John Passos - Big Money

“My friends, my dear friends,” the lawyer crooned, rubbing his fingers together till it looked like they’d smoke, “we mustn’t let ourselves be carried away, must we, not on a solemn occasion like this… What we want is a quiet fireside chat… the friendly atmosphere of the home…”

Charley let out a snorting laugh. “That’s what it’s always been like in my home,” he said halfaloud and turned his back on them to look out of the window over white roofs and iciclehung fireescapes. The snow, thawing on the shingle roof of a frame house next door, was steaming in the early afternoon sun. Beyond it he could see backlots deep in drifts and a piece of clean asphalt street where cars shuttled back and forth.

“Look here, Charley, snap out of it.” Jim’s voice behind him took on a pleading singsong tone. “You know the proposition Ford has put up to his dealers… It’s sink or swim for me… But as an investment it’s the chance of a lifetime… The cars are there… You can’t lose, even if the company folds up.”

Charley turned around. “Jim,” he said mildly, “I don’t want to argue about it… I want to get my share of what Ma left in cash as soon as you and Mr. Goldberg can fix it up… I got somethin’ about airplane motors that’ll make any old Ford agency look like thirty cents.”

“But I want to put Ma’s money in on a sure thing. The Ford car is the safest investment in the world, isn’t that so, Mr. Goldberg?”

“You certainly see them everywhere. Perhaps the young man would wait and think things over a little… I can make the preliminary steps…”

“Preliminary nothing. I want to get what I can out right now. If you can’t do it I’ll go and get another lawyer who will.”

Charley picked up his hat and coat and walked out.

Next morning Charley turned up at breakfast in his overalls as usual. Jim told him he didn’t want him doing any work in his business, seeing the way he felt about it. Charley went back upstairs to his room and lay down on the bed. When Hedwig came in to make it up she said, “Oh, are you still here?” and went out slamming the door after her. He could hear her slamming and banging things around the house as she and Aunt Hartmann did the housework.

About the middle of the morning Charley went down to where Jim sat worrying over his books at the desk in the office. “Jim, I want to talk to you.” Jim took off his glasses and looked up at him. “Well, what’s on your mind?” he asked, cutting off his words the way he had. Charley said he’d sign a power of attorney for Jim if he’d lend him five hundred dollars right away. Then maybe later if the airplane proposition looked good he’d let Jim in on it. Jim made a sour face at that. “All right,” said Charley. “Make it four hundred. I got to get out of this dump.”

Jim rose to his feet slowly. He was so pale Charley thought he must be sick. “Well, if you can’t get it into your head what I’m up against… you can’t and to hell with you… All right, you and me are through… He dwig will have to borrow it at the bank in her name… I’m up to my neck.”

“Fix it any way you like,” said Charley. “I got to get out of here.”

It was lucky the phone rang when it did or Charley and Jim would have taken a poke at each other. Charley answered it. It was Emiscah. She said she’d been over in St. Paul and had seen him on the street yesterday and that he’d just said he was going to be out of town to give her the air, and he had to come over tonight or she didn’t know what she’d do, he wouldn’t want her to kill herself, would he? He got all balled up, what with rowing with Jim and everything and ended by telling her he’d come. By the time he was through talking Jim had walked into the salesroom and was chinning with a customer, all smiles.

Going over on the trolley he decided he’d tell her he’d got married to a French girl during the war but when he got up to her flat he didn’t know what to say, she looked so thin and pale. He took her out to a dancehall. It made him feel bad how happy she acted, as if everything was fixed up again between them. When he left her he made a date for the next week.

Before that day came he was off for Chi. He didn’t begin to feel really good until he’d transferred across town and was on the New York train. He had a letter in his pocket from Joe Askew telling him Joe would be in town to meet him. He had what was left of the three hundred berries Hedwig coughed up after deducting his board and lodging all winter at ten dollars a week. But on the New York train he stopped thinking about all that and about Emiscah and the mean time he’d had and let himself think about New York and airplane motors and Doris Humphries.

When he woke up in the morning in the lower berth he pushed up the shade and looked out; the train was going through the Pennsylvania hills, the fields were freshplowed, some of the trees had a little fuzz of green on them. In a farmyard a flock of yellow chickens were picking around under a peartree in bloom. “By God,” he said aloud, “I’m through with the sticks.”

truly the Steel Corporation stands forth as a corporate colossus both physically and financially

Now the folks in Georgia they done gone wild

Over that brand new dancin’ style

Called Shake That Thing

CARBARNS BLAZE

GYPSY ARRESTED FOR TELLING THE TRUTH

Horsewhipping Hastens Wedding

that strength has long since become almost a truism as steel’s expanding career progressed, yet the dimensions thereof need at times to be freshly measured to be caught in proper perspective

DAZED BY MAINE DEMOCRATS CRY FOR MONEY

shake that thing

Woman of Mystery Tries Suicide in Park Lake

shake that thing

OLIVE THOMAS DEAD FROM POISON

LETTER SAID GET OUT OF WALL STREET

BOMB WAGON TRACED TO JERSEY

Shake That Thing

Writer of Warnings Arrives

BODY FOUND LASHED TO BICYCLE

FIND BOMB CLOCKWORK

“ Mr. Ford the automobileer ” the featurewriter wrote in 1900,

“ Mr. Ford the automobileer began by giving his steed three or four sharp jerks with the lever at the righthand side of the seat; that is, he pulled the lever up and down sharply in order, as he said, to mix air with gasoline and drive the charge into the exploding cylinder… Mr. Ford slipped a small electric switch handle and there followed a puff, puff, puff… The puffing of the machine assumed a higher key. She was flying along about eight miles an hour. The ruts in the road were deep, but the machine certainly went with a dreamlike smoothness. There was none of the bumping common even to a streetcar… By this time the boulevard had been reached, and the automobileer, letting a lever fall a little, let her out. Whiz! She picked up speed with infinite rapidity. As she ran on there was a clattering behind, the new noise of the automobile. ”

For twenty years or more,

ever since he’d left his father’s farm when he was sixteen to get a job in a Detroit machineshop, Henry Ford had been nuts about machinery. First it was watches, then he designed a steamtractor, then he built a horseless carriage with an engine adapted from the Otto gasengine he’d read about in The World of Science , then a mechanical buggy with a onecylinder fourcycle motor, that would run forward but not back;

at last, in ninetyeight, he felt he was far enough along to risk throwing up his job with the Detroit Edison Company, where he’d worked his way up from night fireman to chief engineer, to put all his time into working on a new gasoline engine,

(in the late eighties he’d met Edison at a meeting of electriclight employees in Atlantic City. He’d gone up to Edison after Edison had delivered an address and asked him if he thought gasoline was practical as a motor fuel. Edison had said yes. If Edison said it, it was true. Edison was the great admiration of Henry Ford’s life);