第17章 THE RETURN(2)

But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been transacted in the bar.Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had changed hands.If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed.I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind.Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.

Only the old lady was at home, Mrs.Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger.The ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word.She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer.One touch was so resplendently Hebraic that Icannot pass it over.When her "old man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound herself by an oath - on her knees, I think she said - not to employ it otherwise.

This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more.

Mrs.Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters; of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it - a fear I have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her "the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the States.And the first thing I did," added Mrs.Guele, "was to fall downstairs."At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap, when - judgment of Heaven! - here came Mr.Guele from his vineyard.So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling.The heart fails me.There was yet another stoppage! And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before.We were a pallid couple;but still the Jews were smiling.

So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn.That all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's till;- these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the accumulation of evidence.At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed.Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face therewith an empty pocket."You see, I don't mind if it was only five dollars, Mr.Stevens," he said, "but I must give Mr.Kelmar SOMETHING."Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant.The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that.The village usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords.If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers.Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his brother's mote.