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The Romance of a Plain Man, a novel by Ellen Glasgow |
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Chapter 24. In Which I Go Down |
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_ CHAPTER XXIV. IN WHICH I GO DOWN
"Things are going pretty queer down here. Looks as if a run were beginning. Some old fool started it after reading about that failure of the Darlington Trust Company in New York. Wish you'd hurry." "Call up the directors, and look here!--pay out all deposits slowly until I get there." The telephone rang off, and picking up my hat, I went down the front steps to the carriage, which had been ordered by Sally for an early appointment. As I stepped in, she appeared in her hat and coat and joined me. "Drive to the bank, Micah," I said, "I want to get there like lightning." "Can you wait till I speak to mammy? She is bringing the baby." For the first time since our marriage my nerves got the better of me, and I answered her sharply. "No, I can't wait--not a minute, not a second. Drive on, Micah." In obedience to my commands, Micah touched the horses, and as we sped down Franklin Street, Sally looked at me with an expression which reminded me of the faint wonder under the fixed smile about Miss Mitty's mouth. "What's the matter, Ben? Are you working too hard?" she enquired. "I'm tired and I'm anxious. Do you realise that we are living in the midst of a panic?" "Are we?" she asked quietly, and arranged the fur rug over her knees. "Do you mean to tell me you hadn't heard it?" I demanded, in pure amazement that the thing which had possessed me to madness for three months should have escaped the consciousness of the wife with whom I lived. "How was I to hear of it? You never told me, and I seldom read the papers now since the baby came. Of course I knew something was wrong. You were looking so badly and so much older." To me it had needed no telling, because it had become suddenly the most obvious fact in the world in which I moved. Only a fool would gaze up at the sky during a storm burst and remark to a bystander, "It thunders." Yet even now I saw that what she realised was not the gravity of the financial crisis, but its injurious effect upon my health and my appearance. "You've been on too great a strain," she remarked sympathetically; "when it's all over you must come away and we'll go to Florida in the General's car." To Florida! and at that instant I was struggling in the grip of failure--the failure of the successful financier, which is of all failures the hardest. Not a few retrenchments, not the economy of a luxury here and there, but ultimate poverty was the thing that I faced while I sat beside her on the soft cushions under the rich fur rug. One by one the familiar houses whirled by me. I saw the doors open and shut, the people come out of them, the sunshine fall through the budding trees on the sidewalk; and the houses and the moving people and the budding trees, all seemed to me detached and unreal, as if they stood apart somewhere in a world of quiet, while I was sucked in by the whirlpool. Though I lifted my voice and called aloud to them, I felt that the people I passed would still go quietly in and out of the opening doors in the placid spring sunshine. "There's Bonny Page," said Sally, waving her hand; "she's to marry Ned Marshall next month, you know, and they are going to Europe. Did you notice that baby in the carriage--the one with blue bows and the Irish lace afghan?--it is Bessy Munford's,--the handsomest in town, they say, after little Benjamin." The sight of the baby carriage, with its useless blue fripperies, trundled on the pavement under the budding trees, had aroused in me a sudden ridiculous anger, as though it represented the sinful extravagance of an entire nation. That silly carriage with its blue ribbons and its lace coverlet! And over the whole country factory after factory was shutting down, and thousands of hungry mothers and children were sitting on door-steps in this same sunshine. My nerves were bad. It had been months since I had a good night's sleep, and I knew that in the condition of my temper a trifle might be magnified out of all due proportion to its relative significance. The horses stopped at the bank, and Sally leaned out to bow smilingly to one of the directors, who was coming along the sidewalk. "I never saw so many people about here, Ben," she remarked; "it looks exactly as if it were a theatre. Ah, there's the General now going into his office. He hobbles so badly, doesn't he? When do you think you'll be home?" "I don't know," I returned shortly, "perhaps at midnight--perhaps next week." My tone brought a flush to her cheek, and she looked at me with the faint wonder that I had seen first on the face of Miss Mitty when I went in to breakfast with her on that autumn morning. It was the look of race, of the Bland breeding, of the tradition that questioned, not violently, but gently, "Can this be possible?" She drove on without replying to me, and as I entered my office, the faces of Miss Mitty and of Sally were confused into one by my disordered mind. The run had already started--a depositor, who had withdrawn ten thousand dollars after reading of the failure of the Darlington Trust Company, had been paid off first, and following him the line had come, crawling like black ants on the pavement. As I entered the doors, it seemed to me that the face of each man or woman in the throng stood out, separate and distinct, as though an electric search-light had passed over it; and I saw one and all, frightened, satisfied, or merely ludicrous, with a vividness of perception which failed me when I remembered the features of my own wife. "We can pay them off slowly till three o'clock," said Bingley, the vice-president, whom I found, with five or six of the directors, already in my office. "I've got only one paying teller's window open. The trouble, of course, began with the small accounts, of which we carry such a blamed lot. Mark my words, it is the little depositor that endangers a bank." He looked nervous, and swallowed hastily while he talked, as if he had just rushed in from breakfast, with his last mouthful still unchewed. As I entered and faced the men sitting in different attitudes, but all wearing the same strained and helpless expression, a feeling of irritation swept over me, and I paused in the middle of the floor, with my hat and a folded newspaper in my hand. "A quarter of a million in hard cash would tide us over, I believe," pursued Bingley, swallowing faster; "but the question is how in thunder are we to lay hands on it by nine o'clock to-morrow morning?" I drew out my watch, and with the simple, mechanical action, I was conscious of an immediate quickening of the blood, a clearing of the brain. A certain readiness for decision, a power of dealing with an emergency, of handling a crisis, a response of pulse and brain to the call for action, stood me service now as in every difficult instant of my career. They were picked business men and shrewd financiers before me, yet I was aware that I dominated them, all and each, by some quality of force, of aggressiveness, of inflated self-confidence. The secret of my success, I had once said to the General, was that I began to get cool when I saw other people getting scared. "It is now a quarter of ten, gentlemen," I said, "and I pledge my word of honour that I will have a quarter of a million dollars in bank by ten o'clock to-morrow." "For God's sake, Ben, where is it coming from?" demanded Judge Kenton, an old Confederate, with the solemn face I had sometimes watched him assume in church during the singing of the hymns. As I looked at him the humour of his expression struck me, and I broke into a laugh. "I beg your pardon," I returned the next minute, "but I'll get it--somewhere--if it's in the city." One of the men--I forget which, though I remember quite clearly that he wore a red necktie--got up from the table and slapped me on the shoulder. "Go ahead, Ben, and get it," he said. "We take your word." On the pavement the crowd had thickened, and when it caught sight of me, a confused murmur rose, and I was surrounded by half-hysterical women. The trouble, as Bingley had said, had begun with the small depositors; and in the line that pressed now like black ants to the doors, there were many evidently who had entrusted their nest-eggs to us for safe-keeping. I was not gentle by nature, and the sight of a woman's tears always aroused in me, not the angel, but the brute. For five years I had been married to a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, and yet, as I stood there, held at bay, in the midst of those sobbing women, the veneer of refinement peeled off from me, and the raw strength of the common man showed on the surface, and triumphed again as it had triumphed over the frightened directors in my office. "What are you whining about?" I said with a laugh, "your money is all there. Go in and get it." An old woman in a plaid shawl, with her mouth twisted sideways by a recent stroke of paralysis, barred my way with an outstretched hand, in which she held the foot of a grey yarn stocking. "I'd laid it up for my old age, Mister," she mumbled, through her toothless gums, "an' they told me it was safer in the bank, so I put it there. But I reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back--I reckon I'd feel easier." "Then go after it," I replied harshly, pushing her out of my way. "If you don't get it before I come back, I'll give it to you with my own hands." For a minute my presence subdued the crowd; but the panic terror had gripped it, and while I crossed the street the hysterical murmurs were in my ears. A desire to turn and throttle the sound as I might a howling wild beast took possession of me. It was true, I suppose, as Dr. Theophilus had once told me, that the quality I lacked was tenderness. The General fortunately was alone in his private office, and when I went in he glanced up enquiringly from a railroad report he was reading. "It's you, Ben, is it?" he remarked, and went back to his paper. "General," I said bluntly, and stopped short in the centre of the room, "I want a quarter of a million dollars in cash by nine o'clock to-morrow morning." For a moment he sat speechless, blinking at me with his swollen eyelids, while his lower lip protruded angrily, like the lip of a crying child. Then the old war-horse in him responded gallantly to the scent of battle. "Damn you, Ben, do you know cash is as tight as wax?" he enquired. "You ain't dozing in the midst of a panic?" "There's trouble at the bank," I replied. "A run has started, but so far it is almost entirely among the small depositors. We can manage to pay off till three o'clock, and if we open to-morrow with a quarter of a million, we shall probably keep on our feet, unless the excitement spreads." "When do you want it?" "By nine o'clock to-morrow morning; and I want it, General," I added, "on my personal credit." He rose from his chair and stood swaying unsteadily on his gouty foot. "I'll give you every penny that I've got, Ben," he answered, "but it ain't that much." "You have access to the cash of both the Tilden Bank and the Bonfield Trust Company. If there's a dollar in the city you can get it." A hint of his sly humour appeared for an instant in his eyes. "It wasn't any longer ago than breakfast that I remarked I didn't believe there was a blamed dollar in the whole country," he returned. Then his swaying stopped and he became invested suddenly with the dignity of the greatest financier in the state. "Hand me my stick, Ben, and I'll go and see what I can do about it," he said. I gave him his stick and my arm, and with my assistance he limped to the offices of the Bonfield Trust Company on the next block. When I returned to the bank the directors were talking excitedly, but at my entrance a hush fell, and they sat looking at me with a row of vacant, expectant faces that waited apparently to be filled with expression. "By ten o'clock to-morrow morning," I said, "a quarter of a million in cash will be brought in through the door in bags." "I told you he'd do it," exclaimed Bingley, as he grasped my hand, "and I hope to God it will stay 'em off." "You need a drink, Ben," observed Judge Kenton, "and so do I. Let's go and get it. A soft-boiled egg was all I had for breakfast, and I've gone faint." I remember that I went to a restaurant with him, that a few old women sitting on the curbing spoke to us as we passed, that we ate oysters, and returned in half an hour to another meeting, that we discussed ways and means until eight o'clock and decided nothing. I know also that when we came out again several of the old women were still crouching there, and that when they came whining up to me, I turned on them with an oath and ordered them to be off. As clearly as if it were yesterday, I can see still the long, solemn face of the Judge as he glanced up at me, and I see written upon it something of the faint wonder that I had grown to regard as the peculiar look of the Blands. I had telephoned Sally not to wait, and when I reached home I found that she had dismissed the servants and was preparing a little supper for me herself. While she served me, I sat perfectly silent, too exhausted to talk or to think, trying in vain to remember the more important events of the day. Only once did Sally speak, and that was to beg me to eat the slice of cold turkey she had laid on my plate. "I'm not hungry, I got something with Judge Kenton down town," I returned as I pushed back my chair and rose from the table; "what I need is sleep, sleep, sleep. If I don't get to bed, I'll drop to sleep on the hearth-rug." "Then go, dear," she answered, and not until I reached the landing above did I realise that through it all she had not put a single question to me. With the realisation I knew that I ought to have told her what in her heart she must have felt it to be her right to know; but a nervous shrinking, which seemed to be a result of my complete physical exhaustion, held me back when I started to retrace my steps. She might cry, and the sight of tears would unman me. There's time enough, I thought. Why not to-morrow instead? Yet in my heart I knew it would be no easier to do it to-morrow than it was to-day. By some strange freak of the imagination those unshed tears of hers seemed already dropping upon my nerves. "There's time enough, she'll be obliged to hear it in the end," something within me repeated with a kind of dulness. And with the words, while my head touched the pillow, I started suddenly wide awake as though from the flash of a lantern that was turned inward. Trivial impressions of the afternoon stood out as if illuminated against the outer darkness, and there hovered before me the face of the old woman, in the plaid shawl, with her twisted mouth, and the foot of her grey yarn stocking held out in her palsied hand. "I reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back," said a voice somewhere in my brain. _ |
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