“You know too much,” said Edward, more and more annoyed. He hated to be caught in his generosities. “May I ask what else you know, sir?”
George shook his head. “It is not a weakness to be kind, my Eddie, though sometimes it is dangerous as I have said before. But let us continue. What will happen to this shop?”
Edward looked about him and for a moment there was nostalgia in his eyes. “My father will have it, and he can manage it, with the aid of another clerk. I will retain my interest in it, of course. Supervision. Once or twice a week. Pa will pay me for it. I will do all the ordering, myself, and it will be easier when I have that importing office in New York. Pa will get the goods from me for what I pay for them. He won’t have any complaint there. And he’ll still pay me my salary of twenty-two dollars a week, which I’ll put in the fund as usual.” He looked at George grimly. “I could pull out entirely, but Pa couldn’t manage without me. And I’ve got to run it right, or he’ll learn that without me he must fail or go down to what he was before I made it what it is today. So I’ll keep my interest and get my salary. But Pa won’t be part of the new shop, though I’ll be part of this. I have my obligations, and my brothers and sister will need all the money they can get. And I am the one who can get it for them.”
“You have never considered letting them get it for themselves, my Eddie?” George’s voice was deceptively mild. “You have never considered the character that would strengthen in them?”
Edward stared at him incredulously.
George’s big nostrils expanded as he returned Edward’s stare inexorably.
“No one helped me when I came to this America, a greenhorn, at the age of eighteen, my Eddie, and for that I thank the great God, in Whom I do not believe, of course. I do not believe in Him because of what I suffered in the old country and in this country. I do not speak to Him. He can wait forever for my speaking. But that is of no consequence. I was speaking of the character of your brothers and sister. Without character a man is nothing. You would deprive them of their character? You would make them weaklings?”
Edward blurted, “They have no character, they are weaklings!” And then his face was suffused with a dark wash of blood. He walked down the length of the counter as if escaping from the shrewd point of a rapier presented near his heart. He stood at the end of the counter, in profile. He drew a deep breath, and the color left his face, leaving it very pale and harsh and quiet. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t think it. Dave’s doing wonderfully in his music in New York; his teacher has confirmed that he is a genius. He takes three lessons a week and practices at least eight hours a day in that little apartment I rented for him. He’s only twenty, but he’ll be able to begin a tour in about three years, the teacher said. A limited tour at first, and then all over the country. And then he’ll study in Europe. I’m thinking of sending him to Europe next year and not letting him stay in New York.”
The gas globes hissed warmly in the shining stillness of the shop. George did not speak.
Edward went on, “And Sylvia’s doing fine in her drama and stage-art school here, and she’ll be ready for New York next year, and she’s only eighteen now. And Greg’s in that expensive boy’s school in Pennsylvania, and he gets good marks, especially in literature and composition, and he’s only fourteen. And Ralph will be going to Greg’s school in two years; he’s only twelve.”
Edward came back along the counter and faced George. “Do you think they’d do better working in this shop for wages, or in factories, and then studying at night, and paying for their own educations?” His voice was very loud and furious, and there was a quality of breathlessness in it.
George spread out his hands. “I have known you were emotional, my Eddie, but not this emotional. Nein. It is as if I have attacked you.” He narrowed his eyes. “Have I attacked you, my Eddie? It is not necessary to answer. But I will say this: I have known great men who have worked for their ambition, and have studied in attics, and have struggled, and have succeeded. Because they had character, and character is not a commodity which you can buy. It is not a quality you can acquire in your best schools.”
Edward, so careful these past few years, lost his temper. His anger rose from some enormous and secret wound in himself, which he sensed with an endless pain but which was consciously not known to him. “You have character, sir,” he said rudely. “And—”
“It is not the sort of character you prefer for your brothers and sister?” George smiled oddly. “That is what you would say, and it would not be the truth. You will not speak truth to yourself and that is the flaw I find in you. My Eddie, have you studied Bismarck with Monsieur Faure? No? Then you must ask him of Bismarck. I have noticed that he limps. He must know of Bismarck intimately, from the Franco-Prussian War. He can enlighten you, and then, perhaps, one of these days you will no longer lie to yourself.”
Edward frowned darkly. “I never always understand you, Mr. Enreich.”
“You will, my Eddie, you will. One of these days. One of the very somber days. Perhaps not until it is too late. For you, for your brothers and sister.”
He wiped his fat hands, which were covered with rings, on the white napkin which Edward had given him. Edward said, “I’d rather not discuss my brothers and sister. I am doing my very best for them and I intend to do a lot more. I can’t do it here. That’s why I want the Fine Food Markets. What is your proposition, Mr. Enreich?”
“Ah, it is a realist, this Eddie,” said George. “Well, this is so: twenty-five per cent of the net profits, and I will assume the responsibility of all future financing in the expansion of the business. Am I not generous? Am I not reckless in this investing? But I was always so.” He smiled with mock ruefulness. “Too, I have much trust in your ability or I would not propose it.”
Edward was appalled. “Twenty-five per cent!” he exclaimed. “You aren’t really serious, Mr. Enreich? You can’t be! I’d considered offering you six per cent interest until I could pay you back your money.”
“I am no banker, Eddie. I do not need to lend you five thousand dollars and help you to expand, for six per cent. My investments pay me that now. I do not take risks for nothing. You are not yet twenty. You are not yet of age. I violate the law, I think, by negotiating a contract with you before you are twenty-one. But, you must understand, I am investing, if I invest, not just in the shops. I am investing in that quality which you have repudiated with such anger—character. Your character, my Eddie. And that is where I am generous. For you have that flaw which some men would call strength but which I call weakness. A most terrible and devastating weakness, and it has caused all the world’s greater agonies.”
“What weakness?” Edward demanded, amazed and affronted.
George sighed. “I again recommend that you study Bismarck.”
Edward was baffled. “All right, I’ll study him, if you insist! Didn’t he take Marx’s socialism away from him and give it to Germany? Do you think I’m a Socialist like my father?”
“What is a Socialist?” murmured George, cynically. “A luster for power. A benefactor with a whip. The keeper of a prison where the captives are well fed.”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Enreich. I didn’t hear you.”
“It is of no importance. You would not understand, and I do not discuss matters which are not understood by others. It is a waste of time. They must get their enlightenment from other sources, such as the experience. It is always final—experience, and it is often too late. I shall have the contract ready for you tomorrow, Eddie. You will, naturally, sign it.”
He grunted as he shifted his weight from the stool to the floor. “I am to expect you at my home tomorrow, Saturday night, for the usual discussions? The contract will be there. And now good night to you, my Eddie. I suggest you sleep a little more. There are times when I am not pleased with your color.”
He began to walk weightily to the door, then wheeled like a behemoth. Edward was still standing at his counter, wrathful and fuming over the “proposition,”
and it was several moments before he realized that George had not left the shop. He started when he saw the older man, who was gazing at him formidably.
“No, I am not pleased with your color. It could not be because of one or two of the trollops of the town, hein?”
Edward stiffened at this intrusion into his private affairs, and his pride was outraged. He said, in formal German, “Herr Manager Enreich, I am a man and not a child caught in some small and obscene act. Nor am I your son who needs chastisement. The Herr Manager has eyes in the back of his head, it is evident, and I request that his eyes do not remain on me constantly.”
George perversely replied in English, “Your words are a man’s words, my Eddie, but your annoyance is a child’s annoyance.” He grinned broadly. “You should have said, ‘George, mind your own business,’ and laughed. My Eddie, let me give you advice about women. Let them alone. That is not to say you must be a monk, no. But involve yourself in them not, with your heart and your emotions. I have heard you are attached to that particular trollop, one Annabelle, who has a very sensitive face and is a waitress to hide what she is.”
Edward colored. “I know what Annie is. Well, sir, mind your own business. Quotes. Annie takes her—I mean, I give her half a ham or some delicacies once in a while, besides money.”
For some reason utterly bewildering to Edward, George burst out laughing with such an uproar that all his jowls and his big belly shook as if with an ague. He was still roaring with mirth when he left the shop. Now Edward, his face still warm and flushed, was angrier than ever. He finished cleaning up George’s cup and plate and emptying the coffee pot. Then the doorbell rang and a mildly chill and fragrant breath of the March night flowed in as the door opened. Edward said impatiently, “The shop is closed. I’m sorry.”
He looked up and saw a very shabby but neat man of about thirty-five approaching him, a slight and wiry man wearing a workman’s cap on a mass of curling sandy hair. Edward scowled. “I said—” he began. The man airily waved his hand with a gesture of peculiar flair and grace. “It is not the food I am after, young sir,” he said, with a brogue unfamiliar to Edward. “It is a job.”
Edward thought of the stout safe in his office and the gun he was permitted to keep in a drawer in his desk. He eyed the man closely, concluded that even if he were an armed robber he, Edward, had the advantage over him in size and youth.
“Funny time to come in asking for a job,” he said. “It’s after eleven. How about tomorrow?”
The stranger came easily to the counter and sat on George’s stool and regarded Edward with dancing hazel eyes, so bright, so vivid, so full of laughter and intelligence, that they gave a shine to an otherwise nondescript face, yellowish and sprinkled lavishly with brown freckles. It was a pointed, foxlike face, almost cunning, with a tilted nose and a mobile mouth, thick sandy eyelashes and brows, and a forehead so lined and dry that it was evident that he had spent the major part of his life under the sun. He took off his cap, smoothed his hands over his light curls, then laid the cap on the counter.
“What does it matter when a man looks for a job?” he asked reasonably. “I just dropped into town only half an hour ago.” He coughed. “Inadvertently, as it were. By no will of my own. However, it is an axiom that railroad men have no hearts.”
In spite of his wariness and annoyance, Edward found himself smiling. A tramp. He was also intrigued by the stranger’s manner and his evident air of culture and his language. Here was no ordinary man. Among other things it was apparent that he found life amusing, and Edward was invariably attracted to those who found life amusing. They satisfied a lack in himself.
He studied the man a little closer. The body, for all its slightness, showed strength and agility even under the shabby brown suit. The hands were long and the fingers flexible and the nails well kept. The stranger shrugged his coat down into place with the instinctive movement of a gentleman, and showed a real linen collar and a striped pink-and-white shirt with a knotted black tie. The clothing was all very cheap and worn. Nevertheless, he gave polish to it.
In his turn the stranger studied Edward with those lilting eyes of his and nodded to himself. “It is, indeed, an odd time to be looking for work,” he said, and Edward was pleased at the deep inflections of the brogue. “I might add, if you please, that just at this moment I am also looking for a place to spend the night. I saw the lights in this shop,” and he glanced about the shop approvingly, “and you at the counter, and so tested my luck, which has been abominable lately. If the accommodations, young sir, are worthy, I will consider a position with you.”
Edward laughed involuntarily. He was more and more fascinated by this peculiar stranger. He leaned his elbows on the counter. “It couldn’t be that you’d consider a couple of ham sandwiches with Swiss cheese and English mustard, with a piece of cheesecake on the side, and a big cup of coffee, too?”
The stranger made so comical a face of mock gravity that Edward laughed again. “Young sir, if you insist, I will join you in that slight repast. To tell you the truth I haven’t eaten for three days, with the exception of a can of beans.” He made a grimace. “Beans are, no question, redoubtable food, but I have a delicate digestion. That, too, was good luck, for the beans kept me from feeling hungry for the past two days.”
He scrutinized the deep shelves behind Edward and coughed again. “Ham, too, has its merits. But I see you have Madras curry, there, pâté de foi gras, English smoked chicken, and an excellent chutney. Not to mention some tins of savory. English biscuits, too, and some delightful jasmine tea.”
“I thought you were hungry,” said Edward.
“That I am,” said the stranger. “But a wise man respects his palate and never insults it. Even when he is hungry. Better starvation than plebeian food.”
“Oh, rats,” said Edward, with good humor. Nevertheless, he took down the tins the stranger had indicated, and found a can opener. “You would not have a sherry, a Bristol cream, perchance?” asked the engaging intruder.
“I perchance would not,” said Edward, setting out a plate. “We’re not a saloon.”
The stranger sighed. “A saloon,” he said, meditatively. “What a perversion of language! Salon—saloon! A whole culture and world of difference, yet these two words have merged in a frightful miscegenation. Ah, well. The world decays, elegance is abandoned, life is dusty. Après moi le déluge.”
“The only deluge I can see coming after you is just plain working for a living,” said Edward. “When did you last indulge in that awful thing?”
The stranger was delighted. “Now, then, I thought at first you were an unlettered churl,” he said. “My apologies, my boy. Sometimes, to my chagrin, I am not always perceptive.”
“Let’s stop the fancy language,” said Edward, setting out the contents of the cans with careful appreciation. “Who are you, what do you do for a living, and what do you want?”
The stranger waited until Edward put a kettle on the hot plate in the rear. “Enough water, please,” he said, “so that the teapot can be heated by it. No American knows how to brew tea properly. You have a teapot?” he asked apprehensively.
“Sure we have,” said Edward. “We keep it for the swell customers who pretend they like tea better than coffee.” He found the teapot under the counter and wiped it off. “We aren’t a restaurant, though. This is just one of those touches for customers we appreciate.”
“I have,” said the stranger, “exactly fifteen cents.”
“You’re still a customer,” said Edward. He forgot time. He was enjoying himself for the first time in years. “By the way, what’s your name? Mine’s Ed Enger.”
The stranger bowed profoundly from the waist. “I, young sir, am William Montgomery Percival Chauncey MacFadden, of the MacFaddens of London and Belfast, and regrettably, of County Cork. Perhaps not so regrettably after all. Those of my family in County Cork had a genius for living, sadly lacking in London and Belfast. There is something in the air of London and Belfast t
hat inhibits joy. I have been thinking of writing a small book on the subject. Very provocative.”
He pulled down his face in a risible expression, for he was an actor at heart. “However, just call me Bill,” he said, woefully. “Just plain Bill.”
“No,” said Edward. “You aren’t a Bill. You’re a William. Are you a writer?”
“Very perspicacious,” answered William, with an eloquent glance at his frayed cuffs and worn trousers. “The garb of those born with a pen in their hands. My last book sold exactly two hundred and twenty-one copies. The first two hundred and twenty were purchased by the loyal relatives. The extra one remains, to this day, a profound mystery.”
“What was the name of the book?”
“The book? Ah, yes, the book. It was a treatise on that old fraud Plutarch. A snob. I flayed him from pillar to post. Somehow no one particularly cared, least of all Plutarch.”
Feeling lighthearted for the first time in many months, Edward carefully brewed the tea under the anxious and strained scrutiny of his guest. He was often to say in the future, “William told so many stories that you could never know whether or not he was ever telling the truth. At any rate, he was entertaining. And a good story is a good story.”
Edward ceremoniously spread a fresh white napkin on the counter and elaborately polished the plain silver. William, his eyes clenched shut, daintily sampled the various delicacies on his plate. “Ah,” he said of the Madras curry, “truly authentic. I ate it last in Delhi. Odd to say, the chef was an Englishman. That in itself was a miracle. Have you ever partaken of English cooking?” He gave an elaborate shudder, drew up his shoulders, winced, and rapidly blinked his eyes, giving the impression of a man presented with a frightful dish. Even his freckles gave the impression of flinching.
“What were you doing in Delhi?” asked Edward, folding his arms on the counter.
“I was a younger son, Edward. And younger sons have a reputation to maintain, a reputation for debauchery and recklessness inflicted on them by lady novelists. Being gallant by nature, and never one to refute a lady, I was debauched, I was reckless. A bore, and very expensive. So I became a remittance man. What? Oh, a remittance man is a poor creature exiled by his loving kin with a certain regular income. The income is to insure the kin that the younger son will never again darken their thresholds. Unless, of course, his older brother, or brothers, are providentially murdered or die of overeating or are killed by their horses. Then he has the title and the entailed property and can return in style to the affectionate arms of all his old aunts, cousins, envious, still younger brothers, and uncles with the gout. Unfortunately for me, I have three older brothers and they are still in excellent health. God keep them,” he added piously. “And may all their children be colleens.”
The Sound of Thunder Page 18
