_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 antithesis 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, unassisted, 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 débutante at a
dinner-table, a statesman among his constituents. 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 relationship?”
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.
Except laughter? That suggestion was Savelle’s. But it was not
successful, though he defended himself with his own peculiar fervor. It
appealed to the intense emotionalism of the man, that idea of the
ultimate expression of humanity being laughter. He took up its defense
as recklessly as his school of economics, and with something of the same
breadth of vision and indefinite reasoning. Laughter was, he claimed,
beyond the narrow limits of the question discussed, that very thing, the
ultimate expression of humanity. Man was distinctively not, as he has
been defined, the unfeathered biped, not the tool-using animal; he was
the animal who laughs, and in proof he instanced the great poet. When he
wished to imbue men with his own immense pessimism that the wrath of the
Zeus was not the mysterious working of nature but the malignity of men,
he made that terrible phrase, the most terrible ever spoken, “The
laughter of the gods.”
“Think of it yourselves,” he demanded. “Put it into your own words. The
laughter of God!” He was standing up then in the heat of his pleading.
“What that’s divine is left then? He can only be a man, a fearful
superman.”
But they beat down the orator with instances of gurgling brooks and
hyenas. He strove Homerically with his attackers, thundering his defense
of his vision until old Isham had to come up to the table and look at
them all with his faded blue eyes and precocious face of seventy years.
But though he failed of conviction his argument did just what he said;
it put the question outside the “narrow limits” Norvel had laid it in.
Savelle always did that with every question. After he had spoken the
phrase they all remembered was his—the ultimate expression of humanity.
It was by such phrases, such ideas, Isham’s lived, as a place to which
talk-hungry people learned to go.
Old Sampson, who always listened to Savelle, though he deplored his
tendency “to wander in his talk,” away from the moon and kindred
subjects, took a new lease of life from that night. At last a day had
come when people really liked to talk about the moon, or Mars, which was
almost as good. He became a mental manufacturer of objects of origin so
exclusively human that once they were conveyed to Mars, once that
difficulty overcome, would produce instant understanding. Almost nightly
he would turn up with a new one, and invariably some one would overthrow
his hopes by suggesting a _natural_, in distinction to his _human_,
phenomenon. He would always feebly defend his invention, and then fall
silent—apparently intent upon a new one.
It was Philbin, the novelist, whose hobby was “Weltpolitik,” and who
revelled in prophecies those days of a European cataclysm, who put him,
as it were, finally out of this particular misery.
“It seems to me,” complained Twinkle, in his plaintive voice, blinking
almost tearfully at the table-cloth, “as if nature imitates everything.”
“Twinkle,” said Philbin, who was sitting next to him, “lend me your
ears. I want ‘to whisper into their furry depths.’ Have you ever thought
of going yourself?”
Twinkle, lifting his eyes to the other’s face, blinked and shook his
head.
Savelle was the only man who did not laugh. He never laughed either at
Sampson or Philbin. “Don’t you see,” he cried sharply, in his eager
idea-driven way, “don’t you see what the man has discovered? Your ears
will need cropping soon. ‘_Nature imitates everything!_’ That is, he has
found, he has perceived, he is establishing by his own experiments that
man, after all his effort and his boasting, after all his science and
learning, which has made a joke of the teaching of Jesus and the poetry
of Milton, that this _creature_ itself has in turn _created_ nothing.
That man, after all, has only, can only, imitate nature.”
He let fall his fist on the table, looking around at his listeners. He
always had listeners at Isham’s, and perhaps nowhere else in New York.
For the moment he had forgotten his tiff with Philbin, had forgotten
Philbin himself, and was all for rushing ahead on his idea-driven course
to some unimaginable distance. But Philbin’s vanity never forgot
slights. It was not the words—he gave and took sharper every day of his
life—but the manner in which he was thrown aside as an unnoticeable
obstruction in the other’s path of thought, the rush past him of the
faster mind that mortified him. He knew Savelle, knew him better than
any one in the room did, for that was his business, and he knew how fast
he was going and how sharp he would fall, and then, like a mischievous
little boy, with his foot, he stuck out his tongue and tripped him.
“That’s contrary to every teaching of Christ you ever raved about,” he
said quickly.
Savelle did come down with rather a crash. Even his defenders admitted
that much. But then he had been going very fast. Moreover, he was a man
who habitually used too many words. He used too many to Philbin—a great
deal too many. Philbin’s faults were almost all on the outside, and even
through the casual communion of Isham’s he had made them pretty plain to
every man there. He was vain, slightly arrogant, over-given to sneering.
Savelle, in his defense of his position, managed to comment briefly upon
each quality, and he put into the personalities the same vigor that he
used to defend his theory of the universe. At the very best he showed a
lamentable lack of proportion. At the worst he was vulgarly offensive.
That is the danger of such talk as men plunged into at Isham’s; it lacks
proportion. Personalities and universalities get all mixed up, and
sometimes it takes long patience and a good deal of humor to straighten
out the tangle. Philbin and Savelle were in just such a tangle over
little Norvel’s query. And neither of them had patience and Savelle had
no grain of humor. If he had, he could not have come down from a
discussion of his theory of the universe to criticism of Philbin’s
personality. The matter was quite hopeless. The tangle only grew tighter
until there was only one way of ending it. Philbin took it. He was a
little man, and very nervous, and when he stood up his finger-tips just
touched the table, and he was trembling so they played a tattoo on the
table-cloth. Then he bowed and went out.
He had behaved the better of the two, but every one was glad to see him
go—except old Sampson, to whom anything like ill-feeling gave genuine
pain. He liked a placid world in which one could babble in amity about
the moon. But to the rest Philbin was a bore. His Weltpolitik was
uninteresting. His European cataclysm was a tale told by an idiot, full
enough of learning, but signifying little or nothing. One could imagine
baseball games on Mars, and make the matter realistic; but Philbin’s
imaginings dealt in palpable absurdities. Even at Isham’s talk had
limitations. Philbin had been a war correspondent in the Balkans, and
they thought it had upset his mind.
Savelle affected to ignore his going away, and went on with his
expounding of Twinkle Sampson’s discovery—so he was pleased to call it.
He ridiculed Philbin’s criticism more fiercely than before. He, Sampson,
had given a marvellously stimulating example, Savelle said, of what
religious thought meant, that it was not in man to create, only in God.
All that was human was imitation, even as man himself was God’s image.
In truth, Philbin’s attack had stimulated him, and he talked that night
better than he had ever talked. He felt that he had come off a second
best in the encounter, and he determined to wipe out the remembrance
from the memory of his hearers. Poor old Twinkle, hearing himself
eulogized for the first time in his life, probably, sat in silence,
winking almost tearfully, too amazed to be pleased.
And always after he made a point of emphasizing this theory of his—or of
Sampson’s—as he called it. It became the rival in this talk of Christian
economics. He did so without argument, for Philbin did not come back. A
Futurist painter, who had found out Isham’s purely by accident,
gradually took his place. At Isham’s places were always taken gradually.
To make up for it they were generally taken for a very long time.
Philbin’s was the first defection, in fact, since Twinkle’s low-toned
monologues about the moon, with old Isham for the only listener, in the
corner by the fireplace, had started it all eleven years ago. Philbin,
too, had never been in very good standing; his trick of sarcasm hurt too
many sensibilities. And then he was agnostic in everything, and Isham’s
collectively believed in almost everything. Every man of them, except
the Futurist painter who took his place and had scarcely known him, had
some little hurt somewhere to remember him by, and so, of course, wanted
to forget him.
They had almost succeeded, too, when suddenly that happened which
brought his name up in all thoughts, the war. That night, the night when
all rumors and surmises were solidified into the single, soul-stunning
fact, nobody mentioned his name, though each knew the others were
thinking of it. It seemed uncivil when they had each heard the rest make
such fun of his theories. But after a few days some bolder soul broke
the spell.
“Philbin—do you remember, he always prophesied it?”
But that was all, and Savelle sat silent even then.
In truth, the war changed Isham’s. Of course, it changed somehow almost
everything in the world, but it changed Isham’s peculiarly. Before it
had been a place where people went to talk of curious things, and now
the same people went there—Sampson and Savelle and little Norvel and the
Futurist painter, and old Isham himself was unchanged, nothing could
alter him, and they still talked of curious things, more curious things
than they had ever imagined before, but Isham’s had changed by ceasing
to be different, because everywhere people were talking of the same
things. Talk at Isham’s was just like talk on any street corner. In
fact, the world had caught up with Isham’s.
Then one night Philbin did come back. It was in the second year of the
great war, and it had been nearly five since he had gone away after his
tiff with Savelle. He did not come directly into the back room, as he
had been used to do, but dined by himself at a small table in front. He
sat there a long time after dinner over his coffee, with his back turned
to his old place. Every one of them had seen him and recognized him, and
talk that night was slow. Though he had spoken to none of them and
turned his back to them, each knew somehow that he would speak and that
he had come there especially to speak, and that he would say something
important, and they sat nervously waiting.
At last he did come, pushing back his chair and walking slowly up the
room. They noticed then how he had changed. He had grown very much
older. He had been scarcely fifty when he had left, and now he looked
and walked like an old man, and his dress, which had always been very
neat and careful, showed an old man’s carelessness. They all got up when
he came and greeted him by name and with genuine cordiality. The little
stings of five years since had vanished long ago. Savelle got up last
and a little doubtfully, but it was Savelle he especially picked out.
“Ah, Savelle,” and he put out his hand.
Then he sat down in his old place and ordered more coffee and talked for
a while quietly to his right-hand neighbor, who was little Norvel. He
said nothing of himself and very little of any subject, seeming distrait
and very depressed. After a little, abruptly he took the conversation in
his own hands.
“Gentlemen,” he said, leaning forward with his hands folded on the cloth
in front of him, “since I was here last I have had a very great sorrow.
I have lost my son.”
Then he fell silent again, and apparently not hearing any of the things
that were said to him.
“He was killed,” he began a second time, just as he had begun the first,
“in Flanders, six weeks ago. He was twenty-two years and four months
old. Before he died they pinned this on him.” He fumbled in his
waistcoat, and picking out something threw it across the cloth over in
front of Savelle. It was a little bronze cross known the world over,
with two words on it, “For valor”. “I sent them my son and they sent me
back that,” said Philbin.
It was the old Philbin voice—the same that had in turn galled each one
of them.
“He went out in the night,” he went on, “and pulled back to life two
London fishmongers. Then he died—going back for a third fishmonger.
There is some six inches in a London newspaper telling about it. That
same paper gave a column and a half last week to a story I wrote. And
they gave six inches to my son. That’s queer, too, isn’t it?”
Nobody answered him. They were all afraid to—his tone was too bitter. No
one was quite sure what he would say.
“We used to talk here years ago,” he went on presently, “about curious
things. I think this curious enough to talk about. They gave a ‘stick’
to the death of my son and a column to the birth of my book. Savelle,
you are a newspaper man, tell us about it?”
Savelle was looking at him with his eyes blazing, and he answered not a
word.
“I suppose it’s logical,” said Philbin. “Any man may have a son. But I
have written twenty books and had only one son.”
The only answer came from quite an unexpected quarter. It was little
Norvel, who was sitting at Philbin’s elbow.
“Did you say, sir,” he asked, “that he went back three times?”
“Yes, Mr. Norvel, three times—three fishmongers.”
The man’s sneers would have been disgusting if they had not been so
plainly aimed at himself first. As it was, they were almost terrible.
“Whether the three fishmongers lived or died,” he went on, “I don’t
know. The six inches neglected to state. Want of space, possibly. You
are a newspaper man, Savelle, perhaps you can explain.”
“I wish you would explain this, Mr. Savelle,” said little Norvel.
“What?” said Savelle.
“What part of nature Mr. Philbin was imitating when he went back?”
All the pent-up intensity of Savelle’s being rushed out in his answer:
“I am maliciously misrepresented. There is no human element in such
action. It is the divine phenomenon of Calvary.”
“Savelle,” put in Philbin, “when my son was alive he was a man. I
believe, too, he died like a man. I prefer that to an imitation of
anything—even God.”
The width of the table was between the two men, and the whole meaning of
the universe. Their antagonism was irreconcilable. In that instant it
had recovered all its bitterness of five years before. Time could do
nothing. Not even chance could. It was literally immutable, the only
thing in the world neither of those great forces can effect.
But the only pitiful part of it was, Sampson sitting between them,
turning now to one, now to the other, with dim sight and faulty hearing,
and wanting of either merely something human.