The Pit
F >>
Frank Norris >> The Pit
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28
Often Jadwin had noted the scene, and, unimaginative though he was,
had long since conceived the notion of some great, some resistless
force within the Board of Trade Building that held the tide of the
streets within its grip, alternately drawing it in and throwing it
forth. Within there, a great whirlpool, a pit of roaring waters spun
and thundered, sucking in the life tides of the city, sucking them
in as into the mouth of some tremendous cloaca, the maw of some
colossal sewer; then vomiting them forth again, spewing them up and
out, only to catch them in the return eddy and suck them in afresh.
Thus it went, day after day. Endlessly, ceaselessly the Pit,
enormous, thundering, sucked in and spewed out, sending the swirl of
its mighty central eddy far out through the city's channels.
Terrible at the centre, it was, at the circumference, gentle,
insidious and persuasive, the send of the flowing so mild, that to
embark upon it, yielding to the influence, was a pleasure that
seemed all devoid of risk. But the circumference was not bounded by
the city. All through the Northwest, all through the central world
of the Wheat the set and whirl of that innermost Pit made itself
felt; and it spread and spread and spread till grain in the
elevators of Western Iowa moved and stirred and answered to its
centripetal force, and men upon the streets of New York felt the
mysterious tugging of its undertow engage their feet, embrace their
bodies, overwhelm them, and carry them bewildered and unresisting
back and downwards to the Pit itself.
Nor was the Pit's centrifugal power any less. Because of some sudden
eddy spinning outward from the middle of its turmoil, a dozen
bourses of continental Europe clamoured with panic, a dozen
Old-World banks, firm as the established hills, trembled and
vibrated. Because of an unexpected caprice in the swirling of the
inner current, some far-distant channel suddenly dried, and the
pinch of famine made itself felt among the vine dressers of Northern
Italy, the coal miners of Western Prussia. Or another channel
filled, and the starved moujik of the steppes, and the
hunger-shrunken coolie of the Ganges' watershed fed suddenly fat and
made thank offerings before ikon and idol.
There in the centre of the Nation, midmost of that continent that
lay between the oceans of the New World and the Old, in the heart's
heart of the affairs of men, roared and rumbled the Pit. It was as
if the Wheat, Nourisher of the Nations, as it rolled gigantic and
majestic in a vast flood from West to East, here, like a Niagara,
finding its flow impeded, burst suddenly into the appalling fury of
the Maelstrom, into the chaotic spasm of a world-force, a primeval
energy, blood-brother of the earthquake and the glacier, raging and
wrathful that its power should be braved by some pinch of human
spawn that dared raise barriers across its courses.
Small wonder that Cressler laughed at the thought of cornering
wheat, and even now as Jadwin crossed Jackson Street, on his way to
his broker's office on the lower floor of the Board of Trade
Building, he noted the ebb and flow that issued from its doors, and
remembered the huge river of wheat that rolled through this place
from the farms of Iowa and ranches of Dakota to the mills and
bakeshops of Europe.
"There's something, perhaps, in what Charlie says," he said to
himself. "Corner this stuff--my God!"
Gretry, Converse & Co. was the name of the brokerage firm that
always handled Jadwin's rare speculative ventures. Converse was dead
long since, but the firm still retained its original name. The house
was as old and as well established as any on the Board of Trade. It
had a reputation for conservatism, and was known more as a Bear than
a Bull concern. It was immensely wealthy and immensely important. It
discouraged the growth of a clientele of country customers, of small
adventurers, knowing well that these were the first to go in a
crash, unable to meet margin calls, and leaving to their brokers the
responsibility of their disastrous trades. The large, powerful Bears
were its friends, the Bears strong of grip, tenacious of jaw,
capable of pulling down the strongest Bull. Thus the firm had no
consideration for the "outsiders," the "public"--the Lambs. The
Lambs! Such a herd, timid, innocent, feeble, as much out of place in
La Salle Street as a puppy in a cage of panthers; the Lambs, whom
Bull and Bear did not so much as condescend to notice, but who, in
their mutual struggle of horn and claw, they crushed to death by the
mere rolling of their bodies.
Jadwin did not go directly into Gretry's main office, but instead
made his way in at the entrance of the Board of Trade Building, and
going on past the stairways that on either hand led up to the
"Floor" on the second story, entered the corridor beyond, and thence
gained the customers' room of Gretry, Converse & Co. All the more
important brokerage firms had offices on the ground floor of the
building, offices that had two entrances, one giving upon the
street, and one upon the corridor of the Board. Generally the
corridor entrance admitted directly to the firm's customers' room.
This was the case with the Gretry-Converse house.
Once in the customers' room, Jadwin paused, looking about him.
He could not tell why Gretry had so earnestly desired him to come to
his office that morning, but he wanted to know how wheat was selling
before talking to the broker. The room was large, and but for the
lighted gas, burning crudely without globes, would have been dark.
All one wall opposite the door was taken up by a great blackboard
covered with chalked figures in columns, and illuminated by a row of
overhead gas jets burning under a tin reflector. Before this board
files of chairs were placed, and these were occupied by groups of
nondescripts, shabbily dressed men, young and old, with tired eyes
and unhealthy complexions, who smoked and expectorated, or engaged
in interminable conversations.
In front of the blackboard, upon a platform, a young man in
shirt-sleeves, his cuffs caught up by metal clamps, walked up and
down. Screwed to the blackboard itself was a telegraph instrument,
and from time to time, as this buzzed and ticked, the young man
chalked up cabalistic, and almost illegible figures under columns
headed by initials of certain stocks and bonds, or by the words
"Pork," "Oats," or, larger than all the others, "May Wheat." The air
of the room was stale, close, and heavy with tobacco fumes. The only
noises were the low hum of conversations, the unsteady click of the
telegraph key, and the tapping of the chalk in the marker's fingers.
But no one in the room seemed to pay the least attention to the
blackboard. One quotation replaced another, and the key and the
chalk clicked and tapped incessantly. The occupants of the room,
sunk in their chairs, seemed to give no heed; some even turned their
backs; one, his handkerchief over his knee, adjusted his spectacles,
and opening a newspaper two days old, began to read with peering
deliberation, his lips forming each word. These nondescripts
gathered there, they knew not why. Every day found them in the same
place, always with the same fetid, unlighted cigars, always with the
same frayed newspapers two days old. There they sat, inert, stupid,
their decaying senses hypnotised and soothed by the sound of the
distant rumble of the Pit, that came through the ceiling from the
floor of the Board overhead.
One of these figures, that of a very old man, blear-eyed, decrepit,
dirty, in a battered top hat and faded frock coat, discoloured and
weather-stained at the shoulders, seemed familiar to Jadwin. It
recalled some ancient association, he could not say what. But he was
unable to see the old man's face distinctly; the light was bad, and
he sat with his face turned from him, eating a sandwich, which he
held in a trembling hand.
Jadwin, having noted that wheat was selling at 94, went away, glad
to be out of the depressing atmosphere of the room.
Gretry was in his office, and Jadwin was admitted at once. He sat
down in a chair by the broker's desk, and for the moment the two
talked of trivialities. Gretry was a large, placid, smooth-faced
man, stolid as an ox; inevitably dressed in blue serge, a quill
tooth-pick behind his ear, a Grand Army button in his lapel. He and
Jadwin were intimates. The two had come to Chicago almost
simultaneously, and had risen together to become the wealthy men
they were at the moment. They belonged to the same club, lunched
together every day at Kinsley's, and took each other driving behind
their respective trotters on alternate Saturday afternoons. In the
middle of summer each stole a fortnight from his business, and went
fishing at Geneva Lake in Wisconsin.
"I say," Jadwin observed, "I saw an old fellow outside in your
customers' room just now that put me in mind of Hargus. You remember
that deal of his, the one he tried to swing before he died. Oh--how
long ago was that? Bless my soul, that must have been fifteen, yes
twenty years ago."
The deal of which Jadwin spoke was the legendary operation of the
Board of Trade--a mammoth corner in September wheat, manipulated by
this same Hargus, a millionaire, who had tripled his fortune by the
corner, and had lost it by some chicanery on the part of his
associate before another year. He had run wheat up to nearly two
dollars, had been in his day a king all-powerful. Since then all
deals had been spoken of in terms of the Hargus affair. Speculators
said, "It was almost as bad as the Hargus deal." "It was like the
Hargus smash." "It was as big a thing as the Hargus corner." Hargus
had become a sort of creature of legends, mythical, heroic,
transfigured in the glory of his millions.
"Easily twenty years ago," continued Jadwin. "If Hargus could come
to life now, he'd be surprised at the difference in the way we do
business these days. Twenty years. Yes, it's all of that. I declare,
Sam, we're getting old, aren't we?"
"I guess that was Hargus you saw out there," answered the broker.
"He's not dead. Old fellow in a stove-pipe and greasy frock coat?
Yes, that's Hargus."
"What!" exclaimed Jadwin. "_That_ Hargus?"
"Of course it was. He comes 'round every day. The clerks give him a
dollar every now and then."
"And he's not dead? And that was Hargus, that wretched,
broken--whew! I don't want to think of it, Sam!" And Jadwin, taken
all aback, sat for a moment speechless.
"Yes, sir," muttered the broker grimly, "that was Hargus."
There was a long silence. Then at last Gretry exclaimed briskly:
"Well, here's what I want to see you about."
He lowered his voice: "You know I've got a correspondent or two at
Paris--all the brokers have--and we make no secret as to who they
are. But I've had an extra man at work over there for the last six
months, very much on the quiet. I don't mind telling you this
much--that he's not the least important member of the United States
Legation. Well, now and then he is supposed to send me what the
reporters call "exclusive news"--that's what I feed him for, and I
could run a private steam yacht on what it costs me. But news I get
from him is a day or so in advance of everybody else. He hasn't sent
me anything very important till this morning. This here just came
in."
He picked up a despatch from his desk and read:
"'Utica--headquarters--modification--organic--concomitant--within
one month,' which means," he added, "this. I've just deciphered it,"
and he handed Jadwin a slip of paper on which was written:
"Bill providing for heavy import duties on foreign grains certain to
be introduced in French Chamber of Deputies within one month."
"Have you got it?" he demanded of Jadwin, as he took the slip back.
"Won't forget it?" He twisted the paper into a roll and burned it
carefully in the office cuspidor.
"Now," he remarked, "do you come in? It's just the two of us, J.,
and I think we can make that Porteous clique look very sick."
"Hum!" murmured Jadwin surprised. "That does give you a twist on the
situation. But to tell the truth, Sam, I had sort of made up my mind
to keep out of speculation since my last little deal. A man gets
into this game, and into it, and into it, and before you know he
can't pull out--and he don't want to. Next he gets his nose
scratched, and he hits back to make up for it, and just hits into
the air and loses his balance--and down he goes. I don't want to
make any more money, Sam. I've got my little pile, and before I get
too old I want to have some fun out of it."
"But lord love you, J.," objected the other, "this ain't
speculation. You can see for yourself how sure it is. I'm not a baby
at this business, am I? You'll let me know something of this game,
won't you? And I tell you, J., it's found money. The man that sells
wheat short on the strength of this has as good as got the money in
his vest pocket already. Oh, nonsense, of course you'll come in.
I've been laying for that Bull gang since long before the Helmick
failure, and now I've got it right where I want it. Look here, J.,
you aren't the man to throw money away. You'd buy a business block
if you knew you could sell it over again at a profit. Now here's the
chance to make really a fine Bear deal. Why, as soon as this news
gets on the floor there, the price will bust right down, and down,
and down. Porteous and his crowd couldn't keep it up to save 'em
from the receiver's hand one single minute."
"I know, Sam," answered Jadwin, "and the trouble is, not that I
don't want to speculate, but that I do--too much. That's why I said
I'd keep out of it. It isn't so much the money as the fun of playing
the game. With half a show, I would get in a little more and a
little more, till by and by I'd try to throw a big thing, and
instead, the big thing would throw me. Why, Sam, when you told me
that that wreck out there mumbling a sandwich was Hargus, it made me
turn cold."
"Yes, in your feet," retorted Gretry. "I'm not asking you to risk
all your money, am I, or a fifth of it, or a twentieth of it? Don't
be an ass, J. Are we a conservative house, or aren't we? Do I talk
like this when I'm not sure? Look here. Let me sell a million
bushels for you. Yes, I know it's a bigger order than I've handled
for you before. But this time I want to go right into it, head down
and heels up, and get a twist on those Porteous buckoes, and raise
'em right out of their boots. We get a crop report this morning, and
if the visible supply is as large as I think it is, the price will
go off and unsettle the whole market. I'll sell short for you at the
best figures we can get, and you can cover on the slump any time
between now and the end of May."
Jadwin hesitated. In spite of himself he felt a Chance had come.
Again that strange sixth sense of his, the inexplicable instinct,
that only the born speculator knows, warned him. Every now and then
during the course of his business career, this intuition came to
him, this flair, this intangible, vague premonition, this
presentiment that he must seize Opportunity or else Fortune, that so
long had stayed at his elbow, would desert him. In the air about him
he seemed to feel an influence, a sudden new element, the presence
of a new force. It was Luck, the great power, the great goddess, and
all at once it had stooped from out the invisible, and just over his
head passed swiftly in a rush of glittering wings.
"The thing would have to be handled like glass," observed the broker
thoughtfully, his eyes narrowing "A tip like this is public property
in twenty-four hours, and it don't give us any too much time. I
don't want to break the price by unloading a million or more bushels
on 'em all of a sudden. I'll scatter the orders pretty evenly. You
see," he added, "here's a big point in our favor. We'll be able to
sell on a strong market. The Pit traders have got some crazy war
rumour going, and they're as flighty over it as a young ladies'
seminary over a great big rat. And even without that, the market is
top-heavy. Porteous makes me weary. He and his gang have been
bucking it up till we've got an abnormal price. Ninety-four for May
wheat! Why, it's ridiculous. Ought to be selling way down in the
eighties. The least little jolt would tip her over. Well," he said
abruptly, squaring himself at Jadwin, "do we come in? If that same
luck of yours is still in working order, here's your chance, J., to
make a killing. There's just that gilt-edged, full-morocco chance
that a report of big 'visible' would give us."
Jadwin laughed. "Sam," he said, "I'll flip a coin for it."
"Oh, get out," protested the broker; then suddenly--the gambling
instinct that a lifetime passed in that place had cultivated in
him--exclaimed:
"All right. Flip a coin. But give me your word you'll stay by it.
Heads you come in; tails you don't. Will you give me your word?"
"Oh, I don't know about that," replied Jadwin, amused at the
foolishness of the whole proceeding. But as he balanced the half-dollar
on his thumb-nail, he was all at once absolutely assured that
it would fall heads. He flipped it in the air, and even as he
watched it spin, said to himself, "It will come heads. It could not
possibly be anything else. I know it will be heads."
And as a matter of course the coin fell heads.
"All right," he said, "I'll come in."
"For a million bushels?"
"Yes--for a million. How much in margins will you want?"
Gretry figured a moment on the back of an envelope.
"Fifty thousand dollars," he announced at length.
Jadwin wrote the check on a corner of the broker's desk, and held it
a moment before him.
"Good-bye," he said, apostrophising the bit of paper. "Good-bye. I
ne'er shall look upon your like again."
Gretry did not laugh.
"Huh!" he grunted. "You'll look upon a hatful of them before the
month is out."
That same morning Landry Court found himself in the corridor on the
ground floor of the Board of Trade about nine o'clock. He had just
come out of the office of Gretry, Converse & Co., where he and the
other Pit traders for the house had been receiving their orders for
the day.
As he was buying a couple of apples at the news stand at the end of
the corridor, Semple and a young Jew named Hirsch, Pit traders for
small firms in La Salle Street, joined him.
"Hello, Court, what do you know?"
"Hello, Barry Semple! Hello, Hirsch!" Landry offered the halves of
his second apple, and the three stood there a moment, near the foot
of the stairs, talking and eating their apples from the points of
their penknives.
"I feel sort of seedy this morning," Semple observed between
mouthfuls. "Was up late last night at a stag. A friend of mine just
got back from Europe, and some of the boys were giving him a little
dinner. He was all over the shop, this friend of mine; spent most of
his time in Constantinople; had some kind of newspaper business
there. It seems that it's a pretty crazy proposition, Turkey and the
Sultan and all that. He said that there was nearly a row over the
'Higgins-Pasha' incident, and that the British agent put it pretty
straight to the Sultan's secretary. My friend said Constantinople
put him in mind of a lot of opera bouffe scenery that had got
spilled out in the mud. Say, Court, he said the streets were dirtier
than the Chicago streets."
"Oh, come now," said Hirsch.
"Fact! And the dogs! He told us he knows now where all the yellow
dogs go to when they die."
"But say," remarked Hirsch, "what is that about the Higgins-Pasha
business? I thought that was over long ago."
"Oh, it is," answered Semple easily. He looked at his watch. "I
guess it's about time to go up, pretty near half-past nine."
The three mounted the stairs, mingling with the groups of floor
traders who, in steadily increasing numbers, had begun to move in
the same direction. But on the way Hirsch was stopped by his
brother.
"Hey, I got that box of cigars for you."
Hirsch paused. "Oh! All right," he said, then he added: "Say, how
about that Higgins-Pasha affair? You remember that row between
England and Turkey. They tell me the British agent in Constantinople
put it pretty straight to the Sultan the other day."
The other was interested. "He did, hey?" he said. "The market hasn't
felt it, though. Guess there's nothing to it. But there's Kelly
yonder. He'd know. He's pretty thick with Porteous' men. Might ask
him."
"You ask him and let me know. I got to go on the floor. It's nearly
time for the gong."
Hirsch's brother found Kelly in the centre of a group of settlement
clerks.
"Say, boy," he began, "you ought to know. They tell me there may be
trouble between England and Turkey over the Higgins-Pasha incident,
and that the British Foreign Office has threatened the Sultan with
an ultimatum. I can see the market if that's so."
"Nothing in it," retorted Kelly. "But I'll find out--to make sure,
by jingo."
Meanwhile Landry had gained the top of the stairs, and turning to
the right, passed through a great doorway, and came out upon the
floor of the Board of Trade.
It was a vast enclosure, lighted on either side by great windows of
coloured glass, the roof supported by thin iron pillars elaborately
decorated. To the left were the bulletin blackboards, and beyond
these, in the northwest angle of the floor, a great railed-in space
where the Western Union Telegraph was installed. To the right, on
the other side of the room, a row of tables, laden with neatly
arranged paper bags half full of samples of grains, stretched along
the east wall from the doorway of the public room at one end to the
telephone room at the other.
The centre of the floor was occupied by the pits. To the left and to
the front of Landry the provision pit, to the right the corn pit,
while further on at the north extremity of the floor, and nearly
under the visitors' gallery, much larger than the other two, and
flanked by the wicket of the official recorder, was the wheat pit
itself.
Directly opposite the visitors' gallery, high upon the south wall a
great dial was affixed, and on the dial a marking hand that
indicated the current price of wheat, fluctuating with the changes
made in the Pit. Just now it stood at ninety-three and
three-eighths, the closing quotation of the preceding day.
As yet all the pits were empty. It was some fifteen minutes after
nine. Landry checked his hat and coat at the coat room near the
north entrance, and slipped into an old tennis jacket of striped
blue flannel. Then, hatless, his hands in his pockets, he leisurely
crossed the floor, and sat down in one of the chairs that were
ranged in files upon the floor in front of the telegraph enclosure.
He scrutinised again the despatches and orders that he held in his
hands; then, having fixed them in his memory, tore them into very
small bits, looking vaguely about the room, developing his plan of
campaign for the morning.
In a sense Landry Court had a double personality. Away from the
neighbourhood and influence of La Salle Street, he was
"rattle-brained," absent-minded, impractical, and easily excited,
the last fellow in the world to be trusted with any business
responsibility. But the thunder of the streets around the Board of
Trade, and, above all, the movement and atmosphere of the floor
itself awoke within him a very different Landry Court; a whole new
set of nerves came into being with the tap of the nine-thirty gong,
a whole new system of brain machinery began to move with the first
figure called in the Pit. And from that instant until the close of
the session, no floor trader, no broker's clerk nor scalper was more
alert, more shrewd, or kept his head more surely than the same young
fellow who confused his social engagements for the evening of the
same day. The Landry Court the Dearborn girls knew was a far
different young man from him who now leaned his elbows on the arms
of the chair upon the floor of the Board, and, his eyes narrowing,
his lips tightening, began to speculate upon what was to be the
temper of the Pit that morning.
Meanwhile the floor was beginning to fill up. Over in the railed-in
space, where the hundreds of telegraph instruments were in place,
the operators were arriving in twos and threes. They hung their hats
and ulsters upon the pegs in the wall back of them, and in linen
coats, or in their shirt-sleeves, went to their seats, or, sitting
upon their tables, called back and forth to each other, joshing,
cracking jokes. Some few addressed themselves directly to work, and
here and there the intermittent clicking of a key began, like a
diligent cricket busking himself in advance of its mates.
From the corridors on the ground floor up through the south doors
came the pit traders in increasing groups. The noise of footsteps
began to echo from the high vaulting of the roof. A messenger boy
crossed the floor chanting an unintelligible name.
The groups of traders gradually converged upon the corn and wheat
pits, and on the steps of the latter, their arms crossed upon their
knees, two men, one wearing a silk skull cap all awry, conversed
earnestly in low tones.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 | 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28