Old Gorgon Graham · Chapter 5Contents (5)
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We were all ready for Mister Percy when he came back, and Ham got right down to business.
"Young man, I've decided to help you out of this hole," he began.
Percy chippered right up. "Thank you, sir," he said.
"Yes, I'm going to help you," the old man went on. "I'm going to take all your trades off your hands and assume all your obligations at the banks."
"Thank you, sir."
"Stop interrupting when I'm talking, I'm going to take up all your obligations, and you're going to pay me three million dollars for doing it. When the whole thing's cleaned up that will probably leave me a few hundred thousand in the hole, but I'm going to do the generous thing by you."
Percy wasn't so chipper now. "But, father," he protested, "I haven't got three million dollars; and you know very well I can't possibly raise any three million dollars."
"Yes, you can," said Ham. "There's the million I gave you: that makes one. There's your interest in the business; I'll buy it back for a million: that makes two. And I'll take your note at five per cent, for the third million. A fair offer, Mr. Graham?"
"Very liberal, indeed, Mr. Huggins," I answered.
"But I won't have anything to live on, let alone any chance to pay you back, if you take my interest in the business away," pleaded Percy.
"I've thought of that, too," said his father, "and I'm going to give you a job. The experience you've had in this campaign ought to make you worth twenty-five dollars a week to us in our option department. Then you can board at home for five dollars a week, and pay ten more on your note. That'll leave you ten per for clothes and extras."
Percy wriggled and twisted and tried tears. Talked a lot of flip-flap flub-doodle, but Ham was all through with the proud-popper business, and the young man found him as full of knots as a hickory root, and with a hide that would turn the blade of an ax.
Percy was simply in the fix of the skunk that stood on the track and humped up his back at the lightning express—there was nothing left of him except a deficit and the stink he'd kicked up. And a fellow can't dictate terms with those assets. In the end he left the room with a ring in his nose.
After all, there was more in Percy than cussedness, for when he finally decided that it was a case of root hog or die with him, he turned in and rooted. It took him ten years to get back into his father's confidence and a partnership, and he was still paying on the million-dollar note when the old man died and left him his whole fortune. It would have been cheaper for me in the end if I had let the old man disinherit him, because when Percy ran that Mess Pork corner three years ago, he caught me short a pretty good line and charged me two dollars a barrel more than any one else to settle. Explained that he needed the money to wipe out the unpaid balance of a million-dollar note that he'd inherited from his father.
I simply mention Percy to show why I'm a little slow to regard members of my family as charitable institutions that I should settle endowments on. If there's one thing I like less than another, it's being regarded as a human meal-ticket. What is given to you always belongs to some one else, and if the man who gave it doesn't take it back, some fellow who doesn't have to have things given to him is apt to come along and run away with it. But what you earn is your own, and apt to return your affection for it with interest—pretty good interest.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
P.S.—I forgot to say that I had bought a house on Michigan Avenue for Helen, but there's a provision in the deed that she can turn you out if you don't behave.
No. 7
From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Yemassee-on-the-Tallahassee. The young man is now in the third quarter of the honeymoon, and the old man has decided that it is time to bring him fluttering down to earth.
VII
CHICAGO, January 17, 189-.
Dear Pierrepont: After you and Helen had gone off looking as if you'd just bought seats on 'Change and been baptized into full membership with all the sample bags of grain that were handy, I found your new mother-in-law out in the dining-room, and, judging by the plates around her, she was carrying in stock a full line of staple and fancy groceries and delicatessen. When I struck her she was crying into her third plate of ice cream, and complaining bitterly to the butler because the mould had been opened so carelessly that some salt had leaked into it.
Of course, I started right in to be sociable and to cheer her up, but I reckon I got my society talk a little mixed—I'd been one of the pall-bearers at Josh Burton's funeral the day before—and I told her that she must bear up and eat a little something to keep up her strength, and to remember that our loss was Helen's gain.
Now, I don't take much stock in all this mother-in-law talk, though I've usually found that where there's so much smoke there's a little fire; but I'm bound to say that Helen's ma came back at me with a sniff and a snort, and made me feel sorry that I'd intruded on her sacred grief. Told me that a girl of Helen's beauty and advantages had naturally been very, very popular, and greatly sought after. Said that she had been received in the very best society in Europe, and might have worn strawberry leaves if she'd chosen, meaning, I've since found out, that she might have married a duke.
I tried to soothe the old lady, and to restore good feeling by allowing that wearing leaves had sort of gone out of fashion with the Garden of Eden, and that I liked Helen better in white satin, but everything I said just seemed to enrage her the more. Told me plainly that she'd thought, and hinted that she'd hoped, right up to last month, that Helen was going to marry a French nobleman, the Count de Somethingerino or other, who was crazy about her. So I answered that we'd both had a narrow escape, because I'd been afraid for a year that I might wake up any morning and find myself the father-in-law of a Crystal Slipper chorus-girl. Then, as it looked as if the old lady was going to bust a corset-string in getting out her answer, I modestly slipped away, leaving her leaking brine and acid like a dill pickle that's had a bite taken out of it.
Good mothers often make bad mothers-in-law, because they usually believe that, no matter whom their daughters marry, they could have gone farther and fared better. But it struck me that Helen's ma has one of those retentive memories and weak mouths—the kind of memory that never loses anything it should forget, and the kind of mouth that can't retain a lot of language which it shouldn't lose.
Of course, you want to honor your mother-in-law, that your days may be long in the land; but you want to honor this one from a distance, for the same reason. Otherwise, I'm afraid you'll hear a good deal about that French count, and how hard it is for Helen to have to associate with a lot of mavericks from the Stock Yards, when she might be running with blooded stock on the other side. And if you glance up from your morning paper and sort of wonder out loud whether Corbett or Fitzsimmons is the better man, mother-in-law will glare at you over the top of her specs and ask if you don't think it's invidious to make any comparisons if they're both striving, to lead earnest, Christian lives. Then, when you come home at night, you'll be apt to find your wife sniffing your breath when you kiss her, to see if she can catch that queer, heavy smell which mother has noticed on it; or looking at you slant-eyed when she feels some letters in your coat, and wondering if what mother says is true, and if men who've once taken chorus-girls to supper never really recover from the habit.
On general principles, it's pretty good doctrine that two's a company and three's a crowd, except when the third is a cook. But I should say that when the third is Helen's ma it's a mob, out looking for a chance to make rough-house. A good cook, a good wife and a good job will make a good home anywhere; but you add your mother-in-law, and the first thing you know you've got two homes, and one of them is being run on alimony.
You want to remember that, beside your mother-in-law, you're a comparative stranger to your wife. After you and Helen have lived together for a year, you ought to be so well acquainted that she'll begin to believe that you know almost as much as mamma; but during the first few months of married life there are apt to be a good many tie votes on important matters, and if mother-in-law is on the premises she is generally going to break the tie by casting the deciding vote with daughter. A man can often get the best of one woman, or ten men, but not of two women, when one of the two is mother-in-law.
When a young wife starts housekeeping with her mother too handy, it's like running a business with a new manager and keeping the old one along to see how things go. It's not in human nature that the old manager, even with the best disposition in the world, shouldn't knock the new one a little, and you're Helen's new manager. When I want to make a change, I go about it like a crab—get rid of the old shell first, and then plunge right in and begin to do business with the new skin. It may be a little tender and open to attack at first, but it doesn't take long to toughen up when it finds out that the responsibility of protecting my white meat is on it.
You start a woman with sense to making mistakes and you've started her to learning common-sense; but you let some one else shoulder her natural responsibilities and keep her from exercising her brain, and it'll be fat-witted before she's forty. A lot of girls find it mighty handy to start with mother to look after the housekeeping and later to raise the baby; but by and by, when mamma has to quit, they don't understand that the butcher has to be called down regularly for leaving those heavy ends on the steak or running in the shoulder chops on you, and that when Willie has the croup she mustn't give the little darling a stiff hot Scotch, or try to remove the phlegm from his throat with a button-hook.
There are a lot of women in this world who think that there's only one side to the married relation, and that's their side. When one of them marries, she starts right out to train her husband into kind old Carlo, who'll go downtown for her every morning and come home every night, fetching a snug little basketful of money in his mouth and wagging his tail as he lays it at her feet. Then it's a pat on the head and "Nice doggie." And he's taught to stand around evenings, retrieving her gloves and handkerchief, and snapping up with a pleased licking of his chops any little word that she may throw to him. But you let him start in to have a little fun scratching and stretching himself, or pawing her, and it's "Charge, Carlo!" and "Bad doggie!"
Of course, no man ever believes when he marries that he's going to wind up as kind Carlo, who droops his head so that the children can pull his ears, and who sticks up his paw so as to make it easier for his wife to pull his leg. But it's simpler than you think.
As long as fond fathers slave and ambitious mothers sacrifice so that foolish daughters can hide the petticoats of poverty under a silk dress and crowd the doings of cheap society into the space in their heads which ought to be filled with plain, useful knowledge, a lot of girls are going to grow up with the idea that getting married means getting rid of care and responsibility instead of assuming it.
A fellow can't play the game with a girl of this sort, because she can't play fair. He wants her love and a wife; she wants a provider, not a lover, and she takes him as a husband because she can't draw his salary any other way. But she can't return his affection, because her love is already given to another; and when husband and wife both love the same person, and that person is the wife, it's usually a life sentence at hard labor for the husband. If he wakes up a little and tries to assert himself after he's been married a year or so, she shudders and sobs until he sees what a brute he is; or if that doesn't work, and he still pretends to have a little spirit, she goes off into a rage and hysterics, and that usually brings him to heel again. It's a mighty curious thing how a woman who has the appetite and instincts of a turkey—buzzard will often make her husband believe that she's as high-strung and delicate as a canary-bird!
It's been my experience that both men and women can fool each other before marriage, and that women can keep right along fooling men after marriage, but that as soon as the average man gets married he gets found out. After a woman has lived in the same house with a man for a year, she knows him like a good merchant knows his stock, down to any shelf-worn and slightly damaged morals which he may be hiding behind fresher goods in the darkest corner of his immortal soul. But even if she's married to a fellow who's so mean that he'd take the pennies off a dead man's eyes (not because he needed the money, but because he hadn't the change handy for a two-cent stamp), she'll never own up to the worst about him, even to herself, till she gets him into a divorce court.
I simply mention these things in a general way. Helen has shown signs of loving you, and you've never shown any symptoms of hating yourself, so I'm not really afraid that you're going to get the worst of it now. So far as I can see, your mother-in-law is the only real trouble that you have married. But don't you make the mistake of criticizing her to Helen or of quarrelling with her. I'll attend to both for the family. You simply want to dodge when she leads with the right, take your full ten seconds on the floor, and come back with your left cheek turned toward her, though, of course, you'll yank it back out of reach just before she lands on it. There's nothing like using a little diplomacy in this world, and, so far as women are concerned, diplomacy is knowing when to stay away. And a diplomatist is one who lets the other fellow think he's getting his way, while all the time he's having his own. It never does any special harm to let people have their way with their mouths.
What you want to do is to keep mother-in-law from mixing up in your family affairs until after she gets used to the disgrace of having a pork-packer for a son-in-law, and Helen gets used to pulling in harness with you. Then mother'll mellow up into a nice old lady who'll brag about you to the neighbors. But until she gets to this point, you've got to let her hurt your feelings without hurting hers. Don't you ever forget that Helen's got a mother-in-law, too, and that it's some one you think a heap of.
Whenever I hear of a fellow's being found out by his wife, it always brings to mind the case of Dick Hodgkins, whom I knew when I was a young fellow, back in Missouri. Dickie was one of a family of twelve, who all ran a little small any way you sized them up, and he was the runt. Like most of these little fellows, when he came to match up for double harness, he picked out a six-footer, Kate Miggs. Used to call her Honeybunch, I remember, and she called him Doodums.
Honeybunch was a good girl, but she was as strong as a six-mule team, and a cautious man just naturally shied away from her. Was a pretty free stepper in the mazes of the dance, and once, when she was balancing partners with Doodums, she kicked out sort of playful to give him a love pat and fetched him a clip with her tootsey that gave him water on the kneepan. It ought to have been a warning to Doodums, but he was plumb infatuated, and went around pretending that he'd been kicked by a horse. After that the boys used to make Honeybunch mighty mad when she came out of dark corners with Doodums, by feeling him to see if any of his ribs were broken. Still he didn't take the hint, and in the end she led him to the altar.
We started in to give them a lovely shivaree after the wedding, beginning with a sort of yell which had been invented by the only fellow in town who had been to college.
As I remember, it ran something like this:
Hun, hun, hunch! Bun, bun, bunch! Funny, funny! Honey, honey! Funny Honeybunch!
But as soon as we got this off, and before we could begin on the dishpan chorus, Honeybunch came at us with a couple of bed-slats and cleaned us all out.
Before he had married, Doodums had been one of half a dozen half-baked sports who drank cheap whisky and played expensive poker at the Dutchman's; and after he'd held Honeybunch in his lap evenings for a month, he reckoned one night that he'd drop down street and look in on the boys. Honeybunch reckoned not, and he didn't press the matter, but after they'd gone to bed and she'd dropped off to sleep, he slipped into his clothes and down the waterspout to the ground. He sat up till two o'clock at the Dutchman's, and naturally, the next morning he had a breath like a gasoline runabout, and looked as if he'd been attending a successful coon-hunt in the capacity of the coon.
Honeybunch smelt his breath and then she smelt a mouse, but she wasn't much of a talker and she didn't ask any questions—of him. But she had brother Jim make some inquiries, and a few days later, when Doodums complained of feeling all petered out and wanted to go to bed early, she was ready for him.
Honeybunch wasn't any invalid, and when she went to bed it was to sleep, so she rigged up a simple little device in the way of an alarm and dropped off peacefully, while Doodums pretended to.
When she began to snore in her upper register and to hit the high C, he judged the coast was clear, and leaped lightly out of bed. Even before he'd struck the floor he knew there'd been a horrible mistake somewhere, for he felt a tug as if he'd hooked a hundred-pound catfish. There was an awful ripping and tearing sound, something fetched loose, and his wife was sitting up in bed blinking at him in the moonlight. It seemed that just before she went to sleep she'd pinned her nightgown to his with a safety pin, which wasn't such a bad idea for a simple, trusting, little village maiden.
"Was you wantin' anything, Duckie Doodums?" she asked in a voice like the running of sap in maple-sugar time.
"N-n-nothin' but a drink of water, Honeybunch sweetness," he stammered back.
"You're sure you ain't mistook in your thirst and that it ain't a suddint cravin' for licker, and that you ain't sort of p'intin' down the waterspout for the Dutchman's, Duckie Doodums?"
"Shorely not, Honeybunch darlin'," he finally fetched up, though he was hardly breathing.
"Because your ma told me that you was given to somnambulasticatin' in your sleep, and that I must keep you tied up nights or you'd wake up some mornin' at the foot of a waterspout with your head bust open and a lot of good licker spilt out on the grass."
"Don't you love your Doodums anymore?" was all Dickie could find to say to this; but Honeybunch had too much on her mind to stop and swap valentines just then.
"You wouldn't deceive your Honeybunch, would you, Duckie Doodums?"
"I shorely would not."
"Well, don't you do it, Duckie Doodums, because it would break my heart; and if you should break my heart I'd just naturally bust your head. Are you listenin', Doodums?"
Doodums was listening.
"Then you come back to bed and stay there."
Doodums never called his wife Honeybunch after that. Generally it was Kate, and sometimes it was Kitty, and when she wasn't around it was usually Kitty-cat. But he minded better than anything I ever met on less than four legs.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
P.S.—You might tear up this letter.
No. 8
From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Yemassee-on-the-Tallahassee. In replying to his father's hint that it is time to turn his thoughts from love to lard, the young man has quoted a French sentence, and the old man has been both pained and puzzled by it.
VIII
CHICAGO, January 24, 189-.
Dear Pierrepont: I had to send your last letter to the fertilizer department to find out what it was all about. We've got a clerk there who's an Oxford graduate, and who speaks seven languages for fifteen dollars a week, or at the rate of something more than two dollars a language. Of course, if you're such a big thinker that your ideas rise to the surface too fast for one language to hold 'em all, it's a mighty nice thing to know seven; but it's been my experience that seven spread out most men so thin that they haven't anything special to say in any of them. These fellows forget that while life's a journey, it isn't a palace-car trip for most of us, and that if they hit the trail packing a lot of weight for which they haven't any special use, they're not going to get very far. You learn men and what men should do, and how they should do it, and then if you happen to have any foreigners working for you, you can hire a fellow at fifteen per to translate hustle to 'em into their own fool language. It's always been my opinion that everybody spoke American while the tower of Babel was building, and that the Lord let the good people keep right on speaking it. So when you've got anything to say to me, I want you to say it in language that will grade regular on the Chicago Board of Trade.
Some men fail from knowing too little, but more fail from knowing too much, and still more from knowing it all. It's a mighty good thing to understand French if you can use it to some real purpose, but when all the good it does a fellow is to help him understand the foreign cuss-words in a novel, or to read a story which is so tough that it would make the Queen's English or any other ladylike language blush, he'd better learn hog-Latin! He can be just the same breed of yellow dog in it, and it don't take so much time to pick it up.
Never ask a man what he knows, but what he can do. A fellow may know everything that's happened since the Lord started the ball to rolling, and not be able to do anything to help keep it from stopping. But when a man can do anything, he's bound to know something worth while. Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.
It isn't what a man's got in the bank, but what he's got in his head, that makes him a great merchant. Rob a miser's safe and he's broke; but you can't break a big merchant with a jimmy and a stick of dynamite. The first would have to start again just where he began—hoarding up pennies; the second would have his principal assets intact. But accumulating knowledge or piling up money, just to have a little more of either than the next fellow, is a fool game that no broad-gauged man has time enough to sit in. Too much learning, like too much money, makes most men narrow.
I simply mention these things in a general way. You know blame well that I don't understand any French, and so when you spring it on me you are simply showing a customer the wrong line of goods. It's like trying to sell our Pickled Luncheon Tidbits to a fellow in the black belt who doesn't buy anything but plain dry-salt hog in hunks and slabs. It makes me a little nervous for fear you'll be sending out a lot of letters to the trade some day, asking them if their stock of Porkuss Americanuss isn't running low.
The world is full of bright men who know all the right things to say and who say them in the wrong place. A young fellow always thinks that if he doesn't talk he seems stupid, but it's better to shut up and seem dull than to open up and prove yourself a fool. It's a pretty good rule to show your best goods last.
Whenever I meet one of those fellows who tells you all he knows, and a good deal that he doesn't know, as soon as he's introduced to you, I always think of Bill Harkness, who kept a temporary home for broken-down horses—though he didn't call it that—back in Missouri. Bill would pick up an old critter whose par value was the price of one horse-hide, and after it had been pulled and shoved into his stable, the boys would stand around waiting for crape to be hung on the door. But inside a week Bill would be driving down Main Street behind that horse, yelling Whoa! at the top of his voice while it tried to kick holes in the dashboard.
Bill had a theory that the Ten Commandments were suspended while a horse-trade was going on, so he did most of his business with strangers. Caught a Northerner nosing round his barn one day, and inside of ten minutes the fellow was driving off behind what Bill described as "the peartest piece of ginger and cayenne in Pike County." Bill just made a free gift of it to the Yankee, he said, but to keep the transaction from being a piece of pure charity he accepted fifty dollars from him.
The stranger drove all over town bragging of his bargain, until some one casually called his attention to the fact that the mare was stone-blind. Then he hiked back to Bill's and went for him in broken Bostonese, winding up with:
"What the skip-two-and-carry-one do you mean, you old hold-your-breath-and-take-ten-swallows, by stealing my good money. Didn't you know the horse was blind? Why didn't you tell me?"
"Yep," Bill bit off from his piece of store plug; "I reckon I knew the hoss was blind, but you see the feller I bought her of"—and he paused to settle his chaw—"asked me not to mention it. You wouldn't have me violate a confidence as affected the repertashun of a pore dumb critter, and her of the opposite sect, would you?" And the gallant Bill turned scornfully away from the stranger.
There were a good many holes in Bill's methods, but he never leaked information through them; and when I come across a fellow who doesn't mention it when he's asked not to, I come pretty near letting him fix his own salary. It's only a mighty big man that doesn't care whether the people whom he meets believe that he's big; but the smaller a fellow is, the bigger he wants to appear. He hasn't anything of his own in his head that's of any special importance, so just to prove that he's a trusted employee, and in the confidence of the boss, he gives away everything he knows about the business, and, as that isn't much, he lies a little to swell it up. It's a mighty curious thing how some men will lie a little to impress people who are laughing at them; will drink a little in order to sit around with people who want to get away from them; and will even steal a little to "go into society" with people who sneer at them.