Part 27 (1/2)

The next , if windy The sea sparkled beyond the waste of sand I noted anew the richness of the furnishi+ngs, the greatness of the house Set down in so reat sea, it onderful There was no order for breakfast; we caht on the table

Rolls, chops, anything, were brought on order Possibly because I was one of the first about, led me out--he was up and dressed when I came down--and we strolled over the estate to see e should see

Curiously, although I had seen many country homes of pretension and even luxury, I never saw one that appealed to round of promise and, after a fashi+on, of partial fulfillrand in a limited and yet poetic way Exteriorly its place that vast sweep of sea and sand, its verandahs, so very wide--great smooth floors of red concrete--bordered with stone boxes for flowers and handso walks and drives but newly begun, its stretch of beach, say a half , to be left, as he remarked, ”au naturel,” driftwood, stones and all, struckyachts was to be built, and a certain stretch of beach, not over three hundred feet, cleared for bath houses and a s out into the sea, had already been erected a se tower, open at the botto in a circle upon a concrete floor, above it, a top lookingelse In this upper portion was a room reached by s the reserve and _savoir faire_ hich my host took all this He was so healthy, assured, interested and, I alad to say, not exactly self-satisfied; at least he did not i condition Plainly he was building a very splendid thing His life was nearing its apex He reat taste to have undertaken, let alone acco to a bleak waste of sand between the house and the sea--and it looked like a huge red and yellow bird perched upon a waste of sand--he observed, ”When you coarden of 40,000 roses The wind is nearly always off the sea here I want the perfume to blow over the verandahs I can rotate the roses so that a big percentage of them will always be in blooe, an artesian well newly driven, a drive that was to skirt the sea, a sunken garden some distance fro I caarden was then in blooh this was not a world in which society as yet deigned to move, it was entirely conceivable that at a later period it h and reeable in the main than the hardy, strident members of the so-called really inner circles There were artists, writers, playwrights, singers, actresses, and so men principally who see woirls whose beauty was their only recommendation to consideration

The scene was not without brilliance A butler and numerous flunkeys fluttered to and fro Guests were received at the door by a footoverned in the e,rounds There were affairs, s to and fro at night--no questions asked as to who ca as a reasonable amount of decorum was maintained It was the sarounds were full to overfloith guests and passing friends, whose ay and fascinating costumes and heard as much clever and at times infor this fall and winter I was engaged in hich keptthe period I read , new ventures he was undertaking Yet all at once one winter's day, and out of a clear sky, the papers were full of an enor to the newspapers, the first and foremost of a chain of banks of which he was the head, to say nothing of a bonding and realty co Island, were all involved in the crash Curiously, although no derogatory mention had previously been made of him, the articles and editorials were now most vituperative Their venoet-rich-quick villain of the vilest stripe; he had been juggling a bank, a trust company, an insurance company and a land and street-railway speculative scheambled was not his He had robbed the poor, deceived thee articles which appeared the very first day, I noted one paragraph which stuck in my mind, for I was naturally interested in all this and in him It read:

”Wall Street heard yesterday that Superintendent H---- got his first infor the state in which X----'s affairs were from quarters where resentmentIsland Traction field This is one of the Street's 'clover patches' and the success which the newcoreat pleasure”

Another item read:

”A hitch in a deal that was to have transferred the South Shore to the New York and Queens County Syste Island Railroad, at a profit of almost 2,000,000 to X----, was the cause of all the trouble Very active displeasure on the part of certain powers in Wall Street blocked, it is said, the closing of the deal for the railroad They did not want hih to prevent it At the saht to bear on hi-house refused to clear for his banks X---- was in need of cash, but still insisting on a high rate of remuneration for the road which he had developed to an important point Their sinister influences entered and blocked the transfer until it was no longer possible for hi with these two ite hohen, where he had done thus and so, ”juggled accounts”

between one bank and another, all of which he controlled however, and e sues on, or securities in, new co--tricks which were the ordinary routine of Wall Street and hence rather ridiculous as the sub-stone of so vast a hue and cry

I was puzzled and, more than that, moved by the drama of the man's sudden end, for I understood a little of finance and its ways, also of what place and power had plainly come to mean to him It must be dreadful Yet how could it be, I asked myself, if he really owned fifty-one per cent or more in so many companies that he could be such a dark villain? After all, ownershi+p is ownershi+p, and control, control

On the face of the reports themselves his sche in connection with his happened For one thing, he tried to co out of aof his studio in New York; for another, he tried to take poison Now of a sudden a bachelor sister, of whom I had never heard in all the time I had known him, put in an appearance as his nearest of kin--a woman whose na suddenly been tacked onto it She took him to a sanitarium, from which he was eventually turned out as a criminal, then to a hospital, until finally he surrendered hireat lawyers and other bankers began to enter the case Alienists of repute, those fine chaal world, were employed ore first that he was insane, then that he was not His sister, as a physician and scientist of repute, asked the transfer of all his property to her on the ground that he was incoiving as her reasons for believing hirandeur” and that he believed his which s else to me At the saed this in part in the hope of saving soreat wreck

There were other curious features: Certain eminent men in politics and finance who from revelations made by the books of the various banks were in close financial if not personal relations with X---- denied this coreat cry on the part of these was that he was insane, must be, and that he was all alone in his sche Island, in his studio in New York, were ransacked for details Enough could not be ay, shameful, spendthrift life No one else, of course, had ever been either gay or sha financiers

Then froly low teneion in Brooklyn was discovered somehow or other a very old man and wo people, who insisted that they were his parents, that years before because he and his sister were exceedingly restless and ambitious, they had left them and had only returned occasionally to borrowto come at all In proof of this, letters, witnesses, old photos, were produced It really did appear as if he and his sister, although they had long vigorously denied it, really were the son and daughter of the tho had been petty bakers in Brooklyn, laying up a little co” theh The sister was laying claim to the property as the next of kin If this could be offset, even though X---- were insane, the property would at once be thrown into the hands of the various creditors and sold under a forced sale, of course--in other words, for a song--for their benefit Naturally it was of interest to those ished to have his affairs wound up to have the old people produced But the great financier had been spreading the report all along that he was from Russia, that his parents, or pseudo-parents, were still there, but that really he was the illegitiinally with a poor faht from Brooklyn and compelled to confront hilected the to seriously injure therown in place and station they had becoed their names and soared in a world little dreaainst the sister which effectually prevented her froive the financiers tireat hue and cry over her, the scandal, the shanize their parents as they did or had when confronted by them Horrible! There were most heavily illustrated and tearful Sunday articles, all blazoned forth with pictures of his house and studio, his banks, cars, yacht, groups of guests, while the motives of those who produced the parents were overlooked The pictures of the parents confronting X---- and his sister portrayed very old and feeble people, and were ratherThey insisted that they were his parents and wept brokenly in their hands But why? And he denying it! His sister, who resented all this bitterly and who stood by him valiantly, repudiated, for his sake of course, his and her so-called parents and friends

I never saw such a running to cover of ”friends” in all my life Of all those I had seen about his place and in his company, scores on scores of people reasonably well known in the arts, the stage, the worlds of finance andhis wines, there was scarcely any one noho knew hihtly! When ru, the autoreat country place and the spirited frolics which occurred there began to get abroad, there was no one who about him or them For instance, of all the people who had been close or closest and ht therefore have been expected to be friendly and deeply concerned was de Shay, his fidus Achates and literally his pensioner--yet de Shay was almost the loudest in his denunciation or at least deprecation of X----, his habits and h it was he who had told ed me to come here, there and the other place, especially where X---- was the host, always assuring me that it would be so wonderful and that X---- was really such a great enerous, so worth-while, he was now really the loudest or at least thenever to have been very close to X----, and lifting his eyebrows in astonishuessed what he had actually engineered His ”Did-you-hears,”

”Did-you-knows” and ”Wouldn't-have-dreamed” would have done credit to a tea-party He was so shocked, especially at X----'s robbing poor children and orphans, although in so far asthat went to prove that he had any intention of robbing anybody--that is, directly In the usual Wall Street high finance style he was robbing Peter to pay Paul, that is, he was using the monies of one corporation which he controlled to bolster up any of the others which he controlled, and ashi+ng one hand with the other,” a proceeding so common in finance that to really radically and truly oppose it, or do aith it, would rand crash

Be that as it al” seizure and confiscation of all his properties In the first place, by alienists representing the District Attorney and the State banking department, he was declared sane and placed on trial for embezzlement Secondly, his sister's plea that his property be put into her hands as trustee or administrator was thrown out of court and she herself arrested and confined for perjury on the ground that she had perjured herself in swearing that she was his next of kin when in reality his real parents, or so they swore, were alive and in America

Next, his banks, trust coreat country estate, were swiftly thrown into the hands of receivers (what an appropriate name!) and wound up ”for the benefit of creditors”

All the while X---- was in prison, protesting that he was really not guilty, that he was solvent, or had been until he was attacked by the State bank examiner or the department back of him, and that he was the victi the State banking department and other means to drive him out of financial life, and that solely because of his desire to grow and because by chance he had been iuarded fields of the ultra-rich of Wall Street--the street railway area in New York and Brooklyn

One day, so he publicly swore to the grand jury, by which he was being exareat sky-scrapers of New York, which occupied an entire floor and commanded vast panoramas in every direction (another evidence of the randeur,” I presume), he was called to answer the telephone One Mr Y----, so his assistant said, one of the eminent financiers of Wall Street and America, was on the wire Without any preli was this Mr X---- on the wire, the latter proceeded, ”This is Mr Y---- Listen closely to what I aet out of the street railway business in New York or so you a reasonable warning Take it” Then the phone clicked ely and ominously and superiorly at the other end

”I knew at the tirand jury, ”that I was really listening to the man as most powerful in such affairs in New York and elsewhere and that he et out without closing up the one deal which stood to net me two million dollars clear if I closed it At the same time I wanted to enter this field and didn't see why I shouldn't If I didn't it spelled not ruin by any reat loss, to h, just at this ti pressed by those hom I was associated to wind up this particular venture and turn s I have often wondered, in the light of their subsequent actions, why they should have beco just at this time At the same time, perhaps I was a little vain and self-sufficient I had once got the better of soreat financier in a Western Power deal, and I felt that I could put this thing through too Hence I refused to heed the warning However, I found that all those ere previously interested to buy or at least develop the property were now suddenly grown cold, and a little later when, having entered on several otherdepart fraud and insolvency, closed all my banks

”You kno it is when they do this to you Cry 'Fire!' and you can nearly wreck a perfectly good theater building Depositors withdraw, securities tuin, your financial associates get frightened or asha and nervous as money Time will show that I was not insolvent at the tis, but so would the books or the affairs of any great bank, especially at this ti no et s of various kinds--legal, technical and the like--X---- was finally sent to the penitentiary, and spent some time there At the same time his confession finally wrecked about nine other eminent men, financiers all A dispassionate exaht years later caused me to conclude without hesitation that the man had been a victim of a cold-blooded conspiracy, the object of which was to oust him from opportunities and to forestall him in methods which would certainly have led to enormous wealth He was apparently in a position and with the brains to do s which the ablest and coldest financiers of his day had been and were doing, and they did not want to be bothered with, would not brook, in short, his approaching rivalry Like the various usurpers of regal powers in ancient days, they thought it best to kill a possible claimant to the throne in his infancy

But that youth of his! The long and devious path by which he had co to the case and to a tihteen, and when he was beginning his career as a book agent, was a letter written to his ust, 1892), which read:

”MY DEAR PARENTS: Please answerof you or nothing Reme of you anything You have given to the other child not 15 but hundreds, and nohen I, the very youngest, ask of you,to be so hard-hearted as to refuse me? Without these 15 it is left to me to be without income for two or three weeks