This philosophy did not sadden him. It did not make him brood.
It made him heartlessly watchful.
It helped in business, too — for it let Fern assume automatically that the other fellow was far weaker and. far more bored than he seemed.
Sometimes, too, people with strong stomachs, found Fern’s murmured asides funny.
His situation, working for Noel Constant and then Malachi, conspired nicely to make almost anything he might say bitterly funny — for he was superior to Constant pére and fils in every respect but one, and the respect excepted was the only one that really mattered. The Constants — ignorant, vulgar, and brash — had copious quantities of dumb luck.
Or had had up to now.
Malachi Constant had still to get it through his head that his luck was gone — every bit of it. He had still to get it through his head, despite the hideous news Fern had given him on the telephone.
“Gee,” said Constant ingenuously, “the more I look at this furniture, the more I like it. This stuff should sell like hotcakes.” There was something pathetic and repellent about Malachi Constant’s talking business. It had been the same with his father. Old Noel Constant had never known anything about business, and neither had his son — and what little charm the Constants had evaporated the instant they pretended that their successes depended on their knowing their elbows from third base.
There was something obscene about a billionaire’s being optimistic and aggressive and cunning.
“If you ask me,” said Constant, “that was a pretty sound investment — a company that makes furniture like this.”
“United Hotcake preferred,” said Fern. United Hotcake preferred was a favorite joke of his. Whenever people came to him, begging for investment advice that would double their money in six weeks, he advised them gravely to invest in this fictitious stock. Some people actually tried to follow his advice.
“Sitting on an American Levitation couch is harder than standing up in a birchbark canoe,” said Fern dryly. “Throw yourself into one of these so-called chairs, and it will bounce you off the wall like a stone Out of a slingshot. Sit on the edge of your desk, and it will waltz you around the room like a Wright brother at Kitty Hawk.”
Constant touched his desk ever so lightly. It shuddered nervously.
“Well — they still haven’t got all of the bugs out of it, that’s all,” said Constant.
“Truer words were never spoken,” said Fern.
Constant now made a plea that he had never had to make before. “A guy is entitled to a mistake now and then,” he said.
“Now and then?” said Fern, raising his eyebrows. “For three months you have made nothing but wrong decisions, and you’ve done what I would have said was impossible. You’ve succeeded in more than wiping out the results of almost forty years of inspired guessing.”
Ransom K. Fern took a pencil from the air and broke it in two. “Magnum Opus is no more. You and I are the last two people in the building. Everyone else has been paid off and sent home.”
He bowed and moved toward the door. “The switchboard has been arranged so that all incoming calls will come directly to your desk here. And when you leave, Mr. Constant, sir, remember to turn out the lights and lock the front door.”
A history of Magnum Opus, Inc., is perhaps in order at this point.
Magnum Opus began as an idea in the head of a Yankee traveling salesman of copper-bottomed cookware. That Yankee was Noel Constant, a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was the father of Malachi.
The father of Noel, in turn, was Sylvanus Constant, a loom fixer in the New Bedford Mills of the Nattaweena Division of the Grand Republic Woolen Company. He was an anarchist, though he never got into any trouble about it, except with his wife.
The family could trace its line back through an illegitimacy to Benjamin Constant, who was a tribune under Napoleon from 1799 to 1801, and a lover of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Stael-Holstein, wife of the then Swedish ambassador to France.