The Pit quotes

“I don’t see—I can’t understand.”

Then, abruptly drawing her cape about her, she crossed the vestibule and came up to Jadwin.

As she approached she saw him catch her eye. Then, as he appeared to understand that this young woman was about to speak to him, she noticed an expression of suspicion, almost of distrust, come into his face.

The healthiness of his eye and skin persuaded to a belief in the healthiness of his mind; and, in fact, Landry was as clean without as within. He was frank, openhearted, full of fine sentiments and exaltations and enthusiasms.

Until he was eighteen he had cherished an ambition to become the President of the United States.

“Yes, yes,” he said to Laura, “the bridge was turned. It was an imposition. We had to wait while they let three tows through. I think two at a time is as much as is legal. And we had to wait for three. Yes, sir;

Inside it was dark, and a prolonged puff of hot air, thick with the mingled odours of flowers, perfume, upholstery, and gas, enveloped her upon the instant.

It was the unmistakable, unforgettable, entrancing aroma of the theatre, that she had known only too seldom, but that in a second set her heart galloping.

Every available space seemed to be occupied. Men, even women, were standing up, compacted into a suffocating pressure, and for the moment everybody was applauding vigorously. On all sides Laura heard:

It was always just like that. She told herself that she was forever doing the unexpected thing, the inconsistent thing.

Women were queer creatures, mysterious even to themselves.

“I am so pleased that you are enjoying it all,” said Corthell’s voice at her shoulder. “I knew you would. There is nothing like music such as this to appeal to the emotions, the heart—and with your temperament.”

Thus it went, day after day.

Endlessly, ceaselessly the Pit, enormous, thundering, sucked in and spewed out, sending the swirl of its mighty central eddy far out through the city’s channels.

Terrible at the centre, it was, at the circumference, gentle, insidious and persuasive, the send of the flowing so mild, that to embark upon it, yielding to the influence, was a pleasure that seemed all devoid of risk.

The large, powerful Bears were its friends, the Bears strong of grip, tenacious of jaw, capable of pulling down the strongest Bull. Thus the firm had no consideration for the “outsiders,” the “public”—the Lambs.

The Lambs! Such a herd, timid, innocent, feeble, as much out of place in La Salle Street as a puppy in a cage of panthers;

the Lambs, whom Bull and Bear did not so much as condescend to notice, but who, in their mutual struggle of horn and claw, they crushed to death by the mere rolling of their bodies.

Since then all deals had been spoken of in terms of the Hargus affair. Speculators said, “It was almost as bad as the Hargus deal.” “It was like the Hargus smash.” “It was as big a thing as the Hargus corner.”

Hargus had become a sort of creature of legends, mythical, heroic, transfigured in the glory of his millions.

“Easily twenty years ago,” continued Jadwin. “If Hargus could come to life now, he’d be surprised at the difference in the way we do business these days. Twenty years. Yes, it’s all of that. I declare, Sam, we’re getting old, aren’t we?”

With half a show, I would get in a little more and a little more, till by and by I’d try to throw a big thing, and instead, the big thing would throw me.

Why, Sam, when you told me that that wreck out there mumbling a sandwich was Hargus, it made me turn cold.

”

In the air about him he seemed to feel an influence, a sudden new element, the presence of a new force.

It was Luck, the great power, the great goddess, and all at once it had stooped from out the invisible, and just over his head passed swiftly in a rush of glittering wings.

“The thing would have to be handled like glass,” observed the broker thoughtfully, his eyes narrowing “A tip like this is public property in twenty-four hours, and it don’t give us any too much time.

Jadwin wrote the check on a corner of the broker’s desk, and held it a moment before him.

“Goodbye,” he said, apostrophising the bit of paper. “Goodbye. I ne’er shall look upon your like again.”

“Huh!” he grunted. “You’ll look upon a hatful of them before the month is out.”

… with wisps of hay, peanut shells, apple parings, and orange peel, with torn newspapers, odds and ends of memoranda, crushed paper darts, and above all with a countless multitude of yellow telegraph forms, thousands upon thousands, crumpled and muddied under the trampling of innumerable feet.

It was the debris of the battlefield, the abandoned impedimenta and broken weapons of contending armies, the detritus of conflict, torn, broken, and rent, that at the end of each day’s combat encumbered the field.

At last even the click of the last of telegraph keys died down. Shouldering themselves into their overcoats, the operators departed, calling back and forth to one another, making dates, and cracking jokes.

“Never an egg, and three thousand hens in the runs,” she continued. “Think of that! The Plymouth Rocks had the pip. And the others, my lands! I don’t know. They just didn’t lay.”

“Ought to tickle the soles of their feet,” declared Landry with profound gravity.

“Best thing in the world for hens that don’t lay. It sort of stirs them up. Oh, everyone knows that.”

Ah, no! He knew what was due a gentleman. He closed his eyes and raised his eyebrows to his very hair, murmuring superbly that he was offended. He had but one phrase in answer to all their explanations:

“One does not permit one’s self to bleed at the nose during rehearsal.”

Laura began to feel a certain resentment. The unfortunate Gretry girl had gone away in tears. What with the embarrassment of the wrong gown, the browbeating, and the nosebleed, she was not far from hysterics. She had retired to the dining-room with Mrs.

Page scolded him roundly. What next? The idea. He was not to be so completely silly. She didn’t propose to have the responsibility of his catching pneumonia just for the sake of a quibble.

“Some people,” she declared, “never seemed to be able to find out that they are grown up.”

“Very well,” he announced, “I’ll go if I can tip the driver a dollar.”

“Very well,” he announced, “I’ll go if I can tip the driver a dollar.”

“The man that can afford dollar tips,” she said, “can afford to hire the cab in the first place.”

“Seventy-five cents, then,” he declared resolutely. “Not a cent less. I should feel humiliated with any less.”

“Of course, Landry; I understand.”

“Ah,” he cried, “you don’t know what it means to me to look into the eyes of a woman who really understands.”

Laura stared, wondering just what she had said.

Suddenly Laura felt his arm clasp her. Then all at once, before she had time to so much as think of resistance, he had put both arms about her and kissed her squarely on her cheek.

Then the front door closed, and she was left abruptly alone, breathless, stunned, staring wide-eyed into the darkness.

Her first sensation was one merely of amazement. She put her hand quickly to her cheek, first the palm and then the back, murmuring confusedly:

At length came three days of steady rain, followed by cloudless sunshine and full-bodied, vigorous winds straight from out the south.

Instantly the living embers in tree top and grass plat were fanned to flame. Like veritable fire, the leaves blazed up.

Branch after branch caught and crackled; even the dryest, the deadest, were enfolded in the resistless swirl of green. Tree top ignited tree top; the parks and boulevards were one smother of radiance.

Then, all at once, she seemed to awake. Not the ceremony at St. James’ Church, but that awakening had been her marriage. Now it was irrevocable; she was her husband’s; she belonged to him indissolubly, forever and forever, and the surrender was a glory.

Laura in that moment knew that love, the supreme triumph of a woman’s life, was less a victory than a capitulation.

Since then her happiness had been perfect. Literally and truly there was not a cloud, not a mote in her sunshine. She had everything—the love of her husband, great wealth, extraordinary beauty, perfect health, an untroubled mind, friends, position—everything.

“Oh, let’s get on with the story,” he urged. But Pinkerton for long remained for him an ideal, because he was “smart” and “alive.”

“I’m not long very many of art,” he announced. “But I believe that any art that don’t make the world better and happier is no art at all, and is only fit for the dump heap.”

But at last Laura found his abiding affinity in Howells.

Laura sat thinking. At last she rose.

“It is the first time,” she said to herself, “that Curtis ever forgot to kiss me goodbye.”

The day, for all that the month was December, was fine. The sun shone; under foot the ground was dry and hard. The snow which had fallen ten days before was practically gone. In fine, it was a perfect day for riding.

“Oh, you mean the ‘Unknown Bull.’ ”

“I mean the unknown damned fool,” returned Crookes placidly.

There was not a trace of the snob about Charles Cressler. No one could be more democratic. But at the same time, as this interview proceeded, he could not fight down nor altogether ignore a certain qualm of gratified vanity.

“No,” he answered. “No, you must count me out. I quit speculating years ago. And, besides, to sell short on this kind of market—I don’t need to tell you what you risk.”

“Risk hell!” muttered Crookes.

“Well, now, I’ll explain to you, Charlie,” began Freye.

“Don’t you—don’t you make me forget myself;” she cried, breathlessly.

“It seems to me,” observed Page, quietly, “that you’ve done that long since, yourself.”

Laura flung the crop down and folded her arms.

“Well, well,” murmured her husband, shaking his head, bewildered even yet. “Well, it’s a strange wife I’ve got here.”

“When you’ve realised that,” returned Laura, “you’ve just begun to understand me.”

Never had he seen her gayer. Her vivacity was bewildering.

The castanets snapped like the crackling of sparks; her black mantilla was a hovering cloud of smoke.

She was incarnate flame, capricious and riotous, elusive and dazzling.

Then suddenly she tossed the castanets far across the room and dropped upon the couch, panting and laughing.

There was no more noise.

The silence of the vast empty house widened around her at the shutting of the door as the ripples widen on a pool with the falling of the stone.

She crushed her knuckles tighter and tighter over her lips, she pressed her fingers to her eyes, she slowly clasped and reclasped her hands, listening for what she did not know.

If she wept, she wept in silence, and the muffling stillness of the lofty gallery was broken but once, when a cry, half whisper, half sob, rose to the deaf, blind darkness:

“Oh, now I am alone, alone, alone!”

“Corner wheat!” he had exclaimed to her, the following day.

“Corner wheat! It’s the wheat that has cornered me. It’s like holding a wolf by the ears, bad to hold on, but worse to let go.”

But absorbed, blinded, deafened by the whirl of things, Curtis Jadwin could not see how perilously well grounded had been his faint suspicion as to Laura’s distress.

And hardly a day passed that Laura Jadwin, in the solitude of her own boudoir, did not fling her arms wide in a gesture of lassitude and infinite weariness, crying out:

“Oh, the ennui and stupidity of all this wretched life!”

She could look forward to nothing. One day was like the next. No one came to see her. For all her great house and for all her money, she had made but few friends. Her “grand manner” had never helped her popularity.

“J., you’re mad, old fellow. You’re ruined—don’t you understand?—you’re ruined.”

“Then God curse you, Sam Gretry, for the man who failed me in a crisis.”

And as he spoke Curtis Jadwin struck the broker full in the face.

He heard it now, he heard nothing else.

The Wheat had broken from his control.

For months, he had, by the might of his single arm, held it back; but now it rose like the upbuilding of a colossal billow.

… had held the whole Pit in its grip, flung high in the air, in a gesture of defiance, while his voice like the clangour of bugles sounding to the charge of the forlorn hope, rang out again and again, over the din of his enemies:

“Give a dollar for July⁠—give a dollar for July!”

With one accord they leaped upon him. The little group of his traders was swept aside.

“They can cheer now, all they want. They didn’t do it. It was the wheat itself that beat him; no combination of men could have done it—go on, cheer, you damn fools!

He was a bigger man than the best of us.

”

“They can cheer now, all they want. They didn’t do it.

It was the wheat itself that beat him; no combination of men could have done it

—go on, cheer, you damn fools! He was a bigger man than the best of us.”

And then, her resolution girding itself, her will power at fullest stretch, she had put the tragedy from her. Other and—for her—more momentous events impended. Everything in life, even death itself, must stand aside while her love was put to the test.

Life and death were little things. Love only existed;

let her husband’s career fail; what did it import so only love stood the strain and issued from the struggle triumphant?