Señor Cardonova lifted his beautiful hands in an expressive gesture.
“You Americans! How precipitate! But you are entirely correct. I will come, as you say, to the point.
“I am from Mexico, Señor.” He waited; Ernest’s eyes narrowed just a trifle, then became blank again. “You are not too surprised? No it is not so.
“Señor Barbour, there is a faction in Mexico that is very rich. But it has few guns, little gunpowder. It is a faction that has been vilely insulted and attacked. I need not say how, or by whom. Territory has been torn from my country, unjustly.”
There was a long pause, thick and heavy. Ernest’s expression did not change except for a slow and deliberate compression of his lips. He still regarded his visitor steadily.
“Not only that,” went on the Mexican gentleman, “but my country is in chaos. Our faction desires to control, subdue it, whip it into order and civilization. Our population is strangely mixed: barbarians and Indians and Spaniards. It must be made one, the banditry subdued, law and dignity brought about. For many things, therefore, do we need guns and gunpowder, and ten good cannon.”
Ernest swung about in his chair, one strong hand clenched upon his desk, his eyes staring through the window that looked down to the river. His face was like moulded iron. It was youthful, but not young. It had never been young.
“What made you think we could do this?” he asked in his low and monotonous voice. “What made you think we would do this?”
“I did not know, for certain,” replied Cardonova softly. “I have merely tried. You have competitors, yes, much larger people. But what they made is not good enough for us. We need the best, guns that will not fail, gunpowder that will fire, cannon that will accomplish. All these things you can give us.”
Ernest still stared through the window. He was very pale. “Let me see your credentials,” he said, without looking at the other man.
“But with pleasure,” murmured the Mexican. He lifted a small black bag he had brought in with him, and which he had laid on the floor between his feet. He opened it, laid upon the desk sealed documents and papers. And quite incidentally he laid beside them a well-loaded, well-polished pistol, which Ernest immediately detected as having been made by Barbour & Bouchard. His mouth twitched for an instant. He lifted the papers, read them carefully, kept glancing up from them to observe the Mexican’s serene and smiling face. Then he thrust them back.
“I am promising nothing,” he said abruptly. “But, what do you need?”
“Ten thousand rifles, two thousand kegs of gunpowder, ten cannon,” replied the other swiftly, and as he spoke his teeth glittered against the darkness of his face.
If Ernest were dumfounded and stupefied at this, he gave no sign. His pale eyes did not waver from the other’s eyes.
“That is a large order,” he said gravely. “A very large order. It would take some little time to make. Our facilities are not quite in order yet for all this. Some little time. We have on hand,” he added slowly, “and can produce in one week, two thousand rifles. It would take four weeks longer for the rest.”
The Mexican shrugged, shook his head violently. “Two weeks, only!” he cried.
Ernest stood up, and began to pace the floor measuredly. He spoke, not looking at the Mexican: “You realize, of course, what this means. If we are discovered, you are ruined. And so am I. And more than I: my father, our partner, our whole lives and all our efforts.” He stopped abruptly and faced Cardonova. “I will be honest: your offer tempts me, even though,” he added, smiling faintly, “we have not yet discussed a price, which, naturally, would be very high. But tempted as I am, it is a fearful thing to risk. We lose everything, while you—”
“Merely lose my life?” smiled the Mexican. “Ah, do not frown, I am not annoyed, nor flippant. I can see very clearly that to a young man dike you life is not so valuable as success. My life, you think, would be nothing compared to your ruin. Who knows? Perhaps you are right.”
“It would,” said Ernest thoughtfully, half to himself, “be treason.”
At the word, the Mexican’s face became inscrutable. “That is a word,” he said, almost indifferently. “And words are for children. Not for men. Especially not for men who make the weapons of death. As you make them. Words are for saints, for the small babies, for women. They cloud meanings, like breath on glass. Let us not,” he implored, “exchange words without meanings.”
And the two realists faced each other, grim and quiet.
“Your offer?” asked Ernest.
The Mexican smiled subtly. “Exactly twice your customary price.”
Ernest shook his head; on his forehead there was a dim glisten.
“Not enough. It must be three times.”
“You,” said the Mexican, without rancor and still smiling, “are a thief. That is too high a price, even for honor. And I am not buying honor,” he goaded. He knew his man, now, thoroughly. For just a second Ernest’s face flickered. “No,” continued the Mexican gently, “I am not buying honor. I am not Satan. I am only a poor Mexican patriot who is trying to drive an honest bargain. You spoke of being honest: I believe you desire only your antagonist to be honest, my dear Señor Barbour, for it is impossible for you to be honest.
“I do not hold it against you. Honest men live on charity in their age; the almhouses are full of men who never stole a copper penny. Honest men are the fools and the saints, and you and I are neither.”
“You forget,” said Ernest with his faint bleak smile, “that I am risking something more than honor: I am risking my future, the future of my father, my brother, my partner. If we are caught, the price I demand from you now will be nothing. It is three times, still. Three times. And even then I cannot promise you.”
The Mexican studied him for a long moment; Ernest’s expression was unreadable. Then Cardonova opened his bag again, very deliberately, and began to draw from it small oblong packages. He opened them, and soon one thousand gold bills were spread in crisp beauty upon the desk. Cardonova regarded them with adoration.
“Five thousand beautiful American dollars!” he murmured. He touched them with a lover’s hand. “How miraculous, how splendid!” He lifted his eyes to Ernest’s face, and they were limpid and radiant as though they had looked on ineffable loveliness. “This—now. At the end of this week, ten thousand more. I am weak, I know, but I make this bargain: upon loading, fifty thousand more. And in five discreet banks in New York shall be deposited immediately to your name sixty-five thousand more, to be delivered to you upon the day the shipment crosses the border.
“That is my offer, Señor Barbour. My first offer, my last. It is yours to accept or reject.”
Ernest sat down, a little quickly. The glisten had become a glare on his forehead. He stared at the gold as though hypnotized. And Cardonova smiled, smoked gently and serenely, and waited.
Suddenly Ernest put his hand over his face as if to shut out the sight of the gold. Cardonova could see his young lips, livid and compressed.
“There is little risk, if any, except to me,” said the Mexican with an artless air. “You will have the money on hand. I am in your power. We are in your power. You can betray us, easily enough. But on looking at you, I knew you would not betray us. Not because of—honor. But profit. And profits are not bedfellows of honor. You are not a man for pittances. There is destiny in you.” He waited, suggestively. But Ernest did not stir; the Mexican could still see only those lips, which had taken on a grayish tinge.
“There is little risk,” repeated the Mexican. “Boats hired by us will tie up at your wharf, innocently, in daylight. They will be loaded. You will know nothing of their destination. Thirty days thereafter you may claim the money in the banks.”
Ernest dropped the hand from his face. He looked drained. “This is a lot of money. And Mexico is poor. Who is helping you?”
Cardonova shrugged, smiled, but his eyes brightened like those of a savage animal. “Ah, Señor, you are asking questions! This is a
matter of business, the guns and the gunpowder. You will have your money. That is all that must concern you.”
Ernest got up again, and stood by the window. The spring sun on the river was like a blazing white light. Flatboats stood at the wharfs. The foundry hummed, the men sang and shouted in the distance. He put his hand to his forehead, wiped away the sweat.
“You know, no doubt,” he said, without turning, “that the Sessions Steel Company holds thirty-three and a third per cent of our stock. You must have familiarized yourself with all this, or you would not have come to me.
“I cannot consult my father in this. Nor our partner, Armand Bouchard. My father is one of those men who have honor, and Armand—he has reason, but this is one thing he would not allow. He came to this country for refuge. No, this is one thing he would not allow.
“But I must consult someone else. I must talk to Mr. Gregory Sessions.” He turned to the Mexican, who looked wary and startled. “We can trust Mr. Sessions,” he added, and there was something in his tone that reassured Cardonova, made him smile again, very subtly.
Within half an hour they had walked to the Sessions Steel Company, and had been admitted to Gregory’s office. Ernest, in an amazingly small number of words, told Gregory the whole story, while Cardonova sat in silence, just smiling, but seeing all things. He was greatly relieved; he had studied Gregory Sessions’ face for the past ten minutes, missing nothing, and he knew that here was another realist, above words.
Gregory listened, his lips pursed, leaning back in his chair, his fine hands playing with a pen, his face slightly averted. Then when Ernest had stopped talking, he lifted his head and surveyed both the other men blandly, almost indulgently. He lifted a shoulder; he was a little pale in spite of his smile.
“Of course,” he said in his elegant voice, “I can see that we are not to tell Joseph or Armand.” He surveyed Ernest’s suddenly startled face serenely. Ernest had expected consideration, thought, judicious pursings and hummings. The serenity of Gregory, his manner, which showed that he had not even hesitated, not even thought of refusing, startled him. “No,” said Gregory, “it would not do to tell them. It can all be arranged. You must tell them, or I will, that there is a discreet Army purchase, through my brother,” he added with an ironical smile, “and nothing is to be said about it. A trial offer, or some such trumpery. We can work all this out better at our leisure, Ernest. Joseph is too innocent to ask many questions, and Armand is too discreet. Armand is a Frenchman, who having smelt profit with a slight taint on it, will say nothing and go ahead, provided he is not insistently asked to sniff the odor. Or offered explanations. The French detest explanations. And rightly, too.”
Ernest stared at that smiling and cynical face with its satyrish expression; he suddenly winced when the ironical eyes touched him. He was still young enough to feel a sharp though passing sickness. Then instantly he was ashamed of himself; he was becoming “soft.” But: Gregory Sessions, the “old” American, the gentleman! He never liked Gregory after that, and as the years passed he was to hate him. Hate him, he was to think derisively, because he had shown no sentimentality to a young man who hated sentimentality, had betrayed no momentary scruple to a young man who despised scruple!
Within an astoundingly short time all details were roughly arranged. Gregory figured with precision the amount of steel needed, and Ernest figured with him, while Cardonova sat in smiling silence and examined his fingernails and played with his watch chain.
When Ernest and Gregory were alone a little later, Gregory said “Munitions makers must bargain with strange devils. They are the most neutral people in the world! Wars are nothing to them, as they never are to practical men. Red devil win, blue devil lose. It is all the same to the munitions maker. Panderers to hate. Let the fools hate: the merchant takes his profit, and remains neutral.” Which showed, to a suddenly humiliated Ernest, that Gregory was a very astute man, and that he had missed nothing. “You are doing very well, my Ernest,” he said, smiling. “But fortune always does well by those destined by her to succeed.”
He walked to the door with Ernest, his hand on the young man’s shoulder. His slender and elegant figure swayed gracefully beside Ernest’s shorter and stockier one.
“You know where I live, Ernest? I have told my niece, Amy Drumhill, a great deal about you. Tomorrow is Sunday. Suppose I tell her you will come to dinner tomorrow, at three? Splendid! At three, then, and we can discuss many things at our leisure.”
CHAPTER XIII
It had been six months since George Barbour and his family had returned to England.
No one ever knew what Ernest thought. He professed to think certain things, to agree, to concede, to use hackneyed phrases; he pretended to believe many things, to use the thought processes of others. But he did all this only for certain effects, certain results. What he really thought, what words and phrases he used to himself, what his mental patterns were, no one ever knew. At times, he was an exceedingly fine actor.
He professed to be utterly unaware of his father’s new constraint toward him, a withdrawing of the old confidence in some measure. He pretended not to see Martin’s long slow glances, nor the turning aside of his head. He listened with his slight smile, which was beginning already to take on itself a certain convulsiveness, to his mother’s frank championing of him in the George Barbour affair:
“Well, I must say, Joseph, you don’t do the lad justice! Georgie was a rascal, you admit that, and a thief. When I was a girl they hung men in chains for that on the gibbet. Yet, our lad exposes him, and you berate him for it. You ought to get down on your knees and thank him for finding that scoundrel out in time.
“Never mind, Ernest,” she would add, turning to him protectively, “I understand. And I agree with you. It was only right. He was a thief. He was robbing us all. We want no thieves about us, do we? You were quite right.”
“Of course I was right, Ma,” replied Ernest gently. “This world is hard enough for honest men, without tolerating thieves.”
Martin rarely cared to attract Ernest’s eye to him, or to speak to him. But now he looked at Ernest long and gravely as he said to his mother: “Ernest doesn’t care a fig, Ma, for Uncle Georgie being a thief. He’s wanted to get him out for a long time; it was luck that played into his hands just in time. But he’ll pretend he’s agreeing with you about the thieving part, because that’s what you understand. You know what they call that, don’t you, Ernest? Hypocrisy.”
“You always did like words, didn’t you, Martin?” replied Ernest, not with cynicism nor immature bravado, but in the tone one uses in boredom to compliment a child. He walked out of the room. “He’s a villain,” thought Martin despondently, “but he doesn’t look like one. I can scarce believe it, myself. But he is surely a villain.”
The next day Martin looked for his brother in his office, but he was not there. He went into the shops. The main shop was long and cluttered and dim, acrid with the odor of gunpowder, strong with grease, the air floating with clouds of iron and steel dust from the grinding machines. The wood flooring and even the walls shook with the tremors of the engines in the next shop. The small high windows were open and let in floods of warm spring sunshine, which spilled over prodigally onto mounds of half-finished guns on the floor, and onto the small humming machinery at which men worked, polishing and grinding. Joseph and Armand stood with Ernest near an idle machine, discussing with its operator the reason why it failed to run. Joseph and Armand were oil-stained and odorous, their arms streaked, their faces greasy masks. Ernest had removed his coat, and stood in white shirt sleeves, bending and examining the machine, the sun on his thick light hair, his large face scowling attentively.
Martin disliked the shops. Something in them frightened him. A completed gun frightened while it fascinated him with its utilitarian beauty and smoothness. He was apt to be made ill by strong smells, and gunpowder made his head ache. He was apprehensive of machines; something in their timed and impersonal monotony filled him w
ith a sense of obscure terror. Sometimes he would think: A man could die before them, and spill his blood, or roll in agony, and they’d turn on and on, or roll and reverse, forever and forever, without losing an instant or knowing anything. That anything, even machinery, could be senseless before anguish and death, appalled him. It was like a nightmare, like a hint of the vast Impersonality and bitter mechanism that waited outside the boundaries of reality for the souls of men. He sweated before the spectre of a dead mechanism that moved in relentless rhythms, that accomplished, created, fulfilled, without life or warmth or desire. He was becoming convinced, to his horror, that God was like this: was some awful Machine that ground on, helplessly.
So more and more he stayed out of the shops, but all his working day in his own stuffy little office was besieged by the malignant voices of the machines, their monotonous, their threatening, their guttural and triumphant voices. He had not been in the shops for a long time, and today they seemed smellier, noisier and more appalling than ever. He walked over to his brother, who was too absorbed in the refractory machine to notice his approach. Ernest’s head was almost in the maw of the machine, his fingers pushing and poking tentatively at various springs and bolts and wheels. Joseph and Armand looked at Martin silently, waiting for him to speak. But he was looking at his brother.
“Ernest,” he said, raising his voice above the infernal battering of the machines, “Mr. Beveridge has just sent over a boy from the lumber mill to ask you for your answer about Uncle George’s house. He wants to know if you have considered his offer?”
Upon George’s leaving America, he had turned over his home to Ernest for six thousand dollars, of which Ernest at that time had paid two thousand, and the final four thousand after his negotiations with Señor Cardonova. Two weeks before he had been offered nine thousand by Mr. Edwin Beveridge, who was the superintendent of the Galby Lumber Mills, in which mills Gregory Sessions had a considerable interest. He had expressed his pleasure at the offer, and had announced that he would probably accept it. But something, apparently, had caused him to delay in the closing of the deal.
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