I understood just enough about this business of Ascher’s to be able to read romance, the romance which was certainly there, in the movements of the quiet men who passed and repassed before my eyes, or bent with rarely lifted heads over huge ledgers, or turned over with deft fingers piles of papers in stuffed filing boxes. These men were in touch with the furthest ends of the earth. Coded telegrams fluttered from their hands and went vibrating across thousands of miles of land or through the still depths of oceans, over unlighted tracts of ooze on the sea-bottom. In London the words were read and men set free pent up, dammed streams of money. In Hongkong the words were read and some steamer went out, laden, from her harbour. Gold was poured into the hands of tea-planters in Ceylon. Scanty wages in strange coins, dribbled out to factory workers in Russian cotton mills. Gangs of navvies went to work laying railway lines across the veldt in Bechuanaland. There was no end to the energy controlled, directed by these cable messages, nor any bounds to the field of their influence. Somewhere in Ireland a farmer would go home along a desolate road, crossing brown bogs, thirsty and disconsolate, his lean beasts unsold at a fair where buyers were scarce or shy. What did he know of Ascher or Ascher know of him? Yet the price which he might take or must refuse for those hardly reared bullocks of his depended at the end of a long chain, on what the Aschers in their office said and did.
Perhaps hardly one of all the busy men I watched quite knew what he was doing. They juggled with figures, made précis of the reports of money markets, dissected and analysed the balance sheets of railway companies, decoded messages from London or from Paris, transcribed formulae as abstract, as remote from tangible things as the x and y of algebraic equations. These men all worked—the apologue of the quadratic equation held my mind—moving their symbols here and there, extracting roots, dissolving close-knit phrases into factors, cancelling, simplifying, but always dealing with symbols meaningless, unreal in themselves. Behind them was Ascher, Ascher and I suppose Stutz, who expressed realities in formulae, and, when the sums were done, extracted realities from the formulae again, achieving through the seemingly sterile processes new facts, fresh grasp of the things which are, greater power to deal with them. They knew and understood and held the whole world in leading strings, delicate as silk, invisible, impalpable, but strong.
The door of Ascher’s private office opened and a man passed out. I glanced at him. He was a clean-shaved, keen-eyed, square-jawed man, the type which American business methods have produced, a man of resource and quick decision, but a man, so I guessed, who dealt with things, and money only as the price of things, the reward of making them. He lacked, so I felt, something of the fine spirituality of Ascher, the scientific abstraction of the man who lives in a rarer atmosphere of pure finance.
A clerk at my elbow invited me to leave my place and take my turn with Ascher.
I could not bring myself to plunge straightway into my business. I began by pretending that I had no real business at all.
“Any chance,” I asked, “of our being travelling companions again? I am leaving New York almost at once.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Ascher. “I’ve a great deal to do here still.”
“Those Mexican affairs?”
“Those among others.”
“The Government here seems to be making rather a muddle of Mexico,” I said.