The Tired Business Man
The Tired Business Man
SMITH flashed upon me unexpectedly in Berlin. It was nearly a year ago, just before the summer invasion of tourists, and I was reading the letters of a belated mail over my coffee, when I was aroused by an unmistakable American voice demanding water. I turned and beheld, in a sunny alcove at the end of the restaurant, my old friend Smith who had dropped his newspaper for the purpose of arraigning a frightened and obtuse waiter for his inability to grasp the idea that persons in ordinary health, and reasonably sane, do, at times, use water as a beverage. It was not merely the alarmed waiter and all his tribe that Smith execrated: he swept Prussia and the German Empire into the limbo of lost nations. Mrs. Smith begged him to be calm, offering the plausible suggestion that the waiter couldn’t understand a word of English. She appealed to a third member of the breakfast party, a younglady, whose identity had puzzled me for a moment. It seemed incredible that this could be the Smiths’ Fanny, whom I had dandled on my knee in old times,—and yet a second glance convinced me that the young person was no unlikely realization of the promise of the Fanny who had ranged our old neighborhood at “home” and appalled us, even at five, by her direct and pointed utterances. If the child may be mother to the woman, this was that identical Fanny. I should have known it from the cool fashion in which she dominated the situation, addressing the relieved waiter in his own tongue, with the result that he fled precipitately in search of water—and ice, if any, indeed, were obtainable—for the refreshment of these eccentric Americans.
When I crossed to their table I found Smith still growling while he tried to find his lost place in the New York stock market in his London newspaper. My appearance was the occasion for a full recital of his wrongs, in that amusing hyperbole which is so refreshing in all the Smiths I know. He begged me to survey the table, that I might enjoy his triumph in havingbeen able to surmount local prejudice and procure for himself what he called a breakfast of civilized food. The continental breakfast was to him an odious thing: he announced his intention of exposing it; he meant to publish its iniquity to the world and drive it out of business. Mrs. Smith laughed nervously. She appeared anxious and distraught and I was smitten with pity for her. But there was a twinkle in Miss Smith’s eye, a smile about her pretty lips, that discounted heavily the paternal fury. She communicated, with a glance, a sense of her own attitude toward her father’s indignation: it did not matter a particle; it was merely funny, that was all, that her father, who demanded and commanded all things on his own soil, should here be helpless to obtain a drop of cold water with which to slake his thirst when every one knew that he could have bought the hotel itself with a scratch of the pen. When Smith asked me to account for the prevalence of hydrophobia in Europe it was really for the joy of hearing his daughter laugh. And it is well worth anyone’s while to evoke laughter from Fanny. For Fanny is one of the prettiest girlsin the world, one of the cleverest, one of the most interesting and amusing.
As we lingered at the table (water with ice having arrived and the Stars and Stripes flying triumphantly over the pitcher), I was brought up to date as to the recent history of the Smiths. As an old neighbor from home they welcomed me to their confidence. The wife and daughter had been abroad a year with Munich as their chief base. Smith’s advent had been unexpected and disturbing. Rest and change having been prescribed, he had jumped upon a steamer and the day before our encounter had joined his wife and daughter in Berlin. They were waiting now for a conference with a German neurologist to whom Smith had been consigned—in desperation, I fancied—by his American doctor. Mrs. Smith’s distress was as evident as his own irritation; Miss Fanny alone seemed wholly tranquil. She ignored the apparent gravity of the situation and assured me that her father had at last decided upon a long vacation. She declared that if her father persistedin his intention of sailing for New York three weeks later, she and her mother would accompany him.
While we talked a cablegram was brought to Smith; he read it and frowned. Mrs. Smith met my eyes and shook her head; Fanny frugally subtracted two thirds of the silver Smith was leaving on the tray as a tip and slipped it into her purse. It was a handsome trinket, the purse; Fanny’s appointments all testified to Smith’s prosperity and generosity. I remembered these friends so well in old times, when they lived next door to me in the Mid-Western town which Smith, ten years before, had outgrown and abandoned. His income had in my observation jumped from two to twenty thousand, and no one knew now to what fabulous height it had climbed. He was one of the men to reckon with in the larger affairs of “Big Business.” And here was the wife who had shared his early struggles, and the child born of those contented years, and here was Smith, with whom in the old days I had smoked my after-breakfast cigar on the rear platform of a street car in our town, that we then thought the“best town on earth,”—here were my old neighbors in a plight that might well tax the renowned neurologist’s best powers.
What had happened to Smith? I asked myself; and the question was also in his wife’s wondering eyes. And as we dallied, Smith fingered his newspaper fretfully while I answered his wife’s questions about our common acquaintances at “home” as she still called our provincial capital.
It was not my own perspicacity but Fanny’s which subsequently made possible an absolute diagnosis of Smith’s case, somewhat before the cautious German specialist had announced it. From data supplied by Fanny I arrived at the conclusion that Smith is the “tired business man,” and only one of a great number of American Smiths afflicted with the same malady,—bruised, nerve-worn victims of our malignant gods of success. The phrase, as I shall employ it here, connotes not merely the type of iron-gray stock broker with whom we have been made familiar by our American drama of business and politics, but his brother (also prematurely gray and a trifle puffy under the eyes)found sedulously burning incense before Mammon in every town of one hundred thousand souls in America. I am not sure, on reflection, that he is not visible in thriving towns of twenty-five thousand,—or wherever “collateral” and “discount” are established in the local idiom and the cocktail is a medium of commercial and social exchange. The phenomena presented by my particular Smith are similar to those observed in those lesser Smiths who are the restless and dissatisfied biggest frogs in smaller puddles. Even the farmers are tired of contemplating their glowing harvests and bursting barns and are moving to town to rest.
Is it possible that tired men really wield a considerable power and influence in these American States so lately wrested from savagery? Confirmation of this reaches us through many channels. In politics we are assured that the tired business man is a serious obstructionist in the path of his less prosperous and less weary brethren engaged upon the pursuit of happiness and capable of enjoying it in successes thatwould seem contemptibly meagre to Smith. Thousands of Smiths who have not yet ripened for the German specialists are nevertheless tired enough to add to the difficulty of securing so simple a thing as reputable municipal government. It is because of Smith’s weariness and apathy that we are obliged to confess that no decent man will accept the office of mayor in our American cities.
In my early acquaintance with Smith—in those simple days when he had time to loaf in my office and talk politics—an ardent patriotism burned in him. He was proud of his ancestors who had not withheld their hand all the way from Lexington to Yorktown, and he used to speak with emotion of that dark winter at Valley Forge. He would look out of the window upon Washington Street and declare, with a fine sweep of the hand, that “We’ve got to keep all this; we’ve got to keep it for these people and for our children.” He had not been above sitting as delegate in city and state conventions, and he had once narrowly escaped a nomination for the legislature. The industry he owned and managed was a small affair and he knew all theemployees by name. His lucky purchase of a patent that had been kicked all over the United States before the desperate inventor offered it to him had sent his fortunes spinning into millions within ten years. Our cautious banker who had vouchsafed Smith a reasonable guarded credit in the old days had watched, with the mild cynical smile peculiar to conservative bank presidents, the rapid enrollment of Smith’s name in the lists of directors of some of the solidest corporations known to Wall Street. It is a long way from Washington Street to Wall Street, and men who began life with more capital than Smith never cease marveling at the ease with which he effected the transition. Some who continue where he left them in the hot furrows stare gloomily after him and exclaim upon the good luck that some men have. Smith’s abrupt taking-off would cause at least a momentary chill in a thousand safety-vault boxes. Smith’s patriotism, which in the old days, when he liked to speak of America as the republic of the poor, and when he knew most of the “Commemoration Ode” and all of the “Gettysburg Address” by heart, is far moreconcrete than it used to be. When Smith visits Washington during the sessions of Congress the country is informed of it. It is he who scrutinizes new senators and passes upon their trustworthiness. And it was Smith who, after one of these inspections, said of a member of our upper chamber that, “He’s all right; he speaks our language,” meaning not the language of the “Commemoration Ode” or the “Gettysburg Address,” but a recondite dialect understood only at the inner gate of the money-changers.
No place was ever pleasanter in the old days than the sitting-room of Smith’s house. It was the coziest of rooms and gave the lie to those who have maintained that civilization is impossible around a register. A happy, contented family life existed around that square of perforated iron in the floor of the Smiths’ sitting-room. In the midst of arguments on life, letters, the arts, politics, and what-not, Smith would, as the air grew chill toward midnight, and when Mrs. Smith went to forage for refreshments in the pantry, descend to the cellar torenew the flagging fires of the furnace with his own hands. The purchase of a new engraving, the capture of a rare print, was an event to be celebrated by the neighbors. We went to the theatre sometimes, and kept track of the affairs of the stage; and lectures and concerts were not beneath us. Mrs. Smith played Chopin charmingly on a piano Smith had given her for a Christmas present when Fanny was three. They were not above belonging to our neighborhood book and magazine club, and when they bought a book it was a good one. I remember our discussions of George Meredith and Hardy and Howells, and how we saved Stockton’s stories to enjoy reading them in company around the register. A trip to New York was an event for the Smiths in those days as well as for the rest of us, to be delayed until just the right moment for seeing the best plays, and an opera, with an afternoon carefully set apart for the Metropolitan Museum. We were glad the Smiths could go, even if the rest of us couldn’t; for they told us all so generously of their adventures when they came back! They kept a “horse and buggy,” andMrs. Smith used to drive to the factory with Fanny perched beside her to bring Smith home at the end of his day’s work.
In those days the Smiths presented a picture before which one might be pardoned for lingering in admiration. I shall resent any suggestions that I am unconsciously writing them down as Americanbourgeoiswith the contemptuous insinuations that are conveyed by that term. Nor were they Philistines, but sound, wholesome, cheerful Americans, who bought their eggs direct from “the butterman” and kept a jug of buttermilk in the ice-box. I assert that Smiths of their type were and are, wherever they still exist, an encouragement and a hope to all who love their America. They are the Americans to whom Lincoln became as one of Plutarch’s men, and for whom Longfellow wrote “The Children’s Hour,” and on whom Howells smiles quizzically and with complete understanding. Thousands of us knew thousands of these Smiths only a few years ago, all the way from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. I linger upon them affectionately as I have known and loved them inthe Ohio Valley, but I have enjoyed glimpses of them in Kansas City and Omaha, Minneapolis and Detroit, and know perfectly well that I should find them realizing to the full life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in many other regions,—for example, with only slight differences of background, in Richmond, Virginia, and Burlington, Vermont. And in all these places some particular Smith is always moving to Chicago or Boston or New York on his way to a sanatorium or Bad Neuheim and a German specialist! Innumerable Smiths, not yet so prosperous as the old friend I encountered in Berlin, are abandoning their flower-gardens and the cozy verandas (sacred to neighborhood confidences on the long summer evenings) and their gusty registers for compact and steam-heated apartments with only the roof-garden overhead as a breathing-place.
There seems to be no field in which the weary Smith is not exercising a baneful influence. We have fallen into the habit of laying many of our national sins at his door, and usually with reason. His hand is hardly concealed as he thrusts it nervously through the curtains of legislativechambers, state and national. He invades city halls and corrupts municipal councils. Even the fine arts are degraded for his pleasure. Smith, it seems, is too weary from his day’s work to care for dramas
“That bear a weighty and a serious brow,Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe.”
“That bear a weighty and a serious brow,Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe.”
“That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe.”
He is one of the loyalest patrons of that type of beguilement known as the “musical comedy,” which in its most engaging form is a naughty situation sprinkled with cologne water and set to waltz time. Still, if he dines at the proper hour at a Fifth Avenue restaurant and eats more and drinks more than he should (to further the hardening of his arteries for the German specialist), he may arrive late and still hear the tune every one on Broadway is whistling. The girl behind the book-counter knows Smith a mile off, and hands him at once a novel that has a lot of “go” to it, or one wherein “smart” people assembled in house-parties for week-ends, amuse themselves by pinning pink ribbons on the Seventh Commandment. If the illustrations are tinted and the first page opensupon machine-gun dialogue, the sale is effected all the more readily. Or, reluctant to tackle a book of any sort, he may gather up a few of those magazines whose fiction jubilantly emphasizes the least noble passions of man. And yet my Smith delighted, in those old days around the register, in Howells’s clean, firm stroke; and we were always quoting dear Stockton—“black stockings for sharks”—“put your board money in the ginger jar.” What a lot of silly, happy, comfortable geese we were!
It seems only yesterday that the first trayful of cocktails jingled into a parlor in my town as a prelude to dinner; and I recall the scandalous reports of that innovation which passed up and down the maple-arched thoroughfares that give so sober and cloistral an air to our residential area. When that first tray appeared at our elbows, just before that difficult moment when we gentlemen of the provinces, rather conscious at all times of our dress-coats, are wondering whether it is the right or left arm we should offer the lady we are about to take in, we were startled, as though the Devil had invadedthe domestic sanctuary and perched himself on the upright piano. Nothing is more depressing than the thought that all these Smiths, many of whose fathers slept in the rain and munched hard-tack for a principle in the sixties, are unable to muster an honest appetite, but must pucker their stomachs with a tonic before they can swallow their daily bread. Perhaps our era’s great historian will be a stomach specialist whose pages, bristling with statistics and the philosophy thereof, will illustrate the undermining and honeycombing of our institutions by gin and bitters.
The most appalling thing about us Americans is our complete sophistication. The English are children. An Englishman is at no moment so delightful as when he lifts his brows and says “Really!” The Frenchman at his sidewalk table watches the world go by with unwearied delight. At any moment Napoleon may appear; or he may hear great news of a new drama, or the latest lion of the salon may stroll by. Awe and wonder are still possible in the German,bred as he is upon sentiment and fairy-lore: the Italian is beautifully credulous. On my first visit to Paris, having arrived at midnight and been established in a hotel room that hung above a courtyard which I felt confident had witnessed the quick thrusts of Porthos, Athos, and Aramis, I wakened at an early hour to the voice of a child singing in the area below. It has always seemed to me that that artless song flung out upon the bright charmed morning came from the very heart of France! France, after hundreds of years of achievement, prodigious labor, and staggering defeat, is still a child among the nations.
Only the other day I attended a prize-fight in Paris. It was a gay affair held in a huge amphitheatre and before a great throng of spectators of whom a third were women. The match was for twenty rounds between a Frenchman and an Australian negro. After ten rounds it was pretty clear that the negro was the better man; and my lay opinion was supported by the judgment of two American journalists, sounder critics than I profess to be of the merits of such contests. The decision was, of course, in favorof the Frenchman and the cheering was vociferous and prolonged. And it struck me as a fine thing that that crowd could cheer so lustily the wrong decision! It was that same spirit that led France forth jauntily against Bismarck’s bayonets. I respect the emotion with which a Frenchman assures me that one day French soldiers will plant the tri-color on the Brandenburg Gate. He dreams of it as a child dreams of to-morrow’s games.
But we are at once the youngest and the oldest of the nations. We are drawn to none but the “biggest” shows, and hardly cease yawning long enough to be thrilled by the consummating leap of death across the four rings where folly has already disproved all natural laws. The old prayer, “Make me a child again just for to-night,” has vanished with the belief in Santa Claus. No American really wants to be a child again. It was with a distinct shock that I heard recently a child of five telephoning for an automobile in a town that had been threatened by hostile Indians not more than thirty years ago. Our children avail themselves with the coolest condescension of all the apparatus of our complexmodern life: they are a thousand years old the day they are born.
The farmer who once welcomed the lightning-rod salesman as a friend of mankind is moving to town now and languidly supervising the tilling of his acres from an automobile. One of these vicarious husbandmen, established in an Indiana county seat, found it difficult to employ his newly acquired leisure. The automobile had not proved itself a toy of unalloyed delight, and the feet that had followed unwearied the hay rake and plow faltered upon the treads of the mechanical piano. He began to alternate motor flights with more deliberate drives behind a handsome team of blacks. The eyes of the town undertaker fell in mortal envy upon that team and he sought to buy it. The tired husbandman felt that here, indeed, was an opportunity to find light gentlemanly occupation, while at the same time enjoying the felicities of urban life, so he consented to the use of his horses, but with the distinct understanding that he should be permitted to drive the hearse!
If we are not, after all, a happy people, in the full enjoyment of life and liberty, what is this sickness that troubleth our Israel? Why huddle so many captains within the walls of the city, impotently whining beside their spears? Why seek so many for rest while this our Israel is young among the nations? “Thou hast multiplied the nation and not increased the joy; they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.” Weariness fell upon Judah, and despite the warnings of noble and eloquent prophets she perished. It is now a good many years since Mr. Arnold cited Isaiah and Plato for our benefit to illustrate his belief that with us, as with Judah and Athens, the majority are unsound. And yet from his essay on Numbers—an essay for which Lowell’s “Democracy” is an excellent antidote—we may turn with a feeling of confidence and security to that untired and unwearying majority which Arnold believed to be unsound. Many instances of the soundness of our majority have been affordedsince Mr. Arnold’s death, and it is a reasonable expectation that, in spite of the apparent ease with which the majority may be stampeded, it nevertheless pauses with a safe margin between it and the precipice. Illustrations of failure abound in history, but the very rise and development of our nation has discredited History as a prophet. In the multiplication of big and little Smiths lies our only serious danger. The disposition of the sick Smiths to deplore as unhealthy and unsound such a radical movement as began in 1896, and still sweeps merrily on in 1912, never seriously arrests the onward march of those who sincerely believe that we were meant to be a great refuge for mankind. If I must choose, I prefer to take my chances with the earnest, healthy, patriotic millions rather than with an oligarchy of tired Smiths. Our impatience of the bounds of law set by men who died before the Republic was born does not justify the whimpering of those Smiths who wrap themselves in the grave-clothes of old precedents, and who love the Constitution only when they fly to it for shelter. Tired business men, weary professionalmen, bored farmers, timorous statesmen are not of the vigorous stuff of those
“Who founded us and spread from sea to seaA thousand leagues the zone of liberty,And gave to man this refuge from his past,Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.”
“Who founded us and spread from sea to seaA thousand leagues the zone of liberty,And gave to man this refuge from his past,Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.”
“Who founded us and spread from sea to sea
A thousand leagues the zone of liberty,
And gave to man this refuge from his past,
Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.”
Our country’s only enemies are the sick men, the tired men, who have exhausted themselves in the vain pursuit of vain things; who forget that democracy like Christianity is essentially social, and who constitute a sick remnant from whom it is devoutly to be hoped the benign powers may forever protect us.
It was a year ago that I met my old friend Smith, irritable, depressed, anxious, in the German capital. This morning we tramped five miles, here among the Vermont hills where he has established himself. Sound in wind and limb is my old neighbor, and his outlook on life is sane and reasonable. I have even heard him referring, with something of his old emotion, to that dark winter at Valley Forge, but with a new hopefulness, a wider vision. He does notthink the American Republic will perish, even as Nineveh and Tyre, any more than I do. He has come to a realization of his own errors and he is interested in the contemplation of his own responsibilities. And it is not the German specialist he has to thank for curing his weariness half so much as Fanny.
Fanny! Fanny is the wisest, the most capable, the healthiest-minded girl in the world. Fanny is adorable! As we trudged along the road, Smith suddenly paused and lifted his eyes to a rough pasture slightly above and beyond us. I knew from the sudden light in his face that Fanny was in the landscape. She leaped upon a wall and waved to us. A cool breeze rose from the valley and swept round her. As she poised for a moment before running down to join us in the road, there was about her something of the grace and vigor of the Winged Victory as it challenges the eye at the head of the staircase in the Louvre. She lifted her hand to brush back her hair,—that golden crown so loved by light! And as she ran we knew she would neither stumble nor fall on that rock-strewn pasture. When she reached the brookshe took it at a bound, and burst upon us radiant.
It had been Fanny’s idea to come here, and poor, tired, broken, disconsolate Smith, driven desperate by the restrictions imposed upon him by the German doctors, and only harassed by his wife’s fears, had yielded to Fanny’s importunities. I had been so drawn into their affairs that I knew all the steps by which Fanny had effected his redemption. She had broken through the lines of the Philistines and brought him a cup of water from that unquenchable well by the gate for which David pined and for which we all long when the evil days come. The youth of a world that never grows old is in Fanny’s heart. She is to Smith as a Goddess of Liberty in short skirt and sweater, come down from her pedestal to lead the way to green pastures beside waters of comfort. She has become to him not merely the spirit of youth but of life, and his dependence upon her is complete. It was she who saved him from himself when to his tired eyes it seemed that
“All one’s work is vain,And life goes stretching on, a waste gray plain,With even the short mirage of morning gone,No cool breath anywhere, no shadow nighWhere a weary man might lay him down and die.”
“All one’s work is vain,And life goes stretching on, a waste gray plain,With even the short mirage of morning gone,No cool breath anywhere, no shadow nighWhere a weary man might lay him down and die.”
“All one’s work is vain,
And life goes stretching on, a waste gray plain,
With even the short mirage of morning gone,
No cool breath anywhere, no shadow nigh
Where a weary man might lay him down and die.”
Later, as we sat on Smith’s veranda watching the silver trumpet of the young moon beyond the pine-crowned crest, with the herd a dark blur in the intervening meadows, and sweet clean airs blowing out of the valley, it somehow occurred to me that Fanny of the adorable head, Fanny gentle of heart, quick of wit, and ready of hand, is the fine essence of all that is worthiest and noblest in this America of ours. In such as she there is both inspiration to do and the wisdom of peace and rest. As she sits brooding with calm brows, a quiet hand against her tanned cheek, I see in her the likeness of a goddess sprung of loftier lineage than Olympus knew, for in her abides the spirit of that old and new America that labors in the sun and whose faith is in the stars.