A Far Country, Book 2

W >> Winston Churchill >> A Far Country, Book 2


"So!" cried Mr. Scherer, triumphantly, "or it is close up. We are not
fools, no, we will not lie down and be eaten like lambs for any law.
Dickinson can put his hand on the capital, and I--I have already bought a
tract on the lakes, at Bolivar, I have already got a plant designed with
the latest modern machinery. I can put the ore right there, I can send
the coke back from here in cars which would otherwise be empty, and
manufacture tubes at eight dollars a ton less than they are selling. If
we can make tubes we can make plates, and if we can make plates we can
make boilers, and beams and girders and bridges.... It is not like it was
but where is it all leading, my friend? The time will come--is right on
us now, in respect to many products--when the market will be flooded with
tubes and plates and girders, and then we'll have to find a way to limit
production. And the inefficient mills will all be forced to shut down."

The logic seemed unanswerable, even had I cared to answer it.... He
unfolded his campaign. The Boyne Iron Works was to become the Boyne Iron
Works, Ltd., owner of various subsidiary companies, some of which were as
yet blissfully ignorant of their fate. All had been thought out as calmly
as the partition of Poland--only, lawyers were required; and ultimately,
after the process of acquisition should have been completed, a delicate
document was to be drawn up which would pass through the meshes of that
annoying statutory net, the Sherman Anti-trust Law. New mines were to be
purchased, extending over a certain large area; wide coal deposits;
little strips of railroad to tap them. The competition of the Keystone
Plate people was to be met by acquiring and bringing up to date the plate
mills of King and Son, over the borders of a sister state; the
Somersworth Bridge and Construction Company and the Gring Steel and Wire
Company were to be absorbed. When all of this should have been
accomplished, there would be scarcely a process in the steel industry,
from the smelting of the ore to the completion of a bridge, which the
Boyne Iron Works could not undertake. Such was the beginning of the
"lateral extension" period.

"Two can play at that game," Mr. Scherer said. "And if those fellows
could only be content to let well enough alone, to continue buying their
crude steel from us, there wouldn't be any trouble."...

It was evident, however, that he really welcomed the "trouble," that he
was going into battle with enthusiasm. He had already picked out his
points of attack and was marching on them. Life, for him, would have been
a poor thing without new conflicts to absorb his energy; and he had
already made of the Boyne Iron Works, with its open-hearth furnaces, a
marvel of modern efficiency that had opened the eyes of the Steel world,
and had drawn the attention of a Personality in New York,--a Personality
who was one of the new and dominant type that had developed with such
amazing rapidity, the banker-dinosaur; preying upon and superseding the
industrial-dinosaur, conquering type of the preceding age, builder of the
railroads, mills and manufactories. The banker-dinosaurs, the gigantic
ones, were in Wall Street, and strove among themselves for the industrial
spoils accumulated by their predecessors. It was characteristic of these
monsters that they never fought in the open unless they were forced to.
Then the earth rocked, huge economic structures tottered and fell, and
much dust arose to obscure the vision of smaller creatures, who were
bewildered and terrified. Such disturbances were called "panics," and
were blamed by the newspapers on the Democratic party, or on the
reformers who had wantonly assailed established institutions. These
dominant bankers had contrived to gain control of the savings of
thousands and thousands of fellow-citizens who had deposited them in
banks or paid them into insurance companies, and with the power thus
accumulated had sallied forth to capture railroads and industries. The
railroads were the strategic links. With these in hand, certain favoured
industrial concerns could be fed, and others starved into submission.

Adolf Scherer might be said to represent a transitional type. For he was
not only an iron-master who knew every detail of his business, who kept
it ahead of the times; he was also a strategist, wise in his generation,
making friends with the Railroad while there had yet been time, at length
securing rebates and favours. And when that Railroad (which had been
constructed through the enterprise and courage of such men as Nathaniel
Durrett) had passed under the control of the banker-personality to whom I
have referred, and had become part of a system, Adolf Scherer remained in
alliance, and continued to receive favours.... I can well remember the
time when the ultimate authority of our Railroad was transferred,
quietly, to Wall Street. Alexander Barbour, its president, had been a
great man, but after that he bowed, in certain matters, to a greater one.

I have digressed.... Mr. Scherer unfolded his scheme, talking about
"units" as calmly as though they were checkers on a board instead of
huge, fiery, reverberating mills where thousands and thousands of human
beings toiled day and night--beings with families, and hopes and fears,
whose destinies were to be dominated by the will of the man who sat
opposite me. But--did not he in his own person represent the triumph of
that American creed of opportunity? He, too, had been through the fire,
had sweated beside the blasts, had handled the ingots of steel. He was
one of the "fittest" who had survived, and looked it. Had he no memories
of the terrors of that struggle?... Adolf Scherer had grown to be a
giant. And yet without me, without my profession he was a helpless giant,
at the mercy of those alert and vindictive lawmakers who sought to
restrain and hamper him, to check his growth with their webs. How
stimulating the idea of his dependence! How exhilarating too, the thought
that that vision which had first possessed me as an undergraduate--on my
visit to Jerry Kyme--was at last to be realized! I had now become the
indispensable associate of the few who divided the spoils, I was to have
a share in these myself.

"You're young, Paret," Mr. Scherer concluded. "But Watling has confidence
in you, and you will consult him frequently. I believe in the young men,
and I have already seen something of you--so?"...

When I returned to the office I wrote Theodore Watling a letter
expressing my gratitude for the position he had, so to speak, willed me,
of confidential legal adviser to Adolf Scherer. Though the opportunity
had thrust itself upon me suddenly, and sooner than I expected it, I was
determined to prove myself worthy of it. I worked as I had never worked
before, making trips to New York to consult leading members of this new
branch of my profession there, trips to Washington to see my former
chief. There were, too, numerous conferences with local personages, with
Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Grierson, and Judah B. Tallant,--whose newspaper
was most useful; there were consultations and negotiations of a delicate
nature with the owners and lawyers of other companies to be "taken in."
Nor was it all legal work, in the older and narrower sense. Men who are
playing for principalities are making war. Some of our operations had all
the excitement of war. There was information to be got, and it was
got--somehow. Modern war involves a spy system, and a friendly telephone
company is not to be despised. And all of this work from first to last
had to be done with extreme caution. Moribund distinctions of right and
wrong did not trouble me, for the modern man labours religiously when he
knows that Evolution is on his side.

For all of these operations a corps of counsel had been employed,
including the firm of Harrington and Bowes next to Theodore Watling, Joel
Harrington was deemed the ablest lawyer in the city. We organized in due
time the corporation known as the Boyne Iron Works, Limited; a trust
agreement was drawn up that was a masterpiece of its kind, one that
caused, first and last, meddling officials in the Department of Justice
at Washington no little trouble and perplexity. I was proud of the fact
that I had taken no small part in its composition.... In short, in
addition to certain emoluments and opportunities for investment, I
emerged from the affair firmly established in the good graces of Adolf
Scherer, and with a reputation practically made.

A year or so after the Boyne Company, Ltd., came into existence I chanced
one morning to go down to the new Ashuela Hotel to meet a New Yorker of
some prominence, and was awaiting him in the lobby, when I overheard a
conversation between two commercial travellers who were sitting with
their backs to me.

"Did you notice that fellow who went up to the desk a moment ago?" asked
one.

"The young fellow in the grey suit? Sure. Who is he? He looks as if he
was pretty well fixed."

"I guess he is," replied the first. "That's Paret. He's Scherer's
confidential counsel. He used to be Senator Watling's partner, but they
say he's even got something on the old man."

In spite of the feverish life I led, I was still undoubtedly
young-looking, and in this I was true to the incoming type of successful
man. Our fathers appeared staid at six and thirty. Clothes, of course,
made some difference, and my class and generation did not wear the sombre
and cumbersome kind, with skirts and tails; I patronized a tailor in New
York. My chestnut hair, a little darker than my father's had been, showed
no signs of turning grey, although it was thinning a little at the crown
of the forehead, and I wore a small moustache, clipped in a straight line
above the mouth. This made me look less like a college youth. Thanks to a
strong pigment in my skin, derived probably from Scotch-Irish ancestors,
my colour was fresh. I have spoken of my life as feverish, and yet I am
not so sure that this word completely describes it. It was full to
overflowing--one side of it; and I did not miss (save vaguely, in rare
moments of weariness) any other side that might have been developed. I
was busy all day long, engaged in affairs I deemed to be alone of vital
importance in the universe. I was convinced that the welfare of the city
demanded that supreme financial power should remain in the hands of the
group of men with whom I was associated, and whose battles I fought in
the courts, in the legislature, in the city council, and sometimes in
Washington,--although they were well cared for there. By every means
ingenuity could devise, their enemies were to be driven from the field,
and they were to be protected from blackmail.

A sense of importance sustained me; and I remember in that first flush of
a success for which I had not waited too long--what a secret satisfaction
it was to pick up the Era and see my name embedded in certain dignified
notices of board meetings, transactions of weight, or cases known to the
initiated as significant. "Mr. Scherer's interests were taken care of by
Mr. Hugh Paret." The fact that my triumphs were modestly set forth gave
me more pleasure than if they had been trumpeted in headlines. Although I
might have started out in practice for myself, my affection and regard
for Mr. Watling kept me in the firm, which became Watling, Fowndes and
Paret, and a new, arrangement was entered into: Mr. Ripon retired on
account of ill health.

There were instances, however, when a certain amount of annoying
publicity was inevitable. Such was the famous Galligan case, which
occurred some three or four years after my marriage. Aloysius Galligan
was a brakeman, and his legs had become paralyzed as the result of an
accident that was the result of defective sills on a freight car. He had
sued, and been awarded damages of $15,000. To the amazement and
indignation of Miller Gorse, the Supreme Court, to which the Railroad had
appealed, affirmed the decision. It wasn't the single payment of $15,000
that the Railroad cared about, of course; a precedent might be
established for compensating maimed employees which would be expensive in
the long run. Carelessness could not be proved in this instance. Gorse
sent for me. I had been away with Maude at the sea for two months, and
had not followed the case.

"You've got to take charge, Paret, and get a rehearing. See Bering, and
find out who in the deuce is to blame for this. Chesley's one, of course.
We ought never to have permitted his nomination for the Supreme Bench. It
was against my judgment, but Varney and Gill assured me that he was all
right."

I saw Judge Bering that evening. We sat on a plush sofa in the parlour of
his house in Baker Street.

"I had a notion Gorse'd be mad," he said, "but it looked to me as if they
had it on us, Paret. I didn't see how we could do anything else but
affirm without being too rank. Of course, if he feels that way, and you
want to make a motion for a rehearing, I'll see what can be done."

"Something's got to be done," I replied. "Can't you see what such a
decision lets them in for?"

"All right," said the judge, who knew an order when he heard one, "I
guess we can find an error." He was not a little frightened by the report
of Mr. Gorse's wrath, for election-day was approaching. "Say, you
wouldn't take me for a sentimental man, now, would you?"

I smiled at the notion of it.

"Well, I'll own up to you this kind of got under my skin. That Galligan
is a fine-looking fellow, if there ever was one, and he'll never be of a
bit of use any more. Of course the case was plain sailing, and they ought
to have had the verdict, but that lawyer of his handled it to the queen's
taste, if I do say so. He made me feel real bad, by God,--as if it was my
own son Ed who'd been battered up. Lord, I can't forget the look in that
man Galligan's eyes. I hate to go through it again, and reverse it, but I
guess I'll have to, now."

The Judge sat gazing at the flames playing over his gas log.

"Who was the lawyer?" I asked.

"A man by the name of Krebs," he replied. "Never heard of him before.
He's just moved to the city."

"This city?" I ejaculated.

The Judge glanced at me interestedly.

"This city, of course. What do you know about him?"

"Well," I answered, when I had recovered a little from the shock--for it
was a distinct shock--"he lived in Elkington. He was the man who stirred
up the trouble in the legislature about Bill 709."

The Judge slapped his knee.

"That fellow!" he exclaimed, and ruminated. "Why didn't somebody tell
me?" he added, complainingly. "Why didn't Miller Gorse let me know about
it, instead of licking up a fuss after it's all over?"...

Of all men of my acquaintance I had thought the Judge the last to grow
maudlin over the misfortunes of those who were weak or unfortunate enough
to be defeated and crushed in the struggle for existence, and it was not
without food for reflection that I departed from his presence. To make
Mr. Bering "feel bad" was no small achievement, and Krebs had been
responsible for it, of course,--not Galligan. Krebs had turned up once
more! It seemed as though he were destined to haunt me. Well, I made up
my mind that he should not disturb me again, at any rate: I, at least,
had learned to eliminate sentimentality from business, and it was not
without deprecation I remembered my experience with him at the Capital,
when he had made me temporarily ashamed of my connection with Bill 709. I
had got over that. And when I entered the court room (the tribunal having
graciously granted a rehearing on the ground that it had committed an
error in the law!) my feelings were of lively curiosity and zest. I had
no disposition to underrate his abilities, but I was fortified by the
consciousness of a series of triumphs behind me, by a sense of
association with prevailing forces against which he was helpless. I could
afford to take a superior attitude in regard to one who was destined
always to be dramatic.

As the case proceeded I was rather disappointed on the whole that he was
not dramatic--not even as dramatic as he had been when he defied the
powers in the Legislature. He had changed but little, he still wore
ill-fitting clothes, but I was forced to acknowledge that he seemed to
have gained in self-control, in presence. He had nodded at me before the
case was called, as he sat beside his maimed client; and I had been on
the alert for a hint of reproach in his glance: there was none. I smiled
back at him....

He did not rant. He seemed to have rather a remarkable knowledge of the
law. In a conversational tone he described the sufferings of the man in
the flannel shirt beside him, but there could be no question of the fact
that he did produce an effect. The spectators were plainly moved, and it
was undeniable that some of the judges wore rather a sheepish look as
they toyed with their watch chains or moved the stationery in front of
them. They had seen maimed men before, they had heard impassioned,
sentimental lawyers talk about wives and families and God and justice.
Krebs did none of this. Just how he managed to bring the thing home to
those judges, to make them ashamed of their role, just how he managed--in
spite of my fortified attitude to revive something of that sense of
discomfort I had experienced at the State House is difficult to say. It
was because, I think, he contrived through the intensity of his own
sympathy to enter into the body of the man whose cause he pleaded, to
feel the despair in Galligan's soul--an impression that was curiously
conveyed despite the dignified limits to which he confined his speech. It
was strange that I began to be rather sorry for him, that I felt a
certain reluctant regret that he should thus squander his powers against
overwhelming odds. What was the use of it all!

At the end his voice became more vibrant--though he did not raise it--as
he condemned the Railroad for its indifference to human life, for its
contention that men were cheaper than rolling-stock.

I encountered him afterward in the corridor. I had made a point of
seeking him out, perhaps from some vague determination to prove that our
last meeting in the little restaurant at the Capital had left no traces
of embarrassment in me: I was, in fact, rather aggressively anxious to
reveal myself to him as one who has thriven on the views he condemned, as
one in whose unity of mind there is no rift. He was alone, apparently
waiting for someone, leaning against a steam radiator in one of his
awkward, angular poses, looking out of the court-house window.

"How are you?" I said blithely. "So you've left Elkington for a wider
field." I wondered whether my alert cousin-in-law, George Hutchins, had
made it too hot for him.

He turned to me unexpectedly a face of profound melancholy; his
expression had in it, oddly, a trace of sternness; and I was somewhat
taken aback by this evidence that he was still bearing vicariously the
troubles of his client. So deep had been the thought I had apparently
interrupted that he did not realize my presence at first.

"Oh, it's you, Paret. Yes, I've left Elkington," he said.

"Something of a surprise to run up against you suddenly, like this."

"I expected to see you," he answered gravely, and the slight emphasis he
gave the pronoun implied not only a complete knowledge of the situation
and of the part I had taken in it, but also a greater rebuke than if his
accusation had been direct. But I clung to my affability.

"If I can do anything for you, let me know," I told him. He said nothing,
he did not even smile. At this moment he was opportunely joined by a man
who had the appearance of a labour leader, and I walked away. I was
resentful; my mood, in brief, was that of a man who has done something
foolish and is inclined to talk to himself aloud: but the mood was
complicated, made the more irritating by the paradoxical fact that that
last look he had given me seemed to have borne the traces of
affection....

It is perhaps needless to add that the court reversed its former
decision.




XVI.

The Pilot published a series of sensational articles and editorials about
the Galligan matter, a picture of Galligan, an account of the destitute
state of his wife and family. The time had not yet arrived when such
newspapers dared to attack the probity of our courts, but a system of law
that permitted such palpable injustice because of technicalities was
bitterly denounced. What chance had a poor man against such a moloch as
the railroad, even with a lawyer of such ability as had been exhibited by
Hermann Krebs? Krebs was praised, and the attention of Mr. Lawler's
readers was called to the fact that Krebs was the man who, some years
before, had opposed single-handed in the legislature the notorious Bill
No. 709. It was well known in certain circles--the editorial went on to
say--that this legislation had been drawn by Theodore Watling in the
interests of the Boyne Iron Works, etc., etc. Hugh Paret had learned at
the feet of an able master. This first sight of my name thus
opprobriously flung to the multitude gave me an unpleasant shock. I had
seen Mr. Scherer attacked, Mr. Gorse attacked, and Mr. Watling: I had all
along realized, vaguely, that my turn would come, and I thought myself to
have acquired a compensating philosophy. I threw the sheet into the waste
basket, presently picked it out again and reread the sentence containing
my name. Well, there were certain penalties that every career must pay. I
had become, at last, a marked man, and I recognized the fact that this
assault would be the forerunner of many.

I tried to derive some comfort and amusement from the thought of certain
operations of mine that Mr. Lawler had not discovered, that would have
been matters of peculiar interest to his innocent public: certain
extra-legal operations at the time when the Bovine corporation was being
formed, for instance. And how they would have licked their chops had they
learned of that manoeuvre by which I had managed to have one of Mr.
Scherer's subsidiary companies in another state, with property and assets
amounting to more than twenty millions, reorganized under the laws of New
Jersey, and the pending case thus transferred to the Federal court, where
we won hands down! This Galligan affair was nothing to that.
Nevertheless, it was annoying. As I sat in the street car on my way
homeward, a man beside me was reading the Pilot. I had a queer sensation
as he turned the page, and scanned the editorial; and I could not help
wondering what he and the thousands like him thought of me; what he would
say if I introduced myself and asked his opinion. Perhaps he did not
think at all: undoubtedly he, and the public at large, were used to Mr.
Lawler's daily display of "injustices." Nevertheless, like slow acid,
they must be eating into the public consciousness. It was an
outrage--this freedom of the press.

With renewed exasperation I thought of Krebs, of his disturbing and
almost uncanny faculty of following me up. Why couldn't he have remained
in Elkington? Why did he have to follow me here, to make capital out of a
case that might never have been heard of except for him?... I was still
in this disagreeable frame of mind when I turned the corner by my house
and caught sight of Maude, in the front yard, bending bareheaded over a
bed of late flowers which the frost had spared. The evening was sharp,
the dusk already gathering.

"You'll catch cold," I called to her.

She looked up at the sound of my voice.

"They'll soon be gone," she sighed, referring to the flowers. "I hate
winter."

She put her hand through my arm, and we went into the house. The curtains
were drawn, a fire was crackling on the hearth, the lamps were lighted,
and as I dropped into a chair this living-room of ours seemed to take on
the air of a refuge from the vague, threatening sinister things of the
world without. I felt I had never valued it before. Maude took up her
sewing and sat down beside the table.

"Hugh," she said suddenly, "I read something in the newspaper--"

My exasperation flared up again.

"Where did you get that disreputable sheet?" I demanded.

"At the dressmaker's!" she answered. "I--I just happened to see the name,
Paret."

"It's just politics," I declared, "stirring up discontent by
misrepresentation. Jealousy."

She leaned forward in her chair, gazing into the flames.

"Then it isn't true that this poor man, Galligan--isn't that his
name?--was cheated out of the damages he ought to have to keep himself
and his family alive?"

"You must have been talking to Perry or Susan," I said. "They seem to be
convinced that I am an oppressor of the poor.

"Hugh!" The tone in which she spoke my name smote me. "How can you say
that? How can you doubt their loyalty, and mine? Do you think they would
undermine you, and to me, behind your back?"

"I didn't mean that, of course, Maude. I was annoyed about something
else. And Tom and Perry have an air of deprecating most of the
enterprises in which I am professionally engaged. It's very well for them
to talk. All Perry has to do is to sit back and take in receipts from the
Boyne Street car line, and Tom is content if he gets a few commissions
every week. They're like militiamen criticizing soldiers under fire. I
know they're good friends of mine, but sometimes I lose patience with
them."