In the group were sitting "Harry" Weil, who time and again has tied tin cans to Wall Street's tail; big, bluff, honest "Billy" Oliver, whose "I'll take ten thousand more" is as familiar to Stock Exchange members as the sound of the gong; and little "Jakey" Field, most audacious and resourceful of floor operators, graduated but a few years ago from the ranks of Wall Street's errand boys—"Jakey" Field, who is able single-handed to turn a "bear" market in a rout by "bidding 'em up all round the room five thousand at a crack"—which means he dares buy one hundred thousand shares off the reel in a demoralized market when every one is selling, thus standing to make or lose a million or two on his judgment.
They listened, breathless, while I poured out the story of the terrific rush of Amalgamated subscribers. Another group hailed me and I recounted the same story. So it went all over the busy assemblage—"dollars, dollars, dollars," how to get them, how to get them quick. The money talk ebbed and flowed; the chink of dollars echoed in the rattle of china, in the tinkling of glasses, in the laughs and salutations, in the shuffle of feet. It was the one word, the single theme, the alpha and omega of all these men of talent and virility who accorded me recognition as one of themselves and assumed that I, too, was crucified to the two bars on the snaky S; the whole thing was so interesting that I lost sight of the terrible seriousness of it, and I chuckled as one does when one sits on the cool grass under the apple-trees in summer and watches myriads of ants hustling and jostling and bumping over each other to get away with what to humans is but a tiny grain of dirt.
As I arose to go at last, the head waiter came forward and led me into a corner, where his assistant and the chef awaited me. All with tremendous earnestness asked, "Is it safe, Mr. Lawson, for us to put our savings in Amalgamated?" They took my breath away by telling me they proposed to subscribe for one thousand, five hundred, and two hundred shares each, $100,000, $50,000, and $20,000 worth, if I but said the word.
"Dollars, dollars, dollars" beat a tattoo on my ear-drums as the rain used to on the roof at the old farmhouse.
A moment later Manager Thomas of the great hotel slipped up to me. "I'm in for a thousand or two, if you say the word," he whispered. At dinner my old waiter, who I would have sworn did not know a stock certificate from a dog license, bent over respectfully to tell me that twenty of the boys had chipped in and desired me to take their thousand dollars and put it up for two hundred shares—$20,000 worth more. Room Clerk Palmer called over to me as I went by his desk a moment later to say he was going in for three hundred shares if it broke him. And so it went—bell-boys, chambermaids, valets, elevator men, all begging an interview, and all with the same request—"Would I not put their savings into this magic money-maker?"
All were friends or protégés of mine, these managers, clerks, stewards, and waiters. Their money was more sacred to me than my own. I had been instrumental in bringing many of them up to the palace of American dollar royalty from the old Brunswick, and I would rather have lost a finger any day than have jeopardized their savings. For all of them I had but one answer: "Go your limit."
I looked over the memoranda and telegrams piled high on the table in my room, all recording the whirlwind sweep of this tremendous copper movement that I had set a-booming.
"Dollars, dollars, dollars."
Requests from friends for some of the easy money I was dispensing to the public, appeals from old associates for special allotments of the subscription, urgent petitions from capitalists and bankers with whom I had business relations that their bids for shares should have preference, perfumed notes on tinted paper in feminine handwriting begging aid, advice, my influence, on a hundred specious pleas. It seemed to me that all the world was in a conspiracy of dollars and I the one object of its plotting. For a moment there overcame me a sickening disgust at this universal greed, at this all-absorbing passion for gold which my momentary pre-eminence revealed to my view. Then sanity asserted itself, and I remembered that if there was a conspiracy I was its ringleader, that I myself for months past had thought intensely of nothing but dollars. Why, then, should I resent the eager desires of others to attach to their own bank accounts some of the money which I was proclaiming from the housetops any one who desired might have for the asking? Many of these men, moreover, who sought my assurance of the safety of their little ventures, had earned the private word by thoughtful service and friendly attentions. Dollars were food and drink and fine raiment; were music, pictures, and theatres; were horses and dogs; were green fields, blossoming trees, and the open air of heaven; were liberty, release from sordid cares, from servitude—and why should I, who had helped myself in bountiful measure to the good things in life's cornucopia, feel superior when confronted by the lusts I myself had been instrumental in arousing? I laughed at my egregious virtue and dropped off to sleep.