We landed in New York and to my satisfaction I secured the rooms I usually occupy. They are in a small hotel off Fifth Avenue, half way between the streets which boast of numbers higher than fifty, and those others which follow the effete European customs of having names. It is one of the paradoxes of New York that the parts of the city where fashionable people live and spend their money are severely business-like in the treatment of streets, laying them out so as to form correct parallelograms and distinguishing them by numbers instead of names, as if terrified of letting imagination loose for a moment. Down town where the money is made and the offices of the money makers are piled one on top of another, the streets are as irregular as those of London or Paris, and have all sorts of fascinatingly suggestive names. My hotel stands in the debatable land between the two districts. Fashionable life is ebbing away from its neighbourhood. Business is, as yet, a little shy of invading it. The situation makes an appeal to me. I may be, as Gorman says, a man of no country, but I am a man of two worlds. I cling to the skirts of society, something of an outsider, yet one who has the right of entry, if I choose to take the trouble, the large amount of trouble necessary to exercise the right. I am one who is trying to make money, scarcely more than an amateur among business men, but deeply interested in their pursuits. This particular hotel seems to me therefore a convenient, that is to say a suitable place of residence for me. It is not luxurious, nor is it cheap, but it is comfortable, which is perhaps the real reason why I go to it.
I gave Gorman my address before I left the ship, but I did not expect him to make any use of it. I thought that I had seen the last of him when I crossed the gangway and got caught in the whirlpool of fuss which eddied round the custom house shed. I was very much surprised when he walked in on me at breakfast time on the second morning after our arrival. I was eating an omelette at the time. I offered him a share of it and a cup of coffee. Gorman refused both; but he helped himself to a glass of iced water. This shows how adaptable Gorman is. Hardly any European can drink iced water at or immediately after breakfast during the first week he spends in America. I do not take to the stuff till I have been there about a fortnight. But Gorman, in spite of his patriotism, has a good deal of the cosmopolitan about him. Strange foods and drinks upset him very little.
“Doing anything this evening?” he asked. “If not will you spend it with me? Ascher has promised to come. We’re going to a circus and on for supper afterwards. You remember the circus I mentioned to you on the steamer.”
I hesitated before I answered. I suppose I looked a little astonished. That Gorman should propose an evening out was natural enough. I should not call him a dissipated man, but he has a great deal of vitality and he likes what he calls “a racket” occasionally. What surprised me was that a circus should be his idea of dissipation. A circus is the sort of entertainment to which I send my nephew—a boy of eleven—when he spends the night with me in London on his way to school. My servant, a thoroughly trustworthy man, takes him there. I pay for the tickets. Gorman, Ascher, and I were three grown men and we could not boast of a child among us to serve as an excuse for going to a circus.
“It’s quite a good show,” said Gorman.
I tried to think of Ascher at a circus. I failed to picture him, a man educated up to the highest forms of art, gazing in delight while a lady in short petticoats jumps through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse. I had not been at a circus for about thirty years, since my tenth birthday indeed, but I do not believe that the form of entertainment has changed much since then. The clowns’ jokes—I judge from my nephew’s reports—are certainly the same as they were in my time. But even very great improvements would not make circuses tolerable to really artistic people like Ascher.
“I’ve got free passes for the best seats,” said Gorman.
He had mistaken the cause of my hesitation. I was not thinking of the cost of our evening’s amusement.
“You journalists,” I said, “are wonderful. You get into the front row every time without paying, whether it’s a coronation or a funeral. How did you manage it this time?”
“My brother Tim is connected with the show. I daresay you don’t remember him at Curraghbeg. He was fifteen years younger than me. My father married a second time, you know. Tim is my half-brother.”
I did not remember Gorman himself in Curraghbeg. I could not be expected to remember Tim who must have been still unborn when I left home to join the Army.
“Tim has the brains of our family,” said Gorman. “His mother was a very clever woman.”
I never heard Gorman say anything worse than that about his step-mother, and yet she certainly treated him very badly.
“You’re all clever,” I said. “Your father drove mine out of the country and deprived him of his property. It took ability to do that. You are a Member of Parliament and a brilliant journalist. Timothy—I hardly like to speak of him as Tim—owns a splendid circus.”
“He doesn’t own it,” said Gorman.
“Well, runs it,” I said. “I expect it takes more brains to run a circus than to own one.”
“He doesn’t exactly run it,” said Gorman. “In fact he only takes the money at the door. But he has brains. That’s why I want Ascher to meet him. I didn’t ask Mrs. Ascher,” he added thoughtfully, “though she hinted for an invitation, rather made a set at me, in fact.”
“Give her my ticket,” I said. “I don’t mind a bit. I’ll buy another for myself in a cheap part of the house, and join you at supper afterwards. You ought not to disappoint Mrs. Ascher.”
“I don’t want Mrs. Ascher this time. She’d be in the way. She’s a charming woman, of course, though she does bore me a bit about music and talks of her soul.”
“Good Heavens!” I said. “You haven’t been discussing religion with her, surely. I didn’t think you’d do a thing like that, Gorman. You oughtn’t to.”
“Never mentioned religion to her in my life. Nothing would induce me to. For one thing I don’t believe she has any.”
“You’re a Roman Catholic yourself, aren’t you?”
“Well,” said Gorman, “I don’t know that I can say that I am exactly; but I’m not a Protestant or a Jew. But that’s nothing to do with it. Mrs. Ascher doesn’t talk about her soul in a religious way. In fact—I don’t know if you’ll understand, but what she means by a soul is something quite different, not the same sort of soul.”
I understood perfectly. I have met several women of Mrs. Ascher’s kind. They are rather boastful about their souls and even talk of saving or losing them. But they do not mean what one of Gorman’s priests would mean, or what my poor father, who was a strongly evangelical Protestant, meant by the phrases.
“We are not accustomed to souls like hers in Ireland. We only go in for the commonplace, old-fashioned sort.”
Gorman smiled.
“She wouldn’t be seen with one of them about her,” he said. “They’re vulgar things. Everybody has one.”
“Soul or no soul,” I said, “you ought to invite Mrs. Ascher to your party. Why not do the civil thing?”
“I’ll do the civil thing some other time. I’ll take her to a concert, but I don’t want her to-night.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “your brother’s circus is a little—shall we say Parisian? I don’t think you need mind that. Mrs. Ascher isn’t exactly a girl. It would take a lot to shock her. In fact, Gorman, my experience of these women with artistic souls is that the riskier the thing is the better they like it.”
That is, as I have noticed, one of the great differences between a commonplace, so to speak, religious soul and a soul of the artistic kind. You save the one by keeping it as clean as you can. The other seems to thrive best when heavily manured. It is no disparagement of the artistic soul to say that it likes manure. Some of the most delicious and beautiful things in the world are like that, raspberries for instance, which make excellent jam, roses about which poets write, and begonias. I knew a man once who poured bedroom slops into his begonia bed every day and he had the finest flowers I ever saw.
“Gorman,” I said, “did it ever occur to you that Mrs. Ascher’s soul is like a begonia?”
“Bother Mrs. Ascher’s soul!” said Gorman. “I’m not thinking about it. The circus is a show you might take a nun to. Nobody could possibly object to it. The reason I headed her off was because I wanted to talk business to Ascher, very particular business and rather important. In fact,” here he sank his voice to a confidential whisper, “I want you to help me to rope him in.”
“If you’ve succeeded in roping him into a circus,” I said, “I should think you could rope him into anything else without my help. Would you mind telling me what the scheme is?”
“I’m trying to,” he said, “but you keep interrupting me with silly riddles about begonias.”
“I’m sorry I mentioned begonias. All the same it’s a pity you wouldn’t listen. You’d have liked the part about manure. But never mind. Go on about Ascher.”
“My brother Tim,” said Gorman, “has invented a new cash register. He’s always inventing things; been at it ever since he was a boy. But they’re mostly quite useless things though as cute as the devil. In fact I don’t think he ever hit on anything the least bit of good till he got this cash register.”
“Before we go further,” I said, “what is a cash register?”
“It’s a machine used in shops and cheap tea-places for——”
“I know now,” I said. “It has keys like a typewriter. That’s all right. I thought for a moment it might be a book, a ledger, you know. Go on.”
“Well, Tim’s machine is out and away the best thing of its kind ever seen. There’s simply no comparison between it and the existing cash registers. I’ve had it tested in every way and I know.”
I began, so I thought, to see what Ascher was to be roped into.
“You want money to patent it, I suppose,” I said.
But that was not it. Gorman had scraped together whatever money was necessary to make his brother’s invention secure in Europe and America. He had done more, he had formed a small private company in which he held most of the shares himself. He had manufactured a hundred of the new machines and was prepared to put them on the market.
“Ah,” I said. “Now I see what you’re at. You want more capital. You want to work the thing on a big scale. I might take a share or two myself, just for the sake of having a flutter.”
“We don’t want you,” said Gorman. “The fewer there are in it the better. I don’t want to have to divide the profits with a whole townful of people. But we might let you in if you get Ascher for us. You have a lot of influence with Ascher.”
I had, of course, no influence whatever with Ascher. But Gorman, though he is certainly a clever man, has the defects of his class and his race. He was an Irish peasant to start with and there never was an Irish peasant yet who did not believe in a mysterious power which he calls “influence.” It is curious faith, though it justifies itself pretty well in Ireland. In that country you can get nearly anything done, either good or bad, if you persuade a sufficiently influential person to recommend it. Gorman’s mistake, as it seemed to me, lay in supposing that influence is equally potent outside Ireland. I am convinced that it is no use at all in dealing with a man like Ascher. If a big financial magnate will not supply money for an enterprise on the merits of the thing he is not likely to do so because a friend asks him. Besides I cannot, or could not at that time, boast of being Ascher’s intimate friend. However Gorman’s mistake was no affair of mine.
“If Ascher goes in at all,” I said, “he’ll do it on a pretty big scale. He’ll simply absorb the rest of you.”
“The fact is,” said Gorman, “I don’t want Ascher to join. I don’t want him to put down a penny of money. All I want him to do is to back us. Of course he’ll get his whack of whatever we make, and if he likes to be the nominal owner of some bonus shares in our company he can. That would regularise his position. The way the thing stands is this.”
I had finished my breakfast and lit a cigar. Gorman pulled out his pipe and sat down opposite to me. I am not, I regret to say, a business man, but I succeeded in understanding fairly well what he told me.
His brother’s cash register, if properly advertised and put on the market, would drive out every other cash register in the world. In the long run nothing could stand against it. Of that Gorman was perfectly convinced. But the proprietors of the existing cash registers would not submit without a struggle.
Gorman nodded gravely when he told me this. Evidently their struggles were the very essence of the situation.
“What can they do?” I said. “If your machine is much better than theirs surely——”
“They’ll do what people always do on these occasions. They’ll infringe our patents.”
“But the law——”
“Yes,” said Gorman, “the law. It’s just winning law suits that would ruin us. Every time we got a judgment in our favour the case would be appealed to a higher court. That would happen here and in England and in France and in every country in the world civilised enough to use cash registers. Sooner or later, pretty soon too—we should have no money left to fight with.”
“Bankrupt,” I said, “as a consequence of your own success. What an odd situation!”
“Now,” said Gorman, “you see where Ascher comes in.”
“I do. But I don’t expect he’ll spend his firm’s money fighting speculative law suits all over the world just to please you.”
“You don’t see the position in the least. There’ll be no law suits and he won’t spend a penny. Once it’s known that his firm is behind us no one will attempt to touch our patent. People aren’t such fools as to start playing beggar-my-neighbour with Ascher, Stutz & Co. The whole world knows that their firm has money enough to go on paying lawyers right on until the day of judgment.”
“I hope to goodness,” I said, “that we shan’t meet lawyers then.”
Gorman smiled. Up to that point it had been impossible to move him from his desperate earnestness, but a joke at the expense of lawyers is sure of a smile under any circumstances. With the possible exception of the mother-in-law joke, the lawyer joke is the oldest in the world and like all well tested jokes it may be relied on.
“There won’t be any lawyers then,” said Gorman. “They’ll go straight to hell without the formality of a trial.”
This seemed to me to be carrying the joke too far. I have known several lawyers who were no worse than other professional men, quite upright and honourable compared to doctors. I should have liked to argue the point with Gorman. But for the moment I was more interested in the future of the new cash register than in the ultimate destiny of lawyers.
“If you get Ascher to back you,” I said, “and your patents are safe, you’ll want to begin making machines on a big scale. Where will you get the money for that?”
“You haven’t quite caught on yet,” said Gorman. “I don’t want to make the things at all. Why should I? There would have to be a large company. I have neither time nor inclination to manage it. Tim hasn’t that kind of brains. Besides it would be risky. Somebody might come along any day with a better machine and knock ours out. People are always inventing things, you know. What I want is a nice large sum of hard cash without any bother or risk. Don’t you see that the other people, the owners of the present cash registers, will have to buy us out? If our machine is the best and they daren’t go to law with us they must buy us out. There’s no other course open to them. What’s more, they’ll have to pay pretty nearly what we ask. In fact, if we put up a good bluff there’s hardly any end to the extent to which we can bleed them. See?”
I saw something which looked to me like a modernised form of highway robbery.
“Is that sort of thing common?” I said.
“Done every day,” said Gorman. “It’s business.”
“Well,” I said, “there’s one justification for your proceedings. If half what you say about your brother’s invention is true the world will get the benefit of a greatly improved cash register. I suppose that’s the way civilisation advances.”
“The world be damned,” said Gorman. “It’ll get nothing. You don’t suppose the people who buy us out are going to start making Tim’s machine. They can if they like, of course, once they’ve paid us. But it will cost them hundreds of thousands if they do. They’d have to scrap all their existing plant and turn their factories inside out, and in the end they wouldn’t make any more profit than they’re making now. No. They’ll simply suppress Tim’s invention and the silly old world will go on with the machines it has at present.”
“Gorman,” I said, “you gave me to understand a minute or so ago that you went in for the old-fashioned kind of soul, the kind we were both brought up to. I’m not at all sure that I wouldn’t rather have Mrs. Ascher’s new kind, even if it——”
“Don’t start talking about begonias again,” said Gorman.
“I wasn’t going to. I was only going to say that even plays in which nothing happens and grimy women say indecent things—that’s art you know—seem to me better than the sort of things your soul fattens on.”
“I don’t see any good talking about souls,” said Gorman. “This is a matter of business. The other people will crush us if they can. If they can’t, and they won’t be able to if Ascher backs us, they’ll have to pay us. There’s nothing wrong about that, is there? Look at it this way. We’ve got something to sell——”
“Cash registers,” I said. “But you don’t propose to sell them.”
“Not cash registers, but the right to make a certain kind of cash registers. That’s what we’re going to sell. We could sell it to the public, form a company to use the rights. It suits us better for various reasons to sell it to these people. It suits them to buy. They needn’t unless they like. But they will like. Now if we want to sell and they want to buy and we agree on the price where does anybody’s soul come in?”
“There is evidently,” I said, “a third kind of soul. The original, religious kind, the artistic kind, and what we may call the business soul. You have a mixture of all three in you, Gorman.”
“I wish you’d stop worrying about my soul and tell me this. Are you going to help to rope in Ascher or not? He’ll come if you use your influence with him.”
“My dear fellow,” I said. “Of course I’m going to help. Haven’t you offered me a share of the loot?”
“I thought you would,” said Gorman triumphantly. “But what about your own soul?”
“I haven’t got one,” I said.
I used to have a sort of instinct called honour which served men of my class instead of a soul. But Gorman and Gorman’s father before him and their political associates have succeeded in abolishing gentlemen in Ireland. There is no longer the class of gentry in that country and the few surviving individuals have learned that honour is a silly superstition. I am now a disinterested spectator of a game which my ancestors played and lost. The virtue desirable in a spectator is not honour but curiosity. I wanted very much to see how Ascher would take Gorman’s proposal and how the whole thing would work out. I promised to sit through the circus, to attend the supper party afterwards and to do the best I could to persuade Ascher to join our robber band.
Mrs. Ascher is not the woman to miss an entertainment she desires merely because she lacks an invitation. She arrived at the door of the circus in a taxicab with Ascher. Gorman and I were there and when he first saw Mrs. Ascher he swore. However he was forced to give her some sort of welcome and he did it pretty well, though I fear Ascher might have noticed a note of insincerity in his voice. But that was only at first. Gorman’s temper changed when we reached our seats and Mrs. Ascher threw off her cloak.
She was wearing an evening gown of the most startling design and colour. I should have said beforehand that a woman with a skin as pallid as that of a corpse and so little flesh that her bones stick up jaggedly would be wise to avoid very low dresses. Mrs. Ascher displayed, when she took off her cloak, as much skin and bone as she could without risking arrest at the hands of the police. Her gown, what there was of it, was of a vivid orange colour and she wore emeralds round her neck. If the main object of wearing clothes is, as some philosophers maintain, to attract attention, then Mrs. Ascher understands the art of dress. She created a sensation. That was what pleased Gorman. He is a man who likes to be the centre of interest wherever he is, or if that is not possible, to be attached to the person who has secured that fortunate position. Mrs. Ascher attracts the public gaze wherever she goes. I have seen people turn round to stare at her in the dining room of the Ritz in New York and at supper in the Carlton in London. The men and women who formed the audience in Gorman’s circus were unaccustomed to daring splendour of raiment. They actually gasped when Mrs. Ascher threw off her cloak and Gorman felt glad that she had come.
She said a few words to me about the delight which an artist’s soul feels in coming into direct contact with the seething life of the people, and she mentioned with appreciation a French picture, one of Degas’ I think, which represents ballet dancers practising their art. Then she and Gorman settled down in two of the three seats reserved for us. Ascher and I retired modestly to the back of what I may call the dress circle. After a while when the performance was well under way, Gorman’s brother came in. I suppose the greater part of his evening’s work was done and he was able to leave the task of dealing with late comers to some subordinate clerk. He looked a mere boy, younger than I expected, as he stood at the end of the row of seats trying to attract his brother’s attention. Gorman was so much occupied with Mrs. Ascher that for some time he did not notice Tim. I had time to observe the boy. He had fair hair, and large, childlike blue eyes. He was evidently nervous, for he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He kept pulling at his tie, and occasionally patting his hair. He was quite right to be uncomfortable about his hair. It was very untidy and one particular lock stood out stiffly at the back of his head.
Gorman saw him at last and immediately introduced him to Ascher and to me. But Tim was far too nervous to sit down beside us. He crept after his brother and took a chair, three seats beyond Gorman, away from Mrs. Ascher. She spotted him directly and insisted on his sitting beside her. She is a woman who likes to have a man of some sort on each side of her. Tim Gorman was little more than a boy but he was plainly frightened of her. I suppose that gave zest to the sport of annexing him. Besides, his eyes are very fine, and, if souls really shine through eyes, showed that he was refreshingly innocent. I expect, too, that there was something piquant in the company of the clerk who takes the money at the door of a second-rate entertainment. Mrs. Ascher has often told me that she is more interested in life than in anything else, even art. She distinguishes between life and real life. Mine, I gather, is not nearly so real as that of a performer in a travelling circus. I do not know why this should be so, but I have no doubt that it is. Mrs. Ascher is not by any means the only person who thinks so. Tim Gorman’s life was apparently real enough to attract her greatly. She paid him the compliment of talking a good deal to the boy, though she was far too clever a woman to let the elder brother feel himself neglected.
A learned horse had just begun its performance when Tim Gorman entered. It went on for some time picking out large letters from a pile in front of it and arranging them so as to spell out “yes” or “no” in answer to questions asked by a man with a long whip in his hand. The animal used one of its front hoofs in arranging the letters, and looked singularly undignified. Ascher sat quite still with an air of grave politeness. I tried to get him to tell me what he thought of the learned horse but could get nothing out of him. Long silences make me uncomfortable. I felt at last that it was better to talk nonsense than not to talk at all.
“I suppose,” I said, “that learned men look almost as grotesque to the angels as learned horses do to us. I can fancy Raphael watching a German professor writing a book on the origin of religion. He would feel all the while that the creature’s front paw was meant by nature for nobler uses.”
“Yes,” said Ascher, “yes. Quite so.”
He spoke vaguely. I think he did not hear what I said. Or perhaps the learned horse struck him differently. Or his mind may have been entirely occupied with the problem of Mexican railways so that he could pay no attention either to the learned horse or to me. If so, he was wakened from his reverie by the next performance.
A company of acrobats in spangled tights, three men and one young woman, took possession of the arena. At first they tumbled, turned somersaults, climbed on each other’s shoulders and assumed attitudes which I should have said beforehand were impossible for any creature with bones. Then a large net was stretched some six feet from the ground and several trapezes which had been tied to the roof were allowed to hang down. The acrobats climbed up by a ladder and swung from one trapeze to another. The business was commonplace enough, but I became aware that Ascher was very much interested in it. He became actually excited when we reached the final act, the climax of the performance.
The programme, at which I glanced, spoke of “The Flying Lady.” The woman, her spangles aglitter in a blaze of lime light, did indubitably fly, if rushing unsupported through the air at some height from solid ground is the essence of flying. Two of the men hung on their trapezes, one by his hands and the other by his legs. They swung backwards and forwards. The length of the ropes was so great that they passed through large arcs, approaching each other and then swinging back until there was a long space between them. The young woman, standing on a third trapeze, swung too. Suddenly, at the upward end of a swing, just as her trapeze hung motionless for an instant, she launched herself into the air. The man on the next trapeze came swinging towards her. She caught him by the feet at the very moment when he was nearest to her. He swung back and she dangled below him. When he reached the highest point of the half circle through which he passed, she was stretched out, making with him a horizontal line. At that moment she let go and shot, feet foremost, through the air. The man who hung head downwards from the next trapeze came swiftly towards her and caught her by the ankles. The two swung back together and at the end of his course he let her go. The impulse of his swing sent her, turning swiftly as she flew, towards a ladder at the end of the row. She alighted on her feet on a little platform, high up near the roof of the building. There she stood, bowing and smiling.
The people burst into a shout of cheering. Ascher leaned forward in his seat and gazed at her. The two men still kept their trapezes in full swing. The third man, standing on a platform at the other end of the row, set the remaining trapeze swinging, that from which the woman had begun her flight. A minute later she flung herself from the platform and the whole performance was repeated. I could hear Ascher panting with excitement beside me.
“A horribly risky business,” I said, “but wonderful, really wonderful. If one of those swings were a fraction late—— But of course the whole thing is exactly calculated.”
“Yes, yes,” said Ascher, “calculated, of course. It’s a matter of mathematics and accurate timing of effort. But if it were worked by machinery, with lay figures, we should think nothing of it. Somebody would do sums and there would be nothing particular in it. The wonderful thing is the confidence. The timing of the swings might be all right; but if the woman hesitated for an instant, or if one of the men felt the slightest doubt about the thing’s coming off—If they didn’t all feel absolutely sure that the hands would be there to grasp her at just the proper moment—It’s the perfect trust which the people have, of each other, of the calculations—Don’t you see?”
I began to see that Ascher was profoundly moved by this performance. I also began to see why.
“It’s like—like some things in life,” I said, “or what some things ought to be.”
“It’s like what my life is,” said Ascher. “Don’t you see it?”
“I should be rather stupid if I didn’t see it, considering the trouble you took to explain the working of international credit to me for two whole days.”
“Then you do understand.”
“I understand,” I said, “that you are that woman. Your whole complex business is very like hers. It’s the meeting of obligations exactly at the end of their swing, the fact that at the appointed moment there will be something there for you to grasp.”
“And the confidence,” said Ascher. “If the bankers in any country doubt the solvency of the bankers in another country, if there’s the smallest hesitation, an instant’s pause of distrust or fear, then international credit collapses and——”
He flung out his arm with a gesture of complete hopelessness. I realised that if anything went wrong between bankers in their trapeze act there would be a very ugly smash.
“And in your case,” I said, “there’s no net underneath.”
The girl and the three men were safe on firm ground again. They were bowing final acknowledgments to the cheering crowd. I suppose they do the same thing every night of their lives, but they were still able to enjoy the cheering. Their faces were flushed and their eyes sparkled. They are paid, perhaps pretty well paid, for risking their lives; but the applause is the larger part of the reward.
“Also,” I said to Ascher, “nobody cheers you. Nobody knows you’re doing it.”
“No. Nobody knows we’re doing it. Nobody sees our flights through the air or guesses the supreme confidence we bankers must have in each other. When anybody does notice us it’s—well, our friend Gorman, for instance.”
Gorman holds the theory that financial men, Ascher and the rest, are bloated spiders who spend their time and energy in trapping the world’s workers, poor flies, in gummy webs.
“And of course Gorman is right in a way,” said Ascher. “I can’t help feeling that things ought to be better managed. But—but it’s a pity that men like him don’t understand.”
Ascher is wonderful. I shall never attain his mental attitude of philosophic tolerance. I do not feel that Gorman is in any way right about the Irish landlords. I felt, though I like the man personally, that he and his friends are deliberately and wickedly perverse.
“Some day,” said Ascher, “something will go wrong. A rope will break, or a man will miss his grip, and then people in one place will be starving, while people somewhere else have food all round them rotting in heaps. Men will want all sorts of things and will not be able to get them, though there will be plenty of them in the world. Men will think that the laws of nature have stopped working, that God has gone mad. Hardly any one will understand what has happened, just that one trapeze rope has broken, or that one man has lost his nerve and missed his grip.”
“She might have fallen clear of the net,” I said, “and come down on the audience.”
“When we slip a trick,” said Ascher, “it will be on the audience that we shall come down; and the audience, the people, will be bruised and hurt, won’t in the least know what has happened.”
Gorman—I suddenly recollected this—had an adventure in finance to propose. If Ascher goes into the scheme I shall have an opportunity of watching an interesting variant of the trapeze act. We shall get the people, who own the existing cash registers on the swing and then hold them to ransom. We shall set our small trapeze oscillating right across their airy path and decline to remove it unless they agree to part with some of the very shiniest of their spangles and hand them over to us for our adornment. I wondered how Ascher, who is so deeply moved by the perils of his own flights, would like the idea of destroying other people’s confidence and upsetting their calculations.
I looked down and saw that Gorman had left his seat. Mrs. Ascher had been making good progress with Tim. The boy was leaning towards her and talking eagerly. She lay back in her seat and smiled at him. If she were not interested in what he was saying she succeeded very well in pretending that she was. All really charming women practise this form of deception and all men are taken in by it if it is well done. Mrs. Ascher does it very well.
When the net was cleared away and the trapezes slung up again in the roof, we had a musical ride, performed by six men and six women mounted on very shiny horses. Mrs. Ascher, of course, objected strongly to the music. I could see her squirming in her seat. Ascher did not find the thing interesting and began to fidget. It was, indeed, much less suggestive than either the learned horse or the acrobats. You cannot discover in a musical ride any parable with a meaning applicable to life. Nothing in the world goes so smoothly and pleasantly. There are always risks even when there are no catastrophes, and catastrophes are far too common. Ascher probably felt that we were out of touch with humanity. He kept looking round, as if seeking some way of escape.
Fortunately Gorman turned up again very soon.
“I hope you won’t mind,” he said, “but I have changed the arrangement for supper. Mrs. Ascher,” he nodded towards the seat in which she was writhing, “wants to meet the Galleotti family. They’re not a family, you know, and of course they’re not called Galleotti. The woman is a Mrs. Briggs, and the tallest of the men is her husband. The other two are no relation. I don’t know their names, but Tim will introduce us.”
I looked at my programme again. It was under the name of the Galleotti Family that the acrobats performed.
“That will be most interesting,” I said.
“I’m afraid it won’t,” said Gorman. “People like that are usually quite stupid. However Mrs. Ascher wanted it, so of course I made arrangements.”
Mrs. Ascher evidently wanted to see life, the most real kind of life, thoroughly. Not contented with having the doorkeeper of a cheap circus sitting, so to speak, in her lap all evening, she was now bent on sharing a meal with a troupe of acrobats.
“It’s rather unlucky,” Gorman went on, “but Mrs. Briggs simply refuses to go to the Plaza. I had a table engaged there.”
“How regal of you, Gorman!” I said.
“You’d have thought she’d have liked it,” he said. “But she made a fuss about clothes. It’s extraordinary how women will.”
“You can hardly blame her,” I said; “I expect the head waiter would turn her out if she appeared in that get-up of hers. Very absurd of him, of course, but——”
I was not conscious that my eyes had wandered to Mrs. Ascher’s dress until Gorman winked at me. Fortunately Ascher noticed neither my glance nor Gorman’s wink. I had not thought of suggesting that Mrs. Briggs’ stage costume was no more daring than what Mrs. Ascher wore.
“Of course,” said Ascher, “she wouldn’t come to supper in tights. It’s her other clothes she’s thinking of. I daresay they are shabby.”
I could understand what Mrs. Briggs felt. Gorman could not. I do not think that any feeling about the shabbiness of his coat would make him hesitate about dining with an Emperor.
“I hope you won’t mind,” he said to Ascher, “but we’re going to rather a third-rate little place.”
Gorman had evidently meant to do us well in the way of supper, champagne probably. He may have had the idea that good food would soften Ascher’s heart towards the cash register scheme, but Mrs. Ascher’s insistence on meeting the Galleotti family spoiled the whole plan. We could not talk business across Mrs. Briggs, so it mattered little what sort of supper we had.
Mrs. Ascher left her seat and joined us. Tim, looking more nervous than ever, followed her at a distance.
“Take me out of this,” she said to me. “Take me out of this or I shall go mad. That dreadful band!”
She spoke in a kind of intense hiss, and I took her out at once, leaving the others to collect our hats and coats and to hunt up the Galleotti family. When we reached the entrance hall she sank into a seat. I thought she was going to faint and felt very uncomfortable. She shut her eyes and murmured in a feeble way. I bent down to hear what she was trying to say, and was relieved to find that she was asking for a cigarette. I gave her one at once. I even lit it for her as she seemed very weak. It did her good. When she had inhaled three or four mouthfuls of smoke she was able to speak quite audibly and had forgotten all about the horror of the band. Her mind went back to the Galleotti family.
“Did you notice the muscular development of those men?” she said. “I don’t think I ever saw more perfect symmetry, the tallest of the three especially. The play of his shoulder muscles was superb. I wonder if he would sit for me. I do a little modelling, you know. Some day I must show you my things. I did a baby faun just before I left London. It isn’t good, of course; but I can’t help knowing that it has feeling.”
The tallest Galleotti probably has feeling too, of a different kind. I expect he would have refused Gorman’s invitation to supper if he had known that he was invited in order to give Mrs. Ascher an opportunity of studying his muscular development at close quarters. Perhaps he had some idea that he was to be on show and did not like it. Instead of wearing his spangled tights he came to supper in a very ill-fitting tweed suit, which completely concealed his symmetry. The other two men were equally inconsiderate. Mrs. Briggs wore a rusty black skirt and a somewhat soiled blouse. Mrs. Ascher was disappointed.
She showed her annoyance by ignoring the Galleotti Family. This was rather hard on Gorman, who had invited the family solely to please her and then found that she would not speak to them. She took a chair in a corner next the wall, and beckoned to Tim Gorman to sit beside her. Tim was miserably frightened and dodged about behind the tallest of the Galleottis to avoid her eye. I expect her manner when the band was playing had terrified him. I felt certain that I should be snubbed, but, to avoid general awkwardness, I took the chair beside Mrs. Ascher.
I tried to cheer her up a little.
“Just think,” I whispered, “if Mr. Briggs looks so commonplace in every-day clothes, other men, even I perhaps, might be as splendid as he was if we put on spangled tights.”
I had to whisper because Mr. Briggs was near me, and I did not want to hurt his feelings. Mrs. Ascher may not have heard me. She certainly did not answer; I went on:
“Thus there may be far more beauty in the world than we suspect. We may be meeting men every day who have the figures of Greek gods underneath their absurd coats. It’s a most consoling thought.”
It did not console Mrs. Ascher in the least; but I thought a little more of it might be good for her.
“In the same way,” I said, “heroic hearts may be beating under the trappings of conventionality and great souls may——”
I meant to work the idea out; but Mrs. Ascher cut me short by saying that she had a headache. There was every excuse for her. She wanted to see the muscles of Mr. Briggs’ shoulders and she wanted Tim Gorman to sit beside her. Double disappointments of this kind often bring on the most violent headaches.
The supper party was a failure. The Galleotti men would talk freely only to Tim Gorman and relapsed into gaping silence when Ascher spoke to them. Mrs. Briggs would not speak at all, until Gorman, who has the finest social talent of any man I ever met, talked to her about her baby. On that subject she actually chattered to the disgust of Mrs. Ascher, who has no children herself and regards women who have as her personal enemies. We had sausages and mashed potatoes to eat. We drank beer. Even Ascher drank a little beer, though I know he hated it.
Not a word was said about Tim’s cash register until the Galleotti family went away and the party broke up. Then Gorman suddenly sprang the subject on Ascher. Mrs. Ascher, having snubbed me with her headache story, at last captured Tim Gorman. She spoke quite kindly to him and tried to teach him to help her on with her cloak, a garment which Tim was at first afraid to touch. I heard her, when Tim was at last holding the cloak, asking him to sit for her in her studio. Tim has no very noticeable physical development, but he has very beautiful eyes. Mrs. Ascher may have wanted him as a model for a figure of Sir Galahad. Her interest in the boy gave us a chance of talking business.
It was not a chance that I should have used if I had been Gorman. It seemed to me foolish to lay a complicated scheme before a man who has just been severely tried in temper by unaccustomed kinds of food and drink. However, Gorman set out the case of the cash register in a few words. He did not go into details, and I do not know whether Ascher understood what was expected of him. He invited Gorman to bring Tim and the machine to the bank next day and promised to look into the matter. Gorman, still under the delusion that influence matters, insisted on my being one of the party. He described me as a shareholder in the company. Ascher said he would be glad to see me, too, next day. My impression is that he would have agreed to receive the whole circus company rather than stand any longer in that grimy restaurant talking to Gorman.