It was Philbin, the novelist, whose hobby was “Weltpolitik,” and who revelled in prophecies those days of a European cataclysm, who put him, as it were, finally out of this particular misery.
“It seems to me,” complained Twinkle, in his plaintive voice, blinking almost tearfully at the table-cloth, “as if nature imitates everything.”
“Twinkle,” said Philbin, who was sitting next to him, “lend me your ears. I want ‘to whisper into their furry depths.’ Have you ever thought of going yourself?”
Twinkle, lifting his eyes to the other’s face, blinked and shook his head.
Savelle was the only man who did not laugh. He never laughed either at Sampson or Philbin. “Don’t you see,” he cried sharply, in his eager idea-driven way, “don’t you see what the man has discovered? Your ears will need cropping soon. ‘Nature imitates everything!’ That is, he has found, he has perceived, he is establishing by his own experiments that man, after all his effort and his boasting, after all his science and learning, which has made a joke of the teaching of Jesus and the poetry of Milton, that this creature itself has in turn created nothing. That man, after all, has only, can only, imitate nature.”
He let fall his fist on the table, looking around at his listeners. He always had listeners at Isham’s, and perhaps nowhere else in New York. For the moment he had forgotten his tiff with Philbin, had forgotten Philbin himself, and was all for rushing ahead on his idea-driven course to some unimaginable distance. But Philbin’s vanity never forgot slights. It was not the words—he gave and took sharper every day of his life—but the manner in which he was thrown aside as an unnoticeable obstruction in the other’s path of thought, the rush past him of the faster mind that mortified him. He knew Savelle, knew him better than any one in the room did, for that was his business, and he knew how fast he was going and how sharp he would fall, and then, like a mischievous little boy, with his foot, he stuck out his tongue and tripped him.
“That’s contrary to every teaching of Christ you ever raved about,” he said quickly.
Savelle did come down with rather a crash. Even his defenders admitted that much. But then he had been going very fast. Moreover, he was a man who habitually used too many words. He used too many to Philbin—a great deal too many. Philbin’s faults were almost all on the outside, and even through the casual communion of Isham’s he had made them pretty plain to every man there. He was vain, slightly arrogant, over-given to sneering. Savelle, in his defense of his position, managed to comment briefly upon each quality, and he put into the personalities the same vigor that he used to defend his theory of the universe. At the very best he showed a lamentable lack of proportion. At the worst he was vulgarly offensive.
That is the danger of such talk as men plunged into at Isham’s; it lacks proportion. Personalities and universalities get all mixed up, and sometimes it takes long patience and a good deal of humor to straighten out the tangle. Philbin and Savelle were in just such a tangle over little Norvel’s query. And neither of them had patience and Savelle had no grain of humor. If he had, he could not have come down from a discussion of his theory of the universe to criticism of Philbin’s personality. The matter was quite hopeless. The tangle only grew tighter until there was only one way of ending it. Philbin took it. He was a little man, and very nervous, and when he stood up his finger-tips just touched the table, and he was trembling so they played a tattoo on the table-cloth. Then he bowed and went out.
He had behaved the better of the two, but every one was glad to see him go—except old Sampson, to whom anything like ill-feeling gave genuine pain. He liked a placid world in which one could babble in amity about the moon. But to the rest Philbin was a bore. His Weltpolitik was uninteresting. His European cataclysm was a tale told by an idiot, full enough of learning, but signifying little or nothing. One could imagine baseball games on Mars, and make the matter realistic; but Philbin’s imaginings dealt in palpable absurdities. Even at Isham’s talk had limitations. Philbin had been a war correspondent in the Balkans, and they thought it had upset his mind.