"Ah!" said Gorman. "I rather respect those Mexicans. It's pleasant to hear of wealthy men like you being hit sometimes."

"It's not exactly that," said Ascher. "As a firm we don't lose directly whatever happens in Mexico. What we have to consider is the interest of our customers, the people, some of them quite small people, who went into Mexican railways on our advice. Banking houses don't put their money into investments. That's not our business. But banking is a very dull subject. Let's talk of something else."

He turned to me as he spoke.

"You were speaking just now," he said, "about the necessity of putting up money for the support of theatres. If we are to have any real dramatic art in England----"

Banking is a fascinatingly interesting subject compared to art; but Ascher does not think so, and Ascher had taken hold of the conversation.

He appealed to Gorman as a man whose services to literature and drama had never been properly recognised. He appealed to me as a member of a cultured cla.s.s. Neither of us was sympathetic or responsive. Gorman knows that he has never rendered any service to literature at all, that he wrote novels because he wanted money in the days before a grateful country paid him 400 a year for walking round the lobbies of the House of Commons, that he tumbled into his play by accident and made money out of it because a very charming lady was more charming than usual in the part he wrote for her.

Gorman--this is one of the advantages of being an Irishman--has no illusions about himself. I have none about my cla.s.s. It is not cultured and does not want to be.

When Ascher had smoked his half cigarette we left the dining saloon and went to our special corner in the lounge. Ascher talked on till nearly ten o'clock about art and drama and music as if they were the only things of any interest or importance in the world. Then he went to bed. Gorman and I agreed that art, drama, and music are of very little importance and less interesting than anything else. Gorman's weekly articles, quite the best things of their kind then being published, are all about art, so he has a perfect right to express his opinion. What we wanted to hear Ascher talk about was money.

"I've always wanted to know what high finance really is," I said.

"It seems a pity not to be able to find out now we've got a man who understands it."

"I'll take him in hand to-morrow," said Gorman. "There's no use our having him to dine with us and looking after him all the way cross if we don't get anything out of him."

Gorman's words were cryptic. I wanted to get knowledge--the sort of knowledge which would satisfy my curiosity--out of Ascher; chiefly knowledge though I would not have refused a little inside information about Canadian affairs. Gorman might very well want something more. He might want a subscription to the funds of his party. I hoped he would not get it; either out of Ascher or out of the man at Detroit of whom he spoke. I am not a member of any political party but I hate that to which Gorman belongs. If I were attached to a party and if Gorman's friends joined it in a body, I should leave it at once. My opinion, so far as I have any opinion, is that what Ireland wants is to be let alone. But if the Irish Nationalist Party were to adopt a policy of deliberately doing nothing and preventing other people from doing anything I should not support it. I should then search about for something revolutionary and try to insist on carrying it out. Nothing would induce me to be on the same side as Gorman and his friends. Such is the nature of an Irish gentleman.

I lay awake for a long time that night, smoking cigarettes in my berth and meditating on the fact that, of the three of us I was the one who was going to America for purely selfish purposes. Gorman was trying to get money for his party, for his own ultimate advantage no doubt, but in the first instance the money was not for himself but for a cause.

And Gorman is a politician, a member of a notoriously corrupt and unscrupulous professional cla.s.s. Ascher was taking a long journey in order to devise some means of rescuing his clients' property from the clutches of a people which had carried the principles of democracy rather further than is usual. And Ascher is a financier. No one expects anything but enlightened greed from financiers. I belong by birth and education to an aristocracy, a cla.s.s which is supposed to justify its existence by its altruism. There was no doubt a valuable lesson to be learned from these considerations. I fell asleep before I found out exactly what it was.

Gorman did as he promised. He took Ascher in hand next day. He made the poor man walk up and down the deck with him. There is nothing on shipboard more detestable than that tramp along the deck. Only the strongest minded man can avoid counting his steps, making an estimate of yards, and falling into the bondage of trying to walk a fixed number of miles. Conversation and even coherent thought become impossible when the mind is set on the effort to keep count of the turns made at the end of the deck. I am sure that Ascher did not enjoy himself; but Gorman kept him at it for more than an hour. I watched them from the deck chair in which I sat, rolled up very comfortably in my rug. At one o'clock, when we ought to have gone down to lunch, Gorman stopped opposite my chair.

He proclaimed his success jubilantly.

"We've been talking about finance," he said, "high finance. Pity you wouldn't join us."

Ascher bowed towards me. Gorman described Ascher's manners as foreign.

I daresay they are. There is a certain flavour of formal courtesy about them which Englishmen rarely practise, of which Irishmen of my generation, partly anglicised by their education, have lost the trick.

"Sir James would only have been bored," said Ascher.

"Not he," said Gorman, "he's just as keen as I am to know what bankers do with money."

"It's a dull trade," said Ascher, "very dull. Some day I shall give it up and devote the rest of my time to----"

"Don't say art," said Gorman.

Ascher opened his eyes and looked at Gorman with a mild kind of wonder.

"Of course," he said, "I can never be an artist. I haven't got the temperament, the soul, the capacity for abandon. But I might find enjoyment, the highest pleasure, in understanding, in appreciating, perhaps even in encouraging----"

"Sort of Mecenas," said Gorman. "I wonder if Mecenas was a banker. He seems to have been a rich man."

"He was a descendant of kings," I said, "but that's no reason why he shouldn't have made money."

"Anyhow," said Gorman, "you'd find art just as dull as banking if you went in for it systematically."

"But artists----!" said Ascher, "genuine artists! Men with inspiration!"

"Selfish conceited swine," said Gorman.

"Well," I said, "you ought to know. You're an artist yourself. Ascher told me so yesterday."

"I remember your two novels," said Ascher, "and I recognised in them the touch, the unmistakable touch."

"Let's go down to lunch," said Gorman.

He left the deck as he spoke. Even Gorman does not like to stand self-convicted of being a selfish conceited swine. Ascher laid his hand on my arm as we went down to the saloon.

"What a brilliant fellow he is," he whispered. "I never realised before how magnificently paradoxical your Irish minds are. That pose of abject self depreciation which is in reality not wholly a pose but a vehement protest against the shallow judgment of a conventionalised culture----"

Ascher's language was a little confusing to me, but I could guess at what he meant. Gorman appeared to him to be an unappreciated Oscar Wilde, one of those geniuses--I am bound to admit that they are mostly Irish--who delude the world into thinking they are uttering profound truths when they are merely outraging common sense.

It would be going too far perhaps to say that Ascher fawned on Gorman during luncheon. He certainly showed his admiration for him very plainly.

During the afternoon we talked finance again. Ascher did it because he wanted to please Gorman. I listened and learned several things which interested me very much. I got to understand, for instance, why a sovereign is sometimes worth more, sometimes less, when you try to exchange it for dollars or francs; a thing which had always puzzled me before. I learned why gold has to be shipped in large quant.i.ties from one country to another by bankers, whereas I, a private individual, need only send a cheque to pay my modest debts. I learned what is meant by a bill drawn on London. It took me nearly half an hour to grasp that.

Gorman pretended to see it sooner than I did, but when he tried to supplement Ascher's explanation with one of his own he floundered hopelessly.

It was while we were at tea that afternoon that Mrs. Ascher put in an appearance for the first time. She was a tall, lean woman, with dark red hair--Gorman called it bronze--and narrow eyes which never seemed quite open. Her face was nearly colourless. I was inclined to attribute this to her long suffering from seasickness, but when I got to know her better I found out that she is never anything but pallid, even when she has lived for months on land and has been able to eat all she wants. The first thing she did after we were introduced to her was to put her hands up to her ears and give a low moan, expressive of great anguish. Ascher explained to us that she was very musical and suffered acutely from the ship's band. I made up my mind definitely that she was not the sort of woman I like. Gorman, on the other hand, took to her at once. He could not stop the band, but he led the lady away to a distant corner of the writing room.

For the rest of the voyage Gorman devoted himself to her. I do not mean to suggest that he flirted with her either frivolously, or with yearning artistic seriousness. Gorman enjoys the society of women and is never long happy without it, but I do not think he cares for love-making in any form. Besides he spent most of his time in her company watching her playing Patience. Owen Meredith wrote a poem in which he glorified the game of chess as an aid to quiet conjugal love-making. But so far as I know no one has suggested that Canfield--it was Mrs. Ascher's favourite kind of Patience--has ever been used as an excuse for flirtation. No woman, not even if she has eyes of j.a.panese shape, can look tenderly at a man when she has just buried a valuable two under a pile of kings and queens in her rubbish heap.

The result of Gorman's devotion to the lady was that I was left to improve my acquaintance with her husband. The more I talked to Ascher the better I liked him. His admiration for his wife's sensitiveness to sound was very touching. I am convinced that he knew a great deal more about music than she did and appreciated it more. But her sudden outbursts of petulance when the band played seemed to Ascher a plain proof that she had the spirit of an artist. He confided in me that it gave him real pleasure to see her and Gorman together because, as artists, they must have much in common. Ascher has a very simple and beautiful nature. No one with any other kind of nature could put up with Mrs. Ascher as a wife.

Mere simplicity of soul and beauty of character would not, I am afraid, have kept me at Ascher's side for the rest of the voyage. Virtue, like the innocence of the young, is admirable but apt to be tiresome.

What attracted me most to Ascher was his ability, the last thing he recognised in himself. When he found out that I was interested in his business he talked to me quite freely about it, though always with a certain suggestion of apology. There was no need for anything of the sort. He revealed to me a whole world of fascinating romance of which I had never before suspected the existence. Some day, perhaps, a poet--he will have to be a great poet--will discover that the system of credit by means of which our civilisation works, deserves an epic. Neither the wanderings of Ulysses nor the discoveries of a traveller through Paradise and Purgatory make so splendid an appeal to the imagination as this vastly complex machine which Ascher and men like him guide. The oceans of the world are covered thick with ships. Long freight trains wind like serpents across continents. Kings build navies. Ploughmen turn up the clay. The wheels of factories go round. The minds of men bend nature to their purposes by fresh inventions. Science creeps forward inch by inch. Human beings everywhere eat, drink and reproduce themselves. The myriad activities of the whole wide world go profitably on. They can go on only because the Aschers, sitting at their office desks in London or New York, direct the purchase or sale of what are but scratches with a pen on bits of paper.

There is, no doubt, another way of looking at the system. The ships, the kings, the mighty minds, the common men, are all of them in bondage to Ascher and his kind. He and his brother financiers are the unseen rulers, the mysteriously shrouded tyrants of the world. This system of credit, which need not be at all or might be quite other than it is, has given them supreme, untempered power, which they use to the injury of men. This is Gorman's view. But is it any less romantic than the other?

An epic can be written round a devil as greatly as round a hero. Milton showed us that. What is wanted in a poet's theme is grandeur, either fine or terrible. Ascher's grip upon the world has surely that.

CHAPTER III.

We landed in New York and to my satisfaction I secured the rooms I usually occupy. They are in a small hotel off Fifth Avenue, half way between the streets which boast of numbers higher than fifty, and those others which follow the effete European customs of having names. It is one of the paradoxes of New York that the parts of the city where fashionable people live and spend their money are severely business-like in the treatment of streets, laying them out so as to form correct parallelograms and distinguishing them by numbers instead of names, as if terrified of letting imagination loose for a moment. Down town where the money is made and the offices of the money makers are piled one on top of another, the streets are as irregular as those of London or Paris, and have all sorts of fascinatingly suggestive names. My hotel stands in the debatable land between the two districts. Fashionable life is ebbing away from its neighbourhood. Business is, as yet, a little shy of invading it. The situation makes an appeal to me. I may be, as Gorman says, a man of no country, but I am a man of two worlds. I cling to the skirts of society, something of an outsider, yet one who has the right of entry, if I choose to take the trouble, the large amount of trouble necessary to exercise the right. I am one who is trying to make money, scarcely more than an amateur among business men, but deeply interested in their pursuits. This particular hotel seems to me therefore a convenient, that is to say a suitable place of residence for me. It is not luxurious, nor is it cheap, but it is comfortable, which is perhaps the real reason why I go to it.

I gave Gorman my address before I left the ship, but I did not expect him to make any use of it. I thought that I had seen the last of him when I crossed the gangway and got caught in the whirlpool of fuss which eddied round the custom house shed. I was very much surprised when he walked in on me at breakfast time on the second morning after our arrival. I was eating an omelette at the time. I offered him a share of it and a cup of coffee. Gorman refused both; but he helped himself to a gla.s.s of iced water. This shows how adaptable Gorman is. Hardly any European can drink iced water at or immediately after breakfast during the first week he spends in America. I do not take to the stuff till I have been there about a fortnight. But Gorman, in spite of his patriotism, has a good deal of the cosmopolitan about him. Strange foods and drinks upset him very little.

"Doing anything this evening?" he asked. "If not will you spend it with me? Ascher has promised to come. We're going to a circus and on for supper afterwards. You remember the circus I mentioned to you on the steamer."

I hesitated before I answered. I suppose I looked a little astonished.

That Gorman should propose an evening out was natural enough. I should not call him a dissipated man, but he has a great deal of vitality and he likes what he calls "a racket" occasionally. What surprised me was that a circus should be his idea of dissipation. A circus is the sort of entertainment to which I send my nephew--a boy of eleven--when he spends the night with me in London on his way to school. My servant, a thoroughly trustworthy man, takes him there. I pay for the tickets.

Gorman, Ascher, and I were three grown men and we could not boast of a child among us to serve as an excuse for going to a circus.