'Cigars!' he called harshly to the waiter, to hide his emotion.
'A pack of Turkish cigarettes for mine,' said Merritt.
'They're on you,' chanted Greenbrier, struggling to conceal his contempt.
At seven they dined in the Where-to-Dine-Well column.
That evening a galaxy had assembled there. Bright shone the lights o'er fair women and br--let it go, anyhow--brave men. The orchestra played charmingly. Hardly had a tip from a diner been placed in its hands by a waiter when it would burst forth into soniferousness. The more beer you contributed to it the more Meyerbeer it gave you. Which is reciprocity.
Merritt put forth exertions on the dinner. Greenbrier was his old friend, and he liked him. He persuaded him to drink a cocktail.
'I take the horehound tea,' said Greenbrier, 'for old times' sake. But I'd prefer whiskey straight. They're on you.'
'Right!' said Merritt. 'Now, run your eye down that bill of fare and see if it seems to hitch on any of these items.'
'Lay me on my lava bed!' said Greenbrier, with bulging eyes. 'All these specimens of nutriment in the grub wagon! What's this? Horse with the heaves? I pass. But look along! Here's truck for twenty roundups all spelled out in different directions. Wait till I see.'
The viands ordered, Merritt turned to the wine list.
'This Medoc isn't bad,' he suggested.
'You're the doc,' said Greenbrier. 'I'd rather have whiskey straight. It's on you.'
Greenbrier looked around the room. The waiter brought things and took dishes away. He was observing. He saw a New York restaurant crowd enjoying itself.
'How was the range when you left the Gila?' asked Merritt.
'Fine,' said Greenbrier. 'You see that lady in the red speckled silk at that table. Well, she could warm over her beans at my campfire. Yes, the range was good. She looks as nice as a white mustang I see once on Black River.'
When the coffee came, Greenbrier put one foot on the seat of the chair next to him.
'You said it was a comfortable town, Longy,' he said, meditatively. 'Yes, it's a comfortable town. It's different from the plains in a blue norther. What did you call that mess in the crock with the handle, Longy? Oh, yes, squabs in a cash roll. They're worth the roll. That white mustang had just such a way of turning his head and shaking his mane--look at her, Longy. If I thought I could sell out my ranch at a fair price, I believe I'd--
'Gyar--song!' he suddenly cried, in a voice that paralyzed every knife and fork in the restaurant.
The waiter dived toward the table.
'Two more of them cocktail drinks,' ordered Greenbrier.
Merritt looked at him and smiled significantly.
'They're on me,' said Greenbrier, blowing a puff of smoke to the ceiling.
The poet Longfellow--or was it Confucius, the inventor of wisdom?--remarked:
'Life is real, life is earnest;
And things are not what they seem.'
As mathematics are--or is: thanks, old subscriber!--the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four. Figures-- unassailable sums in addition--shall be set over against whatever oposing element there may be.
A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would say: 'Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that X plus-- that is, that life is real--then things (all of which life includes) are real. Anything that is real is what it seems. Then if we consider the proposition that 'things are not what they seem,' why--'
But this is heresy, and not poesy. We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued, satisfying, mysterious X.
Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus Kinsolving, an old New Yorker, invented an idea. He originated the discovery that bread is made from flour and not from wheat futures. Perceiving that the flour crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having no perceptible effect on the growing wheat, Mr. Kinsolving cornered the flour market.
The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she never had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accomodated) bought a five-cent load of bread you laid down an additional two cents, which went to Mr. Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.
A second result was that Mr. Kinsolving quit the game with $2,000,000 prof--er--rake-off.
Mr. Kinsolving's son Dan was at college when the mathematical experiment in breadstuffs was made. Dan came home during vacation, and found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading 'Little Dorrit' on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square. He had retired from business with enough extra two-cent pieces from bread buyers to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around the earth and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay.
Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich Village to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz. Dan had always admired Kenwitz. Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense, serious, mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of oligarchies. Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning watch-making in his father's jewelry store. Dan was smiling, jovial, easy-tempered and tolerant alike of kings and ragpickers. The two foregathered joyously, being opposites. And then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings-- and to his private library in the rear of the jewelry shop.
