Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 692
Kratch writhed in his chair. Notterdam noticed that he was perspiring. This seemed to him to be intolerable. Why should a lean man sweat on a mild day? This thing must be stopped. It was unreasonable to think that Kratch in his then condition could measure himself against Ermingarde.
She was going on:
‘The big earnings that pay the salaries and overhead charges have come from Mr. Notterdam’s series of economic textbooks with their half million sales. And then from Mr. Holzhauer’s amorous...’
Notterdam heard himself say suddenly:
‘Everyone in the room knows the figures for those biographies.’
He had reached the end of his tether.
Mr. Walpfortzheimer strode before the table. He was noticeably pale. He asked Mr. Notterdam if he was to be accused of rendering false figures. Notterdam answered:
‘You sure are, Walpfortzheimer.’ He added genially: You need not be worried. You are covered. You had your orders. Figures can be made to say anything under pressure.’
Kratch remained sunk in his deep chair. He was breathing rather heavily and looking at the floor.
‘It isn’t,’ Notterdam heard himself say, ‘a matter of figures. People who are satisfied with slow, solid progress will be satisfied by my figures. People who aren’t won’t.... It’s a matter of sentiment.... Sentimentality.... You might almost call it superstition.’
His voice halted. He wondered how he had thought of that. He did not want to go on talking. But Kratch said nothing. Nothing could be done till Kratch actually spoke. His eyes were vengeful.
The grey, lemur-like Pennsylvanian Holzhauer was on his feet.
He said easily, resting his two hands well behind him over his kidneys:
‘As the one indispensable subordinate with the exception of Miss Bergenheimer, I will permit myself to assert that Mr. Notterdam has exactly hit it. It’s superstition - the superstition that, if you aren’t going up like a rocket, you’re planted in a cabbage-bed.’
He said that if no one else proposed to say anything he would fill the breach till they did. By instructing Mr. Lessington Holmes who was in that country for instruction. He wished to explain to a learner how exactly this scene represented the constituents of which their great republic was made up. With the exception of Mr. Lessington Holmes himself everyone there was a representative American. He could in that room hear the grinding of the basic rocks on which Gotham was a-building.
Mr. Kratch represented the tenacity of Holland; Mr. Notterdam was the Anglo-Saxon hundred per cent ingredient; Miss Brooke Phelps was pure Anglo-Saxon Massachusetts too. He himself was a pretty pure Philadelphia German. Those were the three great strains that had worked in the first making of their distinguished Revolution. The rest of them were of the exotic races that gave to the streets of their city the reputation of exhibiting the rarest and most gorgeous blossoms of feminine perfection....
But all those races were, in tempers, and, yes, in superstitions, excruciatingly hostile one to the other....
He went on talking something like that, filling in the gap. As if he thought that Kratch was too ill to speak collectedly.
Perhaps he was.
In the name of Heaven, Notterdam asked himself, why were they going on with this useless torture? He would have suggested adjourning the meeting. But Kratch was going away that afternoon for months.... What did he want? Perhaps nothing more than some expression of agreement with his views. Or perhaps of esteem! You could not tell.
He looked with new attention at the long figure in the chair, Kratch continuing to regard his feet.... You do not look carefully at people with whom you are in daily intercourse.... Well, that was Kratch.... Lean, sharp featured with the bright, opaque eyes. A poet of commerce. But why in thunder did his poetic views have to take just that angle? He desired with passion that what Notterdam advocated should be swept away. He desired it sickly - like a woman with longings because she is with child. Why? It could not be just the desire to be in tune with what he considered to be American modernism. Not merely because of that....
Mr. Holzhauer was still talking. About American characteristics. A good fellow Holzhauer. He was talking to carry off the period of awkward silence... He was saying that old-fashioned thoroughness played as large a part in American success as — call them peppy methods. He was pointing out the tremendous part that tradition played in American life; ‘If you came to my Pennsylvania Dutch valleys,’ he was saying. ‘I could shew you archaisms of thought and habit that would put to shame Zulu kraals. For the matter of that we are sitting actually in the Directors’ sanctum of the oldest publishing firm in the world...’
A singular convulsion passed over Kratch’s face. He screwed his lips nearly up into his thin nose and pressed his crossed feet tight together. His eyes were shut.
Notterdam opened his lips to call the meeting to a close.
But Kratch was now looking at him. Malevolently. He could not climb down before a glance like that....
And Kratch, leaning his arm on the back of his chair and his head on his hand, croaked sardonically:
‘Finished talking, Holzhauer?’
His face was singularly sallow and dark as if with subcutaneous blood. Notterdam never remembered his face looking like that. The left edge of the upper lip turned up in a snarl. One should look at one’s daily associates more often and more inquisitively.
Holzhauer turned his thin body over its hip easily towards Kratch.
‘I’ve got only one thing I want to say,’ he said, ‘but I am ready to fill the gap for hours until you’re ready with your - eh - pronunciamento.’ He swung again towards Lessington Holmes....
A queer, daring, intelligent fellow Holzhauer....
‘You see, Mr. Kratch,’ he was saying, ‘a hundred per center if ever there was one, here in contest with Mr. Notterdam...’ And Notterdam was two hundred percentishly striving to preserve their old American traditions.... He supposed that that was in effect what he was doing.
The House, Mr. Holzhauer said, had been founded in 1792. Mr. Kratch believed that it should be brought up to date by using it to float all the lubricity that he, Holzhauer, could provide. No house but that of Post, Gellatly & Jeaffreson — as Mr. Holmes himself had remarked in his inaudible manner - could have dared to publish his - Holzhauer’s - Amorous Life of Marshal Saxe. To that Mr. Notterdam had resigned himself. The publication of sumptuous biographies was in the tradition of the House. If in such matter the public taste had changed that was not the fault of the House of Post. It was their duty to provide the public with sound entertaining instruction on subjects that the public found tasty. But Mr. Holzhauer went on in a rather deeper voice:
‘Though in our concordious lyre mine is that particular string I cannot help wishing that the old traditions of my country may be preserved. And not only for their own sakes...’ He added that if they were not retained and indeed emphasized he should feel some doubt about remaining with the House. He would experience considerable fear of feeling on his collar the traditional policeman’s hand.
Kratch exclaimed:
‘You damned fool. Don’t you think that with my money...’
Mr. Holzhauer answered:
‘I must confess that I feel better protected by the traditions of the House.’ Graft had a way of breaking down when it came against the real strong feelings of the country. And the real strong feeling of the country, Mr. Holzhauer presumed to say, though he deferred to Mr. Kratch, had a trick of now and then manifesting itself very strongly on behalf of decency, the old traditions and standard authors; ‘So that if this assembly were really democratic, which it isn’t, my vote would very decidedly go.
With an extraordinary bound for a man even of his normal activity Kratch had left his overturned chair and was before the seated figure of Notterdam. He struck the table with the edge of his trowel and exclaimed:
‘That fellow is in your pay. To hell with Thomas Hardy. To hell with Alfred Tennyson. To hell with Carlyle and Emerson. To hell with modern writers! You think you can turn them into classics.’ Drops of moisture spattered from his cropped moustache. He gazed agonizedly and violently at Notterdam, his Adam’s apple working convulsively between the thin, dark strings of his neck.
‘It is an un-American policy,’ he shouted. ‘You are at heart only an alien!’
‘You haven’t...’ Notterdam said. ‘It isn’t....’
It certainly was not drink....”
Kratch paused and breathed heavily. He mumbled:
‘I shouldn’t say that...’
He heaved his body round over his purple hands that rested on the table and stretched his hatchet chin over his shoulder. The assembly fairly quivered behind him.
‘Gentlemen,’ he exclaimed hoarsely, ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Mr. Notterdam is as good a citizen as I. Better. I acknowledge that.’ He dropped his face again towards his partner and his spine shook. He gazed intently into Notterdam’s face with his vivid eyes.
‘I put it to you, Joe,’ he said, ‘is this an American enterprise?...You say you have brought the house to the paying stage. I admit that. But is that an American ideal? Isn’t it your remains of Europeanism? How can you be content to mark time? I appeal to you to jettison your old prejudices....’
He went off on a long, useless speech. He began delving into their pasts.
He said that he remembered Notterdam himself saying on just such an occasion that that was the American way of handling things. If an affair of yours marked time you scrapped it. That had been over the Talky Times that they had started in San Francisco.
But he did not propose to scrap Post, Gellatly & Jeaffreson. He wanted to do better by the House. His ideal would be to make it the one publishing firm in New York. Not in the sense of its being the premier or even the typical one but in that of its being practically the sole one.... He went away into his old dreams as if he were thinking aloud. He spoke even more pleadingly to Notterdam:
‘You remember that to be a very old ideal of mine. We discussed it even in our Spokane days....’
Notterdam felt that, as he sat there, motionless, without expression, unyielding by so much as a look, he was like an executioner. Spokane days! Seattle days!... Alberta days! He was wiping them off the record. In those days what principle would he have gone back on - to be in a lark with Bill! Then what was this all for — all this unhappiness?
It was a desperate pass to have to come to. He had spent his last penny for any whim of Bill’s. In Alberta days. In San Diego nights. Now, how were they better off fighting, he for security, Bill for what?... An ideal. Perhaps....
Bill was saying:
‘I have always admitted you knew more about publishing than I ever did or could. You asserted that such an ideal was a vain dream because of the mere mechanical difficulties of... oh, distribution. Yet even you have admitted that, if it was compassable, I was the man to compass it.’
With immense difficulty Notterdam forced himself to say:
‘I admit that to the full, Bill.’
Kratch stretched out his thin hand with an ineffable smile. It was as usual horny - but scorchingly hot and dry.
He went on talking. He was leaning, by now, sideways with one hand on the table, addressing himself by turns to listeners behind his back, by turns to his partner.
... To do it would call for an immense amount of time, of worry and of work. Well, he was ready to find all those. It was with the full view of having eventually to find them that he had requested Mr. Notterdam to assist him in the business of the House and some of those gentlemen to act under Mr. Notterdam’s orders. But he had bought the controlling interest of the House only with the intention of making it a stepping-stone to immensely larger things. He might not reach his ideal but he would be going towards it and they would be helping. In the interests of the national spirit and of those economies in working that were the ideal of the nation. He was ready now to continue towards that aim. ‘But I cannot agree,’ he said with great emphasis, ‘even to contemplate this enterprise unless I am certain that the House and you all are solid behind me. And with the utmost distinctness I say that I cannot agree to the policy that the House is now pursuing. If you play for safety you must expect to see me lose heart.... Interest.... Loyalty even....’
He paused for a moment and then began again.
‘What do we, in this day, want with safety? Who of us is really to be deterred from his ends by... the fear, metaphorically, of the policeman’s hand on his collar?
...’ He went on and on.
Notterdam was aware that, from Kratch’s point of view, there was a good deal in what he said. He needed moral support. He always had.
But Kratch was exhibiting a desire to get too much moral support within those walls. That must be stopped. Notterdam had a pretty good idea of his friend’s underlying motives for making the present scene. If, that is to say, he could with his eloquence or his promises, bewilder the meeting into expressing a strong desire to back Kratch, Notterdam might at least be made to falter. He imagined Kratch imagining that he, Notterdam, might find all those eyes turned imploringly upon him as if begging him to suffer that all their fortunes on bewildering scales might be made by Kratch. Then he, Notterdam, might falter. Well, that manoeuvre was going to be put a stop to....
Kratch’s speech had gone on and on. He was approaching a peroration.... He had gone back to the topic of the need that he felt for the moral support of all his subordinates. He was swaying his lank arms over the table... pathetically. He was beginning to use biblical phraseology.
If, he was saying, he was to pilot the House to glory the House must be swept clean. The rotten member must be cut out; the bruised bough must be burnt with fire....
Notterdam suddenly remembered a beery English compositor they had once employed in a far-away winter. He had taught them both the more or less oratorical language that modern business men employ.... So both Kratch and he could speak like books.... The fellow would drink a draught of beer by the red-hot stove, throwing his head back to empty the bottle. Then he would make first Notterdam and then Kratch address to him a speech on any subject that came into his head.... In Heaven’s name why had they ever left that far-away township of the old days?... Why?... In order to address these farcical House Conferences in phrases learned then?
If they could, in the light of the crackling stove, have predicted what down the years was awaiting them.
... That before frightened, dull-faced half-circles of slaves they would be using the oratorical devices they had then learned.... If they could have, no doubt, they would perhaps have... gone, oh, into livestock. In the open....
But no doubt they would have persevered in the same courses; perhaps that was what life was for.... For Kratch, obviously sick, and him, Notterdam, with hands and forehead prickling and chilly, to grope for the moral support of fools....
Nevertheless he was not going back on his House Conferences.
There hung in his ante-room an engraving shewing Posts and Gellatlys in council with all their employees, in summer, under the elms that shaded their original printing house in Hartford.
The last generation of those families had let the House down to the point of extinction. They had abolished the Conferences. But he had re-instituted them and found them useful. The members were, as far as could be obtained, experts in their branches. If asked for his opinion on any point in private the director of a department, like young Polignac, the art-specialist who on this occasion had had no occasion to speak - young Polignac in a moment of enthusiasm might voice a pet project for extra-illustration that might have no reference to the general interests of the House. But if asked to voice the same opinion under the critical attention of the rest of the staff he would put his views with a great deal more care. Then he would see where he was unpractical. That served a double purpose. The young man would not feel that he was thwarted in his enthusiasms if he could be convinced that they were inappropriate. At the same time he would not dislike his employer for turning him down.
The enthusiasms of the employees were modified by publicity and having to speak under the eyes of assembled comrades. That had hitherto been singularly more the case with the principals. Notterdam almost always said very little and even the agitated Kratch of to-day was a Kratch very much less vitriolic than he had been only the night before when discussing the same topics with Notterdam alone.
He had then been like a madman....
He had of course other troubles. He had seemed to be at perpetual loggerheads with the Federal authorities ever since he had made his ill-fated visit to Memphis, Tennessee. The trouble had begun over the levees. Of what it had gone on to Notterdam had no idea, though from time to time Kratch would curse some Federal permanent official by name. In their own and adjacent States he was pretty well looked on but with enterprises as far-stretching as his and with his tempestive energy he might well come to loggerheads with Federal officials. They were less open to argument and specific persuasion than those to be found around local capitals.
And indeed Kratch had hinted that if certain contingencies which he did not specify should arise he might desire to make over to Notterdam, as the man he could most trust, a very considerable block of his interests in New York properties.
Something of the sort had occurred once before. Notterdam had imagined that that storm once weathered another might not occur. But apparently one had. And the Federal Government in a nasty frame of mind was about the only institution or body in the country that Kratch was not prepared at any moment to fly at like a wild cat. The mere existence of an inexorably regulating opponent was no doubt sufficient to torment him into such a state of half madness as he was now displaying.
... It was a good thing that he was going away to Mesopotamia. He must be got away at once. Now. Right away.
Notterdam heard himself say:
‘Mr. Kratch, if according to you there is a rotten branch in this House it is I. But I do not intend to be cut away.’
