main joys of life are in ideas--in religion, in love, in beauty, in
duty, in truth--things that no trust can monopolize, and which come
tariff-free through any port. They are the realities, and these bodily
things are mostly shadows, indispensable, to be sure--things that it is
a reproach and a high inconvenience to be without, but which take care
of themselves so long as the realities prosper.
* * * * *
Well, I have got a boost. Major Brace has suggested to me that I move
my tools over to his office this fall and become a partner in his firm.
The suggestion is agreeable to me, and I have closed with it. His firm
is undergoing reorganization. At present it is Brace & Ketcham, but Mr.
Ketcham’s wife has fallen into so much money that, having also some
savings of his own, he feels the need of foreign travel, country air,
and like delights, and proposes to retire from active practice and
concern himself with self-improvement, cows, and public or quasi-public
duties, like being a director in banks and corporations, serving on
committees, or even running for public office. There seems to be a
great deal for competent and experienced citizens to do whenever they
have acquired the means of support and can afford to take nominal pay,
or none, for their services. The new firm is to be Brace, Witherspoon
& Jesup; which last is me. It will be a strong firm. The Major has
experience and connections; Mr. Witherspoon has knowledge, especially
of law, and appalling diligence; and I have a living to make for
Cordelia and Samuel and myself, and everything to buy, including a
city mansion, a country residence, some automobiles, and a garden with
rhododendrons in it. When I think how modest my proportion of the
firm’s winnings is to be, and how much it is to buy, my arithmetical
talents are strained to compute the princely affluence that must be
coming out of the new firm to the Major.
Anyhow, my circumstances will be eased enough for us to move into a
more commodious flat next fall, which is important. The modification
in my prospects pleases me very much. I am attached to the Major.
He is good to be with. I feel confident that he will make a living,
and either make it honestly or make it look so honest to me that my
self-esteem will not be wounded by a lot of compunctions. I think
so because I believe he is at least as scrupulous as I am, and has
more experience in adjusting his scruples to the facts of life. And
that is a mighty delicate matter. If you can’t do it you get nowhere,
and if you overdo it you get eventually, I presume, to that ideality
that we call “hell.” I don’t know that I should necessarily mind
that, for it is possible that the attractions of hell may have been
under-rated; but I hate consumedly the processes of getting there as I
see them. The by-path by drink is so far out of my line that I don’t
have to take serious thought about it; nor yet about the propensity
to divagations in feminine companionship, which makes some persons so
much trouble; but I believe I may say without affectation that I would
hate the detachment from that ideality which we call “truth.” Surely
the greatest possible luxury in life is to think you are on the right
side; to know the truth and follow it, or at least, since we are all so
fallible, to think you know it and are on its trail. To think that I
was going to practise law merely as the agent of the astute, filching
unwarranted profits from the simple, would be quite intolerable, of
course. It would be so at least as long as I continued to be any good,
for I should think of it as a progress to “hell”; and when it ceased to
bother me, that would be the sign that I had arrived. That’s the kind
of hell the idea of which is repellent--the hell in which the damned
are fat and hard and solvent, and relentlessly and eternally gainful
for themselves. Ugh! They make me sick; at least the thought of them
does. When you come to look for them in the flesh, of course they have
their human modifications and are often lean, jocund, and charming.
The Major says there’s a new morality growing up that will express
itself presently in some new commandments, or a new interpretation of
the sixth. Stealing, as heretofore understood, has been limited, he
says, to taking from some one something that was his. But there is a
growing sentiment that it applies also to hogging an unconscionable
amount of things desirable for the mass of folks, but to which none of
them had established legal ownership. As “the people” grow stronger
and more intelligent there is more interest in having them get what
should be coming to them. So the Major looks for the evolution of a
commandment to the general effect of “Thou shalt not take more than
thy share,” and for lots of legislation based on it. And since what
anybody’s share is depends on all manner of circumstances, and is
highly debatable, and is sure to get into court again and again, he
looks for busy--and profitable--times for our profession.
Meanwhile the bulk of the law business is not a wrangle between the
wolf and the lamb, with all the best talent retained for the wolf.
A good deal of it is wrangles between wolves, wherein it is just as
virtuous to be on one side as the other; and a lot more of it is not
wrangle at all, but a tame exercise of the lawyer’s true profession of
keeping order in the world.
All the same, it must be embarrassing to any lawyer’s ethical
self-esteem always to be the defender, at a high price, of the
strong. It can’t be easy to avoid it, once a man gets a considerable
reputation; but I guess it does pinch. Politically, of course, it
is very expensive, and that, without much regard for the truth that
when Strength is right, even though it is incorporated, it is just
as important to society that it should get its dues under the law as
though it were somebody else. The risks of an employment are one of
the considerations on which its rate of payment is based, and in this
legal employment to which I seem committed, the risk of discredit may
well be one basis for extra large fees. Disreputability is bound to rub
off of clients on their lawyers, provided there is enough of it, and
the association is long enough continued, and highly enough paid, or
insufficiently varied by professional associations of another sort.
I should not like to be committed bodily to the side of the Haves in
my legal experiences, and I know I never shall be so long as I am in
the same firm with the Major. Neither do I want to tie up to impossible
enthusiasms and altruisms; and to plans that won’t work, and to
fabulous expectations of making the earth equally comfortable for all
its residents irrespective of their powers and qualities. The Major
does not go in for those phantoms. He will not always be right, but he
will never be systematically impossible.
I guess Witherspoon is going to get rich. He is terribly smart; so
smart, and so nearly sound-minded, and so nearly drink-proof, that,
with the start he has, it will be virtually impossible for him to stay
poor. If not myself, I would rather be Witherspoon than any one I see
about. I could not afford to be the Major; he is too old. I have too
much to do, and too much expectation of liking to do it, to wish to be
he, much as I like him. Witherspoon is older than I am, older by nine
or ten years, I guess, but I could almost afford that advancement in
years for what I might gain in ability by having his head instead of
mine. Not, of course, that I would be he, unless it was compulsory that
I should be some one other than I am. A property that one has taken so
much pains to improve as me becomes dear to the owner. I rate among
improvements Cordelia and Samuel (though you may call them liabilities
if you like), all that I know, my acquaintance, my reputation, the
repairs done on my teeth (which were quite expensive), advertisement
as so far acquired (except as already mentioned under acquaintance and
reputation), a little life insurance paid up to date, and there must
be a lot of other improvements I can’t think of. To offset all that, I
have expensive habits (like Cordelia and Samuel) and the probability
of others. I smoke and drink, though inexpensively as yet, and like
better food and rather better clothes than I am entitled to.
One thing that I admire about Witherspoon is his clothes; they are so
bad--or rather he is so oblivious to them. I guess they are pretty good
clothes, but he is apt to wear them like a man in the woods; I see
him sometimes going about in this polite community in rough-looking,
unshiny, russet shoes, a flannel shirt with a soft collar, his trousers
turned up, not precisely but casually; and if he has on black shoes,
like as not they are not polished. That is liable to be his working
dress. He does better at times; does better doubtless if he happens to
think of it or his wife tells him, and he togs himself out properly
when he goes out to dinner; but his mind is not on raiment, nor much
on details of living, anyhow. Presently, I suppose, his wife will say
he must have a valet, and his clothes will be pressed and laid out for
him for the rest of time, and he will put them on and always go forth
shining. But he’s fine as he is.
It is grand to be enough of a man to be worth a servant to do all one’s
chores. It is also grand meanwhile to be able to dress as inattentively
as Witherspoon does. If he were lazy he couldn’t do it, nor yet if he
had not on him so many of the marks of a first-class man. If he were
just ordinary, you’d be displeased with him for not being clean-shaven,
but when he smiles and begins to talk you don’t care whether he shaved
yesterday or the day before, nor whether his shoes are blacked, nor
what kind of a collar he has on.
I’m not that way at all. I have to wear respectable clothes, brush my
hair and teeth, shave every morning, black my shoes, and pay attention
to millinery. I succeed in all these details, and would make, I
suppose, an acceptable body-servant for a really great man, or a fairly
good housemaid, if it were not that I am able, under Providence, to
put the remnant of my time after attending to my own details to more
profitable use than doing ordinary details for some one else. Details
I shall do, no doubt, for some time to come if not forever, but they
will be fairly remunerative details, I hope, requiring judgment and
knowledge.
It’s all service, and all that matters much to the moralist is that
each of us should come, somehow, where he belongs, and get the sort of
job he can learn to be good at, and delve at it until a better one
calls him--if it does. But of course to find one’s proper job is a
great achievement in life, being the one that engages my energies at
present. Also to find a man proper for a job that needs doing seems to
be a considerable achievement, bigger or less big, according to the
size of the job, but supremely important when the job is a vital matter
like the Presidency sometimes, or the discovery of an effectual general
in war, or a revolutionary leader. The processes by which the top men
come to the top are as interesting as anything in history. Indeed, they
almost constitute history. Usually they are processes of trying out,
and it seems that the qualifications for a great place must include,
as a rule, the ability to get the place, and, if it is political, to
get it away from somebody else. But the unpolitical places don’t seem
so much to be wrested from anybody. The most powerful men just come to
their own. Commonly they make the places which they occupy, and the
places grow with them, until, when they get out, there is a gaping
vacancy to be filled.
That is not the sort of place for which the Major has selected me. Not
yet. It’s just a chance to do some work as it comes along, and make
a place, possibly, which can be recognized as definite, commodious,
and profitable because of some scarcity of the qualities required to
fill it. I have great confidence in the Major, and feel strongly that
his judgment in choosing persons and foreseeing labors for them is
excellent, and I have faith in particular, as I have intimated, in his
sagacity in selecting Witherspoon. So I am a good deal pleased that he
should have invited me.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Typo corrected: “perfomance” to “performance” (page 128).
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.