Antitrust law -- United States -- Fiction; Capitalists and financiers -- Fiction; Railroad stories
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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