Lindau turned his head toward him and said:"You are righdt,Passil;you are righdt.I haf zeen on the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions of human paseness--chelousy,fanity,ecodistic bridte.I haf zeen men in the face off death itself gofferned by motifes as low as--as pusiness motifes.""Well,"said Fulkerson,."it would be a grand thing for 'Every Other Week'if we could get some of those ideas worked up into a series.It would make a lot of talk."Colonel Woodburn ignored him in saying,"I think,Major Lindau--""High brifate;prefet gorporal,"the old man interrupted,in rejection of the title.
Hendricks laughed and said,with a glance of appreciation at Lindau,"Brevet corporal is good."Colonel Woodburn frowned a little,and passed over the joke."I think Mr.Lindau is right.Such exhibitions were common to both sides,though if you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so,I think they were less frequent on ours.We were fighting more immediately for existence.
We were fewer than you were,and we knew it;we felt more intensely that if each were not for all,then none was for any."The colonel's words made their impression.Dryfoos said,with authority,"That is so.""Colonel Woodburn,"Fulkerson called out,"if you'll work up those ideas into a short paper--say,three thousand words--I'll engage to make March take it."The colonel went on without replying:"But Mr.Lindau is right in characterizing some of the motives that led men to the cannon's mouth as no higher than business motives,and his comparison is the most forcible that he could have used.I was very much struck by it."The hobby was out,the colonel was in the saddle with so firm a seat that no effort sufficed to dislodge him.The dinner went on from course to course with barbaric profusion,and from time to time Fulkerson tried to bring the talk back to 'Every Other Week.'But perhaps because that was only the ostensible and not the real object of the dinner,which was to bring a number of men together under Dryfoos's roof,and make them the witnesses of his splendor,make them feel the power of his wealth,Fulkerson's attempts failed.The colonel showed how commercialism was the poison at the heart of our national life;how we began as a simple,agricultural people,who had fled to these shores with the instinct,divinely implanted,of building a state such as the sun never shone upon before;how we had conquered the wilderness and the savage;how we had flung off,in our struggle with the mother-country,the trammels of tradition and precedent,and had settled down,a free nation,to the practice of the arts of peace;how the spirit of commercialism had stolen insidiously upon us,and the infernal impulse of competition had embroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests,developing the worst passions of our nature,and teaching us to trick and betray and destroy one another in the strife for money,till now that impulse had exhausted itself,and we found competition gone and the whole economic problem in the hands of monopolies--the Standard Oil Company,the Sugar Trust,the Rubber Trust,and what not.And now what was the next thing?Affairs could not remain as they were;it was impossible;and what was the next thing?"The company listened for the main part silently.Dryfoos tried to grasp the idea of commercialism as the colonel seemed to hold it;he conceived of it as something like the dry-goods business on a vast scale,and he knew he had never been in that.He did not like to hear competition called infernal;he had always supposed it was something sacred;but he approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil Company;it was all true;the Standard Oil has squeezed Dryfoos once,and made him sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so low in that region that he lost money on every barrel he pumped.
All the rest listened silently,except Lindau;at every point the colonel made against the present condition of things he said more and more fiercely,"You are righdt,you are righdt."His eyes glowed,his hand played with his knife-hilt.When the colonel demanded,"And what is the next thing?"he threw himself forward,and repeated:"Yes,sir!What is the next thing?""Natural gas,by thunder!"shouted Fulkerson.
One of the waiters had profited by Lindau's posture to lean over him and put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar.It expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick,and a touch of nature had been added in the flame of brandy,which burned luridly up from a small pit in the centre of the base,and represented the gas in combustion as it issued from the ground.Fulkerson burst into a roar of laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to Dryfoos.Everybody rose and peered over at the thing,while he explained the work of sinking a gas-well,as he had already explained it to Frescobaldi.In the midst of his lecture he caught sight of the caterer himself,where he stood in the pantry doorway,smiling with an artist's anxiety for the effect of his masterpiece.
"Come in,come in,Frescobaldi!We want to congratulate you,"Fulkerson called to him."Here,gentlemen!Here's Frescobaldi's health."They all drank;and Frescobaldi,smiling brilliantly and rubbing his hands as he bowed right and left,permitted himself to say to Dryfoos :
"You are please;no?You like?"
"First-rate,first-rate!"said the old man;but when the Italian had bowed himself out and his guests had sunk into their seats again,he said dryly to Fulkerson,"I reckon they didn't have to torpedo that well,or the derrick wouldn't look quite so nice and clean.""Yes,"Fulkerson answered,"and that ain't quite the style--that little wiggly-waggly blue flame--that the gas acts when you touch off a good vein of it.This might do for weak gas";and he went on to explain:
