The Driver (15 page)

Mr. Valentine was violently agitated by the traffic manager’s dismissal. If he had been consulted he would have made an issue of it. But there it was. It had happened. The fact created a situation. He might refuse to accept the situation, but he could not extinguish the fact. He fumed and let it pass. Nothing was ever the same again.

Galt consulted nobody. He turned from the traffic man to Harbinger and ordered that the pay of the whole executive staff from the secretary down be doubled. Then he put Harbinger out, took the whole of the room for himself, painted the word “Chairman” on the door and thereafter the Great Midwestern was managed from his desk. There was never a moment’s doubt about it. There was no time to debate his authority. It took all of everybody’s time to keep up with what was happening. He recast the operating department by telegraph in one hour, according to a plan already matured in his mind. He changed the accounting system radically, and much to everyone’s surprise, John Harrier accepted the change with enthusiasm.

Having made a flying trip over the road he sent a telegram ahead of him calling a special meeting of the board of directors. It convened at ten o’clock. Galt came directly from the train, stained, unshaven and a little weary, until he began to talk.

What he proposed was that fifty million dollars be raised at once and spent for new engines, cars, rails and road improvements. Mordecai alone was prepared for this. All the others were daft with astonishment. A railroad only a few days out of bankruptcy to find and spend that sum for improvements I It was preposterous. Not only was the whole board against him, save Mordecai; it was hostile and struck with foreboding. As Galt rose to make his argument I remembered what he had twice said: “I shall be one of ten men in a Board Room. Everything else follows from that.”

vi

This was the first true exhibition of his power to move men’s minds,—a power which nobody understood, which he did not himself understand. Perhaps it was not their minds he moved. Men of strong will often turned from their convictions and voted with him or for what he wanted who afterward, having recovered their own opinions, were unable to say why they had acted that way. He was not eloquent. When he was excited his voice became shrill and irritating. He had no felicity of speech and often lost the grammar of tenses, cases and pronouns. The reasoning was always clear. He moulded an argument in the form of a wedge and then hit it a sledge-hammer blow. But it was not the argument alone that did it. As time went on he more and more dispensed with argument and brought the result to pass directly, as a hypnotist with a well trained subject induces the trance without preparation, seemingly by an act of mere intention. It was a power that increased with use until it was like an elemental force and acted at a distance, so that he had only to send an agent with word that this or that should be done, and men did it helplessly. You may say of course that all such later phenomena were owing to a habit of submission, men having accepted the tyranny of his will, only that would not account for the rise of his power from nothing, would it?

In this first case he had back of him no prestige of success. He was still unknown and distrusted by a majority of the ten directors who sat at the board table. And they were not men accustomed to be led. They were themselves leaders. In all Wall Street it would have been impossible to find a more powerful, self-confident group, cold, calculating, unsentimental in business, their faces all cruelly scarred with the marks of success terrifically achieved. Yet as he talked their chemistries changed. The first visible reaction was one of bothered surprise. This was followed by efforts of resistance. The last phase was one of fascination.

His reasons were these: A flood was about to rise. He adduced evidence on that point. Money, materials and labor were plenty and cheap. Never again would it be possible to increase the railroad’s capacity at a cost so low. And a railroad that made itself ready to receive the flood would reap a rich harvest. Finally, the spending of fifty million dollars in this way would give business the impulse it was waiting for,—the little push that sends a great vessel down the ways into the water. The moment was rare and propitious.

“Is it true,” asked Mr. Valentine, “that the chairman on his own responsibility, without consulting the president or the board of directors, has already placed contracts for engines, cars, rails and construction work, before the money has been voted for that purpose, before anybody knows whether it can be raised or not? I have heard so.”

Everyone was startled by the question. Galt was not expecting it.

“That is true,” he said, and waited.

“So we are committed to this expenditure whether we approve it or not?”

“That’s the predicament,” said Galt, recklessly.

Valentine, wholly deceived by his manner, came heavily on.

“Have you any idea what it will cost us to get out of these contracts,—to cancel them?”

“The construction contracts,” Galt said very slowly, “are subject to cancellation without penalty until this midnight. The contracts for engines, cars and rails cannot be cancelled. I’ve baked this pie for the Great Midwestern. If it doesn’t want it I’ll give the company’s treasurer my check for one hundred thousand dollars and eat it myself.”

“What do you mean?” Horace Potter asked.

“I mean that in consideration of placing the orders when and as I did, on the equipment makers’ empty stomach, I got a special discount of ten per cent. The idea was that the news of our buying as it got around would start a general buying movement. That has happened. Other roads have placed orders behind ours at full prices. We started a stampede. Nobody has been buying equipment for two or three years. Everybody needs some. These contracts can be sold today for at least one hundred thousand dollars.”

“Can we sell fifty millions of bonds?” asked Potter, looking at Mordecai.

“Ve vill guarantee to zell zem,” said Mordecai. “Mr. Gald iss righd. Iv ve reap ve musd zow.”

With no further discussion they voted with Galt, and the feud between Valentine and Galt was openly established.

We were torn by the dilemma of allegiance. Everyone was fond of Valentine. One could not help liking him. And his position was desperately uncomfortable. Galt had reduced him to a mere figurehead, not intentionally perhaps, not by any overt act of hostility certainly, but as an inevitable consequence of his ruthless pursuit of ends. Valentine became obstructive. Galt grew irritable. They ceased to have any working contact whatever. And although the organization to a man was sorry for Valentine, still there was a turning to Galt, purely as an instinctive reaction to strength. As a railroad executive Valentine for all his experience was inefficient. This had been always tolerantly understood. But now with Galt’s work beginning to produce results in contrast the fact was openly admitted. Galt’s touch was sure, propulsive and unhesitating. And besides, in whatever he did there was an element of fortuity that could not be reasoned about. He not only did the right things; he did them at precisely the right time.

“You remember what I told you a long time ago,” said Harbinger. “He sees things before they happen. My heart breaks for the old man... but it’s no use.”

The sight of inspired craftsmanship is irresistible to men. The organization wavered between affection for the one and awe of the other and ended by giving its undivided loyalty to Galt, not for love of his eyes but for reasons that were obvious.

One day Mr. Valentine complained that I was unable to serve him and Galt both, and asked me gently if I did not wish to go entirely to Galt. He had guessed my inclinations. So we shook hands and parted. Thereafter my place was in Galt’s room and I attended the board meetings as his private secretary.

i

H
IS activities were of increasing complexity. A Stock Exchange ticker was installed, for he meant to keep his eye on the stock market; then an automatic printing device on which foreign, domestic and Wall Street news bulletins were flashed by telegraph; then a private switchboard and a number of direct telephones,—one with the house of Mordecai & Co., one with the operating department at Chicago, one with the office of Jonas Gates, several with Stock Exchange brokers and others designated by code letters the terminals of which were his own secret. He worked by no schedule, hated to make fixed appointments, and took people as they came. They waited in the reception room, which of necessity became his ante-chamber. In a little while it was crowded with those who asked for Galt, Galt, Galt. Not one in twenty who entered asked for Valentine, the president. A mixed procession it was,—engineers, equipment makers, brokers, speculators, inventors, contractors and persons summoned suddenly out of the sky whose business one never knew. Never wasting it himself, never permitting anyone else to waste it, he had time for everything. He received impressions whole and instantaneously. With people he was abrupt, often rude. He wanted the point first. If a man with whom he meant to do business insisted upon talking beside the point he would say: “Go outside to make your speech and then come back.” He never read a newspaper. He looked at it, sniffed, crumpled it up and cast it from him, all with one gesture. Four or five times a day he ran a yard or two of ticker tape through his fingers and glanced in passing at the news printing machine. Magazines and books were non-existent matter. Yet within the area of his own purposes no fact, no implication of fact, was ever lost.

Meanwhile Great Midwestern stock was slowly rising. One effect of this was to relieve the tension in the Galt household. Gram’ma Galt’s daily question was no longer dreaded.

Having asked it in the usual way at the end of dinner one evening, and Galt having told her the price, she electrified us all by addressing some remarks to me.

“You are with my son a good deal of the time?”

“All day,” I said.

I was looking at her. She frowned a little before speaking, wetted her lips with her tongue, and spoke precisely, in the level, slightly deaf and utterly detached way of old people.

“Do you see that he gets a hot lunch every day?”

“I have never attended to that,” I said.

“Does he, though?” she asked.

“We’ve been very careless about it,” I said. “Sometimes when he’s busy he doesn’t get any.”

“Please see that he gets a hot lunch every day,” she said. “Cold victuals are not good for him. And tea if he will drink it.”

I promised. An embarrassed silence followed. She was not quite through.

“Have you any Great Midwestern stock?” she asked.

“I have a small amount.”

“You must believe in it,” she said, adding after a pause: “We do.”

Then she was through.

Had she alone in that household always believed in Great Midwestern stock, which was to believe in him? Or had she only of a sudden become hopeful? Was it perhaps a flash of premonition, some slight exercise of the power possessed by her son? Long afterward I tried to find out. She shook her head and seemed not to understand what I was talking about. She had forgotten the incident.

The next day I ordered a hot lunch to be sent in and put upon Galt’s desk. He said, “Huh!” But he was not displeased, and ate it. And this became thereafter a fixed habit.

ii

The new equipment had only just begun to move on the new rails when he went before the board with a proposal to raise one hundred millions for more equipment, more rails, elimination of curves and reduction of grades.

“My God, man I” exclaimed Horace Potter. “Do you want to nickel plate this road?”

“It will nickel plate itself if we make it flat and straight,” said Galt.

He was in a stronger position this time. His predictions were coming true. The flood tide was beginning. Everybody saw the signs. Great Midwestern’s earnings were rising faster than those of any competitor, and at the same time its costs were falling because of the character of the new equipment. Therefore profits were increasing. On the other hand, Valentine now was openly hostile, and Jonas Gates whom Galt could have relied upon, was ill. There were nine at the board table.

He argued his case skillfully. For the first time he produced his profile map of the road, showing where the bad grades were and how on account of them freight was hauled at a loss over two divisions of the right of way. To flatten here a certain grade,—selected for purposes of illustration,—would cost five millions of dollars. The cost of moving freight over that division would be thereby reduced one-tenth of a cent per ton per mile. This insignificant sum multiplied by the number of tons moving would mean a saving of a million dollars a year. That was twenty per cent. on the cost of reducing the grade. It was certain.

“Are the contracts let?” asked Valentine, ironically.

“They are ready to be let,” said Galt “That’s how I know for sure what the cost will be.”

“Let’s vote,” said Potter, suddenly. “He’ll either make or break us. I vote aye.”

The ayes carried it. There were no audible noes. Valentine did not vote.

iii

At this time Galt was laying the foundation for an undisclosed structure. It had to be deep and enduring, for the strain would be tremendous. He poured money into the Great Midwestern with a raging passion. As the earnings increased he plowed them in. With the assistance of the pessimistic treasurer he disguised the returns. Improvements were charged to expenses as if they were repairs. New property was added in the guise of renewing old. This he did for fear the stockholders, if they knew the truth, would begin too soon to clamor for dividends. He spent money only for essential things, that is, in ways that were productive, and neglected everything else, until we had at last the finest transportation machine in the country and the shabbiest general offices. The consequences of this policy, when they began to be realized, were incredible.

In the autumn of 1896 a strange event came suddenly to pass. People were delivered from the Soft Money Plague, not by their own efforts, as they believed, but because maladies of the mind are like those of the body. If they are not fatal you are bound to get well. Doctors will take the credit. The Republican party won the election that year on a gold platform, and this is treated historically as a sacred political victory for yellow money; the white money people were hopelessly overturned. But it was wholly a psychic phenomenon still. Why all at once did a majority of people vote in a certain way? To make a change in the laws, you say. Yes, but there the mystery deepens. Immediately after this vote was cast the shape of events began to change with no change whatever in the laws. The law enthroning gold was not enacted until four years later, in 1900, and this was a mere formality, a certificate of cure after the fact. By that time the madness had entirely passed, for natural reasons.