Part 4

To speak to his partner seemed to Emil unnecessary. He promised himself that after he had put the firm on its feet again he would deal generously with Robinson. Since their late reverses the partnership was not borrowing much money, so its credit was not exhausted. Emil obtained from his bank as large a loan as he dared to ask for, and began to sell pork short on the strength of the proceeds. It was a process which requires small capital at the outset. That is, he had simply to keep his margin good in case the pork which he sold rose in value. To begin with he sold only a few hundred barrels, and within a fortnight the price fell smartly. Not only the price of pork, but of stocks, grain, and merchandise. Emil congratulated himself. Evidently he was correct in his judgment that a period of lower speculative values was at hand. The proper thing would be to sell everything and reap a huge fortune before the dull general public awoke to the truth. His own limited resources forbade this, which was irritating. Still, he could go on selling pork short, and this he continued to do.

The proceeding elated him, for the sudden and large profit was in a sense a revelation. He regretted that he had never before tried this method of demonstrating his business shrewdness. He felt that it suited him admirably. He would be no rash-headed fool; he would sell boldly, but intelligently; he would keep his eye on the general market, and not cover his shorts until the general situation changed. If a serious decline in the prices of everything were in store for Benham--and the indications of this were multiplying from week to week--the price of pork might drop out of sight, so to speak, and he win a fortune as a consequence. It was the chance of a lifetime. He reasoned that he would keep cool and make a big thing of it; that a small fellow would be content with a few thousands and run to cover, but he intended to be one of the big fellows. Why take his profit when the whole financial horizon was ominous with clouds, and money was becoming tighter every day?

Emil's reasoning was perfect. The course of prices was exactly as he had predicted; that is, the price of everything except pork. The unexpected happened there, and this from a cause which no shrewd person could have foreseen. One day when, in the parlance of trade, the bottom seemed to be dropping out of all the markets, a despatch appeared in the newspapers stating that a peculiar disease had broken out among the hogs in Western Illinois. The pork market stiffened, but became flat at the advance after somebody declared the story to be a canard invented by the bulls to bolster up their holdings. Emil, adopting this explanation, and certain that this cunning stratagem to check the decline would prove unavailing, sold more pork.

A week later--one Saturday preceding a Monday which was to be a holiday--there were rumors in Chicago, just before the close of the Exchange, that the disease among the hogs was no mere local manifestation; that it was spreading rapidly, and had already shown itself in Indiana and Ohio. Pork in the last fifteen minutes bounded upward and closed ominously strong. Before the market opened on the following Tuesday it was definitely known that the hogs of the country were in the grasp of an epidemic, the precise character of which, to quote the press, was not yet determined, but which, in the opinion of those most competent to judge, would render the flesh of the animals attacked by the dread disease unfit for food, and their lard unwholesome. When the market opened, the price of pork was so high that Emil's margin of protection was wiped out as thoroughly as the tide wipes out the sand dyke which a child erects upon the beach. He was unable to respond to the demand made on him for money to keep his account with his broker good, and was sold out before night at a loss--a loss which left him in debt. He went home knowing that he was bankrupt, and that his firm must fail the moment his note at the bank became due, even if the broker to whom he owed five thousand dollars over and above his margins did not press him. There was no escape from ruin and humiliation.

He disclosed the truth to Constance with the repressed bitterness of a Prometheus. He explained to her with the mien of a wounded animal at bay the cruelty of the trick of destiny which had crushed him. How had he been at fault? He had been shrewd, far-seeing and prompt to act. The wisdom of his course had been demonstrated by the fall in prices. He was on the high road to fortune, and fate had stabbed him in the back. Could any intelligent man have foreseen that the hogs of the country would be stricken with disease? And more galling still, why had luck played him false by singling out the only possible combination of events which could have done him harm?

"An all-wise Providence!" he ejaculated with a scornful laugh. "A man looks the ground over, uses his wits and is reaping the benefit of his intelligence when he is struck in the head with a brick from behind a hedge, and is then expected to glorify the hand which smote him. How could it have been helped? How was I to blame?" he reiterated with a fierce look at his wife.

Constance could not answer the question. The details of business were a sealed book to her. The brief account of the disaster in pork, which he had just given, was confusing to her, and had left her with no conviction save pity for her husband. She was ready to take his word, and to believe that this overwhelming misfortune was the result of ill-luck which could not have been guarded against. What was uppermost in her mind was the impulse to help and comfort him. It pained her that he should inveigh against fate, though she recognized that the provocation was severe. But he needed her now more than ever. She would be brave and let him see that her love was at his command.

"You mustn't mind too much, Emil," she said. "We have to start again, that's all. I can economize in lots of ways, and we shall manage somehow, I'm sure. We have the house, you know. If it's necessary--in order to set you up in business--we can mortgage that. We've always had that to fall back on."

She knew as she spoke that from the standpoint of prudence the offer of the house was unwise. If that were gone, what would become of her children? Yet she felt a joy in tendering it. Why did her husband look at her with that malevolent gaze as though she had contributed to his distress?

"If you had put a mortgage on the house when I first started in business, and had given me the benefit of a larger capital, then we shouldn't be where we are to-day. I wanted it at the time, but you didn't offer it."

"Oh, Emil. I never dreamt that you wished it. To mortgage our home then would have been rash, surely. Besides, if I had given it to you, wouldn't it have been lost with the rest now?"

"Don't you understand," he said, roughly, "that if I had not been hampered at the start by my small capital, I should never have been forced to go outside the lumber business in order to support my family? Another five thousand dollars would have made all the difference."

His glowering look seemed to suggest that he had persuaded himself that she was partly to blame for what had happened. Constance was ready to make every allowance for him, but his mood offered fresh evidence of the crankiness of his disposition, a revelation to which her devotion could not altogether blind her.

"I don't understand anything about the business part," she answered, putting her arm around his neck. "Oh, Emil, Emil, I'm so sorry for you! I wish to do everything I can to help you and show my love for you. This is a dreadful sorrow for you to bear--for us both to bear. But it has come to us, and we mustn't be discouraged. God will give us strength to bear it if we let him."

"God?" he blurted. "You may leave God out of the question so far as I am concerned."

"Oh, Emil, it grieves me to hear you talk like that."

"And it grieves me that you should aggravate my trouble by cant which I thought you had outgrown."

"I shall never outgrow that," she murmured, appreciating suddenly that the substitute which he offered her for spiritual resignation was a cell bounded by four stone walls. She had reached the limit of her apostacy, and she shrank irrevocably from the final step.

"Of course the rich and the powerful and the fortunate," he was saying, "encourage the delusion that if a man's knocked out as I am he ought to believe it's for the best, because rubbish of that sort keeps together the social system on which they fatten. Do the poor in the tenements in Smith Street over there," he asked with a wave of his hand, "believe it's for the best that they should go hungry and in rags while Carleton Howard and his peers imitate Antony and Cleopatra? Ask the operatives in the factories across the river what they think of the justice of the millionaire's God? The time has passed when you can fool the self-respecting workingman with a basket of coals and a tract on the kingdom of heaven. They may have their heaven, if they'll give us a fair share of this earth." Emil folded his arms as one issuing an ultimatum.

Constance realized that he was in no mood to be reasoned with. She had made clear that she could not subscribe to his doctrine of despair, and save in that respect she was eager to be sympathetic. She could not deny the inequalities and apparent injustice of civilization, and Emil's plea that he had been crushed by an accident which he could not have avoided not only wrung her heart, but filled it with a sense of hostility to an industrial system which permitted its deserving members to be crushed without fault of their own. But she felt instinctively that the best sort of succor which she could bring was of the practical kind. To-morrow was before them, God or no God, and they must adjust themselves to their altered circumstances, take thought and build their hopes anew.

She put her arm around his neck again and kissed him silently. Then she began with quiet briskness to make preparations for the evening meal. It was the maid's afternoon out, and Constance moved as though she were glorying in the occupation. Presently she said:

"Of course I'll dismiss Sophy to-morrow. I am proud to be a workingman's wife, Emil. We'll soon be on our feet again, never fear."

The suggestion of the servant's dismissal deepened the gloom on Emil's face. "I've half a mind to pull up stakes and move to New York," he muttered.

"And give up our home?"

He frowned at the involuntary concern in her voice. "What use is a home in a place where a man is cramped and circumvented in every big thing he attempts? I ought to have moved long ago."

"I am ready to live wherever you think best, Emil. And you mustn't forget, dear, that my trust and faith in you are as great as ever."

Despondent as he was, his habit of buoyancy was already groping for some clue to a brighter vision, to which his wife's words of encouragement now helped him. He was sitting with his elbows resting on the table and his head clasped between his hands. "I'll make a fresh start--here," he said. "They've got me down, but, damn them, I'll show them that they can't keep me there."

Presently he arose, and walking out to the kitchen reappeared with a goblet and two bottles of beer. One of these he uncorked and poured the contents ostentatiously so that the froth gathered. Raising the glass he buried his mouth in the beer and eagerly drank it off. He set down the goblet with a sigh of satisfaction.

"And what's more," he said, "they can't deprive me of that."

Constance watched him with a troubled look. She shrank at this time of his distress from intimating that she regarded the indulgence of this appetite as a poor sort of solace. Besides, a glass of beer was in itself nothing, and he might well take offence at her solicitude as an invasion of his reasonable comfort. Yet observation had taught her that he was becoming more and more fond of seeking a respite from care in liberal potations of this sort.

She restrained her inclination to interfere, but she saw him with concern consume four bottles in the course of the evening. The serenity of temper which this produced--the almost indifferent calm following the storm--was by no means encouraging. To be sure his ugly side seemed entirely in abeyance. Indeed, he took down his fiddle and played on it seductively until he went to bed, as though there were no such things as business troubles. But somehow the very mildness of his mood, gratifying as it was to her from the momentary personal standpoint, disturbed her. Was this good nature the manly, Christian resignation of the victim of misfortune putting aside his grief until the morrow? It suggested to her rather the relaxation of a baffled soul exchanging ambition for a nepenthe of forgetfulness--a fuddled agitator's paradise--and her heart was wrung with dread.

V

The firm of Stuart & Robinson, lumber dealers, was hopelessly insolvent and did not attempt to resume business. The partners separated with sentiments of mutual disdain. To the junior--the dummy--the failure had come as a cruel surprise. He refused to regard Emil's conduct as reasonable or honorable, despite the assurance that the speculation in pork had been for their common benefit, and that, but for an untoward accident, the result would have been a fortune for the firm. On the other hand, Emil expressed scorn for a nature so pusillanimous that it saw only the outcome and failed utterly to appreciate the brilliancy of his undertaking. As Emil explained to his wife, the decision of the partners in regard to the future was typical of their respective dispositions; Robinson, having lost his money, was soliciting a clerkship--a return to servitude; whereas Emil intended to strike out for himself again.

In what field of energy were his talents to be exercised next? This was for Emil the first and most important consideration. His new employment must be of a kind which would provide him with bread and butter until he was on his feet again, but would not deprive him of scope and independence. It must be something which would not require capital. Yet this did not mean that his talent for speculation was to be neglected, but merely to be kept in abeyance until he saw just the opportunity to use to advantage the three thousand dollars which he promptly raised by a second mortgage on his wife's house. His failure had left him more than ever confident of his ability to achieve success by bold and comprehensive methods. But in the meantime, while he was spinning the web of fresh enterprises which were to make him prosperous, he must support his family somehow.

He concluded to become a newspaper reporter and writer of articles for the press. This would provide an immediate income and would not interfere unduly with other projects. Besides it would enable him to give public expression to some of his opinions, which would be an æsthetic satisfaction. He also engaged desk-room in an office shared by four men independent of one another and interchangeably petty lawyers, traders and dealers in mortgages and land. On the glass door one read "Real Estate and Mortgages--Investments--Collections--Loans--Notary Public." Below were the names of the occupants, followed by the titles of several wildcat companies, the dregs of oil and mining ventures in the neighborhood of Benham, of which one of them was the promoter and treasurer. It seemed to Emil a location where he, hampered by circumstances from jostling elbows with men of means, might use his wits profitably until he could see his way to more imposing quarters. Here he would be unobserved and yet not wholly out of touch with what was going on. On the same floor of the building, which was a hive of small concerns, there was a broker's office which had a wire to Chicago and knowing correspondents in New York. That it was described as a "bucket shop" by more prosperous banking firms prejudiced Emil in its favor; he ascribed the stigma to capitalistic envy and social ostracism. He became friendly with the proprietor, discussed with him the merits of the wares on his counter, and presently, acting on "tips" obtained from this source, captured on several occasions sums ranging from ten to fifty dollars by the purchase of ten shares of stock or an equivalent amount of grain, requiring an advance on his own part of not more than three per cent. of the purchase price--a mere bagatelle. This as a beginning was satisfactory. It eked out his journalistic income; and the skill with which he plied the process, contrasted with the folly displayed by most of the customers, flattered the faith which he had in his sound judgment. This broker's shop was the resort of scores of people of small means, trades-folk, clerks, salaried dependents and some women, keen to acquire from the fluctuations of the speculative markets a few crumbs of the huge gains garnered by the magnates of Wall Street, of which they read emulously in the newspapers. To put up one's thirty dollars, and to have one's margin of venture or profit wiped out within twenty-four hours, was the normal experience, sooner or later, of ninety per cent. of these unfortunates. The remainder were shrewder and longer lived, and to this remnant Emil indisputably belonged.

He obtained a position on the _Star_, a sensational, popular one-cent paper. The _Star_ was read both by the workingmen in the manufacturing plants, of whose interests it was a zealous champion, and by a large class of business men and trades-people, who found its crisp paragraphs and exaggerated, inaccurate reports of current horrors and scandals an agreeable form of excitement. Emil's employment was to make the round of the dealers in grain, lumber, wool and other staples and report trade prices and gossip, which under the control of the financial editor he was allowed to expand into commercial prognostications or advice. To the Sunday edition he began to contribute special articles exploiting the grievances of the proletariat, which the management of the _Star_ accepted and presently invited as a weekly feature. They were written with a sardonic acerbity of touch, which afforded him an outlet for his disgruntled frame of mind and free scope for his favorite theories. He also renewed his attendance at the Socialistic Club which he had frequented before his marriage, and became one of the orators there. It occurred to him that a political office would be acceptable while he was husbanding his resources. Why not become alderman on the workingman's ticket? There was a salary of five hundred dollars attached, and as a city father he would have opportunities to know what was going on in municipal affairs, and to get an inkling of some of the big schemes projected by capitalists, for the furtherance of which his vote would be required. He would be able also--and this was an exhilarating consideration--to hold the whip-hand over the arrogant moneyed men seeking franchises for next to nothing, by which to extort millions from the guileless common people. While Emil, with recovered buoyancy, readjusted his plans to meet his circumstances and set his wits to work, his wife met the necessity of strict economy with absorbed devotion. She signed the mortgage with a pang, but without hesitancy. She appreciated the necessity of the contribution. Without ready money Emil would be powerless--must become a mere clerk or subordinate, and his ambition would be crushed. She would have preferred perhaps that he should resign himself to the situation, and without imperilling their home, support his family on a modest footing by a salary or by the journalistic work for which he had an aptitude. But she recognized that his heart was set on independent success on a large scale, and that Emil thwarted or repressed would become an irritable and despondent malcontent. His shrewdness had nearly gained him a fortune, and apparently a cruel freak of chance had been solely responsible for his discomfiture. She did not pretend to criticise the nature of his business dealings. He had explained to her that capital was indispensable to the realization of his aims. She must trust him. She did suggest that he should use the proceeds of the mortgage for the payment of his debts. The thought of doing so was bitter, and she was thankful when Emil assured her with a protesting scoff that such a proceeding would be Utopian. "What," he asked, "was the sense of insolvent laws, if, when a man failed in business, his wife was to cast her little all, her own patrimony, into the common pot for the enrichment of his creditors? Business people understood that they were taking business chances, and did not expect to gobble up the home of a wife bought with her own genuine means. If she were rich, generosity might be honesty, but in the present instance, it would be sentimental folly." This was convincing to Constance, for she felt instinctively that her children must have rights as well as the creditors. A woman's whimsical conception of business honor might well be at fault. She had made her offer, and she was glad to abide by her husband's superior knowledge.

Her duty obviously was to reduce the scale of family living without interfering with Emil's reasonable comfort or wounding his self-respect. She gave herself up to her work of domestic economy with fresh zeal, doing the manual labor of the household with enthusiasm. By steady industry and thoughtful care, she was able not only to minimize expenses, but to produce presentable results from a small outlay. Her heart was in it; for was not Emil at work again and hopeful? She was proud of his newspaper articles and regarded his small gains from shrewd speculations as new proof of his capacity for financial undertakings.

The end of a year found Emil rather more than holding his own pecuniarily. He had obtained commissions as a broker from the successful negotiation of a few small real-estate transactions, his ventures on a cautious scale in the stock market had been almost invariably fortunate, and his earnings as a newspaper writer had been sufficient with these accretions to cover his household expenses, pay the interest on the mortgage, and add slightly to his capital. He felt that he was on his feet again, and was correspondingly bumptious; yet he realized that his recuperation regarded as progress was a snail's pace, which must be greatly accelerated if he would attain wealth and importance. In this connection the idea of becoming an alderman kept recurring to him with increasing attraction. At present he was nobody. His name was unfamiliar and his position obscure. This irritated him, for he craved recognition and publicity. To be sure, while capital was at his disposal, he had seen fit to address his efforts solely to the accumulation of a fortune as the passport to power, but even then he had been at heart a sworn enemy of the moneyed class. And now that he had resumed his old associations, his theories had developed fresh vitality and aroused in him the desire to vindicate them by action. Since fate had condemned him to attain financial prominence slowly, why should he not secure recognition in the best way he could? As an alderman he would be a local power, and once in the arena of politics and given the opportunity to make himself felt, why might he not aspire to political prosperity?