Income

I

Rogers, the book-keeper for the past twenty-two years of my friend Patterson, the banker, told me the other day that he had reared a family of two boys and three girls on his annual salary of two thousand two hundred dollars; that he had put one of the boys through college, one through the School of Mines, brought up one of the girls to be a librarian, given one a coming-out party and a trousseau, and that the remaining daughter, a home body, was likely to be the domestic sunshine of his own and his wife’s old age. All this on two thousand two hundred dollars a year.

Rogers told me with perfect modesty, with just a tremor of self-satisfaction in his tone, as though, all things considered, he felt that he had managed creditably, yet not in the least suggesting that he regarded his performance as out of the common run of happy household annals. He is a neat-looking, respectable, quiet, conservative little man, rising fifty, who, while in the bank, invariably wears a nankeen jacket all the year round, a narrow black necktie in winter, and a narrow yellow and red pongee wash tie in summer, and whose watch is no less invariably right to a second. As I often drop in to see Patterson, his employer, I depend upon it to keep mine straight, and it was while I was setting my chronometer the other day that he made me the foregoing confidence.

Frankly, I felt as though I had been struck with a club. It happened to be the first of the month. Every visit of the postman had brought me a fresh batch of bills, each one of which was a little larger than I had expected. I was correspondingly depressed and remorseful, and had been asking myself from time to time during the day why it need cost so much to live. Yet here was a man who was able to give his daughter a coming-out party and a trousseau on two thousand two hundred dollars a year. I opened my mouth twice to ask him how in the name of thrift he had managed to do it, but somehow the discrepancy between his expenditures and mine seemed such a gulf that I was tongue-tied. “I suppose,” he added modestly, “that I have been very fortunate in my little family. It must indeed be sharper than a serpent’s tooth to have a thankless child.” Gratitude too! Gratitude and Shakespeare on two thousand two hundred dollars a year. I went my way without a word.

There are various ways of treating remorse. Some take a Turkish bath or a pill. Others, while the day lasts, trample it under foot, and shut it out at night with the bed-clothes. Neither course has ever seemed to me exactly satisfactory or manly. Consequently I am apt to entertain my self-reproach and reason with it, and when one begins to wonder why it costs so much to live, he finds himself grappling with the entire problem of civilization, and presently his hydra has a hundred heads. The first of the month is apt to be a sorry day for my wife as well as for me, and I hastened on my return home to tell her, with just a shadow of reproach in my tone, what Mr. Rogers had confided to me. Indeed I saw fit to ask, “Why can’t we do the same?”

“We could,” said Barbara.

“Then why don’t we?”

“Because you wouldn’t.”

I had been reflecting in the brief interval between my wife’s first and second replies that, in the happy event of our imitating Rogers’s example from this time forth and forever more, I should be able to lay up over five thousand dollars a year, and that five thousand dollars a year saved for ten years would be fifty thousand dollars – a very neat little financial nest egg. But Barbara’s second reply upset my calculation utterly, and threw the responsibility of failure on me into the bargain.

“Mr. Rogers is the salt of the earth, a highly respectable man and, if I am not mistaken, the deacon of a church,” I remarked not altogether relevantly. “Why should we spend four times as many thousand dollars a year as he?”

“I wonder,” answered my wife, “if you really do appreciate how your friend Mr. Rogers lives. I am quite aware that you are talking now for effect – talking through your hat as the children say – because it’s the first of the month and you’re annoyed that the bills are worse than ever, and I understand that you don’t for one moment seriously entertain the hope that our establishment can be conducted on the same basis as his. But I should just like to explain to you for once how people who have only twenty-two hundred dollars a year and are the salt of the earth do live, if only to convince you that the sooner we stop comparing ourselves with them the better. I say ‘we’ because in my moments of depression over the household expenses I catch myself doing the same thing. Our butcher’s bill for this month is huge, and when you came in I was in the throes of despair over a letter in the newspaper from a woman who contends that a good housekeeper in modest circumstances can provide an excellent dinner for her family of six persons, including soup, fish, an entrée, meat, pudding, dessert, and coffee, for fifty-three cents. And she gives the dinner, which at first sight takes one’s breath away. But after you prune it of celery, parsley, salted peanuts, raisins, red cabbage, salad, and cheese, all there is left is bean-soup, cod sounds, fried liver, hot gingerbread, and apples.”

“I should dine down town, if you set such repasts before me,” I answered.

“Yes,” said Barbara. “And there is a very good point of departure for illustrating the domestic economies of the Rogers family. Mr. Rogers does dine down town. Not to avoid the fried liver and cod sounds, for probably he is partial to them, but because it is cheaper. When you take what you call your luncheon, and which is apt to include as much as he eats in the entire course of the day, Mr. Rogers dines; dines at a restaurant where he can get a modest meal for from fifteen to twenty-five cents. Sometimes it is pea-soup and a piece of squash-pie. The next day perhaps a mutton-stew and a slice of watermelon, or boiled beef and an éclair. Mrs. Rogers and the children have a pick-up dinner at home, which lasts them very well until night, when they and Rogers sit down to browned-hash mutton and a head of lettuce, or honey-comb tripe and corn-cake, and apple-sauce to wind up with.”

“That isn’t so very bad.”

“Why, they have a splendid time. They can abuse their social acquaintance and discuss family secrets without fear of being overheard by the servants because they don’t keep any servants to speak of. Probably they keep one girl. Or perhaps Mr. Rogers had a spinster sister who helped with the work for her board. Or it may be Mrs. Rogers kept one while the children were little; but after the daughters were old enough to do it themselves, they preferred not to keep anybody. They live extremely happily, but the children have to double up, for in their small house it is necessary to sleep two in a room if not a bed. The girls make most of their dresses, and the boys never dream of buying anything but ready-made clothing. By living in the suburbs they let one establishment serve for all seasons, unless it be for the two weeks when Rogers gets his vacation. Then, if nobody has been ill during the year, the family purse may stand the drain of a stay at the humblest watering-place in their vicinity, or a visit to the farm-house of some relative in the country. An engagement with the dentist is a serious disaster, and the plumber is kept at a respectable distance. The children go to the public schools, and the only club or organization to which Mr. Rogers belongs is a benefit association, which pays him so much a week if he is ill, and would present his family with a few hundred dollars if he were to die. The son who went through college must have got a scholarship or taken pupils. The girl who married undoubtedly made the greater portion of her trousseau with her own needle; and as to the coming-out party, some of the effects of splendor and all the delights of social intercourse can be produced by laying a white drugget on the parlor carpet, the judicious use of half a dozen lemons and a mould of ice-cream with angel-cake, and by imposing on the good nature of a friend who can play the piano for dancing. There, my dear, if you are willing to live like that, we should be able to get along on from twenty-two to twenty-five hundred dollars quite nicely.”

My wife was perfectly correct in her declaration that I did not seriously entertain the hope of being able to imitate Mr. Rogers, worthy citizen and upright man as I believe him to be. I certainly was in some measure talking through my hat. This was not the first time I had brought home a Rogers to confront her. She is used to them and aware that they are chiefly bogies. I, as she knows, and indeed both of us, are never in quite a normal condition on the first day of the month, and are liable, sometimes the one of us and sometimes the other, to indulge in vagaries and resolutions which by the tenth, when the bills are paid, seem almost uncalled for or impracticable. One thing is certain, that if a man earns only twenty-two hundred dollars a year, and is an honest man withal, he has to live on it, even though he dines when others take luncheon, and is forced to avoid the dentist and the plumber. But a much more serious problem confronts the man who earns four times as much as Rogers, more serious because it involves an alternative. Rogers could not very well live on less if he tried, without feeling the stress of poverty. He has lived at hard pan, so to speak. But I could. Could if I would, as my wife has demonstrated. I am perfectly right, as she would agree, in being unwilling to try the experiment; and yet the consciousness that we spend a very large sum of money every year, as compared with Rogers and others like him, remains with us even after the bills are paid and we have exchanged remorse for contemplation.

The moralist, who properly is always with us, would here insinuate, perhaps, that Rogers is happier than I. But I take issue with him promptly and deny the impeachment. Rogers may be happier than his employer Patterson, because Patterson, though the possessor of a steam-yacht, has a son who has just been through the Keeley cure and a daughter who is living apart from her husband. But there are no such flies in my pot of ointment. I deny the superior happiness of Rogers in entire consciousness of the moral beauty of his home. I recognize him to be an industrious, self-sacrificing, kind-hearted, sagacious husband and father, and I admit that the pen-picture which the moralist could draw of him sitting by the evening lamp in his well-worn dressing gown, with his well-darned feet adorned by carpet-slippers of filial manufacture supported by the table or a chair, would be justly entitled to kindle emotions of respect and admiration. But why, after all, should Rogers, ensconced in the family sitting-room with the cat on the hearth, a canary twittering in a cage and scattering seed in one corner, a sewing-machine in the other, and surrounded by all the comforts of home, consisting prominently of a peach-blow vase, a Japanese sun umbrella and engravings of George Washington and Horace Greeley, be regarded as happier than I in my modern drawing-room in evening dress? What is there moral in the simplicity of his frayed and somewhat ugly establishment except the spirit of contentment and the gentle feelings which sanctify it? Assuming that these are not lacking in my home, and I believe they are not, I see no reason for accepting the conclusion of the moralist. There is a beauty of living which the man with a small income is not apt to compass under present social conditions, the Declaration of Independence to the contrary notwithstanding. The doctrine so widely and vehemently promulgated in America that a Spartan inelegance of life is the duty of a leading citizen, seems to be dying from inanition; and the descendants of favorite sons who once triumphed by preaching and practising it are now outvying those whom they were taught to stigmatize as the effete civilizations of Europe, in their devotion to creature comforts.

It seems to me true that in our day and generation the desire to live wisely here has eclipsed the desire to live safely hereafter. Moreover, to enjoy the earth and the fulness thereof, if it be legitimately within one’s reach, has come to be recognized all the world over, with a special point of view for each nationality, as a cardinal principle of living wisely. We have been the last to recognize it here for the reason that a contrary theory of life was for several generations regarded as one of the bulwarks of our Constitution. Never was the sympathy for the poor man greater than it is at present. Never was there warmer interest in his condition. The social atmosphere is rife with theories and schemes for his emancipation, and the best brains of civilization are at work in his behalf. But no one wishes to be like him. Canting churchmen still gain some credence by the assertion that indigence here will prove a saving grace in the world to come; but the American people, quick, when it recognizes that it has been fooled, to discard even a once sacred conviction, smiles to-day at the assumption that the owner of a log cabin is more inherently virtuous than the owner of a steam-yacht. Indeed the present signal vice of democracy seems to be the fury to grow rich, in the mad struggle to accomplish which character and happiness are too often sacrificed. But it may be safely said that, granting an equal amount of virtue to Rogers and to me, and that each pays his bills promptly, I am a more enviable individual in the public eye.