Penny Plain and Penny Colored

YESTERDAY, on the way to my broker’s pleasant office, I turned through the vestibule of what was once upon a time my savings bank and glanced with some pity along the row of patient folk waiting on the benches.

I knew them, those estimable people reared in the chill of economy on adages of thrift. They believe that waste makes want, that a penny saved is a penny got. They have never lit the fire before November. They have walked when they should have called a taxi, have eaten fish when they have wanted a bit of steak. They have violated the first principles of their religion by an eternal taking thought for the morrow in a spirit anxious and frugal. They have been listening to the privy paw of the grim wolf, whether or not he has been actually scratching.

I used to sit near the upward end of the line, I remember, troubled with indiscriminate pity for my fellow beings. A confusion of miserable images crowded upon my sympathy — scenes of mortgages foreclosing, of doctors’ bills accumulating, of loss of jobs coincident with the loss of health, of ungrateful sons addicted to drink and calling in callous repetition for the savings of a mother’s lifetime, of washerwomen whose feet had given out. I sat more heavily with the dragging minutes. And I was sorriest for myself, as I kept my place like a pauper asking for outside relief. My futile accumulation seemed an inconsiderable barrier, ineffective as a pack of cards, against the encroaching future. The poorhouse became an actual image, just over the very next hill. The spectre of penury loomed larger with every dime I saved.

I too used to stand in awe of those clerks to whom their abject customers make from time to time their shy approaches. Those clerks are kind at heart, but, when all was said, they had no personal interest in me. Their usual dole was but a slip of paper, with which, I remember, I used to hurry from wrong window to wrong window, timid, inferior, feeling as I suppose an ‘inmate’ usually feels. Whether I put in my money or took it out, I was persuaded that the last clerk pitied me in his heart and believed that I had no more.

And had I? What sort of property was that? What comfort have these patient waiters, even on the happy supposition that they are all depositing, in that mysterious hoard which we predicate in subterranean vaults but which it is never our privilege to see? When will they ever see the color of their money? What color has it, that remote, theoretical sum indicated only by slow-crawling entries in a thin bank book removed by a lengthening chain from the dear intimacy of pocket and understanding? What profit in that impalpable entity, their four per cent handled by vicarious finger?

That was a heartening story in the papers not long ago telling how in New York they moved securities, negotiable and nonnegotiable, from the old to the new bank building, all in the course of a few hours, with armored cars and machine-gun support, and regiments of that splendid and terrible phalanx, the bicycle police. As I read, I was tempted to take out a savings account again. But I said to myself, ‘No. It may be that in my lifetime we shall never see the like again. That property has become already, as before, intangible, sunk back into the so-called reserve — or, worse, it is already shuffling through the currency, profaned by miscellaneous touch.’

Thank heavens, the shabby days of the savings bank are over for me! Not that times have changed. The peculiarity of Midas died with him. Whatever weights are recoverable from watery depths, nobody has proposed to raise the Rheingold. But I have put a quietus on that wolf. Amid the wide dispersal of interests which we deplore in our economic order, I have remembered an ancient secret. I will handle my own hoard. I return to the wisdom of the nursery years when, in the cadence of true romance, —

I too will be a king.

To resume. I passed through the savings bank at a quickening pace and entered the magnificent structure near by sacred to bond selling and the mysteries of high finance. I was myself again and in my right environment.

Well do I recall my first visit. As I turned in through the big swing doors a wave of air luxuriously warm struck my face like a welcoming. Ahead a genial vista opened of marble hall and spacious vestibule leading off to unsuspected opportunity. I chose one of twenty gilded lifts, and rose with magic and instantaneous upheaval. I shrank for a moment as I entered the sunny office, but a pleasant youth, graceful of guise, hurried forward. He set me a chair, for there was no pauper throng by the wall; and in the warmth I basked happily, waiting till he should be free to give me his complete attention. For a minute he was interrupted to take an order for conceivable thousands; a boy brought a yellow slip indicative of superpowerful propositions. I heard the delightful click of business, that lively rustle with which stocks are exchanged, and settled back, realizing that I had a stake in the country.

My man, courteous and all attention, turned to my service. Blushing, I confided that I am a widow and orphan. I affirmed that no risks must be entertained, but managed to stammer that six per cent was what I should really like, mentioning five hundred dollars as my sum available for investment. My broker, all obsequious, implied in a sort of indistinguishable murmur that it was indeed a considerable property. Since so much was at my disposal, a very advantageous placing could be found, and, by a lucky chance, one that was more than usually under the ægis of his firm. Still, we were in no hurry. He opened an enormous sheet of august promotings, every one appealing to the really imaginative mind.

As I listened, I glowed with startling conceptions. With a rush I realized a quite new set of adages. How true it is that great oaks from little acorns grow! How brave the warning, ‘Nothing venture, nothing have!’ I caught a vision of Capital, that noble thing. I paused, baffled by the choice among attractive miracles to be achieved by my five hundred dollars. Should I build in New York a tower to shiver the skies, ambitious as Babel, which should nevertheless stand and avail for my interest to come? Foreign bonds? Should I strike the dead rock of some public credit till it spring upon its feet? Water power? Should I say to the stream, ‘Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther’? Telephone and telegraph? Should I put a girdle round the earth in less than thirty seconds? Superpower? Should I drive the elements before me, like the good old djinn, and bind in one the forces that move the sun and the other stars? Domestic manufacture? I divined the beauty of Organized Labor — heard the ‘ten thousand times ten thousand spindles’ which Carlyle could hear joining the song of the morning stars of a Monday. I had but to choose.

We returned at last, well satisfied, to the first superpowerful proposition. I relaxed in the consciousness of opulence.

And an endless string of simple pleasures has followed the moment when my polite young broker took my name and address. First arrives the bond itself, by registered mail, clean, crackling, and printed in an attractive shade of blue. I resolve forthright to own before I die a bond in green, a bond in pink, a bond in purple, a bond in orange. There continues, too, the agreeable battery of enticing offers as the years go by, all from the polite young man in whose breast hope springs eternal. And who shall say that his trust is misplaced? I have seen the color of my money. There are, besides, the great coupon days, with their descent into the veritable cave of Mammon. Best, of course, is the coming of the dividend, that check for seven dollars and fifty cents dropping casually out of the mail on an unexpected date so neatly that it seems like a contribution from good Saint Nicholas. Another, it seems, might happen any day. There will be no more trouble with that wolf.

Many needlessly ill-natured things have been written about Mammon. He has been called dull, unhappy, old, said to sit miserable in dim halls of darkness, grown poor in plenty, or weighted with metallic coffers of unprofitable riches. He is not, I am sure, as bad as he is painted. Elderly he is, beyond a doubt, but for the most part innocent as can be. He sits, perhaps, even now by a sunny window in his worn armchair, a-reading of his Times, peering complacently through the financial section to see how his bond grows to-day. By and by, maybe, he will turn to his desk and open carelessly a certificate for two shares in something rather good which he has forgotten to take to the bank. It combines for him all the comforts of the stocking with the romance of El Dorado and the Indian Peru.