Paradise Garden: The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment. Gibbs George
Even a fish can swim!"
I don't know why, but at this conversation, the first of Jerry's maturer years in which the topic had been woman, I felt a slight tremor go over me. Jerry was too good to look at. I fancied that there were many women who would have liked to see the flash of his eye at that moment and to meet his challenge with their wily arts. In the pride of his masculine strength and capacity he scorned them as I had taught him. I had done my work well. Had I done it too well?'
"What are women anyway?" he stormed at me again. "For what good are they? To wash linen and have white arms like Nausicaa? Who cares whether her arms were white or not? They're always weeping because they're loved or raging because they're not. Love! Always love! I love you and Christopher and Radford and Skookums, but I'm not always whining about it. What's the use? Those things go without saying. They're simply what are in a fellow's heart, but he doesn't talk about them."
"Quite right. Jerry. Let's say no more about it."
"I'm glad there are no women around here, but now that I come to think of it, I don't see why there shouldn't be."
"Your father liked men servants best. He believed them to be more efficient."
"Oh, yes, of course," and then, suddenly: "When I go out beyond the wall I'll have to see them and talk to them, won't I?"
"Not if you don't want to."
"Well, I don't want to."
He paused a second and then went on. "But I am a little curious about them. Of course, they're silly and useless and flabby, but it seems queer that there are such a lot of 'em. If they're no good, why don't they pass out of existence? That's the rule of life, you tell me, the survival of the fittest. If they're not fit they ought to have died out long ago."
"You can't keep them from being born, Jerry," I laughed.
"Well," he said scornfully, "it ought to be prevented."
I made a pretense of cutting the leaves of a book. He was going too far. I temporized.
"Ah, they're all right, Jerry," I said with some magnificence, "if they do their duty. Some are much better than others. Now, Miss Redwood, for instance, your governess. She was kind, willing and affectionate."
"Oh, yes," he said, "she was all right, but she wasn't like a man."
I had him safe again. Physical strength and courage at this time were his fetish. But he was still thoughtful.
"Sometimes I think, Roger" (he called me Roger now, for after all I was more like an elder brother than a father to him), "sometimes I think that things are too easy for me; that I ought to be out doing my share in the work of the world."
"Oh, that will come in time. If you think things are too easy, I might manage to make them a little harder."
He laughed affectionately and clapped me on the shoulder.
"Oh, no, you don't, old Dry-as-dust. Not books. That isn't what I meant. I mean life, struggles against odds. I've just been wondering what chance I'd have to get, along by myself, without a lot of people waiting on me."
"I've tried to show you, Jerry. You can go into the woods with a gun and an ax and exist in comfort."
"Yes, but the world isn't all woods; and axes and guns aren't the only weapons."
"But the principle is the same."
He flashed a bright glance at me.
"Flynn told me yesterday that I could make good in the prize ring if I'd let him take me in hand."
(The deuce he had! Flynn would lose his engagement as a boxing teacher if he didn't heed my warnings better.)
"The prize ring is not what you're being trained for, my young friend," I said with some asperity.
"What then?" he asked.
"First of all I hope I'm training you to be a gentleman. And that means—"
"Can't a boxer be a gentleman?" he broke in quickly.
"He might be, I suppose, but he usually isn't." He was forcing me into an attitude of priggishness which I regretted.
"Then why," he persisted, "are you having me taught to box?"
"Chiefly to make your muscles hard, to inure you to pain, to teach you self-reliance."
"But I oughtn't to learn to box then, if it's going to keep me from being a gentleman. What is a gentleman, Roger?"
I tried to think of a succinct generalization and failed, falling back instinctively upon safe ground.
"Christ was a gentleman, Jerry," I said quietly.
"Yes," he assented soberly, "Christ. I would like to be like Christ, but I couldn't be meek, Roger, and I like to box and shoot—"
"He was a man, Jerry, the most courageous the world has ever known. He was even not afraid to die for an ideal. He was meek, but He was not afraid to drive the money changers from the temple."
"Yes, that was good. He was strong and gentle, too. He was wonderful."
I have merely suggested this part of the conversation to show the feeling of reverence and awe with which the boy regarded the Savior. The life of Christ had caught his imagination and its lessons had sunk deeply into his spirit, touching chords of gentleness that I had never otherwise been able to reach. His religion had begun with Miss Redwood and he had clung to it instinctively as he had clung to the vague memory of his mother. No word of mine and no teaching was to destroy so precious a heritage. He was not goody-goody about it. No boy who did and said and thought the things that Jerry did could be accused of prudery or sentimentalism. But in his quieter moods I knew that he thought deeply of sacred things.
But this conversation with Jerry had warned me that the time was approaching when the boy would want to think for himself. Already in our nature-talks some of his questions had embarrassed me. He had seen birds hatched from their eggs and had marveled at it. The mammals and their young had mystified him and he had not been able to understand it. I had reverted to the process of development of the embryo of the seed into a perfect plant. I had waxed scientific, he had grown bewildered. We had reached our impasse. In the end we had compromised. Unable to comprehend, Jerry had ascribed the propagation of the species to a miracle of God. And since that was the precise truth I had been content to let the matter rest there.
But there was another problem that our conversation had suggested: the choice of a vocation. The proposition of the misguided Flynn had made me aware of the fact that I was already letting my charge drift toward the maws of the great unknown which began just beyond the Wall without a plan of life save that he should be a "gentleman." It occurred to me with alarming suddenness that the term "gentleman" was that frequently applied to persons who had no occupation or visible means of support. Nowhere in John Benham's instructions was there mention of any plan for a vocation. Obviously if the old man had intended Jerry for a business career he would have said so, and the omission of any exact instructions convinced me that such an idea was furthest from John Benham's thoughts. It remained for me to decide the matter in the best way that I could, for determined I was that Jerry, merely because of the possession of much worldly goods, should not be that bane of humanity and of nations, an idler.
At about this period Mr. Ballard the elder came down to Horsham Manor on one of his visits of inspection and inquiry. He brought up the subject of his own accord.
"What do you think, Canby, what have you planned about Jerry's future?"
I told him that my only ambition, so far, had been to make of Jerry a gentleman and a scholar.
"Yes, of course," he nodded. "That's what you are here for. But beyond that?"
"Nothing," I replied. "I am following my instructions from Mr. Benham. They go no further than that."
He frowned into the fire.
"That's all very well as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Jerry is now eighteen. Do you realize that in three years he comes into possession of five million dollars, an income of over two hundred thousand a year; and that in seven years, at twenty-five, the executors must