The Driver (7 page)

Between Galt and the president of the Great Midwestern there was a strange relationship. Harbinger had said it was not one of friendship. Perhaps not. Yet it would be difficult to find any other name for it. Their association was constant. Galt did all of Valentine’s private Stock Exchange business, as Harbinger said. What Harbinger did not know was that they were engaged in joint speculations under Galt’s advice and direction. All of this, of course, could be without personal liking on either side. Galt was an excellent broker and an adroit speculator. Valentine never spoke of him without a kind of awe and a certain unease of manner. Galt’s references to Valentine were oblique, sometimes irreverent to the verge of disrespect, but that was Galt. It did not imply dislike.

On the president’s return from Chicago I mentioned the fact of having refused to give Galt the earnings.

“Quite right,” he said. “I ought to have told you about Mr. Galt.”

“Is it all right to give him anything he wants?” I asked, remembering what Harbinger had said and wishing to test it for myself. He did not answer at once, nor directly. After walking about for several minutes he said:

“Mr. Galt is becoming a large stockholder in the Great Midwestern Railroad. Why, I don’t know. I cannot follow his process of thought. Our stock is very low. I don’t know when if ever we shall be able to pay dividends on it again. But I cannot keep him from buying it. He is obstinate in his opinions.”

“Is his judgment good in such matters?” I asked.

“It isn’t judgment,” he said slowly. “It isn’t anything you can touch by reason. I suppose it is intuition.”

“Do his intuitions prove in the sequel?”

He grew more restless and then stood for a long time gazing out of the window.

“It’s queer,” he said, speaking to himself. “He has extraordinary foresight. I wish I could see with him now. If he is right then everybody else is wrong. No, he cannot be right... he cannot be. Conditions are too plain.”

“He doesn’t see conditions as they are?” I said.

“As they are?” he repeated, starting, and then staring at me out of focus with recollected astonishment. “He doesn’t see them at all. They don’t exist. What he sees is... is.... Well, well, no matter,” he said, letting down suddenly and returning to his desk with a large gesture of sweeping something behind him.

It was difficult to be friends with Henry Galt. His power of irritation was impish. None escaped its terrors, least of all those upon whom he bestowed his liking. He knew all their tender spots and kept them sore. No word of satire, derision or petulance was ever restrained, or missed its mark. His aim was unerring; and if you were not the victim you wickedly understood the strength of the temptation. He not only made people feel little; he made them look little. What saved it or made it utterly intolerable, according to the point of view, was that having done this he was scornful of his own ego’s achievement, as to say: “I may be greater than you but that’s no sign I am anything to speak of.” There was a curious fact about his exhibitions of un-governed feeling, either ecstasies or tantrums. He had no sense of physical dignity, and therefore no sensation ever of losing it. For that reason he could bring off a most undignified scene in a manner to humiliate everyone but himself. Having behaved incorrigibly he would suddenly stalk off in majestic possession of himself and leave others in a ludicrous plight, with a sense of having suffered an unanswerable indignity. It delighted him to seize you up on some simple declaration of opinion, demand the reason, then the grounds of the reason, and run you off your wits with endless, nagging questions.

On handing him the weekly earnings one afternoon I passed a word of unconsidered comment. He impeached it with a question. I defended it foolishly. He impeached the defense with another question. And this went on until I said:

“It was nothing in the beginning. I merely meant it to be civil, like passing the time of day. I’m sorry I spoke at all.”

“Sorry spoils it,” he said. “Otherwise very handsome.” And he passed into the president’s office for the long conference which now was a daily fixture. They went away together as usual. Presently Galt alone returned and said in a very nice way:

“Come and have dinner with me, Coxey.”

When we were seated in the Sixth Avenue L train he resumed the inquisitive manner, only now he flattered me by showing genuine interest in my answers. Had I seen the board of directors in action? How was I impressed? Who was the biggest man in the lot at a guess? Why so? What did I think of Valentine, of this and that one? Why? He not only made me recall my impressions, he obliged me to account for them. And he listened attentively. When we descended at 50th Street he seemed not to notice that it was drizzling rain. There was no umbrella. We walked slowly south to 48th Street and turned east, talking all the time.

The Galt house was tall, brown and conventional, lying safe within the fringe. It was near the middle of the block. Eastward toward Fifth Avenue as the scale of wealth ascended there were several handsome houses. Westward toward Sixth Avenue at the extreme end of the block you might suspect high class board. But it is a long block; one end does not know the other. About the entrance, especially at the front door as Galt admitted us with a latch-key, there was an effect of stinted upkeep.

Inside we were putting off our things, with no sign of a servant, when suddenly a black and white cyclone swept down the hall, imperilling in its passage a number of things and threatening to overwhelm its own object; but instead at the miraculous moment it became rigid, gracefully executed a flying slide on the tiled floor, and came to a perfect stop with Galt in its arms.

“Safe!” I shouted, filled with excitement and admiration.

“Natalie,” said Galt, introducing her.

She shook hands in a free, roguish manner, smiling with me at herself, without really for an instant taking her attention off Galt.

“You’re wet,” she said severely.

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re soaking wet,” she insisted, feeling and pinching him at the same time. “You’ve got to change.”

“I’ve got to do nothing of the kind,” he said. “We want to talk. Let us alone.” To me he said: “Come up to my room,” and made for the stairway.

Natalie, getting ahead of him, barred the way.

“You won’t have a minute to talk,” she said. “Dinner is ready. Go in there.”

“Oh, all right... all right,” he growled, turning into the parlor. Almost before he could sit down she was at him with a dry coat, holding it. Grumbling and pretending to be churlish, yet secretly much pleased, he changed garments, saying: “Will that do you?”

“For now,” she said, smoothing the collar and giving him a little whack to finish.

Mrs. Galt appeared. Then Galt’s mother, introduced simply and sweetly by her nursery name, Gram’ma Galt There was an embarrassing pause.

“Where is Vera?” Galt asked.

Vera, I supposed, was the ferryboat girl.

Nobody answered his question. Mrs. Galt by an effort of strong intention moved us silently toward the dining room. The house seemed bare,—no pictures to look at, a few pieces of fine old furniture mixed with modern things, good rugs worn shabby and no artistry of design or effect whatever except in the middle room between parlor and dining room which contained a grand piano, some art objects and a thought of color. Nothing in the house was positively ugly or in bad taste, nor in the total impression was there any uncomfortable suggestion of genteel poverty. What the environment seemed to express, all save that one middle room, was indifference.

“You will want to talk,” said Mrs. Galt, placing me at the left of Galt, so that I faced Natalie, who sat at his right This was the foot of the table. Mrs. Galt sat at the head of it, with Gram’ma Galt at her right and a vacant place at her left.

“Where is Vera?” Galt asked again, beginning to develop symptoms.

“She isn’t coming down,” said Mrs. Galt in a horizontal voice.

“Why not?” asked Galt, beating the table. “Why not?”

“T-e-e o-o-o doubleyou,” said Natalie, significantly, trying to catch his eye. But he either didn’t hear or purposely ignored her, and went on:

“She does this to spite me. She does it every time I bring anybody home. I won’t have it. She’s a monkey, she’s a snob. I’ll call her till she comes. Hey, Ver-a-a-al”

Natalie had been shaking him by the arm, desperately trying to make him look at a figure formed with the fingers of her right hand. Evidently there was a code between them. She had already tried the cipher, T O W, whatever that meant, and now this was the sign. If he would only look! But of course he wouldn’t. Suddenly the girl threw herself around him, and though he resisted she smothered him powerfully and whispered in his ear. Instantly the scene dissolved. She returned to her place slightly flushed with the exertion, he sat up to the table, and dinner began to be served as if nothing unusual had taken place.

Mrs. Galt addressed polite inquiries at me, spoke to the butler, conversed with Natalie, not feverishly or in haste, but placidly, in a calm level voice. She was a magnificent brunette woman, turning gray at a time of life and in a manner to make her look even younger and more striking than before. Her expression was trained, impersonal and weary, as that of one who knows the part too well to be surprised or taken unawares and had forgotten what it was like to be interested without effort. There were lines suitable to every occasion. She knew them all and spoke them well, omitting nothing, slurring nothing, adding nothing. Her conversation, like her expression, was a guise. Back of that there dwelt a woman.

No one spoke to the old mother. I tried to talk to her. She became instantly rigid and remained so until I turned away embarrassed. As I did so Natalie was looking at me.

“Don’t mind Gram’ma,” she said across the table. “When she wants to talk she will let you know.”

I happened to catch the angry look that the grandmother darted at the girl for this polite impertinence. It betrayed an amazing energy of spirit. That old stone house with its breaking lines, dissolving gray textures, and no way in, was still the habitat of an ageless, sultry sibyl. Trespass at your peril! But youth possessing itself is truly impervious. The girl did not mind. She returned the look with a smile, just a little too winsome, as everything about her seemed a little too high in key or color, too extraordinary, too unexpected, or, like the girl in the perfumer’s advertisement, a little too much to be true, not in any sense of being unreal, but as an entity altogether and unfortunately improbable. She had learned how to get what she wanted, and her way of getting it, one could imagine, was all that made life bearable in that household.

Its sky was low and ominous, charged with a sense of psychic stress. I felt two conditions of conflict, one chronic and one acute. The feeling of there being something acute was suddenly deepened when the old mother spoke for the first and only time. Her voice was clear, precise and commanded undivided attention. The question she asked gave me a queer start.

“What is the price of Great Midwestern to-day?”

“Eight,” said Galt, amid profound silence.

That was all. Yet it was as if a spark had passed through inflammable gas. The same feeling was deepened further by another incident.

“Coxey,” said Galt, addressing me rhetorically, “what one thing has impressed you most in Wall Street?”

“The unbelief of people in themselves, in each other and in what they are doing,” I replied.

“What’s that? Say it again.”

I said it again, whereat he burst forth with shrill, discordant, exulting sounds, beating the china with a spoon and making for one person an incredible uproar. At the same time he looked about him with a high air, especially at his wife, whose expression was perfectly blank. Natalie smiled grimly. The old mother was oblivious.

“I don’t see anything in that,” I said, when the racket subsided.

“There is, though,” he said. “You didn’t mean to do it but you hit ‘em in the eye that time,—square in the eye. Wow 1” He was very agreeably excited and got up from the table.

“Come on,” he said, “we’ll talk in my room.”

“I’ll send your coffee up,” Mrs. Galt called after us, as he bore me off.

“This is where I live and play,” he said, applying a latch-key to a door at the top of the stairway. He went in first to get the light on, saying: “I don’t let anybody in here but Natalie. She can dust it up without touching anything.”

The room was a workshop in that state of involved disorder, tools all scattered about, which is sign and measure of the craftsman’s engrossment. There was an enormous table piled high at both ends with papers, briefs, maps, charts, blue prints, files, pamphlets and stuffed envelopes. Books were everywhere,—on the table, on the chairs, on the floor, many of them open, faces up and faces down, straddled one upon another leap-frog fashion, arranged in series with weights to hold them flat, books sprawling, leaning, prone. Poor’s Manual of Railway Statistics, the Financial Chronicle, Statistical Abstract of the United States, Economics of Railroad Construction, History of the Erie Railroad, the Yardmaster’s Assistant,—such were the titles. Against the right wall to a height of six feet were book shelves filled with all the contemporary financial and commercial periodicals in bound volumes, almanacs, endless books of statistical reference and the annual reports of various railway corporations, running back for many years. On top of the shelves was the only decorative thing in the room,—a beautiful working model of a locomotive, perfect in every intricate part, mounted in brass and set upon a nickel plated section of railway.

One could have guessed without seeing him that the occupant of this room was restless, never at physical ease, and worked all over the place, sitting here and there, lying down and walking about. On the left side of the room was a couch and close beside it at one end a morris chair, a reading light between them. Both the couch and chair showed nervous wear and tear. And beyond the table in the clear space the rug had been paced threadbare.

Most of the available wall area was covered with maps and colored charts. I walked about looking at them. Galt removed his shoes, put on slippers, got into a ragged lounging jacket and threw himself on the couch, where he lay for some time watching me with the air of one who waits only to pop open at the slightest touch in the right place.