Part 52 (1/2)
”You mean to say,” asked the man by the window slowly, ”that this very boy you've been telling us about was the one who shot the Archduke?”
”Yes,” said the other, ”he was Gavrilo Prinzip of Sarajevo.”
”Good Lord!” exclaimed the third. ”The boy who brought on the war!”
”As we were saying earlier,” returned the one who had told the tale, ”historians will doubtless trace the beginnings of the war to Gavrilo's shot. Certainly Austria used the shot as her excuse, alleging that a plot to kill the Archduke had been hatched in Serbia-which was absolutely untrue, for Serbia was afraid of nothing so much as of giving offense to Austria, knowing well that Austria was only seeking a pretext to pounce upon her, precisely as she had earlier pounced upon Bosnia and Herzegovina, annexing them.”
After a thoughtful pause he added: ”Poor Gavrilo! I am glad to know that he is free at last. Like Mara's starling, he was not one to live long in a cage. And it is perhaps because I was so fond of him, and also because Austria's excuse was so transparently despicable, that I shall always go behind the shooting in thinking of the beginning of the war. As I conceive it, it was Mara's anger that released Gavrilo from the promise which, otherwise, would have withheld him. And it was the death of the caged starling that brought on her anger. And it was the animalculae that caused the bird's death.”
”That is,” put in the man by the window, ”you prefer to trace the war down to such a small beginning as the death of that caged bird?”
”Rather,” replied the other, ”to a still smaller and more repulsive beginning-to the vermin which destroyed the bird. It seems to me I see them always crawling through the explanations, apologies, excuses, war messages, and peace overtures of the Teutonic autocrats.”
AT ISHAM'S
_By_ EDWARD C. VENABLE From _Scribner's Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner's Sons._ _Copyright, 1919, by Edward C. Venable._
It was a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things. It was not, of course, advertised as that; there was no sign to the public saying as much. Indeed, the only sign of any sort said ”Wines, Ales, and Liquors,” just below the name ”Isham.” But, nevertheless, that is what it distinctively was-a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things.
It was a curious place to look at, too, in a way-the wrong way. It was a three-story house among houses fifteen, twenty, and thirty stories high; it was a house sixty years old, living usefully among houses, most of which were scarcely as many months old. But sixty years is no great age for a house in most places, and three stories is not out of the common.
It is thirty stories that are extraordinary. In the right way Isham's was a very ordinary place to look at, in very curious surroundings-only it took a moment's thought to find it out.
Old Isham himself, though, would have been curious anywhere in the world. He was seventy years old, and he looked precocious. Perhaps having lived so long in an atmosphere of ”wild surmise” had robbed him of the gift of wonderment, the last light of infancy to go out in the world, and so he was absolutely grown up. That is what he was, absolutely grown up. Looking into his face you could not imagine his ever being surprised, quite without a previous experience of the present. As one of his customers said, he could take the gayest dinner-party that ever was, and with a single glance of his faded blue eyes reduce it to a pile of dirty dishes and the bill. He was saturated with the gayety of thirty thousand dinners. He never condescended to the vulgarity of a dress suit, but always wore plain black with immaculate linen. So he would move in the evening, ponderously-for he must have weighed two hundred pounds-among the tables, listening imperturbably to praise and blame. Yes, chops were almost always properly broiled, beer had been flat from the beginning of the world-Lucullus with a dash of Cato.
Twinkle Sampson was his oldest patron. He was as old as Isham, and had been dining there once or twice a week ever since he was thirty; but he was the ant.i.thesis of Isham in appearance. He had the face of a very young child; it was all wonderment. The whole world was for him a wild surmise. His hobby was astronomy. He liked, as he said, to talk about the moon. Any of the heavenly bodies would interest him, but the moon was his own peculiar sphere. His knowledge was for the most laboriously gleaned, una.s.sisted, from books; but twice in his life he had looked at the moon through a great telescope, and those two occasions were to Twinkle Sampson what one wedding and one funeral are to most men. He looked like a moon-lover, too, a pale, weak reflection of masculinity.
The nearest he ever got to anger was when some ignorant person at Isham's threatened to divert the talk from his hobby when once he had dragged it thither.
”I know a man-,” began one of these imprudently on one occasion.
”We don't care if you know a million men,” interrupted Twinkle. ”We want to talk about the moon.”
And he sat for five minutes thereafter, blinking at the interloper like an exasperated white-haired owl. Even in that outburst, though, he characteristically took refuge in the plural.
Such little ”flare-ups” were very, very frequent at Isham's. Indeed, they were inevitable, because there people talked of what they had thought about. It is the talk for talk's sake that is only a string of wearying agreements; the drunkard over a bar, a debutante at a dinner-table, a statesman among his const.i.tuents. Talk at Isham's was intelligently sharp, interrupted, disputative. And, in any case, Savelle would have made it so. He was eaten up by the zeal of his cause, which was Christianity and capitalism. Capitalism, he preached, was founded on Christianity, was a development and an inevitable development of the social implication of the Gospels. It was a curious plea; it had the power of exasperating human beings otherwise kindly and meditative, such as chiefly affected Isham's, to something like fury when Savelle eloquently expounded it. He called it Christian economics. He argued that just as Christianity was developing the social relations of human beings to one of pure love, so it was developing also their economical relations to one of pure trust. The two developments had gone on side by side throughout the Christian era, from the days when merchants hauled ponderous ”talents of silver” about with them in their trading, until now, when one could control all the wealth of the world by the tapping of a telegraph key. And not only was their growth thus synchronous, but each was the exactest exponent of the other; it was only in Christian countries, he explained, that the capitalistic system was to be found at all, and in the quasi-heathen it was invariably established in exact proportion with the spread of Christian ethics. He was full, too, of frequent instances and recondite dates, such as the invention of the bill of exchange by the Hebrews, and the advice of Jesus to his Apostles anent carrying money about with them. There were only two crimes in Christian economics, just as in the ethics; dishonesty, which he claimed was the commercial form of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and bankruptcy, or the refusal of trust, which was simply a denial of the economic implication of the teaching of love one another. Socialism, of course, was merely a new, subtle sacrilege, and Marx the newest incarnation of anti-Christ. His faith or fanaticism would always burn its fiercest in talking of these specific instances. Twinkle Sampson would sit blinking astigmatically at him for an hour in silence when he preached so. He was the only man of them all whom Twinkle Sampson never interrupted, never tried to drag away to the moon.
It was only an occasional horrified Christian or exasperated Socialist who ever diverted him, and then he would descend to embittering personalities with disconcerting quickness. He was of French descent, Gascon, a tall, fair, pale man, and had the racial instinct for combat.
In the daytime he was the Wall Street reporter for one of the evening dailies, and people who knew him down there said he went about his work in that district like a pious pilgrim in Judea. But what you did daytimes never mattered at Isham's. It was what you could say evenings after dinner, in the back of the dining-room beside the bar, that counted, and there Savelle, next to Twinkle, was the best listened-to man in Isham's.
And, measured by that scale, little Norvel was his farthest neighbor. He was the least listened-to man, because he rarely spoke, and the best listener. Indeed, he was the only genuine listener. The others listened only under _force majeure_. He, on the contrary, would dine sparely, for he was very poor, apparently, and sit smoking all evening until ten o'clock, and go away without ever speaking to any one, except the waiter who served, and a ”Good evening” and ”Good night” to Mr. Isham himself.
His prestige was due solely to one effort. He had propounded a query which Isham's had discussed more than any other ever raised there, more than Twinkle's lunar hypotheses, or Savelle's Christian economics, and which had never been settled. It was the one common topic among them.
Other subjects owed their existence and prosperity to the protection and loyalty of one man, but little Norvel, having put his afoot, retired into silence and cigar smoke, and left its life to the care of others.
He had injected the conundrum into a conversation of Twinkle Sampson's about the inhabitants of Mars, in whose existence Twinkle Sampson not only believed, but took a far deeper interest than in those of his fellow earthmen.
”If,” little Norvel began, ”if Mars is inhabited by a race so similar to ourselves-if-”
”Well, well, Mr. Norvel,” Twinkle Sampson interrupted, ”that is fairly well conceded, I think. If-what?”
”If,” continued little Norvel tranquilly, ”if it is so, what means of communication between us is there that is so unmistakably of _human origin_ that a sight of it, or a sound from it, would immediately convince them of our relations.h.i.+p?”
It had seemed, when the quiet little man first spoke, as if it was a question easily brushed aside; but a little discussion, genuine Ishamic, soon proved it to have greater weight. Norvel sat aside, contributing nothing then or ever thereafter. Indeed, the only result the question had, or seemed to have, for him was the winning by it of the deep affection of Twinkle Sampson.
The early discussion of the matter eliminated all possibilities of the sense of hearing. That one of the five senses had to be discarded from the possibilities of communication. There is no sound which humanity can create which nature, in some other form, cannot perfectly imitate.