With no further discussion they voted with Galt, and the feud between Valentine and Galt was openly established.
We were torn by the dilemma of allegiance. Everyone was fond of Valentine. One could not help liking him. And his position was desperately uncomfortable. Galt had reduced him to a mere figurehead, not intentionally perhaps, not by any overt act of hostility certainly, but as an inevitable consequence of his ruthless pursuit of ends. Valentine became obstructive. Galt grew irritable. They ceased to have any working contact whatever. And although the organization to a man was sorry for Valentine, still there was a turning to Galt, purely as an instinctive reaction to strength. As a railroad executive Valentine for all his experience was inefficient. This had been always tolerantly understood. But now with Galt’s work beginning to produce results in contrast the fact was openly admitted. Galt’s touch was sure, propulsive and unhesitating. And besides, in whatever he did there was an element of fortuity that could not be reasoned about. He not only did the right things; he did them at precisely the right time.
“You remember what I told you a long time ago,” said Harbinger. “He sees things before they happen. My heart breaks for the old man ... but it’s no use.”
The sight of inspired craftsmanship is irresistible to men. The organization wavered between affection for the one and awe of the other and ended by giving its undivided loyalty to Galt, not for love of his eyes but for reasons that were obvious.
One day Mr. Valentine complained that I was unable to serve him and Galt both, and asked me gently if I did not wish to go entirely to Galt. He had guessed my inclinations. So we shook hands and parted. Thereafter my place was in Galt’s room and I attended the board meetings as his private secretary.
His activities were of increasing complexity. A Stock Exchange ticker was installed, for he meant to keep his eye on the stock market; then an automatic printing device on which foreign, domestic and Wall Street news bulletins were flashed by telegraph; then a private switchboard and a number of direct telephones,--one with the house of Mordecai & Co., one with the operating department at Chicago, one with the office of Jonas Gates, several with Stock Exchange brokers and others designated by code letters the terminals of which were his own secret. He worked by no schedule, hated to make fixed appointments, and took people as they came. They waited in the reception room, which of necessity became his ante-chamber. In a little while it was crowded with those who asked for Galt, Galt, Galt. Not one in twenty who entered asked for Valentine, the president. A mixed procession it was,--engineers, equipment makers, brokers, speculators, inventors, contractors and persons summoned suddenly out of the sky whose business one never knew. Never wasting it himself, never permitting anyone else to waste it, he had time for everything. He received impressions whole and instantaneously. With people he was abrupt, often rude. He wanted the point first. If a man with whom he meant to do business insisted upon talking beside the point he would say: “Go outside to make your speech and then come back.” He never read a newspaper. He looked at it, sniffed, crumpled it up and cast it from him, all with one gesture. Four or five times a day he ran a yard or two of ticker tape through his fingers and glanced in passing at the news printing machine. Magazines and books were non-existent matter. Yet within the area of his own purposes no fact, no implication of fact, was ever lost.