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Title: The Driver

Author: Garet Garrett

Release date: July 17, 2021 [eBook #65853]

Language: English

Credits: E-text prepared by Tim Lindell, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images digitized by the Google Books Library Project (https://books.google.com) and generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org/)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DRIVER ***


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Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com) and generously made
available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org/)



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THE DRIVER

by

GARET GARRETT

Author of “The Blue Wound,” etc.


[Illustration: Logo]






New York
E. P. Dutton & Company
681 Fifth Avenue

Copyright, 1922
By E. P. Dutton & Company

All Rights Reserved

First printing, September, 1922
Second printing, October, 1922

Printed in the United
States of America




CONTENTS

CHAPTER                         PAGE
   I. PHANTASMA                    1

  II. THE FUNK IDOL               32

 III. GALT                        63

  IV. AN ECONOMIC NIGHTMARE       86

   V. VERA                        99

  VI. A GIANT IN BABY SWEAT      115

 VII. DARING THE DARK            131

VIII. LOW WATER                  136

  IX. FORTH HE GOES              139

   X. HEYDAY                     162

  XI. HEARTH NOTES               180

 XII. A BROKEN SYMBOL            198

XIII. SUCCESS                    213

 XIV. THE COMBAT                 226

  XV. THE HEIGHTS                257

 XVI. GATE OF ENIGMA             285

XVII. NATALIE                    293




THE DRIVER




CHAPTER I

PHANTASMA


i

It is Easter Sunday in the village of Massillon, Stark County, Ohio,
fifty miles south by east from Cleveland. Fourth year of the soft Money
Plague; 1894.

Time, about 10 o’clock.

The sky is low and brooding, with an untimely thought of snow. Church
bells are ringing. They sound remote and disapproving. Almost nobody is
mindful of their call. The soul may miss its feast; the eye of wonder
shall not be cheated. The Comic God has published a decree. Here once
more the sad biped, solemn, ludicrous and romantic, shall mount the
gilded ass. It is a spectacle that will not wait. For weeks in all the
newspapers of the country the fact has been advertised in a spirit of
waggery. At this hour and from this place the Army of the Commonweal
of Christ will set forth on foot in quest of the Economic Millennium.

The village is agog with people congregating to witness the fantasied
event. In the main street natives and strangers mingle their feet
gregariously. There are spasmodic sounds of laughter, retort, argument
and ribaldry; and continually the shrill cries of youth in a frenzy of
expectation. Buggies, two-wheelers, open carts and spring wagons line
both sides of the street. The horses are blanketed. A damp, chill wind
is blowing. Vendors from Chicago, lewd-looking men, working a hundred
feet apart, are yelling: “Git a Christ army button here fer a nickel!”
There is a composite smell of ham sandwiches, peanuts, oranges and
cigars.

A shout rises at the far end of the street. The crowd that has been
so thick there, filling the whole space, bursts open. A band begins
playing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and the spectacle is present.

First comes a negro bearing the American flag.

Next, on a white horse, is a thick, close-bearded, self-regarding man
with powerful, darting eyes and an air of fantastic vanity. He wears a
buckskin coat with fringed sleeves; the breast is covered with gaudy
medals. On his head is a large white sombrero. Around his neck swings a
string of amber beads. He is cheered and rallied as he passes and bows
continually.

Behind him walks a trumpeter, saluted as Windy Oliver. After the
trumpeter walks the Astrologer, bearing the wand of his mysterious
office. Then a band of seven pieces, very willing and enterprising.

And now, by the timbre and volume of the cheering, you recognize the
Commander. He rides. Sitting so still and distant beside a negro
driver in a buggy drawn by two mares he is disappointing to the eye.
There is nothing obviously heroic about him. He wears spectacles.
Above a thin, down-growing mustache the face is that of a man of ideas
and action; the lower features, especially the mouth, denote a shy,
secretive, sentimental, credulous man of mystical preoccupations. None
of these qualities is more than commonplace. The type is well known
to inland communities--the man who believes in perpetual motion, in
the perfectibility of human nature, in miraculous interventions of
deity, and makes a small living shrewdly. He might be the inventor of
a washing machine. He is in fact the owner of a sandstone quarry and a
breeder of horses.

But mark you, the ego may achieve grandeur in any habitat. It is
not in the least particular. This inconsiderable man, ludicrously
setting forth on Easter Sunday in command of a modern crusade, has one
startling obsession. He believes that with the bandit-looking person on
the white horse he _shares the reincarnation of Christ_.

In a buggy following, with what thoughts we shall never know, rides the
wife of this half of Christ reincarnated.

Next comes another negro bearing the banner of the Commonweal of
Christ. In the center of it is a painted Christ head. The lettering,
divided above and below the head, reads:


     PEACE ON EARTH: GOOD WILL TO MEN

                   B U T

      DEATH TO INTEREST BEARING BONDS


Then comes the Army of the Commonwealers. They are counted derisively.
The Commander said there would be an hundred thousand, or at least ten
thousand, or, at the start, not fewer than one thousand. Well, the
number is one hundred scant. They are a weird lot--a grim, one-eyed
miner from Ottumwa; a jockey from Lexington, a fanatical preacher of
the raw gospel from Detroit, a heavy steel mill worker from Youngstown,
a sinewy young farmer from near Sandusky, a Swede laborer from
everywhere, one doctor, one lawyer, clerks, actors, paper hangers,
blind ends, what-nots and tramps. There is not a fat man among them,
nor one above forty. They march in order, looking straight ahead. A
man in a blue overcoat and white trousers, riding a horse with a red
saddle, moves up and down the line eyeing it importantly.

At the end of this strange procession are two wagons. One is called the
commissariat wagon; it is loaded with a circus tent, some bales of hay
for the horses and a few bags of provisions--hardly enough for one day.
The other is a covered wagon painted blue. The sides are decorated
with geometrical figures of incomprehensible meaning. This vehicle of
mystery belongs to the precious being on the white horse ahead. He
created it; inside are sliding panoramas which he has painted.

As these wagons pass, people on foot and in buggies and wagons to
the number of more than a thousand fall into line and follow. Their
curiosity is not yet sated. They cannot abandon the spectacle.

Among these followers are forty-three correspondents, representing
newspapers from New York to San Francisco; four Western Union telegraph
operators, and two linemen. The route to Jerusalem is uncertain.
Something may happen on the open road, miles from a telegraph office.
Hence the linemen, anywhere to climb a pole and tap the wires, and
special operators to dispatch the news emergently! The reporters are to
whoop the story up and be in on the crucifixion.

Could anything less seeming of reality be invented by the imagination?
It has the pattern of a dream. Yet it is history.

This is how two fatuous spirits, charlatans maybe, visionaries
certainly,--Carl Browne on the white horse and Jacob S. Coxey in the
buggy,--led the Army of the Commonweal of Christ (Coxey’s Army for
short), out of Massillon, past the blacksmith shop, past the sandstone
quarry, past the little house where the woman was who waved her apron
with one hand and wiped her eyes with the other, out upon the easting
highway, toward Washington, with the Easter chimes behind them.

And for what purpose? Merely this: to demand from Congress a law by
which unlimited prosperity and human happiness might be established on
earth.


ii

I, who am telling it, was one of the forty-three correspondents.

The road was ankle deep with that unguent kind of mud which lies on
top of frost. Snow began to fall. Curiosity waned in the rear. The
followers began to slough off, shouting words of encouragement as they
turned back. Browne on his white horse, Coxey in his buggy and the
man in the red saddle were immersed in vanity. But the marchers were
extremely miserable. None of them was properly shod or dressed for
it. They were untrained, unused to distance walking, and after a few
miles a number of them began to limp on wet, blistered feet. The band
played a great deal and the men sang, sometimes all together, sometimes
in separate groups. The going was such that no sort of marching order
could be maintained.

At one o’clock there was a stop for coffee and dry bread, served out of
the commissariat wagon.

It was understood that the Army would live on the country as it went
along, trusting to charity and providence; but the shrewdness of
the Commander had foreseen that the art of begging would have to be
learned, and that in any case it could not begin successfully on the
first few miles out.

The Commonwealers watched us curiously as we tapped the telegraph wires
by the roadside to send off flash bulletins of progress. Both Browne
and Coxey exhorted their followers to courage, challenged the weaklings
to drop out, and the march was resumed with only two desertions. These
were made good by accessions further on.

At four o’clock a halt was called near a village, the inhabitants of
which made friendly gestures and brought forth bacons and hams which
were gratefully added to the boiled potatoes and bread served out of
the wagon. The tent was raised. Browne, astride his bespattered white
horse, made a speech.

He was the more aggressive half of the reincarnation. Indeed, it came
presently to be the opinion of the correspondents that he was the
activating principle of the whole infatuation, and held the other in a
spell. He was full of sound and rhetoric and moved himself to ecstacy
with sonorous sayings. His talk was a wild compound of Scripture,
Theosophy and Populism.

The Kingdom of Heaven on earth was at hand, he said. The conditions
foretold in Revelations were fulfilled. The seven heads of the beast
were the seven conspiracies against the money of the people. The
ten horns of the beast were the ten monopolies nourished in Wall
Street--the Sugar Trust, the Oil Trust, and so on.

“We are fast undermining the structure of monopoly in the hearts of the
people,” he declaimed, reaching his peroration. “Like Cyrus of old we
are fast tunnelling under the boodlers’ Euphrates and will soon be able
to march under the walls of the second Babylon, and its mysteries, too.
The infernal, blood-sucking bank system will be overthrown, for the
handwriting is on the wall.”

The listeners, though they growled at the mention of Wall Street and
cheered the fall of Babylon, received his interpretation of their
rôle and errand with an uneasy, bothered air. Voices asked for Coxey.
He spoke to them in a gentle manner, praised them for their courage
and fortitude, emphasized the hardships yet to be endured, proposed a
hymn to be sung, and then dismissed them to rest with some practical
suggestions touching their physical comfort. Rest and comfort, under
the circumstances, were terms full of irony, but nobody seemed to think
of that. They cheered him heartily.


iii

In the village railroad station was a telegraph office, where our
special operators cut in their instruments and received our copy. Among
us we filed more than 40,000 words of narrative, incident, pathos and
ridicule.

News is stranger than fiction not in what it tells but in how it
happens. In a room twenty feet square, lighted by one kerosene lamp, we
wrote our copy on our knees, against the wall, on each other’s backs,
standing up and lying down, matching notes and exchanging information
as we went along.

“What’s the name of this town?”

“Louisville.”

“Kentucky?”

“Kentucky, no. Hear him!--Ohio.”

“Didn’t know there was a Louisville, Ohio.”

“Write it anyway. It isn’t the first time you’ve written what you don’t
know.”

Then silence, save for the clicking of the telegraph instruments and
the cracking of copy paper.

“Who was the man in the red saddle?”

No answer.

Again: “Who was the guy in the red saddle?”

No answer.

Another voice, in the same difficulty, roaring: “Who in hell was the
man in the red saddle?”

Now everybody for a minute stops writing. Nobody knows.

Voice: “Call him Smith: the man of mystery: the great unknown.”

We did. The man in the red saddle was Smith the Great Unknown to the
end of his silly part.

There was a small hotel in the place, with only two bedrooms available,
and these had been selfishly seized by three magazine writers who had
no telegraph stuff to file. They had retired. The rest of us took
possession of a fairly large lounging room and settled ourselves for
the night on cots, pallets and chairs.

The lean-minded man from Cleveland, reclining on the hotel desk with
his feet on the cigar case, started an untimely discussion.

“We’ve sent off a lot of guff about this thing,” he said, “and not a
word of what it means. Not a man here has tried to tell what it means.”

“Leave that to the editorial writers and go to sleep,” said St. Louis
from under his hat. He had made his bed in the swivel chair.

“It means something ... it means something,” said Cleveland.

“Well, what?” asked a petulant voice.

“It’s a joke,” said St. Louis, not moving. “People have to laugh,” he
added. “Go to sleep or be still.”

Another voice: “What does it mean, you Cleveland? I saw you reading
Plutarch. What does it mean?”

“These people are asking questions to which there is no answer,” said
the Cleveland man, lifting on his elbow. “Why is anybody hungry in a
land of surplus food? Why are able bodied men out of work while we have
such roads as the one we traveled to-day? I don’t know. I’m asking.”

A man whom we had hardly noticed before, anæmic, shrill and hairy, sat
up on his mattress and thrust a naked bent arm out of his blanket.

“I’ll tell you what it means,” he shouted. “Wall Street has sucked the
country dry. People may perish, but Wall Street will have its profit
and interest. Labor may starve, but the banking power will keep money
sound. Money in itself is nothing,--merely a convenience, a token by
means of which useful things are exchanged. Is that so? Not at all.
Money no longer exists for the use of people. We exist for the sake of
money. There is plenty everywhere, but people cannot buy because they
are unemployed and have no money. Coxey says, ‘Create the money. Make
it abundant. Then people may work and be prosperous.’ Well, why not?
Wall Street says if you make money abundant you will ruin the country.
Hell! The country is already ruined. We laugh. Yet what we have seen
to-day is the beginning of revolution. As people have freed themselves
from other tyrannies, so they will free themselves from this money
tyranny.”

He stopped, out of breath and choking, and a singular hubbub arose.
Everyone awake had been listening attentively, and now, just as they
lay, not an arm or a leg stirring, all those huddled, inert forms
became vocal, shouting:

“Populist! Right-o! Put him out! Douse him!”

Accents of weariness, irritation and raillery were inseparably mingled.
Yet the overtone was not unfriendly. We could be light and cruel with
the Army of the Commonweal of Christ, because its whole figure was
ludicrous, but there was no love among us for Wall Street or the money
power. Those names stood for ideas of things which were commonly feared
and hated and blamed for all the economic distress of the time.

Above, the plutocratic magazine writers were pounding on the floor. The
hairy agitator, breathing heavily, melted back into his mattress, heavy
in his conscience, no doubt, for having written a very sarcastic piece
about that Easter Day event. We saw it afterward in his Chicago paper.
The fat reporter from Cincinnati began to snore.

For a long time I lay awake, thinking.

What were we doing here? Reporting the news. News of what? One
hundred inconsequent men dreaming in the mud,--was that news? No, not
intrinsically. As a manifestation of the frustrate human spirit it
might serve as material for the reflective fictionist, or text for some
Olympian humorist, but why was it news to be written hot and dispatched
by telegraph?

In their acts of faith, folly, wisdom and curiosity men are moved by
ideas. Perhaps, therefore, the discrepancy between the unimportance
of this incongruous Easter Day spectacle itself and the interest we
bestowed upon it was explained by what it signified--that is, by the
motivating idea. This thought I examined carefully.

Two years before this, Jacob S. Coxey, horse breeder, quarry owner,
crank, whom no one had heard of until then, proposed to cure the
economic disease then afflicting the country by the simple expedient of
hiring all the unemployed on public works. Congress should raise half
a billion dollars from non-interest bearing bonds and spend the money
on national roads. This plan received some publicity as a freak idea;
nobody had been really serious about it. What then happens?

One Carl Browne, theosophist, demagogue and noise-breaker, seeks out
this money crank at Massillon and together they incubate the thought of
calling upon the people to take the plan in the form of a petition and
walk with it to Congress. The thing is Russian,--“a petition in boots,”
a prayer to the government carried great distances by peasants on foot.
The newspapers print it as a piece of light news. Then everybody begins
to talk about it, and the response is amazing. People laugh openly and
are secretly serious.

A day is set for the march to begin, a form of organization is
announced and Coxey Army contingents begin to appear spontaneously all
over the country. This also is news, to be treated in the same light
spirit, and no doubt it is much exaggerated for sportive reasons. As
the day approaches little groups of men, calling themselves units of
the Christ Army of the Commonweal, set out from Missouri, Illinois,
Pennsylvania, Kansas, Michigan, from anywhere east of the Missouri
River, footing it to Massillon to merge their numbers. Then it rains.
For three weeks there is nothing but rain, and the flesh fails. That is
why there is but a scant one hundred to make the start. Coxey believes
the bemired and tardy units will survive and catch up. He still hopes
to have tens of thousands with him when he reaches Washington.

But all of this vibration is unmistakably emotional. That is a fact
to be accounted for. When did it become possible to emotionalize the
human animal with a financial idea?--specifically, a plan to convert
non-interest bearing bonds into an unlimited amount of legal tender
money? Never. The money theory is merely the ostensible aspect, the
outwardness of the matter. Something else is signified. What is it?

I come back to what the Cleveland man said. Why are people hungry in a
land of surplus food? Why is labor idle? Labor applied to materials is
the source of all wealth. There is no lack of materials. The desire for
wealth is without limit. Why are men unemployed instead of acting on
their unfinished environment to improve it?

And now, though I had thought my way around a circle, I began to
glimpse some understanding of what was taking place in a manner
nominally so preposterous. People had tormented themselves with
these questions until they were weary, callous and bitterly ironic.
The country was in the toils of an invisible monster that devoured
its heart and wasted its substance. The name of this monster was
Hard Times. The problem of unemployment was chronic, desperate and
apparently hopeless. The cause of it was unknown. People were sick of
thinking and talking about something for which there was no help. They
had either to despair or laugh. Then came Coxey, fanatic, mountebank
or rare comedian,--so solemn in his egregious pretensions that no one
knew which,--and they laughed. It might become serious. Mass psychology
was in a highly inflammable condition. There was always that thought
in reserve to tinge the laughter with foreboding. But if there came
a conflagration, then perhaps the questions would be unexpectedly
answered; nobody cared much what else happened.

Cincinnati turned over with a frightful snort and was suddenly quiet. I
prayed that he might be dead and went to sleep.

The next morning the New York Herald man took me aside.

“I’ve been recalled from this assignment to go to Europe,” he said.
“I’m waiting for a man to relieve me. He will pick us up some time
to-day.”

I said I was sorry; and I was, for we were made to each other’s liking.

“I don’t care for the man who is relieving me,” he continued. “Besides,
he isn’t competent to do what I’m about to ask you to undertake in my
place.”

“Anything I can,” I said.

“You are from the west,” he continued, “and therefore you’re not likely
to know how jumpy the Wall Street people are about what’s going on.
They are afraid of this Coxey movement,--of what it may lead to. They
want to know a lot about it,--more than they can get from the newspaper
stories. I’ve been sending a confidential letter on it daily to
Valentine ... you know, ... John J., president of the Great Midwestern
Railroad. He wants the tale unvarnished, and what you think of it,
and what others think of it. He particularly wants to know in the
fullest way how the Coxeyites are received along the way, for therein
is disclosed the state of public feeling. Well, I wish you to take
this commission off my hands. It pays fifty a week for the life of the
circus. I’ll see him in New York, tell him who you are and why I left
it for you to do. Then when the thing is over you can run up to New
York from Washington and get your money.”

I hesitated.

“It’s Wall Street money,” I said.

“It’s railroad money,” he replied. “That may be all the same thing.
But there’s no difficulty, really. It’s quite all right for anyone to
do this. What’s wanted is the truth. Put in your own opinions of Wall
Street if you like. Indeed, do that. Wall Street people are not as you
think they are. Valentine is a particularly good sort and honest in his
point of view. I vouch for the whole thing.”

So I took it; and thereafter posted to John J. Valentine, 130 Broadway,
room 607, _personal_, a daily confidential report on the march of the
Commonwealers.

I would not say that the fact of having a retainer in railroad money
changed my point of view. It did somewhat affect my sense of values and
my curiosity was extended.

For the purpose of the Valentine reports I made an intensive personal
study of the Commonwealers. I asked them why they were doing it. Some
took it as a sporting adventure, with no thought of the consequences,
and enjoyed the mob spirit. Some were tramps who for the first time in
their lives found begging respectable. But a great majority of them
were earnest, wistful men, fairly aching with convictions, without
being able to say what it was they had a conviction of, or what was
wrong with the world. Their notions were incoherent. Nobody seemed
very sanguine about the Coxey plan; nobody understood it, in fact; yet
something would have to be done; people couldn’t live without work.

Unemployment was the basic grievance. I took a group of twenty, all
skilled workmen, sixteen of them married, and found that for each of
them the average number of wage earning days in a year had been twelve.
They blamed the money power in Wall Street. When they were asked how
the money power could profit by their unemployment, what motive it
could have in creating hard times, they took refuge in meaningless
phrases. Most of them believed in peaceable measures. Only three or
four harbored destructive thoughts.

The manner of the Army’s reception by farmers, villagers and
townspeople was variable and hard at first to understand. Generally
there was plenty of plain food. Sometimes it was provided in a
generous, sympathetic spirit; then again it would be forthcoming as
a bid for immunity, the givers at heart being fearful and hostile.
The Army was much maligned by rumor as a body of tramps obtaining
sustenance by blackmail. It wasn’t true. There was no theft, very
little disorder, no taking without leave, even when the stomach gnawed.

One learned to anticipate the character of reception by the look of
the place. In poor, dilapidated communities there was always a hearty
welcome with what food the people could spare, cheerfully bestowed;
the better and more prosperous the community the worse for the
Commonwealers.

I spoke of this to some of the more thoughtful men. They had noted the
fact and made nothing of it. Then I spoke of it to one of the tramps,
who knew the technique of begging; he said:

“Sure. Anybody’d know that. D’jew ever get anything at a big house? The
poor give. We ought to stick to the poor towns.”

In those industrial communities where class distinctions had
arisen,--that is to say, where poverty and affluence were separately
self-conscious, the police invariably were disagreeable and the poor
were enthusiastic over the Commonwealers. At Allegheny, where the steel
mill workers had long suffered from unemployment, the Army received a
large white silk banner, lettered:

“Laws for Americans. More money. Less misery.”

Here there were several collisions between, on one side, the
Commonwealers and their welcomers, and, on the other, the police. At
some towns the Army was not permitted to stop at all. At others it was
officially received with music, speeches and rejoicings.

As these incidents became repetitious they ceased to be news, yet they
were more important, merely by reason of recurring, than the bizarre
happenings within the Army which as newspaper correspondents we were
obliged competitively to emphasize, as, for example, the quarrel
between Browne and the bandmaster, the mutiny led by Smith the Great
Unknown, the development of the reincarnation myth and the increasing
distaste for it among the disciples.

The size of the Army fluctuated with the state of the weather. Crossing
the Blue Mountains by the icy Cumberland road in a snow storm was an
act of fortitude almost heroic. Confidence in the leaders declined.
Browne came to be treated with mild contempt. The line,--“Christ
and Coxey,”--which had been painted on the commissariat wagon was
almost too much. There was grumbling in the ranks. Everybody was
discouraged when the expectation of great numbers had finally to be
abandoned. Never did the roll exceed five hundred men, not even after
the memorable junction in Maryland with Christopher Columbus Jones,
forty-eight men and a bull dog, from Philadelphia.

Yet there was a cohesive principle somewhere. Nearly all of those who
started from Massillon stuck to the very end. What held them together?
Possibly, a vague, herd sense of moving against something and a dogged
reaction to ridicule. This feeling of againstness is sometimes stronger
to unite men, especially unhappy men, than a feeling of forness. The
thing they were against was formless in their minds. It could not be
visualized or perceived by the imagination, like the figure of the
horrible Turk in possession of the Holy Sepulchre. Therefore it was a
foredoomed crusade.

The climax was pitiably futile.

Two self-mongering reincarnations of Christ, both fresh and clean,
having nighted in decent hotels, led four hundred draggle-tail men into
Washington and up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol grounds, enormous
humiliated crowds looking on. Browne dismounted and leaped over the
low stone wall. Coxey tried to make a speech. Both were good-naturedly
arrested for trespassing on the public grass and violating a police
ordinance. The leaderless men wandered back to a camp site that had
been mercifully loaned. For a time they dully subsisted upon charity,
ceased altogether to be news, and gradually vanished away.


iv

Though the Army of the Commonweal of Christ was dead, and Coxey himself
was now a pusillanimous figure, Coxeyism survived in a formidable
manner. The term was current in newspaper language; and the country
seemed to be full of those forms of social insubordination which it
was meant to signify. In the west rudely organized bands, some of them
armed, and strong enough to overwhelm the police of the cities through
which they passed, were running amuck. They bore no petition in boots;
they were impatient and headlong. One of their pastimes was train
stealing. They would seize a railroad train, overpower the crew and
oblige themselves to outlaw transportation; and the railroad people,
fearful of accidents, would clear the way to let them through. It was
very exciting for men who had nothing else to do, and rather terrifying
to the forces of law and order.

Public opinion was distracted and outraged.

Some said, “Put down Coxeyism. Put it down with a strong hand. To treat
it tenderly is to encourage lawlessness.”

Others said, “You may be able to put down Coxeyism by force, but you
will sometime have to answer the questions it has raised. Better now
than later.”

There was a great swell of radical thought in the country. The Populist
party, representing a blind sense of revolt, had elected four men to
the Senate and eleven to the House of Representatives. Many newspapers
and magazines were aligned with the agitators, all asking the same
questions:

Why hunger in a land of plenty?

Why unemployment?

Why was the economic machine making this frightful noise?

The Federal and state governments were afraid to act effectively
against Coxeyism because too many people sympathized with it, secretly
or openly. It was partly a state of nerves. Writers in the popular
periodicals and in some of the solemn reviews laid it on red. In
Coxey’s march they saw an historic parallel. In almost the same
way five hundred volunteers, knowing how to die, had marched from
Marseilles to Paris with questions that could not be answered, and gave
the French Revolution a hymn that shook the world. Human distress was
first page news. The New York World gave away a million loaves of bread
and whooped up its circulation. The New York Herald solicited donations
of clothing which it distributed in large quantities to the ragged.

On the train from Washington to New York I found men continually
wrangling in fierce heat about money, tariff and Coxeyism. I was
surprised to hear Wall Street attacked by well dressed, apparently
prosperous men, in the very phrases with which the Coxeyites had
filled my ears. Nobody by any chance ever stood in defense of Wall
Street, but there were those who denounced the Coxeyites and Populists
intemperately. Everybody denounced something; nobody was _for_
anything. National morale was in a very low state.

In the smoking compartment two men, behaving as old acquaintances,
quarreled interminably and with so much dialectical skill that an
audience gathered to listen in respectful silence. One was a neat,
clerical-looking person whose anxieties were unrelieved by any glimpse
of humor or fancy. The other was carelessly dressed, spilt cigar ashes
over his clothes unawares, and had a way of putting out his tongue and
laughing at himself dryly if the argument went momentarily against him
or when he had adroitly delivered himself from a tight place. He was
the elder of the two. He was saying:

“Because men are out of work they do not lose their rights as citizens
to petition Congress in _any_ peaceable manner. Your low tariff is the
cause of unemployment. There is the evidence,--those cold smoke stacks.”

He pointed to them. We were passing through Wilmington.

“The importation of cheap foreign goods has shut our factories up. You
retort by calling the unemployed tramps.”

“It was the high Republican tariff that made the people soft and
helpless,” said the other. “For years you taught them that good times
resulted not from industry and self-reliance but from laws,--that
prosperity was created by law. Now you reap the fruit. You put money
into the pockets of the manufacturers by high tariffs. The people know
this. Now they say, ‘Fill our pockets, too.’ It’s quite consistent. But
it’s Socialism. That’s what all this Coxeyism is,--a filthy eruption of
Socialism, and the Republican party is responsible.”

“You forget to tell what has become of the jobs,” the other said. “All
they want is work to do. Where is the work?”

“These Coxeyites,” the other retorted, “are a lot of strolling beggars.
They refuse work. They enjoy marching through the country in mobs,
living without work, doing in groups what as individuals they would
not dare to do for fear of police and dogs. And the Republican party
encourages them in this criminality because it needs a high tariff
argument.”

At this point an impulse injected me into the discussion.

“You are wrong about the Coxeyites,” I said. “At least as to those from
Massillon. I marched with them all the way. A few were tramps. There
were no criminals. A great majority of them were men willing to work
and honestly unemployed.”

Both of them stared at me, and I went on for a long time, not knowing
how to stop and wishing I hadn’t begun. The younger man heard me
through with a bored air and turned away. But the other asked me some
questions and thanked me for my information.

The episode closed suddenly. We were running into the Jersey City
railroad terminal, on the west bank of the Hudson River, and all
fellow-traveler contacts began to break up without ceremony in the
commotion of arrival. I saw no more of the disputants and forgot them
entirely in the thrill of approaching New York for the first time.

It was early evening. Slowly I made headway up the platform against
the tide of New Jersey commuters returning from work. With a scuffling
roar of feet, and no vocal sound whatever, they came racing through the
terminal in one buffalo mass, then divided into hasty streams, flowed
along the platforms and boarded the westbound trains, strangely at ease
with extraordinary burdens, such as reels of hose, boxes of tomato
plants, rakes, scythes, hand cultivators, bags of bulbs, carpentering
tools and bits of lumber.

Beating my way up the current, wondering how so many people came, by
what means they could be delivered in such numbers continuously, I came
presently into view of the cataract. Great double-decked ferryboats,
packed to the rails with self-loading and unloading cargoes, were
arriving two or three at a time and berthing in slips which lay side by
side in a long row, like horse stalls.

We, the eastbound passengers from the Washington train, gathered at one
of the empty slips. Through the gates I saw a patch of water. Suddenly
a stealthy mass up-heaved, hesitated, then made up its mind and came
head on with terrific momentum. At the breathless moment the engines
were reversed, there was a gnashing of waters, and the boat came
fast with a soft bump. The gates burst open and the people decanted
themselves with a headlong rush. We stood tight against the wall to let
them pass. As the tail of the spill filed by we were sent aboard, the
gates banged to behind us, and the boat was off toward the other shore
for another load. This was before the unromantic convenience of Hudson
River tunnels.

I stood on the bow to have my first look at New York.

One’s inner sense does not perceive the thing in the moment of
experience, but films it, to be afterward developed in fluid
recollection. I see it now in memory as I only felt it then.

A wide mile of opal water, pulsatile, thrilling to itself in a
languorous ancient way. And so indifferent! Indifference was
its immemorial character. I watched the things that walked upon
it--four-eyed, double-ended ferryboats with no fore or aft, like
those monsters of the myth that never turned around; tugs like mighty
Percherons, dragging sledges in a string; a loitering hyena, marked
dynamite, much to be avoided; behemoths of the deep, helpless in this
thoroughfare, led by hawsers from the nose; sore-footed scows with one
pole rigs, and dressy, high-heeled pleasure craft. The river was as
unregardful of all these tooting, hooting, hissing improvisations as
of the natural fish, the creaking gulls, or those swift and ceaseless
patterns woven of the light which seem to play upon its surface and are
not really there.

Beyond was that to which all this hubbub appertained. The city!...
Sudden epic!... Man’s forethought of escape ... his refuge ... his
self-overwhelming integration. Anything may happen in a city. Career
is there, success is there, failure, anguish, horror, women, hell, and
heaven. One has the sense of moral fibres loosening. Lust of conquest
stirs. The spirit of adventure flames. A city is a tilting field.
Unknown, self-named, anyone may enter, cast his challenge where he
will, and take the consequences. The penalties are worse than fatal.
The rewards are what you will.

“New York!” I said.

It stood against the eastern sky, a pure illusion, a rhythmic mass
without weight or substance, in the haze of a May-day evening. The
shadows of twilight were rising like a mist. Everything of average
height already was submerged. Some of the very tall buildings still had
the light above, and their upper windows were a-gleam with reflections
of the sunset.

Seething city!... So full of life transacting potently, and yet so
still! A thin gray shell, a fragile show, a profile raised in time and
space, a challenge to the elements. They take their time about it....
Lovely city!... Ugly city!... Never was there one so big and young and
hopeful all at once.

“New York!” I said again, out loud.

A man who must have been standing close beside me for some time spoke
suddenly, without salutation or word of prelude.

“You were with Coxey’s Army?”

“Yes,” I said, turning to look at him. I recognized him as a man who
sat in one corner of the smoking compartment, listening in an attentive
though supercilious manner, and never spoke.

“Wasn’t there plenty to eat?” he asked, in a truculent tone.

“People were very generous along the way.”

“Wasn’t there plenty to eat?” he asked, repeating the question
aggressively.

“There was generally enough and sometimes plenty,” I replied. Then I
added rather sharply: “I have no case to prove for the Coxeyites, if
that’s what you think.”

“I know you haven’t,” he said. “I have no case to make against them
either. They are out of work. That’s bad. But people who will ask need
not be hungry. You can cut that out. The unemployed eat. You’ve seen
it. Do the ravens feed them?”

“What are you driving at?” I asked.

“They all eat,” he repeated. “Ain’t that extraordinary?”

“It doesn’t seem so to me,” I said. “They have to eat.”

“Oh, do they?” he said. “You can eat merely because you have to, can
you? Suppose there wasn’t anything to eat?”

He was turning away, with his feathers up, as if he had carried the
argument. But I detained him.

“All right,” I said. “There is not enough work but plenty to eat. We’ll
suppose it. What does that prove?”

Eyeing me intently, with some new interest, he hesitated, not as to
what he would say but as to whether he should bother to say it.

“It proves,” he said, “that the country is rich. Nobody knows it.
Nobody will believe it. The country is so rich that people may actually
live without work.”

“That’s an interesting point of view,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Nobody,” he replied, with an oblique sneer. “A member of the Stock
Exchange.”

“Oh!” I said, before I could catch it. And not to leave the
conversation in that lurch I asked: “Do you know who those two men were
who wrangled in the smoking compartment?”

“Editors,” he replied, cynically. “The younger one was Godkin of
the Post. I’ve forgotten the other one’s name. Silly magpies!
Pol-i-t-i-c-s, _hell_!”

At that instant the ferryboat bumped into her slip. The petulant man
screwed his head half round, jerked a come-along nod to a girl who had
been standing just behind us, and stalked off in a mild brain fit.

I had not noticed the girl before. She passed me to overtake her
father,--I supposed it was her father,--and in passing she gave me a
look which made me both hot and cold at once. It left me astonished,
humiliated and angry. It was a full, open, estimating look, too
impervious to be returned as it deserved and much too impersonal to
be rude. It was worse than rude. I was an object and not a person. It
occurred to me that either or both of us might have been stark nude and
it would not have made the slightest difference.

For a moment I thought I must have been mistaken,--that she was not a
girl but a man-hardened woman. I followed them for some distance. And
she was unmistakably a girl, probably under twenty, audaciously lithe
and flexible. She walked without touching her father,--if he were that.
He was a small man, wearing a soft hat a little down on one side, and
moved with a bantam, egregious stride. One hand he carried deep in his
trousers pocket, which gave him a slight list to the right, for his
arms were short. The skirts of his overcoat fluttered in the wind and
his left arm swung in an arc.

Presently I lost them, and that was all of it; but this experience,
apparently so trivial, cost me all other sensations of first contact
with New York. I wandered about for several hours, complaining that all
cities are alike. I had dinner, and the food was like food anywhere
else. Then I found a hotel and went to bed. My last thought was: Why
did she look at me at all?

Her eyes were dark carnelian.




CHAPTER II

THE FUNK IDOL


i

“Where is one-hundred-and-thirty Broadway?” I asked the hotel porter
the next morning.

“One-hundred-and-thirty Broadway? That’s in Wall Street,” he said.
“Take the elevated down town and get off at Rector Street.”

That was literal. Broadway is in Wall Street, as may be explained.

Wall street proper,--street with a small _s_,--is a thoroughfare.
Wall Street in another way of speaking,--street with a big _S_,--is a
district, the money district, eight blocks deep by three blocks wide
by anything from five to thirty stories high. It is bounded on the
north by jewelry, on the northeast by leather, on the east by sugar
and coffee, on the south by cotton, on the southwest by shipping and
on the west by Greek lace, ship chandlery and Trinity churchyard. It
grew that way. The Wall Street station of the elevated railroad is at
Rector Street, and Rector Street is a hand-wide thoroughfare running
uphill to Broadway under the south wall of Trinity graveyard. When you
are half way up you begin to see over the top of the wall, rising to
it gradually, and the first two things you see are the tombstones of
Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton. A few steps more and you are in
Broadway. Rector Street ends there.

Trinity church is on the west side of Broadway, thirty paces to your
left. Standing with your back to Trinity church door you look straight
down Wall street, with a little _s_. All of this is Wall Street with a
big _S_. You are in the midst of it.

If it is nine-thirty or a quarter to ten you may see here and there
in the preoccupied throng groups of three bearing wealth,--in each
case two men with a box carried between them and a third walking close
behind with one hand resting lightly upon something in his outer
pocket. These are the trusted clerks of big banking and brokerage
houses. They go each morning to fetch the strong box from one of
the great Wall Street safety deposit vaults. At four o’clock they
take it back for the night. The third man walking behind is probably
unnecessary. If the box were not too heavy one man unarmed might bear
it safely to and fro. Banditry,--that is to say, taking by force,--is
here unknown. There is a legend to account for this fact. It is
that the police keep a dead line around the money district which
thieves dare not cross. Every crook in the world is supposed to know
and respect the sacred taboo. It may be so, more or less. One need
not believe it whole. A much more probable explanation is what any
highwayman knows. He might make off with a dozen of those strong boxes
and then be no richer than he was before. They contain no money at
all, but stocks and bonds, numbered and registered, which represent
wealth reduced to an impalpable, theft-proof form. A railroad may lie
in one of those boxes. But if you ran away with the box you would have
neither the railroad nor anything you could turn into cash. The lost
stock and bond certificates would be cancelled and new ones issued in
their place; and after that anyone who tried to sell one of the stolen
certificates would be instantly arrested.

I walked a little way into Wall Street, somewhat in awe of it, almost
expecting to be noticed and challenged for trespassing. The atmosphere
was strange and inhospitable and the language unknown. Two men were
quarreling excitedly, one standing on the edge of the sidewalk, the
other down on the pavement. One seemed to be denouncing the government
for letting the country go bankrupt.

“It is busted,” he shrieked. “The United States Treasury is busted.”

The other at the same time spoke of the color, the shape, the bowels
and religion of men who were exporting gold to Europe. I could make
nothing of it whatever. Nobody else so much as glanced at them in
passing. Everybody seemed absent, oblivious and self-involved. When
two acquaintances met, or collided, there was a start of recognition
between them, as if they had first to recall themselves from afar.
Incessantly from within a great red brick building came a sound of
b-o-o-ing, cavernous and despairing. This place was the Stock Exchange
and the noise was that which brokers and speculators make when prices
are falling.

A few steps further down the street a dray stood backed against the
curb, receiving over its tailboard some kind of very heavy freight.
“Ickelheimer & Company--Bullion and Foreign Exchange,” was the legend
on the window; and what the men were bringing forth and loading on
the dray was pure silver, in pigs so large that two strong men could
carry only one. The work went on unguarded. People passed as if they
didn’t see it. Precious money metal flung around like pig iron! The
sight depressed me. I walked slowly back to Broadway feeling dazed and
apprehensive.

No. 130 Broadway was an office building. The executive offices of
the Great Midwestern Railroad occupied the entire sixth floor. Room
607, small and dim, without windows, was the general entrance where
people asked and waited. High-backed wooden benches stood against the
walls. The doors opening out of it were ground glass from the waist
up, lettered in black. The one to the left was lettered, “President,”
the one straight ahead, “Vice President-Secretary,” and the one to the
right, “Private.” In one corner of this room, at a very tiny desk, sat
a boy reading a book. He was just turning a page and couldn’t look up
until he had carried over; but he held out his hand with a pencil and
a small writing pad together, meaning that I should write my name, whom
I wished to see and why. I gave it back to him with my name and nothing
more.

“Your business, please,” he said, holding it out to me again.

I let it to him tactfully that my business was private. If necessary,
I could explain it to the president’s secretary. Might I see his
secretary first?

The boy put down his book and eyed me steadily.

“He left this morning.”

“The president?”

“His secretary.”

“Suddenly, perhaps?” I said.

He slowly nodded his head several times, still gazing at me.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Two weeks.”

“Do you care for it?”

Instead of answering he got up, took the name I had written on the pad,
and disappeared through the door to the left. Almost at once he stood
holding it open and beckoned me to enter.

First was a small ante-space, probably called his office by the private
secretary who had gone suddenly away. It was furnished with letter
filing cases, two chairs and a typewriter desk standing open and
littered with papers.

The president’s room immediately beyond was large and lighted by
windows, but desolate. The rug was shabby. The walls were hung with
maps and railroad scenes in photograph, their frames askew. At one
side against the wall was a long oak table; on it were ink and writing
materials, also some books and periodicals.

On the other side of the room a very large man sat writing at a small,
old-fashioned walnut desk with a green-covered floor that pulled out
and a solid curved top that opened up or closed down with a rotary
motion. That kind of furniture was even then out of style. It is now
extinct. It was too ugly to survive in the antique shops.

He went on writing for a minute or two, then turned slowly, looked me
through and put out his hand.

“I’m preparing a speech on your subject,” he said.

“Coxeyism?”

“Yes. Your reports were excellent,--very good, indeed.”

As he said this he turned to search for something on his desk.

It is an odd sensation to meet a notorious person at close range for
the first time, especially one who has been much caricatured in the
newspapers. There is an imaginary man to be got rid of surreptitiously
before the real one can be accepted. One feels somehow embarrassed
while this act is taking place, with an impulse to apologize for the
human fact of its being so much easier on hearsay to believe ill than
good of a fellow being whom you do not know.

This John J. Valentine was a person of much figure in the country.
He was the head of a family two generations removed from the uncouth
progenitor who founded its fortune in commerce, real estate and
transportation; therefore, he was an aristocrat. For many years he had
been president of the Great Midwestern Railroad. After his name in
the Directory of Directors was a long list of banks, corporations and
insurance companies. He made a great many authoritative speeches, which
were read in the economics classes of the universities, printed at
length in the newspapers and commented upon editorially. What he said
was news because he said it. He represented an immovable point of view,
the chief importance of which lay in the mere fact of its existence. He
spoke courageously and believingly for the vested rights of property.

However, he might have been all that he was and yet not a national
figure in the popular sense. For the essential element of contemporary
greatness he was indebted to the fact that his features gave themselves
remarkably to caricature. The newspaper cartoonists did the rest.
They had fixed him in the public mind’s eye as the symbol of railroad
capital.

There was in him or about him an alarming contradiction. The
explanation was too obvious to be comprehended all at once. It was
this: that his ponderable characteristics were massive, overt and rude,
such as one would not associate with a notable gentleness of manner;
and yet his manner was gentle to the point of delicacy and he seemed
remarkably to possess the gift of natural politeness. Physically he
was enormous in all proportions. The head was tall and the forehead
overhanging gave the profile a concave form. He had a roaring, windy
voice, made husky by long restraint; it issued powerfully from a cave
partly concealed by a dense fibrous mustache.

“Oh, here they are,” he said, producing my reports.

Turning them sheet by sheet he questioned me at length, desiring me to
be most explicit in my recollections as to the reactions of people to
Coxeyism. His knowledge of the country through which we had passed was
surprising. When we were at the end I said:

“I have talked with all sorts of people besides,--people in Washington,
on my way to New York, and here also. Nobody seems to know what is
wrong. Some say it’s the tariff. Others say it’s something that has
been done to money. Nearly everyone blames Wall Street more or less.
What is the matter? Why is labor unemployed?”

He passed his hand over his face, then leaned forward in his chair and
spoke slowly:

“Why are the seven-year locusts? Why do men have seasons of madness?
Who knows?”

After a pause, his thoughts absorbing him, he continued in a tone of
soliloquy.

The country was bewitched. The conglomerate American mind was
foolishly persuaded to a variety of wistful and unverified economic
notions,--that was to say, heresies, about such important matters as
money, capital, prices, debts. People were minding things they knew
nothing about and could never settle, and were neglecting meanwhile to
be industrious. This had happened before in the world. In the Middle
Ages Europe might have advanced, with consequences in this day not
easily to be imagined, but for the time and the energy of mind and body
which were utterly wasted in quest of holy grails and dialectical forms
of truth. So now in this magnificent New World, the resources of which
were unlimited, human progress had been arrested by silly Utopians who
distracted the mind with thoughts of unattainable things.

Take the railroads. With already the cheapest railroad transportation
in the world, people were clamoring for it to be made cheaper. Crazy
Populists were telling the farmers it ought to be free, like the air.
Prejudice against railroads was amazing, irrational and suicidal. All
profit in railroading had been taxed and regulated away. Incentive to
build new roads had been destroyed. If by a special design of the Lord
a railroad did seem to prosper the politicians pounced upon it and
either mulcted it secretly or held it forth to the public as a monster
that must be chained up with restrictive laws. Sometimes they practised
both these arts at once. Result: the nation’s transportation arteries
were strangling. No extension of the arterial system for an increasing
population was possible under these conditions. What would the sequel
be? Rome for all her sins might have endured if only she had developed
means of communication, namely, roads, in an adequate manner. It was
obvious and nobody saw it. Well, now he was trying to save people from
a repetition of that blunder. He was trying to make them see in time
that unless they allowed the railroads to prosper the great American
experiment was doomed.

I could not help thinking: people prophesy against Wall Street and Wall
Street prophesies against the people.

I was surprised that he gave me so much time until it occurred to me
that he was thinking out loud, still working on his speech.

He wished me to take my reports, which were merely field notes, and
pull them into form as an article on Coxeyism. He would procure
publication of it, in one of the monthly reviews perhaps, under his
name if I didn’t mind, and he could adopt it whole, or under my own. It
didn’t matter which.

“An unhappy incident has just occurred in my office,” he said. “My
private secretary had to be sent away suddenly. You might work in his
room out there if it’s comfortable.”

I sat down to the task at once, in the ante-room, at the vacant desk.
Half an hour later, passing out, he dropped me word of where he was
going and when he might be expected back, in case anyone should ask.
In a little while the boy did ask. Either he had not been at his place
when the president passed out, or else the president forgot to tell
him, his habit being to leave word at the desk where I sat. Also the
telephone rang several times and as there was no one else to do it I
answered.

This ambiguous arrangement continued, the president coming and going,
leaving me always informed of his movements and asking me to be so good
as to say this or that to persons who should call up on the telephone.
It took two days to finish the article. He conceived a liking for my
style of writing and asked me to edit and touch up a manuscript that
had been giving him some trouble. Then it was to go over the proofs of
a monograph he had in the printer’s hands.

On the fifth day, about 4 o’clock, I was at work on these proofs and
the president was in his office alone with the door closed when someone
came in from the waiting room unannounced. I did not look up. Whoever
it was stood looking at my back, then moved a little to one side to
get an angular view, and a voice I recognized but could not instantly
identify addressed me.

“Hello, Coxey!”

“Hello,” I said, looking round. It was the irritating man of the
ferryboat incident. He sat down and ogled me offensively.

“Are you the new private secretary?”

“I don’t know what I am,” I said.

“But you’re working for Jeremiah,” he said, jerking a glance at the
proofs. “Oh, o-o-o! Toot-toot!” He was suddenly amused and shrewd. “You
must be the man who sent him those reports on the march of Coxey’s
Army. That’s it. Very fine reports they were. Most excellent nonsense.
My name is Galt--Henry M. Galt.”

“I’m pleased to meet you again,” I said, giving him my name in return.

“And old jobbernowl hasn’t hired you yet!” he said. “I’ll see about it.”

With that he got up abruptly and bolted into the president’s office,
closing the door behind him. I hated him intensely, partly I suppose
because unconsciously I transferred to him the feeling of humiliation
and anger produced in me by that look from the girl who was with him on
the ferryboat. It all came over me again.

Half an hour later, as he was going out, he said: “All right, Coxey.
You’ll be here for some time.”

The last thing the president did that day was to have me in his office
for a long, earnest conversation. He required a private secretary.
Several candidates had failed. What he needed was not a stenographer or
a filing clerk. That kind of service could be had from the back office.
He needed someone who could assist in a larger way, especially someone
who could write, as I could. He had looked me up. The recommendations
were satisfactory. He knew the college from which I came and it was
sound. In short, would I take the job at $200 a month.

“I must tell you,” he said, “there is no future in the railroad
business, no career for a young man. A third of the railway mileage of
the country is bankrupt. God only knows if even this railroad can stand
up. But you will get some valuable experience, and if at any time you
wish to go back to newspaper work I’ll undertake to get you a place in
New York no worse than the one you leave.”

I protested that I knew almost nothing of economics and finance.

“All the better,” he said. “You have nothing unsound to get rid of.
I’ll teach you by the short cuts. Two books, if you will read them
hard, will give you the whole groundwork.”

I accepted.


ii

The next morning Mr. Valentine presented me to the company secretary,
Jay C. Harbinger, and desired him to introduce me around the shop.

“This way,” said Harbinger, taking me in hand with an air of deep,
impersonal courtesy. He stepped ahead at each door, opened it, held
it, and bowed me through. His attitude of deference was subtly yet
unmistakably exaggerated. He was a lean, tall, efficient man, full of
sudden gestures, who hated his work and did it well, and sublimated the
petty irritations of his position in the free expression of violent
private judgments.

We stopped first in his office. It was a small room containing two very
old desks with swivel chairs, an extra wooden chair at the end of each
desk for visitors, a letter squeeze and hundreds of box letter files
in tiers to the ceiling, with a step ladder for reaching the top rows.
There was that smell of damp dust which lingers in a place after the
floor has been sprinkled and swept.

“That’s the vice-president’s desk,” said Harbinger, indicating the
other as he sat down at his own, his hands beneath him, and began to
rock. “He’s never here,” he added, swinging once all around and facing
me again. He evidently couldn’t be still. The linoleum was worn through
under his restless feet. “What brings you into this business?” he asked.

“Accident,” I said.

“It gets you in but never out,” he said. “It got me in thirty years
ago.... Are you interested in mechanical things?”

“Like what?” I asked.

Jerking open a drawer he brought forth a small object which I
recognized as a dating device. He showed me how easily it could be
set to stamp any date up to the year 2000. This was the tenth model.
He had been working on it for years. It would be perfect now but for
the stupidity of the model-maker who had omitted an important detail.
The next problem was how to get it on the market. He was waiting for
estimates on the manufacture of the first 500. Perhaps it would be
adopted in the offices of the Great Midwestern. That would help. The
president had promised to consider it. As he talked he filled a sheet
of paper with dates. Then he handed it to me. I concealed the fact that
it did not impress me wonderfully as an invention; also the sympathetic
twinge I felt. For one could see that he was counting on this absurd
thing to _get him out_. It symbolized some secret weakness in his
character. At the same moment I began to feel depressed with my job.

“Well,” he said, putting it back and slamming the drawer, “there’s
nothing more to see here. This way, please.”

His official manner was resumed like a garment.

In the next room were two motionless men with their backs to each
other, keeping a perfunctory, low-spirited tryst with an enormous iron
safe.

“Our treasurer, John Harrier,” said Harbinger, introducing me to the
first one,--a slight, shy man, almost bald, with a thick, close-growing
mustache darker than his hair. He removed his glasses, wiped them, and
sat looking at us without a word. There was no business before him, no
sign of occupation whatever, and there seemed nothing to say.

“A very hearty lunch,” I remarked, hysterically, calling attention to a
neat pile of pasteboard boxes on top of the desk. Each box was stamped
in big red letters: “Fresh eggs. 1 doz.” He went on wiping his glasses
in gloomy silence.

“Mr. Harrier lives in New Jersey and keeps a few chickens,” said
Harbinger. “He lets us have eggs. If you keep house ... are you
married, though?”

“No,” I said.

The treasurer put on his glasses and was turning his shoulder to us
when I extended my hand. He shook it with unexpected friendliness.

The other man was Fred Minus, the auditor, a very obese and sociable
person of the sensitive type, alert and naïve in his reactions.

“Nice fellows, those, when you know them a bit,” said Harbinger as
we closed the door behind us and stood for a moment surveying a very
large room which might be called the innermost premises of a railroad’s
executive organization. There were perhaps twenty clerks standing or
sitting on stools at high desks, not counting the cashier and two
assistants in a wire cage, which contained also a safe. The bare
floor was worn in pathways. Everything had an air of hallowed age and
honorable use, even the people, all save one, a magnificent person who
rose and came to meet us. He was introduced as Ivy Handbow, the chief
clerk. He was under thirty-five, full of rosy health, with an unmarried
look, whose only vice, at a guess, was clothes. He wore them with
natural art, believing in them, and although he was conscious of their
effect one could not help liking him because he insisted upon it so
pleasantly.

At the furthermost corner of the room was the transfer department.
That is the place where the company’s share certificates, after
having changed hands on the Stock Exchange, come to be transferred
from the names of the old to the names of the new owners. Five clerks
were working here at high pressure. To my remark that it seemed the
busiest spot,--I had almost said the only busy spot,--in the whole
organization, Harbinger replied: “Our stock has recently been very
active. With a large list of stockholders--we have more than ten
thousand--there is a constant come and go, old stockholders selling
out and new ones taking their places. Then all of a sudden, for why
nobody knows, the sellers become numerous and in their anxiety to find
buyers they unfortunately attract speculators who run in between seller
and buyer, create a great uproar, and take advantage of both. That is
what has been happening in the last few days. This is the result. Our
transfer office is swamped.”

He began to show me the routine. We took at random a certificate for
one thousand shares that had just come in and followed it through
several hands to the clerk whose task was to cancel it and make out
another certificate in the new owner’s name. At this point Harbinger
saw something that caused him to stop, forget what he was saying and
utter a grunt of surprise. I could not help seeing that what had
caught his attention was the name that unwound itself from the transfer
clerk’s pen. Harbinger regarded it thoughtfully until it disappeared
from view, overlaid by others; and when he became again aware of me it
was to say: “Well, we’ve been to the end of the shop. There’s nothing
more to see.”

The name that had arrested his attention was Henry M. Galt.


iii

At lunch time Harbinger asked me to go out with him. On our way we
overtook the treasurer and auditor, who joined us without words. We
were a strange party of four,--tall discontent, bald gloom, lonely
obesity and middling innocence. Two and two we walked down Broadway to
the top of Wall Street, turned into it and almost immediately turned
out of it again into New Street, a narrow little thoroughfare which
serves the Stock Exchange as a back alley. The air was distressed
with that frightful, destructive b-oo-o-o-o-ing which attends falling
prices. It seemed to issue not only from the windows and doors of the
great red building but from all its crevices and through the pores of
the bricks.

“They are whaling us in there to-day,” said Harbinger over his shoulder.

“Nine,” said John Harrier. It was the first word I had heard him utter,
and it surprised me that the sound was definite and positive.

“Are you talking about Great Midwestern Railroad stock?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Harbinger, “John says it sold at nine this morning. That is
the lowest price in all the company’s history. Every few days there’s
a rumor on the Stock Exchange that we are busted, as so many other
railroads are, and then the speculators, as I told you, create so much
uproar and confusion that no legitimate buyer can find a legitimate
seller, but all must do business with the speculator, who plays
upon their emotions in the primitive manner by means of terrifying
sounds and horrible grimaces. Hear him! He has also a strange power
of simulation. He adds to the fears of the seller when the seller is
already fearful, and to the anxieties of the buyer when the buyer is
already impatient, making one to part with his stock for less than it’s
worth and the other to pay for it more than he should.”

Eating was at Robins’. The advantage of being four was that we could
occupy either a whole table against the wall opposite the bar or one
of the stalls at the end. As there was neither stall nor table free we
leaned against the bar and waited. We appeared to be well known. Three
waiters called to Harbinger by name and signalled in pantomime over the
heads of the persons in possession how soon this place or that would be
surrendered. While we stood there many other customers passed us and
disappeared down three steps into a larger room beyond. “Nobody ever
goes down there,” said Harbinger, seeing that I noticed the drift of
traffic. “It’s gloomy and the food isn’t so good.” The food all came
from one kitchen, as you could see; but as for its being more cheerful
here than in the lower room that was obviously true because of the
brilliantly lighted bar. And cheerfulness was something our party could
stand a great deal of, I was thinking. Harbinger had left himself in
a temper and was now silent. The other two were lumpish. Presently we
got a stall and sat there in torpid seclusion. The enormous surrounding
clatter of chairs, feet, doors, chinaware and voices touched us not at
all. We were as remote as if we existed in another dimension. Lunch
was procured without one unnecessary vocal sound. Not only was there
no conversation among us; there was no feeling or intuition of thought
taking place. I was obliged to believe either that I was a dead weight
upon them or that it was their habit to make an odious rite of lunch.
In one case I couldn’t help it; in the other I shouldn’t have been
asked. In either case a little civility might have saved the taste of
the food. When there is no possibility of making matters worse than
they are one becomes reckless.

“Who is Henry M. Galt?” I asked suddenly, addressing the question to
the three of them collectively. I expected it to produce some effect,
possibly a strange effect; yet I was surprised at their reactions to
the sound of the name. It was as if I had spilled a family taboo.
Unconsciously gestures of anxiety went around the table. For several
minutes no one spoke, apparently because no one could think just what
to say.

“He’s a speculator,” said Harbinger. “Have you met him?--but of course
you have.”

“The kind of speculator who comes between buyer and seller and harries
the market, as you were telling?” I asked.

“He has several characters,” said Harbinger. “He is a member of
the Stock Exchange, professional speculator, floor trader, broker,
broker’s broker, private counsellor, tipster, gray bird of mystery. An
offensive, insulting man. He spends a good deal of time in our office.”

“Why does he do that?”

“He transacts the company’s business on the Stock Exchange, which isn’t
much. I believe he does something in that way also for the president
who, as you know, is a man of large affairs.”

“He seems to have a good deal of influence with the president,” I said.
There was no answer. Harbinger looked uncomfortable.

“But there’s one thing to be said for him,” I continued. “He believes
in the Great Midwestern Railroad. He is buying its shares.”

Harbinger alone understood what I meant. “It’s true,” he said, speaking
to the other two. “Stock is being transferred to his name.” It was the
secretary’s business to know this. Harrier and Minus were at first
incredulous and then thoughtful. “But you cannot know for sure,”
Harbinger added. “That kind of man never does the same thing with both
hands at once. He may be buying the stock in his own name for purposes
of record and selling it anonymously at the same time.”

While listening to Harbinger I had been watching John Harrier, and now
I addressed him pointedly.

“What do you think of this Henry Galt?”

His reply was prompt and unexpected, delivered with no trace of emotion.

“He knows more about the G. M. railroad than its own president knows.”

“John! I never heard you say that before,” said Harbinger.

Harrier said it again, exactly as before. And there the subject stuck,
head on.

We returned by the way we had come, passing the rear of the Stock
Exchange again. At the members’ entrance people to the number of thirty
or forty were standing in a hollow group with the air of meaning to be
entertained by something that was about to happen. We stopped.

“What is it?” I asked.

Harbinger pushed me through the rind to the hollow center of the
crowd and pointed downward at some blades of grass growing against
the curbstone. The sight caused nothing to click in my brain. For an
instant I thought it might be a personal hoax. It couldn’t be that,
however, with so many people participating. I was beginning to feel
silly when the crowd cheered respectfully and parted at one side to
admit a man with a sprinkling pot. He watered those blades of grass in
an absent, philosophical manner, apparently deaf to the ironic words of
praise and encouragement hurled at him by the spectators, and retired
with dignity. I watched him disappear through an opposite doorway. The
crowd instantly vanished. The four of us stood alone in the middle of
New Street.

“Grass growing at the door of the New York Stock Exchange,” said
Harbinger, grinning warily as one does at a joke that is both bad and
irresistible. The origin of the grass was obvious. An untidy horse had
been fed at that spot from a nose bag and some of the oats that were
spilled had sprouted in a few ounces of silt gathered in a crevice at
the base of the curbstone.

The incident gave me a morose turn of thought. As a jest it was
pitiable. What had happened to people to abase their faith in
themselves and in each other? Simple believing seemed everywhere
bankrupt. Nobody outside of it believed in Wall Street. That you might
understand. But here was Wall Street nurturing in fun a symbol of
its own decay, and by this sign not believing in itself. Harbinger
denounced the Stock Exchange speculators who depressed the price of
Great Midwestern shares and circulated rumors damaging the railroad’s
credit. But did Harbinger himself believe in Great Midwestern? No.
The Great Midwestern did not believe in itself. Its own president
did not believe in it. He was busily advertising his disbelief in the
whole railroad business. Why had he no faith in the railroad business?
Because people had power over railroads and he disbelieved in people.
Therefore, people disbelieved in him.

I was saying to myself that I had yet to meet a man with downright
faith in anything when I thought of Galt. He believed in the country. I
remembered vividly what he said about it on the ferryboat. It was rich
and nobody would believe it. He believed also in Great Midwestern, for
he was buying the stock in the face of those ugly rumors.

The fact of this one man’s solitary believing seemed very remarkable
to me at that instant. In the perspectives of times and achievement it
became colossal.


iv

The president was in Chicago on two errands. One was to hold a solemn
quarterly conference with the operating officials on the ground. There
was supposed to be much merit in having it take place on the ground.
The first time I heard the locution it made me think of Indian chiefs
debating around a camp fire. The executive offices in New York were
more than a thousand miles from the Great Midwestern’s first rail’s
end. It does not matter so much where a railway’s brains are; but its
other organs must remain where they naturally belong, and that is
why all the operating departments were in Chicago. Four times a year
the brains were present in the physical sense. At all other times the
operating officials either brought their problems to New York, solved
them on the spot, or put them in a pigeon hole to await the next
conference.

His other errand was to deliver a speech, entitled, “Lynching the
Railroads,” at a manufacturers’ banquet. On the plane of large ideas
the great Valentine mind was explicit; elsewhere it was vague and
liable. Although this was the first time I had been left alone with the
New York office for more than one day my instructions were very dim. At
the last moment the president said: “You will know what to do. Use your
own judgment. Open everything that comes in. Tell Mr. Harbinger to be
very careful about the earnings. They got out again last week.”

He was referring to the private weekly statement of gross and net
revenues compiled jointly by the secretary and treasurer and delivered
by Harbinger’s own hand to the president. This exhibit was not for
publication like the monthly statement; it was a special sounding for
the information of the executive, or a kind of statistical cheese auger
by means of which the trained sense could sample the state of business.
The figures were supposed to be jealously guarded. On no account were
they to go out of the office, save by direct order of the president.
The crime of my predecessor had been to let them fall regularly into
the hands of certain Stock Exchange speculators.

Knowing all this, everybody knowing it, I wondered at Harbinger when
late one evening he brought the statement to my desk, saying: “Here are
the weekly figures. You take them. It’s better to keep them all in one
place while the chief is away. I haven’t even a copy.”

I was not surprised that he should be trying to rid himself of a
distasteful responsibility. But the act of avoidance was in itself
puerile. Suppose there was another leak. He could say that he had put
the statement out of his keeping into mine; he could say he had not
kept a copy; but could he expect anyone to believe he had erased them
from his mind? It irritated me. I kept thinking about it that night. I
concluded there was something I did not understand; and there was.

As I was opening my desk the next morning Galt came in and without a
word or sign of salutation addressed me summarily.

“Harbinger says you have the earnings.”

“The weekly earnings?” I asked.

“The weekly earnings,” he repeated after me, trying to mimic my voice
and manner. He would have been ridiculous except that he was angry, and
anger was an emotion that seemed curiously to enlarge him. So here was
the explanation of Harbinger’s behavior. He had expected Galt to ask
him for the figures and he meant to be able to say that he didn’t have
them.

We regarded each other steadily.

“Well?” I said.

“You apparently don’t know that I get them,” he said, his anger
beginning to rise against me.

“No, I don’t know it,” I said. “Does Mr. Harbinger know?”

This reference to Harbinger, which he understood to be sarcastic,
completed his rage.

“Do I get them?” he asked, bulging at me in a menacing manner.

“Sorry,” I said. “There’s no hole for you in my instructions.”

At that he began to pass in front of me, with long, stealthy steps,
his shoulders crouched, his hands in his pockets, his head low and
cocked right and then left as he turned and passed again, all the while
looking at me fixedly with a preposterous, maleficent glare. The effect
was so ludicrous that I laughed. And then for only so long as it takes
to see a flashing thing there was a look in his eyes that made me
shudder. Suddenly he went out, slamming the door so hard that I held my
breath for the sound of falling glass.

As the pantomime reconstructed itself in reflection it assumed a comic
aspect. No, it couldn’t have been serious. I was almost persuaded
it had been a bit of undignified acting, an absurd though harmless
way of working off a fit of temper, when I recalled that look and
shuddered again. Once before I had seen that expression in the eyes of
a malevolent hunchback. It was the look of a giant tragically trapped
in a puny body. Galt was a small man, weighing less than one hundred
pounds, with a fretful, nagging body.

Before lunch the president called me on the G. M.’s private telegraph
wire. He stood at the key in the Chicago office and I stood at the
key in the New York office, and we conversed through the operators
without written messages. Was everything all right? he asked me. Yes,
everything was all right. There was nothing urgent? he asked. No, there
was nothing urgent, I said. Then, as if he had but chanced to think of
it, he said: “I forgot to tell you. It’s all right for Mr. Galt to have
the earnings.”

His anxiety to seem casual about it betrayed the fact that he had
called me expressly to say that Galt should have the earnings; and
there was no doubt in my thoughts that Galt since leaving me had been
in communication with my chief by telegraph. What an amazing to-do!

If my deductions were true, then I might expect to be presently favored
with another visit. So I was. He came in about 2 o’clock and sat down
at the end of my desk without speaking. I did not speak either, but
handed him the statement of earnings. He crumpled the paper in his hand
and dropped it in the waste basket. I was sure he hadn’t looked at it.

“Coxey,” he said, “promise never again to laugh at me like that....
We’ve got a long way to go ... up and down grade ... but promise
whatever happens never to do that again.”

Somehow I was not surprised. For a little time we sat looking at each
other.

“All right,” I said, holding out my hand to him. It was an irrational
experience. We shook hands in the veiled, mysterious manner of boys
sealing a life-time compact for high adventure, no more words either
necessary or feasible.

But with Harbinger some further conversation seemed appropriate. So
later I said to him.

“Why are you so afraid of Galt?”

“You do ask some very extraordinary questions?”

“I have a right to ask this one,” I said, “seeing that you put it upon
me to refuse him the earnings. You were afraid to refuse him. Isn’t
that why you gave the figures to me?”

“You will have to think what you like of my motives,” he said, with
rather fine dignity, though at the same time turning red. “I don’t see
why you shouldn’t learn yours as we’ve had to learn ours,” he added.

“My what?”

“That’s all,” he said, twirling about in his swivel chair and avoiding
my regard.

“Why do you dislike him?”

“It isn’t that I dislike him,” he retorted, beginning to lose his
temper a bit. “The thing of it is I don’t know how to treat him. He
has no authority here that one can understand, get hold of, or openly
respect. Yet there are times when you might think he owned the whole
lot of us.”

“How did this come about?”

“Gradually,” he said. “Or, ... at least ... it was only about a year
ago that he began to have the run of the place. Before that we knew him
merely as a broker who made a specialty of dealing in Great Midwestern
securities. From dealing so much in our securities he came to have a
personal curiosity about the property. That’s what he said. So he began
to pry into things, wanting information about this and that, some of it
very private, and when we asked the president about it he said, ‘Oh,
give him anything but the safe.’ Lately he’s been spending so much time
around here that I wonder how he makes a living. He knows too much
about the company. You heard John Harrier. He knows as much about our
mortgages, indentures, leases and records as I know, and that’s my end
of the business. He’s made me look up facts I never heard of before.
He’s been all over the road, looking at it with a microscope. I do
believe he knows generally more about the Great Midwestern than any
other person living. Why? Tell me why?”

“He and the president are old friends, did you say?”

He paused for effect and said: “Henry Galt has only one friend in the
world. That’s himself. Ask anybody who knows him in Wall Street. He’s
been around here twenty years.”

“Maybe it’s his extensive knowledge of the property that gives him his
influence with the president,” I suggested.

Harbinger came forward with a lurch, rested his elbows on his desk,
hung his chin over his double fist and stared at me close up.

“Maybe!” he said.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked. He was aching to tell me what all
of this had been leading up to, and yet the saying of it was inhibited.

“I’m not a superstitious man,” he said, speaking with effort. “There’s
a natural reason for everything if you know what it is.... It’s very
strange.”

“What’s strange?”

“He knows both what is and what isn’t.”

“Galt does?”

He nodded and at the same time implored me by gesture not to let my
voice rise. “May be anywhere around ... in the next room,” he said,
hardly above a whisper. “Yes. He knows things that haven’t happened. If
there’s such a gift as pre-vision he has it.”

“If that were true,” I objected, “he would have all the money in the
world.”

“Just the same it’s true,” said Harbinger, rising and reaching for his
coat. He looked at me a little askance, doubtless with misgivings as to
the propriety of having talked so much.




CHAPTER III

GALT


i

It was true of Galt, as Harbinger said, that he had no friends; it
was not therefore true that his world was full of enemies. He had
many acquaintances and no intimates. He was a solitary worker in the
money vineyards, keeping neither feud nor tryst with any clan. His
reputation in Wall Street was formless and cloudy. Everybody knew him,
or knew something about him; for twenty years he had been a pestiferous
gadfly on the Stock Exchange, lighting here and there, turning up
suddenly in situations where he had to be settled with or bought off,
swaggering, bluffing, baiting, playing the greatest of all games of
wit with skill and daring--and apparently getting nowhere in the end.
Once he had engaged in a lone-handed fight with a powerful banking
group over the reorganization of a railroad, demanding to be elected to
the directorate as the largest minority stockholder. The bankers were
indignant. The audacity of a stock market gambler wanting to sit on
a railroad board! What would anybody think? He took his case to the
courts and was beaten.

Another time he unexpectedly appeared with actual control of a small
railroad, having bought it surreptitiously during many months in the
open market place; but as he held it mostly with credit borrowed from
the banks his position was vulnerable. It would not do for a gambler
like this to own a railroad, the bankers said; so his loans were called
away from him and he had to sell out at a heart-breaking loss. He was
beaten again.

He took his defeats grimly and returned each time to the practice
of free lance speculation, with private brokerage on the side. The
unsuccess of these two adventures caused him to be thought of as a man
whose ambitions exceeded his powers. There were a great many facts
about him, facts of record and facts of hearsay, but when they were
brought together the man was lost. Though he talked a great deal to
any one who would listen he revealed nothing of himself. His office
was one dark little room, full of telephones; and he was never there.
He carried his business in his head. Nobody positively spoke ill of
him, or if one did it was on ground of free suspicion, with nothing
more specific to be alleged than that he turned a sharp corner. That is
nothing to say. To go wide around corners in Wall Street is a mark of
self-display. People neither liked nor disliked him. They simply had no
place in their minds to put him. So they said, “Oh, yes,--Harry Galt,”
and shook their heads. They might say he was unsafe and take it back,
remarking that he had never been insolvent. What they meant was that
he was visionary. Generally on the Stock Exchange there is a shrewd
consensus as to what a man is worth. Nobody had the remotest notion of
what Galt was worth. It was believed that his fortune went up and down
erratically.

Between Galt and the president of the Great Midwestern there was a
strange relationship. Harbinger had said it was not one of friendship.
Perhaps not. Yet it would be difficult to find any other name for it.
Their association was constant. Galt did all of Valentine’s private
Stock Exchange business, as Harbinger said. What Harbinger did not know
was that they were engaged in joint speculations under Galt’s advice
and direction. All of this, of course, could be without personal liking
on either side. Galt was an excellent broker and an adroit speculator.
Valentine never spoke of him without a kind of awe and a certain unease
of manner. Galt’s references to Valentine were oblique, sometimes
irreverent to the verge of disrespect, but that was Galt. It did not
imply dislike.

On the president’s return from Chicago I mentioned the fact of having
refused to give Galt the earnings.

“Quite right,” he said. “I ought to have told you about Mr. Galt.”

“Is it all right to give him anything he wants?” I asked, remembering
what Harbinger had said and wishing to test it for myself. He did not
answer at once, nor directly. After walking about for several minutes
he said:

“Mr. Galt is becoming a large stockholder in the Great Midwestern
Railroad. Why, I don’t know. I cannot follow his process of thought.
Our stock is very low. I don’t know when if ever we shall be able to
pay dividends on it again. But I cannot keep him from buying it. He is
obstinate in his opinions.”

“Is his judgment good in such matters?” I asked.

“It isn’t judgment,” he said slowly. “It isn’t anything you can touch
by reason. I suppose it is intuition.”

“Do his intuitions prove in the sequel?”

He grew more restless and then stood for a long time gazing out of the
window.

“It’s queer,” he said, speaking to himself. “He has extraordinary
foresight. I wish I could see with him now. If he is right then
everybody else is wrong. No, he cannot be right ... he cannot be.
Conditions are too plain.”

“He doesn’t see conditions as they are?” I said.

“As they are?” he repeated, starting, and then staring at me out of
focus with recollected astonishment. “He doesn’t see them at all. They
don’t exist. What he sees is ... is.... Well, well, no matter,” he
said, letting down suddenly and returning to his desk with a large
gesture of sweeping something behind him.

It was difficult to be friends with Henry Galt. His power of irritation
was impish. None escaped its terrors, least of all those upon whom he
bestowed his liking. He knew all their tender spots and kept them sore.
No word of satire, derision or petulance was ever restrained, or missed
its mark. His aim was unerring; and if you were not the victim you
wickedly understood the strength of the temptation. He not only made
people feel little; he made them look little. What saved it or made it
utterly intolerable, according to the point of view, was that having
done this he was scornful of his own ego’s achievement, as to say: “I
may be greater than you but that’s no sign I am anything to speak of.”
There was a curious fact about his exhibitions of ungoverned feeling,
either ecstasies or tantrums. He had no sense of physical dignity, and
therefore no sensation ever of losing it. For that reason he could
bring off a most undignified scene in a manner to humiliate everyone
but himself. Having behaved incorrigibly he would suddenly stalk off in
majestic possession of himself and leave others in a ludicrous plight,
with a sense of having suffered an unanswerable indignity. It delighted
him to seize you up on some simple declaration of opinion, demand the
reason, then the grounds of the reason, and run you off your wits with
endless, nagging questions.

On handing him the weekly earnings one afternoon I passed a word of
unconsidered comment. He impeached it with a question. I defended it
foolishly. He impeached the defense with another question. And this
went on until I said:

“It was nothing in the beginning. I merely meant it to be civil, like
passing the time of day. I’m sorry I spoke at all.”

“Sorry spoils it,” he said. “Otherwise very handsome.” And he passed
into the president’s office for the long conference which now was a
daily fixture. They went away together as usual. Presently Galt alone
returned and said in a very nice way:

“Come and have dinner with me, Coxey.”

When we were seated in the Sixth Avenue L train he resumed the
inquisitive manner, only now he flattered me by showing genuine
interest in my answers. Had I seen the board of directors in action?
How was I impressed? Who was the biggest man in the lot at a guess?
Why so? What did I think of Valentine, of this and that one? Why? He
not only made me recall my impressions, he obliged me to account for
them. And he listened attentively. When we descended at 50th Street he
seemed not to notice that it was drizzling rain. There was no umbrella.
We walked slowly south to 48th Street and turned east, talking all the
time.

The Galt house was tall, brown and conventional, lying safe within the
fringe. It was near the middle of the block. Eastward toward Fifth
Avenue as the scale of wealth ascended there were several handsome
houses. Westward toward Sixth Avenue at the extreme end of the block
you might suspect high class board. But it is a long block; one end
does not know the other. About the entrance, especially at the front
door as Galt admitted us with a latch-key, there was an effect of
stinted upkeep.

Inside we were putting off our things, with no sign of a servant, when
suddenly a black and white cyclone swept down the hall, imperilling
in its passage a number of things and threatening to overwhelm its
own object; but instead at the miraculous moment it became rigid,
gracefully executed a flying slide on the tiled floor, and came to a
perfect stop with Galt in its arms.

“Safe!” I shouted, filled with excitement and admiration.

“Natalie,” said Galt, introducing her.

She shook hands in a free, roguish manner, smiling with me at herself,
without really for an instant taking her attention off Galt.

“You’re wet,” she said severely.

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re soaking wet,” she insisted, feeling and pinching him at the
same time. “You’ve got to change.”

“I’ve got to do nothing of the kind,” he said. “We want to talk. Let us
alone.” To me he said: “Come up to my room,” and made for the stairway.

Natalie, getting ahead of him, barred the way.

“You won’t have a minute to talk,” she said. “Dinner is ready. Go in
there.”

“Oh, all right ... all right,” he growled, turning into the parlor.
Almost before he could sit down she was at him with a dry coat, holding
it. Grumbling and pretending to be churlish, yet secretly much pleased,
he changed garments, saying: “Will that do you?”

“For now,” she said, smoothing the collar and giving him a little whack
to finish.

Mrs. Galt appeared. Then Galt’s mother, introduced simply and sweetly
by her nursery name, Gram’ma Galt. There was an embarrassing pause.

“Where is Vera?” Galt asked.

Vera, I supposed, was the ferryboat girl.

Nobody answered his question. Mrs. Galt by an effort of strong
intention moved us silently toward the dining room. The house seemed
bare,--no pictures to look at, a few pieces of fine old furniture mixed
with modern things, good rugs worn shabby and no artistry of design or
effect whatever except in the middle room between parlor and dining
room which contained a grand piano, some art objects and a thought of
color. Nothing in the house was positively ugly or in bad taste, nor in
the total impression was there any uncomfortable suggestion of genteel
poverty. What the environment seemed to express, all save that one
middle room, was indifference.

“You will want to talk,” said Mrs. Galt, placing me at the left of
Galt, so that I faced Natalie, who sat at his right. This was the foot
of the table. Mrs. Galt sat at the head of it, with Gram’ma Galt at her
right and a vacant place at her left.

“Where is Vera?” Galt asked again, beginning to develop symptoms.

“She isn’t coming down,” said Mrs. Galt in a horizontal voice.

“Why not?” asked Galt, beating the table. “Why not?”

“T-e-e o-o-o doubleyou,” said Natalie, significantly, trying to catch
his eye. But he either didn’t hear or purposely ignored her, and went
on:

“She does this to spite me. She does it every time I bring anybody
home. I won’t have it. She’s a monkey, she’s a snob. I’ll call her till
she comes. Hey, Ver-a-a-a!”

Natalie had been shaking him by the arm, desperately trying to make him
look at a figure formed with the fingers of her right hand. Evidently
there was a code between them. She had already tried the cipher, T O
W, whatever that meant, and now this was the sign. If he would only
look! But of course he wouldn’t. Suddenly the girl threw herself around
him, and though he resisted she smothered him powerfully and whispered
in his ear. Instantly the scene dissolved. She returned to her place
slightly flushed with the exertion, he sat up to the table, and dinner
began to be served as if nothing unusual had taken place.

Mrs. Galt addressed polite inquiries at me, spoke to the butler,
conversed with Natalie, not feverishly or in haste, but placidly, in a
calm level voice. She was a magnificent brunette woman, turning gray at
a time of life and in a manner to make her look even younger and more
striking than before. Her expression was trained, impersonal and weary,
as that of one who knows the part too well to be surprised or taken
unawares and had forgotten what it was like to be interested without
effort. There were lines suitable to every occasion. She knew them
all and spoke them well, omitting nothing, slurring nothing, adding
nothing. Her conversation, like her expression, was a guise. Back of
that there dwelt a woman.

No one spoke to the old mother. I tried to talk to her. She became
instantly rigid and remained so until I turned away embarrassed. As I
did so Natalie was looking at me.

“Don’t mind Gram’ma,” she said across the table. “When she wants to
talk she will let you know.”

I happened to catch the angry look that the grandmother darted at the
girl for this polite impertinence. It betrayed an amazing energy of
spirit. That old stone house with its breaking lines, dissolving gray
textures, and no way in, was still the habitat of an ageless, sultry
sibyl. Trespass at your peril! But youth possessing itself is truly
impervious. The girl did not mind. She returned the look with a smile,
just a little too winsome, as everything about her seemed a little too
high in key or color, too extraordinary, too unexpected, or, like the
girl in the perfumer’s advertisement, a little too much to be true,
not in any sense of being unreal, but as an entity altogether and
unfortunately improbable. She had learned how to get what she wanted,
and her way of getting it, one could imagine, was all that made life
bearable in that household.

Its sky was low and ominous, charged with a sense of psychic stress. I
felt two conditions of conflict, one chronic and one acute. The feeling
of there being something acute was suddenly deepened when the old
mother spoke for the first and only time. Her voice was clear, precise
and commanded undivided attention. The question she asked gave me a
queer start.

“What is the price of Great Midwestern to-day?”

“Eight,” said Galt, amid profound silence.

That was all. Yet it was as if a spark had passed through inflammable
gas. The same feeling was deepened further by another incident.

“Coxey,” said Galt, addressing me rhetorically, “what one thing has
impressed you most in Wall Street?”

“The unbelief of people in themselves, in each other and in what they
are doing,” I replied.

“What’s that? Say it again.”

I said it again, whereat he burst forth with shrill, discordant,
exulting sounds, beating the china with a spoon and making for one
person an incredible uproar. At the same time he looked about him with
a high air, especially at his wife, whose expression was perfectly
blank. Natalie smiled grimly. The old mother was oblivious.

“I don’t see anything in that,” I said, when the racket subsided.

“There is, though,” he said. “You didn’t mean to do it but you hit ’em
in the eye that time,--square in the eye. Wow!” He was very agreeably
excited and got up from the table.

“Come on,” he said, “we’ll talk in my room.”

“I’ll send your coffee up,” Mrs. Galt called after us, as he bore me
off.

“This is where I live and play,” he said, applying a latch-key to a
door at the top of the stairway. He went in first to get the light on,
saying: “I don’t let anybody in here but Natalie. She can dust it up
without touching anything.”

The room was a workshop in that state of involved disorder, tools
all scattered about, which is sign and measure of the craftsman’s
engrossment. There was an enormous table piled high at both ends with
papers, briefs, maps, charts, blue prints, files, pamphlets and stuffed
envelopes. Books were everywhere,--on the table, on the chairs, on
the floor, many of them open, faces up and faces down, straddled one
upon another leap-frog fashion, arranged in series with weights to
hold them flat, books sprawling, leaning, prone. Poor’s Manual of
Railway Statistics, the Financial Chronicle, Statistical Abstract of
the United States, Economics of Railroad Construction, History of
the Erie Railroad, the Yardmaster’s Assistant,--such were the titles.
Against the right wall to a height of six feet were book shelves filled
with all the contemporary financial and commercial periodicals in
bound volumes, almanacs, endless books of statistical reference and
the annual reports of various railway corporations, running back for
many years. On top of the shelves was the only decorative thing in the
room,--a beautiful working model of a locomotive, perfect in every
intricate part, mounted in brass and set upon a nickel plated section
of railway.

One could have guessed without seeing him that the occupant of this
room was restless, never at physical ease, and worked all over the
place, sitting here and there, lying down and walking about. On the
left side of the room was a couch and close beside it at one end a
morris chair, a reading light between them. Both the couch and chair
showed nervous wear and tear. And beyond the table in the clear space
the rug had been paced threadbare.

Most of the available wall area was covered with maps and colored
charts. I walked about looking at them. Galt removed his shoes, put on
slippers, got into a ragged lounging jacket and threw himself on the
couch, where he lay for some time watching me with the air of one who
waits only to pop open at the slightest touch in the right place.

“What is this?” I asked, staring at a large map which showed the Great
Midwestern in heavy red lines, as I fairly well knew it, but with such
ramified extensions in blue lines as to make it look like a gigantic
double-ended animal with its body lying across the continent and its
tentacles flung wide in the east and west.

“That’s crystal gazing,” he said.

“It’s what?”

“What may be,” he said, coming off the couch with a spring. As he
passed the table he snatched up a ruler to point with.

See! There was the Great Midwestern alone,--all there was of it, from
there to there. It was like a desert bridge from east to west, or,
better still, like a strait connecting two vast oceans of freight. It
was not so placed as to be able to originate traffic for itself, not
profitably, yet that is what it had always been trying to do instead of
attending exclusively to its own unique function. Its opportunity was
to become the Dardanelles of trans-continental traffic. To realize its
destiny it must control traffic at both ends. How? Why, by controlling
railroads east and west that developed and originated freight, as
a river gathers water, by a system of branches reaching up to the
springs. And those blue lines, see!--they were those other roads which
the Great Midwestern should control in its own interest.

He turned to a chart ten feet long by four feet deep hung level with
the eyes on the opposite wall. The heavy black line erratically
rising and falling against a background of graduated horizontal
lines was an accurate profile of the Great Midwestern for the whole
of its length,--that is, a cross section of the earth showing the
configuration of its surface under the G. M. railroad’s ties and rails.
It was unique, he said. Never had such a thing been done on this scale
before. The purpose was to exhibit the grades in a graphic manner.
There were many bad grades, each one like a hole in the pocket. His
knowledge was minute. “Now from here to here,” he said, indicating 100
miles of profile with low grades, “it costs half a cent to move a ton
of freight one mile, and that pays. But from here to here,” indicating
a sudden rise in the next fifty miles, “it costs three cents per ton
per mile and all the profit made in the preceding 100 miles is lost on
that one grade.”

“What can be done about it?” I asked.

“Cut that grade down from 150 to 50 feet in the mile,” he said, slicing
the peak of it through with his ruler, “and freight can be moved at a
profit.”

“It would take a lot of labor and money, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, what of all this unemployment belly-ache you and old Bubbly Jock
are writing pieces about?” he retorted. “You say there is more labor
than work. I’ll show you more work to be done on the railroads than you
can find labor in a generation for. All right, you say, but then it’s
the money. The Great Midwestern hasn’t got the money to spend on that
grade. True. Like all other roads with bad grades it’s hard up. But it
could borrow the money and earn big dividends on it. Track levelling
pays better than gold mining.”

“You and Coxey ought to confer,” I said. “You are not so far apart.
He wants the government to create work by the simple expedient of
borrowing money to build good roads. And here you say the railroads, if
they would borrow money to reduce their grades, might employ all the
idle labor there is.”

He gave me a queer look, as if undecided whether to answer in earnest.
“Coxey is technically crazy,” he said, “and I’m technically sane. That
may be the principal difference. Besides, it isn’t the government’s
business.”

This diversion gave his thoughts a more general character. For three
hours he walked about talking railroads,--how they had got built so
badly in the first place, why so many were bankrupt, errors of policy,
capital cost, upkeep, the relative merits of different kinds of
equipment, new lines of development, problems of operation. For this
was the stuff of his dreams. He devoured it. The idea of a railroad
as a means to power filled the whole of his imagination. It was man’s
most dynamic tool. No one had yet imagined its possibilities. He became
romantic. His feeling for a locomotive was such as some men have for
horses. The locomotive, he said, suddenly breaking off another thought
to let that one through,--the locomotive was more wonderful than any
automotive thing God had placed on earth. According to the book of Job
God boasted of the horse. Well, look at it alongside of a locomotive!

He never went back to finish what he was saying when the image of a
locomotive interrupted his thought. Instead he became absent and began
to look slowly about the room as if he had lost something. I understood
what had happened. He was seized with the premonition of an idea. He
felt it before he could see it; it had to be helped out of the fog.
I made gestures of going, which he accepted. As we shook hands he
became fully present for long enough to say: “I never talk like this to
anyone. Just keep that in mind.... Good night.”


ii

He did not come down with me. He did not come even to the door of his
own room. As I closed it I saw his back. He was leaning over the table
in a humped posture, his head sideways in his left hand, writing or
ciphering rapidly on a sheet of yellow paper. Good for the rest of
the night, I thought, as I went down the dimly lighted stairs, got my
things and let myself into the vestibule.

The inner door came to behind me with a bang because the outer door was
partly open and a strong draught swept through. At the same instant I
became aware of a woman’s figure in the darkness of the vestibule. She
was dry; therefore she could not be just coming in, for a cold rain
was falling. And if she had just come out, why hadn’t I seen her in
the hallway? But why was I obliged to account for her at all? It was
unimportant. Probably she had been hesitating to take the plunge into
the nasty night. I felt rather silly. First I had been startled and
then I had hesitated, and now it was impossible to speak in a natural
manner. My impulse was to bolt it in silence. Then to my surprise she
moved ahead of me, stood outside, and handed me her umbrella. I raised
it and held it over her; we descended the steps together.

“I’m going toward Fifth Avenue,” I said.

She turned with me in that direction, saying: “I was waiting for you.”

“You are Vera?”

“Yes.”

“The ferryboat girl,” I added.

“The what?”

“Nothing. Go on. Why were you waiting for me?”

She did not answer immediately. We walked in silence to the next light
where she turned and gave me a frankly inquisitive look.

“Oh,” she said.

“Oh, what?” said I. “You don’t remember me.”

“Nothing,” she answered, giving me a second look, glancewise. “Two
nothings make it even,” she added.

There was an awkward pause. “May I ask you something? You are with the
Great Midwestern, in Mr. Valentine’s office?”

“Yes.”

“I have no one else to ask,” she said. “You will be surprised. It is
this: do you think Great Midwestern stock a good investment?”

I was angry and uncomfortable. Why was she asking me? But she wasn’t
really; she was coming at something else.

“I haven’t any opinion,” I said, “and that isn’t what you mean.”

We were now in Fifth Avenue and had stopped in the doorway of a lighted
shop to be out of the rain. She blushed at my answer and at the same
time gave me a look of scrutiny. I had to admire the way she held to
her purpose.

“I am very anxious to know what Mr. Valentine’s opinion is,” she said.

“That’s better,” I replied. “But why should you want even his opinion?
Your father knows more about Great Midwestern than its president, more
than any other one person. Why not get his opinion?”

Until that moment she had perfectly disguised a state of anxiety
verging upon hysteria. Suddenly her powers of self-repression failed.
My reference to her father caused the strings to snap. Her expression
changed as if a mask had fallen. The grief muscles all at once
relaxed and the pretty frown they had been holding in the forehead
disappeared. Her eyes flamed. Her upper lip retracted on one side,
showing the canine tooth. Her giving way to strong emotion in this
manner was a kind of pagan revelation. It did not in the least distort
her beauty, but made it terrible. This, as I learned in time, was the
only one of her effects of which she was altogether unconscious.

“We know his opinion,” she said. “We take it with our food. He is
putting everything we have into Great Midwestern stock,--his own money,
the family’s money, mother’s, Natalie’s, gram’ma’s and now mine.”

“Without your consent? I don’t understand it,” I said.

“The money in our family is divided. Each of us has a little. Most
of it is from mother’s side of the house. My father and gram’ma are
trustees of a sum that will come to me from my uncle’s estate when
I am twenty-one. It is enough to make me independent for life. They
are putting that into this stock! Is it a proper investment for trust
funds, I ask you?”

I felt I ought not to be listening. Still, I had not encouraged these
intimate disclosures, she was old enough to know what she was doing,
and, most of all, the information was dramatically interesting. I was
obliged to say that by all the rules Great Midwestern stock would not
be considered a proper investment for trust funds.

“I’ve protested,” she said. “I’ve threatened to take steps. Pooh! What
can I do? They pay no more attention to me than _that_! Neither father
nor gram’ma. Mother is neutral. Father says it will make me rich. I
don’t want to be rich. Besides he has said that before.”

“It may turn out well,” I said.

“It isn’t as if this were the first time,” she continued. “Twice he has
had us on the rocks. Twice he has lost all our money, all that he could
get his hands on, in the same way, putting it into a railroad that he
hoped to get control of or something, and going smash at the end. Once
when I was a little girl and again three years ago. To-day on the train
I heard two men talking about a receivership for the Great Midwestern
as if it were inevitable. What would that mean?”

“It would be very disagreeable,” I said.

“That’s almost the same as bankruptcy, isn’t it?”

“It is bankruptcy,” I said; but I added that rumors just then were very
wild in Wall Street and so false in general that the worse they were
the less they were heeded, people reacting to them in a disbelieving,
contrary manner.

She shook her head doubtfully.

“Are you going to tell me what Mr. Valentine’s opinion is?”

“He would not recommend anyone to buy the stock just now,” I said. “He
makes no secret of seeing darkly.”

“The rocks again,” she said. “And no more legacies to save us. Nearly
all of our rich relatives are already dead.”

The realism of youth!

I could not resist the opportunity to ask one question.

“I can understand your case,” I said, “but the others,--your mother and
grandmother,--they are not helpless. Why do they hand over their money
for these adventures in high finance? Or perhaps they believe in your
father’s star.”

“No more than I believe in it,” she replied. “No. It isn’t that.
They can’t help it.” She looked at me from afar, through a haze of
recollections, and repeated the thought to herself, wondering: “They
cannot help it. We cannot say no. Even I cannot say it. What he wants
he gets.”

She shivered.

“Will you walk back with me, please.”

It was still raining. We walked all the way back in silence. At the
step she reached for her umbrella, said thank you and stepped inside.
The door closed with a slam. That could have been the draught again,
provided the inner door stood open, which seemed very improbable.

What left me furious, gave me once more that hot, humiliated feeling
which resulted from our first encounter on the ferryboat, was the
same thing again. She had spoken my name, she had solicited a favor,
she had employed blandishments, she had exposed the family’s closet
of horrors, and all the time I might have been a person in a play, a
non-existent giraffe or one of Cleopatra’s eunuchs.




CHAPTER IV

AN ECONOMIC NIGHTMARE


i

You may define a mass delusion; you cannot explain it really. It is a
malady of the imagination, incurable by reason, that apparently must
run its course. If it does not lead people to self-destruction in a
wild dilemma between two symbols of faith it will yield at last to the
facts of experience.

Once the peace of the world was shattered by this absurd question: Was
the male or the female faculty the first cause of the universe? There
was no answer, for man himself had invented the riddle; nevertheless
what one believed about it was more important than life, happiness or
civilization. Proponents of the male principle adopted the color white.
Worshippers of the female principle took for their sign and symbol
the color red, inclining to yellow. Under these two banners there
took place a religious warfare which involved all mankind, dispersed,
submerged and destroyed whole races of people and covered Asia, Africa
and Europe with tragic ruins. Then someone accidentally thought of
a third principle which reconciled those two and human sanity was
restored on earth. All this is now forgotten.

Since then people have been mad together about a number of
things,--God, tulips, witches, definitions, alchemy and vanities
of precept. In 1894 they were mad about money,--not about the use,
possession and distribution of it, but as to the color of it, whether
it should be silver,--that is to say, white like the symbol of those
old worshippers of the masculine faculty, or gold,--that is, red
inclining to yellow, as was the symbol of those who in the dimness of
human history adored the feminine faculty.

And as people divided on this question of silver or gold they became
utterly delirious. Either side was willing to see the government’s
credit ruined, as it very nearly was, for the vindication of a fetich.
They did not know it. They had not the remotest notion why or how they
were mad because they were unable to realize that they were mad at all.

I have recently turned over the pages of the newspapers and periodicals
of that time to verify the recollection that events as they occurred
were treated with no awareness of their significance. And it was so.
Intelligence was in suspense. The faculty of judgment slept as in a
dream; the imagination ran loose, inventing fears and phantasies. That
the government stood on the verge of bankruptcy or that the United
States Treasury was about to shut up under a run of panic-stricken gold
hoarders was regarded not as a national emergency in which all were
concerned alike, but as proof that one theory was right and another
wrong, so that one side viewed the imminent disaster gloatingly and was
disappointed at its temporary postponement, while the other resorted to
sophistries and denied self-evident things.

Nor does anyone know to this day why people were then mad. Economists
write about it as the struggle for sound money (gold), against unsound
money (silver), and that leaves it where it was. Money is not a thing
either true or untrue. It is merely a token of other things which are
useful and enjoyable. Both silver and gold are sound for that purpose.
Their use is of convenience, and the proportions and quantities in
which they shall circulate as currency is rationally a matter of
arithmetic. Yet here were millions of people emotionally crazed over
the question of which should be paramount, one side talking of the
crime of dethroning silver and the other of the gold infamy.


ii

All other business having come to a stop while this matter was at an
impasse, a truce was effected in this wise by law: Gold should remain
paramount, nominally, but the Treasury should buy each month a great
quantity of silver bullion, turn it into white money, force the white
money into circulation and then keep it equal to gold in value. Now,
the amount of precious metal in a silver dollar was worth only half
as much as the amount of precious metal in a gold dollar. Yet Congress
decreed that gold and silver dollars should be interchangeable and
put upon the Treasury a mandate to keep them equal in value. How? By
what magic? Why, by the magic of a phrase. The phrase was: “It is the
established policy of the United States to maintain the two metals at a
parity with each other by law.”

Naïve trust in the power of words to command reality is found in all
mass delusions.

The Coxeyites were laughed at for thinking that prosperity could be
created by phrases written in the form of law. Congress thought the
same thing. It supposed that the economic distress in the country could
be cured by making fifty cents’ worth of silver equal to one hundred
cents’ worth of gold, and that this miracle of parity could be achieved
by decree.

Anyone would know what to expect. The gold people ran with white
dollars to the Treasury and exchanged them for gold and either hoarded
the gold or sold it in Europe. In this way the government’s gold fund
was continually depleted, and this was disastrous because its credit,
the nation’s credit in the world at large, rested on that gold fund.
It sold bonds to buy more gold, but no matter how fast it got more
gold into the Treasury even faster came people with white money to
be redeemed in money the color of red inclining to yellow, and all
the time the Treasury was obliged by law to buy each month a great
quantity of silver bullion and turn it into white money, so that the
supply of white money to be exchanged for gold was inexhaustible.

Wall Street was the stronghold of the gold people. It was to Wall
Street that the government came to sell bonds for the gold it required
to replenish its gold fund. The spectacle of the Secretary of the
Treasury standing there with his hat out, like a Turkish beggar,
was viewed exultingly by the gold people. “_Carlisle’s Bonds Won’t
Go_,” said the New York Sun in a front page headline, on one of these
occasions. Carlisle was the Secretary of the United States Treasury,
entreating the gold people to buy the government’s bonds with gold.
They did it each time, but no sooner was the gold in the Treasury than
they exchanged it out again with white money.

This could not go on without wrecking the country’s financial system.
That would mean disaster for everyone, silver and gold people alike;
yet nobody knew how to stop. The silver people said the solution was to
dethrone the gold token and make white money paramount; the others said
the only way was to cast the white money fetich into the nearest ash
heap and worship exclusively money of the color red inclining to yellow.


iii

Delusions are states of refuge. The mind, unable to comprehend
realities or to deal with them, finds its ease in superstitions,
beliefs and modes of irrational procedure. It is easier to believe than
to think.

The realities of this period in our economic history, apart from the
madness, were extremely bewildering. For five or six years preceding
there had been an ecstasy of great profits. The prodigious manner in
which wealth multiplied had swindled men’s dreams. No one lay down at
night but he was richer than when he got up, nor without the certainty
of being richer still on the morrow. The golden age had come to pass.
Wishing was having. The government had become so rich from duties
collected on imported luxuries that the Treasury surplus became a
national problem. It could not be properly spent; therefore it was
wasted. And still it grew. This time for sure the tree of Mammon would
touch the Heavens and human happiness must endure forever.

Then suddenly it had fallen. Speculation, greed and dishonesty had
invisibly devoured its heart. The trunk was hollow. Everything turned
hollow. People were astonished, horrified and wild with dismay.
They would not blame themselves. They wished to blame each other
without quite knowing how. The casual facts were hard to see in right
relations. Popular imagination had not been trained to grasp them. The
whole world was dealing with new forces, resulting from the application
of capital to machine production on a vast scale, and there had
just appeared for the first time in full magnitude that monstrous
contradiction which we name overproduction. This was a world-wide
phenomenon, but stranger here than in European countries because this
country was newly industrialized on the modern plan and knew not how to
manage the conditions it had created; could not understand them in fact.

“Ve are a giant in zwaddling cloths,” exclaimed Mordecai, the Jewish
banker, who was one of the directors of the Great Midwestern. He said
it solemnly at every directors’ meeting.

Just so. Still, it was incomprehensible to people generally, and as
the pain of loss, chagrin and disappointment unbearably increased the
conglomerate mind performed the weird self-saving act of going mad.
That is to say, people made a superstition of their economic sins and
cast the blame for all their ills upon two objects,--gold and silver
tokens. Thus what had been an economic crisis only, subject to repair,
became a fiasco of intelligence.

The Europeans, all gold people, who had bought enormous quantities of
American stocks and bonds, said: “What now! These people are going
crazy. They may refuse ever to pay us back in gold.” Whereupon they
began hastily to sell American securities.

“After all,” sighed the London Times, “the United States for all its
great resources is a poor country.”

In the panic of 1893 confidence was destroyed. People disbelieved in
their own things, in themselves, in each other.

Important banking institutions failed for scandalous reasons. Railroads
went headlong into bankruptcy, until more than a billion dollars’ worth
of bonds were in default, and in many cases the disclosures of inside
speculation were most disgraceful.

United States Senators were discovered speculating in the stock of
corporations that were interested in tariff legislation, particularly
the Sugar Trust.

The name of Wall Street became accursed, not that morality was lower
in Wall Street than anywhere else, but because the consequences of its
sins were conspicuous.

All industry sickened.

A scourge of unemployment fell upon the land and labor as such, with
no theory of its own about money, knowing only what it meant to be out
of work, assailed the befuddled intelligence of the country with that
embarrassing question: Why were men helplessly idle in this environment
of boundless opportunity?

The Coxeyites thought it was for want of money. So many people thought.
They proposed that the government should raise money for extensive
public works, thereby creating jobs for the workless, but the United
States Treasury, which only a short time before contained a surplus
so large that Congress had to invent ways of spending it, was now in
desperate straits. The government’s income was not sufficient to pay
its daily bills. However, neither the curse of unemployment nor the
poverty of the United States Treasury was owing to a scarcity of money.
The banks were overflowing with money,--idle money, which they were
willing to lend at ½ of 1 per cent. just to get it out of their vaults.
In one instance a bank offered to lend a large amount of money without
interest. But nobody would borrow money. What should they do with it?
There was no profit in business.

So there was unemployment of both labor and capital.


iv

At the time of my arrival in Wall Street conditions were already
very bad. They grew worse. There was the shocking disclosure after
bankruptcy that one of the principal railroads had deliberately
falsified its figures over a period of years. European investors were
large holders of the shares and bonds of this property, and naturally
the incident caused all American securities to be disesteemed abroad.
Foreign selling now heavily increased for that reason, and as the
foreigners sold their American securities on the New York Stock
Exchange they demanded gold.

The United States Treasury had survived two runs upon its gold fund,
but its condition was chronically perilous, and began at length to
be despaired of. Gold was leaving the country by every steamer. The
feud between the gold and silver people grew steadily more insane and
preoccupied Congress to such a degree that it neglected to consider
ways and means of keeping the government in current funds. Labor, which
had been clamorous and denunciatory, now became militant. Reports of
troops being used to quell riots of the unemployed were incessant
in the daily news. Wheat fell to a very low price and the farmers
embraced Populism, a hot-eyed political movement in which every form
of radicalism this side of anarchy was represented. Then came the
disastrous American Railway Union strike, bringing organized labor
into direct conflict with the authority of the Federal Government. The
nation was in a fit of jumps. Public opinion was hysterical.

As I understood more and more the bearing of such events I marvelled
at Galt’s solitary serenity. He was still buying Great Midwestern
stock, as we all knew. Each time another lot of it passed into his name
word of it came up surreptitiously from the transfer office. Some of
the directors at the same time were selling out. This fact Harbinger
confided to me in a burst of gloom; he thought it very ominous, nothing
less than an augury of bankruptcy. I felt that Galt ought to know, yet
I hesitated a long time about telling him. My decision finally to do so
was sentimental. I had by this time conceived a deep liking for him,
and the thought that he was putting his money into Great Midwestern
stock,--his own, Gram’ma’s and Vera’s,--while the directors were
getting theirs out bothered me in my sleep. But when I told him he
grinned at me.

“I know it, Coxey. They didn’t know enough to sell when the price was
high, and they don’t know any better now.”

That was all he said. The ethical aspect of the matter, if there was
one, apparently did not interest him.

Now befell a magnificent disaster. One of the furnace doors came
unfastened in the Heavens, and a scorching wind, a regular sirocco,
began to blow in the Missouri Valley. More than half the rich,
wealth-making American corn crop was ruined. This was a body-blow for
the Great Midwestern. It meant a slump in traffic which nothing could
repair. On the third day the news was complete. We received it in the
form of private telegraph reports from the Chicago office. They were
on my desk when Galt came in. I called his attention to them, but he
looked away, saying:

“The Lord is ferninst us, Coxey. Maybe ... he ... is.”


v

That night I went home with him to dinner. He was in one of his absent
moods and very tired. Natalie overwhelmed him as usual in the hallway,
and when he neither grumbled nor resisted she put off her boisterous
manner and began to look at him anxiously. At dinner everyone was
silent. He communicated his mood. Vera was there at her mother’s left.
Efforts to make conversation were listless, Galt participating in none
of them. There was a sense of something that was expected to happen;
that was Gram’ma’s remorseless evening question.

“What is the price of Great Midwestern stock today?” she asked,
speaking very distinctly.

“Five and a half,” said Galt, in a petulant voice.

The announcement was received stoically, with not the slightest change
of countenance anywhere, though that was the lowest price at which the
stock had ever sold and represented a serious loss for the house of
Galt. However, the state of feeling made itself felt without words. It
became at last intolerable for Galt. He threw down his napkin, shouted
three times, “Wow! Wow! Wow!”, and each time brought his fist down
on the table with a force that made the china jump. With that he got
up and left us. We heard him unlock the door of his room and slam it
behind him.

“What has happened?” asked Vera, looking at me.

I told them of the disaster to the corn crop and how for that reason
there had been heavy selling of Great Midwestern shares.

Vera shrugged her shoulders. Later in the evening when we were
alone she looked about her at the walls and ceiling, as one with a
premonition of farewell, and said bitterly: “A pretty shipwreck it
will be this time.”

“Has your money gone into it, too?” I asked.

She nodded, and said: “Now he wants to mortgage the house.”




CHAPTER V

VERA


i

By this time I had become a frequent visitor in the Galt household. A
summer had passed since my first appearance there. The second time I
came to dinner Vera presented herself, though tardily. As she entered
the dining room Galt rose and made her an exaggerated bow, which she
altogether disregarded.

“All got up this evening!” he said, squinting at her when she was
seated. That she disregarded, too, looking cold and bored. She wore
a black party gown of some very filmy stuff, cut rather low, with an
effect of elaborate simplicity. A small solitary gem gleamed in her
blue-black hair and a point of light shone in each of her eyes. She was
forbiddingly resplendent, with an immemorial, jewel-like quality. She
derived entirely from her mother and in no particular resembled her
father. He tried another sally.

“Isn’t it chilly over there by you, Vera child?” he asked, ironically
solicitous.

Instantly she replied: “Yes, father dear. Won’t you bring me my scarf,
please.”

After that he let her alone. When dinner was over he took me off to his
room again and we passed another evening with the railroads.

No dinner passed without some glow of the feud between Galt and
Vera. They seldom saw each other at any other time. Her habits were
luxurious. She never came down to breakfast. He delighted to torment
her and always came off with the worst of it. Perhaps he secretly
enjoyed that, too. She was more than a match for him. Their methods
were very different. He taunted and teased, without finesse. She
retorted with cold, keen thrusts which left him sprawling and helpless.
In a pinch she turned upon him that astonishing trick she had of
looking at people without seeing them. The experience, as I knew, was
crushing. It never failed to make him fume.

Gradually I perceived the nature of their antagonism. Natalie was
her father’s play-fellow, but Vera fascinated him. He admired her
tremendously and feared her not a little. She baffled, eluded and
ignored him. The only way he could get her attention was to bully her,
which he did simply for the reason that he could not let her alone.
But there was something on her side, too, for once I noticed that when
he had failed to open hostilities she subtly provoked him to do so.
Probably both enjoyed it unconsciously.

Between the sisters there was a fiercely repressed antagonism. Natalie
was four years the younger and much less subtle, but in the gentle art
of scratching she was the other’s equal. Both were extremely dexterous
and played the game in good sportsmanship.

“I saw Mr. Shaw at the matinée today,” Natalie announced one evening.
After a slight pause she added: “He seems miraculously recovered. I
never saw him looking so well.”

I happened to catch a twinkle, where of all places but in the eyes of
Gram’ma! She looked for an instant quite human. But it was too late to
save me, for I had already asked: “What was he ill of?”

“Something that’s never fatal, apparently,” said Natalie, demurely,
fetching a little sigh. Then I understood that what a person named
Shaw had miraculously recovered from was an infatuation for the elder
sister. And for my stupidity I got a disdainful glance from Vera.

Another time Natalie said to Vera: “I shall see the handsome Professor
Atwood tomorrow. May I tell him you are mad about him?”

“Yes, dear,” said Vera. “He will draw the right conclusion.”

The barb of that retort was hidden, but it did its work. Natalie
blushed furiously and subsided.

Mrs. Galt surveyed the field of these amenities with a neutral,
mind-weary air. She never took part, never interfered, would not
appear to be even listening, though in fact she missed nothing, and
never failed in the embarrassing after-moment to provide a lightning
conductor, a swift bridge or a rescue raft, as the need was. She seemed
to do this mechanically, with not the slightest effort. And although
her topics were commonplace that was not necessarily an indication
of what her mind was like. The want at those moments was for easy,
thoughtless conversation, and therefore trite subjects served best.
Her own interest in them was never sustained. Having cleared the air
she retired within herself again. One wondered what she did with her
mind the rest of the time. Lost it perhaps in wonder at life’s baroque,
uncontrollable projections.


ii

One evening as dinner was finishing Vera looked at me across the table
and said: “Won’t you come sometime to tea when father can’t have you
all to himself? He hates tea.”

I was startled and absurdly thrilled; but the curious feeling was that
I became in that instant an object of curiosity and solicitude mingled,
as one marked by fate for a certain experience. I got this particularly
from Natalie who glanced first at me with an anxious expression, and
then at her sister.

“We are always at home Sunday afternoon,” said Mrs. Galt.

I was the only caller the next Sunday. Galt did not appear. Tea was
served in that middle room, between the parlor and dining room,
which was a domain over which Vera exercised feudal rights. That
was why it was more attractive than any other part of the house. It
expressed something of her personality. Conversation was low-spirited
and artificial. Natalie was not her sparkling self. Mrs. Galt was in
her usual state of pre-occupation, though very gracious, and helpful
in warding off silences. I do not know how these things are managed.
Presently Vera and I were alone. I asked her to play. Her performance,
though finished and accurate, was so empty that I said without thought:
“Why don’t you let yourself go?”

“Like this?” she said, turning back. And then, having no music in
front of her, she played a strange tumultuous Russian thing with
extraordinary power. I begged her to go on. Instead she left the piano
abruptly and stood for a minute far away at the window with her back
to me, breathing rapidly, not from the exertion of playing, I thought,
but from the emotional excitement of it. Then she called me to come
and look at a group of Sunday strollers passing in the street,--three
men and two women, strange, dark aliens full of hot slothful life. The
men around their middles wore striped sashes ending in fringe, and no
coats, like opera brigands; the women were draped in flaming shawls.
All of them wore earrings.

“What are they?” she asked.

Immigrants, I guessed, from some odd corner of Southern Europe, who
hadn’t been here long enough to get out of their native costume.

“They will be drab soon enough,” she said, turning away.

I wanted to talk of her playing, being now enthusiastic about it,
but she put the subject aside, saying, “Please don’t,” and we talked
instead of pictures. There was a special exhibition of old masters at
the Metropolitan Museum which she hadn’t seen. Wouldn’t I like to go?
It came out presently that she painted. I asked to see some of her
things and she got them out,--two or three landscapes and some studies
of the nude. She had just begun working in a life class, she said.

“Very interesting,” I said, trying to get the right emphasis and
knowing instantly that it had failed. She gathered them up slowly and
put them away.

“They are like your playing,” I added, “as you played at first.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean you somehow hinder your self-expression.”

“I do not let myself go? Is that what you mean?”

“Precisely. What are you afraid of?”

“Then you believe in letting oneself go?” she asked.

“Well, why not?”

“Suppose one isn’t sure of one’s stopping places?”

We became involved in a discussion of the moralities, hitherto, present
and future, tending to become audacious. This is a pastime by means of
which, in first acquaintance, two persons of opposite sex may indulge
their curiosity with perfect security. The subject is abstract. The
tone is impersonal. Neither one knows how far the other will go. They
dare each other to follow, one step at a time, and are both surprised
at the ground they can make. There is at the same time an inaudible
exchange, which is even more thrilling, for that is personal. This
need never be acknowledged. If the abstract does not lead naturally to
the concrete, then the whole conversation remains impersonal and the
inaudible part may be treated as if it had never occurred. That is the
basic rule of the game.

Her courage amazed me. I began to see what she meant by supposing that
one might not be sure of one’s stopping places. She had been reading
France, Stendhal, Zola, Shaw, Pater, Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche.

Mrs. Galt reappeared. “We are debating the sins of Babylon,” I said.
She smiled and asked me to dinner.

That was the beginning. We went the next Sunday to the Metropolitan
Museum and one evening that same week to the theatre. What we set out
to see was an English play that everyone was talking about. At the last
minute she asked if the tickets might be changed. And when I asked her
where she would go instead she naïvely mentioned a musical comedy much
more talked about than the English play for very different reasons.
Afterwards when I asked her what part of the show she liked best she
said: “The way people laughed.”

Life transacting thrilled her. Contact with people, especially in
free, noisy crowds, produced in her a kind of intoxication. We walked
a great deal in the pulsating streets, often till late at night, and
that she enjoyed more than the play, the opera or any other form of
entertainment. Her curiosity was insatiable. She was always for going a
little further, for prying still deeper into the secrets of humanity’s
gregarious business, afraid yet venturesome and insistent. She would
pick out of the throng whimsical, weird and dreadful personalities and
we would follow them for blocks.

Once at a corner we came suddenly upon a woman importuning a man. She
was richly gowned and not in any way common. He was sinister, sated
and cruel. She had lost her head, her pride, her sense of everything
but wanting him. We were close enough to hear. He spoke in a low,
admonishing tone, imploring her not to make a scene. She grew louder
all the time, saying, “I don’t care, I don’t care,” and continued
alternately to assail him with revealing reproaches and to entreat him
caressingly, until they both seemed quite naked in the lighted street.
The man was contemptible; the woman was tragic. I took Vera by the arm
to move her away, but she was fixed between horror and attraction and
stood there regarding them in the fascinated way one looks at deadly
serpents through the glass at the Zoo. The man at last yielded with a
bored gesture, called a cab, whisked the woman into it, and the scene
vanished. Vera shuddered and we walked on.

We explored the East Side at night, visiting the Chinese and Jewish
theatres, Hungarian coffee houses and dance halls. Nobody had ever done
this kind of thing with her before. It was a new experience and she
adored it. Of what she did with it in her mind I knew almost nothing.
Emotions in the abstract she would discuss with the utmost simplicity.
Her own she guarded jealously.

One evening late, with a particularly interesting nocturnal adventure
behind us, we stood in the hallway saying good-night. We said it and
lingered; said it again and still lingered. She was more excited than
usual. Her lips were slightly parted. She almost never blushed, but on
rare occasions, such as now, there was a feeling of pink beneath the
deep brunette color of her skin.

Her beauty seemed of a sudden to expand, to become greatly exaggerated,
not in quality but in dimensions, so that it excluded all else from
the sense of space. The sight of it unpoised me. And she knew. I could
feel that she knew. My impulse toward her grew stronger and stronger,
tending to become irresistible. This she knew also. Yet she lingered.
Then I seized and kissed her. At the first touch her whole weight fell
in my arms. Her eyes closed, her head dropped backward, face upturned.
She trembled violently and sighed as if every string of tension in her
being snapped.

How little we can save of those enormous moments in which the old, old
body mind remembers all that ever happened! What was it that one knew
so vividly in that co-extensive, panoramic, timeless interval, and
cannot now recall?

The first kiss goes a journey. The second stays on earth. The first one
is a meeting in the void. Then this world again.

“Vera! Vera!” I whispered.

Her eyes opened.... The look they gave me was so unexpected, so
unnatural in the circumstances, that I had a start of terror lest she
had gone out of herself. Then I recognized it. This was she whom I had
forgotten. These were those impervious, scornful carnelian eyes you
could not see into. The old hot and cold feeling came over me again.
And though she still lay in my arms, not having moved at all, it was
now as if I were not touching her, as if I never had. I released her.
Without a word she turned and walked slowly up the stairway out of
sight.

The next whole day was one of utter, lonely wretchedness, supported
only by a feeling of resentment. I found myself humming “Coming Through
the Rye,” and wondering why, as it was a ditty I had not remembered
for years. Then it came to me why,--“If a body kiss a body need a body
cry?” What had I done that was so terrible after all?

I went to the Galts’ for dinner uninvited, as now I often did. Vera did
not appear. She was reported to be indisposed. I passed the evening
with Galt in his study, and left early. Natalie was alone in the
parlor, reading. She came into the hall as I was putting on my coat and
laid a hand on my arm, consolingly.

“You won’t stop coming, will you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“They always do,” she said. “And some of them are so nice, like you.”

“Natalie, what are you talking about?”

“Father would miss you terribly,” she said.

I promised whatever it was she wanted. She shook hands on it and
watched me down the steps.

The next evening I called after dinner. Vera was out. I wrote her a
note of expostulation, then one in anger, and a third in terms that
were abject; and she answered none of them.


iii

In this state of suspense an enormous time elapsed, three weeks at
least. For me Vera was non-existent in her father’s house. When I was
there for dinner she never came down. There was a pretense that her
absence was unnoticeable. Nobody spoke of it; nobody mentioned her
name. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I could not rid
myself of the notion that I had become an object of sympathy in the
household.

One afternoon I had been in to see Galt, who was ill, and as I let
myself out through the front door there was Vera at the bottom of the
steps in conversation with a huge blond animal of the golden series,
very dangerous for dark women. She saw me obliquely and turned her
attention more to him with a subtle excluding gesture. Evidently she
wished me to pass. Instead I waited, watching them, until he became
conscious of the situation and cast off with a large various manner
which comprehended me. As she came up the steps toward me, slowly,
but with unblurred, definite movements, hard to the ache of desire
yet soft and voluptuous to the forbidden sense of touch, with a kind
of bird-like beauty, I could not for a moment imagine that I had ever
kissed her, much less that she had responded to a ruffling caress. I
forgot what I was going to do, or by what right I meant to do anything.
I was cold and hopeless, with a sudden sense of fatigue, and might have
suffered her to pass me in silence as she wished to do but for the
look she gave me on reaching the top. That was her mistake. It was the
old impersonal, trampling look, to which anger was the one self-saving
reply. I took her by the arm and turned her face about.

“We are going for a walk,” I said, moving her with me down the steps.

I counted upon her horror of a scene to give me the brutal advantage,
and it did. She came unresistingly. Yet it was in no sense a victory.
She submitted to a situation she could not control, but contemptuously,
with no respect or fear for the force controlling it. We walked in
silence to a tea shop in Fifth Avenue; and when we were seated and the
waiter came her respect for appearances made her speak.

“Just some tea, please,” she said, sweetly. And those were the only
words she uttered.

Her defense was to stare at me as if I were reciting a tedious tale.
It bored her. Once I thought she repressed a yawn. That was when I
began to say the same things over again. She was without any vanity
of self-justification. Not for an instant did she avert her eyes.
She looked at me steadily, unblinkingly, with a kind of reptilian
indifference. She could see into me; I could not see into her. At the
end I became abusive. Then if at all there was a faint suspicion of
interest.

“A fool there was who loved the basilisk,” I said. “He who plucks that
icy flame will be destroyed but not consumed.... Shall we go?”

I like still to remember that she did not smile at this idiotic
apostrophe. Every man, I suppose, says a thing like that once,--if he
can. We rose at once. We walked all the way back in silence. I did not
go in, but handed her up the steps and left her without good-night.

On the next day but one a note came. Would I meet her for tea at the
same place?

She was prompt and purposeful. She waited until tea was served, then
put it aside, and spoke.

“Why do all men, though by different ways, come to the same place?”

“I know nothing about all men,” I said. “It’s enough to know about
myself. I’m not very sure of that.”

“They all do,” she said, reflectively.

“But I want to marry you,” I said, with emphasis on the personal
pronoun.

“Yes; ... that, too,” she said, with a saturated air.

“Oh, weary Olympia!” I said. “How stands the score? How many loves lie
beheaded in your chamber of horrors? Or do you bury them decently and
tend their graves?”

“You try me,” she said, with no change of voice or color. “It is very
stupid.... Man takes without leave the smallest thing and presumes upon
that to erect preposterous claims. Take our case. I begin by liking
you. I invite you to a friendship. You are free to accept or decline.
You accept. Wherein so far have you acquired rights in me? We find this
relation agreeable and extend it. All of this is voluntary. Nothing
is surrendered under compulsion. We are both free. Then suddenly you
overwhelm me by a sensuous impulse. It is a wanton, ravishing act. I
resent it by the only peaceable means in my power. That is, I avoid
you. Immediately you assail me with violent reproaches, as by a right.
Is it the invader’s right of might? Is human relationship a state of
war?... Don’t interrupt me, please.... And now, when I have come to
say that under certain conditions I am prepared to make an exception
in your forgiveness,--for Heaven knows what reason!--you taunt me of
things you have no right to mention. They are mine alone.”

There was a retort, but I withheld it. How shall man tell woman she
hath provoked him to it? If he tell her she will wither him. Yet if the
sight, smell and sound of her provoke him not, then is she mortally
offended. He shall see without looking and be damned if he looks
without seeing. It is so. But she divined my thoughts.

“If a woman gives it is quite the same,” she went on. “Only worse, for
in that case he presumes upon what he has received by favor to become
lord of all that she has.”

“I lie in the dust,” I said.

“I know the pose,” she said, with a lighter touch. “Happily it is
absurd. If it were not that it would be contemptible.”

“Well, pitiless woman, what would you have a man to be and do? Let us
suppose provisionally that I ask out of deep, religious curiosity. I
may not like the part. How should a man behave with you?”

“I dislike you very much at this moment,” she replied. “By an effort I
remember that you have saving qualities. Did you hear me say that I was
prepared to make an exception?”

“It may be too late,” I said. “What are the terms? You said under
certain conditions.”

She frowned, hesitated and went on slowly.

“It is my castle. You may dwell there, you may come and go, you may
make free of it in discretion, agreeably to our joint pleasure,
_provided_ you forego beforehand all rights accruing from use and
tenure.”

We debated the contract in a high, ceremonious manner. It was agreed
that the bargain, if made, should terminate automatically at the
instant I should presume to make the slightest demand upon her.

“As if for instance I should demand the key to the chamber of horrors,”
I said, whimsically.

“Exactly,” she replied.

I stipulated, not in earnest of course, that she should make no demands
upon me.

“That was implied,” she said. “We make it explicit.”

When at last I accepted unreservedly she put forth her hand in a full,
generous gesture; and the pact was sealed.

We walked homeward on a perfectly restored basis of friendship, changed
our minds at the last minute, went instead to a restaurant, then to the
theatre, and passed a joyous evening together.




CHAPTER VI

A GIANT IN BABY SWEAT


i

Steadily the American giant grew worse in his mind. There were yet
lower depths of insolvency. The passion to touch them was like the
impulse to collective suicide in the Dark Ages. Bankruptcy ceased to
be a disgrace, there was so much of it. Hope of profit was abandoned.
Optimism was believed to be an unsound mode of thought. All of this
was a state of feeling, a delusion purely. The country was rich. The
unemployed were fed on fine white bread and an unlaundered linen shirt
cost fifty cents.

Every catastrophe was bound to happen.

On a rainy Wall Street morning in late December, with no sign or
gesture of anguish, the Great Midwestern Railroad gave up its corporate
existence and died.

It was a shapeless event.

Ten men sat around the long table in the Board Room smoking, fidgeting,
irritably watching the time. These were the eminent directors. They
were men whose time nobody could afford to waste,--enterprisers in
credit, capital, oil, coal, metals and packing house products. They
wished the obsequies to begin promptly and be as brief as possible, for
they had many other things to mind. Yet the president, with nothing
else to do, had kept them waiting for nearly five minutes. This had
never happened before. However, when he came and silently took his
place at the head of the table he looked so dismal that they forgave
him, and the ceremony might have been brought off with some amiability
of spirit but for a disagreeable incident at the beginning.

The disturber was Jonas Gates, a dry, mottled little man, indecorously
old and lewdly alert, with a shameless, impish sense of pleasantry.
He practiced usury on a large scale as a kind of Stock Exchange pawn
broker, lending money to people in difficulties at high rates of
interest until they had nothing more to pledge and then cutting them
off at the pockets. He knew some of everybody’s secrets and much more
than he knew he guessed by the magic formula that he was sure of
nothing worse of himself than was generally true of his neighbors. He
was hated for his tongue, feared for what he knew and respected for his
wealth, which was one of the largest private fortunes of that time.

This Jonas Gates, cupping his hands to his mouth and making his voice
high and distant, as one calling to the echoes, inquired at large:

“Are there any stockholders present?”

Everyone was scandalized. Several were without pretense of concealing
it. He surveyed their faces with amused impudence. Then spreading his
hands at each side of his mouth and making his voice hoarse, like a boy
calling into an empty hogshead, he inquired again:

“Are there any stockholders present?”

It was a ghastly joke. There is no law forbidding a director to part
with his shares when the omens foretell disaster. It is commonly done
in fact in the anonymous mist of the stock market, only you never
mention it. The convention is that all stockholders have equal rights
of partnership. But as directors are the few who have been elected
by many to act as managing partners, and since it is necessary for
managing partners to have first access to all information, it follows
from the nature of circumstances that they are inside stockholders
and that the others are outside stockholders; and it follows no less
from the nature of mankind that the outsiders invariably suspect the
insiders of selling out in time to save themselves.

“Iss id vor a meeting ov ze directors ve are here, Mr. Presidend?”
asked Mordecai. He was the eminent banker. He spoke sweetly and lisped
slightly as he always did when annoyed.

“This is a directors’ meeting,” said the president, adding: “The
secretary will read the call.”

“Please God!” exclaimed Gates, not yet ready to be extinguished.
“Put it on the record. I ask: Are there any stockholders present? No
answer. Again I ask: Are there any stockholders present? No answer.
Great embarrassment. What is to be done? Idea! This is a directors’
meeting. Bravo! Proceed. On with the stockholders’ business. We are not
stockholders. Therefore we shall be able to transact their business
impartially.”

There was a distraught silence.

“Proceed,” said Gates. “I shan’t interrupt the services any more.”

What followed was brief. A resolution was offered and passed to the
secretary to be read, setting out that owing to conditions which left
the directors helpless and blameless, to wit: the depression of trade,
the distrust of securities, the rapacity of the tax gatherer, the
harassment of carriers by government agencies, et cetera, the Great
Midwestern was unable to pay its current debts, wherefore counsel
should be instructed to carry out the formalities of putting the
property in the hands of the court.

“Is there any discussion?” asked the president.

Horace Potter, of oil, spoke for the first time. He was a sudden,
ferocious man with enormous gray eyebrows and inflammable blue eyes.

“Have a glance at Providence,” he said. “We damn everything else. Say
the crops are a disgrace. That’s true and it’s nobody’s fault here
below.”

“Yes, that should go in,” said the president. He took back the
resolution, wrote into it with a short lead pencil the phrase, “and the
failure of crops over a large part of the railroad’s territory,” and
offered it to be read again. Everybody nodded. He called for the vote.
The ayes were unanimous, and the aye of Jonas Gates was the loudest of
all.

With that they rose.

The Board Room had two doors. One was a service door opening into
Harbinger’s office; it was used only by the secretary and such other
subordinate officials as might be summoned to attend a board meeting
with records and data. The main door through which the directors came
and went was the other one opening into the president’s office. Their
way of normal exit therefore was through the president’s office,
through the anteroom where I worked, into the reception room beyond and
thence to the public corridor.

As the president’s private secretary it was expected of me to see them
out. Directly behind me on this occasion came Mordecai, like a biblical
image, his arms stiff at his sides, the expression of his face remote
and sacrificial. This was his normal aspect; nevertheless it seemed
now particularly appropriate. A sacrifice had been performed upon the
mysterious altar of solvency and he alone had any solemnity about it.
The others followed, helping each other a little with their coats,
exchanging remarks, some laughing.

So we came to the door that opened into the reception room. I had my
hand on the knob when Mordecai suddenly recoiled.

“A-h-h-h-ch, don’d!” he exclaimed. “Zey are zare.”

Evidently some rumor of the truth had got abroad in Wall Street. The
reception room was full of reporters waiting for news of the meeting,
and this was unexpected, since nobody save the officials and directors
were supposed to know that a meeting was taking place. Mordecai’s fear
of reporters was ludicrous, like some men’s fear of small reptiles.
He stood with his back to the door facing the other directors. Horace
Potter was for pushing through.

“Hell,” he said. “Let’s tell them we’ve let her go and get out. I’m
overdue at another meeting three blocks from here.”

He could move through a crowd of clamorous reporters with the safety of
an iceberg.

“Ziz vay, all ze gentlemen, b-l-e-a-s-e,” said Mordecai, ignoring
Potter’s suggestion. He led them back to the president’s office; he
had remembered an unused, permanently bolted door that opened directly
from the president’s office upon the main corridor. His thought was
to go that way and circumvent the reporters. But they had sensed that
possibility. This point of exit also was besieged.

“A-h-h-h-ch!” he said again. “Zey are eferyvare. How iss id zey get
ze news?” Saying this he looked at each of his fellow directors
severely. Potter frowned, not for being looked at by Mordecai, but from
impatience.

“Id iss best zat ze presidend zhall brepare a brief vormal stadement,”
said Mordecai. “Ve can vait in ze Board Room. Zen he vill bring zem for
ze statement in here. Vhile he iss reading id to zem ve can ze ozer
vay ged out.”

“I can’t wait,” said Potter. He bolted into the reception room alone
and banged the door behind him. The reporters instantly surrounded him,
and we heard him say: “A statement is coming.”

The president turned to me and dictated as follows:

“Certain creditors of the Great Midwestern Railroad Company being about
to apply to the court for a receiver to be appointed, the question
to be decided at today’s meeting of the directors was whether to
borrow a sum of money on the company’s unsecured notes at a high rate
of interest and thus temporize with its difficulties or confess its
inability to meet its obligations and allow the property to be placed
in the hands of the court. After due consideration the directors
unanimously resolved to adopt the latter course in order that the
assets may be conserved for the benefit of all parties concerned.
(Signed.) John J. Valentine, president.”

Turning to the directors, who had been standing in a bored, formless
group, he asked: “Does that cover it?”

All of them gave assent save Mordecai. He was gazing at the ceiling,
his hands held out, pressing the tips of his fingers together.

“Id iss fery euvonious, Mr. Falentine,” he said. “Conzerved iss a fine
vord. A fery good vord. Id iss unvair to ze bankers, iss id not, to
zpeak of borrowing ad high rates of interest money? Iss id nod already
zat ze company hass borrowed more money vrom id’s bankers zan id can
pay?”

“Read it please,” said the president to me. I read it aloud.

“Strike out the phrase, ‘whether to borrow a sum of money on its
unsecured notes at a high rate of interest,’ and make it read, ‘the
question to be decided at today’s meeting of the directors was whether
to temporize with its difficulties, or,’--and so on.”

Mordecai, still gazing at the ceiling, nodded with satisfaction. Then
he returned to the plane below and led them back to the Board Room,
waiting himself until they were all through and closing the door
carefully.

The reporters were admitted. We took care to get all of them in at one
time, twenty or more, and held the doors open while the directors,
passing through Harbinger’s office, made their august escape.


ii

When the reporters were gone a stillness seemed to rise about us like
an enveloping atmosphere. Receding events left phantom echoes in our
ears. Valentine, having gazed for some time fixedly at a non-existent
object, looked slowly about him, saying:

“The corpse is gone.”

Then he went and stood in one of the west windows. I stood at the
other. The rain had congealed. Snow was falling in that ominous,
isolating way which produces in blond people a sense of friendly
huddling, instinctive memory perhaps of a north time when contact meant
warmth and security. It blotted out everything of the view beyond
Trinity church and graveyard. There was a surrounding impression of
vertical gray planes in the windows of which lights were beginning to
appear, for it was suddenly dark. The Trinity chimes proclaimed in this
vortex the hour of noon.

“What day of the month is it?” he asked, clearing his voice after
speaking.

“The eighteenth.”

“Twenty years, lacking two days, I have been president of the Great
Midwestern,” he said. “In that time--” He stopped.... Trinity chimes
struck the quarter past. “How it snows,” he said, turning from the
window. “Well, you see what the railroad business is like. Shall I ask
a place for you on one of the New York papers? I promised to do that,
you remember, if anything should happen.”

“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’ll stay on here to clear things up a
bit.”

“I expected you to say that,” he said. “Still, don’t be sentimental
about it. Nobody can tell now what will happen. We shall be in the
hands of the court. Well, as you like. I have an appointment to keep
with counsel. I may not be back today.”

He departed abruptly.

It occurred to me to go about the offices to see what effect the news
was having. That would be something to do. Harbinger, leaning over his
desk on his elbows, his head clutched in his two hands, was looking at
three models of his stamping device.

“How do they take it?”

“Take what?” he asked, not looking up.

“The news.”

“Oh, that! I don’t know. Go ask them yourself.”

John Harrier was sitting precisely as I saw him that first time,
perfectly still, staring at an empty desk.

“Well, it appears we are busted,” I said.

“We’ve been busted for about nine months,” he answered, without moving
his head. “But now two and two make four again. Thank God, I say. I
couldn’t make her look solvent any longer. Arithmetic wouldn’t stand
it, and it stands a lot.”

In the large back office the clerks were gathered in small groups
discussing it. Work was suspended.

“Hey!” shouted Handbow. “We’re going to celebrate to-night. A little
dinner, _with_, at the Café Boulevard. Will you come?”

The reckless spirit of calamity was catching. I felt it. Even the
shabby old furniture took on an irresponsible, vagabond appearance.
Solvency, like a scolding, ailing, virtuous wife, was dead and buried.
Nobody could help it. Now anything might happen. The moment was full
of excitement. There was no boy in the reception room. I sat down
at my desk, got up, took a turn about the president’s office, and
was thinking I should lock up the place and go out to lunch when I
happened to notice that the Board Room door was ajar. In the act of
closing it I was startled by the sight of a solitary figure at the head
of the long directors’ table. Though his back was to me I recognized
him at once. It was Galt. He had slid far down in the chair and was
sitting on the end of his spine, legs crossed, hands in his pockets. He
might have been asleep. While I hesitated he suddenly got to his feet
and began to walk to and fro in a state of excitement. The character
of his thoughts appeared in his gestures. His phantasy was that of
imposing his will upon a group of men, not easily, but in a very
ruthless way.

“Are you running the Great Midwestern?” I asked, pushing the door open.

Starting, he looked at me vaguely, as one coming out of a dream, and
said:

“Yes.”

He asked if I had been present at the meeting and was then anxious to
know all that had taken place, even the most trivial detail.

“And now,” I said, when I was unable to remember anything more, “please
tell me what will happen to the Great Midwestern?”

“Nothing,” he said. “The court will appoint old rhinoceros receiver,
and--”

“Mr. Valentine, you mean?”

“That’s customary in friendly proceedings,” he said. “Anyhow, it will
be so in this case. The court takes charge of the property as trustee
with arbitrary powers. It can’t run the railroad. It must get somebody
to do that. So it looks around a bit and decides that the president is
the very man. He is hired for the job. The next day he comes back to
his old desk with the title of receiver. All essential employes are
retained and you go on as before, only without any directors’ meetings.”

“How as before? I don’t understand.”

“That’s the point, Coxey. You can’t shut up a busted railroad like a
delicatessen shop. Bankrupt or not it has to go on hauling freight and
passengers because it’s what we call a public utility. A railroad may
go bust but it can’t stop.”

“Then what is a receivership for?”

“That’s another point. You are getting now some practical economics,
not like the stuff old polly-woggle has been filling you up with. The
difference is this: When you are bankrupt you put yourself in the hands
of the court for self-protection. Then your creditors can’t worry you
any more. A railroad in receivership doesn’t have to pay what it owes,
but everybody who owes it money has got to pay up because the court
says so. It goes along that way for a few months or a year, paying
nothing and getting paid, until it shows a little new fat around its
bones and is fit to be reorganized.”

“What happens then?”

“Well, then it is purged of sin and gets born again with a new name.
The old Great Midwestern Railroad Company becomes the new Great
Midwestern Railway Company, issues some new securities on the
difference between r-o-a-d and w-a-y, and sets out on its own once
more. The receiver is discharged. The stockholders elect a president,
maybe the same one as before or maybe not, and the directors begin to
hold meetings again.”


iii

The Stock Exchange received the news calmly. It was not unexpected.
The directors, as we knew, had been getting out. They read the signs
correctly. Under their selling the price of Great Midwestern stock had
fallen to a dollar-and-a-half a share. For a stock the par value of
which is one hundred dollars that is a quotation of despair. Nothing
much more could happen short of utter extinction. Many of the finest
railroads in the country were in the same defunct case. You could buy
them for less than the junk value of their rails and equipment. But if
you owned them you could not sell them for junk. You had to work them,
because, as Galt said, they were public utilities. And they worked at a
loss.

It happened also on this day that everyone was thinking of something
else. That was nothing less than the imminent bankruptcy of the United
States Treasury. This delirious event now seemed inevitable.

For several weeks uninterruptedly there had been a run on the
government’s gold fund. People were frantic to exchange white money for
gold. They waited in a writhing line that kept its insatiable head
inside the doors of the sub-Treasury. Its body flowed down the long
steps, lay along the north side of Wall Street and terminated in a
wriggling tail around the corner in William Street, five minutes’ walk
away. It moved steadily forward by successive movements of contraction
and elongation. Each day at 3 o’clock the sub-Treasury, slamming its
doors, cut off the monster’s head. Each morning at 10 o’clock there
was a new and hungrier head waiting to push its way in the instant the
doors opened. Its food was gold and nothing else, for it lived there
night and day. The particles might change; its total character was
always the same. Greed and fear were the integrating principles. Human
beings were the helpless cells. It grew. Steadily it ate its way deeper
into the nation’s gold reserve, and there was no controlling it, for
Congress had said that white money and gold were of equal value and
could not believe it was not so. The paying tellers worked very slowly
to gain time.

The spectacle was weirdly fascinating. I had been going every day at
lunch time to see it. This day the spectators were more numerous than
usual, the street was congested with them, because the officers of the
sub-Treasury had just telegraphed to Washington saying they could hold
out only a few hours more. That meant the gold was nearly gone. It
meant that the United States Treasury might at any moment put up its
shutters and post a notice: “_C L O S E D. Payments suspended. No more
gold._”

Never had the line been so excited, so terribly ophidian in its aspect.
Its writhings were sickening. The police handled it as the zoo keepers
handle a great serpent. That is, they kept it straight. If once it
should begin to coil the panic would be uncontrollable.

Particles detached themselves from the tail and ran up and down the
body trying to buy places nearer the head. Those nearest the head
hotly disputed the right of substitution, as when someone came to take
a position he had been paying another to hold. In the tense babel of
voices there came sudden fissures of stillness, so that one heard one’s
own breathing or the far-off sounds of river traffic. At those moments
what was passing before the eyes had the phantastic reality of a dream.

In the throng on the opposite side of the street I ran into Galt and
Jonas Gates together. Later it occurred to me that I had never before
seen Galt with any director of the Great Midwestern, and it surprised
me particularly, as an after thought, that he should know Gates. Just
then, however, there was no thinking of anything but the drama in view.
Everyone talked to everyone else under the levelling pressure of mass
excitement.

“Have you heard?” I asked Galt. “The sub-Treasury has notified
Washington that it cannot hold out. It may suspend at any moment.”

“I suppose then eighty million healthy people will have nothing to eat,
nothing to wear, no place to go, nothing to do with their idle hands.
We’ll all go to hell in a handbasket.”

He spoke loudly. Many faces turned toward us. A very tall, lean man,
with a wild light in his eyes and a convulsive, turkey neck, laid a
hand on Galt’s arm.

“Right you are, my friend, if I understand your remark. We are about
to witness the dawn of a new era. I have proved it. In this little
pamphlet, entitled, ‘The Crime of Money--thirty reasons why it should
be abolished on earth,’ I show--”

“Don’t jingle your Adam’s apple at me,” said Galt, giving him a look of
droll contempt.

The man was struck dumb. Feeling all eyes focused on the exaggerated
object thus caricatured in one astonishing stroke he began to gulp
uncontrollably. There were shouts of hysterical laughter. In the
confusion Galt disappeared, dragging Gates with him.

The sub-Treasury held out until three o’clock and closed its doors
once more in a solvent manner, probably, for the last time. Everybody
believed it would capitulate to the ophidian thing the next day. There
was no escape. Events were in the lap of despair.




CHAPTER VII

DARING THE DARK


i

At five o’clock that evening Galt called me on the telephone and asked
me to come to his office. I had never been there. It was at 15 Exchange
Place, up a long brass-mounted stairway, second floor front. The
building was one of a type that has vanished,--gas lighted, wise and
old, scornful of the repetitious human scene, full of phantom echoes.
On his door was the name, Henry M. Galt, and nothing else. Inside was
first a small, bare room in which the only light was the little that
came through the opaque glass of a partition door marked “Private.” I
hesitated and was about to knock on this inner door when Galt shouted:

“Come in, Coxey.”

He was alone, sitting with his hat on at a double desk between two
screened windows at the far side of the room. He did not look up at
once. “Sit down a minute,” he said, and went on reading some documents.

The equipment of his establishment was mysteriously simple,--a stock
ticker at one of the windows, a row of ten telephones fastened to
the wall over a long shelf on which to write in a standing position,
a bookkeeper’s high desk and stool, several chairs, a water cooler in
disuse, a neglected newspaper file in the corner, a safe, and that was
all.

“We are waiting for Gates,” he said, with divided attention, reading
still while talking. “I want you to witness ... gn-n-n-u-u, how do you
spell unsalable, _a l a_ or _a l e_?... Yes ... that’s what I made it
... witness our signatures.... We get superstitious down here ... in
this witches’ garden ... we do. There are things that grow best when
planted in the last phase of the moon, ... on a cloudy night ... dogs
barking.... There he is.”

Jonas Gates walked straight in, sat down at the other side of the desk
without speaking, and reached for the papers, which Galt passed to him
one by one in a certain order. Having read them carefully he signed
them. Then Galt signed them, rose, beckoned me to sit in his place,
and put the documents before me separately, showing of each one only
the last page. There were six in all,--three originals which went back
to Gates and three duplicates which Galt retained. There was a seventh
which apparently required neither to be jointly signed nor witnessed.
It lay all the time face up on Gates’ side of the desk. I noted the
large printed title of that one. It was a mortgage deed. Gates put it
with the three others which were his, snapped a rubber band around them
and went out, leaving no word or sign behind him.

“Crime enough for one day,” said Galt, going to the safe. “You are
coming up for dinner. Turn out that light there above you.”

“Did you expect Great Midwestern to go bankrupt?” I asked as we walked
down the stairway.

He did not answer me directly, nor at all for a long time. When we were
seated in the L train he said: “So you know that I was buying the stock
all the way down?”

“Yes.”

He did not speak again until we left the train at 50th Street.

“No, I didn’t expect it,” he said. “It wasn’t inevitable until the Lord
burned up the corn crop. But I allowed for it, and what’s worse in
one way is better in another. We’re all right. In the reorganization
I’ll get the position I want. I’ll be one of ten men in a board room.
Everything else follows from that.”


ii

As Natalie met us I observed her keenly, thinking she would betray
a feeling of anxiety. But she knew his moods at sight and met them
exactly. To my surprise she hailed him gaily and he responded. Then
they fell to wrangling over nothing at all and carried on a fierce
make-believe quarrel until dinner time.

At the table he tried to force a general spirit of raillery and made
reckless sallies in all directions. They failed miserably until
Natalie joined him in a merciless attack upon Vera. It was entirely
gratuitous. When it had gone very far Mrs. Galt was on the point of
interfering, but checked the impulse, leaving Vera to take care of
herself. She held her own with the two of them. When the game lagged
Natalie would whisper to Galt. He would say, “No-o-o-o-o!” with
exaggerated incredulity, and they would begin again. Suddenly they
turned on me, Natalie beginning.

“Don’t you think Coxey ought to get married?” Galt’s name for me had
long been current in the household.

“Coxey, here? No. Nobody would marry him,” said Galt.

“But he’s sometimes quite nice,” said Natalie.

They discussed my character as if I were not there, the kind of wife I
should have and what would please Heaven to come of it. Natalie knew,
as Galt didn’t, that this was teasing Vera still.

Dinner was nearly over when Gram’ma Galt asked her terrible question.
“What is the price of Great Midwestern stock today?”

Galt answered quietly: “One-and-a-half.”

There was no more conversation after that.

Later when we were alone I asked Vera if the house had been pledged.

“The mortgage was executed yesterday,” she said. “It’s roof and all
this time.”

“He doesn’t seem at all depressed,” I said.

“No,” she answered. “That is his way with disaster. We’ve seen it
before.”

“Don’t you admire him for it, though?”

“I hate him!” she cried passionately. The intensity of her emotion
astonished me. Her hands were clenched, her eyes were large and her
body quivered. We were sitting together on the sofa. I got up and
walked around. When I looked at her again she lay face downward in the
pillows, weeping convulsively.




CHAPTER VIII

LOW WATER


i

Well, the United States Treasury did not hang out the bankrupt’s
sign. What happened instead was that President Cleveland in his
solitary strength met a mad crisis in a great way. He engaged a group
of international bankers to import gold from Europe and paid them
for it in government bonds. The terms were hard, but the government,
owing to the fascinated stupidity of Congress, was in a helpless
plight. What Cleveland had the courage to face was the fact that
any terms were better than none. It was fundamentally a question of
psychology. The spell had somehow to be broken. The richest and most
resourceful country in the world was about to commit financial suicide
for a fetich. All that was necessary to save it was to restore the
notion,--merely the notion,--of gold solvency. People really did not
want gold to hoard or keep. They wanted only to think they could get it
if they did want it.

The news of the President’s transaction with the bankers, appearing
in the morning papers, produced a profound sensation. The white money
people denounced him with a fury that was indecent. Many men of his
own political faith turned against him, thinking he had destroyed their
party. Congress was amazed. There was talk of impeachment proceedings.
Popular indignation was extreme and unreasoning. The White House had
sold out the country to Wall Street. Mankind was about to be crucified
upon a cross of gold. The principle of evil had at last prevailed.

Thus people reacted emotionally to an event which marked the beginning
of a return of sanity. Upon the verities of the case the effect of
Cleveland’s act was positive. While the nation raved the malady itself
began to yield. That ophidian monster which was devouring the gold
reserve began to disintegrate from the tail upward. Presently only
the head was left and that disappeared with the arrival of the first
consignment of gold from Europe under the government’s contract with
the bankers.

The full cure of course was not immediate. But never again were people
altogether mad. As the tide reverses its movement invisibly, with many
apparent self-contradictions in the surf line on the sand, so it is
with the course of events. Between the tail of the ebb and the first of
the flood there is a time of slack with no tendency at all. That also
is true in the rhythm of human activities.


ii

Historically it is noted that a stake set in the wet sand on the
morning after the Great Midwestern’s confession of insolvency would
have indicated the extreme low water mark of that strange ebb tide in
the economic affairs of this country the unnatural extent and duration
of which was owing to the moon of a complex delusion. There was first a
time of slack before the flood began to run,--a time of mixed omens, of
alternating hope and doubt. Yet all the time unawares the country grew
richer because people worked hard, consumed less than they produced and
stored the surplus in the form of capital until the reservoirs were
ready to overflow.

As for the Great Midwestern, everything came to pass as Galt predicted.
Valentine was appointed by the court to work the railroad as receiver.
In that rôle he returned to his desk. The word “president” was erased
from the glass door of his office; the word “receiver” was painted
there instead. That was the only visible sign of the changed status. We
paid our way with receiver’s certificates, issued under the direction
of the court. Dust settled in the Board Room, where formerly the
directors met. Trains continued to move as before.




CHAPTER IX

FORTH HE GOES


i

Life in this financial limbo would have exactly suited the placid
temperament of our organization but for the distracting activities of
Galt. With Valentine’s permission he took that old vice-president’s
desk in Harbinger’s office and began to keep hours. Such hours! He
was always there when Harbinger arrived. At ten he went to the Stock
Exchange; at three he returned. He was still there when Harbinger went
home. The scrubwomen complained of him, that he kept them waiting until
late at night. Sometimes for that reason they left the room unswept.
Insatiably he called for records, data, unheard of compilations of
statistics. He wrangled with John Harrier, the treasurer, for hours on
end over the nature of assets and past accounting. Their voices might
often be heard in adjacent rooms, pitched in the key of a fish wives’
quarrel.

Harrier was an autocratic person whose ancient way of accounting
had never before been challenged nor very deeply analyzed. With so
much laxity at the top of the organization he had been able to do as
he pleased, and being a pessimist his tendency was to undervalue
potential assets, such as lands, undeveloped oil and mining rights
and deferred claims. Gradually he wrote them off, a little each year,
until in his financial statements they appeared as nominal items. His
judgments were arbitrary and passed without question. This had been
going on for many years. The result was that a great deal of tangible
property, immediately unproductive yet in fact very valuable, had
been almost lost sight of. The Great Midwestern, like the country,
was richer than anybody would believe. And nobody cared. Live working
assets were in general so unprofitable, especially in the case of
railroads, that dormant assets were treated with contempt. Galt valued
them. He knew how Harrier had sunk them in his figures and forced him
step by step to disclose them.

“They are at it again,” Harbinger said, coming in one evening to sit
for a while in my room, bringing some papers with him.

“Who?”

“Galt and Harrier. I can’t think for their incessant caterwauling.”

“How do you get along with him?” I asked.

“With Galt? He makes me very uncomfortable. There’s no concealing
anything from him.”

“Do you still dislike him?”

“Oh, no. That wears off. I’ve been watching his mind work. It’s a
marvellous piece of mechanism.” He went on with his work. “I know at
last what he’s doing,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“He’s developing a plan of reorganization.”

That was true. I had known it for some time. He accumulated his data
by day in the office and worked it up by night in his room at home. He
showed it to me as it progressed. There was a good deal of writing in
it. The facts required interpretation. He was awkward at writing and I
helped him with it, phrasing his ideas. The financial exposition was
one part only. There was then the physical aspect of the property to be
dealt with. When it came to that he spent six weeks out on the road.
Three days after he set out on this errand we began to receive messages
by telegraph from our operating officials, traffic managers, agents and
division superintendents, to this effect:

“Who is Henry M. Galt?”

At Valentine’s direction I answered all of them, saying: “Treat Henry
M. Galt with every courtesy.”

He went over every mile of the right of way, inspected every shop and
yard, talked with the agents and work masters and finally scandalized
the department of traffic by going through all the contracts in force
with large shippers. He studied traffic conditions throughout the
territory, had a look at competing lines and conferred with bankers,
merchants and chamber of commerce presidents about improving the Great
Midwestern’s service.

He returned with a mass of material which we worked on every night
feverishly, for he was beginning to be very impatient. The physical
aspect of the property having been treated from an original point
of view, there followed an illuminating discussion of business
policy. Good will had been leaving the Great Midwestern, owing to the
unaccommodating nature of its service. This fact he emphasized brutally
and then outlined the means whereby the road’s former prestige might be
regained.

Never had a railroad been so intelligently surveyed before. The work as
it lay finished one midnight on Galt’s table represented an incredible
amount of labor. More than that, it represented creative imagination in
three areas,--finance, physical development and business policy. The
financial thesis was that the Great Midwestern should be reorganized
without assessing the stockholders in the usual way. All that was
necessary was to sell them new securities on the basis of dormant
assets. This was a new idea.

“Have you done all this in collaboration with the bankers?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “They have a plan of their own. My next job is to make
them accept this in place of theirs. That’s why I’ve been in such a
sweat to get it done.”

“What inducement can you offer them?”

“Mine is the better plan,” he said. “It stands on its merits.”

“What will you get out of it?” I asked.

He looked very wise.

“That’s the crow in the pie, Coxey.” He got up, stretched, walked about
a bit, and stood in front of me, saying: “I’ll get a place on the board
of directors. I’ll be one of ten men in a Board Room. Everything else
follows from that.”


ii

A railroad has its own bankers, just as you have your own dentist or
doctor. They sit on the board of directors as financial experts. They
carry out the company’s fiscal policies, they sell its securities to
the public for a commission, they lend it money while it is solvent,
and when it is insolvent they constitute themselves a protective
committee for the security holders and get all the stocks and bonds
deposited in their hands under a trust agreement. Then in due time they
announce a plan of reorganization.

Mordecai & Co. were the Great Midwestern’s bankers. They would
naturally control the reorganization. In fact, they had already evolved
a plan and were waiting only for a propitious moment to bring it forth.
To offer them a new plan in place of their own,--for an outsider to
do this,--would be like selling a song to Solomon. I marvelled not so
much at Galt’s audacity as at his self-confidence. It seemed an utterly
impossible thing to do.

He stopped the next morning at the Great Midwestern office to verify
three figures and to have me fasten the sheets neatly between stiff
cardboards. Then he marched off with it under his arm, his hat slammed
down in front, a slouching, pugnacious figure, blind to obstacles,
dreaming of empire.

“Good luck!” I called after him.

He did not hear me.

The profession of dynamic man is arms. It has never been otherwise.
Only the rules and weapons change. He makes a tilting field of
business. The blood weapon is put away, killing is taboo, but the
struggle is there, if you look, essentially unchanged. Men are the same
as always.

Wall Street is a modern jousting place. The gates stand open. Anyone
may compete. There is no caste. The prizes are unlimited; the
tournament is continuous. Capital is not essential. One may borrow
that, as the stranger knight of ancient time, bringing only his skill
and daring, might have borrowed lance, horse and armor for a trial of
prowess.

To this field of combat you must bring courage, subtlety, nerve,
endurance of mind and swift imagination. Given these qualities, then to
gain more wealth and power than any feudal lord you need only one inch
more than the next longest lance of thought. You have only to outreach
the vision of the champions to unhorse them. There is no mercy for the
fallen, no more than ever. The new hero is acclaimed. He may build him
a castle on any hill and with his wealth command the labor of tens of
thousands. But he must still defend his own against all comers in the
market place. In time he will meet one greater than himself. He may
have the consolation of knowing, if it is a consolation, that defeat
is never fatal, or seldom ever.

Now through these gates went Galt. He had a vision of the future longer
than the lance of any knight defending. He needed horse and armor. I
did not see him again that day.


iii

In the evening I went to the house. Natalie met me.

“He is in bed,” she said.

“Is he ill?”

“He looked very tired and ate no dinner. I was to tell you if you came
that he had to get a big sleep on account of something that will happen
tomorrow.”

I was holding my hat. Natalie looked at it.

“My beautiful sister is not at home,” she said.

“Tell her I was desolate.”

“And that you did not ask for her?” she suggested, slyly.

“Now, Natalie, you are teasing me.”

“Mamma is out. Gram’ma’s gone to bed. There’s nobody to entertain you,”
she said, shaking her head.

“What a dreary state of things!” I said, laughing at her and putting
down my hat.

She went ahead of me into the parlor, arranged a heap of pillows at one
end of the sofa, saying, “There!” and sat herself in a small, straight
chair some distance away.

Going on eighteen is an age between maidenhood and womanhood. Innocence
and wisdom have the same naïve guise and change parts so fast that you
cannot be sure which one is acting. The girl herself is not sure. She
doesn’t stop to think. It is a charming masquerade of two mysterious
forces. The part of innocence is to protect and conceal her; the part
of wisdom is to betray and reveal her.

“I wish I were a man,” she sighed.

“Every girl says that once. Why do you wish it?” I asked.

“But it’s so,” she said. “They know so much ... they can do so many
things.”

“What does a man know that a woman doesn’t?”

“If I were a man,” she said, “I’d be able to help father. I’d
understand figures and charts and all those things he works with. They
make my silly head ache. I’d study finance. What is it like?”

“What is finance like?”

“Yes. Do you think I might understand it a little?”

For an hour or more we talked finance,--that is, I talked and she
listened, saying, “Yes,” and “Oh,” and bringing her chair closer.
She made a very pretty picture of attention. I’m sure she didn’t
understand a word of it. Then she began to ask me questions about
her father,--what his office was like, how he dealt with Wall Street
people, what he did on the Stock Exchange, and so on.

“Must you?” she asked, when I rose to go. “I’m afraid you haven’t been
entertained at all. I love to listen.”

“I just now remember I haven’t had any dinner,” I said. “I stopped late
at the office and came directly here. It’s past ten o’clock.”

“Dear me! Why didn’t you tell me? I’ll get you something. You didn’t
know I could cook. Come on.”

Without waiting for yes or no she scurried off in the direction of the
kitchen. I followed to call her back, but when I had reached the dining
room she was out of sight, the pantry door swinging behind her. I
returned to the parlor and waited, thinking she would report what there
was to eat. Then I could make my excuses and depart.

She did not return. Presently I began to feel embarrassed, as much
for her as for myself; also a little nettled. However, I couldn’t
disappoint her now. It would be too late to stop whatever she was
doing. She had said, “Come on.” Therefore she was expecting me in the
kitchen and was probably by this time in a state of hysterical anxiety,
wondering if I would come, or if perhaps I had gone; and no way out of
the frolic she had started but to see it through.

I found her beating eggs in a yellow bowl. She had put on an apron and
turned up her sleeves. Her face was flushed, her eyes were bright with
a spirit of fun, and wisps of wavy black hair had fallen a little
loose at her temples. I surrendered instantly.

“You won’t mind eating in the kitchen, will you? It’s cozy,” she said,
almost too busy to give me a look.

A small table was already spread for one; chairs were placed for two.

“This is much more interesting than finance,” I said, watching her at
close range.

“I can make a perfect omelette,” she said. “So light you don’t know you
are eating it. You only taste it.”

“Not very filling,” I thought.

“There may be something else, too,” she said.

There was. She rifled the pantry. The imponderable omelette,
accompanied by bacon, was followed by cold chicken, ham, sausage,
asparagus, salad, cheese of two kinds, jams in fluttering uncertainty,
cake and coffee.

When she was convinced at last that I couldn’t encompass another bite
and rested upon her achievement she began to giggle.

“What’s that for?”

“I’m thinking,” she said, “what my sister would say if she saw us now.”

As I walked home I could not help contrasting her with Vera, who
never, even at Natalie’s age, would have thought of doing a thing like
that. Why? Yes, why? Well, because she had not that way with a man.
Natalie was born to get what she wanted through men. She fed them.
She fed their stomachs with food and their egoes with adoration. She
liked doing it for she liked men. She already knew more about their
simplicities than Vera would ever learn. She knew it all instinctively.
And how lovely she was in that apron!


iv

Late the next afternoon he appeared at my desk, sat down, fixed me with
a stare and began to whistle Yankee Doodle out of tune.

“Did they take your plan?” I asked him.

He went on whistling. I couldn’t guess what had happened. His
expression was unreadable.

“Did they?” I asked again.

He stopped for breath.

“Spit on your hands, Coxey,” he said, as if I were at a distance and
needed some encouragement. “We’ve got her by the tail,--by the tail,
_tail!_ _tail!_ We’ll tie a knot in the end of it and then we’re off.”

He never told me how he did it. He had no vanity of reminiscence. Long
afterward I got it from a junior partner of the firm of Mordecai & Co.

They hardly knew him by sight. He appeared in their office on that
hot Summer morning and said simply that he wished to talk Great
Midwestern. He would see nobody but Mordecai himself. At mid-day they
were still talking, and lunch was brought to Mordecai’s room. One by
one the junior members were called in until they were all present.
Galt amazed them with his knowledge of the property, its situation and
possibilities; even more with his acute understanding of its finances.
He gave them information on matters they had never heard of. He gave
them original ideas with such frankness and unreserve that at one point
Mordecai interrupted.

“Ve cannod vorged vad you zay, Mr. Gald. Id iss zo impordand ve mighd
use id. Zare iss no bargain yed. Ve are nod here angels.”

“I can’t help that,” said Galt. “To sell a tune you have to play it.”
And he went on.

When Mordecai spoke again the case was lost.

“Vor uss id iss nod,” he said. “Vor uss id iss nod. Ve are bankers.
To zese heights ov imagination ve cannod vollow, Mr. Gald. Id iss
beautiful. Ve are zorry.”

In the doorway Galt turned and faced them. No one else had moved.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I need some sleep. I’ll come tomorrow.”

The scene was repeated the next day,--Galt talking, the bankers
listening, Mordecai lying back in his chair, gazing at the ceiling,
tapping the ends of his fingers together, blowing his breath through
his short gray beard.

“Vad iss id vor yourself you vand, Mr. Gald?” he asked without moving.

It was Galt’s way when he was winning to press his luck. He wanted a
place on the board of directors. But he demanded more.

“I want to be chairman of the board,” he said.

“Id vould be strange,” said Mordecai, pensively. “Nobody vould
understand id. Ooo iss zat Mr. Gald? Vy iss he made chairman? Zo ze
people vould talk. Ov ze old directors ooo vould fode vor zat Mr. Gald?”

“Gates and Valentine will vote for me,” said Galt.

“You haf asked zem?”

“I have asked Gates,” said Galt. “I am sure of Valentine.”

Another way of Galt’s was to stop at the peak of his argument, and
wait. When the other man in his mind is coming over to your side a
word too much will often stop him. Galt knew he was winning. There was
a long silence. They began to wonder if Mordecai was asleep. He was
a man of few but surprising contradictions. Conservative, cautious,
axiomatic, he had on the other side great courage of mind and a latent
capacity for daring. He distrusted intuition as a faculty, yet on rare
occasions he astonished his associates by arriving most unexpectedly at
an intuitive conclusion, knowing it to be such, and acting upon it with
fatalistic intensity. On those occasions he was never wrong.

Now he sat up slowly and began to toy with a jeweled paper knife.

“Nobody vill understand id, Mr. Gald.... Nobody vill understand id....
Ve accepd your plan. Ve promise all our invluence to use zat you vill
be made chairman of ze board,--on one condition. You vill resign iv ve
ask id immediately.”

Galt unhesitatingly accepted the condition.

When he was gone Mordecai said to his partners: “Ve haf a gread man
discovered. Id iss only zat ve zhall a liddle manage him.”


v

In September the plan was brought out. Though it caused a good deal
of dubious comment the verdict of general opinion was ultimately
favorable. The security holders liked it because they were not assessed
in the ordinary way. They received, instead, the “privilege” so-called
of buying new securities.

When all arrangements were completed the assets of the old Great
Midwestern Railroad Company, meaning the railroad itself and all its
possessions and appurtenances, were put up at auction. Mordecai & Co.,
acting as trustees, were the only bidders.

They delivered the assets to the new Great Midwestern _Railway_
Company, which had been previously incorporated under the laws of New
Jersey. Afterward there was a stockholders’ meeting in Jersey City, in
one of those corporation tenements where rooms are hired in rotation by
corporations that never live in them but come once a year for an hour
or two to transact some formal business and thereby satisfy the fiction
of legal residence.

A stockholders’ meeting is itself a fiction. The stockholders are
present by proxy. Clerks bring the proxies in suit cases. They are
counted and voted in the name of the stockholders under previous
instructions. Thus directors are elected. Mordecai & Co. held six
tenths of the proxies. Horace Potter, representing himself and the oil
crowd whose investment in the old Great Midwestern had been very large,
held three tenths. There was no contest; Mordecai & Co. and the oil
crowd acted concertedly in all matters. They were allied interests.
With one exception the old board was re-elected. The exception was
Henry M. Galt, elected in place of a very old man who had been induced
by the bankers to withdraw.

In the afternoon of the same day the directors met in the Board Room
for the first time since their inglorious exit through Harbinger’s
office eleven months before. Valentine was unanimously re-elected
president. There was a pause.

“I bropose Mr. Gald vor chairman ov ze board,” lisped Mordecai.

It had all been arranged beforehand. There was no doubt of the outcome.
Yet there was an air of constraint about taking the formal step.
Evidently in the background there had been a struggle of forces.

Potter said: “Second the nomination.”

The president called for the vote. Four were silent, including Galt.
Five voted aye. Valentine nodded his head and the result was recorded:
“Chairman of the Board, Henry M. Galt.”

Meanwhile the traffic manager and his three assistants, who had been
summoned from Chicago for a conference, were waiting in Harbinger’s
office. Galt walked directly there from the Board Room, sat on
Harbinger’s desk with his feet in the chair, waived all introductions,
and said:

“Now for business. Hereafter all contracts with shippers and all
agreements with the traffic managers of other roads will be sent to
this office for my approval and signature. They will not be valid
otherwise.”

The traffic manager was a florid, contemptuous man who wore costly
Chicago clothes and carried a watch in each waistcoat pocket, very
far apart. He was one of a ring of traffic managers who waxed fat and
arrogant in the exercise of a power that nobody dared or knew how to
wrest from them. They sold favors to shippers. They sold railroad
stocks for a fall in Wall Street and then got up ruinous rate wars
among themselves to make stocks fall. Their ways were predatory,
scandalous and uncontrollable. If one railroad tried to discipline its
traffic manager the others practiced reprisals and the business of
that one railroad would slump; or if a railroad dismissed its traffic
manager his successor would be just as bad, or more greedy in fact,
having to begin at the beginning to get rich.

At Galt’s speech the traffic manager crossed his legs with amazement,
dropped his arms, slid down in his chair, bowed his neck and assumed
the look of an incredulous bull, showing the white under his eyes.

“And who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Me?” said Galt. “I’m the driver.”

“We’ll see,” said the traffic manager. He rose, overturning his chair,
and made for the door, meaning of course to see the president.

“You’d better wait a minute,” said Galt. “I’m not through yet.”

He waited.

Then Galt, addressing the assistants, outlined a new policy. What they
were to work for was through freight, passing from one end of the
system to the other. What they were to avoid was anything they wouldn’t
like a railroad to do to them. What they were to believe in was a gang
spirit. What they were to get immediately was a doubling of their pay.

Getting down on the floor he advanced slowly with a stealthy step at
the traffic manager, who began to quail.

“You choose whether to resign or be fired,” said Galt. “The first
assistant will take your place.” He added something in a lower tone
that no one else could hear, then stood looking at him fixedly. The
traffic manager started, mopped the back of his neck, wavered, and
stood quite still.

“Well, it’s damned high time,” he said, at last, by way of mentioning a
basic fact. With that he sat down and wrote his resignation.

This incident was an omen. Unconsciously Galt worked on the principle
that once a thing has happened it cannot unhappen. The fact of its
having happened is original and irrevocable. Every other fact in the
universe must adjust itself to that one. Something else may happen the
next instant; that is a new happening again.

Mr. Valentine was violently agitated by the traffic manager’s
dismissal. If he had been consulted he would have made an issue of it.
But there it was. It had happened. The fact created a situation. He
might refuse to accept the situation, but he could not extinguish the
fact. He fumed and let it pass. Nothing was ever the same again.

Galt consulted nobody. He turned from the traffic man to Harbinger and
ordered that the pay of the whole executive staff from the secretary
down be doubled. Then he put Harbinger out, took the whole of the room
for himself, painted the word “Chairman” on the door and thereafter
the Great Midwestern was managed from his desk. There was never a
moment’s doubt about it. There was no time to debate his authority. It
took all of everybody’s time to keep up with what was happening. He
recast the operating department by telegraph in one hour, according to
a plan already matured in his mind. He changed the accounting system
radically, and much to everyone’s surprise, John Harrier accepted the
change with enthusiasm.

Having made a flying trip over the road he sent a telegram ahead of
him calling a special meeting of the board of directors. It convened at
ten o’clock. Galt came directly from the train, stained, unshaven and a
little weary, until he began to talk.

What he proposed was that fifty million dollars be raised at once
and spent for new engines, cars, rails and road improvements.
Mordecai alone was prepared for this. All the others were daft with
astonishment. A railroad only a few days out of bankruptcy to find and
spend that sum for improvements! It was preposterous. Not only was the
whole board against him, save Mordecai; it was hostile and struck with
foreboding. As Galt rose to make his argument I remembered what he had
twice said: “I shall be one of ten men in a Board Room. Everything else
follows from that.”


vi

This was the first true exhibition of his power to move men’s minds,--a
power which nobody understood, which he did not himself understand.
Perhaps it was not their minds he moved. Men of strong will often
turned from their convictions and voted with him or for what he wanted
who afterward, having recovered their own opinions, were unable to say
why they had acted that way. He was not eloquent. When he was excited
his voice became shrill and irritating. He had no felicity of speech
and often lost the grammar of tenses, cases and pronouns. The reasoning
was always clear. He moulded an argument in the form of a wedge and
then hit it a sledge-hammer blow. But it was not the argument alone
that did it. As time went on he more and more dispensed with argument
and brought the result to pass directly, as a hypnotist with a well
trained subject induces the trance without preparation, seemingly by
an act of mere intention. It was a power that increased with use until
it was like an elemental force and acted at a distance, so that he
had only to send an agent with word that this or that should be done,
and men did it helplessly. You may say of course that all such later
phenomena were owing to a habit of submission, men having accepted the
tyranny of his will, only that would not account for the rise of his
power from nothing, would it?

In this first case he had back of him no prestige of success. He
was still unknown and distrusted by a majority of the ten directors
who sat at the board table. And they were not men accustomed to be
led. They were themselves leaders. In all Wall Street it would have
been impossible to find a more powerful, self-confident group, cold,
calculating, unsentimental in business, their faces all cruelly scarred
with the marks of success terrifically achieved. Yet as he talked their
chemistries changed. The first visible reaction was one of bothered
surprise. This was followed by efforts of resistance. The last phase
was one of fascination.

His reasons were these: A flood was about to rise. He adduced evidence
on that point. Money, materials and labor were plenty and cheap.
Never again would it be possible to increase the railroad’s capacity
at a cost so low. And a railroad that made itself ready to receive the
flood would reap a rich harvest. Finally, the spending of fifty million
dollars in this way would give business the impulse it was waiting
for,--the little push that sends a great vessel down the ways into the
water. The moment was rare and propitious.

“Is it true,” asked Mr. Valentine, “that the chairman on his own
responsibility, without consulting the president or the board of
directors, has already placed contracts for engines, cars, rails and
construction work, before the money has been voted for that purpose,
before anybody knows whether it can be raised or not? I have heard so.”

Everyone was startled by the question. Galt was not expecting it.

“That is true,” he said, and waited.

“So we are committed to this expenditure whether we approve it or not?”

“That’s the predicament,” said Galt, recklessly.

Valentine, wholly deceived by his manner, came heavily on.

“Have you any idea what it will cost us to get out of these
contracts,--to cancel them?”

“The construction contracts,” Galt said very slowly, “are subject to
cancellation without penalty until this midnight. The contracts for
engines, cars and rails cannot be cancelled. I’ve baked this pie for
the Great Midwestern. If it doesn’t want it I’ll give the company’s
treasurer my check for one hundred thousand dollars and eat it myself.”

“What do you mean?” Horace Potter asked.

“I mean that in consideration of placing the orders when and as I did,
on the equipment makers’ empty stomach, I got a special discount of ten
per cent. The idea was that the news of our buying as it got around
would start a general buying movement. That has happened. Other roads
have placed orders behind ours at full prices. We started a stampede.
Nobody has been buying equipment for two or three years. Everybody
needs some. These contracts can be sold today for at least one hundred
thousand dollars.”

“Can we sell fifty millions of bonds?” asked Potter, looking at
Mordecai.

“Ve vill guarantee to zell zem,” said Mordecai. “Mr. Gald iss righd. Iv
ve reap ve musd zow.”

With no further discussion they voted with Galt, and the feud between
Valentine and Galt was openly established.

We were torn by the dilemma of allegiance. Everyone was fond of
Valentine. One could not help liking him. And his position was
desperately uncomfortable. Galt had reduced him to a mere figurehead,
not intentionally perhaps, not by any overt act of hostility certainly,
but as an inevitable consequence of his ruthless pursuit of ends.
Valentine became obstructive. Galt grew irritable. They ceased to have
any working contact whatever. And although the organization to a man
was sorry for Valentine, still there was a turning to Galt, purely as
an instinctive reaction to strength. As a railroad executive Valentine
for all his experience was inefficient. This had been always tolerantly
understood. But now with Galt’s work beginning to produce results
in contrast the fact was openly admitted. Galt’s touch was sure,
propulsive and unhesitating. And besides, in whatever he did there was
an element of fortuity that could not be reasoned about. He not only
did the right things; he did them at precisely the right time.

“You remember what I told you a long time ago,” said Harbinger. “He
sees things before they happen. My heart breaks for the old man ... but
it’s no use.”

The sight of inspired craftsmanship is irresistible to men. The
organization wavered between affection for the one and awe of the other
and ended by giving its undivided loyalty to Galt, not for love of his
eyes but for reasons that were obvious.

One day Mr. Valentine complained that I was unable to serve him and
Galt both, and asked me gently if I did not wish to go entirely to
Galt. He had guessed my inclinations. So we shook hands and parted.
Thereafter my place was in Galt’s room and I attended the board
meetings as his private secretary.




CHAPTER X

HEYDAY


i

His activities were of increasing complexity. A Stock Exchange ticker
was installed, for he meant to keep his eye on the stock market;
then an automatic printing device on which foreign, domestic and
Wall Street news bulletins were flashed by telegraph; then a private
switchboard and a number of direct telephones,--one with the house of
Mordecai & Co., one with the operating department at Chicago, one with
the office of Jonas Gates, several with Stock Exchange brokers and
others designated by code letters the terminals of which were his own
secret. He worked by no schedule, hated to make fixed appointments,
and took people as they came. They waited in the reception room,
which of necessity became his ante-chamber. In a little while it was
crowded with those who asked for Galt, Galt, Galt. Not one in twenty
who entered asked for Valentine, the president. A mixed procession it
was,--engineers, equipment makers, brokers, speculators, inventors,
contractors and persons summoned suddenly out of the sky whose business
one never knew. Never wasting it himself, never permitting anyone else
to waste it, he had time for everything. He received impressions whole
and instantaneously. With people he was abrupt, often rude. He wanted
the point first. If a man with whom he meant to do business insisted
upon talking beside the point he would say: “Go outside to make your
speech and then come back.” He never read a newspaper. He looked at it,
sniffed, crumpled it up and cast it from him, all with one gesture.
Four or five times a day he ran a yard or two of ticker tape through
his fingers and glanced in passing at the news printing machine.
Magazines and books were non-existent matter. Yet within the area of
his own purposes no fact, no implication of fact, was ever lost.

Meanwhile Great Midwestern stock was slowly rising. One effect of this
was to relieve the tension in the Galt household. Gram’ma Galt’s daily
question was no longer dreaded.

Having asked it in the usual way at the end of dinner one evening, and
Galt having told her the price, she electrified us all by addressing
some remarks to me.

“You are with my son a good deal of the time?”

“All day,” I said.

I was looking at her. She frowned a little before speaking, wetted her
lips with her tongue, and spoke precisely, in the level, slightly deaf
and utterly detached way of old people.

“Do you see that he gets a hot lunch every day?”

“I have never attended to that,” I said.

“Does he, though?” she asked.

“We’ve been very careless about it,” I said. “Sometimes when he’s busy
he doesn’t get any.”

“Please see that he gets a hot lunch every day,” she said. “Cold
victuals are not good for him. And tea if he will drink it.”

I promised. An embarrassed silence followed. She was not quite through.

“Have you any Great Midwestern stock?” she asked.

“I have a small amount.”

“You must believe in it,” she said, adding after a pause: “We do.”

Then she was through.

Had she alone in that household always believed in Great Midwestern
stock, which was to believe in him? Or had she only of a sudden become
hopeful? Was it perhaps a flash of premonition, some slight exercise of
the power possessed by her son? Long afterward I tried to find out. She
shook her head and seemed not to understand what I was talking about.
She had forgotten the incident.

The next day I ordered a hot lunch to be sent in and put upon Galt’s
desk. He said, “Huh!” But he was not displeased, and ate it. And this
became thereafter a fixed habit.


ii

The new equipment had only just begun to move on the new rails when he
went before the board with a proposal to raise one hundred millions
for more equipment, more rails, elimination of curves and reduction of
grades.

“My God, man!” exclaimed Horace Potter. “Do you want to nickel plate
this road?”

“It will nickel plate itself if we make it flat and straight,” said
Galt.

He was in a stronger position this time. His predictions were coming
true. The flood tide was beginning. Everybody saw the signs. Great
Midwestern’s earnings were rising faster than those of any competitor,
and at the same time its costs were falling because of the character
of the new equipment. Therefore profits were increasing. On the other
hand, Valentine now was openly hostile, and Jonas Gates whom Galt could
have relied upon, was ill. There were nine at the board table.

He argued his case skillfully. For the first time he produced his
profile map of the road, showing where the bad grades were and how on
account of them freight was hauled at a loss over two divisions of the
right of way. To flatten here a certain grade,--selected for purposes
of illustration,--would cost five millions of dollars. The cost of
moving freight over that division would be thereby reduced one-tenth
of a cent per ton per mile. This insignificant sum multiplied by the
number of tons moving would mean a saving of a million dollars a year.
That was twenty per cent. on the cost of reducing the grade. It was
certain.

“Are the contracts let?” asked Valentine, ironically.

“They are ready to be let,” said Galt. “That’s how I know for sure what
the cost will be.”

“Let’s vote,” said Potter, suddenly. “He’ll either make or break us. I
vote aye.”

The ayes carried it. There were no audible noes. Valentine did not vote.


iii

At this time Galt was laying the foundation for an undisclosed
structure. It had to be deep and enduring, for the strain would be
tremendous. He poured money into the Great Midwestern with a raging
passion. As the earnings increased he plowed them in. With the
assistance of the pessimistic treasurer he disguised the returns.
Improvements were charged to expenses as if they were repairs. New
property was added in the guise of renewing old. This he did for fear
the stockholders, if they knew the truth, would begin too soon to
clamor for dividends. He spent money only for essential things, that
is, in ways that were productive, and neglected everything else, until
we had at last the finest transportation machine in the country and the
shabbiest general offices. The consequences of this policy, when they
began to be realized, were incredible.

In the autumn of 1896 a strange event came suddenly to pass. People
were delivered from the Soft Money Plague, not by their own efforts,
as they believed, but because maladies of the mind are like those of
the body. If they are not fatal you are bound to get well. Doctors will
take the credit. The Republican party won the election that year on a
gold platform, and this is treated historically as a sacred political
victory for yellow money; the white money people were hopelessly
overturned. But it was wholly a psychic phenomenon still. Why all at
once did a majority of people vote in a certain way? To make a change
in the laws, you say. Yes, but there the mystery deepens. Immediately
after this vote was cast the shape of events began to change with no
change whatever in the laws. The law enthroning gold was not enacted
until four years later, in 1900, and this was a mere formality, a
certificate of cure after the fact. By that time the madness had
entirely passed, for natural reasons.


iv

After 1896 the flood tide began to swell and roar. Galt was astride of
it,--a colossus emerging from the mist.

The Great Midwestern was finished. He had rebuilt it from end to end.
And now for that campaign of expansion which was adumbrated on the map
I had studied in his room at home. For these operations he required
the active assistance of Mordecai, Gates and Potter. He persuaded them
privately and bent them to his views.

I began to notice that he went more frequently to the stock ticker.
His ear was attuned to it delicately. A sudden change in the rhythm of
its g-n-i-r-r-r-i-n-g would cause him to leave his desk instantly and
go to look at the tape. He was continually wanted on those telephones
with the unknown terminals. Speaking into them he would say, “Yes,” ...
or ... “No,” ... or ... “How many?” ... or ... “Ten more at once.”

One afternoon he turned from the ticker and did a grotesque pirouette
in the middle of the floor.

“Pig in the sack, Coxey. Pig in the sack. Not a squeal out of him.”

“What pig is that?” I asked.

He looked at me shrewdly and said no more.

Under his direction they had been buying control of the Orient &
Pacific Railroad in the open market, so skillfully that no one even
suspected it. He had not been a speculator all his life for nothing.
What set him off at that moment was the sight of the last few thousand
shares passing on the tape.

Valentine was in Europe for his annual vacation. Galt called a special
meeting of the directors. He talked for an hour on the importance
of controlling railroads that could originate traffic. The Great
Midwestern did not originate its own traffic. The Orient & Pacific was
a far western road with many branches in a rich freight producing area.
The Great Midwestern had been getting only one third of its east bound
freight, and it was a very profitable kind of freight, moving in solid
trains of iced cars at high rates; the other two thirds had been going
to competitive lines.

It would be worth nearly fifteen million dollars a year for the Great
Midwestern to own the Orient & Pacific and get all of its business. A
syndicate had just acquired a controlling interest in Orient & Pacific
stock and he, Galt, had got an option on it at an average price of
forty dollars a share. The Great Midwestern could buy it at that price.
What was the pleasure of the board?

The substance was true; the spirit was rhetorical. The formal pleasure
of the board was already prepared. Four members, listening solemnly as
to a new thing, had assisted in the purchase. Galt, Potter, Gates and
Mordecai were the syndicate. Potter as usual called for the vote, and
voted aye. The rest followed.

A brief statement was issued to the Wall Street news bureaus. It
produced a strange sensation. An operation of great magnitude had been
carried through so adroitly that no one suspected what was taking
place, not even the Orient & Pacific Railroad Company’s own bankers.
They were mortified unspeakably. More than that, they were startled,
and so were all the defenders of wealth and prestige in this field of
combat, for they perceived that a master foeman had cast his gage among
them. And they scarcely knew his name.

Twenty minutes after our formal statement had been delivered to the
Wall Street news bureaus the waiting room was full of newspaper
reporters demanding to see the chairman.

“But what do they want?” asked Galt, angry and petulant. “We’ve made
all the statement that’s necessary.”

“They say they must talk to somebody, since it is a matter of public
interest. The bankers have referred them here. There’s nobody but you
to satisfy them.”

“Tell them there’s nothing more to be said.”

“I’ve told them that. They want to ask you some questions.”

It was his first experience and he dreaded it.

“We’ll have a look at them,” he said. “Let them in.”

As they poured in he scanned their faces. Picking out one, a keen,
bald, pugnacious trifle, he asked: “Who are you?”

“I’m from the Evening Post.”

He put the same question to each of the others, and when they were all
identified he turned to the first one again.

“Well, Postey, you look so wise, you do the talking. What do you want
to know?”

Postey stepped out on the mat and went at him hard. Why had control of
the Orient & Pacific been bought? What did it cost? How would it be
paid for? Would the road be absorbed by the Great Midwestern or managed
independently? Had the new management been appointed? What were Galt’s
plans for the future?

To the first question he responded in general terms. To the second he
said: “Is that anybody’s business?”

“It’s the public’s business,” said Postey.

“Oh,” said Galt. “Well, I can’t tell you now. It will appear in the
annual report.”

After that he answered each question respectfully, but really told
very little, and appeared to enjoy the business so long as Postey did
the talking. When he was through the Journal reporter said: “Tell us
something about yourself, Mr. Galt. You are spoken of as one of the
brilliant new leaders in finance.”

“That’s all,” said Galt, repressing an expletive and turning his back.
When they were gone he said to me: “Don’t ever let that Journal man in
again. Postey, though, he’s all right.”

All accounts of the interview, so far as that went, were substantially
correct. In some papers there was a good deal of silly speculation
about Galt. The Journal reporter went further with it than anyone else,
described his person and manners vividly, and went out of his way three
times to mention in a spirit of innuendo that there was a stock ticker
in Galt’s private office, with sinister reference to the fact that
before he became chairman of the Great Midwestern he had been a Stock
Exchange speculator.

I called Galt’s attention to this.

“Yes,” he said. “We’re out in the open now where they can shoot at us.”


v

The Orient & Pacific deal brought on the inevitable crisis. Valentine
was in Paris. An American correspondent took the news to him at his
hotel and asked for comment upon it. He blurted his astonishment. He
knew nothing about it, he said, and believed it was untrue. This was
unexpected news. The correspondent cabled it to his New York paper
together with the statement that Valentine would cut his vacation and
return immediately. Wall Street scented a row. It was rumored that
Valentine was coming home to depose Galt; also that the purchase of the
Orient & Pacific would be stopped by injunction proceedings. Comment
unfriendly to Galt began to appear in the financial columns of the
newspapers. Great Midwestern stock now was very active in the market.
This gave the financial editors their daily text. They spoke of its
being manipulated, presumably by insiders, and it filled them with
foreboding to remember that the man now apparently in command of this
important property was formerly a Stock Exchange speculator, with no
railroad experience whatever.

We easily guessed what all this meant. Galt had no friends among the
financial editors. He did not know one of them by sight or name. But
Valentine knew them well, and so did those bankers who had lost control
of the Orient & Pacific. The seed of prejudice is easily sown. There is
a natural, herd-like predisposition to think ill of a newcomer. That
makes the soil receptive.

Galt was serene until one day suddenly Jonas Gates died of old age and
sin, and then I noticed symptoms of uneasiness. I wondered if he was
worried about those papers I had witnessed in his private office on the
day the Great Midwestern failed. The executors of course would find
them.

On reaching New York Valentine’s first act was to call a meeting of the
board of directors. He was blind with humiliation. First he offered
a resolution so defining the duties and limiting the powers of the
chairman of the board as to make that official subordinate to the
president. Then he spoke.

Owing to the sinister aspect of the situation and to the importance of
the interests involved he felt himself justified in revealing matters
of an extremely confidential character. It had come to his knowledge
that there existed between the chairman and the late Jonas Gates a
formal agreement by the terms of which Gates pledged himself to support
Galt for a place on the board of directors and Galt on his part, _in
consideration of a large sum of money_, undertook first to gain control
of the company’s affairs and overthrow the authority of its president.

Would the chairman deny this?

But wait. There was more. In the same way it had come to his knowledge
that two other agreements existed as of the same date. One provided
that when Galt had gained control of the company’s policies he would
cause it to buy the Orient & Pacific railroad in which Gates was then a
large stockholder. The third was a stipulation that a certain part of
Gates’ profit on the sale of his Orient & Pacific stock to the Great
Midwestern should apply on Galt’s debt to him. Would the chairman deny
the existence of these agreements?

Still not waiting for a reply, not expecting one in fact, he offered
a second resolution calling for the resignation of Henry M. Galt as
chairman of the board; his place to be filled at the pleasure of the
directors.

Galt all this time sat with his back to Valentine gazing out the window
with a bored expression. His onset was dramatic and unexpected.

With a gesture to circumstances he rose, thrust his hands in his
pockets, and began walking slowly to and fro behind Valentine.

“I hate to do it,” he said. “I like Old Dog Tray, here. But he won’t
stay off the track. If he wants to get run over I can’t help it....
Those agreements he speaks of,--without saying how he got hold of
them,--they are true. I had a lot of G. M. stock when the company went
busted. The stock records will show it. I was in a tight place and went
to Gates for money to hold on with. He laughed at me. Didn’t believe
the stock was worth a dollar, he said. I spent hours with him telling
him what I knew about the property, showing him its possibilities. I
had made a study of it. I spoke of the Orient & Pacific as a road the
G. M. would have to control. ‘That would suit me,’ he said. ‘I’ve just
had to take over a large block of that stock for a bad debt.’ I said,
‘All the better. With your stock accounted for it will be easier to buy
the rest.’ And so it was. But that’s ahead of the story. Gates said one
trouble with the G. M. was Valentine. I knew that, too. The end of it
was that I persuaded him. He took everything I had and loaned me the
money. The agreement was that the stuff I pledged with him for the loan
could be redeemed _only_ provided my plans for the development of the
G. M. were realized and certain results appeared. Otherwise he was to
keep it. It was the devil’s own bargain. I was in a hole, remember,
... had the bear in my arms and couldn’t let go, ... and you all knew
Gates.”

Valentine interrupted. He spoke without looking around.

“One of your plans for the development of the Great Midwestern was the
elimination of the president.”

“Exactly,” said Galt. “The president at that time was not president,
but receiver. He was receiver for a property he had managed into
bankruptcy.... Well, that part of the agreement has been kept. There
ain’t any doubt about who’s running the G. M. I’m running it, subject
to the approval of the directors. Five minutes after I was elected
chairman of this board I took the traffic manager’s resignation in
that room out there under threat of having him indicted for theft.
He was the president’s friend. I did this without the president’s
sanction or knowledge. The place was rotten with graft. We were paying
extortionate prices for equipment and materials because the equipment
makers and the material men were our friends. Our pockets were wide
open. Listen to this!”

From typewritten sheets he read a wrecking indictment of the old
Valentine management, setting out how money had been lost and wasted
and frittered away, how the company had been overcharged, underpaid and
systematically mulcted. He gave exact figures, names, dates and ledger
references.

“She’s all right now,” he said. “Clean as a grain of wheat. I’m telling
you what was. I don’t intimate that the president took part in plucking
the old goose. I don’t say that. He was too busy making public speeches
on the miseries of railroads to know what was going on.”

Valentine was not crushed. He showed no sense of guilt. No one believed
him guilty in fact. What he represented, tragically and with great
dignity, was the crime of obsolence. A stronger man was putting him
aside in a new time. He started to speak, but Potter spoke instead.

“I move to strike all this stuff off the record,” he said, “and let
matters rest as they are.” He pushed back his chair. Everyone but
Valentine arose. There was no vote. Officially nothing had been
transacted. The president was left sitting there alone, with his
resolutions in front of him.

All that Galt said was true. It was probably not the whole truth. His
transaction with Gates seemed on the face of it too strange to be so
briefly and plausibly explained. One fact at least he left out, which
was that Gates hated Valentine with a fixation peculiar to cryptic old
age. Nobody knew quite why. He was possibly more interested in revenge
upon Valentine than in the future of the Great Midwestern. It may be
surmised also that he had some intuition of Galt’s latent power, just
as Mordecai had, and placed a bet on him at long, safe odds. It was
Galt who took the risk. And as for the Orient & Pacific deal, that
did not require to be defended on its merits, for there was already a
profit in it for the company.

After this Valentine should have resigned. Instead he carried the
fight outside, over all persuasion. It became a nasty row. He publicly
attacked the company’s purchase of the Orient & Pacific, denounced
Galt personally, and solicited the stockholders for proxies to be
voted at the annual meeting for directors who would support him. His
acquaintance with the financial editors, several of whom were his warm
friends, gave him an apparent advantage. All the newspapers were on his
side.

But nobody then knew how Galt loved a fight. He poured his essence
into it and attained to a kind of lustful ecstacy. His methods were
both direct and devious. To win by a safe margin did not satisfy him.
It must be a smashing defeat for his opponent. He, too, appealed to
the stockholders. Valentine in one way had played into his hands. His
complaint was that Galt had seized the management. Well, if that were
true, nobody but Galt could claim credit for the results, and they were
beginning to be marvelous. Great Midwestern’s earnings were improving
so fast that Galt’s enemies must resort to malicious innuendo. They
said he was a wizard with figures, which was true enough, and that
possibly the earnings were fictitious, which was not the case at all.

Long before the day of the annual meeting Galt had a large majority of
the stockholders with him. Nevertheless, he sent me abroad to solicit
the proxies of foreign stockholders. They were easy to get. I was
surprised to find that the foreigners, who are extremely shrewd in
these matters, with an instinct for men who have the money making gift,
had already made up their minds about Galt. They had been watching his
work and they were buying Great Midwestern stock on account of it.

When it came to the meeting Valentine had not enough support to elect
one director. His humiliation was complete. Then he resigned and Galt
was elected in his place, to be both chairman and president.

He was not exultant. For an hour he walked about the office with a
brooding, absent air. This was his invariable mood of projection. He
was not thinking at all of what had happened. He put on his hat and
stood for a minute in the doorway. Looking back he said, “Hold tight,
Coxey,” and slammed the door behind him.




CHAPTER XI

HEARTH NOTES


i

Galt’s overthrow of Valentine was an episode of business which need
not have concerned the outside world. But the conditions of the
struggle were dramatic and personal and the papers made big news of
it. The consequences were beyond control. Henry M. Galt was publicly
discovered. That of course was inevitable, then or later. He was
already high above the horizon and rising fast. The astronomers were
unable to say whether he was a comet or a planet. They were astonished
not more by the suddenness of his coming than by the rate at which he
grew as they observed him.

The other consequences were abnormal, becoming social and political,
and followed him to the end of his career.

Valentine was not a man to be smudged out of the picture. He was a
person of power and influence. The loss of his historic position was
of no pecuniary moment, for he was very rich; it was a blow at his
prestige and a hurt to his pride, inflicted in the limelight. His
grievance against Galt was irredressible. Honestly, too, he believed
Galt to be a dangerous man. But he was a fair fighter within the rules
and would perhaps never himself have carried the warfare outside of
Wall Street where it belonged.

Mrs. Valentine was the one to do that. She was the social tyrant of her
time, ruling by fear and might that little herd of human beings who
practice self-worship and exclusion as a mysterious rite, import and
invent manners, learn the supercilious gesture which means “One does
not know them,” and in short get the goat of vulgus. Her favor was the
one magic passport to the inner realm of New York society. Her disfavor
was a writ of execution. She was a turbulent woman, whose tongue knew
no inhibitions. Whom she liked she terrified; whom she disliked she
sacrificed.

Now she took up the fight in two dimensions. Galt she slandered
outrageously, implanting distrust of him in the minds of men who
would carry it far and high,--to the Senate, even to the heart of the
Administration. Then as you would expect, from her position as social
dictator she struck at the Galt women. That was easy. With one word she
cast them into limbo.

Mrs. Galt had inalienable rights of caste. She belonged to a family
that had been of the elect for three generations. Her aunt once held
the position now occupied by Mrs. Valentine. Galt’s family, though not
at all distinguished, was yet quite acceptable. Marriage therefore did
not alter Mrs. Galt’s social status. She had voluntarily relinquished
it, without prejudice, under pressure of forbidding circumstances.
These were a lack of wealth, a chronic sense of insecurity and Galt’s
unfortunate temperament.

Gradually she sank into social obscurity, morose and embittered. She
made no effort to introduce her daughters into the society she had
forsaken; and as she was unwilling for them to move on a lower plane
the result was that they were nurtured in exile.

Vera at a certain time broke through these absurd restraints and began
to make her own contacts with the world. They were irregular. She
spent weekends with people whom nobody knew, went about with casual
acquaintances, got in with a musical set, and then took up art, not
seriously for art’s sake, but because some rebellious longing of
her nature was answered in the free atmosphere of studios and art
classes. In her wake appeared maleness in various aspects, eligible,
and ineligible. Natalie, who was not yet old enough to follow Vera’s
lead, nor so bold as to contemplate it for herself, looked on with
shy excitement. The rule is that the younger sister may have what
caroms off. Vera’s men never caromed off. They called ardently for
a little while and then sank without trace, to Natalie’s horror and
disappointment. What Vera did with them or to them nobody ever knew.
She kept it to herself.

“You torpedo them,” said Natalie, accusing her.

Mrs. Galt watched the adventuring Vera with anxiety and foreboding,
which gradually gave way to a feeling of relief, not unmingled with a
kind of awe.

“Thank Heaven I don’t have to worry about Vera!” she said one day,
relevantly to nothing at all. She was thinking out loud.

“Why not, mamma?” asked Natalie.

“Don’t ask me, child. And don’t try to be like her.”


ii

Then all at once they were rich.

For a while they hardly dared to believe it. The habit of not being
rich is something to break. Galt’s revenge for their unbelief, past and
present, was to overwhelm them with money. First he returned to them
severally all that he had borrowed or taken from them to put into Great
Midwestern. This, he said, was not their principal back. It was the
profit. It was only the beginning of their profit. Their investments
were left whole. Presently they began to receive dividends. Besides,
he settled large sums upon them as gifts, and kept increasing them
continually.

“What shall we do with it?” asked Natalie.

“Do with it?” said Galt. “What do people do with money? Anything they
like. Spend it.”

He encouraged them to be extravagant, especially Natalie. She had a
passion for horses. He gave her a stable full on her birthday, all show
animals, one of which, handled by Natalie, took first prize in its
class at Madison Square Garden the next month. Galt, strutting about
the ring, was absurd with wonder and excitement. He wished to clap the
judge on the back. Mrs. Galt restrained him as much as she could. She
could not keep him from shouting when the ribbon was handed out. It was
more a victory for Natalie than for the horse. She was tremendously
admired. People looked at their cards to find her name, then at her
again, asking, “Who is she?”

She was nobody. In the papers the next morning her name was mentioned
and that was all, except that one paper referred to her as the daughter
of a Wall Street broker. Other girls, neither so beautiful nor so
expert as Natalie, were daintily praised.

Galt was furious. Yet he had no suspicion of what was the matter. There
was gloom in his household when he expected gaiety. His efforts to
discover the reasons were met with evasive, cryptic sentences.

“What have you been doing today?” he asked Natalie one hot June evening
at dinner.

“Nothing,” she answered.

This exchange was followed as usual by a despondent silence which
always contained an inaudible accusation of Galt. Everyone would have
denied it sweetly. He couldn’t turn it on them. He could only take it
out in irritability.

“All fuss and feathers and nothing to do,” he said. “You make me sick.
I can’t see why you don’t do what other girls do. There’s nothing
they’ve got that you can’t have. Go some place. Go to Newport. That’s
where they all go, ain’t it?”

“Papa, dear,” said Natalie, “what should we do at Newport?”

“Do! Do! How the--how do I know? Swim, dance, flirt, whatever the rest
of them do. Take a house ... make a splurge ... cut in with the crowd.
I don’t know. Your mother does. That’s her business. Ask her.”

“Oh, but you don’t understand,” said Natalie. “We’d not be taken in.
Mother does know.”

“What does that mean?” Galt asked.

“You can’t just dress up and go where you want to go,” said Natalie.
“You have to be asked. We’d look nice at Newport with a house, wouldn’t
we?”

“Go on,” said Galt, in a dazed kind of way.

“I mean,” said Natalie, ... “oh, you know, papa, dear. Don’t be an old
stupid. Why go on with it?... Of course you can always do things with
people of a sort. They ask you fast enough. But mother says if we do
that we’ll never get anywhere. So we have to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“I don’t know,” said Natalie, on the verge of tears. “Ask mother.”

“So ho-o-o-o!” said Galt, beginning to see. “I’ll ask her.”

Mrs. Galt and Vera were in a state of crystal passivity. They heard
without listening. Galt pursued the matter no further at dinner. Later
he held a long interview with Mrs. Galt and she told him the truth.
Social ostracism was the price his family paid for the enemies he had
made and continued to make in Wall Street. She had tried. She had
knocked, but no door opened. She had prostrated herself before her
friends. They were sorry and helpless. Nothing could be done,--not at
once. She had better wait quietly, they said, until the storm blew
over. Mrs. Valentine was at her worst, terrible and unapproachable. The
subject couldn’t even be mentioned. Anyone who received the Galts was
damned.


iii

Galt was unable to get his mind down to work the next day. He would
leave it and walk about in a random manner, emitting strange,
intermittent sounds,--grunts, hissings and shrewd whistlings. Then he
would sit down to it again, but with no relief, and repeat the absent
performance.

“Come on, Coxey,” he said, taking up his hat. “We’ll show them
something.”

We went up-town by the L train, got off at 42nd Street, took a cab and
drove slowly up Fifth Avenue.

“That’s Valentine’s house,” he said, indicating a beautiful old brick
residence. He called to the cabby to put us down and wait. We walked
up and down the block. Almost directly opposite the Valentine house
was a brown stone residence in ill repair, doors and windows boarded
up, marked for sale. Having looked at it several times, measuring the
width of the plot with his eye, he crossed over to the Valentine
house, squared his heels with the line of its wall and stepped off the
frontage, counting, “Three, six, nine,” etc. It stretched him to do
an imaginary yard per step. He was as unconscious as a mechanical tin
image and resembled one, his arms limp at his sides, his legs shooting
out in front of him with stiff angular movements. He wore a brown straw
hat, his hair flared out behind, his tie was askew and fallen away from
the collar button.

Returning he stepped off in the same way the frontage of the property
for sale.

“About what I thought,” he said. “Twenty feet more.”

He wrote down the number of the house and the name and address of the
real estate firm from the sign and we were through. An agent was sent
immediately to buy the property. He telephoned before the end of the
day.

“We’ve got it, Coxey,” said Galt. “The transfer will be made in your
name. This is all a dead secret. Not a word. Find the best architect in
New York and have him down here tomorrow.”

As luck was, the architect had a set of beautiful plans that had been
abandoned on account of cost. With but few modifications they suited
Galt perfectly. He could hardly wait until everything was settled,--not
only as to the house itself, but as to its equipment, decorations and
furnishings complete, even pictures, linen and plate.

“When it’s done,” he said, “I want to walk in with a handbag and stay
there.”

Having signed the contracts he added an extra cumulative per diem
premium for completion in advance of a specified date. Then he put it
away from his mind and returned,--I had almost said,--to his money
making. That would not be true. His mind was not on money, primarily.
He thought in terms of creative achievement.

There are two regnant passions in the heart of man. One is to tear
down, the other is to build up. Galt’s passion was to build. In his
case the passion to destroy, which complements the other, was satisfied
in removing obstacles. Works enthralled him in right of their own
magic. To see a thing with the mind’s eyes as a vision in space, to
give orders, then in a little while to go and find it there, existing
durably in three dimensions,--that was power! No other form of
experience was comparable to this.

His theory, had he been able to formulate one, would have been that
any work worth doing must pay. That was the ultimate test. If it
didn’t pay there was something wrong. But profit was what followed as
a vindication or a conclusion in logic. First was the thing itself to
be imagined. The difference between this and the common attitude may be
subtle; it is hard to define; yet it is fundamental. He did not begin
by saying: “How can the Great Midwestern be made to earn a profit of
ten per cent.?” No. He said: “How shall we make the Great Midwestern
system the greatest transportation machine in the world?” If that were
done the profit would mind itself. He could not have said this himself.
He never troubled his mind with self-analysis. I think he never knew
how or why he became the greatest money maker of his generation in the
world.


iv

Nothing happened to betray the secret of the house that rose in Fifth
Avenue opposite Valentine’s. The real estate news reporters all went
wild in their guesses as to its ownership. Galt never interfered
about details; but if the chart of construction progress which he
kept on his desk showed the slightest deviation from ideal he must
know at once what was going wrong. There was a strike of workmen. He
said to give them what they wanted and indemnified the contractors
accordingly. Once it was a matter of transportation. Three car loads of
precious hewn stone got lost in transit. The records of the railroad
that had them last showed they had been handed on. The receiving road
had no record of having received them. They had vanished altogether.
At last they were found in Jersey City. A yard crew had been using
them for three weeks as a make-weight to govern the level of one of
those old-fashioned pontoons across which trains were shunted from
the mainland tracks to car barges in the river. They happened to be
just the right weight for the purpose. After that every railroad
with a ferry transfer that the Great Midwestern had anything to say
about installed a new kind of pontoon, raised and lowered by a simple
hydraulic principle.

As the time drew near Galt swelled with mystery. He could not help
dropping now and then at dinner a hint of something that might be
coming to pass. He addressed it always to Natalie, for the benefit
of the others. He looked at her solemnly one evening and contorted a
nursery rhyme:


     Who got ’em in?
     Little Johnnie Quinn
     Who got’ em out?
     Big John Stout.


“Old silly,” said Natalie. “You’ve got it wrong. It goes--”

“Now let me alone,” he said. “I’ve got it the way I want it. What do
you know about it? Poor little outcast! No place to go. Nobody to take
her in.”

He leaned over to pet her consolingly.

“Stop it!” she said, attacking him. They scuffled. Some dishes were
overturned. She caught a napkin under his chin and tied it over the top
of his head.

“All right,” he mumbled. “You’ll be sorry. You wait and see.”

She held his nose and made him say the rhyme the right way, repeating
it after her, under penalty of being made to take a spoonful of
gooseberry jam which he hated.


v

The momentous evening came at last. It had been a particularly hard
day in Wall Street. Galt was cross and easily set off. So the omens
were bad to begin with. Natalie read them from afar and gently let him
alone. He bolted his food, became restless, and asked Mrs. Galt to
order the carriage around.

“Which one?” she asked. “Who will be going?” She did not ask where.

“All of us,” said Galt.

“Gram’ma, too?” Natalie asked.

He nodded.

“Come on,” he said, pushing back his dessert. He went into the hall,
got into his coat, and walked to and fro with his hat on, fuming. He
helped Gram’ma down the steps and handed her into the carriage, then
Mrs. Galt, then Vera, Natalie last.

“Go there,” he said to the coachman, handing him a slip of paper.

The house, with not a soul inside of it, was brilliantly lighted.
Galt in a fever of anticipation crossed the pavement with his most
egregious, cock-like stride. The entrance was level with the street,
screened with two tall iron gates on enormous hinges. Before inserting
the key he looked around, expecting to see the family at his heels.
What he saw instead threw him into a violent temper. I was still
standing at the carriage door waiting to hand them out. Natalie stood
on the curb with her head inside arguing with her mother. Mrs. Galt
would have to know whom they were calling on. Natalie went to find out.

“Nobody,” said Galt. “Nobody, tell her.”

When Natalie returned with this answer Mrs. Galt construed it in the
social sense. She was rigid with horror at the thought that Galt by one
mad impulse might frustrate all her precious plans. For all she knew he
was about to launch them upon a party of upstart nobodies in the very
sight of Mrs. Valentine. Vera now joined with Natalie. They added force
to persuasion and slowly brought her forth. We went straggling across
the pavement toward Galt, who by this time was in a fine rage.

As he unlocked the gates and pushed them open Mrs. Galt had a flash of
understanding. “Oh!” she exclaimed in a bewildered, contrite tone. It
was almost too late.

There were two sets of doors after the gates.

We stood in a vaulted hallway. There was a retiring room on either
side. Further in, where the width of these two rooms was added to that
of the hallway, a grand impression of the house began. We were then in
a magnificently arched space, balanced on four monolith columns. At the
right was a carpeted stone staircase. At the left was a great fireplace
and in front of it a very large velvet-covered divan. Logs were burning
lazily on the andirons. On a table at one side was a cut glass service
and iced water. Beyond, straight ahead, was a view of the dining room.
As we walked in that direction there was a sound of tinkling water.
This issued from a fountain suddenly disclosed in an unsuspected space.
A fire was burning in the dining room. The table was decorated. The
sideboard was furnished.

Galt, silently leading the way, brought us back to the grand staircase.
God knows why,--women must weep in a new house. Possibly it makes them
feel more at home. All the feminine eyes in that party, Vera’s alone
excepted, were red as we mounted the stairs.

As Galt’s satisfaction increased he began to talk. “This,” he said, “is
where we live.”

That was a room the whole width of the house and half its depth, second
floor front, full of soft light reflected from the ceiling, dedicated
to complete human comfort. Everything had been thought of. Trifles of
convenience were everywhere at hand. There were flowers on the table,
books in the bookcases, current magazines lying about, pillows on the
rug in front of the fire place and an enormous divan in which six might
lie at once.

On the same floor was a music room; then a ball room. The chambers were
next above, arranged in suites. This was mother’s, meaning Mrs. Galt;
that was Gram’ma’s, that one Vera’s, that one Natalie’s, those others
for company,--or they could rearrange them as they pleased. Every room
was perfectly dressed, even to towels on the bath room racks and toilet
accessories in the cabinets.

“The help,” he said, “and some other things,” passing the next two
floors without stopping. The top floor was his. One large room was
equipped as an office is. His desk was a large mahogany table with
six telephone instruments on it. Opening off to the right was his
apartment. “And this,” he said, opening a door to the left, “is Coxey’s
when he wants it ... two rooms and bath like mine.”

On the roof, under glass, was a tennis court. The view of the city from
there at night was apparitional. Galt led us to the front ostensibly
that we might see it to better advantage, but for another reason really.

“That’s Valentine’s house down there,” he said, “that roof. We are
three stories higher and twenty feet wider.... You could almost spit on
it.”

Mrs. Galt shuddered.

Well, that was all to see.

“She’s built like a locomotive,” said Galt, trying here and there a
door to show how perfectly it fitted. There was no higher word of
praise.

We went down by an automatic electric elevator and were again in that
vaulted, formal space on the ground floor. Words would not come. Mrs.
Galt stood gazing into the fire, overwhelmed, wondering perhaps how
this would affect her campaign to propitiate Mrs. Valentine. Natalie
sat on the stairway with her chin in her hands. Vera helped herself
to some iced water. Gram’ma Galt sat far off in the corner on a stone
bench.

Galt surveyed them with incredulous disgust. This was a kind of
situation for which he had no intuition at all. His emotions and
theirs were diametrically different. For him the moment was one of
realization. That which was realized had existed in his thoughts whole,
just as it was, for nearly a year. For them it was a terrific shock,
overturning the way of their lives, and women moreover do not make
their adjustments to a new environment in the free, canine manner of
men, but with a kind of feline diffidence. It is very rash to surprise
them so without elaborate preparation.

The tension became unbearable. I was expecting Galt to break forth in
weird sounds. Instead, without a word, but with his teeth set and his
hands clenched, he leaped into the middle of the divan with his feet
and bounced up and down, like a man in a circus net, until I thought
he should break the springs. That seemed to be what he was trying to
do. But it was the very best quality of upholstery, as he ought to have
known. Then he came down on his back full length and lay still, the
women all staring at him.

Vera had a sense of tragedy. It gave her access to his feelings. She
walked over to the divan, knelt down, took his head in her arms and
kissed him. This of all her memorable gestures was the finest. And it
was spoiled. Or was it saved, perhaps? She might not have known how to
end it.

“Ouch!” said Galt. “A pin sticks me.”

He got up.

“Come on, Coxey, I want to show you something in the office upstairs.”

That was subterfuge. He only wished to get away. We took the elevator
and left them. He went directly to his bedroom, ripped off his collar
and threw it on the floor, kicked off his shoes, and cast himself
wearily on the bed. There he lay, on the costly lace counterpane, lined
with pink silk, a forlorn and shabby figure.

Presently Mrs. Galt timidly appeared at the door, followed by Vera
and Natalie. They were a little out of breath, having walked up, not
knowing how to manage the elevator.

“It’s lovely ... perfectly splendid!” said Mrs. Galt, sitting on the
bed and taking his hand. “I’m only sorry I haven’t words to tell you--”
And she began to weep again.

“Don’t,” said Galt. “How does Gram’ma like it?”

“Hadn’t we better start home now?” said Mrs. Galt.

“Home!” said Galt. “What’s this, I’d like to know? Not a bolt missing.
She’s all fueled ... steam up ... ready to have her throttle pulled
open. Go downstairs and hang up your hat. Telephone over for the
servants.... How does Gram’ma like it?”

“We haven’t anything here, you know,” Mrs. Galt protested gently. “The
girls haven’t and neither have I.”

“I’m here for good,” said Galt. “I want my breakfast in that dining
room tomorrow morning.... How does Gram’ma like it?.... What’s the
matter?”

They couldn’t evade it any longer. Natalie told him.

“Gram’ma says she won’t live here.”

“Why not?”

“She won’t say why not. Just says she won’t.”

“All right, all right,” said Galt. “Being a woman is something you
can’t help. Tell her we’ll give her a deed to the old house ... all for
her own. We’ll play company when we come to see her.... That reminds
me.”

He brought a large folded document out of his pocket and handed it to
Mrs. Galt.

“What’s this?”

“Deed to this house,” he said. “It’s from Coxey. Thank him. We kept it
all in his name until today. Now it’s in your name.”




CHAPTER XII

A BROKEN SYMBOL


i

Vera by this time was in high, romantic quest of that which cannot
be found outside oneself. She had a passion to be utterly free. It
was a cold, intellectual phantasy, defeated in every possibility by
some strange, morbid no-saying of her emotional nature. Her delusion
had been that circumstances enthralled her. That refuge now was gone.
Wealth gave her control over the circumstances of her life. She could
do what she pleased. She was free to seek freedom and her mind was
strong and daring.

She leased an old house in West Tenth Street and had it all made over
into studio apartments, four above to be let by favor to whom she liked
and one very grand on the ground floor for herself. Then she became a
patron of the arts. It is an easy road. Art is hungry for praise and
attention. Artists are democratic. They keep no rules, go anywhere,
have lots of time and love to be entertained by wealth, if only to put
their contempt upon it. The hospitality of a buyer must be bad indeed
if they refuse it. Vera’s hospitality was attractive in itself. Her
teas were man teas. Her dinners were gay and excellent. They were
popular at once and soon became smart in a special, exotic way. Her
private exhibitions were written up in the art columns.

She had first a conventional phase and harbored academic art. That
passed. Her taste became more and more radical; so also of course did
her company. I went often to see her there,--to her teas and sometimes
to her dinners, because one could seldom see her anywhere else. But it
was a trial for both of us. She introduced me always with an air which
meant, “He doesn’t belong, as you see, but he is all right.” I was
accepted for her sake. The men were not polite with each other. They
quarrelled and squabbled incessantly, mulishly, pettishly, in terms as
strange to me as the language of my trade would have been to them. They
were polite to me. That was the distinction they made.

As Vera progressed, her understanding of art becoming higher and
higher, new figures appeared, some of them grossly uncouth, either
naturally so or by affectation. She discovered a sculptor who brought
his things with him to be admired,--small ones in his pockets, larger
ones in his arms. I could not understand them. They resembled the
monstrosities children dream of when they need paregoric. He had been
stoker, prize-fighter, mason, poet, tramp,--heaven knows what!--with
this marvellous gift inside of him all the time. He wore brogans,
trousers that sagged, a shirt open to the middle of his hairy chest, a
red handkerchief around his neck and often no hat at all.

Vera seemed quite mad about him. She took me one day to his studio,
saying particularly that she had never been there. It was a small
room at the top of a palsied fire trap near Gramercy Park, reached by
many turnings through dark hallways with sudden steps up and down. In
it, besides the sculptor in a gunny-sack smock, there was nothing but
some planks laid over the tops of barrels, some heaps of clay, and
his things, which he called pieces of form. On the walls, scrawled in
pencil, were his social engagements, all with women. Vera’s name was
there.

Once he came to tea with nothing of his own to show, but from under his
coat he produced and held solemnly aloft an object which proved to be a
stuffed toy beast,--dog, cow, bear or what you couldn’t tell, it was so
battered. One of its shoe-button eyes, one ear and the tail were gone.
Its hide was cotton flannel, now the color of grimy hands.

“What is it?” everybody asked.

He wouldn’t tell until he had found something to stand it on. A book
would serve. Then he held it out at arm’s length.

“I found it on the East Side in a rag picker’s place!” he said. “I seem
to see something in it ... what?... a force ... something elemental ...
something.”

The respect with which this twaddle was received by a sane company,
some of it distinguished, even by Vera herself, filled me with
indignation.

Later the sculptor sat by me and asked ingratiatingly how matters were
in Wall Street.

“You are the third man who has asked me that question today,” I said.
“Why are artists so much interested in Wall Street?”

“I’m not,” he said. “I only thought it was a proper question to ask.
Some of them are. I hear them talking about it. Pictures sell better
when people are making money in Wall Street. Sculpture never sells
anyway. Mine won’t.”

I said men were doing very well in Wall Street. Times were prosperous
again.

“So I understand,” he replied. “It seems very easy to make money there
if you get in right. Do you know of anything sure?”

I said I didn’t.

“You are with Mr. Galt?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“He is a great money maker, isn’t he? What is he like?”

“He’s an elemental force,” I said, leaving him.


ii

But Vera was shrewd and purposeful, having always her ends in view.
Manifestations such as the sculptor person were kept in their place.
They were not permitted to dominate the scene. They played against a
background that was at once exquisite and reassuring. In a mysterious
way she created an atmosphere of pagan, metaphysical tranquillity,
which rejects nothing and refines whatever it accepts. No thought, no
representation of fact or experience, however extreme, was forbidden.
But you must perceive all things æsthetically. Vulgarity was the only
sin. Emotions were objects. You might enjoy them in any way you liked
save one. You must not touch them. For this was the higher sensuality,
ethereal and philosophical,--a sensuality of the mind alone.

All of this was the unconscious expression of herself. Eros
intellectualized! It can be done.

Her achievement became known in a cultish way. She made admission to
her circle more and more difficult and the harder it was the more
anxious people were to get in. On Mrs. Valentine’s world she turned the
tables. She flouted society and it began to knock at her door. She had
something it wanted and sold it dear.

There are always those who seek in art that which they have lost or
used up or never dared take in life. There are those whose desires
are projected upon the mind and obsess it long after the capacity for
direct experience is ruined. There are those to whom anything esoteric
and new is irresistible. There were those, besides, who sought Vera,
notably among them a tall blond animal of the golden series.

He was the man I saw bring Vera home that evening I waited to have
it out with her. I met him again in London on Galt’s business while
soliciting proxies among our foreign stockholders. At that time he
was acting for his father’s estate with an English syndicate that had
large investments in American railroads. Since then, by the will of
Providence, he had come into possession of the estate together with an
hereditary title of great social distinction.

Enter, as he pleases, Lord Porteous. With a thin, cynical head, a
definite simplicity of outline and an exaggerated, voluptuous grace
of body, he remarkably resembled an old Greek drawing. How he had
found Vera in the first place I never knew. That happened, at any
rate, before she was rich. He had the trained British instinct
for putting money with the right people, and it was true that the
English discovered Galt from afar while he was yet almost unknown in
Wall Street. But when I saw him that first time with Vera the Great
Midwestern was on its way to bankruptcy and Galt’s interest in it was
extremely precarious.

Well, no matter. It was inevitable however it happened. When he
returned to this country as Lord Porteous he found her again and
immediately added his prestige to her circle. Art bored him. He
played the part of beguiled Philistine and amused himself by uttering
bourgeoise comments of the most astonishing banality. Whether he
truly meant them or not nobody knew for sure. He never by any chance
betrayed his form. If satire, it was art; if not, it was incredible.
Sensitive victims were reduced to a state of grinning horror. One who
committed suicide was believed to have been driven to it by something
Lord Porteous said to him in a moment of their being accidentally alone
at the sideboard. The artist dropped his glass in a gibbering rage
and went headlong forth. He was never seen alive again, and as m’lord
couldn’t be asked we never knew what it was.

For all that, Lord Porteous was a capital social asset, and a valiant
protagonist. He carried Vera’s name with him wherever he went, even
to Mrs. Valentine’s table,--there especially, in fact, because he
discovered how much it annoyed her. He disliked her; and she was
helpless.


iii

Like her father, Vera was adventurous with success. No measure was
enough. She began to import art objects that were bound to be talked
about,--not old masters, nothing so trite as that, but daring,
controversial things, the latest word of a modern school or the most
authentic fetich of a new movement in thought. Her grand stroke was
the purchase in London of the rarest piece of antique negro sculpture
then known to exist in the world. It had been miraculously discovered
in Africa and was brought to England for sale. Its importance lay
in the fact that a certain self-advertised cult, leading a revolt
against classic Greek tradition, acclaimed it on sight as the perfect
demonstration of some theory which only artists could pretend to
understand. Modern sculpture, these people said, was pure in but two of
its three dimensions. This African thing, wrought by savages in a time
of great antiquity, was pure also in the third dimension. Therefore
it excelled anything that was Greek or derived therefrom. A storm of
controversy broke upon the absurd little idol’s head. Photographs of it
were printed in hundreds of magazines and newspapers in Europe and the
United States. And when it came to be sold at auction it was one of the
most notorious objects on earth.

The British Museum retired after the second bid. Agents acting for
private collectors ran the price up rapidly. The bidding, according to
the news reports cabled to this country the next morning, was “very
spirited,” and the treasure passed at a fabulous price to the agent of
“Miss Vera Galt, the well known American collector.” She had engaged
the assistance of a dealer who knew how to get publicity in these high
matters. English art critics politely regretted that an object of such
rare æsthetic interest should leave Europe; American critics exulted
accordingly and praised Miss Galt’s enterprise.

I was at the studio the day the thing arrived and was unpacked. Besides
the initiates, votaries and friends, a number of art critics were
present by invitation. Vera, as usual, was detached and tentative, with
no air of proprietorship whatever. She was like one of the spectators.
Yet every detail of the ceremony had been rigidly ordained. The place
prepared to receive the idol was not too conspicuous. It was to be
important but not paramount. It must not dominate the scene.

As one not entitled to participate in the chatter I was free to listen.
There were _oh’s_ and _ah’s_ and guttural sounds, meant in each case to
express that person’s whole unique comprehension and theory of art. The
more articulate had almost done better, I thought, to limit themselves
to similar exclamations. What they said was quite meaningless, to me
at least. With the enthusiasm of original discovery one declared that
it was wholly free of any representational quality. Another said with
profound wisdom that it was neither the symbol nor the representation
of anything, but purely and miraculously a thing in itself. Its
unrepresentationalness and thing-in-itselfness were thereupon asserted
over and over, everyone perceiving that to be the safe slant of
opinion. They were wonderfully excited. No lay person may hope to
understand these commotions of æsthetic feeling. The idea was to me
grotesque that this strange, discolored figure, not more than fifteen
inches high, with its upturned nose, its cylindrical trunk, cylindrical
arms not pertaining to the trunk, cylindrical legs pertaining to
neither the trunk nor the arms, terminating in block feet, should be an
august event in the world of art.

Lord Porteous came in. He helped himself to tea and sat down with Vera
at some distance from the murmuring group that surrounded the idol.
Voices kept calling him to come. He went, holding his tea and munching
his cake, and gave it one casual look.

“How very ugly,” he said, and returned to Vera’s side.

I hated him for having the assurance to say it. No one else would
have dared. I hated him for his possessive ways. I hated him for all
the reasons there were. A malicious spirit invaded me. I sat near
them, wishing my proximity to be disagreeable. He was very polite and
friendly, which gave me extra reasons. He made some reference to a
recent occurrence in Wall Street. He asked me what I made of the negro
carving.

“I don’t understand it,” I said.

“We are the barbarians here,” he said. “They understand it. Look at
them.”

Vera was silent.


iv

Gradually the party dispersed, everyone stopping on the way forth to
inform Vera of her greatness, her service to art, her hold upon their
adoration and affection. At length only Lord Porteous and I remained.
The tea things were removed, twilight passed, lights were made, and
still we lingered, making artificial conversation. Suddenly, with a
subtle air of declining the competition, he took his leave.

Vera lay in a great black, ivory-mounted chair, her head far back, her
feet on a hassock, smoking a cigarette in a long shell holder, staring
into the smoke as a man does. The presence of Lord Porteous seemed to
linger between us long after his corporeal entity was gone.

“He says he thinks it very ugly,” I remarked.

“Yes?” she said with that unresolved, rising inflexion which provokes a
man to open the quarrel.

“No one else could have carried off that audacity,” I said.

She let that pass.

“I wonder what your archaic sculptor man would think of it?” I said.
“He wasn’t here.... We haven’t seen him for a long time.”

She shrugged her shoulders and continued to gaze into the smoke of her
cigarette.

“So you are bored,” I said. “A world of your own, a lord at your feet,
and still you are bored.”

“Do you mean to pick a quarrel with me?” she asked.

“I wish to cancel our bargain,” I said. “The one we made that time long
ago in the tea shop.”

“Very well,” she said. “It is cancelled.”

“Is that all?”

“What more could there be?” she asked, looking at me for the first
time, with that naïve expression of blameless innocence which was Eve’s
fig leaf.

“You have nothing to say?”

“No,” she said. “Women are not as vocal about these things as men seem
to be.”

“You were vocal enough when we were making the bargain,” I said. “Have
you no curiosity to know why I wish to cancel it?”

“Friendship does not satisfy a man,” she said.

“Have you made the same bargain with others? ... with Lord Porteous?” I
asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Please don’t be stupid,” she said, lighting another cigarette and
beginning to toy with the smoke. “Are you staying for dinner?”

“I’m going,” I said, “but not until I have told you.”

“What?”

“Why I ask to cancel our bargain.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought that was quite done with.”

“Well, then, why you are bored.”

“Yes,” she said, “why I am bored. You will tell me that?”

Her profile was in silhouette against the black of the chair. She was
smiling derisively.

“It is because you have imprisoned yourself in a lonely castle,” I
said. “You used that figure of speech yourself when we were making
the bargain. ‘It is my castle,’ you said. Therefore you know it. The
name of that castle is Selfishness. The name of your jailer is Vera
Afraid. What you fear is life, for its pain and scars. You hail it from
afar. You call it inside the walls under penalities. It must be good.
It shall not bite or scratch or kiss you. You are too precious to be
touched.”

“You haven’t named the prisoner,” she said, slowly.

“She is Vera Desireful,” I said. “She is starved for life, for the
bread of participation.... She lives upon the poisonous crusts of
phantasy. She is probably in danger of going mad. Her dreams are
terrible.”

“You cannot be saying these things to me!” she exclaimed, with a
startled, incredulous face.

“Long ago I might have said them just as well,” I answered. “I have
known always what an unnatural, self-saving woman you are, how
treacherous you are to the impulse which brings you again and again
to the verge of experience. There, in the act of embracing life, you
suddenly freeze with selfish fear. Do you think life can be so cheated?
If it cannot burn you it will wither you. When it is too late you may
realize that to have one must give. Well, it is impossible of course.
You cannot give yourself. The impulse is betrayed on the threshold. I
knew it when I was fool enough to ask you to marry me.”

“You never asked me,” she said, thoughtfully, as reviewing a state of
facts. “You only said you wanted to marry me.”

I construed it as a challenge. No, that is as I think of it now.
What happened to me then was beyond any process of thought. It
occurred outside of me, if that means anything. There was a sense of
dissolving. Objects, ideas, place, planes, dimensions, my own egoistic
importance, all seemed to dissolve in one significant sensation. There
is a recollection that at this moment something became extremely vivid.
What it was that became vivid I do not know. The word that comprehends
without defining it is completion. In the whole world there was nothing
else of consequence or meaning.

“I ask you now,” I said.

I heard my own words from afar. They were uttered by someone who had
been sitting where I sat and for all I knew or cared might be sitting
there still. _I_ was a body moving through space, with a single
anxiety, which was to meet another body in space for a purpose I could
not stop to examine. I remember thinking, “I may. I may. The bargain is
cancelled.”

She leaped to her feet, evading me, and laughed with her head tossed
back,--an icy, brilliant laugh that made me rigid. I could not
interpret it. I do not know yet what it meant. Nor do I comprehend the
astonishing gesture that followed.

Slowly she moved to the African idol, picked it up, brought it to the
mantel under a strong light and began to examine it carefully. She
explored every plane of its surface and became apparently quite lost
in contemplation of its hideous beauty. Holding it at arm’s length and
still looking at it she spoke.

“Lord Porteous thinks it very ugly?”

“So he said,” I replied.

“He may be right,” she said. “Perhaps it is. So many things turn ugly
when you look at them closely ... friendship even.”

Then she dropped it.

As it crashed on the hearthstone she turned, without a glance at the
fragments or at me, and walked out of the room.

Three days later her engagement to Lord Porteous was announced.




CHAPTER XIII

SUCCESS


i

The ready explanation of Galt’s rise in a few years to the rôle of Wall
Street monarch is that he was a master profit maker. The way of it
was phenomenal. His touch was that of genius, daring, unaccountable,
mysteriously guided by an inner mentality. And when the results
appeared they were so natural, inevitable, that men wondered no less at
their own stupidity than at his prescience. Why had they not seen the
same opportunity?

His associates made money by no effort of their own. They had only
to put their talents with the mighty steward. He took them, employed
them as he pleased, and presently returned them two-fold, five-fold,
sometimes twenty-fold.

But this explanation only begs the secret. The nature of his unique
power is still hidden. It was in the first manifestation a power
to persuade men. It became a power to command them, in virtue of
the ability he had to reward them. This ability was the consummate
power,--a power to imagine and create wealth. As it grew and as the
respect for it became a superstition among his associates and a terror
to all adversaries he passed into the dictatorial phase of his career.

Mordecai’s thought,--“Id iss only zat ve zhall manage him a
liddle,”--was rudely shattered. He was unmanageable. He gave Mordecai
& Co. peremptory orders, and they were obeyed, as they well might be,
since Galt’s star had lifted the house of Mordecai from third to first
rank in the financial world. It had become richer and more powerful
than any other house in Wall Street save one and that one was its
ancient enemy.

Mordecai’s courage had fainting fits. To “zese heights” he was often
unable to follow without a good deal of forcible assistance. Frequently
he would come to wrestle prayerfully with Galt, begging him in vain to
scale down some particularly audacious plan, whatever it was. One day
they had been at this for an hour. Galt was pugnacious and oppressive.
They stood up to it. Mordecai, retreating step by step, had come to bay
in a corner, gazing upward, the tips of his fingers together; Galt was
passing to and fro in front of him, laying down his will, stopping now
and then to emphasize the point by shaking his fist under Mordecai’s
nose.

Just then the boy from the reception room came to my desk with the
name of Horace Potter. That was awkward. Potter was a tempestuous
man, easily moved to high anger, himself an autocrat, unaccustomed
to wait upon the pleasure of others. He was personally one of Galt’s
most powerful supporters and brought to him besides the whole
strength of the puissant oil crowd, which controlled at that time
more available wealth than any other group in Wall Street. It was an
unusual concession for him to call upon anyone. People always came to
him. And there he was outside, waiting. He had come to keep a definite
appointment. There was no excuse. I tried to tell Galt, but he waved me
away fiercely.

“Don’t bother me now, Coxey.”

Five minutes passed. Of a sudden Potter bolted in. “What is this?” he
roared. “Am I one to cool my heels in your outer office?”

Galt turned round and stared at him, blankly at first and then with
blazing anger.

“How did you get in here?” he asked.

“By God, I walked in,” said Potter.

“Then, by God, walk out again,” said Galt, turning his back.

I followed him out, thinking to find some mollifying word to say; he
was unapproachable. The reception room was empty but for Potter and
the friend he had with him, an important banker who was to have been
presented to Galt in a special way. They talked with no heed of me.

“He’s in one of his damned tantrums,” said Potter. “We’ll have to chuck
it or try again.”

The other man got very red.

“Why do you stand it?” he asked. “You!”

“I’ll tell you why,” said Potter. “We make more with him than with any
other man who ever handled our money. That’s a very good reason.”

“I couldn’t help it,” I said to Galt, afterward.

“All right,” he said. “He won’t do it again.”

He never did. And so one by one they learned to take him as he was, to
swallow their pride and submit to his moods, all for the same reason.
He had the power to make them rich, richer, richest.

A meeting of the board of directors became a perfunctory formality,
serving only to verify and approve Galt’s acts for purposes of record.
On his own responsibility he committed the company to policies,
investments, vast undertakings, and informed the board later. Success
was his whole justification. If once that failed him his authority
would collapse instantly.

In a rare moment of self-inspection, after one of his darling visions
had come true, he said:

“After all, Coxey, it’s the Lord makes the tide rise. We don’t control
it. We only ride it.”

It was an amazing tide. Never was one like it before. It floated old
hulks that had been lying helpless and bankrupt on the sands for years.
And when men began to say it was high enough, that it was time to
prepare for the ebb, Galt said it was yet beginning. On the day Great
Midwestern stock sold at one hundred dollars a share,--par!--he said to
Mordecai: “That’s nothing. It will sell at two hundred. Buy me twenty
thousand shares at this price.”

“I belief you, Mr. Gald,” said Mordecai in an awe-struck whisper.


ii

Proceeds of the incessant enormous issues of new securities had been
invested first in the reconstruction of the Great Midwestern itself
and then in the shares of other railroads, beginning with the Orient
& Pacific. That was the first of a series of transactions. We now
owned outright or controlled by stock ownership no fewer than fifteen
other railroad properties, besides lake and ocean steamship lines,
docks, terminals, belt lines, trolley systems, forests, oil fields
and coal mines. The Great Midwestern was the vertebra of an organism,
ramifying east, west, north and south; it reached from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, with antennæ to Asia and Europe. Its treasury was
inexhaustible, fed by so many streams.

Not only did our own earnings increase amazingly as all those other
properties poured their traffic into us, but the Great Midwestern
treasury received dividends on the shares by which it controlled
those traffic bringers. Thus we garnered twice. There was yet a third
source of profit. As the Great Midwestern acquired new properties Galt
rebuilt them out of their own earnings or by use of their own credit,
so that their value increased. Thus, they brought us traffic, they
paid dividends into our treasury and at the same time they were so
enhanced in physical value by Galt’s methods of development that they
were soon worth three or four times what they had cost. All this was
in each case so obvious, once it had happened, and yet so remarkable
in the aggregate, that people could scarcely believe it. A writer in
one of the financial papers exclaimed: “If these figures are true,
then the Great Midwestern Railway Company could go out of the railroad
business entirely and live richly on the profits that appear from its
investments in the securities of other railroads.”

And the figures _were_ true.


iii

Galt’s name rose to impersonal eminence. The properties embraced in
the Great Midwestern organism were referred to as Galt properties.
Their securities were Galt bonds or Galt stocks. The acts of the
Great Midwestern were not its own; they were Galt’s. There was a Galt
influence which reached beyond his own domain. Once an important
railroad system in which neither he nor the Great Midwestern had any
direct interest was about to reduce its rate of dividend. The directors
on their way to the meeting said they would vote to reduce it. But they
didn’t. When the meeting was over they were asked why they had changed
their minds. The explanation was that Galt had sent word to them that
he wished them not to do it. He said it would be a shock to public
confidence, and that he would divert enough traffic to the road to
enable it to earn the dividend it had been paying. And presently Wall
Street people were talking of a Galt crowd or a Galt party, meaning all
that group of men associated with him in his undertakings.

The magazines discovered him. For a long time he would not be
interviewed. There was nothing to talk about, he said; why did they
pester him? They wrote articles about him, notwithstanding, because
he was a new power in the land, and so much of the information they
put forth was garbled or immature that he was persuaded at last to
submit to a regular interview. The writer assigned to the task was
at that time a famous interviewer. He came one evening to the house
by appointment and waited in the great drawing room. I was with him,
giving him some advice, when Galt came in, wearing slippers the heels
of which slapped the floor at every step. He sat in a large chair,
crouched himself, stared for a full minute at the interviewer through
large shell spectacles, justifying, I afterward remembered, the
interviewer’s impression of him as a huge, predatory, not unfriendly
spider. Suddenly he spoke, saying:

“Ain’t you ashamed to be in this business?”

“Everybody has something to be ashamed of,” said the interviewer. “What
are you ashamed of?”

That pleased Galt. He loved a straight hit on the nose. And it turned
out to be a very successful interview.

What the public knew about him was already enough to dazzle the
imagination. What it didn’t know, not yet at least, was more
surprising. His private fortune became so great that he was obliged
to think what to do with it. Unerringly he employed it in means to
greater power. Hitherto he had relied mainly upon the support of
individuals and groups of men who put their money with him. Now he
began on his own account to buy heavily into financial institutions and
before anybody knew what he was doing he had got working control of
several great reservoirs of liquid capital, such as chartered banks and
insurance companies. The use of this was that he could influence them
to invest their funds in the securities of the Great Midwestern and
its collateral properties. That made it easier for him to sell the new
stocks and bonds which he was endlessly creating to provide money for
his projects.

His passion to build burned higher and higher. Any spectacle of
construction fascinated him. We stood for an hour one morning at the
corner of Broadway and Exchange Place watching a new way of putting
down the foundation for a steel building. Wooden caissons were sunk in
the ground by a pneumatic principle to a great depth and then filled
with concrete. The building was to be twenty stories high.

“Have you noticed,” I asked him, “how the skyline of New York has
changed since steel construction began? If you haven’t seen it from
down the bay or across the river for several years you wouldn’t know
it.”

“I haven’t,” he said. “Yes ... of course. It must be so.”

An hour later in the office he called me to the window. “See that
handful of old brick rookeries down there?... Fine place to build....
Let’s do something for your skyline.”

In his mind’s eye was the mirage of a skyscraper thirty stories tall
with the Great Midwestern’s executive offices luxuriously established
on the top floors. A year later it was there, and we were there.

Most men are superstitious about leaving the environment in which
success has been bearded and made docile. Was he? I never quite knew.
All this time we had remained in those dark, awkward old offices with
their funny walnut furniture. Not a desk had been changed. A new rug
was bought for the president’s room when Valentine left and Galt moved
in; and Harbinger, restored to the room Galt had moved him out of,
asked for some new linoleum on the floor. Nothing else had been done to
improve our quarters. Where Cæsar sits, there his empire is. What he
sits on does not matter at all.

His last act in this setting was dramatic. Word came one Saturday
morning that the dæmonic Missouri River was on a wild rampage, with a
sudden mind to change its way. Three towns that lay in its path were
waiting helplessly to be devoured, and there was no telling what would
happen after that. The government’s engineers were frantic, calling
for help, with no idea where it was to come from. Galt got Chicago on
the wire and spoke to the chief of his engineer corps, a man to whom
mountains were technical obstacles and rivers a petty nuisance.

“The Missouri River is cavorting around again,” said Galt. “Now,
listen.... Yes!... Take everything we’ve got, men, materials and
equipment--hello!--anything you need, including the right of way. I
don’t care what it costs, but put a ring in her nose and lead her back
to her trough. This order is unlimited. It takes precedence over mail,
business and acts of Providence. Go like hell.... Hello!... That’s all.”

Then he walked out for the last time and never once looked back. On
Monday morning he walked into our ornate new offices without appearing
to notice them. He was impatient for something that should be on his
desk. It was there,--a message from the engineer:

“Will have her stopped by 6 p. m., Monday. Get her back to bed in a few
days.”

It was a memorable feat, a triumph of daring and skill, and cost the
Great Midwestern several millions of dollars.


iv

At about this time, quite accidentally, there shaped in his thoughts
that ultimate project which lies somewhere near the heart of every
instinctive builder. One evening at dinner Natalie said: “I wonder why
we have no country place? Everyone else has.”

Galt stopped eating and looked at her slowly.

“Why of course, that’s it,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what it was
we didn’t have, ... looking at it all the time, like the man at the
giraffe.... Huh!”

He approached it in a characteristic manner at once. There was
somewhere a topographic map of New Jersey. It was searched for and
found and he and Natalie lay on the floor with their heads together
exploring it. First he explained to her how one got the elevations by
following the brown contour lines and what the signs and figures meant.

“Then this must be a mountain,” she exclaimed.

“Right,” he said. “You get the idea. Here’s a better one. Look here.”

“Oh, but see this one,” she said. “Look! All by itself.”

He examined her discovery thoughtfully. It was a mountain in northern
New Jersey, the tallest one, two small rivers flowing at its feet, a
view unobstructed in all directions.

“You’ve found the button,” he said. “I believe you have ... wild
country ... not much built up.... What’s that railroad, can you see?...
All right. We can get anything at all we want from them.”

The whole family went the next day on a voyage of verification and
discovery. It was all they had hoped for. Natalie was ecstatic in
the rôle of Columbus. Fancy! She had found it on a map, no bigger
than that!--and here it was. Mrs. Galt was acquiescent and a little
bewildered. Vera was conservative. They imagined a large house on top
of the mountain, with a road up, more or less following the trail they
had ascended to get the view, which took the breath out of you, Natalie
said. You could see the Hudson River for many miles up, New York City,
the Catskills possibly on a very clear day,--most of the world, in
fact. Mrs. Galt and Vera perceived the difficulties and had no sense of
how they were to be overcome. Galt imagined an estate of fifty thousand
acres of which this mountain should be the paramount feature; miles of
concrete roads, a power dam and electric light plant large enough to
serve a town, a branch railroad to the base of the mountain, a private
station to be named Galt, and finally,--the most impossible thing he
could conceive,--a swift electric elevator up the mountain.

The business of acquiring the land began at once. The mountain itself
was easy to buy. Many old farm holders in the valley were obstinate.
But he got the heart of what he wanted to begin with, the rest would
come in time, and construction plans of great magnitude were soon under
way. The house in Fifth Avenue was in one sense a failure. It had not
reduced Mrs. Valentine. It only made her worse. The social feud was
unending. Well, now he would show them a country place.

And this, though he knew it not, was to be his castle on a hill,
inaccessible and grand, a place of refuge, the feudal, immemorial
symbol of power and conquest.




CHAPTER XIV

THE COMBAT


i

Meanwhile Galt’s enemies had been drawing together secretly. Hatred,
fear and envy resolved all other emotions. Men who had nothing else in
common were joined in a conspiracy to destroy him. The leviathans of
this deep move slowly and take their time. Besides, it was a fearsome
undertaking. There was bound to be a terrific struggle. One false move
and the dragon would escape.

The plan was to attack him from two sides at once.

Several of the railroad properties acquired by the Great Midwestern
were in some sense competitive,--though Galt had not bought them
primarily for that reason,--and as the law was never clear as to how
far the merging of separate railroads might go, it would be possible
to attack the Galt system under the Anti-Trust Act. If the government
could be moved to do this and if then at the same time his Wall Street
enemies concertedly attacked his credit his downfall might be foretold.

This plan required elaborate preparation. The government could not be
directly solicited to act. It would have to be moved by suggestion, and
with such finesse as to conceal the fact that it was being influenced
at all, elsewise than by its own convictions of right. There are those
who know how to effect these Machiavellian results. Intrigue is still
man’s sovereign art. That is why he makes so much of politics.

Mrs. Valentine, pursuing vengeance in her own way, had made Galt’s name
anathema throughout her precious principality. If you were anybody at
all, or aspired to be, you were obliged to think and speak ill of him,
for he represented vulgarity raised by its own audacity to a wicked
and sinister eminence, if he had been born so one could understand
it, she said. But he knew better. That made it all the worse. He had
betrayed the decencies. His one passion was to amass wealth. Those who
had helped him to rise he trampled down. He made his money dishonestly.
A Stock Exchange gambler with a Napoleonic obsession! Well, she
invariably said at the end, his time would come and then people would
see what she meant.

Her own power she employed in a reckless manner. She visited disfavor
upon those who were lukewarm in malignity, going so far as to make a
scene with Lord Porteous, for that he dared to speak in defense of the
monster. She took in people whose only recommendation was zealotry in
her cause. Her subjects going to and fro carried the evangel to other
realms, especially to official society in Washington, which heard in
this way every scandalous thing Galt had ever said about politicians in
power.

The extent and character of her information could be explained only
on the assumption that somewhere in our organization, probably on the
board of directors, was a masked enemy who continually gave Galt up
to Valentine. He had not disappeared from the field of action. All
this time he was working in the background with a single passion,--a
righteous one, as he believed,--which was to assist in the overthrow of
Galt. It was natural that he should join the conspirators. He brought
them much information; he had political resources and access to the
means of publicity.

A fortuitous time arrived. For several years the public, now restored
to high prosperity, observed with interest, awe, even with pride the
appearance of those vast anonymous shapes which capital by a headlong
impulse had been raising up to control production and transportation.
Mergers, combines, trusts,--they came in endless succession. Hardly a
day passed without a new sensation in phantasmic millions. People were
seized with a gambling mania. Each day promoters threw an enormous
mass of new and unseasoned securities upon the market, and they were
frantically bought, as if the supply were in imminent danger of
failing. Astonishing excesses were committed. The Stock Exchange was
overwhelmed. For many weeks the lights never went out in Wall Street
because clerks worked all day and all night to keep the brokers’ books
straight.

The cauldron boiled over badly at last, and there was a silly panic,
more theatrical than serious. It served, however, to break a dream
and awaken the critical faculty. The public all at once became deeply
alarmed. There arose a great clamor about trusts. Those shapes which
had been viewed with pride, as symbols of the nation’s progress and
strength, were now perceived in the light of fear.

Radical thought had been held in disesteem since the collapse of
the Soft Money Plague. Here was a new bogey. Trusts were human evil
objectified. They were swallowing the country up. In a little while all
business would be in their hands. There would come to be only two kinds
of people,--those few who owned the trusts and the many who worked for
them, and freedom would perish in the land. Something would have to
be done about it. Why had nothing been done? Were the trusts already
more powerful than the state? Suddenly the trust vs. the state was
the paramount political issue. There was an onset of books, essays,
speeches, magazine and newspaper articles. Sense and folly, wisdom
and demagoguery were hopelessly entangled. This kind of outburst is
characteristic of a roaring, busy democracy, whose interest in its
collective self is spasmodic and hysterical. The horse is stolen before
anybody thinks of minding the barn.

Gradually the force of this anti-trust feeling, baffled by the
complexity of the subject and seeking all the more for that reason a
personal victim, began to focus upon Galt. You could see it taking
place. The Galt Railroad System, formerly treated with respect and
wonder, now was represented to be an octopus, oppressive, arrogant,
holding power of life and death over helpless communities.

And all the time there were men at Washington who whispered into the
official ear: “Of course a lot of this outcry is senseless. There are
good trusts and bad trusts. Most of them have the economic welfare
of the country at heart and are willing to submit to any reasonable
regulation. The public is undiscriminating. Its mind becomes fixed on
what is bad. It happens to be fixed on this Galt Railroad Trust. Well,
as to that, we must say there is reason for the public’s prejudice.
You would find very few even in Wall Street to defend his methods. The
danger is that unless the evils justly complained of are torn away
by those who understand how to do it our entire structure will be
destroyed in a fit of popular passion.”

Galt was warned of what was going on at Washington; but he was so
contemptuous of politics and so sure of his own way that he sneered.
Who knew what the law was? It had never been construed. The legality of
his acts had been attended to by the most eminent counsel, including
a former Attorney General of the United States. What could happen to
him that wasn’t just as likely to happen to everybody else? He had only
done what everyone was doing, only better, more of it, and perhaps to
greater profit. If he was vulnerable, then so were all the others who
had combined lesser into greater things, and they would have to find
a way out together. No wealth would be destroyed. And so he reasoned
himself into a state of indifference.

He greatly underestimated the force of public opinion. He knew nothing
about it, for it had never touched him really. Mass psychology in Wall
Street he understood perfectly. Social and political phenomena he did
not comprehend at all.

One day Great Midwestern stock turned suddenly very weak, falling from
220 to 210 in half an hour. He watched it, annoyed and frowning, and
sent for Mordecai, who could not explain it. That afternoon news came
that the minority stockholders of the Orient & Pacific had brought a
suit in equity against the Great Midwestern, alleging that Galt, by
arbitrary exercise of the power of a majority stockholder, had reduced
the Orient & Pacific to a state of utter subservience, had thereby
destroyed its independent and competitive value, and had mulcted it
heavily for the benefit of the Great Midwestern’s treasury. This, they
represented, was a grievous injury to them as minority stockholders and
also contrary to public interest.

That old Orient & Pacific sore had never healed. The bankers who
controlled the road by sacred right for many years before Galt
snatched it out of their hands had all this time ominously retained
a minority interest in the property. Galt did intend from the
beginning to make the Orient & Pacific wholly subordinate to the Great
Midwestern. It was an essential part of his plan. Therefore minority
stockholders, in good faith, would have had a proper grievance. But
these were not minority stockholders in good faith. They were private
bankers, biding their time to take revenge. Galt had been willing at
any time to buy them out handsomely; they wouldn’t sell because the
minority interest was a weapon which some day they would be able to use
against him.

Although the name never appeared in the proceedings, dummies having
been put forward to act as complainants in the case, everybody knew
that Bullguard & Co. inspired the suit. They were the bankers who owned
the minority interest in Orient & Pacific shares. Everybody knew,
too, that they bore Galt an implacable enmity. What nobody knew until
afterward was that the conspiracy to destroy Galt was organized by
Jerome Bullguard himself.

He was a man of tremendous character. His authority in Wall Street
was pontifical. Men accepted it as a natural fact. Until the rise
of Mordecai & Co., under Galt’s ægis, his house occupied a place of
solitary eminence. Its traditions were fixed. Their consequences were
astronomical. Bullguard was the house. His partners were insignificant,
not actually if you took them as individuals, but relatively,
in contrast with him. His imperious will he imposed upon men and
events,--upon men by force of a personality that inspired dread and
obedience, and upon events by the dynamic quality of his intelligence.
His mind seemed to act in an omnipotent manner with no effort whatever.
His sanctions and influence pervaded the whole scheme of things, yet
he himself was as remote as a Japanese emperor. A good deal of the awe
that surrounded him was owing to the fact that he worked invisibly. The
hand that shaped the thunderbolts was almost never seen. There was a
saying in Wall Street that his name appeared nowhere but over the door
of his banking house. In a community where men must be lynx-eyed and
seven-sensed, able to see the unseeable and deduce the unknowable, his
objects were so elaborately concealed that nobody ever knew for sure
what he was doing until it was done, and then it couldn’t be proved,
for he would have had perhaps no actual contact with it at any point.
There were times when he held the stock market in his two hands, doing
with it as he pleased, yet never could anyone say, “He is here,” or
“There he is.”

Bullguard’s attitude toward Galt was natural, quite fair and regular
according to the law of conquest. Galt was an invader, a financial
Attila, who had followed the conqueror’s star to that place at which
the issue is joined for all or none. Nothing short of supremacy would
satisfy him. Therefore, he should fight for it. Did he think the crown
might be surrendered peaceably?

Galt perfectly understood this philosophy of combat. He would not have
wished it otherwise. Fighting he loved. His fight with Valentine,
because it was petty, had been personal in spite of him. His contest
with Bullguard was impersonal and epic, a meeting of champions in the
heroic sense.

The Orient & Pacific suit was but the opening of a barrage. An
important stockholder in the Security Life Insurance Company, which
was one of the capital reservoirs Galt had got control of, brought
suit to compel him to take back all the Great Midwestern stocks and
bonds owned by that institution, on the ground that as a member of its
finance committee he had improperly influenced it to invest its funds
in securities in which he was interested as a seller. The purpose
of this suit was three-fold: firstly, to advertise the fact that he
dominated the fiscal policies of the Security Life Insurance Company;
secondly, to create the suspicion that his motive in gaining control
of institutions in which people kept their savings was to unload his
stocks and bonds upon them; thirdly, to cast discredit upon Great
Midwestern securities as investments.

It produced an enormous popular sensation. Galt was denounced and
caricatured bitterly in the newspapers. One cartoon, with a caption,
“The Milkman,” represented the Security Life as a cow eating his
stocks and bonds and giving down policyholders’ money as milk into his
private pail.

Next he was sued on account of some land which, according to the
complaint, he had cheapened by withholding railroad facilities, only in
order to buy it, whereupon he enhanced its value an hundred times by
making it the site of a large railroad development, thereby enriching
himself to the extent of several millions. That, like so many other
things alleged about him, was both true and untrue.

Ten private suits were brought against him within three months, each
one adroitly contrived to disclose in a biased, damaging manner some
phase of his complex and universal activities hitherto unknown or
unobserved by the public. Each one was preceded by an attack on Great
Midwestern stock and by increasingly hostile comment in the press. The
cumulative effect was disastrous. Public sentiment became hysterical.


ii

Law suits, as such, never worried Galt. He was continually engaged in
litigation and kept a staff of lawyers busy. His way with lawyers was
to tell them baldly what he wanted to do and leave it to them to evolve
the legal technique of doing it. Then if difficulties followed he would
say: “That’s your own bacon. Now cure it.” Only, they were always to
fight, never to settle.

But now he became silent and brooding. He paced his office for
hours together. When spoken to his eyes looked out of a mist. It was
necessary to bring his attention to matters requiring decision. He had
Mordecai in two or three times a day. They conferred endlessly in low
tones and watched the ticker anxiously. So far as I could see he did
nothing to support the pride of Great Midwestern stock. I wondered
why. Later I knew. At this juncture he was selling it himself. He was
selling not only his stock but enormous amounts of his own bonds,
thereby converting his wealth into cash. That is to say, he was
stripping for the fray.

For three days Great Midwestern stock had been falling in a leaden
manner and Wall Street was distraught with a sense of foreboding when
one morning the big shell burst. First the news tickers flashed this
bulletin:


     “The recent extraordinary weakness of Great Midwestern is
     explained by the rumor that the Government is about to bring suit
     under the Anti-Trust Act against the Galt Railroad System. There
     is talk also of criminal proceedings against Mr. Galt.”


Galt read it with no sign of emotion. Evidently he was expecting it.

Events now were moving rapidly. Half an hour later the news tickers
produced a bulletin as follows:


     “Washington--It is announced at the Attorney General’s office
     that the government has filed suit against the Galt Railroad
     Trust praying for its dissolution on the ground of its being an
     oppressive conspiracy in restraint of trade.... No confirmation
     of rumors that criminal proceedings will be brought against Henry
     M. Galt as a person.”


Details followed. They ran for an hour on the news printing machines,
to the exclusion of everything else, while at the same time on the
quotation tickers the price of Great Midwestern was falling headlong
under terrific selling.

The government’s complaint set out the history of the Galt Railway
System, discussed at length its unique power for evil, examined a large
number of its acts, pronounced adverse judgment upon them, and ended
with an impassioned arraignment of Galt as a man who set his will above
the law. Wherefore, it prayed the court to find all his work illegal
and wicked and to decree that the Galt Railway System be broken up into
its component parts, to the end that competition, peace and happiness
might be restored on earth.

The outer office was soon in the possession of reporters clamoring
to see Galt. He obstinately refused to meet them. They demanded a
statement, and while they waited we prepared one as follows:


     “No step in the formation of the Great Midwestern Railway
     System was taken without the approval of eminent counsel. If,
     as it stands, it is repugnant to the law, as the law shall be
     construed, then of course it will have to be dissolved. If that
     comes to pass all those securities in the Great Midwestern’s
     treasury, representing ownership and control of other properties,
     will have to be distributed pro rata among Great Midwestern
     stockholders--either the securities as such or the proceeds of
     their sale. In either case the profit will amount to a dividend
     of not less than $150 a share for Great Midwestern stockholders.
     That is the extent to which these securities have increased in
     value since the Great Midwestern bought them.

     “(Signed) Henry M. Galt.”


All of that was obvious, only nobody had thought of it. The statement
was received with utter amazement. On the strength of it Great
Midwestern stock advanced suddenly ten points.

Now occurred the strangest incident of the chapter. To imagine it you
have to remember that public feeling was extremely inflamed. That
afternoon a New York Grand Jury indicted Galt under an old forgotten
statute making it a crime to circulate false statements calculated to
advance or depress the price of shares on the Stock Exchange.

A huge broad-toe came to our office with the warrant. Galt was under
arrest. His lawyers were summoned. They communicated with the District
Attorney. Couldn’t they appear for Mr. Galt and arrange bail? No. The
District Attorney believed in social equality. Mr. Galt would have to
appear like any other criminal.

Though it was a very hot afternoon and Galt was tired he insisted that
we should walk.

“Do you want to handcuff me?” he asked.

Broad-toe was ashamed and silent.

So we went, Galt and the officer leading,--past the house of Bullguard
& Co., up Nassau Street, dodging trucks, bumping people, sometimes in
the traffic way, sometimes on the pavement; to the Criminal Courts
Building in City Hall Park, up a winding stairway because Galt would
not wait for the elevator, and to the court room where the District
Attorney was waiting. There was some delay. The judge could not be
found at once.

Galt sat on the extreme edge of a chair, one hand in his trouser’s
pocket, the other fiddling with his watch chain, staring at the clock
over the judge’s bench as if he had never seen one before. The searing
emotions of chagrin and humiliation had not come through. Word of our
presence there spread swiftly and the court room began to fill up with
reporters and spectators.

The court arrived, adjusting its gown, read the paper that was handed
up by the District Attorney, then looked down upon us, asking: “Where
is the defendant?”

Galt stood up. The court eyed him curiously until the lawyers began to
speak. The District Attorney wanted bail fixed at one million dollars.
The court shook its head. Galt’s lawyers asked that he be released on
his own recognizance. The court shook its head again. After a long
wrangle it was fixed at $100,000, which the lawyers were prepared to
provide on the spot.

Getting out was an ordeal. By this time the court room was stuffed
with morbid humanity. Reporters surrounded Galt, adhered to him, laid
hands upon him to get his attention. He made continually the gesture
of brushing away flies from his face. The stairway and corridors were
jammed. As we emerged on the street screaming newsboys offered us the
evening papers with eight-column headlines: “Galt Indicted”--“Galt
Arrested”--“Galt May Go To Jail.” From the steps across the pavement to
a cab I had in waiting an open aisle had been broken through the mob
by photographers, who had their cameras trained to catch Galt as we
passed. He looked straight ahead, walking rapidly, but not in haste.

“Where to?” he asked, as the door of the cab slammed behind us.

“Anywhere first, to get out of this,” I said.

“Let’s go to the club,” he said.

I knew which one he meant. Though he was a member of several clubs he
went always to one.

As we entered the big, quiet red lounging room, five bankers, three of
whom had been counted among Galt’s supporters, were seated in various
postures of ease, their minds absorbed in the evening papers. Galt’s
emotions were those of a boy who, having outrun the cops, lands with a
whoop in the arms of his gang. He tossed his hat aside and shouted:

“Wh-e-e-e! Wo-o-ow!”

The five bankers looked up, rose as one, and stalked out of the room.

For a minute Galt did not understand what had happened. He saw them
rise as he sat down and evidently thought they were coming to him.
When they did not arrive he turned his head casually, then with a
start he looked all around at the empty space. His eyes had a startled
expression when they met mine again and his face was an ashen color. He
made as if to ring the bell, hesitated, looked all around once more,
and said:

“Well, Coxey, let’s go home.”


iii

I began to fear he might collapse. The strain was telling. At the house
a servant admitted us. There was no one else in sight. We went directly
to his apartment. He tore off his collar and lay for some time quite
still staring straight ahead.

“We are the goat,” he said. “They put it on us, Coxey. That’s all....
They will, eh?... Valentine and his newspaper friends ... those magpies
at Washington ... we’ll give them something to set their teeth. Now
take down what I’m going to say. Put it in the form of a signed
statement to the press. Are you ready?”

He dictated:


     “On the evening of July seventeen the question of proceeding
     against the Great Midwestern Railway System was the occasion
     of a special Cabinet meeting at the White House. Besides the
     President and the gentlemen of the Cabinet, several members of the
     Interstate Commerce Commission were present. The President asked
     each one for his opinion. The Attorney General spoke for half an
     hour to this effect ... that the Great Midwestern Railway System
     was not a combination in restraint of trade, that its methods
     were not illegal, that it was necessary for the proper development
     of the country that railroads should combine into great systems, a
     process that had been going on since the first two railroads were
     built, and, finally, that a suit for its dissolution, if brought,
     would be lost in the courts. Others spoke in turn. Then someone
     said: ‘Where is the Secretary of War. He is a great jurist. What
     does he think?’ The Secretary of War was asleep in a corner.
     They roused him. He came into the circle and said, ‘Well, Mr.
     President, Galt is the ---- ---- -- ---- we are after, isn’t he?’
     Then the President announced his decision that proceedings should
     be taken. Thereupon the Attorney General spoke again, saying:
     ‘Since that is the decision, I will outline the plan of action.
     First let the Interstate Commerce Commission prepare a brief upon
     the facts, showing that the Great Midwestern Railway System is
     a combination in restraint of trade, that its ways are illegal
     and oppressive and that its existence is inimical to public
     welfare. Upon this the Attorney General’s office will prepare
     the legal case.’ That is how a suit for the dissolution of the
     Great Midwestern Railway System came to be brought. That is how
     politicians conduct government.”


“Have you got all that down? Read it to me.” When I came to the
offensive epithet uttered by the Secretary of War I read,--“dash, dash,
dash.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“We can’t use the term itself. It’s unprintable,” I said.

“Can’t we?” he said. “But we can. It was applied to me without any
dash, dash. Spell it out. Anyhow, it’s history.”


iv

Natalie, who had come in on tip-toe, noiselessly, was standing just
inside the door. Galt seemed suddenly to feel her presence. When he
looked at her tears started in his eyes and he turned his face away.
She rushed to his side, knelt, and put her arms around him. No word was
spoken.

I left them, telephoned for the family physician to come and stay in
the house, and then acted on an impulse which had been rising in me for
an hour. I wished to see Vera.

She was alone in the studio. I had not seen her informally since the
cataclysmic evening that wrecked the African image.

“Oh,” she said, looking up. “I thought you might come. Excuse me while
I finish this.”

She was writing a note. When she had signed it with a firm hand, and
blotted it, she handed it to me to read. It was a very brief note to
Lord Porteous, breaking their engagement.

“He won’t accept it,” I said.

“You can be generous,” she replied. “However, it doesn’t matter. I
accept it.”

“These things are all untrue that people are saying about your father.
It’s a kind of hysteria. The indictment, if that’s what you are
thinking of, is preposterous. Nothing will come of it. There will be a
sudden reaction in public feeling.”

“I know,” she said. “That isn’t all.... I suppose you have come to take
me home?”

“But what else?” I asked.

She shook her head. As we were leaving the studio she paused on
the threshold to look back. I was watching her face. It expressed
a premonition of farewell. Once before I had seen that look. When?
Ah, yes. That night long ago when she told me the old house had been
mortgaged. Then I understood.

To her, and indeed to all the family, this crisis in Galt’s affairs
meant another smash. The only difference between this time and others
was that they would fall from a greater height, and probably for the
last time.

We drove home in a taxi.

“How I loathe it!” she whispered as we were going in, saying it to
herself.

Natalie appeared.

“You’re in for it,” she said to me. “Father wants to know who brought
the doctor in.”

“I was worried about him,” I said.

“So is the doctor. But it’s no use. He can’t do a thing. Father sent
him away in a hurry.”

Gram’ma Galt came in for dinner. So we were five. Galt did not come
down. Conversation was oblique and thin. One wondered what the servants
were thinking, and wished the service were not so noiseless. If only
they would rattle the plates, or break something, or sneeze, instead
of moving about with that oiled and faultless precision. The tinkling
of water in the fountain room was a silly, exasperating sound, and for
minutes together the only sound there was. Mrs. Galt was off her form.
She tried and failed. Nobody else tried at all.

Natalie, as I believed, was the only one whose thoughts were outside
of herself. Several times our eyes met in a lucid, sympathetic manner.
This had not happened between us before. What we understood was that
both of us were thinking of the same object,--of a frail, ill kept
little figure with ragged hair and a mist in its eyes, wounded by the
destiny that controlled it,--of Galt lying in his clothes on a bed
upstairs, and nothing to be done for his ease or comfort. She was
grateful to me that my thoughts were with him, and when I was not
looking at her I was thinking how different these four women were.
Yet one indefinable thing they had all in common. It brought and held
them together in any crisis affecting Galt. It was not devotion, not
loyalty, not faith. Perhaps it was an inborn fatalistic clan spirit.
But whatever it was, I knew that each of them would surrender to
him again, if need were, the whole of all she possessed. They were
expecting to do it.

“What is the price of Great Midwestern stock to-day?” asked Gram’ma
Galt in a firm, clear voice. Everybody started a little, even one of
the servants who happened to stand in the line of my vision.

“One hundred and seventy,” I said.

To those of us who had just seen it fall in a few weeks from
two-hundred-and-twenty this price of one-hundred-and-seventy seemed
calamitous. That shows how soon we lose the true perspective and how
myopically we regard the nearest contrast.

“When my son took charge of it eight years ago it was one-and-a-half
... one-and-a-half,” said Gram’ma Galt in the same clear voice.

For this I rose and saluted her with a kiss on the forehead. She didn’t
mind. Natalie gave me a splendid look. Then I excused myself and went
to see Galt.

The door of his apartment was ajar. I could see him. He was in his
pajamas now, apparently asleep. So I closed the door and sat at his
desk in the work room outside to call up Mordecai, who had asked me to
communicate with him, and attend to some other matters. Presently the
hall door opened and closed gently. I looked around. It was Gram’ma
Galt. In her hand she carried a large envelope tied around with a blue
ribbon. She walked straight to the door of Galt’s apartment and went in
without knocking. I could see her from where I sat. She left the door
open behind her.

“What’s this?” Galt asked, as she put the envelope on the bed beside
him. She did not answer his question, but leaned over, laid one hand on
his forehead and spoke in this delphic manner:

“Fast ye for strife and smite with the fist of wickedness.”

Then she turned, came straight out, closed the door carefully, passed
me without a glance, and was gone. Never again did I wonder whence Galt
derived his thirst for combat. When he emerged some ten minutes later
the mist had fallen from his eyes. The right doctor had been there. He
handed me the envelope tied around with blue ribbon.

“That’s Gram’ma Galt’s little fortune ... everything she has received
out of Great Midwestern. Keep it in the safe for a few days so she will
think we needed it.... Did you give out that statement?”

“Not yet. There is plenty of time,” I said.

“Tear it up. That isn’t the way we fight, ... is it?”

Gram’ma Galt never got her envelope back. Two weeks later she died.


v

The Galt panic was one of those episodes that can never be fully
explained. Elemental forces were loose. Those that derived from human
passion were answerable to the will; there were others of a visitant
nature fortuitous and uncontrollable. What man cannot control he may
sometimes conduct. You cannot command the lightning, but if it is about
to strike you may lure it here instead of there.

Weather is so often the accomplice of dark enterprise! The financial
weather at this time was very bad and favored the Bullguard conspiracy.
Confidence, which in this case means the expectation of profit, was in
decline. It had never recovered from the shock of that first accident
to greed’s cauldron three months before when an ignorant popular mania
for speculation came all at once to grief. Since then the rise of
feeling against trusts, and the certainty that it would be translated
into political action, had filled Wall Street with confusion and alarm.

Bullguard’s part was to focus all this distrust and fear upon Galt.
Each day the papers reported the weakness of Galt securities, how they
fell under the selling of uneasy holders, and what the latest and most
sinister rumors were. That was news. Nobody could help printing it.
The financial editors each day repeated what eminent bankers said: “We
pray to be delivered from this Jonah. His ways are not our ways, yet he
bringeth wrath upon all alike.” That was true. They said it; they even
believed it. The financial editors could not be blamed for writing it.

So many winds running their feet together, like people in a mob,
create a storm; and when it is over and they are themselves again,
sane little winds, they wonder at what was done. The Wall Street news
tickers reported that certain banks were refusing to lend money on Galt
securities. This may have been a stroke of the conspiracy or merely a
reaction to the prevailing fear, or both interacting. One never knows.
But it was true, and Great Midwestern securities suffered another
frightful fall.

This went on for three weeks with scarcely an interruption. Day after
day Galt stood at the ticker watching Great Midwestern fall,--

to 150,

to 140,

to 130,

to 120, and did nothing. For the first time in his life he was on the
defensive. That made the strain much worse. His normal relief was in
action. He loved to carry the fight to the enemy, even rashly; but
foolhardy he was not. He had foreseen that at the crucial moment he
should stand alone against the field. Nobody believed he could win. The
odds were too great. Therefore he could rely only upon himself.

One by one, by twos and threes, then by groups, his supporters fell
away. Those who had submitted to his rule from fear were the first to
go over to the other side, surreptitiously at first, lest they should
have guessed wrong, then openly as they saw how the fight seemed to be
going against him. Several bankers publicly renounced their relations
with him. Others whose allegiance was for profit only, whose gains were
wet with the sweat of their pride, forsook him as fast as they were
convinced that his career as a money maker was at an end. Potter was
one of these, and the last to go. He did it handsomely according to his
way. One day he came in.

“Galt,” he said, “I know you are in a hell of a fix and I have done not
one damn thing to help. I’m not that kind of person. I hate to quit a
man in trouble. So I’ve come to tell you why. There are two reasons.
One reason is I’ve got so much of this Great Midwestern stuff that it’s
all I can do to take care of myself. I didn’t get out in time, and now
I can’t get out at all.... The other reason is ... well, I’ll say it
... why not?... You have trampled on my pride until I have no liking
for you left. You’re the most hateful man I ever did business with.
That’s why.”

The impulse to come and have it out in this manner was big-man-like,
I thought, even though the root was self-justification. No one else
had done so much. All the others had gone slinking away. If Galt had
responded differently a real friendship might have blazed there, for
instinctively they liked and admired each other. Their antagonism was
not essential. And, besides, the real reason, as we afterward knew, was
the one he gave first. Potter, with all his wealth, was himself in a
tight place. Bullguard was pressing the oil crowd, too.

“That’s understood,” said Galt, in his worst manner. “I didn’t buy your
pride. I only rented it. Now you’ve got it back, look it over, see how
much it’s damaged, and send me a bill.”

Potter went out roaring oaths.

A change was taking place in Galt. I saw it in sudden, unexpected
glimpses. The movements of his body were slower. Anger and irritation
no longer found outlet in tantrums, but in sneering, terrible sarcasms,
uttered in a cold voice. He looked without seeing and spoke as from a
great distance, high up. His mind, when he revealed it, was the same
as ever. Nothing had happened to his mind. His soul lived in torment.
His greatest sin had been to hold public opinion in contempt. Now it
was paying him back. To have deserved the opprobrium and suspicion
with which he was overwhelmed would perhaps have killed him then; but
to suffer disgrace undeservedly was in one way worse. He reacted by
suspecting those who suspected him, and some who didn’t. I believe at
one time he almost suspected Mordecai, whose loyalty never for one
moment wavered.

However, Mordecai knew, as no one else did, that Galt was still in
a very strong position. He had not begun to strike. Thanks to the
intuition which moved him at the onset to convert two thirds of his
fortune into cash he could, when the moment came, strike hard.

Now came the day of days,--the time when Bullguard did his utmost.
Fastenings gave way. Walls rocked. Strong men lost their rational
faculties and retained only the power of primitive vocal utterance.
The sounds that issued from the Stock Exchange were appalling. The ear
would think a demented menagerie was devouring itself. Thousands of
small craft disappeared that day and left no trace.

Great Midwestern, spilling out on the tape in five and ten-thousand
share blocks, fell twenty points in two hours. Galt was in his office
at the ticker. Mordecai was with him, holding his hands reverently
together, gazing at the tape in a state of fascination. On one headlong
impulse Great Midwestern touched one hundred dollars a share,--par! It
had fallen from two-hundred-and-twenty in three months.

“It’s over,” said Galt, turning away. I once saw a great prizefighter,
on giving the knock-out blow at the end of a hard battle, turn his back
with the same gesture and walk to his own corner.

“Vhat iss id you zay?” asked Mordecai, following.

“It’s over,” Galt repeated. “They haven’t got me and they can’t go any
further without breaking themselves. Get your house on the wire. That’s
the direct telephone ... that one. I want to give an order.”

Mordecai picked up the telephone and asked for one of his partners, who
instantly responded.

“Vhat iss ze order?” asked Mordecai, holding the telephone and looking
at Galt.

“Buy all the Great Midwestern there is for sale up to
one-hundred-and-f-i-f-t-y!” said Galt.

Mordecai transmitted this extraordinary order, put the telephone down
softly, and lisped, “My Gott!”

Just then the door burst open. Thirty or forty reporters had been
waiting in the outer office all day. Their excitement at last broke
bounds; they simply came in. The Evening Post man was at their head.

“Mr. Galt,” he shouted, “you have got to make some kind of statement.
Public opinion demands it.”

I expected Galt to explode with rage.

“Postey,” he said, “I don’t know a damn thing about public opinion.
That’s your trade. Tell me something about it.”

“It wants to know what all this means,” said Postey.

“Well, tell it this for me,” said Galt. “Tell it just as I tell you.
The panic is over.”

“But, Mr.--”

“Now, that’s all,” said Galt. “Ain’t it enough?”

I had been to look at the tape.

“Great Midwestern is a hundred and thirty,” I announced at large.

The reporters stared at me wide-eyed.

Postey ran to look for himself, bumping Mordecai aside.

“That’s right,” he said, making swiftly for the door. The others
followed him in a trampling rush.

The sensation now to be accounted for was not the weakness but the
sudden recovery of Great Midwestern and Galt’s statement explained it.
So they were anxious to spread their news.

It was true. Galt had timed his stroke unerringly.

Everyone was amazed to see how little Great Midwestern stock was
actually for sale when a buying hand appeared. That was because so
much of the selling had been fictitious. The stock closed that day at
one-hundred-and-fifty and never while Galt lived was it so low again.
The feet of many winds ran rapidly apart and the storm collapsed.


vi

That evening, for the first time in many weeks, Galt had dinner with
the family.

We do not see each other change and grow old as a continuous process.
It is imperceptible that way. But as one looks at a tree that has been
in one’s eye all the time and says with surprise, “Why, the leaves have
turned!” so suddenly we look at a person we have seen every day and
say, “How he has changed!” some association of place or act causing a
vivid recollection to arise in contrast.

We had all seen Galt coming and going. I had been with him constantly.
Yet now as he sat there at table we remembered him only as he was the
last time before this at dinner, making a scene because there was never
anything he liked to eat and the cook put cheese in the potatoes.
The difference was distressing. He was old and world-weary. He ate
sparingly, complained of nothing and was so absent that when anyone
spoke to him he started and must have the words repeated.

Natalie alone succeeded in drawing his interest. She had spent the
day at Moonstool. This name had been provisionally bestowed upon
the country place, because it happened to be the local name of the
mountain, and then became permanent in default of agreement on any
other.

Work there had been progressing rapidly. The house itself was finished;
the principal apartments were ready to be occupied. The surroundings
of course were in confusion. Steam drills were going all the time.
Roadways were blasting through solid rock. The landscape was in turmoil.

“But you could live there now,” said Natalie, “if you didn’t mind the
noise,” closing a long recital, to which Galt had listened thoughtfully.

“We might have the wedding there,” he said.

His suggestion produced a ghastly silence. Mrs. Galt tried to turn it
away. Galt was alert.

“What have I stepped on now?” he wanted to know. “Suffering Moses! It
ain’t safe for me to walk around in my own house. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” said Natalie.

“Yes, there is. What is it?”

When he couldn’t be put off any longer Vera said, quietly: “My
engagement to Lord Porteous is broken.”

“Why?” asked Galt, astonished. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“No matter why,” said Vera. “Let’s not talk about it.”

He looked into their faces severally. His expression was utterly
wretched and they avoided it. He guessed the reason why,--made it
perhaps even worse than it was.

In his own household he was on the defensive. There was always that
inaudible accusation he could never get hold of. In the old days it
was that he stretched them on the rack of insecurity and was not like
other men. Then it was the way he had made them rich. Now it was that
dreadful sense of insecurity again. They did not know whether they
were rich or poor. They thought he was heading for a last spectacular
smash-up. And suppose he had told them there was happily no danger
of that. Their thoughts would accuse him still. Why couldn’t they be
rich as other people were, decently, quietly and in good taste? The
Valentines were rich and no obloquy pursued them. Their privacy was not
besieged by newspaper reporters. The finger of scorn never pointed at
them.

Vera’s broken engagement was a harrowing symbol. Galt was extremely
miserable. One could imagine what he was thinking. The Galt fortune
was saved. The Galt power had survived. But the Galt name was a sound
of reproach. The public opinion that had so devastated his spirit did
not leave his family unwhipped. These women had suffered for being his.
Though they might not believe the things that were said of him, still
they could not help feeling ashamed of the wealth he had brought them.
They were defenseless. He was clothed with a sense of justification
that he could not impart. They were naked to the scourge.

His day of victory ended in gloom and dumb wretchedness.




CHAPTER XV

THE HEIGHTS


i

Then with one swift intention the sun broke through,--and there were
the heights!... directly in front of him. The rest of the way was
enchanted. All its difficulties were illusions. They vanished as he
approached.

His Wall Street enemies were scattered in the night. It was as he had
said. They had been unable to destroy him and they did not dare carry
the fight any further for fear of involving themselves in ruin. His
amazing counter stroke, delivered at the very moment when their utmost
effort had failed, threw them into a panic. It took the stock market
out of their hands and turned it squarely against them. The conspiracy
was not abandoned. It collapsed. After that it was every man for
himself, with the fear of Galt in his heart.

The penitential procession started early the next day. Those who
had deserted him returned with gestures of humility, begging to be
chastised and forgiven. The vanquished sat patiently in his outer
office, bearing tokens of amity and proposals of alliance. For he was
Galt, the one, unique and indestructible.

He treated the spectacle as it deserved, cynically, with a saving salt
of humor.

“They make their beds fast,” he said.

Among the first to come was one of Bullguard’s partners,--a
peasant-minded, ingratiating person whose use to Bullguard was his
ability to face the devil smirk for smirk. His errand was to say that
Bullguard & Co. would entertain any reasonable offer for the purchase
of their minority interest in Orient & Pacific shares, and if they
could be of service to Mr. Galt at any time, why, etc., he had only to
oblige them by letting them know how. Galt was cool as to the services,
etc., but he made an offer for the minority Orient & Pacific shares
which was accepted a few hours later. That was Bullguard’s way of
declaring war at an end. It was the grand salute.

Horace Potter was the only man who never came back. He could not sneak
back and there was no other way. They had mortally wounded each other’s
pride.


ii

Meanwhile Congress, like the old woman of the story book, heavy-footed,
slow to be amazed, always late but never _never_, heard of Galt, became
much alarmed and solemnly resolved to investigate him. He was summoned
to appear before a Committee of the House with all his papers and
books. The Committee felt incompetent to conduct the examination.
Finance is a language politicians must not know. It is not the language
of the people. So it engaged counsel,--a notorious lawyer named Samuel
Goldfuss.

He was a man who knew all the dim and secret pathways of the law, and
charged Wall Street clients enormous fees for leading them past the
spirit to the letter. He charged them more when he caught them alone
in the dark, or lost in the hands of a bungling guide, for then he
could threaten to expose them to the light if they declined to accept
his saving services at his own price. Having got very rich by this
profession he put his money beyond reach of the predacious and became
public spirited, or pretended to have done so, and proceeded to sell
out Satan to the righteous. It became his avocation to plead the cause
of people against mammon, and where or whensoever a malefactor of great
wealth was haled to court or brought to appear before a committee of
Congress, Goldfuss thrust himself in to act as prosecuting attorney,
with or without fees; and his name was dread to any such, for he
knew their devious ways and all the wickedness that had ever been
practiced in or about the Stock Exchange. His motives were never quite
understood. Some said he attended to Satan’s business still, never
sold him out completely, but put the hounds on the wrong scent by some
subtle turn at the end. Others said his motive was to terrorize the
great malefactors so that when they were in trouble he could extort big
fees simply for undertaking not to appear on the people’s side.

And this sinister embodiment of public opinion was the man whom Galt
was to face, who had never before faced public opinion in any manner at
all. It was likely to be a stiff ordeal. Counsel warned him accordingly.

“I’ve got a straight story to tell,” he said. “I don’t need any help.”

However, they insisted on standing by. We arrived in Washington one hot
August morning, left all our eminent counsel in their favorite hotel,
and went empty handed to the Capitol, where neither of us had been
before. We wandered about for half an hour, trying to find the place
where the Committee sat. It was a special Committee with no room of its
own. We were directed at last to the Rivers and Harbors Committee room.
It was full of smoke, electric fans and men in attitudes of waiting.
Six, looking very significant, sat around a long table covered with
green cloth. Others to the number of thirty or forty sat on chairs
against the walls. At a smaller table were the reporters with reams of
paper in front of them.

“Is this the Committee that wants to see Henry M. Galt?” he asked,
standing on the threshold.

“It is,” said the man at the head of the table. He was the chairman.
He sat with one leg over the arm of his chair, his back to the door,
and did not turn or so much as move a hair. He spoke in that loud,
disembodied voice which makes the people’s business seem so impressive
to the multitude and glared at us through the back of his head.

“I am that person,” said Galt.

“You have delayed us a quarter of an hour,” said the chairman, still
with his back to us.

“You were hard to find,” said Galt, very simply, looking about for a
place to sit. A chair was placed for him at the opposite end of the
table. There was no place for me, so I stood a little aside. Goldfuss,
whom I had never seen and had not yet identified, sat beside the
chairman. They had their heads together, whispering. The chairman spoke.

“The question is raised as to whether witness may be permitted to
appear with counsel. It is decided in the negative. Counsel will be
excused.”

Silence. Nothing happened.

“Counsel will be excused,” said the chairman again.

Still nothing happened.

“If you are talking at me,” said Galt, “I have no counsel. I didn’t
bring any,--that is, I left them at the hotel.”

“Who is the gentleman with you?” the chairman asked.

“Oh,” said Galt, looking at me. “That’s all right. He’s my secretary.
He doesn’t know any more law than I do.”

There was a formal pause. The official stenographer leaned toward Galt,
speaking quietly, and took his name, age, address and occupation. The
chairman said, “Proceed.”

Goldfuss poised himself for theatrical effect. He was a small,
body-conscious man with a coarse, loose skin, very close shaven,
powdered, sagging at the jowls; a tiny wire mustache, unblinking blue
eyes close together and a voice like the sound of a file in the teeth
of a rusty saw.

“So this is the great Galt,” he said, sardonically, slowly bobbing his
head.

“And you,” said Galt, “are the Samuel Goldfuss who once tried to
blackmail me for a million dollars.”

Oh, famous beginning! The crowd was tense with delight.

Goldfuss, looking aggrieved and disgusted, turned to the chairman,
saying: “Will the Committee admonish the witness?”

The chairman took his leg down, carefully relighted a people’s cigar,
and said: “Strike that off the record.... I will inform the witness
that this is a Committee of Congress, with power to punish contumacious
and disrespectful conduct.... The witness is warned to answer questions
without any irrelevant remarks of his own.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Galt. “What was the question?”

The official stenographer read from his notes,--“So this is the great
Galt.”

“That ain’t a question,” said Galt.

The round was his. The audience tittered. The chairman put his leg back
and glared wearily into space.

“I withdraw it,” said Goldfuss. “Start the record new from here.... Mr.
Galt, you were directed to produce before this Committee all your books
and papers. Have you brought them?”

“No.”

“No? Why not, please?”

“They would fill this whole room,” said Galt.

Mr. Goldfuss started again.

“Your occupation, Mr. Galt,--you said it was what?”

“Farmer,” said Galt.

“Yes? What do you farm?”

“The country,” said Galt.

“Do you consider that a nice expression?”

“Nicest I know, depending on how you take it,” said Galt.

“Well, now tell this Committee, please, how you farm the country, using
your own expression.”

“I fertilize it,” said Galt. “I sow and reap, improve the soil and keep
adding new machinery and buildings.”

“What do you fertilize it with, Mr. Galt?”

“Money.”

“What do you sow, Mr. Galt?”

“More money.”

“And what do you reap?”

“Profit.”

“A great deal of that?”

“Plenty,” said Galt.

“And what do you do with the profit, Mr. Galt?”

“Sow it again.”

“A lovely parable, Mr. Galt. Is it not true, however, that you are also
a speculator?”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Galt.

“To put it plainly, is it not true that you are a gambler?”

“That’s part of my trade,” said Galt. “Every farmer is a gambler. He
gambles in weather, worms, bugs, acts of Congress and the price of his
produce.”

“You gamble in securities, Mr. Galt?”

“Yes.”

“In the securities of the railroad properties you control?”

“Heavily,” said Galt.

“If, for example, you are going to increase the dividend on Great
Midwestern stock you first go into the market and buy it for a
rise,--buy it before either the public or the other stockholders know
that you are going to increase the dividend?”

“That’s the case,” said Galt.

“As a matter of fact, you did some time ago increase the dividend on
Great Midwestern from four to eight per cent., and the stock had a big
rise for that reason. Tell this Committee, please, when and how and at
what prices you bought the stock in anticipation of that event?”

“In anticipation of that eight per cent. dividend,” said Galt
reminiscently, “I began to buy Great Midwestern stock ... let me see
... nine years ago at ten dollars a share. It went down, and I bought
it at five dollars a share, at two dollars, at a dollar-and-a-half. The
road went into the hands of a receiver, and I stuck to it. I bought it
all the way up again, at fifteen dollars a share, at fifty dollars, at
a hundred-and-fifty, and I’m buying still.”

Goldfuss was bored. He seemed to be saying to the audience: “Well,
so much for fun. Now we get down to the hard stuff.” He took time to
think, stirred about in his papers and produced a certain document.

“Mr. Galt, I show you a certified list of the investments of
the Security Life Insurance Company. You are a director of that
institution, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“You used some of your farming profits to buy a large interest in the
Security Life Insurance Company?”

“Yes.”

“You are chairman of its finance committee?”

“Yes.”

“In fact, Mr. Galt, you control the investments of the Security Life.
You recommend what securities the policy holders’ money shall be
invested in and your suggestions are acted upon. Is that true?”

“Something like that,” said Galt.

“Now, Mr. Galt, look at this certified statement, please. The
investments amount to more than four hundred millions. I call your
attention to the fact that nearly one quarter of that enormous total
consists of what are known as Galt securities, that is, the stocks
and bonds of railroad companies controlled by Henry M. Galt. Is that
correct?”

“Substantially,” said Galt.

“Did you, as chairman of the finance committee of the Security Life,
recommend the purchase of those securities?”

“Yes.”

“And at the same time, as head of the Great Midwestern railway system,
you were interested in selling those securities, were you not?”

“We need a great deal of capital,” said Galt. “We are selling new
securities all the time. We sell all we can and wish we could sell
more. There is always more work to do than we can find the money for.”

“So, Mr. Galt, it comes to this: As head of a great railroad system you
create securities which you are anxious to sell. In that rôle you are a
seller. Then as chairman of the finance committee of the Security Life
Insurance Company, acting as trustee for the policy holders, you are a
buyer of securities. In that position of trust, with power to say how
the policy holders’ money shall be invested, you recommend the purchase
of securities in which you are interested as a seller. Is that true?”

“I don’t like the way you put it, but let it stand,” said Galt.

“How can you justify that, Mr. Galt? Is it right, do you think, that a
trustee should buy with one hand what he sells with the other?”

Galt leaned over, beating the table slowly with his fist.

“I justify it this way,” he said. “I know all about the securities of
the Great Midwestern. I don’t know of anything better for the Security
Life to put its money into. If you can tell me of anything better I
will advise the finance committee at its next meeting to sell all of
its Great Midwestern stuff and buy that, whatever it is. I’ll do more.
If you can tell me of anything better I will sell all of my own Great
Midwestern stocks and bonds and buy that instead. I have my own money
in Great Midwestern. There’s another Galt you left out. As head of
a great railway system I am a seller of securities to investors all
over the world. That is how we find the capital to build our things.
But as an individual I am a buyer of those same securities. I sell to
everybody with one hand and buy for myself all that I can with the
other hand. Do you see the point? I buy them because I know what they
are worth. I recommend them to the Security Life because I know what
they are worth. That is how I justify it, sir.”

Enough of that. Goldfuss had meant to go from the Security Life to each
of the other financial institutions controlled by Galt, meaning to show
how he had been unloading Galt securities upon them. But what was the
use? What could he do with an answer like that? He passed instead to
the Orient & Pacific matter. Galt admitted that he had used the power
of majority stockholder to make the property subservient to the Great
Midwestern because that was the efficient thing to do.

“And that, you think, is a fair way to treat minority stockholders?”
Goldfuss asked.

“We were willing at any time to buy them out at the market price,” said
Galt. “However, that’s now an academic matter. The Great Midwestern has
acquired all that minority interest in Orient & Pacific.”

This was news. There was a stir at the reporters’ table. Several rose
and went out to telegraph Galt’s statement to Wall Street, where nobody
yet knew how Bullguard & Co. had made peace with him.

So they went from one thing to another. They came to that notorious
land transaction on account of which he had been sued.

“We needed that land for an important piece of railroad development,”
said Galt. “Some land traders got wind of our plans, formed a
syndicate, bought up all the ground around, and then tried to make
us buy it through the nose. We simply sat tight until they went
broke. Then we took it off their hands. There was more than the Great
Midwestern needed because they were hogs. The Great Midwestern took
what it wanted and I took the rest. The directors knew all about it.”

“And it was very profitable to you personally, this outcome?”

“Incidentally it was,” said Galt. “Somebody would get it. It fell into
my hands. What would you have done?”

“Strike that off the record,--‘What would you have done?’” said
Goldfuss. “Counsel is not being examined.”

After lunch he took a new line.

“Mr. Galt,” he asked, “what are you worth?”

“I don’t know,” said Galt.

“You don’t know how rich you are?”

“No.”

Goldfuss lay back in his chair with an exaggerated air of astonishment.

“But you will admit you are very rich?” he said, having recovered
slowly.

“Yes,” said Galt. “I suppose I am.”

“Well, as briefly as possible, will you tell this Committee how you
made it?”

“Now you’ve asked me something,” said Galt, leaning forward again.
“I’ll tell you. I made it buying things nobody else wanted. I bought
Great Midwestern when it was bankrupt and people thought no railroad
was worth its weight as junk. When I took charge of the property I
bought equipment when it was cheap because nobody else wanted it and
the equipment makers were hungry, and rails and ties and materials
and labor to improve the road with, until everybody thought I was
crazy. When the business came we had a railroad to handle it. I’ve
done that same thing with every property I have taken up. No railroad
I’ve ever touched has depreciated in value. I’m doing it still. You
may know there has been an upset in Wall Street recently, a panic in
fact. Everybody is uneasy and business is worried because a financial
disturbance has always been followed by commercial depression. There
are signs of that already. But we’ll stop it. In the next twelve
months the Great Midwestern properties will spend five hundred million
dollars for double tracking, grade reductions, new equipment and larger
terminals.”

This was news. Again there was a stir at the reporters’ table as
several rose to go out and flash Galt’s statement to Wall Street.

“Mr. Galt,” said Goldfuss, “do you realize what it means for one man
to say he will spend five hundred millions in a year? That is half the
national debt.”

“I know exactly what it means,” said Galt. “It means for once a
Wall Street panic won’t be followed by unemployment and industrial
depression. Our orders for materials and labor now going out will
start everything up again at full speed. Others will act on our
example. You’ll see.”

“You will draw upon the financial institutions you control, the
Security Life and others, for a good deal of that money,--the five
hundred millions?”

“You get the idea,” said Galt. “That’s what financial institutions are
for. There’s no better use for their money.”

“You have great power, Mr. Galt.”

“Some,” he said.

“If it goes on increasing at this rate you will soon be the economic
dictator of the country.”

No answer.

“I say you will be the economic dictator of the whole country.”

“I heard you say it,” said Galt. “It ain’t a question.”

“But do you think it desirable that one man should have so much
power,--that one man should run the country?”

“Somebody ought to run it,” said Galt.

“Is it your ambition to run it?”

“It is my idea,” said Galt, “that the financial institutions of the
country,--I mean the insurance companies and the banks,--instead of
lending themselves out of funds in times of high prosperity ought
then to build up great reserves of capital to be loaned out in hard
times. That would keep people from going crazy with prosperity at one
time and committing suicide at another time. But they won’t do it by
themselves. Somebody has to see to it,--somebody who knows not only how
not to spend money when everybody is wild to buy, but how to spend it
courageously when there is a surplus of things that nobody else wants.
Every financial institution that I have anything to do with will be
governed by that idea, and the Great Midwestern properties, while I
run them, will decrease their capital expenditures as prices rise and
increase them as prices fall. When we show them the whole trick and how
it pays everybody will do it. We won’t have any more depressions and
Coxey’s armies. We won’t have any more unemployment. In a country like
this unemployment is economic lunacy.”

The hearing continued for three days. The newspapers printed almost
nothing else on their first three pages. Galt’s testimony produced
everywhere a monumental effect. Public opinion went over by a
somersault.

He denied nothing. He admitted everything. He was invincible because he
believed in himself.

“Mr. Galt,” said Goldfuss, rising, “that will be all. You are the most
remarkable witness I have ever examined.”

They shook hands all around.


iii

As we were going down the Capitol steps Galt stumbled and clutched
my arm. The sustaining excitement was at an end and the reaction was
sudden. Solicitude made him peevish. He insisted irritably, and we
went on walking, though it was above his strength. When we were half
way back to the hotel, a mile yet to go, he stopped and said: “You’re
right, Coxey. Ain’t it hot! Let’s call a cab.”

He wouldn’t rest. A strange uneasiness was upon him. We took the next
train for New York.

“I want to go to Moonstool,” he said. The idea seized him after we were
aboard the train.

“Fine. Let’s take a holiday tomorrow and go all over it,” I said.

“Now. I want to go there now,” he said.

“Directly there ... and not go home?”

“That’s home, ain’t it?” he said, becoming irritable. “Let’s go
straight there.”

He had a fixation upon it.

From Baltimore I got off an urgent telegram to Mrs. Galt, telling her
Galt was very tired and insisted on going directly to the country
place. Could she meet us at Newark with a motor car? That would be the
easiest way.

Automobiles were just then coming into general use. Galt with his
ardent interest in all means of mechanical locomotion was enthusiastic
about them. The family had four, besides Natalie’s, which was her own.
She drove it herself.

Mrs. Galt met us at Newark. Galt greeted her with no sign of surprise.
He could not have been expecting her. I had told him nothing about the
arrangements. He slept all the way up from Washington and did not know
where we were when we got off the train. She helped him into the car.
When they were seated he took her hand and went to sleep again.

There was a second motor behind us, with a cook, three servants, some
luggage and provisions. Mrs. Galt was a very efficient woman. She had
thought of everything the situation required.

It was nearly midnight when we arrived at Moonstool and stopped in
front of the iron gates. They were closed and locked. And there was
Natalie who had been sent ahead to announce our coming. She drove
out alone, got lost on the way, and had not yet succeeded in raising
anybody when we came up. The place was dark, except for red lanterns
here and there on piles of construction material. The outside watchmen
were shirking duty, and those inside, if not doing likewise, were
beyond hearing.

Nearby was the railroad station of Galt, a black little pile with not
a light anywhere. It had not yet been opened for use. We could hear
the water spilling over the private Galt dam in the river. There was
enough electricity in the Galt power house to illuminate a town. On the
mountain top, half a mile distant, the Galt castle stood in massive
silhouette against the starry sky. And here was Galt, in the dark, an
unwelcome night-time stranger, forbidden at the gate. He was still
asleep. We were careful not to wake him.

A watchman with a bull’s eye lantern and a billy stick exuded from the
darkness.

“Wha’d’ye want?”

We wanted to go in.

“Y’can’t go in,” he said. “Can’t y’ see it’s private? Nobody lives
there.”

It is very difficult to account for the improbable on the plane of a
night watchman’s intelligence. First he stolidly disbelieved us. Then
he took refuge in limited responsibility.

“M’orders is t’let nobody in,” he said. “D’ye know anybody aroun’ here?”

It seemed quite possible that no human being around here would know
us. By an inspiration Natalie remembered the superintendent of
construction. He lived not far away. She knew where. Once when she was
spending a day on the job he had taken her home with him to lunch. It
was not more than ten minutes’ drive, she said.

It was further than she thought. We were more than three quarters of
an hour returning with the superintendent. It took twenty minutes more
to wake the crew at the power house and get the electricity turned on.
Then we drove slowly up the main concrete road now lighted on each side
by clusters of three ground glass globes in fluted columns fifty feet
apart. Although it was finished the road was still cluttered with heaps
of sand and debris.

Galt all this time was fast asleep, his head resting on Mrs. Galt’s
shoulder. We could scarcely wake him when we tried. He seemed drunk
with weariness. As we helped him out he opened his eyes once and
startled us by saying to the superintendent: “Fire that watchman
... down below,” as if he had been conscious of everything that
happened. His eyes closed again, he tottered, and we caught him. The
superintendent supported him on one side, I on the other, and so he
entered, dragging his feet.

Natalie knew more about the house than anyone else. She led the way to
the apartment that was Galt’s, and then left us to place the servants
and show them their way around. I helped Mrs. Galt undress him and get
him to bed. I was amazed to see how thin and shrunken his body was. He
was inert, like a child asleep. Mrs. Galt, very pale, was strong and
deft.

“We must have a doctor at once,” she said. “I thought of bringing one
and then didn’t because he minds so awfully to have a doctor in.”

Still we were not really alarmed.

The telephone system had been installed. Natalie knew that. She knew
also where the big switchboard was. I telephoned the family physician
to meet us at the Hoboken ferry and then Natalie and I set out to fetch
him, a drive of nearly seventy miles there and back.

“We ought to do it in two hours,” she said, as we coasted freely,--very
freely,--down the lighted cement road and plunged through the gates
into darkness.

“The doctor must be in his right mind when we deliver him.”

I meant it lightly. Her reckless driving was a household topic and she
was incorrigible. But she answered me thoughtfully.

“We’ll make the time going.”

She pulled her gloves tighter, took the time, inspected the
instruments, switched off the dash light, cut out the muffler,
settled herself in the seat and opened the throttle wide. It was a
four-cylinder, high-power engine. The sound we made was that of an
endless rip through a linen sheet. Road side trees turned white, uneasy
faces to our headlights. The highway seemed to lay itself down in front
of us as we needed it; and there was a feeling that it vanished or fell
away into black space behind us. Giddy things such as fences, buildings
and stone walls were tossed right and left in streaming glimpses. Good
motor roads were yet unbuilt. There were short, sharp grades like humps
on the roller coaster at the fair. Taking them at fifty miles an hour,
at night, when you cannot see the top as you start up, nor all the way
down as you begin the plunge, is a wild, liberating sensation. Sense of
level is lost. One’s center of gravity rises and falls momentously, the
heart sloshes around, and you don’t care what happens, not even if you
should run off the world. It doesn’t matter.

Natalie was in a trance-like rapture. She never spoke. Her eyes were
fixed ahead; her body was static. Only her head and arms moved,
sometimes her feet to slip the clutch or apply the brake. All that
pertains to the pattern of consciousness,--seeing, hearing, attention,
will and willing,--were strained outward beyond the windshield, as if
externalized, acting outside of her. What remained on the seat, besides
the thrill at the core of her, was her automatic self controlling this
lunging, roaring mechanism without the slightest effort of thought.
The restrained impulses of her nature apparently found their escape
in this form of excitement. It was one thing she could do better than
anyone else. She did it superbly and adored doing it. I could not help
thinking how Vera would drive, if she drove at all.

There was no traffic at that hour of night until we fell in with the
milk and truck wagons crossing the Hackensack Meadows toward the Hudson
River ferries. Natalie cut in and out of that rumbling procession with
skill and ease. Her calculations were tight and daring, but never
foolhardy.

“Very accomplished driving,” I said, as she pulled up at the ferry with
the engine idling softly.

“Fifty minutes,” she said, a little down, on looking at her watch. “I
thought we should have done it in forty-five. Don’t you love it at
night?”


iv

Dawn was breaking when we returned. It gave us a start of apprehension
to see the lights still burning in Galt’s apartment. We found Mrs. Galt
sitting at the side of his bed. Her face was distorted with horror and
anxiety. Galt lay just as I had seen him last.

“He hasn’t moved,” said Mrs. Galt. “I can’t arouse him. I’m not sure he
is breathing.”

Neither was the doctor. The pulse was imperceptible. A glass held at
his nostrils showed no trace of moisture. All the bodily functions were
in a state of suspense. The only presumption of life lay in the general
arbitrary fact that he was not dead. The doctor had never seen anything
like this before. He was afraid to act without a consultation. Motors
were sent off for four other doctors, two in New Jersey and two in New
York. They would bring nurses with them.

Mrs. Galt could not be moved from the bedside.

Natalie telephoned Vera to come. I telephoned Mordecai. Then we walked
up and down the eastern terrace and watched the sun come up. She
stopped and leaned over the parapet, looking down. Her eyes were dry;
her body shook with convulsive movements. My heart went forth. I put my
arm around her. She stood up, gazed at me with a stricken expression,
then dropped her head on my shoulder and wept, whispering, “Coxey,
Coxey, oh, what shall we do?... what shall we do?”

Gangs of workmen were appearing below. The day of labor was about to
begin. I left her to get the superintendent on the telephone and tell
him to suspend work.


v

The consultation began at nine o’clock. Mordecai arrived while it was
taking place. Somehow on the way he had picked up Vera. They came
together. We waited in the library room of Galt’s apartment. At the end
of an hour the five doctors came to us, looking very grave. The Galts’
family doctor announced the consensus. It was a stroke, with some
very unusual aspects. Life persisted; the thread of it was extremely
fine, almost invisible. It might snap at any moment, and they wouldn’t
know it until some time afterward. Thin as it was, however, it might
pull him back. There was a bare possibility that he would recover
consciousness. Meanwhile there was very little that could be done.

Mordecai rose from his chair with a colossal, awful gesture. His eyes
were staring. His face was like a mask. His head turned slowly right
and left through half a circle with a weird, mechanical movement, as a
thing turning on a pivot in a fixed plane.

“Zey haf kilt him!” he whispered. “All ov you I gall upon to vitness,
zey haf kilt him. Zey could nod ruin him. Zat zey tried to do. But ...
zey haf kilt him!... Ve are vonce more in ze dark ages.”

The physicians were astonished and ill at ease. They did not know what
he was talking about. They did not know who he was. I was the only one
who could know what he meant and for a minute I was bewildered. Then
it broke upon me.

The combat reconstructed itself in my mind. I recalled those days of
strain and anguish when all the forces of Wall Street were acting to
destroy him and he fought alone. He withstood them. In the might of
his own strength, in that moment which it had been torture almost
unendurable to bide the coming of, he smote his enemies “with the fist
of wickedness” and scattered them away. Yes, all that. He had won the
fight. Yet there he lay. His death would leave them in possession of
the field, with a victory unawares. They meant only to break his power,
to unloose his hands, to overthrow him as an upstart dynast. But the
blood weapon which we think is put away, which they never meant and
would not have dared to use,--it had done its work in spite of them.
They could not break him. They had only killed him.

That was what Mordecai meant.


vi

Well, we had to wait. Life must wait upon death because it can. There
was much to think about. Mordecai spent two hours with me making
precise arrangements against any contingency. It was very important
that Wall Street should know nothing about Galt’s condition. The news
might cause a panic. I was to call him up at regular intervals by a
direct telephone wire on which no one could listen in. If any rumor
got out it should be met with blank silence.

“Zey vill vind id zoon oud no matter,” he said.

What he needed was a little time to prepare the financial structure
for the imminent shock. He would inform his associates and such others
as were entitled to know and together they would agree upon protective
measures. Galt’s death was bound to produce a terrific convulsion.
There is no line of succession in Wall Street, no hereditary prince to
receive the crown. When the monarch falls the wail is, “The king is
dead! There is no king!”

About 10 o’clock in the morning of the second day Galt opened his eyes.
He could neither move nor speak, but he was vividly conscious. Mrs.
Galt came to the room where I had established a work station to tell me
this.

“He wants something,” she said. “He says so with his eyes. I think it
is you he wants.”

His eyes expressed pleasure at seeing me. Not a muscle moved. He could
see and hear and think, and that was all. He did want something. I
guessed a number of things and he looked them all away. It wasn’t
Mordecai. It wasn’t anything in relation to business. In this dilemma I
remembered a game we played in childhood. It was for one of the players
to hold in his mind any object on earth and for the other to identify
it by asking questions up to twenty that had to be answered yes or no.
Galt’s eyes could say yes and no and he could hear. Therefore anything
he was thinking of could be found out. I explained the game to him, he
instantly understood, and we began. Was the thing a mineral substance?
He did not answer. Was it vegetable? He did not answer. Was it animal
then? Still no answer, but a bothered look in his eyes. I stopped to
wonder why he hadn’t answered yes or no to one of the three. Was it
perhaps something mineral, vegetable and animal combined? His eyes
lighted, saying yes. Was it in this room? No. Was it far away? No. Was
it just outside? Yes.

I went to the window and looked out. In every direction below the level
of the finished terrace was the sight of construction work in a state
of suspense, heaps of materials, tools where they had fallen, power
machinery idle. A thought occurred to me. I went back and looked in his
eyes.

“We’ve had all the work stopped because of the noise. Do you wish it to
go on? Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” he answered, with a flash of his eyes.

Two hours later the air was vibrant with the clank-clank of many steam
drills, the screech of taut hoisting cables, the throb of donkey
engines, the roar of rock blasting, and he was happy.

Incidentally the resumption of work served Mordecai’s purpose in an
unexpected way. Rumor of Galt’s illness did get out. The newspapers
began to telephone. Unable to get information in that way they thought
it must be serious and sent reporters out in haste. They returned
to their offices saying they couldn’t get a word out of us, but Galt
couldn’t be very ill so long as all that uproar was permitted to go on.

A week passed in this way. One evening on my return from an urgent trip
to New York Natalie came racing down the great hall to meet me, with a
flying slide at the end, as in the old days she was wont to meet Galt,
and whether she meant it quite, or miscalculated the distance, I do not
know; but anyhow I had either to let her go by off her balance or catch
her, and she landed in my arms.

“Oh, Coxey, he’s asking for you,” she said, getting her feet and
dragging me along at a run. “He’s better all at once. He can talk.”

The faculty of speech was gradually restored. When he could talk freely
he told us that he had been conscious all the while, day and night. He
heard every word that was spoken at the consultation. Therefore he had
more expert opinion on his condition than we had. He had kept count of
time. He knew what day it was when he first opened his eyes, and since
then in his sleep he had been continuously conscious. He felt no pain.




CHAPTER XVI

GATE OF ENIGMA


i

And now began the last phase of his career. Lying there in that state,
unable so much as to raise his hand, with a mind all but disembodied,
he intended his thoughts to the passion that ruled him still. The
doctors warned him that it would be extremely dangerous to exercise
his mind. It would cause the thread of life to part. That made no
difference. What was the thread of life for?

Three times a week Mordecai came to talk with him. These visits,
beginning naturally as between friends, soon became conferences
of a consequential character between principal and banker. They
examined problems, discussed measures, evolved policies, and spent
hours, sometimes whole days, together. Mordecai became Galt’s self
objectified. He executed his will, promulgated his ideas, represented
him in all situations. He sat for him at board meetings and in general
Wall Street councils. This became soon an institutional fact. No
business of a high nature proceeded far in Wall Street until Mordecai
was asked, “What does Mr. Galt say?” or “What would Mr. Galt think?”

A paralyzed hand ruled the world of finance.

Galt’s mind was clear and insatiable. It comprehended both details and
principles. He directed minutely the expenditure of that five hundred
millions and verified his own prophecy. The outlay of this vast sum
upon railroad works averted a period of industrial depression.

I remained permanently at Moonstool. The room in which at first I had
established merely a point of contact with the outside world to meet
such emergencies as might arise became a regular office. We installed
news printing machines and direct telephones. Stock Exchange quotations
were received by a private telegraph wire. We had presently a staff of
clerks, typists and statisticians, all living in the house and keeping
hours. The personnel of this singular organization included one fresco
painter.

More than anything else Galt missed his maps and charts. A map of any
portion of the earth’s surface enthralled him. The act of gazing at it
stimulated his thoughts. And statistical charts,--those diagrams in
which quantities, ratios and velocities are symbolized by lines that
rise and fall in curves,--these were to him what mathematical symbols
are to an astronomer. He could not think easily without them. We had
tried various devices for getting maps and charts before him, and they
were all unsatisfactory. One day he said: “I can look at the ceiling
and walls without effort. Why not put them there?”

But we could not get maps large enough to show from the ceiling and
there was a similar difficulty about charts, even though we drew them
ourselves. Then we thought of painting them. We found a fresco painter
possessing the rudiments of the peculiar kind of intelligence required
for such work and then trained him to it.

We painted a map of the world in two hemispheres on the ceiling. The
United States had to be carefully put in, with the Great Midwestern
system showing in bold red lines. On the walls we painted statistical
charts to the number of eight. Several were permanent, such as the
one showing the combined earnings of the Galt railroad properties and
another the state of general business. They had only to be touched up
from time to time as new statistics came in. Others were ephemeral,
serving to illustrate some problem his mind was working on. They were
frequently painted out and new ones put in their place.

Under these conditions, gazing for hours at the world map, he conceived
a project which was destined to survive him in the form of an idea.
If he had lived it might have been realized. This was a pan-American
railroad,--a vertical system of land transportation articulating the
North and South American continents. It was painted there on the
ceiling. Mordecai saw it and wept.

How easily the mind accommodates itself to any situation! In a short
time all of this seemed quite natural because it was taking place.
Having accepted Galt as a dynast in the flesh, Wall Street now accepted
him as an invisible force pervading all its affairs, as if it might
go on that way forever. Through Mordecai it solicited his advice and
opinion on matters that were not his. Once Mordecai brought him the
problem of a railroad that was in trouble; he bought the railroad to
save it from bankruptcy. People, seeing this, began to think he was
not ill at all, but preferred to work in a mysterious manner. Great
Midwestern stock meanwhile was rising, always rising, and touched at
last the fabulous price of three hundred dollars a share. Faith in it
now was as unreasoning as distrust of it had once been.


ii

Galt entertained no thought of malice toward his old enemies. Proof of
this was dramatic and unexpected. A servant came up one afternoon with
the name of Bullguard. I could hardly believe it. I found him standing
in the middle of the hall, just inside the door, a large, impenetrable
figure, giving one the impression of immovable purpose. I had never
seen him before.

“I wish to see Mr. Galt,” he said, in a voice like a tempered north
wind.

“Nobody sees him, you know.”

“I must see him,” he replied.

“I will ask him. Is it a matter of business?”

“It is very personal,” he said.

The way he said this gave me suddenly a glimpse of his hidden
character. Beneath that terrifying aspect, back of that glowering under
which strong men quailed, lay more shy, human gentleness than would be
easily imagined.

Galt received him. They were alone together for a full hour. What
passed between them will never be known. I waited in the library room,
one removed from Galt’s bedchamber, and saw Bullguard leave. He passed
me unawares, looking straight ahead of him, as one in a hypnotic
trance. Outside he forgot his car and went stalking down the drive in
that same unseeing manner, grasping a great thick walking stick at
the middle and waving it slowly before his face. His car followed and
picked him up somewhere out of sight.


iii

One of the minor triumphs of this time was the collapse of the social
feud. Mrs. Valentine’s subjects began to revolt. Society made definite
overtures to the Galt women. But nobody now cared. Mrs. Galt and
Natalie lived only for Galt, and they were the two who would in any
case be interested. Mrs. Galt was his silent companion. Natalie was his
mercury, going errands swiftly between his bedchamber and the office.
She was absorbed in what went on and a good deal of it she understood
in an imaginative manner. Coming with a message from Galt, perhaps a
request for information or data, she would often sit at my desk to
hear or see the results, saying, “I feel so stupid when I don’t know
what it means.” In the evening, as we might be walking or driving
together, she would review the transactions of the day and get them all
explained.

Vera lived in New York at her studio, but came often to Moonstool. Her
engagement to Lord Porteous was renewed. She spoke to me about it one
evening on the west terrace, after sunset.

“You were right about Lord Porteous,” she said. “He refused from the
beginning to consider our engagement broken.”

“Of course,” I said.

That was evidently not what she expected me to say. She gave me a slow,
sidewise look.

“I’m very glad,” I added, making it worse.

We took several turns in silence.

“Why are you glad?” she asked, in a tone she seldom used.

“Isn’t that what I should say?... I was thinking ... I don’t know what
I was thinking ... nor why I am glad.”

We stood for a long time, a little apart, watching the afterglow. She
shivered.

“I am cold,” she said. “Let’s go in, please.”


iv

The next day in the midst of a conference with Mordecai Galt’s eyes
closed. The doctor was in the house. He shook his head knowingly.

There followed a fortnight of horrible suspense. Most of the time we
did not know at a given moment whether he was alive or dead. Once for
three days he did not open his eyes and we thought it was over. Then
he looked at us again and we knew he had been conscious all the time.
The faculty of speech never returned. There would be a rumor that he
was dead and prices would fall on the Stock Exchange; then a rumor that
he wasn’t, and prices would rise again. The newspapers established a
death watch in the private Galt station and kept reporters there day
and night to flash the news away. To keep them from the house I had
to promise them solemnly that I would send word down promptly if the
fatality happened.

Mrs. Galt and Natalie watched alternately. One or the other sat at
his bedside all the time. One evening about 8 o’clock I was sharing
the vigil with Natalie when Galt opened his eyes. We were sitting
on opposite sides of his bed. He looked from one of us to the other
slowly, several times, and then fixed a wanting expression on me.

I knew what he wanted without asking. Natalie knew also. It concerned
us deeply, uniting our lives, yet at that moment we were hardly
conscious of ourselves. What thrilled us was the thought of something
we should do for him, because he wanted it.

I put out my hand to her across the bed. She clasped it firmly.

“That is what you mean,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered.

A flood of recollection swept through me. I saw Natalie all the way
back to girlhood, to that night of our first meeting in her father’s
house. I could not remember when I had not loved her. I saw everything
that had happened between us, saw it in sunlight, and wondered how
I could have been so unaware. Trifling incidents, almost forgotten,
became suddenly luminous, precious and significant. And this instant
had been from the beginning appointed!

Natalie, still clasping my hand, leaned far over and gazed intently
into his eyes.

“You want me to marry Coxey?” she asked, in a tone of caressing
anxiety, which seemed wholly unconscious of me, almost excluding.

“Yes,” he answered, repeating it several times, if that may be
understood. The answer lingered in his eyes. Then they closed, slowly,
as ponderous gates swing to, against his utmost will, and they never
opened again.

He was buried in the side of Moonstool. All of his great enemies came
to assist at the obsequies. Bullguard was one of the pallbearers.




CHAPTER XVII

NATALIE


After the funeral the family returned to the Fifth Avenue house. Though
I took up a permanent abode elsewhere, my apartment was still there,
and I came and went almost as one of the household.

The more I saw of Natalie the stranger and more distant she was. Her
behavior was incomprehensible. She was friendly, often tender, always
solicitous, but kept a wall of constraint between us. She positively
refused to talk of our engagement, and came to the point where
she denied there was any such thing. When I proposed to cure that
difficulty in a very obvious way she took refuge in fits of perverse
and wilful unreasonableness. She would spend a whole evening in some
inaccessible mood and become herself only for an instant at the last.
Suddenly they resolved to travel. She persuaded her mother to it.

“Then we won’t see Coxey for a long, long time,” she said, one evening
at dinner; “and maybe he will miss us.”

They went around the world. Her letters were friendly, sprightly,
teasing, and very unsatisfactory. She would not be serious.

At last Galt’s posthumous affairs began to settle, so that I could
leave them, and I immediately set out in a westerly direction,
intending to meet Mrs. Galt and Natalie in the Orient on surprise.
I missed them in China, because they had revised their schedule and
gone to Japan. In Japan I missed them again because they were suddenly
homesick and cut their sojourn short. We crossed the Pacific a week
apart. They stopped only four days in San Francisco, so I missed them
there. Then I telegraphed Natalie what I had been doing. Four months
had passed without a word of news between us.

On arriving in New York I went directly to the Fifth Avenue house. As I
rang the bell a feeling of desolation assailed me. The absurd thought
rose that she somehow knew of my pursuit and had purposely defeated it.

She was downstairs, sitting alone before the fireplace in the reception
hall, reading. She dropped her book and ran toward me, rather at me,
slid the last ten feet of it with her head down, her arms flung wide,
and welcomed me with a hearty hug.

“Are we?” I asked, holding her.

“Coxey, silly dear! All this time we have been.”




+-------------------------------------------------+
|Transcriber’s note:                              |
|                                                 |
|Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.  |
|                                                 |
+-------------------------------------------------+





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