Gorman did not answer me. He went through the door, the terribly impressive door, without even bowing. There was nothing for me to do but follow him. Tim followed me, nursing his cash register as if it had been a baby, a very heavy and awkwardly shaped baby.
We passed into the outer office. At the first glance it seemed to me like a very orderly town. It was built over with small houses of polished mahogany and plate glass. Through the plate-glass fronts—they were more than windows—I could see the furniture of the houses, rolltop desks of mahogany, broad mahogany tables, chairs and high stools. All the mahogany was very highly polished. The citizens of this town flitted from one glass-fronted house to another. They met in narrow streets and spoke to each other with grave dignity. They spoke in four languages, and English was the one used least. From the remoter parts of the place, the slums, if such a polished town has slums, came the sound of typewriters worked with extreme rapidity. The manual labourers, in this as in every civilised community, are kept out of sight. Only the sound of their toil is allowed to remind the other classes of their happier lot. Some of the citizens—I took them to be men of very high standing, privy counsellors or magistrates—held cigars in their mouths as they walked about. These cigars are badges of office, like the stripes on soldiers’ coats. No one was actually smoking.
Gorman was our spokesman. He explained who we were and what we wanted. We were handed over to a clerk. I suppose he was a clerk, but to me he seemed a gentleman in waiting of some mysterious monarch, or—my feeling wavered—one of the inferior priests of a strange cult. He led us through doors into a large room, impressively empty and silent. There for a minute we left while he tapped reverently at another door. The supreme moment arrived. We passed into the inmost shrine where Ascher sat. My spirit quailed.
Every great profession has its own way of hypnotising the souls of simple men. Indeed I think that professions are accounted great in accordance with their power of impressing on the world a sense of their mysteriousness. Ecclesiastics, those of them who know their business, build altars in dim recesses of vast buildings, light them with flickering tapers, and fill the air with clouds of stupefying incense smoke. Surgeons and dentists allow us fleeting glimpses of bright steel instruments, very strangely shaped. It is contrived that we see them in a cold, clear light, the light of scientific relentlessness. There is a suggestion of torture, not brutal but exquisitely refined, of perfected pain, achieved by the stimulation of recondite nerves of very delicate sensibility. Lawyers wear archaic robes and use a strange language in their mysteries, conveying to us a belief that Justice is an ancient witch whose evil eye can be averted only by the incantation and grotesque posturing of her initiate priests. But I am not sure that financiers do not understand the art of hypnotic suggestion best of all. I have worshipped in cathedrals, sweated cold in operating theatres, trembled before judges, but there is something about large surfaces of polished mahogany and very soft, dimly coloured turkey carpets which quells my feeble spirit still more completely.
There was a heavy deadening silence in Ascher’s private office, and our voices, when they broke it, sounded like the cheeping of ghosts. There was an odour more oppressive than the smell of incense or the penetrating fumes of iodoform. Some one, many hours before, must have smoked a very good cigar in the room, and the scent of it lingered. The doors of huge safes must have been opened. From the recesses of these steel chambers had oozed air which had lain stagnant and lifeless round piles of gold bonds and rich securities for years and years. The faint, sickly odour of sealing wax must have been distilled from immense sticks of that substance and sprinkled overnight upon the carpets and leather-seated chairs. I breathed and my very limbs felt numb.
But certain souls are proof against the subtlest forms of hypnotism. Gorman had escaped from the influence of his church. He would flip a sterilised lancet across a glass slab with his finger and laugh in the face of the surgeon who owned it. He walked with buoyant confidence into Ascher’s office. My case was different. I stood and then sat, the victim of a partial anaesthetic. I saw and heard dimly as if in a dream, or through a mist. Poor Tim trembled as he laid his cash register down on one of Ascher’s mahogany tables. I could hear the keys and bars of the machine rattling together while he handled it.
Ascher spoke through a telephone receiver which stood at his elbow. Another man entered the room. We all shook hands with him. He was Stutz, the New York partner of the firm. Then Ascher spoke through the receiver again, and another man came in.
With him we did not shake hands, but he bowed to us and we to him. He was Mr. Mildmay. He stood near the door, waiting for orders.
Tim Gorman unpacked his machine and exhibited it. I have not the remotest idea what its peculiar virtues are, but Tim believed in them. His nervousness seemed to pass away from him as he spoke about his invention with simple-minded enthusiasm. Love casts out fear, and there is no doubt that Tim loved every screw and lever of the complicated mechanism.
Mr. Mildmay left his place near the door and came forward. His deferential manner dropped off from him. He revealed himself as a mechanical expert with a special knowledge of cash registers. He and Tim Gorman pressed keys, twisted handles and bent together in absorbed contemplation over some singular feature of the machine’s organism. Gorman, the elder brother, watched them with a confident smile. Ascher and Stutz sat gravely silent. They waited Mildmay’s opinion. He was the man of the moment. A few minutes before he had bowed respectfully to Ascher. In half an hour he would be bowing respectfully to Ascher again. Just then, while he handled Tim Gorman’s machine, he was Ascher’s master, and mine of course. They were all my masters.