“But, as I told you, I never had much interest in politics. I like real things; and the political game is more than half make-believe. I still have my seat in the House; but I think they are gladdest when I am not there.
“Well, I am afraid I’m making a long story of it; but I think you will see the drift of it now. Politics failed to give me what I wanted. I had no turn for the routine of it; and I had no wish to be involved in all the petty manoeuvres upon which the nursing of a majority depends. Mind you, I could have done it better than any of them, with that peculiar bent of mine. They consult me whenever a crisis arises; and I can generally pull them through. After all, it’s a case of handling men, there as everywhere else.
“However, I wanted something better to amuse me than the squaring of some nonentity with a knighthood or the pacification of some indignant office-seeker who had been passed over. I wanted to feel myself pitted against men who really were experts in their own line. And that was how I came to take up finance in earnest.”
He paused again and lighted a fresh cigar. While he was doing so, I watched his face. In any other man, his autobiographic sketch would have seemed egotistical; and possibly I have raised that impression in my reproduction of it; for I can only give the sense of what he said. I cannot put on paper the tones of his voice—the faint tinge of contempt with which he spoke of his triumphs, as though they were child’s play. Nor can I do more than indicate here and there that peculiar sensation of duality which his talk took on more and more clearly as he proceeded. It was as though the Nordenholt whom I saw before me were telling his story whilst over behind him stood some greater personality, following the narrative and tracing out in it the clues which were to lead on to some events still in the distant future.
“Finance, Flint,” he continued. “That was the field where I came into my own at last. Money in itself is nothing, nothing whatever. But the making of money, the duel of brain against brain with not even the counters on the table, that’s the great game. The higher branches of finance are simply a combination of arithmetic and psychology. They’re divorced absolutely from any idea of material gain or loss. Railways, steamship lines, coal, oil, wheat, cotton or wool—do you imagine that one thinks of these concrete things while one plays the game? Not at all. They are the merest pawns. The whole affair is compressed into groups of figures and the glimpses of the other man’s brain which one gets here and there throughout the operations. And I played a straight game, Flint; no small investor was ever ruined through my manoeuvres. I doubt if any other financier can say as much. I went into the thing as a game, a big, risky game for my own hand; and I refused to gamble in the savings of little men. I took my gains from the big men who opposed me, not from the swarm of innocents.”
It was true, I remembered. Nordenholt had played the game of finance in a way never seen before. He had made many men’s fortunes—a byproduct, as he would have said, no doubt—but no one had ever gone into the arena unwarned by him. When he had laid his plans, carried out his preliminary moves and was ready to strike, a full-page advertisement had appeared in every newspaper in the country. “Mr. Nordenholt advises the small Investor to Refrain from Operating in Wheat,” or whatever it might be that he proposed to deal in himself. Then, after giving time for this to take effect, he struck his first blow. Wonderful struggles these were, fought out often far in the depths of that strange sea of finance, so that hardly a ripple came to the surface. Often, too, the agitation reached the upper waters and there would be glimpses of the two vast organisations convulsed by their efforts; here a mass of foam only, there some strange tentacle stretching out to reach its prey or to coil itself around a vantage-point which it could use as a fulcrum in further exertions. During this period, the Exchanges of the world would be shaken, there would be failures, hammerings, ruin for those who had ventured into the contest despite the warnings. Then, suddenly, the cascading waves would be stilled. One of the antagonists had gone under.
A fresh advertisement would appear: “Mr. Nordenholt has ceased his Operations.” It was a strange requiem over the grave of some king of finance. Nordenholt was always victorious. And with the collapse of his opponent, the small speculators flocked into the markets of the world and completed the downfall.
Finally, after the gains had been counted, he advertised again asking all those who had involuntarily suffered by his contest to submit their claims to him; and every genuine case was paid in full. He could afford it, no doubt; but how many would have done it? I knew from that move of his that he really spoke the truth when he said that money in itself was nothing to him. And it perhaps illustrates as well as anything the impression he produced upon my mind that afternoon. On the one side he was cold, calculating, pitiless to those whom he regarded as his enemies and the enemies of the smaller investor; on the other, he was full of understanding and
