THE FUNK IDOL
i
“Where is one-hundred-and-thirty Broadway?” I asked the hotel porter
the next morning.
“One-hundred-and-thirty Broadway? That’s in Wall Street,” he said.
“Take the elevated down town and get off at Rector Street.”
That was literal. Broadway is in Wall Street, as may be explained.
Wall street proper,--street with a small _s_,--is a thoroughfare.
Wall Street in another way of speaking,--street with a big _S_,--is a
district, the money district, eight blocks deep by three blocks wide
by anything from five to thirty stories high. It is bounded on the
north by jewelry, on the northeast by leather, on the east by sugar
and coffee, on the south by cotton, on the southwest by shipping and
on the west by Greek lace, ship chandlery and Trinity churchyard. It
grew that way. The Wall Street station of the elevated railroad is at
Rector Street, and Rector Street is a hand-wide thoroughfare running
uphill to Broadway under the south wall of Trinity graveyard. When you
are half way up you begin to see over the top of the wall, rising to
it gradually, and the first two things you see are the tombstones of
Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton. A few steps more and you are in
Broadway. Rector Street ends there.
Trinity church is on the west side of Broadway, thirty paces to your
left. Standing with your back to Trinity church door you look straight
down Wall street, with a little _s_. All of this is Wall Street with a
big _S_. You are in the midst of it.
If it is nine-thirty or a quarter to ten you may see here and there
in the preoccupied throng groups of three bearing wealth,--in each
case two men with a box carried between them and a third walking close
behind with one hand resting lightly upon something in his outer
pocket. These are the trusted clerks of big banking and brokerage
houses. They go each morning to fetch the strong box from one of
the great Wall Street safety deposit vaults. At four o’clock they
take it back for the night. The third man walking behind is probably
unnecessary. If the box were not too heavy one man unarmed might bear
it safely to and fro. Banditry,--that is to say, taking by force,--is
here unknown. There is a legend to account for this fact. It is
that the police keep a dead line around the money district which
thieves dare not cross. Every crook in the world is supposed to know
and respect the sacred taboo. It may be so, more or less. One need
not believe it whole. A much more probable explanation is what any
highwayman knows. He might make off with a dozen of those strong boxes
and then be no richer than he was before. They contain no money at
all, but stocks and bonds, numbered and registered, which represent
wealth reduced to an impalpable, theft-proof form. A railroad may lie
in one of those boxes. But if you ran away with the box you would have
neither the railroad nor anything you could turn into cash. The lost
stock and bond certificates would be cancelled and new ones issued in
their place; and after that anyone who tried to sell one of the stolen
certificates would be instantly arrested.
I walked a little way into Wall Street, somewhat in awe of it, almost
expecting to be noticed and challenged for trespassing. The atmosphere
was strange and inhospitable and the language unknown. Two men were
quarreling excitedly, one standing on the edge of the sidewalk, the
other down on the pavement. One seemed to be denouncing the government
for letting the country go bankrupt.
“It is busted,” he shrieked. “The United States Treasury is busted.”
The other at the same time spoke of the color, the shape, the bowels
and religion of men who were exporting gold to Europe. I could make
nothing of it whatever. Nobody else so much as glanced at them in
passing. Everybody seemed absent, oblivious and self-involved. When
two acquaintances met, or collided, there was a start of recognition
between them, as if they had first to recall themselves from afar.
Incessantly from within a great red brick building came a sound of
b-o-o-ing, cavernous and despairing. This place was the Stock Exchange
and the noise was that which brokers and speculators make when prices
are falling.
A few steps further down the street a dray stood backed against the
curb, receiving over its tailboard some kind of very heavy freight.
“Ickelheimer & Company--Bullion and Foreign Exchange,” was the legend
on the window; and what the men were bringing forth and loading on
the dray was pure silver, in pigs so large that two strong men could
carry only one. The work went on unguarded. People passed as if they
didn’t see it. Precious money metal flung around like pig iron! The
sight depressed me. I walked slowly back to Broadway feeling dazed and
apprehensive.
No. 130 Broadway was an office building. The executive offices of
the Great Midwestern Railroad occupied the entire sixth floor. Room
607, small and dim, without windows, was the general entrance where
people asked and waited. High-backed wooden benches stood against the
walls. The doors opening out of it were ground glass from the waist
up, lettered in black. The one to the left was lettered, “President,”
the one straight ahead, “Vice President-Secretary,” and the one to the
right, “Private.” In one corner of this room, at a very tiny desk, sat
a boy reading a book. He was just turning a page and couldn’t look up
until he had carried over; but he held out his hand with a pencil and
a small writing pad together, meaning that I should write my name, whom
I wished to see and why. I gave it back to him with my name and nothing
more.
“Your business, please,” he said, holding it out to me again.
I let it to him tactfully that my business was private. If necessary,
I could explain it to the president’s secretary. Might I see his
secretary first?
The boy put down his book and eyed me steadily.
“He left this morning.”
“The president?”
“His secretary.”
“Suddenly, perhaps?” I said.
He slowly nodded his head several times, still gazing at me.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Two weeks.”
“Do you care for it?”
Instead of answering he got up, took the name I had written on the pad,
and disappeared through the door to the left. Almost at once he stood
holding it open and beckoned me to enter.
First was a small ante-space, probably called his office by the private
secretary who had gone suddenly away. It was furnished with letter
filing cases, two chairs and a typewriter desk standing open and
littered with papers.
The president’s room immediately beyond was large and lighted by
windows, but desolate. The rug was shabby. The walls were hung with
maps and railroad scenes in photograph, their frames askew. At one
side against the wall was a long oak table; on it were ink and writing
materials, also some books and periodicals.
On the other side of the room a very large man sat writing at a small,
old-fashioned walnut desk with a green-covered floor that pulled out
and a solid curved top that opened up or closed down with a rotary
motion. That kind of furniture was even then out of style. It is now
extinct. It was too ugly to survive in the antique shops.
He went on writing for a minute or two, then turned slowly, looked me
through and put out his hand.
“I’m preparing a speech on your subject,” he said.
“Coxeyism?”
“Yes. Your reports were excellent,--very good, indeed.”
As he said this he turned to search for something on his desk.
It is an odd sensation to meet a notorious person at close range for
the first time, especially one who has been much caricatured in the
newspapers. There is an imaginary man to be got rid of surreptitiously
before the real one can be accepted. One feels somehow embarrassed
while this act is taking place, with an impulse to apologize for the
human fact of its being so much easier on hearsay to believe ill than
good of a fellow being whom you do not know.
This John J. Valentine was a person of much figure in the country.
He was the head of a family two generations removed from the uncouth
progenitor who founded its fortune in commerce, real estate and
transportation; therefore, he was an aristocrat. For many years he had
been president of the Great Midwestern Railroad. After his name in
the Directory of Directors was a long list of banks, corporations and
insurance companies. He made a great many authoritative speeches, which
were read in the economics classes of the universities, printed at
length in the newspapers and commented upon editorially. What he said
was news because he said it. He represented an immovable point of view,
the chief importance of which lay in the mere fact of its existence. He
spoke courageously and believingly for the vested rights of property.
However, he might have been all that he was and yet not a national
figure in the popular sense. For the essential element of contemporary
greatness he was indebted to the fact that his features gave themselves
remarkably to caricature. The newspaper cartoonists did the rest.
They had fixed him in the public mind’s eye as the symbol of railroad
capital.
There was in him or about him an alarming contradiction. The
explanation was too obvious to be comprehended all at once. It was
this: that his ponderable characteristics were massive, overt and rude,
such as one would not associate with a notable gentleness of manner;
and yet his manner was gentle to the point of delicacy and he seemed
remarkably to possess the gift of natural politeness. Physically he
was enormous in all proportions. The head was tall and the forehead
overhanging gave the profile a concave form. He had a roaring, windy
voice, made husky by long restraint; it issued powerfully from a cave
partly concealed by a dense fibrous mustache.
“Oh, here they are,” he said, producing my reports.
Turning them sheet by sheet he questioned me at length, desiring me to
be most explicit in my recollections as to the reactions of people to
Coxeyism. His knowledge of the country through which we had passed was
surprising. When we were at the end I said:
“I have talked with all sorts of people besides,--people in Washington,
on my way to New York, and here also. Nobody seems to know what is
wrong. Some say it’s the tariff. Others say it’s something that has
been done to money. Nearly everyone blames Wall Street more or less.
What is the matter? Why is labor unemployed?”
He passed his hand over his face, then leaned forward in his chair and
spoke slowly:
“Why are the seven-year locusts? Why do men have seasons of madness?
Who knows?”
After a pause, his thoughts absorbing him, he continued in a tone of
soliloquy.
The country was bewitched. The conglomerate American mind was
foolishly persuaded to a variety of wistful and unverified economic
notions,--that was to say, heresies, about such important matters as
money, capital, prices, debts. People were minding things they knew
nothing about and could never settle, and were neglecting meanwhile to
be industrious. This had happened before in the world. In the Middle
Ages Europe might have advanced, with consequences in this day not
easily to be imagined, but for the time and the energy of mind and body
which were utterly wasted in quest of holy grails and dialectical forms
of truth. So now in this magnificent New World, the resources of which
were unlimited, human progress had been arrested by silly Utopians who
distracted the mind with thoughts of unattainable things.
Take the railroads. With already the cheapest railroad transportation
in the world, people were clamoring for it to be made cheaper. Crazy
Populists were telling the farmers it ought to be free, like the air.
Prejudice against railroads was amazing, irrational and suicidal. All
profit in railroading had been taxed and regulated away. Incentive to
build new roads had been destroyed. If by a special design of the Lord
a railroad did seem to prosper the politicians pounced upon it and
either mulcted it secretly or held it forth to the public as a monster
that must be chained up with restrictive laws. Sometimes they practised
both these arts at once. Result: the nation’s transportation arteries
were strangling. No extension of the arterial system for an increasing
population was possible under these conditions. What would the sequel
be? Rome for all her sins might have endured if only she had developed
means of communication, namely, roads, in an adequate manner. It was
obvious and nobody saw it. Well, now he was trying to save people from
a repetition of that blunder. He was trying to make them see in time
that unless they allowed the railroads to prosper the great American
experiment was doomed.
I could not help thinking: people prophesy against Wall Street and Wall
Street prophesies against the people.
I was surprised that he gave me so much time until it occurred to me
that he was thinking out loud, still working on his speech.
He wished me to take my reports, which were merely field notes, and
pull them into form as an article on Coxeyism. He would procure
publication of it, in one of the monthly reviews perhaps, under his
name if I didn’t mind, and he could adopt it whole, or under my own. It
didn’t matter which.
“An unhappy incident has just occurred in my office,” he said. “My
private secretary had to be sent away suddenly. You might work in his
room out there if it’s comfortable.”
I sat down to the task at once, in the ante-room, at the vacant desk.
Half an hour later, passing out, he dropped me word of where he was
going and when he might be expected back, in case anyone should ask.
In a little while the boy did ask. Either he had not been at his place
when the president passed out, or else the president forgot to tell
him, his habit being to leave word at the desk where I sat. Also the
telephone rang several times and as there was no one else to do it I
answered.
This ambiguous arrangement continued, the president coming and going,
leaving me always informed of his movements and asking me to be so good
as to say this or that to persons who should call up on the telephone.
It took two days to finish the article. He conceived a liking for my
style of writing and asked me to edit and touch up a manuscript that
had been giving him some trouble. Then it was to go over the proofs of
a monograph he had in the printer’s hands.
On the fifth day, about 4 o’clock, I was at work on these proofs and
the president was in his office alone with the door closed when someone
came in from the waiting room unannounced. I did not look up. Whoever
it was stood looking at my back, then moved a little to one side to
get an angular view, and a voice I recognized but could not instantly
identify addressed me.
“Hello, Coxey!”
“Hello,” I said, looking round. It was the irritating man of the
ferryboat incident. He sat down and ogled me offensively.
“Are you the new private secretary?”
“I don’t know what I am,” I said.
“But you’re working for Jeremiah,” he said, jerking a glance at the
proofs. “Oh, o-o-o! Toot-toot!” He was suddenly amused and shrewd. “You
must be the man who sent him those reports on the march of Coxey’s
Army. That’s it. Very fine reports they were. Most excellent nonsense.
My name is Galt--Henry M. Galt.”
“I’m pleased to meet you again,” I said, giving him my name in return.
“And old jobbernowl hasn’t hired you yet!” he said. “I’ll see about it.”
With that he got up abruptly and bolted into the president’s office,
closing the door behind him. I hated him intensely, partly I suppose
because unconsciously I transferred to him the feeling of humiliation
and anger produced in me by that look from the girl who was with him on
the ferryboat. It all came over me again.
Half an hour later, as he was going out, he said: “All right, Coxey.
You’ll be here for some time.”
The last thing the president did that day was to have me in his office
for a long, earnest conversation. He required a private secretary.
Several candidates had failed. What he needed was not a stenographer or
a filing clerk. That kind of service could be had from the back office.
He needed someone who could assist in a larger way, especially someone
who could write, as I could. He had looked me up. The recommendations
were satisfactory. He knew the college from which I came and it was
sound. In short, would I take the job at $200 a month.
“I must tell you,” he said, “there is no future in the railroad
business, no career for a young man. A third of the railway mileage of
the country is bankrupt. God only knows if even this railroad can stand
up. But you will get some valuable experience, and if at any time you
wish to go back to newspaper work I’ll undertake to get you a place in
New York no worse than the one you leave.”
I protested that I knew almost nothing of economics and finance.
“All the better,” he said. “You have nothing unsound to get rid of.
I’ll teach you by the short cuts. Two books, if you will read them
hard, will give you the whole groundwork.”
I accepted.
ii
The next morning Mr. Valentine presented me to the company secretary,
Jay C. Harbinger, and desired him to introduce me around the shop.
“This way,” said Harbinger, taking me in hand with an air of deep,
impersonal courtesy. He stepped ahead at each door, opened it, held
it, and bowed me through. His attitude of deference was subtly yet
unmistakably exaggerated. He was a lean, tall, efficient man, full of
sudden gestures, who hated his work and did it well, and sublimated the
petty irritations of his position in the free expression of violent
private judgments.
We stopped first in his office. It was a small room containing two very
old desks with swivel chairs, an extra wooden chair at the end of each
desk for visitors, a letter squeeze and hundreds of box letter files
in tiers to the ceiling, with a step ladder for reaching the top rows.
There was that smell of damp dust which lingers in a place after the
floor has been sprinkled and swept.
“That’s the vice-president’s desk,” said Harbinger, indicating the
other as he sat down at his own, his hands beneath him, and began to
rock. “He’s never here,” he added, swinging once all around and facing
me again. He evidently couldn’t be still. The linoleum was worn through
under his restless feet. “What brings you into this business?” he asked.
“Accident,” I said.
“It gets you in but never out,” he said. “It got me in thirty years
ago.... Are you interested in mechanical things?”
“Like what?” I asked.
Jerking open a drawer he brought forth a small object which I
recognized as a dating device. He showed me how easily it could be
set to stamp any date up to the year 2000. This was the tenth model.
He had been working on it for years. It would be perfect now but for
the stupidity of the model-maker who had omitted an important detail.
The next problem was how to get it on the market. He was waiting for
estimates on the manufacture of the first 500. Perhaps it would be
adopted in the offices of the Great Midwestern. That would help. The
president had promised to consider it. As he talked he filled a sheet
of paper with dates. Then he handed it to me. I concealed the fact that
it did not impress me wonderfully as an invention; also the sympathetic
twinge I felt. For one could see that he was counting on this absurd
thing to _get him out_. It symbolized some secret weakness in his
character. At the same moment I began to feel depressed with my job.
“Well,” he said, putting it back and slamming the drawer, “there’s
nothing more to see here. This way, please.”
His official manner was resumed like a garment.
In the next room were two motionless men with their backs to each
other, keeping a perfunctory, low-spirited tryst with an enormous iron
safe.
“Our treasurer, John Harrier,” said Harbinger, introducing me to the
first one,--a slight, shy man, almost bald, with a thick, close-growing
mustache darker than his hair. He removed his glasses, wiped them, and
sat looking at us without a word. There was no business before him, no
sign of occupation whatever, and there seemed nothing to say.
“A very hearty lunch,” I remarked, hysterically, calling attention to a
neat pile of pasteboard boxes on top of the desk. Each box was stamped
in big red letters: “Fresh eggs. 1 doz.” He went on wiping his glasses
in gloomy silence.
“Mr. Harrier lives in New Jersey and keeps a few chickens,” said
Harbinger. “He lets us have eggs. If you keep house ... are you
married, though?”
“No,” I said.
The treasurer put on his glasses and was turning his shoulder to us
when I extended my hand. He shook it with unexpected friendliness.
The other man was Fred Minus, the auditor, a very obese and sociable
person of the sensitive type, alert and naïve in his reactions.
“Nice fellows, those, when you know them a bit,” said Harbinger as
we closed the door behind us and stood for a moment surveying a very
large room which might be called the innermost premises of a railroad’s
executive organization. There were perhaps twenty clerks standing or
sitting on stools at high desks, not counting the cashier and two
assistants in a wire cage, which contained also a safe. The bare
floor was worn in pathways. Everything had an air of hallowed age and
honorable use, even the people, all save one, a magnificent person who
rose and came to meet us. He was introduced as Ivy Handbow, the chief
clerk. He was under thirty-five, full of rosy health, with an unmarried
look, whose only vice, at a guess, was clothes. He wore them with
natural art, believing in them, and although he was conscious of their
effect one could not help liking him because he insisted upon it so
pleasantly.
At the furthermost corner of the room was the transfer department.
That is the place where the company’s share certificates, after
having changed hands on the Stock Exchange, come to be transferred
from the names of the old to the names of the new owners. Five clerks
were working here at high pressure. To my remark that it seemed the
busiest spot,--I had almost said the only busy spot,--in the whole
organization, Harbinger replied: “Our stock has recently been very
active. With a large list of stockholders--we have more than ten
thousand--there is a constant come and go, old stockholders selling
out and new ones taking their places. Then all of a sudden, for why
nobody knows, the sellers become numerous and in their anxiety to find
buyers they unfortunately attract speculators who run in between seller
and buyer, create a great uproar, and take advantage of both. That is
what has been happening in the last few days. This is the result. Our
transfer office is swamped.”
He began to show me the routine. We took at random a certificate for
one thousand shares that had just come in and followed it through
several hands to the clerk whose task was to cancel it and make out
another certificate in the new owner’s name. At this point Harbinger
saw something that caused him to stop, forget what he was saying and
utter a grunt of surprise. I could not help seeing that what had
caught his attention was the name that unwound itself from the transfer
clerk’s pen. Harbinger regarded it thoughtfully until it disappeared
from view, overlaid by others; and when he became again aware of me it
was to say: “Well, we’ve been to the end of the shop. There’s nothing
more to see.”
The name that had arrested his attention was Henry M. Galt.
iii
At lunch time Harbinger asked me to go out with him. On our way we
overtook the treasurer and auditor, who joined us without words. We
were a strange party of four,--tall discontent, bald gloom, lonely
obesity and middling innocence. Two and two we walked down Broadway to
the top of Wall Street, turned into it and almost immediately turned
out of it again into New Street, a narrow little thoroughfare which
serves the Stock Exchange as a back alley. The air was distressed
with that frightful, destructive b-oo-o-o-o-ing which attends falling
prices. It seemed to issue not only from the windows and doors of the
great red building but from all its crevices and through the pores of
the bricks.
“They are whaling us in there to-day,” said Harbinger over his shoulder.
“Nine,” said John Harrier. It was the first word I had heard him utter,
and it surprised me that the sound was definite and positive.
“Are you talking about Great Midwestern Railroad stock?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Harbinger, “John says it sold at nine this morning. That is
the lowest price in all the company’s history. Every few days there’s
a rumor on the Stock Exchange that we are busted, as so many other
railroads are, and then the speculators, as I told you, create so much
uproar and confusion that no legitimate buyer can find a legitimate
seller, but all must do business with the speculator, who plays
upon their emotions in the primitive manner by means of terrifying
sounds and horrible grimaces. Hear him! He has also a strange power
of simulation. He adds to the fears of the seller when the seller is
already fearful, and to the anxieties of the buyer when the buyer is
already impatient, making one to part with his stock for less than it’s
worth and the other to pay for it more than he should.”
Eating was at Robins’. The advantage of being four was that we could
occupy either a whole table against the wall opposite the bar or one
of the stalls at the end. As there was neither stall nor table free we
leaned against the bar and waited. We appeared to be well known. Three
waiters called to Harbinger by name and signalled in pantomime over the
heads of the persons in possession how soon this place or that would be
surrendered. While we stood there many other customers passed us and
disappeared down three steps into a larger room beyond. “Nobody ever
goes down there,” said Harbinger, seeing that I noticed the drift of
traffic. “It’s gloomy and the food isn’t so good.” The food all came
from one kitchen, as you could see; but as for its being more cheerful
here than in the lower room that was obviously true because of the
brilliantly lighted bar. And cheerfulness was something our party could
stand a great deal of, I was thinking. Harbinger had left himself in
a temper and was now silent. The other two were lumpish. Presently we
got a stall and sat there in torpid seclusion. The enormous surrounding
clatter of chairs, feet, doors, chinaware and voices touched us not at
all. We were as remote as if we existed in another dimension. Lunch
was procured without one unnecessary vocal sound. Not only was there
no conversation among us; there was no feeling or intuition of thought
taking place. I was obliged to believe either that I was a dead weight
upon them or that it was their habit to make an odious rite of lunch.
In one case I couldn’t help it; in the other I shouldn’t have been
asked. In either case a little civility might have saved the taste of
the food. When there is no possibility of making matters worse than
they are one becomes reckless.
“Who is Henry M. Galt?” I asked suddenly, addressing the question to
the three of them collectively. I expected it to produce some effect,
possibly a strange effect; yet I was surprised at their reactions to
the sound of the name. It was as if I had spilled a family taboo.
Unconsciously gestures of anxiety went around the table. For several
minutes no one spoke, apparently because no one could think just what
to say.
“He’s a speculator,” said Harbinger. “Have you met him?--but of course
you have.”
“The kind of speculator who comes between buyer and seller and harries
the market, as you were telling?” I asked.
“He has several characters,” said Harbinger. “He is a member of
the Stock Exchange, professional speculator, floor trader, broker,
broker’s broker, private counsellor, tipster, gray bird of mystery. An
offensive, insulting man. He spends a good deal of time in our office.”
“Why does he do that?”
“He transacts the company’s business on the Stock Exchange, which isn’t
much. I believe he does something in that way also for the president
who, as you know, is a man of large affairs.”
“He seems to have a good deal of influence with the president,” I said.
There was no answer. Harbinger looked uncomfortable.
“But there’s one thing to be said for him,” I continued. “He believes
in the Great Midwestern Railroad. He is buying its shares.”
Harbinger alone understood what I meant. “It’s true,” he said, speaking
to the other two. “Stock is being transferred to his name.” It was the
secretary’s business to know this. Harrier and Minus were at first
incredulous and then thoughtful. “But you cannot know for sure,”
Harbinger added. “That kind of man never does the same thing with both
hands at once. He may be buying the stock in his own name for purposes
of record and selling it anonymously at the same time.”
While listening to Harbinger I had been watching John Harrier, and now
I addressed him pointedly.
“What do you think of this Henry Galt?”
His reply was prompt and unexpected, delivered with no trace of emotion.
“He knows more about the G. M. railroad than its own president knows.”
“John! I never heard you say that before,” said Harbinger.
Harrier said it again, exactly as before. And there the subject stuck,
head on.
We returned by the way we had come, passing the rear of the Stock
Exchange again. At the members’ entrance people to the number of thirty
or forty were standing in a hollow group with the air of meaning to be
entertained by something that was about to happen. We stopped.
“What is it?” I asked.
Harbinger pushed me through the rind to the hollow center of the
crowd and pointed downward at some blades of grass growing against
the curbstone. The sight caused nothing to click in my brain. For an
instant I thought it might be a personal hoax. It couldn’t be that,
however, with so many people participating. I was beginning to feel
silly when the crowd cheered respectfully and parted at one side to
admit a man with a sprinkling pot. He watered those blades of grass in
an absent, philosophical manner, apparently deaf to the ironic words of
praise and encouragement hurled at him by the spectators, and retired
with dignity. I watched him disappear through an opposite doorway. The
crowd instantly vanished. The four of us stood alone in the middle of
New Street.
“Grass growing at the door of the New York Stock Exchange,” said
Harbinger, grinning warily as one does at a joke that is both bad and
irresistible. The origin of the grass was obvious. An untidy horse had
been fed at that spot from a nose bag and some of the oats that were
spilled had sprouted in a few ounces of silt gathered in a crevice at
the base of the curbstone.
The incident gave me a morose turn of thought. As a jest it was
pitiable. What had happened to people to abase their faith in
themselves and in each other? Simple believing seemed everywhere
bankrupt. Nobody outside of it believed in Wall Street. That you might
understand. But here was Wall Street nurturing in fun a symbol of
its own decay, and by this sign not believing in itself. Harbinger
denounced the Stock Exchange speculators who depressed the price of
Great Midwestern shares and circulated rumors damaging the railroad’s
credit. But did Harbinger himself believe in Great Midwestern? No.
The Great Midwestern did not believe in itself. Its own president
did not believe in it. He was busily advertising his disbelief in the
whole railroad business. Why had he no faith in the railroad business?
Because people had power over railroads and he disbelieved in people.
Therefore, people disbelieved in him.
I was saying to myself that I had yet to meet a man with downright
faith in anything when I thought of Galt. He believed in the country. I
remembered vividly what he said about it on the ferryboat. It was rich
and nobody would believe it. He believed also in Great Midwestern, for
he was buying the stock in the face of those ugly rumors.
The fact of this one man’s solitary believing seemed very remarkable
to me at that instant. In the perspectives of times and achievement it
became colossal.
iv
The president was in Chicago on two errands. One was to hold a solemn
quarterly conference with the operating officials on the ground. There
was supposed to be much merit in having it take place on the ground.
The first time I heard the locution it made me think of Indian chiefs
debating around a camp fire. The executive offices in New York were
more than a thousand miles from the Great Midwestern’s first rail’s
end. It does not matter so much where a railway’s brains are; but its
other organs must remain where they naturally belong, and that is
why all the operating departments were in Chicago. Four times a year
the brains were present in the physical sense. At all other times the
operating officials either brought their problems to New York, solved
them on the spot, or put them in a pigeon hole to await the next
conference.
His other errand was to deliver a speech, entitled, “Lynching the
Railroads,” at a manufacturers’ banquet. On the plane of large ideas
the great Valentine mind was explicit; elsewhere it was vague and
liable. Although this was the first time I had been left alone with the
New York office for more than one day my instructions were very dim. At
the last moment the president said: “You will know what to do. Use your
own judgment. Open everything that comes in. Tell Mr. Harbinger to be
very careful about the earnings. They got out again last week.”
He was referring to the private weekly statement of gross and net
revenues compiled jointly by the secretary and treasurer and delivered
by Harbinger’s own hand to the president. This exhibit was not for
publication like the monthly statement; it was a special sounding for
the information of the executive, or a kind of statistical cheese auger
by means of which the trained sense could sample the state of business.
The figures were supposed to be jealously guarded. On no account were
they to go out of the office, save by direct order of the president.
The crime of my predecessor had been to let them fall regularly into
the hands of certain Stock Exchange speculators.
Knowing all this, everybody knowing it, I wondered at Harbinger when
late one evening he brought the statement to my desk, saying: “Here are
the weekly figures. You take them. It’s better to keep them all in one
place while the chief is away. I haven’t even a copy.”
I was not surprised that he should be trying to rid himself of a
distasteful responsibility. But the act of avoidance was in itself
puerile. Suppose there was another leak. He could say that he had put
the statement out of his keeping into mine; he could say he had not
kept a copy; but could he expect anyone to believe he had erased them
from his mind? It irritated me. I kept thinking about it that night. I
concluded there was something I did not understand; and there was.
As I was opening my desk the next morning Galt came in and without a
word or sign of salutation addressed me summarily.
“Harbinger says you have the earnings.”
“The weekly earnings?” I asked.
“The weekly earnings,” he repeated after me, trying to mimic my voice
and manner. He would have been ridiculous except that he was angry, and
anger was an emotion that seemed curiously to enlarge him. So here was
the explanation of Harbinger’s behavior. He had expected Galt to ask
him for the figures and he meant to be able to say that he didn’t have
them.
We regarded each other steadily.
“Well?” I said.
“You apparently don’t know that I get them,” he said, his anger
beginning to rise against me.
“No, I don’t know it,” I said. “Does Mr. Harbinger know?”
This reference to Harbinger, which he understood to be sarcastic,
completed his rage.
“Do I get them?” he asked, bulging at me in a menacing manner.
“Sorry,” I said. “There’s no hole for you in my instructions.”
At that he began to pass in front of me, with long, stealthy steps,
his shoulders crouched, his hands in his pockets, his head low and
cocked right and then left as he turned and passed again, all the while
looking at me fixedly with a preposterous, maleficent glare. The effect
was so ludicrous that I laughed. And then for only so long as it takes
to see a flashing thing there was a look in his eyes that made me
shudder. Suddenly he went out, slamming the door so hard that I held my
breath for the sound of falling glass.
As the pantomime reconstructed itself in reflection it assumed a comic
aspect. No, it couldn’t have been serious. I was almost persuaded
it had been a bit of undignified acting, an absurd though harmless
way of working off a fit of temper, when I recalled that look and
shuddered again. Once before I had seen that expression in the eyes of
a malevolent hunchback. It was the look of a giant tragically trapped
in a puny body. Galt was a small man, weighing less than one hundred
pounds, with a fretful, nagging body.
Before lunch the president called me on the G. M.’s private telegraph
wire. He stood at the key in the Chicago office and I stood at the
key in the New York office, and we conversed through the operators
without written messages. Was everything all right? he asked me. Yes,
everything was all right. There was nothing urgent? he asked. No, there
was nothing urgent, I said. Then, as if he had but chanced to think of
it, he said: “I forgot to tell you. It’s all right for Mr. Galt to have
the earnings.”
His anxiety to seem casual about it betrayed the fact that he had
called me expressly to say that Galt should have the earnings; and
there was no doubt in my thoughts that Galt since leaving me had been
in communication with my chief by telegraph. What an amazing to-do!
If my deductions were true, then I might expect to be presently favored
with another visit. So I was. He came in about 2 o’clock and sat down
at the end of my desk without speaking. I did not speak either, but
handed him the statement of earnings. He crumpled the paper in his hand
and dropped it in the waste basket. I was sure he hadn’t looked at it.
“Coxey,” he said, “promise never again to laugh at me like that....
We’ve got a long way to go ... up and down grade ... but promise
whatever happens never to do that again.”
Somehow I was not surprised. For a little time we sat looking at each
other.
“All right,” I said, holding out my hand to him. It was an irrational
experience. We shook hands in the veiled, mysterious manner of boys
sealing a life-time compact for high adventure, no more words either
necessary or feasible.
But with Harbinger some further conversation seemed appropriate. So
later I said to him.
“Why are you so afraid of Galt?”
“You do ask some very extraordinary questions?”
“I have a right to ask this one,” I said, “seeing that you put it upon
me to refuse him the earnings. You were afraid to refuse him. Isn’t
that why you gave the figures to me?”
“You will have to think what you like of my motives,” he said, with
rather fine dignity, though at the same time turning red. “I don’t see
why you shouldn’t learn yours as we’ve had to learn ours,” he added.
“My what?”
“That’s all,” he said, twirling about in his swivel chair and avoiding
my regard.
“Why do you dislike him?”
“It isn’t that I dislike him,” he retorted, beginning to lose his
temper a bit. “The thing of it is I don’t know how to treat him. He
has no authority here that one can understand, get hold of, or openly
respect. Yet there are times when you might think he owned the whole
lot of us.”
“How did this come about?”
“Gradually,” he said. “Or, ... at least ... it was only about a year
ago that he began to have the run of the place. Before that we knew him
merely as a broker who made a specialty of dealing in Great Midwestern
securities. From dealing so much in our securities he came to have a
personal curiosity about the property. That’s what he said. So he began
to pry into things, wanting information about this and that, some of it
very private, and when we asked the president about it he said, ‘Oh,
give him anything but the safe.’ Lately he’s been spending so much time
around here that I wonder how he makes a living. He knows too much
about the company. You heard John Harrier. He knows as much about our
mortgages, indentures, leases and records as I know, and that’s my end
of the business. He’s made me look up facts I never heard of before.
He’s been all over the road, looking at it with a microscope. I do
believe he knows generally more about the Great Midwestern than any
other person living. Why? Tell me why?”
“He and the president are old friends, did you say?”
He paused for effect and said: “Henry Galt has only one friend in the
world. That’s himself. Ask anybody who knows him in Wall Street. He’s
been around here twenty years.”
“Maybe it’s his extensive knowledge of the property that gives him his
influence with the president,” I suggested.
Harbinger came forward with a lurch, rested his elbows on his desk,
hung his chin over his double fist and stared at me close up.
“Maybe!” he said.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked. He was aching to tell me what all
of this had been leading up to, and yet the saying of it was inhibited.
“I’m not a superstitious man,” he said, speaking with effort. “There’s
a natural reason for everything if you know what it is.... It’s very
strange.”
“What’s strange?”
“He knows both what is and what isn’t.”
“Galt does?”
He nodded and at the same time implored me by gesture not to let my
voice rise. “May be anywhere around ... in the next room,” he said,
hardly above a whisper. “Yes. He knows things that haven’t happened. If
there’s such a gift as pre-vision he has it.”
“If that were true,” I objected, “he would have all the money in the
world.”
“Just the same it’s true,” said Harbinger, rising and reaching for his
coat. He looked at me a little askance, doubtless with misgivings as to
the propriety of having talked so much.