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 Bagsbury’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 conclusions 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 wondering what would come of it all, and just what was the value of the stake that should compensate for this tragic shipwreck she had seen this evening. No one but Dick, not even Jack Dorlin, 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 satisfaction, 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 rocking by on their way down town. Then he would check himself with the impatient admonition 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 ambition 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 smiling over the notion,--yet, allowing for the translation 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 consolation 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 feeling 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 another 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 settling 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, anyway, 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 cautious; 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 where 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 newspapers, 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 treasure 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 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 manifestations whatever. It occurs when the larger depositors 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 depositors 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 circulation among them--and that they would run him in grim earnest. And he rightly suspected that Melville Sponley had thoughtfully provided a rumor or two which might stampede his commercial depositors also.

When Dawson came around at half-past ten, he found a file of waiting depositors that extended clear to the corner. He walked into John’s private office and sat down near the window.

“This is hell, isn’t it?” he remarked cheerfully.

John nodded, and Dawson looked out at the crowd in the street.

“It doesn’t take but a minute to get a pack of fools together at any given point,” the older man went on.

“All the fools aren’t standing in line out there, though,” said John.

Dawson turned from the window and looked over the Banker from head to foot, but made no comment on the remark.

“I’ve been talking with them out there,” he said, “trying to find out what scared them. There are the wildest lot of yarns you ever heard going up and down that line. I don’t suppose the man who started it told anything very big, either. Those things grow like thistles.”

Still the Banker made no reply, but stared moodily at the blotter on his desk.

“You’re not demanding thirty days’ notice, are you?” Dawson asked. “You seem to be paying everybody who asks for his money.”

“Yes, we might as well suspend entirely as to demand notice at a time like this. The moral effect would be as bad. They’d just keep coming to get their money until they fairly ran us out of business. We can keep this up until the cows come home,” and he nodded toward the window.

“This isn’t the worst you’ll get, though,” said Dawson. “Of course nobody but a fool’d be scared by those stories; but there is a story that I’ve heard from three or four sources, that your loans to Pickering are entirely unsecured, and that if he goes down, he’s sure to pull you with him. You wouldn’t think men’d believe a damned lie like that; but they do, and you’re likely to have an awful balance against you at the clearing house.”

“I’ve been selling exchange as fast as I could without breaking the market for it. That’ll help square me there.” John rose and walked nervously to the window. “I’d like to take the whole bunch of lies those people have heard and stuff them down the throat they first came out of--by God, I should!”

“So would I,” said Dawson, quietly. “But look here, John,” it was the first time in years that Dawson had called him by his Christian name, “you can’t afford to get mad yet. Don’t let your bearings get hot until the run’s over. Don’t think about it.”

“I remember Sponley said once,” John’s mind had run back, and for an instant he thought of his old friend rather than his new enemy, “he said that to a man who lives as we do, an emotion was a more expensive luxury than a steam yacht. But by--”

He checked himself abruptly. “Thank you. Do you suppose the Atlantic can let me have some small currency about closing time? These little accounts are taking all I’ve got.”

The old man nodded. “You’re all right. Only keep cool and--well oiled. You can’t waste anything on friction to-day. Good-by.”

Toward noon the crowd grew larger and its temper worse, as the more distant part of it began to fear it would not reach the window by closing time. That sort of gathering, where all have come with the same single purpose, acquires a distinct individuality. This giant is far lower in intelligence than the average of its component parts; more subject to swift, unreasoning enthusiasm or anger, easily led or directed by anything that glitters. It is a person, not a number of persons. You must reckon with it in the singular. In his office John was perfectly conscious of this new sullenness that had come over the crowd, and he soon discovered the cause of it in a newspaper the small boys were hawking about the street. It was a sensational “Extra,” with the words “Bulls break for Cover” in letters three inches high across the front page, followed by the information that Pickering’s gang was badly squeezed by a drop of four dollars a tierce in the price of lard, and that the cause was the serious run that was in progress at Bagsbury’s bank.

At quarter after twelve there came to John’s ears a sound he had never heard before--the noise that this dangerous animal, called a crowd, makes when it is angry. It began with a mutter so far down the scale that it seemed to come from anywhere, or nowhere, swelled slowly at first, and then with a sudden stringendo to a yell, and snapped off so short he could feel the air quivering in the silence behind it.

It fairly jerked the Banker out of his chair, and drew the half-dozen policemen who were standing about the big room, and who knew what it meant, to the door on the run. John reached the window just in time to see Pickering walking slowly up the steps.

When he entered the private office he was slightly pale, but laughing, and he moved with an air of bravado toward the window.

“Stand back from there,” said John. “You shouldn’t have come here to-day, Mr. Pickering.”

“I didn’t come on a pleasure trip. I need some money.”

The excitement that wild yell had wrought in him was oozing out now. His face twitched and he glanced uneasily toward the window. “Damn them,” he said. Then he repeated, “I want some money.”

“You can’t have it,” said the Banker.

They heard the storm rising again, and both men waited for it to break. It wiped the color out of Pickering’s face, and he was no coward, either.

“Isn’t it a little late to let go?” he asked. “If it’s one of us now, it’s both.”

“That may be,” said the Banker; “but you can’t have it. I can’t give you my depositors’ money when they’re lined up here to get it. It may be that when I find out where I stand with the clearing house, I’ll be able to help you. But I can do nothing now. And it seems to me that your staying here any longer,” there it came again, “isn’t going to improve the temper of that crowd,” he went on evenly. “Do you want a couple of policemen to go with you? Those fellows may be rough.”

“No, they’re harmless. They’re chained. They wouldn’t lose their place in line even for me.”

John Bagsbury likes to tell the story of that day, and of the next; but he says nothing of the half hour that followed Pickering’s visit: he has almost forgotten it himself.

Only by his utmost effort had he controlled himself while Pickering was in his office, for the cries from the street maddened him. He knew that Dawson was right, that to lose control of himself was to lose the fight, and he struggled desperately to keep himself in hand. But when the door was shut, and he was alone, and when, a moment later, he heard the derisive cheer which greeted the reappearance of Pickering on the front steps, his anger mastered him. He tried to make himself think. He must discover some way of reassuring those people in the street, of stopping this run before it drained him dry, of meeting the balance there would be against him at the clearing house; but his rage befogged his mind, his faculties were numb, and all he knew was the longing to have Melville Sponley under his hands for--for just one minute.

He would not admit it now, if you were to ask him; yet it is true that when he turned his back on the old desk and bowed his head, he told himself that there was no more use fighting; he confessed that he was beaten.

Then there came a knock at the door and some one said,--

“Mr. Cartwright and Mr. Meredith would like to see you, Mr. Bagsbury.”

When the two old trustees entered the office, they saw the only John Bagsbury that they or anybody else had ever seen in his office,--the courteous, patient, quick-witted, even-minded John Bagsbury whom everybody but these same trustees knew to be the best banker in the city.

“This is outrageous,” said Mr. Cartwright, and his voice shook. Poor Mr. Meredith’s would not come at all, though his lips moved in tremulous imitation of his principal’s.

“Mr. Dawson said something to the same effect when he was here a couple of hours ago,” said John. “I agree with both of you.”

“I suppose you wish to see me on a matter of personal business, gentlemen,” he added, and closed the door.

Half an hour later he opened it and spoke to the telephone boy. He did not speak very loudly, but his voice carried to the farthest corner of the big noisy room.

“Will you call up Mr. Moffat, I wish to speak with him.”