The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport - A Shadow Before

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:00)

Section 11 of The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by Gilles LeBlanc. The Green Flag and Other Stories of War and Sport by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

A Shadow Before The 15th of July, 1870, found John Worlington Dodds a ruined gamester of the stock exchange. Upon the 17th he was a very opulent man, and yet he had effected the change without leaving the penurious little Irish townlet of Dunsloe, which could have been bought outright for a quarter of the sum which he had earned during the single day that he was within its walls.

There is a romance of finance yet to be written, a story of huge forces which are forever waxing and waning, of bold operations, of breathless suspense, of agonized failure, of deep combinations which are baffled by others still more subtle.

The mighty depths of each great European power stand like so many columns of mercury, forever rising and falling to indicate the pressure upon each. He who can see far enough into the future to tell how that ever-varying column will stand to-morrow is the man who has fortune within his grasp. John Worlington Dodds had many of the gifts which lead a speculator to success. He was quick in observing, just in estimating, prompt and fearless in acting. But in finance there is always the element of luck, which, however one may eliminate it, still remains, like the blank at roulette, a constantly present handicap upon the operator. And so it was that Worlington Dodds had come to grief. On the best advices he had dabbled in the funds of a South American Republic in the days before South American Republics had been found out. The Republic defaulted, and Dodds lost his money. He had bulled the shares of a Scotch railway, and a four months' strike had hit him hard. He had helped to underwrite a coffee company in the hope that the public would come along upon the feed and gradually nibble away some of his holding, but the political sky had been clouded and the public had refused to invest. Everything which he had touched had gone wrong, and now, on the eve of his marriage, young, clear-headed and energetic, he was actually a bankrupt had his creditors chosen to make him one. But the stock exchange is an indulgent body. What is the case of one today may be that of another tomorrow, and everyone is interested in seeing that the stricken man is given time to rise again. So the burden of Warrington Dodds was lightened for him. Many shoulders helped to bear it, and he was able to go for a little summer tour into Ireland, for the doctors had ordered him rest and change of air to restore his shaken nervous system. Thus it was that upon the 15th of July, 1870, he found himself at his breakfast in the sly blown coffee-room of the George Hotel in the market square of Dunsloe. It is a dull and depressing coffee-room, and one which is usually empty, but on this particular day it was as crowded and noisy as that of any London hotel. Every table was occupied, and a thick smell of fried bacon and of fish hung in the air. Heavily booted men clattered in and out, spurs jingled, riding crops were stacked in corners, and there was a general atmosphere of the horse.

The conversation, too, was of nothing else. From every side, Worlington Dodds heard of yearlings, of wind galls, of roarers, of spavans, of crib-sockers, of a hundred other terms which were unintelligible to him as his own stock-exchange jargon would have been to the company. He asked the waiter for the reason of it all, and the waiter was an astonished man, that there should be any man in this world who did not know it.

Sure, it's the Dunsloe Horse Fair, your honour, the greatest horse fair in all Ireland. It lasts for a wake, and the folk come from far and near, from England and Scotland and Iberware. If you look out of the window, your honour, you'll see the horses, and it's as if your honour's conscience must be, or you wouldn't sleep so sound that creatures didn't rouse you with their clatter. Dodds had a recollection that he had heard a confused murmur which had interwoven itself with his dreams, a sort of steady rhythmic beating and clanking, and now, when he looked through the window, he saw the cause of it. The square was packed with horses from end to end, greys, bays, browns, blacks, chestnuts, young ones and old, fine ones and coarse, horses of every conceivable sort and size. It seemed a huge function for so small a town, and he remarked as much to the waiter.