All the men who got rich with John Breakspeare developed strange pathologies from nervous shock and strain. Their eyes became opaque and had that uncanny trick of suddenly and without movement changing their focus while they looked at you, as if something were transacting on the far-away horizon of their thoughts and you for that instant were transparent. They had their luck by the tail and could not let go. They could count their gains; they could not seize them. John was always getting them in; he never got them out. Their wealth was in property to which enormous additions had continuously to be made by an uncontrollable law of growth. Thus the richer they grew the greater correspondingly their liabilities were and there seemed no way either to quit or get out. If you had all the wealth in the world you could not sell it. There would be no one to buy it. In principle that was their problem. If they could sell out they would be millionaires. But where was there anybody with money enough to buy them out? It would take twenty-five millions or more. Once they had begun to look at this dilemma they could not let it alone; it filled them with anxiety. They began to worry John about it. He had got them in. Couldn’t he find a way to get them out? [302]
“All right,” he said. “I’ll show you a way out.”
“How?”
“We’re like a railroad,” he said. “No railroad is privately owned any more. It’s too big. It represents too much capital. Only the public is rich enough to own a railroad. It takes thousands of investors putting their money together to build a railroad. Then somebody works it for them and pays them dividends on their shares. We can do that,—put our shares on the New York Stock Exchange and sell out to the public.”
So he led them to Wall Street. The motive was theirs; the plan was his.
The American Steel Company was reorganized. Its capitalization was increased to take in properties hitherto jointly owned among them and for other purposes. They agreed to sell no shares except through John in order that all should fare alike. It was a verbal agreement. All of their private agreements were verbal and never so far had one been broken.
Enter John Breakspeare upon the Wall Street scene with something to sell.
The shares of the American Steel Company were duly listed on the New York Stock Exchange,—that is, they were added to the list of securities permitted to be dealt in there and allotted sign and booth in the great investment bazar.
People stared and passed by. It was a strange sign not only because it was new but for the reason also that the public knew only mining and railroad shares. The day of industrial company shares had not come.[303] John was a pioneer in that line. He was a vendor unused to the ways of this fair with merchandise nobody had ever seen before.
He was not disappointed. He knew, if anybody did, that goods must be brought to the buyer’s attention. Nothing will sell itself, least of all seven per cent. shares for which there is instinctively neither hunger nor thirst. He knew also in principle how this kind of impalpable merchandise should be displayed. It has no appeal to any of the natural senses. Therefore it must be made to appeal to all of them at once, symbolically. How?
First to be engaged is the sense of sight. The shares move. They go up. People ask: “What is that?” They move again. People ask: “Why is that?” They continue to move, going up, then down a little, then suddenly up a great deal, and people say: “Here before our eyes is something doing,—a chance to make some money.” And when once they begin to say that all their senses and appetites are touched with expectation, for money, however derived, is in itself palpable. It is the symbol of all things whatever.
For the art of making shares go up and down in a manner to excite first attention, then curiosity and then an impulse to act for gain, there is a long, inartistic word. The word is manipulation. The stock market manipulator is an illusionist. Perched high upon some eerie crag of the Wall Street canyon, producing enchantment at a distance, he is himself invisible save to the initiate, and even they do not know what he intends or why, because what he seems to be doing is[304] never at all what he is really doing. If it were, the lesser fauna—the wolves, the jackals, the foxes, apes and crows,—would anticipate his ends and take the quarry out of his hands. He makes shares rise when he is selling them and fall when he is buying them. He can take an unnoticed, unwanted thing like American Steel and cause it to become an object of extravagant speculative interest, so that tens of thousands hang over the tape and wait for the next quotation, betting whether it shall be up or down. Moreover, he is a ventriloquist. When he has made certain shares very active by the apparently simple though extremely intricate expedient of buying and selling them furiously through different brokers, no two of whom know they have the same principal,—when he has done this and people begin to ask the question, then answers suitable to his purpose are in everyone’s ears, saturate the atmosphere, and although he, the manipulator, is the source of them that fact is as little known as the fact that he was himself the solitary source of all the buying and selling that started the excitement. Not only is the public deceived; the fauna, too, will often be caught. All is flesh that rises to his lure. His work is sometimes legitimate, as when he creates a public demand for shares the proceeds of which go to build a railroad or some other great economic work so vast that the capital could not have been obtained in any other way; it is sometimes predatory, sometimes wanton.
At this time the pendragon of manipulators was one Sabath,—James Sabath,—feared by the wicked and[305] righteous both. He was not a member of the Stock Exchange for he did not wish to be bound by the rules. There was no name on his door nor was his name in any directory or book of celebrities. Yet it was constantly on the lips of all men concerned in gains and losses from speculation. One might have asked in every bank in Wall Street who and where this Sabath was and one’s inquiry would have been received with utter blankness. Yet there would have been hardly a banker in Wall Street, certainly no very important one, who had not had transactions with him of an extremely intimate and delicate nature. Such is the way of men in the money canyon.
For example, there was Bullguard. He was the great private banker of his time,—a kind of C?sar’s wife to the institution of American finance. His authority was absolute, his power was feudal and tyrannical. For him to have been seen in the society of Sabath would have been scandalous. Nobody would have known what to make of it. Yet in the pursuit of his ends he often engaged Sabath to do things he could not risk doing for himself. That again is the way of men in the little autonomous state which is Wall Street.
John sought an audience with Sabath. After long delay and much unnecessary mystery he was received in that strange man’s lair. Besides himself there was nothing in it except a ticker, some chairs and a worn Turkey carpet. The room was without windows, therefore lighted artificially in daytime. Twice during the interview he rang a bell and each time a boy appeared[306] with one glass of whiskey in his hand. Sabath drank it at a gulp, with no here’s how or by your leave. He sat in an arm chair and combed his beard upward from its roots with his fingers, or for change twisted it with the other hand. His head was continually moving; sometimes he threw it far back to start his fingers through his beard; no matter what he did with his head his eyes all the time were perfectly still and held John in a blue, vise-like gaze. He looked at people in a way to make them feel full of holes. His head was very large; his body was neat and small; his voice was sarcastic, thin and shrill.
John explained his errand. He wished Sabath to take hold of American Steel shares and create some public interest in them. Sabath said nothing, but continued to look at him. John went into details, telling about the company, what it owned and what it earned. Still Sabath continued to gaze at him in silence. John told him at length how the shares had been pooled in his hands by his associates, none to be sold except through him. And Sabath said nothing.
“Does it interest you at all?” John asked at last.
“Come back tomorrow,” said Sabath. He made a gesture toward the door without looking at it. As John went he sat still, but for his head, which turned slowly in a reptilian manner.
To John’s surprise Sabath was vocal the next day and asked many questions in a high, twanging voice. Some of his questions were oblique and some apparently quite irrelevant. Suddenly he said:
“And so you know that God-fearing Creed, do you?[307] You must know him very well. How much of this precious stock has Mr. Creed got?”
John told him. Sabath tweaked his beard, saying: “Who would imagine I’d ever be found in the same alley with a he-cat like Creed.”
“What’s the matter with him?” asked John.
“I say nothing against him,” Sabath answered. “I only say I’d hate to go into a room with him alone.”
There was a third interview, then a fourth and a fifth. Terms were stated. It seemed to be all ready for the signatures and as there weren’t going to be any signatures John couldn’t understand why Sabath kept postponing the final word. Then one day out of a painted sky he said: “We seem unable to make a trade, Mr. Breakspeare. I cannot allow myself to waste any more of your valuable time. I’m not interested.”
John was amazed.
“However,” he said, “I suppose I can trust you to keep to yourself the information you have obtained in the course of these interviews?”
“That’s what we live on down here,—trust,” said Sabath. “We couldn’t do business without it.”
With that he turned his back and stood looking at the ticker. John, thus rudely dismissed, was at the door with his hand on the knob when Sabath spoke again, without turning around, without moving his head, as if he were thinking out loud.
“What did you ever do to Mr. Bullguard?”
[308]
“I don’t know him,” said John. “Why?”
“He knows you,” said Sabath, still reading the tape. “He says you are a gambler. Is that true?”
“I don’t know what he means,” said John. “It would be absurd to ............