The Driver (6 page)

“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 operaing 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.

i

I
T was true of Galt, as Harbinger said, that he had no friends; it was not therefore true that his world was full of enemies. He had many acquaintances and no intimates. He was a solitary worker in the money vineyards, keeping neither feud nor tryst with any clan. His reputation in Wall Street was formless and cloudy. Everybody knew him, or knew something about him; for twenty years he had been a pestiferous gadfly on the Stock Exchange, lighting here and there, turning up suddenly in situations where he had to be settled with or bought off, swaggering, bluffing, baiting, playing the greatest of all games of wit with skill and daring—and apparently getting nowhere in the end. Once he had engaged in a lone-handed fight with a powerful banking group over the reorganization of a railroad, demanding to be elected to the directorate as the largest minority stockholder. The bankers were indignant. The audacity of a stock market gambler wanting to sit on a railroad board! What would anybody think? He took his case to the courts and was beaten.

Another time he unexpectedly appeared with actual control of a small railroad, having bought it surreptitiously during many months in the open market place; but as he held it mostly with credit borrowed from the banks his position was vulnerable. It would not do for a gambler like this to own a railroad, the bankers said; so his loans were called away from him and he had to sell out at a heart-breaking loss. He was beaten again.

He took his defeats grimly and returned each time to the practice of free lance speculation, with private brokerage on the side. The unsuccess of these two adventures caused him to be thought of as a man whose ambitions exceeded his powers. There were a great many facts about him, facts of record and facts of hearsay, but when they were brought together the man was lost. Though he talked a great deal to any one who would listen he revealed nothing of himself. His office was one dark little room, full of telephones; and he was never there. He carried his business in his head. Nobody positively spoke ill of him, or if one did it was on ground of free suspicion, with nothing more specific to be alleged than that he turned a sharp corner. That is nothing to say. To go wide around corners in Wall Street is a mark of self-display. People neither liked nor disliked him. They simply had no place in their minds to put him. So they said, “Oh, yes,—Harry Galt,” and shook their heads. They might say he was unsafe and take it back, remarking that he had never been insolvent. What they meant was that he was visionary. Generally on the Stock Exchange there is a shrewd consensus as to what a man is worth. Nobody had the remotest notion of what Galt was worth. It was believed that his fortune went up and down erratically.