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 pettyirritations 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. Thenext 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 toget 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 bigred 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 couldnot 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 thatwhat 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.
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 anxietywent 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. “Butyou 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 thecrowd 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 notbelieve 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.
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, andthat 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 themfall 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 amalevolent 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 laughat 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 authorityhere 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. Askanybody 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.
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 wouldanybody 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,—HarryGalt,” 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 andreturning 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 oneafternoon 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 severalhandsome 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, whosat 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, spoketo 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, tooextraordinary, 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 witha 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 ofRailroad 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 redlines, 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 lineswas 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 withbad 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 morewonderful 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.”
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 notbe 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 yousomething? 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 totake steps. Pooh! What can I do? They pay no more attention to me thanthat! 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.
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 andhuman 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 wasregarded 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.
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 amountof 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 montha 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.