Page images
PDF
EPUB

never throw good money after bad. Because he could listen to the most desperate entreaties with a face of stone, he was called callous-the man with a bag of pesos for a heart. Yet it was not he who was cruel, but economics-the rule of life itself. He could foresee the end before the common run of men, that was all.

He knew they had called him hard-his wife's relatives, the society of the capital in which he moved with regard to Julio. Well, Julio was the best judge of that, now he was a man grown. They had cried shame behind his back, that a joven distinguido a young man of rank-should spend his youth grinding at ledgers, and living on his bank-clerk's salary in foreign lands, when he might be taking the place in the gay capital of San Martin to which his father's position entitled him. He had tried Julio in a furnace, he was well aware, but he had known his metal. Julio had stood the fire. The bank would be safe with him. The boy knew now, having come to manhood, what life meant, and what his father had done for him: developed his inherited bent, given him a lifework, a just appreciation of the power that lay, for good or ill, in the great position to which he would succeed. Julio was a great comfort, his greatest success-a man, when so many of the sons of the great men of Don Alejandro's youth, the founders of the nation, were futres-idlers in the clubs, with

VOL. CCXXI.-NO. MCCCXXXV.

nothing of their fathers about them.

So reflected the old banker, whom men called jocosely, behind their hands, old Don Dinero, old money-bags, who dreamed selfish dreams of gold, and thought of nothing but sweating the peso. But they would have been astonished if they had realised, and Don Alejandro no less if it had occurred to him, how long it was since he had thought of himself, or of money either. At one time the bank had been his chief preoccupation; but the bank had been an assured success a score of years ago, and another and an earlier idol had taken its place-the idol of a boyhood enthusiasm fired by the example of men around him who were giving their very lives in its service, always at the back of his mind, even in his first struggles, but now revealed in its inner shrine

the land itself, the country of his birth, the Republic of San Martin. He did not suspect his own patriotism; it was rooted deep in his being, so much a part of him that he could only be dimly aware of it as a profound inarticulate emotion. To see ten ox-carts groan through the dust where there had been only one; to see the irrigation works he had financed stretching out their tranques like silver fingers into desolate valleys, so that they bloomed like the rose; to see the country people in their one-roomed huts, who had less control over their own destiny

C

influence in the development of the primitive resources of the land. But too old, also (and he had hoped never to be too old for that), to prevent the beginnings of the slow declin of which he must be a helples witness.

than the sapos which croaked lot, after his years of sound in the ponds at night, gradually improving the tenor of their frugal peasant lives, and their fat babies, the future citizens of the land, rolling in the sun; to have a power like Providence over all this, and the brain to use that power unerringly for the sane practical end-that was what he had lived for these thirty years. He had made his influence paramount in the chaotic welter of the country's revenues, and had known a rare, almost sensuous, enjoyment in the telling weight of his hand. He had produced order from disorder, and sitting at the right hand of Presidents, had guided them in the paths of sound finance, so that the country's credit stood higher in the money markets of the world than that of any other South American republic. The peso stood at forty-seven pence pence only a penny under par-in spite of the recent war with Platarica; and in the middle of that war they had borrowed at 4 per cent in London, and been oversubscribed. Who could show the equal of that from Panama to Tierra del Fuego? It had been largely his doing, and the keystone of his career.

[ocr errors]

Now, so it seemed, he was to do this no more. He was an old man, thank God-too old to see his lifework crumble entirely away, his fostered commerce dead from slow paralysis, his common folk destitute again, stripped of the sufficiency which had begun to be the universal

Paper money! To thir that at this late day, when t country had triumphantly va quished so much, San Mart should come to it! That wh the poverty of the early da of independence, the wasta of civil war, the misrule dictators, had all been ove come, and duly compensate for in full, they were tame to leave their proud positic of integrity, and to have r course to that open fraud, a inconvertible paper currency And he, with his record behin him, overborne and set aside his bank, and the power of hi hand, defied; and to know in his heart that he could b SO defied with impunity Twenty-ay, ten-years ago hi mere disapproval, voiced in the proper quarters, would have been enough to scotch such a scheme. But the great men of his middle age were dead, or past their usefulness, and he was an old man.

There was a sudden hush in the body of the bank outside, and a bolting and barring of the massive front doors. It was twelve o'clock, the time of almuerzo, and the bank would be silent for two hours. The head mozo, his face a mahogany mask over the white linen of

his summer tunic, hovered out

side the glass door. Don Alejandro rose wearily, and pulled down the slide of his desk. He crossed the room, and stood for a moment looking up at the portrait of General Santos,

been wiser fun
where was sirer
would take many more
chests of the st
to buy the compu
to-day.

The mozo, NL

little inner door ʼn the greas
carved portal wien inten rom
the times of the Colony. Jom.
stood for a nomua

[ocr errors]

r

yivate edg, WHE fun-enlowed moles aut

The sens-dc. i igne

and spoteach other

for eleven years Dictator of fully, handed um 18 m San Martin; a bloody old and silk hat, and men despot, with his shootings against walls, but a patriot too; his iron hand had given the country two lustres much-needed peace. Gang upon the pictured linenments encircled by their MANTRANLA. wreath of laurels, saires, and cannon, with an suge atop. he seemed to feel agam the rough clutch on his shoulder. and to hear the barsi vore of the old tyrant "Taigam: Dios! What do I know a your standards and your goir and silver? But I know me Alejandro, none better. In what thou wilt, if it is for the good of the cominy: and any man interferes with thy doings, young man, mentor the name of Baltasar Samo Go thou with God!" And armed with that all-powerin mandate, in the five year tom followed he had ousted the silver dollar from its im morial place as the money of the land, and substituted the new gold eagle. How wel ie remembered those days, and the great cases of battered pessete

new-milled bright eagle,

[ocr errors]
[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Sainty bred by

satin

everybody knows

rmous

There goes Don

shion.

rom counting

ongly

i,hat I stood

sel of

› had

with

lue

bled

[blocks in formation]

Nothing of felings showed

vory features,

wind the familiar

den baskets at the bank steps,

aling melodiously,

Ten cents
There would

shipped overseas as bullman ten cents
be melted down, and the ins L.mime. Paper
scratched and old upon tus titrices stable.
He had freed framing brain of the

watch-chain.

the land from silver, and hać

: aika, so poor

fit, the very

1

qualities which had served him so well in his long life, were turning to smite him now. For he saw, with a vision so clear as almost to magnify, the menaces which threatened his unconscious country, under the coming despotism of that worst of all tyrants, Bad Money. Inflation; a falling exchange abroad, a slipping and sliding of values at home; rising food prices and discontent, possible civil commotion amongst the peones, smitten by an evil they did not understand; a widespread debauching of public life, with the business of the nation set aside in a struggle between political parties for control of the printing press, the source of easy wealth; loss of confidence abroad, the driving away of capital; the slow constructive effort of the years undone. The devil danced before him in the form of a paper note, with its lying promise to pay what its issuers neither could nor wanted to pay. He felt an actual physical ache at the thought of it. Better for Don Alejandro, in the fulness of his years, if he had been a dullard.

Ordinarily, his drive through the Plaza de Armas to his town house was a triumphal progress, a benediction on his white hairs. There was a constant flourish of hats from the strolling throng; personages in other carriages passed ceremonious greetings; a huaso from some big estate, in flaring crimson poncho and tasselled hat, reined back his horse to

make way, with cruel jabs of the three-inch rowels of his silver spurs, and bowed to the high peak of his wooden saddle. But to-day Don Alejandro felt a blight upon it all. Who were these people who saluted him from the pavement ? He scarcely knew one in a dozen. Ten years ago things were different. How one's old friends did vanish when one passed middle age. And-incredible sight!-over there was a lady, wife of young Undurraga, his old friend's son, on foot at mid-day, wearing a hat-a European hat! He wondered what his mother would have made of it. In her day, and in his too, if you saw a woman wearing a hat in the morning, you knew what she was. Decent people wore a manto, and ladies did not jostle upon the pavement among a crowd of men. Times were changing slackening. How old he felt.

He found himself musing again on the cabinet meeting he had attended that morning, with the heads of the other banks, to be consulted (as a matter of form only, for three men behind closed doors had made their decision months before) about that bolt from the blue, the new paper currency. How well they had kept their secret, those derrotistas, those defeatists, who intended to sacrifice their country in cold blood for the power of setting the cat of exchange on the jump-the whole precious plan made, the notes printed and in the country, ready for

circulation, and not a soul the wiser. He remembered the incredulous faces of his colleagues as the project was unfolded, the half-amused contempt of Smith, the local manager of the Bank of London and Rio Bueno, when the full details were known; for at first they had anticipated nothing worse than a convertible note issue, based on gold. Smith could afford to be amused, with his reserves safely tucked away in Lombard Street. Whatever the Government of San Martin might do was opera bouffe to him, the funny antics of "natives" aping civilisation. Once, years ago, the manager of a privately owned English bank had said that the Banco de A. Mackenzie was run "in the native style," and the remark had come to his ears. He had said nothing, but he had invested quietly for many months in the paper of that English bank, and its manager had sung another tune when the whole hoard was presented for conversion one fine morning. The face of Smith reminded him of that other English face so long ago; but this time there was no possible

retort.

Arancibia, Minister of Finance; Sanfuentes, President of the State Bank of San Martin; Benavides, Minister of Home Affairs-how well they had seized their opportunity! He saw it all as well as if he had been a party to it. With the Senate sessions suspended, and the Emergency War Cabi

net wielding autocratic power; with Torrealba, the Vice-President, shrewd, capable, a patriot, absent this twelve months on a special mission in Puerto Melon, the Platarican capital, settling the peace terms with such representatives as could be induced to appear for that shattered and disrupted adversary; with the public purse depleted by the costs of the war, and money tight and taxes heavy

what better occasion could ever arise for the issue of paper money, with an appearance of justification? And behind the screen of public necessity, what a royal chance for plunder by those who controlled the tap of the paper stream! A judicious purchase of ninety days sight drafts on London at the present rate of fortyseven pence to the dollar, a turn of the tap, sending the value of the peso down a few points, and a resale of the purchase before settling daymail day, as it was called: result, a comfortable sum in pesos, coming by magic from nowhere, and reproducible at will by those who controlled the turning of the tap. It would be done, of course, through agents, dummies, palos blancos, whose connection could never be proved, under the present system of forward transactions in exchange, with their exalted employers.

He had done his best, knowing before he began the hopelessness of the case, for was he not a San Martinian born, and wise in the ways of roguery?

« PreviousContinue »