He nodded briefly to Moss, and turned away, and five minutes later had dismissed the incident from his mind.
He continued in the direction of the Mansion House. A famous banker, passing in his motor brougham, waved his hand in salute; a city policeman stolidly ignored him.
Along Cheapside, with the deliberate air of a sightseer, the man in the grey felt hat strolled, turning over in his mind the problem of the boom.
If you see, on one hand, ice forming on a pool, and, on the other, a thermometer rising slowly to blood-heat, you may be satisfied in your mind that something is wrong somewhere. Nature cannot make mistakes. Thermometers are equally infallible. Look for the human agency at work on the mercury bulb for the jet of hot air directed to the instrument. In this parable is explained the market position, and T. B. Smith, who dealt with huge, vague problems like markets and wars and national prosperity, was looking for the hot-air current.
The market rises because big people buy big quantities of shares; it falls because these same people sell, and T. B. Smith happened to know that nobody was buying. That is, nobody of account--Eckhardts, Tollingtons, or Bronte's Bank. You can account for the rise of a particular share by some local and favourable circumstance, but when the market as a whole moves up----?
"We can trace no transactions," wrote Mr. Louis Vell, of the firm of Vell, Vallings & Boys, Brokers, "carried out by or on behalf of the leading jobbers. The market improvement in Industrial Stocks is due, as far as we can gather, to Continental buying--an unusual circumstance."
Who was the "philanthropist" who was making a market in stagnant stocks? Whoever it was, he or they repented long before T. B. Smith had reached the Central Criminal Court, which was his objective.
He was a witness in the Gildie Bank fraud case, and his cross-examination at the hands of one of the most relentless of counsel occupied three hours. This concluded to everybody's satisfaction, save counsel's, T. B. Smith, who hated the law courts, walked out into Old Bailey to find newsboys loudly proclaiming, "Slump on the Stock Exchange!"
"Thank Heaven, that bubble's burst!" said T. B. piously, and walked back to Scotland Yard, whistling.