REFLECTIONS OF
A BEGINNING HUSBAND
BY
EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN
AUTHOR OF
“THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN”
“LUCID INTERVALS,” ETC.
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED APRIL, 1913
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. BY THE SECOND INTENTION 1
II. SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 27
III. COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 52
IV. THE BABY 73
V. A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 94
VI. POLITICS 116
VII. WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 125
VIII. MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 146
REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING
HUSBAND
REFLECTIONS OF
A BEGINNING HUSBAND
I
BY THE SECOND INTENTION
“Dear Mr. French,” my letter began, “Cordelia and I have a mind again
to get married. But having once been engaged and quit, we have no mind
at all to be engaged again and divulge it. Would you mind, please, you
and Mrs. French, if we eloped? It seems so much the more feasible and
private way.”
I would rather have broken it to him by word of mouth, but for some
things it is written words or none. If you have determined to elope
with a man’s daughter you can’t very well go and ask leave of him.
Suppose he objects! Of course he will object, especially after
consulting his wife. The only way, if you propose to consult him at
all, is to write, and mail the letter on the way to the church and come
back to the house afterward for the answer.
Cordelia felt she just couldn’t be publicly engaged to me again. Of
course I didn’t mind. I think meanly of the engaged state _per se_, but
I had always rather be engaged to Cordelia than not. But that was only
because I had always wanted to marry her, and had been glad to throw
any convenient obstacle, even an engagement, in the way of her marrying
any one else. The thing that had bothered me was to have the engagement
end without our being married. I wanted to have it die a natural death
in church, with flowers and a minister, and it had irked me very sore
indeed to be “released” like a baseball-player before the end of the
season. It left me on a miserably awkward footing with the rest of the
world and with her, and it left her in the same case. Nobody quite
knew whether to congratulate either of us on getting rid of the other.
People naturally wanted to know why, and of course you can’t tell in
the newspaper. It was awkward for our families. There was a feeling
that they ought to quarrel, because somebody must be to blame, and the
other side ought to resent it. But they didn’t want to quarrel, and
wouldn’t; not even a little, to keep up appearances. They held their
tongues and went on about their business as before, but inevitably
flocked more apart than they had been wont to do, because when they met
it excited too much interest.
I don’t mean that they were such conspicuous people that the London
papers had cables about them. It was only that when Mrs. Fessenden
or Mrs. Somebody Else got home from the Jenkinses’ tea she told her
family, and whomever she had to dinner, that Mrs. French and Harriet
and Mrs. Jesup were at the Jenkinses’ and spoke, as they passed, as
politely as though nothing had happened. And then would follow a little
chattering tribute of discourse about Cordelia French and Peregrine
Jesup, and why did they break their engagement, anyway!
Not that my family, or Cordelia’s, got direct reports of what was
said at Mrs. Fessenden’s dinner-table. They didn’t; at least, not
often. But they knew what must have been said, and families don’t like
to be subjects of speculation or of critical or even compassionate
observation. They can bear the eye of approval, of admiration, and
even of a moderate envy, but what family likes to have the Fessendens,
the Jenkinses, the Underharrows, the Overtons, and the rest of the
families getting their heads together to swap surmises as to what the
Frenches and the Jesups have got in their closet!
Maybe you’d like to know why Cordelia and I loosed hands after our
intentions had been six months on file. In this private way why should
I not explain that it was not so much the fault of either of us as of
the conditions of life as we found them. You see, I was twenty-three,
and Cordelia was two years younger. I was studying the profession
in which I hope to be useful in my day and generation, and by the
practice of which I hope to derive a respectable maintenance from a
contributory world, which Cordelia was already inspecting. That’s what
she was doing. She was out of school and looking about, shifting from
continent to continent to get a better view; getting acquainted with
people and things, ascertaining whom and what she liked and what places
seemed more joyous to her than others. What for so much inspection
and investigation to prepare her for a destiny already measured off,
tied up, and waiting to be called for? If she had been in college,
she might possibly have kept. I don’t know what are the merits of the
women’s colleges as depositories for engaged girls, but they may have
a value for that use. But a roving life of enlargement by travel and
social experience has no such value at all. There was I, tied up to
professional studies, on such allowances as my indulgent parents could
afford me without too gross injustice to their own family life and
their obligations to their other dependents. And there was Cordelia,
diligently qualifying herself to live creditably and profitably on an
income of from twelve thousand a year up.
You might suppose that ordinary precautions would have been taken to
prevent her from seeing much of a person so unsuited to her needs as
I, but they were not. There was nothing against me: I had no criminal
record, did not drink much, was of respectable origin, had known
Cordelia a long time already, and was such a person, in a general way,
as she might properly enough marry sometime, if circumstances suited.
Cordelia came out, and went to dances and dinners. She had to dance
with somebody. Male persons of the dancing age and disposition with
incomes of from twelve thousand up are rather scarce. Dances cannot
be equipped with such alone: neither can dinners. So Cordelia danced
with anybody who asked her soon enough, and that was often me; and
she ate her dinner alongside of whoever was put next to her, and that
was sometimes me. And when it wasn’t me I wished it was; and so what
happened, happened all in natural course and according to reasonable
expectation, and nobody ventured to disprove, though doubtless there
was a fair volume of conjecture as to whose money Cordelia French and
Peregrine Jesup proposed to get married on. But we had not selected
anybody to underwrite our prospective happiness. We had not got so
far as that. We had just got irresponsibly engaged, according to the
American plan and the spontaneous promptings of youth and affection.
What about our current American practice of turning most of the girls
loose from school at eighteen or nineteen and keeping most of the
youths, who are their natural mates, tied up to professional studies
or business apprenticeships four or five years longer, and letting
them play together meanwhile, and expecting them to shape their own
destinies on practical and satisfactory lines? Isn’t a good deal
expected of us young people, all tinder, sparks, and indiscretion? The
French, they tell me, expect less and provide more. I have thought a
good deal of these concerns since Cordelia and I were first engaged
and found our intentions unseasonable. Of course, I wanted to be
considered in Cordelia’s plans and deportment; wanted, naturally, to
have her stay around where I could see her at recess and on Sundays
and other holidays, and perhaps meet her at festive gatherings when
the urgency of my studies permitted me to get to them. I liked to
have her around handy, but of course I could not interdict her from
going about, or even from going beyond the seas when it suited her
parents to take her. I could say that she had already seen as much
of the world and the people in it as was necessary, but how was I
to insist that, while I was cultivating and improving my abilities
all I knew how, Cordelia should let most of hers lie fallow and mark
time and wait? If she had only had a steady job to work at in the
intermission while I was qualifying myself to work at mine, things
might have worked out serenely; but the only job she had was to get
married, and meanwhile to cheer and satisfy her parents, and try to
be worth her keep to them while she was making acquaintance with the
world. Marriage seems to be a complete occupation (circumstances being
favorable), but being engaged isn’t. It’s just a makeshift, delightful
for six weeks, very suitable for three months, and tolerable for six;
but when it contemplates indefinite extension into uncertain years it
is an asset of very doubtful value to a girl in active social life.
When the Frenches found that Cordelia seemed to be losing interest in
affairs, was indifferent to dances and dinners, was apt to be abandoned
by mankind to the society of chaperones, was getting left out of
house-parties that I could not go to, was gently indisposed to put the
sea or any wide expanse of land between herself and me, and was rather
aggravated than appeased by the little she could see of me when I was
near, they said--the parents did: “This isn’t working to much of a
charm! Nobody is ahead on it, and we are getting behind. Cordelia’s no
fun any more, and there is no end of it in sight.”
And soon after Cordelia and I called our engagement off, much to our
grief and with the sympathy of our elders. I advised her to put me
down to the account of experience, and try to figure out a profit on
me, if she could. But I never put her down to account of anything,
being of just the same mind about her that I always had been, though
grievously put out to leave her blooming on the paternal bush without
any “hands-off” sign on her, protected only by her natural thorns.
There was a line in the paper to say the engagement was off, Cordelia
went abroad again, I continued my studies, and time went on. It does go
on somehow; the trick is to keep on going with it. Who does that, gets
somewhere in spite of impediments, lacerations of the affections, and
all misgivings about the possibility of there being a gap anywhere in
the procession of self-supporters that a new aspirant can fit himself
into. I have been called “sensible.” It seems a painfully tame thing
to be, and I presume I was called so by way of disparagement. But,
after all, there are times when there is no choice but between being
sensible and being silly, and then you have just got to be sensible if
you can, no matter how it tastes. Being sensible, while one is working
to get a start in life, must be excused, because it is the price of
adventure, indiscretion, speculation--all the really glorious and
spectacular parts of human existence.
Three years I was sensible and plugged away at my job, learning the
rudiments and then the application of them. All that time I had never
a word with Cordelia. How could I? I could not go on where I left off,
and unless, or until, I could do that, how could I go on at all? Sight
of her I did have now and then, but seldom; for, though she was often
in town and I nearly always there, our occupations usually kept us from
accidental meetings. We didn’t travel the same beats.
I finished my professional studies, sustained the tests provided to
measure my proficiency, and got a job in an office with a small salary
and some prospects. Candor requires that I admit that I passed those
examinations pretty well, for really I had not spared work in the long
preparation for them.
And the job I got was a good one as beginners’ jobs go, and the
prospects were as good, so far as I could see, as the prospects of
anybody of my time of life and in my line of endeavor. So I didn’t see
why, barring accidents, I should not get somewhere presently.
So the months sped. Coming early up-town on a late October day, I got
into a pay-as-you-enter car at Forty-second Street, and there was
Cordelia, alone and with a seat vacant beside her, which I took.
“This is a fine day,” said I, “and you become it very much, and I hope
you have good health?”
“Oh yes,” said Cordelia.
“And good spirits?” said I.
“Oh yes;” but she said it more doubtfully and with no more than a
languid affirmation.
“And I hope that sport is good,” said I; and she assented to that,
but in a way that suggested that it might be more boisterously
satisfactory. And with that we fell into discourse, trifling but
easy, and that progressed in its tone from easy to friendly, and from
friendly to old-friendly. And I let the car pass Fifty-fourth Street
and pretended to myself I was going to Fifty-ninth, and let it pass
Fifty-ninth and pretended nothing further to myself. It wasn’t until
some days later that I learned that her intended destination was
Fifty-seventh Street. As it was, while rolling through the Sixties
we each cautiously discovered that we were bound for the Museum at
Eighty-second Street, and there we got off; and since it was, as I
pointed out to her, too lovely an autumn day to go indoors, we went
and sat down in the Park instead, and there, a little off the track
of passers-by, fell into discussion of the conditions of contemporary
existence.
“Cordelia,” said I, “are you having any fun?”
She meditated a moment. Three years is a long time in the early
twenties, and Cordelia had grown perceptibly thoughtfuler since she and
I left off.
“Fun? Oh yes, I have _some_. It has been a pleasant summer. We went
abroad in the spring, and it was nice in the country after we got home.
People were sometimes interesting; some of the books were good to read;
I liked the flowers in the garden, and I liked to ride a horse, and
sometimes motoring was pleasant, and the swimming and the sailing.”
I confess that my heart settled back a bit at this list of profitable
occupations. “Are you marrying any one this fall, Cordelia?” said I.
“Have you an interesting line of suitors now? Or can it be that being
well off you have the unusual discretion to realize it?”
“Oh, I realize it; yes, a good deal. But I am only temporarily well
off.”
“What’s the matter? Father’s stocks look shaky to you?”
“Oh no. Father doesn’t seem anxious.”
“Suitors, maybe. Perhaps you feel yourself near capitulation?”
“Possibly! But I have not diagnosed it so.”
“Down there where you spend your summers there are stock-brokers
growing on every bush, and the stock-brokers, you know, Cordelia, are
the only _young_ men--except the hereditary rich--who have money enough
to get married on.”
“Why didn’t you turn to that yourself, Peregrine?”
“I? Bless you! I never had a chance. Nobody ever seemed to see the
making of a stock-broker in me. And besides--well, I confess I have
never felt drawn to that vocation. I would like uncommonly well to
earn plenty of money, and I mean to, sometime; but I’d rather have the
pay seem more like an incident of my job than have my job an incident
of my pay.”
“I’m afraid you are not a really earnest money-maker, Peregrine?”
“Just wait till I get a chance to throw in my clutch; then you’ll
see! And I’ll soon begin to get it now! But if you think well of the
stock-broker calling, Cordelia, there was Archibald Tassel. I heard of
him as having the discernment to be your warm admirer; and a wholesome,
hearty young man too, and well found. And yet you seem never to have
smiled on him?”
“So?”
“It must be you don’t care for a sporting life. Well, I am only
moderately drawn to it myself. You have to work so hard and pay so
high for what you get, and it’s so hard on the tissues, and you get
so little in the end. But there was that cheerful young Van Terminal,
Cordelia; pockets bulging with ancestral coin; nice manners, immense
energy, large appetite for pleasure, four or five automobiles in his
garage, and a private tank of gasolene with a pipe-line connection
with Hunters Point. If there is an eligible young man about, it is
Corlear Van Terminal, and yet, Cordelia--”
“Mercy, Peregrine, would you have me marry him?”
“Oh no! By no means. No! No! I never was the least keen to have you.
But why didn’t you?”
“Why should I?”
“Everything money can buy, and not such a bad encumbrance. Amiable
young man enough, and you with your great qualifications for
companionship and direction might have kept him out of serious
mischief all his days. I don’t say you could have done it, but it was
conceivably possible.”
“He’s very nice and so jocund. Mother and I were much pleased with
him--are still. I don’t know what efforts I should have made if it
hadn’t been for father.”
“What did _he_ say?”
“I hardly like to tell you!”
“Oh yes, do!”
“He said: ‘Good God! Cordelia. Not that one! Wait, and perhaps you may
catch a _man_! Leave those joyous natures to marry chorus girls,’
he said, and told me I was built for something better than to be the
ballast for a joy-rider’s motor-car. That’s just like father. He’s not
very practical. But it flattered me, and I didn’t try after that.”
“Poor girl! What a father! What a tremendous handicap parents are,
anyway!”
“You needn’t complain of father. That was the only time he meddled.
He has done his best for me. He knows admirable young men! ‘Father’s
friends,’ I call them. Somehow they never make up to me. But I’m
improving; I know I am. I think so much my hair is coming out, and the
day may come when I shall find grace in the eyes of one of ‘father’s
friends.’”
“Oh no! Cordelia, don’t! I have a better plan for you. I know such a
good young man, who has needed you with gnawing destitution, night and
day going on four years.”
“How interesting! The poor young man! Destitute of me and I suppose
of all the other goods of this world, and mortgaged besides for the
support of his aged grandmother! I beg you, Peregrine, not to attempt
to entangle me with impossible good young men. Life is too fleeting.
The American spring is too short. All in a minute is it summer, and
to-morrow comes Fourth of July and haytime, and we are cut down and
cast into the oven.”
“Well, dear Cordelia, take a broker--take a broker! Or some nice old
gentleman; or a widower or something, with ready-made shekels strung on
him!”
“Don’t be unkind to me, Peregrine!”
“Oh, well--I was telling you--where was I? You put me all out when
you speak like that. Oh yes--the good young destitute man! Well, the
good young man has no grandmother to support--only himself as yet, and
can do that, by George! And it’s time; he’s rising twenty-seven. And
his prospects are not bad now. And if he could manage to get married
they’d be better; they’d have to be. You see, we have to get one thing
at a time, and I’ve known awful cases--even I in my short experience
have observed them--of men who waited until they had got a good living
before they got married, and found, when they got ready to get a wife,
that their minds had been on other things so long that they had clean
forgotten how. That’s awful, isn’t it? It happens all the time. I
see it at the clubs. I don’t want it to happen to--to the good young
semi-destitute man I had in mind.”
“Oh no, Peregrine; surely not. It’s an awful thought; awful! But yet,
suppose he got the girl, what--”
“What costs so dreadfully much, Cordelia? I know of quite a decent
flat for fifty dollars a month; a nice flat over a tailor shop, and
not in Harlem either--not twenty blocks from where we’re sitting.
And for three dollars a day you can get food enough for two or three
persons--eggs not superlatively fresh, perhaps, but eggs--and for a
dollar a day you can hire a very good servant, and that’s only a little
more than forty dollars a week; and a good young man of twenty-seven,
with four or five years of hard work behind him, who can’t see his way
to lay his hands on at least sixty dollars a week isn’t good enough for
you. But sixty would about do it, Cordelia. Sixty plunks is a great
deal of money--a whole lot of money to earn--but not an unattainable
wage; not one that a diligent and competent trained hand need consider
the limit of his aspirations--no, not in a city like this with a
traction company to be supported, and eighty million people in the
back country to help pay five millions of us for living here.”
“You are a more calculating person than you used to be, Peregrine. When
did you work all that out? And suppose it were possible to live on
sixty dollars a week, what makes you think it would pay to do it, and
why do most people of our habits think they need so very much more?”
“The trouble with them is they haven’t been emancipated. The things
that cost are amusement and social aspirations. If you can cut those
out for a time, living is not so impossibly dear. But stupid people
can’t do it, and unemancipated people don’t dare to.”
“Unemancipated? Unemancipated! Unemancipated from what, Peregrine?”
“From _things_, Cordelia, and the habit of needing them in superfluous
quantity; from the standards of living set by people who are poor on
fifty thousand a year; from the idea of life that is based on what you
have got; from automobiles, and expensive sports, and boxes at the
opera; from the notion that it is essential to keep in the swim, and
know only the right people; from pleasures and from people that waste
time and money and give nothing back that is worth having.”
“My! Peregrine! When did you turn anarchist?”
“Not long after our engagement was broken. I loved you, Cordelia,
that’s the truth, and I hated everything that broke it. I learned to
see that there was no obstacle between you and me that a little time
and hard work could not easily overcome, and that the obstacles that
looked biggest and blackest had no real substance to them, and could be
brushed aside whenever we were ready and had the grit to do it. Don’t
cry, Cordelia! If you let me hold your hand again, I don’t think any
one would notice.”
“I was--I wasn’t crying, Peregrine. I--I was--only thinking!”
“Don’t cry! Because this is such a delightful world for folks who are
free and can work, and have the courage to shape their own courses. It
looks all lovely colors to me, with you here--so much to get and such
an interesting stunt to get to it; so much to do, and such inspirations
for the doing of it; such excellent loads to lift at and maybe
shoulder. Think, Cordelia, think by all means! That is the most fun
there is, and the most we shall either of us get for some time to come
if you marry me on sixty dollars a week. Oh dear! There were times when
I feared you weren’t going to wait! Those were the worst pinches of the
pull. To get tired and have no heart of refuge to fly to--you know that
is pretty trying, Cordelia.”
“I know, Peregrine. And to wait with folded hands and not know--it
tries the faith. A bunch of roses on my birthday, a bunch of roses on
Christmas morning, not a line with either of them! Oh, Peregrine!”
“There! Nobody saw us but the squirrel! ‘Far out of sight, while
sorrows still enfold us, lies the fair country where our hearts abide.’
Do you know that hymn, Cordelia? There were days together when it ran
in my head. It meant heaven to whoever wrote it, but to me it meant a
fifty-dollar-a-month flat and you.”
“Don’t cry, Peregrine!”
“I wasn’t crying. But you must allow a man some sentiment. Are you game
for the flat and sixty dollars a week?”
“Let us look at the flat. I hope all the rooms are not cupboards. Do
you know that my aunt just passed on the drive in a victoria? Gracious!
I have just time to get home before dark and dinner.”
That was the substance of the discourse we had that autumn day. I never
mailed that letter I wrote to Cordelia’s father. We concluded that it
would not be polite to our parents to elope, and, since we both had
very indulgent parents, what was the use! So I broke it to the old
man, and he was quite reasonable and let me stay to dinner, and we had
champagne. And Cordelia’s mother was kind, too, and though she declared
that I was as bad a match as any worldly-wise woman could ask for, she
felt that Cordelia had come as nearly to years of marital discretion
as women who get married ever come, and that it was certainly time she
knew whether I was the ineligible man she wanted or not.
So I told my own parents, too, and my father smiled and said more
marriages hereabouts seemed to be spoiled nowadays by too much money
than by too little; and my mother shed some tears, but they were not
tears of discontent. She has begun to be interested in my trousseau,
and keeps suggesting things that I had better buy and have charged to
Father, and I hear of her being seen in the neighborhood of auction
shops where they sell furniture, and she has counseled me by no means
to trench upon Great-aunt Susan’s legacy, which constitutes the total
sum of my private fortune. It is not a large legacy, and how I shall
ever add anything to it, except Cordelia, I cannot imagine; but I am
going to somehow, and meanwhile Cordelia will be an immense asset and
make me a rich man at the start.
Perhaps Aunt Susan’s legacy will start on its career as the total
fortune of a married man by a period of depletion; for the truth is
I am not taking in the whole of sixty dollars a week at the present
juncture. It is no great income to command at twenty-seven if one
has begun his money-getting at seventeen, but it is a great deal for
any one of that age who has spent three or four years in general
enlargement of the ideas and experiences in a college and three or four
more in learning how to do something that will support life.
I observe that elders are fairly willing to abet the young in getting
married if only the adventurers are positively enough set on the
adventure and have the courage of their intentions. The thing that the
wiser elders won’t do if they can help it is to take responsibility
about the intending parties being pleased with their bargain. For the
rest, unless the adventure is _too_ rash or premature, or they have
violent personal objections, the elders, as far as I see, are apt to be
complaisant, and even to push along an affair that is clearly at the
stage where it is safe to push it.
The cards are out for three weeks from next Thursday. It was the first
our friends in general heard of it, which was as it should be. The flat
is hired, and yesterday I got my pay raised five a week. Where there’s
a will there’s a way to break it, the lawyers say, but Cordelia and I
have passed through that once, and our will is going to probate this
time.
I am thinking about what we shall talk about, for talk will have to be
our main reliance for entertainment. There’s a fireplace in the flat,
and I dare say I shall be seen going home dragging boards and boxes
after me like the children one sees in the street, for I don’t know
how we shall afford any wood for that fireplace. Wood, I understand,
is dear. Never mind; we shall have a fire and sit before it, and talk
about everything--about votes for women (which I don’t want, though it
matters little), whether we ought to be abstainers (I’d rather not, but
it matters little), whether the good English are played out, about the
future of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, whether it
isn’t time for the Democrats to shelve Thomas Jefferson and get a new
prophet, whether Tammany will ever be killed permanently dead and what
then, whether the People have got any sense, whether legislation has an
important effect upon divorce, whether the Americans are too much bent
on substituting legislation for character, and all those things that
one thinks about.
I wonder if she will be willing to talk about those things! Very likely
she won’t. It will be more prudent, I think, not to let her see the
catalogue of them beforehand. Unless brought up to them gently she
might shy. One talks, I find, to another person a good deal according
to what is in the other person’s mind.
And for a change we can gossip, and extenuate our neighbor’s faults,
first agreeing what they are, which always is a pleasant exercise. And
when somebody makes a good book with real meat in it, well served--if
any one should--we can read it, and that’s fun, and cheap, and will
make more talk. And charities are interesting if one goes at them right
(and cheap as things go), and so are politics.
It is such an interesting world if you get the hang at all of what is
going on in it, and why, and whither things are tending! I do love to
see it roll along and to try to puzzle out why things happen as they
do. It will be fun to talk to Cordelia about all these matters. What
is there about a woman’s mind--if it is a fairly good one--that it is
so extraordinarily stimulating to a man’s mind, so that when you’re
too tired to talk to a man you can chatter on amazingly to a woman,
provided she’s the right one! They beat drink; they certainly do! They
are the great natural stimulant and tonic for mankind.
II
SOME DETAILS OF LIVING
Cordelia and I duly got married (see the newspaper a piece back)
and are still married, and, speaking for myself and, as far as
observation enables me, for Cordelia, we are still pleased with our
audacious experiment. But why should I call it audacious? I am more
and more impressed, so far, with the calculating prudence of it, and
surely sensible observers must agree with me, and for ten who will
think we were rash to get married on sixty dollars a week there will
be hundreds, certainly, who will smile at the idea of that being a
doubtful income to marry on.
Our maid, Matilda Finn, is a person of considerable talent. I doubt
whether two people who aim to subsist on sixty dollars a week
are entitled to have a maid at all. I dare say they belong in a
boarding-house, or else in a flat where they do their own work and
put at least fifty dollars in the bank the first of every month. Oh,
delightful thought! Imagine being six hundred dollars to the good at
the end of the year, and putting it into some safe gamble that would
be the corner-stone of a competence! And if I had only courted Matilda
Finn instead of Cordelia it would have been so easy! Do you remember
Andrew Cannybee and his first investment in Pullman? But he was living
with his mother then and had few expenses. I suppose the money-savers
are folks who go without everything they want except money until they
cease to want it. That would have been all right if I had wanted
Matilda Finn. I know I could have held myself down to self-denial until
I could really afford to marry, and by that time I should have got
over wanting Matilda. Whereas I never could endure the thought of not
wanting Cordelia. I am afraid the Cannybee strain in me isn’t strong
enough to do any good. I seem to like life while it is here.
All the same I like Matilda, who is part of life at these presents,
and so does Cordelia. Matilda is cheerful, she is clean and indulgent,
and she can cook. When food is scarce and dear and you have to have
it, you don’t want to have it fooled with by the wasteful or the
inexpert. The little that man wants here below he has to have two or
three times a day, and it does make a difference how it is fixed up for
him. Consider the staples of nourishment--bread, toast, tea, coffee,
bacon, eggs, chickens, chops, beefsteak, fish, codfish, oysters,
clams, lettuce, rice, beans, milk, and the package foods that some of
us eat for breakfast to divert our minds from diet! How various are
the dealings of the human mind and hand with these simple alimentary
provisions! What grace or defect of human character is there that
cannot find its demonstration in the way an egg is dropped on toast!
There is as much difference in toast as there is in people; there is a
great native difference in eggs, and much individuality; no two slabs
of bacon are alike to start with, or are affected quite the same by
smoke and other processes of education. When it comes to coffee, what a
problem! Leaving out all the coffee that is not coffee at all, consider
the horde of coffees that _are_ coffee; their propensity to masquerade
under names that do not belong to them, to be blended, and to taste
unexpectedly every time you get a new lot!
But give the coffees their due. Nearly all of them are good. It is only
that some of them are enough better than others to interest an aspiring
spirit which reaches out instinctively in the direction of the highest
good for the money. Such a spirit will early recognize that, food being
variable, the mind that prepares it should be constant and sagacious in
its processes.
I would not have you suppose I am an epicure. I never think much about
food unless it is not so good as I think it ought to be, all things
considered; or else is better than I expected. There needs to be some
standard of nourishment in a family, and in our family of three it
has to be adjusted to an expenditure of three dollars a day. Cordelia
says that I contribute the standard and the dollars and leave her to
furnish the adjustment. That is where Matilda Finn comes in. I asked
Mrs. French once if Cordelia could cook--asked her quite casually, and
not, of course, as though it was of any consequence. She said yes,
that every woman could cook, and that Cordelia could, of course, and
that the question was whether any man could live off her cooking. She
has taken cooking lessons since then and courses in Domestic Science,
which includes cooking, and I think she can do it. But cooking is an
agitating job, and I don’t like to have Cordelia agitated. Nor is
there any need. I like better to have her stick to her own profession,
which is ministering to happiness. I suppose they don’t teach that in
the domestic-science courses. Cordelia ministers to Matilda Finn’s
happiness, and Matilda cooks and does all the other things that need
to be done in a flat, except what Cordelia and I do; and Cordelia
ministers to my happiness remarkably. All sorts and conditions of folks
Cordelia ministers to: she has captivated her mother’s market-man,
with whom she talks meat, poultry, fish, politics, and current events
every morning. She knows all his reasons for the high price of meat.
“That man,” she said the other day, “can bamboozle me into anything!”
Nevertheless, she seems to be getting intimately acquainted with the
butcher business and the anatomy of the animals on which we elect to
subsist, and the comparative cost and edibleness of their various
sections. The spring lamb that we had for dinner the day Caseby dined
with us was “a bargain I got off of Mr. Cooper,” who had an oversupply
of fore quarters and sold one at a great reduction to young Mrs. Jesup.
As a rule, we do not subsist on spring lamb at home in the spring. That
seems to be a favorite dinner-party provision, and we still dine out
enough to keep up our acquaintance with it. The “lamb” we have is the
most neutral of all meats, unexciting, but sufficient for the purpose
of nourishment.
Cordelia sings at her work, and that makes me think she must like the
life. Perhaps I should say her employments rather than her work. Being
away all day, I don’t know very much about them, but at least I hear
her singing while she is putting up her hair.
This matter of woman’s work looks important. I wonder what they do
all day--girls, that is, like Cordelia. If she had a job it would
simplify matters, particularly if it was a remunerated job, for I dare
say Cordelia would spend more money if she had it. _I_ could. But it
would have to be some kind of an independent home job, like painting
or writing or taking in washing. If she went out to work and had any
boss but me, it would not be tolerable. Moreover, if she had a job that
she was qualified for and was worthy of her talents, she would probably
be better at it than I am at mine and earn more at it than I do, and
then where would I come in! Think of us both coming home tired from
wage-earning! Awful! I am glad she has no job except, as I said before,
the great one of ministering to happiness. I seem to be just a poor
old-fashioned monopolist, not much farther along than the Stone Age.
But she does keep busy in a way. I hear of her making calls--though
she says calls are a queer employment for a lady who lives over a
tailor shop--and she goes to see her mother, and my mother, and various
girls, and goes to market, and sews a little and reads a little and
does charities a good deal, and has girls in to lunch and feeds them on
I don’t know what. She says it’s not wise to break with the life you
know any more than you have to, and of course that’s so; though neither
is it wise to hang on to the life you know when you can’t afford it.
The life you know isn’t the only good one even for you. I have come
to feel that tremendously since I turned anarchist--to feel that life
is a big thing, a bully thing, and that we are fools to cramp it and
trim it down too much to fit usage and environment. Friends are very
valuable, acquaintance is valuable, a standard of living and a set of
associations when once you are used to them are very hard to shift
from; but all those things are the accessories of life rather than life
itself, and it seems a chicken-hearted sort of prudence that would
sacrifice life to its accessories.
This from a man who is as sensitive as I am to the differences in
dropped eggs, and feels as strongly as I do about fish-balls and bacon,
and who likes caviare when it is really good, and alligator-pears, and
pâtés of goose-livers, may sound a little forced; but must it follow
that because one sees and admires the trees he cannot see the forest?
Yes, I am glad Cordelia has no money-making job, but I suppose that
is no argument against such employments for women in general who need
them. _I_, being so gifted in money-getting and commanding the income
I do, did not need to have my labors supplemented in the wage-earning
line. _My_ need was for assistance in spending our money.
By the way, as I meditate on money and my large appetite for it
and the ways of getting it, it occurs to me that there is a new
profession--muck-raking. Maybe it’s not new, since nothing is, but at
any rate it’s coming along on a good slant just now, is very lively,
looks altruistic, and I dare say can be made modestly remunerative; for
muck-rakers, of course, like other working folks, must live. More than
moderately remunerative it can hardly be without spoiling it, for the
great business opportunity in it would be to make a great record as a
prosecutor and then be retained for the defense. To me, as a lawyer,
that looks good, but there are those who would gibe at it as a sort of
blackmail.
Well, there does seem to be a lot of tar in money. Sometimes I despair
of ever getting enough to keep an auto on without having to pay some
impossibly defiling or enslaving price for it; but I haven’t got to
have an auto yet, so I take courage.
Father and Father-in-law both growl at the muck-rakers, as is proper
enough for gentlemen of their years and responsibilities, but the
muck-rakers look to me like microbes of a very natural and timely kind,
lawfully and inevitably produced, and going about a necessary business
with a catching sort of enthusiasm. When they beat a bad grab, the
anarchist in me insists upon rejoicing, no matter what respect the
lawyer in me may feel for clients who appreciate lawyers and pay them
suitably.
Father-in-law has sent me three gallons of superior European champagne
put up in bottles the usual way, mostly pints. He is a kind man. Why he
thinks it wise to cultivate expensive thirsts in Cordelia and me I do
not know, but my theory is that he thinks a taste for beverages that
we can’t afford will make for abstemiousness. So it will, I dare say.
Cordelia says the gallons are just a tribute of affection, unsullied
by ulterior purposes of any sort. We are going to ask Father-in-law to
dinner, and that is a great tribute, for even reduced to his simplest
needs he is expensive to feed.
Naturalists have observed and recorded a tendency in married people to
duplication. That is, in some respects, a solemn thought. I understand
you can get lots more room in Brooklyn for the same money, and people
do it; but to me that’s a much more solemn thought than the other
one--too solemn altogether. Up the island there are extraordinary rows
and successions of human hives. Cordelia and I catch a Sunday afternoon
automobile ride up there once in a while and marvel at them as we
pass. One could get a fine detachment up there; though for that matter
there is an interesting grade of detachment to be had in Brooklyn.
And detachment has its value--breaks habits, brings folks in some
ways harder up against the facts of life, invites a new inspection of
people, brings various releases and stimulations--but I don’t know that
it is a thing that Cordelia and I are disposed to chase very hard for
its own sake. We are hard enough up against the facts of life as it
is, and we are gregarious people and like companions, and if we got a
good detachment would go right to work, I suppose, to mitigate it by
new associations. We will never move to Harlem or beyond merely for
the sake of pioneering, nor swap associations for the mere benefit of
swapping. And yet that’s what the Methodist ministers used to do under
the old three-years-in-a-place rule--may be doing it still. It was
the intention that they should gather no moss, so the plan was to keep
them rolling. To me, now, moss looks very nice, and I wouldn’t mind
its adhering. I love old associations and permanence of relation, and
my heart is even hospitable to some fixity of condition; but there
is plenty to be said in favor of wearing the garments of life loose
enough to shed them when they get seriously in the way. One should be
enough of a change artist to quit a part he cannot excel in before the
scene-shifters shut him out. The predicament of people who haven’t
it in them to prosper in the social level they find themselves in,
and who are so fettered by the conventions and expectations of that
level that they can’t break into another, is very pathetic. We hear
plenty about the tragedies of families that sink, but what of the
tragedies of those that rise, as when a man makes a raft of money and
his sons experiment with leisure, drink, chorus-girls, and divorce;
and his daughter, for lack of inviting marital opportunities, is
obliged to elope with the chauffeur! That sounds better than eloping
with the coachman, as used to happen; but still there is a prejudice
against it. Of course advantages--most of them--are advantageous, else
civilization wouldn’t get ahead; but, by George! they have their price.
If Cordelia and I were a grain less stylish we might be living in a
model tenement and saving money. (I wonder if we could get one that
would hold Matilda too!) The residents of New York around here where
we live are roughly divided into two classes, people who eat in the
front basement and are getting rich, and people who are too stylish to
eat in the front basement, and have upstairs dining-rooms and butler’s
pantries, and are (some of them) getting poor. The receipt for getting
rich in this neighborhood is--Eat in the basement! But I’m not sure
that it is a reliable receipt. It tends to blight some opportunities.
Anyhow, it does not fit the ambitions of the socially ambitious of this
generation, to whom eating in the basement would seem to conflict with
about all that is delectable in life. Of course basement dining-rooms
belong to the habits of forty years ago, and invited the simple life,
which now for the most part has been chased into flats. But the truth
remains that advantages are bought with a price.
It is harder to get something for nothing than we think it is when we
read of wills going to probate. They do go there, and then it is to
observe whether the heirs get the money or the money gets the heirs. We
don’t take medicine unless we are sick. Money in large chunks is pretty
strong medicine, but we take it when it offers without regard to our
condition, and it does not always do us good.
Tom Merchant was saying something the other day to the effect that a
man could not be of very considerable use in the world until he ceased
to be dependent on his work for his living. Of course that is not so,
as Lincoln’s case and innumerable others attest, and as new cases keep
attesting every day. Nevertheless, the venerable John Bigelow has said
something very like what Tom said, and I think there is a slice of
truth in it. Money in store is power, and makes for leisure to think
and act, and may help enormously, in a crisis, to independence in
thought and action. Lincoln was poor, but, after all, he had enough
cash in hand to spare the time for the debate with Douglas and for all
the politics that followed, up to the time when he began to draw a
salary as President.
The trouble with the chaps that come early into ready-made money is
that so few of them ever learn enough about common human life, and
people, and the elements of the job, to be considerably useful, even
if they aspire to be. Still, I think they do better nowadays than they
used to. The money-getting school, whatever course you take, is an
exacting school. Somehow you have to deliver the goods--some kind of
goods that somebody is willing to pay for. I wonder how much the girls
miss, those of them who do miss it, by not taking the courses in that
school! Of course, they miss some great possibilities of development,
but against that you have to measure what they would miss by not being
able to do two kinds of things in the same years, and sacrificing what
they get as it is, for what they might get as it might be. There comes
in the division of work between men and women and the difference in
their natural careers. Cordelia as she is, for me.
Cordelia and I are agreed that we will have rhododendrons in our
garden. Those in the Park have begun to bloom, and I am excessively
pleased with them. They have such a fine Greek name that takes me
back to Xenophon’s Anabasis, and such splendid blossoms and such
interesting shades of color, and then they bloom in the shade. I
respect them most of all for that. To live in the shade and turn
out so splendid--well, allegorically speaking, it happens more or
less to folks, too. It will cost us something to have a good lot of
rhododendrons in our garden, but when it comes to planning for our
country place we never spare expense. Why should we? Frugality of
imagination is no saving to anybody. Cordelia is less extravagant in
that particular than I am, because when I see the men who earn a lot
of money I speculate in my mind as to how they do it and whether _I_
could do it, and I usually decide that I shall be able to presently if
I have time, and then, naturally, I think what I shall have when I get
all that money, and just now it is rhododendrons because they are just
coming along. A good deal goes with rhododendrons: hired men, domestic
animals, chariots of locomotion; I dare say by the time Cordelia and
I get around to have them aeroplanes will have become a reasonable
solicitation. But there’s no hurry. The rhododendrons in the Park are
lovely, and I dare say there are more in the Bronx (if you can get
there), and we have hospitable friends who have them in gardens.
This observing the money-getters and noticing how they do it, and
computing how long it will take to learn the trick and acquire the
necessary prestige, is all right enough and even useful, but it plagues
me when I get my mind too much on it. That’s not really the way to
live--and yet, and yet. “The life is more than meat; the body more than
raiment,” but, having life, meat comes very handy, and having a body,
raiment is convenient. The people who miss it are those who starve
life, or overlook it, in their solicitude for meat and motors.