They were sitting on deck after the others had gone to bed; a still night, and the yacht gliding through the water with scarcely a sound. Suddenly the host remarked: "Do you know what this show costs every hour?"
"I never tried to estimate," said the guest, taken aback.
"You wouldn’t, because you’ve always had money. I figured it up last night—about a hundred dollars every hour of the day or night. It cost me several hours' sleep to realize it."
There was a pause. Lanny didn’t know what to say.
"It’s a weakness; I suppose it’s racial. I can’t get over the fear of spending so much!"
"Why do you do it, then?"
"I force myself to be rational. What good is money if you hoard it? My children don’t want it, and their children won’t know how to use it; and, anyhow, it mayn’t last. I assume that I give my friends some pleasure, and I don’t do any harm that I can think of. Can you?"
"No," replied the other.
"Of course I shouldn’t mention it," said the host, "but you like to understand people."
"We’d all be happier if we did," replied Lanny. "I, too, am conscious of weaknesses. If I happened to be in your position, I would be trying to make up my mind whether I had a right to own a yacht."
III
Lanny went to bed thinking about this "racial" peculiarity. When he had first met Johannes Robin, the salesman had been traveling over Europe with two heavy suitcases full of electric curling-irons and toasters, and a "spiel" about promoting international trade and the spread of civilization. During the war he had made money buying magnetos and such things to be sold in Germany. Then he had gone in with Robbie Budd and bought left-over supplies of the American army. He had sold marks and bought shares in German industry, and now he was sometimes referred to as a "king" of this and that. Doubtless all kings, underneath their crowns and inside their royal robes, were hesitant and worried mortals, craving affection and tormented by fears of poison and daggers, of demons and gods, or, in these modem times, of financial collapses and revolutions.
Jascha Rabinowich had changed his name but had remained a Jew, which meant that he was race-conscious; he was kept that way by contempt and persecution. Part of the time he blustered and part of the time he cringed, but he tried to hide both moods. What he wanted was to be a man like other men, and to be judged according to his merits. But he had had to flee from a pogrom in Russia, and he lived in Germany knowing that great numbers of people despised and hated him; he knew that even in America, which he considered the most enlightened of countries, the people in the slums would call him a "sheeny" and a Christ-killer, while the "best" people would exclude him from their country clubs.
He talked about all this with Lanny, who had fought hard for his sister’s right to marry Hansi. People accused the Jews of loving money abnormally. "We are traders," said Johannes. "We have been traders for a couple of thousand years, because we have been driven from our land. We have had to hide in whatever holes we could find in one of these Mediterranean ports, and subsist by buying something at a low price and selling it at a higher price. The penalty of failure being death has sharpened our wits. In a port it often happens that we buy from a person we shall never see again, and sell to some other person under the same conditions; they do not worry much about our welfare, nor we about theirs. That may be a limitation in our morality, but it is easy to understand."
Lanny admitted that he understood it, and his host continued:
"My ancestors were master-traders all the way from Smyrna to Gibraltar while yours were barbarians in the dark northern forests, killing the aurochs with clubs and spears. Naturally our view of life was different from yours. But when you take to commerce, the differences disappear quickly. I have heard that in your ancestral state of Connecticut the Yankee does not have his feelings hurt when you call him slick. You have heard, perhaps, of David Harum, who traded horses."
"I have heard also of Potash and Perlmutter," said Lanny, with a smile.
"It is the same here, all around the shores of this ancient sea which once was the civilized world. The Greeks are considered skillful traders; take Zaharoff, for example. The Turks are not easy to deceive, and I am told that the Armenians can get the better of any race in the world. Always, of course, I am referring to the professional traders, those who live or die by it. The peasant is a different proposition; the primary producer is the predestined victim, whether he is in Connecticut buying wooden nutmegs or in Anatolia receiving coins made of base metal which he will not be clever enough to pass on."
IV
Lanny sat with Madame Zyszynski, but the results he obtained were not of the best. Tecumseh, the noble redskin, was suspicious and inclined to be crotchety; he took offense when one did not accept his word, and Lanny had made the mistake of being too honest. The way to get results was to be like Parsifal Dingle, who welcomed the spirits quite simply as his friends, chatting with them and the "control" in an amiable matter-of-fact way. Apparently it was with the spirits as with healing: except ye be converted, and become as little children! . . .
What Tecumseh would do was to send messages to Lanny through Parsifal. He would say: "Tell that smart young man that Marcel was here, and that he is painting spirit pictures, much more wonderful than anything he ever did on earth—but they will never be sold at auctions." Lanny wanted to know if Marcel objected to having his works sold; but for a long time the painter ignored his question. Then one day Tecumseh said, rather grudgingly, that it didn’t really matter to Marcel; everything was sold in Lanny’s world, and it was no use keeping beautiful things in a storeroom. This sounded as if the spirit world was acquiring a "pinkish" tinge.
Madame gave several seances every day. She had done it while she was earning her living on Sixth Avenue, and insisted that it didn’t hurt her. She would accommodate anyone who was interested, and presently she was delving into the past of the Rabinowich family, telling about those members who had "passed over." It was a bit unsatisfactory, for there were many members of that family, and Jascha had lost track of them; he said that he never heard from them except when someone needed money for some worthy purpose, and all purposes were worthy. He said that the way to check on the identity of any member of his family in the spirit world would be that he was asking for money to be given to a son or daughter, a nephew or niece still on earth!
But there had been indeed an Uncle Nahum, who had peddled goods in Russian-Polish villages, and had been clubbed to death by the Black Hundreds. The realistic details of this event sounded convincing to Mama Robin, who had witnessed such an incident as a child and still had nightmares now and then as a result. Then it was Jascha’s own father talking to him; when he mentioned that his beard had turned white faster on one side than on the other, and how he had kept his money hidden under a loose brick in the hearth, Lanny saw his urbane host look startled. Johannes said afterward that he had thought all this must be a fraud of some sort, but now he didn’t know what to think. It was really unthinkable.