The talkers

The Talkers were talking at the Fireside Club. The Talkers were talking of women. Fairless quoted Lombroso, Kraft-Ebbing, and Havelock-Ellis. Harry Stayr, who had been for years “half-way” in a “new novel,” and who, like all Talkers, was taking out the remaining “half” in talk, laid down axioms, hard boiled, for his listeners to digest at leisure.

“Si duo sunt idem,” he insisted in dog-Latin, “non sunt idem. But it’s only in detail they differ,” he added, “—finger-prints are still the prints of fingers. Like abhors like. There always is a latent antipathy between women. It is not so between men. Toward men women unconsciously but always cherish sex antipathy. There is no such fundamental instinct in men.

“Woman is a poor specimen of the species—if, indeed, she be not a sub-species. She is perfectly equipped to be the worst possible comrade for man. The normal woman is originally conservative, practically passionless. That is why it became necessary to invent the convention of marriage. That is why men are polygamous.

“In marriage she remains the congenital egotist. Necessity for beauty having passed, she becomes a slut. Like all animals she nourishes her young; fights for them. So do rats.

“What in God’s name is there admirable about a woman except her beauty?

“Because she is soft, graceful, fine skinned, delicately limbed, men ascribe to her a sensitiveness which she is absolutely without.

“She is less sensitive physically than men; bears pain more easily.

“She suffers less spiritually than men. She has less capacity for real emotion, less mental potentiality, less physical sensibility.

“I’m sick listening to the cant of poets and novelists. They describe themselves and their own sensations when they try to write realistically about women. They ascribe qualities to her of which she is ignorant, virtues of which, constitutionally, she is utterly incapable; vices to which she is too lazy and indifferent to fall a victim.

“I tell you she’s a tenth rate imitation of man, and man is a bum chromo of Christ.

“Now, go and tell that to the Great American Boob! Tell it to the American Aunty. Tell it to the Demagogue, the sissy sentimentalist, the pastoral crape-hanger, the national hypocrite, the dog-town fanatic!”

“Why don’t you tell ’em yourself in your great novel, Harry?” asked Fairless.

Sam Warne said: “If you’d stop stuffing yourself, Harry, you’d reverse your argument. Your perversely sordid theories originate in that paté-de-fois-gras which you think is your liver.”

The shrill cackle of Derring left Stayr with his mouth opening to speak.

“That’s it,” he said, “—livers talk, not brains! If you’d ever had a dear old mother you couldn’t talk that way. Even a guy in Sing-Sing will admit that. Ask Lyken what they say when they’re bumped off! Every damned one of ’em cries for his dear old mother. Isn’t she a woman? Aren’t there billions of mothers? Almost every man has had one. You ought to be ashamed, Harry——”

“Can’t you love a thing that’s imperfect?” growled Stayr. “It’s the only thing man can love. If you’re crazy about a girl it’s because, in the back of your head, you know she’s imperfect.”

“Why don’t the damned novelists say so?”

“Who cares,” sneered Pockman, “what a novelist says? It never matters.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, old Holbein,” retorted Stayr. “Look what these slops have done to the country! Look what the ‘good woman’ stuff has done to the Middle West. Why, they’re a race of chipmunks out there. ‘The good woman’ is running the country, knocking cigarettes out of your mouth, scaring a poltroon nation into prohibition, planning blue laws, re-gilding the old god Bunk to trot him out and scare a boob republic into Sabbath superstition again. That’s what your women-praising novelists are doing. That’s why the fanatics are raising the slogan of Christ and Kansas! Can you beat the blasphemous vulgarity? No, nor anybody else, including a Hottentot!”

Sutton, rather red, got up and started for the door.

“Am I right, Stuart?” cried Stayr. “Is there any difference in chickens except the colour of their feathers?”

Sutton said: “If we men really believed what you say, Harry, I think the decent ones among us would blow out our brains.”

After he had gone, Stayr said: “What can you expect? He’s acting up to the little Greenway girl as though he meant to marry her. He’s the sort that would. There’s your congenital celibate. There’s your woman-worshiper for you! Why, Joseph was a lounge-lizard compared to that hick! Hell! He’s spoiled as good a little sport as ever danced at Derring’s!”

Sutton, nauseated with talk, and now, for the first time, utterly loathing the Talkers, shook the dust of the Fireside from his heels and drew in a lung-full of outside air.

All the pretense, tinsel logic, shabby intellectuality, pseudo-deduction—all the squalid impotence of these men who created nothing, produced nothing, meant nothing to the world, was becoming apparent to a young man who knew no more of modernism than to wish to be a decent member of the human family.

What was fundamentally right and what was wrong concerned him less than tradition regarding right and wrong—the tradition which had preserved the world through its development—the tradition which had proved wholesome to the human race, which had safeguarded his country, his family.

Whoever had framed the Decalogue, God or man, was the father of men. The records of the New Testament were chronicles of a God and his archangels, human or immortal.

Gradually he had been sickening of the Talkers. Now he was utterly sickened. Pockman had said they were mostly mouth and the remainder only an intestine.

More clearly, now, this boy whose business in life was to grow, cut, and sell timber, began to understand that there are only two kinds of men—Talkers and Doers. Some Doers are talkative; no Talkers ever do anything.

This great gabbling Mouth was the plague of the working world. It was the parasite of the people, a hook-worm to energy, a louse to humanity, breeding bacteria that poisoned all mankind.

He wondered, now, how the Talkers of the world had contrived to loosen his grip on Truth; how they had managed to emasculate his belief in God. Why, what pitiable imitations they were!—what mental dwarfs! And he thought of Vathek, and the “noise of the storks and the dwarfs.” And he thought of the little daughter of Jairus, too. And of Gilda lying dead in her green mask.

The long, open New York winter had come to end. In the Park the grass was intensely green. Grackle and starling walked amid dandelions; thorns were white, yellow bell-flowers in bloom; some trees in sunny hollows and along the east wall were exquisitely green.

The gilded bronze General now rode his delivery-wagon nag behind a limestone balustrade—which he, his horse, and the winged servant-girl would be obliged to leap if they insisted on continuing down Fifth Avenue.

Proudly the expensive marble buildings looked down upon a new limestone quarry. Saucily the naked bronze jade across the way inspected the grim old warrior—who knew a pretty lass when he saw one, they say, and must have been bored to death with the winged domestic at his stirrup.

Sutton glanced up at the most classically uninteresting mansion in Manhattan, soon to be converted to business uses. Opposite, another and interesting commercial structure was rising almost over night. Farther down, the most beautiful private residence in Gotham, doomed to pay tribute to Hermes, flanked the most lovely of all metropolitan churches—cool, calm, silver-grey façades in the feverish riot of architecture roystering away southward toward the tawdry horrors of Broadway.

What a city! What would it become if Faith died within its grotesque walls; on its crazy heights? What would these milling swarms turn into if belief withered—if conformation to custom, trust in tradition, perished?

If it were true, as Stayr said, that there are only two parties in the world—Conservatives, who are women; Liberals, who are men; then the salvation of the world is due to its conservatism—to woman, the perfect egotist, born respecter of custom and tradition—and not to Liberal man whose atavistic instinct is for an informality that would bring the temples of the earth crashing about his ears.

Stuart turned into Thirty-fifth Street. He was thinking: “The thing to do, the thing to believe, is what your father did, and what he believed. And his father. And his.... Not, of course, going too far back.... When they burnt witches....”

He ascended the stairs, stood a moment at Gilda’s door.

“The thing to do,” he concluded, “is to take what’s coming to you within the law. Or fight it.... But always fight inside the law. You stand no show out of bounds.”

Freda admitted him. He found Gilda pale, silent, seated at her satin-wood desk, a few sheets of scored music-paper before her—some task in transposition set her; the ink still wet on the heavily penned sixteenth notes.

“Are you all right, dear?” he asked uneasily.

She nodded, lifted her childish face; the long line of the neck so lovely that he kissed her throat.

“I have our transportation,” he said happily. “Your luggage is checked and so is mine. Leggett wires that our shanty is ready——” He hesitated, looking at her. “What is the matter, Gilda? You are all right, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am all right.”

“Anything to worry you?”

“No.”

“You haven’t had any unpleasant experience with Sadoul?”

“Not recently.... He’s been decent since I relented and went back to help him. He looks so ill, Stuart—so emaciated.”

The boy kept his counsel, sombrely, playing square with the man who was slowly losing out. For a while he sat gazing absently at the sheets of ruled paper, darkly lost in a mental maze. After a little he looked up; regarded her more intently:

“Gilda, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing serious. I’m silly to be upset.... The surprise ... unexpected ... kindly intended, no doubt——”

He waited, perplexed.

She leaned over and blotted the wet score: “Fancy,” she said. “I was in my bedroom—combing out my hair, I believe—when Freda came with her card!”

“Whose card?”

“A—woman’s. A relative of mine.”

Gilda drummed on the desk with nervous fingers.

“I supposed she was in England. I didn’t know she was coming. And there she was.... In this room!”

“Was it not agreeable to have her come to see you?”

“I hadn’t asked her. I have declined to visit her. Or any of them. I reply to their letters. I am civil. That seemed sufficient.”

“Why does it upset you?”

“I don’t know why it does.... For one thing, your sport-coat and stick were on the lounge where you left them this morning.”

“Oh, Lord!” he said.

“It was all right. Being British she took them for mine. It wasn’t that.”

“What, then?”

“Oh, everything, Stuart. It was all well meant, you see, but I’d avoided it.... Didn’t I once tell you that I couldn’t endure being accounted for by my respectable relatives? Well, she is one of them and that was it.”

“What did she wish of you?”

“She desired me to accept the respectable shelter of herself and the common family tree.... It’s full enough of foliage without me. Also, she’d have to explain me.... No, no, no! A thousand, thousand times no! To explain me is to reflect on my parents. The British are not reticent in family matters. If they don’t like anybody in their own family they don’t hesitate to say so. I know how they regarded my mother. It’s no use; they have nothing to offer that I could accept.”

“She wished to take you back to England?” he asked, worried.

“To California first. She’s travelling.”

“And afterward?”

“She goes to Italy. Constantinople, too; and China and India, I believe. Ultimately to England. I couldn’t endure it.” She looked up at the boy: “Not that she’s not presentable. I didn’t mean it that way. There’s nothing queer about her. You’d probably like her—” she smiled faintly—“your parents would quite approve, Stuart.”

“That’s just it,” he said seriously. “It would make things so easy for us——”

“But darling! Can’t you ever recollect that I’m married? I’d have to tell my relatives and your parents. How could I account for you to my aunt? How could you account for me to your mother?”

“Isn’t it rotten luck?” he said fiercely.

“Yes, but listen, dear. Even if there were any prospects for my freedom, do you imagine my aunt and your mother would tolerate our companionship until the law unmarried me?”

“I suppose not,” he said.

“Your supposition is painfully correct, monsieur.... I fancy that your people are rather conservative. My relatives are quite as rigid. They’ve had their nets and lines out angling for me from the day my father died. I thought they’d never notice me again when, after fulfilling legal requirements in London, I refused to remain to be cherished and explained.

“But my father was their idol. He died in battle. They continue writing to my dead father’s only child—as in duty bound—or bound, perhaps, by something that may be more vital still to such gentle-folk as they.”

“I can understand,” said the boy.

“That is why I mentioned it—because you can understand.”

An odd consciousness of the subtle but complete reversal of roles preoccupied him. This girl was, unconsciously, accounting to herself for him, a Hudson River Sutton. Evidently she expected, ultimately, to account to her relatives for him.

And what had always caused him anxiety for the future was that he must account for her to a family and a circle which was entirely equipped to make them miserable at will.

It seemed funny. He smiled, then looked worried.

“How long does your aunt remain in New York?”

“Oh, she left this afternoon for Denver.”

“Then it won’t make any difference about your going to the Forest?”

“No, darling. I said I’d go.”

“But if you think——”

“I don’t think! I won’t think. There’s no harm in it if we’re not caught. I want to go; and I’m going to marry you sometime, anyway. And, oh! my beautiful sportclothes, and my trout-rod, and you—you—O wonderful clairvoyant who looked into a muddy crystal and saw love on his knees to you!”

She looked at him humourously, tenderly, studying his features with the enigmatical smile hovering on her lips.

“At first,” she said, “you naturally thought me depraved. I was merely queer. Not as queer as you very reasonably supposed. Not wanton. When you comprehended that you were sweet. Then I scared you.... And myself.... And went to pieces. You picked them up. You glued me together. I’m almost as good as new. I’ll be quite new when we marry.... Your brand new toy.”

After a moment he asked her if she had told Pockman and Sadoul that she was going away.

“Yes,” she said, “I had to. Of course, I did not say I was going with you.”

“Did they object?”

“Dr. Pockman grumbled. But I told him very gently that I didn’t expect to be under observation indefinitely.”

“Was Sadoul unpleasant?”

“No. He merely asked me to let him know when I returned.”

“That’s not like him, is it?”

“It’s made me a little uneasy,” she admitted. “But what could he do to us?”

Freda appeared to announce dinner.

It was late when the boy took his coat and stick, walked with his arm around Gilda to the hall, took her into his arms, then with a happy good-night put on his hat and went out.

She waited till she heard the upper door slam, then locked herself in for the night.

Stuart crossed the lower landing. The place was rather dark. Half way down the stairs a tall shadow detached itself from the wall. The boy halted, instinctively. There was a moment’s silence.

“Sadoul!” he said sharply.

Sadoul’s first shot deafened him; then the pistol crashed again; but Stuart was already jerking the weapon upward, wrenching it free.

The bitter smoke strangled them both; he hurled Sadoul at the lower door, kicked him through it, kicked him across the sidewalk, saw him stumble, collapse, roll over on the asphalt.

He stood looking on as Sadoul got up on hands and knees, then staggered to his feet. His chin and collar and shirt were all over blood.

Stuart was still breathing hard. “Go home, you lunatic!” he managed to say. “Do you want a cop to butt in?”

Sadoul stood swaying slightly, fumbling toward his handkerchief. A passing taxi slowed up, interested. Stuart took Sadoul by the arm and looked into his deathly face.

“Where do you want to go?” he said in an altered voice. “Home?”

“Yes,” whispered Sadoul.

To the driver: “This gentleman has fallen and hurt himself.”

“I get you,” returned the driver.

“Hadn’t I better go with you?” asked the boy.

Sadoul, lying back in the cab, shook his head.

“I think I’d better see you safe, Sadoul. That was a nasty fall.”

He got into the cab. It started with a buck and a jerk, ran skittishly to Fifth Avenue, rolled rapidly uptown.

Sadoul seemed exhausted, but when they arrived at the laboratory he descended from the cab without aid.

At the door of the building Stuart took the pistol out of his pocket, pulled out and threw away the clip, and handed the weapon to Sadoul.

“Here’s your gun,” he said in a low voice. “It wouldn’t have solved our problem.”

“Where are you going with her?” whispered Sadoul hoarsely.

“Only to look over our Forest. I’m playing square with you both, Sadoul.”

“You’ll bring her back?”

“Of course.”

“When?”

“Oh, in a week or ten days.”

Sadoul touched his bloody lips with his handkerchief:

“In—in ten days?”

“Not longer.”

“No.... Don’t stay longer.... I am—ill, Sutton.”

He went up the steps, his shoulders sagging, carrying the empty pistol in his hand.

“What the hell did you hand that guy?” inquired the driver as Sutton went slowly back to the cab.

“What do you think it was, a ham sandwich? Drive back to Thirty-fifth Street and step on the tack!”