Part 12 (1/2)
”It's all such bos.h.!.+” said Kenneth Kincaid, flinging down a handful of papers. ”I've no right, I solemnly think, to help such stuff out into the world! A man can't take hold anywhere, it seems, without s.m.u.tting his fingers!”
Kenneth Kincaid was correcting proof for a publisher. What he had to work on this morning was the first chapters of a flimsy novel.
”It isn't even confectionery,” said he. ”It's terra alba and cochineal. And when it comes to the sensation, it will be benzine for whiskey. Real things are bad enough, for the most part, in this world; but when it comes to sham fictions and adulterated poisons, Dorris, I'd rather help bake bread, if it were an honest loaf, or make strong shoes for laboring men!”
”You don't always get things like that,” said Dorris. ”And you know you're not responsible. Why will you torment yourself so?”
”I was so determined not to do anything but genuine work; work that the world wanted; and to have it come down to this!”
”Only for a time, while you are waiting.”
”Yes; people must eat while they are waiting; that's the--devil of it! I'm not swearing, Dorris, dear; it came truly into my head, that minute, about the Temptation in the Wilderness.” Kenneth's voice was reverent, saying this; and there was an earnest thought in his face.
”You'll never like anything heartily but your Sunday work.”
”That's what keeps me here. My week-day work might be wanted somewhere else. And perhaps I ought to go. There's Sunday work everywhere.”
”If you've found one half, hold on to it;” said Dorris. ”The other can't be far off.”
”I suppose there are a score or two of young architects in this city, waiting for a name or a chance to make one, as I am. If it isn't here for all of them, somebody has got to quit.”
”And somebody has got to hold on,” repeated Dorris. ”You are morbid, Kent, about this 'work of the world.'”
”It's overdone, everywhere. Fifth wheels trying to hitch on to every coach. I'd rather be the one wheel of a barrow.”
”The Lord is Wheelwright, and Builder,” said Dorris, very simply.
”You _are_ a wheel, and He has made you; He'll find an axle for you and put you on; and you shall go about his business, so that you shall wonder to remember that you were ever leaning up against a wall. Do you know, Kentie, life seems to me like the game we used to play at home in the twilight. When we shut our eyes and let each other lead us, until we did not know where we were going, or in what place we should come out. I should not care to walk up a broad path with my eyes wide open, now. I'd rather feel the leading. To-morrow always makes a turn. It's beautiful! People don't know, who _never_ shut their eyes!”
Kenneth had taken up a newspaper.
”The pretenses at doing! The dodges and go-betweens that make a sham work between every two real ones! There's hardly a true business carried on, and if there is, you don't know where or which. Look at the advertis.e.m.e.nts. Why, they cheat with their very tops and faces!
See this man who puts in big capitals: 'Lost! $5,000! $1,000 reward!' and then tells you, in small type, that five thousand dollars are lost every year by breaking gla.s.s and china, that his cement will mend! What business has he to cry 'Wolf!' to the hindrance of the next man who may have a real wolf to catch? And what business has the printer, whom the next man will pay to advertise his loss, to help on a lie like this beforehand? I'm only twenty-six years old, Dorris, and I'm getting ashamed of the world!”
”Don't grow hard, Kenneth. 'The Son of Man came not to condemn the world, but to save it.' Let's each try to save our little piece!”
We are listening across the street, you see; between the windows in the rain; it is strange what chords one catches that do not catch each other, and were never planned to be played together,--by the _players_.
Kenneth Kincaid's father Robert had been a s.h.i.+p-builder. When s.h.i.+pping went down in the whirlpool of 1857, Robert Kincaid's building had gone; and afterward he had died leaving his children little beside their education, which he thanked G.o.d was secured, and a good repute that belonged to their name, but was easily forgotten in the crowd of young and forward ones, and in the strife and scramble of a new business growth.
Between college and technical studies Kenneth had been to the war.
After that he had a chance to make a fortune in Wall Street. His father's brother, James, offered to take him in with him to buy and sell stocks and gold, to watch the market, to touch little unseen springs, to put the difference into his own pocket every time the tide of value s.h.i.+fted, or could be made to seem to s.h.i.+ft. He might have been one of James R. Kincaid and Company. He would have none of it. He told his uncle plainly that he wanted real work; that he had not come back from fighting to--well, there he stopped, for he could not fling the truth in his uncle's face; he said there were things he meant to finish learning, and would try to do; and if n.o.body wanted them of him he would learn something else that was needed. So with what was left to his share from his father's little remnant of property, he had two years at the Technological School, and here he was in Boston waiting. You can see what he meant by real work, and how deep his theories and distinctions lay. You can see that it might be a hard thing for one young man, here or there, to take up the world on these terms now, in this year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-nine.
Over the way Desire Ledwith was beginning again, after a pause in which we have made our little cha.s.see.
”I know a girl,” she said, ”who has got a studio. And she talks about art, and she knows styles, and who has done what, and she runs about to see pictures, and she copies things, and she has little plaster legs and toes and things hanging round everywhere. She thinks it is something great; but it's only Mig, after all.
Everything is. Florence Migs into music. And I won't Mig, if I never do anything. I'm come here this morning to darn stockings.” And she pulled out of her big waterproof pocket a bundle of stockings and a great white ball of darning cotton and a wooden egg.
”There is always one thing that is real,” said Mrs. Ripwinkley, gently, ”and that shows the way surely to all the rest.”
”I know what you mean,” said Desire, ”of course; but they've mixed that all up too, like everything else, so that you don't know where it is. Glossy Megilp has a velvet prayer-book, and she blacks her eyelashes and goes to church. We've all been baptized, and we've learned the Lord's Prayer, and we're all Christians. What is there more about it? I wish, sometimes, they had let it all alone. I think they vaccinated us with religion, Aunt Frank, for fear we should take it the natural way.”