Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905

Her yardstick touched the basket lovingly, as she went on: “That banana, on the extreme left, contains my grandfather’s gold-bowed spectacles, jest as he used to wear ’em. Gran’pa grew terrible deaf when he got to be an old man, and so he never heard a team coming up behind him one day when mother’d sent him down to the store for a loaf of bread. Miss Jenkins, them glasses was on his nose just as lifelike when they brought him in to us! My mother’s wedding ring is in that greengage plum next to the banana, and aunt Sophia Babcock’s is in that damson, a little below to the right.

“You see that peach? Pretty lifelike, I call it – well, there ain’t anything in it yet, but my great-uncle Bradly’s shirtstuds are in the Bartlett pear, just beyond, and that orange contains a Honiton lace collar that my mother wore the day she was married.

“And this Baldwin apple” – her voice grew intimate – “has in it some little relics of my own uncle Aaron Roscoe. He was a good man, and he felt the call early, and he journeyed to heathen lands to carry the glad tidings, and we never heard from him again – till quite recent, when these little relics was sent back.

“Do you remember my brother Willy? Gracious, no! What was I thinking of? Of course you don’t – your aunt Mary’d remember him, though. He was my youngest brother, and a great hand for all sorts of frolic and fun. Well, it’s more’n thirty years ago, but it seems just yesterday that he fell in the mill pond. Sister Coretta was with him, and she’d let him get out of her sight – which she hadn’t ought to – but, childlike, she’d got to playing with the shavings, and sticking ’em over her ears, and when she sensed things Willy wa’n’t nowhere to be found. They drawed off the water, and there he was, poor little thing, and they brought him home and laid him on the kitchen table, and then mother and I, we went through his pockets to see what there was, and there we found a bag of marbles, just as he’d had ’em – and he was a great hand for marbles. Well, mother she kept ’em in her bureau drawer for years, and whenever she’d open the bureau drawer it would make her feel bad, ’cause she’d think of Willy, and after mother’s death it made me feel bad to see ’em, ’cause I’d think of Willy and mother, too. Yet, somehow, I couldn’t think of no way to put ’em in here till suddenly it occurred to me in the night – ’twas three weeks ago come Friday – and I got up then and there and I covered ’em each with purple silk and made ’em into that bunch of grapes on the extreme right.”

Miss Roscoe turned to her audience, her face rapt, as is the face of one who has gazed on a masterpiece. Annie recognized that now or never was her chance to state the errand that had brought her, to break through the strong reluctance that had held her at bay through the interview. She rose and held out her hand.

“It is – wonderful,” she looked toward the memorial, “and I can’t tell you how good it is of you to explain it all to me. I envy you the power you have of making —wonderful things.” The adjective crowded out every other in her vocabulary. “But I really came to ask you to do something for me, Miss Roscoe,” she smiled at the sphinxlike figure. “I’ve been getting up a sort of fair, and it’s going to be a great success – everybody in the village has promised to help, and my New York friends from Pungville are to give a sort of entertainment. I thought, you know – that you’d like to help, too, so I came to see what you’d be willing to do. We mean to have a sort of raffle.”

Miss Roscoe maintained her air of pathetic sternness.

“And wouldn’t you like to give something that we could take shares in – something, perhaps, that you have made – one of your what-not jars, or, if you’re very generous, why not the ‘Memorial Fruit Piece’?”

She stopped, somewhat staggered by the daring of her own suggestion. Miss Pamela had replaced the yardstick in its corner, and Annie was conscious of a vague relief when it was out of the way. She rested her hand on the Bo-Peep chair and waited.

Miss Pamela folded her thin arms across her breast, and regarded her calmly.

“Miss Jenkins, I don’t think there’s going to be any fair,” she remarked, succinctly.

The blood of youth boiled at the finality of it. “Oh, yes, there is, Miss Roscoe; I told you that I’d made all the arrangements.”

“Well, I’ve been making some arrangements, too.”

“And everybody’s going to help – your cousin, Mrs. Collamer, and Dorothea Roscoe and Roscoe Collamer and Mrs. Collamer Roscoe and your cousin Paterson.”

“Paterson, indeed!” Miss Roscoe’s voice showed its first touch of warmth as she seized the conversation. “Miss Jenkins,” she said, “you’re a young woman, and a well-meaning one, and my feelings toward you are kindly. But a mistake has been made. There ain’t going to be any fair!

“I know all about your plans, knew ’em from the minute you started talking ’em over with the minister and cousin Parthenia, down at the meeting house. After she left you, she came right over and told me.”

“But she seemed very enthusiastic,” began Annie, feebly.

“Yes, seemed,” interrupted the older woman, “but she didn’t dare! Cousin Parthenia never set herself up against me yet, and she’s getting a little too well on in years to begin. Next day there was quite a meeting of our folks here. My back gate kept a-clicking till sundown. All but Paterson came, Miss Jenkins, and he’s less than half a Roscoe, and no Collamer at all. His mother was one of them white-livered Lulls, from Pomfret. He’s bound, anyway, to stand by you, because he’s getting wages from your uncle. Well, I settled it all then and there, this fair business, I mean, but I told them to wait, for I some expected to see you!”

Annie’s eyes opened wide. “I meant to come before; I’m afraid I am a little late.” Her attitude was deprecatory; it might have moved a stone, but it produced no impression on her listener.

“I’m afraid you are,” Miss Pamela assented, gloomily. “I’m an old woman, and there ain’t much left to me, but I don’t mean to let the authority that I’ve always had in my family be taken away by any outsider. If you’d come to me first, Miss Jenkins, things might have been arranged different; but that’s over now, and I was always one to let bygones be bygones.”

Annie had moved to the hall, while her hostess fumbled at the door. It opened and let in a whiff of cool air and sounds of crickets on the grass.

“Autumn is here,” remarked Miss Roscoe, impersonally, addressing the world at large. Then she called to the girl between the box rows. Was there a touch of amusement in the mortuary voice?

“I presume you’ll hear from the folks to-morrow that they’ve changed their minds. Do drop in again some time. I’ve enjoyed your visit, and don’t forget to tell Miss Bangs to be careful of her headache!”

At home they were all in the dining room. Annie stood in the doorway, taking the pins out of her straw hat.

“Well?” called uncle William from the head of the table.

“Far from it,” replied the girl. Her cheeks burned, as she shook her head, but there was a glint of laughter in her eyes. She smoothed out her veil, pinned it to the hat and tossed them both in the hall, as she sank into her chair.

“I’ll have a lot to tell you after supper, but here are a few facts to occupy you till then:

“First, there isn’t going to be any fair!

“Second, I believe I shall accept the Masons’ invitation, after all, and spend next week in Pungville.

“Third, behold in me a woman who knows when she is beaten!

“Last, my afternoon’s experiences have made me as hungry as a bear. Uncle William, I am preparing to eat four of those big, baked potatoes in front of you, and, Aunt Mary, please let Cassandra bring in a large pitcher of cream!”

WALL STREET

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 when he talks? 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 the region 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 Wall Street 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 did my best 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 he knows the City Bank people are buying Amalgamated Copper. There is a sudden chorus of greetings and smiles; the popular man of 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 thousand at 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.