Jordan was sitting in his office one day, in the week following his wife's party, examining his diary of bills coming due, considering where renewals might be granted, and how much he might extort in consideration of his forebearance, what sums would be paid him, and how they were to be employed. Rouget, overbearing the clerk who kept the sanctum door--it was an inner room, lined with tin boxes, but free from the professional lumber which garnished that wherein he received his clients, the spider-hole, in fact, where he sat to devour his flies, and very private--appeared before him.
"Jordain! Your clerk ees not respectueux. I must complain. He tell me you were gone out. Yen vid dis ear I hear you cough my ownself. Everee body know Jordain's cough. Yet he défend my entry."
Jordan laid down his pen testily, but composed himself at once. "M. Rouget de la Hache, eh? The young man has orders to let no one in here. He should have said I was engaged. Those were his orders."
"He deed say so; but I shust look heem in ze eye--so!--vit a grand sévérité; and he fail of his word, and grow confus; and zen he tell me you were gone out. And so--behold me."
"Sim should stick to his orders. The first lie is always the best and safest. Not that this was a lie--he had his orders to say I was engaged, and admit no one. You would have been an exception, of course, had I expected to see you. But how should I? Nevertheless, most pleased to see you; though really I am very busy. Pray sit down. How can I serve you?"
Rouget sat down, looking vacantly about him. To attempt to hurry him, shook up his muddy wits, which needed all their accustomed rest to clarify themselves in any measure.
It was a bare little room, all but its wall covering of shelves, supporting tin boxes, which were all brown japanned alike, and garnished with gold letters and numbers enough to give one headache. There were three chairs, on one of which he was sitting, while Jordan had another, and the third stood waiting--for whom? It disturbed him, this foolish question, for it was impossible to answer it. The table was covered with black leather, and there was a book open--a big fat book--wonder what it was about?--and a bit of paper with names and figures, which Jordan was noting down with a pencil. Wonder what he meant by it? Had it anything to do with him, Jean Vincent de Paul Rouget? But yet the pencil and slip of paper looked unimportant enough, and so, with the bold assurance of ignorance Rouget concluded that they could not possibly be of much consequence, and Jordan was only making believe--a humbug, in fact, as all people là bas mostly were. It takes a transatlantic "swell," who has never seen one of the acknowledged great ones of the earth, to fully realize the vast inferiority of the "lower orders" to his own ineffable mightiness.
And yet it was easier to make the grand entrance he had achieved, and even to seat himself with dignity, than to plunge at once in medias res. He shuddered a little, like a bather on the brink, and looked round the room again, but it was so bare it would not suggest anything; and he wanted an idea--some neutral subject of talk which could be steered and edged about, whither he would; like a boat to waft him round the cliffs on the opposing shore, to some unguarded inlet with sloping banks, where he could land in good order and deploy at will toward the point he sought to gain. But this fellow was so abrupt. The brusquerie was not in good taste, and at another time he would have let him see it; but now----
"How can I serve you?" said the spider again. He knew the value of directness and dispatch. A fly must be well inmeshed in the web to be there present. It is mercy to the poor things to come to the point with a bound, and bleed or devour. To prolong the preliminaries is but adding gratuitous pain. The victim will but flutter the more wildly, and what usurer would make rich if he heeded the remonstrance of impotence? In prolonged palaver, too, and the frantic flutterings, may not the captive burst a gossamer bond, and be free? The bonds are all gossamer, at first, like the rainbow-coloured rays of a sea anemone, but they thicken and grow tense when the prey gets among them, and do it so quietly that he is partly swallowed before he realizes his danger, and then his struggles are apt to be in vain. Still, there are chances, and vigour and dispatch are best.
"How can I serve you?" and Jordan glanced into the book before him, and then made a cross with his pencil at a name and some failures on the list he seemed to be making out. It was manifest that he guessed already what was going to be said. It was mortifying, and still it was a relief to see that preliminaries were unnecessary and the subject already opened.