Reflections of a beginning husband

By Edward Sandford Martin

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Title: Reflections of a beginning husband

Author: Edward Sandford Martin


        
Release date: April 17, 2026 [eBook #78473]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1913

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND ***




  REFLECTIONS OF
  A BEGINNING HUSBAND

  BY
  EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN

  AUTHOR OF
  “THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN”
  “LUCID INTERVALS,” ETC.

  [Illustration]

  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
  NEW YORK AND LONDON
  MCMXIII




  COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  PUBLISHED APRIL, 1913




CONTENTS


  CHAP.                                                   PAGE

  I. BY THE SECOND INTENTION                                 1

  II. SOME DETAILS OF LIVING                                27

  III. COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT                          52

  IV. THE BABY                                              73

  V. A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE                        94

  VI. POLITICS                                             116

  VII. WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION                   125

  VIII. MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE                               146




  REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING
  HUSBAND




  REFLECTIONS OF
  A BEGINNING HUSBAND




I

BY THE SECOND INTENTION


“Dear Mr. French,” my letter began, “Cordelia and I have a mind again
to get married. But having once been engaged and quit, we have no mind
at all to be engaged again and divulge it. Would you mind, please, you
and Mrs. French, if we eloped? It seems so much the more feasible and
private way.”

I would rather have broken it to him by word of mouth, but for some
things it is written words or none. If you have determined to elope
with a man’s daughter you can’t very well go and ask leave of him.
Suppose he objects! Of course he will object, especially after
consulting his wife. The only way, if you propose to consult him at
all, is to write, and mail the letter on the way to the church and come
back to the house afterward for the answer.

Cordelia felt she just couldn’t be publicly engaged to me again. Of
course I didn’t mind. I think meanly of the engaged state _per se_, but
I had always rather be engaged to Cordelia than not. But that was only
because I had always wanted to marry her, and had been glad to throw
any convenient obstacle, even an engagement, in the way of her marrying
any one else. The thing that had bothered me was to have the engagement
end without our being married. I wanted to have it die a natural death
in church, with flowers and a minister, and it had irked me very sore
indeed to be “released” like a baseball-player before the end of the
season. It left me on a miserably awkward footing with the rest of the
world and with her, and it left her in the same case. Nobody quite
knew whether to congratulate either of us on getting rid of the other.
People naturally wanted to know why, and of course you can’t tell in
the newspaper. It was awkward for our families. There was a feeling
that they ought to quarrel, because somebody must be to blame, and the
other side ought to resent it. But they didn’t want to quarrel, and
wouldn’t; not even a little, to keep up appearances. They held their
tongues and went on about their business as before, but inevitably
flocked more apart than they had been wont to do, because when they met
it excited too much interest.

I don’t mean that they were such conspicuous people that the London
papers had cables about them. It was only that when Mrs. Fessenden
or Mrs. Somebody Else got home from the Jenkinses’ tea she told her
family, and whomever she had to dinner, that Mrs. French and Harriet
and Mrs. Jesup were at the Jenkinses’ and spoke, as they passed, as
politely as though nothing had happened. And then would follow a little
chattering tribute of discourse about Cordelia French and Peregrine
Jesup, and why did they break their engagement, anyway!

Not that my family, or Cordelia’s, got direct reports of what was
said at Mrs. Fessenden’s dinner-table. They didn’t; at least, not
often. But they knew what must have been said, and families don’t like
to be subjects of speculation or of critical or even compassionate
observation. They can bear the eye of approval, of admiration, and
even of a moderate envy, but what family likes to have the Fessendens,
the Jenkinses, the Underharrows, the Overtons, and the rest of the
families getting their heads together to swap surmises as to what the
Frenches and the Jesups have got in their closet!

Maybe you’d like to know why Cordelia and I loosed hands after our
intentions had been six months on file. In this private way why should
I not explain that it was not so much the fault of either of us as of
the conditions of life as we found them. You see, I was twenty-three,
and Cordelia was two years younger. I was studying the profession
in which I hope to be useful in my day and generation, and by the
practice of which I hope to derive a respectable maintenance from a
contributory world, which Cordelia was already inspecting. That’s what
she was doing. She was out of school and looking about, shifting from
continent to continent to get a better view; getting acquainted with
people and things, ascertaining whom and what she liked and what places
seemed more joyous to her than others. What for so much inspection
and investigation to prepare her for a destiny already measured off,
tied up, and waiting to be called for? If she had been in college,
she might possibly have kept. I don’t know what are the merits of the
women’s colleges as depositories for engaged girls, but they may have
a value for that use. But a roving life of enlargement by travel and
social experience has no such value at all. There was I, tied up to
professional studies, on such allowances as my indulgent parents could
afford me without too gross injustice to their own family life and
their obligations to their other dependents. And there was Cordelia,
diligently qualifying herself to live creditably and profitably on an
income of from twelve thousand a year up.

You might suppose that ordinary precautions would have been taken to
prevent her from seeing much of a person so unsuited to her needs as
I, but they were not. There was nothing against me: I had no criminal
record, did not drink much, was of respectable origin, had known
Cordelia a long time already, and was such a person, in a general way,
as she might properly enough marry sometime, if circumstances suited.
Cordelia came out, and went to dances and dinners. She had to dance
with somebody. Male persons of the dancing age and disposition with
incomes of from twelve thousand up are rather scarce. Dances cannot
be equipped with such alone: neither can dinners. So Cordelia danced
with anybody who asked her soon enough, and that was often me; and
she ate her dinner alongside of whoever was put next to her, and that
was sometimes me. And when it wasn’t me I wished it was; and so what
happened, happened all in natural course and according to reasonable
expectation, and nobody ventured to disprove, though doubtless there
was a fair volume of conjecture as to whose money Cordelia French and
Peregrine Jesup proposed to get married on. But we had not selected
anybody to underwrite our prospective happiness. We had not got so
far as that. We had just got irresponsibly engaged, according to the
American plan and the spontaneous promptings of youth and affection.

What about our current American practice of turning most of the girls
loose from school at eighteen or nineteen and keeping most of the
youths, who are their natural mates, tied up to professional studies
or business apprenticeships four or five years longer, and letting
them play together meanwhile, and expecting them to shape their own
destinies on practical and satisfactory lines? Isn’t a good deal
expected of us young people, all tinder, sparks, and indiscretion? The
French, they tell me, expect less and provide more. I have thought a
good deal of these concerns since Cordelia and I were first engaged
and found our intentions unseasonable. Of course, I wanted to be
considered in Cordelia’s plans and deportment; wanted, naturally, to
have her stay around where I could see her at recess and on Sundays
and other holidays, and perhaps meet her at festive gatherings when
the urgency of my studies permitted me to get to them. I liked to
have her around handy, but of course I could not interdict her from
going about, or even from going beyond the seas when it suited her
parents to take her. I could say that she had already seen as much
of the world and the people in it as was necessary, but how was I
to insist that, while I was cultivating and improving my abilities
all I knew how, Cordelia should let most of hers lie fallow and mark
time and wait? If she had only had a steady job to work at in the
intermission while I was qualifying myself to work at mine, things
might have worked out serenely; but the only job she had was to get
married, and meanwhile to cheer and satisfy her parents, and try to
be worth her keep to them while she was making acquaintance with the
world. Marriage seems to be a complete occupation (circumstances being
favorable), but being engaged isn’t. It’s just a makeshift, delightful
for six weeks, very suitable for three months, and tolerable for six;
but when it contemplates indefinite extension into uncertain years it
is an asset of very doubtful value to a girl in active social life.
When the Frenches found that Cordelia seemed to be losing interest in
affairs, was indifferent to dances and dinners, was apt to be abandoned
by mankind to the society of chaperones, was getting left out of
house-parties that I could not go to, was gently indisposed to put the
sea or any wide expanse of land between herself and me, and was rather
aggravated than appeased by the little she could see of me when I was
near, they said--the parents did: “This isn’t working to much of a
charm! Nobody is ahead on it, and we are getting behind. Cordelia’s no
fun any more, and there is no end of it in sight.”

And soon after Cordelia and I called our engagement off, much to our
grief and with the sympathy of our elders. I advised her to put me
down to the account of experience, and try to figure out a profit on
me, if she could. But I never put her down to account of anything,
being of just the same mind about her that I always had been, though
grievously put out to leave her blooming on the paternal bush without
any “hands-off” sign on her, protected only by her natural thorns.

There was a line in the paper to say the engagement was off, Cordelia
went abroad again, I continued my studies, and time went on. It does go
on somehow; the trick is to keep on going with it. Who does that, gets
somewhere in spite of impediments, lacerations of the affections, and
all misgivings about the possibility of there being a gap anywhere in
the procession of self-supporters that a new aspirant can fit himself
into. I have been called “sensible.” It seems a painfully tame thing
to be, and I presume I was called so by way of disparagement. But,
after all, there are times when there is no choice but between being
sensible and being silly, and then you have just got to be sensible if
you can, no matter how it tastes. Being sensible, while one is working
to get a start in life, must be excused, because it is the price of
adventure, indiscretion, speculation--all the really glorious and
spectacular parts of human existence.

Three years I was sensible and plugged away at my job, learning the
rudiments and then the application of them. All that time I had never
a word with Cordelia. How could I? I could not go on where I left off,
and unless, or until, I could do that, how could I go on at all? Sight
of her I did have now and then, but seldom; for, though she was often
in town and I nearly always there, our occupations usually kept us from
accidental meetings. We didn’t travel the same beats.

I finished my professional studies, sustained the tests provided to
measure my proficiency, and got a job in an office with a small salary
and some prospects. Candor requires that I admit that I passed those
examinations pretty well, for really I had not spared work in the long
preparation for them.

And the job I got was a good one as beginners’ jobs go, and the
prospects were as good, so far as I could see, as the prospects of
anybody of my time of life and in my line of endeavor. So I didn’t see
why, barring accidents, I should not get somewhere presently.

So the months sped. Coming early up-town on a late October day, I got
into a pay-as-you-enter car at Forty-second Street, and there was
Cordelia, alone and with a seat vacant beside her, which I took.

“This is a fine day,” said I, “and you become it very much, and I hope
you have good health?”

“Oh yes,” said Cordelia.

“And good spirits?” said I.

“Oh yes;” but she said it more doubtfully and with no more than a
languid affirmation.

“And I hope that sport is good,” said I; and she assented to that,
but in a way that suggested that it might be more boisterously
satisfactory. And with that we fell into discourse, trifling but
easy, and that progressed in its tone from easy to friendly, and from
friendly to old-friendly. And I let the car pass Fifty-fourth Street
and pretended to myself I was going to Fifty-ninth, and let it pass
Fifty-ninth and pretended nothing further to myself. It wasn’t until
some days later that I learned that her intended destination was
Fifty-seventh Street. As it was, while rolling through the Sixties
we each cautiously discovered that we were bound for the Museum at
Eighty-second Street, and there we got off; and since it was, as I
pointed out to her, too lovely an autumn day to go indoors, we went
and sat down in the Park instead, and there, a little off the track
of passers-by, fell into discussion of the conditions of contemporary
existence.

“Cordelia,” said I, “are you having any fun?”

She meditated a moment. Three years is a long time in the early
twenties, and Cordelia had grown perceptibly thoughtfuler since she and
I left off.

“Fun? Oh yes, I have _some_. It has been a pleasant summer. We went
abroad in the spring, and it was nice in the country after we got home.
People were sometimes interesting; some of the books were good to read;
I liked the flowers in the garden, and I liked to ride a horse, and
sometimes motoring was pleasant, and the swimming and the sailing.”

I confess that my heart settled back a bit at this list of profitable
occupations. “Are you marrying any one this fall, Cordelia?” said I.
“Have you an interesting line of suitors now? Or can it be that being
well off you have the unusual discretion to realize it?”

“Oh, I realize it; yes, a good deal. But I am only temporarily well
off.”

“What’s the matter? Father’s stocks look shaky to you?”

“Oh no. Father doesn’t seem anxious.”

“Suitors, maybe. Perhaps you feel yourself near capitulation?”

“Possibly! But I have not diagnosed it so.”

“Down there where you spend your summers there are stock-brokers
growing on every bush, and the stock-brokers, you know, Cordelia, are
the only _young_ men--except the hereditary rich--who have money enough
to get married on.”

“Why didn’t you turn to that yourself, Peregrine?”

“I? Bless you! I never had a chance. Nobody ever seemed to see the
making of a stock-broker in me. And besides--well, I confess I have
never felt drawn to that vocation. I would like uncommonly well to
earn plenty of money, and I mean to, sometime; but I’d rather have the
pay seem more like an incident of my job than have my job an incident
of my pay.”

“I’m afraid you are not a really earnest money-maker, Peregrine?”

“Just wait till I get a chance to throw in my clutch; then you’ll
see! And I’ll soon begin to get it now! But if you think well of the
stock-broker calling, Cordelia, there was Archibald Tassel. I heard of
him as having the discernment to be your warm admirer; and a wholesome,
hearty young man too, and well found. And yet you seem never to have
smiled on him?”

“So?”

“It must be you don’t care for a sporting life. Well, I am only
moderately drawn to it myself. You have to work so hard and pay so
high for what you get, and it’s so hard on the tissues, and you get
so little in the end. But there was that cheerful young Van Terminal,
Cordelia; pockets bulging with ancestral coin; nice manners, immense
energy, large appetite for pleasure, four or five automobiles in his
garage, and a private tank of gasolene with a pipe-line connection
with Hunters Point. If there is an eligible young man about, it is
Corlear Van Terminal, and yet, Cordelia--”

“Mercy, Peregrine, would you have me marry him?”

“Oh no! By no means. No! No! I never was the least keen to have you.
But why didn’t you?”

“Why should I?”

“Everything money can buy, and not such a bad encumbrance. Amiable
young man enough, and you with your great qualifications for
companionship and direction might have kept him out of serious
mischief all his days. I don’t say you could have done it, but it was
conceivably possible.”

“He’s very nice and so jocund. Mother and I were much pleased with
him--are still. I don’t know what efforts I should have made if it
hadn’t been for father.”

“What did _he_ say?”

“I hardly like to tell you!”

“Oh yes, do!”

“He said: ‘Good God! Cordelia. Not that one! Wait, and perhaps you may
catch a _man_! Leave those joyous natures to marry chorus girls,’
he said, and told me I was built for something better than to be the
ballast for a joy-rider’s motor-car. That’s just like father. He’s not
very practical. But it flattered me, and I didn’t try after that.”

“Poor girl! What a father! What a tremendous handicap parents are,
anyway!”

“You needn’t complain of father. That was the only time he meddled.
He has done his best for me. He knows admirable young men! ‘Father’s
friends,’ I call them. Somehow they never make up to me. But I’m
improving; I know I am. I think so much my hair is coming out, and the
day may come when I shall find grace in the eyes of one of ‘father’s
friends.’”

“Oh no! Cordelia, don’t! I have a better plan for you. I know such a
good young man, who has needed you with gnawing destitution, night and
day going on four years.”

“How interesting! The poor young man! Destitute of me and I suppose
of all the other goods of this world, and mortgaged besides for the
support of his aged grandmother! I beg you, Peregrine, not to attempt
to entangle me with impossible good young men. Life is too fleeting.
The American spring is too short. All in a minute is it summer, and
to-morrow comes Fourth of July and haytime, and we are cut down and
cast into the oven.”

“Well, dear Cordelia, take a broker--take a broker! Or some nice old
gentleman; or a widower or something, with ready-made shekels strung on
him!”

“Don’t be unkind to me, Peregrine!”

“Oh, well--I was telling you--where was I? You put me all out when
you speak like that. Oh yes--the good young destitute man! Well, the
good young man has no grandmother to support--only himself as yet, and
can do that, by George! And it’s time; he’s rising twenty-seven. And
his prospects are not bad now. And if he could manage to get married
they’d be better; they’d have to be. You see, we have to get one thing
at a time, and I’ve known awful cases--even I in my short experience
have observed them--of men who waited until they had got a good living
before they got married, and found, when they got ready to get a wife,
that their minds had been on other things so long that they had clean
forgotten how. That’s awful, isn’t it? It happens all the time. I
see it at the clubs. I don’t want it to happen to--to the good young
semi-destitute man I had in mind.”

“Oh no, Peregrine; surely not. It’s an awful thought; awful! But yet,
suppose he got the girl, what--”

“What costs so dreadfully much, Cordelia? I know of quite a decent
flat for fifty dollars a month; a nice flat over a tailor shop, and
not in Harlem either--not twenty blocks from where we’re sitting.
And for three dollars a day you can get food enough for two or three
persons--eggs not superlatively fresh, perhaps, but eggs--and for a
dollar a day you can hire a very good servant, and that’s only a little
more than forty dollars a week; and a good young man of twenty-seven,
with four or five years of hard work behind him, who can’t see his way
to lay his hands on at least sixty dollars a week isn’t good enough for
you. But sixty would about do it, Cordelia. Sixty plunks is a great
deal of money--a whole lot of money to earn--but not an unattainable
wage; not one that a diligent and competent trained hand need consider
the limit of his aspirations--no, not in a city like this with a
traction company to be supported, and eighty million people in the
back country to help pay five millions of us for living here.”

“You are a more calculating person than you used to be, Peregrine. When
did you work all that out? And suppose it were possible to live on
sixty dollars a week, what makes you think it would pay to do it, and
why do most people of our habits think they need so very much more?”

“The trouble with them is they haven’t been emancipated. The things
that cost are amusement and social aspirations. If you can cut those
out for a time, living is not so impossibly dear. But stupid people
can’t do it, and unemancipated people don’t dare to.”

“Unemancipated? Unemancipated! Unemancipated from what, Peregrine?”

“From _things_, Cordelia, and the habit of needing them in superfluous
quantity; from the standards of living set by people who are poor on
fifty thousand a year; from the idea of life that is based on what you
have got; from automobiles, and expensive sports, and boxes at the
opera; from the notion that it is essential to keep in the swim, and
know only the right people; from pleasures and from people that waste
time and money and give nothing back that is worth having.”

“My! Peregrine! When did you turn anarchist?”

“Not long after our engagement was broken. I loved you, Cordelia,
that’s the truth, and I hated everything that broke it. I learned to
see that there was no obstacle between you and me that a little time
and hard work could not easily overcome, and that the obstacles that
looked biggest and blackest had no real substance to them, and could be
brushed aside whenever we were ready and had the grit to do it. Don’t
cry, Cordelia! If you let me hold your hand again, I don’t think any
one would notice.”

“I was--I wasn’t crying, Peregrine. I--I was--only thinking!”

“Don’t cry! Because this is such a delightful world for folks who are
free and can work, and have the courage to shape their own courses. It
looks all lovely colors to me, with you here--so much to get and such
an interesting stunt to get to it; so much to do, and such inspirations
for the doing of it; such excellent loads to lift at and maybe
shoulder. Think, Cordelia, think by all means! That is the most fun
there is, and the most we shall either of us get for some time to come
if you marry me on sixty dollars a week. Oh dear! There were times when
I feared you weren’t going to wait! Those were the worst pinches of the
pull. To get tired and have no heart of refuge to fly to--you know that
is pretty trying, Cordelia.”

“I know, Peregrine. And to wait with folded hands and not know--it
tries the faith. A bunch of roses on my birthday, a bunch of roses on
Christmas morning, not a line with either of them! Oh, Peregrine!”

“There! Nobody saw us but the squirrel! ‘Far out of sight, while
sorrows still enfold us, lies the fair country where our hearts abide.’
Do you know that hymn, Cordelia? There were days together when it ran
in my head. It meant heaven to whoever wrote it, but to me it meant a
fifty-dollar-a-month flat and you.”

“Don’t cry, Peregrine!”

“I wasn’t crying. But you must allow a man some sentiment. Are you game
for the flat and sixty dollars a week?”

“Let us look at the flat. I hope all the rooms are not cupboards. Do
you know that my aunt just passed on the drive in a victoria? Gracious!
I have just time to get home before dark and dinner.”

That was the substance of the discourse we had that autumn day. I never
mailed that letter I wrote to Cordelia’s father. We concluded that it
would not be polite to our parents to elope, and, since we both had
very indulgent parents, what was the use! So I broke it to the old
man, and he was quite reasonable and let me stay to dinner, and we had
champagne. And Cordelia’s mother was kind, too, and though she declared
that I was as bad a match as any worldly-wise woman could ask for, she
felt that Cordelia had come as nearly to years of marital discretion
as women who get married ever come, and that it was certainly time she
knew whether I was the ineligible man she wanted or not.

So I told my own parents, too, and my father smiled and said more
marriages hereabouts seemed to be spoiled nowadays by too much money
than by too little; and my mother shed some tears, but they were not
tears of discontent. She has begun to be interested in my trousseau,
and keeps suggesting things that I had better buy and have charged to
Father, and I hear of her being seen in the neighborhood of auction
shops where they sell furniture, and she has counseled me by no means
to trench upon Great-aunt Susan’s legacy, which constitutes the total
sum of my private fortune. It is not a large legacy, and how I shall
ever add anything to it, except Cordelia, I cannot imagine; but I am
going to somehow, and meanwhile Cordelia will be an immense asset and
make me a rich man at the start.

Perhaps Aunt Susan’s legacy will start on its career as the total
fortune of a married man by a period of depletion; for the truth is
I am not taking in the whole of sixty dollars a week at the present
juncture. It is no great income to command at twenty-seven if one
has begun his money-getting at seventeen, but it is a great deal for
any one of that age who has spent three or four years in general
enlargement of the ideas and experiences in a college and three or four
more in learning how to do something that will support life.

I observe that elders are fairly willing to abet the young in getting
married if only the adventurers are positively enough set on the
adventure and have the courage of their intentions. The thing that the
wiser elders won’t do if they can help it is to take responsibility
about the intending parties being pleased with their bargain. For the
rest, unless the adventure is _too_ rash or premature, or they have
violent personal objections, the elders, as far as I see, are apt to be
complaisant, and even to push along an affair that is clearly at the
stage where it is safe to push it.

The cards are out for three weeks from next Thursday. It was the first
our friends in general heard of it, which was as it should be. The flat
is hired, and yesterday I got my pay raised five a week. Where there’s
a will there’s a way to break it, the lawyers say, but Cordelia and I
have passed through that once, and our will is going to probate this
time.

I am thinking about what we shall talk about, for talk will have to be
our main reliance for entertainment. There’s a fireplace in the flat,
and I dare say I shall be seen going home dragging boards and boxes
after me like the children one sees in the street, for I don’t know
how we shall afford any wood for that fireplace. Wood, I understand,
is dear. Never mind; we shall have a fire and sit before it, and talk
about everything--about votes for women (which I don’t want, though it
matters little), whether we ought to be abstainers (I’d rather not, but
it matters little), whether the good English are played out, about the
future of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, whether it
isn’t time for the Democrats to shelve Thomas Jefferson and get a new
prophet, whether Tammany will ever be killed permanently dead and what
then, whether the People have got any sense, whether legislation has an
important effect upon divorce, whether the Americans are too much bent
on substituting legislation for character, and all those things that
one thinks about.

I wonder if she will be willing to talk about those things! Very likely
she won’t. It will be more prudent, I think, not to let her see the
catalogue of them beforehand. Unless brought up to them gently she
might shy. One talks, I find, to another person a good deal according
to what is in the other person’s mind.

And for a change we can gossip, and extenuate our neighbor’s faults,
first agreeing what they are, which always is a pleasant exercise. And
when somebody makes a good book with real meat in it, well served--if
any one should--we can read it, and that’s fun, and cheap, and will
make more talk. And charities are interesting if one goes at them right
(and cheap as things go), and so are politics.

It is such an interesting world if you get the hang at all of what is
going on in it, and why, and whither things are tending! I do love to
see it roll along and to try to puzzle out why things happen as they
do. It will be fun to talk to Cordelia about all these matters. What
is there about a woman’s mind--if it is a fairly good one--that it is
so extraordinarily stimulating to a man’s mind, so that when you’re
too tired to talk to a man you can chatter on amazingly to a woman,
provided she’s the right one! They beat drink; they certainly do! They
are the great natural stimulant and tonic for mankind.




II

SOME DETAILS OF LIVING


Cordelia and I duly got married (see the newspaper a piece back)
and are still married, and, speaking for myself and, as far as
observation enables me, for Cordelia, we are still pleased with our
audacious experiment. But why should I call it audacious? I am more
and more impressed, so far, with the calculating prudence of it, and
surely sensible observers must agree with me, and for ten who will
think we were rash to get married on sixty dollars a week there will
be hundreds, certainly, who will smile at the idea of that being a
doubtful income to marry on.

Our maid, Matilda Finn, is a person of considerable talent. I doubt
whether two people who aim to subsist on sixty dollars a week
are entitled to have a maid at all. I dare say they belong in a
boarding-house, or else in a flat where they do their own work and
put at least fifty dollars in the bank the first of every month. Oh,
delightful thought! Imagine being six hundred dollars to the good at
the end of the year, and putting it into some safe gamble that would
be the corner-stone of a competence! And if I had only courted Matilda
Finn instead of Cordelia it would have been so easy! Do you remember
Andrew Cannybee and his first investment in Pullman? But he was living
with his mother then and had few expenses. I suppose the money-savers
are folks who go without everything they want except money until they
cease to want it. That would have been all right if I had wanted
Matilda Finn. I know I could have held myself down to self-denial until
I could really afford to marry, and by that time I should have got
over wanting Matilda. Whereas I never could endure the thought of not
wanting Cordelia. I am afraid the Cannybee strain in me isn’t strong
enough to do any good. I seem to like life while it is here.

All the same I like Matilda, who is part of life at these presents,
and so does Cordelia. Matilda is cheerful, she is clean and indulgent,
and she can cook. When food is scarce and dear and you have to have
it, you don’t want to have it fooled with by the wasteful or the
inexpert. The little that man wants here below he has to have two or
three times a day, and it does make a difference how it is fixed up for
him. Consider the staples of nourishment--bread, toast, tea, coffee,
bacon, eggs, chickens, chops, beefsteak, fish, codfish, oysters,
clams, lettuce, rice, beans, milk, and the package foods that some of
us eat for breakfast to divert our minds from diet! How various are
the dealings of the human mind and hand with these simple alimentary
provisions! What grace or defect of human character is there that
cannot find its demonstration in the way an egg is dropped on toast!
There is as much difference in toast as there is in people; there is a
great native difference in eggs, and much individuality; no two slabs
of bacon are alike to start with, or are affected quite the same by
smoke and other processes of education. When it comes to coffee, what a
problem! Leaving out all the coffee that is not coffee at all, consider
the horde of coffees that _are_ coffee; their propensity to masquerade
under names that do not belong to them, to be blended, and to taste
unexpectedly every time you get a new lot!

But give the coffees their due. Nearly all of them are good. It is only
that some of them are enough better than others to interest an aspiring
spirit which reaches out instinctively in the direction of the highest
good for the money. Such a spirit will early recognize that, food being
variable, the mind that prepares it should be constant and sagacious in
its processes.

I would not have you suppose I am an epicure. I never think much about
food unless it is not so good as I think it ought to be, all things
considered; or else is better than I expected. There needs to be some
standard of nourishment in a family, and in our family of three it
has to be adjusted to an expenditure of three dollars a day. Cordelia
says that I contribute the standard and the dollars and leave her to
furnish the adjustment. That is where Matilda Finn comes in. I asked
Mrs. French once if Cordelia could cook--asked her quite casually, and
not, of course, as though it was of any consequence. She said yes,
that every woman could cook, and that Cordelia could, of course, and
that the question was whether any man could live off her cooking. She
has taken cooking lessons since then and courses in Domestic Science,
which includes cooking, and I think she can do it. But cooking is an
agitating job, and I don’t like to have Cordelia agitated. Nor is
there any need. I like better to have her stick to her own profession,
which is ministering to happiness. I suppose they don’t teach that in
the domestic-science courses. Cordelia ministers to Matilda Finn’s
happiness, and Matilda cooks and does all the other things that need
to be done in a flat, except what Cordelia and I do; and Cordelia
ministers to my happiness remarkably. All sorts and conditions of folks
Cordelia ministers to: she has captivated her mother’s market-man,
with whom she talks meat, poultry, fish, politics, and current events
every morning. She knows all his reasons for the high price of meat.
“That man,” she said the other day, “can bamboozle me into anything!”
Nevertheless, she seems to be getting intimately acquainted with the
butcher business and the anatomy of the animals on which we elect to
subsist, and the comparative cost and edibleness of their various
sections. The spring lamb that we had for dinner the day Caseby dined
with us was “a bargain I got off of Mr. Cooper,” who had an oversupply
of fore quarters and sold one at a great reduction to young Mrs. Jesup.
As a rule, we do not subsist on spring lamb at home in the spring. That
seems to be a favorite dinner-party provision, and we still dine out
enough to keep up our acquaintance with it. The “lamb” we have is the
most neutral of all meats, unexciting, but sufficient for the purpose
of nourishment.

Cordelia sings at her work, and that makes me think she must like the
life. Perhaps I should say her employments rather than her work. Being
away all day, I don’t know very much about them, but at least I hear
her singing while she is putting up her hair.

This matter of woman’s work looks important. I wonder what they do
all day--girls, that is, like Cordelia. If she had a job it would
simplify matters, particularly if it was a remunerated job, for I dare
say Cordelia would spend more money if she had it. _I_ could. But it
would have to be some kind of an independent home job, like painting
or writing or taking in washing. If she went out to work and had any
boss but me, it would not be tolerable. Moreover, if she had a job that
she was qualified for and was worthy of her talents, she would probably
be better at it than I am at mine and earn more at it than I do, and
then where would I come in! Think of us both coming home tired from
wage-earning! Awful! I am glad she has no job except, as I said before,
the great one of ministering to happiness. I seem to be just a poor
old-fashioned monopolist, not much farther along than the Stone Age.

But she does keep busy in a way. I hear of her making calls--though
she says calls are a queer employment for a lady who lives over a
tailor shop--and she goes to see her mother, and my mother, and various
girls, and goes to market, and sews a little and reads a little and
does charities a good deal, and has girls in to lunch and feeds them on
I don’t know what. She says it’s not wise to break with the life you
know any more than you have to, and of course that’s so; though neither
is it wise to hang on to the life you know when you can’t afford it.
The life you know isn’t the only good one even for you. I have come
to feel that tremendously since I turned anarchist--to feel that life
is a big thing, a bully thing, and that we are fools to cramp it and
trim it down too much to fit usage and environment. Friends are very
valuable, acquaintance is valuable, a standard of living and a set of
associations when once you are used to them are very hard to shift
from; but all those things are the accessories of life rather than life
itself, and it seems a chicken-hearted sort of prudence that would
sacrifice life to its accessories.

This from a man who is as sensitive as I am to the differences in
dropped eggs, and feels as strongly as I do about fish-balls and bacon,
and who likes caviare when it is really good, and alligator-pears, and
pâtés of goose-livers, may sound a little forced; but must it follow
that because one sees and admires the trees he cannot see the forest?

Yes, I am glad Cordelia has no money-making job, but I suppose that
is no argument against such employments for women in general who need
them. _I_, being so gifted in money-getting and commanding the income
I do, did not need to have my labors supplemented in the wage-earning
line. _My_ need was for assistance in spending our money.

By the way, as I meditate on money and my large appetite for it
and the ways of getting it, it occurs to me that there is a new
profession--muck-raking. Maybe it’s not new, since nothing is, but at
any rate it’s coming along on a good slant just now, is very lively,
looks altruistic, and I dare say can be made modestly remunerative; for
muck-rakers, of course, like other working folks, must live. More than
moderately remunerative it can hardly be without spoiling it, for the
great business opportunity in it would be to make a great record as a
prosecutor and then be retained for the defense. To me, as a lawyer,
that looks good, but there are those who would gibe at it as a sort of
blackmail.

Well, there does seem to be a lot of tar in money. Sometimes I despair
of ever getting enough to keep an auto on without having to pay some
impossibly defiling or enslaving price for it; but I haven’t got to
have an auto yet, so I take courage.

Father and Father-in-law both growl at the muck-rakers, as is proper
enough for gentlemen of their years and responsibilities, but the
muck-rakers look to me like microbes of a very natural and timely kind,
lawfully and inevitably produced, and going about a necessary business
with a catching sort of enthusiasm. When they beat a bad grab, the
anarchist in me insists upon rejoicing, no matter what respect the
lawyer in me may feel for clients who appreciate lawyers and pay them
suitably.

Father-in-law has sent me three gallons of superior European champagne
put up in bottles the usual way, mostly pints. He is a kind man. Why he
thinks it wise to cultivate expensive thirsts in Cordelia and me I do
not know, but my theory is that he thinks a taste for beverages that
we can’t afford will make for abstemiousness. So it will, I dare say.
Cordelia says the gallons are just a tribute of affection, unsullied
by ulterior purposes of any sort. We are going to ask Father-in-law to
dinner, and that is a great tribute, for even reduced to his simplest
needs he is expensive to feed.

Naturalists have observed and recorded a tendency in married people to
duplication. That is, in some respects, a solemn thought. I understand
you can get lots more room in Brooklyn for the same money, and people
do it; but to me that’s a much more solemn thought than the other
one--too solemn altogether. Up the island there are extraordinary rows
and successions of human hives. Cordelia and I catch a Sunday afternoon
automobile ride up there once in a while and marvel at them as we
pass. One could get a fine detachment up there; though for that matter
there is an interesting grade of detachment to be had in Brooklyn.
And detachment has its value--breaks habits, brings folks in some
ways harder up against the facts of life, invites a new inspection of
people, brings various releases and stimulations--but I don’t know that
it is a thing that Cordelia and I are disposed to chase very hard for
its own sake. We are hard enough up against the facts of life as it
is, and we are gregarious people and like companions, and if we got a
good detachment would go right to work, I suppose, to mitigate it by
new associations. We will never move to Harlem or beyond merely for
the sake of pioneering, nor swap associations for the mere benefit of
swapping. And yet that’s what the Methodist ministers used to do under
the old three-years-in-a-place rule--may be doing it still. It was
the intention that they should gather no moss, so the plan was to keep
them rolling. To me, now, moss looks very nice, and I wouldn’t mind
its adhering. I love old associations and permanence of relation, and
my heart is even hospitable to some fixity of condition; but there
is plenty to be said in favor of wearing the garments of life loose
enough to shed them when they get seriously in the way. One should be
enough of a change artist to quit a part he cannot excel in before the
scene-shifters shut him out. The predicament of people who haven’t
it in them to prosper in the social level they find themselves in,
and who are so fettered by the conventions and expectations of that
level that they can’t break into another, is very pathetic. We hear
plenty about the tragedies of families that sink, but what of the
tragedies of those that rise, as when a man makes a raft of money and
his sons experiment with leisure, drink, chorus-girls, and divorce;
and his daughter, for lack of inviting marital opportunities, is
obliged to elope with the chauffeur! That sounds better than eloping
with the coachman, as used to happen; but still there is a prejudice
against it. Of course advantages--most of them--are advantageous, else
civilization wouldn’t get ahead; but, by George! they have their price.
If Cordelia and I were a grain less stylish we might be living in a
model tenement and saving money. (I wonder if we could get one that
would hold Matilda too!) The residents of New York around here where
we live are roughly divided into two classes, people who eat in the
front basement and are getting rich, and people who are too stylish to
eat in the front basement, and have upstairs dining-rooms and butler’s
pantries, and are (some of them) getting poor. The receipt for getting
rich in this neighborhood is--Eat in the basement! But I’m not sure
that it is a reliable receipt. It tends to blight some opportunities.
Anyhow, it does not fit the ambitions of the socially ambitious of this
generation, to whom eating in the basement would seem to conflict with
about all that is delectable in life. Of course basement dining-rooms
belong to the habits of forty years ago, and invited the simple life,
which now for the most part has been chased into flats. But the truth
remains that advantages are bought with a price.

It is harder to get something for nothing than we think it is when we
read of wills going to probate. They do go there, and then it is to
observe whether the heirs get the money or the money gets the heirs. We
don’t take medicine unless we are sick. Money in large chunks is pretty
strong medicine, but we take it when it offers without regard to our
condition, and it does not always do us good.

Tom Merchant was saying something the other day to the effect that a
man could not be of very considerable use in the world until he ceased
to be dependent on his work for his living. Of course that is not so,
as Lincoln’s case and innumerable others attest, and as new cases keep
attesting every day. Nevertheless, the venerable John Bigelow has said
something very like what Tom said, and I think there is a slice of
truth in it. Money in store is power, and makes for leisure to think
and act, and may help enormously, in a crisis, to independence in
thought and action. Lincoln was poor, but, after all, he had enough
cash in hand to spare the time for the debate with Douglas and for all
the politics that followed, up to the time when he began to draw a
salary as President.

The trouble with the chaps that come early into ready-made money is
that so few of them ever learn enough about common human life, and
people, and the elements of the job, to be considerably useful, even
if they aspire to be. Still, I think they do better nowadays than they
used to. The money-getting school, whatever course you take, is an
exacting school. Somehow you have to deliver the goods--some kind of
goods that somebody is willing to pay for. I wonder how much the girls
miss, those of them who do miss it, by not taking the courses in that
school! Of course, they miss some great possibilities of development,
but against that you have to measure what they would miss by not being
able to do two kinds of things in the same years, and sacrificing what
they get as it is, for what they might get as it might be. There comes
in the division of work between men and women and the difference in
their natural careers. Cordelia as she is, for me.

Cordelia and I are agreed that we will have rhododendrons in our
garden. Those in the Park have begun to bloom, and I am excessively
pleased with them. They have such a fine Greek name that takes me
back to Xenophon’s Anabasis, and such splendid blossoms and such
interesting shades of color, and then they bloom in the shade. I
respect them most of all for that. To live in the shade and turn
out so splendid--well, allegorically speaking, it happens more or
less to folks, too. It will cost us something to have a good lot of
rhododendrons in our garden, but when it comes to planning for our
country place we never spare expense. Why should we? Frugality of
imagination is no saving to anybody. Cordelia is less extravagant in
that particular than I am, because when I see the men who earn a lot
of money I speculate in my mind as to how they do it and whether _I_
could do it, and I usually decide that I shall be able to presently if
I have time, and then, naturally, I think what I shall have when I get
all that money, and just now it is rhododendrons because they are just
coming along. A good deal goes with rhododendrons: hired men, domestic
animals, chariots of locomotion; I dare say by the time Cordelia and
I get around to have them aeroplanes will have become a reasonable
solicitation. But there’s no hurry. The rhododendrons in the Park are
lovely, and I dare say there are more in the Bronx (if you can get
there), and we have hospitable friends who have them in gardens.

This observing the money-getters and noticing how they do it, and
computing how long it will take to learn the trick and acquire the
necessary prestige, is all right enough and even useful, but it plagues
me when I get my mind too much on it. That’s not really the way to
live--and yet, and yet. “The life is more than meat; the body more than
raiment,” but, having life, meat comes very handy, and having a body,
raiment is convenient. The people who miss it are those who starve
life, or overlook it, in their solicitude for meat and motors.

The prevalent habit of going to Europe is curious. For that matter the
habits of contemporary Americans are very curious--the motor-car habit
so conspicuous just now, their travel habit, much cultivated by farmers
in winter and by city people in summer. They are remarkable habits;
instructive, no doubt; expensive, but somehow at present there is money
for them. Cordelia says she has traveled, and need not go on the road
again for some time. I haven’t, but I am content to wait until it is
convenient. This town of New York is trying to live in in some ways,
but it can be said for it that here a great many things are brought to
the door. There are pictures here, and very pleasing objects in the
shop windows, and a variety of people, and spoken languages enough
to satisfy the most ambitious, and a mighty interesting assortment
of architecture, and more making while you wait. Some Americans in
time past have been to Europe to good purpose--as witness our newer
architecture--and some keep going there to pretty good purpose every
year. That makes it the easier to stay at home and say _Cœlum non
animum_ to oneself, and grub along. Cordelia and I bestow some of our
spare attention on the growth of characters. They don’t seem to grow
so very much on the road. Intelligence and powers of comparison may
get a boost in the school of itineracy, but character not so probably.
Corlear Van Terminal has been to Europe once or twice every year since
I can remember, and gads constantly when at home, and all but sleeps in
a motor-car, and yet, so far as I can see, he’s always just the same as
he was the last time. I can’t see that he’s got ahead one lap. Chapman
says the soul of man requires to be fed on the Bible and the Greek
poets. One can do that at home, and one can work at home, and have
faith and endure and plug along--all quite useful to character, and as
developing in some ways as travel and Europe can be in others.

Cordelia and I have been reading about the Wesleys and the characters
they got and how they got them. There were eighteen children or
thereabouts, and a dozen or so grew up. Fine people, too; admirable
stock and developed by discipline, privation, and pious training, all
tempered by affection, humor, and lots of quality in the trainers. It
makes you feel that character is a very expensive product, and hardly
to be had at the ten-cent store where we and our contemporaries are
prone to go for it.

The Wesleys were poor; very much poorer than is thought at all suitable
in these times, even for the reverend clergy or for the teachers
of our youth. The father was a clergyman; the mother was a lady of
excellent abilities and education, and they lived in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Food was plain and hard to get in that
family, and raiment was only slightly related to embellishment, and
sickness was frequent and poverty perpetual; but with what audacity
those Wesleys took hold on life! It makes our timid overtures look
like mill-pond voyaging. Really it is wholesome to sit by the window,
within ear-shot of the rattle of the street-cars and the chug-chug of
the automobiles, and read of the past straits of the straitened and the
courage of the bold, and observe on what shoulders of men and women,
and through what bogs of privation, civilization has come along.

Not that the Wesleys had a preference for privation. The Reverend
Samuel scrambled actively to maintain his family, but the increasing
family outran his best diligence. We have changed all that. Families
are less apt to outrun the paternal diligence in these days. So far as
numbers go, they trudge along respectfully behind the census man and
look over his shoulder at the figures. But that change is all in the
day’s work, and springs out of changed conditions. People in our time
are not curious enough about the processes of nature to raise very
large families in order that they may watch near at hand the workings
of the rule about the survival of the fittest. What they can observe
of the application of that rule in written biography and among the
neighbors seems to suffice, and in their own personal speculation they
seem to care for no more progeny than they think they can contrive
survival for, whether they are fittest or not. So butts in man, and
tries to adjust the processes of nature to match his judgment and his
taste in expenditure.

When it gets hot Cordelia will be going off to her father’s country
palace in Connecticut, varying that experience in due time by a sojourn
in my father’s country palace in New Jersey, and I shall spend with
her so much of the time as my urban duties permit. That will save
us from dependence on any fresh-air funds this year. Parents are a
considerable convenience, especially nowadays, when so many of them
have learned their place, and especially in this town of New York,
where it costs all you can earn to provide a winter habitation, and
where the young wives of earnest workers like me are apt to be a good
deal out of a job in summer. Much more systematic provision is made
to carry my kind of man through the summer than for Cordelia’s kind
of woman--the clubs, for example. For man and wife at our stage of
life parents, duly qualified and equipped, are a very suitable and
timely provision. Indeed, I feel sometimes that the worthlessness and
miscellaneous degeneracy of parents in these times is exaggerated. I
don’t say this by way of casting an anchor to the windward, nor out
of mere magnanimity, but because I honestly think so. People say that
parental authority is all gone. Some think it good riddance; others
lament. Since democracy came to be the fashion everybody wants his own
way more than formerly, and gets it rather more, children included. But
parental direction is still a factor in life, and parental influence
is enormous, and influence gets to the springs of action and character
even more effectually than dogmatic authority. It is much harder
for a fool father to blight a Mirabeau nowadays, and those Wesley
parents that I spoke of might in our time have meddled less with their
daughters’ marriages, thereby, possibly, avoiding some disasters; for
the Wesley girls chose ill, but their parents, in choosing for them,
chose still worse. Parents doubtless realize the limitations of their
calling better than they did, and a good deal more is done in these
days than formerly to piece out their deficiencies and help them with
their duties. Doctors give them better advice than the Wesley parents
got; schools in this country--in spite of the constant stream of
criticism and deprecation which schools endure--average surely a great
deal better than schools did fifty years ago. The raising and training
of the young, being as important a matter as there is in sight, has had
protracted attention from some of the best minds, and has had money
showered on it in a huge profusion. All that has been more or less
helpful to parents, but it does not warrant the idea, so popular among
current commentators, that parents have come to be supernumeraries on
the public stage. That is a ridiculous notion, the absurdity of which
would be demonstrated in about half a day if parents universally should
quit work and take a half-holiday.

We ought to save a little money this summer living on our fathers. It
is a grand way to save. I don’t know of a better. It makes frugality
possible without self-denial--at least without privation. They say
there is excellent sport to be got out of self-denial, and I read that
saving money and the repression of the impulse to spend it make like
everything for the development of character. I dare say that is so.
It is all a part of self-control, and of government by intelligence
instead of by impulse. And self-control, including timely and suitable
repression of expenditure, means freedom, and power to give, and
the power to do, and the power to jump in and seize an opportunity.
Possibly I can acquire the accomplishment of not buying some things
that I want, even though I have the money to pay for them. That will be
a wonderful acquisition to me, though I have got so far as to be mighty
particular about what I buy on credit. One has got to get as far as
that if he is going to get married on such an income as ours.

That was a great stroke--getting married. I don’t see how I had the
nerve to do it. Probably I hadn’t. I dare say we got married on
Cordelia’s nerve, for when you come down to the facts it was she who
took most of the chances, and really made the choice. To choose and to
decide things seem in our day to be very largely women’s work. I am
more and more impressed with that as I go more and more to Cordelia
to get her views. I get them on pretty much everything except points
of law. I am the specialist on that and on the earning of money, but
she is the specialist on the arrangement of life. I guess she is an
obedient wife, but in practice I seem to make suggestions and she to
make decisions. She makes them with great consideration and indulgence
for me, and with a degree of judgment that saves me much mental effort.
The opportunities of mental effort that I enjoy below Canal Street,
between ten o’clock and six, suffice to keep my mind exercised, and
I am no glutton about making unnecessary mental efforts after I get
uptown. Perhaps that simplifies life for Cordelia. I wonder what women
do whose husbands don’t have to work!




III

COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT


We have been out to Orange County to spend a week-end with the
Peytons. They are about our age, but differ from us in condition in
that they have adequate means of support. Archie Peyton got them by
inheritance, and they are very ample and enable Archie and Eleanor to
have all the desirable things and do everything they want to. They try
conscientiously to live up to their opportunities, making pretty hard
work of it, but that’s natural, for it _is_ hard work. They went abroad
in the summer, and now they are providing country lodging and food and
sport for their available friends. This sport is golf and tennis and
road exercises, relieved by dabs of riding after hounds, for the Orange
County Hunt meets out in their country. Eleanor says it’s nice, except
that they have to invite too many people who have had too much to eat
and are trying to get thin, whereas it would be more satisfactory to
be inviting people who have had too little to eat and were trying to
get fat.

That’s not why they asked us, for we had been living on our parents all
summer and were quite plump. They have got motor-cars, horses, butlers,
valets, chrysanthemums, greenhouses, and all the apparatus of pride.
For us on sixty dollars a week it is rather expensive even to nibble
at it. We can’t do it often, but we saved money living on our parents,
and the fall is a grand season, and to fill one’s lungs with the air
of it and one’s vision with autumn colors is worth some fiscal strain,
and it always does me good, too, spiritually even more than physically,
to get over a little easy country on a horse. Besides, Archie is my
client, and that’s important. I have discovered that one of the great
secrets of prosperity and advancement in this world, especially in the
profession that I affect, is to have one’s coevals grow up and prosper
and have business, especially law business, that somebody must be paid
to do. When people have these opportunities of lawful gain to bestow
they seem to like to bestow them on habitual friends, provided that
they have any and can persuade themselves that they are competent. A
great deal of opportunity goes by association--is bound to.

To be honest, I did not make all these discoveries solely on my own
hook. Though they are simple enough. Major Brace expounded some of them
to me after dinner. He gave me great encouragement in the effort to
exist. Promotion, he said, cometh neither from the East nor the West,
but from the cemetery, so it was almost sure to come to any one that
could hold out; and in the long run a man who was sober, competent and
diligent, and intelligent about his associations couldn’t very well
miss it. There were so many advantageous jobs to distribute and each
generation had them in turn, as the world and what is in it came to be
its property. Moreover, as things go now and with us, each generation
has a lot more things and opportunities and good employments than the
generation that preceded it, not only absolutely, but _per capita_,
because the increase of wealth and business is outrunning the increase
of population. It wasn’t a scramble, the Major insisted, for a share in
a limited quantity of goods, but for an unlimited quantity, and the
harder the scramble the more there was to distribute.

All that came out of a discussion whether we should restrict our wants
or try to satisfy them. Try to satisfy them, the Major said. Effort
in that direction enriches and develops civilization. It tends to
increase the supply of commodities. It is not the satisfied people,
nor the people who are content to go without, that make civilization
go forward, but the unsatisfied ones, who want a lot of things they
have not got, and get out and go after them and build railroads and
factories and improve agriculture and invent machinery and multiply
automobiles and take an interest in aeroplanes and try to accumulate
money and keep it employed.

“Are you doing all those things, Major?” said I.

“Me? Oh no! I belong to the police. My job is to help to keep order
and protect property. I never had one of the large-sized appetites
for commodities--just food, clothes, shelter, money in the bank, and
something to give away, and protection against rainy days, and enough
to keep my wife and children off the Charity Organization when I get
run over by a motor-car--that’s all I want. You see, I’m a lazy man and
like to read the newspaper and invite my soul, and everything I can’t
get by working five or six hours a day I go without. Don’t take me for
a pattern. I haven’t got the progress of civilization really at heart.”

“The express-drivers help it on, I suppose, Major, when they strike for
more pay?” They were striking at that time.

“No doubt. All that should help distribution, provided the funds they
are all striking to share exist in sufficient quantity. Distribution
is next in importance to production. You’ve got to have something to
distribute, and strikes are not immediately helpful to production, as
you may have noticed, but the organization of labor ought to be helpful
to distribution. Only nowadays when an important strike is won the
cost of it is immediately shifted onto the general public by a gentle
elevation of prices.”

The Major is a lawyer and practises considerably as a trustee, and is
doubtless more concerned with the philosophy of business than if his
energies were enlisted in selling goods and wresting a profit out of
it. “Mankind can be eased considerably in this earthly competition,”
he went on, “by great increases of production, great extensions of
agriculture and manufacturing and transportation, and great economies
in all of them, provided that distribution fairly keeps pace with
production.” It comes nearer to doing so, he thought, than all the
exhorters and socialist people admit, because products have to find a
market; but when it comes to that, this is a fairly roomy world, with
many mouths and backs in it, and transportation is cheap and markets
are world-wide, and goods as yet don’t necessarily pile up on any of us
because there are a lot of them produced.

And so the Major argued in effect that one way to help bring on
the millennium was to increase the production and distribution of
commodities. I suppose that _is_ one way. There must be some connection
between the millennium and civilization. The millennium isn’t going to
swoop down on a world that has no meat in the house and where half the
people live in trees. It is true that it was not a lack of commodities
that drove Eve to eat the apple and brought on working for a living,
and most of us realize that man cannot live by bread alone, and that
with binsful of commodities on every corner free for the taking the
world would not be saved nor the folks in it satisfied and happy. What
an interesting simplification of wants would happen in that case, and
how quickly people would come to ascertain what they really needed and
refuse to be loaded up with anything else! Still, there is a connection
between human progress and wants and the commodities that appease them.
A missionary’s daughter told me once about her father’s experience
with the South-African blacks. Now and then he would make a convert,
and always, if it was a thorough job, the convert would begin to reach
out after civilization--some clothes, a bigger dwelling--presently,
I dare say, a top-hat. It wasn’t all mere acquisitiveness, either,
for some of the incidents of conversion were inconvenient, especially
the troublesome domestic readjustment called for by the theory of the
sufficiency of one wife. Of course, the millennium may swoop down and
find us running about in skins or less, and living on roots, but I bet
it won’t. It is much more likely to be welcomed by flocks of aeroplanes
to an enormously productive earth, worked for all it is worth by
people intelligent enough to have abolished poverty and solved the
problem of distribution.

What does man want here below, anyway? Room and bath, food, clothes, a
newspaper, and a job and fair opportunities to better himself. He has
got the newspaper already. In this country, at least, there are enough
newspapers to go around, and in the cities any one who declines to buy
one can supply himself out of the first ash barrel. There is nothing
so cheap as newspapers, and that is a consequence of the pressure of
commodities on the market. The advertiser pays all but a cent’s worth
of the cost of the newspaper, and would gladly pay that, no doubt, but
for the fear of arousing the reader’s suspicions. How much this has to
do with the fact that I hear of likely young men who come out of the
nurseries of learning and look wistfully at the newspapers and fail to
see attractive jobs on them and go away and do something else, I don’t
know. It may be that likely young men never did troop in large swarms
into newspapering. Banking usually looks better to them, because men
get rich at it, and law because a knowledge of it is no hindrance in
any calling.

The supply of rooms and baths is not so nearly equal to human needs
as the supply of newspapers, but it is gaining on the population. Out
there at the Peytons’ house, for example, it has caught up. In all the
newer country houses hereabouts the great architectural feature is
room and bath. In a Long Island house just completed that I inspected
last spring before the family moved in there were between twenty and
twenty-five bathrooms. There were three in the family, with a liability
to guests if the owner’s wife ever succeeded in getting rested. I
thought this marked a considerable forward stride in civilization.
Church unity still hangs back a bit, but we are getting pretty strong
on plumbing, and the millennium may find us with a bath apiece.

The Peytons hadn’t so many bathrooms, because their house was not so
large as the Long Island house, and they had to save part of it for
clothed appearances; but they had many, and Cordelia and I admired
them very much. Living in a six-hundred-dollar New York flat makes
marvelously for the appreciation of space, light, air, and running
water. Of course the Peytons’ country house had all these blessings,
and, besides, was delightfully fresh and clean and embellished with
very pleasing adornments. “No doubt, Cordelia,” said I, “you might
have had a set of things like this if you had shown a little timely
judgment.” “Possibly;” said Cordelia; “this is a nice set, too. How
many bathrooms shall _we_ need, Peregrine?”

“One--two--four--six; six will do us, I think, with a little management
and a few extra sets of bath-robes and slippers. We don’t want to keep
a plumber. To have more than a dozen makes a home too much like a
hotel.”

But there are a number of things that we shall want before we have
even one house with even six bathrooms in it. I do not greatly
covet a superfluity of bathrooms, though enough of them is one of
the great luxuries of our time. Hot water is one of the leading
valuables of life--one of the things that help to reconcile humanity
to civilization and to offset its interference with such privileges
as living out-of-doors and not having newspapers. That has long been
appreciated. I believe the Greeks liked hot water and made provision to
have it. Certainly the Romans liked it and went in strong for baths.
The English have liked it and had it in fair quantity, along with daily
deluges of cold water. We Americans delight in it and have more of it
already, I suppose, than any people ever had before, and our supply
is constantly increasing and constantly spreading from the cities to
the country. It is cheap, as things go, and there is fair prospect
that there will eventually be enough to go around. To have a universal
supply of hot water and newspapers and a long start toward a universal
supply of what we call education is doing not so ill as things go. I
can wait for the six bathrooms, or even three. We have one now. One is
a great blessing. I suppose it is our egotism that makes us more or
less indifferent to what is not ours and cannot be for the present.
What most of us want is the next thing--the thing almost within our
reach. We don’t think about the things that are altogether beyond the
scope of our fortunes. We do not covet them, nor are we jealous of our
neighbors who have them, unless we conclude that we have too little
because they have too much. If the competition seems to us fair, we
rather like to see prizes go to those who can win them, for a life with
prizes in it for winners, even material prizes, looks richer and more
attractive to most of us than a life planned on the principle of a
division of the gate money among all who come in.

Do you notice how strong the propensity is among all the fairly
comfortable people to consider their own condition and their own
standards as normal and truly desirable, and those of other folks,
whether they have more or less, as a little off? I think that
propensity is a wonderful provision for human happiness. We value, as
a rule, what seems the best thing obtainable for ourselves. Whether it
is abundance or a stimulating degree of privation, we incline to think
it is a good thing for us and a better thing than other people have who
have something different.

“Cordelia,” said I, while we were talking about the bathroom, “you
might have got a better set of things with some other man, but he
would not have the experience or the discipline that I shall have by
the time I have acquired the set of things that you ought eventually
to get with _me_.” There you are! We think we’re better off than the
Peytons because we haven’t got so much as they have, and better off
than the Goves because we’ve got more (mostly prospective) than they
have. _We_ are the standard. We laugh at ourselves, but surely it’s a
fine thing to have so strong a bent toward toleration of things as they
are, and expectation of being pleased with them as they’re going to be.
I suppose it is just a different form of this same self-satisfaction
that makes the teetotalers want to vote away everybody’s grog, and
the college authorities insist that all the boys shall want to be
high scholars like themselves, and the appeased women deprecate the
agitations of the unappeased for woman’s suffrage.

Probably Cordelia and I are exceptionally resigned to our condition;
more so than the average of mankind. Yes, I suspect that is so, but
I suspect also that it is only a provisional resignation. We reached
out and got the next thing--each other. That was highly satisfactory
and a good deal better than if we had waited for something else.
But this reaching out for the next thing seems to be a continuing
process, and I suspect it has to go on till stopping-time, and that
satisfaction in life is pretty closely geared to the ability to
maintain it effectively. That is not altogether a soothing reflection,
but I don’t know that it is desirable that all reflections should be
soothing. A fair proportion of them ought to be stimulating. I observe
that I read the writings of the efficient when my energies are high,
and when they are low find solace in those of the lazy--only they must
not be too lazy to write. Some of the very best writers were lazy, and
struggled with it. Maybe it’s hard work to be a writer, but then it’s
hard work to be _much_ of anything. But that’s nothing! Nobody wastes
sympathy, or ought to, on hard workers, provided they get in fair
measure what they go out after. And one of the greatest things they get
is increased ability to work hard. This is not entirely my discovery.
It was suggested by an aged friend, but as far as I have experimented
with it I think it is so. Of course, the suggestion was accompanied
by a reminder in quotation-marks that life would be endurable except
for its pleasures, but that’s not to be accepted too confidently. It
depends on the pleasures and whether they please or not. There are
a lot of things that are labeled “pleasure,” and most of them are
price-marked in more or less forbidding figures, but the considerable
satisfactions of life seem to be conditions of the mind which may
be related to living conditions that cost money, but which are not
themselves price-marked in figures that are at all plain. There’s polo,
a good, lively pleasure and fairly high-priced and consumptive also
of time, but I judge the main value of active sports of that sort to
aspiring men is indirect. They contribute to a physical efficiency
which is useful just so far as it promotes mental efficiency--sanity
and activity of mind, spontaneity of thought and speech and power. No
doubt for some men sports are a form of discipline. They train some
spirits to exertion, and make for energy and supply driving force for
work, but, dear me, they take a lot of time and tend to consume more
energy than they furnish. They are fine for boys, soldiers, Englishmen,
and people with a disposition to grow fat, and an excellent vacation
employment for some people, but I suspect there is an economic warrant
for the disposition of the common run of American adults to intrust
the transaction of their active sports to persons who can give their
whole time to them, and whose skilful exertions it is restful now and
then to watch.

I remember my classmate Hollaway saying one day of a group of sporty
young gentlemen whom we were discussing, “The things that seem to amuse
them would not give me pleasure.” That was true. Hollaway liked to
_think_. That was the way he had most of his fun. He was willing to put
in enough physical exertion to make his machinery run smoothly, and
liked, as a rule, to do it quickly and have it over, but he got his fun
out of what went on in his head, and in talk. He practised and enjoyed
all the mental processes, observation, cogitation, consideration,
reflection, rumination, imagination, and the rest, with resulting and
accompanying discourse. Nobody around had more fun than Hollaway.
Somebody said he had a “happy activity of the soul.” Maybe that is out
of Emerson. I’ll ask Cordelia, who confesses to some acquaintance with
Emerson. But, anyhow, the happy activity of the soul is good to have
and not visibly price-marked nor denied necessarily, like the opera
and polo, to the impecunious.

Going out to visit the Peytons was an enlivening change, and gave
us new topics for discourse and reflection, but the best of it was
to talk about it with Cordelia. I like the tranquillity of being
married--married, that is, to Cordelia. Visiting the Peytons is a bit
of embroidery on the fabric of life, but coming home to the flat and
staying in all the evening and reading as many of the contemporary
periodicals as I can manage to get hold of and get time to explore, and
talking to Cordelia--that is the very web of life. I seldom have the
sense of justification in life so strongly as in these domesticated
discourses with Cordelia. I have got her to reading the contemporary
periodicals and the newspapers and keeping some track of what is going
on in the world. I don’t know what kind of radicals we will turn out to
be if we keep our minds on that diet. But I get the other point of view
down-town, where my employment is largely to assist my boss to help
gentlemen with property to adjust the management of their concerns to
laws contrived with intent to retard their processes of acquisition.
It is nip and tuck in these days between the gentlemen who make the
progressive political periodicals and the gentlemen who control the
railroads and banks and trusts and their employees, to determine who
is going to run the country. As things are, the country is run, after
a fashion. The wheels do turn, and production and distribution are
accomplished. To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and the
production is pretty wasteful compared with what the professional
economists say it might be, and the stream of distribution runs so
lumpy that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion of the Lord’s will
seems to be done, and hopeful people calculate that the proportion
is increasing, though you might not always think so to read the
progressive periodicals. A large part of the happy activity of nature
consists of the big creatures eating the little ones, but we complain
awfully about it when we think we see it going on in human society,
and the law, whose humble but aspiring servant I am, was invented to
check it. Everything that is invented to check that propensity tends
to develop an appetite of its own. The law, the church, the walking
delegate, all have in them the ingredients of voracity, and I dare say
the same ingredients are latent in the progressive periodicals. Who has
the brains to govern will govern, and the mere substitution of lean
masters for fat ones is not necessarily an advantage. I suppose it is
largely our own consciousness of that that restrains us from taking the
country away from the interests and giving it to the periodicals; and
besides, of course, it is harder, because the interests hang on so to
what is theirs, and the law, which is me, finds so many obstacles to
detaching them.

Well, practising law all day below Canal Street in the interest
of the interests, and reading the progressive periodicals all the
evening--there’s such a raft of them--in the interest of righteousness,
altruism, and the people, ought to make me a very broad-minded
person--so broad-minded probably that I shall lose sense of direction
and fetch up in the driver’s place on a Brooklyn street-car.

And yet probably not, with Cordelia as a partner. I have consulted her
about going to the Assembly. Not that anybody wants me to go there,
but it looks interesting. I wish my boss would employ me to go there
and see that I did not starve. But he couldn’t very well. I would
be a legislator in the employ of an employee of the interests, and
all the fun would be gone. Father and Father-in-law might finance me,
but neither of them is that much of a patriot. If I were employed
by one of the periodicals there would be less scandal in that, but
that’s not a practical thought. I dare say that I shall have to make
considerably more progress in the practice of my profession before I
can go to Albany, and by that time I shall have become too valuable to
myself and dependent associates to be spared to go there. After all,
I got married, and I suppose that is as fatal an indiscretion as a
person of my attenuated means should permit himself at this stage of
his endeavors. It is about politics very much as it is about getting
married--if you wait till you’re ready, you can’t. It seems as if
everything had to be shot on the wing. We ought to be governed by
people of independent means. They are the only people who can afford
the employment. But most people who have independent means have a point
of view to match, and there you are--it isn’t quite the point of view
of a large proportion of the governed. Just so contradictory things
are, and yet, after all, it’s that that makes the game.

My, my! We have been married nearly a year, and have not yet repented.
Our circumstances improve a little from month to month. Besides The
Firm’s regular contribution to my maintenance, I pick up odd jobs now
and then on my own account. Father and Father-in-law take occasional
chances in the lottery of my accomplishments by sending me bits of
business, and I pick up other bits from other people. I have even made
literary compositions, and tried, not always fruitlessly, to sell them.
That is a good enough game, if one dared give himself to it, but,
except as compounded with politics, economics, or public service of
some sort, it leads away from law, so I don’t follow it hard.




IV

THE BABY


Undoubtedly the baby makes a great difference. He fills up the flat,
for one thing. I foresee that he will turn us out of it. Nevertheless
he is valuable, and probably worth his space even in New York. His
name is Samuel French. Cordelia named him after her father. She is
extremely pleased with him. So is Matilda Finn, so is my mother, so
is my mother-in-law. Even the trained assistant to nature who was
here to welcome him seemed very pleased to meet Samuel, and both his
grandfathers have been around to inspect him, and have approved and
duly benefacted him. Neither of these aged but still profitable men has
had a grandchild before, and they seem to like it. As for me, naturally
I am like to burst with the pride at being associated, however humbly,
with an achievement so important. Father-in-law is building a new
room on to his summer palace in Connecticut, with a view, I think, to
the more convenient entertainment of his new descendant, and I think
that nothing but consideration for my fiscal incapacity withholds him
from building Cordelia a country house. By various expedients I have
swelled our sixty dollars a week to about seventy, which is a grateful
gain, and appreciable in spite of the demands of the Post-office,
the public transportation companies, the market-men, and the other
agencies of depletion, so corroding to the fiscal being; but even--let
me see, seven times fifty-two weeks--but even $3,640 is not an annual
income that seems equal to the maintenance of two residences. I guess
if we are to have a suburban home it must be an all-the-year-round
home for the present, and father-in-law’s place in Connecticut is not
just the right place for that. It is some miles from the station, and
involves maintenance of horsepower of some sort, and of course that
is unspeakable except as father-in-law provides it. Our lay would be
a villa about the length of a baseball ground from the station, or,
better still, something five cents from Wall Street by tunnel or
trolley, and you catch the car on the next corner.

But think of the crowd on the car!

No, I won’t think of it. It is the common lot hereabouts, and I should
be able to stand my share of it, which I would not get in full, anyhow,
because, being a lawyer, I can leave home a little later, and leave
for home usually a little earlier or later than the great body of the
workers for a living.

My new responsibility has brought me a variety of new appreciations.
As a parent I find I have new sentiments about parents, and increased
esteem and regard for them as pillars that uphold life and direct it.
Beyond doubt, they are fine for upholding grandchildren. No doubt
there would be considerably more grandchildren in our world if there
were more grandparents who recognized their responsibilities and made
provision, as a matter of course, to meet them. But that does not
accord with the lively individualism of our generation. Not only are
we all desirous of independent life, but our parents prefer it for us.
Accordingly, when we get above the social plane in which independent
life for man and wife can be maintained for twenty dollars a week,
marriage is apt to come late. There are immense advantages about that
social plane in which twenty dollars a week is a complete living, and
the wife is cook and housemaid, wife, mother, and nurse all in one,
and the state provides education, and the doctor adjusts his charges
to your income, and all the man has to look after is food, clothes,
shelter, and pocket money! I hope the people who are born with a call
on that phase of existence appreciate their luck. To rise to the
twenty-dollar-a-week phase must be full of satisfactions, but to drop
to it is quite another matter. Whatever starting-point is dealt out to
us, it is from that point that we have to go on, and, whether we like
it or not, the point at which it behooves us to arrive is measured from
the point at which we start.

Raising babies must have been very much simplified by the invention of
the kodak. There is no attitude, expression, sentiment, costume, or
absence of costume of Samuel that this handy little instrument has not
perpetuated. And inasmuch as Samuel varies and progresses from hour to
hour, acquiring personality, weight, and accomplishments, changing in
his features and developing new resemblances, the click of the kodak
is almost as frequent in our flat as the whir of the sewing-machine.
When infants had to run to the photographer’s for every new picture, I
don’t see how they got their natural rest. You know they sleep about
eighteen hours a day. One would think that with all that somnolence a
baby would be no more trouble than a dormouse, but Samuel is almost
a complete occupation. As an example of woman’s work he qualifies by
being never done. When he is asleep he is about to waken, and when
he is awake he is about to sleep, and either way he is either taking
nourishment or about to take it, or taking a bath, or changing his
clothes, or acquiring ideas, or taking first lessons in language. Since
I have known him I sympathize with the woman who thought it just as
easy to raise six children as one, because one took up all your time,
and six couldn’t do more.

I never saw Cordelia so much amused with anything, and I admit to
being, myself, more diverted and entertained than I should have thought
possible. I had a puppy once that was a delight, so cheerful, so
prodigal of affectionate welcomes, and so incessant in his activities.
Mother has got him now. She appropriated him--or he her--and kept him,
she said, to remind her of me. But Samuel beats the puppy. He does not
get around as briskly yet as the puppy did, but he has the same delight
in very simple toys, and a similar liveliness of mind, and a like
capacity to be pleased. He is quite a lot like that puppy as he was
when I first got him.

I didn’t need anything to increase my interest in getting home at
night. Cordelia attended to that. But Samuel has increased it. He is
awake when I get home, and, though he is usually getting ready to go to
bed, he always expresses a flattering satisfaction at meeting me again,
and has interesting details of progress to report, and smiles, and puts
out arms, and makes inarticulate noises, and sits in my lap, and makes
an inventory of my accessible properties.

And, of course, there is a great deal to be told about him, including
the day’s report of what has been said of him by admiring friends, and
of the visits he has made and received, and, now and then, statistics
of his weight and progress in intelligence and activity. I think
Cordelia talks to Matilda Finn and her various visitors about him all
day, and then to me about him most of the evening. It is surprising
that so small a carcass should afford so much discourse.

We have entered him at a suitable school, which is perhaps another
token of the incompleteness of my emancipation. You know that for some
years past some of the boarding-schools have been so highly esteemed,
for one reason or another, by unemancipated parents that they have
coveted the privilege of having their sons go to them, and, to insure
getting it, have entered their boys’ names at those schools as soon as
they were born. So I entered Samuel at the school where I went myself.
If that implied incompleteness of emancipation in me, I don’t care.
Samuel must have his chance. It is enough for _me_ to be emancipated.
Emancipation is a personal affair, like conversion, and no one ought to
try to force his emancipation on any one else, least of all a parent
on a child. Samuel may prefer the old order, and by the time he grows
up we may have the wherewithal to enable him to experiment with it if
there is any of it left. I don’t know that there will be, and, to be
sure, when did life offer a bigger or more uncertain speculation than
this that Samuel yawns and gapes in the face of? Perhaps I ought not to
call it uncertain, except as to times and means and details, but that’s
enough; and as to those the uncertainty is ample. The great task that
is doing now seems to be the improvement of the common lot. No doubt
that is always going on when civilization is in its forward moods, but
nowadays there is uncommon urgency about it, and remarkable command
and handling of the progressive forces, and apparent enfeeblement of
the powers of resistance. It is very attractive, very hopeful, but I
suppose no thoughtful person denies that it is possible to improve the
common lot so much and so fast as to force society into the hands of a
receiver. That is one possibility that little Samuel is up against, and
for that matter so are his parents; for the receivership may come, and
reorganization after it, before Samuel is old enough to sit into the
game.

My! my! what will you see, little son? All the women voting, all
the trades-unions joined under a single head, armies abolished, the
immediate will of majorities the supreme and only law, detachable
marriage, detachable judges, detachable constitutions?

You may, you may; and so may your parents, for that matter, and are
as likely to, perhaps, as you are. But stay with us, none the less.
There seems always to be good sport in this world for good sports--no
matter what may be going on. Folks lived, and liked to live, hereabouts
when the men walked between plow-handles with a rifle across their
shoulders, and they can stand considerable variations in public habits
without losing the appetite for life. An unchanging order is bound to
grow tiresome, always did, always will; though outside of China it is
hard to find one, and even there the old order is moving now. We must
try to make a good sport of Samuel; one who will be interested in life
no matter what, and, when new rules are making, have a say about them.

I don’t see why I hang back so about votes for women. At times I think
I am not opposed. I think I don’t care. But I read all the opposed
discourse that has any sense in it with sympathy, and all the _pro_
discourse in a critical spirit, rejoicing when it seems to me unsound.
It is true enough that there is no compelling reason why I should want
votes for women. _My_ proprietors don’t want them. Mother sniffs at
them. Cordelia is observant, with very much such an instinctive leaning
toward the _antis_ as I have. Why should I excite myself about “equal
suffrage” when my ladies like things better as they are? Aren’t mother
and Cordelia representative women? A great deal more so, I think, than
most of the suffragists. The mass of women hereabouts don’t seem to
be concerned about voting. The suffragists in agitating to make them
concerned seem to be trying to create an artificial want. They go about
to persuade women that they are oppressed, and are rated politically
with insane persons, criminals, and aliens.

Now, what is all that? Is it progress, or is it mischief? Is it based
on a mistaken conception of women’s job, or is it a natural detail of
the redistribution of powers and privileges that appears to be going
on? Am I opposed because I am a pig and a stand-patter and an old fogy?
Are votes worth so much fuss, anyhow, and is it going to make any vital
difference whether American women have them or not?

I don’t know that it is. The women and the men are so inextricably
bound together that it is inconceivable that with woman suffrage the
vote should divide in proportions materially different from what
happens now. But that’s not a reason for letting suffrage come. I
do think that at present men and women do not long work together on
the same level at the same tasks. Where women come in either they
work under the direction of men or the men go out. The departments
of life in which they rule--and there are plenty of them--are those
in which men do not compete. I don’t think they can compete with men
as voters or as organizers and directors of political government. If
the suffragists get their votes for women, they will get an enlarged
electorate controlled by men as now. And why should it be expected that
the controlling men in that case will be better than they are now? Are
the mass of women wiser, more honest, and better judges of men than the
mass of men? I don’t think so. I think men and women are just mates.
There seems to be a woman to match every man, but different from him,
and a man to match almost every woman. It is not sensible to compare a
superior woman with an ordinary or inferior man, and point out that she
is fitter to vote than he is. Of course she is, but that does not touch
the real question, which is whether government will be better conducted
with votes for all women than it is now.

Those agitators talk about the “injustice” of depriving women of the
ballot. They might as well talk of the injustice of the refusal of
water to run uphill. There’s no injustice about it. It is nature. If it
can be bettered, all right. Water will run uphill if there is enough
pressure behind it. But if injustice has been done woman about her
vote, it was done when she was born female and not male, and the appeal
from that lies to the higher court.

Was there any done? Take it by and large, is it a misfortune to born
a girl and not a boy? That may happen to any of us any time we happen
to be born. It’s a toss-up. It’s not the slightest credit to us to be
born male, and certainly it should not be the slightest discredit to us
to be born female; but according as we are born male or female we are
born to different duties. If political government is one of the male
duties, civilization will not get ahead by having men loosen their
hold on it. For my part I suppose that down in the intricacies of my
composition I have an instinctive conviction, or hunch, that political
government is a male attribute, and that out of that comes my objection
to abdicate, or even dilute, my share of it. Instinctive convictions
have great weight in these matters, though the surface arguments they
put out may be inadequate or mistaken, as the anti-suffrage arguments
are so apt to be. The suffragist expounders demolish them, and think
that they have accomplished something; but, alas! the demolition of
puerile arguments leaves the question just where it was, with the pith
of it still untouched. Still I think the agitation does good, bothering
people like me, and making us think; asking us, What does belong to
women, then, if not votes? How else are you going to give them equal
life? What does justice demand for them if not the suffrage?

If the males since the beginning of time have overestimated their
importance and erred in regarding themselves as specialists in
government, then it is only a matter of time when we shall be disabused
of that error and shaken down into our rightful places. But if
government--meaning political government rather than domestic--really
prospers better in the long run in the hands of males, in their hands
it is likely to stay--the substance of it certainly, however that
shadow we call a vote may flutter off, and wherever it may alight.

Nothing happens without a cause. If the men are to be abased, doubtless
it will be for their abundant sins. If they will not work as men
should, they will lose their jobs. If they will not govern as men
should, they will be governed. History is a record of the strong races
subduing the weak, and the wise the foolish, to the end that strength
and wisdom shall prevail in human affairs. In these days of Monroe
doctrines and alliances and arbitration treaties those harsh processes
seem to have been superseded. Is this invasion by women of the province
of men a new expedient of Nature to preserve the competition that is
essential to human progress?

We cannot beat Nature. She is obdurate, resourceful, impossible to
fool, with a trick to meet every trick that is offered her. She seems
determined that man shall come to something and plays man against
man to make him better himself, and is probably equal, if occasion
demands it, to play one half of him against the other. For of course
that is what woman is--the other half of man. There cannot be a real
competition between the two halves, for they are inseparably joined
and have to pull each other along. But for all that, they are distinct
individuals, and one in a given period may make faster progress than
the other, with a good deal of disturbance of relations and equities
and ideas. What man gets, woman gets; what woman gets, man gets. When
woman gets education, liberty, opportunity, protection, the whole race
gets those benefits.

Then shall we say that when woman gets the vote the race is that much
ahead? It may be, but to me it has not been so revealed up to these
presents. Who gave man strength gave him dominion. If he loses dominion
it will be because he has either misused his strength or lost it.

Samuel has not lost his. He is truly a great power. As I have said,
he is almost a complete occupation for his mother, and a profitable,
satisfying occupation, too. I confess to fears in time past that
girls of Cordelia’s sort did not have enough to do to bring them their
proper growth and keep them happy. If they didn’t go to college and
didn’t marry as soon as they got out of school, they seemed to drift
into a lot of occupations that looked rather futile, and like a mere
provision for killing time. They played around, they visited, they
dabbled in anything that came handy--dances, charities, house-parties,
art, music, extra improvements for the mind--anything that could be
cast into a void of time which should have ached, and doubtless did. It
used to make me sorry for the girls because it seemed so hard for them
to buckle down to anything remunerative and continuous and really get
ahead in it. If they did that, they forfeited too many opportunities of
the leisure class, to which it seems to be intended that the daughters
of the well-to-do, from nineteen to about twenty-three, shall belong.
If they went to college, that solved the problem for those years, but
it came back at them as soon as they came out. If they were satisfied
with their indefinite employments it was bad, and if they were not it
was also bad. So I used to feel sorry for the girls because their
job looked to me so vague, and their employments so fragmentary and
unpromising.

I dare say I was wrong, and that the girls were working more hours
at their proper vocation than I had the wit to recognize. I see it
more clearly now; that there are fruits that ripen best in the sun,
and should not be hurried in the process; that Cordelia did not
really waste those years in which she waited for me to get started
as a wage-earner, but learned in them a kind of patience and useful
domestication, besides other accomplishments that make her better to
live with now.

Major Brace has paid us the compliment to look in and inspect Samuel.
He expressed himself as pleased with him, and was very gratifying in
the warmth of his congratulations to Cordelia and me. Speaking as
a father of almost complete experience, he told me of the special
enthusiasm he felt for a child that had never run up a dentist’s bill.
Samuel hasn’t. There is little or nothing about him as yet that would
interest a dentist; but Cordelia, whose forefinger is a good deal in
his mouth, says there may be any minute.

I must ask mother if that is so. No doubt Cordelia’s enthusiasm is
liable to mislead her.

I believe Cordelia dislikes to spend money. I find her perpetually
weighing something that might be had against its price, and deciding
not to have it. Unless the purchasable object is indispensable or
very positively desirable--like a kodak to snap at Samuel--the money
looks better to her. That’s remarkable, isn’t it? People differ in
temperament as well as in training about that, inheriting tighter or
looser fists, I suppose, according to the forebear they individually
trace back to. To me, now, things that I want always look better than
what money I have. It makes me unhappy to spend _much_ more than I
have, but I enjoy very much spending what I have got. I never have any
money ahead, unless you can see savings in life insurance, to which I
make some inadequate pretense. Maybe that is a defect in my character,
though accumulation on seventy dollars a week has its reluctances when
you have a wife and baby and a cook and flat and all that. Still, if
I had no elders to fall back on I’d have to pinch some salvage out of
every dollar.

But Cordelia is naturally more retentive than I am. It is remarkable
how little she cares, relatively, for things. She has a good many
things, and has always been used to them. She likes them, but with an
interest that is altogether secondary, preferring power, independence,
and tranquillity of mind to objects of convenience or embellishment,
and to almost everything else except health and an easy conscience. She
has a private fortune--I don’t know that I have mentioned that--not
large, but yielding sufficient income to buy her clothes. All girls
ought to have private fortunes. Small ones will do: do better, perhaps,
than larger ones, for I don’t suppose it is quite ideal to be swamped
by your wife’s money. Cordelia gets a great deal of comfort out of
hers, but I see her basis of expenditure is different from mine. Mine
is adjusted to what I have; hers to what, on due reflection, she would
rather have than money. On that basis she spends not only her own
money, but mine. I dare say she will be a rich woman some day, and,
I hope, still married to me; so there is a chance that, with other
good luck, I may gather some surplus too. I believe she dislikes to
shop; indeed, I have heard her say so. There is a streak of Scotch in
the Frenches, and I dare say it happened her way. My! my! What luck!
When you think of the women--and men too, but especially women--whose
highest happiness is to buy things and lug them home, it seems a
marvelous dispensation that I should have acquired a companion of so
opposite a sort. To be sure, no girl that was infatuated with the joys
of purchase would have thought twice of me; and yet, who can tell,
for I suppose there are girls who have neither self-restraint nor
self-denial about anything, and are liable to think they must have
something that really would not suit them at all? I have always thought
that Rosamond Viney in _Middlemarch_ was the most fatal character in
literature. What must it be to be money-grubber for a woman like that,
with an expensive appreciation of the material side of life and no
conception of the rest of it! Stars above! how much better it is to be
lucky than wise, especially in youth, when, as Major Brace assures me,
none of us know anything. There was Solomon, who wrote the Proverbs,
and Ben Franklin, who wrote Poor Richard; both able to make shrewd
discourse by the ream, and neither of them fortunate on the domestic
side. Probably it does not accord with the economy of nature that wise
men should have wise wives; certainly if there is a scheme of things
that is worthy of respect, it would not have fitted into it for me to
have a foolish one.




V

A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE


I remark the disposition of contemporary American families to regulate
their church-going by the inclination of the ladies. I suppose it will
soon happen that Cordelia and I will go to church when Cordelia feels
it to be desirable, and that when she stays at home it will look more
profitable to me to stay at home with her. Although that means that we
will go pretty regularly, it is not quite as it should be, any more
than that I should go without my dinner when she has a failure of the
appetite. But it seems apt to be so with contemporary Protestant people
who get married. Even if the male has a previous habit of church-going,
and convictions or preferences in favor of it, the woman is apt to
be captain in that particular, and to assume command of the family
conscience. That is an item in the contemporary slump of the male in
the business of directing the course of life. He tries to keep a hand
of his own on politics, but in the concerns of religion easily falls
into the practice of looking to the woman to make his decisions and
remind him of his practices. Which is feeble of him, for, as between
religion and politics, religion is decidedly the more important, for it
shapes and inspires and regulates the whole of life, politics included,
whereas politics is no more than a detail.

When I think of women and their needs and powers and rights, and
their office in life--as I do a great deal nowadays, with Cordelia to
observe and those suffragists prodding at the subject all the time--I
have bursts of momentary conviction to the effect that if women go
on assimilating four-fifths of the available religion and leaving
nine-tenths of the alcohol and nearly all the tobacco to the men, they
will govern our world before we know it. The Turks understand better.
The male Turks make a specialty of piety, go without rum, and share
tobacco liberally with their women; so to be a male Turk is still a
relatively powerful condition, though I understand the Turkish ladies
are restless nowadays, in spite of sweetmeats and cigarettes, and are
covetous of education, and suspect that there should be more coming to
them than they are getting.

Cordelia has intimated that that observation of mine about men having
strength, and therefore dominion, is something of a bluff. She is too
polite to contradict it, but not too polite to stir me to further
reflections about it. Are men stronger? Have they dominion?

There is no doubt that the average man we see about can hit harder
than the average woman. He can also run faster and make better time
up a tree, so that he seems to have the best of it, physically, both
in offense and escape. If you come to translate these powers into
practical contemporary factors he can usually earn more money at
present than she can, and is much less vulnerable in the reputation. It
may be argued that this superiority in male abilities is not the work
of nature at all, but a consequence of male malignancy and oppression,
and that if woman had a fair show to get her due development she could
stand up to man when he put up his hooks, and run him down when he ran
away. So Olive Schreiner seems to feel about it. Man’s power to make
more money than woman is challenged as an injustice. Perhaps it is an
injustice in many cases. Perhaps our industrial system is not adjusted
yet to women’s undomestic work in schools and factories and offices,
and maybe the payroll will be revised in time in women’s favor. Still
I think man’s superior money-making powers are of a piece with his
power to hit harder and run faster. Money-getting seems to be more in
the line of his natural job than of hers. He is less distracted from
it by other leanings than she is. I guess he will always be the head
money-getter, though very likely her claim on what he gets may come to
rest even more on a basis of natural right than it does at present.
It is a very much respected claim as it is, and supported by law and
sentiment.

Man is superior in some kinds of bodily strength, and apparently in
some kinds of mental strength, too, but does it give him dominion?
Some, I think. It seems to give him a good deal of dominion among
savages, and less and less as civilization increases. Probably it would
give him more if he were not inferior in some of the kinds of strength,
and in some other respects that we are not used to classify as
strength, but which offset it. There are war-powers and peace-powers.
Admitting, in spite of Kipling’s she-bear poem, that man’s war-powers
beat woman’s, how about peace-powers? Of course they are enormous. If
she uses them for offense, she can spoil the man’s cake at any time.
There is no living without women, and to be assigned to one of them
and have her contrive that there shall be no living with her makes a
serious dilemma. I have discussed this matter with our old friend Major
Brace, and he has illuminated it with such wisdom as his great age (as
he says) has enabled him to supply. “We can’t do anything, Peregrine,”
he said, “but try our utmost [of course he really said damnedest] to
make them happy, and hope that they will be good.” He told me a story
about a house-painter he once knew in the country who had some ferrets.
“I noticed when looking at the ferrets,” the Major said, “that he had a
padlock on the place where he kept them, and he let me know, somehow,
that he carried the key in his pocket and let nobody but himself
meddle with them. I took note of that, because it seemed to me that
the ferrets being part of the domestic establishment, the natural way
would have been to leave the key in the house when he was away and
intrust the ferrets to his wife. But that was not his way, and I set
him down in my mind as a believer in male dominion and an upholder of
the authority of the head of the house. And, accordingly, when I heard
about a year later that his wife had eloped with the butcher I wasn’t
at all surprised. No doubt he had felt about her as he had about the
ferrets--that she was his property. I heard that he was extremely put
out when she ran away, and took it so much to heart that he left the
village. I suppose he didn’t know any better, though of course it
is possible that the woman was a fool and couldn’t be trusted. Her
going off with the butcher implies a certain carelessness, though not
necessarily a lack of intelligence.

“You see, Peregrine, one measure of the liberty of women is the
intelligence of man. And it works the other way round, too. A man who
is intelligent enough to prefer a free woman for his companion will
plan and take thought to have one; and a woman who is clever enough
to prefer a free man will take thought to keep her man free and still
keep him. That’s what all decent people do nowadays who are passably
wise, and I suppose it is what such people have been doing, not
always, perhaps, but easily since the time of Adam. And I dare say the
better-grade animals do the like.”

I asked the Major if he thought Kipling was right about the she-bear
and the superior offensiveness of females. He said he thought there
was a good deal of meat in Kipling’s verses, and that few intelligent
men came to be half a century old without having had to take thought
of the intensity of the female disposition. “Somehow, Peregrine,” said
he, “they seem to be a little nearer nature than we are. The primitive
creature seems to survive in them a little more perceptibly than it
does in us. And it is a very valuable survival--very valuable--and
fit to receive the most respectful consideration, because, as Kipling
intimates, it is a factor in the continuation of the race. When a man
has a wise wife who loves him, as you and I have, Peregrine, it is his
business to get the benefit of everything she has. All her strength as
well as his is needed in their common business. If he troubles her
with his limitations, checks her initiative, and ignores her dissent,
it is as bad for the common interest as when she does the like to him.
He should attend to her risings-up and her sittings-down, and when at
times the primitive creature rises up in her, his best procedure often
is neither to run nor to try to rule the storm, but to sit down in the
sand, wrap his burnoose around his head, and keep his face attentively
to leeward until the gale blows out and calm re-eventuates. Then,
in due time, she will dig him out again, if necessary, and he will
have much less to unsay and repent of than if he had talked back. And
usually, if he has been attentive, he will have learned something that
it is valuable to know.

“Lord love us,” went on the Major, “I hate subdued wives. I hate
subdued husbands also, but subdued wives worse, if possible, because
what subdues a wife is usually such an offensive combination of egotism
and stupidity. And yet I know quite able men who bully their wives and
have checked their wives’ development and diminished their abilities by
doing so. It is a shocking waste, although it is to admire the wives
who bear it. That is apt to be the best thing they can do, under the
circumstances. You see, in marriage that suggestion of Scripture about
cutting off the right hand that offends has only limited application.
Man or woman of us, when we have stood up in church and acquired a
right hand of the opposite gender, we have need to go mighty slow about
casting it from us. To read the divorce statistics, and about the
growth of that practice in this country in the last twenty years, you’d
think divorce was on the way to become a universal habit. But I guess
it won’t. I guess when the ratio has reached a point where it provides
duly for the irresponsible, intemperate, light-minded, and unfortunate,
the increase will stop, and maybe, if civilization improves, the
figures will begin to run the other way. That may seem optimistic, but
I can’t think that woman’s extraordinary gift for living with man, and
man’s surprising talent for getting along with woman, are going to
perish or be wasted.”

       *       *       *       *       *

My coevals that I meet are still talking about football; not
exclusively, of course, but with perseverance and of a lively
appearance of interest. Talking about it has some obvious advantages
over playing it, but I never learned to be really expert in either.
Cordelia and I saved quantities of money last fall staying away from
football games. Also quite a lot in staying away from the great final
series in professional baseball. Also time and strength on both of
these items. If our circumstances had been four or five times as easy
and Samuel could have spared us, we would have enriched our experience
of contemporary life by taking in several of these contests. As studies
in crowdology they are mighty good and leave permanent impressions
behind them. And they are interesting socially and anthropologically.
And sometimes they are pretty good as sport--the football games better,
I think, than before the rules were changed. But as it was, it was a
very easy economy for us. Cordelia said she had been to football games
and didn’t believe there were any important new thrills left in them
for her; and we read a lot about them in the papers and were content,
though I don’t think football really makes first-class newspaper
reading. I can’t follow the ball in type even as well as from the
seats, and I only get the score and the spectacular features. The
worst of it is I cannot care inordinately who wins. Of course, the
players do. They ought to. And so should the undergraduates and persons
just emerged from that condition. But I don’t understand why such
large masses of adult people contrive to care so much--if they really
do--whether Harvard beats Yale, or either of them beats Princeton, or
whether the Army or the Navy wins.

I am getting deplorably careless in my feelings in this great subject.
To be sure, when there is a big game I want to know how it has gone,
and buy the latest evening paper and take it home and assimilate, and
discuss a little, its disclosures about what the score was and why it
was so. But however it turns out it doesn’t affect my appetite for
dinner, nor my interest in food, and I can’t talk about it more than
half an hour. And when the Sunday paper comes with all the details I
am apt to get interested in other news and skip the football stories
altogether, or until late at night.

Really, I am ashamed. It comes, no doubt, with increase of years and
the pressure of responsibilities and concern about the more vital
details of human existence. Cordelia reviles me and says I am getting
older than my years. Maybe I am, mentally, though she is just about
as much interested in football as I am, and no more. I suppose sport
naturally falls into a secondary place in the thoughts of people
who have a living to make and rent to pay and a child to raise. If
everybody was like us, sport might languish, and that would be a pity.
I’m glad they’re not. The Pharisee was not so far out, perhaps, in
thanking God he was not like other men. The trouble was, he did not
go on and thank God that other men were not like him. There needs to
be great variety in the world if all the jobs are to get attention.
I’m thankful that the prosperity of football does not depend on me,
and that I can be bored by it without detriment to the great cause of
sport, because, I suppose, it really is a great cause, and related to
the perpetuation of vigor and virility in men.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have been thinking about celibates. There is something to be said for
persons to whom celibacy comes natural. To most persons it does not
come natural. It never did to me, for instance. I hate it when it is
forced, and object with what may be a Protestant detestation to vows
that bind people to it; but there are marvelously useful people in the
ranks of the unmarried.

Brookfield, a contemporary whose line is education, has been telling
me a story about a rich man, named Thompson, who has got interested in
the improvement of mankind. Somebody said the other day that the men
who get rich are those who are able to get more out of other people
than other people get out of them. That is a very plausible definition
and good as far as it goes, but the story I heard made me realize that
it doesn’t cover all the ground, and that many rich men are creators
of wealth. This Thompson that I heard of had extraordinary brains for
business. He could think to the bottom of propositions, and think out
all their details and perceive whether they could be made profitable
and how. He got at business almost as young as Alexander Hamilton, for
his parents, who were good people, both died when he was fifteen and
left him, as you might say, with his hat on, going out to look for
means of support. He went to a big town and got a job with a good
concern. At the end of three years he was ill, probably from overwork.
His employer told him to go away and stay two months and get rested.
He went, and stayed six weeks, and came back with the biggest bunch of
orders that the firm had ever had. His employer saw then that he was
incorrigible, and pretty soon he took him into partnership.

Now there comes another likeness to Hamilton. The boy wanted to know
more, and determined that when he had got money enough he would quit
work and go off and study. He calculated that he would have a million
dollars by the time he was twenty-six, and he thought that would do.
He actually did get his million and something to spare at twenty-six
(and this is not a newspaper story, either; Brookfield told it to me),
and actually did pull out and go off to Europe and spent three years
in France and Germany improving his mind. Now comes in his gift of
celibacy, in which he was quite different from Hamilton--who never
had any discernible talent that way--and from me. Instead of getting
married and raising a family, and having a flower-garden and horses
and cows--this being before they had invented automobiles--and enjoying
life, he did not get married at all. I don’t know why not. Maybe he
didn’t know how and was too old to learn; maybe somebody else persuaded
the girl that he aspired to persuade. At any rate, he didn’t marry,
but came home and made lots more money, and finally retired from
active business and set his wits to see what he could do to make the
world better. Now he lives on twelve or fifteen thousand a year, and
spends most of his strength and his surplus income and more or less
of his principal chiefly on one considerable enterprise that combines
philanthropy and education. But he is dragged back into business now
and then, Brookfield told me, when a commercial rescue job offers, that
looks so difficult that nobody else will touch it.

Of course, celibacy has no particular bearing on Thompson’s usefulness
except that he was qualified to get along with it, and it left him
entirely free to spend himself in trying to better the general
conditions of life. It is not news that there are always some mighty
useful bachelors about. Still less is it news that there are many
indispensable spinsters. I suppose the sentiment that everybody must
get married and have four children has got some open seams in it; but a
life is the thing that folks like best to leave in the world, and with
reason, for, on the whole, a life, if it is good enough, lasts the best
of anything, and leaves the most imperishable effects.

It is too soon yet to say if my son Samuel is going to leave an
imperishable effect in the world, but he is doing well, and the more
perishable effects have already been found to be so little suited to
him that one of his grandmothers has given him a modern rag-doll--an
elegant creation that comes from a shop--and the other a teddy-bear.
Teddy-bears are scarcer in the toy shops than they were, because the
current of politics has rolled on, but they can still be had and may
yet become more plentiful. Samuel lives a care-free life. In that
respect he is an example and encouragement to us all. He assumes no
responsibility about anything, takes his nourishment without turning
a hair or sweating so much as one bead, and shows indifference to the
primal curse. It is cheering and strengthening to have such a spirit in
the family.

Ben Bowling, who came home with me to dinner the other night, has some
of Samuel’s quality. Ben likes life and does not care what happens. I
threatened him with universal prohibition and the total disappearance
of potable grog from Christendom. He said it would never happen so,
but if it did he didn’t care. He drank too much, anyhow, and if there
was nothing to drink it would be good for his health and save him lots
of money. I threatened him with woman suffrage. He refused even to
object; said checkers was still checkers after all the pieces had got
into the king-row, and as good a game as ever, though with differences
of detail. I threatened him with stagnation of all industrial activity
as the result of enforcing the Sherman law. He didn’t care; said he
worked too hard, anyway, and needed a rest; could eat very simple food
at a pinch; was too fat; was threatened with an unsuitable entanglement
of the affections, and might escape the bag if the times were hard
enough. Then we all talked about the Sherman law. I see in the papers
that the consumption of alcoholic drinks in the United States last year
was the greatest on record. No wonder, when you think how much the
Sherman law has been talked over: a dry subject on which you get no
further and sink into despondency unless buoyed up. It is funny to see
the sagacity of the country flunked, apparently, by that problem. What
Ben and I agree on is so, and we agreed that the Sherman law, grinding
out prosecutions and disorganizing business because public opinion
could not settle on any plan to improve or amend it, was not unlike
the silver-purchase law that kept loading silver into the Treasury and
scaring off gold until Cleveland finally got it repealed. We did not
agree that the Sherman law ought to be repealed, but did agree that it
might elect the next President. Also that neither party was satisfied
with any one who was running for nomination, though that is perhaps
not an unusual condition when nomination is still five or six months
off. But Ben did not care. He was attentive, interested, and amused,
but hoped to stay aboard, no matter what the weather was, and help in
navigation if his services were required. He and Samuel are reassuring.

Another thing I find reassuring is the glimpses I get now and then of
men who are at work providing government for the country; especially
unadvertised men whom few people ever hear of, who hold no office
and aspire to none; whose pictures are never in the papers, nor
their names in the reporter’s books or the mouths of the multitude.
I heard the other day about one such person (Brookfield told me), a
man of sufficient fortune--a million, I dare say--not a celibate like
Thompson, but married and with a few children; a shrewd, experienced,
thoughtful man, whose interest in life is and always has been politics,
to handle the machinery of it and get the best results compatible
with the material offered to pass laws and fill the offices, and the
prejudices and mental disabilities of the voters. “I have known that
man,” Brookfield said, “for eighteen years, and watched him play
politics all that time; plan and direct; weigh men and choose between
them; use their talents and abilities when they had them: put them in
places where they belonged when he could; put in the next-best man
when he couldn’t. He always played fair; always wanted the best man,
the best law, and the best principle that he could see, and never
wanted anything for himself except the fun of playing the game. You
couldn’t drive him into office. He never tried to make a penny out of
legislation. The less he was seen and heard of the better he liked
it, but he recognized politics as the great man’s game, and he liked
to play it. No doubt the sense of power was pleasant to him, but his
use of power was entirely conscientious, and the source of his power
was never money, but the confidence that men had in his sagacity and
his unselfishness. Back in him somewhere there was, of course, a sense
of duty and a belief in certain principles of government, and a sort
of unconscious consecration to the desire to see our experiment in
government go well and to see the country prosper. But the immediate
interest that kept his mind busy was just a delight in guiding the
political affairs of men.”

I dare say Brookfield’s man is an exceptional political boss; but I
dare say, also, that in so far as we have, or ever have had, or will
have, decent government, we owe it to somebody who has had a call to
provide it for us, and has had the talents necessary to make his call
effective. The rare thing about Brookfield’s man, as he described him,
was his self-effacement and superiority to vanity. He loved to play
the game, but not only never thought of the gate money, but never cared
to be a grandstand player. To do the job and do it well brought him
the joy of a true artist in his art. As I said, I have felt encouraged
about the future of politics in this country since I heard about him.
If he had been a saint I wouldn’t have been so much encouraged, but
Brookfield represented him as a mere human being, like any of us,
looking about for things that interested his mind and made life taste
good, and finding them supremely in politics. It is an encouragement
to find that our politics is so good a game that folks with money and
brains enough to experiment with pleasures will play at it purely for
their inward satisfaction, and without attention even to the applause.
Of course, men of that temperament and that high degree of sagacity and
self-control are rare, but we have our share of men with an insight
into cause and effect, and an understanding of the human mind both in
the individual and in the crowd, and with ability to hear what is going
on when they put their ears to the ground, and with a lively interest
in human affairs that must surely draw them into politics whenever
they see that politics is a paramount interest. We have no picturesque
Dukes of Devonshire drudging dutifully at government without vanity
or political ambition, as fathers drudge for their families, and as
Washington, maybe, drudged for us, but I believe we have a native
product of our own that does like work, and quite as often with
intelligence, because the work calls to them and because they not
only feel the responsibilities of civilization, but find delight in
undertaking them.

And why not, to be sure! What else is there in life that is so fruitful
in recompenses as a cheerful undertaking of the responsibilities of
civilization? Mine are represented mainly, as yet, by Cordelia and
Samuel, but I mean to undertake lots more. I see quantities of them
about waiting to be undertaken. So does Cordelia, who is one of the
most active and responsible of responsibilities, and, being less tied
up to wage-earning than I am, gives more attention to putting props
under civilization.




VI

POLITICS


My calling does not seem nowadays to inspire respect. Folks hoot at
lawyers, declaring with much reiteration that law has ceased to be a
profession and become a business. They vary that by pointing out that
all the best talent in it is bought up day by day by the corporations
and the rich. Even the judges--look at them! The current disposition
is, when you don’t like a decision of a court, to take the judge’s
number and write to the management to have him fired. It is to laugh at
decisions and the feeling about them. The other day the United States
Supreme Court decided something thus and so by four to three. Justices
1, 3, and 5 protested vigorously. Personally I sustained the dissenting
opinion, and thought the decision left the law in a bad condition.
That could be cured by Congress, which is perhaps the best way, but
the popular method would be to dock Justices 2, 4, 6, and 7 a month’s
pay, and try the case again with a full court. That’s how folks seem to
feel, and perhaps some of them would act on their feelings.

_Some_ of them! Stars above! What some of us would do is past guessing.
What some of us are thought capable of doing quite outruns belief,
but that is because the air is charged with politics and with plans
and specifications for making over the world, and with a perceptible
leaning, as I have intimated, toward beginning with the legal
profession.

Oh, well, let ’em! I’m not afraid. A man who can make a living by
law can make a living at something else if necessary. It is the
understanding when they put young fellows to learn the law that they
will be qualified, more or less, if they learn it, not only to be
lawyers, but to be bankers, brokers, railroad officers, editors,
milliners, grocers, contractors, and nurses-general to ailing
industries, and undertakers. Accordingly they usually appoint lawyers
to receiverships, and usually the appointees go ahead and bury the
patient. No doubt it is a natural consequence of this theory that
lawyers shall know and do everybody’s business that there is this
prevalence of impressions that everybody ought to be able to beat the
lawyers at law. Of course there ought to be reciprocity in omniscience.
Of course the lawyer trade can be overdone, but there’s more to it
than these recall people think. I guess it will last my time. It’s the
science of keeping order in the world. I admit that it needs assistance
from cops and sometimes from soldiers, and cannon and warships, and
that too much of the time it keeps a sort of crystallized disorder that
has to be smashed occasionally and rearranged. But when it comes to
rearrangement, back they come to the lawyers, professors of the science
of keeping order in the world.

It is interesting how people divide in politics. All the decent people
seem to be after the same thing, more or less, but differ according to
knowledge, temperament, circumstances, and affiliations as to methods
of getting it. And the differences last so wonderfully! There’s free
trade and protection, or high and low protection--we’ve been discussing
those matters in this country voluminously and insistently for from
fifty to a hundred years, and by far the most of us don’t know now
precisely where we stand. We are, reasonably enough, for as much
improvement as will do us good, and not for any more than is helpful
at the price. But tariff-improvement isn’t to be had in quarter-yard
lengths. Congress makes a rough effort to please customers, and when it
has finished it is take it or leave it, and the customers usually go
off grumbling.

And the other things that people want--restraint of corporations,
restraint of labor-unions, restraint of political bosses, changes in
the machinery of politics, hand-made government by the people, single
taxes, income taxes, minimum wages, municipal ownership of public
utilities, votes for women--my gracious--there’s a new remedy every day.

Not but that many of them are good and some of them timely. The world
seems to be progressive nowadays, and I suppose its progress is upward,
and not to the bow-wows. But it is to wonder about every proposed
change whether it is really improvement or merely change, and about
every novelty that people clamor for whether their true need is not
something else--a change in themselves, rather than any practicable
change in the regulations of life. For one need not be very old to
observe that different people make out very differently in the same
circumstances, and that folks affect circumstances much more than
circumstances affect folks. Yet circumstances do affect folks very
much, crush them sometimes, and stunt or warp them often; and certainly
there is an obligation in the folks who have it in them to affect
circumstances to improve them for the benefit of all hands, and provide
reasonable access to opportunity.

Do I get in with the cart-tail orators this campaign? Why not, to be
sure? Politics has been an early crop this year, sprouting hard in
March, and working overtime ever since, with an enormous profusion of
discourse and a vast expenditure of time and money in a general public
effort to get somewhere. But that’s all right. The crop is going to be
worth the labor. This is really the first time the political school has
been run wide open since Bryan’s first campaign, and that was sixteen
years ago, a period that carries me clear back to Eton collars. Alas
for me! I suppose I’m a sort of conservative. They ought to examine the
blood and find out where people belong, and save us some of our mental
struggles to discover it by cerebral analysis. I don’t know what’s in
my blood, but when people are for scuttling the ship so as to get the
boats out easier I always seem to be for some other plan. Now and then
it’s necessary to scuttle. There was the everlasting French Revolution,
where they blew up their ship, and in the long run made a good thing
out of it. But that was an exceptionally rotten ship, and they had
things fixed aboard so that the crew were too successfully separated
from the grub--a feat that a large share of human ability seems always
at work to accomplish, and which, when it is successfully pulled off,
achieves a very penetrating and comprehensive quality of ruin. Perhaps
it is the conservative molecules in my blood that makes me as much
adverse to this detachment of the crew from the grub as I am to blowing
up the ship. No true friend of navigation wants either of them.

I guess it’s more fun to be a meat-ax radical than a conservative.
The ax-handle is a simple implement, and probably blisters the hands
less than this eternal pulling on the sheets and throwing the wheel
over. But we don’t really choose our line in politics. We take the
steer we get from our inside, and which comes down to us, no doubt,
from our forebears, along with the tendency to fat or lean, and
variations in the adherence of hairs to our scalps. I dare say we
are not as grateful as we should be to other persons whose molecular
inheritance is different from ours for going their way and following
their hereditary propensities, so that we can better and more helpfully
follow ours. If we all got the same steer I dare say the ship would
run aground. To avoid that there comes this variety of propensity, and
also the great principle of reaction on inherited inclinations, which
has always raised up from time to time such valuable and efficient
revolutionaries. The pinch for the natural conservatives comes at
times when conservatism has outrun its license and crystallized into a
do-nothingness which is more dangerous than radicalism. Then the real
conservatives like me, who always want to let things down easy, have to
flop, and it is always a very nice matter to know just when to do it
and what to flop to.

This is a pretty floppy year, no doubt about it. I’d give a penny to
know whose cart-tail, if any, I should aspire to mount. Great din at
this writing, and a handsome field of candidates, with leaders whom
we have been contemplating for months, and putting on the scales and
pulling off, and whose points we have reckoned and re-reckoned. And as
it comes to the choice, how prevalent is dubiety of mind as to whether
we shall get candidates for whom we want to vote! Was there ever such
a lot of men put up for office? I read the papers, all varieties of
them, and have been studying candidates hard now for three or four
months, and begin to wonder how so many incompetent or unprincipled
citizens have contrived to cheat the gallows and avoid all places of
detention all these years. Not one of them has so much as been to
jail as yet. I dare say they would pass even now as half-way decent
men if they were not candidates. Perhaps we are too particular. I
notice that a large proportion of the important work in the world has
been done by pretty bad men: men, some of them, who would have been
insufferable if they had not been indispensable. When things are in
a bad-enough hole, the indispensable man has to be taken whether he
is insufferable or not. But luckily we’re not up against it so hard
as that. Nobody seems indispensable this year. Our world seems to me
less tippy nowadays, blowing as it is at all its blow-holes, than it
did six or seven years ago, when stocks were kiting and being kited,
and everybody was consolidating, and every active person who wasn’t a
syndicate or an underwriter of something was asking the way to those
fashionable employments. We have blown off a lot of steam since then,
and our safety-valves are all working pretty well; and, though they’re
noisy, to me they don’t look dangerous. We must be patient with the
candidates, and look sometimes on their bright sides. When we regard
them all with discontent, it is too much like that common saying, “Why
do women marry such men?” They marry the best in sight, and that’s all
we can do about candidates. But, by George! the light that beats upon a
throne is mere moonshine to the light that beats upon a candidate.

We shall see about the candidates, but just what we shall see beats me.




VII

WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION


We want to ask people to dinner--at least _I_ do--and do ask a good
many, first and last, in spite of restricted space and our other
restrictions. About four besides ourselves is our limit, and that’s
a dinner-party. More often I bring home a man, or a married pair of
our generation come in and bring new topics and points of view, and
sometimes news, into our discourse. People seem willing enough to come
to dinner if you have something to eat in the house and something to
say. I sometimes wish we had more dinner-parties, but the doctrine of
compensation comes in on that, for, I suppose, if we were rich enough
to have people to dinner whenever we wanted, we would have to dine
out the rest of the time, and the upshot of it would be that we would
never have time to read up anything really good to say. But we do dine
out considerably as it is, not only with our cherished relatives who
regale us when occasion offers (and also when it doesn’t) with meat,
drink, and affection, but also with our friends, both those who live
somewhat near our economic plane and those who move and have beings in
planes much more exalted and profuse.

For example, we dine sometimes with Major and Mrs. Brace, indulgent
elders of whom I have so often spoken, and who, I think, are disposed
to assume some restricted but affectionate responsibility for our
successful progress through this vale of dues. We are on such terms
with that family that Mrs. Brace has a habit of telephoning to Cordelia
please to come and fill in at a dinner-party when a pair of guests give
out at the last moment, which we do, when we can, with cheerfulness of
spirit. Then the Major bestows little jobs of law business on me from
time to time, and is apt to say “Come to dinner, and talk it over, and
fetch Cordelia.” And then we talk other things over also, and maybe
play auction bridge for an hour.

The last one of Mrs. Brace’s dinners we filled in at was unusually
well stocked with persons apt at discussion, and the talk took a turn
toward the education of women, and more particularly the education of
daughters of well-to-do parents in New York. On the general subject I
don’t see that there is much to discuss. The prevailing practice is
to teach girls up to eighteen or nineteen years of age anything that
they will consent to learn, the same as boys. The girls don’t go to
college yet as generally as the boys do, but they go a good deal, and
more and more, I should say, all the time. The girls’ colleges prosper
and increase in number and in size, but the authorities seem to feel
that they have not yet fully struck their gait; not yet established
themselves as the best places for girls in general between eighteen and
twenty-two, and not yet demonstrated to the satisfaction of all the
observant and considerate that the training they give fulfils its aim,
and is better worth the time of girls who acquire it or might acquire
it than some other things that some of them are or might be doing in
those four years, if they were not doing that.

You may say that the same reluctance of unrestricted approval attaches
to the boys’ colleges. There was the New Haven lady who felt so
strongly that Yale was one of the more popular gates of hell, and
the late Mr. Crane, of Chicago, who maintained that our whole system
of college education was pernicious and a shocking waste of time,
and Dr. Wilson, late of Princeton, who felt so strongly that the
college side-shows, athletic and social, had diverted to themselves
the stronger currents of young life, to the great detriment of the
academic performance in the main tent, and who did what he could to
bring them back. Certainly the boys’ colleges are imperfect enough,
and are conceded both by their friends and their detractors to be so,
but at least they have won in the competition with home training. As a
rule, the boys who can, go to college. They may not get there what they
should, but they are not kept at home and put into business, or brought
out into society, for fear that what they may miss by not staying at
home will be more valuable than what they may gain by being in college.
All sorts of boys go to college; the rich and the poor, the fashionable
and the simple; the boys with a living to scramble for, and those with
cotton-wadded places and ready-made incomes waiting for them. It is
felt that boys must know one another if they know nothing else, and
that college is a good place to get that knowledge.

So it is felt about girls, that they must know one another, and also
boys, if nothing else, but college is not yet the place where the
more modish girls in the biggest cities can know the girls whom it
belongs to them to know. The American girls from the big cities who
are advantageously situated for experiments in polite society do not
yet go much to college. Their brothers go as matter of course. Their
brothers, like as not, are sent five or six years to boarding-school,
and then three or four years to college, and then perhaps kept away
several years longer learning the rudiments of some profession in which
they start to work at twenty-five or later. But to keep the girls off
in institutions away from their mothers, until they reach so ripe an
age as that, or even the maturity of twenty-two, is an experiment that
affectionate parents who have social aspirations for their daughters,
and some means of furthering them, are apt to look upon with hostility,
doubt, or, at best, with grudging and uncertain approval. The mass
of the college girls seems to be recruited from the lesser cities,
or from families whose daughters have a doubtful prospect, or worse,
of inheriting means of support, and must, as a matter of common
prudence, be qualified betimes for self-maintenance and all the kinds
of self-help, against a turn of fortune that may leave them without a
competent wage-earner to depend on.

These considerations all got due attention at Mrs. Brace’s
dinner-party. “Send Maria to college?” exclaimed Mrs. Van Pelt. “What
for? She’s eighteen, and has been to school as it is ever since she
was four years old, and to boarding-school three years, and knows an
enormous amount, and can read and spell fairly, speak some French, and
read German, and knows the English kings, and a few of the Presidents,
and whether Dryden or Milton wrote the ‘Fairy Queen.’ Mercy! The
child’s crammed with knowledge; what she needs to know is how to use
some of it. She can’t talk at a dinner-party. I want her to learn to
talk. I want her to have an acquaintance. It won’t hurt her to inspect
the young gentlemen. The colleges are nunneries, full of nuns whose
mothers I don’t know, busy learning unimportant things like how to cut
up frogs, and the pedigrees of the Saxon kings, and eschatology, and
neglecting all the important things like how to put on a hat, how to
cut up a lobster, how to keep hair attached to the scalp, how to talk
to a boy, how to help a mother, how to engage a cook, whom to ask to a
dinner-party. Why college? Maria’d come home in four years, forgotten
by all the girls she ought to know, qualified to be a school-teacher
and with a large acquaintance among young ladies similarly qualified,
and with a strong and reasonable impulse to put her acquirements to
practical use either by continuing her studies or getting a situation
and earning her living. I don’t want her to get a situation and earn
her living, I want her to get married.”

“Oh, come!” said the Major, who was sitting next to her. “It isn’t so
bad as that. I know Maria. She’ll get married anyhow, but give her
time. Does she want to go to college?”

“She could have gone. She knew enough when she got out of school. She
passed the examinations, and she thought about it more or less. But
finally she came out instead. She may go yet. I don’t know. She still
talks to her father about it, and meanwhile she takes courses with
learned women about art and such things, and does something at music.
And she goes to dances a little, and dines out a little, and slums a
little, and organizes charity a little.”

“Does she play with the boys?”

“A very little. The young men don’t seem to be the absorbing interest
they were when I was young. But I suppose that is more a change in
human nature. New York has come to be a good deal of a street-car, with
people crowding in and out all the time, and the conductor perpetually
calling out, ‘Please move up there in front!’ Girls and young men don’t
meet here familiarly any more. I don’t know how they ever see enough of
one another to get married unless they meet in the summer somewhere.
New York girls seem mostly to marry men they meet on steamers,
nowadays.”

“I understand,” said the Major, “that our population is now divided
into those who travel and those who stay at home. Those who travel
meet, especially on steamers where they are cooped up together with
a week of idle time on their hands and are liable to develop mutual
appreciations. Those who don’t travel also meet more or less, and some
of them seem to marry. There were you and Cordelia, Peregrine; you were
not a traveler, yet you got married somehow.”

“Oh yes,” said I. “I had to. There was nothing else that I wanted to do
that was compatible with earning a living. I never traveled. I never
could; but Cordelia traveled plenty.”

“To be sure,” put in Mrs. Van Pelt, “they can travel if they don’t go
to college. It doesn’t cost much more, and they have the time. And
they do travel. Also they visit about with their school friends, and
find their way about Boston and Philadelphia and Washington and other
places more civilized than this, and I have known of girls who went to
visit in St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul, which was interesting and
enlarging to the mind, though not so necessary perhaps as though we did
not have the finished products of those cities brought daily to our
doors, and could not inspect them and the rest of the United States any
day on Fifth Avenue, or by walking through the Waldorf-Astoria or the
Plaza Hotel, or at home, or out at dinner--and I beg you to recognize,
Mrs. Lamson, that I remember that we borrowed you from Seattle, and
you and your husband, Mrs. Butler, from Buffalo, and that I, who was
brought here from Baltimore, speak humbly and with great respect of
all our Western cities. But send your girl to college, and then she is
like a butterfly pinned to a card. Can’t visit, can’t travel, can’t
beguile her father, can’t console her mother, can’t take her brother to
dances, can’t pay calls, lost to earth, learning the family connections
of mollusks--what is a mollusk?--and the other unusable things that
erudite people have put into tiresome books. And yet I don’t doubt that
Maria’s father will send her to college if she wants to go.”

Mr. Van Pelt, farther down the table, seeing that his wife had the
floor, had lent an ear to her deliverance. “Well,” said he, “what can
you do? Four years is only four years, and a girl in these days can
afford to spend it in getting something definite and lasting, if only
she gets it. I only know this game of being a girl by observation. I
have never played at it. But my wife knows it as a player, and what
she perceives in it by experience and instinct always outweighs my
theories in my own judgment. She decides these matters except in so
far as Maria decides them for herself, which is a good ways. My wife is
uncertain about the good of girls’ colleges because she never went to
one. They’re very new. They didn’t prevail so much in her educational
period as they do now. They must be excellent for girls whose mothers
are desperate or frivolous characters, from whom they need to be
separated. All the institutions are valuable in separating children
with possibilities from impossible parents. But where the parents
are not impossible, of course the separation involves loss. We feel
as to boys that the gain pretty certainly counterbalances it. But we
feel that girls do well to form the habit of living at home, which is
something that takes practice, and even prayers, if you’re going to do
it as you should. If Maria goes to college, I’m for having her sleep
at home, where I can see her at dinner. Though whether that’s right
or not, I don’t know. I don’t expect to give Maria more than a very
imperfect steer in this life anyhow. That’s all I got; all my wife
got; all my father and mother got. But I don’t mind taking a chance
if it looks good, and the fact that college does not fit conveniently
into the social machinery that has been devised for the development
of girls in New York does not appall me. The machinery exists for the
benefit of the girls, not the girls for the machinery. What we are
after is to train fine women. You don’t do it by wholesale processes.
It is hard work, anyhow, and what suits one doesn’t suit another. It
is with a girl, I take it, as it is with a boy. The facts they get in
college they mostly lose, but the minds of some of them expand in the
process of getting facts, and gain scope and power, and the ability to
understand things, and increased interest in life, and capacity. Any
way, so that the girls get their own.”

“If we’ve all got to vote presently,” said Mrs. Brace, “no doubt the
girls will have to go to college. I’m told we’re not constitutional in
our political remedies.”

“As to votes,” said the Major, “it’s a case of half-knowledge is a
dangerous thing. The most able women that I happen to know, the most
thoroughly trained and schooled in hard mental work, those that seem to
me the deepest thinkers, don’t want votes for women. Of course college
at its best is only a step, but it is a step toward sound thinking. I
should be inclined to argue that college for a girl was a step toward
giving her such a grasp upon human affairs and the conditions of life
as would incline her to leave votes where they are, and spend her
strength in other forms of expression. So if Maria sends herself to
college, Van Pelt, it may be a process in the making of a really able
anti-suffragist who will understand herself, and other women and men,
and can sift the chaff out of an argument. If the suffragists are to
be beaten they will be beaten by the rest of women--those who have
found their vocation and are happy in it, those who are busy, at least,
whether happy or not, and cannot be harangued into excitement about
politics, and those of first-rate mental powers and deep experience,
who can turn the whole matter over in their minds and conclude that
woman suffrage would not help society. At any rate, woman suffrage or
not, the way out lies in the direction of more power in the human mind,
male and female, and not in less.”

We males continued to discuss this subject when the ladies had gone
out and we went into the Major’s library to burn tobacco. They set
upon me as the latest transplantation from the college nursery into
the garden of actual life, and demanded to know what I had got out
of college. I said that for one thing I had got an acquaintance with
several hundred men of about my own age, a good many of them now living
in New York and the rest scattered variously about the country. Some
of these men I knew intimately. All of them I knew well enough to have
views about their qualities, and what I knew of them helped me to
know other men, and gave me a measure which helped me to estimate men
in general. I said that the way to know pictures was to be where you
could see pictures, that the way to know men was, doubtless, to live
with them and look them over, and that college--a big college--was a
very convenient place to view a collection of young men, and learn
to know the species. I said I didn’t think any other thing we got in
college was so important as that, because the other things you might
learn in a big college could be learned anywhere if you took the
necessary time and put in the necessary work. But the beauty about
college was that you had the time there to add to knowledge in all
the ways, to learn the men and also to inspect the books and examine
the mental secretions of the professors, and that with reasonable
gumption and diligence you could do it all. As to that end of it I
quoted Tomlinson, who dined with us the other night. He is a still
more recent college product than I am, and is still immersed in law
studies. We got to talking college and what we thought it had done
for us, and he said, as I remember, that he could hardly recall a
fact that he had learned in college, but still he thought he had got
great good out of it. When he was an undergraduate, he said, he was
interested mostly in history, government, and economics. When he got
out, his tastes entirely changed, and he got interested in literature
and philosophy. “Nowadays,” said he, “I look forward to Sunday with the
utmost impatience, and when it comes round I put it in with Spencer,
Huxley, and Emerson. I am getting to be an authority on biology, I tell
you, and wrestle with _First Principles_ in a way to make my law-books
jealous.”

They were quite interested in Tomlinson. The Major said he loved to see
a boy come out of college with a desire to know something. “Now that
boy,” said he, “is really interested in what is going on, and wants
to know why. It’s delightful. He’s got the inquiring mind, and, you
see, college has developed it. Perhaps it would have developed anyhow,
but at least the environment was favorable. It’s a mighty inquisitive
mind that develops on general lines if it is put hard into the game
of money-grubbing at seventeen. And I don’t know that the game of
‘society’ is so much better for girls, though it is better in this:
that its more strenuous phase doesn’t last long, and after that a girl
who has not yet formed an attachment has a great deal more leisure
than a boy who is tied up to a job. We should recognize that ‘society’
is intended to give to girls that acquaintance with people, and the
opportunities to observe them and handle them, that Jesup, here, values
so much in college. Only ‘society’ does not include the systematic
cultivation of recorded knowledge which the colleges still exact. If
your Maria, now, Van Pelt, could supplement her social experiments with
such fruits of college learning as that young Tomlinson reports, she’d
be ahead on it. Don’t you think so? She’d be a more interesting woman,
and have a livelier interest in life, and take hold of things more
intelligently, and put in her spare time to better purpose, and have
more fun. It is a great thing, it really is a great thing, to get the
young started up the tree of knowledge; to get them to want to know,
and start them climbing.”

“I agree with you, Major,” said Mr. Van Pelt. “I quite agree with you.
But Tomlinson’s a boy and Maria’s a girl. Is that going to make a
difference? Evidently Tomlinson’s not going to let the trees obstruct
his view of the forest. He seems to be after knowledge because it will
help him to understand life. That’s all the good there is in knowledge.
Now I see women who seem to claw after knowledge as though it were a
sunburst, or some such embellishment that adorned them to good purpose.
I see their minds caked up with it, so that they don’t work well. Some
of the learned ladies are tiresome, just as some of the learned men
are. They are not tiresome because they know too much, but because they
lack the instinct that should tell them how to be interesting. You know
a lively retail shop with a good show-window is always more interesting
than a storage warehouse, no matter what treasures the warehouse may
contain. I was saying the other day that Mrs. Jameson, the professor’s
wife, was such a charming lady, and a very accomplished woman who heard
me, said, ‘Oh yes; but she doesn’t know English literature.’ What odds
whether she knows English literature or not if she is a charming lady?
As much English literature as will make her lovelier and better able
to express herself and more interesting and wiser is a good thing, and
more than that is of very secondary importance except to a specialist.
But that other lady who did know English literature like a specialist
spoke of Mrs. Jameson’s defective hold on it very much as though it
were an absent sunburst or an unbecoming gown. As for Maria, I should
hate to spoil a woman to make a scholar. But on the other hand, I
should hate to stunt a woman to make a pretty lady.”

The Major said that in Maria’s case he would rather take the first
chance than the second. “But if you will encourage Maria to come around
here to dinner, Van Pelt,” he said, “I’ll get Jesup to catch that young
Tomlinson person, and we will examine his mind. Perhaps Maria may be
interested to look into it, and if she is, I should love to see her
try. I don’t know why, but when I hear of girls who are disposed to
use their heads to think with, and who think it would be nice to know
what’s doing, I always have irresistible impulses to abet them. They
may sometime--yes, any time--think out and disclose such interesting
things. For, after all, women are women, and we men all grope and want
to know when we speculate about them.”

He got up, went to a table drawer, and got out a little paper, which he
gave me, saying “Here’s a tract for you, Peregrine,” and then we went
back to the ladies.

When Cordelia and I got home that night, and had viewed, approved, and
tucked in our slumbering son, Samuel, and had discussed the company and
their discourse, I brought out the Major’s tract and read it to her, to
wit:

“What are regarded as the great prizes of life--fame, money, and such
showy things--are nearly all things geared to the powers of men. It is
easy to measure the successes of men. They stand out in plain sight to
be weighed and examined.

“But the successes of most of the successful women are much
less tangible. As a rule they are contributions to life as it
passes--influence, care, nurture, direction, companionship; valuables
of the highest order, but which finally appear, not as properties of
the woman from whom they proceeded, but of the men or the children who
received them, and the families and communities that they have blessed.

“The evidences of the success of men stand on pedestals and hang on
walls and are recorded in books and occupy safe-deposit boxes in bank
vaults. They stretch across the country in the form of steel rails or
copper wires, or stand as buildings in stone and steel. On every one of
them is the woman’s hand. In every one of them she has had her share.
There is no success of any kind, no power, no progress, which is not
half hers. But ordinarily she does not much appear; not, at least,
in a degree at all commensurate with her importance. Her work is not
expressed--not much--in things. It is made flesh.

“Is that unjust to her? Is it unfair that man should seem to outdo her?

“Who shall say what is fair and what not in the management of this
universe? We flatter ourselves with the idea that the Almighty has
chosen to express Himself in mankind. Admitting that, it is a daring
critic who will assert that woman is disparaged because it is allotted
to her to express herself in like fashion.”




VIII

MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE


How am I to get a garden for Cordelia? I love so to see her in a
garden. They’re fine for women. I like them myself, but the calls
of the industry I pursue below Canal Street distract me from
floriculture and personal pokings in the earth. I don’t even _plan_
garden in any detail, which is partly, of course, because we have
no actual garden possibilities yet to plan, though we still aspire
to remote rhododendrons. But I get perceptible refreshment out of
flower-beds, and very innocent and healing joys in the colors and
texture and designs of flowers and the various patterns of millinery
they affect. They are the great natural argument for art and beauty;
immensely consoling and inspiring both for what they are and for what
they intimate. Admiring them, even the imperfectly Scriptural, like
me, revert instinctively to Scripture and to consideration of the
lilies, that toil not, neither spin, and yet are in the front of the
competition for looks, and fit for their beauty’s sake to reproach the
doubts of them of little faith. Certainly the Creator did not get up
flowers for nothing.

We must have a garden, if only for its pious uses, but for Cordelia
it has admirable physical and mental uses besides. It gives her all
the exercises--of mind, body, and spirit. Detached as she is from the
soil she sprang from, in her mother’s garden she gets personally back
to earth, grubbing in it with trowels and like implements, with beads
on her brow and blisters and mosquito bites wherever they happen to
come, but with a zest and an enjoyment that comes near to passion.
Our parents, happily, have pretty good gardens, and all the spring we
have been improving the week-ends by getting near to nature on the
paternal suburban reservations. This being Samuel’s first spring, he
has viewed it mostly from a perambulator, but, so seen, it has been
profitable to him, and he has regarded its advances with perceptible
approval, especially when it has been warm enough, and dry enough, for
him to sleep informally out-of-doors. No doubt the modern theory is
sound that it is never too cold or too wet to sleep out-of-doors, but
Samuel, being naturally robust, has never had to be absolutely modern
in his observances. I leave it to any fair person if it is tolerable
to think of his growing up without close and long association with the
green-and-brown earth? Yet children do it by the hundred thousand in
New York, and a fair proportion of them grow up stronger and better
than a considerable proportion of the country-bred children. There
are children, I am told, whom the city agrees with, and others--a
minority--who suffer from the nervous tension of it. It is agreed, I
suppose, that all children are better off out of town in summer, but so
are grown people, provided they go to a healthier place and can find
fit employments, or make them for themselves. But the hardy children,
like the hardy grown-ups, seem to get along in town or out. I find that
in June the country air begins to taste different from the town air,
and when I get off the cars in the rural districts I fill my lungs with
great gulps of it, to the easement of my feelings.

Bless me, how much we want, and how much it seems to cost to get it!
Everybody wants a lot nowadays, and everybody, except the seriously
opulent, seems to find the cost excessive. I suppose everybody wants
for his child what Cordelia and I want for Samuel. Everybody seems to
want to live some sort of a life that’s worth living, and to get the
price of it somehow. It is a large contract for society to meet these
natural and reasonable desires; no wonder the world’s machinery groans
so, and that strikes and perplexities and trust trials so much abound,
and that so much talk is in the air about the right of the people to
rule. But ruling is a skilled job, and though it is none too well
done, and never has been, the notion that “the people” are first-class
experts at it who are kept out of power by interlopers seems to me
more or less humorous. And so is the notion that we “people” have any
great eagerness to rule. We haven’t. That’s one trouble. Almost all of
us want to go about our business and procure some of the ameliorations
of existence. Ruling is hard work and small pay. We want some one else
to do it, if possible; some one who has a call and feels that he has
a talent for government. These gentlemen who talk about the people
ruling are usually gentlemen who have inward admonitions that they
possess governmental talent. We choose between them, and to that extent
we rule, and have been ruling for some time, and will rule, I guess,
for some time to come.

Cordelia and I would like to vote for more room in our flat. It’s too
tight. Now, with Samuel and his belongings to provide for, we haven’t
room to hang up and put away our things. We want a larger apartment,
cheaper food, especially milk, reduction in the price of clothes,
lower servants’ wages--more, generally, for our money. But I don’t
know just how to vote for these things without running up against
the reasonable needs of other people. All the measures I would favor
as suitable to make my earnings go further seem constituted to make
somebody else’s earnings less. That wouldn’t hinder me from voting to
reduce the tariff, because I think it ought to be reduced, but I don’t
want to vote any less wages for Matilda Finn. Demand and taxation fix
rents; how am I going to vote them cheaper? If the Meat Trust makes
meat unduly dear, I’m against it; but I am not at all sure that it
does. If the excessive multiplication of grocers makes potatoes high,
it is a pity, but how am I going to vote against it? I can vote, when
the chance comes, for the best city government that is offered, and
the best obtainable bargain about public utilities, and supervision
of milk, and such things; and I can vote for tariff reform, and trust
regulation, and conservation in so far as those desirables are affected
by retaining or dismissing the present administrators of the Federal
government; but after I have voted all I can--and expressed my primary
preference, and initiated and recalled and referended, if those
privileges are offered me--it will still remain undoubtedly that if I
want more closet-room for Cordelia and a continuing residence in town
and a garden somewhere, I’ve got to get in more money. So I’m in just
the same case as the mill-hands and the miners and everybody else who
has been on a strike lately, except that I haven’t got to strike unless
I want to, and I sha’n’t want to until I have an offer of something
better than I’ve got now.

It makes me ashamed to keep wanting more money, even though the
mill-hands and miners and the rest feel just as I do about it. But,
after all, that want is the great spur of civilization. If most of
us didn’t want more closet-room, and a garden, and a roof-garden
sleeping-apartment for Samuel, and a little larger dinner-parties
than we can give as it is and more of them, and food, clothes,
education, leisure, travel, automobiles, and all the other necessaries
and unnecessaries, I suppose all progress would slacken. The whole
apparatus of civilization seems to be geared to these more or less
humble human desires. Politics is a sort of rash that breaks out on
bodies of men that are tired with too much work, or hungry, or starved
in their spirits, or thwarted in their aspirations, or who need more
closet-room and gardens. The politicians are not rulers, after all;
they are doctors, making diagnoses, and offering prescriptions and
treatments, and taking fees, and flunked a good deal of the time by the
symptoms of the patient. A real cure of human ailments by politics is
inconceivable. There are too many people, and they want more than there
is, and if they were all satisfied for once at a quarter past six,
there would be a lot more of them, and they would have developed a lot
more wants, by seven o’clock. But that only proves that politics is a
continuing job, that never will lapse, and never will be finished so
long as there are folks on the earth.

It is wonderful what is accomplished; how we endure labor, privations,
disappointment, restricted closet-space, and lack of gardens, and go
on comparatively orderly and patient, getting what we can and going
without the rest. Shops are full of goods and the doors open; trains
run, crowds surge here and there, strikers strike and pickets picket,
judges sit, juries find, the polls open and close, and the papers tell
us who was elected. Somehow, in all this muddle, life is fairly safe,
most of the people are fed, babies get attention, the dead are buried,
the processes of existence go on.

The whole of politics seems secondary because the whole material side
of life, even gardens and closet-room, seems secondary. I guess that
is what saves the world alive. There are not enough material things
to satisfy everybody. I doubt indeed if there are enough to satisfy
anybody. But of the things of the mind and of the things of the spirit
there is a boundless supply, and any one who can may help himself.

We scramble for things as though they were all there was, and yet the
main joys of life are in ideas--in religion, in love, in beauty, in
duty, in truth--things that no trust can monopolize, and which come
tariff-free through any port. They are the realities, and these bodily
things are mostly shadows, indispensable, to be sure--things that it is
a reproach and a high inconvenience to be without, but which take care
of themselves so long as the realities prosper.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, I have got a boost. Major Brace has suggested to me that I move
my tools over to his office this fall and become a partner in his firm.
The suggestion is agreeable to me, and I have closed with it. His firm
is undergoing reorganization. At present it is Brace & Ketcham, but Mr.
Ketcham’s wife has fallen into so much money that, having also some
savings of his own, he feels the need of foreign travel, country air,
and like delights, and proposes to retire from active practice and
concern himself with self-improvement, cows, and public or quasi-public
duties, like being a director in banks and corporations, serving on
committees, or even running for public office. There seems to be a
great deal for competent and experienced citizens to do whenever they
have acquired the means of support and can afford to take nominal pay,
or none, for their services. The new firm is to be Brace, Witherspoon
& Jesup; which last is me. It will be a strong firm. The Major has
experience and connections; Mr. Witherspoon has knowledge, especially
of law, and appalling diligence; and I have a living to make for
Cordelia and Samuel and myself, and everything to buy, including a
city mansion, a country residence, some automobiles, and a garden with
rhododendrons in it. When I think how modest my proportion of the
firm’s winnings is to be, and how much it is to buy, my arithmetical
talents are strained to compute the princely affluence that must be
coming out of the new firm to the Major.

Anyhow, my circumstances will be eased enough for us to move into a
more commodious flat next fall, which is important. The modification
in my prospects pleases me very much. I am attached to the Major.
He is good to be with. I feel confident that he will make a living,
and either make it honestly or make it look so honest to me that my
self-esteem will not be wounded by a lot of compunctions. I think
so because I believe he is at least as scrupulous as I am, and has
more experience in adjusting his scruples to the facts of life. And
that is a mighty delicate matter. If you can’t do it you get nowhere,
and if you overdo it you get eventually, I presume, to that ideality
that we call “hell.” I don’t know that I should necessarily mind
that, for it is possible that the attractions of hell may have been
under-rated; but I hate consumedly the processes of getting there as I
see them. The by-path by drink is so far out of my line that I don’t
have to take serious thought about it; nor yet about the propensity
to divagations in feminine companionship, which makes some persons so
much trouble; but I believe I may say without affectation that I would
hate the detachment from that ideality which we call “truth.” Surely
the greatest possible luxury in life is to think you are on the right
side; to know the truth and follow it, or at least, since we are all so
fallible, to think you know it and are on its trail. To think that I
was going to practise law merely as the agent of the astute, filching
unwarranted profits from the simple, would be quite intolerable, of
course. It would be so at least as long as I continued to be any good,
for I should think of it as a progress to “hell”; and when it ceased to
bother me, that would be the sign that I had arrived. That’s the kind
of hell the idea of which is repellent--the hell in which the damned
are fat and hard and solvent, and relentlessly and eternally gainful
for themselves. Ugh! They make me sick; at least the thought of them
does. When you come to look for them in the flesh, of course they have
their human modifications and are often lean, jocund, and charming.

The Major says there’s a new morality growing up that will express
itself presently in some new commandments, or a new interpretation of
the sixth. Stealing, as heretofore understood, has been limited, he
says, to taking from some one something that was his. But there is a
growing sentiment that it applies also to hogging an unconscionable
amount of things desirable for the mass of folks, but to which none of
them had established legal ownership. As “the people” grow stronger
and more intelligent there is more interest in having them get what
should be coming to them. So the Major looks for the evolution of a
commandment to the general effect of “Thou shalt not take more than
thy share,” and for lots of legislation based on it. And since what
anybody’s share is depends on all manner of circumstances, and is
highly debatable, and is sure to get into court again and again, he
looks for busy--and profitable--times for our profession.

Meanwhile the bulk of the law business is not a wrangle between the
wolf and the lamb, with all the best talent retained for the wolf.
A good deal of it is wrangles between wolves, wherein it is just as
virtuous to be on one side as the other; and a lot more of it is not
wrangle at all, but a tame exercise of the lawyer’s true profession of
keeping order in the world.

All the same, it must be embarrassing to any lawyer’s ethical
self-esteem always to be the defender, at a high price, of the
strong. It can’t be easy to avoid it, once a man gets a considerable
reputation; but I guess it does pinch. Politically, of course, it
is very expensive, and that, without much regard for the truth that
when Strength is right, even though it is incorporated, it is just
as important to society that it should get its dues under the law as
though it were somebody else. The risks of an employment are one of
the considerations on which its rate of payment is based, and in this
legal employment to which I seem committed, the risk of discredit may
well be one basis for extra large fees. Disreputability is bound to rub
off of clients on their lawyers, provided there is enough of it, and
the association is long enough continued, and highly enough paid, or
insufficiently varied by professional associations of another sort.

I should not like to be committed bodily to the side of the Haves in
my legal experiences, and I know I never shall be so long as I am in
the same firm with the Major. Neither do I want to tie up to impossible
enthusiasms and altruisms; and to plans that won’t work, and to
fabulous expectations of making the earth equally comfortable for all
its residents irrespective of their powers and qualities. The Major
does not go in for those phantoms. He will not always be right, but he
will never be systematically impossible.

I guess Witherspoon is going to get rich. He is terribly smart; so
smart, and so nearly sound-minded, and so nearly drink-proof, that,
with the start he has, it will be virtually impossible for him to stay
poor. If not myself, I would rather be Witherspoon than any one I see
about. I could not afford to be the Major; he is too old. I have too
much to do, and too much expectation of liking to do it, to wish to be
he, much as I like him. Witherspoon is older than I am, older by nine
or ten years, I guess, but I could almost afford that advancement in
years for what I might gain in ability by having his head instead of
mine. Not, of course, that I would be he, unless it was compulsory that
I should be some one other than I am. A property that one has taken so
much pains to improve as me becomes dear to the owner. I rate among
improvements Cordelia and Samuel (though you may call them liabilities
if you like), all that I know, my acquaintance, my reputation, the
repairs done on my teeth (which were quite expensive), advertisement
as so far acquired (except as already mentioned under acquaintance and
reputation), a little life insurance paid up to date, and there must
be a lot of other improvements I can’t think of. To offset all that, I
have expensive habits (like Cordelia and Samuel) and the probability
of others. I smoke and drink, though inexpensively as yet, and like
better food and rather better clothes than I am entitled to.

One thing that I admire about Witherspoon is his clothes; they are so
bad--or rather he is so oblivious to them. I guess they are pretty good
clothes, but he is apt to wear them like a man in the woods; I see
him sometimes going about in this polite community in rough-looking,
unshiny, russet shoes, a flannel shirt with a soft collar, his trousers
turned up, not precisely but casually; and if he has on black shoes,
like as not they are not polished. That is liable to be his working
dress. He does better at times; does better doubtless if he happens to
think of it or his wife tells him, and he togs himself out properly
when he goes out to dinner; but his mind is not on raiment, nor much
on details of living, anyhow. Presently, I suppose, his wife will say
he must have a valet, and his clothes will be pressed and laid out for
him for the rest of time, and he will put them on and always go forth
shining. But he’s fine as he is.

It is grand to be enough of a man to be worth a servant to do all one’s
chores. It is also grand meanwhile to be able to dress as inattentively
as Witherspoon does. If he were lazy he couldn’t do it, nor yet if he
had not on him so many of the marks of a first-class man. If he were
just ordinary, you’d be displeased with him for not being clean-shaven,
but when he smiles and begins to talk you don’t care whether he shaved
yesterday or the day before, nor whether his shoes are blacked, nor
what kind of a collar he has on.

I’m not that way at all. I have to wear respectable clothes, brush my
hair and teeth, shave every morning, black my shoes, and pay attention
to millinery. I succeed in all these details, and would make, I
suppose, an acceptable body-servant for a really great man, or a fairly
good housemaid, if it were not that I am able, under Providence, to
put the remnant of my time after attending to my own details to more
profitable use than doing ordinary details for some one else. Details
I shall do, no doubt, for some time to come if not forever, but they
will be fairly remunerative details, I hope, requiring judgment and
knowledge.

It’s all service, and all that matters much to the moralist is that
each of us should come, somehow, where he belongs, and get the sort of
job he can learn to be good at, and delve at it until a better one
calls him--if it does. But of course to find one’s proper job is a
great achievement in life, being the one that engages my energies at
present. Also to find a man proper for a job that needs doing seems to
be a considerable achievement, bigger or less big, according to the
size of the job, but supremely important when the job is a vital matter
like the Presidency sometimes, or the discovery of an effectual general
in war, or a revolutionary leader. The processes by which the top men
come to the top are as interesting as anything in history. Indeed, they
almost constitute history. Usually they are processes of trying out,
and it seems that the qualifications for a great place must include,
as a rule, the ability to get the place, and, if it is political, to
get it away from somebody else. But the unpolitical places don’t seem
so much to be wrested from anybody. The most powerful men just come to
their own. Commonly they make the places which they occupy, and the
places grow with them, until, when they get out, there is a gaping
vacancy to be filled.

That is not the sort of place for which the Major has selected me. Not
yet. It’s just a chance to do some work as it comes along, and make
a place, possibly, which can be recognized as definite, commodious,
and profitable because of some scarcity of the qualities required to
fill it. I have great confidence in the Major, and feel strongly that
his judgment in choosing persons and foreseeing labors for them is
excellent, and I have faith in particular, as I have intimated, in his
sagacity in selecting Witherspoon. So I am a good deal pleased that he
should have invited me.


THE END




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


Typo corrected: “perfomance” to “performance” (page 128).

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.



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