[Part III here.]
The journey to Luxembourg was undertaken in November, after the weather had turned. The days were short, bleak, damp and windy. Nights were getting ever longer. For Gormally, this was his first journey to the Continent. Kuhn, whose forebears hailed from there, felt more at home. The papers were carried in a leather case, tied with tape; Gormally, who had assembled them, knew their order without looking, and could have recited the sequence of messages as one might recite a lesson learned by heart.
A steam packet took them across a choppy sea to Calais, and thence by rail across a country that seemed, to Gormally, somehow strange and familiar at the same time. The train ran through fields already stripped, the hedges bare, the grey villages set close about their churches. At the larger stations there were delays – small ones, nothing that could not be explained – but Kuhn noted them all the same, as though each interruption confirmed something he had long suspected.
“It is the same everywhere,” he said once, as they stood upon a platform waiting for a connection that did not come at the appointed time. “We imagine the system as continuous. It is not so. It is a series of parts, each subject to its own failure.” Gormally thought of the wire, of the way a message travelled without visible interruption, and said nothing.
Kuhn had travelled extensively across Western Europe, but he had never been to Luxembourg. It turned out to be smaller than he had expected. The town, set upon its rock, seemed less a place of trade than of administration, its buildings solid, its streets orderly, its people speaking mainly French, but some German. Their hotel, close to the court, was small and clean.
Kuhn and Gormally were received by a local avocat, engaged by the house that had transmitted the claim. He was a careful man, courteous, precise, who listened more than he spoke and who, when he did speak, chose his words as though each were to be entered into a record.
“You will understand,” he said, as he laid out the papers upon the table in his office, “that the matter will be considered upon the documents. The court will wish to see the sequence, the exact terms, the times at which the communications were made. Oral explanations are of less weight.”
Kuhn inclined his head. “We are prepared,” he said.
The hearing took place two days later, in a room that was neither large nor imposing, but which nevertheless possessed a certain gravity. Three judges sat together at a raised table, the presiding judge in the centre, the others slightly behind. There was no jury. There was no sense of an audience. Those present were there for the purpose of the matter and no other.
The proceedings were conducted in French. Kuhn and Gormally's avocat translated where necessary, though much of what was said could be followed by reference to the papers themselves, which lay before the court in ordered bundles.
The telegrams were read.
It was done slowly, each message taken in turn, the dates and times noted, the words rendered into French with a care that seemed to Gormally to alter them even as it preserved them. Phrases that had been, in their original form, quick and provisional, acquired a different quality when set down in another language, one more accustomed, it seemed, to definition.
Gormally experienced a revelation: while the common law of England might seek the spirit of a bargain, the Continent's code-based system demanded only the letter. It was a machinery of words, and he had been caught in the gears.
“Condition de l’expédition dans quatorze jours, strict,” read the clerk, and Gormally felt the word take on a weight it had not borne in his own hand.
Their avocat rose to speak. He set out the facts as Gormally and Kuhn had understood them: the urgency of the Hamburg request; the customary nature of such terms; the efforts made to secure shipment; the interruption of traffic beyond their control. He referred, without emphasis, to reports of disturbances upon the railway, to delays not of their making. He spoke of good faith.
The other side replied. Their advocat was more emphatic. He spoke of obligation, of the clarity of the condition as expressed, of the reliance placed upon it. He did not dwell upon the cause of the delay. It was, he suggested, irrelevant. What mattered was that the terms had not been met.
One of the judges asked: “At what time was the acceptance received?”
There was a brief consultation. The time was given.
“And the confirmation?” he asked.
The answer followed.
There was a small interval between the two – minutes, no more. It had not seemed significant at the time. Set out now, it formed part of a sequence, each element fixed.
The presiding judge leaned forward slightly.
“In your confirmation,” he said, addressing their avocat, “you repeat the term of fourteen days. Do you not?”
“It is mentioned, yes,” said the avocat.
“And without qualification,” said the judge.
“Our clients understood it as descriptive of the expected period,” said the avocat. “Not as a condition altering the nature of the acceptance.”
The judge nodded, acknowledging the distinction, and made a note.
Gormally sat very still. He watched as the papers were taken up and set down, as the words he had written were traced in another hand, as the meaning he had intended was separated from the meaning that might be drawn.
When it was over, there was no immediate pronouncement. The court would deliver its judgment in due course. They left as they had entered, quietly, the papers gathered, the sequence preserved. That evening, Kuhn had bought two tickets to see Mozart's Magic Flute at the Théâtre des Capucins, which Gormally said was profoundly uplifting.
The decision was given two days later, their fifth day in Luxembourg, by which time a harsh early frost had set in on the city; the anxiety and impotence of their situation adding to a sense of gloom that contrasted with the joy of watching the opera.
The judgment was written, as such decisions are, in a language of reasons. The court found that the acceptance, as expressed, had introduced a condition. No supposition of ill-will, no intent to cheat. But the confirmation, by repeating that condition, had accepted it. The failure to ship within the fourteen days, whether caused by interruption of traffic or not, constituted a breach. Damages were to be assessed accordingly.
Kuhn read the judgment in silence, then folded it and placed it with the others.
“It is as they must decide,” he said. “They have read what was written.”
Gormally did not at once reply. He had followed the reasoning, had seen the line by which the court had moved from one point to the next, each step justified by the one before. It was not unjust. It was, in its way, exact.
“We did not mean it so,” he said at last.
Kuhn looked at him.
“No,” he said. “But we wrote it so.”
They returned to London by the same route, the fields now more bare than before, the days shorter still. The office in Mincing Lane was as they had left it. The ledgers were there, the desks, the steady work of the business continuing, as it must, even in the face of loss.
In the weeks that followed, the figures were set down, the accounts adjusted, the obligations met as far as they could be met. The profit that had once seemed assured was not only gone, but reversed; the sum they were required to pay exceeded it many times. Kuhn bore it with a composure that did not conceal the extent of the blow.
For Gormally, the lesson was of another kind. He had learned to see a margin where others did not, to act when others hesitated. It had served him well. Yet here, in the reading of a few words, it had turned against him.
He continued to work, to reckon, to send and receive the messages upon which the business depended. But there was, from that time, a difference, slight but persistent, in the way he set down a phrase, in the pause before he committed it to paper.
It is a small thing, the placing of a word, the repetition of a term. It passes in a moment, carried by a boy along a street, tapped out upon a wire, received and read elsewhere. Yet it endures, fixed in ink, to be taken up again in another place, in another language, and given a weight it did not possess when first sent.
Kuhn felt obliged to mention the court case at the Lodge; the worshipful brothers expressed their concern at his company's loss, as well as their admiration for his frankness. There, but for the grace of the Great Architect... What happened to Kuhn could have happened to many another trader. A subscription was raised that certainly helped cover the company's immediate cash-flow needs. Kuhn accepted it with grace and gratitude in the spirit it was given.
The coda here.
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