Well, Southern Atlantic went down and stayed down and I lost, I forget how much, on my ten thousand shares before Dan sold me out. I owed him more than ever. But you never saw a nicer or less importunate creditor in your life. Never a whimper from him. Instead, encouraging words and admonitions not to worry about it. In the end the loss was made up for me in the same generous but mysterious way.
He gave no details whatever. They were all numbered accounts. Dan Williamson would just say to me, “We made up your Southern Atlantic loss with profits on this other deal,” and he’d tell me how he had sold seventy-five hundred shares of some other stock and made a nice thing out of it. I can truthfully say that I never knew a blessed thing about those trades of mine until I was told that the indebtedness was wiped out.
After that happened several times I began to think, and I got to look at my case from a different angle. Finally I tumbled. It was plain that I had been used by Dan Williamson. It made me angry to think it, but still angrier that I had not tumbled to it quicker. As soon as I had gone over the whole thing in my mind I went to Dan Williamson, told him I was through with the firm, and I quit the office of Williamson & Brown. I had no words with him or any of his partners. What good would that have done me? But I will admit that I was sore—at myself quite as much as at Williamson & Brown.
The loss of the money didn’t bother me. Whenever I have lost money in the stock market I have always considered that I have learned something; that if I have lost money I have gained experience, so that the money really went for a tuition fee. A man has to have experience and he has to pay for it. But there was something that hurt a whole lot in that experience of mine in Dan Williamson’s office, and that was the loss of a great opportunity. The money a man loses is nothing; he can make it up. But opportunities such as I had then do not come every day.
The market, you see, had been a fine trading market. I was right; I mean, I was reading it accurately. The opportunity to make millions was there. But I allowed my gratitude to interfere with my play. I tied my own hands. I had to do what Dan Williamson in his kindness wished done. Altogether it was more unsatisfactory than doing business with a relative. Bad business!
And that wasn’t the worst thing about it. It was that after that there was practically no opportunity for me to make big money. The market flattened out. Things drifted from bad to worse. I not only lost all I had but got into debt again—more heavily than ever. Those were long lean years, 1911, 1912, 1913 and 1914. There was no money to be made. The opportunity simply wasn’t there and so I was worse off than ever.
It isn’t uncomfortable to lose when the loss is not accompanied by a poignant vision of what might have been. That was precisely what I could not keep my mind from dwelling on, and of course it unsettled me further. I learned that the weaknesses to which a speculator is prone are almost numberless. It was proper for me as a man to act the way I did in Dan Williamson’s office, but it was improper and unwise for me as a speculator to allow myself to be influenced by any consideration to act against my own judgment. Noblesse oblige—but not in the stock market, because the tape is not chivalrous and moreover does not reward loyalty. I realise that I couldn’t have acted differently. I couldn’t make myself over just because I wished to trade in the stock market. But business is business always, and my business as a speculator is to back my own judgment always.
It was a very curious experience. I’ll tell you what I think happened. Dan Williamson was perfectly sincere in what he told me when he first saw me. Every time his firm did a few thousand shares in any one stock the Street jumped at the conclusion that Alvin Marquand was buying or selling. He was the big trader of the office, to be sure, and he gave this firm all his business; and he was one of the best and biggest traders they have ever had in Wall Street. Well, I was to be used as a smoke screen, particularly for Marquand’s selling.
Alvin Marquand fell sick shortly after I went in. His ailment was early diagnosed as incurable, and Dan Williamson of course knew it long before Marquand himself did. That is why Dan covered my Chesapeake & Atlantic stock. He had begun to liquidate some of his brother-in-law’s speculative holdings of that and other stocks.
Of course when Marquand died the estate had to liquidate his speculative and semispeculative lines, and by that time we had run into a bear market. By tying me up the way he did, Dan was helping the estate a whole lot. I do not speak boastfully when I say that I was a very heavy trader and that I was dead right in my views on the stock market. I know that Williamson remembered my successful operations in the bear market of 1907 and he couldn’t afford to run the risk of having me at large. Why, if I had kept on the way I was going I’d have made so much money that by the time he was trying to liquidate part of Alvin Marquand’s estate I would have been trading in hundreds of thousands of shares. As an active bear I would have done damage running into the millions of dollars to the Marquand heirs, for Alvin left only a little over a couple of hundred millions.