“Wheeled about? Was he an invalid?”
“He was suffering from locomotor ataxia, so I was told. Really, the poor chap aroused my pity, and I left my party of friends and went over to speak to him. He had never heard of me nor I of him since we left college. Think of that! And when I told him that I had become the largest pickle grower in the world, what do you think he said?”
“Tell me?”
“He said, ‘Crowther, that’s why you used always to be saying, “Pass the pickles, please.”’ Ha, ha. That was the only time I saw him. He didn’t seem to want to talk; it seemed to tire him; and his old negro wheeled him away into the shade. Poor chap, what a mess he has made out of life! I don’t suppose you know that he came of one of our oldest Virginian families. I own an estate which adjoins what was once his father’s plantation. I hunt partridges down there every fall—you will pardon me, but I see that I am keeping my guests waiting. I must leave you. Be here long? Come to see me some time at my cottage. Mighty glad to have seen you.”
As he walked down to his automobile and thence drove to his launch, I said to myself, Crowther, a metropolitan man of affairs, a landed proprietor, a member of our noted society, an American millionaire, known wherever pickles are eaten; and—and—what was it he called the obscure exile whom he met—“a mess.”
Even the mad Lear asked: Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.
Who was William Wirt Dunlevy? Where is he? What was he? A failure?