This incident was an omen. Unconsciously Galt worked on the principle that once a thing has happened it cannot unhappen. The fact of its having happened is original and irrevocable. Every other fact in the universe must adjust itself to that one. Something else may happen the next instant; that is a new happening again.
Mr. Valentine was violently agitated by the traffic manager’s dismissal. If he had been consulted he would have made an issue of it. But there it was. It had happened. The fact created a situation. He might refuse to accept the situation, but he could not extinguish the fact. He fumed and let it pass. Nothing was ever the same again.
Galt consulted nobody. He turned from the traffic man to Harbinger and ordered that the pay of the whole executive staff from the secretary down be doubled. Then he put Harbinger out, took the whole of the room for himself, painted the word “Chairman” on the door and thereafter the Great Midwestern was managed from his desk. There was never a moment’s doubt about it. There was no time to debate his authority. It took all of everybody’s time to keep up with what was happening. He recast the operating department by telegraph in one hour, according to a plan already matured in his mind. He changed the accounting system radically, and much to everyone’s surprise, John Harrier accepted the change with enthusiasm.
Having made a flying trip over the road he sent a telegram ahead of him calling a special meeting of the board of directors. It convened at ten o’clock. Galt came directly from the train, stained, unshaven and a little weary, until he began to talk.
What he proposed was that fifty million dollars be raised at once and spent for new engines, cars, rails and road improvements. Mordecai alone was prepared for this. All the others were daft with astonishment. A railroad only a few days out of bankruptcy to find and spend that sum for improvements! It was preposterous. Not only was the whole board against him, save Mordecai; it was hostile and struck with foreboding. As Galt rose to make his argument I remembered what he had twice said: “I shall be one of ten men in a Board Room. Everything else follows from that.”
vi
This was the first true exhibition of his power to move men’s minds,—a power which nobody understood, which he did not himself understand. Perhaps it was not their minds he moved. Men of strong will often turned from their convictions and voted with him or for what he wanted who afterward, having recovered their own opinions, were unable to say why they had acted that way. He was not eloquent. When he was excited his voice became shrill and irritating. He had no felicity of speech and often lost the grammar of tenses, cases and pronouns. The reasoning was always clear. He moulded an argument in the form of a wedge and then hit it a sledge-hammer blow. But it was not the argument alone that did it. As time went on he more and more dispensed with argument and brought the result to pass directly, as a hypnotist with a well trained subject induces the trance without preparation, seemingly by an act of mere intention. It was a power that increased with use until it was like an elemental force and acted at a distance, so that he had only to send an agent with word that this or that should be done, and men did it helplessly. You may say of course that all such later phenomena were owing to a habit of submission, men having accepted the tyranny of his will, only that would not account for the rise of his power from nothing, would it?
In this first case he had back of him no prestige of success. He was still unknown and distrusted by a majority of the ten directors who sat at the board table. And they were not men accustomed to be led. They were themselves leaders. In all Wall Street it would have been impossible to find a more powerful, self-confident group, cold, calculating, unsentimental in business, their faces all cruelly scarred with the marks of success terrifically achieved. Yet as he talked their chemistries changed. The first visible reaction was one of bothered surprise. This was followed by efforts of resistance. The last phase was one of fascination.
His reasons were these: A flood was about to rise. He adduced evidence on that point. Money, materials and labor were plenty and cheap. Never again would it be possible to increase the railroad’s capacity at a cost so low. And a railroad that made itself ready to receive the flood would reap a rich harvest. Finally, the spending of fifty million dollars in this way would give business the impulse it was waiting for,—the little push that sends a great vessel down the ways into the water. The moment was rare and propitious.