The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 52

"You mean to say," asked the man by the window slowly, "that this very boy you've been telling us about was the one who shot the Archduke?"

"Yes," said the other, "he was Gavrilo Prinzip of Sarajevo."

"Good Lord!" exclaimed the third. "The boy who brought on the war!"

"As we were saying earlier," returned the one who had told the tale, "historians will doubtless trace the beginnings of the war to Gavrilo's shot. Certainly Austria used the shot as her excuse, alleging that a plot to kill the Archduke had been hatched in Serbia-which was absolutely untrue, for Serbia was afraid of nothing so much as of giving offense to Austria, knowing well that Austria was only seeking a pretext to pounce upon her, precisely as she had earlier pounced upon Bosnia and Herzegovina, annexing them."

After a thoughtful pause he added: "Poor Gavrilo! I am glad to know that he is free at last. Like Mara's starling, he was not one to live long in a cage. And it is perhaps because I was so fond of him, and also because Austria's excuse was so transparently despicable, that I shall always go behind the shooting in thinking of the beginning of the war. As I conceive it, it was Mara's anger that released Gavrilo from the promise which, otherwise, would have withheld him. And it was the death of the caged starling that brought on her anger. And it was the animalculae that caused the bird's death."

"That is," put in the man by the window, "you prefer to trace the war down to such a small beginning as the death of that caged bird?"

"Rather," replied the other, "to a still smaller and more repulsive beginning-to the vermin which destroyed the bird. It seems to me I see them always crawling through the explanations, apologies, excuses, war messages, and peace overtures of the Teutonic autocrats."

AT ISHAM'S

_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 ant.i.thesis 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, una.s.sisted, 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 debutante at a dinner-table, a statesman among his const.i.tuents. 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 relations.h.i.+p?"

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 G.o.ds."

"Think of it yourselves," he demanded. "Put it into your own words. The laughter of G.o.d!" 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d.

All that was human was imitation, even as man himself was G.o.d'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.