Part 8

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.