Along Broadway, too, he is known favorably, in that happy-go-easy circle of minor actors, wine-merchants, and women aspirants for the stage and movies. Head waiters are deferential, and slightly contemptuous toward him. He is a good spender, and yet— There is something repulsive, unhealthy in the way he enjoys food and drink and looks at women.
"Six things doth the Lord hate; yea, seven, which are an abomination unto him": and the first is haughty eyes. I cannot conceive that as denoting the light that shines from eyes lit from a sense of high and noble lineage, of chivalrous ideals, of just power. I translate it by the eyes of Matthew Kerrigan—those gray, full orbs which look about a room stating that there is no man present whose equal and superior Kerrigan is now. Eyes which tell you Kerrigan has money, and is prepared to spend money for what he wants. You know that man will get good measure for his money—shrewdness and sophistication gleam from them in a wary, reptilian way.
"They may call this the Rube City," Morgenthal, the little real-estate broker, announced at the Elks' Club, "but, believe me, there 's one guy in town they can't put anything over on, and that's Kerrigan. He 's wise. I tell you, boy, he 's wise. Did you hear about that baby at the Winter Garden that tried to pull that hard-luck story on him? You didn't, eh? Well, let me tell you something: She got hers...."
There is one other place you may collect facts about Matthew Kerrigan and that is the down-town lunch-rooms of the financial district—uncomfortable, clattering places where you eat on a high stool at a counter and compute the price of your meal to the cashier as you go out. There is a race of clerks there, old men, natty but shabby of dress, pinched in the face, gray-headed, stoop-shouldered. Some of them are bitter and many are garrulous. They specialize in the early histories of well-known men.
"I remember him when he was a bum in the street," they will tell you of nearly all of them; "when he had n't got a nickle for a shoe-shine. Did you ever hear how he got on his feet?" And then will follow either a sordid or a criminal story. And from them you can learn the story of Matthew Kerrigan and Leonard Holt.
An office friend had told Kerrigan of an eccentric inventor who lived out in his home town of Englewood, a poor, poverty-stricken, scatter-brained mechanic who plodded in a broken-down cottage on the outskirts of Englewood at magnificent and foolish dreams, such as aviation and perpetual motion. When Kerrigan went out to see his friend he was taken, on a rainy afternoon, to pass the dull hours, on a visit to the man Holt. Beyond an occasional dunning tradesman, who sneered at him, and an occasional equally poor friend who remonstrated with him and urged him to take a position in a factory, Holt saw no one. And when Kerrigan was introduced, he talked like a starved fanatic. Tall; loosely built, as though his jointures were precarious; stooped; with great greasy hands; sandy-haired; with burning blue eyes and a high forehead, and a listless mouth and chin—one might have been pardoned for believing him an impractical fool. He pointed out a large system of wheels and pulleys, of weights and springs. It was the perpetual-motion model on which he was working.
"But I thought perpetual motion had been given up as impossible," Kerrigan objected.
"They have been making strides toward it," Holt answered. "The Struttapparat was a great advance. Of course a small quantity of radium is necessary. But, still, energy may be—it is just possible—created mechanically. They disprove perpetual motion by the hypothesis of the conservation of energy, which is not proven—"
And so he went on at great length in his jerky sentences, while Kerrigan listened, picking up things and dropping them boredly—a Bunsen burner, a pair of pliers, a tripod—what not. He lifted two pieces of asbestos, clamped queerly together by two long pieces of flexible metal. As he toyed with it the thing came apart in his hands. A snap, and it was together again. Kerrigan looked up in interest.
"What's this for?"