IN WHICH I GO DOWN
I had just risen from breakfast on the last day of March when I was
called to the telephone by Cummins, the cashier of the bank.
"Things are going pretty queer down here. Looks as if a run were
beginning. Some old fool started it after reading about that failure of
the Darlington Trust Company in New York. Wish you'd hurry."
"Call up the directors, and look here!--pay out all deposits slowly
until I get there."
The telephone rang off, and picking up my hat, I went down the front
steps to the carriage, which had been ordered by Sally for an early
appointment. As I stepped in, she appeared in her hat and coat and
joined me.
"Drive to the bank, Micah," I said, "I want to get there like
lightning."
"Can you wait till I speak to mammy? She is bringing the baby."
For the first time since our marriage my nerves got the better of me,
and I answered her sharply.
"No, I can't wait--not a minute, not a second. Drive on, Micah."
In obedience to my commands, Micah touched the horses, and as we sped
down Franklin Street, Sally looked at me with an expression which
reminded me of the faint wonder under the fixed smile about Miss Mitty's
mouth.
"What's the matter, Ben? Are you working too hard?" she enquired.
"I'm tired and I'm anxious. Do you realise that we are living in the
midst of a panic?"
"Are we?" she asked quietly, and arranged the fur rug over her knees.
"Do you mean to tell me you hadn't heard it?" I demanded, in pure
amazement that the thing which had possessed me to madness for three
months should have escaped the consciousness of the wife with whom I
lived.
"How was I to hear of it? You never told me, and I seldom read the
papers now since the baby came. Of course I knew something was wrong.
You were looking so badly and so much older."
To me it had needed no telling, because it had become suddenly the most
obvious fact in the world in which I moved. Only a fool would gaze up at
the sky during a storm burst and remark to a bystander, "It thunders."
Yet even now I saw that what she realised was not the gravity of the
financial crisis, but its injurious effect upon my health and my
appearance.
"You've been on too great a strain," she remarked sympathetically; "when
it's all over you must come away and we'll go to Florida in the
General's car."
To Florida! and at that instant I was struggling in the grip of
failure--the failure of the successful financier, which is of all
failures the hardest. Not a few retrenchments, not the economy of a
luxury here and there, but ultimate poverty was the thing that I faced
while I sat beside her on the soft cushions under the rich fur rug. One
by one the familiar houses whirled by me. I saw the doors open and shut,
the people come out of them, the sunshine fall through the budding trees
on the sidewalk; and the houses and the moving people and the budding
trees, all seemed to me detached and unreal, as if they stood apart
somewhere in a world of quiet, while I was sucked in by the whirlpool.
Though I lifted my voice and called aloud to them, I felt that the
people I passed would still go quietly in and out of the opening doors
in the placid spring sunshine.
"There's Bonny Page," said Sally, waving her hand; "she's to marry Ned
Marshall next month, you know, and they are going to Europe. Did you
notice that baby in the carriage--the one with blue bows and the Irish
lace afghan?--it is Bessy Munford's,--the handsomest in town, they say,
after little Benjamin."
The sight of the baby carriage, with its useless blue fripperies,
trundled on the pavement under the budding trees, had aroused in me a
sudden ridiculous anger, as though it represented the sinful
extravagance of an entire nation. That silly carriage with its blue
ribbons and its lace coverlet! And over the whole country factory after
factory was shutting down, and thousands of hungry mothers and children
were sitting on door-steps in this same sunshine. My nerves were bad. It
had been months since I had a good night's sleep, and I knew that in the
condition of my temper a trifle might be magnified out of all due
proportion to its relative significance.
The horses stopped at the bank, and Sally leaned out to bow smilingly to
one of the directors, who was coming along the sidewalk.
"I never saw so many people about here, Ben," she remarked; "it looks
exactly as if it were a theatre. Ah, there's the General now going into
his office. He hobbles so badly, doesn't he? When do you think you'll be
home?"
"I don't know," I returned shortly, "perhaps at midnight--perhaps next
week."
My tone brought a flush to her cheek, and she looked at me with the
faint wonder that I had seen first on the face of Miss Mitty when I went
in to breakfast with her on that autumn morning. It was the look of
race, of the Bland breeding, of the tradition that questioned, not
violently, but gently, "Can this be possible?"
She drove on without replying to me, and as I entered my office, the
faces of Miss Mitty and of Sally were confused into one by my disordered
mind.
The run had already started--a depositor, who had withdrawn ten thousand
dollars after reading of the failure of the Darlington Trust Company,
had been paid off first, and following him the line had come, crawling
like black ants on the pavement. As I entered the doors, it seemed to me
that the face of each man or woman in the throng stood out, separate and
distinct, as though an electric search-light had passed over it; and I
saw one and all, frightened, satisfied, or merely ludicrous, with a
vividness of perception which failed me when I remembered the features
of my own wife.
"We can pay them off slowly till three o'clock," said Bingley, the
vice-president, whom I found, with five or six of the directors, already
in my office. "I've got only one paying teller's window open. The
trouble, of course, began with the small accounts, of which we carry
such a blamed lot. Mark my words, it is the little depositor that
endangers a bank."
He looked nervous, and swallowed hastily while he talked, as if he had
just rushed in from breakfast, with his last mouthful still unchewed. As
I entered and faced the men sitting in different attitudes, but all
wearing the same strained and helpless expression, a feeling of
irritation swept over me, and I paused in the middle of the floor, with
my hat and a folded newspaper in my hand.
"A quarter of a million in hard cash would tide us over, I believe,"
pursued Bingley, swallowing faster; "but the question is how in thunder
are we to lay hands on it by nine o'clock to-morrow morning?"
I drew out my watch, and with the simple, mechanical action, I was
conscious of an immediate quickening of the blood, a clearing of the
brain. A certain readiness for decision, a power of dealing with an
emergency, of handling a crisis, a response of pulse and brain to the
call for action, stood me service now as in every difficult instant of
my career. They were picked business men and shrewd financiers before
me, yet I was aware that I dominated them, all and each, by some quality
of force, of aggressiveness, of inflated self-confidence. The secret of
my success, I had once said to the General, was that I began to get cool
when I saw other people getting scared.
"It is now a quarter of ten, gentlemen," I said, "and I pledge my word
of honour that I will have a quarter of a million dollars in bank by ten
o'clock to-morrow."
"For God's sake, Ben, where is it coming from?" demanded Judge Kenton,
an old Confederate, with the solemn face I had sometimes watched him
assume in church during the singing of the hymns. As I looked at him the
humour of his expression struck me, and I broke into a laugh.
"I beg your pardon," I returned the next minute, "but I'll get
it--somewhere--if it's in the city."
One of the men--I forget which, though I remember quite clearly that he
wore a red necktie--got up from the table and slapped me on the
shoulder.
"Go ahead, Ben, and get it," he said. "We take your word."
On the pavement the crowd had thickened, and when it caught sight of me,
a confused murmur rose, and I was surrounded by half-hysterical women.
The trouble, as Bingley had said, had begun with the small depositors;
and in the line that pressed now like black ants to the doors, there
were many evidently who had entrusted their nest-eggs to us for
safe-keeping. I was not gentle by nature, and the sight of a woman's
tears always aroused in me, not the angel, but the brute. For five years
I had been married to a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, and
yet, as I stood there, held at bay, in the midst of those sobbing women,
the veneer of refinement peeled off from me, and the raw strength of the
common man showed on the surface, and triumphed again as it had
triumphed over the frightened directors in my office.
"What are you whining about?" I said with a laugh, "your money is all
there. Go in and get it."
An old woman in a plaid shawl, with her mouth twisted sideways by a
recent stroke of paralysis, barred my way with an outstretched hand, in
which she held the foot of a grey yarn stocking.
"I'd laid it up for my old age, Mister," she mumbled, through her
toothless gums, "an' they told me it was safer in the bank, so I put it
there. But I reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back--I reckon I'd feel
easier."
"Then go after it," I replied harshly, pushing her out of my way. "If
you don't get it before I come back, I'll give it to you with my own
hands."
For a minute my presence subdued the crowd; but the panic terror had
gripped it, and while I crossed the street the hysterical murmurs were
in my ears. A desire to turn and throttle the sound as I might a howling
wild beast took possession of me. It was true, I suppose, as Dr.
Theophilus had once told me, that the quality I lacked was tenderness.
The General fortunately was alone in his private office, and when I went
in he glanced up enquiringly from a railroad report he was reading.
"It's you, Ben, is it?" he remarked, and went back to his paper.
"General," I said bluntly, and stopped short in the centre of the room,
"I want a quarter of a million dollars in cash by nine o'clock to-morrow
morning."
For a moment he sat speechless, blinking at me with his swollen eyelids,
while his lower lip protruded angrily, like the lip of a crying child.
Then the old war-horse in him responded gallantly to the scent of
battle.
"Damn you, Ben, do you know cash is as tight as wax?" he enquired. "You
ain't dozing in the midst of a panic?"
"There's trouble at the bank," I replied. "A run has started, but so far
it is almost entirely among the small depositors. We can manage to pay
off till three o'clock, and if we open to-morrow with a quarter of a
million, we shall probably keep on our feet, unless the excitement
spreads."
"When do you want it?"
"By nine o'clock to-morrow morning; and I want it, General," I added,
"on my personal credit."
He rose from his chair and stood swaying unsteadily on his gouty foot.
"I'll give you every penny that I've got, Ben," he answered, "but it
ain't that much."
"You have access to the cash of both the Tilden Bank and the Bonfield
Trust Company. If there's a dollar in the city you can get it."
A hint of his sly humour appeared for an instant in his eyes. "It wasn't
any longer ago than breakfast that I remarked I didn't believe there was
a blamed dollar in the whole country," he returned. Then his swaying
stopped and he became invested suddenly with the dignity of the greatest
financier in the state.
"Hand me my stick, Ben, and I'll go and see what I can do about it," he
said.
I gave him his stick and my arm, and with my assistance he limped to the
offices of the Bonfield Trust Company on the next block. When I returned
to the bank the directors were talking excitedly, but at my entrance a
hush fell, and they sat looking at me with a row of vacant, expectant
faces that waited apparently to be filled with expression.
"By ten o'clock to-morrow morning," I said, "a quarter of a million in
cash will be brought in through the door in bags."
"I told you he'd do it," exclaimed Bingley, as he grasped my hand, "and
I hope to God it will stay 'em off."
"You need a drink, Ben," observed Judge Kenton, "and so do I. Let's go
and get it. A soft-boiled egg was all I had for breakfast, and I've gone
faint."
I remember that I went to a restaurant with him, that a few old women
sitting on the curbing spoke to us as we passed, that we ate oysters,
and returned in half an hour to another meeting, that we discussed ways
and means until eight o'clock and decided nothing. I know also that when
we came out again several of the old women were still crouching there,
and that when they came whining up to me, I turned on them with an oath
and ordered them to be off. As clearly as if it were yesterday, I can
see still the long, solemn face of the Judge as he glanced up at me, and
I see written upon it something of the faint wonder that I had grown to
regard as the peculiar look of the Blands.
I had telephoned Sally not to wait, and when I reached home I found that
she had dismissed the servants and was preparing a little supper for me
herself. While she served me, I sat perfectly silent, too exhausted to
talk or to think, trying in vain to remember the more important events
of the day. Only once did Sally speak, and that was to beg me to eat the
slice of cold turkey she had laid on my plate.
"I'm not hungry, I got something with Judge Kenton down town," I
returned as I pushed back my chair and rose from the table; "what I need
is sleep, sleep, sleep. If I don't get to bed, I'll drop to sleep on the
hearth-rug."
"Then go, dear," she answered, and not until I reached the landing above
did I realise that through it all she had not put a single question to
me. With the realisation I knew that I ought to have told her what in
her heart she must have felt it to be her right to know; but a nervous
shrinking, which seemed to be a result of my complete physical
exhaustion, held me back when I started to retrace my steps.
She might cry, and the sight of tears would unman me. There's time
enough, I thought. Why not to-morrow instead? Yet in my heart I knew it
would be no easier to do it to-morrow than it was to-day. By some
strange freak of the imagination those unshed tears of hers seemed
already dropping upon my nerves. "There's time enough, she'll be obliged
to hear it in the end," something within me repeated with a kind of
dulness. And with the words, while my head touched the pillow, I started
suddenly wide awake as though from the flash of a lantern that was
turned inward. Trivial impressions of the afternoon stood out as if
illuminated against the outer darkness, and there hovered before me the
face of the old woman, in the plaid shawl, with her twisted mouth, and
the foot of her grey yarn stocking held out in her palsied hand. "I
reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back," said a voice somewhere in my
brain.