第39章

That kind of reticence is a thing you simply have to learn in banking.I mean, if you've got to be in a position where you know for a fact that the Mariposa Packing Company's account is overdrawn by sixty-four dollars, and yet daren't say anything about it, not even to the girls that you play tennis with,--I don't say, not a casual hint as a reference, but not really tell them, not, for instance, bring down the bank ledger to the tennis court and show them,--you learn a sort of reticence and self-control that people outside of banking circles never can attain.

Why, I've known Pupkin at the Fireman's Ball lean against the wall in his dress suit and talk away to Jim Eliot, the druggist, without giving the faintest hint or indication that Eliot's note for twenty-seven dollars had been protested that very morning.Not a hint of it.I don't say he didn't mention it, in a sort of way, in the supper room, just to one or two, but I mean there was nothing in the way he leant up against the wall to suggest it.

But, however, I don't mention that as either for or against Mr.

Pupkin.That sort of thing is merely the A B C of banking, as he himself told me when explaining why it was that he hesitated to divulge the exact standing of the Mariposa Carriage Company.Of course, once you get past the A B C you can learn a lot that is mighty interesting.

So I think that if you know Mariposa and understand even the rudiments of banking, you are perfectly acquainted with Mr.Pupkin.

What? You remember him as being in love with Miss Lawson, the high school teacher? In love with HER? What a ridiculous idea.You mean merely because on the night when the Mariposa Belle sank with every soul on board, Pupkin put off from the town in a skiff to rescue Miss Lawson.Oh, but you're quite wrong.That wasn't LOVE.I've heard Pupkin explain it himself a dozen times.That sort of thing,--paddling out to a sinking steamer at night in a crazy skiff,--may indicate a sort of attraction, but not real love, not what Pupkin came to feel afterwards.Indeed, when he began to think of it, it wasn't even attraction, it was merely respect,--that's all it was.And anyway, that was long before, six or seven months back, and Pupkin admitted that at the time he was a mere boy.

Mr.Pupkin, I must explain, lived with Mallory Tompkins in rooms over the Exchange Bank, on the very top floor, the third, with Mullins's own rooms below them.Extremely comfortable quarters they were, with two bedrooms and a sitting-room that was all fixed up with snowshoes and tennis rackets on the walls and dance programmes and canoe club badges and all that sort of thing.

Mallory Tompkins was a young man with long legs and check trousers who worked on the Mariposa Times-Herald.That was what gave him his literary taste.He used to read Ibsen and that other Dutch author--Bumstone Bumstone, isn't it?--and you can judge that he was a mighty intellectual fellow.He was so intellectual that he was, as he himself admitted, a complete eggnostic.He and Pupkin used to have the most tremendous arguments about creation and evolution, and how if you study at a school of applied science you learn that there's no hell beyond the present life.

Mallory Tompkins used to prove absolutely that the miracles were only electricity, and Pupkin used to admit that it was an awfully good argument, but claimed that he had heard it awfully well answered in a sermon, though unfortunately he had forgotten how.

Tompkins used to show that the flood was contrary to geology, and Pupkin would acknowledge that the point was an excellent one, but that he had read a book,--the title of which he ought to have written down,--which explained geology away altogether.

Mallory Tompkins generally got the best of the merely logical side of the arguments, but Pupkin--who was a tremendous Christian--was much stronger in the things he had forgotten.So the discussions often lasted till far into the night, and Mr.Pupkin would fall asleep and dream of a splendid argument, which would have settled the whole controversy, only unfortunately he couldn't recall it in the morning.

Of course, Pupkin would never have thought of considering himself on an intellectual par with Mallory Tompkins.That would have been ridiculous.Mallory Tompkins had read all sorts of things and had half a mind to write a novel himself--either that or a play.All he needed, he said, was to have a chance to get away somewhere by himself and think.Every time he went away to the city Pupkin expected that he might return with the novel all finished; but though he often came back with his eyes red from thinking, the novel as yet remained incomplete.