Tutt and Mr. Tutt - Arthur Train
"What!" protested Tutt incredulously.
"That's the law," returned the senior partner. "A man can call himself
what he chooses and change his name as often as he likes--so long, of
course, as he doesn't do it to defraud. The mere fact that a statute
likewise gives him the right to apply to the courts to accomplish the
same result makes no difference."
"Of course it might make him feel a little more comfortable about it to
do it that way," suggested Tutt. "Do you know, as long as I've practised
law in this town I've always assumed that one had to get permission to
change one's name."
"You've learned something," said Mr. Tutt suavely. "I hope you will put
it to good account. Here's '76 Fed.' Take it out and console the Fat and
Skinny Club with it if you can."
Mr. Tutt surrendered the volume without apparent regret and Tutt retired
to his own office and to the task of soothing the injured feelings of
Mr. Sorg.
A simple-minded little man was Tutt, for all his professional shrewdness
and ingenuity. Like many a hero of the battlefield and of the bar, once
inside the palings of his own fence he became modest, gentle, even
timorous. For Abigail, his wife, had no illusions about him and did not
affect to have any. To her neither Tutt nor Mr. Tutt was any such great
shakes. Had Tutt dared to let her know of many of the schemes which he
devised for the profit or safety of his clients she would have thought
less of him still; in fact, she might have parted with him forever. In a
sense Mrs. Tutt was an exacting woman. Though she somewhat reluctantly
consented to view the hours from nine a.m. to five p.m. in her husband's
day as belonging to the law, she emphatically regarded the rest of the
twenty-four hours as belonging to her.
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!
That is Binks, or Calkins, or Shivers, or any one of those worried
gray-haired men who sit in the outer office behind a desk strewn with
papers and make sure that no mistakes have been made. To them every
doubtful question of practise is referred and they answer
instantly--sometimes wrongly, but always instantly. They know the last
day for serving the demurrer in Bilbank against Terwilliger and whether
or not you can tax a referee's fee as a disbursement in a bill of costs;
they are experts on the precise form for orders in matrimonial actions
and the rule in regard to filing a summons and complaint in Oneida
County; they stand between the members of the firm and disagreeable
clients; they hire and discharge the office boys; they do everything
from writing a brief for the Supreme Court of the United States down to
making the contract with the window cleaners; they are the only lawyers
who really know anything and they were once promising young men, who
have found out at last that life and the Sunday-school books are very
far apart; but they run the works and make the law a gentleman's
profession for the rest of us. They are always there. Others come, grow
older, go away, but they remain. Many of them drink. All of which would
be irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial if this were not a legal
story.
Scraggs had been one of these, but he had also been one of those who
drank, and now he was merely a bookkeeper. Miss Wiggin reigned in his
stead.
A woman and not a man kept Tutt & Tutt on the map. When this sort of
thing occurs it is usually because the woman in question is the ablest
and very likely also the best person in the outfit, and she assumes the
control of affairs by a process of natural selection. Miss Wiggin was
the conscience, if Mr. Tutt was the heart, of Tutt & Tutt. Nobody,
unless it was Mr. Tutt, knew where she had come from or why she was
working if at all in only a semi-respectable law office. Without her
something dreadful would have happened to the general morale. Everybody
recognized that fact.
Her very appearance gave the place tone--neutralized the faint odor of
alcohol from the cage. For in truth she was a fine-looking woman. Had
she been costumed by a Fifth Avenue dressmaker and done her coiffure
differently she would have been pretty. Because she drew her gray hair
straight back from her low forehead and tied it in a knob on the back of
her head, wore paper cuffs and a black dress, she looked nearer fifty
than forty-one, which she was. Two hundred dollars would have taken
twenty years off her apparent age--a year for every ten dollars; but she
would not have looked a particle less a lady.
Her duties were ambiguous. She was always the first to arrive at the
office and was the only person permitted to open the firm mail outside
of its members. She overlooked the books that Scraggs kept and sent out
the bills. She kept the key to the cash box and had charge of the safe.
She made the entries in the docket and performed most of the duties of a
regular managing clerk. She had been admitted to the bar. She checked up
the charge accounts and on Saturdays paid off the office force. In
addition to all these things she occasionally took a hand at a brief,
drew most of the pleadings, and kept track of everything that was done
in the various cases.
But her chief function, one which made her invaluable was that of
receiving clients who came to the office, and in the first instance
ascertaining just what their troubles were; and she was so sympathetic
and at the same time so sensible that many a stranger who casually
drifted in and would otherwise just as casually have drifted out again
remained a permanent fixture in the firm's clientele. Scraggs and
William adored her in spite of her being an utter enigma to them. She
was quiet but businesslike, of few words but with a latent sense of
humor that not infrequently broke through the surface of her gravity,
and she proceeded upon the excellent postulate that everyone with whom
she came in contact was actuated by the highest sense of honor. She
acted as a spiritual tonic to both Mr. Tutt and Tutt--especially to the
latter, who was the more in need of it. If they were ever tempted to
stray across the line of professional rectitude her simple assumption
that the thing couldn't be done usually settled the matter once and for
all. On delicate questions Mr. Tutt frankly consulted her. Without her,
Tutt & Tutt would have been shysters; with her they were almost
respectable. She received a salary of three thousand dollars a year and
earned double that amount, for she served where she loved and her first
thought was of Tutt & Tutt. If you can get a woman like that to run your
law office do not waste any time or consideration upon a man. Her price
is indeed above rubies.
Yet even Miss Wiggin could not keep the shadow of the vernal equinox off
the simple heart of the junior Tutt. She had seen it coming for several
weeks, had scented danger in the way Tutt's childish eye had lingered
upon Miss Sondheim's tumultous black hair and in the rather rakish,
familiar way he had guided the ladies who came to get divorces out to
the elevator. And then there swam into his life the beautiful Mrs.
Allison, and for a time Tutt became not only hysterically young again,
but--well, you shall see.
Yet, curiously enough, though we are a long way from where this story
opened, it all goes back to Phillips Brooks Vanderbilt and the Fat and
Skinny Club and the right to call ourselves by what names we please.
Moreover, as must be apparent, all that happened occurred beyond Miss
Wiggin's sphere of spiritual influence. Yet, had it not, even she could
not have harnessed Leviathan or loosed the bands of Orion--to say
nothing of counteracting the effect of spring.
When Tutt returned with "76 Fed." after the departure of Mr. Sorg he
found his partner smoking the usual stogy and gazing pensively down upon
the harbor. The immediate foreground was composed of rectangular roofs
of divers colors, mostly reddish, ornamented with eccentrically shaped
chimney pots, pent-houses, skylights and water tanks, in addition to
various curious whistle-like protuberances from which white wraiths of
steam whirled and danced in the gay breeze. Beyond, in the middle
distance, a great highway of sparkling jewels led across the waves to
the distant faintly green hills of Staten Island. Three tiny aeroplanes
wove invisible threads against the blue woof of the sky above the New
Jersey shore. It was not a day to practise law at all. It was a day to
lie on one's back in the grass and watch the clouds or throw one's
weight against the tugging helm of a racing sloop and bite the spindrift
blown across her bows--not a day for lawyers but for lovers!
"Here's '76 Fed.'," said Tutt.
"What's become of Sorg?"
"Gone. Mad. Says the whole point of the Fat and Skinny Club is in the
name."
"I fancy--from looking at Mr. Sorg--that that is quite true," remarked
Mr. Tutt. He paused and reaching down into a lower compartment of his
desk, lifted out a tumbler and his bottle of malt extract, which he
placed carefully at his elbow and leaned back again contemplatively.
"Look here, Tutt," he said. "I want to ask you something. Is there
anything the matter with you?"
Tutt regarded him with the air of a small boy caught peeking through a
knot hole.
"Why,--no!" he protested lamely. "That is--nothing in particular. I do
feel a bit restless--sort of vaguely dissatisfied."
Mr. Tutt nodded sympathetically.
"How old are you, Tutt?"
"Forty-eight."
"And you feel just at present as if life were 'flat, stale and
unprofitable?'"
"Why--yes; you might put it that way. The fact is every day seems just
like every other day. I don't even get any pleasure out of eating. The
very sight of a boiled egg beside my plate at breakfast gives me the
willies. I can't eat boiled eggs any more. They sicken me!"
"Exactly!" Mr. Tutt poured out a glass of the malt extract.
"I feel the same way about a lot of things," Tutt hurried on. "Special
demurrers, for instance. They bore me horribly. And supplementary
proceedings get most frightfully upon my nerves."
"Exactly!" repeated Mr. Tutt.
"What do you mean by 'exactly?'" snapped Tutt.
"You're bored," explained his partner.
"Rather!" agreed Tutt. "Bored to death. Not with anything special, you
understand; just everything. I feel as if I'd like to do something
devilish."
"When a man feels like that he better go to a doctor," declared Mr.
Tutt.
"A doctor!" exclaimed Tutt derisively. "What good would a doctor do me?"
"He might keep you from getting into trouble."
"Oh, you needn't be alarmed. I won't get into any trouble."
"It's the dangerous age," said Mr. Tutt. "I've known a lot of
respectable married men to do the most surprising things round fifty."
Tutt looked interested.
"Have you now?" he inquired. "Well, I've no doubt it did some of 'em a
world of good. Tell you frankly sometimes I feel as if I'd rather like
to take a bit of a fling myself!"
"Your professional experience ought to be enough to warn you of the
dangers of that sort of experiment," answered Mr. Tutt gravely. "It's
bad enough when it occurs inadvertently, so to speak, but when a man in
your condition of life deliberately goes out to invite trouble it's a
sad, sad spectacle."
"Do you mean to imply that I'm not able to take care of myself?"
demanded Tutt.
"I mean to imply that no man is too wise to be made a fool of by some
woman."
"That every Samson has his Delilah?"
"If you want to put it that way--yes."
"And that in the end he'll get his hair cut?"
Mr. Tutt took a sip from the tumbler of malt and relit his stogy.
"What do you know about Samson and Delilah, Tutt?" he challenged.
"Oh, about as much as you do, I guess, Mr. Tutt," answered his partner
modestly.
"Well, who cut Samson's hair?" demanded the senior member.
He emptied the dregs of the malt-extract bottle into his glass and
holding it to the light examined it critically.
"Delilah, of course!" ejaculated Tutt.
Mr. Tutt shook his head.
"There you go off at half-cock again, Tutt!" he retorted whimsically.
"You wrong her. She did no such thing."
"Why, I'll bet you a hundred dollars on it!" cried Tutt excitedly.
"Make it a simple dinner at the Claridge Grill and I'll go you."
"Done!"
There were four books on the desk near Mr. Tutt's right hand--the New
York Code of Civil Procedure, an almanac, a Shakesperean concordance and
a Bible.
"Look it up for yourself," said Mr. Tutt, waving his arm with a gesture
of the utmost impartiality. "That is, if you happen to know in what part
of Holy Writ said Delilah is to be found."
Tutt followed the gesture and sat down at the opposite side of the desk.
"There!" he exclaimed, after fumbling over the leaves for several
minutes. "What did I tell you? Listen, Mr. Tutt! It's in the sixteenth
chapter of Judges: 'And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with
her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death; That he
told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come a razor
upon mine head.' Um--um."
"Read on, Tutt!" ordered Mr. Tutt.
"Um. 'And when Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she sent
and called for the lords of the Philistines, saying, Come up this once.'
Um-um."
"Yes, go on!"
"'And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and
she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head.' Well, I'll be
hanged!" exclaimed Tutt. "Now, I would have staked a thousand dollars on
it. But look here, you don't win! Delilah did cut Samson's hair--through
her agent. '_Qui facit per alium facit per se!_'"
"Your point is overruled," said Mr. Tutt. "A barber cut Samson's hair.
Let it be a lesson to you never to take anything on hearsay. Always look
up your authorities yourself. Moreover"--and he looked severely at
Tutt--"the cerebral fluid--like malt extract--tends to become cloudy
with age."
"Well, anyhow, I'm no Samson," protested Tutt. "And I haven't met anyone
that looked like a Delilah. I guess after the procession of
adventuresses that have trailed through this office in the last twenty
years I'm reasonably safe."
"No man is safe," meditated Mr. Tutt. "For the reason that no man knows
the power of expansion of his heart. He thinks it's reached its
limit--and then he finds to his horror or his delight that it hasn't. To
put it another way, a man's capacity to love may be likened to a
thermometer. At twenty-five or thirty he meets some young person, falls
in love with her, thinks his amatory thermometer has reached the
boiling-point and accordingly marries her. In point of fact it
hasn't--it's only marking summer heat--hasn't even registered the
temperature of the blood. Well, he goes merrily on life's way and some
fine day another lady breezes by, and this safe and sane citizen, who
supposes his capacity for affection was reached in early youth, suddenly
discovers to his amazement that his mercury is on the jump and presently
that his old thermometer has blown its top off."
"Very interesting, Mr. Tutt," observed Tutt after a moment's silence.
"You seem to have made something of a study of these things."
"Only in a business way--only in a business way!" Mr. Tutt assured him.
"Now, if you're feeling stale--and we all are apt to get that way this
time of year--why don't you take a run down to Atlantic City?"
Now Tutt would have liked to go to Atlantic City could he have gone by
himself, but the idea of taking Abigail along robbed the idea of its
attraction. She had got more than ever on his nerves of late. But his
reply, whatever it might have been, was interrupted by the announcement
of Miss Wiggin, who entered at that moment, that a lady wished to see
him.
"She asked for Mr. Tutt," explained Minerva.
"But I think her case is more in your line," and she nodded to Tutt.
"Good looking?" inquired Tutt roguishly.
"Very," returned Miss Wiggin. "A blonde."
"Thanks," answered Tutt, smoothing his hair; "I'm on my way."
Now this free, almost vulgar manner of speech was in reality foreign to
both Tutt and Miss Wiggin and it was born of the instant, due doubtless
to some peculiar juxtaposition of astral bodies in Cupid's horoscope
unknown to them, but which none the less had its influence. Strange
things happen on the eve of St. Agnes and on Midsummer Night--even in
law offices.
Mrs. Allison was sitting by the window in Tutt's office when he came in,
and for a full minute he paused upon the threshold while she pretended
she did not know that he was there. The deluge of sunlight that fell
upon her face betrayed no crack or wrinkle--no flaw of any kind--in the
white marble of its perfection. It was indeed a lovely face, classic in
the chiseling of its transparent alabaster; and when she turned, her
eyes were like misty lakes of blue. Bar none, she was the most beautiful
creature--and there had been many--that had ever wandered into the
offices of Tutt & Tutt. He sought for a word. "Wonderful"; that was, it,
she was "wonderful." His stale spirit soared in ecstasy, and left him
tongue-tied. In vulgar parlance he was rattled to death, this
commonplace little lawyer who for a score of years had dealt cynically
with the loves and lives of the flock of female butterflies who
fluttered annually in and out of the office. Throughout that period he
had sat unemotionally behind his desk and listened in an aloof, cold,
professional manner to the stories of their wrongs as they sobbed or
hissed them forth. Wise little lawyer that he was, he had regarded them
all as just what they were and nothing else--specimens of the Cecropia.
And he had not even patted them upon the shoulder or squeezed their
hands when he had bade them good-by--maintaining always an impersonal
and dignified demeanor.