The canny, the meretricious, the sycophants, and the needy, who at one
time or another passed in almost constant stream about that white-pine
table, sensed it even when Henry himself was most unconscious of the
trait.
His scorn for money. It made even the hardened recipient of his
largesse shrink a little as he left his presence. It made Dave, to whom
money had suddenly and for the first time loomed with importance, feel
sticky-fingered at the savage generosity which made his brother, as if
angrily forestalling more ado, thrust the check into his hand.
“Henry, you’re just about the best friend a fellow ever had.”
“I’m just about the best boob a fellow ever had. Keep me in front
of you, boy, for your ‘Don’t’ slogan. Look at me, and pretty nearly
everything you see me doing, don’t do. And above all, don’t laugh at
the age you live in. Laugh with it. That’s not my idea so much as the
laughing philosopher’s, Democritus. Whatever you do, don’t, like gloomy
Heraclitus, shed tears about it. Shed your illusions if you must, and
then fight like hell to recapture them in terms of reality. Don’t keep
your tongue in your cheek. Just poke it in occasionally. The pupils of
Socrates, you remember, were divided into cynics and Cyrenaics. Don’t
let the stale apathy of cynicism get you, ever. It takes a clever man
to turn cynic, and a wise man to be clever enough not to.”
“Is that one of those eppy-grams, Henry?”
“No, only a rather dull truth. A wise man lets his mind ferment,
Dave, but never turn to vinegar. You’ve got a level head on your
shoulders. Keep it there. Don’t let it get caught in the rut between
your shoulders. The sixth human sense, Dave, is a sense of humor. Care
passionately about everything, Dave, using your sixth sense all the
while, and see to it that almost everything is worth caring about. Then
curb your passions.”
“I can care all right, Henry—_now_!”
“Don’t march ahead of the band-wagon. They’ll stone you, boy, if you
do. Ride with it, but keep your eyes ahead. If you see Light, guide
them toward it, only in the name of Heaven, don’t let them know they
are not seeing it for themselves.”
“You know what you should have been, Henry?”
“Yes, I know what I should have been, Dave. I’m one of those fellows
who, by making a few wise cracks to the not-so-wise, gets the
reputation of still water running deep. As a matter of fact, still
water doesn’t run at all. Yes, know what I should have been? I should
have been Diogenes with a radium-lantern. I should have been Socrates
with the wing of an aeroplane for his coping. I should have been that
fellow Teufelsdröck. Who was Teufelsdröck? Quick!”
“Oh, I know! He’s the old chap in _Sartor Resartus_ who——”
“Good! Well, I should have been him, spending my days in the tower of
a two-hundred-and-ninety-eight-story Woolworth skyscraper, playing
marbles with the stars. Or maybe, by Jove, I should have been a
third-rate country-lawyer trying to sprinkle salt on the tail of the
comet I inhabit, and preaching to a small brother, to be able when he
reaches my age, to sum up his life in terms of ‘I am,’ instead of like
me, ‘I might have been.’”
“Well, allrighty, you mighta been—allrighty—you mighta been——”
“I mighta been, allrighty——” said Henry, looking out upon the tide of
High Street, his eyes seeming suddenly to be the wise, tired, prophetic
eyes of what he “mighta been.”
* * * * *
There entered, unannounced, as everyone entered that office
unannounced, the hurried, perspiring figure of Steve Renchler. In
spite of the fact that he had come in out of the thin-aired bluster of
November, there were moist little places out under his eyes and along
his upper lip; and although he wore a sweater-waistcoat (a handsome
slip-over, of a variety which Claire could knit so skillfully that a
Springfield department-store purchased her output), his coat was jerked
back, and his derby hat was along the back of his head, pushed there by
a mopping handkerchief.
There was little resemblance left to the dark, tortured boy and
dreamer. It was a fed face. The face of a man of strong, healthy
appetites, and strong, healthy gratifications. If the mere smell of
alcohol could turn Steve pale and gone-at-the-knees, the delights of
the table had done their measure, and apparently were not without
compensations. Steve’s clothing bore the horizontal creases of a man
whose legs bend heavily. There were dimples out along the backs of
his hands, set in little cushions of fat. The tailor, in taking his
measurements, had to throw the tape-line around his waist.
Right in the town of Centralia, hundreds of replicas of
this derby-hatted Steve were meeting their life-insurance
endowment-policies, being fairly true to their wives, reading their
_Saturday Evening Posts_, _Literary Digests_ and comic-supplements,
mowing their front lawns, paying their installments on loud-speakers,
eating their Blue Plate luncheons, dodging jury-service, reconciling
themselves to bob-haired wives, driving their family sedans, having
their children’s tonsils out, purchasing Frigidaire ice-boxes in
fourteen monthly payments, attending the cinema-houses, tuning-in
before turning-in, struggling to relieve financial strain, staving
off blood-pressure, subscribing to fifty bricks, at a dollar a brick,
in the new municipal hospital, scheming to turn in this year’s
four-cylinder model for next year’s six, dreaming of college education
for the children, struggling for Country Club membership, “now that the
children are growing up,” hoping for that raise, dreaming of the trip
to the Canadian Rockies, spoiling their children, hating, indulging,
loving, or spoiling their wives, achieving nervous indigestion, joining
the boosters’ club, stifling another old dream, climbing after new
dreams, voting the full Republican ticket, flying an “excuse my dust”
pennant from off the old sedan, teaching son to salute the flag,
doctoring income-tax.
The stamp of his times was on Steve. His was the rather flabby
figure of a man with a body still fairly adapted to the lugging of
water and the killing of game but who finds himself instead, turning
spigots, and picking up the telephone-receiver when he would eat red
meat. He read two newspapers a day. A local morning-sheet controlled
by Republican interests and a Chicago day-old pink evening-sheet
controlled by capital and designed to meet the mammalian needs of who
runs as he reads the-syndicated-universities of Frank Crane and Parkes
Cadman, Eddie Guest, Beatrice Fairfax, Bud Fisher, Glenn Frank, comic
strip, and baseball brevities, and such of the financial, industrial,
governmental, international, and political fluctuations as were deemed
digestible for a barley-watered public. The newspapers were as doped
for public consumption as many of the foodstuffs and drink-substitutes
that found their way down the naïve palate of Centralia. A press
that was free to mix, dilute, pervert truth to meet the demand of
politics and policies, hurled its vitiated and vitrioled facts in
twirled newspapers against the front doors of Centralia as the carrier
passed down the streets in a two-wheeled cart, from which he was crack
sure-shot.
Steve read his morning-paper propped up against the sugar-bowl as he
dipped up his nationalized cereal, and then left it at home for Claire,
who read the death, marriage, advice to-the-lovelorn, and Lost and
Found Departments.
Claire, however, also read Mencken and Sherwood Anderson and Cabell
at her Saturday Morning Literary Club, considered them terribly
interesting, and “Mencken a scream. I just love his way of writing. He
sees right through everybody—and don’t hesitate to say so.”
There was an uncut volume of _Prejudices, First Series_ on the
center table of Steve’s reception-hall, and an unthumbed edition
of _Winesburg, Ohio_, inscribed “To Claire Schuyler in recognition
of her loyal presidency of the Saturday Morningers,” and in a neat
row, between bronze-elephant book-ends, such miscellany as Burns’s
_Collected Poems_, _The Winning of Barbara Worth_, _Girl of the
Limberlost_, _Ingersoll’s Collected Sermons_, _Stella Dallas_, _Guide
to Bridge Whist_, _Motion Picture Classic_, _Watch Your Calories_,
_Adult Book of Knowledge_, _Child’s History of England_, Kathleen
Norris’s _Mother_, Ben King’s _Verse_, _A Thought a Day_, Owen
Meredith, _Ethan Frome_, Papini’s _Life of Christ_, _Innocents Abroad_,
_The Iron Woman_, _Garden of Allah_, _Mary Page_, by Leroy Scott, _One
Hundred Famous Quotations_, and _Friendship and Flower Book_.
When Stevey waited for his barber or dentist, or took a train to
Springfield, the _Literary Digest_ served him one news-concoction after
another, as quickly as an Automat....
News-reels flashed to him, from his favorite motion-picture theater,
such items of the day as were considered good for his American
well-being. Such as the Soviet scenes that could instruct him
only in the dangerous and unsuccessful aspects of the gigantic
world-experiment. Political slogans put forth by this and that
“interest.” Propaganda. Publicity. Advertising.
If the thousands of half-doped Steves abroad over the land ever paused
to think about Russia at all, it was in terms that had been doled out
to them in careful rations from a careful Press, of a terror-ridden
country lying prostrate under the savage and kicking heel of crazed and
delirious labor.
At the same time, the headline-story of some creedist in Vermont
being thrown into jail for protesting against jury duty, scarcely
indented itself with any of its monstrous and satiric import into the
anesthetized brains of the Steves.
Birth-control, book-censorship, Eugene Debs in jail, Tea Pot Dome
scandal, lynchings, child-labor, Lawrenceville Kansas, or any of the
acid awarenesses of things current that had cut the lines of pain and
cynicism around Henry’s mouth, flashed across the less-sensitized,
half-doped Steveys who mutely accepting their God, their food, their
censored motion-pictures, books, and politics in the tabloid form
rationed out to them in the interests of the greatest good for the
greatest number, were mute indeed.
The Steveys were the doers, not the thinkers. They bought their
tinned propaganda, theirs not to reason why. They read the Tea Pot
Dome scandal as news, and not an outrageous infringement upon their
own rights. They let their propaganda-logged eyes skim Eugene Debs
headlines, and said “Serves him right.” “Tarring and feathering is too
good for those anarchist fellows.”
They squealed a little when the shoe pinched their own particular foot,
or when a case of local or municipal graft touched their particular
pocket-nerves. But otherwise, except for nervous indigestion, the
infernal high cost of living, the appalling and expensive precocity
of children, the wife’s mounting demands of budget, the daily grind
of office and high blood-pressure and self-playing piano, the bad
street-car service and the unendurable tax-burden, the growing
difficulties of labor-unrest, the high cost of production and college
education, of butter and life insurance, coal, children’s shoes, tires,
tonsil operations and dining-room rugs, life was a charivari, merry
enough in its way, of radios, electric signs, aeroplane-races, baseball
series, Armistice Days, lodge meetings, and making ends meet.
Steve Renchler had been caught up by the rhythm of the machine.
He ate his morning cereal and slightly-watered milk with the
newspaper-spokesman of that machine propped up against the sugar-bowl,
and suffered no more than the normal indigestion due to overeating.
Cereal and watered milk, news that the Ku Klux had tarred and feathered
a negro, a college professor dismissed for free speech, Mexican
unrest, Rockefeller’s dime-gesture, private ownership of railroads,
were as normal to the digestion of the Steveys as seal meat and frozen
fish to an Eskimo.
The stomach and the brain can be trained to overcome any initial
aversions to certain foods and learn to assimilate them.
Steve had assimilated. At thirty, he had practically passed the danger
of thinking, hurting, or rebelling against any social, aesthetic or
spiritual shortcomings of environment, except where personal struggle
for existence, and sweet butter and life insurance, coal, children’s
shoes, tires, and dining-room rugs had kept the mind competitively keen
as a blade. Due to the exigencies of the age in which he lived, the
chief of his sensory organs which he had developed was the eye. The
motion-picture, the rotogravure, the observation-car, the motor-car,
had developed a visual age. Stevey thought mostly with his eyes.
What he beheld first-hand, with the evidence of his own eyes,
stimulated him. The Tallahassee Aeroplane Field and Government
experimental shops, practically adjoined the Tool Works where Steve was
by now department-manager.
In the beginning, it had been necessary to use disciplinary methods
with the foundry employees, and even with the office-workers, to keep
them from flocking to the windows every time a flight or even the most
casual hop-off took place.
The curiously exultant roar of a mounting machine had long since become
a matter of course, scarcely causing the lifting of a head. Except to
Steve. The excitement of that living, throbbing note of release, as
steel and timber took flight, never ceased to thrill him. In spite of
the need to be exemplary to his men, it was practically impossible for
him to remain away from the window when the song of flight began to hum
its way above the din of foundry.
Frequently, instead of lolling his lunch period at home with Claire
and the children, or stretched on the flat of his back beneath
his five-passenger sedan, he spent it among the men on the field.
Government inspectors. Mechanics. Pilots. Once, unbeknown to Claire,
he had made a short flight. He was even versed in the phraseology of
a new, strangely buoyant, etheric world. Air-pockets. High-pressure
areas. Angle-of-drift.
With something of the old inchoate yearnings which had stirred the dark
and nervous boy, this present goose-stepping Stevey, snatched back to
normalcy by what was probably an inherited capacity for it that was
stronger than even his weakness was weak, must have felt something of
those remote old stirrings. But felt them safely.
The air, particularly after his first flight, interested Stevey
principally from the vantage of his two feet on the ground.
Here was a new world of navigation, of commercial possibility that
soared beyond credulity. New undreamed-of lanes of transportation,
unchartered. By Jove, the day those two Ohio fellows flew at Kittyhawk,
had unroofed the world! There were fortunes in those new lanes up there
as yet scarcely trammeled by competition.
Here was a means of communicability as yet unchartered to any
appreciable extent by “interests.”
Steve meant to be a ground-floor man, so to speak, in the new etheric
zones of air commerce.
Men’s creative brains had wrought the miracle of the flying-machine.
The brains of practical men must launch it.
Air commerce. Air franchise.
Steve’s dreams as a family-man began to weave about this idea. His
ambition for position. A large and beautiful home for Claire. Heavy
insurances. A new battleship-gray limousine with balloon tires.
A thousand-dollar radio and loud-speaker. That see-America-first
rail-trip, celebrated in a folder that he and Claire liked to pore
over. Niagara Falls. Yellowstone Park. Seattle. Banff.
Suddenly, to Stevey, who paid forty-two dollars a month house rent;
doctor, music, dancing, school fees for the children, clothing for two
adults and three youngsters; laundry, gas, gasoline, fuel, lodge, fire,
automobile, and life insurance, special tutelage for his child Henry,
who stammered, and miscellany _ad infinitum_, on a salary of forty
dollars a week, had come a chance which brought him pell-mell, and with
a speed that caused the caves of perspiration beneath his eyes, to that
haven of the needy and the desirous, his uncle Henry’s office.
“Uncle Henry, must see you. Right away. Alone. Sorry, Dave—get
out—there’s a good kid. This is the only time I can get away from the
office.”
In a slow-mannered sort of indulgence, Henry regarded his nephew
without uncurling his posture.
“Hold your horses, Steve. Me and Dave are having a talk here that about
amounts to what you fellows would call a ‘conference.’ Everything in
the world excepting time and a bad egg will keep on a day like this.”
“I’ve only about forty minutes, Uncle. I wouldn’t butt in this way, if
it wasn’t important.”
His uncle rose, his great length of body unwinding in slow good-humor.
“Of course, if it’s something special.”
“It is, Uncle. As special as anything that has ever happened to me.”
“I see. Well then, Dave, shall we give way to your nephew a bit? Guess
we’ve about said it all for the present, anyway. We’ll let the universe
rest as is.”
Dave rose and began rolling his cap. A conference was something
inviolate. And here was Stevey crashing selfishly, inconsiderately,
domineeringly, through the very warp and woof of an hour of interview
with his brother, so privately his own.[57]
“Well, one thing,” said Dave defiantly, folding his check and slipping
it into his trousers pocket with the long down-gesture of a man now of
pocket-affairs, “if I’ve got to shove my way in this world, I’m going
to shove it with my head, and not my shoulders.”
Stevey, far too hurried to be amused, cast a perspiring look at the
rangy figure of his young uncle.
“Snap out of it, Dave, and don’t be a fool.”
“Dave’s in nobody’s way. Out with what’s on your mind, Steve.”
Steve slapped down his hat and, straddling a stool, jerked it to him
until he was up face to face with the lean lantern from which Henry’s
eyes looked so humorously.
“I’ve got the chance of a lifetime, Uncle. And I need two hundred
dollars to grab it.”
It was Steve’s pronouncement of himself as a crisp go-getter man of
affairs. Bandier of no words. American business man tactics. Straight
from the shoulder. Right to the point. Efficiency.
It was Dave who half leaped forward, not Henry, who sat with his slow,
contemplative thumb and forefinger, stroking his slow, contemplative
jaw, and his other hand, with pipe that always smelled, held equally
lax, as he tapped it against the table.
“That’s not such a large order, Steve, provided the fellow you’re
striking for the loan has the two hundred.”
“Well, you have it for every Tom, Dick and Harry, Uncle!”
“You may be right, Steve,” drawled Henry, “but fact remains, I haven’t
got it—now.”
“He hasn’t,” yapped Dave. “Henry’s no mint.”
“Keep out of this, Dave! It’s the first time, Uncle, I’ve ever come
to you for the loan of a penny! I’ve worried along on my own pretty
steadily. You’ll have to grant me that. But there’s nobody I can turn
to, between heaven and earth but you now, Henry.”
“That’s what we all say. That’s why he’s the hounded one of the whole
fam——”
“Shut up, Dave. I only need a couple of hundred dollars, Henry. My
whole future depends on those few paltry dollars. If I’m ever going to
be anything more than a two-by-four cog in the wheel of a man-eating
iron-foundry, you’ve got to advance me the few dollars to pull myself
and my wife and kids out of the rut that’ll close us in, sure as
fate, if I wait much longer. I’m borrowed to the hilt, as it is, on
my insurance-policies. My Buick isn’t even paid for. Let me have that
couple of hundred, Uncle. You can. You must. I’ll give you my note on
any terms you say.”
“That’s not fair, Steve. Henry’s not got it.”
“For cripes sake, keep out of this, I say, Dave. It may do you some
good to listen to some of the things I’ve got to say. They may help you
to get a move on.”
“Steve! That’s no way to talk to the boy.”
“Opportunity is knocking at my door, Uncle. Oh, I’m not whining, but
if you stop to look at my life for a minute, it—it hasn’t been all beer
and skittles, Uncle. I—I’ve had a fight every inch of the way through
two or three kinds of hells that—for what I’ve got—out of it——”
“I appreciate that, Steve,” said his uncle.
“You should, Uncle, because—you—helped.”[58]
“I do understand, Steve, more, perhaps, than you realize.”
“Well then, Uncle—you know better than anybody—the everything of what
I’ve been through. I’ve worked my way along pretty steadily these last
years, grant me that.”
“Indeed I do. I’ve man-size respect for the struggle you’ve made and
won, Steve.”
“Well then, prove it. Opportunity bobbed up for me today. Out of a
clear sky. Opportunity’s knocking at my door. For two hundred dollars I
can open it.”
“I tell you he hasn’t got it. Is it always going to be like this for
him? First me. Then you. Tom and Dick and Harry? I’ve just borrowed his
last penny off him. If you don’t believe it—here—looka this check—then
looka his stubs. What are we around him, anyway? A lot of bleeders?
Henry hasn’t got it!”
“Not so fast, Dave.”
“He’s got to have it. It’s my whole life, Henry, getting my hands on
this money today. There’s a half a dozen can grab this chance away from
me if I don’t.”
The narrowed look had come into Henry’s face. A tired look. An old look.
“Mighty ’fraid Dave’s right, Steve. Fact is, I haven’t got it.”
“All you have to do is look at his stubs, Steve! If it was for anything
else except getting me out of the way and started toward something, I
wouldn’t take it, either.”
“Borrow me that money, Henry. For God’s sake, get it for me.”
“Why, boy, I can’t borrow the price of a bus ticket from here to
Middleton. Everybody in this town is onto my way of borrowing from
Peter, so Paul can borrow it off me.”
With a quick fist flashing down over David’s wrists, Steve jerked his
young uncle toward him, so that his spectacles jerked off one ear-lobe
and hung dangling across his face.
“Dave, let me have that money.”
“Steve!”
“He’s only a kid, Uncle. Whatever he’s going to do with it now, he
can do later. I’ll make it up to him. This is my chance, Dave. You’re
eighteen. I’m nearly twice that and where am I? Tied to a snide job in
a snide town. Opportunities like this don’t come twice to a man like me
in a town like this. You see, Dave, I’ve got a family and kids. I’ve
got a mother—your own flesh and blood sister, who deserves, if ever
anybody on God’s earth did, to have me make good. All right, call it
sniveling if you will, but let me have that money, Dave.”
“Steve—shame!”
“Why, Uncle? A man with sense will go any length to throw a sop to
opportunity, if she’s pausing outside his door. I wouldn’t ask Dave if
I wasn’t so sure. It’s a turning-point in my life. It’s now or never.”
“What about Dave’s life, Steve?”
“He’s a kid.”
“Yes, but Dave’s been what you might call grist between the mills of
poverty and war, pretty much since he was born. He came along just in
time for his father’s bad financial times to set in, and then what did
he do but run into a world-war during the years he was growing up.”
“He’s got life before him.”
“That’s where it will remain for him, Steve, unless he begins to
encroach upon it.”
“My life’s as important to me, as yours is to you, Steve.”
“I know that, Dave. But what you’ve got to realize is this. You’re a
bright kid in your way. Maybe a slow way, but you’ve got something
to you that I won’t have, if I live to be a hundred. May not get you
anywhere—much—unless you get a hustle on you. But you’ve the makings,
Dave, of quite an unusual kind of fellow. Don’t know just what
kind—but—but life’s full of opportunities for you. Scientific farming.
Or maybe big business. I’m just a regular, every-day fellow, Dave, with
a nose for the opportunity when it comes along. And I tell you this is
opportunity.”
“Might I ask,” said Henry, tapping his dry teeth with a pencil, and
regarding his nephew with a frown over-hanging his eyes, “the nature of
this er—a—mysterious opportunity?”
“Indeed you may! That’s my best selling-card, the nature of the
project. You’ll be the first to see the thing, Uncle. The idea sells
itself to a fellow with vision....”
“Well?”
“The birth of the air-age is taking place right under our eyes. I want
to capitalize that fact. I want to ride in on it. Me and a fellow at
Tallahassee Field, Eugene Bymore, a crack pilot and a fellow that knows
the air-game, A to Z, can buy up a plane out of that Smoothfield wreck
you read about the other day for a song. This is all inside stuff that
comes to Bymore, who’s the Government aeronautic engineer. Took a fancy
to me. Anxious to meet you, Uncle Hen. Knows about the family and all.
This plane can be bought, Uncle, for the price almost of so much junk.
Nothing much the matter with it that a fellow like Bymore, who knows
the plane through and through, can’t handle in a jiffy. Me and this
fellow—funny, Uncle, the way he took a fancy to me—we’ve got an idea
for starting a parcel-delivery service between here and Chicago. Over
a known lane that Bymore’s flown himself for off and on of two years
in mail-planes. Idea looks so big to me, there’s just no stopping it.
Somebody’s going to hit on it sooner or later, certain as fate, and
it might as well be us. It’s coming, just as sure as there’s express
trains this minute running between here and there. Only, it’s coming in
a bigger fashion than anything we’ve ever dreamt of.”
“You’re right there, boy, but many a good man and good plane have gone
down to prove what you’re saying.”
“The way we’ve worked it out, on the principle of what Bymore calls the
aerodynamic safety in transport-aviation, there’ll be minimum chance of
a good man or a good plane going down.”
“It’s gambling with tomorrow, Steve, but tomorrow’s coming, sure as
hell.”
“I knew you’d be the one to see the can before the can’ts. That’s what
makes you the darnedest fellow, Uncle.”
“You mean, Steve,” said Dave, with his spectacles thrust forward along
his nose, and his head thrust forward on his shoulders, “you mean
you’re starting in the aeroplane-delivery business?”
“Exactly. Parcel-delivery by air, just like the Centralia Parcel
Delivery by wagon. When the Chicago Motor Company needs a bale of
special screw eyes from the Giles Tool Works, double-quick jiffy, we
supply the double-quick jiffy. When Cincinnati needs half a gram of
radium for an emergency operation, and that half a gram happens to be
on a shelf in Chicago at nine A.M., Cincinnati is going to have that
tube beside the operating-table forenoon that same day. Let us deliver
your ivory, apes, and peacocks by air! Express by air and save ten
hours delivery-time between Centralia and Chicago. Nothing in time or
space can stop us, Uncle.”
“It’s big, Steve. By God, nothing should stop you!”
“I won’t stop you,” cried Dave, and slapped down the check on the
table. “Yes, sir. Looka. Looka what the Zeppelins are doing now! Why
couldn’t it be the same from Hamburg to New York and New York to
Bombay? You can have this here check, Steve—reckon that’s all right
with you, Henry?”
“You reckon right, boy, only how are _you_ going to tunnel out, boy?
Dave was going to Springfield, Steve, on that money to commit the
well-known turning-point-of-his-career act.”
“You won’t be sorry, Dave. You and Henry can regard yourselves as
partners in on this enterprise—stock-holders or anything you say——”[59]
“Gee, Stevey, you fellows get the world small enough, and there’s not
going to be any more distance!”
“Righto, Kid! I’ll be in a position to pay you both back, tenfold, some
day—mark my word——”
“Cut out distance—kinda get the whole world to draw up its chairs
in a closer circle and get acquainted, and you cut out a lot of
misunderstanding between fellows and countries, get countries to
feeling friendlier, and——”
“Righto, again, Kid! This here initial money doesn’t mean capital—it
just means if we can get enough fellows interested in the cost of
laying an air-line between——”
“What’s that you were saying Dave—about drawing up chairs closer——”
“What I was trying to say, Henry, was—cut out the strangeness between
men, so’s they understand each other better by sitting in closer, and
there aren’t going to be so many wars, and—and—now my idea is this——”
“Yes, Dave!”
“Say, the kid’s right bright! It’s as Bymore says, Uncle, if we can go
to a bunch of fellows and say, look here, we have the——”
“You were saying, Dave?”
“Nothing, Henry, except——”
“This check means more to me than you’ll ever know, Dave. It’s going to
put a crimp in your plans, but——”
“Crimp, nothing, I’m going anyhow.”[60]