Mr. Cardan replenished his glass and then, politely, did the same for his host. Wine—it was the only thing that was likely to make this dismal devil talk. With his practised and professional eye, Mr. Cardan thought he could detect in his host’s expression certain hardly perceptible symptoms of incipient tipsiness. A spidery creature like that, thought Mr. Cardan contemptuously, couldn’t be expected to hold his liquor well; and he had been putting it down pretty steadily all through supper. A little more and, Mr. Cardan was confident, he’d be as clay in the hands of a sober interrogator (and Mr. Cardan could count on being sober for at least three bottles longer than a poor feeble creature like this); he’d talk, he’d talk; the only difficulty would be to get him to stop talking.
“Thanks,” said Mr. Elver, and gloomily gulped down the replenished glass.
That’s the style, thought Mr. Cardan; and in his liveliest manner he began to tell the story of the grocer’s brother’s statue and of his pursuit of it, ending up with an account, already more florid than the previous version, of how he lost himself.
“I console myself superstitiously,” he concluded, “by the reflection that fate wouldn’t have put me to these little troubles and inconveniences if it weren’t intending to do something handsome by me in the end. I’m paying in advance; but I trust I’m paying for something round and tidy. All the same, what a curse this, hunt for money is!”
Mr. Elver nodded. “It’s the root of all evil,” he said, and emptied his glass. Unobtrusively Mr. Cardan replenished it.
“Quite right,” he confirmed. “And it’s twice cursed, if you’ll allow me to play Portia for a moment: it curses him that hath—can you think of a single really rich person of your acquaintance who wouldn’t be less avaricious, less tyrannous, self-indulgent and generally porkish if he didn’t pay super-tax? And it also curses him that hath not, making him do all manner of absurd, humiliating, discreditable things which he’d never think of doing if the hedgerows grew breadfruit and bananas and grapes enough to keep one in free food and liquor.”
“It curses him that hath not the most,” said Mr. Elver with a sudden savage animation. This was a subject, evidently, on which he felt deeply. He looked sharply at Mr. Cardan for a moment, then turned away to dip his long nose once more in his tumbler.
“Perhaps,” said Mr. Cardan judicially. “At any rate there are more complaints about this curse than about the other. Those that have not complain about their own fate. Those that have do not, it is only those in contact with them—and since the havers are few these too are few—who complain of the curse of having. In my time I have belonged to both categories. Once I had; and I can see that to my fellow men I must then have been intolerable. Now”—Mr. Cardan drew a deep breath and blew it out between trumpeting lips, to indicate the way in which the money had gone—“now I have not. The curse of insolence and avarice has been removed from me. But what low shifts, what abjections this not-having has, by compensation, reduced me to! Swindling peasants out of their artistic property, for example!”
“Ah, but that’s not so bad,” cried Mr. Elver excitedly, “as what I’ve had to do. That’s nothing at all. You’ve never been an advertisement canvasser.”
“No,” Mr. Cardan admitted, “I’ve never been an advertisement canvasser.”