THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY.
The poet Longfellow--or was it Confucius, the inventor of wisdom?--remarked:
"Life is real, life is earnest;
And things are not what they seem."
As mathematics are--or is: thanks, old subscriber!--the only just rule by which questions of life can be measured, let us, by all means, adjust our theme to the straight edge and the balanced column of the great goddess Two-and-Two-Makes-Four.Figures--unassailable sums in addition--shall be set over against whatever oposing element there may be.
A mathematician, after scanning the above two lines of poetry, would say: "Ahem! young gentlemen, if we assume that X plus--that is, that life is real--then things (all of which life includes) are real.Anything that is real is what it seems.Then if we consider the proposition that 'things are not what they seem,' why--"But this is heresy, and not poesy.We woo the sweet nymph Algebra; we would conduct you into the presence of the elusive, seductive, pursued, satisfying, mysterious X.
Not long before the beginning of this century, Septimus Kinsolving, an old New Yorker, invented an idea.He originated the discovery that bread is made from flour and not from wheat futures.Perceiving that the flour crop was short, and that the Stock Exchange was having no perceptible effect on the growing wheat, Mr.Kinsolving cornered the flour market.
The result was that when you or my landlady (before the war she never had to turn her hand to anything; Southerners accomodated)bought a five-cent load of bread you laid down an additional two cents, which went to Mr.Kinsolving as a testimonial to his perspicacity.
A second result was that Mr.Kinsolving quit the game with $2,000,000 prof--er--rake-off.
Mr.Kinsolving's son Dan was at college when the mathematical experiment in breadstuffs was made.Dan came home during vacation, and found the old gentleman in a red dressing-gown reading "Little Dorrit" on the porch of his estimable red brick mansion in Washington Square.He had retired from business with enough extra two-cent pieces from bread buyers to reach, if laid side by side, fifteen times around the earth and lap as far as the public debt of Paraguay.
Dan shook hands with his father, and hurried over to Greenwich Village to see his old high-school friend, Kenwitz.Dan had always admired Kenwitz.Kenwitz was pale, curly-haired, intense, serious, mathematical, studious, altruistic, socialistic, and the natural foe of oligarchies.Kenwitz had foregone college, and was learning watch-****** in his father's jewelry store.Dan was smiling, jovial, easy-tempered and tolerant alike of kings and ragpickers.The two foregathered joyously, being opposites.And then Dan went back to college, and Kenwitz to his mainsprings--and to his private library in the rear of the jewelry shop.
Four years later Dan came back to Washington Square with the accumulations of B.A.and two years of Europe thick upon him.
He took a filial look at Septimus Kinsolving's elaborate tombstone in Greenwood and a tedious excursion through typewritten documents with the family lawyer; and then, feeling himself a lonely and hopeless millionaire, hurried down to the old jewelry store across Sixth Avenue.
Kenwitz unscrewed a magnifying glass from his eye, routed out his parent from a dingy rear room, and abandoned the interior of watches for outdoors.He went with Dan, and they sat on a bench in Washington Square.Dan had not changed much; he was stalwart, and had a dignity that was inclined to relax into a grin.
Kenwitz was more serious, more intense, more learned, philosophical and socialistic.
"I know about it now," said Dan, finally."I pumped it out of the eminent legal lights that turned over to me poor old dad's collections of bonds and boodle.It amounts to $2,000,000, Ken.
And I am told that he squeezed it out of the chaps that pay their pennies for loaves of bread at little bakeries around the corner.
You've studied economics, Dan, and you know all about monopolies, and the masses, and octopuses, and the rights of laboring people.
I never thought about those things before.Football and trying to be white to my fellowman were about the extent of my college curriculum.
"But since I came back and found out how dad made his money I've been thinking.I'd like awfully well to pay back those chaps who had to give up too much money for bread.I know it would buck the line of my income for a good many yards; but I'd like to make it square with 'em.Is there any way it can be done, old Ways and Means?"Kenwitz's big black eyes glowed fierily.His thin, intellectual face took on almost a sardonic cast.He caught Dan's arm with the grip of a friend and a judge.
"You can't do it!" he said, emphatically."One of the chief punishments of you men of ill-gotten wealth is that when you do repent you find that you have lost the power to make reparation or restitution.I admire your good intentions, Dan, but you can't do anything.Those people were robbed of their precious pennies.It's too late to remedy the evil.You can't pay them back""Of course," said Dan, lighting his pipe, "we couldn't hunt up every one of the duffers and hand 'em back the right change.
