It was no use to argue the question, for the lawyer had evidently been over the whole matter and knew the facts.
"It isn't that bribery matter, Van, alone; I have been hand and glove with you fellows too long to be above suspicion. My record is against me all through. It isn't worth talking about.... I have had my pay: I am a rich man, richer than I ever expected to be when I put foot in Chicago. I have no right to complain."
But I felt that, in spite of all he said, that wasn't enough—somehow the money did not make it square for him. As the night passed, he warmed up more than I had ever known him to in all the years we had worked together, and he let me see some way inside him. I remember he said something like this:—
"There were three things I promised myself I would do with my life. That was back in my senior year at Bowdoin College. I was a poor boy—had borrowed from a relative a few hundred dollars to go through college with, and felt the burden of that debt pretty hard. Well, of those three purposes, one was for myself. First, I promised myself I would pay back my uncle's loan. That was a simple matter of decency. He was not a rich man, and his children felt rather sore at his letting me have those six hundred dollars to spend on a college education. I managed to do that out of what I earned as a law clerk the first years we were together at Ma Pierson's. The next thing I had promised myself was to buy back our old brick house in the aristocratic part of Portland—the house my father had been obliged to part with after the panic of '76. I meant to put my mother and sisters in it. The only sister I have living is there now with her children. My mother died in her old home, and that has always been a comfort to me.... You may think it was my desire to do this that made me stick by you when we had that difference about the Chicago and London bonds, but you are mistaken. I went with you, Van, because I wanted to—just that. I saw then what it meant, and I am not kicking now.
"Well, the third aim I set myself when I was speculating, as college boys do about such things, was the hardest of all. The others, with reasonable success, I could hope to accomplish. And I did fulfil them sooner than I had any reason to hope I should. The third was a more difficult matter, and that was my ambition to sit some day on the Supreme Bench. There were two members of our family who had been distinguished judges, one of the Supreme Court of Maine, and another of the Federal Supreme Court, back in the early forties. I had always heard these two men referred to with the greatest respect in our family, especially my great-uncle, Judge Lambert Cushing. Although by the time I came to college our family had reached a pretty low ebb, it was natural that I should secretly cherish the ambition to rise to the high-water mark.
"And," he concluded, "after thirty years of contact with the world, I haven't seen much that is more worthy of a man's ambition in our country than a seat on our Supreme Bench. I have no reason to be ashamed of my three aims in life. Two of them I made—the third I might never have come near to, anyway; but I chucked away my chance a good many years ago. However, I have done pretty well by myself as it is. So you see there is nothing, Van, that you can give me that I should want to take."
"So you see there is nothing, Van, that you can give me that I should want to take."
He reached for another cigar, and stretched his long legs. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me from the bottom of his heart, and now that he had revealed the truth about himself, there was nothing to be said. He was not just the ordinary corporation lawyer, who sells his learning and his shrewdness for a fat fee. I had run up against that kind often enough. They are an indispensable article to the modern man of affairs; for the strategy of our warfare is largely directed by them. But Jaffrey Slocum was much more than such a trained prostitute: he was a man of learning and a lover of the law for its own sake. I suspect that if he had ever sat on the bench he would have been a tough nut for the corporations....