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I should offer to present the War Office with half a dozen aeroplanes to be called 'The Ascher Flying Fleet'; or a first-rate cannon of the largest size. A good deal can be done to shut people's mouths in that sort of way." "You do not understand," said Mrs. Ascher. She turned to me, evidently hoping that I would explain Ascher's real difficulty to Gorman. I hesitated for a moment.
He saw in the inflow of capital the way of triumph for his Gospel, the means of breaking up old careless, lazy creeds, the infusion of energy and love of freedom. Ascher, so I conceived the situation, was to stretch his threads from Calvary to the grapefruit trees of Cartagena. At Bahia I was introduced to a Brazilian statesman. I met him first at the house of one of Ascher's banker friends.
I have no country, but I believe I can understand Ascher quite as well as Gorman does. Nor am I sure that I ought to be thankful for my immunity from the fever of patriotism. Ascher suffered severely because at a critical moment in his life a feeling of loyalty to his native land gripped him hard. I have also suffered, a rending of the body at least comparable to Ascher's rending of the soul.
South America and Ascher's web of international credit sank into their proper insignificance. I met Malcolmson in my club a week after my return. He very nearly pulled the buttons off my waistcoat in his eagerness to explain the situation to me. Malcolmson has a vile habit of grabbing the clothes of any one he particularly wants to speak to.
I am no expert judge of anything in the world except perhaps a horse or a bottle of claret, but I was impressed by this piece of Mrs. Ascher's work. Tim Gorman's fine eyes were the only things about him which struck me as noticeable. No artist can model eyes in clay. But Mrs. Ascher had got all that I saw in his eyes into the head before me all and a great deal more.
The mention of Mrs. Ascher's name recalled Gorman to a sense of his duties as a host. The two ladies were not getting on very well together. I imagine that Mrs. Ascher was too much excited by her Irish news to care for talking about the Naval Review we were going to see, and that was a topic which would inevitably suggest itself to Miss Gibson.
I'll make you rich, and as for Viola, I'll get her a husband such a husband that all the girls in Bohemia will turn green and yellow with envy...Ascher's daughter shall have as rich a dowry as the daughter of a Rothschild... But there's one thing, and one thing only, that I need, and then all will happen as I promise, in one night."
"Run across the trail of our friend Ascher much? I expect you did." Gorman very nearly sidetracked me there. I was strongly tempted to tell him about the impression which Ascher's gossamer had made on me. "The slime of the financier," said Gorman, "lies pretty thick over the world.
He once told me about a Spirit which moves very much as Mrs. Ascher's does. Its aim was goodness and the bishop called it God. His definition of faith was, except for the different object, precisely Mrs. Ascher's. Gorman propounds a somewhat similar philosophy of life, and occasionally talks about faith in the same rapt way.
I had more sense than to mention money to a woman in Mrs. Ascher's frame of mind. "I have money enough of my own," she said. "He and I want very little. What do we care for except just to love each other and to see beautiful things and to escape from all this nightmare of blood and hate and horror and hideousness?" I felt helpless. Mrs. Ascher had undoubtedly hit on a new solution of the problem.
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