JANEWAY VISITS EAGLES NEST

Judge Harrison had a town house in Fond du Lac, and on out the Shell Bay Road, just northwest of the city, a country place to which he made his escape, to use his own words, at the first sign of spring. Accordingly, every spring he watched with jealous eye for the coming of the first robin. There was a perennial rivalry between him and Bishop Marion as to which should spot the earliest bird. March 10 was the date accepted by both as the most probable for the return of the winter truants, but the schedule of these red-breasted travellers was subject to many contingencies.

Nor were they fastidious as to their first stopping-place. Bishop Marion, who lived in a big, smoke-grimed, red-brick house next the old procathedral, in the lower town, maintained that the Judge, living amid maples and elms, in the exclusive part of the town, enjoyed an advantage. Judge Harrison--never without resource--pointed out, on the other hand, that robins are not aristocrats, and urged that the Bishop often snatched victory from his own grasp through his habit of getting up earlier in the morning; and that to equalize opportunity, the Bishop should either rise later, or should not, in fairness, look out of doors until he had massed and breakfasted, as Judge Harrison expressed it.

However it was, as to advantage, the Bishop was quite as often victor in the contest as to which should call the other up to announce the first robin as Harrison in his more attractive surroundings up-town. Between the two men it was an affair of honor; each accepted without question the word of the other over the telephone, even in midwinter, when it was assumed by both--in the event of a stray bird’s appearance being spotted by either--that the unfortunate had trusted to the promise of a mild season, or had been hampered pecuniarily in his plans for getting south. But if any one else in the community, even members of their own households, announced a robin out of season, the Bishop and the Judge presented to the claimant the united scepticism of experienced observers, and frowned together on sensational and unauthenticated reports.

The coming of the robin always gave to Judge Harrison the initial impulse to desert the city house for The Farms, as he modestly termed his handsome estate. Elizabeth, his wife, had called it after the old Delaware home of her father, Eagles Nest. The Judge’s objection to this was that he had never, even as a boy, seen an eagle within a hundred miles of the place. But this difficulty did not deter Mrs. Harrison. And her choice of a name appeared on the road pillars at the entrance, and as well in the society columns.

Judge Harrison had a second spring token to lure him from town. His old man servant, Oliver, survivor of many combinations of serving men and women in the Harrison ménage, had been from time long gone accustomed to search the Big Woods, as the hills on the extreme northwest corner of The Farms were called, for the first arbutus blooms. When Oliver wanted new rubber boots, he was not infrequently “stood off” by the Judge in his requisition. But, familiar with his master’s crotchets, the venerable darky learned to wait till winter was on the wane. When he told the Judge he needed new boots to look for arbutus, permission to buy them was never long deferred. In this way Oliver became an arbutus authority, as his master professed to be a first-robin authority. At the earliest sign of a spring-like sun, that might warm the melting snows and encourage the tiny pink-white blossoms to peep forth, Oliver was tramping the depths of the Big Woods and spying upon the openings to bring in the coveted flowers.

It meant for him a ten-dollar bill--and one much easier to get than at other times a one-dollar tip for more important adventuring. Thus Oliver always outdistanced neighboring and jealous gardeners in the arbutus race, and appeared occasionally with the welcome prize so early that the Judge accused him of having a private supply in the hothouse.

Some three months after the close of the dynamiting trial, Janeway was to come to the Harrisons’ for a week-end. Negotiations looking toward his assuming control of the Durand Corporation legal affairs had been going forward during the interval. Durand, in particular, seemed to have taken Janeway up strongly. Janeway had more than once been a guest of Durand’s at his home, where, despite the domestic strain and the humiliations put on her by the entertaining of Durand’s convivial friends, Louise resolutely maintained her position as hostess until she should leave for good what she had once fondly thought to be really her own home. Janeway, at these little drinking parties of Durand’s, conducted himself with reserve, never leading; rather as one just outside the boisterous fun that characterized some of the entertainments.

Janeway had not, however, seen Judge Harrison’s country place for over a year. On the afternoon he arrived from Chicago--a day behind schedule--Harrison took him out to show him what he had done in the interval. For one thing, he had built a new house.

The Judge took his guest through bypaths down to the entrance to the grounds, and, turning to secure an effect, walked him up the formal avenue leading to the residence. “Elizabeth,” he observed, “thought the French traditions of this part of the country would justify something in the château style. It’s too formal, but Elizabeth likes it.”

“Don’t you?”

“As much as I like any new-fangled thing. The truth is, Janeway, I’m sick to death of fuss and feathers. I’d like to live, like my grandfather, in a log cabin. When I talk simplicity my friends laugh at me. But I mean it. I used to think the loss of money a stupendous calamity. I don’t any more; I’m beginning to regard it with equanimity--especially if it’s the other fellow loses it. I don’t fancy a stone house, myself,” he explained in his pseudo deprecatory fashion--an inoffensive affectation. “The only stone house in Appleton, where I got my early impressions of life, was the county jail. The association of ideas has always sort of spoiled a stone house for me, but Elizabeth got to talking with an architect, and this is the outcome. It has its compensations, for when the Socialists come in we lawyers will all be living in stone houses with the sort of Michael Angelo windows they had on our county jail. And I shall be accustomed to it.”

He pointed across the wide slough that bore the name of The Skokie, and cut through one corner of his holdings. “I’ve added that ‘forty’ since you’ve seen the place,” he went on. “You know all this land--all this part of the country, in fact--belonged once to my grandfather; that’s why I wanted it back. I was brought up here. My father had to sell this place to educate the boys. He took us to Appleton. And that was the end of my farming.

“But I’m just naturally a farmer, Janeway. I love it. Why, sometimes I get on a train and run out to my Nebraska ranch just to see them turn over a new piece of sod----”

“Still got that Nebraska land?”

“Some of it--about ten sections--little over six thousand acres. It was railroad land, you know, and I got it for a song. You were in the office when I picked it up; I wanted you to buy some----”

“I never was cut out for a millionaire, Judge, was I?”

“Well, sir, I just enjoy seeing them turn that virgin soil over with a sod plough. Think of it--soil that never since the creation of the world has been touched by the hand of man. My grandfather”--Judge Harrison pointed to the grass under their feet--“did the same thing right here that I am doing in Nebraska----”

“With this difference,” interposed Janeway, “that your grandfather did it himself; you’re hiring somebody to do it for you.”

“A generation from now no American will be able to see that done in his own country,” continued Harrison, unperturbed. “It’s filling up too fast--too fast. The Russians have overrun that part of the country where I am, out there--trying all the time to cut roads through me and all that----”

“Not willing to drive a couple or eight miles around----”

“Janeway,” exclaimed the Judge with conviction, “speaking as an American--not as a steel maker--I’d like to put up the bars and keep every blamed emigrant out of this country for the next hundred years.”

Janeway raised his hand as if to say: “Stop right there.” “Judge,” he said with emphasis, “you’ve told me a great many things in my day. Now I am going to tell you one: The very day that the stream of our European emigration stops, that day the tide of our material greatness turns; that day it touches high-water mark, and from that day it will steadily and inevitably recede.

“Nothing--not all our fine words, our fine boasting, will avert that consequence. We owe our nation’s present material greatness to the fact that it has been fed by a constant stream of European emigrants to do our work. Americans don’t work any more--don’t you realize that? We haven’t used our hands for two generations. Whoever is turning your Nebraska sod, whether Swede, or Slav, or German, you may be sure it’s neither Leatherstocking nor an Indian brave. The Indian has too much sense to touch a plough, and Leatherstocking’s “gifts” have been developed entirely in the direction of getting somebody else to do his work for him. Poor men from Europe, as able physically as we ever were and as clean morally, have dug our canals, built our railroads, manned our factories, worked our mines, and tilled our farms. Shut your gates as soon as you please--I don’t care anything about that. But when you do, remember you pay that particular price for doing it.

“Think a minute, Judge. There is one part of our country, and only one, that has never been fed by that European stream. The penniless emigrant had no chance to get a job there, because the cotton, tobacco, and corn were picked by slaves. There was no free land there when our West was new. So the Irishman and the German, the Swiss and the Scandinavian went to Illinois and Wisconsin and Iowa and Minnesota. What is the result? The part of our country which missed that stream is to-day the poorest part of it materially, and the most pitiful politically--whole communities, States in fact, given over voluntarily to illiteracy and steeped in ignorance and bigotry. And yet that part of our country once held the highest and best of our nation’s traditions----”

“You’re forgetting the Civil War, Janeway----”

“No, I’m not. But if you want to see what Americans left to themselves, pure and undefiled, have done, look to the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, where moonshine and in-breeding stalk hand in hand. They don’t get any immigration down there--they don’t want any.”

“Well, shut up, Janeway, anyway, and listen to me. I didn’t bring you out here to talk to me; I brought you out here to talk to you. Let us contemplate the restfulness of this landscape and let our shortcomings momentarily be forgotten.

“When I got hold of this place again Elizabeth asked me to suggest the best way to ‘treat’ it. I said: ‘Let it alone.’ Then she consulted a man from Boston and proceeded to ‘landscape’ it. See that old barn, the other side of the garage? They wanted to scrap that, Janeway. I said: ‘No! You can spoil the rest of the four hundred and sixty acres as much as you like--not that. I reserve that for my own.’” He spoke parenthetically and apologetically. “That barn was on the place when my father lived here. I can remember the hay-loft, and the cutter up there in the summer, and the horse and cow stalls down-stairs--and at one end the chicken yard, you know.

“Well, I’ve got the same thing now. A hay-loft--hay forty dollars a ton! And the riding-horses and cows down-stairs, and chickens, by gum!--my own chickens. How many? Eighteen--hens--widows at that. Elizabeth complained the roosters kept her awake, so we soft-boiled them. About half the time I feed the hens myself. And I get the eggs myself. They hide their nests--exactly the way they used to when I was a boy. Sometimes I stumble on a surprise nestful of eggs; well, sir, you wouldn’t believe how rich that nest of eggs makes me feel. It’s the nearest sensation to getting something for nothing I ever experience. Sometimes I get caught for five or ten thousand dollars at a clip in Steel. But if I happen next day to find a nest of eggs, painstakingly hidden away by a thrifty old hen, I feel as prosperous as all-get-out again.”

Mrs. Harrison joined her husband and her guest. The Judge pointed once more.

“That’s my vegetable garden over there. The real millionaire, Janeway--rich or poor, I don’t care whether he’s got money in the bank or not--is the man who can grow his own vegetables and fruits, and eat them the day they’re picked. These infernal market-growers cultivate, not fruits that taste good, but fruits that’ll keep. They’ve got that market quality down so blamed fine their berries aren’t fit to eat; they’d keep forever. But I like the green stuff from the garden. As I get older I grow more like Nebuchadnezzar--my taste runs to grass--system seems to require it. Now, this is that kind of an old-fashioned vegetable and fruit garden where I grow things that taste the way they used to taste.”

“Take care of it yourself?” asked Janeway, looking at the well-kept plot through the smoke rising from his cigar.

“Oh, I get out into it once in a while,” asserted the Judge, but in the half-hearted tone of a man knowing that he faces immediate exposure.

His wife burst into a laugh. “Sidney Harrison!” she exclaimed. “What a story! Don’t you ever believe that, Mr. Janeway. His gardening is a perfect joke. What he _does_ do every once in a while is to drive up and down Kinzie Street in Chicago, stop at all the seed stores, and buy every rake and tool and hoe they show him----”

“Labor-saving devices,” muttered the Judge, feebly defensive.

“--and store them away in that rickety old barn. He won’t even let the gardeners use them. There they lie, rusting their weary lives away.”

Her husband stood his ground. “The point is, Janeway,” he maintained firmly, “they _are_ there. The tools are there, the garden’s there, if I take a notion to hoe something the hoe’s there, and the thing’s there to be hoed--hm?”

Elizabeth spoke to Janeway in a confidence. “I’m going to have a grand auction some day.”

“Don’t you touch anything in that barn,” interposed her husband. “A tramp came along last summer, and Elizabeth, passing all my old shoes, gave him the only new pair I had in the world.”

“Does he still look to the robins for his spring calendar?” asked Janeway of Mrs. Harrison.

“He does. But I don’t. I’ve a much better calendar than that. I always know when spring is near, whether the robins come or not, for when the days begin to grow the least bit longer Sidney invariably begins to talk about moving that old barn. He ought to have respect for its age, but he hasn’t. He moves it every spring, regularly. I call it his barn de luxe. It must cost him more than the house to keep it going. I suggested putting the thing on wheels. But every time he moves it, he sets it down on a stone foundation that would hold up the Masonic Temple.”

“Ever make tunnels in the hay, Janeway?” asked the Judge, pushing the conversation along. “If you feel like it to-morrow morning, go to it; the hay’s there.”

“Why, to-morrow’s Sunday!” exclaimed his wife, simulating a shock.

“Very good. Comb the hay out of his hair, the way my sister used to comb it out of mine, and send him to Sunday-school,” responded Harrison, unruffled.

When they got back to the house Gertrude Durand was there with Jim Kennedy. Kennedy was a young lawyer in Janeway’s Chicago office, a poor Fond du Lac boy whom Janeway had trained and taken to the city, and who had recently astonished his home town, enraged Robert Durand, and amazed his own happy mother by winning the favor of the richest girl in it, Gertrude Durand. Kennedy and Gertrude stayed to dinner. The talk turned to steel and to the phenomenal expansion of the Durand business.

“But, Uncle Sidney,” asked Gertrude imperiously, “_when_ are we going to get another one of those nice extra dividends?”

Judge Harrison pursed his mouth. “By jing, you’ll have to ask Bob about that. I don’t know any more. I guess labor’s getting the extra dividends these days.”

“Oh, dear!” exclaimed Gertrude, in despair. “And here I’ve made poor Jim put all his savings into Steel, with the idea that he’d have no end of extras!”

The Judge looked at Kennedy grimly. “The only consolation Jim will have is that he’s in the same boat with the rest of the rich men.”

“I arrive always and everywhere too late,” retorted Kennedy. “Now that I join the ranks of the rich they all get poor.”

“It’s really got so now,” continued the Judge, “that it’s the rich man who has to hustle to pay his bills. Simms was growling the other day about the high prices of everything, from butter and eggs to barbers and hotels; he kicks at the awful hotel tariffs.

“‘What’s happened, Simms,’ I said to him, ‘is that the small fry have paid us the compliment of imitating us. We began it; we pointed the way. To-day every producer, whether he sells lumber or prunes or just plain sand, is in touch with every other producer of lumber or prunes or sand to “regulate” production and prices. In every territory manufacturer meets manufacturer, jobber meets jobber, to “regulate” prices; the meanest retailer combines with the other meanest retailer to “stabilize” the price of peanuts; it is a hard-and-fast combine every step of the way from the cradle to the grave. Of course, these birds all camouflage their real objects. The lumbermen meet as “What-Nots,” the bartenders as “Eagles,” the hucksters as benefactors of society. The result is always the same. These conventions of philanthropists may be entertained by great humorists, enlivened by the cavorting of short-skirted women, decorated beautifully with flowers. But it’s like a wake and a funeral--and after the feasting and under the flowers there lie the remains of that enemy to prosperity and progress--competition.’

“It reminds me of a book I read recently, ‘The Personal Recollections of Bill Jones.’ Bill announced in Chapter One that his ambition, from his earliest years, had been to make the world better for his having lived in it. This sounded like a fair proposition--one of the fair kind Janeway would put up to a jury. But when I got through the book and had digested Bill’s efforts--and they were interesting--I saw they had indeed been aimed at making the world better; but it was in the direction, more particularly, of making it better for Bill Jones.”