Friday, the Thirteenth by Thomas W. Lawson
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Thomas W. Lawson >> Friday, the Thirteenth
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He slowly rose to his feet. I could see from his eyes and the shudder that
went over him as he caught sight of the paper on the desk that he was
himself; that memory of the happenings of the day had not fled in his
sleep. He rose to his full height, his head went up, and his shoulders
back, but only from habit and for an instant. Then he folded Beulah Sands
to his breast and dropped his head upon her shoulder. He sobbed like a
father with the corpse of his child.
"Why, Bob, my Bob, is this the way you treat your Beulah when she's let
you sleep so your beautiful eyes would be pretty for the wedding? Is this
the way to act before this kind man who has come to take us to the church?
Naughty, naughty Bob."
I looked at her, at Bob, in horror. I was beginning to realise the
absolute deadness of this woman. From the first look I had known that her
mind had fled, but knowledge is not always realisation. She did not even
know who I was. Her mind was dead to all but the man she loved, the man
who through all those long days of her suffering she had silently
worshiped. To all but him she was new-born.
At the sound of "wedding," "church," Bob's head slowly rose from her
shoulder. I saw his decision the instant I caught his eye; I realised the
uselessness of opposing it, and, sick at heart and horrified, I listened
as he said in a voice now calm and soothing as that of a father to his
child, "Yes, Beulah, my darling, I have slept too long. Bob has been
naughty, but we will make up for lost time. Get your hat and cloak and
we'll hurry to the church or we will be late."
With a laugh of joy she followed him to the closet where hung the little
gray turban and the pretty gray jacket. He took them from their peg and
gave them to her.
"Not a word, Jim," he bade me. "In the name of God and all our friendship,
not a word. Beulah Sands will be my wife as soon as I can find a minister
to marry us. It is best, best. It is right. It is as God would have it, or
I am not capable of knowing right from wrong. Anyway, it is what will be.
She has no father, no mother, no sister, no one to protect and shield her.
The 'System' has robbed her of all in life, even of herself, of
everything, Jim, but me. I must try to win her back for herself, or to
make her new world a happy one--a happy one for her."
Chapter VII.
An old gambler, whose life had been spent listening to the rattle of the
drop-in-bound-out little roulette ball, was told by a fellow victim, as
his last dollar went to the relentless tiger's maw, that the keeper's foot
was upon an electric button which enabled him to make the ball drop where
his stake was not. He simply said, "Thank God. I thought that prince of
cheats, Fate, who all through life has had his foot on the button of my
game, was the one who did the trick." Long suffering had driven the old
gambler to the loser's bible, Philosophy! Cheated by man's device, he knew
he had some chance of getting even; but Fate he could not combat.
Bob Brownley had thought himself in hard luck when his eyes opened to the
fact that he had been robbed by means of dice loaded by man, but when Fate
pressed the button he saw that his man-made hell was but a feeble
imitation, and--was satisfied, as whoever knows the game of life is
satisfied, because--he must be. Bob's strong head bowed, his iron will
bent, and meekly his soul murmured, "Thy will be done."
That night he married Beulah Sands. The minister who united the grown-up
man and the woman who was as a new-born babe saw nothing extraordinary in
the match. He murmured to me, who acted as best man to the groom, maid of
honour to the bride, and father and mother to both, "We see strange
sights, we ministers of the great city, Mr. Randolph. The sweet little
lady appears to be a trifle scared." My explanation that she and Mr.
Brownley were the only survivors of the awful tragedies of the day was
sufficient. He was satisfied when he got no other response to his
question, "Do you take this man to be your wedded husband?" than a sweet
childish smile as she snuggled closer to Bob.
Bob and his bride went South to his mother and sisters the next day. He
left to me the settlement of his trades. He instructed me to set aside
$3,000,000 profits for Beulah Sands-Brownley, and insisted that I pay from
the balance the notes he had given me a few weeks before. There remained
something over $5,000,000 for himself.
The leading Wall Street paper, in its preachment on the panic, wound up
with:
"Wall Street has lived through many black Fridays. Some of them have
been thirteenth-of-the-month Fridays, but no Friday yet marked from the
calendar, no Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday yet
garnered to the storehouse of the past was ever more jubilantly
welcomed by his Satanic Majesty than yesterday. We pray heaven no
coming day may be ordained to go against yesterday's record for
tigerish cruelty and awful destruction. It is rumoured that Mr.
Brownley of Randolph & Randolph, either for himself or his clients
cleared twenty-five millions of profit. We believe that this estimate
is low. The losses coming through Robert Brownley's terrible onslaught
must have run over five hundred millions. Wall Street and the country
will do well to take the moral of yesterday's market to their heart. It
is this: The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few Americans is
a menace to our financial structure. It is the unanimous opinion of
'the Street' that Robert Brownley could never have succeeded in
battering down the price of Sugar in the very teeth of the Camemeyer
and Standard Oil support as he did yesterday, without a cash backing of
from fifty to one hundred millions. If a vast aggregation of money
owners deliberately place themselves behind an onslaught such as was so
successfully made yesterday, why can that slaughter not be repeated at
any time, on any stock, and against the support of any backing?"
When I read this and listened to talk along the same lines, I was puzzled.
I could not for the life of me see where Bob Brownley could have got five
to ten millions' backing for such a raid, much less fifty to a hundred.
Yet I was forced to confess that he must have had some tremendous backing;
else how could he have done what I had seen him do?
Bob left his wife at his mother's house while he went to Sands Landing to
the funeral. After the old judge and his victims had been laid away and
the relatives had gathered in the library of the great white Sands
mansion, he explained their kinswoman's condition and told them that she
was his wife. He insisted upon paying all Judge Sands's debts, over
$500,000 of which was owed to members of the Sands family for whom he had
been trustee. Before he went back to his mother's, Bob had turned a great
calamity into an occasion for something near rejoicing. Judge Sands and
his family were very dear to the people of the section, but his misfortune
had threatened such wide-spread ruin that the unlooked-for recovery of a
million and a half was a godsend that made for happiness.
Two days after the funeral Bob's dearest hope fled. He had ordered all
things at the Sands plantation put in their every-day condition. Beulah
Sands's uncles, aunts, and cousins had arranged to welcome her and to try
by every means in their power to coax back her lost mind. They assured Bob
that, barring the absence of Beulah's father, mother, and sister, there
would not be a memory-recaller missing. Bob and his wife landed from the
river packet at the foot of the driveway, which led straight from the
landing to the vine-covered, white-pillared portico. Bob's agony must have
been awful when his wife clapped her hands in childish joy as she
exclaimed, "Oh, Bob, what a pretty place!" She gave no sign that she had
ever seen the great entrance, through which she had come and gone from her
babyhood. Bob took her to the library, to her mother's room, to her own,
to the nursery where were the dolls and toys of her childhood, but there
came no sign of recognition, nothing but childish pleasure. She looked at
her aunts and uncles and the cousins with whom she had spent her life,
bewildered at finding so many strangers in the otherwise quiet place. As a
last hope, they led in her old black foster-mother, who had nursed her in
babyhood, who was the companion of her childhood and the pet of her
womanhood. There was not a dry eye in the library when she met the old
mammy's outburst of joy with the puzzled gaze of the child who does not
understand. The grief of the old negress was pitiful as she realised that
she was a stranger to her "honey bird." The child seemed perplexed at her
grief. It was plain to all that the Sands home meant nothing to the last
of the judge's family.
Bob brought her back to New York and besought the aid of the medical
experts of America and of the Old World to regain that which had been
recalled by its Maker. The doctors were fascinated with this new phase of
mind blight, for in some particulars Beulah's case was unlike any known
instances, but none gave hope. All agreed that some wire connecting heart
and brain had burned out when the cruel "System" threw on a voltage beyond
the wire's capacity to transmit. All agreed that the woman-child wife
would never grow older unless through some mental eruption beyond human
power to produce. Some of the medical men pointed to one possibility, but
that one was too terrible for Bob to entertain.
The first anniversary of their marriage found Bob and his wife settled in
their new Fifth Avenue mansion. He had bought and torn down two old
houses between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets and had erected a
palace, the inside of which was unique among all New York's unusual
structures. The first and second floors were all that refined taste and
unlimited expenditure of money could produce. Nothing on those splendid
floors told of the strange things above. A sedate luxury pervaded the
drawing-rooms, library, and dining-room. Bob said to me, in taking me
through them, "Some day, Jim, Beulah may recover, may come back to me, and
I want to have everything as she would wish, everything as she would have
had it if the curse had never come." The third floor was Beulah's. A
child's dainty bedroom; two nurses' rooms adjoining; a nursery, with a
child's small schoolroom and a big playroom, with dolls and doll houses,
child's toys of every description in abandon, as though their owner were
in fact but a few years old. Across the hall were three offices, exact
duplicates of mine, Bob's, and Beulah Sands's at Randolph & Randolph's.
When I first saw them it was with difficulty that I brought myself to
realise that I was not where the gruesome happenings of a year before had
taken place. Bob had reproduced to the minutest details our down-town
workshop. Standing in the door of Beulah Sands's office I faced the flat
desk at which she had sat the afternoon when I first saw that hideous
result of the work of the "System." I could almost see the little gray
figure holding the afternoon paper. In horror my eyes sought the floor at
the side of the chair in search of Bob's agonised face and uplifted hands.
As I stood for the first time in the middle of Bob's handiwork, I seemed
to hear again those awful groans.
"Jim," Bob said, "I have a haunting idea that some day Beulah will wake
and look around and think she has been but a few minutes asleep. If she
should, she must have nothing to disabuse her mind until we break the news
to her. I have instructed her nurses, one or the other of whom never loses
sight of her night or day, to win her to the habit of spending her time at
her old desk; I have told them always to be prepared for her awakening,
and when it comes they are instantly to shut off the rest of the floor and
house until I can get to her. Here comes Beulah now."
Out of the nursery came a laughing, happy child-woman. In spite of her
finely developed, womanly figure, which had lost nothing of its wonderful
beauty, and the exquisite face and golden-brown hair and great blue eyes,
which were as fascinating as on the day she first entered the offices of
Randolph & Randolph; in spite of the close-fitting gray gown with dainty
turned-over lace collar, I could hardly bring myself to believe that she
was anything but a young child. With an eager look and a happy laugh she
went to Bob and throwing her arms about his neck, covered his face with
kisses.
"Good Bob has come back to play with Beulah," she said, "She knew he
would. They told Beulah Bob had gone away to the woods to gather pretty
flowers. Beulah knew if Bob had gone to the woods he would have taken
Beulah with him. Now Bob must play school with Beulah." She sat at her
desk and opened her child's school-book. With mock severity she said,
"Bob, c-a-t. What does it spell?" For half an hour Bob sat and played
scholar and teacher by turns with all the patience of a fond father. With
difficulty I kept back the tears the sad sight brought to my eyes.
For the first year of Bob's marriage we saw but little of him at the
office. The Exchange saw less. He had wandered in upon the floor two or
three times, but did no business and seemed to take but little interest.
"The Street" knew Bob had married the daughter of Judge Lee Sands, the
victim of Tom Reinhart's cold-blooded Seaboard Air Line deal. Otherwise it
knew nothing of the affair. His friends never met his wife. Occasionally
they would pass the Brownley carriage on the avenue or in the park and,
taking it for granted that the beautiful woman was Mrs. Brownley, they
thought Bob a lucky fellow. It seemed quite natural that his wife should
choose seclusion after the awful tragedy at her home in Virginia. But they
could not understand why, with such cause for mourning, the exquisite
figure beside Bob in the victoria should always be garbed in gray. After a
while it was whispered that there was something wrong in Bob's household.
Then his friends and acquaintances ceased to whisper or to think of his
affairs. With all New York's bad points--and they are as plentiful as her
church spires and charity bazaars--she has one offsetting virtue. If a
dweller in her midst chooses to let New York alone, New York is willing to
reciprocate. In her most crowded fashionable districts a person may come
and go for a lifetime, and none in the block in which he dwells will know
when his coming and going ceases. When a New Yorker reads in his newspaper
of the man who lives next door to him, "murdered and his body discovered
by the gas man" or the tax collector, the butcher or the baker, as the
case may be, he never thinks he may have been remiss in his neighbourly
duties. There is no such word as "neighbour" in the New York City
dictionary. It may have been there once, but, if so, it was long
ago used as a stake for the barbed-wire fence of exclusive
keep-your-distance-we-keep-our-distance-until-we-know-youness. It is told
of a minister from the rural districts, an old-fashioned American, who
came to New York to take charge of a parish, that he started out to make
his calls and was seized in the hall of what in civilisation would have
been his next-door neighbour. He was rushed away to Bellevue for
examination as to sanity. The verdict was: "Insane. Had no letter of
introduction and was not in the set."
Shortly after the first anniversary of his wedding Bob gave up his office
with Randolph & Randolph and opened one for himself. He explained that he
was giving up his commission business to devote all his time to personal
trading. With the opening of his new office he again became the most
active man on the floor. His trading was intermittent. For weeks he would
not be seen at the Exchange or on "the Street." Then he would return and,
after executing a series of brilliant trades, which were invariably
successful, he would again disappear. He soon became known as the luckiest
operator in Wall Street, and the beginning of his every new deal was the
signal for his fast-growing following to tag on.
From time to time I learned that Beulah Sands was making no real
improvement, though in some details she had learned as a child learns. But
there was no indication that she would ever regain her lost mind.
Strange stories of Bob's doings began to seep into my office. For long
periods he would disappear. Neither the nurses in charge of his wife, nor
his brother, mother, and sisters, for whom he had purchased a mansion a
few blocks above his own, would hear a word from him. Then he would
return as suddenly as he had disappeared, and his wild eyes and haggard
face would tell of a prolonged and desperate soul struggle. He drank often
now, a habit he had never before indulged in.
For ten days before the second anniversary of his marriage he had been
missing. On the morning of the anniversary he appeared at the Exchange,
wild-eyed and dare-devil reckless. The market had been advancing for weeks
and was at a high level. Tom Reinhart and his branch of the "System" were
working out a new fleecing of the public in Union and Northern Pacific. At
the strike of the gong Bob took possession of the Union Pacific pole and
in thirty minutes had precipitated a panic by his merciless selling. Our
house was heavily interested in the Pacifics, although not in connection
with Reinhart and his crowd. As soon as I got word that Bob was the cause
of the slaughter, I rushed over to the Exchange and working my way into
the crowd, I begged a word with him. He had broken both stocks over fifty
points a share and the panic was raging through the room. He glared at me,
but finally followed me out into the lobby. At first he would not heed my
appeal, but finally he said, "Jim, it is too bad to let up. I had
determined to rub this devilish institution off the map, but if it really
is a case of injury to the house, it's my opportunity to do something for
you who have done so much for me, so here goes." He threw himself into the
Union Pacific crowd, first giving an order to a group of his brokers, who
jumped for a number of other poles. Almost instantly the panic was stayed
and stocks were bounding upward two to five points at a leap. Bob
continued buying Union Pacific and his brokers other stocks in unlimited
quantities. Nothing like such a quick turn of the market had been seen
before. His power to absorb stocks seemed to be boundless. It was
estimated that personally and through his brokers he bought over half a
million shares before he joined me and left the Exchange.
I looked at him in wonderment. "Bob, I cannot understand you," I said at
last as we turned out of Broad Street into Wall. "It seems as if you work
with magic. Everything you touch turns to gold."
He wheeled on me. "Yes, Jim, you are right. Gold, heartless, soulless
gold. But what is the dross good for? What is it good for to me? To-day I
suppose I have made the biggest one-man killing in the history of 'the
Street.' I must be an easy twenty-five millions richer in gold than I was
this morning, and I had enough then to dam the East River and a good
section of the North. But tell me, Jim, tell me, what can it buy in this
world that I have not got? I had health and happiness, perfect health,
pure happiness, when I did not have a thousand all told. Now I have fifty
millions, and I know how to get fifty or five hundred and fifty more any
time I care to take them, and I have only physical and mental hell. No
beggar in all the world is so poor in happiness as I. Tell me, tell me,
Jim, in the name of God, if there is one--for already the game of gold is
robbing me of my faith in God--where can I buy a little, just a little
happiness with all this cursed yellow dirt? What will it get me in the
next world, Jim Randolph, what will it get me? If I had died when I was
poor, I think you will agree with me that, if there is a heaven, I should
have stood an even chance of getting there. Now on a day like to-day, when
you see the results of my work, the results of my handling of unlimited
gold, you must agree that if I were taken off I should stand more than an
even show of landing in hell where the sulphur is thickest and the flames
are hottest."
We were at the entrance of Randolph & Randolph's office as he poured out
this terrible torrent of bitterness. He glared at me as a dungeon prisoner
might glare at his keeper for his answer to "Where can I find liberty?" I
had no words to answer him. As I noted the awful changes his new life was
making in every line of his face, the rigid hardness, the haunted, nervous
look of desperation, which seemed a forerunner of madness, I could not
see, either, where his millions brought any happiness. His hair, which
once was smooth and orderly, hung over his forehead in an unparted mass of
tangled curls, and here and there showed a streak of white. Bob Brownley
was still handsome, even more fascinating than before the mercury entered
his soul, but it was that wild, awful beauty of the caged lion, lashing
himself into madness with memories of his lost freedom.
"Jim," he went on, when he saw I could not answer, "I guess you don't know
where I can swap the yellow mud for balm of Gilead. I won't bother you
with my troubles any longer. I will go up-town and see the little girl
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.
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