From "ADVENTURES IN CONTENTMENT," Chapter VII, by David
Grayson. Doubleday, Page & Co.
An Argument With a Millionaire.
"Let the mighty and great
Roll in splendour and state,
I envy them not, I declare it.
I eat my own lamb,
My own chicken and ham,
I shear my own sheep and wear it.
I have lawns, I have bowers,
I have fruits, I have flowers,
The lark is my morning charmer;
So you jolly dogs now,
Here's God bless the plow--
Long life and content to the farmer."
--Rhyme on an old pitcher of English pottery.
I have been hearing of John Starkweather ever since I came here. He is
a most important personage in this community. He is rich. Horace
especially loves to talk about him. Give Horace half a chance, whether
the subject be pigs or churches, and he will break in somewhere with
the remark: "As I was saying to Mr. Starkweather--" or, "Mr.
Starkweather says to me--" How we love to shine by reflected glory!
Even Harriet has not gone by unscathed; she, too, has been affected by
the bacillus of admiration. She has wanted to know several times if I
saw John Starkweather drive by: "The finest span of horses in this
country," she says, and "did you see his daughter?" Much other
information concerning the Starkweather household, culinary and
otherwise, is current among our hills. We know accurately the number
of Mr. Starkweather's bedrooms, we can tell how much coal he uses in
winter and how many tons of ice in summer, and upon such important
premises we argue his riches.
Several times I have passed John Starkweather's home. It lies between
my farm and the town, though not on the direct road, and it is really
beautiful with the groomed and guided beauty possible to wealth. A
stately old house with a huge end chimney of red bricks stands with
dignity well back from the road; round about lie pleasant lawns that
once were cornfields; and there are drives and walks and exotic
shrubs. At first, loving my own hills so well, I was puzzled to
understand why I should also enjoy Starkweather's groomed
surroundings. But it came to me that after all, much as we may love
wildness, we are not wild, nor our works. What more artificial than a
house, or a barn, or a fence? And the greater and more formal the
house, the more formal indeed must be the nearer natural
environments. Perhaps the hand of man might well have been less
evident in developing the surroundings of the Starkweather home--for
art, dealing with nature, is so often too accomplished!
But I enjoy the Starkweather place and as I look in from the road, I
sometimes think to myself with satisfaction: "Here is this rich man
who has paid his thousands to make the beauty which I pass and take
for nothing--and having taken, leave as much behind." And I wonder
sometimes whether he, inside his fences, gets more joy of it than I,
who walk the roads outside. Anyway, I am grateful to him for using his
riches so much to my advantage.
On fine mornings John Starkweather sometimes comes out in his
slippers, bare-headed, his white vest gleaming in the sunshine, and
walks slowly around his garden. Charles Baxter says that on these
occasions he is asking his gardener the names of the vegetables.
However that may be, he has seemed to our community the very
incarnation of contentment and prosperity--his position the acme of
desirability.
What was my astonishment, then, the other morning to see John
Starkweather coming down the pasture lane through my farm. I knew him
afar off, though I had never met him. May I express the inexpressible
when I say he had a rich look; he walked rich, there was richness in
the confident crook of his elbow, and in the positive twitch of the
stick he carried: a man accustomed to having doors opened before he
knocked. I stood there a moment and looked up the hill at him, and I
felt that profound curiosity which every one of us feels every day of
his life to know something of the inner impulses which stir his
nearest neighbor. I should have liked to know John Starkweather; but
I thought to myself as I have thought so many times how surely one
comes finally to imitate his surroundings. A farmer grows to be a part
of his farm; the sawdust on his coat is not the most distinctive
insignia of the carpenter; the poet writes his truest lines upon his
own countenance. People passing in my road take me to be a part of
this natural scene. I suppose I seem to them as a partridge squatting
among dry grasses and leaves, so like the grass and leaves as to be
invisible. We all come to be marked upon by nature and dismissed--how
carelessly!--as genera or species. And is it not the primal struggle
of man to escape classification, to form new differentiations?
Sometimes--I confess it--when I see one passing in my road, I feel
like hailing him and saying:
"Friend, I am not all farmer. I, too, am a person, I am different and
curious. I am full of red blood, I like people, all sorts of people;
if you are not interested in me, at least I am intensely interested in
you. Come over now and let's talk!"
So we are all of us calling and calling across the incalculable gulfs
which separate us even from our nearest friends!
Once or twice this feeling has been so real to me that I've been near
to the point of hailing utter strangers--only to be instantly overcome
with a sense of the humorous absurdity of such an enterprise. So I
laugh it off and I say to myself:
"Steady now: the man is going to town to sell a pig; he is coming back
with ten pounds of sugar, five of salt pork, a can of coffee and some
new blades for his mowing machine. He hasn't time for talk"--and so I
come down with a bump to my digging, or hoeing, or chopping, or
whatever it is.
Here I've left John Starkweather in my pasture while I remark to the
extent of a page or two that I didn't expect him to see me when he
went by.
I assumed that he was out for a walk, perhaps to enliven a worn
appetite (do you know, confidentially, I've had some pleasure in times
past in reflecting upon the jaded appetites of millionaires!), and
that he would pass out by my lane to the country road; but, instead of
that, what should he do but climb the yard fence and walk over toward
the barn where I was at work.
Perhaps I was not consumed with excitement: here was fresh adventure!
"A farmer," I said to myself with exultation, "has only to wait long
enough and all the world comes his way."
I had just begun to grease my farm wagon and was experiencing some
difficulty in lifting and steadying the heavy rear axle while I took
off the wheel. I kept busily at work, pretending (such is the
perversity of the human mind) that I did not see Mr. Starkweather. He
stood for a moment watching me; then he said:
"Good morning, sir."