CHICKEN, OR STEAK?
On the outbreak of a bygone rudeness between the United States and
Spain, one free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan paper, unable to
adequately express its violent emotions on the subject, utilised its
whole front page with the one word “War!” printed in red ink, and since
this edition was jumped off the press as fast as that word could be
matrixed and cast, there was not another line anywhere in the paper
about the subject which was so prominently indexed, and the read-overs
about the latest briberies and murders and scandals had no beginnings at
all. But that was good journalism. The public had been expecting war for
some days. They knew what it was all about, and here it was. They bought
up that edition with avidity, and read the one word of news, which they
had seen from afar, and threw down the paper, satisfied.
Now, however, the free and entirely uncurbed, having risen most
gloriously in the past to every emergency, no matter how great,
positively floundered in the very wealth of its opportunities. To begin
with, the free and entirely uncurbed, usually a unit in what constituted
the news of the day, found itself ignominiously scattered, foozled in
its judgment, inadequate in its expression of anything; and one
brilliant head writer, after trying in vain to combine the diverse
elements of this uncomfortably huge sensation, landed on the single word
“Yow!” and went out, in a daze, for a drink. One paper landed on the
Franco-German War as the leading thrill in this overly rich combination
of news, one took up the greed of Allison, one featured the world
monopoly, one the assured downfall of England, and one, that represented
by the squib, the general absorption of everything by the cereal trust.
Saturday night, however, saw no late extras. The “story” was too big to
touch without something more tangible than the word of even so
substantial a man as Gerald Fosland; and long before any of the twelve
eager young gentlemen had reached the office, the scout brigade,
hundreds strong, were sniffing over every trail and yelping over every
scent.
They traced the visiting diplomats from the time they had stepped down
their respective gangplanks to the time they walked up them again. They
besieged and bombarded and beleaguered the eight members of the
International Transportation Company, or as many of them as they could
locate, and they even found their way out to Gerald Fosland’s yacht, in
mad pursuit of Eldridge Babbitt. Here, however, they were foiled, for
Gerald, ordering the anchor hoist at the first hail, stepped out on the
deck from his belated dinner, and informed the gentlemen of the press
that the rights of hospitality on his yacht would be held inviolate,
whereupon he headed for Sandy Hook. The scout brigade were also unable
to locate Joseph G. Clark, the only multi-millionaire in America able to
crawl in a hole and pull the hole in after him, Robert E. Taylor, who
never permitted anybody but a personal friend to speak to him from
dinner time on, and Edward E. Allison, of whom there had been no trace
since noon. They might just as well not have found the others, for
neither Chisholm, nor Haverman, nor Grandin, nor Vance, could be induced
to make any admissions, be trapped into a yes or no, or grunt in the
wrong place. They had grown up with the art of interviewing, and had
kept one lap ahead of it, in obedience to nature’s first law, which, as
every school boy knows, though older people may have forgotten it, is
the law of self-preservation.
Until three o’clock in the morning every newspaper office in New York
was a scene of violent gloom. Throughout all the city, and into many
outside nooks and crannies, were hundreds of human tentacles, burrowing
like moles into the sandy soil of news, but unearthing nothing of any
value. The world’s biggest sensation was in those offices, and they
couldn’t touch it with a pair of tongs! Nor were libel suits, or any
such trivial considerations, in the minds of the astute managers of the
free and entirely uncurbed. The deterrent was that the interests
involved were so large that one might as well sit on a keg of gunpowder
and light it, as to make the slightest of errors. The gentlemen
mentioned as the organisers of the International Transportation Company
collectively owned about all the money, and all the power, and all the
law, in the gloriously independent United States of America; and if they
got together on any one subject, such as the squashing of a newspaper,
for instance, something calm and impressive was likely to happen. On the
other hand, if the interesting story the free and entirely uncurbed had
in its possession were true, the squashing would be reversed, and the
freeness and entirely uncurbedness would be still more firmly seated
than ever, which is the palladium of our national liberties; and Heaven
be good to us.
It was a distressing evening. Whole reams of copy, more throbbing than
any fiction, more potent than any explosion, more consequential than any
war, hung on the “hold” hooks, and grew cold! Whole banks of galleys of
the same gorgeous stuff stood on the racks, set and revised, and ready
to be plated, and not a line of it could be released!
Towards morning there was an army of newspaper men so worried and
distressed, and generally consumed with the mad passion of restraint,
that there was scarcely a fingernail left in the profession, and
frightened-eyed copy boys hid behind doors. Suddenly a dozen telegraph
operators, in as many offices, jumped from their desks, as if they had
all been touched at the same instant by a powerful current from their
instruments, and shouted varying phrases, a composite of which would be
nearest expressed by:
“Let ’er go!”
It had been eight o’clock in the evening in New York when Gerald Fosland
had first given out his information, and at that moment it was one A.M.
in Berlin. At three A.M., Berlin time, which was ten P.M. in New York,
the Baron von Slachten, who had been detained by an unusual stress of
diplomatic business, strolled to his favourite café. At three-five, the
Baron von Slachten became the most thought about man in his city, but
the metropolitan press of Berlin is slightly fettered and more or less
curbed, and there are certain formalities to be observed. It is
probable, therefore, that the Baron might have gone about his peaceful
way for two or three days, had not a fool American, in the advertising
branch of one of the New York papers, in an entire ignorance of decent
formalities, walked straight out Unter den Linden, to Baron von
Slachten’s favourite café, and, picking out the Baron at a table with
four bushy-faced friends, made this cheerful remark, in the manner and
custom of journalists in his native land:
“Well, Baron, the International Transportation Company has confessed.
Could you give me a few words on the subject?”
The Baron, who had been about to drink a stein of beer, set down his
half liter and stared at the young man blankly. His face turned slowly
yellow, and he rose.
“Lass bleiben,” the Baron ordered the handy persons who were about to
remove the cheerful advertising representative and incarcerate him for
life, and then the Baron walked stolidly out of the café, and rode home,
and wrote for an hour or so, and ate a heavy early breakfast, and
returned to his study, and obligingly shot himself.
This was at seven A.M., Berlin time, which was two A.M., in New York;
and owing to the nervousness of an old woman servant, the news reached
New York at three A.M., and the big wheels began to go around.
Where was Edward E. Allison? There was nothing the free and entirely
uncurbed wanted to know so much as that; but the f. and e. u. was doomed
to disappointment in that one desire of its heart. Even as he had
stumbled down the steps of the Sargent house, Allison was aware of the
hideous thing he had done; aware, too, that Jim Sargent was as violent
as good-natured men are apt to be. This thought, it must be said in
justice to Allison, came last and went away first. It was from himself
that he tried to run away, when he shot his runabout up through the Park
and into the north country, and, by devious roads, to a place which had
come to him as if by inspiration; the Willow Club, which was only open
in the summertime, and employed a feeble old caretaker in the winter. To
this haven, bleak and cold as his own numbed soul, Allison drove in
mechanical firmness, and ran his machine back into the garage, and
closed the doors on it, and walked around to the kitchen, where he found
old Peabody smoking a corncob pipe, and laboriously mending a pair of
breeches.
“Why, howdy, Mr. Allison,” greeted Peabody, rising, and shoving up his
spectacles. “It’s a treat to see anybody these days. I ain’t had a
visitor for nigh onto a month. There ain’t any provisions in the house,
but if you’d like anything I can run over to the village and get it. I
got a jug of my own, if you’d like a little snifter. How’s things in the
city?” and still rambling on with unanswered questions and miscellaneous
offers and club grounds information, he pottered to the corner cupboard,
and produced his jug, and poured out a glass of whiskey.
“Thanks,” said Allison, and drank the liquor mechanically. He was
shuddering with the cold, but he had not noticed it until now. He
glanced around the room slowly and curiously, as if he had not seen it
before. “I think I’ll stay out here over night,” he told Peabody. “I’ll
occupy the office. If any one rings the phone, don’t answer.”
“Yes-sir,” replied Peabody. “Tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Allison. I’ll
muffle the bell. I guess I better light a fire in the office.”
“Eh? Yes. Oh yes. Yes, you might light a fire.”
“Get you a nice chicken maybe.”
“Eh? Yes. Oh yes. Yes.”
“Chicken or steak? Or maybe some chops.”
“Anything you like,” and Allison went towards the office. At the door he
turned. “You’ll understand, Peabody, that I have come here to be quiet.
I wish to be entirely alone, with certain important matters which I must
decide. If anybody should happen to drop in, get rid of him. Do not say
that I am here or have been here.”
“Yes-sir,” replied Peabody. “I know how it is that away. I want to be by
myself, often. Shall I make up the bed in the east room or the west
room? Seems to me the west room is a little pleasanter.”
Allison went into the office, and closed the door after him. It was damp
and chill in there, but he did not notice it. He sat down in the swivel
chair behind the flat top desk, and rested his chin in his hands, and
stared out of the window at the bleak and dreary landscape. Just within
his range of vision was a lonely little creek, shadowed by a mournful
drooping willow which had given the Club its name, and in the wintry
breeze it waved its long tendrils against the leaden grey sky. Allison
fixed his eyes on that oddly beckoning tree, and strove to think. Old
Peabody came pottering in, and with many a clang and clatter builded a
fire in the capacious Dutch stove; with a longing glance at Allison, for
he was starved with the hunger of talk, he went out again.
At dusk he once more opened the door. Allison had not moved. He still
sat with his chin in his hands, looking out at that weirdly waving
willow. Old Peabody thought that he must be asleep, until he tiptoed up
at the side. Allison’s grey eyes, unblinking, were staring straight
ahead, with no expression in them. It was as if they had turned to
glass.
“Excuse me, Mr. Allison. Chicken or steak? I got ’em both, one for
supper and one for breakfast.”
Allison turned slowly, part way towards Peabody; not entirely.
“Chicken or steak?” repeated Peabody.
“Eh? Yes. Oh yes. Yes. The chicken.”
The fire had gone out. Peabody rebuilt it. He came in an hour later, and
studied the silent man at the desk for a long minute, and then he
decided an important question for himself. He brought in Allison’s
dinner on a tray, and set it on a corner of the desk.
“Shall I spread a cloth?”
“No,” returned Allison. The clatter had aroused him for the moment, and
Peabody went away with a very just complaint that if he had to be
bothered with a visitor on a grey day like this, he’d rather not have
such an unsociable cuss.
At eleven Peabody came in again, to see if Allison were not ready to go
to bed; but Allison sent him away as soon as he had fixed the fire. The
tray was untouched, and out there in the dim moonlight, which peered now
and then through the shifting clouds, the long-armed willow beckoned and
beckoned.
Morning came, cold and grey and damp as the night had been. Allison had
fallen asleep towards the dawn, sitting at his desk with his heavy head
on his arms, and not even the clatter of the building of the fire roused
him. At seven when Peabody came, Allison raised up with a start at the
opening of the door, but before he glanced at Peabody, he looked out of
the window at the willow.
“Good morning,” said Peabody with a cheerfulness which sounded oddly in
that dim, bare room. “I brought you the paper, and some fresh eggs.
There was a little touch of frost this morning, but it went away about
time for sun-up. How will you have your eggs? Fried, I suppose, after
the steak. Seems like you don’t have much appetite,” and he scrutinised
the untouched tray with mingled regret and resentment. Since Allison
paid no attention to him, he decided on eggs fried after the steak, and
started for the door.
Allison had picked up the paper mechanically. It had lain with the top
part downwards, but his own picture was in the centre. He turned the
paper over, so that he could see the headlines.
“Peabody!” No longer the dead tones of a man in a mental stupor, a man
who can not think, but in the sharp tones of a man who can feel.
“Yes-sir.” Sharp and crisp, like the snap of a whip. Allison had scared
it out of him.
“Don’t come in again until I call you.”
“Yes-sir.” Grieved this time. Darn it, wasn’t he doing his best for the
man!
So it had come; the time when his will was not God! A God should be
omnipotent, impregnable, unassailable, absolute. He was surprised at the
calmness with which he took this blow. It was the very bigness of the
hurt which left it so little painful. A man with his leg shot off
suffers not one-tenth so much as a man who tears his fingernail to the
quick. Moreover, there was that other big horror which had left him
stupefied and numb. He had not known that in his ruthlessness there was
any place for remorse, or for terror of himself at anything he might
choose to do. But there was. He entered into no ravings now, no
writhings, no outcries. He realised calmly and clearly all he had done,
and all which had happened to him in retribution. He saw the downfall of
his stupendous scheme of worldwide conquest. He saw his fortune, to the
last penny, swept away, for he had invested all that he could raise on
his securities and his business and his prospects, in the preliminary
expenses of the International Transportation Company, bearing this
portion of the financial burden himself, as part of the plan by which he
meant to obtain ultimate control and command of the tremendous
consolidation, and become the king among kings, with the whole world in
his imperious grasp, a sway larger than that of any potentate who had
ever sat upon a throne, larger than the sway of all the monarchs of
earth put together, as large terrestrially as the sway of God himself!
All these he saw crumbled away, fallen down around him, a wreck so
complete that no shred or splinter of it was worth the picking up; saw
himself disgraced and discredited, hated and ridiculed throughout the
length and breadth and circumference of the very earth he had meant to
rule; saw himself discarded by the strong men whom he had inveigled into
this futile scheme and saw himself forced into commercial death as
wolves rend and devour a crippled member of their pack; last, he saw
himself loathed in the one pure breast he had sought to make his own;
and that was the deepest hurt of all; for now, in the bright blaze of
his own conflagration, he saw that, beneath his grossness, he had loved
her, after all, loved her with a love which, if he had shorn it of his
dross, might perhaps have won her.
Through all that day he sat at the desk, and when the night-time came
again, he walked out of the house, and across the field, and over the
tiny foot-bridge, under the willow tree with the still beckoning arms;
and the world, his world, the world he had meant to make his own, never
saw him again.