Volume VII Part 11 (1/2)
It sometimes occurred to Morris Leighton that he was not getting ahead in the world very fast. He knew that his salary from Carr was more than any other young lawyer of his years earned by independent practice; but it seemed to him that he ought to be doing better. He had not drawn on his mother's small resources since his first year at college; he had made his own way--and a little more--but he experienced moments of restlessness in which the difficulties of establis.h.i.+ng himself in his profession loomed large and formidable.
An errand to a law firm in one of the fas.h.i.+onable new buildings that had lately raised the Mariona sky-line led him one afternoon past the office of his college cla.s.smate, Jack Balcomb. ”J. Arthur Balcomb,” was the inscription on the door, ”Suite B, Room 1.” Leighton had seen little of Balcomb for a year or more, and his friend's name on the ground-gla.s.s door arrested his eye.
Two girls were busily employed at typewriters in the anteroom, and one of them extended a blank card to Morris and asked him for his name. The girl disappeared into the inner room and came back instantly followed by Balcomb, who seized Morris's hand, dragged him in and closed the door.
”Well, old man!” Balcomb shouted. ”I'm glad to see you. It's downright pleasant to have a fellow come in occasionally and feel no temptation to take his watch. Sink into yonder soft-yielding leather and allow me to offer you one of these plutocratic perfectos. Only the elect get these, I can tell you. In that drawer there I keep a brand made out of car waste and hemp rope, that does very well for ordinary commercial sociability. Got a match? All right; smoke up and tell me what you're doing to make the world a better place to live in, as old Prexy used to say at college.”
”I'm digging at the law, at the same old stand. I can't say that I'm flouris.h.i.+ng like Jonah's gourd, as you seem to be.”
Morris cast his eyes over the room, which was handsomely furnished.
There was a good rug on the floor and the desk and table were of heavy oak; an engraving of Thomas Jefferson hung over Balcomb's desk, and on the opposite side of the room was a table covered with financial reference books.
”Well, I tell you, old man,” declared Balcomb, ”you've got to fool all the people all the time these days to make it go. Those venerable whiskers around town whine about the good old times and how a young man's got to go slow but sure. There's nothing in it; and they wouldn't be in it either, if they had to start in again; no siree!”
”What is your game just now, Jack, if it isn't impertinent? It's hard to keep track of you. I remember very well that you started in to learn the wholesale drug business.”
”Oh tus.h.!.+ don't refer to that, an thou lovest me! That is one of the darkest pages of my life. Those people down there in South High Street thought I was a jay, and they sent me out to help the s.h.i.+pping clerk.
Wouldn't that jar you! Overalls,--and a hand truck. Wow! I couldn't get out of that fast enough. Then, you know, I went to Chicago and spent a year in a broker's office, and I guess I learned a few up there. Oh, rather! They sent me into the country to sell mining stock and I made a record. They kept the printing presses going overtime to keep me supplied. Say, they got afraid of me; I was too good!”
He stroked his vand.y.k.e beard complacently, and flicked the ash from his cigar.
”What's your line now? Real estate, mortgages, lending money to the poor? How do you cla.s.sify yourself?”
”You do me a cruel wrong, Morris, a cruel wrong. You read my sign on the outer wall? Well, that's a bluff. There's nothing in real estate, _per se_, as old Doc Bridges used to say at college. And the loan business has all gone to the bad,--people are too rich; farmers are rolling in real money and have it to lend. There was nothing for little Willie in petty brokerages. I'm scheming--promoting--and I take my slice off of everything that pa.s.ses.”
”That certainly sounds well. You've learned fast. You had an ambition to be a poet when you were in college. I think I still have a few pounds of your verses in my traps somewhere.”
Balcomb threw up his head and laughed in self-pity.
”I believe I _was_ bitten with the literary tarantula for a while, but I've lived it down, I hope. Prexy used to predict a bright literary future for me in those days. You remember, when I made Phi Beta Kappa, how he took both my hands and wept over me. 'Balcomb,' he says, 'you're an honor to the college.' I suppose he'd weep again, if he knew I'd only forgotten about half the letters of the Greek alphabet,--left them, as one might say, several thousand parasangs to the rear in my mad race for daily sustenance. Well, I may not leave any vestiges on the sands of time, but, please G.o.d, I shan't die hungry,--not if I keep my health.
Dear old Prexy! He was a nice old chump, though a trifle somnolent in his chapel talks.”
”Well, we needn't pull the planks out of the bridge we've crossed on. I got a lot out of college that I'm grateful for. They did their best for us,” said Morris.
”Oh, yes; it was well enough, but if I had it to do over, Tippecanoe wouldn't see me; not much! It isn't what you learn in college, it's the friends.h.i.+ps you make and all that sort of thing that counts. A western man ought to go east to college and rub up against eastern fellows. The atmosphere at the freshwater colleges is pretty jay. Fred Waters left Tippecanoe and went to Yale and got in with a lot of influential fellows down there,--chaps whose fathers are in big things in New York. Fred has a fine position now, just through his college pull, and first thing you know, he'll pick up an heiress and be fixed for life. Fred's a winner all right.”
”He's also an a.s.s,” said Leighton. ”I remember him of old.”
”An a.s.s of the large gray and long-eared species,--I'll grant you that, all right enough; but look here, old man, you've got to overlook the fact that a fellow occasionally lifts his voice and brays. Man does not live by the spirit alone; he needs bread, and bread's getting hard to get.”
”I've noticed it,” replied Leighton, who had covered all this ground before in talks with Balcomb and did not care to go into it further.
”And then, you remember,” Balcomb went on, in enjoyment of his own reminiscences, ”I wooed the law for a while. But I guess what I learned wouldn't have embarra.s.sed Chancellor Kent. I really had a client once. I didn't see a chance of getting one any other way, so I hired him. He was a c.o.o.n. I employed him for two dollars to go to the Grand Opera House and buy a seat in the orchestra when Sir Henry Irving was giving _The Merchant of Venice_. He went to sleep and snored and they threw him out with rude, insolent, and angry hands after the second act; and I brought suit against the management for damages, basing my claim on the idea that they had spurned my dusky brother on account of his race, color and previous condition of servitude. The last clause was a joke. He had never done any work in his life, except for the state. He was a very sightly c.o.o.n, too, now that I recall him. The show was, as I said, _The Merchant of Venice_, and I'll leave it to anybody if my client wasn't at least as pleasing to the eye as Sir Henry in his Shylock togs. I suppose if it had been _Oth.e.l.lo_, race feeling would have run so high that Sir Henry would hardly have escaped lynching. Well, to return. My client got loaded on gin about the time the case came up on demurrer and gave the snap away, and I dropped out of the practice to avoid being disbarred.
And it was just as well. My landlord had protested against my using the office at night for poker purposes, so I pa.s.sed up the law and sought the asphodel fields of promotion. _Les affaires font l'homme_, as old Professor Garneau used to say at college. So here I am; and I'm glad I shook the law. I'd got tired of eating coffee and rolls at the Berlin bakery three times a day.
”Why, Morris, old man,” he went on volubly, ”there were days when the loneliness in my office grew positively oppressive. You may remember that room I had in the old Adams and Harper Block? It gave upon a courtyard where the rats from a livery stable came to disport themselves on rainy days. I grew to be a dead shot with the flobert rifle; but lawsy, there's mighty little consideration for true merit in this world!
Just because I winged a couple of cheap hack horses one day, when my nerves weren't steady, the livery people made me stop, and one of my fellow tenants in the old rookery threatened to have me arrested for conducting a shooting gallery without a license. He was a dentist, and he said the snap of the rifle worried his victims.”