Mince Pie

The Key Ring

I know a man who carries in his left-leg trouser pocket a large heavy

key ring, on which there are a dozen or more keys of all shapes and

sizes. There is a latchkey, and the key of his private office, and the

key of his roll-top desk, and the key of his safe deposit box, and a key

to the little mail box at the front door of his flat (he lives in what

is known as a pushbutton apartment house), and a key that does something

to his motor car (not being an automobilist, I don't know just what),

and a key to his locker at the golf club, and keys of various traveling

bags and trunks and filing cases, and all the other keys with which a

busy man burdens himself. They make a noble clanking against his thigh

when he walks (he is usually in a hurry), and he draws them out of his

pocket with something of an imposing gesture when he approaches the

ground glass door of his office at ten past nine every morning. Yet

sometimes he takes them out and looks at them sadly. They are a mark and

symbol of servitude, just as surely as if they had been heated red-hot

and branded on his skin.

Not necessarily an unhappy servitude, I hasten to remark, for servitude

is not always an unhappy condition. It may be the happiest of

conditions, and each of those little metal strips may be regarded as a

medal of honor. In fact, my friend does so regard them. He does not

think of the key of his roll-top desk as a reminder of hateful tasks

that must be done willy-nilly, but rather as an emblem of hard work that

he enjoys and that is worth doing. He does not think of the latchkey as

a mandate that he must be home by seven o'clock, rain or shine; nor does

he think of it as a souvenir of the landlord who must be infallibly paid

on the first of the month next ensuing. No, he thinks of the latchkey as

a magic wand that admits him to a realm of kindness "whose service is

perfect freedom," as say the fine old words in the prayer book. And he

does not think of his safe deposit box as a hateful little casket of

leases and life insurance policies and contracts and wills, but rather

as the place where he has put some of his own past life into voluntary

bondage--into Liberty Bondage--at four and a quarter per cent. Yet,

however blithely he may psychologize these matters, he is wise enough to

know that he is not a free man. However content in servitude, he does

not blink the fact that it is servitude.

"Upon his will he binds a radiant chain," said Joyce Kilmer in a fine

sonnet. However radiant, it is still a chain.

So it is that sometimes, in the lulls of telephoning and signing

contracts and talking to salesmen and preparing estimates and dictating

letters "that must get off to-night" and trying to wriggle out of

serving on the golf club's house committee, my friend flings away his

cigar, gets a corncob pipe out of his desk drawer, and contemplates his

key ring a trifle wistfully. This nubby little tyrant that he carries

about with him always makes him think of a river in the far Canadian

north, a river that he visited once, long ago, before he had built up

all the barbed wire of life about his spirit. It was a green lucid river

that ran in a purposeful way between long fringes of pine trees. There

were sandy shelves where he and a fellow canoeist with the good gift of

silence built campfires and fried bacon, or fish of their own wooing.

The name of that little river (his voice is grave as he recalls it), was

the Peace; and it was not necessary to paddle if you didn't feel like

it. "The current ran" (it is pathetic to hear him say it) "from four to

seven miles an hour."

The tobacco smoke sifts and eddies into the carefully labeled

pigeonholes of his desk, and his stenographer wonders whether she dare

interrupt him to ask whether that word was "priority" or "minority" in

the second paragraph of the memo to Mr. Ebbsmith. He smells that bacon

again; he remembers stretching out on the cool sand to watch the dusk

seep up from the valley and flood the great clear arch of green-blue

sky. He remembers that there were no key rings in his pocket then, no

papers, no letters, no engagements to meet Mr. Fonseca at a luncheon of

the Rotary Club to discuss demurrage. He remembers the clear sparkle of

the Peace water in the sunshine, its downward swell and slant over many

a boulder, its milky vexation where it slid among stones. He remembers

what he had said to himself then, but had since forgotten, that no

matter what wounds and perplexities the world offers, it also offers a

cure for each one if we know where to seek it. Suddenly he gets a vision

of the whole race of men, campers out on a swinging ball, brothers in

the common motherhood of earth. Born out of the same inexplicable soil

bred to the same problems of star and wind and sun, what absurdity of

civilization is it that has robbed men of this sense of kinship? Why he

himself, he feels, could enter a Bedouin tent or an Eskimo snow-hut and

find some bond of union with the inmates. The other night, he reflects,

he saw moving pictures of some Fiji natives, and could read in their

genial grinning faces the same human impulses he knew in himself. What

have men done to cheat themselves of the enjoyment of this amazing

world? "We've been cheated!" he cries, to the stenographer's horror.

He thinks of his friends, his partners, his employees, of conductors on

trains and waiters in lunchrooms and drivers of taxicabs. He thinks, in

one amazing flash of realization, of all the men and women he has ever

seen or heard of--how each one nourishes secretly some little rebellion,

some dream of a wider, freer life, a life less hampered, less mean, less

material. He thinks how all men yearn to cross salt water, to scale

peaks, to tramp until weary under a hot sun. He hears the Peace, in its

far northern valley, brawling among stones, and his heart is very low.

"Mr. Edwards to see you," says the stenographer.

"I'm sorry, sir," says Edwards, "but I've had the offer of another job

and I think I shall accept it. It's a good thing for a chap to get a

chance----"

My friend slips the key ring back in his pocket.

"What's this?" he says. "Nonsense! When you've got a good job, the thing

to do is to keep it. Stick to it, my boy. There's a great future for you

here. Don't get any of those fool ideas about changing around from one

thing to another."