I had no idea of breaking the promise I made Mrs. Ascher; but I felt
a certain hesitation about entering again the Holiest of Holies in the
office of Ascher, Stutz & Co. I was a little afraid of Stutz, who seemed
to me a severe man, very little tolerant of human folly. Still I would
have faced Stutz without shrinking, especially in a good cause. What I
really disliked was the idea of suggesting a business policy to
Ascher. The man was immeasurably my superior in natural ability and in
experience. I felt that I should be guilty of insolence if I offered him
any advice, and of something worse than insolence if I insisted on my
advice being taken. Yet it was just this which Mrs. Ascher expected of
me, and I did not want to disappoint her.
It is true that I was a shareholder in the New Excelsior Cash Register
Company. I may have been a director. Gorman said something about my
being a director. I had accepted the office, pledged beforehand to the
approval of Gorman’s policy and therefore had no right to intervene.
What claim had I to insist on Ascher’s doing this or that? I should
not feel myself justified in calling on an archbishop and insisting
on drastic alterations in the Apostle’s Creed. Ascher is at least an
archbishop, possibly a patriarch, or even a cardinal, in that truly
catholic church which worships Mammon.
But I had promised.
I went to the office next morning, early. Having forgotten to make an
appointment with Ascher beforehand I had to wait some time before I saw
him. I sat in the large anteroom through which I had passed when I first
visited the office with Gorman. Through the glass door I was able to see
the public office outside where men went busily to and fro.
I understood just enough about this business of Ascher’s to be able to
read romance, the romance which was certainly there, in the movements
of the quiet men who passed and repassed before my eyes, or bent with
rarely lifted heads over huge ledgers, or turned over with deft fingers
piles of papers in stuffed filing boxes. These men were in touch with
the furthest ends of the earth. Coded telegrams fluttered from their
hands and went vibrating across thousands of miles of land or through
the still depths of oceans, over unlighted tracts of ooze on the
sea-bottom. In London the words were read and men set free pent up,
dammed streams of money. In Hongkong the words were read and some
steamer went out, laden, from her harbour. Gold was poured into the
hands of tea-planters in Ceylon. Scanty wages in strange coins, dribbled
out to factory workers in Russian cotton mills. Gangs of navvies went to
work laying railway lines across the veldt in Bechuanaland. There was no
end to the energy controlled, directed by these cable messages, nor any
bounds to the field of their influence. Somewhere in Ireland a farmer
would go home along a desolate road, crossing brown bogs, thirsty and
disconsolate, his lean beasts unsold at a fair where buyers were scarce
or shy. What did he know of Ascher or Ascher know of him? Yet the price
which he might take or must refuse for those hardly reared bullocks of
his depended at the end of a long chain, on what the Aschers in their
offices said and did.
Perhaps hardly one of all the busy men I watched quite knew what he was
doing. They juggled with figures, made précis of the reports of money
markets, dissected and analysed the balance sheets of railway companies,
decoded messages from London or from Paris, transcribed formulae as
abstract, as remote from tangible things as the x and y of algebraic
equations. These men all worked--the apologue of the quadratic equation
held my mind--moving their symbols here and there, extracting roots,
dissolving close-knit phrases into factors, cancelling, simplifying, but
always dealing with symbols meaningless, unreal in themselves. Behind
them was Ascher, Ascher and I suppose Stutz, who expressed realities
in formulae, and, when the sums were done, extracted realities from the
formulae again, achieving through the seemingly sterile processes new
facts, fresh grasp of the things which are, greater power to deal with
them. They knew and understood and held the whole world in leading
strings, delicate as silk, invisible, impalpable, but strong.
The door of Ascher’s private office opened and a man passed out. I
glanced at him. He was a clean-shaved, keen-eyed, square-jawed man, the
type which American business methods have produced, a man of resource
and quick decision, but a man, so I guessed, who dealt with things, and
money only as the price of things, the reward of making them. He lacked,
so I felt, something of the fine spirituality of Ascher, the scientific
abstraction of the man who lives in a rarer atmosphere of pure finance.
A clerk at my elbow invited me to leave my place and take my turn with
Ascher.
I could not bring myself to plunge straightway into my business. I began
by pretending that I had no real business at all.
“Any chance,” I asked, “of our being travelling companions again? I am
leaving New York almost at once.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Ascher. “I’ve a great deal to do here still.”
“Those Mexican affairs?”
“Those among others.”
“The Government here seems to be making rather a muddle of Mexico,” I
said.
Opinion on this subject was, so far as I knew, nearly unanimous among
business men. Everyone who owned shares in Mexican companies, everyone
who had invested hopefully a little while before in Mexican railways,
everyone who had any kind of interest in Mexico was of the same opinion
about the inaction of the American Government.
“I think it is a muddle,” said Ascher, “but the idea in the minds of the
men who are making the muddle is a fine one. If only the world could be
worked on those principles----”
“But it can’t.”
“Not yet,” said Ascher. “Perhaps never. Yet the idea on which
the Government in Washington proceeds is a noble one. Respect for
constitutional order should be a greater thing as a principle of
statesmanship than obvious expediency.”
The man’s unnatural detachment of view worried me. It was the same when
Gorman blared out his stereotyped abuse of financiers, his well-worn
cliches about money kings and poison spiders. Ascher agreed with
him. Ascher, apparently, had some approval for the doctrinaire
constitutionalism of university professors turned diplomats. I could not
follow him to those heights of his.
“I was thinking,” I said, “of going home by way of the West Indies.”
“Yes? You will find it very agreeable. I was there in 1903 and remember
enjoying myself greatly.”
“I wish you and Mrs. Ascher would come too. It would be much pleasanter
for me if I had you with me.
“It’s very kind of you to say so; but----”
“Besides,” I said, “I should see so much more. If I go by myself I shall
step from a steamer into an hotel and from an hotel into a steamer.
I shall be forced to buy a Baedeker, if there is a Baedeker for those
regions. I shall be a tourist of the ordinary kind. But if I travelled
with you I should really see things.”
Ascher took up the telephone receiver.
“If you like,” he said, “I can give you letters of introduction to our
correspondents wherever you go. They are bankers, of course, but you
will find them intelligent men.”
He summoned a clerk.
“If you give me an idea of your route----” he said.
“At present,” I said, “my plans are very vague. I haven’t settled
anything. Perhaps you will give me your advice.”
He drew a sheet of paper towards him and began to write.
“You ought to see the work at Panama,” he said. “It is very interesting
and of course of immense importance. Certainly you must see that.
Afterwards----”
He scribbled on his sheet of paper, making lists of place names and
adding notes about ways of travelling.
“If you go further south still----” he said. “I don’t recommend the
Amazon, a huge river of course, but unless you are interested in rubber
or entomology. The insect life I believe----”
“I’m interested in everything,” I said, “even insects which bite.”
“Well, Para, perhaps, then south again. The South American ports are
worth seeing.”
A clerk entered while he was speaking. Ascher handed him the list he had
written.
“Look out the names of our agents in these places,” he said, “and have
letters of introduction made out to them for Sir James Digby.”
The clerk left the room and I thanked Ascher warmly. It seemed to me
that he was taking a great deal of trouble for which he could expect no
kind of reward. He waved my gratitude aside.
“I think,” he said, “that our agents will be able to make your trip
interesting for you. They can tell you what you want to know about the
trade and the natural wealth of the places you visit. They will put you
in the way of finding out the trend of political feeling. It is their
business to know these things, and in visiting new countries--new in
the sense that they have only lately felt the influences of our
civilisation--it is just these things that you will want to know. If you
were going to Italy, or Egypt, or Greece----”
Ascher sighed. I felt that he would have preferred Italy to Brazil if he
had been travelling for pleasure.
“Ah, there,” I said, “an artist or a scholar would be a better friend to
have than a banker.”
“Even there,” said Ascher, “the present and the future matter more than
the past, perhaps. But are you tied at all by time? The tour which I
have indicated will take some months.”
“I am an idle man,” I said. “I shall go on as long as your introductions
last, gathering knowledge which will not be the slightest use to me or
any one else.”
“I had better provide you with a circular letter of credit,” said
Ascher. “It is never wise to carry considerable sums about in your
pocket.”
We had got to money, to business in the strictest sense of the word.
My opportunity had plainly come for attacking the subject of the cash
register. Yet I hesitated. A banker ought to be the easiest man in the
world to talk business to. There is no awkwardness about the subject
of toothache in a dentist’s parlour. He expects to be talked to about
teeth. It ought to have been an equally simple thing to speak to Ascher
about the future of a company in which we were both interested. Yet I
hesitated. There was something in his manner, a grave formality, which
kept me miles away from him. I thanked him for the promise of the letter
of credit and then sat silent for a minute.
“By the way,” said Ascher, “I have just had a visit from a man on
business in which you are interested.”
“Was that the man who passed me in the anteroom before I was shown in
here?”
“Yes. He came to talk to me about Gorman’s new cash register. He was
not an accredited agent, you will understand. He did not profess to
represent anybody. He was not empowered to treat with us in any way,
but----”
Ascher smiled faintly.
“I understand,” I said, “a sort of informal ambassador who could easily
be disowned if anything he said turned out to be inconvenient. In
politics men of that sort are very useful; but I somehow had the idea
that business methods are more straightforward.”
“All negotiations,” said Ascher, “whether in politics or business are
carried on in much the same way. But before I go into his suggestions I
had better tell you how the matter stands. Mildmay sent us his report
and it was entirely favourable to the new machine. I think the invention
is likely to turn out a valuable property. We have made inquiries and
find out that the patent rights are duly protected here and in all the
chief European countries. In fact----”
“It was really that and not my travels which I came to talk to you about
to-day. I may take it that we have got a good thing.”
“We think so,” said Ascher, “and our opinion is confirmed by the fact
that we are not the only people who think so. If I am right about the
man who visited me this morning we have very good evidence that our
opinion is sound. The men who are in the best position to know about
cash registers, who are most interested in their future----”
“The makers of the existing machines?”
“Exactly. That is to say, if I am right about my visitor.”
“But how did they--how could any one know about Tim Gorman’s invention?”
Ascher shrugged his shoulders.
“Surely,” I said, “Gorman can’t have been such a fool as to talk to
newspaper reporters.”
“We need not suppose so,” said Ascher. “My experience is that anything
worth knowing always is known. The world of business is a vast
whispering gallery. There is no such thing as secrecy.”
“Well,” I said, “the main point is that this man did know. What did he
want?”
“He wanted us to sell the patent rights,” said Ascher. “What he said
was that he had a client--he posed as some kind of commission agent--who
would pay a substantial sum for them.”
“That is just what Gorman said would happen once it was understood that
your firm is behind the new company.”
“Gorman is--well, astute. But you understand, I am sure, that we cannot
do that kind of business.”
“I always had a suspicion,” I said, “that Gorman’s scheme was fishy.”
“I do not say fishy,” said Ascher. “Gorman’s plan is legitimate,
legitimate business, but business of an unenlightened kind. What is
wrong with Gorman is that he does not see far enough, does not grasp the
root principle of all business. We have a valuable invention. I do not
mean merely an invention which will put money into the pocket of the
inventor and into our pockets. If it were valuable only in that way
Gorman would be quite right, and our wisest course would be to take what
we could get with the least amount of risk and trouble, in other words
to accept the best price which we could induce the buyers to give us.
But this invention is valuable in quite another way. The new machine,
if we are right about it, is going to facilitate the business of retail
sellers all over the world. It will save time, increase accuracy, and,
being cheaper, make its way into places where the old machines never
went.”
“Ah,” I said, “curiously enough I looked at the matter in that way when
Gorman first mentioned it to me. I said that the world ought to get the
benefit of this invention.”
Ascher nodded.
“I see that,” I went on. “I understand that way of looking at it. But
surely that’s altruism, not business. Business men don’t risk their
money with the general idea of benefiting humanity. That isn’t the way
things are done.”
“I agree,” said Ascher. “It’s not the way things are done or can be done
at present, though there is more altruism in business than most people
think. Even we financiers----”
“I know you subscribe to charity,” I said, “largely, enormously.”
“That’s not what I mean,” said Ascher. “But we need not go into that. I
believe that business is not philanthropy, finance is not altruism.”
“Then why----?” I said. “On strict business principles, altruism apart,
why not take what we can get out of Tim Gorman’s invention and let the
thing itself drop into the dustheap?”
“On business principles,” said Ascher, “on the strictest business
principles, it would be foolish to do that. From time to time men hit
on some improvement in the way of making things or in the way of dealing
with things after they are made, that is to say in business methods.
Every such improvement increases the wealth of the world, tends to make
everybody richer. This invention which we have got hold of is a small
thing. It’s only going to do a little, a very little to make the world
richer, but it is going to do something for it is going to lessen the
labour required for certain results and therefore is going to increase
men’s power, a little, just a little. That is why we must make the
thing available, if we can; in order to add to the general wealth, and
therefore to our own wealth. Those are business principles.”
Ascher paused. I had nothing to say for a moment. Business principles as
he explained them were not the business principles I was accustomed to,
certainly not the business principles on which Gorman acted. After a
minute’s silence Ascher went on.
“The mistake which is most often made in business,” he said, “is to
suppose that we grow rich by taking riches from other men, or that
nations prosper by depriving other nations of prosperity. That would be
true if riches consisted of money, and if there were just so much money
and no more in the world. Then business and finance would be a scramble,
in which the roughest and strongest scrambler would get most. But that
is not so.”
“Isn’t it?” I said. “I should have thought that business just is a
scramble.”
“No,” said Ascher, “it is not. Nations grow rich, that is to say, get
comfort, ease, and even luxury, only when other nations are growing rich
too, only because other nations are growing rich.”
“The way to grow rich,” I said, “is to make other people rich. Is that
it? It sounds rather like one of the--what do you call them?--counsels
of perfection in the Gospel.”
“Perhaps it is a religious truth too,” said Ascher. “I don’t know. I
have never studied religion. Some day I think I shall. There must be a
great deal that is very interesting in the New Testament.”
“Confound you, Ascher! Is there anything in heaven or earth that you
don’t look at from the outside, as if you were some kind of superior
epicurean god?”
“I beg your pardon. I ought not to have spoken in that way. You are, no
doubt, a Christian.”
“Of course I am--in--in a general way.”
“I have often thought,” said Ascher slowly, “that I should like to be.
But from the little I know of that religion----”
“I expect you know as much as I do,” I said.
“It must be,” said Ascher, “very hard to be a Christian.”
I was not going to discuss that point with Ascher. It was bad enough
to have an artistic soul awakened in me by Mrs. Ascher. I could not
possibly allow her husband to lead me to the discovery that I had
the other kind of soul. Nor was it any business of mine to work out
harmonies between Christian ethics and the principles of modern banking.
I detest puzzles of all kinds. It is far better, at all events far
more comfortable, to take life as one finds it, a straightforward,
commonplace affair. I have the greatest respect for Christianity of a
moderate, sensible kind and I subscribe to the funds of the Church
of Ireland. But when it comes to practical matters I find myself in
agreement with Wordsworth’s “Rob Roy”,
“The good old rule
Sufficeth me, the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power
And they should keep who can.”
So long, of course, as one does not do anything shady. I do not like
lying or theft.
Ascher sat looking at me as if he expected me to tell him exactly how
hard it is to be a Christian. I made a determined effort to get back
again to cash registers.
“Tim Gorman’s invention will get its chance then?”
“Yes. If we can manage it the thing will get its chance. It will be made
and, I think, people will use it.”
“Mrs. Ascher will be very pleased to hear that.”
“Ah,” said Ascher. “Is she interested? But I remember now. Young Gorman
has been sitting to her. She would naturally be interested in him.”
“Her idea,” I said, “is that Tim Gorman is producing a baby, with all
the usual accompaniments of that difficult business, labour, you know,
and pain. She regards you as the doctor in attendance, and she thinks it
would be exceedingly wrong of you to choke the little thing.”
Ascher looked at me quite gravely. For a moment I was afraid that he
was going to say something about the paradoxical brilliance of the Irish
mind. I made haste to stop him.
“That’s Mrs. Ascher’s metaphor,” I said, “not mine. I should never have
thought of it. I don’t know enough about the artistic soul to appreciate
the feelings of people who give birth to cash registers. But the idea
is plain enough. Tim Gorman will be bitterly disappointed if he does
not see girls in cheap restaurants putting actual shillings into those
machines of his.”
“From my wife’s point of view,” said Ascher, “and from mine, too, that
ought to be an important consideration. It’s the artist’s feeling; but
business and art--unfortunately business and art----”
“I don’t see why they shouldn’t kiss and be friends,” I said. “They’re
not nearly such irreconcilable enemies as business and religion. Now
that those two have lain down together like a lion and a lamb--I don’t
quite see how they do it, but in that new philosophy of yours it seemed
quite a simple matter--there’s no real reason why art shouldn’t come in
too.”
But Ascher shook his head. He did not seem hopeful of a marriage between
art and business. He knows a good deal about both of them, far more, by
his own confession, than he knows about religion.