He was sure of controlling the majority of shares before another year passed; and he did.
"What exactly do you intend to do?" Monsieur Vandémanque, eager for compromise, had asked, on the day when Lewis had forced himself in as general manager, nominated by the shareholders.
"Play an open game, that's all," he answered. "Pass the ball to the three-quarter line when I get it, and win the game as quickly as possible."
The old man looked at him uncomprehendingly, but his face was purple.
"You are going to reduce me ..."
"To obedience or penury," answered Lewis, with his usual brutality. A year before he would not have dared talk like that.
The shock killed Monsieur Vandémanque. Six months later his high-priest's hands ceased to tremble and the veins on his forehead to bulge, and now he was lying there beneath the first chrysanthemums of the year.
Lewis, having successfully broken through that crust which our traditions and our morals pile up on youth, and having renounced the immortal principle of the commerce and the spirit of France, namely:—always be suspicious of what you are creating, had, among the first of his generation, struggled out into the open air. It enabled him to experience the obloquy that is always hurled at any form of youthful success. Exhausted France, divided between the struggle for existence and the struggle to keep up her reputation as a jealous nation, accepted his innovations with reluctance.
In one year Lewis trebled his business interests and succeeded in getting hold of the controlling number of shares. Where before everything was done clandestinely (Lewis could almost hear Monsieur Vandémanque's: "good wine needs no bush"), all business was now conducted in the full glare of publicity; whereas before only one telephone line connected the Rue Scribe with the Bourse, now there were eighteen lines devoted solely to foreign exchange dealing. Lewis was now managing the Franco-African Bank and its affiliated companies practically without control, the Ætas Assurance Company, which was expanding enormously since its new re-insurance contract with Lloyds, and the Fidius Research Corporation (chemical products, commercial rubber, phosphates, oxygen).