The game he was playing interested him like a new novel. His quick imagination had taken fire, and this defeat spurred him to a fresh endeavor. He felt himself in honor bound to regain what he had lost; and this evening went like the last, in complicated and decidedly amateurish efforts to bring his imaginary finances into a satisfactory condition. The writing of the play of which he was to read the skeleton to the manager in a fortnight advanced not at all. He took his pen to write, and laid it down to refresh his memory on the latest quotation on some stock; he tried to think of his plot, and found himself reflecting concerning debenture bonds and second mortgages, with the vaguest possible notion of what either might be.
The strange possession which a vivid fancy may take of a lonely and imaginative mind is a phenomenon not unfamiliar to those who have studied the lives of men of fervid temperament; and the whim to which West now gave himself up was no more extravagant than many another which has had consequences far more serious. For days he went on, becoming more and more completely engrossed by the folly he was following. His writing-table was covered with papers upon which he had memoranda of stocks, of sales, of investments, calculations of commissions, and all the rest of it. He even thought of going down town to watch the bulletin boards at some broker’s, but he would hardly have been the fanciful dreamer he was, had he not shrunk from actually coming in contact with men and the reality of the business at which he played.
For a week this absurdity continued. Sometimes West gained a little in his visionary speculations, and this inspired him with new courage, although whether he won or lost he was still possessed with the fatal gambling mania. His work meanwhile was not advancing. It is true that he sat for hours at his table nominally at work upon his play, but he interrupted himself constantly to consider whether there were not some way of recovering the money he had lost.
When Saturday night came he looked back over his week with regret and shame. The date fixed for his presenting his sketch to the manager was now only eight days off, and he was practically no further advanced in his preparation than on the day when his friend brought him the delightful news that that elusive personage had consented to make the appointment. He had wasted the past week in a foolish day-dream, as profitless as it was absurd. Yet he smiled to himself at the reflection that his day-dream had at least been amusing. It had been like creating a story or the plot for a play; and with a characteristically bachelor thought, he added to himself that it was at least less dangerous to play with visions of fortune than of love, and quite as sensible.
He could not, on the whole, however, be satisfied with the result of his week, and he determined to have no more of this folly. He must set to work in earnest, and he resented the consciousness which forced itself upon him that his lonely life and imaginative turn made it possible for him to fall into vagaries which to the practical common-sense of mankind in general would be held to indicate anything but a sound mind. He started up suddenly and gathered all the papers upon which were recorded his unlucky stock transactions, and began to thrust them into the stove. He would make an end of the whole foolish business. And yet, so far from entirely burning his ships, he at least left for himself a little boat in which to continue his explorations into the delusive regions of financial fairy-land, since he saved the one slip which contained the statement of the present condition of his much-diminished fortune. He condescended to the weak, but eminently human trick of attempting to humbug himself in regard to his reasons for doing so. He said to himself, exactly as if he were explaining to another person, that the bit of paper would serve as a warning to him, should he ever be tempted to indulge in so idiotic a diversion again; and he added, as if to quiet the least suspicion that he meant to use the memorandum, that the morrow being Sunday there would be no market with which he could play.
And yet, so weak is human resolution, such a rope of sand is it to fetter the resistless progress of character,—which is destiny,—that the next evening found West with the Sunday paper spread before him, carefully studying the financial article, and elaborating his plans for a grand coup, by which he should regain all the thousands he had lost. He had become very canny during the week’s study of the market reports, and he felt this Sunday evening all the pleasant satisfaction of one who, out of sight, cunningly devises the overthrow of clever enemies. On Monday morning he would—in imagination, of course—go into the field with a shrewdly devised scheme of buying and selling, which should result in the triumphant re-establishment of his financial standing. When one is dealing with life in imagination merely there is of course no limit to the extent to which one may make himself master of events; and partly from a keen fancy, partly from pure naïveté, West’s plan involved nothing less than bulling the market himself upon his visionary capital, now shrunken to some $70,000.
All day Monday West was in a state of excitement which was amazingly absurd when one considers that the cause was wholly fancy. When a drunkard returns to his cups he is notoriously more intemperate than before, and in delivering himself up for a second time to the intoxication of his vagaries Barum plunged more recklessly than ever into its extravagances. On Tuesday he was once more to be rich, and then he would speculate no more. Safe mortgages and government bonds should suffice him as investments, even though the rate of interest they paid was low. He would not again expose himself to the chances of such feverish excitement as that in which he had spent the past week.
So real had the whole business become to him that, while he smiled at his own folly as he took up the Tuesday evening paper, he actually felt a pang of disappointment to discover that his imaginary operations had produced no effect on the stock market. So far from rising, stocks had that day gone almost out of sight, so great had been the fall in the price of securities of all sorts.
A feeling almost of despair came over the young man as he read. He had gone out into the street to buy the earliest edition which would contain the account of the sales that day, and as he walked toward his attic he experienced almost as sharp a pang as if the absolute wreck which he found had overtaken his imaginary fortune had befallen a genuine bank-account. That unreasonable youthful disappointment which arises from a sense of failure per se, with little reference to the real importance of the stake, stung him keenly; and he was one of those men who cannot but confound real and æsthetic grievances.
He returned to his attic and figured it out. He was absolutely and hopelessly ruined. He had not only lost every dollar of his imaginary fortune, but he was, on paper, some seven or eight hundred dollars in debt to his brokers for commissions. He was so overwhelmed by this catastrophe that he sat brooding over it in the darkness of the February twilight and gathering night, until it was far past the hour when he usually took his apology for a dinner. He was not without a sense of humor sufficiently vivid to make him laugh at himself, and mentally mock at the vexation which the result of his airy speculations caused him; but this did not prevent his being vexed, or take his thoughts from laborious calculations how a different result might have been reached. He went off to dinner at last with a sober and abstracted mien, ordering a repast even more economical than usual, as befitted one who had just lost his whole fortune in ill-starred speculation.