Common Cause

by Samuel Hopkins Adams

  “I was going by this way so I stopped in to save time,” said Jeremy Robson.

  “You’re welcome. But I’d ruther she’d come, herself. We had a good talk, her an’ me, when she brung in the boots.” He wrapped them up clumsily but carefully. “An extry good operation. But no extry charge.”

  A figure stirred in a long canvas chair in the corner. From it came a mutter in which the words “Scab-work” in a contemptuous tone were alone comprehensible. The figure reared a white-thatched head, and a keen, lined face, above a sinewy neck set upon a spare frame. “Rich, ain’t she?” said the figure. “Let her pay extry, then, for extry work.”

  “Rich she may or may not be,” replied the Boot & Shoe surgeon. “Proud she ain’t. Comes in here as free as fresh air an’ as pleasant. ‘Mr. Wade?’ s’ she. ‘Doctor Wade, when I’m in the Surgery, Miss,’ s’ I. ‘Doctor Wade, you get my trade,’ s’ she, and laughed a little, for she hadn’t meant to say it that way. ‘That’s as purty a rhyme as ever I heard in my life, Miss,’ s’ I. I looked at the boots. ‘Furrin?’ s’ I. ‘No,’ s’ she. ‘American,’ s’ she. ‘As American as you are.’ ‘Glad to hear it,’ s’ I. ‘You must be an American from ’way-back,’ s’ I, ‘fer the wades f’m Wal-tham,’ s’ I, ‘have fit in every war f’m the Revolution sence, all an’ inclusive, an’ I reckon to live to fight in the comin’ one, ef they take ’em over sixty years of age,’ s’ I. ‘What is the comin’ one, Doctor Wade?’ s’ she. ‘Why, the war when us Americans has got to get together and fight for Americar against all these durn furiners that think they own the earth,’ s’ I. ‘That’s the comin’ war as I reckon it, an’ I guess it’s comin’ right here in Centralia an’ through the Middle West purty soon unless we figger to let ourselves get shevved plum off the map,’ s’ I. Then she told me about noticin’ the flag an’ the motter in my winder, an’ says that’s why she brung me her trade, an’ she hopes the flag’ll stay there, fer trade follers the flag, s’ she, or ought to in sech a good cause. An’ she laughs that laugh of hern, like music, an’ we settled down an’ had a real good palaver. So,” said the Boot & Shoe Surgeon, “she gets a low-priced, extry-good operation. Though I’m bound to say, she’d ’a’ got somethin’ extry jest on the straight way she wears shoeleather.”

  “You read character from shoes, then,” commented Jeremy Robson, mildly amused.

  “What’d I be if I couldn’t? A cobbler! A leather-patcher! Not a genuwyne Boot & Shoe Surgeon. Character in shoes? Of course there is. Lemme see yours.” He lifted up first one, then the other foot of his visitor, as if he were a horse, and shook his head soberly over them.

  “You stumble,” he said. “You ain’t struck your gait, yet. Bump up against things when there’s no sense in it. Foolish. Obstinit, too, I wouldn’t wonder. Lazy? M-m-m! I dunno. I guess you like the easy way an’ a clear path pretty good. If you’re sensible an’ saving, better leave them shoes with me for a little toning-up.”

  “Will you undertake to improve my character with the improvement to my shoes?”

  “Laugh at me if you like. You don’t laugh at folks that believes in palmistry. What’s a man’s palm to read! He can change every line in it with a hoe, or an awl, or a golf-stick. But his shoes! Ah! As a man walks, so he is. An’ his shoes tell the tale. Take these, young man.” The Boot & Shoe Surgeon laid an affectionate hand upon Miss Marcia Ames’ boots. “Study ’em. They’ll repay you. There’s courage an’ clean pride an’ a warm heart that travels the path she walks. Yes; an’ a touch of vanity—Why not? An’ a temper of their own, them boots. Hot an’ quick an’ generous. You’ve got to travel some to keep pace with them boots. I dunno when I’ve had a pair to match ’em. Here’s another pair’ll go far.” He lifted them into view. “Hand-made, stout-made, and serviceable. They’re climbers, they are! They’ll reach the high places—if they don’t slip.”

  “Who owns them?”

  “The Honorable Martin Embree.”

  “A faker,” grunted the white-haired figure.

  “A climber. A hustler. A fighter. No faker. Yet—they may slip,” said the diagnostician, studying the sole of the left boot. “They may slip. Gave me some advice, when he saw my winder. ‘Leave the flag, but take out the motter,’ s’ he. ‘There’s no sense in that “It stands alone.” The country is big enough an’ broad enough for all nationalities, an’ welcome,’ s’ he.”

  “Sensible enough,” growled the figure in the chair. “But he’s a faker. A half-heart. All for the people in words. But put it up to him in deeds—he ain’t there.”

  “He’s a Socialist,”1 explained the Boot & Shoe Surgeon, pointing his awl at the chair. “Nicholas Milliken. Make you acquainted. What did you say your name was?”

  “Jeremy Robson,” said its owner, who hadn’t yet said anything of the sort.

  The figure in the chair for the first time honored him with its attention.

  “On The Record?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Reporter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ve got the soul of a louse.”

  “Soft words, Nick,” prescribed Eli Wade.

  “Soft words? Hard facts! The soul of a louse!”

  “Who the devil are you?” demanded Jeremy.

  “A Socialist,” repeated the Boot & Shoe Surgeon. “Don’t mind him.”

  Milliken rose and stood before the subject of his contemptuous phrase; long, lean, dry, and bitter. “Me?” said he. “I’m a man. I’m no hired pen. I write for The Free-Thinker, when I write.”

  “Rest of the time he sets type on The Record,” explained Wade.

  “That’s it. Many a time I’ve run the stick over your stuff.”

  “It seems to have made an unfavorable impression on you,” remarked Jeremy.

  “Oh, you can write.” The other flung the concession to him condescendingly. “I grant you that. What good does that do you? You’ve got to trim your facts to your owner’s orders, haven’t you?”

  “Not facts,” denied the reporter with some heat. “Facts are facts. I don’t trim them for anybody.”

  “Nobody trims them after they’re written, either, I suppose.”

  The tone was not to Jeremy’s liking. “The copydesk—” he began.

  “Oh, cut the guff! The copy-desk is a hired blue pencil, just like you’re a hired pen. You know what I mean. Why didn’t they print your story on the girl at the Federated German Societies meeting? Wasn’t it facts? Wasn’t it good enough?”

  Jeremy was silent.

  “I’ll tell you,” resumed the implacable Socialist. “They were afraid. Afraid of the German crowd. Call their souls their own? Not any more than you can.”

  “What about yourself, Nick?” put in the proprietor of the place. “You take The Record’s money, the same as this gentleman, only maybe not so much of it.”

  “Do I sell myself for it? Would I write for The Record? Or any other of the capitalistic press? Eli Wade, you’re honest, you are. A fool, but honest. You don’t know what a reporter’s go to do to hold his job. Why, if you was to get into some mix-up over a pair of shoes with the owner of his paper tomorrow, he’d be sent down here to write you wrong, whether you were right or wrong, and he’d do it. He’d have to do it. That’s what comes of a privately owned press, under our capitalistic system.”

  Through the gross exaggeration Jeremy felt the point of a half-truth and resented it. “No decent reporter would do it,” he asserted.

  “Who said anything about ‘decent’ reporters?’ countered the other.

  Jeremy’s face changed; his weight shifted slightly upon his feet. Not so slightly but that the pedal diagnostician noticed the movement. “Want to get your eye punched?” he inquired, of Milliken. “You’re going the right way for it.”

  The Socialist grinned wickedly and relishingly. “Don’t like that, huh? All right. Come to me a year from now and tell me I’m wrong, and I’ll apologize. That’s fair. Ain’t it?

  “That’s fair,” cor
roborated the Boot & Shoe Surgeon.

  “Mind you,” continued the Socialist, pursuing his favorite path of self-explication; “I wouldn’t ha’ printed your story either. It was a fool story. Ain’t the Germans just as good as we are? Better’n a lot of us. They believe in the rights o’ men, they do. None of your dirty aristocratic notions about them. Look at Germany! Most Socialistic country in the world today. Most civilized, too.”

  “Let ’em stay I their own country, then,” said Eli Wade. “We don’t want ’em.”

  “Ah, but we do! We need ’em to help on the Social Revolution.”

  “My folks fit in one American Revolution,” said the Doctor stoutly. “I don’t reckon none of us is going to fight in another led by Germans and crazy folks.”

  “You’ll come around,” laughed Milliken. “You’ll live to be ashamed of that silly motto in your window. Take it out! Take it out, Eli Wade, and put the Red Flag of World-Brotherhood in its place.”

  “Above the American flag, mebbe?”

  “Along with it. My stock’s as good Yankee as yours, Eli. But I’m ready to fight again for libutty, and you ain’t. You read too much in the capitalistic press. Someday you’ll be reading this young feller’s editorials, all about the rights o’ capital and what the laboring man owes to his employer.”

  “You will not,” said Jeremy.

  “Trying your pen at editorials, ain’t you?”

  “Have you been setting those up, too?”

  “Exactly. You’ll land. You’ve got the knack. The slick, smooth, oily trick of making the thing seem what it ain’t. So pretty soon I’ll have to take that back about your having the soul of a louse. You’ll be worse than that. I’ll tell you what you’ll be.” And he told, naming a very ancient and much blown-upon profession.

  “That’ll be enough an’ some-to-carry from you,” said the Boot & Shoe Surgeon indignantly. “Get out of my place an’ don’t come back until you’ve cleaned your dirty tongue.”

  Resentment of his brusque dismissal was far remote from Mr. Nicholas Milliken’s philosophic mind, if one were to judge by the cheerful smile with which he rose. “All right, old moozle-head!” he returned affectionately. “He fires me about once a week,” he explained to Jeremy. “That’s when he can’t stand any more good, plain facts. They boil over on him and out I go, with the steam. Don’t you mind me, either, young feller. You’ll see I’m right, one day. We’re all bound upon the Wheel of Things,2 as the old Lammy said to Kim. Sup-prised, are you, that I know Roodyerd Kipling?” He preened himself with a childish vanity. “I read everything! The old Lammy was a bit of a Socialist himself. All bound upon the Wheel of Things. And if I see a little clearer than you, it’s only because I happen to be bound a turn or two higher up.”

  The ineffable patronage of this amused Jeremy into good humor. “I’ll call on you for that apology, though, one of these days,” he said to the parting guest.

  Eli Wade looked after Milliken with a frown. “Them shoes of his have got a gallows gait,” he declared. “Lawless paths! Lawless paths! Why do I stand his bitter tongue? I guess it’s because he makes me think. I wish I had his education,” sighed the old man.

  “Where did he get it?”

  “Picked it up. Libraries, night schools, and the like. He was a New England mill-hand, always in hot water. Stirrin’ up labor troubles and all that. Picked up typography an’ drifted out here. A quirky mind an’ a restless one, an’ a bad course it sets for his feet to follow,” said the gentle, one-ideaed old philosopher of foot-gear. “But not a bad heart, Nick hasn’t. Come in again, young gentleman,” he added. “Not in the way of trade. Come in an’ talk with the old man. One of you newspaper gentlemen drops in for a chat, often. Mr. Galpin of The Guardian. You’ll know him, I guess?”

  “Very well.”

  “Them are his spare shoes, yonder. Rough, ordinary, plain articles. Plodders. But good wearing stuff in ’em an’ right solid on the ground, every inch. Slow-moving,” he nodded thoughtfully. “Yes; they’ll move slow, but they won’t never wobble. An’ don’t think to trip up the man that walks in ’em. It ain’t to be done.”

  “I believe you’re right, there.”

  “Right? Cert’nly I’m right. Leather never lies. Not good leather. An’ poor leather’s a dead give-away. My museum of soles.” He waved a showman’s hand toward the rows of shoes suspended neatly in brackets of his own devising against the walls. “Look at them Congress gaiters. Wouldn’t you know they was a banker’s belongings? Robert Wanser, President of the Trust Company. Full and easy and comfortable and mebbe a little sly in the gait. But there’s weight in ’em. Don’t get in their way. There’s Rappelje’s next ’em; Professor Rappelje, of the University. Queer neighbors. Straight and thin and fine finished, his gear. Mebbe a little pinchy. But a man to swear by. And Bausch: them high-button calfs. He’s a buster. Busts his buttons off. One of them big, puffin’-up Germans. Always marching. Tramp-tramp-tramp: the goose-step. Nothin’ o’ that in that lot on the end. Judge Dana. See the ball of the soles? Worn down. Creeps, he does. Guess he can jump too, after he’s crept near enough. An’ that pair below, on the right. That’s a shuffler. Mr. Wymett. Owns The Guardian and runs it. Now here’s a mincer. Dainty an’ soft he goes an’ daity an’ soft he lives: the Rev. Mr. Merserole, rector of our rich folks’ church. For all that, there’s stuff an’ weight in his shoes.” His hand hovered and touched a pair of elegantly made, low, laced Oxfords, of almost feminine delicacy. “Style there, eh? Know what they want, those shoes. Got to be jest so. Spick an’ span. They say Montrose Clark never has to pay to have ’em cleaned.”

  “Why is that?” asked Jeremy, responsive to the look of invitation in the old man’s eye.

  “Got so many boot-lickers around him, chuckled the philosopher. “Kick you as soon as look at you, those would, for all they look so finicky.”

  “I’ll come in to see you when I need pointers about people,” said Jeremy, smiling.

  The Boot & Shoe Surgeon handed him the repaired golf-boots. “I’m an ignorant old man,” he said, “but I know folks’s feet and sometimes I can guess what path they’ll take. I’ve been talking pretty free to you, Mr. Robson, for a stranger. But I reckon you’re trustable, ’spite of what Nick Milliken says.”

  “I reckon I am, Doctor Wade,” returned Jeremy, and believed himself as he said it.

  “Yes: the old man likes to talk,” confessed Eli Wade; “an’ about people. Gossip, some call it. That’s a silly word. What’s history but gossip about folks that are dead? But, of course, a man like me has to be careful who he talks to, being in public life.”

  “Certainly,” acquiesced the amused Jeremy. “But I didn’t know you were in public life. What office do you hold?”

  “I’m on the Fenchester Public School Board,” said Eli Wade with simple but profound pride.

  5

  Bobolink on a grass-tuft piped ecstatic welcome to a long-lost friend, the sun. Five gray and weary days had passed since that amiable orb had bestowed so much as one uncloaked beam upon birds and men, and on each of those rain-soaked days, Jeremy Robson had racked his overstrained vocabulary for new objurgations against the malign fates which had spread a watery barrier between himself and Marcia Ames. Now the sun was an hour above the eastern horizon with a flawless sky outspread like a luxurious carpet for its day’s journey. Secure at that hour in the undisputed possession of the earth, bobolink swayed and sang, when to its wrath and amaze a shining missile descended from the sky and bounded with sprightly twists toward its chosen choir-loft.

  “Sliced into the rough again,” said a voice of despair from the hollow below, and two figures appeared, headed toward the singer, who moved on with an indignant and expostulatory chirp, but found another perch still within ear-shot.

  “Because you will not keep your head down,” reprehended the deeper tones of the young man.

  Bobolink stretched his liquid throat in a love-song. He sang the warm sweetness of the earth, and the conque
ring glory of the sun; the breeze’s kiss and the welcome of the flower for the bees, and youth which is made up of all these and comes but once. Out of a full heart he sent forth his missioning call to young hearts; then, as the girl turned an exquisite face toward him, he waited for her response.

  “That is four,” said she, “and I am not out yet.” And she hewed away a whole clump of innocent daisies, with one ferocious chop.

  “You should have used a niblick the first time,” observed the young man.

  Perceiving that romance had forever departed from the human race when, on such a May morning, such a maid and such a youth could satisfy their soul with such conversation as this, bobolink flew away to a tussock in an adjacent field where his own private romance was safe hidden.

  To versatile human kind, it is given to make love in many and diverse manners uncomprehended of the bird species. Not the least ingenious of his species, Mr. Jeremy Robson had marked out as his first step the establishment of a systematic association with Miss Marcia Ames, through golf; and until that association could be trusted to walk alone, as it were, he purposed to confine his attention strictly to the matter in hand. Her desire to make the college team was a very genuine one, and he guessed her to be a young lady of no small determination. Therefore, he was well satisfied to observe that, on this their first experiment as teacher and pupil, she was playing rather poorly. This meant longer and more arduous practice. At the end of the first round, during which he had devoted close attention but scant suggestion to her performance, he was four up and her card showed a painful total.

  “Fifty-twos will never land you anywhere,” was the conclusion which he derived from the addition.

  “What is to be done?” she asked in her precise English. “I grow worse.”

  “Do you read Ibsen?” he inquired.

  “I have read him a great deal. But not upon golf,” said Miss Ames with raised eyebrows.

  “Does your playing suggest any particular character of his?”