Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 710
Towards the end of the Conference week Notterdam had gradually found arising in him a combative spirit. It forced him not only to talk but also to act very drastically. He proposed, that is to say, to fight the price-cutting institutions on their own ground - more particularly if he could have the support of others of the older houses. He had worked himself gradually up into a sort of black anger. He proposed to turn the House itself, with its enormous output, and its organization that extended over the whole continent, into a gigantic Book Club. Before his colleagues he argued in this way:
The appeal of the new institutions to the public was that having enlisted in their service the chief critics of the country they were qualified to assert that they would select the best books of the current output for individuals too busy themselves to form an opinion as to the merits of contemporary work. But what else had the House of Post, Gellatly & Jeaffreson been doing for a hundred and thirty-eight years? How otherwise could they have continued in business and, have occupied for so long the tremendous position that they did occupy in the nation? If you looked at it candidly what else were Mr. Holzhauer, Miss Brooke Phelps, Mr. Lessington Holmes and even Mr. Walpfortzheimer, Miss Felise, himself and Mr. Post - what else were they all but critics to whom the public taste had been thus demonstrably entrusted? It remained then simply a matter of organizing a House monthly prize. It would be awarded by the persons there present at the House Conference to one or other of the books published each month by the House. The public could feel absolutely confident that in purchasing that volume they were getting the best book that America that month could shew. The question of cutting prices would have to be discussed with care and the organizing of the necessary publicity would be very costly. But not nearly so costly for them as for their rivals because they already had the ground covered and because their lists of names and addresses of bookbuyers were unrivalled in number and quality. On the other hand the work would probably call for a very considerable increase of their staff - or indeed for a department all of its own. And Notterdam was by no means certain that he personally was able to superintend more subordinates than he at present had. Still he was quite conscious of the principle that said a House must either progress or go back. If the work was made as easy as possible for him he was quite ready to go forward with it.
That would depend very much on the enthusiasm with which the idea was supported by his subordinates. To his pleasure, everyone at that little meeting, including Mr. Post, had heartily congratulated him on his plan - excepting, of course, Henrietta Felise. Acting vicariously and as the mouthpiece of the absent Kratch, she actively opposed the idea. He knew that she was going to. They had discussed the scheme for several days. As a scheme, Henrietta was as enthusiastic for it as anyone could have desired. She foresaw the difficulties and the labours and she foresaw the chances of failure more clearly than did Notterdam himself. But she liked her man to be a fighter and was ready to abide by the consequences of failure.
Nevertheless, at the meeting she averred, with almost more emphasis than she had shewn in private, that she was convinced that Kratch would oppose the project. Of his reasons she was perfectly aware, though she did not propose there to give them. But she said that Mr. Kratch had specifically instructed her, in the event of any such meeting, to deal with any proposed great extension of the activities of the House, unhesitatingly to announce that, at any rate for the present, he opposed it. They might put it, if they liked, that Mr. Kratch had plans for extensions of his own with which any other schemes at all would clash.
She had naturally been overwhelmed by the sense of the rest of the meeting. Oddly enough the most active supporter of Notterdam was old Mr. Post himself - a ruddy, gentle New Englander of seventy-six. He took the position of the House and his ancestry almost with reverence. He dropped the rather frail aspect and gentle voice that usually distinguished him, he drew a picture of the price-cutting institutions as dragons who proposed to chain the free taste of the inhabitants of the United States. And he pictured Notterdam and the House of his fathers as a sort of Perseus combination that should deliver the national Andromeda from these chains and infamies. He himself was perfectly ready to come out of his semi-retirement and with voice and pen contribute all the encouragement that his age and his tradition would permit to him.
This voice from the past was of great use to Notterdam. He saw himself receiving the accolade of the old gentleman’s ancestors - a thing that hitherto he had been not at all certain of either receiving or deserving. But that and the really great respect with which he had been listened to by the others had very much heartened Notterdam. He had all but authorized the drawing up of a programme by the sales manager and the communication of preliminary details to the press and to the other older houses. They had agreed that if he took the lead they would adopt exactly similar courses. That was very important. But the distress that he had read into Henrietta Felise’s face had caused him to delay taking any definite steps. If she had spoken so strongly there must be very warrantable reasons for her so doing.
In the automobile, after the meeting, she had thrown her arms passionately round his neck and had begged his pardon for having so strongly opposed him. She said that she had been thinking a great deal about their position - from the financial and business point of view. She was now going to put to him matters that it seemed inevitable that he must now know if only in the interests of Kratch himself. She said she knew that she could expect him to respect the confidences she was going to make him. They were inspired partly by secrets that, in his crises of pain, Mr. Kratch had let out to her and partly by guesses as to what had probably since happened. Notterdam would respect them as he respected the sacredness and beauty of their union. The words had given him infinite pleasure What she had gone on to say had given him even more, because in everything she said she spoke of their futures as one common future. She had said: ‘We might possibly have to curtail our building a good deal,’ or ‘it might make a great deal of extra work for us...’ She implied a great deal more than had ever passed between them since the atrocious events of the night that had brought them together.
It amounted to her practical conviction that Kratch, if he was not entirely ruined, had latterly been very severely pinched in the money market. At any rate that was what Kratch himself believed... Kratch had told her specifically that if the Federal Reserve Bank took certain steps during his absence and if some building stocks which he had named to her and whose prices he had ordered her to watch - if those building stocks fell and remained at a certain low level she was definitely to request Notterdam not to make any calls on the bank for loans which otherwise Kratch had guaranteed. As to whether it was likely that the Federal institution would take such very grave steps merely for the purpose of ruining Mr. Kratch she could naturally not say anything. Kratch was a little of a megalomaniac. But during the time she had acted as his almost most private secretary he certainly had had several unpleasantnesses - mostly connected with huge building operations - with the Federal Government. In any case the actions of the Federal Reserve Bank lately had been notorious, and in the direction that Kratch had feared. The whole money market had been in an uproar. Even Notterdam knew that! Just three days ago the building stocks that Kratch had ordered her to watch had duly fallen to the price that he had named as his limit. So Mr. Kratch could no longer be considered as the financial backer of the House.
The House could now stand on its own feet. But when it came to launching out on enormous new departures she had to consider very seriously how they would affect her man and herself. The time had perhaps come when it would be certainly dignified even if it did not turn out to be absolutely necessary that Notterdam should himself acquire Mr. Kratch’s interests in the House. That would be a tremendous step. It would mean that Notterdam would be very much overstrained to raise the money, the small fortune that he had so lately raised and invested not being enough by about half actually to buy out Kratch. Still, that was an everyday commercial operation.
It would mean that they would have all their eggs in the one basket of the House. She could herself contemplate that situation with equanimity, but she knew that it would probably fret Notterdam himself, and she did not mean to have him fretted. She needed his calm and equable society.
It was a matter as to which they need take no immediate action. She wanted him to be in possession of her mind about these things. He might find it necessary to take some immediate step when she was not at hand. She was accustomed to facing the necessity for very considerable economies. She did not wish him to have to worry at all. Yet, with her moral support and presence at his side he might be more fitted to face them for a short time than had lately been the case. With Elspeth separated from him, until their union was finally made public, he could very considerably reduce their expenditure. He would have the appearance of a lonely bachelor with a little companion of inexpensive tastes. There would be no establishment to keep up....
The glutinous voice of Mizzuolo seemed to gain an enhanced air of mystery and secrecy from the consciousness of the great distance from which it came. Notterdam saw what great reason he had to be thankful to that girl. For he heard with calmness that Kratch was no longer available as a backer of the House. The news that otherwise must have been a terrible shock came practically as none at all. If it had not been for the hindering presence of Lola Porter he would have had relatively little difficulty in dealing with the situation clear-headedly enough.
He saw that he must go to Paris. The situation at home needed very speedy action. If the House did not take the lead in the matter of the price cutting some other old firm might well do so. To do that he must first settle with Kratch. Moreover, Kratch might very possibly need his assistance. He had, moreover, promised Elspeth — or so nearly as made no difference - that he would go if Kratch asked him. Kratch had now asked him. He could not see what difference it could make to Elspeth unless she were much deeper in Kratch’s counsels than he saw any likelihood of her being. But women had these mysterious intuitions and habits of knowing what was happening to you at a distance... For it had really come as a shock to him to learn from brother Tom that Elspeth knew that he was housing Lola Porter in his East Fifty-second Street apartment.
The extreme complication of his position again overwhelmed his tired brain. He had now again all the physical sensations that usually preceded a visit from his doppelgaenger.
In a way that was almost a relief. He had been severely on the water-waggon for at least the last five days. The evenings he had passed in quiet and satisfaction. He had sat working quietly in the apartment with Henrietta Felise reading nearby. So that if his double was actually about to appear to him now, the phenomenon was not a product of liquor. He preferred its being a product of straight nerves and overwork to its being a manifestation of a delirium tremens type. His double had appeared to him twice during the last three weeks: each time when he was more or less agitated by liquor. He had taken it to calm his nerves. It had appeared at five or so of the morning after the drive with Henrietta Felise. He had been going to fetch Lola Porter for the interview with Willems Fredericks. It had again appeared at East Fifty-second Street. They had both drunk a little - but not much — too much. Lola Porter had made him the most violent of her scenes. When she had drunk from two to three cocktails she became almost madly obscene and furious; but when she had taken a few more she might become either lachrymose or singularly reasonable. She would pass out, after that, altogether. Now she might have had one. Or at most two. She was looking at him, that is to say, with eyes that changed dramatically from demonstrative rage to intense mournfulness. Occasionally she was muttering beneath her breath or drumming on the table with her fingers.
Mizzuolo’s voice was continuing in the telephone. It was giving whatever account of Kratch’s misfortunes Kratch allowed to come through. The story was naturally romantic because Kratch would want to conceal hard facts from Mizzuolo in the first place and then, if in a less degree, from Notterdam. At any rate, Notterdam’s half-attention gathered what he was wanted to believe. The persecution of the Federal Government, Mizzuolo dramatically alleged to have been barbarous. Kratch’s excursion to Mesopotamia - which apparently had not got any farther than Constantinople, or possibly Leghorn — this pleasure-and-rest trip had actually been a forced bolting from arrest. He had escaped by the skin of his teeth.
New York is an extraordinary whispering gallery - and the whisperers are there so wanting in tact or luck - that Notterdam had naturally not escaped hearing from one mouth or another sinister rumours as to Kratch’s absence from Park Avenue and Wall Street. One slightly intoxicated gentleman had told him this at a club, another slightly more drunk, had told him that in a modest speakeasy to which he had gone with Henrietta Felise. But he let those pieces of gossip remain as merely ‘this’ and ‘that’ in his normally sceptical mind.
Another piece of gossip had been more or less forced upon him. A distinguished, but very disagreeable critic, had come into the office on the morning after Willems Fredericks had broadcasted his singularly pathetic interview with Lola Porter. He had come ostensibly to ask Notterdam what were his plans for the coming publishing season and had not been contented - being so distinguished - with the information that he had been given in the outer office. Notterdam hated him as he hated all, or nearly all, critics. They were fellows who had not succeeded in turning out merchandisable copy and lived by blackmailing those who could.... Their other functions could be perfectly filled by advertisements.
Notterdam had mentioned one or two of the books he was publishing in the autumn. Then he spoke, very naturally, of the great edition of Porter’s works. The fellow began at once by very strongly advising Notterdam to let Mrs. Porter have no finger in that undertaking. It was perfectly well known that Porter had committed suicide because of his wife’s misconduct with members of the underworld. On the night of Porter’s death, he and his wife had been in a particularly gorgeous and disreputable haunt in Harlem. Mrs. Porter had insisted on dancing half nude with a very formidable racketeer in a regular tohuwabohu of negroes, mulâtresses and gangsters. Porter, the fellow alleged, had remonstrated in vain and had then gone home and killed himself. Porter was by way of being an English gentleman. He had been miserably in love with that harlot... Notterdam had better know that if, with his new edition, he tried to make capital out of the pathos of Mrs. Porter’s widowhood, the greater part of the critics of New York would certainly do their best to ensure the soft-pedalling of the enterprise.
Notterdam had put the matter out of his mind: he was too used to the gossip of the city. But now the stories both as to Kratch, three thousand miles away, and as to Lola Porter, three feet from him - the stories suddenly came back to him. He was almost ready to believe that Kratch had only just escaped the City or Federal Marshals because the liner on which he embarked was the property of the Kratch-Miller Company. He was more than almost ready to believe that the woman near him had actually killed her husband by dancing hula hula dances in a booze den...
He listened to Mizzuolo’s voice therefore with dreary scepticism. The only thing he actually believed was that Kratch had lost his voice. That he thought he knew. But even then it might suit Kratch to let Notterdam report in New York that he was sick and he might have taken that way of doing so....
Mizzuolo forced himself into the upper place in Notterdam’s attention. He was asking that Notterdam should sail on the day after the morrow by the Cadennabbia, the chief vessel of the Kratch-Miller Company. In the conviction that Notterdam would come, Mr. Kratch had reserved the President Wilson suite for him. Notterdam said:
‘I don’t see how I can possibly spare the time to go to Paris at all. Certainly I don’t see how I can be ready by the day after to-morrow at nine in the morning.’ Mizzuolo dared to beg him to observe that the Cadennabbia was a six-day ship. Mr. Notterdam could be in Paris, have his interview with Mr. Kratch, catch the Mauretania on the Saturday from an English port and be back in New York in under the fortnight.
Notterdam knew that he must go: everything forced him to it. And rather to give himself the chance to see exactly where he would stand than because there was any necessity for further pressing on the part of the Levantine mouthpiece of Kratch he delayed for a little to consent. Across the table Mrs. Porter said:
‘If you are going to Paris on the day after to-morrow you will take me with you.’
A heavyish man of thirty or so was behind her, looking at him without expression. He resented it because he wanted to think clearly. When that fellow was there he was always almost unable to think. His eyelids always pricked, his hands felt numb, his feet cold. They were doing so now. Suddenly he asked her:
‘I suppose, on the day before your husband died, you thought a great deal about the money you expected from me?’
She said:
‘You can bet your hat I did. I nearly came to see you about it. I was ready to do anything... Take me with, you if you go to Paris....’
