“Well,” said Fortinbras, the next day, “and how is my speculator in happiness getting on?”
They were sitting on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel, their usual midday meeting-place. Save on these occasions the philosopher seemed to live dimly, in a sort of Oriental twilight. Yet all that Martin had seen (with the exception of the social moving-picture) he had also seen and therefrom sucked vastly more juice than the younger man. How and in what company he had visited the various monuments he did not say. It amused him to maintain his mysterious independence. Very rarely, and only when compelled by the imperious ruthlessness of Lucilla, did he otherwise emerge from his obscurity than on these daily visits to the famous terrace. There surrounded by chatter in all tongues and by representatives of all cities from Seattle round the earth’s girth to Tokio, he loved to sit and watch the ever-shifting scene—the traffic of all the centuries in the narrow street, from the laden ass driven by a replica of one of Joseph’s brethren to the modern Rolls-Royce sweeping along with a fat and tarbushed dignitary of the court; the ox-cart omnibus carrying its dingy load of veiled women; the poor funeral procession, the coffin borne on shoulders amid the perfunctory ululations of hired mourners; on the footpaths the contrast of slave attended, black-robed, trim-shod Egyptian ladies in yashmaks and the frank summer-clad Western women; Soudanese and Turks and Greeks and Jews and straight, clear-eyed English officers, and German tourists attired for the wilds of the Zambesi; and here and there a Gordon Highlander swinging along in kilts and white tunic; and lounging against the terrace balustrade, the dragomen, flaunting villains gay in rainbow robes, and the vendors of beads and fly-whisks and postcards holding up their wares at arm’s height and regarding prospective purchasers with the eyes of a crumb-expectant though self-respecting dog who sits on his tail by his master’s side; and, across the way, the curio shops rich with the spoils of Samarcand. From all this when alone he garnered the harvest of a quiet eye. When Martin was with him, he shared with his pupil the golden grain of the panorama.
“How,” said he, “is my speculator in happiness getting on?”
“The stock is booming,” replied Martin with a laugh.
“What an education,” said Fortinbras, “is the society of American men of substance!”
“It pleases you to be ironical,” said Martin, “but you speak literal truth. An American doesn’t set a man down as a damned fool because he is ignorant of his own particular line of business. Dangerfield, for instance, who keeps a working balance of his soul locked up in a safe in Wall Street, has explained to me the New York Stock Exchange with the most courteous simplicity.”
“And in return,” said Fortinbras, waving away a seller of rhinoceros-horn amber, with the gesture of a monarch dismissing his chamberlain, “you have given him an exhaustive criticism, not untempered with jaundice, of lower middle-class education in England.”
“Now, how the deuce,” said Martin, recklessly throwing his half-finished cigarette over the balustrade—“How the deuce did you know that?”
“C’est mon secret,” replied Fortinbras. “It is also the secret of a dry and successful man like Mr. Dangerfield, with whom I am sorry to have had no more than ten minutes’ conversation. In those ten minutes I discovered in him a lamentable ignorance of the works of Chaucer, Cervantes and Tourguenieff, but for my benefit he sized up in a few clattering epigrams the essence of the Anglo-Saxon, Spanish and Sclavonic races, and, for his own, was extracting from me all I know about Tolstoi, when Lucilla called me away to expound to his wife the French family system. From which you will observe that the American believes in a free exchange of knowledge as a system of education. To revert to my original question, however, you imagine that your present path is strewn with roses?”