King Street

I

KING STREET is the main street of the city in which I live. The city lies today, as when Kipling’s Red Jacket visited it, in ‘a kindly, softly country there, back of Philadelphia’—so far back, indeed, that it has been, from its foundation, the centre of an independent community and is just now engaged in celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of its elevation to the dignity of a county seat. History will tell you that it was once the largest inland city in the United States, and that when the frightened Continental Congress fled westward after the battle of Brandywine it became for a few hours the capital of the United States, but these glories — if glories they were — have long since departed. Though every census has recorded its steady growth, it is a small city now.

Since I was born in the county over which it presides, I may call it my own city by an unimpeachable title, which, however, suffers somewhat in dignity because of the fact that three of my four grandparent s were born elsewhere. Anything less than title by birth is, as we reckon such matters, no title at all. Not long ago, in the heat of a political campaign, we were earnestly exhorted not to let ‘outsiders’ tell us how to run our city, though of t he two denizens — I will not be so unkind as to say aliens — thus held up to public suspicion one had lived among us for more than a quarter of a century and the other for at least half of that period.

So it comes about that my ancestral memories are perhaps less vivid and authentic than they would be if more of my progenitors had been to the manor born. I may not, for instance, speak of historical matters with the authority of my tobacconist, who conducts his business on the very site on which his great-great-grandfather established it in 1770. Though I attended the college that Benjamin Franklin helped to found, I can throw no light on the solution of the mooted question as to whether he was personally present when the corner stone was laid. I remember the stagecoaches lumbering into King Street over the old stone bridge across the Conestoga River, but not the Conestoga wagons in the days of ihe Oregon Trail. I was born in the house once occupied by Baron Stiegel on the farms which he named Elizabeth, after his wife, but no echo comes to me of the salutes he caused to be fired from a neighboring hill (called Cannon Hill to this day) to welcome him home at the ends of his journeys.

One of the Baron’s neighbors, by the way, was a manufacturer of iron and a mighty hunter as well. One day, enraged at his failure in the chase and being deep in his cups, he drove his pack of foxhounds into the fire of one of his furnaces and burned them alive. The last to go through the door of the furnace was his favorite white bitch. She fawned upon him and cried piteously, begging to be spared, but he forced her remorselessly into the flames. Men say that on winter nights she still gives tongue, and that as often as she does so it is the doom of her cruel master to rise from his grave and follow her over the frozen hills of our northern townships. I too have heard strange sounds on winter nights, but I cannot certainly affirm that they came from the throat of the white bitch.

II

Let our legends be what they will. I set out not to recount hearsay, but, like Mark Antony, ‘to speak what I do know,’ and in order to do so I must confine myself to the last decade of the old century and the first of the new one, — in which I grew up, went to school and college, and studied law, — and to the years since then, in which I have been continuously engaged in the practice of my profession.

I suppose that my connection with the organized life of my city began with my presence, as an undergraduate in college, at the coming-out parties at which an older generation, under the form of presenting its daughters to society, really presented society for the inspection of its daughters and their younger guests. So far as I can remember, all of these parties were exactly alike, and all of them were held at the same place. They consisted of sixteen dances and four ‘extras,’ alternately two-steps and waltzes, with a supper at the end of the eighth dance. A few guests from out of town were usually present, but otherwise there were no ‘outsiders.’ Programmes were in use, and the dancing, which began at nine o’clock, lasted until about one.

It was not much past the turn of the century, and many of those who came to watch the festivities, and who were at that time active in the business and professional life of the community, had played parts in the great drama of the Civil War. Some knew more than they had ever told about the workings of the underground railroad. One or two had been included in the party invited to drink punch with James Buchanan on the fateful third of July, 1863, and, sitting on the lawn in the rear of his lovely house, had heard from time to time the thunder of the guns at Gettysburg. One would give something to know what thoughts were in the mind of the former president as he listened. The whole picture presented was that of a society in which were represented the conflicting ideals and aspirations of two epochs, but through which there ran, nevertheless, the thread of an unbroken culture and tradition.

After supper most of the older guests went home, and the young people were left very largely to their own devices. In a room opening from the ballroom there were invariably two tables — a large one in the centre of the room and a small one against the wall. On the centre table stood two punch bowls, one containing an unfortified fruit punch and the other a concoction made, for all I know, from the very recipe of Buchanan. On the side table stood decanters of Scotch and rye whiskey, a siphon bottle, a pitcher of water, and a bow l of cracked ice. Nearly everyone drank in those days, — at least nearly all men drank, and many of them were hard drinkers, — but I never saw a young man or young girl touch the whiskey. Moreover, I never but once saw anyone visibly under the influence of liquor. On that occasion a boy of about my own age imbibed too freely of the strong punch and insisted on mounting a chair as a rostrum, from which he delivered a perfectly decorous though somewhat too enthusiastic speech about the pleasures of high society. The incident made a tremendous impression, and I went home that night feeling sure, as indeed proved to be the case, that the offender had attended his last coming-out party.

About three months after my graduation from college I began to study law, or, as our rules of court express it, to ‘serve a regular clerkship in the office of a practising attorney.’ It is almost impossible to assert that this is a bad way to study law, since, for want of a different one, it is the way in which all the lawyers of America received their legal education up to comparatively recent times. On the contrary, given the atmosphere of an old-fashioned lawoffice, a preceptor with the time and ability to transmit to his student the fruits of his own experience, and a student not too easily discouraged by the absence of the stimulus that comes from competition and discussion with other students, I think it is an excellent way to study law. It has passed away utterly in the large cities, and is passing away in my own city as well, because the circumstances which made it possible have, in large measure, ceased to exist. The fee to be paid by a student for his tuition was in my day, and still is, fixed by tradition at two hundred dollars, one half payable upon registration and the other half upon admission to the bar. As Thaddeus Stevens, whose office was popular with law students, is said to have remarked: ‘Some pay; some don’t.’ I paid the whole of my fee a year or two after I had begun practice. No one ever asked me for the money.

A student in a law office has no rights that anyone is bound to respect. In times long past he was expected to sweep out the office and to attend to the stove in the winter, but I had no such tasks to perform. I searched titles, wrote deeds and mortgages, copied wills and other legal papers, and spent much time in court listening to the leaders of the bar of that day, the most famous of whom was an ex-attorneygencral of Pennsylvania, whose former partner, then a member of the stale Supreme Court, has since been its Chief Justice. In addition, I learned to know a number of local characters not ordinarily to be found on the list of expected guests at coming-out parlies.

There was a woman — for whom, as it now seems to me, something might, have been done — who suffered from the delusion that she had a case which was just about to come up and who sat in court from the beginning to the end of every session waiting for her case to be called. There was a freckled colored man named Sam, a bootblack, who went the rounds of the law offices every morning, plying his trade and retailing the gossip of the day. There was an eccentric lawyer of morose appearance but consistently convivial habits, a strange mixture of Dr. Johnson and Boswell — given, like the former, to sudden and startling ejaculations, and, like the latter, to the making of minute written records of casual conversations. I once heard him begin an argument in the Orphans’ Court about the distribution of the estate of a man named Grimes by remarking in a resonant voice, ‘If Your Honor please, old Grimes is dead.’ For all his eccentricities, lie was a careful and competent lawyer, scrupulously exact in the transaction of his professional business, and as methodical in his personal habits as one of his predecessors at the bar, — whom I never knew, but of whom I have often heard, — who was accustomed to shave every other day, and who attended divine service only on those alternate Sundays when the calendar brought the rite of shaving into proper conjunction with the rites of the church.

III

The dramatis personœ of a small community are infinitely various. In addition, they acquire a semiofficial standing and a local universality of influence which have no counterparts in a really large city, except perhaps in the lives of the notorious figures of its underworld. The reason lies in the very nature of provincial civilization. A lawyer or a musician living, for example, in London or New York may, if he chooses, so order his affairs as to spend all of his leisure hours in the company of those interested in the work in which he is engaged or engaged in similar work of their own, but the resident of a small city can of necessity make no such selection of his acquaintances. For better or worse, he must reckon with the whole of a small environment rather than with a selected portion of a large one. He must, in short, accept the common lot of social interdependence, and, as Mr. Chesterton has somewhere pointed out, live a broad life at the inevitable risk of living a shallow one.

Breadth and depth are, after all, relative terms, and, when used in a figurative sense, they are inaccurate as well. Our most influential citizen during the early years of my practice was the minister of one of our local churches, —a small, frail man without physical distinction of any sort, — who was probably unheard of outside the limits of the city in which he lived and worked. I remember having heard my mother say that in her youth she thought him a little mad because of the perfect simplicity with which he bowed to everyone he met, whether he knew the person or not. He was not a modern man. I think he lived and died happy, but he would have been happier still if he had been born in the great days of the thirteenth century. He was the only person I have ever known who spoke naturally in the language of Saint Francis’s ‘Canticle to the Sun.’

The truth is that I did not really know him. I saw him hundreds of times, but I have no recollection of having ever addressed him except once, and then only by making a written inquiry as to a date shown in the baptismal records of his parish. He answered me in longhand by the next post, thanking me at. the outset for my ‘good letter’ and giving me the information requested. As a matter of fact, my letter was in no way different from any other formally worded inquiry. Doubtless he did not stop to reason about the matter, but I think, nevertheless, that he did not call it good merely as the result of a literary habit. It was a letter from a man, and therefore his instinct was to regard it as a good letter. At bottom he cared more about people than about ideas.

He cared more about charity than about efficiency. I am sure that he gave his support to all the organized efforts for social welfare that were made in his day — to the ministerial associations, the community-service associations, and the law-and-order societies. He would no more have thought of opposing the work of such organizations than of opposing the work of the fire department. It is better to damage property with water than to let fires burn, and it is better for society to put prostitutes in jail than to have them walking the streets. But in his heart he had no interest in abstract conceptions like society. He knew a good many prostitutes, although I am not sure that he realized the business in which they were engaged. If he had realized it, I do not know what he would have done. It might have been something as irrelevant as to stoop down and with his finger write on the ground.

If the members of provincial society are more dependent than others in their personal relationships, they are far more independent than others in their attitude toward the law and the problems with which the law is concerned. A whole chapter of legal history is suggested in the contrast. The times have passed when drunkenness was regarded as an aggravation of a crime committed, and when every citizen boasted of his right to bear arms. In these instances we have all turned about face — drunkenness, though we have sought by statute to prevent it altogether, may now be pleaded everywhere as a defense to crime, and the trend of modern legislation is to forbid the bearing of arms without a license from the police. There are, however, other connections in which the older tradition of independence and responsibility persists. A man may still lawfully strike in his own defense, eject trespassers from his real estate, retake his stolen goods, and abate nuisances, but it is only in the country that such rights amount to anything in practice — it is only in the country that one may still watch the erection of a ‘spite fence’ or observe the discomfiture of a telephone company whose employees come to set a pole in a prepared hole and find the hole occupied by a heroic, sturdy old lady who refuses to budge.

The spite fence with which I am most familiar is not really a fence at all. It was constructed by a client of mine who had no actual spite in her heart, but who acted, as she thought, defensively; and it is, in its way, a masterpiece of ingenuity. The client in question, an unmarried woman of middle age, lived alone in a small house which had belonged to her parents and in which she had been brought up. She spent most of her leisure time in the kitchen, which opened to the south on a small and pleasant garden. When, in course of time, the property on the south changed hands and her new neighbor, who was a barber, began to open a window looking directly into her garden and kitchen, she was outraged beyond measure. Her sense of outrage lay principally in a feeling that she was being imposed upon because she was a woman, and that if she had had ‘a man in the house’ no one would have dared to disturb her privacy. I purposely said nothing to her about obstructing the window, telling her simply that her neighbor was entirely within his rights, that he probably felt a need for additional light and air, and that there was no reason to suppose that he wanted to spy upon her.

A week or two passed; the offending window was completed and proved unendurable. She arrived in her own mind at the idea of shutting it, and called to her aid a sympathetic plumber, who was both an architect and an artificer. Together they sank in concrete two pipes, to the tops of which they screwed a steel plate exactly the size of the window. The window was on the property line, and the plate shut it as effectively as a lid shuts a box.

Within a few days I received a call from the barber, who, as I suspect, had previously consulted his own attorney and had been advised that he was without a legal remedy. It was summer, and he complained that the steel plate cast heat into his house in such a way as to make life unendurable for himself and family. I explained to him that I regretted his inconvenience, but that there was nothing I could do to help him. At parting he said, ' You tell that woman to take that plate down or I will paint my house red, white, and blue in stripes.’ This threat was duly transmitted to his antagonist, but she remained inflexible. It was the barber’s last move. He never carried out his patriotic idea about the painting. Years have passed, and I do not know whether or not he has moved away. I do know, however, that the plate remains triumphantly in place.

IV

Much has been written recently about life in villages and small cities in the United States, and the composite picture presented is, to say the least, an unpleasant one. I think it might well be argued that this picture is false. If a philosopher were to make a list of the things men in the abstract would say were best worth living for, — friendship, leisure, beauty, quiet, — it is certainly not in the big cities that he would find them. There is, moreover, a certain charm in small communities — in the definiteness and finality of their social categories, in the simplicity of their human relationships, most of all in the genuineness of the interest which their members feel toward one another—which springs perhaps from the qualities of those very defects which have been so much in the public eye. It has been said that there are two words for everything, the word that swells and the word that belittles. Perhaps the swelling words in this particular connection are those which have remained unwritten.

But I am not a philosopher, and I have no wish to do anything so dreary as to engage in a debate on the relative merits of rural and urban civilization. Still less do I wish to set up the proposition that life in small cities is stupid, narrow, and ugly, and then to rebut it, as one rebuts the proposition that all crows are black by producing one white crow. There are, God knows, enough evil things in every community, big or little, to give pause to the most ardent local patriot about to cast the first stone. I have sought to do no more than to bear testimony to some of the characteristics of life in the small city with which I happen to be best acquainted. The testimony is true. I cannot speak for Main Street, but King Street is, at all events, a real street in a real city.