“Very well, then, it comes down to this: If you fail us now, out of any of your fool scruples toward that poor devil across the street,—who’s bound to get the blood sucked out of him anyway,—you ruin your own prospects, and you try and cheat us out of the money we put up on you. By——, if you see any honor in that, I don’t.”
“Mr. Leverich,” said Justin, raising his head swiftly, with a steely gleam in his eyes that matched the other’s, “when I try to cheat you or Lewiston or any man out of what has been put up on me, I’ll give you leave to say what you please. At present I’ll say good morning.”
Leverich shrugged his shoulders and turned his back as he bent over his desk. Justin picked up his hat and went out, brushing, as he did so, against a dark, pleasant-faced man who had been sitting in the next room. Something in his face instantly conveyed to Justin the knowledge that the conversation he had just been engaged in had grown louder than the partition warranted. The next instant he recognized the man as a Mr. Warren, of Rondell Brothers. Each turned to look back at the other, and both men bowed; the action had a certain definiteness in it, unwarranted by the slightness of the meeting. The next moment Justin was in the street.
The clash of steel always roused the blood in him; he felt actively stronger for combat. He was competently apportioning toward Lewiston’s note the different sums coming in this month. There were large bills to be paid to the typometer’s credit by several firms, one of them Coneways’. Coneways represented the largest counted-in asset for the entire year—it was the backbone of the establishment. If it went to Lewiston, what would be left for the business? That could come next, Lewiston was first. Leverich and Martin would exact every penny of their principal after these intervening six months of the year were over. Well, let them! Lewiston’s note was what he had to think of now.
All business undertakings, no matter how wild, how precarious to the sense of the beholder, are started with confidence in their ultimate success; it is the one trite, universal reason for starting—that faith is the capital that all possess in common. Some of these doubtful ventures, while never really succeeding, do not fail at once; they are always hard up, but they keep on, though gradually sinking lower all the time. Others seem to exist by the continuance of that first faith alone—a sheer optimism that keeps the courage alive and keen enough to seize hold of the slightest driftwood of opportunity, binding this flotsam into a raft that takes them triumphantly out on the high tide. For all the long drag, the anxiety, the physical strain, the harassment, failure in itself seemed as inherently impossible to Justin as that he should be stricken blind or lose the use of his limbs. He must think harder to find a way of accomplishment, that was all.
His step had its own peculiar ring in it as he left Leverich’s, but it lost somewhat of its alertness as he turned down the street that led to the factory, unaltered, since his first coming to it, save for the transformation of the neglected house he had noticed then, with its grewsome interior, which had been turned into a freshly painted shop long ago. The effect of association is inexorable. There was not a corner, not a building, along that too familiar way, that was not hung with some thought of care; there were moments of such strong repulsion that he felt as if he couldn’t turn down that street again—moments lately when to enter the factory with its red-brick-arched yawning mouth of a doorway occasioned a physical nausea—a foolish, womanish state which irritated him.
The mail brought him the usual miscellaneous assortment of orders and bills, and letters on minor points, and questions as to the typometer. The mail was rather apt to be encouraging in its suggestions of a large trade. Two letters this morning were full of enthusiastic encomium on the use of the machine. In spite of an enormous and long-outstanding bill for office stationery, insistently clamorous for payment—one of those bills looked upon as trifles until they suddenly become staggering—there was, after the mail, a general feeling of wielding the destiny of a large part of the world, where the typometer was a power.
A little woman whose husband, now dead, had been in his employ, came in to get help in collecting his insurance; she was timid before Justin, deeply grateful for his kind and effective assistance. Two men called at different times, for advice and introductions to important people. A friend brought in a possible customer from the Sandwich Islands. There was all that aura of prosperity that has nothing to do with the payment of one’s bills.
Justin took both the friend and the customer out to lunch, his pleasant sense of hospitality only dimmed by the disagreeable fact of its taking every cent of the five dollars he had expected to last him for the week. He was “strapped.” The luncheon took longer, also, than he had counted on its doing. The morning, begun well, seemed to lead up only to sordid and anxious details and a sense of non-accomplishment, induced also by small requisitions from different people presupposing cash from a cash-drawer that was empty.
It was a welcome relief to figure, with Harker’s assistance, on the large sums coming in at the end of the month from Coneways. There were a hundred ways for them to go, but they were to go to Lewiston. Perhaps, after all, as Harker astutely suggested, Lewiston would be satisfied with a partial payment and extend the rest of the note. While they were still consulting, word was brought in that Mr. Lewiston was there.