"Don't they!" I bitterly exclaimed. "Let unemotional pedants speak as they stupidly will, Alicia. Nothing can be more poignantly pathetic than a fallacy!"
"Yes, sir," murmured Alicia and with reverent fingers she silently helped me to place some of those books. She has a tender touch for the objects of other people's love, a charming attribute in a woman.
And from the physical chaos in the châlet at Crestlands I am whirled madly every morning in a crowded express train, then in a convulsively serried subway car, to the more subtle chaos in the office of Salmon and Byrd—to sell Roumanian bonds. Roumanian bonds are overrunning those offices like the rats in the town of Hamelin. Ah, will not some piper, pied or otherwise, come and pipe them all into the sea? The answer, I grieve to say, is no! The impossibility of shifting one's burdens is the fundamental mistake of Creation.
Nothing irritates me more after a morning's fruitless telephoning or ineffectual running about than to have Fred Salmon smile sleekly, clap me on the back and mumble mechanically:
"Great work, old boy! You're doing fine!"
What is the use of these false inanities? On Saturday he came to me with the gratifying intelligence that Imber and Smith, who took two millions of the bonds, have already sold out their allotment.
"Damn them!" was the only answer I could find.
"That's what I say," he answered in his perfect rôle of being all things to all men, then reflectively, "I think Smith's a liar, though." I'll wager nevertheless that he congratulated Smith as heartily as he bruises my back. To be all things to all men is surely one of the most disgusting traits in a human biped. Fitfully ever and again I wish myself out of the ruck and rabble of all that. But sadly and heavily it comes to me that it is better perhaps to bear the ills one has than to fly to others that are a mere sinister blank. I seem like a man on a raft with the storm-lashed waves washing over me the while I gasp for breath and hope for rescue.
I wonder what this life would be like if upon coming home to Crestlands there were not those eager little retrievers to fetch and to carry and to wait upon me, to surround me with their glad young freshness. But in candor I must admit that but for them I should be leading my old secluded life, undisturbed among books, that now seems remote as a past incarnation.
The weeks go by and, toiling under our burden, we are desperately trying to stem the rush of time. In certain hard-pressed moments I have a sickly feeling that time will win—and crush us. A revoltingly new discovery I made yesterday, that Fred has taken to drinking during business hours, suddenly drew the life out of me like a suction pump. Then, realizing the meaning and the enormity of the fact, I was frightened out of fear and talked to him in as friendly and kindly a vein as the circumstances would permit, in an effort to show him our position and where it might lead us.