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the time of my recovery several years. I was young enough to
wait with patience for the strayed millions to come back. But
five years is a long time for a man to be poor. Young or old, it
is not to be relished. I could do without the yachts a great
deal easier than I could without a market to come back on. The
greatest opportunity of a lifetime was holding before my very
nose the purse I had lost. I could not put out my hand and reach
for it. A very shrewd boy, that Dan Williamson; as slick as they
make them; farsighted, ingenious, daring. He is a thinker, has
imagination, detects the vulnerable spot in any man and can plan
cold-bloodedly to hit it. He did his own sizing up and soon
doped out just what to do to me in order to reduce me to
complete inoffensiveness in the market. He did not actually do
me out of any money. On the contrary, he was to all appearances
extremely nice about it. He loved his sister, Mrs. Marquand, and
he did his duty toward her as he saw it.
CHAPTER XIV
IT has always rankled in my mind that after I left William-
son & Brown's office the cream was off the market. We ran smack
into a long moneyless period; four mighty lean years. There was
not a penny to be made. As Billy Henriquez once said, "It was
the kind of market in which not even a skunk could make a
scent."
It looked to me as though I was in Dutch with destiny. It
might have been the plan of Providence to chasten me, but really
I had not been filled with such pride as called for a fall. I
had not committed any of those speculative sins which a trader
must expiate on the debtor side of the account. I was not guilty
of a typical sucker play. What I had done, or, rather, what I
had left undone, was something for which I would have received
praise and not blame north of Forty-second Street. In Wall
Street it was absurd and costly. But by far the worst thing
about it was the tendency it had to make a man a little less
inclined to permit himself human feelings in the ticker
district.
I left Williamson's and tried other brokers' offices. In
every one of them I lost money. It served me right, because I
was trying to force the market into giving me what it didn't
have to give to wit, opportunities for making money. I did not
find any trouble in getting credit, because those who knew me
had faith in me. You can get an idea of how strong their
confidence was when I tell you that when I finally stopped trad-
ing on credit I owed well over one million dollars.
The trouble was not that I had lost my grip but that during
those four wretched years the opportunities for making money
simply didn't exist. Still I plugged along, trying to make a
stake and succeeding only in increasing my indebtedness. After I
ceased trading on my own hook because I wouldn't owe my friends
any more money I made a living handling accounts for people who
believed I knew the game well enough to beat it even in a dull
market. For my services I received a percentage of the profits
when there were any. That is how I lived. Well, say that is how
I sustained life.
Of course, I didn't always lose, but I never made enough to
allow me materially to reduce what I owed. Finally, as things
got worse, I felt the beginnings of discouragement for the first
time in my life.
Everything seemed to have gone wrong with me. I did not go
about bewailing the descent from millions and yachts to debts
and the simple life. I didn't enjoy the situation, but I did not
fill up with self-pity. I did not propose to wait patiently for
time and Providence to bring about the cessation of my
discomforts. I therefore studied my problem. It was plain that
the only way out of my troubles was by making money. To make
money I needed merely to trade successfully. I had so traded
before and I must do so once more. More than once in the past I
had run up a shoe string into hundreds of thousands. Sooner or
later the market would offer me an opportunity.
I convinced myself that whatever was wrong was wrong with
me and not with the market. Now what could be the trouble with
me? I asked myself that question in the same spirit in which I
always study the various phases of my trading problems. I
thought about it calmly and came to, the conclusion that my main
trouble came from worrying over the money I owed. I was never
free from the mental discomfort of it. I must explain to you
that it was not the mere consciousness of my indebtedness. Any
business man contracts debts in the course of his regular
business. Most of my debts were really nothing but business
debts, due to what were unfavourable business conditions for me,
and no worse than a merchant suffers from, for instance, when
there is an unusually prolonged spell of unseasonable weather.
Of course as time went on and I could not pay I began to
feel less philosophical about my debts. I'll explain: I owed
over a million dollars -- all of it stock-market losses,
remember. Most of my creditors were very nice and didn't bother
me; but there were two who did bedevil me. They used to follow
me around. Every time I made a winning each of them was
Johnny-on-the-spot, wanting to know all about it and insisting
on getting theirs right off. One of them, to whom I owed eight
hundred dollars, threatened to sue me, seize my furniture, and
so forth. I can't conceive why he thought I was concealing
assets, unless it was that I didn't quite look like a stage hobo
about to die of destitution.
As I studied the problem I saw that it wasn't a case that
called for reading the tape but for reading my own self. I quite
cold-bloodedly reached the conclusion that I would never be able
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Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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