《股票作手回忆录·第十二章·棉花惨败·被专家说服》第19节
To learn that a man can make foolish plays for no reason whatever was a valuable lesson. It cost me millions to learn that another dangerous enemy to a trader is his susceptibility to the urgings of a magnetic personality when plausibly expressed by a brilliant mind. It has always seemed to me, however, that I might have learned my lesson quite as well if the cost had been only one million. But Fate does not always let you fix the tuition fee. She delivers the educational wallop and presents her own bill, knowing you have to pay it, no matter what the amount may be. Having learned what folly I was capable of I closed that particular incident. Percy Thomas went out of my life. There I was, with more than nine-tenths of my stake, as Jim Fisk used to say, gone where the woodbine twineth--up the spout. I had been a millionaire rather less than a year. My millions I had made by using brains, helped by luck. I had lost them by reversing the process. I sold my two yachts and was decidedly less extravagant in my manner of living. But that one blow wasn’t enough. Luck was against me. I ran up first against illness and then against the urgent need of two hundred thousand dollars in cash. A few months before that sum would have been nothing at all; but now it meant almost the entire remnant of my fleet-winged fortune. I had to supply the money and the question was: Where would I get it? I didn’t want to take it out of the balance I kept at my brokers’ because if I did I wouldn’t have much of a margin left for my own trading; and I needed trading facilities more than ever if I was to win back my millions quickly. There was only one alternative that I could see, and that was to take it out of the stock market!
注释摘要
要理解利文斯顿这段沉痛的独白，我们得先聊聊他提到的那个名字：吉姆·菲斯克。菲斯克是1860年代华尔街最浮夸的投机者，喜欢用俚语，“up the spout”就是他爱说的话，当铺收了你的东西，会用一个升降装置送到楼上仓库，这东西就进了那个竖井，也就是上了当铺。后来这个说法变成了“完蛋了、血本无归”的代名词。利文斯顿在这里引用这么个古早的俚语，心思很细：他把自…