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 dangerousman. 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 toa 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.”
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 itsclass 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 gotthat 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 helda 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.
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 ofthe 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 theGreat 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.
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 forthe 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 QuinnWho got’ em out?Big John Stout.
Who got ’em in?Little Johnnie QuinnWho got’ em out?Big John Stout.
Who got ’em in?Little Johnnie QuinnWho got’ em out?Big John Stout.
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.
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 insidearguing 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 ofthe 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. Thiswas 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.”
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 teaswere 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 themiddle 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 receivedby 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.
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 onceexquisite 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 himagain 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; ifnot, 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.
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 sightas 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 theceremony 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 wereoh’sandah’sand 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 fromthe 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.
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, herhead 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 begood. 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 outsideof 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.Iwas 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.
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 aterror 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 powerfulsupporters 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 morewith 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.
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 thatthey 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 figuresweretrue.
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 dividendit 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’tknow, 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 forhelp, 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.
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 hadhoped 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. Thesocial 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.