i
Steadily 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-l-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.”
Turning to the directors, who had been standing in a bored, formless group, he asked: “Does that cover it?”
All of them gave assent save Mordecai. He was gazing at the ceiling, his hands held out, pressing the tips of his fingers together.
“Id iss fery euvonious, Mr. Falentine,” he said. “Conzerved iss a fine vord. A fery good vord. Id iss unvair to ze bankers, iss id not, to zpeak of borrowing ad high rates of interest money? Iss id nod already zat ze company hass borrowed more money vrom id’s bankers zan id can pay?”
“Read it please,” said the president to me. I read it aloud.
“Strike out the phrase, ‘whether to borrow a sum of money on its unsecured notes at a high rate of interest,’ and make it read, ‘the question to be decided at today’s meeting of the directors was whether to temporize with its difficulties, or,’—and so on.”
Mordecai, still gazing at the ceiling, nodded with satisfaction. Then he returned to the plane below and led them back to the Board Room, waiting himself until they were all through and closing the door carefully.
The reporters were admitted. We took care to get all of them in at one time, twenty or more, and held the doors open while the directors, passing through Harbinger’s office, made their august escape.