by Frank Norris
And before the door of the room was closed, Jadwin was back at the table again. Once more, painfully, toilfully, he went over his plans, retesting, altering, recombining, his hands full of lists, of despatches, and of endless columns of memoranda. Occasionally he murmured fragments of sentences to himself. “H’m ... I must look out for that.... They can’t touch us there.... The annex of that Nickel Plate elevator will hold — let’s see ... half a million.... If I buy the grain within five days after arrival I’ve got to pay storage, which is, let’s see — three-quarters of a cent times eighty thousand....”
An hour passed. At length Jadwin pushed back from the table, drank a glass of ice water, and rose, stretching.
“Lord, I must get some sleep,” he muttered.
He threw off his clothes and went to bed, but even as he composed himself to sleep, the noises of the street in the awakening city invaded the room through the chink of the window he had left open. The noises were vague. They blended easily into a far-off murmur; they came nearer; they developed into a cadence:
“Wheat-wheat-wheat, wheat-wheat-wheat.”
Jadwin roused up. He had just been dropping off to sleep. He rose and shut the window, and again threw himself down. He was weary to death; not a nerve of his body that did not droop and flag. His eyes closed slowly. Then, all at once, his whole body twitched sharply in a sudden spasm, a simultaneous recoil of every muscle. His heart began to beat rapidly, his breath failed him. Broad awake, he sat up in bed.
“H’m!” he muttered. “That was a start — must have been dreaming, surely.”
Then he paused, frowning, his eyes narrowing; he looked to and fro about the room, lit by the subdued glow that came in through the transom from a globe in the hall outside. Slowly his hand went to his forehead.
With almost the abruptness of a blow, that strange, indescribable sensation had returned to his head. It was as though he were struggling with a fog in the interior of his brain; or again it was a numbness, a weight, or sometimes it had more of the feeling of a heavy, tight-drawn band across his temples.
“Smoking too much, I guess,” murmured Jadwin. But he knew this was not the reason, and as he spoke, there smote across his face the first indefinite sensation of an unnamed fear.
He gave a quick, short breath, and straightened himself, passing his hands over his face.
“What the deuce,” he muttered, “does this mean?”
For a long moment he remained sitting upright in bed, looking from wall to wall of the room. He felt a little calmer. He shrugged his shoulders impatiently.
“Look here,” he said to the opposite wall, “I guess I’m not a schoolgirl, to have nerves at this late date. High time to get to sleep, if I’m to mix things with Crookes to-morrow.”
But he could not sleep. While the city woke to its multitudinous life below his windows, while the grey light of morning drowned the yellow haze from the gas jet that came through the transom, while the “early call” alarms rang in neighbouring rooms, Curtis Jadwin lay awake, staring at the ceiling, now concentrating his thoughts upon the vast operation in which he found himself engaged, following out again all its complexities, its inconceivable ramifications, or now puzzling over the inexplicable numbness, the queer, dull weight that descended upon his brain so soon as he allowed its activity to relax.
By five o’clock he found it intolerable to remain longer in bed; he rose, bathed, dressed, ordered his breakfast, and, descending to the office of the hotel, read the earliest editions of the morning papers for half an hour.
Then, at last, as he sat in the corner of the office deep in an armchair, the tired shoulders began to droop, the wearied head to nod. The paper slipped from his fingers, his chin sank upon his collar.
To his ears the early clamour of the street, the cries of newsboys, the rattle of drays came in a dull murmur. It seemed to him that very far off a great throng was forming. It was menacing, shouting. It stirred, it moved, it was advancing. It came galloping down the street, shouting with insensate fury; now it was at the corner, now it burst into the entrance of the hotel. Its clamour was deafening, but intelligible. For a thousand, a million, forty million voices were shouting in cadence:
“Wheat-wheat-wheat, wheat-wheat-wheat.”
Jadwin woke abruptly, half starting from his chair. The morning sun was coming in through the windows; the clock above the hotel desk was striking seven, and a waiter stood at his elbow, saying:
“Your breakfast is served, Mr. Jadwin.”
He had no appetite. He could eat nothing but a few mouthfuls of toast, and long before the appointed hour he sat in Gretry’s office, waiting for the broker to appear, drumming on the arm of his chair, plucking at the buttons of his coat, and wondering why it was that every now and then all the objects in his range of vision seemed to move slowly back and stand upon the same plane.
By degrees he lapsed into a sort of lethargy, a wretched counterfeit of sleep, his eyes half closed, his breath irregular. But, such as it was, it was infinitely grateful. The little, over-driven cogs and wheels of the mind, at least, moved more slowly. Perhaps by and by this might actually develop into genuine, blessed oblivion.
But there was a quick step outside the door. Gretry came in.
“Oh, J.! Here already, are you? Well, Crookes will begin to sell at the very tap of the bell.”
“He will, hey?” Jadwin was on his feet. Instantly the jaded nerves braced taut again; instantly the tiny machinery of the brain spun again at its fullest limit. “He’s going to try to sell us out, is he? All right. We’ll sell, too. We’ll see who can sell the most — Crookes or Jadwin.”
“Sell! You mean buy, of course.”
“No, I don’t. I’ve been thinking it over since you left last night. Wheat is worth exactly what it is selling for this blessed day. I’ve not inflated it up one single eighth yet; Crookes thinks I have. Good Lord, I can read him like a book! He thinks I’ve boosted the stuff above what it’s worth, and that a little shove will send it down. He can send it down to ten cents if he likes, but it’ll jump back like a rubber ball. I’ll sell bushel for bushel with him as long as he wants to keep it up.”
“Heavens and earth, J.,” exclaimed Gretry, with a long breath, “the risk is about as big as holding up the Bank of England. You are depreciating the value of about forty million dollars’ worth of your property with every cent she breaks.”
“You do as I tell you — you’ll see I’m right,” answered Jadwin. “Get your boys in here, and we’ll give ’em the day’s orders.”
The “Crookes affair” — as among themselves the group of men who centred about Jadwin spoke of it — was one of the sharpest fights known on the Board of Trade for many a long day. It developed with amazing unexpectedness and was watched with breathless interest from every produce exchange between the oceans.
It occupied every moment of each morning’s session of the Board of Trade for four furious, never-to-be-forgotten days. Promptly at half-past nine o’clock on Tuesday morning Crookes began to sell May wheat short, and instantly, to the surprise of every Pit trader on the floor, the price broke with his very first attack. In twenty minutes it was down half a cent. Then came the really big surprise of the day. Landry Court, the known representative of the firm which all along had fostered and encouraged the rise in the price, appeared in the Pit, and instead of buying, upset all precedent and all calculation by selling as freely as the Crookes men themselves. For three days the battle went on. But to the outside world — even to the Pit itself — it seemed less a battle than a rout. The “Unknown Bull” was down, was beaten at last. He had inflated the price of the wheat, he had backed a false, an artificial, and unwarrantable boom, and now he was being broken. Ah Crookes knew when to strike. Here was the great general — the real leader who so long had held back.
By the end of the Friday session, Crookes and his clique had sold five million bushels, “going short,” promising to deliver wheat that they did not own, but expected to buy
at low prices. The market that day closed at ninety-five.
Friday night, in Jadwin’s room in the Grand Pacific, a conference was held between Gretry, Landry Court, two of Gretry’s most trusted lieutenants, and Jadwin himself. Two results issued from this conference. One took the form of a cipher cable to Jadwin’s Liverpool agent, which, translated, read: “Buy all wheat that is offered till market advances one penny.” The other was the general order issued to Landry Court and the four other Pit traders for the Gretry-Converse house, to the effect that in the morning they were to go into the Pit and, making no demonstration, begin to buy back the wheat they had been selling all the week. Each of them was to buy one million bushels. Jadwin had, as Gretry put it, “timed Crookes to a split second,” foreseeing the exact moment when he would make his supreme effort. Sure enough, on that very Saturday Crookes was selling more freely than ever, confident of breaking the Bull ere the closing gong should ring.
But before the end of the morning wheat was up two cents. Buying orders had poured in upon the market. The price had stiffened almost of itself. Above the indicator upon the great dial there seemed to be an invisible, inexplicable magnet that lifted it higher and higher, for all the strenuous efforts of the Bears to drag it down.
A feeling of nervousness began to prevail. The small traders, who had been wild to sell short during the first days of the movement, began on Monday to cover a little here and there.
“Now,” declared Jadwin that night, “now’s the time to open up all along the line hard. If we start her with a rush to-morrow morning, she’ll go to a dollar all by herself.”
Tuesday morning, therefore, the Gretry-Converse traders bought another five million bushels. The price under this stimulus went up with the buoyancy of a feather. The little shorts, more and more uneasy, and beginning to cover by the scores, forced it up even higher.
The nervousness of the “crowd” increased. Perhaps, after all, Crookes was not so omnipotent. Perhaps, after all, the Unknown Bull had another fight in him. Then the “outsiders” came into the market. All in a moment all the traders were talking “higher prices.” Everybody now was as eager to buy as, a week before, they had been eager to sell. The price went up by convulsive bounds. Crookes dared not buy, dared not purchase the wheat to make good his promises of delivery, for fear of putting up the price on himself higher still. Dismayed, chagrined, and humiliated, he and his clique sat back inert, watching the tremendous reaction, hoping against hope that the market would break again.
But now it became difficult to get wheat at all. All of a sudden nobody was selling. The buyers in the Pit commenced to bid against each other, offering a dollar and two cents. The wheat did not “come out.” They bid a dollar two and a half, a dollar two and five-eighths; still no wheat. Frantic, they shook their fingers in the very faces of Landry Court and the Gretry traders, shouting: “A dollar, two and seven-eighths! A dollar, three! Three and an eighth! A quarter! Three-eighths! A half!” But the others shook their heads. Except on extraordinary advances of a whole cent at a time, there was no wheat for sale.
At the last-named price Crookes acknowledged defeat. Somewhere in his big machine a screw had been loose. Somehow he had miscalculated. So long as he and his associates sold and sold and sold, the price would go down. The instant they tried to cover there was no wheat for sale, and the price leaped up again with an elasticity that no power could control.
He saw now that he and his followers had to face a loss of several cents a bushel on each one of the five million they had sold. They had not been able to cover one single sale, and the situation was back again exactly as before his onslaught, the Unknown Bull in securer control than ever before.
But Crookes had, at last, begun to suspect the true condition of affairs, and now that the market was hourly growing tighter and more congested, his suspicion was confirmed. Alone, locked in his private office, he thought it out, and at last remarked to himself:
“Somebody has a great big line of wheat that is not on the market at all. Somebody has got all the wheat there is. I guess I know his name. I guess the visible supply of May wheat in the Chicago market is cornered.”
This was at a time when the price stood at a dollar and one cent. Crookes — who from the first had managed and handled the operations of his confederates — knew very well that if he now bought in all the wheat his clique had sold short, the price would go up long before he could complete the deal. He said nothing to the others, further than that they should “hold on a little longer, in the hopes of a turn,” but very quietly he began to cover his own personal sales — his share of the five million sold by his clique. Foreseeing the collapse of his scheme, he got out of the market; at a loss, it was true, but still no more than he could stand. If he “held on a little longer, in the hopes of a turn,” there was no telling how deep the Bull would gore him. This was no time to think much about “obligations.” It had got to be “every man for himself” by now.
A few days after this Crookes sat in his office in the building in La Salle Street that bore his name. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning. His dry, small, beardless face creased a little at the corners of the mouth as he heard the ticker chattering behind him. He knew how the tape read. There had been another flurry on the Board that morning, not half an hour since, and wheat was up again. In the last thirty-six hours it had advanced three cents, and he knew very well that at that very minute the “boys” on the floor were offering nine cents over the dollar for the May option — and not getting it. The market was in a tumult. He fancied he could almost hear the thunder of the Pit as it swirled. All La Salle Street was listening and watching, all Chicago, all the nation, all the world. Not a “factor” on the London ’Change who did not turn an ear down the wind to catch the echo of this turmoil, not an agent de change in the peristyle of the Paris Bourse, who did not strain to note the every modulation of its mighty diapason.
“Well,” said the little voice of the man-within-the-man, who in the person of Calvin Hardy Crookes sat listening to the ticker in his office, “well, let it roar. It sure can’t hurt C. H. C.”
“Can you see Mr. Cressler?” said the clerk at the door.
He came in with a hurried, unsteady step. The long, stooping figure was unkempt; was, in a sense, unjointed, as though some support had been withdrawn. The eyes were deep-sunk, the bones of the face were gaunt and bare; and from moment to moment the man swallowed quickly and moistened his lips.
Crookes nodded as his ally came up, and one finger raised, pointed to a chair. He himself was impassive, calm. He did not move. Taciturn as ever, he waited for the other to speak.
“I want to talk with you, Mr. Crookes,” began Cressler, hurriedly. “I — I made up my mind to it day before yesterday, but I put it off. I had hoped that things would come our way. But I can’t delay now.... Mr. Crookes, I can’t stand this any longer. I must get out of the clique. I haven’t the ready money to stand this pace.”
There was a silence. Crookes neither moved nor changed expression. His small eyes fixed upon the other, he waited for Cressler to go on.
“I might remind you,” Cressler continued, “that when I joined your party I expressly stipulated that our operations should not be speculative.”
“You knew—” began Crookes.
“Oh, I have nothing to say,” Cressler interrupted. “I did know. I knew from the first it was to be speculation. I tried to deceive myself. I — well, this don’t interest you. The point is I must get out of the market. I don’t like to go back on you others” — Cressler’s fingers were fiddling with his watch chain— “I don’t like to — I mean to say you must let me out. You must let me cover — at once. I am — very nearly bankrupt now. Another half-cent rise, and I’m done for. It will take as it is — my — my — all my ready money — all my savings for the last ten years to buy in my wheat.”
“Let’s see. How much did I sell for you?” demanded Crookes. “Five hundred thousand?”
“Yes,
five hundred thousand at ninety-eight — and we’re at a dollar nine now. It’s an eleven-cent jump. I — I can’t stand another eighth. I must cover at once.”
Crookes, without answering, drew his desk telephone to him.
“Hello!” he said after a moment. “Hello! ... Buy five hundred May, at the market, right away.”
He hung up the receiver and leaned back in his chair.
“They’ll report the trade in a minute,” he said. “Better wait and see.”
Cressler stood at the window, his hands clasped behind his back, looking down into the street. He did not answer. The seconds passed, then the minutes. Crookes turned to his desk and signed a few letters, the scrape of his pen the only noise to break the silence of the room. Then at last he observed:
“Pretty bum weather for this time of the year.”
Cressler nodded. He took off his hat, and pushed the hair back from his forehead with a slow, persistent gesture; then as the ticker began to click again, he faced around quickly, and crossing the room, ran the tape through his fingers.
“God,” he muttered, between his teeth, “I hope your men didn’t lose any time. It’s up again.”
There was a step at the door, and as Crookes called to come in, the office messenger entered and put a slip of paper into his hands. Crookes looked at it, and pushed it across his desk towards Cressler.
“Here you are,” he observed. “That’s your trade. Five hundred May, at a dollar ten. You were lucky to get it at that — or at any price.”
“Ten!” cried the other, as he took the paper.
Crookes turned away again, and glanced indifferently over his letters. Cressler laid the slip carefully down upon the ledge of the desk, and though Crookes did not look up, he could almost feel how the man braced himself, got a grip of himself, put all his resources to the stretch to meet this blow squarely in the front.
“And I said another eighth would bust me,” Cressler remarked, with a short laugh. “Well,” he added, grimly, “it looks as though I were busted. I suppose, though, we must all expect to get the knife once in a while — mustn’t we? Well, there goes fifty thousand dollars of my good money.”
