Harbinger pushed me through the rind 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 in 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 ferryboat. 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 ugly rumors.
The fact of this one man’s solitary believing seemed very remarkable to me at that instant. In the perspectives of times and achievement it became colossal.
iv
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 camp fire. 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 manufacturers’ 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.”