THE COMBAT
i
Meanwhile Galt’s enemies had been drawing together secretly. Hatred,
fear and envy resolved all other emotions. Men who had nothing else in
common were joined in a conspiracy to destroy him. The leviathans of
this deep move slowly and take their time. Besides, it was a fearsome
undertaking. There was bound to be a terrific struggle. One false move
and the dragon would escape.
The plan was to attack him from two sides at once.
Several of the railroad properties acquired by the Great Midwestern
were in some sense competitive,--though Galt had not bought them
primarily for that reason,--and as the law was never clear as to how
far the merging of separate railroads might go, it would be possible
to attack the Galt system under the Anti-Trust Act. If the government
could be moved to do this and if then at the same time his Wall Street
enemies concertedly attacked his credit his downfall might be foretold.
This plan required elaborate preparation. The government could not be
directly solicited to act. It would have to be moved by suggestion, and
with such finesse as to conceal the fact that it was being influenced
at all, elsewise than by its own convictions of right. There are those
who know how to effect these Machiavellian results. Intrigue is still
man’s sovereign art. That is why he makes so much of politics.
Mrs. Valentine, pursuing vengeance in her own way, had made Galt’s name
anathema throughout her precious principality. If you were anybody at
all, or aspired to be, you were obliged to think and speak ill of him,
for he represented vulgarity raised by its own audacity to a wicked
and sinister eminence, if he had been born so one could understand
it, she said. But he knew better. That made it all the worse. He had
betrayed the decencies. His one passion was to amass wealth. Those who
had helped him to rise he trampled down. He made his money dishonestly.
A Stock Exchange gambler with a Napoleonic obsession! Well, she
invariably said at the end, his time would come and then people would
see what she meant.
Her own power she employed in a reckless manner. She visited disfavor
upon those who were lukewarm in malignity, going so far as to make a
scene with Lord Porteous, for that he dared to speak in defense of the
monster. She took in people whose only recommendation was zealotry in
her cause. Her subjects going to and fro carried the evangel to other
realms, especially to official society in Washington, which heard in
this way every scandalous thing Galt had ever said about politicians in
power.
The extent and character of her information could be explained only
on the assumption that somewhere in our organization, probably on the
board of directors, was a masked enemy who continually gave Galt up
to Valentine. He had not disappeared from the field of action. All
this time he was working in the background with a single passion,--a
righteous one, as he believed,--which was to assist in the overthrow of
Galt. It was natural that he should join the conspirators. He brought
them much information; he had political resources and access to the
means of publicity.
A fortuitous time arrived. For several years the public, now restored
to high prosperity, observed with interest, awe, even with pride the
appearance of those vast anonymous shapes which capital by a headlong
impulse had been raising up to control production and transportation.
Mergers, combines, trusts,--they came in endless succession. Hardly a
day passed without a new sensation in phantasmic millions. People were
seized with a gambling mania. Each day promoters threw an enormous
mass of new and unseasoned securities upon the market, and they were
frantically bought, as if the supply were in imminent danger of
failing. Astonishing excesses were committed. The Stock Exchange was
overwhelmed. For many weeks the lights never went out in Wall Street
because clerks worked all day and all night to keep the brokers’ books
straight.
The cauldron boiled over badly at last, and there was a silly panic,
more theatrical than serious. It served, however, to break a dream
and awaken the critical faculty. The public all at once became deeply
alarmed. There arose a great clamor about trusts. Those shapes which
had been viewed with pride, as symbols of the nation’s progress and
strength, were now perceived in the light of fear.
Radical thought had been held in disesteem since the collapse of
the Soft Money Plague. Here was a new bogey. Trusts were human evil
objectified. They were swallowing the country up. In a little while all
business would be in their hands. There would come to be only two kinds
of people,--those few who owned the trusts and the many who worked for
them, and freedom would perish in the land. Something would have to
be done about it. Why had nothing been done? Were the trusts already
more powerful than the state? Suddenly the trust vs. the state was
the paramount political issue. There was an onset of books, essays,
speeches, magazine and newspaper articles. Sense and folly, wisdom
and demagoguery were hopelessly entangled. This kind of outburst is
characteristic of a roaring, busy democracy, whose interest in its
collective self is spasmodic and hysterical. The horse is stolen before
anybody thinks of minding the barn.
Gradually the force of this anti-trust feeling, baffled by the
complexity of the subject and seeking all the more for that reason a
personal victim, began to focus upon Galt. You could see it taking
place. The Galt Railroad System, formerly treated with respect and
wonder, now was represented to be an octopus, oppressive, arrogant,
holding power of life and death over helpless communities.
And all the time there were men at Washington who whispered into the
official ear: “Of course a lot of this outcry is senseless. There are
good trusts and bad trusts. Most of them have the economic welfare
of the country at heart and are willing to submit to any reasonable
regulation. The public is undiscriminating. Its mind becomes fixed on
what is bad. It happens to be fixed on this Galt Railroad Trust. Well,
as to that, we must say there is reason for the public’s prejudice.
You would find very few even in Wall Street to defend his methods. The
danger is that unless the evils justly complained of are torn away
by those who understand how to do it our entire structure will be
destroyed in a fit of popular passion.”
Galt was warned of what was going on at Washington; but he was so
contemptuous of politics and so sure of his own way that he sneered.
Who knew what the law was? It had never been construed. The legality of
his acts had been attended to by the most eminent counsel, including
a former Attorney General of the United States. What could happen to
him that wasn’t just as likely to happen to everybody else? He had only
done what everyone was doing, only better, more of it, and perhaps to
greater profit. If he was vulnerable, then so were all the others who
had combined lesser into greater things, and they would have to find
a way out together. No wealth would be destroyed. And so he reasoned
himself into a state of indifference.
He greatly underestimated the force of public opinion. He knew nothing
about it, for it had never touched him really. Mass psychology in Wall
Street he understood perfectly. Social and political phenomena he did
not comprehend at all.
One day Great Midwestern stock turned suddenly very weak, falling from
220 to 210 in half an hour. He watched it, annoyed and frowning, and
sent for Mordecai, who could not explain it. That afternoon news came
that the minority stockholders of the Orient & Pacific had brought a
suit in equity against the Great Midwestern, alleging that Galt, by
arbitrary exercise of the power of a majority stockholder, had reduced
the Orient & Pacific to a state of utter subservience, had thereby
destroyed its independent and competitive value, and had mulcted it
heavily for the benefit of the Great Midwestern’s treasury. This, they
represented, was a grievous injury to them as minority stockholders and
also contrary to public interest.
That old Orient & Pacific sore had never healed. The bankers who
controlled the road by sacred right for many years before Galt
snatched it out of their hands had all this time ominously retained
a minority interest in the property. Galt did intend from the
beginning to make the Orient & Pacific wholly subordinate to the Great
Midwestern. It was an essential part of his plan. Therefore minority
stockholders, in good faith, would have had a proper grievance. But
these were not minority stockholders in good faith. They were private
bankers, biding their time to take revenge. Galt had been willing at
any time to buy them out handsomely; they wouldn’t sell because the
minority interest was a weapon which some day they would be able to use
against him.
Although the name never appeared in the proceedings, dummies having
been put forward to act as complainants in the case, everybody knew
that Bullguard & Co. inspired the suit. They were the bankers who owned
the minority interest in Orient & Pacific shares. Everybody knew,
too, that they bore Galt an implacable enmity. What nobody knew until
afterward was that the conspiracy to destroy Galt was organized by
Jerome Bullguard himself.
He was a man of tremendous character. His authority in Wall Street
was pontifical. Men accepted it as a natural fact. Until the rise
of Mordecai & Co., under Galt’s ægis, his house occupied a place of
solitary eminence. Its traditions were fixed. Their consequences were
astronomical. Bullguard was the house. His partners were insignificant,
not actually if you took them as individuals, but relatively,
in contrast with him. His imperious will he imposed upon men and
events,--upon men by force of a personality that inspired dread and
obedience, and upon events by the dynamic quality of his intelligence.
His mind seemed to act in an omnipotent manner with no effort whatever.
His sanctions and influence pervaded the whole scheme of things, yet
he himself was as remote as a Japanese emperor. A good deal of the awe
that surrounded him was owing to the fact that he worked invisibly. The
hand that shaped the thunderbolts was almost never seen. There was a
saying in Wall Street that his name appeared nowhere but over the door
of his banking house. In a community where men must be lynx-eyed and
seven-sensed, able to see the unseeable and deduce the unknowable, his
objects were so elaborately concealed that nobody ever knew for sure
what he was doing until it was done, and then it couldn’t be proved,
for he would have had perhaps no actual contact with it at any point.
There were times when he held the stock market in his two hands, doing
with it as he pleased, yet never could anyone say, “He is here,” or
“There he is.”
Bullguard’s attitude toward Galt was natural, quite fair and regular
according to the law of conquest. Galt was an invader, a financial
Attila, who had followed the conqueror’s star to that place at which
the issue is joined for all or none. Nothing short of supremacy would
satisfy him. Therefore, he should fight for it. Did he think the crown
might be surrendered peaceably?
Galt perfectly understood this philosophy of combat. He would not have
wished it otherwise. Fighting he loved. His fight with Valentine,
because it was petty, had been personal in spite of him. His contest
with Bullguard was impersonal and epic, a meeting of champions in the
heroic sense.
The Orient & Pacific suit was but the opening of a barrage. An
important stockholder in the Security Life Insurance Company, which
was one of the capital reservoirs Galt had got control of, brought
suit to compel him to take back all the Great Midwestern stocks and
bonds owned by that institution, on the ground that as a member of its
finance committee he had improperly influenced it to invest its funds
in securities in which he was interested as a seller. The purpose
of this suit was three-fold: firstly, to advertise the fact that he
dominated the fiscal policies of the Security Life Insurance Company;
secondly, to create the suspicion that his motive in gaining control
of institutions in which people kept their savings was to unload his
stocks and bonds upon them; thirdly, to cast discredit upon Great
Midwestern securities as investments.
It produced an enormous popular sensation. Galt was denounced and
caricatured bitterly in the newspapers. One cartoon, with a caption,
“The Milkman,” represented the Security Life as a cow eating his
stocks and bonds and giving down policyholders’ money as milk into his
private pail.
Next he was sued on account of some land which, according to the
complaint, he had cheapened by withholding railroad facilities, only in
order to buy it, whereupon he enhanced its value an hundred times by
making it the site of a large railroad development, thereby enriching
himself to the extent of several millions. That, like so many other
things alleged about him, was both true and untrue.
Ten private suits were brought against him within three months, each
one adroitly contrived to disclose in a biased, damaging manner some
phase of his complex and universal activities hitherto unknown or
unobserved by the public. Each one was preceded by an attack on Great
Midwestern stock and by increasingly hostile comment in the press. The
cumulative effect was disastrous. Public sentiment became hysterical.
ii
Law suits, as such, never worried Galt. He was continually engaged in
litigation and kept a staff of lawyers busy. His way with lawyers was
to tell them baldly what he wanted to do and leave it to them to evolve
the legal technique of doing it. Then if difficulties followed he would
say: “That’s your own bacon. Now cure it.” Only, they were always to
fight, never to settle.
But now he became silent and brooding. He paced his office for
hours together. When spoken to his eyes looked out of a mist. It was
necessary to bring his attention to matters requiring decision. He had
Mordecai in two or three times a day. They conferred endlessly in low
tones and watched the ticker anxiously. So far as I could see he did
nothing to support the pride of Great Midwestern stock. I wondered
why. Later I knew. At this juncture he was selling it himself. He was
selling not only his stock but enormous amounts of his own bonds,
thereby converting his wealth into cash. That is to say, he was
stripping for the fray.
For three days Great Midwestern stock had been falling in a leaden
manner and Wall Street was distraught with a sense of foreboding when
one morning the big shell burst. First the news tickers flashed this
bulletin:
“The recent extraordinary weakness of Great Midwestern is
explained by the rumor that the Government is about to bring suit
under the Anti-Trust Act against the Galt Railroad System. There
is talk also of criminal proceedings against Mr. Galt.”
Galt read it with no sign of emotion. Evidently he was expecting it.
Events now were moving rapidly. Half an hour later the news tickers
produced a bulletin as follows:
“Washington--It is announced at the Attorney General’s office
that the government has filed suit against the Galt Railroad
Trust praying for its dissolution on the ground of its being an
oppressive conspiracy in restraint of trade.... No confirmation
of rumors that criminal proceedings will be brought against Henry
M. Galt as a person.”
Details followed. They ran for an hour on the news printing machines,
to the exclusion of everything else, while at the same time on the
quotation tickers the price of Great Midwestern was falling headlong
under terrific selling.
The government’s complaint set out the history of the Galt Railway
System, discussed at length its unique power for evil, examined a large
number of its acts, pronounced adverse judgment upon them, and ended
with an impassioned arraignment of Galt as a man who set his will above
the law. Wherefore, it prayed the court to find all his work illegal
and wicked and to decree that the Galt Railway System be broken up into
its component parts, to the end that competition, peace and happiness
might be restored on earth.
The outer office was soon in the possession of reporters clamoring
to see Galt. He obstinately refused to meet them. They demanded a
statement, and while they waited we prepared one as follows:
“No step in the formation of the Great Midwestern Railway
System was taken without the approval of eminent counsel. If,
as it stands, it is repugnant to the law, as the law shall be
construed, then of course it will have to be dissolved. If that
comes to pass all those securities in the Great Midwestern’s
treasury, representing ownership and control of other properties,
will have to be distributed pro rata among Great Midwestern
stockholders--either the securities as such or the proceeds of
their sale. In either case the profit will amount to a dividend
of not less than $150 a share for Great Midwestern stockholders.
That is the extent to which these securities have increased in
value since the Great Midwestern bought them.
“(Signed) Henry M. Galt.”
All of that was obvious, only nobody had thought of it. The statement
was received with utter amazement. On the strength of it Great
Midwestern stock advanced suddenly ten points.
Now occurred the strangest incident of the chapter. To imagine it you
have to remember that public feeling was extremely inflamed. That
afternoon a New York Grand Jury indicted Galt under an old forgotten
statute making it a crime to circulate false statements calculated to
advance or depress the price of shares on the Stock Exchange.
A huge broad-toe came to our office with the warrant. Galt was under
arrest. His lawyers were summoned. They communicated with the District
Attorney. Couldn’t they appear for Mr. Galt and arrange bail? No. The
District Attorney believed in social equality. Mr. Galt would have to
appear like any other criminal.
Though it was a very hot afternoon and Galt was tired he insisted that
we should walk.
“Do you want to handcuff me?” he asked.
Broad-toe was ashamed and silent.
So we went, Galt and the officer leading,--past the house of Bullguard
& Co., up Nassau Street, dodging trucks, bumping people, sometimes in
the traffic way, sometimes on the pavement; to the Criminal Courts
Building in City Hall Park, up a winding stairway because Galt would
not wait for the elevator, and to the court room where the District
Attorney was waiting. There was some delay. The judge could not be
found at once.
Galt sat on the extreme edge of a chair, one hand in his trouser’s
pocket, the other fiddling with his watch chain, staring at the clock
over the judge’s bench as if he had never seen one before. The searing
emotions of chagrin and humiliation had not come through. Word of our
presence there spread swiftly and the court room began to fill up with
reporters and spectators.
The court arrived, adjusting its gown, read the paper that was handed
up by the District Attorney, then looked down upon us, asking: “Where
is the defendant?”
Galt stood up. The court eyed him curiously until the lawyers began to
speak. The District Attorney wanted bail fixed at one million dollars.
The court shook its head. Galt’s lawyers asked that he be released on
his own recognizance. The court shook its head again. After a long
wrangle it was fixed at $100,000, which the lawyers were prepared to
provide on the spot.
Getting out was an ordeal. By this time the court room was stuffed
with morbid humanity. Reporters surrounded Galt, adhered to him, laid
hands upon him to get his attention. He made continually the gesture
of brushing away flies from his face. The stairway and corridors were
jammed. As we emerged on the street screaming newsboys offered us the
evening papers with eight-column headlines: “Galt Indicted”--“Galt
Arrested”--“Galt May Go To Jail.” From the steps across the pavement to
a cab I had in waiting an open aisle had been broken through the mob
by photographers, who had their cameras trained to catch Galt as we
passed. He looked straight ahead, walking rapidly, but not in haste.
“Where to?” he asked, as the door of the cab slammed behind us.
“Anywhere first, to get out of this,” I said.
“Let’s go to the club,” he said.
I knew which one he meant. Though he was a member of several clubs he
went always to one.
As we entered the big, quiet red lounging room, five bankers, three of
whom had been counted among Galt’s supporters, were seated in various
postures of ease, their minds absorbed in the evening papers. Galt’s
emotions were those of a boy who, having outrun the cops, lands with a
whoop in the arms of his gang. He tossed his hat aside and shouted:
“Wh-e-e-e! Wo-o-ow!”
The five bankers looked up, rose as one, and stalked out of the room.
For a minute Galt did not understand what had happened. He saw them
rise as he sat down and evidently thought they were coming to him.
When they did not arrive he turned his head casually, then with a
start he looked all around at the empty space. His eyes had a startled
expression when they met mine again and his face was an ashen color. He
made as if to ring the bell, hesitated, looked all around once more,
and said:
“Well, Coxey, let’s go home.”
iii
I began to fear he might collapse. The strain was telling. At the house
a servant admitted us. There was no one else in sight. We went directly
to his apartment. He tore off his collar and lay for some time quite
still staring straight ahead.
“We are the goat,” he said. “They put it on us, Coxey. That’s all....
They will, eh?... Valentine and his newspaper friends ... those magpies
at Washington ... we’ll give them something to set their teeth. Now
take down what I’m going to say. Put it in the form of a signed
statement to the press. Are you ready?”
He dictated:
“On the evening of July seventeen the question of proceeding
against the Great Midwestern Railway System was the occasion
of a special Cabinet meeting at the White House. Besides the
President and the gentlemen of the Cabinet, several members of the
Interstate Commerce Commission were present. The President asked
each one for his opinion. The Attorney General spoke for half an
hour to this effect ... that the Great Midwestern Railway System
was not a combination in restraint of trade, that its methods
were not illegal, that it was necessary for the proper development
of the country that railroads should combine into great systems, a
process that had been going on since the first two railroads were
built, and, finally, that a suit for its dissolution, if brought,
would be lost in the courts. Others spoke in turn. Then someone
said: ‘Where is the Secretary of War. He is a great jurist. What
does he think?’ The Secretary of War was asleep in a corner.
They roused him. He came into the circle and said, ‘Well, Mr.
President, Galt is the ---- ---- -- ---- we are after, isn’t he?’
Then the President announced his decision that proceedings should
be taken. Thereupon the Attorney General spoke again, saying:
‘Since that is the decision, I will outline the plan of action.
First let the Interstate Commerce Commission prepare a brief upon
the facts, showing that the Great Midwestern Railway System is
a combination in restraint of trade, that its ways are illegal
and oppressive and that its existence is inimical to public
welfare. Upon this the Attorney General’s office will prepare
the legal case.’ That is how a suit for the dissolution of the
Great Midwestern Railway System came to be brought. That is how
politicians conduct government.”
“Have you got all that down? Read it to me.” When I came to the
offensive epithet uttered by the Secretary of War I read,--“dash, dash,
dash.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“We can’t use the term itself. It’s unprintable,” I said.
“Can’t we?” he said. “But we can. It was applied to me without any
dash, dash. Spell it out. Anyhow, it’s history.”
iv
Natalie, who had come in on tip-toe, noiselessly, was standing just
inside the door. Galt seemed suddenly to feel her presence. When he
looked at her tears started in his eyes and he turned his face away.
She rushed to his side, knelt, and put her arms around him. No word was
spoken.
I left them, telephoned for the family physician to come and stay in
the house, and then acted on an impulse which had been rising in me for
an hour. I wished to see Vera.
She was alone in the studio. I had not seen her informally since the
cataclysmic evening that wrecked the African image.
“Oh,” she said, looking up. “I thought you might come. Excuse me while
I finish this.”
She was writing a note. When she had signed it with a firm hand, and
blotted it, she handed it to me to read. It was a very brief note to
Lord Porteous, breaking their engagement.
“He won’t accept it,” I said.
“You can be generous,” she replied. “However, it doesn’t matter. I
accept it.”
“These things are all untrue that people are saying about your father.
It’s a kind of hysteria. The indictment, if that’s what you are
thinking of, is preposterous. Nothing will come of it. There will be a
sudden reaction in public feeling.”
“I know,” she said. “That isn’t all.... I suppose you have come to take
me home?”
“But what else?” I asked.
She shook her head. As we were leaving the studio she paused on
the threshold to look back. I was watching her face. It expressed
a premonition of farewell. Once before I had seen that look. When?
Ah, yes. That night long ago when she told me the old house had been
mortgaged. Then I understood.
To her, and indeed to all the family, this crisis in Galt’s affairs
meant another smash. The only difference between this time and others
was that they would fall from a greater height, and probably for the
last time.
We drove home in a taxi.
“How I loathe it!” she whispered as we were going in, saying it to
herself.
Natalie appeared.
“You’re in for it,” she said to me. “Father wants to know who brought
the doctor in.”
“I was worried about him,” I said.
“So is the doctor. But it’s no use. He can’t do a thing. Father sent
him away in a hurry.”
Gram’ma Galt came in for dinner. So we were five. Galt did not come
down. Conversation was oblique and thin. One wondered what the servants
were thinking, and wished the service were not so noiseless. If only
they would rattle the plates, or break something, or sneeze, instead
of moving about with that oiled and faultless precision. The tinkling
of water in the fountain room was a silly, exasperating sound, and for
minutes together the only sound there was. Mrs. Galt was off her form.
She tried and failed. Nobody else tried at all.
Natalie, as I believed, was the only one whose thoughts were outside
of herself. Several times our eyes met in a lucid, sympathetic manner.
This had not happened between us before. What we understood was that
both of us were thinking of the same object,--of a frail, ill kept
little figure with ragged hair and a mist in its eyes, wounded by the
destiny that controlled it,--of Galt lying in his clothes on a bed
upstairs, and nothing to be done for his ease or comfort. She was
grateful to me that my thoughts were with him, and when I was not
looking at her I was thinking how different these four women were.
Yet one indefinable thing they had all in common. It brought and held
them together in any crisis affecting Galt. It was not devotion, not
loyalty, not faith. Perhaps it was an inborn fatalistic clan spirit.
But whatever it was, I knew that each of them would surrender to
him again, if need were, the whole of all she possessed. They were
expecting to do it.
“What is the price of Great Midwestern stock to-day?” asked Gram’ma
Galt in a firm, clear voice. Everybody started a little, even one of
the servants who happened to stand in the line of my vision.
“One hundred and seventy,” I said.
To those of us who had just seen it fall in a few weeks from
two-hundred-and-twenty this price of one-hundred-and-seventy seemed
calamitous. That shows how soon we lose the true perspective and how
myopically we regard the nearest contrast.
“When my son took charge of it eight years ago it was one-and-a-half
... one-and-a-half,” said Gram’ma Galt in the same clear voice.
For this I rose and saluted her with a kiss on the forehead. She didn’t
mind. Natalie gave me a splendid look. Then I excused myself and went
to see Galt.
The door of his apartment was ajar. I could see him. He was in his
pajamas now, apparently asleep. So I closed the door and sat at his
desk in the work room outside to call up Mordecai, who had asked me to
communicate with him, and attend to some other matters. Presently the
hall door opened and closed gently. I looked around. It was Gram’ma
Galt. In her hand she carried a large envelope tied around with a blue
ribbon. She walked straight to the door of Galt’s apartment and went in
without knocking. I could see her from where I sat. She left the door
open behind her.
“What’s this?” Galt asked, as she put the envelope on the bed beside
him. She did not answer his question, but leaned over, laid one hand on
his forehead and spoke in this delphic manner:
“Fast ye for strife and smite with the fist of wickedness.”
Then she turned, came straight out, closed the door carefully, passed
me without a glance, and was gone. Never again did I wonder whence Galt
derived his thirst for combat. When he emerged some ten minutes later
the mist had fallen from his eyes. The right doctor had been there. He
handed me the envelope tied around with blue ribbon.
“That’s Gram’ma Galt’s little fortune ... everything she has received
out of Great Midwestern. Keep it in the safe for a few days so she will
think we needed it.... Did you give out that statement?”
“Not yet. There is plenty of time,” I said.
“Tear it up. That isn’t the way we fight, ... is it?”
Gram’ma Galt never got her envelope back. Two weeks later she died.
v
The Galt panic was one of those episodes that can never be fully
explained. Elemental forces were loose. Those that derived from human
passion were answerable to the will; there were others of a visitant
nature fortuitous and uncontrollable. What man cannot control he may
sometimes conduct. You cannot command the lightning, but if it is about
to strike you may lure it here instead of there.
Weather is so often the accomplice of dark enterprise! The financial
weather at this time was very bad and favored the Bullguard conspiracy.
Confidence, which in this case means the expectation of profit, was in
decline. It had never recovered from the shock of that first accident
to greed’s cauldron three months before when an ignorant popular mania
for speculation came all at once to grief. Since then the rise of
feeling against trusts, and the certainty that it would be translated
into political action, had filled Wall Street with confusion and alarm.
Bullguard’s part was to focus all this distrust and fear upon Galt.
Each day the papers reported the weakness of Galt securities, how they
fell under the selling of uneasy holders, and what the latest and most
sinister rumors were. That was news. Nobody could help printing it.
The financial editors each day repeated what eminent bankers said: “We
pray to be delivered from this Jonah. His ways are not our ways, yet he
bringeth wrath upon all alike.” That was true. They said it; they even
believed it. The financial editors could not be blamed for writing it.
So many winds running their feet together, like people in a mob,
create a storm; and when it is over and they are themselves again,
sane little winds, they wonder at what was done. The Wall Street news
tickers reported that certain banks were refusing to lend money on Galt
securities. This may have been a stroke of the conspiracy or merely a
reaction to the prevailing fear, or both interacting. One never knows.
But it was true, and Great Midwestern securities suffered another
frightful fall.
This went on for three weeks with scarcely an interruption. Day after
day Galt stood at the ticker watching Great Midwestern fall,--
to 150,
to 140,
to 130,
to 120, and did nothing. For the first time in his life he was on the
defensive. That made the strain much worse. His normal relief was in
action. He loved to carry the fight to the enemy, even rashly; but
foolhardy he was not. He had foreseen that at the crucial moment he
should stand alone against the field. Nobody believed he could win. The
odds were too great. Therefore he could rely only upon himself.
One by one, by twos and threes, then by groups, his supporters fell
away. Those who had submitted to his rule from fear were the first to
go over to the other side, surreptitiously at first, lest they should
have guessed wrong, then openly as they saw how the fight seemed to be
going against him. Several bankers publicly renounced their relations
with him. Others whose allegiance was for profit only, whose gains were
wet with the sweat of their pride, forsook him as fast as they were
convinced that his career as a money maker was at an end. Potter was
one of these, and the last to go. He did it handsomely according to his
way. One day he came in.
“Galt,” he said, “I know you are in a hell of a fix and I have done not
one damn thing to help. I’m not that kind of person. I hate to quit a
man in trouble. So I’ve come to tell you why. There are two reasons.
One reason is I’ve got so much of this Great Midwestern stuff that it’s
all I can do to take care of myself. I didn’t get out in time, and now
I can’t get out at all.... The other reason is ... well, I’ll say it
... why not?... You have trampled on my pride until I have no liking
for you left. You’re the most hateful man I ever did business with.
That’s why.”
The impulse to come and have it out in this manner was big-man-like,
I thought, even though the root was self-justification. No one else
had done so much. All the others had gone slinking away. If Galt had
responded differently a real friendship might have blazed there, for
instinctively they liked and admired each other. Their antagonism was
not essential. And, besides, the real reason, as we afterward knew, was
the one he gave first. Potter, with all his wealth, was himself in a
tight place. Bullguard was pressing the oil crowd, too.
“That’s understood,” said Galt, in his worst manner. “I didn’t buy your
pride. I only rented it. Now you’ve got it back, look it over, see how
much it’s damaged, and send me a bill.”
Potter went out roaring oaths.
A change was taking place in Galt. I saw it in sudden, unexpected
glimpses. The movements of his body were slower. Anger and irritation
no longer found outlet in tantrums, but in sneering, terrible sarcasms,
uttered in a cold voice. He looked without seeing and spoke as from a
great distance, high up. His mind, when he revealed it, was the same
as ever. Nothing had happened to his mind. His soul lived in torment.
His greatest sin had been to hold public opinion in contempt. Now it
was paying him back. To have deserved the opprobrium and suspicion
with which he was overwhelmed would perhaps have killed him then; but
to suffer disgrace undeservedly was in one way worse. He reacted by
suspecting those who suspected him, and some who didn’t. I believe at
one time he almost suspected Mordecai, whose loyalty never for one
moment wavered.
However, Mordecai knew, as no one else did, that Galt was still in
a very strong position. He had not begun to strike. Thanks to the
intuition which moved him at the onset to convert two thirds of his
fortune into cash he could, when the moment came, strike hard.
Now came the day of days,--the time when Bullguard did his utmost.
Fastenings gave way. Walls rocked. Strong men lost their rational
faculties and retained only the power of primitive vocal utterance.
The sounds that issued from the Stock Exchange were appalling. The ear
would think a demented menagerie was devouring itself. Thousands of
small craft disappeared that day and left no trace.
Great Midwestern, spilling out on the tape in five and ten-thousand
share blocks, fell twenty points in two hours. Galt was in his office
at the ticker. Mordecai was with him, holding his hands reverently
together, gazing at the tape in a state of fascination. On one headlong
impulse Great Midwestern touched one hundred dollars a share,--par! It
had fallen from two-hundred-and-twenty in three months.
“It’s over,” said Galt, turning away. I once saw a great prizefighter,
on giving the knock-out blow at the end of a hard battle, turn his back
with the same gesture and walk to his own corner.
“Vhat iss id you zay?” asked Mordecai, following.
“It’s over,” Galt repeated. “They haven’t got me and they can’t go any
further without breaking themselves. Get your house on the wire. That’s
the direct telephone ... that one. I want to give an order.”
Mordecai picked up the telephone and asked for one of his partners, who
instantly responded.
“Vhat iss ze order?” asked Mordecai, holding the telephone and looking
at Galt.
“Buy all the Great Midwestern there is for sale up to
one-hundred-and-f-i-f-t-y!” said Galt.
Mordecai transmitted this extraordinary order, put the telephone down
softly, and lisped, “My Gott!”
Just then the door burst open. Thirty or forty reporters had been
waiting in the outer office all day. Their excitement at last broke
bounds; they simply came in. The Evening Post man was at their head.
“Mr. Galt,” he shouted, “you have got to make some kind of statement.
Public opinion demands it.”
I expected Galt to explode with rage.
“Postey,” he said, “I don’t know a damn thing about public opinion.
That’s your trade. Tell me something about it.”
“It wants to know what all this means,” said Postey.
“Well, tell it this for me,” said Galt. “Tell it just as I tell you.
The panic is over.”
“But, Mr.--”
“Now, that’s all,” said Galt. “Ain’t it enough?”
I had been to look at the tape.
“Great Midwestern is a hundred and thirty,” I announced at large.
The reporters stared at me wide-eyed.
Postey ran to look for himself, bumping Mordecai aside.
“That’s right,” he said, making swiftly for the door. The others
followed him in a trampling rush.
The sensation now to be accounted for was not the weakness but the
sudden recovery of Great Midwestern and Galt’s statement explained it.
So they were anxious to spread their news.
It was true. Galt had timed his stroke unerringly.
Everyone was amazed to see how little Great Midwestern stock was
actually for sale when a buying hand appeared. That was because so
much of the selling had been fictitious. The stock closed that day at
one-hundred-and-fifty and never while Galt lived was it so low again.
The feet of many winds ran rapidly apart and the storm collapsed.
vi
That evening, for the first time in many weeks, Galt had dinner with
the family.
We do not see each other change and grow old as a continuous process.
It is imperceptible that way. But as one looks at a tree that has been
in one’s eye all the time and says with surprise, “Why, the leaves have
turned!” so suddenly we look at a person we have seen every day and
say, “How he has changed!” some association of place or act causing a
vivid recollection to arise in contrast.
We had all seen Galt coming and going. I had been with him constantly.
Yet now as he sat there at table we remembered him only as he was the
last time before this at dinner, making a scene because there was never
anything he liked to eat and the cook put cheese in the potatoes.
The difference was distressing. He was old and world-weary. He ate
sparingly, complained of nothing and was so absent that when anyone
spoke to him he started and must have the words repeated.
Natalie alone succeeded in drawing his interest. She had spent the
day at Moonstool. This name had been provisionally bestowed upon
the country place, because it happened to be the local name of the
mountain, and then became permanent in default of agreement on any
other.
Work there had been progressing rapidly. The house itself was finished;
the principal apartments were ready to be occupied. The surroundings
of course were in confusion. Steam drills were going all the time.
Roadways were blasting through solid rock. The landscape was in turmoil.
“But you could live there now,” said Natalie, “if you didn’t mind the
noise,” closing a long recital, to which Galt had listened thoughtfully.
“We might have the wedding there,” he said.
His suggestion produced a ghastly silence. Mrs. Galt tried to turn it
away. Galt was alert.
“What have I stepped on now?” he wanted to know. “Suffering Moses! It
ain’t safe for me to walk around in my own house. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” said Natalie.
“Yes, there is. What is it?”
When he couldn’t be put off any longer Vera said, quietly: “My
engagement to Lord Porteous is broken.”
“Why?” asked Galt, astonished. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
“No matter why,” said Vera. “Let’s not talk about it.”
He looked into their faces severally. His expression was utterly
wretched and they avoided it. He guessed the reason why,--made it
perhaps even worse than it was.
In his own household he was on the defensive. There was always that
inaudible accusation he could never get hold of. In the old days it
was that he stretched them on the rack of insecurity and was not like
other men. Then it was the way he had made them rich. Now it was that
dreadful sense of insecurity again. They did not know whether they
were rich or poor. They thought he was heading for a last spectacular
smash-up. And suppose he had told them there was happily no danger
of that. Their thoughts would accuse him still. Why couldn’t they be
rich as other people were, decently, quietly and in good taste? The
Valentines were rich and no obloquy pursued them. Their privacy was not
besieged by newspaper reporters. The finger of scorn never pointed at
them.
Vera’s broken engagement was a harrowing symbol. Galt was extremely
miserable. One could imagine what he was thinking. The Galt fortune
was saved. The Galt power had survived. But the Galt name was a sound
of reproach. The public opinion that had so devastated his spirit did
not leave his family unwhipped. These women had suffered for being his.
Though they might not believe the things that were said of him, still
they could not help feeling ashamed of the wealth he had brought them.
They were defenseless. He was clothed with a sense of justification
that he could not impart. They were naked to the scourge.
His day of victory ended in gloom and dumb wretchedness.