CHAPTER XXIII
Throughout these late trying experiences Dan had been further distressed to discover that during the hours he was unavoidably separated from Tamea, he thought more about her than he did of his business. He had missed her bright presence far too keenly during her brief sojourn at the convent—so much so, in fact, that when one day he asked himself if it were really possible that he, sober, steady, dependable, sane Dan Pritchard, had fallen in love with this lovely half-caste girl, his common sense assured him that it was even so.
He told himself that this was silly, stupid, unintelligent, that he could not afford to yield to this tremendous temptation, that it would be a terrible mistake, bitterly to be repented. Nevertheless, he lacked the courage or the steadfastness of purpose to take the offensive immediately; he told himself he would take the offensive, but not immediately. . . and following his brief spat with Maisie over the telephone he found Tamea’s society so comforting and stimulating that he shuddered at the thought of hurting her—himself—with the promulgation of a sophisticated argument she could not possibly understand and which she would have rejected even had she possessed the gift of understanding a white man’s reason for discarding her love, even while he yearned for it.
From time to time Sooey Wan, growing impatient at his adored employer’s shilly-shallying, urged definite action. Again and again he reminded Dan that the sooner he married the lady queen the sooner would his adventure in fatherhood commence. Sooey Wan confided that he had consulted with the most eminent magicians in Dupont Street, with a priest who was a very wise man and an oracle; he had sought signs of approbation from his numerous Chinese gods and had propitiated them with much burning of punk in the Joss houses; he had burned devil papers in every room of the house and had strung fire crackers completely around the house and set them off, to the signal terror of the neighbors.
The magician had predicted for Dan five brawny sons—a hard hand to beat. The oracle had advised quick action since procrastination has ever been the thief of time and the girl was young and comely. Why, then, dally until she should become a hag? In his own mind Sooey Wan was fully convinced, from certain signs, that his Mongolian gods looked with favor upon the match, and since practically all of the fire crackers had exploded, the old heathen was certain that the devils of bad luck, which might or might not have interfered, had been thoroughly exorcised.
To all of this harangue Dan gave a stereotyped reply: “Sooey Wan, you are an interfering and impudent old Chinaman. Keep your nose out of my private affairs.”
Whereupon Sooey Wan would fairly screech: “Missa Dan, wh’ for you play damn fool? Boy, you klazy. Sure you klazy.”
When Dan discovered that he would have to mark time until the convent in Sacramento should be released from quarantine, he pleaded the urgent necessity for an unavoidable absence from the city and sought to start his offensive campaign against Tamea’s steadily mounting influence over him by going away for a two weeks’ fishing and painting excursion in Southern California. Tamea was somewhat piqued because he did not invite her to accompany him, but he ignored her little pout, kissed her tenderly and fled. And he had no sooner settled himself comfortably in a hotel at Santa Catalina Island than Maisie Morrison rang up Julia.
“Julia,” she said, “where is Mr. Pritchard?”
“The dear Lord only knows, Miss Morrison.”
“I must know where a telegram can reach him, Julia. Mr. Pritchard did not tell his secretary where he was going, so it could not have been a business trip. Put Graves on the line, Julia.”
Graves, summoned from the garage, informed Maisie that he had driven Mr. Pritchard to the Southern Pacific depot. There he had heard his employer direct a porter to stow his baggage in a compartment. Included in this impedimenta had been a case of fishing rods and a sketching outfit. Graves had noted that his employer had not taken a creel with him, hence he opined that if any fishing was to be done it would be sea fishing—and the boss had always had a weakness for Santa Catalina.
When Dan Pritchard came in from fishing that first day he found a telegram in his box at the hotel. It was from Maisie and read:
Something has jarred Uncle John dreadfully. He is at home ill, but mentally, not physically. Better assure yourself that everything is quite right at the office. Would return immediately if I were you, although when you do you need not bother to call on me unless you feel you really ought to.
Maisie.
Within the hour Dan Pritchard had chartered a seaplane and was flying north. About ten o’clock that night the plane swooped down in the moonlight and landed him at Harbor View; within half an hour he was ringing the doorbell of John Casson’s home.
“Take me immediately to Mr. Casson’s room,” he ordered the butler who admitted him. “It will not be necessary to announce me.”
The man eyed him sympathetically and silently led the way upstairs. John Casson was not in bed, however. He was seated on a divan in his wife’s upstairs sitting room, staring dully into a small grate fire. From her seat across the room his wife watched him furtively.
“Good evening, Mrs. Casson. Good evening, Mr. Casson,” Dan greeted them. “What’s gone wrong, Mr. Casson?”
The old dandy looked up, frightened. Dan could have sworn he shuddered. “I’d rather not discuss the matter tonight, Pritchard,” he parried. “I’m not well.”
“I’m sorry for that, sir. What appears to be the matter with you? Where do you feel ill? Have you eaten something that didn’t agree with you or——”
“He has,” Mrs. Casson interrupted bitterly. “He’s been on a diet of high-priced rice for the past several weeks and it has made him ill. John, do not evade Dan’s query. He is equally interested with you in this matter. Tell him what happened the day he left town.”
“Well, Pritchard, my boy,” old Casson quavered, “the rice market has gone to glory. It’s down to five cents and every rice dealer in this city is a bankrupt.”
“Do you include Casson and Pritchard in the cataclysm?”
Casson nodded slowly and suddenly commenced to weep.
“But we sold our rice——”
“I know we did—on ninety days. Now the people we have sold it to are wiped out and cannot pay for it. The damned Cubans are responsible. They deliberately wrecked the market. Overnight they made up their minds they had rice enough. The cargadores went on strike and refused to handle any more rice. The port of Havana is glutted with rice. It’s on every dock and on every barge. They jammed the docks with it and loaded all the barges and then quit. Now the rice is being rained on; the ships that brought it are lying under heavy demurrage because they cannot get discharged; the rice brokers and wholesalers have treacherously refused to accept delivery on bona fide orders because the Havana market broke immediately when some frightened owners of cargoes cut their prices in order to unload at any price. Panic, I tell you—worst rice panic imaginable. Rice was up to twenty-one cents and overnight it broke to five cents.”
Dan sat down. This was exactly what he had feared might happen. The war was ended, but profiteers, still hungry for exorbitant gains, had put the screws on rice, the staple food of Cuba. They had cornered the crop there, such as it was, and the crop that year had been meager. Then they had filled Havana harbor with ships loaded with Oriental rice and had steadily jacked the price up to the point of saturation. And then the Cubans, maddened at this brutal and perfectly legal form of brigandage, had sprung their coup and, overnight, had smashed their oppressors by the very simple method of refusing to handle longer the commodity which was so necessary to their existence. They knew they could get rice when they needed it, and get it at their price. These ships had brought rice to Havana; now that Havana would not accept it or handle it, where could another ready and highly profitable market be found? And would these ships, chafing at the delay, agree to go elsewhere with their cargoes, save at a prohibitive freight rate? Rice freights from the Orient would collapse now, and that collapse would be followed by a debacle in other lines.
In a flash Dan saw that the post-war slump had started—an economic avalanche, traveling swiftly toward bankruptcy and ruin. “I see,” he said quietly. “Beautiful work, beautiful. Three cheers for the Cubans. I didn’t think they were up to a brilliant stroke like that. And now you’re cussing them out, Mr. Casson, because they refused to let the rice bandits take the food out of their mouths. Well, you deserve this, Mr. Casson, but I’ll be hanged if I do. You dragged me into this, without my knowledge or consent—you damned, silly, egotistical, brainless idiot—Mrs. Casson, I forgot you were present. I crave your pardon for my rudeness and I shall not again offend. I—I—think—I—shall—sit down.”
He did, looking quite white and strained. His eyes burned like live coals. “Well, Mr. Casson,” he said presently, “suppose we start in at the beginning. To begin with, we had half a million bags of California rice stored in warehouses here and there, and you hypothecated the warehouse receipts and bought Philippine and Chinese rice. Well, we sold our rice in warehouse at a huge profit, half cash, balance in ninety days. How about Banning and Company, who bought it?”
“The chief clerk telephoned me today that they had filed a petition of voluntary bankruptcy. They must be cleaned out because Banning blew his brains out an hour after filing the petition. He had half a million dollars’ worth of life insurance, without an anti-suicide clause in it. His family will doubtless get that. I suppose he wanted to do the decent thing.”
“Well,” said Dan, “Banning and Company jarred us but they didn’t put us down. Lucky for us I sold that Shanghai rice, ex. steamer Chinook, for cash. You raved at my idiocy when I made an eight thousand dollars’ profit on that deal and accused me of throwing away a potential profit of a quarter of a million dollars. As a matter of fact, I threw away a potential loss of about a million dollars. We’ll take a loss of more than a dollar a bag on that million bags of California rice, however. I’ll tell ’em you’re a smart business man, Mr. Casson. Well, how about that eight thousand tons at Manila—the lot we sold to Katsuma and Company at the market, against sight draft with bill of lading attached, payable at the Philippine National Bank?”
“Our Manila agent cabled that the bank had refused to honor the documents. I called up Katsuma and tried to get him to do something about providing funds or a credit to meet that draft, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t——”
“Katsuma didn’t want to. He was up to the usual Jap trick—running out from a losing game. They never stand for their beating. You made him a price, f.o.b. Havana, that included cost, insurance and freight, did you not?”
Old Casson nodded miserably.
“Well, Katsuma got a notion that shipping rice to Havana was apt to lead to great grief, so he just didn’t meet the draft. That keeps the owners of the Malayan out of their freight money and the chances are they will not permit the vessel to sail until the freight is paid. Did they come back on us for the freight?”
“They did. I paid it, and the Malayan is at sea with a cargo of eight thousand tons of rice fully insured but not paid for. It is going to cost us eighteen cents a pound to deliver that rice in Havana, and when it gets there we cannot deliver it. If we do it will be worth what we can get for it—say three to five cents—and the demurrage on the Malayan will be two thousand dollars a day. Of course we have a suit against Katsuma and Company for breach of contract, but in the meantime we have to pay for the rice and I’ve given a ninety-day draft on London for that——”
“When it comes due we will not be able to meet it,” Dan said dully. “The Katsuma assets are already nicely sequestrated. You monumental jackass! Why didn’t you sue and attach their bank account, everything they have, quietly and without notice, the instant you learned they had repudiated their contract?”
“That would be a great deal like locking the stable door after the horse had been stolen, wouldn’t it, Pritchard?”
Dan nodded. This was the first bright thing he could remember Casson having said in years. Yes, the wily Orientals had seen the storm gathering and had fled to their cyclone cellar, caring not a whit what happened to others, to their own business honor, to their business, provided their capital remained intact. They could always organize again under a new name.
“Well, we’ve been sent to the cleaners, Mr. Casson. You have succeeded magnificently, despite all I could do to thwart you. You have made a hiatus of your own life and mine. You’ve smashed your wife and Maisie. You were drowning; I tried to save you and you pulled me under with you. Well, I don’t know what you intend doing with your private fortune—if you have any, which I doubt—but I have assets close to two million dollars and our creditors can have them. As your partner I am jointly and severally responsible. If you cannot pay, I must. I shall. When the squall hits us we will call a meeting of our creditors, tell them how it happened, have a receiver appointed, turn over everything we have to him and quit business with whatever dignity we can muster.”
He turned to Mrs. Casson. “If you will excuse me, Mrs. Casson, I will go now. Good night.”
He went out into the hall and his head hung low on his heaving breast, his shoulders sagged, his arms dangled loosely from his long, raw-boned frame. He shook his head a little and mumbled something—curses, doubtless. At the bottom of the stairs he ran into Maisie. Her face was very white and she had been weeping.
“Thanks for your telegram, Maisie. I came as fast as I could. It’s too late. Cleaned—cleaned—smashed by that madman—crooked as a can of worms—lucky thing I didn’t ask you to marry me that day—lucky for you you weren’t interested in my proposition. I couldn’t afford that luxury now, my dear. It’s terrible to have made two million dollars doing work one loathes, then lose the two million filthy dollars and have to start in doing the loathsome job all over again.
“Well, I’m young—I suppose I can stand it. Good night, Maisie, good night. Sorry for you and Mrs. Casson—mighty sorry.”
He fended away the imploring, uplifted arms that sought to enfold him, for Maisie, like all women who trifle with a man’s heart when he is prosperous and happy, desired to claim that heart now that it was bruised and broken.
“Don’t—please—I can’t stand it—don’t want to be coddled,” he muttered, and strode past her to the door. It opened and closed after him swiftly, and Maisie, standing on the steps, watched through her tears his tall, ungainly form stumbling down the street. She yearned with a great yearning to run after him, to take that white face to her heart, to whisper to him a torrent of love words, to cherish and comfort him. Yet she knew that Dan, like all men, when cruelly hurt, preferred to be alone, resenting sympathy and desiring silence.
“Poor dear,” she murmured, “when you have recovered a little from the shock of this failure I shall go to you and nothing shall keep you from me.”