Chapter 2. The Funk Idol
1. Where is 130 Broadway? I asked the hotel porter the next morning.
130 Broadway? That's in Wall Street, he said. Take the elevated downtown 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 chandeliery, and Trinity churchyard.
It grew that way.
The Wall Street station of the elevated railroad is at Rector Street, and Rector Street is
is a hand-wide thoroughfare running uphill to Broadway under the south wall of Trinity
Graveyard.
When you are halfway 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, 30 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
The Theory of Money and Credit
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
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
Incessantly from within a great red brick building came a sound of booing, 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.
Icklheimer and 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
Number 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 wish 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 anti-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.
Coxeism?
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 and 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
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's mind 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 coxiaism.
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 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
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 molted it secretly or held it forth to the public as a monster that must
be chained up with restrictive laws.
Sometimes they practiced 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 coxiaism.
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.
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 four 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, Coxie.
Hello, I said, looking around.
It was the irritating man of the ferry boat 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, toot toot.
He was suddenly amused and shrewd.
You must be the man who sent him those reports on the march of Coxie'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 Jobber now 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 ferry boat.
It all came over me again.
Half an hour later, as he was going out, he said,
All right, Coxie, 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 shortcuts. Two books, if you will read them hard, will give you
the whole groundwork. I accepted.
2. The next morning Mr. Valentine presented me to the company secretary, J. 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 irritation 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 stepladder 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
Working 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 manufacturer 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, there were two motionless men with their backs to each other, keeping
A Perfunctory Low-Spirited Trist 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 moustache 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, one dozen.
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
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 35, 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, though he was conscious of their
effect, one could not help liking him because he insisted upon it so pleasantly.
At the furthest 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
and the whole organization, Harbinger replied,
Our stock has recently been very active.
With a large list of stockholders, we have more than 10,000.
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
He began to show me the routine. We took at random a certificate for 1,000 shares that had just come in and followed it through several hands to the clerk whose task it 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 aware again 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. 3. At lunchtime Harbinger asked me to go out with him. On
our way we overtook the treasurer and auditor who joined us without words. We
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 booing 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 today, 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 its worth and the other to pay for it more than he should.
Eating was at Robin's.
The advantage of being four was that we could occupy either a whole table against the wall
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.
and the other two were lumpish. Presently we got a stall and sat there in torpid seclusion.
The enormous surrounding clatter of chairs, feet, doors, china ware 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
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 result, 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 counselor, tipster, gray bird of mystery, an offensive, insulting man.
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 is one thing to be said for him, I continued.
He believes in the Great Midwestern Railroad.
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 Minas 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 GM 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
member's 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
Harbinger pushed me through the Rhine 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 cheered respectfully and parted at one side
to admit a man with a sprinkling pot.
He watered those blades of grass in an absent philosophical manner, apparently deaf to the
ironic words of praise and encouragement hurled at him by the spectators, and retired with
dignity.
I watched him disappear through an opposite doorway.
The crowd instantly vanished.
The four of us stood alone in the middle of New Street.
Grass growing at the door of the New York Stock Exchange, said Harbinger, grinning warily
as one does at a joke that is both bad and irresistible.
The origin of the grass was obvious.
An untidy horse had been fed at that spot from a nose-bag, and some of the oats that were
spilled had sprouted in a few ounces of silt gathered in a crevice at the base of the curbstone.
The incident gave me a morose turn of thought.
As a jest, it was pitiable.
What had happened to people to abase their faith in themselves and in each other?
Simple believing seemed everywhere bankrupt.
Nobody outside of it believed in Wall Street.
That you might understand.
But here was Wall Street, nurturing and fun, a symbol of its own decay, and by this sign
not believing in itself.
Harbinger denounced the stock exchange speculators who depressed the price of Great Midwestern
shares and circulated rumors damaging the railroad's credit.
But did Harbinger himself believe in Great Midwestern?
No.
The Great Midwestern did not believe in itself.
Its own president did not believe in it.
He was busily advertising his disbelief in the whole railroad business.
Why had he no faith in the railroad business?
Because people had power over railroads and he disbelieved in people, therefore people
disbelieved in him.
I was saying to myself that I had yet to meet a man with downright faith in anything when
I thought of Galt.
He believed in the country.
I remembered vividly what he said about it on the ferry boat.
It was rich and nobody would believe it.
He believed also in Great Midwestern, for he was buying the stock in the face of those
4.
The President was in Chicago on two errands.
One was to hold a solemn quarterly conference with the operating officials on the ground.
There was supposed to be much merit in having it take place on the ground.
The first time I heard the locution, it made me think of Indian chiefs debating around
a campfire.
The executive offices in New York were more than a thousand miles from the Great Midwestern's
first rail's end.
It does not matter so much where a railway's brains are, but its other organs must remain
where they naturally belong, and that is why all the operating departments were in Chicago.
Four times a year, the brains were present in the physical sense.
At all other times, the operating officials either brought their problems to New York,
solved them on the spot, or put them in a pigeon hole to await the next conference.
His other errand was to deliver a speech entitled, Lynching the Railroads, at a Manufacturer's
Banquet.
On the plane of large ideas, the great Valentine mind was explicit.
Elsewhere, it was vague and liable.
Although this was the first time I had been left alone with the New York office for more
than one day, my instructions were very dim.
At the last moment, the President said, You will know what to do.
Use your own judgment.
Open everything that comes in.
Tell Mr. Harbinger to be very careful about the earnings.
They got out again last week.
He was referring to the private weekly statement of gross and net revenues compiled jointly
by the Secretary and Treasurer and delivered by Harbinger's own hand to the President.
This exhibit was not for publication, like the monthly statement.
It was a special sounding for the information of the executive, or a kind of statistical
cheese auger by means of which the trained sense could sample the state of business.
The figures were supposed to be jealously guarded.
On no account were they to go out of the office, save by direct order of the president.
The crime of my predecessor had been to let them fall regularly into the hands of certain
stock exchange speculators.
Knowing all this, everybody knowing it, I wondered at Harbinger when late one evening
he brought the statement to my desk, saying, Here are the weekly figures.
You take them.
It's better to keep them all in one place while the chief is away.
I haven't even a copy.
I was not surprised that he should be trying to rid himself of a distasteful responsibility,
but the act of avoidance was in itself puerile.
Suppose there was another leak.
He could say that he had put the statement out of his keeping into mine.
He could say he had not kept a copy.
But could he expect anyone to believe he had erased them from his mind?
It irritated me.
I kept thinking about it that night.
I concluded there was something I did not understand, and there was.
As I was opening my desk the next morning, Galt came in, and without a word or sign of
salutation addressed me summarily.
Harbinger says you have the earnings.
The weekly earnings, I asked.
The weekly earnings, he repeated after me, trying to mimic my voice and manner.
He would have been ridiculous except that he was angry, and anger was an emotion that
The Theory of Money and Credit
which he understood to be sarcastic, completed his rage.
Do I get them? he asked, bulging at me in a menacing manner.
Sorry, I said, there's no hole for you in my instructions.
At that he began to pass in front of me, with long stealthy steps, his shoulders crouched,
his hands in his pockets, his head low and cocked right, and then left, as he turned
and Past Again, all the while looking at me fixedly with a preposterous, maleficent glare.
The effect was so ludicrous that I laughed.
And then, for only so long as it takes to see a flashing thing, there was a look in
his eyes that made me shudder.
Suddenly he went out, slamming the door so hard that I held my breath for the sound of
falling glass.
As the pantomime reconstructed itself in reflection, it assumed a comic aspect.
No, it couldn't have been serious.
I was almost persuaded it had been a bit of undignified acting, an absurd, though harmless
way of working off a fit of temper, when I recalled that look and shuddered again.
Once before I had seen that expression in the eyes of a malevolent hunchback.
It was the look of a giant tragically trapped in a puny body.
Galt was a small man, weighing less than 100 pounds, with a fretful, nagging body.
Before lunch, the President called me on the GM's private telegraph wire.
He stood at the key in the Chicago office and I stood at the key in the New York office
and we conversed through the operators without written messages.
Was everything all right, he asked me.
His anxiety to seem casual about it betrayed the fact that he had called me expressly to say that Galt should have the earnings, and there was no doubt in my thoughts that Galt, since leaving me, had been in communication with my
by Chief by Telegraph. What an amazing to-do!
If my deductions were true, then I might expect to be presently favored with another visit. So I was.
He came in about two o'clock and sat down at the end of my desk without speaking.
I did not speak either, but handed him the Statement of Earnings.
He crippled the paper in his hand and dropped it in the wastebasket.
I was sure he hadn't looked at it.
Coxie, he said, promised never again to laugh at me like that.
We've got a long way to go, up and down grade.
But promise whatever happens, never to do that again.
Somehow I was not surprised.
For a little time we sat looking at each other.
All right, I said, holding out my hand to him.
It was an irrational experience.
We shook hands in the veiled mysterious manner of boys sealing a lifetime compact
for High Adventure, No More Words, Either Necessary or Feasible.
But with Harbinger some further conversation seemed appropriate.
So later I said to him, Why are you so afraid of Galt?
You do ask some very extraordinary questions.
I have a right to ask this one, I said, seeing that you put it upon me to refuse him the
earnings.
You were afraid to refuse him.
Isn't that why you gave the figures to me?
You will have to think what you like of my motives, he said, with rather fine dignity,
though at the same time turning red.
I don't see why you shouldn't learn yours as we've had to learn ours, he added.
My what?
That's all, he said, twirling about in his swivel chair and avoiding my regard.
Why do you dislike him?
It isn't that I dislike him, he retorted, beginning to lose his temper a bit.
The thing of it is, I don't know how to treat him.
He has no authority here that one can understand, get hold of, or openly respect, yet there
are times when you might think he owned the whole lot of us.
How did this come about?
Gradually, he said, or at least it was only about a year ago that he began to have the
run of the place.
Before that we knew him merely as a broker who made a specialty of dealing in great mid-western
securities.
In the time dealing so much in our securities, he came to have a personal curiosity about the property. That's what he said.
So he began to pry into things, wanting information about this and that, some of it very private.
And when we asked the president about it, he said, oh, give him anything but the safe.
Lately he's been spending so much time around here that I wonder how he makes a living.
He knows too much about the company. You heard John Harrier. He knows as much about our mortgages,
indentures, leases and records as I know, and that's my end of the business. He's made me look up facts
I never heard of before. He's been all over the road looking at it with a microscope. I do believe
he knows generally more about the Great Midwestern than any other person living. Why? Tell me why.
Why?
He and the President are old friends, did you say?
He paused for effect and said, Henry Galt has only one friend in the world.
That's himself.
Ask anybody who knows him in Wall Street.
He's been around here twenty years.
Maybe it's his extensive knowledge of the property that gives him his influence with
the President, I suggested.
Harbinger came forward with a lurch, rested his elbows on his desk, hung his chin over
The Theory of Money and Credit
Galt does? He nodded, and at the same time implored me by gesture not to let my voice rise.
Maybe anywhere around, in the next room, he said, hardly above a whisper. Yes, he knows things that haven't happened.
If there's such a gift as pre-vision, he has it.
If that were true, I objected, he would have all the money in the world.
Just the same, it's true, said Harbinger, rising and reaching for his coat.
He looked at me a little askance, doubtless with misgivings as to the propriety of having talked so much.