iii
As we were going down the Capitol steps Galt stumbled and clutched my arm. The sustaining excitement was at an end and the reaction was sudden. Solicitude made him peevish. He insisted irritably, and we went on walking, though it was above his strength. When we were half way back to the hotel, a mile yet to go, he stopped and said: “You’re right, Coxey. Ain’t it hot! Let’s call a cab.”
He wouldn’t rest. A strange uneasiness was upon him. We took the next train for New York.
“I want to go to Moonstool,” he said. The idea seized him after we were aboard the train.
“Fine. Let’s take a holiday tomorrow and go all over it,” I said.
“Now. I want to go there now,” he said.
“Directly there ... and not go home?”
“That’s home, ain’t it?” he said, becoming irritable. “Let’s go straight there.”
He had a fixation upon it.
From Baltimore I got off an urgent telegram to Mrs. Galt, telling her Galt was very tired and insisted on going directly to the country place. Could she meet us at Newark with a motor car? That would be the easiest way.
Automobiles were just then coming into general use. Galt with his ardent interest in all means of mechanical locomotion was enthusiastic about them. The family had four, besides Natalie’s, which was her own. She drove it herself.
Mrs. Galt met us at Newark. Galt greeted her with no sign of surprise. He could not have been expecting her. I had told him nothing about the arrangements. He slept all the way up from Washington and did not know where we were when we got off the train. She helped him into the car. When they were seated he took her hand and went to sleep again.
There was a second motor behind us, with a cook, three servants, some luggage and provisions. Mrs. Galt was a very efficient woman. She had thought of everything the situation required.
It was nearly midnight when we arrived at Moonstool and stopped in front of the iron gates. They were closed and locked. And there was Natalie who had been sent ahead to announce our coming. She drove out alone, got lost on the way, and had not yet succeeded in raising anybody when we came up. The place was dark, except for red lanterns here and there on piles of construction material. The outside watchmen were shirking duty, and those inside, if not doing likewise, were beyond hearing.
Nearby was the railroad station of Galt, a black little pile with not a light anywhere. It had not yet been opened for use. We could hear the water spilling over the private Galt dam in the river. There was enough electricity in the Galt power house to illuminate a town. On the mountain top, half a mile distant, the Galt castle stood in massive silhouette against the starry sky. And here was Galt, in the dark, an unwelcome night-time stranger, forbidden at the gate. He was still asleep. We were careful not to wake him.
A watchman with a bull’s eye lantern and a billy stick exuded from the darkness.
“Wha’d’ye want?”
We wanted to go in.
“Y’can’t go in,” he said. “Can’t y’ see it’s private? Nobody lives there.”
It is very difficult to account for the improbable on the plane of a night watchman’s intelligence. First he stolidly disbelieved us. Then he took refuge in limited responsibility.
“M’orders is t’let nobody in,” he said. “D’ye know anybody aroun’ here?”
It seemed quite possible that no human being around here would know us. By an inspiration Natalie remembered the superintendent of construction. He lived not far away. She knew where. Once when she was spending a day on the job he had taken her home with him to lunch. It was not more than ten minutes’ drive, she said.
It was further than she thought. We were more than three quarters of an hour returning with the superintendent. It took twenty minutes more to wake the crew at the power house and get the electricity turned on. Then we drove slowly up the main concrete road now lighted on each side by clusters of three ground glass globes in fluted columns fifty feet apart. Although it was finished the road was still cluttered with heaps of sand and debris.
Galt all this time was fast asleep, his head resting on Mrs. Galt’s shoulder. We could scarcely wake him when we tried. He seemed drunk with weariness. As we helped him out he opened his eyes once and startled us by saying to the superintendent: “Fire that watchman ... down below,” as if he had been conscious of everything that happened. His eyes closed again, he tottered, and we caught him. The superintendent supported him on one side, I on the other, and so he entered, dragging his feet.
Natalie knew more about the house than anyone else. She led the way to the apartment that was Galt’s, and then left us to place the servants and show them their way around. I helped Mrs. Galt undress him and get him to bed. I was amazed to see how thin and shrunken his body was. He was inert, like a child asleep. Mrs. Galt, very pale, was strong and deft.
“We must have a doctor at once,” she said. “I thought of bringing one and then didn’t because he minds so awfully to have a doctor in.”
Still we were not really alarmed.
The telephone system had been installed. Natalie knew that. She knew also where the big switchboard was. I telephoned the family physician to meet us at the Hoboken ferry and then Natalie and I set out to fetch him, a drive of nearly seventy miles there and back.
“We ought to do it in two hours,” she said, as we coasted freely,—very freely,—down the lighted cement road and plunged through the gates into darkness.
“The doctor must be in his right mind when we deliver him.”
I meant it lightly. Her reckless driving was a household topic and she was incorrigible. But she answered me thoughtfully.
“We’ll make the time going.”
She pulled her gloves tighter, took the time, inspected the instruments, switched off the dash light, cut out the muffler, settled herself in the seat and opened the throttle wide. It was a four-cylinder, high-power engine. The sound we made was that of an endless rip through a linen sheet. Road side trees turned white, uneasy faces to our headlights. The highway seemed to lay itself down in front of us as we needed it; and there was a feeling that it vanished or fell away into black space behind us. Giddy things such as fences, buildings and stone walls were tossed right and left in streaming glimpses. Good motor roads were yet unbuilt. There were short, sharp grades like humps on the roller coaster at the fair. Taking them at fifty miles an hour, at night, when you cannot see the top as you start up, nor all the way down as you begin the plunge, is a wild, liberating sensation. Sense of level is lost. One’s center of gravity rises and falls momentously, the heart sloshes around, and you don’t care what happens, not even if you should run off the world. It doesn’t matter.
Natalie was in a trance-like rapture. She never spoke. Her eyes were fixed ahead; her body was static. Only her head and arms moved, sometimes her feet to slip the clutch or apply the brake. All that pertains to the pattern of consciousness,—seeing, hearing, attention, will and willing,—were strained outward beyond the windshield, as if externalized, acting outside of her. What remained on the seat, besides the thrill at the core of her, was her automatic self controlling this lunging, roaring mechanism without the slightest effort of thought. The restrained impulses of her nature apparently found their escape in this form of excitement. It was one thing she could do better than anyone else. She did it superbly and adored doing it. I could not help thinking how Vera would drive, if she drove at all.
There was no traffic at that hour of night until we fell in with the milk and truck wagons crossing the Hackensack Meadows toward the Hudson River ferries. Natalie cut in and out of that rumbling procession with skill and ease. Her calculations were tight and daring, but never foolhardy.
“Very accomplished driving,” I said, as she pulled up at the ferry with the engine idling softly.
“Fifty minutes,” she said, a little down, on looking at her watch. “I thought we should have done it in forty-five. Don’t you love it at night?”