First harvests

THE new year has come; and all the world has been celebrating, with children’s dances and with children’s dinners and with a multiplicity of costly toys, the birth of Christ. Grown-up people who have been good-natured have assisted, and helped their boys play with candles and with evergreens as they helped them play with fire-crackers on the fourth of July, that other great feast or holy-day our calendar still keeps. Grown people who have not been good-natured have kept to their clubs, mostly, men to men; and the women have snatched the chance to get a week of resting and a little early sleep. For now the children’s play is over; and the winter’s balls are to begin in earnest, a serious business, as we have said.

On the evening of December thirty-first, young Townley was invited to dine with his partner, Mr. Phineas Tamms, in Brooklyn. He never liked these dinners; but yet he learned too much from them to stay away. A voyage to Brooklyn combined all the discomforts of a trip to Europe, without the excitement and rewards—as he said at his favorite Columbian Club, where he stopped to take a modest tonic on his way down-town. “I wish I were going,” said one of the circle, who dallied a little in stocks, “and had your chance of getting points.” For these dinners of Tamms, the great street leader, were known as meetings where many schemes were laid, and information gleaned, as Tamms unbended after dinner, worth many thousands for each syllable, in gold.

“Yes,” said old Mr. Townley, wagging his gray head sagely, “my partner is a very able young man—a very able young man indeed.” He was taking nothing; but it was his usual hour to be at the club; and the New Year’s time inclined the old gentleman to kindliness for all the world; so he had left his private and particular seat by the window and joined the group of younger fellows, to see how “his Boys” (as he called all young men he knew) were getting along. As such, he was liked by them; and treated with but the faintest tinge of patronage his age made necessary.

“What do you think of the market, Mr. Townley?” said one of them with a manner of much deference. “We have had a long spell of sag, and the public are not in it.”

“Ha, ha,” chuckled Mr. Townley, delightedly, rubbing his hands. “Townley & Son have seen a longer spell than this. The public will come in it fast enough when we pull the market through. Wait till after the holidays, my boys—I say no more; but wait till after the holidays. As I was saying to my old friend Livingstone, just now, a panic never comes on a long falling market. There was fifty-seven—and thirty-eight—he did not remember thirty-eight—Charles Townley & Son held up the banks, not they us, in those days—” and the old man went off, chuckling, and joined his old friend Livingstone, the oldest member of the club, after himself, in the corner window that was sacred to them.

Jimmy De Witt looked after the retreating figure sadly. “What a pity the old man does not know anything,” said he. “He would not lie about it, if he could.”

Charlie left the club, and drew his fur overcoat tightly about his chest, as the biting wind swept, from river to river, through Twenty-third Street. He was not surprised his senior partner was not going to the dinner, and only wished he did not have to go himself. Day after to-morrow was the Duval ball; and he wished to keep himself fresh for that. Was he not going to put his fate to the test, and win or lose the girl he meant to marry? And New Year’s day would be all work for him; for Tamms had bespoken his most private services; and he had some reason to look upon the balance-sheet with apprehension.

Nor was his peace of mind restored by Tamms’s dinner. No ladies were allowed at Tamms’s dinners, and only one well-tried and proven waiter. Tamms sat at the head of his table, and until the coffee was brought, said nothing; or if he did speak, talked of church matters or of the weather. But when the coffee and cigars appeared (for cigars and coffee were almost his only food, and he was never known to drink wine at a business dinner) Tamms’s rusty iron jaw would open and the slow words drop out gingerly, one by one, over the stiff curtain of his beard, while all the knights of his round table craned their ears to hear them.

But Townley noticed some very curious things about this dinner. In the first place, the guests were all young men, and rich men; but not men of much experience or sagacity upon the street. Deacon Remington, who in times past had had his regular seat, was notably absent. And Tamms talked more freely than was his wont, and more steadily throughout the dinner, which last was far more rich than usual and was served by half a dozen hired waiters.

“What do you think of the market?” was again the question a beardless youth asked of Tamms anxiously, to the dismay of all about him. But the beardless youth had just come fresh from California with his father’s fourteen millions, bent on becoming a power in the street; and had not learned his money-changer’s etiquette as yet. But to the surprise of all the rest, Tamms answered quite naturally and fully. “I don’t know much about the market,” said he, cannily. “I guess perhaps there ain’t much in the market, anyhow, of itself——”

“You think it a good sale?” broke in the beardless youth eagerly; while his neighbors kicked him under the table and the ones placed farthest from their host swore at him audibly.

“I ain’t sayin’ what I think it—at least, not jest now,” said Tamms, with dignity. “I s’pose things is kind o’ stagnant—unless some feller drops a stone into the pool.”

The attention grew breathless; you might have heard a pin drop; though not, perhaps, the flutter of an angel’s wing. “There’s a good deal of money coming in on the first of January; and I don’t know but what things might start up a little, if some stock got kind o’ scarce.” Tamms spoke these last words with greater precision, and in much better English than the former ones; and his young partner knew that in this accent he was always lying. But all the rest had treasured every syllable of the oracle’s words, more carefully than any reporter’s note-book could have set them down, while in appearance dallying with their cigarettes and iced champagne. “He means a corner,” said every man to himself; “who’s he gunning for?”—“He wants them to think he means to corner Allegheny,” said young Townley to himself.

“Old man Remington has caused the present break,” said a rich young stock-broker with an air of much importance.

“The deacon and I are kind o’ out,” said Tamms. “The fact is, I’m afraid the deacon may have been selling too many stocks.”

“Remington has sold nothing but Allegheny,” said every man to himself; and felt that they were well repaid their ferry-trips to Brooklyn. But after this, Mr. Tamms obstinately refused to talk any more stocks, but only Shakespeare and the music-glasses, that is, of Mr. Beecher and the Coney Island races.

Charlie outstayed them all, and then went home alone. “It can’t be done,” he said to himself; “the Governor knows it and he’s desperate. I don’t believe that we can borrow fifty thousand more.” He was sitting alone in the ladies’ room of the ferry-boat, his fur collar pulled well up about his face, smoking one of his own cigars; for Tamms’s were too strong. There was only one other passenger upon the boat; a drunken working-man; and he was cursing Townley for a swell. “Confound him, they wouldn’t let me smoke there, though it is late at night. But I ain’t got no fine cigar, perhaps.”

Tamms’s fertility of invention was miraculous; but still it seemed to Townley that he was hard pressed now. Their profit on that last summer’s operation had been large—on paper; but it was this devilish tightness of money that made things bad.

Suddenly, there was a peal of joyous bells, ringing loud all at once, chimes, church-bells, factories, and schools, from both sides of the river. Townley started nervously, and then remembered with a laugh that it was New Year’s day. “What damned rot it is,” said he; and then betook himself again to thinking. It seemed as if that merry music brought him new ideas; for he slapped his thigh, and said aloud, “By Jove, I have it.”—“What’s the swell a-chuckling over now?” said our friend Simpson, looking in the window from outside.

“The deacon must have sold about all the stock there is,” Charlie went on to himself; “and if we can only carry ours, and those rich lambs go in to buy—the deacon can’t deliver. Why, it’s making them do the cornering for us—doesn’t cost us a cent—and if we get a little short of money, we can even drop a few shares to them ourselves, and no one be the wiser. Provided only some devilish panic or strike or war of rates does not come in just now,” he added, as the boat jarred heavily against the dock.

The bells were silent now, and Charlie, wrapping his fur about him, walked up the snowy and deserted street along the wharves. There was a foul dampness coming from the tired water that still splashed beneath the piles; but the city’s faults were charitably covered up in snow. For once in his life, Townley had an instinct of economy, and took no carriage; a fact which Simpson, slouching along behind him, had noticed. There was no horse-car waiting, so he walked briskly up a narrow cross-street into the city, still smoking his cigar. “Damn him,” thought Simpson, “I wonder how much he’s got? I’d scrag him for a hundred.” And he drew a long knife from its sheath, and hid it with his right hand, in his breast. Simpson has been unlucky lately, with his pools, even as has Mr. Tamms.

But Charlie is still thinking; of Mamie Livingstone and of the ball to-morrow night. The evening’s talk has had one consequence, not wholly material, at least; it has won for little Mamie the cavalier she loves. Townley feels now that all his future hangs upon this slender thread: curse it, he may have waited too long. He has had a dozen chances to marry girls before this; Pussie Duval, herself, who gives the ball to-morrow night—

He is stopped by a man at the corner of the street. “Got a light, boss?”

The voice is rude and husky, and the man has been drinking. Charlie looks at him good-naturedly, and throws open his fur-lined coat; and as he does so, the man notices that he too looks pale and worried.

“Certainly,” says Charlie. “Take a cigar, won’t you—for the first of the year?” Charlie has a pleasant smile; and he meets the other’s eye frankly. And Simpson takes his right hand from his breast.

He takes the cigar, shame-facedly; and shambles hurriedly off, not waiting for his light.

“Poor devil, I suppose he wants to smoke it in a warmer place than this,” says Charlie; and pulls his furs close about him and hurries safely home.