Business Law in the Natural World

THE staid and worthy Bachelor of whom I write does not belong to that branch of the human family that calls every city home. He neither travels nor is anxious to travel. It matters nothing to him whether the Mauretania crosses in four days or ten, and he is not interested in bills before Congress for trans-continental roads for motor-cars. His accounts of journeying would be the “short and simple annals of the poor,” and a Baedeker is to him that necessary volume perused by all maiden aunts and stern parents in magazine short stories, to the end, on the author’s part, that the hero and heroine may lay unmolested plans. But once in a while, in the press of business, he makes a flying trip from Boston to New York or Philadelphia, and nourishes his sense of beauty, and his appreciation of scenery, upon what can be secured in this brief experience.

“Just open the mind,” he said contentedly to himself, not long ago, “and in this beautiful world even a short time will suffice to secure lasting impressions of loveliness.” This is his best early Elizabethan manner of conducting a conversation with himself on important occasions, and he rolled out the mellifluous sentence cheerfully in the gloom of the car still standing in the dark train-shed at the South Station. He was really so unused to travel-holidays that even the stuffy chair-car held possibilities of rest and refreshment. He strewed his belongings about, and got out his cap and a dozen newspapers and magazines. This he did to appear like other rushing business men, and not like one exulting within himself at the chance to look out of window for six or seven straight hours, with no one to comment or cavil. Double windows, doubly dirty, could not dim anticipation.

The train moved. The dingy and dejected outskirts of Boston gave place to pleasant suburban vistas. But now began the real traveling experience of this provincial and “ behind-the-ages” American. To his amazement and consternation, the scenery began to assume an entirely unfamiliar aspect. No longer unobtrusively peace-begetting and rural, it unexpectedly began to take on human life and interest. It appealed from barnroof and fence, from meadow and cliff, from brookside and pasture: it implored, it coaxed, it threatened, it coerced, it invited, it allured, it gesticulated, it ejaculated. It became vital, monstrous, alarming; it thrust out predatory hands; it obtruded muscular shoulders; it leered, it mocked. It marched gigantic, benign in Quaker garb; it rode caparisoned, of warlike mien; it laughed uproariously, it danced bewitchingly, it posed fashionably — always gigantic, insistent, overwhelming.

Now, it took on a knowing, man-of-the-world, just-between-ourselves attitude. It laid aside its Protean aspect and assumed the position of guide, philosopher, and friend. Frankly, as man to man, it presented the inferential statement that the wages of sin is a mighty good time, in such disarming fashion that he who skurried by in a railway train might read, and, reading, haste to endure and pity and embrace.

Then, conscience-smitten, fearful of having gone too far, it became repentant, tender. It pleaded for reformation from tenement roofs and tin sheds, and set forth burning words of Holy Writ with as much violence as it had previously used to proclaim the virtues of whiskey and beer and tobacco; although on the side of a cattle-shed, this was all meant, evidently, for the Bachelor, who recalled the words of that ingenuous expounder of Scripture — Luther, was n’t it? — who wrote of a certain text, “this was manifestly not intended for oxen, seeing that oxen cannot read.” It dealt only with the Bachelor; it presumed him at last touched and responsive.

Farther on, a herd of cows loomed through the train smoke, Brobdignagian, gentle, painted to awful life-likeness, reminiscent of boyhood days and home and mother, while beyond, a huge green frog cast goggle eyes into the mists of memory. These were aided in their winning appeal to childhood’s days of innocence, by the unnaturally resplendent kitchen-range, and, a score of miles away, by the cook of the Bachelor’s early home, waiting to fry a cake that set his mouth watering. Sorrowfully he felt, owing to disproportionate size, as unable to attempt its consumption as was Alice before she partook of the little bottle marked “drink me.” But his drooping spirit, realizing that all this was for his soul’s good, revived under the domestic influences which now began to invade the bill-boards.

His weary mind sought solace. Had he not sounded the depths of iniquity? Had he not dressed and smoked and drunk as a wild young man under the malign tutelage of the scenery ? Had he not repented, been converted, gone back in thought to boyhood and its tender associations, that he might “ begin again,” because of the uplifting and ennobling influence of the scenery ? Had the scenery not invaded his mind, encroached on his soul, thrust upon him its companionship, led him in ways that are dark, and rescued him in the nick of time, when he had approached it as a solid, middle-aged bachelor of settled habits, a church member in good and regular standing? This it had done. Ought it not therefore to carry on its work, and having dragged him from the error of his ways, ought it not to allure him into paths of domesticity? Surely. Therefore the Bachelor, recognizing that there is justice in all things, having allowed himself to be withdrawn from the pit, gave his mind to be instructed in fireside virtues and joys.

Home, sweet home; verily, a noble recovery had the scenery made. It now told him, in enticing language, where to buy his land and put up his cheap domicile; it furnished it, for nothing down and so much a week, with rustless screens, chewing gum, and patent breakfast foods. It joyously reassured him about the coal bill. It cajoled him with a lawn-mower, and set him to planting seeds and raising chickens. And at last, its suspicions as to his horrible past being quite allayed, it took it for granted that all was now well with him, that his feet were set in the paths of rectitude, and that he was fitted to be entrusted with responsibility. It then inquired, breathlessly, hopefully, sympathetically, in very large letters, “ Have you a baby?” and offered to provide the milk. What more could the father of a family ask than that? For the Bachelor had fully entered upon his new rôle, and he climbed from the train at Philadelphia a pitiable pulp of emotion.

A well-behaved and serious bachelor when he left Boston, the Rake’s Progress, with the scenery for guide, had dragged him through an exciting and checkered career, had filled his life with experiences dark and bright, and had left, him at last a man of family cares and responsibilities. It was difficult for him to find himself again. How, in the anxiety over his new incubator, his bright green lawnmower, and his bursting flower-beds, the outward and visible sign of an inward and domestic regeneration, could he recall the relatively unimportant fact that he had come from Boston to Philadelphia with the sober intention of selling leather banding? The old-fashioned landscape, with its primitive appeal of greening willows and reddening maples, with its simplicities of young grass and awakening brooks, its stretches of silver water under the cool paleness of the blue spring sky — these things had all but passed into the region of forgetfulness.

Who would look twice at an emeraldringed pasture stone, with its unobtrusive silence of gray dignity, when he could see that same rock articulate, vociferate, aflame with righteous indignation, done in appropriate red paint? Who would care for the unbroken expanse of a field of vernal loveliness, when that same field could be made, by the addition of judiciously distributed lumber, into an area of comprehensive and worldly instruction ? Certainly not the present day traveler, so long accustomed to the excitement of cataloguing all those things which minister to the body’s material wants. He no longer craves the healing and serenity for the weary mind which used to come to him from the contemplation of wide, quiet reaches of gray, poolgemmed, green-splashed marshes; from uninvaded woods and wilderness. There Beauty, fled forever from the cities, was wont to reveal her shy face to those who loved and sought her silent comradeship, or even to those who, like this disappointed traveler, sometimes were able to cast longing, loving glances at her dim retreats from the windows of a rushing train.

The scenery is no longer the still haunt of an unbodied dream; it has become a grave and unavoidable moral issue. Hinc illæ lacrimæ.