ii
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.