The Woman in Black | Page 3

among the raving crowd of
Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfort one leaped from the

Cathedral top, leaving a redder stain where he struck the red tower.
Men stabbed and shot and strangled themselves, drank death or
breathed it as the air, because in a lonely corner of England the life had
departed from one cold heart vowed to the service of greed.
The blow could not have fallen at a more disastrous moment. It came
when Wall Street was in a condition of suppressed "scare." Suppressed:
because for a week past the great interests known to act with or to be
actually controlled by the Colossus had been desperately combating the
effects of the sudden arrest of Lucas Hahn, and the exposure of his
plundering of the Hahn banks. This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at
a time when the market had been "boosted" beyond its real strength. In
the language of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the
corn-lands had not been good, and there had been two or three railway
statements which had been expected to be much better than they were.
But at whatever point in the vast area of speculation the shudder of the
threatened break had been felt, "the Manderson crowd" had stepped in
and held the market up. All through the week the speculator's mind, as
shallow as it is quick-witted, as sentimental as greedy, had seen in this
the hand of the giant stretched out in protection from afar. Manderson,
said the newspapers in chorus, was in hourly communication with his
lieutenants in the Street. One journal was able to give, in round figures,
the sum spent on cabling between New York and Marlstone in the past
twenty-four hours; it told how a small staff of expert operators had
been sent down by the Post Office authorities to Marlstone to deal with
the flood of messages. Another revealed that Manderson, on the first
news of the Hahn crash, had arranged to abandon his holiday and return
home by the Lusitania; but that he soon had the situation so well in
hand that he had 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 shrewd
business men of the Manderson group, who knew that nothing could
better help their plans than this illusion of hero-worship--knew also that
no word had come from Manderson in answer to their messages, and
that Howard B. Jeffrey, of Steel and Iron fame, was the true organizer
of victory. So they fought down apprehension through four feverish

days, and minds grew calmer. On Saturday, though the ground beneath
the feet of Mr. Jeffrey yet rumbled now and then with Ætna-mutterings
of disquiet, he deemed his task almost done. The market was firm and
slowly advancing. Wall Street turned to its sleep of Sunday, worn out
but thankfully at peace.
In the first trading hour of Monday a hideous rumor flew round the
sixty acres of the financial district. It came into being as the lightning
comes, a blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be
suspected that it was first whispered over the telephone--together with
an urgent selling order--by some employee in the cable service. In five
minutes the dull noise of the curbstone market in Broad Street had
leaped to a high note of frantic interrogation. From within the hive of
the Exchange itself could be heard a droning hubbub of fear and men
rushed hatless in and out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man
replied, with trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some
unscrupulous "short" interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter
of an hour news came of a sudden and ruinous collapse of "Yankees" in
London at the close of the Stock Exchange day. It was enough. New
York had still four hours' trading in front of her. The strategy of
pointing to Manderson as the savior and warden of the market had
recoiled upon its authors with annihilating force, and Jeffrey, his ear at
his private telephone, listened to the tale of disaster with a set jaw. The
new Napoleon had lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial
landscape sliding and falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the
news of the finding of Manderson's body, with the inevitable rumor that
it was suicide, was printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a
copy reached Wall Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and
Howard B. Jeffrey and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves
before its breath.
* * * * *
All this sprang out of nothing.
Nothing in the texture of the general