THE COMBAT
Meanwhile Galt’s enemies had been drawing together secretly. Hatred, fear and envy resolved all other emotions. Men who had nothing else in common were joined in a conspiracy to destroy him. The leviathans of this deep move slowly and take their time. Besides, it was a fearsome undertaking. There was bound to be a terrific struggle. One false move and the dragon would escape.
The plan was to attack him from two sides at once.
Several of the railroad properties acquired by the Great Midwestern were in some sense competitive,—though Galt had not bought them primarily for that reason,—and as the law was never clear as to how far the merging of separate railroads might go, it would be possible to attack the Galt system under the Anti-Trust Act. If the government could be moved to do this and if then at the same time his Wall Street enemies concertedly attacked his credit his downfall might be foretold.
This plan required elaborate preparation. The government could not be directly solicited to act. It would have to be moved by suggestion, and with such finesse as to conceal the fact that it was being influenced at all, elsewise than by its own convictions of right. There are those who know how to effect these Machiavellian results. Intrigue is still man’s sovereign art. That is why he makes so much of politics.
Mrs. Valentine, pursuing vengeance in her own way, had made Galt’s name anathema throughout her precious principality. If you were anybody at all, or aspired to be, you were obliged to think and speak ill of him, for he represented vulgarity raised by its own audacity to a wicked and sinister eminence, if he had been born so one could understand it, she said. But he knew better. That made it all the worse. He had betrayed the decencies. His one passion was to amass wealth. Those who had helped him to rise he trampled down. He made his money dishonestly. A Stock Exchange gambler with a Napoleonic obsession! Well, she invariably said at the end, his time would come and then people would see what she meant.
Her own power she employed in a reckless manner. She visited disfavor upon those who were lukewarm in malignity, going so far as to make a scene with Lord Porteous, for that he dared to speak in defense of the monster. She took in people whose only recommendation was zealotry in her cause. Her subjects going to and fro carried the evangel to other realms, especially to official society in Washington, which heard in this way every scandalous thing Galt had ever said about politicians in power.
The extent and character of her information could be explained only on the assumption that somewhere in our organization, probably on the board of directors, was a masked enemy who continually gave Galt up to Valentine. He had not disappeared from the field of action. All this time he was working in the background with a single passion,—a righteous one, as he believed,—which was to assist in the overthrow of Galt. It was natural that he should join the conspirators. He brought them much information; he had political resources and access to the means of publicity.
A fortuitous time arrived. For several years the public, now restored to high prosperity, observed with interest, awe, even with pride the appearance of those vast anonymous shapes which capital by a headlong impulse had been raising up to control production and transportation. Mergers, combines, trusts,—they came in endless succession. Hardly a day passed without a new sensation in phantasmic millions. People were seized with a gambling mania. Each day promoters threw an enormous mass of new and unseasoned securities upon the market, and they were frantically bought, as if the supply were in imminent danger of failing. Astonishing excesses were committed. The Stock Exchange was overwhelmed. For many weeks the lights never went out in Wall Street because clerks worked all day and all night to keep the brokers’ books straight.
The cauldron boiled over badly at last, and there was a silly panic, more theatrical than serious. It served, however, to break a dream and awaken the critical faculty. The public all at once became deeply alarmed. There arose a great clamor about trusts. Those shapes which had been viewed with pride, as symbols of the nation’s progress and strength, were now perceived in the light of fear.
Radical thought had been held in disesteem since the collapse of the Soft Money Plague. Here was a new bogey. Trusts were human evil objectified. They were swallowing the country up. In a little while all business would be in their hands. There would come to be only two kinds of people,—those few who owned the trusts and the many who worked for them, and freedom would perish in the land. Something would have to be done about it. Why had nothing been done? Were the trusts already more powerful than the state? Suddenly the trust vs. the state was the paramount political issue. There was an onset of books, essays, speeches, magazine and newspaper articles. Sense and folly, wisdom and demagoguery were hopelessly entangled. This kind of outburst is characteristic of a roaring, busy democracy, whose interest in its collective self is spasmodic and hysterical. The horse is stolen before anybody thinks of minding the barn.
Gradually the force of this anti-trust feeling, baffled by the complexity of the subject and seeking all the more for that reason a personal victim, began to focus upon Galt. You could see it taking place. The Galt Railroad System, formerly treated with respect and wonder, now was represented to be an octopus, oppressive, arrogant, holding power of life and death over helpless communities.
And all the time there were men at Washington who whispered into the official ear: “Of course a lot of this outcry is senseless. There are good trusts and bad trusts. Most of them have the economic welfare of the country at heart and are willing to submit to any reasonable regulation. The public is undiscriminating. Its mind becomes fixed on what is bad. It happens to be fixed on this Galt Railroad Trust. Well, as to that, we must say there is reason for the public’s prejudice. You would find very few even in Wall Street to defend his methods. The danger is that unless the evils justly complained of are torn away by those who understand how to do it our entire structure will be destroyed in a fit of popular passion.”
Galt was warned of what was going on at Washington; but he was so contemptuous of politics and so sure of his own way that he sneered. Who knew what the law was? It had never been construed. The legality of his acts had been attended to by the most eminent counsel, including a former Attorney General of the United States. What could happen to him that wasn’t just as likely to happen to everybody else? He had only done what everyone was doing, only better, more of it, and perhaps to greater profit. If he was vulnerable, then so were all the others who had combined lesser into greater things, and they would have to find a way out together. No wealth would be destroyed. And so he reasoned himself into a state of indifference.
He greatly underestimated the force of public opinion. He knew nothing about it, for it had never touched him really. Mass psychology in Wall Street he understood perfectly. Social and political phenomena he did not comprehend at all.
One day Great Midwestern stock turned suddenly very weak, falling from 220 to 210 in half an hour. He watched it, annoyed and frowning, and sent for Mordecai, who could not explain it. That afternoon news came that the minority stockholders of the Orient & Pacific had brought a suit in equity against the Great Midwestern, alleging that Galt, by arbitrary exercise of the power of a majority stockholder, had reduced the Orient & Pacific to a state of utter subservience, had thereby destroyed its independent and competitive value, and had mulcted it heavily for the benefit of the Great Midwestern’s treasury. This, they represented, was a grievous injury to them as minority stockholders and also contrary to public interest.
That old Orient & Pacific sore had never healed. The bankers who controlled the road by sacred right for many years before Galt snatched it out of their hands had all this time ominously retained a minority interest in the property. Galt did intend from the beginning to make the Orient & Pacific wholly subordinate to the Great Midwestern. It was an essential part of his plan. Therefore minority stockholders, in good faith, would have had a proper grievance. But these were not minority stockholders in good faith. They were private bankers, biding their time to take revenge. Galt had been willing at any time to buy them out handsomely; they wouldn’t sell because the minority interest was a weapon which some day they would be able to use against him.
Although the name never appeared in the proceedings, dummies having been put forward to act as complainants in the case, everybody knew that Bullguard & Co. inspired the suit. They were the bankers who owned the minority interest in Orient & Pacific shares. Everybody knew, too, that they bore Galt an implacable enmity. What nobody knew until afterward was that the conspiracy to destroy Galt was organized by Jerome Bullguard himself.
He was a man of tremendous character. His authority in Wall Street was pontifical. Men accepted it as a natural fact. Until the rise of Mordecai & Co., under Galt’s ægis, his house occupied a place of solitary eminence. Its traditions were fixed. Their consequences were astronomical. Bullguard was the house. His partners were insignificant, not actually if you took them as individuals, but relatively, in contrast with him. His imperious will he imposed upon men and events,—upon men by force of a personality that inspired dread and obedience, and upon events by the dynamic quality of his intelligence. His mind seemed to act in an omnipotent manner with no effort whatever. His sanctions and influence pervaded the whole scheme of things, yet he himself was as remote as a Japanese emperor. A good deal of the awe that surrounded him was owing to the fact that he worked invisibly. The hand that shaped the thunderbolts was almost never seen. There was a saying in Wall Street that his name appeared nowhere but over the door of his banking house. In a community where men must be lynx-eyed and seven-sensed, able to see the unseeable and deduce the unknowable, his objects were so elaborately concealed that nobody ever knew for sure what he was doing until it was done, and then it couldn’t be proved, for he would have had perhaps no actual contact with it at any point. There were times when he held the stock market in his two hands, doing with it as he pleased, yet never could anyone say, “He is here,” or “There he is.”
Bullguard’s attitude toward Galt was natural, quite fair and regular according to the law of conquest. Galt was an invader, a financial Attila, who had followed the conqueror’s star to that place at which the issue is joined for all or none. Nothing short of supremacy would satisfy him. Therefore, he should fight for it. Did he think the crown might be surrendered peaceably?
Galt perfectly understood this philosophy of combat. He would not have wished it otherwise. Fighting he loved. His fight with Valentine, because it was petty, had been personal in spite of him. His contest with Bullguard was impersonal and epic, a meeting of champions in the heroic sense.
The Orient & Pacific suit was but the opening of a barrage. An important stockholder in the Security Life Insurance Company, which was one of the capital reservoirs Galt had got control of, brought suit to compel him to take back all the Great Midwestern stocks and bonds owned by that institution, on the ground that as a member of its finance committee he had improperly influenced it to invest its funds in securities in which he was interested as a seller. The purpose of this suit was three-fold: firstly, to advertise the fact that he dominated the fiscal policies of the Security Life Insurance Company; secondly, to create the suspicion that his motive in gaining control of institutions in which people kept their savings was to unload his stocks and bonds upon them; thirdly, to cast discredit upon Great Midwestern securities as investments.
It produced an enormous popular sensation. Galt was denounced and caricatured bitterly in the newspapers. One cartoon, with a caption, “The Milkman,” represented the Security Life as a cow eating his stocks and bonds and giving down policyholders’ money as milk into his private pail.
Next he was sued on account of some land which, according to the complaint, he had cheapened by withholding railroad facilities, only in order to buy it, whereupon he enhanced its value an hundred times by making it the site of a large railroad development, thereby enriching himself to the extent of several millions. That, like so many other things alleged about him, was both true and untrue.
Ten private suits were brought against him within three months, each one adroitly contrived to disclose in a biased, damaging manner some phase of his complex and universal activities hitherto unknown or unobserved by the public. Each one was preceded by an attack on Great Midwestern stock and by increasingly hostile comment in the press. The cumulative effect was disastrous. Public sentiment became hysterical.
Law suits, as such, never worried Galt. He was continually engaged in litigation and kept a staff of lawyers busy. His way with lawyers was to tell them baldly what he wanted to do and leave it to them to evolve the legal technique of doing it. Then if difficulties followed he would say: “That’s your own bacon. Now cure it.” Only, they were always to fight, never to settle.
But now he became silent and brooding. He paced his office for hours together. When spoken to his eyes looked out of a mist. It was necessary to bring his attention to matters requiring decision. He had Mordecai in two or three times a day. They conferred endlessly in low tones and watched the ticker anxiously. So far as I could see he did nothing to support the pride of Great Midwestern stock. I wondered why. Later I knew. At this juncture he was selling it himself. He was selling not only his stock but enormous amounts of his own bonds, thereby converting his wealth into cash. That is to say, he was stripping for the fray.
For three days Great Midwestern stock had been falling in a leaden manner and Wall Street was distraught with a sense of foreboding when one morning the big shell burst. First the news tickers flashed this bulletin:
“The recent extraordinary weakness of Great Midwestern is explained by the rumor that the Government is about to bring suit under the Anti-Trust Act against the Galt Railroad System. There is talk also of criminal proceedings against Mr. Galt.”
Galt read it with no sign of emotion. Evidently he was expecting it.
Events now were moving rapidly. Half an hour later the news tickers produced a bulletin as follows:
“Washington—It is announced at the Attorney General’s office that the government has filed suit against the Galt Railroad Trust praying for its dissolution on the ground of its being an oppressive conspiracy in restraint of trade.... No confirmation of rumors that criminal proceedings will be brought against Henry M. Galt as a person.”
Details followed. They ran for an hour on the news printing machines, to the exclusion of everything else, while at the same time on the quotation tickers the price of Great Midwestern was falling headlong under terrific selling.
The government’s complaint set out the history of the Galt Railway System, discussed at length its unique power for evil, examined a large number of its acts, pronounced adverse judgment upon them, and ended with an impassioned arraignment of Galt as a man who set his will above the law. Wherefore, it prayed the court to find all his work illegal and wicked and to decree that the Galt Railway System be broken up into its component parts, to the end that competition, peace and happiness might be restored on earth.
The outer office was soon in the possession of reporters clamoring to see Galt. He obstinately refused to meet them. They demanded a statement, and while they waited we prepared one as follows:
“No step in the formation of the Great Midwestern Railway System was taken without the approval of eminent counsel. If, as it stands, it is repugnant to the law, as the law shall be construed, then of course it will have to be dissolved. If that comes to pass all those securities in the Great Midwestern’s treasury, representing ownership and control of other properties, will have to be distributed pro rata among Great Midwestern stockholders—either the securities as such or the proceeds of their sale. In either case the profit will amount to a dividend of not less than $150 a share for Great Midwestern stockholders. That is the extent to which these securities have increased in value since the Great Midwestern bought them.
“(Signed) Henry M. Galt.”
All of that was obvious, only nobody had thought of it. The statement was received with utter amazement. On the strength of it Great Midwestern stock advanced suddenly ten points.
Now occurred the strangest incident of the chapter. To imagine it you have to remember that public feeling was extremely inflamed. That afternoon a New York Grand Jury indicted Galt under an old forgotten statute making it a crime to circulate false statements calculated to advance or depress the price of shares on the Stock Exchange.
A huge broad-toe came to our office with the warrant. Galt was under arrest. His lawyers were summoned. They communicated with the District Attorney. Couldn’t they appear for Mr. Galt and arrange bail? No. The District Attorney believed in social equality. Mr. Galt would have to appear like any other criminal.
Though it was a very hot afternoon and Galt was tired he insisted that we should walk.
“Do you want to handcuff me?” he asked.
Broad-toe was ashamed and silent.
So we went, Galt and the officer leading,—past the house of Bullguard & Co., up Nassau Street, dodging trucks, bumping people, sometimes in the traffic way, sometimes on the pavement; to the Criminal Courts Building in City Hall Park, up a winding stairway because Galt would not wait for the elevator, and to the court room where the District Attorney was waiting. There was some delay. The judge could not be found at once.
Galt sat on the extreme edge of a chair, one hand in his trouser’s pocket, the other fiddling with his watch chain, staring at the clock over the judge’s bench as if he had never seen one before. The searing emotions of chagrin and humiliation had not come through. Word of our presence there spread swiftly and the court room began to fill up with reporters and spectators.
The court arrived, adjusting its gown, read the paper that was handed up by the District Attorney, then looked down upon us, asking: “Where is the defendant?”
Galt stood up. The court eyed him curiously until the lawyers began to speak. The District Attorney wanted bail fixed at one million dollars. The court shook its head. Galt’s lawyers asked that he be released on his own recognizance. The court shook its head again. After a long wrangle it was fixed at $100,000, which the lawyers were prepared to provide on the spot.
Getting out was an ordeal. By this time the court room was stuffed with morbid humanity. Reporters surrounded Galt, adhered to him, laid hands upon him to get his attention. He made continually the gesture of brushing away flies from his face. The stairway and corridors were jammed. As we emerged on the street screaming newsboys offered us the evening papers with eight-column headlines: “Galt Indicted”—“Galt Arrested”—“Galt May Go To Jail.” From the steps across the pavement to a cab I had in waiting an open aisle had been broken through the mob by photographers, who had their cameras trained to catch Galt as we passed. He looked straight ahead, walking rapidly, but not in haste.
“Where to?” he asked, as the door of the cab slammed behind us.
“Anywhere first, to get out of this,” I said.
“Let’s go to the club,” he said.
I knew which one he meant. Though he was a member of several clubs he went always to one.
As we entered the big, quiet red lounging room, five bankers, three of whom had been counted among Galt’s supporters, were seated in various postures of ease, their minds absorbed in the evening papers. Galt’s emotions were those of a boy who, having outrun the cops, lands with a whoop in the arms of his gang. He tossed his hat aside and shouted:
“Wh-e-e-e! Wo-o-ow!”
The five bankers looked up, rose as one, and stalked out of the room.
For a minute Galt did not understand what had happened. He saw them rise as he sat down and evidently thought they were coming to him. When they did not arrive he turned his head casually, then with a start he looked all around at the empty space. His eyes had a startled expression when they met mine again and his face was an ashen color. He made as if to ring the bell, hesitated, looked all around once more, and said:
“Well, Coxey, let’s go home.”
I began to fear he might collapse. The strain was telling. At the house a servant admitted us. There was no one else in sight. We went directly to his apartment. He tore off his collar and lay for some time quite still staring straight ahead.
“We are the goat,” he said. “They put it on us, Coxey. That’s all.... They will, eh?... Valentine and his newspaper friends ... those magpies at Washington ... we’ll give them something to set their teeth. Now take down what I’m going to say. Put it in the form of a signed statement to the press. Are you ready?”
He dictated:
“On the evening of July seventeen the question of proceeding against the Great Midwestern Railway System was the occasion of a special Cabinet meeting at the White House. Besides the President and the gentlemen of the Cabinet, several members of the Interstate Commerce Commission were present. The President asked each one for his opinion. The Attorney General spoke for half an hour to this effect ... that the Great Midwestern Railway System was not a combination in restraint of trade, that its methods were not illegal, that it was necessary for the proper development of the country that railroads should combine into great systems, a process that had been going on since the first two railroads were built, and, finally, that a suit for its dissolution, if brought, would be lost in the courts. Others spoke in turn. Then someone said: ‘Where is the Secretary of War. He is a great jurist. What does he think?’ The Secretary of War was asleep in a corner. They roused him. He came into the circle and said, ‘Well, Mr. President, Galt is the —— —— — —— we are after, isn’t he?’ Then the President announced his decision that proceedings should be taken. Thereupon the Attorney General spoke again, saying: ‘Since that is the decision, I will outline the plan of action. First let the Interstate Commerce Commission prepare a brief upon the facts, showing that the Great Midwestern Railway System is a combination in restraint of trade, that its ways are illegal and oppressive and that its existence is inimical to public welfare. Upon this the Attorney General’s office will prepare the legal case.’ That is how a suit for the dissolution of the Great Midwestern Railway System came to be brought. That is how politicians conduct government.”
“Have you got all that down? Read it to me.” When I came to the offensive epithet uttered by the Secretary of War I read,—“dash, dash, dash.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“We can’t use the term itself. It’s unprintable,” I said.
“Can’t we?” he said. “But we can. It was applied to me without any dash, dash. Spell it out. Anyhow, it’s history.”
Natalie, who had come in on tip-toe, noiselessly, was standing just inside the door. Galt seemed suddenly to feel her presence. When he looked at her tears started in his eyes and he turned his face away. She rushed to his side, knelt, and put her arms around him. No word was spoken.
I left them, telephoned for the family physician to come and stay in the house, and then acted on an impulse which had been rising in me for an hour. I wished to see Vera.
She was alone in the studio. I had not seen her informally since the cataclysmic evening that wrecked the African image.
“Oh,” she said, looking up. “I thought you might come. Excuse me while I finish this.”
She was writing a note. When she had signed it with a firm hand, and blotted it, she handed it to me to read. It was a very brief note to Lord Porteous, breaking their engagement.
“He won’t accept it,” I said.
“You can be generous,” she replied. “However, it doesn’t matter. I accept it.”
“These things are all untrue that people are saying about your father. It’s a kind of hysteria. The indictment, if that’s what you are thinking of, is preposterous. Nothing will come of it. There will be a sudden reaction in public feeling.”
“I know,” she said. “That isn’t all.... I suppose you have come to take me home?”
“But what else?” I asked.
She shook her head. As we were leaving the studio she paused on the threshold to look back. I was watching her face. It expressed a premonition of farewell. Once before I had seen that look. When? Ah, yes. That night long ago when she told me the old house had been mortgaged. Then I understood.
To her, and indeed to all the family, this crisis in Galt’s affairs meant another smash. The only difference between this time and others was that they would fall from a greater height, and probably for the last time.
We drove home in a taxi.
“How I loathe it!” she whispered as we were going in, saying it to herself.
Natalie appeared.
“You’re in for it,” she said to me. “Father wants to know who brought the doctor in.”
“I was worried about him,” I said.
“So is the doctor. But it’s no use. He can’t do a thing. Father sent him away in a hurry.”
Gram’ma Galt came in for dinner. So we were five. Galt did not come down. Conversation was oblique and thin. One wondered what the servants were thinking, and wished the service were not so noiseless. If only they would rattle the plates, or break something, or sneeze, instead of moving about with that oiled and faultless precision. The tinkling of water in the fountain room was a silly, exasperating sound, and for minutes together the only sound there was. Mrs. Galt was off her form. She tried and failed. Nobody else tried at all.
Natalie, as I believed, was the only one whose thoughts were outside of herself. Several times our eyes met in a lucid, sympathetic manner. This had not happened between us before. What we understood was that both of us were thinking of the same object,—of a frail, ill kept little figure with ragged hair and a mist in its eyes, wounded by the destiny that controlled it,—of Galt lying in his clothes on a bed upstairs, and nothing to be done for his ease or comfort. She was grateful to me that my thoughts were with him, and when I was not looking at her I was thinking how different these four women were. Yet one indefinable thing they had all in common. It brought and held them together in any crisis affecting Galt. It was not devotion, not loyalty, not faith. Perhaps it was an inborn fatalistic clan spirit. But whatever it was, I knew that each of them would surrender to him again, if need were, the whole of all she possessed. They were expecting to do it.
“What is the price of Great Midwestern stock to-day?” asked Gram’ma Galt in a firm, clear voice. Everybody started a little, even one of the servants who happened to stand in the line of my vision.
“One hundred and seventy,” I said.
To those of us who had just seen it fall in a few weeks from two-hundred-and-twenty this price of one-hundred-and-seventy seemed calamitous. That shows how soon we lose the true perspective and how myopically we regard the nearest contrast.
“When my son took charge of it eight years ago it was one-and-a-half ... one-and-a-half,” said Gram’ma Galt in the same clear voice.
For this I rose and saluted her with a kiss on the forehead. She didn’t mind. Natalie gave me a splendid look. Then I excused myself and went to see Galt.
The door of his apartment was ajar. I could see him. He was in his pajamas now, apparently asleep. So I closed the door and sat at his desk in the work room outside to call up Mordecai, who had asked me to communicate with him, and attend to some other matters. Presently the hall door opened and closed gently. I looked around. It was Gram’ma Galt. In her hand she carried a large envelope tied around with a blue ribbon. She walked straight to the door of Galt’s apartment and went in without knocking. I could see her from where I sat. She left the door open behind her.
“What’s this?” Galt asked, as she put the envelope on the bed beside him. She did not answer his question, but leaned over, laid one hand on his forehead and spoke in this delphic manner:
“Fast ye for strife and smite with the fist of wickedness.”
Then she turned, came straight out, closed the door carefully, passed me without a glance, and was gone. Never again did I wonder whence Galt derived his thirst for combat. When he emerged some ten minutes later the mist had fallen from his eyes. The right doctor had been there. He handed me the envelope tied around with blue ribbon.
“That’s Gram’ma Galt’s little fortune ... everything she has received out of Great Midwestern. Keep it in the safe for a few days so she will think we needed it.... Did you give out that statement?”
“Not yet. There is plenty of time,” I said.
“Tear it up. That isn’t the way we fight, ... is it?”
Gram’ma Galt never got her envelope back. Two weeks later she died.
The Galt panic was one of those episodes that can never be fully explained. Elemental forces were loose. Those that derived from human passion were answerable to the will; there were others of a visitant na