THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely indeed a busy or anxious time in the City. In the ordinary course of things, it serves as the easy-going prelude--with but casual and inattentive visits eastward, and with only the most careless glances through the financial papers--to the halcyon period of the real vacation.
Men come to the City during this week, it is true, but their thoughts are elsewhere--on the moors, on the blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant German pine forests.
To the great mass of City people; this August in question began in a normal enough fashion. To one little group of operators, however, and to the widening circle of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose interests were more or less involved with those of this group, it was a season of keen perturbation.
A combat of an extraordinary character was going on--a combat which threatened to develop into a massacre.
Even to the operators who, unhappily for themselves, were principals in this fight, it was a struggle in the dark.
They knew little about it, beyond the grimly-patent fact that they were battling for their very lives. The outer ring of their friends and supporters and dependents knew still less, though their rage and fears were perhaps greater.
The "press" seemed to know nothing at all. This unnatural silence of the City's mouthpieces, usually so resoundingly clamorous upon the one side and the other when a duel is in progress, gave a sinister aspect to the thing.
The papers had been gagged and blindfolded for the occasion.
This in itself was of baleful significance. It was not a duel which they had been bribed to ignore.
It was an assassination.
Outwardly there was nothing to see, save the unofficial, bald statement that on August 1st, the latest of twelve fortnightly settlements in this stock, Rubber Consols had been bid for, and carried over, at 15 pounds for one-pound shares.
The information concerned the public at large not at all.
Nobody knew of any friend or neighbour who was fortunate enough to possess some of these shares. Readers here and there, noting the figures, must have said to themselves that certain lucky people were coining money, but very little happened to be printed as to the identity of these people.
Stray notes were beginning to appear in the personal columns of the afternoon papers about a "Rubber King"of the name of Thorpe, but the modern exploitation of the world's four corners makes so many "kings" that the name had not, as yet, familiarized itself to the popular eye.
City men, who hear more than they read, knew in a general way about this "Rubber King." He was an outsider who had come in, and was obviously filling his pockets; but it was a comforting rule that outsiders who did this always got their pockets emptied for them again in the long run.
There seemed nothing about Thorpe to suggest that he would prove an exception to the rule. He was investing his winnings with great freedom, so the City understood, and his office was besieged daily by promoters and touts.
They could clean out his strong-box faster than the profits of his Rubber corner could fill it.
To know such a man, however, could not but be useful, and they made furtive notes of his number in Austin Friars on their cuffs, after conversation had drifted from him to other topics.
As to the Rubber corner itself, the Stock Exchange as a whole was apathetic. When some of the sufferers ventured cautious hints about the possibility of official intervention on their behalf, they were laughed at by those who did not turn away in cold silence.
Of the fourteen men who had originally been caught in the net drawn tight by Thorpe and Semple, all the conspicuous ones belonged to the class of "wreckers,"a class which does not endear itself to Capel Court.
Both Rostocker and Aronson, who, it was said, were worst hit, were men of great wealth, but they had systematically amassed these fortunes by strangling in their cradles weak enterprises, and by undermining and toppling over other enterprises which would not have been weak if they had been given a legitimate chance to live.
Their system was legal enough, in the eyes alike of the law and of the Stock Exchange rules. They had an undoubted right to mark out their prey and pursue it, and bring it down, and feed to the bone upon it. But the exercise of this right did not make them beloved by the begetters and sponsors of their victims. When word first went round, on the last day of February, that a lamb had unexpectedly turned upon these two practised and confident wolves, and had torn an ear from each of them, and driven them pell-mell into a "corner," it was received on all sides with a gratified smile.
Later, by fortnightly stages, the story grew at once more tragic and more satisfactory. Not only Rostocker and Aronson, but a dozen others were in the cul de sac guarded by this surprising and bloody-minded lamb.
Most of the names were well-known as those of "wreckers."In this category belonged Blaustein, Ganz, Rothfoere, Lewis, Ascher, and Mendel, and if Harding, Carpenter, and Vesey could not be so confidently classified, at least their misfortune excited no particular sympathy.
Two other names mentioned, those of Norfell and Pinney, were practically unknown.
There was some surprise, however, at the statement that the old and respected and extremely conservative firm of Fromentin Bros. was entangled in the thing. Egyptian bonds, minor Levantine loans, discounts in the Arabian and Persian trades--these had been specialties of the Fromentins for many years. Who could have expected to find them caught among the "shorts" in Mexican rubber? It was Mexico, wasn't it, that these Rubber Consols purported to be connected with?
