Part 2

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.