Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee
to houses and to people and who would sit down in his house when it is finished and look about in it seriously, and think of all the people that have been built, in solid wood and stone, into it, would get up softly and steal out of it, out of the front door of it, and never enter that house again.
This is what Non saw. He saw how people felt about their houses, and how they lived in them helplessly and angrily year after year, and felt hateful about the world.
I gradually drew out of him the way he felt about it. I found he was not as good as some people are at talking about himself, but the subject was interesting. He began his career building houses for people, as nearly every one does. The general idea is that everybody is expected to exact commissions from everybody else, and the owner is expected to pay each man his own commission and then pay all the commissions that each man has charged the other man. Every house that got built in this way seemed to be a kind of network or conspiracy of not doing as you would be done by. Non did not see any way out at first, just for one man. He merely noticed how things were going, and he noticed that nearly every person that he had dealings with, from the bottom to the top of the house, seemed to make him feel that he either was, or would be, or ought to be, a grafter. He could not so much as look at a house he had built, through the trees when he was going by, without wishing he could be a better man, and studying on how it could be managed. His own first houses made him see things. They proved to be the making of him, and if similar houses have not made similar men, it is their fault. It might not be reassuring to the men who are now living in these first houses to dwell too much on this (and I might say he did not build them alone), but it seems to be necessary to bring out the most striking thing about Non in his first stage as a business man, viz.: He hated his business. He made up his mind he either would make the business the kind of business he liked or get out of it. I did not gather from the way he talked about it that he had any idea of being an uplifter. He merely had, apparently, an obstinate, doggedly comfortable idea about himself, and about what a thing would have to be, in this world, if he was connected with it. He proposed to enjoy his business. He was spending most of his time at it.
Other people have had this same happy thought, but they seem to manage to keep on being patient. Non could not fall back on being patient, and it made him think harder.
The first thing he thought of was that doing his business as he thought he ought to, if he once worked his idea out, and worked it down through and organized it, might pay. He almost had the belief that people might pay a man a little extra, perhaps, for enjoying his business. It cannot be said that he believed this immediately. He merely wanted to, and worked toward it, and merely contrived new shrewd ways at first of being able to afford it. Gradually he began to notice that the more he enjoyed his business, the more he enjoyed it with his whole soul and body, enjoyed it down to the very toes of his conscience, the more people there were who stepped into his office and wanted him to enjoy his business on their houses. It was what they had been looking for for years—for some builder who was really enjoying his business. And the more he enjoyed his business in his own particular way—that of building a house for a man in less time than he said he would, and for less money, not infrequently sending him a check at the end of it—the more his business grew.
I do not know that there would be any special harm in speaking of Non's idea—of just doing as you would be done by—in more moral or religious language, but it is not necessary. And I find I take an almost religious joy in looking at the Golden Rule at last as a plain business proposition. All that happened was that Non was original, saw something that everybody thought they knew, and acted as if it were so. Theoretically one would not have said that it would be original to take an old platitudinous law like the law of supply and demand, and act as if it were so; but it was. At the time Non was beginning his career there was nothing in the building-market people found harder to hire than honesty. Here was something, he saw at last, that thousands of busy and important men who did not have time to be detectives, wanted. There did not seem to be any one very actively supplying the demand. A big market, a small supply, and almost no competition. Non stepped in and proposed to represent a man's interest who is building a house as literally as the man would represent his interests himself, if he knew all about houses. Everything has followed from this. What Non's business is now, when a man is building a house, is to step quietly into the man's shoes, let him put on another pair, and go about his business. It is not necessary to go into the details. Any reader who has ever built a house knows the details. Just take them and turn them around.
What those of us who know Non best like about him is that he is a plain business man, and that he has acted in this particular matter without any fine moral frills or remarks. He has done the thing because he liked it and believed in it.
But the most efficient thing to me about Non is not the way he is making money out of saving money for other people, but the way the fact that he can do it makes people feel about the world. Whenever I have a little space of discouragement or of impatience about the world because it does not hurry more, I fall to thinking of Non. "Perhaps next week"—I say to myself cheerfully—"I can go down to New York and slip into Non's office and get the latest news as to how religion is getting on. Or he will take me out with him to lunch, and I will stop scolding or idealizing, and we will get down to business, and I will take a good long look into that steady-lighted, unsentimental face of his while he tells me across the little corner table at Delmonico's for three hours how shrewd the Golden Rule is, and how it works." Sometimes when I have just been in New York, and have come home and am sitting in my still study, with the big idle mountain just outside, and the great meadow and all the world, like some great, calm gentle spirit or picture of itself, lying out there about me, and I fall to thinking of Non, and of how he is working in wood and stone inside of people's houses, and inside of their lives day after day, and of how he is touching people at a thousand points all the weeks, being a writer, making lights and shadows and little visions of words fall together just so, seems, suddenly a very trivial occupation—like amusing one's self with a pretty little safe kaleidoscope, holding it up, aiming it and shaking softly one's coloured bits of phrases at a world! Of course, it need not be so. But there are moments when I think of Non when it seems so.
In our regular Sunday religion we do not seem to be quite at our best just now.
At least (perhaps I should speak for one) I know I am not.
Being a saint of late is getting to be a kind of homely, modest, informal, almost menial everyday thing. It makes one more hopeful about religion. Perhaps people who once get the habit, and who are being good all the week, can even be good on Sunday.
There are many ways of resting or leaning back upon one's instincts and getting over to one's religion or perspective about the world. Mount Tom (which is in my front yard, in Massachusetts) helps sometimes—with a single look.
When I go down to New York, I look at the Metropolitan Tower, the Pennsylvania Station, the McAdoo Tunnels, and at Non.
If I wanted to make anybody religious, I would try to get him to work in Non's office, or work with anybody who ever worked with him, or who ever saw him; or I would have him live in a house built by him, or pay a bill made out by him.
It has seemed to me that his succeeding and making himself succeed in this way is a great spiritual adventure, a pure religion, a difficult, fresh, and stupendous religion.
Now these many days have I watched him going up and down through all the empty reputations, the unmeaning noises of the world, living his life like some low, old-fashioned, modest Hymn Tune he keeps whistling—and I have seen him in fear, and in danger, and in gladness being shrewder and shrewder for God, now grimly, now radiantly, hour by hour, day by day getting rich with the Holy Ghost!
CHAPTER III
IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE INTERESTING?
People