The law may be, as Judge Holmes has called it, “a jealous mistress,” but in the case of Tutt it was not nearly so jealous as his wife. So Tutt was compelled to walk the straight-and-narrow path whether he liked it or not. On the whole he liked it well enough, but there were times-usually in the spring-when without being conscious of what was the matter with him he mourned his lost youth. For Tutt was only forty-eight and he had had a grandfather who had lived strenuously to upward of twice that age. He was vigorous, sprightly, bright-eyed and as hard as nails, even if somewhat resembling in his contours the late Mr. Pickwick. Mrs. Tutt was tall, spare, capable and sardonic. She made Tutt comfortable, but she no longer appealed to his sense of romance. Still she held him. As the playwright hath said “It isn't good looks they want, but good nature; if a warm welcome won't hold them, cold cream won't.”
However, Tutt got neither looks nor cold cream. His welcome, in fact, was warm only if he stayed out too late, and then the later the warmer. His relationship to his wife was prosaic, respectful. In his heart of hearts he occasionally thought of her as exceedingly unattractive. In a word Mrs. Tutt performed her wifely functions in a purely matter-of-fact way. Anything else would have seemed to her unseemly. She dressed in a manner that would have been regarded as conservative even on Beacon Hill. She had no intention of making an old fool of herself or of letting him be one either. When people had been married thirty years they could take some things for granted. Few persons therefore had ever observed Mr. Tutt in the act of caressing Mrs. Tutt; and there were those who said that he never had. Frankly, she was a trifle forbidding: superficially not the sort of person to excite a great deal of sentiment; and occasionally, as we have hinted, in the spring Tutt yearned for a little sentiment.
He did his yearning, however, entirely on the side and within those hours consecrated to the law. In his wife's society he yearned not at all. In her company he carefully kept his thoughts and his language inside the innermost circle of decorum. At home his talk was entirely “Yea, yea,” and “Nay, nay,” and dealt principally with politics and the feminist movement, in which Abigail was deeply interested.
And by this we do not mean to suggest that at other times or places Tutt was anything but conventionally proper. He was not. He only yearned to be, well knowing that he was deficient in courage if not in everything else.
But habit or no habit, likely or unlikely, Mrs. Tutt had no intention of taking any chances so far as Tutt was concerned. If he did not reach home precisely at six explanations were in order, and if he came in half an hour later he had to demonstrate his integrity beyond a reasonable doubt according to the established rules of evidence.
Perhaps Mrs. Tutt did wisely to hold Tutt thus in leash considering the character of many of the firm's clients. For it was quite impossible to conceal the nature of the practise of Tutt &Tutt; much of which figured flamboyantly in the newspapers. Some women would have taken it for granted under like circumstances that their husbands had acquired a touch at least of the wisdom of the serpent even if they remained quite harmless. Abigail countenanced no thought of any demoralization in her spouse. To her he was like the artist who smears himself and his smock with paint while in his studio, but appears at dinner in spotless linen without even a whiff of benzine about him to suggest his occupation. So Tutt, though hand and glove in his office with the most notorious of the elite of Longacre Square, came home to supper with the naivete and innocence of a theological student for whom an evening at a picture show is the height of dissipation.
Yet Tutt was no more of a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than most of us. Merely, his daily transition was a little more abrupt. And when all is said and done most of the devices invented by his fertile little brain to further the interests of his clients were no more worthy of condemnation than those put forward by far higher-priced and much more celebrated attorneys.
Not that Mrs. Tutt was blind to the dangers to which her husband by virtue of his occupation was exposed. Far from it. Indeed she made it her business to pay periodical visits to the office, ostensibly to see whether or not it was properly cleaned and the windows washed, but in reality-or at least so Tutt suspected-to find out whether the personnel was entirely suitable for a firm of their standing and particularly for a junior partner of his susceptibilities.
But she never discovered anything to give her the slightest cause for alarm. The dramatis personae of the offices of Tutt &Tutt were characteristic of the firm, none of their employees-except Miss Sondheim, the tumultous-haired lady stenographer-and Willie, the office boy, being under forty years of age.
When not engaged in running errands or fussing over his postage-stamp album, Willie spent most of his time teasing old Scraggs, the scrivener, an unsuccessful teetotaler. A faint odor of alcohol emanated from the cage in which he performed his labors and lent an atmosphere of cheerfulness to what might otherwise have seemed to Broadway clients an unsympathetic environment, though there were long annual periods during which he was as sober as a Kansas judge. The winds of March were apt, however, to take hold of him. Perhaps it was the spring in his case also.
The backbone of the establishment was Miss Minerva Wiggin. In every law office there is usually some one person who keeps the shop going. Sometimes it is a man. If so, he is probably a sublimated stenographer or law clerk who, having worked for years to get himself admitted to the bar, finds, after achieving that ambition, that he has neither the ability nor the inclination to brave the struggle for a livelihood by himself. Perchance as a youth he has had visions of himself arguing test cases before the Court of Appeals while the leaders of the bar hung upon his every word, of an office crowded with millionaire clients and servile employees, even as he is servile to the man for whom he labors for a miserly ten dollars a week.
His ambition takes him by the hand and leads him to high places, from which he gazes down into the land of his future prosperity and greatness. The law seems a mysterious, alluring, fascinating profession, combining the romance of the drama with the gratifications of the intellect. He springs to answer his master's bell; he sits up until all hours running down citations and making extracts from opinions; he rushes to court and answers the calendar and sometimes carries the lawyer's brief case and attends him throughout a trial. Three years go by-five-and he finds that he is still doing the same thing. He is now a member of the bar, he has become the managing clerk, he attends to fairly important matters, engages the office force, superintends transfer of title, occasionally argues a motion. Five years more go by and perhaps his salary is raised a trifle more. Then one day he awakes to the realization that his future is to be only that of a trusted servitor.
Perchance he is married and has a baby. The time has come for him to choose whether he will go forth and put his fortune to the test “to win or lose it all” or settle down into the position of faithful legal hired man. He is getting a bit bald, he has had one or two tussles with his bank about accidental overdrafts. The world looks pretty bleak outside and the big machine of the law goes grinding on heartless, inevitable. Who is he to challenge the future? The old job is fairly easy; they can't get on without him, they say; here is where he belongs; he knows his business-give him his thirty-five hundred a year and let him stay!