Chapter XIII: Gathering Clouds

Newspaper men are notoriously improvident. Many of them spend their salaries as fast as they earn them. Perhaps if they were to acquire habits of thrift and were ambitious to save, they would cease to be newspaper men and would go into fields where the brains and energy and hard work that make a successful newspaper man, would make the same man rich if as earnestly applied to almost any legitimate business enterprise. In proof of this nearly all of the good newspaper men I knew who left editorial jobs to go into business, soon climbed to the top, while those of us who stuck and grew old and gray, with no taste for business and little inclination to save, counted ourselves lucky if we kept out of debt.

Love of luxury was my besetting sin. I was like the chap who declared he could get along without the necessities if he could have the luxuries. Perhaps I was too much absorbed in news gathering and newspaper making to give much serious thought to personal matters. I was not one of the saving kind, too fond of the good things of life to hoard my earnings.

There was a more cogent reason why I didn’t feel called upon to stint and save; I had expectations of inheriting great wealth. A relative, whose sincerity I never had cause to question, had promised to make me rich, so why deny myself and those I loved, at a time we could most enjoy what money could buy? Why worry over what became of my newspaper salary when there were millions in sight that would some day be mine?

An old man whose life was nearly spent would soon go to his grave and there would be no pocket in his shroud to hold the eighty millions of his miserly hoarding. Hadn’t he assured me time and again that he intended leaving me a large slice of his vast fortune and wouldn’t it be silly for me to scrimp in the present when the future would soon be splendidly provided for? It never occurred to me that a slip might come that would deprive me of the expected inheritance.

Already I had visions of a mansion on the Avenue, a home in the country, a yacht, a garage full of cars, a closet all my own to hang my clothes in and a pair of suspenders for each pair of trousers.

The relative whose millions I expected to inherit was Russell Sage, my great uncle.

He had no children. My grandmother was his only sister and I appeared to be the only relative in whom he was interested. He liked to go about with me, for I had passes to everything that was worth while and it pleased him that we could sit in a box at the opera or at any of the theaters and not have to pay. I took him to many of the big political gatherings at Madison Square Garden and got him a seat on the platform, and before the meetings were over my police friends would lift him over the heads of the crowds and escort him to the street to save him from the crush. I took him to prize fights and watched him grow as excited as any around us.

Sometimes he would drive with me behind my team of fast horses, sometimes I drove with him behind his, and often we would meet out at the speedway and he would race his team against mine. I took him for his first automobile ride. It tickled him so much that I think he would have been tempted to buy a car if my chauffeur hadn’t told him how much gasoline was consumed in a drive of twenty-five miles. He always figured the cost of everything. He didn’t buy a car, but he rode in mine whenever I would take him and I never saw him so happy as when we were racing at high speed over the fine roads of Westchester County and on Long Island.

What a lot of fun that old man could have gotten out of life if he hadn’t been so stingy!

Russell Sage was the most penurious man I ever knew. In all his life he never spent more than twenty dollars for a suit of clothes or four dollars for a pair of shoes. He boasted to me that he made a twenty-dollar suit last him from five to ten years, and he wore them until they were more threadbare and shabby than the clothes worn by the man who cleaned his office. He was more than eighty years old before he put on his first suit of underwear.

I have sat in his shabby little bedchamber when we were going out to an evening entertainment and watched him sew a button on his coat or mend a rent in some part of his clothing. I have seen him draw off his shoes and display no embarrassment because his toes were peeping through the holes in his socks. I have walked a mile with him through congested streets to return an empty mineral water bottle and collect the nickel he had deposited with the dealer.

He was a director and one of the largest stockholders of the elevated lines and when we would ride uptown together he would crowd ahead with his annual pass and wait until I had purchased a ticket. Once he said he could get me by the ticket chopper on his pass, but he didn’t feel it would be fair to the other stockholders.

Russell Sage worshipped God, but his God was Mammon. He loved nothing but money. Nothing else in all this wonderful world counted.

“You’ll be a very rich man some day,” he often said to me. Once when he had repeated this several times and looked as if he was expecting me to reply, I said that I hoped I would get more enjoyment out of riches than he did.

“I hope you will get as much pleasure out of spending my money as I have had in accumulating it,” was his characteristic response.

I sometimes wonder what he would have thought could he have known what became of his millions after death deprived him of the pleasure of counting them. I have never doubted that Mr. Sage meant what he so often said about making me rich, but Mr. Sage had no voice in distributing his fortune. Long before he died his mind went awry and trustees were secretly appointed to look after his business affairs, while he remained secluded in his home. It was while the old man was in this pitiful state of mental decay that he signed a will. It is common history how his will subsequently was altered and erasures made with chemicals.

Some of my relatives started to contest it, but they were persuaded by their lawyers to compromise and their lawyers received fat fees not only from my relatives who employed them, but from those who had charge of settling the estate. I remained passively inert. One of the big lawyers of New York urged me to contest and offered to supply the funds to carry the suit to the highest court, but I couldn’t without hurting those who were near and dear to me and who needed what they got by the settlement to make easy declining years.

Newspaper readers will remember how that crazy Norcross came on from Boston, walked into the office of Russell Sage, demanded a million dollars and when he didn’t get it exploded a bomb that blew his body into fragments, wrecked the offices, hurled a man through a window into St. Paul’s churchyard, and cruelly maimed for life the unfortunate Laidlaw, with whom my uncle shielded himself from harm. I was called to Mr. Sage’s home that evening, where I listened to the graphic recital he gave of what had happened.

Although he had passed through the most exciting experience that ever came to him, he told the story without apparent emotion and with astonishing calmness, not forgetting the smallest detail. The amazing part of it to me was when he related how he had grabbed Laidlaw, a broker’s clerk, who chanced to enter the office just as the robber made his demand for money, and had forcibly held him in front of himself until the bomb went off. A few trivial scratches on his face were the only marks on Mr. Sage to show how close he had been to death.

I told him that the robber had been torn apart and that Laidlaw had been so terribly hurt that he might not recover. If he did he would probably be a helpless cripple all the rest of his life.

“Too bad, too bad,” was Mr. Sage’s only comment.

I suggested that someone be sent to look after Laidlaw and provide the best medical aid obtainable, but he made no reply other than an impatient movement of his hand. The suggestion plainly annoyed him. He hated anything that touched his pocket.

Afterward, when he was sued for damages, he denied on the witness stand that he had used Laidlaw to shield himself from the robber, but I know from his own lips that he did do it and I have always believed that if he had given Laidlaw one of his eighty millions he would have gotten off cheap.

Russell Sage wasn’t built that way. He would pay without protest a fifty-thousand-dollar fee to his lawyer for fighting a damage suit, but not a dollar would he voluntarily give to the unfortunate victim of his selfish cowardice.

It was in the parlor of his Fifth Avenue home, one Sunday afternoon, that Mr. Sage introduced me to Jay Gould, with whom he was associated for many years in great financial operations. Jay Gould was a wiry little man with bristling beard and ferret-like eyes. He impressed me as being extraordinarily restless and nervous.

He motioned me to a seat beside him on a divan and became so chatty and affable that I ventured to relate an incident of my early reporting days in which he figured. It was while I was with the Chicago _Tribune_. I had been sent out of town to meet an incoming train to which his private car was attached, my mission being to interview him concerning a western railroad he was accused of having deliberately wrecked. While we were seated in his car he began to grow fidgety over the speed the train was making. Both of us were nearly pitched from our seats every time the train took a curve. The locomotive engineer had probably been told who was behind him and was trying to show off.

Mr. Gould stood it as long as he could but became so frightened that he interrupted our interview by springing to his feet and jerking the bellcord. The train was stopped and when the conductor came running back to find out what was the matter, he got a lecture on carelessness that made his ears tingle.

When I related this incident that Sunday afternoon in Mr. Sage’s parlor, a peculiar expression came over Mr. Gould’s face.

“Are you a newspaper man?” he asked.

When I told him that I was with the _World_, the newspaper he once owned and used to boost his schemes, he hastily arose, abruptly walked to another part of the room and never deigned to notice me again. Jay Gould didn’t like newspaper men. There was a reason. Newspapers blocked some of his cleverest schemes by turning the searchlight of publicity on them.

It was a treat to listen to Mr. Sage relate bits of anecdotes about the big men of finance. He knew them all, knew most of them more intimately than their wives did, for it was to him they came in times of stress to borrow money. It has been said of him that he had more ready cash at his immediate command than any man in the world. His loans were usually made in millions and I am certain that he always exacted two millions of collateral for every million of his cash.

He told me a lot of interesting stories about his financial “buddies” that I don’t feel privileged to repeat. I loved to hear him tell about Vanderbilt. Mr. Sage always called him “Bill.” Fancy being able to speak of the greatest railway magnate in the world as “Bill!” That alone must be full compensation for the many annoyances of being a multimillionaire. It was a treat to hear him tell how “Bill” would come to him and humbly plead for a loan of a few millions to tide him over the week-end. That is where his fun came in. It was all the fun he ever got.

The Sages lived for almost half a century in an old-fashioned brown stone house on Fifth Avenue, a few doors above Forty-second Street, but after the aged financier lost his mind a more pretentious house was bought farther up the avenue and Mrs. Sage furnished it newly throughout. When it was ready for occupancy the old gentleman was decoyed up there and shown through the handsome rooms, but he turned his nose up at the expensive furnishings and insisted on returning to the familiar old home with all its well-worn shabbiness. They had a hard time coaxing him to stay. It wasn’t until everything in the old house had been sent to an auction shop and the house itself turned into a busy hive for dressmakers and hairdressers that he was weaned from it.

Even his personal wardrobe went with the rest. Riley, his nurse, bundled all of the threadbare garments and battered hats and patched shoes and sent them to the Salvation Army to be given to anyone who would accept them, ordering for Mr. Sage an entirely new outfit. It was then that this poor old millionaire, poor in spite of the fact that he had more ready cash than any other man in the world, put on the first suit of underwear he ever wore and for the first time in all his life was attired in clothing that distinguished him from the most lowly beggar in the street.

My grandmother told me this story connected with the birth of Russell Sage: Her parents were poor and lived on a small farm near Oneida, midway between Syracuse and Utica, in the central part of New York State. When my grandmother was seven years old she was sent out of the house one day and cautioned not to return until late in the afternoon. She wandered into the woods and came back with her apron filled with black and white “kittens” which she had found squealing in a stump. They smelled so dreadfully she intended to wash them but when she got home she was immediately called to her mother’s room and the bedclothing drawn down to show to her astonished eyes a new baby brother the doctor had brought in her absence. Grandmother was so surprised that she dumped the litter of kittens on the bed for the baby to play with, but her horrified mother quickly pulled the covers over the baby and screamed for someone to come and take away “those nasty skunks.”

I related this incident to Russell Sage eighty years after it happened and he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks.

Grandmother also told me that he didn’t attend the funeral of either his father or his mother. On both occasions he telegraphed that he was too busy to leave New York, directing that bills for the funeral expenses be sent to him. In later years, when the cemetery where his parents were buried was abandoned, he telegraphed instructions to have the bodies taken up and interred in another cemetery at Oneida and he also directed that a suitable headstone be erected. All this was done, but he didn’t so much as acknowledge receipt of the bills that were repeatedly sent to him. In the end my grandmother had to pay.

He left her fifty thousand dollars when he died. That is, a bequest for that amount was one of the clauses in his will, but when the will was filed she had been dead for several years. He had evidently forgotten, for she died before the will was drawn. Riley told me that Mr. Sage didn’t know what he was doing when he signed the will and hadn’t the mentality to understand what was in it.

When I tumbled from the dream clouds and realized that the millions I had expected to get had faded into a single cipher that hadn’t even a rim, I accepted the situation philosophically and I do not recall now that I had any feeling of disappointment or resentment. I would have liked the money for the comforts and pleasures it would have brought, but when Mr. Sage’s will was made public I was already in such easy circumstances that I had been able to provide for myself nearly everything that I could have gotten with his money. I had been successful with speculation in Wall Street and had salted away in a safe-deposit vault securities that apparently insured me a competence as long as I might live. I had a yacht, a high-powered touring car, fast horses, and was able to live in the finest hotel in New York, to make a tour of Europe and to spend all of my vacations as luxuriously as the richest of the idle rich.

And I had the closet all my own that I had always coveted and the pair of suspenders for each pair of trousers. Besides all this I had a good position and a good salary that promised to endure as long as I should need them. I felt that I could afford to smile over the loss of my potential inheritance and smile I did, for I had already enjoyed a dozen years of affluence and I was so lucky in speculating that I had an idea that I would gain riches without having them handed to me by the administrators of a dead man’s estate.

Then things began to happen. In Wall Street one may get rich or go broke almost over night. The ticker is a fascinating play-thing when it is ticking thousands of dollars into one’s pockets, but it doesn’t always tick that way. Somehow I didn’t realize that my “luck” was in following the tips of friends who let me in on some of their financial deals. I got an idea that I could do as well on my own hook and sometimes I played the tips of men who thought they knew and were only poor guessers. There came some hard knocks and my securities began to take wings. The more I plunged the harder the knocks. Then came sickness and a peremptory order from a physician to take my tubercular throat to California.

I had some big deals pending when this calamity befell me, deals that I was confident would turn out successful and recoup all of my losses. To safeguard my account if the market took a downward turn in my absence, I withdrew my securities and deposited them with my brokers. I also took to them securities that were not mine, but of which I was legal custodian. In doing this there was no thought of dishonesty in my mind.

In the hurry of getting away my only thought was to leave with my brokers more than sufficient collateral to protect my account in any emergency that might arise while I was away. It didn’t occur to me that I might be wiped out. I expected to be gone not more than six weeks, but it was eight months before I returned, eight months of hardening outdoor life in the mountains of California and Colorado and two months of recuperative sojourn in the lazy atmosphere of the beautiful Hawaiian Islands.

During the winter months that I was in California I kept pretty closely in touch with the trend of affairs in Wall Street and the reports that came from my brokers were all favorable. In the effort to regain health I spent money with the free hand of a Pittsburgh millionaire, but with every confidence that my speculations would pay it back and leave a fat margin to my credit. This was the situation when I sailed for Honolulu.

In that far-away, fascinating paradise, it was easy to forget Wall Street. Surf riding, midnight bathing, moonlight rides, shore picnics, native feasts with wonderful dancing and more wonderful music, climbs up Mount Tantalus, motor trips over the Pali and around the island through sugar and coffee plantations, and cocoanut and pineapple groves, and an excursion to the awe-inspiring volcano, Kilauea; all these delightful distractions tend to make one unmindful of the frantic clashing of bulls and bears in the arena of the New York Stock Exchange. There is no other spot on all the earth that I have seen where one can so completely forget to worry and gain such perfect rest. It is called the paradise of the Pacific. It is dreamland.

For three months I didn’t see a market quotation. I knew that I was many thousands of dollars ahead of the game when my ship sailed from San Francisco, and it never occurred to me that a convulsion might come that would turn rich men into paupers. A convulsion did come.

On my return to California I found that all of my supposed profits had been swept away and that many of the securities I had deposited as margins had gone with them. I telegraphed to my brokers to find out how I stood. A reassuring reply came back that the worst was over and the tendency of the market was now upward. The statement that came with it showed a satisfactory balance to my credit. I had been scorched a bit but was far from consumed.

A San Francisco bank president took me to his club to luncheon and introduced me to other financiers, all of whom spoke optimistically in discussing the future of the stock market. I confided to the bank president what had happened to me while I was blissfully oblivious in Hawaii and he gave me a tip that he said would make up my losses and a lot of money besides. It was to buy sugar. He got the tip in “strict confidence” he told me, from the biggest sugar grower in the world. That night I wired to my brokers an order to buy me enough sugar to stock a wholesale grocer. A few days later I was inflated with optimism, for sugar began to rise.

Before starting for New York, I decided to visit a celebrated throat specialist and let him look me over. At the end of the week he declared that it would be hazardous for me to return East before warm weather set in. My throat was improved but not cured. He suggested Arizona or Colorado. A friend who had accompanied me back from Honolulu, invited me to go to his big cattle ranch, six thousand feet above sea level, on the western slope of the Rockies.

So to Colorado I went, after a flying trip to the Yosemite and the Big Trees. On the way I read the newspapers and sugar looked to be the sweetest quotation in the market reports. I was certain from the way the market was then going that my profits would bring back all I had lost and more than pay for the expenses of my trip. I decided to act on the advice of the banker and not sell until sugar reached a point that he had jotted on the back of his visiting card.

I got to the ranch of my friend, after a hard ride on a hard-riding horse. It was a fifty-mile climb over steep mountain roads. There was a log cabin with a blazing fire to welcome me. It was to be exclusively mine as long as I cared to stay. The cowboys took me on hunting and fishing trips and I went with them on the spring round-up and aided in driving thousands of cattle to be branded. It was the best fun I ever experienced and all the while I knew that the tubercular germs in my throat were being killed and that sugar was going to bring me greater riches than I had ever known.

One day a telegram came from my brokers. Sugar had gone to smash and so had I. All of my securities and securities that were not mine had been lost.

I was broke. Worse than that, I was ruined and dishonored.