“Oh, I guess whoever takes the magazine will be glad enough to keep you!”
“Do you think so? Well, perhaps. But I don’t believe Fulkerson would let me stand long between him and an Angel of the right description.”
“Well, then, I believe he would. And you’ve never seen anything, Basil, to make you really think that Mr. Fulkerson didn’t appreciate you to the utmost.”
“I think I came pretty near an undervaluation in that Lindau trouble. I shall always wonder what put a backbone into Fulkerson just at that crisis. Fulkerson doesn’t strike me as the stuff of a moral hero.”
“At any rate, he was one,” said Mrs. March, “and that’s quite enough for me.”
March did not answer. “What a noble thing life is, anyway! Here I am, well on the way to fifty, after twenty-five years of hard work, looking forward to the potential poorhouse as confidently as I did in youth. We might have saved a little more than we have saved; but the little more wouldn’t avail if I were turned out of my place now; and we should have lived sordidly to no purpose. Someone always has you by the throat, unless you have someone else in your grip. I wonder if that’s the attitude the Almighty intended His respectable creatures to take toward one another! I wonder if He meant our civilization, the battle we fight in, the game we trick in! I wonder if He considers it final, and if the kingdom of heaven on earth, which we pray for—”
“Have you seen Lindau today?” Mrs. March asked.
“You inferred it from the quality of my piety?” March laughed, and then suddenly sobered. “Yes, I saw him. It’s going rather hard with him, I’m afraid. The amputation doesn’t heal very well; the shock was very great, and he’s old. It’ll take time. There’s so much pain that they have to keep him under opiates, and I don’t think he fully knew me. At any rate, I didn’t get my piety from him today.”
“It’s horrible! Horrible!” said Mrs. March. “I can’t get over it! After losing his hand in the war, to lose his whole arm now in this way! It does seem too cruel! Of course he oughtn’t to have been there; we can say that. But you oughtn’t to have been there, either, Basil.”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly advising the police to go and club the railroad presidents.”
“Neither was poor Conrad Dryfoos.”
“I don’t deny it. All that was distinctly the chance of life and death. That belonged to God; and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance. But what I object to is this economic chance-world in which we live, and which we men seem to have created. It ought to be law as inflexible in human affairs as the order of day and night in the physical world that if a man will work he shall both rest and eat, and shall not be harassed with any question as to how his repose and his provision shall come. Nothing less ideal than this satisfies the reason. But in our state of things no one is secure of this. No one is sure of finding work; no one is sure of not losing it. I may have my work taken away from me at any moment by the caprice, the mood, the indigestion of a man who has not the qualification for knowing whether I do it well, or ill. At my time of life—at every time of life—a man ought to feel that if he will keep on doing his duty he shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear to him, except through natural causes. But no man can feel this as things are now; and so we go on, pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling, thrusting aside and trampling underfoot; lying, cheating, stealing; and when we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame, and look back over the way we’ve come to a palace of our own, or the poorhouse, which is about the only possession we can claim in common with our brother-men, I don’t think the retrospect can be pleasing.”
“I know, I know!” said his wife. “I think of those things, too, Basil. Life isn’t what it seems when you look forward to it. But I think people would suffer less, and wouldn’t have to work so hard, and could make all reasonable provision for the future, if they were not so greedy and so foolish.”
“Oh, without doubt! We can’t put it all on the conditions; we must put some of the blame on character. But conditions make character; and people are greedy and foolish, and wish to have and to shine, because having and shining are held up to them by civilization as the chief good of life. We all know they are not the chief good, perhaps not good at all; but if someone ventures to say so, all the rest of us call him a fraud and a crank, and go moiling and toiling on to the palace or the poorhouse. We can’t help it. If one were less greedy or less foolish, someone else would have and would shine at his expense. We don’t moil and toil to ourselves alone; the palace or the poorhouse is not merely for ourselves, but for our children, whom we’ve brought up in the superstition that having and shining is the chief good. We dare not teach them otherwise, for fear they may falter in the fight when it comes their turn, and the children of others will crowd them out of the palace into the poorhouse. If we felt sure that honest work shared by all would bring them honest food shared by all, some heroic few of us, who did not wish our children to rise above their fellows—though we could not bear to have them fall below—might trust them with the truth. But we have no such
