Wheels within Wheels

by Alec Waugh

  He had, therefore, arranged as far as possible that when Rivers was invited to a young people’s party it should be to meet men who would be unimpressed by his achievements and ambitions: athletic, outdoor men: men of sport and action. When he invited Rivers to meet older men it was usually men of his own way of thinking, who would resent in him the coming of the New Idea. Whereas men of an opposing school of thought would have been interested: would have questioned him out of curiosity to find what the young were thinking. He had never arranged a party that Rivers could be expected to dominate: had never consciously done anything to increase Daphne’s opinion of him.

  Yet after a summer of these tactics, whatever effect might have been made on Daphne, as far as he was himself concerned he had been aware of a very definite change of opinion in the young man’s favour. He did not like the fellow. Rivers was unlikeable: he was angular: prickly: quick to take offence. All the same, there were two things he could not help liking about him: his refusal to be cowed: to be self-apologetic before the young men who considered him of no account; and a humility that was without subservience or sycophancy before those whom he respected, no matter of how small account they might consider him. There was a basic honesty and reality about the man one respected. In twenty years’ time he would probably be a person with whom anyone would be glad and most people proud to claim acquaintance. But at the moment he was distinctly a person without whom every party was the happier. Newton couldn’t see what it was in him that fascinated Daphne. He wasn’t good-looking. He couldn’t give her a good time. He cut her off from a quarter of the things she liked. One of the chief reasons that he was not anxious to get moved into the new house was his wish to show Daphne, by example, how ill-equipped Rivers was to fit into her world.

  • • • • •

  In England and New Orleans the happiness of that summer was one of a tranquil, deep content. In New York, the fountain of that content, there was no such placidity. Every bellhop, every coloured chauffeur, every tram conductor, every waiter had his share in the Wall Street transactions. The dream of the Land of Promise had come true. There was gold where the Rainbow ended. And the Rainbow’s foot lay along the length of the Lincoln Highway. There was no telling how the miracle might end. Every article, every sermon, every speech boomed out the news that America’s great days were only starting. Men and women who had been born to poverty, who had endured poverty, who were resigned to poverty, saw dazzlingly before their eyes, only a few years off, motor cars, yachts, country clubs. Smart salesmen offering radios, cars, victrolas, in return for a signature and a small first payment, assured them that in three years’ time they would be laughing at the present high levels: to think that they had ever thought that high. “Trust the future.” The cry was lifted on all sides. Don’t sell out. Buy more shares on margin with the profits. Scrap the automobiles that are two years old. Buy. Increased consumption means increased production. Increased profits mean new high levels on the ticker. Buy, buy, buy.

  No wine was headier. Roy Bauer grew more exuberant every day. He hardly considered the salary he drew from his work in the office. That was meal-ticket stuff. Wall Street was the thing. His mother’s apartment was high-piled with fresh flowers every morning. The flowers that were a day old weren’t fresh. Candy arrived every afternoon at three. The corsage of orchids on Caroline’s shoulder stretched half way down her back.

  • • • • •

  In the midst of the typhoon Caroline contrived to remain reasonably calm. The excitement meant very little to her. Presents were things that one got used to very quickly. She accepted the presence of orchids as a matter of course in the same way that previously she had accepted the absence of them. She would have been as annoyed now at not getting them as before she would have been delighted at getting them. That was all. As then she had never had them and now she always did, it cannot be said that their presence made the slightest difference to her. It was the same with her other presents: the clothes, the bangles, even her apartment. She had been perfectly happy in her small room in a garret on the south side of Washington Square. Her life had altered when she exchanged many men for one, but it had not altered when that one man had begun to see himself as a plutocrat.

  Even if material things had meant much to her, it is improbable that that summer, red-lettered now in so many memories, would have meant much except Mark Lester.

  He had rung her up the very morning after they had gone to see Eddie Cantor. He had been ringing her up most mornings since. It was a relationship without precedent in her experience. She had known many men, and her relations with all of them seemed variations upon a single theme. Roy in a way was different. At least the setting of their relationship was. But Roy was less a man, less an “affair” than a job, an occupation. He was a piece of furniture in her life: something that precluded her from the succession of romances that she had never dignified with any high-sounding labels: a succession that included no figure at all comparable with Lester, nor any relationship that approximated to theirs.

  He was attracted by her, she knew that. As she was by him. But he had made no essay at gallantry. They would meet for lunch, quite often, always at his expense. They would sit on the stool of drug stores and eat chicken à la King and combination salad. Or they would join the queue at caféterias, piling their plates high with standardized, but wholesome food. They never went to speakeasies.

  “I can’t afford to pay a dollar for a thimbleful of frozen poison,” he said.

  After the perpetual highballs it was a relief to her to drink coffee. Most of their meetings were in the morning or afternoon. But very soon the understanding grew up between them that whenever she had an evening disengaged she should ring him up.

  Usually they would go a picture, directly his work ended, at about six, when the cinemas were less certain to be crowded. Afterwards they would buy some sandwiches at a drug store: they would picnic in her apartment: she would make an omelette: the radio was playing: they would dance. Or they would sit on the deep-cushioned divan talking, inconsequentially, of different things. Half the time together they were laughing.

  They held hands occasionally, but he had never kissed her. She would have been surprised now if he had. There would come a day when he would kiss her. She did not know where or how, but there would be a harmony of the mood and moment. It would be the loveliest hour of her life. But she did not look ahead. She had ceased to wonder what Lester meant or intended. She surrendered to the rhythm of his courtship.

  It was a courtship such as she had never known. The courtship reverent, tender and profound that a young man offers to an unawakened girl, reaching her senses through her heart. Caroline had known no such courtship. She had had no real girlhood. At one moment she had been a grubby urchin: the next a standardized, hard-boiled “cutie,” taking a cold-hearted, sensual relish in petting parties, discarding her inexperience, stage by stage, as easily as she had shed a childhood’s frocks. She had never known first love.

  The emotions of early, awakening adolescence had been stamped down. She was a cutie as standardized, as bright, as polished, as smart, as any automobile out of the workshops in Detroit. There was a demand for cuties, she fulfilled it, no more understanding the purpose to which she was put than the tuber-roses gathered on the high hills of Grasse to be distilled into the stoppered bottles along a dressing-table.

  Her response to Lester was no putting back of a clock in such a way as is a mature woman’s capacity to believe herself a girl again because a man years younger than herself feels a young man’s love for her. The mature woman is returning to what she has already known in a desperate attempt to believe she still is what she was: knowing that she is not: so that her whole love-affair is built on make-believe. Caroline’s was not like that. She was not returning to something familiar. She was discovering something new. She was becoming something she had never been. She had made love, but she had never loved. She was now on the brink of loving. The soaring level of the stock
market meant nothing to her.

  • • • • •

  There were not many others who watched with calm eyes the mounting cascade of riches. The fever that two hundred years earlier had spurred London into the floating of companies to extract salt from sea water and import jackasses from Spain had taken hold of the rock-based island of Manhattan.

  Bergheim, sitting at his desk, watched the ticking of the tape with an unemotional interest. For fifty years he had watched the tape machine. But this was without parallel in his experience. He was not a prophet; he could not tell whether it was going to last. A great many conservative, sober, level-headed financiers held it would. On the face of it, it was possible that a country as vast as the United States; an empire without frontiers, able to satisfy its own needs, careless as to whether the world outside bought or did not buy the surplus, unlikely again to waste its energies on war, without the need to prepare itself for war, beginning where other countries had left off, with an unmortgaged future, might be able to create a general standard of wealth, such as older countries had barely dreamed of. It might be that the millennium might be at hand.

  He did not know. He was not certain that he cared. It was not in his business to know or care. He was childless. He had not a parent’s preoccupation with the manner of world his children would inherit. He had moreover the Oriental’s relish of luxury combined with the Oriental’s indifference to luxury. He had the Oriental capacity to withdraw into the calm countries of the spirit. He did not believe that even the millennium would alter the needs and hungers of the spirit. The body and the body’s needs were ultimately unimportant. His very recognition of their ultimate unimportance gave him his knowledge of their immediate importance. He understood exchange. Money was not a game to him. Figures were not like a score at billiards. They were the counters with which certain necessities and luxuries were bought. He, knowing what it could not buy, knew also what it could. As he listened to the tapping of the ticker, he computed the amount of brokerage this fury of buying would bring him in.

  Through the long hot summer he bought and sold: for other people, but never for himself. Fortunes—paper fortunes—were being made on every side of him. The boys who came round to his apartment every evening vied with each other in their stories of how much they had made that day: of how much they were worth: of how much they were going to be worth.

  “If I were to sell out now, I wouldn’t need to do another stroke of work as long as I lived,” they said. “But, boy, I’m not going to be that dumb.”

  They laughed at Bergheim for his caution. Fancy being satisfied with his miserly brokerage when General Electric had gone up six points in a single day!

  “I reckon I’m getting old,” he answered. “I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks. I’ve learnt one way of making money.”

  “It’s like a man going round a golf course with a putter,” they told him laughingly.

  He shrugged his shoulders, opened the case of Bourbon, drummed his fingers on the side of his chair in time with the throbbing of the radio. They might be right, but he had played for safety too long to change his tactics now. If the market broke, and they were forced to change their tune, well, the laugh would be against them. And if they were right, and this was only the beginning, well, he would be glad to see the boys making all that money. He only hoped they would be sensible and keep their heads and not imagine they were the sons of glory because they happened to have been in the elevator when it was going up. Success was a harder test than failure any day.

  • • • • •

  He did not know whether it was steadiness of head or a bland self-confidence that left them undaunted on that September morning when the market broke.

  “I suppose you’d be advising us to sell out now,” they told him scoffingly.

  “I’ve known a number of people regret having sold short, but I’ve known many more regret that they held on too long,” was his reply.

  The young men laughed.

  Roy Bauer came one morning into his office, his tie bright, his smile brighter, an armoury of pencils, fountain pens, cigars bristling like bayonets in his coat.

  “Now’s the time to buy,” he said. “Stocks are down to a bargain level. Do you remember the two panics last year, in June and December? And then again in March and May of this year? The wise men were those who held on and bought in. Steel is down and Radio’s down. The two soundest concerns in the whole country. I’m throwing my money in the market. When a country’s prosperous, stocks stand high. It stands to reason.”

  Bergheim nodded his head. Perhaps it stood to reason. He took Bauer’s order, handed him a cigar, listened to the flood of talk.

  “There’s no need to worry. You saw what Charlie Mitchell said. The industrial situation’s sound; as long as that’s not wobbling, we’re safe. I suppose you’ve heard nothing more about that oil well?”

  Bergheim shook his head.

  “It’s costing a good deal of money, and it’s shown no returns so far.”

  “It will though, it will. I was born under a lucky star.”

  “Some of your partners weren’t. They have been half wiped out. They are thinking of withdrawing their guarantees.”

  “Got cold feet?”

  “No money.”

  “There’s credit.”

  “Will you be prepared to give it them?”

  Bauer hesitated.

  “I reckon these shoulders are broad enough for any weight that little well will put upon them. That’s only a sideshow.”

  Bergheim had made it his business never to argue. He never wished to prove people wrong. He was content to wait for the future to do that for him. If it didn’t, he was spared the annoyance of being proved wrong himself. He kept his own judgments.

  It looked as though he were wrong. The stock market began to rally, prices rose, the prophets continued to speak soothingly to the public. The margin buyers had not lost their faith in the Philosopher’s Stone. Bergheim took his profit from their faith and took care to see that their collateral was abundantly adequate to their purchases.

  • • • • •

  It might be that their faith was justified. But he had not the same faith in the stability of the Golden Tripod that supported this dizzy structure of wealth and happiness. The Tripod was the least secure device in architecture: the palace “on two main pillars vaulted high” was firmer. For it was by a tripod the pedestal of wealth was maintained: by real capacity, by confidence that was the interior recognition of that capacity, by timeliness that was a recognition of the moment’s needs that was described as luck, but actually was an instinctive knowledge of the use to which that capacity could be put. As long as each of those legs stood firm the vase that it supported was as firm as a hundred-pillared balcony. If one leg of the tripod failed, the whole edifice collapsed: there was no chance for bastions, for bolstering up.

  Bergheim was sceptical and therefore cautious.

  XI

  The downward swing of a pendulum is measured by its upward swing and Josef Bergheim had faced the summer fever with a calmness that left him invulnerable to the autumn chill. It was with a calm mind that he travelled down by the subway to his office on Thursday, October the 24th. He had no reason to believe that that day was to be any different from any other. During the last week the market had been unsteady. If he did not find waiting for him that morning at the office sufficient fresh collateral, a great many of his clients would have their stock flung upon the markets. There would no doubt be some bargains going. Other brokers were in the same position.

  He looked carefully at the human figures seated on their straw chairs or swaying from their hangers. Their faces as always at this hour wore a strained, driven look. It was to see that look that he preferred the subway to his car. He liked to be reminded of the unceasing struggle underneath. Was the strain on those faces due to such demands from other brokers for increased collateral as he had sent on the previous morning to his clients? He had been told t
hat over two million Americans owned stock on margin. He could well believe it. Every other man had his paper turned to the stock market page. The girls might be reading the sensation, gossip-mongerings of the tabloids, but the men were scanning with knit eyebrows the columns that spelt wealth or ruin for them.

  • • • • •

  Usually Bergheim left his office shortly after five, but at ten o’clock that evening the lights were still burning in his room. It was not till seven o’clock that the ticker had recorded the last sale made on the floor that afternoon at three. Close upon thirteen million shares had been flung upon the market. His clerks would be working till dawn to straighten out the muddle. There was no need for him to linger on. There was only routine work waiting. He walked slowly to the subway, conscious that he had lived through history during the ten hours since he had climbed its stairs.

  October the 24th, 1929, was one of the dates of the twentieth century that in the twenty-first every school child would have to memorize. It dated an end. It dated a beginning. Wall Street had been struck with panic. However quickly, however completely it recovered, that panic would remain a deep scar upon the memory: a corrective to the exaggerated optimism of the young men who had imagined that life was a bicycle ride down hill, with the wind behind them: that all they had to do was to keep their eyes straight ahead and let the slope and the wind do the rest for them. That optimism might return, but never so unquestioningly.

  He felt an old man as he turned his key in the lock of his apartment.

  His coloured manservant was waiting for him in the hall. The darkie’s face wore a puzzled, lost expression.

  “Ah get your message, boss. Some of the boys ring up. Ah tell them yo’ come back late. Ah tell them yo’ want to be alone.”

  “That’s right, Peter.”