II
They lunched near the Bourse, in a flaring café whither the jobbers resorted. There were a few conspicuous women of the company, loudly dressed and aggressive in the true spirit of their commercial patrons. These liked neither English nor Americans, and said so by face and gesture. The jobbers themselves looked a gloomy troop, though whether depressed by their hopes of gain or surety of loss it would have been difficult to say. Had they known that John Sebastian Faber sat cheek by jowl with them, it would have been another story. How many a time had he, from his distant office in New York, set that same market hoarse with excitement, filled the streets with bawling madmen, and put ropes of pearls about the necks of the cocottes who now made inelegant grimaces at him when the clients had their backs turned. He thought of it with some pleasure over a sole meringue. They would have been down upon him like a pack of wolves had they known him.
Bertie Morris enjoyed his déjeuner with the satisfaction of a man who knows he is not paying for it. He had a programme for the afternoon, which was to be capped by a dinner at the Ritz Hotel, also at Faber's expense. It never occurred to him that he was not putting his companion under a large obligation, and the whole tone of his talk was autocratic, as one who should say, "I open all doors."
"We'll trot out to the Avenue de Nancy and see where the Versaillese came in," he put it cheerfully. "It was on a Sunday, Picard tells me, and the fraternity lot got a few shells for breakfast. They had just made up their minds that the millennium had come, when Vinot and Ladmirault turned up with the cannon. They had a good deal in common afterwards—chiefly explosive. I'll show you a house at Passy with a shell in the wall over the front door. The owner won't have it touched. It's right there, just where the Versaillese put it."
"A kind of keepsake. Do they remember anything about all this in Paris nowadays?"
"On the first of May, before they get drunk. I don't think it comes up at any other time. The century isn't interested overmuch in yesterday. It's all 'to-morrow' nowadays."
"I don't know that I quarrel with that. Half the people would commit suicide if it wasn't for to-morrow. We're a sort of recurring decimal, but we don't believe it."
"Say, then you don't believe overmuch in the 'destiny' department?"
"I do not. A few things are going on all the time—very few. The civilization of Babylon was pretty much the civilization of Rome; while Rome wasn't so very different from ourselves. There's a little levelling of the classes; but there's no longer a goal, either in heaven or hell. That means a soulless people."
"But it marches all the same."