The Square and the Circle

‘You have picked your farm as only the president of a life-insurance company could,’ I assured Mr. Caysor, as I clenched the seat-rail of his touring-car. ‘Death himself could never make his way over these roads up into your secret valley. You would have to fetch him in the auto— Hoo! Watch that boulder! ’

Six winding miles we had pounded from the railway station, ever up grade and over rocks on whose surface some dust, having drifted more thickly in one direction than in another, claimed the courtesy of being called the Milbridge Turnpike. On the crest of a granite swell, our engine stopped, at the end of its patience, its gasoline, and its journey. Mr. Caysor dropped me on a porch as wide and as long as a race-track, while he stepped into the gray Titan he miscalled a ‘farmhouse,’ to summon a servant for my luggage. With a heart as full of contentment as my eyes were full of dust, I surveyed this place where, during the month to follow, I should earn twice my salary from the college merely by glancing through the table of probabilities which Mr. Caysor’s experts had compiled for a new scheme of endowment policies. An ideal spot for brain work! The shrillest locomotive whistle and the smelliest factory chimney could not fling their irritations hither; a half-mile lay between us and the next house, and no Sunday stream of impious automobiles was to be feared over that alleged road. Its thank-you-ma’ams, taken at thirty miles an hour, had added a most unpleasant personal flavor to my task of figuring the chances of death for an insurance company. I resolved to defer work until the upland air had washed away that bad taste.

‘Good!’ said my host, ‘let’s stroll over the farm. I must visit a queer codger down by the brook ’ — He gestured toward a streak glinting across a far meadow. ‘ My superintendent cannot manage Sam Felton. The fellow’s chickens put the crows to shame when they hold a scratching-bee in my corn. His curs chase his cats and Nature’s rabbits across my young potatoes. And three times this week we’ve driven his cow out of our Italian clover. I don’t mind the damage in dollars and cents; but I am anxious to test, some fertilizers. How can even a mathematician like you estimate their value, if the crops are going to be nibbled and trampled and uprooted?’

A city man, to whom is added the disability of being academic, must practice extreme caution and reserve when passing judgment on even the apparent axioms of agriculture. Modestly I suggested to Mr. Caysor that high fences and trespass signs might protect him.

‘They are quite contrary to principle and policy,’ he objected, as we stumbled down a jagged and jerky lane, at whose thin, frayed end I could see the swirl of a brook. ‘ If the fences are built as the law requires, I am in one mess; and I’m in another if I construct them myself. Suppose I compel Pelton and my other two obnoxious neighbors to build their part of our line fences. First, they will be angry, for this has been a wide-open countryside ever since these stones and hills were put here. Before I came here, line fences would have cost more than the land and crops they were to protect, so of course the natives built none. Well, in the second place, if I brought the stat utes to bear upon them, they would work at their fences only when they had nothing else to do — you know how often that is on a farm! And, after a year or two of pottering, they would have erected the flimsiest, lowest, openest barrier permissible, which would hinder the hens and dogs about as much as the Golden Rule does.’

‘You could almost, afford to put up all the fences at your own expense. Then they’d be right,’ I suggested; and cleverly, I thought.

Millionaires, who, like Mr. Caysor, are not newly rich, are often flattered by the insinuation that they must count their pennies before spending.

‘It’s not the money cost,’ he explained, ‘ but the reputation I should win by such a move, that I can ill afford. I do not wish to hear these rustics calling me a fool behind my back, and I resent being dealt with as an alien. My family comes from New Jersey soil, and it throve there longer than these people have. I’ve taken this farm to live on it, to bring up my boys wholesomely, to find rest and contentment. Once let Pelton and the others believe I am a fool, a soft mark, putting up other people’s fences for them, — and they will set me apart as a freak, a rank outsider, a convenient loosepurse to swindle, but not a person to gossip with. We should all be shut out, of the neighborhood life.’

A New York financier fancying that there was a ‘neighborhood life’ in this desolation! And that, if diplomatic, he might break into its smart set! Even the worldly-wise must beware of straying beyond the atmosphere which enshrouds their own little sphere. People judge distances by the air to which they are accustomed; as the seaboard native visiting Colorado who imagines he can walk before breakfast to a mountain fifty miles away, so was Mr. Caysor insensitive to the gulf between Hawk’s Nest and the institutions of the vicinage.

‘You really hope some day to mix with Pelton and his kind?’ I laughed, toning down my incredulity as best I could.

‘ Why, yes! Why not ? I’m no aristocrat.’

‘But not all democrats can rub noses in brotherly love. Hop around with milkmaids at the barn dance, debate turnips, polish the counter of the crossroads emporium with the seat of your orthodox jeans,—you will never take the measure of these folks.’

‘That smells of college, Professor Maggam! ’ My host and employer bestowed a pitying smile upon me, allegorically knocking off the head of a wild carrot with his cane. ‘You academics are odd weeds!’

‘College often smells of truth,’ I retorted. ‘The human mind, like mathematics, is full of incommensurables. As the area of no circle can be exactly reproduced in the form of a square, so with men’s thoughts, their standards, and ways of judging things. Smith’s ideas are round — ’

‘Logical circles, as it were,’ Mr. Caysor interpolated.

‘While Brown’s are square. Smith cannot, match Brown’s thoughts, nor can Brown duplicate Smith’s. So it comes to pass that the world is full of inevitable misunderstandings. Genius in one of us seems madness to another; religion seems depravity, and morals corruption.’

‘That’s Pelton’s!’

Mr. Caysor pointed at a wry chimney smoking over the ragged top of a wild-mulberry hedge. Where we walked, the rocks, victorious over the highway, thrust themselves heavily through the powdered clay. On our left, they had been expelled from a great, gentle field, for that was of the Caysor farm; but at the rise of ground on our right, they protruded everywhere between unpainted cottages, which reminded one of stranded fishes, spasmodically waving their window-blinds like fins, and panting desperately through long gillslits between their gaping weatherboards. Dirty urchins, yelling in rustic unrestraint, chased gaunt dogs through a maze of despondent stumps.

‘Now, my fine philosopher!' said Mr. Caysor. ‘Watch closely, and tell me honestly whether I can measure Pelton, and Pelton me. When I was a young insurance agent, I made myself understood to queerer sticks!'

A ridge of insolent granite pitched the lane roughly to the west and brought the Pelton barnyard in view. A bent man — he might have been the ‘Crooked Man who lived in a Crooked House ’ — was twisting a reluctant cow’s tail, in a vain struggle to urge the animal out upon the road.

‘An unruly beast!’ I observed again with that caution and reserve which are seemly in an urbanite. ‘If I had a cow — ’

‘ Lord! That’s my Jersey!' Mr. Caysor shouted and broke into a sharp jogtrot. ‘What the devil is he doing with her? Hey! Leave her tail alone! I’ll twist your—’

As he found his stride, he lost his breath. At the same instant one of those evil spirits which inhabit even the meekest kine prompted the Caysor Jersey to plunge down the road in the direction toward which Pelton had been advising her. Ours was a stern chase of a full half-mile.

‘ I ’ll have you arrested!' roared Caysor when we had overhauled the two children of the soil.

‘No, y’ won’t, mister!’ piped back the weazened Pelton, wrinkling the bridge of his long nose. ‘This here cow is goin’ t’ th’ pound! She’s et up ten times her lenth ’n bredth o’ my oats. ’N y’ll pay th’ poundmaster a dollar ’n me anuther one fer th’ damages!’

‘Oho!’ Mr. Caysor was flustered only between two breaths. ‘Well, it’s a mile further to the pound.’ He drew forth a dollar. ‘That for the oats. Now spare yourself and Bossie the rest of the journey. It’s a hot day.’

Pelton turned his back on us, sneering. ‘Y’ kin buy people off like that down in New York, mebbe; but we’re law-abidin’ folks out here, an’ y’d better larn it spry! Cows that ruin other folks’ grain goes t’ th’ pound; that’s th’ law!’

‘To be sure, my good man,’ Mr. Caysor assented gently, as he drew his wallet again. ‘Here! Take two dollars, one for damages and the other for the poundmaster. I don’t wish to dodge my fine!’

‘Not so easy, mister!’ Pelton cackled triumphantly, still moving off. ‘This here cow’s put me to a peck o’ trouble, a catchin’ her an’ a draggin’ her darned carcass outen the oat field. I ’ve wasted ’n hour that I otto a spent in the cabbage patch. Now you’ve gotto do the same. An eye fer an eye, an’ a tooth fer a tooth, says the Good Book; a peck o’ trouble fer a peck o’ trouble that means, if y’ve got th’ brains t’ unnerstand it.’

Mr. Caysor doffed his Panama affably. ‘As you like it! Pray enjoy your walk to the pound and back! You’ll spare me the trouble of leading Bossie home. George will drive over for her this afternoon. And you’ll collect your dollar damages after the court has passed on the claim. — Let’s cut back through my wood lot, Professor. There are some odd mushrooms I should like to show you. Can you distinguish the poisonous kinds?’

I caught Pelton’s eye as we turned. It flickered like a candle-flame caught in eddying gusts, knowing not which way to swing. Then the strong, deep draught of instinct blew it straight and clear. Pelton marched on toward the pound.

‘That fungus you’ve just been talking to looks poisonous.’

I welcomed mushrooms as a pleasant change from incommensurables, which, I feared, might stir my employer and friend to measureless wrath, if broached now.

‘Nonsense!’ insisted Mr. Caysor. ‘If you let a little misunderstanding like that affect you, you could n’t sell life-insurance policies at a railroad wreck. I’ll have him pacified before you leave Hawk’s Nest.’

From our hammocks on the porch of Hawk’s Nest, after luncheon, our field-glasses followed Pelton, as he limped wearily homeward. Once he seemed to look squarely into our faces and scowl.

‘He has n’t enjoyed his promenade,’smiled Caysor dryly. ‘ By the way, I must send George after Bossie.’

Under a cherry tree Pelton surlily watched the hostler flash down the lane on a lank bay mare.

‘He’s bitterly disappointed because I am not walking barefoot over the rocky road to haul the cow home!’

Though Caysor chuckled, he was mildly disturbed. The farmer puzzled him, the prince of insurance agents! I fancied Caysor was thinking no primitive man had a right to do that. Yet my host was above bitterness.

‘He’s just waking to the bad bargain he drove. He has spoiled his temper, his morning, and his feet, not to mention his chance of collecting his dollar damages. Poor devil! I ’ll spare him that last annoyance.”

He dispatched a stable boy with the dollar. The lad returned grinning and passed the bill back. ‘He say he can’t make you go to the pound, but he can make you go to court; and he’s going to collect the damages that way. I didn’t catch on to the rest, sir; it was something about you having to waste as much time and strength as he has on your account.’

‘Mad!’ Mr. Caysor’s exclamation was tinged with the feeling a child experiences on opening its first Jack-inthe-Box; he was shocked, tickled, and amused. ‘He twists Moses as violently as Bossie’s tail.’

‘No!’ I objected. ‘And, far from being mad, he suffers from too much sanity.’

‘What must I say now?’ my host asked feebly. ‘Spring your little jest.’

‘Madness and genius are allied, you know; genius is useful originality, madness is useless originality. But Pelton is utterly unoriginal. You think you are a conservative, but you are as flighty as an aeroplane in comparison with Pelton; he is a brother to the boulders, he has n’t moved since the Age of Ice. Primitive men took a goat from the poor thief who had stolen one; from the rich thief they confiscated five for every one he had purloined. The peasant, in the days of blood-money, paid a year’s hard labor in penalty for murder, but his wealthy neighbor, for the same offense, had to yield up all his flocks. Crude, perhaps, but not absurd ! ’

I was on the verge of demonstrating the necessity of reviving this law, when Mr. Grace, the president’s private secretary dashed up in a fagged runabout, bearing a bundle of urgent letters, one of which took Mr. Caysor to his desk at once, and to Chicago an hour later. His grief over the thought of missing the comedy at court when Pelton’s lawsuit should come up bulked disproportionately large in the midst of the momentous worries of high finance. Pelton had excited him; was causing the New Yorker to squander his fiftydollar minutes on him, after all. Though I told my host I was sorry, I afterward rejoiced at his absence.

A week later, the judge reached Pelton versus Caysor. Mr. Grace and I found the primeval countryman strutting up and down the courtroom, proud as a conquering barnyard cock. The case was called. Mr. Grace, himself an attorney, rose and stated that his client would not oppose the claim. This the judge fixed at two dollars and costs, which Mr. Grace paid.

‘That ain’t the feller!’ shrieked Pelton, pointing at the secretary. ‘I never seen him. Mister Caysor is a big porker ’ith a hole in th’ middle o’ his hair.’

His Honor scanned the documents of the next case and the courtroom tittered, while the farmer gnawed his nails as a rat gnaws the wire of his trap.

‘Next case! Meacham versus — ’

The judge shot a startled glance at Pelton, who had advanced, one skinny arm outstretched.

‘Jedge,’ he cried, and in his throat sounded the sharp whistle of January wind, ‘I’ve spent most o’ two workin’ days catchin’ Caysor’s cow, ’n pullin’ her over t’ th’ pound, ’n comin’ t’ this here court, fer my damages, when there wuz strawberries t’ pick ’n peas t’ hoe. Caysor ain’t put himself out a minnit! He don’t even come here t’ be fined; ’n th’ six dollars this hired man o’ his’n pays, — I ’ll bet his boss never earned ’em ner even saw ’em! ’T ain’t fair! ’T ain’t square!’

‘Silence!’ thundered the court. ‘Another word in that vein, and you will be fined ten dollars for contempt!’

Pelton slunk out of the courtroom, the laughter of spectators nipping him from behind like a street cur. As our car swished past him before the courthouse, he watched us with the despair and fright of a cave man seeing a mastodon for the first time, and knowing neither flint that can pierce the monster’s hide nor trap that will hold him.

A few days afterward, Mr. Caysor returned with an amusing tale about an Illinois court which had fined his company five thousand dollars for ‘a slight, irregularity’ by which the corporation had cleared two hundred thousand.

' I fired the State manager, who planned the clever trick and tried it out on his own hook,’ said Mr. Caysor. ’We paid the maximum penalty the law allows, and we are not obliged, morally or legally, to surrender our profit, because we have cheated nobody.’ Then he asked about Pelton. ‘ If he’s so vindictive,’ he commented at the close of my story, ‘we’ll have to build that line fence between him and my meadow, which has the best grass on my farm for Bossie.’

Mr. Grace and I visited the farmer, under instructions to let him choose the easier half of the fence to build. The secretary foresaw another row, I none; and I proved the better prophet. The sharing of line fences Pelton’s moral code approved, and against that, code he would not struggle, however painful submission might be. Caysor’s meadow bounded Pelton’s eight irregular acres on the north, the east, and the south. There were a thousand feet of fence to build over bed-rock topped with soil so shallow that posts were quite out of the question; a stone wall must be constructed. Pelton set to work a few days later with a small stone boat pulled by a horse which found it a burden unloaded. Mr. Grace put on ten huskies and four ponderous Percherons, which finished Mr. Caysor’s five hundred feet to the lawful height of four feet, six inches, before Pelton had laid twenty; incidentally, they transmuted twelve worthless acres of boulders into excellent grazing lands, stoneless and smooth.

On the glad mid-June morning when Mr. Caysor inspected the new wall, he and I saw from a distance Pelton and his bony horse panting in the shade of his wild-mulberry hedge. In a minute Pelton spied us coming and slipped into his cottage.

‘Pie’s not glad to see me,’ Mr. Caysor laughed.

We strolled along the wall, my host, poking at it with his cane, in search of loose spots. We rounded the southern tip of the mulberry hedge and met Pelton, his savage eyes, and the muzzle of an ancient rifle aimed at Caysor’s face.

‘Th’ law sez I must build one half o’ this here fence, ’n you, Mister Caysor, must put up th’ other half. I’ve been slavin’ at these stones a week, an’ what’ve you done? Sat on yer front steps a-watchin’ me an’ grinnin’! Y’ ain’t lifted a pebble. Y’ cheated me about the cow fine, but y’ ain’t goin’t’ have the chanct to cheat me again! Jest pile another layer onto those five hundred feet o’ yourn; there’s some nice flat, slabs o’ shale over there,—see ’em? An’ you,’ Pelton nodded at me without quivering his rifle, ‘you set down here by me, er I’ll pop y’ in the calf o’ th’ left leg, jest enough t’ keep y’ still a while!’

‘Mind him, for heaven’s sake!' Caysor warned me. ‘The maniac can trim a squirrel’s tail at two hundred yards!'

‘ Y’ kin take my horse er y’ kin carry ’em in yer arms.’ Pelton returned to the stones and his delinquent neighbor. ‘The fence’ll keep yer cow outen my oats all th’ better, if it’s a foot higher! Get busy now!’

The president of the New York Friendly Mutual Insurance Company (capital, $12,000,000, undivided profits, $9,254,000, and outstanding insurance, $225,456,000) loaded the stone boat thrice and added to the stature of some six feet of wall, before his hands, scratched, bruised, and bleeding, rebelled. He held them up to Pelton.

‘ I can’t, do more! They won’t work.’ He smiled weakly.

‘Th’ bones ’ve stuck clean outen mine,’ Pelton replied, ‘but I’ve kept ’em at work, ’n I guess you kin! If y’ can’t, it’s high time y’ learned.’

Mr. Caysor sat down, Pelton counted three, warning him at each number, but Caysor watched a thrush fly past. At the end of the last count, Pelton fired, splitting the sole of my host’s right shoe. The sting of the quick bruise brought the victim to his feet.

‘The next bullet ’ll bruise yer heel a little hotter.’

About the middle of the sweltering afternoon Caysor fainted.

‘If this is sunstroke,’ I shook my fist in Pelton’s happy face, ‘you will sit a year or two in jail!’

‘Sunstroke, nuthin’!’ he grunted. ‘Th’ loafer jist ain’t used t’ givin’ folks a square deal an’ abidin’ by th’ law! That’s all! If he don’t pick up soon, y’ kin take him home in th’ spring wagon.’

Mr. Caysor did not pick up soon. We picked him up. I brought him to Hawk’s Nest in Pelton’s creaky vehicle, still senseless, my coat over his head to baffle the merciless sun.

At the trial, Pelton’s attorney was Moses, whom the court refused to recognize. As Mr. Caysor entered a vigorous plea for clemency, the convicted man was sentenced to jail for only ninety days; ‘though you deserve two years,’ protested the judge.

‘Ninety days!’ Pelton trembled and went as white as the morning mist that hangs about his cottage in the bottoms. ‘Ninety days! Y’ don’t mean that, Jedge! Middle o’ June — July, August, middle o’ September. ’Fore I git home, my cherries ’ll be withered t’ th’ pits, an’ th’ pears rotten. My rye’ll be flat on th’ ground, an’ the peas — In God’s name, Jedge, I won’t have nothin’ fer eatin’ next winter! It ain’t square!’

At a nod from the judge, an officer dragged the wretch off, and the next case was called.

‘We may have erred,’ Mr. Caysor told the judge afterward. ‘His place may be the asylum, not the jail.’

And the judge nodded: ‘Maybe.’

Pelton had sadly disarranged my work on the insurance company’s papers. I took them home with me, still uninspected, when Mr. Caysor locked up Hawk’s Nest and left for Canada on a two-months’ fishing trip.

September was burning her continent-wide swath in the crimson-andgold uplands when Mr. Caysor next jounced me to the retreat which Death could reach only in an automobile. Three of the six miles lay smoking in their own dust behind us when, rounding a bend, we barely missed a gaunt dog which was licking the face of an old man. The man, squatted on a stone in the middle of the road, was shrilly singing: —

His tune was that of ‘The Battle
Hymn of the Republic.’

‘Pelton!’ I whispered, a little sick.

‘By George!’ A sudden memory came down upon the financier at the wheel. ‘His ninety days ended yesterday.’

‘So did his mind,’ I added grimly.

We helped him into the car. He did not recognize us. He told us in confidence that a band of demons had slipped into Heaven through a crack in the Table of the Laws and had strangled God while He was asleep. As the robins had stripped his cherry trees and the ragweed was lording it over his garden, we fed him in the servants’ quarters until an officer removed him to a still, green yard which the State provides for wandering minds. There November caught him on a bench, wondering where he should plant red cabbage next spring; and December answered his question as she swept him off with the last autumn leaves, crooning his Miltonic hymn in the music of that land whose citizens are born free and equal. There being no heir, Mr. Caysor bought his eight acres for three hundred dollars.

‘I knew from the beginning that he was mad,’ the insurance king said as we watched his workmen burn the Pelton cottage, one fresh April day.

‘There was no common measure of justice between you,’ I closed the tragedy. ‘His moral ideas were cut square. Yours are circles. He tried to square the circle, and failed, as we all must.’