“But,” I protested, “don’t you see you’re giving me absolute power to swindle you out of the whole proceeds? Suppose I just use you? Suppose the taste of power goes to my head, and I collar everything? I’m only Homo sapiens, not Homo superior.” And for once I privately felt that John was perhaps not so superior after all.
John laughed delightedly at the title, but said, “My dear thing, you just won’t. No, no, I refuse to have any business arrangements. That would be too ‘sapient’ altogether. We should never be able to trust one another. Probably I’d cheat you all round, just for fun.”
“Oh, well,” I sighed, “you’ll keep accounts and see how the money goes.”
“Keep accounts, man! What in hell do I want with accounts? I keep ’em in my head, but never look at ’em.”
CHAPTER VII
FINANCIAL VENTURES
HENCEFORTH my own work was seriously interfered with by my increasing duties in connexion with John’s commercial enterprise. I spent a great deal of my time travelling about the country, visiting patent agents and manufacturers. Quite often John accompanied me. He had always to be introduced as “a young friend of mine who would so like to see the inside of a factory.” In this way he picked up a lot of knowledge of the powers and limitations of different kinds of machines, and was thus helped to produce easily manufacturable designs.
It was on these expeditions that I first came to realize that even John had his disability, his one blind spot, I called it. I approached these industrial gentlemen with painful consciousness that they could do what they liked with me. Generally I was kept from disaster by the advice of the patent agents, who, being primarily scientists, were on our side not only professionally but by sympathy. But quite often the manufacturer managed to get at me direct. On several of these occasions I was pretty badly stung. Nevertheless, I learned in time to be more able to hold my own with the commercial mind. John, on the other hand, seemed incapable of believing that these people were actually less interested in producing ingenious articles than in getting the better of us, and of every one else. Of course, he knew intellectually that it was so. He was as contemptuous of the morality as of the intelligence of Homo sapiens. But he could not “feel it in his bones” that men could really “be such fools as to care so much about sheer money-making as a game of skill.” Like any other boy, he could well appreciate the thrill of beating a rival in personal combat, and the thrill of triumph in practical invention. But the battle of industrial competition made no appeal whatever to him, and it took him many months of bitter experience to realize how much it meant to most men. Though he was himself in the thick of a great commercial adventure, he never felt the fascination of business undertakings as such. Though he could enter zestfully into most of man’s instinctive and primitive passions, the more artificial manifestations of those passions, and in particular the lust of economic individualism, found no spontaneous echo in him. In time, of course, he learned to expect men to manifest such passions, and he acquired the technique of dealing with them. But he regarded the whole commercial world with a contempt which suggested now the child, and now the philosopher. He was at once below it and above it.
Thus it was that in the first phase of John’s commercial life it fell to me to play the part of hard-headed business man. Unfortunately, as was said, I myself was extremely ill-equipped for the task, and at the outset we parted with several good inventions for a price which we subsequently discovered to be ludicrously inadequate.
But in spite of early disasters we were in the long run amazingly successful. We launched scores of ingenious contrivances which have since become universally recognized as necessary adjuncts of modern life. The public remarked on the spate of minor inventions which (it was said) showed the resilience of human capacity a few years after the war.
Meanwhile our bank balance increased by leaps and bounds, while our expenses remained minute. When I suggested setting up a decent workshop in my name in a convenient place, John would not hear of it. He produced a number of poor arguments against the plan, and I concluded that he was determined to cling to his lair for no reason but boyish love of sensationalism. But presently he divulged his real reason, and it horrified me. “No,” he said, “we mustn’t spend yet. We must speculate. That bank balance must be multiplied by a hundred, and then by a thousand.”
I protested that I knew nothing about finance, and that we might easily lose all we had. He assured me that he had been studying finance, and that he already had a few neat little plans in mind. “John,” I said, “you simply mustn’t do it. That’s the sort of field where sheer intelligence is not enough. You want half a lifetime’s special knowledge of the stock market. And anyhow it’s nearly all luck.”
It was no use talking. After all, he had good reason to trust his Own judgment rather than mine. And he gave evidence that he had gone into the subject thoroughly, both by reading the financial journals and by ingratiating himself with local stockbrokers on the morning and evening trains to town. He had by now passed far beyond the naive child that had interviewed Mr. Magnate, and he was, as ever, an adept at making people talk about their own work.
“It’s now or never,” he said. “We’re entering a boom, inevitable after the war; but in a few years we shall be in the midst of such a slump that people will wonder if civilization is going smash. You’ll see.”
I laughed at his assurance, and was treated to a lecture on economics and the state of Western society, the sort of thing that in eight or ten years was to be generally accepted among the more advanced students of social problems. At the end of this discourse John said, “We’ll put half our capital into British light industry—motors, electricity and so on, because that sort of thing is bound to go ahead, comparatively. The rest we’ll use for speculation.”
“We’ll lose the whole lot, I expect,” I grumbled. Then I tried a new line of attack. “Anyhow isn’t all this money-making a bit too trivial for Homo superior? I believe you’re bitten by the speculation bug after all. I mean, what is the object of it all?”
“It’s all right, Fido, old thing,” he answered. (It was about this time that he began to use this nickname for me. When I protested, he assured me that it was meant to be Phaido, which name, he said, was connected with the Greek for “brilliant.”) “It’s all right. I’m quite sane still. I don’t care a damn about finance for its own sake, but in the world of Hom. sap. it’s the quickest way to get power, which means money. And I must have money, big money. Now don’t snort! We’ve made a good little start, but it’s only a start.”
“What about ‘advancing the spirit,’ as you called it?”
“That’s the goal, all right; but you seem to forget I’m only a child, and very backward too, in all that really matters. I must do the things I can do before the things I can’t yet do. And what I can do is to prepare—by getting (a) experience, (b) independence. See?”
Evidently the thing had to be. But it was with grave misgiving that I agreed to act as John’s financial agent; and when he insisted on indulging in various wild speculations against my advice, I began to tell myself that I had been a fool to treat him as anything but a brilliant child.
John’s financial operations did not spontaneously hold his attention as his practical inventions had done. And by now both kinds of activity were being subordinated increasingly to the study of human society and the absorbing personal contacts which came to him with adolescence. There was a certain absent-mindedness and dilatoriness about his buying and selling of stock, very exasperating to me, his agent. For though most of our common fortune was in my name, I could never bring myself to act without his consent.