I had finished my breakfast and lit a cigar. Gorman pulled out his pipe and sat down opposite to me. I am not, I regret to say, a business man, but I succeeded in understanding fairly well what he told me.

His brother's cash register, if properly advertised and put on the market, would drive out every other cash register in the world. In the long run nothing could stand against it. Of that Gorman was perfectly convinced. But the proprietors of the existing cash registers would not submit without a struggle.

Gorman nodded gravely when he told me this. Evidently their struggles were the very essence of the situation.

"What can they do?" I said. "If your machine is much better than theirs surely----"

"They'll do what people always do on these occasions. They'll infringe our patents."

"But the law----"

"Yes," said Gorman, "the law. It's just winning law suits that would ruin us. Every time we got a judgment in our favour the case would be appealed to a higher court. That would happen here and in England and in France and in every country in the world civilised enough to use cash registers. Sooner or later, pretty soon too--we should have no money left to fight with."

"Bankrupt," I said, "as a consequence of your own success. What an odd situation!"

"Now," said Gorman, "you see where Ascher comes in.

"I do. But I don't expect he'll spend his firm's money fighting speculative law suits all over the world just to please you."

"You don't see the position in the least. There'll be no law suits and he won't spend a penny. Once it's known that his firm is behind us no one will attempt to touch our patent. People aren't such fools as to start playing beggar-my-neighbour with Ascher, Stutz & Co. The whole world knows that their firm has money enough to go on paying lawyers right on until the day of judgment."

"I hope to goodness," I said, "that we shan't meet lawyers then."

Gorman smiled. Up to that point it had been impossible to move him from his desperate earnestness, but a joke at the expense of lawyers is sure of a smile under any circ.u.mstances. With the possible exception of the mother-in-law joke, the lawyer joke is the oldest in the world and like all well tested jokes it may be relied on.

"There won't be any lawyers then," said Gorman. "They'll go straight to h.e.l.l without the formality of a trial."

This seemed to me to be carrying the joke too far. I have known several lawyers who were no worse than other professional men, quite upright and honourable compared to doctors. I should have liked to argue the point with Gorman. But for the moment I was more interested in the future of the new cash register than in the ultimate destiny of lawyers.

"If you get Ascher to back you," I said, "and your patents are safe, you'll want to begin making machines on a big scale. Where will you get the money for that?"

"You haven't quite caught on yet," said Gorman. "I don't want to make the things at all. Why should I? There would have to be a large company.

I have neither time nor inclination to manage it. Tim hasn't that kind of brains. Besides it would be risky. Somebody might come along any day with a better machine and knock ours out. People are always inventing things, you know. What I want is a nice large sum of hard cash without any bother or risk. Don't you see that the other people, the owners of the present cash registers, will have to buy us out? If our machine is the best and they daren't go to law with us they must buy us out.

There's no other course open to them. What's more, they'll have to pay pretty nearly what we ask. In fact, if we put up a good bluff there's hardly any end to the extent to which we can bleed them. See?"

I saw something which looked to me like a modernised form of highway robbery.

"Is that sort of thing common?" I said.

"Done every day," said Gorman. "It's business."

"Well," I said, "there's one justification for your proceedings. If half what you say about your brother's invention is true the world will get the benefit of a greatly improved cash register. I suppose that's the way civilisation advances."

"The world be d.a.m.ned," said Gorman. "It'll get nothing. You don't suppose the people who buy us out are going to start making Tim's machine. They can if they like, of course, once they've paid us. But it will cost them hundreds of thousands if they do. They'd have to sc.r.a.p all their existing plant and turn their factories inside out, and in the end they wouldn't make any more profit than they're making now. No.

They'll simply suppress Tim's invention and the silly old world will go on with the machines it has at present."

"Gorman," I said, "you gave me to understand a minute or so ago that you went in for the old-fashioned kind of soul, the kind we were both brought up to. I'm not at all sure that I wouldn't rather have Mrs.

Ascher's new kind, even if it----"

"Don't start talking about begonias again," said Gorman.

"I wasn't going to. I was only going to say that even plays in which nothing happens and grimy women say indecent things--that's art you know--seem to me better than the sort of things your soul fattens on."

"I don't see any good talking about souls," said Gorman. "This is a matter of business. The other people will crush us if they can. If they can't, and they won't be able to if Ascher backs us, they'll have to pay us. There's nothing wrong about that, is there? Look at it this way.

We've got something to sell----"

"Cash registers," I said. "But you don't propose to sell them."

"Not cash registers, but the right to make a certain kind of cash registers. That's what we're going to sell. We could sell it to the public, form a company to use the rights. It suits us better for various reasons to sell it to these people. It suits them to buy. They needn't unless they like. But they will like. Now if we want to sell and they want to buy and we agree on the price where does anybody's soul come in?"

"There is evidently," I said, "a third kind of soul. The original, religious kind, the artistic kind, and what we may call the business soul. You have a mixture of all three in you, Gorman."

"I wish you'd stop worrying about my soul and tell me this. Are you going to help to rope in Ascher or not? He'll come if you use your influence with him."

"My dear fellow," I said. "Of course I'm going to help. Haven't you offered me a share of the loot?"

"I thought you would," said Gorman triumphantly. "But what about your own soul?"

"I haven't got one," I said.

I used to have a sort of instinct called honour which served men of my cla.s.s instead of a soul. But Gorman and Gorman's father before him and their political a.s.sociates have succeeded in abolishing gentlemen in Ireland. There is no longer the cla.s.s of gentry in that country and the few surviving individuals have learned that honour is a silly superst.i.tion. I am now a disinterested spectator of a game which my ancestors played and lost. The virtue desirable in a spectator is not honour but curiosity. I wanted very much to see how Ascher would take Gorman's proposal and how the whole thing would work out. I promised to sit through the circus, to attend the supper party afterwards and to do the best I could to persuade Ascher to join our robber band.

CHAPTER IV.

Mrs. Ascher is not the woman to miss an entertainment she desires merely because she lacks an invitation. She arrived at the door of the circus in a taxicab with Ascher. Gorman and I were there and when he first saw Mrs. Ascher he swore. However he was forced to give her some sort of welcome and he did it pretty well, though I fear Ascher might have noticed a note of insincerity in his voice. But that was only at first.

Gorman's temper changed when we reached our seats and Mrs. Ascher threw off her cloak.

She was wearing an evening gown of the most startling design and colour.

I should have said beforehand that a woman with a skin as pallid as that of a corpse and so little flesh that her bones stick up jaggedly would be wise to avoid very low dresses. Mrs. Ascher displayed, when she took off her cloak, as much skin and bone as she could without risking arrest at the hands of the police. Her gown, what there was of it, was of a vivid orange colour and she wore emeralds round her neck. If the main object of wearing clothes is, as some philosophers maintain, to attract attention, then Mrs. Ascher understands the art of dress. She created a sensation. That was what pleased Gorman. He is a man who likes to be the centre of interest wherever he is, or if that is not possible, to be attached to the person who has secured that fortunate position. Mrs.

Ascher attracts the public gaze wherever she goes. I have seen people turn round to stare at her in the dining room of the Ritz in New York and at supper in the Carlton in London. The men and women who formed the audience in Gorman's circus were unaccustomed to daring splendour of raiment. They actually gasped when Mrs. Ascher threw off her cloak and Gorman felt glad that she had come.

She said a few words to me about the delight which an artist's soul feels in coming into direct contact with the seething life of the people, and she mentioned with appreciation a French picture, one of Degas' I think, which represents ballet dancers practising their art.

Then she and Gorman settled down in two of the three seats reserved for us. Ascher and I retired modestly to the back of what I may call the dress circle. After a while when the performance was well under way, Gorman's brother came in. I suppose the greater part of his evening's work was done and he was able to leave the task of dealing with late comers to some subordinate clerk. He looked a mere boy, younger than I expected, as he stood at the end of the row of seats trying to attract his brother's attention. Gorman was so much occupied with Mrs. Ascher that for some time he did not notice Tim. I had time to observe the boy. He had fair hair, and large, childlike blue eyes. He was evidently nervous, for he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He kept pulling at his tie, and occasionally patting his hair. He was quite right to be uncomfortable about his hair. It was very untidy and one particular lock stood out stiffly at the back of his head.

Gorman saw him at last and immediately introduced him to Ascher and to me. But Tim was far too nervous to sit down beside us. He crept after his brother and took a chair, three seats beyond Gorman, away from Mrs.

Ascher. She spotted him directly and insisted on his sitting beside her.

She is a woman who likes to have a man of some sort on each side of her.

Tim Gorman was little more than a boy but he was plainly frightened of her. I suppose that gave zest to the sport of annexing him. Besides, his eyes are very fine, and, if souls really shine through eyes, showed that he was refreshingly innocent. I expect, too, that there was something piquant in the company of the clerk who takes the money at the door of a second-rate entertainment. Mrs. Ascher has often told me that she is more interested in life than in anything else, even art. She distinguishes between life and real life. Mine, I gather, is not nearly so real as that of a performer in a travelling circus. I do not know why this should be so, but I have no doubt that it is. Mrs. Ascher is not by any means the only person who thinks so. Tim Gorman's life was apparently real enough to attract her greatly. She paid him the compliment of talking a good deal to the boy, though she was far too clever a woman to let the elder brother feel himself neglected.

A learned horse had just begun its performance when Tim Gorman entered.

It went on for some time picking out large letters from a pile in front of it and arranging them so as to spell out "yes" or "no" in answer to questions asked by a man with a long whip in his hand. The animal used one of its front hoofs in arranging the letters, and looked singularly undignified. Ascher sat quite still with an air of grave politeness.

I tried to get him to tell me what he thought of the learned horse but could get nothing out of him. Long; silences make me uncomfortable. I felt at last that it was better to talk nonsense than not to talk at all.

"I suppose," I said, "that learned men look almost as grotesque to the angels as learned horses do to us. I can fancy Raphael watching a German professor writing a book on the origin of religion. He would feel all the while that the creature's front paw was meant by nature for n.o.bler uses."