First harvests

by Frederic Jesup Stimson

But we, who know everything, will not attempt to escape the reader’s perspicacity. Yes (though it has nothing to do with the story), James Starbuck was in fact the grandson of that old whaling-captain Obed, Flossie’s father’s elder brother—he would have been her second cousin, then—quite too far for city kin to be counted, even had Mrs. Gower known anything about it. His father, by some curious chance, atavism, or some other influence, had taken after the uncle, and ceased to follow the sea; but, not like his uncle, he had not prospered, and had lived upon the world when he could; when he could not, he brought his wife back to her home in the small country town in Connecticut. The father was one of those curious fellows who turn their hand to anything, and of whom the best you can say is that they are hardly respectable, and the worst that they don’t quite deserve to be hanged. Their lives are one long misdemeanor, but (unless we count fraudulent bankruptcy, and except an occasional bigamy) they rarely commit a crime. This Horace Starbuck had his ups and his downs, his ins and his outs; but the friends and the places of his prosperity knew him not in his adversity, and vice versa. There was no more continuity to his career than there is to a string of cheap assorted beads; and I doubt if even the devil took any serious interest in him. He was clever, too, in a way, with that common-school education no person born in New England can be without; he had made an invention, and owned a patent or two in the course of his life, and formed several corporations, in Connecticut and elsewhere, for their exploitation. It chanced that in one of these (it was upon a patent for machine-made shirts) some stockholder had actually paid up his stock; this lucky chance was the means of bringing seven thousand dollars into Horace Starbuck’s pocket, the largest sum he ever possessed at any one time of his life. He promptly got himself married to a girl in his own town, which was probably, on the whole, the most defensible action of his career. They went on a wedding-trip to New York, where Starbuck went into six new corporations; and in a few months they were as poor as ever, and these twin children were born to them. Mrs. Starbuck’s health gave out after this; and she never had any more children. Her husband’s business made it necessary for him to travel a great deal; and she sometimes went with him, sometimes not. Hardly a commercial hotel in the United States but Starbuck had stopped there; he made his nest in hotels, as a spider does in dark places by the sea. His travels led him all over the northern part of America and to Australia; his assets consisted of a diamond-pin, a gold watch and chain, and four collars and a shirt, besides the clothes he wore; and he subsisted mysteriously. At one time he had considerable reputation in Ohio and Indiana as Dr. Westminster, the cancer doctor; he wore his hair long, and had his portrait so taken printed in the newspapers; his treatment consisted in an application of leaves of bracken or fern, steeped in hot water, and business prospered, until he foolishly used cabbage-leaves instead, and a patient died of the blister. He made some money by curing stammering, at one hundred dollars the cure; if the patients did not pay him, he threatened suit, and they were glad to get rid of him at any price. At times he gave temperance lectures (drinking never was one of his vices); and if worst came to worst he could play three-card-monte, though he hated to resort to this, as being fairly beyond the liberal moral line he drew for himself. He never had any permanent occupation; when luck ran strong against him, he would return to the little Connecticut town, where his wife had a bit of real estate and a home with her brother, old Sam Wolcott, and there vegetate. He honestly and in good faith considered himself a gentleman; he always wore a black coat, and once came near getting a Labor nomination for Congress. But the workmen, when it came to the point, would none of him; though he did occupy a seat for a year as a Prohibitionist in the Connecticut Legislature. He was given to long disappearances; and at the time of his Australian tour it really seemed to his wife as if he were never coming back. However, he walked in home, one day, with the gold watch and chain, and quite a little sum of money; and did not finally disappear until that time in the Pennsylvania mining-town, whither he had gone to buy oil-land, having at last persuaded his wife to sell her little bit of real estate in Connecticut, against her brother Sam’s advice. All this James Starbuck did not know, of course; but in a general way he did not accord much respect to his father’s memory. He considered pride of ancestry a most disagreeable form of aristocracy; and whereas his father would speak of himself as a gentleman, James Starbuck boasted openly that he was nothing but a plain laboring-man. James was perfectly honest in financial affairs, and he tried to look after his twin-sister. Much of his childhood had been spent with his uncle Sam; and his earliest recollections were of that little district-school the reader may remember. For uncle Sam belonged to the salt of the earth, good old Puritan stock, and lived to be the last of it, the day he hanged himself, and the Wolcott family tomb was sealed.

They had had a scene to-night, apropos of her visit to the garden-concert. She had gone with an ornate and expensive person, a sporting gentleman, whose ostentatious affluence had won her fancy; and whom James detested. She called him one of her “gentleman-friends;” and they had angry words about him, for I suspect, after all, James was a better judge of a gentleman than his father had been. But she had his own cleverness and strength of will; and it was difficult for James, who despised all authority himself, to exercise it upon another. Both brother and sister were, and had always been, absolutely and utterly devoid of any semblance or savor of religion; how absolutely, only those who have lived in certain classes of society in modern American manufacturing towns can know; and there was a large range of motive upon which it was perfectly hopeless for the brother to call. He knew it, and he was too bluntly honest not to recognize it; so he ended merely by hoping that his sister would not make a d——d fool of herself; which as they both had common-sense and practical minds, was perhaps the best argument he could use. But Jenny, perfectly conscious of her ability to take care of herself, was quite well aware of all that could be said on both sides; and replied that if Jim chose to smoke pipes in his shirt-sleeves with common laborers, there was no reason why his sister should not accept a gentleman’s invitation to go to a concert. An English navvy might have stopped her going with a knock-down argument; but no pure-blooded American ever strikes a woman, and James could only swallow his wrath, admitting that his sister was a free human being in a free country, and if she preferred pleasure and he power, why it was the way of humanity. He was conscious that his own aims were selfish enough, and though he dimly felt that jewellery and fashionable hats and shawls were vanities, it was hard to put that idea into their language. For he believed in labor and commodities; and these, at least, were commodities. What fault he found was in their distribution alone; and his sister was but taking her way to get them unto herself. But to see her aping aristocracy added a drop to the hate he bore that bête noire of his class; though surely Dave St. Clair was no aristocrat, as he had to admit. Dave St. Clair was the gentleman who had taken his sister to the garden.

What was it, then, that made him hate the world? It was money, accumulation, capital, as he had learned to call the word. And he went back to the little coterie in the back room, and fervidly resumed his speech where his sister’s departure had interrupted it.

“I tell you,” said he, “we must change it all. A man is only worth what he makes. They tell us society would be a chaos without private property; I tell them it is private property that makes a chaos of society. They talk about the law! the law! I tell them the world would be better without law. It is a bogey, invented to scare off us ignorant fellows from the plunder the rich have appropriated, just such a bogey as religion was, only religion has been exploded. It is the law’s turn to go next. All property is robbery; and it is only because land-owners are the worst thieves of all, that we feel differently about other things. The earth belongs to the human race; and no man can rightly own its surface, whether he got his title from a feudal baron or a Spanish general, any more than he can own the air of heaven. But property in other things is just as bad; and Jay Gould is a worse man than the Duke of Westminster, though he has ten million acres and Gould only a few hundred. How much of his wealth represents the honest labor of himself or his forefathers?”

There was a murmur of applause at this. There were some half dozen men in the room, all sober and apparently intelligent, and all natural-born Americans.

“But somebody must own things,” one of them remarked. “Somebody must own the mills, and the railroads, and the machinery. Why up to our works we’ve got a single engine that cost nigh unto eighty thousand dollars.”

“We can all own them,” Starbuck went on earnestly, “just as we all made them. Who do you suppose made that eighty-thousand dollar machine—the banks with their money and so-called capital, or the men as put it together? A man is worth just what he makes, I tell you. Can Jay Gould make an engine? But because we’ve all got to have a little land, and a little plant and money, are those as have got it to take away from us ninety-nine per cent. of all we make? Yes—if we’re fools enough to stand it. A man can have what he can keep and use, what he can eat and what he can wear. If he chooses to store up his day’s labor, to set aside the bread and meat he earns, he can do so, and keep it till it spoils. But this dog-in-the-manger business ain’t to be carried no further; and if a feller squats down on land, and don’t use it, an’ another feller without no land comes along and wants it, that first feller has got to get up and git—that’s all. A man’s a man for what he is, for what he can do—not for what he owns.”

“But who’s going to support the Government?”

“Government,” said Starbuck, with a snort of disgust, to the speaker, who was something of a ward politician. “Government! We don’t want no government, Bill. What’s the use of a government, except to scrouge out taxes, and make wars, and support standing armies and lazy politicians?—To protect life, liberty, and property, they say; property may go to h—l for all I care; and I guess life and liberty can take care of themselves; they aren’t much helped by government, anyhow. And don’t you suppose we fellers can look after them? And our own schools, and our roads and things, too, each town and city for itself?”

The man addressed as Bill paid little attention to these last remarks, but was talking politics with his neighbor. “Vote for F—— this year,” he was saying; and Starbuck caught the end of his sentence as he finished his own remarks.