The Mouse on Wall Street

by Leonard Wibberley

  Gloriana was herself quite unaware of the gargantuan fortune which she was amassing by mischance. Her only source of financial information was the London Times, which arrived irrregularly depending upon the view Salat, the French bus driver, took of world affairs and the glory of France.

  The single copy of the Times which was delivered to Grand Fenwick traveled an established route throughout the castle. It went first to the Prime Minister, now David Bent-ner, leader of the Labor or Dilutionist party, who turned immediately to the sports pages for he was an avid supporter of the Tottenham Hotspurs Football Club in England. (In summer he had to be content with cricket scores and favored Hampshire, though cricket is not, by its nature, a competitive game.) Mountjoy usually sent his man down to Bentner’s office to get the paper about midday so that he could glance at the Court Circular and what he called the “foreign intelligence.” He also read the leader articles, liked to speculate at the behest of what cabinet minister in England a particular point had been made, and occasionally wrote to the editor correcting the English used in an article. He had managed to carry on a correspondence of some months with readers of the Times on the difference between the words “special” and “especial” and vigorously denounced the American habit of turning any noun into an adverb by the addition of the suffix “wise.”

  After Mountjoy, Gloriana usually managed to get the Times and these days turned immediately to the stock listings. The only stocks she had been interested in were Westwood Coal and Rimrock Oil. Shortly after she had instructed Mr. Balche to buy these they had both disappeared from The New York Times listings, and Gloriana assumed that the companies had gone into bankruptcy and were no longer in ~ existence. Since this was exactly what she wanted she was quite happy about the matter, and although she wasn’t quite clear about the figure, she believed that she had managed at last to get rid of all the money except perhaps for a few thousand dollars which might remain after bankruptcy proceedings out of the millions invested.

  She was, however, a little disturbed one day, in going through the stock lists, to come upon the name “Pinot Productions” with after it a quotation of 1351/2 Per share. She asked Mountjoy about that. “Someone over there is taking our name,” she said. “Look at that.” And she showed him the listing.

  “Nothing for us to be concerned about, Your Grace,” Mountjoy replied. “Pinot, after all, is the name of a wine available in several parts of France. The Pinot blanc of the Graves district is almost respectable. There is really nothing to stop an American corporation putting the word Pinot in its name.”

  “I wonder what Pinot Productions produces?” said Gloriana.

  “Money,” said Mountjoy. “It is the object of all commercial activity.”

  “Tell me, Bobo,” said Gloriana, “when the name of a stock no longer appears in these lists, does that mean that the company concerned went broke?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Mountjoy. “It may have merged. It may have changed its name. There are other explanations. But it is a suspicious sign when it ceases to be listed.”

  With that Gloriana was content. She had received no letters from Balche for some weeks. She assumed that she soon would get a letter saying that her investment funds were exhausted and she noted that there was no longer a listing of Bickster and Company on the financial pages of the Times. So perhaps that had gone broke, too, and thus the financial difficulties of the Duchy would be at an end.

  When the patent roses and bulbs and flower seeds which she had ordered through Balche arrived she was glad that enough of the money had been saved to provide these for the castle gardens. And she was glad, too, when a small heavy crate arrived on Salat’s bus, containing the special piece of equipment which Dr. Kokintz had required. The crate was labeled “Carriage Fully Paid” so there wasn’t even an airplane freight bill to worry about.

  Kokintz was delighted to receive the apparatus. It was taken immediately to his laboratory and he had four men working for a week installing it in a section which he had cleared near one of the walls. Gloriana went to see the apparatus when it was in place and was disappointed to find nothing more than two highly polished metal lenses with four red squares painted on them. They were set up to face each other only an inch or two apart, and in the center of them was a tuning fork. (She hated tuning forks because in her father’s day she had had to take singing lessons, and her teacher was constantly producing a tuning fork, striking it, and demanding that she sing the note, which she couldn’t.)

  “What is it for?” she asked.

  “Your Grace,” said Kokintz, “if I tell you you won’t understand. Better I get some results. Then I will show you the results and everything will be clear.”

  “Well, is it something to do with heat, light, or sound?” asked Gloriana, who remembered that much from her physics teaching.

  “Heat, light and sound,” said Kokintz, smiling. “Once they were nice and separate. Now they are all aspects of the same thing. Well, of the three of them, it has most to do with sound.”

  With that Gloriana had to be content. But she turned to the planting of the new roses and bulbs and flower seeds in the castle gardens and began to think of a vast garden party when everybody could come and see the enchanting floral display in the castle grounds.

  When the bombshell burst, the advance warning was so subtle that Gloriana did not get the signal. She received one day a letter from England—from the London Times. She thought it might be a bill for the renewal of the Duchy’s subscription, but the bills usually came in stone-colored envelopes and this was a chaste white envelope with the Times letterhead discreetly engraved on one corner. Also it was addressed personally to her, and the typing of the address was almost as beautiful as the letterhead. She opened it with an expectation of pleasure and found inside a short letter from the Financial Editor of the newspaper begging the favor of an interview with her on her activities in the American stock market.

  “Your Grace is perhaps not unaware,” the letter said, “of the universal admiration which your calculation and daring have aroused in financial circles not only in the United States but on the London exchange as well. That Your Grace has entered the world of finance is now no longer a secret and we would be very happy if you could see your way now to discussing your investment theories and perhaps give your views of the long-range future of conglomerates and the growing involvement of the small speculator in mutual funds.”

  The letter surprised Gloriana. She turned to the envelope to see whether it was indeed addressed to her. She had no idea what a conglomerate was. It sounded like something that Kokintz might know of—a collection of jelly-like substances perhaps resembling frog’s eggs. And mutual funds? There was a Mutual Insurance Company somewhere, she believed, but she had no connection with it. Surely there was some mistake.

  She kept the letter for three days without replying, Mount-joy’s training that delay was always an advantage asserting itself here. Then she decided that she had better let someone else in on her secret—the method she had devised of getting rid of the unneeded money by investing it in the stock market.

  So she told her husband Tully about it over breakfast, and he choked on his buttered toast but otherwise suffered no harm when she assured him that she had got rid of almost everything in under seven months. Then a little nervous, she told Mountjoy, visiting his office herself instead of summoning him, which was quite unusual. But she knew that if she went to him he would be less angry if she had, in fact, done anything wrong. She wasn’t quite sure of the propriety of even titular heads of state investing in American stocks. Mountjoy was aghast. His face went quite white. He was for a moment—but only for a moment—without a single phrase, without indeed a word, to utter to express his feelings.

  “. . . so I got rid of it all,” Gloriana concluded hurriedly, “and now there’s this funny letter from the London Times. What do you think I ought to do about it?”

  Mountjoy ignored the letter. “Your Grace,” he exclaimed, �
�you overwhelm me. You leave me in silent and stricken admiration. Never in all my experience or all my reading have I heard of anything so completely magnificent.”

  “Oh, I’m glad I didn’t do anything wrong,” murmured Gloriana, blushing prettily.

  “Wrong?” cried Mountjoy. “What you did was so absolutely right it would bring cheers—loud cheers—for you from the wizards of finance of every nationality. The Rothschilds would be on their knees before you. John Maynard Keynes would regard as wasted every moment he did not spend in your presence.

  “Your Grace, yours was a stroke which bears the clear hallmark of genius. Utter simplicity. How to get rid of money without disrupting anyone’s economy? Of course, invest it in the stock market in the purchase of the very worst stocks that can be found. For money is at base only an expression of public confidence. And if you can transform money into something in which the public has no confidence, then the money disappears. And nobody is hurt in the slightest. I am humbled, my lady. This is the classic solution which I should long ago have been able to present to you. Instead you have shown it to me.”

  “Will you tell Mr. Bentner for me then?” asked Gloriana. “I think you could explain it to him better than I can.” “I will be delighted,” said Mountjoy.

  “And about this letter? Why do you suppose they would want an interview with me?”

  “Your Grace, you have demonstrated such a genius in financial affairs that I am sure this is just the first of many letters which you will receive. Reflect for a moment that the stock market has always been used to make money and this is probably the first time in history that it has ever been used to lose money deliberately. You have stumbled on a device for curbing inflation which may have enormous value for government everywhere. No longer will it be necessary to siphon off surplus money by taxation, leaving the government a harvest of popular ill will and also the problem of what to do with the taxes thus accumulated. You have found a method of making surplus and inflationary money disappear.

  “Of course you must give your interview to the Times. Keynes’s theories concerning deficit financing will utterly pale compared with your discovery of deflationary speculation.”

  “Well, what are conglomerates? They want to ask me about them,” persisted Gloriana.

  Mountjoy picked up the letter and read it through. “Do not fear, Your Grace,” he said. “I will instruct you on all these terms and, if you wish, be present during the course of the interview. As for conglomerates, the whole theory concerning them is embraced in the ancient country saying, ‘Do not put all your eggs in one basket/ It is merely the application to Wall Street and the world of finance of a maxim that small farmers have known and used for years. In short, you are safer if everything you own is not in one crop.”

  And so Gloriana, ignorant of the fact that her name had become one of awe and admiration in the world of finance, and that articles concerning her wizardry were always appearing in Baron’s Weekly, Fortune and other widely read publications, wrote to the financial editor of the Times of London and the interview was arranged.

  15

  MR. JACK SWEETING, financial editor of the Times of London, was quite swept off his feet by Gloriana. An Englishman, he had, by nature, an attitude of protective gallantry toward women provided they did not (as, alas, so often happened in the modern world) desert their femininity and demonstrate learning and intelligence. Of such women he was nervous, if not afraid, and therefore his attitude toward them was one of cold politeness.

  He had suspected that Gloriana XII of Grand Fenwick might be such a woman—a lamentable product, perhaps, of the London School of Economics (a drab institution which lent a wintry touch to the Thames embankment even in the height of summer), rather than of an Elizabeth Arden beauty spa.

  He found her completely charming—lovely, gentle, witty and gracious. She made tea for him herself (Twining’s Number 2 on the advice of Mountjoy, who was up on these things) and took him for a tour of the Duchy which, the spring now burgeoning, was not unlike a tour through Cam-elot.

  Although an economist of world standing, Jack Sweeting was country bred and of the generation which could remember the English countryside between the wars. Grand Fenwick reminded him of that departed England. He met flocks of white-faced sheep, their fleeces heavy upon them, being taken to upland pastures where the grass was now freshening. He heard long-forgotten sounds, like the slow creak of farm carts rumbling down the road, the twittering of hedge sparrows and the piping of curlews. He heard also the silence of the countryside during which only the wind speaks, touching here and there the sere stalks of leftover grass and the twigs of hawthorn and elder, now misted with green. In fact, he was so overcome by Gloriana and her country that she could have produced answers which were completely nonsensical to his questions and he, completely bowled over, would gallantly have made of them, if not pearls of wisdom, at least beads of sense.

  Actually Gloriana did very well with the interview. She said, under the schooling of Mountjoy, that she suspected that the United States would very soon legislate in the field of conglomerates to prevent the manipulation of industries for financial profit unrelated to their produce. (She had that sentence by heart and was very relieved not to be pressed on the subject.) She said that foreign investment would without a doubt be an increasingly powerful factor in all stock markets and that this represented a healthy growth of international capitalism, competing with international communism. She said that the adoption of a set of international values for currencies, which were not changeable, would greatly facilitate international trade and investment.

  “If trade is international, then we must have an international kind of money,” she said. “Wouldn’t you like a fresh cup of tea, Mr. Sweeting? I am afraid yours is cold.”

  Mr. Sweeting accepted the tea and asked what monetary unit for international exchange and investment Gloriana had in mind. Mountjoy suggested the Swiss franc, in which there was widespread public confidence backed by the neutrality of Switzerland and the vast experience of its bankers. A few more questions in this area produced some rather muddy answers because Gloriana really didn’t know anything about Swiss francs or Portuguese escudos (suggested by Sweeting). But she made the point that a housewife living in an international city would be very much handicapped in her marketing if she had to pay Chinese yen for her laundry, French francs for her clothing and English pounds for her meat.

  “Is the European Common Market a step in the direction you are advocating?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Gloriana, who really didn’t know anything about the European Common Market except that it was generally reckoned a good thing.

  “Would Grand Fenwick be interested in joining the European Common Market?” asked Sweeting.

  Gloriana glanced at Mountjoy. She really didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Grand Fenwick has no place in the European Common Market,” said Mountjoy. “Our two principal products, wine and wool, find their own market without competition. We do not need the cooperation and aid of other nations in selling them. Common markets arise from common causes. We have no common economic cause with others.”

  Sweeting now turned to Gloriana’s own investment policy. He half hoped Mountjoy would go away so that he could question her closely here, but the Count was as firmly fixed by the side of Gloriana as the castle was around her, and so Sweeting had to go ahead with his questioning with Mountjoy standing by as guard.

  “You have yourself demonstrated a remarkable knowledge of the New York stock market, following a bold investment policy which has roused widespread admiration,” said Sweeting. “Can you, in a sentence or two, summarize your philosophy of investment?”

  Gloriana had her reply down pat. “I think the very best attitude for anyone investing in the stock market is to make up his mind to lose money,” said Gloriana. “I don’t see how any other attitude could possibly work.” Mr. Sweeting smiled. She was being cagey with him, reiterating advice which, he recal
led, had once been given by Baron Rothschild.

  “And you entered the market then with the prospect before you of losing your total investment?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Gloriana. “That was never for one moment out of my mind. I just kept on investing and investing. And you know what happened.”

  “The world knows,” said Mr. Sweeting. “One of the most remarkable feats of the present century. I am sure that you undertook a great deal of study of the market, however, before starting your investment program.”

  “No,” said Gloriana, “I can’t say that I did. I had an objective in mind and I persisted until I achieved that objective. That is really all that I can say. I don’t think that there is anything extraordinary in what I did.”

  “Your name has been linked, in connection with your raid on Wall Street, with the brilliant young American financier, Mr. Ted Holleck,” said Sweeting. “Is it true that you were working in close cooperation with Mr. Holleck in making your choice of investments?”

  “Mr. who?” said Gloriana.

  “Holleck.”

  “I’m afraid I have never heard of him,” said the Duchess. “I did all my ordering of stocks through Mr. Joseph Balche, who is the financial agent of Grand Fenwick in the United States. He sent me all my seeds too.”

  “Seeds?”

  “Yes—seeds and bulbs. And the new roses which I showed you in the garden.”

  Sweeting, nonplused, repeated his question. “You are quite sure that you had not heard of Mr. Holleck?” he asked. “He followed almost precisely the same investment program as yourself.”

  “I really have never heard of him,” said Gloriana. “And if he followed the same program as I did, then maybe he had the same method of selecting his stocks.”

  “Can you show me what that method is?” asked Sweeting, returning to this question.

  For answer Gloriana, ignoring Mountjoy, secured the financial page of the Times, got a pin from the arm of the sofa on which she was sitting and stuck it, her eyes shut, into the page.