I went to my rooms, purposing to go straight to bed, and get a good sleep.
I did make a start toward undressing; then I realized that I should only
lie awake with my brain wearing me out, spinning crazy thoughts and schemes
hour after hour--for my imagination rarely lets it do any effective
thinking after the lights are out and the limitations of material things
are wiped away by the darkness. I put on a dressing-gown and seated myself
to smoke and to read.
When I was very young, new to New York, in with the Tenderloin crowd and
up to all sorts of pranks, I once tried opium smoking. I don't think I
ever heard of anything in those days without giving it a try. Usually, I
believe, opium makes the smoker ill the first time or two; but it had no
such effect on me, nor did it fill my mind with fantastic visions. On
the contrary, it made everything around me intensely real--that is, it
enormously stimulated my dominant characteristic of accurate observation.
I noticed the slightest details--such things as the slight difference in
the length of the arms of the Chinaman who kept the “joint,” the number of
buttons down the front of the waist of the girl in the bunk opposite mine,
across the dingy, little, sweet-scented room. Nothing escaped me, and also
I was conscious of each passing second, or, rather, fraction of a second.
As a rule, time and events, even when one is quietest, go with such a rush
that one notes almost nothing of what is passing. The opium seemed to
compel the kaleidoscope of life to turn more slowly; in fact, it sharpened
my senses so that they unconsciously took impressions many times more
quickly and easily and accurately. As I sat there that night after leaving
Anita, forcing my mind to follow the printed lines, I found I was in
exactly the state in which I had been during my one experiment with opium.
It seemed to me that as many days as there had been hours must have elapsed
since I got the news of the raised Textile dividend. Days--yes, weeks, even
months, of thought and action seemed to have been compressed into those six
hours--for, as I sat there, it was not yet eleven o'clock.
And then I realized that this notion was not of the moment, but that I had
been as if under the influence of some powerful nerve stimulant since my
brain began to recover from the shock of that thunderbolt. Only, where
nerve stimulants often make the mind passive and disinclined to take part
in the drama so vividly enacting before it, this opening of my reservoirs
of reserve nervous energy had multiplied my power to act as well as my
power to observe. “I wonder how long it will last,” thought I. And it made
me uneasy, this unnatural alertness, unaccompanied by any feverishness or
sense of strain. “Is this the way madness begins?”
I dressed myself again and went out--went up to Joe Healey's gambling place
in Forty-fourth Street. Most of the well-known gamblers up town, as well as
their “respectable” down town fellow members of the fraternity, were old
acquaintances of mine; Joe Healey was as close a friend as I had. He had
great fame for squareness--and, in a sense, deserved it. With his fellow
gamblers he was straight as a string at all times--to be otherwise would
have meant that when he went broke he would stay broke, because none of
the fraternity would “stake” him. But with his patrons--being regarded by
them as a pariah, he acted toward them like a pariah--a prudent pariah. He
fooled them with a frank show of gentlemanliness, of honesty to his own
hurt; under that cover he fleeced them well, but always judiciously.
That night, I recall, Joe's guests were several young fellows of the
fashionable set, rich men's sons and their parasites, a few of the big down
town operators who hadn't yet got hipped on “respectability”--they playing
poker in a private room--and a couple of flush-faced, flush-pursed chaps
from out of town, for whom one of Joe's men was dealing faro from what
looked to my experienced and accurate eye like a “brace” box.
Joe, very elegant, too elegant in fact, in evening dress, was showing a new
piece of statuary to the oldest son of Melville, of the National Industrial
Bank. Joe knew a little something about art--he was much like the art
dealers who, as a matter of business, learn the difference between good
things and bad, but in their hearts wonder and laugh at people willing to
part with large sums of money for a little paint or marble or the like.
As soon as Joe thought he had sufficiently impressed young Melville, he
drifted him to a roulette table, left him there and joined me.
“Come to my office,” said he. “I want to see you.”
He led the way down the richly-carpeted marble stairway as far as the
landing at the turn. There, on a sort of mezzanine, he had a gorgeous
little suite. The principal object in the sitting-room or office was a huge
safe. He closed and locked the outside door behind us.
“Take a seat,” said he. “You'll like the cigars in the second box on my
desk--the long one.” And he began turning the combination lock. “You
haven't dropped in on us for the past three or four months,” he went on.
“No,” said I, getting a great deal of pleasure out of seeing again, and
thus intimately, his round, ruddy face--like a yachtman's, not like a
drinker's--and his shifty, laughing brown eyes. “The game down town has
given me enough excitement. I haven't had to continue it up town to keep
my hand in.”
In fact, I had, as I have already said, been breaking off with my former
friends because, while many of the most reputable and reliable financiers
down town go in for high play occasionally at the gambling houses, it isn't
wise for the man trying to establish himself as a strictly legitimate
financier. I had been playing as much as ever, but only in games in my own
rooms and at the rooms of other bankers, brokers and commercial leaders.
The passion for high play is a craving that gnaws at a man all the time,
and he must always be feeding it one way or another.
“I've noticed that you are getting too swell to patronize us fellows,” said
he, his shrewd smile showing that my polite excuse had not fooled him.
“Well, Matt, you're right--you always did have good sound sense and a
steady eye for the main chance. I used to think the women'd ruin you, they
were so crazy about that handsome mug and figure of yours. But when I saw
you knew exactly when to let go, I knew nothing could stop you.”
By this time he had the safe open, disclosing several compartments and a
small, inside safe. He worked away at the second combination lock, and
presently exposed the interior of the little safe. It was filled with a
great roll of bills. He pried this out, brought it over to the desk and
began wrapping it up. “I want you to take this with you when you go,” said
he. “I've made several big killings lately, and I'm going to get you to
invest the proceeds.”
“I can't take that big bundle along with me, Joe,” said I. “Besides, it
ain't safe. Put it in the bank and send me a check.”
“Not on your life,” replied Healey with a laugh. “The suckers we trimmed
gave checks, and I turned 'em into cash as soon as the banks opened. I
wasn't any too spry, either. Two of the damned sneaks consulted lawyers
as soon as they sobered off, and tried to stop payment on their checks.
They're threatening proceedings. You must take the dough away with you, and
I don't want a receipt.”
“Trimming suckers, eh?” said I, not able to decide what to do.
“Their fathers stole it from the public,” he explained. “They're drunken
little snobs, not fit to have money. I'm doing a public service by
relieving them of it. If I'd 'a' got more, I'd feel that much more”--he
vented his light, cool, sarcastic laugh--“more patriotic.”
“I can't take it,” said I, feeling that, in my present condition, to take
it would be very near to betraying the confidence of my old friend.
“They lost it in a straight game,” he hastened to assure me. “I haven't had
a 'brace' box or crooked wheel for four years.” This with a sober face and
a twinkle in his eye. “But even if I had helped chance to do the good work
of teaching them to take care of their money, you'd not refuse me. Up town
and down town, and all over the place, what's business, when you come to
look at it sensibly, but trading in stolen goods? Do you know a man who
could honestly earn more than ten or twenty thousand a year--good clean
money by good clean work?”
“Oh, for that matter, your money's as clean as anybody's,” said I. “But,
you know, I'm a speculator, Joe. I have my downs--and this happens to be a
stormy time for me. If I take your money, I mayn't be able to account for
it or even to pay dividends on it for--maybe a year or so.”
“It's all right, old man. I'll never give it a thought till you remind me
of it. Use it as you'd use your own. I've got to put it behind somebody's
luck--why not yours?”
He finished doing up the package, then he seated himself, and we both
looked at it through the smoke of our cigars.
“It's just as easy to deal in big sums as in little, in large matters as in
small, isn't it, Joe,” said I, “once one gets in the way of it?”
“Do you remember--away back there--the morning,” he asked musingly--“the
last morning--you and I got up from the straw in the stables over at Jerome
Park--the stables they let us sleep in?”
“And went out in the dawn to roost on the rails and spy on the speed trials
of old Revell's horses?”
“Exactly,” said Joe, and we looked at each other and laughed. “We in
rags--gosh, how chilly it was that morning! Do you remember what we talked
about?”
“No,” said I, though I did.
“I was proposing to turn a crooked trick--and you wouldn't have it. You
persuaded me to keep straight, Matt. I've never forgotten it. You kept me
straight--showed me what a damn fool a man was to load himself down with a
petty larceny record. You made a man of me, Matt. And then those good looks
of yours caught the eye of that bookmaker's girl, and he gave you a job at
writing sheet--and you worked me in with you.”
So long ago it seemed, yet near and real, too, as I sat there, conscious of
every sound and motion, even of the fantastic shapes taken by our upcurling
smoke. How far I was from the “rail bird” of those happy-go-lucky years,
when a meal meant quite as much to me as does a million now--how far from
all that, yet how near, too. For was I not still facing life with the same
careless courage, forgetting each yesterday in the eager excitement of each
new day with its new deal? We went on in our reminiscences for a while;
then, as Joe had a little work to do, I drifted out into the house, took
a bite of supper with young Melville, had a little go at the tiger, and
toward five in the clear June morning emerged into the broad day of the
streets, with the precious bundle under my arms and a five hundred-dollar
bill in my waistcoat pocket.
“Give my win to me in a single bill,” I said to the banker, “and blow
yourself off with the change.”
Joe walked down the street with me--for companionship and a little air
before turning in, he said, but I imagine a desire to keep his eye on his
treasure a while longer had something to do with his taking that early
morning stroll. We passed several of those forlorn figures that hurry
through the slowly-awakening streets to bed or to work. Finally, there came
by an old, old woman--a scrubwoman, I guess, on her way home from cleaning
some office building. Beside her was a thin little boy, hopping along on a
crutch. I stopped them.
“Hold out your hand,” said I to the boy, and he did. I laid the five
hundred-dollar bill in it. “Now, shut your fingers tight over that,” said
I, “and don't open them till you get home. Then tell your mother to do what
she likes with it.” And we left them gaping after us, speechless before
this fairy story come true.
“You must be looking hard for luck to-day,” said Joe, who understood this
transaction where another might have thought it a showy and not very wise
charity. “They'll stop in at the church and pray for you, and burn a
candle.”
“I hope so,” said I, “for God knows I need it.”
XX. A BREATHING SPELL.
Langdon, after several years of effort, had got recognition for Textile
in London, but that was about all. He hadn't succeeded in unloading any
great amount of it on the English. So it was rather because I neglected
nothing than because I was hopeful of results that I had made a point of
telegraphing to London news of my proposed suit. The result was a little
trading in Textiles over there and a slight decline in the price. This fact
was telegraphed to all the financial centers on this side of the water, and
reinforced the impression my lawyers' announcement and my own “bear” letter
were making.
Still, this was nothing, or next to it. What could I hope to avail against
Langdon's agents with almost unlimited capital, putting their whole energy
under the stock to raise it? In the same newspapers that published my bear
attack, in the same columns and under the same head-lines, were official
denials from the Textile Trust and the figures of enormous increase of
business as proof positive that the denials were honest. If the public
had not been burned so many times by “industrials,” if it had not learned
by bitter experience that practically none of the leaders of finance and
industry were above lying to make or save a few dollars, if Textiles had
not been manipulated so often, first by Dumont and since his death by his
brother-in-law and successor, this suave and cynical Langdon, my desperate
attack would have been without effect. As it was--
Four months before, in the same situation, had I seen Textiles stagger as
they staggered in the first hour of business on the Stock Exchange that
morning, I'd have sounded the charge, clapped spurs to my charger, and
borne down upon them. But--I had my new-born yearning for “respectability”;
I had my new-born squeamishness, which led me to fear risking Bob Corey
and his bank and the money of my old friend Healey; finally, there was
Anita--the longing for her that made me prefer a narrow and uncertain
foothold to the bold leap that would land me either in wealth and power
or in the bottomless abyss.
Instead of continuing to sell Textiles, I covered as far as I could; and
I bought so eagerly and so heavily that, more than Langdon's corps of
rocketers, I was responsible for the stock's rally and start upward. When I
say “eagerly” and “heavily,” I do not mean that I acted openly or without
regard to common sense. I mean simply that I made no attempt to back up my
followers in the selling campaign I had urged them into; on the contrary,
I bought as they sold. That does not sound well, and it is no better than
it sounds. I shall not dispute with any one who finds this action of mine
a betrayal of my clients to save myself. All I shall say is that it was
business, that in such extreme and dire compulsion as was mine, it was--and
is--right under the code, the private and real Wall Street code.
You can imagine the confused mass of transactions in which I was involved
before the Stock Exchange had been open long. There was the stock we had
been able to buy or get options on at various prices, between the closing
of the Exchange the previous day and that morning's opening--stock from all
parts of this country and in England. There was the stock I had been buying
since the Exchange opened--buying at figures ranging from one-eighth above
last night's closing price to fourteen points above it. And, on the debit
side, there were the “short” transactions extending over a period of nearly
two months--“sellings” of blocks large and small at a hundred different
prices.
An inextricable tangle, you will say, one it would be impossible for a
man to unravel quickly and in the frantic chaos of a wild Stock Exchange
day. Yet the influence of the mysterious state of my nerves, which I have
described above, was so marvelous that, incredible though it seems, the
moment the Exchange closed, I knew exactly, where I stood.
Like a mechanical lightning calculator, my mind threw up before me the net
result of these selling and buying transactions. Textile Common closed
eighteen points above the closing quotation of the previous day; if
Langdon's brother had not been just a little indiscreet, I should have been
as hopeless a bankrupt in reputation and in fortune as ever was ripped up
by the bulls of Wall Street.
As it was, I believed that, by keeping a bold front, I might extricate and
free myself when the Coal reorganization was announced. The rise of Coal
stocks would square my debts--and, as I was apparently untouched by
the Textile flurry, so far as even Ball, my nominal partner and chief
lieutenant, knew, I need not fear pressure from creditors that I could
not withstand.