Free Tornado Pratt by Paul Ableman

neither was Alexander. He wanted to live to the fullest and so did I. But how? For a time I collected sculpture and painting and built up a pretty good collection. But this was a somewhat static activity. I wrote a book—and I sometimes wonder, Horace, if you ever came across it? It was called: The Pioneer and it was a romance, a novel, about a self-made millionaire based on—you guessed it! Well, it got a few kind mentions and it sold three thousand copies and I made five hundred bucks out of that book which had taken me eight months to write! That was pretty lousy pay when you consider I could normally make five hundred bucks in the time it takes to have a piss. If I’d felt I could be a great writer—or painter or any damn thing in the arts—why I might have stuck to it but I knew I couldn’t. No, what I was was a businessman and now that I’d reached the pinnacle of my profession at the age of thirty, it seemed there was nothing left for me to do. Alarmed at this prospect, I combatted it by dreaming up projects the whole time. After all, if I was Alexander then I must be a twentieth-century Alexander and find my adventure in business.
    “How about whaling?” I asked Harvey.
    “How about it?”
    “You think we ought to go into whaling?”
    I think we had this conversation in Cincinnati. There was a factory in Cincinnati which turned out rubber aprons, rubber boots, garden hose and stuff like that. Harvey and I had flown into Cincinnati to inspect the factory, found that it was inefficient and unexhilarating, declined to purchase it, or even prop it up, and stepped out to the best joint in Cincinnati for a slap-up dinner. I was proud of us. It seemed to me we were doing a great job and I ordered bootleg wine with our dinner. We drank two bottles of bootleg claret, the colour of shoe polish and the flavour of carrots, and it went to my head. That’s when I asked Harvey about whaling. He nodded reflectively:
    “It might be a very good idea.”
    “You think so, Harvey?”
    “Well, let’s see, if we went into whaling we would assure ourselves a steady supply of whales. I’m not absolutely sure what we’d do with them but doubtless you’d come up with something.”
    “There’s a big market for whale oil, Harvey, especially sperm oil.”
    “There’s certainly a market for sperm oil, Tornado, but I was under the impression that it was a small, specialized market. In order to whale successfully, you need an enormous capital investment . You have to buy whaling ships and shore installations. If you have a bad year, you run up fantastic debts. Then again it’s becoming an archaic industry. The world is running out of whales and into petroleum. Might I ask, Tornado, what commended the idea of whaling to you?”
    “Ty Lipkowicz makes a buck or two out of whaling.”
    “Ty Lipkowicz probably makes one buck in a thousand out of whaling. He inherited his whaling fleet and it was the basis of his fortune. But I very much doubt if Ty Lipkowicz, were he starting now from scratch, would invest his money in a blubber hunt. Anyway , Tornado, take my word for it, you couldn’t handle a harpoon—”
    “Sure I could, Harvey—”
    Then I stopped, Horace, and grinned, for I saw how Harvey had trapped me. He continued:
    “That’s it, isn’t it, old sport? It’s not the shrewd business brain of Tycoon Pratt talking, is it? It’s the frustrated hero, imagining himself poised like Hercules in the prow of a pitching boat ready tomatch cunning and strength with the monsters of the deep. Well, there’s nothing wrong with a yearning for adventure, Tornado, but there’s everything wrong with confusing it with good old honest greed.”
    I wasn’t too happy about Harvey seeing through me like that and I guess I became a mite silent. Then I suddenly remembered an occasion when, at the age of about eleven, I’d broken through some underbrush and come upon a little, deserted cabin. At first glance it had seemed perfect,