"Oh, no great shakes. Only, I went to his place to buy that wild turkey
you told me about. I wanted to stand it away up on top of that beautiful
old carved buffet I picked up in England last year. I was fully prepared
to buy it on your say-so, but, all the same, I saw its merits the moment I
set eyes on it. It has but one fault; did you notice that? I don't believe
you did. I pointed it out to him."
"You pointed--what did he say?"
"He said I was right."
"Why, what was the fault?"
"Fault? Why, the perspective is bad; not exactly bad, but poor; lacks
richness and rhythm."
"And yet you bought the thing."
"No, I didn't."
"You didn't buy it?"
"No, sir, I didn't buy it. I began by pricing three or four other things
first, so he couldn't know which one to stick the fancy price on to, and
incidentally I thought I would tell him--you'd told me, you remember, how
your accounts of your two birds had warmed him up and melted his
feelings----"
"I didn't tell you. My wife told your wife, and your wife, I----"
"Yes, yes. Well, anyhow, I thought I'd try the same game, so I told him
how I had stuffed a bird once upon a time myself. It was a pigeon, with
every feather as white as snow; a fan-tail. It had belonged to my little
boy who died. I thought it would make such a beautiful emblem at his
funeral, rising with wings outspread, you know, typical of the
resurrection--we buried him from the Sunday-school, you remember. And so I
killed it and wired it and stuffed it myself. It was hard to hang it in a
soaring attitude, owing to its being a fan-tail, but I managed it."
"And you told that to Manouvrier! What did he say?"
"Say? He never so much as cracked a smile. When I'd done he stood so
still, looking at me, that I turned and sort o' stroked the turkey and
said, jestingly, says I, 'How much a pound for this gobbler?'"
"That ought to have warmed him up."
"Well, it didn't. He smiled like a dancing-master, lifted my hand off the
bird and says, says he, 'She's not for sale.' Then he turned to go into
his back room and leave me standing there. Well, that warmed _me_ up. Says
I, 'What in thunder is it here for, then? and if it ain't for sale, come
back here and show me what is!'
"'Nawtin',' says 'e, with the same polite smile. 'Nawtin' for sale. I come
back when you gone.' His voice was sweet as sugar, but he slammed the
door. I would have followed him in and put some better manners into him
with a kick, but the old orang-outang had turned the key inside, and when
I'd had time to remember that I was a deacon and Sunday-school teacher I
walked away. What do you mean by his good fortune of yesterday?"
"I mean he struck Charlie Howard for seventy-five thousand."
My hearer's mouth dropped open. He was equally amazed and amused. "Well,
well, well! That accounts for his silly high-headedness."
"Ah! no: that matter of yours was last week and the drawing was only
yesterday."
"Oh, that's so. I don't keep run of that horrible lottery business. It
makes me sick at heart to see the hideous canker poisoning the character
and blasting the lives of every class of our people--why, don't you think
so?"
"Oh, yes, I--I do. Yes, I certainly do!"
"But your conviction isn't exactly red-hot, I perceive. Come, wake up."
We rose. At the first street corner, as we were parting, I noticed he was
still talking of the lottery.
"Pestilential thing," he was calling it. "Men blame it lightly on the
ground that there are other forms of gambling which our laws don't reach.
I suppose a tiger in a village mustn't be killed till we have killed all
the tigers back in the woods!"
I assented absently and walked away full of a vague shame. For I know as
well as anyone that a man without a quick, strong, aggressive, insistent
indignation against undoubted evil is a very poor stick.
V
At dinner that evening, Mrs. Smith broke a long silence with the question:
"Did you go to see Manouvrier?"
"Nn--o."