AN EMPIRE AND AN EMPRESS
The soft air which blew upon Gail’s cheek was like the first breath of
spring, and there was the far-off prophecy of awakening in the very
sunshine, as she sped out the river road with Allison in his powerful
runabout. For days the weather had been like this, mild and still
invigorating, and it had been a tremendous rest from the protracted
crispness of the winter. There was the smell of moist earth, and the
vague sense of stirring life, as if the roots and the seeds, deep in the
ground, were answering to the thrill of coming birth.
“It’s glorious!” exclaimed Gail, her cheeks answering to the caress of
the air with a flush of blossom-like delicacy. She was particularly
contented to-day. Allison had been so busy of late, and she had missed
him. With all his strength, he was restful.
“I feel like a new man at this time of the year,” returned Allison,
glancing at Gail with cool appreciation. A car full of men passed them,
and the looks they cast in his runabout pleased him. “Gail, do you
remember the first time we drove out here?”
“Indeed yes,” she laughed. “With the snow in our eyes, and the roads
all white, with the lights gleaming through the flakes like Arctic
will-o’-the-wisps. We ran away that night, and dined at Roseleaf Inn,
and worried the folks to death, for fear we had had an accident.”
“I had more than an accident that night,” said Allison. “I had a total
wreck.”
Gail glanced at him quickly, but his face was clear of any apparent
purpose. He was gazing straight ahead, his clean-cut profile, always a
pleasant thing to look upon, set against the shifting background of
rocky banks as if it were the one steadfast and unalterable thing in the
universe; and he was smiling introspectively.
“It was about here that it happened,” he went on. “I think I’d been
bragging a little, and I think you meant to slyly prick my balloon,
which I will admit seemed a kind and charitable thing to do.”
“What was it?” wondered Gail, trying to recall that unimportant
conversation.
“Oh, a gentle intimation that I hadn’t done so much,” he laughed. “I had
just finished consolidating all the traction cars in New York, subways,
L’s, and surface: and I felt cocky about it. I even remarked that I had
achieved the dream of my life, and intended to rest a while. All you
said was, ‘Why?’” and his laugh pealed out. Four birds in a wayside bush
sprang into the air and flew on ahead.
“I used to be conspicuous for impertinence,” smiled Gail. “I’m trying to
reform.”
“I’m glad you hadn’t started when I met you,” returned Allison, steering
around a sharp stone with the firm accuracy which Gail had so often
admired. “I never had so stinging a reproof as that little why. It did
me more good than any sermon I ever heard.”
“That’s positively startling,” replied Gail lightly. “I usually hear
from my impertinences, long after, as a source of discomfort.”
“‘Why?’” repeated Allison. “I took that why home with me. If you had
said, ‘Why should you rest a while?’ or ‘Why should you stop when you’ve
just made a start?’ or something of that nature, it might not have
impressed me so much; but just the one unexplained word was like a
barbed hook in my mind. It wouldn’t come out. I asked myself that why
until daylight, and I found no answer. Why, when I was young and strong,
and had only tasted of victory, should I sit by the fireside and call
myself old? If I had ability to conquer this situation with so much
ease, why should I call it a great accomplishment; for great
accomplishments are measured by the power employed.”
Gail looked at him in questioning perplexity. She could not gather what
he meant, but she had a sense of something big, and once more she was
impressed with the tremendous reserve force in the man. His clear grey
eyes were fixed on the road ahead, and the very symbol of him seemed to
be this driving; top speed, a long road, a steady hand, a cool
determination, a sublime disregard of hills and valleys which made them
all a level road.
“Why? That word set me out on a new principle that never, while I had
strength in me, would I consider my work finished, no matter how great
an achievement I had made. I am still at work.”
Something within her leaped up in answer to the thrill of exultation in
his voice. To have been the inspiration of great deeds, even by so
simple an agency as the accidental use of a word, was in itself an
exalting thing, though an humbling one, too. And there were great deeds.
She was sure of that as she looked at him. He was too calm about it, and
too secure to have been speaking of trifles.
“When I was a boy I lived on ancient history,” he went on, with a smile
for the bygone dreamer he had been. “I wanted to be a soldier, a great
general, a warrior, in the sturdy old sense, and my one hero was
Alexander the Great, because he conquered the world! That’s what I
wanted to do. I wanted to go out and fight and kill, and bring kingdom
after kingdom under my sway, and finally set myself on a mighty throne,
which should have for its boundaries the north and the south pole! When
I grew older, and found how small was the world which Alexander had
conquered, not much bigger than the original thirteen states, I grew
rather disillusioned, particularly as I was working at about that time
for a dollar and a quarter a day. I spent a few busy years, and had
forgotten the dream; then you said ‘why’ and it all came back.”
“Hurry!” commanded Gail. “Curiosity is bad for me.”
Allison laughed heartily at her impatience. He had meant to arouse her
interest, and he had done so. She would not have confessed it, but she
was fascinated by the thing he had held in reserve. It was like the
cruelty of telling a child of a toy in a trunk which is still at the
station.
“I conquered it,” he told her, with an assumption of nonchalance which
did not deceive her. There was too much of under-vibration in his tone,
and the eyes which he turned upon her were glowing in spite of his
smile. “In my hand I hold control of the transportation of the world! If
a pound of freight is started westward or eastward from New York,
addressed to me at its starting point, it will circle the globe, and on
every mile of its passage it will pay tribute to me. If a man starts to
travel north or south or east or west, anywhere on the five continents
or the seven seas, he must pay tribute to me. With that shipment of
every necessity and luxury under my control, I control the necessities
and luxuries themselves; so there is no human being in the world who can
escape contributing tithes to the monster company I have consolidated.”
He was disappointed, for a moment. She seemed almost unimpressed. In
reality, she was struggling to comprehend what he had just said to her.
It was so incredibly huge in its proportions, so gigantic, so
extravagantly far reaching that she had only words in her ears. He must
be speaking in hyperbole.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“It is difficult to grasp,” he admitted. “When I first conceived of it,
in answer to your why, I could not myself comprehend any more than that
I had thought of an absurdity, like the lover who wished that the sea
were ink and the land a pen that he might seize it, and write across the
sky ‘I love you!’ It was as fantastic as that in my mind, at first, and
in order to reduce the idea to actual thought, I had to break it into
fragments; and that is the way I set about my campaign.”
Gail was listening eagerly now. She was beginning to dimly comprehend
that Allison had actually wrought a miracle of commerce, probably the
most stupendous in this entire century of commercial miracles; and her
admiration of him grew. She had always admired great force, great
strength, great power, and here, unfolding before her, was the evidence
of it at its zenith.
“Let me build it up, step by step, for you. Incidentally, I’ll give you
some confidential news which you will be reading in months to come. I
hope,” and he laughed, “that you will not tell your friends the
reporters about it.”
“Cross my heart, I won’t,” she gaily replied. The sting of her one big
newspaper experience had begun to die away.
“When you asked me why, I was trying to secure Vedder Court for a
terminal station for my city traction lines. Vedder Court quickly
became, in my imagination, the terminal point not only of the city
traction lines, but of the world’s transportation. From that I would run
a railroad tube to the mainland, so that I could land passengers, not
only in the heart of New York, but at the platforms of every street car
and L and subway train.”
“How wonderful!” exclaimed Gail, in enthusiasm. This was an idea she
could grasp. “And have you secured Vedder Court?”
“It’s a matter of days,” he returned carelessly. “The next step was the
transcontinental line. I built it up, piece by piece, and to-day, under
my own personal control, with sufficient stock to elect my own
directors, who will jump when I crack the whip, I possess a railroad
line from the Atlantic to the Pacific so direct, so straight, and so
allied with ninety-five per cent. of the freight interests of the United
States that, within two years, there will not be a car wheel turning in
America which does not do so at the command of the A.-P. Railroad. That
is the first step leading out of Vedder Court. The news of that
consolidation will be in to-morrow morning’s papers, and from that
minute on, the water will begin to drip from railroad stocks.”
“How about Uncle Jim’s road?” Gail suddenly interrupted.
“I am taking care of him,” he told her easily. “From Vedder Court run
subways along the docks.”
“I see!” interrupted Gail. “You have secured control of the steamship
companies, of the foreign railroads, of everything which hauls and
carries!”
“Airships excepted,” he laughingly informed her. “Gail, it’s an empire,
and none so great ever existed in all the world! The giant monopolies of
which so much has been said, are only parts of it, like principalities
in a kingdom. There isn’t a nook or corner on the globe where one finger
of my giant does not rest. The armies which swept down from the north
and devastated Europe, the hordes which spread from Rome, the legions
which marched to Moscow, even those mighty armies of the Iliad and the
Odyssey were insignificant as compared to the sway of this tremendous
organisation! All commerce, all finance, all politics, must bow the knee
to it, and serve it! Maps will be shifted for its needs. Nations will
rise and fall as it shall decree, and the whole world, every last
creature of it, shall feed it and be fed by it!”
He paused, and turned to her with a positive radiance on the face which
she had always considered heavy. She had looked on him as a highly
successful money-grubber, as a commercial genius, as a magician of
manipulation, as a master of men; but he was more than all these; he was
a poet, whose rude epics were written in the metre of whirling wheels
and flying engines and pounding propellers; a poet whose dreams extended
beyond the confines of imagination itself; and then, above that, a
sorcerer who builded what he dreamed!
There is a magic thrill in creation. It extends beyond the creator to
the created, and it inspires all who come in contact with it. Gail’s
eager mind traversed again and again the girdle he had looped around the
world, darting into all its intricacies and ramifications, until she,
too, had pursued it into all the obscure nooks and crannies, and saw the
most remote and distant peoples dependent upon it, and paying toll to
it, and swaying to its command. This was a dream worthy of
accomplishment; a dream beyond which there could be no superlative; and
the man beside her had dreamed it, and had builded it; and all this
would not have happened if she had not given him the hint with one
potent word which had spurred him, and set his marvellously constructive
mind to work.
In so far they were partners in this mighty enterprise, and he had been
magnanimous enough to acknowledge her part in it. It drew them strangely
near. It was a universe, in the conception of which no other minds than
theirs had dabbled, in the modelling of which no other hand had been
thrust. What agile mind, gifted with ambition, and broad conception, and
the restlessness which, in her, had not only ranged world wide but
beyond the æther and across the vast seas of superstition and ignorance
and credulity to God himself; what mind such as this could resist the
insidious flattery of that mighty collaboration?
She was silent now, and he left her silent, brooding, himself, upon the
vast scope of his dreaming, and planning still to centre more and more
the fruits of that dreaming within his own eager hand.
Roseleaf Inn. Gail recognised it with a smile as they turned in at the
drive. She was glad that they had come here, for it was linked in her
mind with the beginnings of that great project of which she had been the
impulse, and in which the thing in her that had been denied opportunity
because she was a woman, claimed a hungry share. At his suggestion—it
was more like a command, but she scarcely noticed—she telephoned that
she was going to remain to dinner with Allison; and then they enjoyed a
two hour chat of many things, trivial in themselves, but fraught now
with delightful meaning, because they had to think on so many
unexpressed things, larger than these idle people about them could
conceive, or grasp if they knew.
[Illustration: She telephoned that she was going to remain to dinner
with Allison; and they enjoyed a two hour chat of many things]
Homeward again in the starlit night, still in that whirl of exultation.
It was somewhat chillier now, and Allison bundled her into the machine
with rough tenderness. She felt the thrill of him as he sat beside her,
and the firm strength with which he controlled the swiftly speeding
runabout, was part her strength. They were kindred spirits, these two,
soaring above the affairs of earth in the serene complacency of those
who make trifles of vastness itself. They did not talk much, for they
had not much to talk about. The details of a scheme so comprehensive as
Allison’s were not things to be explained, they were things to be seen
in a vision. Once she asked him about the bringing of the foreign
railroads into the combination, and he told her that this would only be
accomplished by a political upheaval, which would take place next month,
and would probably involve the whole of Europe. It was another detail;
and it seemed quite natural. She was so interested that he told her all
about his foreign visitors.
In the Park, Allison stopped at the little outlook house where they had
climbed on that snowy night, and they stood there, with the stars above
and the trees below and the twinkling lights stretching out to the
horizon, all alone above the world of civilisation. Below sounded the
clang of street cars, and far off to the left, high in the air, there
gleamed the lights of a curving L train. That was a part of Allison’s
world which he had long since conquered, a part which he already held in
the hollow of his hand; and the fact that every moving thing which clung
upon a track in all this vast panorama was under his dominion, served
only to illustrate and make plain the marvel of the accomplishment which
was now under way. Beyond that dim horizon lay another and still
another, and in them all, wherever things moved or were transported, the
lift of Allison’s finger was to start and stop the wheels, to the
uttermost confines of the earth! Oh, it was wonderful; wonderful! And
she was part of it!
It was there that he proposed to her. It did not surprise her. She had
known it when they had entered the Park, and that this was the place.
He told her that all this empire was being builded to lay at her feet,
that she was the empress of it and he the emperor, but that their joy
was to be not in the sway, not in the sceptre and crown, but in the
doing, and in the having done, and in the conceiving and having
conceived!
Was this a cold painting of pomp and glory and advantage and reward? He
added to it the fire of a lover, and to that the force and mastery and
compulsion of his dynamic power. She felt again the potent thrill of
him, and the might and sweep and drive of him, and with the hot,
tumbling words of love in her ears, and her senses a-reel, and her mind
in its whirling exultation, she felt between them a sympathy and a union
which it was not in human strength to deny! Something held her back,
something made her withhold the word of promise, on the plea that she
must have more time to think, to consider, to straighten out the tangle
of her mind; but she suffered him to sweep her in his arms, and rain hot
kisses upon her face, and to tell her, over and over and over and over,
that she belonged to him, forever and forever!