ARTHUR SEES THE WORLD.
It was near the end of the first hour in the New York Stock Exchange.
The floor was crowded. A few of the young brokers, who had less
business and more time, having executed their orders, were now ready
for sky-larking and horse-play. But it had been a great “bull” morning,
and the greater number, many of whom were older brokers, and had only
been attracted personally to the scene as the news of the great battle
spread abroad about the Street, were still madly pressing around the
painted signs which were set, like standards, to mark the stations of
the stocks. The high roof of the hall seemed too close to make the
noise endurable; the air itself seemed torn and tired with the cries of
the combatants. The rays of light which came down from the high windows
were full of shreds and the dust of battle; the worn floor was littered
with bits of paper, telegrams and orders, the exploded cartridges of
that paper warfare. To the contemplative stranger in the gallery--if
any contemplating stranger there had presence of mind and spirit calm
enough to remain so--it seemed as if the actors in the scene, rushing
madly from one skirmish to another, crying their orders, now unheeded,
now to a crazy crowd, were the orators or leaders of a vast mob, trying
each to work his will upon the multitude. Or he may have thought it a
parliament, a congress that had overleapt all rules of decorum, where
each member forgot all save the open rush for private gain. But one who
understood might still have seen the battle wax and wane; might have
seen here the attack and there the repulse, here the concentration of
forces and the charge, there the support brought up to the post that
showed signs of wavering. And it _was_ a battle, of a sort more common
now than that of arms; and who shall say, less real than it? Surely,
they were fighting for their hearths and for their altars; such altars
and such firesides as they had. And many a city palace, and many a
country cottage, were hanging with their owners on the outcome of
the day. Each magnate of the market, each leader in the fray, stood
surrounded by his staff and subaltern officers; while the telegraph
boys and camp-followers rushed hither and thither, and nimble clerks
hastened from the room with messages and returned with new supplies.
Near the end of the great arena where the chief point of onslaught
seemed to be, stood the standard of the Allegheny Centrals--Allegheny
Central, the great railroad that made their houses and their yachts
and carriages for hundreds of the rich, and to which some ten thousand
of the poor looked for their daily bread. No great corporation had a
better name than this: none was surer, none more favored by widows
with their mites, by shrewd lawyers, by banks, and by trustees. A
greater power, almost, than the people, in the States through which
it ran, it was well and honestly managed, and little in favor with
speculators and those who like best of all to win by other people’s
losses; perhaps the easiest way. This stock had therefore been chosen
by the flower of the “bull” army, and was the very wedge of their
attack. A great crop had been sown upon its line that year; and about
the sign of Allegheny the maddest fight of all was fought. A dense
crowd encircled it, a small sea of high hats--some already crushed in
the conflict--and a babel of hoarse voices; and even on its outskirts
were others madly pushing, pressing to get in. The figures cried went
up by leaps at a time--Ninety! Ninety-one! a half! three quarters!
Ninety-two for any part of ten thousand! And the smaller men, who had
no thought of purchase at such a time, were drawn in as by a whirlpool,
such was the excitement of seeing others get what all were there to
make, such was the resistless attraction of success.
Among the men who took no part, but stood curiously, on the outskirts
of the fight, were two whose faces and figures would attract you even
in that crowd. They were apparently friends; at least, they had come
in together. The older was a young man of twenty-four or five, very
handsome in his way; that is, he was lithe, graceful, tall, with dark
hair neatly cut, a small black moustache, shaped like a gentleman’s--it
was not the moustache of a gambler, nor yet of an elegant of the
dry-goods counter--and, above all, with an indescribable air of
high finish and high living. His clothes were beautifully cut;
his hands white, his cheeks red, his nervous system evidently in
perfect order, and his digestion unimpaired. He came in sauntering,
carelessly pointing out the people of interest to his friend; his
manner was perfectly indifferent, as he drifted from one sign-post to
another, chewing between his lips the green stem of some flower,--as
a countryman puts a straw in his mouth when making a horse-trade. He
passed by the Allegheny Central and stopped in front of the Louisville
and Nashville sign; and no one suspected that he, Charlie Townley, of
Townley & Tamms, had just sent brokers into the heat of the fight,
by order of headquarters, to sell twenty thousand shares of the
Allegheny Central itself. He cast no glance behind him, but was engaged
in pointing out to his friend three well-known brokers--one famed
for his wit, the other for his wife, and the third, to continue the
alliteration, for his wiles. The companion was of different build; but
we need not describe him. Arthur Holyoke had arrived in New York the
very night before. He had come on from the country with his cousin and
her aunt, Mrs. Livingstone, with whom in future Gracie was to live.
He had been with Gracie all those weeks since her father’s death; but
his quick perception had prevented him from speaking to her again of
their engagement. Gracie was a girl whose standard of conduct was
placed above the plain and obvious right; who would go out of her way
to seek duties that were almost romantic, justice more than poetical,
motives ethereal, and benefits to others that their better angels might
have overlooked. And Arthur was enough of a poet himself to feel that
he would not wisely mention love to her for many months at least; not
because her father had not approved it, but because he was no longer
there to approve.
When Judge Holyoke had written to his sister-in-law about Arthur, Mrs.
Livingstone had spoken at once to Mr. Townley, who was an old friend of
hers; and he had promptly offered to let Arthur serve an apprenticeship
in his own business. Mr. Townley, the old gentleman, that is; for
Charlie, despite all his finish and importance, was but a line-officer,
representing them actively in the field. He was only a far-off orphan
cousin of Mr. Townley’s, and a clerk in the firm of Townley & Tamms, on
a salary of $2500 a year. But his alertness and his wide-awake air had
gained for him the pleasanter duty of representing the firm in its seat
in the Stock Exchange; said seat being, as we have seen, a privilege to
get standing-room therein if possible.
No one knew all this of Townley. Most of his merely society
acquaintances supposed him to be the senior partner’s son; even his
intimate friends thought of him as the probable heir, in a fair way to
be a partner, an impression which Charlie artfully heightened by his
extravagant mode of life when away from his boarding-place, his late
hours, and his general inattention to all but the showy work of the
firm. It was evident that he took far more interest in keeping his
dress correct than in the books of the firm; and, the Stock Exchange
once closed, no young man of fashion could be more safely relied upon
for an afternoon of sport, or a ride and dinner at the Hill-and-Dale
Club.
But all this Arthur had yet to learn; for the present, he was
interested in the battle around him, the conflict of the two spirits,
hope and despair, affirmation and negation, enterprise and nihilism, in
this safety-valve of traffic, where alone the two forces meet directly,
each at touch and test with the other. For the Stock Exchange is a kind
of gauge, testing the force of the national store and the national need
of money; and the bears, too, have their healthy function, keeping down
the fever in the body politic.
In the shriek and roar of all the crowd about them, the young men could
hardly converse intelligibly; but that might come after; meantime,
Arthur was fully employed in seeing. Few of the men showed evidence
of much mental anxiety; opposite them, to be sure, a pale-faced
little Jew stood in a corner, nervously biting his lips; but most of
the crowd were red-faced, and panting with the physical excitement
alone, as if it were a foot-ball match. As they looked on, a fat,
good-natured-looking broker with an impudent face and a white hat
cocked on one side of his head, came out of the Lake Shore crowd, and
with the slightest perceptible wink to Townley as he passed, joined the
madder fight about Allegheny Central.
“Ninety-one,” said he, “a thousand!”
“Come out of the floor,” said Townley to Arthur; “come up-stairs;
there’s going to be some fun.” At first, no one paid any attention to
the new-comer; and when our friends got to the gallery, the fat broker
was still offering his stock at ninety-one to an unheeding world, and
the state of affairs was much the same as before. Only, that at this
distance the noise had something in it less human; it was inarticulate,
monstrous, and the sight of half a thousand men, struggling, every eye
fixed on his neighbor’s, made a something awful in the experience, as
if they two on-lookers were unseen Valkyrs, looking down upon some
battle of the Huns.
“Ninety-one,” they heard the new-comer say again; and this time he was
answered; for there was a howl of derision, and then a sudden sway in
the crowd, and a rush to where he stood. “Ninety and three quarters,”
said he; “a half,” and there was another howl; but by this time the
leaders of the inner defence had heard of this flank movement, and
their tactics changed. “Ninety!” “Nine and a half!” “Eighty-nine!”
“Eight and three quarters!” “A half!”
“Seven, for ten thousand,” said the solitary broker, coolly; and the
roar doubled in volume, if such a thing were possible; and the rush to
sell began, at rapidly dropping figures. The fat, good-natured broker
turned away, and started to go, having sold the stock down five points
in hardly fifty seconds; when crash! a small soft orange went through
the centre of the impudent white hat. With a yell of derision, the
crowd turned their fury upon this; whack! crack! flew the unlucky hat,
from one fist to another, amid the cheers of the multitude, until a
well-directed kick landed it beside Arthur in the gallery. This gave
a new object to their humor; and with one accord the assemblage began
singing in regular well-tempered cadence, evidently referring to Arthur:
“Lambs! Lambs!
One shorn lamb!”
Arthur, blushing, hurried from the gallery; and Charlie Townley
followed him, laughing inordinately.
“They’ll get used to you in a day or two, my dear fellow,” said he.
“They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t seen you with me.”
When they got into the corridor below, they met the broker of the
ravaged hat. He had got another by this time, and winked, this time
with a broad smile, at Townley as they came out. “I did that pretty
well, I think?” said he.
“First-rate,” said Townley. “How much did it cost?”
“Not over twenty thousand shares, I guess, and twelve at least went to
your friends. The boys didn’t like it, though, did they?” And the man’s
mouth grinned wider, as he thought of the scene we have described.
“Charge the hat to the pool,” laughed Townley. “Who’s selling,--not the
Old Man?”
“Tammy, I guess,” said the other. “Doubt if the Old Man even knows it.”
“Ta-ta,” said Townley; and they sallied forth, Arthur much wondering
at these metropolitan methods of doing business; and Townley completed
his duties as host and cicerone by giving him a very elaborate lunch
at a down-town club and putting his name down among the candidates for
membership. “You needn’t feed here unless you like,” said he; “but
it’s so convenient to bring a fellow to.” Indeed, Townley had been
very friendly to the young countryman; and this was no less than the
third club at which he had “put him up” that day. “You can try ’em all,
and then make up your mind which ones you’d like to join,” said he.
At a word of remonstrance from Arthur, he had glibly anticipated all
objection. “Now don’t talk about extravagance,” said he; “I tell you,
no fellow ever made money in New York who didn’t spend it first.” And
Arthur had been silenced by this paradoxical philosophy.
Townley’s friendship had even extended to providing him with a
boarding-place, a room in the house where he himself lodged; and toward
this the young fellows took their way, early in the afternoon. Arthur
was already tired, with his short and idle day; he was overcome by the
rush and the whirl and the magnitude of things. He had heard talked
of, had handled, had seen the management of, huge sums of money; he
had seen millions in the process of their making; but how to divert a
rivulet of the Pactolean stream to himself seemed a greater mystery
than ever. It took so much to make so little! Such huge heaps of
bullion had to be sweated to yield to the manipulator the clippings
of one gold dollar! Truly, on the other hand, Townley talked to him
of millions made and lost as if they had been blackberries. It was,
“There’s old Prime--he made a million in that Panhandle deal,” or
“There goes poor old Howard--the shorts in Erie used him up,” until
Arthur saw that he was seeing here a most instructive process: nothing
less than the creation and founding of American families. Here were
the people, the progenitors of future castes; the sources of inherited
estate, of culture, of consideration; this old man with the battered
hat, that sharp-faced young Israelite, were the ancestors, the
probable fathers and grandfathers of the men and maidens who were to
be “society” in the future Republic; the first acquirers of--not the
broad acres, but the city lots--the rich houses, the stocks and bonds,
the whole equipment of life, that was (if our laws are maintained) to
make sleek the _jeunesse dorée_ of the twentieth century. A million!
It is not much, in many ways, in most ways that we read about in books
and bibles; it is not a factor of the Crusades, nor of the War of the
Roses, nor yet (as we are informed) of the kingdom of heaven. But most
things that Townley saw were multiples of it; and now Townley carefully
avoided reading books; for even General Gordon, you remember, writing
from Khartoum to posterity, records the reflection that mankind and
his works are governed by his ventral tube. Now of ventral tubes, a
million is the deity; books should, as they used to, speak to souls.
And Arthur, thinking of all this, who had marvelled first at all their
eagerness, now wondered rather at their carelessness; of these men,
taking and losing such things so lightly.
Arthur could not have had a better cicerone than Charlie Townley. He
knew his New York like the inside of his pocket; its streets, its ways,
its women, its wiles, its heroes and its favorites; its eating places,
drinking places, breathing places; its getting up and its lying down.
When they passed Fourteenth Street, his manner changed very apparently;
the æsthetic overcame the practical; the hard shine of millions was
displaced by the softer radiance of women’s eyes. Many of these same
eyes were, in their turn, riveted by the display of women’s wares in
the shop-windows about Union Square, which gave Townley the opportunity
of gazing at his ease; although, it must be owned, if any of these eyes
looked up and met his own, he seemed little disconcerted.
They stopped and made a call at the Columbian Club, which was crowded
with men, breaking the long journey homeward to their firesides,
domestic or otherwise. And as, in some country hamlet of the Middle
Ages, we can fancy the little ale-house, standing on the heath, midway;
Jock and Dickon are plodding home tired from the long day’s plowing;
behind this one smoking chimney the cold November sky lowers drearily,
the last pale tints of the tired day are fading, and the common is
bare, and the naked moorland left to the wolves; and the two men stop
in a moment at the Cat-and-Fiddle to have a bite and a sup, a cup
around the tavern-fire, and a bit of human companionship, to talk
about the price of corn, and of Hodge the tinker’s son and Joan his
sweetheart, and the doings of the new squire, whose round brown towers
peep from the coppice of the distant park--so, too, here in our New
York, the jaded men drop in, and chat about the price of stocks, their
neighbor’s horses and his wife, and have a glass of bitters round
the fire. Townley took vermouth, lamenting bitterly that his health
permitted nothing stronger; but other paler men than he administered
brandy-cocktails unto themselves, or pick-me-ups of gin. Here Charlie
brushed himself, and took his silver-headed cane; and again the
pair sallied forth upon their journey, crossing Madison Square and
striking up the Avenue. Many damsels, richly robed, now lit up the long
way; there is usually a received type at any period for the outdoor
gorgeousness of womankind, and this year it was blue--a walking-suit of
blue, from neck to heel, close-fitting, and all of velvet. Dozens and
scores of velvet gowns they passed, and Arthur noticed that his guide,
philosopher, and friend looked at many of them as if they were familiar
sights, but bowed to few. Now there had been many, in Union Square, to
whom he had nodded, at the least. He seemed to read Arthur’s thoughts,
for he said:
“These are all off-side girls. You don’t see the others out at this
time.”
“What do you mean?” said Arthur.
“Why, they’re not in society, you know.” And he lifted his hat to
one of them, who had given him a most _empressé_ bow, including in
it Arthur. “There’s one of the prettiest girls in town,” said he,
meditatively; “Kitty Farnum. They’re awfully rich, too; old Farnum’s
got no end of money.” This thought seemed to depress Charlie for a
minute, and they walked on in silence. Now Arthur had met Miss Farnum
at a New Haven ball, where she had been a very proud belle indeed.
“There,” said Townley, at last, as they crossed a side street, “is Mrs.
Levison Gower’s.” There was a certain reverence in his tone, as he said
this, that his voice had not yet shown in all that day, and Arthur
looked with a proper admiration, though not clearly understanding why,
at the house we have already described.
Their lodgings were near by (so Townley always spoke of the
boarding-house where he lived), and the young men separated to dress
for dinner. Arthur had been rather surprised that so elegant a person
lived in a boarding-house at all; but the fact was, Townley preferred
to use his money elsewhere than at home. But he never dined with the
other inhabitants; in fact, his acquaintance with them was extremely
slight, as he always breakfasted in his room; and to-night he put a
finishing touch upon his hospitality by inviting Arthur to a very
pretty little dinner at the Piccadilly Club. But after this, Townley
had an engagement, and Arthur was left to his own devices. He smoked
his cigar and read the evening paper; then he began an article in the
_Edinburgh Review_, took up the _Spectator_, and ended with _Punch_;
after which he became unoccupied, and his spirits dropped visibly.
By this time several men had strolled in; there was much laughing and
gay spirits; around him were all the luxuries of mind and body that the
inventive bachelor mind has yet devised for the comfort of either such
part of himself. But as Arthur leaned back in the deep, throne-like
leather chair and sipped (if one may so say) his _reina victoria_, his
consciousness went back to a certain sunny hillside, with the light of
the rich autumn morning, and the joyous beat of the hoofs upon the dewy
grass.
He had been to see Gracie only the day before; but he drew on his
overcoat and walked around to the Livingstones. A light was in the
second-story window of the high house; and he rang the bell hopefully.
“Mrs. Livingstone?”
“Not at home,” said the man, gravely.
“Is--is Miss Holyoke in?”
“The ladies are out, sir,” said the man, decidedly.
“I will not leave a card,” said Arthur, answering the man’s gesture;
and he walked sadly back to the club-house.
Surely, Arthur felt, the forms of life and the trammels of the great
city were coming home to him.