You Can Always Tell

Southland Times, Issue 23308, 18 September 1937, Page 13

You Can Always Tell

SHORT STORY

One of the three city men apparently noticed the actions of their guests, for

By

GREGORY CLARK

iinpAKE a look,” said Jimmie A Frise quietly, “at the second table to your right.” We were having supper in a busy down-town restaurant. “Behold,” said Jimmie, “one of the tragedies of everyday life.”

I shifted so as to see the group. There were five people at the table: a plain woman in very plain clothes, wearing glasses; a plain man with a weatherbeaten face and unpretentious garments such as country folk wear, and his hair roughly brushed. But the other three—city men, for sure; more than city men—they were imitation swells. They had a sort of faded handsomeness about them that you see in men of forty who have had a good time of life and paid too much for it.

“You are beholding,” said Jim, “one of the oldest rackets on earth. You are seeing three high-pressure men, three shoddy financiers, finishing the job on a couple of poor, stupid people from the country, who are turning in, I should say, the lifework of their ancestors of three generations back—the farm, their carefully hoarded bonds and mortgages—for some worthless wildcat stock.” I looked with new interest at the group. “How can you tell that?” I demanded. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” said Jim. “Look at the three city slickers. They’re in their forties. Look at the type. The greyish temples. The tweed clothes, a little too smart. The appearance of being temporarily sobered up. The general appearance of that type of man who has found life pretty easy up to forty, but after that age the going isn’t so easy, and they have to resort to smart tricks to get by.” “Maybe you exaggerate,” I said. “All right,” said Jim. “Look at the way they are acting. Look at the false eagerness and attentiveness of them. Look at the way they sit forward, vieing with each other to say nice things to that poor, plain woman as if she were a beauty.” The woman was simpering grotesquely in response to the gallantries of the three swells. Her husband’s red face, crowned with a rough thatch of brindle hair, had an expression of importance on it, as he rather timidly forked food into his mouth. He seemed ill at ease amid the noise and excitement of the restaurant.

“Jim,”l admitted, “I begin to see it.” “It’s a tragedy,” said Jimmie, “in the garments of comedy. It is laugh-

able if it were not for tears. None of the five but is, in the end, a comic figure already shaping into tragedy. Those pathetic city men, all imagining they are such smart boys, yet with the marks of their decay open to every eye.” “Maybe they know,”! said gently. “And that man and woman,” went on Jim. “Life has never done much for them. The man looks as if he had spent forty years trying in vain to beat a farm. The woman looks as though no breath of beauty or charm had ever blown upon her.” “Surely nobody,” I insisted, “lives so far back from the railroad tracks nowadays that they don’t know about swindlers.” “Those two country cousins,” said Jim, “think they are the smart ones. It is they who feel like swindlers, trading that thing they hate, that farm, that bleak and lonely burden, for something gay and racy and wicked.” “By George,” I confessed, “look at them; they do look a little crafty don’t they?” The woman, in her spectacles, simpering an giggling coyly, had, in fact, a hard, shrewd look. The man, for all his weather-beaten air, his clumsy hands and humped shoulders, veiled an expression of cunning when his eyes rose to look briefly at his three sparkling hosts. “So you see,” said Jimmie, “you see, my friend, life consists of eating and being eaten. In all the living world there are those fated to be eaten and those fated to eat. Yet in the end all is consumed.”

“I suppose,” I suggested, “there is nothing we can do about these poor souls over here?” “Not a thing,” said Jim, “except perhaps, we might continue staring at them in a cold, warning way, and maybe they might catch the hint. Maybe if we pointedly stare at those city slickers, as if we knew them to be swindlers, the two poor dupes might wake up out of their dream and walk more cautiously.” “It’s an idea, Jim,” I agreed, shifting my chair so as to be able to turn a cold gaze toward our neighbours between each scoop of onion soup. Thus we sat and ate. Leisurely we ate, concentrating our cold and slightly contemptuous gaze on the five denizens of the table two to my right. The city men had their backs to us, but the country pair were more or less facing us and inevitably one or the other would have to catch that gaze. The man was the first. His seldomraised eyes usually flickered awkwardly to his three men companions, but on one lift he stared straight at me, and instantly I set my face in a look full of meaning: a deliberate, cold, forbidding expression. Startled, his eyes fell. In a moment he raised them again, only to let them drop instantly, and I knew by the way he pawed around with his hands, that he had caught my signal. In a moment I saw him put his table napkin up to his face and lean over and say something to his wife. To say that she was alert is too mild. She seemed to freeze. Her cold face lost every trace of the coy simper that so ill became it. I saw her turn her eyes around at the neighbouring tables, until with a kind of start, her gaze fell on Jim and me. You would think we had thrown something at her. She fairly shrank. “They’ve got it,” I said to Jim.

he turned cautiously and looked over his shoulder. He found us. And he looked straight into the same spoonpoised, cold, deliberate stare from Jim and me.

In less than ten seconds he had com-, municated with his two partners in crime. With every air of casualness they, too, turned and cast their eyes around the dining room only to meet the motionless, meaningful, contemptuous stare from Jim and me. And the effect was electrical.

They were near the end of their festive meal, anyway, but it was as if a balloon had been pricked. The jaunty set of shoulders of the city men vanished. They continued to drop table napkins and pick them up in order to cast furtive glances at us. “The other two,” I remarked to Jim, “seem as upset as the big shots.” “Thank goodness,” said Jim. Their revels were ended. The waiters could not seem to give them their check quickly enough. They rose and with a self-conscious air, filed past us.

“Keep it up,” hissed Jim. And as the five filed by, they each glanced in turn and saw us, food suspended, with a faint derisive smile, staring at them. ' “Well,” said Jim, preparing to encounter the mixed grill the waiter was presenting to us, “that wasn’t a bad job. Whatever they thought, they all thought something.” We dawdled long over a trifle of French pastry followed by a touch of genuine—not the Swiss—Gorgonzola. And it was with the small coffees, probably an hour after our adventure with the swindlers, that I beheld, somewhat to my horror, all three swindlers standing out in the lobby and looking in, at us, unmistakably. “Jim,” I said, “There’s going to be an unpleasantness, I’m afraid.” The three slickers, all looking somewhat exhausted and excited, advanced straight to our table. “Pardon me gentlemen,” said the leader of them, the most fadedly handsome, “but are you from the department?”

“What department?” demanded Jim guardedly. “The Securities Department?” said the gentleman anxiously, cautiously. “Certainly not,” said Jim and I together. “May we sit here a moment?” he asked, apparently weak with relief on hearing our reply. The three, gazing at us with immense interest, sidled on to chairs. “Do you happen,” asked the leader, “to know the two people, man and woman, we had in here to dinner an

hour back?” “We do not,” said Jim, carefully but firmly. “Never saw them before?” begged the head swindler earnestly. “Never,” we both said. “Well, it’s very curious,” said he, looking at his two companions and heaving a sigh of perplexity. “But we three owe you gentlemen a very great debt of gratitude.” “Indeed?” said Jim sarcastically and I echoed, “Indeed?” “Yes, and perhaps we ought to explain to you,” he said, while his two companions relaxed into easier attitudes and lighted cigarettes with trembling fingers. “You see, we are in the financial business. We deal in various securities of one kind and another.”

“We guessed it,” said Jim. “Er,” said the head one, “and we had a business deal on with these two people, husband and wife, who claimed to be farmers living up near Orangeville. They wanted to give up farming and we were arranging for them a planned estate, see?”

“Ah,” said Jim. “They had some Government bonds, went on the head man, wiping his brow with his handkerchief. “And we were in the very act of turning over to them a planned estate of various promising stocks and so forth, plus a balance of cash, in return for these slow maturing bonds and the deed of the farm.”

Jim and I sat silent, marvelling at the frankness of this disclosure. “Now, tonight,” said the leader, “we were dining here preparatory to returning to our office and closing the deal. Suddenly, we noticed a remarkable confusion on the part of our guests, and on looking about, we traced it to you. You seemed to know them, the way you were staring?” “It was not them we knew,” explained Jim. “On our way out in the lobby,” said the leader. “I happened to remark to my two partners here that you two gentlemen ‘might belong to the department.’ Hie lady overheard my remark. The effect was magical. Hardly bidding us farewell, the two rushed out the door, grabbed a taxi-cab and vanished.”

“So what?” demanded Jim, feeling the fight -was now on. “So we went to our office,” said the leader, “and did a little investigating. We telephoned to Orangeville, and there is nobody of the name they gave living in the neighbourhood described in the deeds and other documents they furnished us.” “Heavens,” said Jim

“And as for the bonds they deposited with us before dinner,” said the second gentleman, “they are, on examination, forged.” “Merciful me,” I cried. “And telephoning to Buffalo to certain friends of ours who were recently badly swindled by a gang of crooks posing as country people wanting to dispose of their property,” said the leader, “we secured an absolutely perfect description of the handsome pair you scared out of their wits tonight.” “My, my, my,” said Jimmie and I both.

“We thought, naturally,” said the leader, “that you gentlemen were with the department or may be with some protective agency. But at all events, we want to thank you.” “Don’t mention it,” said we both.

“How on earth ’did you spot them?” inquired the second man, in mystified admiration.

“Ah,” smiled Jimmie, “we know crooks when we see them.”