“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 damned,” 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 scrap 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.”