"Down, Brennus," he said, "quiet, boy."
The hound sat back impassively and Eliot walked by him nervously, with his hand outstretched.
"Well, Jim," John Wardell said, giving him a perfunctory handshake, "I don't see you here often; you must be in trouble. Come in and have a drink."
It took a long time to get it out—three drinks, in fact—but in the end Eliot told it all to the old man who hated him.
"It's not for myself, it's for Julia and the kids. If I don't get some help, we're dead."
"Of course, of course, Jim," the old man said, "I know you're not thinking about yourself. But just the same," he said, smiling maliciously, "I don't see any way out of it—unless you start embezzling from the bank."
Eliot jerked his head nervously, as if the old man were reading his mind. Then he forced a smile.
"I was thinking you might be able to tide us over for a while . . .Uncle John," he added, gravely and sincerely.
John Wardell began to laugh.
"You think I have money, Jim? You think Julia has expectations? You're waiting for dead men's shoes? Good God, all I have is my pension, and not much of that, and the big annuity I bought years ago. That takes care of it all. There's enough for me to live on, and it ends when I die."
Eliot looked at him hopelessly and extended his glass for a refill. Oblivious of the old man's clinical, detached amusement.
"The hell of it is," he said loudly, "if I had a bit of money, I couldn't lose. I could spread the risks. The trend is up. I could be rich."
"But you have even less than nothing, Jim," the old man said, "you owe more than you possess. Even if you could know the future, you couldn't raise enough to make it worth while."
"If I knew the future," Eliot said, "I could get hold of the money somehow."
"Is that all you want, Jim? That's really pretty simple. All you need is an oracle to consult—or a sibyl, as the Romans called it. You ask the questions, and the god gives you the answer through his priestess. No house should be without one."
For a while Eliot had thought that the old man had softened to him. Now, looking at the over-red cynical lips below the hawk nose and the white halo of hair, he knew that the fires were only banked.
"How would you like your own oracle, Jim?"
"If you're not going to help, don't needle me."
"There's a story in Petronius about an oracle in a bottle in Cumae. You just feed her regularly and she lives forever. Could you use something like that?"
"I'm going," Eliot said, struggling to his feet unsteadily.
"This is no joke, Jim. I've owed you a wedding present for eighteen years, and now I think I'll give you one. Just sit down."
John Wardell left the room, and in two minutes returned carrying a small doll-house. He put it carefully on the table. Eliot looked at it curiously. It was not the standard Victorian-mansion doll-house but strangely reminiscent of something he had seen ten years ago, on his one trip to Europe, at Pompeii.
The old man looked at him carefully.
"You recognize it? The house of the Vettii at Pompeii. In perfect scale. Look at the atrium and the pool, the rooms to the sides. I bought it there."
Eliot lowered his head to gaze through the gate into the atrium and the pool. From that position he could see nothing else; but he remembered that with most doll-houses the roof was hinged and could be lifted so as to give a bird's-eye view of the interior. He fumbled around the side of the model looking for a hook to unfasten. For a moment he thought he heard a scurrying noise inside the doll-house. He drew back his hand sharply, brushing against the structure and almost knocking it off the table.
"Leave it alone," John Wardell said, suddenly and sharply. "Don't look at the Oracle, she doesn't like it. Never do it, on your life."
"Are you trying to say there's something inside?"
"I don't need to, you heard her move. But don't open it, ever."
"How does it operate, then?" Eliot asked, humoring the old man.
"Do you see that empty pool past the atrium? Well, write your question on a slip of paper, fold it up and put it in the pool. Get a tiny bowl and fill it with milk sweetened with honey and push it inside the gateway. Then go away and the next morning take the piece of paper from the pool. There will be an answer written on it."
"Can you make it work faster?"
"Sometimes it can be done, but I wouldn't advise you to try. It stirs things up."
"Can't you make it work right now? Show me."
John Wardell shrugged his shoulders. Then he went to the kitchen and returned with a dried bay leaf. He lit it, holding it until it smoked aromatically. Then he pushed it into the doll-house, watching the pungent vapor curl through it.
"Now," he said, "what you want to know. Anything. Write it down quickly."
Eliot tore off a slip of paper and wrote on one side of it, "Who will win the World Series?" Then he folded it and slipped it into the empty pool.
"All right," John Wardell said, "we have to leave. Bring the bottle."
When they returned in half an hour, the pungent bay-leaf vapor had died out. Wardell leaned down and reached into the doll-house. In his hand was a folded piece of paper which he handed to Eliot.
Eliot unfolded it and read it quickly. Then he read it more slowly.
"Fringillidae sunt," he quoted, "what kind of crap is that?"
"The second word is easy," John Wardell said. "It means 'they [the winners] are.' But Fringillidae, wait a minute."
He pulled out the third volume of a twenty-volume classical dictionary, thumbed through it for a minute or two, then shook his head.
"It's a new word to me. I've never seen it."
"Then what the hell good is it?"
"I should have told you, the Oracle uses several languages and she tends to be obscure. You know—'If King Croesus crosses the river Halys with his army, he will destroy a mighty empire'—which one? Well, as it turned out, his own. He just didn't read it right."
"Don't worry about me, I can figure it out."
"Well, in that case you have no troubles."
There was a tinge of unpleasant mockery in Uncle John's voice, as though he knew something very nasty about Eliot, something the younger man should also sense about himself, something, above all, at which he should bridle if he owned the sensitivity to understand or the touchy sense of personal honor to take offense.
Then, abruptly, Eliot caught himself. This was advanced senility talking. He wanted money, a life preserver, a hook to fasten into the mountain from which he was falling, and here this crazy and slightly malevolent old bastard was offering him dreams and fantasies.
"Look, I don't know how you worked this dime store Cassandra, but if it isn't too much bother, would you mind telling me how this—this Oracle happened? I mean, what the hell is she? Where did she come from?"
"You really don't know?" the old man asked him. "No, I forgot, you wouldn't, of course. I imagine you majored in business administration, or salesmanship, or art appreciation at that educational cafeteria you attended."
Like uncle, like niece, Eliot thought savagely, remembering Julia's taunts the night before. You'd think I was some kind of a savage because I didn't go to Harvard. For a moment he was tempted to walk out, but his need and desperation were too great; and, too, for the first time in their association, he told himself he could sense something different from the cold, mocking hostility with which the old man normally treated him, as if Eliot had advanced from the status of outsider to that of bungling, inferior relative, but nonetheless relative. Or perhaps to the status of a large, stupid, clumsy dog with annoying habits, but still not completely outside.
"The Cumaean Sibyl," Uncle John went on, "as you would know if you had been given a decent education, was believed to be immortal. Originally, she was a young priestess of Apollo, and the god spoke through her lips when she was in a trance and foretold the future to those who asked. There were half a dozen such priestesses operating, but the one
at Cumae took the fancy of the god Apollo and he gave her two presents—the gift of prophecy and immortality. Like any other mortal suitor, he was fatuously in love—but not completely so: when he caught his girl friend out on the grass one night with a local fisherman, he couldn't take away the gifts he had granted her, but he had wisely held back on giving her eternal youth to go along with immortality. And just to make sure there would be no more young fishermen, he reduced her to the size of a large mouse, shut her up in a box and turned her over to the priests of the temple to use for all eternity."
"You believe all this hogwash?"
Uncle John almost shrugged. There was too much uncertainty in the gesture for it to have been called a definite movement.
"I don't know really. There is a story in Livy that the second king of Rome talked with the immortal oracle at Cumae, and that was around 700 B.C. And then a contemporary reference in Petronius seven or eight hundred years after indicates that the same person, or maybe creature, was alive in his day, still functioning. I've tried to find out on several occasions, to go beyond the myths, but each time I get a reply that only confuses me more. Maybe she fell from the sky and couldn't get back. Maybe you'd feel more scientific and rational if I talked in terms of slipping over from another continuum, another frame of illusion, some other . . ."
"Oh, Christ, cut the crap," Eliot said under his breath. Then aloud, "What is it inside—a cockroach, a mouse, or what? How do you do the writing trick? Is it like the old money machine?"
"As long as you don't open the top and try to find out, and as long as it tells you what will be, what does it matter? If you find it more comforting to believe I'm a trainer of rodents or lice, or am lapsing into senility, then do so. Or if your conception of the universe is too limited to accept a miracle—from Mars or the Moon, or the past or the future, or wherever—then leave it by all means, and we'll both consider this visit fruitless. All I can tell you is that I bought it a few years ago somewhere between Cumae and the ruins of Pompeii, that I got it cheap, and that I've seen it work. 'La vecchia religione'—the old religion, the man said, and he wanted a quick sale—probably dug it up illegally."
The old kook really believes it, Eliot thought. He found himself looking at the older man with growing disquiet. Not for a moment did he believe that within the doll-house was the Oracle of Pompeii or Cumae or wherever the hell it came from; but the old man seemed convinced of it, and he had learned not to underestimate the old man. Could it be? Had the night suddenly opened like a giant mouth, just beyond his peripheral range of understanding, and belched forth a genuine miracle? He decided to go along with the weird . . .
"Look," Eliot said suddenly. "I believe you about the money. You just have the pension and annuity. Otherwise you're broke; and so am I. But will you sell it to me? I can't pay now, but if this thing works, I'll have plenty, I've got some angles figured out already. Just put a price on it."
"No," the old man said. "Just take it as a delayed wedding present. You can have it. I know all I want about the future at my age. Like a fool, last year I asked it how long I would live—and it's not pleasant to know."
Uncle John Wardell paused and looked at Eliot with an odd expression. It was a very brief pause and a moment later the old man had resumed his normal controlled and guarded look; but in that transitory second Eliot, impervious as he usually was to other people's unexpressed feelings, had read the cold despairing hatred of someone who is going to die for someone who is going to live.
"Go on, take it," the old man continued. "Just remember to feed the Oracle every night, milk and honey. Don't open the top of the house. She doesn't like to be disturbed or looked at. Leave your question at night, but don't expect an answer until the morning. Don't try to rush her."
"I really appreciate this," Eliot said.
"Nothing at all," the old man replied, smiling oddly. "Don't thank me yet. You can show yourself out, I imagine."
When Eliot got home, he was surprised to find that Julia was rather touched that he had visited Uncle John on his own. She was warm and affectionate, and it was not until late at night that he was able to go quietly out to the car, while she slept, and take the doll-house down to the little plyboard room in the cellar that was his undisturbed private study.
On Monday he took the slip of paper to the public library and asked for a translation. In the ensuing days he made ten phone calls unavailingly, while the World Series became locked at three games apiece and the bookmakers' odds fluctuated wildly. Finally, two days after the end of the Series, the slip of paper got to a reference librarian who had majored in zoology as an undergraduate. Fringillidae, Eliot was told, was a genus of birds of which the North American cardinal was among the best known.
He stood there, scratching his head, two days too late to collect on the victory of the St. Louis Cardinals. It was then that he realized that the predictions of the Oracle were sometimes too obscure to be of value, sometimes too late to profit by.
In the next weeks he tested the Oracle, each night faithfully putting out the bowl of milk and honey, each morning, when he had left a question, patiently pulling out the answer. He was becoming satisfied with the tests.
In late October he asked the Oracle who would win the presidential election and got the answer: filius Johanni victor est. By that time he had invested in a Latin dictionary and had no difficulty in translating the less than elegant Latin (after all, the Oracle was Greek by birth), "The son of John is the victor," a day or so before he read the headlines, "Johnson Landslide."
But he was still cautious. The next week he asked the Oracle whether he should buy Space Industries, Ltd., of Canada, selling at two cents a share. The two words "caveat emptor," warned him off, so that it was with little surprise that he read the next month that the shares had dropped to nothing and that the officers of the company had been indicted.
As a last test, he asked the Oracle when John Wardell would die. He was still looking at the reply, "ille fuit," when the long-distance call for Julia told them that the old man had died that night in his sleep. Poor old boy, Eliot thought as he sat through the interminable funeral services. We had our quarrels, but at the end I guess he was coming around to like me after all. He wanted to do me a favor—at last.
One of the best clients of the bank, and a man whom Jim Eliot had dealt with for five years, was in the undyed cloth end of the textile business. To hear Max Siegal tell it, it seemed relatively simple: You bought up a lot of undyed cloth—often on credit—you figured what colors would be in fashion in the coming season, then you had your cloth dyed and resold at a profit. But it was a lot more complicated and dangerous than that. If you guessed wrong, you could be left with a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of cloth dyed the wrong colors. If that happened, you could hold it, paying storage costs, for years until the colors came in again; you could sell it at a loss; or you could have it redyed and hope to God that the cost of redying wouldn't put you out of business. Max Siegal had shown an uncanny knack of anticipating the fashionable colors, and the bank had been glad to give him short-term loans, since they had always been repaid before they became due.
"All right, Max," Jim Eliot said over the second luncheon martini, "there'll be no trouble over the loan. You know your credit's good. By the way, what's the color this year?"
"You thinking of taking a flyer, Jim? Forget it, you get paid regularly every two weeks. Bank your money."
"It's just so I can give Julia a little fashion preview."
"Well, I'm going forest green, one hundred per cent."
That night Eliot asked the Oracle the question and in the morning had the answer, "ex Tyre ad Caesarem." It was easy enough to read—"from Tyre to Caesar"—but it didn't make sense to him. He tried the library again, and this time learned in ten minutes that the city of Tyre manufactured a rare purple dye that was reserved for the Roman emperors.
Jim Eliot handled a few investment accounts, and the best of them was about $500,000 owned by an out-o
f-town spinster whom he rarely saw, an elderly woman who usually left matters entirely in the hands of the bank provided the returns remained at a level of better than five per cent. At any given time, about a tenth of the estate was in savings accounts waiting to be transferred into a more profitable investment; another tenth was in cash in a safe deposit box, as the old lady insisted. It was the first time for Eliot, and his hands were sweating as he took $10,000 from the safe deposit box.
With the cash, he bought $10,000 worth of undyed cloth and then arranged with a dyer for thirty days' credit. When he specified the color—royal purple—the man looked at him as if he wanted to cancel the agreement. But Eliot was beyond fear by now. "Purple," he said, "royal purple, all of it."
It was the next week when Max Siegal called him for lunch.
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