The Readjustment. Will Irwin

Tacoma; his father kept a wagon repair shop. His people had gone too heavily into the land boom, and lost everything.

      “I felt that I could work my way through Berkeley or Stanford more easily than through an Eastern college,” he said simply. 38

      “And then I shouldn’t be so far away from home. Mother likes to see me at least once a year.”

      He was going home after the apricot picking was over; he felt that in vacation he should earn at least his fare to Washington and back.

      “I’m sure she must be a very good mother to deserve that devotion,” said Mrs. Tiffany, warming to him.

      “She deserves more,” he said, a kind of inner glow rising to his white-and-pink boyish face. That same glow—Mrs. Tiffany might have noticed this and did not—illuminated him whenever, from across the table, Chester’s laugh or his energetic crack on a sentence called a forced attention. Mr. Heath deferred always to this louder personality; kept for him the anxious and eager interest of a mother toward her young. Gradually, this interest absorbed both Mr. Heath and Mrs. Tiffany. The table talk became a series of monologues by young Bertram Chester, Judge Tiffany throwing in just enough replies to spur and guide him.

      “No, I don’t belong to any fraternity,” said the confident youth, “don’t believe in them. 39 They plenty beat me for football captain last year too. When I came to college, they didn’t want me. After I made the team and got prominent, they began to rush me. Then I didn’t want them.”

      “It might have been easier for Bert if he had joined them,” said Heath. “They don’t like to have their members working at—with their hands; they always find them snap jobs if they are poor and prominent.”

      “Oh, I don’t know,” said Bertram. “The barbs elected me business manager of the Occident last season—I didn’t make the team until I was a Sophomore, you know—and that more than paid my way. This year I’ve got a billiard hall with Sandy McCusick.

      “He used to be a trainer for the track team,” explained Bertram. “I steer him custom and he runs it. Ought to get me through next year over and above. That’s one reason I’m picking fruit and resting my mind this summer instead of hustling for money in the city.”

      “And then?” asked the Judge.

      “Law, I guess.”

      “I am an attorney myself.”

      “I guess I know that!” 40

      “What school have you chosen?”

      “None, I guess. I don’t want to afford the time. Yes, I know you want good preparation, but I’d rather be preparing in an office, making a little and keeping my eye open for chances. I may find, before my three years are up, that it isn’t law I want, but business.”

      “I’m not a college man myself,” said the Judge, “I got my education by reading nights on the farm, and pounded out what law I knew in an office at Virginia City. One didn’t need a great deal of law to practice in Comstock days—more nerve and mining sense. But I’ve regretted always that I didn’t have a more thorough preparation. Still, every man to his own way. This may be best for you.”

      “That’s what I think,” said Bertram Chester. “When I got through High School in Tulare, Dad said, ‘Unless you want to stay on the ranch, you’d better foot it for college.’ I didn’t want to ranch it, and I saw that college must be the best place for a start. Dad put up for the first year. I might have stretched it out to cover a little of my Sophomore year if I’d been careful. I was a pretty fresh Freshman,” he added. 41

      “And your mother?” asked Mrs. Tiffany. “I suppose she was crazy for you to go.”

      “Yes, I suppose she would have been. She’s been dead ten years. How hard is it to get into a law office in San Francisco?” he added, shifting.

      Judge Tiffany met the direct hint with a direct parry.

      “We have five thousand attorneys in San Francisco and only five hundred of them are making a living.”

      “Yes, I know it is overcrowded,” said Bertram Chester, not a particle abashed.

      After black coffee on the piazza, the two college boys swung off down the lane, Bertram smoking rapidly at one of the Judge’s cigars.

      “He can be almost anything,” said the Judge, meditatively.

      “Even a gentleman?” gently inquired Mrs. Tiffany.

      “Perhaps that isn’t necessary in our Western way of life. Thank God, we haven’t come yet to the point where the caste of Vere de Vere is necessary to us.”

      “I wish I had it,” he went on, a little wistfully. 42

      “Gentility? why Edward, if anyone—”

      “Oh no, my dear. I may say that was half the trouble. So many considerations came up; so many things I didn’t want to do, so many it didn’t seem right to do. I was forever turning aside to wrestle with my feelings on those things, and forever hesitating. Half the time, after the opportunity was gone by, I discovered that my scruples had been foolish; but I always discovered afterward. I don’t believe that success lies that way in a new world.”

      He had risen; and now his wife rose and stood beside him.

      “You are forever talking as though you were a failure. I know you’re not. Everyone knows you’re not.”

      “The parable of the ten talents, Mattie. Not how much we’ve got, but how much interest we’ve earned on our powers. However, we had that out long ago, my dear. Yes, I know. I promised not to talk and think this way. But if I’d been like this boy! He’ll seize the thing before him. No side considerations in his mind!”

      “It is a policy,” said Mrs. Tiffany in a tone 43 of injured partisanship, “that will land him in jail.”

      “No,” said the Judge, “success does not lead towards jails. He’ll look out for that.”