Delusions are states of refuge. The mind, unable to comprehend realities or to deal with them, findsits ease in superstitions, beliefs and modes of irrational procedure. It is easier to believe than to think.
The realities of this period in our economic history, apart from the madness, were extremely bewildering. For five or six years preceding there had been an ecstasy of great profits. The prodigious manner in which wealth multiplied had swindled men’s dreams. No one lay down at night but he was richer than when he got up, nor without the certainty of being richer still on the morrow. The golden age had come to pass. Wishing was having. The government had become so rich from duties collected on imported luxuries that the Treasury surplus became a national problem. It could not be properly spent; therefore it was wasted. And still it grew. This time for sure the tree of Mammon would touch the Heavens and human happiness must endure forever.
Then suddenly it had fallen. Speculation, greed and dishonesty had invisibly devoured its heart. The trunk was hollow. Everything turned hollow. People were astonished, horrified and wild with dismay. They would not blame themselves. They wished to blame each other without quite knowing how. The casual facts were hard to see in right relations. Popular imagination had not been trained to grasp them. The whole world was dealing with new forces, resulting from the application of capital to machine production on a vast scale, and there hadjust appeared for the first time in full magnitude that monstrous contradiction which we name overproduction. This was a world-wide phenomenon, but stranger here than in European countries because this country was newly industrialized on the modern plan and knew not how to manage the conditions it had created; could not understand them in fact.
“Ve are a giant in zwaddling cloths,” exclaimed Mordecai, the Jewish banker, who was one of the directors of the Great Midwestern. He said it solemnly at every directors’ meeting.
Just so. Still, it was incomprehensible to people generally, and as the pain of loss, chagrin and disappointment unbearably increased the conglomerate mind performed the weird self-saving act of going mad. That is to say, people made a superstition of their economic sins and cast the blame for all their ills upon two objects,—gold and silver tokens. Thus what had been an economic crisis only, subject to repair, became a fiasco of intelligence.
The Europeans, all gold people, who had bought enormous quantities of American stocks and bonds, said: “What now! These people are going crazy. They may refuse ever to pay us back in gold.” Whereupon they began hastily to sell American securities.
“After all,” sighed the London Times, “the United States for all its great resources is a poor country.”
In the panic of 1893 confidence was destroyed.People disbelieved in their own things, in themselves, in each other.
Important banking institutions failed for scandalous reasons. Railroads went headlong into bankruptcy, until more than a billion dollars’ worth of bonds were in default, and in many cases the disclosures of inside speculation were most disgraceful.
United States Senators were discovered speculating in the stock of corporations that were interested in tariff legislation, particularly the Sugar Trust.
The name of Wall Street became accursed, not that morality was lower in Wall Street than anywhere else, but because the consequences of its sins were conspicuous.
All industry sickened.
A scourge of unemployment fell upon the land and labor as such, with no theory of its own about money, knowing only what it meant to be out of work, assailed the befuddled intelligence of the country with that embarrassing question: Why were men helplessly idle in this environment of boundless opportunity?
The Coxeyites thought it was for want of money. So many people thought. They proposed that the government should raise money for extensive public works, thereby creating jobs for the workless, but the United States Treasury, which only a short time before contained a surplus so large that Congress had to invent ways of spending it, was now in desperate straits. The government’s income was notsufficient to pay its daily bills. However, neither the curse of unemployment nor the poverty of the United States Treasury was owing to a scarcity of money. The banks were overflowing with money,—idle money, which they were willing to lend at ½ of 1 per cent. just to get it out of their vaults. In one instance a bank offered to lend a large amount of money without interest. But nobody would borrow money. What should they do with it? There was no profit in business.
So there was unemployment of both labor and capital.
At the time of my arrival in Wall Street conditions were already very bad. They grew worse. There was the shocking disclosure after bankruptcy that one of the principal railroads had deliberately falsified its figures over a period of years. European investors were large holders of the shares and bonds of this property, and naturally the incident caused all American securities to be disesteemed abroad. Foreign selling now heavily increased for that reason, and as the foreigners sold their American securities on the New York Stock Exchange they demanded gold.
The United States Treasury had survived two runs upon its gold fund, but its condition was chronically perilous, and began at length to be despaired of. Gold was leaving the country by every steamer.The feud between the gold and silver people grew steadily more insane and preoccupied Congress to such a degree that it neglected to consider ways and means of keeping the government in current funds. Labor, which had been clamorous and denunciatory, now became militant. Reports of troops being used to quell riots of the unemployed were incessant in the daily news. Wheat fell to a very low price and the farmers embraced Populism, a hot-eyed political movement in which every form of radicalism this side of anarchy was represented. Then came the disastrous American Railway Union strike, bringing organized labor into direct conflict with the authority of the Federal Government. The nation was in a fit of jumps. Public opinion was hysterical.
As I understood more and more the bearing of such events I marvelled at Galt’s solitary serenity. He was still buying Great Midwestern stock, as we all knew. Each time another lot of it passed into his name word of it came up surreptitiously from the transfer office. Some of the directors at the same time were selling out. This fact Harbinger confided to me in a burst of gloom; he thought it very ominous, nothing less than an augury of bankruptcy. I felt that Galt ought to know, yet I hesitated a long time about telling him. My decision finally to do so was sentimental. I had by this time conceived a deep liking for him, and the thought that he was putting his money into Great Midwestern stock,—his own, Gram’ma’s and Vera’s,—while thedirectors were getting theirs out bothered me in my sleep. But when I told him he grinned at me.
“I know it, Coxey. They didn’t know enough to sell when the price was high, and they don’t know any better now.”
That was all he said. The ethical aspect of the matter, if there was one, apparently did not interest him.
Now befell a magnificent disaster. One of the furnace doors came unfastened in the Heavens, and a scorching wind, a regular sirocco, began to blow in the Missouri Valley. More than half the rich, wealth-making American corn crop was ruined. This was a body-blow for the Great Midwestern. It meant a slump in traffic which nothing could repair. On the third day the news was complete. We received it in the form of private telegraph reports from the Chicago office. They were on my desk when Galt came in. I called his attention to them, but he looked away, saying:
“The Lord is ferninst us, Coxey. Maybe ... he ... is.”
That night I went home with him to dinner. He was in one of his absent moods and very tired. Natalie overwhelmed him as usual in the hallway, and when he neither grumbled nor resisted she put off her boisterous manner and began to look at himanxiously. At dinner everyone was silent. He communicated his mood. Vera was there at her mother’s left. Efforts to make conversation were listless, Galt participating in none of them. There was a sense of something that was expected to happen; that was Gram’ma’s remorseless evening question.
“What is the price of Great Midwestern stock today?” she asked, speaking very distinctly.
“Five and a half,” said Galt, in a petulant voice.
The announcement was received stoically, with not the slightest change of countenance anywhere, though that was the lowest price at which the stock had ever sold and represented a serious loss for the house of Galt. However, the state of feeling made itself felt without words. It became at last intolerable for Galt. He threw down his napkin, shouted three times, “Wow! Wow! Wow!”, and each time brought his fist down on the table with a force that made the china jump. With that he got up and left us. We heard him unlock the door of his room and slam it behind him.
“What has happened?” asked Vera, looking at me.
I told them of the disaster to the corn crop and how for that reason there had been heavy selling of Great Midwestern shares.
Vera shrugged her shoulders. Later in the evening when we were alone she looked about her at the walls and ceiling, as one with a premonition offarewell, and said bitterly: “A pretty shipwreck it will be this time.”
“Has your money gone into it, too?” I asked.
She nodded, and said: “Now he wants to mortgage the house.”
By this time I had become a frequent visitor in the Galt household. A summer had passed since my first appearance there. The second time I came to dinner Vera presented herself, though tardily. As she entered the dining room Galt rose and made her an exaggerated bow, which she altogether disregarded.
“All got up this evening!” he said, squinting at her when she was seated. That she disregarded, too, looking cold and bored. She wore a black party gown of some very filmy stuff, cut rather low, with an effect of elaborate simplicity. A small solitary gem gleamed in her blue-black hair and a point of light shone in each of her eyes. She was forbiddingly resplendent, with an immemorial, jewel-like quality. She derived entirely from her mother and in no particular resembled her father. He tried another sally.
“Isn’t it chilly over there by you, Vera child?” he asked, ironically solicitous.
Instantly she replied: “Yes, father dear. Won’t you bring me my scarf, please.”
After that he let her alone. When dinner was over he took me off to his room again and we passed another evening with the railroads.
No dinner passed without some glow of the feud between Galt and Vera. They seldom saw each other at any other time. Her habits were luxurious. She never came down to breakfast. He delighted to torment her and always came off with the worst of it. Perhaps he secretly enjoyed that, too. She was more than a match for him. Their methods were very different. He taunted and teased, without finesse. She retorted with cold, keen thrusts which left him sprawling and helpless. In a pinch she turned upon him that astonishing trick she had of looking at people without seeing them. The experience, as I knew, was crushing. It never failed to make him fume.
Gradually I perceived the nature of their antagonism. Natalie was her father’s play-fellow, but Vera fascinated him. He admired her tremendously and feared her not a little. She baffled, eluded and ignored him. The only way he could get her attention was to bully her, which he did simply for the reason that he could not let her alone. But there was something on her side, too, for once I noticed that when he had failed to open hostilities she subtly provoked him to do so. Probably both enjoyed it unconsciously.
Between the sisters there was a fiercely repressed antagonism. Natalie was four years the youngerand much less subtle, but in the gentle art of scratching she was the other’s equal. Both were extremely dexterous and played the game in good sportsmanship.
“I saw Mr. Shaw at the matinée today,” Natalie announced one evening. After a slight pause she added: “He seems miraculously recovered. I never saw him looking so well.”
I happened to catch a twinkle, where of all places but in the eyes of Gram’ma! She looked for an instant quite human. But it was too late to save me, for I had already asked: “What was he ill of?”
“Something that’s never fatal, apparently,” said Natalie, demurely, fetching a little sigh. Then I understood that what a person named Shaw had miraculously recovered from was an infatuation for the elder sister. And for my stupidity I got a disdainful glance from Vera.
Another time Natalie said to Vera: “I shall see the handsome Professor Atwood tomorrow. May I tell him you are mad about him?”
“Yes, dear,” said Vera. “He will draw the right conclusion.”
The barb of that retort was hidden, but it did its work. Natalie blushed furiously and subsided.
Mrs. Galt surveyed the field of these amenities with a neutral, mind-weary air. She never took part, never interfered, would not appear to be even listening, though in fact she missed nothing, and never failed in the embarrassing after-moment toprovide a lightning conductor, a swift bridge or a rescue raft, as the need was. She seemed to do this mechanically, with not the slightest effort. And although her topics were commonplace that was not necessarily an indication of what her mind was like. The want at those moments was for easy, thoughtless conversation, and therefore trite subjects served best. Her own interest in them was never sustained. Having cleared the air she retired within herself again. One wondered what she did with her mind the rest of the time. Lost it perhaps in wonder at life’s baroque, uncontrollable projections.
One evening as dinner was finishing Vera looked at me across the table and said: “Won’t you come sometime to tea when father can’t have you all to himself? He hates tea.”
I was startled and absurdly thrilled; but the curious feeling was that I became in that instant an object of curiosity and solicitude mingled, as one marked by fate for a certain experience. I got this particularly from Natalie who glanced first at me with an anxious expression, and then at her sister.
“We are always at home Sunday afternoon,” said Mrs. Galt.
I was the only caller the next Sunday. Galt did not appear. Tea was served in that middle room, between the parlor and dining room, which was a domain over which Vera exercised feudal rights.That was why it was more attractive than any other part of the house. It expressed something of her personality. Conversation was low-spirited and artificial. Natalie was not her sparkling self. Mrs. Galt was in her usual state of pre-occupation, though very gracious, and helpful in warding off silences. I do not know how these things are managed. Presently Vera and I were alone. I asked her to play. Her performance, though finished and accurate, was so empty that I said without thought: “Why don’t you let yourself go?”
“Like this?” she said, turning back. And then, having no music in front of her, she played a strange tumultuous Russian thing with extraordinary power. I begged her to go on. Instead she left the piano abruptly and stood for a minute far away at the window with her back to me, breathing rapidly, not from the exertion of playing, I thought, but from the emotional excitement of it. Then she called me to come and look at a group of Sunday strollers passing in the street,—three men and two women, strange, dark aliens full of hot slothful life. The men around their middles wore striped sashes ending in fringe, and no coats, like opera brigands; the women were draped in flaming shawls. All of them wore earrings.
“What are they?” she asked.
Immigrants, I guessed, from some odd corner of Southern Europe, who hadn’t been here long enough to get out of their native costume.
“They will be drab soon enough,” she said, turning away.
I wanted to talk of her playing, being now enthusiastic about it, but she put the subject aside, saying, “Please don’t,” and we talked instead of pictures. There was a special exhibition of old masters at the Metropolitan Museum which she hadn’t seen. Wouldn’t I like to go? It came out presently that she painted. I asked to see some of her things and she got them out,—two or three landscapes and some studies of the nude. She had just begun working in a life class, she said.
“Very interesting,” I said, trying to get the right emphasis and knowing instantly that it had failed. She gathered them up slowly and put them away.
“They are like your playing,” I added, “as you played at first.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean you somehow hinder your self-expression.”
“I do not let myself go? Is that what you mean?”
“Precisely. What are you afraid of?”
“Then you believe in letting oneself go?” she asked.
“Well, why not?”
“Suppose one isn’t sure of one’s stopping places?”
We became involved in a discussion of the moralities, hitherto, present and future, tending to become audacious. This is a pastime by means of which, in first acquaintance, two persons of opposite sexmay indulge their curiosity with perfect security. The subject is abstract. The tone is impersonal. Neither one knows how far the other will go. They dare each other to follow, one step at a time, and are both surprised at the ground they can make. There is at the same time an inaudible exchange, which is even more thrilling, for that is personal. This need never be acknowledged. If the abstract does not lead naturally to the concrete, then the whole conversation remains impersonal and the inaudible part may be treated as if it had never occurred. That is the basic rule of the game.
Her courage amazed me. I began to see what she meant by supposing that one might not be sure of one’s stopping places. She had been reading France, Stendhal, Zola, Shaw, Pater, Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche.
Mrs. Galt reappeared. “We are debating the sins of Babylon,” I said. She smiled and asked me to dinner.
That was the beginning. We went the next Sunday to the Metropolitan Museum and one evening that same week to the theatre. What we set out to see was an English play that everyone was talking about. At the last minute she asked if the tickets might be changed. And when I asked her where she would go instead she naïvely mentioned a musical comedy much more talked about than the English play for very different reasons. Afterwards when Iasked her what part of the show she liked best she said: “The way people laughed.”
Life transacting thrilled her. Contact with people, especially in free, noisy crowds, produced in her a kind of intoxication. We walked a great deal in the pulsating streets, often till late at night, and that she enjoyed more than the play, the opera or any other form of entertainment. Her curiosity was insatiable. She was always for going a little further, for prying still deeper into the secrets of humanity’s gregarious business, afraid yet venturesome and insistent. She would pick out of the throng whimsical, weird and dreadful personalities and we would follow them for blocks.
Once at a corner we came suddenly upon a woman importuning a man. She was richly gowned and not in any way common. He was sinister, sated and cruel. She had lost her head, her pride, her sense of everything but wanting him. We were close enough to hear. He spoke in a low, admonishing tone, imploring her not to make a scene. She grew louder all the time, saying, “I don’t care, I don’t care,” and continued alternately to assail him with revealing reproaches and to entreat him caressingly, until they both seemed quite naked in the lighted street. The man was contemptible; the woman was tragic. I took Vera by the arm to move her away, but she was fixed between horror and attraction and stood there regarding them in the fascinated way one looks at deadly serpents through the glass at theZoo. The man at last yielded with a bored gesture, called a cab, whisked the woman into it, and the scene vanished. Vera shuddered and we walked on.
We explored the East Side at night, visiting the Chinese and Jewish theatres, Hungarian coffee houses and dance halls. Nobody had ever done this kind of thing with her before. It was a new experience and she adored it. Of what she did with it in her mind I knew almost nothing. Emotions in the abstract she would discuss with the utmost simplicity. Her own she guarded jealously.
One evening late, with a particularly interesting nocturnal adventure behind us, we stood in the hallway saying good-night. We said it and lingered; said it again and still lingered. She was more excited than usual. Her lips were slightly parted. She almost never blushed, but on rare occasions, such as now, there was a feeling of pink beneath the deep brunette color of her skin.
Her beauty seemed of a sudden to expand, to become greatly exaggerated, not in quality but in dimensions, so that it excluded all else from the sense of space. The sight of it unpoised me. And she knew. I could feel that she knew. My impulse toward her grew stronger and stronger, tending to become irresistible. This she knew also. Yet she lingered. Then I seized and kissed her. At the first touch her whole weight fell in my arms. Her eyes closed, her head dropped backward, faceupturned. She trembled violently and sighed as if every string of tension in her being snapped.
How little we can save of those enormous moments in which the old, old body mind remembers all that ever happened! What was it that one knew so vividly in that co-extensive, panoramic, timeless interval, and cannot now recall?
The first kiss goes a journey. The second stays on earth. The first one is a meeting in the void. Then this world again.
“Vera! Vera!” I whispered.
Her eyes opened.... The look they gave me was so unexpected, so unnatural in the circumstances, that I had a start of terror lest she had gone out of herself. Then I recognized it. This was she whom I had forgotten. These were those impervious, scornful carnelian eyes you could not see into. The old hot and cold feeling came over me again. And though she still lay in my arms, not having moved at all, it was now as if I were not touching her, as if I never had. I released her. Without a word she turned and walked slowly up the stairway out of sight.
The next whole day was one of utter, lonely wretchedness, supported only by a feeling of resentment. I found myself humming “Coming Through the Rye,” and wondering why, as it was a ditty I had not remembered for years. Then it came to me why,—“If a body kiss a body need a body cry?” What had I done that was so terrible after all?
I went to the Galts’ for dinner uninvited, as now I often did. Vera did not appear. She was reported to be indisposed. I passed the evening with Galt in his study, and left early. Natalie was alone in the parlor, reading. She came into the hall as I was putting on my coat and laid a hand on my arm, consolingly.
“You won’t stop coming, will you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“They always do,” she said. “And some of them are so nice, like you.”
“Natalie, what are you talking about?”
“Father would miss you terribly,” she said.
I promised whatever it was she wanted. She shook hands on it and watched me down the steps.
The next evening I called after dinner. Vera was out. I wrote her a note of expostulation, then one in anger, and a third in terms that were abject; and she answered none of them.
In this state of suspense an enormous time elapsed, three weeks at least. For me Vera was non-existent in her father’s house. When I was there for dinner she never came down. There was a pretense that her absence was unnoticeable. Nobody spoke of it; nobody mentioned her name. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I could not rid myself of thenotion that I had become an object of sympathy in the household.
One afternoon I had been in to see Galt, who was ill, and as I let myself out through the front door there was Vera at the bottom of the steps in conversation with a huge blond animal of the golden series, very dangerous for dark women. She saw me obliquely and turned her attention more to him with a subtle excluding gesture. Evidently she wished me to pass. Instead I waited, watching them, until he became conscious of the situation and cast off with a large various manner which comprehended me. As she came up the steps toward me, slowly, but with unblurred, definite movements, hard to the ache of desire yet soft and voluptuous to the forbidden sense of touch, with a kind of bird-like beauty, I could not for a moment imagine that I had ever kissed her, much less that she had responded to a ruffling caress. I forgot what I was going to do, or by what right I meant to do anything. I was cold and hopeless, with a sudden sense of fatigue, and might have suffered her to pass me in silence as she wished to do but for the look she gave me on reaching the top. That was her mistake. It was the old impersonal, trampling look, to which anger was the one self-saving reply. I took her by the arm and turned her face about.
“We are going for a walk,” I said, moving her with me down the steps.
I counted upon her horror of a scene to give me the brutal advantage, and it did. She cameunresistingly. Yet it was in no sense a victory. She submitted to a situation she could not control, but contemptuously, with no respect or fear for the force controlling it. We walked in silence to a tea shop in Fifth Avenue; and when we were seated and the waiter came her respect for appearances made her speak.
“Just some tea, please,” she said, sweetly. And those were the only words she uttered.
Her defense was to stare at me as if I were reciting a tedious tale. It bored her. Once I thought she repressed a yawn. That was when I began to say the same things over again. She was without any vanity of self-justification. Not for an instant did she avert her eyes. She looked at me steadily, unblinkingly, with a kind of reptilian indifference. She could see into me; I could not see into her. At the end I became abusive. Then if at all there was a faint suspicion of interest.
“A fool there was who loved the basilisk,” I said. “He who plucks that icy flame will be destroyed but not consumed.... Shall we go?”
I like still to remember that she did not smile at this idiotic apostrophe. Every man, I suppose, says a thing like that once,—if he can. We rose at once. We walked all the way back in silence. I did not go in, but handed her up the steps and left her without good-night.
On the next day but one a note came. Would I meet her for tea at the same place?
She was prompt and purposeful. She waited until tea was served, then put it aside, and spoke.
“Why do all men, though by different ways, come to the same place?”
“I know nothing about all men,” I said. “It’s enough to know about myself. I’m not very sure of that.”
“They all do,” she said, reflectively.
“But I want to marry you,” I said, with emphasis on the personal pronoun.
“Yes; ... that, too,” she said, with a saturated air.
“Oh, weary Olympia!” I said. “How stands the score? How many loves lie beheaded in your chamber of horrors? Or do you bury them decently and tend their graves?”
“You try me,” she said, with no change of voice or color. “It is very stupid.... Man takes without leave the smallest thing and presumes upon that to erect preposterous claims. Take our case. I begin by liking you. I invite you to a friendship. You are free to accept or decline. You accept. Wherein so far have you acquired rights in me? We find this relation agreeable and extend it. All of this is voluntary. Nothing is surrendered under compulsion. We are both free. Then suddenly you overwhelm me by a sensuous impulse. It is a wanton, ravishing act. I resent it by the only peaceable means in my power. That is, I avoid you. Immediately you assail me with violent reproaches, as by a right.Is it the invader’s right of might? Is human relationship a state of war?... Don’t interrupt me, please.... And now, when I have come to say that under certain conditions I am prepared to make an exception in your forgiveness,—for Heaven knows what reason!—you taunt me of things you have no right to mention. They are mine alone.”
There was a retort, but I withheld it. How shall man tell woman she hath provoked him to it? If he tell her she will wither him. Yet if the sight, smell and sound of her provoke him not, then is she mortally offended. He shall see without looking and be damned if he looks without seeing. It is so. But she divined my thoughts.
“If a woman gives it is quite the same,” she went on. “Only worse, for in that case he presumes upon what he has received by favor to become lord of all that she has.”
“I lie in the dust,” I said.
“I know the pose,” she said, with a lighter touch. “Happily it is absurd. If it were not that it would be contemptible.”
“Well, pitiless woman, what would you have a man to be and do? Let us suppose provisionally that I ask out of deep, religious curiosity. I may not like the part. How should a man behave with you?”
“I dislike you very much at this moment,” she replied. “By an effort I remember that you have saving qualities. Did you hear me say that I was prepared to make an exception?”
“It may be too late,” I said. “What are the terms? You said under certain conditions.”
She frowned, hesitated and went on slowly.
“It is my castle. You may dwell there, you may come and go, you may make free of it in discretion, agreeably to our joint pleasure,providedyou forego beforehand all rights accruing from use and tenure.”
We debated the contract in a high, ceremonious manner. It was agreed that the bargain, if made, should terminate automatically at the instant I should presume to make the slightest demand upon her.
“As if for instance I should demand the key to the chamber of horrors,” I said, whimsically.
“Exactly,” she replied.
I stipulated, not in earnest of course, that she should make no demands upon me.
“That was implied,” she said. “We make it explicit.”
When at last I accepted unreservedly she put forth her hand in a full, generous gesture; and the pact was sealed.
We walked homeward on a perfectly restored basis of friendship, changed our minds at the last minute, went instead to a restaurant, then to the theatre, and passed a joyous evening together.
Steadily the American giant grew worse in his mind. There were yet lower depths of insolvency. The passion to touch them was like the impulse to collective suicide in the Dark Ages. Bankruptcy ceased to be a disgrace, there was so much of it. Hope of profit was abandoned. Optimism was believed to be an unsound mode of thought. All of this was a state of feeling, a delusion purely. The country was rich. The unemployed were fed on fine white bread and an unlaundered linen shirt cost fifty cents.
Every catastrophe was bound to happen.
On a rainy Wall Street morning in late December, with no sign or gesture of anguish, the Great Midwestern Railroad gave up its corporate existence and died.
It was a shapeless event.
Ten men sat around the long table in the Board Room smoking, fidgeting, irritably watching the time. These were the eminent directors. They were men whose time nobody could afford to waste,—enterprisers in credit, capital, oil, coal, metals andpacking house products. They wished the obsequies to begin promptly and be as brief as possible, for they had many other things to mind. Yet the president, with nothing else to do, had kept them waiting for nearly five minutes. This had never happened before. However, when he came and silently took his place at the head of the table he looked so dismal that they forgave him, and the ceremony might have been brought off with some amiability of spirit but for a disagreeable incident at the beginning.
The disturber was Jonas Gates, a dry, mottled little man, indecorously old and lewdly alert, with a shameless, impish sense of pleasantry. He practiced usury on a large scale as a kind of Stock Exchange pawn broker, lending money to people in difficulties at high rates of interest until they had nothing more to pledge and then cutting them off at the pockets. He knew some of everybody’s secrets and much more than he knew he guessed by the magic formula that he was sure of nothing worse of himself than was generally true of his neighbors. He was hated for his tongue, feared for what he knew and respected for his wealth, which was one of the largest private fortunes of that time.
This Jonas Gates, cupping his hands to his mouth and making his voice high and distant, as one calling to the echoes, inquired at large:
“Are there any stockholders present?”
Everyone was scandalized. Several were without pretense of concealing it. He surveyed their faceswith amused impudence. Then spreading his hands at each side of his mouth and making his voice hoarse, like a boy calling into an empty hogshead, he inquired again:
“Are there any stockholders present?”
It was a ghastly joke. There is no law forbidding a director to part with his shares when the omens foretell disaster. It is commonly done in fact in the anonymous mist of the stock market, only you never mention it. The convention is that all stockholders have equal rights of partnership. But as directors are the few who have been elected by many to act as managing partners, and since it is necessary for managing partners to have first access to all information, it follows from the nature of circumstances that they are inside stockholders and that the others are outside stockholders; and it follows no less from the nature of mankind that the outsiders invariably suspect the insiders of selling out in time to save themselves.
“Iss id vor a meeting ov ze directors ve are here, Mr. Presidend?” asked Mordecai. He was the eminent banker. He spoke sweetly and lisped slightly as he always did when annoyed.
“This is a directors’ meeting,” said the president, adding: “The secretary will read the call.”
“Please God!” exclaimed Gates, not yet ready to be extinguished. “Put it on the record. I ask: Are there any stockholders present? No answer. Again I ask: Are there any stockholders present? Noanswer. Great embarrassment. What is to be done? Idea! This is a directors’ meeting. Bravo! Proceed. On with the stockholders’ business. We are not stockholders. Therefore we shall be able to transact their business impartially.”
There was a distraught silence.
“Proceed,” said Gates. “I shan’t interrupt the services any more.”
What followed was brief. A resolution was offered and passed to the secretary to be read, setting out that owing to conditions which left the directors helpless and blameless, to wit: the depression of trade, the distrust of securities, the rapacity of the tax gatherer, the harassment of carriers by government agencies, et cetera, the Great Midwestern was unable to pay its current debts, wherefore counsel should be instructed to carry out the formalities of putting the property in the hands of the court.
“Is there any discussion?” asked the president.
Horace Potter, of oil, spoke for the first time. He was a sudden, ferocious man with enormous gray eyebrows and inflammable blue eyes.
“Have a glance at Providence,” he said. “We damn everything else. Say the crops are a disgrace. That’s true and it’s nobody’s fault here below.”
“Yes, that should go in,” said the president. He took back the resolution, wrote into it with a short lead pencil the phrase, “and the failure of crops over a large part of the railroad’s territory,” and offered it to be read again. Everybody nodded. He calledfor the vote. The ayes were unanimous, and the aye of Jonas Gates was the loudest of all.
With that they rose.
The Board Room had two doors. One was a service door opening into Harbinger’s office; it was used only by the secretary and such other subordinate officials as might be summoned to attend a board meeting with records and data. The main door through which the directors came and went was the other one opening into the president’s office. Their way of normal exit therefore was through the president’s office, through the anteroom where I worked, into the reception room beyond and thence to the public corridor.
As the president’s private secretary it was expected of me to see them out. Directly behind me on this occasion came Mordecai, like a biblical image, his arms stiff at his sides, the expression of his face remote and sacrificial. This was his normal aspect; nevertheless it seemed now particularly appropriate. A sacrifice had been performed upon the mysterious altar of solvency and he alone had any solemnity about it. The others followed, helping each other a little with their coats, exchanging remarks, some laughing.
So we came to the door that opened into the reception room. I had my hand on the knob when Mordecai suddenly recoiled.
“A-h-h-h-ch, don’d!” he exclaimed. “Zey are zare.”
Evidently some rumor of the truth had got abroad in Wall Street. The reception room was full of reporters waiting for news of the meeting, and this was unexpected, since nobody save the officials and directors were supposed to know that a meeting was taking place. Mordecai’s fear of reporters was ludicrous, like some men’s fear of small reptiles. He stood with his back to the door facing the other directors. Horace Potter was for pushing through.
“Hell,” he said. “Let’s tell them we’ve let her go and get out. I’m overdue at another meeting three blocks from here.”
He could move through a crowd of clamorous reporters with the safety of an iceberg.
“Ziz vay, all ze gentlemen, b-l-e-a-s-e,” said Mordecai, ignoring Potter’s suggestion. He led them back to the president’s office; he had remembered an unused, permanently bolted door that opened directly from the president’s office upon the main corridor. His thought was to go that way and circumvent the reporters. But they had sensed that possibility. This point of exit also was besieged.
“A-h-h-h-ch!” he said again. “Zey are eferyvare. How iss id zey get ze news?” Saying this he looked at each of his fellow directors severely. Potter frowned, not for being looked at by Mordecai, but from impatience.
“Id iss best zat ze presidend zhall brepare a brief vormal stadement,” said Mordecai. “Ve can vait in ze Board Room. Zen he vill bring zem for zestatement in here. Vhile he iss reading id to zem ve can ze ozer vay ged out.”
“I can’t wait,” said Potter. He bolted into the reception room alone and banged the door behind him. The reporters instantly surrounded him, and we heard him say: “A statement is coming.”
The president turned to me and dictated as follows:
“Certain creditors of the Great Midwestern Railroad Company being about to apply to the court for a receiver to be appointed, the question to be decided at today’s meeting of the directors was whether to borrow a sum of money on the company’s unsecured notes at a high rate of interest and thus temporize with its difficulties or confess its inability to meet its obligations and allow the property to be placed in the hands of the court. After due consideration the directors unanimously resolved to adopt the latter course in order that the assets may be conserved for the benefit of all parties concerned. (Signed.) John J. Valentine, president.”
Turning to the directors, who had been standing in a bored, formless group, he asked: “Does that cover it?”
All of them gave assent save Mordecai. He was gazing at the ceiling, his hands held out, pressing the tips of his fingers together.
“Id iss fery euvonious, Mr. Falentine,” he said. “Conzerved iss a fine vord. A fery good vord. Id iss unvair to ze bankers, iss id not, to zpeak ofborrowing ad high rates of interest money? Iss id nod already zat ze company hass borrowed more money vrom id’s bankers zan id can pay?”
“Read it please,” said the president to me. I read it aloud.
“Strike out the phrase, ‘whether to borrow a sum of money on its unsecured notes at a high rate of interest,’ and make it read, ‘the question to be decided at today’s meeting of the directors was whether to temporize with its difficulties, or,’—and so on.”
Mordecai, still gazing at the ceiling, nodded with satisfaction. Then he returned to the plane below and led them back to the Board Room, waiting himself until they were all through and closing the door carefully.
The reporters were admitted. We took care to get all of them in at one time, twenty or more, and held the doors open while the directors, passing through Harbinger’s office, made their august escape.
When the reporters were gone a stillness seemed to rise about us like an enveloping atmosphere. Receding events left phantom echoes in our ears. Valentine, having gazed for some time fixedly at a non-existent object, looked slowly about him, saying:
“The corpse is gone.”
Then he went and stood in one of the west windows. I stood at the other. The rain had congealed. Snow was falling in that ominous, isolating waywhich produces in blond people a sense of friendly huddling, instinctive memory perhaps of a north time when contact meant warmth and security. It blotted out everything of the view beyond Trinity church and graveyard. There was a surrounding impression of vertical gray planes in the windows of which lights were beginning to appear, for it was suddenly dark. The Trinity chimes proclaimed in this vortex the hour of noon.
“What day of the month is it?” he asked, clearing his voice after speaking.
“The eighteenth.”
“Twenty years, lacking two days, I have been president of the Great Midwestern,” he said. “In that time—” He stopped.... Trinity chimes struck the quarter past. “How it snows,” he said, turning from the window. “Well, you see what the railroad business is like. Shall I ask a place for you on one of the New York papers? I promised to do that, you remember, if anything should happen.”
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’ll stay on here to clear things up a bit.”
“I expected you to say that,” he said. “Still, don’t be sentimental about it. Nobody can tell now what will happen. We shall be in the hands of the court. Well, as you like. I have an appointment to keep with counsel. I may not be back today.”
He departed abruptly.
It occurred to me to go about the offices to see what effect the news was having. That would besomething to do. Harbinger, leaning over his desk on his elbows, his head clutched in his two hands, was looking at three models of his stamping device.
“How do they take it?”
“Take what?” he asked, not looking up.
“The news.”
“Oh, that! I don’t know. Go ask them yourself.”
John Harrier was sitting precisely as I saw him that first time, perfectly still, staring at an empty desk.
“Well, it appears we are busted,” I said.
“We’ve been busted for about nine months,” he answered, without moving his head. “But now two and two make four again. Thank God, I say. I couldn’t make her look solvent any longer. Arithmetic wouldn’t stand it, and it stands a lot.”
In the large back office the clerks were gathered in small groups discussing it. Work was suspended.
“Hey!” shouted Handbow. “We’re going to celebrate to-night. A little dinner,with, at the Café Boulevard. Will you come?”
The reckless spirit of calamity was catching. I felt it. Even the shabby old furniture took on an irresponsible, vagabond appearance. Solvency, like a scolding, ailing, virtuous wife, was dead and buried. Nobody could help it. Now anything might happen. The moment was full of excitement. There was no boy in the reception room. I sat down at my desk, got up, took a turn about the president’s office, and was thinking I should lock up the place and go out tolunch when I happened to notice that the Board Room door was ajar. In the act of closing it I was startled by the sight of a solitary figure at the head of the long directors’ table. Though his back was to me I recognized him at once. It was Galt. He had slid far down in the chair and was sitting on the end of his spine, legs crossed, hands in his pockets. He might have been asleep. While I hesitated he suddenly got to his feet and began to walk to and fro in a state of excitement. The character of his thoughts appeared in his gestures. His phantasy was that of imposing his will upon a group of men, not easily, but in a very ruthless way.
“Are you running the Great Midwestern?” I asked, pushing the door open.
Starting, he looked at me vaguely, as one coming out of a dream, and said:
“Yes.”
He asked if I had been present at the meeting and was then anxious to know all that had taken place, even the most trivial detail.
“And now,” I said, when I was unable to remember anything more, “please tell me what will happen to the Great Midwestern?”
“Nothing,” he said. “The court will appoint old rhinoceros receiver, and—”
“Mr. Valentine, you mean?”
“That’s customary in friendly proceedings,” he said. “Anyhow, it will be so in this case. The court takes charge of the property as trustee with arbitrarypowers. It can’t run the railroad. It must get somebody to do that. So it looks around a bit and decides that the president is the very man. He is hired for the job. The next day he comes back to his old desk with the title of receiver. All essential employes are retained and you go on as before, only without any directors’ meetings.”
“How as before? I don’t understand.”
“That’s the point, Coxey. You can’t shut up a busted railroad like a delicatessen shop. Bankrupt or not it has to go on hauling freight and passengers because it’s what we call a public utility. A railroad may go bust but it can’t stop.”
“Then what is a receivership for?”
“That’s another point. You are getting now some practical economics, not like the stuff old polly-woggle has been filling you up with. The difference is this: When you are bankrupt you put yourself in the hands of the court for self-protection. Then your creditors can’t worry you any more. A railroad in receivership doesn’t have to pay what it owes, but everybody who owes it money has got to pay up because the court says so. It goes along that way for a few months or a year, paying nothing and getting paid, until it shows a little new fat around its bones and is fit to be reorganized.”
“What happens then?”
“Well, then it is purged of sin and gets born again with a new name. The old Great Midwestern Railroad Company becomes the new GreatMidwestern Railway Company, issues some new securities on the difference between r-o-a-d and w-a-y, and sets out on its own once more. The receiver is discharged. The stockholders elect a president, maybe the same one as before or maybe not, and the directors begin to hold meetings again.”
The Stock Exchange received the news calmly. It was not unexpected. The directors, as we knew, had been getting out. They read the signs correctly. Under their selling the price of Great Midwestern stock had fallen to a dollar-and-a-half a share. For a stock the par value of which is one hundred dollars that is a quotation of despair. Nothing much more could happen short of utter extinction. Many of the finest railroads in the country were in the same defunct case. You could buy them for less than the junk value of their rails and equipment. But if you owned them you could not sell them for junk. You had to work them, because, as Galt said, they were public utilities. And they worked at a loss.
It happened also on this day that everyone was thinking of something else. That was nothing less than the imminent bankruptcy of the United States Treasury. This delirious event now seemed inevitable.
For several weeks uninterruptedly there had been a run on the government’s gold fund. People were frantic to exchange white money for gold. Theywaited in a writhing line that kept its insatiable head inside the doors of the sub-Treasury. Its body flowed down the long steps, lay along the north side of Wall Street and terminated in a wriggling tail around the corner in William Street, five minutes’ walk away. It moved steadily forward by successive movements of contraction and elongation. Each day at 3 o’clock the sub-Treasury, slamming its doors, cut off the monster’s head. Each morning at 10 o’clock there was a new and hungrier head waiting to push its way in the instant the doors opened. Its food was gold and nothing else, for it lived there night and day. The particles might change; its total character was always the same. Greed and fear were the integrating principles. Human beings were the helpless cells. It grew. Steadily it ate its way deeper into the nation’s gold reserve, and there was no controlling it, for Congress had said that white money and gold were of equal value and could not believe it was not so. The paying tellers worked very slowly to gain time.
The spectacle was weirdly fascinating. I had been going every day at lunch time to see it. This day the spectators were more numerous than usual, the street was congested with them, because the officers of the sub-Treasury had just telegraphed to Washington saying they could hold out only a few hours more. That meant the gold was nearly gone. It meant that the United States Treasury might at any moment put up its shutters and post a notice:“C L O S E D. Payments suspended. No more gold.”
Never had the line been so excited, so terribly ophidian in its aspect. Its writhings were sickening. The police handled it as the zoo keepers handle a great serpent. That is, they kept it straight. If once it should begin to coil the panic would be uncontrollable.
Particles detached themselves from the tail and ran up and down the body trying to buy places nearer the head. Those nearest the head hotly disputed the right of substitution, as when someone came to take a position he had been paying another to hold. In the tense babel of voices there came sudden fissures of stillness, so that one heard one’s own breathing or the far-off sounds of river traffic. At those moments what was passing before the eyes had the phantastic reality of a dream.
In the throng on the opposite side of the street I ran into Galt and Jonas Gates together. Later it occurred to me that I had never before seen Galt with any director of the Great Midwestern, and it surprised me particularly, as an after thought, that he should know Gates. Just then, however, there was no thinking of anything but the drama in view. Everyone talked to everyone else under the levelling pressure of mass excitement.
“Have you heard?” I asked Galt. “The sub-Treasury has notified Washington that it cannot hold out. It may suspend at any moment.”
“I suppose then eighty million healthy people will have nothing to eat, nothing to wear, no place to go, nothing to do with their idle hands. We’ll all go to hell in a handbasket.”
He spoke loudly. Many faces turned toward us. A very tall, lean man, with a wild light in his eyes and a convulsive, turkey neck, laid a hand on Galt’s arm.
“Right you are, my friend, if I understand your remark. We are about to witness the dawn of a new era. I have proved it. In this little pamphlet, entitled, ‘The Crime of Money—thirty reasons why it should be abolished on earth,’ I show—”
“Don’t jingle your Adam’s apple at me,” said Galt, giving him a look of droll contempt.
The man was struck dumb. Feeling all eyes focused on the exaggerated object thus caricatured in one astonishing stroke he began to gulp uncontrollably. There were shouts of hysterical laughter. In the confusion Galt disappeared, dragging Gates with him.
The sub-Treasury held out until three o’clock and closed its doors once more in a solvent manner, probably, for the last time. Everybody believed it would capitulate to the ophidian thing the next day. There was no escape. Events were in the lap of despair.
At five o’clock that evening Galt called me on the telephone and asked me to come to his office. I had never been there. It was at 15 Exchange Place, up a long brass-mounted stairway, second floor front. The building was one of a type that has vanished,—gas lighted, wise and old, scornful of the repetitious human scene, full of phantom echoes. On his door was the name, Henry M. Galt, and nothing else. Inside was first a small, bare room in which the only light was the little that came through the opaque glass of a partition door marked “Private.” I hesitated and was about to knock on this inner door when Galt shouted:
“Come in, Coxey.”
He was alone, sitting with his hat on at a double desk between two screened windows at the far side of the room. He did not look up at once. “Sit down a minute,” he said, and went on reading some documents.
The equipment of his establishment was mysteriously simple,—a stock ticker at one of the windows,a row of ten telephones fastened to the wall over a long shelf on which to write in a standing position, a bookkeeper’s high desk and stool, several chairs, a water cooler in disuse, a neglected newspaper file in the corner, a safe, and that was all.
“We are waiting for Gates,” he said, with divided attention, reading still while talking. “I want you to witness ... gn-n-n-u-u, how do you spell unsalable,a l aora l e?... Yes ... that’s what I made it ... witness our signatures.... We get superstitious down here ... in this witches’ garden ... we do. There are things that grow best when planted in the last phase of the moon, ... on a cloudy night ... dogs barking.... There he is.”
Jonas Gates walked straight in, sat down at the other side of the desk without speaking, and reached for the papers, which Galt passed to him one by one in a certain order. Having read them carefully he signed them. Then Galt signed them, rose, beckoned me to sit in his place, and put the documents before me separately, showing of each one only the last page. There were six in all,—three originals which went back to Gates and three duplicates which Galt retained. There was a seventh which apparently required neither to be jointly signed nor witnessed. It lay all the time face up on Gates’ side of the desk. I noted the large printed title of that one. It was a mortgage deed. Gates put it with the three others which were his, snapped a rubber band around them and went out, leaving no word or sign behind him.
“Crime enough for one day,” said Galt, going to the safe. “You are coming up for dinner. Turn out that light there above you.”
“Did you expect Great Midwestern to go bankrupt?” I asked as we walked down the stairway.
He did not answer me directly, nor at all for a long time. When we were seated in the L train he said: “So you know that I was buying the stock all the way down?”
“Yes.”
He did not speak again until we left the train at 50th Street.
“No, I didn’t expect it,” he said. “It wasn’t inevitable until the Lord burned up the corn crop. But I allowed for it, and what’s worse in one way is better in another. We’re all right. In the reorganization I’ll get the position I want. I’ll be one of ten men in a board room. Everything else follows from that.”
As Natalie met us I observed her keenly, thinking she would betray a feeling of anxiety. But she knew his moods at sight and met them exactly. To my surprise she hailed him gaily and he responded. Then they fell to wrangling over nothing at all and carried on a fierce make-believe quarrel until dinner time.
At the table he tried to force a general spirit of raillery and made reckless sallies in all directions.They failed miserably until Natalie joined him in a merciless attack upon Vera. It was entirely gratuitous. When it had gone very far Mrs. Galt was on the point of interfering, but checked the impulse, leaving Vera to take care of herself. She held her own with the two of them. When the game lagged Natalie would whisper to Galt. He would say, “No-o-o-o-o!” with exaggerated incredulity, and they would begin again. Suddenly they turned on me, Natalie beginning.
“Don’t you think Coxey ought to get married?” Galt’s name for me had long been current in the household.
“Coxey, here? No. Nobody would marry him,” said Galt.
“But he’s sometimes quite nice,” said Natalie.
They discussed my character as if I were not there, the kind of wife I should have and what would please Heaven to come of it. Natalie knew, as Galt didn’t, that this was teasing Vera still.
Dinner was nearly over when Gram’ma Galt asked her terrible question. “What is the price of Great Midwestern stock today?”
Galt answered quietly: “One-and-a-half.”
There was no more conversation after that.
Later when we were alone I asked Vera if the house had been pledged.
“The mortgage was executed yesterday,” she said. “It’s roof and all this time.”
“He doesn’t seem at all depressed,” I said.
“No,” she answered. “That is his way with disaster. We’ve seen it before.”
“Don’t you admire him for it, though?”
“I hate him!” she cried passionately. The intensity of her emotion astonished me. Her hands were clenched, her eyes were large and her body quivered. We were sitting together on the sofa. I got up and walked around. When I looked at her again she lay face downward in the pillows, weeping convulsively.