“Are you perfectly sure?” insisted the Senior Surgeon.
The pink in the White Linen Nurse’s profiled cheek deepened a little.
“Perfectly sure, sir,” declared the carmine lips.
Like the crack of a pistol, the Senior Surgeon snapped the ivory
paper-cutter in two.
“All right, then,” he said. “Rae Malgregor, look at me! Don’t take your
eyes from mine, I say! Rae Malgregor, if I should decide in my own
mind, here and now, that it was best for you, as well as for me, that
you should come away with me now for this week, not as my guest, as I
had planned, but as my wife, even if you were not quite ready for it in
your heart, even if you were not yet remotely ready for it, would you
come because I told you to come?”
Heavily under her white eyelids, heavily under her black lashes, the
girl’s eyes struggled up to meet his own.
“Yes, sir,” whispered the White Linen Nurse.
Abruptly the Senior Surgeon pushed back his chair from the desk and
stood up. The important decision once made, no further finessing of
words seemed either necessary or dignified to him.
“Go and pack your suitcase quickly, then,” he ordered. “I want to get
away from here within half an hour.”
But before the girl had half crossed the room he called to her
suddenly. And his face in that moment was as haggard as though a whole
lifetime’s struggle was packed into it.
“Rae Malgregor,” he drawled mockingly, “this thing shall be--barter
’way through to the end, with the credit always on your side of the
account. In exchange for the gift of yourself--your wonderful self,
and the trust that goes with it, I will give you,--God help me!--the
ugliest thing in my life. And God knows I have broken faith with myself
once or twice, but never have I broken my word to another. From now on,
in token of your trust in me, for whatever the bitter gift is worth to
you, as long as you stay with me, my Junes shall be yours, to do with
as you please.”
“_What_, sir?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “_What_, sir?”
Softly, almost stealthily, she was half-way back across the room to
him, when she stopped suddenly and threw out her arms with a gesture of
appeal and defiance.
“All the same, sir,” she cried passionately--“all the same, sir,
the place is too hard for the small pay I get. Oh, I will do what I
promised,” she declared with increasing passion; “I will never leave
you; and I will mother your little girl; and I will servant your big
house; and I will go with you wherever you say! And I will be to you
whatever you wish; and I will never flinch from any hardship you impose
on me, nor whine over any pain, on and on and on, all my days, all my
years, till I drop in my tracks again, and die, as you say, ‘still
smiling’: all the same,” she reiterated wildly, “the place is too hard!
It always was too hard, it always will be too hard, for such small pay!”
“For such small pay?” gasped the Senior Surgeon.
About his heart a horrid, clammy chill began to settle. Sickeningly
through his brain a dozen recent financial transactions began to
rehearse themselves.
“You mean, Miss Malgregor,” he said a bit brokenly--“you mean that I
haven’t been generous enough with you?”
“Yes, sir,” faltered the White Linen Nurse. All the storm and passion
died suddenly from her, leaving her just a frightened girl again,
flushing pink-white before the Senior Surgeon’s scathing stare. One
step, two steps, three, she advanced toward him. “Oh, I mean, sir,”
she whispered--“oh, I mean, sir, that I’m just an ordinary, ignorant
country girl, and you--are further above me than the moon from the sea!
I couldn’t expect you to--love me, sir, I couldn’t even dream of your
loving me; but I do think you might like me just a little bit with your
heart!”
“What?” cried the Senior Surgeon. “What?”
_Whacketty-bang_ against the window-pane sounded the Little Crippled
Girl’s knuckled fists. Darkly against the window-pane squashed the
Little Crippled Girl’s staring face.
“Father,” screamed the shrill voice. “Father, there’s a white lady
here, with two black ladies, washing the breakfast dishes! Is it Aunt
Agnes?”
With a totally unexpected laugh, with a totally unexpected desire to
laugh, the Senior Surgeon strode across the room and unlocked his door.
Even then his lips against the White Linen Nurse’s ear made just a
whisper, not a kiss.
“For God’s sake, hurry!” he said. “Let’s get out of here before any
telephone-message catches me!”
Then almost calmly he walked out on the piazza and greeted his
sister-in-law.
“Hello, Agnes!” he said.
“Hello, yourself!” smiled his sister-in-law.
“How’s everything?” he inquired politely.
“How’s everything with you?” parried his sister-in-law.
Idly for a few moments the Senior Surgeon threw out stray crumbs of
thought to feed the conversation, while smilingly all the while from
her luxuriant East Indian chair his sister-in-law sat studying the
general situation. The Senior Surgeon’s sister-in-law was always
studying something. Last year it was archæology; the year before,
basketry; this year it happened to be eugenics, or something funny like
that; next year, again, it might be book-binding.
“So you and your pink-and-white shepherdess are going off on a little
trip together?” she queried banteringly. “The girl’s a darling,
Lendicott. I haven’t had as much sport in a long time as I had that
afternoon last June when I came in my best calling clothes and helped
her paint the kitchen woodwork. And I had come prepared to be a bit
nasty, Lendicott. In all honesty, Lendicott, I might just as well ’fess
up that I had come prepared to be just a little bit nasty.”
“She seems to have a way,” smiled the Senior Surgeon--“she seems to
have a way of disarming people’s unpleasant intentions.”
A trifle quizzically for an instant the woman turned her face to the
Senior Surgeon’s. It was a worldly face, a cold-featured, absolutely
worldly face, with a surprisingly humorous mouth that warmed her nature
just about as cheerfully, and just about as effectually, as one open
fireplace warms a whole house. Nevertheless, one often achieved much
comfort by keeping close to “Aunt Agnes’s” humorous mouth, for Aunt
Agnes knew a thing or two, Aunt Agnes did, and the things that she made
a point of knowing were conscientiously amiable.
“Why, Lendicott Faber,” she rallied him now, “why, you’re as nervous as
a school-boy! Why, I believe--I believe that you’re going courting!”
More opportunely than any man could have dared to hope, the White
Linen Nurse appeared suddenly on the scene in her little blue serge
wedding-suit, with her traveling-case in her hand. With a gasp of
relief the Senior Surgeon took her case and his own and went on
down the path to his car and his chauffeur, leaving the two women
temporarily alone. When he returned to the piazza, the woman of the
world and the girl not at all of the world were bidding each other a
really affectionate good-by, and the woman’s face looked suddenly just
a little bit old, but the girl’s cheeks were most inordinately blooming.
In unmistakable friendliness his sister-in-law extended her hand to him.
“Good-by, Lendicott, old man!” she said, “and good luck to you!” A
little slyly out of her shrewd, gray eyes, she glanced up sidewise at
him. “You’ve got the devil’s own temper, Lendicott dear,” she teased,
“and two or three other vices probably, and if rumor speaks the truth,
you’ve run amuck more than once in your life; but there’s one thing I
will say for you, though it prove you a dear stupid: you never were
overquick to suspect that any woman could possibly be in love with you.”
“To what woman do you particularly refer?” mocked the Senior Surgeon,
impatiently.
Quite brazenly to her own heart, which never yet apparently had stirred
the laces that enshrined it, his sister-in-law pointed with persistent
banter.
“Maybe I refer to myself,” she laughed, “and maybe to the only other
lady present.”
“Oh!” gasped the White Linen Nurse.
“You do me much honor, Agnes,” bowed the Senior Surgeon. Quite
resolutely he held his gaze from following the White Linen Nurse’s
quickly averted face.
A little oddly for an instant the older woman’s glance hung on his.
“More honor perhaps than you think, Lendicott Faber,” she said, and
kept right on smiling.
“Eh?” jerked the Senior Surgeon. Restively he turned to the White Linen
Nurse.
Very flushingly on the steps the White Linen Nurse knelt arguing with
the Little Crippled Girl.
“Your father and I are going away,” she pleaded. “Won’t you please kiss
us good-by?”
“I’ve only got one kiss,” sulked the Little Crippled Girl.
“Give it to your father!” pleaded the White Linen Nurse.
Amazingly, all in a second, the ugliness vanished from the little face.
Dartlingly, like a bird, the child swooped down and planted one large,
round kiss on the astonished Senior Surgeon’s boot.
“Beautiful Father!” she cried. “I kiss your feet.”
Abruptly the Senior Surgeon plunged from the step and started down the
walk. His cheek-bones were quite crimson.
Two or three rods behind him the White Linen Nurse followed
falteringly. Once she stopped to pick up a tiny stick or a stone, and
once she dallied to straighten out a snarled spray of red and brown
woodbine.
Missing the sound or the shadow of her, the Senior Surgeon turned
suddenly to wait for her. So startled was she by his intentness, so
flustered, so affrighted, that just for an instant the Senior Surgeon
thought that she was going to wheel in her tracks and bolt madly back
to the house. Then quite unexpectedly she gave an odd, muffled little
cry, and ran swiftly to him, like a child, and slipped her bare hand
trustingly into his. And they went on together to the car.
With his foot already half lifted to the step, the Senior Surgeon
turned abruptly around, and lifted his hat, and stood staring back
bare-headed for some unexplainable reason at the two silent figures on
the piazza.
“Rae,” he said perplexedly--“Rae, I don’t seem to know just why, but
somehow I’d like to have you kiss your hand to Aunt Agnes.”
Obediently the White Linen Nurse withdrew her fingers from his and
wafted two kisses, one to “Aunt Agnes” and one to the Little Crippled
Girl.
Then the White Linen Nurse and the Senior Surgeon climbed up into the
tonneau of the car, where they had never, never sat alone before,
and the Senior Surgeon gave a curt order to his man, and the big car
started off again into interminable spaces.
Mutely, without a word, without a glance, passing between them, the
Senior Surgeon held out his hand to her once more, as though the
absence of her hand in his was suddenly a lonesomeness not to be
endured again while life lasted.
_Whizz, whizz, whizz, whir, whir, whir_, the ribbony road began to
roll up again on that hidden spool under the car.
When the chauffeur’s mind seemed sufficiently absorbed in speed and
sound, the Senior Surgeon bent down a little mockingly and mumbled his
lips inarticulately at the White Linen Nurse.
“See,” he laughed, “I’ve got a text, too, to keep my courage up. Of
course you _look_ like an angel,” he teased closer and closer to her
flaming face; “but all the time to myself, to reassure myself, I just
keep saying, ’Bah! she’s nothing but a woman, nothing but a woman,
nothing but a woman!’”
Within the Senior Surgeon’s warm, firm grasp the White Linen Nurse’s
calm hand quickened suddenly like a bud forced precipitously into full
bloom.
“Oh, don’t--talk, sir,” she whispered. “Oh, don’t talk, sir! Just
listen!”
“Listen? Listen to what?” laughed the Senior Surgeon.
From under the heavy lashes that shadowed the flaming cheeks the soul
of the girl who was to be his peered up at the soul of the man who was
to be hers, and saluted what she saw!
“Oh, my heart, sir!” whispered the White Linen Nurse. “Oh, my heart, my
heart, my _heart_.”
THE END
THE BEGGAR
BY JAMES W. FOLEY
Always beside me as I go my way
This beggar, Time, walks with his outstretched palms,
Demanding, not beseeching, of me alms--
Alms of the precious hours of my day.
So side by side we walk until my day
Is growing dusk, and Time’s purse of the years
Holds alms of mine, bright-jeweled with my tears,
Since I have given these treasured hours away.
Nor from his swollen purse will he give me
One hour, although with spendthrift song and gay
I flung him alms, nor ever said him nay.
A beggar and a miser both is he!
[Illustration]
IN “THE CIRCUIT OF THE SUMMER HILLS”
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
Author of “Wake Robin,” “Locusts and Wild Honey,” etc.
WITH A PORTRAIT
I
To sit on one’s rustic porch, or at the door of one’s tent, and see the
bees working on the catnip or motherwort or clover, to see the cattle
grazing leisurely in the fields or ruminating under the spreading
trees, or the woodchucks creeping about the meadows and pastures, or
the squirrels spinning along the fences, or the hawks describing great
spirals against the sky; to hear no sound but the voice of birds,
the caw of crows, the whistle of marmots, the chirp of crickets; to
smell no odors but the odors of grassy fields, or blooming meadows, or
falling rain; and amid it all, to lift one’s eyes to the flowing and
restful mountain lines--this is to get a taste of the peace and comfort
of the summer hills.
This boon is mine when I go to my little gray farm-house on a broad
hill-slope on the home farm in the Catskills. Especially is it mine
when, to get still nearer nature and beyond the orbit of household
sounds and interruptions, I retreat to the big hay-barn, and on an
improvised table in front of the big open barn-doors, looking out into
the sunlit fields where I hoed corn or made hay as a boy, and write
this and other papers.
The peace of the hills is about me and upon me, and the leisure of the
summer clouds, whose shadows I see slowly drifting across the face of
the landscape. The dissonance and the turbulence and the stenches of
cities, how far off they seem; the noise and the dust and the acrimony
of politics--how completely the hum of the honey-bees and the twitter
of swallows blot them all out!
In the circuit of the hills, the days take form and character as they
do not in town, or in a country of low horizons. George Eliot says in
one of her letters: “In the country the days have broad open spaces
and the very stillness seems to give a delightful roominess to the
hours.” This is especially true in a hilly and mountainous country,
where the eye has a great depth of perspective opened to it. Take those
extra brilliant days that we so often have in the autumn--what a vivid
sense one gets of their splendor amid the hills! The deep, cradle-like
valleys, and the long flowing mountain lines, make a fit receptacle for
the day’s beauty; they hold and accumulate it, as it were. I think of
Emerson’s line:
“O, tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire.”
The valleys are vast blue urns that hold a generous portion of the
lucid hours.
To feel to the full the peace of the hills, one must choose his
hills, and see to it that they are gentle and restful in character.
Abruptness, jagged lines, sharp angles, frowning precipices, while they
may add an element of picturesqueness, interfere with the feeling of
ease and restfulness that the peace of the hills implies. The eye is
disturbed by a confusion of broken and abrupt lines as is the ear by a
volume of discordant sounds. Long, undulating mountain lines, broad,
cradle-like valleys, easy basking hill-slopes, as well as the absence
of loud and discordant sounds, are a factor in the restfulness of any
landscape.
My landscape is very old geologically, as old as the order of
vertebrate animals, but young historically, having been settled only
about one hundred and fifty years. The original forests still cover
the tops of the mountains with a dark-green mantle, which comes well
down upon their sides, where it is cut and torn and notched into by the
upper fields of the valley farms.
I call my place Woodchuck Lodge, as I tell my friends, because we are
beleagured by these rodents. There is a cordon of woodchuck-holes all
around us. In the orchard, in the meadows, in the pastures, these
whistling marmots have their dens. Here one might easily have woodchuck
venison for dinner every day, yea, and for supper and breakfast, too,
if one could acquire a taste for it. I tried to dine on a woodchuck
once when I was a boy, but never have felt inclined to repeat the
experiment. If one were born in the woods and lived in the woods,
maybe he could relish a woodchuck. Talk about being autocthonous, and
savoring of the soil--try a woodchuck! The feeding habits of this
animal are as cleanly as those of a sheep or a cow--clover, plantain,
peas, beans, cucumbers, cabbages, apples--all sweet and succulent
things go to the making of his flabby body; yet he spends so much of
his time in pickle in the ground that his flesh is rank with the earth
flavor. He is not lean like a rabbit or a squirrel, nor so firm of
muscle as a ’coon or a ’possum; he is little more than a skin filled
with viscera. He is busy all summer storing up fat in his loose pouch
of a body for fuel during his long winter sleep. This sleep appears
to begin in late September, or after the first white frost. This year
I saw my last specimen on the twenty-eighth of the month as he was
running in great haste to his hole. Evidently he does not like the
pinch of the cold. He is a fair-weather animal and is the epicure
of the meadows and pastures. While the apples are still mellow on
the ground, while the red-thorn is still dropping its fruit, and the
aftermath is still fresh in the meadows, my woodchucks turn their backs
upon the world and retreat to their underground chambers for their six
months’ slumber. I know of no other hibernating animal that retires
from the light of day so early in the season. His active life stretches
from the vernal equinox to the autumnal equinox, and that is about all.
Half the year he is under ground, and at least half of each summer
day. No wonder his flesh is rank with the earth flavor. He appears to
live only to accumulate his winter store of fat. Apparently he comes
out of his den in summer only to feed, and maybe occasionally to bask
in the sunshine. He is never sportive or discursive like the birds and
squirrels. Life is a very serious business with him, and he has reduced
it to the lowest terms--eat, breed, and sleep. If woodchucks ever
engage in any sort of play, like other wild creatures, I have never
seen them, though I once had a tame young ’chuck that would play with
the kitten.
The woodchuck probably sleeps more than half the time in summer; he
economizes his precious fat. Only once have I seen his tracks on the
snow. This was in late December; and following them up, I found the
woodchuck wandering about the meadow like one half demented. Something
had evidently gone wrong with him. Apparently he had not succeeded
in storing up his usual amount of fat. He showed little fight, and
we picked him up by the tail, put him into the sleigh, and brought
him home. A place under the barn floor was given to him, but he did
not long survive. All the glory of the fall, the heyday of the ’coon
and the squirrels, the woodchuck misses. No golden October, no Indian
summer for him; he has had his day.
Though the woodchuck’s muscles are flabby, his heart is stout. The
farm-dog can kill him, but he cannot make him show fear or dismay; he
is game to the last. Twice I have seen him from my porch at Woodchuck
Lodge put on so bold a front, and become so aggressive, when surprised
in the middle of a field by a big shepherd-dog, that the dog did not
dare attack him, but circled about, seeking some unfair advantage,
only to be met at every point with those threatening, grating teeth.
In one case the woodchuck was far from his hole, and he kept charging
the dog and driving him nearer and nearer the stone wall, where his
own safety lay. An observer inoculated with the idea of animal reason
would have said that the tactics of the ’chuck were premeditated; but
I am sure he was too much engrossed with the task of defending himself
from the jaws of that dog to do any logical thinking or planning.
It was only the fortunes of battle that finally brought the hunter
and the hunted near the hole of safety, when, seeing his chance, the
woodchuck made a sudden, successful dash, too hurried, I fancy, even
to whistle his usual note of defiance. In the other case, the dog was
of a still more timid nature, and when the surprised woodchuck showed
fight, he concluded that he had no business at all with that particular
’chuck, which actually chased him from the meadow. I can still see the
woodchuck’s bristling, expanded tail as he drove fiercely after the
fleeing dog, which, with a tail anything but threatening, escaped over
the wall into the road.
I find that one may be the principal actor in a little comedy, and not
see the humor of it at all at the time. I know the humor of a race I
had with a ’chuck last summer in my orchard was quite lost upon me till
it was over, and the ’chuck was in his hole, and I was back upon my
porch recovering my wind. The ’chuck was a hundred yards or more from
his den when I leaped over the fence from the road and surprised him. I
pressed him so closely that he took refuge in an apple-tree. Instantly
seeing his mistake, as the missile I hurled struck the tree, he sprang
down and rushed for his hole, a hundred and fifty feet away. But I got
there first. The ’chuck paused twenty feet to one side and regarded me
intently, defiantly. We stood and glared at each other a few moments,
while I recovered my breath. I wanted the scalp of that “varmint.” I
knew that he would make himself believe that I had planted my garden
for his special benefit, and I wanted to anticipate that conclusion. I
was weaponless. Twenty or more feet from me, on the opposite side from
the ’chuck, I saw a stone that would answer my purpose. I calculated
the chances; so did the woodchuck; I sprang for the stone and the
’chuck sprang for his hole, and was in it as my hand touched the stone.
He had won! As I sat on my porch, the recklessness and absurdity of a
man more than threescore and ten running down a woodchuck came over me;
and I have not yielded to such a temptation since.
II
Where cattle and woodchuck thrive, there thrive I. The pastoral is
in my veins. Clover and timothy, daisies and buttercups indirectly
colored my youthful life; and if the dairy cow did not rock my cradle,
her products sustained the hand that did rock it. Hence I love this
land of wide, open, grassy fields, of smooth, broad-backed hills,
and of long, sweeping mountain lines. The cow fits well into these
scenes. It seems as if her broad, smooth muzzle and her potent tongue
might have shaped the landscape; it is certainly her cropping that has
brought about the hour-glass form of so many of the red-thorn trees,
which give a unique feature to the fields. Her fragrant breath is upon
the air, her hoof-prints are upon the highway; she may not yet have
attained to wisdom, yet surely all her ways are ways of pleasantness
and all her paths are paths of peace. Hence, when her ways and her
paths coincide with mine, I thrive best. From Woodchuck Lodge I look
out upon broad pastures, lands where dairy herds have grazed for a
hundred years, never the same herd for many summers, but all of the
same habits and dispositions. They all scour the pastures in the same
way, scattering, searching out every nook and corner, leaving no yard
of ground unvisited, apparently hunting each day for the sweet morsel
they missed the day before, disposing themselves in picturesque groups
upon the hills; never massed, except under the shade-trees on hot days;
slow-moving, making their paths here and there, lingering under the
red-thorn trees, where the fruit begins to drop in September; tossing
their heads above the orchard wall, where the fragrance of ripening
apples is on the air; in the autumn lying upon the cold, damp ground
and ruminating contentedly, with no fear of our ills and pains before
them; wading in the swamps, converging slowly toward the pasture-bars
as milking-time draws nigh, with always some tardy, indifferent ones
that the farm-dog has to hurry up; many colored--white, black, red,
brown--at times showing rare gentleness and affection toward one
another, such as licking one another’s heads or bodies, then spitefully
butting or goring one another; occasionally one of them lifting up her
head and sending her mellow voice over the hills like a horn, as if
to give voice to a vague unrest, or invoking some far-off divinity to
release the imprisoned Io--what a series of shifting rural pictures I
thus have spread out before me! Such an atmosphere of peace and leisure
over it all! The unhurrying and ruminating cattle make the days long;
they make the fields friendly, the hills eloquent, the shade-trees
idyllic. I wake up to hear the farmer summoning them from the field
in the dewy summer dawns, and I listen for his call to them on the
tranquil afternoons. One season an especially musical voice did the
evening calling--a trained voice from beyond the hills. What a pleasure
it was as we swung in our hammocks under apple-trees to hear the free,
sonorous summons, and to see the response of the herd in many-colored
lines converging down the slope to the bar-way!
When the meadows have gotten a new carpet of tender grass in September,
and the cows are free to range in them, a new series of moving pictures
greets the eye. The grazing forms have a finer setting now, and
contentment and satisfaction are in every movement. How they sweep off
the tender herbage, into what artistic groups they naturally fall,
what pictures of peace and plenty they present! When they lie down to
ruminate, Emerson’s sentence comes to mind: “And the cattle lying on
the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts.” As a matter of
fact, I suppose no more vacant mind could be found in the universe
than that of the cow when she is reposing in a field, chewing her
cud. But she is the cause of tranquil if not of great thoughts in the
lookers-on, and that is enough. Tranquillity attends her wherever she
goes; it beams from her eyes, and lingers in her footsteps.
I sympathize with Whitman as he expressed himself in these lines:
“I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid
and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them, long and long.
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or happy over the whole earth.”
III
If one has a bit of the farmer in him, it is a pleasure in the country
to have a real farmer for a neighbor--a man whose heart is in his work,
who is not longing for the town or the city, who improves his fields,
who makes two spears of grass grow where none grew before, whose whole
farm has an atmosphere of thrift and well-being. There are so many
reluctant, half-hearted farmers in our eastern States nowadays, so many
who do only what they have to do in order to survive; who leave the
paternal acres to run to weeds or brush; the paternal fences to fall
into ruins; the paternal orchards untrimmed and unplowed; the paternal
meadows unfertilized, while the fertilizer wastes in the barn-yard; who
get but one spear of grass where their fathers or grandfathers got two
or three; and whose plaint always is that farming does not pay. What is
the matter with our rural population? Has all the good farming blood
gone West, and do only the dregs of it remain?
It is the man who makes the farm, as truly as it is the man who makes
any other business; it is the man behind the plow, as truly as it is
the man behind the gun, that wins the battle. A half-heart never won
a whole sheaf yet. The average farmer has deteriorated. He may know
more, but he does less than his father. He is like the second or third
steeping of the tea. Did the original settlers and improvers of the
farms, and the generations that followed them, leave all their virtue
and grip in the soil? It is certainly true that in my section the last
two generations have lived off the capital of labor and brains which
their ancestors put into the land; only here and there has a man added
anything, only here and there is a farmer who does not wish he had some
other business. If such men had that other business, they would reap
the same poor results. In the long run, you cannot reap where you have
not sown, and the only seed you can sow, in any business that yields
tenfold, is yourself--your own wit, your own industry. Unless you
plant your heart with your corn, it will mostly go to suckers; unless
you strike your own roots into the subsoil of your lands, it will not
bear fruit in your character, or in your bank-account--all of which
is simply saying that thin, leachy land will not bear good crops, and
unless a man has the real farming stuff in him, his farm quickly shows
it.
My neighbor makes smooth the way of the plow and of the mower. Last
summer I saw him take enough stones and rocks from a three-acre field
to build quite a fortress; and land whose slumbers had never been
disturbed by the plow was soon knee-high with Hungarian grass. How
one likes to see a permanent betterment of the land like that!--piles
of renegade stone and rock. It is such things that make the country
richer. If all New England and New York had had such drastic treatment
years ago, the blight of discouraged farming never would have fallen
upon them, and the prairie States would not have so far distanced the
granite States. A granite soil should grow a better crop of men than
the silt of lake or river bottom, though it yields less corn to the
acre.
The prairie makes a strong appeal to a man’s indolence and cupidity;
it is a place where he can sit at ease and let his team do most of his
work. But I much doubt whether the western farms ever will lay the
strong hands upon their possessors that our more varied and picturesque
eastern farms lay. Every field in these farms has a character of its
own, and the farms differ from one another as much as the people do.
An eastern farm is the place for a home; the western farm is the
place to grow wheat, pork, and beef. Oh, the flat, featureless,
monotonous, cornstalk-littered middle West! how can the rural virtues
of contentment and domesticity thrive there? There is no spot to make
your nest except right out on the rim of the world; no spot for a walk
or a picnic except in the featureless open of a thousand miles of black
prairie--the roads black, straight lines of mud or dust through the
landscape; the streams slow, indolent channels of muddy water; the
woods, where there are woods, a dull assemblage of straight-trunked
trees; the sky a brazen dome that shuts down upon you; there are no
hills or mountains to lift it up. The prairie draws no strong distinct
lines against the sky; the horizon is vague and baffling. Ah, my
mountains are very old measured by the geologic calendar! Yet how
foreign to our experience or ways of thinking it seems to speak of
mountains as either old or young, as if birth and death apply to them
also. But such is the fact: mountains have their day, which day is the
geologist’s day of millions of years. My mountains were being carved
out of a great plateau by the elements while the prairies were still
under the sea, and while most of the Rocky Mountains and the Alps, and
the Himalayas were gestating in the vast earth-womb. In point of age,
these mountains beside the Catskills are like infants beside their
great-grandfathers. Yet it is a singular contradiction that in their
outlines old mountains look young, and young mountains look old. The
only youthful feature about young mountains is that they carry their
heads very high, and the only old feature about old mountains is that
they have a look of repose and calmness and peace. All the gauntness,
leanness, angularity, and crumbling decrepitude are with the young
mountains; all the smoothness, plumpness, graceful flowing lines of
youth are with the old mountains. Not till the rocks are clothed with
soil made out of their own decay are outlines softened and life made
possible. Youthful mountains like the Alps are battle-marked by the
elements, and their proud heads are continually being laid low by
frost, wind, and snow; they are scarred and broken by avalanches the
season through. Old mountains, such as the Appalachian range, wear an
armor of soil and verdure over their rounded forms on which the arrows
of time have little effect. The turbulent and noisy and stiff-necked
period of youth is far behind them.
Hundreds of dairy-farms nestle in the laps of the Catskills; and their
huge, grassy aprons, only a little wrinkled here and there, hold as
many grazing herds. Woodchuck Lodge is well upon the knee of one of
the ranges, and the fields we look upon are like green drapery lying
in graceful curves and broad, smooth masses over huge extended limbs.
Patches of maple forest here and there bend over a rounded arm or
shoulder, like a fur cape upon a woman. Here and there also huge,
weather-worn boulders rest upon the ground, dropped there by the moving
ice-sheet tens upon tens of thousands of years ago; and here and there
are streaks of land completely covered with smaller rocks wedged and
driven into the ground. It used to be told me in my youth that the
devil’s apron-string broke as he was carrying a load of these rocks
overhead, and let the mass down upon the ground. The farmers seldom
attempt to clear away these leavings of the devil.
IV
My interest in the birds is not as keen as it once was, but they are
still an asset in my life. I must live where I can hear the crows caw,
the robins sing, and the song-sparrow trill. If I can hear also the
partridge drum, and the owl hoot, and the chipmunk cluck in the still
days of autumn, so much the better. The crow is such a true countryman,
so much at home everywhere, so thoroughly in possession of the land,
going his way winter and summer in such noisy contentment and pride
of possession, that I cannot leave him out. The bird I missed most in
California was the crow. I missed his glistening coat in the fields,
his ebony form and hearty call in the sky.
One advantage of sleeping out of doors, as we do at Woodchuck Lodge,
is that you hear the day ushered in by the birds. Toward autumn you
hear the crows first, making proclamation in all directions that it
is time to be up and doing, and that life is a good thing. There is
not a bit of doubt or discouragement in their tones. They have enjoyed
the night, and they have a stout heart for the day. They proclaim
it as they fly over my porch at five o’clock in the morning; they
call it from the orchard, they bandy the message back and forth in
the neighboring fields; the air is streaked with cheery greetings and
raucous salutations. Toward the end of August, or in early September,
I witness with pleasure their huge mass-meetings or annual congress on
the pasture-hills or in the borders of the woods. Before that time,
you see them singly or in loose bands; but on some day in late summer,
or in early autumn, you see the clans assemble as if for some rare
festival and grand tribal discussion. A multitudinous cawing attracts
your attention when you look hillward and see a swarm of dusky forms
circling in the air, their voices mingling in one dissonant wave of
sound, while loose bands of other dusky forms come from all points of
the compass to join them. Presently many hundred crows are assembled,
alternately lighted upon the ground and silently walking about as if
feeding, or circling in the air, cawing as if they would be heard in
the next township. What they are doing or saying or settling, what
it all means, whether they meet by appointment in the human fashion,
whether it is a jubilee, a parliament, or a convention, I confess I
should like to know. But second thought tells me it is more likely
the gregarious instinct asserting itself after the scatterings and
separations of the summer. The time of the rookery is not far off, when
the inclement season will find all the crows from a large section of
the country massed at night in lonely tree-tops in some secluded wood.
These early noisy assemblages may be preliminary to the winter union of
the tribe. What an engrossing affair it seems to be with the crows, how
oblivious they appear to all else in the world! The world was made for
crows, and what concerns them is alone important. The meeting adjourns,
from time to time, from the fields to the woods, then back again, the
babel of voices waxing or waning according as they are on the wing
or at rest. Sometimes they meet several days in succession and then
disperse, going away in different directions and irregularly, singly or
in pairs and bands, as men do on similar occasions. No doubt in these
great reunions the crows experience some sort of feeling or emotion,
though one would doubtless err in ascribing to them anything like
human procedure. It is not a definite purpose, but a tribal instinct,
that finds expression in their jubilees.
The crow seems to have a great deal of business besides getting a
living. How social, how communicative he is--what picnics he has in
the fields and woods, how absolutely at home is he at all times and
places! I see them from my window flying by, by twos or threes or more,
on happy, holiday wings, sliding down the air, or diving and chasing
one another, or walking about the fields, their coats glistening in
the sun, the movement of their heads timing the movements of their
feet--what an air of independence and respectability and well-being
attends them always! The pedestrian crow! no more graceful walker ever
trod the turf. How different his bearing from that of a game-bird, and
from any of the falcon tribe. He never tries to hide like the former,
and he is never morose and sulky like the latter. He is gay and social
and in possession of the land; the world is his and he knows it, and
life is good.
I suppose that if his flesh were edible, like that of the gallinaceous
birds, he would have many more enemies and his whole demeanor would
be different. His complacent, self-satisfied air would vanish. He
would not advertise his comings and goings so loudly. He would be less
conspicuous in the landscape; his huge mass-meetings in September would
be more silent and withdrawn. Well, then, he would not be the crow--the
happy, devil-may-care creature as we now know him.
His little gaily dressed brother, the jay, does not tempt the sportsman
any more than the crow does, but he tempts other creatures--the owl
and squirrels, and maybe the hawks. Hence his tribe is much less. His
range is also more restricted, and his feeding habits are much less
miscellaneous. Only the woods and groves are his; the fields and rivers
he knows not.
The crow is a noisy bird. All his tribe are noisy, but the noise
probably has little psychic significance. The raven in Alaska appears
to soliloquize most of the time. This talkativeness of the crow tribe
is probably only a phase of crow life, and signifies no more and no
less than other phases--their color, their cunning, the flick of their
wings, and the like. The barn-yard fowls are loquacious also, but
probably their loquacity is not attended with much psychic activity.
In the mornings of early summer the out-of-door sleeper is more likely
to be awakened by the song-birds. In June and early July they strike
up about half-past three. “When it is light enough to see that all is
well around you, it is light enough to sing,” they carol. “Before the
early worm is stirring, we will celebrate the coming of day.” During
the summer the song-sparrows have been the first to nudge me in the
morning with their songs. One little sparrow especially would perch on
the telephone-wire above the roadside and go through his repertoire
of five songs with great regularity and joyousness. He will long be
associated in my mind with those early, fragrant, summer dawns. One of
his five songs fell so easily into words that I had only to call the
attention of my friends to it to have them hear the words that I heard:
“If, if, if you please, Mr. Durkee,”--the last word a little prolonged,
and with a rising inflection. Another was not quite so well expressed
by these words: “Please, please, speak to me, sweetheart.” The third
one suggested this sentence: “Then, then, Fitzhugh says, yes, sir!”
The fourth one was something like this: “If, if, if you seize her, do
it quick.” The fifth one baffled me to suggest by words. But in August
his musical enthusiasm began to decline. His different songs lost their
distinctiveness and emphasis. It was as if they had faded and become
blurred with the progress of the season.
The little birds are insignificant and unobtrusive on the great
background of nature, yet if one learns to distinguish them and to
love them, their songs may become a sort of accompaniment to one’s
daily life. In May, while I was much occupied in repairing and making
habitable an old farm-house, a solitary, mourning, ground-warbler,
which one rarely sees or hears, came and tarried about the place for
a week or ten days, singing most of each forenoon in the orchard
and garden about the house, and giving to my occupation a touch of
something rare and sylvan. He lent to the apple-trees, which I had
known as a boy, an interest that the boy knew not. Then he went away,
whether on the arrival of his mate or not I do not know.
[Illustration: Photograph, copyright, by Alvin Langdon Coburn.
Color-tone made for ~The Century~ by Henry Davidson
JOHN BURROUGHS
]
A butternut-tree stands across the road in front of Woodchuck Lodge.
One season the red squirrels stored the butternuts in the wall of one
of the upper rooms of the unoccupied house, to which they gained access
through a hole in the siding. When we moved in, in the summer, the
squirrels soon became uneasy, and one day one of them began removing
the butternuts, not to some other granary or place of safety, but
to the grass and dry leaves on the ground in the orchard. He was
unwittingly planting them by the act of hiding them. The automatic
character of much animal behavior, the extent to which their lives flow
in fixed channels, was well seen in the behavior of this squirrel.
His procedure in transferring the nuts from his den in the house to
the ground in the orchard, a distance of probably one hundred feet,
was as definite and regular as that of a piece of machinery. He would
rush up and over the roof of the house with a nut in his mouth, by
those sharp, spasmodic sallies so characteristic of the movements of
the red squirrel, down the corner of the house to the ground by the
same jerky movements, across some rubbish and open ground in the same
manner, alert and cautious, up the corner of a small building ten feet
high and eight long, over its roof, with arched tail and spread feet,
snickering and jerking, down to the ground on the other side, dashing
to the trunk of an apple-tree ten feet away, up it a few feet to make
an observation, then down to the ground again, and out into the grass,
where he would carefully hide his nut, and cover it with leaves. Then
back to the house again by precisely the same route and with precisely
the same movements, and bring another nut. Day after day I saw him thus
engaged till apparently all the nuts were removed. He probably did not
know he was planting butternut-trees for other red squirrels, but that
was what he was blindly doing. The crows and jays carry away and plant
acorns and chestnuts in the same blind way, thereby often causing a
pine forest to be succeeded by these trees.
The red squirrel is only an irregular storer of nuts in the autumn.
In this respect he stands half-way between the chipmunk and the gray
squirrel, one of which regularly lays up winter stores and the other
none at all.
How diverse are the ways of nature in reaching the same end! Both the
chipmunk and the woodchuck lay up stores against the needs of winter,
the latter in the shape of fat upon his own ribs, and the former in
the shape of seeds and nuts in his den in the ground; and I fancy that
one of them is no more conscious of what he is doing than the other.
Animals do not take conscious thought of the future; it is as if
something in their organization took thought for them. One November,
seized with the cruel desire to go to the bottom of the question of
the chipmunk’s winter stores, I dug out one after he had got his house
settled for the season. I found his den three feet below the surface
of the ground--just beyond the frostline--and containing nearly four
quarts of various seeds, most of them the little black grains of wild
buckwheat--two hundred and fifty thousand of them, I estimated--all
cleaned of their husks as neatly as if done by some patent machine.
How many perilous journeys along stone walls and through weedy tangles
this store of seeds represented! One would say at least a thousand
trips, beset by many dangers from hawks and cats and weasels and other
enemies of the little rodent.
The chipmunk is provident; he is a wise housekeeper, but one can hardly
envy him those three or four months of inaction in the pitchy darkness
of his subterranean den. His mate is not with him, and evidently the
oblivion of the hibernating sleep, like that of the woodchuck and of
certain mice, is not his. The life of the red and gray squirrels, who
are more or less active all winter, seems preferable. They lay up no
stores and are no doubt often cold and hungry, but the light of day
and the freedom of the snow and of the tree-tops are theirs. Abundant
stores are a good thing for both man and beast, but action, adventure,
struggle are better.
THE FOREIGN TRADE OF THE UNITED STATES
(“THE TRADE OF THE WORLD” PAPERS)
BY JAMES DAVENPORT WHELPLEY
Author of “The Commercial Strength of Great Britain,” “Germany’s
Foreign Trade,” etc.
Queen Elizabeth was the founder of the school of “dollar diplomacy,”
and to this day her memory is revered by the merchant gilds of London.
This great queen paid much attention to the welfare of industry at
home, and sent trade adventurers abroad to open avenues of foreign
commerce; and in the degree with which the rulers and governments of
all lands have observed the necessities and development of the material
interests of their respective countries have nations flourished or
marked time.
Through a peculiar misuse of the term, the foreign policy of the United
States has been termed “dollar diplomacy,” whereas, partly because of
national tradition and partly through lack of skill and experience,
the diplomacy of America has less relation to the extension of foreign
commerce than that of any other great modern nation. American diplomacy
has been governed more by altruistic ideas, the protection of foreign
peoples against themselves and others, the elimination of money
tributes and indemnities, the recognition of new governments without
conditions, and arbitration of international troubles as a neutral
nation. In these and in many other ways America has played her part
in various international controversies; but in the general scramble
for selfish advantage in all these affairs she has taken little or
no successful part. Yet American diplomacy has been called that of
the “dollar,” and has been credited in the minds of many of her own
citizens, as well as by foreigners, with a mercenary basis.
The people of a nation have it within their power to advance the
interests of their foreign commerce in two ways: one by intelligent
legislation at home, and the other by intelligent diplomacy abroad.
The shipment of merchandise from one country to another means to the
selling nation a foreign market for the raw material, the employment
of labor to the extent of from thirty to ninety per cent. of the
selling value of the goods, and the payment for this material and
labor by foreigners in money or its equivalent. It is a clear gain
in every phase of the transaction. There is an old frontier adage,
which originated in the early days of the Western boom, to the effect
that “outside money makes the camp.” It is a homely expression that
summarizes the advantages of an export of two billion dollars’ worth
of goods with a comprehensiveness equal to its original application.
It is not too much to say that anything in the shape of legislation or
of increased facilities which assists the outward flow of the products
of labor is of unquestioned advantage to the producing nation. An
unnatural, though perhaps comprehensible, attitude of suspicion toward
successful export has come about in the United States. This has led to
hostility toward special rail and water-rates for export, lower prices
for bulk foreign business, niggardliness of national expenditures
for diplomatic representation and for the work of the Department of
Commerce and its foreign-trade bureau. It might almost be said that the
great and growing figures of foreign trade, issued triumphantly every
year by the government statisticians, have been achieved despite the
obstructions placed in the path of their progress.
The growth of those figures in their largest aspect is due to organized
private effort, the methods and operations of which are a sealed
book to the government official or the general public, and which
unfortunately have shared in the recent and sweeping condemnation
of the business methods of all big corporations. There has been no
sifting of the wheat from the chaff, the good from the evil, with most
deplorable results, for which both public and corporations are to
blame. The natural result has been that in attempting to regulate the
home activities of “big business” their foreign activities have been
hindered and even checked. Lost ground in foreign directions is more
difficult to regain than at home, for certain artificial and natural
barriers always exist, which favor home markets, while foreign trade
meets well-equipped rivals at least on equal terms, and often with a
handicap.
In the year 1913 the people of the United States are entering upon a
radical change in the national attitude toward domestic and foreign
commerce. There is a partial reversal of policy toward home industry;
there is also an important experiment afoot in diplomacy. It is too
early to say just how radical these changes will be in the final
reckoning, or what may be the outcome. It is quite possible that
increased freedom of trade may bring good results at home; and if
Congress recognizes the need of a commercial diplomacy auxiliary
to that of the litterateur, the reformer, the peace-advocate, the
missionary, and the general uplifter of mankind, and the administration
provides competent, permanent, and resident commercial diplomats or
attachés to all important American missions, a threatened disadvantage
may be turned into a victory. At present, however, American foreign
trade is the foot-ball of national politics.
Private enterprise, with its able American representatives abroad, is
the only real guard against serious damage possessed by this great
asset of the nation. The advance of American foreign commerce may be
likened to a more or less friendly conflict with an allied army of
foreign competitors. This is specially true of American trade, for it
is generally a new-comer, and is regarded with dislike and antagonism
to such an extent as to induce combinations of rivals to resist its
advance.
The strongest efforts of American diplomacy should be directed to
Russia and China to bring about a commercial entente between the
United States and these two countries. The future of China as a market
for foreign enterprise and merchandise will develop slowly, it is
true, but the results will in time prove stupendous. In view of this,
firm foundations should be laid for the structure of international
trade, which will inevitably develop in the course of years. In the
case of Russia there is no time to be lost. Here is a great area of
wonderfully productive territory inhabited by scores of millions of
people. Education is spreading among these people, and their wants
are multiplying. Such foreign trade as has found a lodgment there
is of the kind America wants, and will need more and more as her
productiveness increases and the oversupply of home markets becomes
more noticeable. England, Germany, France, the Low Countries, and those
of Scandinavia are losing no time. Political, financial, commercial,
and industrial bonds are being forged with all possible rapidity to
this awakening nation of industrious people. American interests in
Russia are already large, but their existence is due to private and
not national initiative. As a nation we have not only done much to
discourage the betterment of intercourse with Russia, but have even
actually threatened the existence of American interests therein by
inviting antagonism instead of friendly coöperation. It is not too late
to remedy this unfortunate attitude, but the situation needs prompt,
wise, and fearless handling by those responsible for the foreign policy
of the United States.
American foreign commerce rests on a basis of international friendship.
Once established, the needs of the respective countries determine the
extent of international trading, modified as it must be, however, by
conditions of transportation and such fiscal restrictions as may be
imposed. Leaving the matter of price and quality to be dealt with by
the industrial exporter, as must be the case, the influence of the
Government remains as the most important outside factor in determining
the prosperity of this trade. Under the control of the Government
come the treaty-making power, with its bid for favorable reception
of American products; the official attitude toward facilities for the
manufacturing of exports and toward transportation; and assistance in
gathering information for exporters. The important, but more technical,
details of foreign commerce can safely be left to private enterprise in
its effort toward profitable trading. There is no doubt as to the good
intention of government officials and of those who vote the money for
their work: it is, of course, that American consumers shall benefit.
There are two points of view, however, well illustrated in the attitude
of the British and the United States Government, respectively, as
to the direction in which governmental efforts may be extended in
the furtherance of foreign trade. The British Government pays great
attention to the diplomatic end of the business, and lets private
enterprise follow up any advantage gained. The United States Government
spends vastly more money and effort upon the details of trade, but in
many cases unfortunately attempts to build upon a shifting and insecure
foundation, in that the relations of the two countries may be weak
diplomatically, or there may be lack of knowledge or understanding as
to the general conditions to be met. For some American consul to inform
American manufacturers through the State Department of great openings
for the sale of goods does not mean necessarily that these goods can
be sold; for in some cases American competition would find itself
hopelessly handicapped by the superior trade diplomacy and knowledge
of its adversary, thus nullifying any possible superiority in goods or
prices.
From a practical point of view, to analyze American foreign trade in
detail would be an endless and useless task. It has grown to be what it
is through exports of food-stuffs and raw materials, followed naturally
by the surplus products of manufacturing. Of imports the same may be
said, reversing the order of the progression. The land furnished the
material, and labor came at its call from all parts of the world. The
logical result of plenty of material, a constantly increasing supply
of labor, combined with national ingenuity and a climate conducive to
the development of nervous energy, is the production of more or less
finished merchandise in such quantities as to keep half the ships of
the world in daily use carrying it to and fro. Whether governmental
intervention has helped or hindered has been the subject of controversy
since this commerce began, and will continue until commerce ends; but
out of it all must come a certain amount of wisdom, gained through
experience, which should be of practical benefit to those on whom rests
the responsibility of official coöperation with private adventure in
foreign lands.
The three great foreign trading nations of the world are England,
Germany, and the United States, in the order named. In 1912 the foreign
commerce of England amounted to a little less than $6,000,000,000,
that of Germany to more than $4,600,000,000, and that of the United
States to nearly $4,200,000,000. The total foreign trade of these three
countries is proportioned approximately between imports and exports as
follows:
England Germany United
States
Imports 60 per cent. 54 per cent. 43 per cent.
Exports 40 “ “ 46 “ “ 57 “ “
These figures mean that the United States is still a debtor nation.
If the imports of gold brought the imports level with the exports in
value, which they do not, but far from it, the figures would indicate
that the American people were getting cash for their goods instead of
merchandise, as would be the case if merchandise exports and imports
were equal. The most considerable factors that annually balance this
trade are the payments of interest and principal on American securities
held abroad, remittances by American immigrants to foreign lands, money
spent abroad by American tourists, and payments made to foreign-owned
vessels for freight-charges on goods carried to and from America. There
are several other factors in this balance, but the four named are the
most considerable. In the case of England and Germany, as well as many
other prosperous countries whose foreign-trade sheets show an excess
of imports over exports, this excess represents the profit on trading
abroad, and the inflow of returns upon capital invested abroad. In
other words, these nations are creditor, or money-lending, communities.
The imports of all money-lending countries, like France, England,
Germany, the Netherlands, and others, considerably exceed the exports,
while the exports of all borrowing, developing, or unequally developed
countries, like Russia, the United States, Argentina, Rumania, and many
others, exceed the imports, as the foreign investor must be paid his
interest, and the only source of money for such payment is eventually
either the product of the soil or of industry.
One hundred years ago, when the population of the United States
was about seven millions, the American people imported annually
considerably less than $100,000,000 worth of merchandise, less than ten
per cent. of which came in free of duty. In 1912, when the population
was more than ninety millions, the importations amounted to nearly
$1,700,000,000, of which about fifty-four per cent. entered duty free.
The average ad valorem rate of import duty on dutiable goods one
hundred years ago was about forty per cent., and on the total imports,
dutiable and free, it was about thirty-five per cent. In 1912 the
average ad valorem on dutiable goods was about the same as one hundred
years before, and on the total imports, both dutiable and free, it was
about nineteen per cent. The progress of American foreign trade in one
hundred years is recorded as follows:
_Year_ _Imports_ _Exports_ _Total Foreign
Trade_
1810 $85,000,000 $67,000,000 $152,000,000
1830 63,000,000 72,000,000 135,000,000
1850 174,000,000 144,000,000 318,000,000
1870 436,000,000 393,000,000 829,000,000
1890 790,000,000 858,000,000 1,648,000,000
1912 1,818,000,000 2,363,000,000 4,181,000,000
In one hundred years the population has increased more than thirteen
times, and the foreign trade more than twenty-five times. In 1810 the
per capita foreign trade of America was about $21, and in 1912 it was
nearly $40. These latter figures are really much more significant than
appears at first glance, for the population of America, as estimated
in 1810, was composed of a larger proportion of effective producing
units than in 1912. Few but white people were counted, the percentage
of women and children was smaller, and virtually every white American
was self-supporting. The estimate of to-day includes, therefore, a
much larger percentage of human beings who, though counted as units
in population, are not so potential in the material activities of
the nation. The $40 per capita of 1912 is much more significant of
the growth of American foreign interests, therefore, than merely the
increase from the $21 of 1810 appears.
Speaking generally, the foreign trade of the United States has
doubled every twenty years since 1830, regardless of wars, changes of
government, administrative policies, the rise or decline of shipping
interests, the increasing power of foreign competition, or the opening
and development of competitive territory in other parts of the world.
The development of industry in a country is usually written on the
character of the imports and exports, and the changes that take place
in the proportions of raw material and manufactured goods are most
significant. In the case of the United States, these are strikingly
shown in the more or less shifting percentages of a long period in
the growth of the nation--a period fully covering the time the United
States has figured to any marked degree in the economic affairs of the
world. In the last eighty-two years American foreign trade has been
roughly classified by percentages as follows:
_IMPORTS_
_1830_ _1870_ _1912_
Crude food-stuffs and
food animals 11.77 12.41 13.93
Food-stuffs partly or
wholly manufactured 15.39 22.03 11.86
Crude manufactured
material 6.72 12.76 33.63
Manufactures for use
in manufacture 8.22 12.75 17.77
Manufactures ready for
consumption 56.97 39.82 21.78
Miscellaneous .93 .23 1.03
------ ------ ------
100.00 100.00 100.00
The most noticeable features of the statement given above are that
the importation of crude food-stuffs and food animals remain about
the same in their relation to total imports, that the importation of
partly manufactured food-stuffs has decreased, that the importation
of materials for use in manufacture has enormously increased, and
that the importation of manufactured goods ready for consumption has
decreased by nearly two thirds. All of these figures, both of imports
and exports, are based on values and not on quantities. The latter
would be the most accurate measure of progress, as prices have changed
materially--either fallen or increased, mostly the latter--on many
important staples; but it would be virtually impossible to consider
these matters from a point of view other than that of values, where
everything is grouped under an inclusive total, and in all probability
the change that might follow a quantitative analysis, rather than one
based on values, would not materially alter any conclusions that might
be drawn. The changes in American exports during the same period were
by percentages as follows:
_EXPORTS_
_1830_ _1870_ _1912_
Crude food-stuffs and
food animals 4.65 11.12 4.60
Food-stuffs partly or
wholly manufactured 16.32 13.53 14.69
Crude manufactured
material 62.34 56.64 33.31
Manufactures for use
in manufacture 7.04 3.66 16.04
Manufactures ready
for consumption 9.34 14.96 30.98
Miscellaneous .31 .09 .38
------ ------ ------
100.00 100.00 100.00
The noticeable features of the record of American exports for the last
eighty-two years are that the export of food-stuffs has decreased
rather than increased in proportion to business in other commodities;
that the export of crude manufactured material has greatly decreased,
and in fact, with the exception of cotton, has become a negligible
quantity; and that the export of manufactured goods ready for
consumption has increased enormously. Exports of cotton are now the
basis of American export of raw material. Whereas the total production
of cotton in the United States in 1830 was only about 1,000,000 bales,
in 1912 the United States furnished nearly 11,000,000 bales for export,
valued at $625,000,000, amounting to fully five sixths of the value
of all raw material for manufacturing purposes exported by the United
States in that year.
The export of raw cotton in the case of the United States does not mean
any appreciable backwardness of home manufacture. The importations of
manufactured cotton goods are decreasing annually, so far as cloths are
concerned. In 1912 less than $8,000,000 in cotton cloth was imported
from abroad. The heaviest importation of cotton goods was in laces
and such other things as are specialties of foreign manufacture, in
many cases hereditary trades, or trades dependent upon cheap, trained
female labor, such as is not available in America. America uses
nearly 6,000,000 bales of home-grown cotton every year in her own
factories, and supplies not only the home market with manufactured
goods, but manufactures more than $30,000,000 worth for foreign sale,
in competition with the great spinning and manufacturing countries
of Europe. The growing of cotton is not a raw-material industry in
the strict sense of the word, for, owing to peculiarities of climate,
certain features of the American labor supply, and the great amount
of money this staple crop brings from abroad and distributes in
non-manufacturing districts, it possesses a peculiar and great economic
value to the country. Coal, tobacco, petroleum, and timber are the
more important of the crude materials exported from the United States
in addition to cotton; but the total value of all these is, as stated,
about one sixth of the whole.
The total value of the exports of domestic merchandise from the United
States in 1912 was about $2,363,000,000. As stated, cotton stands at
the head of the list. The iron and steel industry comes next; the
farmers of the United States furnish the third largest amount of
merchandise for export; and machinery of all kinds, oils, paper, fruit,
and chemicals, are the leaders in American export. The most interesting
changes that have taken place in American foreign trade in the last few
years are those that indicate certain possibilities of the future; in
fact, they are in a way prophetic of what is to happen in the economic
life of the nation. In 1902 93,000 head of cattle were imported, and in
1912 the importations numbered 325,000. In 1902 about 327,000 head of
cattle were exported, and in 1912 only about 46,000. This means that
the American people have nearly reached the point where the home market
absorbs all cattle grown in the country, and that in future other
peoples, who in the past have been dependent upon the United States for
their beef supply, must look elsewhere. The exportation of bread-stuffs
has decreased materially, while importation has quadrupled, thus
telling a story of shortage in food-supply, as did the change in the
cattle movement. This same shortage is shown in like changes in the
trade in meat products, dairy products, eggs, and nearly every other
variety of staple food.
The United States produces half the copper of the world, but both
exports and imports of this metal are increasing, showing that other
countries are sending copper to this country for treatment. In 1902,
America imported 135,000,000 pounds of tin plates, and in 1912 only
4,500,000 pounds. The exports of tin plates increased during the same
period from 3,500,000 pounds to 183,000,000 pounds. Iron and steel
show a marked decline in imports and an enormous gain in exports. The
American people are no longer importing automobiles to any extent,
but are increasing their sales abroad, and in 1912 sold $28,000,000
worth to foreign buyers. The importations of coffee virtually hold
their own, amounting in 1912 to nearly 1,000,000,000 pounds; but owing
to increased prices, the value of this importation is nearly double
that of 1902. The exports of the iron and steel industry of the United
States, including the manufactures of these materials as well, now
amount to about $1,000,000 per day. Europe takes the higher class of
goods, and Canada and South America take the rails, structural iron
and steel, heavy castings, and other like products that constitute the
heavy tonnage of the industry.
The countries taking their largest proportionate share of their imports
from the United States are: Haiti, 69 per cent.; Honduras, 68 per
cent.; Canada, 62 per cent.; Santo Domingo, 61 per cent.; Panama, 56
per cent.; Mexico, 55 per cent.; Cuba, 53 per cent.; and Costa Rica 51
per cent. England takes 17.3 per cent. of her imports from the United
States, Germany 13.3 per cent., and France 8.6 per cent. Of the South
American countries, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Peru take from
20 to 30 per cent. of their imports from the United States, while
others take smaller percentages, ranging from the 13.8 of Argentina
and the 12.8 of Brazil to the 2.8 per cent. of Bolivia. Other countries
draw very slightly upon the United States for their imports, notably
China, which takes only 5 per cent.; India, 3 per cent.; Morocco, less
than 1 per cent.; Servia, 1 per cent.; and about the same for Turkey
and Rumania. The great markets for American products at the present,
in total value of goods sold to the peoples of these countries, are
England, purchasing as she does from America goods to the amount of
$572,000,000; Canada, $285,000,000; Germany, $283,000,000; France,
$119,000,000; the Netherlands, $117,000,000; Italy, $70,000,000; Cuba,
$57,000,000; Mexico, $56,000,000; Russia, $52,000,000; Austria-Hungary,
Argentina, and Belgium, between $45,000,000 and $50,000,000 each, and
Australia, Brazil, and Japan, between $27,000,000 and $32,000,000 each.
Of the export trade of the United States, 60 per cent. goes to Europe,
23 per cent. to North America, 6 per cent. to South America, 5 per
cent. to Asia, 4 per cent. to Oceanica, and 2 per cent. to Africa.
American producers send more than 90 per cent. of their entire foreign
shipments, or more than $2,000,000,000 worth of goods, to nineteen
countries, and the remaining ten per cent. covers the trade with all
the rest of the world. England buys about 26 per cent. of the total
American export; Canada 15 per cent.; Germany 13 per cent.; France 7
per cent.; the Netherlands 4 per cent.; Italy, Cuba, and Belgium, each
3 per cent.; Mexico, Japan, Argentina, Australia, Russia, and Brazil,
each 2 per cent.; and Spain, Austria-Hungary, Panama, China, and the
Philippines, each about 1 per cent.
Official figures of imports and exports are useful as indications from
which deductions may safely be drawn, but they are not an accurate
record of the trade relations of any two countries. In some cases the
indirect trade of the United States with certain countries is much
larger than custom-house figures would indicate, in that American
goods are purchased by other nations, who act as distributors or
intermediaries in conducting the foreign trade of the world. This
is very largely so in American trade with England. That country is
credited with purchases of American goods far in excess of the needs
of the British people. These goods are bought by English firms whose
dealings are largely with other foreign countries, and by them sold
to their customers on the Continent of Europe, in Asia, Oceanica,
or elsewhere. A striking example of this is the American trade with
Russia. It is impossible to state exactly the value of American goods
which in time find their way to the Russian consumer, but it is vastly
in excess of the amount of trade between the United States and Russia,
or $52,380,000, as given in government statistics. In the official
statement of exports of American cotton, Russia is credited by the
Department of Commerce figures as receiving 64,590 bales, valued at
$3,796,867.
American consuls in Russia, and the cotton experts of that country,
estimate that Russia consumes annually nearly $50,000,000 worth of
American raw cotton, an amount nearly equal to the total export to
Russia of all American goods, according to United States government
figures. That the government figures are misleading is due to the fact
that they are figures of direct business only; and direct trade between
the United States and Russia is, for geographical, transportation, and
financial reasons, more or less hampered. American cotton is bought
for Russia in London, Hamburg, Antwerp, Copenhagen, and other great
European markets. The exports are credited in the United States to the
ports mentioned, and while the ultimate destination does not affect
the totals of American foreign trade, it does lead to wide-spread
confusion as to the comparative value of the various foreign markets
for American products. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of
Russia, a country with which the United States has recently had some
difficulty in the matter of a treaty of mutual trade and friendship.
Judging from United States government statistics, American trade
relations with Russia might be regarded as almost negligible; whereas
in fact they are already of the greatest value and importance, to say
nothing of the brilliant prospects of possible trade expansion in the
near future. Even the government figures show a direct sale to Russia
of nearly $50,000,000 worth of American goods, deducting the direct
sales of cotton. With a known consumption of $50,000,000 worth of
American cotton, this gives at least $100,000,000 as the value of
American sales to Russia. Cotton, however, is not the only merchandise
sold indirectly, and if other goods are handled in the same way to an
equal amount, it is possible that the annual sales of American goods to
Russia amount to nearly $200,000,000, or four times the amount allowed
by United States official figures.
This correction would give Russia fourth instead of ninth place in
the list of great buyers of American goods. This is the most striking
illustration of the deceptive feature of government trade-statistics
in determining the order of importance of foreign buyers of American
goods, though there are other countries which suffer in the estimation
of exporters for the same reason. As has been already stated, it was
peculiarly unfortunate that this was so in the case of Russia, for
those who, for reasons of their own, favored national retaliation
against that country through mutual trade relations used United States
government statistics to support their argument, and the American
public naturally accepted these data at their apparent value. A final
and accurate determination of the value of each foreign country as a
market for American merchandise, a laborious and almost impossible
task, would undoubtedly lead to interesting and unexpected results.
It would not only make many changes in the list of the most important
customers, but would immediately suggest possibilities of more direct
trading, which would stimulate American rail, shipping, and financial
interests, increase profits by cutting out the middleman, and in the
end give added stimulus to American foreign trade.
One of the most serious difficulties that confront the American
Government in its dealings with foreign nations is the inelasticity
of the American tariff laws. The most sensible and scientific tariff
law which the United States could have,--allowing that the principle
of tariff for revenue and protection is to prevail,--is such rate
of duty as may be deemed advisable, all things considered; an
arrangement whereby a surtax could be imposed upon goods from countries
discriminating against American merchandise, and a trading margin
for treaty-making purposes, ranging from the normal rate of duty,
as set forth in the customs laws, to absolute free trade between
the treaty-making powers. There is little or no hope that such a law
can prevail or will be formally advocated by any political party in
power; but it is a hopeful sign that it has been seriously suggested
and discussed by men prominent in the councils of the nation. That
tariff laws will in time be formulated on that basis is likely, but
such a statement reaches further into the domain of prophecy than is
apparently warranted in the present temper of actual legislation.
There is a simple truth, apparently often forgotten or ignored, and
it is that to give is necessary, to be able to take, in all dealings
between nations, as much as between individuals. All trading is in
the end a compromise, presumably mutually beneficent and equally so.
It rests with the wit and ability of the trader to see that he at
least comes out even. It would be interesting to know just how far
the late President McKinley intended to go in his advocacy of better
foreign-trade relations for the United States had not his tragic death
cut short his program. The last speech he made at Buffalo was crowded
with significance of what might come later. It was in a sense as though
he were only preparing the way for an important development of American
fiscal policy in connection with foreign trade. Those who were in his
closest confidence in the days just prior to his death have knowledge
of an evolution that had taken place in his mind--a mind that had given
more thorough thought and study to tariff matters than almost any
other in America at that time. They firmly believe that at the moment
the life of President McKinley ended, he had planned a pronunciamento
in favor of concessions to American foreign-trade interests which
would have startled the country, put the Republican party in line with
the mass of the voters who desired tariff revision, and of which his
Buffalo speech strongly advocating reciprocity in commerce was only the
opening paragraph. Had he lived, this one thing might have made a vast
difference in the subsequent fortunes of the Republican party; but when
he died his place was taken by a man whose marvelous activities did not
include an interest in the tariff. In fact, as he frankly expressed it,
the subject “bored” him, as it does many others, unfortunate for the
country as this may be.
The American diplomatic service has passed through some remarkable
phases in the last twenty-five years. A few years ago it was quite
frankly used as a means for rewarding political services to the party
in power. No good could possibly come out of such a system. There were
some exceptions to the general rule that American ambassadors and
ministers were either indifferent to or else ignorant of the needs of
the United States in international politics, but they were few and far
between. More recently men have been selected for the most important
places by reason of their wealth and social standing. Some of those
selected made excellent representatives, but owing to the shortness of
their terms of office they had no more than familiarized themselves
with their surroundings than they were either recalled or found it
expedient to return to their native land.
President Wilson has apparently established a new plan, or rather
revived an old one. He is selecting his foreign representatives
from the class known in Europe as the “intellectuals.” This policy
is adopted at a highly critical time in the history of the foreign
trading of the United States, and at a time when virtually all the
great international questions and controversies are those of respective
economic advantage, one nation over another. It comes also at a
time when the great commercial and industrial rivals of the United
States are pursuing a different policy, one which is perhaps worth
considering. England and Germany to a notable degree, and France,
Russia, and some others of the great Powers to a sufficient degree
to be noticeable, are training men for all diplomatic positions, and
promotions are made even to the highest places almost entirely upon the
merits and suitability of the candidates. The young man who enters the
foreign office service of England or Germany in a subordinate position
has within his power, if he develop accordingly, to become in time an
ambassador to some important country. He is thoroughly tried out, step
by step, as consul and minister before the highest rank is given to
him. He is moved about from one part of the world to another until he
becomes in truth a cosmopolitan not only in thought and habit, but
in language and knowledge. The most serious part of the education of
these men is, first, the economics of their own country, and, secondly,
the economics of the country to which they are to be accredited.
This education is practical and not theoretical. This is true to so
great an extent that, when a technical matter of trade enters into
a controversy between the two state departments, the minister or
ambassador is often found fully qualified to fight the battle himself
in aid of the material interests of the country he represents. There
are no more practical men anywhere than a majority of these who now
represent the progressive industrial countries of Europe as foreign
ministers or ambassadors. This particular feature of their equipment
for the office is not unnecessarily paraded, however, for their social
and political qualifications are more in the public eye. It is in the
private talks at the State Department at Washington, in London, Berlin,
Paris, St. Petersburg, or elsewhere, that their real fighting strength
is disclosed. It is not a question of private fortune with them, for
their governments remove any anxiety on that score by an adequate and
even abundant allowance of funds not only for salaries, but for housing
and maintenance. The British ambassador to Washington receives more
in salary and expense allowance than does the President of the United
States in proportion to the necessary expenditures of his office.
To the American manufacturer, deeply engaged with his cost of
production and the filling of orders, it may appear that too much
stress is laid upon the function of foreign diplomacy in the success of
American business abroad; but it will not be necessary to give emphasis
to its importance with those Americans who have already pioneered their
business into remote parts of the world. They know, through bitter
experience, how inefficiency in an American embassy or legation can
hinder and even destroy the greater possibilities for American success.
At present, and for years past, the fortunes of American foreign
trading depend, so far as diplomacy is concerned, upon the character,
ability, common sense, and adroitness of the individual government
representative abroad rather than upon the Government or the system as
a whole. Within the year 1912 we had the two extremes: in one country
an able, intelligent, and practical man, working persistently for weeks
to bring about a commercial entente cordiale between the United States
and the country in which he was stationed; and in another country
American interests were forced to appeal to English or other foreign
representatives to help them through a time of stress, because the
American representative considered things commercial as outside of
the province of his labors. Both of these men are out of office now
not because one was useful and the other useless, but because of the
system, or lack of system, which required their places for others.
An English minister who was stationed in an important country a few
years ago failed when there to secure certain large contracts for
English builders. This same minister is still in the service, but is
now kicking his heels in an unimportant place, where what he does or
does not is of little consequence. A certain German ambassador was
recently denied the place of his choice because he had done so well
where he was that his services were still needed at that point; but
when the crisis has passed, he will get his reward all the more surely.
The day will come in America when it will be realized that a nation
can well afford to cheapen for export by every means in its power,
and that such cheapness does not necessarily mean discrimination
against the home consumer. There are few signs of the dawn of this day
at the moment, and it will come only when the ultimate and general
overproduction of manufactures forces the attention of the whole nation
upon the need of still greater markets elsewhere. There is one comfort
for the people of the United States, possessed in no such degree by
any other nation at the present time or for several generations to
come, and that is, the abounding possibilities of the North American
continent in its natural resources, and the amazing vitality and
resourcefulness of its inhabitants.
[Illustration: LAÏLA, FROM MESOPOTAMIA
NEW-MADE AMERICANS
A Few Types of Foreign Women Sketched, in New York, from the Life
By W. T. Benda]
[Illustration: ZOBÉIDA, FROM SYRIA]
[Illustration: MARGHERITA, FROM ITALY]
[Illustration: JENNY, FROM CANADA
ULANA, FROM POLAND
DOLORES, FROM SPAIN
KALINKA, FROM BULGARIA
ALICE, FROM ENGLAND
SARAH, FROM SOUTHERN RUSSIA]
[Illustration]
THE DEVIL, HIS DUE
BY PHILIP CURTISS
Now, Furniss was a devil. I mean that exactly, and if I might, I should
like to explain it, for I wish to draw a distinction between the
devils and the merely devilish. If argot had not spoiled the phrase, I
might have said that he was a regular devil, as distinguished from the
volunteer, the territorial, the occasional, or the would-be devil.
The distinction between a regular devil and one who is merely devilish
is exactly the distinction between the professional and the amateur
in all occupations. The devilish do things purely for the éclat of
the doing, while the devils do them because they want the things
done. A professional carpenter carpenters in order that he may have
a table, to be used for his varying ends; an amateur uses his tools
merely for the sake of the chips. That an occasional amateur displays
unusual brilliancy in the accomplishment has nothing to do with the
distinction. The real devils, moreover, regard the devilish purely
with a mild amusement, if they regard them at all. Their only vexation
is that of professional craftsmen at the “pin-money” workers, whose
spasmodic efforts cut into legitimate trade.
The most powerful proof which I can bring to the statement that Furniss
was a real devil, however, is the one that he did not regard himself as
a devil at all. On the contrary, he regarded himself as an industrious
citizen, fairly successful in the accomplishments of his ends. As
a career, devilishness did not interest him in the slightest. Its
material rewards were all that he sought.
Now, at midnight, on the thirtieth of October, Furniss, with the best
intentions in the world, was standing in a group in the ball-room of
the Fitchly Country Club, harmlessly singing “Auld Lang Syne.” At one
minute past twelve the engineer turned out all the lights, having
standing instructions to do so, for Fitchly was a goodly town, and on
this particular night the steward had forgotten to make an exception.
The result was that which usually occurs when the lights are turned
out on a perfectly respectable and usually sane gathering of grown men
and women--every bit of asininity in the mob swarmed to the surface.
There were cat calls, screams, and suggestive labials, while all the
naturally executive began groping toward the door and the steward.
What the others did, however, did not matter. It was generally
understood that they were merely devilish, and no score was to be
counted against them. Furniss, on the other hand, played everything
for stakes, and his tally had to meet with a reckoning. For, when the
lights left their sudden wave of darkness on the mixed and rollicking
group, Furniss quietly and modestly followed the promptings of his
profession, turned slowly, gathered the nearest woman into his arms,
and thoroughly and deliberately kissed her. Who she was he had not the
slightest idea, nor did he, indeed, have any very lively curiosity.
The act was purely professional, perfectly methodic, as automatic
and unemotional as a response in a ritual. Thus, despite Furniss’s
known make-up, the fact would have passed unnoticed had it not been
for two things, first, that, owing to the deliberateness of Furniss
and the quickness of the engineer, the lights went on again before
he was through, and the second that the woman thus discovered in his
arms was the only one in the room whom he would have had the slightest
reason for wanting to kiss. It was a perfect triumph of circumstantial
evidence.
The sudden hush which fell on the group when the lights were restored
at once displayed the awfulness of Furniss’s depravity, as viewed by
the Fitchly Country Club, in riot assembled. Had any other man been
caught in the same act, with any other woman, there would have been
merely a triumphant outcry of self-acknowledged devilishness. The man
would have bought at the bar below, and the women would have screamed
themselves to their motors; but, by some unusual instinct that was
positively primitive, every man and woman in the room realized that
Furniss was a professional and his act took a much more vital aspect.
By the same perfect precision of instinct not a single iota of blame
was attached to the lady in question, for the accurate conception of
Furniss on the part of the Country Club demonstrated also that she was
only an instrument in a tragedy of the elements. One does not accuse a
person of being an accessory to a cyclone.
At the vivid and not wholly beautiful picture thus presented by
the electrics, the whole room foolishly and utterly unsuccessfully
attempted to give an imitation of a gathering which knows that nothing
has happened. After the awful hush of the first moment, the women began
quietly conversing in tones unusually subdued; the men began skylarking
and shouting on subjects unusually hollow. The object of instructing
the engineer to turn on the lights again, after midnight, had been to
allow the dance to continue until two in the morning. At one there was
not a single person left in the ball-room, and the waiters were already
sweeping up the fragments. Some fragments, however, they could not
sweep, and these make the following prelude:
Ten years before, at the age of twenty-five, Furniss had had one chance
in a million of being decent; that is to say, he had nearly married a
good woman, and that woman, needless to explain, was the one whom by
sheer accident he kissed just ten years later. Furthermore, it was the
nearest that he had ever come to marrying anybody, or ever would come,
and it was a hollow victory for the law of chances.
Furniss was a devil because he came of that stock. It bred true to
type, merely with refinements in each succeeding generation. His father
was a stout, red-faced man of the kind that, thirty years ago, drove
trotting-horses to a red-wheeled run-about, with wooden knobs on the
reins, and loops to hold to--a true example of the days when it took
absolute defiance to be a sporting-man. Furniss himself drove the
best-looking motor-car in Fitchly, and his effect was esthetically
better than his father’s, for, owing to the rigidity of the thing, it
is much easier to have a good taste in motor-cars than in horses. His
mother was a blonde, expensively-dressed woman of the type which goes
through life in the hideous belief that tight-lacing will make feminine
obesity anything but revolting.
Yet at twenty-five Furniss had had his chances. He went to college
and played foot-ball. He played it well. It is frequently the noblest
thing that men of his stamp ever do, except one. They sometimes get
into the army, and into the cavalry; less frequently into the infantry,
but never, absolutely never, into the engineers. It was, moreover, the
heyday of the college athlete, those golden years of the nineties when
men wore huge white Y’s and H’s on high-necked sweaters at mountain
resorts all summer, and when reputations lasted more than a year.
With one of these reputations Furniss had come out of college, and
tentatively, against its judgment, Fitchly had received him. It was one
of those inconceivable cases when reason and instinct battle. Everybody
knew old man Furniss and had not the slightest illusions about him;
yet here was young Furniss a half-back at Yale! Time has helped us to
understand these things nowadays, but they troubled us then.
In Furniss’s case reason won over instinct, and Fitchly received him
with open arms which wavered slightly. The only return he made was to
fall mildly in love with Helen Witherspoon. It would be nice to think
that something in the sweet, old-fashioned manner of this dainty,
refined girl, whose ancestors had been immigrants two hundred years
before Furniss’s, appealed to the brute and barbaric in the foot-ball
hero, and perhaps it did, but a more plausible reason for his falling
in love with her was that every one else was doing it. It was the
temptation of the desired, the invitation of a contest, and of all
things this appealed most to Furniss. Every one was doing it; but in a
very short time it narrowed down to Furniss and Butley Smith, of the
well-known legal firm of Smith, Smith & Smith, which drew up the city
charter and refused to accept criminal practice. She married Smith.
You could hardly call it a disappointed love-affair. It was rather
precision by elimination, and Furniss was eliminated. Furnisses were
all right as half-backs, but we didn’t marry them in Fitchly; at least
Father and Mother Witherspoon didn’t marry them, and in Fitchly they
did the marrying.
From Furniss’s point of view it was unfortunate, but it was natural. As
an economic system, marriage did not wholly persuade him, anyway.
So Furniss reverted to type, and did well at it. He lost little of his
athletic good looks, and he was certainly invaluable as a club-man.
Thirty-five found him stocky, but not fat, with a face rather round,
but not repellent; a tiny, trim mustache; the inevitable blue serge
and that almost offensively white linen which one associates with the
broker type--that whiteness which threatens to, but does not quite,
suggest scented soap. It would have been extremely difficult to say
whether or not he had brains. His achievements rather pointed to the
fact that he had, and his tastes to the fact that he had not; but, in
any case, he made money, and whatever might be his misdeeds, he never
bothered any one by telling about them. He manufactured in quantity the
best off-set drill in America, and furthermore, as he held the patents,
the wholesale jobbers who bought the drill troubled not one whit with
his morals. The society of Fitchly shook its head occasionally, but on
the whole kept him along. It would be extremely difficult to drop a man
who had nowhere to drop to; and as he asked nothing of Fitchly, there
was nothing to refuse. This occasion at the Country Club, then, was
the first real instance in which the elements had come in conflict.
Of the many mixed emotions which accompanied the premature withdrawal
from the Country Club that night, only two will suffice for
illustration, as they marked the extremes--those of Furniss himself
and of Butley Smith, the Menelaus of the ravished Helen. Those of
Furniss, indeed, were no doubt very similar to the emotions of the son
of Priam himself on the occasion of the original Hellenic uprising--an
amusing incident and an unfortunate one, but why this unseemly outcry?
His kissing some one when the lights went out had been a perfectly
consistent act. It was not an emotional impulse; it was, in a way, a
duty to the conventions, and how was he to know that the recipient was
a former sweetheart? He had no desire to repeat the crime. The attitude
of the Country Club had made osculation rather nauseous. It would seem
better breeding not to notice it; and yet, and yet, it was rather funny
that it should have been Helen. It was the first personal illustration
which Furniss had ever had of the dramatic, and he began to ponder. If
you ever wish to reclaim a devil, just try him on the dramatic. It is
the only uplifting influence which sleeps in the souls of most of them.
The emotions of Butley Smith were less happily chosen. He also felt the
impulse of the drama, but his was the stiff and unnatural drama of the
classic schools, for his cue directed him to punch in the face of the
offending Furniss. It was a glowing idea, but it wasn’t practical, as
associates of Butley brutally pointed out when they drew attention to
the fact that the face of the ex-half-back, and the present associate
of half the prize-fighters in the East, would be an extremely hard one
to pummel, and their logic suggests an admirable course of action for
one who would play a dramatic part in such histories. If you must be an
outraged husband, be one in a novel or a play, where you will always
be able to thrash or horsewhip or shoot the villain within an inch
of his life. The physical incapacity of villains in these circles is
admirable. In real life, unfortunately, they are quite apt to be fully
the equals of the outraged husband, or otherwise the husbands would be
less frequently outraged.
The probabilities of this situation were easily comprehended by a legal
mind which spurned a criminal practice, and Butley Smith had to take
his satisfaction in biding his time, reserving, however, the privilege
of biting his lip, to which extent he lived up to the unities. Meantime
the situation in Fitchly did not improve.
Just how bad the situation was growing, just how fitfully the pot was
boiling, how it was even fanned by his own disregard of it, was utterly
aside from the observation of Furniss. He never knew, for example,
and probably would not have cared if he did, that there had been a
proposition to expel him from the Fitchly Country Club. But, then, as
was pointed out by Carter of the firm of Carter, Pills & Carter, who
did take an occasional criminal case, if an action were instituted
against Furniss, it must necessarily involve the guileless Helen, and,
whatever might be the popular verdict, just how much she could be
called an accomplice would be a decision extremely delicate for the
trained legal mind. It was certain that Furniss’s face had borne no
scratches when the lights went on again.
So Butley boiled and chafed under his natural injunction against
punching Furniss, and bit his lip, and bided his time, until ultimately
it began to react on Helen, whose original emotions had been as simple
as those of the criminal. He boiled and chafed and bided his time until
the desperate Helen resolved on a terrible step--no less than an actual
move to the walls of Ilium. She wrote a note, and invited Furniss to
meet her in the private dining-room of the Fitchly Inn.
He went. We will not flatter Furniss. Any note in a feminine
handwriting would have brought him just the same, and his mood was not
of the most elevated. His dim, uncertain stirrings of the dramatic on
the morning of the thirty-first had gone permanently back to sleep, and
on this particular day he had reasons to be distinctly savage, for he
had just lost a forty-thousand-dollar order for the off-set drill, and
he had no active inclinations toward mushrooms. Still, business was
business, and one had to buy luncheon for two, anyway.
So Helen met him, and Helen pleaded. Aside from the boiling of Butley,
her feminine sense of the just had told her that wrong must be
righted and happy endings must prevail. She had not the rude melodrama
of her consort, which saw a trouncing as the only fit remedy for
non-patrons of husbandry; but she had, nevertheless, an Emersonian
theory of compensation, which perceived that the apparent impunity of
the outrager was contrary to the ultimate laws of existence. So Helen
pleaded, and Paris got mad. He didn’t like Butley, anyway. He would
apologize to Helen, but he wouldn’t to Menelaus. He couldn’t see that
the affair was international, anyway. It seemed to him distinctly
Parisian. But Helen wore a tailored gown with a fringe of lace at her
neck, so Paris surrendered, and the entente cordiale was restored.
He promised to apologize at the Quoits Club that very day, and that
evening, at a prearranged dinner, the nations would banquet in harmony.
Seven stalwart oxen would be killed, a libation poured to the gods, and
for seven hours--
But just then the waiter brought the bill.
The bill, with tips, was twenty-four dollars and sixty cents, and with
a sudden recollection of the forty-thousand-dollar order, Furniss
reverted to type. With the usual inconsistency of a man who can lose
large sums with apparent indifference, he raved and fumed at the loss
of a penny. He raved and fumed all the afternoon at his office, and it
was not until well after five that he made an unaccustomed appearance
at the Quoits Club, still raging and fuming, with the only horror that
a man of his type can ever know--the horror of losing money.
Butley Smith was already at the Quoits Club, as Helen well knew
he would be; but Furniss was an unaccustomed presence. He usually
preferred the Racquets, where the stakes were worth playing, and his
advent in this, the stronghold of strictly civil practice, made a
commotion. The commotion, moreover, soon attracted the attention of
Butley, who was straying through the tables looking for a partner.
Now, Butley Smith was rated a magnificent card-player, which meant that
he played auction like a stop-watch, and poker like a two-year-old
child. The exact opposite was true, by reputation, of Furniss, and at
sight of him in the stronghold of his own followers, who demanded his
redemption, Butley had a sudden golden inspiration. He ceased biting
his lip, and his time was bid. He would beard the lion in his den, and
beard him he did.
“Furniss,” he said, “are you busy?”
Furniss looked up in perplexity.
“Suppose,” continued Butley, “that we throw a few hands of poker.”
Butley was right. With Furniss of Fitchly that was indeed an audacious
suggestion to give, but, brooding on the circumstances of the last
two months, in the minds of the Quoits Club it instantly assumed
Homeric proportions. The turn of a card, the fall of a die, a woman’s
honor--there was a romance about it that struck clear home to their
devilishness; a veritable thrill went among them. Only Furniss was
mystified; but, then, he was a devil, and naturally did not know how it
felt to be devilish. But he saw light--his own light, a light that is
not on land or sea, only in the waters under the earth.
“I’m on,” he said, and Butley dealt.
In a crowded club-room at five o’clock in the afternoon a two-handed
game would ordinarily have been a monstrosity, but this was no
ordinary contest. It was a fight to the very death, and without a word
the spectators gathered at the only points where it is proper for
spectators to gather in a poker-game--without a word and without a
suggestion to join.
I want to do justice to that game, but the truth is that Butley did not
win a single hand--or just one in the early part.
“I raise you four,” said Furniss as the clock struck six.
Butley glanced at his hand.
“It’s yours,” he said sadly, and regretfully laid down three jacks,
while Furniss rapidly shuffled an ace high into the pack and looked at
his watch.