WALL STREETBy Robert StewartSSir Richard Steele, in describing the Spectator Club, remarks of the Templer that “most of his thoughts are fit for conversation, as few of them are derived from business.” Nevertheless, almost any man should be able to philosophize more or less pleasantly and instructively over his calling, and if statesmen, soldiers, lawyers and medical gentlemen write autobiographies and describe the various debates, campaigns, litigations and horrible operations they have been engaged in, why should not an old stockbroker chat about his business, and give a little “inside information,” perhaps, about that Street whose ways are supposed to be so tortuous?Go into the Waldorf any afternoon you please, and see which has the more attentive audience, Mr. Justice Truax discussing cases, or Mr. Jakey Field tipping his friends on sugar. Watch the women at a tea and see how their eyes brighten when young Bull, of the Stock Exchange, comes in. Bull has a surer road to smiles and favor than all the flowers and compliments in New York—he has a straight tip from John Gates.Business not fit for conversation! Ask Mr. Morgan if anybody fidgets whenhetalks? Has any clergyman as eager a congregation as the audience Mr. Clews preaches to from the platform in front of his quotation board every morning at eleven o’clock?“Come, ye disconsolate,” then, and if I can’t tell you how to make money, I venture to assert I can interest you in the place where you lost it.There is no place of business, indeed, so pictorial as Wall Street. Sunk down amid huge buildings which wall it in like precipices, with a graveyard yawning at its head and a river surging at its feet, its pavement teeming with an eager, nervous multitude, its street rattling with trucks laden with gold and silver bricks, its soil mined with treasure vaults and private wires, its skyline festooned with ticker tape, its historic sense vindicated by the heroic statue of Washington standing in majestic serenity on the portico of that most exquisite model of the Parthenon, and with the solemn sarcasm of the stately brown church, backed by its crumbling tombstones, lifting its slender spire like a prophetic warning finger in its pathway—this most impressive and pompous of thoroughfares is at once serious and lively, solid and vivacious. You say to yourself this must be a vast business which is so grandly domiciled; and you wonder if the men live up to the buildings.The broker, in fact, who fills the eye of pictorial satire and the country press, is not an admirable object. His tall hat and shiny boots are in too obvious a foreground in sketches of race meetings, uptown cafés and flash clubs. He is represented as a maddened savage on ’Change, and a reckless debauchee at leisure, who analyzes the operations of finance in the language of a monte dealer describing a prize fight, and whose notion of a successful career is something between a gambler, a revolutionist and a buccaneer. He is supposed to vibrate in cheerful nonchalance between Delmonico’s and a beanery, according as he is in funds or hard up, and to exhibit a genial assurance that “a member of the New York Stock Exchange, sir,” will prove a pleasant addition to the most exclusive circles.This happy-go-lucky gentleman, however, to use one of his own delightful metaphors, “cuts very little ice” in theregion where he is believed to exert himself most effectively. He is really but the froth, riding lightly on the speculative current. Still, I have placed him, like Uriah, “in the forefront of the battle,” while we draw back a little, because he is the caricature of that stocking-broking man-about-town Wall Street has had the honor to create, and because in popular fancy he is seen standing, like Washington, before the doors of the Stock Exchange, with a gold pencil in one hand and a pad in the other, ready to pounce on the pocketbooks of parsons and schoolmistresses.Parsons and schoolmistresses actually do come to Wall Street; all the world comes here, incorporates its idioms into its dialect and is infected with its spirit. It is a lounge for men of pleasure, a study for men of learning, an El Dorado for men of adventure, and a market for men of business. It has a habitat and a manner, a character and a vernacular. It bristles with incongruity and contradiction, yet it is as logical as a syllogism.Superficially, everything is manipulation, chance, accident. Really, every fluctuation is regulated by laws of science, and, with adequate knowledge and just deduction, profit is not speculative but certain. It is this which differentiates it from all mere gambling. And it is this union of impulse and logic which makes it so human, so humorous, so dramatic and pathetic.Perhaps its most curious incongruity is its combination of secrecy and frankness. The atmosphere about the Stock Exchange fairly palpitates with suspicion and subterfuge. No man knows what another man is about, and every man bends his energy to find out. “Inside information” is the philosopher’s stone that turns every fraction into golden units. The leading firms take the greatest pains to conceal their dealings. Orders are given in cipher. Certificates are registered in the names of clerks. Large blocks of stock are bought, and sold, and “crossed,” for the mere purpose of misleading. A wink or a shrug is accepted as more significant than the most positive assertion. The disposition to “copper a point” is so general that the late Mr. Gould used to say he always told the truth, because nobody ever believed him.The very penny chroniclers of the market acquire an infelicitous adroitness in the phraseology of deceit. And yet nowhere on earth is ignorance so carefully counseled and so almost ludicrously warned as in this place of trickery and innuendo.What conceivable enterprise which expected to exist on public patronage would assume as the unofficial metaphor of dealings a pair of wild beasts bellowing and growling over the carcass of a lamb, and make this most helpless and stupid of animals the representation of the customer? To call a trader a lamb is as opprobrious an epithet as it was to call a Norman baron an Englishman.In any other business the buyer is an honored and privileged patron; in Wall Street he is welcomed with the respect and pleasure that was exhibited to a bailiff serving a writ in Alsatia. Should he stroll guilelessly into the Exchange he proposes to benefit, he is set upon, mobbed, hustled, mussed and finally ejected from the door with a battered hat and torn coat collar. Every other broking office in the Street has a pictorial caricature hanging over its ticker of his hesitancy and timidity, his rash venture, his silly and short-lived hilarity, his speedy and inevitable ruin, and his final departure, with his face distorted by rage and grief, and his pockets turned inside out.The air is thick with signs and evil portents: Stop-loss orders, breaks, raids, slumps, more margins, are in everybody’s mouth. The path to fortune is emphasized as slippery by every adjective of peril, and is hedged with maxims, over each of which is dangling, like a horrible example, the corpse of a ruined speculator.A too subtle analyst might suggest that this presentation of opportunity and restraint, while apparently incongruous, is the most fascinating form of temptation. But subtlety, except in manipulating stock values, is not a WallStreet characteristic. The Stock Exchange is an arena where men fight hand to hand, head to head. Beneath the conventions of courtesy, each man’s fists are guarding his pockets and his eyes are on his neighbor. Such a vocation breeds courage, quickness, keenness, coolness. Weak men and fools are weeded out with surprising celerity and certainty.Wall Street men are frank because they have learned it is wisest. The average commission broker secretly regards his clients with a feeling of benevolence delicately tinctured with contempt. Experience teaches him to use a favorite professional phrase, that there are times when “you can’t keep the public out of the market with a club,” and that when engaged in stock operations they usually display the judgment of a child picking sweets out of a box. His first care, naturally, is to protect himself, financially and otherwise, against the losses which ensue. Hence he surrounds their transactions with every legal and friendly restraint. But his existence depends on their success, or in replacing them. The broker, therefore, is quite as anxious for his clients to make money as they are themselves. More profit, more margin; more margin, more commissions and less risk. There you have it in a nutshell.The stockbroker says to the public: “My dear sir, here is an open market. Nowhere else can you get such large and quick returns on so small an investment. For these opportunities I charge you the ridiculously small percentage of one-eighth of one per cent., and loan you, besides, ninety per cent. of your investment. Could any man with a proper regard for his wife and children do better by you? You own whatever security you buy, and get its dividend. Your margin is your equity in it. In property whose market value fluctuates so widely and rapidly, I naturally require you to keep your margin at the per cent. agreed upon. If, unfortunately, it becomes exhausted, I, as mortgagee, foreclose at the best price obtainable. I shall be pleased to execute all orders with which you may favor me on the above basis, in all securities dealt in on the New York Stock Exchange, reserving to myself, of course, the right to refuse to carry any security I do not care to loan my capital on. Some are risky, some safe, some inactive. All speculation implies risk.“I beg you to remember my relation with you is only to execute your orders. You must use your own judgment. I should advise you, nevertheless, to keep in the active stocks. Opportunities for quick and profitable turns in them are more frequent, and the broader the market, the closer the trades, and the less the difficulty of disposal. Union Pacific, just now, looks good for a rise. They tell me, confidentially, that the Rockefellers are buying it, but I know nothing about it. It acts all right. Mr. Jones, this is my partner, Mr. Robinson. I’ve just been telling Mr. Jones, Robinson, that we hear the Rockefellers are buying U. P. There it is, three-quarters, on the board now——”And the broker glances over the quotation board, grabs his hat, and flies to the “floor,” shaking his head and saying to himself: “I’ll give that fellow just six months to drop his wad.”Well, is it his fault? He has been honest with you, frank with you. Be sure he will help you make money if he can.“I didmybest for him—damn fool!” is the mental summary inclosed along with many a closing-out statement.To the visitor accustomed to regard Wall Street as a vast faro layout, its very face should be a striking object-lesson.Emerging from the lofty and beautiful hallway of the Empire Building, those stupendous heights of stone and glass which confront him in solid squares are evidently not the creations of the baccarat table and the roulette wheel. The most dignified temples of chance are designed to shelter pleasure and frivolity. These huge homes of the corporation and the bank, with entrances as sternly embellished as palaces of justice, are oppressively significant of business.As one crosses Broadway and descends to Broad Street, the impression deepens, stirs, until you realize you are standing in a place of strength and power, in the very heart of the nation’s financial life. The crowd of curb brokers yelling out quotations before the Stock Exchange seems merely a casual and ludicrous episode, and the Stock Exchange itself but a factor in this tremendous neighborhood.Here is a world force which expresses itself on land and sea, and in the heaven above; which has built itself an abode that is the wonder of man; which bids fleets go forth, transports armies, and commands in foreign senates; which restrains kings in their wrath; which feeds the peasant on the banks of the Gloire, and clothes the coolie toiling in the rice fields of Honan.You stand there, I say, and recognize that you are in the presence of the creative energy of millions of men and machines building, hauling, planting, laboring, all over the world; and then you go into your broker’s office and hear slim young gentlemen talk of “playing the market,” and you don’t wonder the broker is cynical and careful.This serious, solid, fundamental character of Wall Street, performing amid its colossal setting, an important and essential office in the world’s work, must be conscientiously painted in and emphasized in any portrait, however gay and frolicsome, which attempts to depict its spirit.This sense of drama, indeed, this consciousness that tremendous things are happening while we amuse ourselves, is one of the causes which make Wall Street so fascinating. You can take it as seriously or as frivolously as you please. You can operate with all the statistics of “Poor’s Manual” and “The Financial Chronicle” packed into your head, or you can trade with the gay abandon of M. D’Artagnan breakfasting under the walls of La Rochelle.I have said all the world comes here, and the more I reflect upon it, as a man of twenty years’ experience, the less I wonder. The wonder is that anybody stays away. It is so tempting, so amusing, so respectable, so reckless or cautious, as you choose.In appearance, a broker’s office is something between a club parlor and a bank, and it unconsciously represents its business. The room is spacious and richly carpeted. The great quotation board, with that jumping jack of a boy bobbing up and down on the platform before it, is of solid mahogany. The chairs are large and comfortable. From the great windows you can look out on the varied and beautiful panorama of the Hudson and the harbor, the water flashing in the sunlight and lively with tugs, schooners, steamers, yachts. On the table are all sorts of stock reports, newsfiles, financial statements.The daily papers are in a rack, and over the mantel are bound volumes of the “Chronicle,” and copies of “Poor’s Manual.” Here is a commodious desk with note paper, order pads and so forth for your use. By the quotation board the ticker is clicking busily, and next it Dow-Jones’ news machine is clacking out printed copy that the newsboy will be howling “Extra” over an hour afterward. Cigars in the table drawer await your acceptance.A knot of gentlemen are chatting about the ticker; some more are watching the board. An old man with a white beard is dozing in a corner with a “Reading Annual Report” on his knee. If you are a quick and accurate judge of values, here is a means of livelihood under the most agreeable, gentlemanly and easy auspices. You are making your fortune seated comfortably among your friends, so to speak, smoking and chatting pleasantly.Every minute something happens, and every other event is a financial opportunity. A boy rushes in with a news slip that Russia is to coerce China—wheat rises. Chicago unloads stocks to buy grain—shares decline a point all round. A money broker in to offer a million dollars, and heknowsthe City Bank people are buying Amalgamated Copper. There is a sudden chorus of greetings and smiles; the popular manof the office has arrived unexpectedly from London. The telephone rings; the board member sends word the market looks like a buy.“Mr. Morgan has started for the Steel meeting,” reads the manager, from the news machine. “The div-i-dend on Steel”—whirr—whirr—clack, clack, clack—“one per cent.” … “regular.”“Gee whiz! Look at Steel,” calls the tape trader. “Three-quarters, one-half, one-quarter, one-eighth, one! See ’em come.Three thousandat a clip. Sell ’em! Sell me two hundred, Robinson, quick!”A clubman drops in with a funny story. Somebody offers to match you for lunch. A friend invites you, over the telephone, to dine with him. You conclude to take your profit in Wabash Preferred on the rally. It is three o’clock and “closing” before you know it, and time to run over to Fred Eberlin’s and have Frank mix you a cocktail.But aside from a profitable acquaintance with values, I know of no place equal to a stockbroking office for the acquirement of that general and intimate knowledge of men and of the town, which, organized and classified, constitutes the science of life. Here congregate men of every conceivable calling and character, all meeting on the equal and easy terms of a reputable pursuit, and all more or less under the influence of the natural and perfectly selfish ambition of money making.One has only to observe them to be instructed. They are well groomed. They are rosy and plump. Any one of them evidently could sit down at the desk and write you a check any minute. Whatever they may be elsewhere, whether their private lives are distinguished and benevolent or riotous and shameless, whether their margins are the fruit of admirable diligence or the purloined inheritance of the widow and the orphan, while they are here these men are capitalists. They have the feelings, the ideals, the desires and fears of the rich.Here is a railway president amusing himself taking a flier in sugar, while he waits for his steamer. He is chatting with a tobacco manufacturer who sold out to the Trust. On that sofa by the window Jerry Jackson, the bookmaker, is whispering a point to a man of pleasure from the Knickerbocker Club. There is a clergyman from Chelsea Seminary talking to a doctor smelling of iodoform. The two tall gentlemen laughing with the manager are lawyers who will be scowling fiercely at each other presently before Recorder Goff.The man with his hand in a bag is a mine owner from Colorado, showing a copper specimen to a dry-goods merchant on his way to the Custom House. The man with his nose glued to the ticker globe is a professional operator who trades from the tape. And that hungry-looking person who has just rushed in is a bankrupt tipster, making a precarious and pitiful existence, like a woman of the town, out of the means of his ruin.Graduates of Oxford and alumni of Harvard rub elbows with City Hall politicians, and farmers from Kansas and Pennsylvania exchange market opinions with men of science.It is only for short intervals that the customers in broking offices can be busy. At other times they must lounge, and smoke; and chat, and read, and watch the board. A good-sized concern may easily have two hundred running accounts. Can you imagine a livelier, more entertaining place of gossip? You can have stocks, horses, commerce, law, medicine, small talk, art, science, the theater and religion in fifteen minutecauseries, every day if you like. You have themilieuof every club in New York and the Waldorf café massed in one elegant composition in more than one broker’s parlor.I once knew a clever fellow who dined out every evening. He always had the latest scandal, the newest story, the straightest tip and the last word from Washington. He knew all about stocks, grain, races, theaters, society, clubs, athletics. He could advise you about ocean steamers, table d’hôte places, country hotels, Berlin pensions,young ladies’ schools, where to buy Ayrshire bacon and who had a yacht to sell. And he acquired this vast and useful assortment of knowledge simply by spending his afternoons, from noon to three, at different Wall Street offices.The brokers cordially welcome such a visitor. Now and again they carry a hundred shares of stock for him. He is a kind of private news agency. The dull office gets ready to laugh whenhecomes in; and his tips, whispered merely out of friendship, of course, to the customers, add many a credit entry to Commission Account. It may be said, without any hysterical exaggeration, that he represents the worst of Wall Street; and that the worst of Wall Street is very bad. But among his virtues are a merry mind and an abiding faith that a “board member” is the most distinguished of associates.The broker, indeed, if he is not always that most elevated of human spectacles, a Christian gentleman, is a highly pictorial and interesting person. He is the creature of his business, and is half host and half business man. His habitual chatty intercourse with all kinds of men of means gives him the easy nonchalance of the town, and the nervous strain he is constantly under to protect himself and his clients against those impulses of greed and fear so fostered by Wall Street, creates that keen, rapid concentration for which he is so remarkable.Where everybody is liable to lose his wits any instant, it is necessary those in authority should be cool. This constant state of high tension, these perpetual changes from extreme concentration to frivolity, produce, in the end, the Wall Street manners, and the desire for exciting, highly colored amusements.Every day in Wall Street is a completed day. It is a cash business. Your broker likes to talk about his trades over his after-dinner cigar, and to tell you, in the horsy, professional jargon of the Street, how he “pulled a thousand out of ‘Paul,’ and went home long of ‘little Atch.’”He is, like all nervous people, a social animal. He is gregarious by instinct and interest. Accustomed all day long to his exciting pursuit and his club-parlor office, he seeks society for amusement and profit. He wishes to chat with his friends and to increase his following. He has no wares to display. He has no monetary advantage to offer over any of the other seven or eight hundred commission men in the Exchange. All members must charge one-eighth of one per cent, per hundred shares, each way. Interest charges can’t be very much reduced.Every broker in Wall Street has inside information of some kind. His appeal, therefore, for commissions must rest on acquaintance and personality. He must know how to stimulate cupidity and create confidence. He must impress himself on as many people as possible as successful, honest, jolly, shrewd, well informed; a capital fellow and a first-rate business man. It is only fair to him to remark that whatever his faults, he almost invariably is a capital fellow and a first-rate business man. But is it extraordinary that this individual should become a man’s man, a man about town?Whether he is the blatant, vulgar wretch of the caricaturist, or the cultivated, polished person who justifies Wall Street’s boast of being the aristocracy of trade, depends, of course, not on his being a broker, but on his being a gentleman.His completed portrait, however, would be a too ambitious performance for the limits of my sketch, and I have made this little office study of him, as he leans against his ticker pinching the tape, with bits of board-room paper falling off his hat and a cigar between his teeth, simply to show the influence of his vocation on himself and on his companions.The flavor of speculation permeates Wall Street like soot, and settles on the professional and the public alike. It is a sporty business. It appeals to the idle, the reckless, the prodigal and thedéclassé. In the quickness and uncertainty of its evolutions, it is unfortunately so analogous to racing and gamingthat their terms are interchangeable, and to the thoughtless the stock market is the ranking evil in that unholy trinity.“Stocks, papers and ponies,” is the ringside slang for Wall Street, cards and horses. The sporting man finds it a no less hazardous, but an equally congenial and more respectable, means of money making, and he drifts into a broker’s office as naturally as the broker relaxes his nerves—similia similibus curantur—spending half an hour over a roulette wheel in his client’s “place.”The flash public very naturally choose the same pleasant road to fortune. To their minds, whether they place their money on “Reading Common” or on “Waterboy,” the intention, the risk and the result are the same. There are “fake races” and “fake pools.”“The percentage will ruin you in the end,” they warn you, “no matter what you play.” And the business man, who should know better, too often enters the share market as if he were sitting in an open poker party, among sharpers and pickpockets, and recklessly surrenders himself to every temptation of this devil-may-care atmosphere, while he “plays the game.”It is this combination of the gambler, the sporting man, the fast broker, the frivolous and ignorant trader and the speculative public, all possessed with the mad passions of gain and fear, and all struggling more or less grimly in the maelstrom which boils about the Stock Exchange, that constitutes the Wall Street spirit.It is a derisive goblin or a piteous, ineffective human soul, according as you are a laughing or a weeping philosopher. It expresses everything in the Street that is pictorial and dramatic; but Wall Street is first and last a realm of business. It is a strong man’s country.The men who built the buildings and work in them are giants. When they war, they hurl millions at each other, as the Titans did mountains. When they combine, civilization strides.The Stock Exchange is their battleground. It is a dangerous place for ladies and civilians. It is best to be serious and cautious, and to keep one’s eyes open, when one travels that way.
WALL STREETBy Robert Stewart
By Robert Stewart
Sir Richard Steele, in describing the Spectator Club, remarks of the Templer that “most of his thoughts are fit for conversation, as few of them are derived from business.” Nevertheless, almost any man should be able to philosophize more or less pleasantly and instructively over his calling, and if statesmen, soldiers, lawyers and medical gentlemen write autobiographies and describe the various debates, campaigns, litigations and horrible operations they have been engaged in, why should not an old stockbroker chat about his business, and give a little “inside information,” perhaps, about that Street whose ways are supposed to be so tortuous?
Go into the Waldorf any afternoon you please, and see which has the more attentive audience, Mr. Justice Truax discussing cases, or Mr. Jakey Field tipping his friends on sugar. Watch the women at a tea and see how their eyes brighten when young Bull, of the Stock Exchange, comes in. Bull has a surer road to smiles and favor than all the flowers and compliments in New York—he has a straight tip from John Gates.
Business not fit for conversation! Ask Mr. Morgan if anybody fidgets whenhetalks? Has any clergyman as eager a congregation as the audience Mr. Clews preaches to from the platform in front of his quotation board every morning at eleven o’clock?
“Come, ye disconsolate,” then, and if I can’t tell you how to make money, I venture to assert I can interest you in the place where you lost it.
There is no place of business, indeed, so pictorial as Wall Street. Sunk down amid huge buildings which wall it in like precipices, with a graveyard yawning at its head and a river surging at its feet, its pavement teeming with an eager, nervous multitude, its street rattling with trucks laden with gold and silver bricks, its soil mined with treasure vaults and private wires, its skyline festooned with ticker tape, its historic sense vindicated by the heroic statue of Washington standing in majestic serenity on the portico of that most exquisite model of the Parthenon, and with the solemn sarcasm of the stately brown church, backed by its crumbling tombstones, lifting its slender spire like a prophetic warning finger in its pathway—this most impressive and pompous of thoroughfares is at once serious and lively, solid and vivacious. You say to yourself this must be a vast business which is so grandly domiciled; and you wonder if the men live up to the buildings.
The broker, in fact, who fills the eye of pictorial satire and the country press, is not an admirable object. His tall hat and shiny boots are in too obvious a foreground in sketches of race meetings, uptown cafés and flash clubs. He is represented as a maddened savage on ’Change, and a reckless debauchee at leisure, who analyzes the operations of finance in the language of a monte dealer describing a prize fight, and whose notion of a successful career is something between a gambler, a revolutionist and a buccaneer. He is supposed to vibrate in cheerful nonchalance between Delmonico’s and a beanery, according as he is in funds or hard up, and to exhibit a genial assurance that “a member of the New York Stock Exchange, sir,” will prove a pleasant addition to the most exclusive circles.
This happy-go-lucky gentleman, however, to use one of his own delightful metaphors, “cuts very little ice” in theregion where he is believed to exert himself most effectively. He is really but the froth, riding lightly on the speculative current. Still, I have placed him, like Uriah, “in the forefront of the battle,” while we draw back a little, because he is the caricature of that stocking-broking man-about-town Wall Street has had the honor to create, and because in popular fancy he is seen standing, like Washington, before the doors of the Stock Exchange, with a gold pencil in one hand and a pad in the other, ready to pounce on the pocketbooks of parsons and schoolmistresses.
Parsons and schoolmistresses actually do come to Wall Street; all the world comes here, incorporates its idioms into its dialect and is infected with its spirit. It is a lounge for men of pleasure, a study for men of learning, an El Dorado for men of adventure, and a market for men of business. It has a habitat and a manner, a character and a vernacular. It bristles with incongruity and contradiction, yet it is as logical as a syllogism.
Superficially, everything is manipulation, chance, accident. Really, every fluctuation is regulated by laws of science, and, with adequate knowledge and just deduction, profit is not speculative but certain. It is this which differentiates it from all mere gambling. And it is this union of impulse and logic which makes it so human, so humorous, so dramatic and pathetic.
Perhaps its most curious incongruity is its combination of secrecy and frankness. The atmosphere about the Stock Exchange fairly palpitates with suspicion and subterfuge. No man knows what another man is about, and every man bends his energy to find out. “Inside information” is the philosopher’s stone that turns every fraction into golden units. The leading firms take the greatest pains to conceal their dealings. Orders are given in cipher. Certificates are registered in the names of clerks. Large blocks of stock are bought, and sold, and “crossed,” for the mere purpose of misleading. A wink or a shrug is accepted as more significant than the most positive assertion. The disposition to “copper a point” is so general that the late Mr. Gould used to say he always told the truth, because nobody ever believed him.
The very penny chroniclers of the market acquire an infelicitous adroitness in the phraseology of deceit. And yet nowhere on earth is ignorance so carefully counseled and so almost ludicrously warned as in this place of trickery and innuendo.
What conceivable enterprise which expected to exist on public patronage would assume as the unofficial metaphor of dealings a pair of wild beasts bellowing and growling over the carcass of a lamb, and make this most helpless and stupid of animals the representation of the customer? To call a trader a lamb is as opprobrious an epithet as it was to call a Norman baron an Englishman.
In any other business the buyer is an honored and privileged patron; in Wall Street he is welcomed with the respect and pleasure that was exhibited to a bailiff serving a writ in Alsatia. Should he stroll guilelessly into the Exchange he proposes to benefit, he is set upon, mobbed, hustled, mussed and finally ejected from the door with a battered hat and torn coat collar. Every other broking office in the Street has a pictorial caricature hanging over its ticker of his hesitancy and timidity, his rash venture, his silly and short-lived hilarity, his speedy and inevitable ruin, and his final departure, with his face distorted by rage and grief, and his pockets turned inside out.
The air is thick with signs and evil portents: Stop-loss orders, breaks, raids, slumps, more margins, are in everybody’s mouth. The path to fortune is emphasized as slippery by every adjective of peril, and is hedged with maxims, over each of which is dangling, like a horrible example, the corpse of a ruined speculator.
A too subtle analyst might suggest that this presentation of opportunity and restraint, while apparently incongruous, is the most fascinating form of temptation. But subtlety, except in manipulating stock values, is not a WallStreet characteristic. The Stock Exchange is an arena where men fight hand to hand, head to head. Beneath the conventions of courtesy, each man’s fists are guarding his pockets and his eyes are on his neighbor. Such a vocation breeds courage, quickness, keenness, coolness. Weak men and fools are weeded out with surprising celerity and certainty.
Wall Street men are frank because they have learned it is wisest. The average commission broker secretly regards his clients with a feeling of benevolence delicately tinctured with contempt. Experience teaches him to use a favorite professional phrase, that there are times when “you can’t keep the public out of the market with a club,” and that when engaged in stock operations they usually display the judgment of a child picking sweets out of a box. His first care, naturally, is to protect himself, financially and otherwise, against the losses which ensue. Hence he surrounds their transactions with every legal and friendly restraint. But his existence depends on their success, or in replacing them. The broker, therefore, is quite as anxious for his clients to make money as they are themselves. More profit, more margin; more margin, more commissions and less risk. There you have it in a nutshell.
The stockbroker says to the public: “My dear sir, here is an open market. Nowhere else can you get such large and quick returns on so small an investment. For these opportunities I charge you the ridiculously small percentage of one-eighth of one per cent., and loan you, besides, ninety per cent. of your investment. Could any man with a proper regard for his wife and children do better by you? You own whatever security you buy, and get its dividend. Your margin is your equity in it. In property whose market value fluctuates so widely and rapidly, I naturally require you to keep your margin at the per cent. agreed upon. If, unfortunately, it becomes exhausted, I, as mortgagee, foreclose at the best price obtainable. I shall be pleased to execute all orders with which you may favor me on the above basis, in all securities dealt in on the New York Stock Exchange, reserving to myself, of course, the right to refuse to carry any security I do not care to loan my capital on. Some are risky, some safe, some inactive. All speculation implies risk.
“I beg you to remember my relation with you is only to execute your orders. You must use your own judgment. I should advise you, nevertheless, to keep in the active stocks. Opportunities for quick and profitable turns in them are more frequent, and the broader the market, the closer the trades, and the less the difficulty of disposal. Union Pacific, just now, looks good for a rise. They tell me, confidentially, that the Rockefellers are buying it, but I know nothing about it. It acts all right. Mr. Jones, this is my partner, Mr. Robinson. I’ve just been telling Mr. Jones, Robinson, that we hear the Rockefellers are buying U. P. There it is, three-quarters, on the board now——”
And the broker glances over the quotation board, grabs his hat, and flies to the “floor,” shaking his head and saying to himself: “I’ll give that fellow just six months to drop his wad.”
Well, is it his fault? He has been honest with you, frank with you. Be sure he will help you make money if he can.
“I didmybest for him—damn fool!” is the mental summary inclosed along with many a closing-out statement.
To the visitor accustomed to regard Wall Street as a vast faro layout, its very face should be a striking object-lesson.
Emerging from the lofty and beautiful hallway of the Empire Building, those stupendous heights of stone and glass which confront him in solid squares are evidently not the creations of the baccarat table and the roulette wheel. The most dignified temples of chance are designed to shelter pleasure and frivolity. These huge homes of the corporation and the bank, with entrances as sternly embellished as palaces of justice, are oppressively significant of business.
As one crosses Broadway and descends to Broad Street, the impression deepens, stirs, until you realize you are standing in a place of strength and power, in the very heart of the nation’s financial life. The crowd of curb brokers yelling out quotations before the Stock Exchange seems merely a casual and ludicrous episode, and the Stock Exchange itself but a factor in this tremendous neighborhood.
Here is a world force which expresses itself on land and sea, and in the heaven above; which has built itself an abode that is the wonder of man; which bids fleets go forth, transports armies, and commands in foreign senates; which restrains kings in their wrath; which feeds the peasant on the banks of the Gloire, and clothes the coolie toiling in the rice fields of Honan.
You stand there, I say, and recognize that you are in the presence of the creative energy of millions of men and machines building, hauling, planting, laboring, all over the world; and then you go into your broker’s office and hear slim young gentlemen talk of “playing the market,” and you don’t wonder the broker is cynical and careful.
This serious, solid, fundamental character of Wall Street, performing amid its colossal setting, an important and essential office in the world’s work, must be conscientiously painted in and emphasized in any portrait, however gay and frolicsome, which attempts to depict its spirit.
This sense of drama, indeed, this consciousness that tremendous things are happening while we amuse ourselves, is one of the causes which make Wall Street so fascinating. You can take it as seriously or as frivolously as you please. You can operate with all the statistics of “Poor’s Manual” and “The Financial Chronicle” packed into your head, or you can trade with the gay abandon of M. D’Artagnan breakfasting under the walls of La Rochelle.
I have said all the world comes here, and the more I reflect upon it, as a man of twenty years’ experience, the less I wonder. The wonder is that anybody stays away. It is so tempting, so amusing, so respectable, so reckless or cautious, as you choose.
In appearance, a broker’s office is something between a club parlor and a bank, and it unconsciously represents its business. The room is spacious and richly carpeted. The great quotation board, with that jumping jack of a boy bobbing up and down on the platform before it, is of solid mahogany. The chairs are large and comfortable. From the great windows you can look out on the varied and beautiful panorama of the Hudson and the harbor, the water flashing in the sunlight and lively with tugs, schooners, steamers, yachts. On the table are all sorts of stock reports, newsfiles, financial statements.
The daily papers are in a rack, and over the mantel are bound volumes of the “Chronicle,” and copies of “Poor’s Manual.” Here is a commodious desk with note paper, order pads and so forth for your use. By the quotation board the ticker is clicking busily, and next it Dow-Jones’ news machine is clacking out printed copy that the newsboy will be howling “Extra” over an hour afterward. Cigars in the table drawer await your acceptance.
A knot of gentlemen are chatting about the ticker; some more are watching the board. An old man with a white beard is dozing in a corner with a “Reading Annual Report” on his knee. If you are a quick and accurate judge of values, here is a means of livelihood under the most agreeable, gentlemanly and easy auspices. You are making your fortune seated comfortably among your friends, so to speak, smoking and chatting pleasantly.
Every minute something happens, and every other event is a financial opportunity. A boy rushes in with a news slip that Russia is to coerce China—wheat rises. Chicago unloads stocks to buy grain—shares decline a point all round. A money broker in to offer a million dollars, and heknowsthe City Bank people are buying Amalgamated Copper. There is a sudden chorus of greetings and smiles; the popular manof the office has arrived unexpectedly from London. The telephone rings; the board member sends word the market looks like a buy.
“Mr. Morgan has started for the Steel meeting,” reads the manager, from the news machine. “The div-i-dend on Steel”—whirr—whirr—clack, clack, clack—“one per cent.” … “regular.”
“Gee whiz! Look at Steel,” calls the tape trader. “Three-quarters, one-half, one-quarter, one-eighth, one! See ’em come.Three thousandat a clip. Sell ’em! Sell me two hundred, Robinson, quick!”
A clubman drops in with a funny story. Somebody offers to match you for lunch. A friend invites you, over the telephone, to dine with him. You conclude to take your profit in Wabash Preferred on the rally. It is three o’clock and “closing” before you know it, and time to run over to Fred Eberlin’s and have Frank mix you a cocktail.
But aside from a profitable acquaintance with values, I know of no place equal to a stockbroking office for the acquirement of that general and intimate knowledge of men and of the town, which, organized and classified, constitutes the science of life. Here congregate men of every conceivable calling and character, all meeting on the equal and easy terms of a reputable pursuit, and all more or less under the influence of the natural and perfectly selfish ambition of money making.
One has only to observe them to be instructed. They are well groomed. They are rosy and plump. Any one of them evidently could sit down at the desk and write you a check any minute. Whatever they may be elsewhere, whether their private lives are distinguished and benevolent or riotous and shameless, whether their margins are the fruit of admirable diligence or the purloined inheritance of the widow and the orphan, while they are here these men are capitalists. They have the feelings, the ideals, the desires and fears of the rich.
Here is a railway president amusing himself taking a flier in sugar, while he waits for his steamer. He is chatting with a tobacco manufacturer who sold out to the Trust. On that sofa by the window Jerry Jackson, the bookmaker, is whispering a point to a man of pleasure from the Knickerbocker Club. There is a clergyman from Chelsea Seminary talking to a doctor smelling of iodoform. The two tall gentlemen laughing with the manager are lawyers who will be scowling fiercely at each other presently before Recorder Goff.
The man with his hand in a bag is a mine owner from Colorado, showing a copper specimen to a dry-goods merchant on his way to the Custom House. The man with his nose glued to the ticker globe is a professional operator who trades from the tape. And that hungry-looking person who has just rushed in is a bankrupt tipster, making a precarious and pitiful existence, like a woman of the town, out of the means of his ruin.
Graduates of Oxford and alumni of Harvard rub elbows with City Hall politicians, and farmers from Kansas and Pennsylvania exchange market opinions with men of science.
It is only for short intervals that the customers in broking offices can be busy. At other times they must lounge, and smoke; and chat, and read, and watch the board. A good-sized concern may easily have two hundred running accounts. Can you imagine a livelier, more entertaining place of gossip? You can have stocks, horses, commerce, law, medicine, small talk, art, science, the theater and religion in fifteen minutecauseries, every day if you like. You have themilieuof every club in New York and the Waldorf café massed in one elegant composition in more than one broker’s parlor.
I once knew a clever fellow who dined out every evening. He always had the latest scandal, the newest story, the straightest tip and the last word from Washington. He knew all about stocks, grain, races, theaters, society, clubs, athletics. He could advise you about ocean steamers, table d’hôte places, country hotels, Berlin pensions,young ladies’ schools, where to buy Ayrshire bacon and who had a yacht to sell. And he acquired this vast and useful assortment of knowledge simply by spending his afternoons, from noon to three, at different Wall Street offices.
The brokers cordially welcome such a visitor. Now and again they carry a hundred shares of stock for him. He is a kind of private news agency. The dull office gets ready to laugh whenhecomes in; and his tips, whispered merely out of friendship, of course, to the customers, add many a credit entry to Commission Account. It may be said, without any hysterical exaggeration, that he represents the worst of Wall Street; and that the worst of Wall Street is very bad. But among his virtues are a merry mind and an abiding faith that a “board member” is the most distinguished of associates.
The broker, indeed, if he is not always that most elevated of human spectacles, a Christian gentleman, is a highly pictorial and interesting person. He is the creature of his business, and is half host and half business man. His habitual chatty intercourse with all kinds of men of means gives him the easy nonchalance of the town, and the nervous strain he is constantly under to protect himself and his clients against those impulses of greed and fear so fostered by Wall Street, creates that keen, rapid concentration for which he is so remarkable.
Where everybody is liable to lose his wits any instant, it is necessary those in authority should be cool. This constant state of high tension, these perpetual changes from extreme concentration to frivolity, produce, in the end, the Wall Street manners, and the desire for exciting, highly colored amusements.
Every day in Wall Street is a completed day. It is a cash business. Your broker likes to talk about his trades over his after-dinner cigar, and to tell you, in the horsy, professional jargon of the Street, how he “pulled a thousand out of ‘Paul,’ and went home long of ‘little Atch.’”
He is, like all nervous people, a social animal. He is gregarious by instinct and interest. Accustomed all day long to his exciting pursuit and his club-parlor office, he seeks society for amusement and profit. He wishes to chat with his friends and to increase his following. He has no wares to display. He has no monetary advantage to offer over any of the other seven or eight hundred commission men in the Exchange. All members must charge one-eighth of one per cent, per hundred shares, each way. Interest charges can’t be very much reduced.
Every broker in Wall Street has inside information of some kind. His appeal, therefore, for commissions must rest on acquaintance and personality. He must know how to stimulate cupidity and create confidence. He must impress himself on as many people as possible as successful, honest, jolly, shrewd, well informed; a capital fellow and a first-rate business man. It is only fair to him to remark that whatever his faults, he almost invariably is a capital fellow and a first-rate business man. But is it extraordinary that this individual should become a man’s man, a man about town?
Whether he is the blatant, vulgar wretch of the caricaturist, or the cultivated, polished person who justifies Wall Street’s boast of being the aristocracy of trade, depends, of course, not on his being a broker, but on his being a gentleman.
His completed portrait, however, would be a too ambitious performance for the limits of my sketch, and I have made this little office study of him, as he leans against his ticker pinching the tape, with bits of board-room paper falling off his hat and a cigar between his teeth, simply to show the influence of his vocation on himself and on his companions.
The flavor of speculation permeates Wall Street like soot, and settles on the professional and the public alike. It is a sporty business. It appeals to the idle, the reckless, the prodigal and thedéclassé. In the quickness and uncertainty of its evolutions, it is unfortunately so analogous to racing and gamingthat their terms are interchangeable, and to the thoughtless the stock market is the ranking evil in that unholy trinity.
“Stocks, papers and ponies,” is the ringside slang for Wall Street, cards and horses. The sporting man finds it a no less hazardous, but an equally congenial and more respectable, means of money making, and he drifts into a broker’s office as naturally as the broker relaxes his nerves—similia similibus curantur—spending half an hour over a roulette wheel in his client’s “place.”
The flash public very naturally choose the same pleasant road to fortune. To their minds, whether they place their money on “Reading Common” or on “Waterboy,” the intention, the risk and the result are the same. There are “fake races” and “fake pools.”
“The percentage will ruin you in the end,” they warn you, “no matter what you play.” And the business man, who should know better, too often enters the share market as if he were sitting in an open poker party, among sharpers and pickpockets, and recklessly surrenders himself to every temptation of this devil-may-care atmosphere, while he “plays the game.”
It is this combination of the gambler, the sporting man, the fast broker, the frivolous and ignorant trader and the speculative public, all possessed with the mad passions of gain and fear, and all struggling more or less grimly in the maelstrom which boils about the Stock Exchange, that constitutes the Wall Street spirit.
It is a derisive goblin or a piteous, ineffective human soul, according as you are a laughing or a weeping philosopher. It expresses everything in the Street that is pictorial and dramatic; but Wall Street is first and last a realm of business. It is a strong man’s country.
The men who built the buildings and work in them are giants. When they war, they hurl millions at each other, as the Titans did mountains. When they combine, civilization strides.
The Stock Exchange is their battleground. It is a dangerous place for ladies and civilians. It is best to be serious and cautious, and to keep one’s eyes open, when one travels that way.
THE WIND’S WORDO Wind of the wild sweet morning!You have entered the heart in me!And I’m fain to sing for life and springAnd all young things that be!O whispering wind of the shadow!A voice from the day that is past,You make me fain for the home againAnd quiet love at last.Arthur Ketchum.
O Wind of the wild sweet morning!You have entered the heart in me!And I’m fain to sing for life and springAnd all young things that be!O whispering wind of the shadow!A voice from the day that is past,You make me fain for the home againAnd quiet love at last.
O Wind of the wild sweet morning!You have entered the heart in me!And I’m fain to sing for life and springAnd all young things that be!
O Wind of the wild sweet morning!
You have entered the heart in me!
And I’m fain to sing for life and spring
And all young things that be!
O whispering wind of the shadow!A voice from the day that is past,You make me fain for the home againAnd quiet love at last.
O whispering wind of the shadow!
A voice from the day that is past,
You make me fain for the home again
And quiet love at last.
Arthur Ketchum.
THE BOY MANBy the Baroness Von HuttenAAmongother things, Lady Harden knew when to be silent, and now, having made her speech, she sat watching Cleeve, as, aghast, he dropped his rod until its flexible tip lay on the darkening water, and stared off toward the house.She had said it, and its effect on him was much what she had expected it to be.He was so young that his strength, she knew, was largely potential; only she, as far as she knew, had ever observed its potentiality; to others he was a handsome, merry, young animal, “keen on girls,” as he himself called it, and as innocent of any comprehension of the deeper meanings of life as a pleasant poodle pup.She, being of those who have eyes to see, had, during the three days she had known him, watched him closely, with the result that he interested her.And now she had said to him this thing that so utterly disconcerted him.Partly out of kindness she had said it, and partly because it was the quickest way to fix his genial but roving attention where she wished it to be—on herself.He was so young that her five years of seniority, and the existence of her eleven-year-old son, had, to his mind, separated her from him by something like a generation. He had found her a ripper as to looks, awfully jolly to talk to and no end of a musician.But he had never thought of her as belonging to his own class in years, and she knew this.And as she watched him first shrink and then straighten himself under the blow she had given him, she knew that her first move was a success.For over a minute he did not speak. Then he looked up.“How in the devil did you find that out?” he asked, abruptly.“I saw it. Do you mind my warning you?”“Good gracious, no. It’s—most awfully kind of you. I—I really never thought of such a thing. You see, she was always a great pal of Dudley’s—my eldest brother’s.”Lady Harden laughed.“So she seemed too old for—that sort of thing? I see. In fact, Isawfrom the first, and that is why I ventured—— We have drifted nearly to the willows, by the way.”He laid his neglected rod in the bottom of the boat, and rowed in silence until his companion resumed, lighting a cigarette, and speaking with easy deliberation between puffs: “She is thirty-four, and—that is not old, nowadays. The Duke of Cornwall is crazy to marry her, by the way.”“Cornwall!”“Cornwall. And—there are others. My dear Teddy—may I, a contemporary of Miss—Methuselah—call you Teddy? Are you really sonaïfas not to have known?”It was almost dark, but she could still see the flush that burnt his face at the question.“I hadn’t the slightest idea,” he protested, indignantly, jerking the boat into the boathouse.“But why have you been making love to her so—outrageously?”She rose and stood balancing herself gracefully while she lit a fresh cigarette. Her figure was remarkably good.“Making love to her? I? Nonsense!” he returned, rudely. “She’s the best dancer in the house, and the best sort, all round—those Warringham girls are frights, and the little Parham thing is—poisonous.”“But—at breakfast, who fetched her eggs and bacon? Who made her tea? Who——”She held out her hand as she spoke, and leaned on him as she got out of the boat.“Who gotyoureggs and bacon, then?” he retorted.It was the first sounding of the Personal tone, and behind the cigarette her lips quivered for a fraction of a second.Then, looking up at him: “Colonel Durrant—a contemporary of my own, as is right and proper.”“A contemporary—why, the man’s old enough to be your father!”“No.” They had left the dusky darkness of the trees, and struck off across the lawn. “He could hardly be my father, as he’s forty-five and I—thirty!”Then silence fell, and she knew that he was somewhat tumultuously readjusting his thoughts. If Mrs. Fraser, who was thirty-four, was in love with him, then this woman with the sleepy, farseeing eyes, who was only thirty—what an ass he had been! Just because he had known Bess Fraser ever since he was a kid, and because Lady Harden was a great swell, and wore diamond crowns and things, and had a son at Harrow——And Lady Harden, apparently dreamily enjoying the exquisite evening, read his thoughts with the greatest ease, and smiled to herself—the vague smile that consisted more of a slight, dimpled lift of her upper lip than of a widening of her mouth.That evening, by some caprice, she wore no diamonds, and the simplest of her rather sumptuous gowns.Colonel Durrant, who had fallen deeply in love with her ten years before, and never fallen out, whispered to her that she looked twenty.And as she smiled in answer, her eyes met Teddy Cleeve’s.Mrs. Fraser, quite unconsciously, gave the great Lady Harden all the information she wanted.And Lady Harden—her greatness, in several ways, was an undoubted fact, and the proof of this is that only two people in the world suspected it—was insatiable in the matter of information.Like a boa constrictor, her tremendous curiosity would sleep for months, and then, on awakening, it hungered with a most mighty and most devastating hunger.And her concentrative force was such that while one person interested her, she lived in a small world, half of which was in blackest shadow, half in brightest light, and in the shadow she stood, watching the only other person who, for the time being, existed.Bess Fraser, after dinner, told her, quite without knowing it, the whole story of her own rather absurd love for the boy.She had once been engaged to Dudley Cleeves; she had known Teddy as a little fellow in long sailor trousers and white blouses; he had had thedearestcurls—had Lady Harden noticed that the close-cropped hair turned up at the ends even now?He had been an obstinate child,alwaysgood-tempered but always bent on his own way. He was his mother’s pet, and was by her always plentifully supplied with money, so that the world was for him a smiling place.He had insisted on going into thenavy—or, rather, he had not insisted; he had simply taken for granted that he was to go, and he had gone.He had always been in love, but never with one girl for long. “Of course, he’s a perfect child,” Mrs. Fraser added, with elaborate carelessness.She herself had been a widow for five years. She was a magnificently beautiful woman, much handsomer than Lady Harden, but she did not know her own points, and wore the wrong colors.Lady Harden, watching her while she talked, knew how ashamed she was of her love for Teddy Cleeve, and, constitutionally kind and comforting, the younger woman tried to put her at her ease by chiming in with her tone of detached, middle-aged friendliness toward the beautiful youth.“He is adearboy,” she agreed; “I do like to see him dance! He’s so big and strong. Billy, my boy, is going to be big, too, and I only hope he’ll turn out like this Teddy!”And Teddy, attracted, while rather frightened, by the idea of Mrs. Fraser’s caring for him, made love to her spasmodically, just to convince himself, and then, convinced by something in her voice, fled to Lady Harden for protection, and was scolded by her.“You are a wretch,” she said, looking up at him. She was a small woman, and in this day of giantesses this has its charm.“A wretch?”“Yes. You are a flirt.”Of course, he was delighted by this accusation, and smiled down, his teeth gleaming under his young, yellow mustache.“I am a saint,” he declared, with conviction. “A young, innocent—anchorite.”“Young—yes. You areveryyoung, Mr. Cleeve.”“You called me Teddy this afternoon.”“Then I was a very abandoned person.”“Please be abandoned again. By the way, the colonel expiated many times at dinner, didn’t he?”She stared. “How?”“By sitting where he did. Not even opposite side of the table! My luck, even, was better.”“Your luck? How?”“Because—I could at leastseeyou!”Lady Harden was an adept in the gentle art of snubbing.“My dear child,” she said, very gently, pulling off her gloves, “don’tbe absurd. I can’t bear being made love to by boys!”“I haven’t the slightest intention——” he began, fiercely, but she had turned, and, opening her violin case, took out what she always called her fiddle.She was not a musical artist—so few people are—but she had worked hard, and knew the things she played.If there was no Heaven-shaking inspiration about her, there was no flatting, no slipping from note to note. She played simple, little-known things, plaintive for the most part, and played them well.She also looked her best with fiddle in her arms, a rapt, far-off expression in her half-closed eyes.Teddy Cleeve, watching her, hated her for the moment.And, while he had, in a youthful way, loved several women, this was the first one he had hated.He was, however, too young to see the signification of this fact, and as soon as she had ceased playing, escaped to the smoking room with a major of hussars, who declared that fiddling was the one thing he couldn’t stand.“Lovely creature, Lady Harden,” the unmusical major began, as he lit his cigar.“Too thin,” returned Teddy, the crafty.The major stared. “Are you drunk?” he asked, severely. “Her figger’s the best in England! And amusin’. Tells the best stories of any woman I know. Only thing I don’t like about her is that infernal fiddlin’.”But the fiddling continued, and Teddy, who loved it, felt his hatred melt. After a bit he went back to the drawing room, only to see the violin being returned to its case. Lady Harden smiled absently at him, and soonafterward was settled at a bridge table, opposite Colonel Durrant.The next morning Lady Harden went for a ride with a man who had just arrived—a fellow named Broughton. Cleeve watched them go. Then, finding Bess Fraser at his elbow, he asked her to play “fives” with him.Bess had become non-interesting since Lady Harden’s revelation. Poor old Bess—he wondered whether she really—— And to think of Cornwall’s wanting to marry her! She really was a splendid creature. Much better looking than Lady Harden. Lady Harden was too pale by daylight.“I say, Bess, what is Lady Harden’s first name?”“Dagny. Her mother’s mother was a Norwegian, you know.”“Dagny,” repeated Cleeve, slowly. “I never heard the name before. I like it; it suits her, somehow.”Alas for poor Mrs. Fraser, she was not clever.Pausing in the game, she looked up.“Mind you don’t fall in love with her, Teddy,” she said, sharply.“What rot!” he answered, smashing the ball into a pocket. “Why should I fall in love with her?”“Well, a good many men do. And she’s frightfully attractive, and you’re so—young.”He frowned. “I’m twenty-five, and—a fellow sees a lot by that time—if he’s ever going to see anything. Play.”When Lady Harden came in from her ride, she found Teddy waiting for her.“I’ve been warned against you,” he said, abruptly, his blue eyes dancing.“Against me?”“Yes. Against falling in love with you.”The personal note was strong now. Lady Harden sank into a chair with a laugh.“How perfect! Who warned you?Dearold Lady Carey? Did you tell her a man may not fall in love with his great-aunt?”“I’m even not sure that yesterday I was not in love with some one who is five years older than you.”Her charming face, flushed with exercise, grew suddenly serious. “Oh! but that was—different.”“I don’t see why.”“Why, because she is married.”Cleeve burst out laughing. “I may be an infant,” he said, “but I’m not such an infant as to think that ‘married or not married’ has anything to do with the question.”She laughed, too. “You are a charming infant, at all events. Perhaps if you were a little older——”“Well?”“I might allow you to—do what you were warned against.”“Allow me?”She rose, and went slowly to the foot of the stairs. Then she gathered up her habit and turned.“Yes, allow you to.”“You grant a great deal by that remark. How about the old ‘I had no idea of such a thing?’” he retorted.She looked at him meditatively. “You know more than I had thought. How old are you?”“Nearly twenty-six,” he answered, stretching a point. “Why?”“Because my boy is only eleven. I am so curious as to how he will turn out. He is blond, too. Well,au ’voir. I must go and dress.”If anyone had asked Dagny Harden, at that period, just what she wanted of young Cleeve, she would not have known what to answer.She was a great flirt, but, at the same time, she was a very kind woman, and never willfully gave pain to anyone.A careful study of the science of flirting and its masters and mistresses would probably prove that the greatest—in the sense of artistic skill—flirts are those people who have excitable brains and little imagination.Dagny Harden had been fond of him in a mild, domestic, sincere way that satisfied both him and herself, and that had never faltered.She had, however, a really remarkable dramatic talent, and this needing outlet, she interested herself with a series of gracefully conducted, scandal-avoidingflirtations, in which she appeared to each man as a very good woman, found by him personally to be more charming than she intended.These men, some of them, suffered intensely during their term, but they had no bitterness for her.And she, liking them all—for she was discriminating, and never let herself in for an affair with a dull man—had really no appreciation of their suffering.When she had turned a victim’s mind and heart wrong side out; when she had watched the wheels go round; when all had been said that could be said without her nice scales of judgment being weighed down on the side of either too great severity or too great indulgence, it was good-by.She was exquisitely ruthless, brutally enchanting, admirably cruel.And she never talked of her victims to each other or to other women. She was, in a way, great.“I wish,” said Teddy Cleeve, folding his arms as he sat on the low stone wall, and looking at her, “that I was clever.”“Aren’t you clever?”“No.”“And if you were?”“If I were, I’d know what you are thinking about.”This, too, is a milestone on the Dover Road.“What I am thinking about? Well, at that moment I was thinking about you.”“Honor bright?”“Honor bright. I was wondering what you will be like in fifteen years.”“Why fifteen?”She smiled, and prodded with her stick at a bit of moss in a crack in the wall. Somewhere below them there was a view, but it was far away.“Well, because if you were forty you would be just my age.”“You are thirty.”“Voilà!That’s exactly what I said. A woman of thirty is as old as a man of forty. As it is, you are a child, and I a middle-aged person.”Cleeve watched her for a moment. Then he said, slowly: “I’d give up those intervening years to be forty today.”“Then you’d be an awful idiot!”“I’d not be an idiot at all. You treat me like a child.”“You are one—to me.”“I’m not a child.”“Very well—you are old. You are a padded veteran of sixty—like Mr. Blake. Do you like that better?”He was silent, and after a pause they started slowly down the hill.Two days passed since she had told him that Mrs. Fraser was in love with him. They had been much together, but never alone until now, and she knew that he was furious with himself for letting the minutes slip unmarked by. Suddenly he burst out: “Will you wear that gray frock you wore the first night, to-night? And the low diamond thing in your hair?”“Why?”“Because—I want to see you again as I saw you then. I—I have lost my bearings. I can’t remember how you looked, and I—want——”“I looked like a well-preserved, middle-aged lady. Please don’t begin to think me young, Teddy.”Under her broad hat brim her eyes gleamed maliciously.“Youareyoung! I was an idiotic——”She raised her head.“Oh, don’t! Don’t fall in love with me; it would bore us both to death; be my nice adopted son.”“Dear Lady Harden,” he returned, flushing, “I assure you that I have not the slightest idea of falling in love with you.”“Thank Heaven! I adore boys, but a boy in love is reallytooappalling.”He caught her hand and looked down at her, something suddenly dominating in his eyes.“That is nonsense,” he said, shortly. “I am young, but I am not a child, and if I fell in love with you——”“Well?”“It would not be as a child loves. That is all.”He released her hand, and they walked on in silence.The extraordinary delight that most charming women take in playing with fire had ever been Dagny Harden’s, for the reason that she had never, in all her experiences, been in the slightest danger of burning her delicate fingers. Purely cerebral flirt that she was, her unawakened heart dozed placidly in the shadow of her husband’s strong affection for her.Once or twice when the suffering she inflicted was plainly written on the face of her victim, her mind shrank fastidiously away from closer examination of pain she had caused, and the disappearance of the man was a relief to her.As she descended the stairs that evening, in the gray frock and the diamond circlet, she smiled the little smile that meant pleased anticipation.Teddy was a dear boy, and he had grown older in the last day or two. After dinner she would play on her fiddle and—watch the dear boy. Then there would be a rather picturesque good-by, for he was leaving at dawn, and—that would be all.Fate, grinning in his monk’s sleeve, had settled things otherwise.There was no music, and at half-past ten Lady Harden found herself in a little boat on the lake, one of several parties, alone with Teddy Cleeve. In the shadow of some willows he pulled in his oars.His face was very white, his mouth fixed.“Why have you done this?” he asked, abruptly.She hesitated, and then, the obvious banality refusing to be uttered, answered, slowly: “It isn’t really done, Teddy, you only think it is.”“That is—a damned lie.”The woman never lived who did not enjoy being sworn at by the right man, in the right way.“Teddy!”“Oh, yes, ‘Teddy’! Itisa lie. Why tell it?”“I mean that—if it hadn’t been me it would have been—some one else. Your time had come,” she returned, nervously.From across the lake came singing—some “coon song” anglicized into quaint incomprehensibility. Cleeve folded his arms.“Don’t—look like that, Teddy.”“I look as I feel. I am not—you.”“What do you mean?”“I mean that you looked at me at dinner as if——”“Hush! Don’t say horrid things.”“You looked at me as though you loved me. And if truth is better than lying, it was worse to look like that—without feeling it, than it would have been to really feel it.”“You are talking nonsense. I am very nearsighted, and——”He laughed harshly. “Can’t you play the game even for five minutes? I understood that it amused you to make a fool of me, but it didn’t end with that. You have made me really love you. Really love you, do you understand?”As he spoke, they heard peals of distant laughter, and saw six or seven of the people who had been boating scampering across the moonlit lawn toward the nearest park gates.“They must be going over to the Westerleighs’—we must go, too,” said Lady Harden. “Will you row in?”Cleeve did not answer; he did not appear to have heard her remark.After a pause he said, slowly: “You have made me really love you. I don’t know why you did it, for I surely had not hurt you in any way. However, you did it, and you must have had some reason. You found me a boy; you have made me a man. Well—you must love me, too.”The boat had begun to drift, and was alone on the burnished water.Lady Harden clasped her hands nervously.“I must love you! Whatrot!Come, row to the landing, please. I am going back to the house, and you must go on to the Westerleighs’.”“Dagny—I say, you must love me, too.”“You are crazy.”“I am not.”“Well, I do not love you, and I never shall. Now let us end this melodrama.”Cleeve took up the oars and rowed rapidly to the landing place. Then, as she stepped onto the platform, he took her into his arms.“Youmust,” he said, looking down at her. “It’s all your own fault. You did it willfully. Now you must love me.”His dogged persistency puzzled her and routed all her usual array of graceful phrases.“Am I being invited to—elope with you?” she asked, laughing a little shrilly.He flushed. “No. I—love you. But—you must feel something of this that is hurting me. Hurting? Why, it’shell.”“Hell! I am sorry—indeed I am——”“Oh,thatdoes no good. Words can’t help. You have got to suffer, too,” he returned, still holding her round the shoulders.It was, in spite of the thrill of the unusual that she distinctly felt, absurd. It ought to be laughed at. So she laughed.“How can you make me suffer, you baby?” she asked.“Well, I can. Woman have their weapons, and men have theirs. You’ve made a man of me. I know a lot of things I didn’t know last week. Among others, I know that you couldn’t have been as you have been unless I had attracted you pretty strongly. You are”—he went on, with the green coolness that sat so oddly on his tense young face—“pretty near to loving me at this moment.”“That is not true.”“Oh, yes, it is, Lady Harden. It’s because I am young, and big, and—good looking. These things count for you as well as for us. And you are thirty. I read a book the other day about a woman of thirty. Thirty is young enough, but thirty-five isn’t, and—thirty-five is coming.”Her eyes closed for an instant. “You are brutal.”“Yes, I am very brutal. You were brutal, too. You see, I remembered that novel while I was dressing for dinner, and it taught me a lot. You andithave made me rather wise between you. Well, I love you,” he went on, suddenly fierce, “and you must love me.Dagny!”Bending, he kissed her.She herself had killed his boyish shyness, his youthful hesitation, all the boy’s natural fear of repulsion.He was the man, she the woman. He dominated, she submitted; he was strong, she was weak; he was big, she was small.“Oh, why——” she stammered, as he released her.“Because—it is the only way. You could always have beaten me at talking——”“You had no right to kiss me.”“I think I had. If a woman has a right to torment a man as you tormented me, he surely has a right to take whatever means he can of—getting even. Women are so brutal——”He had found, she felt, the solution to the Eternal riddle.Her heart was beating furiously, but her voice, as she went on, was cool enough.“Look here, Teddy, I will tell you the truth about all this. Will you believe me?”After a second’s hesitation he answered, curtly: “Yes.”“Well—you are right. I mean your—method is right. It never occurred to me before that—well, that turn about is fair play. Women are brutes—particularly, perhaps, the good ones who flirt.”Cleeve laughed. “‘The good ones who flirt.’ Go on!”“And I suppose you were, in a way, entitled to use against me the only weapons you had. You see, I am quite frank. Only—you used them too soon. I don’t love you. Probably, if we had been together a week longer, I should have, but—I donotlove you at this minute.”“Wait till I’m gone,” he observed, with his horrible young wisdom.She frowned. “That has nothing todo with it. You leave here to-morrow morning, and on Friday you sail. And I do not love you. I am sorry for having hurt you. Believe this.”“I don’t believe it. I’m not sorry, and I don’t believe you are. Listen—the others are coming. Run back to the house, and I’ll go and meet them. And first—let me kiss you again.”The voices, still afar seemed discordant in the white stillness.Cleeve opened his arms. “Come. Then I shall believe you.” Lady Harden took a step forward, and held her face bravely to his.Then, just as he bent his head, she turned and hid her face on his arm. “I cannot,” she whispered.The Boy-Man’s lips were set hard, his brows drawn down.“Ah, Dagny, dearest,” he whispered, “and I must go to-morrow.”She looked up. “You have won; I have lost; thank God you go to-morrow!” she answered.A moment later she was speeding through the shadows toward the house, and Cleeve, lighting a cigarette, lounged down to the drive toward the laughing groups of returning frolickers.
THE BOY MANBy the Baroness Von Hutten
By the Baroness Von Hutten
AAmongother things, Lady Harden knew when to be silent, and now, having made her speech, she sat watching Cleeve, as, aghast, he dropped his rod until its flexible tip lay on the darkening water, and stared off toward the house.She had said it, and its effect on him was much what she had expected it to be.He was so young that his strength, she knew, was largely potential; only she, as far as she knew, had ever observed its potentiality; to others he was a handsome, merry, young animal, “keen on girls,” as he himself called it, and as innocent of any comprehension of the deeper meanings of life as a pleasant poodle pup.She, being of those who have eyes to see, had, during the three days she had known him, watched him closely, with the result that he interested her.And now she had said to him this thing that so utterly disconcerted him.Partly out of kindness she had said it, and partly because it was the quickest way to fix his genial but roving attention where she wished it to be—on herself.He was so young that her five years of seniority, and the existence of her eleven-year-old son, had, to his mind, separated her from him by something like a generation. He had found her a ripper as to looks, awfully jolly to talk to and no end of a musician.
Amongother things, Lady Harden knew when to be silent, and now, having made her speech, she sat watching Cleeve, as, aghast, he dropped his rod until its flexible tip lay on the darkening water, and stared off toward the house.
She had said it, and its effect on him was much what she had expected it to be.
He was so young that his strength, she knew, was largely potential; only she, as far as she knew, had ever observed its potentiality; to others he was a handsome, merry, young animal, “keen on girls,” as he himself called it, and as innocent of any comprehension of the deeper meanings of life as a pleasant poodle pup.
She, being of those who have eyes to see, had, during the three days she had known him, watched him closely, with the result that he interested her.
And now she had said to him this thing that so utterly disconcerted him.
Partly out of kindness she had said it, and partly because it was the quickest way to fix his genial but roving attention where she wished it to be—on herself.
He was so young that her five years of seniority, and the existence of her eleven-year-old son, had, to his mind, separated her from him by something like a generation. He had found her a ripper as to looks, awfully jolly to talk to and no end of a musician.
But he had never thought of her as belonging to his own class in years, and she knew this.And as she watched him first shrink and then straighten himself under the blow she had given him, she knew that her first move was a success.For over a minute he did not speak. Then he looked up.“How in the devil did you find that out?” he asked, abruptly.“I saw it. Do you mind my warning you?”“Good gracious, no. It’s—most awfully kind of you. I—I really never thought of such a thing. You see, she was always a great pal of Dudley’s—my eldest brother’s.”Lady Harden laughed.“So she seemed too old for—that sort of thing? I see. In fact, Isawfrom the first, and that is why I ventured—— We have drifted nearly to the willows, by the way.”He laid his neglected rod in the bottom of the boat, and rowed in silence until his companion resumed, lighting a cigarette, and speaking with easy deliberation between puffs: “She is thirty-four, and—that is not old, nowadays. The Duke of Cornwall is crazy to marry her, by the way.”“Cornwall!”
But he had never thought of her as belonging to his own class in years, and she knew this.
And as she watched him first shrink and then straighten himself under the blow she had given him, she knew that her first move was a success.
For over a minute he did not speak. Then he looked up.
“How in the devil did you find that out?” he asked, abruptly.
“I saw it. Do you mind my warning you?”
“Good gracious, no. It’s—most awfully kind of you. I—I really never thought of such a thing. You see, she was always a great pal of Dudley’s—my eldest brother’s.”
Lady Harden laughed.
“So she seemed too old for—that sort of thing? I see. In fact, Isawfrom the first, and that is why I ventured—— We have drifted nearly to the willows, by the way.”
He laid his neglected rod in the bottom of the boat, and rowed in silence until his companion resumed, lighting a cigarette, and speaking with easy deliberation between puffs: “She is thirty-four, and—that is not old, nowadays. The Duke of Cornwall is crazy to marry her, by the way.”
“Cornwall!”
“Cornwall. And—there are others. My dear Teddy—may I, a contemporary of Miss—Methuselah—call you Teddy? Are you really sonaïfas not to have known?”
It was almost dark, but she could still see the flush that burnt his face at the question.
“I hadn’t the slightest idea,” he protested, indignantly, jerking the boat into the boathouse.
“But why have you been making love to her so—outrageously?”
She rose and stood balancing herself gracefully while she lit a fresh cigarette. Her figure was remarkably good.
“Making love to her? I? Nonsense!” he returned, rudely. “She’s the best dancer in the house, and the best sort, all round—those Warringham girls are frights, and the little Parham thing is—poisonous.”
“But—at breakfast, who fetched her eggs and bacon? Who made her tea? Who——”
She held out her hand as she spoke, and leaned on him as she got out of the boat.
“Who gotyoureggs and bacon, then?” he retorted.
It was the first sounding of the Personal tone, and behind the cigarette her lips quivered for a fraction of a second.
Then, looking up at him: “Colonel Durrant—a contemporary of my own, as is right and proper.”
“A contemporary—why, the man’s old enough to be your father!”
“No.” They had left the dusky darkness of the trees, and struck off across the lawn. “He could hardly be my father, as he’s forty-five and I—thirty!”
Then silence fell, and she knew that he was somewhat tumultuously readjusting his thoughts. If Mrs. Fraser, who was thirty-four, was in love with him, then this woman with the sleepy, farseeing eyes, who was only thirty—what an ass he had been! Just because he had known Bess Fraser ever since he was a kid, and because Lady Harden was a great swell, and wore diamond crowns and things, and had a son at Harrow——
And Lady Harden, apparently dreamily enjoying the exquisite evening, read his thoughts with the greatest ease, and smiled to herself—the vague smile that consisted more of a slight, dimpled lift of her upper lip than of a widening of her mouth.
That evening, by some caprice, she wore no diamonds, and the simplest of her rather sumptuous gowns.
Colonel Durrant, who had fallen deeply in love with her ten years before, and never fallen out, whispered to her that she looked twenty.
And as she smiled in answer, her eyes met Teddy Cleeve’s.
Mrs. Fraser, quite unconsciously, gave the great Lady Harden all the information she wanted.
And Lady Harden—her greatness, in several ways, was an undoubted fact, and the proof of this is that only two people in the world suspected it—was insatiable in the matter of information.
Like a boa constrictor, her tremendous curiosity would sleep for months, and then, on awakening, it hungered with a most mighty and most devastating hunger.
And her concentrative force was such that while one person interested her, she lived in a small world, half of which was in blackest shadow, half in brightest light, and in the shadow she stood, watching the only other person who, for the time being, existed.
Bess Fraser, after dinner, told her, quite without knowing it, the whole story of her own rather absurd love for the boy.
She had once been engaged to Dudley Cleeves; she had known Teddy as a little fellow in long sailor trousers and white blouses; he had had thedearestcurls—had Lady Harden noticed that the close-cropped hair turned up at the ends even now?
He had been an obstinate child,alwaysgood-tempered but always bent on his own way. He was his mother’s pet, and was by her always plentifully supplied with money, so that the world was for him a smiling place.
He had insisted on going into thenavy—or, rather, he had not insisted; he had simply taken for granted that he was to go, and he had gone.
He had always been in love, but never with one girl for long. “Of course, he’s a perfect child,” Mrs. Fraser added, with elaborate carelessness.
She herself had been a widow for five years. She was a magnificently beautiful woman, much handsomer than Lady Harden, but she did not know her own points, and wore the wrong colors.
Lady Harden, watching her while she talked, knew how ashamed she was of her love for Teddy Cleeve, and, constitutionally kind and comforting, the younger woman tried to put her at her ease by chiming in with her tone of detached, middle-aged friendliness toward the beautiful youth.
“He is adearboy,” she agreed; “I do like to see him dance! He’s so big and strong. Billy, my boy, is going to be big, too, and I only hope he’ll turn out like this Teddy!”
And Teddy, attracted, while rather frightened, by the idea of Mrs. Fraser’s caring for him, made love to her spasmodically, just to convince himself, and then, convinced by something in her voice, fled to Lady Harden for protection, and was scolded by her.
“You are a wretch,” she said, looking up at him. She was a small woman, and in this day of giantesses this has its charm.
“A wretch?”
“Yes. You are a flirt.”
Of course, he was delighted by this accusation, and smiled down, his teeth gleaming under his young, yellow mustache.
“I am a saint,” he declared, with conviction. “A young, innocent—anchorite.”
“Young—yes. You areveryyoung, Mr. Cleeve.”
“You called me Teddy this afternoon.”
“Then I was a very abandoned person.”
“Please be abandoned again. By the way, the colonel expiated many times at dinner, didn’t he?”
She stared. “How?”
“By sitting where he did. Not even opposite side of the table! My luck, even, was better.”
“Your luck? How?”
“Because—I could at leastseeyou!”
Lady Harden was an adept in the gentle art of snubbing.
“My dear child,” she said, very gently, pulling off her gloves, “don’tbe absurd. I can’t bear being made love to by boys!”
“I haven’t the slightest intention——” he began, fiercely, but she had turned, and, opening her violin case, took out what she always called her fiddle.
She was not a musical artist—so few people are—but she had worked hard, and knew the things she played.
If there was no Heaven-shaking inspiration about her, there was no flatting, no slipping from note to note. She played simple, little-known things, plaintive for the most part, and played them well.
She also looked her best with fiddle in her arms, a rapt, far-off expression in her half-closed eyes.
Teddy Cleeve, watching her, hated her for the moment.
And, while he had, in a youthful way, loved several women, this was the first one he had hated.
He was, however, too young to see the signification of this fact, and as soon as she had ceased playing, escaped to the smoking room with a major of hussars, who declared that fiddling was the one thing he couldn’t stand.
“Lovely creature, Lady Harden,” the unmusical major began, as he lit his cigar.
“Too thin,” returned Teddy, the crafty.
The major stared. “Are you drunk?” he asked, severely. “Her figger’s the best in England! And amusin’. Tells the best stories of any woman I know. Only thing I don’t like about her is that infernal fiddlin’.”
But the fiddling continued, and Teddy, who loved it, felt his hatred melt. After a bit he went back to the drawing room, only to see the violin being returned to its case. Lady Harden smiled absently at him, and soonafterward was settled at a bridge table, opposite Colonel Durrant.
The next morning Lady Harden went for a ride with a man who had just arrived—a fellow named Broughton. Cleeve watched them go. Then, finding Bess Fraser at his elbow, he asked her to play “fives” with him.
Bess had become non-interesting since Lady Harden’s revelation. Poor old Bess—he wondered whether she really—— And to think of Cornwall’s wanting to marry her! She really was a splendid creature. Much better looking than Lady Harden. Lady Harden was too pale by daylight.
“I say, Bess, what is Lady Harden’s first name?”
“Dagny. Her mother’s mother was a Norwegian, you know.”
“Dagny,” repeated Cleeve, slowly. “I never heard the name before. I like it; it suits her, somehow.”
Alas for poor Mrs. Fraser, she was not clever.
Pausing in the game, she looked up.
“Mind you don’t fall in love with her, Teddy,” she said, sharply.
“What rot!” he answered, smashing the ball into a pocket. “Why should I fall in love with her?”
“Well, a good many men do. And she’s frightfully attractive, and you’re so—young.”
He frowned. “I’m twenty-five, and—a fellow sees a lot by that time—if he’s ever going to see anything. Play.”
When Lady Harden came in from her ride, she found Teddy waiting for her.
“I’ve been warned against you,” he said, abruptly, his blue eyes dancing.
“Against me?”
“Yes. Against falling in love with you.”
The personal note was strong now. Lady Harden sank into a chair with a laugh.
“How perfect! Who warned you?Dearold Lady Carey? Did you tell her a man may not fall in love with his great-aunt?”
“I’m even not sure that yesterday I was not in love with some one who is five years older than you.”
Her charming face, flushed with exercise, grew suddenly serious. “Oh! but that was—different.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Why, because she is married.”
Cleeve burst out laughing. “I may be an infant,” he said, “but I’m not such an infant as to think that ‘married or not married’ has anything to do with the question.”
She laughed, too. “You are a charming infant, at all events. Perhaps if you were a little older——”
“Well?”
“I might allow you to—do what you were warned against.”
“Allow me?”
She rose, and went slowly to the foot of the stairs. Then she gathered up her habit and turned.
“Yes, allow you to.”
“You grant a great deal by that remark. How about the old ‘I had no idea of such a thing?’” he retorted.
She looked at him meditatively. “You know more than I had thought. How old are you?”
“Nearly twenty-six,” he answered, stretching a point. “Why?”
“Because my boy is only eleven. I am so curious as to how he will turn out. He is blond, too. Well,au ’voir. I must go and dress.”
If anyone had asked Dagny Harden, at that period, just what she wanted of young Cleeve, she would not have known what to answer.
She was a great flirt, but, at the same time, she was a very kind woman, and never willfully gave pain to anyone.
A careful study of the science of flirting and its masters and mistresses would probably prove that the greatest—in the sense of artistic skill—flirts are those people who have excitable brains and little imagination.
Dagny Harden had been fond of him in a mild, domestic, sincere way that satisfied both him and herself, and that had never faltered.
She had, however, a really remarkable dramatic talent, and this needing outlet, she interested herself with a series of gracefully conducted, scandal-avoidingflirtations, in which she appeared to each man as a very good woman, found by him personally to be more charming than she intended.
These men, some of them, suffered intensely during their term, but they had no bitterness for her.
And she, liking them all—for she was discriminating, and never let herself in for an affair with a dull man—had really no appreciation of their suffering.
When she had turned a victim’s mind and heart wrong side out; when she had watched the wheels go round; when all had been said that could be said without her nice scales of judgment being weighed down on the side of either too great severity or too great indulgence, it was good-by.
She was exquisitely ruthless, brutally enchanting, admirably cruel.
And she never talked of her victims to each other or to other women. She was, in a way, great.
“I wish,” said Teddy Cleeve, folding his arms as he sat on the low stone wall, and looking at her, “that I was clever.”
“Aren’t you clever?”
“No.”
“And if you were?”
“If I were, I’d know what you are thinking about.”
This, too, is a milestone on the Dover Road.
“What I am thinking about? Well, at that moment I was thinking about you.”
“Honor bright?”
“Honor bright. I was wondering what you will be like in fifteen years.”
“Why fifteen?”
She smiled, and prodded with her stick at a bit of moss in a crack in the wall. Somewhere below them there was a view, but it was far away.
“Well, because if you were forty you would be just my age.”
“You are thirty.”
“Voilà!That’s exactly what I said. A woman of thirty is as old as a man of forty. As it is, you are a child, and I a middle-aged person.”
Cleeve watched her for a moment. Then he said, slowly: “I’d give up those intervening years to be forty today.”
“Then you’d be an awful idiot!”
“I’d not be an idiot at all. You treat me like a child.”
“You are one—to me.”
“I’m not a child.”
“Very well—you are old. You are a padded veteran of sixty—like Mr. Blake. Do you like that better?”
He was silent, and after a pause they started slowly down the hill.
Two days passed since she had told him that Mrs. Fraser was in love with him. They had been much together, but never alone until now, and she knew that he was furious with himself for letting the minutes slip unmarked by. Suddenly he burst out: “Will you wear that gray frock you wore the first night, to-night? And the low diamond thing in your hair?”
“Why?”
“Because—I want to see you again as I saw you then. I—I have lost my bearings. I can’t remember how you looked, and I—want——”
“I looked like a well-preserved, middle-aged lady. Please don’t begin to think me young, Teddy.”
Under her broad hat brim her eyes gleamed maliciously.
“Youareyoung! I was an idiotic——”
She raised her head.
“Oh, don’t! Don’t fall in love with me; it would bore us both to death; be my nice adopted son.”
“Dear Lady Harden,” he returned, flushing, “I assure you that I have not the slightest idea of falling in love with you.”
“Thank Heaven! I adore boys, but a boy in love is reallytooappalling.”
He caught her hand and looked down at her, something suddenly dominating in his eyes.
“That is nonsense,” he said, shortly. “I am young, but I am not a child, and if I fell in love with you——”
“Well?”
“It would not be as a child loves. That is all.”
He released her hand, and they walked on in silence.
The extraordinary delight that most charming women take in playing with fire had ever been Dagny Harden’s, for the reason that she had never, in all her experiences, been in the slightest danger of burning her delicate fingers. Purely cerebral flirt that she was, her unawakened heart dozed placidly in the shadow of her husband’s strong affection for her.
Once or twice when the suffering she inflicted was plainly written on the face of her victim, her mind shrank fastidiously away from closer examination of pain she had caused, and the disappearance of the man was a relief to her.
As she descended the stairs that evening, in the gray frock and the diamond circlet, she smiled the little smile that meant pleased anticipation.
Teddy was a dear boy, and he had grown older in the last day or two. After dinner she would play on her fiddle and—watch the dear boy. Then there would be a rather picturesque good-by, for he was leaving at dawn, and—that would be all.
Fate, grinning in his monk’s sleeve, had settled things otherwise.
There was no music, and at half-past ten Lady Harden found herself in a little boat on the lake, one of several parties, alone with Teddy Cleeve. In the shadow of some willows he pulled in his oars.
His face was very white, his mouth fixed.
“Why have you done this?” he asked, abruptly.
She hesitated, and then, the obvious banality refusing to be uttered, answered, slowly: “It isn’t really done, Teddy, you only think it is.”
“That is—a damned lie.”
The woman never lived who did not enjoy being sworn at by the right man, in the right way.
“Teddy!”
“Oh, yes, ‘Teddy’! Itisa lie. Why tell it?”
“I mean that—if it hadn’t been me it would have been—some one else. Your time had come,” she returned, nervously.
From across the lake came singing—some “coon song” anglicized into quaint incomprehensibility. Cleeve folded his arms.
“Don’t—look like that, Teddy.”
“I look as I feel. I am not—you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you looked at me at dinner as if——”
“Hush! Don’t say horrid things.”
“You looked at me as though you loved me. And if truth is better than lying, it was worse to look like that—without feeling it, than it would have been to really feel it.”
“You are talking nonsense. I am very nearsighted, and——”
He laughed harshly. “Can’t you play the game even for five minutes? I understood that it amused you to make a fool of me, but it didn’t end with that. You have made me really love you. Really love you, do you understand?”
As he spoke, they heard peals of distant laughter, and saw six or seven of the people who had been boating scampering across the moonlit lawn toward the nearest park gates.
“They must be going over to the Westerleighs’—we must go, too,” said Lady Harden. “Will you row in?”
Cleeve did not answer; he did not appear to have heard her remark.
After a pause he said, slowly: “You have made me really love you. I don’t know why you did it, for I surely had not hurt you in any way. However, you did it, and you must have had some reason. You found me a boy; you have made me a man. Well—you must love me, too.”
The boat had begun to drift, and was alone on the burnished water.
Lady Harden clasped her hands nervously.
“I must love you! Whatrot!Come, row to the landing, please. I am going back to the house, and you must go on to the Westerleighs’.”
“Dagny—I say, you must love me, too.”
“You are crazy.”
“I am not.”
“Well, I do not love you, and I never shall. Now let us end this melodrama.”
Cleeve took up the oars and rowed rapidly to the landing place. Then, as she stepped onto the platform, he took her into his arms.
“Youmust,” he said, looking down at her. “It’s all your own fault. You did it willfully. Now you must love me.”
His dogged persistency puzzled her and routed all her usual array of graceful phrases.
“Am I being invited to—elope with you?” she asked, laughing a little shrilly.
He flushed. “No. I—love you. But—you must feel something of this that is hurting me. Hurting? Why, it’shell.”
“Hell! I am sorry—indeed I am——”
“Oh,thatdoes no good. Words can’t help. You have got to suffer, too,” he returned, still holding her round the shoulders.
It was, in spite of the thrill of the unusual that she distinctly felt, absurd. It ought to be laughed at. So she laughed.
“How can you make me suffer, you baby?” she asked.
“Well, I can. Woman have their weapons, and men have theirs. You’ve made a man of me. I know a lot of things I didn’t know last week. Among others, I know that you couldn’t have been as you have been unless I had attracted you pretty strongly. You are”—he went on, with the green coolness that sat so oddly on his tense young face—“pretty near to loving me at this moment.”
“That is not true.”
“Oh, yes, it is, Lady Harden. It’s because I am young, and big, and—good looking. These things count for you as well as for us. And you are thirty. I read a book the other day about a woman of thirty. Thirty is young enough, but thirty-five isn’t, and—thirty-five is coming.”
Her eyes closed for an instant. “You are brutal.”
“Yes, I am very brutal. You were brutal, too. You see, I remembered that novel while I was dressing for dinner, and it taught me a lot. You andithave made me rather wise between you. Well, I love you,” he went on, suddenly fierce, “and you must love me.Dagny!”
Bending, he kissed her.
She herself had killed his boyish shyness, his youthful hesitation, all the boy’s natural fear of repulsion.
He was the man, she the woman. He dominated, she submitted; he was strong, she was weak; he was big, she was small.
“Oh, why——” she stammered, as he released her.
“Because—it is the only way. You could always have beaten me at talking——”
“You had no right to kiss me.”
“I think I had. If a woman has a right to torment a man as you tormented me, he surely has a right to take whatever means he can of—getting even. Women are so brutal——”
He had found, she felt, the solution to the Eternal riddle.
Her heart was beating furiously, but her voice, as she went on, was cool enough.
“Look here, Teddy, I will tell you the truth about all this. Will you believe me?”
After a second’s hesitation he answered, curtly: “Yes.”
“Well—you are right. I mean your—method is right. It never occurred to me before that—well, that turn about is fair play. Women are brutes—particularly, perhaps, the good ones who flirt.”
Cleeve laughed. “‘The good ones who flirt.’ Go on!”
“And I suppose you were, in a way, entitled to use against me the only weapons you had. You see, I am quite frank. Only—you used them too soon. I don’t love you. Probably, if we had been together a week longer, I should have, but—I donotlove you at this minute.”
“Wait till I’m gone,” he observed, with his horrible young wisdom.
She frowned. “That has nothing todo with it. You leave here to-morrow morning, and on Friday you sail. And I do not love you. I am sorry for having hurt you. Believe this.”
“I don’t believe it. I’m not sorry, and I don’t believe you are. Listen—the others are coming. Run back to the house, and I’ll go and meet them. And first—let me kiss you again.”
The voices, still afar seemed discordant in the white stillness.
Cleeve opened his arms. “Come. Then I shall believe you.” Lady Harden took a step forward, and held her face bravely to his.
Then, just as he bent his head, she turned and hid her face on his arm. “I cannot,” she whispered.
The Boy-Man’s lips were set hard, his brows drawn down.
“Ah, Dagny, dearest,” he whispered, “and I must go to-morrow.”
She looked up. “You have won; I have lost; thank God you go to-morrow!” she answered.
A moment later she was speeding through the shadows toward the house, and Cleeve, lighting a cigarette, lounged down to the drive toward the laughing groups of returning frolickers.