New Brooms

by Robert J. Shores

Now, as every man is the slave of general laws and customs, so, in a lesser sense, is he the slave of his own personal habits. And oddly enough this is more often true of good habits than of bad ones. Should the town drunkard make a sudden resolution to reform, the town may laugh, but nobody will condemn his resolution to mend his ways; nobody will be scandalized at his change of habits. But should the leader of the local prohibitionists suddenly resolve to test the joys of inebriety, what a protest would go up on all sides! Even the town drunkard would sneer and despise him as a man who had fallen from his high estate. Much as the inebriate may dislike the sincere teetotaler, he dislikes the ex-teetotaler even more. No, every man is a slave to his good habits and he can not hope to change them without exciting the animosity of all who know him.

I recall reading not long ago a story of an eastern governor who was caught in the act of smoking a cigarette. Now, there was nothing especially horrifying about the fact that he smoked cigarettes except for the fact that he was the vice-president of an anti-cigarette society. Under the circumstances this governor, who is in all probability a capable and fairly honest executive, has endangered, if he has not destroyed, his political future—and all for the matter of a cigarette! While it may seem an injustice to him that he be made to suffer a political eclipse for so slight a lapse, there is hardly a smoker who will not heartily agree with the idly busy people who make up the anti-cigarette league, that the governor deserves all the punishment his outraged associates may choose to inflict upon him. He has been a double renegade; for he has betrayed his fellow smokers by publicly indorsing the aims of the society, and he has betrayed his fellow members of the society by privately indulging in the very habit which the society condemns.

And the general public may very justly condemn him not because he smokes cigarettes—but because he has played the hypocrite. This statesman is evidently one of those foolish men who believe that it pays to appear better than one really is, and that an undeserved reputation for abstinence and virtue is better than none. And of all the possible attitudes that he might have assumed in this connection, the one which he did assume was the worst, for it was the most hypocritical and insincere. And what monumental folly! For the sake of a cigarette he has jeopardized his career—by such a slender thread is the Damoclean sword of public opprobrium suspended!

But I am digressing. I did not intend to write you a dissertation upon the follies of politicians, but to set forth, in some sort, the results of my own stupidity in failing to discover early in life the tyranny of custom and habit.

I am, as you may possibly have conjectured, a member of the legal profession; which profession I have followed with some degree of success for the last thirty years. I think I may say without boasting that I have attained an enviable reputation among my colleagues of the bar as an able advocate and a man possessed of a logical mind and a rather extensive knowledge of the “delightful fictions of the law.” I have no complaint to make upon the score of my professional career. If it has not led me to eminence, it has at least preserved me from want. My practise, while general and not so profitable as that of some legal specialists of my acquaintance, is yet sufficiently lucrative to enable me to maintain a comfortable establishment at home and to pay without pinching the expenses of my son’s collegiate and my daughter’s “finishing school” education. I have a comfortable home, a healthy and happy family, a prosperous business, a large number of congenial friends and a hale and hearty constitution. Doubtless you will say that I am blessed beyond the majority of mankind. Doubtless I am, and doubtless, too, beyond my deserts. But for all these blessings, which are obviously much to be desired, there is, so to speak, a fly in the ointment of my contentment. And that is just this—I have too good a reputation! In me, Sir, you may behold a man who has become an abject slave to good Reputation. Totally unknown to the great majority of my millions of fellow countrymen, and having but a modest degree of celebrity among the members of my own profession, I am yet compelled to be as careful of my speech and as circumspect in my actions as if I were the Czar of all the Russias! I am bound hand, foot and tongue by the ties of a lifetime; I am manacled at the cart-tail of Respectability; I am pilloried in the pillory of Dignified Demeanor! If you will bear with me a bit longer, I shall endeavor to explain my present situation.

I was born and reared in the little Missouri town where I now reside. I am personally acquainted with practically every man, woman and child in the place, which, while not exactly a village, is hardly large enough to be called a city outside of the columns of our local newspapers. The present county attorney is a young man of thirty whom I trotted on my knee and for whom I made kites many years ago. The county judge and I fell out many years ago because he insisted that we had been playing marbles for “keeps”, while I maintained that we had been playing merely for fun. We are now the best of friends, however, and there is no judge in the state who passes heavier sentences on convicted gamblers than he. The pastor of the church which I attend is a lad who in former years was a member of the Sunday-school class I taught and which used to embarrass me with all sorts of questions concerning the wives of Cain and Abel and the origin of the inhabitants of the Land of Nod. And so it is; I know them all and they all know me.

“Jimmy” Vance is our family physician; he is the family physician for at least a third of our population. He has been helping the people of our town to be born and to die for more than thirty years—but he is still “Jimmy”. Jimmy and I were born in the same year. It was once a joke with us to call ourselves “twins” on this account. But Jimmy and I are “twins” no longer. Jimmy is still a smooth-faced boy at fifty-five, while I am a gray-bearded oldster. You may gather something of my life when I tell you that though my Christian names are Jeremiah Samuel (I do not give my surname for reasons you will understand), I have never, since my twenty-first year, been addressed either as “Jerry” or “Sam”. My wife calls me “Jeremiah”, as do my other relatives, while my business associates and friends never grow more familiar than “Jeremiah S.”

When I determined to enter upon the study and practise of the law, my maternal uncle, who was himself a practising attorney, became a sort of supplementary preceptor to me by virtue of his avuncular relationship. He assisted me in my studies and when the time came for me to be admitted to the bar, he gave me a deal of what he no doubt considered sound advice as to my future conduct. “Jeremiah,” said he, “there is no profession on earth which is a more serious business than the law. Men do not go to law for fun. Nobody brings a lawsuit for mere amusement. When clients come to you they will come because they have serious business on hand and they want a sober competent man to attend to it for them. It is no joke to them and they don’t want you to joke about it. Now, my advice to you—which you may take or leave as you see fit—is always to keep a straight face. No matter how funny a case may seem to you, don’t laugh. Your dignity will be more than half your capital; see that you don’t forget your dignity.”

Such was the advice of my maternal uncle. And such was the character I assumed upon entering the practise of the law. From the day I drew my first real brief I became the very essence of dignity. I even wooed and won my wife in the character of a dignified young man of serious mind and purpose. She has never in all these years suspected my innate frivolity. Should I yield to my natural impulse and indulge in the nonsense and fun which has ever been so dear to my heart, I am convinced that she would at once lose all respect for me, if, indeed, she did not think me suddenly insane. I am grave. Under all conditions and circumstances I am as grave as an undertaker. I do smile now and then, but it is generally the indulgent superior smile which I labored so hard to acquire when young and which I can not now shake off. I have been dignified so long that my dignity has become a part of me—not really a part of my inward personality—but a part of my outward appearance; I should feel naked and ashamed without it; it would seem like going about half-dressed. I am so grave that nobody ever tells me a funny story excepting the kind that one tells a minister. They are afraid to be natural when in my presence. As Midas turned everything he touched to gold, so I turn all my friends to bores. No sooner do I come into my house than the whole family stops talking and waits to hear what I have to say. Nobody dares to interrupt me; nobody presumes to contradict me, unless it be old Brownly, who is our oldest inhabitant and so considers himself somewhere near my own age. Every one is grave when with me. That is, every one but Jimmy. Jimmy has always seen through my pose and Jimmy takes a malicious pleasure in pretending he is young when with me.

From the day I entered upon the practise of the law, I modeled my conduct upon that of my maternal uncle who was, as my boy Tom says, “as cheerful as a crutch.” I abandoned the bright colored scarfs which have always delighted my eye, and I donned the sober black bow tie which I wear to this day. Striped and checked clothing gave way to the non-committal pepper-and-salt suit of indefinite hue which has been my unvarying garb from that day to this. And I grew that Vandyke beard, to which, I am convinced, I owed my early reputation for learning and even now owe a good part of the respect which I command. My beard is as fixed an institution as our local literary club. Fashion has at least relieved me of the necessity of wearing a top hat, or “plug” as we call it here; but fashion will never relieve me of my beard, for beards may come and beards may go, but mine grows on forever. Should I shave that beard it would electrify the community. My wife would regard me with suspicion, my children with pity, my friends with mirth and my clients with horror. I verily believe that old Brown the banker, who is my best client, would be less shocked should I tell him that I had forgotten how to frame a complaint or draw a mortgage, than if he should walk into my office and find me clean-shaven.