第38章

Betting on the condition of the market weeks, even months, in advance.You bet wheat goes up.I bet it goes down.Those fellows in the Pit don't own the wheat; never even see it.Wou'dn't know what to do with it if they had it.They don't care in the least about the grain.But there are thousands upon thousands of farmers out here in Iowa and Kansas or Dakota who do, and hundreds of thousand of poor devils in Europe who care even more than the farmer.I mean the fellows who raise the grain, and the other fellows who eat it.It's life or death for either of them.

And right between these two comes the Chicago speculator, who raises or lowers the price out of all reason, for the benefit of his pocket.You see Laura, here is what I mean." Cressler had suddenly become very earnest.Absorbed, interested, Laura listened intently."Here is what I mean," pursued Cressler.

"It's like this: If we send the price of wheat down too far, the farmer suffers, the fellow who raises it if we send it up too far, the poor man in Europe suffers, the fellow who eats it.And food to the peasant on the continent is bread--not meat or potatoes, as it is with us.The only way to do so that neither the American farmer nor the European peasant suffers, is to keep wheat at an average, legitimate value.The moment you inflate or depress that, somebody suffers right away.

And that is just what these gamblers are doing all the time, booming it up or booming it down.Think of it, the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade.They make the price.They say just how much the peasant shall pay for his loaf of bread.

If he can't pay the price he simply starves.And as for the farmer, why it's ludicrous.If I build a house and offer it for sale, I put my own price on it, and if the price offered don't suit me I don't sell.But if Igo out here in Iowa and raise a crop of wheat, I've got to sell it, whether I want to or not at the figure named by some fellows in Chicago.And to make themselves rich, they may make me sell it at a price that bankrupts me."Laura nodded.She was intensely interested.A whole new order of things was being disclosed, and for the first time in her life she looked into the workings of political economy.

"Oh, that's only one side of it," Cressler went on, heedless of Jadwin's good-humoured protests."Yes, Iknow I am a crank on speculating.I'm going to preach a little if you'll let me.I've been a speculator myself, and a ruined one at that, and I know what I am talking about.Here is what I was going to say.These fellows themselves, the gamblers--well, call them speculators, if you like.Oh, the fine, promising manly young men I've seen wrecked--absolutely and hopelessly wrecked and ruined by speculation! It's as easy to get into as going across the street.They make three hundred, five hundred, yes, even a thousand dollars sometimes in a couple of hours, without so much as raising a finger.Think what that means to a boy of twenty-five who's doing clerk work at seventy-five a month.Why, it would take him maybe ten years to save a thousand, and here he's made it in a single morning.

Think you can keep him out of speculation then? First thing you know he's thrown up his honest, humdrum position--oh, I've seen it hundreds of times--and takes to hanging round the customers' rooms down there on La Salle Street, and he makes a little, and makes a little more, and finally he is so far in that he can't pull out, and then some billionaire fellow, who has the market in the palm of his hand, tightens one finger, and our young man is ruined, body and mind.He's lost the taste, the very capacity for legitimate business, and he stays on hanging round the Board till he gets to be--all of a sudden--an old man.And then some day some one says, 'Why, where's So-and-so?' and you wake up to the fact that the young fellow has simply disappeared--lost.I tell you the fascination of this Pit gambling is something no one who hasn't experienced it can have the faintest conception of.I believe it's worse than liquor, worse than morphine.Once you get into it, it grips you and draws you and draws you, and the nearer you get to the end the easier it seems to win, till all of a sudden, ah! there's the whirlpool....'J.,' keep away from it, my boy."Jadwin laughed, and leaning over, put his fingers upon Cressler's breast, as though turning off a switch.

"Now, Miss Dearborn," he announced, "we've shut him off.Charlie means all right, but now and then some one brushes against him and opens that switch."Cressler, good-humouredly laughed with the others, but Laura's smile was perfunctory and her eyes were grave.

But there was a diversion.While the others had been talking the rehearsal had proceeded, and now Page beckoned to Laura from the far end of the parlor, calling out:

"Laura--'Beatrice,' it's the third act.You are wanted.""Oh, I must run," exclaimed Laura, catching up her play-book."Poor Monsieur Gerardy--we must be a trial to him."She hurried across the room, where the coach was disposing the furniture for the scene, consulting the stage directions in his book:

"Here the kitchen table, here the old-fashioned writing-desk, here the _armoire_ with practicable doors, here the window.Soh! Who is on? Ah, the young lady of the sick nose, 'Marion.' She is discovered--knitting.And then the duchess--later.That's you Mademoiselle Dearborn.You interrupt--you remember.

But then you, ah, you always are right.If they were all like you.Very well, we begin."Creditably enough the Gretry girl read her part, Monsieur Gerardy interrupting to indicate the crossings and business.Then at her cue, Laura, who was to play the role of the duchess, entered with the words:

"I beg your pardon, but the door stood open.May Icome in?"

Monsieur Gerardy murmured:

"_Elle est vraiment superbe._"