Some called our loans and some demanded more collateral.And while I was fighting front and rear and both sides, bang came that lie about your condition.The market broke.All I could do was sell, sell, sell, to try to meet or protect our loans."Giddings heard a sound that made him glance at Dumont.His head had fallen forward and he was snoring.Giddings looked long and pityingly.
"A sure enough dead one," he muttered, unconsciously using the slang of the Street which he habitually avoided.And he went away, closing the door behind him.
After half an hour Dumont roused himself--out of a stupor into a half-delirious dream.
"Must get cash," he mumbled, "and look after the time loans."He lifted his head and pushed back his hair from his hot forehead."I'll stamp on those curs yet!"He took another drink--his hands were so unsteady that he had to use both of them in lifting it to his lips.He put the flask in his pocket instead of returning it to the drawer.No one spoke to him, all pretended not to see him as he passed through the offices on his way to the elevator.With glassy unseeing eyes he fumbled at the dash-board and side of the hansom; with a groan like a rheumatic old man's he lifted his heavy body up into the seat, dropped back and fell asleep.A crowd of clerks and messengers, newsboys and peddlers gathered and gaped, awed as they looked at the man who had been for five years one of the heroes of the Street, and thought of his dazzling catastrophe.
"What's the matter?" inquired a new-comer, apparently a tourist, edging his way into the outskirts of the crowd.
"That's Dumont, the head of the Woolens Trust," the curb-broker he addressed replied in a low tone."He was raided yesterday--woke up in the morning worth a hundred millions, went to bed worth--perhaps five, maybe nothing at all."At this exaggeration of the height and depth of the disaster, awe and sympathy became intense in that cluster of faces.A hundred millions to nothing at all, or at most a beggarly five millions--what a dizzy precipice! Great indeed must be he who could fall so far.The driver peered through the trap, wondering why his distinguished fare endured this vulgar scrutiny.He saw that Dumont was asleep, thrust down a hand and shook him.
"Where to, sir?" he asked, as Dumont straightened himself.
"To the National Industrial Bank, you fool," snapped Dumont.
"How many times must I tell you?"
"Thank you, sir," said the driver--without sarcasm, thinking steadfastly of his pay--and drove swiftly away.
Theretofore, whenever he had gone to the National Industrial Bank he had been received as one king is received by another.Either eager and obsequious high officers of King Melville had escorted him directly to the presence, or King Melville, because he had a caller who could not be summarily dismissed, had come out apologetically to conduct King Dumont to another audience chamber.That day the third assistant cashier greeted him with politeness carefully graded to the due of a man merely moderately rich and not a factor in the game of high finance.
"Be seated, Mr.Dumont," he said, pointing to a chair just inside the railing--a seat not unworthy of a man of rank in the plutocratic hierarchy, but a man of far from high rank."I'll see whether Mr.Melville's disengaged."Dumont dropped into the chair and his heavy head was almost immediately resting upon his shirt-bosom.The third assistant cashier returned, roused him somewhat impatiently."Mr.
Melville's engaged," said he."But Mr.Cowles will see you."Mr.Cowles was the third vice-president.
Dumont rose.The blood flushed into his face and his body shook from head to foot."Tell Melville to go to hell," he jerked out, the haze clearing for a moment from his piercing, wicked eyes.And he stalked through the gateway in the railing.He turned."Tell him I'll tear him down and grind him into the gutter within six months."In the hansom again, he reflected or tried to reflect.But the lofty buildings seemed to cast a black shadow on his mind, and the roar and rush of the tremendous tide of traffic through that deep canon set his thoughts to whirling like drink-maddened bacchanals dancing round a punch-bowl."That woman!" he exclaimed suddenly."What asses they make of us men! And all these vultures--I'm not carrion yet.But THEY soon will be!"And he laughed and his thoughts began their crazy spin again.
A newsboy came, waving an extra in at the open doors of the hansom."Dumont's downfall!" he yelled in his shrill, childish voice."All about the big smash!"Dumont snatched a paper and flung a copper at the boy.
"Gimme a tip on Woolens, Mr.Dumont," said the boy, with an impudent grin, balancing himself for flight."How's Mrs.
Fanshaw?"
The newspapers had made his face as familiar as the details of his private life.He shrank and quivered.He pushed up the trap."Home!" he said, forgetting that the hansom and driver were not his own.
"All right, Mr.Dumont!" replied the driver.Dumont shrank again and sat cowering in the corner--the very calling him by his name, now a synonym for failure, disgrace, ridicule and contempt, seemed a subtile insult.
With roaring brain and twitching, dizzy eyes he read at the newspaper's account of his overthrow.And gradually there formed in his mind a coherent notion of how it had come to pass, of its extent; of why he found himself lying in the depths, the victim of humiliations so frightful that they penetrated even to him, stupefied and crazed with drink and fever though he was.His courage, his self-command were burnt up by the brandy.His body had at last revolted, was having its terrible revenge upon the mind that had so long misused it in every kind of indulgence.
"I'm done for--done for," he repeated audibly again and again, at each repetition looking round mentally for a fact or a hope that would deny this assertion--but he cast about in vain.
