DARING THE DARK
At 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, a l a or a l e?... 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.
“Crime enough for one day,” said Galt, going to the safe. “You are coming up for dinner. Turn out that light there above you.”
“Did you expect Great Midwestern to go bankrupt?” I asked as we walked down the stairway.
He did not answer me directly, nor at all for a long time. When we were seated in the L train he said: “So you know that I was buying the stock all the way down?”
“Yes.”
He did not speak again until we left the train at 50th Street.
“No, I didn’t expect it,” he said. “It wasn’t inevitable until the Lord burned up the corn crop. But I allowed for it, and what’s worse in one way is better in another. We’re all right. In the reorganization I’ll get the position I want. I’ll be one of ten men in a board room. Everything else follows from that.”
As Natalie met us I observed her keenly, thinking she would betray a feeling of anxiety. But she knew his moods at sight and met them exactly. To my surprise she hailed him gaily and he responded. Then they fell to wrangling over nothing at all and carried on a fierce make-believe quarrel until dinner time.
At the table he tried to force a general spirit of raillery and made reckless sallies in all directions. They failed miserably until Natalie joined him in a merciless attack upon Vera. It was entirely gratuitous. When it had gone very far Mrs. Galt was on the point of interfering, but checked the impulse, leaving Vera to take care of herself. She held her own with the two of them. When the game lagged Natalie would whisper to Galt. He would say, “No-o-o-o-o!” with exaggerated incredulity, and they would begin again. Suddenly they turned on me, Natalie beginning.
“Don’t you think Coxey ought to get married?” Galt’s name for me had long been current in the household.
“Coxey, here? No. Nobody would marry him,” said Galt.
“But he’s sometimes quite nice,” said Natalie.
They discussed my character as if I were not there, the kind of wife I should have and what would please Heaven to come of it. Natalie knew, as Galt didn’t, that this was teasing Vera still.
Dinner was nearly over when Gram’ma Galt asked her terrible question. “What is the price of Great Midwestern stock today?”
Galt answered quietly: “One-and-a-half.”
There was no more conversation after that.
Later when we were alone I asked Vera if the house had been pledged.
“The mortgage was executed yesterday,” she said. “It’s roof and all this time.”
“He doesn’t seem at all depressed,” I said.
“No,” she answered. “That is his way with disaster. We’ve seen it before.”
“Don’t you admire him for it, though?”
“I hate him!” she cried passionately. The intensity of her emotion astonished me. Her hands were clenched, her eyes were large and her body quivered. We were sitting together on the sofa. I got up and walked around. When I looked at her again she lay face downward in the pillows, weeping convulsively.