Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison Part 12

I left London by the night mail from Victoria Station for Paris, the first of many hurried trips I took to the Continent on the business we had entered upon. Truly, we worked hard, spent money lavishly, brought all our power and genius to work--for what? To have the lightning fall on us.

Upon my arrival I drove at once to the Hotel Bristol, Place Vendome, a swell hotel, where none but the great sirs o' the earth could afford to stop.

Here I registered as F. A. Warren, London, and at once sent off the following letter:

P. M. Francis, Esq., Manager Bank of England, London.

Dear Sir: I am a customer of the bank, therefore I take the liberty of troubling you in the hope to have the benefit of your advice.

Will you kindly inform me what good 4 per cent. stocks are to be had in the market, also if the bank will transact the business for me? I remain very truly yours,

F. A. WARREN.

By return mail came a letter wherein I was advised to invest in India 4 per cents or London Gas. I wrote an immediate order to have the bank purchase ten thousand pounds of India stock and sent my check for that amount, on his own bank, payable to the order of the manager. I received the stock, instantly sold it, and replaced the money to my credit, and the next day sent off an order for ten thousand pounds gas stock, and repeated the operation until I had made the impression I wanted to make on the mind of the manager, so that when I returned to London for my decisive interview and sent in my card he would at once recognize the name, F. A. Warren, as the multi-millionaire American who had been sending him ten thousand pound checks from Paris.

All the time of my stay in France I had nothing to do but enjoy myself, and I entered upon a systematic sightseeing in and around Paris. There are some strange contrasts in that old town. One day I made one of a coaching party to Fontainebleau, twenty-one miles from the city. Every foot of the road there is cla.s.sic ground, and I had a.s.siduously studied day by day the history of France. That Paris is France is nearly a truth, and I had in my mind a tolerably clear view of the history of the country and of the men who made its history. I was right there on the scene of the history-making, and I found an intensity of interest in my excursions such as I had never experienced before. The driver of the coach was an Englishman by the name of Nunn. I mention this here, as he eventually became my servant, and will appear again in the narrative.

To the Parisian hotel proprietor and shopkeeper the American visitor is truly a providence. "Mine host" looks to him for loaves and fishes, and is never deceived. The antics of our rich countrymen in Paris are portentous in their amazing prodigality, and I fear we are the laughing stock of the shopkeepers there.

At the Cafe Riche and Tortoni's I have seen extravagances in ordering expensive wines and viands by my countrymen that made me regret that the fools who were being served were not forced to toil for the mere necessaries of existence. Certainly they were unworthy stewards of the wealth heaven or the other place had bestowed on them by inheritance. I remember one boy there throwing away in vice and dissipation the fortune his father had through years of a long life spent toilsome hours in acc.u.mulating. I sat at a table near him on several occasions, when, after his banquet was half over, he used to reward the waiter with a five-hundred franc note ($100), but the proprietor was ever close at hand and would instantly despoil the garcon of his prize. He was companioned by a member of the demi-monde, who, when arrayed in male attire, as she was nightly, would cut up enough monkey tricks in one night at the Valentino or Mabille to have made the fortunes of all our comic paper artists had they been on the spot to catch her antics with a kodak and then lay them before an admiring public.

The fortune this boy had inherited was unfortunately too vast and too well-invested by his overfond and madly foolish father for the son to run through it entirely. A very few years left him an imbecile in body and mind, to become the prey of a parcel of sharks who, dressing in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day, held him in a state of abject slavery and fear. One day, aboard his own yacht, off Naples, they married him to a notorious woman. Under the guardianship of his wife and her villain paramour he wandered like a spectre amid the scene of his former riot.

For long at Monte Carlo he lingered like a ghost, and at last died in Florence. The American colony attended his funeral in a body, while his widow, dissolved in tears, refused to be comforted. Although many dark stories were whispered, the Americans there forgave her all, for her grief and sorrow were so overpoweringly evident that it would have seemed a crime to doubt her tender love for the departed. After having the body embalmed, she embarked with her dead love for America, and to-day his ashes rest in that mighty city of the dead, Greenwood, under a Greek cross of white marble, bearing the date of birth and death. I went to see it last Easter week. The grave was strewn with flowers, and the pedestal bears this inscription:

"Too good for this world, The angels bore him to heaven, Leaving his heartbroken wife To mourn her unspeakable loss."

Unopposed she succeeded to her husband's estate. It was large then; to-day it has grown to enormous proportions. She is not, but easily might have been, one of the Four Hundred.

At Saratoga last August I saw her sitting on the balcony of the United States Hotel--fat, wrinkled, vulgar-looking, covered with diamonds.

Nemesis appears to have postponed her visit to the lady. Her life from her own standpoint has been a tremendous success. She has been philosopher enough to appreciate what an immense factor mere eating and drinking is in the sum of human enjoyment. Born with a cold heart, a const.i.tution of iron, and the digestion of an ostrich, happily for her peace of mind she was absolutely without imagination.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "IN MY DREAM I WAS ON A Sh.o.r.eLESS SEA."--Page 286.]

To fill the sum of human happiness (from her own standpoint) she only required one other thing, a good bank account, and that, she said, heaven had put in her way, so her life has been filled full of joy, and of the only sort she cared for or could appreciate. In her early years, when her pa.s.sions were strong, lover and paramour followed in rapid succession. When her blood grew cold she found her delight in the pleasures of the table, and keeping the same cook, who was an expert, for twenty years, and exercising freely, 1894 found her at 60 with a strong pulse, a perfect digestion and a keen enjoyment of sport, racing in particular, and, on the whole, enjoying life as well as any woman in the universe, with no regrets, no torturing remorse, but with a serene faith that when done with this world she--never having done anything very bad here--will have a pretty good time in the world to come.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ENTRANCE TO BULLION VAULTS, BANK OF ENGLAND.]

CHAPTER XX.

DETAILS NECESSARY, IF TEDIOUS.

After the events narrated in the last chapter, I returned to London. I arrived early in the morning, and, meeting my companions, we had a long and anxious talk over my near-approaching and all-important interview with that great Sir of the London world, the manager of the Bank of England. Happy for us if in that interview the manager had asked for the customary references, or had used ordinary business precaution and investigated me, or, indeed, had acted as any ordinary business man would have done under ordinary circ.u.mstances. Our own conclusions were that the fact that I was already a depositor, together with the impression made by the letters and my 10,000 checks, would put the thing through. Yet we, of course, felt that a thousand things could arise to block our way effectually. A look, a word too much, a shadow, or a smile in my face might ruin all; but still, after providing so far as possible for every contingency, after planning what was to be said or left unsaid at the interview, after my companions filling me full of advice, we felt after all that everything must be left to my discretion, to say and to act as I thought best under the circ.u.mstances.

This council of war was held in my room in the Grosvenor. I had arrived from Paris at 6 o'clock. Mac and I breakfasted together at 8. George joined us at 9, and we talked until 10, then we set out together for the bank. Arriving there, they remained outside, watching for my reappearance. Entering the bank, I sent in my card (F. A. Warren) by a liveried flunkey, and was immediately ushered into the manager's parlor.

He has long since gone over to the majority, so here I will not so much as name or describe him. Sufficient to say, that as soon as I set eyes upon him I thought that we would have no particular difficulty in carrying out our plans, save only so far as details went.

The manager, who had been told that I was a railroad contractor, expressed himself highly gratified to have me do my business through the bank, and said they would do all in their power to accommodate me. I told him that, of course, I was financing large sums, and would require more or less discounts before the year was out. Then I came away, and meeting my two friends outside of the bank, in answer to their eager inquiries as to what had transpired, I told them that, so far as the bank officials were concerned, our way to the vaults of the bank was wide open.

So ended the last scene of Act I.

The next day I went to the Continental Bank, in Lombard street, and bought sight exchange on Paris for 200,000 francs, paying for it by a check on the Bank of England. I was given a note of identification to the Paris agent of the bank.

That night I left Victoria Station for Paris. At 10 the next morning I had my money, and, going to the Place de la Bourse, near the Exchange, I commissioned a broker, who was a member of the Exchange, to purchase bills on London for 8,000. I cautioned him to buy bills drawn only on well-known banking houses. About 3 o'clock he had the bills ready. I paid him the amount, along with his commission, and, examining the paper, found that he had purchased for me about what I wanted.

I will explain, for the benefit of any reader not conversant with financial transactions, that if John Russell, cotton broker in Savannah, ships a thousand bales of cotton to a firm in Manchester, England, the firm in Manchester authorizes him to draw a bill of exchange on their firm, payable at some London bank at three or six months' time, for the value of the cotton. We will say the price is 10,000. Russell draws ten bills for 1,000 each, say payable at the Union Bank of London. He gives these bills to a money broker in Savannah, who sells them on the Exchange and gets for them whatever the rate of exchange may then be on London. The president of the Georgia Central Railroad may have ordered a thousand tons of steel rail in England for his road, and to pay for them he orders a broker to buy for him bills on London to the amount of the cost of the rails. He purchases the Russell bills, and these bills of exchange he sends in payment to the steel rail manufacturers in England, so, as a matter of fact, the president of the Georgia Central pays Russell for his thousand bales of cotton, but has the bills of exchange.

So, in place of 10,000 in gold being freighted twice across the ocean, the ten pieces of paper cross only once. These ten bills for 1,000 each, drawn on the Union Bank of London at six months, in due time are presented, duly accepted and paid at maturity by the bank.

Instead of commercial notes or bills they are now known as acceptances, and are just as good as a bank note. Therefore, if the owner--no matter who it is--wants the money at once, any bank will discount all or either for the face value less the interest. In every commercial centre of the world these accepted bills are being discounted by banks and moneyed corporations for enormous sums, but by no bank in the world in such huge amounts as by the Bank of England. Their daily discounts run into the millions.

What our plan was will be made clear later.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BILL OF EXCHANGE.]

The evening of the day of my arrival in Paris found me on the express speeding to Paris. Two hours past midnight I was on the miserable little pa.s.senger steamer that plies across the chopping channel, and which I suppose has seen more of human misery than all the fleets that sail the Atlantic, for the channel has stronger counter currents, and wind, tide and currents seem ever to be in violent opposition, and here

"E'er across the main doth float A sad and solemn swell, The wild, fantastic, fitful note Of Triton's breathing sh.e.l.l."

And Triton (old Neptune's t'other name) makes all pa.s.sers over this part of his realm pay ample tribute for "his fantastic, fitful notes."

The Paris night express lands one at early dawn in London, nearly always weak on the legs, however. I breakfasted with Mac, and after that took the bills to the various banks on which they were drawn, and leaving them for their acceptance, I called again the next day and received them back, bearing across the face, the magic words:

"London, Aug. 14, 1872.

"Accepted for the Union Bank of London.

"E. Barclay, Manager.

"J. Wayland, a.s.sistant Manager."

Then I hurried to the Grosvenor, and we all looked at them with curiosity, for it was upon the imitation of just such acceptances that our whole plan was based. I intended to present this and many more batches of genuine bills for discount at the bank until the officials should become accustomed to discounting for me. In the mean time, as fast as I got genuine acceptances and bills, we kept on making imitations of them for future use, only leaving out the date until such time as we should be ready to put them in for discount. Of course, the success or failure of our whole plan turned upon this point. Is it the custom of the Bank of England (in 1873) to send acceptances offered for discount to the acceptors for verification of signatures?

This is always done in America, and had this very requisite precaution been used by the Bank of England our plan would have been fruitless and we should have been a few thousands out of pocket; but, if not, then we could throw into the hopper enough acceptances of home manufacture so that through the red tape routine of the bank millions of sovereigns would be ground out into our pockets.

Taking my deposit book and the genuine bills, I went to the bank and left the bills for discount. This was at once done and the amount placed to my credit. I drew 10,000, and that night found me once more one of 500 unfortunates paying tribute to Neptune. This time I landed at Ostend and took the train for Amsterdam. There I repeated the Paris operation, securing 10,000 in genuine bills. I returned to London, and as before left them for acceptance. Then my companion manufactured a lot of imitations and put them away with those previously manufactured, to be all ready when the day came to use them. The genuine bills were then discounted. Again and again I went to the Continent, repeating the operation, until at last my credit at the bank was firm as a rock, and we were ready to reap our harvest. But these operations, simple as they seem, lasted over a period of six months, and had been made at heavy cost. Our ordinary living expenses were not less than $25 a day for the three, while our extraordinary expenses were enormous. I probably traveled 10,000 miles over the Continent in my bill-buying expeditions to Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfort and Vienna.

Another source of expense was the commissions paid to brokers for buying bills on the exchange. Then we had many expenses purely personal, and, enormous as it seems, the sum total from the day of our return from Brazil until the day of our operations against the bank began to bring us in cash were quite $500 a week, so that we had invested $15,000 in preparation, not to speak of our hard work--and it was hard work, and trying, too, for there were a mult.i.tude of details to be worked out.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE EGYPTIANS Pa.s.s OVER THE RED SEA AND THE HEBREWS ARE DROWNED THEREIN.