LARD
“Is Mr. Bagsbury in?”
The question was addressed to Jervis Curtin, who was sitting at his
desk just outside the private office.
“I think so,” he answered. “Just go right through into the inner
office. I fancy you’ll find him there.”
The visitor nodded, and, walking through the cashier’s private office,
entered John Bagsbury’s sanctum and closed the door behind him.
“Who is he?” Curtin asked of a clerk who happened to be standing near
his desk.
“Don’t you know him? That’s Pickering, William George Pickering, the
soap man. You’ve heard of Pickering’s Diamond Soap, haven’t you? Well,
he’s the man. It’s pretty poor soap, I guess, but he got the scheme
of making it in diamond-shaped cakes, and it caught right on. He’s
richer’n the devil.”
The clerk thought Curtin looked interested, so he was encouraged to
continue his remarks.
“He takes a whirl at the market every now and then, too. He smashed
up that Smith deal last winter: smashed it all to smithereens.
Just a joke,” he added, to explain the fact that he had giggled,
“Smith--smithereens. But, as I was saying, Pickering’s a corker. He
just lays low and doesn’t show his hand until----”
“Good Lord!” ejaculated Curtin, with a laugh. “That’s enough. I don’t
want to write his biography.”
“All right,” said the clerk, “I just came over to ask you if I should
enter that----”
“You’d better take it to Mr. Jackson or Mr. Peters,” Curtin interrupted
quickly. “I haven’t time to see about it now.”
“But----” the clerk began.
“I’ve got to meet a man,” said Curtin, looking at his watch, “in
exactly three minutes, at a place just five and a half squares from
here, so you’ll have to excuse me,” and seizing his hat, he fled.
The younger man stared after him disapprovingly and then walked
back toward his own place, stopping for a talk with one of his
fellow-clerks, who was none other than Jack Dorlin.
“That man Curtin doesn’t know a damn thing,” he said. “I can’t see,
if Bagsbury is as good a banker as they say he is, why he doesn’t get
on to it. Any man who knows anything much about banking, can see that
Curtin isn’t fit for his job.”
Jack stopped his pencil, which was moving slowly up a column of
figures, just as carefully as though he had not lost count two inches
back. “I’ll tell you what, Hillsmead,” he said to the clerk, “I should
think you’d go and speak to Mr. Bagsbury about it.”
“Oh, that wouldn’t do at all. You see, it wouldn’t be good form, in
the first place, and then I don’t believe he’d see it, anyway. But
Curtin is certainly no good. Why, he’d never heard of W. G. Pickering!”
And Jack listened with what gravity he could command while Hillsmead
repeated the recital with which he just favored the assistant cashier,
until the joke about Smith--with the explanation--gave him excuse to
laugh immoderately. Hillsmead was to Jack the one bright spot about the
bank.
Jervis Curtin was not exactly popular among the employees of Bagsbury
and Company. No man of his invincible ignorance about banking, and
in his highly salaried position, could be popular in any bank. But
his good-humored manner saved him from being cordially hated, and
made it possible for him to think that his associates liked him. As
for his ignorance, that did not trouble him at all. The only thing
that he did not entirely relish was his relation to Melville Sponley.
Spying is at best not an occupation conducive to any great degree of
self-satisfaction, and unsuccessful spying is still less gratifying to
one’s pride. Months had passed since Curtin had entered the bank, and
as yet he had been able to tell Sponley nothing of importance which the
speculator had not already learned directly from John.
But something important was going on now in the private office.
“Yes,” John was saying; “we’d be very glad to open an account with you.”
“I suppose you understand,” said Pickering, slowly, “that at one time
or another I shall want to borrow a good deal of money.”
John smiled. “That’s why I want your business,” he said. “Good loans
are what I’m looking for. This bank’s in good shape. We’ll be able to
take care of you without any trouble.”
“There may be times,” the soap manufacturer went on, “when I shall
want a big chunk of money in a hurry. Now, I believe in conservative
banking; that’s why I’m coming to you. But I don’t want anything to do
with the kind of conservatism that’ll leave me in the lurch without
any warning the first time it comes to a pinch. That was the trouble
over at the other place. They got scared and let go of me once in a
rather tight place, after they’d told me that they’d see me through.
The collateral I offered them was all right, but they’d lost their
nerve. Stevenson was so scared he told me to go to hell. I came near
going, too. I got out all right, but it was a close thing--a question
of minutes.”
“I wouldn’t wreck the bank for the sake of backing up any of your
little amusements,” said John. “I’d sell you out the minute I thought
it necessary to save the bank a loss; and if I thought a loan was
bad, I wouldn’t throw good money after it. But if I tell you I’ll
see you through, I’ll do it; and if I tell you you can have so much
money to-morrow, you’ll get it to-morrow, no matter what’s happened
over night. I’ll not get scared. It’s a crime for a banker to lose his
nerve. I’ll tell you this, though,” he added, laughing, “I wouldn’t
take more than three accounts like yours for a hundred thousand a year
salary. You’re the sort of fellows that make a banker’s head white.” He
had thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and slipped far down in
his chair, resting his head against the back of it. “I guess I can take
care of one of you all right, though,” he said.
Pickering looked at him thoughtfully a moment; then he said:--
“I guess you can. We’ll get on together first rate.”
John straightened up in his chair and nodded. “We’ll call it settled,
then. Do you want to make a deposit to-day?”
“Yes,” said Pickering; “I want it fixed up right away. I’ll deposit a
hundred thousand. I want a loan, too.”
“A big one?”
Pickering nodded. “Half a million,” he said calmly.
“Yes,” said John, with a dry laugh, “that is big. It needs a little
thinking over.”
He leaned over his desk, scowling, picked up a pencil and made a few
figures on a bit of scratch paper. Then he said:--
“Well, I can do it. If you’ve the right sort of collateral, I’ll let
you have it.”
“Oh, the collateral’s good: best kind; it’s lard.”
John glanced at him sharply. “So, that’s the story, is it? Lard, eh!
Well, lard’s good collateral if you’ve got enough of it.”
“I’ve got enough,” said Pickering, laughing. “Plenty. How much of a
margin do you want?”
“Fifty per cent.”
“You _are_ cautious,” said Pickering. “Of course, lard’s high now, but
just remember that it’s scarce. The normal price of it is certainly a
good deal more than half the present market price.”
“I suppose so--but here’s the point. What are you going to do with all
that stuff? You can’t make soap out of it. Normal price! You can’t
talk about a normal price when you’re manipulating the market. When a
corner’s nearly made and then busted--well, I want to be a long way on
the safe side. That’s just the time when it pays a bank to be cautious.”
“You’re all right, from your point of view, at least,” said the soap
manufacturer, “and I want that half million, so I’ll put up enough lard
to cover it. It’s worth about twenty-four dollars a tierce to-day, and
you say you lend me twelve on it. As I figure it then,” he paused for a
rough calculation, “you want about forty thousand tierces.”
“Yes,” said John a moment later, “that’ll do. You can make out a note
right here and send round the collateral in the morning.”
“Oh, I’ve got it with me. I didn’t want to waste any time,” and
Pickering took from his pocket warehouse receipts for the lard,
and made them over to Bagsbury and Company. Then he filled out the
blank-note form which John handed him.
John took the warehouse receipts and looked at them curiously. “That’s
an awful lot of lard. Here’s twelve million pounds right here.”
“I’ve got more than that,” said Pickering, as he signed the note, “and
I’ve been shipping it out of the city for two months.”
“I don’t see how the devil you’ve managed to do it so quietly. Of
course everybody’s wondered more or less about it, but nobody’s really
known a thing. You’ve covered your tracks mighty well.”
“That suggests something I want to speak about,” Pickering spoke
slowly. He seemed to be feeling for his words. “This will all come
out before so very long, I suppose; everybody’ll catch on to what’s
happening, and act accordingly; but I don’t want that to happen any
sooner than I can help. Of course, I can trust to your discretion, and
I wouldn’t speak of this if it weren’t that there are one or two of
your directors--one in particular--that I’d much rather didn’t know
anything about this loan.”
“I’ll not speak of it to anybody,” John said briefly. “Do you know our
cashier, Mr. Jackson? Come out here and I’ll introduce you to him;
he’ll attend to your deposit. I’ll leave you in his hands and ask you
to excuse me. I’ve an engagement.”
John’s engagement was not an important one--simply to lunch with
himself. What he ate was never a matter of interest to him, and this
noon they might have brought him anything, for his mind was absorbed in
lard.
The hog is an uninteresting beast. His way of life is monotonous
and restricted; he has but one ambition, which in nearly all cases
is satisfied. There is no individuality about him; no interesting
variation from the normal to attract our studious attention. But
when, by a swift and highly ingenious metamorphosis, he ceases to be
Hog, and becomes Provisions, he assumes a national importance; his
fluctuations become fascinating, romantic. Over him is fought many a
fierce battle; he builds fortunes for some men, and others are brought
to irretrievable ruin from yielding to his alluring seductions.
It was evident to John that Pickering was trying to run a corner in
lard; in other words, that he meant to buy all of that commodity that
could be delivered to him, and a great deal more; then, being in
command of the market, he would put up the price as high as he chose,
and make enough profit from the non-existent, and hence undeliverable,
surplus to more than defray the expense of disposing of the lard he
actually possessed, or as the vernacular inelegantly puts it, burying
the corpse.
The morality of this sort of operation must not be scrutinized too
closely. Commercially it is “all right.” A man who only just fails to
get a corner--and get out of it--may even get a little sympathy from
his fellows. A man who succeeds is sure of unbounded admiration.
The commercial sort of morality is all that a banker has a right to
expect from his customers, and that was not the phase of the question
which interested John. He was wondering whether Pickering would
succeed. Cornering a market is at best a desperate operation; the
chances lie heavily on the side of failure. It is daring, splendid,
Napoleonic; it makes capital reading in the daily papers, and affords
the outsiders a chance to win a little and to lose a great deal of
money; but bankers regard it with suspicion.
However, Pickering might win. Everything that one could foresee was in
his favor. The stock of lard was small,--there had been a short corn
crop two years before,--and he had succeeded in buying a large part
of what there was of it without attracting attention. Nobody seemed
to think of a corner. Most of all in his favor was the man himself.
His skill was the growth of years of experience, his resources were
immense, and his nerve would never fail. Yes, he might win.
When John came back to the bank, he found Melville Sponley talking to
Curtin. Had he entered just a second sooner, he would have heard Curtin
say,--
“A fellow named Pickering--”
But as it happened, when he came in earshot, Sponley was talking,--
“It’s just a quiet little place, but you can sit over your coffee and
cigars as long as you like and nobody hurries you. I generally go
there--Hello!”
“What place is this?” John asked, coming up.
“The place I want you to go to with me for lunch to-day.”
“Oh, you’re too late,” said John. “I’ve just been.”
“You’re the worst victim of the early hour habit I know,” Sponley
exclaimed, with feigned impatience. “I thought I’d come early enough to
catch you. I suppose you breakfasted to-day at seven and will dine at
six.”
John laughed. “I’m getting to be an old dog,” he said. “You’ve got
to expect me to keep at my old tricks. Come in here and sit down. You
won’t want your lunch for an hour yet.”
He followed Sponley into the office and sat down before his desk. His
eyes rested on it a moment and he scowled.
“That old thing irritates me,” he said. “It’s always dirty. The cracks
and filigree stuff on the thing would defy the best-intentioned office
boy in the world.”
“It’s symbolic,” said Sponley, laughing. “It’s the exact type of the
ancient régime of Bagsbury and Company. All the rest of the furniture
of the bank is of the same kind.”
“I don’t dare change it,” John continued. “I don’t suppose the majority
of my father’s old customers would know whether my loans were secured
with government bonds or shares in Suburban Improvement Companies;
but if I should pack all this old lumber off to the second-hand shop,
they’d think I was just taking the whole bank straight to the devil.
It belonged here in father’s day, but it’s nothing now but a great big
bluff. I hate to be forced to keep up false appearances. Perhaps if
I hadn’t changed the policy, I would have dared to experiment on the
furniture.”
He unlocked the desk and lifted the heavy cover. The warehouse receipts
which Pickering had given him lay there in full view. As he picked them
up deliberately and laid them in a drawer, it occurred to him that
Melville Sponley was the one man connected with the bank who should be
kept in ignorance of the loan to Pickering, let alone the nature of the
collateral that secured it. He could not be sure whether Sponley had
seen the receipts or not.
“How’s Harriet these days?”
“Pretty well,” was the answer. “That is, most of the time she seems
perfectly well. She certainly looks all right, only once in a while
she’ll get all worked up over some little thing. It never happens when
anything’s going on that interests her; but when she’s home by herself
all day, and there hasn’t been anything to keep her occupied, she’ll be
as nervous as a cat. I think that’s all the trouble: she likes things
that are exciting, and when there isn’t anything, she gets bored. Now
last night we had some people over to dinner--first time we’ve had
anybody but you and Alice for a long while, and she was just as she
used to be twenty years ago, not a day older.”
There was a pause while John nodded reflectively, then Sponley asked,--
“How’s everything going here at the bank?”
“Just the same,” John answered, “and that means thundering good.
Deposits keep coming right up. They’re nearly twice what they were when
we took hold. Next quarter we’ll pay the first dividend in the history
of the bank that anywhere near represents the working value of the
capital invested.”
He paused and shook his head impatiently. “I don’t suppose it will do
us any good, though. If those old fossils get a big dividend, they’ll
think it means reckless banking. Lord! but I’m sick of their mummified
ideas. If I can ever get hold of my stock--”
“I think you will before the year’s out,” Sponley interrupted. “I think
your trustees will turn the whole business over to you, not formally,
perhaps, but at least will give you a free hand, to do about what you
please.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Why, you see, it’s never been you as much as the company you’ve kept,
that bothered your father and the other old fellows, and I’ve had the
honor to be the one they objected to most. I never could do anything
with Moffat; but I’ve put in my odd moments ever since the first of the
year in convincing Cartwright and Meredith that I’m all right. If they
once believe that, it’ll take away their only objection to you.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of that move,” said John.
“I haven’t mentioned it because at first I was so confounded
unsuccessful that I hated to own up how badly I’d been beat. They were
prickly as the very devil at first. And then when they commenced to
come round, I thought I’d wait until I had them all done up in a neat
parcel and hand them over to you as a sort of Christmas present. They
and their wives were the people we had to dinner last night. I tell
you, Harriet was the trump card of the whole hand. She swung them
nearer into line in two hours than I had done in two months. I think
that we’ve just about landed them. Of course, they’re only two out of
the three, but still that means something.”
Next to John’s capacity for perfectly calm, impersonal judgment, the
most valuable thing in his commercial equipment was a sort of intuitive
grasp of a situation, an ability instantly to correlate scattered
circumstances without waiting for the mind’s slower, logical processes.
In other words, he possessed the same sort of creative imagination
that characterizes great generals. Before Sponley had fairly finished
speaking, he had fully comprehended the strategic possibilities of
the speculator’s ground. Supposing that Sponley were working in his
own interests, John knew exactly the strength and the limitations of
Sponley’s position. And in the same instant he took the decision that
the man he had known intimately for twenty years would bear watching.
He went no further than that. He did not jump to the conclusion that
his friend meant to betray him. But the knowledge that Sponley might,
if he chose, take advantage of his hold on the two old trustees, made
him alert.
Sponley got slowly to his feet. “I’m ready for my lunch,” he said. “You
don’t happen to want another, do you?”
“No,” said John, “and I’ve got a big afternoon’s work ahead, even if I
did.”
“Nothing especially new has turned up to-day, I suppose?”
John shook his head.
“Well, come round and see us when you can get time. Good-by.”
As Sponley left the room, he thought: “There’s something in that
Pickering business. If there hadn’t been, he’d have mentioned it.”
When he passed Curtin’s desk, he spoke to him:--
“Going to be home to-night? I’m coming round to see you.”