THE STORM BREAKS
The morning came in a mist of dull gray clouds that clung in rings
about the street lamps like the damp fog of a typical February thaw,
yet it was the last day of October. Such weather was uncanny. It added
to the strange feeling of impending calamity which had been hanging
over the business world during the summer and had broken at last into
the fierce storms of disaster of the past two weeks. Men who usually
rose at nine o'clock were up at dawn. Some of them hadn't slept at all.
The more optimistic traders on the Stock Exchange expected to-day a
change in the market. Stocks had declined for two weeks with appalling
swiftness and fatality. Every hour had marked the ruin of men hitherto
bulwarks of solidity. Experienced men reasoned and reasoned from
experience that there must be a turn somewhere. The bottom surely had
been reached. The time for a rally had come. Nine men out of every ten
in the market at its close the night before expected the rally to begin
at the stroke of the gong the next morning. The men who bought stocks
in the closing hour were sure of this.
They rose to curse the weather. For the weather always affects
speculation. Wall Street is superstitious. The proud intellect that
struts the floor of the Exchange and scorns the powers of his feebler
fellow-men carries secretly a horse chestnut in his pocket for luck.
Without an exception all these great men believe in signs and wonders,
in witches, palmists, spells and hoodoos.
Weather always gets on their nerves. Half the fluctuations of stocks
under normal conditions of trade are purely the results of the mental
states of the men who buy and sell.
The doctor rose early with a new hope filling his heart which no cloud
could obscure. He watched Harriet pour his coffee at breakfast with his
old-time smile of good cheer playing about his fine mouth.
Stuart was sleeping late. He was up until one o'clock writing a reply
to a peculiarly venomous attack on his integrity which a morning paper
had printed. The writer had boldly accused him of being the hired tool
of the group of financial cut-throats who were coining millions out of
the ruin of others in the destruction of public faith.
His reply was simple and his concluding paragraph was unanswerable,
except by an epithet.
"My business is the enforcement of justice. I am the servant of the
people. If Wall Street can not stand the enforcement of law, so much
the worse for the Street. It's no affair of mine. I didn't make the
laws of the State any more than I made the law of gravitation. Nor did
I write the Ten Commandments, but I have an abiding faith that they
will stand when the last stone in the Stock Exchange building shall
have crumbled into dust. I refuse to believe that the only way to save
Wall Street is by a sworn officer of the law compounding a felony."
The doctor hurried down town to the office of a friend on Pine Street,
an old-fashioned banker and broker whose name had always stood for
honesty and fair dealing and conservative business. It was half an hour
before the Stock Exchange opened but the dingy little office was packed
with an excited crowd of customers. They all talked in low tones as if
fearing the spirits of the air that hovered near. An eager group leaned
over the bulletin from the London market. London was up half a point.
The credulous were pleased. It was a good omen. The pessimists scoffed.
"Rigged from New York!" sneered a fat German the office boy had
nicknamed the "Judge."
The doctor was struck with the curiously mottled crowd that jostled one
another, waiting for the first cry of the opening quotations. Every
walk and profession of life had its representative there--merchants,
lawyers, doctors, clerks, clergymen, barbers, boot-blacks, retired
capitalists and capitalists about to retire permanently.
The saddest group of all was in the adjoining room reserved for ladies.
An opening through the partition wall allowed them to see the
quotations as they were placed on the board around which the throng of
jostling, smoking, perspiring men moved and stood. Most of these pale
excited women with their hats awry and their hair disordered were the
wives of solid business and professional men who wouldn't allow their
husbands to know of their little venture into stocks for the world.
They peeped through the opening occasionally and turned their backs
quickly to avoid the gaze of the men.
But the most ominous figures were two or three "vultures" who stood
grim and silent on the outer fringe of the moving crowd. Only one or
two of the older ones recognized them.
The "Judge" saw them first.
"Ach, Gott, look at dem!" he exclaimed. "They never come except for
carrion; they've scented the dead. It's all over with us, poys!"
One of the most curious things in the history of Wall Street is the
appearance of these vultures in a panic. They scent the final
death-struggle with unerring accuracy. They never buy stocks except in
those awful moments of ruin. They hold them grimly until the next
tidal-wave of prosperity, sell out at the top, and wait patiently for
the next killing. They are the only outsiders who ever make a dollar in
Wall Street.
The doctor followed old Dugro, the head of the firm, into his private
office and asked his advice. He got it--sharp, short and to the point.
"Go home, Doctor, and stay there. This market is no place for an
amateur. It's all I can do to keep the wolf from my door in these
days."
"But I've received some important information."
"Keep it dark," old Dugro scowled. "Don't tell it to your worst enemy.
If you've got a dollar, nail it up and sleep on the box."
"But I've some information I think I'm going to act on and I want to
open a small account with you."
"All right. I've warned you," was the grim answer. "I wish you good
luck."
The doctor drew his check for two thousand dollars and smilingly took
his place among the crowd before the board. He was never surer of
anything in his life than he was of Adam's sincerity. He prided himself
on the fact that he was a judge of character. He was sure the cashier
was wrong in his accounts; he was equally sure that the information he
had received from Bivens's private secretary was accurate, provided, of
course, the little weasel carried out the program he had mapped out.
The ticker would tell the story in the first hour. If stocks should
sell off three points before noon, he would know. He determined to put
this to the test first. He would not sell the market short. He would be
content with the big jump the market would make upward when it started.
The ticker began its sharp metallic click.
The crowd stirred as if the electric shock had swept every nerve. A
moment of breathless silence and the board boy leaning over the ticker
shouted:
"Atch--92-1/2!"
A groan, low, half-stifled, half-articulate came from the room and then
a moment of silence followed.
"There, Gott," muttered the "Judge." "I knew London was rigged--I told
you so!"
In quick, sharp, startling tones the man at the ticker called out the
quotations as the market rapidly sank.
For half an hour the downward movement never paused for a moment. The
silence of the crowded room became more and more suffocating. Men stood
in their tracks with staring eyes and dry lips as they watched the last
hope of a morning rally fade into despair.
The doctor's breath came quicker and his eyes began to sparkle intense
excitement.
Now and then old Dugro's stolid face appeared at the door and summoned
another man to his inner office--"the chamber of horrors"--where the
lambs are sheared. The story was always the same. The customer squirmed
and asked for a little more time to watch the market. The old man was
adamant.
"I've got to have more money to margin your stock or I'll sell it in
five minutes. This firm is sound as a dollar and it's going to stay
sound as long as I'm at the helm. If I carry weak accounts I imperil
the money of every man who has put his faith in my bank."
If the squirming victim had more money he always put it up. If he had
drawn his last dollar he just wiped the cold sweat from his brow and
gasped:
"You'll have to sell out."
Quick as a flash the old man's hand was on the telephone and his broker
on the floor of the Exchange was executing the order.
As the noon hour drew near the doctor's heart was beating like a sledge
hammer. Bivens's programme had been carried out to the letter. Stocks
had declined for the first hour a point, and in the second hour
suddenly smashed down two more points amid the wildest excitement on
the Exchange.
There was a momentary lull and the market hesitated. For ten minutes
the sales dragged with only fractional changes--first up, then down.
The moment to buy had come. The doctor was sure of it. Stocks had
touched bottom. The big bear pool would turn bull in a moment and the
whole market would rise by leaps and bounds.
He called old Dugro.
"Buy for me now, Amalgamated Copper, the market leader, for all I'm
worth!"
The broker glared at him.
"Buy! Buy in this market? Man, are you mad?"
"I said buy!" was the firm answer. "What's the limit?"
"Not a share without a stop loss order under it."
"Well, with the stop?"
"I'll buy you 400 shares on a four-point stop."
"And when it goes up five points?" the doctor asked eagerly.
"I'll double your purchase and raise your stop, and every five points
up I'll keep on until you are a millionaire!"
The old broker smiled contemptuously, but it was all lost on the
doctor.
"Do it quick."
The order was scarcely given before it was executed. Dugro handed the
memorandum to Woodman with a grunt.
"It don't take long to get 'em to-day!"
The words had scarcely left his lips when a hoarse cry rose from the
crowd hanging over the ticker.
Copper had leaped upward a whole point between sales. A wild cheer
swept the room. For ten minutes every stock on the list responded and
began to climb.
The doctor's face was wreathed in smiles. Men began to talk and laugh
and feel human for the first moment in two weeks.
Dugro grasped the doctor's hand and his deep voice rang above the roar:
"You're a mascot! You've broken the spell! For God's sake stay with
us!"
Suddenly another cry came from the crowd at the ticker. The boy at the
board sprang to the instrument with a single bound, his eyes blazing
with excitement. His cry pierced every ear in the room with horror.
"The hell you say! Down a whole point! No!"
There was a moment's hush, every breath was held. Only the sharp click
of the ticker broke the stillness.
"It was one point," groaned the Judge, "now, Gott, it's two--now it's
three!"
The last words ended in a scream. Hell had broken loose at last.
The panic had come!
In ten minutes stocks tumbled five points and the doctor's last dollar
was swept into space while the whole market plunged down, down, down
into the abyss of ruin and despair.
Men no longer tried to conceal their emotion. Some wept, some cursed,
some laughed; but the most pitiful sight of all was the man who could
do neither, the man with white lips and the strange hunted expression
in his eyes who was looking Death in the face for the first time.
A full quarter of an hour of the panic had spent itself before the
dazed crowds in the broker's offices read the startling news that
caused the big break. The ticker shrieked its message above the storm's
din like a little laughing demon:
"_The Van Dam Trust Company Has Closed Its Doors and Asked for
the Appointment of a Receiver!_"
"Impossible!"
"A fake!"
"Hell--it's a joke!"
From all who read it at first came these muttered exclamations. It was
beyond belief.
The "Judge" was particularly emphatic.
"Dot's a lie, chentlemens! Take my vord for it! Dey haf ninety millions
on deposit."
It took the second bulletin with particulars to convince them. Bivens
had not kept his solemn pledge. The great bank had stood the run for
two hours and closed its doors. And the work of destruction had just
begun.
At three o'clock, the doctor walked out of Dugro's office without a
dollar. It was utterly impossible for a man of his temperament to
realize it. The crash had come so suddenly, its work was so complete
and overwhelming it seemed a sort of foolish prank Fate had played on
him.
He walked home in a state of strange excitement. He had seen many
sights in his eventful life among the people of New York; never had he
passed through a scene so weird, so horrible, so haunting as the five
hours he had just spent among those men and women whom the struggle for
money had transformed into raving, jibbering, snivelling maniacs. It
was too absurd to be real. His own loss was appalling but at least he
thanked God he was not mad. He yet had two good hands and legs. He
could see, hear, smell, taste and feel, and he had a soul with five
more senses still turned upward toward the infinite and eternal by
which he could see the invisible and hear the inaudible. He felt almost
happy by contrast with the fools he had left shuffling over the floor
of Dugro's office.
His own sense of loss was merely a blur. The revelation he had just had
of the mad lust for money which had begun to possess all classes was
yet so fresh and startling he could form no adequate conception of his
own position.
It was not until he entered his own door, and paused at the sound of
Harriet's voice, that he began to realize the enormity of the tragedy
that had befallen him.