Kitabı oku: «The Boss, and How He Came to Rule New York», sayfa 18
CHAPTER XXIV – HOW VAN FLANGE WENT INTO STOCKS
IT was by the suggestion of young Van Flange himself that he became a broker. His argument I think was sound; he had been bred to no profession, and the floor of the Exchange, if he would have a trade, was all that was left him. No one could be of mark or consequence in New York who might not write himself master of millions. Morton himself said that; and with commerce narrowing to a huddle of mammoth corporations, how should anyone look forward to the conquest of millions save through those avenues of chance which Wall Street alone provided? The Stock Exchange was all that remained; and with that, I bought young Van Flange a seat therein, and equipped him for a brokerage career. I harbored no misgivings of his success; no one could look upon his clean, handsome outlines and maintain a doubt.
Those were our happiest days – Blossom’s and mine. In her name, I split my fortune in two, and gave young Van Flange a million and a half wherewith to arm his hands for the fray of stocks. Even now, as I look backward through the darkness, I still think it a million and a half well spent. For throughout those slender months of sunshine, Blossom went to and fro about me, radiating a subdued warmth of joy that was like the silent glow of a lamp. Yes, that money served its end. It made Blossom happy, and it will do me good while I live to think how that was so.
Morton, when I called young Van Flange from his Mulberry desk to send him into Wall Street, was filled with distrust of the scheme.
“You should have him stay with Mulberry,” said he. “If he do no good, at least he will do no harm, and that, don’t y’ know, is a business record far above the average. Besides, he’s safer; he is, really!”
This I did not like from Morton. He himself was a famous man of stocks, and had piled millions upon millions in a pyramid of speculation. Did he claim for himself a monopoly of stock intelligence? Van Flange was as well taught of books as was he, and came of a better family. Was it that he arrogated to his own head a superiority of wit for finding his way about in those channels of stock value? I said something of this sorb to Morton.
“Believe me, old chap,” said he, laying his slim hand on my shoulder, “believe me, I had nothing on my mind beyond your own safety, and the safety of that cub of yours. And I think you will agree that I have exhibited a knowledge of what winds and currents and rocks might interrupt or wreck one in his voyages after stocks.”
“Admitting all you say,” I replied, “it does not follow that another may not know or learn to know as much.”
“But Wall Street is such a quicksand,” he persisted. “Gad! it swallows nine of every ten who set foot in it. And to deduce safety for another, because I am and have been safe, might troll you into error. You should consider my peculiar case. I was born with beak and claw for the game. Like the fish-hawk, I can hover above the stream of stocks, and swoop in and out, taking my quarry where it swims. And then, remember my arrangements. I have an agent at the elbow of every opportunity. I have made the world my spy, since I pay the highest price for information. If a word be said in a cabinet, I hear it; if a decision of court is to be handed down, I know it; if any of our great forces or monarchs of the street so much as move a finger, I see it. And yet, with all I know, and all I see, and all I hear, and all my nets and snares as complicated as the works of a watch, added to a native genius, the best I may do is win four times in seven. In Wall Street, a man meets with not alone the foreseeable, but the unforeseeable; he does, really! He is like a man in a tempest, and may be struck dead by some cloud-leveled bolt while you and he stand talking, don’t y’ know!”
Morton fell a long day’s journey short of convincing me that Wall Street was a theater of peril for young Van Flange. Moreover, the boy said true; it offered the one way open to his feet. Thus reasoning, and led by my love for my girl and my delight to think how she was happy, I did all I might to further the ambitions of young Van Flange, and embark him as a trader of stocks. He took office rooms in Broad Street; and on the one or two occasions when I set foot in them, I was flattered as well as amazed by the array of clerks and stock-tickers, blackboards, and tall baskets, which met my untaught gaze. The scene seemed to buzz and vibrate with prosperity, and the air was vital of those riches which it promised.
It is scarce required that I say I paid not the least attention to young Van Flange and his business affairs. I possessed no stock knowledge, being as darkened touching Wall Street as any Hottentot. More than that, my time was taken up with Tammany Hall. The flow of general feeling continued to favor a return of the machine, for the public was becoming more and sorely irked of a misfit “reform” that was too tight in one place while too loose in another. There stood no doubt of it; I had only to wait and maintain my own lines in order, and the town would be my own again. It would yet lie in my lap like a goose in the lap of a Dutch woman; and I to feather-line my personal nest with its plumage to what soft extent I would. For all that, I must watch lynx-like my own forces, guarding against schism, keeping my people together solidly for the battle that was to be won.
Much and frequently, I discussed the situation with Morton. With his traction operations, he had an interest almost as deep as my own. He was, too, the one man on whose wisdom of politics I had been educated to rely. When it became a question of votes and how to get them, I had yet to meet Morton going wrong.
“You should have an issue,” said Morton. “You should not have two, for the public is like a dog, don’t y’ know, and can chase no more than just one rabbit at a time. But one you should have – something you could point to and promise for the future. As affairs stand – and gad! it has been that way since I have had a memory – you and the opposition will go into the campaign like a pair of beldame scolds, railing at one another. Politics has become a contest of who can throw the most mud. Really, the town is beastly tired of both of you – it is, ‘pon my word!”
“Now what issue would you offer?”
“Do you recall what I told our friend Bronson? Public Ownership should be the great card. Go in for the ownership by the town of street railways, water works, gas plants, and that sort of thing, don’t y’ know, and the rabble will trample on itself to vote your ticket.”
“And do you shout ‘Municipal Ownership!’ – you with a street railway to lose?”
“But I wouldn’t lose it. I’m not talking of anything but an issue. It would be a deuced bore, if Public Ownership actually were to happen. Besides, for me to lose my road would be the worst possible form! No, I’m not so insane as that. But it doesn’t mean, because you make Public Ownership an issue, that you must bring it about. There are always ways to dodge, don’t y’ know. And the people won’t care; the patient beggars have been taught to expect it. An issue is like the bell-ringing before an auction; it is only meant to call a crowd. Once the auction begins, no one remembers the bell-ringing; they don’t, really!”
“To simply shout ‘Public Ownership:’” said I, “would hardly stir the depths. We would have to get down to something practical – something definite.”
“It was the point I was approaching. Really! what should be better now than to plainly propose – since the route is unoccupied, and offers a field of cheapest experiment – a street railway with a loop around Washington Square, and then out Fifth Avenue to One Hundred and Tenth Street, next west on One Hundred and Tenth Street to Seventh Avenue, and lastly north on Seventh Avenue until you strike the Harlem River at the One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street bridge?”
“What a howl would go up from Fifth Avenue!” said I.
“If it were so, what then? You are not to be injured by silk-stocking clamor. For each cry against you from the aristocrats, twenty of the peasantry would come crying to your back; don’t y’, know! Patrician opposition, old chap, means ever plebeian support, and you should do all you may, with wedge and maul of policy, to split the log along those lines. Gad!” concluded Morton, bursting suddenly into self-compliments; “I don’t recall when I was so beastly sagacious before – really!”
“Now I fail to go with you,” I returned. “I have for long believed that the strongest force with which the organization had to contend, was its own lack of fashion. If Tammany had a handful or two of that purple and fine linen with which you think it so wise to quarrel, it might rub some of the mud off itself, and have quieter if not fairer treatment from a press, ever ready to truckle to the town’s nobility. Should we win next time, it is already in my plans to establish a club in the very heart of Fifth Avenue. I shall attract thither all the folk of elegant fashion I can, so that, thereafter, should one snap a kodak on the machine, the foreground of the picture will contain a respectable exhibition of lofty names. I want, rather, to get Tammany out of the gutter, than arrange for its perpetual stay therein.”
“Old chap,” said Morton, glorying through his eyeglass, “I think I shall try a cigarette after that. I need it to resettle my nerves; I do, really. Why, my dear boy! do you suppose that Tammany can be anything other than that unwashed black sheep it is? We shall make bishops of burglars when that day dawns. The thing’s wildly impossible, don’t y’ know! Besides, your machine would die. Feed Tammany Hall on any diet of an aristocracy, and you will unhinge its stomach; you will, ’pon my faith!”
“You shall see a Tammany club in fashion’s center, none the less.”
“Then you don’t like ‘Public Ownership?’” observed Morton, after a pause, the while twirling his eyeglass. “Why don’t you then go in for cutting the City off from the State, and making a separate State of it? You could say that we suffer from hayseed tyranny, and all that. Really! it’s the truth, don’t y’ know; and besides, we City fellows would gulp it down like spring water.”
“The City delegation in Albany,” said I, “is too small to put through such a bill. The Cornfields would be a unit to smother it.”
“Not so sure about the Cornfields!” cried Morton. “Of course it would take money. That provided, think of the wires you could pull. Here are a half-dozen railroads, with their claws and teeth in the country and their tails in town. Each of them, don’t y’ know, as part of its equipment, owns a little herd of rustic members. You could step on the railroad tail with the feet of your fifty city departments, and torture it into giving you its hayseed marionettes for this scheme of a new State. Pon my word! old chap, it could be brought about; it could, really!”
“I fear,” said I banteringly, “that after all you are no better than a harebrained theorist. I confess that your plans are too grand for my commonplace powers of execution. I shall have to plod on with those moss-grown methods which have served us in the past.”
It would seem as though I had had Death to be my neighbor from the beginning, for his black shadow was in constant play about me. One day he would take a victim from out my very arms; again he would grimly step between me and another as we sat in talk. Nor did doctors do much good or any; and I have thought that all I shall ask, when my own time comes, is a nurse to lift me in and out of bed, and for the rest of it, why! let me die.
It was Anne to leave me now, and her death befell like lightning from an open sky. Anne was never of your robust women; I should not have said, however, that she was frail, since she was always about, taking the whole weight of the house to herself, and, as I found when she was gone, furnishing the major portion of its cheerfulness. That was what misled me, doubtless; a brave smile shone ever on her face like sunlight, and served to put me off from any thought of sickness for her.
It was her heart, they said; but no such slowness in striking as when Big Kennedy died. Anne had been abroad for a walk in the early cool of the evening. When she returned, and without removing her street gear, she sank into a chair in the hall.
“What ails ye, mem?” asked the old Galway wife that had been nurse to Blossom, and who undid the door to Anne; “what’s the matter of your pale face?”
“An’ then,” cried the crone, when she gave me the sorry tale of it, “she answered wit’ a sob. An’ next her poor head fell back on the chair, and she was by.”
Both young Van Flange and I were away from the house at the time of it; he about his business, which kept him often, and long, into the night; and I in the smothering midst of my politics. When I was brought home, they had laid Anne’s body on her bed. At the foot on a rug crouched the old nurse, rocking herself forward and back, wailing like a banshee. Blossom, whose cheek was whitened with the horror of our loss, crept to my side and stood close, clutching my hand as in those old terror-ridden baby days when unseen demons glowered from the room-comers. It was no good sight for Blossom, and I led her away, the old Galway crone at the bed’s foot keening her barbarous mourning after us far down the hall.
Blossom was all that remained with me now. And yet, she would be enough, I thought, as I held her, child-fashion, in my arms that night to comfort her, if only I might keep her happy.
Young Van Flange worked at his trade of stocks like a horse. He was into it early and late, sometimes staying from home all night. I took pride to think how much more wisely than Morton I had judged the boy.
Those night absences, when he did not come in until three of the morning, and on occasion not at all, gave me no concern. My own business of Tammany was quite as apt to hold me; for there are events that must be dealt with in the immediate, like shooting a bird on the wing. A multitude of such were upon me constantly, and there was no moment of the day or night that I could say beforehand would not be claimed by them. When this was my own case, it turned nothing difficult to understand how the exigencies of stocks might be as peremptory.
One matter to promote a growing fund of confidence in young Van Flange was his sobriety. The story ran – and, in truth, his own mother had told it – of his drunkenness, when a boy fresh out of his books, and during those Barclay Street days when he went throwing his patrimony to the vultures. That was by and done with; he had somehow gotten by the bottle. Never but once did he show the flush of liquor, and that fell out when he had been to a college dinner. I had always understood how it was the custom to retire drunk from such festivals, wherefore that particular inebriety gave me scant uneasiness. One should not expect a roaring boy about town to turn deacon in a day.
Blossom was, as I’ve said, by nature shy and secret, and never one to relate her joys or griefs. While she and he were under the same roof with me, I had no word from her as to her life with young Van Flange, and whether it went bright, or was blurred of differences. Nor do I believe that in those days there came aught to harrow her, unless it were the feeling that young Van Flange showed less the lover and more like folk of fifty than she might have wished.
Once and again, indeed, I caught on her face a passing shade; but her eyes cleared when I looked at her, and she would come and put her arms about me, and by that I could not help but see how her marriage had flowered life’s path for her. This thought of itself would set off a tune in my heart like the songs of birds; and I have it the more sharply upon my memory, because it was the one deep happiness I knew. The shadows I trapped as they crossed the brow of Blossom, I laid to a thought that young Van Flange carried too heavy a load of work. It might break him in his health; and the fear had warrant in hollow eyes and a thin sallowness of face, which piled age upon him, and made him resemble twice his years.
Towards me, the pose of young Van Flange was that one of respectful deference which had marked him from the start. Sometimes I was struck by the notion that he was afraid of me; not with any particularity of alarm, but as a woman might fear a mastiff, arguing peril from latent ferocities and a savagery of strength.
Still, he in no wise ran away; one is not to understand that; on the contrary he would pass hours in my society, explaining his speculations and showing those figures which were the record of his profits. I was glad to listen, too; for while I did not always grasp a meaning, being stock-dull as I’ve explained, what he said of “bull” and “bear” and “short” and “long,” had the smell of combat about it, and held me enthralled like a romance.
There were instances when he suggested speculations, and now and then as high as one thousand shares. I never failed to humor him, for I thought a negative might smack of lack of confidence – a thing I would not think of, if only for love of Blossom. I must say that my belief in young Van Flange was augmented by these deals, which turned unflaggingly, though never largely, to my credit.
It was when I stood waist-deep in what arrangements were preliminary to my battle for the town, now drawing near and nearer, that young Van Flange approached me concerning Blackberry Traction.
“Father,” said he – for he called me “father,” and the name was pleasant to my ear – “father, if you will, we may make millions of dollars like turning hand or head.”
Then he gave me a long story of the friendship he had scraped together with the president of Blackberry – he of the Hebrew cast and clutch, whom I once met and disappointed over franchises.
“Of course,” said young Van Flange, “while he is the president of Blackberry, he has no sentimental feelings concerning the fortunes of the company. He is as sharp to make money as either you or I. The truth is this: While the stock is quoted fairly high, Blackberry in fact is in a bad way. It is like a house of cards, and a kick would collapse it into ruins. The president, because we are such intimates, gave me the whole truth of Blackberry. Swearing me to secrecy, he, as it were, lighted a lantern, and led me into the darkest corners. He showed me the books. Blackberry is on the threshold of a crash. The dividends coming due will not be paid. It is behind in its interest; and the directors will be driven to declare an immense issue of bonds. Blackberry stock will fall below twenty; a receiver will have the road within the year. To my mind, the situation is ready for a coup. We have but to sell and keep selling, to take in what millions we will.”
There was further talk, and all to similar purpose. Also, I recalled the ease with which Morton and I, aforetime, took four millions between us out of Blackberry.
“Now I think,” said I, in the finish of it, “that Blackberry is my gold mine by the word of Fate itself. Those we are to make will not be the first riches I’ve had from it.”
Except the house we stood in, I owned no real estate; nor yet that, since it was Blossom’s, being her marriage gift from me. From the first I had felt an aversion for houses and lots. I was of no stomach to collect rents, squabble with tenants over repairs, or race to magistrates for eviction. This last I should say was the Irish in my arteries, for landlords had hectored my ancestors like horseflies. My wealth was all in stocks and bonds; nor would I listen to anything else. Morton had his own whimsical explanation for this:
“There be those among us,” said he, “who are nomads by instinct – a sort of white Arab, don’t y’ know. Not intending offense – for, gad! there are reasons why I desire to keep you good-natured – every congenital criminal is of that sort; he is, really! Such folk instinctively look forward to migration or flight. They want nothing they can’t pack up and depart with in a night, and would no more take a deed to land than a dose of arsenic. It’s you who are of those migratory people. That’s why you abhor real estate. Fact, old chap! you’re a born nomad; and it’s in your blood to be ever ready to strike camp, inspan your teams, and trek.”
Morton furnished these valuable theories when he was investing my money for me. Having no belief in my own investment wisdom, I imposed the task upon his good nature. One day he brought me my complete possessions in a wonderful sheaf of securities. They were edged, each and all, with gold, since Morton would accept no less.
“There you are, my boy,” said he, “and everything as clean as running water, don’t y’ know. Really, I didn’t think you could be trusted, if it came on to blow a panic, so I’ve bought for you only stuff that can protect itself.”
When young Van Flange made his Blackberry suggestions, I should say I had sixteen hundred thousand dollars worth of these bonds and stocks – mostly the former – in my steel box. I may only guess concerning it, for I could not reckon so huge a sum to the precise farthing. It was all in the same house with us; I kept it in a safe I’d fitted into the walls, and which was so devised as to laugh at either a burglar or a fire. I gave young Van Flange the key of that interior compartment which held these securities; the general combination he already possessed.
“There you’ll find more than a million and a half,” said I, “and that, with what you have, should make three millions. How much Blackberry can you sell now?”
“We ought to sell one hundred and fifty thousand shares. A drop of eighty points, and it will go that far, would bring us in twelve millions.”
“Do what you think best,” said I. “And, mind you: No word to Morton.”
“Now I was about to suggest that,” said young Van Flange.
Morton should not know what was on my slate for Blackberry. Trust him? yes; and with every hope I had. But it was my vanity to make this move without him. I would open his eyes to it, that young Van Flange, if not so old a sailor as himself, was none the less his equal at charting a course and navigating speculation across that sea of stocks, about the treacherous dangers whereof it had pleased him so often to patronize me.
