Trent's Last Case

  Produced by Stuart E. Thiel

  TRENT'S LAST CASE

  THE WOMAN IN BLACK

  By E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley

  CHAPTER I: Bad News

  Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world weknow judge wisely?

  When the scheming, indomitable brain of Sigsbee Manderson was scatteredby a shot from an unknown hand, that world lost nothing worth a singletear; it gained something memorable in a harsh reminder of the vanityof such wealth as this dead man had piled up--without making one loyalfriend to mourn him, without doing an act that could help his memory tothe least honour. But when the news of his end came, it seemed to thoseliving in the great vortices of business as if the earth too shudderedunder a blow.

  In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been nofigure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world. Hehad a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct andaugment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millionsfor their labour, had existed before; but in the case of Manderson therehad been this singularity, that a pale halo of piratical romance, athing especially dear to the hearts of his countrymen, had remainedincongruously about his head through the years when he stood in everyeye as the unquestioned guardian of stability, the stamper-out ofmanipulated crises, the foe of the raiding chieftains that infest theborders of Wall Street.

  The fortune left by his grandfather, who had been one of thosechieftains on the smaller scale of his day, had descended to himwith accretion through his father, who during a long life had quietlycontinued to lend money and never had margined a stock. Manderson, whohad at no time known what it was to be without large sums to his hand,should have been altogether of that newer American plutocracy which issteadied by the tradition and habit of great wealth. But it was not so.While his nurture and education had taught him European ideas of a richman's proper external circumstance; while they had rooted in him aninstinct for quiet magnificence, the larger costliness which does notshriek of itself with a thousand tongues; there had been handed on tohim nevertheless much of the Forty-Niner and financial buccaneer, hisforbear. During that first period of his business career which had beencalled his early bad manner, he had been little more than a gambler ofgenius, his hand against every man's--an infant prodigy--who brought tothe enthralling pursuit of speculation a brain better endowed thanany opposed to it. At St Helena it was laid down that war is une belleoccupation; and so the young Manderson had found the multitudinous andcomplicated dog-fight of the Stock Exchange of New York.

  Then came his change. At his father's death, when Manderson was thirtyyears old, some new revelation of the power and the glory of the godhe served seemed to have come upon him. With the sudden, elasticadaptability of his nation he turned to steady labour in his father'sbanking business, closing his ears to the sound of the battles of theStreet. In a few years he came to control all the activity of the greatfirm whose unimpeached conservatism, safety, and financial weight liftedit like a cliff above the angry sea of the markets. All mistrust foundedon the performances of his youth had vanished. He was quite plainly adifferent man. How the change came about none could with authority say,but there was a story of certain last words spoken by his father, whomalone he had respected and perhaps loved.

  He began to tower above the financial situation. Soon his name wascurrent in the bourses of the world. One who spoke the name of Mandersoncalled up a vision of all that was broad-based and firm in the vastwealth of the United States. He planned great combinations of capital,drew together and centralized industries of continental scope, financedwith unerring judgement the large designs of state or of privateenterprise. Many a time when he 'took hold' to smash a strike, or tofederate the ownership of some great field of labour, he sent ruin upona multitude of tiny homes; and if miners or steelworkers or cattlemendefied him and invoked disorder, he could be more lawless and ruthlessthan they. But this was done in the pursuit of legitimate business ends.Tens of thousands of the poor might curse his name, but the financierand the speculator execrated him no more. He stretched a hand to protector to manipulate the power of wealth in every corner of the country.Forcible, cold, and unerring, in all he did he ministered to thenational lust for magnitude; and a grateful country surnamed him theColossus.

  But there was an aspect of Manderson in this later period that lay longunknown and unsuspected save by a few, his secretaries and lieutenantsand certain of the associates of his bygone hurling time. This littlecircle knew that Manderson, the pillar of sound business and stabilityin the markets, had his hours of nostalgia for the lively times whenthe Street had trembled at his name. It was, said one of them, as ifBlackbeard had settled down as a decent merchant in Bristol on thespoils of the Main. Now and then the pirate would glare suddenlyout, the knife in his teeth and the sulphur matches sputtering in hishatband. During such spasms of reversion to type a score of tempestuousraids upon the market had been planned on paper in the inner room of theoffices of Manderson, Colefax and Company. But they were never carriedout. Blackbeard would quell the mutiny of his old self within him and gosoberly down to his counting-house--humming a stave or two of 'SpanishLadies', perhaps, under his breath. Manderson would allow himself theharmless satisfaction, as soon as the time for action had gone by, ofpointing out to some Rupert of the markets a coup worth a million tothe depredator might have been made. 'Seems to me,' he would say almostwistfully, 'the Street is getting to be a mighty dull place since Iquit.' By slow degrees this amiable weakness of the Colossus becameknown to the business world, which exulted greatly in the knowledge.

  ***

  At the news of his death panic went through the markets like ahurricane; for it came at a luckless time. Prices tottered and crashedlike towers in an earthquake. For two days Wall Street was a clamorousinferno of pale despair. All over the United States, whereverspeculation had its devotees, went a waft of ruin, a plague of suicide.In Europe also not a few took with their own hands lives that had becomepitiably linked to the destiny of a financier whom most of them hadnever seen. In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of theBourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd ofJews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leapt from theCathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower. Menstabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or breathed itas the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had departedfrom one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.

  The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came whenWall Street was in a condition of suppressed 'scare'--suppressed, becausefor a week past the great interests known to act with or to be actuallycontrolled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the effects ofthe sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his plundering ofthe Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at a time whenthe market had been 'boosted' beyond its real strength. In the languageof the place, a slump was due. Reports from the corn-lands had not beengood, and there had been two or three railway statements which had beenexpected to be much better than they were. But at whatever point in thevast area of speculation the shudder of the threatened break had beenfelt, 'the Manderson crowd' had stepped in and held the market up.All through the week the speculator's mind, as shallow as it isquick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in this the hand ofthe giant stretched out in protection from afar. Manderson, said thenewspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication with his lieutenantsin the Street. One journal was able to give in round figures the sumspent on cabling between New York and Marlstone in the past twenty-fourhours; it told how a small staff of expert operators had been sent downby the Post Office authorities to Marlstone to deal with the flood ofmessages. Another revea
led that Manderson, on the first news of theHahn crash, had arranged to abandon his holiday and return home by theLusitania; but that he soon had the situation so well in hand that hehad determined to remain where he was.

  All this was falsehood, more or less consciously elaborated by the'finance editors', consciously initiated and encouraged by the shrewdbusiness men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could betterhelp their plans than this illusion of hero-worship--knew also thatno word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and thatHoward B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true organizer ofvictory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish days,and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath thefeet of Mr. Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with Etna-mutterings ofdisquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm, andslowly advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn outbut thankfully at peace.

  In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumour flew round thesixty acres of the financial district. It came into being as thelightning comes--a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to besuspected that it was first whispered over the telephone--together withan urgent selling order by some employee in the cable service. A sharpspasm convulsed the convalescent share-list. In five minutes the dullnoise of the kerbstone market in Broad Street had leapt to a high noteof frantic interrogation. From within the hive of the Exchange itselfcould be heard a droning hubbub of fear, and men rushed hatless in andout. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with tremblinglips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous 'short' interestseeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news came of asudden and ruinous collapse of 'Yankees' in London at the close ofthe Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four hours'trading in front of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson as thesaviour and warden of the markets had recoiled upon its authors withannihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at his private telephone,listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The new Napoleon hadlost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial landscape sliding andfalling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news of the findingof Manderson's body, with the inevitable rumour that it was suicide, wasprinting in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached WallStreet the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B. Jeffreyand his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its breath.

  ***

  All this sprang out of nothing.

  Nothing in the texture of the general life had changed. The corn had notceased to ripen in the sun. The rivers bore their barges and gave powerto a myriad engines. The flocks fattened on the pastures, the herds wereunnumbered. Men laboured everywhere in the various servitudes to whichthey were born, and chafed not more than usual in their bonds. Bellonatossed and murmured as ever, yet still slept her uneasy sleep. To allmankind save a million or two of half-crazed gamblers, blind to allreality, the death of Manderson meant nothing; the life and work of theworld went on. Weeks before he died strong hands had been in controlof every wire in the huge network of commerce and industry that hehad supervised. Before his corpse was buried his countrymen had made astrange discovery--that the existence of the potent engine of monopolythat went by the name of Sigsbee Manderson had not been a condition ofeven material prosperity. The panic blew itself out in two days, thepieces were picked up, the bankrupts withdrew out of sight; the market'recovered a normal tone'.

  While the brief delirium was yet subsiding there broke out a domesticscandal in England that suddenly fixed the attention of two continents.Next morning the Chicago Limited was wrecked, and the same day a notablepolitician was shot down in cold blood by his wife's brother in thestreets of New Orleans. Within a week of its rising, 'the Mandersonstory', to the trained sense of editors throughout the Union, was'cold'. The tide of American visitors pouring through Europe made eddiesround the memorial or statue of many a man who had died in poverty; andnever thought of their most famous plutocrat. Like the poet who diedin Rome, so young and poor, a hundred years ago, he was buried far awayfrom his own land; but for all the men and women of Manderson's peoplewho flock round the tomb of Keats in the cemetery under the MonteTestaccio, there is not one, nor ever Will be, to stand in reverence bythe rich man's grave beside the little church of Marlstone.