The Mouse on Wall Street

by Leonard Wibberley

  “In times of national crisis,” Mountjoy said, “it is a tradition that all parties join hands. Such a crisis confronts us now. I pledge full support and that of my party to the Prime Minister and his government.”

  It was then that the dam burst again. This time there was no dancing on the benches, but members were on their feet in a moment, shaking their fists at Mountjoy and Bentner, and again drowning out the Speaker in the uproar. Three were ejected by the sergeant-at-arms before order was restored and Bentner could go over once again his reasons for deciding that the money must not be allowed into the Duchy. Actually all were, from their own experience, aware of the reasons. They were now suffering in public the agony which Bentner had suffered in private—the anguish of parting with ten million dollars, which experience told them must be done, but which training and emotion made extremely difficult.

  Avoiding the decision for a while, they fumed at Mountjoy and demanded to know why he had originally given out the news that only ten thousand dollars was available.

  “I disguised the sum thinking that if the full figure were published, people would not have the courage or the wisdom to turn it back,” said Mountjoy. “I wanted to spare you the agony you now endure and the Duchy the peril in which it now stands. I trust I misjudged you and my fellow citizens and that you and the people will have the courage to turn down these ten million dollars which menace our whole future—these and the millions more which are undoubtedly to follow.”

  He got no immediate assurance on this point and the debate which followed was long and the questions asked searching.

  “Why could not the money be just left in America at interest?” one member asked.

  “That could be done,” Bentner replied, “but it would merely postpone the decision. The money would keep increasing until not ten million but perhaps a hundred million dollars lay to the credit of the Duchy. Who among us could turn his back on such a fortune? No, the longer we delay, the harder the decision will be.

  “What lies at the basis of all this,” he went on, “is whether we want to continue with the kind of life we have lived in the past or whether we want to change it completely so that our children will depend for their security and happiness not on their work but on unearned wealth coming in from abroad. Do we want our descendants to be self-supporting or to become a nation of wealthy idlers? Putting all the figures aside, that is the question you have to ask yourselves.”

  “What about the debts already incurred?” asked another. “They were contracted in the belief that there would be money coming to pay them.”

  “Why not keep enough of the money to pay off all the debts of individuals and the government and abolish taxation for the rest of this year?” another asked.

  Nobody wanted to keep all the money. Nobody advocated taking it and dividing it up among the voters of Grand Fenwick. Everybody agreed, in varying degrees, that the money should not be allowed to disturb the economy of Grand Fenwick—the delicate relationship of labor to produce to wage which had been achieved through the years.

  In the end it was agreed, thirty-three to seven, that all public and private debts arising from the previous disbursement of dollars should be paid off with the new money. Thereafter not a dollar of it was to be allowed to enter the country.

  The seven who voted against this wanted sufficient of the funds placed in the Treasury to make it unnecessary for anyone in Grand Fenwick to pay taxes for several years to come. This was opposed by Mountjoy, who pointed out again that if people do not pay taxes they lose interest in their government. “For a government to remain healthy,” he argued, “every penny of a nation's budget should be subject to scrutiny and debate. This will never be so if the money is not contributed in the first place by the voters themselves."

  After the vote a motion was made from the floor that the problem of disposing of the unneeded millions of dollars be turned over “to our gracious and sovereign Lady the Duchess Gloriana the Twelfth, who may call for advice in this matter from her humble privy councilors." This was passed without dissent, for the people would gladly give to their Duchess, who was above politics, that trust which they withheld from Mountjoy and Bentner.

  Gloriana had very little experience in money matters and was not regarded by her consort, Tully Bascomb, as a practical handler of finance. She tended, like many other women, to get hold of a principle which applied in a limited situation and, willy-nilly, to apply it in every situation. She went on occasional shopping expeditions to Villeurbanne or Lyons or Marseilles and bought large quantities of things for which she had no real need because they were cheap. Tully was quite incapable of convincing her that nothing is cheap if it isn't needed. She also tended to buy against future needs which did not eventuate. These, of course, were but peccadilloes common to many, but Tully was at best disturbed that his wife should be entrusted now with the problem of getting rid of close to ten million dollars.

  “And yet," he mused, “perhaps she is just the person to do the job. She has been able to get rid of every penny of her personal allowance as it comes to her."

  Gloriana had heard all she wanted to hear on the subject of money from Bentner and Mountjoy. Seeking a fresh viewpoint, she went to see Dr. Kokintz. The great mathematician and physicist had been quite unperturbed by the recent financial turmoil, though his days had been enlivened by an occasional call to repair a television set.

  “Are you sure there isn’t something really expensive that I can buy you?” she asked. “You’re not interested in astronomy? We could build you a nice big observatory, with a huge telescope.” But Kokintz said that his interest in astronomy did not justify such a vast expenditure. He did want one piece of equipment, however, which would have to be specially made and might prove expensive.

  “What is it?” asked Gloriana eagerly.

  “Two pieces of case-hardened steel with the surfaces optically ground to a given curve,” said Kokintz. “I think only Calton Research Supply in Scranton, Pennsylvania, could make up what is needed.”

  “Order them right away,” said Gloriana. “Tell them to ship them out by special airplane. Don’t let them spare any cost whatever. How much do you think they’ll come to?” “Perhaps two hundred dollars each,” said Kokintz. “But the special plane might cost several thousands of dollars.” “Oh blow,” said Gloriana. “Can’t you think of anything better than that?” But Kokintz couldn’t. She asked him what he was working on, hoping for some ideas. He replied that he was busy with two problems. One was an old one—the affinity of most elements for oxygen. All science accepted but none understood it. He suspected that somewhere in the relationship between oxygen and other elements there was a key to the problem of the transmutation of one element into another.

  A second line of investigation which also occupied him was ultrahigh-frequency vibrations. “We have developed already an airplane that will travel faster than sound,” he said. “And yet I suspect that it will be possible to develop a sound that will travel faster than an airplane.”

  “What earthly use will that be?” asked Gloriana.

  Kokintz removed his thick-lensed glasses and, failing to find anything else immediately, pulled out the tail of his shirt and polished the lenses with it. “It may have no use at all,” he said. “But then, use is only one measure of value. Knowledge has its own value. Adding to knowledge makes man more wholly man.” Gloriana left, having made a mental note to buy Dr. Kokintz several cases of tissues with which to clean his spectacles.

  Then one day, quite by happenstance, she discovered what to do with the unwanted millions. She had been studying the Times and in utter boredom had turned to the financial pages. An article at the beginning of the section detailed a decline in the value of industrials and a slight rise in rails and the value of government bonds.

  “Why didn’t I think of that before?” she demanded. “People lose millions on the stock market without the slightest effort every day. I’ll just buy shares and keep on buying them and I’m bou
nd to lose every penny. And it will be fun too.”

  She reflected for a moment that not everybody lost money on the stock exchange. Some people—vague distant people whom one never met—made money on the stock exchange. Some people (especially gifted in financial matters) even got their whole income from investments in the stock market. But these, she was sure, were people who made the most careful study of the value of stocks, of the condition of particular industries, of the management and research programs of the companies in which they were interested. And even so, they sometimes lost.

  Encouraged by these reflections, she spread the financial page of the Times carefully on a table before her. Then she shut her eyes tight and stuck a pin in the page. The pin pierced the page opposite the name Westwood Coal and Carriage.

  That same day an air-mail letter was dispatched from Grand Fenwick, over the signature of Her Grace Gloriana XII, to Balche and Company, of New Jersey, the Duchy’s financial agents in the United States, telling them to invest six million dollars in the stock of that unsuspecting corporation.

  9

  THE Westwood Coal and Carriage Company was a surprising survivor of the American transportation boom which had followed on the heels of the Civil War. The company had been founded in the middle of that conflict, having undertaken to transport supplies to McClellan’s army for a fee which somewhat detracted from the patriotism of the service. The company had started with drovers and wagons and had, with the earnings gained, branched after the war into rolling stock. An interest in railroad engines had naturally led to an interest in coal mines which provided the fuel for the engines.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, Westwood Coal and Carriage Company was a force to be reckoned with in both transportation and mining. But about then there had been a shift in transportation techniques, which the company’s directors (Ted and Cy Westwood, sons of General Hiram Westwood, the company’s founder) had not been sufficiently astute to gauge.

  A few automobiles started chuffing around the roads powered some by steam and some by a derivative of the rock oil called petroleum, the first great wells of which had been discovered just before the Civil War in Pennsylvania. Ted and

  Cy Westwood shouldered these developments aside as mere toys in the world of transportation. Automobiles, which they pictured as self-service trains, would never, they thought, get anywhere because roads throughout the nation were uncommonly bad. And it was plain that the more these roads were used, the worse they would become. Who then would want to be bumped along at five to eight miles an hour in an automobile when they could ride at fifty miles an hour on a smooth roadbed of steel rails?

  And electricity would plainly never replace coal as a fuel because it just didn’t have the muscle. It was all right for producing a wavering glow in light bulbs or for powering telephones. But it would never turn machines; and since it had to be conducted along wires in any case, the nation must become a horrible tangle of wires, a sort of netting of wiring, for electricity to have any universal use. Therefore rails and coal were sound and no change in company activity, it was thought, was called for.

  But over the years, what with reduced demand for coal, the increases in the wages of coal miners and the depletion of the deposits, the mines of Westwood Coal and Carriage Company proved less and less profitable and were sold one by one until but two remained to the company. And the company’s holdings in railroad rights of way and rolling stock were also reduced as freight and passengers went increasingly by road, until the company decided to get out of the railroad business altogether. Too late the aging directors turned to automobile manufacture.

  There were, to be sure, some initial profits from the Westwood motorcar, but the real profits from automobiles now lay in mass production and the Westwood car, a late arrival in the market, was almost hand-built. Each year the directors of the company had to make a big loan from the bank to finance the production of their new model. Each year they just managed to pay the loan off. The company was starved for capital and had shown no profit for ten years. For seven of those years it had been run at a book loss.

  And yet, with suicidal fidelity, Westwood Coal and Carriage Company continued to operate in those fields where past experience had proved that it could not succeed—transportation and coal. At its factory in western Michigan it turned out six thousand cars a year. And each year the board announced that if the six thousand could only be increased to sixty thousand, there would be a handsome profit to share (in part) with the faithful stockholders.

  This was the situation of the Westwood Coal and Carriage Company when Balche and Company of New Jersey was surprised by instructions from Gloriana to invest six million dollars of the Duchy’s earnings in shares. The letter came to Mr. Joseph Balche himself, a large man of great dignity, whose white handlebar moustache suggested he was a survivor of McKinley’s Cabinet.

  “Westwood Coal and Carriage,” he said on reading the letter. “Six million dollars? Upon my word.”

  He reached for his Financial Times, wondered whether some miracle had occurred of which he was ignorant and looked up the quotation on Westwood Coal. It was two and seven-eighths, down an eighth. He glanced at the letter again to make sure he had read it correctly. There was no mistake.

  When under great stress Mr. Balche watered his geraniums. They grew in a box outside the window of his office and he had a watering can on the floor of the bathroom adjoining for this purpose. He went into the bathroom, got the watering can, opened the window and started watering. He watched the neat jets of water from the rose on the can splash on the leaves of the geraniums and cascade in silvery waterfalls into the black loam of the box. The sight soothed him. His nerve was steadied and he returned to his desk and without a further glance at the letter called up John Dibbs of the brokerage firm of Dibbs, Hedstrom, Morris, Strong, Williams and Benjamin on Wall Street.

  John Dibbs was of a character completely the opposite of Mr. Joseph Balche, and the two, though they had had many business dealings, had never met. Dibbs had a large stomach, a red face and meaty shoulders and smoked cigars. He used his desk quite often as a place on which to rest his feet. He seemed to have received his training in business behavior from watching early movies dealing with gangsters and newspapermen. His manner was that of Chicago in the days of snap-brim hats and submachine guns. “Dibbs,” he said into the mouthpiece of the telephone. “What can I do for you?” “Joseph Balche here,” said the other. “I have a client who is interested in Westwood Coal and Carriage. What is available?”

  “Available?” asked Dibbs. “I should think everything the company has is available, including the president’s wife. Two and five-eighths.”

  “Down a quarter since yesterday,” said Balche, ignoring the crudity of the other’s humor. “See what you can do about rounding up everything that is offered. My client is interested in acquiring the largest possible holdings.”

  “Who is your client?” asked Dibbs.

  “At this point I would prefer not to say,” said Balche somewhat distantly.

  “Okay. Answer me this question. Is this new money?” “Yes,” said Mr. Balche, “it is. My client has not previously invested in the stock market.”

  “Well,” said Dibbs, “if you want to cure them of investing forevermore—and I personally would regard that as a favor because this new money coming into the market starts too many hares running across the fields for the serious investor—go ahead and make the purchases. But if you want your client to continue with an interest in the stock market, then I would advise mutual funds or something more solid.

  Because Westwood Coal is going nowhere else but down and your client is going to lose seventy cents on every dollar.”

  “Thank you for your advice,” said Balche icily. “Meanwhile will you kindly go ahead with buying up all the shares available, at whatever price is in keeping with current values.”

  “What’s your limit?” asked Dibbs.

  “Six million dollars,” said Mr. Bal
che and hung up.

  Mr. Dibbs had no geraniums to water. He glanced at the clock and noted that it was four in the afternoon and the Stock Exchange was therefore closed. He struggled into his overcoat and, ignoring the elevator, scuttled down the four flights of rickety stairs in which his brokerage company was located and out into Wall Street. He turned sharply to the right, made his way past J. P. Morgan’s solemn bank, entered the swinging doors of a saloon nearby and, crossing the floor strewn with sawdust, ordered a manhattan.

  He was fortunate in that Hans, the German proprietor and head bartender, was on duty, for when the Stock Exchange closed, Hans was the only really reliable and central source of information on the whole street. Hans knew every one of the several hundred rumors which flitted up and down the street every day. He not only knew the rumors but he knew the sources, knew who repeated them, knew to whom they were repeated, knew who believed them and who disbelieved them.

  And out of all this knowledge could be distilled the degree of truth in each one of the stories of mergers, or recapitalization, of mortgage and of tax proceedings which flitted around the little village of Wall Street during each short but vigorous day.

  That Mr. Dibbs was able to get to the bar at all in that crowded saloon was attributable to the fact that brokers had, by custom, places at the bar as they had booths on the floor of the Stock Exchange. As soon as he entered, it was known that he would require a slot and so room was made for him.

  Hans, of course, did not bring him his drink. Hans had been known to serve only one drink in thirty years and that was to a former President of the United States who had been brought to Hans’s Bar after a tour of the Stock Exchange. Then Hans had himself reached for the bottle of bourbon, unerringly selecting the right brand, and decanted a drink of just the right size for the former President, with the solemnity of a cardinal giving communion to a bishop.

  Jimmy, the Irish bartender, brought Mr. Dibbs his manhattan, and Dibbs, first eating the cherry as he always did, then took a good pull at his drink and, listening to the buzz of talk about him with an occasional and unexpected laugh here and there, reflected that in the face of six million dollars available for investment in Westwood Coal and Carriage, nothing in the world made any sense anyway. He was asked a few questions by his neighbors and answered them without any reflection whatever, scarcely conscious of what he was saying, so bowled over was he with the order to invest six million dollars in worthless stock. And then Hans—tall Hans with his face like that of a Knight Templar carved upon a tomb, his ginger hair mixed with white and his pale-blue eyes, which seemed incapable of a sparkle of either excitement or grief—noted that John Dibbs was preoccupied and had therefore something on his mind.