Together

by Robert Herrick

Mrs. Price had an enormous pride in the Colonel and in his reputation in St. Louis, a pride that no duke's wife could exceed. It was the Colonel who had started the movement for a Commercial Association and was its first president. As his wife she had entertained under her roof a President of the United States, not to mention a Russian prince and an English peer. It was the Colonel, as she told her children, who had carried through the agitation for a Water Commission; who urged the Park system; who saved the Second National Bank from failure in the panic days of ninety-three. She knew that he might have been governor, senator, possibly vice-president, if it had not been for his modesty and his disinclination to dip into the muddy pool of politics. As she drove into the city on her errands she was proudly conscious that she was the wife of the best-known private citizen, and as such recognized by every important resident and every quick-witted clerk in the stores where she dealt. To be plain Mrs. Ezra Price was ample reward for all the hardship and deprivation of those beginning years!

She was proud, too, of the fact that the money which she spent was honest money. For the hardware merchant belonged to the class that made its fortunes honestly, in the eye of the Law and of Society, also. Although latterly his investments had carried him into real estate, railroads, and banks, nevertheless it was as the seller of hardware that he wished to be known. He was prouder of the Lion brand of tools than of all his stock holdings. And though for many years a director in the Atlantic and Pacific and other great corporations, he had always resolutely refused to be drawn into the New York whirlpool; he was an American merchant and preferred to remain such all his life rather than add a number of millions to his estate "by playing faro in Wall Street."

The American merchant of this sort is fast disappearing, alas! As a class it has never held that position in the East that it had in the West. In the older states the manufacturer and the speculator have had precedence. Fortunes built on slaves and rum and cotton have brought more honor than those made in groceries and dry goods. Odd snobbery of trade! But in that broad, middle ground of the country, its great dorsal column, the merchant found his field, after the War, to develop and civilize. The character of those pioneers in trade, men from Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, was such as to make them leaders. They were brave and unselfish, faithful, and trusting of the future. With the plainest personal habits and tastes, taking no tarnish from the luxury that rose about them, seeing things larger than dollars on their horizon, they made the best aristocracy that this country has seen. Their coat of arms bore the legend: Integrity and Enterprise.

For their fortunes were built not speculatively, but on the ancient principles of trade, of barter between men, which is to divine needs and satisfy them, and hence they are the only fortunes in our rich land that do not represent, to some degree, human blood, the sacrifice of the many for the few. They were not fattened on a protective tariff, nor dug in wild speculation out of the earth, nor gambled into being over night on the price of foodstuffs, nor stolen from government lands, nor made of water in Wall Street. These merchants earned them, as the pedler earns the profit of his pack, as the farmer reaps the harvest of his seed. They earned them by labor and sagacity, and having them, they stood with heads erect, looking over their world and knowing that such as it is they helped to build it.

The day of the great merchant has already gone. Already the names of these honorable firms are mere symbols, cloaking corporate management, trading on the old personalities. No one saw the inevitable drift clearer than Colonel Price. In common with his class he cherished the desire of handing on the structure that he had built to the next generation, with the same sign-manual over the door,—to his son and his grandson. So he had resisted the temptation to incorporate the business and "take his profits." There was a son to sit in his seat. The sons of the other partners would not be fit: Starbird's only son, after a dissipated youth, was nursing himself somewhere on the Riviera; his daughter had married an Easterner, and beyond the quarterly check which the daughter and son received from the business, this family no longer had a share in it. As for Parrott there was a younger son serving somewhere in the immense establishment, but he had already proved his amiable incapacity for responsibility. The second generation, as the Colonel was forced to admit, was a disappointment. Somehow these merchants had failed to transmit the iron in their blood to their children. The sons and sons-in-law either lacked ability and grit, or were frankly degenerate,—withered limbs!

With the Colonel it had promised to be different; that first boy he had left behind when he went to the War had grown up under his eye, was saturated with the business idea. Young Ezra had preferred to leave the military academy where he had been at school and enter the store at eighteen. At twenty-six he had been made treasurer of the firm, only a few months before his death…. The Colonel's thin figure bent perceptibly after that autumn of ninety-seven. He erected a pseudo-Greek temple in Fairview Cemetery, with the name Price cut in deep Roman letters above the door, to hold the ashes of his son,—then devoted all his energies to measures for sanitary reform in the city. He was a fighter, even of death….

Vickers had cabled at once when the news reached him that he was sailing for home. He and Isabelle had inherited their mother's nervous constitution and had come later in the family fortunes. They had known only ease and luxury, tempered as it was by their father's democratic simplicity and their mother's plain tastes. Insensibly they had acquired the outlook of the richer generation, the sense of freedom to do with themselves what they pleased. Both had been sent East to school,—to what the Colonel had been told were the best schools,—and Vickers had gone to a great university.

There for a time the boy had tried to compete in athletics, as the one inevitable path of ambition for an American boy at college; but realizing soon that he was too slightly built for this field, he had drifted into desultory reading and sketching for the college comic paper. Then a social talent and a gift for writing music gave him the composition of the score for the annual musical play. This was a hit, and from that time he began to think seriously of studying music. It was agreed in the family that after his graduation he should go abroad "to see what he could do." Ezra had already taken his place in the hardware business, and the younger son could be spared for the ornamental side of life, all the more as he was delicate in health and had not shown the slightest evidence of "practical ability." So the summer that he took his degree, a creditable degree with honors in music, the Prices sailed for Europe to undertake one of those elaborate tasting tours of foreign lands that well-to-do American families still essay. In the autumn it concluded by the Colonel's establishing the family in Munich and returning to his affairs. Vickers had been in Europe most of the time since, living leisurely, studying, writing "little things" that Isabelle played over for the Colonel on the piano.

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Now he had come home at the family call,—an odd figure it must be confessed in St. Louis, with his little pointed beard, and thin mustache, his fondness for flowing neckwear and velveteen waistcoats, his little canes and varnished boots. And he stayed on; for the family seemed to need him, in a general way, though it was not clear to him what good he could do to them and there were tempting reasons for returning to Rome. In spite of the sadness of the family situation the young man could not repress his humorous sense of the futility of all hopes built upon himself.