THE FUNK IDOL
“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 steps 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 repetition 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.
“Hello, Coxey!”
“Hello,” I said, looking round. It was the irritating man of the ferryboat incident. He sat down and ogled me offensively.
“Are you the new private secretary?”
“I don’t know what I am,” I said.
“But you’re working for Jeremiah,” he said, jerking a glance at the proofs. “Oh, o-o-o! Toot-toot!” He was suddenly amused and shrewd. “You must be the man who sent him those reports on the march of Coxey’s Army. That’s it. Very fine reports they were. Most excellent nonsense. My name is Galt—Henry M. Galt.”
“I’m pleased to meet you again,” I said, giving him my name in return.
“And old jobbernowl hasn’t hired you yet!” he said. “I’ll see about it.”
With that he got up abruptly and bolted into the president’s office, closing the door behind him. I hated him intensely, partly I suppose because unconsciously I transferred to him the feeling of humiliation and anger produced in me by that look from the girl who was with him on the ferryboat. It all came over me again.
Half an hour later, as he was going out, he said: “All right, Coxey. You’ll be here for some time.”
The last thing the president did that day was to have me in his office for a long, earnest conversation. He required a private secretary. Several candidates had failed. What he needed was not a stenographer or a filing clerk. That kind of service could be had from the back office. He needed someone who could assist in a larger way, especially someone who could write, as I could. He had looked me up. The recommendations were satisfactory. He knew the college from which I came and it was sound. In short, would I take the job at $200 a month.
“I must tell you,” he said, “there is no future in the railroad business, no career for a young man. A third of the railway mileage of the country is bankrupt. God only knows if even this railroad can stand up. But you will get some valuable experience, and if at any time you wish to go back to newspaper work I’ll undertake to get you a place in New York no worse than the one you leave.”
I protested that I knew almost nothing of economics and finance.
“All the better,” he said. “You have nothing unsound to get rid of. I’ll teach you by the short cuts. Two books, if you will read them hard, will give you the whole groundwork.”
I accepted.
The next morning Mr. Valentine presented me to the company secretary, Jay C. Harbinger, and desired him to introduce me around the shop.
“This way,” said Harbinger, taking me in hand with an air of deep, impersonal courtesy. He stepped ahead at each door, opened it, held it, and bowed me through. His attitude of deference was subtly yet unmistakably exaggerated. He was a lean, tall, efficient man, full of sudden gestures, who hated his work and did it well, and sublimated the petty irritations of his position in the free expression of violent private judgments.
We stopped first in his office. It was a small room containing two very old desks with swivel chairs, an extra wooden chair at the end of each desk for visitors, a letter squeeze and hundreds of box letter files in tiers to the ceiling, with a step ladder for reaching the top rows. There was that smell of damp dust which lingers in a place after the floor has been sprinkled and swept.
“That’s the vice-president’s desk,” said Harbinger, indicating the other as he sat down at his own, his hands beneath him, and began to rock. “He’s never here,” he added, swinging once all around and facing me again. He evidently couldn’t be still. The linoleum was worn through under his restless feet. “What brings you into this business?” he asked.
“Accident,” I said.
“It gets you in but never out,” he said. “It got me in thirty years ago.... Are you interested in mechanical things?”
“Like what?” I asked.
Jerking open a drawer he brought forth a small object which I recognized as a dating device. He showed me how easily it could be set to stamp any date up to the year 2000. This was the tenth model. He had been working on it for years. It would be perfect now but for the stupidity of the model-maker who had omitted an important detail. The next problem was how to get it on the market. He was waiting for estimates on the manufacture of the first 500. Perhaps it would be adopted in the offices of the Great Midwestern. That would help. The president had promised to consider it. As he talked he filled a sheet of paper with dates. Then he handed it to me. I concealed the fact that it did not impress me wonderfully as an invention; also the sympathetic twinge I felt. For one could see that he was counting on this absurd thing to get him out. It symbolized some secret weakness in his character. At the same moment I began to feel depressed with my job.
“Well,” he said, putting it back and slamming the drawer, “there’s nothing more to see here. This way, please.”
His official manner was resumed like a garment.
In the next room were two motionless men with their backs to each other, keeping a perfunctory, low-spirited tryst with an enormous iron safe.
“Our treasurer, John Harrier,” said Harbinger, introducing me to the first one,—a slight, shy man, almost bald, with a thick, close-growing mustache darker than his hair. He removed his glasses, wiped them, and sat looking at us without a word. There was no business before him, no sign of occupation whatever, and there seemed nothing to say.
“A very hearty lunch,” I remarked, hysterically, calling attention to a neat pile of pasteboard boxes on top of the desk. Each box was stamped in big red letters: “Fresh eggs. 1 doz.” He went on wiping his glasses in gloomy silence.
“Mr. Harrier lives in New Jersey and keeps a few chickens,” said Harbinger. “He lets us have eggs. If you keep house ... are you married, though?”
“No,” I said.
The treasurer put on his glasses and was turning his shoulder to us when I extended my hand. He shook it with unexpected friendliness.
The other man was Fred Minus, the auditor, a very obese and sociable person of the sensitive type, alert and naïve in his reactions.
“Nice fellows, those, when you know them a bit,” said Harbinger as we closed the door behind us and stood for a moment surveying a very large room which might be called the innermost premises of a railroad’s executive organization. There were perhaps twenty clerks standing or sitting on stools at high desks, not counting the cashier and two assistants in a wire cage, which contained also a safe. The bare floor was worn in pathways. Everything had an air of hallowed age and honorable use, even the people, all save one, a magnificent person who rose and came to meet us. He was introduced as Ivy Handbow, the chief clerk. He was under thirty-five, full of rosy health, with an unmarried look, whose only vice, at a guess, was clothes. He wore them with natural art, believing in them, and although he was conscious of their effect one could not help liking him because he insisted upon it so pleasantly.
At the furthermost corner of the room was the transfer department. That is the place where the company’s share certificates, after having changed hands on the Stock Exchange, come to be transferred from the names of the old to the names of the new owners. Five clerks were working here at high pressure. To my remark that it seemed the busiest spot,—I had almost said the only busy spot,—in the whole organization, Harbinger replied: “Our stock has recently been very active. With a large list of stockholders—we have more than ten thousand—there is a constant come and go, old stockholders selling out and new ones taking their places. Then all of a sudden, for why nobody knows, the sellers become numerous and in their anxiety to find buyers they unfortunately attract speculators who run in between seller and buyer, create a great uproar, and take advantage of both. That is what has been happening in the last few days. This is the result. Our transfer office is swamped.”
He began to show me the routine. We took at random a certificate for one thousand shares that had just come in and followed it through several hands to the clerk whose task was to cancel it and make out another certificate in the new owner’s name. At this point Harbinger saw something that caused him to stop, forget what he was saying and utter a grunt of surprise. I could not help seeing that what had caught his attention was the name that unwound itself from the transfer clerk’s pen. Harbinger regarded it thoughtfully until it disappeared from view, overlaid by others; and when he became again aware of me it was to say: “Well, we’ve been to the end of the shop. There’s nothing more to see.”
The name that had arrested his attention was Henry M. Galt.
At lunch time Harbinger asked me to go out with him. On our way we overtook the treasurer and auditor, who joined us without words. We were a strange party of four,—tall discontent, bald gloom, lonely obesity and middling innocence. Two and two we walked down Broadway to the top of Wall Street, turned into it and almost immediately turned out of it again into New Street, a narrow little thoroughfare which serves the Stock Exchange as a back alley. The air was distressed with that frightful, destructive b-oo-o-o-o-ing which attends falling prices. It seemed to issue not only from the windows and doors of the great red building but from all its crevices and through the pores of the bricks.
“They are whaling us in there to-day,” said Harbinger over his shoulder.
“Nine,” said John Harrier. It was the first word I had heard him utter, and it surprised me that the sound was definite and positive.
“Are you talking about Great Midwestern Railroad stock?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Harbinger, “John says it sold at nine this morning. That is the lowest price in all the company’s history. Every few days there’s a rumor on the Stock Exchange that we are busted, as so many other railroads are, and then the speculators, as I told you, create so much uproar and confusion that no legitimate buyer can find a legitimate seller, but all must do business with the speculator, who plays upon their emotions in the primitive manner by means of terrifying sounds and horrible grimaces. Hear him! He has also a strange power of simulation. He adds to the fears of the seller when the seller is already fearful, and to the anxieties of the buyer when the buyer is already impatient, making one to part with his stock for less than it’s worth and the other to pay for it more than he should.”
Eating was at Robins’. The advantage of being four was that we could occupy either a whole table against the wall opposite the bar or one of the stalls at the end. As there was neither stall nor table free we leaned against the bar and waited. We appeared to be well known. Three waiters called to Harbinger by name and signalled in pantomime over the heads of the persons in possession how soon this place or that would be surrendered. While we stood there many other customers passed us and disappeared down three steps into a larger room beyond. “Nobody ever goes down there,” said Harbinger, seeing that I noticed the drift of traffic. “It’s gloomy and the food isn’t so good.” The food all came from one kitchen, as you could see; but as for its being more cheerful here than in the lower room that was obviously true because of the brilliantly lighted bar. And cheerfulness was something our party could stand a great deal of, I was thinking. Harbinger had left himself in a temper and was now silent. The other two were lumpish. Presently we got a stall and sat there in torpid seclusion. The enormous surrounding clatter of chairs, feet, doors, chinaware and voices touched us not at all. We were as remote as if we existed in another dimension. Lunch was procured without one unnecessary vocal sound. Not only was there no conversation among us; there was no feeling or intuition of thought taking place. I was obliged to believe either that I was a dead weight upon them or that it was their habit to make an odious rite of lunch. In one case I couldn’t help it; in the other I shouldn’t have been asked. In either case a little civility might have saved the taste of the food. When there is no possibility of making matters worse than they are one becomes reckless.
“Who is Henry M. Galt?” I asked suddenly, addressing the question to the three of them collectively. I expected it to produce some effect, possibly a strange effect; yet I was surprised at their reactions to the sound of the name. It was as if I had spilled a family taboo. Unconsciously gestures of anxiety went around the table. For several minutes no one spoke, apparently because no one could think just what to say.
“He’s a speculator,” said Harbinger. “Have you met him?—but of course you have.”
“The kind of speculator who comes between buyer and seller and harries the market, as you were telling?” I asked.
“He has several characters,” said Harbinger. “He is a member of the Stock Exchange, professional speculator, floor trader, broker, broker’s broker, private counsellor, tipster, gray bird of mystery. An offensive, insulting man. He spends a good deal of time in our office.”
“Why does he do that?”
“He transacts the company’s business on the Stock Exchange, which isn’t much. I believe he does something in that way also for the president who, as you know, is a man of large affairs.”
“He seems to have a good deal of influence with the president,” I said. There was no answer. Harbinger looked uncomfortable.
“But there’s one thing to be said for him,” I continued. “He believes in the Great Midwestern Railroad. He is buying its shares.”
Harbinger alone understood what I meant. “It’s true,” he said, speaking to the other two. “Stock is being transferred to his name.” It was the secretary’s business to know this. Harrier and Minus were at first incredulous and then thoughtful. “But you cannot know for sure,” Harbinger added. “That kind of man never does the same thing with both hands at once. He may be buying the stock in his own name for purposes of record and selling it anonymously at the same time.”
While listening to Harbinger I had been watching John Harrier, and now I addressed him pointedly.
“What do you think of this Henry Galt?”
His reply was prompt and unexpected, delivered with no trace of emotion.
“He knows more about the G. M. railroad than its own president knows.”
“John! I never heard you say that before,” said Harbinger.
Harrier said it again, exactly as before. And there the subject stuck, head on.
We returned by the way we had come, passing the rear of the Stock Exchange again. At the members’ entrance people to the number of thirty or forty were standing in a hollow group with the air of meaning to be entertained by something that was about to happen. We stopped.
“What is it?” I asked.
Harbinger pushed me through the rind to the hollow center of the crowd and pointed downward at some blades of grass growing against the curbstone. The sight caused nothing to click in my brain. For an instant I thought it might be a personal hoax. It couldn’t be that, however, with so many people participating. I was beginning to feel silly when the crowd che