CHAPTER VIII THE DISCOVERER OF THE OYSTER

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Max Fargus, on leaving Sheila to be shadowed by the lawyer, departed in such a fever of amorous suspense that it became absolutely essential to his intense nature to inflict some cruelty on his fellow beings. The nearer he approached to the realization of his infatuation the more imperative became these sudden revulsions to savagery. With this temperamental debauch in mind, he hastened to Broadway, purposing to surprise his principal establishment and find food for his spleen.

By a back entrance he glided into the kitchens, where he passed like a storm among the scullions, who feared him like the Evil One. But this time, to pour out the floods of his wrath on oyster openers and dish washers no longer satisfied him. The crisis in his affections was too vital for him to find relief in petty browbeating. Realizing that only a master stroke could satisfy him to-day, he climbed the stairs and passed moodily through the restaurant, where the waiters watched him from the corners of their eyes. Then passing into his office he shut himself up and waited angrily for an inspiration.

All at once he struck the bell and shouted joyfully:

"Send Bastien here!"

At the end of a brief moment a portly, florid Frenchman slipped through the door and glided to attention, waiting blandly the moment it pleased his employer to speak. Fargus, enjoying the surprise his announcement would bring, feasted his eyes interminably on the victim a flash of genius had suggested to him. The head waiter, who by a miracle had for three years avoided the suspicions of his master, without troubling himself at this savage inspection, shifted his balance, coughed faintly, and fell to studying the clouded tops of his employer's shoes.

"Bastien," Fargus began softly, "do you know why I want you?"

"No, sir, I don't, sir."

"Can't guess?"

"Why, no, sir," Bastien said, beginning to show some perplexity.

"I sent for you," Fargus said, hanging on each word, "to tell you, Bastien, that I don't need your services any more."

"Me?" exclaimed the head waiter, who could not have been more astonished had a bomb exploded under his legs.

"You, Bastien."

"Beg pardon, sir, you said—"

"Discharged!"

"Me—me?"

"You, Bastien."

"What for, sir?" he cried all in a gulp. "Haven't I served you three years without your finding a word of fault?"

"Exactly!" said Fargus, whose black eyes under the frowning eyebrows, like threatening muzzles, had been holding in their pent-up rage. "Exactly. For all that time I have never found fault—found—Bastien. There's the trouble. There's where you started my suspicions. You're clever, my man, but there you overreached yourself."

Before the impossibility of such a charge, Bastien for the first time in his life lost his self-possession and remained, desperately fastening his hope on the chances of a joke. Fargus, shaking with malicious, dumb laughter ran on:

"Too sharp, my man, too clever: You forget I know the business from A to Z. If you'd stolen a little I should have said nothing. Don't tell me you don't steal. You steal—all steal—and if I haven't caught you it's because you stole too well, or, OR," he cried, raising his finger theatrically, to confound him with the shrewdness of his guess, "OR, because you thought you'd wait until you were put where you could touch the keys of the safe! Aha, have I hit it—you scoundrel!"

"Before God, Mr. Fargus—" the frightened waiter started to protest, but Fargus, with a contemptuous laugh, waved him off, crying:

"Discharged, discharged!"

"What, you turn me out," Bastien said sullenly, "because you haven't found fault with me?"

"Yes! It is impossible, I say, to be so virtuous without some evil purpose."

"But not for good, sir—I can come back?"

"No!" Fargus shouted with a crash of his fist. "No you don't! You gave yourself away that time! If you were innocent you wouldn't take it so meekly. I only suspected before, now I KNOW!"

Bastien, helpless before such madness, remained a moment staring stupidly at him. Then suddenly, convinced of the hopelessness of appeasing such an obsession, he forgot the waiter, and as a man, outraged and indignant, raised his fists and cursed him. At the uproar the clerks and the waiters ran in, while Fargus, rubbing his hands with delight, shouted above the din of oaths:

"So, at last you rage! Now you show your true character! And for three years you have tried to put me to sleep with your meek face! You villain, I'll tell you what I'll do—I'll have your accounts investigated, before you get a cent!"

Bastien, purple in the face, screamed that he would have a lawyer.

"You will, will you!" Fargus cried, bounding up. "And I'll have a judge on you! Oscar, Peter, put him out! Throw him out! Joseph, call a policeman!"

The waiters, who had suffered the usual indignities from the fallen chief, without waiting a second urging seized the struggling Bastien and propelled him from the office.

Fargus, with lips still trembling from his excitation, listened with clenched fists to the dwindling tumult that announced the progress of the eviction. Then gradually his breathing grew quieter, the anger passed from his eyes, he reseated himself, held his head a moment in his hands, then, stretching back, threw out his arms and smiled a smile of vast contentment. Peace had returned to his soul.

His history, from the age of nineteen, had been the record of a ledger, of the hour of rising, eating, working, and returning to sleep. He spent not one cent more one day than another. He woke invariably at half past four he was in bed by one o'clock. He spent five cents on carfare each morning, and saved five by walking home each night. He lunched and dined at his restaurants. His one extravagance was to breakfast at a coffee stall, kept by a woman who thirty years before had jilted him for a longshoreman, where for six cents he might remind her each day of the fortune she had flung aside.

So much for the history of the man. Before nineteen his youth had been one of storm. Three great disillusionments had marked the period, the greatest which can befall a man, in the loyalty of a friend, in the virtue of his mother, and in the love of a woman. The friend was a newsboy, the mother a pedler, and the woman a waitress in a restaurant on the wharves. Society, which regards honor, virtue, and faith, and the capability of sorrow, peculiar to itself, can see nothing but the ridiculous in such tragedies. To the frail boy, however, with his misanthropic bent, these three trials changed the complexion of the sky and brought a rage against humanity, and with it an abiding, vindictive purpose to treat it always as an enemy.

His worldly progress had been the journey of the mole. Burrowing through his youth, obscure and undivined, he had broken ground one day and emerged, to the surprise of his associates, rich and successful. Starting as a chore boy, rising to a waiter in a small oyster house near the docks, he had progressed to the proprietorship of one lunch counter, to the ownership of a restaurant, of an oyster house, of three; until the city knew him at last as the owner of half a dozen resorts, Fargus's West Side Oyster Rooms, Fargus's Bowery Oyster Parlors, Fargus's Broadway Oyster & Chop House, etc. He had but one vanity, a weakness pardonable in self-made men, he had come to regard himself as the discoverer of the oyster.

On the night of the interview with Bofinger, to the upsetting of all routine he left his office an hour earlier. The hat boy, hastily summoned, arrived trembling, but to the amazement of every one Fargus departed without a word of reproof.

The violence which had eased his craving for cruelty had departed and left him timid and infatuated, with the elusive figure of Sheila running before him and mocking his desires. Instead of following his invariable course down Broadway, he turned into the quieter side streets seeking an opportunity for reflection.

He did not walk like the generality of men, who propel themselves from the back foot, but like the animals who draw themselves forward by their claws. This peculiarity, which was not so noticeable when he was in a hurry, sprang into notice the moment his gait relaxed, when he appeared, as to-night, to be prowling over the ground, alert as a panther to bound forward a dozen feet.

So immersed was he in the perplexities of his passion that he failed to notice the sudden swooping down of three soldiers of the night, until a hand fell on his shoulder and an angry voice commanded:

"Stop short, damn ye!"

Fargus, thus threatened, answered without disconcertion:

"Well, my friend, what can I do for you?"

At this moment, the third of the party, coming up, broke in with a shout:

"Bill—you fool, what'cher stopping him for? It's the old screw!"

"It is, eh?" the other cried with an oath. "And what if it is?"

"Go through him, then, if you're so green!" continued the first, "and if you pull more than a nickel I'll double what you get."

"Quite right," Fargus said cheerfully. "I've been here forty-nine years and no one's ever found any more on me than the next day's car fare." He drew from his pocket five pennies which he displayed for confirmation. "And what's more, you can't find another cent in my room!"

"Ah, come on. Don't waste time over that guy," said the third. "We've turned him inside out a dozen times."

"The hell you have!" the other cried in disgust, and struck up his hand, causing the pennies to scatter into the street.

The three footpads lurched into the darkness. Fargus, fondling his chin, stood a moment chuckling at their discomfiture before striking a match and betaking himself to the task of recovering his pennies. The fifth having been secured on his hands and knees he started rapidly home, penetrated a squalid, heated street, filled with children slumbering on the steps, and halting at a flight of tenements stumbled up a dark stairway and found his door.

Lighting the butt of a candle, which he had drawn from his pocket, he entered a room with one window, murky and pinched, which he called his home, and whose horror can only be appreciated when it is realized that three families had shared the room before him.

In the further corner stood a cot, without covering, and a pine washstand. By the window was a small leather trunk. In the whole room there was not another object. Placing the flickering stump on the washstand, Fargus secured the door. Then going to the trunk he unlocked it, drew out the bedding and made the bed. Once undressed he went in his nightgown to the window and, resting his chin in his palm, gazed up a moment at the black rim of the opposite tenement.

Forty-nine years before, in the little room under the heated roof opposite, he had opened his eyes to the struggle of life. From there, as a child, he had a thousand times gazed down on the room he now occupied as a region of unattainable felicity. To possess such a paradise, all to himself, seemed then the zenith of earthly ambition. It was his earliest conception of the possibilities of wealth, it had never changed. He had remained in his present home twenty-one years, without a larger desire.

To-night he stayed but a short time at the window, the contemplation of his progress did not bring him its accustomed satisfaction. He was conscious of a great unrest, of having suddenly laid his way along unfamiliar and perilous paths, where everything was problematical and uncertain.

"If the lawyer finds everything all right," he said to himself, turning away, "I'll marry her. But if he don't—"

He blew out the candle with the breath of his irritation and flung down on the bed, saying to himself querulously:

"Am I going to sleep to-night, I wonder? Well, supposing he don't—what then?"


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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