Gossamer Part 6

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 G.o.ds 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.

CHAPTER V.

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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed through the doors of a huge sky-sc.r.a.per 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 pa.s.sengers 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 cla.s.sical. 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 l.u.s.tration? 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s. Through the plate-gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s-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 cla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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.