The Banker and the Bear

by Henry Kitchell Webste

  Her first comfort came with the thought that it had not always been so. There had been a time when he cared, and as she was thinking of the time gone by she found his defence.

  It would not have weighed heavily with a jury of his peers; to an impartial mind it would hardly have been a defence at all, but in her eyes it saved him.

  Her very knowledge of the game he had played this score of years, the knowledge that had enabled her to discover his contemplated treachery, was what now furnished his justi- fication. Being a mere spectator and under- standing his moves had hardened her, she knew, and had already made an old woman of her. And, she argued, it was small wonder that he who had played the game, had fought the battles, should have become hard, and that the long straining of his eyes toward one object should have blinded him to every other con- sideration. He was not himself, for in this last campaign the fever was in his blood, and his going to any length to win was as inevitable as his regret afterward would be unavailing.

  Mercifully blind to the pathetic weakness of the plea, and unconscious of the confession of its weakness that lay in her much protesting, she told herself that it was not his fault.

  He was making his last fight ; this temptation that beguiled him would be the last. If only she could save him from its consequences !

  For a moment she entertained the notion of going to him, but she saw that even if she could turn him it would be too late. Not even his wonderful ingenuity could avert the ruin it had been exercised to provoke. But perhaps there was yet time to warn John and to save the bank.

  Then in a second her resolve was taken.

  She had on a thin house dress, and with the idea of putting on something better suited for street wear in this summer evening, she tugged impatiently at its fastenings, but her shaking fingers would not obey her will. She dared not call her maid, for after what had happened an hour before, the girl would be certain to protest against her going out, and might tell her hus- band. She must go as she was. With a quick motion she partly rearranged her disordered hair, and pinning on a hat, any hat, and seizing her purse, she sped softly down the stairs, and without being observed she reached the street. She hesitated for an instant, then set out reso- lutely for the nearest elevated station.

  For months a fear had been following her which she had never dared to look at squarely, to which she had even been afraid to give a name. Sometimes it had been almost upon her, and sometimes so far behind that she had thought it could never overtake her again. When it was at her heels, she stayed within doors; for the very thought of a crowd, or of revolving wheels, was terrifying. At such times she told herself that she dared not look over the banister rail in her own upper hall, and fancied that her familiar servants eyed her curiously and whispered. A physician would have given her morbid fancies a name common enough in medical practice nowadays, and would have told her that she was as safe on a high place or in a crowd or beside the railroad tracks as anybody else. But to Harriet, her disease was simply a nameless, indeterminate horror, which brought with it the melancholy foreboding that in some season of stress it was certain to conquer her.

  In her new excitement this old dread had been forgotten, save in her momentary nervous- ness when she found herself alone in the street. She reached the station without experiencing even the fear that she would be afraid. But the platform was crowded, and she grew a shade paler as she was pushed and jostled close to the edge, and the reflection of the lights from the gleaming steel rails wakened a terror which was all the sharper because she knew it was perfectly irrational. When she saw the head- light of the train growing bigger and brighter out of the distance, she tried to step back, and failing that, her fear mastered her completely, and she clutched for support at the person who stood beside her. When the train came jolting to a stop, the screaming of the brakes sounded to her ears like an articulate human cry, and in fancy she saw a woman’s body mangled under the trucks. She did not know that she had stood hesitating, blocking the way for all the impatient passengers behind her, until the exasperated guard had taken her arm and fairly thrust her into the car; but when the horrible vision left her eyes, and she again became conscious of her present surroundings, she knew that she must have done something out of the ordinary, for everybody in the car who could see was staring at her.

  It was nearly nine o’clock before, Sponley came home after an arduous and only partially successful quest. It is one of the perversities of finance that when a man has plenty of money, people will crowd around him, beseech- ing him to use theirs also ; but when he needs it, when he really must have it, they look at him from the corners of their eyes and sidle away. After one or two flat failures, however, the Bear had succeeded in misleading some people into coming to his help. He had not got as much as he wanted ; but enough, with luck and with the reinforcement the run at Bagsbury’s would give him, to last him through another day.

  He had already dined, so, after reading Har- riet’s note, he settled himself in the library to the enjoyment of a cigar. It was a point of pride with him, that once his day’s work was done, he could completely banish its cares from his thoughts ; and he had a hearty contempt for all the amusements in which weaker spirits are wont to seek that diversion, which with him was simply a matter of will. But to-night, after an uneasy ten minutes, he took up “ The Count of Monte Cristo,” and tried to read.

  Half an hour later the library door was flung open without ceremony, and Harriet’s maid spoke his name.

  “ What is it ? “ he asked.

  “ Mrs. Sponley “ the girl began, but there her excitement and fright choked her.

  “ What is it ? “ he repeated. “ Here, stop that nonsense and tell me.”

  “ She’s gone,” at length she managed to say. “ She isn’t in her room, and she isn’t anywhere. She’s gone.”

  What a mask that thick, swarthy face could be ! Now it changed not at all, save that the eyes grew narrower and he frowned impatiently.

  “ What you say would be very interesting if I did not know it already. Mrs. Sponley is at Mrs. Bagsbury’s. She left me a note saying that she meant to spend the evening there. Don’t be so hasty in your conclusions another time.”

  He nodded in the direction of the door and turned back to his book. Before the maid was fairly out of the room it occurred to him that the explanation he had given her was probably true, after all. He went quickly to the telephone. Then, suddenly changing his mind, he rang for a cab.

  “ Drive to the elevated as fast as you can,” he ordered shortly. “ I’m in a hurry.”

  For all his efforts it seemed to the Bear an interminable while before he reached John Bagsbury’s house, and in that time his thoughts were grim indeed ; but just as he was about to go up the steps he paused suddenly and smiled, as though just possessed of an idea that pleased him. He glanced at his watch and nodded with a satisfied air, then he rang the bell.

  He found Alice in the library, and the per- fectly easy way in which she greeted him con- vinced him that she knew as little of the lard deal and its collateral incidents as though it were taking place in some cannibal island.

  “ You know Harriet is here, of course,” she said. “ She’s all right now, I imagine ; but she gave us a most terrible scare a couple of hours ago. I didn’t see her when she came in ; but Dick did, and she saw that something was the matter with her, so she took her right up to what she calls her den. Dick says she thinks that something must have happened something to frighten her on her way down here. Anyway, before she had been here ten minutes she had sort of well, the doctor said it was a hysterical seiz- ure. It wasn’t like any hysterics I’d ever heard of, though. But whatever it was she’s all over it now, and the doctor’s given her something to put her to sleep. I think she will be all right by morning ; but you’ll leave her here till then. We’ll take good care of her. I wanted to tele- phone to you, but John and Dick seemed to think it wasn’t necessary.”

  John came into the room in time to hear the concluding
words of Alice’s explanation.

  “ I’m glad it’s no worse,” Sponley said. “ I was a little afraid she might break down. The excitement of the last few days has been hard on her.”

  Then he turned to John.

  “ I came around on a business matter. It’ll take but a moment,” he hesitated, “if Alice will excuse us.”

  He led the way to a remote corner of the room. “ I’ve been hearing rumors all the afternoon about your bank; I’m afraid you’re likely to have some trouble to-morrow. I wanted to warn you.”

  “ Thank you,” John answered drily. “ I’ve heard something of it myself. Harriet told Dick that you asked her to tell me that I was going to have a run on my hands.”

  “ I fancy that Miss Haselridge did not under- stand precisely, or it may be that in her excite- ment Harriet misunderstood me. I told her that I meant to let you know.”

  “I must be going on,” he added, again addressing Alice. “ I’ll call up in the morn- ing and find out how Harriet is.”

  Then, to John, “ Well, good night. I wish you luck.”

  John smiled, “I wish you the same thing,” he said.

  CHAPTER XVII

  WEDNESDAY MORNING

  IT was, however, a most unpleasant smile that accompanied John’s words. It brought to Sponley’s mind the story Hauxton had recalled to him that afternoon, of John Bags- bury’s moment of indecision whether or not to kick Drake downstairs. He was himself no weakling, even when measured by a merely physical test ; but he had no wish to try con- clusions of that sort with the Banker, and he took his leave promptly.

  Then Alice went upstairs to assure herself that Harriet was being well cared for, and a few moments later Dick came down to the library.

  “ Mrs. Sponley is sleeping heavily,” she said in answer to John’s inquiry. “ There’s nothing we can do, I suppose, but leave her alone and keep everything quiet.”

  Then she hesitated, “ Wasn’t he down here ? “ she asked. “ I thought I heard him.”

  “ You did. He came to warn me, too.”

  “ To warn you ! “

  “Don’t you see? If there’s going to be a run to-morrow, there’s absolutely nothing I can do at ten o’clock in the evening to stop it. He knows that ; and he knows I know he knows it. He did it for amusement, I suppose, though that’s not like him. Perhaps it was to give me time to get scared over night.”

  He paused and meditatively brought his clenched fist down on the arm of his chair twice, very softly.

  “I’m getting mad,” he said, rising. “It’s time I went to bed.”

  Left alone in the library, Dick tried to read; but every little while the book would drop idly to her knee, and grave-faced, with all the light gone out of her eyes, she would fall to wonder- ing what would come of it all, and just what was the value of the stake that should compen- sate for this tragic shipwreck she had seen this evening. No one but Dick, not even Jack Dor- lin, was ever to know how complete that wreck had been ; for she could never tell what had happened after she had shut the door of her den behind Harriet Sponley.

  When she turned away from it to thinking of John Bagsbury, she smiled. Perhaps because any sort of gesture was so unusual with him, that gentle little movement of his clenched fist had caused her a shiver of rather pleasant excitement. In its very mildness, its total inadequacy, lay its significance. It seemed to Dick a sort of ironical prophecy. She did not exactly hope to see him in a magnificent rage before this struggle was well over ; but she could not help imagining with an exultant thrill what a hammer that big, lean fist would be if ever it should be driven in grim earnest.

  But if she expected him to show any sign of excitement when he came down to breakfast next morning, she was disappointed. John drank his coffee, glanced over the paper, and read aloud, with some appearance of satisfac- tion, the weather prediction to the effect that it would be fair, followed by showers in the afternoon ; and then, as always in any tolerable weather, he set out to walk down to the bank. Ordinarily his pace did not vary one hundred yards either way from the easy swing of four miles an hour, but to-day something seemed to be driving him. Faster and faster he would go, glancing enviously at the cars roaring and rock- ing by on their way down town. Then he would check himself with the impatient admoni- tion that there was no hurry. The miles were interminable that morning, and he was tired when he reached the end of the last one.

  But they were behind him now, and with a long breath of relief he turned the corner that commanded a view of the bank, and saw Try to imagine just what the bank meant to John Bagsbury. He was more of a man than his father before him had been, he had more humanity in him ; but like the withered old miser who had died over his desk, John had put well- nigh all he had into this creature whose birth had been the signing of a bit of parchment by a state official. His fortune was in it, his ambi- tion was in it, his credit with the world of trade, his commercial honor, if you will allow me, was in it.

  His common honesty he had put above it, before it. He would have been the last man on earth to think of repeating

  “ loved I not honor more,”

  in that connection, and I fancy I see you smil- ing over the notion, yet, allowing for the trans- lation into the unromantic, sordid life of the “ street,” that had been precisely the significance of his flat refusal to sell out Pickering, and of his grimly accepting Sponley’s challenge. But his was not the sort of mind to find any conso- lation in the nobility of a sentiment ; his honor was not self-conscious.

  So if you remember how he had passed his boyhood in that squat old building half a square away, and can guess at what had been his feel- ing toward it during the third of his lifetime he had spent elsewhere in preparation for his return to it, you can understand why the sight he saw halted his heart as it halted his feet, and then sent it hammering on, almost to bursting.

  It was nothing but a little group of people, fifteen men, perhaps, and five or six women, standing on the steps, some of them peering through the glass doors in the futile attempt to see around the shades which hung behind. The crowd grew half again as large while John was walking the half square from the corner. In the glance he cast about as he walked through he recognized Sponley’s coachman. As he was going up the stairs, he heard some one say in an undertone, “That’s Bagsbury ; I thought you told me he’d run off with all the money.”

  “That’s what a fellow told me,” returned an- other voice. “ Is that Bagsbury, sure enough ? “

  John closed the door behind him quickly, walked the length of the short passage, and once in a big dingy room looked about with a heavy scowl. You could have told from the faces, from the very attitudes of the clerks as they were set- tling to their day’s work, that there was a crowd in the street.

  “ Mr. Peters,” John called. Peters was the man who did the work for which Curtin received his salary. “ Mr. Peters, I think you had better bring those people in and pay them their money at once. I wish you’d done it before now.”

  “ They can’t be paid yet, Mr. Bagsbury. The time-lock on the vaults is set for nine o’clock. It’s only quarter of.”

  John looked at his watch. “ I’d no idea it was so early,” he said. He walked away half a dozen paces and then returned. “ Don’t begin then till flat ten o’clock. It seems we’re in for a crowd, any way, and there’s no use telling them that we’re afraid of one.”

  A run on a bank is like a slit in a man’s vein ; it does no particular harm if it can be stopped in time, but the stopping of it is imperative, and it will not stop itself. No bank could pay its depositors the money they have put in if they should all come and ask for it at once. The bank which, at a day’s notice, could pay half of them would be esteemed cautious far too cau- tious ; that is why it is necessary to stop a run. The very human predilection for being of the sheep who get their money, instead of finding oneself with the goats who do not, is the reason why the run will not stop itself.

  And just as a man may bleed externally whe
re it is easy to estimate the extent of the damage, or internally, where it is not, so a bank may suffer a run in two different ways. There is the kind of a run which interests the general public, and which is therefore described in the news- papers, with great detail and circumstance and spirited little pen-and-ink sketches, three to the column. It occurs when those who have small amounts of money, generally savings, in a bank, fear it is going to fail, and come to carry this treas- ure home, where they hide it in stockings or old teapots or feather beds, until reassured that the bank, or some other, is safe after all. That sort T of run has all the picturesque accessories, the file of frightened men and women, the police to keep order; and if it is occurring in a work of fiction, it is likely to be concluded by the entrance of some philanthropist who flings down upon the counter bags of gold, at the reassuring clink of which the depositors depart with cheers.

  The other kind of a run, to return to our old figure, is likely not to be discovered until the patient is dead. It has no external manifesta- tions whatever. It occurs when the larger de- positors write checks for the amount of their accounts and deposit them in other banks. The banker can know nothing about it until he learns of the staggering adverse balance he must meet at the clearing house. The drain may be swift and brief, or it may continue slowly for a month ; in either case, it is far harder to break, far more likely to persist, until it lands the bank in the examiner’s hands : that is the sort of run whose progress you may watch from across the street.

  It was evident to John that his savings depos- itors had been thoroughly frightened the wild lie he had overheard as he entered the bank was probably but one of a score that were in circula- tion among them and that they would run him in grim earnest. And he rightlysuspected that Melville Sponley had thoughtfully provided a rumor or two which might stampede his com- mercial depositors also.