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The Financier: A Novel

by Theodore Dreiser · English · Gutenberg #1840 · 1,113,212 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Financier: A Novel

Author: Theodore Dreiser


        
Release date: February 26, 2006 [eBook #1840]
                Most recently updated: June 21, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1840

Credits: Produced by Kirk Pearson and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FINANCIER: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Kirk Pearson and David Widger




The Financier

by Theodore Dreiser


Contents

 Chapter I
 Chapter II
 Chapter III
 Chapter IV
 Chapter V
 Chapter VI
 Chapter VII
 Chapter VIII
 Chapter IX
 Chapter X
 Chapter XI
 Chapter XII
 Chapter XIII
 Chapter XIV
 Chapter XV
 Chapter XVI
 Chapter XVII
 Chapter XVIII
 Chapter XIX
 Chapter XX
 Chapter XXI
 Chapter XXII
 Chapter XXIII
 Chapter XXIV
 Chapter XXV
 Chapter XXVI
 Chapter XXVII
 Chapter XXVIII
 Chapter XXIX
 Chapter XXX
 Chapter XXXI
 Chapter XXXII
 Chapter XXXIII
 Chapter XXXIV
 Chapter XXXV
 Chapter XXXVI
 Chapter XXXVII
 Chapter XXXVIII
 Chapter XXXIX
 Chapter XL
 Chapter XLI
 Chapter XLII
 Chapter XLIII
 Chapter XLIV
 Chapter XLV
 Chapter XLVI
 Chapter XLVII
 Chapter XLVIII
 Chapter XLIX
 Chapter L
 Chapter LI
 Chapter LII
 Chapter LIII
 Chapter LIV
 Chapter LV
 Chapter LVI
 Chapter LVII
 Chapter LVIII
 Chapter LIX
 Concerning Mycteroperca Bonaci
 The Magic Crystal




Chapter I


The Philadelphia into which Frank Algernon Cowperwood was born was a
city of two hundred and fifty thousand and more. It was set with
handsome parks, notable buildings, and crowded with historic memories.
Many of the things that we and he knew later were not then in
existence—the telegraph, telephone, express company, ocean steamer,
city delivery of mails. There were no postage-stamps or registered
letters. The street car had not arrived. In its place were hosts of
omnibuses, and for longer travel the slowly developing railroad system
still largely connected by canals.

Cowperwood’s father was a bank clerk at the time of Frank’s birth, but
ten years later, when the boy was already beginning to turn a very
sensible, vigorous eye on the world, Mr. Henry Worthington Cowperwood,
because of the death of the bank’s president and the consequent moving
ahead of the other officers, fell heir to the place vacated by the
promoted teller, at the, to him, munificent salary of thirty-five
hundred dollars a year. At once he decided, as he told his wife
joyously, to remove his family from 21 Buttonwood Street to 124 New
Market Street, a much better neighborhood, where there was a nice brick
house of three stories in height as opposed to their present
two-storied domicile. There was the probability that some day they
would come into something even better, but for the present this was
sufficient. He was exceedingly grateful.

Henry Worthington Cowperwood was a man who believed only what he saw
and was content to be what he was—a banker, or a prospective one. He
was at this time a significant figure—tall, lean, inquisitorial,
clerkly—with nice, smooth, closely-cropped side whiskers coming to
almost the lower lobes of his ears. His upper lip was smooth and
curiously long, and he had a long, straight nose and a chin that tended
to be pointed. His eyebrows were bushy, emphasizing vague,
grayish-green eyes, and his hair was short and smooth and nicely
parted. He wore a frock-coat always—it was quite the thing in financial
circles in those days—and a high hat. And he kept his hands and nails
immaculately clean. His manner might have been called severe, though
really it was more cultivated than austere.

Being ambitious to get ahead socially and financially, he was very
careful of whom or with whom he talked. He was as much afraid of
expressing a rabid or unpopular political or social opinion as he was
of being seen with an evil character, though he had really no opinion
of great political significance to express. He was neither anti- nor
pro-slavery, though the air was stormy with abolition sentiment and its
opposition. He believed sincerely that vast fortunes were to be made
out of railroads if one only had the capital and that curious thing, a
magnetic personality—the ability to win the confidence of others. He
was sure that Andrew Jackson was all wrong in his opposition to
Nicholas Biddle and the United States Bank, one of the great issues of
the day; and he was worried, as he might well be, by the perfect storm
of wildcat money which was floating about and which was constantly
coming to his bank—discounted, of course, and handed out again to
anxious borrowers at a profit. His bank was the Third National of
Philadelphia, located in that center of all Philadelphia and indeed, at
that time, of practically all national finance—Third Street—and its
owners conducted a brokerage business as a side line. There was a
perfect plague of State banks, great and small, in those days, issuing
notes practically without regulation upon insecure and unknown assets
and failing and suspending with astonishing rapidity; and a knowledge
of all these was an important requirement of Mr. Cowperwood’s position.
As a result, he had become the soul of caution. Unfortunately, for him,
he lacked in a great measure the two things that are necessary for
distinction in any field—magnetism and vision. He was not destined to
be a great financier, though he was marked out to be a moderately
successful one.

Mrs. Cowperwood was of a religious temperament—a small woman, with
light-brown hair and clear, brown eyes, who had been very attractive in
her day, but had become rather prim and matter-of-fact and inclined to
take very seriously the maternal care of her three sons and one
daughter. The former, captained by Frank, the eldest, were a source of
considerable annoyance to her, for they were forever making expeditions
to different parts of the city, getting in with bad boys, probably, and
seeing and hearing things they should neither see nor hear.

Frank Cowperwood, even at ten, was a natural-born leader. At the day
school he attended, and later at the Central High School, he was looked
upon as one whose common sense could unquestionably be trusted in all
cases. He was a sturdy youth, courageous and defiant. From the very
start of his life, he wanted to know about economics and politics. He
cared nothing for books. He was a clean, stalky, shapely boy, with a
bright, clean-cut, incisive face; large, clear, gray eyes; a wide
forehead; short, bristly, dark-brown hair. He had an incisive,
quick-motioned, self-sufficient manner, and was forever asking
questions with a keen desire for an intelligent reply. He never had an
ache or pain, ate his food with gusto, and ruled his brothers with a
rod of iron. “Come on, Joe!” “Hurry, Ed!” These commands were issued in
no rough but always a sure way, and Joe and Ed came. They looked up to
Frank from the first as a master, and what he had to say was listened
to eagerly.

He was forever pondering, pondering—one fact astonishing him quite as
much as another—for he could not figure out how this thing he had come
into—this life—was organized. How did all these people get into the
world? What were they doing here? Who started things, anyhow? His
mother told him the story of Adam and Eve, but he didn’t believe it.
There was a fish-market not so very far from his home, and there, on
his way to see his father at the bank, or conducting his brothers on
after-school expeditions, he liked to look at a certain tank in front
of one store where were kept odd specimens of sea-life brought in by
the Delaware Bay fishermen. He saw once there a sea-horse—just a queer
little sea-animal that looked somewhat like a horse—and another time he
saw an electric eel which Benjamin Franklin’s discovery had explained.
One day he saw a squid and a lobster put in the tank, and in connection
with them was witness to a tragedy which stayed with him all his life
and cleared things up considerably intellectually. The lobster, it
appeared from the talk of the idle bystanders, was offered no food, as
the squid was considered his rightful prey. He lay at the bottom of the
clear glass tank on the yellow sand, apparently seeing nothing—you
could not tell in which way his beady, black buttons of eyes were
looking—but apparently they were never off the body of the squid. The
latter, pale and waxy in texture, looking very much like pork fat or
jade, moved about in torpedo fashion; but his movements were apparently
never out of the eyes of his enemy, for by degrees small portions of
his body began to disappear, snapped off by the relentless claws of his
pursuer. The lobster would leap like a catapult to where the squid was
apparently idly dreaming, and the squid, very alert, would dart away,
shooting out at the same time a cloud of ink, behind which it would
disappear. It was not always completely successful, however. Small
portions of its body or its tail were frequently left in the claws of
the monster below. Fascinated by the drama, young Cowperwood came daily
to watch.

One morning he stood in front of the tank, his nose almost pressed to
the glass. Only a portion of the squid remained, and his ink-bag was
emptier than ever. In the corner of the tank sat the lobster, poised
apparently for action.

The boy stayed as long as he could, the bitter struggle fascinating
him. Now, maybe, or in an hour or a day, the squid might die, slain by
the lobster, and the lobster would eat him. He looked again at the
greenish-copperish engine of destruction in the corner and wondered
when this would be. To-night, maybe. He would come back to-night.

He returned that night, and lo! the expected had happened. There was a
little crowd around the tank. The lobster was in the corner. Before him
was the squid cut in two and partially devoured.

“He got him at last,” observed one bystander. “I was standing right
here an hour ago, and up he leaped and grabbed him. The squid was too
tired. He wasn’t quick enough. He did back up, but that lobster he
calculated on his doing that. He’s been figuring on his movements for a
long time now. He got him to-day.”

Frank only stared. Too bad he had missed this. The least touch of
sorrow for the squid came to him as he stared at it slain. Then he
gazed at the victor.

“That’s the way it has to be, I guess,” he commented to himself. “That
squid wasn’t quick enough.” He figured it out.

“The squid couldn’t kill the lobster—he had no weapon. The lobster
could kill the squid—he was heavily armed. There was nothing for the
squid to feed on; the lobster had the squid as prey. What was the
result to be? What else could it be? He didn’t have a chance,” he
concluded finally, as he trotted on homeward.

The incident made a great impression on him. It answered in a rough way
that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: “How is
life organized?” Things lived on each other—that was it. Lobsters lived
on squids and other things. What lived on lobsters? Men, of course!
Sure, that was it! And what lived on men? he asked himself. Was it
other men? Wild animals lived on men. And there were Indians and
cannibals. And some men were killed by storms and accidents. He wasn’t
so sure about men living on men; but men did kill each other. How about
wars and street fights and mobs? He had seen a mob once. It attacked
the Public Ledger building as he was coming home from school. His
father had explained why. It was about the slaves. That was it! Sure,
men lived on men. Look at the slaves. They were men. That’s what all
this excitement was about these days. Men killing other men—negroes.

He went on home quite pleased with himself at his solution.

“Mother!” he exclaimed, as he entered the house, “he finally got him!”

“Got who? What got what?” she inquired in amazement. “Go wash your
hands.”

“Why, that lobster got that squid I was telling you and pa about the
other day.”

“Well, that’s too bad. What makes you take any interest in such things?
Run, wash your hands.”

“Well, you don’t often see anything like that. I never did.” He went
out in the back yard, where there was a hydrant and a post with a
little table on it, and on that a shining tin-pan and a bucket of
water. Here he washed his face and hands.

“Say, papa,” he said to his father, later, “you know that squid?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’s dead. The lobster got him.”

His father continued reading. “Well, that’s too bad,” he said,
indifferently.

But for days and weeks Frank thought of this and of the life he was
tossed into, for he was already pondering on what he should be in this
world, and how he should get along. From seeing his father count money,
he was sure that he would like banking; and Third Street, where his
father’s office was, seemed to him the cleanest, most fascinating
street in the world.




Chapter II


The growth of young Frank Algernon Cowperwood was through years of what
might be called a comfortable and happy family existence. Buttonwood
Street, where he spent the first ten years of his life, was a lovely
place for a boy to live. It contained mostly small two and three-story
red brick houses, with small white marble steps leading up to the front
door, and thin, white marble trimmings outlining the front door and
windows. There were trees in the street—plenty of them. The road
pavement was of big, round cobblestones, made bright and clean by the
rains; and the sidewalks were of red brick, and always damp and cool.
In the rear was a yard, with trees and grass and sometimes flowers, for
the lots were almost always one hundred feet deep, and the
house-fronts, crowding close to the pavement in front, left a
comfortable space in the rear.

The Cowperwoods, father and mother, were not so lean and narrow that
they could not enter into the natural tendency to be happy and joyous
with their children; and so this family, which increased at the rate of
a child every two or three years after Frank’s birth until there were
four children, was quite an interesting affair when he was ten and they
were ready to move into the New Market Street home. Henry Worthington
Cowperwood’s connections were increased as his position grew more
responsible, and gradually he was becoming quite a personage. He
already knew a number of the more prosperous merchants who dealt with
his bank, and because as a clerk his duties necessitated his calling at
other banking-houses, he had come to be familiar with and favorably
known in the Bank of the United States, the Drexels, the Edwards, and
others. The brokers knew him as representing a very sound organization,
and while he was not considered brilliant mentally, he was known as a
most reliable and trustworthy individual.

In this progress of his father young Cowperwood definitely shared. He
was quite often allowed to come to the bank on Saturdays, when he would
watch with great interest the deft exchange of bills at the brokerage
end of the business. He wanted to know where all the types of money
came from, why discounts were demanded and received, what the men did
with all the money they received. His father, pleased at his interest,
was glad to explain so that even at this early age—from ten to
fifteen—the boy gained a wide knowledge of the condition of the country
financially—what a State bank was and what a national one; what brokers
did; what stocks were, and why they fluctuated in value. He began to
see clearly what was meant by money as a medium of exchange, and how
all values were calculated according to one primary value, that of
gold. He was a financier by instinct, and all the knowledge that
pertained to that great art was as natural to him as the emotions and
subtleties of life are to a poet. This medium of exchange, gold,
interested him intensely. When his father explained to him how it was
mined, he dreamed that he owned a gold mine and waked to wish that he
did. He was likewise curious about stocks and bonds and he learned that
some stocks and bonds were not worth the paper they were written on,
and that others were worth much more than their face value indicated.

“There, my son,” said his father to him one day, “you won’t often see a
bundle of those around this neighborhood.” He referred to a series of
shares in the British East India Company, deposited as collateral at
two-thirds of their face value for a loan of one hundred thousand
dollars. A Philadelphia magnate had hypothecated them for the use of
the ready cash. Young Cowperwood looked at them curiously. “They don’t
look like much, do they?” he commented.

“They are worth just four times their face value,” said his father,
archly.

Frank reexamined them. “The British East India Company,” he read. “Ten
pounds—that’s pretty near fifty dollars.”

“Forty-eight, thirty-five,” commented his father, dryly. “Well, if we
had a bundle of those we wouldn’t need to work very hard. You’ll notice
there are scarcely any pin-marks on them. They aren’t sent around very
much. I don’t suppose these have ever been used as collateral before.”

Young Cowperwood gave them back after a time, but not without a keen
sense of the vast ramifications of finance. What was the East India
Company? What did it do? His father told him.

At home also he listened to considerable talk of financial investment
and adventure. He heard, for one thing, of a curious character by the
name of Steemberger, a great beef speculator from Virginia, who was
attracted to Philadelphia in those days by the hope of large and easy
credits. Steemberger, so his father said, was close to Nicholas Biddle,
Lardner, and others of the United States Bank, or at least friendly
with them, and seemed to be able to obtain from that organization
nearly all that he asked for. His operations in the purchase of cattle
in Virginia, Ohio, and other States were vast, amounting, in fact, to
an entire monopoly of the business of supplying beef to Eastern cities.
He was a big man, enormous, with a face, his father said, something
like that of a pig; and he wore a high beaver hat and a long frock-coat
which hung loosely about his big chest and stomach. He had managed to
force the price of beef up to thirty cents a pound, causing all the
retailers and consumers to rebel, and this was what made him so
conspicuous. He used to come to the brokerage end of the elder
Cowperwood’s bank, with as much as one hundred thousand or two hundred
thousand dollars, in twelve months—post-notes of the United States Bank
in denominations of one thousand, five thousand, and ten thousand
dollars. These he would cash at from ten to twelve per cent. under
their face value, having previously given the United States Bank his
own note at four months for the entire amount. He would take his pay
from the Third National brokerage counter in packages of Virginia,
Ohio, and western Pennsylvania bank-notes at par, because he made his
disbursements principally in those States. The Third National would in
the first place realize a profit of from four to five per cent. on the
original transaction; and as it took the Western bank-notes at a
discount, it also made a profit on those.

There was another man his father talked about—one Francis J. Grund, a
famous newspaper correspondent and lobbyist at Washington, who
possessed the faculty of unearthing secrets of every kind, especially
those relating to financial legislation. The secrets of the President
and the Cabinet, as well as of the Senate and the House of
Representatives, seemed to be open to him. Grund had been about, years
before, purchasing through one or two brokers large amounts of the
various kinds of Texas debt certificates and bonds. The Republic of
Texas, in its struggle for independence from Mexico, had issued bonds
and certificates in great variety, amounting in value to ten or fifteen
million dollars. Later, in connection with the scheme to make Texas a
State of the Union, a bill was passed providing a contribution on the
part of the United States of five million dollars, to be applied to the
extinguishment of this old debt. Grund knew of this, and also of the
fact that some of this debt, owing to the peculiar conditions of issue,
was to be paid in full, while other portions were to be scaled down,
and there was to be a false or pre-arranged failure to pass the bill at
one session in order to frighten off the outsiders who might have heard
and begun to buy the old certificates for profit. He acquainted the
Third National Bank with this fact, and of course the information came
to Cowperwood as teller. He told his wife about it, and so his son, in
this roundabout way, heard it, and his clear, big eyes glistened. He
wondered why his father did not take advantage of the situation and buy
some Texas certificates for himself. Grund, so his father said, and
possibly three or four others, had made over a hundred thousand dollars
apiece. It wasn’t exactly legitimate, he seemed to think, and yet it
was, too. Why shouldn’t such inside information be rewarded? Somehow,
Frank realized that his father was too honest, too cautious, but when
he grew up, he told himself, he was going to be a broker, or a
financier, or a banker, and do some of these things.

Just at this time there came to the Cowperwoods an uncle who had not
previously appeared in the life of the family. He was a brother of Mrs.
Cowperwood’s—Seneca Davis by name—solid, unctuous, five feet ten in
height, with a big, round body, a round, smooth head rather bald, a
clear, ruddy complexion, blue eyes, and what little hair he had of a
sandy hue. He was exceedingly well dressed according to standards
prevailing in those days, indulging in flowered waistcoats, long,
light-colored frock-coats, and the invariable (for a fairly prosperous
man) high hat. Frank was fascinated by him at once. He had been a
planter in Cuba and still owned a big ranch there and could tell him
tales of Cuban life—rebellions, ambuscades, hand-to-hand fighting with
machetes on his own plantation, and things of that sort. He brought
with him a collection of Indian curies, to say nothing of an
independent fortune and several slaves—one, named Manuel, a tall,
raw-boned black, was his constant attendant, a bodyservant, as it were.
He shipped raw sugar from his plantation in boat-loads to the Southwark
wharves in Philadelphia. Frank liked him because he took life in a
hearty, jovial way, rather rough and offhand for this somewhat quiet
and reserved household.

“Why, Nancy Arabella,” he said to Mrs Cowperwood on arriving one Sunday
afternoon, and throwing the household into joyous astonishment at his
unexpected and unheralded appearance, “you haven’t grown an inch! I
thought when you married old brother Hy here that you were going to
fatten up like your brother. But look at you! I swear to Heaven you
don’t weigh five pounds.” And he jounced her up and down by the waist,
much to the perturbation of the children, who had never before seen
their mother so familiarly handled.

Henry Cowperwood was exceedingly interested in and pleased at the
arrival of this rather prosperous relative; for twelve years before,
when he was married, Seneca Davis had not taken much notice of him.

“Look at these little putty-faced Philadelphians,” he continued, “They
ought to come down to my ranch in Cuba and get tanned up. That would
take away this waxy look.” And he pinched the cheek of Anna Adelaide,
now five years old. “I tell you, Henry, you have a rather nice place
here.” And he looked at the main room of the rather conventional
three-story house with a critical eye.

Measuring twenty by twenty-four and finished in imitation cherry, with
a set of new Sheraton parlor furniture it presented a quaintly
harmonious aspect. Since Henry had become teller the family had
acquired a piano—a decided luxury in those days—brought from Europe;
and it was intended that Anna Adelaide, when she was old enough, should
learn to play. There were a few uncommon ornaments in the room—a gas
chandelier for one thing, a glass bowl with goldfish in it, some rare
and highly polished shells, and a marble Cupid bearing a basket of
flowers. It was summer time, the windows were open, and the trees
outside, with their widely extended green branches, were pleasantly
visible shading the brick sidewalk. Uncle Seneca strolled out into the
back yard.

“Well, this is pleasant enough,” he observed, noting a large elm and
seeing that the yard was partially paved with brick and enclosed within
brick walls, up the sides of which vines were climbing. “Where’s your
hammock? Don’t you string a hammock here in summer? Down on my veranda
at San Pedro I have six or seven.”

“We hadn’t thought of putting one up because of the neighbors, but it
would be nice,” agreed Mrs. Cowperwood. “Henry will have to get one.”

“I have two or three in my trunks over at the hotel. My niggers make
’em down there. I’ll send Manuel over with them in the morning.”

He plucked at the vines, tweaked Edward’s ear, told Joseph, the second
boy, he would bring him an Indian tomahawk, and went back into the
house.

“This is the lad that interests me,” he said, after a time, laying a
hand on the shoulder of Frank. “What did you name him in full, Henry?”

“Frank Algernon.”

“Well, you might have named him after me. There’s something to this
boy. How would you like to come down to Cuba and be a planter, my boy?”

“I’m not so sure that I’d like to,” replied the eldest.

“Well, that’s straight-spoken. What have you against it?”

“Nothing, except that I don’t know anything about it.”

“What do you know?”

The boy smiled wisely. “Not very much, I guess.”

“Well, what are you interested in?”

“Money!”

“Aha! What’s bred in the bone, eh? Get something of that from your
father, eh? Well, that’s a good trait. And spoken like a man, too!
We’ll hear more about that later. Nancy, you’re breeding a financier
here, I think. He talks like one.”

He looked at Frank carefully now. There was real force in that sturdy
young body—no doubt of it. Those large, clear gray eyes were full of
intelligence. They indicated much and revealed nothing.

“A smart boy!” he said to Henry, his brother-in-law. “I like his
get-up. You have a bright family.”

Henry Cowperwood smiled dryly. This man, if he liked Frank, might do
much for the boy. He might eventually leave him some of his fortune. He
was wealthy and single.

Uncle Seneca became a frequent visitor to the house—he and his negro
body-guard, Manuel, who spoke both English and Spanish, much to the
astonishment of the children; and he took an increasing interest in
Frank.

“When that boy gets old enough to find out what he wants to do, I think
I’ll help him to do it,” he observed to his sister one day; and she
told him she was very grateful. He talked to Frank about his studies,
and found that he cared little for books or most of the study he was
compelled to pursue. Grammar was an abomination. Literature silly.
Latin was of no use. History—well, it was fairly interesting.

“I like bookkeeping and arithmetic,” he observed. “I want to get out
and get to work, though. That’s what I want to do.”

“You’re pretty young, my son,” observed his uncle. “You’re only how old
now? Fourteen?”

“Thirteen.”

“Well, you can’t leave school much before sixteen. You’ll do better if
you stay until seventeen or eighteen. It can’t do you any harm. You
won’t be a boy again.”

“I don’t want to be a boy. I want to get to work.”

“Don’t go too fast, son. You’ll be a man soon enough. You want to be a
banker, do you?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Well, when the time comes, if everything is all right and you’ve
behaved yourself and you still want to, I’ll help you get a start in
business. If I were you and were going to be a banker, I’d first spend
a year or so in some good grain and commission house. There’s good
training to be had there. You’ll learn a lot that you ought to know.
And, meantime, keep your health and learn all you can. Wherever I am,
you let me know, and I’ll write and find out how you’ve been conducting
yourself.”

He gave the boy a ten-dollar gold piece with which to start a
bank-account. And, not strange to say, he liked the whole Cowperwood
household much better for this dynamic, self-sufficient, sterling youth
who was an integral part of it.




Chapter III


It was in his thirteenth year that young Cowperwood entered into his
first business venture. Walking along Front Street one day, a street of
importing and wholesale establishments, he saw an auctioneer’s flag
hanging out before a wholesale grocery and from the interior came the
auctioneer’s voice: “What am I bid for this exceptional lot of Java
coffee, twenty-two bags all told, which is now selling in the market
for seven dollars and thirty-two cents a bag wholesale? What am I bid?
What am I bid? The whole lot must go as one. What am I bid?”

“Eighteen dollars,” suggested a trader standing near the door, more to
start the bidding than anything else. Frank paused.

“Twenty-two!” called another.

“Thirty!” a third. “Thirty-five!” a fourth, and so up to seventy-five,
less than half of what it was worth.

“I’m bid seventy-five! I’m bid seventy-five!” called the auctioneer,
loudly. “Any other offers? Going once at seventy-five; am I offered
eighty? Going twice at seventy-five, and”—he paused, one hand raised
dramatically. Then he brought it down with a slap in the palm of the
other—“sold to Mr. Silas Gregory for seventy-five. Make a note of that,
Jerry,” he called to his red-haired, freckle-faced clerk beside him.
Then he turned to another lot of grocery staples—this time starch,
eleven barrels of it.

Young Cowperwood was making a rapid calculation. If, as the auctioneer
said, coffee was worth seven dollars and thirty-two cents a bag in the
open market, and this buyer was getting this coffee for seventy-five
dollars, he was making then and there eighty-six dollars and four
cents, to say nothing of what his profit would be if he sold it at
retail. As he recalled, his mother was paying twenty-eight cents a
pound. He drew nearer, his books tucked under his arm, and watched
these operations closely. The starch, as he soon heard, was valued at
ten dollars a barrel, and it only brought six. Some kegs of vinegar
were knocked down at one-third their value, and so on. He began to wish
he could bid; but he had no money, just a little pocket change. The
auctioneer noticed him standing almost directly under his nose, and was
impressed with the stolidity—solidity—of the boy’s expression.

“I am going to offer you now a fine lot of Castile soap—seven cases, no
less—which, as you know, if you know anything about soap, is now
selling at fourteen cents a bar. This soap is worth anywhere at this
moment eleven dollars and seventy-five cents a case. What am I bid?
What am I bid? What am I bid?” He was talking fast in the usual style
of auctioneers, with much unnecessary emphasis; but Cowperwood was not
unduly impressed. He was already rapidly calculating for himself. Seven
cases at eleven dollars and seventy-five cents would be worth just
eighty-two dollars and twenty-five cents; and if it went at half—if it
went at half—

“Twelve dollars,” commented one bidder.

“Fifteen,” bid another.

“Twenty,” called a third.

“Twenty-five,” a fourth.

Then it came to dollar raises, for Castile soap was not such a vital
commodity. “Twenty-six.” “Twenty-seven.” “Twenty-eight.” “Twenty-nine.”
There was a pause. “Thirty,” observed young Cowperwood, decisively.

The auctioneer, a short lean faced, spare man with bushy hair and an
incisive eye, looked at him curiously and almost incredulously but
without pausing. He had, somehow, in spite of himself, been impressed
by the boy’s peculiar eye; and now he felt, without knowing why, that
the offer was probably legitimate enough, and that the boy had the
money. He might be the son of a grocer.

“I’m bid thirty! I’m bid thirty! I’m bid thirty for this fine lot of
Castile soap. It’s a fine lot. It’s worth fourteen cents a bar. Will
any one bid thirty-one? Will any one bid thirty-one? Will any one bid
thirty-one?”

“Thirty-one,” said a voice.

“Thirty-two,” replied Cowperwood. The same process was repeated.

“I’m bid thirty-two! I’m bid thirty-two! I’m bid thirty-two! Will
anybody bid thirty-three? It’s fine soap. Seven cases of fine Castile
soap. Will anybody bid thirty-three?”

Young Cowperwood’s mind was working. He had no money with him; but his
father was teller of the Third National Bank, and he could quote him as
reference. He could sell all of his soap to the family grocer, surely;
or, if not, to other grocers. Other people were anxious to get this
soap at this price. Why not he?

The auctioneer paused.

“Thirty-two once! Am I bid thirty-three? Thirty-two twice! Am I bid
thirty-three? Thirty-two three times! Seven fine cases of soap. Am I
bid anything more? Once, twice! Three times! Am I bid anything
more?”—his hand was up again—“and sold to Mr.—?” He leaned over and
looked curiously into the face of his young bidder.

“Frank Cowperwood, son of the teller of the Third National Bank,”
replied the boy, decisively.

“Oh, yes,” said the man, fixed by his glance.

“Will you wait while I run up to the bank and get the money?”

“Yes. Don’t be gone long. If you’re not here in an hour I’ll sell it
again.”

Young Cowperwood made no reply. He hurried out and ran fast; first, to
his mother’s grocer, whose store was within a block of his home.

Thirty feet from the door he slowed up, put on a nonchalant air, and
strolling in, looked about for Castile soap. There it was, the same
kind, displayed in a box and looking just as his soap looked.

“How much is this a bar, Mr. Dalrymple?” he inquired.

“Sixteen cents,” replied that worthy.

“If I could sell you seven boxes for sixty-two dollars just like this,
would you take them?”

“The same soap?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Dalrymple calculated a moment.

“Yes, I think I would,” he replied, cautiously.

“Would you pay me to-day?”

“I’d give you my note for it. Where is the soap?”

He was perplexed and somewhat astonished by this unexpected proposition
on the part of his neighbor’s son. He knew Mr. Cowperwood well—and
Frank also.

“Will you take it if I bring it to you to-day?”

“Yes, I will,” he replied. “Are you going into the soap business?”

“No. But I know where I can get some of that soap cheap.”

He hurried out again and ran to his father’s bank. It was after banking
hours; but he knew how to get in, and he knew that his father would be
glad to see him make thirty dollars. He only wanted to borrow the money
for a day.

“What’s the trouble, Frank?” asked his father, looking up from his desk
when he appeared, breathless and red faced.

“I want you to loan me thirty-two dollars! Will you?”

“Why, yes, I might. What do you want to do with it?”

“I want to buy some soap—seven boxes of Castile soap. I know where I
can get it and sell it. Mr. Dalrymple will take it. He’s already
offered me sixty-two for it. I can get it for thirty-two. Will you let
me have the money? I’ve got to run back and pay the auctioneer.”

His father smiled. This was the most business-like attitude he had seen
his son manifest. He was so keen, so alert for a boy of thirteen.

“Why, Frank,” he said, going over to a drawer where some bills were,
“are you going to become a financier already? You’re sure you’re not
going to lose on this? You know what you’re doing, do you?”

“You let me have the money, father, will you?” he pleaded. “I’ll show
you in a little bit. Just let me have it. You can trust me.”

He was like a young hound on the scent of game. His father could not
resist his appeal.

“Why, certainly, Frank,” he replied. “I’ll trust you.” And he counted
out six five-dollar certificates of the Third National’s own issue and
two ones. “There you are.”

Frank ran out of the building with a briefly spoken thanks and returned
to the auction room as fast as his legs would carry him. When he came
in, sugar was being auctioned. He made his way to the auctioneer’s
clerk.

“I want to pay for that soap,” he suggested.

“Now?”

“Yes. Will you give me a receipt?”

“Yep.”

“Do you deliver this?”

“No. No delivery. You have to take it away in twenty-four hours.”

That difficulty did not trouble him.

“All right,” he said, and pocketed his paper testimony of purchase.

The auctioneer watched him as he went out. In half an hour he was back
with a drayman—an idle levee-wharf hanger-on who was waiting for a job.

Frank had bargained with him to deliver the soap for sixty cents. In
still another half-hour he was before the door of the astonished Mr.
Dalrymple whom he had come out and look at the boxes before attempting
to remove them. His plan was to have them carried on to his own home if
the operation for any reason failed to go through. Though it was his
first great venture, he was cool as glass.

“Yes,” said Mr. Dalrymple, scratching his gray head reflectively. “Yes,
that’s the same soap. I’ll take it. I’ll be as good as my word. Where’d
you get it, Frank?”

“At Bixom’s auction up here,” he replied, frankly and blandly.

Mr. Dalrymple had the drayman bring in the soap; and after some
formality—because the agent in this case was a boy—made out his note at
thirty days and gave it to him.

Frank thanked him and pocketed the note. He decided to go back to his
father’s bank and discount it, as he had seen others doing, thereby
paying his father back and getting his own profit in ready money. It
couldn’t be done ordinarily on any day after business hours; but his
father would make an exception in his case.

He hurried back, whistling; and his father glanced up smiling when he
came in.

“Well, Frank, how’d you make out?” he asked.

“Here’s a note at thirty days,” he said, producing the paper Dalrymple
had given him. “Do you want to discount that for me? You can take your
thirty-two out of that.”

His father examined it closely. “Sixty-two dollars!” he observed. “Mr.
Dalrymple! That’s good paper! Yes, I can. It will cost you ten per
cent.,” he added, jestingly. “Why don’t you just hold it, though? I’ll
let you have the thirty-two dollars until the end of the month.”

“Oh, no,” said his son, “you discount it and take your money. I may
want mine.”

His father smiled at his business-like air. “All right,” he said. “I’ll
fix it to-morrow. Tell me just how you did this.” And his son told him.

At seven o’clock that evening Frank’s mother heard about it, and in due
time Uncle Seneca.

“What’d I tell you, Cowperwood?” he asked. “He has stuff in him, that
youngster. Look out for him.”

Mrs. Cowperwood looked at her boy curiously at dinner. Was this the son
she had nursed at her bosom not so very long before? Surely he was
developing rapidly.

“Well, Frank, I hope you can do that often,” she said.

“I hope so, too, ma,” was his rather noncommittal reply.

Auction sales were not to be discovered every day, however, and his
home grocer was only open to one such transaction in a reasonable
period of time, but from the very first young Cowperwood knew how to
make money. He took subscriptions for a boys’ paper; handled the agency
for the sale of a new kind of ice-skate, and once organized a band of
neighborhood youths into a union for the purpose of purchasing their
summer straw hats at wholesale. It was not his idea that he could get
rich by saving. From the first he had the notion that liberal spending
was better, and that somehow he would get along.

It was in this year, or a little earlier, that he began to take an
interest in girls. He had from the first a keen eye for the beautiful
among them; and, being good-looking and magnetic himself, it was not
difficult for him to attract the sympathetic interest of those in whom
he was interested. A twelve-year old girl, Patience Barlow, who lived
further up the street, was the first to attract his attention or be
attracted by him. Black hair and snapping black eyes were her portion,
with pretty pigtails down her back, and dainty feet and ankles to match
a dainty figure. She was a Quakeress, the daughter of Quaker parents,
wearing a demure little bonnet. Her disposition, however, was
vivacious, and she liked this self-reliant, self-sufficient,
straight-spoken boy. One day, after an exchange of glances from time to
time, he said, with a smile and the courage that was innate in him:
“You live up my way, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she replied, a little flustered—this last manifested in a
nervous swinging of her school-bag—“I live at number one-forty-one.”

“I know the house,” he said. “I’ve seen you go in there. You go to the
same school my sister does, don’t you? Aren’t you Patience Barlow?” He
had heard some of the boys speak her name. “Yes. How do you know?”

“Oh, I’ve heard,” he smiled. “I’ve seen you. Do you like licorice?”

He fished in his coat and pulled out some fresh sticks that were sold
at the time.

“Thank you,” she said, sweetly, taking one.

“It isn’t very good. I’ve been carrying it a long time. I had some
taffy the other day.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” she replied, chewing the end of hers.

“Don’t you know my sister, Anna Cowperwood?” he recurred, by way of
self-introduction. “She’s in a lower grade than you are, but I thought
maybe you might have seen her.”

“I think I know who she is. I’ve seen her coming home from school.”

“I live right over there,” he confided, pointing to his own home as he
drew near to it, as if she didn’t know. “I’ll see you around here now,
I guess.”

“Do you know Ruth Merriam?” she asked, when he was about ready to turn
off into the cobblestone road to reach his own door.

“No, why?”

“She’s giving a party next Tuesday,” she volunteered, seemingly
pointlessly, but only seemingly.

“Where does she live?”

“There in twenty-eight.”

“I’d like to go,” he affirmed, warmly, as he swung away from her.

“Maybe she’ll ask you,” she called back, growing more courageous as the
distance between them widened. “I’ll ask her.”

“Thanks,” he smiled.

And she began to run gayly onward.

He looked after her with a smiling face. She was very pretty. He felt a
keen desire to kiss her, and what might transpire at Ruth Merriam’s
party rose vividly before his eyes.

This was just one of the early love affairs, or puppy loves, that held
his mind from time to time in the mixture of after events. Patience
Barlow was kissed by him in secret ways many times before he found
another girl. She and others of the street ran out to play in the snow
of a winter’s night, or lingered after dusk before her own door when
the days grew dark early. It was so easy to catch and kiss her then,
and to talk to her foolishly at parties. Then came Dora Fitler, when he
was sixteen years old and she was fourteen; and Marjorie Stafford, when
he was seventeen and she was fifteen. Dora Fitter was a brunette, and
Marjorie Stafford was as fair as the morning, with bright-red cheeks,
bluish-gray eyes, and flaxen hair, and as plump as a partridge.

It was at seventeen that he decided to leave school. He had not
graduated. He had only finished the third year in high school; but he
had had enough. Ever since his thirteenth year his mind had been on
finance; that is, in the form in which he saw it manifested in Third
Street. There had been odd things which he had been able to do to earn
a little money now and then. His Uncle Seneca had allowed him to act as
assistant weigher at the sugar-docks in Southwark, where
three-hundred-pound bags were weighed into the government bonded
warehouses under the eyes of United States inspectors. In certain
emergencies he was called to assist his father, and was paid for it. He
even made an arrangement with Mr. Dalrymple to assist him on Saturdays;
but when his father became cashier of his bank, receiving an income of
four thousand dollars a year, shortly after Frank had reached his
fifteenth year, it was self-evident that Frank could no longer continue
in such lowly employment.

Just at this time his Uncle Seneca, again back in Philadelphia and
stouter and more domineering than ever, said to him one day:

“Now, Frank, if you’re ready for it, I think I know where there’s a
good opening for you. There won’t be any salary in it for the first
year, but if you mind your p’s and q’s, they’ll probably give you
something as a gift at the end of that time. Do you know of Henry
Waterman & Company down in Second Street?”

“I’ve seen their place.”

“Well, they tell me they might make a place for you as a bookkeeper.
They’re brokers in a way—grain and commission men. You say you want to
get in that line. When school’s out, you go down and see Mr.
Waterman—tell him I sent you, and he’ll make a place for you, I think.
Let me know how you come out.”

Uncle Seneca was married now, having, because of his wealth, attracted
the attention of a poor but ambitious Philadelphia society matron; and
because of this the general connections of the Cowperwoods were
considered vastly improved. Henry Cowperwood was planning to move with
his family rather far out on North Front Street, which commanded at
that time a beautiful view of the river and was witnessing the
construction of some charming dwellings. His four thousand dollars a
year in these pre-Civil-War times was considerable. He was making what
he considered judicious and conservative investments and because of his
cautious, conservative, clock-like conduct it was thought he might
reasonably expect some day to be vice-president and possibly president,
of his bank.

This offer of Uncle Seneca to get him in with Waterman & Company seemed
to Frank just the thing to start him off right. So he reported to that
organization at 74 South Second Street one day in June, and was
cordially received by Mr. Henry Waterman, Sr. There was, he soon
learned, a Henry Waterman, Jr., a young man of twenty-five, and a
George Waterman, a brother, aged fifty, who was the confidential inside
man. Henry Waterman, Sr., a man of fifty-five years of age, was the
general head of the organization, inside and out—traveling about the
nearby territory to see customers when that was necessary, coming into
final counsel in cases where his brother could not adjust matters,
suggesting and advising new ventures which his associates and hirelings
carried out. He was, to look at, a phlegmatic type of man—short, stout,
wrinkled about the eyes, rather protuberant as to stomach, red-necked,
red-faced, the least bit popeyed, but shrewd, kindly, good-natured, and
witty. He had, because of his naturally common-sense ideas and rather
pleasing disposition built up a sound and successful business here. He
was getting strong in years and would gladly have welcomed the hearty
cooperation of his son, if the latter had been entirely suited to the
business.

He was not, however. Not as democratic, as quick-witted, or as pleased
with the work in hand as was his father, the business actually offended
him. And if the trade had been left to his care, it would have rapidly
disappeared. His father foresaw this, was grieved, and was hoping some
young man would eventually appear who would be interested in the
business, handle it in the same spirit in which it had been handled,
and who would not crowd his son out.

Then came young Cowperwood, spoken of to him by Seneca Davis. He looked
him over critically. Yes, this boy might do, he thought. There was
something easy and sufficient about him. He did not appear to be in the
least flustered or disturbed. He knew how to keep books, he said,
though he knew nothing of the details of the grain and commission
business. It was interesting to him. He would like to try it.

“I like that fellow,” Henry Waterman confided to his brother the moment
Frank had gone with instructions to report the following morning.
“There’s something to him. He’s the cleanest, briskest, most alive
thing that’s walked in here in many a day.”

“Yes,” said George, a much leaner and slightly taller man, with dark,
blurry, reflective eyes and a thin, largely vanished growth of
brownish-black hair which contrasted strangely with the egg-shaped
whiteness of his bald head. “Yes, he’s a nice young man. It’s a wonder
his father don’t take him in his bank.”

“Well, he may not be able to,” said his brother. “He’s only the cashier
there.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, we’ll give him a trial. I bet anything he makes good. He’s a
likely-looking youth.”

Henry got up and walked out into the main entrance looking into Second
Street. The cool cobble pavements, shaded from the eastern sun by the
wall of buildings on the east—of which his was a part—the noisy trucks
and drays, the busy crowds hurrying to and fro, pleased him. He looked
at the buildings over the way—all three and four stories, and largely
of gray stone and crowded with life—and thanked his stars that he had
originally located in so prosperous a neighborhood. If he had only
brought more property at the time he bought this!

“I wish that Cowperwood boy would turn out to be the kind of man I
want,” he observed to himself, meditatively. “He could save me a lot of
running these days.”

Curiously, after only three or four minutes of conversation with the
boy, he sensed this marked quality of efficiency. Something told him he
would do well.




Chapter IV


The appearance of Frank Cowperwood at this time was, to say the least,
prepossessing and satisfactory. Nature had destined him to be about
five feet ten inches tall. His head was large, shapely, notably
commercial in aspect, thickly covered with crisp, dark-brown hair and
fixed on a pair of square shoulders and a stocky body. Already his eyes
had the look that subtle years of thought bring. They were inscrutable.
You could tell nothing by his eyes. He walked with a light, confident,
springy step. Life had given him no severe shocks nor rude awakenings.
He had not been compelled to suffer illness or pain or deprivation of
any kind. He saw people richer than himself, but he hoped to be rich.
His family was respected, his father well placed. He owed no man
anything. Once he had let a small note of his become overdue at the
bank, but his father raised such a row that he never forgot it. “I
would rather crawl on my hands and knees than let my paper go to
protest,” the old gentleman observed; and this fixed in his mind what
scarcely needed to be so sharply emphasized—the significance of credit.
No paper of his ever went to protest or became overdue after that
through any negligence of his.

He turned out to be the most efficient clerk that the house of Waterman
& Co. had ever known. They put him on the books at first as assistant
bookkeeper, vice Mr. Thomas Trixler, dismissed, and in two weeks George
said: “Why don’t we make Cowperwood head bookkeeper? He knows more in a
minute than that fellow Sampson will ever know.”

“All right, make the transfer, George, but don’t fuss so. He won’t be a
bookkeeper long, though. I want to see if he can’t handle some of these
transfers for me after a bit.”

The books of Messrs. Waterman & Co., though fairly complicated, were
child’s play to Frank. He went through them with an ease and rapidity
which surprised his erstwhile superior, Mr. Sampson.

“Why, that fellow,” Sampson told another clerk on the first day he had
seen Cowperwood work, “he’s too brisk. He’s going to make a bad break.
I know that kind. Wait a little bit until we get one of those rush
credit and transfer days.” But the bad break Mr. Sampson anticipated
did not materialize. In less than a week Cowperwood knew the financial
condition of the Messrs. Waterman as well as they did—better—to a
dollar. He knew how their accounts were distributed; from what section
they drew the most business; who sent poor produce and good—the varying
prices for a year told that. To satisfy himself he ran back over
certain accounts in the ledger, verifying his suspicions. Bookkeeping
did not interest him except as a record, a demonstration of a firm’s
life. He knew he would not do this long. Something else would happen;
but he saw instantly what the grain and commission business was—every
detail of it. He saw where, for want of greater activity in offering
the goods consigned—quicker communication with shippers and buyers, a
better working agreement with surrounding commission men—this house,
or, rather, its customers, for it had nothing, endured severe losses. A
man would ship a tow-boat or a car-load of fruit or vegetables against
a supposedly rising or stable market; but if ten other men did the same
thing at the same time, or other commission men were flooded with fruit
or vegetables, and there was no way of disposing of them within a
reasonable time, the price had to fall. Every day was bringing its
special consignments. It instantly occurred to him that he would be of
much more use to the house as an outside man disposing of heavy
shipments, but he hesitated to say anything so soon. More than likely,
things would adjust themselves shortly.

The Watermans, Henry and George, were greatly pleased with the way he
handled their accounts. There was a sense of security in his very
presence. He soon began to call Brother George’s attention to the
condition of certain accounts, making suggestions as to their possible
liquidation or discontinuance, which pleased that individual greatly.
He saw a way of lightening his own labors through the intelligence of
this youth; while at the same time developing a sense of pleasant
companionship with him.

Brother Henry was for trying him on the outside. It was not always
possible to fill the orders with the stock on hand, and somebody had to
go into the street or the Exchange to buy and usually he did this. One
morning, when way-bills indicated a probable glut of flour and a
shortage of grain—Frank saw it first—the elder Waterman called him into
his office and said:

“Frank, I wish you would see what you can do with this condition that
confronts us on the street. By to-morrow we’re going to be overcrowded
with flour. We can’t be paying storage charges, and our orders won’t
eat it up. We’re short on grain. Maybe you could trade out the flour to
some of those brokers and get me enough grain to fill these orders.”

“I’d like to try,” said his employee.

He knew from his books where the various commission-houses were. He
knew what the local merchants’ exchange, and the various
commission-merchants who dealt in these things, had to offer. This was
the thing he liked to do—adjust a trade difficulty of this nature. It
was pleasant to be out in the air again, to be going from door to door.
He objected to desk work and pen work and poring over books. As he said
in later years, his brain was his office. He hurried to the principal
commission-merchants, learning what the state of the flour market was,
and offering his surplus at the very rate he would have expected to get
for it if there had been no prospective glut. Did they want to buy for
immediate delivery (forty-eight hours being immediate) six hundred
barrels of prime flour? He would offer it at nine dollars straight, in
the barrel. They did not. He offered it in fractions, and some agreed
to take one portion, and some another. In about an hour he was all
secure on this save one lot of two hundred barrels, which he decided to
offer in one lump to a famous operator named Genderman with whom his
firm did no business. The latter, a big man with curly gray hair, a
gnarled and yet pudgy face, and little eyes that peeked out shrewdly
through fat eyelids, looked at Cowperwood curiously when he came in.

“What’s your name, young man?” he asked, leaning back in his wooden
chair.

“Cowperwood.”

“So you work for Waterman & Company? You want to make a record, no
doubt. That’s why you came to me?”

Cowperwood merely smiled.

“Well, I’ll take your flour. I need it. Bill it to me.”

Cowperwood hurried out. He went direct to a firm of brokers in Walnut
Street, with whom his firm dealt, and had them bid in the grain he
needed at prevailing rates. Then he returned to the office.

“Well,” said Henry Waterman, when he reported, “you did that quick.
Sold old Genderman two hundred barrels direct, did you? That’s doing
pretty well. He isn’t on our books, is he?”

“No, sir.”

“I thought not. Well, if you can do that sort of work on the street you
won’t be on the books long.”

Thereafter, in the course of time, Frank became a familiar figure in
the commission district and on ’change (the Produce Exchange), striking
balances for his employer, picking up odd lots of things they needed,
soliciting new customers, breaking gluts by disposing of odd lots in
unexpected quarters. Indeed the Watermans were astonished at his
facility in this respect. He had an uncanny faculty for getting
appreciative hearings, making friends, being introduced into new
realms. New life began to flow through the old channels of the Waterman
company. Their customers were better satisfied. George was for sending
him out into the rural districts to drum up trade, and this was
eventually done.

Near Christmas-time Henry said to George: “We’ll have to make
Cowperwood a liberal present. He hasn’t any salary. How would five
hundred dollars do?”

“That’s pretty much, seeing the way times are, but I guess he’s worth
it. He’s certainly done everything we’ve expected, and more. He’s cut
out for this business.”

“What does he say about it? Do you ever hear him say whether he’s
satisfied?”

“Oh, he likes it pretty much, I guess. You see him as much as I do.”

“Well, we’ll make it five hundred. That fellow wouldn’t make a bad
partner in this business some day. He has the real knack for it. You
see that he gets the five hundred dollars with a word from both of us.”

So the night before Christmas, as Cowperwood was looking over some
way-bills and certificates of consignment preparatory to leaving all in
order for the intervening holiday, George Waterman came to his desk.

“Hard at it,” he said, standing under the flaring gaslight and looking
at his brisk employee with great satisfaction.

It was early evening, and the snow was making a speckled pattern
through the windows in front.

“Just a few points before I wind up,” smiled Cowperwood.

“My brother and I have been especially pleased with the way you have
handled the work here during the past six months. We wanted to make
some acknowledgment, and we thought about five hundred dollars would be
right. Beginning January first we’ll give you a regular salary of
thirty dollars a week.”

“I’m certainly much obliged to you,” said Frank. “I didn’t expect that
much. It’s a good deal. I’ve learned considerable here that I’m glad to
know.”

“Oh, don’t mention it. We know you’ve earned it. You can stay with us
as long as you like. We’re glad to have you with us.”

Cowperwood smiled his hearty, genial smile. He was feeling very
comfortable under this evidence of approval. He looked bright and
cheery in his well-made clothes of English tweed.

On the way home that evening he speculated as to the nature of this
business. He knew he wasn’t going to stay there long, even in spite of
this gift and promise of salary. They were grateful, of course; but why
shouldn’t they be? He was efficient, he knew that; under him things
moved smoothly. It never occurred to him that he belonged in the realm
of clerkdom. Those people were the kind of beings who ought to work for
him, and who would. There was nothing savage in his attitude, no rage
against fate, no dark fear of failure. These two men he worked for were
already nothing more than characters in his eyes—their business
significated itself. He could see their weaknesses and their
shortcomings as a much older man might have viewed a boy’s.

After dinner that evening, before leaving to call on his girl, Marjorie
Stafford, he told his father of the gift of five hundred dollars and
the promised salary.

“That’s splendid,” said the older man. “You’re doing better than I
thought. I suppose you’ll stay there.”

“No, I won’t. I think I’ll quit sometime next year.”

“Why?”

“Well, it isn’t exactly what I want to do. It’s all right, but I’d
rather try my hand at brokerage, I think. That appeals to me.”

“Don’t you think you are doing them an injustice not to tell them?”

“Not at all. They need me.” All the while surveying himself in a
mirror, straightening his tie and adjusting his coat.

“Have you told your mother?”

“No. I’m going to do it now.”

He went out into the dining-room, where his mother was, and slipping
his arms around her little body, said: “What do you think, Mammy?”

“Well, what?” she asked, looking affectionately into his eyes.

“I got five hundred dollars to-night, and I get thirty a week next
year. What do you want for Christmas?”

“You don’t say! Isn’t that nice! Isn’t that fine! They must like you.
You’re getting to be quite a man, aren’t you?”

“What do you want for Christmas?”

“Nothing. I don’t want anything. I have my children.”

He smiled. “All right. Then nothing it is.”

But she knew he would buy her something.

He went out, pausing at the door to grab playfully at his sister’s
waist, and saying that he’d be back about midnight, hurried to
Marjorie’s house, because he had promised to take her to a show.

“Anything you want for Christmas this year, Margy?” he asked, after
kissing her in the dimly-lighted hall. “I got five hundred to-night.”

She was an innocent little thing, only fifteen, no guile, no
shrewdness.

“Oh, you needn’t get me anything.”

“Needn’t I?” he asked, squeezing her waist and kissing her mouth again.

It was fine to be getting on this way in the world and having such a
good time.




Chapter V


The following October, having passed his eighteenth year by nearly six
months, and feeling sure that he would never want anything to do with
the grain and commission business as conducted by the Waterman Company,
Cowperwood decided to sever his relations with them and enter the
employ of Tighe & Company, bankers and brokers.

Cowperwood’s meeting with Tighe & Company had come about in the
ordinary pursuance of his duties as outside man for Waterman & Company.
From the first Mr. Tighe took a keen interest in this subtle young
emissary.

“How’s business with you people?” he would ask, genially; or, “Find
that you’re getting many I.O.U.’s these days?”

Because of the unsettled condition of the country, the over-inflation
of securities, the slavery agitation, and so forth, there were
prospects of hard times. And Tighe—he could not have told you why—was
convinced that this young man was worth talking to in regard to all
this. He was not really old enough to know, and yet he did know.

“Oh, things are going pretty well with us, thank you, Mr. Tighe,”
Cowperwood would answer.

“I tell you,” he said to Cowperwood one morning, “this slavery
agitation, if it doesn’t stop, is going to cause trouble.”

A negro slave belonging to a visitor from Cuba had just been abducted
and set free, because the laws of Pennsylvania made freedom the right
of any negro brought into the state, even though in transit only to
another portion of the country, and there was great excitement because
of it. Several persons had been arrested, and the newspapers were
discussing it roundly.

“I don’t think the South is going to stand for this thing. It’s making
trouble in our business, and it must be doing the same thing for
others. We’ll have secession here, sure as fate, one of these days.” He
talked with the vaguest suggestion of a brogue.

“It’s coming, I think,” said Cowperwood, quietly. “It can’t be healed,
in my judgment. The negro isn’t worth all this excitement, but they’ll
go on agitating for him—emotional people always do this. They haven’t
anything else to do. It’s hurting our Southern trade.”

“I thought so. That’s what people tell me.”

He turned to a new customer as young Cowperwood went out, but again the
boy struck him as being inexpressibly sound and deep-thinking on
financial matters. “If that young fellow wanted a place, I’d give it to
him,” he thought.

Finally, one day he said to him: “How would you like to try your hand
at being a floor man for me in ’change? I need a young man here. One of
my clerks is leaving.”

“I’d like it,” replied Cowperwood, smiling and looking intensely
gratified. “I had thought of speaking to you myself some time.”

“Well, if you’re ready and can make the change, the place is open. Come
any time you like.”

“I’ll have to give a reasonable notice at the other place,” Cowperwood
said, quietly. “Would you mind waiting a week or two?”

“Not at all. It isn’t as important as that. Come as soon as you can
straighten things out. I don’t want to inconvenience your employers.”

It was only two weeks later that Frank took his departure from Waterman
& Company, interested and yet in no way flustered by his new prospects.
And great was the grief of Mr. George Waterman. As for Mr. Henry
Waterman, he was actually irritated by this defection.

“Why, I thought,” he exclaimed, vigorously, when informed by Cowperwood
of his decision, “that you liked the business. Is it a matter of
salary?”

“No, not at all, Mr. Waterman. It’s just that I want to get into the
straight-out brokerage business.”

“Well, that certainly is too bad. I’m sorry. I don’t want to urge you
against your own best interests. You know what you are doing. But
George and I had about agreed to offer you an interest in this thing
after a bit. Now you’re picking up and leaving. Why, damn it, man,
there’s good money in this business.”

“I know it,” smiled Cowperwood, “but I don’t like it. I have other
plans in view. I’ll never be a grain and commission man.” Mr. Henry
Waterman could scarcely understand why obvious success in this field
did not interest him. He feared the effect of his departure on the
business.

And once the change was made Cowperwood was convinced that this new
work was more suited to him in every way—as easy and more profitable,
of course. In the first place, the firm of Tighe & Co., unlike that of
Waterman & Co., was located in a handsome green-gray stone building at
66 South Third Street, in what was then, and for a number of years
afterward, the heart of the financial district. Great institutions of
national and international import and repute were near at hand—Drexel &
Co., Edward Clark & Co., the Third National Bank, the First National
Bank, the Stock Exchange, and similar institutions. Almost a score of
smaller banks and brokerage firms were also in the vicinity. Edward
Tighe, the head and brains of this concern, was a Boston Irishman, the
son of an immigrant who had flourished and done well in that
conservative city. He had come to Philadelphia to interest himself in
the speculative life there. “Sure, it’s a right good place for those of
us who are awake,” he told his friends, with a slight Irish accent, and
he considered himself very much awake. He was a medium-tall man, not
very stout, slightly and prematurely gray, and with a manner which was
as lively and good-natured as it was combative and self-reliant. His
upper lip was ornamented by a short, gray mustache.

“May heaven preserve me,” he said, not long after he came there, “these
Pennsylvanians never pay for anything they can issue bonds for.” It was
the period when Pennsylvania’s credit, and for that matter
Philadelphia’s, was very bad in spite of its great wealth. “If there’s
ever a war there’ll be battalions of Pennsylvanians marching around
offering notes for their meals. If I could just live long enough I
could get rich buyin’ up Pennsylvania notes and bonds. I think they’ll
pay some time; but, my God, they’re mortal slow! I’ll be dead before
the State government will ever catch up on the interest they owe me
now.”

It was true. The condition of the finances of the state and city was
most reprehensible. Both State and city were rich enough; but there
were so many schemes for looting the treasury in both instances that
when any new work had to be undertaken bonds were necessarily issued to
raise the money. These bonds, or warrants, as they were called, pledged
interest at six per cent.; but when the interest fell due, instead of
paying it, the city or State treasurer, as the case might be, stamped
the same with the date of presentation, and the warrant then bore
interest for not only its original face value, but the amount then due
in interest. In other words, it was being slowly compounded. But this
did not help the man who wanted to raise money, for as security they
could not be hypothecated for more than seventy per cent. of their
market value, and they were not selling at par, but at ninety. A man
might buy or accept them in foreclosure, but he had a long wait. Also,
in the final payment of most of them favoritism ruled, for it was only
when the treasurer knew that certain warrants were in the hands of “a
friend” that he would advertise that such and such warrants—those
particular ones that he knew about—would be paid.

What was more, the money system of the United States was only then
beginning slowly to emerge from something approximating chaos to
something more nearly approaching order. The United States Bank, of
which Nicholas Biddle was the progenitor, had gone completely in 1841,
and the United States Treasury with its subtreasury system had come in
1846; but still there were many, many wildcat banks, sufficient in
number to make the average exchange-counter broker a walking
encyclopedia of solvent and insolvent institutions. Still, things were
slowly improving, for the telegraph had facilitated stock-market
quotations, not only between New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, but
between a local broker’s office in Philadelphia and his stock exchange.
In other words, the short private wire had been introduced.
Communication was quicker and freer, and daily grew better.

Railroads had been built to the South, East, North, and West. There was
as yet no stock-ticker and no telephone, and the clearing-house had
only recently been thought of in New York, and had not yet been
introduced in Philadelphia. Instead of a clearing-house service,
messengers ran daily between banks and brokerage firms, balancing
accounts on pass-books, exchanging bills, and, once a week,
transferring the gold coin, which was the only thing that could be
accepted for balances due, since there was no stable national currency.
“On ’change,” when the gong struck announcing the close of the day’s
business, a company of young men, known as “settlement clerks,” after a
system borrowed from London, gathered in the center of the room and
compared or gathered the various trades of the day in a ring, thus
eliminating all those sales and resales between certain firms which
naturally canceled each other. They carried long account books, and
called out the transactions—“Delaware and Maryland sold to Beaumont and
Company,” “Delware and Maryland sold to Tighe and Company,” and so on.
This simplified the bookkeeping of the various firms, and made for
quicker and more stirring commercial transactions.

Seats “on ’change” sold for two thousand dollars each. The members of
the exchange had just passed rules limiting the trading to the hours
between ten and three (before this they had been any time between
morning and midnight), and had fixed the rates at which brokers could
do business, in the face of cut-throat schemes which had previously
held. Severe penalties were fixed for those who failed to obey. In
other words, things were shaping up for a great ’change business, and
Edward Tighe felt, with other brokers, that there was a great future
ahead.




Chapter VI


The Cowperwood family was by this time established in its new and
larger and more tastefully furnished house on North Front Street,
facing the river. The house was four stories tall and stood twenty-five
feet on the street front, without a yard.

Here the family began to entertain in a small way, and there came to
see them, now and then, representatives of the various interests that
Henry Cowperwood had encountered in his upward climb to the position of
cashier. It was not a very distinguished company, but it included a
number of people who were about as successful as himself—heads of small
businesses who traded at his bank, dealers in dry-goods, leather,
groceries (wholesale), and grain. The children had come to have
intimacies of their own. Now and then, because of church connections,
Mrs. Cowperwood ventured to have an afternoon tea or reception, at
which even Cowperwood attempted the gallant in so far as to stand about
in a genially foolish way and greet those whom his wife had invited.
And so long as he could maintain his gravity very solemnly and greet
people without being required to say much, it was not too painful for
him. Singing was indulged in at times, a little dancing on occasion,
and there was considerably more “company to dinner,” informally, than
there had been previously.

And here it was, during the first year of the new life in this house,
that Frank met a certain Mrs. Semple, who interested him greatly. Her
husband had a pretentious shoe store on Chestnut Street, near Third,
and was planning to open a second one farther out on the same street.

The occasion of the meeting was an evening call on the part of the
Semples, Mr. Semple being desirous of talking with Henry Cowperwood
concerning a new transportation feature which was then entering the
world—namely, street-cars. A tentative line, incorporated by the North
Pennsylvania Railway Company, had been put into operation on a mile and
a half of tracks extending from Willow Street along Front to Germantown
Road, and thence by various streets to what was then known as the
Cohocksink Depot; and it was thought that in time this mode of
locomotion might drive out the hundreds of omnibuses which now crowded
and made impassable the downtown streets. Young Cowperwood had been
greatly interested from the start. Railway transportation, as a whole,
interested him, anyway, but this particular phase was most fascinating.
It was already creating widespread discussion, and he, with others, had
gone to see it. A strange but interesting new type of car, fourteen
feet long, seven feet wide, and nearly the same height, running on
small iron car-wheels, was giving great satisfaction as being quieter
and easier-riding than omnibuses; and Alfred Semple was privately
considering investing in another proposed line which, if it could
secure a franchise from the legislature, was to run on Fifth and Sixth
streets.

Cowperwood, Senior, saw a great future for this thing; but he did not
see as yet how the capital was to be raised for it. Frank believed that
Tighe & Co. should attempt to become the selling agents of this new
stock of the Fifth and Sixth Street Company in the event it succeeded
in getting a franchise. He understood that a company was already
formed, that a large amount of stock was to be issued against the
prospective franchise, and that these shares were to be sold at five
dollars, as against an ultimate par value of one hundred. He wished he
had sufficient money to take a large block of them.

Meanwhile, Lillian Semple caught and held his interest. Just what it
was about her that attracted him at this age it would be hard to say,
for she was really not suited to him emotionally, intellectually, or
otherwise. He was not without experience with women or girls, and still
held a tentative relationship with Marjorie Stafford; but Lillian
Semple, in spite of the fact that she was married and that he could
have legitimate interest in her, seemed not wiser and saner, but more
worth while. She was twenty-four as opposed to Frank’s nineteen, but
still young enough in her thoughts and looks to appear of his own age.
She was slightly taller than he—though he was now his full height (five
feet ten and one-half inches)—and, despite her height, shapely,
artistic in form and feature, and with a certain unconscious placidity
of soul, which came more from lack of understanding than from force of
character. Her hair was the color of a dried English walnut, rich and
plentiful, and her complexion waxen—cream wax—-with lips of faint pink,
and eyes that varied from gray to blue and from gray to brown,
according to the light in which you saw them. Her hands were thin and
shapely, her nose straight, her face artistically narrow. She was not
brilliant, not active, but rather peaceful and statuesque without
knowing it. Cowperwood was carried away by her appearance. Her beauty
measured up to his present sense of the artistic. She was lovely, he
thought—gracious, dignified. If he could have his choice of a wife,
this was the kind of a girl he would like to have.

As yet, Cowperwood’s judgment of women was temperamental rather than
intellectual. Engrossed as he was by his desire for wealth, prestige,
dominance, he was confused, if not chastened by considerations relating
to position, presentability and the like. None the less, the homely
woman meant nothing to him. And the passionate woman meant much. He
heard family discussions of this and that sacrificial soul among women,
as well as among men—women who toiled and slaved for their husbands or
children, or both, who gave way to relatives or friends in crises or
crucial moments, because it was right and kind to do so—but somehow
these stories did not appeal to him. He preferred to think of
people—even women—as honestly, frankly self-interested. He could not
have told you why. People seemed foolish, or at the best very
unfortunate not to know what to do in all circumstances and how to
protect themselves. There was great talk concerning morality, much
praise of virtue and decency, and much lifting of hands in righteous
horror at people who broke or were even rumored to have broken the
Seventh Commandment. He did not take this talk seriously. Already he
had broken it secretly many times. Other young men did. Yet again, he
was a little sick of the women of the streets and the bagnio. There
were too many coarse, evil features in connection with such contacts.
For a little while, the false tinsel-glitter of the house of ill repute
appealed to him, for there was a certain force to its luxury—rich, as a
rule, with red-plush furniture, showy red hangings, some coarse but
showily-framed pictures, and, above all, the strong-bodied or
sensuously lymphatic women who dwelt there, to (as his mother phrased
it) prey on men. The strength of their bodies, the lust of their souls,
the fact that they could, with a show of affection or good-nature,
receive man after man, astonished and later disgusted him. After all,
they were not smart. There was no vivacity of thought there. All that
they could do, in the main, he fancied, was this one thing. He pictured
to himself the dreariness of the mornings after, the stale dregs of
things when only sleep and thought of gain could aid in the least; and
more than once, even at his age, he shook his head. He wanted contact
which was more intimate, subtle, individual, personal.

So came Lillian Semple, who was nothing more to him than the shadow of
an ideal. Yet she cleared up certain of his ideas in regard to women.
She was not physically as vigorous or brutal as those other women whom
he had encountered in the lupanars, thus far—raw, unashamed
contraveners of accepted theories and notions—and for that very reason
he liked her. And his thoughts continued to dwell on her,
notwithstanding the hectic days which now passed like flashes of light
in his new business venture. For this stock exchange world in which he
now found himself, primitive as it would seem to-day, was most
fascinating to Cowperwood. The room that he went to in Third Street, at
Dock, where the brokers or their agents and clerks gathered one hundred
and fifty strong, was nothing to speak of artistically—a square chamber
sixty by sixty, reaching from the second floor to the roof of a
four-story building; but it was striking to him. The windows were high
and narrow; a large-faced clock faced the west entrance of the room
where you came in from the stairs; a collection of telegraph
instruments, with their accompanying desks and chairs, occupied the
northeast corner. On the floor, in the early days of the exchange, were
rows of chairs where the brokers sat while various lots of stocks were
offered to them. Later in the history of the exchange the chairs were
removed and at different points posts or floor-signs indicating where
certain stocks were traded in were introduced. Around these the men who
were interested gathered to do their trading. From a hall on the third
floor a door gave entrance to a visitor’s gallery, small and poorly
furnished; and on the west wall a large blackboard carried current
quotations in stocks as telegraphed from New York and Boston. A
wicket-like fence in the center of the room surrounded the desk and
chair of the official recorder; and a very small gallery opening from
the third floor on the west gave place for the secretary of the board,
when he had any special announcement to make. There was a room off the
southwest corner, where reports and annual compendiums of chairs were
removed and at different signs indicating where certain stocks of
various kinds were kept and were available for the use of members.

Young Cowperwood would not have been admitted at all, as either a
broker or broker’s agent or assistant, except that Tighe, feeling that
he needed him and believing that he would be very useful, bought him a
seat on ’change—charging the two thousand dollars it cost as a debt and
then ostensibly taking him into partnership. It was against the rules
of the exchange to sham a partnership in this way in order to put a man
on the floor, but brokers did it. These men who were known to be minor
partners and floor assistants were derisively called “eighth chasers”
and “two-dollar brokers,” because they were always seeking small orders
and were willing to buy or sell for anybody on their commission,
accounting, of course, to their firms for their work. Cowperwood,
regardless of his intrinsic merits, was originally counted one of their
number, and he was put under the direction of Mr. Arthur Rivers, the
regular floor man of Tighe & Company.

Rivers was an exceedingly forceful man of thirty-five, well-dressed,
well-formed, with a hard, smooth, evenly chiseled face, which was
ornamented by a short, black mustache and fine, black, clearly penciled
eyebrows. His hair came to an odd point at the middle of his forehead,
where he divided it, and his chin was faintly and attractively cleft.
He had a soft voice, a quiet, conservative manner, and both in and out
of this brokerage and trading world was controlled by good form.
Cowperwood wondered at first why Rivers should work for Tighe—he
appeared almost as able—but afterward learned that he was in the
company. Tighe was the organizer and general hand-shaker, Rivers the
floor and outside man.

It was useless, as Frank soon found, to try to figure out exactly why
stocks rose and fell. Some general reasons there were, of course, as he
was told by Tighe, but they could not always be depended on.

“Sure, anything can make or break a market”—Tighe explained in his
delicate brogue—“from the failure of a bank to the rumor that your
second cousin’s grandmother has a cold. It’s a most unusual world,
Cowperwood. No man can explain it. I’ve seen breaks in stocks that you
could never explain at all—no one could. It wouldn’t be possible to
find out why they broke. I’ve seen rises the same way. My God, the
rumors of the stock exchange! They beat the devil. If they’re going
down in ordinary times some one is unloading, or they’re rigging the
market. If they’re going up—God knows times must be good or somebody
must be buying—that’s sure. Beyond that—well, ask Rivers to show you
the ropes. Don’t you ever lose for me, though. That’s the cardinal sin
in this office.” He grinned maliciously, even if kindly, at that.

Cowperwood understood—none better. This subtle world appealed to him.
It answered to his temperament.

There were rumors, rumors, rumors—of great railway and street-car
undertakings, land developments, government revision of the tariff, war
between France and Turkey, famine in Russia or Ireland, and so on. The
first Atlantic cable had not been laid as yet, and news of any kind
from abroad was slow and meager. Still there were great financial
figures in the held, men who, like Cyrus Field, or William H.
Vanderbilt, or F. X. Drexel, were doing marvelous things, and their
activities and the rumors concerning them counted for much.

Frank soon picked up all of the technicalities of the situation. A
“bull,” he learned, was one who bought in anticipation of a higher
price to come; and if he was “loaded up” with a “line” of stocks he was
said to be “long.” He sold to “realize” his profit, or if his margins
were exhausted he was “wiped out.” A “bear” was one who sold stocks
which most frequently he did not have, in anticipation of a lower
price, at which he could buy and satisfy his previous sales. He was
“short” when he had sold what he did not own, and he “covered” when he
bought to satisfy his sales and to realize his profits or to protect
himself against further loss in case prices advanced instead of
declining. He was in a “corner” when he found that he could not buy in
order to make good the stock he had borrowed for delivery and the
return of which had been demanded. He was then obliged to settle
practically at a price fixed by those to whom he and other “shorts” had
sold.

He smiled at first at the air of great secrecy and wisdom on the part
of the younger men. They were so heartily and foolishly suspicious. The
older men, as a rule, were inscrutable. They pretended indifference,
uncertainty. They were like certain fish after a certain kind of bait,
however. Snap! and the opportunity was gone. Somebody else had picked
up what you wanted. All had their little note-books. All had their
peculiar squint of eye or position or motion which meant “Done! I take
you!” Sometimes they seemed scarcely to confirm their sales or
purchases—they knew each other so well—but they did. If the market was
for any reason active, the brokers and their agents were apt to be more
numerous than if it were dull and the trading indifferent. A gong
sounded the call to trading at ten o’clock, and if there was a
noticeable rise or decline in a stock or a group of stocks, you were
apt to witness quite a spirited scene. Fifty to a hundred men would
shout, gesticulate, shove here and there in an apparently aimless
manner; endeavoring to take advantage of the stock offered or called
for.

“Five-eighths for five hundred P. and W.,” some one would call—Rivers
or Cowperwood, or any other broker.

“Five hundred at three-fourths,” would come the reply from some one
else, who either had an order to sell the stock at that price or who
was willing to sell it short, hoping to pick up enough of the stock at
a lower figure later to fill his order and make a little something
besides. If the supply of stock at that figure was large Rivers would
probably continue to bid five-eighths. If, on the other hand, he
noticed an increasing demand, he would probably pay three-fourths for
it. If the professional traders believed Rivers had a large buying
order, they would probably try to buy the stock before he could at
three-fourths, believing they could sell it out to him at a slightly
higher price. The professional traders were, of course, keen students
of psychology; and their success depended on their ability to guess
whether or not a broker representing a big manipulator, like Tighe, had
an order large enough to affect the market sufficiently to give them an
opportunity to “get in and out,” as they termed it, at a profit before
he had completed the execution of his order. They were like hawks
watching for an opportunity to snatch their prey from under the very
claws of their opponents.

Four, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and sometimes
the whole company would attempt to take advantage of the given rise of
a given stock by either selling or offering to buy, in which case the
activity and the noise would become deafening. Given groups might be
trading in different things; but the large majority of them would
abandon what they were doing in order to take advantage of a
speciality. The eagerness of certain young brokers or clerks to
discover all that was going on, and to take advantage of any given rise
or fall, made for quick physical action, darting to and fro, the
excited elevation of explanatory fingers. Distorted faces were shoved
over shoulders or under arms. The most ridiculous grimaces were
purposely or unconsciously indulged in. At times there were situations
in which some individual was fairly smothered with arms, faces,
shoulders, crowded toward him when he manifested any intention of
either buying or selling at a profitable rate. At first it seemed quite
a wonderful thing to young Cowperwood—the very physical face of it—for
he liked human presence and activity; but a little later the sense of
the thing as a picture or a dramatic situation, of which he was a part
faded, and he came down to a clearer sense of the intricacies of the
problem before him. Buying and selling stocks, as he soon learned, was
an art, a subtlety, almost a psychic emotion. Suspicion, intuition,
feeling—these were the things to be “long” on.

Yet in time he also asked himself, who was it who made the real
money—the stock-brokers? Not at all. Some of them were making money,
but they were, as he quickly saw, like a lot of gulls or stormy
petrels, hanging on the lee of the wind, hungry and anxious to snap up
any unwary fish. Back of them were other men, men with shrewd ideas,
subtle resources. Men of immense means whose enterprise and holdings
these stocks represented, the men who schemed out and built the
railroads, opened the mines, organized trading enterprises, and built
up immense manufactories. They might use brokers or other agents to buy
and sell on ’change; but this buying and selling must be, and always
was, incidental to the actual fact—the mine, the railroad, the wheat
crop, the flour mill, and so on. Anything less than straight-out sales
to realize quickly on assets, or buying to hold as an investment, was
gambling pure and simple, and these men were gamblers. He was nothing
more than a gambler’s agent. It was not troubling him any just at this
moment, but it was not at all a mystery now, what he was. As in the
case of Waterman & Company, he sized up these men shrewdly, judging
some to be weak, some foolish, some clever, some slow, but in the main
all small-minded or deficient because they were agents, tools, or
gamblers. A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a
gambler—acting for himself or for others—he must employ such. A real
man—a financier—was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led.

Clearly, very clearly, at nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one years of
age, he saw all this, but he was not quite ready yet to do anything
about it. He was certain, however, that his day would come.




Chapter VII


In the meantime, his interest in Mrs. Semple had been secretly and
strangely growing. When he received an invitation to call at the Semple
home, he accepted with a great deal of pleasure. Their house was
located not so very far from his own, on North Front Street, in the
neighborhood of what is now known as No. 956. It had, in summer, quite
a wealth of green leaves and vines. The little side porch which
ornamented its south wall commanded a charming view of the river, and
all the windows and doors were topped with lunettes of small-paned
glass. The interior of the house was not as pleasing as he would have
had it. Artistic impressiveness, as to the furniture at least, was
wanting, although it was new and good. The pictures were—well, simply
pictures. There were no books to speak of—the Bible, a few current
novels, some of the more significant histories, and a collection of
antiquated odds and ends in the shape of books inherited from
relatives. The china was good—of a delicate pattern. The carpets and
wall-paper were too high in key. So it went. Still, the personality of
Lillian Semple was worth something, for she was really pleasing to look
upon, making a picture wherever she stood or sat.

There were no children—a dispensation of sex conditions which had
nothing to do with her, for she longed to have them. She was without
any notable experience in social life, except such as had come to the
Wiggin family, of which she was a member—relatives and a few
neighborhood friends visiting. Lillian Wiggin, that was her maiden
name—had two brothers and one sister, all living in Philadelphia and
all married at this time. They thought she had done very well in her
marriage.

It could not be said that she had wildly loved Mr. Semple at any time.
Although she had cheerfully married him, he was not the kind of man who
could arouse a notable passion in any woman. He was practical,
methodic, orderly. His shoe store was a good one—well-stocked with
styles reflecting the current tastes and a model of cleanliness and
what one might term pleasing brightness. He loved to talk, when he
talked at all, of shoe manufacturing, the development of lasts and
styles. The ready-made shoe—machine-made to a certain extent—was just
coming into its own slowly, and outside of these, supplies of which he
kept, he employed bench-making shoemakers, satisfying his customers
with personal measurements and making the shoes to order.

Mrs. Semple read a little—not much. She had a habit of sitting and
apparently brooding reflectively at times, but it was not based on any
deep thought. She had that curious beauty of body, though, that made
her somewhat like a figure on an antique vase, or out of a Greek
chorus. It was in this light, unquestionably, that Cowperwood saw her,
for from the beginning he could not keep his eyes off her. In a way,
she was aware of this but she did not attach any significance to it.
Thoroughly conventional, satisfied now that her life was bound
permanently with that of her husband, she had settled down to a staid
and quiet existence.

At first, when Frank called, she did not have much to say. She was
gracious, but the burden of conversation fell on her husband.
Cowperwood watched the varying expression of her face from time to
time, and if she had been at all psychic she must have felt something.
Fortunately she was not. Semple talked to him pleasantly, because in
the first place Frank was becoming financially significant, was suave
and ingratiating, and in the next place he was anxious to get richer
and somehow Frank represented progress to him in that line. One spring
evening they sat on the porch and talked—nothing very
important—slavery, street-cars, the panic—it was on then, that of
1857—the development of the West. Mr. Semple wanted to know all about
the stock exchange. In return Frank asked about the shoe business,
though he really did not care. All the while, inoffensively, he watched
Mrs. Semple. Her manner, he thought, was soothing, attractive,
delightful. She served tea and cake for them. They went inside after a
time to avoid the mosquitoes. She played the piano. At ten o’clock he
left.

Thereafter, for a year or so, Cowperwood bought his shoes of Mr.
Semple. Occasionally also he stopped in the Chestnut Street store to
exchange the time of the day. Semple asked his opinion as to the
advisability of buying some shares in the Fifth and Sixth Street line,
which, having secured a franchise, was creating great excitement.
Cowperwood gave him his best judgment. It was sure to be profitable. He
himself had purchased one hundred shares at five dollars a share, and
urged Semple to do so. But he was not interested in him personally. He
liked Mrs. Semple, though he did not see her very often.

About a year later, Mr. Semple died. It was an untimely death, one of
those fortuitous and in a way insignificant episodes which are,
nevertheless, dramatic in a dull way to those most concerned. He was
seized with a cold in the chest late in the fall—one of those seizures
ordinarily attributed to wet feet or to going out on a damp day without
an overcoat—and had insisted on going to business when Mrs. Semple
urged him to stay at home and recuperate. He was in his way a very
determined person, not obstreperously so, but quietly and under the
surface. Business was a great urge. He saw himself soon to be worth
about fifty thousand dollars. Then this cold—nine more days of
pneumonia—and he was dead. The shoe store was closed for a few days;
the house was full of sympathetic friends and church people. There was
a funeral, with burial service in the Callowhill Presbyterian Church,
to which they belonged, and then he was buried. Mrs. Semple cried
bitterly. The shock of death affected her greatly and left her for a
time in a depressed state. A brother of hers, David Wiggin, undertook
for the time being to run the shoe business for her. There was no will,
but in the final adjustment, which included the sale of the shoe
business, there being no desire on anybody’s part to contest her right
to all the property, she received over eighteen thousand dollars. She
continued to reside in the Front Street house, and was considered a
charming and interesting widow.

Throughout this procedure young Cowperwood, only twenty years of age,
was quietly manifest. He called during the illness. He attended the
funeral. He helped her brother, David Wiggin, dispose of the shoe
business. He called once or twice after the funeral, then stayed away
for a considerable time. In five months he reappeared, and thereafter
he was a caller at stated intervals—periods of a week or ten days.

Again, it would be hard to say what he saw in Semple. Her prettiness,
wax-like in its quality, fascinated him; her indifference aroused
perhaps his combative soul. He could not have explained why, but he
wanted her in an urgent, passionate way. He could not think of her
reasonably, and he did not talk of her much to any one. His family knew
that he went to see her, but there had grown up in the Cowperwood
family a deep respect for the mental force of Frank. He was genial,
cheerful, gay at most times, without being talkative, and he was
decidedly successful. Everybody knew he was making money now. His
salary was fifty dollars a week, and he was certain soon to get more.
Some lots of his in West Philadelphia, bought three years before, had
increased notably in value. His street-car holdings, augmented by still
additional lots of fifty and one hundred and one hundred and fifty
shares in new lines incorporated, were slowly rising, in spite of hard
times, from the initiative five dollars in each case to ten, fifteen,
and twenty-five dollars a share—all destined to go to par. He was liked
in the financial district and he was sure that he had a successful
future. Because of his analysis of the brokerage situation he had come
to the conclusion that he did not want to be a stock gambler. Instead,
he was considering the matter of engaging in bill-brokering, a business
which he had observed to be very profitable and which involved no risk
as long as one had capital. Through his work and his father’s
connections he had met many people—merchants, bankers, traders. He
could get their business, or a part of it, he knew. People in Drexel &
Co. and Clark & Co. were friendly to him. Jay Cooke, a rising banking
personality, was a personal friend of his.

Meanwhile he called on Mrs. Semple, and the more he called the better
he liked her. There was no exchange of brilliant ideas between them;
but he had a way of being comforting and social when he wished. He
advised her about her business affairs in so intelligent a way that
even her relatives approved of it. She came to like him, because he was
so considerate, quiet, reassuring, and so ready to explain over and
over until everything was quite plain to her. She could see that he was
looking on her affairs quite as if they were his own, trying to make
them safe and secure.

“You’re so very kind, Frank,” she said to him, one night. “I’m awfully
grateful. I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t been for
you.”

She looked at his handsome face, which was turned to hers, with
child-like simplicity.

“Not at all. Not at all. I want to do it. I wouldn’t have been happy if
I couldn’t.”

His eyes had a peculiar, subtle ray in them—not a gleam. She felt warm
toward him, sympathetic, quite satisfied that she could lean on him.

“Well, I am very grateful just the same. You’ve been so good. Come out
Sunday again, if you want to, or any evening. I’ll be home.”

It was while he was calling on her in this way that his Uncle Seneca
died in Cuba and left him fifteen thousand dollars. This money made him
worth nearly twenty-five thousand dollars in his own right, and he knew
exactly what to do with it. A panic had come since Mr. Semple had died,
which had illustrated to him very clearly what an uncertain thing the
brokerage business was. There was really a severe business depression.
Money was so scarce that it could fairly be said not to exist at all.
Capital, frightened by uncertain trade and money conditions,
everywhere, retired to its hiding-places in banks, vaults, tea-kettles,
and stockings. The country seemed to be going to the dogs. War with the
South or secession was vaguely looming up in the distance. The temper
of the whole nation was nervous. People dumped their holdings on the
market in order to get money. Tighe discharged three of his clerks. He
cut down his expenses in every possible way, and used up all his
private savings to protect his private holdings. He mortgaged his
house, his land holdings—everything; and in many instances young
Cowperwood was his intermediary, carrying blocks of shares to different
banks to get what he could on them.

“See if your father’s bank won’t loan me fifteen thousand on these,” he
said to Frank, one day, producing a bundle of Philadelphia & Wilmington
shares. Frank had heard his father speak of them in times past as
excellent.

“They ought to be good,” the elder Cowperwood said, dubiously, when
shown the package of securities. “At any other time they would be. But
money is so tight. We find it awfully hard these days to meet our own
obligations. I’ll talk to Mr. Kugel.” Mr. Kugel was the president.

There was a long conversation—a long wait. His father came back to say
it was doubtful whether they could make the loan. Eight per cent., then
being secured for money, was a small rate of interest, considering its
need. For ten per cent. Mr. Kugel might make a call-loan. Frank went
back to his employer, whose commercial choler rose at the report.

“For Heaven’s sake, is there no money at all in the town?” he demanded,
contentiously. “Why, the interest they want is ruinous! I can’t stand
that. Well, take ’em back and bring me the money. Good God, this’ll
never do at all, at all!”

Frank went back. “He’ll pay ten per cent.,” he said, quietly.

Tighe was credited with a deposit of fifteen thousand dollars, with
privilege to draw against it at once. He made out a check for the total
fifteen thousand at once to the Girard National Bank to cover a
shrinkage there. So it went.

During all these days young Cowperwood was following these financial
complications with interest. He was not disturbed by the cause of
slavery, or the talk of secession, or the general progress or decline
of the country, except in so far as it affected his immediate
interests. He longed to become a stable financier; but, now that he saw
the inside of the brokerage business, he was not so sure that he wanted
to stay in it. Gambling in stocks, according to conditions produced by
this panic, seemed very hazardous. A number of brokers failed. He saw
them rush in to Tighe with anguished faces and ask that certain trades
be canceled. Their very homes were in danger, they said. They would be
wiped out, their wives and children put out on the street.

This panic, incidentally, only made Frank more certain as to what he
really wanted to do—now that he had this free money, he would go into
business for himself. Even Tighe’s offer of a minor partnership failed
to tempt him.

“I think you have a nice business,” he explained, in refusing, “but I
want to get in the note-brokerage business for myself. I don’t trust
this stock game. I’d rather have a little business of my own than all
the floor work in this world.”

“But you’re pretty young, Frank,” argued his employer. “You have lots
of time to work for yourself.” In the end he parted friends with both
Tighe and Rivers. “That’s a smart young fellow,” observed Tighe,
ruefully.

“He’ll make his mark,” rejoined Rivers. “He’s the shrewdest boy of his
age I ever saw.”




Chapter VIII


Cowperwood’s world at this time was of roseate hue. He was in love and
had money of his own to start his new business venture. He could take
his street-car stocks, which were steadily increasing in value, and
raise seventy per cent. of their market value. He could put a mortgage
on his lots and get money there, if necessary. He had established
financial relations with the Girard National Bank—President Davison
there having taken a fancy to him—and he proposed to borrow from that
institution some day. All he wanted was suitable investments—things in
which he could realize surely, quickly. He saw fine prospective profits
in the street-car lines, which were rapidly developing into local
ramifications.

He purchased a horse and buggy about this time—the most
attractive-looking animal and vehicle he could find—the combination
cost him five hundred dollars—and invited Mrs. Semple to drive with
him. She refused at first, but later consented. He had told her of his
success, his prospects, his windfall of fifteen thousand dollars, his
intention of going into the note-brokerage business. She knew his
father was likely to succeed to the position of vice-president in the
Third National Bank, and she liked the Cowperwoods. Now she began to
realize that there was something more than mere friendship here. This
erstwhile boy was a man, and he was calling on her. It was almost
ridiculous in the face of things—her seniority, her widowhood, her
placid, retiring disposition—but the sheer, quiet, determined force of
this young man made it plain that he was not to be balked by her sense
of convention.

Cowperwood did not delude himself with any noble theories of conduct in
regard to her. She was beautiful, with a mental and physical lure for
him that was irresistible, and that was all he desired to know. No
other woman was holding him like that. It never occurred to him that he
could not or should not like other women at the same time. There was a
great deal of palaver about the sanctity of the home. It rolled off his
mental sphere like water off the feathers of a duck. He was not eager
for her money, though he was well aware of it. He felt that he could
use it to her advantage. He wanted her physically. He felt a keen,
primitive interest in the children they would have. He wanted to find
out if he could make her love him vigorously and could rout out the
memory of her former life. Strange ambition. Strange perversion, one
might almost say.

In spite of her fears and her uncertainty, Lillian Semple accepted his
attentions and interest because, equally in spite of herself, she was
drawn to him. One night, when she was going to bed, she stopped in
front of her dressing table and looked at her face and her bare neck
and arms. They were very pretty. A subtle something came over her as
she surveyed her long, peculiarly shaded hair. She thought of young
Cowperwood, and then was chilled and shamed by the vision of the late
Mr. Semple and the force and quality of public opinion.

“Why do you come to see me so often?” she asked him when he called the
following evening.

“Oh, don’t you know?” he replied, looking at her in an interpretive
way.

“No.”

“Sure you don’t?”

“Well, I know you liked Mr. Semple, and I always thought you liked me
as his wife. He’s gone, though, now.”

“And you’re here,” he replied.

“And I’m here?”

“Yes. I like you. I like to be with you. Don’t you like me that way?”

“Why, I’ve never thought of it. You’re so much younger. I’m five years
older than you are.”

“In years,” he said, “certainly. That’s nothing. I’m fifteen years
older than you are in other ways. I know more about life in some ways
than you can ever hope to learn—don’t you think so?” he added, softly,
persuasively.

“Well, that’s true. But I know a lot of things you don’t know.” She
laughed softly, showing her pretty teeth.

It was evening. They were on the side porch. The river was before them.

“Yes, but that’s only because you’re a woman. A man can’t hope to get a
woman’s point of view exactly. But I’m talking about practical affairs
of this world. You’re not as old that way as I am.”

“Well, what of it?”

“Nothing. You asked why I came to see you. That’s why. Partly.”

He relapsed into silence and stared at the water.

She looked at him. His handsome body, slowly broadening, was nearly
full grown. His face, because of its full, clear, big, inscrutable
eyes, had an expression which was almost babyish. She could not have
guessed the depths it veiled. His cheeks were pink, his hands not
large, but sinewy and strong. Her pale, uncertain, lymphatic body
extracted a form of dynamic energy from him even at this range.

“I don’t think you ought to come to see me so often. People won’t think
well of it.” She ventured to take a distant, matronly air—the air she
had originally held toward him.

“People,” he said, “don’t worry about people. People think what you
want them to think. I wish you wouldn’t take that distant air toward
me.”

“Why?”

“Because I like you.”

“But you mustn’t like me. It’s wrong. I can’t ever marry you. You’re
too young. I’m too old.”

“Don’t say that!” he said, imperiously. “There’s nothing to it. I want
you to marry me. You know I do. Now, when will it be?”

“Why, how silly! I never heard of such a thing!” she exclaimed. “It
will never be, Frank. It can’t be!”

“Why can’t it?” he asked.

“Because—well, because I’m older. People would think it strange. I’m
not long enough free.”

“Oh, long enough nothing!” he exclaimed, irritably. “That’s the one
thing I have against you—you are so worried about what people think.
They don’t make your life. They certainly don’t make mine. Think of
yourself first. You have your own life to make. Are you going to let
what other people think stand in the way of what you want to do?”

“But I don’t want to,” she smiled.

He arose and came over to her, looking into her eyes.

“Well?” she asked, nervously, quizzically.

He merely looked at her.

“Well?” she queried, more flustered.

He stooped down to take her arms, but she got up.

“Now you must not come near me,” she pleaded, determinedly. “I’ll go in
the house, and I’ll not let you come any more. It’s terrible! You’re
silly! You mustn’t interest yourself in me.”

She did show a good deal of determination, and he desisted. But for the
time being only. He called again and again. Then one night, when they
had gone inside because of the mosquitoes, and when she had insisted
that he must stop coming to see her, that his attentions were
noticeable to others, and that she would be disgraced, he caught her,
under desperate protest, in his arms.

“Now, see here!” she exclaimed. “I told you! It’s silly! You mustn’t
kiss me! How dare you! Oh! oh! oh!—”

She broke away and ran up the near-by stairway to her room. Cowperwood
followed her swiftly. As she pushed the door to he forced it open and
recaptured her. He lifted her bodily from her feet and held her
crosswise, lying in his arms.

“Oh, how could you!” she exclaimed. “I will never speak to you any
more. I will never let you come here any more if you don’t put me down
this minute. Put me down!”

“I’ll put you down, sweet,” he said. “I’ll take you down,” at the same
time pulling her face to him and kissing her. He was very much aroused,
excited.

While she was twisting and protesting, he carried her down the stairs
again into the living-room, and seated himself in the great armchair,
still holding her tight in his arms.

“Oh!” she sighed, falling limp on his shoulder when he refused to let
her go. Then, because of the set determination of his face, some
intense pull in him, she smiled. “How would I ever explain if I did
marry you?” she asked, weakly. “Your father! Your mother!”

“You don’t need to explain. I’ll do that. And you needn’t worry about
my family. They won’t care.”

“But mine,” she recoiled.

“Don’t worry about yours. I’m not marrying your family. I’m marrying
you. We have independent means.”

She relapsed into additional protests; but he kissed her the more.
There was a deadly persuasion to his caresses. Mr. Semple had never
displayed any such fire. He aroused a force of feeling in her which had
not previously been there. She was afraid of it and ashamed.

“Will you marry me in a month?” he asked, cheerfully, when she paused.

“You know I won’t!” she exclaimed, nervously. “The idea! Why do you
ask?”

“What difference does it make? We’re going to get married eventually.”
He was thinking how attractive he could make her look in other
surroundings. Neither she nor his family knew how to live.

“Well, not in a month. Wait a little while. I will marry you after a
while—after you see whether you want me.”

He caught her tight. “I’ll show you,” he said.

“Please stop. You hurt me.”

“How about it? Two months?”

“Certainly not.”

“Three?”

“Well, maybe.”

“No maybe in that case. We marry.”

“But you’re only a boy.”

“Don’t worry about me. You’ll find out how much of a boy I am.”

He seemed of a sudden to open up a new world to her, and she realized
that she had never really lived before. This man represented something
bigger and stronger than ever her husband had dreamed of. In his young
way he was terrible, irresistible.

“Well, in three months then,” she whispered, while he rocked her cozily
in his arms.




Chapter IX


Cowperwood started in the note brokerage business with a small office
at No. 64 South Third Street, where he very soon had the pleasure of
discovering that his former excellent business connections remembered
him. He would go to one house, where he suspected ready money might be
desirable, and offer to negotiate their notes or any paper they might
issue bearing six per cent. interest for a commission and then he would
sell the paper for a small commission to some one who would welcome a
secure investment. Sometimes his father, sometimes other people, helped
him with suggestions as to when and how. Between the two ends he might
make four and five per cent. on the total transaction. In the first
year he cleared six thousand dollars over and above all expenses. That
wasn’t much, but he was augmenting it in another way which he believed
would bring great profit in the future.

Before the first street-car line, which was a shambling affair, had
been laid on Front Street, the streets of Philadelphia had been crowded
with hundreds of springless omnibuses rattling over rough, hard,
cobblestones. Now, thanks to the idea of John Stephenson, in New York,
the double rail track idea had come, and besides the line on Fifth and
Sixth Streets (the cars running out one street and back on another)
which had paid splendidly from the start, there were many other lines
proposed or under way. The city was as eager to see street-cars replace
omnibuses as it was to see railroads replace canals. There was
opposition, of course. There always is in such cases. The cry of
probable monopoly was raised. Disgruntled and defeated omnibus owners
and drivers groaned aloud.

Cowperwood had implicit faith in the future of the street railway. In
support of this belief he risked all he could spare on new issues of
stock shares in new companies. He wanted to be on the inside wherever
possible, always, though this was a little difficult in the matter of
the street-railways, he having been so young when they started and not
having yet arranged his financial connections to make them count for
much. The Fifth and Sixth Street line, which had been but recently
started, was paying six hundred dollars a day. A project for a West
Philadelphia line (Walnut and Chestnut) was on foot, as were lines to
occupy Second and Third Streets, Race and Vine, Spruce and Pine, Green
and Coates, Tenth and Eleventh, and so forth. They were engineered and
backed by some powerful capitalists who had influence with the State
legislature and could, in spite of great public protest, obtain
franchises. Charges of corruption were in the air. It was argued that
the streets were valuable, and that the companies should pay a road tax
of a thousand dollars a mile. Somehow, however, these splendid grants
were gotten through, and the public, hearing of the Fifth and Sixth
Street line profits, was eager to invest. Cowperwood was one of these,
and when the Second and Third Street line was engineered, he invested
in that and in the Walnut and Chestnut Street line also. He began to
have vague dreams of controlling a line himself some day, but as yet he
did not see exactly how it was to be done, since his business was far
from being a bonanza.

In the midst of this early work he married Mrs. Semple. There was no
vast to-do about it, as he did not want any and his bride-to-be was
nervous, fearsome of public opinion. His family did not entirely
approve. She was too old, his mother and father thought, and then
Frank, with his prospects, could have done much better. His sister Anna
fancied that Mrs. Semple was designing, which was, of course, not true.
His brothers, Joseph and Edward, were interested, but not certain as to
what they actually thought, since Mrs. Semple was good-looking and had
some money.

It was a warm October day when he and Lillian went to the altar, in the
First Presbyterian Church of Callowhill Street. His bride, Frank was
satisfied, looked exquisite in a trailing gown of cream lace—a creation
that had cost months of labor. His parents, Mrs. Seneca Davis, the
Wiggin family, brothers and sisters, and some friends were present. He
was a little opposed to this idea, but Lillian wanted it. He stood up
straight and correct in black broadcloth for the wedding
ceremony—because she wished it, but later changed to a smart business
suit for traveling. He had arranged his affairs for a two weeks’ trip
to New York and Boston. They took an afternoon train for New York,
which required five hours to reach. When they were finally alone in the
Astor House, New York, after hours of make-believe and public pretense
of indifference, he gathered her in his arms.

“Oh, it’s delicious,” he exclaimed, “to have you all to myself.”

She met his eagerness with that smiling, tantalizing passivity which he
had so much admired but which this time was tinged strongly with a
communicated desire. He thought he should never have enough of her, her
beautiful face, her lovely arms, her smooth, lymphatic body. They were
like two children, billing and cooing, driving, dining, seeing the
sights. He was curious to visit the financial sections of both cities.
New York and Boston appealed to him as commercially solid. He wondered,
as he observed the former, whether he should ever leave Philadelphia.
He was going to be very happy there now, he thought, with Lillian and
possibly a brood of young Cowperwoods. He was going to work hard and
make money. With his means and hers now at his command, he might
become, very readily, notably wealthy.




Chapter X


The home atmosphere which they established when they returned from
their honeymoon was a great improvement in taste over that which had
characterized the earlier life of Mrs. Cowperwood as Mrs. Semple. They
had decided to occupy her house, on North Front Street, for a while at
least. Cowperwood, aggressive in his current artistic mood, had
objected at once after they were engaged to the spirit of the furniture
and decorations, or lack of them, and had suggested that he be allowed
to have it brought more in keeping with his idea of what was
appropriate. During the years in which he had been growing into manhood
he had come instinctively into sound notions of what was artistic and
refined. He had seen so many homes that were more distinguished and
harmonious than his own. One could not walk or drive about Philadelphia
without seeing and being impressed with the general tendency toward a
more cultivated and selective social life. Many excellent and expensive
houses were being erected. The front lawn, with some attempt at floral
gardening, was achieving local popularity. In the homes of the Tighes,
the Leighs, Arthur Rivers, and others, he had noticed art objects of
some distinction—bronzes, marbles, hangings, pictures, clocks, rugs.

It seemed to him now that his comparatively commonplace house could be
made into something charming and for comparatively little money. The
dining-room for instance which, through two plain windows set in a hat
side wall back of the veranda, looked south over a stretch of grass and
several trees and bushes to a dividing fence where the Semple property
ended and a neighbor’s began, could be made so much more attractive.
That fence—sharp-pointed, gray palings—could be torn away and a hedge
put in its place. The wall which divided the dining-room from the
parlor could be knocked through and a hanging of some pleasing
character put in its place. A bay-window could be built to replace the
two present oblong windows—a bay which would come down to the floor and
open out on the lawn via swiveled, diamond-shaped, lead-paned frames.
All this shabby, nondescript furniture, collected from heaven knows
where—partly inherited from the Semples and the Wiggins and partly
bought—could be thrown out or sold and something better and more
harmonious introduced. He knew a young man by the name of Ellsworth, an
architect newly graduated from a local school, with whom he had struck
up an interesting friendship—one of those inexplicable inclinations of
temperament. Wilton Ellsworth was an artist in spirit, quiet,
meditative, refined. From discussing the quality of a certain building
on Chestnut Street which was then being erected, and which Ellsworth
pronounced atrocious, they had fallen to discussing art in general, or
the lack of it, in America. And it occurred to him that Ellsworth was
the man to carry out his decorative views to a nicety. When he
suggested the young man to Lillian, she placidly agreed with him and
also with his own ideas of how the house could be revised.

So while they were gone on their honeymoon Ellsworth began the revision
on an estimated cost of three thousand dollars, including the
furniture. It was not completed for nearly three weeks after their
return; but when finished made a comparatively new house. The
dining-room bay hung low over the grass, as Frank wished, and the
windows were diamond-paned and leaded, swiveled on brass rods. The
parlor and dining-room were separated by sliding doors; but the
intention was to hang in this opening a silk hanging depicting a
wedding scene in Normandy. Old English oak was used in the dining-room,
an American imitation of Chippendale and Sheraton for the sitting-room
and the bedrooms. There were a few simple water-colors hung here and
there, some bronzes of Hosmer and Powers, a marble venus by Potter, a
now forgotten sculptor, and other objects of art—nothing of any
distinction. Pleasing, appropriately colored rugs covered the floor.
Mrs. Cowperwood was shocked by the nudity of the Venus which conveyed
an atmosphere of European freedom not common to America; but she said
nothing. It was all harmonious and soothing, and she did not feel
herself capable to judge. Frank knew about these things so much better
than she did. Then with a maid and a man of all work installed, a
program of entertaining was begun on a small scale.

Those who recall the early years of their married life can best realize
the subtle changes which this new condition brought to Frank, for, like
all who accept the hymeneal yoke, he was influenced to a certain extent
by the things with which he surrounded himself. Primarily, from certain
traits of his character, one would have imagined him called to be a
citizen of eminent respectability and worth. He appeared to be an ideal
home man. He delighted to return to his wife in the evenings, leaving
the crowded downtown section where traffic clamored and men hurried.
Here he could feel that he was well-stationed and physically happy in
life. The thought of the dinner-table with candles upon it (his idea);
the thought of Lillian in a trailing gown of pale-blue or green silk—he
liked her in those colors; the thought of a large fireplace flaming
with solid lengths of cord-wood, and Lillian snuggling in his arms,
gripped his immature imagination. As has been said before, he cared
nothing for books, but life, pictures, trees, physical contact—these,
in spite of his shrewd and already gripping financial calculations,
held him. To live richly, joyously, fully—his whole nature craved that.

And Mrs. Cowperwood, in spite of the difference in their years,
appeared to be a fit mate for him at this time. She was once awakened,
and for the time being, clinging, responsive, dreamy. His mood and hers
was for a baby, and in a little while that happy expectation was
whispered to him by her. She had half fancied that her previous
barrenness was due to herself, and was rather surprised and delighted
at the proof that it was not so. It opened new possibilities—a
seemingly glorious future of which she was not afraid. He liked it, the
idea of self-duplication. It was almost acquisitive, this thought. For
days and weeks and months and years, at least the first four or five,
he took a keen satisfaction in coming home evenings, strolling about
the yard, driving with his wife, having friends in to dinner, talking
over with her in an explanatory way the things he intended to do. She
did not understand his financial abstrusities, and he did not trouble
to make them clear.

But love, her pretty body, her lips, her quiet manner—the lure of all
these combined, and his two children, when they came—two in four
years—held him. He would dandle Frank, Jr., who was the first to
arrive, on his knee, looking at his chubby feet, his kindling eyes, his
almost formless yet bud-like mouth, and wonder at the process by which
children came into the world. There was so much to think of in this
connection—the spermatozoic beginning, the strange period of gestation
in women, the danger of disease and delivery. He had gone through a
real period of strain when Frank, Jr., was born, for Mrs. Cowperwood
was frightened. He feared for the beauty of her body—troubled over the
danger of losing her; and he actually endured his first worry when he
stood outside the door the day the child came. Not much—he was too
self-sufficient, too resourceful; and yet he worried, conjuring up
thoughts of death and the end of their present state. Then word came,
after certain piercing, harrowing cries, that all was well, and he was
permitted to look at the new arrival. The experience broadened his
conception of things, made him more solid in his judgment of life. That
old conviction of tragedy underlying the surface of things, like wood
under its veneer, was emphasized. Little Frank, and later Lillian,
blue-eyed and golden-haired, touched his imagination for a while. There
was a good deal to this home idea, after all. That was the way life was
organized, and properly so—its cornerstone was the home.

It would be impossible to indicate fully how subtle were the material
changes which these years involved—changes so gradual that they were,
like the lap of soft waters, unnoticeable. Considerable—a great deal,
considering how little he had to begin with—wealth was added in the
next five years. He came, in his financial world, to know fairly
intimately, as commercial relationships go, some of the subtlest
characters of the steadily enlarging financial world. In his days at
Tighe’s and on the exchange, many curious figures had been pointed out
to him—State and city officials of one grade and another who were
“making something out of politics,” and some national figures who came
from Washington to Philadelphia at times to see Drexel & Co., Clark &
Co., and even Tighe & Co. These men, as he learned, had tips or advance
news of legislative or economic changes which were sure to affect
certain stocks or trade opportunities. A young clerk had once pulled
his sleeve at Tighe’s.

“See that man going in to see Tighe?”

“Yes.”

“That’s Murtagh, the city treasurer. Say, he don’t do anything but play
a fine game. All that money to invest, and he don’t have to account for
anything except the principal. The interest goes to him.”

Cowperwood understood. All these city and State officials speculated.
They had a habit of depositing city and State funds with certain
bankers and brokers as authorized agents or designated State
depositories. The banks paid no interest—save to the officials
personally. They loaned it to certain brokers on the officials’ secret
order, and the latter invested it in “sure winners.” The bankers got
the free use of the money a part of the time, the brokers another part:
the officials made money, and the brokers received a fat commission.
There was a political ring in Philadelphia in which the mayor, certain
members of the council, the treasurer, the chief of police, the
commissioner of public works, and others shared. It was a case
generally of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Cowperwood
thought it rather shabby work at first, but many men were rapidly
getting rich and no one seemed to care. The newspapers were always
talking about civic patriotism and pride but never a word about these
things. And the men who did them were powerful and respected.

There were many houses, a constantly widening circle, that found him a
very trustworthy agent in disposing of note issues or note payment. He
seemed to know so quickly where to go to get the money. From the first
he made it a principle to keep twenty thousand dollars in cash on hand
in order to be able to take up a proposition instantly and without
discussion. So, often he was able to say, “Why, certainly, I can do
that,” when otherwise, on the face of things, he would not have been
able to do so. He was asked if he would not handle certain stock
transactions on ’change. He had no seat, and he intended not to take
any at first; but now he changed his mind, and bought one, not only in
Philadelphia, but in New York also. A certain Joseph Zimmerman, a
dry-goods man for whom he had handled various note issues, suggested
that he undertake operating in street-railway shares for him, and this
was the beginning of his return to the floor.

In the meanwhile his family life was changing—growing, one might have
said, finer and more secure. Mrs. Cowperwood had, for instance, been
compelled from time to time to make a subtle readjustment of her
personal relationship with people, as he had with his. When Mr. Semple
was alive she had been socially connected with tradesmen
principally—retailers and small wholesalers—a very few. Some of the
women of her own church, the First Presbyterian, were friendly with
her. There had been church teas and sociables which she and Mr. Semple
attended, and dull visits to his relatives and hers. The Cowperwoods,
the Watermans, and a few families of that caliber, had been the notable
exceptions. Now all this was changed. Young Cowperwood did not care
very much for her relatives, and the Semples had been alienated by her
second, and to them outrageous, marriage. His own family was closely
interested by ties of affection and mutual prosperity, but, better than
this, he was drawing to himself some really significant personalities.
He brought home with him, socially—not to talk business, for he
disliked that idea—bankers, investors, customers and prospective
customers. Out on the Schuylkill, the Wissahickon, and elsewhere, were
popular dining places where one could drive on Sunday. He and Mrs.
Cowperwood frequently drove out to Mrs. Seneca Davis’s, to Judge
Kitchen’s, to the home of Andrew Sharpless, a lawyer whom he knew, to
the home of Harper Steger, his own lawyer, and others. Cowperwood had
the gift of geniality. None of these men or women suspected the depth
of his nature—he was thinking, thinking, thinking, but enjoyed life as
he went.

One of his earliest and most genuine leanings was toward paintings. He
admired nature, but somehow, without knowing why, he fancied one could
best grasp it through the personality of some interpreter, just as we
gain our ideas of law and politics through individuals. Mrs. Cowperwood
cared not a whit one way or another, but she accompanied him to
exhibitions, thinking all the while that Frank was a little peculiar.
He tried, because he loved her, to interest her in these things
intelligently, but while she pretended slightly, she could not really
see or care, and it was very plain that she could not.

The children took up a great deal of her time. However, Cowperwood was
not troubled about this. It struck him as delightful and exceedingly
worth while that she should be so devoted. At the same time, her
lethargic manner, vague smile and her sometimes seeming indifference,
which sprang largely from a sense of absolute security, attracted him
also. She was so different from him! She took her second marriage quite
as she had taken her first—a solemn fact which contained no possibility
of mental alteration. As for himself, however, he was bustling about in
a world which, financially at least, seemed all alteration—there were
so many sudden and almost unheard-of changes. He began to look at her
at times, with a speculative eye—not very critically, for he liked
her—but with an attempt to weigh her personality. He had known her five
years and more now. What did he know about her? The vigor of
youth—those first years—had made up for so many things, but now that he
had her safely...

There came in this period the slow approach, and finally the
declaration, of war between the North and the South, attended with so
much excitement that almost all current minds were notably colored by
it. It was terrific. Then came meetings, public and stirring, and
riots; the incident of John Brown’s body; the arrival of Lincoln, the
great commoner, on his way from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington
via Philadelphia, to take the oath of office; the battle of Bull Run;
the battle of Vicksburg; the battle of Gettysburg, and so on.
Cowperwood was only twenty-five at the time, a cool, determined youth,
who thought the slave agitation might be well founded in human
rights—no doubt was—but exceedingly dangerous to trade. He hoped the
North would win; but it might go hard with him personally and other
financiers. He did not care to fight. That seemed silly for the
individual man to do. Others might—there were many poor, thin-minded,
half-baked creatures who would put themselves up to be shot; but they
were only fit to be commanded or shot down. As for him, his life was
sacred to himself and his family and his personal interests. He
recalled seeing, one day, in one of the quiet side streets, as the
working-men were coming home from their work, a small enlisting squad
of soldiers in blue marching enthusiastically along, the Union flag
flying, the drummers drumming, the fifes blowing, the idea being, of
course, to so impress the hitherto indifferent or wavering citizen, to
exalt him to such a pitch, that he would lose his sense of proportion,
of self-interest, and, forgetting all—wife, parents, home, and
children—and seeing only the great need of the country, fall in behind
and enlist. He saw one workingman swinging his pail, and evidently not
contemplating any such denouement to his day’s work, pause, listen as
the squad approached, hesitate as it drew close, and as it passed, with
a peculiar look of uncertainty or wonder in his eyes, fall in behind
and march solemnly away to the enlisting quarters. What was it that had
caught this man, Frank asked himself. How was he overcome so easily? He
had not intended to go. His face was streaked with the grease and dirt
of his work—he looked like a foundry man or machinist, say twenty-five
years of age. Frank watched the little squad disappear at the end of
the street round the corner under the trees.

This current war-spirit was strange. The people seemed to him to want
to hear nothing but the sound of the drum and fife, to see nothing but
troops, of which there were thousands now passing through on their way
to the front, carrying cold steel in the shape of guns at their
shoulders, to hear of war and the rumors of war. It was a thrilling
sentiment, no doubt, great but unprofitable. It meant self-sacrifice,
and he could not see that. If he went he might be shot, and what would
his noble emotion amount to then? He would rather make money, regulate
current political, social and financial affairs. The poor fool who fell
in behind the enlisting squad—no, not fool, he would not call him
that—the poor overwrought working-man—well, Heaven pity him! Heaven
pity all of them! They really did not know what they were doing.

One day he saw Lincoln—a tall, shambling man, long, bony, gawky, but
tremendously impressive. It was a raw, slushy morning of a late
February day, and the great war President was just through with his
solemn pronunciamento in regard to the bonds that might have been
strained but must not be broken. As he issued from the doorway of
Independence Hall, that famous birthplace of liberty, his face was set
in a sad, meditative calm. Cowperwood looked at him fixedly as he
issued from the doorway surrounded by chiefs of staff, local
dignitaries, detectives, and the curious, sympathetic faces of the
public. As he studied the strangely rough-hewn countenance a sense of
the great worth and dignity of the man came over him.

“A real man, that,” he thought; “a wonderful temperament.” His every
gesture came upon him with great force. He watched him enter his
carriage, thinking “So that is the railsplitter, the country lawyer.
Well, fate has picked a great man for this crisis.”

For days the face of Lincoln haunted him, and very often during the war
his mind reverted to that singular figure. It seemed to him
unquestionable that fortuitously he had been permitted to look upon one
of the world’s really great men. War and statesmanship were not for
him; but he knew how important those things were—at times.




Chapter XI


It was while the war was on, and after it was perfectly plain that it
was not to be of a few days’ duration, that Cowperwood’s first great
financial opportunity came to him. There was a strong demand for money
at the time on the part of the nation, the State, and the city. In
July, 1861, Congress had authorized a loan of fifty million dollars, to
be secured by twenty-year bonds with interest not to exceed seven per
cent., and the State authorized a loan of three millions on much the
same security, the first being handled by financiers of Boston, New
York, and Philadelphia, the second by Philadelphia financiers alone.
Cowperwood had no hand in this. He was not big enough. He read in the
papers of gatherings of men whom he knew personally or by reputation,
“to consider the best way to aid the nation or the State”; but he was
not included. And yet his soul yearned to be of them. He noticed how
often a rich man’s word sufficed—no money, no certificates, no
collateral, no anything—just his word. If Drexel & Co., or Jay Cooke &
Co., or Gould & Fiske were rumored to be behind anything, how secure it
was! Jay Cooke, a young man in Philadelphia, had made a great strike
taking this State loan in company with Drexel & Co., and selling it at
par. The general opinion was that it ought to be and could only be sold
at ninety. Cooke did not believe this. He believed that State pride and
State patriotism would warrant offering the loan to small banks and
private citizens, and that they would subscribe it fully and more.
Events justified Cooke magnificently, and his public reputation was
assured. Cowperwood wished he could make some such strike; but he was
too practical to worry over anything save the facts and conditions that
were before him.

His chance came about six months later, when it was found that the
State would have to have much more money. Its quota of troops would
have to be equipped and paid. There were measures of defense to be
taken, the treasury to be replenished. A call for a loan of
twenty-three million dollars was finally authorized by the legislature
and issued. There was great talk in the street as to who was to handle
it—Drexel & Co. and Jay Cooke & Co., of course.

Cowperwood pondered over this. If he could handle a fraction of this
great loan now—he could not possibly handle the whole of it, for he had
not the necessary connections—he could add considerably to his
reputation as a broker while making a tidy sum. How much could he
handle? That was the question. Who would take portions of it? His
father’s bank? Probably. Waterman & Co.? A little. Judge Kitchen? A
small fraction. The Mills-David Company? Yes. He thought of different
individuals and concerns who, for one reason and another—personal
friendship, good-nature, gratitude for past favors, and so on—would
take a percentage of the seven-percent. bonds through him. He totaled
up his possibilities, and discovered that in all likelihood, with a
little preliminary missionary work, he could dispose of one million
dollars if personal influence, through local political figures, could
bring this much of the loan his way.

One man in particular had grown strong in his estimation as having some
subtle political connection not visible on the surface, and this was
Edward Malia Butler. Butler was a contractor, undertaking the
construction of sewers, water-mains, foundations for buildings,
street-paving, and the like. In the early days, long before Cowperwood
had known him, he had been a garbage-contractor on his own account. The
city at that time had no extended street-cleaning service, particularly
in its outlying sections and some of the older, poorer regions. Edward
Butler, then a poor young Irishman, had begun by collecting and hauling
away the garbage free of charge, and feeding it to his pigs and cattle.
Later he discovered that some people were willing to pay a small charge
for this service. Then a local political character, a councilman friend
of his—they were both Catholics—saw a new point in the whole thing.
Butler could be made official garbage-collector. The council could vote
an annual appropriation for this service. Butler could employ more
wagons than he did now—dozens of them, scores. Not only that, but no
other garbage-collector would be allowed. There were others, but the
official contract awarded him would also, officially, be the end of the
life of any and every disturbing rival. A certain amount of the
profitable proceeds would have to be set aside to assuage the feelings
of those who were not contractors. Funds would have to be loaned at
election time to certain individuals and organizations—but no matter.
The amount would be small. So Butler and Patrick Gavin Comiskey, the
councilman (the latter silently) entered into business relations.
Butler gave up driving a wagon himself. He hired a young man, a smart
Irish boy of his neighborhood, Jimmy Sheehan, to be his assistant,
superintendent, stableman, bookkeeper, and what not. Since he soon
began to make between four and five thousand a year, where before he
made two thousand, he moved into a brick house in an outlying section
of the south side, and sent his children to school. Mrs. Butler gave up
making soap and feeding pigs. And since then times had been exceedingly
good with Edward Butler.

He could neither read nor write at first; but now he knew how, of
course. He had learned from association with Mr. Comiskey that there
were other forms of contracting—sewers, water-mains, gas-mains,
street-paving, and the like. Who better than Edward Butler to do it? He
knew the councilmen, many of them. Het met them in the back rooms of
saloons, on Sundays and Saturdays at political picnics, at election
councils and conferences, for as a beneficiary of the city’s largess he
was expected to contribute not only money, but advice. Curiously he had
developed a strange political wisdom. He knew a successful man or a
coming man when he saw one. So many of his bookkeepers,
superintendents, time-keepers had graduated into councilmen and state
legislators. His nominees—suggested to political conferences—were so
often known to make good. First he came to have influence in his
councilman’s ward, then in his legislative district, then in the city
councils of his party—Whig, of course—and then he was supposed to have
an organization.

Mysterious forces worked for him in council. He was awarded significant
contracts, and he always bid. The garbage business was now a thing of
the past. His eldest boy, Owen, was a member of the State legislature
and a partner in his business affairs. His second son, Callum, was a
clerk in the city water department and an assistant to his father also.
Aileen, his eldest daughter, fifteen years of age, was still in St.
Agatha’s, a convent school in Germantown. Norah, his second daughter
and youngest child, thirteen years old, was in attendance at a local
private school conducted by a Catholic sisterhood. The Butler family
had moved away from South Philadelphia into Girard Avenue, near the
twelve hundreds, where a new and rather interesting social life was
beginning. They were not of it, but Edward Butler, contractor, now
fifty-five years of age, worth, say, five hundred thousand dollars, had
many political and financial friends. No longer a “rough neck,” but a
solid, reddish-faced man, slightly tanned, with broad shoulders and a
solid chest, gray eyes, gray hair, a typically Irish face made wise and
calm and undecipherable by much experience. His big hands and feet
indicated a day when he had not worn the best English cloth suits and
tanned leather, but his presence was not in any way offensive—rather
the other way about. Though still possessed of a brogue, he was
soft-spoken, winning, and persuasive.

He had been one of the first to become interested in the development of
the street-car system and had come to the conclusion, as had Cowperwood
and many others, that it was going to be a great thing. The money
returns on the stocks or shares he had been induced to buy had been
ample evidence of that, He had dealt through one broker and another,
having failed to get in on the original corporate organizations. He
wanted to pick up such stock as he could in one organization and
another, for he believed they all had a future, and most of all he
wanted to get control of a line or two. In connection with this idea he
was looking for some reliable young man, honest and capable, who would
work under his direction and do what he said. Then he learned of
Cowperwood, and one day sent for him and asked him to call at his
house.

Cowperwood responded quickly, for he knew of Butler, his rise, his
connections, his force. He called at the house as directed, one cold,
crisp February morning. He remembered the appearance of the street
afterward—broad, brick-paved sidewalks, macadamized roadway, powdered
over with a light snow and set with young, leafless, scrubby trees and
lamp-posts. Butler’s house was not new—he had bought and repaired
it—but it was not an unsatisfactory specimen of the architecture of the
time. It was fifty feet wide, four stories tall, of graystone and with
four wide, white stone steps leading up to the door. The window arches,
framed in white, had U-shaped keystones. There were curtains of lace
and a glimpse of red plush through the windows, which gleamed warm
against the cold and snow outside. A trim Irish maid came to the door
and he gave her his card and was invited into the house.

“Is Mr. Butler home?”

“I’m not sure, sir. I’ll find out. He may have gone out.”

In a little while he was asked to come upstairs, where he found Butler
in a somewhat commercial-looking room. It had a desk, an office chair,
some leather furnishings, and a bookcase, but no completeness or
symmetry as either an office or a living room. There were several
pictures on the wall—an impossible oil painting, for one thing, dark
and gloomy; a canal and barge scene in pink and nile green for another;
some daguerreotypes of relatives and friends which were not half bad.
Cowperwood noticed one of two girls, one with reddish-gold hair,
another with what appeared to be silky brown. The beautiful silver
effect of the daguerreotype had been tinted. They were pretty girls,
healthy, smiling, Celtic, their heads close together, their eyes
looking straight out at you. He admired them casually, and fancied they
must be Butler’s daughters.

“Mr. Cowperwood?” inquired Butler, uttering the name fully with a
peculiar accent on the vowels. (He was a slow-moving man, solemn and
deliberate.) Cowperwood noticed that his body was hale and strong like
seasoned hickory, tanned by wind and rain. The flesh of his cheeks was
pulled taut and there was nothing soft or flabby about him.

“I’m that man.”

“I have a little matter of stocks to talk over with you” (“matter”
almost sounded like “mather”), “and I thought you’d better come here
rather than that I should come down to your office. We can be more
private-like, and, besides, I’m not as young as I used to be.”

He allowed a semi-twinkle to rest in his eye as he looked his visitor
over.

Cowperwood smiled.

“Well, I hope I can be of service to you,” he said, genially.

“I happen to be interested just at present in pickin’ up certain
street-railway stocks on ’change. I’ll tell you about them later. Won’t
you have somethin’ to drink? It’s a cold morning.”

“No, thanks; I never drink.”

“Never? That’s a hard word when it comes to whisky. Well, no matter.
It’s a good rule. My boys don’t touch anything, and I’m glad of it. As
I say, I’m interested in pickin’ up a few stocks on ’change; but, to
tell you the truth, I’m more interested in findin’ some clever young
felly like yourself through whom I can work. One thing leads to
another, you know, in this world.” And he looked at his visitor
non-committally, and yet with a genial show of interest.

“Quite so,” replied Cowperwood, with a friendly gleam in return.

“Well,” Butler meditated, half to himself, half to Cowperwood, “there
are a number of things that a bright young man could do for me in the
street if he were so minded. I have two bright boys of my own, but I
don’t want them to become stock-gamblers, and I don’t know that they
would or could if I wanted them to. But this isn’t a matter of
stock-gambling. I’m pretty busy as it is, and, as I said awhile ago,
I’m getting along. I’m not as light on my toes as I once was. But if I
had the right sort of a young man—I’ve been looking into your record,
by the way, never fear—he might handle a number of little
things—investments and loans—which might bring us each a little
somethin’. Sometimes the young men around town ask advice of me in one
way and another—they have a little somethin’ to invest, and so—”

He paused and looked tantalizingly out of the window, knowing full well
Cowperwood was greatly interested, and that this talk of political
influence and connections could only whet his appetite. Butler wanted
him to see clearly that fidelity was the point in this case—fidelity,
tact, subtlety, and concealment.

“Well, if you have been looking into my record,” observed Cowperwood,
with his own elusive smile, leaving the thought suspended.

Butler felt the force of the temperament and the argument. He liked the
young man’s poise and balance. A number of people had spoken of
Cowperwood to him. (It was now Cowperwood & Co. The company was fiction
purely.) He asked him something about the street; how the market was
running; what he knew about street-railways. Finally he outlined his
plan of buying all he could of the stock of two given lines—the Ninth
and Tenth and the Fifteenth and Sixteenth—without attracting any
attention, if possible. It was to be done slowly, part on ’change, part
from individual holders. He did not tell him that there was a certain
amount of legislative pressure he hoped to bring to bear to get him
franchises for extensions in the regions beyond where the lines now
ended, in order that when the time came for them to extend their
facilities they would have to see him or his sons, who might be large
minority stockholders in these very concerns. It was a far-sighted
plan, and meant that the lines would eventually drop into his or his
sons’ basket.

“I’ll be delighted to work with you, Mr. Butler, in any way that you
may suggest,” observed Cowperwood. “I can’t say that I have so much of
a business as yet—merely prospects. But my connections are good. I am
now a member of the New York and Philadelphia exchanges. Those who have
dealt with me seem to like the results I get.”

“I know a little something about your work already,” reiterated Butler,
wisely.

“Very well, then; whenever you have a commission you can call at my
office, or write, or I will call here. I will give you my secret
operating code, so that anything you say will be strictly
confidential.”

“Well, we’ll not say anything more now. In a few days I’ll have
somethin’ for you. When I do, you can draw on my bank for what you
need, up to a certain amount.” He got up and looked out into the
street, and Cowperwood also arose.

“It’s a fine day now, isn’t it?”

“It surely is.”

“Well, we’ll get to know each other better, I’m sure.”

He held out his hand.

“I hope so.”

Cowperwood went out, Butler accompanying him to the door. As he did so
a young girl bounded in from the street, red-cheeked, blue-eyed,
wearing a scarlet cape with the peaked hood thrown over her red-gold
hair.

“Oh, daddy, I almost knocked you down.”

She gave her father, and incidentally Cowperwood, a gleaming, radiant,
inclusive smile. Her teeth were bright and small, and her lips bud-red.

“You’re home early. I thought you were going to stay all day?”

“I was, but I changed my mind.”

She passed on in, swinging her arms.

“Yes, well—” Butler continued, when she had gone. “Then well leave it
for a day or two. Good day.”

“Good day.”

Cowperwood, warm with this enhancing of his financial prospects, went
down the steps; but incidentally he spared a passing thought for the
gay spirit of youth that had manifested itself in this red-cheeked
maiden. What a bright, healthy, bounding girl! Her voice had the
subtle, vigorous ring of fifteen or sixteen. She was all vitality. What
a fine catch for some young fellow some day, and her father would make
him rich, no doubt, or help to.




Chapter XII


It was to Edward Malia Butler that Cowperwood turned now, some nineteen
months later when he was thinking of the influence that might bring him
an award of a portion of the State issue of bonds. Butler could
probably be interested to take some of them himself, or could help him
place some. He had come to like Cowperwood very much and was now being
carried on the latter’s books as a prospective purchaser of large
blocks of stocks. And Cowperwood liked this great solid Irishman. He
liked his history. He had met Mrs. Butler, a rather fat and phlegmatic
Irish woman with a world of hard sense who cared nothing at all for
show and who still liked to go into the kitchen and superintend the
cooking. He had met Owen and Callum Butler, the boys, and Aileen and
Norah, the girls. Aileen was the one who had bounded up the steps the
first day he had called at the Butler house several seasons before.

There was a cozy grate-fire burning in Butler’s improvised private
office when Cowperwood called. Spring was coming on, but the evenings
were cool. The older man invited Cowperwood to make himself comfortable
in one of the large leather chairs before the fire and then proceeded
to listen to his recital of what he hoped to accomplish.

“Well, now, that isn’t so easy,” he commented at the end. “You ought to
know more about that than I do. I’m not a financier, as you well know.”
And he grinned apologetically.

“It’s a matter of influence,” went on Cowperwood. “And favoritism. That
I know. Drexel & Company and Cooke & Company have connections at
Harrisburg. They have men of their own looking after their interests.
The attorney-general and the State treasurer are hand in glove with
them. Even if I put in a bid, and can demonstrate that I can handle the
loan, it won’t help me to get it. Other people have done that. I have
to have friends—influence. You know how it is.”

“Them things,” Butler said, “is easy enough if you know the right
parties to approach. Now there’s Jimmy Oliver—he ought to know
something about that.” Jimmy Oliver was the whilom district attorney
serving at this time, and incidentally free adviser to Mr. Butler in
many ways. He was also, accidentally, a warm personal friend of the
State treasurer.

“How much of the loan do you want?”

“Five million.”

“Five million!” Butler sat up. “Man, what are you talking about? That’s
a good deal of money. Where are you going to sell all that?”

“I want to bid for five million,” assuaged Cowperwood, softly. “I only
want one million but I want the prestige of putting in a bona fide bid
for five million. It will do me good on the street.”

Butler sank back somewhat relieved.

“Five million! Prestige! You want one million. Well, now, that’s
different. That’s not such a bad idea. We ought to be able to get
that.”

He rubbed his chin some more and stared into the fire.

And Cowperwood felt confident when he left the house that evening that
Butler would not fail him but would set the wheels working. Therefore,
he was not surprised, and knew exactly what it meant, when a few days
later he was introduced to City Treasurer Julian Bode, who promised to
introduce him to State Treasurer Van Nostrand and to see that his
claims to consideration were put before the people. “Of course, you
know,” he said to Cowperwood, in the presence of Butler, for it was at
the latter’s home that the conference took place, “this banking crowd
is very powerful. You know who they are. They don’t want any
interference in this bond issue business. I was talking to Terrence
Relihan, who represents them up there”—meaning Harrisburg, the State
capital—“and he says they won’t stand for it at all. You may have
trouble right here in Philadelphia after you get it—they’re pretty
powerful, you know. Are you sure just where you can place it?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” replied Cowperwood.

“Well, the best thing in my judgment is not to say anything at all.
Just put in your bid. Van Nostrand, with the governor’s approval, will
make the award. We can fix the governor, I think. After you get it they
may talk to you personally, but that’s your business.”

Cowperwood smiled his inscrutable smile. There were so many ins and
outs to this financial life. It was an endless network of underground
holes, along which all sorts of influences were moving. A little wit, a
little nimbleness, a little luck-time and opportunity—these sometimes
availed. Here he was, through his ambition to get on, and nothing else,
coming into contact with the State treasurer and the governor. They
were going to consider his case personally, because he demanded that it
be considered—nothing more. Others more influential than himself had
quite as much right to a share, but they didn’t take it. Nerve, ideas,
aggressiveness, how these counted when one had luck!

He went away thinking how surprised Drexel & Co. and Cooke & Co. would
be to see him appearing in the field as a competitor. In his home, in a
little room on the second floor next his bedroom, which he had fixed up
as an office with a desk, a safe, and a leather chair, he consulted his
resources. There were so many things to think of. He went over again
the list of people whom he had seen and whom he could count on to
subscribe, and in so far as that was concerned—the award of one million
dollars—he was safe. He figured to make two per cent. on the total
transaction, or twenty thousand dollars. If he did he was going to buy
a house out on Girard Avenue beyond the Butlers’, or, better yet, buy a
piece of ground and erect one; mortgaging house and property so to do.
His father was prospering nicely. He might want to build a house next
to him, and they could live side by side. His own business, aside from
this deal, would yield him ten thousand dollars this year. His
street-car investments, aggregating fifty thousand, were paying six per
cent. His wife’s property, represented by this house, some government
bonds, and some real estate in West Philadelphia amounted to forty
thousand more. Between them they were rich; but he expected to be much
richer. All he needed now was to keep cool. If he succeeded in this
bond-issue matter, he could do it again and on a larger scale. There
would be more issues. He turned out the light after a while and went
into his wife’s boudoir, where she was sleeping. The nurse and the
children were in a room beyond.

“Well, Lillian,” he observed, when she awoke and turned over toward
him, “I think I have that bond matter that I was telling you about
arranged at last. I think I’ll get a million of it, anyhow. That’ll
mean twenty thousand. If I do we’ll build out on Girard Avenue. That’s
going to be the street. The college is making that neighborhood.”

“That’ll be fine, won’t it, Frank!” she observed, and rubbed his arm as
he sat on the side of the bed.

Her remark was vaguely speculative.

“We’ll have to show the Butlers some attention from now on. He’s been
very nice to me and he’s going to be useful—I can see that. He asked me
to bring you over some time. We must go. Be nice to his wife. He can do
a lot for me if he wants to. He has two daughters, too. We’ll have to
have them over here.”

“I’ll have them to dinner sometime,” she agreed cheerfully and
helpfully, “and I’ll stop and take Mrs. Butler driving if she’ll go, or
she can take me.”

She had already learned that the Butlers were rather showy—the younger
generation—that they were sensitive as to their lineage, and that money
in their estimation was supposed to make up for any deficiency in any
other respect. “Butler himself is a very presentable man,” Cowperwood
had once remarked to her, “but Mrs. Butler—well, she’s all right, but
she’s a little commonplace. She’s a fine woman, though, I think,
good-natured and good-hearted.” He cautioned her not to overlook Aileen
and Norah, because the Butlers, mother and father, were very proud of
them.

Mrs. Cowperwood at this time was thirty-two years old; Cowperwood
twenty-seven. The birth and care of two children had made some
difference in her looks. She was no longer as softly pleasing, more
angular. Her face was hollow-cheeked, like so many of Rossetti’s and
Burne-Jones’s women. Her health was really not as good as it had
been—the care of two children and a late undiagnosed tendency toward
gastritis having reduced her. In short she was a little run down
nervously and suffered from fits of depression. Cowperwood had noticed
this. He tried to be gentle and considerate, but he was too much of a
utilitarian and practical-minded observer not to realize that he was
likely to have a sickly wife on his hands later. Sympathy and affection
were great things, but desire and charm must endure or one was
compelled to be sadly conscious of their loss. So often now he saw
young girls who were quite in his mood, and who were exceedingly robust
and joyous. It was fine, advisable, practical, to adhere to the virtues
as laid down in the current social lexicon, but if you had a sickly
wife—And anyhow, was a man entitled to only one wife? Must he never
look at another woman? Supposing he found some one? He pondered those
things between hours of labor, and concluded that it did not make so
much difference. If a man could, and not be exposed, it was all right.
He had to be careful, though. Tonight, as he sat on the side of his
wife’s bed, he was thinking somewhat of this, for he had seen Aileen
Butler again, playing and singing at her piano as he passed the parlor
door. She was like a bright bird radiating health and enthusiasm—a
reminder of youth in general.

“It’s a strange world,” he thought; but his thoughts were his own, and
he didn’t propose to tell any one about them.

The bond issue, when it came, was a curious compromise; for, although
it netted him his twenty thousand dollars and more and served to
introduce him to the financial notice of Philadelphia and the State of
Pennsylvania, it did not permit him to manipulate the subscriptions as
he had planned. The State treasurer was seen by him at the office of a
local lawyer of great repute, where he worked when in the city. He was
gracious to Cowperwood, because he had to be. He explained to him just
how things were regulated at Harrisburg. The big financiers were looked
to for campaign funds. They were represented by henchmen in the State
assembly and senate. The governor and the treasurer were foot-free; but
there were other influences—prestige, friendship, social power,
political ambitions, etc. The big men might constitute a close
corporation, which in itself was unfair; but, after all, they were the
legitimate sponsors for big money loans of this kind. The State had to
keep on good terms with them, especially in times like these. Seeing
that Mr. Cowperwood was so well able to dispose of the million he
expected to get, it would be perfectly all right to award it to him;
but Van Nostrand had a counter-proposition to make. Would Cowperwood,
if the financial crowd now handling the matter so desired, turn over
his award to them for a consideration—a sum equal to what he expected
to make—in the event the award was made to him? Certain financiers
desired this. It was dangerous to oppose them. They were perfectly
willing he should put in a bid for five million and get the prestige of
that; to have him awarded one million and get the prestige of that was
well enough also, but they desired to handle the twenty-three million
dollars in an unbroken lot. It looked better. He need not be advertised
as having withdrawn. They would be content to have him achieve the
glory of having done what he started out to do. Just the same the
example was bad. Others might wish to imitate him. If it were known in
the street privately that he had been coerced, for a consideration,
into giving up, others would be deterred from imitating him in the
future. Besides, if he refused, they could cause him trouble. His loans
might be called. Various banks might not be so friendly in the future.
His constituents might be warned against him in one way or another.

Cowperwood saw the point. He acquiesced. It was something to have
brought so many high and mighties to their knees. So they knew of him!
They were quite well aware of him! Well and good. He would take the
award and twenty thousand or thereabouts and withdraw. The State
treasurer was delighted. It solved a ticklish proposition for him.

“I’m glad to have seen you,” he said. “I’m glad we’ve met. I’ll drop in
and talk with you some time when I’m down this way. We’ll have lunch
together.”

The State treasurer, for some odd reason, felt that Mr. Cowperwood was
a man who could make him some money. His eye was so keen; his
expression was so alert, and yet so subtle. He told the governor and
some other of his associates about him.

So the award was finally made; Cowperwood, after some private
negotiations in which he met the officers of Drexel & Co., was paid his
twenty thousand dollars and turned his share of the award over to them.
New faces showed up in his office now from time to time—among them that
of Van Nostrand and one Terrence Relihan, a representative of some
other political forces at Harrisburg. He was introduced to the governor
one day at lunch. His name was mentioned in the papers, and his
prestige grew rapidly.

Immediately he began working on plans with young Ellsworth for his new
house. He was going to build something exceptional this time, he told
Lillian. They were going to have to do some entertaining—entertaining
on a larger scale than ever. North Front Street was becoming too tame.
He put the house up for sale, consulted with his father and found that
he also was willing to move. The son’s prosperity had redounded to the
credit of the father. The directors of the bank were becoming much more
friendly to the old man. Next year President Kugel was going to retire.
Because of his son’s noted coup, as well as his long service, he was
going to be made president. Frank was a large borrower from his
father’s bank. By the same token he was a large depositor. His
connection with Edward Butler was significant. He sent his father’s
bank certain accounts which it otherwise could not have secured. The
city treasurer became interested in it, and the State treasurer.
Cowperwood, Sr., stood to earn twenty thousand a year as president, and
he owed much of it to his son. The two families were now on the best of
terms. Anna, now twenty-one, and Edward and Joseph frequently spent the
night at Frank’s house. Lillian called almost daily at his mother’s.
There was much interchange of family gossip, and it was thought well to
build side by side. So Cowperwood, Sr., bought fifty feet of ground
next to his son’s thirty-five, and together they commenced the erection
of two charming, commodious homes, which were to be connected by a
covered passageway, or pergola, which could be inclosed with glass in
winter.

The most popular local stone, a green granite was chosen; but Mr.
Ellsworth promised to present it in such a way that it would be
especially pleasing. Cowperwood, Sr., decided that he could afford to
spent seventy-five thousand dollars—he was now worth two hundred and
fifty thousand; and Frank decided that he could risk fifty, seeing that
he could raise money on a mortgage. He planned at the same time to
remove his office farther south on Third Street and occupy a building
of his own. He knew where an option was to be had on a twenty-five-foot
building, which, though old, could be given a new brownstone front and
made very significant. He saw in his mind’s eye a handsome building,
fitted with an immense plate-glass window; inside his hardwood fixtures
visible; and over the door, or to one side of it, set in bronze
letters, Cowperwood & Co. Vaguely but surely he began to see looming
before him, like a fleecy tinted cloud on the horizon, his future
fortune. He was to be rich, very, very rich.




Chapter XIII


During all the time that Cowperwood had been building himself up thus
steadily the great war of the rebellion had been fought almost to its
close. It was now October, 1864. The capture of Mobile and the Battle
of the Wilderness were fresh memories. Grant was now before Petersburg,
and the great general of the South, Lee, was making that last brilliant
and hopeless display of his ability as a strategist and a soldier.
There had been times—as, for instance, during the long, dreary period
in which the country was waiting for Vicksburg to fall, for the Army of
the Potomac to prove victorious, when Pennsylvania was invaded by
Lee—when stocks fell and commercial conditions were very bad generally.
In times like these Cowperwood’s own manipulative ability was taxed to
the utmost, and he had to watch every hour to see that his fortune was
not destroyed by some unexpected and destructive piece of news.

His personal attitude toward the war, however, and aside from his
patriotic feeling that the Union ought to be maintained, was that it
was destructive and wasteful. He was by no means so wanting in
patriotic emotion and sentiment but that he could feel that the Union,
as it had now come to be, spreading its great length from the Atlantic
to the Pacific and from the snows of Canada to the Gulf, was worth
while. Since his birth in 1837 he had seen the nation reach that
physical growth—barring Alaska—which it now possesses. Not so much
earlier than his youth Florida had been added to the Union by purchase
from Spain; Mexico, after the unjust war of 1848, had ceded Texas and
the territory to the West. The boundary disputes between England and
the United States in the far Northwest had been finally adjusted. To a
man with great social and financial imagination, these facts could not
help but be significant; and if they did nothing more, they gave him a
sense of the boundless commercial possibilities which existed
potentially in so vast a realm. His was not the order of speculative
financial enthusiasm which, in the type known as the “promoter,” sees
endless possibilities for gain in every unexplored rivulet and prairie
reach; but the very vastness of the country suggested possibilities
which he hoped might remain undisturbed. A territory covering the
length of a whole zone and between two seas, seemed to him to possess
potentialities which it could not retain if the States of the South
were lost.

At the same time, the freedom of the negro was not a significant point
with him. He had observed that race from his boyhood with considerable
interest, and had been struck with virtues and defects which seemed
inherent and which plainly, to him, conditioned their experiences.

He was not at all sure, for instance, that the negroes could be made
into anything much more significant than they were. At any rate, it was
a long uphill struggle for them, of which many future generations would
not witness the conclusion. He had no particular quarrel with the
theory that they should be free; he saw no particular reason why the
South should not protest vigorously against the destruction of their
property and their system. It was too bad that the negroes as slaves
should be abused in some instances. He felt sure that that ought to be
adjusted in some way; but beyond that he could not see that there was
any great ethical basis for the contentions of their sponsors. The vast
majority of men and women, as he could see, were not essentially above
slavery, even when they had all the guarantees of a constitution
formulated to prevent it. There was mental slavery, the slavery of the
weak mind and the weak body. He followed the contentions of such men as
Sumner, Garrison, Phillips, and Beecher, with considerable interest;
but at no time could he see that the problem was a vital one for him.
He did not care to be a soldier or an officer of soldiers; he had no
gift for polemics; his mind was not of the disputatious order—not even
in the realm of finance. He was concerned only to see what was of vast
advantage to him, and to devote all his attention to that. This
fratricidal war in the nation could not help him. It really delayed, he
thought, the true commercial and financial adjustment of the country,
and he hoped that it would soon end. He was not of those who complained
bitterly of the excessive war taxes, though he knew them to be trying
to many. Some of the stories of death and disaster moved him greatly;
but, alas, they were among the unaccountable fortunes of life, and
could not be remedied by him. So he had gone his way day by day,
watching the coming in and the departing of troops, seeing the bands of
dirty, disheveled, gaunt, sickly men returning from the fields and
hospitals; and all he could do was to feel sorry. This war was not for
him. He had taken no part in it, and he felt sure that he could only
rejoice in its conclusion—not as a patriot, but as a financier. It was
wasteful, pathetic, unfortunate.

The months proceeded apace. A local election intervened and there was a
new city treasurer, a new assessor of taxes, and a new mayor; but
Edward Malia Butler continued to have apparently the same influence as
before. The Butlers and the Cowperwoods had become quite friendly. Mrs.
Butler rather liked Lillian, though they were of different religious
beliefs; and they went driving or shopping together, the younger woman
a little critical and ashamed of the elder because of her poor grammar,
her Irish accent, her plebeian tastes—as though the Wiggins had not
been as plebeian as any. On the other hand the old lady, as she was
compelled to admit, was good-natured and good-hearted. She loved to
give, since she had plenty, and sent presents here and there to
Lillian, the children, and others. “Now youse must come over and take
dinner with us”—the Butlers had arrived at the evening-dinner period—or
“Youse must come drive with me to-morrow.”

“Aileen, God bless her, is such a foine girl,” or “Norah, the darlin’,
is sick the day.”

But Aileen, her airs, her aggressive disposition, her love of
attention, her vanity, irritated and at times disgusted Mrs.
Cowperwood. She was eighteen now, with a figure which was subtly
provocative. Her manner was boyish, hoydenish at times, and although
convent-trained, she was inclined to balk at restraint in any form. But
there was a softness lurking in her blue eyes that was most sympathetic
and human.

St. Timothy’s and the convent school in Germantown had been the choice
of her parents for her education—what they called a good Catholic
education. She had learned a great deal about the theory and forms of
the Catholic ritual, but she could not understand them. The church,
with its tall, dimly radiant windows, its high, white altar, its figure
of St. Joseph on one side and the Virgin Mary on the other, clothed in
golden-starred robes of blue, wearing haloes and carrying scepters, had
impressed her greatly. The church as a whole—any Catholic church—was
beautiful to look at—soothing. The altar, during high mass, lit with a
half-hundred or more candles, and dignified and made impressive by the
rich, lacy vestments of the priests and the acolytes, the impressive
needlework and gorgeous colorings of the amice, chasuble, cope, stole,
and maniple, took her fancy and held her eye. Let us say there was
always lurking in her a sense of grandeur coupled with a love of color
and a love of love. From the first she was somewhat sex-conscious. She
had no desire for accuracy, no desire for precise information. Innate
sensuousness rarely has. It basks in sunshine, bathes in color, dwells
in a sense of the impressive and the gorgeous, and rests there.
Accuracy is not necessary except in the case of aggressive, acquisitive
natures, when it manifests itself in a desire to seize. True
controlling sensuousness cannot be manifested in the most active
dispositions, nor again in the most accurate.

There is need of defining these statements in so far as they apply to
Aileen. It would scarcely be fair to describe her nature as being
definitely sensual at this time. It was too rudimentary. Any harvest is
of long growth. The confessional, dim on Friday and Saturday evenings,
when the church was lighted by but a few lamps, and the priest’s
warnings, penances, and ecclesiastical forgiveness whispered through
the narrow lattice, moved her as something subtly pleasing. She was not
afraid of her sins. Hell, so definitely set forth, did not frighten
her. Really, it had not laid hold on her conscience. The old women and
old men hobbling into church, bowed in prayer, murmuring over their
beads, were objects of curious interest like the wood-carvings in the
peculiar array of wood-reliefs emphasizing the Stations of the Cross.
She herself had liked to confess, particularly when she was fourteen
and fifteen, and to listen to the priest’s voice as he admonished her
with, “Now, my dear child.” A particularly old priest, a French father,
who came to hear their confessions at school, interested her as being
kind and sweet. His forgiveness and blessing seemed sincere—better than
her prayers, which she went through perfunctorily. And then there was a
young priest at St. Timothy’s, Father David, hale and rosy, with a curl
of black hair over his forehead, and an almost jaunty way of wearing
his priestly hat, who came down the aisle Sundays sprinkling holy water
with a definite, distinguished sweep of the hand, who took her fancy.
He heard confessions and now and then she liked to whisper her strange
thoughts to him while she actually speculated on what he might
privately be thinking. She could not, if she tried, associate him with
any divine authority. He was too young, too human. There was something
a little malicious, teasing, in the way she delighted to tell him about
herself, and then walk demurely, repentantly out. At St. Agatha’s she
had been rather a difficult person to deal with. She was, as the good
sisters of the school had readily perceived, too full of life, too
active, to be easily controlled. “That Miss Butler,” once observed
Sister Constantia, the Mother Superior, to Sister Sempronia, Aileen’s
immediate mentor, “is a very spirited girl, you may have a great deal
of trouble with her unless you use a good deal of tact. You may have to
coax her with little gifts. You will get on better.” So Sister
Sempronia had sought to find what Aileen was most interested in, and
bribe her therewith. Being intensely conscious of her father’s
competence, and vain of her personal superiority, it was not so easy to
do. She had wanted to go home occasionally, though; she had wanted to
be allowed to wear the sister’s rosary of large beads with its pendent
cross of ebony and its silver Christ, and this was held up as a great
privilege. For keeping quiet in class, walking softly, and speaking
softly—as much as it was in her to do—for not stealing into other
girl’s rooms after lights were out, and for abandoning crushes on this
and that sympathetic sister, these awards and others, such as walking
out in the grounds on Saturday afternoons, being allowed to have all
the flowers she wanted, some extra dresses, jewels, etc., were offered.
She liked music and the idea of painting, though she had no talent in
that direction; and books, novels, interested her, but she could not
get them. The rest—grammar, spelling, sewing, church and general
history—she loathed. Deportment—well, there was something in that. She
had liked the rather exaggerated curtsies they taught her, and she had
often reflected on how she would use them when she reached home.

When she came out into life the little social distinctions which have
been indicated began to impress themselves on her, and she wished
sincerely that her father would build a better home—a mansion—such as
those she saw elsewhere, and launch her properly in society. Failing in
that, she could think of nothing save clothes, jewels, riding-horses,
carriages, and the appropriate changes of costume which were allowed
her for these. Her family could not entertain in any distinguished way
where they were, and so already, at eighteen, she was beginning to feel
the sting of a blighted ambition. She was eager for life. How was she
to get it?

Her room was a study in the foibles of an eager and ambitious mind. It
was full of clothes, beautiful things for all occasions—jewelry—which
she had small opportunity to wear—shoes, stockings, lingerie, laces. In
a crude way she had made a study of perfumes and cosmetics, though she
needed the latter not at all, and these were present in abundance. She
was not very orderly, and she loved lavishness of display; and her
curtains, hangings, table ornaments, and pictures inclined to
gorgeousness, which did not go well with the rest of the house.

Aileen always reminded Cowperwood of a high-stepping horse without a
check-rein. He met her at various times, shopping with her mother, out
driving with her father, and he was always interested and amused at the
affected, bored tone she assumed before him—the “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!
Life is so tiresome, don’t you know,” when, as a matter of fact, every
moment of it was of thrilling interest to her. Cowperwood took her
mental measurement exactly. A girl with a high sense of life in her,
romantic, full of the thought of love and its possibilities. As he
looked at her he had the sense of seeing the best that nature can do
when she attempts to produce physical perfection. The thought came to
him that some lucky young dog would marry her pretty soon and carry her
away; but whoever secured her would have to hold her by affection and
subtle flattery and attention if he held her at all.

“The little snip”—she was not at all—“she thinks the sun rises and sets
in her father’s pocket,” Lillian observed one day to her husband. “To
hear her talk, you’d think they were descended from Irish kings. Her
pretended interest in art and music amuses me.”

“Oh, don’t be too hard on her,” coaxed Cowperwood diplomatically. He
already liked Aileen very much. “She plays very well, and she has a
good voice.”

“Yes, I know; but she has no real refinement. How could she have? Look
at her father and mother.”

“I don’t see anything so very much the matter with her,” insisted
Cowperwood. “She’s bright and good-looking. Of course, she’s only a
girl, and a little vain, but she’ll come out of that. She isn’t without
sense and force, at that.”

Aileen, as he knew, was most friendly to him. She liked him. She made a
point of playing the piano and singing for him in his home, and she
sang only when he was there. There was something about his steady, even
gait, his stocky body and handsome head, which attracted her. In spite
of her vanity and egotism, she felt a little overawed before him at
times—keyed up. She seemed to grow gayer and more brilliant in his
presence.

The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact
definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of
contradictions—none more so than the most capable.

In the case of Aileen Butler it would be quite impossible to give an
exact definition. Intelligence, of a raw, crude order she had
certainly—also a native force, tamed somewhat by the doctrines and
conventions of current society, still showed clear at times in an
elemental and not entirely unattractive way. At this time she was only
eighteen years of age—decidedly attractive from the point of view of a
man of Frank Cowperwood’s temperament. She supplied something he had
not previously known or consciously craved. Vitality and vivacity. No
other woman or girl whom he had ever known had possessed so much innate
force as she. Her red-gold hair—not so red as decidedly golden with a
suggestion of red in it—looped itself in heavy folds about her forehead
and sagged at the base of her neck. She had a beautiful nose, not
sensitive, but straight-cut with small nostril openings, and eyes that
were big and yet noticeably sensuous. They were, to him, a pleasing
shade of blue-gray-blue, and her toilet, due to her temperament, of
course, suggested almost undue luxury, the bangles, anklets, ear-rings,
and breast-plates of the odalisque, and yet, of course, they were not
there. She confessed to him years afterward that she would have loved
to have stained her nails and painted the palms of her hands with
madder-red. Healthy and vigorous, she was chronically interested in
men—what they would think of her—and how she compared with other women.

The fact that she could ride in a carriage, live in a fine home on
Girard Avenue, visit such homes as those of the Cowperwoods and others,
was of great weight; and yet, even at this age, she realized that life
was more than these things. Many did not have them and lived.

But these facts of wealth and advantage gripped her; and when she sat
at the piano and played or rode in her carriage or walked or stood
before her mirror, she was conscious of her figure, her charms, what
they meant to men, how women envied her. Sometimes she looked at poor,
hollow-chested or homely-faced girls and felt sorry for them; at other
times she flared into inexplicable opposition to some handsome girl or
woman who dared to brazen her socially or physically. There were such
girls of the better families who, in Chestnut Street, in the expensive
shops, or on the drive, on horseback or in carriages, tossed their
heads and indicated as well as human motions can that they were
better-bred and knew it. When this happened each stared defiantly at
the other. She wanted ever so much to get up in the world, and yet
namby-pamby men of better social station than herself did not attract
her at all. She wanted a man. Now and then there was one “something
like,” but not entirely, who appealed to her, but most of them were
politicians or legislators, acquaintances of her father, and socially
nothing at all—and so they wearied and disappointed her. Her father did
not know the truly elite. But Mr. Cowperwood—he seemed so refined, so
forceful, and so reserved. She often looked at Mrs. Cowperwood and
thought how fortunate she was.




Chapter XIV


The development of Cowperwood as Cowperwood & Co. following his
arresting bond venture, finally brought him into relationship with one
man who was to play an important part in his life, morally,
financially, and in other ways. This was George W. Stener, the new city
treasurer-elect, who, to begin with, was a puppet in the hands of other
men, but who, also in spite of this fact, became a personage of
considerable importance, for the simple reason that he was weak. Stener
had been engaged in the real estate and insurance business in a small
way before he was made city treasurer. He was one of those men, of whom
there are so many thousands in every large community, with no breadth
of vision, no real subtlety, no craft, no great skill in anything. You
would never hear a new idea emanating from Stener. He never had one in
his life. On the other hand, he was not a bad fellow. He had a stodgy,
dusty, commonplace look to him which was more a matter of mind than of
body. His eye was of vague gray-blue; his hair a dusty light-brown and
thin. His mouth—there was nothing impressive there. He was quite tall,
nearly six feet, with moderately broad shoulders, but his figure was
anything but shapely. He seemed to stoop a little, his stomach was the
least bit protuberant, and he talked commonplaces—the small change of
newspaper and street and business gossip. People liked him in his own
neighborhood. He was thought to be honest and kindly; and he was, as
far as he knew. His wife and four children were as average and
insignificant as the wives and children of such men usually are.

Just the same, and in spite of, or perhaps, politically speaking,
because of all this, George W. Stener was brought into temporary public
notice by certain political methods which had existed in Philadelphia
practically unmodified for the previous half hundred years. First,
because he was of the same political faith as the dominant local
political party, he had become known to the local councilman and
ward-leader of his ward as a faithful soul—one useful in the matter of
drumming up votes. And next—although absolutely without value as a
speaker, for he had no ideas—you could send him from door to door,
asking the grocer and the blacksmith and the butcher how he felt about
things and he would make friends, and in the long run predict fairly
accurately the probable vote. Furthermore, you could dole him out a few
platitudes and he would repeat them. The Republican party, which was
the new-born party then, but dominant in Philadelphia, needed your
vote; it was necessary to keep the rascally Democrats out—he could
scarcely have said why. They had been for slavery. They were for free
trade. It never once occurred to him that these things had nothing to
do with the local executive and financial administration of
Philadelphia. Supposing they didn’t? What of it?

In Philadelphia at this time a certain United States Senator, one Mark
Simpson, together with Edward Malia Butler and Henry A. Mollenhauer, a
rich coal dealer and investor, were supposed to, and did, control
jointly the political destiny of the city. They had representatives,
benchmen, spies, tools—a great company. Among them was this same
Stener—a minute cog in the silent machinery of their affairs.

In scarcely any other city save this, where the inhabitants were of a
deadly average in so far as being commonplace was concerned, could such
a man as Stener have been elected city treasurer. The rank and file did
not, except in rare instances, make up their political program. An
inside ring had this matter in charge. Certain positions were allotted
to such and such men or to such and such factions of the party for such
and such services rendered—but who does not know politics?

In due course of time, therefore, George W. Stener had become persona
grata to Edward Strobik, a quondam councilman who afterward became ward
leader and still later president of council, and who, in private life
was a stone-dealer and owner of a brickyard. Strobik was a benchman of
Henry A. Mollenhauer, the hardest and coldest of all three of the
political leaders. The latter had things to get from council, and
Strobik was his tool. He had Stener elected; and because he was
faithful in voting as he was told the latter was later made an
assistant superintendent of the highways department.

Here he came under the eyes of Edward Malia Butler, and was slightly
useful to him. Then the central political committee, with Butler in
charge, decided that some nice, docile man who would at the same time
be absolutely faithful was needed for city treasurer, and Stener was
put on the ticket. He knew little of finance, but was an excellent
bookkeeper; and, anyhow, was not corporation counsel Regan, another
political tool of this great triumvirate, there to advise him at all
times? He was. It was a very simple matter. Being put on the ticket was
equivalent to being elected, and so, after a few weeks of exceedingly
trying platform experiences, in which he had stammered through
platitudinous declarations that the city needed to be honestly
administered, he was inducted into office; and there you were.

Now it wouldn’t have made so much difference what George W. Stener’s
executive and financial qualifications for the position were, but at
this time the city of Philadelphia was still hobbling along under
perhaps as evil a financial system, or lack of it, as any city ever
endured—the assessor and the treasurer being allowed to collect and
hold moneys belonging to the city, outside of the city’s private
vaults, and that without any demand on the part of anybody that the
same be invested by them at interest for the city’s benefit. Rather,
all they were expected to do, apparently, was to restore the principal
and that which was with them when they entered or left office. It was
not understood or publicly demanded that the moneys so collected, or
drawn from any source, be maintained intact in the vaults of the city
treasury. They could be loaned out, deposited in banks or used to
further private interests of any one, so long as the principal was
returned, and no one was the wiser. Of course, this theory of finance
was not publicly sanctioned, but it was known politically and
journalistically, and in high finance. How were you to stop it?

Cowperwood, in approaching Edward Malia Butler, had been unconsciously
let in on this atmosphere of erratic and unsatisfactory speculation
without really knowing it. When he had left the office of Tighe & Co.,
seven years before, it was with the idea that henceforth and forever he
would have nothing to do with the stock-brokerage proposition; but now
behold him back in it again, with more vim than he had ever displayed,
for now he was working for himself, the firm of Cowperwood & Co., and
he was eager to satisfy the world of new and powerful individuals who
by degrees were drifting to him. All had a little money. All had tips,
and they wanted him to carry certain lines of stock on margin for them,
because he was known to other political men, and because he was safe.
And this was true. He was not, or at least up to this time had not
been, a speculator or a gambler on his own account. In fact he often
soothed himself with the thought that in all these years he had never
gambled for himself, but had always acted strictly for others instead.
But now here was George W. Stener with a proposition which was not
quite the same thing as stock-gambling, and yet it was.

During a long period of years preceding the Civil War, and through it,
let it here be explained and remembered, the city of Philadelphia had
been in the habit, as a corporation, when there were no available funds
in the treasury, of issuing what were known as city warrants, which
were nothing more than notes or I.O.U.’s bearing six per cent.
interest, and payable sometimes in thirty days, sometimes in three,
sometimes in six months—all depending on the amount and how soon the
city treasurer thought there would be sufficient money in the treasury
to take them up and cancel them. Small tradesmen and large contractors
were frequently paid in this way; the small tradesman who sold supplies
to the city institutions, for instance, being compelled to discount his
notes at the bank, if he needed ready money, usually for ninety cents
on the dollar, while the large contractor could afford to hold his and
wait. It can readily be seen that this might well work to the
disadvantage of the small dealer and merchant, and yet prove quite a
fine thing for a large contractor or note-broker, for the city was sure
to pay the warrants at some time, and six per cent. interest was a fat
rate, considering the absolute security. A banker or broker who
gathered up these things from small tradesmen at ninety cents on the
dollar made a fine thing of it all around if he could wait.

Originally, in all probability, there was no intention on the part of
the city treasurer to do any one an injustice, and it is likely that
there really were no funds to pay with at the time. However that may
have been, there was later no excuse for issuing the warrants, seeing
that the city might easily have been managed much more economically.
But these warrants, as can readily be imagined, had come to be a fine
source of profit for note-brokers, bankers, political financiers, and
inside political manipulators generally and so they remained a part of
the city’s fiscal policy.

There was just one drawback to all this. In order to get the full
advantage of this condition the large banker holding them must be an
“inside banker,” one close to the political forces of the city, for if
he was not and needed money and he carried his warrants to the city
treasurer, he would find that he could not get cash for them. But if he
transferred them to some banker or note-broker who was close to the
political force of the city, it was quite another matter. The treasury
would find means to pay. Or, if so desired by the note-broker or
banker—the right one—notes which were intended to be met in three
months, and should have been settled at that time, were extended to run
on years and years, drawing interest at six per cent. even when the
city had ample funds to meet them. Yet this meant, of course, an
illegal interest drain on the city, but that was all right also. “No
funds” could cover that. The general public did not know. It could not
find out. The newspapers were not at all vigilant, being pro-political.
There were no persistent, enthusiastic r

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