Gorman called for me at my hotel next morning at 9 o’clock.
“Time to start,” he said, “if we’re to keep our appointment with Ascher.”
I was still at breakfast and did not want to start till I had finished.
“Do you think,” I said, “that it’s wise to tackle him quite so early? Most men’s tempers improve as the day goes on,—up to a certain point, not right into the evening. Now I should say that noon would be the very best hour for business of our kind.”
But Gorman is very severe when he is doing business. He took no notice whatever of my suggestion. He pulled a long envelope out of his pocket and presented it to me. It contained a nicely printed certificate, which assured me that I was the owner of one thousand ordinary shares in the New Excelsior Cash Register Company, Ltd. The face value of the shares was five dollars each.
“I did not mean to take quite so many shares,” I said. “However, I don’t mind. If you will work out the rate of exchange while I finish my coffee, I’ll give you an English cheque for the amount.”
Gorman laughed at the proposal.
“You needn’t pay anything,” he said. “All we want from you is your name on our list of directors and your influence with Ascher. Those shares will be worth a couple of hundred dollars each at least when we begin our squeeze and you don’t run the slightest risk of losing anything.”
The owning of shares of this kind seems to me the easiest way there is of making money. I thanked Gorman effusively and pocketed the certificate.
We went down town by the elevated railway, and got out at Rector Street. Tim Gorman met us at the bottom of the steps which lead to the station. He was carrying his cash register in his arms. We hurried across Broadway and passed through the doors of a huge sky-scraper building. I thought we were entering Ascher’s office. We were not. We were taking a short cut through a kind of arcade like one of the covered shopping ways which one sees in some English towns, especially in Birmingham. There was a large number of little shops in it, luncheon places, barbers’ shops, newspaper stalls, tobacconists’ stalls, florists’ stalls, and sweet shops, which displayed an enormous variety of candies. We were in the very centre of the business part of the city, a part to which women hardly ever go, unless they are typists or manicure girls. Above our heads were offices, tiers and tiers of them. I wondered why there were so many florists’ shops and sweet shops. The American business man must, I imagine, have a gentle and childlike heart. No one who has lost his first innocence would require such a supply of flowers and chocolate at his office door.
There were lifts on each side of this arcade, dozens of them, in cages. Some were labelled “Express” and warned passengers that they would make no stop before the eleventh floor. I should have liked very much to make a journey in an express lift, and I hoped that Ascher’s office might turn out to be on the 25th or perhaps the 30th floor of the building. I was disappointed. Gorman hurried us on.
We emerged into the open air and found ourselves in a narrow, crooked street along which men were hurrying in great numbers and at high speed. On both sides of it were enormously tall houses. There was just one building, right opposite to us, which was of English height. It was not in the least English in any other way. It was white and very dignified. Its lines were severely classical. It had tall, narrow windows and a door which somehow reminded me of portraits of the first Duke of Wellington. The architect may perhaps have been thinking of the great soldier’s nose. Gorman walked straight up to that door.
“Here we are,” he said.
“Surely,” I said, “this Greek temple can’t be Ascher’s office?”
“This is the exact spot.”
“Tell me,” I said, “do we take off our shoes at the threshold or say grace, or perform some kind of ceremonial lustration? We can’t go in just as we are.”
Gorman did not answer me. He went through the door, the terribly impressive door, without even bowing. There was nothing for me to do but follow him. Tim followed me, nursing his cash register as if it had been a baby, a very heavy and awkwardly shaped baby.
We passed into the outer office. At the first glance it seemed to me like a very orderly town. It was built over with small houses of polished mahogany and plate glass. Through the plate-glass fronts—they were more than windows—I could see the furniture of the houses, rolltop desks of mahogany, broad mahogany tables, chairs and high stools. All the mahogany was very highly polished. The citizens of this town flitted from one glass-fronted house to another. They met in narrow streets and spoke to each other with grave dignity. They spoke in four languages, and English was the one used least. From the remoter parts of the place, the slums, if such a polished town has slums, came the sound of typewriters worked with extreme rapidity. The manual labourers, in this as in every civilised community, are kept out of sight. Only the sound of their toil is allowed to remind the other classes of their happier lot. Some of the citizens—I took them to be men of very high standing, privy counsellors or magistrates—held cigars in their mouths as they walked about. These cigars are badges of office, like the stripes on soldiers’ coats. No one was actually smoking.
Gorman was our spokesman. He explained who we were and what we wanted. We were handed over to a clerk. I suppose he was a clerk, but to me he seemed a gentleman in waiting of some mysterious monarch, or—my feeling wavered—one of the inferior priests of a strange cult. He led us through doors into a large room, impressively empty and silent. There for a minute we left while he tapped reverently at another door. The supreme moment arrived. We passed into the inmost shrine where Ascher sat. My spirit quailed.
Every great profession has its own way of hypnotising the souls of simple men. Indeed I think that professions are accounted great in accordance with their power of impressing on the world a sense of their mysteriousness. Ecclesiastics, those of them who know their business, build altars in dim recesses of vast buildings, light them with flickering tapers, and fill the air with clouds of stupefying incense smoke. Surgeons and dentists allow us fleeting glimpses of bright steel instruments, very strangely shaped. It is contrived that we see them in a cold, clear light, the light of scientific relentlessness. There is a suggestion of torture, not brutal but exquisitely refined, of perfected pain, achieved by the stimulation of recondite nerves of very delicate sensibility. Lawyers wear archaic robes and use a strange language in their mysteries, conveying to us a belief that Justice is an ancient witch whose evil eye can be averted only by the incantation and grotesque posturing of her initiate priests. But I am not sure that financiers do not understand the art of hypnotic suggestion best of all. I have worshipped in cathedrals, sweated cold in operating theatres, trembled before judges, but there is something about large surfaces of polished mahogany and very soft, dimly coloured turkey carpets which quells my feeble spirit still more completely.
There was a heavy deadening silence in Ascher’s private office, and our voices, when they broke it, sounded like the cheeping of ghosts. There was an odour more oppressive than the smell of incense or the penetrating fumes of iodoform. Some one, many hours before, must have smoked a very good cigar in the room, and the scent of it lingered. The doors of huge safes must have been opened. From the recesses of these steel chambers had oozed air which had lain stagnant and lifeless round piles of gold bonds and rich securities for years and years. The faint, sickly odour of sealing wax must have been distilled from immense sticks of that substance and sprinkled overnight upon the carpets and leather-seated chairs. I breathed and my very limbs felt numb.
But certain souls are proof against the subtlest forms of hypnotism. Gorman had escaped from the influence of his church. He would flip a sterilised lancet across a glass slab with his finger and laugh in the face of the surgeon who owned it. He walked with buoyant confidence into Ascher’s office. My case was different. I stood and then sat, the victim of a partial anaesthetic. I saw and heard dimly as if in a dream, or through a mist. Poor Tim trembled as he laid his cash register down on one of Ascher’s mahogany tables. I could hear the keys and bars of the machine rattling together while he handled it.
Ascher spoke through a telephone receiver which stood at his elbow. Another man entered the room. We all shook hands with him. He was Stutz, the New York partner of the firm. Then Ascher spoke through the receiver again, and another man came in.
With him we did not shake hands, but he bowed to us and we to him. He was Mr. Mildmay. He stood near the door, waiting for orders.
Tim Gorman unpacked his machine and exhibited it. I have not the remotest idea what its peculiar virtues are, but Tim believed in them. His nervousness seemed to pass away from him as he spoke about his invention with simple-minded enthusiasm. Love casts out fear, and there is no doubt that Tim loved every screw and lever of the complicated mechanism.
Mr. Mildmay left his place near the door and came forward. His deferential manner dropped off from him. He revealed himself as a mechanical expert with a special knowledge of cash registers. He and Tim Gorman pressed keys, twisted handles and bent together in absorbed contemplation over some singular feature of the machine’s organism. Gorman, the elder brother, watched them with a confident smile. Ascher and Stutz sat gravely silent. They waited Mildmay’s opinion. He was the man of the moment. A few minutes before he had bowed respectfully to Ascher. In half an hour he would be bowing respectfully to Ascher again. Just then, while he handled Tim Gorman’s machine, he was Ascher’s master, and mine of course. They were all my masters.
The inspection of the machine was finished at last. Tim stood flushed and triumphant. The child of his ingenious brain had survived the tests of an expert. Mildmay turned to Ascher and bowed again.
“It’s a wonderful invention,” he said. “I see no reason why it should not be a commercial success.”
“Perhaps, Mr. Mildmay,” said Ascher, “you will study the subject further and submit a report to us in writing.”
Mr. Mildmay left the room. I had no doubt that he would report enthusiastically on the new cash register. Mechanical experts do not, I suppose, write poetry, but there was without doubt a lyric in Mildmay’s heart as he left the room. Tim packed the thing up again. Now that the mechanical part of the business was over, he relapsed into shy silence in a corner. His brother took out a cigarette and lit it. I would not have ventured to light a cigarette in that sanctuary for a hundred pounds. But Gorman is entirely without reverence.
“Well,” he said, “there’s no doubt about the value of the invention.”
“We shall wait for Mr. Mildmay’s report,” said Ascher, “before we come to any decision; but in the meanwhile we should like to hear any proposal you have to make.”
“Yes,” said Stutz, “your proposals. We are prepared to listen to them.”
Stutz seemed to me to speak English with difficulty. His native language was perhaps German, perhaps Hebrew or Yiddish or whatever the language is which modern Jews speak in private life.
“The matter is simple enough,” said Gorman. “Our machine will drive any other out of the market. There’s no possibility of competition. The thing is simply a dead cert. It can’t help going.”
“A large capital would be required,” said Stutz, “a very large capital.”
“Yes,” said Gorman, “a very large capital, much larger than I should care to see invested in the thing. I may as well be quite frank with you gentlemen. At present the patents of my brother’s invention are owned by a small company in which I am the chief shareholder. If we ask the public for a million dollars and get them—I don’t say we can’t get them. We may. But if we do I shall be a very small shareholder. I shall get 5 per cent, or 6 per cent, or perhaps 10 per cent, on my money. Now I want more than that. I’m speaking quite frankly, you see. I believe in frankness.”
He looked at Ascher for approval. Stutz bowed, with an impassive face. On Ascher’s lips there was the ghost of a mournful little smile. I somehow gathered that he had come across frankness like Gorman’s before and had not altogether liked it. Gorman went on. He explained, as he had explained to me, the plan he had made for forcing the owners of existing cash registers to buy his company out. At last he got to the central, the vitally important point.
“All we want, gentlemen, is your backing. You needn’t put down any money. Your names will be enough. I will make over to you such bonus shares as may be agreed upon. The only risk we run is lawsuits about our patent rights. You understand how that game is worked. I needn’t explain.”
It was evident that both Ascher and Stutz understood that game thoroughly. It was also plain to me, though not, I think, to Gorman, that it was a game which neither one nor other of them would be willing to play.
“But if we have your names,” said Gorman, “that game’s off. It simply wouldn’t pay. I don’t want to flatter you, gentlemen, but there isn’t a firm in the world that would care to start feeing lawyers in competition with Ascher, Stutz & Co.”
“That is so,” said Stutz.
“And your proposal?” said Ascher.
“If they can’t crush us,” said Gorman, “and they can’t if you’re behind us, they must buy us. I need scarcely say that your share in the profits will be satisfactory to you. Sir James Digby is one of our directors. There are only four others, and three of them scarcely count. There won’t be many of us to divide what we get.”
I felt that my time had come to speak. If I was to justify Gorman’s confidence in me as an “influence,” I must say something. Besides Ascher was looking at me inquiringly.
“I’m not a business man,” I said, “and I’m afraid that my opinion isn’t worth much, but I think——”
I hesitated. Ascher’s eyes were fixed on me, and there was a curiously wistful expression in them. I could not understand what he wanted me to say.
“I think,” I said, “that Gorman’s plan sounds feasible, that it ought to work.”
“But your own opinion of it?” said Ascher.
He spoke with a certain gentle insistency. I could not very well avoid making some answer.
“We are able to judge for ourselves,” he said, “whether it will work. But the plan itself—what do you think of it?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m a modern man. I have accepted all the ideas and standards of my time and generation. I can hardly give you an opinion that I could call my own, but if my father’s opinion would be of any use to you—— He was an old-fashioned gentleman, with all the rather obsolete ideas about honour which those people had.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” said Gorman.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “He’s been dead for fifteen years. Still I’m sure I could tell you what he’d have said about this.”
“I do not think,” said Stutz, “that we need consider the opinion of Sir James Digby’s father, who has been dead for fifteen years.”
“I quite agree with you,” I said. “It would be out of date, hopelessly.”
“But your own opinion?” said Ascher, still mildly insistent.
“Well,” I said, “I’ve been robbed of my property—land in Ireland, Mr. Stutz—by Gorman and his friends. Everybody says that they were quite right and that I ought not to have objected; so, I suppose, robbery must be a proper thing according to our contemporary ethics.”
“And that is your opinion of the scheme?” said Ascher.
“Yes,” I said. “I hope I’ve made myself clear. I think we are justified in pillaging when we can.”
“You Irish,” said Ascher, “with your intellects of steel, your delight in paradox and your reckless logic!”
Stutz was not interested in the peculiarities of the Irish mind. He went back to the main point with a directness which I admired.
“This is not,” he said, “the kind of business we care to do.”
“Mr. Gorman,” said Ascher, “we shall wait for Mr. Mildmay’s report on your brother’s invention. If it turns out to be favourable, as I confidently expect, we may have a proposal to lay before you. Our firm cannot, you will understand, take shares in your company. That is not a bank’s business. But I myself, in my private capacity, will consider the matter. So will Mr. Stutz. It may be possible to arrange that your brother’s machine shall be put on the market.”
“But your proposal,” said Stutz obstinately. “It is not the kind of business we undertake.”
The interview was plainly at an end. We rose and left the room.
Tim Gorman did not understand, perhaps did not hear, a word of what was said. He followed us out of the office nursing his machine and plainly in high delight. Curiously enough, the elder Gorman seemed equally pleased.
“We’ve got them,” he said when we reached the street. “We’ve got Ascher, Stutz & Co quite safe. I don’t see what’s to stop us now.”
My own impression was that both Ascher & Stutz had definitely refused to entertain our proposal or fall in with our plans. I said so to Gorman.
“Not at all,” he said. “You don’t understand business or business men. Ascher and Stutz are very big bugs, very big indeed, and they have to keep up appearances. It wouldn’t do for them to admit to you and me, or even to each other, that they were out for what they could get from the old company. They have to keep up the pretence that they mean legitimate business. That’s the way these things are always worked. But you’ll find that they won’t object to pocketing their cheques when the time comes for smashing up Tim’s machine and suppressing his patents.”
I turned, when I reached the far side of the street, to take another look at Ascher’s office. I was struck again by the purity of line and the severe simplicity of the building. Two thousand years ago men would have had a statue of Pallas Athene in it.
I spent a very pleasant fortnight in New York among people entirely unconnected with the Aschers or Gorman. I was kept busy dining, lunching, going to the theatre, driving here and there in motor cars, and enjoying the society of some of the least conventional and most brilliant women in the world. I only found time to call on the Aschers once and then did not see either of them. They were stopping in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and the young man in the office told me that Mrs. Ascher spent the whole of every day in her studio. Her devotion to art was evidently very great. She could not manage to spend a holiday in New York without hiring a studio. I inquired whether any members of the Galleotti family were sitting for her, but the hotel clerk did not know that. He told me, however, that Mr. Ascher was in Washington. Gorman always says that the strings of government in modern states are pulled by financiers. Ascher was probably chucking at those which are fastened to the arms and legs of the President of the United States, with a view to making that potentate dance threateningly in the direction of Mexico. I am sure that Ascher does this sort of thing very nicely and kindly if indeed he does it at all. He would not willingly destroy the self-respect even of a marionette.
Of Gorman I saw nothing more before I left New York. I think he went off to Detroit almost immediately after our interview with Ascher and Stutz. Gorman is not exactly the man to put his public duties before his private interests, but I am sure the public duties always come in a close second. Having settled, or thought he had settled, the affair of the cash register, he immediately turned his attention to that wealthy motor man in Detroit from whom he meant to get a subscription. The future of the Irish Party possibly, its comforts probably, depended on the success of Gorman’s mission. And a party never deserved comfort more. The Home Rule Bill was almost passed for the third and last time. Nothing stood between Ireland and the realisation of Gorman’s hopes for her except the obstinate perversity of the Ulster men. A few more subscriptions, generous subscriptions, and that would be overcome.
After enjoying myself in New York for a fortnight I went to Canada. I did not gather much information about the companies in which I was interested. But I learned a good deal about Canadian politics. The men who play that game out there are extraordinarily clearsighted and honest. They frankly express lower opinions of each other than the politicians of any other country would dare to hold of the players in their particular fields. In the end the general frankness became monotonous and I tired of Canada. I went back to New York, hoping to pick up someone there who would travel home with me by way of the West Indies, islands which I had never seen. I thought it possible that I might persuade the Aschers, if they were still in New York, to make the tour with me. There was just a chance that I might come across Gorman again and that he would be taken with the idea of preaching the doctrines of Irish nationalism in Jamaica. I called on the Aschers twice and missed them both times. But the second visit was not fruitless. Mrs. Ascher rang me up on the telephone and asked me to go to see her in her studio. She said that she particularly wanted to see me and had something very important to say.
I obeyed the summons, of course. I found Mrs. Ascher clad in a long, pale-blue pinafore. Over-all is, I believe, the proper name for the garment. But it looked to me like a child’s pinafore, greatly enlarged. It completely covered all her other clothes in front and almost completely covered them behind. I recognised it as the sort of thing a really earnest artist would wear while working. Her hair was hanging in loops and wisps about her head, a disorder which was effective with dark-red hair. Her hands were damp and dirty. Her face was smudged here and there, as if, in moments of artistic travail, she had pressed her muddy fingers against her forehead and chin. The room had very little furniture in it, but there were several tables, large and small. On these stood what seemed to me shapeless lumps of various sizes, swathed in damp rags. They reminded me a little of the shrouded objects on the tables of dissecting rooms after the students have gone home. There was the same suggestion of mutilated human forms. Mrs. Archer saw me looking at them.
“Some of my little things,” she said, “but nothing finished. I don’t know why it is, but here in New York I find it very difficult to finish anything.”
“You’re not singular in that,” I said. “The New York people themselves suffer in exactly the same way. There isn’t a street in their city that they’ve finished or ever will finish. If anything begins to look like completion they smash it up at once and start afresh. It must be something in the air, a restlessness, a desire of the perfection which can never be realised.”
Mrs. Ascher very carefully unwrapped a succession of damp rags from one of the largest of her lumps which was standing on a table by itself. I have, since then, seen nurses unwrapping the bandages from the wounded limbs of men. The way they did it always reminded me of Mrs. Ascher. The removal of the last bandage revealed to me a figure about eighteen inches high of a girl who seemed to me to be stretching herself after getting out of bed before stepping into her bath.
“Psyche,” said Mrs. Ascher.
I had to show my admiration in some way. The proper thing, I believe, when shown a statue by a sculptor, is to stroke it with your fingers and murmur, “Ah!” I was afraid to stroke Psyche because she was certainly wet and probably soft. A touch might have dinted her, made a dimple in a wrong place. I dared not risk it. It became all the more necessary to speak.
The first thing I thought of was a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe.
“I pacified Psyche and kissed her,” I murmured, “and tempted her out of the gloom.”
I said the lines in what I am convinced is the proper way, as if they were forced from me, as if I spoke them to myself and did not mean them to be heard. I do not think Mrs. Ascher knew them. I fear she suspected me of making some sort of joke. I hastened to redeem my character.
“Psyche,” I said, “the soul.”
I was right so far. Psyche is the Greek for the soul. I ventured further.
“The human soul, the artistic soul.”
Mrs. Ascher appeared to be absolutely hanging on my words. I plunged on.
“Aspiring,” I said, “reaching after the unattainable.”
I would not have said, “hoping for a yawn” for anything that could have been offered me; but the young woman who stood for Mrs. Ascher’s Psyche must have longed for that relief. The attitude in which she was posed suggested yawning all the time, and we all know how fatal it is to think of a yawn.
“Quite unfinished,” said Mrs. Ascher with a sigh.
“The fault of New York,” I said. “When you get home again——”
I hesitated. I did not wish to commit myself to a confession of ignorance, and I do not know whether a damp, soft Psyche can be packed up and transported across the Atlantic to be finished in London.
“But the aspiration is there,” I said, “and you owe that to New York. The air, the very same air which forbids completion, is charged with aspiration. We all feel it. The city itself aspires. Since the great days when men set out to build a tower the top of which should reach unto heaven, there has never been such aspiration anywhere in the world. Look at the Woolworth Building.”
I was maundering and I knew it. Mrs. Ascher’s statuette was very nice and graceful; a much better thing than I expected to see, but there was nothing in it, nothing at all in the way of thought or emotion. There must be hundreds of people who can turn out clay girls just as good as that Psyche. Somehow I had expected something different from Mrs. Ascher, less skill in modelling, less care, but more temperament.
“There’s nothing else worth showing,” she said, “except perhaps this. Yes, except this.”
She unwrapped more bandages. A damp, pale-grey head appeared. It was standing in a large saucer or soup plate. At first I thought she had been at John the Baptist and had chosen the moment when his head lay in the charger ready for the dancing girl to take to her mother. Fortunately I looked at it carefully before speaking. I saw that it was Tim Gorman’s head.
“He sat to me,” said Mrs. Ascher, “and by degrees I came to know him very well. One does, one cannot help it, talking to a person every day and watching, always watching. Do you think——?”
“I think it’s wonderful,” I said.
This time I spoke with real and entire conviction. I am no expert judge of anything in the world except perhaps a horse or a bottle of claret, but I was impressed by this piece of Mrs. Ascher’s work. Tim Gorman’s fine eyes were the only things about him which struck me as noticeable. No artist can model eyes in clay. But Mrs. Ascher had got all that I saw in his eyes into the head before me—all and a great deal more. She had somehow succeeded in making the lips, the nostrils, the forehead, the cheek-bones, express the fact that Tim Gorman is an idealist, a dreamer of fine dreams and at the same time innocent as a child which looks out at the world with wonder. I do not know how the woman did it. I should not have supposed her capable of even seeing what she had expressed in her clay, but there it was.
“You really like it?”
She spoke with a curious note of humility in her voice. My impulse was to say that I liked her, for the first time saw the real good in her; but I could not say that.
“Like it!” I said. “It isn’t for me to like or dislike it. I don’t know anything about those things. I am not capable of judging. But this seems to me to be really great.”
“Ah!” said Mrs. Ascher, “and this time you are sincere.”
She looked at me quite gravely as she spoke. Then a smile slowly broadened her mouth.
“That’s not the way you spoke of poor Psyche’s aspiration,” she said, “you were laughing at me then.”
A cold sweat broke out on my forehead. The woman had understood every word I said to her, understood what I meant as well as what I wanted to convey to her, two very different things. She was immensely more clever than I suspected or could have guessed.
“Mrs. Ascher,” I said, “I beg your pardon.”
“You were quite right,” she said. “That other thing isn’t Psyche. It’s just a silly little girl, the model—— There wasn’t anything about her that I could see, nothing but just a pretty body.”
So she dismissed my apology and turned to Tim Gorman’s head again. She ran her finger lightly round the rim of the saucer.
“What shall I do with this?” she said. “What is his head to stand on, to rise from? I was thinking of water-lily leaves, as if the head were emerging——”
I felt that I owed Mrs. Ascher some frankness in return for my first insult to her intelligence. Besides, I was moved. I was, as I had not been for years, emotional. Tim Gorman’s head gripped me in a curious way.
“Good God, Woman,” I said, “anything in the world but that! Wrap up that chorus girl of a Psyche in leaves if you like. Sprinkle rose petals over her or any other damned sentimentalism. But this man is a mechanic. He has invented a cash register. What in the name of all that’s holy has he got to do with water-lily leaves? Put hammers round his head, and pincers, and long nails.”
I stopped. I realised suddenly that I was making an unutterable fool of myself. I was talking as I never talked in my life before, saying out loud the sort of things I have carefully schooled myself neither to feel nor to think.
“After all,” said Mrs. Ascher, “you have an artist’s soul.”
I shuddered. Mrs. Ascher looked at me and smiled again, a half-pitiful smile.
“I suppose I must have,” I said. “But I won’t let it break loose in that way again. I’ll suppress it. It’s—it’s—this is rather an insulting thing to say to you, but it’s a humiliating discovery to make that I have——”
Mrs. Ascher nodded.
“My husband always says that you Irish——”
“He’s quite wrong,” I said; “quite wrong about me at all events. I hate paradoxes. I’m a plain man. The only thing I really admire is common sense.”
“I understand,” she said. “I understand exactly what you feel.”
She is a witch and very likely did understand. I did not.
“Now,” she said. “Now, I can talk to you. Sit down, please.”
She pulled over a low stool, the only seat in the room. I sat on it. Mrs. Ascher stood, or rather drooped in front of me, leaning on one hand, which rested, palm down, on the table where Tim Gorman’s image stood. I doubt whether Mrs. Ascher ever stands straight or is capable of any kind of stiffness. But even drooping, she had a distinct advantage over me. My stool was very low and my legs are long. If I ventured to lean forwards, my knees would have touched my chin, a position in which it is impossible for a man to assert himself.
“I am so very glad,” she said, “that you like the little head.”
I was not going to be caught again. One lapse into artistic fervour was enough for me. Even at the risk of offending Mrs. Ascher beyond forgiveness, I was determined to preserve my self-respect.
“I wish you wouldn’t take my word for it’s being good,” I said. “Ask somebody who knows. The fact that I like it is a proof that it’s bad, bad art, if it’s a proof of anything. I never really admire anything good, can’t bear, simply can’t bear old masters, or”—I dimly recollected some witty essays by my brilliant fellow-countryman Mr. George Moore—“I detest Corot. My favourite artist is Leader.”
Mrs. Ascher smiled all the time I was speaking.
“I know quite well,” she said, “that my work isn’t good. But you saw what I meant by it. You can’t deny it now, and you know that the boy is like that.”
“I don’t know anything of the sort. I don’t know anything at all about him. The only time I ever came into touch with him he was helping his brother to persuade Mr. Ascher to go into a doubtful—well, to make money by what I’d call sharp practice.”
“I don’t think he was,” said Mrs. Ascher. “The elder brother may have been doing what you say; but Tim wasn’t.”
“He was in the game,” I said.
I spoke all the more obstinately because I knew that Tim was not in the game, I was determined not to be hysterical again.
“I’ve had that poor boy here day after day,” said Mrs. Ascher, “and I really know him. He has the soul of an artist. He is a creator. He is one of humanity’s mother natures. You know how it is with us. Something quickens in us. We travail and bring to the birth.”
Mrs. Ascher evidently included herself among the mother natures. It seemed a pity that she had not gone about the business in the ordinary way. I think she would have been happier if she had. However, the head of Tim Gorman was something. She had produced it.
“That is art,” she said dreamily, “conception, gestation, travail, birth. It does not matter whether the thing born is a poem, a picture, a statue, a sonata, a temple——”
“Or a cash register,” I said.
The thing born might apparently be anything except an ordinary baby. The true artist does not think much of babies. They are bourgeois things.
“Or a cash register,” she said. “It makes no difference. The man who creates, who brings into being, has only one desire, that his child, whatever it may be, shall live. If it is stifled, killed, a sword goes through his heart.”
It seemed to me even then with Mrs. Ascher’s eyes on me, that it was rather absurd to talk about a cash register living. I do not think that men have ever personified this machine. We talk of ships and engines by the names we give them and use personal pronouns, generally feminine, when we speak of them. But did any one ever call a cash register “Minnie” or talk of it familiarly as “she”?
“He thinks,” said Mrs. Ascher, “indeed he is sure—he says his brother told him——”
“I know,” I said. “The machine isn’t going to be put on the market at all. It is to be used simply as a threat to make other people pay what I should call blackmail.”
“That must not be,” said Mrs. Ascher.
Her voice was pitched a couple of tones higher than usual. I might almost say she shrieked.
“It must not be,” she repeated, “must not. It is a crime, a vile act, the murder of a soul.”
Cash registers have not got souls. I am as sure of that as I am of anything.
“That boy,” she went on, “that passionate, brave, pure boy, he must not be dragged down, defiled. His soul——”
It was Tim Gorman’s soul then, not the cash registers, which she was worrying about. Having seen her presentation of the boy’s head, having it at that moment before my eyes, I understood what she meant. But I was not going to let myself be swept again into the regions of artistic passion to please Mrs. Ascher.
“Well,” I said, “it does seem rather a shady way of making money. But after all——”
I have mentioned that Mrs. Ascher never stands upright. She went very near it when I mentioned money.
She threw her head back, flung both her arms out wide, clenched her fists tightly, and, if the expression is possible, drooped backwards from her hips. A slightly soiled light-blue overall is not the garment best suited to set off the airs and attitudes of high tragedy. But Mrs. Ascher’s feelings were strong enough to transfigure even her clothes.
“Money!” she said. “Oh, Money! Is there nothing else? Do you care for, hope for, see nothing else in the world? What does it matter whether you make money or not, or how you make it?”
It is only those who are very rich indeed or those who are on the outer fringe of extreme poverty who can despise money in this whole-hearted way. The wife of a millionaire—the millionaire himself probably attaches some value to money because he has to get it—and the regular tramp can say “Oh, money? Is there nothing else?” The rest of us find money a useful thing and get what we can of it.
Mrs. Ascher let her arms fall suddenly to her sides, folded herself up and sat down, or rather crouched, on the floor. From that position she looked up at me with the greatest possible intensity of eye.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking of my husband. But he hates money just as much as I do. All he wants is to escape, to have done with it, to live peaceably with me, somewhere far away, far, far away from everywhere.”
Her eyes softened as she spoke. They even filled with water, tears, I suppose. But she seemed to me to be talking nonsense. Ascher was making money, piling it up. He could stop if he liked. So I thought. So any sensible man must think. And as for living somewhere far, far away, what did the woman want to get away from? Every possible place of residence on the earth’s surface is near some other place. You cannot get far, far away from everywhere. The thing is a physical impossibility. I made an effort to get back to common sense.
“About Tim Gorman’s cash register?” I said. “What would you suggest?”
“You mustn’t let them do that hateful thing,” she said. “You can stop them if you will.”
“I don’t believe I can,” I said. “I’m extraordinarily feeble and ineffectual in every way. In business matters I’m a mere babe.”
“Mr. Gorman will listen to you,” she said. “He will understand if you explain to him. He is a writer, an artist. He must understand.”
I shook my head. Gorman can write. I admit that. His writing is a great deal better than Mrs. Ascher’s modelling, though she did do that head of Tim. I do not hail Gorman’s novels or his plays as great literature, though they are good. But some of his criticism is the finest thing of its kind that has been published in our time. But Gorman does not look at these matters as Mrs. Ascher does. I do not believe he ever wrote a line in his life without expecting to be paid for it. He would not write at all if he could find any easier and pleasanter way of making money. There was no use saying that to Mrs. Ascher. All I could do when she asked me to appeal to Gorman’s artistic soul was to shake my head. I shook it as decisively as I could.
“And my husband will listen to you,” she said.
“My dear lady! wouldn’t he be much more likely to listen to you?”
“But we never talk about such things,” she said. “Never, never. Our life together is sacred, hallowed, a thing apart,