Friday, the Thirteenth: A Novel
whose happiness Tom Reinhart needed in his business. I will go up and show
her the pictures in this week’s _Collier’s_ of the fine hospital for
incurables that Reinhart has so generously and nobly built at a cost of
two and a half millions! The little girl may think better of Reinhart when
she knows that her father’s money was put to such good use. Who knows but
the great finance king may dedicate it as the ‘Judge Lee Sands Home’ and
carve over the entrance a bas-relief of her father, mother, and sister
with Hope, Faith, and Charity coming from the mouths of their hanging
severed heads?”
Bob Brownley laughed a horrible ringing laugh as he uttered these awful
words. Then he beat his hand down on my shoulders as he said in a hoarse
voice, “Jim, but for you I should have had crimps in that jackal
philanthropist’s soul by now and in the souls of his kind. But never mind.
He will keep; he will surely keep until I get to him. Every day he lives
he will be fitter for the crimping. Within the short two years since he
finished grilling Judge Sands’s soul, he has put himself in better form
to appreciate his reward. I see by the press that at last his aristocratic
wife has gold-cured Newport of its habit of dating back the name Reinhart
to her scullionhood, and it has taken her into the high-instep circle. I
read the other day of his daughter’s marriage to some English nob, and of
the discovery of the ancient Reinhart family tree and crest with the
mailed hand and two-edged dirk and the vulture rampant, and the motto,
‘Who strikes in the back strikes often.’”
He left me with his laugh still ringing in my ears. I shuddered as I
passed under the old black-and-gold sign my uncle and my father had nailed
over the office entrance in an age now dead, an age when Wall Street men
talked of honour and gold, not gold and more gold.
In telling my wife of the day’s happenings I could not refrain from giving
vent to the feelings that consumed me. “Kate, Bob will surely do something
awful one of these days. I can see no hope for him. He grows more and more
the madman as he broods over his horrible situation. The whole thing seems
incredible to me. Never was a human being in such perpetual living
purgatory—unlimited, absolute power on the one hand, unfathomable,
never-cool-down hell on the other.”
“Jim, how does he do what he does? I cannot make out from anything I have
read or you have told me, how he creates those panics and makes all that
money.”
“No one has ever been able to figure it out,” I answered. “I understand
the stock business, but I cannot for the life of me see how he does it. He
has none of the money powers in league with him, that’s sure, for in the
mood he has been in during the past two years it would be impossible for
him to work with them, even if his salvation depended on it. The mention
of any of the big ‘System’ men drives him to a fury. He has to-day made
more money than any one man ever made in a day since the world began, and
he had only commenced his work when he quit to please me. As I stand in
the Exchange and watch him do it, it seems commonplace and simple.
Afterward it is beyond my comprehension. At the gait he is going, the
Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Gould fortunes combined will look tiny in
comparison with the one he will have in a few years. It is beyond my power
of figuring out, and it gives me a headache every time I try to see
through it.”
Chapter VIII.
A number of times during the following year, and finally on the
anniversary of the Sands tragedy, Bob carried the Exchange to the verge of
panic, only to turn the market and save “the Street” in the end. His
profits were fabulous. Already his fortune was estimated to be between two
and three hundred millions, one of the largest in the world. His name had
become one of terror wherever stocks were dealt in. Wall Street had come
to regard his every deal, from the moment that he began operations, as
inevitably successful. Now and again he would jump into the market when
some of the plunging cliques had a bear raid under way, and would put them
to rout by buying everything in sight and bidding up prices until it
looked as though he intended to do as extraordinary work on the up-side as
he was wont to do on the down. At such times he was the idol of the
Exchange, which worships the man who puts prices up as it hates him who
pulls them down. Once when war news flashed over the wires from Washington
and rumour had the Cabinet members, Senators, and Congressmen selling the
market short on advance information, when the “Standard Oil” banks had put
up money rates to 150 per cent, and a crash seemed inevitable, Bob
suddenly smashed the loan market by offering to lend one hundred millions
at four per cent.; and by buying and bidding up prices at the same time,
he put the whole Washington crowd and its New York accomplices to
disastrous rout and caused them to lose millions. He continued his
operations with increasing violence and increasing profits up to the
fourth anniversary of the tragedy. On the intervening anniversary I had
been compelled by self-interest and fear that he would really pull down
the entire Wall Street structure, to rush in and fairly drag him off. But
with his growing madness my influence was waning. Each raid it was with
greater difficulty that I got his ear.
Finally, on the fourth anniversary, in a panic that seemed to be running
into something more terrible than any previous, he savagely refused to
accede to my appeal, telling me that he would not stop, even if Randolph
& Randolph were doomed to go down in the crash. It had become known on the
floor that I was the only one who could do anything with him in his
frenzies, and my pleading with him in the lobby was watched by the members
of the Exchange with triple eyed suspense. When it was clear from his
emphatic gestures and raised voice—for he was in a reckless mood from
drink and madness and took no pains to disguise his intentions—that I
could not prevail upon him, there was a frantic rush for the poles to
throw over stocks in advance of him. Suddenly, after I had turned from him
in despair, there flashed into my mind an idea. The situation was
desperate. I was dealing with a madman, and I decided that I was justified
in making this last try. I rushed back to him. “Bob, good-bye,” I
whispered in his ear, “good-bye. In ten minutes you will get word that Jim
Randolph has cut his throat!” He stopped as though I had plunged a knife
into him, struck his forehead a resounding blow, and into his wild brown
eyes came a sickening look of fear.
“Stop, Jim, for God’s sake, don’t say that to me. My cup is full now.
Don’t tell me I am to have that crime on my soul.” He thought a moment.
“I don’t know whether you mean it, Jim, but I can take no chances, not for
all the money in the world, not even for revenge. Wait here, Jim.” He
yelled for his brokers, and several rushed to him from different parts of
the room. He sent them back into the crowd while he dashed for the
Amalgamated-pole. The day was saved.
Presently he came back to me. “Jim, I must have a talk with you. Come over
to my office.” When we got there he turned the key and stood in front of
me. His great eyes looked full into mine. In college days, gazing into
their brown depths, by some magic I seemed to see the heroes and heroines
of always happy-ending tales, as the child sees enchanted creatures far
back in the burning Yule log flames. But there were no joyous beings in
the haunted depths of Bob’s eyes that day.
“Jim, you gave me an awful scare,” he said brokenly. “Don’t ever do it
again. I have little left to live for. To be sure I have some feeling for
mother, Fred, and sisters. But for you I have a love second only to that I
should have felt for Beulah had I been allowed to have her. The thought,
Jim, that I had wrecked your life, with all you have to live for, would
have been the last straw. My life is purgatory. Beulah is only an
ever-present curse to me—a ghost that rends my heart and soul, one minute
with a blind frenzy to revenge her wrongs, the next with an icy remorse
that I have not already done so. If I did not have her, perhaps in time I
could forget; perhaps I might lay out some scheme to help poor devils
whose poverty makes life unendurable, and with the millions I have taken
from that main shaft of hell I might do things that would at least bring
quiet to my soul; but it is impossible with the living corpse of Beulah
Sands before me every minute and that devil machinery whirling in my brain
all the time the song, ‘Revenge her and her father, revenge yourself.’ It
is impossible to give it up, Jim. I must have revenge. I must stop this
machinery that is smashing up more American hearts and souls each year
than all the rest of earth’s grinders combined. Every day I delay I become
more fiendish in my desires. Jim, don’t think I do not know that I have
literally turned into a fiend. Whenever of late I see myself in the
mirror, I shudder. When I think of what I was when your father stood us up
in his office and started us in this heart-shrivelling, soul-callousing
business, and what I am now, I cannot keep the madness down except with
rum. You know what it means for me to say this, me who started with all
the pride of a Brownley; but it is so, Jim. The other night I went home
with my soul frozen with thoughts of the past and with my brain ablaze
with rum, intending to end it all. I got out my revolver, and woke Beulah,
but as I said, ‘Bob is going to kill Beulah and himself,’ she laughed that
sweet child’s laugh and clapping her hands said, ‘Bob is so good to play
with Beulah,’ and then I thought of that devil Reinhart and the other
fiends of the ‘System’ being left to continue their work unhindered and I
could not do it. I must have revenge; I must smash that heart-crushing
machinery. Then I can go, and take Beulah with me. Now, Jim, let us have
it clearly understood once and for all.”
Remorse and softness were past; he was the Indian again. “I am going to
wreck that hell-annex some day, and that some day will be the next time I
start in. Don’t argue with me, don’t misunderstand me. To-day you stopped
me. I don’t know whether you meant what you threatened; I don’t care now.
It is just as well that I stopped, for the ‘System’s’ machine will be
there whenever I start in again. It loses nothing of its fiendishness,
none of its destructive powers by grinding, but, on the contrary, as you
know, it increases its speed every day it runs. Now, Jim Randolph, I want
to tell you that you must get yours and the house’s affairs in such shape
that you won’t be hurt when I go into that human rat-pit the next time,
for when I come from it the New York Stock Exchange and the ‘System’ will
have had their spines unjointed. Yes, and I’ll have their hearts out, too.
Neither will ever again be able to take from the American people their
savings and their manhood and womanhood and give them in exchange
unadulterated torment. I am going to be fair with you, Jim; this is the
last time I will discuss the subject. After this you must take your chance
with the rest of those who have to do with the cursed business. When I
strike again, none will be spared. I will wreck ‘the Street’, and the
innocent will go down with the guilty, if they have any stocks on hand at
that time.
“My power, Jim, is unlimited; nothing can stay it. I am not going to
explain any further. You have seen me work. You must know that my power is
greater than the ‘System’s,’ and you and I and ‘the Street’ have always
known that the ‘System’ is more powerful than the Government, more
powerful than are the courts, legislatures, Congress, and the President of
the United States combined, that it absolutely controls the foundation on