Part 4

“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.