By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 3, 1932.
“Barter,” I said to Jimmie Frise, “barter, what is barter?”
“Well,” said Jim, “in the country, for instance, instead of a farmer selling his eggs to the general storekeeper he trades his eggs for a pair of boots.”
“I notice,” said I, “that all the editors are writing about barter and over the radio all the world problem solvers are talking about barter. The dollar is no good any more. Neither are quarters, dimes and nickels. Even fifty dollars isn’t any good any more, according to them. The world, they say, is going to fall back on barter.”
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” said Jimmie. “They’re just earning their living. I bet they take dollars for talking and writing. I bet they don’t take it out in barter. Imagine a radio expert taking a bunch of air in payment. Or a big newspaper editor going around with a truck from house to house collecting bread, potatoes, old boots, cast-off shirts and phonograph records from his readers.”
“Personally,” I remarked, “I don’t see how barter would work. How would it take care of you and me, Jimmie, for example?”
“Well, as for me,” said Jim, “I could draw a lot of little cartoons on small cards and then I could call around at the grocery store and trade a laugh for a pound of butter. Then I’d go into the dairy and get a bottle of milk for a chuckle.”
“Wait a minute, Jim,” said I. “Cartoons are very perishable things. You go into the grocery store and offer an original and new cartoon for a pound of butter. The grocer would want to see it first, wouldn’t he?”
“I guess he would.”
“Well, then, he’d look at the cartoon, have a grin at it and hand it back and say he was full up with jokes for the present.”
“H’m,” h’med Jimmie.
“And it would take a lot of cartoons to buy a pair of boots,” said I. “What shoemaker would want twenty cartoons? One cartoon at a time is plenty.”
“How about you?” asked Jimmie. “You could type out a story, but how far would it get you?”
“I’d do little stories for the grocer and the butcher,” said I, “and big full-page stories for the shoemaker; and I’d write a serial novel for the milkman, a chapter a day, in exchange for the milk.”
“You’d be a lot busier writing than you are now,” said Jim. “I wonder if part of the trouble with the dollar isn’t the fact that cartoonists and jazz singers and brokers and lawyers get too many dollars for what they do in comparison with the people who grow food and make clothes and things?”
“It’s supply and demand,” said I.
“The farmer up north of Orangeville doesn’t demand Greta Garbo1 or Eddie Cantor2,” said Jimmie. “As far as the fellow who grows our potatoes and turnips is concerned there is no demand for these big shot lawyers that live in those half-acre houses north of St. Clair avenue.”
“I hope barter doesn’t come in,” I said. “If it does I’m going to learn some useful trade. About the only thing I can do, outside of this writing, is hunt and fish. Maybe I could work up a nice business in rabbits and pheasants; and in the summer fresh bass and trout.”
“You’d work out some pleasant sort of job, anyway,” said Jim. “But if the worst came to the worst, we’ve all got a lot of things we could dispose of and never miss. The average home is filled with extras that aren’t needed, goods lying idle that other people need badly, and we could trade them for the things other people have that we need.”
Everything We Don’t Need
“That wouldn’t last long,” said I.
“The farmers,” said Jim, “with wagon loads of meat and vegetables would come driving through the city streets calling their wares and the city people would come out and trade hats, coats, blankets, radio sets and all kinds of things. I know lots of houses that have eleven cast-off wrist watches lying about in drawers, fountain pens, umbrellas, all manner of things, valuable and idle.”
“I can see a farmer,” said I, “trading a roast of beef for an old umbrella or six worn-out fountain pens. The more I think of this barter business, Jimmie, the more it looks to me as if the farmers were going to have all us city people working for them as hired men and hired girls before very long.”
“I must have about a thousand dollars worth of stuff in my house that isn’t working,” mused Jim. “Counting your fishing rods and books, I bet you have two thousand dollars worth of stuff that isn’t earning its keep.”
“I could trade you a good fly rod for one of your guns,” I suggested. “How about it?”
“I haven’t any use for a fishing rod just now, Jim replied, “and this is the shooting season. What else besides a fishing rod would you give me?”
“There you are!” I exclaimed. “That’s barter for you. The old racket. Getting more than you give.”
“I tell you what to do,” cried Jim. “Let’s send our wives out some night to the movies or a hockey game and you and I have a night of barter. A grand spree of barter. I’ll get together everything that we don’t need any longer and bring it over to your house. You collect everything you can dispose of in one room, and we will see what this barter business goes like. What do you say?”
“It sounds good, but our wives–“
“Listen,” said Jim. “These are hard times. Us men have got to assert ourselves. The old-fashioned man wins nowadays.”
“We’ll buy them hockey tickets.”
“All right,” said Jim.
So it was arranged. Jim, as the proposer of the big barter market, was to bring the stuff from his house in clothes baskets. We were about evenly matched. We had been married the same length of time; a couple of war brides. We had worked up fairly large families. We had houses about the same number of rooms and we both had attics, storerooms and mothers-in-law.
Our wives were safely shipped to the hockey game and then we went to work. Jim was to arrive at nine p.m.
I had done some preliminary scouting for several evenings and I was certainly amazed at the quantity of goods and chattels which had succeeded in finding permanent resting places in all sorts of holes and corners, drawers, boxes, closets and shelves in my house.
First, a baby carriage. Blue, wicker, a little gone in the tires, three hub caps gone and a slight sag in one spring.
I wheeled it down to the living room, which was cleared for auction.
Out of bureau and desk drawers I got five wrist watches, seven assorted fountain pens, a lovely white satin book for Baby, with pages in which to enter all the details of baby’s birth, christening, growth, first tooth, first word, etc.
I found a large round cardboard box, white and shiny, of a style I had quite forgotten, in which were four of my mother-in- law’s ancient hats. Boy! Purple ostrich plumes, beads, bird’s feet, glass eyes!
A clock! A great big gift clock that struck the hours. It had black marble slabs on it.
In another box I found a pair of my black dancing pumps that I had not seen for years, and beside them, done up in old tissue paper, a pair of white satin pumps that my wife wore long, long ago.
Three umbrellas, one black, one gray and one mauve. They were worn and ragged, but I do not remember ever having seen them before.
An old gas heater from the cellar.
An old lawn mower that only needed a good mechanic to make it work.
A magic lantern and seven glass slides. I nearly cried when I found this. It was given to me on my twelfth birthday. One slide was of gold fish. Another was Little Red Riding Hood. One was Bible stories. How on earth had it followed me all through the twisted path of life, from twelve to forty!
If We Only Knew How
By nine o’clock I had all these articles placed against the far wall of the living room and I cleared the opposite wall for Jimmie to stack his barter.
And at nine p.m. he arrived and backed his car into the side drive.
First, he handed out a baby carriage.
It was blue, wicker, three of its hub caps were gone and it was weak on one spring. He pushed it into the living room and stacked it up facing mine.
I assisted him to hoist in a couple of clothes baskets. And then he shoved ahead of him a lawn mower. It was a 1910 model, in need of a mechanic.
Out of the clothes baskets, as I sat on the far side watching him, he dished out a large black onyx clock with gilt slabs on it, four fountain pens, seven assorted watches, including wrist and ladies’ bosom watches worn with a pin; three hats with plumes, five pairs of satin slippers, assorted colors, all a little up in the toe; two umbrellas and a hand-carved walking-stick with a horse’s head for a handle; one old gas heater; one magic lantern; and last of all, a white satin book.
“Hold up that book, Jim,” I said, a little weakly. “Let’s see the title.”
On it in gold paint was printed “Baby’s Own Book.”
Jim arranged all his goods along the wall, dusted off his hands and then strolled across the room to look at mine.
He looked at the baby carriage! The lawnmower, the rusty gas heater! He stared intently at the hats, the satin slippers, the Baby book. His hand went up to his mouth when he looked at the umbrellas, the fountain pen and the decayed wrist watches.
Then his wavering eyes met mine.
“This is funny,” he said, uncertainly. “
“No, it isn’t,” I replied. “I’ve been thinking about it. Everybody has about the same amount of no use for the same things. You would likely find these same things in every house in Canada.”
“Let’s trade something,” said Jim, “just for luck. I’ll trade you this pair of green satin slippers with the ostrich feather trimmings for those white satin ones you got there.”
“No,” said I. “I just remember what these are. I just recollect these black pumps of mine were the ones I was wearing the night I met my wife, when she was wearing the white ones.”
“Trade baby carriages,” said Jim. “They are about the same model.”
“It just occurs to me why our wives keep those old things,” said I.
“I better pack up,” said Jimmie, rather lamely.
“Barter,” said I. “Barter means only things you make or grow. It doesn’t mean things you own. And we city people only know how to make parts of things. We don’t know how to make anything whole. Storekeepers, clerks, doers of small services, handers-over-the-counter, adders up of other people’s figures, each of us a jig in the jigsaw puzzle of life. It looks bad for us, Jimmie.”
“No,” replied Jim, his arms full of property. “It’ll work out all right. In the old days the story-tellers went from village to village, singing songs and telling stories, and everybody was glad to see them. The artists travelled all over the world, building cathedrals, palaces, painting frescoes that have lived forever.”
“Not cartoonists,” said I.
“Yes, sir, cartoonists!” cried Jim. “They put gargoyles on the cathedrals!”
“Room for everybody.”
“For everybody,” said Jim, shoving his lawnmower across my hardwood floor. “If we only knew how.”
Editor’s Notes: This story was reprinted on January 20, 1940, as “Fair Exchange”.
- Greta Garbo was an actress and huge star in 1932. Here name was retained in the 1940 reprint. ↩︎
- Eddie Cantor was a comedian who was best known for film and a variety radio program at the time. In the 1940 reprint, he was replaced with Bing Crosby. ↩︎
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