“Can we get that much?” asked the other doubtfully. “On the security of the plant? Easy.”
Jeremy’s money was in the Fenchester Trust Company, of which Robert Wanser was president. No difficulty whatsoever was made by him when Jeremy called. Wanser was an anomaly in national sentiment. The grandson of a leader of the Young German movement who had found refuge in this country from the rigorous repression of Germany in ’48, the son of a major who fought with distinction for the Union through the Civil War, he remained impregnably Teutonic in thought, sentiment, and prejudice. He was a large, softish man who suggested in his appearance a sleek and benignant walrus. He sat back in his chair and listened and puffed and nodded, and when the applicant was through, made a notation on a bit of paper. The rest was merely a matter of “Jeremy Robson” at the bottom of a dated form, and “Do you wish to draw it now or leave it on deposit, Mr. Robson?” To the borrower it seemed like the nearest thing to magic since his great-aunt’s bequest.
“And how is the paper getting on, Mr. Robson?” asked Wanser benevolently.
“First-rate. We can feel it taking hold harder and harder every day.”
“Ah!” Robert Wanser’s “Ah” had just the faintest touch of a medial “c” in it; just a hint of the guttural, the only relic left in his speech of a Teutonicism which three generations had failed to Americanize. “That must be a great satisfaction.”
“It is.”
“And a great responsibility. What a power for good a newspaper may be, even in a small community such as this! Or for evil. Or for evil,” he repeated sorrowfully.
Jeremy waited.
“It can radiate enlightenment. Or it can scatter poison. The poison of class hatred, of political unrest, of racial dissension.” He sighed.
Always for the direct method Jeremy asked, “You think The Guardian is too radical?”