The Driver

by Garet Garrett

  “Incidentally it was,” said Galt. “Somebody would get it It fell into my hands. What would you have done?”

  “Strike that off the record,—’What would you have done?’ “said Goldfuss. “Counsel is not being examined.”

  After lunch he took a new line.

  “Mr. Galt,” he asked, “what are you worth?”

  “I don’t know,” said Galt.

  “You don’t know how rich you are?”

  “No.”

  Goldfuss lay back in his chair with an exaggerated air of astonishment.

  “But you will admit you are very rich?” he said, having recovered slowly.

  “Yes,” said Galt. “I suppose I am.”

  “Well, as briefly as possible, will you tell this Committee how you made it?”

  “Now you’ve asked me something,” said Galt, leaning forward again. “I’ll tell you. I made it buying things nobody else wanted. I bought Great Midwestern when it was bankrupt and people thought no railroad was worth its weight as junk. When I took charge of the property I bought equipment when it was cheap because nobody else wanted it and the equipment makers were hungry, and rails and ties and materials and labor to improve the road with, until everybody thought I was crazy. When the business came we had a railroad to handle it. I’ve done that same thing with every property I have taken up. No railroad I’ve ever touched has depreciated in value. I’m doing it still. You may know there has been an upset in Wall Street recently, a panic in fact. Everybody is uneasy and business is worried because a financial disturbance has always been followed by commercial depression. There are signs of that already. But we’ll stop it. In the next twelve months the Great Midwestern properties will spend five hundred million dollars for double tracking, grade reductions, new equipment and larger terminals.”

  This was news. Again there was a stir at the reporters’ table as several rose to go out and flash Galt’s statement to Wall Street.

  “Mr. Galt,” said Goldfuss, “do you realize what it means for one man to say he will spend five hundred millions in a year? That is half the national debt.”

  “I know exactly what it means,” said Galt. “It means for once a Wall Street panic won’t be followed by unemployment and industrial depression. Our orders for materials and labor now going out will start everything up again at full speed. Others will act on our example. You’ll see.”

  “You will draw upon the financial institutions you control, the Security Life and others, for a good deal of that money,—the five hundred millions?”

  “You get the idea,” said Galt “That’s what financial institutions are for. There’s no better use for their money.”

  “You have great power, Mr. Galt.”

  “Some,” he said.

  “If it goes on increasing at this rate you will soon be the economic dictator of the country.”

  No answer.

  “I say you will be the economic dictator of the whole country.”

  “I heard you say it,” said Galt. “It ain’t a question.”

  “But do you think it desirable that one man should have so much power,—that one man should run the country?”

  “Somebody ought to run it,” said Galt.

  “Is it your ambition to run it?”

  “It is my idea,” said Galt, “that the financial institutions of the country,—I mean the insurance companies and the banks,—instead of lending themselves out of funds in times of high prosperity ought then to build up great reserves of capital to be loaned out in hard times. That would keep people from going crazy with prosperity at one time and committing suicide at another time. But they won’t do it by themselves. Somebody has to see to it,—somebody who knows not only how not to spend money when everybody is wild to buy, but how to spend it courageously when there is a surplus of things that nobody else wants. Every financial institution that I have anything to do with will be governed by that idea, and the Great Midwestern properties, while I run them, will decrease their capital expenditures as prices rise and increase them as prices fall. When we show them the whole trick and how it pays everybody will do it. We won’t have any more depressions and Coxey’s armies. We won’t have any more unemployment. In a country like this unemployment is economic lunacy.”

  The hearing continued for three days. The newspapers printed almost nothing else on their first three pages. Galt’s testimony produced everywhere a monumental effect. Public opinion went over by a somersault.

  He denied nothing. He admitted everything. He was invincible because he believed in himself.

  “Mr. Galt,” said Goldfuss, rising, “that will be all. You are the most remarkable witness I have ever examined.”

  They shook hands all around.

  iii

  As we were going down the Capitol steps Galt stumbled and clutched my arm. The sustaining excitement was at an end and the reaction was sudden. Solicitude made him peevish. He insisted irritably, and we went on walking, though it was above his strength. When we were half way back to the hotel, a mile yet to go, he stopped and said: “You’re right, Coxey. Ain’t it hot! Let’s call a cab.”

  He wouldn’t rest. A strange uneasiness was upon him. We took the next train for New York.

  “I want to go to Moonstool,” he said. The idea seized him after we were aboard the train.

  ‘Fine. Let’s take a holiday tomorrow and go all over it,” I said.

  “Now. I want to go there now,” he said.

  “Directly there... and not go home?”

  “That’s home, ain’t it?” he said, becoming irritable. “Let’s go straight there.”

  He had a fixation upon it.

  From Baltimore I got off an urgent telegram to Mrs. Galt, telling her Galt was very tired and insisted on going directly to the country place. Could she meet us at Newark with a motor car? That would be the easiest way.

  Automobiles were just then coming into general use. Galt with his ardent interest in all means of mechanical locomotion was enthusiastic about them. The family had four, besides Natalie’s, which was her own. She drove it herself.

  Mrs. Galt met us at Newark. Galt greeted her with no sign of surprise. He could not have been expecting her. I had told him nothing about the arrangements. He slept all the way up from Washington and did not know where we were when we got off the train. She helped him into the car. When they were seated he took her hand and went to sleep again.

  There was a second motor behind us, with a cook, three servants, some luggage and provisions. Mrs. Galt was a very efficient woman. She had thought of everything the situation required.

  It was nearly midnight when we arrived at Moonstool and stopped in front of the iron gates. They were closed and locked. And there was Natalie who had been sent ahead to announce our coming. She drove out alone, got lost on the way, and had not yet succeeded in raising anybody when we came up. The place was dark, except for red lanterns here and there on piles of construction material. The outside watchmen were shirking duty, and those inside, if not doing likewise, were beyond hearing.

  Nearby was the railroad station of Galt, a black little pile with not a light anywhere. It had not yet been opened for use. We could hear the water spilling over the private Galt dam in the river. There was enough electricity in the Galt power house to illuminate a town. On the mountain top, half a mile distant, the Galt castle stood in massive silhouette against the starry sky. And here was Galt, in the dark, an unwelcome night-time stranger, forbidden at the gate. He was still asleep. We were careful not to wake him.

  A watchman with a bull’s eye lantern and a billy stick exuded from the darkness.

  “Wha’d’ye want?”

  We wanted to go in.

  “Y’can’t go in,” he said. “Can’t y’ see it’s private? Nobody lives there.”

  It is very difficult to account for the improbable on the plane of a night watchman’s intelligence. First he stolidly disbelieved us. Then he took refuge in limited responsibility.

  “M�
��orders is t’let nobody in,” he said. “D’ye know anybody aroun’ here?”

  It seemed quite possible that no human being around here would know us. By an inspiration Natalie remembered the superintendent of construction. He lived not far away. She knew where. Once when she was spending a day on the job he had taken her home with him to lunch. It was not more than ten minutes’ drive, she said.

  It was further than she thought. We were more than three quarters of an hour returning with the superintendent. It took twenty minutes more to wake the crew at the power house and get the electricity turned on. Then we drove slowly up the main concrete road now lighted on each side by clusters of three ground glass globes in fluted columns fifty feet apart. Although it was finished the road was still cluttered with heaps of sand and debris.

  Galt all this time was fast asleep, his head resting on Mrs. Galt’s shoulder. We could scarcely wake him when we tried. He seemed drunk with weariness. As we helped him out he opened his eyes once and startled us by saying to the superintendent: “Fire that watchman... down below,” as if he had been conscious of everything that happened. His eyes closed again, he tottered, and we caught him. The superintendent supported him on one side, I on the other, and so he entered, dragging his feet.

  Natalie knew more about the house than anyone else. She led the way to the apartment that was Galt’s, and then left us to place the servants and show them their way around. I helped Mrs. Galt undress him and get him to bed. I was amazed to see how thin and shrunken his body was. He was inert, like a child asleep. Mrs. Galt, very pale, was strong and deft.

  “We must have a doctor at once,” she said. “I thought of bringing one and then didn’t because he minds so awfully to have a doctor in.”

  Still we were not really alarmed.

  The telephone system had been installed. Natalie knew that. She knew also where the big switchboard was. I telephoned the family physician to meet us at the Hoboken ferry and then Natalie and I set out to fetch him, a drive of nearly seventy miles there and back.

  “We ought to do it in two hours,” she said, as we coasted freely,—very freely,—down the lighted cement road and plunged through the gates into darkness.

  “The doctor must be in his right mind when we deliver him.”

  I meant it lightly. Her reckless driving was a household topic and she was incorrigible. But she answered me thoughtfully.

  “We’ll make the time going.”

  She pulled her gloves tighter, took the time, inspected the instruments, switched off the dash light, cut out the muffler, settled herself in the seat and opened the throttle wide. It was a four-cylinder, high-power engine. The sound we made was that of an endless rip through a linen sheet. Road side trees turned white, uneasy faces to our headlights. The highway seemed to lay itself down in front of us as we needed it; and there was a feeling that it vanished or fell away into black space behind us. Giddy things such as fences, buildings and stone walls were tossed right and left in streaming glimpses. Good motor roads were yet unbuilt. There were short, sharp grades like humps on the roller coaster at the fair. Taking them at fifty miles an hour, at night, when you cannot see the top as you start up, nor all the way down as you begin the plunge, is a wild, liberating sensation. Sense of level is lost. One’s center of gravity rises and falls momentously, the heart sloshes around, and you don’t care what happens, not even if you should run off the world. It doesn’t matter.

  Natalie was in a trance-like rapture. She never spoke. Her eyes were fixed ahead; her body was static. Only her head and arms moved, sometimes her feet to slip the clutch or apply the brake. All that pertains to the pattern of consciousness,—seeing, hearing, attention, will and willing,—were strained outward beyond the windshield, as if externalized, acting outside of her. What remained on me seat, besides the thrill at the core of her, was her automatic self controlling this lunging, roaring mechanism without the slightest effort of thought. The restrained impulses of her nature apparently found their escape in this form of excitement. It was one thing she could do better than anyone else. She did it superbly and adored doing it. I could not help thinking how Vera would drive, if she drove at all.

  There was no traffic at that hour of night until we fell in with the milk and truck wagons crossing the Hackensack Meadows toward the Hudson River ferries. Natalie cut in and out of that rumbling procession with skill and ease. Her calculations were tight and daring, but never foolhardy.

  “Very accomplished driving,” I said, as she pulled up at the ferry with the engine idling softly.

  “Fifty minutes,” she said, a little down, on looking at her watch. “I thought we should have done it in forty-five. Don’t you love it at night?”

  iv

  Dawn was breaking when we returned. It gave us a start of apprehension to see the lights still burning in Galt’s apartment. We found Mrs. Galt sitting at the side of his bed. Her face was distorted with horror and anxiety. Galt lay just as I had seen him last.

  “He hasn’t moved,” said Mrs. Galt. “I can’t arouse him. I’m not sure he is breathing.”

  Neither was the doctor. The pulse was imperceptible. A glass held at his nostrils showed no trace of moisture. All the bodily functions were in a state of suspense. The only presumption of life lay in the general arbitrary fact that he was not dead. The doctor had never seen anything like this before. He was afraid to act without a consultation. Motors were sent off for four other doctors, two in New Jersey and two in New York. They would bring nurses with them.

  Mrs. Galt could not be moved from the bedside.

  Natalie telephoned Vera to come. I telephoned Mordecai. Then we walked up and down the eastern terrace and watched the sun come up. She stopped and leaned over the parapet, looking down. Her eyes were dry; her body shook with convulsive movements. My heart went forth. I put my arm around her. She stood up, gazed at me with a stricken expression, then dropped her head on my shoulder and wept, whispering, “Coxey, Coxey, oh, what shall we do?... what shall we do?”

  Gangs of workmen were appearing below. The day of labor was about to begin. I left her to get the superintendent on the telephone and tell him to suspend work.

  v

  The consultation began at nine o’clock. Mordecai arrived while it was taking place. Somehow on the way he had picked up Vera. They came together. We waited in the library room of Galt’s apartment. At the end of an hour the five doctors came to us, looking very grave. The Galts’ family doctor announced the consensus. It was a stroke, with some very unusual aspects. Life persisted; the thread of it was extremely fine, almost invisible. It might snap at any moment, and they wouldn’t know it until some time afterward. Thin as it was, however, it might pull him back. There was a bare possibility that he would recover consciousness. Meanwhile there was very little that could be done.

  Mordecai rose from his chair with a colossal, awful gesture. His eyes were staring. His face was like a mask. His head turned slowly right and left through half a circle with a weird, mechanical movement, as a thing turning on a pivot in a fixed plane.

  “Zey haf kilt him!” he whispered. “All ov you I gall upon to vitness, zey haf kilt him. Zey could nod ruin him. Zat zey tried to do. But... zey haf kilt him!... Ve are vonce more in ze dark ages.”

  The physicians were astonished and ill at ease. They did not know what he was talking about. They did not know who he was. I was the only one who could know what he meant and for a minute I was bewildered. Then it broke upon me.

  The combat reconstructed itself in my mind. I recalled those days of strain and anguish when all the forces of Wall Street were acting to destroy him and he fought alone. He withstood them. In the might of his own strength, in that moment which it had been torture almost unendurable to bide the coming of, he smote his enemies “with the fist of wickedness” and scattered them away. Yes, all that. He had won the fight. Yet there he lay. His death would leave them in possession of the field, with a victory unawares. They meant only to break his power, to
unloose his hands, to overthrow him as an upstart dynast. But the blood weapon which we think is put away, which they never meant and would not have dared to use,—it had done its work in spite of them. They could not break him. They had only killed him.

  That was what Mordecai meant.

  vi

  Well, we had to wait. Life must wait upon death because it can. There was much to think about. Mordecai spent two hours with me making precise arrangements against any contingency. It was very important that Wall Street should know nothing about Galt’s condition. The news might cause a panic. I was to call him up at regular intervals by a direct telephone wire on which no one could listen in. If any rumor got out it should be met with blank silence.

  “Zey vill vind id zoon oud no matter,” he said.

  What he needed was a little time to prepare the financial structure for the imminent shock. He would inform his associates and such others as were entitled to know and together they would agree upon protective measures. Galt’s death was bound to produce a terrific convulsion. There is no line of succession in Wall Street, no hereditary prince to receive the crown. When the monarch falls the wail is, “The king is dead! There is no king!”

  About 10 o’clock in the morning of the second day Galt opened his eyes. He could neither move nor speak, but he was vividly conscious. Mrs. Galt came to the room where I had established a work station to tell me this.

  “He wants something,” she said. “He says so with his eyes. I think it is you he wants.”

  His eyes expressed pleasure at seeing me. Not a muscle moved. He could see and hear and think, and that was all. He did want something. I guessed a number of things and he looked them all away. It wasn’t Mordecai. It wasn’t anything in relation to business. In this dilemma I remembered a game we played in childhood. It was for one of the players to hold in his mind any object on earth and for the other to identify it by asking questions up to twenty that had to be answered yes or no. Galt’s eyes could say yes and no and he could hear. Therefore anything he was thinking of could be found out. I explained the game to him, he instantly understood, and we began. Was the thing a mineral substance? He did not answer. Was it vegetable? He did not answer. Was it animal then? Still no answer, but a bothered look in his eyes. I stopped to wonder why he hadn’t answered yes or no to one of the three. Was it perhaps something mineral, vegetable and animal combined? His eyes lighted, saying yes. Was it in this room? No. Was it far away? No. Was it just outside? Yes.