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_ The banking house of Jay Cooke & Co., in spite of its tremendous
significance as a banking and promoting concern, was a most
unpretentious affair, four stories and a half in height of gray
stone and red brick. It had never been deemed a handsome or
comfortable banking house. Cowperwood had been there often.
Wharf-rats as long as the forearm of a man crept up the culverted
channels of Dock Street to run through the apartments at will.
Scores of clerks worked under gas-jets, where light and air were
not any too abundant, keeping track of the firm's vast accounts.
It was next door to the Girard National Bank, where Cowperwood's
friend Davison still flourished, and where the principal financial
business of the street converged. As Cowperwood ran he met his
brother Edward, who was coming to the stock exchange with some
word for him from Wingate.
"Run and get Wingate and Joe," he said. "There's something big
on this afternoon. Jay Cooke has failed."
Edward waited for no other word, but hurried off as directed.
Cowperwood reached Cooke & Co. among the earliest. To his utter
astonishment, the solid brown-oak doors, with which he was familiar,
were shut, and a notice posted on them, which he quickly read, ran:
September 18, 1873.
To the Public--We regret to be obliged to announce that, owing
to unexpected demands on us, our firm has been obliged to suspend
payment. In a few days we will be able to present a statement
to our creditors. Until which time we must ask their patient
consideration. We believe our assets to be largely in excess
of our liabilities.
Jay Cooke & Co.
A magnificent gleam of triumph sprang into Cowperwood's eye. In
company with many others he turned and ran back toward the exchange,
while a reporter, who had come for information knocked at the
massive doors of the banking house, and was told by a porter, who
peered out of a diamond-shaped aperture, that Jay Cooke had gone
home for the day and was not to be seen.
"Now," thought Cowperwood, to whom this panic spelled opportunity,
not ruin, "I'll get my innings. I'll go short of this--of
everything."
Before, when the panic following the Chicago fire had occurred,
he had been long--had been compelled to stay long of many things
in order to protect himself. To-day he had nothing to speak of--
perhaps a paltry seventy-five thousand dollars which he had managed
to scrape together. Thank God! he had only the reputation of
Wingate's old house to lose, if he lost, which was nothing. With
it as a trading agency behind him--with it as an excuse for his
presence, his right to buy and sell--he had everything to gain.
Where many men were thinking of ruin, he was thinking of success.
He would have Wingate and his two brothers under him to execute
his orders exactly. He could pick up a fourth and a fifth man if
necessary. He would give them orders to sell--everything--ten,
fifteen, twenty, thirty points off, if necessary, in order to trap
the unwary, depress the market, frighten the fearsome who would
think he was too daring; and then he would buy, buy, buy, below
these figures as much as possible, in order to cover his sales and
reap a profit.
His instinct told him how widespread and enduring this panic would
be. The Northern Pacific was a hundred-million-dollar venture.
It involved the savings of hundreds of thousands of people--small
bankers, tradesmen, preachers, lawyers, doctors, widows, institutions
all over the land, and all resting on the faith and security of
Jay Cooke. Once, not unlike the Chicago fire map, Cowperwood had
seen a grand prospectus and map of the location of the Northern
Pacific land-grant which Cooke had controlled, showing a vast
stretch or belt of territory extending from Duluth--"The Zenith
City of the Unsalted Seas," as Proctor Knott, speaking in the House
of Representatives, had sarcastically called it--through the
Rockies and the headwaters of the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean.
He had seen how Cooke had ostensibly managed to get control of
this government grant, containing millions upon millions of acres
and extending fourteen hundred miles in length; but it was only
a vision of empire. There might be silver and gold and copper
mines there. The land was usable--would some day be usable. But
what of it now? It would do to fire the imaginations of fools
with--nothing more. It was inaccessible, and would remain so for
years to come. No doubt thousands had subscribed to build this
road; but, too, thousands would now fail if it had failed. Now
the crash had come. The grief and the rage of the public would
be intense. For days and days and weeks and months, normal
confidence and courage would be gone. This was his hour. This
was his great moment. Like a wolf prowling under glittering,
bitter stars in the night, he was looking down into the humble
folds of simple men and seeing what their ignorance and their
unsophistication would cost them.
He hurried back to the exchange, the very same room in which only
two years before he had fought his losing fight, and, finding
that his partner and his brother had not yet come, began to sell
everything in sight. Pandemonium had broken loose. Boys and men
were fairly tearing in from all sections with orders from panic-struck
brokers to sell, sell, sell, and later with orders to buy; the
various trading-posts were reeling, swirling masses of brokers and
their agents. Outside in the street in front of Jay Cooke & Co.,
Clark & Co., the Girard National Bank, and other institutions,
immense crowds were beginning to form. They were hurrying here
to learn the trouble, to withdraw their deposits, to protect their
interests generally. A policeman arrested a boy for calling out
the failure of Jay Cooke & Co., but nevertheless the news of the
great disaster was spreading like wild-fire.
Among these panic-struck men Cowperwood was perfectly calm, deadly
cold, the same Cowperwood who had pegged solemnly at his ten chairs
each day in prison, who had baited his traps for rats, and worked
in the little garden allotted him in utter silence and loneliness.
Now he was vigorous and energetic. He had been just sufficiently
about this exchange floor once more to have made his personality
impressive and distinguished. He forced his way into the center
of swirling crowds of men already shouting themselves hoarse,
offering whatever was being offered in quantities which were
astonishing, and at prices which allured the few who were anxious
to make money out of the tumbling prices to buy. New York Central
had been standing at 104 7/8 when the failure was announced; Rhode
Island at 108 7/8; Western Union at 92 1/2; Wabash at 70 1/4;
Panama at 117 3/8; Central Pacific at 99 5/8; St. Paul at 51;
Hannibal & St. Joseph at 48; Northwestern at 63; Union Pacific at
26 3/4; Ohio and Mississippi at 38 3/4. Cowperwood's house had
scarcely any of the stocks on hand. They were not carrying them
for any customers, and yet he sold, sold, sold, to whoever would
take, at prices which he felt sure would inspire them.
"Five thousand of New York Central at ninety-nine, ninety-eight,
ninety-seven, ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four, ninety-three,
ninety-two, ninety-one, ninety, eighty-nine," you might have heard
him call; and when his sales were not sufficiently brisk he would
turn to something else--Rock Island, Panama, Central Pacific,
Western Union, Northwestern, Union Pacific. He saw his brother
and Wingate hurrying in, and stopped in his work long enough to
instruct them. "Sell everything you can," he cautioned them
quietly, "at fifteen points off if you have to--no lower than that
now--and buy all you can below it. Ed, you see if you cannot buy
up some local street-railways at fifteen off. Joe, you stay near
me and buy when I tell you."
The secretary of the board appeared on his little platform.
"E. W. Clark & Company," he announced, at one-thirty, "have just
closed their doors."
"Tighe & Company," he called at one-forty-five, "announce that
they are compelled to suspend."
"The First National Bank of Philadelphia," he called, at two o'clock,
"begs to state that it cannot at present meet its obligations."
After each announcement, always, as in the past, when the gong had
compelled silence, the crowd broke into an ominous "Aw, aw, aw."
"Tighe & Company," thought Cowperwood, for a single second, when
he heard it. "There's an end of him." And then he returned to
his task.
When the time for closing came, his coat torn, his collar twisted
loose, his necktie ripped, his hat lost, he emerged sane, quiet,
steady-mannered.
"Well, Ed," he inquired, meeting his brother, "how'd you make
out?" The latter was equally torn, scratched, exhausted.
"Christ," he replied, tugging at his sleeves, "I never saw such
a place as this. They almost tore my clothes off."
"Buy any local street-railways?"
"About five thousand shares."
"We'd better go down to Green's," Frank observed, referring to
the lobby of the principal hotel. "We're not through yet. There'll
be more trading there."
He led the way to find Wingate and his brother Joe, and together
they were off, figuring up some of the larger phases of their
purchases and sales as they went.
And, as he predicted, the excitement did not end with the coming
of the night. The crowd lingered in front of Jay Cooke & Co.'s
on Third Street and in front of other institutions, waiting
apparently for some development which would be favorable to them.
For the initiated the center of debate and agitation was Green's
Hotel, where on the evening of the eighteenth the lobby and corridors
were crowded with bankers, brokers, and speculators. The stock
exchange had practically adjourned to that hotel en masse. What
of the morrow? Who would be the next to fail? From whence would
money be forthcoming? These were the topics from each mind and
upon each tongue. From New York was coming momentarily more news
of disaster. Over there banks and trust companies were falling
like trees in a hurricane. Cowperwood in his perambulations, seeing
what he could see and hearing what he could hear, reaching
understandings which were against the rules of the exchange, but
which were nevertheless in accord with what every other person was
doing, saw about him men known to him as agents of Mollenhauer and
Simpson, and congratulated himself that he would have something
to collect from them before the week was over. He might not own
a street-railway, but he would have the means to. He learned from
hearsay, and information which had been received from New York and
elsewhere, that things were as bad as they could be, and that
there was no hope for those who expected a speedy return of normal
conditions. No thought of retiring for the night entered until
the last man was gone. It was then practically morning.
The next day was Friday, and suggested many ominous things. Would
it be another Black Friday? Cowperwood was at his office before
the street was fairly awake. He figured out his program for the
day to a nicety, feeling strangely different from the way he had
felt two years before when the conditions were not dissimilar.
Yesterday, in spite of the sudden onslaught, he had made one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and he expected to make as
much, if not more, to-day. There was no telling what he could
make, he thought, if he could only keep his small organization in
perfect trim and get his assistants to follow his orders exactly.
Ruin for others began early with the suspension of Fisk & Hatch,
Jay Cooke's faithful lieutenants during the Civil War. They had
calls upon them for one million five hundred thousand dollars in
the first fifteen minutes after opening the doors, and at once
closed them again, the failure being ascribed to Collis P. Huntington's
Central Pacific Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio. There was a
long-continued run on the Fidelity Trust Company. News of these
facts, and of failures in New York posted on 'change, strengthened
the cause Cowperwood was so much interested in; for he was selling
as high as he could and buying as low as he could on a constantly
sinking scale. By twelve o'clock he figured with his assistants
that he had cleared one hundred thousand dollars; and by three
o'clock he had two hundred thousand dollars more. That afternoon
between three and seven he spent adjusting his trades, and between
seven and one in the morning, without anything to eat, in gathering
as much additional information as he could and laying his plans
for the future. Saturday morning came, and he repeated his
performance of the day before, following it up with adjustments
on Sunday and heavy trading on Monday. By Monday afternoon at
three o'clock he figured that, all losses and uncertainties to one
side, he was once more a millionaire, and that now his future lay
clear and straight before him.
As he sat at his desk late that afternoon in his office looking
out into Third Street, where a hurrying of brokers, messengers,
and anxious depositors still maintained, he had the feeling that
so far as Philadelphia and the life here was concerned, his day
and its day with him was over. He did not care anything about
the brokerage business here any more or anywhere. Failures such
as this, and disasters such as the Chicago fire, that had overtaken
him two years before, had cured him of all love of the stock
exchange and all feeling for Philadelphia. He had been very
unhappy here in spite of all his previous happiness; and his
experience as a convict had made, him, he could see quite plainly,
unacceptable to the element with whom he had once hoped to associate.
There was nothing else to do, now that he had reestablished
himself as a Philadelphia business man and been pardoned for an
offense which he hoped to make people believe he had never committed,
but to leave Philadelphia to seek a new world.
"If I get out of this safely," he said to himself, "this is the
end. I am going West, and going into some other line of business."
He thought of street-railways, land speculation, some great
manufacturing project of some kind, even mining, on a legitimate
basis.
"I have had my lesson," he said to himself, finally getting up and
preparing to leave. "I am as rich as I was, and only a little
older. They caught me once, but they will not catch me again."
He talked to Wingate about following up the campaign on the lines
in which he had started, and he himself intended to follow it up
with great energy; but all the while his mind was running with
this one rich thought: "I am a millionaire. I am a free man. I
am only thirty-six, and my future is all before me."
It was with this thought that he went to visit Aileen, and to plan
for the future.
It was only three months later that a train, speeding through the
mountains of Pennsylvania and over the plains of Ohio and Indiana,
bore to Chicago and the West the young financial aspirant who, in
spite of youth and wealth and a notable vigor of body, was a solemn,
conservative speculator as to what his future might be. The West,
as he had carefully calculated before leaving, held much. He had
studied the receipts of the New York Clearing House recently and
the disposition of bank-balances and the shipment of gold, and had
seen that vast quantities of the latter metal were going to Chicago.
He understood finance accurately. The meaning of gold shipments
was clear. Where money was going trade was--a thriving, developing
life. He wished to see clearly for himself what this world had
to offer.
Two years later, following the meteoric appearance of a young
speculator in Duluth, and after Chicago had seen the tentative
opening of a grain and commission company labeled Frank A. Cowperwood
& Co., which ostensibly dealt in the great wheat crops of the West,
a quiet divorce was granted Mrs. Frank A. Cowperwood in Philadelphia,
because apparently she wished it. Time had not seemingly dealt
badly with her. Her financial affairs, once so bad, were now
apparently all straightened out, and she occupied in West Philadelphia,
near one of her sisters, a new and interesting home which was fitted
with all the comforts of an excellent middle-class residence. She
was now quite religious once more. The two children, Frank and
Lillian, were in private schools, returning evenings to their mother.
"Wash" Sims was once more the negro general factotum. Frequent
visitors on Sundays were Mr. and Mrs. Henry Worthington Cowperwood,
no longer distressed financially, but subdued and wearied, the wind
completely gone from their once much-favored sails. Cowperwood,
senior, had sufficient money wherewith to sustain himself, and
that without slaving as a petty clerk, but his social joy in life
was gone. He was old, disappointed, sad. He could feel that with
his quondam honor and financial glory, he was the same--and he was
not. His courage and his dreams were gone, and he awaited death.
Here, too, came Anna Adelaide Cowperwood on occasion, a clerk in
the city water office, who speculated much as to the strange
vicissitudes of life. She had great interest in her brother, who
seemed destined by fate to play a conspicuous part in the world;
but she could not understand him. Seeing that all those who were
near to him in any way seemed to rise or fall with his prosperity,
she did not understand how justice and morals were arranged in
this world. There seemed to be certain general principles--or
people assumed there were--but apparently there were exceptions.
Assuredly her brother abided by no known rule, and yet he seemed
to be doing fairly well once more. What did this mean? Mrs.
Cowperwood, his former wife, condemned his actions, and yet
accepted of his prosperity as her due. What were the ethics of
that?
Cowperwood's every action was known to Aileen Butler, his present
whereabouts and prospects. Not long after his wife's divorce,
and after many trips to and from this new world in which he was
now living, these two left Philadelphia together one afternoon in
the winter. Aileen explained to her mother, who was willing to
go and live with Norah, that she had fallen in love with the former
banker and wished to marry him. The old lady, gathering only a
garbled version of it at first, consented.
Thus ended forever for Aileen this long-continued relationship
with this older world. Chicago was before her--a much more
distinguished career, Frank told her, than ever they could have
had in Philadelphia.
"Isn't it nice to be finally going?" she commented.
"It is advantageous, anyhow," he said.
Concerning Mycteroperca Bonaci
There is a certain fish, the scientific name of which is Mycteroperca
Bonaci, its common name Black Grouper, which is of considerable
value as an afterthought in this connection, and which deserves
to be better known. It is a healthy creature, growing quite
regularly to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds, and lives
a comfortable, lengthy existence because of its very remarkable
ability to adapt itself to conditions. That very subtle thing
which we call the creative power, and which we endow with the
spirit of the beatitudes, is supposed to build this mortal life
in such fashion that only honesty and virtue shall prevail.
Witness, then, the significant manner in which it has fashioned
the black grouper. One might go far afield and gather less
forceful indictments--the horrific spider spinning his trap for
the unthinking fly; the lovely Drosera (Sundew) using its crimson
calyx for a smothering-pit in which to seal and devour the victim
of its beauty; the rainbow-colored jellyfish that spreads its
prismed tentacles like streamers of great beauty, only to sting
and torture all that falls within their radiant folds. Man himself
is busy digging the pit and fashioning the snare, but he will not
believe it. His feet are in the trap of circumstance; his eyes
are on an illusion.
Mycteroperca moving in its dark world of green waters is as fine
an illustration of the constructive genius of nature, which is not
beatific, as any which the mind of man may discover. Its great
superiority lies in an almost unbelievable power of simulation,
which relates solely to the pigmentation of its skin. In electrical
mechanics we pride ourselves on our ability to make over one
brilliant scene into another in the twinkling of an eye, and flash
before the gaze of an onlooker picture after picture, which appear
and disappear as we look. The directive control of Mycteroperca
over its appearance is much more significant. You cannot look at
it long without feeling that you are witnessing something spectral
and unnatural, so brilliant is its power to deceive. From being
black it can become instantly white; from being an earth-colored
brown it can fade into a delightful water-colored green. Its
markings change as the clouds of the sky. One marvels at the
variety and subtlety of its power.
Lying at the bottom of a bay, it can simulate the mud by which it
is surrounded. Hidden in the folds of glorious leaves, it is of
the same markings. Lurking in a flaw of light, it is like the
light itself shining dimly in water. Its power to elude or strike
unseen is of the greatest.
What would you say was the intention of the overruling, intelligent,
constructive force which gives to Mycteroperca this ability? To
fit it to be truthful? To permit it to present an unvarying
appearance which all honest life-seeking fish may know? Or would
you say that subtlety, chicanery, trickery, were here at work? An
implement of illusion one might readily suspect it to be, a living
lie, a creature whose business it is to appear what it is not, to
simulate that with which it has nothing in common, to get its
living by great subtlety, the power of its enemies to forefend
against which is little. The indictment is fair.
Would you say, in the face of this, that a beatific, beneficent
creative, overruling power never wills that which is either tricky
or deceptive? Or would you say that this material seeming in which
we dwell is itself an illusion? If not, whence then the Ten
Commandments and the illusion of justice? Why were the Beatitudes
dreamed of and how do they avail?
The Magic Crystal
If you had been a mystic or a soothsayer or a member of that
mysterious world which divines by incantations, dreams, the mystic
bowl, or the crystal sphere, you might have looked into their
mysterious depths at this time and foreseen a world of happenings
which concerned these two, who were now apparently so fortunately
placed. In the fumes of the witches' pot, or the depths of the
radiant crystal, might have been revealed cities, cities, cities;
a world of mansions, carriages, jewels, beauty; a vast metropolis
outraged by the power of one man; a great state seething with
indignation over a force it could not control; vast halls of
priceless pictures; a palace unrivaled for its magnificence; a
whole world reading with wonder, at times, of a given name. And
sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.
The three witches that hailed Macbeth upon the blasted heath might
in turn have called to Cowperwood, "Hail to you, Frank Cowperwood,
master of a great railway system! Hail to you, Frank Cowperwood,
builder of a priceless mansion! Hail to you, Frank Cowperwood,
patron of arts and possessor of endless riches! You shall be famed
hereafter." But like the Weird Sisters, they would have lied, for
in the glory was also the ashes of Dead Sea fruit--an understanding
that could neither be inflamed by desire nor satisfied by luxury;
a heart that was long since wearied by experience; a soul that was
as bereft of illusion as a windless moon. And to Aileen, as to
Macduff, they might have spoken a more pathetic promise, one that
concerned hope and failure. To have and not to have! All the
seeming, and yet the sorrow of not having! Brilliant society that
shone in a mirage, yet locked its doors; love that eluded as a
will-o'-the-wisp and died in the dark. "Hail to you, Frank
Cowperwood, master and no master, prince of a world of dreams whose
reality was disillusion!" So might the witches have called, the
bowl have danced with figures, the fumes with vision, and it would
have been true. What wise man might not read from such a beginning,
such an end?
THE END.
The Financier, by Theodore Dreiser. _
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