“Also,” I said to Ascher, “nobody cheers you. Nobody knows you’re doing it.”
“No. Nobody knows we’re doing it. Nobody sees our flights through the air or guesses the supreme confidence we bankers must have in each other. When anybody does notice us it’s—well, our friend Gorman, for instance.”
Gorman holds the theory that financial men, Ascher and the rest, are bloated spiders who spend their time and energy in trapping the world’s workers, poor flies, in gummy webs.
“And of course Gorman is right in a way,” said Ascher. “I can’t help feeling that things ought to be better managed. But—but it’s a pity that men like him don’t understand.”
Ascher is wonderful. I shall never attain his mental attitude of philosophic tolerance. I do not feel that Gorman is in any way right about the Irish landlords. I felt, though I like the man personally, that he and his friends are deliberately and wickedly perverse.
“Some day,” said Ascher, “something will go wrong. A rope will break, or a man will miss his grip, and then people in one place will be starving, while people somewhere else have food all round them rotting in heaps. Men will want all sorts of things and will not be able to get them, though there will be plenty of them in the world. Men will think that the laws of nature have stopped working, that God has gone mad. Hardly any one will understand what has happened, just that one trapeze rope has broken, or that one man has lost his nerve and missed his grip.”
“She might have fallen clear of the net,” I said, “and come down on the audience.”
“When we slip a trick,” said Ascher, “it will be on the audience that we shall come down; and the audience, the people, will be bruised and hurt, won’t in the least know what has happened.”
Gorman—I suddenly recollected this—had an adventure in finance to propose. If Ascher goes into the scheme I shall have an opportunity of watching an interesting variant of the trapeze act. We shall get the people, who own the existing cash registers on the swing and then hold them to ransom. We shall set our small trapeze oscillating right across their airy path and decline to remove it unless they agree to part with some of the very shiniest of their spangles and hand them over to us for our adornment. I wondered how Ascher, who is so deeply moved by the perils of his own flights, would like the idea of destroying other people’s confidence and upsetting their calculations.
I looked down and saw that Gorman had left his seat. Mrs. Ascher had been making good progress with Tim. The boy was leaning towards her and talking eagerly. She lay back in her seat and smiled at him. If she were not interested in what he was saying she succeeded very well in pretending that she was. All really charming women practise this form of deception and all men are taken in by it if it is well done. Mrs. Ascher does it very well.