"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; _væ 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.