CHAPTER XIII.
DESCRIBES A GREAT FINANCIAL STORM AND EXHIBITS THOMAS
DIBBLE IN A NEW CHARACTER.
It came steadily but surely, gently at first, like great storms come, with a gradual lowering of the clouds and a gradual increase in the wind. It began in a calm—a quiet, happy, pleasant calm—a calm that may be typified by a man seated on the lawn at Barton, and smoking in the shade, with sheep bleating at a distance.
It came out of a calm, we say—a delightful time of rising markets, when the bulls of the Stock Exchange were in clover, and the bears at fault. It began when most kinds of shares were at a premium; when all sorts of companies were paying big dividends, and 5l. shares were selling at 8l. and 10l.; when everything was “looking up;” when men bought to invest, and even bought one day to sell the next at a profit. First, there was a whisper from the Continent which agitated the financial atmosphere for a moment—the first breeze of the coming storm. The bears sniffed it, but the bulls feared it not; and shares for a moment wavered, only to recover and make the calm seem all the more assuring. Then a whisper came from the New World, and there was an Atlantic roughness about it at which the bears opened their nostrils and sniffed with a hungry relish. The bulls wavered still in doubt, and then in a sudden darkness the big clouds gathered, and the wind blew a hurricane—blew tempestuously from the shores of France, with tributary winds from Austria and Prussia, and local winds from St. Stephen’s. Then the bears growled and frisked and bit and bellowed, and the bulls fought hard and butted with their horns; but the bears tore and lacerated them: for the financial storm had come, and there was panic everywhere. The Genii of Finance no longer in the sun looked hideous and fearful, and the magicians who had hitherto controlled them had lost their power, because the world had faith in them no longer. The story is not new; it crops up afresh once in about every eight or ten years.
The newspapers did not describe the storm as we have described it. They conveyed the intelligence in technical terms which made it hard and biting:—“Orientals are now at 1¹⁄₄ to 1¹⁄₈ dis.; Credits, 1 to ⁷⁄₈; Unity shares have declined to 8 to 7¹⁄₂ dis.; Imperials have gone to 5¹⁄₈ to 4³⁄₈ dis.; Discount Company, ³⁄₈ to ¹⁄₄ dis.; Overton, Baker and Co.’s Bank, ⁷⁄₈ to ³⁄₄ dis. The railway market continues dull, with a downward tendency; there is a further reduction of ¹⁄₄ to ¹⁄₂ per cent. in Great Western, South Eastern, Great Eastern, and Great Northerns.
“Another serious failure is reported from Liverpool, and the directors of the Bank of England have to-day raised the minimum rate of discount from 6 to 7 per cent.”
This was the fragmentary way in which the newspapers indicated the financial storm, and the figures started up in the night, like fiends, haunting the pillows of many a man, in town and in country, who had been induced to “speculate” in a few finance and other shares “just to make a little money”—men who had never touched shares before, and did not even know the “beastly” title affixed to professional buyers and sellers on the Stock Exchange. To them a bull meant an animal that was dangerous in the fields, and grand at agricultural shows; and a bear was an ugly brute that climbed up a pole at the Zoological Gardens. William Jones the grocer and Timothy Robinson the draper, who had been induced to buy a few Overtons, or Orientals, at 3 premium, in the hope of selling at 5 or 6 premium before the half-yearly meeting, were nothing more than bulls, nevertheless, in Stock Exchange phraseology, and only to become despondent and miserable bears at 5 or 10 discount.
“Been bulling the market, Mithter Dibble? Pray explain yourself, and don’t offend a woman’s thenthibilities by such terms as that,” said Mrs. Thomas Dibble, leaning back in her chair, and vainly endeavouring to thread a needle.
“Bulling means selling, my love,” said Thomas, trembling; “selling shares without having them, you see, and——”
“Mithter Dibble, it isn’t as I wish to be severe on you, but I begin to suspect you are drunk, thir!——drunk, drunk, drunk,” said Mrs. Dibble, laying down her needle in despair, and rapping the table with her thimble.
“You may call I what you likes,” said Dibble, with a tremendous effort to be bold; “but I’m sober enough. I wishes I were drunk.”
“Good heaventh! why, whath come to the man? How dare you wish you were drunk, thir—how dare you, thir!”
“Dare? I tell you, Maria, I’m a miserable bull, a dead-beat bull, as ever was,” said Dibble, weeping.
“You’re a beast, if that’s what you mean,” said Mrs. Dibble, convinced that her Thomas was intoxicated.
But Dibble was only suffering from the panic. He had been tempted by the financial sunshine—and Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs—and had bought the shares of a company that had made a call and failed, and of another whose shares had fallen from 10l. a share to 5l. worse than nothing. It had been brought about in this wise: Mr. Gibbs was indebted to Mr. Dibble for many little acts of courtesy and attention, as a visitor to Mr. Richard Tallant at the Iron Company’s offices. Thomas had always a chair and a polite submissive word for Mr. Gibbs, and so one day that gentleman, arguing correctly that Mr. Dibble must have saved a few hundred pounds, kindly showed that confiding porter how to make a few hundreds more; and Mr. Thomas Dibble, in the simplicity of his nature, became a bull, without the knowledge of his better-half. Whispers of the panic had come into the big company’s offices where Thomas portered it, and at last he began to understand that his five hundred pounds were tossed about in the storm, and liable to be sunk and lost for ever; and on the day in question, when Thomas went home and confessed that he was a bull in a panic, and other similarly insane things, Mr. Gibbs had explained to him his position, and advised him to consider his money lost for the present, but consoling him with stories of the immense losses which other people had suffered.
“Mr. Gibbs advised me to do it,” said Dibble.
“Do what, you fool?” shouted Mrs. Dibble, who lost all patience with him.
“Speckerlate with the five hundred pounds which we had at the bank,” said Thomas.
“We had—we had, Mithther Dibble: it wath my own money, Thomath, and you have never dared to touch it?” said Mrs. D., her face white and her eyes flashing.
“I touched it to make a thousand of it, Maria; that were my full intention.”
“Oh, you monthter! Oh, Dibble, Dibble! Oh, Thomath, Thomath! I thee it all—you have lost the money!”
“Ise afraid on it, that I be,” said Dibble. “The bull sells, and the bear buys. ‘If you bear the market now,’ Mr. Gibbs says, ‘you may get right;’ but, oh Lord! oh dear, Maria! Ise quite lost! What be I to do? what be I to do?”
Poor Dibble lifted up his arms, and looked appealingly towards his furious wife, who sunk back in her chair with a scream for water. The wretched bull, glad of any diversion from the main point, rushed to his wife’s assistance. She had really fainted, this strong-minded Mrs. Dibble, who could think for everybody, and conduct the government of the country if necessary.
She had often said that had she been a man she would have been in Parliament; and not only in Parliament, but a cabinet minister. There was nothing too high for the giant intellect of this domineering wife of poor Thomas Dibble; and yet here she lay like a dead thing, with her cap on the floor, her arms lying helplessly by her side, and Dibble bathing her face, at the loss of five hundred pounds. But it was the insubordination of Dibble which affected her more than the loss of the money, and when she came to herself again, wet and soddened, she declared she would never forgive him.
“Never, Thomath, tho don’t athk it; ith not ath I bear malithe, nor am mean, but for a woman who hath loved like me, and refuthed the greatetht offerth from noblemen—I say, for one who gave her heart up ath I did, it ith not in nature to forgive thuch detheption as yourth, Thomath Dibble. How true it ith, ath it ith written, that the heart of man ith dethperately wicked.”
And Mrs. Dibble went to bed with her woes, locked her door, and left the wretched Thomas to bemoan his unhappy lot in darkness and in the kitchen, where he fell asleep by-and-by, and dreamed that he was a bull being devoured by a horde of bears; but he awoke, and found that he was only in danger of being eaten by crickets and beetles, which held great meetings on the Dibbleonian hearth-stone every night. They were no doubt greatly astonished to find poor Thomas lying there all his length; for their investigation of him was very minute, much more so than Thomas liked, who jumped upon his feet, and roared and kicked until Mrs. Dibble, certain of thieves and murder, opened the window, and cried “Fire!” and then, being a strong-minded woman, jumped into bed, and covered her head with the bed-clothes.
Happily, Paul Somerton came home just in time to put matters right, and induce Mrs. Dibble to admit Thomas to her room, at least for her own protection. Poor Dibble said next day he would rather have slept with the beetles; he was sure he should have been happier in the kitchen, after all.
Meanwhile the storm in the City was raging, and spreading far away to all points of the compass. Though the moon shone forth calmly, on Cornhill and Lombard-street, on Threadneedle-street and on the Stock Exchange, through all the night the storm raged in men’s hearts; it tossed men and women on their beds, and shook giants of finance where they lay sleepless and afeared: it tore along the railways, sealed up in letters, which carried the tempest to Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Birmingham, and even to the cathedral city where Mr. Phillips resided. They were like so many Pandora’s boxes, these letters from the City the next morning, letting out on being opened evils without end. Despair and ruin were in many of them, and all the country was agitated with fear. If an invading host had been sailing up the Thames, the consternation would not have been so great; for the people could have gone forth and done battle with the foe. But there is no fighting a financial storm,—no contending with Stock Exchange terrors.
After the arrival of Pandora’s letters, there went forth into the country flights of telegrams,—electric pigeons which settled in crowds with their missives in all the towns of England, and the storm increased tenfold with the excitement of the electric current.
During the morning hundreds of bulls put on bear’s clothing, and the shares of Overton, Baker, & Co., began to fall; and in the afternoon the leading discount-house in the country gave way to the pressure: and then fresh flights of electric pigeons went forth into the towns that Overton, Baker, & Co., had failed for ten millions of money.
You may fancy that this panic bears a strong likeness to the one which has only recently occurred. Panics are closely akin, and therefore much alike. If the crash of 1866 enables you the better to realise that which forms part of the present history, so much the better. Thomas Dibble will never forget in which panic he lost his wife’s five hundred pounds, and how he suffered by his mad efforts to replace the money.