CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Slipped through your fingers like that! Like a—” Leverich’s words were not fit for print. He had been away for a couple of days, and now sat tilted back in his office chair, a heavy, leather-covered thing not meant for tilting, his face puffed with anger, his mouth snarling—a wild beast balked of his prey. His eyes, ferociously insolent, dwelt on Justin, who, fine and keen and smiling a little, sat opposite him. Brute anger never had any effect on Justin but to give him a contemptuous, chill self-possession.

“You’re sure the agreement’s made?”

“Cater’s been sending new consignments as fast as they could go for the past three days; he’s loaded up with machines.”

Leverich swore again. “D——d fools, not to have made terms with Hardanger first! If we’d only known! If there was only some way to put a spoke in the wheel, even yet!”

“Oh, I’ve got the spoke, easily enough,” said Justin indifferently, “the only trouble is, I can’t use it.”

“Got a spoke! Why in heaven didn’t you say that before?” Leverich came down on the front legs of his chair with a force that sent it rolling ahead on its casters. “What are you sitting here for? What do you mean by telling me that you can’t use it?”

“Just what I say. But it’s not worth talking about.”

“See here, Alexander, could you get our machine in now instead of his?”

“I suppose I might.”

“And you’re not going to do it?”

“I can’t, I tell you, Leverich. The information came to me in such a way that I can’t touch it.”

“‘The information—’ It’s something damaging to do with the machine?”

Justin drummed with his fingers on the desk without answering.

“You have proof?”

“What’s the sense of talking, Leverich? Proof or no, I tell you, I can’t use it. This isn’t any funny business, you can see that. Don’t you suppose, if I could use it, that I would? But there are some things a man can’t do—at any rate, _I_ can’t. And that settles it.”

Heaven knows he had gone over the matter insistently enough in the last few days, since the combination had been unwillingly given into his hands, but always with the foregone conclusion. The devil—granting that there is one,—doesn’t, as a rule, actively try to tempt us to evil—he simply confuses us, so that we are kept from using our reason. But this time he had no field for action. To use secret information against Cater, that could never have been had but for Cater’s kindness to him in helping him to those bars in time of need, was first, last, and every time impossible to Justin Alexander. It was vain for argument to suggest that this very deed of kindness had worked his disaster—the fact remained the same. He might do other things, he might do worse things—this thing he could not do, not though the refusal worked his own ruin, not though Cater’s ruin with Hardanger was insured anyway, but too late for the typometer to profit by it. Even if the typometer could by some means keep afloat until that day arrived, it would take a couple of years for such a timing-machine to regain its prestige in a foreign country.

Justin had no excess of sentiment, no quixotic impulse urged him to go and tell Cater what he had learned. It was Cater’s business to look after his end of the game, if the price of material or labor was too cheap, he must know that there was something wrong with it. The stream of Justin’s mind ran clear in spite of that feeling of sharp practice toward himself—nay, because of it; it was impossible to use the weapon that a former kindness had placed in his hand. He looked at Leverich now with an expression which the latter quieted himself to meet. This was a situation, not for bluster and rage, but to be competently grappled with.

“How about your obligations? Do you call this fair dealing to us, Alexander? There’s Lewiston’s note—once this deal was settled we would have paid that, as you know. But it’s out of the question as things stand. We’ll have to get our money out the best way we can. If this is your sense of honor—to sacrifice your friends! See here, Alexander, let’s talk this out. When it comes to talking of ruin, no man can afford to stand on terms. We didn’t put you into the typometer business on any kindergarten principles—it isn’t to form your character. What we did, we did for profit; and if the profit isn’t there, we get out. We’ve no objection to doing a kindness for anyone, if we can do it and make a profit, but it stands to reason that we’re not in the business for philanthropy any more than for kindergartening. We liked you, and we were willing to give you a place in the game if you could run it to suit us, but we don’t consider any scheme that doesn’t make money—what doesn’t make money has to go. Profit, profit, profit—that’s what every sane man puts first, and there’s no justice in losing a chance to make it. What you lose, another man takes—if you make another man’s wife and children better off, you stint your own. You’ve got to consider a question on all sides. No woman respects a man who can’t make money; it’s his everlasting business to make money, and she knows it. Your wife won’t think much of your fine scruples if she’s to go without for ’em—and, by the Lord, she’s right! When you go into business, you’ve got to make up your mind to one of two things: you’ve either got to step hard on the necks of those below you, or you’ve got to lie down and let them wipe their feet on you.”

Leverich had stopped at intervals for comment from Justin. Since none was offered, he went on, with the large and easy manner of one who feels the justice of his convictions: “No man ever accused me of being close. I’m free-handed, if I say it that shouldn’t. I like to give, and I _do_ give. If there’s money wanted for charity, the committees know very well where to come. And my wife likes to give, too; her name’s on the books of twenty charitable organizations. But we give out of money I’ve made by _not_ being free-handed—by getting every last cent that belonged to me. You see, I don’t leave my wife out of my calculations—any man’s a fool that does. She’s got the right to have as good as I can give her. I wouldn’t talk like this to most men, Alexander, but between you and me it’s different. It pays to keep your wife in a good humor, when you’ve got to go home after a hard day’s work; you take a dissatisfied woman, and she’ll make your home a hell. I know men—Great Scott! I don’t know how they live!” He paused again. Justin did not answer. He sat with his head on his hand, looking, not at Leverich, but to one side of him.

“When I say I’ve made the money,” continued Leverich, “I mean that I actually _have_ made most of it—made it out of nothing! like the first chapter of Genesis. If a man has money to start with, he can add to it as easily as you can roll up a snowball—it’s no credit to him. But I’ve had only my brains. I’ve seen money where other men couldn’t, and nothing has stood in my way of getting to it; that’s the whole secret of success. And my attitude’s fair—you couldn’t find a fairer. When one of your clerks falls sick, you pay him his full salary for three or four months till he’s around again. _I_ know! Well, I don’t do any such stunts. When I was a clerk myself, I was on the sick-list once for three months, and nobody paid me. After the first month I was bounced, and I didn’t expect anything else. I didn’t expect any philanthropical business, and I don’t give it. That’s fair, isn’t it? I don’t give quarter, and I don’t expect any. If I’m squeezed, I pay. I don’t stand still in the middle of a deal and snivel about what I can do and what I can’t do. I don’t snivel about what you call moral obligations; I only recognize money obligations. Why, see here, Alexander,” he broke off, “if you use the influence you spoke of, you don’t have to tell me what it is—you don’t have to tell anybody but Hardanger. Cater himself needn’t know that you had anything to do with it.”

“But I’d know,” said Justin quietly.

Leverich lost his easy manner; his jaw protruded.

“Very well, then, it comes down to this: If you fail us now, out of any of your fool scruples toward that poor devil across the street,—who’s bound to get the blood sucked out of him anyway,—you ruin your own prospects, and you try and cheat us out of the money we put up on you. By——, if you see any honor in that, I don’t.”

“Mr. Leverich,” said Justin, raising his head swiftly, with a steely gleam in his eyes that matched the other’s, “when I try to cheat you or Lewiston or any man out of what has been put up on me, I’ll give you leave to say what you please. At present I’ll say good morning.”

Leverich shrugged his shoulders and turned his back as he bent over his desk. Justin picked up his hat and went out, brushing, as he did so, against a dark, pleasant-faced man who had been sitting in the next room. Something in his face instantly conveyed to Justin the knowledge that the conversation he had just been engaged in had grown louder than the partition warranted. The next instant he recognized the man as a Mr. Warren, of Rondell Brothers. Each turned to look back at the other, and both men bowed; the action had a certain definiteness in it, unwarranted by the slightness of the meeting. The next moment Justin was in the street.

The clash of steel always roused the blood in him; he felt actively stronger for combat. He was competently apportioning toward Lewiston’s note the different sums coming in this month. There were large bills to be paid to the typometer’s credit by several firms, one of them Coneways’. Coneways represented the largest counted-in asset for the entire year—it was the backbone of the establishment. If it went to Lewiston, what would be left for the business? That could come next, Lewiston was first. Leverich and Martin would exact every penny of their principal after these intervening six months of the year were over. Well, let them! Lewiston’s note was what he had to think of now.

All business undertakings, no matter how wild, how precarious to the sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting—that faith is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful ventures, while never really succeeding, do not fail at once; they are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking lower all the time. Others seem to exist by the continuance of that first faith alone—a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity, binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin as that he should be stricken blind or lose the use of his limbs. He must think harder to find a way of accomplishment, that was all.

His step had its own peculiar ring in it as he left Leverich’s, but it lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its grewsome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung with some thought of care; there were moments of such strong repulsion that he felt as if he couldn’t turn down that street again—moments lately when to enter the factory with its red-brick-arched yawning mouth of a doorway occasioned a physical nausea—a foolish, womanish state which irritated him.

The mail brought him the usual miscellaneous assortment of orders and bills, and letters on minor points, and questions as to the typometer. The mail was rather apt to be encouraging in its suggestions of a large trade. Two letters this morning were full of enthusiastic encomium on the use of the machine. In spite of an enormous and long-outstanding bill for office stationery, insistently clamorous for payment—one of those bills looked upon as trifles until they suddenly become staggering—there was, after the mail, a general feeling of wielding the destiny of a large part of the world, where the typometer was a power.

A little woman whose husband, now dead, had been in his employ, came in to get help in collecting his insurance; she was timid before Justin, deeply grateful for his kind and effective assistance. Two men called at different times, for advice and introductions to important people. A friend brought in a possible customer from the Sandwich Islands. There was all that aura of prosperity that has nothing to do with the payment of one’s bills.

Justin took both the friend and the customer out to lunch, his pleasant sense of hospitality only dimmed by the disagreeable fact of its taking every cent of the five dollars he had expected to last him for the week. He was “strapped.” The luncheon took longer, also, than he had counted on its doing. The morning, begun well, seemed to lead up only to sordid and anxious details and a sense of non-accomplishment, induced also by small requisitions from different people presupposing cash from a cash-drawer that was empty.

It was a welcome relief to figure, with Harker’s assistance, on the large sums coming in at the end of the month from Coneways. There were a hundred ways for them to go, but they were to go to Lewiston. Perhaps, after all, as Harker astutely suggested, Lewiston would be satisfied with a partial payment and extend the rest of the note. While they were still consulting, word was brought in that Mr. Lewiston was there.

Mr. Lewiston was a young man, small-featured, black-haired, smooth-shaven, and with an air of nattiness and fashion set at odds at present by a very pale and anxious face and eager, dilated black eyes. He cut short Justin’s greeting with the words:

“I’ve just come over to speak about that note, Alexander.”

“Well, I was just wanting to speak to you about it myself,” said Justin easily. “Have a cigar?”

“Thank you,” said Lewiston mechanically, and as mechanically holding out his hand for the cigar, evidently forgetting it the next moment. “The fact is, I don’t want to seem importunate, but if you could pay off that note fifteen days before date,—a week from to-day, that is,—we’d discount it to satisfy you. I didn’t want to bother you about it, and I tried outside first, but nobody will take up the paper just now, except at a ruinous rate. If you could make it convenient, Alexander——” Young Lewiston sat with his small, eager face bent forward over his knees, his lips twitching slightly. “You know that money wasn’t loaned on strictly business principles, Alexander, but for friendship; I got father to consent to it. If you could let us have it now, it would save us a world of trouble. It’s really not much—only ten thousand.”

Justin shook his head, his keen blue eyes fixed on the other. “I can’t let you have it, Lewiston; I wish I could! But I’m waiting on payments myself. Can’t you pull out without it?”

Lewiston drew in his breath. “Oh, yes, of course we’ll have to, but it means—Well, I know you would if you could, Alexander, I told father so—father in a way holds me responsible, he was in London when I renewed the note the last time. There isn’t anything to interfere with the payment when it’s due?”

“On my honor, no,” said Justin. “You shall have it then without fail.”

“For if that should slip up—” continued young Lewiston, wrapped in somber contemplation of his own affairs alone; he threw his arms outward with a gesture suddenly tragic in its intensity, paused an instant, then wrung Justin’s hand silently and departed.

“Are you busy, Alexander? They said I could come in.”

“Why, Girard!”

Justin wheeled a chair around with an instantly brightened face. “Sit down. I’m mighty glad to see you.” He looked smilingly at his visitor, whose presence, long-limbed, straight, clean, and clear-eyed, always elicited a peculiar admiration from other men. “I heard that you had a room at the Snows’ now, while Billy is away, but I haven’t laid eyes on you for a month.”

“I’ve been coming in on a later train every morning and going out again on a very much later one at night. I’m back in town on the paper for a while.”

“Why don’t you settle down to something worth while?” asked Justin, with the reserved disapproval of the business man for any mode of life but his own.

“Settle down to this kind of thing?” said Girard thoughtfully. “Well, I did think of it last year, when I undertook those commissions for you. But what’s the use—yet awhile, at any rate? You see, I can always make enough money for what I want and to spare, and there’s nobody else to care. I like my liberty! The love of trade doesn’t take hold of me, somehow—and you have to have such a tremendous amount of capital to keep your place. By the way, have you sold the island yet?” The island was a small one up near Nova Scotia, taken once for a debt.

“Not yet.”

Girard gave him a quick glance—with the instant penetration of a man who has known hard times himself, he detected the signs of it in another; the perception lent a sort of under-warmth and kindness to his voice as he asked: “How are things going with you?”

“Fine,” said Justin in a conventionally prosperous tone, with a sudden sight of a bottomless pit yawning below him. “I’ve had a few things on my mind lately—but they’re all right now. By the way, how do you like it at the Snows’?”

“Oh, fairly well.” Girard’s gray eyes twinkled in an irrepressible smile. “I score high at present. They all approve of me, and I am told that I am the only man who has never run into the Boston fern or got tangled in the Wandering Jew. Miss Bertha and I have long talks together—she’s great. As for Mrs. Snow—she heard Sutton speak of her the other night to Ada as ‘the old lady.’ I assure you that since—” He shook his head, and both men laughed.

“Come to see us. Miss Linden is back with us again,” said Justin hospitably, indescribably cheered by some soul-offered sympathy that lay below the trivial converse.

“Thank you,” said Girard, an indefinable stiffening change coming over him momentarily, to disappear at once, however, as he went on: “By the way, I mustn’t forget what I came for before I hurry off.”

He took some bills out of his long, flat leather wallet as he rose. “Do you remember lending that fifty dollars to my friend Keston last year? He turned up yesterday, and asked me to see that you got this.”

“I’d forgotten all about it,” averred Justin. He had not realized until he took the bills that he had been keeping up all day by main strength, with that caved-in sensation of there being nothing back of it—nothing back of it. There are times when the touch of money is as the elixir of life. Justin, holding on by the skin of his teeth for ten thousand dollars, and needing imperatively at least as much more, felt that with this paltry fifty dollars it was suddenly possible to draw a free breath, felt a sheer, uncalculating lightness of spirit that showed how terrible was the persistent weight under which he was living. The very feeling of those separate bills in his pocket made him calmly sanguine.

He got ready to go home a little earlier than usual, saying lightly to Harker, who had come in for his signature to some papers:

“Those payments will begin to straggle in next week. Coneways’ isn’t due until the 31st—the very last minute! But he’s always prompt, thank Heaven—what are you doing?”

“Knocking on wood,” said Harker, with a grim smile.

“Oh, knock on wood all you want to,” returned Justin.

He even thought of Lois on his way, and stopped to buy her some flowers. It was the first time he had thought of her unconsciously for a week. While he was waiting for a car to pass before he crossed the street, his eye caught the headline on a paper a newsboy was holding out to him:

GREAT CRASH CONEWAYS & CO. FAIL IN BOSTON