“New York!” I said again, out loud.
A man who must have been standing close beside me for some time spoke suddenly, without salutation or word of prelude.
“You were with Coxey’s Army?”
“Yes,” I said, turning to look at him. I recognized him as a man who sat in one corner of the smoking compartment, listening in an attentive though supercilious manner, and never spoke.
“Wasn’t there plenty to eat?” he asked, in a truculent tone.
“People were very generous along the way.”
“Wasn’t there plenty to eat?” he asked, repeating the question aggressively.
“There was generally enough and sometimes plenty,” I replied. Then I added rather sharply: “I have no case to prove for the Coxeyites, if that’s what you think.”
“I know you haven’t,” he said. “I have no case to make against them either. They are out of work. That’s bad. But people who will ask need not be hungry. You can cut that out. The unemployed eat. You’ve seen it. Do the ravens feed them?”
“What are you driving at?” I asked.
“They all eat,” he repeated. “Ain’t that extraordinary?”
“It doesn’t seem so to me,” I said. “They have to eat.”
“Oh, do they?” he said. “You can eat merely because you have to, can you? Suppose there wasn’t anything to eat?”
He was turning away, with his feathers up, as if he had carried the argument. But I detained him.
“All right,” I said. “There is not enough work but plenty to eat. We’ll suppose it. What does that prove?”
Eyeing me intently, with some new interest, he hesitated, not as to what he would say but as to whether he should bother to say it.
“It proves,” he said, “that the country is rich. Nobody knows it. Nobody will believe it. The country is so rich that people may actually live without work.”
“That’s an interesting point of view,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Nobody,” he replied, with an oblique sneer. “A member of the Stock Exchange.”
“Oh!” I said, before I could catch it. And not to leave the conversation in that lurch I asked: “Do you know who those two men were who wrangled in the smoking compartment?”
“Editors,” he replied, cynically. “The younger one was Godkin of the Post. I’ve forgotten the other one’s name. Silly magpies! Pol-i-t-i-c-s, hell!”
At that instant the ferryboat bumped into her slip. The petulant man screwed his head half round, jerked a come-along nod to a girl who had been standing just behind us, and stalked off in a mild brain fit.
I had not noticed the girl before. She passed me to overtake her father,—I supposed it was her father,—and in passing she gave me a look which made me both hot and cold at once. It left me astonished, humiliated and angry. It was a full, open, estimating look, too impervious to be returned as it deserved and much too impersonal to be rude. It was worse than rude. I was an object and not a person. It occurred to me that either or both of us might have been stark nude and it would not have made the slightest difference.
For a moment I thought I must have been mistaken,—that she was not a girl but a man-hardened woman. I followed them for some distance. And she was unmistakably a girl, probably under twenty, audaciously lithe and flexible. She walked without touching her father,—if he were that. He was a small man, wearing a soft hat a little down on one side, and moved with a bantam, egregious stride. One hand he carried deep in his trousers pocket, which gave him a slight list to the right, for his arms were short. The skirts of his overcoat fluttered in the wind and his left arm swung in an arc.
Presently I lost them, and that was all of it; but this experience, apparently so trivial, cost me all other sensations of first contact with New York. I wandered about for several hours, complaining that all cities are alike. I had dinner, and the food was like food anywhere else. Then I found a hotel and went to bed. My last thought was: Why did she look at me at all?
Her eyes were dark carnelian.
CHAPTER II
THE FUNK IDOL
i
“WHERE is one-hundred-and-thirty Broadway?” I asked the hotel porter the next morning.
“One-hundred-and-thirty Broadway? That’s in Wall Street,” he said. “Take the elevated down town and get off at Rector Street”
That was literal. Broadway is in Wall Street, as may be explained.
Wall street proper,—street with a small s,—is a thoroughfare. Wall Street in another way of speaking,—street with a big S,—is a district, the money district, eight blocks deep by three blocks wide by anything from five to thirty stories high. It is bounded on the north by jewelry, on the northeast by leather, on the east by sugar and coffee, on the south by cotton, on the southwest by shipping and on the west by Greek lace, ship chandlery and Trinity churchyard. It grew that way. The Wall Street station of the elevated railroad is at Rector Street, and Rector Street is a hand-wide thoroughfare running uphill to Broadway under the south wall of Trinity graveyard. When you are half way up you begin to see over the top of the wall, rising to it gradually, and the first two things you see are the tombstones of Robert Fulton and Alexander Hamilton. A few steps more and you are in Broadway. Rector Street ends there.
Trinity church is on the west side of Broadway, thirty paces to your left. Standing with your back to Trinity church door you look straight down Wall street, with a little s. All of this is Wall Street with a big S. You are in the midst of it.
If it is nine-thirty or a quarter to ten you may see here and there in the preoccupied throng groups of three bearing wealth,—in each case two men with a box carried between them and a third walking close behind with one hand resting lightly upon something in his outer pocket. These are the trusted clerks of big banking and brokerage houses. They go each morning to fetch the strong box from one of the great Wall Street safety deposit vaults. At four o’clock they take it back for the night. The third man walking behind is probably unnecessary. If the box were not too heavy one man unarmed might bear it safely to and fro. Banditry,—that is to say, taking by force,—is here unknown. There is a legend to account for this fact. It is that the police keep a dead line around the money district which thieves dare not cross. Every crook in the world is supposed to know and respect the sacred taboo. It may be so, more or less. One need not believe it whole. A much more probable explanation is what any highwayman knows. He might make off with a dozen of those strong boxes and then be no richer than he was before. They contain no money at all, but stocks and bonds, numbered and registered, which represent wealth reduced to an impalpable, theft-proof form. A railroad may lie in one of those boxes. But if you ran away with the box you would have neither the railroad nor anything you could turn into cash. The lost stock and bond certificates would be cancelled and new ones issued in their place; and after that anyone who tried to sell one of the stolen certificates would be instantly arrested.
I walked a little way into Wall Street, somewhat in awe of it, almost expecting to be noticed and challenged for trespassing. The atmosphere was strange and inhospitable and the language unknown. Two men were quarreling excitedly, one standing on the edge of the sidewalk, the other down on the pavement. One seemed to be denouncing the government for letting the country go bankrupt.
“It is busted,” he shrieked. “The United States Treasury is busted.”
The other at the same time spoke of the color, the shape, the bowels and religion of men who were exporting gold to Europe. I could make nothing of it whatever. Nobody else so much as glanced at them in passing. Everybody seemed absent, oblivious and self-involved. When two acquaintances met, or collided, there was a start of recognition between them, as if they had first to recall themselves from afar. Incessantly from within a great red brick building came a sound of b-o-o-ing, cavernous and despairing. This place was the Stock Exchange and the noise was that which brokers and speculators make when prices are falling.
A few step
s further down the street a dray stood backed against the curb, receiving over its tailboard some kind of very heavy freight. “Ickelheimer & Company—Bullion and Foreign Exchange,” was the legend on the window; and what the men were bringing forth and loading on the dray was pure silver, in pigs so large that two strong men could carry only one. The work went on unguarded. People passed as if they didn’t see it. Precious money metal flung around like pig iron! The sight depressed me. I walked slowly back to Broadway feeling dazed and apprehensive.
No. 130 Broadway was an office building. The executive offices of the Great Midwestern Railroad occupied the entire sixth floor. Room 607, small and dim, without windows, was the general entrance where people asked and waited. High-backed wooden benches stood against the walls. The doors opening out of it were ground glass from the waist up, lettered in black. The one to the left was lettered, “President,” the one straight ahead, “Vice President-Secretary,” and the one to the right, “Private.” In one corner of this room, at a very tiny desk, sat a boy reading a book. He was just turning a page and couldn’t look up until he had carried over; but he held out his hand with a pencil and a small writing pad together, meaning that I should write my name, whom I wished to see and why. I gave it back to him with my name and nothing more.
“Your business, please,” he said, holding it out to me again.
I let it to him tactfully that my business was private. If necessary, I could explain it to the president’s secretary. Might I see his secretary first?
The boy put down his book and eyed me steadily.
“He left this morning.”
“The president?”
“His secretary.”
“Suddenly, perhaps?” I said.
He slowly nodded his head several times, still gazing at me.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Two weeks.”
“Do you care for it?”
Instead of answering he got up, took the name I had written on the pad, and disappeared through the door to the left. Almost at once he stood holding it open and beckoned me to enter.
First was a small ante-space, probably called his office by the private secretary who had gone suddenly away. It was furnished with letter filing cases, two chairs and a typewriter desk standing open and littered with papers.
The president’s room immediately beyond was large and lighted by windows, but desolate. The rug was shabby. The walls were hung with maps and railroad scenes in photograph, their frames askew. At one side against the wall was a long oak table; on it were ink and writing materials, also some books and periodicals.
On the other side of the room a very large man sat writing at a small, old-fashioned walnut desk with a green-covered floor that pulled out and a solid curved top that opened up or closed down with a rotary motion. That kind of furniture was even then out of style. It is now extinct. It was too ugly to survive in the antique shops.
He went on writing for a minute or two, then turned slowly, looked me through and put out his hand.
“I’m preparing a speech on your subject,” he said.
“Coxeyism?”
“Yes. Your reports were excellent,—very good, indeed.”
As he said this he turned to search for something on his desk.
It is an odd sensation to meet a notorious person at close range for the first time, especially one who has been much caricatured in the newspapers. There is an imaginary man to be got rid of surreptitiously before the real one can be accepted. One feels somehow embarrassed while this act is taking place, with an impulse to apologize for the human fact of its being so much easier on hearsay to believe ill than good of a fellow being whom you do not know.
This John J. Valentine was a person of much figure in the country. He was the head of a family two generations removed from the uncouth progenitor who founded its fortune in commerce, real estate and transportation; therefore, he was an aristocrat. For many years he had been president of the Great Midwestern Railroad. After his name in the Directory of Directors was a long list of banks, corporations and insurance companies. He made a great many authoritative speeches, which were read in the economics classes of the universities, printed at length in the newspapers and commented upon editorially. What he said was news because he said it. He represented an immovable point of view, the chief importance of which lay in the mere fact of its existence. He spoke courageously and believingly for the vested rights of property.
However, he might have been all that he was and yet not a national figure in the popular sense. For the essential element of contemporary greatness he was indebted to the fact that his features gave themselves remarkably to caricature. The newspaper cartoonists did the rest. They had fixed him in the public mind’s eye as the symbol of railroad capital.
There was in him or about him an alarming contradiction. The explanation was too obvious to be comprehended all at once. It was this: that his ponderable characteristics were massive, overt and rude, such as one would not associate with a notable gentleness of manner; and yet his manner was gentle to the point of delicacy and he seemed remarkably to possess the gift of natural politeness. Physically he was enormous in all proportions. The head was tall and the forehead overhanging gave the profile a concave form. He had a roaring, windy voice, made husky by long restraint; it issued powerfully from a cave partly concealed by a dense fibrous mustache.
“Oh, here they are,” he said, producing my reports.
Turning them sheet by sheet he questioned me at length, desiring me to be most explicit in my recollections as to the reactions of people to Coxeyism. His knowledge of the country through which we had passed was surprising. When we were at the end I said:
“I have talked with all sorts of people besides,—people in Washington, on my way to New York, and here also. Nobody seems to know what is wrong. Some say it’s the tariff. Others say it’s something that has been done to money. Nearly everyone blames Wall Street more or less. What is the matter? Why is labor unemployed?”
He passed his hand over his face, then leaned forward in his chair and spoke slowly:
“Why are the seven-year locusts? Why do men have seasons of madness? Who knows?”
After a pause, his thoughts absorbing him, he continued in a tone of soliloquy.
The country was bewitched. The conglomerate American mind was foolishly persuaded to a variety of wistful and unverified economic notions,—that was to say, heresies, about such important matters as money, capital, prices, debts. People were minding things they knew nothing about and could never settle, and were neglecting meanwhile to be industrious. This had happened before in the world. In the Middle Ages Europe might have advanced, with consequences in this day not easily to be imagined, but for the time and the energy of mind and body which were utterly wasted in quest of holy grails and dialectical forms of truth. So now in this magnificent New World, the resources of which were unlimited, human progress had been arrested by silly Utopians who distracted the mind with thoughts of unattainable things.
Take the railroads. With already the cheapest railroad transportation in the world, people were clamoring for it to be made cheaper. Crazy Populists were telling the farmers it ought to be free, like the air. Prejudice against railroads was amazing, irrational and suicidal. All profit in railroading had been taxed and regulated away. Incentive to build new roads had been destroyed. If by a special design of the Lord a railroad did seem to prosper the politicians pounced upon it and either mulcted it secretly or held it forth to the public as a monster that must be chained up with restrictive laws. Sometimes they practised both these arts at once. Result: the nation’s transportation arteries were strangling. No extension of the arterial system for an increasing population was possible under these conditions. What would the sequel be? Rome for all her sins might have endured if only she had developed means of communication, namely, roads, in an adequate manner. It was obvious and nobody saw it. Well, now he was trying to save people from a repet
ition of that blunder. He was trying to make them see in time that unless they allowed the railroads to prosper the great American experiment was doomed.
I could not help thinking: people prophesy against Wall Street and Wall Street prophesies against the people.
I was surprised that he gave me so much time until it occurred to me that he was thinking out loud, still working on his speech.
He wished me to take my reports, which were merely field notes, and pull them into form as an article on Coxeyism. He would procure publication of it, in one of the monthly reviews perhaps, under his name if I didn’t mind, and he could adopt it whole, or under my own. It didn’t matter which.
“An unhappy incident has just occurred in my office,” he said. “My private secretary had to be sent away suddenly. You might work in his room out there if it’s comfortable.”
I sat down to the task at once, in the ante-room, at the vacant desk. Half an hour later, passing out, he dropped me word of where he was going and when he might be expected back, in case anyone should ask. In a little while the boy did ask. Either he had not been at his place when the president passed out, or else the president forgot to tell him, his habit being to leave word at the desk where I sat. Also the telephone rang several times and as there was no one else to do it I answered.
This ambiguous arrangement continued, the president coming and going, leaving me always informed of his movements and asking me to be so good as to say this or that to persons who should call up on the telephone. It took two days to finish the article. He conceived a liking for my style of writing and asked me to edit and touch up a manuscript that had been giving him some trouble. Then it was to go over the proofs of a monograph he had in the printer’s hands.
On the fifth day, about 4 o’clock, I was at work on these proofs and the president was in his office alone with the door closed when someone came in from the waiting room unannounced. I did not look up. Whoever it was stood looking at my back, then moved a little to one side to get an angular view, and a voice I recognized but could not instantly identify addressed me.
The Driver Page 3
