CHAPTER X
Mr. Oscar Mitchell, attorney and counselor at law, sauntered down RiverStreet, with the cheerful and optimistic poise of one who has lunchedwell. A well-set-up man, a well-groomed man, as-it-is-done; plainlyworshipful; worthy the highest degree of that most irregular ofadjectives, respectable; comparative, smart; superlative, correct.
Mr. Mitchell was correct; habited after the true Polonian precept;invisible, every buckle, snap, clasp, strap, wheel, axle, wedge, pulley,lever, and every other mechanical device known to science, was in placeand of the best. As to adornment, all in good taste--scarfpin, anunpretentious pearl in platinum; garnet links, severely plain and quiet;an unobtrusive watch-chain; one ring, a small emerald; no earrings.
Mr. Mitchell's face was well shaped, not quite plump or pink, with theunlined curves, the smooth clear skin, and the rosy glow that comes fromhealth and virtue, or from good living and massage. Despite fifty years,or near it, the flax-smooth hair held no glint of gray; his eyes, blueand big and wide, were sharp and bright, calm, confident, almostcandid--not quite the last, because of a roving trick of clandestineobservation; his mouth, where it might or should have curved--mustonce have curved in boyhood--was set and guarded, even in skillfulsmilings, by a long censorship of undesirable facts, material orotherwise to any possible issue.
Mr. Mitchell's whole bearing was confident and assured; his step, for allthose fifty afore-said years, was light and elastic, even in sauntering;he took the office stairs with the inimitable sprightly gallop of thetown-bred.
Man is a quadruped who has learned to use his front legs for other thingsthan walking. Some hold that he has learned to use his head. But thereare three things man cannot do, and four which he cannot compass: to see,to think, to judge, and to act--to see the obvious; to think upon thething seen; to judge between our own resultant and conflicting thoughts,with no furtive finger of desire to tip the balance; and to act upon thatjudgment without flinching. We fear the final and irretrievable calamity:we fear to make ourselves conspicuous, we conform to standard, we bearourselves meekly in that station whereunto it hath pleased Heaven to callus; the herd instinct survives four-footedness. For, we note the strangebut not the familiar; our thinking is to right reason what peat is tocoal; the outcry of the living and the dead perverts judgment, closes theear to proof; and our wisest fear the scorn of fools. So we walk crampedand strangely under the tragic tyranny of reiteration: whatever is right;whatever is repeated often enough is true; and logic is a device forevading the self-evident. Moreover, Carthage should be destroyed.
Such sage reflections present themselves automatically, contrasting theblithesome knee action of prosperous Mr. Mitchell with the stiffenedjoints of other men who had climbed those hard stairs on occasion withshambling step, bent backs and sagging shoulders; with faces lined andinterlined; with eyes dulled and dim, and sunken cheeks; with handsmisshapen, knotted and bent by toil: if image indeed of God, strangelydistorted--or a strange God.
Consider now, in a world yielding enough and to spare for all, theendless succession of wise men, from the Contributing Editor ofProverbs unto this day, who have hymned the praise of diligence anddocility, the scorn of sloth. Yet not one sage of the bountiful bunchhas ever ventured to denounce the twin vices of industry and obedience.True, there is the story of blind Samson at the mill; perhaps a parable.
Underfed and overworked for generations, starved from birth, starvedbefore birth, we drive and harry and crush them, the weakling and hisweaker sons; we exploit them, gull them, poison them, lie to them, filchfrom them. We crowd them into our money mills; we deny them youth, wedeny them rest, we deny them opportunity, we deny them hope, or any hopeof hope; and we provide for age--the poorhouse. So that charity is becomeof all words the most feared, most hated, most loathed and loathsome;worse than crime or shame or death. We have left them from the work oftheir hands enough, scantly enough, to keep breath within their stuntedbodies. "All the traffic can bear!"--a brazen rule. Of such sage policythe result can be seen in the wizened and undersized submerged of London;of nearer than London. Man, by not taking thought, has taken a cubit fromhis stature.
Meantime we prate comfortable blasphemies, scientific or other; naturalselection or the inscrutable decrees of God. Whereas this was manifestlya Hobson's selection, most unnatural and forced, to choose want of allthat makes life sweet and dear; to choose gaunt babes, with pinched andlivid lips--unlovely, not unloved; and these iniquitous decrees are mostscrutable, are surely of man's devising and not of God's. Or we invent afire-new science, known as Eugenics, to treat the disease by new namingof symptoms: and prattle of the well born, when we mean well fed; or thedegenerate, when we might more truly say the disinherited.
It is even held by certain poltroons that families have been startedgutterward, of late centuries, when a father has been gloriously slain inthe wars of the useless great. That such a circumstance, howeverglorious, may have been rather disadvantageous than otherwise to childrenthereby sent out into the world at six or sixteen years, lucky to becomeditch-diggers or tip-takers. That some proportion of them do becomebeggars, thieves, paupers, sharpers, other things quite unfit for the earof the young person--a disconcerting consideration; such ears cannot betoo carefully guarded. That, though the occupations named are entirelynormal to all well-ordered states, descendants of persons in thoseoccupations tend to become "subnormal"--so runs the cant of it--somethinghandicapped by that haphazard bullet of a lifetime since, fired toadvance the glorious cause of--foreign commerce, or the like.
* * * * *
Mr. Mitchell occupied five rooms lined with law books and musty with thesmell of leather. These rooms ranged end to end, each with a door thatopened upon a dark hallway; a waiting-room in front, the private officeat the rear, to which no client was ever admitted directly. Depressed bydelay, subdued by an overflow of thick volumes, when he reaches asuitable dejection he is tip-toed through dismal antechambers of wisdom,appalled by tall bookstacks, ushered into the leather-chaired office, andthere further crushed by long shelves of dingy tin boxes, each boxcrowded with weighty secrets and shelved papers of fabulous moment andurgency; the least paper of the smallest box more important--theunfortunate client is clear on that point--than any contemptible need ofhis own. Cowed and chastened, he is now ready to pay a fee suitable tothe mind that has absorbed all the wisdom of those many bookshelves; ormeekly to accept as justice any absurdity or monstrosity of the law.
Mr. Mitchell was greeted by a slim, swarthy, black-eyed, elderly personof twenty-five or thirty, with a crooked nose and a crooked mind, halfclerk and half familiar spirit--Mr. Joseph Pelman, to wit; who appearedperpetually on the point of choking himself by suppressed chucklings athis principal's cleverness and the simplicity of dupes.
"Well, Joe?"
"Two to see you, sir," said Joe, his face lit up with sprightly malice."On the same lay. That Watkins farm of yours. I got it out of 'em. Ho ho!I kept 'em in different rooms. I hunted up their records in your recordbooks. Doomsday Books, I call 'em. Ho ho!"
Mr. Mitchell selected a cigar, lit it, puffed it, and fixed his eye onhis demon clerk.
"Now then," he said sharply, "let's have it!"
The demon pounced on a Brobdingnagian volume upon the desk and worried itopen at a marker. It had been meant for a ledger, that huge volume; thegray cloth covers bore the legend "N to Z." Ledger it was, of a grimsort, with sinister entries of forgotten sins, the itemized strength orweakness of a thousand men. The confidential clerk ran a long,confidential finger along the spidery copperplate index of the W's:"Wakelin, Walcott, Walker, Wallace, Walsh, Walters; Earl, John, Peter,Ray, Rex, Roy--Samuel--page 1124." His nimble hands flew at the pageslike a dog at a woodchuck hole.
"Here't is--'Walters, Samuel: born '69, son of John Walters, HollandHill; religion--politics--um-um--bad habits, none; two years VesperAcademy; three years Dennison shoe factories; married 1896--one child, b.1899. Bought Travis Farm 1898, paying half down; pai
d balance out in fiveyears; dairy, fifteen cows; forehanded, thrifty. Humph! Good pay, Iguess."
He cocked his head to one side and eyed his employer, fingering a wisp ofblack silk on his upper lip.
"And the other?"
The second volume was spread open upon the desk. Clerk Pelman flunghimself upon it with savage fury.
"Bowen, Chauncey, son William Bowen, born 1872--um--um--married LouiseHill 92--um--divorced '96; married Laura Wing '96--see Lottie Hall. Ranhotel at Larren '95 to '97; sheriff's sale '97; worked Bowen Farm '97 to1912; bought Eagle Hotel, Vesper, after death of William Bowen, 1900.Traded Eagle Hotel for Griffin Farm, 1912; sold Griffin Farm, 1914; clerkSimon's hardware store, Emmonsville, Pennsylvania. Heavy drinker, thoughseldom actually drunk; suspected of some share in the Powers affair,or some knowledge, at least; poker fiend. Bank note protested and paid byendorser 1897, and again in 1902; has since repaid endorsers. See LarrenHotel, Eagle Hotel."
"Show him in," said Mitchell.
"Walters?" The impish clerk cocked his head on one side again and gulpeddown a chuckle at his own wit.
"Bowen, fool! Jennie Page, his mother's sister, died last week and lefthim a legacy--twelve hundred dollars. I'll have that out of him, or mostof it, as a first payment."
The clerk turned, his mouth twisted awry to a malicious grin.
"Trust you!" he chuckled admiringly, and laid a confidential fingerbeside his crooked nose. "Ho ho! This is the third time you've sold theWatkins Farm; and it won't be the last! Oh, you're a rare one, you are!Four farms you've got, and the way you got 'em ho! You go Old Benjaminone better, you do.
"Who so by the plow would thriveHimself must neither hold nor drive.
"A regular hard driver, you are!"
"Some fine day," answered Mitchell composedly, "you will exhaust mypatience and I shall have to let you be hanged!"
"No fear!" rejoined the devil clerk, amiably. "I'm too useful. I do yourdirty work for you and leave you always with clean hands to show. Whostirs up damage suits? Joe. Who digs up the willing witness? J. Pelman.Who finds skeletons in respectable closets? Joey. Who is the go-between?Joseph. I'm trusty too, because I dare not be otherwise. And becauseI like the work. I like to see you skin 'em, I do. Fools! And because yougive me a fair share of the plunder. Princely, I call it--and wise. Yoube advised, Lawyer Mitchell, and always give me my fair share. Hang Joey?Oh, no! Never do! No fear!" A spasm of chuckles cut him short.
"Go on, fool, and bring Bowen in. Then tell Walters the farm is alreadysold."
The door closed behind the useful Joseph, and immediately popped openagain in the most startling fashion.
"No; nor that, either," said Joseph.
He closed the door softly and leaned against it, cocking his head on oneside with an evil smile.
His employer glanced at him with uninquiring eyes.
"You won't ask what, hey? No? But I'll tell you what you were thinkingof: Dropping me off the bridge. Upsetting the boat. The like of that.Can't have it. I can't afford it. You're too liberal. Why, I wouldn'tcrawl under your car to repair it--or go hunting with you--not if it wasever so!"
"I really believe," said Mr. Mitchell with surprised eyebrows, "that youare keeping me waiting!"
"That is why I never throw out hints about a future partnership,"continued the confidential man, undaunted. "You are such a liberalpaymaster. Lord love you, sir, I don't want any partnership! This suitsme. You furnish the brains and the respectability; I take the risk, and Iget my fair share. Then, if I should ever get caught, you are unsmirched;you can keep on making money. And you'll keep on giving me my share. Oh,yes; you will! You've such a good heart, Mr. Oscar! I know you. Youwouldn't want old Joey hanged! Not you! Oh, no!"