Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 695
But the remembrance of that episode too had very quickly faded from his mind. It had been as nearly as possible fourteen years before the Editorial Conference of Post, Gellatly & Jeaffreson that was to cause him so much perturbation. He had at that date been absolutely swamped under work....
The nature of their financial disaster had been singularly commonplace and had indeed arisen from the fatigue from which he had suffered during practically all of the fifteen years of their residence in New York. He had come to New York on the extension of his San Francisco business to the metropolis of the eastern sea-board. He had originally got in rather on the ground floor of news-gathering as attached to the phonogram. So, after a short time given to prospecting he had contrived to come in right on the rock-bottom of activities of a like nature connected with the radio. His labours in this case had not taken the shape of founding and conducting a periodical such as had been the case with the Talky Times. He had founded and edited a syndicate that supplied not only programmes, but interviews as to preferences, news of inventions and publicity to a great number of daily papers. Their activities extended half across the Continent.
He had at first met with very great success - with so much that he had thought it really time that Elspeth should mitigate some of what was sardonic in her attitude towards himself. He could not avoid thinking that that was in large part due to his relative want of the faculty of speedy accession to immense wealth. He imagined her comparing his career to that of Kratch whom she might have married — for Kratch was already a multi-millionaire. And he imagined that her coolness towards his friend who never - or hardly ever - came to the house except during absences of hers... that that coolness was caused by envy of his meteoric exploits. She had indeed once said that she found Mr. Kratch insufferably patronizing.
The syndicate had latterly not made a rocket-like progress. Nevertheless, at the expense of constant labours and voyages of his own - for he let no one but himself visit new territories or prepare new campaigns - it had continued to progress. But he had grown tired of nights passed in sleepers or the mammoth hotels of large centres of population and when his brothers-in-law had suggested that he should take a chance - that was hardly speculative at all - in oil, he had finally consented to come in with them on a practical certainty. They had acquired, that is to say, an option over a triangular territory, surrounded by the land of three very large concerns that were all in full flow and a natural expectation was that oil would very soon be found on their property. It was not.
In the course of these operations practically all that Notterdam was worth had disappeared. He sold his interest in the San Francisco publishing business which had remained fairly satisfactory and which he had regarded as his nest-egg - and he mortgaged his interests in the New York syndicate heavily to his bank. For the last four years he had been practically nothing but the salaried director of the concern with quarterly memories extremely painful and mortifying interviews with the bank president.
Heaven alone knew how he would have got through with it. But almost exactly at the moment when the oil proposition had finally shewed itself to be hopeless, Kratch had taken it into his head to purchase a more than controlling proportion of the shares of Post, Gellatly & Jeaffreson. He had done so on condition that Notterdam would consent to assume autocratic control of the company’s publications.
There were times when Notterdam believed that Kratch had actually made the purchase in order to provide a refuge for him in his ruin. Had he really thought that, he would have violently refused to have anything to do with the company. But Kratch had vehemently put to him the aspects of his indispensability to the House and of his, Kratch’s, passionate desire to get hold of the publishing trade. Notterdam had finally believed that, in consenting to accept the Presidency of the company and a considerable salary with a more than considerable bonus out of possible profits, he was conferring on Kratch a very singular favour. Kratch had spoken of his publishing ambitions with almost lyrical fervour.
And, indeed, how was Kratch to know of his discomfiture? Never, even when they had together impecuniously taken up newspaper stands in derelict towns or jumped the blind baggage across the plains had they revealed their financial conditions the one to the other - except when they were simultaneously penniless. That habit had continued after the rivalry that had made them both woo the same young woman. So that, as a matter of fact, Kratch would fairly often jeeringly ask Notterdam how much he had in his money-box - a million? Two? Five? Seven? The jeering tone was due to Notterdam’s un-American desire to have a money-boxful of gold-edged investments. Instead of wincing, Notterdam would sink farther into his chair, adopting the mystery and the aspect of a Governor of the Bank of England.
So that Kratch might be regarded as being absolutely ignorant of Notterdam’s plight....
Notterdam, indeed, a little deplored at times the fact that he had none of the hundred percenter’s passion for stock gambling. Every human being that he knew, even to the nicest, softest and simplest of women, lived in a perpetual rustle of newspaper leaves being rapidly turned over to see how such and such a stock had most lately fared. It irked him at times that he could not ever bring himself to indulge in the national pursuit. But Nature would not do it. Or it was perhaps second nature. His mother dying at a moment when he himself was in a very impressionable stage - for he had just seduced a young woman and was suffering a considerable mental reaction - his mother, though she was ignorant of that fact, had extracted from him the promise that he would never beguile a virgin or gamble on the stock exchange. This had impressed on his mind a singular horror of either operation. So that it was not so much the fact of the promise that deterred him but a deep emotion born of the moment of his mother’s death. He imagined it to be what was called an inhibition.
But, though he never had gambled, it appeared, at the time of his lowest water, that his wife certainly had done so and to some effect. For, having with her household economies of many years bought small lots of, as he understood, National Cash Registers at between 48 and 59 she had sold, not being able to bear the strain any longer, at 118 or thereabouts. That, or something like that, had been at any rate what she had told him though from her manner he imagined that she wanted him to gather that her gambling had been even more bold if not reprehensible.
It had tided them over the most disastrous moments of their joint career. Almost without resources, they had had to carry on a sufficiently expensive existence. They had had in addition to house and keep Elspeth’s two brothers who were temporarily reduced to beggary. However, the mining engineer had found a job in one of the enterprises of Kratch and the financing one had been able to return to Wall Street on money borrowed from someone who trusted him enough substantially to back him. From that moment Tom had never looked back and the expensive presents he had made to his sister had been a source of gratification and pride.
The Notterdams themselves too might be said never to have looked really back from the early days of their near-downfall. The re-ascent into prosperity had cost Notterdam such incessant and harassing work that he sometimes thought that he would have been better off in a settler’s shack in the West. It was essential that he should keep the affairs of his own mortgaged news-supplying syndicate in absolute trim. Otherwise the bank would have called in its money. That had meant no relaxation in an almost ceaseless life of sleepers. And the affairs of the House - the mere reorganizing of departments and supervision of costings had in itself been more than one man’s work. So that, looking back, he seemed to have slept for more than half that period in his clothes.
That, of course, had been merely a figure of his mind. But in truth he had hardly ever dared to look back - as men dread to remember when they have been unconsciously on the brink of terrible precipices....
The final relief had come rather quickly... For two years a considerable portion of his salary as President of the House had gone towards stopping up leakages in his Syndicate banking account. With his third year’s bonus he had managed to pay the bank nearly completely off and with a small part of that of the fourth year he had been able completely to re-acquire his almost sole control.
This he had immediately sold to a larger company that had been anxious for some years to amalgamate with him. Of the united businesses he retained the vice-presidency which assured him a fair salary for practically no work of the developing and market-seeking variety.
So, a few days before the Editorial Council of the House he had found himself again in the enviable position of having a very large balance indeed at his bank. And all his liabilities - including that to Elspeth herself - were by now discharged, whilst he held a Presidency and Vice-Presidency that together brought him in between sixty and seventy thousand dollars a year. He could not consider himself as, by any means, a big millionaire, but he could at least regard his position as secure and himself as a pretty warm man. He was worthy of an introduction to the tailor of a great financier and a week-end invitation to the castle and rock-gardens of a super-lawyer. And those he had.
Thus it had been with a certain good-humour that he had surveyed and read through the rather preposterous agreement with Mr. Porter that he had extracted from the tails of his evening coat the night before the Meeting. It had occurred to him to notice that Mr. Porter had probably exceeded himself a little, for he must have delivered to Notterdam the copy that Notterdam had signed whilst retaining his own copy. And Notterdam had thought a little amusedly that, if he wished, he could repudiate the contract altogether. Such an expedient he would have shrunk from, for he had behind him not only his own personal honour but all the traditions of the House itself.
The determination to honour his word was by no means modified on his arrival at the office. He found awaiting him on his home-like table a dog-eared and rather dirty manuscript of Porter’s. There was also a letter in which Porter said that he was absolutely starving. Here was the first work under their contract; he would be obliged by a cheque for a couple of thousand dollars by special messenger - the cheque being also as per contract. Notterdam found himself shewing his teeth a little grimly. Porter had very efficiently got him!
He read through again the contract that he had brought, naturally, with him. He did not want to be bothered with it at the moment for he had the editorial conference to prepare for and the struggle that he knew to be coming with Kratch. But, in this matter, absolute etiquette must be observed - if only because Porter was a man who could be quite nasty. Post, Gellatly & Jeaffreson might be able to treat its authors badly - but it never did.
He sat down at his table and the august traditions of the House should have made him feel good... The majestic and dull dinner of the publishers’ trade council members over which he had presided had been dry enough the night before. But no doubt the terrapin diamond Maryland had disagreed with him and the long wait in the garage that was as large as a cathedral lit by arc lamps in the appallingly icy wind - And the long drive back to the Sound. Elspeth had been with him for the dinner and was giving a children’s lunch that day for which the early services of Giovanni were needed. And Giovanni anyhow hated driving at night since he had a panic fear of hold-ups such as daily occurred in the suburbs of Chicago. It was no good telling him that New York was not Chicago and that the road out and home was almost all the way as glaringly lit as Fifth Avenue; in his half-comprehensible Italian jargon he would bring out a complicated story of what had happened in Brooklyn only the night before. Gangsters had dragged a boy of fifteen out of a crowded cafeteria and given him the works, no one exactly knew why, on the sidewalk outside. And Giovanni had trembled.
Of course, if they ordered him to drive them he would do it but it was such obvious cruelty that they seldom did.
So Notterdam had had to drive himself into town and having had to be up at seven he was a little dazed when he at last arrived at the office building. Into this dazedness which usually went off in the elevator there forced itself the perception that there was not any elevator. An Irish washerwoman had contrived to wedge her corpse firmly into one of the shafts, all the other local cars being in consequence out of gear. So Notterdam had had occasion to observe how alarmingly out of condition he was. After two short flights of stairs he found himself panting as if he had run a record quarter and he had had to wait a full two minutes before he could take out the key of his private door. He could not face Miss Cresswell, his large-bespectacled New England amanuensis, panting like a carp on a pond bank.
So that it had been with feelings of depression, not caused by the terms of Mr. Porter’s contract, that, standing behind his loved tableful of objects and confronted, as if votively, by the quiescent Miss Cresswell, he had reread that liquor-stained document. It was not so bad.
No, really, it was not so bad: considering that Porter had had him blank and at his disposal he might have made it ever so much worse... But what was the good of a not-so-bad contract if he himself, Joseph Notterdam, was going to be no good... Oh, say, if merely with women!
It might come to that. Rapidly....
The semi-circular stain of a glass bottom, blurring the purple lettering of the contract, gave him the peculiar sensation of having thin metal against his lower teeth... Whilst he had been reading that document first then, Porter... Or perhaps it had been Mrs. Wagner, literary daughter of a great... the greatest corporation lawyer... His brain desperately and impotently attempted to produce for him stronger impressions of the evening when he had been trepanned into signing... A tall room, taller than it was broad or long. Dim! Porter writing at an hotel desk. Mrs. Wagner hanging over him. Mrs. Porter kissing him... Mrs. Wagner, of course, was socially anxious for the honour of persuading a Great House to take up Porter, a neglected great man!...
... He had been aware, for some time, of course, that all wasn’t well with him physically. How could it be rationally? The life he led, from a hygienic point of view, was madness - unless there were a special providence that looked after him. There ought to be... He felt suddenly, with intense indignation, that there ought to be... The life he led was one of stern virtue, of unremitting toil, of ceaseless fatigue - of patriotism. For surely it was patriotism to do one’s part in the work of keeping going the immense machine... Well, then!... Fatigue, fatigue, fatigue... They said that exercise was necessary for keeping fit. But what did exercise produce but fatigue? He asked you? Then wasn’t what he did the same as exercise? No one could say he was sedentary... He was perpetually displacing himself. Jumping in and out of cars, out of trains. Fighting, even, for the sake of time to get in and out of subway cars to go downtown. In perpetual racket... The beastly riveters opposite every three minutes... Wasn’t there a law?... Ought not all that fatigue in circumstances of perpetual discomfort to count as not only civic but also hygienic virtue? Ought it not to keep you slim, deep-breathed... attractive to women in short....
Either because Porter was a gentleman, or because Mrs. Wagner had been present in the dim room, or because he thought that a too-unconscionable contract could be voided seeing the circumstances in which it had been made — or perhaps for a mixture of all three because Porter had stipulated for the barest of living wages - the very barest - for three years and a quite moderate bonus — fifteen hundred dollars - on sending in a manuscript of a completed book... It was indeed the sort of contract he himself would have offered Porter if he had offered him any at all... Porter, with his pike’s features, pallid, like rice and thin. No doubt about his taking exercise. Fencing! He was a vice-president, or some sort of official of the London Epée Club... Extraordinary fellows these Englishmen. For ever gnawing the curling end of his little, pale moustache. As if he were starving... Perhaps both he and his thin, blackamoor wife were both starving. It would be better for him, Notterdam, perhaps if he starved a little.... And drank less! The terrible drink....
And at the thought of Drink - the dreadful thing to contemplate in the morning - his stomach suddenly fell away as if he had been in a swiftly descending elevator. It was indeed dreadful... He tried to imagine what a stroke would be like... They called it euphoniously a ‘shock’ in the daily papers. They did not want to give their readers disagreeable emotions that came too near the knuckle... And it took the best men, the best brains, the best women... What a horror!... He remembered three good men in the last month. Suddenly a ‘shock’; then three weeks’ dithering. No more, et cetera... Then the end!
And, to get away into action, he threw Porter’s agreement down on the table in front of Miss Cresswell and said:
‘Get that typed out cleanly in three copies for me to sign. And have a cheque for two thousand dollars made out to the order of Mr. Edward Porter... A letter... Tell him, Porter, we view with satisfaction the beginning of a connection that we hope will be prosperous for... No, will be long-lasting and advantageous... For all parties, you know....’
He had looked distastefully at the manuscript from Porter that had arrived that morning and that now was lying before him beside an immense pile of opened letters. He said to the already working Miss Cresswell:
‘Anything urgent in the letters?... Anything you can’t draft an answer to yourself?... Has the Hardy Griffin estimate come in?...You know, for the plates of the Sheraton furniture book? It wouldn’t have....’ She asked him colourlessly if he intended to let Mr. Zebedetsky have his contract and when he said that he had not yet made up his mind she said that she could deal with the rest of the letters but three which were personal... One, indeed, was from one of the former occupants of the East Fifty-second apartment who wanted to know if he could let her have a hundred dollars for old sake’s sake.
He said:
‘Ask who’s waiting for me... I must have Professor Gresham Hacker in the moment he comes and no one else before him... Get that cheque off to Porter. He’ll want it....’
