Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Stephen Leacock [people reading books .TXT] 📗

Paris. As you saw her swinging up the street to the Telephone Exchange in a suit that was straight out of the Delineator and brown American boots, there was style written all over her⁠—the kind of thing that Mariposa recognised and did homage to. And to see her in the Exchange⁠—she was one of the four girls that I spoke of⁠—on her high stool with a steel cap on⁠—jabbing the connecting plugs in and out as if electricity cost nothing⁠—well, all I mean is that you could understand why it was that the commercial travellers would stand round in the Exchange calling up all sorts of impossible villages, and waiting about so pleasant and genial!⁠—it made one realize how naturally good-tempered men are. And then when Myra would go off duty and Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, would come on, the commercial men would be off again like autumn leaves.

It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself: and yet if she’d hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he’d have had her arrested for assault.

Mind you, I don’t mean that Myra was merely flippant and worthless. Not at all. She was a girl with any amount of talent. You should have heard her recite “The Raven,” at the Methodist Social! Simply genius! And when she acted Portia in the Trial Scene of the Merchant of Venice at the High School concert, everybody in Mariposa admitted that you couldn’t have told it from the original.

So, of course, as soon as Jeff made the fortune, Myra had her resignation in next morning and everybody knew that she was to go to a dramatic school for three months in the fall and become a leading actress.

But, as I said, the public recognition counted a lot for Jeff. The moment you begin to get that sort of thing it comes in quickly enough. Brains, you know, are recognized right away. That was why, of course, within a week from this Jeff received the first big packet of stuff from the Cuban Land Development Company, with coloured pictures of Cuba, and fields of bananas, and haciendas and insurrectos with machetes and Heaven knows what. They heard of him, somehow⁠—it wasn’t for a modest man like Jefferson to say how. After all, the capitalists of the world are just one and the same crowd. If you’re in it, you’re in it, that’s all! Jeff realized why it is that of course men like Carnegie or Rockefeller and Morgan all know one another. They have to.

For all I know, this Cuban stuff may have been sent from Morgan himself. Some of the people in Mariposa said yes, others said no. There was no certainty.

Anyway, they were fair and straight, this Cuban crowd that wrote to Jeff. They offered him to come right in and be one of themselves. If a man’s got the brains, you may as well recognize it straight away. Just as well write him to be a director now as wait and hesitate till he forces his way into it.

Anyhow, they didn’t hesitate, these Cuban people that wrote to Jeff from Cuba⁠—or from a post office box in New York⁠—it’s all the same thing, because Cuba being so near to New York the mail is all distributed from there. I suppose in some financial circles they might have been slower, wanted guarantees of some sort, and so on, but these Cubans, you know, have got a sort of Spanish warmth of heart that you don’t see in business men in America, and that touches you. No, they asked no guarantee. Just send the money whether by express order or by bank draft or cheque, they left that entirely to oneself, as a matter between Cuban gentlemen.

And they were quite frank about their enterprise⁠—bananas and tobacco in the plantation district reclaimed from the insurrectos. You could see it all there in the pictures⁠—tobacco plants and the insurrectos⁠—everything. They made no rash promises, just admitted straight out that the enterprise might realise 400 percent or might conceivably make less. There was no hint of more.

So within a month, everybody in Mariposa knew that Jeff Thorpe was “in Cuban lands” and would probably clean up half a million by New Year’s. You couldn’t have failed to know it. All round the little shop there were pictures of banana groves and the harbour of Habana, and Cubans in white suits and scarlet sashes, smoking cigarettes in the sun and too ignorant to know that you can make four hundred percent by planting a banana tree.

I liked it about Jeff that he didn’t stop shaving. He went on just the same. Even when Johnson, the livery stable man, came in with five hundred dollars and asked him to see if the Cuban Board of Directors would let him put it in, Jeff laid it in the drawer and then shaved him for five cents, in the same old way. Of course, he must have felt proud when, a few days later, he got a letter from the Cuban people, from New York, accepting the money straight off without a single question, and without knowing anything more of Johnson except that he was a friend of Jeff’s. They wrote most handsomely. Any friends of Jeff’s were friends of Cuba. All money they might send would be treated just as Jeff’s would be treated.

One reason, perhaps, why Jeff didn’t give up shaving was because it allowed him to talk about Cuba. You see, everybody knew in Mariposa that Jeff Thorpe had sold out of Cobalts and had gone into Cuban Renovated Lands⁠—and that spread round him a kind of halo of wealth and mystery and outlandishness⁠—oh, something Spanish. Perhaps you’ve felt it about people that you know.