The Red Book Magazine/Volume 6/Number 3/The Federal Imp Company

by Herbert Quick

 

The Federal Imp Company

BY HERBERT QUICK

When the porter came snooping about as if desiring to make up my berth, I went into the smoking compartment. I do not smoke; but it was the only place to go. I found there a person of striking appearance who told me the most remarkable story I ever heard in my life, and one which I feel it my duty to make public.

He had before him a bottle of ready-mixed cocktails, a glass, and a newspaper. With his bags and the little card table on which he rested his elbows, he was occupying most of the compartment. I sidled in hesitatingly, in that unobtrusive way which I believe to be the unfailing mark of the retiring and artistic mind, and for want of a place to sit down, I leaned upon the lavatory. He was gazing fixedly at the half-empty bottle, his sweeping black moustaches curling back past his ears, his huge grizzled eyebrows shot through with the gleam of his eyes. He looked so formidable that I confess I was daunted, and should have escaped to the vestibule; but he saw me, rose, and with extreme politeness began tossing aside baggage to make room.

“I trust, Sir,” said he with a capital S, “that you will pardon my occupancy of so much of a room in which your right is equal to mine! Be seated, I beg of you, Sir!”

I sat down; partly because, when not aroused, I am of a submissive temperament; and partly because he had thrown the table and grips across the door.

“Don't mention it,” said I. “Thank you.”

“Permit me, Sir,” said he, “to offer you a drink.”

“I hope you will excuse me,” I replied, now slightly roused, for I abhor alcohol and its use. “I never drink!”

“It is creditable to any man, Sir,” said he, “to carry around with him a correct estimate of his weaknesses.”

This really aroused in me that indignation which sometimes renders me almost terrible; but his fixed and glittering gaze seemed to hold me back from making the protest which rose to my lips.

“Permit me, Sir,” said he, “to offer you a cigar.”

It was a strong looking weed; but although I am not a smoker, I took and lighted it. He resumed his attention to his bottle and paper.

“Will you be so kind,” said he, breaking silence, “as to read that item as it appears to your”

“'Federal Improvement Company,'” I read. “'Organized under the laws of New Jersey, on January 4th, with a capital of $1,000,000. Charter powers very broad, taking in almost every field of business. The incorporators are understood to be New York men.'”

“'Imp',” said he, “isn't it? 'Imp', not 'Improvement.'”

“I take it, sir,” said I, “'that the omission of the period is a printer's error, and that i-m-p means 'Improvement.'”

He leaned forward, grasped my wrist and peered like a hypnotist into my face.

“Just as badly mistaken,” said he, ”as if you had lost—as could be! It means 'Imp' just as it says 'Imp.' Have another drink!”

This time I really did not feel free to refuse him. He seemed greatly pleased at my tasting.

“Sit still,” said he, “and I'll tell you the condemdest story you ever heard. That corporation means that we are now entering a governmental and sociological area of low pressure that will make the French Revolution look like a cipher with the rim rubbed out. In the end you'll be apt to have clearer views as to whether or not 'i-m-p' spells 'improvement'!”

This he seemed to consider a very clever play upon words, and he sat for some time, laughing in the manner adopted by the stage villain in his moments of solitude. His Mephistophelean behavior, or something, made me giddy. His manner was quite calm, however, and after a while we lapsed back into the common-place.

“Ever read a story,” said he, “named 'The Bottle Imp'?”

“Stevenson's' 'Bottle Imp'?” I exclaimed, glad to find a topic of common interest, and feeling that it could not be a dangerous thing to be shut into the same smoking compartment with any man who loved such things, no matter how Captain-Kiddish he might appear. “Why yes, I have often read it. I am a teacher of literature, and an admirer of Stevenson. He possesses——”

“Who? Adlai?” he said. “Did he ever have it?”

“I mean Robert Louis,” said I. “He wrote it.”

“Oh!” said my companion meditatively, “he did, did he? Wrote it, eh? It's as likely as not he did—. I know Adlai. Met him once, when I was putting a bill through down at Springfield: nice man! Well about this 'Bottle Imp.' You know the story tells how he was shut up in a bottle—the Imp was—and whoever owned it could have anything he ordered, just like the fellow with the lamp—”

“Except long life!” said I, venturing to interrupt.

“Of course, not that!” replied my strange travelling companion. “If the thing had been used to prolong life, where would the Imp come in? His side of the deal was to get a soul to torture. He couldn't be asked to give 'em length of days, you understand. It couldn't be expected.”

I had to admit that from the Imp's standpoint, there was much force in this remark.

“And that other clause in the contract that the owner could sell it,” he went on. “That had to be in, or the Imp never could have found a man sucker enough to take the Bottle in the first place.”

The cases of Faust, and the man who had the Wild Ass's Skin seemed to me authorities against this statement; but I allowed the error to pass uncorrected.

“On the other hand,” he went on, “it was nothing more than fair to have that other clause in, providing that every seller must take less for it than he gave. Otherwise they'd have kept transferring it just before the owner croaked, and the Imp would never have got his victim. But with that rule in force the price just had to get down so low sometime that it couldn't get any lower, and the Imp would get his quid pro quo.”

“You speak,” said I indignantly, for it horrified me to hear the loss of a soul spoken of in this light manner; “you speak like a veritable devil's advocate!”

“When I've finished telling you of this Federal Imp Company that's just been chartered,” said he, “you'll have to admit that there's at least one devil that's in need of the best advocate that money'll hire!”

Here he gave one of his sardonic chuckles, long-continued and rumbling, and peered into the bottle of cocktails, as if the prospective client of the advocate referred to had been confined there.

“When it don't cost anything,” he added, “there's no harm in being fair, even with an Imp.”

I failed to come to the defense of my position, and he went on

“Well,” said he, “do you remember the 'Bottle Imp's' history that this man Stevenson gives us? Caesar had it once, and wished himself clear up to the head of the Roman Empire. Charlemagne, Napoleon, and a good many of the fellows who had everything coming their way, owed their successes to the Bottle Imp, and their failures to selling out too soon: got scared when they got a headache, or on the eve of battle, or something like that. It was owned in South Africa, and Barney Barnato and Cecil Rhodes both had it. That accounts for the way they got up in the world. Then the Bottle and Imp went to the Nob Hill millionaire who bought it for eighty dollars and sold it to Keawe the Kanaka for fifty. The price was getting dangerously low, now, and Keawe was mighty glad when he had wished himself into a fortune and got rid of the thing. Then, just as he was about to get married, he discovered that he had leprosy, hunted up the Bottle, which he found in the possession of a fellow who had all colors of money and insomnia, both of which he had acquired by purchasing the Bottle Imp for two cents, you remember, and was out looking for a transferee, and about on the verge of nervous prostration because he couldn't find one, not at that price! Keawe became so desperate from the danger of going to the leper colony and the loss of his sweetheart, that he bought the Bottle for a cent, in the face of the fact that, so far as he knew, a cent was the smallest coin in the world, and the bargain, accordingly, cinched him as the Imp's peculiar property, for all eternity. I'll be—hanged—if I know whether to despise him for his foolishness or to admire him for his sand!”

“You recall,” said I, “that his wife directed his attention to the centime—”

“Yes,” said he, “she put him on. And they threw away one transfer by placing it on the market at four centimes. They might just as well have started it at five.”

“I don't see that,” said I.

“Because you haven't figured on it,” said he. “You haven't been circulating in Imp circles lately, as I have, where these things are discussed. Listen! A centime is the hundredth part of a franc, and a franc is about nineteen cents. A cent, therefore, is a fraction more than five centimes. But they started it at four, the chocolate-colored idiots, after getting rid of their leprosy! When I think how that Bottle Imp has been mismanaged, I am driven—”

He illustrated that to which he was driven, by a gesture with the bottle on the table. He coughed, and took up his résumé of the story.

“Let that pass. They put it up at four centimes, and without Keawe's knowledge that she had anything to do with it, Keawe's wife got an old man to buy it, and she took it off his hands at three. The Kanaka soon found out that he was now carrying his eternal damnation in his wife's name, and he procured an old skipper or mate, or some such fellow in a state of intoxication, to buy it of her for two, on the agreement that he would take it again for one. Here they were, frittering away untold fortunes, each trying to go to perdition to save the other—it makes me tired! But the old bos'n or whatever he was, said he was going, you know where, anyhow, and figured that the Bottle was a good thing to take with him, and kept it. And there's where the Kanakas got out of a mighty tight place—”

“And the Bottle disappeared and passed into history!” I broke in. I was really absorbed in the conversation, in spite of a slight vertigo, now that we had got into the field of literature where I felt at home.

“Passed into—nothing!” he snorted. “Passed into the state of being the Whole Thing! Became It! Went on the road to the possession of the Federal Imp Company as the asset of the corporation. Folks 'll see now pretty quick, whether it passed into history or not! Yes, I should say so!”

“Who's got it now?” I whispered. I was so excited that I found myself sitting across the table, and us mingling our breaths like true conspirators. He had a good working majority in the breaths, however.

“Who's the Charlemagne, the J. Caesar, the Napoleon of the present day?” he whispered in reply, after looking furtively over his shoulder. “It don't need a Sherlock Holmes to tell that, does it?”

“Not,” said I, “not J. P.—”

“No,” said he, “It's John D.—”

But before he finished the name he crept to the door and peered down the aisle, and then whispered it in my ear so sibilantly that I felt for a minute as I used to do when I got water in my ear when swimming. But I noticed it very little in my astonishment at the fact he had imparted to me. I felt that I was pale. He rose again and prowled about as if for eavesdroppers. I felt myself a Guy Fawkes, an Aaron Burr, an—anything covert and dangerous.

“He bought this Bottle Imp,” my companion went on, resuming his seat, “of the old sailing-master, or whatever he was—the man with the downward tendency and the jag. What J. D. wanted was power, just as Caesar and Napoleon wanted it in their times. But the same kind of power wouldn't do. Armies were the tools of nations then; now they are the playthings. Now nations are the tools of money, and wealth runs the machine. This emperor of ours chose between having the colors dip as he went by, and owning the fellows that made 'em dip. He gave the grand-stand the go-by, and took the job of being the one to pull the string that turned on the current that moved the ruling force that controlled the power behind the power behind the throne. D'ye understand?”

“It's a little complex,” said I, “the way you state it, but—”

“It'll all be clear in the morning,” he said. “Anyway, that's what he chose. And what is he? The Emperor of Coin. He was a modest business man a few years ago. Suddenly the wealth of a continent began flowing into his control. It rolled in and rolled in, every coin making him stronger and stronger, until now the business of the world takes out insurance policies on his life and scans the reports of his health as if the very basis of society were John D. You-Know-Who. Emperors court his favor, and the financial world shakes when he walks. You don't think for a minute that this could be done by any natural means, do you?”

“But the price of the bottle was one centime!” said I, my altruism coming uppermost once more. “One centime: and he is no longer young!”

“Exactly,” he answered, “and he's got to sell it, or go to—. Well, he's just about got to sell it!”

“But how?” I queried. “What coin is there smaller than a centime—what he paid?”

“All been figured out,” said he, airily. “Who solved the puzzle I don't know; but I guess it was Senator Depew. Know what a mill is?”

“A mill? Yes,” said I. “A factory? A pugilistic encounter? A money of account?”

“Yes,” said he, “a 'money of account.' Never coined. One tenth of a cent. One half a centime! Have you heard of Senator Aldrich's currency bill, S. F. 41144? It's got a clause in it providing for the coinage of the mill. And there's where I come in. I'm an unelected legislator—third house, you know. Let the constructive statesmen bring in their little bills. I'm satisfied to put 'em through! S. F. 41144 is going to be put through, and old J. D.'ll sell his Bottle, Imp and all. Price, one mill. When this grip epidemic started in, he got a touch of it, and I'll state that a sick man feels a little nervous with that Imp in stock. So they wired for me. It's going to be a fight all right!”

“Why, who will oppose the bill?” said I. “No one will know its object.”

“Lots of folks will oppose it,” said he. “Every association of clergymen in the country is liable to turn up fighting it tooth and nail. There are too many small coins now for the interests of the people who depend on contribution boxes. The Sunday Schools will all be against it. And the street-car companies won't want the cent subdivided. Then it'll be hard to convince Joe Cannon; he's always looking for a nigger in the fence, and there is one here, you understand. But the mill's going to be coined, all the same!”

“But,” said I, “who will buy the diabolical thing for a mill. If Keawe and his wife had such trouble selling it for a centime, it will be impossible to dispose of it for a mill, absolutely impossible! It's the irreducible minimum!”

“I take it, Sir,” said he, with a recurrence of the capital S, “that you are not engaged in what Senator Lodge in our conference last night called 'hot finance'?”

“No,” I admitted, for in spite of the orthoepical error, I understood him. “No, I am not—not exactly.”

“I inferred as much from your remark,” said he. “When there's anything to be done, too large for individual power, or dangerous in its nature, or, let us say, repugnant to some back-number criminal law, or, as in this case, dangerous to the individual's soul's salvation, what do you do? Why you organize a corporation, if you know your business, and turn the whole thing over to it—and there you are. The Federal Imp Company will take over the Bottle Imp at the price of one mill. Mr. R. won't own it any more. His stock will be non-assessable, and all paid up by the transfer of the Imp, and there can't be any liability on it. He can retain control of it if he wants to—and you notice he generally wants to, and can laugh in the Imp's face. We've got all kinds of legal opinions on that. And whoever controls that company will rule the world. That Imp is the greatest corporate asset that ever existed. All that's needed is for the president of the corporation to wish for anything, or the board of directors to pass a resolution, and the thing asked for comes a-running. The railways, steamships, banks, factories, lands—everything worth having—are just as good as taken over.

Why it's the Universal Merger, the Trust of Trusts! The stockholders of the Federal Imp Company will be the ruling class of the world, a perpetual aristocracy; and the man with fifty-one per cent of the stock, or proxies for it, will be Emperor, Czar, Kaiser, Everything!”

“But this is stupendous!” I exclaimed: for, being a student of political economy—“economics”, they call it now—I at once perceived the significance of his statements. “This is terrible! It is revolution! It is the end of democracy! Can't it be stopped?”

“M'h'm,” said he, quietly, evidently assenting to my rather excited statement; and then in reply to my question, he added with another chuckle, “Stop nothing! Federal injunction won't do it: presidential veto won't do it: nor calling out the militia: nor anything else. For the Imp controls the courts, the president, and the army; and J. D. R. runs the Imp—fifty-one per cent of the Imp stock! The socialists will go out campaigning in favor of the government's taking over the Federal Imp Company, but the Imp controls the government—and the socialists, too, when you come down to brass nails. Oh, it's a cinch, a timelock, leadpipe cinch! The stuff's off with everybody else, if we can get this bill through!”

I was shocked into something like a cataleptic state, and sat dazed for awhile. Either this or the strong cigar, or something, so effected me that, as he passed the flask to me for the fourth time, the smoking compartment seemed to swim about me as the train rolled thunderously onward through the night. To steady myself I gazed fixedly at my extraordinary fellow traveller as he sat, his now well-nigh empty bottle before him, peering into it from time to time as if for some potent servant of his own. Suddenly he leaned back and laughed more diabolically than ever.

“Ha, ha, ha!'” he roared. “You ought to have been with us last night in his library! Aldrich and Depew and some of the others were there, and we were checking over our list of sure votes in the 'house.' The old man had the 'grip', as I said a while ago, and privately, I'll state I think he's scared stiff; for every fifteen minutes we got a bulletin from his doctors and messages from him to rush S. F. 41144 to its passage, regardless, or he'd accept a bid he'd got for the Bottle Imp from Sir Thomas Lipton, who wants it for some crazy scheme regarding lifting the Cup. All the while, there stood the Bottle with the Imp in it. When the grip news was coming in there was nothing doing with his Impship. But whenever we began discussing his transfer to the Company, the way business picked up in that bottle was a caution! Why, you could hear him stabing the stopper with his tail, and grinding his horns against the sides of the bottle, and fighting like a weasel in a trap, in such a rage that the Bottle glowed like a red-hot iron. It was shameful! One of the lawyers took the horrors, and had to be taken home in a carriage—threw a conniption fit every block! Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Oh! it was great stuff!”

“I don't see—” I began.

“No?: Don't you?” he queried, between the satanic chuckles. “Well, by George, the Imp saw, all right! He saw that modern financial ingenuity has found a way to flim-flam the devil himself. He saw, Sir, (here his voice assumed an oratorical orotund, and the capital S came in again) that our corporation lawyers have found a spoon long enough so that we can safely sup with Satan! Why, let me ask you once, what did the Imp go into the Bottle deal for in the first place? To get the aforesaid soul. You can see how he'd feel, now that the price is down to the last notch but one, to have it sold to a corporation, with no more soul than a rabbit! If—that—don't beat the—the devil, what does?”

It all dawned upon me now. The reasonableness of the entire story appealed to me. I reached for the paper. There it was: “Federal Imp Company: Charter powers very broad, taking in almost the entire field of business.” I looked at the lobbyist. He had dropped asleep with his head on the table beside the empty cocktail bottle. Again things seemed to swim, and I lapsed into a state of something like coma, from which I was aroused by someone shaking me by the shoulder.

“Berth's ready, suh,” said the porter, and passed to my companion.

“Hyah's Devil's Gulch Sidin', suh,” said he, rousing the slumbering lobbyist. “You get off, hyah, suh!”

He passed out of the door with a Chesterfieldian bow and good night. I passed a sleepless and anxious night. The shock, or something, made me quite ill. I have not yet recovered my peace of mind. An effort which I made to place the matter before Dr. Byproduct, the president of the university where I am a teacher of English, led to such a stern reproof that I was forced to subside. The doctor said that the story was a libel upon a great and good man who had partially promised the university an endowment of ten millions of dollars. I am ready, however, to appear before any congressional committee which may be appointed to investigate the matter, or before the Interstate Commerce Commission, and to testify to the facts as above written, if it costs me my position