The Cost Part 39

"Look what's doing in Woolens!"

Dumont had ordered a general a.s.sault upon his enemies, front, rear and both flanks. His forces were now attacking not only through Great Lakes but also through Woolens. Two apparently opposing sets of his brokers were trading in Woolens, were hammering the price down, down, a point, an eighth, a half, a quarter, at a time. The sweat burst out all over Zabriskie's body and his eyes rolled wildly. He was caught among four fires:

To continue to sell Great Lakes in face of its rising price--that was ruin. To cease to sell it and so let its price go up to where he could not buy when settlement time came--that was ruin. To sell Woolens, to help batter down its price, to shrink the value of his enormous investment in it--ruin again. To buy Woolens in order to hold up its price, to do it when he would need all obtainable cash to extricate him from the Great Lakes entanglement--ruin, certain ruin.

His judgment was gone; his brute instinct of fighting was dominant; he began to strike out wildly, his blows falling either nowhere or upon himself.

At the Woolens post he was buying in the effort to sustain its price, buying stock that might be worthless when he got it--and that he might not be able to pay for. At the Great Lakes post he was selling in the effort to force the price down, selling more and more of a stock he did not have and---- At last the thought flashed into his befuddled brain: "There may be a corner in Great Lakes. What if there were no stock to be had?"

He struck his hands against the sides of his head. "Trapped!" he groaned, then bellowed in Brackett's ear. "Sell Woolens--do the best you can to keep the price up, but sell at any price! We must have money--all we can get! And tell Farley"--Farley was Brackett's partner--"to buy Great Lakes--buy all he can get--at any price.

Somebody's trying to corner us!"

He felt--with an instinct he could not question--that there was indeed a corner in Great Lakes, that he and his house and their a.s.sociates were caught. Caught with promises to deliver thousands upon thousands of shares of Great Lakes, when Great Lakes could be had only of the mysterious cornerer, and at whatever price he might choose to ask!

"If we've got to go down," he said to himself, "I'll see that it's a tremendous smash anyhow, and that we ain't alone in it." For he had in him the stuff that makes a man lead a forlorn hope with a certain joy in the very hopelessness of it.

The scene on the day of Dumont's downfall was a calm in comparison with the scene which Dumont, sitting alone among the piled-up coils of ticker-tape, was reconstructing from its, to him, vivid second-by-second sketchings.

The mysterious force which had produced a succession of earthquakes moved horribly on, still in mystery impenetrable, to produce a cataclysm. In the midst of the chaos two vast whirlpools formed--one where Great Lakes sucked down men and fortunes, the other where Woolens drew some down to destruction, flung others up to wealth. Then Rumor, released by Tavistock when Dumont saw that the crisis had arrived, ran hot foot through the Exchange, screaming into the ears of the brokers, shrieking through the telephones, howling over the telegraph wires, "A corner! A corner! Great Lakes is cornered!" Thousands besides the Fanning-Smith coterie had been gambling in Great Lakes, had sold shares they did not have. And now all knew that to get them they must go to the unknown, but doubtless merciless, master-gambler--unless they could save themselves by instantly buying elsewhere before the steel jaws of the corner closed and clinched.

Reason fled, and self-control. The veneer of civilization was torn away to the last shred; and men, turned brute again, gave themselves up to the elemental pa.s.sions of the brute.

In the quiet, beautiful room in upper Fifth Avenue was Dumont in his wine-colored wadded silk dressing-gown and white silk pajamas. The floor near his lounge was littered with the snake-like coils of ticker-tape. They rose almost to his knees as he sat and through telephone and ticker drank in the ma.s.sacre of his making, glutted himself with the joy of the vengeance he was taking--on his enemies, on his false or feeble friends, on the fickle public that had trampled and spat upon him. His wet hair was hanging in strings upon his forehead.

His face was flushed and his green-gray eyes gleamed like a mad dog's.

At intervals a jeer or a grunt of gratified appet.i.te ripped from his mouth or nose. Like a great lean spider he lay hid in the center of that vast net of electric wires, watching his prey writhe helpless.

Pauline, made uneasy by his long isolation, opened his door and looked--glanced, rather. As she closed it, in haste to shut from view that spectacle of a hungry monster at its banquet of living flesh, Culver saw her face. Such an expression an angel might have, did it chance to glance down from the battlements of heaven and, before it could turn away, catch a glimpse of some orgy in h.e.l.l.

But Dumont did not hear the door open and close. He was at the climax of his feast.

Upon his two maelstroms, sucking in the wreckage from a dozen other explosions as well as from those he had directly caused, he could see as well as if he were among the fascinated, horrified spectators in the galleries of the Exchange, the mangled flotsam whirling and descending and ascending. The entire stock list, the entire speculating public of the country was involved. And expression of the emotions everywhere was by telegraph and telephone concentrated in the one hall, upon the faces and bodies of those few hundred brokers. All the pa.s.sions which love of wealth and dread of want breed in the human animal were there finding vent--all degrees and shades and modes of greed, of hate, of fear, of despair. It was like a shipwreck where the whole fleet is flung upon the reefs, and the sailors, drunk and insane, struggle with death each in his own awful way. It was like the rout where frenzied victors ride after and among frenzied vanquished to shoot and stab and saber.

And while this battle, precipitated by the pa.s.sions of a few "captains of industry," raged in Wall Street and filled the nation with the clamor of ruined or triumphant gamblers, ten-score thousand toilers in the two great enterprises directly involved toiled tranquilly on--herding sheep and shearing them, weaving cloths and dyeing them, driving engines, handling freight, conducting trains, usefully busy, adding to the sum of human happiness, subtracting from the sum of human misery.

At three o'clock Dumont sank back among his cushions and pillows. His child, his other self, his Woolens Monopoly, was again his own; his enemies were under his heel, as much so as those heaps and coils of ticker-tape he had been churning in his excitement. "I'm dead tired,"

he muttered, his face ghastly, his body relaxed in utter exhaustion.

He closed his eyes. "I must sleep--I've earned it. To-morrow"--a smile flitted round his mouth--"I'll hang their hides where every coyote and vulture can see."

Toward four o'clock in came Doctor Sackett and Culver. The room was flooded with light--the infinite light of the late-spring afternoon reflected on the white enamel and white brocade of walls and furniture.

On the floor in the heaps and coils of ticker-tape lay Dumont.

In his struggles the tape had wound round and round his legs, his arms, his neck. It lay in a curling, coiling mat, like a serpent's head, upon his throat, where his hands clutched the collar of his pajamas.

Sackett knelt beside him, listening at his chest, feeling for his pulse in vain. And Culver stood by, staring stupidly at the now worthless instrument of his ambition for wealth and power.

XXVIII.

AFTER THE LONG WINTER.

Within two hours Langdon, in full control, had arranged with Tavistock to make the imperiled victory secure. Thus, not until the next day but one did it come out that the cataclysm had been caused by a man ruined and broken and with his back against death's door to hold it shut; that Dumont himself had turned the triumphing host of his enemies into a flying mob, in its panic flinging away its own possessions as well as its booty.

Perhaps the truth never would have been known, perhaps Langdon would have bribed Tavistock to silence and would have posed as the conquering genius, had he found out a day earlier how Dumont had put himself in funds. As it was, this discovery did not come too late for him to seize the opportunity that was his through Dumont's secret methods, Pauline's indifference to wealth and his own unchecked authority. He has got many an hour of--strictly private--mental gymnastics out of the moral problem he saw, in his keeping for himself and Gladys the spoils he gathered up. He is inclined to think he was intelligent rather than right; but, knowing his weakness for self-criticism, he never gives a positive verdict against himself. That, however, is unimportant, as he is not the man to permit conscience to influence conduct in grave matters.

He feels that, in any case, he did not despoil Pauline or Gardiner.

For, after he had told her what Dumont did--and to protect himself he hastened to tell it--she said: "Whatever there may be, it's all for Gardiner. I waive my own rights, if I have any. But you must give me your word of honor that you won't let anything tainted pa.s.s to him."

Langdon, judging with the delicacy of a man of honor put on honor, was able to find little such wealth.

He gives himself most of the credit for Gardiner's turning out so well--"Inherited riches are a hopeless handicap," he often says to Gladys when they are talking over the future of their children.

Pauline--

The first six months of her new life, of her resumed life, she spent in Europe with her father and mother and Gardiner. Late in the fall they were back at Saint X, at the old house in Jefferson Street. In the following June came Scarborough. She was in the garden, was waiting for him, was tying up a tall rose, whose splendid, haughty head had bent under the night's rain.

He was quite near her when she heard his step and turned. He stood, looked at her--the look she had seen that last afternoon at Battle Field. He came slowly up and took both her hands.

"After all the waiting and longing and hoping," he said, "at last--you!

I can't put it into words--except to say--just--Pauline!"

She drew a long breath; her gaze met his. And in her eyes he saw a flame that had never shone clearly there before--the fire of her own real self, free and proud. "Once you told me about your father and mother--how he cared--cared always."

"I remember," he answered.

"Well--I--I," said Pauline, "I care as SHE must have cared when she gave him herself--and YOU."