I
"THE devil!" Paul Garnett exclaimed as he re-read his note; and the dry
old gentleman who was at the moment his only neighbour in the quiet
restaurant they both frequented, remarked with a smile: "You don't seem
particularly annoyed at meeting him."
Garnett returned the smile. "I don't know why I apostrophized him, for
he's not in the least present--except inasmuch as he may prove to be at
the bottom of anything unexpected."
The old gentleman who, like Garnett, was an American, and spoke in the
thin rarefied voice which seems best fitted to emit sententious truths,
twisted his lean neck toward the younger man and cackled out shrewdly:
"Ah, it's generally a woman who is at the bottom of the unexpected.
Not," he added, leaning forward with deliberation to select a
tooth-pick, "that that precludes the devil's being there too."
Garnett uttered the requisite laugh, and his neighbour, pushing back
his plate, called out with a perfectly unbending American intonation:
"Gassong! L'addition, silver play."
His repast, as usual, had been a simple one, and he left only thirty
centimes in the plate on which his account was presented; but the
waiter, to whom he was evidently a familiar presence, received the
tribute with Latin affability, and hovered helpfully about the table
while the old gentleman cut and lighted his cigar.
"Yes," the latter proceeded, revolving the cigar meditatively between
his thin lips, "they're generally both in the same hole, like the owl
and the prairie-dog in the natural history books of my youth. I believe
it was all a mistake about the owl and the prairie-dog, but it isn't
about the unexpected. The fact is, the unexpected _is_ the devil--the
sooner you find that out, the happier you'll be." He leaned back,
tilting his smooth bald head against the blotched mirror behind him,
and rambling on with gentle garrulity while Garnett attacked his omelet.
"Get your life down to routine--eliminate surprises. Arrange things so
that, when you get up in the morning, you'll know exactly what is going
to happen to you during the day--and the next day and the next. I don't
say it's funny--it ain't. But it's better than being hit on the head by
a brick-bat. That's why I always take my meals at this restaurant. I
know just how much onion they put in things--if I went to the next
place I shouldn't. And I always take the same streets to come
here--I've been doing it for ten years now. I know at which crossings
to look out--I know what I'm going to see in the shop-windows. It saves
a lot of wear and tear to know what's coming. For a good many years I
never did know, from one minute to another, and now I like to think
that everything's cut-and-dried, and nothing unexpected can jump out at
me like a tramp from a ditch."
He paused calmly to knock the ashes from his cigar, and Garnett said
with a smile: "Doesn't such a plan of life cut off nearly all the
possibilities?"
The old gentleman made a contemptuous motion. "Possibilities of what?
Of being multifariously miserable? There are lots of ways of being
miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is
to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to
be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time."
"That was Schopenhauer's idea, I believe," the young man said, pouring
his wine with the smile of youthful incredulity.
"I guess he hadn't the monopoly," responded his friend. "Lots of people
have found out the secret--the trouble is that so few live up to it."
He rose from his seat, pushing the table forward, and standing passive
while the waiter advanced with his shabby overcoat and umbrella. Then
he nodded to Garnett, lifted his hat politely to the broad-bosomed lady
behind the desk, and passed out into the street.
Garnett looked after him with a musing smile. The two had exchanged
views on life for two years without so much as knowing each other's
names. Garnett was a newspaper correspondent whose work kept him mainly
in London, but on his periodic visits to Paris he lodged in a dingy
hotel of the Latin Quarter, the chief merit of which was its nearness
to the cheap and excellent restaurant where the two Americans had made
acquaintance. But Garnett's assiduity in frequenting the place arose,
in the end, less from the excellence of the food than from the
enjoyment of his old friend's conversation. Amid the flashy
sophistications of the Parisian life to which Garnett's trade
introduced him, the American sage's conversation had the crisp and
homely flavor of a native dish--one of the domestic compounds for which
the exiled palate is supposed to yearn. It was a mark of the old man's
impersonality that, in spite of the interest he inspired, Garnett had
never got beyond idly wondering who he might be, where he lived, and
what his occupations were. He was presumably a bachelor--a man of
family ties, however relaxed, though he might have been as often absent
from home would not have been as regularly present in the same
place--and there was about him a boundless desultoriness which renewed
Garnett's conviction that there is no one on earth as idle as an
American who is not busy. From certain allusions it was plain that he
had lived many years in Paris, yet he had not taken the trouble to
adapt his tongue to the local inflections, but spoke French with the
accent of one who has formed his conception of the language from a
phrase-book.
The city itself seemed to have made as little impression on him as its
speech. He appeared to have no artistic or intellectual curiosities, to
remain untouched by the complex appeal of Paris, while preserving,
perhaps the more strikingly from his very detachment, that odd American
astuteness which seems the fruit of innocence rather than of
experience. His nationality revealed itself again in a mild interest in
the political problems of his adopted country, though they appeared to
preoccupy him only as illustrating the boundless perversity of mankind.
The exhibition of human folly never ceased to divert him, and though
his examples of it seemed mainly drawn from the columns of one exiguous
daily paper, he found there matter for endless variations on his
favorite theme. If this monotony of topic did not weary the younger
man, it was because he fancied he could detect under it the tragic
implication of the fixed idea--of some great moral upheaval which had
flung his friend stripped and starving on the desert island of the
little cafe where they met. He hardly knew wherein he read this
revelation--whether in the resigned shabbiness of the sage's dress, the
impartial courtesy of his manner, or the shade of apprehension which
lurked, indescribably, in his guileless yet suspicious eye. There were
moments when Garnett could only define him by saying that he looked
like a man who had seen a ghost.