Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
Those Times and These

“Mister Ikey Felsburg,” said Mr. Herman slowly, “if you could mind your own business I should possibly be able to mind mine. Remember this, if you please – I look at who I please. You are too nosey and you talk too damn much with your mouth! I am older than what you are; and I tell you this – a talking jaw gathers no moss. Also, I would like to know, do my eyes belong to me or do they maybe belong to you, and you have just loaned ‘em to me for a temporary accommodation?”

“But, Hermy – ”

“Ike, shut up!”

And Mr. Ike, warned by the tone in his brother’s voice, shut up.

One afternoon, perhaps six months after this passage between the two partners, Mr. Herman crossed the street from the Oak Hall to the Commonwealth Bank to make a deposit.

Through his wicket window Herb Kivil, the cashier, spoke to him, lowering his voice: “Oh, Mr. Felsburg; you remember that Albritton matter you were speaking to me about week before last?”

Mr. Felsburg nodded.

“Well, the last interest payment is more than a month overdue now; and, on top of that, Albritton still owes the payment that was due three months before that. There’s not a chance in the world of his being able to pay up. He practically admitted as much when he was in here last, asking for more time. So I’ve followed your instructions in the matter.”

“That’s a good boy, Herby – a very good boy,” said Mr. Felsburg, seemingly much gratified. “You wrote him, then, like I told you?”

“Yes, sir; I wrote him. Yesterday I served notice on him by mail that we would have to go ahead and foreclose right away. So this morning he called me up by telephone from out in the country and asked us to hold off, please, until he could come in here and talk the thing over again.”

“Does he think maybe he can pay his just debts with talk?” inquired Mr. Felsburg.

“Well, if he does I’ll mighty soon undeceive him,” said Kivil. “And yet I can’t help but feel sorry for the poor devil – he’s had an awful run of luck, by all accounts. But here’s the thing I mainly wanted to speak to you about: You see, he still thinks the bank holds these mortgages. He doesn’t know you bought ‘em from the bank; and what I wanted to ask you was this: Do you want me to tell him the truth when he comes in, or would you rather I waited and let him find it out for himself when the foreclosure goes through and the sheriff takes possession?”

“Don’t do neither one,” ordered Mr. Felsburg. “You should call him up right away and tell him to come in to see about it to-morrow at ten o’clock. And then, Herby, when he does come in, you should tell him he should step over to the Oak Hall and see me in my office. That’s all what you should tell him. I got reasons of my own why I should prefer to break the news to him myself. Understand, Herby?”

“I understand, Mr. Felsburg,” said Mr. Kivil. “The minute he steps in here – before he’s had time to open up the subject – I’m to send him over to see you. Is that right?”

“That’s exactly right, Herby.” And, with pleased puckers at the corners of his eyes, Mr. Felsburg turned away and went stumping out.

Physically Mr. Felsburg didn’t in the least suggest a cat, and yet, after he was gone, Cashier Kivil found himself likening Mr. Felsburg to a cat with long claws – a cat that would play a long time with a captive mouse before killing it. He turned to his assistant, Emanuel Moon.

“What’s bred in the bone is bound to show sooner or later,” said Herb Kivil sagely. “I never thought of it before – but I guess there must be a mighty mean streak in Mr. Felsburg somewheres. I know this much: I’d hate mightily to owe him any money. Did you see that look on his face? He looked like a regular little old Shylock. I’ll bet you he takes his pound of flesh every pop – with an extra half pound or so thrown in for good measure.” Long before ten o’clock the following morning Mr. Felsburg sat waiting in his little cubicle of a private office on the mezzanine floor at the back of the Oak Hall. He kept taking out his watch and looking at it. About ten minutes past the hour one of the clerks climbed the stairs to tell him that Mr. Thomas Albritton, from out in the Massac Creek neighbourhood, was below, asking to see him.

“All right,” said Mr. Felsburg; “you should send him up here to me right away. Tell him I said, please, he should step this way.”

Presently, the clunk of heavy feet sounding on the steps, Mr. Felsburg reared himself back in his chair at his desk with an expectant, eager look on his face. In the doorway at the top of the stairs appeared the man for whom he waited – a middle-aged man with slumped shoulders, in worn, soiled garments, and in every line of his harassed face expressing the fact that here stood a failure, mutely craving the pardon of the world for being a failure. The yellow dust of country roads was thick, like powdered sulphur, in the wrinkles of his shoes and the creases of his shabby old coat. He had his hat in his hand.

“Good mornin’, Mr. Felsburg,” he said.

“Morning!”

Mr. Felsburg returned the greeting with a sharp and businesslike brevity. He did not invite the caller to seat himself. In the small room there was but one chair – the one that held Mr. Felsburg’s short form. So, during the early part of the scene that followed, Albritton continued to stand, while Mr. Felsburg enjoyed the advantage of being seated and at his ease where, without stirring, he might, from beneath his lowered brows, look the other up and down.

“I’ve just come from over at the Commonwealth Bank,” said Albritton, fumbling his hat. “I came in to see about getting an extension on my loans, and Mr. Kivil, over there, said I was to come on over here and talk to you first. He said you wanted to see me ‘bout something – if I understood him right.”

Mr. Felsburg nodded in affirmation of this, but made no other reply. Albritton, having halted for a moment, went on again:

“I suppose you want to talk to me about my affairs, you being a director of the bank?”

“And also, furthermore, vice president,” supplemented Mr. Felsburg.

“Yes, suh. Just so. And that’s what made me suppose – ”

Mr. Felsburg raised a fat, short hand upon which the biggest, whitest diamond in Red Gravel County glittered.

“You should not talk with me as an officer of that bank – if you will be so good, please,” he stated. “You should talk with me now as an individual.”

“An individual? I’m afraid I don’t understand you, suh.”

“Pretty soon you will, Mr. Albritton. This is an individual matter – just between you and me; because I, and not the bank, am the party what holds these here mortgages on your place.”

“You hold ‘em?”

“Sure! I bought both those mortgages off the bank quite some time ago. I own those mortgages – and not anybody else whatsoever.”

“But I thought – ”

“You don’t need to think. You need only that you should listen at what I am telling you now. It is me – Herman Felsburg, Esquire, of the Oak Hall Clothing Emporium – to which you owe this money, principal and likewise interest. So we will talk together, man to man, if you please, Mr. Albritton. Do I make myself plain? I do.”

The debtor dropped to his side the hand with which he had been rubbing a perplexed forehead. A little gleam, as of hope reawakening, came into his eyes.

“Well, suh,” he said, “you sort of take me by surprise – I didn’t have any idea that was the state of the case at all. Then, all along, the bank has just been representing you in the matter?”

“As my agent – yes,” said the little merchant. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not sorry to hear it,” said Albritton. “A bank has got its rules, I reckin, and has to live up to ‘em. But, dealing with you, suh, as an individual, is another thing altogether. Anyhow, I’m hoping so, Mr. Felsburg.”

“How you make that out?”

Mr. Felsburg’s tone was so sharply staccato that Albritton’s face fell a little.

“Well, suh, I’m hoping that maybe you can see your way clear not to foreclose on me just yet a while. I’d hate mightily to lose my home – I would so! I was born there, Mr. Felsburg. And I’ve got a sickly wife and a whole houseful of children. I don’t know where I’d turn to get another roof over their heads if I was driven off my place. I know I owe you the money and by law you’re entitled to it; but I certainly would appreciate the favour if you’d give me a little more time.”

“So? And was there any other little favour you’d like to ask from me, Mr. Albritton?” inquired Mr. Felsburg with impressive politeness.

Perhaps the other missed the note in the speaker’s voice; or perhaps he was merely desperate. A drowning man does not pick and choose the straws at which he grasps.

“Yes, suh; since you bring up the subject yourself, there is something else, Mr. Felsburg. If you can see your way clear to giving me a little time, and, on top of that, if you could loan me, say, four hundred dollars more to help carry me over until fall, I believe I can pay you back everything and start clean and clear again.”

“So-o-o!”

Mr. Felsburg turned himself in his chair, showing his back to his visitor, and, taking up a pen, bent over his desk and for a minute wrote briskly, as though to record notes of the proposition. Then he swung back again, facing Albritton.

“Let me see if I get you right, Mr. Albritton,” he said, speaking slowly and prolonging the suspense. “Already you owe me money; and now, instead of paying up what you owe, you should like to borrow yet some more money, eh? What security should you expect to give, Mr. Albritton?”

“Only my word and my promise, Mr. Felsburg,” pleaded Albritton. “You don’t know me very well; but if you’ll inquire round you’ll find out I’ve got the name for being an honest man, even if I have had a power of hard luck these last few years. I ain’t a drinking man, Mr. Felsburg, and I’m a hard worker. If there was somebody I knew better than I know you I’d go to him; but there ain’t anybody. I’m right at the end of my rope – I ain’t got anywhere to turn.

“I’m confident, if you’ll give me a little help, Mr. Felsburg, I can make out to get a new start. But if I’m put off my place now I’ll lose the crop I’ve put in – lose all my time and my labour too. It looks like tobacco is going to fetch a better price this fall than it’s fetched for three or four years back, and the young plants I’ve put in are coming up mighty promising. But I need money to carry me over until I can get my tobacco cured and marketed. Don’t you see how it is with me, Mr. Felsburg? Just a little temporary accommodation from you and I’m certain – ”

“Business is business, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr. Felsburg, cutting in on him. “And all my life I have been a business man. Is it good business, I should like to ask you, that I should loan you yet more money when already you owe me money which you cannot pay? Huh, Mr. Albritton?”

“Maybe it ain’t good business; but, just as one human being to another – ”

“Oh! So now you put it that way? Well, suit yourself. We talk, then, as two human beings, eh? We make this a personal matter, eh? Good! That also is how I should prefer it should be. Listen to me for one little minute, Mr. Albritton. I am going to speak with you about a small matter which happened quite a long while ago. Do you perhaps re-member something which happened in the spring of the year eighteen hundred and sixty – the year before the war broke out?”

“Why, yes,” said Albritton after a moment of puzzled thought. “That was the year my father died and left me the place; the same year that I got married too. I wasn’t but just twenty-two years old then. But I don’t get your drift, Mr. Felsburg. What’s the year eighteen-sixty got to do with you and me?”

“I’m coming to that pretty soon,” said Mr. Felsburg. He sat up straight now, his eyes ashine and his hands clenched on the arms of his chair. “Do you perhaps remember something else which also happened in that year, Mr. Albritton?”

“I can’t say as I do,” confessed the puzzled countryman.

“Then, if you’ll be so good as to listen, Mr. Albritton, I should be pleased to tell you. Maybe I have got a better memory than what your memory is. Also, maybe I have got something on me to remember it by. Now you listen to me!

“There was a hot day in the springtime of that year, when you sat on the porch of your house out there in the country, and a little young Jew-boy pedlar came up your lane from the road, with a pack on his back; and he opened the gate of your horse lot, in the front of your house, and he came through that gate.

“And you was sitting there on your porch, just like I am telling you; and you yelled to him that he should get out – that you did not want to buy nothing from him. Well, maybe he was new in this country and could not understand all what you meant. Or maybe it was that he was very tired and hot, and that he only wanted to ask you to let him sit down and take his heavy pack off his back, and drink some cool water out of your well, and maybe rest a little while there. And maybe, too, he had not sold anything at all that day and hoped that if he showed you what he had you would perhaps change your mind and buy something from him – just a little something, so that his whole day would not be wasted.

“So he came through that gate of your horse lot and he kept on coming. And then you cursed at him, and you told him again he should get out. But he kept coming. And then you called your dogs. And two dogs came – big, mean dogs – out from under your house.

“And when he saw the dogs come from under the house, that young Jew boy he turned round and he tried to run away and save himself. But the pack on his back was heavy, and he was already so very tired, like I am telling you, from walking in the sun all day. And so he could not run fast. And the dogs they soon caught him, and they bit him many times in the legs; and then he was more worse scared than before and the biting hurt him very much, and he cried out.

“But you stood there on your porch; and you clapped your two hands together and you laughed to hear that poor little pedlar boy cry out. And your dogs chased him away down the lane, and they bit him still more in his legs. Maybe perhaps you thought a poor Jew would not have feelings the same as you? Maybe perhaps you thought he would not bleed when those sharp teeth bit him in his legs? So you clapped your hands and you laughed to see him run and to hear him yell out that way. Do you remember all that, Mr. Albritton?”

He stood up now, shaking all over; and his eyes glittered to match the diamond on his quivering hand. They glittered like two little hard bright stones.

Under the tan the face of the man at whom he glared turned a dull brick-dust red. Albritton put up a hand to one burning cheek; and as he made answer the words came from him haltingly, self-accusingly:

“I don’t remember it, Mr. Felsburg; but if you say it’s true – why, I reckin it must ‘a’ happened just the way you tell it. It was a low-down, cruel, mean thing to do; and if it was me I’m sorry for it – even now, after all these years. I wasn’t much more than a boy, though; and – ”

“You were a grown man, Mr. Albritton; anyhow, you were older than the little pedlar boy that your dogs bit. You say you are sorry now; but you forgot about it, didn’t you?

“I didn’t forget about it, Mr. Albritton! All these years I have not forgotten it. All these years I have been waiting for this day to make you sorry. All these years I have been waiting for this day to get even with you. I was that little Jew boy, Mr. Albritton. In my legs I have now the red marks from your dogs’ teeth. And so now you come here and you stand here before me” – he raised his chubby clenched fists and shook them – “and you – you – you – ask me that I should do you favours!”

“Mr. Felsburg,” said Albritton – and his figure drooped as though he would prostrate himself before the triumphant little man – “I ain’t saying this because I hope to get any help from you in a money way – I know there’s no chance of that now – I’m saying it because I mean it from the bottom of my soul. I’m sorry. If I thought you’d believe me I’d be willing to go down on my knees and take my Bible oath that I’m sorry.”

“You should save yourself the trouble, Mr. Albritton,” said Mr. Felsburg, calmer now. “In the part of your Bible which I believe in it says ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,’ Mr. Albritton.”

“All right!” said Albritton. “You’ve had your say – you’re even with me.”

He turned from the gloating figure of the other and started to go. From the chair in which he had reseated himself, Felsburg, a pic-ture of vengeance gratified and sated, watched him, saying nothing until the bankrupt had descended the first step of the stairs and the second. Then he spoke.

“You wait!” he ordered in the tone of a master. “I am not yet done.”

“What’s the use?” said Albritton; but he faced about, humbled and crushed. “There ain’t anything you could say or do that would make me feel any worse.”

“Come back!” bade Felsburg; and, like a man whipped, the other came back to the doorway.

“You’re even with me, I tell you,” he said from the threshold. “What’s the use of piling it on?”

Mr. Felsburg did not answer in words. He reached behind him to his desk, wadded up something in his fingers, and, once more rising, he advanced, with his figure distended, on Albritton. Albritton flinched, then straightened himself.

“Hit me if you want to,” he said brokenly. “I won’t hit back if you do. I deserve it.”

“Yes, I will hit you,” said Felsburg. “With this I will hit you.”

Into Albritton’s right hand he thrust a crumpled slip of paper. At the wadded paper Albritton stared numbly.

“I don’t know what you are driving at,” he said; “but, if this is a notice of foreclosure, I don’t need any notice.”

“Look at it – close,” bade Felsburg.

And Albritton, obeying, looked; and his face turned from red to white and then to red again.

“Now you see what it is,” said Felsburg. “It is my check for four hundred dollars. I loan it to you – without security; and to-day I fix up those mortgages for you. Mr. Albritton, I am even with you. All the days from now on that you live in your house I am getting even with you – more and more every day what passes. And now, please, go away.”

He turned from the other, ignoring the fumbling hand that would have taken his own in its grasp; and, resting his elbows on his desk, he put his face in his cupped palms and spoke from between his fingers:

“I ask you again – please go away!”

When Judge Priest had finished telling me the story, in form much as I have retold it here, he sat back, drawing hard on his pipe, which had gone out. Bewildered, I pondered the climax of the tale.

“But if Mr. Felsburg really wanted to get even,” I said at length, “what made him give that man the money?”

The Judge scratched a match on a linen-clad flank and applied the flame to the pipe-bowl; and then, between puffs, made answer slowly.

“Son,” he said, “you jest think it over in your spare time. I reckin mebbe when you’re a little older the answer’ll come to you.”

And sure enough, when I was a little older it did.

CHAPTER IV. THE GARB OF MEN

THEY used to say – and how long ago it seems since they used to say it! – that the world would never see another world war. They said that the planet, being more or less highly civilised with regard to its principal geographical divisions, and in the main peaceably inclined, would never again send forth armed millions to slit the throats of yet other armed millions. That was what they said back yonder in 1912 and 1913, and in the early part of 1914 even.

But something happened – something unforeseen and unexpected and unplausible happened. And, at that, the structure of amity between the nations which so carefully had been built up on treaty and pledge, so shrewdly tongued-and-grooved by the promises of Christian statesmen, so beautifully puttied up by the prayers of Christian men, so excellently dovetailed and mortised and rabbeted together, all at once broke down, span by span; just as it is claimed that a fiddler who stations himself in the middle of a bridge and plays upon his fiddle a certain note may, if only he keeps up his playing long enough, play down that bridge, however strong and well-piered it is.

We still regard the fiddle theory as a fable concocted upon a hypothesis of physics; but when that other thing happened – a thing utterly inconceivable – we so quickly adjusted ourselves to it that at once yesterday’s impossibility became to-day’s actuality and to-mor-row’s certain prospect.

This war having begun, they said it could not at the very most last more than a few months; that the countries immediately concerned could not, any of them, for very long withstand the drains upon them in men and money and munitions and misery; that the people at home would rise in revolt against the stupid malignity of it, if the men at the front did not.

Only a few war-seasoned elderly men, including one in a War Office at London and one in a General Staff at Berlin and one in a Cabinet Chamber at Paris, warned their respective people to prepare themselves for a struggle bloodier, and more violent and costlier, and possibly more prolonged, than any war within the memories of living men.

At first we couldn’t believe that either; none of us could believe it. But those old men were right and the rest of us were wrong. The words of the war wiseacres came true.

Presently we beheld enacted the intolerable situation they had predicted; and in our own country at least the tallies of dead, as enumerated in the foreign dispatches, began to mean to us only headlines on the second page of the morning paper.

Then they said that when, by slaughter and maiming and incredible exertion, the manhood of Europe had been decimated to a given point the actual physical exhaustion of the combatants would force all the armies to a standstill. But the thing went on.

It went on through its first year and through its second year. We saw it going on into its third year, with no sign of abatement, no evidence of a weakening anywhere among the states and the peoples immediately affected. We saw our own country drawn into it. And so, figuring what might lie in front of us and them by what laid behind, we might, without violence to credibility, figure it as going on until all of Britain’s able-bodied adult male population wore khaki or had been buried in it; until sundry millions of the men of France were corpses or on crutches; until Germania had scraped and harrowed and combed her domains for cannon fodder; until Russia’s countless supply of prime human grist for the red hopper of this red mill no longer was countless but countable.

There is a town in the northern part of the Republic of France called Courney. Rather, I should say that once upon a time there was such a town. Considered as a town, bearing the outward manifestations of a town and nourishing within it the communal spirit of a town, it ceased to exist quite a time back. Nevertheless, it is with that town, or with the recent site of it, that this story purports to deal.

There is no particular need of our trying to recreate the picture of it as it was before the war began. Before the war it was one of a vast number of suchlike drowsy, cosy little towns lying, each one of them, in the midst of tilled fat acres on the breasts of a pleasant land; a town with the grey highroad running through it to form its main street, and with farms and orchards and vineyards and garden patches round about it; so that in the springtime, when the orchard trees bloomed and the grapevines put forth their young leaves and the wind blew, it became a little island, set in the centre of a little, billowy green-and-white sea; a town of snug small houses of red brick and grey brick, with a priest and a mayor, a schoolhouse and a beet-sugar factory, a town well for the gossips and a town shrine for the devout.

Nor is there any especial necessity for us to try to describe it as it was after the war had rolled forward and back and forward again over it; for then it was transformed as most of those small towns that lay in the tracks of the hostile armies were transformed. It became a ruin, a most utter and complete and squalid ruin, filled with sights that were affronts to the eye and smells that were abominations to the nose.

In this place there abode, at the time of which I aim to write, a few living creatures. They were human beings, but they had ceased to exist after the ordinary fashion of human beings in this twentieth century of ours. So often, in the first months and the first years of the war, had their simple but ample standards been forcibly upset that by now almost they had forgotten such standards had ever been.

To them yesterday was a dimming memory, and to-morrow a dismal prospect without hope in it of anything better. To-day was all and everything to them; each day was destiny itself. Just to get through it with breath of life in one’s body and rags over one’s hide and a shelter above one’s head – that was the first and the last of their aim. They lived not because life was worth while any more, but because to keep on living is an instinct, and because most human beings are so blessed – or, maybe, so cursed – with a certain adaptability of temperament, a certain inherent knack of adjustability that they may endure anything – even the unendurable – if only they have ceased to think about the past and to fret about the future.

And these people in this town had ceased to think. They were out of habit with thinking. A long time before, their sensibilities had been rocked to sleep by the everlasting lullaby of the cannon; their imaginations were wrapped in a smoky coma. They lived on without conscious effort, without conscious ambition, almost without conscious desire: just as blind worms live under a bank, or slugs in a marsh, or protoplasms in a pond.

Once, twice, three times Courney had been a stepping-stone in the swept and garnished pathways of battle. Back in September of 1914 the Germans, sweeping southward as an irresistible force, took possession of this town, after shelling it quite flat with their big guns to drive out the defending garrison of French and British. Then, a little later, in front of Paris the irresistible force met the immovable body and answered the old, old question of the scientists; and, as the Germans fell back to dig themselves in along the Somme and the Aisne, there was again desperate hard fighting here, and many, very many, lives were spent in the effort of one side to take and retain, and of the other to gain and hold fast, the little peaky heaps of wreckage protruding above the stumps of the wasted orchard trees.

Now, though, for a long time things had been quiet in Courney. Though placed in debatable territory, as the campaign experts regard debatable territory, it had lapsed into an eddy and a backwater of war, becoming, so to speak, a void and a vacuum amid the twisting currents of the war. In the core of a tornado there may be calm while about it the vortex swirls and twists. If this frequently is true of windstorms it occasionally is true of wars.

Often to the right of them and to the left of them, sometimes far in front of them, and once in a while far back in the rear of them, those who still abode at Courney heard the distant voices of the big guns; but their place of habitation, by reasons of shifts in the war game, was no longer on a route of communication between separate groups of the same fighting force. It was not even on a line of travel. No news of the world beyond their limited horizon seeped in to them. They did not know how went the war – who won or who lost – and almost they had quit desiring to know. What does one colony of blind worms in a bank care how fares it with colonies of blind worms in other banks?

You think this state of apathy could not come to pass? Well, I know that it can, because with my own eyes I saw it coming to pass in the times while yet the war was new; while it yet was a shock and an affront to our beliefs; and you must remember that now I write of a much later time, when the world war had become the world’s custom.

Also, could you have looked in upon the surviving remnant of the inhabitants of Courney, you would have had a clearer and fuller corroboration of the fact I state, because then you would have seen that here in this place lived only those who were too old or too feeble to care, or else were too young to understand.

All tallied, there were not more then than twenty remaining of two or three hundred who once had been counted as the people of this inconsequential village; and of these but two were individuals in what ordinarily would be called the prime of life.

One of these two was a French petty officer, whose eyes had been shot out, and who, having been left behind in the first retreat toward Paris, had been forgotten, and had stayed behind ever since. The other had likewise been a soldier. He was a Breton peasant. His disability seemed slight enough when he sustained it. A bullet bored across the small of his back, missing the spine. But the bullet bore with it minute fragments of his uniform coat; and so laden with filth had his outer garments become, after weeks and months of service in the field, that, with the fragments of cloth, germs of tetanus had been carried into his flesh also, and lockjaw had followed.

Being as strong as a bullock, he had weathered the hideous agonies of his disease; but it left him beset with an affliction like a queer sort of palsy, which affected his limbs, his tongue, and the nerves and muscles of his face.

Continually he twitched all over. He moved by a series of spasmodic jerks, and when he sought to speak the sounds he uttered came out from his contorted throat in slobbery, unintelligible gasps and grunts. He was sane enough, but he had the look about him of being an idiot.

Besides these two there were three or four very aged, very infirm men on the edge of their dotage; likewise some women, including one masterful, high-tempered old woman and a younger woman who wept continuously, with a monotonous mewing sound, for a husband who was dead in battle and for a fourteen-year-old son who had vanished altogether out of her life, and who, for all she knew, was dead too. The rest were children – young children, and a baby or so. There were no sizable youths whatsoever, and no girls verging on maidenhood, remaining in this place.