FullReads

I took my shoes out of their wrapper. The cobbler is old and wrinkled and so bent that one might think that Nature aimed to contrive a hoop of him but had botched the full performance. He scratched my name upon the soles and tossed them into the pile. There were big and little shoes, some with low square heels and others with high thin heels as if their wearers stood tiptoe with curiosity. It is a quality, they say, that marks the sex. On the bench were bits of leather, hammers, paring-knives, awls, utensils of every sort.

On arriving home I found an old friend awaiting me. B—- has been engaged in a profitable business for fifteen years or so and he has amassed a considerable fortune. Certainly he deserves it, for he has been at it night and day and has sacrificed many things to it. He has kept the straight road despite all truant beckoning. But his too close application has cramped his soul. His organization and his profits, his balance sheets and output have seemed to become the whole of him.

But for once I found that B—- was in no hurry and we talked more intimately than in several years. I discovered soon that his hard busyness was no more than a veneer and that his freer self still lived, but in confinement. At least he felt the great lack in his life, which had been given too much to the piling up of things, to the sustaining of position–getting and spending. Yet he could see no end. He was caught in the rich man’s treadmill, only less horrible than that of the poor man with its cold and hunger.

Afterwards, when he had gone, I fell into a survey of certain other men of my acquaintance. Some few of them are rich also, and they heap up for themselves a pile of material things until they stifle in the midst. They run swiftly and bitterly from one appointment to another in order that they may add a motor to their stable. If they lie awake at night, they plan a new confusion for the morrow. They are getting and spending always. They have been told many times that some day they will die and leave their wealth, yet they labor ceaselessly to increase their pile. It is as if one should sweat and groan to load a cart, knowing that soon it goes off on another road. And yet not one of these persons will conceive that I mean him. He will say that necessity keeps him at it. Or he will cite his avocations to prove he is not included. But he plays golf fretfully with his eye always on the score. He drives his motor furiously to hold a schedule. Yet in his youth many of these prosperous fellows learned to play upon a fiddle, and they dreamed on college window-seats. They had time for friendliness before they became so busy holding this great world by its squirming tail.

Or perhaps they are not so very wealthy. If so, they work the harder. To support their wives and children? By no means. To support the pretense that they are really wealthy, to support a neighbor’s competition. It is this competition of house and goods that keeps their noses on the stone. Expenditure always runs close upon their income, and their days are a race to keep ahead.

I was thinking rather mournfully of the hard and unnecessary condition of these persons, when I fell asleep. And by chance, these unlucky persons, my boots and my cobbler, even the oboe mender, all of them somehow got mixed in my dream.

It seems that there was a cobbler once, long ago, who kept a shop quite out of the common run and marvelous in its way. It stood in a shadowy city over whose dark streets the buildings toppled, until spiders spun their webs across from roof to roof. And to this cobbler the god Mercury himself journeyed to have wings sewed to his flying shoes. High patronage. And Atalanta, too, came and held out her swift foot for the fitting of a running sandal. But perhaps the cobbler’s most famous customer was a well-known giant who ordered of him his seven-league boots. These boots, as you may well imagine, were of prodigious size, and the giant himself was so big that when he left his order he sat outside on the pavement and thrust his stockinged foot in through the window for the cobbler to get his measure.