There was a certain princely building in Birmingham where all the business connected with the name of Peter Masters was transacted. On each floor were long rooms full of clerks bending over rows of desks, carrying on with automatic regularity the affairs of each separate concern. Thus on the ground floor the Lack Vale Coal Company worked out its grimy history, on the second floor the Brunt Rubber Company had command, on the fifth the great Steel Axle Company, the richest and most important of all, lodged royally. But on the very topmost floor of all were the offices devoted to the personal affairs of Peter Masters, and through them, shut in by a watchful guard of head clerks, was the innermost sanctum, the nest of the great spider whose intricate web stretched over so great a circumference, the central point from which radiated the vast circle of concerns, and to which they ultimately returned materialised into precious metal—the private office, in short, of Peter Masters.

The heads of each separate floor were picked men—great men away from the golden glamour of the master mind—each involved in the success or failure of his own concern, all partners in their respective firms, but partners who accepted the share allotted to them without question, who served faithfully or disappeared from the ken of their fellow-workers, who were nominally accountable to their respective “company,” but actually dependent on the word and will of the great man up above them. None but these men and his own special clerks ever approached him. 127 Some junior clerk or obscure worker might pass him occasionally in a passage, or await the service of the lift at his pleasure; they might receive a sharp glance, a demand for name and department, but they knew no more of this controller of their humble destinies.

It was a marvellous organisation, a perfected system, a machine whose parts were composed of living men.

The owner of the machine cared much for the whole and nothing for the parts. When some screw or nut failed to answer its purpose, it was cast aside and another substituted. There was no question, no appeal. Nuts and screws are cheap. The various parts were well cared for, well oiled, just so long as they fulfilled their purpose; if they failed in that—well, the running of the machine was not endangered for sentiment.

Apart from this business, however, Peter Masters was a man of sentiment, though the workers in Masters’s Building would have scorned the idea. He had expended this sentiment on two people, one, his wife, who had died in Whitmansworth Union, the other Aymer Aston, his cousin, who on the moment of his declared union with Elizabeth Hibbault, had fallen victim to so grim a tragedy. His “sentiment” had never spread beyond these two people, certainly never to the person of his unseen child, whom, however, he was prepared to “discover” in his own good time.

His wife had left him within a year of his marriage, and whatever investigations he may have privately made, they were sub rosa, and he had persistently refused to make public ones. She would come back, he believed, with an almost childish simplicity in the lure of his great fortune,—if she needed money,—or him. That she should suffer real poverty or hardship, lack the bare necessities of life, never for a moment occurred 128 to him. Why should she, when his whole fortune was at her disposal—for her personal needs?

People who knew him a little said he had resented the slight to his money more than the scandal to himself when Mrs. Masters disappeared. They were in the wrong. Peter’s pride had been very cruelly hurt: she had not only scorned his gold, but spurned his affection, which was quite genuine and deep so far as it went, but since he had never taken the world into his confidence in the matter of his having any affection to bestow, he as carefully kept his own counsel as to the amount it had been hurt, and continued his life as if the coming and going of Mrs. Masters was a matter of as little concern as the coming or going of any other of the immortal souls and human bodies who got caught in the toils of the great Machine.

As for the expected child, let her educate it after her own foolish, pretty fancy. When it was of an age to understand matters, the man of Power would slip in and claim his own, and he never doubted but that the dazzle of his gold would outshine the vapid illusions of the mother, and procure for him the homage of his offspring. Such was the mingled simplicity and cuteness of the man that he never for one moment allowed to himself there was any other possible reverse to this picture, this, the only thought of revenge he harboured, its very sting to be drawn by his own good-natured laugh at her “fancies.” So he worked on in keen enjoyment, and the dazzle of the gold grew brighter as the years passed away unnoticed.

Peter Masters sat in the innermost sanctuary of the Temple of Mammon. It was a big corner room with six windows facing south and east, with low projecting balustrades outside which hid the street far down below. The room had not a severely business-like aspect, 129 it rather suggested to the observer the word business was translatable into other meanings than work. Thus the necessary carpet was more than a carpet in that it was a work of Eastern art. The curtains were more than mere hangings to exclude light or draught, but fabrics to delight the eye. The plainness of the walls was but a luxury to set off the admirable collection of original sketches and clever caricatures that adorned them. One end of the room was curtained off to serve as a dining-room on necessity. No sybarite could have complained of the comfort of the chairs or the arrangement of the light. The great table at which Peter Masters sat, was not only of the most solid mahogany, but it was put together by an artist in joinery—a skilful, silent servant to its owner, offering him with a small degree of friction every possible convenience a busy man could need. The only other furniture in the room was a gigantic safe, or rather a series of little safes cased in mahogany which filled one wall like a row of school lockers, each labelled clearly with a letter.

Peter Masters leant back in his chair and gazed straight before him for one moment—just that much space of time he allowed before the next problem of the day came before him—then he rang one of the row of electric bells suspended overhead.

Its short, imperious summons resounded directly in the room occupied by the head clerk of the Lack Vale Coal Company, and that worthy, without waiting to finish the word he begun writing, slipped from his stool and hurried to the office door of his chief, where he knocked softly and entered in obedience to a curt order. The room was a simplified edition of the room on the top floor; everything was there, but in a less luxurious degree, and the result was insignificant. The manager of the Lack Vale Coal Company, who 130 sat at the table, was a hard-featured, thin-lipped man of forty-five, with thin hair already turning grey, and pince-nez dangling from his button hole.

“Mr. Masters’s bell, sir,” said the clerk apologetically.

Mr. Foilet nodded and his thin lips tightened. He gathered up a sheaf of carefully arranged papers and went out by a private door to the central lift.

Peter greeted him affably and waved his hand to the opposite chair.

“You have Bennin’s report at last?”

“Yes. He apologised for the delay, but thought it useless to send it until he had investigated the gallery itself.”

“That’s the business of his engineers. If he is not satisfied with them he should get others.”

Mr. Foilet bowed, selected a paper from the sheaf he carried and handed it over. Peter Masters perused it with precisely the same kindly smiling countenance he wore when studying a paper or deciphering a friendly epistle. It was not a friendly letter at all, it was a curt, bald statement that a certain rich gallery in a certain mine was unsafe for working, though the opinion of two specialists differed on the point. The two reports were enclosed, and when all three reports were read Peter asked for the wage sheet of the mine. There was no cause of complaint there.

“The articles of the last settlement between the firm and the men have been rigorously adhered to?” questioned Masters, flinging down the paper.

“Rigorously. I will say they have taken no advantage of their success.”

Peter smiled. “It is for us to do that. Mr. Weirs pronounces the gallery fit for working. The seam is one of the richest we have. What improvements can be done to the ventilation and propping before Monday are to be done, but the gallery is to be worked 131 then, until the new shaft is completed. Then we will reconsider it.”

Again Mr. Foilet bowed, but his hand fingered his glasses nervously.

“And if the men refuse?” he questioned in a low voice, with averted eyes.

Peter Masters waved his hand.

“There are others. Men who receive wages like that must expect to have a certain amount of danger to face. Danger is the spice of life.” He leant back in his chair, humming a little tune and watched Mr. Foilet with smiling eyes. Mr. Foilet was wondering whether his chief was personally fond of spice, but he knew better than to say more. He left the room with a vague uneasy feeling at his heart. “A nice concern it will be if anything happens before the New Shaft’s ready,” he muttered; “if it wasn’t for his wonderful luck, I’d have refused.”

So he thought: but in reality he would have done no such thing.

The manager of the Stormby Foundry, which was a private property of Mr. Masters’s, and no company, was the next visitor. He was a tall lank Scotchman with a hardy countenance and a soft heart when not fretted by the roll of the Machine. The question he brought was concerning the selling of some land in the neighbourhood of the works, for the erection of cottages.

“Surely you need no instructions on that point, Mr. Murray,” said Peter a little more curtly than he had spoken to Mr. Foilet.

“There are two offers,” said the Scotchman quietly. “Tennant will give £150 and Fortman £200.”

“Then there is no question.”

“Tennant will build decent cottages of good material and with proper foundations, and Fortman—well, you know what Fortman’s hovels are like.” 132

“No, I don’t,” said Peter drily. “He has never been my landlord.”

Mr. Murray appeared to swallow something, probably a wish, with difficulty.

“They are mere hovels pretending to be villas.”

“No one’s obliged to live in them.”

“There are no others,” persisted Mr. Murray desperately, imperilling his own safety for the cause.

Masters frowned ominously.

“Mr. Murray,” he said, “as I have before remarked, you are too far-sighted. Your work is to sell the ground for the benefit of the company, which, I may remind you, is for your benefit also. You have not to build the cottages or live in them. If the people don’t like them they needn’t take them. I do not profess to house the people. I pay them accordingly. They can afford to live in decent houses if they like.”

“If they can get them,” remarked the heroic Mr. Murray.

Peter smiled, his anger apparently having melted away.

“Let them arrange it with Fortman, and keep your obstinacy for more profitable business, Murray, and you’ll be as rich as I am some day.”

There was nothing apparently offensive in the words, yet the speaker seemed a singularly unlovable person as he spoke them, and Murray did not smile at the compliment, but went out with a grave air.

Neither he nor his business lingered on Peter’s mind once the door had closed behind him. Peter got up and lounged to the window. He stood a while looking down into the street below with its crowd of strangely foreshortened figures. On the opposite side of the wide street was a shop where mechanical toys were sold, a paradise for boys. As Peter watched, a chubby-faced, stout little man with a tall, lanky boy at his side came to a stand before the windows. Peter 133 knew the man to be one of the hardest-headed, shrewdest men in the iron trade, and he guessed the boy was his son. Both figures disappeared within the shop, the elder with evident reluctance, the younger with assured expectation. Peter waited a long time—a longer period than he would have supposed he had to spare, had he thought of it. They emerged at last in company with a big parcel, hailed a hansom and drove away. Peter looked at the clock and chuckled. “To think Coblan is that sort of fool. Well, that youngster will add little to the fortunes of Coblan and Company. Toys!” He turned away from the window, and, seated again at his desk, began to scribble down some dates on a scrap of paper. Then he leant back in his chair thoughtfully.

“Hibbault says that boy has just got a rise in that berth of his in Liverpool. I’ll let him have a year or so more to prove his grit. I suppose Hibbault’s to be trusted, but I might write to the firm and ask how he gets on! However, Aymer’s boy shall have the vacancy!”

Therefore he took up his pen again and wrote the following brief letter:

Princes Building, Birmingham, April 10.

Dear Aymer:—

Are you going to ’prentice that boy of yours to me or not? I’ve an opening now in the Steel Axle Company, if you like to take it.

Yours,
Peter Masters.

Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker