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

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 minute causeries, every day if you like. You have the milieu of 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 when he comes 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 the déclassé. In the quickness and uncertainty of its evolutions, it is unfortunately so analogous to racing and gaming that 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 WORD

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.Arthur Ketchum.

THE BOY MAN

By the Baroness Von Hutten

Among other 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, I saw from 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 so naïf as 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 got your eggs 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 the dearest curls – had Lady Harden noticed that the close-cropped hair turned up at the ends even now?

He had been an obstinate child, always good-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 the navy – 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 a dear boy,” 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 are very young, 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 least see you!”

Lady Harden was an adept in the gentle art of snubbing.

“My dear child,” she said, very gently, pulling off her gloves, “don’t be 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 soon afterward 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? Dear old 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-avoiding flirtations, 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?”