The Uses of Adversity

I

You must have noticed the opening of our new village aquarium. It was an occasion of the greatest interest. We all felt instinctively that history was being made. Our village doctor, though retired from practice these fifteen years, became so concerned about the manatee, who was not feeling very well, that he on the spot bestowed upon the creature medical advice worth fully a thousand dollars at his ordinary rates, and thus became our first ichthyiatrist.

My own concern for the fish, though no less deep than his, took another form. I was led to reflect upon the fortunate condition in which they now find themselves: sheltered in a magnificent marble temple, reminiscent of Phidias and Pericles; protected from unseasonable changes of temperature and weather; ensured ample, wholesome, and regular meals, and safe from the attacks of their natural enemies — kingfishers, otters, and the Izaak Walton League. They are, in short, in the full enjoyment of what is generally understood as Prosperity, and of course, incidentally, that degree of Publicity that usually goes with it. Security, Prosperity, Publicity — all these are theirs. Who could ask more?

They are also as never before in a position to profit by the inestimable benefits of Modern Science. The water in which they live is in perpetual motion, and is constantly filtered and aerated. Anyone who knows the conditions under which the ordinary selfsupporting fish exists — the miserable dirty water he has to live in, full of weeds, snags, polliwogs, and algæ— will realize what an agreeable change this must be for any decent fish. It is like being elected a life member of a good hotel.

Now consider the condition of one of them if these benefits were suddenly withdrawn. Suppose him plunged once more, after a short railway journey, in the murky depths of his native lake, all his security, prosperity, and publicity taken from him, and himself thrown once more upon his own resources. The extraordinary thing is that most people would consider him happy! All the real benefits he has lost — æsthetic and scientific surroundings, good living conditions, regular meals, and expert medical attendance — they would think of no importance compared to what he has gained, which really amounts only to this: he has got to go to work.

There is a fearful moment in most English novels when the hero, foully defrauded of his rightful inheritance, faces, though perhaps only for a moment, the unbearable prospect of having to go to work. This, next to death, or at least to living out of London, the author most fears for him. That is not quite the American mood. Our present apprehension certainly is rather, Can we hold our job?

II

For the first time in the lives of any of us, there has been creeping into our thoughts of late a doubt upon what is unquestionably the fundamental axiom of American life — that our best minds are occupied in business. Is it after all barely possible that they are not? I do not say so; I have no desire to prostrate a tottering market. But cross’d as I am with adversity (to adapt the noble Shakespeare), I cannot wholly escape that suspicion. And yet no one would be happier than I to be convinced that it is groundless.

Meanwhile, what of adversity? It is a fine art. Whether prosperity is one may be doubted, but there is no doubt about adversity. How to take reduction in wealth, influence, prestige — this is a problem to tax the artist within us to the utmost. Observe a man who has never known it and you feel the lack at once. The responsibilities of wealth are much discussed; but what are they to the responsibilities of adversity? Indeed these latter are so great as to overwhelm most of those who experience them. One trouble with us is that we have forgotten these responsibilities and simply capitulated at once, under the impression that adversity can mean nothing but defeat.

Adversity is also a medicine. Sitting in the crowded restaurant of a great and gay resort, where people do little but sit down to eat and drink and rise up to play, one feels that a few years more of unbroken ‘prosperity’ would have been the ruin of us.

Adversity is also the most social force in the world. Nothing brings people together like it. In its presence men stand shoulder to shoulder against a common enemy. Prosperity divides us; that is the bane of it. Adversity unites us; that is the glory of it. The market is crashing; your brother comes over. He has been hit too, but he is more concerned about you. Can’t he let you have a check? You pooh-pooh the idea; still, on second thoughts you perceive that you might as well take the check. It was not prosperity that sent him to you.

A certain glorious house where you were once lavishly entertained has passed out of the family, you hear; and that charming girl whose wedding you saw celebrated amid such magnificence has gone to work. Well, you admire her all the more, and know that she works with as much zest and spirit as she played with before. You perceive that everybody is cutting down his budget, just as you are cutting yours, and a fellow feeling steals over you for people you never really took much stock in before.

It is a great help to realize that you are not especially singled out for calamity; without wishing anybody any bad luck, it is nevertheless comforting to think that lots of other people are in the same boat. This is not an unsocial attitude; quite the contrary. The one thing you dread about adversity is that it will cut you off from your kind, and if they are all going along with you, evidently that is not going to happen. You are not going to be isolated; in fact you are going to be less isolated than ever. Your friends will still be about you, to comfort and annoy. In fact adversity may bring you closer to them than you have ever been.

And never in a long and eventful married life have you been so heartily commended by your consort as when in a recent hour of economic stress you compassed an unexpected fifty dollars with your bare pen. Never have you been so uplifted as by her unmistakably sincere refrain, muttered at intervals through that memorable morning, ‘You’re a smart man! You’re a smart man! ’ Only a husband of some standing, whose wife may be supposed to have fully explored and perhaps somewhat discounted his powers, can appreciate the full force of such a tribute after more than twenty years of matrimony. You can only say that, as far as you are concerned, that morning fully made up for the so-called depression. You had astonished your wife! Could you have done so in normal and supposedly happier times?

Cautious friends ask you if a certain stock now at 12½ is ‘good.’ You reply that you thought so at 25, and still do. You only regret that you perceived its worth so soon. But such is ever the fate of men in advance of their times. Others, wise beyond their day, saw that it was good at 38 and still others at 50. What a mistake it is to seek to rise above the common herd! Let us rather troop unreflectingly along with them, seeking no personal advantage from our superior intelligence. Let us even, in these days of stress, descend into the basements of the marts of trade and there mingle freely with the common herd aforesaid. It seems to know a thing or two after all.

III

A young friend who is engaged in the manufacture of door and window screens has been feeling the decline in the market for such luxuries. But he also makes a few washboards on the side, and of a sudden a tremendous demand for these appliances has developed. Explain it as you will; the despised washboard, which has been dwindling toward extinction in our modern electrified life, now sells by the hundred dozen. Why? Imagination grapples with the problem. Perhaps people can no longer meet the monthly payments and so are losing their washing machines. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and whatever the depression in the screen factory, the washboard plant is for the present a scene of feverish activity. So probably are the washboards.

Such is your own desolation that you resolve to buy something for the country from your favorite mail-order house on the installment plan. How fortunate that such arrangements can be made, and how advantageous they now appear! The bill is about $100, and it seems you can pay it off quite painlessly at only $8.00 a month! The thing is almost incredible, it is so simple. It shows how easy it is to be poor.

The only thing in the world they require is that they be allowed to add $8.50 to the total, which seems reasonable enough. Though, when you come to foot it up, they are really lending you $8.00 for seventy-eight months, running more or less concurrently; or, to put it another way, they lend you $624 for one month, or $52 for one year; and all for $8.50, or the modest rate of roughly 16½ per cent per annum. But never mind; why be cold-blooded and bankerish about it? It’s worth it in these troubled times. Anyway, you order about the cheapest bathtub in the whole catalogue, and imagine your satisfaction at receiving at once a long letter in reply, with this cheering statement: —

You have made an excellent selection in these furnishings, for they are made of very high-quality material, by expert workmen, and assure you long, satisfactory service.

Now, of a surety, fine words and smooth speeches are not for the rich alone; the installment buyer is not without his proper meed.

A most enjoyable questionnaire, it seems, is to be filled out to accompany your order. Who is your present employer? A certain university. How long have you worked for your present employer? Thirty-two years. What is your weekly pay? It does not come weekly, alas, but it is easily figured. From what source do you expect to make these payments? (This is getting easier and easier.) Name two reputable citizens as references. . . .

This really is embarrassing. How can you stop at two? If you mention two, are there not others just as reputable who would wonder, if it came to their attention, that you had made such a list and had not included them? It would really have been easier if the blank had asked for ten. Suppose you meet one of the Trustees, for example, and he has seen the list: he will naturally think, though he may not feel like mentioning it, that of the first two reputable citizens of your acquaintance to come to your mind he should have been one. A most invidious question, truly, and if the questionnaire has a flaw, I should find it here. The idea that a list of two would exhaust the number of reputable citizens you know and would take positive pride in referring to is a reflection not so much upon you as upon your fellow citizens. In fact, it seems to imply that reputable citizens are few, and that it will tax you to name two. Two hundred would be more like it. Why don’t these people give you a chance to tell them who it is you know? You are half inclined to send in a couple of hundred names just of those you simply don’t see how you can leave out, but perhaps that would look too much like a list of honorary pallbearers.

Your wife inquires why you bother to fill in all these details. You reply that you enjoy puzzling out the answers and jotting them down. This is, in fact, the very pleasantest part of the installment plan. Paying cash has no such pleasurable social aspects. You perceive that the company is getting personally interested in you. Here is a specially good one: ‘How far do you live from the railroad?’ What solicitude! They seem to fear that you are going to disappear in the wilderness and lose touch. You have been living up there for thirty-five years, but you have never figured the thing out before. You decide that you live about a mile from the railroad, most of the distance being water. If they mean to look you up, you hope they will not try to walk.

IV

Flowers have been costing a good deal, it seems. Let us then get out that admirable cluster of artificial flowers cunningly wrought of beads, and sent us by our sister in California in years gone by. What a pleasing centrepiece they make upon the dinner table, not overloading the air with a too heavy fragrance, and gratefully reminding us of the substantial economy we are hourly making by the simple and pleasurable expedient of their use. Thus, if nature prove too costly for us, does man resort to art.

Then there is all that stationery, now slightly outmoded, it is true, of a certain society of which you were last year an officer. Why not fling away ambition, as someone has suggested, and use it up, first candidly obliterating your name in the once proper place? Better men than you have done the like before now.

And have you not illustrious precedent in a certain club you lunch at, where the dining-room slips are all conveniently dated 192unto this day? But do you despise this frugality on the part of the Council and House Committee? No! With a right good will you change the 2 to a 3 as you have been doing for some two years, and silently register approval for officers so mindful of the public good. ‘0 si sic omnia!' you murmur, in city, county, sanitary district, state, and nation.

Then the neighbors would not be in rebellion against the tax bills, and everybody might breathe a bit easier.

One no longer takes pains to tie his necktie so as to conceal the worn spots. Quite the contrary. Why seek to separate ourselves from the common lot of man? Poverty, we now perceive, is honorable in all. There is something almost indecent now about the gay new raiment wherewith we were wont to greet the spring and match her bravery. Let us rather, like our fellows and companions, resume the clothes of yesteryear. What, after all, is dearer than the old hat, the old shoes? Are not these the very symbols of comfort and ease?

The old car, too! No one shall take it from us. On this subject the telephone ringeth but in vain. We will not this spring slow down almost to a stop before a certain show window in Automobile Row and then find a few minutes after reaching home that our number was taken, ourselves looked up at the city hall, and the salesman set upon our track! From such perils we are for the present free. No dallying with stylish models by Fisher or Fleetwood. Let the world go by — though as a matter of fact it docs n’t seem at all inclined to do so, but rather seems, if we read the signs of the times aright, to feel in the main just as we do.

V

The hardest thing to retrench in is books. You recall with pain the days when you could not buy the new books you wanted; you had to borrow them or go without. Must these days return? Well, for a while you can get on with the books you have. There used to be such things as ‘standard’ authors; they must be somewhere about the house. Why not rediscover the values supposed to reside in them? Perhaps the depression may turn out a good thing for our literary tastes and habits, as well as our figures.

For the djinn who lurked in jars and bottles, ready to obey Sindbad and Aladdin, were nothing to those you have, shut up in books, behind the glass doors of your library. What heroines of enchantment are there, what paladins of romance and adventure, what villains of perfidy and guile! — all cheerfully and amiably ready to emerge and appear whenever you want them. Was there ever such a galaxy? Charlie Chan and the Count of Monte Cristo, Robinson Crusoe and Dr. Thorndike, Sherlock Holmes and the Knight of Ivanhoe, Jeeves and Father Brown. And the ladies! those queens of our hearts — Lossie and Lorna Doone and Miss Dalton and Little Nell. There are villains, too, but their names do not come back to me. (Strange how easily we forget the villains!)

And how approachable and obliging they all are — willing at a moment’s notice to emerge from their seclusion and join you for a solitary luncheon, or an evening hour! Myself, I should fear to state how many luncheons I have had, for example, with the Count of Monte Cristo. What inimitable conversations one can thus enjoy, and delectable thrills and shudders, alarms, hopes, fears, vicissitudes.

And then how simple — relatively — to shut them all up again in the glassfronted bookcase, for a month or a year, or ten years, until you really crave their company again, when out they troop once more, untouched by time, as fascinating and companionable as ever. Though some of them, you must admit, are not so easy to get rid of, once you have let them out, but hang around for an hour or two, or even all the afternoon perhaps. And even then you cram them back into the bookcase with something like a pang.

As a matter of fact, a penetrating intelligence does not live so long with a literary masterpiece like the Count of Monte Cristo without discerning in it a deep, almost occult, significance. For is not the Count the college student? The Château d’If — that is, of course, the Castle of If — is college (and was ever a college better named? ’If College!’ This is something that even the new educators have never thought of); the course is thirteen years; the Abbé Busoni is the faculty; the governor is the president, and the guards are the deans. We escape or are flung forth at the end of our sentence into the sea of life, weighted with a frightful handicap (the ‘bullet’ at our feet) and shrouded in our professor’s sack; unless we have the address to rid ourselves of it at once and strike out for shore. Which if we reach, and can once get to our treasure island, we shall find what our old professor told us immensely useful for the purposes we have been forming all these long, weary years, whether foul or fair.