The Best Short Stories of 1918, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story - Unknown

It was a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things. It was not, of course, advertised as that; there was no sign to the public saying as much. Indeed, the only sign of any sort said “Wines, Ales, and Liquors,” just below the name “Isham.” But, nevertheless, that is what it distinctively was—a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things.

It was a curious place to look at, too, in a way—the wrong way. It was a three-story house among houses fifteen, twenty, and thirty stories high; it was a house sixty years old, living usefully among houses, most of which were scarcely as many months old. But sixty years is no great age for a house in most places, and three stories is not out of the common. It is thirty stories that are extraordinary. In the right way Isham’s was a very ordinary place to look at, in very curious surroundings—only it took a moment’s thought to find it out.

Old Isham himself, though, would have been curious anywhere in the world. He was seventy years old, and he looked precocious. Perhaps having lived so long in an atmosphere of “wild surmise” had robbed him of the gift of wonderment, the last light of infancy to go out in the world, and so he was absolutely grown up. That is what he was, absolutely grown up. Looking into his face you could not imagine his ever being surprised, quite without a previous experience of the present. As one of his customers said, he could take the gayest dinner-party that ever was, and with a single glance of his faded blue eyes reduce it to a pile of dirty dishes and the bill. He was saturated with the gayety of thirty thousand dinners. He never condescended to the vulgarity of a dress suit, but always wore plain black with immaculate linen. So he would move in the evening, ponderously—for he must have weighed two hundred pounds—among the tables, listening imperturbably to praise and blame. Yes, chops were almost always properly broiled, beer had been flat from the beginning of the world—Lucullus with a dash of Cato.

Twinkle Sampson was his oldest patron. He was as old as Isham, and had been dining there once or twice a week ever since he was thirty; but he was the antithesis of Isham in appearance. He had the face of a very young child; it was all wonderment. The whole world was for him a wild surmise. His hobby was astronomy. He liked, as he said, to talk about the moon. Any of the heavenly bodies would interest him, but the moon was his own peculiar sphere. His knowledge was for the most laboriously gleaned, unassisted, from books; but twice in his life he had looked at the moon through a great telescope, and those two occasions were to Twinkle Sampson what one wedding and one funeral are to most men. He looked like a moon-lover, too, a pale, weak reflection of masculinity. The nearest he ever got to anger was when some ignorant person at Isham’s threatened to divert the talk from his hobby when once he had dragged it thither.

“I know a man—,” began one of these imprudently on one occasion.

“We don’t care if you know a million men,” interrupted Twinkle. “We want to talk about the moon.”

And he sat for five minutes thereafter, blinking at the interloper like an exasperated white-haired owl. Even in that outburst, though, he characteristically took refuge in the plural.

Such little “flare-ups” were very, very frequent at Isham’s. Indeed, they were inevitable, because there people talked of what they had thought about. It is the talk for talk’s sake that is only a string of wearying agreements; the drunkard over a bar, a débutante at a dinner-table, a statesman among his constituents. Talk at Isham’s was intelligently sharp, interrupted, disputative. And, in any case, Savelle would have made it so. He was eaten up by the zeal of his cause, which was Christianity and capitalism. Capitalism, he preached, was founded on Christianity, was a development and an inevitable development of the social implication of the Gospels. It was a curious plea; it had the power of exasperating human beings otherwise kindly and meditative, such as chiefly affected Isham’s, to something like fury when Savelle eloquently expounded it. He called it Christian economics. He argued that just as Christianity was developing the social relations of human beings to one of pure love, so it was developing also their economical relations to one of pure trust. The two developments had gone on side by side throughout the Christian era, from the days when merchants hauled ponderous “talents of silver” about with them in their trading, until now, when one could control all the wealth of the world by the tapping of a telegraph key. And not only was their growth thus synchronous, but each was the exactest exponent of the other; it was only in Christian countries, he explained, that the capitalistic system was to be found at all, and in the quasi-heathen it was invariably established in exact proportion with the spread of Christian ethics. He was full, too, of frequent instances and recondite dates, such as the invention of the bill of exchange by the Hebrews, and the advice of Jesus to his Apostles anent carrying money about with them. There were only two crimes in Christian economics, just as in the ethics; dishonesty, which he claimed was the commercial form of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and bankruptcy, or the refusal of trust, which was simply a denial of the economic implication of the teaching of love one another. Socialism, of course, was merely a new, subtle sacrilege, and Marx the newest incarnation of anti-Christ. His faith or fanaticism would always burn its fiercest in talking of these specific instances. Twinkle Sampson would sit blinking astigmatically at him for an hour in silence when he preached so. He was the only man of them all whom Twinkle Sampson never interrupted, never tried to drag away to the moon.