I dare say when you studied American history you read about Shays’ Rebellion, in Massachusetts, and duly learned that it was put down, and the instigators punished. But I am sure that you never knew, and never wondered, what became of Colonel Shays himself, of whom the history books say succinctly, “the leader himself, escaped.”
I have never seen in print anything about the latter part of his life beyond one or two scanty and inaccurate references in one or two out-of-date books of reference; but all the older people in our town were brought up on stories about him, for it was to the valley just over the mountain from us that he fled after his last defeat. And later on, as an old man, he lived for some years in our town, in a house still standing, and told many people what I am going to set down here.
At the time when he made his escape from the officers of the State in Massachusetts, Vermont was, quaintly enough, an independent republic, all by itself, and hence a sufficient refuge for men fleeingfrom the officers of any State in the Union. Furthermore it was still rather wild, sparsely settled, none too respectful of any authority, and distinctly sympathetic to strangers who came from the east, south, or west over the mountains on the run, with the manner of men escaping from sheriffs. Sheriffs were not popular persons in Vermont in 1787.
But all this did not seem to make it a safe enough refuge to the man with a price set on his head, the man who had risked everything on the boldest of enterprises, and had lost everything. He passed by the rough scattered little hamlets and went into a remote, narrow, dark, high valley, which is to this day a place where a man might hide for years and never be seen. Colonel Shays, traveling at night, on foot, through the forests, came down into the Sandgate valley through the Beartown notch, over the mountains, and not a soul knew that he had come.
He made his first camp, which was also his permanent and last one, since he was never disturbed, high up on a shoulder of the mountain, overlooking the trail for a great distance, and densely surrounded with a thick growth of pine trees. Very cautiously, making no noise, using the ax and knife which were his only tools, he put up a rough shelter, andbuilding a fire only at night in a hollow where rocks masked its flame, began cooking some of the game he caught. He lived in this way, all alone for years and years. Game was abundant; like most men of that time he was an adroit trapper, a good pioneer, and knew how to smoke and preserve the flesh of animals and to save their skins. For the first year he did not dare to let any one know that a man was living there, and literally saw not one soul.
Then one day about a year after he began this life, a little boy going fishing saw a tall, strong, black-haired stranger standing in the trail and holding a large packet of furs. He told the child to take the packet and ask his father for a bushel of seed-corn and a bag of salt. He specified that the man who brought it was to leave it just where they then stood and go away without waiting.
The child’s father was a rough, half-civilized, good-natured trapper, who had had troubles of his own with unreasonable officers of the law in York State. When the child told his story, the father laughed knowingly, took the skins, got the seed-corn and the salt, left them in the place indicated, and kept a neighborly shut mouth. He could not read or write, had never heard of Shays’ Rebellion, and supposed the man in hiding to be in the same situationas himself. Living as he did, it seemed no awful fate to make one’s living out of the woods, and he thought little of the fact that he had a new neighbor.
After this, Colonel Shays began a little cultivation of the ground, in scattered places, hidden behind screens of thick trees, in a few natural clearings in the forest. He used to say that life was infinitely more tolerable to him after the addition to his diet of salt and cereals. After some months he risked a little more, and, buying them with furs worth forty times their value, he secured a few tools and some gunpowder. The transactions were always carried on through the child, the only one to see the fugitive.
Nothing has come down to me of what this terrible dead halt in mid-career, and this grim isolation from the world meant to the active, intelligent, ambitious man at the height of his powers. None of the old people who heard him talk seem to have asked him about this, or to have had any curiosity on the subject. Only the bare facts are known, that he lived thus for many years, till the little boy grew up, till his own hair turned gray and then white, till the few families in that valley were quite used to the knowledge that a queer, harmless old man was living up in the woods near the northern pass of themountains, miles from any neighbor. Once in a great while, now, some one saw him—a boy fishing, a hunter far on the trail of a deer, or a group of women picking berries. He occasionally exchanged a few words with his neighbors at such times, but he had almost forgotten how to speak aloud. All the stories about him mention the rough, deep, hoarseness of his unused voice.
One day his nearest neighbor, meaning to do him a kindness, told him with a rough good-will that he might as well quit hiding now, “Whatever ’tis you done, ’tis so long past now! And up here ... nobody from your part of the country, wherever ’tis, would ever be coming up here. And if they did they wouldn’t know you. Why, your own mother wouldn’t know you in them clothes, and with that white beard.”
It is said that Colonel Shays on hearing this, drew back and looked down at himself with a strange air of astonishment.
Apparently the advice stuck in his mind, for, some weeks after this, he decided to risk it, and to make the trip to Cambridge, the nearest town to those mountain settlements. Early one morning the people of the Sandgate valley were astonished to see the old man going down the trail of the valley whichled into the State road going to Cambridge. Well, that was something to talk about! He was going to town at last like anybody else.
Now, this happened a good many years after Shays’ Rebellion had failed, and the bitterness of the feeling about it had died down. Although Colonel Shays could not know this, most people had even forgotten all about him, and as for looking for him to arrest him, nobody would have dreamed of doing it. There were many other things in the world to think of by that time and although to himself Colonel Shays was still the dramatically hunted fugitive with every man’s hand against him, to other people he had begun to sink into the history-book paragraph, which he has since remained. His family and friends in Massachusetts had waited till the occasion seemed favorable, and then petitioned for his pardon, on the ground that he must be, if still living, an old man now, quite harmless, and that it would be only decent to let him come back to spend his last days in his own home; and if he were dead, his pardon would clear his family name, and straighten out certain complications about his property. At first they had not succeeded. People still remembered too vividly the treasonable attempt tooverturn the authority of the State, only just established and none too strong. But by and by, the pertinacity of the petitioners wore out the fading hostility to his name. He was proclaimed pardoned, and notices were sent to all American newspapers informing him that he could now return. This had happened a year before Colonel Shays had started down to Cambridge, but you may be sure that at that period no newspapers found their way to the Sandgate valley.
After a year had gone by, and no sign came from the fugitive, people generally thought him dead. But a fellow-townsman who had known him well by sight and who, some years after his flight, had married his youngest sister, volunteered to try to spread the news more widely than by newspaper. There had been a faint notion among his kinspeople that he had fled to Vermont, although they had taken care to keep this to themselves as long as he was an outlaw, and had now almost forgotten about it. Acting on this notion, Shays’ brother-in-law took the long journey on horseback up into Vermont. He entered the state at Bennington and slowly worked his way north, branching off at every practicable road. But nowhere did he find any one who had ever heard of any such man as his wife’s brother.Colonel Shays had hidden himself only too well.
The Massachusetts man began to think his errand a futile one, and prepared to turn back. But on a chance he rode down to Cambridge, just over the New York line. Cambridge was the nearest town to a number of small valley settlements in Vermont. He would ask there if any one had seen or heard of the man he was seeking. He knew that men from the remote outlying settlements came to Cambridge to do their trading. He arrived rather late one evening and as he was no longer young, and very much tired by his long and fruitless journey, he slept that night in the Cambridge Inn.
For the rest of the story there are plenty of details, for Colonel Shays told over and over exactly what happened and just how he felt, and why he acted as he did. It seared deep into him, and to the end of his days, he always showed a consuming agitation in speaking of it.
He walked along the road, the first road he had seen since the night so many years ago when he had fled along the roads in Massachusetts. It seemed like iron to his buckskin-shod feet. He walked slowly for this and other reasons. Every house which came into view along the road brought himup short with a jerk like a frightened horse. The instinct to hide, to trust himself in no man’s sight, had deformed his whole nature so that the bold leader of men halted, trembling and white-faced, at the sight of an ordinary farm-house. He forced himself to go on, to pass those sleeping homes, but after he had passed each one with his silent, stealthy wood-dweller’s tread, he quickened his pace and looked fearfully over his shoulder, expecting to see men run out after him with warrants for his arrest.
By the time he approached Cambridge, the nervous strain was telling on him. He was wet with sweat, and as tired as though he had been four times over the mountains. Only a few people were abroad as it was the breakfast hour. Partly from the old fear of years, partly from the mere habit of total isolation, every strange face was startling to him. He felt his knees weak under him and sat down on a bench in front of the kitchen door of the Cambridge Inn to get his breath. He had been a man of powerful will and strong self-control or he never could have lived through those terrible years of being buried alive, and he now angrily told himself there was nothing to fear in this remote little hamlet, where everybody was used to the sight of men in buckskins coming down to trade their fursfor gunpowder and salt. At the sight of all those human faces taking him back to the days of his human life, a deep yearning had come upon him to get back into the world of living men. He could have wept aloud and taken them into his arms like brothers. He was determined to master his tense nerves, to learn to move about among his fellow-men once more. In a moment, just a moment, he decided he would stand up and move casually over to the general store across the street where a lad was then unlocking the door. He would go in and make a purchase—the first in so many years!
He turned his head to glance into the kitchen of the Inn, and as he did so, the door opened, and a man came in, a traveler with a face familiar to him in spite of gray hair and wrinkles, a man he had known in Massachusetts, who knew him, and no friend of his, a man who had been on the other side in the Rebellion.
Colonel Shays’ heart gave a staggering leap. He caught at the door-jamb and shrank out of sight. He heard the other voice say, “I stepped in to ask if any of you know whether Colonel Shays was ever heard of in this....”
And then the old man, running madly for his life, fled back to his den in the woods.
A whole decade passed after this, before he happened to learn in a conversation overheard between two trappers, that for eleven priceless, irreplaceable years, he had been a free man.
When my pretty young cousin and god-daughter, Flossie, fell in love with Peter Carr, we all felt rather apprehensive about her future. But Flossie faced the facts with an honest, even a rather grim resolution which surprised us. She said with only a little tremor in her voice that she never expected to occupy the place in Peter’s heart which Eleanor Arling had taken forever, but that she loved him so much she was willing to take whatever he could give her. It wasn’thisfault, she said, with the quaintest chivalric defiance of us, if poor Peter hadn’t more to give. She thought a great love like that “was a noble thing in any one’s life, even if it did make them perfectly miserable.” If Miss Arling felt that personal happiness must be sacrificed for her art, why, that was an exalted attitude to take, and Peter’s sorrow was “sacred in her eyes”; and so on and so forth—the usual things that are said in such cases by people who are in sympathy with that sort of thing.
So they were married, with the understanding thatPeter could still go on worshiping the very sound of Eleanor Arling’s name and turning white when he came across a mention of her or of her pictures in the cabled news of the art world in Paris. Flossie was, so we all agreed, a good sport if there ever was one, and she stuck gamely to her bargain. She had transferred the big silver-framed photograph of Miss Arling from Peter’s bachelor quarters to the wall of their new living room, and she dusted it as conscientiously as she did the Botticelli Spring which I gave her for a wedding present. It was not easy for her. I have seen her flush deeply and set her lips hard as Peter looked up at the dusky brooding eyes shadowed by the casque of black braids. Flossie is one of the small, quick, humming-bird women, with nothing to set against Miss Arling’s massive classic beauty, and by her expression at such moments, I know she felt her defenselessness bitterly. But she never let Peter see how she felt. She had taken him, the darkness of his unrequited passion heavy on him, and if she ever regretted it, she gave no sign.
She flashed about the house, keeping it in perfect order, feeding Peter the most delicious food, and after the twins came, caring for them with no strain or nervous tension, with only a bright thankfulenjoyment of them that was warm on your heart like sunshine. Peter enjoyed his pretty home and devoted wife and lively babies and excellent food. He began to lay on flesh, and to lose the haggard, gray leanness which, just after Miss Arling had gone away, had made people turn and look after him in the street. Architecture is, even when you are busy and successful as Peter is, a rather sedentary occupation, offering no resistance to such cooking as Flossie’s. Peter’s skin began to grow rosy and sleek, his hair from being rough and bristling, began to look smooth and glossy. It was quite beautiful hair as long as it lasted; but as the years went on and the twins began to be big children, it, unlike the rest of Peter, began to look thinner. Peter with a bald spot was queer enough, but before he was thirty-five it was not a mere spot, but all the top of his head. We thought it very becoming to him as it gave him a beneficent, thoughtful, kindly look, like a philosopher. And his added weight was also distinctly an improvement to his looks. We often said to each other that nobody would ever have thought that crazy-looking boy would make such a nice-looking man.
Flossie had not changed an atom. Those tiny, slight women occasionally remain stationary inlooks as though they were in cold storage. She continued to worship Peter, and as he had made a good husband, we had nothing to say, although of course you never can understand what an excessively devoted wife sees in her husband, year after year. Flossie never mitigated in the least the extremity of her attention to Peter’s needs. When he was called away on a business trip she always saw that his satchel was packed with just what he would need; and she would have risen from her grave to put exactly the right amount of cream and sugar into his coffee.
The rest of us had forgotten all about Miss Arling’s connection with Peter, and had grown so used to the big photograph of the big, handsome woman that we did not see it any more, when one morning I found Flossie waiting for me as I came downstairs. She was very pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She was holding a newspaper in her clenched hand—the New York newspaper they had always taken on account of its full, gossipy “Happenings in the World of Art” column. Flossie opened it to that column now, and read in a dry voice: “American art lovers are promised a treat in the visit of the famous Eleanor Arling who arrives on theMauretania. Miss Arling plans an extensivetrip in her native country from which she has been absent for many years. She will visit New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco. Her keen artistic memory is shown by her intention of breaking her trip for a few days at ...” Flossie’s voice broke.... “She’s cominghere!” she gasped. Then collecting herself, she continued reading, “Miss Arling told our interviewer that she once passed some weeks there and remembers with pleasure a composition of cliff, water, and pine trees. She wishes to see it again.”
“Cliff, water, and pine trees,” repeated Flossie, her eyes blazing. “Of courseweknow it is nothing in the way of alandscapeshe is coming to see here!” I saw that her little fists were clenched. “I won’t stand it!” she cried, “I won’t stand it!”
But she looked horribly frightened all the same.
“What can you do?” I asked, sympathizing painfully with the poor little thing.
“I shall go to her the minute she reaches town.”
This threw me into a panic, “What good wouldthatdo?” I cried, alarmed at the prospect of scenes and goings-on.
“I don’t know! I don’t know! If I see her, I can think of some way to make her go away and not ...” she said wildly.
I hoped devoutly that she would settle down from this hysterical state of unreason, but three days after this she darted in, her face pinched, and told me that the time was now, and that she wanted me to be with her.... “I must havesomebody there,” she said piteously.
I was thoroughly alarmed, protested, tried desperately to back out, but found myself in Flossie’s car driving at a dangerous rate of speed towards Miss Arling’s hotel.
We were shown into the sitting room of her suite, and sat down, both breathing hard. I am fond of Flossie and I was very sorry for her, but I certainly wished her at the other end of the world just then. If I had not feared she would have rushed to lock me in, I would have tried to escape even then, but before I could collect myself, the door opened, and a stout, middle-aged woman came in. Her straight gray hair was bobbed and hanging in strings around a very red, glistening face. It was terribly hot weather and she had, I suppose, just came in from the long motor trip. She had a lighted cigarette in one hand. Her cushiony shapeless feet were thrust into a pair of Japanese sandals. She distinctly waddled as she walked. We supposed that she was Miss Arling’s companion, and I said, because Flossiewas too agitated to speak, “We wished to speak to Miss Arling, please.”
“I am Miss Arling,” she said casually. “Won’t you sit down?” I don’t know what I did, but I heard Flossie give a little squeak like a terrified rabbit. So I hurried on, saying desperately the first thing that came into my mind. “We heard you were coming ... in the newspapers ... we are old residents here ... a cliff, water, and pine trees.... I know the view ... we thought perhaps we might show you where....”
She was surprised a little at my incoherence and Flossie’s strange face, but she was evidently a much-experienced woman-of-the-world, whom nothing could surprise very much. “Oh, that’s very kind,” she said civilly, tossing her cigarette butt away and folding her strong hands on her ample knees, “But I went that way on the road coming into town. I remembered it perfectly I find. I used it as the background in a portrait, some years ago.”
She saw no reason for expanding the topic and now stopped speaking. I could think of nothing more to say. There was a profound silence. Our hostess evidently took us for tongue-tied, small-town people who do not know how to get themselves out of a room, and went on making conversationfor us with a vague, fluent, absent-minded kindness. “It’s very pleasant to be here again. I stayed here once, you know, a few weeks, many years ago, when I was young. We had quite a jolly time, I remember. There was a boy here ... a slim, dark, tall fellow, with the most perfect early-Renaissance head imaginable, quite like the Jeune Homme Inconnu. I’ve been trying all day to remember his name? Paul?... no. Walter?... it had two syllables it seems to me. Well, at any rate, he had two great beauties, the pale, flat white of his skin, and his great shaggy mass of dark hair. I’ve often used his hair in drawings, since. But I don’t suppose he looks like that now.”
Flossie spoke. She spoke with the effect of a revolver discharging a bullet, “Oh, yes, he does! He looks exactly like that still, only more mature, more interesting,” she said in an indignant tone.
“Ah, indeed,” said the painter with an accent of polite acquiescence. She sighed now and looked firmly at the clock. I rose and said since we could not be of use to her, we would leave her to rest.
She accompanied us to the door pleasantly enough, with the professional, impersonal courtesy of a celebrity.
Outside Flossie sprang into her car, leaving mestranded on the sidewalk. “I must get Peter away,” she said between her teeth.
“But not now, surely!” I cried.
“Now more than ever,” she flung back at me, as she whirled the car around.
Then as I stood open-mouthed, utterly at a loss, she drove the car close to the curb and leaning to my ear, whispered fiercely, “You don’t suppose I’d let him see how she looksnow.”
Miss Arling was gone before they returned from the two-day fishing-trip on which they started that night. I doubt if Peter ever heard that she had been in town.
The morning after their return, as soon as Peter had gone downtown, Flossie tore down the big photograph from the wall and flung it into the garbage can.
I noticed its absence some days later, when I went over to see them, and asked with a little apprehension, “What did Peter say when he found it gone?”
The strangest expression came into her face. She said in a low tone, “He has never even missed it.” And then she began to cry. As I looked at her, I saw that she had suddenly begun to show her age.
The thoughtful intellectual people around the fire were talking with animation and conviction, and I hoped the one business-man present, a relative of mine, was appreciating his privileges. It was not often that you could collect before your fire so many brilliant people representing so many important varieties of human activity; and when you had collected them it was not often that the talk fell on a subject big enough to draw out of each one his most hotly held conviction.
The subject was big enough in all conscience: nothing more or less than what is the matter with the world in general and with our country in particular. They all had different ideas about what the trouble is and about the best cure for it. The head nurse of the big City Hospital had started the ball rolling by some of her usual scornful remarks about the idiocy with which most people run their physical lives, and the super-idiocy, as she put it, “which makes them think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.”
“We’ll never have any health as a nation till wehave health as individuals,” she said. “See that the babies have clean milk; give the children plenty of space and time for out-door play; keep the young folks busy with athletic sports; run down all the diphtheria carriers and make it a misdemeanor not to be both vaccinated for small-pox and inoculated against typhoid ... and we’d be a nation such as the world never saw before.”
The political reformer was sincerely shocked by the narrowness of her views, and took her down in a long description of our villainously mismanaged government. “Much good mere physical health would do against our insane tolerance of such political ineptness and corruption!” he ended. “What we need is an awakening to the importance of government as every man’s personal business.”
Mrs. Maynard, the tragic-faced, eloquent Scotch expert on birth-control, now said in that low, bitter voice of hers which always makes every one stop to listen, “I would be obliged if you would point out to me how either physical health or the very best of municipal governments should alleviate in the slightest, the hideous ulcers of our so-called respectable married homes. When the very foundation of every-day human life is cemented in such unthinkable cruelty and suffering to defenseless women, Idon’t see how human beings with hearts in their bosoms can stop for an instant to consider such puerile non-essentials as athletics and party politics!”
The two or three happily married women in the group, startled by her fierce acrimony, were silent, feeling abashed by the grossly comfortable way we had managed to escape even a knowledge of the horrors which she so urgently assured us were universal. But Mr. Sharpless, the efficiency engineer, shook his head pityingly. “No, no, my dear lady, you can’t cure anything by going at it with the hammer and tongs of direct action. The economic key is the only one that fits all locks, opens all doors. The women of what we call the ‘upper classes’ do not suffer as you describe. You know they don’t. Now why do wecallthem the ‘upper classes’? Because they have money. You know it! Hence, if everybody had money ...! I tell you the thing to do is to reorganize our wretched old producing machinery till ever so much more is produced, ever so much more easily; and then invent distributing machinery that will ensure everybody’s getting his share. You may not think home life is much affected by the chemist in his laboratory, devising a way to get nitrogen chiefly from the air, or by the engineerstruggling with the problem of free power out of the tides or the sun. But it is. Just once putallwomen in the comfortable upper classes....”
He was interrupted here by a number of protesting voices, all speaking at once, the loudest of which, Professor Oleny’s finally drowned out the others, “... money without intelligence is the most fatal combination conceivable to man! Economic prosperity would spell speedy destruction without an overhauling of education.” He spun like a pinwheel for a moment, in a sparkling, devastating characterization of American schools, and of their deadening effect on the brains which passed through them, and began on a description of what schools should be.
But I had heard him lecture on that only the day before and, looking away from him, sought out the face of my cousin, the business-man. He had sat through it all, and now continued to sit through the free-for-all debate which followed, without opening his mouth except to emit an occasional thoughtful puff of cigar-smoke. His thoughts seemed to be with the billowing smoke-rings, which he sent towards the ceiling rather than with the great sweep of the subjects being discussed. I knew well enough that his silence did not come in the least from anyinability to follow the pyrotechnics about him, and I felt in his absent preoccupation something of the disdain, traditionally felt for talkers and reformers by men of action—when in the twentieth century and in the United States, you say “man of action” you mean of course, “business-man.”
It nettled me a little, and after the others had gone and he was finishing the end of his cigar, I said challengingly, “I suppose you think they are all off! I suppose you think that you know what is the matter with the world and that it is something quite different.”
He considered the end of his cigar meditatively and answered mildly, “I don’tthinkI know, IknowI know.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” I said, amused and ironic. “Would you mind telling me what it is?”
He shucked further down in his chair, tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling. “Well, if you really want to know, I’ll tell you a story that happened just lately in one of the biggest mail-order houses in this country. Of course, I know that you don’t fully appreciate the importance of mail-order houses, not being in business. And they’re too through and through American a growthfor people like your friends to-night to know about or talk about. But some of the best brains and real sure-enough genius in the United States have gone into creating the mail-order house idea. Maybe you might allow that to be a good enough reason for considering for a moment what goes on inside one of them ... what?
“As a matter of fact, the story isn’t just about a mail-order house, but about what is the matter with the world ... the very same subject your friends were debating. My story won’t have so many long words in it as they use, nor so many abstract ideas ... at least on the surface; but it won’t do you any harm to soak it away and think it over. I’ll tell you what,I’vebeen thinking it over this evening, as I listened to the talk. I only heard the story this morning, and it’s stuck in my head all day ... and especially this evening, as they were all talking about how to hit on some organization of society that would really fix things up, once and for all.”
He paused for a moment, stretched his legs out straight before him and put his hands into his pockets. “If I really told you all you ought to know, to understand the background and setting of the story, I’d be sitting here to-morrow morning still talking. So I won’t try, I’ll just tell you the plainstory as it happened. You try to imagine the background: an organization as big, as complicated, with as many chances for waste motion, or overorganization, or poor organization as society itself. And not only power and glory, butcash, plenty of hard cash as immediate reward for the successful use of brains.
“Well now, into that arrives a smart youngster full of enthusiasm for making things run better, just like your friends to-night; dead sure just like them thathehas the key; with lots of pep and brains and interest in his job, pushing his way right up from the stenographer’s desk, with his eye on the Manager’s. Do you get him? Well, he’s laid awake nights, thinking how to improve the organization, partly because he wanted to improve it, partly because he wanted to get the credit for it ... just like your friends again. And because he is a smart young fellow as keen as a razor, he soon figured out a way to increase business, to increase it like a house afire, and to handle it once it was increased.
“He went to the big man of the concern and laid out his plans. Now, you’d better believe the big men in any organization always have a glad hand out for anybody in the concern who’ll show interest and brains; and the boy got treated like a king. Sure, he could try out his plan! On a small scaleat first, to see how it would work. Let him take a county out of each of six selected states, and concentrate on them. And, sure, yes, indeed, he could have anything in the organization he wanted, to make his try with.
“So the boy went away bounding like a rubber-ball and planned his campaign. I won’t bother you by trying to tell you what it was.... It wouldn’t interest you, and anyhow you couldn’t understand the business details. It was a mixture of intensive publicity, special attention paid to detail, a follow-up system that meant personal care and personal acquaintance with the tastes of customers, and intimate knowledge of what past orders from customers had been. To get the right kind of assistants he went through the various departments of that big organization and hand-picked his staff; the very best of the publicity men, the smartest of the order-clerks, the brightest of the stenographers. And then they just tore in and ate up the territory they were practising on! They plowed it with publicity, and sowed it with personal service, they reaped, by George, a harvest that would put your eye out! Business increased by a twenty-five per cent, by a fifty per cent! At the end of a year, the boy, too big for his skin, paraded into the Manager-in-chief’soffice with statistics to prove a seventy-five per cent increase over any business ever done there before! Well, that was simply grand, wasn’t it? Yes, the Manager would certainly sit up and take some notice of a system that had accomplishedthat!”
My cousin had finished his cigar, now threw the butt into the fire-place, and sat looking at the embers with a somber expression. I couldn’t see anything to look somber about. Indeed I found myself stifling a yawn. What did I care how much business a mail-order house did or how they did it?
My cousin answered my thought, “Don’t you see that the story is all about the same general idea you were all discussing this evening? It is about getting things done more intelligently, more efficiently, about avoiding fool mistakes, about rising to big opportunities, about learning how to scramble over the obstacles that prevent human beings from being intelligent and efficient and effective. Now, then, at the first take-off, the boy had soared right over those obstacles, hadn’t he? But the Manager-in-chief knew a thing or two about them, too. In fact he had grown bald and gray trying to climb over those very same obstacles. But you can be sure the boy didn’t once think that his chief might be just as anxious as he was to have things done better.Boys never do....” There was a pause, while my cousin considered the embers moodily.
“So, by and by, after the boy had fizzed the place all foamy with his wonderful statistics, the bald-headed, gray-haired Manager began to come down to brass tacks, and to inquire just how the thing had been done. The boy was crazy to tell him, went into every detail; and the Manager listened hard.
“And then he shook his old bald gray head. He said: ‘Young fellow, you listen to me. It takessenseto run that system of yours. You’re counting on everybody, from you right down to the boy that works your mimeograph, paying attention to what he’s doing, using his brains and using them every minute. If everybody doesn’t, you won’t get your results, will you? Now, consider this, how did you get hold of a staff that would have any brains to use and would use them?Youknow how! We let you run a fine tooth comb through our whole organization, thousands and thousands of employees. You took out of every department the very best they had; three or four out of hundreds, and they are the only ones out of thousands who amount to anything after years of training at our expense. And then you put your very best licks into it yourself. Now, who are you? You’re the firststenographer we’ve had in ten years, who took enough interest in the business as a whole to have a single idea about it. You tell me something. Suppose we reorganized along your lines, who would I get to run all the other departments and keep up the high-speed efficiency and red-hot ambition you’ve shown, which is theonlyreason your scheme works? You know as well as I do I can’t find anotherone, let alone the eighty or ninety I’d have to have, if we tried to do business on your plan. And if I could—supposing for the sake of argument that an angel from Heaven served such department heads to me on a silver platter, where am I going to find staffs to work with them. You’vegotall the really efficient employees we’ve been able to rake in from the whole United States in the past twenty years.
“‘Did you ever have to work with a plain, ordinary six-for-a-quarter stenographer, such as the business colleges turn out, such as you mostly get? You’ve built your machine so that only brains and sense will run it. How long would it take a couple of hundred of such stenogs to smash your system into splinters? Did you ever have to try and get work out of the average dressy young employee who puts ninety-eight and a half per cent of what gray matter he has on his neckties and the bets he madeon the horse-races, and the little flier he took on stocks; and one and a half per cent of his brains on his work when somebody higher up is looking at him? How do you suppose you can persuade a crowd of light-weights like that to care a whoop whether Mrs. Arrowsmith in Cohoes, N. Y., is satisfied with the color of the linoleum rug she bought?’”
My cousin looked at me hard, and again answered an unspoken thought of mine. “Are you wondering why hadn’t the boy interrupted long before this, to hold up his end, if he was really so enthusiastic as I’ve said? This is the reason. Though he hadn’t let on to the Manager, he really had had plenty of troubles of his own, already, keeping even his hand-picked crew up to the scratch. Many’s the time he’d been ready to murder them! Drive as hard as he might, he couldn’t keep them steadily up to the standard he’d set for his work. He’d noticed that. Oh, yes, of course, he’d noticed it all right, and he’d been furious about it. But until that minute, he hadn’t thought of it—what it meant; and the minute the Manager spoke, he knew in his bones the old man was right. And he felt things come down with a smash.
“It pretty nearly knocked him silly. He neversaid a word. And the old bald-head looked at him, and saw that in the last three minutes the boy had grown up ... he’d grown up! That hurts, hurts more than any visit to the dentist. I know how he felt; probably the Manager knew how he felt. Anybody who’s ever tried to get anything done has run his head into that stone wall.
“Well, he was sorry for the kid, and tried to let him down easy. He went on talking, to give the boy time to catch his breath. ‘You understand, I’d like, maybe more than you, to reorganize the whole ball o’ wax, on any lines that would work better. And there are lots of good points in your plan that wecanuse, plenty of ’em. This invention of yours about cross-indexing orders now, that is a splendid idea. I believe we could install that ... it looksalmostfool proof! And maybe we might run a special mailing-list along the lines you’ve worked out. Lemme look at it again. Well, I guess the mistakes the stenogs would makemightbe more than offset by the extra publicity ... maybe!
“But the lad was feeling too cut up to pay any attention to these little poultices. He stood there, and almost fell in pieces, he was thinking so hard. Not very cheerful thoughts, at that. When he could get his breath he leaned over the table andsaid in a solemn, horrified voice, ‘Good God, Mr. Burton, why then ... why then....’ He was all but plumb annihilated by the hardness of the fact that had just hit him on the head. He broke out, ‘What’s theuseof inventing a better system as long as ... as long as ...?’ he got it out finally. ‘Why, Mr. Burton, there just aren’t enough folks with sense to go around!’”
My cousin stood up, moved to the hall, secured his hat and looked in at me through the door-way. “Poor kid!” he commented pityingly. “Just think of his never having thought of that before!”
I never saw my Uncle Ellis because he died before I was born, but I heard a great deal about him when I was a child. His stepdaughter married one of our fellow-townsmen, and lived next door to us when I was a little girl, and her mother, my great-aunt, Uncle Ellis’ third wife, lived with her. Whatever Cousin Ruth did not say about her stepfather, Aunt Molly supplied. The two women spent the rest of their lives hating him, and for his sake hated, distrusted and despised all men.
The gruesome impressions of married life which float through the air to most little girls, came to me from their half-heard and half-understood stories of Uncle Ellis. He had killed his first two wives, they said, just as much as though he had taken an ax to them, and only his opportune death had saved Aunt Molly from the same fate. His innumerable children—I would never venture to set down how many he had, all in legal marriage—feared and detested him and ran away from home as soon as they could walk. He was meanness itself, secret,sneaking meanness, the sort of man who would refuse his wife money for a wringer to do the family wash, and spend five dollars on a box of cigars; he would fly into a black rage over a misplaced towel, and persecute the child who had misplaced it, till she was ready to commit suicide; and then open his arms with a spectacular smile to the new baby of a parishioner. After mistreating his wife till she could hardly stand, she used to hear him holding forth in a boys’ meeting, exhorting them to a chivalric attitude towards women.
Aunt Molly died long ago, firing up to the last in vindictive reminiscences of her husband. Ruth is dead now, too, in the fullness of time. I am a middle-aged woman, and probably the only one now alive who ever heard those two talk about Uncle Ellis; and I had forgotten him. If he stayed at all in my memory it was with the vague, disembodied presence of a character in a book.
About a month ago, I accepted an invitation to speak at a convention in a town in the middle-west which I had never seen, but the name of which seemed slightly familiar; perhaps, I thought, because I had learned it in a geography lesson long ago. But when I arrived I understood the reason. It wasthe town where for many years Uncle Ellis had been pastor of the church. At the railway station, as I stepped down on the platform, one of the older women in the group who met me, startled me by saying, “We have been especially anxious to see you because of your connection with our wonderful Dr. Ellis Randolph. I was a young girl when he died, but I can truly say that my whole life has been influenced for good by the words and example of that saintly man.”
The elderly man beside her added, “You will find many here who will say the same. In the formative period of our town’s history he made an indelible impression for good.”
They took me to his church, where a large bronze tablet set forth his virtues and his influence. They showed me the Ellis Randolph Memorial Library. I was shown the public playground which he conceived a generation before any one else thought of such a thing. But what made the deepest impression on me were the men and women who came to shake my hand because I was Uncle Ellis’ niece, because they wanted to testify to the greatness of his value in their lives. The minister of the town, a white-haired man, told me with a deep note of emotion in his voice, that Dr. Randolph had done morethan merely save his life; in his wayward youth he had saved his soul alive. The banker told me that he had heard many celebrated orators, but never any one who could go straight to the heart like Dr. Randolph. “I often tell my wife that she ought to be thankful to Dr. Randolph for a lecture on chivalry to women which he gave to us boys, at an impressionable moment of our lives.”
And the old principal of the school said, “Not a year goes by that I do not thank God for sending that righteous man to be an example to my youth. He left behind him many human monuments to his glory.”
What did I say to them? Oh, I didn’t say anything to them. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
When I was a faculty-child living in a middle-western university town we were all thrilled by the news that the energetic Chancellor of the University had secured as head of the Department of Chemistry a noted European scientist. Although still young he had made a name for himself by some important discoveries in organic chemistry. We talked about those discoveries as fluently, and understood about them as thoroughly as we all now discuss and understand the theories of Professor Einstein.
Professor Behrens was not only a remarkable chemist, so we heard, but a remarkable teacher and a man of wide sympathies and democratic ideals. It was the candid period in American life, when, especially in the west, the word “Europe” was pronounced with a very special intonation, of which Henry James’ wistful admiration was the quintessence. It was the time in American university life when Germany was the goal toward which all our younger scholars ran their fastest race. Yet here was Professor Behrens, leaving a University not only European but German, from which our youngerprofessors were proud to have a Ph.D. and deliberately choosing our new, raw, young institution for the sake of the free, untrammeled, democratic life in America. It went to our heads!
Passages in his letter of acceptance were read to my mother by my father, who had borrowed the letter from the Chancellor. “I have a family of children and as they grow older I am more and more aware of the stifling, airless stagnation of European life. I want them to know something bigger and freer than will ever come to them in this Old World of rigid caste lines and fixed ideas. My wife and I, too, wish to escape from the narrowness of this provincial town where an arrogant young lieutenant swaggering about in his gold-braided white broadcloth uniform is much higher in social rank than the most learned and renowned member of the University faculty; where a rich lumber-merchant, brutal and ignorant, can buy his way into political position and parade about with sash and gold chain and the insignia of the office of Mayor.”
We were all righteously indignant over such elements of life in Europe, and quite exalted in our certainty that the distinguished immigrant would find nothing like that in our midst. The sole and only representative of the military caste was thelieutenant who drilled the university battalion, and he was a most unassuming young American who never on any occasion wore white broadcloth, put on his plain dark-blue uniform as seldom as possible, and for the most part wore a pepper-and-salt business suit and a derby hat. Since there were no trees on the Western plains, there was no equivalent to the iniquitous lumber merchant, the nearest approach being a man who had made a good deal of money out of lucky guesses in real estate. But he would have dropped dead before putting on a sash and a gold chain.
So we awaited the Behrens full of pride and pleasure. When they arrived, everybody in the faculty gave receptions and lunch-parties for them, and all we children rejoiced in the unlimited leavings of fried chicken (it was in September), ice cream, and cake, which were at our disposition after these “functions,” as the Faculty ladies called them. Although surprisingly unceremonious as to table manners, the Behrens were as nice as we expected to find them; and they were evidently delighted with the warm-hearted, open-handed good nature of Americans, by the cordiality of their reception (which seemed quite to amaze them) by the wide-open doors which led anywhere they might wish to go, by the absence ofclass distinction, and by the generosity with which America supported universities, hospitals, libraries, and public schools. When the University opened, Professor Behrens threw himself into his teaching and soon became one of the favorite professors. He had a song sung about him at the winter concert of the Glee Club; and the Junior year-book was dedicated to him in the spring. By that time the Behrens children, who were in the eighth, fifth, and third grades of my public school were no longer to be distinguished from the rest of us, running and yelling on the hard-beaten earth of the playground, and thoroughly acquainted with duck-on-a-rock, prisoner’s base, and run-sheep-run. Julie and I were classmates in the fifth grade that year, and the next and the next.
But just as we were about to pass together into the exalted rank of the eighth grade, Professor Behrens received a call to be Rector (Julie explained to me that this had nothing to do with a church, but was the same as our Chancellor) of a university in his own country.
It seemed such an advancement to be promoted from Professor to Chancellor that it was no surprise to have him accept, and to see Mrs. Behrens begin hastily to pack up the family belongings. Butwhat did surprise us was the sudden revelation brought out by this event, of a great home-sickness on the part of the Behrens to get back to a “civilized country.” This was one of the phrases Julie overheard her father saying to her mother, which she repeated to me, and I to my parents. A faculty circle gets its news by about the same channels as an army post or a village sewing circle. So by the time this remark had reached my parents it did not surprise them. The Behrens, although still heartily grateful for all the kindness that had been shown them, although still feeling a lively affection for the good-hearted qualities in American life, could not conceal their immense relief at the prospect of the change. Professor Behrens discussed the question with the open frankness of a scientist before a new phenomenon: “I had no idea, till I had to go without them, how vital to civilization are the finer shades, the polish, the stability, the decorum, which comes only with long life of a society in an old country. I had never thought of them, had always supposed, of course, they were to be found everywhere. It is not that I blame America for not having them ... nothing but time can give them ... but there is no denying that they give a different color to life, the same difference of color there is between campingout in a cave, ever so fine and airy and open a cave, and living in a well-ordered house with the appurtenances of civilization. There is a certain something which springs up from such niceties of life.... I can hardly wait to get home, and give a real dinner with well-trained servants, and cultivated, established guests who have had a social position for so long that it is a part of them. The crudeness, the abruptness, the roughness in human intercourse here! And the total lack on the part of people in the lower classes of any sense of the fitness of things! Theconductor on the street-carslapped me on the back the other day!”
So we gave them a grand good-by reception in the gymnasium, and we faculty-children fairly swam in lemonade and wallowed in left-over cake. The faculty presented Professor Behrens with a beautifully bound edition of Emerson, and Mrs. Behrens with a little pearl pendant; and then they went away, and we supposed we would never see them again.
Julie and I corresponded once in a while as children do, the letters growing less frequent as Julie evidently began to forget her English. Mrs. Behrens wrote back a round-robin letter or two to be passed about among her faculty friends, one of themdescribing the splendid, ceremonious, Old-World way in which Professor Behrens was inducted into his new position. She spoke with special pride of the way in which both the military and municipal authorities of the town had turned out to do him honor, the soldiers, officers, and the Mayor of the town marching at the head of the procession, the latter in his bright sash and gold chain of office. It seemed to us we had heard something about that Mayor before, but we could not remember what it was.
And then Julie forgot her English altogether, and Mrs. Behrens’ letters dwindled and there were none.
I got on through the eighth grade and went into the University prep-school. After three years there, my father was called to a better position in another State University. As we were settling ourselves in the new home, what should we hear but that a distinguished European scientist was about to be added to the faculty, none other than Professor Behrens.
Foreigners, even distinguished ones, were more common in American faculties then than they had been seven years before; there was a large German Department, with many native German instructors; and the University was further east and hence not so open-heartedly welcoming. There was, therefore,no such stir over the newcomers as on their first arrival although every one was very nice to them and the President’s wife had Mrs. Behrens stand by her in the receiving line at the first of the faculty receptions. But the Behrens did not seem to notice that there was anything lacking in their treatment. You never saw people more delighted than they were to be back in America.
“It was worse than I remembered,” Professor Behrens told my father. “After an experience of the free, breezy, self-respecting life in America it was simply unendurable. Suffocating, simply suffocating! With the most ridiculous caste spirit. Rusted to a stand-still with cock-sure conservatism! An instant, hermetic closing up of every pore at any mention of new possibilities for human nature, or for human organizations. And such absurd, stiff, artificial rules of conduct and precedence in society! Let me tell you an episode which will seem almost incredible to you, but which really decided us to come back here. At a garden party my wife ...mywife!... seeing there the wife of the General commanding the troops in the town garrison and knowing her quite well, stepped across the lawn to speak to her, one lady to another. Will you believe it, because she had not waited till the General’s wifehad summoned her to her circle, my poor wife received a cold, unrecognizing stare, her outstretched hand was left hanging in the air, and the General’s wife turned her back on her. And when I was furious and protested, I was made uncomfortable, seriously uncomfortable!”
And Mrs. Behrens told my mother she had been horrified by the cold-hearted envy, hatred and meanness which lay underneath the polished manners of many of the people in their circle. “They do not wish you well. They wish you ill. They simply have no conception of the meaning of that American word ‘friendly.’”
Julie was ready for the University, as I was, and we entered the Freshman class together. She was a very pretty girl, one of the brown-haired Teutons, who are so much finer and more neatly finished than the blonde ones, and she had her fair share of popularity. We were taken into the same fraternity, studied together, and were much in each other’s homes. I soon saw that the Behrens home was not altogether a light-hearted one. After the first flush of pleasure at being back had passed, a cloud of depression settled over them. Their sojourn in a more finished and stable, low-toned and nuanced civilization had put them all out of key for the loud-mouthed,cheerful American tune. They found it shrill and noisy, and often stopped their ears against it. Heavens, they had not remembered that American trades-people were so utterly mannerless! Nor that all Americans were so blackly ignorant of the arts! They had no interest in organized athletics, and very soon developed an active hostility for football because of the indisputable fact that the university world was so occupied with it, that nothing serious was done in classes until after Thanksgiving when the last game was played. The Behrens were musical and nobody in the city cared for music except the German-Americans in their shabby quarter at the other end of town, and they were fat grocers, saloon-keepers or foremen in factories, people with whom the Behrens could not dream of associating. They were really very miserable and lonely and disillusioned.
When we were Seniors there came a wonderful offer from Germany: a very high Government position for Professor Behrens. I heard them discussing this with a certain indecision which I had never heard in their remarks before. They knew very well what was before them in Germany. But, oh, what was about them here! The very servant problem alone made it impossible for civilized beings toorganize a livable existence in America. Not to speak of a thousand other, raw, unfinished edges which rasped and fretted them at every turn.
They finally decided to go, but their packing-up was conducted in a very different spirit from the first one I had seen. They had begun to divine that there was, in this business of looking for the ideal country, something more than meets the eye.
I happened to visit them a few years after this, just before I was married, and found them much dissatisfied with European life. Mrs. Behrens was nettled and fretted by the question of social precedence which was, so it seemed to her, constantly used to humiliate her; and the children were stifling in the restricted, fenced-in, tyrannically regulated corner of life which was theirs. Julie took me off for a long walk one afternoon and told me something of her opinion of European young men, especially the officers whom for the most part she met in society, as they were the ones who had most leisure for afternoon and evening parties. “I can just tell you one thing,” she said with a grim accent and a hardset jaw, “I’ll never marry a European, if I die an old maid!”
But later on, when her mother and she wereexchanging reminiscences about the difficulties of American housekeeping, Julie cried out, “Oh, I couldn’t keep house in a country where there is no servant class!”
Mrs. Behrens sighed, “Yes, I know, but just remember the bath-rooms, and the vacuum cleaners, and the hot water.”
It seemed to me, as I looked about on their much traveled chairs and tables that I saw them patiently making ready for another journey.
One of my mother’s distant cousins was left a widow, years ago with no assets but the house she lived in, a savings-bank account, and a very pretty daughter, then eighteen years old. Cousin Henrietta’s decisions were always prompt. It took her about six weeks to sell the house, draw the money from the savings-bank and take her daughter to Europe. I think her intention probably was to give Ella the benefit of a year’s polish, and bring her back to the home market, her value enhanced by the reputation of her Continental “Education.” But the impossible happened, as energetic women like Cousin Henrietta can occasionally make it happen. Through some chance connection at the pension in Florence, they made the acquaintance of a wealthy, middle-aged Tuscan, not the traditional European nobleman at all, but a swarthy, well-preserved man of the people, risen to wealth by his own exertions. He was presented to Ella and lost his head entirely over her pale blonde prettiness. He was fifty-five. They were married on her nineteenth birthday.
Cousin Henrietta shared their married life with them, of course, although this did not last very long. Signor Cattaneo, as not infrequently happens to elderly husbands of very young wives, tried to renew his youth too rapidly. He danced all one evening with his bride, an exercise which his great bulk made extremely violent for him; stepped out upon a balcony with her, in a cool, damp wind, and died of double pneumonia at the end of a week.
Cousin Henrietta still in charge of affairs, at once brought home to the God’s country of Chicago, the lovely, wealthy little widow. They set up housekeeping on a grand scale with the money which was sent to them every month from the honest, conscientious Tuscan agent in Florence. The agent got it from the honest, conscientious Tuscan peasants, and they got it out of their bodies, sweating and toiling endlessly long hours in all weathers. Ella and Cousin Henrietta had everything they could think of, that money could buy; and presently Ella, wanting something new, bought herself a husband. He did not turn out very well: Ella had done exactly as she pleased for too long to bother with a husband, and after a time they separated, though there was never any legal action taken, since Cousin Henrietta was an extremely orthodox church member, whodisapproved of any laxity in the relations between the sexes. Divorce seemed to her such a laxity.
Then Ella wanted to do as other wealthy and fashionable ladies do and learn how to ride. They bought, as usual, the best that money could buy, and this time it was a little too good for Ella; for the high-spirited thorough-bred took fright one day and, disregarding Ella’s amateur efforts to control him, ran away, threw Ella off and broke her poor little neck.
Cousin Henrietta was horrified and scandalized to find that now Ella’s remote but still legal husband would inherit a very large proportion of the Italian property. Her whole soul and being rose up wildly in an understandable and instinctive protest against this iniquity. She simply could not believe that the law would countenance such a barefaced theft of other people’s property. She filled the newspapers and the courts with her clamor and made us all ashamed of the family name. But that was all the good it did her. Ella had not dreamed of making a will; Cousin Henrietta’s son-in-law had no reason to love his wife’s mother, and could see no reason why she had any more right to that fortune than he had. Neither can I, when it comes to that.
Ella’s husband was rather dazed by his good luckand made all haste to marry. But he did not make quite haste enough. That was one of the years when the influenza was going the rounds, and he died of it two days before his wedding, in spite of all the care of three trained nurses and a whole battery of consulting physicians. I never knew what became of his fiancée, but always wondered if she did not perhaps go to live with Cousin Henrietta, as being the only person who would entirely sympathize with her.
So the Cattaneo fortune passed to the casual next-of-kin, who happened to be the only nephew of Ella’s husband, a young clerk of twenty. The honest conscientious agent in Florence, who was paid a small annual salary for his services, and who would have died before touching a penny not his, went on administering the Italian estate which was growing steadily in value all the time, and paying more income. He sent that income over to the new name and address in America. He was upheld in his meager, narrow, difficult life by feeling that he was living up to the fine old Tuscan code of honor; and he often told his children, who lacked schooling and opportunities he could have given them if he had had more money, that the best inheritance a father can leave his children is an unblemished name.
The children of Ella’s husband’s nephew have something much more substantial as an inheritance than that. For the young man with a fortune was married by a competent, ambitious girl as soon as he came of age. They have three children, who learned very young how to spend a great deal of money with great speed. The money which the Italian day-laborers and small-farmers earn by patient endurance of hardships, by eating rough, poor, scanty food, by working their pregnant wives to the day before their confinements, by taking their children out of school before they can read, is sent month by month to America and spent in buying a new fur set for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s young-lady daughter, a ten-thousand-dollar racing-car for Ella’s husband’s nephew’s seventeen-year-old son, and to keep Ella’s husband’s nephew from doing anything more strenuous than clipping the end of his cigars.