Very much as though he were entering a disreputable place, Matthew Kerrigan slipped furtively from the taxicab into the hallway of the old New York mansion made over into an apartment-house. He stood at the door, portly, important, wrapped in his fur coat. He pushed the button marked "Mr. Sergius." A young Russian butler admitted him.
"Just say a Mr. Smith," Kerrigan announced importantly. Across the Russian boy's harsh features there was the shadow of contempt. He reappeared in an instant and held open a door for Kerrigan.
Kerrigan had been expecting something of the dark, perfumed, cheap interior of a palmist's studio; or the meretricious mystery of a clairvoyant apartment with its crystal glass on faded velvet. Even Kerrigan's untrained Broadwayish mind was awe-struck by the huge, somber living-room into which he was ushered. He sensed, rather than understood, the richness of the pictures and hangings, the beautiful ceiling. Only in books and papers had he seen anything like the great white borzoi lying before the roaring fireplace like a patient cat. The man he had come to see was sitting by the fire; dead-white features against a black background. Lean, emaciated, with his full black beard, black cassock, and high black headdress of the Greek monk, he seemed more spirit than body. He looked at Kerrigan with the insolence of a prince.
"Yes?" He did not ask Kerrigan to sit down.
Kerrigan had planned a neat speech, somewhat humorous, cynical, patronizing, but it had fled from his memory. He felt a sort of vague terror, as though this man were probing, uninvited, inside his soul and mind.
"I heard—down-town—" he muttered.
"Yes!" the monk said impatiently. "What do you want me to do?"
"I wondered, Mr.—ah, Mr.—"
"Brother Sergius!"
"I wondered, Brother Sergius, if it were possible to hold converse—or see—or have some communication—some certain communication—with a person who 's been dead some time, some fourteen years—"
The monk was looking at him keenly. What had this well-fed business man, with the sweeping mustache and obviously massaged face, to do with the dim inhabitants of Death?
"How did this man die?" the monk Sergius asked.
"By accident," Matthew Kerrigan answered. "He drowned himself."
"What interest have you in him?"
"They say he killed himself on account of me," Kerrigan's voice broke out as though he were pleading to a judge. "It's not true!"
"You don't know whether it's true or not?" The Greek monk was studying Kerrigan's terrified features.
"Can it be done?" Kerrigan was surprised at himself, so hoarse his voice sounded, so sincere his tones. "I must know about it. Can it be done?"
"It can be done." The monk nodded.
"If there 's any fee—" Kerrigan suggested.
"There is no fee." The monk laughed contemptuously. "I act for the good of souls, when it is necessary." He watched Kerrigan intently for some minutes. "On Monday morning—at two in the morning—if the weather is clear, I will send for you. Leave your name and address with the butler." And he turned again to the book he was reading, oblivious of Kerrigan, as a great lord might be of the peasant standing awkward and awe-stricken in his presence.
Financial agents admire Matthew Kerrigan. He is the sort of person who gives them no trouble. They are more cordial toward him than they are toward great bankers or great Wall Street men. For great bank-presidents and stock-manipulators wage terrific and lyrical battles on the terrain of commerce, and though there are great Leipzigs and Jenas, there are also great Waterloos. But Kerrigan is safe. He takes no chances. His factories in Yonkers purr, day in, day out, making by the million that simple fastening device for women's corsets that has made him several fortunes.
"That's the way to make money," they will tell you. "Just hit upon something simple and necessary, like a hair-pin or a shoe-horn, that no other person has thought of. Make it and sell it to the public and bank your money in gilt-edged securities. Look at Matthew Kerrigan! And not fifteen years ago he was a clerk in an accountant's office."
Along Broadway, too, he is known favorably, in that happy-go-easy circle of minor actors, wine-merchants, and women aspirants for the stage and movies. Head waiters are deferential, and slightly contemptuous toward him. He is a good spender, and yet— There is something repulsive, unhealthy in the way he enjoys food and drink and looks at women.
"Six things doth the Lord hate; yea, seven, which are an abomination unto him": and the first is haughty eyes. I cannot conceive that as denoting the light that shines from eyes lit from a sense of high and noble lineage, of chivalrous ideals, of just power. I translate it by the eyes of Matthew Kerrigan—those gray, full orbs which look about a room stating that there is no man present whose equal and superior Kerrigan is now. Eyes which tell you Kerrigan has money, and is prepared to spend money for what he wants. You know that man will get good measure for his money—shrewdness and sophistication gleam from them in a wary, reptilian way.
"They may call this the Rube City," Morgenthal, the little real-estate broker, announced at the Elks' Club, "but, believe me, there 's one guy in town they can't put anything over on, and that's Kerrigan. He 's wise. I tell you, boy, he 's wise. Did you hear about that baby at the Winter Garden that tried to pull that hard-luck story on him? You didn't, eh? Well, let me tell you something: She got hers...."
There is one other place you may collect facts about Matthew Kerrigan and that is the down-town lunch-rooms of the financial district—uncomfortable, clattering places where you eat on a high stool at a counter and compute the price of your meal to the cashier as you go out. There is a race of clerks there, old men, natty but shabby of dress, pinched in the face, gray-headed, stoop-shouldered. Some of them are bitter and many are garrulous. They specialize in the early histories of well-known men.
"I remember him when he was a bum in the street," they will tell you of nearly all of them; "when he had n't got a nickle for a shoe-shine. Did you ever hear how he got on his feet?" And then will follow either a sordid or a criminal story. And from them you can learn the story of Matthew Kerrigan and Leonard Holt.
An office friend had told Kerrigan of an eccentric inventor who lived out in his home town of Englewood, a poor, poverty-stricken, scatter-brained mechanic who plodded in a broken-down cottage on the outskirts of Englewood at magnificent and foolish dreams, such as aviation and perpetual motion. When Kerrigan went out to see his friend he was taken, on a rainy afternoon, to pass the dull hours, on a visit to the man Holt. Beyond an occasional dunning tradesman, who sneered at him, and an occasional equally poor friend who remonstrated with him and urged him to take a position in a factory, Holt saw no one. And when Kerrigan was introduced, he talked like a starved fanatic. Tall; loosely built, as though his jointures were precarious; stooped; with great greasy hands; sandy-haired; with burning blue eyes and a high forehead, and a listless mouth and chin—one might have been pardoned for believing him an impractical fool. He pointed out a large system of wheels and pulleys, of weights and springs. It was the perpetual-motion model on which he was working.
"But I thought perpetual motion had been given up as impossible," Kerrigan objected.
"They have been making strides toward it," Holt answered. "The Struttapparat was a great advance. Of course a small quantity of radium is necessary. But, still, energy may be—it is just possible—created mechanically. They disprove perpetual motion by the hypothesis of the conservation of energy, which is not proven—"
And so he went on at great length in his jerky sentences, while Kerrigan listened, picking up things and dropping them boredly—a Bunsen burner, a pair of pliers, a tripod—what not. He lifted two pieces of asbestos, clamped queerly together by two long pieces of flexible metal. As he toyed with it the thing came apart in his hands. A snap, and it was together again. Kerrigan looked up in interest.
"What's this for?"
"A little fastening trick. Of no practical use—except, perhaps, for women's corsets!" Holt laughed. Kerrigan was silent.
"Patented?" he suggested, after a while.
"Everything I have is patented," Holt said with a touch of pride.
"May I bring it along," Kerrigan asked, "to show it to a friend?"
"Why, certainly!" Holt nodded. "Now, if you understand that the energy develops in geometric progression—"
And very efficiently did Matthew Kerrigan show Holt's fastening device to his friend—a prominent banker who had never heard of Kerrigan before, but had always money to sink, at a price, in worthy enterprises. Kerrigan returned to Holt.
"There may be something in that little thing of yours. Will you take a hundred dollars for it outright?"
But that intuition which sometimes warns the unworldly minded, and that mulish obstinacy which some men have, made Holt stand out for a share of the profits, and unwillingly Kerrigan and his associate had to allow it.
"It's a hold-up," they complained to each other bitterly, "but we can't do anything about it!"
So Holt was admitted to the profits of his patent, and for a while he dreamed dreams of wealth untellable; a wealth that would enable him to send his motherless three-year-old daughter to boarding-school and college and leave him in peace to work, with all appliances to hand—Stuttapparat and radium and everything—at the problem which had baffled scientific dreamers since the dawn of intelligence.
"The model on a big scale," he figured, "would cost ten thousand dollars—" and on his visions went, unhampered, unselfish, unpractical. He wanted to benefit the world by his discovery—and to get a little applause, a little credit.
I don't know how they do these things, but they do them, and they must do them skilfully, for they evade the law, the iron law which insists on justice for all men. Kerrigan laid his hand feelingly on Holt's shoulder.
"I 'm sorry, old man," he said with that sincere stop in his voice. "We made a mistake. It's not practical."
Holt had received many blows, and was nearly impervious to them. He smiled wistfully.
"Perhaps I can do something," Kerrigan continued. "I might get a little for your rights from some one who will take a chance. I should like you to get something for it. I led you to believe so much in it—"
They were very generous, for they knew there were millions ahead of them, so they gave Holt a thousand dollars, and he buckled to again at his grotesque machine. A few weeks later some well-intentioned Christian told him the truth and commented fulsomely on what a fool Holt was. The last blow was the fatal one. It split his heart in two.
Methodically he made arrangements for his child to be brought up in a convent, and he left what money he had for the purpose. He took the train to New York and crossing on the ferry-boat he climbed to the upper deck. He sat huddled up in a corner, gray and shabby of clothes, gray and shabby of face, until the boat was half-way over. He stood up on the seat and jumped, and the noise his jump made was drowned in the clatter of the paddles.
Tall, lank, oblivious, unpractical—your economist will tell you that the man was of no value to the community, and was better dead. And your religious person will tell you that the crime of suicide merits hell-fire. But somehow I feel that for these poor men with the light heads and the light bodies, and the heavy, heavy hearts, there is somewhere Understanding and Great Tenderness....
All this they will tell you, the garrulous and bitter old men, and while they inveigh against Kerrigan, you see somewhere in their eyes a glint of admiration and of envy. The arena of Wall Street differs little from the arena of Neronic Rome; v? victis is the motto and the rule of the game. And before you can leave them in contemptuous horror they will tap you on the knee, gloatingly dramatic.
"And now Kerrigan is going to marry Holt's daughter! Can you beat it? Can you beat that?"
He had gone—perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps out of the depths of sentimentality that men of his type have somewhere in the bottom of their hearts—with his cousin, the chubby little minister of religion, to the prize-giving at the convent in Newark. The bishop was there, and a play of Dunsany's was given; a few poems recited, and a song or two sung.
His eye had been attracted all through the exercises by a tall girl in a white dress with a blue sash—a slim girl with hazel eyes and light-brown hair who in the distance had the profile of a Saint Cecilia—a Saint Cecilia with a somewhat broad, honest mouth and good firm teeth.
"That's an attractive girl," he told his cousin.
The little cherubic minister, who worried in secret about his cousin's soul, was delighted. He dreamed often of having his cousin Matthew reformed by the influence of some sweet woman. A Dominican religious brought her forward.
"Miss Holt, Miss Agnes Holt." Kerrigan was introduced to her. He talked banalities to her for a half-hour, when she shyly took her leave of him, blushing furiously under the glances of her schoolmates. When he was alone Kerrigan smiled queerly, with a distant look in his eyes.
At forty-five there comes always to a man of Kerrigan's type, with the first gray hairs, the fear of age. There will be an inevitable day when he will no longer attract women, and when, in the bars and about the clubs, he will be referred to as an old man of another generation, and there arises in his mind the fear of loneliness in the fifties and the sixties, with Death hurrying breathlessly toward him day by day. The only thing to do then is to begin anew with a young wife, far away from the swirl of the city.
"It's the only life," they say pathetically; "a wife and kiddies, a little bit of land somewhere, away from all this stuff." And they wave their hands at the gleaming glasses and the pictures on the bar-room walls. "There's nothing to it," they aver; and they drink up and have another one.
He met the religious as he was going away.
"That Miss Holt," he said, "is a very attractive girl." It was the only adjective he knew to fit her.
"Yes," the nun agreed. "We all like her. She 's been with us nearly all her life. Her father died when she was young. He was an inventor; Leonard Holt was his name."
"The name is familiar." Kerrigan was shocked, but his self-restraint was superb. "Died after some business depression,............