“Tom,” you say (timidly or roughly as the case may be)—“I suppose you know what time it is.”
“Yes,” says Tom.
That ought to end it. But if you are a true boss, you go on. You know that you are being irritating. You know that Tom is of age. But you are willing, like all great prophets, to risk unpopularity for the sake of your Message. The spirit of the crier in the wilderness is upon you, and you keep at it until one of two things happens. If Tom is in a good temper, he goes upstairs to humor you, with a condescending tread and a tired sigh. If he is fractious, he argues: Did you ever know him to miss a train? Did you ever hear of his forgetting an appointment? How do you suppose he ever manages to get to places when you are away from home?
My brother Geoffrey, in his day, has been a great sufferer from this kind of thing. As memory reviews his youth, there stands out only one occasion when he really achieved anything like freedom from sisterly counsel. This was when he picked the pears. The pears on six large loaded trees were ready to harvest. Geoffrey said that he was willing to pick, but not to pick to order. We would have to engage to let him pick the pears in his own way. We promised, though we knew too well our brother's way of picking pears. He holds quite a little reception from the tree-tops, entertaining passers-by with delightful repartee, and giving everybody a pear. As time goes on, he gets to throwing pears. “Somebody will get hurt,” said our mother anxiously. But a contract is a contract, and we tried not to look out of the window. In this unaccustomed air of freedom, Geoffrey's spirits rose and rose. High in the branches, taking his time, he grew more and more abandoned. He had just reached the very top of the tallest tree when he saw far up the street the form of the ugliest and largest dog who ever visited our town, a strange white creature named Joe—a dog hard to define, but resembling one's childhood idea of the blood-hound type. Every one spoke of this dog as “Joseph A. Graham”: “Joe” seemed too simple a name to be in scale with his size and ferocity. Down the street he came, loafing along. Geoffrey, ordinarily kind to pets, selected a large mellow pear, aimed it with steady eye, and hit Joseph A. Graham, accurately, amidships. Joseph flew up into the air, landed on a slant, gathered his large feet together for a plunge, and came dashing down the street with murder in his great red eye. At that moment Geoffrey looked down and saw with horror that an elderly gentleman was just coming up the street. It was obvious that Joseph thought that the old gentleman threw the pear. Geoffrey, emitting hoarse cries of warning, came swarming down the tree to the rescue, swinging from branch to branch like an orang-outang. The elderly gentleman, grasping the situation in the nick of time, stepped neatly inside our screen door, and Joseph, thwarted of reprisal, snuffed around the steps, muttered to himself for a few moments, and then went shuffling on down the street. Geoffrey, still ardently apologizing to the passer-by, went back to his tree-top to recover from this, the only troubled moment in that influential day.
By clever bargaining, you can occasionally buy off your natural advisers in this way, and enjoy perfect independence. But there are projects that really call for a good boss. When a number of people are at work together, the trained worker should direct the group. Even in your family, you are allowed to be an autocrat in things that are your specialty. But you are supposed to be pleasant about it. This is not so easy when you are in the full heat of action. When you have your mind on a difficult project, your commands to your helpers are apt to sound curt. You are likely to talk to them as if they were beneath you. The unskilled helper in an affair demanding skill gives the impression of belonging to an inferior class—something a little below the social status of a coolie. He even feels inferior, and is therefore touchy. If you order him too gruffly, he is likely to take offence and knock off for the day.
Barbara, for instance, once very nearly lost a valued slave when I was giving her my awkward assistance about the camera. She had decided to take a picture of Israel Putnam's Wolf-Den from a spot where no camera-tripod had ever been pitched before. The Wolf-Den sits on a slant above a cliff in the deep woods. At one side of it there is a capital place from which to take its picture, a level spot on which a tripod will stand securely. From this point most of the pictures hitherto taken of the Den were snapped. But Barbara was resolved to get a full front view to show the lettering on a bronze tablet that had recently been placed on the Den. She wanted a time exposure, and she said that she was going to need assistance. Her idea was to stand on a jutting rock just at the edge of the cliff and hold the camera in the desired position while the rest of the party adjusted the legs of the tripod beneath it.
Every one who has ever set up a tripod knows that its loosely hinged legs can be elongated or telescoped by a system of slides and screws. In order to arrange our tripod with all its three pods on the uneven ground, we found that we must shorten one leg to its extreme shortness, and lengthen the second leg to its maximum length. This left the third leg out in the air over the brink of the precipice. Our guest was to manage the short leg, our mother was to manage the important and strategic leg among the rocks, and I offered to build a combination of bridge and flying buttress out from the slope of the cliff, for the third.
We started our project with that cordial fellow-feeling that rises from a common faith in a visionary enterprise, and I am sure that we could have kept that beautiful spirit to the end if it had not been for the mosquitoes. There are no wolves at the Wolf-Den now, but on a muggy day the mosquitoes are just as hungry. They rise all around in insubstantial drifts, never seeming to alight, yet stinging in clusters. A true Wolf-Den mosquito can land, bite, and make good his escape before you have finished brushing him out of your eyes. You cannot brush insects out of your eyes, slap the back of your neck, and take a picture at the same time. Barbara, both hands busy holding the camera, was desperately kicking the ankle of one foot with the toe of the other. I counted fifteen mosquitoes sitting unmoved around the rims of her low shoes.
“Don't take too much pains with that bridge,” said she to me in considerate company tones.
“No,” said I respectfully, “but I have to build it up high enough to meet the leg.”