“I beg pardon?”
“What did you think of my idea for getting a hundred percent church attendance by keeping them afraid they’d miss something good by staying away?”
Mr. Talliaferro turned his stricken face to the others, one by one. After a while his interrogator said in a tone of cold displeasure, “You don’t mean to say you do not recall me?”
Mr. Talliaferro cringed. “Really, sir — I am distressed—” The other interrupted heavily.
“You were not at lunch today?”
“No,” Mr. Talliaferro replied with effusive gratitude. “I take only a glass of buttermilk at noon. I breakfast late, you see.” The other man stared at him with chill displeasure, and Mr. Talliaferro added with inspiration, “You have mistaken me for someone else, I fear.”
The stranger regarded Mr. Talliaferro for a cold moment. The waiter placed a dish before Mr. Talliaferro and he fell upon it in a flurry of acute discomfort.
“Do you mean—” began the stranger. Then he put his fork down and turned his disapproval coldly upon Fairchild. “Didn’t I understand you to say that this — gentleman was a member of Rotary?”
Mr. Talliaferro suspendedhis fork and he too looked at Fairchild in shocked unbelief. “I a member of Rotary?” he repeated.
“Why, I kind of got the impression he was,” Fairchild admitted. “Hadn’t you heard that Talliaferro was a Rotarian?” he appealed to the others. They were noncommittal and he continued: “I seem to recall somebody telling me you were a Rotarian. But then, you know how rumors get around. Maybe it is because of your prominence in the business life of our city. Talliaferro is a member of one of our largest ladies’ clothing houses,” he explained. “He is just the man to help you figure out some way to get God into the mercantile business. Teach Him the meaning of service, hey, Talliaferro?”
“No: really, I—” Mr. Talliaferro objected with alarm. The stranger interrupted again.
“Well, there’s nothing better on God’s green earth than Rotary. Mr. Fairchild had given me to understand that you were a member,” he accused with a recurrence of cold suspicion. Mr. Talliaferro squirmed with unhappy negation. The other stared him down, then he took out his watch: “Well, well. I must run along. I run my day to schedule. You’d be astonished to learn how much time can be saved by cutting off a minute here and a minute there,” he informed them. “And—”
“What do you do with them?” Fairchild asked.
“I beg pardon?”
“When you’ve cut off enough minutes here and there to make up a sizable mess, what do you do with them?”
“—Setting a time limit to everything you do makes a man get more punch into it; makes him take the hills on high, you might say.” A drop of nicotine on the end of the tongue will kill a dog, Fairchild thought, chuckling to himself. He said aloud:
“Our forefathers reduced the process of gaining money to proverbs. But we have beaten them; we have reduced the whole of existence to fetishes.”
“To words of one syllable that look well in large red type,” the Semitic man corrected.
The stranger ignored them. He half turned in his chair. He gestured at the waiter’s back, then he snapped his fingers until he had attracted the waiter’s attention. “Trouble with these small second-rate places,” he told them. “No pep, no efficiency, in handling trade. Check, please;” he directed briskly. The cherubic waiter bent over them.
“You found the dinner nice?” he suggested.
“Sure, sure, all right. Bring the bill, will you, George?” The waiter looked at the others, hesitating.
“Never mind, Mr. Broussard,” Fairchild said quickly. “We won’t go right now. Mr. Hooper here has got to catch a train. You are my guest,” he explained to the stranger. The other protested conventionally: he offered to match coins for it, but Fairchild repeated: “You are my guest tonight. Too bad you must hurry away.”
“I haven’t got the leisure you New Orleans fellows have,” the other explained. “Got to keep on the jump, myself.” He arose and shook hands all around. “Glad to’ve met you boys,” he said to each in turn. He clasped Mr. Talliaferro’s elbow with his left hand while their rights were engaged. The waiter fetched his hat and he gave the man a half dollar with a flourish. “If you’re ever in the little city”—he paused to reassure Fairchild.
“Sure, sure,” Fairchild agreed heartily, and they sat down again. The late guest paused at the street door a moment, then he darted forth shouting, “Taxi! Taxi!” The cab took him to the Monteleone hotel, three blocks away, where he purchased two tomorrow’s papers and sat in the lobby for an hour, dozing over them. Then he went to his room and lay in bed staring at them until he had harried his mind into unconsciousness by the sheer idiocy of print.
6
“Now,” said Fairchild, “let that be a lesson to you young men. That’s what you’ll come to by joining things, by getting the habit of it. As soon as a man begins to join clubs and lodges, his spiritual fiber begins to disintegrate. When you are young, you join things because they profess high ideals. You believe in ideals at that age, you know. Which is all right, as long as you just believe in them as ideals and not as criterions of conduct. But after a while you join more things, you are getting older and more sedate and sensible; and believing in ideals is too much trouble so you begin to live up to them with your outward life, in your contacts with other people. And when you’ve made a form of behavior out of an ideal, it’s not an ideal any longer, and you become a public nuisance.”
“It’s a man’s own fault if the fetish men annoy him,” the Semitic man said. “Nowadays there are enough things for everyone to belong to something.”
“That’s a rather stiff price to pay for immunity, though,” Fairchild objected.
“That need not bother you,” the other told him. “You have already paid it.”
Mr. Talliaferro laid aside his fork. “I do hope he’s not offended,” he murmured. Fairchild chuckled.
“At what?” the Semitic man asked. He and Fairchild regarded Mr. Talliaferro kindly.
“At Fairchild’s little joke,” Mr. Talliaferro explained.
Fairchild laughed. “I’m afraid we disappointed him. He probably not only does not believe that we are bohemians, but doubts that we are even artistic. Probably the least he expected was to be taken to dinner at the studio of two people who are not married to each other, and to be offered hashish instead of food.”
“And to be seduced by a girl in an orange smock and no stockings,” the ghostly young man added in a sepulchral tone.
“Yes,” Fairchild said. “But he wouldn’t have succumbed, though.”
“No,” the Semitic man agreed. “But, like any Christian, he would have liked the opportunity to refuse.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Fairchild admitted. He said, “I guess he thinks that if you don’t stay up all night and get drunk and ravish somebody, there’s no use in being an artist.”
“Which is worse?” murmured the Semitic man.
“God knows,” Fairchild answered. “I’ve never been ravished.” He sucked at his coffee. “But he’s not the first man that ever hoped to be ravished and was disappointed. I’ve spent it lot of time in different places laying myself open, and always come off undefiled. Hey, Talliaferro?”
Mr. Talliaferro squirmed again, diffidently. Fairchild lit a cigarette. “Well, both of them are vices, and we’ve all seen tonight what an uncontrolled vice will lead a man into — defining a vice as any natural impulse which rides you, like the gregarious instinct in Hooper.” He ceased a while. Then he chuckled again. “God must look about our American scene with a good deal of consternation, watching the antics of these volunteers who are trying to help Him.”