Читать книгу Yankee Lawyer: the Autobiography of Ephraim Tutt - Arthur Train - Страница 5

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I do not know why I wanted so much to go to college. It may well have been because the people held in highest respect in our community were those who had the most education. Also they were usually the most financially secure. My natural inclination towards argument predisposed me towards the law; most of the political figures of the day were lawyers; and the fame of Daniel Webster still hung over Dartmouth College at Hanover less than fifty miles away. I had listened to a few court trials in Windsor and could imagine the fun of being in a good legal joust. Yet I felt no irresistible “call” to the bar and would no doubt have gone as soon into medicine or teaching.

What I thought of myself at that time is hard for me to recall. I was too close to this boy who used to be me to know what he was like. Now looking back at him through the small end of Time’s telescope I realize that the gawky, eighteen-year-old lad, in his high-water trousers, Congress shoes with elastic sides purchased at Ezra Higgins’ grocery, his bob-sleeved jacket and hand-made straw hat must have been a first-class specimen of what was then known as a “Hey, Rube!” He was, however, a good-natured, well-meaning fellow with a prankish humor, who instinctively looked at the funny side of things. He was all ready for a jolt and he got it.

I arrived in Cambridge with eight dollars in my pocket, travelling out from Boston in the Warren Avenue Bridge horse-car and carrying the green worsted carpet bag upon which my mother had worked the initials “E.T.” over a stag’s head in yellow.

I had just sat down with it between my feet when I noticed opposite me a tall, dandified, unhealthy looking youth, who was observing me with interest. Catching my eye he addressed me in a loud nasal drawl which instantly attracted the attention of the rest of the passengers:

“How’s crops?”

“Firstrate!” I replied politely. “We put in twenty tons of 14 hay.”

“We-el, by gosh!” he ejaculated. “Excuse me, but I see you’ve got some straw in your hair!”

Innocently I put my hand to my head, an involuntary gesture that produced a roar of laughter from the group beside him.

“Are you trying to be funny?” I flared.

“Not at all, young-fellow-me-lad!” he returned blandly. “I was merely trying to be helpful. May I inquire your name?”

“Tutt,” I said.

My answer was followed by a further explosion of merriment.

“Tut, tut!—Tutt!” he intoned, and they all began to stamp their feet and chant in unison “Tut, tut!—Tutt! Tut, tut!—Tutt!”

“Go after him, Wilbur,” urged one of them. “Tweak his nose!”

At this the other passengers showed signs of nervousness, and one of them, an elderly woman, appealed to the conductor in behalf of order. Suddenly the one addressed leaned forward and jerked my tie from my waistcoat, while another knocked my hat over my eyes. I jumped to my feet just as the conductor threw himself between us.

“Here you!” he cried, ignoring my adversaries. “I’ve had enough disturbance. Get out of here!”

“I haven’t done anything,” I protested. “These fellows have been trying to pick a fight with me.”

By this time the driver had stopped the car. The conductor grabbed my arm and had dragged me nearly to the step when, swinging my carpet bag with all my might, I caught him a crack on the head that toppled him over the back fender. Coincidently I found myself in the arms of a policeman.

“I’ve got you, you young devil!” he roared. “Come along to the station.”

The conductor dusted himself off.

“Want me as a witness, Mike?” he asked.

“No, Tim. I saw him hit you!” replied the officer.

The bell jangled, the horses threw themselves against the harness straps, and the car jerked forward.

“Tut, tut!—Tutt! Tut, tut!—Tutt!” came from the open window.

The cop marched me to the Cambridge Square precinct house 15 where I was booked under a charge of assault and, being unable to furnish bail, was held for trial before the magistrate next morning. About six o’clock in the afternoon I was astounded to hear my name called, an officer unlocked my cell, and I was led outside to the desk. Awaiting me there was a small, antique gentleman in a silk hat and blue cape-coat. His round parchment face, wrinkled like a walnut, was surmounted by a yellow wig, while his cavernous eyes gave him the appearance of a wise old owl. Beside him, in a black bombazine dress and small black bonnet, stood the little old lady who had protested to the conductor.

“That is the young man!” she said.

“I am Mr. Caleb Tuckerman,” the Owl informed me. “I am here to bail you out at the request of my client, Miss Abegail Pidgeon.—But mind you, you must be here in court promptly, tomorrow morning at half past eight.”

I stammered my surprised thanks.

“Have you had your supper?” inquired Miss Pidgeon.

“No, ma’am,” I replied.

“You poor boy! Come right home with me!” she said. “Perhaps you had better join us, Mr. Tuckerman, if you are going to defend him.”

So the three of us walked to Miss Pidgeon’s residence, a big yellow house on a side street about half a mile from the college, where I recounted my adventure while my hostess stuffed me with hot tea and toast, Mr. Tuckerman taking careful notes meanwhile.

That night I slept in a chamber, with bathroom adjoining, more magnificent than anything I had ever imagined. The bed was covered by a patchwork quilt rivalling Joseph’s coat of many colors, there were hook rugs depicting St. Bernard dogs and ships, a marble topped bureau and a chandelier—although I did not then know it to be so called—with four separate jets of gas, which Miss Abegail carefully turned off after I had retired.

“Good night, Ephraim,” she said. “Sleep well. You are momentarily the victim of injustice, but the right will triumph. Tomorrow we shall defeat the Philistines.”

“I don’t know why you should be so kind to me!” I said gratefully.

“Pshaw!” she answered with a self-conscious sniff. “I’m only 16 living up to my principles. If I see an ox or an ass fallen into a pit I make it my business to pull it out!”

Next morning, when my case was called before the magistrate, Mr. Tuckerman, laden with law books, was already on hand, and never have I heard such a torrent of erudition as poured from his lips. He pointed out that, so far from my being personally in any way at fault, the street car company, having accepted my fare, was legally bound to protect me from annoyance other than “strikes, riots or acts of God,” and in arbitrarily ejecting me from the car, had made itself liable for breach of contract and false arrest to the extent of thousands of dollars damages, costs and counsel fees, actions for which would be duly instituted.

Nor was that all! The Municipality of Cambridge and the County of Middlesex, as well as Mike, the officer, and his friend Tim, the conductor, were particeps in a criminal assault. In support of his contentions he cited cases from the English Year Books and Massachusetts reports, as well as those of the United States Supreme Court, referred to various esoteric doctrines—including the obligations of carriers, the right of self-defense, lex naturae, the privilege of communication with counsel (it seemed I had been held “incommunicado”), and the special tenderness of the law towards infants. It had never occurred to me, being over eighteen years of age, that I belonged in that category, but it seemed that I did and that Mr. Tuckerman and Miss Pidgeon were acting “in loco parentis.” The apologetic cop, too staggered even to attempt to defend his actions, was dismissed with a contemptuous wave of Mr. Tuckerman’s hand, and there being no further witnesses, instead of being sent to jail for sixty days, I was triumphantly acquitted with the thanks of the court.

When, on leaving the courtroom, I described my assailant in detail the old boy burst into such a tirade that I thought he would die of apoplexy.

“Ha!” he cried, “so it was that scoundrelly ward of mine, Master Wilbur Pratt, was it? The lazy, lying, lecherous rascal! Keep away from him, young Tutt! If you fall under his influence you’ll be done for! He’s clever and unscrupulous, but he’ll end in State’s prison, mark my word, on’t.”

“I’ll steer clear of him after I’ve punched his nose!” I replied 17 heatedly. “If I accomplish nothing else at Harvard I intend to do that!”

“So! So! You’d deliberately break the law, would you?” murmured Mr. Tuckerman slyly.

“Yes, sir. If necessary I shall deliberately break the law,” I declared.

“In which case, should you need legal assistance, I’ll be glad to give it you!” quoth he, offering me his hand.

My encounter with Pratt might easily have curdled my confidence in human nature had it not been for Miss Pidgeon. Sensing that I was hard up the good old soul offered to take me on as handy man around her house at ten dollars a month, which job I was glad to accept.

Well, here at last I was at Harvard! I had never seen a town larger than Windsor, Vermont, and I was filled with wonder at the great dormitories, the library, the chapel and old Massachusetts and Harvard Halls. I was even more amazed at the elegance of the young men I saw everywhere about and who looked to me as if they were dressed up to be married. Back home, if you met a man on the road you spoke to him as a matter of course, but although I accosted several of these popinjays most of them pretended not to see me. I had yet to learn that Harvard men did not speak unless they were first properly introduced.

On the strength of my entrance examinations I had already been promised financial aid by the college bursar and, having duly registered my arrival, was able in return for doing the same sort of chores as at Miss Pidgeon’s to secure a lodging in the attic of a house on Brattle Square belonging to an Amelia Bowles who rented out the lower floors to young gentlemen of means. My apartment was about seven by five feet in size, just large enough to contain a small iron bed, bureau and wash stand, with a single window so encrusted with dirt that I felt sure it had not known soap and water since before the Civil War. This impression was confirmed by my finding in a lower pane a hole pasted over with coarse brown paper on which were pencilled the words “W. H. Jones, Feb. 10, 1860.” Yet it was a far better room than I had been used to in Vermont.

At the “Holly Tree Coffee Rooms” nearby I fell into conversation with a thick-set, tousle-headed lad in a black sweater and 18 threadbare jacket—a sophomore named Otto Wiegand—who listened with interest to the story of my welcome into what President Eliot called “the brotherhood of educated men,” and who volunteered to accompany me in search of Pratt on the express stipulation that he should play the part only of an innocent bystander. As luck would have it, we had no sooner entered the Yard than we encountered our quarry strolling in front of Harvard Hall with a group of his friends who at sight of us immediately renewed their chant of: “Tut, tut!—Tutt!—Tut, tut!—Tutt!”

Mr. Tuckerman’s argument before the Magistrate regarding the right of self-defense had given me an idea, for he had pointed out that one did not have to wait to be laid low, but might act on appearances. All I needed was to induce Pratt to make a hostile movement, anything that might be construed as a threat, and I would have a legal excuse. So in order to lead him into it, I said:

“If you raise your hand I’ll pound you to a pulp!”

That was all that was necessary.

“You will, eh!” he snarled, brandishing his fist, and I let him have it spank on the nose. He was a better boxer than I was, but he had no stamina, and I presently had him so groggy that he made no pretense of trying to fight fair, but fell to kicking, clawing and biting, until in the middle of a mad rush I felled him with a straight blow to the chin.

I was wondering whether or not I had killed him, when I was seized from behind by a cop who had been hastily summoned from Harvard Square by one of Pratt’s crowd. Meanwhile others had dragged their unconscious leader to the college pump. Presently he revived and, breathing anathema against me, headed the procession to the near-by police court.

And now Mr. Tuckerman’s remarks stood me in good stead, for when Pratt charged me with assaulting him, I forced even his own witnesses to admit that he had threatened me with his fist while my own hands had remained at my side. This, added to Wiegand’s testimony and my own, resulted in the Magistrate dismissing the case and receiving my complaint against Pratt for disorderly conduct, upon which he was found guilty and fined ten dollars. We were hustled out of the station house into the street, where I found myself momentarily something of a hero.

I was an unpresentable object, spattered with Pratt’s blood as well as my own, my clothes having been nearly torn from my back. It was my only suit and since clearly something had to be done, Otto took me to the hock shop of a gentleman named “Poco” Abrahams, who detached from a hanger, in return for six of my eight dollars, a suit of dark blue serge which I thought fitted me to perfection. Strangely enough, on looking inside a pocket I discovered that it had been made by a fashionable Boston tailor for none other than Mr. Wilbur Pratt himself.

At first I was foolish enough to imagine that my valor would win the approval of my classmates, but I soon discovered that it had had a contrary effect. More than once thereafter as I passed a group of undergraduates I heard a “Who’s that queer-looking hick?” followed by, “Oh, that’s the guy that got into a brawl with Wilbur Pratt.”

I have described this episode at length because I see in retrospect that it had not a little to do with determining my career. The law had got me into the mess and the law had got me out of it. Blessed was the name of the Law! And Mr. Tuckerman, who somehow heard of the affair, sent me a warm letter of congratulation followed by an invitation to dinner. Otherwise my arrival under the classic shades passed unnoticed.

I am wondering now what next to slip into my “stereoscope.” What Harvard did to me is a question to which I do not know the answer. I had too much sense to expect my patrician associates[1] to clasp me to their bosoms, but their cool indifference to my existence exasperated me. It is one of the queer things about life that a man can stand any insult or injury better than being simply ignored. My more fortunate classmates had a wonderful time, but they kept it jealously to themselves. The general attitude seemed to be that you had no kick coming if you had not had the luck to be born on Beacon Hill of a father who had inherited a million dollars. If you had brains and ability you might deserve to succeed, but it was no one’s business to help you. This may have been good training for the struggle of life, but it was disheartening to an eager country lad like myself whose heart was overflowing with the milk of human kindness. 20 If it had not been for Miss Pidgeon, Miss Bowles, Mr. Tuckerman, my work and Otto I should have had a miserable time indeed, and I was left with a permanent feeling of rebellion.

I got four A’s and one B my freshman year, was awarded a scholarship of $200, and spent the summer tutoring the backward son of a Beacon Street family who had a summer cottage at Nahant. The father, Mr. Eliot Boardman, was a handsome, sun-burned man, a partner in a leading banking house. He had belonged to all the Harvard clubs, been chief marshal of his class, seemed to be a trustee of almost everything in or near Boston, and he spoke with a clipped self-sufficiency due perhaps to the silver spoon tightly gripped between his lips at birth. His wife was a brisk, capable woman who had been one of the belles of Brookline. There were two children, “Eliot Jr.,” a boy of twelve, and his elder sister Priscilla, a pert minx of fifteen.

The cottage stood on a point of rocks, surrounded by the ocean. I had never seen the sea and I was thrilled with wonder and delight. While the Boardmans had dinner at night instead of noonday, and were waited on by maids in uniform, they spoke with the flat a and faintly rustic drawl common throughout New England and prided themselves on an ostentatious simplicity. They were kind and gracious, treating me quite as one of the family, and I did not object to running up and down stairs on errands which the children could have done as easily as myself.

Priscilla had a slender, boyish figure, blue eyes, dark hair and a warm flush beneath her golden brown skin. At first she was inclined to be bossy and to look down her nose at me on account of my clothes, but by autumn we had become good friends and, after I had said goodbye, I found in my carpet bag a little pin cushion she had surreptitiously made and tucked there.

Otto and I had pooled our resources and had been allotted a room on the top floor of Hollis Hall overlooking the Yard. There was no plumbing and we were obliged to carry all our water and coal up three flights of stairs. After my association with people as exclusive as the Boardmans I was less prepared to find myself treated with such disregard by my classmates. Although 21 I had no possible reason to expect to make any college society, I resented bitterly a system that made me an outsider, and some of the most wretched evenings of my life were those when I listened from our window to the lilting song of my classmates marching along below to “take out” the latest members of the Dickey.

“Tra—lala—la-lala—lala—lala lala—lala—la—”

Other lonely lads, sitting in other shabby rooms, heard the song and undoubtedly their hearts—like mine—stopped beating in the dim hope that in some mysterious way unknown to themselves they might be of the elect. And then the sound grew fainter, breaking at last into a distant yell, and the hope was gone!

“Tra—lala—la-lala—lala—lala—” To Hell with it!

Otto was an excellent influence for me. Without knowledge of the world his values were absolutely sound, for he saw through all outward forms and appearances and was no respecter of persons. The slightest infraction of honesty finished, anyone for Otto. “Once a liar, always a liar!” was one of his tenets, which I later found reflected in the legal maxim of “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus!” The son of a small tailor in Chelsea, today he is a member of the New York Court of Appeals. From him I learned to judge men not by what they said but by what they did.

“Don’t let this social nonsense get your goat, Eph!” Otto used to say. “You’ve got something better to do than sit around sucking up rum and swapping smutty stories. Most of these Beacon Street sports will never amount to anything. After they graduate they’ll just take care of their family estates or go into Lee Higginson & Co. There isn’t anything the matter with Harvard, Eph. It’s Boston with its smugness and complacency. Why, I know a chap who was invited to lunch at the Somerset Club and he said the dining room was full of pink-faced old birds talking about what they had done in college. I agree with you about all this fake pumped-up ‘class spirit.’ It’s puerile! Harvard is bigger than all that.”

Intellectually I knew he was right. I realized that my point of view was that of an ignorant country lad catapulted into the life of a great university, and that, compared with the opportunities Harvard offered, the sense of personal neglect I suffered 22 was a trifling matter. But emotionally it was not a trifling matter.

Doubtless today on the strength of the symptoms I have described I should be told by any good psychiatrist that I was only suffering from an “inferiority complex.” But whatever its neurological classification I do not believe that it is a good thing for any boy to be made to feel that he is less desirable than his fellows. I had no knowledge of social distinctions when I arrived in Cambridge. They had not existed in Vermont; and my character might easily have become permanently embittered by what I went through.

That my friend Cal was not unmindful of social advantages is shown by a letter he sent me when about to graduate from Ludlow and enter Amherst:

Dear Eph:

I hope you are getting on well at Harvard. If you were around here I would like to ask you a few things. I am going to enter Amherst next fall. The societies are a great factor at Amherst and of course I want to join one if I can. Don’t you think I had better go down there some time to see about it? It means something to get into a good society at Amherst. If you don’t, you become what they call an ‘ouden.’[2] They don’t take in everybody but Dick Lane thinks I can if we scheme enough. If you are out this way be sure to look me up. Truly yours, Calvin Coolidge.

Looking back from the present era of radio, air transport and television, upon those days of horse-cars, “booby-hutches” and buggies they seem altogether quaint, an age of innocence. It was the period of fixed wooden bathtubs lined with tin, sulphur matches, chewing tobacco, nightgowns, Rogers groups, “Pinafore” and “The Mikado.” The waltz was an innovation, gentlemen did not smoke in the house, and a woman with a cigarette in her mouth would have caused as much excitement as if she walked down Brattle Street stark naked.

“Women’s rights” and “votes for women” were jokes, and ladies who aped man’s apparel were treated not only as freaks 23 but as of doubtful virtue. There were hitching posts on the residential streets of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, and I have seen great herds of cattle mooing and bellowing along Beacon Street on their way to shipment or the abattoir. Cigarettes were referred to as “coffin nails” and generally regarded as “nasty,” due perhaps to the picture, given away with each package, of some Amazonian stage favorite exhibiting the exuberant pulchritude then so much admired. “Chestnut bells”—small gongs an inch in diameter attached to one’s lapel and rung twice when anyone “got off an old one”—were hilariously popular. Bicycle riding was fashionable and solemn professors would go “wheeling” of a Saturday (not on a Sunday) in dinky blue suits, pill box caps and “knickers.” Otherwise men’s costumes varied but slightly from the present. Women, it is true, wore long skirts, tight corsets and puff sleeves, but collegians no longer indulged in beards, small moustaches being favored instead.[3]

The beard, however, still flourished among the elder generation as an advertisement of the wearer’s dignity. One rarely saw a doctor, lawyer, professor, poet or banker without whiskers. There were endless varieties. To mention but a few, there was the “mutton-chop,” the “Burnside” or “sideburn,” the “scimitar,” the “Lord Dundreary,” “D’Orsays” otherwise known as “Piccadilly Weepers,” the “chin tuft,” the “Imperial,” the “Van Dyke,” the “plain” or “goat” chin beard, the “fringe,” the “spade,” the “slugger,” “Galway” or “Gladstonian throat whisker,” the “banker’s straight-cut,” the “full beard” or “umbilicus tickler,” and the “ferry-slip” parted in the middle to facilitate the absorption of liquid refreshment. Each profession affected a particular style. This served a useful purpose, for if you saw Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or James Russell Lowell coming down the street you knew at once that he was a poet.

The beard in my opinion has been sadly overlooked in literature. Apart from the concealment of deformity, ugliness or in some cases an absence of linen, it not only availed to produce an illusion of age, wisdom and importance but, since the only thing women could not do as well, if not better, than men was 24 to raise a beard, it also gave man his chance to flaunt a spurious sex superiority. In an age of hypocrisy, partisanship and narrow-mindedness, the beard waving from a man’s chin like a flag upon a rampart, was the signal that the masculine fort had not yet been taken. When thirty years later the male army surrendered and women were given the vote, the beard lost its symbolic value and more or less disappeared, although I am informed that it still is popular in Boston.

And yet the world beyond the smoke of cities seems much the same to me now as it did then. After all the Gay Nineties are only just around the corner and over one hundred and fifty members of our Class turned up at a recent Harvard Commencement.

In the room opposite ours in Hollis Hall lived a queer bird named Angus McGillicuddy who, having graduated from Harvard in the class of ‘57 and from the Law School in ‘60, had remained a hardy perennial among students ever since, and now, having absorbed practically all the university had to offer, was studying Phoenician inscriptions, a half course given by Professor Toy on Thursdays at four o’clock in the afternoon. He had taken any number of degrees including the A.B., M.A., Ph.D., LL.B., D.D., SB. and I don’t know how many more. He was a red-faced old codger with a taste for the bottle, whose lifetime of study had not apparently stimulated any desire for culture, for I never saw him with a book in his hand. He would wander over to our room and spend the afternoon with his feet crossed on the window-sill looking out at the robins in tranquil happiness. Due to our common passion for fishing we became great friends. One day he said to me:

“You wonder what I’m doing here at Harvard at my age? Well, I’ll tell you. I’m having a good time. My folks lost their money when I was a kid and my great-uncle Andy put a certain amount in trust, the income to be paid over to me ‘so long as he pursues his studies at Harvard.’ When I had finished here it was to go to the Massachusetts Humane Society. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get along on. That was back in 1855. Well, after I’d taken my bachelor’s degree I stayed on another year and took an M.A. and then, since I hadn’t any plans, I consulted a lawyer and he said he saw no reason why I couldn’t keep on indefinitely. So I have. I’ve read practically all the 25 books in the world, but I’m not particularly interested in any of ’em. After I’d been here thirty years or so the Humane Society made a fuss and tried to get my money away from me, but I licked ’em in the Supreme Court and Judge Holmes held that so long as I was a bona fide student—even if I only took one half-course a year—I could stay at Harvard as long as I lived. So once a week I go to a lecture on Assyrian Cuneiform inscriptions or Coptic Art and the rest of the time I enjoy my otium cum dignitate. Summers I fish.”

At first I was rather startled at his disclosure, but later on, after getting to know some of the dons at Oxford and Cambridge, I came to the conclusion that their lives did not differ greatly from McGillicuddy’s. I took several trips into the woods with him at one time or another, to which is due my present interest in salmon fishing. I decided that on the whole he led a pretty good sort of life.

Old Mr. Tuckerman seemed to have taken quite a shine to me. He spent all his days and many of his nights in a small musty office lined to the ceiling with law books, in Barrister’s Hall, Boston. The only other furniture consisted of a green baize table covered with neat stacks of papers, a worn and faded Turkey-red carpet, an engraving of the Honorable Jeremiah Mason and a fascinating small bronze horse which he used as a paperweight. He was a shrewd old fellow with a dry wit, and sometimes he would take me for a glass of ale to the “Bell in Hand,” a saloon with a sand-sprinkled floor, largely frequented by drovers in “Pie Alley.” Mr. Tuckerman’s practice consisted almost entirely in drawing wills and executing them after the deaths of their respective testators, whom he inevitably outlived. He must have been incredibly old for he told me several times that he had been born during the presidency of John Adams, prior to the death of George Washington. But, at that, he need not have been much over ninety and his mind was as clear as a bell.

I continued to see something of Miss Bowles, my former landlady, whom I had found to be, under a protective coloration of acerbity, a warm-hearted, motherly old soul. She had a hard time to make her living, her only financial asset being her Brattle Square house.

My acquaintance among my classmates was extremely limited, 26 and the only man I knew in college who later became famous was that waggish genius Robert Williams Wood, chemist, inventor, and originator during the first World War of the scheme for training seals to locate and retrieve submarine mines.[4] Wood was a great practical joker. Already, Bob knew almost as much about Chemistry as Professor Cook, and could make as many devastating stinks in Boylston Hall. He would surreptitiously toss some mysterious ingredient into a mud puddle in Harvard Square and a moment later casually spit into it, upon which, like the beer keg in “Faust,” it would burst into flames to the terror of the elderly ladies waiting to take the horse-car.

On the scholastic side Dr. Eliot’s so-called “Elective System” enabled the undergraduate butterfly to flutter at will over the entire field of knowledge, sipping the nectar of culture from such educational blossoms as Botany 1, Zoology 1, Geology 4, Chemistry A, and Fine Arts 4, History 1, and Philosophy 4. Almost the entire class including myself took these courses simply because they were “snaps” and without the slightest expectation of deriving any permanent benefit from them. During my subsequent fifty years of legal practice, however, I was surprised to find how frequently I made use of what I had thus learned.

Of my numerous courses I regard as of greatest profit English 2, a course in Shakespeare given by Professor Francis J. Child and his associate, Professor George L. Kittridge, in which we were required to learn by heart complete scenes from several plays. Thus while my mind was still impressionable I committed to memory long passages of Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice, which, taken with the chapters of the Psalms and Proverbs taught me by my mother, have furnished me throughout life with a solid bank account of English words, phrases and quotations upon which to draw.

Yet, it is to one who figured in a less scholastic and perhaps humbler capacity that I am most grateful—John Joseph Hayes, or “Hay Hay Jayes,” as he was familiarly known, an instructor in elocution called English 10. Casting about for a convenient half-course to round out my junior schedule, I picked it for 27 that reason. Mr. Hayes was a rotund, robin-like gentleman, with a brick-colored face, who most surprisingly knew his business and, in his leisure hours, coached bishops, statesmen and amateur actors and showed them how to breathe. Under his direction the class would expand its lungs and exultantly exhale at the top of its register: “All—call—Paul!—All-call-tall-Paul-to-the-ball!”

It may sound a bit ridiculous, but I got a lot out of it and it is indirectly due to “Hay Hay’s” instruction that I have managed to keep my voice as long as I have without its cracking. It may also have helped me to pull out the tremolo and diapason stops when appealing to the jury. Now that NBC and CBS control the wave lengths a man who can successfully woo the microphone with his larynx may rule the Nation.

It was due to “Hay! Hay!” that I had—perhaps I should say “enjoyed”—my first intensive experience of alcoholic exhilaration. Remarking one day that I had an excellent vocal organ—“Oh, yes you have! Just say ‘All-call-Paul’ again—like this ‘A-a-ll c-a-all P-a-a-aul!’ Don’t you feel that tone?”—he suggested that I compete in the “Boylston Prize Speaking” contest.

Such a possibility had never occurred to me, but thus encouraged I entered my name as a contestant and hired a retired actor named George Riddle to groom me for the event. Mr. Riddle promptly selected Tennyson’s “Siege of Lucknow” as offering the best opportunities for vocal pyrotechnics.

Fortified by a shot of brandy on an empty stomach I was shoved by Otto upon the stage of Sanders Theatre. At first I could hardly make myself heard for nervousness, but soon, the brandy having done its work, I gained in confidence and my voice in strength. Lucknow had to be saved and I was going to save it! Could it hold out until relief arrived? By all the gods, it should! Mimicking every emotional inflection and dramatic effect as taught me by Mr. Riddle I played the part of an imaginary sapper, crouched listening tensely for the tap of an invisible pick.

I must have been pretty good in spite of the shameless exhibition I made of myself, for I took second money, and on the strength of it invited Otto to celebrate my victory by going to a performance of the Castle Square Opera Company in Boston. Sitting in state in a box while the curtain was up we descended 28 between the acts to the bar, where we worked our way through “The Barkeeper’s Handbook”—beginning with A, for ale, B, for burgundy, C, for champagne, etc.—until by the end of the performance we had absorbed a fairly large percentage of the alphabet.

It was moonlight and, having nowhere in particular to go, we strolled down to the old Adam’s House bar on lower Boylston Street, where for a time we continued our alphabetical career, to be presently interrupted by an ingratiating person with a goatee who, introducing himself as “General D’Olier of Virginia,” invited us to share a bottle of claret. During the consumption of the bottle, which was quickly followed by another, the general, who seemed to have formed an unaccountable attachment for me, confided not only most of his family history but the fact that he was considered the best shot south of Mason and Dixon’s line. There was seemingly no reason why this should have aroused any spirit of emulation of my part, yet it did and led me in turn to speak boastfully of my own marksmanship.

Accordingly, Otto having been lost in the shuffle, the general and I, arm in arm, and each carrying a partially emptied bottle, sallied forth shortly after midnight, seeking for a place to demonstrate the pre-eminence of our skill. I was feeling fit as a fiddle—a well-tuned fiddle—being now the better off for perhaps fifteen or sixteen assorted drinks largely constituted of alcohol. On Tremont Row we found an open-air shooting-gallery still obligingly open—with rabbits whirling around the periphery of a circle, ducks swimming and suddenly disappearing, silver balls dancing upon jets of water. In spite of the fact that the general had shown a marked inclination to lean upon my shoulder when walking down Tremont Row, he now took off his coat and hat, selected a Flaubert rifle, and proceeded to knock the silver ball off the jet fourteen times in succession, missing only upon the fifteenth and last shot. It was now my turn.

Solemnly General D’Olier watched me bring the rifle to my shoulder.

“Pop!” Down went the ball!

“I’m not drunk!” I muttered. “What was the use of going to all this trouble!”

That I was nowhere near the state which I had subconsciously desired to attain was demonstrated by the fact that, without the slightest expectation of doing so, I shot the ball down, not fourteen, but fifteen, times! I did not know whether to be disappointed at being so incontrovertibly sober or pleased at having won over so redoubtable a general, but on turning around to receive his congratulations I found that he, like Otto, had disappeared.

The event, however, that was to make the night epochal in the Tutt family had yet to come. Minus my general and also my hat I managed to catch the “last car” for Cambridge, where I recall regaling my fellow passengers to Cambridge by appropriate selections from my prize rendition of the early evening.

“Mine? Yes, a mine! Countermine!”

I crouched, then possessed by the thrill of battle, dug furiously with a phantom spade. Bullets fell upon and around me, cannons roared, bugles sounded, the wounded were carried off,—“Millions of musket bullets, and thousands of cannon balls—” Hark! What was that? The cheers of the relieving column? Thank God! Thank God!

“Saved! We are saved!—Saved by the valor of Havelock! Saved by the blessing of Heaven!—And ever aloft on the palace roof the old banner of England blew!”

Sobbing, I was at last ejected by the conductor in Harvard Square, and still holding my own, worked my way across the deserted yard. A single lamp gleamed like a friendly beacon from one of the windows,—mine, I concluded. My thoughtful roommate, having arrived home before me, must have placed it there. “A light in the window for me, Mother!”

I had some difficulty in crossing the yard owing to the tangle of wire fences which had unaccountably sprung up and which I had never before observed. As fast as I got my legs over one I found myself confronted by another! Even the dormitory steps were so obstructed that I was obliged to negotiate them upon my hands and knees. Crouching like my “sapper” I slowly ascended the stairs amid a furious hail of bullets and cannon balls, until I reached a door beneath which shone a crack of light.

“Saved! We are saved! Saved by the valor of Havelock! Saved by the blessing of Heaven!”

Still on all fours I butted my head against the door and pushed it open with my nose. To my bewilderment a fat man, in shirt-sleeves and eye-shade, was sitting at his desk, before a huge pile of blue books. He looked up good-naturedly and nodded.

“Good evening,” he remarked in an ordinary conversational tone. “How do you do?”

He was an instructor in the English department, Byron Satterlee Hurlbut, later Dean of Harvard College. I recognized, although I did not know him.

“Good evening, Professor,” I said. “I am very, very tired.”

Mr. Hurlbut regarded me searchingly.

“I should say that you were very, very drunk!” he replied. “Come in and lie down on my sofa for awhile.”

Although I knew his diagnosis to be erroneous, I was not offended.

“The sofa is over here—not there,” he explained, assisting me to adjust my legs. “Rather a rough night?”

“Millions of musket bullets and thousands of cannon balls!” I replied, and then passed out entirely.

I had a vague recollection of being later assisted across the yard to my own room and of being put to bed by the fat man. I was not “summoned,” nor was I otherwise penalized. On the contrary, nature having later come to my rescue, I had an extraordinary sense of well being next day, and thereafter I took a less jaundiced view of my surroundings. That I was probably mistaken as to the amount of Christian charity among my classmates is shown by the fact that, if I be correctly informed, there are today among them six full-fledged bishops.

The most enjoyable part of my college life as I now look back upon it was sitting on the steps of Hollis Hall on warm spring evenings, listening to the Glee Club sing “Come, Landlord, Fill the Flowing Bowl” and “Here’s a Health to King Charles,” smoking innumerable stogies, which, not being able to afford cigars, I imported from Wheeling at $6.85 per thousand, consuming on a conservative estimate during my seven years in Cambridge not less than 25,000.[5] I had been to all intents and 31 purposes a lone wolf throughout my college course, and I have remained one ever since.

During the summer vacations I had continued to act as a tutor in the Boardman family, for while Eliot Jr. had grown in stature he had not correspondingly increased in wisdom. The family brains seemed to be concentrated in Priscilla. In three years she had grown from a rather self-conscious show-off into a graceful, vivacious young woman of eighteen, the most popular girl in Papanti’s Saturday Evening Dancing Class and already pursued by boyish suitors. She was a protégée of Henry Cabot Lodge, who lived near by, and the Senator from Massachusetts often strolled over to chat with her. We walked and read together, I admired her greatly and, although I was careful not to presume upon our relationship, I felt confident that she was fond of me. I realized that her parents might object to me as a son-in-law, but I believed that she had strength of mind enough to choose for herself, for besides many evidences of her liking, she often boasted that when she married she intended to do so not for money or position, but “for character.”

“Have I got character?” I asked her one day after my graduation as we lay on the beach.

She peered down into the seaweed.

“Of course you have, Eph!” she murmured.

“The kind you’re looking for?”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” she said smiling sideways at me.

I could feel my heart thumping against the sand like a tethered balloon ready to soar into ecstasy.

“Enough—to—marry me—sometime?” I asked her humbly.

The smile left her face. She stared at me for a moment, then scrambled to her knees.

“Why, Eph! I’m not even ‘out’ yet. What an idea!”

“But it’s a very good idea. You brought it on yourself!”

“You mean I’ve led you on?” she demanded.

“I haven’t said so. I can’t help it. I love you, Priscilla.”

She jumped to her feet, biting her lips.

“Listen, Eph!” she said in a high, hard voice that had a slight twang in it. “I’m surprised at you! Of course I like you, and all that, but I couldn’t marry you. It’s simply out of the question!”

“Why—if you like me!” I insisted.

Her lips narrowed.

“Let’s be frank! It’s ridiculous for you to think of such a thing! It’s grotesque! Father and Mother would have a fit. Do you know why they engaged you in the first place? I heard them talking about it. It was because they thought you’d be perfectly safe to have around.”

She turned and swung off quickly towards the house.

“And you are!” she threw back over her shoulder with a half sob.

My advent at the Harvard Law School was signalized by a “boner” which has gone rattling down the corridors of legal time. Having been away with Angus McGillicuddy on a fishing trip I had missed the first lecture on the Law of Property in which had been discussed the famous Rule in Shelley’s Case.[6] When the class next convened Professor John Chipman Gray glanced around and, his eye happening to light on me, asked: “Well now, Mr. Tutt, what was the Rule in Shelley’s Case?” Completely at sea, yet putting on as bold a face as I could, I replied to the great joy of my associates: “The law is no respecter of persons. The Rule in Shelley’s Case was the same as in any other.” Even the dignified professor could not hide a smile.

Gray was a big-barrelled graybeard, the final authority regarding “Restraints on Alienation,” with an aloof politeness that was rather terrifying. I have a vivid memory of him sitting like a ponderous idol at his desk, swinging his eyeglasses on the end of their ribbon, and rumbling gruffly: “You want to know what ‘an act of God’ is, gentlemen?—Well, the best definition I can give you is that it is something excessively disagreeable that you can’t help.”

The fact that this was the only explanation he could give of a term used a thousand times a day by lawyers astounded me.

Dean Christopher C. Langdell was a character out of Balzac—a strange, shy, white-bearded old gnome who lived in a legal past oblivious of the world outside. He was, when I knew him, 33 practically blind and found his way about by following a little fox terrier attached to a string. Equally blindly he would follow an idea, and had revolutionized the traditional method of teaching law through text books by the “case system.”

The Harvard Law School was at the apex of its fame. Concededly no more brilliant galaxy of legal teachers have ever been gathered together than Langdell and Gray, with their associates, Professors James Bradley Thayer, James Barr Ames, William A. Keener, Joseph Henry Beale, Samuel Williston, and ex-Justice Jeremiah Smith of the Supreme Court of New Hampshire. The significant thing about this particular group of law teachers was not that they were the most brilliant or most learned men in the world—although they were in fact both learned and brilliant—but that in addition to their culture and scholarship they were high-minded gentlemen. They were also human,—not merely legal pundits or “men of measured merriment.”

In addition to the regular courses, there was a system of voluntary law clubs, and to be an editor of The Harvard Law Review was a highly prized distinction. The common enthusiasm was so infectious that it worked a transformation in men who theretofore had thought of nothing more vital than college athletics and social clubs. No matter how much of a snob a man might have been in college, as soon as he entered Austin Hall he shed his snobbishness, along with his coat, and worked in his shirt sleeves with the rest of us.

My next three years were a brainstorm of wet towels, late hours and frenzied discussion. We lived in an intoxicating mental absorption, devouring the law of contracts, sales, property, trusts, equity jurisdiction, partnership, agency, torts, damages and criminal law, which last so fascinated me by its fine distinctions that Otto and I spent hours wrangling over such questions as whether or not a thief should be held guilty of an attempt to steal if he put his hand in his victim’s pocket only to find it empty, or whether one could be guilty of an attempt to commit murder if by mistake he fired at a shadow instead of at the man himself.

My absorption with the law had dulled the bitterness of my unhappy love affair. My acquaintance with the Boardmans had ceased abruptly and I had neither been invited to call upon 34 them nor received an invitation to Priscilla’s coming out party. It had been a very smart occasion, at which all the Brahmin families of the Back Bay had been represented, and during the next few months her name had been regularly featured in the social columns. Then, with the acclaim appropriate to a proposed alliance between two noble houses, her engagement to my classmate Winthrop Winslow of Commonwealth Avenue was announced. The wedding took place at Trinity Church the following June. This time a handsomely engraved invitation requested my presence both at the ceremony and later at an open-air reception at the Brookline Country Club. I did not attend. The Boston Evening Transcript called attention to the fact that Mr. Winslow’s ushers were all members of leading Harvard social clubs.

My first practical lesson in the law came from Mr. Tuckerman. Calling on my former landlady Miss Bowles one evening I found her in great distress. Her mortgage had matured and she was without means to pay it because one of her lodgers, whose indebtedness amounted to over a thousand dollars, had given her an assignment of his income from a trust fund and the trustee had refused to honor it. She had finally hired a lawyer and secured a judgment against him, but when the sheriff sought to levy he found that it was “a spendthrift trust” under which the income could not be attached or assigned in advance.

The poor old lady was in despair, for her house was about to be sold over her head, while her lodger had merely transferred himself and his belongings to another equally comfortable abode, where he continued to live at ease while thumbing his nose at his creditors.

“Mr. Pratt was always so kind spoken I never suspected what sort of person he was,” she told me between sobs. “I sometimes even let him have a few dollars when he complained of being strapped, but he never offered to pay them back.”

I had a flash of intuition.

“And the assignment was directed to a Mr. Tuckerman of 14 Barrister’s Hall in Boston?”

“Yes, a funny old man who laughed in my face and said that Mr. Pratt’s signature wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.”

At first I could not believe that the courts would permit an 35 honest old woman to be so cheated. Hurrying to the library I looked up “spendthrift trusts.” Sure enough, I found it to be the law of Massachusetts that: “Property may be settled in trust . . . with the provision that it shall not be alienated by anticipation or subject to be seized by creditors in advance of payment, either as to income or principal,” whereas in England, to the contrary, such trusts were held to be invalid.

The discovery that the greatest legal minds in these two Anglo-Saxon countries held a diametrically opposite view upon the same question bewildered me. How could this be? And, if it were so, who was to decide which was right? I found Mr. Tuckerman at his green-baize covered desk, his goosequill pen stuck behind his ear.

“Well, friend Tutt,” quoth he, “what can I do for ye? Shall we have a mug of ale at the ‘Bell in Hand’?”

“You can right a great wrong!” I said, showing him the order for $1,200 of accumulated income which Pratt had given Miss Bowles. “This rascally ward of yours has occupied this woman’s best suite for three years, eaten her out of house and home, and borrowed money of her besides.”

“I told ye he was a scalawag!” said the old man drily. “So I drew that trust in such a way that he could be kept from starvation and yet not waste his gran’ther’s hard earned substance.”

“And at the same time,” I retorted, “you have fixed it so that by always having money in his pocket he can make it appear that he is a man of means, and thus secure credit from honest people out of all proportion to his ability to pay.”

“Come! Come!” he said. “Shouldn’t a man be allowed to die in peaceful knowledge that the law will prevent his fortune from being dissipated by a wastrel?”

“Should he be allowed to die in peace realizing that he has made it possible for innocent people to be swindled?” I cried. “If Pratt is willing that this debt should be paid, what moral right have you to refuse?”

“H’m!” said Mr. Tuckerman rubbing his chin. “Harkee, Tutt! Let’s not quarrel about it. When old Parson Pratt, the gran’ther of Wilbur, consulted me he said: ‘Caleb, make sure—tie up that trust fund so’s the wastrel can’t get over fifteen hundred a year, fix it so he can’t anticipate it, or assign it, or subject it to judgments or hock it; let him run up enough 36 debts to send him to hell, but—keep a way out in a case of a real hardship.’ So I left a loophole. After I’d limited said Wilbur’s income to fifteen hundred dollars a year in a spendthrift trust, I added a provision that as trustee I might apply the balance to his maintenance, support and education as I saw fit. So on your representation that there’s no hocus pocus between her and Pratt—”

“Hocus pocus! She loathes the very sight of him!”

“And so do I!” he chuckled, “but, as I was about to say, as trustee for maintenance I will honor Miss Bowles’ claim in full with compound interest at six per cent for three years—if you can figure it out!”

“You will never regret it, sir!” I cried.

“I hope not! I hope not!” he grinned. “So my young friend, take this lesson to heart. In the law there’s always a way out either by intention or otherwise. There is no so-called doctrine to which there’s not an exception, and no exception to which there is not some further exception. You recall the couplet:

‘Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.’

The only difference is that the fleas are real and here the principles are all in your eye.

“They tell you out at the Law School that the law is a wonderful science—the perfection of reason. Wonderful fiddle-sticks! ’Tis in fact a hodge-podge of Roman law, Bible texts, writings of the Christian Fathers, Germanic customs, myths, canon law, superstitions, scraps of feudalism, crazy fictions, and long dead statutes. Your professors try to bring order out of chaos and make sense where the devil himself couldn’t find any. They turn you into metaphysicians instead of lawyers. I warrant ye that the top third of your class will become teachers, the second third judges, and only the tail end successful lawyers. God help all of ye! The law is nothing but a vast series of individual stratagems. Usually it has neither rhyme nor reason, having grown up nobody knows how or why and continuing to exist out of sheer inertia—a mass of contradictions and inconsistencies by means of which lawyers make a living and politicians accomplish their evil purposes. So, Tutt, take the law 37 as you find it and twist it to your ends”—he winked—“so long as they be good ones.”

I thanked him and put Miss Bowles’ check in my pocket. The poor old soul was so grateful when I handed it to her that she threw herself into my arms, insisting that she could never repay me for my effort in her behalf. Walking back to my room in Hollis my heart aglow, I felt that, if, like Miss Pidgeon in my own case, I could assist others who thus came in my way to get their rights, it would be a far more gratifying sort of success than to be a judge on the bench or the attorney for a ten-million-dollar corporation. Mr. Tuckerman’s strictures upon the profession of which he was so shining an ornament profoundly disconcerted me. I had been taught that the law was founded upon eternal principles which I was even then, with the help of my professors, engaged in disentangling from the brush piles of ancient error, and now Old Tuck in effect declared it to be all tosh.

I had made the Law Review early in my course, and having maintained an “A” rank throughout, graduated third in my class. The most sought-after legal plum, which went naturally to the highest man, was a year’s service in Washington as secretary to Mr. Justice Horace Gray of the United States Supreme Court. The next two or three usually had their pick of clerkships in the better known firms and I had opened tentative negotiations with Curtis, Jones & Mason of 60 State Street in Boston. In any case it was desirable to secure admittance to the local bar.

After my life at Harvard and my experience with the Boardmans I was not enamoured of The Hub, but as Cal Coolidge later said of Northampton under similar circumstances, it was “the nearest court house.”[7]

“Boston isn’t your dish, Eph!” declared Otto, who, having graduated the year before with honors, was now working for Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, then of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. “It’s dominated by a group of wealthy families whose members intermarry and leave their money to each other, and who have a private Darwinian Theory of their own. They 38 believe they’re the fittest because they’ve survived, and that God wants them to run the whole show. And how they run it! All the interests are tied up together; they have the same lobby and the same attorneys. If you expect to succeed here you’ve got to join the procession. Look at The New York, New Haven & Hartford and The Boston & Maine! Why, if you should lift the dome off the roof of the State House what you’d find underneath would stink to Heaven! You’ve only one life to live. Why waste it here! You can’t buck the system. Come to New York with me.”

“Isn’t there a system in New York?” I countered.

“Not the same sort. They don’t make any pretense of righteousness down there.”

Otto was, of course, a zealot. While he ultimately became a judge and a good one, he did not in those days have a judicial temperament. It is perhaps better to go off at half cock rather than not to go off at all. Thus although I did not wholly accept his rather neat theory, whereby Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards became historically responsible for the transgressions of Henry Cabot Lodge, what he said disturbed me.

However, I decided to make a try of it, and reporting at the office of Curtis, Jones & Mason was ushered into the august presence of the senior partner, at the moment engaged in having his shoes polished while smoking a cigar. Mr. Curtis, who was pink and obviously well fed, wore a carefully parted “ferry-slip” and, in spite of the odor of legal sanctity surrounding him, I had an unreasonable desire to kick him in the pants.

“We-ell?” he remarked coldly as if I had intruded upon some intimate personal function.

“My name is Ephraim Tutt,” I explained. “I have a letter from your firm asking me to call.”

“H’m!” he muttered scrutinizing me. “Oh, yes. I remember, Professor Gray recommended you, I believe. Well, you look as if you had some sense. What are your politics?”

“I voted for President Cleveland.”

He grunted.

“A ‘mug-wump,’ I suppose? Well, we’ll overlook that if you haven’t any other crazy ideas. You may report to our chief clerk.”

“How much shall I be paid?” I ventured.

“What!—Do you expect to be paid,” he demanded as if outraged. “Most young men are glad to come into my firm for the experience. However, if you need it, I’ll give you five dollars a week.—By the way,” he added, running his eye over my costume, “I suggest that you wear a stand-up collar instead of the thing you have on.—That will be all for the moment.”

His smugness infuriated me.

“I’ll change my collar if you’ll change your beard!” I retorted.

“Well, I’ll be—” he exploded.

“‘Damned’,” I finished for him.

I had saved a couple of hundred dollars and was in no immediate danger of starvation. On my way back to Cambridge I encountered Angus McGillicuddy, who said he was about to start for upper New York on a fishing trip and urged me to join him.

“I know just the place for you,” he assured me. “Pottsville, New York, in the Mohawk Valley, a pleasant little town with several fine trout streams in the neighborhood. The only good lawyer in the place—Judge Eben Wynkoop—died a couple of years ago. You might take over his practice. Come along!”

The thought of returning to a country life again was like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land. Otto had already gone to New York. I was confused and a bit disillusioned about the law. Why not have a try at country practice? If I didn’t attract any clients I could at least get some fishing.