Roden's Corner

by Henry Seton Merriman

“There is no knowing,” went on the banker, “how the world will take it. It is one of our greatest financial difficulties that there is never any knowing how the world will take anything. Of course, we in the City are plain-going men, who have no handles to our names and no time for the fashionable fads. We are only respectable, and we cannot afford to be mixed up in such a scheme as your malgamite business.” Mr. Wade glanced at Cornish and paused a moment. He was a stolid Englishman, who had received punishment in his time, and could hit hard when he deemed that hard hitting was merciful. “It has only been a question of time. The credulity of the public is such that, sooner or later, a bogus charity must assuredly have followed in the wake of the thousand bogus companies that exist to-day. I only wonder that it has not come sooner. You and Ferriby and, of course, the women have been swindled, my dear Tony—that is the head and the tail of it.”

Cornish laughed gaily. “I dare say we have,” he admitted. “But I will be hanged if I see what it all means, now.”

“It may mean ruin to those who have anything to lose,” explained Mr. Wade, calmly. “The whole thing has been cleverly planned—one of the cleverest things of recent years, and the man who thought it out had the makings of a great financier in him. What he wanted to do was to get the malgamite industry into his own hands. If he had formed a company and gone about it in a straightforward manner, the paper-makers of the whole world would have risen like one man and smashed him. Instead of that, he moved with the times, and ran the thing as a charity—a fashionable amusement, in fact. The malgamite industry is neither better nor worse than the other dangerous trades, and no man need go into it unless he likes. But the man who started this thing—whoever he may be—supplied that picturesqueness without which the public cannot be moved—and lo! We have an army of martyrs.”

Mr. Wade paused and jerked the ash from his cigar. He glanced at Cornish.

“No one suspected that there was anything wrong. It was plausibly put forth, and Ferriby ... did his best for it. Then the money began to come in, and once money begins to come in for a popular charity the difficulty is to stop it. I suppose it is still coming in?”

“Yes,” said Cornish. “It is still coming in, and nobody is trying to stop it.”

Mr. Wade laughed in his throat, as fat men do. “And,” he cried, sitting upright and banging his heavy fist down on the arm of his chair—“and there are millions in your malgamite works at the Hague—millions. If it were only honest it would be the finest monopoly the world has ever seen—for two years, but no longer. At the end of that period the paper-makers will have had time to combine and make their own stuff—then they'll smash you. But during those two years all the makers in the world will have to buy your malgamite at the price you chose to put upon it. They have their forward contracts to fulfil—government contracts, Indian contracts, newspaper contracts. Thousands and thousands of tons of paper will have to be manufactured at a loss every week during the next two years, or they'll have to shut up their mills. Now do you see where you are?”

“Yes,” answered Cornish, “I see where I am, now.”

His face was drawn and his eyes hard, like those of a man facing ruin. And that which was written on his face was an old story, so old that some may not think it worth the telling; for he had found out (as all who are fortunate will, sooner or later, discover) that success or failure, riches or poverty, greatness or obscurity, are but small things in a man's life. Mr. Wade looked at his companion with a sort of wonder in his shrewd old face. He had seen ruined men before now—he had seen criminals convicted of their wrong-doing—he had seen old and young in adversity, and, what is more dangerous still, in prosperity—but he had never seen a young face grow old in the twinkling of an eye. The banker was only thinking of this matter as a financial crisis, in which his great skill made him take a master's delight. There must inevitably come a great crash, and Mr. Wade's interest was aroused. Cornish was realizing that the crash would of a certainty fall between himself and Dorothy.

“This thing,” continued the banker, judicially, “has not evolved itself. It is not the result of a singular chain of circumstances. It is the deliberate and careful work of one man's brain. This sort of speculative gambling comes to us from America. It was in America that the first cotton corner was conceived. That is what the paper means when it plainly calls it the malgamite corner. Now, what I want to know is this—who has worked this thing?”