First harvests

IT was near the end of the first hour in the New York Stock Exchange. The floor was crowded. A few of the young brokers, who had less business and more time, having executed their orders, were now ready for sky-larking and horse-play. But it had been a great “bull” morning, and the greater number, many of whom were older brokers, and had only been attracted personally to the scene as the news of the great battle spread abroad about the Street, were still madly pressing around the painted signs which were set, like standards, to mark the stations of the stocks. The high roof of the hall seemed too close to make the noise endurable; the air itself seemed torn and tired with the cries of the combatants. The rays of light which came down from the high windows were full of shreds and the dust of battle; the worn floor was littered with bits of paper, telegrams and orders, the exploded cartridges of that paper warfare. To the contemplative stranger in the gallery—if any contemplating stranger there had presence of mind and spirit calm enough to remain so—it seemed as if the actors in the scene, rushing madly from one skirmish to another, crying their orders, now unheeded, now to a crazy crowd, were the orators or leaders of a vast mob, trying each to work his will upon the multitude. Or he may have thought it a parliament, a congress that had overleapt all rules of decorum, where each member forgot all save the open rush for private gain. But one who understood might still have seen the battle wax and wane; might have seen here the attack and there the repulse, here the concentration of forces and the charge, there the support brought up to the post that showed signs of wavering. And it was a battle, of a sort more common now than that of arms; and who shall say, less real than it? Surely, they were fighting for their hearths and for their altars; such altars and such firesides as they had. And many a city palace, and many a country cottage, were hanging with their owners on the outcome of the day. Each magnate of the market, each leader in the fray, stood surrounded by his staff and subaltern officers; while the telegraph boys and camp-followers rushed hither and thither, and nimble clerks hastened from the room with messages and returned with new supplies.

Near the end of the great arena where the chief point of onslaught seemed to be, stood the standard of the Allegheny Centrals—Allegheny Central, the great railroad that made their houses and their yachts and carriages for hundreds of the rich, and to which some ten thousand of the poor looked for their daily bread. No great corporation had a better name than this: none was surer, none more favored by widows with their mites, by shrewd lawyers, by banks, and by trustees. A greater power, almost, than the people, in the States through which it ran, it was well and honestly managed, and little in favor with speculators and those who like best of all to win by other people’s losses; perhaps the easiest way. This stock had therefore been chosen by the flower of the “bull” army, and was the very wedge of their attack. A great crop had been sown upon its line that year; and about the sign of Allegheny the maddest fight of all was fought. A dense crowd encircled it, a small sea of high hats—some already crushed in the conflict—and a babel of hoarse voices; and even on its outskirts were others madly pushing, pressing to get in. The figures cried went up by leaps at a time—Ninety! Ninety-one! a half! three quarters! Ninety-two for any part of ten thousand! And the smaller men, who had no thought of purchase at such a time, were drawn in as by a whirlpool, such was the excitement of seeing others get what all were there to make, such was the resistless attraction of success.

Among the men who took no part, but stood curiously, on the outskirts of the fight, were two whose faces and figures would attract you even in that crowd. They were apparently friends; at least, they had come in together. The older was a young man of twenty-four or five, very handsome in his way; that is, he was lithe, graceful, tall, with dark hair neatly cut, a small black moustache, shaped like a gentleman’s—it was not the moustache of a gambler, nor yet of an elegant of the dry-goods counter—and, above all, with an indescribable air of high finish and high living. His clothes were beautifully cut; his hands white, his cheeks red, his nervous system evidently in perfect order, and his digestion unimpaired. He came in sauntering, carelessly pointing out the people of interest to his friend; his manner was perfectly indifferent, as he drifted from one sign-post to another, chewing between his lips the green stem of some flower,—as a countryman puts a straw in his mouth when making a horse-trade. He passed by the Allegheny Central and stopped in front of the Louisville and Nashville sign; and no one suspected that he, Charlie Townley, of Townley & Tamms, had just sent brokers into the heat of the fight, by order of headquarters, to sell twenty thousand shares of the Allegheny Central itself. He cast no glance behind him, but was engaged in pointing out to his friend three well-known brokers—one famed for his wit, the other for his wife, and the third, to continue the alliteration, for his wiles. The companion was of different build; but we need not describe him. Arthur Holyoke had arrived in New York the very night before. He had come on from the country with his cousin and her aunt, Mrs. Livingstone, with whom in future Gracie was to live. He had been with Gracie all those weeks since her father’s death; but his quick perception had prevented him from speaking to her again of their engagement. Gracie was a girl whose standard of conduct was placed above the plain and obvious right; who would go out of her way to seek duties that were almost romantic, justice more than poetical, motives ethereal, and benefits to others that their better angels might have overlooked. And Arthur was enough of a poet himself to feel that he would not wisely mention love to her for many months at least; not because her father had not approved it, but because he was no longer there to approve.

When Judge Holyoke had written to his sister-in-law about Arthur, Mrs. Livingstone had spoken at once to Mr. Townley, who was an old friend of hers; and he had promptly offered to let Arthur serve an apprenticeship in his own business. Mr. Townley, the old gentleman, that is; for Charlie, despite all his finish and importance, was but a line-officer, representing them actively in the field. He was only a far-off orphan cousin of Mr. Townley’s, and a clerk in the firm of Townley & Tamms, on a salary of $2500 a year. But his alertness and his wide-awake air had gained for him the pleasanter duty of representing the firm in its seat in the Stock Exchange; said seat being, as we have seen, a privilege to get standing-room therein if possible.

No one knew all this of Townley. Most of his merely society acquaintances supposed him to be the senior partner’s son; even his intimate friends thought of him as the probable heir, in a fair way to be a partner, an impression which Charlie artfully heightened by his extravagant mode of life when away from his boarding-place, his late hours, and his general inattention to all but the showy work of the firm. It was evident that he took far more interest in keeping his dress correct than in the books of the firm; and, the Stock Exchange once closed, no young man of fashion could be more safely relied upon for an afternoon of sport, or a ride and dinner at the Hill-and-Dale Club.

But all this Arthur had yet to learn; for the present, he was interested in the battle around him, the conflict of the two spirits, hope and despair, affirmation and negation, enterprise and nihilism, in this safety-valve of traffic, where alone the two forces meet directly, each at touch and test with the other. For the Stock Exchange is a kind of gauge, testing the force of the national store and the national need of money; and the bears, too, have their healthy function, keeping down the fever in the body politic.

In the shriek and roar of all the crowd about them, the young men could hardly converse intelligibly; but that might come after; meantime, Arthur was fully employed in seeing. Few of the men showed evidence of much mental anxiety; opposite them, to be sure, a pale-faced little Jew stood in a corner, nervously biting his lips; but most of the crowd were red-faced, and panting with the physical excitement alone, as if it were a foot-ball match. As they looked on, a fat, good-natured-looking broker with an impudent face and a white hat cocked on one side of his head, came out of the Lake Shore crowd, and with the slightest perceptible wink to Townley as he passed, joined the madder fight about Allegheny Central.

“Ninety-one,” said he, “a thousand!”

“Come out of the floor,” said Townley to Arthur; “come up-stairs; there’s going to be some fun.” At first, no one paid any attention to the new-comer; and when our friends got to the gallery, the fat broker was still offering his stock at ninety-one to an unheeding world, and the state of affairs was much the same as before. Only, that at this distance the noise had something in it less human; it was inarticulate, monstrous, and the sight of half a thousand men, struggling, every eye fixed on his neighbor’s, made a something awful in the experience, as if they two on-lookers were unseen Valkyrs, looking down upon some battle of the Huns.

“Ninety-one,” they heard the new-comer say again; and this time he was answered; for there was a howl of derision, and then a sudden sway in the crowd, and a rush to where he stood. “Ninety and three quarters,” said he; “a half,” and there was another howl; but by this time the leaders of the inner defence had heard of this flank movement, and their tactics changed. “Ninety!” “Nine and a half!” “Eighty-nine!” “Eight and three quarters!” “A half!”

“Seven, for ten thousand,” said the solitary broker, coolly; and the roar doubled in volume, if such a thing were possible; and the rush to sell began, at rapidly dropping figures. The fat, good-natured broker turned away, and started to go, having sold the stock down five points in hardly fifty seconds; when crash! a small soft orange went through the centre of the impudent white hat. With a yell of derision, the crowd turned their fury upon this; whack! crack! flew the unlucky hat, from one fist to another, amid the cheers of the multitude, until a well-directed kick landed it beside Arthur in the gallery. This gave a new object to their humor; and with one accord the assemblage began singing in regular well-tempered cadence, evidently referring to Arthur:

Arthur, blushing, hurried from the gallery; and Charlie Townley followed him, laughing inordinately.

“They’ll get used to you in a day or two, my dear fellow,” said he. “They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t seen you with me.”

When they got into the corridor below, they met the broker of the ravaged hat. He had got another by this time, and winked, this time with a broad smile, at Townley as they came out. “I did that pretty well, I think?” said he.

“First-rate,” said Townley. “How much did it cost?”

“Not over twenty thousand shares, I guess, and twelve at least went to your friends. The boys didn’t like it, though, did they?” And the man’s mouth grinned wider, as he thought of the scene we have described.

“Charge the hat to the pool,” laughed Townley. “Who’s selling,—not the Old Man?”

“Tammy, I guess,” said the other. “Doubt if the Old Man even knows it.”

“Ta-ta,” said Townley; and they sallied forth, Arthur much wondering at these metropolitan methods of doing business; and Townley completed his duties as host and cicerone by giving him a very elaborate lunch at a down-town club and putting his name down among the candidates for membership. “You needn’t feed here unless you like,” said he; “but it’s so convenient to bring a fellow to.” Indeed, Townley had been very friendly to the young countryman; and this was no less than the third club at which he had “put him up” that day. “You can try ’em all, and then make up your mind which ones you’d like to join,” said he. At a word of remonstrance from Arthur, he had glibly anticipated all objection. “Now don’t talk about extravagance,” said he; “I tell you, no fellow ever made money in New York who didn’t spend it first.” And Arthur had been silenced by this paradoxical philosophy.

Townley’s friendship had even extended to providing him with a boarding-place, a room in the house where he himself lodged; and toward this the young fellows took their way, early in the afternoon. Arthur was already tired, with his short and idle day; he was overcome by the rush and the whirl and the magnitude of things. He had heard talked of, had handled, had seen the management of, huge sums of money; he had seen millions in the process of their making; but how to divert a rivulet of the Pactolean stream to himself seemed a greater mystery than ever. It took so much to make so little! Such huge heaps of bullion had to be sweated to yield to the manipulator the clippings of one gold dollar! Truly, on the other hand, Townley talked to him of millions made and lost as if they had been blackberries. It was, “There’s old Prime—he made a million in that Panhandle deal,” or “There goes poor old Howard—the shorts in Erie used him up,” until Arthur saw that he was seeing here a most instructive process: nothing less than the creation and founding of American families. Here were the people, the progenitors of future castes; the sources of inherited estate, of culture, of consideration; this old man with the battered hat, that sharp-faced young Israelite, were the ancestors, the probable fathers and grandfathers of the men and maidens who were to be “society” in the future Republic; the first acquirers of—not the broad acres, but the city lots—the rich houses, the stocks and bonds, the whole equipment of life, that was (if our laws are maintained) to make sleek the jeunesse dorée of the twentieth century. A million! It is not much, in many ways, in most ways that we read about in books and bibles; it is not a factor of the Crusades, nor of the War of the Roses, nor yet (as we are informed) of the kingdom of heaven. But most things that Townley saw were multiples of it; and now Townley carefully avoided reading books; for even General Gordon, you remember, writing from Khartoum to posterity, records the reflection that mankind and his works are governed by his ventral tube. Now of ventral tubes, a million is the deity; books should, as they used to, speak to souls. And Arthur, thinking of all this, who had marvelled first at all their eagerness, now wondered rather at their carelessness; of these men, taking and losing such things so lightly.

Arthur could not have had a better cicerone than Charlie Townley. He knew his New York like the inside of his pocket; its streets, its ways, its women, its wiles, its heroes and its favorites; its eating places, drinking places, breathing places; its getting up and its lying down. When they passed Fourteenth Street, his manner changed very apparently; the æsthetic overcame the practical; the hard shine of millions was displaced by the softer radiance of women’s eyes. Many of these same eyes were, in their turn, riveted by the display of women’s wares in the shop-windows about Union Square, which gave Townley the opportunity of gazing at his ease; although, it must be owned, if any of these eyes looked up and met his own, he seemed little disconcerted.

They stopped and made a call at the Columbian Club, which was crowded with men, breaking the long journey homeward to their firesides, domestic or otherwise. And as, in some country hamlet of the Middle Ages, we can fancy the little ale-house, standing on the heath, midway; Jock and Dickon are plodding home tired from the long day’s plowing; behind this one smoking chimney the cold November sky lowers drearily, the last pale tints of the tired day are fading, and the common is bare, and the naked moorland left to the wolves; and the two men stop in a moment at the Cat-and-Fiddle to have a bite and a sup, a cup around the tavern-fire, and a bit of human companionship, to talk about the price of corn, and of Hodge the tinker’s son and Joan his sweetheart, and the doings of the new squire, whose round brown towers peep from the coppice of the distant park—so, too, here in our New York, the jaded men drop in, and chat about the price of stocks, their neighbor’s horses and his wife, and have a glass of bitters round the fire. Townley took vermouth, lamenting bitterly that his health permitted nothing stronger; but other paler men than he administered brandy-cocktails unto themselves, or pick-me-ups of gin. Here Charlie brushed himself, and took his silver-headed cane; and again the pair sallied forth upon their journey, crossing Madison Square and striking up the Avenue. Many damsels, richly robed, now lit up the long way; there is usually a received type at any period for the outdoor gorgeousness of womankind, and this year it was blue—a walking-suit of blue, from neck to heel, close-fitting, and all of velvet. Dozens and scores of velvet gowns they passed, and Arthur noticed that his guide, philosopher, and friend looked at many of them as if they were familiar sights, but bowed to few. Now there had been many, in Union Square, to whom he had nodded, at the least. He seemed to read Arthur’s thoughts, for he said:

“These are all off-side girls. You don’t see the others out at this time.”

“What do you mean?” said Arthur.

“Why, they’re not in society, you know.” And he lifted his hat to one of them, who had given him a most empressé bow, including in it Arthur. “There’s one of the prettiest girls in town,” said he, meditatively; “Kitty Farnum. They’re awfully rich, too; old Farnum’s got no end of money.” This thought seemed to depress Charlie for a minute, and they walked on in silence. Now Arthur had met Miss Farnum at a New Haven ball, where she had been a very proud belle indeed.

“There,” said Townley, at last, as they crossed a side street, “is Mrs. Levison Gower’s.” There was a certain reverence in his tone, as he said this, that his voice had not yet shown in all that day, and Arthur looked with a proper admiration, though not clearly understanding why, at the house we have already described.

Their lodgings were near by (so Townley always spoke of the boarding-house where he lived), and the young men separated to dress for dinner. Arthur had been rather surprised that so elegant a person lived in a boarding-house at all; but the fact was, Townley preferred to use his money elsewhere than at home. But he never dined with the other inhabitants; in fact, his acquaintance with them was extremely slight, as he always breakfasted in his room; and to-night he put a finishing touch upon his hospitality by inviting Arthur to a very pretty little dinner at the Piccadilly Club. But after this, Townley had an engagement, and Arthur was left to his own devices. He smoked his cigar and read the evening paper; then he began an article in the Edinburgh Review, took up the Spectator, and ended with Punch; after which he became unoccupied, and his spirits dropped visibly.

By this time several men had strolled in; there was much laughing and gay spirits; around him were all the luxuries of mind and body that the inventive bachelor mind has yet devised for the comfort of either such part of himself. But as Arthur leaned back in the deep, throne-like leather chair and sipped (if one may so say) his reina victoria, his consciousness went back to a certain sunny hillside, with the light of the rich autumn morning, and the joyous beat of the hoofs upon the dewy grass.

He had been to see Gracie only the day before; but he drew on his overcoat and walked around to the Livingstones. A light was in the second-story window of the high house; and he rang the bell hopefully.

“Mrs. Livingstone?”

“Not at home,” said the man, gravely.

“Is—is Miss Holyoke in?”

“The ladies are out, sir,” said the man, decidedly.

“I will not leave a card,” said Arthur, answering the man’s gesture; and he walked sadly back to the club-house.

Surely, Arthur felt, the forms of life and the trammels of the great city were coming home to him.