The Driver (12 page)

Turning to the directors, who had been standing in a bored, formless group, he asked: “Does that cover it?”

All of them gave assent save Mordecai. He was gazing at the ceiling, his hands held out, pressing the tips of his fingers together.

“Id iss fery euvonious, Mr. Falentine,” he said. “Conzerved iss a fine vord. A fery good vord. Id iss unvair to ze bankers, iss id not, to zpeak of borrowing ad high rates of interest money? Iss id nod already zat ze company hass borrowed more money vrom id’s bankers zan id can pay?”

“Read it please,” said the president to me. I read it aloud.

“Strike out the phrase, ‘whether to borrow a sum of money on its unsecured notes at a high rate of interest,’ and make it read, ‘the question to be decided at today’s meeting of the directors was whether to temporize with its difficulties, or,’—and so on.”

Mordecai, still gazing at the ceiling, nodded with satisfaction. Then he returned to the plane below and led them back to the Board Room, waiting himself until they were all through and closing the door carefully.

The reporters were admitted. We took care to get all of them in at one time, twenty or more, and held the doors open while the directors, passing through Harbinger’s office, made their august escape.

ii

When the reporters were gone a stillness seemed to rise about us like an enveloping atmosphere. Receding events left phantom echoes in our ears. Valentine, having gazed for some time fixedly at a non-existent object, looked slowly about him, saying:

“The corpse is gone.”

Then he went and stood in one of the west windows. I stood at the other. The rain had congealed. Snow was falling in that ominous, isolating way which produces in blond people a sense of friendly huddling, instinctive memory perhaps of a north time when contact meant warmth and security. It blotted out everything of the view beyond Trinity church and graveyard. There was a surrounding impression of vertical gray planes in the windows of which lights were beginning to appear, for it was suddenly dark. The Trinity chimes proclaimed in this vortex the hour of noon.

“What day of the month is it?” he asked, clearing his voice after speaking.

“The eighteenth.”

“Twenty years, lacking two days, I have been president of the Great Midwestern,” he said. “In that time—” He stopped.... Trinity chimes struck the quarter past. “How it snows,” he said, turning from the window. “Well, you see what the railroad business is like. Shall I ask a place for you on one of the New York papers? I promised to do that, you remember, if anything should happen.”

“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’ll stay on here to clear things up a bit.”

“I expected you to say that,” he said. “Still, don’t be sentimental about it. Nobody can tell now what will happen. We shall be in the hands of the court. Well, as you like. I have an appointment to keep with counsel. I may not be back today.”

He departed abruptly.

It occurred to me to go about the offices to see what effect the news was having. That would be something to do. Harbinger, leaning over his desk on his elbows, his head clutched in his two hands, was looking at three models of his stamping device.

“How do they take it?”

“Take what?” he asked, not looking up.

“The news.”

“Oh, that! I don’t know. Go ask them yourself.”

John Harrier was sitting precisely as I saw him that first time, perfectly still, staring at an empty desk.

“Well, it appears we are busted,” I said.

“We’ve been busted for about nine months,” he answered, without moving his head. “But now two and two make four again. Thank God, I say. I couldn’t make her look solvent any longer. Arithmetic wouldn’t stand it, and it stands a lot.”

In the large back office the clerks were gathered in small groups discussing it. Work was suspended.

“Hey!” shouted Handbow. “We’re going to celebrate to-night. A little dinner,
with,
at the Café Boulevard. Will you come?”

The reckless spirit of calamity was catching. I felt it. Even the shabby old furniture took on an irresponsible, vagabond appearance. Solvency, like a scolding, ailing, virtuous wife, was dead and buried. Nobody could help it. Now anything might happen. The moment was full of excitement. There was no boy in the reception room. I sat down at my desk, got up, took a turn about the president’s office, and was thinking I should lock up the place and go out to lunch when I happened to notice that the Board Room door was ajar. In the act of closing it I was startled by the sight of a solitary figure at the head of the long directors’ table. Though his back was to me I recognized him at once. It was Galt. He had slid far down in the chair and was sitting on the end of his spine, legs crossed, hands in his pockets. He might have been asleep. While I hesitated he suddenly got to his feet and began to walk to and fro in a state of excitement. The character of his thoughts appeared in his gestures. His phantasy was that of imposing his will upon a group of men, not easily, but in a very ruthless way.

“Are you running the Great Midwestern?” I asked, pushing the door open.

Starting, he looked at me vaguely, as one coming out of a dream, and said:

“Yes.”

He asked if I had been present at the meeting and was then anxious to know all that had taken place, even the most trivial detail.

“And now,” I said, when I was unable to remember anything more, “please tell me what will happen to the Great Midwestern?”

“Nothing,” he said. “The court will appoint old rhinoceros receiver, and—”

“Mr. Valentine, you mean?”

“That’s customary in friendly proceedings,” he said. “Anyhow, it will be so in this case. The court takes charge of the property as trustee with arbitrary powers. It can’t run the railroad. It must get somebody to do that. So it looks around a bit and decides that the president is the very man. He is hired for the job. The next day he comes back to his old desk with the title of receiver. All essential employes are retained and you go on as before, only without any directors’ meetings.”

“How as before? I don’t understand.”

“That’s the point, Coxey. You can’t shut up a busted railroad like a delicatessen shop. Bankrupt or not it has to go on hauling freight and passengers because it’s what we call a public utility. A railroad may go bust but it can’t stop.”

“Then what is a receivership for?”

“That’s another point. You are getting now some practical economics, not like the stuff old pollywoggle has been filling you up with. The difference is this: When you are bankrupt you put yourself in the hands of the court for self-protection. Then your creditors can’t worry you any more. A railroad in receivership doesn’t have to pay what it owes, but everybody who owes it money has got to pay up because the court says so. It goes along that way for a few months or a year, paying nothing and getting paid, until it shows a little new fat around its bones and is fit to be reorganized.”

“What happens then?”

“Well, then it is purged of sin and gets born again with a new name. The old Great Midwestern Railroad Company becomes the new Great Midwestern Railway Company, issues some new securities on the difference between r-o-a-d and w-a-y, and sets out on its own once more. The receiver is discharged. The stockholders elect a president, maybe the same one as before or maybe not, and the directors begin to hold meetings again.”

iii

The Stock Exchange received the news calmly. It was not unexpected. The directors, as we knew, had been getting out. They read the signs correctly. Under their selling the price of Great Midwestern stock had fallen to a dollar-and-a-half a share. For a stock the par value of which is one hundred dollars that is a quotation of despair. Nothing much more could happen short of utter extinction. Many of the finest railroads in the country were in the same defunct case. You could buy them for less than the junk value of their rails and equipment. But if you owned them you could not sell them for junk. You had to work them, because, as Galt said, they were public utilities. And they worked at a loss.

It happened also on this day that everyone was thinking of something else. That was nothing less than the imminent bankruptcy of the United States Treasury. This delirious event now seemed inevitable.

For several weeks uninterruptedly there had been a run on the government’s gold fund. People were frantic to exchange white money for gold. They waited in a writhing line that kept its insatiable head inside the doors of the sub-Treasury. Its body flowed down the long steps, lay along the north side of Wall Street and terminated in a wriggling tail around the corner in William Street, five minutes’ walk away. It moved steadily forward by successive movements of contraction and elongation. Each day at 3 o’clock the sub-Treasury, slamming its doors, cut off the monster’s head. Each morning at 10 o’clock there was a new and hungrier head waiting to push its way in the instant the doors opened. Its food was gold and nothing else, for it lived there night and day. The particles might change; its total character was always the same. Greed and fear were the integrating principles. Human beings were the helpless cells. It grew. Steadily it ate its way deeper into the nation’s gold reserve, and there was no controlling it, for Congress had said that white money and gold were of equal value and could not believe it was not so. The paying tellers worked very slowly to gain time.

The spectacle was weirdly fascinating. I had been going every day at lunch time to see it. This day the spectators were more numerous than usual, the street was congested with them, because the officers of the sub-Treasury had just telegraphed to Washington saying they could hold out only a few hours more. That meant the gold was nearly gone. It meant that the United States Treasury might at any moment put up its shutters and post a notice:
“CLOSED. Payments suspended. No more gold.”

Never had the line been so excited, so terribly ophidian in its aspect. Its writhings were sickening. The police handled it as the zoo keepers handle a great serpent. That is, they kept it straight. If once it should begin to coil the panic would be uncontrollable.

Particles detached themselves from the tail and ran up and down the body trying to buy places nearer the head. Those nearest the head hotly disputed the right of substitution, as when someone came to take a position he had been paying another to hold. In the tense babel of voices there came sudden fissures of stillness, so that one heard one’s own breathing or the far-off sounds of river traffic. At those moments what was passing before the eyes had the phantastic reality of a dream.

In the throng on the opposite side of the street I ran into Galt and Jonas Gates together. Later it occurred to me that I had never before seen Galt with any director of the Great Midwestern, and it surprised me particularly, as an after thought, that he should know Gates. Just then, however, there was no thinking of anything but the drama in view. Everyone talked to everyone else under the levelling pressure of mass excitement.

“Have you heard?” I asked Galt. “The sub-Treasury has notified Washington that it cannot hold out. It may suspend at any moment.”

“I suppose then eighty million healthy people will have nothing to eat, nothing to wear, no place to go, nothing to do with their idle hands. We’ll all go to hell in a handbasket.”

He spoke loudly. Many faces turned toward us. A very tall, lean man, with a wild light in his eyes and a convulsive, turkey neck, laid a hand on Gait’s arm.

“Right you are, my friend, if I understand your remark. We are about to witness the dawn of a new era. I have proved it. In this little pamphlet, entitled, ‘The Crime of Money—thirty reasons why it should be abolished on earth,’ I show—”

“Don’t jingle your Adam’s apple at me,” said Galt, giving him a look of droll contempt.

The man was struck dumb. Feeling all eyes focused on the exaggerated object thus caricatured in one astonishing stroke he began to gulp uncontrollably. There were shouts of hysterical laughter. In the confusion Galt disappeared, dragging Gates with him.

The sub-Treasury held out until three o’clock and closed its doors once more in a solvent manner, probably, for the last time. Everybody believed it would capitulate to the ophidian thing the next day. There was no escape. Events were in the lap of despair.

i

A
T five o’clock that evening Galt called me on the telephone and asked me to come to his office. I had never been there. It was at 15 Exchange Place, up a long brass-mounted stairway, second floor front. The building was one of a type that has vanished,—gas lighted, wise and old, scornful of the repetitious human scene, full of phantom echoes. On his door was the name, Henry M. Galt, and nothing else. Inside was first a small, bare room in which the only light was the little that came through the opaque glass of a partition door marked “Private.” I hesitated and was about to knock on this inner door when Galt shouted:

“Come in, Coxey.”

He was alone, sitting with his hat on at a double desk between two screened windows at the far side of the room. He did not look up at once. “Sit down a minute,” he said, and went on reading some documents.

The equipment of his establishment was mysteriously simple,—a stock ticker at one of the windows, a row of ten telephones fastened to the wall over a long shelf on which to write in a standing position, a bookkeeper’s high desk and stool, several chairs, a water cooler in disuse, a neglected newspaper file in the corner, a safe, and that was all.

“We are waiting for Gates,” he said, with divided attention, reading still while talking. “I want you to witness... gn-n-n-u-u, how do you spell unsalable,
ala
or
ale?
... Yes... that’s what I made it... witness our signatures.... We get superstitious down here... in this witches’ garden... we do. There are things that grow best when planted in the last phase of the moon,... on a cloudy night... dogs barking.... There he is.”

Jonas Gates walked straight in, sat down at the other side of the desk without speaking, and reached for the papers, which Galt passed to him one by one in a certain order. Having read them carefully he signed them. Then Galt signed them, rose, beckoned me to sit in his place, and put the documents before me separately, showing of each one only the last page. There were six in all,—three originals which went back to Gates and three duplicates which Galt retained. There was a seventh which apparently required neither to be jointly signed nor witnessed. It lay all the time face up on Gates’ side of the desk. I noted the large printed title of that one. It was a mortgage deed. Gates put it with the three others which were his, snapped a rubber band around them and went out, leaving no word or sign behind him.