There was consternation in the great offices of Marcus Trefethen, for the chief had given an order that could not be understood. It was a sentence of twelve words, but its result, carried out, would be the sacrifice of more dollars than might be calmly contemplated. Beside infinite further consequences—throwing away, for instance, the glory, now almost in reach of these offices, of seeing their head the richest man on earth; that was a probable result if the twelve words went into action. It is easier to knock things to pieces than to build them. A great fortune assured, a great place in the financial world won, a future tremendous enough for a Dumas romance lying a few steps on—and the man who had done the work was tossing these immensities from him like playthings. What did it mean? Three men skilled in affairs, in touch with the delicate pulse of business life, bent their heads together and discussed it. Friday the policy of the office had been in the full vigor of its unhurrying, unrelenting swing. Saturday the chief had been restless, and had gone away and left things in a plastic form which needed his master-touch—an action out of character. And the first thing on this Monday was the extraordinary order. As long as they dared they discussed it, Compton and Barnes and Haywood, the three who stood next the throne, and at length, not over-eagerly, Compton knocked and went into the inner room of the great man and closed the door. He emerged five minutes later with a slight dizziness in his air. He answered the inquiry of his associates’ attentive silence.
“It’s so,” he said. “The order is to be carried out. He’s gone clean mad. ‘All negotiations as to the Southwestern road to be stopped at once.’”
In the inner room a man sat at a desk littered with the crisp sheets of a large mail, and stared out of the window, down over a wide landscape of jutting roofs and soaring sky-scrapers, over a harbor filled with shipping, and a broad quiet ocean. He was a big man, with a look of bygone athletic form; his face was lined, and every line meant accomplishment; his mouth was set now as if he were this moment engaged in something whose doing called for force. He drew a breath, and spoke aloud.
“It’s done,” he said. “Thank the Lord it’s done. Compton and the lot think me insane; but they can’t undo it now. Thank the Lord it’s done.” Then he dropped his head into his hand and, gazing once more across the brilliant volcano of the feverish city, across the water-city of masts and smokestacks, his eyes rested on the sea. With the crystal-clear, unwavering, and rapid consideration which was his greatest power he reviewed events; he followed up a clue which Compton and Barnes and Haywood had missed. Clearly as if it were a business affair he reviewed the time—but fully he did it—no moment of the three days’ crisis was forgotten. For an hour he sat so, withdrawn from the whirlpool in which he had been the master-swimmer, which flowed about him yet.
On Friday at ten there had been a short meeting of the directors of the Imperial and Western Railway; seven men present had decided in half an hour a few questions which would affect twenty thousand. The Southwestern Railway, covering much of the same country, willing or unwilling, was to be consolidated. Unwillingly it would be, for it was an old road, with a large clientage which could be held in spite of the new Imperial, and the routes differed enough to make both still useful. That was the point. If there was money to make, why should not the Imperial merge the Southwestern and make it all? There was a large mortgage on the Southwestern, and Marcus Trefethen held the bonds; the Imperial and Western was richer; they could afford to lower their rates, forcing the older road to do the same; it was a question of a short time before the Southwestern would be making no money and would be unable to pay interest on the mortgage. Trefethen could foreclose—the two roads would merge. And beyond this, to Trefethen’s far-seeing eye—the eye of a poet in stocks and combinations—sounded the rhythm of a greater combination, a poem in which railroads rhymed to each other, and whose metre was the swing of accumulating millions. It was not money he wanted—he had plenty—it was the interest of the great game which drew him, the poet’s joy to fit the verse and realize the vision.
The seven men decided that there was no reason why money should be made within reach of their grasp which they did not grasp. Marcus Trefethen unexpectedly demurred for a moment. In a flash of memory it came to him who the president of the Southwestern was, and that all his fortune was in the road.
“It seems a bit brutal,” he said, “to undo solid work of forty years’ standing.”
“It’s a case of the survival of the fittest,” Carroll’s harsh voice answered. “Centralization makes for efficiency—this is a world where the inefficient goes under.”
“The Southwestern isn’t inefficient. It’s a well-managed business, with a future as well as a past.”
“That’s why we want it,” Harrington slid in with suave readiness, and the others laughed cheerfully. Carroll took up the thread.