The hearing continued for three days. The newspapers printed almost nothing else on their first three pages. Galt’s testimony produced everywhere a monumental effect. Public opinion went over by a somersault.
He denied nothing. He admitted everything. He was invincible because he believed in himself.
“Mr. Galt,” said Goldfuss, rising, “that will be all. You are the most remarkable witness I have ever examined.”
They shook hands all around.
As we were going down the Capitol steps Galt stumbled and clutched my arm. The sustaining excitement was at an end and the reaction was sudden.Solicitude made him peevish. He insisted irritably, and we went on walking, though it was above his strength. When we were half way back to the hotel, a mile yet to go, he stopped and said: “You’re right, Coxey. Ain’t it hot! Let’s call a cab.”
He wouldn’t rest. A strange uneasiness was upon him. We took the next train for New York.
“I want to go to Moonstool,” he said. The idea seized him after we were aboard the train.
“Fine. Let’s take a holiday tomorrow and go all over it,” I said.
“Now. I want to go there now,” he said.
“Directly there ... and not go home?”
“That’s home, ain’t it?” he said, becoming irritable. “Let’s go straight there.”
He had a fixation upon it.
From Baltimore I got off an urgent telegram to Mrs. Galt, telling her Galt was very tired and insisted on going directly to the country place. Could she meet us at Newark with a motor car? That would be the easiest way.
Automobiles were just then coming into general use. Galt with his ardent interest in all means of mechanical locomotion was enthusiastic about them. The family had four, besides Natalie’s, which was her own. She drove it herself.
Mrs. Galt met us at Newark. Galt greeted her with no sign of surprise. He could not have been expecting her. I had told him nothing about the arrangements. He slept all the way up fromWashington and did not know where we were when we got off the train. She helped him into the car. When they were seated he took her hand and went to sleep again.
There was a second motor behind us, with a cook, three servants, some luggage and provisions. Mrs. Galt was a very efficient woman. She had thought of everything the situation required.
It was nearly midnight when we arrived at Moonstool and stopped in front of the iron gates. They were closed and locked. And there was Natalie who had been sent ahead to announce our coming. She drove out alone, got lost on the way, and had not yet succeeded in raising anybody when we came up. The place was dark, except for red lanterns here and there on piles of construction material. The outside watchmen were shirking duty, and those inside, if not doing likewise, were beyond hearing.
Nearby was the railroad station of Galt, a black little pile with not a light anywhere. It had not yet been opened for use. We could hear the water spilling over the private Galt dam in the river. There was enough electricity in the Galt power house to illuminate a town. On the mountain top, half a mile distant, the Galt castle stood in massive silhouette against the starry sky. And here was Galt, in the dark, an unwelcome night-time stranger, forbidden at the gate. He was still asleep. We were careful not to wake him.
A watchman with a bull’s eye lantern and a billy stick exuded from the darkness.
“Wha’d’ye want?”
We wanted to go in.
“Y’can’t go in,” he said. “Can’t y’ see it’s private? Nobody lives there.”
It is very difficult to account for the improbable on the plane of a night watchman’s intelligence. First he stolidly disbelieved us. Then he took refuge in limited responsibility.
“M’orders is t’let nobody in,” he said. “D’ye know anybody aroun’ here?”
It seemed quite possible that no human being around here would know us. By an inspiration Natalie remembered the superintendent of construction. He lived not far away. She knew where. Once when she was spending a day on the job he had taken her home with him to lunch. It was not more than ten minutes’ drive, she said.
It was further than she thought. We were more than three quarters of an hour returning with the superintendent. It took twenty minutes more to wake the crew at the power house and get the electricity turned on. Then we drove slowly up the main concrete road now lighted on each side by clusters of three ground glass globes in fluted columns fifty feet apart. Although it was finished the road was still cluttered with heaps of sand and debris.
Galt all this time was fast asleep, his head resting on Mrs. Galt’s shoulder. We could scarcely wakehim when we tried. He seemed drunk with weariness. As we helped him out he opened his eyes once and startled us by saying to the superintendent: “Fire that watchman ... down below,” as if he had been conscious of everything that happened. His eyes closed again, he tottered, and we caught him. The superintendent supported him on one side, I on the other, and so he entered, dragging his feet.
Natalie knew more about the house than anyone else. She led the way to the apartment that was Galt’s, and then left us to place the servants and show them their way around. I helped Mrs. Galt undress him and get him to bed. I was amazed to see how thin and shrunken his body was. He was inert, like a child asleep. Mrs. Galt, very pale, was strong and deft.
“We must have a doctor at once,” she said. “I thought of bringing one and then didn’t because he minds so awfully to have a doctor in.”
Still we were not really alarmed.
The telephone system had been installed. Natalie knew that. She knew also where the big switchboard was. I telephoned the family physician to meet us at the Hoboken ferry and then Natalie and I set out to fetch him, a drive of nearly seventy miles there and back.
“We ought to do it in two hours,” she said, as we coasted freely,—very freely,—down the lighted cement road and plunged through the gates into darkness.
“The doctor must be in his right mind when we deliver him.”
I meant it lightly. Her reckless driving was a household topic and she was incorrigible. But she answered me thoughtfully.
“We’ll make the time going.”
She pulled her gloves tighter, took the time, inspected the instruments, switched off the dash light, cut out the muffler, settled herself in the seat and opened the throttle wide. It was a four-cylinder, high-power engine. The sound we made was that of an endless rip through a linen sheet. Road side trees turned white, uneasy faces to our headlights. The highway seemed to lay itself down in front of us as we needed it; and there was a feeling that it vanished or fell away into black space behind us. Giddy things such as fences, buildings and stone walls were tossed right and left in streaming glimpses. Good motor roads were yet unbuilt. There were short, sharp grades like humps on the roller coaster at the fair. Taking them at fifty miles an hour, at night, when you cannot see the top as you start up, nor all the way down as you begin the plunge, is a wild, liberating sensation. Sense of level is lost. One’s center of gravity rises and falls momentously, the heart sloshes around, and you don’t care what happens, not even if you should run off the world. It doesn’t matter.
Natalie was in a trance-like rapture. She never spoke. Her eyes were fixed ahead; her body wasstatic. Only her head and arms moved, sometimes her feet to slip the clutch or apply the brake. All that pertains to the pattern of consciousness,—seeing, hearing, attention, will and willing,—were strained outward beyond the windshield, as if externalized, acting outside of her. What remained on the seat, besides the thrill at the core of her, was her automatic self controlling this lunging, roaring mechanism without the slightest effort of thought. The restrained impulses of her nature apparently found their escape in this form of excitement. It was one thing she could do better than anyone else. She did it superbly and adored doing it. I could not help thinking how Vera would drive, if she drove at all.
There was no traffic at that hour of night until we fell in with the milk and truck wagons crossing the Hackensack Meadows toward the Hudson River ferries. Natalie cut in and out of that rumbling procession with skill and ease. Her calculations were tight and daring, but never foolhardy.
“Very accomplished driving,” I said, as she pulled up at the ferry with the engine idling softly.
“Fifty minutes,” she said, a little down, on looking at her watch. “I thought we should have done it in forty-five. Don’t you love it at night?”
Dawn was breaking when we returned. It gave us a start of apprehension to see the lights still burning in Galt’s apartment. We found Mrs. Galt sitting atthe side of his bed. Her face was distorted with horror and anxiety. Galt lay just as I had seen him last.
“He hasn’t moved,” said Mrs. Galt. “I can’t arouse him. I’m not sure he is breathing.”
Neither was the doctor. The pulse was imperceptible. A glass held at his nostrils showed no trace of moisture. All the bodily functions were in a state of suspense. The only presumption of life lay in the general arbitrary fact that he was not dead. The doctor had never seen anything like this before. He was afraid to act without a consultation. Motors were sent off for four other doctors, two in New Jersey and two in New York. They would bring nurses with them.
Mrs. Galt could not be moved from the bedside.
Natalie telephoned Vera to come. I telephoned Mordecai. Then we walked up and down the eastern terrace and watched the sun come up. She stopped and leaned over the parapet, looking down. Her eyes were dry; her body shook with convulsive movements. My heart went forth. I put my arm around her. She stood up, gazed at me with a stricken expression, then dropped her head on my shoulder and wept, whispering, “Coxey, Coxey, oh, what shall we do?... what shall we do?”
Gangs of workmen were appearing below. The day of labor was about to begin. I left her to get the superintendent on the telephone and tell him to suspend work.
The consultation began at nine o’clock. Mordecai arrived while it was taking place. Somehow on the way he had picked up Vera. They came together. We waited in the library room of Galt’s apartment. At the end of an hour the five doctors came to us, looking very grave. The Galts’ family doctor announced the consensus. It was a stroke, with some very unusual aspects. Life persisted; the thread of it was extremely fine, almost invisible. It might snap at any moment, and they wouldn’t know it until some time afterward. Thin as it was, however, it might pull him back. There was a bare possibility that he would recover consciousness. Meanwhile there was very little that could be done.
Mordecai rose from his chair with a colossal, awful gesture. His eyes were staring. His face was like a mask. His head turned slowly right and left through half a circle with a weird, mechanical movement, as a thing turning on a pivot in a fixed plane.
“Zey haf kilt him!” he whispered. “All ov you I gall upon to vitness, zey haf kilt him. Zey could nod ruin him. Zat zey tried to do. But ... zey haf kilt him!... Ve are vonce more in ze dark ages.”
The physicians were astonished and ill at ease. They did not know what he was talking about. They did not know who he was. I was the only one whocould know what he meant and for a minute I was bewildered. Then it broke upon me.
The combat reconstructed itself in my mind. I recalled those days of strain and anguish when all the forces of Wall Street were acting to destroy him and he fought alone. He withstood them. In the might of his own strength, in that moment which it had been torture almost unendurable to bide the coming of, he smote his enemies “with the fist of wickedness” and scattered them away. Yes, all that. He had won the fight. Yet there he lay. His death would leave them in possession of the field, with a victory unawares. They meant only to break his power, to unloose his hands, to overthrow him as an upstart dynast. But the blood weapon which we think is put away, which they never meant and would not have dared to use,—it had done its work in spite of them. They could not break him. They had only killed him.
That was what Mordecai meant.
Well, we had to wait. Life must wait upon death because it can. There was much to think about. Mordecai spent two hours with me making precise arrangements against any contingency. It was very important that Wall Street should know nothing about Galt’s condition. The news might cause a panic. I was to call him up at regular intervals by a direct telephone wire on which no one could listenin. If any rumor got out it should be met with blank silence.
“Zey vill vind id zoon oud no matter,” he said.
What he needed was a little time to prepare the financial structure for the imminent shock. He would inform his associates and such others as were entitled to know and together they would agree upon protective measures. Galt’s death was bound to produce a terrific convulsion. There is no line of succession in Wall Street, no hereditary prince to receive the crown. When the monarch falls the wail is, “The king is dead! There is no king!”
About 10 o’clock in the morning of the second day Galt opened his eyes. He could neither move nor speak, but he was vividly conscious. Mrs. Galt came to the room where I had established a work station to tell me this.
“He wants something,” she said. “He says so with his eyes. I think it is you he wants.”
His eyes expressed pleasure at seeing me. Not a muscle moved. He could see and hear and think, and that was all. He did want something. I guessed a number of things and he looked them all away. It wasn’t Mordecai. It wasn’t anything in relation to business. In this dilemma I remembered a game we played in childhood. It was for one of the players to hold in his mind any object on earth and for the other to identify it by asking questions up to twenty that had to be answered yes or no. Galt’s eyes could say yes and no and he could hear. Thereforeanything he was thinking of could be found out. I explained the game to him, he instantly understood, and we began. Was the thing a mineral substance? He did not answer. Was it vegetable? He did not answer. Was it animal then? Still no answer, but a bothered look in his eyes. I stopped to wonder why he hadn’t answered yes or no to one of the three. Was it perhaps something mineral, vegetable and animal combined? His eyes lighted, saying yes. Was it in this room? No. Was it far away? No. Was it just outside? Yes.
I went to the window and looked out. In every direction below the level of the finished terrace was the sight of construction work in a state of suspense, heaps of materials, tools where they had fallen, power machinery idle. A thought occurred to me. I went back and looked in his eyes.
“We’ve had all the work stopped because of the noise. Do you wish it to go on? Is that what you want?”
“Yes,” he answered, with a flash of his eyes.
Two hours later the air was vibrant with the clank-clank of many steam drills, the screech of taut hoisting cables, the throb of donkey engines, the roar of rock blasting, and he was happy.
Incidentally the resumption of work served Mordecai’s purpose in an unexpected way. Rumor of Galt’s illness did get out. The newspapers began to telephone. Unable to get information in that way they thought it must be serious and sent reportersout in haste. They returned to their offices saying they couldn’t get a word out of us, but Galt couldn’t be very ill so long as all that uproar was permitted to go on.
A week passed in this way. One evening on my return from an urgent trip to New York Natalie came racing down the great hall to meet me, with a flying slide at the end, as in the old days she was wont to meet Galt, and whether she meant it quite, or miscalculated the distance, I do not know; but anyhow I had either to let her go by off her balance or catch her, and she landed in my arms.
“Oh, Coxey, he’s asking for you,” she said, getting her feet and dragging me along at a run. “He’s better all at once. He can talk.”
The faculty of speech was gradually restored. When he could talk freely he told us that he had been conscious all the while, day and night. He heard every word that was spoken at the consultation. Therefore he had more expert opinion on his condition than we had. He had kept count of time. He knew what day it was when he first opened his eyes, and since then in his sleep he had been continuously conscious. He felt no pain.
And now began the last phase of his career. Lying there in that state, unable so much as to raise his hand, with a mind all but disembodied, he intended his thoughts to the passion that ruled him still. The doctors warned him that it would be extremely dangerous to exercise his mind. It would cause the thread of life to part. That made no difference. What was the thread of life for?
Three times a week Mordecai came to talk with him. These visits, beginning naturally as between friends, soon became conferences of a consequential character between principal and banker. They examined problems, discussed measures, evolved policies, and spent hours, sometimes whole days, together. Mordecai became Galt’s self objectified. He executed his will, promulgated his ideas, represented him in all situations. He sat for him at board meetings and in general Wall Street councils. This became soon an institutional fact. No business of a high nature proceeded far in Wall Street until Mordecai was asked, “What does Mr. Galt say?” or “What would Mr. Galt think?”
A paralyzed hand ruled the world of finance.
Galt’s mind was clear and insatiable. It comprehended both details and principles. He directed minutely the expenditure of that five hundred millions and verified his own prophecy. The outlay of this vast sum upon railroad works averted a period of industrial depression.
I remained permanently at Moonstool. The room in which at first I had established merely a point of contact with the outside world to meet such emergencies as might arise became a regular office. We installed news printing machines and direct telephones. Stock Exchange quotations were received by a private telegraph wire. We had presently a staff of clerks, typists and statisticians, all living in the house and keeping hours. The personnel of this singular organization included one fresco painter.
More than anything else Galt missed his maps and charts. A map of any portion of the earth’s surface enthralled him. The act of gazing at it stimulated his thoughts. And statistical charts,—those diagrams in which quantities, ratios and velocities are symbolized by lines that rise and fall in curves,—these were to him what mathematical symbols are to an astronomer. He could not think easily without them. We had tried various devices for getting maps and charts before him, and they were all unsatisfactory. One day he said: “I can look at the ceiling and walls without effort. Why not put them there?”
But we could not get maps large enough to show from the ceiling and there was a similar difficulty about charts, even though we drew them ourselves. Then we thought of painting them. We found a fresco painter possessing the rudiments of the peculiar kind of intelligence required for such work and then trained him to it.
We painted a map of the world in two hemispheres on the ceiling. The United States had to be carefully put in, with the Great Midwestern system showing in bold red lines. On the walls we painted statistical charts to the number of eight. Several were permanent, such as the one showing the combined earnings of the Galt railroad properties and another the state of general business. They had only to be touched up from time to time as new statistics came in. Others were ephemeral, serving to illustrate some problem his mind was working on. They were frequently painted out and new ones put in their place.
Under these conditions, gazing for hours at the world map, he conceived a project which was destined to survive him in the form of an idea. If he had lived it might have been realized. This was a pan-American railroad,—a vertical system of land transportation articulating the North and South American continents. It was painted there on the ceiling. Mordecai saw it and wept.
How easily the mind accommodates itself to any situation! In a short time all of this seemed quitenatural because it was taking place. Having accepted Galt as a dynast in the flesh, Wall Street now accepted him as an invisible force pervading all its affairs, as if it might go on that way forever. Through Mordecai it solicited his advice and opinion on matters that were not his. Once Mordecai brought him the problem of a railroad that was in trouble; he bought the railroad to save it from bankruptcy. People, seeing this, began to think he was not ill at all, but preferred to work in a mysterious manner. Great Midwestern stock meanwhile was rising, always rising, and touched at last the fabulous price of three hundred dollars a share. Faith in it now was as unreasoning as distrust of it had once been.
Galt entertained no thought of malice toward his old enemies. Proof of this was dramatic and unexpected. A servant came up one afternoon with the name of Bullguard. I could hardly believe it. I found him standing in the middle of the hall, just inside the door, a large, impenetrable figure, giving one the impression of immovable purpose. I had never seen him before.
“I wish to see Mr. Galt,” he said, in a voice like a tempered north wind.
“Nobody sees him, you know.”
“I must see him,” he replied.
“I will ask him. Is it a matter of business?”
“It is very personal,” he said.
The way he said this gave me suddenly a glimpse of his hidden character. Beneath that terrifying aspect, back of that glowering under which strong men quailed, lay more shy, human gentleness than would be easily imagined.
Galt received him. They were alone together for a full hour. What passed between them will never be known. I waited in the library room, one removed from Galt’s bedchamber, and saw Bullguard leave. He passed me unawares, looking straight ahead of him, as one in a hypnotic trance. Outside he forgot his car and went stalking down the drive in that same unseeing manner, grasping a great thick walking stick at the middle and waving it slowly before his face. His car followed and picked him up somewhere out of sight.
One of the minor triumphs of this time was the collapse of the social feud. Mrs. Valentine’s subjects began to revolt. Society made definite overtures to the Galt women. But nobody now cared. Mrs. Galt and Natalie lived only for Galt, and they were the two who would in any case be interested. Mrs. Galt was his silent companion. Natalie was his mercury, going errands swiftly between his bedchamber and the office. She was absorbed in what went on and a good deal of it she understood in an imaginative manner. Coming with a message from Galt, perhaps a request for information or data, shewould often sit at my desk to hear or see the results, saying, “I feel so stupid when I don’t know what it means.” In the evening, as we might be walking or driving together, she would review the transactions of the day and get them all explained.
Vera lived in New York at her studio, but came often to Moonstool. Her engagement to Lord Porteous was renewed. She spoke to me about it one evening on the west terrace, after sunset.
“You were right about Lord Porteous,” she said. “He refused from the beginning to consider our engagement broken.”
“Of course,” I said.
That was evidently not what she expected me to say. She gave me a slow, sidewise look.
“I’m very glad,” I added, making it worse.
We took several turns in silence.
“Why are you glad?” she asked, in a tone she seldom used.
“Isn’t that what I should say?... I was thinking ... I don’t know what I was thinking ... nor why I am glad.”
We stood for a long time, a little apart, watching the afterglow. She shivered.
“I am cold,” she said. “Let’s go in, please.”
The next day in the midst of a conference with Mordecai Galt’s eyes closed. The doctor was in the house. He shook his head knowingly.
There followed a fortnight of horrible suspense. Most of the time we did not know at a given moment whether he was alive or dead. Once for three days he did not open his eyes and we thought it was over. Then he looked at us again and we knew he had been conscious all the time. The faculty of speech never returned. There would be a rumor that he was dead and prices would fall on the Stock Exchange; then a rumor that he wasn’t, and prices would rise again. The newspapers established a death watch in the private Galt station and kept reporters there day and night to flash the news away. To keep them from the house I had to promise them solemnly that I would send word down promptly if the fatality happened.
Mrs. Galt and Natalie watched alternately. One or the other sat at his bedside all the time. One evening about 8 o’clock I was sharing the vigil with Natalie when Galt opened his eyes. We were sitting on opposite sides of his bed. He looked from one of us to the other slowly, several times, and then fixed a wanting expression on me.
I knew what he wanted without asking. Natalie knew also. It concerned us deeply, uniting our lives, yet at that moment we were hardly conscious of ourselves. What thrilled us was the thought of something we should do for him, because he wanted it.
I put out my hand to her across the bed. She clasped it firmly.
“That is what you mean,” I said.
“Yes,” he answered.
A flood of recollection swept through me. I saw Natalie all the way back to girlhood, to that night of our first meeting in her father’s house. I could not remember when I had not loved her. I saw everything that had happened between us, saw it in sunlight, and wondered how I could have been so unaware. Trifling incidents, almost forgotten, became suddenly luminous, precious and significant. And this instant had been from the beginning appointed!
Natalie, still clasping my hand, leaned far over and gazed intently into his eyes.
“You want me to marry Coxey?” she asked, in a tone of caressing anxiety, which seemed wholly unconscious of me, almost excluding.
“Yes,” he answered, repeating it several times, if that may be understood. The answer lingered in his eyes. Then they closed, slowly, as ponderous gates swing to, against his utmost will, and they never opened again.
He was buried in the side of Moonstool. All of his great enemies came to assist at the obsequies. Bullguard was one of the pallbearers.
After the funeral the family returned to the Fifth Avenue house. Though I took up a permanent abode elsewhere, my apartment was still there, and I came and went almost as one of the household.
The more I saw of Natalie the stranger and more distant she was. Her behavior was incomprehensible. She was friendly, often tender, always solicitous, but kept a wall of constraint between us. She positively refused to talk of our engagement, and came to the point where she denied there was any such thing. When I proposed to cure that difficulty in a very obvious way she took refuge in fits of perverse and wilful unreasonableness. She would spend a whole evening in some inaccessible mood and become herself only for an instant at the last. Suddenly they resolved to travel. She persuaded her mother to it.
“Then we won’t see Coxey for a long, long time,” she said, one evening at dinner; “and maybe he will miss us.”
They went around the world. Her letters were friendly, sprightly, teasing, and very unsatisfactory. She would not be serious.
At last Galt’s posthumous affairs began to settle, so that I could leave them, and I immediately set out in a westerly direction, intending to meet Mrs. Galt and Natalie in the Orient on surprise. I missed them in China, because they had revised their schedule and gone to Japan. In Japan I missed them again because they were suddenly homesick and cut their sojourn short. We crossed the Pacific a week apart. They stopped only four days in San Francisco, so I missed them there. Then I telegraphed Natalie what I had been doing. Four months had passed without a word of news between us.
On arriving in New York I went directly to the Fifth Avenue house. As I rang the bell a feeling of desolation assailed me. The absurd thought rose that she somehow knew of my pursuit and had purposely defeated it.
She was downstairs, sitting alone before the fireplace in the reception hall, reading. She dropped her book and ran toward me, rather at me, slid the last ten feet of it with her head down, her arms flung wide, and welcomed me with a hearty hug.
“Are we?” I asked, holding her.
“Coxey, silly dear! All this time we have been.”
Transcriber’s Note:Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.
Transcriber’s Note:Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.