by Frank Norris
“What are the orders for to-day, sir?”
Gretry was very pale. Despite his long experience on the Board of Trade, Landry could see anxiety in every change of his expression, in every motion of his hands. The broker before answering the question crossed the room to the water cooler and drank a brief swallow. Then emptying the glass he refilled it, moistened his lips again, and again emptied and filled the goblet. He put it down, caught it up once more, filled it, emptied it, drinking now in long draughts, now in little sips. He was quite unconscious of his actions, and Landry as he watched, felt his heart sink. Things must, indeed, be at a desperate pass when Gretry, the calm, the clear-headed, the placid, was thus upset.
“Your orders?” said the broker, at last. “The same as yesterday; keep the market up — that’s all. It must not go below a dollar fifteen. But act on the defensive. Don’t be aggressive, unless I send word. There will probably be very heavy selling the first few moments. You can buy, each of you, up to half a million bushels apiece. If that don’t keep the price up, if they still are selling after that ... well”; Gretry paused a moment, irresolutely, “well,” he added suddenly, “if they are still selling freely after you’ve each bought half a million, I’ll let you know what to do. And, look here,” he continued, facing the group, “look here — keep your heads cool ... I guess to-day will decide things. Watch the Crookes crowd pretty closely. I understand they’re up to something again. That’s all, I guess.”
Landry and the other Gretry traders hurried from the office up to the floor. Landry’s heart was beating thick and slow and hard, his teeth were shut tight. Every nerve, every fibre of him braced itself with the rigidity of drawn wire, to meet the issue of the impending hours. Now, was to come the last grapple. He had never lived through a crisis such as this before. Would he prevail, would he keep his head? Would he avoid or balk the thousand and one little subterfuges, tricks, and traps that the hostile traders would prepare for him — prepare with a quickness, a suddenness that all but defied the sharpest, keenest watchfulness?
Was the gong never going to strike? He found himself, all at once, on the edge of the Wheat Pit. It was jammed tight with the crowd of traders and the excitement that disengaged itself from that tense, vehement crowd of white faces and glittering eyes was veritably sickening, veritably weakening. Men on either side of him were shouting mere incoherencies, to which nobody, not even themselves, were listening. Others silent, gnawed their nails to the quick, breathing rapidly, audibly even, their nostrils expanding and contracting. All around roared the vague thunder that since early morning had shaken the building. In the Pit the bids leaped to and fro, though the time of opening had not yet come; the very planks under foot seemed spinning about in the first huge warning swirl of the Pit’s centripetal convulsion. There was dizziness in the air. Something, some infinite immeasurable power, onrushing in its eternal courses, shook the Pit in its grasp. Something deafened the ears, blinded the eyes, dulled and numbed the mind, with its roar, with the chaff and dust of its whirlwind passage, with the stupefying sense of its power, coeval with the earthquake and glacier, merciless, all-powerful, a primal basic throe of creation itself, unassailable, inviolate, and untamed.
Had the trading begun? Had the gong struck? Landry never knew, never so much as heard the clang of the great bell. All at once he was fighting; all at once he was caught, as it were, from off the stable earth, and flung headlong into the heart and centre of the Pit. What he did, he could not say; what went on about him, he could not distinguish. He only knew that roar was succeeding roar, that there was crashing through his ears, through his very brain, the combined bellow of a hundred Niagaras. Hands clutched and tore at him, his own tore and clutched in turn. The Pit was mad, was drunk and frenzied; not a man of all those who fought and scrambled and shouted who knew what he or his neighbour did. They only knew that a support long thought to be secure was giving way; not gradually, not evenly, but by horrible collapses, and equally horrible upward leaps. Now it held, now it broke, now it reformed again, rose again, then again in hideous cataclysms fell from beneath their feet to lower depths than before. The official reporter leaned back in his place, helpless. On the wall overhead, the indicator on the dial was rocking back and forth, like the mast of a ship caught in a monsoon. The price of July wheat no man could so much as approximate. The fluctuations were no longer by fractions of a cent, but by ten cents, fifteen cents twenty-five cents at a time. On one side of the Pit wheat sold at ninety cents, on the other at a dollar and a quarter.
And all the while above the din upon the floor, above the tramplings and the shoutings in the Pit, there seemed to thrill and swell that appalling roar of the Wheat itself coming in, coming on like a tidal wave, bursting through, dashing barriers aside, rolling like a measureless, almighty river, from the farms of Iowa and the ranches of California, on to the East — to the bakeshops and hungry mouths of Europe.
Landry caught one of the Gretry traders by the arm.
“What shall we do?” he shouted. “I’ve bought up to my limit. No more orders have come in. The market has gone from under us. What’s to be done?”
“I don’t know,” the other shouted back, “I don’t know. We’re all gone to hell; looks like the last smash. There are no more supporting orders — something’s gone wrong. Gretry hasn’t sent any word.”
Then, Landry, beside himself with excitement and with actual terror, hardly knowing even yet what he did, turned sharply about. He fought his way out of the Pit; he ran hatless and panting across the floor, in and out between the groups of spectators, down the stairs to the corridor below, and into the Gretry-Converse offices.
In the outer office a group of reporters and the representatives of a great commercial agency were besieging one of the heads of the firm. They assaulted him with questions.
“Just tell us where you are at — that’s all we want to know.”
“Just what is the price of July wheat?”
“Is Jadwin winning or losing?”
But the other threw out an arm in a wild gesture of helplessness.
“We don’t know, ourselves,” he cried. “The market has run clean away from everybody. You know as much about it as I do. It’s simply hell broken loose, that’s all. We can’t tell where we are at for days to come.”
Landry rushed on. He swung open the door of the private office and entered, slamming it behind him and crying out:
“Mr. Gretry, what are we to do? We’ve had no orders.”
But no one listened to him. Of the group that gathered around Gretry’s desk, no one so much as turned a head.
Jadwin stood there in the centre of the others, hatless, his face pale, his eyes congested with blood. Gretry fronted him, one hand upon his arm. In the remainder of the group Landry recognised the senior clerk of the office, one of the heads of a great banking house, and a couple of other men — confidential agents, who had helped to manipulate the great corner.
“But you can’t,” Gretry was exclaiming. “You can’t; don’t you see we can’t meet our margin calls? It’s the end of the game. You’ve got no more money.”
“It’s a lie!” Never so long as he lived did Landry forget the voice in which Jadwin cried the words: “It’s a lie! Keep on buying, I tell you. Take all they’ll offer. I tell you we’ll touch the two dollar mark before noon.”
“Not another order goes up to that floor,” retorted Gretry. “Why, J., ask any of these gentlemen here. They’ll tell you.”
“It’s useless, Mr. Jadwin,” said the banker, quietly. “You were practically beaten two days ago.”
“Mr. Jadwin,” pleaded the senior clerk, “for God’s sake listen to reason. Our firm—”
But Jadwin was beyond all appeal. He threw off Gretry’s hand.
“Your firm, your firm — you’ve been cowards from the start. I know you, I know you. You have sold me out. Crookes has bought you. Get out of my way!” he shouted. “Get out of my way! Do you hear? I’ll play my hand alone
from now on.”
“J., old man — why — see here, man,” Gretry implored, still holding him by the arm; “here, where are you going?”
Jadwin’s voice rang like a trumpet call:
“Into the Pit.”
“Look here — wait — here. Hold him back, gentlemen. He don’t know what he’s about.”
“If you won’t execute my orders, I’ll act myself. I’m going into the Pit, I tell you.”
“J., you’re mad, old fellow. You’re ruined — don’t you understand? — you’re ruined.”
“Then God curse you, Sam Gretry, for the man who failed me in a crisis.” And as he spoke Curtis Jadwin struck the broker full in the face.
Gretry staggered back from the blow, catching at the edge of his desk. His pale face flashed to crimson for an instant, his fists clinched; then his hands fell to his sides.
“No,” he said, “let him go, let him go. The man is merely mad.”
But, Jadwin, struggling for a second in the midst of the group that tried to hold him, suddenly flung off the restraining clasps, thrust the men to one side, and rushed from the room.
Gretry dropped into his chair before his desk.
“It’s the end,” he said, simply.
He drew a sheet of note paper to him, and in a shaking hand wrote a couple of lines.
“Take that,” he said, handing the note to the senior clerk, “take that to the secretary of the Board at once.”
And straight into the turmoil and confusion of the Pit, to the scene of so many of his victories, the battle ground whereon again and again, his enemies routed, he had remained the victor undisputed, undismayed came the “Great Bull.” No sooner had he set foot within the entrance to the Floor, than the news went flashing and flying from lip to lip. The galleries knew it, the public room, and the Western Union knew it, the telephone booths knew it, and lastly even the Wheat Pit, torn and tossed and rent asunder by the force this man himself had unchained, knew it, and knowing stood dismayed.
For even then, so great had been his power, so complete his dominion, and so well-rooted the fear which he had inspired, that this last move in the great game he had been playing, this unexpected, direct, personal assumption of control struck a sense of consternation into the heart of the hardiest of his enemies.
Jadwin himself, the great man, the “Great Bull” in the Pit! What was about to happen? Had they been too premature in their hope of his defeat? Had he been preparing some secret, unexpected manoeuvre? For a second they hesitated, then moved by a common impulse, feeling the push of the wonderful new harvest behind them, they gathered themselves together for the final assault, and again offered the wheat for sale; offered it by thousands upon thousands of bushels; poured, as it were, the reapings of entire principalities out upon the floor of the Board of Trade.
Jadwin was in the thick of the confusion by now. And the avalanche, the undiked Ocean of the Wheat, leaping to the lash of the hurricane, struck him fairly in the face.
He heard it now, he heard nothing else. The Wheat had broken from his control. For months, he had, by the might of his single arm, held it back; but now it rose like the upbuilding of a colossal billow. It towered, towered, hung poised for an instant, and then, with a thunder as of the grind and crash of chaotic worlds, broke upon him, burst through the Pit and raced past him, on and on to the eastward and to the hungry nations.
And then, under the stress and violence of the hour, something snapped in his brain. The murk behind his eyes had been suddenly pierced by a white flash. The strange qualms and tiny nervous paroxysms of the last few months all at once culminated in some indefinite, indefinable crisis, and the wheels and cogs of all activities save one lapsed away and ceased. Only one function of the complicated machine persisted; but it moved with a rapidity of vibration that seemed to be tearing the tissues of being to shreds, while its rhythm beat out the old and terrible cadence:
“Wheat — wheat — wheat, wheat — wheat — wheat.”
Blind and insensate, Jadwin strove against the torrent of the Wheat. There in the middle of the Pit, surrounded and assaulted by herd after herd of wolves yelping for his destruction, he stood braced, rigid upon his feet, his head up, his hand, the great bony hand that once had held the whole Pit in its grip, flung high in the air, in a gesture of defiance, while his voice like the clangour of bugles sounding to the charge of the forlorn hope, rang out again and again, over the din of his enemies:
“Give a dollar for July — give a dollar for July!”
With one accord they leaped upon him. The little group of his traders was swept aside. Landry alone, Landry who had never left his side since his rush from out Gretry’s office, Landry Court, loyal to the last, his one remaining soldier, white, shaking, the sobs strangling in his throat, clung to him desperately. Another billow of wheat was preparing. They two — the beaten general and his young armour bearer — heard it coming; hissing, raging, bellowing, it swept down upon them. Landry uttered a cry. Flesh and blood could not stand this strain. He cowered at his chief’s side, his shoulders bent, one arm above his head, as if to ward off an actual physical force.
But Jadwin, iron to the end, stood erect. All unknowing what he did, he had taken Landry’s hand in his and the boy felt the grip on his fingers like the contracting of a vise of steel. The other hand, as though holding up a standard, was still in the air, and his great deep-toned voice went out across the tumult, proclaiming to the end his battle cry:
“Give a dollar for July — give a dollar for July!”
But, little by little, Landry became aware that the tumult of the Pit was intermitting. There were sudden lapses in the shouting, and in these lapses he could hear from somewhere out upon the floor voices that were crying: “Order — order, order, gentlemen.”
But, again and again the clamour broke out. It would die down for an instant, in response to these appeals, only to burst out afresh as certain groups of traders started the pandemonium again, by the wild outcrying of their offers. At last, however, the older men in the Pit, regaining some measure of self-control, took up the word, going to and fro in the press, repeating “Order, order.”
And then, all at once, the Pit, the entire floor of the Board of Trade was struck dumb. All at once the tension was relaxed, the furious struggling and stamping was stilled. Landry, bewildered, still holding his chief by the hand, looked about him. On the floor, near at hand, stood the president of the Board of Trade himself, and with him the vice-president and a group of the directors. Evidently it had been these who had called the traders to order. But it was not toward them now that the hundreds of men in the Pit and on the floor were looking.
In the little balcony on the south wall opposite the visitors’ gallery a figure had appeared, a tall grave man, in a long black coat — the secretary of the Board of Trade. Landry with the others saw him, saw him advance to the edge of the railing, and fix his glance upon the Wheat Pit. In his hand he carried a slip of paper.
And then in the midst of that profound silence the secretary announced:
“All trades with Gretry, Converse & Co. must be closed at once.”
The words had not ceased to echo in the high vaultings of the roof before they were greeted with a wild, shrill yell of exultation and triumph, that burst from the crowding masses in the Wheat Pit.
Beaten; beaten at last, the Great Bull! Smashed! The great corner smashed! Jadwin busted! They themselves saved, saved, saved! Cheer followed upon cheer, yell after yell. Hats went into the air. In a frenzy of delight men danced and leaped and capered upon the edge of the Pit, clasping their arms about each other, shaking each others’ hands, cheering and hurrahing till their strained voices became hoarse and faint.
Some few of the older men protested. There were cries of:
“Shame, shame!”
“Order — let him alone.”
“Let him be; he’s down now. Shame, shame!”
But the jubilee was irrepressible, they had been too cruelly pres
sed, these others; they had felt the weight of the Bull’s hoof, the rip of his horn. Now they had beaten him, had pulled him down.
“Yah-h-h, whoop, yi, yi, yi. Busted, busted, busted. Hip, hip, hip, and a tiger!”
“Come away, sir. For God’s sake, Mr. Jadwin, come away.”
Landry was pleading with Jadwin, clutching his arm in both his hands, his lips to his chief’s ear to make himself heard above the yelping of the mob.
Jadwin was silent now. He seemed no longer to see or hear; heavily, painfully he leaned upon the young man’s shoulder.
“Come away, sir — for God’s sake!”
The group of traders parted before them, cheering even while they gave place, cheering with eyes averted, unwilling to see the ruin that meant for them salvation.
“Yah-h-h. Yah-h-h, busted, busted!”
Landry had put his arm about Jadwin, and gripped him close as he led him from the Pit. The sobs were in his throat again, and tears of excitement, of grief, of anger and impotence were running down his face.
“Yah-h-h. Yah-h-h, he’s done for, busted, busted!”
“Damn you all,” cried Landry, throwing out a furious fist, “damn you all; you brutes, you beasts! If he’d so much as raised a finger a week ago, you’d have run for your lives.”
But the cheering drowned his voice; and as the two passed out of the Pit upon the floor, the gong that closed the trading struck and, as it seemed, put a period, definite and final to the conclusion of Curtis Jadwin’s career as speculator.
Across the floor towards the doorway Landry led his defeated captain. Jadwin was in a daze, he saw nothing, heard nothing. Quietly he submitted to Landry’s guiding arm. The visitors in the galleries bent far over to see him pass, and from all over the floor, spectators, hangers-on, corn-and-provision traders, messenger boys, clerks and reporters came hurrying to watch the final exit of the Great Bull, from the scene of his many victories and his one overwhelming defeat.