The Real Adventure
taken him like that, except that the notion of her in court trying a
case--he was a lawyer himself--seemed rather startling.
She sighed. "And now I suppose," she said, "you'll advise me not to be.
Portia won't hear of my being a decorator. She says there's nothing in
it any more; and my two brothers--one's a professor of history and the
other's a high-school principal--say, 'Let her do anything but teach.'
One of mother's great friends is a doctor, and she says, 'Anything but
medicine,' so I suppose you'll say, 'Anything but law.'"
"Not a bit," he said. "It's the finest profession in the world."
But he said it off the top of his mind. Down below, it was still engaged
with the picture of her in a dismal court room, blazing up at a jury the
way she had blazed up at that street-car conductor. It was a queer
notion. He didn't know whether he liked it or not.
"I suppose," she hazarded, "that it's awfully dull and tiresome, though,
until you get way up to the top."
That roused him. "It's awfully dull when you do get to the top, or
what's called the top--being a client caretaker with the routine law
business of a few big corporations and rich estates going through your
office like grist through a mill. I can't imagine anything duller than
that. That's supposed to be the big reward, of course. That's the
bundle of hay they dangle in front of your nose to keep you trotting
straight along without trying to see around your blinders."
He was out of his chair now, tramping up and down the room. "You're not
supposed to discover that it's interesting. You're pretty well spoiled
for their purposes if you do. The thing to bear in mind, if you're going
to travel their road, is that a case is worth while in a precise and
unalterable ratio to the amount of money involved in it. If you question
that axiom at all seriously, you're lost. That's what happened to me."
He pulled up with a jerk, looked at her and laughed. "If my sister
Frederica were here," he explained, "she would warn you, out of a long
knowledge of my conversational habits, that now was the time for you to
ask me,--firmly, you know,--if I'd been to see Maude Adams in this new
thing of hers, or something like that. In Frederica's absence, I suppose
it's only fair to warn you myself. Have you been to see it? I haven't."
She smiled in a sort of contented amusement and let that do for an
answer to his question about Maude Adams. Then the smile transmuted
itself into a look of thoughtful gravity and there was a long silence
which, though it puzzled him, he made no move to break.
At last she pulled in a long breath, turned straight to him and said, "I
wish you'd tell me what _did_ happen to you."
And under the compelling sincerity of her, for the next two hours and a
half, or thereabouts, he did--told it as he had never told it
before--talked as Frederica, who thought she knew him, had never heard
him talk.
He told her how he had started at the foot of the ladder in one of the
big successful firms of what he called "client caretakers," drawing up
bills and writs, rounding up witnesses in personal injury suits, trying
little justice-shop cases--the worst of them, of course, because there
was a youngster just ahead of him who got the better ones. And then,
dramatically, he told of his discovery amid this chaff, of a real legal
problem--a problem that for its nice intricacies and intellectual
suggestiveness, would have brought an appreciative gleam to the eye of
Mr. Justice Holmes, or Lord Mansfield, or the great Coke himself. He
told of the passionate enthusiasm with which he had attacked it, the
thrilling weeks of labor he had put on it. And then he told her the
outcome of it all; how the head of the firm, an old friend of his
father, had called him in and complimented him on the work that he had
done; said it was very remarkable, but, unfortunately, not profitable to
the firm, the whole amount involved in the case having been some twenty
dollars. They were only paying him forty dollars a month, to be sure,
but they figured that forty dollars practically a total loss and they
thought he might better go to practising law for himself. In other
words, he was fired.
But the thing that rang through the girl's mind like the clang of a
bell--the thing that made her catch her breath, was the quality of the
big laugh with which he concluded it. He didn't ask her to be sorry for
him. He wasn't sorry for himself one bit,--nor bitter--nor cynical. He
didn't even seem trying to make a merit of his refusal to acquiesce in
that sordid point of view. He just dismissed the thing with a
cymbal-like clash of laughter and plunged ahead with his story.
He told her how he'd got in with an altruistic bunch--the City Homes
Association; how, finding him keen for work that they had little time
for, the senior legal counselors had drawn out and let him do it. And
from the way he told of his labors in drafting a new city building
ordinance, she felt that it must have been one of the most fascinating
occupations in the world, until he told her how it had drawn him into
politics--municipal, city council politics, which was even more
thrilling, and then how, after an election, a new state's attorney had
offered him a position on his staff of assistants.
In a sense, of course, it was true that he had, as Frederica would have
put it, forgotten she was there--had forgotten, at least, who she was.
Because, if he had remembered that she was just a young girl in the
university, he would hardly, as he tramped about the room expounding the
practise of criminal law in the state's attorney's office, have
characterized the state's attorney himself as a "damned gallery-playing
mountebank," nor have described the professions and the misdeeds of
some of the persons he prosecuted in blunt Anglo-Saxon terms she had
never heard used except in the Bible.
The girl knew he had forgotten, and her only discomfort came from the
fear that the spell might be broken and he remember suddenly and be
embarrassed and stop.
In the deeper sense--and she was breathlessly conscious of this too--he
hadn't forgotten she was there. He was telling it all because she was
there--because she was herself and nobody else. She knew, though how she
couldn't have explained,--with that intuitive certainty that is the only
real certainty there is,--that the story couldn't have been evoked from
him in just that way, by any one else in the world.
At the end of two years in the state's attorney's office, he told her,
he figured he had had his training and was ready to begin.
"I made just one resolution when I hung out my shingle," he said, "and
that was that no matter how few cases I got, I wouldn't take any that
weren't interesting--that didn't give me something to bite on. A lot of
my friends thought I was crazy, of course--the ones who came around
because they liked me, or had liked my father, to offer me nice plummy
little sinecures, and got told I didn't want them. Just for the sake of
looking successful and accumulating a lot of junk I didn't want, I
wasn't going to asphyxiate myself, have strings tied to my arms and legs
like a damned marionette. I wasn't willing to be bored for any reward
they had to offer me. It's cynical to be bored. It's the worst
immorality there is. Well, and I never have been."
It wasn't all autobiographical and narrative. There was a lot of his
deep-breathing, spacious philosophy of life mixed up in it. And this the
girl, consciously, and deliberately, provoked. It didn't need much. She
said something about discipline and he snatched the word away from her.
"What is discipline? Why, it's standing the gaff--_standing_ it, not
submitting to it. It's accepting the facts of life--of your own life, as
they happen to be. It isn't being conquered by them. It's not making
masters of them, but servants to the underlying things you want."
She tried to make a reservation there--suppose the things you wanted
weren't good things.
But he wouldn't allow it.
"Whatever they are," he insisted, "your desires are the only motive
forces you've got. No matter how fine your intelligence is, it can't
ride anywhere except on the backs of your own passions. There's no good
lamenting that they're not different, and it's silly to beat them to
death and make a merit of not having ridden anywhere because they might
have carried you into trouble. Learn to ride them--control them--spur
them. But don't forget that they're _you_ just as essentially as the
rider is."
It was with a curiously relaxed body, her chin cradled in the crook of
her arm that lay along the back of the couch, her eyes unfocused on the
window, that the girl listened to it.
Primarily, indeed, she wasn't exactly listening. Much of the narrative
went by almost unheard. Much of the philosophy she hardly tried to
understand. What was constantly present and more and more poignantly
vivid with every five minutes that ticked away on the banjo clock, was a
consciousness of the man himself, the driving power of him, the
boisterous health and freshness and confidence. She was conscious, too,
of something formidable--carelessly exultant in his own strength. She
got to thinking of the flight of a great bird wheeling up higher and
higher on his powerful wings.
He had caught her up, too, and was carrying her to altitudes far beyond
her own powers. He might drop her, but if he did, it wouldn't be through
weakness. At what he said about riding on the backs of one's own
passions, her imagination varied the picture so that she saw him
galloping splendidly by.
At that, suddenly and to her consternation, she felt her eyes flushing
up with tears. She tried to blink them away, but they came too fast.
Presently he stopped short in his walk--stopped talking, with a gasp,
in the middle of a sentence, and looked into her face. She couldn't see
his clearly, but she saw his hands clench and heard him draw a long
breath. Then he turned abruptly and walked to the window and for a
mortal endless minute, there was a silence.
At last she found something--it didn't matter much what--to say, and the
conversation between them, on the surface of it, was just what it had
been for the first ten minutes after he had come in. But, paradoxically,
this superficial commonplaceness only heightened the tensity of the
thing that underlay it. Something had happened during that moment while
he stood looking into her tear-flushed eyes; something momentous,
critical, which no previous experience in her life had prepared her for.
And it had happened to him, too. The memory of his silhouette as he
stood there with his hands clenched, between her and the window, would
have convinced her, had she needed convincing.
The commonplace thing she had found to say met, she knew, a need that
was his as well as hers, for breathing-space--for time for the recovery
of lost bearings. Had he not felt it as well as she--she smiled a little
over this--he wouldn't have yielded. The man on horseback would have
taken an obstacle like that without breaking the stride of his gallop.
What underlay her quiet meaningless chat, was wonder and fear, and more
deeply still, a sort of cosmic contentment--the acquiescence of a
swimmer in the still irresistible current of a mighty river.
It was distinctly a relief to her when her mother came in and,
presently, Portia. She introduced him to them, and then dropped out of
the conversation altogether. As if it were a long way off, she heard him
retailing last night's adventure and expressing his regret that he
hadn't taken her to Frederica (that was his sister, Mrs. Whitney) to be
dried out, before he sent her home.
She was aware that Portia stole a look at her in a puzzled penetrating