"Who is this man? What is he doing here? What is his real business? What does he want to conceal on that island?" These were questions which presented themselves and demanded an answer.
Time is an eel. No matter how you sand your fingers, it wriggles through and is gone. One sets an act for to-morrow, especially if one be laboring as Potter Waite was laboring in those feverish days, and awakes suddenly to find it is next week or next month--and nothing had been done. When every hour of the day is carrying a double freight of necessary things to be done, the urgent thing that is capable of being pushed ahead finds itself moving hopelessly into the future.
When Potter drove to his office from the Bloomfield Hills club he was a man of single purpose, and that purpose was to pry into the affairs of Cantor until they lay upheaved for any man to view. He suspected Cantor, he knew not of what, but of something sinister. It sufficed, in such times, that the man had something to conceal; that the truth of him was not held up to public view.... And Potter hated him.
As with every other man, he had used the word "hate," but he had never understood it. Now he knew that it had a very special and exact meaning, and he could have defined it with precision--not in words, perhaps, but by acts which speak with an eloquence words can never hope to achieve. One can describe with words a sunset, a hurricane, the eruption of a volcano. But when one is done there is nothing but vowels and consonants arranged in a certain order. They may convey a suggestion, but no more. A printed page, no matter from what master's hand, remains a printed page. It is not sunset, hurricane, volcano. So with hate. It cannot be stamped upon paper; it can be indicated by conventional signs; but those conventional signs mean nothing but a vague hint to the individual who has not experienced the _thing_. Potter Waite experienced it. He hated Cantor, and when that is said words have reached their limit in denoting that human emotion which is the reverse of love.
But he did not act. He worked. No man who has not waited through days of construction to see a new mill begin the business of its existence, to see the shafts revolve, carrying with them their multitude of pulleys, communicating energy from the power-plant to the machine of production, does not know impatience. He is looking forward to the day when machines, perfect and exact for their appointed work, shall produce a concrete thing that can be seen and felt. It is not enough to know that each day brings nearer the concrete thing. No man but a mill man, skilled in such matters, knows what delays intervene, what errors creep in, what changes have to be made--and what a pall of anxiety hangs over the whole.... Once there was a mill which started up and ran flawlessly when it was completed. The residence of that mill is in a fairy-tale....