Mr. Oscar Mitchell, attorney and counselor at law, sauntered down River
Street, with the cheerful and optimistic poise of one who has lunched
well. A well-set-up man, a well-groomed man, as-it-is-done; plainly
worshipful; worthy the highest degree of that most irregular of
adjectives, respectable; comparative, smart; superlative, correct.
Mr. Mitchell was correct; habited after the true Polonian precept;
invisible, every buckle, snap, clasp, strap, wheel, axle, wedge, pulley,
lever, and every other mechanical device known to science, was in place
and of the best. As to adornment, all in good taste--scarfpin, an
unpretentious pearl in platinum; garnet links, severely plain and quiet;
an unobtrusive watch-chain; one ring, a small emerald; no earrings.
Mr. Mitchell's face was well shaped, not quite plump or pink, with the
unlined curves, the smooth clear skin, and the rosy glow that comes from
health and virtue, or from good living and massage. Despite fifty years,
or near it, the flax-smooth hair held no glint of gray; his eyes, blue
and big and wide, were sharp and bright, calm, confident, almost
candid--not quite the last, because of a roving trick of clandestine
observation; his mouth, where it might or should have curved--must
once have curved in boyhood--was set and guarded, even in skillful
smilings, by a long censorship of undesirable facts, material or
otherwise to any possible issue.
Mr. Mitchell's whole bearing was confident and assured; his step, for all
those fifty afore-said years, was light and elastic, even in sauntering;
he took the office stairs with the inimitable sprightly gallop of the
town-bred.
Man is a quadruped who has learned to use his front legs for other things
than walking. Some hold that he has learned to use his head. But there
are three things man cannot do, and four which he cannot compass: to see,
to think, to judge, and to act--to see the obvious; to think upon the
thing seen; to judge between our own resultant and conflicting thoughts,
with no furtive finger of desire to tip the balance; and to act upon that
judgment without flinching. We fear the final and irretrievable calamity:
we fear to make ourselves conspicuous, we conform to standard, we bear
ourselves meekly in that station whereunto it hath pleased Heaven to call
us; the herd instinct survives four-footedness. For, we note the strange
but not the familiar; our thinking is to right reason what peat is to
coal; the outcry of the living and the dead perverts judgment, closes the
ear to proof; and our wisest fear the scorn of fools. So we walk cramped
and strangely under the tragic tyranny of reiteration: whatever is right;
whatever is repeated often enough is true; and logic is a device for
evading the self-evident. Moreover, Carthage should be destroyed.
Such sage reflections present themselves automatically, contrasting the
blithesome knee action of prosperous Mr. Mitchell with the stiffened
joints of other men who had climbed those hard stairs on occasion with
shambling step, bent backs and sagging shoulders; with faces lined and
interlined; with eyes dulled and dim, and sunken cheeks; with hands
misshapen, knotted and bent by toil: if image indeed of God, strangely
distorted--or a strange God.
Consider now, in a world yielding enough and to spare for all, the
endless succession of wise men, from the Contributing Editor of
Proverbs unto this day, who have hymned the praise of diligence and
docility, the scorn of sloth. Yet not one sage of the bountiful bunch
has ever ventured to denounce the twin vices of industry and obedience.
True, there is the story of blind Samson at the mill; perhaps a parable.
Underfed and overworked for generations, starved from birth, starved
before birth, we drive and harry and crush them, the weakling and his
weaker sons; we exploit them, gull them, poison them, lie to them, filch
from them. We crowd them into our money mills; we deny them youth, we
deny them rest, we deny them opportunity, we deny them hope, or any hope
of hope; and we provide for age--the poorhouse. So that charity is become
of all words the most feared, most hated, most loathed and loathsome;
worse than crime or shame or death. We have left them from the work of
their hands enough, scantly enough, to keep breath within their stunted
bodies. "All the traffic can bear!"--a brazen rule. Of such sage policy
the result can be seen in the wizened and undersized submerged of London;
of nearer than London. Man, by not taking thought, has taken a cubit from
his stature.
Meantime we prate comfortable blasphemies, scientific or other; natural
selection or the inscrutable decrees of God. Whereas this was manifestly
a Hobson's selection, most unnatural and forced, to choose want of all
that makes life sweet and dear; to choose gaunt babes, with pinched and
livid lips--unlovely, not unloved; and these iniquitous decrees are most
scrutable, are surely of man's devising and not of God's. Or we invent a
fire-new science, known as Eugenics, to treat the disease by new naming
of symptoms: and prattle of the well born, when we mean well fed; or the
degenerate, when we might more truly say the disinherited.
It is even held by certain poltroons that families have been started
gutterward, of late centuries, when a father has been gloriously slain in
the wars of the useless great. That such a circumstance, however
glorious, may have been rather disadvantageous than otherwise to children
thereby sent out into the world at six or sixteen years, lucky to become
ditch-diggers or tip-takers. That some proportion of them do become
beggars, thieves, paupers, sharpers, other things quite unfit for the ear
of the young person--a disconcerting consideration; such ears cannot be
too carefully guarded. That, though the occupations named are entirely
normal to all well-ordered states, descendants of persons in those
occupations tend to become "subnormal"--so runs the cant of it--something
handicapped by that haphazard bullet of a lifetime since, fired to
advance the glorious cause of--foreign commerce, or the like.
* * * * *
Mr. Mitchell occupied five rooms lined with law books and musty with the
smell of leather. These rooms ranged end to end, each with a door that
opened upon a dark hallway; a waiting-room in front, the private office
at the rear, to which no client was ever admitted directly. Depressed by
delay, subdued by an overflow of thick volumes, when he reaches a
suitable dejection he is tip-toed through dismal antechambers of wisdom,
appalled by tall bookstacks, ushered into the leather-chaired office, and
there further crushed by long shelves of dingy tin boxes, each box
crowded with weighty secrets and shelved papers of fabulous moment and
urgency; the least paper of the smallest box more important--the
unfortunate client is clear on that point--than any contemptible need of
his own. Cowed and chastened, he is now ready to pay a fee suitable to
the mind that has absorbed all the wisdom of those many bookshelves; or
meekly to accept as justice any absurdity or monstrosity of the law.
Mr. Mitchell was greeted by a slim, swarthy, black-eyed, elderly person
of twenty-five or thirty, with a crooked nose and a crooked mind, half
clerk and half familiar spirit--Mr. Joseph Pelman, to wit; who appeared
perpetually on the point of choking himself by suppressed chucklings at
his principal's cleverness and the simplicity of dupes.
"Well, Joe?"
"Two to see you, sir," said Joe, his face lit up with sprightly malice.
"On the same lay. That Watkins farm of yours. I got it out of 'em. Ho ho!
I kept 'em in different rooms. I hunted up their records in your record
books. Doomsday Books, I call 'em. Ho ho!"
Mr. Mitchell selected a cigar, lit it, puffed it, and fixed his eye on
his demon clerk.
"Now then," he said sharply, "let's have it!"
The demon pounced on a Brobdingnagian volume upon the desk and worried it
open at a marker. It had been meant for a ledger, that huge volume; the
gray cloth covers bore the legend "N to Z." Ledger it was, of a grim
sort, with sinister entries of forgotten sins, the itemized strength or
weakness of a thousand men. The confidential clerk ran a long,
confidential finger along the spidery copperplate index of the W's:
"Wakelin, Walcott, Walker, Wallace, Walsh, Walters; Earl, John, Peter,
Ray, Rex, Roy--Samuel--page 1124." His nimble hands flew at the pages
like a dog at a woodchuck hole.
"Here't is--'Walters, Samuel: born '69, son of John Walters, Holland
Hill; religion--politics--um-um--bad habits, none; two years Vesper
Academy; three years Dennison shoe factories; married 1896--one child, b.
1899. Bought Travis Farm 1898, paying half down; paid balance out in five
years; dairy, fifteen cows; forehanded, thrifty. Humph! Good pay, I
guess."
He cocked his head to one side and eyed his employer, fingering a wisp of
black silk on his upper lip.
"And the other?"
The second volume was spread open upon the desk. Clerk Pelman flung
himself upon it with savage fury.
"Bowen, Chauncey, son William Bowen, born 1872--um--um--married Louise
Hill 92--um--divorced '96; married Laura Wing '96--see Lottie Hall. Ran
hotel at Larren '95 to '97; sheriff's sale '97; worked Bowen Farm '97 to
1912; bought Eagle Hotel, Vesper, after death of William Bowen, 1900.
Traded Eagle Hotel for Griffin Farm, 1912; sold Griffin Farm, 1914; clerk
Simon's hardware store, Emmonsville, Pennsylvania. Heavy drinker, though
seldom actually drunk; suspected of some share in the Powers affair,
or some knowledge, at least; poker fiend. Bank note protested and paid by
endorser 1897, and again in 1902; has since repaid endorsers. See Larren
Hotel, Eagle Hotel."
"Show him in," said Mitchell.
"Walters?" The impish clerk cocked his head on one side again and gulped
down a chuckle at his own wit.
"Bowen, fool! Jennie Page, his mother's sister, died last week and left
him a legacy--twelve hundred dollars. I'll have that out of him, or most
of it, as a first payment."
The clerk turned, his mouth twisted awry to a malicious grin.
"Trust you!" he chuckled admiringly, and laid a confidential finger
beside his crooked nose. "Ho ho! This is the third time you've sold the
Watkins Farm; and it won't be the last! Oh, you're a rare one, you are!
Four farms you've got, and the way you got 'em ho! You go Old Benjamin
one better, you do.
"Who so by the plow would thrive
Himself must neither hold nor drive.
"A regular hard driver, you are!"
"Some fine day," answered Mitchell composedly, "you will exhaust my
patience and I shall have to let you be hanged!"
"No fear!" rejoined the devil clerk, amiably. "I'm too useful. I do your
dirty work for you and leave you always with clean hands to show. Who
stirs up damage suits? Joe. Who digs up the willing witness? J. Pelman.
Who finds skeletons in respectable closets? Joey. Who is the go-between?
Joseph. I'm trusty too, because I dare not be otherwise. And because
I like the work. I like to see you skin 'em, I do. Fools! And because you
give me a fair share of the plunder. Princely, I call it--and wise. You
be advised, Lawyer Mitchell, and always give me my fair share. Hang Joey?
Oh, no! Never do! No fear!" A spasm of chuckles cut him short.
"Go on, fool, and bring Bowen in. Then tell Walters the farm is already
sold."
The door closed behind the useful Joseph, and immediately popped open
again in the most startling fashion.
"No; nor that, either," said Joseph.
He closed the door softly and leaned against it, cocking his head on one
side with an evil smile.
His employer glanced at him with uninquiring eyes.
"You won't ask what, hey? No? But I'll tell you what you were thinking
of: Dropping me off the bridge. Upsetting the boat. The like of that.
Can't have it. I can't afford it. You're too liberal. Why, I wouldn't
crawl under your car to repair it--or go hunting with you--not if it was
ever so!"
"I really believe," said Mr. Mitchell with surprised eyebrows, "that you
are keeping me waiting!"
"That is why I never throw out hints about a future partnership,"
continued the confidential man, undaunted. "You are such a liberal
paymaster. Lord love you, sir, I don't want any partnership! This suits
me. You furnish the brains and the respectability; I take the risk, and I
get my fair share. Then, if I should ever get caught, you are unsmirched;
you can keep on making money. And you'll keep on giving me my share. Oh,
yes; you will! You've such a good heart, Mr. Oscar! I know you. You
wouldn't want old Joey hanged! Not you! Oh, no!"