The banker and the bear

The withered, leering, old Goddess of Luck must have grinned wide that morning. To smile knowingly over men’s hopes is her delight; but to smile behind the back of a man who is smiling, is the double distillation of pleasure. Melville Sponley had never enjoyed living before as in those minutes, one or two less than ninety, while he played cautiously and allowed Pickering some small hope of winning, and postponed planting the last thrust in him until the hour he himself had set should have fully come. He had had fancies of this kind before, but never had he indulged one of them, and so this had the added delight of novelty.

But while he waited, John Bagsbury, whom he thought to be no longer in the game, was taking a hand in this last dealing of the cards. When Sponley smiled over Pickering’s last desperate rally, Jervis Curtin had already sworn out a warrant that was to confound him. And when, after an amused glance at the big clock, the Bear began to deliver the final attack, it was too late, for the carriage that had driven through the streets in such reckless hurry had already pulled up before the Board of Trade building.

The men inside came tumbling out before it had fairly stopped; they crossed the sidewalk and the wide vestibule at a run and dashed upstairs, three steps at a stride, to the entrance to the floor.

There they stopped and peered frowning into the crowd. One of them, it was John Bagsbury, began giving swift instructions to the other two, and they followed with their eyes the direction of his pointing finger. In a moment they nodded comprehendingly, and as John turned away, they moved out on the floor.

The old policeman who guards the entrance—a landmark he is in that place where men come and go so quickly—stepped in front of them, saying that visitors were not allowed on the floor. But they jerked their coats open impatiently so that he could see the stars that were pinned inside them, and then walked briskly over to the provision pit. They climbed the pair of steps outside the circle, and one waited on the rim, while the other wriggled his way through the dense press of men down toward the centre. He laid his hand on the Bear’s wide shoulder.

“You’re Melville Sponley, aren’t you?”

The Bear was making an entry on his card, and he paid no heed.

The hand gripped his shoulder more tightly. “Isn’t your name Melville Sponley?”

“That’s it,” he answered shortly, and he raised his hand to make another sale.

Then, in a flash, for even John Bagsbury was a very little slower than he, the Bear knew what it meant. He wheeled suddenly upon his interrogator, and he did not need the glimpse he caught of the point of a star beneath the coat to convince him that he had comprehended aright. He spoke directly into the man’s ear and so rapidly that the words blurred together. But the man understood.

“Do you want to earn a thousand dollars in the next five minutes? Stand where you are and don’t speak to me or interfere with me till then. That’s all you’ll have to do.”

He turned back toward Keyes and started to raise his arm, but again the detaining hand came down upon his shoulder.

“Do you want five?” he snapped.

It might have saved him. If John Bagsbury had not been waiting for them over across the hall, it would in all probability have saved him. The detectives had known John less than half an hour, but in that time one can sometimes learn something of a man’s essential characteristics.

The detective turned away uneasily and called to his fellow, “Come down here, Ryan.”

Until that moment the pit had been a scene of tumult; in other words, its yelling, frenzied, chaotic self. But at that call the tempest died away into a mere buzzing curiosity. The men who a moment before had been oblivious to all save the price of lard, were now wondering what the man called Ryan was going to do, and they stood aside to make way for him. They would only have had to crowd a bit close and perhaps indulge in a little harmless rushing to give Sponley the three or four minutes he needed to win his fight, but no one began it. Friends and enemies simply stood by and watched Ryan join his fellow close beside Sponley.

“You’ll have to come along with us,” said the one who had first accosted him. “You’re wanted for assault and battery.”

“Assault and battery!” echoed the Bear, looking at the two men in genuine surprise. “You’ve got the wrong man.”

He shook himself free and turned again upon Keyes, but in a second the detectives had his elbows pinned at his sides and were forcing him backward toward the rim of the pit.

“Show me your warrant.”

“When we get out of this crowd,” said Ryan.

Sponley made no further attempt to resist. He turned and walked quietly out of the pit. “Show me your warrant,” he repeated.

He smiled as he read it, a dog’s smile that bared every tooth in his upper jaw.

“Curtin, by God!” he said softly. Then he turned briskly to the detectives. “All right, I’ll go with you; only be quick. I’m in a hurry.” But he stopped involuntarily as the sudden roar that went up from the pit told him that trading had begun again. He knew that hurry would avail him nothing. For the first time in his life, the Bear tasted the bitterness of defeat.

He was beaten; not, after all, by luck, and only secondarily by John Bagsbury. It was Nemesis that had overtaken him; or, to phrase it more modernly, the reflex action of the very force that had contributed so largely to his former successes. Had it been the other way about, they might have arrested Keyes without materially affecting the outcome of the struggle, for Keyes was, from half-past nine to half-past one, simply a machine for buying or for selling, as the case might be. But Melville Sponley had always been a visible incarnation of success. The men who had faced him all these years in the pit knew that he had never been beaten, and they had cherished the superstition, which he held himself, that he could not be beaten. During years on the Board of Trade—that place among all others where nothing should count but hard sense and telegraphic advices—no rumor had been so potent in bearing down the market as the report that Sponley was selling short.

In this duel he fought with Pickering, reason was on the Bull side; the lard market was really narrow. Nearly all the traders who dabbled at all in provisions had sided with Sponley simply because he was Sponley. The small, visible supply of lard was an insignificant fact compared with that. So when the Bear, after reading the warrant, walked quietly away between the two detectives, there was blank dismay among his followers.

Keyes was not the man to lose a golden moment like that one. He thrust his hands high in the air, his palms toward him, and every finger extended. His voice, as he shouted the new price, rang with defiant challenge for the men who had been giving his principal so terrible a drubbing. For a moment they made a show of resistance, and then their opposition melted away like a child’s fort of sand before the first rush of the tide.

When the news came downstairs to Pickering, he was sitting on the table in Sievert’s private office. He said nothing to the head clerk, who congratulated him. He simply sat there open-mouthed, breathing fast, like a man who has just made a hundred-yard dash. He did not even wipe away the perspiration that gathered on his forehead and ran down into his eyes. He had not moved when John Bagsbury came into the room a few minutes later.

“Here you are,” said the Banker. “Well, I guess this lets you out. It was cut pretty close, though.”

“It was cut close,” Pickering answered. “I hope it may never be cut so damned close again. Are you going to wait, too?”

John nodded. There was no need of their discussing what they were waiting for, and neither man spoke again until it happened, which was about half an hour later.

Everybody had expected it, though not so soon; but none the less it seemed unreal, incredible, when from the gallery the secretary of the Board of Trade read the formal announcement,—

“All parties having accounts with Melville Sponley are instructed to close out the same immediately.”

The formula is as familiar as the alphabet, but containing that name, it came strangely, unpleasantly to the older men on the floor. They acted upon it, however.

In Sievert’s office again it was John who broke the silence. “That’s all,” he said, when the clerk told them. “We really didn’t have him till now, but I guess this settles it.”

Pickering slipped down from the table and moved toward the door. “Yes, this settles it. I’ve had enough for to-day.”

He paused and came back to where John was standing. “I haven’t thanked you yet, but I will sometime. You pulled me out of the hole.”

“I don’t need to be thanked,” said John, brusquely. “I was going on my own hook this morning. It was my innings.”

He accompanied Pickering to the street, parted from him with a nod, and walked slowly back to the bank. He felt tired now that it was all over, but he was glad that he had a day’s work before him. He did not yet fully realize that the man he had fought so furiously was Melville Sponley, his friend, and he was half conscious of a wish to put off that realization for a while longer. Time would readjust things on some sort of basis, though there was an enemy where there had seemed to be a friend before. Anyway, the fight was over and well over. It had been a good fight. With that reflection the Banker turned into his office and attacked the pile of letters that lay on his desk; but even this habitual work which he did so swiftly and so easily could not prevent the sudden recurrence every little while of an uneasy feeling that something in the scheme of things was fundamentally wrong. If he had been any one but John Bagsbury, he would have discovered that he had the blues.

Our story is almost done, for with Pickering’s subsequent and highly successful manipulation of the lard market, we have no concern. What was once the great fact in John Bagsbury’s life, his friendship with Melville Sponley, is now nothing but a memory, and the test to show which of the two is the better man, the test that the Bear so long ago foresaw, is fully accomplished.

Yet there is a little more to tell.

From very early that Thursday morning, before any one at the Bagsburys’ house was stirring, Harriet Sponley had lain in the white bed in Dick’s little white room, waiting. The delirium, which, all through the day before, had mercifully protected her, had gone away with the fever, and she remembered everything that had happened before she had started for the Bagsburys’ on Tuesday evening with perfect distinctness. But the interval of unconsciousness gave her a curious feeling of detachment from the Harriet she remembered. She looked back to those days as one might look at a picture: the excitement, the terror, the bitterness of those hours after she had learned what were her husband’s plans, she saw as clearly as possible; but the memory brought no revival of those emotions in her now. They had belonged to somebody else. She would begin to be that somebody again by and by, perhaps, but that did not matter now. So she lay quietly, sometimes dozing, sometimes broad awake, waiting for something. She did not try to guess what it would be.

The room pleased her. It was bright and dainty, there was no unrestful decoration about it. It reminded her somehow of Dick. She asked for Miss Haselridge a number of times that morning, and was disappointed each time that they said she had not yet come home. She would have liked to have Dick about. When Alice Bagsbury tiptoed into the room, she generally pretended to be asleep, for Alice’s well-meant ministrations and inquiries were irritating.

A little after four o’clock, she heard a step approaching her door, along the hall. It was a quiet tread, but the boards of the old floor creaked under it. For years she had known it better than any other, and in all those years it had never been unwelcome. But now it brought her back instantly to herself; she was again the broken, quivering Harriet she had looked at so impersonally a little while ago. With a sudden impulse of fear she turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes. She knew now what she had been waiting for.

The door opened almost silently; then after a moment’s pause Melville Sponley walked softly across the room and sat down upon the bed close beside her. But not until she felt his hand upon her forehead did she dare open her eyes and look at him.

“How is it going?” she asked, preventing the question that was on his lips. “I’ve waited all day to find out.”

“Pretty well.”

“No, tell me everything. I’m not afraid—of that.”

“I don’t believe you are. I don’t believe you’re afraid of anything. But it isn’t easy to tell. They’ve beaten us, Harriet. They closed me out just before noon. We’re broke.”

She turned quickly away and buried her face in the pillow.

“I thought I should never have to tell you anything like that,” he went on, speaking slowly, for the words came hard. “I didn’t think anybody could beat me.”

He paused and looked at her anxiously; the effect of his words alarmed him a little. “I know I ought not to be talking to you about it now, but—”

“It isn’t that,” she interrupted quickly. “Please don’t think it’s that. It’s something I’ve got to tell you that frightens me.”

His face told her that her words had puzzled him, but he only waited for her to go on. For a long time she did not speak. Courageous as she was, she could hardly force the words to her lips, for all her happiness hung on the way he should receive them.

“This is it,” she said monotonously: “I came here that night to tell John that there was going to be a run on his bank. So you see it was I who beat you. I did it because—”

“So that is what worried you!” he exclaimed, catching both her hands in his. “Why, that didn’t beat me. I knew you’d told him; he said so. I’ve been proud of you ever since for that. It didn’t occur to me to do it till later; but when it did, I came around and warned him myself. Then he said you’d already told him.”

The tears brimmed from her eyes and moistened her hot cheeks. “Don’t tell me any more. It doesn’t matter. I’m happier than I thought I ever could be again.”

“So you were frightened because—”

“Don’t,” she pleaded; “let’s not talk about it at all. Let’s agree never to speak at all about these days. It’s all over, and this was the last.”

“Yes,” he said slowly; “we agreed that this was to be the last.”

She gazed into his face, eagerly at first, but soon the brightness died out of her eyes; then she looked away, out through the dainty white curtain that hung before the window, at a patch of blue sky.

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” she said, with a smile on her lips. “Of course you can’t stop after a defeat. I’d forgotten that it was a defeat. But you want to win again.”

“That makes me feel better. I hoped you’d feel that way about it. I know I can win, and I’d like to. And it’ll only be one more.”

“Only one more,” she echoed softly. Then she roused herself and said energetically: “I wish you’d get the carriage and take me home. I’m strong enough to go, really, and I want to get back there.”

Jack Dorlin has always accounted it a miracle of self-control that he stayed at the bank that day until he had finished up his day’s work. But in spite of Dick’s face, with its lurking dimple, that kept coming between him and his remittance ledgers, and her voice that was always in his ears, he did it. It will go without saying that when the last of the work was done, a little before five in the afternoon, that he made record-breaking speed straight to John Bagsbury’s house. When he came near it, he was struck with a sudden incredulity concerning the astounding events of that morning. It was absurd to think that they had really happened. With true lover’s insanity he took counsel with himself that he would assume nothing at all unless Dick’s behavior should give him the warrant.

But when he came up the steps, and she opened the door for him—

There is nothing at all original about it, though they would dispute that statement vigorously, nothing that does not happen too many times to be worth telling, nothing that some persons do not know already, and others could not understand if it were told, about what they said and what they left unsaid as they lingered in that dark old hall.

But when he started to open the door into the library, she checked him, saying in a whisper that John was there.

“Well,” said this lion-hearted lover, “let’s go in and tell him.”

She protested for a little, but finally yielded, and together they entered the library. They thought that after what he had seen that morning, he would understand, and certainly their faces as John looked at them should have told the story to any average intelligence. But John had once before narrowly escaped a disastrous blunder through too confidently judging from appearances, and experience had made him cautious.

So he did nothing to meet them halfway, and Jack, whose valor seemed to have remained out in the dark hall, had to stammer out the news a word at a time until the last.

When John fairly understood, his confusion exceeded that of Jack Dorlin. He glanced furtively at the hall door as though meditating flight. When he saw, however, that nothing happened,—he never could be induced to tell what he had expected that they would do,—he sat down again. But as soon as possible he changed the subject of conversation, evidently still regarding it as dangerous.

“We’ve had quite a day of it,” he said, and they both assented cordially.

“It seems to me that a literary fellow like you, Dorlin, might write up that time-lock business into a pretty good story.”

Jack said yes again, but this time more vaguely. “Of course,” the Banker hastened to add, “you’d have to fix it up a little. You could have them blow the vault open with dynamite and kill the villain.”

Dick’s hand stole into a larger one that had hidden itself under the fold of her skirt. “Come and play for me, Jack, until dinner-time,” she said; then turning to the Banker, she added, “Don’t you feel like some music, too?”

But he understood. “No—no—run along,” he said, and laughing they slipped away and left him alone in the library.