XXI
It was our interest in the disowned, the outcast, the poor, and the criminal that drew us first together; that and the fact that we are gradually assuming the same attitude toward life. He was full of Tolstoy at that time, and we could talk of the great Russian, and I could introduce him to the other great Russians. He was then a little past fifty, and had just made the astounding discovery that there was such a thing as literature in the world: he had been so busy working all his life that he had never had time to read, and the whole world of letters burst upon his vision all suddenly, and the glorious prospect fairly intoxicated him, so that he stood like stout Cortez, though not so silent, upon a peak in Darien.
He was reading Mazzini also, and William Morris and Emerson, who expressed his philosophy fully, or as fully as one man can express anything for another, and it was not long before Jones discovered an unusual facility for expressing himself, both with his voice and with his pen. The letters he wrote to the men in his shops—putting them in their pay-envelopes—are models of simplicity and sincerity, which show a genuine culture and have that beauty which is the despair of conscious art.[A] He had just learned of Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” and he committed it to memory, or got it into his memory somehow, so that he would recite stanzas of it to anyone. He read Burns, too, with avidity, and I can see him now standing on the platform in one of his meetings, snapping his fingers as he recited:
A fig for those by law protected!
Liberty’s a glorious feast!
But it was Walt Whitman whom he loved most, and his copy of “Leaves of Grass” was underscored in heavy lines with a red pencil until nearly every striking passage in the whole work had become a rubric. When anything struck him, he would have to come and tell me of it; sometimes he would not wait, but would call me up on the telephone and read it to me. I remember that occasion when his voice, over the wire, said:
“Listen to this [and he read]:
“The snag-tooth’d hostler with red hair, redeeming sins past and to come,
Selling all he possesses, traveling on foot to fee lawyers for his brother and sit by him while he is tried for forgery.”
Then he laughed, and his chuckle died away on the wire. That expressed him; that was exactly what he would have done for a brother, exactly what he did do for many a brother, since he regarded all men as his brothers, and treated them as such if they would let him. He was always going down to the city prisons, or to the workhouses, and talking to the poor devils there, quite as if he were one of them, which indeed he felt he was, and as all of us are, if we only knew it. And he was working all the time to get them out of prison, and finally he and I entered into a little compact by which he paid the expenses incident to their trials—the fees for stenographers and that sort of thing—if I would look after their cases. Hard as the work was, and sad as it was, and grievously as my law partners complained of the time it took, and of its probable effect on business (since no one wished to be known as a criminal lawyer!), it did pay in the satisfaction there was in doing a little to comfort and console—and, what was so much more, to compel in one city, at least, a discussion of the grounds and the purpose of our institutions. For instance, if some poor girl were arrested, and a jury trial were demanded for her, and her case were given all the care and attention it would have received had she been some wealthy person, the police, when they found they could not convict, were apt to be a little more careful of the liberties of individuals: they began to have a little regard for human rights and for human life.