Wheels within Wheels Read online

  Into his eyes came the quick look of a man who sees suddenly, unexpectedly, the chance he’s been waiting for a lifetime. Her heart glowed as she saw that look.

  “Marry, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d have to behave, if you married me.”

  “I’d behave.”

  “Then we might as well call all this a day.”

  XV

  Early next morning Sally rang up her guardian.

  “Darling,” she announced, “I’m going to be married.”

  “To whom?”

  “Nobody that you know.”

  “I see.”

  “He’s nice.”

  “When are you getting married?”

  “As soon as you can let me have my money.”

  “I see.”

  “How soon can you?”

  “This afternoon, if you like.”

  “To-morrow’ll do.”

  “Seriously, though; how soon?”

  “By the end of the week.”

  “I’ll ring up old Newton straightway.”

  “Angel!”

  “And you’d better bring your young man round to dine with me to-morrow.”

  • • • • •

  The news that his ward was to be married and that her capital would have to be restored to her at short notice was for Frank Newton as serious as it was an unexpected blow. He had had during the last few weeks a number of unexpected drains on his resources. He had lost heavily in the Hatry failure; he had lost heavily, though less heavily, in Wall Street. He had taken over further oil responsibilities. He had been unable to sell his London house. He had decided to settle fifteen thousand pounds upon his daughter. He now had to find another ten thousand pounds for Sally. He was uncertain, as every capitalist in the world was uncertain, of the exact value of his assets. But he did not believe that he could realize without ruining himself an immediate sum of twenty-five thousand pounds. He knew that no bank would consider the assets he possessed adequate guarantee for so large an overdraft.

  Frank Newton was not, however, the man to face the worst till it is the worst. There was the chance that he might realize his share in the oil well. It might be that the oil well at the last would rescue him. It would be justice if it did. It was largely responsible for his predicament. Looking back, it seemed as though everything had started from the over-exuberance with which he had received that cable from Santa Marta. It was then that he had agreed to his wife’s caprice to buy a house that had a golf course. It was from that moment that he had begun to find himself in difficulties. How much money, he wondered, had he not poured down that well? How much did he stand a chance of recovering? The man who had bought up so many shares might be induced to take up some more. Two thirds of them were after all held already on the other side of the Atlantic. Clearly, to find out was his first task. He wrote a cablegram to Bergheim.

  “Anxious to sell my share in Caribbean Syndicate. Cable best offer.”

  And that’s that, thought Bergheim as he opened the cablegram. He was in the throes of a busy morning. The Golden Tripod was lying on its side. The panic was in full flood. Everyone was selling. Nobody would buy. Prices tumbled. The ticker was an hour behind. Name after name was sold out short. Now London had joined the rout. If this cable was to be symptomatic. It had gone cold on this oil idea. He wondered how Bauer would receive the news.

  Bauer was in conference when the message was sent through. His secretary took it. She did not know how long Mr. Bauer would be: it might be for a little time. He was very busy at the moment. He had not been busier, in fact, for many years. The slump had not ruined every business. On some it was actually conferring benefits. There were certain stores which, because they produced standardized articles, had been avoided by the fashionable and the would-be fashionable. During the last weeks you heard less often the contemptuously drawled “It’s the kind of thing you’d find at Macy’s.” On the contrary, you heard, “You know, you really get surprisingly good things at places like Macy’s and Wanamakers’.” To such stores the slump had brought a temporary prosperity. They had not lost their simpler clients; and they had gained a new clientele of rich people who were rapidly ceasing to be rich. For the moment, in consequence, the chain of stores of which Bauer was on the Directorate were booming at a rate which contrasted surprisingly with the rapid fall of the stocks which a year earlier had made him on paper, a millionaire.

  It had forced him to revise his outlook. In the days when his stocks had stood at their inflated level, while, his salary and share of the profits remained relatively stationary, he had described as a sap anyone who concentrated exclusively upon a job when there were such rich profits to be made on Wall Street. He was grateful now for that previously scorned Directorate. He had swung round completely to the other pole. He was as contemptuous of Wall Street as he had before been humble in its presence. His reaction was typical of the wave of scepticism that had followed the exuberant over-confidence of the summer: the confidence that had been one of the legs of the Tripod: that broken now had flung the Tripod on its side with the heavy burden it had supported. Bauer was as recklessly ready to sell as three months earlier he had been recklessly ready to buy. He had one idea: to cut his losses. He had no intention of spending one cent more upon that oil well.

  “Let it go,” he said to Bergheim. “Sell it if you can. But don’t mind if you can’t. You’ve got rid of that Kennecott stock for me, haven’t you? That’s right. Bonds are the only thing I’ve any use for now. I never want to hear that oil well mentioned to me again.”

  It was the oil well that had begun half his troubles. He had felt exuberant and bought those General Motor shares. He had told Caroline that she could buy that jewellery. She had made friends with that smart-Alick salesman. To impress that salesman and to show Caroline that he was a bigger noise than the young men she seemed to fancy, he had let himself in for another instalment of speculation: more stock and another wad of real money poured down that damned pit in Santa Marta. Well, that was over now. He wasn’t a rich man any longer. He didn’t bother to think how little or how much he had left. He knew that the wind was on the wrong side of the road. He’d cut his losses: sell all he had. Caroline would have to do the same: give up that big apartment: take a one-roomed apartment in the village. That’s all she needed: no more rye and Scotch: gin at a dollar and a half a quart. That’s what it would have to be. That’s what it was going to be for everyone. Caroline would understand.

  • • • • •

  It was the answer that Bergheim had expected of him. The panic had set in. Everyone was cutting their losses: reducing their lives to an irreducible medium. They were finding what was essential to them: and what was inessential. The slump was a wide-meshed sieve: only what really bulked remained. Six months earlier people had been able to afford so many things that they had littered their lives with fancies. Now they had only room for needs. People had to take stock, to decide what they really needed. The house was burning; they had only a few seconds to rescue what they really needed. In those seconds they had to decide what was trivial and what was not. That second forced them to a recognition of what they themselves really were. The world was returning to reality.

  This oil venture had been a feather in a hat: a gesture: a fair-weather toy. It had gone down with the general subsidence. But as always there was some profit left. Not everyone had lost. The middlemen would have managed to collect a little. One or two of the protagonists were slightly better off. Shirley had had ten thousand dollars that he’d not expected. The factories had sold some tools. The drillers in Santa Marta had had to look for a job eight months later than they would otherwise have done. Some one who would otherwise have been workless had had their jobs: which in its turn meant prosperity of a kind for some one. The ramifications of one person’s least considered action were endless. No, it was not all loss. Himself would be content enough to draw his pencil across a sheet that had proved by no means unremunerativ
e.

  Before he could do that, however, before he could send Newton a definitely decisive cable, he would have first to give Shirley a chance of taking over the syndicate.

  “Unless you are ready take over syndicate liabilities liquidation inevitable,” he cabled.

  • • • • •

  John Shirley chuckled when he read the cablegram. As though he could undertake any liabilities. So that’s that, he thought. Well, he’d had a nice run for his money. Six months of amusement that he had not expected. And there was the apartment in the Pontalba buildings to show for it. The balance of the transaction certainly stood as far as he was concerned on the credit side.

  He rang up his broker.

  “I’m afraid I shall have to stop speculating,” he told Tooley.

  “A good many people are wishing they’d done that three months ago.”

  “I was wise not to touch my bonds.”

  “I’ll say you were.”

  “And as there’s no more money coming through to me from New York I’ve nothing left to gamble with.”

  “That’s true too.”

  “So you’d better send me a winding up statement. I guess it’ll pretty well balance out.”

  “I guess.”

  They laughed together, and Shirley rang off in no ill humour, imagining that the episode was closed.

  He was surprised when Tooley rang up an hour later to ask if he would come round and see him. But it was without any misgivings that he walked down St. Charles Street in the bright cool December sunlight.

  The moment he entered his broker’s office he knew, however, that something was in the air. There was in his broker’s face that look of animated welcome that presages ill news.

  “Come in, John, come in. I’m glad to see you. Take a seat. You’re looking well, I’ll say you are. It’s great weather for those that can be about in it.”

  He was over-eager. Shirley eyed him inquisitively. He did not know the man very well: there had never passed between them the transactions that would have enabled him to assess the behaviour of the other at any crisis.

  Perhaps that was why the man was worried. The money he had been told to gamble with was lost; he was afraid that Shirley would turn round on him and abuse him: call him a betrayer of trust. Shirley supposed that a good many people had turned round upon their brokers: holding them responsible for their own recklessness or foolhardiness. He had better show the man as soon as possible that he was not that kind of person. He smiled genially.

  “I imagine that it’s about those shares you want to talk to me?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact it is.”

  “You needn’t bother. I’ve read the papers. They’ve gone below my recovering of margin.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Don’t you worry about that. I told you to gamble with it. I knew that I was running a gambler’s chance. I hoped to win. But I was prepared to lose. I had my fixed income as a certainty. I was not going to let anything touch that. The other thing was just a flutter.”

  “Yes, I know, I know….”

  There was an extremely uncomfortable expression on the broker’s face. He fidgeted nervously in his seat. He had something clearly on his mind. “If only I knew what it was,” thought Shirley. “I could put him at his ease. As it is, the only way I can get it out of him is like the only way of getting a check out of a waiter—by getting up and going.”

  “Don’t you worry about that at all,” he said, rising to his feet. “There’s no feeling in my mind about it. You did the best you could for me. It wasn’t your fault things went wrong.”

  And he stretched out his hand. But the broker did not take it. He, too, had risen to his feet; there was an extremely painful expression on his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not as simple as that: not quite. Won’t you sit down? I’ve something further to explain.”

  They both resumed their seats. There was silence. The broker opened his mouth; closed it; paused; then, in a rush:

  “Look here, there’s been a mistake. I don’t know how to explain it to you. A misunderstanding: you know how things happen! Instructions get misunderstood. You know the first day you came here. My clerk was with us. I asked, ‘did you want all your money to go on margin?’ You said, ‘Yes, to the last cent.’ My clerk misunderstood you. He thought you meant those bonds as well. He’d assumed they covered you as collateral: the result was, that when I looked at your account this morning, I said, ‘My word, this man has gone beyond his margin.’ The clerk said, ‘Oh no, there’s still another two thousand dollars left.’ ‘How do you make that out?’ I asked. “Those bonds.’ ’You fool,’ I told him. ‘That’s a separate account.’ Of course I sold out at once. But I’m afraid there’s only two thousand dollars left of your capital.”

  He had tried to speak easily, in an offhand manner. But Shirley could tell that beneath that manner he was genuinely afraid: ashamed of what he had done: alarmed of what John would do.

  As to the legal position of the case Shirley was uncertain. He might or he might not be able to sue Tooley in a court of law. He doubted, though, whether even were he to win the case Tooley would be in a positon to make good the loss. He might even prefer to go into bankruptcy as so many other houses were doing: more probably the case would linger on with all the innumerable other cases that must be crowding the courts just now. He did not imagine much good would come out of litigation. Anyhow, he didn’t want to hit at any man at a time like this: to exact the last pound of flesh. At the same time he knew that Tooley would be reluctant to have his name brought into public notice in a connection such as this. It would be the worst conceivable advertisement. He imagined that Tooley would be going to make him some offer of recompense.

  “What’s to be done about it now?” he asked.

  Tooley began a long harangue. He said that he was more sorry than words could express that such a thing had happened, but that at the same time the mistake was in part Shirley’s. He had used the phrase ‘to the last cent.’ The clerk ought to have made certain as to the exact meaning with which he had used those words. But at the same time the literal meaning to those words was that every cent Shirley possessed was to be used as collateral for this speculation. Yet equally at the same time he did realize that some compensation was due to Mr. Shirley.

  Patiently, half listening, John Shirley waited. Sooner or later Tooley would come round to the important point: how much of compensation he was going to offer. At last it came. He was suggesting that a cheque for five thousand dollars would settle the account.

  “I accept.”

  From the look of astonished relief on Tooley’s face he realized that he could have asked for and obtained a considerably larger sum. But he had a horror of arguing about money. He believed in refusing or accepting; and not haggling. “That’s been my mistake all along,” he thought. “I don’t see money or the fight for money at its proper value.” And here he was now signing a document which left him with the total sum of seven thousand dollars: and his furniture in an apartment in the Quarter. Ten thousand dollars: six hundred dollars a year. It would not do much more than pay the rent of his apartment. He had bought that apartment so lightly: in the belief that he was going to have a fortune earned for him by that oil well. That confounded well! But for it he would not only never have saddled himself with an apartment, he would never have had any money to gamble with; the absurd mistake of Tooley’s clerk could never have taken place; he would be just where he had been before: with his comfortable yearly income of ten thousand dollars, and the prospect of marriage to Julia on terms of independence. Heaven knew what was going to happen to him now: to his future: to his marriage: to Julia. Confound that well, he thought.

  • • • • •

  The cause of the trouble, direct or indirect, was of less matter than the actual trouble. That was serious enough.

  He had now a yearly income at best of six hundred dollars. He saw no chance of adding to that income.
Here in New Orleans, such an income was completely inadequate to the independent existence that he had so jealously preserved. He could not afford to keep on his apartment: or his car. He could barely afford to clothe himself. He would be dependent on someone—his mother, or Julia. It was too late for him to find work. He had broken the city’s faith in him. Moreover, he had a sufficient sense of what was fitting to realize how inappropriate would be the picture of his going round with a hat in his hand, asking for a job. His position such as it was had depended on his aloofness: on his ability to ignore the standards by which his fellow citizens ran their lives. He would be ridiculous and contemptible, were he now to accept their standards, and accepting them to fail in his attempt at conformity. He had been respected reluctantly as an internationalist. As an unemployed and unemployable he would be an object of derision.

  • • • • •

  He walked slowly from Tooley’s office to the car park by the Gymnastic Club. On such a day there was comfort and reassurement in the city’s setting to his perplexity. It was as though the city were a fellow sufferer.

  New Orleans might be young in years but in experience it was very old. It had known fire and flood, famine and siege and pestilence. From its towers five flags had flown. There had been the first French days; the days of the Chevalier de Grieux and Manon Lescaut when engagés from Bordeaux, buccaneers from Tortuga, imported Africans from the Guinea Coast had developed land precariously wrested from the swamps. There had been the proud Spanish period when the sugar islands of the Caribbean “held the gorgeous West in fee,” when the phrase “rich as a Creole” was lisped enviously in London, Paris and Madrid. There had then followed the patrician years of cotton, the great houses’ hospitality, paddle-boats upon the River, darkies singing on the levees: that rich prelude to the dark curtain of the Civil War; the carpet-baggers; negroes vested in authority, swaggering along the banquettes; finally the Ku Klux Klan.