The Driver (20 page)

Then she dropped it.

As it crashed on the hearthstone she turned, without a glance at the fragments or at me, and walked out of the room.

Three days later her engagement to Lord Portcous was announced.

i

T
HE ready explanation of Galt’s rise in a few years to the rôle of Wall Street monarch is that he was a master profit maker. The way of it was phenomenal. His touch was that of genius, daring, unaccountable, mysteriously guided by an inner mentality. And when the results appeared they were so natural, inevitable, that men wondered no less at their own stupidity than at his prescience. Why had they not seen the same opportunity?

His associates made money by no effort of their own. They had only to put their talents with the mighty steward. He took them, employed them as he pleased, and presently returned them two-fold, five-fold, sometimes twenty-fold.

But this explanation only begs the secret. The nature of his unique power is still hidden. It was in the first manifestation a power to persuade men. It became a power to command them, in virtue of the ability he had to reward them. This ability was the consummate power,—a power to imagine and create wealth. As it grew and as the respect for it became a superstition among his associates and a terror to all adversaries he passed into the dictatorial phase of his career.

Mordecai’s thought,—“Id iss only zat ve zhall manage him a liddle,”—was rudely shattered. He was unmanageable. He gave Mordecai & Co. peremptory orders, and they were obeyed, as they well might be, since Galt’s star had lifted the house of Mordecai from third to first rank in the financial world. It had become richer and more powerful than any other house in Wall Street save one and that one was its ancient enemy.

Mordecai’s courage had fainting fits. To “zese heights” he was often unable to follow without a good deal of forcible assistance. Frequently he would come to wrestle prayerfully with Galt, begging him in vain to scale down some particularly audacious plan, whatever it was. One day they had been at this for an hour. Galt was pugnacious and oppressive. They stood up to it. Mordecai, retreating step by step, had come to bay in a corner, gazing upward, the tips of his fingers together; Galt was passing to and fro in front of him, laying down his will, stopping now and then to emphasize the point by shaking his fist under Mordecai’s nose.

Just then the boy from the reception room came to my desk with the name of Horace Potter. That was awkward. Potter was a tempestuous man, easily moved to high anger, himself an autocrat, unaccustomed to wait upon the pleasure of others. He was personally one of Galt’s most powerful supporters and brought to him besides the whole strength of the puissant oil crowd, which controlled at that time more available wealth than any other group in Wall Street. It was an unusual concession for him to call upon anyone. People always came to him. And there he was outside, waiting. He had come to keep a definite appointment. There was no excuse. I tried to tell Galt, but he waved me away fiercely.

“Don’t bother me now, Coxey.”

Five minutes passed. Of a sudden Potter bolted in. “What is this?” he roared. “Am I one to cool my heels in your outer office?”

Galt turned round and stared at him, blankly at first and then with blazing anger.

“How did you get in here?” he asked.

“By God, I walked in,” said Potter.

“Then, by God, walk out again,” said Galt, turning his back.

I followed him out, thinking to find some mollifying word to say; he was unapproachable. The reception room was empty but for Potter and the friend he had with him, an important banker who was to have been presented to Galt in a special way. They talked with no heed of me.

“He’s in one of his damned tantrums,” said Potter. “We’ll have to chuck it or try again.”

The other man got very red.

“Why do you stand it?” he asked. “You!”

“I’ll tell you why,” said Potter. “We make more with him than with any other man who ever handled our money. That’s a very good reason.”

“I couldn’t help it,” I said to Galt, afterward.

“All right,” he said. “He won’t do it again.”

He never did. And so one by one they learned to take him as he was, to swallow their pride and submit to his moods, all for the same reason. He had the power to make them rich, richer, richest.

A meeting of the board of directors became a perfunctory formality, serving only to verify and approve Galt’s acts for purposes of record. On his own responsibility he committed the company to policies, investments, vast undertakings, and informed the board later. Success was his whole justification. If once that failed him his authority would collapse instantly.

In a rare moment of self-inspection, after one of his darling visions had come true, he said:

“After all, Coxey, it’s the Lord makes the tide rise. We don’t control it. We only ride it.”

It was an amazing tide. Never was one like it before. It floated old hulks that had been lying helpless and bankrupt on the sands for years. And when men began to say it was high enough, that it was time to prepare for the ebb, Galt said it was yet beginning. On the day Great Midwestern stock sold at one hundred dollars a share,—par!—he said to Mordecai: “That’s nothing. It will sell at two hundred. Buy me twenty thousand shares at this price.”

“I belief you, Mr. Gald,” said Mordecai in an awe-struck whisper.

ii

Proceeds of the incessant enormous issues of new securities had been invested first in the reconstruction of the Great Midwestern itself and then in the shares of other railroads, beginning with the Orient & Pacific. That was the first of a series of transactions. We now owned outright or controlled by stock ownership no fewer than fifteen other railroad properties, besides lake and ocean steamship lines, docks, terminals, belt lines, trolley systems, forests, oil fields and coal mines. The Great Midwestern was the vertebra of an organism, ramifying east, west, north and south; it reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with antennae to Asia and Europe. Its treasury was inexhaustible, fed by so many streams.

Not only did our own earnings increase amazingly as all those other properties poured their traffic into us, but the Great Midwestern treasury received dividends on the shares by which it controlled those traffic bringers. Thus we garnered twice. There was yet a third source of profit. As the Great Midwestern acquired new properties Galt rebuilt them out of their own earnings or by use of their own credit, so that their value increased. Thus, they brought us traffic, they paid dividends into our treasury and at the same time they were so enhanced in physical value by Galt’s methods of development that they were soon worth three or four times what they had cost. All this was in each case so obvious, once it had happened, and yet so remarkable in the aggregate, that people could scarcely believe it. A writer in one of the financial papers exclaimed: “If these figures are true, then the Great Midwestern Railway Company could go out of the railroad business entirely and live richly on the profits that appear from its investments in the securities of other railroads.”

And the figures
were
true.

iii

Galt’s name rose to impersonal eminence. The properties embraced in the Great Midwestern organism were referred to as Galt properties. Their securities were Galt bonds or Galt stocks. The acts of the Great Midwestern were not its own; they were Galt’s. There was a Galt influence which reached beyond his own domain. Once an important railroad system in which neither he nor the Great Midwestern had any direct interest was about to reduce its rate of dividend. The directors on their way to the meeting said they would vote to reduce it. But they didn’t. When the meeting was over they were asked why they had changed their minds. The explanation was that Galt had sent word to them that he wished them not to do it. He said it would be a shock to public confidence, and that he would divert enough traffic to the road to enable it to earn the dividend it had been paying. And presently Wall Street people were talking of a Galt crowd or a Galt party, meaning all that group of men associated with him in his undertakings.

The magazines discovered him. For a long time he would not be interviewed. There was nothing to talk about, he said; why did they pester him? They wrote articles about him, notwithstanding, because he was a new power in the land, and so much of the information they put forth was garbled or immature that he was persuaded at last to submit to a regular interview. The writer assigned to the task was at that time a famous interviewer. He came one evening to the house by appointment and waited in the great drawing room. I was with him, giving him some advice, when Galt came in, wearing slippers the heels of which slapped the floor at every step. He sat in a large chair, crouched himself, stared for a full minute at the interviewer through large shell spectacles, justifying, I afterward remembered, the interviewer’s impression of him as a huge, predatory, not unfriendly spider. Suddenly he spoke, saying:

“Ain’t you ashamed to be in this business?”

“Everybody has something to be ashamed of,” said the interviewer. “What are you ashamed of?”

That pleased Galt. He loved a straight hit on the nose. And it turned out to be a very successful interview.

What the public knew about him was already enough to dazzle the imagination. What it didn’t know, not yet at least, was more surprising. His private fortune became so great that he was obliged to think what to do with it. Unerringly he employed it in means to greater power. Hitherto he had relied mainly upon the support of individuals and groups of men who put their money with him. Now he began on his own account to buy heavily into financial institutions and before anybody knew what he was doing he had got working control of several great reservoirs of liquid capital, such as chartered banks and insurance companies. The use of this was that he could influence them to invest their funds in the securities of the Great Midwestern and its collateral properties. That made it easier for him to sell the new stocks and bonds which he was endlessly creating to provide money for his projects.

His passion to build burned higher and higher. Any spectacle of construction fascinated him. We stood for an hour one morning at the corner of Broadway and Exchange Place watching a new way of putting down the foundation for a steel building. Wooden caissons were sunk in the ground by a pneumatic principle to a great depth and then filled with concrete. The building was to be twenty stories high.

“Have you noticed,” I asked him, “how the skyline of New York has changed since steel construction began? If you haven’t seen it from down the bay or across the river for several years you wouldn’t know it.”

“I haven’t,” he said. “Yes... of course. It must be so.”

An hour later in the office he called me to the window. “See that handful of old brick rookeries down there?... Fine place to build.... Let’s do something for your skyline.”

In his mind’s eye was the mirage of a skyscraper thirty stories tall with the Great Midwestern’s executive offices luxuriously established on the top floors. A year later it was there, and we were there.

Most men are superstitious about leaving the environment in which success has been bearded and made docile. Was he? I never quite knew. All this time we had remained in those dark, awkward old offices with their funny walnut furniture. Not a desk had been changed. A new rug was bought for the president’s room when Valentine left and Galt moved in; and Harbinger, restored to the room Galt had moved him out of, asked for some new linoleum on the floor. Nothing else had been done to improve our quarters. Where Cæsar sits, there his empire is. What he sits on does not matter at all.

His last act in this setting was dramatic. Word came one Saturday morning that the daemonic Missouri River was on a wild rampage, with a sudden mind to change its way. Three towns that lay in its path were waiting helplessly to be devoured, and there was no telling what would happen after that. The government’s engineers were frantic, calling for help, with no idea where it was to come from. Galt got Chicago on the wire and spoke to the chief of his engineer corps, a man to whom mountains were technical obstacles and rivers a petty nuisance.

“The Missouri River is cavorting around again,” said Gait. “Now, listen.... Yes!... Take everything we’ve got, men, materials and equipment—hello!—anything you need, including the right of way. I don’t care what it costs, but put a ring in her nose and lead her back to her trough. This order is unlimited. It takes precedence over mail, business and acts of Providence. Go like hell.... Hello!... That’s all.”

Then he walked out for the last time and never once looked back. On Monday morning he walked into our ornate new offices without appearing to notice them. He was impatient for something that should be on his desk. It was there,—a message from the engineer:

“Will have her stopped by 6 p. m., Monday. Get her back to bed in a few days.”

It was a memorable feat, a triumph of daring and skill, and cost the Great Midwestern several millions of dollars.

iv

At about this time, quite accidentally, there shaped in his thoughts that ultimate project which lies somewhere near the heart of every instinctive builder. One evening at dinner Natalie said: “I wonder why we have no country place? Everyone else has.”

Gait stopped eating and looked at her slowly.

“Why of course, that’s it,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what it was we didn’t have,... looking at it all the time, like the man at the giraffe.... Huh!”

He approached it in a characteristic manner at once. There was somewhere a topographic map of New Jersey. It was searched for and found and he and Natalie lay on the floor with their heads together exploring it. First he explained to her how one got the elevations by following the brown contour lines and what the signs and figures meant.

“Then this must be a mountain,” she exclaimed.

“Right,” he said. “You get the idea. Here’s a better one. Look here.”