The Driver (14 page)

Now through these gates went Galt. He had a vision of the future longer than the lance of any knight defending. He needed horse and armor. I did not see him again that day.

iii

In the evening I went to the house. Natalie met me.

“He is in bed,” she said.

“Is he ill?”

“He looked very tired and ate no dinner. I was to tell you if you came that he had to get a big sleep on account of something that will happen tomorrow.”

I was holding my hat. Natalie looked at it.

“My beautiful sister is not at home,” she said.

“Tell her I was desolate.”

“And that you did not ask for her?” she suggested, slyly.

“Now, Natalie, you are teasing me.”

“Mamma is out. Gram’ma’s gone to bed. There’s nobody to entertain you,” she said, shaking her head.

“What a dreary state of things!” I said, laughing at her and putting down my hat.

She went ahead of me into the parlor, arranged a heap of pillows at one end of the sofa, saying, “There I” and sat herself in a small, straight chair some distance away.

Going on eighteen is an age between maidenhood and womanhood. Innocence and wisdom have the same naïve guise and change parts so fast that you cannot be sure which one is acting. The girl herself is not sure. She doesn’t stop to think. It is a charming masquerade of two mysterious forces. The part of innocence is to protect and conceal her; the part of wisdom is to betray and reveal her.

“I wish I were a man,” she sighed.

“Every girl says that once. Why do you wish it?” I asked.

“But it’s so,” she said. “They know so much... they can do so many things.”

“What does a man know that a woman doesn’t?”

“If I were a man,” she said, “I’d be able to help father. I’d understand figures and charts and all those things he works with. They make my silly head ache. I’d study finance. What is it like?”

“What is finance like?”

“Yes. Do you think I might understand it a little?”

For an hour or more we talked finance,—that is, I talked and she listened, saying, “Yes,” and “Oh,” and bringing her chair closer. She made a very pretty picture of attention. I’m sure she didn’t understand a word of it. Then she began to ask me questions about her father,—what his office was like, how he dealt with Wall Street people, what he did on the Stock Exchange, and so on.

“Must you?” she asked, when I rose to go. “I’m afraid you haven’t been entertained at all. I love to listen.”

“I just now remember I haven’t had any dinner,” I said. “I stopped late at the office and came directly here. It’s past ten o’clock.”

“Dear me! Why didn’t you tell me? I’ll get you something. You didn’t know I could cook. Come on.”

Without waiting for yes or no she scurried off in the direction of the kitchen. I followed to call her back, but when I had reached the dining room she was out of sight, the pantry door swinging behind her. I returned to the parlor and waited, thinking she would report what there was to eat. Then I could make my excuses and depart.

She did not return. Presently I began to feel embarrassed, as much for her as for myself; also a little nettled. However, I couldn’t disappoint her now. It would be too late to stop whatever she was doing. She had said, “Come on.” Therefore she was expecting me in the kitchen and was probably by this time in a state of hysterical anxiety, wondering if I would come, or if perhaps I had gone; and no way out of the frolic she had started but to see it through.

I found her beating eggs in a yellow bowl. She had put on an apron and turned up her sleeves. Her face was flushed, her eyes were bright with a spirit of fun, and wisps of wavy black hair had fallen a little loose at her temples. I surrendered instantly.

“You won’t mind eating in the kitchen, will you? It’s cozy,” she said, almost too busy to give me a look.

A small table was already spread for one; chairs were placed for two.

“This is much more interesting than finance,” I said, watching her at close range.

“I can make a perfect omelette,” she said. “So light you don’t know you are eating it. You only taste it.”

“Not very filling,” I thought.

“There may be something else, too,” she said.

There was. She rifled the pantry. The imponderable omelette, accompanied by bacon, was followed by cold chicken, ham, sausage, asparagus, salad, cheese of two kinds, jams in fluttering uncertainty, cake and coffee.

When she was convinced at last that I couldn’t encompass another bite and rested upon her achievement she began to giggle.

“What’s that for?”

“I’m thinking,” she said, “what my sister would say if she saw us now.”

As I walked home I could not help contrasting her with Vera, who never, even at Natalie’s age, would have thought of doing a thing like that. Why? Yes, why? Well, because she had not that way with a man. Natalie was born to get what she wanted through men. She fed them. She fed their stomachs with food and their egoes with adoration. She liked doing it for she liked men. She already knew more about their simplicities than Vera would ever learn. She knew it all instinctively. And how lovely she was in that apron!

iv

Late the next afternoon he appeared at my desk, sat down, fixed me with a stare and began to whistle Yankee Doodle out of tune.

“Did they take your plan?” I asked him.

He went on whistling. I couldn’t guess what had happened. His expression was unreadable.

“Did they?” I asked again.

He stopped for breath.

“Spit on your hands, Coxey,” he said, as if I were at a distance and needed some encouragement. “We’ve got her by the tail,—by the tail,
tail! tail!
We’ll tie a knot in the end of it and then we’re off.”

He never told me how he did it. He had no vanity of reminiscence. Long afterward I got it from a junior partner of the firm of Mordecai & Co.

They hardly knew him by sight. He appeared in their office on that hot Summer morning and said simply that he wished to talk Great Midwestern. He would see nobody but Mordecai himself. At mid-day they were still talking, and lunch was brought to Mordecai’s room. One by one the junior members were called in until they were all present.

Galt amazed them with his knowledge of the property, its situation and possibilities; even more with his acute understanding of its finances. He gave them information on matters they had never heard of. He gave them original ideas with such frankness and unreserve that at one point Mordecai interrupted.

“Ve cannod vorged vad you zay, Mr. Gald. Id iss zo impordand ve mighd use id. Zare iss no bargain yed. Ve are nod here angels.”

“I can’t help that,” said Galt. ‘To sell a tune you have to play it.” And he went on.

When Mordecai spoke again the case was lost.

“Vor uss id iss nod,” he said. “Vor uss id iss nod. Ve are bankers. To zese heights ov imagination ve cannod vollow, Mr. Gald. Id iss beautiful. Ve are zorry.”

In the doorway Galt turned and faced them. No one else had moved.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I need some sleep. I’ll come tomorrow.”

The scene was repeated the next day,—Galt talking, the bankers listening, Mordecai lying back in his chair, gazing at the ceiling, tapping the ends of his fingers together, blowing his breath through his short gray beard.

“Vad iss id vor yourself you vand, Mr. Gald?” he asked without moving.

It was Galt’s way when he was winning to press his luck. He wanted a place on the board of directors. But he demanded more.

“I want to be chairman of the board,” he said.

“Id vould be strange,” said Mordecai, pensively. “Nobody vould understand id. Ooo iss zat Mr. Gald? Vy iss he made chairman? Zo ze people vould talk. Ov ze old directors ooo vould fode vor zat Mr. Gald?”

“Gates and Valentine will vote for me,” said Galt.

“You haf asked zem?”

“I have asked Gates,” said Galt “I am sure of Valentine.”

Another way of Galt’s was to stop at the peak of his argument, and wait. When the other man in his mind is coming over to your side a word too much will often stop him. Galt knew he was winning. There was a long silence. They began to wonder if Mordecai was asleep. He was a man of few but surprising contradictions. Conservative, cautious, axiomatic, he had on the other side great courage of mind and a latent capacity for daring. He distrusted intuition as a faculty, yet on rare occasions he astonished his associates by arriving most unexpectedly at an intuitive conclusion, knowing it to be such, and acting upon it with fatalistic intensity. On those occasions he was never wrong.

Now he sat up slowly and began to toy with a jeweled paper knife.

“Nobody vill understand id, Mr. Gald.... Nobody vill understand id.... Ve accepd your plan. Ve promise all our invluence to use zat you vill be made chairman of ze board,—on one condition. You vill resign iv ve ask id immediately.”

Galt unhesitatingly accepted the condition.

When he was gone Mordecai said to his partners: “Ve haf a gread man discovered. Id iss only zat ve zhall a liddle manage him.”

v

In September the plan was brought out. Though it caused a good deal of dubious comment the verdict of general opinion was ultimately favorable. The security holders liked it because they were not assessed in the ordinary way. They received, instead, the “privilege” so-called of buying new securities.

When all arrangements were completed the assets of the old Great Midwestern Railroad Company, meaning the railroad itself and all its possessions and appurtenances, were put up at auction. Mordecai & Co., acting as trustees, were the only bidders.

They delivered the assets to the new Great Midwestern
Railway
Company, which had been previously incorporated under the laws of New Jersey. Afterward there was a stockholders’ meeting in Jersey City, in one of those corporation tenements where rooms are hired in rotation by corporations that never live in them but come once a year for an hour or two to transact some formal business and thereby satisfy the fiction of legal residence.

A stockholders’ meeting is itself a fiction. The stockholders are present by proxy. Clerks bring the proxies in suit cases. They are counted and voted in the name of the stockholders under previous instructions. Thus directors are elected. Mordecai & Co. held six tenths of the proxies. Horace Potter, representing himself and the oil crowd whose investment in the old Great Midwestern had been very large, held three tenths. There was no contest; Mordecai & Co. and the oil crowd acted concertedly in all matters. They were allied interests. With one exception the old board was re-elected. The exception was Henry M. Galt, elected in place of a very old man who had been induced by the bankers to withdraw.

In the afternoon of the same day the directors met in the Board Room for the first time since their inglorious exit through Harbinger’s office eleven months before. Valentine was unanimously reelected president. There was a pause.

“I bropose Mr. Gald vor chairman ov ze board,” lisped Mordecai.

It had all been arranged beforehand. There was no doubt of the outcome. Yet there was an air of constraint about taking the formal step. Evidently in the background there had been a struggle of forces.

Potter said: “Second the nomination.”

The president called for the vote. Four were silent, including Galt. Five voted aye. Valentine nodded his head and the result was recorded: “Chairman of the Board, Henry M. Galt.”

Meanwhile the traffic manager and his three assistants, who had been summoned from Chicago for a conference, were waiting in Harbinger’s office. Galt walked directly there from the Board Room, sat on Harbinger’s desk with his feet in the chair, waived all introductions, and said:

“Now for business. Hereafter all contracts with shippers and all agreements with the traffic managers of other roads will be sent to this office for my approval and signature. They will not be valid otherwise.”

The traffic manager was a florid, contemptuous man who wore costly Chicago clothes and carried a watch in each waistcoat pocket, very far apart. He was one of a ring of traffic managers who waxed fat and arrogant in the exercise of a power that nobody dared or knew how to wrest from them. They sold favors to shippers. They sold railroad stocks for a fall in Wall Street and then got up ruinous rate wars among themselves to make stocks fall. Their ways were predatory, scandalous and uncontrollable. If one railroad tried to discipline its traffic manager the others practiced reprisals and the business of that one railroad would slump; or if a railroad dismissed its traffic manager his successor would be just as bad, or more greedy in fact, having to begin at the beginning to get rich.

At Galt’s speech the traffic manager crossed his legs with amazement, dropped his arms, slid down in his chair, bowed his neck and assumed the look of an incredulous bull, showing the white under his eyes.

“And who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Me?” said Galt. “I’m the driver.”

“We’ll see,” said the traffic manager. He rose, overturning his chair, and made for the door, meaning of course to see the president.

“You’d better wait a minute,” said Galt. “I’m not through yet.”

He waited.

Then Galt, addressing the assistants, outlined a new policy. What they were to work for was through freight, passing from one end of the system to the other. What they were to avoid was anything they wouldn’t like a railroad to do to them. What they were to believe in was a gang spirit. What they were to get immediately was a doubling of their pay.

Getting down on the floor he advanced slowly with a stealthy step at the traffic manager, who began to quail.

“You choose whether to resign or be fired,” said Galt. “The first assistant will take your place.” He added something in a lower tone that no one else could hear, then stood looking at him fixedly. The traffic manager started, mopped the back of his neck, wavered, and stood quite still.

“Well, it’s damned high time,” he said, at last, by way of mentioning a basic fact. With that he sat down and wrote his resignation.

This incident was an omen. Unconsciously Galt worked on the principle that once a thing has happened it cannot unhappen. The fact of its having happened is original and irrevocable. Every other fact in the universe must adjust itself to that one. Something else may happen the next instant; that is a new happening again.