Either through the softening influence of the Thanksgiving festival
upon litigious natures, or by reason of the relaxing reaction from
over-feasting, it happened that no clients of any kind visited Reuben
Tracy’s law office next day. He came down early enough to light his own
fires in both the inner and outer rooms--an experience for which he had
been prepared by long observation of the effect produced by holidays
upon his clerk--and he sat for a couple of hours by the stove, with his
feet on the table and a book in his lap, waiting for Horace Boyce
to keep the appointment. The book was an old collection of Carlyle’s
earlier essays, and Reuben liked it better, perhaps, than any other
member of his library family. He had not read it through, and there was
a good deal in it which he seemed likely never to read. But there were
other portions, long since very familiar to his mind and eye, which it
was his habit to go over again whenever he had nothing else to do. The
rough, thought-compelling diction rested his brain, by some curious rule
of paradox. In the front of the volume he had written, “Not new books,
but good books,” an apothegm adapted from a preface of an old English
play which had pleased him.
He was indolently ruminating on the wealth of epithet with which the
portrait of Cagliostro is painted, when his expected visitor arrived. He
laughed aloud at some whimsical conceit that this association of people
suggested, and tossed the book aside as he rose.
“I’ve been killing time,” he said, still smiling, “by reading about the
prize impostor of the eighteenth century. You know it?--_The Diamond
Necklace_. I like to read it. For good, downright swindling and
effrontery there’s nothing anywhere like that fellow.”
Horace glanced at the book as he shook hands and took off his overcoat.
He said nothing, but made a mental note that Reuben had come to know
about Carlyle after everybody else had ceased reading him.
The two young men sat down together, and their talk for the first hour
or so was of business matters. Reuben made clear what his practice was
like, its dimensions, its profits, and its claims upon his time. The
railroad business had come to him through the influence of his old
friend Congressman Ansdell, of Tecumseh, and was very important.
The farmers in the vicinity, too, had brought him the bulk of their
patronage in the matter of drawing deeds and mortgages--most frequently
the latter, he was sorry to say--because he was a farmer’s son. This
conveyancing work had grown to such proportions, and entailed such an
amount of consultation, that he had been more and more crowded out from
active court practice, which he was reluctant to abandon. This was his
reason for thinking of a partner. Then the conversation drifted into
discussion of Horace’s fitness for the place, and his proper share in
the earnings of the firm. They went over for dinner to the Dearborn
House, where Reuben lived, before this branch of the talk was concluded.
Upon their return, over some cigars which Horace thought very bad, they
made more headway, and arrived at an understanding satisfactory to both.
Reuben printed the firm name of “Tracy & Boyce” on a blotter, to see how
it would look, and Horace talked confidently of the new business which
the long connection of his family with Thessaly would bring to them.
“You know, they’ve been here from the very beginning. My
great-grandfather was county judge here as far back as 1796, almost the
first one after the county was created. And his son, my great-uncle, was
congressman one term, and assemblyman for years; and another brother
was the president of the bank; and my grandfather was the rector of St.
Matthew’s; and then my father being the best-known soldier Dearborn sent
out during the war--what I mean is, all this ought to help a good deal.
It’s something to have a name that is as much a part of the place as
Thessaly itself. You see what I mean?”
Horace finished with an almost nervous query, for it had dawned upon him
that his companion might not share this high opinion of the value of an
old name and pedigree. Come to think of it, the Tracys were nobody in
particular, and he glanced apprehensively at Reuben’s large, placid face
for signs of pique. But there was none visible to the naked eye, and
Horace lighted a fresh cigar, and put his feet up on the table beside
those of his new partner.
“I daresay there’s something in that,” Reuben remarked after a time. “Of
course there must be, and for that matter I guess a name goes for more
in our profession than it does anywhere else. I suppose it’s natural for
people to assume that jurisprudence runs in families, like snub-noses
and drink.” As soon as he had uttered this last word, it occurred to him
that possibly Horace might construe it with reference to his father, and
he made haste to add:
“I never told you, I think, about my own career. I don’t talk about
it often, for it makes a fellow sound like Mr. Bounderby in _Hard
Times_--the chap who was always bragging about being a self-made man.”
“No; I’d like to hear about it,” said Horace. “The first I remember of
you was at the seminary here.”
“Well, I was only fifteen years old then, and all the story I’ve got
dates before that. I can just remember when we moved into this part of
the world--coming from Orange County. My father had bought a small farm
some fifteen miles from here, over near Tyre, and we moved onto it in
the spring. I was about five. I had an older brother, Ezra, and two
younger ones. There was a good deal of hard work to do, and father tried
to do it all himself, and so by harvest time he was laid up; and the men
who came and got in the crops on shares robbed us down to the ground.
When winter came, father had to get up, whether he was well enough
or not, and chop wood for the market, to make up for the loss on
harvesting. One evening he didn’t come home, and the team was away
all night, too, with mother never going to bed at all, and then before
daybreak taking Ezra to carry a lantern, and starting through the drifts
for our patch of woods. They found my father dead in the forest, crushed
under a falling tree.
“I suppose it was a terrible winter. I only dimly remember it, or the
summer that followed. When another winter was coming on, my mother grew
frightened. Try the best she knew how, she was worse off every month
than she had been the month before. To pay interest on the mortgage, she
had to sell what produce we had managed to get in, keeping only a bare
moiety for ourselves, and to give up the woodland altogether. Soon the
roads would be blocked; there was not enough fodder for what stock we
had, nor even food enough for us. We had no store of fuel, and no means
of staving off starvation. Under stern compulsion, solely to secure
a home for her boys, my mother married a well-to-do farmer in the
neighborhood--a man much older than herself, and the owner of a
hundred-acre farm and of the mortgages on our own little thirty acres.
“I suppose he meant to be a just man, but he was as hard as a steel
bloom. He was a prodigious worker, and he made us all work, without
rest or reward. When I was nine years old, narrow-chested and physically
delicate, I had to get up before sunrise for the milking, and then work
all day in the hay-field, making and cocking, and obliged to keep ahead
of the wagon under pain of a flogging. Three years of this I had, and
I recall them as you might a frightful nightmare. I had some stray
schooling--my mother insisted upon that--but it wasn’t much; and I
remember that the weekly paper was stopped after that because Ezra and I
wasted too much time in reading it.
“Finally my health gave out. My mother feared that I would die, and at
last gained the point of my being allowed to go to Tyre to school, if I
could earn my board and clothes there. I went through the long village
street there, stopping at every house to ask if they wanted a little
boy to do chores for his board and go to school. I said nothing about
clothes after the first few inquiries. It took me almost all day to
find a place. It was nearly the last house in the village. The people
happened to want a boy, and agreed to take me. I had only to take
care of two horses, milk four cows, saw wood for three stoves, and run
errands. When I lay awake in my new bed that night, it was with joy that
I had found such a kind family and such an easy place!
“I went to school for a year, and learned something--not much, I
daresay, but something. Then I went back to the farm, alternating
between that and other places in Tyre, some better, some worse, until
finally I had saved eight dollars. Then I told my mother that I was
going to Thessaly seminary. She laughed at me--they all laughed--but in
the end I had my way. They fitted me out with some clothes--a vest of
Ezra’s, an old hat, trousers cut perfectly straight and much too short,
and clumsy boots two sizes too big for me, which had been bought by my
stepfather in wrath at our continual trouble in the winter to get on our
stiffened and shrunken boots.
“I walked the first ten miles with a light heart. Then I began to grow
frightened. I had never been to Thessaly, and though I knew pretty well
from others that I should be well received, and even helped to find work
to maintain myself, the prospect of the new life, now so close at hand,
unnerved me. I remember once sitting down by the roadside, wavering
whether to go on or not. At last I stood on the brow of the hill, and
saw Thessaly lying in the valley before me. If I were to live a thousand
years, I couldn’t forget that sight--the great elms, the white buildings
of the seminary, the air of peace and learning and plenty which it all
wore. I tell you, tears came to my eyes as I looked, and more than once
they’ve come again, when I’ve recalled the picture. I remember, too,
that later on in the day old Dr. Burdick turned me loose in the library,
as it were There were four thousand books there, and the sight of them
took my breath away. I looked at them for a long time, I know, with my
mouth wide open. It was clear to me that I should never be able to read
them all--nobody, I thought, could do that--but at last I picked out a
set of the encyclopaedia at the end of the shelf nearest the door, and
decided to begin there, and at least read as far through the room as I
could.”
Reuben stopped here, and relighted his cigar. “That’s my story,” he said
after a pause, as if he had brought the recital up to date.
“I should call that only the preface--or rather, the prologue,” said
Horace.
“No; the rest is nothing out of the ordinary. I managed to live
through the four years here--peddling a little, then travelling for
a photographer in Tecumseh who made enlarged copies of old pictures
collected from the farm-houses, then teaching school. I studied law
first by myself, then with Ansdell at Tecumseh, and then one year in New
York at the Columbia Law School. I was admitted down there, and had a
fair prospect of remaining there, but I couldn’t make myself like New
York. It is too big; a fellow has no chance to be himself there. And so
I came back here; and I haven’t done so badly, all things considered.”
“No, indeed; I should think not!” was Horace’s hearty comment.
“But I see the way now, I think,” continued Reuben, meditatively, “to
doing much better still. I see a good many ways in which you can help me
greatly.”
“I should hope so,” smiled young Mr. Boyce. “That’s what I’m coming in
for.”
“I’m not thinking so much of the business,” answered Reuben; “there need
be no borrowing-of trouble about that. But there are things outside that
I want to do. I spoke a little about this the other day, I think.”
“You said something about going into politics,” replied Horace, not
so heartily. The notion had already risen in his mind that the junior
member of the new partnership might be best calculated to shine in the
arena of the public service, if the firm was to go in for that sort of
thing.
“Oh, no! not ‘politics’ in the sense you mean,” explained Reuben. “My
ambition doesn’t extend beyond this village that we’re in. I’m not
satisfied with it; there are a thousand things that we ought to be doing
better than we are, and I’ve got a great longing to help improve them.
That was what I referred to. That is what has been in my mind ever
since my return. You spoke about politics just now. Strictly speaking,
‘politics’ ought to embrace in its meaning all the ways by which the
general good is served, and nothing else. But, as a matter of fact, it
has come to mean first of all the individual good, and quite often the
sacrifice of everything else. This is natural enough, I suppose. Unless
a man watches himself very closely, it is easy for him to grow to attach
importance to the honor and the profit of the place he holds, and
to forget its responsibilities. In that way you come to have a whole
community regarding an office as a prize, as a place to be fought for,
and not as a place to do more work in than the rest perform. This notion
once established, why, politics comes naturally enough to mean--well,
what it does mean. The politicians are not so much to blame. They merely
reflect the ideas of the public. If they didn’t, they couldn’t stand up
a minute by their own strength. You catch my idea?”
“Perfectly,” said Horace, politely dissembling a slight yawn.
“Well, then, the thing to do is to get at the public mind--to get the
people into the right, way of regarding these things. It is no good
effecting temporary reforms in certain limited directions by outbursts
of popular feeling; for just as soon as the public indignation cools
down, back come the abuses. And so they will do inevitably until the
people get up to a calm, high level of intelligence about the management
of such affairs as they have in common.”
“Quite so,” remarked Horace.
“Of course all this is trite commonplace,” continued Reuben. “You can
read it in any newspaper any day. My point is in the application of it.
It’s all well enough to say these things in a general way. Everybody
knows they are true; nobody disputes them any more than the
multiplication-table. But the exhortation does no good for that very
reason. Each reader says: ‘Yes, it’s too bad that my neighbors don’t
comprehend these things better;’ and there’s an end to the matter.
Nothing is effected, because no particular person is addressed. Now, my
notion is that the way to do is to take a single small community, and go
at it systematically--a house-to-house canvass, so to speak--and labor
to improve its intelligence, its good taste, its general public attitude
toward its own public affairs. One can fairly count on at least some
results, going at it in that way.”
“No doubt,” said the junior partner, smiling faintly.
“Well, then, I’ve got a scheme for a sort of society here--perhaps in
the nature of a club--made up of men who have an interest in the town
and who want to do good. I’ve spoken to two or three about it. Perhaps
it is your coming--I daresay it is--but all at once I feel that it is
time to start it. My notion is it ought to establish as a fundamental
principle that it has nothing to do with anything outside Thessaly and
the district roundabout. That is what we need in this country as much
as anything else--the habit of minding our own immediate business. The
newspapers have taught us to attend every day to what is going on in New
York and Chicago and London and Paris, and every other place under the
sun except our own. That is an evil. We have become like a gossiping
woman who spends all her time in learning what her neighbors are doing,
and lets the fire go out at home. Now, I like to think this can be
altered a good deal, if we only set to work at it. You have been abroad;
you have seen how other people do things, and have wider notions than
the rest of us, no doubt, as to what should be done. What do you say?
Does the idea attract you?”
Horace’s manner confessed to some surprise. “It’s a pretty large order,”
he said at last, smilingly. “I’ve never regarded myself as specially
cut out for a reformer. Still, there’s a good deal in what you say. I
suppose it is practicable enough, when you come really to examine it.”
“At all events, we can try,” answered Reuben, with the glow of
earnestness shining on his face. “John Fairchild is almost as fond of
the notion as I am, and his paper will be of all sorts of use. Then,
there’s Father Chance, the Catholic priest, a splendid fellow, and Dr.
Lester, and the Rev. Mr. Turner, and a number of others more or less
friendly to the scheme. I’m sure they will all feel the importance of
having you in it. Your having lived in Europe makes such a difference.
You can see things with a new eye.”
Horace gave a little laugh. “What my new eye has seen principally so
far,” he said, with an amused smile running through his words, “is the
prevalence of tobacco juice. But of course there are hundreds of things
our provincial people could learn with profit from Europe. There,
for example, is the hideous cooking done at all the small places. In
England, for instance, it is a delight to travel in the country, simply
because the food is so good in the little rural inns; our country hotel
here is a horror. Then the roads are so bad here, when they might
be made so good. The farmer works out his road tax by going out and
ploughing up the highway, and you break your carriage-wheels in the task
of smoothing it down again. Porters to carry one’s luggage at railway
stations--that’s something we need, too. And the drinking of light beers
and thin, wholesome wines instead of whiskey--that would do a great
deal. Then men shouldn’t be allowed to build those ugly flat-topped
wooden houses, with tin eaves-troughs. No people can grow up to be
civilized who have these abominations thrust upon their sight daily.
And--oh, I had forgotten!--there ought to be a penal law against those
beastly sulphur matches with black heads. I lit one by accident the
other night, and I haven’t got the smell of it out of my nostrils yet.”
Horace ended, as he had begun, with a cheerful chuckle; but his
companion, who sat looking abstractedly at the snow line of the roofs
opposite, did not smile.
“Those are the minor things--the graces of life,” he said, speaking
slowly. “No doubt they have their place, their importance. But I am sick
at heart over bigger matters--over the greed for money, the drunkenness,
the indifference to real education, the neglect of health, the immodesty
and commonness of our young folks’ thought and intercourse, the
narrowness and mental squalor of the life people live all about me--”
“It is so everywhere, my dear fellow,” broke in Horace. “You are making
us worse by comparison than we are.”
“But we ought to be so infinitely better by comparison! And we have it
really in us to be better. Only nobody is concerned about the others;
there is no one to check the drift, to organize public feeling for its
own improvement. And that”--Reuben suddenly checked himself, and looked
at his new partner with a smile of wonderful sweetness--“that is what I
dream of trying to do. And you are going to help me!”
He rose as he spoke, and Horace, feeling his good impulses fired in a
vague way by his companion’s earnestness and confidence, rose also, and
stretched out his hand.
“Be sure I shall do all I can,” he said, warmly, as the two shook hands.
And when young Mr. Boyce went down the narrow stairway by himself, a few
minutes later, having arranged that the partnership was to begin on
the approaching 1st of December, he really fancied himself as a
public-spirited reformer, whose life was to be consecrated to noble
deeds. He was conscious of an added expansion of breast as he buttoned
his fur coat across it, and he walked down the village street in a maze
of proud and pleasant reflections upon his own admirable qualities.