Catty had the rest of Thursday and Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to get
together the things he had to have to paint Mr. Manning’s warehouse—and
to convince his father he had to go to work. That last looked to me to
be about as difficult as the other was. Mr. Atkins didn’t look like
work. I never saw a man who looked less like it in my life. But then I
looked at Catty, and his jaw was all squared up and there was a kind of
a spark in his eye. Right then I made up my mind that Mr. Atkins was in
for a time of it.
All of a sudden Catty started to talk.
“There’s lots of things folks thinks is necessary that I don’t see any
use in. There’s being well off, for instance. What’s the use? Nobody
ever had a better time ’n Dad and me has had. There’s them tall silk
hats. Some day Dad’s got to wear one, though I’ll bet it ’ll be a job to
git it on his head. He’d shy off a hat like that jest the same way a
horse shies away from an elephant. Then there’s this thing of being
respectable.”
“But you got to be respectable,” says I.
“Why? All I can see to bein’ respectable is workin’ and gittin’ tired
out and bein’ tied down to one place instead of bein’ shiftless and
moseyin’ along wherever you want to, and enjoyin’ yourself. I can’t see
why folks set so much store by makin’ themselves miserable.”
“There’s more ’n that to bein’ respectable,” says I. “There’s bein’
honest and havin’ manners and—oh, a heap of things.”
“We always calc’lated to be honest,” says Catty. “As for manners, them
we had was plenty for us. Dad he never complained of mine and I never
complained of his’n. ’Twasn’t nobody else’s business that I kin see.”
“But you eat with your knife,” says I.
“’Twouldn’t cut nobody’s mouth but mine,” says he.
“Respectable folks don’t do it. Eatin’ with your knife is the worst
thing a feller kin do.”
“Worse’n stealin’?”
“I wouldn’t go so far’s to say that.”
“Bet Mrs. Gage would think it was,” says Catty. “She’s one of them kind
of folks that don’t see nothin’ but the trimmin’s. If Dad and me had
drove into town behind a team of milk-white horses, and each of us
wearin’ stovepipe hats, and a bushel of dollar bills scattered on the
floor of the buggy, she’d ’a’ invited us to dinner, and wouldn’t have
cared how much her boy played with me. Not even if we stole them dollar
bills.”
“I dunno,” says I.
“I do,” says he. “The way I see it there’s jest good folks and bad
folks. If you’re good you’re good, no matter if you’re respectable or
not, nor if you eat with a shingle instead of a fork; and you’re bad if
you’re bad, and no amount of eatin’ with the right kind of tools nor
wearin’ silk hats kin make you good.”
“That’s right,” says I.
“Well, then?”
“Why, clothes and manners is—well, maybe I can’t tell you, but my Dad
kin. He’d know, and he’d tell you so’s you wouldn’t have no arguin’ and
wranglin’ to do about it.”
“Let’s find him, then,” says he. “I got my mind made up to be
respectable and all, but I’d kinder like to know what I’m bein’ it for
and what good it’s doin’ _me_.”
“Come on,” says I.
We went up to my house, and Dad was fussing around in the garden.
“Hello!” says he, and straightened up, with a smile.
“Hello!” says I. “Here’s Catty and he wants you should explain to him
what good it is to be respectable.”
“Um!... What’s your idea of being respectable, Catty?”
“Why, to work and git all tired out, and to eat with somethin’ besides a
knife, and to wear good clothes. Then folks respects you. I dunno why.”
“I thought you could think, Catty,” says Dad.
“I calc’late to.”
“But you’re not thinking. When you think you have to dig down into
things and not just look at the skin. You’re looking at the skin.”
“If I be,” says Catty, “I hain’t enjoyin’ the looks of it.”
“You’re all wrong. Work and clothes and manners aren’t respectability.
They’re just signs of it. How do you know, in the wintertime, when a
rabbit has run across a field?”
“You see his tracks in the snow.”
“That’s the way it is with manners and work and clothes. They’re nothing
but the tracks of the rabbit of respectability. There might be
respectability without any tracks at all, but then folks wouldn’t know
it had been past.”
“But rabbit tracks is always rabbit tracks, and clothes and manners and
sich might be had by a feller that wasn’t respectable at all, but by
some feller that wanted to fool folks.”
“Now you’re thinking,” says Dad. “Manners and clothes aren’t
respectability, as I told you. They’re just an advertisement of it. Some
advertisements aren’t true, but most are. Now take a case like this. You
see a stranger. He’s dirty and slouchy and he doesn’t do any work. Right
off you’re prejudiced against him. He may be perfectly good and
respectable, but he doesn’t look it. Take another stranger. He is well
dressed. You see him working. He is polite and pleasant. Right away you
get the idea that he is respectable. Now, he might be a very bad man,
but he doesn’t look it. One man advertises that he isn’t respectable;
the other advertises that he is. Do you see?”
“Yes,” says Catty.
“Now about work. Work is always respectable. A man that doesn’t work may
get along and enjoy himself and be honest, but he isn’t doing anybody
any good. You can’t work without doing some good for somebody else.
You’re helping the world along every time you do a bit of work, no
matter how small it is. You’re contributing your share to the world.
Here’s your common laborer who is digging a cellar. He’s an Italian,
maybe, and doesn’t get much pay, but the world can’t get along without
him. Until he has dug his cellar the skilled mason or bricklayer can’t
lay a brick. They’ve got to have the hole dug for their foundation, and
so they’re dependent on him. The carpenter can’t drive a nail until the
bricklayer has the foundation dug. The plasterer can’t plaster till the
house is up; the plumber and the paperhanger and the painter are
dependent on the others. See all that? Every man that works is helping
some other man that works, and all of them are providing a house for
somebody to live in and be comfortable.”
“I see,” says Catty.
“And the man that hires the others to build him a house is helping his
town by increasing the amount of property in it. He helps the bank by
borrowing money, maybe. He pays taxes to help run the country. He has
provided labor for a lot of men—and he, in his turn has had to work
somewhere to get the money to build the house. So all of it comes back
to work. You can’t work a second without helping the whole world a
little.”
“I’ll be dog-goned!” says Catty.
“And that’s why work is respectable—because you can’t do a stroke of
work without benefiting everybody in the country and maybe in the whole
world. Just so, the fellow who never works is looked down on because he
isn’t helping anybody, but is really a detriment, because he is getting
food that somebody else has to work to produce, and doesn’t do his share
to pay for it. See?”
“Yes. But manners, how about manners?”
“Manners,” says Dad, “are just to make life more pleasant for
everybody—like music or pictures or scenery. When the world was made it
could have been fixed so it would have been just as useful without ever
being beautiful at all. The coal and iron could have been piled on top
and not hidden under the ground. There needn’t have been valleys and
hills, but just an ugly flat. The Lord could have made it that way if He
wanted to, most likely, but He didn’t want to. He wanted folks to love
the earth and He made it beautiful so they would enjoy living on it.
Now, manners are like that. You can get along without them. But the more
of the right kind of manners you have the more people enjoy being with
you. Manners, when you get right down to brass tacks, are nothing but
actions agreed upon by people with good sense to make it easier and more
pleasant to get along with one another.”
“Um!” says Catty, kind of thoughtful. “I git the idee. Never thought of
that. Guess I’ll git me a set of manners.”
“But you can work and have manners and clothes—good clothes are merely
the best way to be clean—and still not be respectable. Respectable means
worthy of being respected, and to be that you have to act in just one
way. It only takes a few words to tell you what that is; it is always to
give the other fellow a fair deal. Just be fair, that’s all. If you’re
always fair you can’t help being respected.”
“Uh-huh!” says Catty. “Much ’bleeged to you, Mr. Moore. Guess I’ll be
moseyin’ along. Got a lot of things to do.”
“Catty’s took a contract to paint Mr. Manning’s new warehouse,” says I,
“and all he’s got to do is convince his Dad to go to work and then get
the ladders and brushes and paints to do the job.”
Dad looked at Catty a second or so before he said anything, and then he
says, “Want any help?”
“No, thankee,” says Catty. “I got to do this myself—jest to show wimmin
like her”—and he pointed over at Gage’s house—“that they hain’t got no
business talkin’ about me like she did. I got to show ’em all, and I’m
a-goin’ to.”
“Good for you, Catty. Go at it.... Good-by.”
“G’-by,” says Catty, and we moved off toward the bayou where his Dad was
fishing.
We found Mr. Atkins sitting on an old log about nine-tenths asleep and
the other tenth drowsy. Catty tickled his ear with a straw, and after he
had batted at it a couple of times with his hand he woke up and turned
around.
“Pesterin’ your ol’ Dad, eh? Crept up jest to pester me when I was
a-sittin’ and thinkin’ and reasonin’ out how to ketch a big fish. One of
these here times, young feller, I’m a-goin’ to ketch you jest when you
start to pester me, and pieces of you ’ll come rainin’ down more ’n six
mile away.”
What he said was awful ferocious, but the way he said it wasn’t
ferocious a mite. “Go ’way,” says he, “and pester somebody else.”
“Dad,” says Catty, “you used to be a painter, didn’t you?”
“Who? Me?... Say, young feller, since I quit there hain’t been no _real_
painters ’cause there hain’t nobody to teach ’em. Paint! Now I come to
think back there never was sich a painter as me, not for speed nor for
skill nor for nothin’. One time I call to mind a man and his wife that
wanted their house painted. He wanted it red and she was sot on blue.
They called me in and give me the job of satisfyin’ both of ’em, and I
done it. Nobody else could ’a’ managed it.”
“How’d you do it?” I asked, because it looked like a puzzler to me.
“Painted it blue,” says he.
“But that only satisfied the woman. Didn’t her husband complain?”
“Nary. Come to find out he was colorblind. Jest let on to him that I was
paintin’ it bright red, and he never knowed the difference. Don’t to
this day. Figgers he’s got a red house when ’tain’t no more red than a
blue jay. That’s the kind of a painter I was.”
“Do you remember how, Dad? Could you paint now if you was of a mind to?”
“Could I paint now? Ho! Why, if folks was to see me paint once all the
other painters ’u’d be out of a job. I kin shut both my eyes and tie my
right hand and outpaint any other man in the U-nited States of America,
with Canady throwed in. I kin paint more in a day than any other feller
kin in four, and do it better and more artistic.”
“That’s fine,” says Catty, with a kind of a funny look around his eyes,
“because you’re goin’ to start in Monday.”
“Start in what?”
“Paintin’.”
“Paintin’ what?”
“Big warehouse.”
“You mean me—your own Dad that raised you?”
“Yes.”
“Now you look here. You hadn’t ought to of done that. Why, I hain’t used
to paintin’. It’s been nigh ten year since I touched a paint-brush! Why,
I plumb lost the habit! Dunno’s I could dip a brush in a paint-pail.
Never was much of a painter, nohow.”
“You _said_ you was the best.”
“So I was,” said Mr. Atkins, stubbornly.
“Said you could do it better now than anybody.”
“Kin.”
“Then what you mean by sayin’ you lost the habit and never was any
good?”
“Jest a way of speakin’. Didn’t want to scare you. I _kin_ paint and I
_could_ paint, but I been so long away from paint that it would be
mighty dangerous for me to git near it agin.
“Why?”
“Painters’ colic. I’d git doubled up with it in a minnit. Frightful
ailment. Nothin’ worse. If I was to be took with it when I was on top of
a ladder nothin’ ’u’d save me. Down I’d come, _ker-plop_, and most
likely bust my neck. Then what _’u’d_ you do?”
“That’s bad, Dad, but we got to risk it.”
“Besides, I hain’t got no paint-brush. Can’t paint without a brush.”
“I’ll git you a brush.”
Mr. Atkins stared at the water and waggled his head. “Looks to me like
you was goin’ to crowd me right into this paintin’ job. What’s the
idee?”
“You and me is goin’ to be respectable. You’re a-goin’ to have a store
and hire men, and maybe wear a silk hat, and we’re goin’ to have money
and a house, and go to church, and have folks invite us to dinner, and
all sich.”
“I snummy!... What’s that about hirin’ men? Like the sound of it. Why
can’t we start out like that? No need of my paintin’ if we kin hire men
to do it for me.”
“We’ve got to begin small. What we make on this job we’ll put into stock
and git a start. In a little while you won’t have to do anythin’ but
boss and look after the work, and maybe paint a little on jobs that’s
too good to trust to anybody else.”
“Hope we don’t git many of them kind of jobs,” said Mr. Atkins, mighty
sadlike.... “Wa-al, Sonny, if you’re sot on your ol’ Dad a-fallin’ off a
ladder with the colic, why, you go ahead, and I’ll tumble for you as
often as I kin till I wear out. Maybe we won’t git no job, though,” he
said, with what looked to me like a hopeful look.
“We got one—and a big one. Start in Monday. All I got to do is git
brushes and ladders and paints and sich.”
“That all you need to git?”
“Yes.”
“Um!... Guess I’ll go on fishin’, then. We kin eat fish, but a feller
that starts in to eat a paintin’ job when he hain’t got paint to spread
nor brushes to spread it, nor yet ladders to climb up onto, is goin’
hungry for a spell. When you git all them things you come back and tell
me, and I’ll go to work.”
“Promise that?”
“Yes indeedy.”
“G’-by, Dad. I got to hustle around spry.”
“Looks that way. I’ll have fish for supper, Sonny.”
We walked off, but Catty acted like he was perfectly satisfied.
“Dad he never made no promise he didn’t keep,” says he. “When once he’s
give out his word, that’s the end. Now let’s see about them ladders.”