Swirling Waters | Page 3

evening.
There was a quiet simplicity in Matheson's office that one would
scarcely associate with the operations of high finance. One might have
looked for costly furnishings and an atmosphere redolent of big money.
Yet here was a simple rosewood desk with a bowl of mimosa on it, and
around the walls were a few simple landscapes from recent salons.
If Lars Larssen were a magic name to Sir Francis Letchmere, it was a
magic name also to many other men of affairs. From cabin-boy to
millionaire shipowner was his story in brief. But that does not tell one
quarter. The son of Scandinavian immigrants to the States,
factory-workers, he had run away to sea at the age of fourteen, with the
call of the ocean ringing in his ears from the Viking inheritance that

was his. But on this was superposed the fierce desire for success that
formed the psychical atmosphere of the new American environment.
As a boy in the smoke-blackened factory town, he had breathed in the
longing to make money--big money--to use men to his own ends, to be
a master of masters.
With precocious insight he quickly learnt that money is made not by
those who go out upon the waters, but by those who stay on land and
send them hither and thither. He soon gave up the seafaring life and
entered a shipbroker's office. He starved himself in order to save money
to speculate in shipping reinsurance. An uncanny insight had guided
him to rush in when shrewdly prudent business men held aloof.
He had emphatically "made good." Each fresh success had given him
new confidence in himself and his judgment and his powers. He would
allow nothing to stand in his path. Scruples were to him the burden of
fools.
A fair-haired giant in build, with inscrutable eyes and mouth set grim
and straight--such was Lars Larssen.
Though Matheson was in no way a small man, yet he seemed somehow
dwarfed when Larssen entered the room. The financier was a self-made
master, but the shipowner was a born master of men--perhaps one's
instinctive contrast lay there. The one had the strength of finished steel,
but the other was rugged granite.
Lars Larssen said quietly: "Your letter brought me over to Paris. I don't
usually waste time in railway trains myself when I have men I can pay
to do it for me. So you can judge that I consider your letter mighty
important."
"I'm sorry if you have given yourself an unnecessary journey," returned
Matheson. "I had intended my letter to make my attitude clear to you."
"Then you missed fire."
"My attitude is simply this: I want to call the deal off."

"Not enough in it for you?" cut in Larssen.
"Not enough in it for the public."
The shipowner surveyed the other man through half-closed lids,
weighing up how far this declaration might be a genuine expression of
opinion and how far a mere excuse to cover some hidden motive.
"Talk it longer," he said.
For reply Matheson drew out a large-scale map of Canada from a
drawer and unfolded it with a decisive deliberation. He laid a finger on
the south-western corner of Hudson Bay. "Here is Fanning trading
station, the terminus of your five-hundred-mile railway. The land you
run it over is mostly lakes, rivers, and frozen swamps for three-quarters
of the year. The line is useless except for your own purpose--to carry
wheat for the Hudson Bay steamship route to England. You agree?"
"Agreed." Larssen was not the man to waste argument over minor
points when a vital matter was under discussion.
"Then the scheme centres on the practicability of making the arctic
Hudson Bay passage a commercial highway. It means the creating of a
modern port at Fanning. It means the lighting of a whole
coast-line"--his finger travelled to the north of Hudson Bay and the
northern coast of Labrador--"before a cargo of wheat leaves Port
Fanning."
"I'll build lighthouses myself by the dozen if the Canadian Government
won't. I'll equip every one with long-range wireless."
"The cost will be tremendous."
"There will be a differential of sixpence a bushel on wheat over my
route. That talks down fifty lighthouses."
"But it makes no allowance for rate-cutting by the big men on the
present routes. Further, if the Canadian Government are not with you

on this scheme, they'll be against you. There are a dozen ways in which
you might be frozen out. In that case the Hudson Bay Route will be the
biggest fiasco that ever happened."
"Nothing I've yet touched has been a fiasco," answered Lars Larssen
with a grim tightening of jaw. "Leave that end to me.... Now your end
is to get the money."
"From the English and Canadian public."
"Naturally."
"You came to me