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A Way To Be Happy
by
In the final act of giving up, he felt a much greater reluctance than he had supposed would be the case, and very unexpectedly began to ask himself what he should do all the day, after he had no longer a shop in which to employ himself. The feeling was but momentary, however. It was forced back by the idea of living at his ease; of being able to come and go just as it suited his fancy; to have no care of business, nor any of its perplexities and anxieties. This thought was delightful.
“If I were you, I would go into the country and employ myself on a little farm,” said a friend to the hatter. “You will find it dull work in town, with nothing on your hands to do.”
The hatter shook his head. “No, no,” said he, “I have no taste for farming; it is too much trouble. I am tired of work, and want a little rest during the remainder of my life.”
Freedom from labour was the golden idea in his mind, and nothing else could find an entrance. For a few days after he had fully and finally got clear from all business, and was, to use his own words, a free man, he drank of liberty almost to intoxication. Sometimes he would sit at his window, looking out upon the hurrying crowd, and marking with pity the care written upon each face; and sometimes he would walk forth to breathe the free air and see every thing to be seen that could delight the eye.
Much as the hatter gloried in this freedom and boasted of his enjoyments, after the first day or two he began to grow weary long before evening closed in, and then he could not sit and quietly enjoy the newspaper, as before, for he had already gone over them two or three times, even to the advertising pages. Sometimes, for relief, he would walk out again, after tea, and sometimes lounge awhile on the sofa, and then go to bed an hour earlier than he had been in the habit of doing. In the morning he had no motive for rising with the sun; no effort was therefore made to overcome the heaviness felt on awaking; and he did not rise until the ringing of the breakfast-bell.
The “laziness” of her husband, as Mrs. Parker did not hesitate so call it, annoyed his good wife. She did not find things any easier–she could not retire from business. In fact, the new order of things made her a great deal more trouble. One-half of her time, as she alleged, Mr. Parker was under her feet and making her just double work. He had grown vastly particular, too, about his clothes, and very often grumbled about the way his food come on the table, what she had never before known him to do. The hatter’s good lady was not very choice of her words, and, when she chose to speak out, generally did so with remarkable plainness of speech. The scheme of retiring from business in the very prime of life she never approved, but as her good man had set his heart on it for years, she did not say much in opposition. Her remark to a neighbour showed her passive state of mind: “He has earned his money honestly, and if he thinks he can enjoy it better in this way, I suppose it is nobody’s business.”
This was just the ground she stood upon. It was a kind of neutral ground, but she was not the woman to suffer its invasion. Just so long as her husband came and went without complaint or interference with her, all would be suffered to go on smoothly enough; but if he trespassed upon her old established rights and privileges, he would hear it.
“I never saw a meal cooked so badly as this,” said Mr. Parker, knitting his brow one rainy day, at the dinner-table.