THE CASE OF THE MOTHER-IN-LAW-OF-PEARL
It was a bright afternoon after much rain and Doctor Eszterhazy decided to take the steam runabout on the fashionable three turns along the Motor Road in the great Private Park. He had put on his duster and was reaching for his cap when the day-porter came in.
“Yes, Lemkotch.”
“Sir Doctor, Housekeeper asks if you would be so graciously kind as to leave this here off at Weitmondl, in the Golden Hart, to be prepared,” and he set down a box upon the desk, bowed, and withdrew.
If the housekeeper’s master had been a boss butcher or an advocate of the Court of First Jurisdiction, he would probably have said, “What, damn it, does the woman think I am a messenger boy?” but as he was Engelebert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Medicine, Doctor of Jurispurdence, Doctor of Science, Doctor of Philosophy, and Doctor of Literature, he merely said, “Yes, of course.” He took up the box—it was a small one, inlaid, with part of the inlay missing and part about to be, evidently a sewing-box: and he put it in his pocket.
His manservant, Herrek, sat beside him, ringing the large bronze bell; Schwebel, the retired railroadman, sat behind, carefully stoking the fire. They were trying out a new fuel which Eszterhazy had been working on for some time now—the late Count Tunk and Tunk, for many years Consul for the Triune Monarchy at Boston in the American province of Nevengland, had been enamored of a tree called hickory and had planted thousands on his estates in Transbalkania and the Gothic Midlands: but the present Count found that he could make no commercial use of the wood, which was not known in East Central Europe—Eszterhazy, an old schoolmate of Count Beo Tunk and Tunk, desired to see if brickquets, made of the hickory sawdust, might not be an utile fuel.
“Nothing to lose,” Count Beo had said, with a shrug. "All that my stewards hear, they say, when they offer the wood for sale, is a variation on the phrase, ‘Ai—or, ‘Yoi’—"Us never hear of no khic- kory tree,’ and that, of course, is that. But if we call it say—” here he paused, at a loss as what to call it, say.
“Tunkfuel,” said Eszterhazy. “Tunkfuel, Patent-Amerikansko. ”
The Count had thought that Tunkfuel, American Invention, was an excellent idea; and so did his friend: but the former had nothing in mind but an economic use for a crop planted out of sentiment, and the latter hoped to devise something which might tend to retrench the reprehensible increase—slight but evident—in the use of hydrocarbon vehicles. He was aware that even many steam-propelled road vehicles used either kerosene or naphtha, or both, to say nothing of the ones powered entirely by petroleum-derivatives: but steadfastly preferred fuels less offensive to eye and nostril. They might be preferable to coal iself; other than that, he had nothing to say for them.
As though to prove his point for him, he observed, some streets ahead, the enormous vehicle of Glutlovicx the sweets-magnate. The magnate himself had no social ambitions, but as his wife could not be persuaded to be happy in a brand-new castle set in the semiexact center of forty thousand acres of sugar beets (the exact exact center was occupied by the refinery), Gutlovics, with a shrug, had agreed to move to Bella. There he had, among other things apparently needful for the happiness of Frow G., acquired a motor-vehicle. Neither one had any other standard of judging the value of new things save by cost and size: their motor was a hydrocarbon talley-ho, and, as they rode along, enabled them to look into the windows on the second floors of buildings. Glutlovicx always looked to see if his sweets, his sugars, or his preserves were on the tables; she only looked at her reflection in the mirrors or the windows.
And as always, driving along, Eszterhazy at the tiller, Herrek tirelessly tolled the bell. This not only alerted nervous pedestrians to get out of the way, it enabled drivers of nervous horses to make necessary adjustments of the reins—even, if deemed needful— to jump down and take the horse by the head. Sometimes bystanders had thought it funny to see a horse rear upon hind legs and whinny: but the horse had not thought it funny: sometimes horses had gone mad with fear and dashed up on the sidewalks and spilled drivers or passengers and trampled people; and sometimes they had galloped through the new-fasioned plates of window-glass, slashing themselves so that they had to be destroyed.
But such incidents were now becoming less frequent.
After the traditional three turns around the Motor Road, Eszterhazy drew off to the side. “How is the new fuel behaving, Stoker?” he asked. (It would perhaps have been fashionable to have addressed him in the French equivalent, but Schewebel, for one thing, would not have known what chauffeur meant; and, for another, was very proud of having been what he had been on the Royal and Imperial Ironroads S.-
P.-T.)
“Sir: a hot fire, a clean smoke, a clean ash,” he answered.
“Good, good. Very well, let us change places. The Court of the Golden Hart.”
The boiler required no fresh fuel for a while now, and, even if it had, Eszterhazy might have stoked it without soiling white gloves, so cleanly the new fuel was.
The interior of Weitmondl’s consisted chiefly of drawers, shelf after shelf of them, up to the ceiling; moving ladders ran on wheels along rails, and someone seemed always restocking the drawers or else taking stock out: and each drawer had in its front a little window, as it were, containing samples of the size and style of button contained within.
One of the clerks from aloft called something into the back, and the proprietor himself appeared. Seligman Weitmondl was himself a little blanched almond of a man, who managed to be serious and cheerful at the same time. He took the sewing box from Eszterhazy with small crows and clucks of pleasurable recognitoion. “Oh yes, oh yes! Done in my father’s day, my father’s day,” he affirmed. “That was the style, then, lozenge-work, lozenge-work,” he said, tapping the inlay with his finger. “Cheap stuff,” he said, a moment later.
Eszterhazy looked at it more closely. The nacre seemed indeed faint, the opalescence rather dim. “It does not appear to be the highest quality of mother-of- pearl,” he conceded. “Although I might have supposed it had merely faded—”
Weitmondl chuckled. “Faded here, faded there,” he said; “it wasn’t bright and it didn’t fade. It isn’t even mother-of-pearl, be blessed, my dear Sir: it’s what we in the trade call mother-in-law-of pearl. It doesn’t come from the South Sea or the North Sea or the Gulfs of Persia or the Gulfs of Anywhere-else. It comes from a mere river-mussle, somewhere in the Blox-Major. And if you had come to us last week, I’d have had to say, ‘No Sir, we can no longer repair the article in the same material for the reason that we haven’t got it in stock and haven’t had it in stock for long years, long years.’ ” And he nodded seriously. And, seemingly out of nowhere, perhaps from each nostril, he produced two shells. “This one, you see at once, dear Sir, is mother-of-pearl, the real and genuine article: look at it: Beautiful. Though not from Persia, to be sure, from Australia, which is a large island, my dear Sir, to the south of Persia— And this one, you see at once the difference, my dear Sir, day and night, day and night, is the river-mussel, such as we used to get in as a staple, ever so much cheaper, of course.”
And, sometimes stimulated by questions, and sometimes volunteering the data, Seligman Weit- mondl went on to explain, for one thing, the price of standard quality mother-of-pearl had come down—owing to the opening of new grounds in such places as Australia and the South Seas—and the purchasing power of the public had gone up, owing to manufacturing, railroads, abolition of the octroi, the defeat of the Serbians and the Grasutarkers, benevolent laws, and the immense benign influences of the Throne—consequently the demand for the cheaper article had dropped. “Nobody would buy it anymore, it took a long time for us to sell out what we had on hand, soldiers wouldn’t even buy it in snuffboxes for their sweethearts, you see. And then, then when, what with one thing and another, we could have sold some items in the cheaper material, why, we couldn’t get it anymore.”