Making Money
by Owen Johnson · English · Gutenberg #33761 · 473,470 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Making Money
Author: Owen Johnson
Illustrator: James Montgomery Flagg
Release date: September 19, 2010 [eBook #33761]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33761
Credits: Produced by Annie McGuire
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAKING MONEY ***
Produced by Annie McGuire
[Illustration: Book Cover]
MAKING MONEY
[Illustration: "'Bojo, you must marry Doris,' she said brokenly"]
MAKING MONEY
BY
OWEN JOHNSON
AUTHOR OF "THE SALAMANDER," "STOVER AT YALE,"
"THE SIXTY-FIRST SECOND," ETC.
_WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS BY_
_JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1915, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE ARRIVAL 1
II FOUR AMBITIONS, AND THREE WAYS TO MAKE MONEY 16
III ON THE TAIL OF A TERRIER 31
IV BOJO'S FATHER 46
V DANIEL DRAKE, THE MULTI-MILLIONAIRE 58
VI BOJO OBEYS HIS GENERAL MANAGER 67
VII UNDER THE TICKER'S TYRANNY 75
VIII THE RETURN OF PATSIE 88
IX THE WEDDING BALL 100
X DRAKE'S GAME 111
XI BOJO BUTTS IN 122
XII SNOW MAGIC 133
XIII BOJO MAKES A DECISION 147
XIV THE CRASH 154
XV SUDDEN WEALTH 165
XVI BOJO BEGINS TO SPEND HIS QUARTER-MILLION 173
XVII PAYING THE PIPER--PLUS 184
XVIII BOJO FACES THE TRUTH 195
XIX A CHIP OF THE OLD BLOCK 207
XX BOJO HUNTS A JOB 213
XXI BOJO IN OVERALLS 222
XXII DORIS MEETS A CRISIS 234
XXIII THE LETTER TO PATSIE 247
XXIV PATSIE APPEALS FOR HELP 259
XXV DRAKE ADMITS HIS DANGER 270
XXVI A FIGHT IN MILLIONS 277
XXVII PATSIE'S SCHEME 288
XXVIII ONE LAST CHANCE 302
XXIX THE DELUGE 309
XXX THE AFTER-YEARS 323
ILLUSTRATIONS
"'Bojo, you must marry Doris,' she said brokenly" _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
"'Say, you're a judge of muscle, aren't you?'" 40
"'Just you wait; you're going to be one of the big men some
day!'" 104
"'Drina, dear child,' he said in a whisper" 144
"The message was the end of hope" 158
"'What does all the rest amount to?' she said breathlessly. 'I
want you'" 208
"'He wants to see you now,' she said" 268
"'Your promise. No one is to know what I do'" 292
CHAPTER I
THE ARRIVAL
Toward the close of a pleasant September afternoon, in one of the years
when the big stick of President Roosevelt was cudgeling the shoulders of
malefactors of great wealth, the feverish home-bound masses which poured
into upper Fifth Avenue with the awakening of the electric night were
greeted by the strangest of all spectacles which can astound a
metropolitan crowd harassed by the din of sounds, the fret and fury of
the daily struggle which is the tyranny of New York. A very young man,
of clean-cut limbs and boyish countenance, absolutely unhurried amidst
the press, without a trace of preoccupation, worry, or painful mental
concentration, was swinging easily up the Avenue as though he were
striding among green fields, head up, shoulders squared like a
grenadier, without a care in the world, so visibly delighted at the
novelty of gay crowds, of towering buildings decked in electric
garlands, of theatric shop-windows, that more than one perceiving this
open enthusiasm smiled with a tolerant amusement.
Now when a young man appears thus on Fifth Avenue, undriven, without
preoccupation, without a contraction of the brows and particularly
without that strained metropolitan gaze of trying to decide something
of importance, either he is on his way to the station with a coveted
vacation ahead or he has been in the city less than twenty-four hours.
In the present instance the latter hypothesis was true.
Tom Beauchamp Crocker, familiarly known as Bojo, had sent his baggage
ahead, eager to enjoy the delights one enjoys at twenty-four, which the
long apprenticeship of school and college is ended and the city is
waiting with all the mystery of that uncharted dominion--The World. He
went his way with long, swinging steps, smiling from the pure delight of
being alive, amazed at everything: at the tangled stream of nations
flowing past him; at the prodigious number of entrancing eyes which
glanced at him from under provoking brims; at the sheer flights of
blazing windows, shutting out the feeble stars; at the vigor and
vitality on the sidewalks; at the flooded lights from sparkling shop
windows; at the rolling procession of incalculable wealth on the Avenue.
Everywhere was the stir of returning crowds, the end of the summer's hot
isolation, the reopening of gilded theaters, the thronging of hotels,
and the displays of radiant shop fronts, preparing for the winter's
campaign. In the crush of the Avenue was the note of home-coming, in
taxicabs and coupes piled high with luggage and brown-faced children
hanging at the windows, acclaiming familiar landmarks with piping cries.
Tradesmen and all the world of little business, all the world that must
prepare to feed, clothe, and amuse the winter metropolis, were pouring
in.
And in the midst of this feverish awaking of luxury and pleasure one
felt at every turn a new generation of young men storming every avenue
with high imaginations, eager to pierce the multitudes and emerge as
masters. Bojo himself had not woven his way three blocks before he felt
this imperative need of a stimulating dream, a career to emulate--a
master of industry or a master of men--and, sublimely confident, he
imagined that some day, not too distant, he would take his place in the
luxurious flight of automobiles, a personage, a future Morgan or a
future Roosevelt, to be instantly recognized, to hear his name on a
thousand lips, never doubting that life was only a greater game than the
games he had played, ruled by the same spirit of fair play with the
ultimate prize to the best man.
In the crowd he perceived a familiar figure, a college mate of the class
above him, and he hailed him with enthusiasm as though the most amazing
and delightful thing in the world was to be out of college on Fifth
Avenue and to meet a friend.
"Foster! Hallo there!"
At this greeting the young man stopped, shot out his hand, and rattled
off in business manner: "Why, Bojo, how are you? How's it going? Making
lots of money?"
"I've just arrived," said Crocker, somewhat taken back.
"That so? You're looking fine. I'm in the devil of a rush--call me up at
the club some time. Good luck."
He was gone with purposeful steps, lost in the quick, nervous crowd
before Crocker with a thwarted sense of comradeship could recover
himself. A little later another acquaintance responded to his greeting,
hesitated, and offered his hand.
"Hello, Bojo, how are things? You look prosperous; making lots of money,
I suppose. Glad to have seen you--so long."
For a second time he felt a sense of disappointment. Every one seemed in
a hurry, oppressed by the hundred details to be crowded into the too
short day. He became aware of this haste in the air and in the street.
In this speed-driven world even the great stone flights seemed to have
risen with the hour. Dazzling electric signs flashed in and out,
transferring themselves into bewildering combinations with the necessity
of startling this wonder-surfeited city into an instant's recognition.
Electricity was in the vibrant air, in the scurrying throngs, in the
nervous craving of the crowd for excitement after drudgery, to be out,
to be seen in brilliant restaurants, to go with the rushing throngs,
keyed to a higher tension, avid of lights and thrumming sounds.
Insensibly he felt the stimulus about him, his own gait adjusted itself
to the rush of those who jostled past him. He began to watch for
openings, to dart ahead, to slip through this group and that, weaving
his way as though there was something precious ahead, an object to be
gained by the first arrival. All at once he perceived how unconsciously
he had surrendered to the subtle spirit of contention about him, and
pulled himself up, laughing. At this moment an arm was slipped through
his and he turned to find a classmate, Bob Crowley, at his side.
"Whither so fast?
"Just in. I'm bound for the diggings."
"Fred DeLancy's been asking about you for a week. I saw Marsh and old
Granny yesterday. The Big Four still keeping together?
"Yes, we're going to stick together. How are you?"
"Oh, so-so."
"Making money?"
The salutation came like a trick to his lips before he noticed the
adoption. Crowley looked rather pleased.
"Thanks, I've got a pretty good thing. If you've got any loose change I
can put you on to a cinch. Step into the club a moment. You'll see a lot
of the crowd."
At the club, an immense hotel filled with businesslike young men rushing
in and rushing out, thronging the grill-room with hats and coats on, an
eye to the clock, Bojo was acclaimed with that rapturous campus
enthusiasm which greets a returned hero. The tribute pleased him, after
the journey through the indifferent multitude. It was something to
return as even a moderate-sized frog to the small puddle. He wandered
from group to group, ensconced at round tables for a snatched moment
before the call of the evening. The vitality of these groups, the
conflict of sounds in the low room, bewildered him. Speculation was in
the air. The bonanza age of American finance was reaching its climax.
Immense corporations were being formed overnight and stocks were
mounting by bounds. All the talk in corners was of this tip and that
while in the jumble staccato sentences struck his ear.
"A sure thing, Joe-- I'll tell you where I got it."
"They say Harris cleaned up two thousand last week."
"The amalgamation's bound to go through."
"I'm in the bond business now; let me talk to you."
"Two more years in the law school, worse luck."
"At the P. and S."
"They say the Chicago crowd made fifteen millions on the rise--"
"I ran across Bozer last week."
"Hello, Bill, you old scout, they tell me you're making money so fast--"
All the talk was of business and opportunity, among these graduates of a
year or two, eager and restless, all keen, all confident of arriving,
all watching with vulture-like sharpness for an opportunity for a
killing: a stock that was bound to shoot up or to tumble down. Every one
seemed to be making money or certain to do so soon, cocksure of his
opinion, prognosticating the trend of industry with sure mastery. Bojo
was rather dazed by this academic fervor for material success; it gave
him the feeling that the world was after all only a postgraduate course.
He had left a group, with a beginning of critical amusement, when a hand
spun him around and he heard a well-known voice cry:
"Bojo--you old sinner--you come right home!"
It was Roscoe Marsh, chum of chums, rather slight, negligently dressed
among these young men of rather precise elegance, but dominating them
all by the shock of an aggressive personality that stood out against
their factoried types. Just as the generality of men incline to the
fashions of conduct, philosophy, and politics of the day, there are
certain individualities constituted by nature to be instinctively of the
opposition. Marsh, finding himself in a complacent society, became a
terrific radical, perhaps more from the necessity of dramatic sensations
which was inherent in his brilliant nature than from a profound
conviction. His features were irregular, the nose powerful and aquiline,
the eyebrows arched with a suggestion of eloquence and imagination, the
eyes gray and domineering, the mouth wide and expressive of every
changing thought, while the outstanding ears on the thin, curved head
completed an accent of oddity and obstinacy which he himself had
characterized good-humoredly when he had described himself as looking
like a poetical calf. Roscoe Marsh, the father--editor, politician, and
capitalist, one of the figures of the last generation--had died, leaving
him a fortune.
"What the deuce are you wasting time in this collection of
fashion-plates and messenger-boys for?" said Marsh when the greetings
were over. "Come out into the air where we can talk sense. When did you
come?"
"An hour ago."
"Fred and Granny have been here all summer. You're a pampered darling,
Bojo, to get a summer off. What was it--heart interest?"
"Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies," said Bojo with a half
laugh and a whirl of his cane. "By George, Roscy, it's good to be here!"
"We'll get you to work."
"Who could help it? I say, is every one making money in this place? I've
heard nothing else since I landed."
"On paper, yes, but you don't make money till you hear it chink, as lots
will find out," said Marsh with a laugh. "However, this place's a
regular mining-camp--every one's speculating. I say, what are you going
to do?"
"Oh, I'm going into Wall Street too, I suppose. I spent a month with Dan
Drake."
"--And daughter."
"And daughters," said Bojo, smiling. "I think I'll have a good opening
there--after I learn the ropes, of course."
"Drake, eh," said Marsh reflectively, naming one of the boldest
manipulators of the day. "Well, you ought to get plenty of excitement
out of that. No use my tempting you with a newspaper job, then. But how
about your Governor?"
Bojo became quiet, whistling to himself. "I've got a bad half-hour
there," he said solemnly. "I've got to fight it out with the old man as
soon as he arrives. You know what he thinks of Wall Street."
"I like your Governor."
"So do I. The trouble is we're too much alike."
"So you've made up your mind?"
"I have; no mills and drudgery for me."
"Well, if you've made up your mind, you've made it up," said Marsh a
little anxiously.
In college the saying was that Marsh would sputter but Crocker would
stick, and this byword expressed the difference between them. One
attacked and the other entrenched. Crocker had an intense admiration for
Marsh, for whom he believed all things possible. As they walked side by
side, Bojo was the more agreeable to the eye; there was an instinctive
sense of pleasing about him. He liked most men, so genuinely interested
in their problems and point of view that few could resist his good
nature. Mentally and in the knowledge of the world he was much the
younger. There was a boyishness and an unsophistication about him that
was in the clear forehead and laughing brown eyes, in the spontaneous
quality of his smile, the spring in his feet, the general enthusiasm for
all that was new or difficult. But underneath this easy manner there was
a dangerous obstinacy ready to flare up at an instant's provocation,
which showed in the lower jaw slightly undershot, which gave the lips a
look of being pugnaciously compressed. He was implacable in a hatred or
a fight, blind to the faults of a friend, and stubborn in his opinions.
"What sort of quarters have we got?" asked Bojo, who had left the detail
to his three friends.
"The queerest spot in New York--the cave of Ali Baba. Wait till you see
it--you'd never believe it. Hidden as safe as a needle in a haystack. No
more than a stone's throw from here, and you'd never guess it."
He stopped, for at this moment they entered Times Square under the
shadow of the incredible tower, dazzled by the sudden ambuscade of
lights which flamed about them. Marsh, who could never brook waiting,
without having altered his pace made a wide detour amid a jam of
automobiles, dodged two surface cars and a file of trucks, and arrived
at the opposite curb considerably after Crocker, who had waited for the
direct route. Neither perceived how characteristic of their divergent
temperaments this incident had been. But Marsh, whose spirit was
irreverence, exclaimed contemptuously:
"The Great White Way. What a sham!" He extended his arm with an
extravagant gesture, as much as to say, "I could change all that," and
continued: "Look at it. There are not ten buildings on it that will last
five years. Take away the electric advertisements and you'll see it as
it is--a main street in a mining town. All the rest is shanty
civilization, that will come tumbling down like a pack of cards. Look at
it; a few hidden theaters with an entrance squeezed between a
cigar-store and a haberdashery, restaurants on one floor, and the rest
advertisements."
"Still it gives you quite a feeling," said Bojo in dissent, caught in
the surging currents of automobiles and the mingled throngs of late
workers and early pleasure-seekers. "There's an exhilaration about it
all. It does wake you up."
"Think of a city of five thousand millionaires that can build a hundred
business cathedrals a year, that has an opera house with the front of a
warehouse and calls a row of squatty booths luxury. Well, never mind;
here we are. Rub your eyes."
They had left the roar and brilliancy of the curiously blended mass
behind, plunging down a squalid side street with tenements in the dark
distances, when Marsh came to a stop before two green pillars, above
which a swaying sign announced--
WESTOVER COURT
BACHELOR APARTMENTS
Before Bojo could recover from his astonishment, he found himself
conducted through a long, irregular monastic hall flooded with mellow
lights and sudden arches, and as bewilderingly introduced, in a sort of
Arabian Nights adventure, into an oasis of quiet and green things. They
were in an inner court shut in from the outer world by the rise of a
towering wall at one end and at the other by the blazing glass back of a
great restaurant. In the heart of the noisiest, vilest, most brutal
struggle of the city lay this little bit of the Old World, decked in
green plots, with vine-covered fountain and a stone Cupid perched on
tip-toe, and above a group of dream trees filling the lucent yellow and
green enclosure with a miraculous foliage. Lights blazed in a score of
windows above them, while at four medieval entrances, of curved doorways
under sloping green aprons, the suffused glow of iron lanterns seemed
like distant signals lost in a fog. Everything about them was so remote
from the stress and fury out of which they had stepped, that Bojo
exclaimed in astonishment:
"Impossible!"
"Isn't it bully?" said Marsh enthusiastically. "Ali Baba Court I call
it. That's what a touch of imagination can do in New York. I say, look
over here. What do you think of this for a quiet pipe at night?"
He drew him under the trees, where a table and comfortable chairs were
waiting. Above the low roofs high against the blue-black sky the giant
city came peeping down upon them from the regimented globes of fire on
the Astor roof. A milky flag drifted lazily across an aigrette of steam.
To the right, the top of the Times Tower, divorced from all the ugliness
at its feet, rose like an historic campanile played about by timid
stars. Over the roof-tops the hum of the city, never stilled, turned
like a great wheel, incessantly, with faint, detached sounds pleasantly
audible: a bell; a truck moving like a shrieking shell; the impertinent
honk of taxis; urchins on wheels; the shattering rush of distant iron
bodies tearing through the air; an extra cried on a shriller note; the
ever-recurring pipe of a police whistle compelling order in the
confusion; fog horns from the river, and underneath something more
elusive and confused, the churning of great human masses passing and
repassing.
Marsh gave a peculiar whistle and instantly at a window on the second
floor a shadowy figure appeared, the sash went up with a bang, and a
cheery voice exclaimed:
"Hello, below there! Is that Bojo with you? Come up and show your
handsome map!"
"Coming, Freddie, coming," said Bojo with a laugh, and, plunging into a
swinging entrance, he found himself in a cozy den, almost thrown off his
feet by the greetings of a little fellow who dived at him with the
frenzy of a faithful dog.
"Well, old fashion-plate, how are you?" Bojo said at last, flinging him
across the room. "Been into any more trouble?"
"Nope. That is, not lately," said DeLancy, picking himself up. "Haven't
a chance, living with two policemen. What kept you all this time? Fallen
in love?"
"None of your damned business. By George, this looks homelike," said
Bojo to turn the conversation. On the walls were a hundred mementoes of
school and college, while a couple of lounges and several great chairs
were indolently grouped about the fireplace, where a fire was laid. "I
say, Roscy, has the infant really been behaving?"
"Well, we haven't bailed, him out yet," said Marsh meditatingly.
Fred DeLancy had been in trouble all his life and out of it as easily.
Trouble, as he himself expressed it, woke up the moment he went out. He
had been suspended and threatened with expulsion for one scrape after
another more times than he could remember. But there was something that
instantly disarmed anger in the odd star-pointing nose, the twinkly
eyes, and the wide mouth set at a perpetual grin. One way or another he
wriggled through regions where angels fear to tread, assisted by much
painful effort on the part of his friends.
"I'm getting frightfully serious," he said with mock contrition. "I'm
getting to be an old man; the cares of life and all that sort of stuff."
He broke off and flung himself at the piano, where he started an
improvisation:
"The cares of life,
This dreadful strife,
I'll take a wife--
No, change the rhyme
I haven't time
For matrimony--O!
Leave that to handsome Bojo
Bojo's in love,
Blush like a dove--
"No, doves don't blush," he said, swinging around. "Do they or don't
they? Anyhow, a dove in love might-- To continue:
"Bojo's in love,
Blush like a dove,
Won't tell her name,
I'll guess the same--"
But at this moment, just as a pillow came hurtling through the air, the
doorway was ruled with a great body and George Granning came crowding
into the room, hand out, a smile on his honest, open face.
"Hello, Tom, it's good to see you again."
"The government can go on," said DeLancy joyfully. "We're here!"
As the four sat grouped about the room they presented one of those
strange combinations of friendship which could only result from the
process of American education. Four more dissimilar individualities
could not have been molded together except by the curious selective
processes of an academic society system. The Big Four, as they had been
dubbed (there is always a Big Four in every school and college), had
come from Andover linked by the closest ties, and this intimacy had
never relaxed, despite all the incongruous opposition of their
beginnings.
Marsh was a New Yorker, an aristocrat by inheritance and by force of
fortune; Crocker a Yankee, son of a keen, self-made father, who had
fought his way up to a position of mastery in the woolen mills of New
England; DeLancy from Detroit, of more modest means, son of a small
business man, to whom his education had meant a genuine sacrifice; while
George Granning, older by many years than the rest, was evidence of that
genius for evolution that stirs in the American mass. They knew but
little of his history beyond what he had chosen to confide in his
silent, reserved way.
He had the torso of a stevedore, the neck and hands of the laborer,
while the boulder-like head, though devoid of the lighter graces of
imagination and wit, had certain immovable qualities of persistence and
determination in the strongly hewn jaw and firm, high-cheekbones. He
was tow-headed and blue-eyed, of unfailing good humor, like most men of
great strength. Only once had he been known to lose his temper, and that
was in a football match in his first year in the varsity. His opponent,
doubtless hoping to intimidate the freshman, struck him a blow across
the face under cover of the first scrimmage. Before the half was over
the battering he had received from the enraged Granning was so terrific
that he had to be transferred to the other side of the line.
Granning had worked his way through Andover by menial service at the
beginning, gradually advancing by acquiring the agencies for commercial
fields and doing occasional tutoring. His summers had been given over to
work in foundries and in preparation for the business career he had
chosen long ago. He was deeply religious in a quiet, unostentatious way.
That there had been stormy days in the beginning, tragedies perhaps, the
friends divined; besides, there were lines in his face, stern lines of
pain and hardship, that had been softened but could never disappear.
CHAPTER II
FOUR AMBITIONS, AND THREE WAYS TO MAKE MONEY
They dined that night on the top of the Astor roof, where in the midst
of aerial gardens one forgot that another city waited toiling below.
Their table was placed by an embrasure from which they could scan the
dark reaches toward the west where the tenements of the city, broken by
the occasional uprising of a blatant sign, mathematically divided into
squares by rows of sentinel lights, rolled somberly toward the river. To
the south, vaguely defined by the converging watery darkness, the city
ran down to flaming towers in the glistening haze that seemed a luminous
vapor rising from dazzling avenues.
Wherever the eye could see myriad lights were twinkling: brooding and
fraught with the dark mystery of lonely, distant river banks; red, green
and golden on the rivers, crossing busily on a purposeful way; intruding
and bewildering in the service of industry from steel skeletons against
the sky; magic and dreamlike on the fairy spread of miraculous bridges;
winking and dancing with the spirit of gaiety from the theaters below
and the roof gardens above; that in the summer, suddenly spread a new
and brilliant city of the night above the tired metropolis of the day.
Looking down on these myriad points of light one seemed to have suddenly
come upon the nesting of the stars; where planets and constellations
germinated and took flight toward the swarming firmament.
The incomparable drama of the spectacle affected the four young men on
the threshold of life in a different way. Bojo, to whom the sensation
was new, felt a sort of prophetic stimulation as though in the
glittering sweep below lay the jewel which he was to carry off.
Granning, who had broken into the monastic routine of his life to make
an exception of this gathering of the clans, looked out in reverence,
stirred to deeper questionings of the spirit. Marsh, more dramatically
attuned, felt a sensation of weakness, as though suddenly confronted
with the gigantic scheme of the multitude; he felt the impotence of
single effort. While DeLancy, who dined thus every night, seeing no
further than the festooned gardens, the brilliant splashes of color, the
faces of women flushed in the yellow glow of candle-lights, hearing only
the pleasant thrumming sounds of a hidden orchestra, rattled on in his
privileged way.
"Well, now that the Big Four is together again, let's divide up the
city." He sent a sweeping gesture toward the stenciled stretch of blocks
below and continued: "Boscy, what'll you have? Take your choice. I'll
have a couple of hotels, a yacht and a box at the opera. Next bidder,
please!"
But Bojo without attention to this chatter said:
"Remember the night before we went to college and we picked out what we
intended to make. Came pretty close to it too, didn't we?"
Marsh looked up quickly, seized by a sudden dramatic suggestion.
"Well, here we are again. I'll tell you what we'll do. Let's tell the
truth--no buncombe--just what each expects to get out of life."
"But will we tell the truth?" said Bojo doubtfully.
"I will."
"Of course we all want to make a million first," said Fred DeLancy,
laughing. "Roscy's got his, so I suppose he wants ten. First place, is
it admitted each of us wants a million? Every properly brought up young
American ought to believe in that, oughtn't he?"
"Freddie, behave yourself," said Bojo severely. "Be serious."
"Serious," said DeLancy, with an offended air. "I'll be more serious
than any of you and I'll tell more of the truth and when I do you won't
believe me."
"Go on, Roscy, start first."
"Freddie's right in one respect. I intend to treble what I've got in ten
years or go bankrupt," said Marsh instantly. He flung the stub of his
cigar out into the night, watched it a moment in earthbound descent, and
then leaned forward over the table, elbows down, hands clasped, the
lights laying deep shadows about the hollowed eyes, the outstanding ears
accentuating the irregularity and oddity of the head. "I'm not sure but
that would be the best thing for me. If I had to start at the bottom I
believe I'd do something. I mean something big."
A half-concealed smile passed about the group, accustomed to the
speaker's dramatic instincts.
"Well, I've got to start at life in a different way. The trouble is, in
this American scheme I have no natural place unless I make one. Abroad I
could settle down to genteel loafing and find a lot of other congenial
loafers, who would gamble, hunt, fish, race, globe-trot, beat up Africa
in search of big sport, or drift around fashionable capitals for a bit
of amusement; either that or if I wanted to develop along the line of
brains there's a career in politics or a chance at diplomacy. Here we
are developing millionaires as fast as we can turn them out and never
thinking how we can employ them. What's the result? The daughters of
great fortunes marry foreign titles as fast as they get the chance in
order to get the opportunity to enjoy their wealth to the fullest,
because here there is no class so limited and circumscribed without
national significance as our so-called Four Hundred; the sons either
become dissipated loafers, professional amateurs of sport, or are
condemned to piling more dollars on dollars, which is an absurdity."
"I grieve for the millionaire," interjected DeLancy flippantly.
"And yet you want to triple what you've got," said Bojo with a smile.
"I'm coming to that--wait. Now the idea of money grubbing is distasteful
to me. What I want is a great opportunity which only money can give. I
have, I suppose, if a conservative estimate could be made, pretty close
to two million dollars--which means around one hundred thousand a year.
Now if I want to settle down and marry, that's a lot; but if I want to
go in and compete with other men, the leaders, that's nothing at all.
Now the principal interest I've got ahead is the _Morning Post_; it's
not all mine, but the controlling share is. It's a good conservative
nursery rocking-horse. It can go rocking on for another twenty years,
satisfied with its little rut. Now do you understand why I want more
money? I want a million clear to throw into it. I don't want it to be a
profitable high-class publication--I want it to be _the_ paper in New
York."
"But are you willing to go slow, to learn every rope first?" said
Granning with a shake of his head.
"You know I am," said Marsh impatiently. "I've plugged at it harder than
any one on the paper this summer and last too."
"Yes, you work hard--and play hard too," Granning admitted.
Marsh accepted the admission with a pleased smile and continued
enthusiastically:
"Exactly. Win or lose, play the limit! That's my motto, and there's
something glorious in it. I'm going to work hard, but I'm going to play
just as hard. I want to live life to its fullest; I want to get every
sensation out of it. And when I'm ready I'm going to make the paper a
force, I'm going to make myself feared. I want to round myself out. I
want to touch everything that I can, but above all I want to be on the
fighting line. After this period of financial buccaneering there's going
to come a great period--a radical period, the period of young men."
"Roscy, you want to be noticed," said DeLancy.
"I admit it. If you had what I have, wouldn't you? I repeat, I want the
sensation of living in the big way. Granning shakes his head-- I know
what he's thinking."
"Roscy, you're a gambler," said Granning, but without saying all he
thought.
"I am, but I'm going to gamble for power, which is different, and that's
the first step to-day; that's what they all have done."
"You haven't told us what your ambition is," said Bojo.
"I want to make of the _Morning Post_ not simply a great paper but a
great institution," said Marsh seriously. "I believe the newspaper can
be made the force that the church once was. Now the church was dominant
only as it entered into every side of the life of the community; when it
was not simply the religious and political force, but greater still, the
social force. I believe the newspaper will become great as it satisfies
every need of the human imagination. There are papers that print a
Sunday sermon. I would have a religious page every day, just as you
print a woman's page and a children's page. I'd run a legal bureau free
or at nominal charges, and conduct aggressive campaigns against petty
abuses. I'd organize the financial department so as to make it personal
to every subscriber, with an investment bureau which would offer only a
carefully selected list for conservative investors and would refuse to
deal in seven per cent. bonds and fifteen per cent. shares. I would have
a great auditorium where concerts and plays would be given at no higher
price than fifty cents."
"Hold up! How could you get plays on such conditions?" said DeLancy, who
had been held breathless by this Utopian scheme.
"Any manager in the city with a sense of publicity would jump at the
chance of giving an afternoon performance, expenses paid, under such
conditions, especially as the list would be guaranteed. Then, above all,
I'd give the public fiction, the best I could get and first hand. What
do you think gives _Le Petit Parisien_ and _Le Petit Journal_ a
circulation of about a million each and all over France? Serial novels.
Do you know the circulation of papers in New York? There are only three
over a hundred thousand and the greatest has hardly a quarter of a
million. However, I won't go on. You see my ideas make an
institution--the modern institution, replacing and absorbing all past
institutions."
"And what else do you want?" said Bojo, laughing.
"I want that by the time I'm thirty-five. I want ten millions and I want
to be at forty either senator or ambassador to Paris or London. I want
to build a yacht that will defend the American cup and to own a horse
that will win the derby.
"And will you marry?"
"The most beautiful woman in America."
The four burst into laughter simultaneously, none more heartily than
Marsh, who added:
"Remember, we're to tell the truth, and that's what I'd like to do." He
concluded: "Win or lose, play the limit. Never mind, Granny; when I'm
broke, you'll give me a job. Up to you. Confess."
Granning began diffidently, for he was always slow at speech and the
fluency of Marsh's recital intimidated him.
"I don't know that there's anything so interesting in my future," he
began, turning the menu nervously in his hands and fixing a spot on the
tablecloth where a wine stain broke the white monotony. "You see, I'm
different from you fellows. You're facing life in a different sort of
way. I'm not sure but what there's more danger in it than you think, but
the fact is you're all looking for the gamble. You want what you want,
Roscy, by the time you're thirty-five. Bojo and Fred want a million by
the time they're thirty. You're looking for the easy way--the quick way.
You may get it and then you may not. You've got friends,
opportunities--perhaps you will."
"That's where you'll never learn, you old fossil," said Marsh. "If you'd
get out and meet people, why, some time you'd strike a man with a nice
fat contract in his pocket looking for just the reliable--" he stopped,
not wishing to add, "old plodder that you are."
Granning shook his head emphatically. Among these boyish types he seemed
of another generation, a rather roughly hewn type of a district leader
of fixed purpose and irresistible momentum.
"Not for me," he said decisively. "There's one thing I've got strong,
where I have the start over you and a good thing it is, too: I know my
limitations. I'm not starting where you are. My son will; I'm not. Hold
up; it's the truth, and the truth is what we're telling. You can gamble
with life--you've got something to fall back on. I'm the fellow who's
got to build. Yes, I'll be honest. I want to make a million, too, I
suppose, as Fred said, like every American does. After all, if you're
out to make money, it's a good thing to try for something high. There
isn't much chance for romance in what I'm doing. I've got to go up step
by step, but it means more to me to get a fifty-dollar raise than that
next million can mean to you, Roscy. That's because I look back, because
I remember."
He stopped and the memories of the existence out of which he had dragged
himself, of which he never spoke, threw thoughtful shadows over the
broad forehead. All at once, taking a knife, he drew a long straight
line on the table, inclining upward like the slope of a hill, with a
cross at the bottom and one at the top, while the others looked on,
puzzled.
"You see there's not much banging of drums or dancing in what I've got
ahead and not much to tell until I get there. You know how a mole
travels; well, that's me." He laid his finger on the cross at the bottom
and then shifted it to the cross at the top. "Here's where I go in and
here's where I come out. In between doesn't count."
"And what besides that?" said Bojo.
"Well," said Granning simply, "I don't know what else. I'd like to get
off for a couple of months and see Europe and what they're doing over in
France and Germany in the steel line."
"But all that'll happen. What would you really like to get out of life?"
said Marsh, smiling--"you old unimaginative bear!"
"I'd like to go into politics in the right sort of way; I think every
man ought. Perhaps I'll marry, have a home and all that sort of thing
some day. I think what I'd like best would be to get a chance to run a
factory along certain lines I've thought out--a cooperative arrangement
in a way. There's so much to be worked out along the lines of
organization and efficiency." He thought over the situation a moment and
then concluded with sudden diffidence as though surprised at the daring
of his self-confession. "That's about all there is to it, I guess."
When he had ended thus clumsily, DeLancy took up immediately, but
without that spirit of good-humored raillery which was characteristic.
When he spoke in matter-of-fact, direct phrases, the three friends
looked at him in astonishment, realizing all at once an undivined intent
underneath all the lightness of that attitude by which they had judged
him.
"One thing Granning said strikes at me--knowing your limitations," he
said with a certain defiance, as though aware that he was going to shock
them. "I suppose you fellows think of me as a merry little jester, an
amusing loafer, happy-go-lucky and all that sort of stuff. Well, you're
mistaken. I know my limitations, I know what I can do and what I can't.
I'm just as anxious to get ahead as any of you, and you can bet I don't
fool myself. I don't sit down and say, 'Freddie, you've got railroads in
your head--you're an organizer--you'd shine at the bar--you'd push John
Rockefeller off the map,' or any of that rot. No, sir! I know where I
stand. On a straight out-and-out proposition I wouldn't be worth twenty
dollars a week to any one. But just the same I'm going to have my
million and my automobile in five years. Dine with me five years from
this date and you'll see."
"Well, Fred, what's the secret? How are you going to do it?" said Bojo,
a little suspicious of his seriousness.
But DeLancy as though still aware of the necessity of further
explanations before his pronouncement continued:
"I said I didn't fool myself and I don't. I haven't got ability like
Granning over here, who's entirely too modest and who'll end by being an
old money-bags--see if he doesn't. I haven't got a bunch of greenbacks
left me or behind me like Roscy or Bojo. My old dad's a brick; he's
scraped and pinched to put me through college on the basis of you
fellows. Now it's up to me. I haven't got what you fellows have got, but
I've got some very valuable qualities, very valuable when you keep in
mind what you can do with them. I have a very fine pair of dancing legs,
I play a good game of bridge and a better at poker, I can ride other
men's horses and drive their automobiles in first-rate style, I wear
better clothes than my host with all his wad, and you bet that impresses
him. I know how to gather in friends as fast as you can drum up
circulation, I can liven up any party and save any dinner from going on
the rocks, I can amuse a bunch of old bores until they get to liking
themselves; in a word, I know how to make myself indispensable in
society and the society that counts."
"What the deuce is he driving at?" Marsh broke in with a puzzled
expression.
"Why am I sitting down in a broker's office drawing fifty dollars a
week, just to smoke long black cigars? Because I know a rap what's
going on? No. Because I know people, because I'm a cute little social
runner who brings custom into the office; because my capital is friends
and I capitalize my friends."
"Oh, come now, Fred, that's rather hard," said Bojo, feeling the note of
bitterness in this cynical self-estimate.
"It's the truth. What do you think that old fraud of a Runker, my boss,
said to me last week when I dropped in an hour late? 'Young man, what do
you come to the office for--for afternoon tea?' And what did I answer? I
said 'Boss, you know what you've got me here for, and do you want me to
tell you what you ought to say? You ought to say, "Mr. DeLancy, you've
been working very hard in our interest these nights and though we can't
give you an expense account, you must be more careful of your health. I
don't want to see you burning the candle at both ends. Sleep late of
mornings."' And what did he say, the old humbug? He burst out laughing
and raised my salary. He knew I was wise."
"Well, what's the point of all this?" said Granning after the laugh.
"Never heard you take so long coming to the point before."
"The point is this: there're three ways of making money and only three:
to have it left you like Roscy, to earn it like Granning, and to marry
it--"
"Like you!"
"Like me!"
The others looked at him with constraint, for at that period there was
still a prejudice against an American man who made a marriage of
calculation. Finally Granning said:
"You won't do that, Freddie!"
"Indeed I will," said DeLancy, but with a nervous acceleration. "My
career is society. Oh, I don't say I'm going to marry for money and
nothing else. It's much easier than that. Besides, there's the patriotic
motive, you know. I'm saving an American fortune for American uses,
American heiresses for American men. Sounds like American styles for
American women," he added, trying to take the edge off the declaration
with a laugh. "After all, there's a lot of buncombe about it. A
broken-down foreigner comes over here with a reputation like a Sing-Sing
favorite, and because he calls himself Duke he's going to marry the
daughter of Dan Drake to pay up his debts and the Lord knows for what
purposes in the future--and do you fellows turn your back on him and
raise your eyebrows as you did a moment ago? Not at all. You're tickled
to death to go up and cling to his ducal finger. Am I right, Roscy?"
"Yes, but--"
"But I'm an American and will make a damned sight better husband, and
American children will inherit the money instead of its being swallowed
up by a rotten aristocracy. There's the answer."
"It's the way you say it, Fred," said Bojo uneasily.
"Because I have the nerve to say it. This is all I'm worth and this is
the only way to get what we all want."
"You'll never do it," said Granning with decision; "not in the way you
say it."
"Granning, you're a babe in the woods. You don't know what life is,"
said DeLancy, laughing boisterously. "After all, what are you going to
do? You're going to put away the finest days of your life to come out
with a pile when you're middle-aged and then what good will it do you? I
knew I'd shock you. Still there it is--that's flat!" He drew back,
lighting a cigar to cover his retreat and said: "Bojo next. I dare you
to be as frank."
Bojo, thus interrogated, took refuge in an evasive answer. The
revelations he had listened to gave him a keen sense of change. On this
very evening when they had come together for the purpose of celebrating
old friendship, it seemed to him that the parting of their ways lay
clearly before him.
"I don't know what I shall do," he said at last. "No, I'm not dodging; I
don't know. Much depends on certain circumstances." He could not say how
vividly their different announced paths represented to him the
difficulties of his choice. "I'd like to do something more than just
make money, and yet that seems the most natural thing, I suppose. Well,
I'd like a chance to have a year or two to think things over, see all
kinds of men and activities--but I don't know, by next week I may be at
the bottom--striking out for myself and glad of a chance."
He stopped and they did not urge him to continue. After DeLancy's flat
exposition each had a feeling of the danger of disillusionment. Besides,
Fred and Roscoe were impatient to be off, Fred to a roof garden, Marsh
to the newspaper. Bojo declined DeLancy's invitation, alleged the
necessity of unpacking, in reality rather desirous of being alone or of
a quieter talk with Granning in the new home.
"Here's to us, then," said Marsh, raising his glass. "Whatever happens
the old combination sticks together."
Bojo raised his glass thoughtfully, feeling underneath that there was
something irrevocably changed. The city was outside sparkling and black,
but there was a new feeling in the night below, and the more he felt the
multiplicity of its multifold expressions the more it came to him that
what he would do he would do alone.
CHAPTER III
ON THE TAIL OF A TERRIER
When he returned with Granning into the court and upstairs to their
quarters a telegram greeted him from the floor as he opened the door. It
was from his father, brief and businesslike.
Arrive to-morrow. Wish to see you at three at office.
Important.
J. B. CROCKER.
He stood by the fireplace tearing it slowly to pieces, feeling the
approach of reality in his existence, a little frightened at its
imminence.
"Not bad news," said Granning, settling his great bulk on the couch and
reaching for a pipe from the rack. But at this instant a smiling
Japanese valet ushered in the trunks.
"This is Sweeney," said Granning with an introductory wave. "He's one of
four. We gave up trying to remember their names, so Fred rechristened
them. The others are Patsy, O'Rourke, and Houlahan. Sweeney speaks
perfect English, if you ask him for a telephone book he'll rush out and
bring you a taxicab. Understand, eh, Sweeney?"
"Velly well, yes, sir," said Sweeney, smiling a pleased smile.
"How the deuce do you work it then?" said Bojo, prying open his trunk.
"Oh, it's quite simple. Fred discovered the combination. All you have to
remember is that no matter what you ask for Sweeney always gets a taxi,
Patsy brings in the breakfast, Houlahan starts for the tailor, and
O'Rourke produces the scrubwoman. Just remember that and you'll have no
trouble. But for the Lord's sake don't get em mixed up." He broke off.
"What's the matter? You look serious."
"I'm wondering how I'll feel this time to-morrow," said Bojo with his
arms full of shirts and neckties. "I've got a pleasant little interview
with the Governor ahead." He filled a drawer of the bureau and returned
into the sitting-room, and as Granning, with his usual discretion,
ventured no question he added, looking out at the court where three
blazing windows of the restaurant were flinging pools of light across
the dark green plots: "He'll want me to chuck all this,--shoot up to a
hole in the mud; bury myself in a mill town for four or five years.
Pleasant prospect."
It did seem a bleak prospect, indeed, standing there in the commodious
bay window, seeing the flooded sky, hearing all the distant mingled
songs of the city. From the near-by wall the orchestra of the theater
sent the gay beats of a musical comedy march feebly out through open
windows, while from the adjoining wall of the Times Annex, beyond the
brilliant busy windows, the linotype machines were clicking out the news
of the world that came throbbing in. The theater, the press, that world
of imagination and hourly sensation, the half-opened restaurant with
glimpses of gay tables and the beginnings of the nightly cabaret, the
blazing court itself filled with ardent young men at the happy period
of the first great ventures, all were brought so close to his own eager
curiosity that he turned back rebelliously:
"By heavens, I won't do it, whatever happens! I won't be starved out for
the sake of more dollars. Well, would you in my place--now?"
He took a pair of shoes and flung them scudding across the floor into
the room and then stood looking down at the noncommittal figure of his
friend.
"Granning, you don't approve of us, do you? Stop looking like a sphinx.
Answer or I'll dump the tray over you. You don't approve, do you?
Besides, I watched your face to-night when Fred was spouting all that
ridiculous stuff."
"He meant it."
"Do you think so?" He sat down thoughtfully. "I wonder."
"What worried you?" said Granning directly, with a sharp look.
"I was sort of upset," Bojo admitted. "You know when you got through and
Fred got through, I thought after all you were right--we are gamblers.
We want things quick and easily. It's the excitement, the living on a
high tension."
"I always sort of figured out you'd want to do something different,"
said Granning slowly.
"So I would," he said moodily. "I wish I had Roscy's brains. I wonder
what I could do if I had to shift for myself."
"So that's the idea, is it?"
He nodded.
"The old Dad's stubborn as blazes. Had an up-and-down row with Jack, my
older brother, and turned him out. Lord knows what's become of him.
Dad's got as much love for the Wall Street game as your pesky old self.
Thinks they're a lot of loafers and confidence men."
"I didn't say it," said Granning with a short laugh.
"No, but you think it."
Granning rose as the clock struck ten and shouldered off to his bedroom
according to his invariable custom. When Bojo finally turned in it was
to sleep by fits and starts. The weight of the decision which he would
have to make on the morrow oppressed him. It was all very well to
announce that he would start at the bottom rather than yield, but the
world had opened up to him in a different light since the dinner of
confidences. He saw the two ways clearly--the long, slow plodding way of
Granning, and the other way, the world of opportunities through friends,
the world of quick results to those privileged to be behind the scenes.
If the end were the same, why take the way of toil and deprivation?
Besides, there were other reasons, sentimental reasons, that urged him
to the easier choice. If he could only make his father see things
rationally--but he had slight hope of making an impression upon that
direct and adamant will.
"Well, if everything goes smash, I'll make Roscy give me a job on the
paper," he thought as he turned restlessly in his bed.
The white gleam of a shifting electric sign, high above the roofs,
played over the opposite wall. At midnight he heard dimly two sounds
which were destined from now on to dispute the turning of the night
with their contending notes of work and pleasure--the sound of great
presses beginning to rumble under the morning edition and from the
restaurant an inconscient chorus welcoming the midnight with jingling
rhythm.
You want to cry,
You want to die,
But all you do is laugh, Hi! Hi!
You've got the High Jinks! That's why!
When he awoke the next morning it was to the sound of Roscoe Marsh in
the adjoining sitting-room telephoning for breakfast. The sun was
pouring over his coverlet and the clock stood reproachfully at nine o
clock. He slipped into a dressing-gown and found Marsh yawning over the
papers. Granning had departed at seven o'clock to the works on the
Jersey shore. DeLancy presently staggered out, tousled and sleepy,
resplendent in a blazing red satin dressing-gown, announcing:
"Lord, but this brokerage business is exacting work."
"Late party, eh?" said Bojo, laughing.
"Where the devil is the coffee?" said DeLancy for all answer.
Marsh, too, had been of the party after the night work had been
completed, though he showed scarcely a trace of the double strain.
Breakfast over, Bojo finished unpacking, killing time until noon
arrived, when, after a solicitous selection of shirts and neckties, he
went off by appointment to meet Miss Doris Drake.
To-day the thoughts of that other interview with his father were too
present in his imagination to permit of the usual zest such a meeting
usually drew forth. The attachment, for despite the insinuations of
DeLancy and Marsh it was hardly more than that, had been of long
standing. There had been a period toward the end of boarding-school when
he had been tremendously in love and had corresponded with extraordinary
faithfulness and treasured numerous tokens of feminine reciprocation
with a sentimental devotion. The infatuation had cooled, but the
devotion had remained as a necessary romantic outlet. She had been his
guest as a matter of course at all the numerous gala occasions of
college life, at the football match, the New London race, and the Prom.
He was tremendously proud to have her on his arm, so proud that at times
he temporarily felt a return of that bitter-sweet frenzy when at school
he turned hot and cold with the expectancy of her letters. At the bottom
he was perhaps playing at love, a little afraid of her with that spirit
of cautious deliberation which, had he but known it, abides not with
romance.
During the month on the ranch he had spent in their house-party, he had
a hundred times tried to convince himself that the old ardor was there,
and when somehow in his own honesty he failed, he would often wonder
what was the subtle reason that prevented it. She was everything that
the eye could imagine, brilliant, perhaps a little too much so for a
young lady of twenty, and sought after by a score of men to whom she
remained completely indifferent. He was flattered and yet he remained
uneasy, forced to admit to himself that there was something lacking in
her to stir his pulses as they had once been stirred. When DeLancy had
so frankly announced his intention of making a favorable marriage,
something had uneasily stirred his conscience. Was there after all some
such unconscious instinct in him at the bottom of this continued
intimacy?
When he reached the metropolitan castle of the Drakes on upper Fifth
Avenue, he found the salons still covered up in summer trappings, long
yellow linens over the furniture, the paintings on the walls still
wrapped in cheesecloth. As he was twirling his cane aimlessly before the
fireplace, wondering how long it would please Miss Doris to keep him
waiting, there came a breathless scamper and rush, accompanied by
delighted giggles, and the next moment an Irish terrier, growling and
snarling in mock fury, slid over the polished floor, pursued by a young
girl who had a firm grip on the stubby tail. The chase ended in the
center of the room with a sudden tumble. The dog, liberated, stood
quivering with delight at a safe distance, head on one side, tongue out,
ready for the next move of his tormenter who was camped in the middle of
the floor. But at this moment she perceived Bojo.
"Oh, hello," she said with a start of surprise but no confusion. "Who
are you?"
"I'm Crocker, Tom Crocker," he said, laughing back at the flushed oval
face, with mischievous eyes dancing somewhere in the golden hair that
tumbled in shocks to her shoulder.
She sprang up brightly, advancing with outstretched hand.
"Oh, you're Bojo," she said in correction. "You don't know me. I'm
Patsie, the terror of the family. Now don't say you thought I was a
child, I'm seventeen--going on eighteen in January."
He shook the hand that was thrust out to him in a direct boyish grip,
surprised and a little bewildered at the irresistible youth and spirits
of the young lady who stood so naturally before him in short skirt and
in simple shirtwaist open at the tanned neck.
"Of course they've told you I'm a terror," she said defiantly. He
nodded, which seemed to please her, for she rattled on: "Well, I am.
They had to keep me away until Dolly hooked the Duke. Have you seen him?
Well, if that's a duke all I've got to say is I think he's a mutt. Of
course you're waiting for Doris, aren't you?"
The assumption of his vassalage somehow stirred a little antagonism, but
before he could answer she was off again.
"Well, a jolly long wait you'll have, too. Doris is splashing around
among the rouge and powder like Romp in a puddle."
Her own cheeks needed no such encouragement, he thought, laughing back
at her through the pure infection of her high spirits.
"I like you; you're all right," she said, surveying him with her head on
one side like Romp, the terrier, who came sniffing up to him in the
friendliest way. "You're not like a lot of these fashion plates that
come in on tiptoes. Say, that was a bully tackle you made in that
Harvard game."
He was down on one knee rubbing the shaggy coat of the terrier. He
looked up.
"Oh you saw that, did you?"
"Yep! I guess there wasn't much left of that fellow! Dad said that was
the finest tackle he ever saw."
"It shook me up all right," he said, grinning.
"Well, if Dad likes you and Romp likes you, you must be some account,"
she continued, camping on the rug and seizing triumphantly the stubby
tail. "Dad's strong for you!"
Bojo settled on the edge of the sofa, watching the furious encounter
which took place for the possession of the strategic point.
"I suppose you're going to marry Doris," she said in a moment of calm,
while Romp made good his escape.
Bojo felt himself flushing under the direct child-like gaze.
"I should be very flattered if Doris--"
"Oh, don't talk that way," she said with a fling of her shoulders.
"That's like all the others. Tell me, are all New York men such hopeless
ninnies? Lord, I'm going to have a dreary time of it." She looked at him
critically. "One thing I like about you; you don't wear spats."
"I suppose you're home for the wedding," he asked curiously, "or are you
through with the boarding-school?"
"Didn't you hear about this?" she said with a touch to her shortened
hair. "They wanted me to come out and I said I wouldn't come out. And
when they said I should come out, I said to myself, I'll just fix them
so I can't come out, and I hacked off all my hair. That's why they sent
me off to Coventry for the summer. I'd have hacked it off again, but
Dad cut up so I let it grow, and now the plaguey old fashion has gotten
around to bobbed hair. What do you think of that?"
"So you don't want to come out?" he answered.
"What for? To be nice to a lot of old frumps you don't like, to dress up
and drink tea and lean up against a wall and have a crowd of mechanical
toys tell you that your eyes are like evening stars and all that rot. I
should say _not_."
"Well, what would you like to do?"
"I'd like to go riding and hunting with Dad, live in a great country
house, with lots of snow in winter and tobogganing--" She broke off with
a sudden suspicion. "Say, am I boring you?"
"You are not," he said with emphasis.
[Illustration: "'Say, you're a judge of muscle, aren't you?'"]
"You don't like that society flub-dub either, do you?" she continued
confidentially. "Lord, these dolled up women make me tired. I'd like to
jounce them ten miles over the hills. Say, you're a judge of muscle,
aren't you?"
"In a way."
"What do you think of that?" She held out a cool firm forearm for his
inspection and he was in this intimate position when Doris came down the
great stairway, with her willowy, trailing elegance. She gave a quick
glance of her dark eyes at the unconventional group, with Romp in the
middle an interested spectator, and said:
"Have I been keeping you hours? I hope this child's been amusing you."
The child, being at this moment perfectly screened, retorted by a
roguish wink which almost upset Bojo's equanimity. The two sisters
were an absolute contrast. In her two seasons Doris had been converted
into a complete woman of the world; she had the grace that was the grace
of art, yet undeniably effective; stunning was the term applied to her.
Her features were delicate, thinly turned, and a quality of precious
fragility was about her whole person, even to the conscious moods of her
smile, her enthusiasm, her serious poising for an instant of the eyes,
which were deep and black and lustrous as the artfully pleasing masses
of her hair. But the charm that was gone was the charm that looked up at
him from the unconscious twilight eyes of the younger sister!
"Patsie, you terrible tomboy--will you ever grow up!" she said
reprovingly. "Look at your dress and your hair. I never saw such a
little rowdy. Now run along like a dear. Mother's waiting."
But Patsie maliciously declined to hurry. She insisted that she had
promised to show off Romp and, abetted by Bojo in this deception, she
kept her sister waiting while she put the dog through his tricks and--to
cap the climax went off with a bombshell.
"My, you two don't look a bit glad to see each other--you look as
conventional as Dolly and the Duke."
"Heavens," said Doris with a sigh, "I shall have my hands full this
winter. What they'll think of her in society the Lord knows."
"I wouldn't worry about her," said Bojo pensively. "I don't think she's
going to have as much trouble as you fear."
"Oh, you think so?" said Doris, glancing up. Then she laid her hand over
his with a little pressure. "I'm awfully glad to see you, Bojo."
"I'm awfully glad to see you," he returned with accented enthusiasm.
"Just as glad as ever?"
"Of course."
"We shall have to use the Mercedes; Dolly's off with the Reynier. You
don't mind?" she said, flitting past the military footman. "Where are we
lunching?"
He named a fashionable restaurant.
"Oh, dear, no; you never see any one you know there. Let's go to the
Ritz." And without waiting for his answer she added: "Duncan, the Ritz."
At the restaurant all the personelle seemed to know her. The head waiter
himself showed her to a favorite corner, and advised with her
solicitously as to the selection of the menu, while Bojo, who had still
to eat ten thousand such luncheons, furtively compared his elegant
companion with the brilliant women who were grouped about him like rare
hot-house plants in a perfumed conservatory. The little shell hat she
wore suited her admirably, concealing her forehead and half of her eyes
with the same provoking mystery that the eastern veil lends to the women
of the Orient. Everything about her dress was soft and beguilingly
luxurious. All at once she turned from a fluttered welcome to a distant
group and, assuming a serious air, said:
"Have you seen Dad yet? Oh, of course not--you haven't had time. You
must right away. He's taken a real fancy to you, and he's promised me
to see that you make a lot of money--" she looked up in his eyes and
then down at the table with a shy smile, adding emphatically--"soon!"
"So you've made up your mind to that?"
"Yes, indeed. I'm going to make you!"
She nodded, laughing and favoring him with a long contemplation.
"You dress awfully well," she said approvingly. "Clothes seem to hang on
you just right--"
"But--" he said, laughing.
"Well, there are one or two things I'd like you to do," she admitted, a
little confused. "I wish you'd wear a mustache, just a little one like
the Duke. You'd look stunning."
He laughed in a way that disconcerted her, and an impulse came into his
mind to try her, for he began to resent the assumption of possession
which she had assumed.
"How do you think that would go in a mill town with overalls and a lunch
can?"
"What do you mean?
"In a week I expect to be shipped to New England, to a little town, with
ten thousand inhabitants; nice, cheery place with two moving-picture
houses and rows on rows of factory homes for society."
"For how long?"
"For four or five years."
"Bojo, how horrible! You're not serious!"
"I may be. How would you like to keep house up there?" He caught at the
disconsolate look in her face and added: "Don't worry, I know better
than to ask that of you. Now listen, Doris, we've been good chums too
long to fool ourselves. You've changed and you're going to change a lot
more. Do you really like this sort of life?"
"I adore it!"
"Dressing up, parading yourself, tearing around from one function to
another." She nodded, her face suddenly clouded over. "Then why in the
world do you want me? There are fifty--a hundred men you'll find will
play this game better than I can."
He had dropped his tone of sarcasm and was looking at her earnestly, but
the questions he put were put to his own conscience.
"Why do you act this way just when you've come back?" she said,
frightened at his sudden ascendency.
"Because I sometimes think that we both know that nothing is going to
happen," he said directly; "only it's hard to face the truth. Isn't that
it?"
"No, that isn't it. I love to be admired, I love pretty things and
society and all that. Why shouldn't I? But I do care for you, Bojo;
you've always brought out--" she was going to say, "the best in me," but
changed her mind and instead added: "I am very proud of you-- I always
would be. Don't look at me like that. What have I done?"
"Nothing," he said, drawing a breath. "You can't help being what you
are. Really, Doris, in the whole room you're the loveliest here. No one
has your style or a smile as bewitching as yours. There is a fascination
about you."
She was only half reassured.
"Well, then, don't talk so idiotically."
"Idiotic is exactly the word," he said with a laugh, and the
compliments he had paid her in a spirit of self-raillery awakened a
little feeling of tenderness after his teasing had shown him that,
according to her lights, she cared more than he had thought.
All the same when he rose to hurry downtown, he was under no illusions:
if opportunity permitted him to fit into the social scheme of things,
well and good; if not-- His thoughts recurred to Fred DeLancy's words:
"There are three ways of making money: to have it left to you, to earn
it, and to marry it."
He broke off angrily, troubled with doubts, and for the hundredth time
he found himself asking:
"Now why the deuce can't I be mad in love with a girl who cares for me,
who's a beauty and has everything in the world! What is it?"
For he had once been very much in love when he was a schoolboy and Doris
had been just a schoolgirl, with open eyes and impulsive direct ways,
like a certain young lady, with breathless, laughing lips who had come
sliding into his life on the comical tail of a scampering terrier.
CHAPTER IV
BOJO'S FATHER
The offices of the Associated Woolen Mills were on the sixteenth floor
of a modern office building in the lower city, which towered above the
surrounding squalid brownstone houses given over to pedlers and
delicatessen shops like a gleaming stork ankle deep in a pool of murky
water.
Bojo wandered through long mathematical rooms with mathematical young
men perched high on desk stools all with the same mathematical curve of
the back, past squadrons of clicking typewriters, clicking endlessly as
though each human unit had been surrendered into the cogs of a universal
machine. He passed one by one a row of glassed-in rooms with names of
minor officers displayed, marking them solemnly as though already he saw
the long slow future ahead: Mr. Pelton, treasurer; Mr. Spinny, general
secretary; Mr. Colton, second vice-president; Mr. Horton,
vice-president; Mr. Rhoemer, general manager, until he arrived at the
outer waiting-room with its faded red leather sofas and polished brass
spittoons, where he had come first as a boy in need of money.
Richardson, an old young man, who walked as though he had never been in
a hurry and spoke in a whisper, showed him into the inner office of
Jotham B. Crocker, explaining that his father would return presently.
Everything was in order; chairs precisely placed, the window shades at
the same level, bookcases with filed memoranda, even to the desk, where
letters to be read and letters to be signed were arranged in neat
packages side by side.
On the wall was extended an immense oil painting fifteen feet by ten, of
Niagara Falls in frothy eruption, with a large and brilliant rainbow
lost in the mist and several figures in the foreground representing the
noble Indians gazing with feelings of awe upon the spectacle of nature.
Behind the desk hung a large black and white engraving of Abraham
Lincoln, with one hand resting on the Proclamation of Emancipation,
flanked by smaller portraits of Henry Ward Beecher and the author of the
McKinley tariff. Opposite was an old-time family group done in crayons,
representing Mr. and Mrs. Crocker standing side by side, with Jack in
long trousers and Tom in short, while on the shining desk amid the
papers was a daguerrotype mounted in a worn leather frame, of the wife
who had been dead fifteen years.
Bojo selected a cigar from the visitors box and strode up and down,
rehearsing in his mind the arguments he would bring to bear against the
expected ultimatum. From the window the lower bay expanded below him
with its steam insects crawling across the blue-gray surface, its
wharf-crowded shores, beyond the ledges on ledges of factories trailing
cotton streamers against the brittle sky. Everywhere the empire of
industry extended its stone barracks without loveliness or pomp,
smoke-grimed, implacable prisons, where multitudes herded under
artificial light that humanity might live in terms of millions.
As he looked, he seemed already to have surrendered his individuality,
swallowed up in the army of labor, and the revolt arose in him anew.
What was the use of money if it could not bring a wider horizon and
greater opportunities? And a sort of dull anger moved in him against the
parental ambition which limited him to unnecessary drudgery.
Of all the persons he had met the greatest stranger to him was his
father. Since his mother's death, when he was but eight years of age,
his life had been spent in boarding school and college, in summer camps
or on visits to chums. Their relations had been formal. At the beginning
and end of each summer he had come down the long avenue of desks, past
the glass doors into the private office, to report, to receive money,
and to be sped with a few appropriate words of advice. Several times
during the year his father would appear on a short warning, stay a few
hours, and hurry off. On such occasions Tom had always felt that he was
being surveyed and estimated as a lumberman watches the growth of a
young forest.
His father was always in a hurry, always in good health, matter of fact,
and generous. That his business had prospered and extended he knew,
though to what extent his father's activities had multiplied he still
was ignorant. Conversation between them had always been difficult in
those tours of inspection; but Bojo, instinctively, censored the
lithographs on the wall (harmless though they were) and the choice of
novels which his father would be sure to examine with a critical eye.
Klondike, the sweep, arranged the room in military order and Fred
DeLancy was enjoined to observe a bread-and-milk diet. Bojo had an idea
that his father was very stern, rigid, and exact, with the unrelenting
attitude toward folly and leisure which had characterized the Crocker
family in the days of their seven celebrated divines.
"How are you, Tom?" said a chest-voice behind him. "Turn around. You
look in first-class shape. Glad to see you."
"Glad to see you, father," he said hastily, taking the stubby, powerful
hand.
"Just a moment--go on with your cigar. Let me straighten out this desk.
Train was ten minutes late."
"Now it comes," thought Bojo to himself as he gripped his hands and
assumed a determined frown.
As they faced each other they were astonishingly alike and unlike. They
had the same squaring of the brows, the same obstinate rise of the head
at the back, and the prominent undershot jaw. Years had thickened the
frame of the father and written characteristic lines about the mouth and
the eyes. He had become so integral a part of the machine he had created
that in the process all the finer youthful shades of expression had
faded away.
Concentration on a fixed idea, indomitable purpose, decision,
self-discipline were there in the strongly sculptured chin and maxillary
muscles, under the sparse, close-cropped beard shot with gray; courage
and tenacity in the deep eyes, which, like Bojo's, had the disconcerting
fixity of the mastiff's; but the quality of dreams which so keenly
qualified the tempestuous obstinacy of the son had been discarded as so
much superfluous baggage. Life to him was a succession of immediate
necessities, a military progress, and his imagination went with
difficulty beyond the demands of the hour. He dressed in a
pepper-and-salt business suit made of his own product, wore a made-up
tie and comfortable square-toed shoes, with a certain aggressive disdain
for the fashions as a quality of pretentiousness.
He ran through his correspondence in five minutes while Bojo pricked up
his ears at the sums which he flung off without hesitation. Richardson
faded from the room, the father shifted a package of memoranda, turned
the face of his desk clock so he could follow the time, drew back in his
chair, and helped himself to a cigar, shooting a glance at the embattled
figure of the son.
"You look all primed up--ready to jump in the ring," he said with a
smile, and without waiting for Bojo's embarrassed answer he continued,
caging his fingers and adopting a quick, incisive tone.
"Well, Tom, you have now arrived at man's estate and it is right that I
should discuss with you your future course in life. But before we come
to that I wish to say several things. You've finished your college
course very creditably. You have engaged a good deal in different
sports, it is true; but you have not allowed it to interfere with your
serious work, and I believe on the whole your experience in athletics
has been valuable. It has taught you qualities of self-restraint and
discipline, and it has given you a sound body. Your record in your
studies, while it has not been brilliant, has been creditable. You've
kept out of bad company, chosen the right friends-- I am particularly
impressed with Mr. Granning--and you've not gone in for dissipation.
You've done well and I have no complaint. You've worked hard and you've
played hard. You will take a serious view of life."
This discourse annoyed Bojo. It seemed to fling a barrier of
conventionality between them, driving them further apart.
"Why the deuce doesn't he talk in a natural way?" he thought moodily.
And he felt with a sudden depression the futility of arguing his case.
"We're in for a row. There's no way out."
"Now, Tom, lets talk about the future."
"Here it comes," said Bojo to himself, bracing himself to resist.
"What would you like to do?"
"What would _I_ like?" said Tom, completely off his guard.
"Yes, what are your ideas?"
The turn was so unexpected that he could not for the moment assemble his
thoughts. He rose, making a pretext of seeking an ash-tray, and
returned.
"Why, to tell the truth, sir, I came here expecting that you would
demand that I go into this--into the mills."
"I see, and you don't want to do what your father's done. You want
something else, something better."
The tone in which this was said aroused the obstinacy in the young man,
but he repressed the first answer.
"Well?"
"I don't know, sir, that there's any use of my explaining myself; I
don't know what good it'll do," he said slowly.
"On the contrary, I am not making demands on you. I am here to discuss
with you." (Bojo repressed a smile at this.) "You've thought about this.
What do you suggest?"
"I don't think you'll understand it at all, but I want time."
"Time to do what?"
"To get out and see the world, to meet men who are doing things, to get
a chance to develop, to get my ideas straightened out a bit."
"Is that all?"
"No, that's not quite honest," said Bojo suddenly. "The truth is, sir, I
don't see why I should begin all over again, the drudgery and the
isolation and all. If you wanted me to do only that why did you send me
to college? I've made friends and it's only right I should have the
opportunity to lead as big a life as they. Money isn't everything, it's
what you get out of life, and besides I've got opportunities, unusual
opportunities to get ahead here."
"Have you made up your mind, Tom?" said the father slowly.
"I'm afraid I have, sir."
"Let me talk to you. You may see it in a different light. First you
speak of opportunities--what opportunities?"
"Mr. Drake has been kind enough--"
"That means Wall Street."
"Yes, sir."
The father thought a moment.
"What is the situation between you and Miss Drake?"
"We are very good friends."
"Would you marry her if you didn't have a cent?"
"I would not."
"I am glad to hear you say that. Very glad. So you re going into Wall
Street," he said, after a moment. "Are you going into the banking
business?"
"Why, no."
"Or into railroads or any creative industry?"
"Not exactly."
"You're going into Wall Street," said Crocker, "like a great many young
men, who've been having an easy, luxurious time at college and who want
to go on with it. You're going there as a gambler, hoping to get the
inside track through some influence and make a hundred thousand dollars
of other people's money in a lucky year."
"That's rather a hard way to put it, sir."
"You don't pretend to be able to earn a hundred thousand dollars in one
year or in five, do you, Tom?"
"Let me put it in another way," said Bojo after a moment's indecision.
"What you have made and what you have been able to give me have put me
in the way of acquiring friends that others can't make, and friends are
assets. The higher up you go in society the easier it is to make money;
isn't it so? Opportunities are assets also. If I have the opportunity to
make a lot of money in a short time, what is the sense of turning my
back on the easiest way and taking up the hardest?"
"Tom, do you young fellows ever stop to think that there is such a thing
as your own country, and that if you've got advantages you've also got
responsibilities?" said Crocker, senior, shaking his head. "You want
money like all the rest. What good do you want to do in return? What
usefulness do you accomplish in the scheme of things here? You talk of
opportunity--you don't know what a real opportunity and a privilege is.
Now let me say my say."
Richardson came sliding into the room at this moment and he paused to
deny the card, with a curt order against further interruptions. When he
resumed it was on a quieter note, with a touch of sadness.
"The trouble is, our points of view are too far apart for us to come
together at present. You want something that isn't going to satisfy you
and I know isn't going to satisfy you. But I can't make you see it,
there's the pity of it. You've got to get your hard knocks yourself.
You've got real ambition in you. Now let me tell you something about the
mills and you think it over. There's some bigger things in this world
than you think, and the biggest is to create something, something useful
to the community; to make a monument of it and to pass it down for your
son to carry on--family pride. You think there's only drudgery in it.
Did you ever think there were thousands and thousands of people
depending on how you run your business? Do you realize that every great
business to-day means the protection of those thousands; that you've got
to study out how to protect them at every point in order to make them
efficient; that there's nothing unimportant? You've got to watch over
their health and their happiness, see that they get amusement,
relaxation; that they're encouraged to buy homes and taught to save
money. You've got to see that they get education to keep them out of the
hands of ignorant agitators. You've got to make them self-respecting and
able intelligently to understand your own business, so that they'll
perceive they're getting their just share. Add to that the other side,
the competition, the watching of every new invention, the calculating to
the last cent, the study of local and foreign conditions of supply and
demand, the habits and tastes of different communities. Add also the
biggest thing that you've got, a mixed population, that's got to be
turned into intelligent, useful American citizens, and you've got as big
an opportunity and responsibility as you can place before any young
fellow I know. What do you say?"
Bojo had nothing to say--not that he had surrendered, but that his own
arguments seemed petty besides these.
The father rose and laid his hands on his son's shoulders.
"Why, Tom, don't you know it's been the dream of my life to hand you
down this thing that I've built myself? Don't you know there's a
sentiment about it? Why, it isn't dollars and cents: I've got ten times
what I want; it's pride. I'm proud of every bit of it. There isn't a new
turn, mechanical or social, has come up over the world but what I've
adopted it there. I haven't had a strike in fifteen years. I've done
things there would open your eyes. You'd be proud. Well, what are you
thinking?"
"You make it very hard, sir," he said slowly. He had not expected this
sort of appeal. "If I were older, I don't know--but it's hard now." He
could not tell him all the surrender would mean, and though his deeper
nature had been reached he still fought on. "I'm not starting where you
started, sir; that's the trouble. You went to work when you were twelve.
It would be easier if I had, and, if you'll forgive me, it's your fault
too that I want what I want now. I suppose I do want to begin on top,
but I've been on top all these years, that's all. I couldn't do it now;
perhaps later--I don't know. If I went up to the mills now I should eat
my heart out. I'm sorry to have to say this to you, but it's the truth."
The father left him abruptly and seated himself at his desk without
speaking.
"If I insisted you would refuse," he said slowly.
"I'm afraid I'd have to, sir," said Bojo, with a feeling of dread.
There was another silence, at the end of which Mr. Crocker drew out his
check-book and looked at it solemnly.
"Good! Now he's figuring how much he'll give me and cut me off!" thought
the son.
"Tom, I don't want to lose you too," said the father slowly. "I'm going
to try a different way with you. You're sound and you ring true. The
only trouble is you don't know; you've got to learn your lesson. So you
think if you had a start you'd clean up a fortune, don't you?--and you
believe--" he paused--"in Wall Street friends. Very well; I'm going to
give you an opportunity to get your eyes open."
He dipped his pen in the ink and wrote a check with deliberation, while
Bojo, puzzled, thought to himself: "What the deuce is he up to now?"
"I'm not going to make a bargain with you. I'm going to trust to
experience and to the Crocker in you. I know the stuff you're made of.
You'll never make an idler, you'll never stand that life, but you want
to try it. Very well. I'm going to give you a check. It's yours. Play
with it all you want. You'll get it taken away from you in two years at
the most. When that happens come back to me, do you understand, where
you belong! Blood's thicker than water, my boy; there's something in
father and son sticking together, doing something that counts! Here,
take this."
And he placed in his hand a check which read:
Pay to the order of Thomas Beauchamp Crocker
Fifty thousand dollars
JOTHAM B. CROCKER.
CHAPTER V
DANIEL DRAKE, THE MULTI-MILLIONAIRE
A week after his interview with his father, Tom Crocker entered the
great shadowy library of the Drakes in response to an invitation from
the father. At this time, when Wall Street was approaching that dramatic
phase which is inevitable in social transformations, when dominant and
outstanding individualities succumb to the obliterating rise of
bureaucracies, there was no more picturesque personality than Daniel
Drake. He had come to New York several years before, awaited as a
vaulting spirit who played the game recklessly and who would never cease
to aspire until he had forced his way to the top or been utterly broken
in the attempt.
His career had bordered on the fantastic. As a boy the _Wanderlust_ had
driven him over the face of the globe. A shrewd capacity for making
money of anything to which he put his hand had carried him through
strange professions. He had been a pedler on the Mississippi, cook on a
tramp steamer to Australia, boxed in minor professional encounters,
exhibited as a trick bicycle rider, served as a soldier of fortune up
and down Central America, and returned to his native country to
establish a small fortune in the field of the country fairs.
With the acquisition of capital, he became conservative and
industrious. Reconciled with his family, he had secured the necessary
funds to attempt an operation in the wheat market which, conducted on a
reasonable scale, netted him a handsome profit and enlarged his
activities. His genius for manipulation and trading, which was soon
recognized, brought him into the services of big industries. He made
money rapidly, and married impulsively against the advice of his friends
a woman of social prominence who cared absolutely nothing about him--a
fact which he was the last to perceive.
He next undertook a daring operation, the buying up of the control of a
great industry in competition with an eastern group. A friend whom he
trusted betrayed the pool he had formed, and the loyalty of his
associates, which made him continue, completely bankrupted him. Before
the public had even an inkling of the extent of his catastrophe he had
mended his fortunes by the brilliant stroke, secured control of one of
the subsidiary companies destined for the steel trust, and realized a
couple of millions as his share. When he referred to this moment, which
he often did, he used to say frankly:
"We went into the meeting bankrupt and came out seven millionaires."
He became the leader of a group of young financiers who acquired and
developed with amazing success a chain of impoverished railroads. He
played the game, scrupulous to his word, merciless in a fight, generous
to a conquered enemy, for the love of the game itself. A big man with a
curious atmosphere of amused calm in the midst of the flurry and turmoil
he aroused, he enjoyed the turns and twists of fate with the zest of a
boy gray-eyed, imperturbable, and magnetic, winning even those who saw
in him an ethical and economical danger.
Such was the man who was bending over a great oaken table engrossed in
the piecing together of an intricate picture puzzle, as Bojo came
through the heavy tapestry portieres. Patsie, perched on a corner, was
looking on with approving interest at the happy solving of a perplexing
group. She sprang down, flung her arms about her father in an impulsive
farewell, and came prancing over to Bojo with a laughing warning:
"Whatever you do, _never_ find a piece for him. It makes him madder than
a wet hen. He wants to do it all himself. Now I'm running off. Don't
worry! Go on, talk your old business."
She went off like the flash of a golden bird while Bojo, slightly
intimidated, was wishing she might remain.
"Tom--glad to see you--come in--just a moment--help yourself to a cigar.
Confound that piece, I knew it fitted in there!" Drake left the board
with a lingering regret, shook hands with a grip that seemed to envelop
the young man, and went to the mantel for a match, where a large
equestrian statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni rose threateningly from the
shadows.
"Glad to see you, my boy--my orders are in from the General Manager, and
when the General Manager gives orders I know it means hustle!" By this
title he designated Doris, whose practical ambitions and perseverance he
satirized with an indulgent smile. "Far as I can make out, Doris has
determined to make you a millionaire in a couple of years or so, so I
suppose the best thing is to sit down and discuss it."
As he stood there gaunt and alert against the bronze background, there
was something about him too of the old condottieri, a certain blunt and
hardened quality of the grizzled head, as though he too had just hung
back a steel helmet and emerged tense and victorious from a bruising
scramble.
"Supposing he's figuring out that I'll cost him less than the Duke,"
thought Tom, conscious of a certain proprietary estimation below all the
surface urbanity, and, squaring to the charge, he said: "I'm afraid,
sir, you've a pretty poor opinion of me."
"What do you mean?" said Drake, with sudden interest.
"May I talk to you plainly, sir?" said Tom, a little flustered. "I don't
know just how I feel about Doris or even just how she feels about me. I
certainly have no intention of marrying her until I know what I am worth
myself, and I certainly don't intend to come to you, her father, to make
money for me."
He stopped with a little fear for his boldness, for this had not been
his intention on entering the room. In fact, he had come rather in a
state of indecision, after long discussions with Doris, and much serving
up of sophistries to his conscience; but Drake's greeting had struck at
his young independence, as perhaps it had been meant to do, and an
impulsive wave of indignation overruled his calculations. He stood a
little apprehensive, watching the older man, wondering how he would
receive the defiance.
"That's talking," said Drake, with an approving smile. "Go on."
"Mr. Drake, I can't help feeling that we're going to look at things more
and more from a different point of view. Doris cares for me--I suppose
so--if she can have me without sacrificing anything. I don't express it
very well, but I do feel at times that she's more interested in what she
can make out of me than in me, and I don't know if I'll work out the way
she wants; in fact, I'm not at all sure," he blurted out pugnaciously.
"But I want to work out that way, and if I don't there'll come a smashup
pretty soon."
"There's something in what you say," said Drake, nodding, "and I like
your coming straight out with it. Now look here, my boy, I'm not going
to take hold of you because I expect you to marry Doris, but because I
_want_ you to marry her! Get that down. I can control lots of things,
but I can't control the women. They beat me every time. I'm pulp. I've
given in once, though Lord knows I hope my little girl won't regret it.
I've got one decayed foreign title dangling to the totem-pole, and
that's enough; that's got to satisfy the missus. I don't want another
and I don't want any high-stepping Fifth Avenue dude. I want a man, one
of my own kind who can talk my language."
He arose, took a turn, and clapped him on the shoulder. "I want you. I
settled that in my own mind long ago. Now I'm going to talk as plain to
you. As you get on you'll look at people differently than you do. You'll
see how much is due to accident, the parting of the ways, going to the
left instead of to the right. Now I know Doris. I've watched her. She's
got two sides to her; you appeal to the best. I know it. She knows it.
She wouldn't marry you if you were a beggar--women are that way--but
she'll stick to you loyal, as a regular, if she marries you; and you're
not going to be a beggar."
"Yes, if I consent to close my eyes and let you build--"
"Now don't get huffy. I'm not going to tuck you under my wing," said
Drake, grinning. "Furthermore, I wouldn't want you in the family if I
didn't know you had stuff in you. Don't you think I want some one I can
trust in this cut-throat game? Don't worry, if you're the right sort I
can use you. Now quit thinking too much--let things work out. Doris is
the kind that belongs at the top; she's bound to be a leader, and we're
going to put her there, you and I. Now what do you want to do?"
"I want to stand on my own feet," said Tom, with a last resistance. "I
want to see what I'm worth by myself."
"Wall Street, of course," said Drake, grinning again. "Well, why not?
You'll learn quicker the things you've got to learn, even if it costs
you more."
He flung down in a great armchair, and stared out at the raw recruit as
though for an instant rolling back the years to his own beginnings.
"Tom, if you're going in," he said all at once, "go in with your eyes
open and make up your mind soon what you want; but when you've made up
your mind don't fool yourself. If you want to plod along safe and sane,
you can do it just as well in Wall Street as anywhere else. But I reckon
that's not what you're after." He chuckled at Bojo's confused
acknowledgment of the patness of his surmise and continued:
"Well, then, recognize that what you're going into is war, nothing more
nor less. You see, we're a curious people; we haven't had the chance to
develop as others. And there's something instinctive about war; in a
growing nation it lets off a lot of wild energy. Now there's a group of
the big fellows here that ought to have had a chance at being field
marshals or admirals, and because they haven't the chance they've
developed a special little battlefield of their own to fight each other.
And, say, the big fellows don't fool themselves--they know what they're
doing! They're under no illusions. But there're a lot of big little men
down there who go around hugging delusions to their hearts, who'll sack
a railroad or lay siege to a corporation with the idea they're ordained
to grab the other fellow's property. Now I don't fool myself: that's my
strong point. I'm grabbing as fast as the other fellow, but I know the
time's coming when they won't let us grab any more. I do it because I
want to, because I love it and because we're founding aristocracies here
as the Old World did a couple of centuries ago. Well, to come back to
you. I'll see you start in a good firm--"
"I'd rather do it myself."
"As you wish. Got any money?"
"Fifty thousand dollars," said Tom, who then related his father's
prediction.
"Ordinarily he's a good guesser," said Drake, laughing. "But we may put
one over on him. There's a scheme I've been brewing over for a big
combine in the woolen industry that may give him a pleasant surprise.
Well, then, start in on your own feet, my boy. Learn all you can of men.
Study them--browse around in figures, if you want, but everlastingly
keep your eyes on men! It's the man and not the proposition that's
gilt-edged or empty. You've got to learn how the other fellow thinks,
what he'll do in a given situation, if you're going to think ahead of
him, and that's the quality that counts. That's where I've got them
guessing, every minute of the day; there isn't one of them can figure
out now if I'm twenty millions to the good or ten behind."
"Why, Tom, there was a time when I was stone broke--by golly, even my
creditors were broke, which is an awful thing; and everything depended
on my getting the right backing on the proposition that saved me. Do you
think any one of those sleuth-hounds were on? Not on your life. I was
living at the biggest hotel, in the biggest suite, spilling money all
over the city--on tick, of course. And, say, in the critical week, when
I was dodging my own tailor, I sent the missus (she didn't know
anything, either) up to Fifth Avenue to buy a $100,000 necklace. That
settled it. The other fellows, the fellows whose brains wind up like
clocks, couldn't figure it out. I got my backing."
"But supposing you hadn't," said Bojo involuntarily. He had been
listening to this recital open-eyed like a child at a circus. "What
would have happened?"
Drake laughed contentedly. "There you are. That's all the other fellow
could figure on. Now don't imagine you can do what I did--you can't. I
suppose there's no use telling you not to speculate, because you're
going to, no matter what you think now. You will; because the young
fellow who goes into Wall Street and doesn't think he's a genius in the
first three months hasn't been born yet! But the first time it comes
over you, throw only a third of your capital out of the window. Do you
get me?"
"I won't do that," said Bojo resolutely.
"Go on. Do. You ought. It's cheap at that! I paid seven hundred thousand
for the same information," said Drake, giving him his hand. He caught
his shoulder in his powerful grip and added: "If you get in too much
trouble, come to me! Remember that and good luck!"
CHAPTER VI
BOJO OBEYS HIS GENERAL MANAGER
Three months after his entry into Wall Street, Bojo emerged from his
bedroom into the communal sitting-room in a state of tense excitement.
The day before he had taken his first plunge into the world of
speculation and bought a thousand shares of Indiana Smelter on a twenty
per cent. margin. This transaction, which represented to his mind the
inevitable challenge at the gates of fortune, had left him in a turmoil
through all the restless night. He had taken the decision which was to
decide his future only after a long wrestling with his conscience.
At first he had imposed a limit, promising himself that he would not
touch a penny of his $50,000 capital until he should know of his own
knowledge. Gradually this time limit had contracted. Speculation was in
the air, triumphant and insidious. The whole market was sweeping up
irresistibly. The times were dramatic. Golden opportunity seemed within
every one's grasp. Expansion, development, amalgamation were on every
tongue. Roscoe Marsh had made a hundred thousand on paper. Even Fred
DeLancy had won several turns which had netted him handsome profits.
Bojo had resisted stubbornly at first, turning heedless ears to the
excited arguments of his friends, but the fever of speculation had
entered his veins, he dreamed of nothing else, and gradually the thought
of his $50,000, so modestly invested in four per cent. bonds obsessed
him. What was worse was that each time he had refused to follow a tip of
Marsh or DeLancy or a dozen new-found friends, he secretly noted down
the speculation; and the thought of these dollars he had refused, which
could have been his for the asking, rose up before him in a constant
reproach. In the end it was Doris who decided him.
That indefatigable schemer, whom even he now called the General Manager,
had a dozen times summoned him for an excited consultation on some rumor
which she had caught in passage. At first he had laughed her down, then
he had stubbornly refused such an alliance. But Doris, undaunted,
returned to the charge, amazing him at times with the pertinency of her
information, which she picked up from the wives and daughters, from
those who came as suitors, or as mere friends of the family, while just
as industriously and cleverly she commandeered her acquaintance and sent
Bojo a string of customers which had remarkably affected his progress in
the brokerage offices of Hauk, Flaspoller and Forshay.
Finally he had yielded, because for weeks he had been longing to yield
as a spectator tires of watching inactive the spectacle of the shifting
golden combinations on the green cloth of the gambling table. She had
information of the most explicit sort. A great combination of Middle
Western Smelters had been held up for several weeks by the refusal of
two great companies to enter at the price offered--Indiana Smelter and
Rockland Foundry. She knew positively that the matter would be adjusted
in the next fortnight.
"Did your father say so?" he asked, really impressed, for Drake was
reported as directly interested.
"Not in the first place."
"But where did you get your information?"
"Oh, I have my ways," she said, delighted, "and I keep my secrets too.
Just remember if you'd taken my advice what you'd have made."
"It is astounding how right you've been," he said doubtfully.
"Listen, Bojo, this is absolutely correct. I know it. I can't tell you
now--I promised--but if I could you wouldn't have the slightest doubt.
Can't you trust me just this once? Don't you know that I'm working for
you? Oh, it's such an opportunity for us both. Listen, if you won't do
it, buy five hundred shares for me with my own money. Oh, how can I
convince you!"
He looked away thoughtfully; tempted, convinced, suspecting the source
of her information, but wishing to remain ignorant.
"You are determined to buy?" She nodded energetically. "What does your
father say?"
She seized his idea, saving him the embarrassment of a direct
suggestion.
"If Dad says yes, will that convince you? Wait." She thought a moment,
pacing up and down, humming brightly to herself. Suddenly she turned,
her eyes sparkling with the delight of her own machinations. "I'll tell
you how I'll do it. Next week's my birthday. I'll ask him to give me
the tip as a birthday present." She clapped her hands gleefully, adding:
"I'll tell him it's for my trousseau. If he says all right you won't
refuse."
"No, I won't."
She flung herself joyfully into his arms at this victory won, at this
prospect opened.
"Bojo, I do love you and I do want to do so much for you!" she cried,
tightening her arms about his neck, with more genuine demonstration than
she had shown in months.
"After all, I'd be a fool to refuse," he thought, excited too, and aloud
he said, "Yes, Miss General Manager."
"Oh, call me anything you like if you'll only let me manage you!" she
said, laughing. "Now sit down and let me tell you all I've planned out
for you to do."
That night she told him excitedly over the telephone that her little
scheme had succeeded, that her father had given his O. K., but of course
no one must know. The next day he had bought five hundred shares for
her, and after much hesitation a thousand for his own account at
104-1/2. It was a good risk; the stock had been stable for years; even
if the combination did not go through, there was little danger of a
rapid fall; and if it went up there was a chance at a thirty- or
forty-point rise. He kept the injunction of secrecy, as all such
injunctions are kept, to the point of telling only his closest friends,
Marsh and DeLancy, who bought at once.
Nevertheless, no sooner had the transaction been completed than he had a
sudden revulsion. He had been long enough in Wall Street to have heard
a hundred tales of the methods of big manipulators. What if Dan Drake's
endorsement was only a clever ruse to conceal his real intentions, quits
for reimbursing Doris afterward with a check, according to a famous
precedent? Perhaps he even suspected that he, Bojo, had put Doris up to
it and was taking this method to read him the lesson that his methods
were not to be solved along such lines. At any rate, Tom passed a very
bad night, saying to himself that he had plunged ahead on the flimsiest
sort of evidence and fully deserved a shearing.
A glorious December morning, with a touch of Indian summer, was pouring
through the half-opened window, bearing the distant sounds of steam
riveters. Marsh was busily culling half a dozen newspapers, while Fred
was yawning over the eggs and coffee, when the mail was brought in by
the grinning Oriental who had been dubbed Sweeney. DeLancy, who had the
curiosity of a girl, pounced upon the letters, slinging half a dozen at
Bojo with a grumbled comment.
"Dog ding him if he isn't more popular than me! Important business
letters--Mr. Morgan and Mr. Rockefeller asking your advice--society
invitations--do honor our humble palace, pink envelope, heavily scented.
I say, Bojo, I've gone in deep on your precious stock, two hundred
shares--all I could scrape together. Hope you guess right. Anything I
hate is work, and 10 per cent. margin ought to be bolstered up by divine
revelation."
"Wish the deuce you hadn't," said Bojo, sitting down and opening the
formal announcement of his broker's purchase, which struck his eyes
like a criminal warrant.
"Cheer up," said Marsh, emerging from the litter of papers. "I've got a
tip from another angle, one of the lawyers involved. I'm going in for
another couple of thousand shares. Why so glum, Bojo?"
"Wish I hadn't told you fellows."
"Rats; that's all in the game!" said Marsh, but DeLancy did not look so
philosophical.
Bojo opened several invitations, a notice from the tailor to call for a
fitting, two letters from clients, personal friends, and finally the
pink envelope, which was from Doris.
Bojo dear:
Whatever you do don't tell a soul. Dad questioned me
terrifically and I told a little fib. How many shares did
you buy? Dad made me promise to buy only five hundred, but I
know it's all right from the way he acted. Oh, Bojo, I hope
you make lots and lots of money! Wouldn't Dad be surprised?
He asked me to-night in the funny gruff way he puts on,
'How's that young man of yours getting on? Have they got his
hide yet?' Won't it be a joke on him? By the way, I dined
with the Morrisons (she's an old school chum of mine) and
put in my clever little oar. Don't be surprised if some one
else calls you up soon to place a little order. I'm working
in another direction too. Don't fail to come up for tea.
With much love,
DORIS.
P.S. The Tremaines are _awfully_ influential. Be sure and go
to their dance.
He placed the letter in his pocket thoughtfully, not entirely happy. It
was a fair sample of a score of letters--enthusiasm, solicitude,
ambition, and clever worldly advice, but lacking the one note that
something in him craved despite all the purely mental satisfaction the
prospect held for him.
DeLancy continuing to loiter, he went out, alone, obsessed with the
thought of the opening of the market and the sound of the ticker, and
caught the subway for Wall Street, preoccupied and serious.
It had been three months now since the day when he had first come
downtown to take up service as a broker's runner, and much had changed
within him during that time, much of which he himself was not aware. The
first days he had been rather bewildered and resentful of the menial
beginning. It did not seem quite a man's work--this messenger service,
and the contemplation of those above him, the men at the sheets and the
office clerks, inspired him with a distaste. Often he remembered his
conversation with his father and talks with Granning, the
matter-of-fact; comparing their outlook on the life with his associates
much to the disadvantage of the curiously inconsequential throng of
young men who, like himself, were willing to go scurrying in the rain
and dark on servants' quests, in order to get a peek into the intricate
mysteries of Wall Street that held sudden fortunes for those who could
see.
He had come out of college with a love of manly qualities and the belief
that it was a man's privilege to face difficult and laborious tasks, and
the prevalent type among the beginners was not his type. Then, too, the
magnitude of the Street overpowered him, the skyscrapers without tops
dwarfed him, its jargon mystified him, as the colossal scale of the
operations he saw seemed to rob him of the sense of his own
individuality. But gradually, being possessed of shrewd native sense and
persistence, he began to distinguish in the mob types and among the
types figures that stood out in bold relief. He began to see those who
would pass and those who would persist.
He began to meet the more rugged type, schooled in earlier tests,
shrewd, cautious, and resolved, self-made men who had abrupt ways of
speaking their thoughts, who frankly classed him with other fortunate
youths and assured him that they were there by right, to take away from
them what had been foolishly given and pay them back in experience. He
took their chaffing in good humor, seeking their companionship and their
points of view by preference, gradually disarming their criticism,
secretly resolved that whatever might be the common fate at least he
would not prove a foolish lamb for the shearing.
Steeled in this resolution, he began by setting his face against
speculation, investing his money temporarily in irreproachable bonds,
refusing to listen to all the tips, whispered or openly proffered, which
assailed his ears from morning until night, until the day when he should
know of his own knowledge of men and things. He worked hard, following
Drake's advice, seeking information from men rather than from books,
checking up what each told him by what the next man had to say of his
last informant, mystified often by the glib psychology of finance,
slowly rating men at their just value, no longer lending credulous ear
to the frayed prophets of New Street or thrilling with the excitement of
a thrice confidential tip.
He had advanced rapidly, but underneath all his delight there was an
abiding suspicion that his progress had not been entirely due to his own
glaring accomplishments, but that the name of Crocker, senior, his bank
account, and the magic touch of Daniel Drake had been for much.
CHAPTER VII
UNDER THE TICKER'S TYRANNY
During the last month he had had several tentative approaches from
Weldon Forshay, who was what DeLancy called the social scavenger of the
firm, a club man irreproachably connected, amiable and winning in his
ways, who received uptown clients in the outer office, went out to lunch
with the riding set, who lounged in toward midday for what they termed a
whack at the market. Forshay was a thoroughly good fellow who gave his
friends the best of advice, which was no advice at all, and left
business details to his partners, Heinrich Flaspoller and Silas T. Hauk,
shrewd, conservative, self-made men who exchanged one ceremonial family
dinner party a year with their brilliant associate.
Forshay, who was no fool and neglected no detail of social connections,
had been keen to perceive the advantages of an alliance with the
prospective son-in-law of Daniel Drake, keeping in view the voluminous
transactions that flowed monthly from the keys of that daring
manipulator. The transactions of the last days had been noted with more
than usual interest, and Bojo's announcement of the amount of collateral
which he had to offer as security (he did not, naturally, give the
impression that this was the sum of his holdings) had further increased
the growing affection of the firm for an industrious young man, of such
excellent prospects.
When Crocker arrived, excited and keyed to the whirring sound of the
ticker, Forshay, a splendid American imitation of an English aristocrat,
drew him affably into an inner room.
"I say, Crocker," he said, "the firm's been thinking you over rather
seriously. It isn't often a young fellow comes down here and makes his
way as quickly as you. We like your methods, and I think we've been
quick to recognize them--haven't we?"
"You certainly have," said Tom with real enthusiasm.
"You've brought us business and you'll bring us more. Now some evening
soon I want you to come up to the club and sit down over a little dinner
and discuss the whole prospect." He looked at him benignly and added: "I
don't see why an ambitious man like you who has got what you have ahead
of you shouldn't fit into this firm before very long."
"Provided I marry Miss Doris Drake," thought Bojo to himself. The cool
way in which he received the news made a distinct impression on Forshay,
who went a little further. "We realize that with the friends and backing
you've got you're not on the lookout to stay forever on a salary. What
you want is to get a fair share of the business you can swing, and the
only way is to join some firm. Well, I won't say any more now. You know
what we're thinking. We'll foregather later."
"You're very kind, indeed, Mr. Forshay," said Bojo, delightfully
flustered.
"Not at all. You're the kind that goes ahead. Oh, by the way, the firm
wants me to tell you that from next week your salary will be
seventy-five dollars."
This time Bojo gulped down his surprise and shook hands in boyish
delight.
"Mighty glad to give it to you," said Forshay, laughing. "I see you
think well of Indiana Smelter. Now I don't want you to betray any
confidences, but of course I know how you stand in certain quarters.
There is no harm in my saying that, is there? I've watched you. You
haven't been running after every rumor on the block. You're shrewd.
You're too conservative to invest without some pretty solid reason or to
let your friends in unless you're pretty sure."
"I am pretty sure," said Crocker solemnly.
"I thought so," said Forshay meditatively. "I'm rather tempted to try
the thing myself. I've sort of a hunch about you. I liked you, Tom, from
the first. Hope you hit it hard." He glanced in the direction of the
senior partners and lowered his voice confidentially. "Then it's good to
see one of our own kind make good--you understand?"
In five minutes Bojo had told him in the strictest confidence all he
knew. Forshay received the news with thoughtful deliberation.
"I'd like it better if Dan Drake had said it direct to you," he said,
frowning. "Still, it's valuable. There may be a good deal in it. I think
I can get a line on it myself. Jimmie Boskirk is a good pal of mine and
he'll know. You keep me informed and I'll let you know what I find out.
Go a little slow. Dan Drake is up to a good many tricks. He's fooled
the talent many a time before. Suppose we say Friday night for our
little confab. Good."
The mention of Jimmie Boskirk cast a damper over the delights the
interview had brought Bojo. He did not at once realize how easily
Forshay had played him for the information he desired and how really
valuable he believed it. He was lost in a new irritation. Young Boskirk
had been conspicuously assiduous in his attentions to Doris; and, while
this fact aroused in him no jealousy, he had an uncomfortable feeling
that Boskirk was in fact the source of her information.
But the opening of the market completely drove all other thoughts out of
his mind. For the first time he came under the poignant tyranny of the
flowing tape. Do what he would he could not keep away from it. Indiana
Smelter opened at 104-1/2, went off the fraction, and then advanced to
106 on moderate strength in buying orders.
"A point and a half--$1500--I've made $1500--just like that," he said to
himself, stupefied. He went to his desk, but ten minutes later on the
pretext of getting a glass of water he returned to the tape to make sure
that his eyes had not deceived him. There it was again and no
mistake--200 Indiana Smelter, 106. He sat down at his desk in a turmoil.
Fifteen hundred dollars! Five times what he had made in three months. If
he had bought two thousand shares, as he could have easily, at a safe
twenty per cent. margin, he would have made three thousand. He felt
angry at himself, defrauded, and, drawing a paper before him, he began
to figure out his profits if the stock should go to 140 or 150, as
every one said it must if the combination went through.
Then, in order to realize himself his colossal earnings, he called up
Doris on the telephone to hear the sound of such figures. At one, when
he went out to snatch a mouthful at a standing lunch, he consulted three
tickers, impatient that no further sales had been recorded. When
Ricketts, who was still on the sheets, came up to him with his daily
budget of gossip, he listened avidly. Every tip interested him, fraught
with a new dramatic significance. He felt like taking him aside and
whispering in his ear:
"Listen, Ricketts, if you want a good thing buy Indiana Smelter: it'll
go to 140. I've made fifteen hundred dollars on it in a couple of
hours."
But he did nothing of the sort. He looked very wise and bored, feeling
immensely superior as a capitalist and future member of the firm of
Hauk, Flaspoller and Forshay, over Ricketts, who had started when he had
started and was still on the sheets at fifteen dollars a week.
"Whispering Bill" Golightly, who had the hypnotic art of inducing
clients to buy and sell and buy again all in the same day, on artfully
fluctuating rumors (to no disparagement of his commission account), came
sidling up, and he hailed him regally.
"Hello, Bill, what do you know?"
"Buy Redding," said Golightly softly, with a confidential flutter of the
near eyelid.
"You're 'way behind. I know something better than that. Come around next
week."
He left Golightly smiling incredulously and ambled slowly through the
motley group of New Street, that tragic anteroom to Wall Street, where
fallen kings of finance retell the glories of the past and wager a few
miserable dollars on a fugitive whisper.
"If they only knew what I know," he said to himself, smiling as he
passed on in confident youth, through these wearied old men who in their
misfortune still preferred to be last in the Street if only to be near
Rome. At the offices, high on Exchange Place, looking down on the
huddled group of the curb below in sheepskins and mufflers, flinging
fingered signals in the air to waiting figures in windows above, he
found a new order from Roscoe Marsh and hurriedly had it executed. He
felt like calling up all his friends and asking them to follow his lead
blindly.
He wanted every one to be making money as easily as he could. Before the
market closed Indiana Smelter receded to 105-1/4 and he felt as though
some one had bodily lifted $500 from his pocket. Still he had made a
thousand dollars for the day. He caught the subway with the crowd of
stockbrokers who came romping out of the stock exchange like released
schoolboys after the day's tension, pommeling and shoving each other
with released glee. His first action was to turn to the financial
columns of his newspaper, to make sure there had been no error, to see
in cold print that he had actually made no mistake. During the week
Indiana Smelter climbed irregularly to 111-1/4, broke three points, and
ended at 109 amid a sudden concentration of public interest.
On Saturday, when he came back to his blazing windows in the mellow
half-lights of the court, preparatory to dressing for a party in the
wake of Fred DeLancy, he took the flight two steps at a time, bursting
with the need of pouring out his tale of good fortune to responsive
ears. He found only George Granning, snug in the big armchair, sunk in
the beatific contemplation of an immense ledger.
"What the deuce are you grinning at, you old rhinoceros?" said Bojo,
stopping surprised.
"I'm casting up accounts," said Granning. "I'm twelve hundred and
forty-two dollars ahead of the game. To-morrow you can buy me my first
bond and make me a capitalist. Bojo, congratulate me. I've got my
raise--forty a week from now on--assistant superintendent! What do you
think of that?"
"No!" exclaimed Bojo, who had been dreaming in hundreds of thousands. He
shook hands with all the enthusiasm he could force. Then a genuine pity
seized him for the inequalities of opportunity. He seized a chair and
drew it excitedly near his friend. "Granny, listen to me. Do you know
what I have made in ten days? Almost five thousand dollars! Now you know
nothing in this world would let me get you in wrong, unless I knew.
Well, Granny, I know! I'll guarantee you--do you understand--that if
you'll let me take your thousand and invest it as I want, I'll double
your capital in a month."
"Thank you, no," said Granning in a way that admitted no discussion.
"The gilt-edged kind is my ambition. Look here, how much money have you
put up?"
"Only twenty thousand."
"Then give me the rest and let me bury it for you."
"I tell you I can sell it now and make $4500. What do you say to that?"
"I'm damned sorry to hear it."
"You're a nice friend."
"Lecturing isn't my strong point," said Granning imperturbably, "but
since you insist, the first lesson in life to my mind is a wholesome
respect for the difficulty of making money."
"You act as though you think I've robbed some old widow, you anarchist!"
"Twelve times 30 is 360, add 12 times 150 times 30," said Granning,
taking up his pencil.
"What the deuce are you figuring out?"
"I'm calculating that at the rate I'm living I can buy another bond in
about ten and three quarter months," said Granning blissfully.
"Oh, go to the devil," said Bojo, retreating into his room.
As he started to dress for the evening he began to moralize, glancing
out at Granning, who continued his figuring, a picture of rugged
happiness.
"Suppose he's thinking of that forty-five dollar a year income now,"
thought Bojo, who began to indulge in many worldly speculations of which
he would have been incapable three months before. After all, if some
people only knew it, it was just as easy to make a hundred thousand as a
thousand. All it required was to recognize that the world was unequal
and always would remain unequal, and toward the top of society, when one
had the opportunity of course, it was all a question of knowledge and
influence.
"Poor old Granny," he said, shaking his head. "In four years I'll be
worth a million and he'll be plodding on, working like a slave,
gloating over a ten-dollar raise." But as he was withal honest in his
values he added: "And the old fellow's worth ten times what I am too!"
He remembered his own raise in salary, but for certain reasons
determined not to risk an ethical comparison.
"Well, Capitalist, good night," he said, arrayed in top hat, fur coat,
and glowing linen.
Granning grunted complacently and called him back as he was
disappearing.
"Hi, there!"
"What?"
"Come over to the factory with me some day and see what real work is."
Bojo slammed the door and went laughing down the stairs.
* * * * *
The buying orders multiplied in Indiana Smelter, the air was full of
rumors, the financial columns accepted as a fact that the combination
was decided, and the stock went soaring in the third week, despite one
day of horrible uncertainty, when the report was spread that all
negotiations were off and Indiana Smelter dropped twelve points. When
135 was reached, Bojo became bewildered. In less than a month he had
cleared over thirty thousand dollars. He could not believe his own
reason. Where had it come from? Did it actually exist or would he wake
up some morning and find it evaporated?
The spinning tack-tack of the ticker was always in his ears. At night
when he started to go to sleep, the room was always full of diabolical
instruments, and great curling streams of thin paper fell over his bed
and Indiana Smelter was kiting up into impossible figures or abruptly
crumbling to nothing. One morning the necessity of actually holding in
his own hands these enormous sums which he had been incredulously
contemplating all these weeks was so imperious that he sold out as the
stock reached 138-1/4.
For a day a feeling of sublime liberation came to him, as though the
clicking tyranny were forever vanished from his ears. In his pocket was
certainty, incredible but tangible, a check to his order for over
thirty-three thousand dollars. When once this certainty had impressed
itself upon him he had a quick revulsion. It seemed to him that what he
had done was grossly immoral, as though he had thrown his money on a
gambling table and won fabulously with a beginner's luck. Some
providence must have protected him, but he resolved firmly never to
repeat the test.
He informed Granny of this decision, admitting frankly all the appetite
for gain, the reckless, dangerous excitement it had roused in him. He
spoke with such profound conviction, being for the moment convinced
himself, that Granny's skepticism was conquered, and they shook hands
upon Bojo's sudden enlightenment.
But the next day, when he had gone up to the Drakes and exhibited the
check for the delectation of Doris, his good intentions began to waver
in the flush of triumph.
"Now, aren't you glad you listened to a wise little person who is going
to make your fortune?" she said, thrilled at the sight of the check.
"Who gave you the tip, Doris?" he said uneasily. "You can tell me now."
"Ask me no questions--"
"A man or a woman?" he persisted, seeking a subterfuge, for the thought
of asking pointblank if he owed his fortune to Boskirk was repugnant.
She hesitated a moment, divining his qualms.
"Promise to ask no more questions."
"If you'll tell me."
"A woman, then."
He pretended to himself a great satisfaction, immensely relieved in his
pride, willing to be convinced. Dan Drake came in and Doris, glad of the
interruption, displayed the check in triumph.
"So that's it, is it?" said Drake, glancing up at Bojo, who looked
sheepishly happy. And assuming an angry air, he caught Doris by the ear.
"A traitor in my own household, eh?"
"What do you mean?" she said, defending herself.
"I mean the next time you wheedle such inside information out, just
remember you've got a daddy."
"Now, Dad, don't be horrid and take away all my fun. Isn't it glorious!"
"Very," said Drake with a grimace. "I congratulate you, young scamps.
Your getting in and spreading the good news among the bosom friends--"
he glanced at Bojo, who flushed--"cost me a couple of hundred thousand
more than I intended to pay. I guess, young man, it'll be cheaper for me
to have you inside my office than out!"
"I didn't realize, sir--"
"No reason you should, but I want to tell you and your General Manager
so that you won't get any mistaken ideas of your Napoleonic talents,
that there was a moment ten days ago when the whole combination came
near a cropper, wherever you got your information." He stopped, looked
at his daughter severely, and said: "By the way, where _did_ you get
your information, young lady?"
Doris laughed mischievously, not at all deceived by his assumed anger.
"I have my own sources of information," she said, imitating his manner.
The father looked at her shrewdly, amused at the intrigue he divined.
"Well, this is my guess--"
But Doris, flinging herself, laughing, at him, closed his lips with her
pretty hand.
"She used Boskirk to help me," thought Bojo, perceiving her start of
fear and the shrewd smile on the face of the father.
He did not pursue the matter, but the conviction remained with him.
Despite his new-found resolutions he was surprised to find that the
obsession of the ticker still held him. With the announcement of the
completion of the Smelter merger, Indiana Smelter rose as high as
142-3/4, and the thought of these thousands which he might have had as
easily as not began to annoy him. He forgot that he had condemned
speculation in the contemplation of what might have been.
Looking back, it seemed to him that what he had made was ridiculously
small. If he had played the stock as other resolute spirits conducting
such campaigns for fortune, he should have thrown the rest of his
capital behind the venture once he was playing on velvet. He figured out
a dozen ways by which he might have achieved a master stroke and
trebled, even quadrupled, his profits, and the more his mind dwelt upon
it the more eager he became to embark into a fresh venture. Dan Drake
had hinted at taking him into his office. He began to long for the time
when the proposition would be again offered to him, to accept, to be
privileged to play the game as others played it--with marked cards.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RETURN OF PATSIE
During this time Bojo had seen much of life. Marsh was too busily
occupied in the detailed exploration of the machinery and organization
of his paper to be often available, and Bojo's time was pretty evenly
divided between the formal evenings in Doris's set and the excursions
with Fred DeLancy into regions not quite so orthodox. He began to see a
good deal behind the scenes, to marvel at the unbending of big men of a
certain suddenly enriched type, at their gullibility and curious
vanities of display. He himself had an innate love of refinement and an
olden touch of chivalry in his attitude toward women, and went through
what he saw without more harm than disillusionment, wiser for the
lesson.
To his surprise he found, that what DeLancy had estimated of his social
values was quite true. Fred was in great demand at quiet dances in
discreet salons at Tenafly's and Lazare's, where curious elements
combined to distract the adventurer, rich at forty-five, who, after a
life of Spartan routine, awoke to the call of pleasure and curiosity at
an age when other men have solved their attitude. Fred was looked upon
as a sort of _enfant gate_ to be rewarded after a gay night with an
easily tossed off order for a thousand shares of this or that to make
his commission. It did not take Bojo long to perceive the inherent
weakness in DeLancy's lovable but pleasure-running character, nor to
speculate upon his future with some apprehension, despite all Fred's
protestations that he was shrewd as they are made, and jolly well alive
to the main chance every minute of the day.
Bojo had been admitted far enough into his confidence to know that there
was already some one in the practical background, a Miss Gladys Stone,
financially a prize who had been caught with the volatile gaiety and
amusing tricks of Fred DeLancy. DeLancy in fact, in moments of serious
intimacy, openly avowed his intention of settling down within a year or
two at the most, and Bojo, with the memory of riotous nights from which
he had with difficulty extracted the popular Fred, owned to himself that
the sooner this occurred the better he would be suited.
He had met Gladys Stone once when he had dropped in on Doris, and he had
a blurred recollection of a thin, blond girl, who giggled and chattered
a great deal and spoke several times of being bored by this or that, by
the opera where there was nothing new, by dinner parties where it was
such a bore to talk bridge, by Palm Beach, which was getting to be a
bore because cheaper hotels had gone up and every one was being let in,
but who would go off into peals of laughter the moment Fred DeLancy
struck a chord on the piano and imitated a German ballade.
"Gladys is a good soul at bottom. She's crazy about Fred and he can
marry her any day he wants her," said Doris, sitting in judgment.
"Do you think it would turn out well?" he said.
"Why not? Gladys hasn't a thought in her head. She'll be a splendid
audience for Fred. He isn't the sort of a person ever to fall
desperately in love."
"I don't know about that," said Bojo, with an uneasy recollection of a
certain alluring but rather obvious little actress, respectable but
entirely too calculating to his way of thinking, whom Fred had been
seeing entirely too much.
"Nonsense! That sort of person is always thinking of the crowd. Besides
Gladys is too stupid to be jealous. It's a splendid match. She'll get a
husband that'll save her house from being a bore, and he'll get a pile
of money: just what each needs."
He saw Doris three or four times a week. She had become a very busy
lady, constantly complaining of the fatigues of a social season. Fred
DeLancy, who, with Marsh, had been admitted to intimacy, made fun of her
to her face in his impudent way, pretending a deep solicitude for the
overburdened rich.
"But it's true," said Doris indignantly. "I haven't a minute to myself.
I'm going from morning to night. You haven't an idea how exacting our
lives are."
"Tell me," said DeLancy, assuming a countenance of commiseration, while
Bojo laughed.
"Horrid beast!" said Doris, pouting. "And then there's charity; you've
no idea how much time charity takes. I'm on three committees and we have
to meet once a week for luncheon. Then I'm in the show for the benefit
of some hospital or other, and now they want us to come to morning
rehearsals. Then there's the afternoon bridge class until four, and half
a dozen teas to go through, and back to be dressed and curled and start
out for dinner and a dance, night after night. And now there's Dolly's
wedding coming on, and the dressmaker and the shopping. I tell you I'm
beginning to look old already!"
She glanced at the clock and went off with a sigh to be decked out for
another social struggle, as Mrs. Drake entered. The young men excused
themselves. Bojo never felt quite comfortable under the scrutiny of the
mother's menacing lorgnette. She was a frail, uneasy little woman, who
dressed too young for her age, whose ready tears had won down the
opposition of her husband, much as the steady drip of a tiny rivulet
bores its way through granite surfaces. She did not approve of Bojo--a
fact of which he was well aware--and was resolved when her first
ambition had been gratified by Dolly's coming marriage to turn her
forces on Doris.
At present she was too much occupied, for there were weak moments when
Dolly, for all her foreign education, rose up in revolt, and others when
Mr. Drake, incensed at the cold-blooded conduct of the pre-nuptial
business arrangements, had threatened to send the whole pack of impudent
lawyers flying. Patsie had been packed off on a visit to a cousin after
a series of indiscretions, culminating in a demand to know from the Duke
what the French meant by a _mariage de convenance_--a request which fell
like a bombshell in a sudden silence of the family dinner.
It was a week before the wedding, as Bojo was swinging up the Avenue
past the Park on his way to Doris, that he suddenly became aware of a
young lady in white fur cap and black velvets skipping toward him,
pursued by a terrier that had a familiar air, while from the attendant
automobile a tall and scrawny spinster was gesticulating violently and
unheeded. The next moment Patsie had run up to him, her arm through his,
Romp leaning against him in recognition, while she exclaimed:
"Bojo, thank Heaven! Save me from this awful woman!"
"What's wrong, what's the matter?" he said, laughing, feeling all at
once a delightful glow at the sight of her snapping eyes and breathless,
parted lips.
"They've brought me back and tied a dragon to me," she cried
indignantly. "I won't stand it. I won't go parading up and down with a
keeper, just like an animal in a zoo. It's all mother's doings, and
Dolly's, because I miffed her old duke. Send the dragon away, please,
Bojo, please."
"What's her name?" he said, with an eye to the approaching car.
"Mlle. du Something or other--how do I know?"
The frantic companion now bearing down, with the chauffeur set to a
grin, Bojo explained his right to act as Miss Drina's escort, and the
matter was adjusted by the _demoiselle de compagnie_ promising to keep a
block behind until they neared home.
Patsie waxed indignant. "Wait till I get hold of Dad! I'll fix her! The
idea! I'm eighteen-- I guess I can take care of myself. I say, let's
give them the slip. No? Oh, dear, it would be such fun. I'm crazy to
slip off and get some skating. What do you think? Can't even do that.
Too vulgar!"
"What did you say to the Duke that raised such a row?" said Bojo,
pleasantly conscious of the light weight on his arm.
"Nothing at all," said Patsie, with an innocent face; but there was a
twinkle in the eyes. "I simply asked what this _mariage de convenance_
was I heard them all talking about, and when he started in to make some
long-winded speech I cut in and asked him if it wasn't when people
didn't love each other but married to pay the bills. Then every one
talked out loud and mother looked at me through her telescope."
"You knew, of course," said Bojo reprovingly.
Drina laughed a guilty laugh.
"I don't think Dolly wants to marry him a bit," she declared. "It's all
mother. Catch me marrying like that."
"And how are you going to marry?"
"When I marry, it'll be because I'm so doggoned in love I'd be sitting
out on the top step waiting for him to come round. If I were engaged to
a man I'd hook him tight and I wouldn't let go of him either, no matter
who was looking on. What sort of a love is it when you sit six feet
apart and try to look bored when some one rattles a door!"
"Patsie--you're very romantic, I'm afraid."
She nodded her head energetically, rattling on: "Moonlight, shifting
clouds, heavily scented flowers, and all that sort of thing. Never mind,
they'd better look out. I'm not going to stand this sort of treatment.
I'll elope."
"You wouldn't do that, Patsie."
"Yes, I would. I say, when you and Doris marry will you let me come and
stay with you?"
"We certainly will," he said enthusiastically.
"Then what are you waiting for?"
"I'm waiting," said Bojo dryly, after a pause, "until I have made enough
money of my own."
"Good for you," she said, as if immensely relieved. "I knew you were
that sort."
"And when are you coming out?" he asked, to turn the conversation.
"The night before the wedding. Isn't it awful?"
"You'll have lots of men hanging about you--crazy about you," he said
abruptly.
"Pooh!"
"Never mind, I shall watch over you carefully and keep the wrong ones
away."
"Will you?"
He nodded, looking into her eyes.
"Good for you. I'll come to you for advice."
They were at the house, the lemon livery of the footmen showing behind
the glass doors.
"I say," said Patsie, with a sudden mischievous smile, "meet me at the
corner to-morrow at four and we'll go off skating."
He shook his head sternly.
"Bojo, please--just for a lark!"
"I will call for you in a proper social manner perhaps."
"Will Doris have to be along?" she asked, thoughtfully.
"I shall of course ask Doris."
"On second thoughts, no, thank you. I think I shall go to my
dressmaker's," she said, with a perfect imitation of his formal
tone--and disappeared with a final burst of laughter.
* * * * *
He went in to see Doris with a sudden determination to clear up certain
matters which had been on his conscience. As luck would have it, as he
entered the great anteroom Mr. James Boskirk was departing. He was a
painstaking, rather obvious young man of irreproachable industry and
habits, a little over serious, rated already as one of the solid young
men of the younger generation of financiers, who made no secret of the
fact that he had arrived at a deliberate decision to invite Miss Doris
Drake into the new firm which he had determined to found for the
establishment of his home and the perpetuation of his name.
It seemed to Bojo, in the perfunctory greeting which they exchanged as
civilized savages, that there was a look of derogatory accusation in
Boskirk's eyes, and, infuriated, he determined to bring up the subject
of Indiana Smelter again and force the truth from Doris.
He came in with a well-assumed air of amusement, adopting a sarcastic
tone, which he knew she particularly dreaded.
"See here, Miss General Manager, this'll never do," he said lightly. "I
thought you were cleverer than that."
"What do you mean?" she said, instantly scenting danger.
"Letting your visits overlap. I only hope you had time to manage all Mr.
Boskirk's affairs. Only, for Heaven's sake, Doris, now that you've got
him in hand, get him to change his style of collar and cuffs. He looks
like the head of an undertakers' trust."
The idea that he might be jealous pleased her.
"Poor Mr. Boskirk," she said, smiling. "He's a very straightforward,
simple fellow."
"Very simple," he said dryly. "Well, what more information has he been
giving you?"
"He does not give me any information."
"You know perfectly well, Doris, that he gave you the tip on Indiana
Smelter," he said furiously, "and that you denied because you knew I
would never have approved."
"You are perfectly horrid, Bojo," she said, going to the fireplace and
stirring up the logs. "I don't care to discuss it with you."
"I'm sorry," he said, "but you've hurt my pride."
"How?"
"Good heavens, can't you see! Haven't you women any sense of fitness?
Don't you know that some things are done and some things are not done?"
She came to him contritely and put her hands on his shoulders.
"Bojo, why do you reproach me? Because I am only thinking of your
success, all the time, every day? Is that what you are angry about?"
He felt like blurting out that there was something in that too, that he
wanted the privilege of feeling that he was winning his own way; but
instead he said:
"So it was Boskirk."
She looked at him, hesitated, and answered:
"No, it wasn't. But if it had been why should you hold it against me?
Why don't you want me to help?--for you don't!"
He resolved to be blunt.
"If you would only do something that is not reasonable, not calculated,
Doris! But everything you do is so well considered. You didn't use to
be this way. I can't help thinking you care more about your life in
society than you do me. It's the worldly part of you I'm afraid about."
She looked into his eyes steadily a moment and then turned her head away
and nodded, smiling in assent.
"Heavens, Doris, if you want to do like Dolly, if you want a position,
or a title, say so and let's be honest."
"But I don't-- I don't," she cried impetuously. "You don t know how I
have fought--" she stopped, not wishing to mention her mother and,
lifting her glance to him anxiously, said: "Bojo, what do you want me to
do?"
"I want you to do something uncalculated," he burst out--"mad,
impulsive, as persons do who are wild in love with each other. I want
you to marry me now."
"Now!"
"Listen: With what I've got and my salary I can scrape up ten
thousand--no, don't spoil it-- I don't want any money from you. Will you
take your chances and marry me on my own basis now?"
She caught her breath and finally said, marking each word:
"Yes--I--will--marry--you--now!"
He burst out laughing at the look of terror in her eyes at the thought
of facing life on ten thousand a year.
"Don't worry, Doris," he said, taking her in his arms. "I wouldn't be so
cruel. I only wanted to hear you say it."
"But I did--I will--if you ask it," she said quickly.
He shook his head.
"If you'd only said it differently. Don't mind me--I'm an idiot--and you
don't understand."
What he meant was that he was an idiot, when he was getting so much that
other men coveted, to insist on what was not in her charming, facile
self to give him. An hour later, after an interview with Daniel Drake,
he was ready to wonder what had made him flare up so quickly--Boskirk's
presence perhaps, or something impulsive which had awakened within him
when Drina had flushed while describing her distinct ideas upon the
subject of the sentiments.
But a new exhilaration effectively drove away all other emotions--the
delirious appetite for gain which had come irresistibly and tyrannically
into his life with the dramatic intensity of his first speculation. In
the interim in Daniel Drake's library, with Doris perched excitedly on
the arm of his chair, several things had been decided. A great operation
was under way which promised an unusual profit. Bojo was to place
$50,000 in the pool which was to be used to operate in the stocks of a
certain Southern railroad long suspected to be on the verge of a
receivership, at the end of which campaign he was to enter Mr. Drake's
service in the role of a private secretary.
Meanwhile he was to continue in the employ of Hauk, Flaspoller and
Forshay, the better to figure in the mixed scheme of manipulation which
would be necessary. He was so seized with the drama of the opportunity,
so keen over the thought of being once more a part of all the whirling,
hurtling machinery of speculation that he did not remember even for a
passing thought, the horror which had come over him at his first
incredible success.
CHAPTER IX
THE WEDDING BALL
The wedding of Miss Dolly Drake to the Duke of Polin-Crecy was the event
of the season. It was preceded by a ball which marked the definite
surrender of the last recalcitrant members of New York society to the
ambitions of Mrs. Drake. Such events have a more or less public quality,
like a performance for charity or a private view at an important
auction. Every one who could wheedle an invitation by hook or crook,
arrived with the rolling crowd that blocked the avenue and side streets
and necessitated a special detachment of the police to prevent the mob
of enthusiastic democrats from precipitating themselves on the ducal
carriage and tearing the ducal garments in shreds in the quest of
souvenirs.
The three young men from Ali Baba Court arrived together, abandoning
their taxicab and forcing their way on foot to the front. Marsh, who was
always moved to sarcasm by such occasions, kept up a running comment.
"Marvelous exhibition! Every one who's gunning for Drake is here
to-night. There's old Borneman. He's been laying for a chance to catch
Daniel D. on the wrong side of the market ever since Drake trimmed him
in a wheat corner in Chicago. By Jove, the Fontaines and the Gunthers.
They're going to this as to a circus. Why the deuce didn't the cards
read Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Drake invite you to meet their enemies!"
"Never mind," said Bojo, laughing. "It's Mrs. Drake's night--she'll be
in her glory, you can bet."
"Oh, you'll be as bad as the rest," said Marsh, who spoke his mind.
"Tom, you're doomed. I can see that. You've got a feminine will to
contend with, so make your mind up to the inevitable. There's Haggerdy's
party now--every bandit in Wall Street'll be here figuring up how they
can get at their host. Well, Bojo, you're lost to us already."
"How so?"
"In this game, you never pay attention to your friends--you've got to
entertain those who dislike you, to make sure they'll have to invite you
to some function or other where everybody must be seen. Well, I know
what I'll do, I'll get hold of the youngest sister, who is a trump, and
play around with her."
Bojo looked at him uneasily; even this casual interest in Patsie
affected him disagreeably. DeLancy had deserted them to rush over to the
assistance of the Stones, who were just arriving.
"I hope he gets her," said Marsh, studying the blond profile of Miss
Gladys Stone.
"I believe there's some sort of an understanding."
"The sooner the better--for Freddie," said Marsh, with a shake of his
head. "The trouble with Fred is he thinks he's a cold thinking machine,
and he's putty in the hands of any woman who comes along."
"I'm worried about a certain person myself," said Bojo.
But at this moment Thornton, one of Mr. Drake's secretaries, touched him
on the arm.
"Will you please come to the library, Mr. Crocker? Mr. Drake has been
asking for you to witness some papers."
In the library off in a quiet wing he found a party of five gathered
about the table desk, lawyers verifying the securities for the marriage
settlement, Maitre Vondin, a stubby, black-bearded Frenchman imported
for the occasion, coldly incredulous and suavely insistent, the storm
center of an excited group who had been arguing since dinner. Drake, by
the fireplace, was pacing up and down, swearing audibly.
"Is the _gentleman_ now quite satisfied?" he said angrily.
Maitre Vondrin smiled in the affirmative.
Drake sat down at the table with the gesture of brushing away a swarm of
flies and signed his name to a document that was placed before him,
nodding to Bojo to add his signature as a witness.
"Pity some of our corporations couldn't employ Vondrin," said Drake,
rising angrily. "There wouldn't be enough money left to keep a savings
bank."
Other signatures were attached and the party broke up, Maitre Vondrin,
punctilious and unruffled, bowing to the master of the house and
departing with the rest.
Drake's anger immediately burst forth.
"Cussed little sharper! He was keen enough to save this until now. By
heavens, if he'd sprung these tactics on me a week ago, his little Duke
could have gone home on a borrowed ticket."
Bojo learned afterward that the lawyer for the noble family had refused
to take Drake's word on a single item of the transfer of property,
insisting on having every security placed before his eyes, personally
examining them all, wrangling over values, compelling certain
substitutes, even demanding a personal guarantee in one debated issue of
bonds.
"God grant she doesn't come to regret it," said Drake, thinking of his
wife. His anger made him careless of what he said. "Tom, mark my words,
if ever this precious Duke comes to me for money--as, mark my words, he
will--I'll make him get down on his knees for all his superciliousness,
and turn somersaults like a trick dog. Yes, by heaven, I will!"
Bojo was silent, not knowing what to say, and Drake finally perceived
it.
"It isn't Dolly's fault," he said apologetically. "She's a good sort.
This isn't her doing. There was a time when her mother-- Well, I'll say
no more. Nasty business! Tom, I'll bless the day when I see Doris safe
with you, married to a decent American." He took a turn or two and said
abruptly, trying to convey more than he expressed: "Don't wait too long.
It's a bad atmosphere, all this--there are influences--it isn't fair to
the girl, to Doris. Money be damned! I'll see you never have to ask your
wife for pocket money. No, I won't present it to you. We'll make it
together. There are a lot of buzzards sitting around here to-night,
calculating I'm loaded up to the brim and ready for a plucking. Well,
Tom, I'm going to fool them. I'm going to make them pay for the
wedding."
The idea struck him. He burst out laughing. His eyes snapped with a
sudden project.
"Here," he said, clapping Bojo on the shoulder. "Forget what you've
heard. Go in and take a look at Doris. She's a sight for tired eyes." He
held his hand. "Are you willing to risk your money with me--go it blind,
eh?"
"Every cent I have, Mr. Drake," said Bojo, drawn to him by the dramatic
sympathies the older man knew how to arouse; "only I don't want any
favors. If we lose I lose."
"We won't lose," said Drake and, drawing Bojo's arm under his, he added:
"Come on. I've got to get a smile on my face. So here goes."
Bojo found Doris in the corner of the ballroom assiduously surrounded by
a black-coated hedge of young men. He had a moment's thrill at the sight
of her, radiant and dazzling with every art of dressmaker and
hairdresser, revealed in a sinuous arrangement of black chiffon with
mysterious sudden sheens of gold. She came to him at once, expectancy in
her eyes; and the thought that this prize was his, that hundreds would
watch them as they stood together, acknowledging his right, gave him a
sudden swift sense of power and conquest.
"I was with your father," he said, in explanation, "to witness some
papers. Say, Doris, how every woman here must hate you to-night!"
"It's all for you," she said, delighted. "Dance with me. Tell me what
happened. There's been a dreadful row, I know, for days. Mother and
father haven't spoken except in public, and Dolly's been moping."
"It was something about the settlements. Your father was white-hot all
right."
"We won't have more than a round or two," she said. "I've kept what I
could for you--the supper dance, of course. Every one is here!"
"I should say so. Your mother is smiling all over. She even favored me.
Look out, though, Doris--she'll begin on you."
[Illustration: "'Just you wait; you're going to be one of the big men
some day!'"]
"Don't worry, Bojo," she said in a whisper, with a little pressure of
his arm. She was quite excited by the brilliance of the throng, at her
own personal triumph and the good looks of her partner. "I want
something I can make myself, and we'll do it too. Just you wait, you're
going to be one of the big men one of these days, and we'll have our
house and our parties--finer than this, too!"
This time he fell into her mood, turning her over to another partner
with a confident smile, exhilarated with the thought of little
supremacies in regions of brilliant lights and dreamy music. Fred
DeLancy, back from a dance with Gladys Stone, stopped him with an
anecdote.
"I say, Bojo, wish you could have seen some of the old hens inspecting
the palace. You know Mrs. Orchardson, Standard Oil? I was right back of
her when she wandered into some Louis or other room, and what did she
do? She ran her thumbnail into a partition and whispered to her
neighbor: 'Ours is real mahogany'! Don't they love one another, though?"
By the buffet groups of men were smoking, glass in hand, Borneman and
Haggerdy talking business. In the ante-chamber where the great marble
staircase came winding down, he found Patsie at bay repelling a group
of admirers. She signaled him frantically.
"Bojo; rescue me. They're even quoting poetry to me!"
She sprang away and down the stairs to his side, hurrying him off.
"Faster, faster! Isn't there any place we can hide? My ears are dropping
off."
"Patsie, I never should have known you!" he said, amazed.
"Well, I'm out!" she said, with an indignant pout. "How do you like me?"
She stood away from him, a little malicious delight in her eyes at his
bewilderment, her chin saucily tilted, her profile turned, her little
hands balanced in the air.
"This is the way the models pose. Well?"
"I thought you were a child--" he said stupidly, troubled at the sudden
discovery of the woman.
"Is that all?" she said, pretending displeasure.
He checked an impulsive compliment and said a little angrily:
"Oh, Patsie, you are going to make a terrible amount of trouble. I can
see that!"
"Pooh!"
"Yes, and you like the mischief you're causing too. Don t fib!"
"Yes, I like it," she said, nodding her head. "Dolly and Doris stared at
me as if I were a ghost. Well, I'll show them I'm not such a savage."
"I hope you won't change," he said.
"Won't I?" she said, and to tease him she continued, "I'll show them!"
He felt sentimentally moved to give her a lecture, but instead he said,
deeply moved:
"I'd hate to think of your being different."
"Oh, really?" she continued irrelevantly. "You didn't bother your soul
about me while you thought I was nothing but a tomboy and a terror! But
now when there are a lot of black flies buzzing around me--"
"Now, Patsie, you know that isn't true!"
She relented with a laugh.
"Do you really like me like this? No, don't say anything mushy. I see
you do. Oh, dear, I knew this old money would find me," she said,
suddenly perceiving a plump youngster with a smirch of a mustache
bearing down. "Please, Bojo, come and dance with me--often."
He more than shared the evening with her, quite unconscious of the
effect she had made on him, constantly following her in the confusion of
the dances, pleased when at a distance she saw his look and smiled back
at him.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, in the buffet, Haggerdy and Borneman, in the midst of a
group, discussed their host; that is, Borneman discussed and Haggerdy,
stolid as a buffalo, with his great emotionless mask, nodded
occasionally.
"Well, Dan's at the top," said Marcus Stone. "Dukes come high. What do
you think it cost him?"
"Dukes are no longer a novelty," said Borneman. He was rather out of
place in this formal gathering, having about him a curious air of
always being in his shirt-sleeves. A long, sliding nose, lips pursed
like a catfish, every feature seemed alert and pointed to catch the
furthest whisper. Stone nodded and moved off. Borneman drew Haggerdy
into a corner.
"Jim, I have reason to believe Drake's overloaded," he said.
Haggerdy scratched his chin, thoughtfully, as much as to say, "quite
possible," and Borneman continued: "He's stocked up with Indiana
Smelter, and a lot of other things too. I happen to know. He's
long--mighty long of the market. A little short flurry might worry him
considerable. Now, do you know how I've figured it?"
"How?"
"Dan Drake's a plunger, always was. This here duke has cost him
considerable--a million." He glanced at Haggerdy. "Two million
perhaps--and in securities, Jim; nothing speculative; gilt-edged bonds.
That's a million or two out of his reserve--do you get me?--and that's a
lot, when you're carrying a dozen deals at once."
"Well?"
"Well, Dan Drake's a plunger, remember that; he don't see one million
going out--without itching to see where another million's coming in--"
Haggerdy nudged him quietly. At this moment Drake came through the crowd
and perceived them in consultation. A glance at their attitudes made him
divine the subject of their conversation.
"Hello, boys," he said, coming up; "being properly attended to?"
"Dan, that's a pretty fine duke you've got there. Darn sight more
intelligent looking than the one Fontaine picked up," said Borneman.
"Dukes are expensive articles though, Dan. Take more than a wheat corner
to settle up for this, I should say."
"Been thinking so myself," said Drake cheerily. "Well, Al, if I made up
my mind to try a little flyer--just to pay for the wedding, you
understand--what would you recommend?"
"What would _I_ recommend?" said Borneman, startled.
"Exactly. What do you think about general conditions?"
"My feelings are," said Borneman, watching him warily, "the market's
top-heavy. Values are 'way above where they ought to be. Prices are
coming tumbling sooner or later, and then, by golly, it's going hard
with a lot of you fellows."
"You're inclined to be bearish, eh?" said Drake, as though struck by the
thought.
"I most certainly am."
"Shouldn't wonder if you're right, Al. I've a mind to follow your
advice. Sell one thousand Southern Pacific, one thousand Seaboard Air
Line, one thousand Pennsylvania, and one thousand Pittsburgh & New
Orleans. Just as a feeler, Al. Perhaps to-morrow I'll call you up and
increase that. Can't introduce you to any of the pretty girls--not
dancing? All right."
Borneman caught his breath and looked at Haggerdy as Drake went off. If
there was one man he had fought persistently, at every turn biding his
time, it was Daniel Drake, who had thus come to him with an appearance
of frankness and exposed his game.
"It's a bluff," he said excitedly. "He thinks he can fool me. He's in
the market, but he's in to buy."
"Think so?" said Haggerdy profoundly.
"Or he has the impudence to show me his game thinking I won't believe
him. Anyhow, Dan's got something started, and if I know the critter,
it's something big!"
Haggerdy smiled and scratched his chin.
CHAPTER X
DRAKE'S GAME
The evening was still at its height as Daniel Drake left Haggerdy and
Borneman with their heads together puzzling over the significance of his
selling orders.
"Let them crack that nut," he said, chuckling grimly. "Borneman will
worry himself sick for fear I'll catch him again." He looked around for
further opportunities, anxious to avail himself of the seeming chance
which had played so well into his plans. Across the room through the
shift and sudden yield of gay colors he saw the low, heavy-shouldered
figure of Gunther, the banker, in conversation with Fontaine and Marcus
Stone. Gunther, the simplest of human beings, a genius of common sense,
had even at this time assumed a certain legendary equality in Wall
Street, due to the possession of the unhuman gift of silence, that had
magnified in the popular imagination the traits of tenacity, patience
and stability which in the delicately constructed mechanism of
confidence and credit had made him an indispensable balance wheel,
powerful in his own right, yet irresistible in the intermarried forces
of industry he could set in motion. Fontaine was of the old landed
aristocracy; Stone, a Middle-Westerner, floated to wealth on the
miraculous flood of oil.
Aware that every conversation would be noted, Drake allowed several
minutes to pass before approaching the group and, profiting by a
movement of the crowd, contrived to carry off Gunther on the pretext of
showing him a new purchase of Chinese porcelains in the library. They
remained a full twenty minutes, engrossed in the examination of the
porcelains and Renaissance bronzes, of which Gunther was a connoisseur,
and returned without a mention of matters financial. But as Wall Street
men are as credulous as children, this interview made an immense
impression, for Gunther was of such power that no broker was unwilling
to concede that the slightest move of his could be without significance.
To be again in the arena of manipulation awakened all the boyish
qualities of cunning and excitement in Drake. In the next hour he
conversed with a dozen men seemingly bending before their advice,
bullish or bearish, mixing up his orders so adroitly that had the entire
list been spread before one man, it would have been impossible to say
which was the principal point of attack. At two o'clock, as the party
began to thin out, Borneman and Haggerdy came up to shake hands.
Borneman restless and worried, Haggerdy impassive and brooding.
"What, going already? Haven't they been treating you right?" said Drake
jovially.
"Dan, you've a great poker face," said Borneman slyly.
"In what way?"
"That was quite a little bluff you threw into us--those selling orders.
Orders are cheap _before_ business hours."
"So you think I'll call you up in the morning, bright and early, and
cancel?"
Borneman nodded with a nervous, jerky motion of his head.
"I suppose you've been sort of fretting over those orders all evening.
Trouble with you, Al, is _you_ don't play poker: great game. Teaches you
to size up a bluff from a stacked hand."
"I've got your game figured out this time all right," said Borneman,
with his ferret's squint.
"Have you told Haggerdy?" said Drake laughing. "You have. Want a little
bet on it? A thousand I'll tell you exactly what you've figured out."
He took a bill from his pocketbook and held it out tauntingly.
"Are you game?"
Borneman hesitated and frowned.
"Come on," said Drake, with a mischievous twinkle, "the information's
worth something."
This last decided Borneman. He nodded to Haggerdy.
"My check to-morrow if you win. What exactly have I figured your game to
be?"
"You've figured out that I am long to the guzzle in the market and that
I'm putting up a bluff at running down values to get you fellows to run
stocks up on me while I unload. Credit that thousand to my account. I'm
going to use it!"
Haggerdy smiled grimly and handed over the bill, while Borneman,
completely perplexed, stood staring at the manipulator like a startled
child.
"Al, don't buck up against me," said Drake, serious all at once. "Of
course you will, but remember I warned you. Let bygones be bygones or
trim some other fellow."
"I don't forget as easy as that," said Borneman sullenly.
"Great mistake," said Drake, with a mocking smile. "You let your
personal feelings get into your business--bad, very bad. You ought to be
like Haggerdy and me--no friends and no enemies. Well, Al, you will have
a crack at me, I know. If you've figured it out, you've got me. I may
have told you the truth. It's all very simple--either you're right or
you're wrong. Flip up a coin."
Borneman went off mumbling. Haggerdy loitered, ostensibly to shake
hands.
"Drake, you and I ought to do something together," he said slowly, with
his cold, lantern stare.
"Why not?"
"Instead of taking a fling, suppose we work up something worth while.
The market's ready for it."
"And Borneman?"
"Use him," said Haggerdy, with a trace of a smile.
"Why, yes, we might do something together," said Drake, pretending to
consider. "You might do me or I might do you."
"I'm serious."
"So am I." He shook hands and turned back for a final shot. "By the way,
Haggerdy, I'll tell you one thing. Your information's correct. That
federal suit is coming off. Didn't know I knew it? Lord bless you, I
passed it on to you!"
He turned his back without waiting to watch the effect of this
disclosure and returned to the supper room, where he signaled Crocker
and drew him aside.
"Tom, I'll have a little something for you to do to-morrow. It's about
time we started moving things. I'm going to put some orders in through
you and I'm going to operate some through one of my agents. Put this
away in your head--Joseph R. Skelly. Write it down when you get home.
Anything that comes through him, I stand behind. We won't do anything in
a rush, but we'll lay a few lines. To-morrow I want you to sell for
me--" He paused and deliberated, suddenly changing his mind. "No, do it
this way. Call me up from your office at twelve--no, eleven sharp. I've
got that wedding at three. Ask for me personally. Understand? All
right?"
At half past three Fred DeLancy, Marsh and Bojo went out with the last
stragglers. Fred was in high spirits, keeping them in roars of laughter,
on the brisk walk home. He had been with Gladys Stone constantly all the
evening and the two friends had watched a whispered parting on the
stairs.
"I believe it's a go," said Marsh, while DeLancy was passing the time of
day with the policeman at the corner. (Fred was assiduous in his
cultivation of the force; he called it "accident insurance.")
"Something was settled," said Bojo nodding. "They've got an
understanding, I'll bet. I passed them once tucked in back of a palm and
they stopped talking like a shot. Wish we had the infant safely put
away, Fred."
"So do I."
The streets were unearthly stilled and inhuman as they came back to Ali
Baba Court, with all the windows black, and only the iron lanterns at
the entrances shining their foggy welcome.
"Don't feel a bit like sleep," said Bojo.
"Neither do I," said Marsh. He stood looking up at the incessantly
vigilant windows of the great newspaper office now in the charge of the
night watch. "Wonder what's filtering in there? I always feel guilty
when I cut a night. I suppose it's like the fascination of the tape. It
always gets me--the click of the telegraph."
"How are things working out on the paper?" said Bojo.
"Thanks, I'm getting into all sorts of trouble," said Marsh, rather
gloomily, he thought. "I'm finding out a lot of things I don't
know--sort of measles and mumps period. I had no right to be out
to-night. I say, if you get into any other good thing, let me know. I
may need it."
Alone in his room, Bojo did not go to bed at once. He was nervously
awake, revolving in his mind too many new impressions, new ambitions and
strange philosophies. The evening at the Drakes had swept from him his
last prejudices against the adventurous life on which he had embarked.
There was something overpowering in the spectacle of society as he had
seen it, something so insolently triumphant and aloof from all plodding
standards, so dramatically enticing that he felt no longer compunctions
but only fierce desires. The appetite had entered his veins, infusing
its fever. The few words Drake had spoken to him had sent his hope
soaring. He was surprised, even a little alarmed, at the intensity which
awoke in him to risk the easy profits against a greater gamble.
The market went off a shade the next morning, rallied and then weakened
under a steady stream of selling orders. Rumors filled the air of
possible causes known only to the inside group, a conflict of big
interests, a suit for dissolution by a federal investigation. Something
was up-- Drake's name was whispered about, along with Haggerdy's and a
western group. On the Exchange a hundred rumors came into existence like
newly hatched swarms of insects. Some one was steadily bearing eastern
railroads and some one as obstinately supporting them, but who remained
a mystery, eagerly discussed in little knots, fervently alive to a
firmer touch on the strings of speculation.
At eleven o'clock, true to appointment, Bojo called up Daniel Drake on
his private wire and received an order to buy at once 500 shares of
Seaboard Air Line and sell 500 of Pittsburgh & New Orleans. He turned
the order over to Forshay, with the caution of secrecy that had been
transmitted to him. This transaction created quite a flurry, and after a
consultation Forshay was delegated to sound Bojo.
"Personal order from the old man himself?" he said, when he had reported
to him the execution of the order. "Nothing confidential, of course.
Happened to hear you telephone."
"Why, no," said Bojo, telephoning in his report.
"Suppose you've an inkling what's up? Naturally you have," said Forshay.
"Now, I'm not going to beat around the bush or worm things out of you.
We're mighty grateful to you, Tom, for the shot at Indiana Smelter. If
you can let us in on anything, why do so. You understand. I've been
talking things over with Hauk and Flaspoller. If Drake's going into the
market, we don't see why we can't be of use. 'Course, on account of your
relations, he probably wouldn't want to do much openly here. Too many
eyes on us. But what we want you to put up to him is--we can cover
things up as well as any one else. Any orders to be placed quietly, we
can work through certain channels--you understand. By the way, doing
anything on your own account?"
"Not yet."
"Don't want to talk?"
Bojo shrugged his shoulders.
"I'm quite in the dark, Mr. Forshay," he said cautiously.
Forshay took a few steps thoughtfully about the room, stopping curiously
to examine the tape and came back.
"Look here, Tom, if there's anything on a big scale on, why shouldn't we
get a whack at it? You see, I'm putting my cards on the table. We
consider you a sort of a member of the firm. I made you a proposition
once. Perhaps we can better it now." He hesitated, rearranging the
sheets on the desk before him. "I'm trying to see how we could work this
out. It's not exactly etiquette to give commissions down here--though
why the Lord knows. Suppose I work out a scale of salary--to meet, say,
certain eventualities. Let me think that over. Meanwhile here's what
we'd be glad to do. You can't be calling up Drake out here where any one
can be pricking up his ears. Now it may fit in his plans or not, but
there's no harm trying. If he wants to operate through us, and have
things well covered up, it might be better for you to handle it from my
room on a special wire. We'll fix you up in there; glad to." He stopped,
considered Bojo thoughtfully, and added: "Tom, we want some of Drake's
business. No reason in the world why you shouldn't get it. You know us.
You know we can be trusted, and you know we are appreciative--understand?
"I can try," said Bojo doubtfully.
But to his surprise when he approached Drake on the following night he
found a receptive listener.
"Don't know but what I could use your firm," said the operator
thoughtfully. "Not that I'm rushing matters too much, Tom. The market's
pretty strong at present. I want to feel it out. Maybe I could use
them--for what I want them to know. Get your raise, but keep out of the
firm--for the present, anyhow. Just now I'm holding back a little, Tom,
a little early to uncover my game--tell you, though, what you might do;
sell five hundred shares a day of Pittsburgh & New Orleans for me, but
tell them to break it up 50 here and 50 there. I don't mind telling you
one thing, but keep it under your belt; no confidences this time." He
looked up sharply at the young fellow, who twisted on his heel under the
look. "Confidences sometimes react and I don't want the cat out of the
bag. What's Pittsburgh & New Orleans quoted?"
"47-1/8 Closing," said Bojo.
"A month from to-day it'll sell below thirty. And another thing, Tom,
don't go trying any fliers on your own hook, without coming to me. You
had fool's luck once, don't try it again. Remember I'm manipulating this
pool and I have my ways!"
This time Bojo was under no illusions. Despite his warning he knew in
the bottom of his heart that when the moment came he would operate for
himself. However, he resolved on two things: to share his secret with no
one and to watch the course of Pittsburgh and New Orleans for a week
before making up his mind. The first flurry had subsided. To the
surprise of every one the attack ceased over night. The list resumed its
normal position with the exception of several southern railroad stocks,
notably Pittsburgh & New Orleans, which remained heavy, declining
fractionally.
During these days, Bojo resolutely stuck to his resolve, imparting no
information, keeping out of the market himself. On the announcement of
the first order for Drake, his salary was raised to $125 a week and the
affection of the firm showed itself in several invitations to enter the
consultation. Each day Forshay found opportunity to ask in a casual way:
"Not doing anything on your own hook yet, eh? Sort of watching
developments?"
Ten days after the first attack, another flurry arrived, but this time
the attack was from the open, from all the bear cohorts who for months
had been grumbling in vain, predicting disaster from inflation and the
panic that must follow inevitable readjustment. Borneman and his crowd
sold openly and viciously, raiding all stocks alike, particularly
industrials. That day, among other orders, Hauk, Flaspoller and Forshay
sold 10,000 shares of Pittsburgh & New Orleans which broke from 44 to
39-5/8 under savage pounding. Crocker resisted no longer and sold a
thousand for his own account. That day Forshay failed to make his usual
inquiry.
After three days of convulsive advances and speedy falls, the attack
again slackened, but this time the whole list rallied with difficulty,
receding almost imperceptibly, but slowly yielding under a decided
change of public sentiment. When Pittsburgh & New Orleans touched 38,
Bojo squared his conscience to the extent of exacting the most solemn
promises of undying secrecy from Fred DeLancy before communicating to
them the information that had now become a conviction, that he had
placed $50,000 in a pool which Drake was engineering to sell the market
short and make a killing of Pittsburgh & New Orleans. He imparted the
confidence not simply because it had become an almost intolerable secret
to carry, but for deeper reasons. Fred DeLancy had sunk half of his
former profits in the purchase of an automobile and in free spending,
and Marsh was faced with serious losses on the paper from a strike of
compositors and a falling of advertising as the result of the new
radical policy of the editorial page.
CHAPTER XI
BOJO BUTTS IN
Sunday the four were accustomed to lounge through the morning and
saunter down the Avenue for a late luncheon at the Brevoort. On the
present date, Granning was stretched on the window-seat re-reading a
favorite novel of Dumas, Bojo and Marsh pulling at their pipes in a deep
discussion of an important rumor which might considerably affect the
downward progress of Pittsburgh & New Orleans--a possible investigation
by certain Southern States which was the talk of the office--while Fred
at the piano was replaying by ear melodies from last night's comic
opera, when the telephone rang.
"You answer it, Bojo," said DeLancy, "and hist, be cautious!"
Bojo did as commanded, saying almost immediately:
"Party for you, Freddie."
"Male or female voice?"
"Male."
DeLancy rose with a look of relief and tripped over to the receiver. But
almost immediately he crumpled up with a simulation of despair. Bojo and
Marsh exchanged a glance, and Granning ceased reading, at muffled sounds
of explanation which reached them from the other room.
"Pinched," said DeLancy, returning gloomy and, flopping on the piano
stool, he struck an angry chord.
The three friends, according to male etiquette, maintained an attitude
of correct incomprehension while Fred marched lugubriously up and down
the keyboard. "Holy cats, now I am in for it!"
"Louise Varney?" said Bojo.
"Louise! And I swore on my grandmother's knuckles I was going up country
this afternoon. Beautiful--beautiful prospect! I say, Bojo, you got me
into this--you've got to stick by me!"
"What's that mean?"
"Shooting off in the car with us for luncheon. For the love of me, stand
by a fellow, will you?"
Bojo hesitated.
"Go on," said Marsh with a wary look. "If you don't, the infant'll come
back married!"
"Quite possible," said DeLancy, disconsolately.
"I'll go if you'll stand for the lecture," said Bojo severely, for
DeLancy had become a matter of serious deliberation.
"Anything. You can't rub it in too hard," said Fred, who went to the
mirror to see if his hair was turning gray. "And say, for Mike's sake,
think up a new lie-- I'm down to dentist's appointments and mother's
come to town."
Delighted at Bojo's adherence that saved him from the prospects of a
difficult tete-a-tete, he began to recover his spirits; but Bojo,
assuming a severe countenance, awaited his opportunity.
"I say, don't look at me with that pulpit expression," said DeLancy an
hour later as they streaked through the Park on their way to upper
Riverside. "What have I done?"
"Fred, you're getting in deep!"
"Don't I know it?" said that impressionable young man, jerking the car
ahead. "Well, get me out."
"I'm not sure you want to get out," said Bojo.
DeLancy confessed; in fact, confession was a pleasant and
well-established habit with him.
"Bojo, it's no use. When I'm away from her, I can call myself a fool in
six languages. I _am_ a fool. I know I have no business hanging round;
but, say, the moment she turns up I'm ready to lie down and roll over."
"It's puppy love."
"I admit it."
"She's just going to keep you dangling, Fred. You know as well as I do
you haven't a chance even if you were idiotic enough to think of
marrying her. She's not losing her head, you can bet on that. That's why
the mother is on deck."
"Oh, there are half a dozen Yaps with a wad she could have, and any time
she wants to whistle," said Fred pugnaciously.
Bojo decided to change his tactics.
"I thought you were cleverer. Thought you'd planned out your whole
career; remember the night up on the Astor roof--you weren't going to
make any mistakes, oh no! You were going to marry a million. You weren't
going to get caught!"
"Shut up, Bojo. Can't you see how rotten I'm in it? I'm doing my best to
break away."
"Get up a row then and stay away."
"I've tried, but she's too clever for that. Honest, Tom, I think she's
fond of me."
Bojo groaned.
"She thinks you're a millionaire with your confounded style, and your
confounded car--that's all!"
"Well, maybe I will be," said DeLancy with a sudden revulsion to
cheerfulness, "if Pittsburgh & New Orleans keeps a-sliding."
"Suppose we get caught."
"I say, there's no danger of that?" said Fred, alarmed. "I'm in deep."
"No, not much, but there's always the chance of a slip," said Bojo, who
began to wonder if a successful issue would not further complicate
Fred's sentimental entanglements.
At this moment they came to a stop, and Fred said in a comforting tone:
"Louise'll be furious because I brought you."
"You old humbug," said Bojo, perceiving the eagerness in Mr. Fred's
eyes. "You're just tickled to death."
"Well, perhaps I am," said Fred, laughing at his friend's serious face.
"Say, she has a way with her--hasn't she now?"
Miss Louise Varney did not seem over-delighted at the spectacle of a
guest in the party as she came running out, backed by the vigilant
dowager figure of Mrs. Varney, who never let her daughter out of her
charge. But whatever irritation she might have felt she concealed under
a charming smile, while Mrs. Varney, accustomed to swinging in solitary
dignity in the back seat, welcomed him with genuine enthusiasm.
"Well, Mr. Crocker, isn't this grand! You and me can sit here flirting
on the back seat and let them whisper sweet nothings." She tapped him on
the arm, saying in a half voice: "Say, they certainly are a good looking
team now, ain't they?"
The old Grenadier, as she was affectionately termed by her daughter's
admirers, was out in her war paint, dressed like a debutante, fatly
complacent and smiling with the prospect of a delicious lunch at the end
of the drive.
"Say, I think Fred's the sweetest feller," she began, beaming on Bojo,
"and so smart too. Louise says he could make a forchin in vaudeville. I
think he's much cleverer than that Pinkle feller who gets two-fifty a
week for giving imitations on the pianner. Why haven't you been around,
Mr. Crocker?" She nudged him again, her maternal gaze fondly fixed on
her daughter. "Isn't she a dream in that cute little hat? My Lord, I
should think all the men would be just crazy about her."
"Most of them are, I should say," said Bojo, and, smiling, he nodded in
the direction of Fred DeLancy, who was at that moment in the throes of a
difficult explanation.
Mrs. Varney gave a huge sigh and proceeded confidentially.
"'Course Louise's got a great future, every one says, and vaudeville
does pay high when you get to be a top notcher; but, my sakes, Mr.
Crocker, money isn't everything in this world, as I often told her--"
"Mother, be quiet--you're talking too much," said Miss Louise Varney
abruptly, whose alert little ear was always trained for maternal
indiscretions. Mrs. Varney, as was her habit, withdrew into an attitude
of sulky aloofness, not to relax until they were cozily ensconced at a
corner table in a wayside inn for luncheon. By this time Miss Varney had
evidently decided to accept the protestations of DeLancy, and peace
having been declared and the old Grenadier mollified by her favorite
broiled lobster and a carafe of beer, the party proceeded gaily. Fred
DeLancy, in defiance of Bojo's presence, beaming and fascinated,
exchanged confidential whispers and smiles with the girl which each
fondly believed unperceived.
"Good Lord," thought Bojo to himself, now quite alarmed, "this is a
pickle! He's in for it fair this time and no mistake. She can have him
any time she wants to. Of course she thinks he's loaded with diamonds."
Mr. Fred's attitude, in fact, would have deceived a princess of the
royal blood.
"Louis, get up something tasty," he said to the bending _maitre
d'hotel_. "You know what I like. Don't bother me with the menu. Louis,"
he added confidentially, "is a jewel--the one man in New York you can
trust." He initialed the check without examining it and laid down a
gorgeous tip with a careless flip of the finger.
"The little idiot," thought Bojo. "I wonder what bills he's run up.
Decidedly I must get a chance at the girl and open her eyes."
Chance favored him, or rather Miss Varney herself. Luncheon over, while
Fred went out for the car, she said abruptly:
"Let's run out in the garden. I want to talk to you. Don't worry, mamma.
It's all right." And as Mrs. Varney, true to her grenadierial instincts,
prepared to object, she added with a shrug of her shoulders: "Now just
doze away like a dear. We can't elope, you know!"
"What can she want to say to me?" thought Bojo curiously, suffering her
to lead him laughing out through the glass doors into the pebbled paths.
Despite his growing alarm, Bojo was forced to admit that Miss Varney,
with her quick Japanese eyes and bubbling humor, was a most fascinating
person, particularly when she exerted herself to please in little
intimate ways.
"Mr. Crocker, you don't like me," she said abruptly. He defended himself
badly. "Don't fib--you are against me. Why? On account of Fred?"
"I don't dislike you--no one could," he said, yielding to the persuasion
of her smile, "but if you want to know, I am worried over Fred. He is
head over heels in love with you, young lady."
"And why not?"
"Do you care for him?"
"Yes--very much," she said quietly, "and I want you to be our friend."
"Good heavens, I really believe she does," he thought, panic-stricken.
Aloud he said abruptly: "If that is what you want, let me ask you a
question. Please forgive me for being direct. Do you know that Fred
hasn't a cent in the world but what he makes? You can judge yourself how
he spends that."
"But Fred told me he had made a lot lately and I know he expects to make
ten times that in something--" she stopped hastily at a look in Bojo's
face. "Why, what's wrong?"
"Miss Varney--you haven't put anything into it, have you?
"Yes, I have," she said after a moment's hesitation. "Why, he told me
you yourself told him he couldn't lose. You don't mean to say there's
any--any danger?"
"I'm sorry. He shouldn't have told you! There's always a risk. I'm sorry
he let you do that."
"Oh, I oughtn't to have let it out," she said contritely. "Promise not
to tell him. I didn't mean to! Besides--it's not much really."
Bojo shook his head.
"Mr. Crocker-- Tom," she said, laying her hand on his arm, "don't turn
him against me. I'm being square with you. I do care for Fred. I don't
care if he hasn't a cent in the world; really I'm not that sort,
honest."
"And your mother?"
She was silent, and he seized the advantage.
"Why get into something that'll only hurt you both? Suppose things turn
out all right. He'll spend every cent he'll make in a few months. Now
listen, Louise. You're not made for life in a flat; neither is he. It
would be a miserable disaster. I'm sorry," he said, seeing her eyes
fill. "But what I say is true. You've got a career, a brilliant career
with money and fame ahead; don't spoil your chances and don't spoil
his."
"What do you mean?" she said, flaring up. "Then there is some one else!
I knew it! That's where he's going this afternoon!"
"There is no one else," he said, lying outrageously. "I've warned you.
I've told you the real situation. That's all."
"Let's go back," she said abruptly, and she went in silence as far as
the house, where she turned on him. "I don't believe what you've told
me. I know he is not poor or a beggar as you say. Would he be going
around with the crowd he does? No!" With an upspurt of rage of which he
had not believed her capable, she added: "Now I warn you. What we do is
our affair. Don't butt in or there'll be trouble!"
On the return, doubtless for several reasons, she elected to send her
mother in front, and to keep Bojo company on the back seat, where as
though regretting her one revealing flash of temper, she sought to be as
gracious and entertaining as possible. Despite a last whispered appeal
accompanied by a soft pressure of the arm and a troubled glance of the
eyes, no sooner had they deposited mother and daughter than Bojo broke
out:
"Fred, what in the name of heaven possessed you to put Louise Varney's
money in a speculation? How many others have you told?"
"Only a few--very few."
"But, Fred, think of the responsibility! Now look here, straight from
the shoulder--do you know what's going to happen? Before you know it,
you're going to wake up and find yourself married to Louise Varney!"
"Don't jump on me, Bojo," said Fred, miserably. "I'm scared to death
myself."
"But, Fred, you can't do such a thing. Louise is pretty--attractive
enough--I'll admit it--and straight; but the mother, Fred--you can't do
it, you'll just drop out. It'll be the end of you. Man, can't you see
it? I thought you prided yourself on being a man of the world. Look at
your friends. There's Gladys Stone--crazy about you. You know it. Are
you going to throw all that away!"
"If I was sure of a hundred thousand dollars I believe I'd marry Louise
to-morrow!" said Fred with a long breath. "Call me crazy--I am crazy--a
raving, tearing fool, but that doesn't help. Lord, nothing helps!"
"Fred, answer me one question. We all thought, the night of the ball,
you and Gladys Stone had come to an understanding. Is that true?"
Fred turned his head and groaned.
"I'm a cad, a horrible, beastly little cad!"
"Good Lord, is it as bad as that!" said Bojo. "But, Fred, old boy, how
did it happen? How did you ever get in so deep!"
"How do I know?" said DeLancy miserably. "It was just playing around.
Other men were crazy over her. I never meant to be serious in the
beginning--and then--then I was caught."
"Fred, old fellow, you've got to get hold of yourself. Will you let me
butt in?"
"I wish to God you would."
That night Bojo sent a long letter off to Doris, who was staying in the
Berkshires with Gladys Stone as a guest. As a result the two young men
departed for a week-end of winter sports. On the Pullman they stowed
their valises and wandered back into the smoker where the first person
Bojo saw, bound for the same destination, was young Boskirk.
CHAPTER XII
SNOW MAGIC
Boskirk and Bojo greeted each other with that excessive cordiality which
the conventions of society impose upon two men who hate each other
cordially but are debarred from the primeval instincts to slay.
"He wouldn't gamble, he wouldn't take a risk! Oh no, nothing human about
him," said Bojo to Fred, sending a look of antagonism at Boskirk, who
was adjusting his glasses and spreading the contents of a satchel on the
table before him.
"The human cash-register!" said DeLancy. "Born at the age of forty-two,
middle names Caution, Conservatism, and the Constitution. Favorite
romance--Statistics."
"Thank you!" said Bojo, somewhat mollified.
"There was a young man named Boskirk
Who never his duty would shirk,--"
began DeLancy--and forthwith retired into intellectual seclusion to
complete the limerick.
The spectacle of Boskirk immersed in business detail irritated Bojo
immeasurably. The feeling it aroused in him was not jealousy but rather
a sense that some one was threatening his right and his property.
A complete and insidious change had been worked in his moral fiber. The
hazardous speculation to which he was now committed, which was nothing
but the sheerest and most vicious form of gambling, the wrecking of
property, would have been impossible to him six months before. But he
had lived too long in the atmosphere of luxury, and too close to the
master adventurers of that speculative day. Luxury had become a second
nature to him; contact with men who could sell him out twenty times over
had brought him the parching hunger for money. All other ideals had
yielded before a new ideal--force. To impose one's self, making one's
own laws, brushing aside weak scruples, planning above ridiculously
simple and obvious schemes of legal conduct for the ordering of the
multitude, silencing criticism by the magnitude of the operation--a
master where a weak man ended a criminal:--this was the new scheme of
life which he was gradually absorbing.
He had become worldly with the confidence of succeeding. Whatever
compunctions he had formerly felt about a marriage with Doris he had
dismissed as pure sentimentality. There remained only a certain pride, a
desire to know his worth by some master stroke. In this fierce need, he
had lost moderation and caution. With the steady decline of Pittsburgh &
New Orleans, his appetite had increased. It was no longer a fair profit
he wanted, but something miraculous. He had sold hundreds of shares,
placing always a limit, vowing to be satisfied, and always going beyond
it. He had plunged first to the amount of thirty odd thousand, reserving
the fifty thousand which was pledged to the pool, but which he had not
been called on to deliver. But this fifty thousand remained a horrible
ever-present temptation. He resisted at first, borrowing five thousand
from Marsh when the rage of selling drove him deeper in; then finally,
absolutely confident, he had yielded, without much shock to his
conscience, and drawn each day until on this morning he had drawn on the
last ten thousand as collateral.
And still Pittsburgh & New Orleans receded, heaping up before his mind
fantastic profits.
"When asked, 'Don't you tire,'
He said, 'Di diddledee dire--
I never can get enough work.'"
finished Fred with a grimace. "That's pretty bad--but so's the subject."
"Look here, Fred," said Bojo, thus recalled from the tyranny of figures
which kept swirling before his eyes. "I want to talk to you. I'm worried
about your letting Louise Varney in on Pittsburgh & New Orleans; besides
I suspect you've plunged a darned sight deeper than you ought."
And from the moral superiority of a man of force, he read him a lecture
on the danger to the mere outsider of risking all on one hazard--a
sensible pointed warning which DeLancy accepted contritely, in utter
ignorance of the preacher's own perilous position.
It was well after seven when they stepped out on the icy station amid
the gay crowd of week-enders. Patsie, at the reins, halloed to them from
a rakish cutter, and the next moment they were off over the crackling
snow with long, luminous, purple shadows at their sides, racing past
other sleighs with jingling bells and shrieks of recognition.
"Heavens, Patsie, you're worse than Fred with his car! I say, look
out--you missed that cutter by a foot," said Bojo, who had taken the
seat beside the young Eskimo at an imperious command.
"Pooh, that's nothing!" said that reckless person. "Watch this." With a
sudden swerve she drew past a contending sleigh and gained the head of
the road by a margin so narrow that the occupants of the back seat broke
into many cries.
"Here, let me out-- Murder!-- Police!"
"Don't worry, the snow's lovely and soft!" Patsie shouted back,
delighted. "Turned over myself yesterday--doesn't hurt a bit."
This encouraging information was received with frantic cries and demands
on Bojo to take the reins.
"Don't you dare," said the gay lady indignantly, setting her feet firmly
and flinging all the weight of her shoulders against a sudden break of
the spirited team.
"Pulling pretty hard," said Bojo, watching askance the riotous struggle
that whirled past cottage and evergreen and filled the air with a snowy
bombardment from the scurrying hoofs. "Say when, if you need me."
"I _won't_! Tell the back seat to jump if I shout!"
"Holy murder!" exclaimed Fred DeLancy, who so far forgot his animosities
as to cling to Boskirk, possibly with the idea of providing himself a
cushion in case of need.
"Are they awfully scared?" said Patsie in a delighted whisper. "Yes?
Just you wait till we get to the gate. That will make them howl! How's
your nose--frozen?
"Glorious!"
"Too cold for Doris and the rest. Catch them getting chapped up. Their
idea of winter sports is popping popcorn by the fire. Thank heaven
you've arrived, Bojo! I'm suffocating. Hold tight!"
"Hold tight!" sang out Bojo, not without some apprehension as the
sleigh, without slackening speed, approached the sudden swerve which led
through massive stone columns into the Drake estate. The quick turn
raised them on edge, skidding over the beaten snow so that the sleigh
came up with a bump against the farther pillar and then shot forward up
the long hill crowned with blazing porches and to a stop at last,
saluted by the riotous acclaim of a dozen dogs of all sizes and breeds.
"Scared--honor-bright?" said Patsie, leaping out as a groom came up to
take the horses.
"Never again!" said DeLancy, springing to terra firma with a groan of
relief, while Boskirk looked at the reckless girl with a disapproving
shake of his head.
They went stamping into the great hall to the warmth of a great log
blaze, Patsie dancing ahead, shedding toboggan cap and muffler riotously
on the way, for a dignified footman to gather in.
"Don't look so disappointed!" she cried, laughing, as the three young
men looked about expectantly. "The parlor beauties are upstairs
splashing in paint and powder, getting ready for the grand entrance!"
Boskirk and DeLancy went off to their rooms while Bojo, at a sign from
Patsie, remained behind.
"Well?" he said.
"Bojo, do me a favor--a great favor," she said instantly, seizing the
lapels of his coat. "It's moonlight to-night and we've got the most
glorious coast for a toboggan and, Bojo, I'm just crazy to go. After
dinner, won't you? Please say yes."
"Why, we'll get up a party," said Bojo, hesitating and tempted.
"Party? Catch those mollycoddles getting away from the steam-heaters!
Now, Bojo, be a dear. You're the only real being I've had here in weeks.
Besides, if you have any spunk you'll do it," she added artfully.
"What do you mean?"
"Just let Doris get her fill of that old fossil of a Boskirk. Show your
independence. Bojo, please do it for me!"
She clung to him, coquetting with her eyes and smile with the dangerous
inconscient coquetry of a child, and this radiance and rosy youth, so
close to him, so intimately offered, brought him a disturbing emotion.
He turned away so as not to meet the sparkling, pleading glance.
"Young lady," he said with assumed gruffness, "I see you are learning
entirely too fast. I believe you are actually flirting with me."
"Then you will!" she cried gleefully. "Hooray!" She flung her arms about
him in a rapturous squeeze and fled like a wild animal in light,
graceful bounds up the stairs, before he could qualify his
acquiescence.
When he came down dressed for dinner, Doris was flitting about the
library, waiting his coming. She glanced correctly around to forestall
eavesdroppers, and offered him her cheek.
"Is this a skating costume?" he said, glancing quizzically at the
trailing, mysterious silken ballgown of lavender and gold, which
enfolded her graceful figure like fragrant petals. "By the way, why
didn't you let me know I was to have a rival?"
"Don't be silly," she said, brushing the powder from his sleeve. "I was
furious. It was all mother's doings."
"Yes, you look furious!" he said to tease her. "Never mind, Doris,
General Managers must calculate on all possibilities."
She closed his lips with an indignant movement of her scented fingers,
looking at him reproachfully.
"Bojo, don't be horrid. Marry Boskirk? I'd just as soon m
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