The "Goldfish" Part 16

"We'll roast 'em after supper," said her father. "Toddle along now and wash up."

She put up a rosy, beaming face to be kissed and dashed away toward the house. I tried to remember what either of my two girls had been like at her age, but for some strange reason I could not.

Across the road the fertile countryside sloped away into a distant valley, hemmed in by dim blue hills, below which the sun had already sunk, leaving only a gilded edge behind. The air was filled with a soft, smoky haze. A church bell in the village struck six o'clock.

"_The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way_,"

I murmured.

"For 'plowman' read 'golfer,'" smiled my host. "By George, though--it is pretty good to be alive!" The air had turned crisp and we both instinctively took a couple of deep breaths. "Makes the city look like thirty cents!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "Of course it isn't like New York or Southampton."

"No, thank G.o.d! It isn't!" I muttered as we wandered toward the house.

"I hope you don't mind an early supper," apologized Mrs. Hastings as we entered; "but Jim gets absolutely ravenous. You see, on weekdays his lunch is at best a movable feast."

Our promptly served meal consisted of soup, scrambled eggs and bacon, broiled chops, fried potatoes, peas, salad, apple pie, cheese, grapes plucked fresh from the garden wall, and black coffee, distilled from a s.h.i.+ning coffee machine. Mrs. Hastings brought the things hot from the kitchen and dished them herself. Tom and Sylvia, carefully spruced up, ate prodigiously and then helped clear away the dishes, while I produced my cigar case.

Then Hastings led me across the hall to a room about twelve feet square, the walls of which were lined with books, where a wood fire was already crackling cozily. Motioning me to an old leather armchair, he pulled up a wooden rocker before the mantel and, leaning over, laid a regiment of chestnuts before the blazing logs.

I stretched out my legs and took a long pull on one of my Carona-Caronas. It all seemed too good to be true. Only six hours before in my marble entrance hall I had listened disgustedly to the cackle of my wife's luncheon party behind the tapestry of my own dining room.

After all, how easy it was to be happy! Here was Hastings, jolly as a clam and living like a prince on--what? I wondered.

"Hastings," I said, "do you mind telling me how much it costs you to live like this?"

"Not at all," he replied--"though I never figured it out exactly. Let's see. Five per cent on the cost of the place--say, two hundred dollars.

Repairs and insurance a hundred. That's three hundred, isn't it? We pay the hired man thirty-five dollars and Carmen eighteen dollars a month, and give 'em their board--about six hundred and fifty more. So far nine hundred and fifty. Our vegetables and milk cost us practically nothing--meat and groceries about seventy-five a month--nine hundred a year.

"We have one horse; but in good weather I use my bicycle to go to the station. We cut our own ice in the pond back of the orchard. The schools are free. I cut quite a lot of wood myself, but my coal comes high--must cost me at least a hundred and fifty a year. I don't have many doctors'

bills, living out here; but the dentist hits us for about twenty-five dollars every six months--that's fifty more. My wife spends about three hundred and the children as much more. Of course that's fairly liberal.

One doesn't need ballgowns in our village.

"My own expenses are, railroad fare, lunches, tobacco--I smoke a pipe mostly--and clothes--probably about five hundred in all. We go on a big bat once a month and dine at a table-d'hote restaurant, and take in the opera or the play. That costs some--about ten dollars a clip--say, eighty for the season; and, of course, I blow the kids to a camping trip every summer, which sets me back a good hundred and fifty. How does that come out?"

I had jotted the items down, as he went along, on the back of an envelope.

"Thirty-three hundred and eighty dollars," I said, adding them up.

"It seems a good deal," he commented, turning and gazing into the fire; "but I have usually managed to lay up about fifteen hundred every year--besides, of course, the little I give away."

I sat stunned. Thirty-three hundred dollars!--I spent seventy-two thousand!--and the man lived as well as I did! What did I have that he had not? But Hastings was saying something, still with his back toward me.

"I suppose you thought I must be an ungrateful dog not to jump at the offer you made me this morning," he remarked in an embarra.s.sed manner.

"It's worried me a lot all day. I'm really tremendously gratified at your kindness. I couldn't very well explain myself, and I don't know what possessed me to say what I did about my not being willing to exchange places with you. But, you see, I'm over forty. That makes a heap of difference. I'm as good a stenographer as you can find, and so long as my health holds out I can be sure of at least fifty dollars a week, besides what I earn outside.

"I've never had any kink for the law. I don't think I'd be a success at it; and frankly, saving your presence, I don't like it. A lot of it is easy money and a lot of it is money earned in the meanest way there is--playing dirty tricks; putting in the wrong a fellow that's really right; aggravating misunderstandings and profiting by the quarrels people get into. You're a high-cla.s.s, honorable man, and you don't see the things I see." I winced. If he only knew, I had seen a good deal!

"But I go round among the other law offices, and I tell you it's a demoralizing profession.

"It's all right to reorganize a railroad; but in general litigation it seems to me as if the lawyers spend most of their time trying to make the judge and jury believe the witnesses are all criminals. Everything a man says on the stand or has ever done in his life is made the subject of a false inference--an innuendo. The law isn't constructive--it's destructive; and that's why I want my boy to be a civil engineer."

He paused, abashed at his own heat.

"Well," I interjected, "it's a harsh arraignment; but there's a great deal of truth in what you say. Wouldn't you like to make big money?"

"Big money! I do make big money--for a man of my cla.s.s," he replied with a gentle smile. "I wouldn't know what to do with much more. I've got health and a comfortable home, the affection of an honest woman and two fine children. I work hard, sleep like a log, and get a couple of sets of tennis or a round of golf on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays. I have the satisfaction of knowing I give you your money's worth for the salary you pay me. My kids have as good teachers as there are anywhere. We see plenty of people and I belong to a club or two. I bear a good reputation in the town and try to keep things going in the right direction. We have all the books and magazines we want to read. What's more, I don't worry about trying to be something I'm not."

"How do you mean?" I asked, feeling that his talk was money in my moral pocket.

"Oh, I've seen a heap of misery in New York due to just wanting to get ahead--I don't know where; fellows that are just crazy to make 'big money' as you call it, in order to ride in motors and get into some sort of society. All the clerks, office boys and stenographers seem to want to become stockbrokers. Personally I don't see what there is in it for them. I don't figure out that my boy would be any happier with two million dollars than without. If he had it he would be worrying all the time for fear he wasn't getting enough fun for his money. And as for my girl I want her to learn to do something! I want her to have the discipline that comes from knowing how to earn her own living. Of course that's one of the greatest satisfactions there is in life anyway--doing some one thing as well as it can be done."

"Wouldn't you like your daughter to marry?" I demanded.

"Certainly--if she can find a clean man who wants her. Why, it goes without saying, that is life's greatest happiness--that and having children."

"Certainly!" I echoed with an inward qualm.

"Suppose she doesn't marry though? That's the point. She doesn't want to hang round a boarding house all her life when everybody is busy doing interesting things. I've got a theory that the reason rich people--especially rich women--get bored is because they don't know anything about real life. Put one of 'em in a law office, hitting a typewriter at fifteen dollars a week, and in a month she'd wake up to what was really going on--she'd be _alive_!"

"'_The world is so full of a number of things I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings_!'"

said I. "What's Sylvia going to do?"

"Oh, she's quite a clever little artist." He handed me some charming sketches in pencil that were lying on the table. "I think she may make an ill.u.s.trator. Heaven knows we need 'em! I'll give her a course at Pratt Inst.i.tute and then at the Academy of Design; and after that, if they think she is good enough, I'll send her to Paris."

"I wish I'd done the same thing with my girls!" I sighed. "But the trouble is--the trouble is--You see, if I had they wouldn't have been doing what their friends were doing. They'd have been out of it."

"No; they wouldn't like that, of course," agreed Hastings respectfully.

"They would want to be 'in it'"

I looked at him quickly to see whether his remark had a double entendre.

"I don't see very much of my daughters," I continued. "They've got away from me somehow."

"That's the tough part of it," he said thoughtfully. "I suppose rich people are so busy with all the things they have to do that they haven't much time for fooling round with their children. I have a good time with mine though. They're too young to get away anyhow. We read French history aloud every evening after supper. Sylvia is almost an expert on the Duke of Guise and the Ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew."

We smoked silently for some moments. Hastings' ideas interested me, but I felt that he could give me something more personal--of more value to myself. The fellow was really a philosopher in his quiet way.

"After all, you haven't told me what you meant by saying you wouldn't change places with me," I said abruptly. "What did you mean by that? I want to know."

"I wish you would forget I ever said it, sir," he murmured.

"No," I retorted, "I can't forget it. You needn't spare me. This talk is not _ex cathedra_--it's just between ourselves. When you've told me why, then I will forget it. This is man to man."

"Well," he answered slowly, "it would take me a long time to put it in just the right way. There was nothing personal in what I said this morning. I was thinking about conditions in general--the whole thing. It can't go on!"

"What can't go on?"

"The terrible burden of money," he said.