First harvests

by Frederic Jesup Stimson

Tamms perceived this, not so dithyrambically, but more practically, and he profited by it. No one could turn in and out of corporations more cleverly than he; or turn them more adroitly to private ends, or drop out of them more apropos. Such an ingenious contrivance for clever men are these; more ingenious than the law which governs them. Indeed, the law has now dropped far behind, standing where it stood in the Middle Ages, when corporations were few and simple, and it stares agape at the Frankensteins of its own creation. But these same soulless monsters afford to their masters unlimited power, without interest or responsibility; and Tamms revelled in them. And Tamms was a self-made man, and a smart one; and the public deified him for both attributes, as is its wont; and his church would have canonized him, had his business needed a saintship instead of a seat in the Stock Exchange.

Arthur’s head grew dizzy at the corporations, and syndicates, and pools and other unnamed enterprises that Tamms’s busy life was wound up in. Head and chief was, of course, the great Allegheny Central Railroad; this was the chief gold-mine that they worked; for in it Tamms could make his own market and buy and sell at his own price. But there were many others. And of these, the stock of the Silas Starbuck Oil Company had grown lately prominent.

The Stock Exchange was no longer a strange sight to Arthur; he had grown familiar with it, with its moods, its dialect, its very battle-cries and interjections. And here he had seen the Allegheny Central bought and sold, and bought again; and of late he had been sent to out-of-the-way holes and corners, auctions, and even to the up-town houses of retired merchants (Mrs. Gower’s among the number, only Mrs. Gower would not sell) in search of the share certificates of the Starbuck Oil.

“Governor’s up to something,” said Charlie. “Don’t believe anybody knows what—not even the old man.” The “governor” was Mr. Tamms; Mr. Townley was the “old man.” And it was true the latter had little to do with the business of the firm. He had been a conservative, prominent banker in his day; and still carried much weight with the multitude; but, though he bore his gray head with much dignity behind his white choker, there was little in it—as Townley might have said. Little remained of the once active spirit behind it but a fixed belief in Allegheny Central and a strong taste for landscape paintings of the French school. However, no one had found this out but Tamms, not even Mr. Townley himself, though Charlie, as we have seen, suspected it. And Mr. Townley was a merchant of the old school, whom all the world delighted to make trustee for its posterity. He had a great box in the Safety Deposit Vaults, crammed with the stocks and bonds upon which others lived; and these he administered carefully and well.

But one great day there was a “corner” in Starbuck Oil stock; for some mysterious reason the once common certificates had disappeared, like partridges on the first of September. Madder and more extravagant grew the demand for it at the board; scantier still the supply offering; one per cent. a day was bid, even for its temporary possession, so highly were the shares suddenly prized. There were vague rumors of “plums,” “melons,” and consolidations; meantime the Starbuck Oil stock had disappeared from human vision. Then, one morning, came the news; the Allegheny Central had absorbed the Silas Starbuck Oil Company; two shares were to be given for one, and in addition, to cover terminal facilities, connection, etc., five millions of six per cent. bonds were to be issued. Townley & Tamms, it was announced, had taken them all, and offered them to the eager public for 105 and interest. “Thought the governor was up to something,” said Charlie. “What do you suppose we paid for them?—the bonds, I mean,” said he to Arthur; and he put his tongue in his cheek and looked very knowing.

Arthur was kept busy, writing personal letters to the more valued clients of the firm, calling attention to the merits of the bonds in question; and preferred not thinking of the matter at all. He solaced himself with human sympathy; that is to say, the delights of society as offered in balls and dinners; and soon grew so accustomed to the stimulant as to take much pleasure in it.

For do we not see every day, gentle reader—that is to say, fashionable, fascinating, admired reader—how great and potent is the charm of this life? Do we not see men ruining themselves, girls giving themselves, for this alone? How dull, how short-sighted must our forefathers have been, who flattered themselves that we, their clever children, would content ourselves with the rights of man! What we desire is the envy of mankind.

Humanity has indeed labored over a thousand years for these simpler things, ever since that crowd of uncultivated Dutchmen came down on Rome, and the feudal system adopted Christianity unto itself and strangled it, or sought to do so. We have tried with brain and sinew, through blood and fire, to get this boon, that our lives may be respected, and our liberty of person not constrained. And now, in the nineteenth century, we have got it; and lo! society is bored. Languid and dull—too dull to hear, in its liberal mass, that low and distant murmur, too skeptical, indifferent, to see the dark low cloud, just forming, now, to the West and East—is it a mighty swarm of locusts, or is it merely storm and rain? Here and there a tory sees it, dreading it; here and there a radical, dreaming of it; their imagination aiding both. And the multitude, who are not indifferent, and who are never bored, have little time to look at the weather, still less to read and think; or, if they read, it is no longer now the Bible, which, they are told, is but a feudal book, a handy tool of bishops and of premiers. Moreover, modern enlightenment teaches that it is a lie; there never were twelve basketfuls of fragments left from loaves and fishes on the Mountain; therefore what words were spoken on the Mountain cannot be true.

The world is free; and ninety-nine per cent. are miserable, and the other one is bored. So, we remember, Flossie Gower was bored, when she got all her wishes, and had liberty to do what thing she chose. But surely, liberty being the greatest good, it follows she must choose to do good things? But to-day the light of the sun does not content us, nor the fragrance of the woods and fields, the breath of free air and the play of mind and body, love and friendship, and health and sympathy. These are but the tasteless water of life; the joys of possession and of envy are the wine. The early pagans were happy with these indeed, benighted creatures; but what though the ancient text says, What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Others will envy us the world; but our own souls pall with us. We moderns have invented amour-propre. What matters being happy? The true bliss is, that others think you so. We have realized equality; and all these good people (even to Jem Starbuck’s sister) struggle to escape from it. Jem Starbuck was a nihilist, and their logical counterpart. What did Flossie care for her two horses and Russian sleigh and silver mountings and black and white furs and waving scarlet plumes? If Central Park were the wastes about the Northern Pole, do you suppose she would care to take her sleigh-ride there, and show off to old John Franklin’s whitened bones alone? Is it the light, and the air, and the motion, that makes her pleasure; is it the mere child’s delight in brilliant colors that makes her flaunt her trailing scarlet plumes; or is it the subtile intoxication of the world’s notice of those things the world desires? And Mrs. Gower’s equals see these things and do homage; and their daughters wed for these, and their husbands work; and in pretty Jenny Starbuck’s head, walking on the roadside, the homage turns to envy; and in James her brother’s heart, to gall.

Arthur went in this sleigh many times, and enjoyed it, and said pretty things to Mrs. Gower in exchange. He had a poet’s delight in rich and beautiful things, in show and speed and glitter. Shine, not light, attracts your women, says Goethe; and the old courtier-poet might have said the same of men, himself included. And Mrs. Gower lolled back, beautiful, her yellow hair shining strangely through the snow; so Helen in the Greek sunlight; so Faustina in the streets of noble Rome; so Gutrune, by whose wiles twelve thousand heroes and the gods went down to darkling death. All these were blondes, and smiled and charmed and had their adoration and their joy of life. What call had Flossie to trouble herself with the eternal verities, or man’s past or future? She was not eternal. She was, furthermore, a skeptic and a cynic—if a butterfly can be said to be skeptic of eternal life. She had no real knowledge of the things she won. She would have liked the sword of Siegfried for a panoply, to put the Grail in her cabinet of rare china. She would have liked to possess these things, and money and fans and dresses, and have other women know that she possessed them. She would have liked to possess men’s hearts.