The Driver (11 page)

“We are going for a walk,” I said, moving her with me down the steps.

I counted upon her horror of a scene to give me the brutal advantage, and it did. She came unresistingly. Yet it was in no sense a victory. She submitted to a situation she could not control, but contemptuously, with no respect or fear for the force controlling it. We walked in silence to a tea shop in Fifth Avenue; and when we were seated and the waiter came her respect for appearances made her speak.

“Just some tea, please,” she said, sweetly. And those were the only words she uttered.

Her defense was to stare at me as if I were reciting a tedious tale. It bored her. Once I thought she repressed a yawn. That was when I began to say the same things over again. She was without any vanity of self-justification. Not for an instant did she avert her eyes. She looked at me steadily, unblinkingly, with a kind of reptilian indifference. She could see into me; I could not see into her. At the end I became abusive. Then if at all there was a faint suspicion of interest.

“A fool there was who loved the basilisk,” I said. “He who plucks that icy flame will be destroyed but not consumed.... Shall we go?”

I like still to remember that she did not smile at this idiotic apostrophe. Every man, I suppose, says a thing like that once,—if he can. We rose at once. We walked all the way back in silence. I did not go in, but handed her up the steps and left her without good-night.

On the next day but one a note came. Would I meet her for tea at the same place?

She was prompt and purposeful. She waited until tea was served, then put it aside, and spoke.

“Why do all men, though by different ways, come to the same place?”

“I know nothing about all men,” I said. “It’s enough to know about myself. I’m not very sure of that.”

“They all do,” she said, reflectively.

“But I want to marry you,” I said, with emphasis on the personal pronoun.

“Yes;... that, too,” she said, with a saturated air.

“Oh, weary Olympia!” I said. “How stands the score? How many loves lie beheaded in your chamber of horrors? Or do you bury them decently and tend their graves?”

“You try me,” she said, with no change of voice or color. “It is very stupid.... Man takes without leave the smallest thing and presumes upon that to erect preposterous claims. Take our case. I begin by liking you. I invite you to a friendship. You are free to accept or decline. You accept. Wherein so far have you acquired rights in me? We find this relation agreeable and extend it. All of this is voluntary. Nothing is surrendered under compulsion. We are both free. Then suddenly you overwhelm me by a sensuous impulse. It is a wanton, ravishing act. I resent it by the only peaceable means in my power. That is, I avoid you. Immediately you assail me with violent reproaches, as by a right. Is it the invader’s right of might? Is human relationship a state of war?... Don’t interrupt me, please.... And now, when I have come to say that under certain conditions I am prepared to make an exception in your forgiveness,—for Heaven knows what reason!—you taunt me of things you have no right to mention. They are mine alone.”

There was a retort, but I withheld it. How shall man tell woman she hath provoked him to it? If he tell her she will wither him. Yet if the sight, smell and sound of her provoke him not, then is she mortally offended. He shall see without looking and be damned if he looks without seeing. It is so. But she divined my thoughts.

“If a woman gives it is quite the same,” she went on. “Only worse, for in that case he presumes upon what he has received by favor to become lord of all that she has.”

“I lie in the dust,” I said.

“I know the pose,” she said, with a lighter touch. “Happily it is absurd. If it were not that it would be contemptible.”

“Well, pitiless woman, what would you have a man to be and do? Let us suppose provisionally that I ask out of deep, religious curiosity. I may not like the part. How should a man behave with you?”

“I dislike you very much at this moment,” she replied. “By an effort I remember that you have saving qualities. Did you hear me say that I was prepared to make an exception?”

“It may be too late,” I said. “What are the terms? You said under certain conditions.”

She frowned, hesitated and went on slowly.

“It is my castle. You may dwell there, you may come and go, you may make free of it in discretion, agreeably to our joint pleasure,
provided
you forego beforehand all rights accruing from use and tenure.”

We debated the contract in a high, ceremonious manner. It was agreed that the bargain, if made, should terminate automatically at the instant I should presume to make the slightest demand upon her.

“As if for instance I should demand the key to the chamber of horrors,” I said, whimsically.

“Exactly,” she replied.

I stipulated, not in earnest of course, that she should make no demands upon me.

“That was implied,” she said. “We make it explicit.”

When at last I accepted unreservedly she put forth her hand in a full, generous gesture; and the pact was sealed.

We walked homeward on a perfectly restored basis of friendship, changed our minds at the last minute, went instead to a restaurant, then to the theatre, and passed a joyous evening together.

i

S
TEADILY the American giant grew worse in his mind. There were yet lower depths of insolvency. The passion to touch them was like the impulse to collective suicide in the Dark Ages. Bankruptcy ceased to be a disgrace, there was so much of it. Hope of profit was abandoned. Optimism was believed to be an unsound mode of thought. All of this was a state of feeling, a delusion purely. The country was rich. The unemployed were fed on fine white bread and an unlaundered linen shirt cost fifty cents.

Every catastrophe was bound to happen.

On a rainy Wall Street morning in late December, with no sign or gesture of anguish, the Great Midwestern Railroad gave up its corporate existence and died.

It was a shapeless event.

Ten men sat around the long table in the Board Room smoking, fidgeting, irritably watching the time. These were the eminent directors. They were men whose time nobody could afford to waste,—enterprisers in credit, capital, oil, coal, metals and packing house products. They wished the obsequies to begin promptly and be as brief as possible, for they had many other things to mind. Yet the president, with nothing else to do, had kept them waiting for nearly five minutes. This had never happened before. However, when he came and silently took his place at the head of the table he looked so dismal that they forgave him, and the ceremony might have been brought off with some amiability of spirit but for a disagreeable incident at the beginning.

The disturber was Jonas Gates, a dry, mottled little man, indecorously old and lewdly alert, with a shameless, impish sense of pleasantry. He practiced usury on a large scale as a kind of Stock Exchange pawn broker, lending money to people in difficulties at high rates of interest until they had nothing more to pledge and then cutting them off at the pockets. He knew some of everybody’s secrets and much more than he knew he guessed by the magic formula that he was sure of nothing worse of himself than was generally true of his neighbors. He was hated for his tongue, feared for what he knew and respected for his wealth, which was one of the largest private fortunes of that time.

This Jonas Gates, cupping his hands to his mouth and making his voice high and distant, as one calling to the echoes, inquired at large:

“Are there any stockholders present?”

Everyone was scandalized. Several were without pretense of concealing it. He surveyed their faces with amused impudence. Then spreading his hands at each side of his mouth and making his voice hoarse, like a boy calling into an empty hogshead, he inquired again:

“Are there any stockholders present?”

It was a ghastly joke. There is no law forbidding a director to part with his shares when the omens foretell disaster. It is commonly done in fact in the anonymous mist of the stock market, only you never mention it. The convention is that all stockholders have equal rights of partnership. But as directors are the few who have been elected by many to act as managing partners, and since it is necessary for managing partners to have first access to all information, it follows from the nature of circumstances that they are inside stockholders and that the others are outside stockholders; and it follows no less from the nature of mankind that the outsiders invariably suspect the insiders of selling out in time to save themselves.

“Iss id vor a meeting ov ze directors ve are here, Mr. Presidend?” asked Mordecai. He was the eminent banker. He spoke sweetly and lisped slightly as he always did when annoyed.

“This is a directors’ meeting,” said the president, adding: “The secretary will read the call.”

“Please God!” exclaimed Gates, not yet ready to be extinguished. “Put it on the record. I ask: Are there any stockholders present? No answer. Again I ask: Are there any stockholders present? No answer. Great embarrassment What is to be done? Idea! This is a directors’ meeting. Bravo! Proceed. On with the stockholders’ business. We are not stockholders. Therefore we shall be able to transact their business impartially.”

There was a distraught silence.

“Proceed,” said Gates. “I shan’t interrupt the services any more.”

What followed was brief. A resolution was offered and passed to. the secretary to be read, setting out that owing to conditions which left the directors helpless and blameless, to wit: the depression of trade, the distrust of securities, the rapacity of the tax gatherer, the harassment of carriers by government agencies, et cetera, the Great Midwestern was unable to pay its current debts, wherefore counsel should be instructed to carry out the formalities of putting the property in the hands of the court.

“Is there any discussion?” asked the president.

Horace Potter, of oil, spoke for the first time. He was a sudden, ferocious man with enormous gray eyebrows and inflammable blue eyes.

“Have a glance at Providence,” he said. “We damn everything else. Say the crops are a disgrace. That’s true and it’s nobody’s fault here below.”

“Yes, that should go in,” said the president. He took back the resolution, wrote into it with a short lead pencil the phrase, “and the failure of crops over a large part of the railroad’s territory,” and offered it to be read again. Everybody nodded. He called for the vote. The ayes were unanimous, and the aye of Jonas Gates was the loudest of all.

With that they rose.

The Board Room had two doors. One was a service door opening into Harbinger’s office; it was used only by the secretary and such other subordinate officials as might be summoned to attend a board meeting with records and data. The main door through which the directors came and went was the other one opening into the president’s office. Their way of normal exit therefore was through the president’s office, through the anteroom where I worked, into the reception room beyond and thence to the public corridor.

As the president’s private secretary it was expected of me to see them out. Directly behind me on this occasion came Mordecai, like a biblical image, his arms stiff at his sides, the expression of his face remote and sacrificial. This was his normal aspect; nevertheless it seemed now particularly appropriate. A sacrifice had been performed upon the mysterious altar of solvency and he alone had any solemnity about it. The others followed, helping each other a little with their coats, exchanging remarks, some laughing.

So we came to the door that opened into the reception room. I had my hand on the knob when Mordecai suddenly recoiled.

“A-h-h-h-ch, don’d!” he exclaimed. “Zey are zare.”

Evidently some rumor of the truth had got abroad in Wall Street. The reception room was full of reporters waiting for news of the meeting, and this was unexpected, since nobody save the officials and directors were supposed to know that a meeting was taking place. Mordecai’s fear of reporters was ludicrous, like some men’s fear of small reptiles. He stood with his back to the door facing the other directors. Horace Potter was for pushing through.

“Hell,” he said. “Let’s tell them we’ve let her go and get out. I’m overdue at another meeting three blocks from here.”

He could move through a crowd of clamorous reporters with the safety of an iceberg.

“Ziz vay, all ze gentlemen, b-1-e-a-s-e,” said Mordecai, ignoring Potter’s suggestion. He led them back to the president’s office; he had remembered an unused, permanently bolted door that opened directly from the president’s office upon the main corridor. His thought was to go that way and circumvent the reporters. But they had sensed that possibility. This point of exit also was besieged.

“A-h-h-h-ch!” he said again. “Zey are eferyvare. How iss id zey get ze news?” Saying this he looked at each of his fellow directors severely. Potter frowned, not for being looked at by Mordecai, but from impatience.

“Id iss best zat ze presidend zhall brepare a brief vormal stadement,” said Mordecai. “Ve can vait in ze Board Room. Zen he vill bring zem for ze statement in here. Vhile he iss reading id to zem ve can ze ozer vay ged out.”

“I can’t wait,” said Potter. He bolted into the reception room alone and banged the door behind him. The reporters instantly surrounded him, and we heard him say: “A statement is coming.”

The president turned to me and dictated as follows:

“Certain creditors of the Great Midwestern Railroad Company being about to apply to the court for a receiver to be appointed, the question to be decided at today’s meeting of the directors was whether to borrow a sum of money on the company’s unsecured notes at a high rate of interest and thus temporize with its difficulties or confess its inability to meet its obligations and allow the property to be placed in the hands of the court. After due consideration the directors unanimously resolved to adopt the latter course in order that the assets may be conserved for the benefit of all parties concerned. (Signed.) John J. Valentine, president.”