The Driver (21 page)

“Oh, but see this one,” she said. “Look! All by itself.”

He examined her discovery thoughtfully. It was a mountain in northern New Jersey, the tallest one, two small rivers flowing at its feet, a view unobstructed in all directions.

“You’ve found the button,” he said. “I believe you have... wild country... not much built up.... What’s that railroad, can you see?... All right. We can get anything at all we want from them.”

The whole family went the next day on a voyage of verification and discovery. It was all they had hoped for. Natalie was ecstatic in the rôle of Columbus. Fancy! She had found it on a map, no bigger than that!—and here it was. Mrs. Galt was acquiescent and a little bewildered. Vera was conservative. They imagined a large house on top of the mountain, with a road up, more or less following the trail they had ascended to get the view, which took the breath out of you, Natalie said. You could see the Hudson River for many miles up, New York City, the Catskills possibly on a very clear day,—most of the world, in fact. Mrs. Galt and Vera perceived the difficulties and had no sense of how they were to be overcome. Galt imagined an estate of fifty thousand acres of which this mountain should be the paramount feature; miles of concrete roads, a power dam and electric light plant large enough to serve a town, a branch railroad to the base of the mountain, a private station to be named Galt, and finally,—the most impossible thing he could conceive,—a swift electric elevator up the mountain.

The business of acquiring the land began at once. The mountain itself was easy to buy. Many old farm holders in the valley were obstinate. But he got the heart of what he wanted to begin with, the rest would come in time, and construction plans of great magnitude were soon under way. The house in Fifth Avenue was in one sense a failure. It had not reduced Mrs. Valentine. It only made her worse. The social feud was unending. Well, now he would show them a country place.

And this, though he knew it not, was to be his castle on a hill, inaccessible and grand, a place of refuge, the feudal, immemorial symbol of power and conquest.

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M
EANWHILE 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 lynxeyed 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.