IT was by the suggestion of young Van Flange himself that he became
a broker. His argument I think was sound; he had been bred to no
profession, and the floor of the Exchange, if he would have a trade,
was all that was left him. No one could be of mark or consequence in New
York who might not write himself master of millions. Morton himself said
that; and with commerce narrowing to a huddle of mammoth corporations,
how should anyone look forward to the conquest of millions save through
those avenues of chance which Wall Street alone provided? The Stock
Exchange was all that remained; and with that, I bought young Van Flange
a seat therein, and equipped him for a brokerage career. I harbored no
misgivings of his success; no one could look upon his clean, handsome
outlines and maintain a doubt.
Those were our happiest days--Blossom's and mine. In her name, I split
my fortune in two, and gave young Van Flange a million and a half
wherewith to arm his hands for the fray of stocks. Even now, as I look
backward through the darkness, I still think it a million and a half
well spent. For throughout those slender months of sunshine, Blossom
went to and fro about me, radiating a subdued warmth of joy that was
like the silent glow of a lamp. Yes, that money served its end. It made
Blossom happy, and it will do me good while I live to think how that was
so.
Morton, when I called young Van Flange from his Mulberry desk to send
him into Wall Street, was filled with distrust of the scheme.
“You should have him stay with Mulberry,” said he. “If he do no good, at
least he will do no harm, and that, don't y' know, is a business record
far above the average. Besides, he's safer; he is, really!”
This I did not like from Morton. He himself was a famous man of stocks,
and had piled millions upon millions in a pyramid of speculation. Did
he claim for himself a monopoly of stock intelligence? Van Flange was as
well taught of books as was he, and came of a better family. Was it that
he arrogated to his own head a superiority of wit for finding his way
about in those channels of stock value? I said something of this sorb to
Morton.
“Believe me, old chap,” said he, laying his slim hand on my shoulder,
“believe me, I had nothing on my mind beyond your own safety, and the
safety of that cub of yours. And I think you will agree that I have
exhibited a knowledge of what winds and currents and rocks might
interrupt or wreck one in his voyages after stocks.”
“Admitting all you say,” I replied, “it does not follow that another may
not know or learn to know as much.”
“But Wall Street is such a quicksand,” he persisted. “Gad! it swallows
nine of every ten who set foot in it. And to deduce safety for another,
because I am and have been safe, might troll you into error. You should
consider my peculiar case. I was born with beak and claw for the game.
Like the fish-hawk, I can hover above the stream of stocks, and swoop
in and out, taking my quarry where it swims. And then, remember my
arrangements. I have an agent at the elbow of every opportunity. I have
made the world my spy, since I pay the highest price for information. If
a word be said in a cabinet, I hear it; if a decision of court is to be
handed down, I know it; if any of our great forces or monarchs of the
street so much as move a finger, I see it. And yet, with all I know, and
all I see, and all I hear, and all my nets and snares as complicated as
the works of a watch, added to a native genius, the best I may do is
win four times in seven. In Wall Street, a man meets with not alone the
foreseeable, but the unforeseeable; he does, really! He is like a man in
a tempest, and may be struck dead by some cloud-leveled bolt while you
and he stand talking, don't y' know!”
Morton fell a long day's journey short of convincing me that Wall Street
was a theater of peril for young Van Flange. Moreover, the boy said
true; it offered the one way open to his feet. Thus reasoning, and led
by my love for my girl and my delight to think how she was happy, I did
all I might to further the ambitions of young Van Flange, and embark him
as a trader of stocks. He took office rooms in Broad Street; and on the
one or two occasions when I set foot in them, I was flattered as well as
amazed by the array of clerks and stock-tickers, blackboards, and
tall baskets, which met my untaught gaze. The scene seemed to buzz and
vibrate with prosperity, and the air was vital of those riches which it
promised.
It is scarce required that I say I paid not the least attention to young
Van Flange and his business affairs. I possessed no stock knowledge,
being as darkened touching Wall Street as any Hottentot. More than that,
my time was taken up with Tammany Hall. The flow of general feeling
continued to favor a return of the machine, for the public was becoming
more and sorely irked of a misfit “reform” that was too tight in one
place while too loose in another. There stood no doubt of it; I had only
to wait and maintain my own lines in order, and the town would be my
own again. It would yet lie in my lap like a goose in the lap of a Dutch
woman; and I to feather-line my personal nest with its plumage to what
soft extent I would. For all that, I must watch lynx-like my own forces,
guarding against schism, keeping my people together solidly for the
battle that was to be won.
Much and frequently, I discussed the situation with Morton. With his
traction operations, he had an interest almost as deep as my own. He
was, too, the one man on whose wisdom of politics I had been educated to
rely. When it became a question of votes and how to get them, I had yet
to meet Morton going wrong.
“You should have an issue,” said Morton. “You should not have two, for
the public is like a dog, don't y' know, and can chase no more than just
one rabbit at a time. But one you should have--something you could point
to and promise for the future. As affairs stand--and gad! it has been
that way since I have had a memory--you and the opposition will go into
the campaign like a pair of beldame scolds, railing at one another.
Politics has become a contest of who can throw the most mud. Really, the
town is beastly tired of both of you--it is, 'pon my word!”
“Now what issue would you offer?”
“Do you recall what I told our friend Bronson? Public Ownership should
be the great card. Go in for the ownership by the town of street
railways, water works, gas plants, and that sort of thing, don't y'
know, and the rabble will trample on itself to vote your ticket.”
“And do you shout 'Municipal Ownership!'--you with a street railway to
lose?”
“But I wouldn't lose it. I'm not talking of anything but an issue. It
would be a deuced bore, if Public Ownership actually were to happen.
Besides, for me to lose my road would be the worst possible form! No,
I'm not so insane as that. But it doesn't mean, because you make Public
Ownership an issue, that you must bring it about. There are always ways
to dodge, don't y' know. And the people won't care; the patient beggars
have been taught to expect it. An issue is like the bell-ringing before
an auction; it is only meant to call a crowd. Once the auction begins,
no one remembers the bell-ringing; they don't, really!”
“To simply shout 'Public Ownership:'” said I, “would hardly stir the
depths. We would have to get down to something practical--something
definite.”
“It was the point I was approaching. Really! what should be better now
than to plainly propose--since the route is unoccupied, and offers
a field of cheapest experiment--a street railway with a loop around
Washington Square, and then out Fifth Avenue to One Hundred and Tenth
Street, next west on One Hundred and Tenth Street to Seventh Avenue, and
lastly north on Seventh Avenue until you strike the Harlem River at the
One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street bridge?”
“What a howl would go up from Fifth Avenue!” said I.
“If it were so, what then? You are not to be injured by silk-stocking
clamor. For each cry against you from the aristocrats, twenty of the
peasantry would come crying to your back; don't y', know! Patrician
opposition, old chap, means ever plebeian support, and you should do
all you may, with wedge and maul of policy, to split the log along those
lines. Gad!” concluded Morton, bursting suddenly into self-compliments;
“I don't recall when I was so beastly sagacious before--really!”
“Now I fail to go with you,” I returned. “I have for long believed that
the strongest force with which the organization had to contend, was its
own lack of fashion. If Tammany had a handful or two of that purple and
fine linen with which you think it so wise to quarrel, it might rub some
of the mud off itself, and have quieter if not fairer treatment from a
press, ever ready to truckle to the town's nobility. Should we win next
time, it is already in my plans to establish a club in the very heart of
Fifth Avenue. I shall attract thither all the folk of elegant fashion
I can, so that, thereafter, should one snap a kodak on the machine, the
foreground of the picture will contain a respectable exhibition of lofty
names. I want, rather, to get Tammany out of the gutter, than arrange
for its perpetual stay therein.”
“Old chap,” said Morton, glorying through his eyeglass, “I think I
shall try a cigarette after that. I need it to resettle my nerves; I do,
really. Why, my dear boy! do you suppose that Tammany can be anything
other than that unwashed black sheep it is? We shall make bishops of
burglars when that day dawns. The thing's wildly impossible, don't y'
know! Besides, your machine would die. Feed Tammany Hall on any diet
of an aristocracy, and you will unhinge its stomach; you will, 'pon my
faith!”
“You shall see a Tammany club in fashion's center, none the less.”
“Then you don't like 'Public Ownership?'” observed Morton, after a
pause, the while twirling his eyeglass. “Why don't you then go in for
cutting the City off from the State, and making a separate State of it?
You could say that we suffer from hayseed tyranny, and all that. Really!
it's the truth, don't y' know; and besides, we City fellows would gulp
it down like spring water.”
“The City delegation in Albany,” said I, “is too small to put through
such a bill. The Cornfields would be a unit to smother it.”
“Not so sure about the Cornfields!” cried Morton. “Of course it would
take money. That provided, think of the wires you could pull. Here are
a half-dozen railroads, with their claws and teeth in the country
and their tails in town. Each of them, don't y' know, as part of its
equipment, owns a little herd of rustic members. You could step on the
railroad tail with the feet of your fifty city departments, and torture
it into giving you its hayseed marionettes for this scheme of a new
State. Pon my word! old chap, it could be brought about; it could,
really!”
“I fear,” said I banteringly, “that after all you are no better than
a harebrained theorist. I confess that your plans are too grand for
my commonplace powers of execution. I shall have to plod on with those
moss-grown methods which have served us in the past.”
It would seem as though I had had Death to be my neighbor from the
beginning, for his black shadow was in constant play about me. One day
he would take a victim from out my very arms; again he would grimly step
between me and another as we sat in talk. Nor did doctors do much good
or any; and I have thought that all I shall ask, when my own time comes,
is a nurse to lift me in and out of bed, and for the rest of it, why!
let me die.
It was Anne to leave me now, and her death befell like lightning from an
open sky. Anne was never of your robust women; I should not have said,
however, that she was frail, since she was always about, taking the
whole weight of the house to herself, and, as I found when she was gone,
furnishing the major portion of its cheerfulness. That was what misled
me, doubtless; a brave smile shone ever on her face like sunlight, and
served to put me off from any thought of sickness for her.
It was her heart, they said; but no such slowness in striking as when
Big Kennedy died. Anne had been abroad for a walk in the early cool of
the evening. When she returned, and without removing her street gear,
she sank into a chair in the hall.
“What ails ye, mem?” asked the old Galway wife that had been nurse to
Blossom, and who undid the door to Anne; “what's the matter of your pale
face?”
“An' then,” cried the crone, when she gave me the sorry tale of it, “she
answered wit' a sob. An' next her poor head fell back on the chair, and
she was by.”
Both young Van Flange and I were away from the house at the time of it;
he about his business, which kept him often, and long, into the night;
and I in the smothering midst of my politics. When I was brought home,
they had laid Anne's body on her bed. At the foot on a rug crouched the
old nurse, rocking herself forward and back, wailing like a banshee.
Blossom, whose cheek was whitened with the horror of our loss, crept to
my side and stood close, clutching my hand as in those old terror-ridden
baby days when unseen demons glowered from the room-comers. It was no
good sight for Blossom, and I led her away, the old Galway crone at the
bed's foot keening her barbarous mourning after us far down the hall.
Blossom was all that remained with me now. And yet, she would be enough,
I thought, as I held her, child-fashion, in my arms that night to comfort
her, if only I might keep her happy.
Young Van Flange worked at his trade of stocks like a horse. He was into
it early and late, sometimes staying from home all night. I took pride
to think how much more wisely than Morton I had judged the boy.
Those night absences, when he did not come in until three of the
morning, and on occasion not at all, gave me no concern. My own business
of Tammany was quite as apt to hold me; for there are events that must
be dealt with in the immediate, like shooting a bird on the wing. A
multitude of such were upon me constantly, and there was no moment of
the day or night that I could say beforehand would not be claimed
by them. When this was my own case, it turned nothing difficult to
understand how the exigencies of stocks might be as peremptory.
One matter to promote a growing fund of confidence in young Van Flange
was his sobriety. The story ran--and, in truth, his own mother had told
it--of his drunkenness, when a boy fresh out of his books, and during
those Barclay Street days when he went throwing his patrimony to the
vultures. That was by and done with; he had somehow gotten by the
bottle. Never but once did he show the flush of liquor, and that fell
out when he had been to a college dinner. I had always understood how
it was the custom to retire drunk from such festivals, wherefore that
particular inebriety gave me scant uneasiness. One should not expect a
roaring boy about town to turn deacon in a day.
Blossom was, as I've said, by nature shy and secret, and never one to
relate her joys or griefs. While she and he were under the same roof
with me, I had no word from her as to her life with young Van Flange,
and whether it went bright, or was blurred of differences. Nor do I
believe that in those days there came aught to harrow her, unless it
were the feeling that young Van Flange showed less the lover and more
like folk of fifty than she might have wished.
Once and again, indeed, I caught on her face a passing shade; but her
eyes cleared when I looked at her, and she would come and put her arms
about me, and by that I could not help but see how her marriage had
flowered life's path for her. This thought of itself would set off a
tune in my heart like the songs of birds; and I have it the more sharply
upon my memory, because it was the one deep happiness I knew. The
shadows I trapped as they crossed the brow of Blossom, I laid to a
thought that young Van Flange carried too heavy a load of work. It might
break him in his health; and the fear had warrant in hollow eyes and a
thin sallowness of face, which piled age upon him, and made him resemble
twice his years.
Towards me, the pose of young Van Flange was that one of respectful
deference which had marked him from the start. Sometimes I was struck
by the notion that he was afraid of me; not with any particularity of
alarm, but as a woman might fear a mastiff, arguing peril from latent
ferocities and a savagery of strength.
Still, he in no wise ran away; one is not to understand that; on the
contrary he would pass hours in my society, explaining his speculations
and showing those figures which were the record of his profits. I was
glad to listen, too; for while I did not always grasp a meaning, being
stock-dull as I've explained, what he said of “bull” and “bear” and
“short” and “long,” had the smell of combat about it, and held me
enthralled like a romance.
There were instances when he suggested speculations, and now and then as
high as one thousand shares. I never failed to humor him, for I thought
a negative might smack of lack of confidence--a thing I would not think
of, if only for love of Blossom. I must say that my belief in young Van
Flange was augmented by these deals, which turned unflaggingly, though
never largely, to my credit.
It was when I stood waist-deep in what arrangements were preliminary
to my battle for the town, now drawing near and nearer, that young Van
Flange approached me concerning Blackberry Traction.
“Father,” said he--for he called me “father,” and the name was pleasant
to my ear--“father, if you will, we may make millions of dollars like
turning hand or head.”
Then he gave me a long story of the friendship he had scraped together
with the president of Blackberry--he of the Hebrew cast and clutch, whom
I once met and disappointed over franchises.
“Of course,” said young Van Flange, “while he is the president of
Blackberry, he has no sentimental feelings concerning the fortunes of
the company. He is as sharp to make money as either you or I. The truth
is this: While the stock is quoted fairly high, Blackberry in fact is
in a bad way. It is like a house of cards, and a kick would collapse it
into ruins. The president, because we are such intimates, gave me the
whole truth of Blackberry. Swearing me to secrecy, he, as it were,
lighted a lantern, and led me into the darkest corners. He showed me the
books. Blackberry is on the threshold of a crash. The dividends coming
due will not be paid. It is behind in its interest; and the directors
will be driven to declare an immense issue of bonds. Blackberry stock
will fall below twenty; a receiver will have the road within the year.
To my mind, the situation is ready for a coup. We have but to sell and
keep selling, to take in what millions we will.”
There was further talk, and all to similar purpose. Also, I recalled the
ease with which Morton and I, aforetime, took four millions between us
out of Blackberry.
“Now I think,” said I, in the finish of it, “that Blackberry is my gold
mine by the word of Fate itself. Those we are to make will not be the
first riches I've had from it.”
Except the house we stood in, I owned no real estate; nor yet that,
since it was Blossom's, being her marriage gift from me. From the first
I had felt an aversion for houses and lots. I was of no stomach
to collect rents, squabble with tenants over repairs, or race to
magistrates for eviction. This last I should say was the Irish in my
arteries, for landlords had hectored my ancestors like horseflies. My
wealth was all in stocks and bonds; nor would I listen to anything else.
Morton had his own whimsical explanation for this:
“There be those among us,” said he, “who are nomads by instinct--a sort
of white Arab, don't y' know. Not intending offense--for, gad! there are
reasons why I desire to keep you good-natured--every congenital criminal
is of that sort; he is, really! Such folk instinctively look forward
to migration or flight. They want nothing they can't pack up and depart
with in a night, and would no more take a deed to land than a dose of
arsenic. It's you who are of those migratory people. That's why you
abhor real estate. Fact, old chap! you're a born nomad; and it's in your
blood to be ever ready to strike camp, inspan your teams, and trek.”
Morton furnished these valuable theories when he was investing my money
for me. Having no belief in my own investment wisdom, I imposed the task
upon his good nature. One day he brought me my complete possessions in a
wonderful sheaf of securities. They were edged, each and all, with gold,
since Morton would accept no less.
“There you are, my boy,” said he, “and everything as clean as running
water, don't y' know. Really, I didn't think you could be trusted, if
it came on to blow a panic, so I've bought for you only stuff that can
protect itself.”
When young Van Flange made his Blackberry suggestions, I should say
I had sixteen hundred thousand dollars worth of these bonds and
stocks--mostly the former--in my steel box. I may only guess concerning
it, for I could not reckon so huge a sum to the precise farthing. It was
all in the same house with us; I kept it in a safe I'd fitted into the
walls, and which was so devised as to laugh at either a burglar or a
fire. I gave young Van Flange the key of that interior compartment which
held these securities; the general combination he already possessed.
“There you'll find more than a million and a half,” said I, “and that,
with what you have, should make three millions. How much Blackberry can
you sell now?”
“We ought to sell one hundred and fifty thousand shares. A drop of
eighty points, and it will go that far, would bring us in twelve
millions.”
“Do what you think best,” said I. “And, mind you: No word to Morton.”
“Now I was about to suggest that,” said young Van Flange.
Morton should not know what was on my slate for Blackberry. Trust him?
yes; and with every hope I had. But it was my vanity to make this move
without him. I would open his eyes to it, that young Van Flange, if not
so old a sailor as himself, was none the less his equal at charting a
course and navigating speculation across that sea of stocks, about the
treacherous dangers whereof it had pleased him so often to patronize me.