The divinity that made the pattern of John’s life is infinitely mysterious. Some call it luck. Others call it chance. Both are begging names. Mathematicians call it probability—the theory of, and devote a branch of their science to it. Definition is impossible. It is whatever it is that causes, permits or brings one thing to happen in place of all the other things that might just as well have happened. Its commonest manifestations are profoundly obscure. On the first toss of a coin the chances are even between head and tail. On the second toss they change. Why they change nobody can tell; but everyone knows that the odds against the heads coming twice in succession are two to one. If you think of it, how preposterous! Rationally, how can the result of one throw create any probability as to the result of the next? Yet it does. Here evidently is some principle or rhythmic variation that we do not understand. We speak of the law of chance. There is no such thing, for if chance could be reduced to law it would cease to be chance. It is outside any law we know. The mathematical odds are two to one against double heads, yet the head may happen to come ten times in succession, so that the actual predestined odds against[201] the tail showing once in ten throws were ten to one. If the head may come ten times in succession, could it come a thousand times? No one will say it could not. But since it has never happened as a matter of record you can’t imagine it, and the odds against it are what you will.
The fact of oneself is an amazing unlikelihood. The biological chances against one’s getting born as one is, plus the chances against any particular organism getting born at all, must have been billions to one. Yet here one is, thinking it had been precisely inevitable since all eternity. Perhaps it was. There may be no such thing as chance. It may be only that we never know all the factors. It may be. Yet does not everyone believe from experience that survival is a continuous chance?
There are innumerable chances for and against one’s living another day, another hour. These chances are estimated statistically and great companies are formed to bet on them. That is life insurance. The insurance company bets not on the life of an individual, for that would be gambling; it bets that the aggregate life of ten thousand people will correspond to the average duration of human life, and that works out, because those who fall short of the average are balanced by those who exceed it, and there is an average. But any single life is the sport of pure chance. And we know nothing about this fickle arbiter. Therefore we become superstitious. Belief in luck is the only universal religion. Luck is the happy chance. The right thing happens when it is needed. It strains a point[202] to happen. Why it happens, in streaks, why it happens more to some than to others, why to a darling few it happens importunately,—these are questions one asks in a rhetorical sense. There is no answer. Luck and genius may be two aspects of the same thing. Luck happens and genius happens, and there is no accounting for it.
It came to be a notorious saying about John Breakspeare that he was lucky. But people at the same time said he was dangerous, which would mean that he sometimes failed. That was true. He often failed. When that happened he did not curse his luck. It only occurred to him that he had played the wrong chance, and he went on from there. Probably in a case like his there is a highly developed intuition of the winning chance corresponding to a musical composer’s intuition of harmony. The principles of harmony have been partially discovered. But the rhythms of chance are still a mystery.
Certainly it was chance, not luck, that brought John this day to the edge of a small crowd in front of the county court house just as the auctioneer was saying:
“Three thousand—three thousand—three thousand—t-h-r-E-E thous-A-N-D! Three thousand dollars for a first class nail mill. Why, gentlemen, it would fetch more than that by the pound for junk. Three thousand do I hear one? Three thousand do I hear one? GOING, at three—One! Thank you, sir.”
He bowed ironically to John.
“Thirty-one—thirty-one—thirty-one hund-r-e-d! Do-I-hear-two? Do-I-hear-two? Do-I-hear-two? Two[203] over there! Now do I hear three? Do-I-hear-three? Two-do-I-hear-three?”
He was looking at John.
“Going at thirty-two. Are you all DONE? T-h-i-r-t-y-two, ONCE. T-h-i-r-t-y-two, T W I C E. T-h-i-r-t-y-two for the third and—”
John nodded his head.
“Three! Three-I-have, three-I-have, three-I-have. Thirty-three-hundred dollars for an up-to-date iron mill in the great city of Pittsburgh. Thirty-three-hundred. Do I hear four? Four do I hear? Thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three. Going at thirty-three hundred. Going, ONCE. Going, TWICE. Going for the third and last time—SOLD! to that young man over there. Now, gentlemen, the next property to be sold by the decree of the court is a nail mill as is a mill. It has a capacity of—”
John, thrusting his way through the crowd, interrupted.
“Where shall I go to settle for this?”
The auctioneer eyed him suspiciously and relighted his cigar before speaking.
“If I were you,” he squinted, “I’d try the clerk of the court.”
“Where is he?”
“Haven’t you seen him?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“There was no occasion.”
The auctioneer could not stand anything so opaque. It made him sarcastic.
[204]
“If you have been playing booby horse with me and the court,—if you h-a-v-e! Does anybody around here know your figger to look at it?”
“This is a public auction, isn’t it?” John asked.
“Yes-sir-ee.”
“A certain property was put up here for sale?”
“Yes-sir-ee.”
“Well, I bought it,” said John. “Now I want to pay for it. Is that clear? I want to pay for it in cash. Does that make it any clearer? Whom shall I pay? That’s all I want to know.”
The auctioneer saved his ego with a gesture of being exceedingly bored. He turned to the bailiff at his side and wearily tore from his hands a large legal document. “I’ll read this,” he said. “Take him in to the clerk.” Then he resumed—“A nail mill as is a mill, gentlemen, particularly described, if we may read without further interruption, in terms as follows:—”
Half an hour later John walked out of the courthouse with title to a mill he had never seen, guaranteed by the bankruptcy court to exist in Twenty-ninth Street and to contain tools, machines, devices, etc., pertaining to the manufacture of cut iron nails. It was one of four nail mills sold that day on the court house steps.
“Can’t be much of a mill,” mused John. “Still, it doesn’t take much of a mill to be worth thirty-three hundred dollars.”
Not until long afterward, and then not very hard, did the incongruity of this transaction strike his sense of humor. And in fact it was not as irrational as it[205] might seem. He had to have a mill of some sort in which to place Thane. Nail mills were very cheap because they had increased too fast and were falling into bankruptcy. The other bidders undoubtedly were men who not only had examined the mill but who knew the state of the nail industry. It was not likely that they would over-value the property; and he paid only one hundred dollars more than they had been willing to give for it.
The next thing he did was to visit a lawyer whom he favorably remembered from slight acquaintance. That was Jubal Awns,—two small black eyes in a big round head and a pleasant way of saying yes.
John drew a slip of paper from his pocket. He wished to incorporate a company, to be styled the North American Manufacturing Company, Ltd., with an authorized capital of a quarter of a million dollars and three incorporators,—himself, the lawyer Awns an............