The Financier

T >> Theodore Dreiser >> The Financier






Chapter LIX


The banking house of Jay Cooke & Co., in spite of its tremendous
significance as a banking and promoting concern, was a most
unpretentious affair, four stories and a half in height of gray stone
and red brick. It had never been deemed a handsome or comfortable
banking house. Cowperwood had been there often. Wharf-rats as long as
the forearm of a man crept up the culverted channels of Dock Street
to run through the apartments at will. Scores of clerks worked under
gas-jets, where light and air were not any too abundant, keeping track
of the firm's vast accounts. It was next door to the Girard National
Bank, where Cowperwood's friend Davison still flourished, and where the
principal financial business of the street converged. As Cowperwood ran
he met his brother Edward, who was coming to the stock exchange with
some word for him from Wingate.

"Run and get Wingate and Joe," he said. "There's something big on this
afternoon. Jay Cooke has failed."

Edward waited for no other word, but hurried off as directed.

Cowperwood reached Cooke & Co. among the earliest. To his utter
astonishment, the solid brown-oak doors, with which he was familiar,
were shut, and a notice posted on them, which he quickly read, ran:

September 18, 1873.
To the Public--

We regret to be obliged to announce that, owing to
unexpected demands on us, our firm has been obliged to
suspend payment. In a few days we will be able to present a
statement to our creditors. Until which time we must ask
their patient consideration. We believe our assets to be
largely in excess of our liabilities.

Jay Cooke & Co.

A magnificent gleam of triumph sprang into Cowperwood's eye. In company
with many others he turned and ran back toward the exchange, while a
reporter, who had come for information knocked at the massive doors
of the banking house, and was told by a porter, who peered out of a
diamond-shaped aperture, that Jay Cooke had gone home for the day and
was not to be seen.

"Now," thought Cowperwood, to whom this panic spelled opportunity, not
ruin, "I'll get my innings. I'll go short of this--of everything."

Before, when the panic following the Chicago fire had occurred, he had
been long--had been compelled to stay long of many things in order to
protect himself. To-day he had nothing to speak of--perhaps a paltry
seventy-five thousand dollars which he had managed to scrape together.
Thank God! he had only the reputation of Wingate's old house to lose, if
he lost, which was nothing. With it as a trading agency behind him--with
it as an excuse for his presence, his right to buy and sell--he had
everything to gain. Where many men were thinking of ruin, he was
thinking of success. He would have Wingate and his two brothers under
him to execute his orders exactly. He could pick up a fourth and a fifth
man if necessary. He would give them orders to sell--everything--ten,
fifteen, twenty, thirty points off, if necessary, in order to trap the
unwary, depress the market, frighten the fearsome who would think he was
too daring; and then he would buy, buy, buy, below these figures as much
as possible, in order to cover his sales and reap a profit.

His instinct told him how widespread and enduring this panic would be.
The Northern Pacific was a hundred-million-dollar venture. It involved
the savings of hundreds of thousands of people--small bankers,
tradesmen, preachers, lawyers, doctors, widows, institutions all over
the land, and all resting on the faith and security of Jay Cooke. Once,
not unlike the Chicago fire map, Cowperwood had seen a grand prospectus
and map of the location of the Northern Pacific land-grant which Cooke
had controlled, showing a vast stretch or belt of territory extending
from Duluth--"The Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas," as Proctor Knott,
speaking in the House of Representatives, had sarcastically called
it--through the Rockies and the headwaters of the Missouri to the
Pacific Ocean. He had seen how Cooke had ostensibly managed to get
control of this government grant, containing millions upon millions of
acres and extending fourteen hundred miles in length; but it was only a
vision of empire. There might be silver and gold and copper mines there.
The land was usable--would some day be usable. But what of it now? It
would do to fire the imaginations of fools with--nothing more. It was
inaccessible, and would remain so for years to come. No doubt thousands
had subscribed to build this road; but, too, thousands would now fail
if it had failed. Now the crash had come. The grief and the rage of the
public would be intense. For days and days and weeks and months, normal
confidence and courage would be gone. This was his hour. This was his
great moment. Like a wolf prowling under glittering, bitter stars in
the night, he was looking down into the humble folds of simple men and
seeing what their ignorance and their unsophistication would cost them.

He hurried back to the exchange, the very same room in which only two
years before he had fought his losing fight, and, finding that his
partner and his brother had not yet come, began to sell everything in
sight. Pandemonium had broken loose. Boys and men were fairly tearing in
from all sections with orders from panic-struck brokers to sell, sell,
sell, and later with orders to buy; the various trading-posts were
reeling, swirling masses of brokers and their agents. Outside in the
street in front of Jay Cooke & Co., Clark & Co., the Girard National
Bank, and other institutions, immense crowds were beginning to form.
They were hurrying here to learn the trouble, to withdraw their
deposits, to protect their interests generally. A policeman arrested a
boy for calling out the failure of Jay Cooke & Co., but nevertheless the
news of the great disaster was spreading like wild-fire.

Among these panic-struck men Cowperwood was perfectly calm, deadly cold,
the same Cowperwood who had pegged solemnly at his ten chairs each day
in prison, who had baited his traps for rats, and worked in the little
garden allotted him in utter silence and loneliness. Now he was vigorous
and energetic. He had been just sufficiently about this exchange floor
once more to have made his personality impressive and distinguished.
He forced his way into the center of swirling crowds of men already
shouting themselves hoarse, offering whatever was being offered in
quantities which were astonishing, and at prices which allured the few
who were anxious to make money out of the tumbling prices to buy.
New York Central had been standing at 104 7/8 when the failure was
announced; Rhode Island at 108 7/8; Western Union at 92 1/2; Wabash at
70 1/4; Panama at 117 3/8; Central Pacific at 99 5/8; St. Paul at 51;
Hannibal & St. Joseph at 48; Northwestern at 63; Union Pacific at 26
3/4; Ohio and Mississippi at 38 3/4. Cowperwood's house had scarcely any
of the stocks on hand. They were not carrying them for any customers,
and yet he sold, sold, sold, to whoever would take, at prices which he
felt sure would inspire them.

"Five thousand of New York Central at ninety-nine, ninety-eight,
ninety-seven, ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four, ninety-three,
ninety-two, ninety-one, ninety, eighty-nine," you might have heard him
call; and when his sales were not sufficiently brisk he would turn to
something else--Rock Island, Panama, Central Pacific, Western Union,
Northwestern, Union Pacific. He saw his brother and Wingate hurrying in,
and stopped in his work long enough to instruct them. "Sell everything
you can," he cautioned them quietly, "at fifteen points off if you have
to--no lower than that now--and buy all you can below it. Ed, you see
if you cannot buy up some local street-railways at fifteen off. Joe, you
stay near me and buy when I tell you."

The secretary of the board appeared on his little platform.

"E. W. Clark & Company," he announced, at one-thirty, "have just closed
their doors."

"Tighe & Company," he called at one-forty-five, "announce that they are
compelled to suspend."

"The First National Bank of Philadelphia," he called, at two o'clock,
"begs to state that it cannot at present meet its obligations."

After each announcement, always, as in the past, when the gong had
compelled silence, the crowd broke into an ominous "Aw, aw, aw."

"Tighe & Company," thought Cowperwood, for a single second, when he
heard it. "There's an end of him." And then he returned to his task.

When the time for closing came, his coat torn, his collar twisted
loose, his necktie ripped, his hat lost, he emerged sane, quiet,
steady-mannered.

"Well, Ed," he inquired, meeting his brother, "how'd you make out?" The
latter was equally torn, scratched, exhausted.

"Christ," he replied, tugging at his sleeves, "I never saw such a place
as this. They almost tore my clothes off."

"Buy any local street-railways?"

"About five thousand shares."

"We'd better go down to Green's," Frank observed, referring to the lobby
of the principal hotel. "We're not through yet. There'll be more trading
there."

He led the way to find Wingate and his brother Joe, and together they
were off, figuring up some of the larger phases of their purchases and
sales as they went.

And, as he predicted, the excitement did not end with the coming of the
night. The crowd lingered in front of Jay Cooke & Co.'s on Third
Street and in front of other institutions, waiting apparently for some
development which would be favorable to them. For the initiated the
center of debate and agitation was Green's Hotel, where on the evening
of the eighteenth the lobby and corridors were crowded with bankers,
brokers, and speculators. The stock exchange had practically adjourned
to that hotel en masse. What of the morrow? Who would be the next to
fail? From whence would money be forthcoming? These were the topics from
each mind and upon each tongue. From New York was coming momentarily
more news of disaster. Over there banks and trust companies were falling
like trees in a hurricane. Cowperwood in his perambulations, seeing what
he could see and hearing what he could hear, reaching understandings
which were against the rules of the exchange, but which were
nevertheless in accord with what every other person was doing, saw
about him men known to him as agents of Mollenhauer and Simpson, and
congratulated himself that he would have something to collect from them
before the week was over. He might not own a street-railway, but he
would have the means to. He learned from hearsay, and information which
had been received from New York and elsewhere, that things were as bad
as they could be, and that there was no hope for those who expected a
speedy return of normal conditions. No thought of retiring for the night
entered until the last man was gone. It was then practically morning.

The next day was Friday, and suggested many ominous things. Would it be
another Black Friday? Cowperwood was at his office before the street
was fairly awake. He figured out his program for the day to a nicety,
feeling strangely different from the way he had felt two years before
when the conditions were not dissimilar. Yesterday, in spite of the
sudden onslaught, he had made one hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
and he expected to make as much, if not more, to-day. There was no
telling what he could make, he thought, if he could only keep his small
organization in perfect trim and get his assistants to follow his orders
exactly. Ruin for others began early with the suspension of Fisk &
Hatch, Jay Cooke's faithful lieutenants during the Civil War. They had
calls upon them for one million five hundred thousand dollars in the
first fifteen minutes after opening the doors, and at once closed them
again, the failure being ascribed to Collis P. Huntington's Central
Pacific Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio. There was a long-continued
run on the Fidelity Trust Company. News of these facts, and of failures
in New York posted on 'change, strengthened the cause Cowperwood was so
much interested in; for he was selling as high as he could and buying
as low as he could on a constantly sinking scale. By twelve o'clock he
figured with his assistants that he had cleared one hundred thousand
dollars; and by three o'clock he had two hundred thousand dollars more.
That afternoon between three and seven he spent adjusting his trades,
and between seven and one in the morning, without anything to eat, in
gathering as much additional information as he could and laying his
plans for the future. Saturday morning came, and he repeated his
performance of the day before, following it up with adjustments on
Sunday and heavy trading on Monday. By Monday afternoon at three o'clock
he figured that, all losses and uncertainties to one side, he was once
more a millionaire, and that now his future lay clear and straight
before him.

As he sat at his desk late that afternoon in his office looking out
into Third Street, where a hurrying of brokers, messengers, and
anxious depositors still maintained, he had the feeling that so far as
Philadelphia and the life here was concerned, his day and its day with
him was over. He did not care anything about the brokerage business here
any more or anywhere. Failures such as this, and disasters such as the
Chicago fire, that had overtaken him two years before, had cured him of
all love of the stock exchange and all feeling for Philadelphia. He had
been very unhappy here in spite of all his previous happiness; and
his experience as a convict had made, him, he could see quite plainly,
unacceptable to the element with whom he had once hoped to associate.
There was nothing else to do, now that he had reestablished himself as
a Philadelphia business man and been pardoned for an offense which
he hoped to make people believe he had never committed, but to leave
Philadelphia to seek a new world.

"If I get out of this safely," he said to himself, "this is the end. I
am going West, and going into some other line of business." He thought
of street-railways, land speculation, some great manufacturing project
of some kind, even mining, on a legitimate basis.

"I have had my lesson," he said to himself, finally getting up and
preparing to leave. "I am as rich as I was, and only a little older.
They caught me once, but they will not catch me again." He talked to
Wingate about following up the campaign on the lines in which he had
started, and he himself intended to follow it up with great energy; but
all the while his mind was running with this one rich thought: "I am a
millionaire. I am a free man. I am only thirty-six, and my future is all
before me."

It was with this thought that he went to visit Aileen, and to plan for
the future.

It was only three months later that a train, speeding through the
mountains of Pennsylvania and over the plains of Ohio and Indiana, bore
to Chicago and the West the young financial aspirant who, in spite of
youth and wealth and a notable vigor of body, was a solemn, conservative
speculator as to what his future might be. The West, as he had carefully
calculated before leaving, held much. He had studied the receipts of the
New York Clearing House recently and the disposition of bank-balances
and the shipment of gold, and had seen that vast quantities of the
latter metal were going to Chicago. He understood finance accurately.
The meaning of gold shipments was clear. Where money was going trade
was--a thriving, developing life. He wished to see clearly for himself
what this world had to offer.

Two years later, following the meteoric appearance of a young speculator
in Duluth, and after Chicago had seen the tentative opening of a
grain and commission company labeled Frank A. Cowperwood & Co., which
ostensibly dealt in the great wheat crops of the West, a quiet divorce
was granted Mrs. Frank A. Cowperwood in Philadelphia, because apparently
she wished it. Time had not seemingly dealt badly with her. Her
financial affairs, once so bad, were now apparently all straightened
out, and she occupied in West Philadelphia, near one of her sisters, a
new and interesting home which was fitted with all the comforts of an
excellent middle-class residence. She was now quite religious once more.
The two children, Frank and Lillian, were in private schools, returning
evenings to their mother. "Wash" Sims was once more the negro general
factotum. Frequent visitors on Sundays were Mr. and Mrs. Henry
Worthington Cowperwood, no longer distressed financially, but subdued
and wearied, the wind completely gone from their once much-favored
sails. Cowperwood, senior, had sufficient money wherewith to sustain
himself, and that without slaving as a petty clerk, but his social joy
in life was gone. He was old, disappointed, sad. He could feel that with
his quondam honor and financial glory, he was the same--and he was not.
His courage and his dreams were gone, and he awaited death.

Here, too, came Anna Adelaide Cowperwood on occasion, a clerk in the
city water office, who speculated much as to the strange vicissitudes of
life. She had great interest in her brother, who seemed destined by fate
to play a conspicuous part in the world; but she could not understand
him. Seeing that all those who were near to him in any way seemed to
rise or fall with his prosperity, she did not understand how justice and
morals were arranged in this world. There seemed to be certain general
principles--or people assumed there were--but apparently there were
exceptions. Assuredly her brother abided by no known rule, and yet
he seemed to be doing fairly well once more. What did this mean? Mrs.
Cowperwood, his former wife, condemned his actions, and yet accepted of
his prosperity as her due. What were the ethics of that?

Cowperwood's every action was known to Aileen Butler, his present
whereabouts and prospects. Not long after his wife's divorce, and after
many trips to and from this new world in which he was now living, these
two left Philadelphia together one afternoon in the winter. Aileen
explained to her mother, who was willing to go and live with Norah, that
she had fallen in love with the former banker and wished to marry
him. The old lady, gathering only a garbled version of it at first,
consented.

Thus ended forever for Aileen this long-continued relationship with this
older world. Chicago was before her--a much more distinguished career,
Frank told her, than ever they could have had in Philadelphia.

"Isn't it nice to be finally going?" she commented.

"It is advantageous, anyhow," he said.




Concerning Mycteroperca Bonaci

There is a certain fish, the scientific name of which is Mycteroperca
Bonaci, its common name Black Grouper, which is of considerable value
as an afterthought in this connection, and which deserves to be better
known. It is a healthy creature, growing quite regularly to a weight of
two hundred and fifty pounds, and lives a comfortable, lengthy existence
because of its very remarkable ability to adapt itself to conditions.
That very subtle thing which we call the creative power, and which
we endow with the spirit of the beatitudes, is supposed to build this
mortal life in such fashion that only honesty and virtue shall prevail.
Witness, then, the significant manner in which it has fashioned
the black grouper. One might go far afield and gather less forceful
indictments--the horrific spider spinning his trap for the unthinking
fly; the lovely Drosera (Sundew) using its crimson calyx for a
smothering-pit in which to seal and devour the victim of its beauty;
the rainbow-colored jellyfish that spreads its prismed tentacles like
streamers of great beauty, only to sting and torture all that falls
within their radiant folds. Man himself is busy digging the pit and
fashioning the snare, but he will not believe it. His feet are in the
trap of circumstance; his eyes are on an illusion.

Mycteroperca moving in its dark world of green waters is as fine
an illustration of the constructive genius of nature, which is
not beatific, as any which the mind of man may discover. Its great
superiority lies in an almost unbelievable power of simulation, which
relates solely to the pigmentation of its skin. In electrical mechanics
we pride ourselves on our ability to make over one brilliant scene into
another in the twinkling of an eye, and flash before the gaze of an
onlooker picture after picture, which appear and disappear as we look.
The directive control of Mycteroperca over its appearance is much more
significant. You cannot look at it long without feeling that you are
witnessing something spectral and unnatural, so brilliant is its power
to deceive. From being black it can become instantly white; from being
an earth-colored brown it can fade into a delightful water-colored
green. Its markings change as the clouds of the sky. One marvels at the
variety and subtlety of its power.

Lying at the bottom of a bay, it can simulate the mud by which it is
surrounded. Hidden in the folds of glorious leaves, it is of the same
markings. Lurking in a flaw of light, it is like the light itself
shining dimly in water. Its power to elude or strike unseen is of the
greatest.

What would you say was the intention of the overruling, intelligent,
constructive force which gives to Mycteroperca this ability? To fit it
to be truthful? To permit it to present an unvarying appearance which
all honest life-seeking fish may know? Or would you say that subtlety,
chicanery, trickery, were here at work? An implement of illusion one
might readily suspect it to be, a living lie, a creature whose business
it is to appear what it is not, to simulate that with which it has
nothing in common, to get its living by great subtlety, the power of its
enemies to forefend against which is little. The indictment is fair.

Would you say, in the face of this, that a beatific, beneficent
creative, overruling power never wills that which is either tricky or
deceptive? Or would you say that this material seeming in which we dwell
is itself an illusion? If not, whence then the Ten Commandments and the
illusion of justice? Why were the Beatitudes dreamed of and how do they
avail?




The Magic Crystal

If you had been a mystic or a soothsayer or a member of that mysterious
world which divines by incantations, dreams, the mystic bowl, or the
crystal sphere, you might have looked into their mysterious depths at
this time and foreseen a world of happenings which concerned these
two, who were now apparently so fortunately placed. In the fumes of
the witches' pot, or the depths of the radiant crystal, might have been
revealed cities, cities, cities; a world of mansions, carriages, jewels,
beauty; a vast metropolis outraged by the power of one man; a great
state seething with indignation over a force it could not control; vast
halls of priceless pictures; a palace unrivaled for its magnificence; a
whole world reading with wonder, at times, of a given name. And sorrow,
sorrow, sorrow.

The three witches that hailed Macbeth upon the blasted heath might in
turn have called to Cowperwood, "Hail to you, Frank Cowperwood, master
of a great railway system! Hail to you, Frank Cowperwood, builder of
a priceless mansion! Hail to you, Frank Cowperwood, patron of arts and
possessor of endless riches! You shall be famed hereafter." But like the
Weird Sisters, they would have lied, for in the glory was also the ashes
of Dead Sea fruit--an understanding that could neither be inflamed by
desire nor satisfied by luxury; a heart that was long since wearied by
experience; a soul that was as bereft of illusion as a windless moon.
And to Aileen, as to Macduff, they might have spoken a more pathetic
promise, one that concerned hope and failure. To have and not to have!
All the seeming, and yet the sorrow of not having! Brilliant society
that shone in a mirage, yet locked its doors; love that eluded as a
will-o'-the-wisp and died in the dark. "Hail to you, Frank Cowperwood,
master and no master, prince of a world of dreams whose reality was
disillusion!" So might the witches have called, the bowl have danced
with figures, the fumes with vision, and it would have been true. What
wise man might not read from such a beginning, such an end?