"Well, I congratulate you," said Justin formally, rising.
"This isn't going to make any difference in the friendship between me and you, Mr. Alexander? I've thought a powerful lot of your friendship. If I'd 'a' seen any way to have come in with you, I'd 'a' done it. But business ain't going to interfere between two such good friends as we are!"
"Why, no," said Justin, with the conventional answer to an appeal which still pitifully claims for truth that which it has made false. The handshake that followed was one in which all their friendship seemed to dissolve and change its character, hardening into ice.
Hardanger!
Hardanger & Company represented one of the greatest factors in the trade of two hemispheres. To say that a thing was taken up by Hardanger meant its success. They took nothing that was not likely to succeed; they made it succeed—for them. Their agents in all parts of the known world had easy access to firms and to opportunities hard to be reached by those of lesser credit. Their reputation was unassailed; they kept scrupulously to the terms agreed upon. The only bar to putting an article into their hands was the fact that their terms—except in the case of certain standard articles which they were obliged to have—embraced nearly all the profits, only the very narrowest margins coming to the original owners. Everything had to be figured down, and still further and further down, by those owners, to make that margin possible. It was cutthroat all the way through—a policy that made for the rottenness of trade.
Justin and Leverich had once made tentative investigations as to Hardanger, with the conclusion that there was far more money outside, even if one must go a little more slowly. It was better to go a little more slowly, for the sake of getting so much more out of it in the end. Hardanger was to be kept as a last resort, if everything else failed. Cater had expressed himself as feeling the same way; that was the understanding between them. But now? Backed by this powerful agency, the timoscript assumed disquieting proportions. In the distance, a time not so very far distant either, Justin could see himself squeezed to the wall, the output of his factory bought up by Hardanger for the price of old iron—forced into it, whether he would or no. Why had he been so short-sighted? Why hadn't he made terms himself sooner? But Cater had been a fool to give in to those terms when, by combining, they could have swung trade between them to their own measure. Then Hardanger might have been obliged to seek them, to take their price!—Hardanger, who could afford to laugh at his pretensions now!
He thought of Cater without malice—with, instead, a shrewd, kind philosophy, a sad, clear-visioned impulse of pity mixed with his wonder. So that was the way a man was caught stumbling between the meshes, blinded, dulled, unconsciously maimed of honor, while still feeling himself erect and honest-eyed! There had been no written agreement between them that either should consult the other before seeking Hardanger; but some promises should be all the stronger for not being written.
This thing couldn't happen; in some way, he must get his foot inside the door, so that it couldn't shut on him. There was that note of Lewiston's, due in thirty days—no, twenty-five now. What about that?
Later in the day, after he had been seeing drayful after drayful of boxes leave the factory opposite, Bullen, the foreman, came into the office with some estimates, pointing out the figures with a small strip of steel tubing held absently in his fingers.
While the clerks were all deferential, and those of foreign birth obsequious, Bullen had an air that was more than sturdily independent—the air and the eye of the skilled mechanic. On his own ground he was master, and Justin, with a smile, deferred to him. But Justin broke into Bullen's calculations abruptly, after a while, to ask: