第16章

"This Carnegie, I bet you, would be worth," said Jeff, closing up his eyes in calculation, "as much as perhaps two million dollars, if you was to sell him up.And this Rockefeller and this Morgan, either of them, to sell them up clean, would be worth another couple of million--"I may say in parentheses that it was a favourite method in Mariposa if you wanted to get at the real worth of a man, to imagine him clean sold up, put up for auction, as it were.It was the only way to test him.

"And now look at 'em," Jeff went on."They make their money and what do they do with it? They give it away.And who do they give it to?

Why, to those as don't want it, every time.They give it to these professors and to this research and that, and do the poor get any of it? Not a cent and never will.""I tell you, boys," continued Jeff (there were no boys present, but in Mariposa all really important speeches are addressed to an imaginary audience of boys)--"I tell you, if I was to make a million out of this Cubey, I'd give it straight to the poor, yes, sir--divide it up into a hundred lots of a thousand dollars each and give it to the people that hadn't nothing."So always after that I knew just what those bananas were being grown for.

Indeed, after that, though Jefferson never spoke of his intentions directly, he said a number of things that seemed to bear on them.He asked me, for instance, one day, how many blind people it would take to fill one of these blind homes and how a feller could get ahold of them.And at another time he asked whether if a feller advertised for some of these incurables a feller could get enough of them to make a showing.I know for a fact that he got Nivens, the lawyer, to draw up a document that was to give an acre of banana land in Cuba to every idiot in Missinaba county.

But still,--what's the use of talking of what Jeff meant to do?

Nobody knows or cares about it now.

The end of it was bound to come.Even in Mariposa some of the people must have thought so.Else how was it that Henry Mullins made such a fuss about selling a draft for forty thousand on New York? And why was it that Mr.Smith wouldn't pay Billy, the desk clerk, his back wages when he wanted to put it into Cuba?

Oh yes; some of them must have seen it.And yet when it came it seemed so quiet,--ever so quiet,--not a bit like the Northern Star mine and the oyster supper and the Mariposa band.It is strange how quiet these things look, the other way round.

You remember the Cuban Land frauds in New York and Porforio Gomez shooting the detective, and him and Maximo Morez getting clear away with two hundred thousand? No, of course you don't; why, even in the city papers it only filled an inch or two of type, and anyway the names were hard to remember.That was Jeff's money--part of it.

Mullins got the telegram, from a broker or someone, and he showed it to Jeff just as he was going up the street with an estate agent to look at a big empty lot on the hill behind the town--the very place for these incurables.

And Jeff went back to the shop so quiet--have you ever seen an animal that is stricken through, how quiet it seems to move?

Well, that's how he walked.

And since that, though it's quite a little while ago, the shop's open till eleven every night now, and Jeff is shaving away to pay back that five hundred that Johnson, the livery man, sent to the Cubans, and--Pathetic? tut! tut! You don't know Mariposa.Jeff has to work pretty late, but that's nothing--nothing at all, if you've worked hard all your lifetime.And Myra is back at the Telephone Exchange--they were glad enough to get her, and she says now that if there's one thing she hates, it's the stage, and she can't see how the actresses put up with it.

Anyway, things are not so bad.You see it was just at this time that Mr.Smith's caff opened, and Mr.Smith came to Jeff's Woman and said he wanted seven dozen eggs a day, and wanted them handy, and so the hens are back, and more of them, and they exult so every morning over the eggs they lay that if you wanted to talk of Rockefeller in the barber shop you couldn't hear his name for the cackling.