George didn’t bother. Wannamaker and Thelusson, the two trustees, gave him all the money he wanted and the world all the fun. A juvenile replica of old Harley on the outside, he was not unlike him on the in; he had something better than wealth, than good looks, even than health, a radium quality inherited from his father that kept him far younger than his years. When Harley du Cane died at the age of seventy-six from a surfeit of ice cream following the excitement of a base-ball match, Cazenove, the broker, reading out the news to his family said the reporters had got the age wrong, for Harley wasn’t more than nine; and he was right. The Great Bear, to give him his name in the Stock Market, in many respects wasn’t more than nine.
George, having finished his letter, touched an electric bell. A waiter approached.
“Waiter,” said George, “bring me an—Oh, damn it!” Egg flip had been on his tongue and prohibition had risen in his mind. The waiter waited. He was used to orders like this of late. “Lemonade,” said George.
He got up and moved to where some men were seated near one of the windows. Cyrus Reid, the poet; Carolus, the musician; Abrahams, the artist. A few months ago these three would have been fighting, no doubt, over the merits of Henri, Matisse or the possibilities of Cubist music. Today they were just talking about how dry they were and of the great drought that had struck San Francisco. Reid was mostly a coffee drinker, an occasional glass of beer satisfied Carolus, and Abrahams was all but teetotal, yet they were filled with discontent. George sat down with them and listened to them and drank his lemonade and absorbed their gloom. Prohibition may be good or it may be bad, but there is one undoubted fact about it, it doesn’t improve the social life of a club. Whilst they were talking, Hank Fisher came in. Hank was twenty-three or so; thin, tanned, hollow-cheeked, he looked like the mixture of a red Indian and an East coast Yankee.
He had been born in New Hampshire, served in a whaler, driven an engine, waited in a café, hoboed, stoked a Stockton river boat, canned in a cannery. He had educated himself, in a wild sort of way that produced flowers of the mind in an extraordinary pattern; he was both a Socialist and an individualist. There was nothing that the hands of men could do that the hands of Hank couldn’t. He could make boots or a fishing-net or mend a watch, he had invented and patented a rat trap that brought him in a small income, and he had the specifications in hand of a clock that would go for forty-eight years without winding. He had, also, in the last year or two, made quite a sum of money speculating in real estate. But the crowning point of Hank, and the thing that had secured his entry to the Bohemian Club and endeared him to all imaginative people, was the fact that he was a little bit mad. Not crazy mad, but pleasantly mad. A madness so mixed with cold sanity and streaks of genius that you could scarcely call it madness.
“You can’t tell what he’ll do next,” was the best description of him, given by Cedarquist, barring Reid’s “He’s an opal.”
The opal sat down with scarcely a word and listened to Abrahams, who was holding forth. Said Abrahams:
“Yes, sir, you may talk and talk, but you haven’t got to the bed-rock of the subject. The fact is the world never struck universal unrest till it struck universal lime-juice. If you could dig up the Czar and make him talk, I’ll bet he’d back me. Talk of crime waves, when has crime ever waved before as it’s waving now? Look at the hold-ups, look at New York, look at Chicago, look at this town. Look at the things that are done in the broad light of day. Milligan’s raided yesterday by two gunmen and the place cleared of fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stuff in fifteen minutes. Look at this chap Vanderdecken.”
“What’s he been doing?” asked Carolus.
“Doing! Don’t you read the papers?”