CHAPTER XXIX
THE DELUGE
The next day the deluge broke.
On leaving Patsie and her father he had gone down the Avenue in a vain hope that his father might be in town, hoping to catch him at his hotel. On his way to his amazement he perceived a long line of curious shapes stretched along the sidewalk. As he came nearer he saw a file of men and women, some standing, some seated, camped out for the night. Then he noticed above all the great white columns of the Atlantic Trust and he realized that these were the first frightened outposts of the army of despair and panic which would come storming at the doors on the morrow. By the morning a dozen banks scattered over the city were besieged by frantic hordes of depositors, a dozen others hastily preparing against the impending tide of evil rumor and disaster.
With the opening of the Stock Exchange the havoc began, for with the threatened collapse of gigantic banking systems orders came pouring in from all over the country to sell at any price. In the wild hours that ensued holdings were thrown on the market in such quantities that the machinery of the Stock Exchange was momentarily paralyzed. Stocks were selling at half a dozen figures simultaneously, until it became a human impossibility for the frantic brokers to fulfil the demands that came pouring in on them to sell at any price. Any rumor was believed and shouted frantically: receivers were to be appointed for a dozen institutions: the State Superintendent's investigation was showing incredible defalcations and misuses of funds. Indictments were to be returned against the most prominent men in the financial world, and at the close of the day on top of the wildest fabrications of the imagination came the supreme horror of fact. Majendie, the president of the Atlantic Trust, was dead, slain by his own hand. But what happened this day would be nothing to the morrow.
At Patsie's frantic request Bojo went down in the late forenoon to see Mr. Swift. He had to wait almost an hour in the outer offices, watching breathless, frantic men, men of fifty and sixty as panic-stricken as youngsters of twenty-five, breaking under the strain of their first knowledge of overwhelming ruin, an indiscriminate convulsive mass pouring in and out. Then a door opened and a secretary issued him in. Mr. Swift received him with an agitated clutch of the hand, and valuing the precious seconds, without waiting for his questions, burst out:
"Mr. Crocker, it's absolutely humanly impossible for me to do what Miss Drake requested. We disposed yesterday of over forty thousand dollars. To sell now would be a financial slaughter to which I simply will not give my permission. Moreover, it's all very well to talk of selling, but who's going to buy?"
"If you can't sell," said Bojo, gloomily, "Miss Drake would like to know what you could raise on her holdings as security."
"She wants to know?" said Mr. Swift, on edge with the anxiety of twenty operations to be safe-guarded, "I'll tell you. Not a hundred thousand dollars, nor ten thousand. There isn't an institution that would dare weaken its cash supply to-day on any security offered. Mr. Crocker, say for me that I absolutely and completely refuse to offer a single security." A door opened and back of the secretary the faces of two new visitors were already to be seen. Mr. Swift with scant ceremony seized his hand and dismissed him. "It can't be done, that's all; it can't be done."
Bojo went out and telephoned the result. He even tried, though he knew the futility of the attempt, to place a loan at two banks where he was known, one his own and the other the depository for the Crocker Mills. At the first he got no further than a subordinate, who threw up his hands at the first mention of his plan. At the latter he gained a moment's opportunity to state his demand to the vice-president, who had known him from childhood. The refusal was as instantaneous. The banks were coming to the aid of no one, frightened for their own security. He even attempted to call up his father on long distance, but after long, tedious waits he was unable to locate him. What he would have asked of him he did not quite know, only that he was seeking frantically some means, some way, to come to the assistance of the girl he loved, even though in his heart he knew the futility of her attempt; perhaps even despite his admiration for her unselfishness, glad that the sacrifice could not be made. He went up later in the afternoon to explain to her all he had tried to do, to get her to go for a short ride up the river in order to snatch a little rest and calm, but Patsie refused obstinately. She was afraid that at any moment her father might return and call for her, declaring that she must be ready to go to him. Perhaps she had fears that she did not express even to him, but she remained as she had remained all day, waiting feverishly. Drake did not come back until long after midnight. Then there were conferences to be held in his library far into the gray morning. Everything seemed topsy-turvy. The night was like the daytime. At every hour an automobile came rustling up, a hurried ring of the bell followed by a ghostly flitting passage into the library of strange, hurrying figures. Drake was no longer the dejected, resigned man, broken in pride and courage, of the night before. He put them aside hastily with a swift, convulsive hug for his daughter and a welcoming handshake for Bojo. He would say nothing and they could guess nothing of all the desperate remedies that were being discussed and acted upon in the shifting conference within the library. It was after four o'clock when Bojo left, after persuading Patsie of the uselessness of further vigil. He felt too tremulously awake for need of sleep. He went down the Avenue and in the convalescing gray of the weak and sickly dawn passed the growing lines of depositors still obstinately clinging to their posts, feeling as though he were walking a world of nightmares and alarms. About seven o'clock he came back to the Court for a tub and a cup of coffee. There he received news of Fred DeLancy, who had been in frantically the night before begging for loans to back up his disappearing margins. Neither Marsh nor Granning could come to his assistance and he had left absolutely unnerved, vowing that he would be wiped out if he could not raise only ten thousand dollars before the morrow. Bojo shook his head. He had no desire to help him. The few thousands he still retained seemed to him something miraculously solid and precious in the whirling evaporation of fictitious values. There was nothing he could do before the arrival of Doris and her husband, if anything could be done then. He went down again to Wall Street merely as a matter of curiosity and entered the spectators' gallery in the Stock Exchange. The panic there had become a delirium. He stood leaning over the railing gazing profoundly down into this frenzy which had once been his life. Removed from its peril—judging it. What he saw was ugly to look upon. A few figures stood out grim, game and defiant to the last, meeting the crisis as sportsmen facing the last chance. But for the rest, the element of the human seemed to have disappeared in the animal madness of beasts trapped awaiting destruction. These shifting, struggling, contending clumps of men, shrieking and hoarse, all strength cast to the winds, fighting for the last disappearing rung of financial security, gave him a last final distaste of the life he had renounced. He went out and passed another howling group of savages on the curb, feeling all at once the high note of tragedy that lies in the manifestation of obliterating rage of a great people disposing finally of all the shallow horde of petty parasites that are eliminated by the cleansing force of a great panic.