Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town - Stephen Leacock (best ebook reader under 100 TXT) 📗

Anyhow, they asked him about the climate, and yellow fever and what the negroes were like and all that sort of thing.

“This Cubey, it appears is an island,” Jeff would explain. Of course, everybody knows how easily islands lend themselves to making money⁠—“and for fruit, they say it comes up so fast you can’t stop it.” And then he would pass into details about the Hash-enders and the resurrectos and technical things like that till it was thought a wonder how he could know it. Still, it was realized that a man with money has got to know these things. Look at Morgan and Rockefeller and all the men that make a pile. They know just as much as Jeff did about the countries where they make it. It stands to reason.

Did I say that Jeff shaved in the same old way? Not quite. There was something even dreamier about it now, and a sort of new element in the way Jeff fell out of his monotone into lapses of thought that I, for one, misunderstood. I thought that perhaps getting so much money⁠—well, you know the way it acts on people in the larger cities. It seemed to spoil one’s idea of Jeff that copper and asbestos and banana lands should form the goal of his thought when, if he knew it, the little shop and the sunlight of Mariposa was so much better.

In fact, I had perhaps borne him a grudge for what seemed to me his perpetual interest in the great capitalists. He always had some item out of the paper about them.

“I see where this here Carnegie has give fifty thousand dollars for one of them observatories,” he would say.

And another day he would pause in the course of shaving, and almost whisper: “Did you ever see this Rockefeller?”

It was only by a sort of accident that I came to know that there was another side to Jefferson’s speculation that no one in Mariposa ever knew, or will ever know now.

I knew it because I went in to see Jeff in his house one night. The house⁠—I think I said it⁠—stood out behind the barber shop. You went out of the back door of the shop, and through a grass plot with petunias beside it, and the house stood at the end. You could see the light of the lamp behind the blind, and through the screen door as you came along. And it was here that Jefferson used to sit in the evenings when the shop got empty.

There was a round table that The Woman used to lay for supper, and after supper there used to be a chequered cloth on it and a lamp with a shade. And beside it Jeff would sit, with his spectacles on and the paper spread out, reading about Carnegie and Rockefeller. Near him, but away from the table, was The Woman doing needlework, and Myra, when she wasn’t working in the Telephone Exchange, was there too with her elbows on the table reading Marie Corelli⁠—only now, of course, after the fortune, she was reading the prospectuses of Dramatic Schools.

So this night⁠—I don’t know just what it was in the paper that caused it⁠—Jeff laid down what he was reading and started to talk about Carnegie.

“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