"It's quite a good show," said Gorman.

I tried to think of Ascher at a circus. I failed to picture him, a man educated up to the highest forms of art, gazing in delight while a lady in short petticoats jumps through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse. I had not been at a circus for about thirty years, since my tenth birthday indeed, but I do not believe that the form of entertainment has changed much since then. The clowns' jokes--I judge from my nephew's reports--are certainly the same as they were in my time. But even very great improvements would not make circuses tolerable to really artistic people like Ascher.

"I've got free pa.s.ses for the best seats," said Gorman.

He had mistaken the cause of my hesitation. I was not thinking of the cost of our evening's amus.e.m.e.nt.

"You journalists," I said, "are wonderful. You get into the front row every time without paying, whether it's a coronation or a funeral. How did you manage it this time?"

"My brother Tim is connected with the show. I daresay you don't remember him at Curraghbeg. He was fifteen years younger than me. My father married a second time, you know. Tim is my half-brother."

I did not remember Gorman himself in Curraghbeg. I could not be expected to remember Tim who must have been still unborn when I left home to join the Army.

"Tim has the brains of our family," said Gorman. "His mother was a very clever woman."

I never heard Gorman say anything worse than that about his step-mother, and yet she certainly treated him very badly.

"You're all clever," I said. "Your father drove mine out of the country and deprived him of his property. It took ability to do that. You are a Member of Parliament and a brilliant journalist Timothy--I hardly like to speak of him as Tim--owns a splendid circus."

"He doesn't own it," said Gorman.

"Well, runs it," I said. "I expect it takes more brains to run a circus than to own one."

"He doesn't exactly run it," said Gorman. "In fact he only takes the money at the door. But he has brains. That's why I want Ascher to meet him. I didn't ask Mrs. Ascher," he added thoughtfully, "though she hinted for an invitation, rather made a set at me, in fact."

"Give her my ticket," I said. "I don't mind a bit. I'll buy another for myself in a cheap part of the house, and join you at supper afterwards.

You ought not to disappoint Mrs. Ascher."

"I don't want Mrs. Ascher this time. She'd be in the way. She's a charming woman, of course, though she does bore me a bit about music and talks of her soul."

"Good Heavens!" I said. "You haven't been discussing religion with her, surely. I didn't think you'd do a thing like that, Gorman. You oughtn't to."

"Never mentioned religion to her in my life. Nothing would induce me to.

For one thing I don't believe she has any."

"You're a Roman Catholic yourself, aren't you?"

"Well," said Gorman, "I don't know that I can say that I am exactly; but I'm not a Protestant or a Jew. But that's nothing to do with it. Mrs.

Ascher doesn't talk about her soul in a religious way. In fact--I don't know if you'll understand, but what she means by a soul is something quite different, not the same sort of soul."

I understood perfectly. I have met several women of Mrs. Ascher's kind.

They are rather boastful about their souls and even talk of saving or losing them. But they do not mean what one of Gorman's priests would mean, or what my poor father, who was a strongly evangelical Protestant, meant by the phrases.

"We are not accustomed to souls like hers in Ireland. We only go in for the commonplace, old-fashioned sort."

Gorman smiled.

"She wouldn't be seen with one of them about her," he said. "They're vulgar things. Everybody has one.

"Soul or no soul," I said, "you ought to invite Mrs. Ascher to your party. Why not do the civil thing?"

"I'll do the civil thing some other time. I'll take her to a concert, but I don't want her to-night."

"Perhaps," I said, "your brother's circus is a little--shall we say Parisian? I don't think you need mind that. Mrs. Ascher isn't exactly a girl. It would take a lot to shock her. In fact, Gorman, my experience of these women with artistic souls is that the riskier the thing is the better they like it."

That is, as I have noticed, one of the great differences between a commonplace, so to speak, religious soul and a soul of the artistic kind. You save the one by keeping it as clean as you can. The other seems to thrive best when heavily manured. It is no disparagement of the artistic soul to say that it likes manure. Some of the most delicious and beautiful things in the world are like that, raspberries for instance, which make excellent jam, roses about which poets write, and begonias. I knew a man once who poured bedroom slops into his begonia bed every day and he had the finest flowers I ever saw.

"Gorman," I said, "did it ever occur to you that Mrs. Ascher's soul is like a begonia?"

"Bother Mrs. Ascher's soul!" said Gorman. "I'm not thinking about it.

The circus is a show you might take a nun to. n.o.body could possibly object to it. The reason I headed her off was because I wanted to talk business to Ascher, very particular business and rather important. In fact," here he sank his voice to a confidential whisper, "I want you to help me to rope him in."

"If you've succeeded in roping him into a circus," I said, "I should think you could rope him into anything else without my help. Would you mind telling me what the scheme is?"

"I'm trying to," he said, "but you keep interrupting me with silly riddles about begonias."

"I'm sorry I mentioned begonias. All the same it's a pity you wouldn't listen. You'd have liked the part about manure. But never mind. Go on about Ascher."

"My brother Tim," said Gorman, "has invented a new cash register. He's always inventing things; been at it ever since he was a boy. But they're mostly quite useless things though as cute as the devil. In fact I don't think he ever hit on anything the least bit of good till he got this cash register."

"Before we go further," I said, "what is a cash register?"

"It's a machine used in shops and cheap tea-places for----"

"I know now," I said. "It has keys like a typewriter. That's all right.

I thought for a moment it might be a book, a ledger, you know. Go on."

"Well, Tim's machine is out and away the best thing of its kind ever seen. There's simply no comparison between it and the existing cash registers. I've had it tested in every way and I know."

I began, so I thought, to see what Ascher was to be roped into.

"You want money to patent it, I suppose," I said.

But that was not it. Gorman had sc.r.a.ped together whatever money was necessary to make his brother's invention secure in Europe and America.

He had done more, he had formed a small private company in which he held most of the shares himself. He had manufactured a hundred of the new machines and was prepared to put them on the market.

"Ah," I said. "Now I see what you're at. You want more capital. You want to work the thing on a big scale. I might take a share or two myself, just for the sake of having a flutter."

"We don't want you," said Gorman. "The fewer there are in it the better.

I don't want to have to divide the profits with a whole townful of people. But we might let you in if you get Ascher for us. You have a lot of influence with Ascher."

I had, of course, no influence whatever with Ascher. But Gorman, though he is certainly a clever man, has the defects of his cla.s.s and his race. He was an Irish peasant to start with and there never was an Irish peasant yet who did not believe in a mysterious power which he calls "influence." It is curious faith, though it justifies itself pretty well in Ireland. In that country you can get nearly anything done, either good or bad, if you persuade a sufficiently influential person to recommend it. Gorman's mistake, as it seemed to me, lay in supposing that influence is equally potent outside Ireland. I am convinced that it is no use at all in dealing with a man like Ascher. If a big financial magnate will not supply money for an enterprise on the merits of the thing he is not likely to do so because a friend asks him. Besides I cannot, or could not at that time, boast of being Ascher's intimate friend. However Gorman's mistake was no affair of mine.

"If Ascher goes in at all," I said, "he'll do it on a pretty big scale.

He'll simply absorb the rest of you."

"The fact is," said Gorman, "I don't want Ascher to join. I don't want him to put down a penny of money. All I want him to do is to back us.

Of course he'll get his whack of whatever we make, and if he likes to be the nominal owner of some bonus shares in our company he can. That would regularise his position. The way the thing stands is this."