The Driver (17 page)

Long before the day of the annual meeting Galt had a large majority of the stockholders with him. Nevertheless, he sent me abroad to solicit the proxies of foreign stockholders. They were easy to get. I was surprised to find that the foreigners, who are extremely shrewd in these matters, with an instinct for men who have the money making gift, had already made up their minds about Galt. They had been watching his work and they were buying Great Midwestern stock on account of it.

When it came to the meeting Valentine had not enough support to elect one director. His humiliation was complete. Then he resigned and Galt was elected in his place, to be both chairman and president.

He was not exultant. For an hour he walked about the office with a brooding, absent air. This was his invariable mood of projection. He was not thinking at all of what had happened. He put on his hat and stood for a minute in the doorway. Looking back he said, “Hold tight, Coxey,” and slammed the door behind him.

i

G
ALT’S overthrow of Valentine was an episode of business which need not have concerned the outside world. But the conditions of the struggle were dramatic and personal and the papers made big news of it. The consequences were beyond control. Henry M. Galt was publicly discovered. That of course was inevitable, then or later. He was already high above the horizon and rising fast. The astronomers were unable to say whether he was a comet or a planet They were astonished not more by the suddenness of his coming than by the rate at which he grew as they observed him.

The other consequences were abnormal, becoming social and political, and followed him to the end of his career.

Valentine was not a man to be smudged out of the picture. He was a person of power and influence. The loss of his historic position was of no pecuniary moment, for he was very rich; it was a blow at his prestige and a hurt to his pride, inflicted in the limelight. His grievance against Galt was irredressible. Honestly, too, he believed Galt to be a dangerous man. But he was a fair fighter within the rules and would perhaps never himself have carried the warfare outside of Wall Street where it belonged.

Mrs. Valentine was the one to do that. She was the social tyrant of her time, ruling by fear and might that little herd of human beings who practice self-worship and exclusion as a mysterious rite, import and invent manners, learn the supercilious gesture which means “One does not know them,” and in short get the goat of vulgus. Her favor was the one magic passport to the inner realm of New York society. Her disfavor was a writ of execution. She was a turbulent woman, whose tongue knew no inhibitions. Whom she liked she terrified; whom she disliked she sacrificed.

Now she took up the fight in two dimensions. Galt she slandered outrageously, implanting distrust of him in the minds of men who would carry it far and high,—to the Senate, even to the heart of the Administration. Then as you would expect, from her position as social dictator she struck at the Galt women. That was easy. With one word she cast them into limbo.

Mrs. Galt had inalienable rights of caste. She belonged to a family that had been of the elect for three generations. Her aunt once held the position now occupied by Mrs. Valentine. Galt’s family, though not at all distinguished, was yet quite acceptable. Marriage therefore did not alter Mrs. Galt’s social status. She had voluntarily relinquished it, without prejudice, under pressure of forbidding circumstances. These were a lack of wealth, a chronic sense of insecurity and Galt’s unfortunate temperament.

Gradually she sank into social obscurity, morose and embittered. She made no effort to introduce her daughters into the society she had forsaken; and as she was unwilling for them to move on a lower plane the result was that they were nurtured in exile.

Vera at a certain time broke through these absurd restraints and began to make her own contacts with the world. They were irregular. She spent weekends with people whom nobody knew, went about with casual acquaintances, got in with a musical set, and then took up art, not seriously for art’s sake, but because some rebellious longing of her nature was answered in the free atmosphere of studios and art classes. In her wake appeared maleness in various aspects, eligible, and ineligible. Natalie, who was not yet old enough to follow Vera’s lead, nor so bold as to contemplate it for herself, looked on with shy excitement. The rule is that the younger sister may have what caroms off. Vera’s men never caromed off. They called ardently for a little while and then sank without trace, to Natalie’s horror and disappointment. What Vera did with them or to them nobody ever knew. She kept it to herself.

“You torpedo them,” said Natalie, accusing her.

Mrs. Galt watched the adventuring Vera with anxiety and foreboding, which gradually gave way to a feeling of relief, not unmingled with a kind of awe,

“Thank Heaven I don’t have to worry about Vera!” she said one day, relevantly to nothing at all, She was thinking out loud.

“Why not, mamma?” asked Natalie.

“Don’t ask me, child. And don’t try to be like her.”

ii

Then all at once they were rich.

For a while they hardly dared to believe it. The habit of not being rich is something to break. Galt’s revenge for their unbelief, past and present, was to overwhelm them with money. First he returned to them severally all that he had borrowed or taken from them to put into Great Midwestern. This, he said, was not their principal back. It was the profit. It was only the beginning of their profit. Their investments were left whole. Presently they began to receive dividends. Besides, he settled large sums upon them as gifts, and kept increasing them continually.

“What shall we do with it?” asked Natalie.

“Do with it?” said Galt. “What do people do with money? Anything they like. Spend it.”

He encouraged them to be extravagant, especially Natalie. She had a passion for horses. He gave her a stable full on her birthday, all show animals, one of which, handled by Natalie, took first prize in its class at Madison Square Garden the next month. Galt, strutting about the ring, was absurd with wonder and excitement. He wished to clap the judge on the back. Mrs. Galt restrained him as much as she could. She could not keep him from shouting when the ribbon was handed out. It was more a victory for Natalie than for the horse. She was tremendously admired. People looked at their cards to find her name, then at her again, asking, “Who is she?”

She was nobody. In the papers the next morning her name was mentioned and that was all, except that one paper referred to her as the daughter of a Wall Street broker. Other girls, neither so beautiful nor so expert as Natalie, were daintily praised.

Galt was furious. Yet he had no suspicion of what was the matter. There was gloom in his household when he expected gaiety. His efforts to discover the reasons were met with evasive, cryptic sentences.

“What have you been doing today?” he asked Natalie one hot June evening at dinner.

“Nothing,” she answered.

This exchange was followed as usual by a despondent silence which always contained an inaudible accusation of Galt. Everyone would have denied it sweetly. He couldn’t turn it on them. He could only take it out in irritability.

“All fuss and feathers and nothing to do,” he said. “You make me sick. I can’t see why you don’t do what other girls do. There’s nothing they’ve got that you can’t have. Go some place. Go to Newport. That’s where they all go, ain’t it?”

“Papa, dear,” said Natalie, “what should we do at Newport?”

“Do! Do! How the—how do I know? Swim, dance, flirt, whatever the rest of them do. Take a house... make a splurge... cut in with the crowd. I don’t know. Your mother does. That’s her business. Ask her.”

“Oh, but you don’t understand,” said Natalie. “We’d not be taken in. Mother does know.”

“What does that mean?” Galt asked.

“You can’t just dress up and go where you want to go,” said Natalie. “You have to be asked. We’d look nice at Newport with a house, wouldn’t we?”

“Go on,” said Galt, in a dazed kind of way.

“I mean,” said Natalie,... “oh, you know, papa, dear. Don’t be an old stupid. Why go on with it?... Of course you can always do things with people of a sort. They ask you fast enough. But mother says if we do that we’ll never get anywhere. So we have to wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“I don’t know,” said Natalie, on the verge of tears. “Ask mother.”

“So ho-o-o-o!” said Galt, beginning to see. “I’ll ask her.”

Mrs. Galt and Vera were in a state of crystal passivity. They heard without listening. Galt pursued the matter no further at dinner. Later he held a long interview with Mrs. Galt and she told him the truth. Social ostracism was the price his family paid for the enemies he had made and continued to make in Wall Street. She had tried. She had knocked, hut no door opened. She had prostrated herself before her friends. They were sorry and helpless. Nothing could be done,—not at once. She had better wait quietly, they said, until the storm blew over. Mrs. Valentine was at her worst, terrible and unapproachable. The subject couldn’t even be mentioned. Anyone who received the Galts was damned.

iii

Galt was unable to get his mind down to work the next day. He would leave it and walk about in a random manner, emitting strange, intermittent sounds,—grunts, hissings and shrewd whistlings. Then he would sit down to it again, but with no relief, and repeat the absent performance.

“Come on, Coxey,” he said, taking up his hat. “We’ll show them something.”

We went up-town by the L train, got off at 42nd Street, took a cab and drove slowly up Fifth Avenue.

“That’s Valentine’s house,” he said, indicating a beautiful old brick residence. He called to the cabby to put us down and wait. We walked up and down the block. Almost directly opposite the Valentine house was a brown stone residence in ill repair, doors and windows boarded up, marked for sale. Having looked at it several times, measuring the width of the plot with his eye, he crossed over to the Valentine house, squared his heels with the line of its wall and stepped off the frontage, counting, “Three, six, nine,” etc. It stretched him to do an imaginary yard per step. He was as unconscious as a mechanical tin image and resembled one, his arms limp at his sides, his legs shooting out in front of him with stiff angular movements. He wore a brown straw hat, his hair flared out behind, his tie was askew and fallen away from the collar button.

Returning he stepped off in the same way the frontage of the property for sale.

“About what I thought,” he said. “Twenty feet more.”

He wrote down the number of the house and the name and address of the real estate firm from the sign and we were through. An agent was sent immediately to buy the property. He telephoned before the end of the day.

“We’ve got it, Coxey,” said Galt. “The transfer will be made in your name. This is all a dead secret. Not a word. Find the best architect in New York and have him down here tomorrow.”

As luck was, the architect had a set of beautiful plans that had been abandoned on account of cost. With but few modifications they suited Galt perfectly. He could hardly wait until everything was settled,—not only as to the house itself, but as to its equipment, decorations and furnishings complete, even pictures, linen and plate.

“When it’s done,” he said, “I want to walk in with a handbag and stay there,”

Having signed the contracts he added an extra cumulative per diem premium for completion in advance of a specified date. Then he put it away from his mind and returned,—I had almost said,—to his money making. That would not be true. His mind was not on money, primarily. He thought in terms of creative achievement.

There are two regnant passions in the heart of man. One is to tear down, the other is to build up. Galt’s passion was to build. In his case the passion to destroy, which complements the other, was satisfied in removing obstacles. Works enthralled him in right of their own magic. To see a thing with the mind’s eyes as a vision in space, to give orders, then in a little while to go and find it there, existing durably in three dimensions,—that was power!
NO
other form of experience was comparable to this.

His theory, had he been able to formulate one, would have been that any work worth doing must pay. That was the ultimate test. If it didn’t pay there was something wrong. But profit was what followed as a vindication or a conclusion, in logic First was the thing itself to be imagined. The difference between this and the common attitude may be subtle; it is hard to define; yet it is fundamental. He did not begin by saying: “How can the Great Midwestern be made to earn a profit of ten per cent?” No. He said: “How shall we make the Great Midwestern system the greatest transportation machine in the world?” If that were done the profit would mind itself. He could not have said this himself. He never troubled his mind with self-analysis. I think he never knew how or why he became the greatest money maker of his generation in the world.

iv

Nothing happened to betray the secret of the house that rose in Fifth Avenue opposite Valentine’s. The real estate news reporters all went wild in their guesses as to its ownership. Galt never interfered about details; but if the chart of construction progress which he kept on his desk showed the slightest deviation from ideal he must know at once what was going wrong. There was a strike of workmen. He said to give them what they wanted and indemnified the contractors accordingly. Once it was a matter of transportation. Three car loads of precious hewn stone got lost in transit. The records of the railroad that had them last showed they had been handed on. The receiving road had no record of having received them. They had vanished altogether. At last they were found in Jersey City. A yard crew had been using them for three weeks as a make-weight to govern the level of one of those old-fashioned pontoons across which trains were shunted from the mainland tracks to car barges in the river. They happened to be just the right weight for the purpose. After that every railroad with a ferry transfer that the Great Midwestern had anything to say about installed a new kind of pontoon, raised and lowered by a simple hydraulic principle.