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I liked that song. I was not sure that I should like the Aschers' music equally well. However, I had no intention of contradicting Mrs. Ascher. "I'm passionately fond of music," I said. Ascher is a singularly guileless man.
I rang the bell and five minutes later Gorman left me. He had not told me anything about Home Rule, or how his party meant to deal with a recalcitrant Ulster. He seemed very little interested in Ulster. Yet Malcolmson was indubitably in earnest. I felt perfectly sure about that. I intended to call on the Aschers as soon as I could after I returned to London.
They can go on only because the Aschers, sitting at their office desks in London or New York, direct the purchase or sale of what are but scratches with a pen on bits of paper. There is, no doubt, another way of looking at the system. The ships, the kings, the mighty minds, the common men, are all of them in bondage to Ascher and his kind.
I did not like to give them dinner at a restaurant without taking them on to the theatre; and the Aschers are rather superior to most plays. I had no way of knowing which they would regard as real drama. The revival of Gorman's play solved my difficulty. I knew that Mrs. Ascher regarded him as an artist and that Ascher had the highest respect for his brilliant and paradoxical Irish mind.
In the end the general frankness became monotonous and I tired of Canada. I went back to New York, hoping to pick up some one there who would travel home with me by way of the West Indies, islands which I had never seen. I thought it possible that I might persuade the Aschers, if they were still in New York, to make the tour with me.
His music was loud sometimes, sometimes soft, but it did not fail to create the sense of passionate deliciousness and, for a time, a longing for more of it. After a while my senses grew numb, sated I suppose. I looked over at the Aschers. She still lay as she had lain at first, but her fists were no longer clenched. All her muscles seemed to be relaxed. Ascher had crept over close to her.
"What about the Aschers?" he said. He handed the list to me. There was a pencil mark opposite the name of Mr. Carl Ascher. Immediately below it was "Mrs. Ascher and maid." "I don't know him," I said. "Who is he? Has he done anything particular?" "Heavens above!" said Gorman. "Who is Ascher! But perhaps you don't recognise him apart from the rest of the firm. Ever heard of Ascher, Stutz & Co.?"
"I don't see it," said Gorman, "unless you mean that they'd be eating hothouse peaches if there were no Aschers." I did not mean that. I am, indeed, pretty sure that if there were no Aschers, if Gorman succeeded in abolishing the class, neither the city clerk, nor his pretty wife, nor any one else in England would eat hothouse peaches. There would not be any.
There was just a chance that I might come across Gorman again and that he would be taken with the idea of preaching the doctrines of Irish nationalism in Jamaica. I called on the Aschers twice and missed them both times. But the second visit was not fruitless. Mrs. Ascher rang me up on the telephone and asked me to go to see her in her studio.
The position of the Aschers in England might become impossible. Gorman with his highly developed faculty for gauging the force and direction of popular opinion understood at once and thoroughly the difficulties that lay before Ascher. What he did not understand was the peculiar difficulty which Ascher felt. I responded to Mrs. Ascher's glance of appeal and tried to explain things to Gorman.
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