Changeling, and Other Stories
Kerrigan's untrained Broadwayish mind was awe-struck by the huge,
somber living-room into which he was ushered. He sensed, rather than
understood, the richness of the pictures and hangings, the beautiful
ceiling. Only in books and papers had he seen anything like the great
white borzoi lying before the roaring fireplace like a patient cat.
The man he had come to see was sitting by the fire; dead-white features
against a black background. Lean, emaciated, with his full black
beard, black cassock, and high black headdress of the Greek monk, he
seemed more spirit than body. He looked at Kerrigan with the insolence
of a prince.
"Yes?" He did not ask Kerrigan to sit down.
Kerrigan had planned a neat speech, somewhat humorous, cynical,
patronizing, but it had fled from his memory. He felt a sort of vague
terror, as though this man were probing, uninvited, inside his soul and
mind.
"I heard--down-town--" he muttered.
"Yes!" the monk said impatiently. "What do you want me to do?"
"I wondered, Mr.--ah, Mr.--"
"Brother Sergius!"
"I wondered, Brother Sergius, if it were possible to hold converse--or
see--or have some communication--some certain communication--with a
person who 's been dead some time, some fourteen years--"
The monk was looking at him keenly. What had this well-fed business
man, with the sweeping mustache and obviously massaged face, to do with
the dim inhabitants of Death?
"How did this man die?" the monk Sergius asked.
"By accident," Matthew Kerrigan answered. "He drowned himself."
"What interest have you in him?"
"They say he killed himself on account of me," Kerrigan's voice broke
out as though he were pleading to a judge. "It's not true!"
"You don't know whether it's true or not?" The Greek monk was studying
Kerrigan's terrified features.
"Can it be done?" Kerrigan was surprised at himself, so hoarse his
voice sounded, so sincere his tones. "I must know about it. Can it be
done?"
"It can be done." The monk nodded.
"If there 's any fee--" Kerrigan suggested.
"There is no fee." The monk laughed contemptuously. "I act for the
good of souls, when it is necessary." He watched Kerrigan intently for
some minutes. "On Monday morning--at two in the morning--if the
weather is clear, I will send for you. Leave your name and address
with the butler." And he turned again to the book he was reading,
oblivious of Kerrigan, as a great lord might be of the peasant standing
awkward and awe-stricken in his presence.
Financial agents admire Matthew Kerrigan. He is the sort of person who
gives them no trouble. They are more cordial toward him than they are
toward great bankers or great Wall Street men. For great
bank-presidents and stock-manipulators wage terrific and lyrical
battles on the terrain of commerce, and though there are great Leipzigs
and Jenas, there are also great Waterloos. But Kerrigan is safe. He
takes no chances. His factories in Yonkers purr, day in, day out,
making by the million that simple fastening device for women's corsets
that has made him several fortunes.
"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