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Title: The Master Rogue
The Confessions of a Croesus
Author: David Graham Phillips
Illustrator: Gordon H. Grant
Release Date: January 2, 2022 [eBook #67089]
Language: English
Produced by: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MASTER ROGUE ***
THE MASTER ROGUE
OTHER BOOKS BY
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS
[Illustration]
_The Great God Success_, _Her Serene Highness_
_A Woman Ventures_
_Golden Fleece_
[Illustration: “_The razor cut me and dropped to the floor._”]
_THE MASTER ROGUE_
_The Confessions of a Crœsus_
_By_
_David Graham Phillips_
_Illustrated by Gordon H. Grant_
[Illustration]
_McClure, Phillips & Co._
_New York_
_1903_
COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO
Published September, 1903
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“The Razor cut me, and dropped to the floor” _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
“‘Don’t get apoplectic,’ he said, calmly; ‘you
know you stole your start’” 39
“‘You liar! you forger!’” 73
“‘Not to have told you would have been a lie’” 119
“‘You will marry on the sixteenth of April, at
noon. Get yourself ready’” 129
“I came upon Helen, sitting in the alcove, sobbing” 218
THE MASTER ROGUE
I
I cannot remember the time when I was not absolutely certain that I
would be a millionaire. And I had not been a week in the big wholesale
dry-goods house in Worth Street in which I made my New York start,
before I looked round and said to myself: “I shall be sole proprietor
here some day.”
Probably clerks dream the same thing every day in every establishment
on earth--but I didn’t dream; I _knew_. From earliest boyhood I had
seen that the millionaire was the only citizen universally envied,
honoured, and looked up to. I wanted to be in the first class, and I
knew I had only to stick to my ambition and to think of nothing else
and to let nothing stand in the way of it. There are so few men capable
of forming a definite, serious purpose, and of persisting in it, that
those who are find the road almost empty before they have gone far.
By the time I was thirty-three years old I had arrived at the place
where the crowd is pretty well thinned out. I was what is called a
successful man. I was general manager of the dry-goods house at ten
thousand a year--a huge salary for those days. I had nearly sixty
thousand dollars put by in gilt-edged securities. I had built a
valuable reputation for knowing my business and keeping my word. I
owned a twenty-five-foot brownstone house in a side street not far from
Madison Avenue, and in it I had a comfortable, happy, old-fashioned
home. At thirty-two I had gone back to my native town to marry a girl
there, one of those women who have ambition beyond gadding all the time
and spending every cent their husbands earn, and who know how to make
home attractive to husband and children.
I couldn’t exaggerate the value of my family, especially my wife, to
me in those early days. True, I should have gone just as far without
them, but they made my life cheerful and comfortable; and, now that
sentiment of that narrow kind is all in the past, it’s most agreeable
occasionally to look back on those days and sentimentalise a little.
That I worked intelligently, as well as hard, is shown by the fact
that I was made junior partner at thirty-eight. My partner--there
were only two of us--was then an elderly man and the head of the old
and prominent New York family of Judson--that is not the real name,
of course. Ours was the typical old-fashioned firm, doing business on
principles of politeness rather than of strict business. One of its
iron-clad customs was that the senior partner should retire at sixty.
Mr. Judson’s intention was to retire in about five years, I to become
the head of the firm, though with the smaller interest, and one of
his grandsons to become the larger partner, though with the lesser
control--at least, for a term of years.
It was called evidence of great friendship and confidence that Mr.
Judson thus “favoured” me. Probably this notion would have been
stronger had it been known on what moderate terms and at what an
easy price he let me have the fourth interest. No doubt Mr. Judson
himself thought he was most generous. But I knew better. There was no
sentimentality about my ideas of business, and my experience has been
that there isn’t about any one’s when you cut through surface courtesy
and cant and get down to the real facts. I knew I had earned every
step of my promotion from a clerk; and, while Mr. Judson might have
selected some one else as a partner, he wouldn’t have done so, because
he needed me. I had seen to that in my sixteen years of service there.
Judson wasn’t a self-made man, as I was. He had inherited his share in
the business, and a considerable fortune, besides. The reason he was so
anxious to have me as a partner was that for six years I had carried
all his business cares, even his private affairs. Yes, he needed
me--though, no doubt, in a sense, he was my friend. Who wouldn’t have
been my friend under the circumstances? But, having looked out for his
own interest and comfort in selecting me, why should he have expected
that I wouldn’t look out for mine? The only kind of loyalty a man who
wishes to do something in the world should give or expect is the mutual
loyalty of common interest.
I confess I never liked Judson. To be quite frank, from the first day
I came into that house, I envied him. I used to think it was contempt;
but, since my own position has changed, I know it was envy. I remember
that the first time I saw him I noted his handsome, carefully dressed
figure, so out of place among the sweat and shirt sleeves and the
litter of goods and packing cases, and I asked one of my fellow-clerks:
“Who’s that fop?” When he told me it was the son of the proprietor, and
my prospective chief boss, I said to myself: “It won’t be hard to get
_you_ out of the way;” for I had brought from the country the prejudice
that fine clothes and fine manners proclaim the noddle-pate.
I envied my friend--for, in a master-and-servant way, that was highly,
though, of course, secretly distasteful to me, we became friends. I
envied him his education, his inherited wealth, his manners, his
aristocratic appearance, and, finally, his social position. It seemed
to me that none of these things that he had and I hadn’t belonged of
right to him, because he hadn’t earned them. It seemed to me that his
having them was an outrageous injustice to me.
I think I must have hated him. Yes, I did hate him. How is it possible
for a man who feels that he is born to rule not to hate those whom
blind fate has put as obstacles in his way? To get what you want in
this world you must be a good hater. The best haters make the best
grabbers, and this is a world of grab, not of “By your leave,” or “If
you’ll permit me, sir.” You can’t get what you want away from the
man who’s got it unless you hate him. Gentle feelings paralyse the
conquering arm.
So, at thirty-eight, it seemed to be settled that I was to be a
respectable Worth Street merchant, in active life until I should
be sixty, always under the shadow of the great Judson family, and
thereafter a respectable retired merchant and substantial citizen with
five hundred thousand dollars or thereabouts. But it never entered
my head to submit to that sort of decree of destiny, dooming me to
respectable obscurity. Nature intended me for larger things.
The key to my true destiny, as I had seen for several years, was the
possession of a large sum of money--a million dollars. Without it, I
must work on at my past intolerably slow pace. With it, I could leap
at once into my kingdom. But, how get it? In the regular course of any
business conducted on proper lines, such a sum, even to-day, rewards
the successful man starting from nothing only when the vigour of youth
is gone and the habits of conservatism and routine are fixed. I knew
I must get my million not in driblets, not after years of toil, but at
once, in a lump sum. I must get it even at some temporary sacrifice of
principle, if necessary.
If I had not seen the opportunity to get it through Judson and
Company, I should have retired from that house years before I got the
partnership. But I did see it there, saw it coming even before I was
general manager, saw it the first time I got a peep into the private
affairs of Mr. Judson.
Judson and Company, like all old-established houses, was honeycombed
with carelessness and wastefulness. To begin with, it treated its
employees on a basis of mixed business and benevolence, and that is
always bad unless the benevolence is merely an ingenious pretext for
getting out of your people work that you don’t pay for. But Mr.
Judson, having a good deal of the highfaluting _grand seigneur_ about
him, made the benevolence genuine. Then, the theory was that the
Judsons were born merchants, and knew all there was to be known, and
did not need to attend to business. Mr. Judson, being firmly convinced
of his greatness, and being much engaged socially and in posing as a
great merchant at luncheons and receptions to distinguished strangers
and the like, put me in full control as soon as he made me general
manager. He interfered in the business only occasionally, and then
merely to show how large and generous he was--to raise salaries, to
extend unwise credits, to bolster up decaying mills that had long sold
goods to the house, to indorse for his friends. Friends! Who that can
and will lend and indorse has not hosts of friends? What I have waited
to see before selecting my friends is the friendship that survives the
death of its hope of favours--and I’m still waiting.
As soon as I became partner I confirmed in detail the suspicion, or,
rather, the instinctive knowledge, which had kept me from looking
elsewhere for my opportunity.
I recall distinctly the day my crisis came. It had two principal events.
The first was my discovery that Mr. Judson had got the firm and
himself so entangled that he was in my power. I confess my impulse
was to take a course which a weaker or less courageous man would have
taken--away from the course of the strong man with the higher ambition
and the broader view of life and morals. And it was while I seemed to
be wavering--I say “seemed to be” because I do not think a strong,
far-sighted man of resolute purpose is ever “squeamish,” as they
call it--while, I say, I was in the mood of uncertainty which often
precedes energetic action, we, my wife and I, went to dinner at the
Judsons.
That dinner was the second event of my crucial day. Judson’s family and
mine did not move in the same social circle. When people asked my wife
if she knew Mrs. Judson--which they often maliciously did--she always
answered: “Oh, no--my husband keeps our home life and his business
distinct; and, you know, New York is very large. The Judsons and we
haven’t the same friends.” That was her way of hiding our rankling
wound--for it rankled with me as much as with her; in those days we had
everything in common, like the humble people that we were.
I can see now her expression of elation as she displayed the note of
invitation from Mrs. Judson: “It would give us great pleasure if you
and your husband would dine with us quite informally,” etc. Her face
clouded as she repeated, “quite informally.” “They wouldn’t for worlds
have any of their fashionable friends there to meet US.” Even then she
was far away from the time when, to my saying, “You shall have your
victoria and drive in the park and get your name in the papers like
Mrs. Judson,” she laughed and answered--honestly, I know--“We mustn’t
get to be like these New Yorkers. Our happiness lies right here with
ourselves and our children. I’ll be satisfied if we bring them up to be
honest, useful men and women.” That’s the way a woman should talk and
feel. When they get the ideas that are fit only for men everything goes
to pot.
But to return to the Judson dinner--my wife and I had never before been
in so grand a house. It was, indeed, a grand house for those days,
though it wouldn’t compare with my palace overlooking the park, and
would hardly rank to-day as a second-rate New York house. We tried to
seem at our ease, and I think my wife succeeded; but it seemed to me
that Judson and his wife were seeing into my embarrassment and were
enjoying it as evidence of their superiority. I may have wronged him.
Possibly I was seeking more reasons to hate him in order the better to
justify myself for what I was about to do. But that isn’t important.
My wife and I were as if in a dream or a daze. A whole, new world was
opening to both of us--the world of fashion, luxury, and display. True,
we had seen it from the outside before; and had had it constantly
before our eyes; but now we were touching it, tasting it, smelling
it--were almost grasping it. We were unhappy as we drove home in our
ill-smelling public cab, and when we reentered our little world it
seemed humble and narrow and mean--a ridiculous fool’s paradise.
We did not have our customary before-going-to-sleep talk that night,
about my business, about our investments, about the household, about
the children--we had two, the boys, then. We lay side by side, silent
and depressed. I heard her sigh several times, but I did not ask her
why--I understood. Finally I said to her: “Minnie, how’d you like to
live like the Judsons? You know we can afford to spread out a good
deal. Things have been coming our way for twelve years, and soon----”
She sighed again. “I don’t know whether I’m fitted for it,” she said;
“I think all those grand things would frighten me. I’d make a fool of
myself.”
It amuses me to recall how simple she was. Who would ever suspect
her of having been so, as she presides over our great establishments
in town and in the country as if she were born to it? “Nonsense!” I
answered. “You’d soon get used to it. You’re young yet, and a thousand
times better looking than fat old Mrs. Judson. You’ll learn in no time.
You’ll go up with me.”
“I don’t think they’re as happy as we are,” she said. “I ought to be
ashamed of myself to be so envious and ungrateful.” But she sighed
again.
I think she soon went to sleep. I lay awake hour after hour, a
confusion of thoughts in my mind--we worry a great deal over nice
points in morals when we are young. Then, suddenly, as it seemed to me,
the command of destiny came--“You can be sole master, in name as well
as in fact. You _are_ that business. He has no right there. Put him
out! He is only a drag, and will soon ruin everything. It is best for
him--and you _must_!”
I tossed and turned. I said to myself, “No! No!” But I knew what I
would do. I was not the man to toil for years for an object and then
let weakness cheat me out of it. I knew I would make short shrift of a
flabby and dangerous and short-sighted generosity when the time came.
One morning, about six months later, Mr. Judson came to me as I was
busy at my desk and laid down a note for five hundred thousand dollars,
signed by himself. “It’ll be all right for me to indorse the firm’s
name upon that, won’t it?” he said, in a careless tone, holding to a
corner of the note, as if he were assuming that I would say “Yes,” and
he could then take it away.
A thrill of delight ran through me at this stretch of the hand of my
opportunity for which I had been planning for years, and for which
I had been waiting in readiness for nearly three months. I looked
steadily at the note. “I don’t know,” I said, slowly, raising my eyes
to his. His eyes shifted and a hurt expression came into them, as if
he, not I, were refusing. “I’m busy just now. Leave it, won’t you? I’ll
look at it presently.”
“Oh, certainly,” he said, in a surprised, shy voice. I did not look up
at him again, but I saw that his hand--a narrow, smooth hand, not at
all like mine--was trembling as he drew it away.
We did not speak again until late in the afternoon. Then I had to go
to him about some other matter, and, as I was turning away, he said,
timidly: “Oh, about that note----”
“It can’t be indorsed by the firm,” I said, abruptly.
There was a long silence between us. I felt that he was inwardly
resenting what he must be calling the insolence of the “upstart” he had
“created.” I was hating him for the contemptuous thoughts that seemed
to me to be burning through the silence from his brain to mine, was
hating him for putting me in a false position even before myself with
his plausible appearance of being a generous gentleman--I abhor the
idea of “gentleman” in business; it upsets everything, at once.
When he did speak, he only said: “Why not?”
I went to my desk and brought a sheet of paper filled with figures. “I
have made this up since you spoke to me this morning,” I said, laying
it before him.
That was false--a trifling falsehood to prevent him from
misunderstanding my conduct in making a long and quiet investigation.
The truth is that that crucial paper was the work of a great many days,
and not a few nights, of thought and labour--it was my cast for my
million.
The paper seemed to show at a glance that the firm was practically
ruined, and that Mr. Judson himself was insolvent. It was to a certain
extent an over-statement, or, rather, a sort of anticipation of
conditions that would come to pass within a year or two if Mr. Judson
were permitted to hold to his course. While in a sense I took advantage
of his ignorance of our business and his own, and also of his lack of
familiarity with all commercial matters, yet, on the other hand, it
was not sensible that I should tide him over and carry him, and it was
vitally necessary that I should get my million. Had he been shrewder,
I should have got it anyhow, only I should have been compelled to use
methods that, perhaps, would have seemed less merciful.
I sat beside him as he read; and, while I pitied him, for I am human,
after all, I felt more strongly a sense of triumph, that I, the poor,
the obscure, by sheer force of intellect, had raised myself up to where
I had my foot upon the neck of this proud man, ranking so high among
New York’s distinguished merchants and citizens. I have had many a
triumph since, and over men far superior to Judson; but I do not think
that I have ever so keenly enjoyed any other victory as this, my first
and most important.
Still, I pitied him as he read, with face growing older and older, and,
with his pride shot through the vitals, quivering in its death agony.
I said, gently, when he had finished and had buried his face in his
hands: “Now, do you understand, Mr. Judson, why I won’t sign away my
commercial honour and my children’s bread?”
He shrank and shivered, as if, instead of having spoken kindly to him,
I had struck him. “Spare me!” he said, brokenly. “For God’s sake, spare
me!” and, after a moment, he groaned and exclaimed: “and I--_I_--have
ruined this house, established by my grandfather and held in honour for
half a century!” A longer pause, then he lifted his haggard face--he
looked seventy rather than fifty-five; his eyeballs were sunk in deep,
blue-black sockets; his whole expression was an awful warning of the
consequences of recklessness in business. I have never forgotten it. “I
trust you,” he said; “what shall I do?”
He placed himself entirely in my hands; or, rather, he left his affairs
where they had been, except when he was muddling them, for more than
six years. I dealt generously by him, for I bought him out by the
use of my excellent personal credit, and left him a small fortune in
such shape that he could easily manage it. He was free of all business
cares; I had taken upon my shoulders not only the responsibilities of
that great business, but also a load of debt which would have staggered
and frightened a man of less courageous judgment.
I did not see him when the last papers were signed--he was ill and
they were sent to his house. Two or three weeks later I heard that he
was convalescent and went to see him. Now that he was no longer in my
way, and that the debt of gratitude was transferred from me to him, I
had only the kindliest, friendliest feelings for him. Those few weeks
had made a great change in me. I had grown, I had come into my own,
I realised how high I was above the mass of my fellow-men, and I
was insisting upon and was receiving the respect that was my due. My
sensations, as I entered the Judson house, were vastly different from
what they were when the pompous butler admitted me on the occasion
of the one previous visit, and I could see that he felt strongly the
alteration in my station. I felt generous pity as I went into the
library and looked down at the broken old failure huddled in a big
chair. What an unlovely thing is failure, especially grey-haired
failure! I said to myself: “How fortunate for him that this helpless
creature fell into my hands instead of into the hands of some rascal or
some cruel and vindictive man!” I was about to speak, but something in
his steady gaze restrained me.
“I have admitted you,” he said, in a surprisingly steady voice, when he
had looked me through and through, “because I wish you to hear from me
that I know the truth. My son-in-law returned from Europe last week,
and, learning what changes had been made, went over all the papers.”
He looked as if he expected me to flinch. But I did not. Was not my
conscience clear?
“I know how basely you have betrayed me,” he went on. “I thank you for
not taking everything. I confess your generosity puzzles me. However,
you have done nothing for which the law can touch you. What you have
stolen is securely yours. I wish you joy of it.”
My temper is not of the sweetest--dealing with the trickeries and
stupidities of little men soon exhausts the patience of a man who has
much to do in the world, and knows how it should be done. But never
before or since have I been so insanely angry. I burst into a torrent
of abuse. He rang the bell; and, when the servant came, calm and clear
above my raging rose his voice, saying, “Robert, show this person to
the door.” For the moment my mind seemed paralysed. I left, probably
looking as base and guilty as he with his wounded vanity and his
sufferings from the loss of all he had thrown away imagined me to be.
I confess that that was a very bad quarter of an hour. But, to make
a large success in this world, and in the brief span of a lifetime,
one must submit to discomforts of that kind occasionally. There are
compensating hours. I had one last week when I attended the dedication
of the splendid two-million-dollar recitation hall I have given to ----
University.
Not until I was several blocks from Judson’s did the sense of my
wrongs sting me into rage again. I remember that I said: “Infamous
ingratitude! I save this fine gentleman from bankruptcy, and my reward
is that he calls me a thief--me, a millionaire!”
Millionaire! In that word there was a magic balm for all the wounds to
my pride and my then supersensitive conscience--a justification of the
past, a guarantee of the future.
With my million safely achieved, I looked about me as a conqueror looks
upon the conquered. A thousand dollars saved is the first step toward
a competence; a million dollars achieved is the first step toward a
Crœsus; and, in matters of money, as in everything else, “it is the
first step that counts,” as the French say. I was filled with the
passion for more, more, more. I felt myself, in imagination, growing
mightier and mightier, lifting myself higher and more dazzlingly
above the dull mass of work-a-day people with their routines of petty
concerns.
In the days of our modesty my wife used to plan that we would retire
when we had twenty thousand a year--enough, she then thought, to
provide for every want, reasonable or unreasonable, that we and the
children could have. Now, she would have scorned the idea of retiring
as contemptuously as I would. She was eager to do her part in the
process of expansion and aggrandisement, was eager to see us socially
established, to put our children in the position to make advantageous
marriages. We would be outshone in New York by none!
To win a million is to taste blood. The million-mania--for, in a sense,
I’ll admit it is a mania--is roused and put upon the scent, and it
never sleeps again, nor is its appetite ever satisfied or even made
less ravenous.
A few years, and I left dry-goods for finance, where the pursuit of my
passion was more direct and more rapidly successful. Every day I fixed
my thoughts upon another million; and, as all who know anything about
the million-mania will tell you, the act of fixing the thought upon a
million, when one has earned the right to acquire millions, makes that
million yours, makes all who stand between you and it aggressors to be
clawed down and torn to pieces. As I grew my rights were respected more
and more deferentially. Men now bow before me. They understand that I
can administer great wealth to the best advantage, that I belong to
one of that small class of beings created to possess the earth and to
command the improvident and idealess inhabitants thereof how and where
and when to work.
My family?
I confess they have not risen to my level or to the opportunities I
have made for them. Naturally, with great wealth, the old simple
family relationship was broken up. That was to be expected--the duties
of people in our position do not permit indulgence in the simple
emotions and pastimes of the family life of the masses. But neither,
on the other hand, was it necessary that my wife should become a cold
and calculating social figure, full of vanity and superciliousness,
instead of maintaining the proud dignity of her position as my wife.
Nor was it necessary that my children should become selfish, heartless,
pleasure-seekers, caring nothing for me except as a source of money.
I suppose I am in part responsible--my great enterprises have left
me little time for the small details of life, such as the training
of children. They were admirably educated, too. I provided the best
governesses and masters, and saw to it that they learned all that a
lady or a gentleman should know; and in respect of dress and manners I
admit that they do very well, indeed. Possibly, the complete breaking
up of the family, except as it is held together by my money, is due to
the fact that we see so little of one another, each having his or her
separate establishment. Possibly I am a little old-fashioned, a little
too exacting, in my idea of wife and children. Certainly they are
aristocratic enough.
My son James is the thorn in my side. And, whenever I have a moment’s
rest from my affairs, I find myself thinking of him, worrying over him.
The latest development in his character is certainly disquieting.
He was twenty-five years old yesterday. He was educated at our most
aristocratic university here, and at one in Europe of the same kind. It
was his mother’s dream that he should be “brought up as a gentleman”;
and that fell in with my ideas, for I did not wish him to be a
money-maker, but the head of the family I purposed to found upon my
millions, which are already numerous enough to secure it for many
generations. “There is no call for him to struggle and toil as I have,”
I said to myself. “The sort of financial ability I possess is born
in a man and can’t be taught or transmitted by birth. He would make
a small showing, at best, as a business man. As a gentleman he will
shine. He only needs just enough business training to enable him to
supervise those who will take care of his fortune and that of the rich
woman he will marry.” I was determined that he should marry in his own
class--and, indeed, he is not a sentimentalist, and, therefore, is not
likely to disregard my wishes in that matter.
When he was eighteen I caught him in a fashionable gambling-house one
night when I thought he was at his college. I could not but admire
the coolness with which he made the best of it: stood beside me as I
sat playing faro, then went over to a roulette table and lost several
hundred dollars on a few spins of the ball. But the next day I took him
sharply to task--it was one thing for me to play, at my age and with my
fortune, I explained, but not the same for him, at his age, and with
nothing but an allowance.
He shrugged his shoulders indifferently. “Really, governor,” he said,
“a man must do as the other fellows in his set do. Didn’t you see whom
I was with? If you wish me to travel with those people I must go their
gait.”
That was not unreasonable, so I dismissed him with a cautioning. At
twenty he went abroad, and, a year after he had returned, his bills
and drafts were still coming. I sent for him. “Why don’t you pay your
debts, sir?” I demanded, angrily, for such conduct was directly
contrary to my teaching and example.
He gave me his grandest look--he is a handsome, aristocratic-looking
fellow, away ahead of what Judson must have been at his age. “But, my
dear governor,” he said, “a gentleman pays his debts when he feels like
it.”
“No, he don’t,” I answered, furiously, for my instinct of commercial
promptness was roused. “A scoundrel pays his debts when he feels like
it. A gentleman pays ’em when they’re due.”
His reply was a smile of approval, and “Excellent! The best epigram
I’ve heard since I left Paris. You’re as great a genius at making
phrases as you are at making money.”
I caught him speculating in Wall Street--“One must amuse one’s self,”
he said, cheerfully. But I was not to be put off this time. I had
had some reports on his life--many wild escapades, many fantastic
extravagances. The terrible downfall of two young men of his set made
me feel that the time for discipline was at hand. But, as I was very
busy, I had only time to read him a brief lecture on speculation and to
exact from him a promise that he would keep out of Wall Street. He gave
the promise so reluctantly that I felt confident he meant to keep it.
A week ago yesterday morning he came into my bedroom, before I was up,
and said to my valet, Pigott: “Just take yourself off, Piggy!” And,
when we were alone, he began: “Mother said I was to come straight to
you.”
“What is it?” I demanded, my anger rising--experience has taught me
that the more offhand his manner, the more serious the offence I should
have to repair.
“I broke my promise to you about speculating, sir,” he replied, much as
if he were apologising for having jostled me in a crowd.
I sat up in bed, feeling as if I were afire. “And does a gentleman keep
his promises only when he feels like it?” I asked.
“But that isn’t all,” he went on. “My pool’s gone smash--you were on
the other side and I never suspected it. And I’ve got a million to pay,
besides----”
He took out his cigarette case, and lighted a cigarette with great
deliberation.
“Besides--what?” I said, wishing to know all before I began upon him.
“I wrote your name across the back of a bit of paper,” he answered,
hiding his face in a big cloud of smoke.
I fell back in the bed, feeling as if I had been struck on the head
with a heavy weight. “You scoundrel!” I gasped.
“Sour grapes,” he muttered, his cheeks aflame and his eyes blazing at
me.
[Illustration: “_‘Don’t get apoplectic,’ he said, calmly; ‘you know you
stole your start.’_”]
“What do you mean?” I said, my mind in confusion.
“The fathers have eaten sour grapes,” he quoted, “and the children’s
teeth are set on edge.”
I half sprang from the bed at this insolence. “Don’t get apoplectic,”
he said, calmly; “you know you stole your start.”
At this infamous calumny I leaped upon him and flung him bodily out of
the room. It was several hours before I was calm enough to dismiss the
incident sufficiently to take up my affairs.
This has come at a particularly unfortunate time for me, as I am in the
midst of several delicate, vast, and intricate negotiations, involving
many millions and demanding all my thought. He has gone down on Long
Island in care of his mother. It will be at least ten days before I
can take up his case and dispose of it. I am undecided whether to give
him another trial under severe conditions or to cast him off and make
his younger brother my principal heir and successor. I confess to a
weakness for him--possibly because he is so audacious and fearless.
His younger brother is entirely too smooth and diplomatic with me; if
I should elevate him, he would fancy that he had deceived me with his
transparent tricks.
However, we shall see.
II
About a month after I sent James to my place on Long Island to be in
the custody of his mother, I was dining in my Fifth Avenue house with
only Burridge, my secretary, and Jack Ridley, who calls himself my
“court fool.”
Although my mind was crowded with large affairs involving great
properties and millions of capital, hardly a day had passed without my
thinking of James and of his infamous conduct toward me. But without
neglecting the duties which my position as a financial leader impose
upon me, it was impossible for me to take time to do my duty as a
parent. The duty which particularly pressed and absolutely prevented
me from attending to my son was that of overcoming difficulties I
had encountered in consolidating the three railways which I control
in the State. To achieve my purpose it was necessary that a somewhat
radical change be made in a certain law. I sent my agent to Boss ----
to arrange the matter. I learned that he refused to order the change
unless I would pay him three hundred thousand dollars in cash and would
give him the opportunity to buy to a like amount of the new stock at
par. He pleaded that the change would cause a tremendous outcry if it
were discovered, as it almost certainly would be, and that he must
be in a position to provide a correspondingly large campaign fund to
“carry the party” successfully through the next campaign. He said his
past favours to me had brought him to the verge of political ruin. In
a sentence, the miserable old blackmailer was trying to drive as hard
a bargain with me as if I had not been making stiff contributions to
what he calls his “campaign fund” for years with only trifling favours
in return. I was willing to pay what the change was worth, but I would
not be bled. I brought pressure to bear from the national organisation
of his party, and he came round--apparently.
Just as my bill was slipping quietly through the State Senate, having
passed the Lower House unobserved, the other boss raised a terrific
hullabaloo. Boss ---- denied to my people that he had “tipped off”
what was doing in order to revenge himself and get his blood-money in
another way; but I knew at once that the sanctimonious old thief had
outwitted me.
It looked as if I would have to yield. Of course I should have done
so in the last straits, for only a fool holds out for a principle
when holding out means no gain and a senseless and costly loss. But
the knowledge that a defeat would cost me dear in future transactions
of this kind made me struggle desperately. I sent for my lawyer,
Stratton--an able fellow, as lawyers go, but, like most of this stupid,
lazy human race, always ready to say “impossible” because saying so
saves labour. “Stratton,” I said, “there must be a way round--there
always is. Can’t I get what I want by an amendment to some other law
that can be slipped through by the lobby of some other corporation as
if for its benefit only? Take a week. Paw over the books and rake that
brain of yours! There’s a hundred and fifty thousand in it for you if
you find me the way round.”
“But the law--” he began.
I lost my temper--I always do when one of my men begins his reply
to an order I’ve given him with the word “But.” “Don’t ‘but’ me,
damn you,” said I. “I’m getting sick and tired of your eternal
opposition. Crawford”--Crawford was my lawyer until I put him into the
Senate--“used always to tell me how I could do what I wanted to do.
You’re always telling me that I can’t do what I want to do.”
“I’m sorry to displease you, sir, but----”
“‘But’ again!” I exclaimed, sarcastically.
“Then, however,” he went on, with a conciliatory smile, “I’m not a
legislator; I’m a lawyer.”
“Precisely,” said I. “And the only use I have for a lawyer is to show
me how to do as I please, in spite of these wretched demagogues and
blackmailers that control the statute-books. If you are as intelligent
as Crawford led me to believe and as my own observation of you
suggests, you’ll profit by this little talk we’ve had. Look round
you at the men who are making the big successes in your profession
nowadays--look at your predecessor, Crawford. Imitate them and stop
casting about for ways of interpreting the law against your employer’s
interest.”
Two days later he came to me in triumph. He had found the “way round.”
I had my law slipped through, signed by the Governor, and safely put on
the statute-book, the two bosses as unsuspicious as were the newspapers
and the public. Then I came out in a public disavowal of my original
purpose, denounced it as a crime against the people, and deplored that
my railroad corporation should be unjustly accused of promoting it. You
must fight the devil with fire.
Those two bosses--and the sensational newspapers that had been
attacking them and my corporations--were astounded, and haven’t
recovered yet. It will be six months before they realise that I have
accomplished my purpose; even then they won’t be sure that I planned
it, but will half believe it was my “luck.”
In passing, I may note that Stratton tells me I ought to pay him two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars instead of one hundred and fifty
thousand--for pulling me out of the hole! He has wholly forgotten
having said “can’t be done” and “impossible” to me so many times that
I finally had to stop him by cursing him violently. With their own
vanity and their women-folks’ flattery for ever conspiring to destroy
their judgment, it’s a wonder to me that men are able to get on at all.
Indeed, they wouldn’t if they didn’t have masters like me over them.
After I had got my little joke on the bosses and the impertinent public
safely on the statute-book, there remained the problem of how to take
advantage of it without stirring up the sensational newspapers and the
politicians, always ready to pander to the spirit of demagogy. I had
my rights safely embodied in the law; but in this lawless time that is
not enough. Instead of being respectful to the great natural leaders
and deferential to their larger vision and larger knowledge, the people
regard us with suspicion and overlook our services in their envy of the
trifling commissions we get--for, what is the wealth we reserve for
ourselves in comparison with the benefits we confer upon the country?
At this dinner which I have mentioned, both Burridge and Ridley were
silent, and so my thoughts had no distraction. As I know that it is
bad for my digestion to use my brain as I eat, I tried to start a
conversation.
“Have you seen Aurora to-day?” I asked Burridge. She is my eldest
daughter, just turned eighteen.
“She and Walter”--he is my second son, within a month or so of
twenty-two--“are dining out this evening; she at Carnarvon’s, he at
Longview’s. I think they meet at Mrs. Hollister’s dance and come home
together.”
This was agreeable news. The names told me that my wife was at
last succeeding in her social campaign, thanks to the irresistible
temptation to the narrow aristocrats of the inner circle in the
prospective fortunes of my children. While this social campaign of
ours has its vanity side--and I here admit that I am not insensible
to certain higher kinds of vanity--it also has a substantial business
side. The greatest disadvantage I have laboured under--and at times
it was serious--has been a certain suspicion of me as a newcomer and
an adventurer. Naturally this has not been lessened by the boldness
and swiftness of my operations. When I and my family are admitted on
terms of intimacy and perfect equality among the people of large and
old-established fortune, I shall be absolutely trusted in the financial
world and shall be secure in the position of leadership which my brains
have won for me and which I now maintain only by steady fighting.
“And Helen?” I went on. Helen is my other daughter, not yet twelve.
“She’s dining in her own sitting-room with her companion,” replied
Burridge.
“I haven’t seen her for a day or two,” I said.
“Two weeks to-morrow,” answered Burridge.
Jack Ridley laughed, and I frowned. It irritates me for Ridley to note
it whenever I am caught in seeming neglect of my children. He pretends
not to believe that it is my sense of duty that makes me deprive myself
of the family happiness of ordinary men for the sake of my larger
duties. But he must know at the bottom that all my self-sacrifice is
for my children, for my family, ultimately. I have the thankless,
misunderstood toil; they have the enjoyment.
“Two weeks!” I protested; “it can’t be!”
“She came to me for her allowance this morning,” he said, “and she
asked after you. She said your valet had told her you were staying here
and were well. She said she’d like to see you some time--if you ever
got round to it.”
This little picture of my domestic life did not tend to cheer me.
Naturally, I went on to think of Jim. Ridley interrupted my thoughts by
saying: “Have you been down on Long Island yet?”
This was going too far even for a “court fool”--his name for himself,
not mine. Ridley is my pensioner, confidant, listening machine,
and talking machine. He is of an old New York family, an honest,
intelligent fellow, with an extravagant stomach and back. My wife
engaged him, originally, to help her in her social campaigns. I saw
that I could use him to better advantage, and he has gradually grown
into my confidence.
In my lesser days, one of the things that most irritated me against
the very rich was their habit of buying human beings, body and soul,
to do all kinds of unmanly work, and I especially abhorred the
“parasites”--so I called them--who hung about rich men, entertaining
them, submitting to their humours, and bearing degradations and
humiliations in exchange for the privileges of eating at luxurious
tables, living in the colder corners of palaces, driving in the
carriages of their patrons, and being received nominally as their
social equals. But now I understand these matters better. It isn’t
given to many men to be independent. As for the “parasites,” how should
I do without Jack Ridley?
I can’t have friends. Friends take one’s time--they must be treated
with consideration, or they become dangerous enemies. Friends impose
upon one’s friendship--they demand inconvenient or improper, or, at
any rate, costly favours which it is difficult to refuse. I must
have companionship, and fate compels that my companion shall be my
dependant, one completely under my control--a Jack Ridley. I look after
his expensive stomach and back; he amuses me and keeps me informed as
to the trifling matters of art, literature, gossip, and so forth, which
I have no time to look up, yet must know if I am to make any sort of
appearance in company. Really, next to my gymnasium, I regard poor old
Jack as my most useful belonging, so far as my health and spirits are
concerned.
To his impertinent reminder of my neglected duty I made no reply beyond
a heavy frown. The rest of the dinner was eaten in oppressive silence,
I brooding over the absence of cheerfulness in my life. They say it is
my fault, but I know it is simply their stupidity in being unable to
understand how to deal with a superior personality. It is my fate to be
misunderstood, publicly and privately. The public grudgingly praises,
often even derides, my philanthropies; the members of my family laugh
at my generosities and self-sacrifices for them.
As I was going to my apartment and to bed, Ridley waylaid me. “You’re
offended with me, old man?” he asked, his eyes moist and his lips
trembling under his grey moustache. He weeps easily: at a glass of
especially fine wine; over a sentimental story in a paper or magazine;
if a grouse is cooked just right; when I am cross with him. And I think
all his emotions, whether of heart or of stomach, are genuine--and
probably about as valuable as most emotions.
“Not at all, not at all, Jack,” I said, reassuringly; “but you ought to
be careful when you see I’m low in my mind.”
“Do go down to see the boy,” he went on, earnestly. “He’s a good boy at
heart, as good as he is handsome and clever. Give him a little of your
precious time and he’ll be worth more to you than all your millions.”
“He’s a young scalawag,” said I, pretending to harden. “I’m almost
convinced that it’s my duty to drive him out and cut him off
altogether. After all I’ve done for him! After all the pains I’ve taken
with him!”
Ridley looked at me timidly, but found courage to say: “He told me he’d
never talked with you so much as sixty consecutive minutes in his whole
life!”
This touched me at the moment. I’m soft at times, where my family is
concerned. “I’ll see; I’ll see,” I said. “Perhaps I can go down to him
Sunday. But don’t annoy me about it again, Jack!” There’s a limit to my
good-nature, even with poor old well-meaning Ridley.
But other matters pressed in, and it was the following Monday and then
the following Saturday before I knew it. Then came the first Sunday in
the month, and Burridge, as usual, brought in the preceding month’s
domestic accounts as soon as I had settled myself at breakfast after
my run and swim and rubdown in my “gym” in the basement. As a rule,
at that time I’m in my best possible humour. My wife and children
know it and lie in wait then with any particularly impudent requests
for favours or particularly outrageous confessions that must be made.
But on the first Sunday in the month even my “gym” can’t put me in
good-humour. I am a liberal man. My large gifts to education and
charity and my generosity with my family prove it beyond a doubt. My
wife looks scornful when I speak of this. Her theory is that my public
gifts are an exhibition of my vanity, and that my establishments, my
yacht, etc., etc., are partly vanity, and partly my selfish passion
for my own comfort. She, however, never attributes a good motive or
instinct to me, or to any one else, nowadays. Really, the change in
her since our modest days is incredible. It is amazing how arrogant
affluence makes women.
But, as I was saying, my monthly bill-day is too much for my
good-humour. It is not the money going out that I mind so much, though
I’m not ashamed to admit that it is not so agreeable to me to see money
going out as it is to see money coming in. The real irritation is the
waste--the wanton, wicked, dangerous waste.
I can’t attend to details. I can’t visit kitchens, do marketing,
superintend housekeepers and butlers, oversee stables, and buy all the
various supplies. I can’t shop for furniture and clothing, and look
after the entertainments. All those things are my wife’s business and
duty. And she has a secretary, and a housekeeper, and Burridge, and
Ridley, to assist her. Yet the bills mount and mount; the waste grows
and grows. Extravagance for herself, extravagance for her children,
thousands thrown away with nothing whatever to show for it! The money
runs away like water at a left-on faucet.
The result is the almost complete estrangement between my wife and me.
Every month we have a fierce quarrel over the waste, often a quarrel
that lasts the month through and breaks out afresh every time we meet.
She denounces me as a miser, a vulgarian. She goads me into furious
outbursts before the children. What with my battles against stupidity
and insolence down-town, and my battles against waste in my family,
my life is one long contention. However, I suppose this is the lot of
all the great men who play large parts on the world’s stage. No wonder
those who fancy we are on earth to seek and find happiness regard life
as a ghastly fraud.
“What’s the demnition total, Burridge?” I asked, when he appeared with
his arms full of books and papers.
“Ninety-two thousand, four, twenty-six, fifty-one,” he answered, in a
tone of abject apology.
I could not restrain an indignant expostulation. “That’s seventy-three
hundred and four above last month. Impossible! You’ve made a mistake in
adding.”
He went over his figures nervously and flushed scarlet. “I beg your
pardon, sir,” he said, in a tone of terror. “The total is ninety-five
thousand instead of ninety-two.”
Ten thousand-odd above month before last! Eighty-nine hundred above the
same month last year! I had to restrain myself from physical violence
to Burridge. I ordered him out of the room--giving as my reason anger
at his mistake in addition. I wanted to hear no more, as I felt sure
the details of the shameful waste would put me in a rage which would
impair my health. The total was enough for my purpose--we were now
living at the rate of more than a million dollars a year! I took the
eleven o’clock train for my place on Long Island.
When I reached my railway station none of my traps was there. In
my angry preoccupation I had forgotten to telephone from the Fifth
Avenue house; and, of course, neither Pigott nor the butler nor
Burridge nor Ridley nor any of my herd of blockhead servants had had
the consideration to repair my oversight. Yet there are fools who say
money will buy everything. Sometimes I think it won’t buy anything but
annoyances.
So I had to go to my place in a rickety, smelly station-surrey--and
that did not soothe my rage. However, as I drove into and through my
grounds--there isn’t a finer park on Long Island--I began to feel
somewhat better. There is nothing like lands and houses to give one the
sensation of wealth, of possession. I have often gone into my vaults
and have looked at the big bundles and boxes of securities; and, by
setting my imagination to work, I have got some sort of notion how vast
my wealth and power are. But bits of paper supplemented by imagination
are not equal to the tangible, seeable things--just as a hundred-dollar
bill can’t give one the sensation in the fingers and in the eyes that
a ten-dollar gold piece gives. That is why I like my big houses and my
city lots and my parked acres in the country--yes, and my yacht and
carriages and furniture, my servants and horses and dogs, my family’s
jewels and finery.
But the instant I entered the house my spirits soured again, curdled
into an acid fury.
I had sent my son down there with his mother to await my sentence upon
him for his crimes--his insults to me, his waste of nearly a million
of my money, his violation of his word of honour, his forgery. I had
been assuming that in those five weeks of waiting he was suffering from
remorse and suspense, was thinking of his crimes against me and of my
anger and justice. As I entered the large drawing-room unannounced,
they were about to go in to luncheon. “They” means my wife and James,
and Walter and Aurora, who had gone down to the country for the
week-end. “They” means also ten others, six of whom were guests staying
in the house. As I stood dumfounded, five more who had been to church
came trooping in. I had gone, expecting a house of mourning. I had
found a revel.
At sight of me the laughter and conversation died. My wife coloured.
James looked abashed for a moment. Then--what a well-mannered,
self-possessed dog he is!--he burst out laughing. “Fairly trapped!” he
said. And he went on to explain to the others: “The governor and I had
a little fall-out, and he sent me down here to play with the ashes.
You’ve caught me with the goods on me, governor. It’s up to me--I’ve
got to square myself. So I’ll pay by giving you the two prettiest young
girls in the room to sit on either side of you at luncheon. Let’s go
in, for I’m half-starved.”
As all the women in the room except three--including Aurora--were
married, James’s remark was doubly adroit. What could I do but put
aside my wrath and set my guests at their ease?
This was the less difficult to do as Natalie Bradish and Horton Kirkby
were among the guests--and stopping in the house. I have long had my
eye on Miss Bradish as the proper wife for James or Walter--whichever
should commend himself to me as my fit successor at the head of the
family I purpose to found with the bulk of my wealth. She is a handsome
girl; she has a proud, distinguished look and manner; she will inherit
several millions some day that can’t be distant, as her father is
in hopelessly bad health; she comes of a splendid, widely connected
family, and is extremely ambitious and free from sentimental nonsense.
Young Kirkby is the very husband for Aurora. His great-grandfather
founded their family securely in city real estate and lived long enough
firmly to establish the tradition of giving the bulk of the fortune to
the eldest male heir. Kirkby is not brilliant; but Aurora has brains
enough for two, and he has a set of long, curved fingers that never
relax their hold upon what’s in them.
After luncheon I drew my wife away to the sitting-room for the plain
talk which was the object of my visit. As the presence of Miss Bradish
and Kirkby in the house had lessened my anger on the score of my wife
and son’s light-hearted way of looking at his crimes, I put forward the
matter of the expense accounts.
“Burridge tells me the total for last month is--” I began, and paused.
As I was speaking I was glancing round the room. I had not been in it
for several years. I had just noted the absence of a Corot I bought ten
years before and paid sixteen thousand dollars for. I don’t care for
pictures or that sort of thing, any more than I care for the glitter
of diamonds or the colours of gold and silver in themselves. I know
that most of this talk of “art” and the like is so much rubbish and
affectation. But works of art, like the precious stones and metals,
have come to be the conventionally accepted standards of luxury, the
everywhere recognised insignia of the aristocracy of wealth. So I have
them, and add to my collection steadily just as I add to my collection
of finely bound books that no one ever opens. What slaves of convention
and ostentation we are!
“What’s become of the Corot that used to hang there?” I asked,
suspiciously, because I had had so many experiences of my family’s
trifling with my possessions.
My wife smiled scornfully. “I believe you carry round in your head
an inventory of everything we’ve got, even to the last pot in the
kitchen,” she said. “The Corot is safe. It’s hanging in my bedroom.”
In her bedroom! A Corot I’ve been offered twenty-five thousand dollars
for, and she had hidden it away in her bedroom! I was irritated when
she put it in her sitting-room where few people came, for it should
have had a good place in our New York palace. But in her bedroom, where
no one but the servants would ever have a chance to look at it!
“Why didn’t you put it in the attic or the cellar?” I asked.
She lifted her eyebrows and gave me an affected, disdainful glance. “I
put it in my bedroom because I like to look at it,” she said.
I laughed. What nonsense! As if any sensible person--and she is
unquestionably shrewdly sensible--ever looks at those things except
when some one is by, noting their “devotion to art.” I said: “Certainly
my family has the most amazing disregard of money--of value. If it were
not----”
“You started to say something about last month’s accounts,” she
interrupted.
“The total was ninety-five thousand,” I said, looking sternly at her.
“You are now living at the rate of more than a million a year. In ten
years we have jumped from one hundred thousand a year to a million a
year. And this madness grows month by month.”
She--shrugged her shoulders!
“I came to say to you, madam--” I went on, furiously.
“Did you look at the items?” she cut in coldly.
“No,” I replied; “I could not trust myself to do it.”
“Twenty-seven thousand of last month’s expenses went toward paying a
small instalment on your little place for your own amusement in the
Adirondacks. I had nothing to do with it. None of us but you will ever
go there.”
This was most exasperating. I can’t account for my leaping into such
a trap, except on the theory that my preoccupation with the railway
matters must have made me forget ordering that item into my domestic
accounts instead of into my personal accounts down-town. Of course, my
contention of my family’s extravagance was sound. But I had seemed to
give the whole case away, had destroyed the effect of all I had said,
and, as I glanced at my wife, I saw a triumphant, contemptuous smile in
her eyes. “You are always trying to punish some one else for your own
sins,” she said. “The truth is that the only truly prodigal member of
the family is yourself.”
Me prodigal with my own wealth! But I did not answer her. One is
at a hopeless disadvantage in discussion with a woman. They are
insensible to reason and logic except when they can gain an advantage
by using them. It’s like having to keep to the rules in a game where
your antagonist keeps to them or makes his own rules as it suits him.
“Nevertheless,” I said, “the waste in my establishments must stop and
your son James must come to his senses. It was about him that I came.”
“Poor boy--he’s had such a bad example all his life!” she said. “My
dear, _we_ have no right to judge him.”
I knew that she, like him, was throwing up to me my transactions with
Judson. And like him, she was taking the petty, narrow view of them.
“Madam,” I said, “your son is a liar, forger, and thief.”
Just then there came a knock at the door and James’s voice called: “May
I come in, mother?”
“No, go away, Jim. Your father and I are busy,” she called in reply.
I went to the door and opened it, beside myself with fury. “Come in!” I
exclaimed. “It’s business that concerns you.”
He entered--tall and strong, his handsome face graver than I had ever
seen it before. He closed the door behind him and stood looking from
one to the other of us. “Well?” he said, “but--no abuse!”
Whenever James and I have come face to face in a crisis I have always
had the, to me, maddening feeling that a will as strong as my own
has been lifting its head defiantly against me. My wife and my son
Walter deal with me by evasion and slippery trickery. My daughter
Aurora wins from me, when I choose to let her, by cajolery or tears.
Little Helen has never yet had to do with me in a serious matter, and
I cannot remember her ever a me even the trifling favours which
most children seek from their parents. But James has always played the
high and haughty--and I am ashamed to think how often he has ridden
me down and defeated me and gained his object. As I have looked upon
him as entitled to peculiar consideration because I had planned for
him one day to wear my mantle, he has had me at a disadvantage. But my
indulgent conduct toward him only makes the blacker his conduct toward
me.
[Illustration: “_‘You liar--you forger!’_”]
As he stood there that day, looking so calm and superior, I can’t
describe the conflict of pride in him and hatred of him that surged up
in me. I lost control of myself. I clinched my fists and shook them in
his face. “You liar! You forger! You conscienceless----”
His mother rushed between us. “I knew it! I knew it!” she wailed. “Ever
since he was a baby, I knew this day would come. Oh, my God! James, my
husband--James, my son!”
James lowered the hand he had lifted to strike me. His face was pale
and his eyes were blazing hate at me--I saw his real feeling toward me
at last. How could I have overlooked it so long?
“Who would ever think you were my father?” he asked, in a voice
that sounded to me like an echo of my own. “You--with hate in your
face--hate for the son whom you poisoned before he was born, whom you
have been poisoning ever since with your example. _You_--my _father_!”
The young scoundrel had taunted me into that calm fury which is so
dreadful that I fear it myself--for, when I am possessed by it,
there is no length to which I would not go. Our wills had met in
final combat. I saw that I must crush him--the one human being who
dared to oppose me and defy me, and he my own child who should have
been deferential, grateful, obedient, unquestioning. “But I am _not_
your father,” I said. “In my will I had made you head of the family,
had given you two-thirds of my estate. I shall write a revocation
here--immediately. I shall make a new will to-morrow.”
If the blow crushed him, he did not show it. He did not even wince as
he saw forty millions swept away from him. “As you please,” he said,
putting scorn into his face and voice--as if I could be fooled by such
a pretence. The man never lived who could scorn a tenth, or even a
fortieth, of forty millions. “I came into this room,” he went on, “to
tell you how ashamed I was of what I have done--how vile and low I
have felt. I didn’t come to apologise to _you_, but to my--my mother
and to myself in your presence. I am still ashamed of what I did, of
what you made me do. Do you know why I did it? Because your money, your
millions, have changed you from a man into a monster. This wealth has
injured us all--yes, even mother, noble though she is. But you--it has
made you a fiend. Well, I wished to be independent of you. You have
brought me up so that I could not live without luxury. But you haven’t
destroyed in me the last spark of self-respect. And I decided to make
a play for a fortune of my own. I--broke my word and speculated. I
overreached--I saw my one hope of freeing myself from slavery to you
slipping from me. I--I--no matter. What _did_ matter after I’d broken
my word? And I was justly punished. I lost--everything.”
As he flung these frightful insults at me my calm fury grew cold as
well. “You will leave the house within an hour,” I said. “Your mother
will make your excuses to her guests--I shall spare you the humiliation
of a public disowning. During my lifetime you shall have nothing from
me--no, nor from your mother. I shall see to that. In my will I shall
leave you a trifling sum--enough to keep you alive. I am responsible to
society that you do not become a public charge. And you may from this
day continue on your way to the penitentiary without hindrance from
those who were your kin.”
As I finished, he smiled. His smile grew broader, and became a laugh.
“Very well, ex-father,” he said; “there’s one inheritance you can’t rob
me of--my mind. I’ll lop off its rotten spots, and I think what’s left
will enable me to stagger along.”
“You imagine I’ll relent,” I went on, “but my days of weakness with you
are over.”
“You--relent!” He smiled mockingly. “I’m not such a fool as to fancy
that. Even if you had a heart, your pride wouldn’t let you. And I’m not
sorry--just at this moment. Perhaps I shall be later--I’m fond of cash,
and your pot for me was a big one. But just now I feel as if you were
doing me a favour.” He drew a long breath. “God!” he exclaimed. “I’m
free! In spite of myself, I’m free! I’m a man at last!”
I did not care to listen to any more of the frothings of the silly
young fool. Already I was regarding him as a stranger, was turning to
his brother Walter as a possible successor to him and my principal
heir. I left the room and went for a walk with my daughter and Natalie
Bradish. When we returned he was gone. I sent for Walter and told him
the news.
“Your brother has forfeited everything,” I said, in conclusion. “It
remains for you to prove yourself worthy of the place I had designed
for him. In the will I shall make to-morrow my estate will be divided
equally among my three children, your mother getting her dower rights.
If you do not show the qualities I hope, the will shall stand. If you
do, I shall make another, giving you your own share plus what I had
intended for James.”
Walter is a square-shouldered youth of medium height, with irregular,
rather commonplace features, a rough skin, and an unpleasant habit
of shifting his eyes rapidly round and round yours as you talk with
him--I am as impartial a judge of my own family as a stranger would
be. Walter has been a good deal of a sneak all his life--at least, he
was up to the time when a man’s real character disappears behind the
pose he adopts to face and fool the world with. “I don’t know what to
say, sir,” he said to me now. “I’d plead for my brother, only that you
are just and must have done what was right. I don’t know how to thank
you for the chance you’re giving me. I can’t hope to come up to your
standards, but I’ll just keep on trying to do my best to please you and
show my gratitude to you. I always have been very proud of being your
son. It will make me doubly proud if I can win your confidence so that
you will select me as head of our family if it should ever need another
head. But all that’s too far away to think about.”
I was much pleased by the modesty and sound sense of what he said, and
from that moment have been taking a less unfavourable view of him.
Indeed, it seems to me that I was unjust to him in my partiality for
his brother. I exaggerated Jim’s impudence into courage, Walter’s
diplomacy into cringing cowardice. This is another illustration of how
careful a man should be not to let his hopes and desires blind him. I
had been refusing to see what a wretched, untrustworthy scoundrel James
was, all because I wished my elder son and namesake to be my principal
heir and had made up my mind that he must be worthy of the honour.
There was only one point left unguarded--lest his mother should, in her
weakness for her first-born, secretly supply him with money. I might
have been powerless to prevent this, though I had determined to take
from her all power over the domestic expenditures and put it in the
hands of Burridge, in order that she might have as few spare dollars
as possible. I knew I could count on her not sacrificing her personal
vanity to keep him in funds. But with characteristic folly James shut
his one door upon himself and spared me the trouble of watching his
mother.
She came to town Thursday last and sent for me. I went up to the house
for luncheon with her. As soon as she heard that I was there she joined
me in the library. Her face was stern and hard. “Read this,” she said,
handing me a letter. It was in James’s handwriting:
_Mother dear_: You don’t know Theodora, or you couldn’t have written
what you did about her. You will love her--no one can help loving her
who knows her. We were married this morning. When will you come and
let me show her what a beautiful, good mother I have? I know you’ll
come as soon as ever you can.
JIM.
“Theodora?” I said--I couldn’t imagine whom he had induced to share his
poverty.
“Theodora Glendenning,” she replied.
“The miserable boy!” I exclaimed, forgetting for an instant that he is
nothing to me. Theodora Glendenning was a widow, an adventuress from
heaven knows where. She had obtained a slight footing in fairly good
New York society a few years before, as a young girl, and had been
invited to one or two first-class houses. She was good-looking, had
the ways and voice of a siren, and a certain plausible sweetness and
gentleness. She trapped young Nick Glendenning. His family promptly
cast him off and they sank into obscurity, living on the income of the
few hundred thousands he had inherited from a grandaunt. Then he died.
We did not know where or how James met her.
“He wrote me on Tuesday,” said my wife, “that he’d been engaged to
Theodora for six months. It is infamous. I wrote him that, if he
sacrificed all his chances for position and recognition in New York by
marrying an adventuress, he needn’t expect me to do anything for him.”
“Now you realise that I knew what I was about when I shook him off,” I
said.
“Yes, James. And after all the care I gave him, after all I did for
him! To defy me, to trample on my love, and marry that worthless nobody
with her beggarly income! I had arranged for him to marry Natalie
Bradish. She’d have helped us with her splendid family.”
I smiled. “She wouldn’t have had him, my dear,” I said; “she will marry
Walter.”
“No--she would have married James. She was crazy about him.”
This amazed me--women are always thinking each other sentimental, yet
every woman ought to know that at bottom all women are sensible and
never take their eyes off the main chance. But I said nothing. I was
too well content with matters as they stood. Women are so perverse
that had I joined her just then in attacking James she might have
veered round to him again on impulse.
Now that he has thwarted her ambitions for him, and for herself through
him, she will be bitter in her hate where I shall be calm in mine.
She had her whole heart in the social strength she was to gain by his
making a brilliant marriage. He has crushed her heart, has killed the
affection she had for him. She would have forgiven him anything but a
wife offensive to her.
I don’t altogether like the idea of this sort of mother love. Men
should be just; but women should be merciful and loving. New York and
wealth and the social struggle have made her too hard. However, I’m not
quarrelling seriously with what works so admirably for my purpose as to
James. Our common disaster in him will draw us nearer together than we
have been for years--at least until the next wrangle over an expense
account. For years we have had opposite interests--I, to restrain her;
she, to outwit me. Now we again have a common interest, and it is
common interest that makes husband and wife live together in harmonious
peace.
Nothing happens with me as with ordinary human beings. What could be
stranger than that my new era of domestic quiet should be founded, not
upon love or affection or feelings of that sort, but upon hate--upon my
and her common hate for our unworthy elder son?
III
It has been two years and five months since I expelled James, yet my
dissatisfaction with Walter has not decreased.
No doubt this is due in part to the grudge a man of my age who loves
power and wealth must have against the impatient waiter for his throne
and sceptre. No doubt, also, age and long familiarity with power have
made me, perhaps, too critical of my fellow-beings and too sensitive to
their shortcomings. But, after all allowances, I have real ground for
my feeling toward Walter.
My principal heir and successor, who is to sustain my dignity after I
am gone, and to maintain my name in the exalted position to which my
wealth and genius have raised it, should have, above all else, two
qualifications--character and an air of distinction.
Walter has neither.
My wife defends him for his lack of distinction in manner and look by
saying that I have crushed him. “How could he have the distinction
you wish,” she says, “when he has grown in the shadow of such a big,
masterful, intolerant personality as yours?” There is justice in this.
I admire distinction, or individuality, but at a distance. I cannot
tolerate it in my immediate neighbourhood. There it tempts me to crush
it. I suspect that it would have exasperated me even in one of my own
flesh and blood. Indeed, at bottom, that may have had something to do
with the beginnings of my break with James.
But whatever excuse there may be for Walter’s shifty, smirking,
deprecating personality, which seems to me, at times, not a peg above
the personality of a dancing-master, there is no excuse whatsoever for
his lack of character.
I rarely talk to him so long as ten minutes without catching him in
a lie--usually a silly lie, about nothing at all. In money matters
he is not sensibly prudent, but downright miserly. That is not an
unnatural quality in age, for then the time for setting the house in
order is short. An avaricious young man is a monstrosity. I suppose
that avarice is almost inseparable from great wealth, or even from
the expectation of inheriting it. Just as power makes a man greedy
of power, so riches make a man greedy of riches. But, granting that
Walter has to be avaricious, why hasn’t he the wit to conceal it? It
gives me no pleasure, nowadays, to give; in fact, it makes me suffer
to see anything going out, unless I know it is soon to return bringing
a harvest after its kind. Yet, I give--at least, I have given, and
that liberally. Walter need not have made himself so noted and disliked
for stinginess that he has been able to get into only one of the
three fashionable clubs I wished him to join--and that one the least
desirable.
His mother says he was excluded because the best people of our class
resent my having elbowed and trampled my way into power too vigorously,
and with too few “beg pardons,” and “if you pleases.” Perhaps my
courage in taking my own frankly wherever I found it may have made his
admission difficult, just as it has made our social progress slow.
But it would not have excluded him--would not have made him patently
unpopular where my money and the fear of me gains him toleration. A
very few dollars judiciously spent would have earned him the reputation
of a good fellow, generous and free-handed.
Your poor chap has to fling away everything he’s got to get that name,
but a rich man can get it for what, to him, is a trifle. By means of a
smile or a dinner I’d have to pay for anyhow, or perhaps by allowing
him to ride a few blocks beside me in my brougham or victoria, I send a
grumbler away trumpeting my praises. I throw an industry into confusion
to get possession of it, and then I give a twentieth of the profits to
some charity or college; instead of a chorus of curses, I get praise,
or, at worst, silence. The public lays what it is pleased to call the
“crime” upon the corporation I own; the benefaction is credited to me
personally.
Nor has Walter the excuse for his lying and shifting and other moral
lapses that a man who is making his way could plead.
I did many things in my early days which I’d scorn to do now. I did
them only because they were necessary to my purpose. Walter has not
the slightest provocation. When his mother says, “But he does those
things because he’s afraid of you,” she talks nonsense. The truth is
that he has a moral twist. It is one thing for a clear-sighted man
of high purpose and great firmness, like myself, to adopt indirect
measures as a temporary and desperate expedient; it’s vastly different
for a Walter, with everything provided for him, to resort to such
measures voluntarily and habitually.
Sometimes I think he must have been created during one of my periods of
advance by ambuscade.
How ridiculous to fall out with honesty and truth when there’s any
possible way of avoiding it! To do so is to use one’s last reserves at
the beginning of a battle instead of at the crisis.
However, it’s Walter or nobody. I cannot abandon my life’s ambition,
the perpetuation of my fortune and fame in a family line. Next to its
shortness, life’s greatest tragedy for men of my kind is the wretched
tools with which we must work. All my days I’ve been a giant, doing
a giant’s work with a pygmy’s puny tools. Now, with the end--no, not
near, but not so far away as it was--
Just as I got home from the Chamber of Commerce dinner two weeks ago
to-night, my wife was coming down to go to Mrs. Garretson’s ball. The
great hall of my house, with its costly tapestries and carpets and
statuary, is a source of keen pleasure to me. I don’t think I ever
enter it, except when I’m much preoccupied, that I don’t look round and
draw in some such satisfaction as a toper gets from a brimming glass
of whiskey. But, for that matter, all the luxuries and comforts which
wealth gives me are a steady source of gratification. The children of
a man who rose from poverty to wealth may possibly--I doubt it--have
the physical gratification in wealth blunted. But the man who does the
rising has it as keen on the last day of healthy life as on the first
day he became the owner of a carriage with somebody in his livery to
drive him.
As my wife came down the wide marble stairs the great hall became
splendid. I had to stop and admire her, or, rather, the way she shone
and sparkled and blazed, becapped and bedecked and bedraped with
jewels as she was. I have an eye that sees everything; that’s why I’m
accused of being ferociously critical. I saw that there was something
incongruous in her appearance--something that jarred. A second glance
showed me that it was the contrast between her rubies and diamonds,
in bands, in clusters, and in ropes, and her fading physical charms.
She is not altogether faded yet--she is fifty to my sixty-four--and
she has been for years spending several hours a day with _masseuses_,
complexion-specialists, hair-doctors, and others of that kind. But
she has reached the age where, in spite of doctoring and dieting and
deception, there are many and plain signs of that double tragedy of a
handsome, vain woman’s life--on the one hand, the desperate fight to
make youth remain; on the other hand, the desperate fight to hide from
the world the fact that it is about to depart for ever.
Naturally it depressed me that I could no longer think with pride of
her beauty, and of how it was setting off my wealth. I must have shown
what I was thinking, for she looked at me, first with anxious inquiry,
then with frightened suspicion, as if guessing my thoughts.
Poor woman! I felt sorry for her.
Her life, for the past twenty years, has been based wholly on vanity.
The look in my face told her, perhaps a few weeks earlier than she
would have learned it from her mirror or some malicious bosom friend,
that the basis of her life was swept away, and that her happiness was
ended. She hurried past me, spoke savagely to the four men-servants
who were jostling one another in trying to help her to her carriage,
and drove away in her grandeur to the ball, probably as miserable a
creature as there was on Manhattan Island that night.
I went up to my apartment, half depressed, half amused--I have too keen
a sense of humour not to be amused whenever I see vanity take a tumble.
As I reached my sitting-room I was in the full swing of my moralisings
on the physical vanity of women, and on their silliness in setting
store by their beauty after it has served its sole, legitimate, really
useful purpose--has caught them husbands. Only mischief can come of
beauty in a married woman. She should give it up, retire to her home,
and remain there until it is time for her to bring out and marry off
her grown sons and daughters. If my wife hadn’t been handsome she might
have done this, and so might have continued to shine in her proper
sphere--the care of her household and her children, the comfort of her
husband.
As I reached this point in my moralisings I caught sight of my own face
by the powerful light over my shaving glass.
I’ve never taken any great amount of interest in my face, or anybody
else’s. I’ve no belief in the theory that you can learn much from your
adversary’s expression. In a sense, the face is the map of the mind.
But the map has so many omissions and mismarkings, all at important
points, that time spent in studying it is time wasted. My plan has been
to go straight along my own line, without bothering my head about the
other fellow’s plans--much less about his looks. I think my millions
prove me right.
As I was saying, I saw my face--suddenly, with startling clearness,
and when my mind was on the subject of faces. The sight gave me a
shock--not because my expression was sardonic and--yes, I shall confess
it--cruel and bitterly unhappy. The shock came in that, before I
recognised myself, I had said, “Who is this _old_ man?”
The glass reflected wrinkles, bags, creases, hollows--signs of the old
age of a hard, fierce life.
Curiously, my first comment on myself, seen as others saw me, was a
stab into my physical vanity--not a very deep stab, but deep enough
to mock my self-complacent jeers at my wife. Then I went on to wonder
why I had not before understood the reason for many things I’ve done of
late.
For example, I hadn’t realised why I put five hundred thousand
dollars into a mausoleum. I did it without the faintest notion that
my instinctive self was saying, “You’d better see to it at once that
you’ll be fittingly housed--some day.” Again, I hadn’t understood why
it was becoming so hard for me to persuade myself to keep up my public
gifts.
I have always seen that for us men of great wealth gifts are not merely
a wise, but a vitally necessary, investment.
Jack Ridley insists that I exaggerate the envy the lower classes feel
for us. “You rich men think others are like yourselves,” he says.
“Because all your thoughts are of money, you fancy the rest of the
world is equally narrow and spends most of its time in hating you
and plotting against you. Why, the fact is that rich men envy one
another more than the poor envy them.” There’s some truth in this. The
fellow with one million enviously hates the fellow with ten; as for
most fellows with twenty or thirty, they can hardly bear to hear the
fellows with fifty or sixty spoken of. But, in the main, Jack is wrong.
I’ve not forgotten how I used to feel when I had a few hundred a year;
and so I know what’s going on in the heads of people when they bow
and scrape and speak softly, as they do to me. It means that they’re
envying and are only too eager to find an excuse for hating. They want
me to think that they like me.
I used to give chiefly because I liked the fame it brought me--also, a
little, because it made me feel that I was balancing my rather ruthless
financial methods by doing vast good with what many would have kept
selfishly to the last penny. Latterly my chief motive has been more
substantial; and I wonder how I could have let wealth-hunger so blind
me, as it has in the past four or five years, that I have haggled over
and cut my public gifts.
The very day after I saw my face in the mirror I definitely committed
myself to my long tentatively promised gift of an additional four
millions to the university which bears my name. I also arranged to get
those four millions--but that comes later. Finally, I began to hasten
my son Walter’s marriage to Natalie Bradish.
My son Walter!
It certainly isn’t lack of shrewdness that unfits him to be head of the
family. Why do the qualities we most admire in ourselves, and find most
useful there, so often irritate and even disgust us in another?
I have not told him that he is already the principal heir under the
terms of my will. He will work harder to please me so long as he thinks
the prize still withheld--still to be earned. He does not know how
firmly my mind is set against James. So he never loses an opportunity
to clinch my purpose. One day last week, in presence of his sister
Aurora, I was reproving him for one of his many shortcomings, and, to
enforce my reproof, was warning him that such conduct did not advance
him toward the place from which his brother had been deposed.
His upper lip always twitches when he is about to launch one of those
bits of craftiness he thinks so profound. The longer I live, the deeper
is my contempt for craft--it so rarely fails to tangle and strangle
itself in its own unwieldy nets. After his lip had twitched awhile,
he looked furtively at Aurora. I looked also, and saw that she was a
partner in his scheme, whatever it was.
“Well!” said I, impatiently, “what is it? Speak out!”
“You spoke of the position James lost,” he forced himself to say;
“there wasn’t any such place, was there, Aurora?”
“No,” she answered; “James was deceiving you right along.”
“What do you mean?” I demanded.
Aurora looked nervously at Walter, and he said: “James often used to
talk to us about your plans, and he always said that he wouldn’t let
you make him your principal heir. He said he would disregard your will
and would just divide the money up, giving a third to mother and making
all us children equal heirs with him.”
It is amazing how the most astute man will overlook the simplest and
plainest dangers. In all my thinking and planning on the subject of
founding a family. I had never once thought of the possibility of my
will being voluntarily broken by its chief beneficiary.
“What reason did he give?” I asked, for I could conceive no reason
whatsoever.
Aurora and Walter were silent. Walter looked as if he wished he had not
launched his torpedo at James.
“What reason, Aurora?” I insisted.
She flushed and stammered: “He said he--he didn’t want to be hated by
mother and the rest of us. He said we’d have the right to hate him, and
couldn’t help it if he should be low enough to profit by your--your----”
“My--what?”
“Your heartlessness.”
“And do you think my plan was heartless?” I asked.
“No,” said Aurora, but I saw that she thought “Yes.”
“You’ve a right to do as you wish with your own,” said Walter. “We know
you’ll do what is for the best interest of us all. Even if you should
leave us nothing, we’d still be in your debt. You owe us nothing,
father. We owe you everything.”
Although this was simply a statement of a truth which I hold to be
fundamental, it irritated me to hear him say it. I know too well what
havoc self-interest works in the sense of right and wrong, and Walter
would be the first of my children to insult my memory if he were to get
less by a penny than any other of the family. Had I been concerning
myself about what my wife and my children would think of me after I was
gone, I should never have entertained the idea of founding a family.
But men of large view and large wealth and large ambition do not
heed these minor matters. When it comes to human beings, they deal in
generals, not in particulars.
A fine world we should have if the masters of it consulted the feelings
of those whom destiny compels them to use or to discard.
I looked at this precious pair of plotters satirically. “Naturally,”
said I, “you never spoke to me of James’s purpose so long as there was
a chance of your profiting by his intended treachery to me.” Then to
Aurora I added: “I understand now why, for several months after James
left, you persisted in begging me to take him back.”
Aurora burst into tears. As tears irritate me, I left the room.
Thinking over the scandalous exhibition of cupidity which these
children of mine had given, I was almost tempted to tear up my will
and make a new one creating a vast public institution that would bear
my name, and endowing it with the bulk of my wealth. I have often
wondered why an occasional man of great wealth has done this. I now
have no doubt that usually it has been because he was disgusted by the
revolting greediness of his natural heirs. If rich men should generally
adopt this course, I suspect their funerals would have less of the air
of sunshine bursting through black clouds--it’s particularly noticeable
in the carriages immediately behind the hearse.
Jack Ridley says my sense of humour is like an Apache’s. Perhaps that’s
why the idea of a posthumous joke of this kind tickles me immensely.
Were I not a serious man, with serious purposes in the world, I might
perpetrate it.
The net result of Walter and Aurora’s effort to advance themselves--I
wonder what Walter promised Aurora that induced her to aid him?--was
that I formed a new plan. I resolved that Walter should marry at once.
As soon as he has a male child I shall make a new will leaving it the
bulk of my estate, and giving Walter only the control of the income for
life--or until the child shall have become a man thirty years old.
That evening I ordered him to arrange with Natalie for a wedding within
two months. I knew he would see her at the opera, as my wife had
invited her to my box. I intended to ask him in the morning what he and
she had settled upon, but before I had a chance I saw in my paper a
piece of news that put him and her out of my mind for the moment.
James, so the paper said, was critically ill with pneumonia at his
house in East Sixty-third Street, near Fifth Avenue. He has lived
there ever since he was married, and has kept up a considerable
establishment. I am certain that his wife’s dresses and entertainments
are part of the cause of my wife’s rapid aging. Really, her hatred
of that woman amounts to insanity. It amazes me, used as I am to the
irrational emotions of women. I could understand her being exasperated
by the social success of James and his wife. I confess that it has
exasperated me--almost as much as has his preposterous luck in Wall
Street. But there is undeniably a better explanation than luck for
his and her social success. They say she has beauty and charm, and
her entertainments show originality and talent, while my wife’s are
commonplace and dull, in spite of the money she lavishes. But, in
addition to those reasons, there are many of the upper-class people who
hate me. Mine is a pretty big omelet; there is a lot of eggs in it;
and, with every broken egg, somebody, usually somebody high up, felt
robbed or cheated.
But I did not trust to my wife’s insane hate for James’s wife to keep
her away from her son in his illness. I went straight to her. “I see
that James is ill, or pretends to be,” I said. “Probably he and his
wife are plotting a reconciliation.”
My wife has learned to mask her feelings behind a cold, expressionless
face; but she has also learned to obey me. She often threatens, but she
dares not act. I know it--and she knows that I know it.
“You will not go to him under any circumstances,” I went on--“neither
you nor any of the rest of us. If you disobey, I shall at once
rearrange my domestic finances. Thereafter you will go to Burridge for
money whenever you want to buy so much as a paper of pins.”
She was white--perhaps with fury, perhaps with dread, perhaps with
both. I said no more, but left her as soon as I saw that she did not
intend to reply. Toward six o’clock that evening I met Walter in the
main hall of the first bedroom floor. He was for hurrying by me, but I
stopped him. I have an instinct which tells me unerringly when to ask a
question.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
He shifted from leg to leg; he, like most people, is never quite at
ease in my presence; when he is trying to conceal some specific thing
from me he becomes a victim of a sort of suppressed hysteria. “To the
drawing-room,” he answered.
“Who’s there?” said I.
He shivered, then blurted it out: “James’s wife.”
“Why didn’t you tell me in the first place?”
He stammered: “I--wished to--to spare you--the----”
“Bah!” I interrupted. As if I could not read in his face that her
coming had roused his fears of a reconciliation with James! “What are
you going to say to her?”
“A message from mother,” he muttered.
“Have you seen your mother, or did you make up the message?”
“A servant brought mother her card and a note. I didn’t know she was in
the house till mother sent for me and gave me the message to take down.”
“Will your mother see her?”
“No, indeed,” he replied, recovered somewhat; “mother won’t have
anything to do with them.”
“Well, go on and deliver your message,” I said; “I’ll step into the
little reception-room behind the drawing-room. See that you speak loud
enough for me to hear every word.”
As I entered the reception-room, he entered the drawing-room. “Mother
says,” he said--naturally, his voice was ridiculously loud and
nervous--“that she has no interest in the information you sent her, and
no acquaintance with the person to whom it relates.”
There was a silence so long that curiosity made me move within range of
one of the long drawing-room mirrors. I saw her and Walter reflected,
facing each other. She was so stationed that I had a plain view of her
whole figure and of her face--the first time I had ever really seen her
face. Her figure was drawn to its full height, and her bosom was rising
and falling rapidly. Her head was thrown back, and upon poor Walter was
beating the most contemptuous expression I ever saw coming from human
eyes. No wonder even his back showed how wilted and weak he was.
As I watched, she suddenly turned her eyes; her glance met mine in
the mirror. Before I could recover and completely drive the look of
amusement from my face, she had waved Walter aside and was standing in
front of me. “You heard what your son said!” she exclaimed; “what do
_you_ say?”
I liked her looks, and especially liked her voice. It was clear. It was
magnetic. It was honest. When I wish to separate sheep from goats I
listen to their voices, for voices do not often lie.
“I refuse to believe that he delivered my note to--to James’s mother.”
There was a break in her voice as she spoke James’s name--it distinctly
made my nerves tingle, unmoved though my mind was. “James is--is--” she
went on, slowly, but not unsteadily--“the doctors say there’s no hope.
And he--your son--sent me, and I am here when--when--but--what do _you_
say?”
It is extraordinary what power there is in that woman’s personality.
If Walter hadn’t been there I might have had to lash myself into a
fury and insult her to save myself from being swept away. As it was, I
looked at her steadily, then rang the bell. The servant came.
“Show this lady out,” I said, and I bowed and went to Walter in the
drawing-room. I can only imagine how she must have felt. Nothing
frenzies a woman--or a man--so wildly as to be sent away from a “scene”
without a single insult given to gloat over or a single insult received
to bite on.
The morning paper confirmed her statement of James’s condition. In
fact, I didn’t have to wait until then, for toward twelve that night
I heard the boys in the street bellowing an “extra” about him--that
he was dying, and that none of his family had visited him. Those
whose sense of justice is clouded by their feelings will be unable to
understand why I felt no inclination to yield. Indeed, I do not expect
to be understood in this except by those of my class--the men whose
large responsibilities and duties have forced them to put wholly aside
those feelings in which the ordinary run of mankind may indulge without
harm. I don’t deny that I had qualms. I can sympathise now with those
kings and great men who have been forced to order their sons to death.
And I have charged against James the pangs he then caused me.
In the superficial view it may seem inconsistent that, while I stood
firm, I was shocked by my wife’s insensibility. I had to do my duty,
but she should have found it impossible to do hers. I could not, of
course, rebuke her and Aurora for not transgressing my orders; but all
that night and all the next day I wondered at their hardness, their
unwomanliness. It seemed to me another illustration of the painful side
of wealth and position--their demoralising effect upon women.
The late afternoon papers announced--truthfully--a favourable change
in James’s condition. In defiance of the doctors’ decree of death,
he had rallied. “It is that wife of his,” I said to myself. “Such a
personality is a match for death itself.” I had a sense of huge relief.
Indeed, it was not until I knew James wasn’t going to die that I
realised how hard a fight my parental instinct had made against duty.
If I had liked Walter better I should not have been thus weak about
James.
When I reached home and was about to undress for my bath and evening
change, my daughter Helen knocked and entered. “Well?” said I.
She stood before me, tall and slim and golden brown--the colour is
chiefly in her hair and lashes and brows, but there is a golden brown
tinge in her skin; as for her eyes, they are more gold than brown, I
think. Her dress reaches to her shoe-tops. With her hands clasped in
front of her, she fixed her large, serious eyes upon me.
“I went to see James this morning,” she said; then seemed to be
waiting--not in fear, but in courage--for my vengeance to descend.
I scowled and turned away to hide the satisfaction this gave me. At
least there is one female in my family with a woman’s heart!
“Who put you up to it?” I demanded, sharply.
[Illustration: “_‘Not to have told you would have been a lie.’_”]
“Nobody. I heard the boys calling in the street--and--I went.”
I turned upon her and looked at her narrowly. “Why do you tell me?” I
asked.
“Because not to have told you would have been a lie.”
She said this quite simply. I had never been so astonished before in
my life. “And what of that?” said I--a shameful question under the
circumstances to put to a child; but I was completely off my guard, and
I couldn’t believe there was not an underlying motive of practical gain.
“I do not care to lie,” she answered, her eyes upon mine. I found her
look hard to withstand--a new experience for me, as I can usually
compel any one’s gaze to shift.
“You’re a good child,” said I, patting her on the shoulder. “I shall
not punish you this time. You may go.”
She flushed to the line of her hair, and her eyes blazed. She drew
herself away from my hand and left me staring after her, more
astonished than before.
A strange person--surely, a personality! She will be troublesome some
day--soon.
With such beauty and such fine presence she ought to make a magnificent
marriage.
I was free to take up Walter and Natalie again. After dinner I said to
him, as we sat smoking: “Have you spoken to Natalie? What does she say?
What date did you settle upon?”
He looked sheepishly from Burridge to Ridley, then appealingly at me. I
laughed at this affectation of delicacy, but I humoured him by sending
them away. “What date?” I repeated.
He twitched more than usual before he succeeded in saying: “She refuses
to decide just yet.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“She says she doesn’t want to settle down so young.”
“Young!” I exclaimed. “Why, she’s twenty-one--out three seasons. What’s
the matter with you, that you haven’t got her half frightened to death
lest she’ll lose you?” With all he has to offer through being my son
and my principal heir he ought to be able to settle the marriage on his
own terms in every respect--and to keep the whip for ever afterward.
“I don’t know,” he replied; “she just won’t. I don’t think she cares
much about--about the marriage.”
This was too feeble and foolish to answer. There isn’t a more sensible,
better-brought-up girl in New York than Natalie. Her mother began
training her in the cradle to look forward to being mistress of a great
fortune. I knew she, and her mother and father too, had fixed on mine
as _the_ fortune as long ago as five years--she was only sixteen when
I myself noted her making eyes at Jim and never losing a chance to
ingratiate herself with me. Her temporising with Walter convinced me
there was something wrong--and I suspected what. I went to see her, and
got her to take a drive with me.
As my victoria entered the Park I began: “What’s the matter, Natalie?
Why won’t you ‘name the day’? We’re old friends. You can talk to me as
freely as to your own father.”
“I know it,” she replied; “you’ve always been _so_ good to me--and you
are _so_ kind and generous.” There isn’t a better manner anywhere than
Natalie’s. She has a character as strong and fine as her face.
“I’m getting old,” I went on, “and I want to see my boy settled. I want
to see you my daughter, ready to take up your duties as head of my
house.”
“Don’t try to hurry me,” she said, a trace of irritation in her voice.
“I’m only twenty-one. I wish to have a little pleasure before I become
as serious as I’ll have to be when I’m--your daughter.”
I noticed that she pointedly avoided saying “Walter’s wife.” This
confirmed my suspicion. The habit of judging everything and everybody
calmly and dispassionately has made me see the members of my own family
just as I see outsiders. And I couldn’t blame her for balking at
Walter, exasperating though it was to have her thus impede my plans.
“Is there anything wrong, Natalie?” I asked, gently. “Speak frankly to
me--perhaps I can smooth it out.”
“Oh, thank you!” she exclaimed. It’s really delightful to see a person
who can be warmhearted, yet stop short of indiscreet and dangerous
sentimentality. “But,” she went on, “how can I tell _you_?”
“Is it Walter?” I asked, with a smile that invited confidence and
guaranteed sympathy.
She was silent.
“Has he been disagreeable to you?”
“Oh, no!--he’s kindness itself. But--I don’t know--I simply can’t make
up my mind to marry.”
She didn’t add “him,” but she let me see that she meant it. I saw the
struggle that had been going on in her mind. She did not like him, to
put it mildly. She longed to give him up. Every time she thought of him
she felt that she must. Every time she thought of me and my fortune,
and the position I would give my son’s wife, she felt that she couldn’t.
“Have you talked with your mother about this?” I knew what a
clear-headed, far-sighted woman Matt Bradish’s wife was--she’s married
off three children, all splendidly, not to speak of her catching Matt.
“If she doesn’t stop nagging me she’ll drive me to marry--somebody
else,” said Natalie, her voice trembling with anger. “I’ll kick the
traces, sure as fate.”
“But I’m sure you don’t care for this somebody else,” I said,
positively. I knew the chap--a painter. I can’t conceive why people of
our sort permit youths of that kind to roam among their marriageable
daughters. Even a sensible, well-trained girl, with all youth’s disdain
of poverty and adoration of wealth, has her foolish moments like the
rest of us. “I’m sure you don’t,” I repeated.
“But at least I don’t--don’t--_dislike_ him.”
I was thoroughly alarmed. I saw that she was actually trying to goad
me into anger against her; that she was riding for a fall; wished to
force herself into a position where marriage with Walter would be made
impossible. The poor child hadn’t the heart to refuse the prize which
she lacked the stomach to take; she wished to make me snatch it from
her. But the Bradish connection is far too important to my plans. I
haven’t had my hand on my temper-rein for forty years without being
able to control my feelings--when I wish. Besides, it was Walter that
she practically said she disliked; and I can see how she might--I
certainly shouldn’t love him if it were not my duty to do so.
“You’ve got your choice, my child,” said I, “of being married for
your money or of marrying into as enviable a position as there is in
New York. I _know_ you’re too sensible to let trifles obscure your
judgment.”
“I simply _won’t_ be driven!” she retorted. “Why should I bother? I’ve
got a little something in my own right.”
“Just enough to make you realise the possibilities of wealth,” I
replied--“just enough to spur your ambition.” I began to watch her face
keenly. “And you sha’n’t have to wait for your triumph,” I said, and I
made an impressive pause before I slowly added: “I’m going to settle an
annual income of a quarter of a million on you for life.”
I saw her face soften. The colour came and went in her delicate skin.
“I have tested you, Natalie,” I went on. “I know you are the woman
I want as my daughter. It will make me happy to see you outshining
them all, as you will. And I’ll make you absolutely independent of
Walter--of me, even.”
She was looking at me with glistening eyes. I saw that I had thrilled
her through and through. Profoundly to move a human being, one must
touch his or her deepest passion--his or her particular form of vanity.
“Won’t you, Natalie?” I pleaded, “won’t you make me happy? Won’t you
let me give you what your beauty and refinement demand?”
She looked at me sweetly--a look of surrender.
I knew I had won. Then her eyes were twinkling, and instantly I grasped
the reason. We both burst out laughing. It certainly was amusing--a
father wooing and winning for his son where all his son’s efforts had
made his cause only more hopeless. And throughout, what a quaint
reversal of old-established, generally accepted ideas of love and
marriage! But--“Other times, other customs!”
[Illustration: “_‘You will marry on the sixteenth of April, at noon.
Get yourself ready.’_”]
I dropped Natalie at Mrs. Kirkby’s and went back to my study. I rang
the bell and sent the answering servant for Walter. Presently I looked
up from my work--he was standing before me, shifting his eyes from
point to point, his body from leg to leg.
“You will marry on the sixteenth of April, at noon,” said I. “Get
yourself ready.”
And I dismissed him with a wave of my hand.
It would be sheer madness for me to keep my apparent promise, made, in
the heat of my earnestness, merely to save Natalie from her own folly,
and therefore not really binding. To give her a quarter of a million a
year absolutely and for life would be to invite disaster--no, to compel
it. She’d be in the divorce courts ridding herself of Walter within
two years.
She shall have the substance of my promise--I shall do everything for
her. But she must not have the mere letter, which would injure her,
would tempt her to wreck her life and my plans and the future of her
children. It was wise to promise; it would be wrong to fulfil. No, I
must retain full control, must keep my steadying hand firmly upon her.
And, after all, what did I pledge?
I was careful to phrase it delicately, for I’m always extremely
particular in my choice and use of words at crucial moments. I was
careful to say, “an annual income of a quarter of a million.” All turns
upon the word “an”--if it were “the,” my phrase would mean something
entirely different.
I shall settle two hundred and fifty thousand on her on the day they
marry--after the ceremony. I shall protest that a quarter of a million
in all was what I meant--and I certainly did, though I don’t here deny
that I may have meant for her to think I meant a quarter of a million a
year. She will be--not in what you would call a pleasant state of mind.
But what can she do? When she shall have calmed down, she’ll probably
give me the benefit of the doubt, tell herself she misunderstood me,
rail at herself for her folly, and then--behave herself.
True, she’s shrewd, and her parents, too. They’ll try legally to commit
me _before_ the wedding. But surely I can circumvent them.
There’s “a way out.” There _always_ is!
IV
It was necessary for me to find, calculating liberally, about
eight million dollars--the four millions definitely promised to my
university, a quarter of a million to redeem my promise to Natalie,
a million properly to set Walter and her going in an independent
establishment, two millions to provide them with the income to
maintain it, and about half a million for my own and my family’s
regular annual expenses. Further, an investment of twelve millions
that had been sending its seven per cent. securely and regularly for
the past nine years was about to fall in through the payment of the
debt it represented--I could write a volume on the harassments and
exasperations of hunting investments. Finally, I was hoping that Aurora
would marry Horton Kirkby, which might mean a million, perhaps several
millions, more, if he should demand a dowry.
The situation commanded me to plan and carry through some new
enterprise which would afford me a safe investment for my released
twelve millions and in addition would net me enough to cover well the
other demands upon me. Years ago--as soon as I had my first million put
by--I resolved that I would never for any purpose whatsoever subtract
a penny either from the principal or from the income of my fortune.
Gifts of all kinds, expenses of all kinds, outgo of every description,
must come from new sources of revenue; my fortune and its income and
the surplus over the previous year’s outgo must be treated as a sacred
fund of which I was merely the trustee. That rule has put me often
in straits, has forced me to many money-making measures that in the
narrow view would be called relentless. But to it the world owes my
highest achievements, as a financier and industrial leader, and to it I
owe the bulk of my fortune.
The brain earns in vain, however hugely, if the hands do not hoard;
and, thanks to my rule, my hands have been like those valves which open
only to pressure from without and seal the more tightly the greater the
pressure from within.
I could not break my rule. Yet I must properly marry my children
and must keep my promise to my university; and to have left twelve
millions of capital idle would have been to show myself unworthy of the
responsibilities of great wealth. I was thus literally driven to one
of those large public services which are so venomously criticised by
the small and the envious. Every action of no matter what kind produces
both good and bad consequences. To wait until one could act without
any unfortunate results to anybody would be to sit motionless, even to
refrain from eating. The most that conscience demands is that one shall
do only those things which in his best judgment will show a balance on
the side of good.
I had long had my eye on certain mines and appendant manufactories
situated at several points on two of my three lines of railway. They
were doing well enough in a small way; but I knew that, combined under
the direction of such a brain as mine, they would become immensely
more profitable. I now saw no alternative to taking them and making
them as valuable and as useful as they were clearly intended to be.
In preparation for the _coup_ I withdrew from the directory of my
third railway, substituting one of my unrecognised agents, himself a
millionaire in a small way; and I put my stock in the names of others
of my agents and did not deny the report that I had ceased to have any
financial interest in the road. Thus I was in a position to alter its
freight rates without the change being traced to me by those prying
meddlers who are so active in their interference in other people’s
business nowadays. When it was universally believed that I no longer
had any connection with my third road, and that it had passed to a
control hostile to me, I ordered it to give large secret rebates upon
all freight of the kind I wished to affect.
The result was that the owners of those mines and factories, being
compelled to ship by my two other railways, which stiffly maintained
rates, were no longer able to compete. Their competitors, shipping by
my third line, easily undersold them with the assistance of the secret
rebate. They came in a stew and sweat to my two presidents and said
that secret rebates by the third line were the cause of their impending
ruin. My two presidents agreed with them and opened a fierce war of
words upon my third president--him whom they and every one else thought
hostile to me. He retorted with a sweeping denial of their charges. “It
is nothing new in a world of self-excuse,” said he, “for incompetent
business men to attribute their misfortunes to the wickedness of others
instead of to the real source--their own incapacity and incompetence.”
And so the sham battle raged by mail and newspaper interview. But--the
mine and factory owners I was gunning for got nothing tangible out
of it. Their competitors continued to undersell them; their business
rapidly languished.
When I saw that they were in a sufficiently humble frame of mind I came
to their relief. I sent word to them that, as I had a warm personal
feeling for the towns dependent upon the prosperity of their works, I
would take a hand in their languishing businesses if they wished and
would do my utmost to maintain the apparently hopeless battle.
My offer was received with enthusiastic gratitude--as it should have
been; for, while it is true that I had precipitated the crisis which
their antiquated methods of doing business would have inevitably
brought sooner or later, is it not also true that I have the right
to do what I wish with my own? And are not those two railways, and
the third, as well, my own? But for the present rampant spirit of
contemptuous disregard for the rights of private property and the
impudent intrusions into private business it would not have been
necessary for me to disguise myself and act like a housebreaker in
order to exercise my plain rights--yes, and do my plain duty; for can
there be any question in any judicial mind that it is the duty of men
of the commercial and financial genius which I possess to use it to
bring the resources of the country to their highest efficiency?
After some negotiations I got control of the properties that I needed
and that needed me. I agreed to pay altogether fifteen millions for
a controlling share in them--about half what it would have cost me
before I brought my rebate artillery to bear, but about twice what
control would have cost had I battered away for six months longer. I
might have accomplished my purpose much more cheaply; but I am not
a hard man, and I do not flatter myself when I say that conscience
is the dominant factor in all my operations. I felt that in the
circumstances the owners were entitled to consideration and that to
make my victory complete would be an abuse of power. It is hardly
necessary to add that my generosity had its prudent side, as has all
rational generosity. To have assailed the properties too long in order
to get them cheap would have permanently impaired their value; to have
wiped out the owners utterly would have caused a profound, possibly
dangerous, public resentment against my class, too many members of
which had been guilty of the grave blunder of using their power without
regard to public opinion. But while prudence was a factor in my general
settlement, the main factor was, as I have said, conscience. Not
the narrow conscientiousness of ordinary men, which is three parts
ignorance, two parts cowardice, and five parts envy--for is it not
usually roused only when the acts of others are to be judged?
When my offer was accepted I organised a combination to take over
the properties, and I paid for them with its guaranteed bonds and
preferred stock. Then I countermanded the order for a heavy secret
rebate against their products and, instead, issued an order for a
small secret rebate in their favour--letting the public think I had by
some secret audacious move regained control of my third railroad. The
combination’s business boomed, its stock went up, and all that it was
necessary for me to sell was eagerly bought. What with the bonds and
the stocks I sold, I had gained control without its having cost me a
penny. It is not vanity, is it, when I call that genius?
But control is not possession, and these properties are worth
possessing. I must possess them. It is not just that so large a part of
the profits of my labour--of my act of creation--should go to others.
I have anticipated somewhat. The operation took a considerable time,
but not long in view of the great results. When one has my vast
resources and my peculiar talents, men and events _move_, obstacles
are blown up, roads are thrust swift and straight through the thickest
tangles, and the objective is reached before feeble folk have got
beyond the stage of debate and diplomacy. Still, nearly a year elapsed
between the start and the finish, and many things happened which were
the reverse of satisfactory--most of them, as usual, in my domestic
affairs.
I had got the enterprise only fairly under way when the invitations
for Walter’s wedding were issued. Natalie’s father had seen me several
times and had shown his determination to intervene in the matter of
her dowry by bringing up the subject at our business conferences
whenever he could force the smallest opening. Like all my associates,
from capitalist to clerk, he is in awe of me. I see to it that in
the velvet glove there shall always be holes through which the iron
hand can be plainly seen. That often saves me the exertion of using
it. An iron hand, once it has an established reputation, is mightier
when merely seen than when felt. He would always begin by some vague,
halting reference to my promised generosity.
“A royal gift, Galloway!” he would say, enthusiastically. “You
certainly are a king, much more powerful than those European
figureheads.”
But he never had the courage to speak the exact sum, the “quarter of a
million dollars a year,” that I saw in his hungry, glistening, hopeful,
yet doubtful eyes. And I would not take the hint to discuss the gift
further, but would put him off by showing how completely I was absorbed
in the forming combination. Probably at the time he was letting his
greed blind him into believing I would make as big a fool of myself as
I had rashly promised and so was fearful of irritating me in any way.
Two days before the wedding invitations went out he forced himself on
me for lunch. I saw determination written in his face--determination
to compel me to something definite about that “quarter of a million a
year” for his daughter. So, at the first pause in the conversation, I
played my card.
“Matt,” said I, “I really must arrange the formalities for that
settlement on _our_ daughter. I’ll have my lawyer--will the latter part
of the week do? He’s up to his eyes in the combination just now.”
Bradish looked enormously relieved. He could hardly keep from laughing
outright with delight--the miserable old seller of his own children.
“Oh, I wasn’t disturbing myself,” he replied; “your word’s good
enough, though, of course, you’d--we’d--want the thing in legal
shape--before the marriage.”
“Of course,” said I, waving the matter aside as settled, and beginning
again on the affairs of the combination. I had let him into it on
attractive terms and had put him on my board of directors. He revelled
in these favours as the mere foretaste of his gains from the powerful
commercial alliance he was making through his daughter.
Out went the invitations--and the first danger point was rounded.
On the following Sunday night I left suddenly in my private car for an
inspection of the new properties. Every day of nearly two weeks was
full to its last minute. When I returned to New York five days before
the wedding, I was utterly worn out. I went to bed and sent for my
doctor--Hanbury.
He is one of those highly successful New York physicians who are famed
among the laity for their skill in medicine, and in the profession
for their skill at hocus-pocus. He is a specialist in what I may call
the diseases of the idle rich--boredom, exaggeration of a slight
discomfort into a frightful torture, craving for fussy personal
attentions, abnormal fear of death, etc. He is a professional “funny
man,” a discreet but depraved gossip, and a tireless listener--and is
handsome and well-mannered. He has a soft, firm touch--on pulse and on
purse. The women adore him--when they want to rest, they complain of
nervousness and send for him to prescribe for them. One of his most
successful and lucrative lines of treatment is helping wives to loosen
the purse-strings of husbands by agitating their sympathies and fears.
He never irritates or frightens his clients with unpleasant truths. He
doesn’t tell the men to stop eating and drinking and the women to stop
gadding. He gives them digestion-tablets and nerve-tonics and sends
them on agreeable excursions to Europe. Of all the swarm of parasites
that live upon rich New Yorkers none keeps up a more dignified front
than does Hanbury. I’ve found him useful in social matters, and, as
I’ve paid him liberally, he is greatly in my debt.
“Hanbury,” I said, from my bed, “I’m a very sick man.”
“Nonsense--only tired,” replied he. “A good sleep, a few days’ rest----”
I looked at him steadily. “I tell you I’m desperately ill, and here’s
my son’s wedding only five days away!”
“You’ll be all right by that time. I’ll guarantee to fix you up, good
as new.”
I continued to look at him steadily. “No, I sha’n’t--it’s impossible.
And I sha’n’t be able to transact any business whatever. I mustn’t be
allowed to see even the members of my own family. Do you understand?”
He glanced curiously at me, then reflected, twisting the end of his
Van Dyck beard. He looked at my tongue, listened to my heart, felt my
pulse, and took my temperature. “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said,
gravely; “I see you’re worse off than I thought. We must have a trained
nurse.”
“But I must have you, too,” said I. “You must move into the house, and
I don’t want anybody but you to attend me.”
“Very well. You know I’m at your service. I’ll--_superintend_ the
nurse.”
“Thank you, Hanbury,” said I. “You understand me perfectly. I can trust
you. And--something might happen to me--I’ll write you a check for ten
thousand at once--a little personal matter quite apart from your bill.”
Hanbury reddened. I think he thought he was hesitating. But when he
spoke it was to say: “Thank you--if you wish--but I’m sure I’ll pull
you through.”
“I shall be able to see _no one_,” I went on. “But I’ve set my heart on
my son’s marrying--the wedding _must not be put off_. I’m sure it would
kill me if there were to be a delay.”
“I understand.” His eyes were smiling; the rest of his face was grave.
“And not a word of the serious nature of my illness must get into
the papers. You will deny any rumour of that kind, should there be
occasion. My stocks must not be affected--and they would be, and the
whole list----”
“And the prosperity of the country,” said Hanbury.
This illness of mine, while primarily for smoothly carrying through
Walter’s marriage, was really inspired by an actual physical need. I
had long felt that the machine needed rest. The necessity of preventing
Natalie from making a fool of herself gave me the opportunity to
combine rest with accomplishment. Before shutting myself in I had put
my affairs into such shape that my lieutenants and secretaries could
look after them. I dozed and slept and listened to the nurse or Hanbury
reading, or talked with Hanbury. The nurse had little to do--and I
suspect could do little. What Hanbury did not do was done by my stupid
old Pigott, half crazed with fear lest I should die and he should find
that he was right in suspecting he had not been handsomely remembered
in my will. Hanbury’s manner was so perfect that, had I not felt
robustly well on long sleep, short diet, and no annoyances, I might
have been convinced and badly frightened. My family--Hanbury managed to
keep them from thinking it necessary to try to impress me with their
affection for me by pretending wild alarm. He had most difficulty with
poor little Helen--not so very little any more, though I think of her
as a baby still. It’s astonishing how unspoiled she is--another proof
of her unusuality.
On the third day Hanbury said: “Your wife tells me she must see you,
and that, if she doesn’t, the wedding will surely be postponed.”
“It’s impossible to admit her--when I’m just entering the crisis,”
replied I. “Tell her--you know how to do it--that, if Bradish acts up,
she shall as a last resort go to Burridge, who will let him see my
will. And can’t you call--don’t you think you had better call--some
one--say Doctor Lowndes--in consultation?”
He reflected for several minutes. “I’ll call Lowndes,” he said. “You
couldn’t possibly have picked out a better man.” And he looked at me
with the admiration I deserved.
“Let Bradish know you’ve done it,” I added.
“Certainly,” he replied, in a tone which assured me he knew what to do
at the right time.
Lowndes came--and went. A quarter of an hour before he came Hanbury
gave me a dose of some strong-smelling, yellow-black medicine. The
blood bounded through my arteries and throbbed with fierce violence in
my veins; I sank into a sort of stupor. I dimly realised that another
man was in the room with Hanbury and was making a hasty examination
of me. It must have been an amusing farce. Lowndes indorsed Hanbury,
and--yesterday I paid Lowndes’s bill for twelve hundred dollars.
I fell asleep while he was still solemnly studying Hanbury’s
temperature chart. When I awoke the latter was reading by the shaded
electric light on the night-stand. I felt somewhat dazed and tired, but
otherwise extremely comfortable.
“What news?” I asked.
“Your wife says the wedding is to go on--a quiet ceremony at Mr.
Bradish’s house. I fear I gave him the impression that, while there was
no immediate danger, you would----”
“Hardly pull through?”
“I fear so.”
That amused me. “Did he see my will?” I asked.
“I believe he did. I think that was what decided him.”
And well it might, for not only had he read that I had willed
three-fourths of my entire estate to my son Walter, but also he had
read a schedule of my chief holdings which I had folded in with the
will in anticipation of this very contingency. It must have amazed
him--it must have stirred every atom in his avaricious old body--to
see how much richer I am than is generally supposed. No, it would have
been impossible for him to take any chances on losing my principal
heir for his daughter after that will and that schedule had burned
themselves into his brain.
I’ve not the slightest doubt that he knew his daughter would never get
the dowry she was dreaming of, for he is a sensible, practical man.
If I did not know how glibly young people talk and think of huge sums
of money nowadays I’d not believe Natalie herself silly enough ever
seriously to imagine me giving her outright the enormous sum necessary
to produce a quarter of a million a year.
Hanbury urged that Walter and his bride go down to the country near
town, assuring them he could give them several hours’ warning of a
turn for the worse. The change in the wedding plans had started a
report that I was dangerously ill. As the best possible denial of this
stock-depressing rumour they yielded to Hanbury’s representations.
I ordered Hanbury to give it out that I was much better, as soon as
I heard that the marriage ceremony had been performed, and I began
to mend so rapidly that he, in alarm for his reputation, begged me
to restrain myself. “I want people to say I worked a cure,” he said,
“not to say I worked a miracle--and then wink.” In two weeks I was far
enough advanced for Walter and Natalie to sail on the trip which my
illness had delayed.
I was now free to give my entire attention to my down-town affairs.
My long rest had made me young again and had given me fresh points of
view upon nearly every department of my activity. Also I found that
my success with my big combination and my stupendous public gift had
enormously increased my reputation. Half one’s power comes from within
himself, the other half from the belief of other people in him. My star
was approaching the zenith, and I saw it. I always work incessantly,
regardless of the position of my star--no man who accomplishes great
things ever takes his mind off his work.
Not that I am one of those who disbelieve in luck. Luck is the tide.
When it is with me, I reach port--if I row hard and steer straight.
When it is against me, I must still row hard and steer straight to keep
off the rocks and be ready for the turn.
At my suggestion, my down-town confidential man intimated to a few of
the principal men in the towns dependent on my mines and factories
that it would be gracious and fitting to show in some public way their
appreciation of what I had done. Usually these demonstrations are
extremely perfunctory, betraying on the surface that they are got up
either by the man honoured or out of a reluctant sense of decency and a
lively sense of the right way to get more favours. But in this instance
the suggestion met with a spontaneous and universal response. All that
my agents had to do in the matter was to organise the enthusiasm and
relieve the entertainment committee of the heavier expenses--such as
railway transportation, catering, music, and carriages. The people did
the rest.
They regarded me as their saviour--and so I was. Could I not have
destroyed them had I willed it? Was I not inaugurating for them a
prosperity such as the former small-fry owners of those properties had
neither the genius nor the resources to create?
The trouble with those who criticise the morality of the actions of men
like me is that they are trying to study astronomy with a microscope.
Jack Ridley and I fell into an argument along these lines one evening
after dinner, and the only answer he could make to me was, “Then a
murderer, on the same principle, could say: ‘I’m killing this man
so that his family, to whom he’s really of no use, may get his life
insurance and live comfortably and happily. I’m not doing it because
I want what he has in his pockets--though I’ll take it partially to
repay me for risking my neck.’” I couldn’t help smiling--he put it so
plausibly. I should have reasoned precisely like that twenty years ago.
But my mind and my conscience have grown since then. I no longer look
out upon life through the twisted glass of the windows of the House of
Have-not; I see it through the clear French-plate of the House of Have.
When the programme for my testimonial was perfected, a joint delegation
from the city governments, the chambers of commerce, and the ministers’
associations of the five towns waited upon me to invite me to a grand
joint reception and banquet to be held in the largest town. They
invited my wife, also, but I did not permit her to accept. In the first
place, she had done nothing to entitle her to divide the honour with
me; and, in the second place, she would have had her head even more
utterly turned than it now is. On the appointed day I went up in my
private car, taking Burridge and Jack Ridley with me. I had outlined to
Ridley what I wished to say, and he had expanded it into the necessary
three speeches. In the main he caught the spirit of my ideas very
cleverly. The only editing I had to do was in striking out a lot of
self-deprecatory rubbish which would have made me minimise my part in
the new era for the towns. A man is a fool who assists his enemies to
rob him of what is justly his. How could I expect any one to have a
proper respect for me if I did not show that I have a proper respect
for myself?
Where this so-called modesty is genuine it is a dangerous weakness;
where it is false, it is hypocritical cowardice.
As the train carrying my car drew into the station I stared amazed,
much to the delight of the reception committee, which had joined me at
the station below. Before me I saw ten or twelve thousand people. The
schoolgirls, each dressed in white and carrying flowers, occupied the
front space--there must have been a thousand of them.
“Wonderful! Wonderful!” I exclaimed.
“There hasn’t been such an outpouring of the people,” said a gentleman
who stood near me, “since Mr. Blaine passed through here when he was a
candidate for the presidency.”
I noted that several of the committee grew red and frowned at him.
Afterward Ridley told me why--the Blaine demonstration had led them
to expect that he would carry the county by an overwhelming majority;
instead, he had lost it by a “landslide” vote against him.
When the train stopped, a battery of artillery began to fire a salute
of one hundred guns. Several bands struck up, the children sang “The
Star-Spangled Banner,” and the crowd burst into frenzies of cheering.
I was overcome with emotion and the tears streamed down my cheeks. At
that the cheering was more tremendous and I saw many of the women and
little girls crying.
I entered the carriage drawn by six horses, the mayor of the town
beside me, and the march to the Court House began. I had given my
workingmen a holiday and my excursion trains had poured the people
of the four other towns into this fifth town, about quadrupling its
population for the day. The streets were therefore thronged from the
house-walls to the edges of a lane just wide enough for the procession.
The houses were draped with bunting; arches of evergreens and bunting,
each bearing my name and words of welcome, spanned the route of march
at frequent intervals. I stood all the way, my hat in hand. As I bowed,
the cheers answered me. The bells in all the towers and steeples rang,
cannon boomed, and the procession, in five divisions, each with a band
and militia, wound in my wake. My heart swelled with triumph and with
grateful appreciation. I fully realised myself for the first time in my
life.
As I have said, I always did have a self-respecting opinion of
myself, even when an over-nice and inexperienced conscience was
annoying me with its hair-splittings. As I have grown older, and have
seen the inferiority of other men and the superiority of my own mind
and judgment, naturally my early opinion has been strengthened and
deepened. But on that day I realised how my own sight of myself had
been obscured by a too close view. My domestic exasperations, the
necessary disagreeableness and pettiness of so many of the details of
my great projects, the triviality of my routine of business and its
harassments--all these had combined to make me belittle my own stature
and bulk. On that day I saw myself as others see me. I felt a great
uplifting, a supreme disdain for those who oppose me or cavil at me, a
high and firm resolve to devote myself thereafter more confidently and
more boldly to my plans.
But--the more splendid the crown, the more splitting the headache.
At the banquet in the evening I observed that the enthusiasm of the
daytime was not being sustained. I was amazed and irritated by the
large number of vacant places at the tables, when my agents had been
instructed judiciously and quietly to distribute free tickets should
there not be a sufficient number of persons able to pay the five
dollars a plate we were charging for a nine-dollar dinner. I was
puzzled by the nervous uneasiness of those who sat with me at the
table of honour and who had been all geniality a few hours before.
The speeches seemed to me halting and inadequate--my own speech,
well calculated to rouse local pride, was received with a faint
hand-clapping which soon died away. After the dinner I, Burridge, and
Ridley drove alone to the station. It was filled with weary throngs
taking the returning excursion trains. They did not cheer me; they only
stared curiously.
When we were on our way back to New York I wished to discuss the
triumph with my two companions, but Burridge was dumb and Ridley
morose. In the morning I called for the New York dailies; they were
haltingly produced. Imagine my amazement when I saw, in many kinds
of type, now jubilant, now regretful, now apologetic headlines, all
agreeing that my reception was a _fiasco_. Only my stanch ---- printed
the truth, and it laid entirely too much stress upon the “act of
malicious and mendacious demagoguery.” That act was: Some enemy of
mine had discovered inside facts as to my manipulation of freight
rates to get control of the mines and factories, and, late in the
afternoon, in the interval between the reception and the banquet, a
New York newspaper containing what purported to be a full account of
my machinations had been hawked about the streets, and was read by
everybody--except me.
I do not here deny that the basic facts were practically true as
printed. But the worst possible colour was given to them, and the worst
possible motives of rapacity and conscienceless cruelty were ascribed
to me. Instead of showing that I was like a general who sacrifices a
comparative few in order that he may save millions and advance a great
cause, the wretched rag held me up as a swindler and robber--worse, as
an assassin!
I understood all, and sympathised with my hosts, the people of those
five towns, in their embarrassment. As their local newspapers, which
I got the next day, assured me, they did not believe the slanderous
story. But I can readily see how nervous it must have made them. It is
fortunate for them that they had the good sense to discern the truth.
Had I been insulted, I should have taken a terrible revenge, even
though it had cost me several hundred thousand dollars.
While I was reading those New York papers, Jack Ridley was smoking a
cigar at the opposite side of the breakfast-table. When I had finished,
I spoke. “Did you see that newspaper yesterday?” I demanded, my rage
hardly able to wait upon his answer before bursting.
Ridley nodded.
“And Burridge?”
“Yes--he saw it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Bad news will always keep.”
I shouted for Burridge, and, when he came, ordered him into a seat.
“At every step in my career I’ve been harassed and hampered by petty
minds,” I said--“not among my enemies, for there they have been a help,
but among my employees and servants of every kind. How often have I
told both of you never to think for me? I don’t pay you to _think_--I
pay you to _do_ what _I_ think. Had you told me I could have met this
slander when and where it showed itself and would have choked it to
death. As it is, everybody except you two believes I knew and was
silent. Fortunately my reputation is strong enough to compel them to
put a decent interpretation on my silence. But no thanks to you! I
discharge you both.”
Burridge rose and went to the other part of the car--and I did not
see him again. Ridley fell to whimpering and crying, and for old
friendship’s sake, and because the poor devil is useful in his way, I
took him back at two-thirds his former pay. His gratitude was really
touching--sometimes I think he’s honestly fond of me, though no doubt
the wages and what he has free enter into it. He’s one of those fellows
who actually enjoy licking the hand they fear. Burridge did not try
to get himself reinstated. Probably he thought himself indispensable
and held aloof in the belief that I would beg him to come back. But
I was on the whole glad to get rid of him. He was too much of an
alleged gentleman for the work he had to do. There’s room for only one
gentleman in my establishment.
Into his place I put a young chap named Cress who had been near me
at the office for several years and had shown loyalty, energy, and
discretion. He was not at his new work a week before my wife came to
me in a hot temper and demanded that he be dismissed. “He has insulted
me!” she said, her head rearing and her nose in the air.
“How?” I asked; “I can’t discharge a faithful servant on a mere
caprice.”
“He has dared to question my accounts,” she replied, in her grandest
manner.
This was interesting! “But that’s his business,” said I; “that’s what I
pay him for.”
“To insult your wife?”
“To guard my money.”
“Mr. Burridge never found it necessary to insult me in guarding your
money. He ventured to assume that as your wife I was to be respected,
and----”
“Burridge had no right to assume any such thing,” I said. “He was
nothing but my machine--my cash-register. I instructed him, again and
again, to assume that everybody was dishonest. A ridiculous mess I
should make of my affairs if I did not keep a most rigid system of
checks upon everybody. You must remember, my dear, that I am beset by
hungry fellows, many of them clever and courageous, waiting for me to
relax my vigilance so that they can swoop on my fortune. I’m moving
through a swarm of parasites who prey upon my prey or upon me, and the
larger I become the larger the swarm and the more dangerous. I must
have eyes everywhere. You should be reasonable.”
She gave me a curious look. “And you’re so sublimely unconscious of
yourself!” she said. “That is why you are so terrible. But it saves you
from being repulsive.” I was instantly on the alert. Flattery tickles
me--and tickling wakes me. “Can’t you see, you great monster of a man,”
she went on, “that you mustn’t treat your wife and children as if they
were parasites?”
“They must keep their accounts with my fortune straight,” said I.
To that point I held while she cajoled, stormed, denounced,
threatened, wept. The longer she worked upon me the more set I became,
for the more firmly I was convinced that there had been some sort of
chicanery at which that weak fool Burridge had winked. She was greatly
agitated--and not with anger--when she left me, though she tried to
conceal it. I sent for Cress and ordered him to hunt out Burridge’s
accounts and vouchers for the past fifteen years, or ever since I put
my domestic finances on the sound basis of business. I told him to take
everything to an expert accountant.
After two days’ search he reported to me that he could find accounts
for only nine years back and vouchers for only the last three years.
The rest had been lost or deliberately destroyed--contrary to my
emphatic orders. One of the curses of large affairs with limited time
and imbecile agents is the vast number of ragged ends hanging out. I
never take up any part of my business after having disregarded it for
a while without finding it ravelled and ravelling. A week later I had
the accountant’s report, reviewed by Cress. I read it with amazement.
I sent at once for my wife. I ordered Cress out of the room as soon as
she entered, for I wished to spare her all unnecessary humiliation.
“Madam,” said I, without the slightest heat, “you will kindly make over
to me all my money and property which you have got by juggling your
accounts. It’s about half a million, I think--Cress and I may presently
discover that it is more. But, whatever it is, it must all be made
over.”
“I have nothing that belongs to you,” she replied, as calm as I, and
facing me steadily.
“We won’t quibble,” said I, determined to keep my temper. “All you
have must be made over. I give you until--day after to-morrow morning.”
“I shall answer then as I answer now,” she said--and I saw that she
felt cornered and would fight to the last.
“I’ve often heard,” I went on, “that some wives take advantage of their
husbands’ carelessness and confidence to--to--I shall not use the
proper word--I shall say to _reserve_ from the household and personal
allowances by over-charges, by conspiring with tradespeople of all
kinds, by making out false bills, by substitution of jewels----”
“That is true enough,” she interrupted. “Women who thought they were
marrying men and find they are married to monsters sometimes do imitate
their husbands’ methods in a small, feeble way, and for self-defence
and for the defence of their children, and I’m one of those women. I’m
ashamed of it--you’ve not hardened me beyond shame yet. But in another
sense I’m not ashamed of it--I’m----”
“We won’t quarrel,” said I; “I’m not the keeper of your conscience. All
I say is--disgorge!”
“I’ve nothing that belongs to you,” she repeated.
“Then you deny that you have sto--” I began.
“I deny nothing. I have learned much from you since you ceased to be a
man, but I’ve not yet learned how to educate my conscience into being
my pander.”
I smiled and pointed significantly at the cooked accounts. “Yes--here’s
the evidence how sensitive your conscience is and how it must trouble
you!” I couldn’t resist saying this. It was a mistake, as retorts
always are--for it was the spark that touched off her temper.
“My conscience does trouble me!” she blazed out--“troubles me because
I have remained in this house all these years. I have permitted myself
and my children to become corrupted. I have been content with merely
trying to provide against your going mad with vanity and greediness,
and turning against your own children. I am guilty--though I stayed
first through weakness and love of you--guilty because afterward it
was weakness and love of what your wealth bought that kept me. But I
thought it was my duty to my children. I should have gone and taken
them with me. I should have gone the day I learned you had stolen
Judson’s----”
In my fury I almost struck her. The very mention of Judson’s name makes
me irresponsible. But she did not flinch. “Yes,” she went on, “and if
you persist in your demand, if you don’t call off that miserable spy of
yours, I tell you, James Galloway, I’ll walk out of your house publicly
and never set foot in it again!”
“After you have disgorged,” said I, getting and keeping myself well in
hand.
“I shall go,” she continued, “and what will become of your social
ambitions, of your pet scheme to marry Aurora to Horton Kirkby, of
your public reputation? If I go, the whole country shall ring with the
scandal of it.”
I hadn’t thought of that! I saw instantly that she had me. With a
scandal of that kind public, it would be impossible to marry Aurora
into one of the oldest and proudest and richest families in New York. I
knew just how it would impress old Mrs. Kirkby, who, if her notion of
her social position were correct, would find all New York on its knees
as she took the air in her victoria. Then there was Natalie--it would
surely stir her up to do something disagreeable when she learns that
she isn’t going to get the quarter of a million a year she’s dreaming
of.
I studied my wife carefully as she stood facing me, and afterward,
while we went on with our talk, and saw that she meant just what she
said, I pretended to believe her statement that she hadn’t more than
a small part of her “commissions” left--indeed, it may be so. With
this pretence as a basis, I let her off from disgorging. “But,” said
I, “hereafter Cress manages the household--_all_ the accounts--I can’t
trust you.”
“As you will,” she replied, affecting indifference. Probably she was so
relieved by my consenting to drop the past that she was glad to concede
the future.
If women were as large as they are crafty, it would be the men who
would stay at home and mind the babies. As it is they can only irritate
and hamper the men. It is fortunate for me that women have never had
influence over me. I’d not be where I am if I had taken them seriously.
Soon after this shocking discovery there happened what was, in some
respects, the most unpleasant incident of my life.
One afternoon, as the heating apparatus in my sitting-room was out of
order, I went down to the library and was lying on the lounge thinking
out some of the day’s business complications. I was presently disturbed
by the sound of excited voices--my wife’s and my daughter Helen’s. The
noise came from the small reception-room adjoining the library. It
is very annoying to hear voices, especially agitated voices, and not
to be able to distinguish the words. I rose and went quietly to the
connecting door and listened.
“I won’t have it, Helen!” my wife was saying. “You know that is the
most exclusive dancing class in New York.”
“I don’t care; I shall never go again--_never_!” The child’s voice was
as resolute as it was angry.
“Helen, you must not speak in that way to your mother!” replied my
wife. “Unless you give a good reason, you must go--and there can’t be
any reason.”
“Don’t ask me, mother!” she pleaded.
“You must tell me why. I insist.”
There was a long silence, then Helen said: “I can’t tell you any more
than that some of the girls--insult me.”
“What _do_ you mean?” exclaimed my wife.
“Several of them turn their backs on me, and won’t speak to me, and
look at me--_oh_!” That exclamation came in a burst of fury. “And they
sneer at me to the boys--and some of them won’t speak to me, either.”
There was another silence. Then my wife said: “You must expect that,
Helen. So many are envious of your father’s--of his wealth, that they
try to take their spite out upon us. But you must have pride. The way
to deal with such a situation is to face it--to----”
All the blame upon _me_! I could not endure it. I put the door very
softly and very slightly ajar and returned to the lounge. From there
I called out: “Don’t forget the other reason, madam, while you’re
teaching your child to respect her parents.” Then I rose and went into
the reception-room.
Helen was white as a sheet. My wife was smiling a little--satirically.
“Eavesdropping?” she said--apparently not in the least disturbed at my
having heard her insidious attack upon me.
“I could not help overhearing your quarrel,” I replied, “and I felt it
was time for me to speak. No doubt your lack of skill in social matters
is the chief cause of this outrage upon Helen. Of what use is it for
me to toil and struggle when you cannot take advantage of what my
achievement ought to make so easy for you?”
“Father--” interrupted Helen.
“Your mother is right,” I said, turning to her. “You must go to the
class. In a short time all these unpleasant incidents will be over. If
any of those children persist, you will give me their names. I think I
know how to bring their fathers to terms, if your mother is unable to
cope with their mothers.”
“Father,” Helen repeated, “it wasn’t on _her_ account that
they--they----”
This exasperated me afresh. “Your mother has trained you well, I see,”
said I. “Now--I tell you that what you say is----”
She started to her feet, her eyes flashing, her breath coming fast.
“I’ll tell you why I came home to-day and said I’d never go there
again. I was talking to Herbert Merivale at the dance, this afternoon,
and his sister Nell and Lottie Stuyvesant were sitting near, and Lottie
said, loud, so that Herbert and I would hear: ‘I don’t see why your
brother talks to her. None of the very nice boys and girls will have
anything to do with her, you know. How can we when she’s--she’s----’”
Helen stopped, her face flushed, and her head dropped. My wife said:
“Go on, Helen; what was it?”
“‘When she’s the--the--daughter of a--_thief_!’”
I was so overwhelmed that I fairly staggered into a chair. Helen
darted to me and knelt beside me. “And I _won’t_ go there again! I
didn’t show her that I was cut. I didn’t feel cut. I only felt what
a great, noble father I have, and how low and contemptible all those
girls and boys and their parents are. I stayed until nearly the last.
But I’ll never go again. You won’t ask me to, will you, father?”
I patted her on the shoulder. It was impossible for me to answer her.
Whether through fear of me or to gain her point with her child, my wife
concealed the triumph she must have felt, and said: “The more reason
for going, Helen. Where is your pride? If you should stay away, they
would say it was because you were ashamed----”
“But that isn’t the reason,” interrupted Helen. “And I don’t care what
_they_ think!” she added, scornfully.
I have never been in such a rage as possessed me at that moment. I felt
an insane impulse to rush out and strangle and torture those envious
wretches who were seeking to revenge themselves for having been worsted
in the encounter with me down-town by humiliating my children. But
the matter of Helen’s holding the social advantage we had gained when
we got the Merivales to put her in that class was too important to be
neglected for a burst of impotent fury. I joined with her mother, and
finally we brought her round to see that she must keep on at the class
and must make a fight to overthrow the _clique_ of traducers of her
father. When she saw it her enthusiasm was roused, and--well, she can’t
fail to win with her cleverness and good looks, and with me to back her
up.
What that miserable girl said in her hearing, and her expression as she
repeated it, comes back to me again and again, and, somehow, I feel as
if old Judson were getting revenge upon me. First James--and now Helen!
But James believed it, while Helen, splendid girl that she is, knew at
once that it was untrue. At least, I think so.
What an ugly word “thief” is! And how ugly it sounds from the lips
of my child--even when there is no real justification for it! I know
that all who come in contact with me, whether socially or in business,
envy and hate me. It seems to me now that I know the thought in their
spiteful brains--know the word that trembles on their lips but dares
not come out.
Yesterday I turned upon my wife when we were alone for a moment. I have
felt that she has been gloating over me ever since that afternoon.
“Well,” I said, angrily--for I have been extremely irritable through
sleeplessness of late, “why don’t you say it, instead of keeping this
cowardly silence? Why don’t you taunt me?”
She showed what she’d been thinking by understanding me instantly.
“Taunt you!” she said; “I’m trying to forget it--I’ve been trying to
forget it all these years. That’s why I’m an old woman long before my
time.”
Her look was a very good imitation of tragedy. I felt unable to answer
her and so begin a quarrel that might have relieved my mind. The best
I was able to do was to say, sarcastically: “So that’s the reason, is
it? I had noted the fact, but was attributing it to your anxiety about
falsifying your accounts.”
I hurried away before she had a chance to reply.
V
A curious kind of cowardice has been growing on me of late. Whenever I
feel the slightest pain or ache--a twinge I’d not have given a second
thought to a year or so ago--I send post-haste for my doctor, the
ridiculous, lying, flattering Hanbury. My intelligence forbids me to
put the least confidence in him. I know he’d no more tell me or any
other rich man a disagreeable truth than he’d tell one of his rich
old women that she was past the age of pleasing men. Yet I send for
Hanbury; and I swallow his lies about my health, and urge him on to
feed me lies about my youthful appearance that are even more absurd.
I’m thinking of employing him exclusively and keeping him by me--for
companionship. Cress is worse than worthless except for business, Jack
is getting stale and repetitive with age, and I badly need some one to
amuse me, to take my mind off myself and my affairs and my family.
At this moment I happen to be in my mood for mocking my fears and
follies about the end. The End!--I’m not afraid of what comes after.
All the horror I’m capable of feeling goes into the thought of giving
up my crown and my sceptre, my millions and my dominion over men and
affairs. The afterward? I’ve never had either the time or the mind for
the speculative and the intangible--at least not since I passed the
sentimental period of youth.
Each day my power grows--and my love of power and my impatience of
opposition. It seems to me sacrilege for any one to dare oppose me
when I have so completely vindicated my right to lead and to rule.
I understand those tyrants of history who used to be abhorrent to
me--much could be said in defence of them. Once the power I now wield
would have seemed tremendous. And it is tremendous. But I am so often
galled by its limitations, more often still by the absurd obstacles
that delay and fret me.
Early last month I found that down at Washington they were about to
pass a law “regulating” railway rates, which means, of course, lowering
them and cutting my dividends and disarranging my plans in general. I
telephoned Senator ----, whom we keep down there to see that that sort
of demagoguery is held in check, to come to me in New York at once. He
appeared at my house the same evening, full of excuses and apologies.
“The public clamour is so great,” said he, “and the arguments of the
opposition are so plausible, that we simply have to do something. This
bill is the least possible.”
I rarely argue with understrappers. I merely told him to go to my
lawyer’s house, get the bill I had ordered drawn, take it back to
Washington on the midnight train, and put it through. “You old women
down there,” said I, “seem incapable of learning that the mob isn’t
appeased, but is made hungrier, by getting what it wants. Humbug’s the
only dish for it. Fill it full of humbug and it gets indigestion and
wishes it had never asked for anything.”
My substitute was apparently more drastic than the other bill, but I
had ordered into it a clause that would send it into the courts where
we could keep it shuffling back and forth for years. To throw the
demagogues off the scent, Senator ---- had it introduced by one of
the leaders of the opposition--as clever a dealer in humbug as ever
took command of a mob in order to set it brawling with itself at the
critical moment. Our fellows pretended to yield with great reluctance
to this “sweeping and dangerous measure,” and it went through both
houses with a whirl.
The President was about to sign it when up started that scoundrel ----,
who owes his fortune to me and who got his place on the recommendation
of several of us who thought him a safe, loyal, honourable man. The
rascal pointed out the saving clause in my bill and made such a stir in
the newspapers that our scheme was apparently ruined.
I quietly took a regular express for Washington, keeping close to my
drawing-room. By roundabout orders from me a telegram had been sent to
a signal tower in the outskirts of Washington, and it halted the train.
In the darkness I slipped away, hailed a cab, and drove to ----’s
house. He was taken completely by surprise--I suppose he thought I’d be
afraid to come near him, or to try to reach him in any way with those
nosing newspapers watching every move. The only excuse he could make
for himself was a whine about “conscience.”
“I am taking the retaining fee of the people,” said he; “I must serve
their interests just as I served you when I took your retainers.” This
was his plea at the end of a two hours’ talk in which I had exhausted
argument and inducement. I felt that gentleness and diplomacy were in
vain. I released my temper--temper with me is not waste steam, but
powder to be saved until it can be exploded to some purpose.
“We put you in office, sir,” I replied, “and we will put you out. You
owe your honours to us, not to this mob you’re pandering to now in the
hope of getting something or other. We’ll punish you for your treachery
if you persist in it. We’ll drop you back into obscurity, and you’ll
see how soon your ‘people’ will forget you.”
He paled and quivered under the lash. “If the people were not so sane
and patient,” said he, “they’d act like another Samson. They’d pull the
palace down upon themselves for the pleasure of seeing you banqueting
Philistines get your deserts.”
“Don’t inflict a stump speech on me,” said I, going to the door--it
just occurred to me that he might publicly eject me from his house and
so make himself too strong to be dislodged immediately. “Within six
months you’ll be out of office--unless you come to your senses.”
So I left him. A greater fool I never knew. I can understand the
out-in-the-cold fellow snapping his fangs; but for the life of me
I can’t understand a man with even a job as waiter or crumb-scraper
at the banquet doing anything to get himself into trouble. He proved
not merely a fool, but a weak fool as well; for, after a few days
of thinking it over, he switched round, withdrew his objection, and
explained it away--and so my bill was signed. But we are done with him.
A man may be completely cured of an attack of insanity, but who would
ever give him a position of trust afterward? Not I, for one. Too many
men who have never gone crazy are waiting, eager to serve us.
Still, looking back over the incident, I am not satisfied with myself.
I won, but I played badly. I must be careful--I am becoming too
arrogant. If he had been a little stronger and cleverer, he would
have had me thrown out of his house, and I don’t care to think what
a position that would have put me in, not only then, but also for
the future. As long as I was engaged in hand-to-hand battle and had
personally to take what I got, it was well to have an outward bearing
that frightened the timid and made the easy-going anxious to conciliate
me. But, now that I employ others to retrieve the game I bring down, it
is wiser that I show courtesy and consideration. I get better service;
I cause less criticism. Enemies are indispensable to a rising man--they
put him on his mettle and make people look on him as important. But to
a risen man they are either valueless or a hindrance, and, at critical
moments, a danger.
It is one of the large ironies of life that when one has with infinite
effort gained power, one dares not indulge in the great pleasure of
openly exercising it, for fear of losing it. Not even I can eat my cake
and have it. Sometimes success seems to me to mean rising to a height
where one can more clearly see the things one cannot have.
And now luck, plus strong rowing and right steering, swept me on to
another success--this time a brilliant marriage. The element of luck
was particularly large in this instance, as in any matter where one of
the factors is feminine. Every wise planner reduces the human element
in his projects to the minimum, because human nature is as uncertain as
chance itself. But while one can always rely, to a certain extent, upon
the human element where it is masculine, where it is feminine there’s
absolutely no more foundation than in a quicksand. The women not only
unsettle the men, but they also unsettle themselves; and, acting always
upon impulse, they are as likely as not to fly straight in the face of
what is best for them. Women are incapable of cooperation. The only
business they understand or take a genuine interest in is the capture
of men--a business which each woman must pursue independently and alone.
Fortunately, Aurora, like most of the young women of our upper class,
had been thoroughly trained in correct ideas of self-interest.
She was born in the purple. When she came into the world I had been a
millionaire several years, and my wife and I had changed our point of
view on life from that of the lower middle class in which we were bred
(though we didn’t know it at the time, and thought ourselves “as good
as anybody”), to that of the upper class, to which my genius forced our
admission. Aurora was our first child to have a French nurse, the first
to have teachers at home--a French governess and a German one.
James had gone to the public school and then to Phillips Exeter;
Walter had gone to public school a little while, and then to ----,
where he was prepared for Harvard, not in a mixed and somewhat motley
crowd, as James was, but in a company made up exclusively of youths
of his own class, the sons of those who are aristocratic by birth or
by achievement. Aurora was even more exclusively educated. She--with
difficulty, as we were still new to our position--was got into a small
class of aristocratic children that met at the house of the parents
of two of them. Each day she went there in one of our carriages with
her French nursery governess, promoted to be her companion; and, when
the class was over for the day, the companion called for her in the
carriage and took her home.
All Aurora’s young friends were girls like herself, bred in the
strictest ideas of the responsibilities of their station, and intent
upon making a social success, and, of course, a successful marriage.
At the time, my wife, who had not then been completely turned by the
adulation my wealth had brought her, used to express to me her doubts
whether these children were not too sordid. I was half inclined to
agree with her, for it isn’t pleasant to hear mere babies talk of
nothing but dresses and jewels, palaces and liveries and carriages,
good “catches,” and social position. But I see now that there is
no choice between that sort of education and sheer sentimentalism.
It is far better that children who are to inherit millions and
the responsibilities of high station should be over-sordid than
over-sentimental. Sordidness will never lead them into the ruinous
mischief of prodigality and bad marriages; sentimentalism is almost
certain to do so.
My wife was extremely careful, as the mothers of our class must be, to
scan the young men who were permitted to talk with Aurora. Only the
eligible had the opportunity to get well acquainted with her--indeed, I
believe Horton Kirkby was the first man she really knew well.
It was a surprise to me when Kirkby began to show a preference for her.
His mother is one of the leaders of that inner circle of fashionable
society which still barred the doors haughtily against us, though
it admitted many who were glad to be our friends--perhaps I should
say _my_ friends. Kirkby himself keenly delighted in the power which
his combination of vast wealth, old family, and impregnable social
position gave him. Every one supposed he would marry in his own set.
But Aurora got a chance at him, and--well, Aurora inherits something
of my magnetism and luck. Kirkby’s coldness to me at the outset and
his mother’s deliberately snubbing us again and again make me think
his intentions were not then serious. But Aurora alternately fired and
froze him with such skill that she succeeded in raising in his mind
a doubt which had probably never entered it before--a doubt of his
ability to marry any woman he might choose. So, she triumphed.
But after they were engaged she continued to play fast and loose with
him. At first I thought this was only clever manœuvring on her part to
keep him uncertain and interested. But I presently began to be uneasy
and sent her mother to question her adroitly. “She says,” my wife
reported to me, “that she can’t take him and she can’t give him up. She
says there’s one thing she’d object to more than to marrying him, and
that is to seeing some other girl marry him.”
“What nonsense!” said I; “I thought she was too well brought up for
such folly.”
“You must admit Kirkby is--clammy,” replied my wife, always full of
excuses for her children.
Before I could move to bring Aurora to her senses, Kirkby did it--by
breaking off the engagement and transferring his attentions to Mary
Stuyvesant, poor as poverty but beautiful and well born. Within a week
Aurora had him back; within a fortnight she had the cards out for the
wedding.
The presents began to pour in; two rooms down-stairs were filling with
magnificence, and we had sent several van loads to the safety deposit
vaults. There must have been close upon half a million dollars’ worth,
including my gift of a forty-thousand-dollar tiara. Every one in the
house was agitated. I had given my wife and daughter _carte blanche_,
releasing Cress and Jack Ridley from attendance on me to assist them
and to see that extravagance did not spread into absolutely wanton
waste. But this does not mean that I was not in hearty sympathy with
my wife’s efforts to make the full realisation of our social ambition
a memorable occasion. On the contrary, I wanted precisely that; and
I knew the way to accomplish it was by getting five cents’ worth for
every five cents spent, not by imitating the wastefulness of the
ignorant poor. I was willing that the dollars should fly; but I was
determined that each one should hit the mark.
Jack Ridley said to me once: “Why, to you five hundred dollars is less
than one dollar would be to me.”
“Not at all,” I replied; “we cling to five cents more tightly than you
would to five dollars. We know the value of money because we have it;
you don’t know because you haven’t.”
But the happiest, most interested person in all the household was my
daughter Helen. She was to be maid of honour, and on the wedding day
was to make her first appearance in a long dress. It seemed to me that
she suddenly flashed out into wonderful beauty--a strange kind of
beauty, all in shades of golden brown and having an air of mystery that
moved even me to note and admire and be proud--and a little uneasy.
Obviously she would be able to make a magnificent marriage, if she
could be controlled. The greater the prize, the greater the anxiety
until it is grasped.
When she tried on that first long dress of hers she came in to show
herself off to me. She has never been in the least afraid of me--there
is a fine, utter courage looking from her eyes--an assurance that she
could not be afraid of any one or anything.
She turned round slowly, that I might get the full effect. “Well,
well!” said I, put into a tolerant mood by my pride in her. “Aurora had
better keep you out of Horton’s sight until after the ceremony.”
She tossed her head. “He’d be safe from me if there wasn’t another man
in the world,” she answered.
I frowned on this. “You’ll have a hard time making as good a marriage
as your sister, miss,” said I. “You’ll see, when we begin to look for a
husband for you.”
“I shall look for my own husband, thank you,” she replied, pertly.
But her smile was so bright that I only said, “We’ll cross that bridge,
miss, when we come to it--we’ll cross it together.”
There was an unpleasant silence--her expression made me feel more
strongly than ever before that she would be troublesome. I said: “How
old are you now?”
“Why, don’t you remember? I was sixteen last Wednesday. You gave me
_this_.” She touched a pearl brooch at her neck.
No, I didn’t remember--Ridley attends to all those little matters for
me. But I said, “To be sure,” and patted her on the shoulder--and let
her kiss me, and then sent her away. For a moment I envied the men
whose humble station enables them to enjoy more of such intercourse as
that. I confess I have my moments when all this striving and struggling
after money and power seems miserably unsatisfactory, and I picture
myself and my fellow strugglers as so many lunatics in a world full of
sane people whom we toil for and give a bad quarter of an hour now and
then as our lunacy becomes violent.
But that is a passing mood.
The next I heard of Helen she had set the whole house in an uproar. Two
days before the wedding she shut herself in her apartment and sent out
word by her maid that she would not be maid of honour--would not attend
the wedding. “I can do nothing with her,” said my wife; “she’s been
beyond my control for two years.”
“I’ll go to her,” I said. “We’ll see who’s master in this house.”
She herself opened her sitting-room door for me. She had a book in her
hand and was apparently calm and well prepared. The look in her eyes
made me think of what my wife had once said to me: “Be careful how you
try to bully her, James. She’s like you--and Jim.”
“What’s this I hear about you refusing to appear in your first long
dress?” I asked--a very different remark, I’ll admit, from the one I
intended to open with.
She smiled faintly, but did not take her serious eyes from mine. “I
can’t go to the wedding,” said she. “Please, father, don’t ask it! I--I
hoped they wouldn’t tell you. I told them they might say I was ill.”
I managed to look away from her and collect my thoughts. “You are the
youngest,” I began, “and we have been foolishly weak with you. But
the time has come to bring you under control and save you from your
own folly. Understand me! You will go to the wedding, and you will go
as maid of honour.” I was master of myself again and I spoke the last
words sternly, and was in the humour for a struggle. She had roused one
of my strongest passions--the passion for breaking wills that oppose
mine.
There was a long pause, and then she said, quietly: “Very well,
father. I shall obey you.”
I was like a man who has flung himself with all his might against
what he thinks is a powerful obstacle and finds himself sprawling
ridiculously upon vacancy. I lost my temper. “What do you mean,” I
exclaimed, angrily, “by making all this fuss about nothing? You will go
at once and apologise to your mother and sister.”
She sat silent, her eyes down.
“Do you hear?” I demanded.
She fixed her gaze steadily on mine. “Yes, sir,” she answered, “but I
cannot obey.”
“How dare you say that to me?” I said, so furious that I was calm. I
had a sense of impotence--as if the irresistible force had struck the
immovable body.
“Because what you ask isn’t right.”
“You forget that I am your father.”
“And you forget that I am”--she drew herself up proudly and looked at
me unafraid--“your daughter.”
There seems to be some sort of magic in her. I can’t understand it
myself, but her answer completely changed my feeling toward her. It
had never before occurred to me that the fact of her being my daughter
gave her rights and privileges which would be intolerable in another. I
saw family pride for the first time and instantly respected it. “If I
only had a son like you!” I said, on impulse, for the moment forgetting
everything else in this new conception of family line and its meaning.
The tears rushed to her eyes. She leaned forward in her eagerness. “You
_had_--you _have_,” she said. “Oh, father----”
“Not another word,” I said, sternly; “why did you refuse to go to
Aurora’s wedding?”
“Tuesday night she came into my room and got into my bed. She put her
arms round me and said, ‘Helen, I _can’t_ marry him! He’s--he’s just
_awful_! It makes me cold all over for him to touch me.’ We talked
nearly all night--and--I feel sorry for her--but I felt it would be
wrong for me to go to the wedding or have anything to do with it. She
wouldn’t break it off--she said she’d go on if it killed her. And
I begged her to go to you and ask you to stop it, but she said she
wanted to marry him or she wouldn’t. And--but when you said I must go,
it seemed to me it’d be wrong to disobey. Only--I can’t apologise to
them--I can’t--because--I’ve done nothing to apologise for.”
“Never mind, child,” I said--I felt thoroughly uncomfortable. It is
impossible clearly to explain many matters to an innocent mind. “You
need not apologise. But pay no attention to Aurora’s hysterics--and
enjoy yourself at the wedding. Girls always act absurdly when they’re
about to marry. Six months from now she’ll be the happiest woman in New
York, and if she didn’t marry him she’d be the most wretched.”
“Poor Aurora!” said Helen, with a long sigh.
But Helen could not have said “poor” Aurora on the great day at St.
Bartholomew’s. It was, indeed, an hour of triumph for us all. As she
and Kirkby came down from the altar, I glanced round the church and
had one of my moments of happiness. There they all were--all the pride
and fashion and established wealth of New York--all of them at my
feet. I, who had sprung from nothing; I, who had had to fight, fight,
fight, staking everything--yes, character, even liberty itself--here
was I, enthroned, equal to the highest, able to put my heel upon the
necks of those who had regarded me as part of the dirt under their
feet. I went down the aisle of the church, drunk with pride and joy.
I had not had such happiness since that day when, smarting under
Judson’s insults, I suddenly remembered that, if he had honour, I had
the million and was a millionaire. As my wife and I drove back to
the house for the reception, I caught myself muttering to the crowds
pushing indifferently along the sidewalks, intent upon their foolish
little business, “Bow! Bow! Don’t you know that one of your masters is
passing?”
Just as I was in the full swing of this ecstasy I happened to notice a
huge stain on the costly cream-coloured lining of the brougham--I was
in my wife’s carriage. “What’s that?” said I, pointing to it.
She told a silly story of how she had carelessly broken a bottle in the
carriage a few days before and had ruined a seven-hundred-dollar dress
and the carriage-lining.
Instantly the routine of my life claimed me--my happiness was over. I
made the natural comment upon such criminal indifference to the cost of
things; she retorted after her irrational, irresponsible fashion. We
were soon quarrelling fiercely upon the all-important subject, money,
which she persists in denouncing as vulgar. We could scarcely compose
our faces to leave the carriage and make a proper appearance before the
crowds without the house and the throngs within. As for me, my day was
ruined.
But the reception was, in fact, a failure, though it seemed a success.
Aurora, the excitement of the ceremony over, was looking wretched;
and, as she came down to go away, her face was tragical. I could feel
the hypocritical whisperings of my guests. Exasperated, I turned,
only to stumble on Helen, crying as if her heart were breaking. My new
son-in-law bade me good-bye with a cold, condescending shake of the
hand, and in a voice that made me long to strike him. It set me to
gnawing again on what Helen heard at the dancing class three years ago.
When every one had gone my wife came to me, her eyes sparkling with
anger.
“Did you see old Mrs. Kirkby leave?” she asked.
“No--she must have gone without speaking to me,” I replied.
“She left less than a minute after Aurora and Horton. When I put out
my hand to her she just touched it with the tips of her fingers, and
all she said was, ‘I hope we’ll run across each other at my son’s, some
time.’”
“They’ll change their tune when I get after them!” I exclaimed.
“What can _you_ do?” sneered my wife. “They know your money goes to
Walter. Besides, it’s all your fault.”
“_My_ fault?” I said, in disgust--everything is always my fault,
according to my wife.
“Yes--it’s your reputation,” she retorted, bitterly. “It’ll take two
generations of respectability to live it down.”
I left the room abruptly. The injustice of this was so hideous that
reply was impossible. After all my sacrifices, after all my stupendous
achievements, after lifting my family from obscurity to the highest
dignity--_this_ was my reward! Yes, the highest dignity. I know how
they sneer. I know how they whisper the ugly word that Helen heard at
the dancing class. I see it in their eyes when I take them unawares.
But--they cringe before me, they fear me, and they dare not offend me.
What more could I ask? What do I care about their cowardly mutterings
which they dare not let me hear?
In the upper hall I came upon Helen, sitting in the alcove, sobbing.
“Poor Aurora! Poor Aurora!” she said, when I paused before her.
“Poor Aurora!” I retorted, angrily. “Your sister is married to one of
the richest men in New York.”
“He tried to kiss me as they were leaving,” she went on, between sobs,
“and I drew away and slapped him. When Aurora hugged me she whispered,
‘I don’t blame you--I detest him!’ Poor Aurora!”
I went into my apartment and slammed the door. I knew how it would turn
out, and this hysterical nonsense infuriated me.
[Illustration: “_I came upon Helen, sitting in the alcove, sobbing._”]
When Aurora and Kirkby came back from their trip through the South
and burst in on us at lunch [it was a Sunday], probably I was the
only one at the table who wasn’t surprised by their looks. Helen, I
knew, had been expecting Aurora would return with a face like the
last scene of the last act of a tragedy. Instead she was radiant,
beautifully dressed, and with an assurance of manner that was immensely
becoming to her--the assurance of a woman who is conscious of having
married brilliantly and is determined to enjoy her good fortune to
the uttermost. It was plain that she was on the best possible terms
with Kirkby. As for him, he looked foolishly happy and was obviously
completely under her control, as I knew he would be. He is certainly in
himself not a dignified figure--short and fat and sallow and amazingly
ordinary-looking for a man of such birth and breeding. But the instant
people hear who he is, they forget his face, figure, and mind. In this
world, what things really are is not important; it’s altogether what
they seem to be, altogether the valuation agreed upon. I’ve sometimes
watched the children at their games, “playing” that pins and rags have
fantastic big values; and I’ve thought how ridiculous it was to smile
at them and keep serious faces over our own grown-up game of precisely
the same kind.
Aurora had been sending home the newspapers of every town in which
they had stopped, so we had a pretty good idea of the ovation they
had received. But as soon as she was alone with us she went over it
all--and we were as proud as was she. “I don’t think Horton liked it
particularly, but there wasn’t a place where they didn’t know more
about me than about him,” said she. “You noticed, didn’t you, that the
papers often said, ‘James Galloway’s daughter and her husband’? Horton
was awfully funny about the excitement over us. At first he kept up
the pretence with me that he thought it vulgar. But he soon cut that
out and fairly devoured the newspapers. Of course we didn’t drop our
exclusiveness before people--everywhere they talked about how anxious
we were to avoid notoriety. Whenever the reporters came near us, my!
but didn’t Horton sit on them.”
She made only one criticism of him--and that a laughing one. “You
thought,” said she, “that we started in a private car. Well, we didn’t.
When I got to Jersey City he put me into a stuffy old regular Pullman
with all sorts of people. And he said, with the grandest air, ‘I took
the drawing-room, as I thought you’d like privacy.’ I saw that it was
my time to assert myself.” She laughed. “We had a little talk,” she
went on, “and at Philadelphia he rushed round and got a private car.”
She soon brought his mother to terms. Mrs. Kirkby called on my wife
three days after they got back, and took her driving the following
afternoon. That drive is one of the important events in my career. It
marks the completion of my conquest of New York. Thinking it over, I
decided to double Aurora’s portion under my will. Next to Judson, she
has been the most useful person to me--no, not next to Judson, but
without exception. I should have got my million-dollar start somehow,
if I had never seen him; but I should have had some difficulty in
reaching my climax if I had not had Aurora.
My flood-tide of luck held through one more event--the settlement with
Natalie.
Naturally, I had put a good deal of thought upon this problem. The
longer I considered it the more clearly I realised that to give her
anything at all would be an act of sheer generosity, perhaps of
dangerous generosity. As I have said before, it did not take me long
to absolve myself from the impossible letter of my promise. If I had
been capable of keeping a promise to give six million dollars--the
sum necessary to produce “_an_ income of a quarter of a million”--to
a person whom it was absolutely vital to have financially dependent
upon me, I should have accomplished very little in the world. At first
my decision to keep the spirit of my promise by giving “_the_ income
of a quarter of a million” seemed as fair as it was liberal. But now
that she was safely married to my son, I began to see that to give her
anything would be to strike a blow at his domestic happiness, and that
would mean striking a blow at her own happiness. It could not fail
to unsettle her mind to find herself with an independent income of
ten or twelve thousand a year in addition to the five or six thousand
she already had. Nothing else is so certain to destroy a husband’s
influence or to unfit a wife contentedly to fill her proper place in
the family as for her to be financially independent.
I have never been lacking in the courage to do right, no matter what
moral quibble or personal unpleasantness has stood in the way. I
resolved not to give her anything outright, but, instead, to provide
for her in my will--the income of a quarter of a million, to be hers
for life, unless Walter should die and she marry again.
There now remained only the comparatively simple matter of reconciling
her to this arrangement when she was expecting at once to receive the
equivalent of six millions, free from conditions.
A weak man would have put off the issue until the last moment, through
dislike of disagreeable scenes. But I am not one of those who aggravate
difficulties by postponing them. The day after Walter and Natalie
sailed from the other side for the homeward journey, I sent for her
father. “Matt,” said I, “as you probably remember, I made up my mind
to do something for your daughter as soon as she decided to become my
daughter, too. I finally got round to it this morning. I thought I’d
tell you I had made the necessary changes in my will.”
He looked at me narrowly, with an expression between wonder and
suspicion. “I don’t understand,” said he.
“I promised your daughter she should have the income of a quarter of a
million,” I replied, “and this morning I put the necessary provision
into my will.”
His mouth dropped open. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief
several times. Then all of a sudden he flushed a violent red and struck
the table with his fist. “Why, damn it, Galloway,” he exclaimed, “you
promised her you’d settle _an_ income of a quarter of a million on her
at once.”
I looked at him as if I thought him crazy. “Where did you get that
notion?” said I. “I never heard of anything so preposterous. Did you
think I’d gone stark mad?” I let him see that I was getting angry.
“She told me so--told me within an hour of your promising it,” he
replied. “And, by heavens, you’ll stick to your promise!” He banged the
table with his fist again.
As I had made clear my intention--which was my only purpose for that
first interview--I rose. “I permit no man to talk to me in that
fashion,” said I; “not even an old friend who has apparently gone out
of his mind. I do not care to discuss the matter further.”
I went into my inner office and shut him out. I knew he was too
practical a man ever really to have believed that I intended to give
his daughter any such stupendous sum. I was certain he had pretended
to her that he believed it, because he was as eager for her to marry
Walter as I was. Assuming that he did believe it, he could not but see
there was nothing but disaster for him in offending me. Therefore, I
had not the slightest fear that he would persist in his anger; I knew
he would calm down, would at most cook up some scheme for trying to
frighten some sort of a settlement out of me, and would break the news
to his daughter at the first opportunity, so that he might caution her
against doing anything foolish on impulse.
I heard nothing from him and did not see him again until we all went
down to the dock to meet Walter and Natalie. The exchange of greetings
between the two families was far from cordial, her father and I barely
nodding at each other. Natalie and her mother and Walter went up-town
together. I saw that her mother could hardly wait to get her alone so
that she could tell her and coach her.
I did not permit her to see me in circumstances in which she could
have talked freely until nearly two weeks had passed. Then, her
friendly manner was rather strained, but she said nothing about her
settlement--and, of course, I’m not the one to poke a sleeping dog. I
was delighted to find such a striking confirmation of my good opinion
of her. Doubtless she doesn’t feel especially kindly toward me, but she
has given no sign--and that is the important fact. A less intelligent
woman would not have seen how useless it was to make a fight, or would
have given way to her temper just for the pleasure of relieving her
feelings.
To these two triumphs was now added a third, which, in its
many-sidedness, gave me more satisfaction than either of the others.
It came in the course of my campaign to push out of my industrial
combination the minor elements that had to be conciliated when I was
forming it. These were the little fellows who were the chief original
owners of the various concerns of which it was composed. They were no
longer of the slightest use to the industry; they were simply clinging
to it, mere parasites fattening upon my brains. I felt that the time
had come for shaking them off, and forcing them to give up their
holdings. I needed every share either for my own investment purposes or
to bind to me the men I had put in direct charge.
Having always had the shaking off of the parasites in mind, I had never
let the combination develop its full earning capacity. As my first
move toward complete possession, I caused it to be given out that I was
privately much disappointed with the outlook for the industry and for
the combination, and was thinking of disposing of my holdings quietly.
When this rumour that I was about to “unload” was brought to my
attention, I refused either to confirm or to deny it. I followed this
with some slight manipulations of rates, prices, and the stock market.
I was, of course, careful to do nothing violent. I never forget,
nowadays, that I am one of the bulwarks of conservatism and stability;
I and my fellow-occupants of the field of high finance sternly repress
all the stock-raiding moves of the little fellows who are struggling to
get together in a hurry the millions that would enable them to break
into our company.
My moves against my combination sent its stock slowly down. The
minority stockholders unloaded--the most timid upon the least timid;
then, as fear spread and infected the most hopeful among them, all
unloaded upon the public. Finally, I gave the stock a hard blow that
sent it tumbling--almost openly I sold ten thousand shares, and the
sale was regarded by the public as ominously significant, because
it was known that I no longer speculated, and that I frowned upon
speculation and speculators. When I had gathered in what I wanted, at
bottom prices, I came to the rescue, put up the price with a strong
hand, denounced those who had attacked it, expressed my great faith in
the future of the industry and of my combination--and caught in the
net, along with a lot of _bona fide_ sellers, a vast shoal of wriggling
and gasping speculators in “shorts.”
The one of these fish that peculiarly interested me was--my son Walter.
I knew he would be there, and had known it since the third week of my
campaign. As I have never permitted him to see into the machinery of my
financial plant, he fancied that he could operate without my finding
it out. But one of my spies had brought the news to my chief brokers
when he placed his second selling order. I was astonished that another
son of mine had gone into such low and stupid and even dishonourable
business--yes, dishonourable. My own speculative operations were never
of the petty character and for the petty purposes that constitute
gambling. I sent at once for a transcript of his bank account--a man
in my position must have at his command every possible source of
inside information and I have made getting at bank accounts one of
my specialties. My astonishment became amazement when I learned that
four cash items in that account, making in the total nearly the whole
of his gambling capital, were four checks for fifty thousand dollars
each--from his mother!
I had tried many times to get hold of her bank account; but she, partly
through craft, partly through the perversity of luck, did business with
one of the banks into whose secrets I had never been able to penetrate.
I understand at a glance where the two hundred thousand had come
from. They were her “commissions” got from me by stealth, by juggling
household and personal accounts. I saw that I had the opportunity to
give Walter a vivid lesson, to get back my money, and to reduce my wife
once more to a proper complete dependence. So I talked business with
Walter a great deal during those three months, taking always a gloomy
view of prospects of my combination. From time to time through my
spies I learned that he was eagerly taking advantage of these “tips,”
was plunging deeper and deeper in his betting that the stock of my
industrial would continue to fall. When I suddenly put up the price of
the stock, he was on the wrong side of the market to the extent of all
his cash, and, like scores of other fools, far beyond.
I went home to lunch on the day I hauled in my net, for I wished to be
where I could brand the lesson indelibly upon my wife. I had ordered
my men to give out my strong statement and to rocket the market not
earlier than a quarter past one and not later than half past--our lunch
hour. We had been at table about ten minutes when my wife was called
away to the telephone. She was in high good-humour as she left the
room; indeed, for nearly two months her confident hopes of profits that
would give her a million or more in her own right had made her almost
youthful in looks and in spirits. She was gone a long time, so long
that I was just sending for her when she entered. The change in her was
shocking. For a moment I was alarmed lest my lesson had been too severe.
Helen started up, upsetting her chair in her fright at her mother’s
grey old face. “Mother!” she exclaimed, “what is it?”
Her mother tried to smile, but gave me a frightened, cowed glance.
“I--I--I’m not well all of a sudden,” she said. Then she abruptly left
the room, Helen following her.
As I and Ridley and Cress were smoking our after-lunch cigars, she sent
for me. I found her alone in her darkened sitting-room, lying on the
lounge. She asked me to sit, and then she began: “I wish to speak to
you about--about Walter.”
“About his gambling?” said I.
She did not move or speak for fully a minute. It was so dark in her
corner that I could not see her distinctly; besides, when I spoke, she
had quickly covered her face. At length she said: “So you knew all the
time? You set this trap for----”
“Both of you,” I said, as I saw that she did not intend to complete her
sentence.
Presently she went on: “Then I needn’t explain. What I want to say
is--it’s all my fault that Walter did it. He’s down at your office
now. He didn’t have a chance to cover, the stock went up so fast. He’s
lost everything, and--but I suppose it’s to you that he’s in debt. I’m
sick--sick in body, and sick in mind. I give up. I’ve made my last
fight. All I ask is--don’t punish him for what’s all my fault.”
“Your fault?” said I, my curiosity roused.
“I wished to be free,” she replied. “I wished them to be free. I tried
through James when I saw how certain it was he could never get on with
you. Then I tried through Walter when I saw how you were crushing him
and Natalie.”
“So you set James to gambling?”
“Yes--and I’d have confessed, but there were the other children
just at the age when they most needed me to protect them from you.
And--I--I--couldn’t. Besides, he begged me not to--and there was his
forgery. I never thought he had it in him to do that.”
“But he was _your_ son,” said I, “and he had _your_ example. He knew
how you got the money you gave him----”
“Oh, don’t! don’t--please don’t!” she wailed, breaking down altogether.
“If you could see yourself as others, as my children and I see you,
you’d understand--No! No! I don’t mean that. Forgive me--and don’t
punish Walter for my sins.” She burst into such a wild passion of sobs
and tears that I rang for her maid, and, when she came, left to go
down-town.
In my office sat Walter, looking dejected, but far from the sorry
figure I had expected to see. He followed me into my inside room and
stood near my desk, his eyes down.
“Well, sir!” said I, sternly. In fact, I was not the least bit angry;
my complete victory, and the recovery of my control over my family had
put me in a serene frame of mind. “Your mother has told me everything,”
I added, not wishing him to irritate me with any lies.
“But she doesn’t know everything,” said he, “I risked half of Natalie’s
money--and--I--her father loaned me two hundred thousand.”
I frowned still more heavily to conceal the satisfaction this news
gave me. “Did Bradish know what you were going to do with the money?” I
demanded.
“Yes,” replied Walter, in a voice that must have come out of a
desert-dry throat. “He--he went twenty thousand shares short on his own
account.”
This was better and better. For the first time in years I felt like
laughing aloud. “You didn’t by any chance draw Kirkby in?” I asked,
with a pretence of sarcasm.
Walter shook his head. “No--Kirkby doesn’t care about stocks.”
That gave me a chance to laugh. But it wasn’t a kind of laughter that
Walter found contagious. If anything, he got a few shades whiter. “I’ve
known you were in this for two months and a half,” said I. “I wished
to give you an object-lesson that would make you appreciate why Kirkby
doesn’t care about stocks. I’ve known every move you made--we who rule
down here always know about the small people, about the idiots like
you. We are rarely able to fool each other; what chance have you and
your kind got? I told you all this, and now I’ve taught it to you. I’ve
not decided on your punishment yet. But one thing I can tell you: if
you ever go into the market again, you will--join your ex-brother!”
He was silent for a moment, then began: “Mother----”
“I know about her,” I interrupted. “I wish to hear nothing from you.”
He straightened himself and looked at me for the first time. “She
telephoned me she was going to take all the blame,” he said,
resolutely. “It isn’t true that she led me into this. I started with my
own money, then added Natalie’s, then some from Mr. Bradish, and it
wasn’t until then that I went to mother and induced her to risk her
money.”
I was astonished at the manliness of his look and tone--as unlike him
as possible. “Marriage seems to have improved you,” said I.
“Yes--it’s Natalie,” he replied, his face taking on the foolish look
a man gets when he is under the thumb of some woman. “She’s very
different from what we thought--or from what she thought herself. She’s
made me into a new sort of man.”
“A stock gambler?” said I.
He reddened, but knew better than to show his teeth at me, when he was,
if possible, more dependent than ever before.
“A fine story you tell for your mother,” I went on; “but she told me
everything--about James, too.”
“If she says she led James into speculating, that wasn’t so, either,”
he replied, and again his voice was honest. “Jim was deep in the hole,
and she tried to help him out.”
“And how do you happen to know so much about James and his
speculating?” I asked, sharply.
His eyes dropped and he began to shift from leg to leg in his old
despicable fashion. “I--know,” he said, doggedly.
But I wasn’t interested in James--or, for that matter, in the
comparative guilt of Walter and his mother. I had no more time to give
to the affair. I sent Walter away, after repeating my warning as to
the consequences of another lapse, and then I gave my whole attention
to business--to punishing the other wretched “shorts” and to putting
on full steam throughout my combination, mine now in its entirety and
therefore ready for the utmost development of its earning power.
Six months later--that is, last week--I doubled the outstanding
capital stock and at the same time increased the dividend from five per
cent. to six. It is now earning forty-two per cent. on my total actual
investment--a satisfactory property, quite up to my expectations.
My wife has gone abroad with Helen. Poor woman! She has never been the
same since her dream collapsed. However, she no longer irritates or
opposes me. And Natalie is the most satisfactory of daughters-in-law,
and Walter the most docile of sons. As for Aurora, I have been
unexpectedly able to get a hold upon her, and through her upon Kirkby.
She rules him in every matter except one. He keeps her on short,
absurdly short, supplies for the household and her personal expenses.
“When I found that he carried a change purse, I had a foreboding,”
said she to me the other day. “And when I saw how he looked as he
opened it, took a nickel out and closed it, I knew what I had to look
forward to.” I have raised her hopes for a large allowance from me in
the near future, and a fortune under my will. Presently, through my
efforts, combined with hers, I think I shall have Kirkby for a colossal
undertaking I am working out.
Altogether, my affairs are in a thoroughly satisfactory condition. If
it weren’t for old age, and certain pains at times in the back of my
head--though they may be largely imaginary. Then there is the matter of
sleep. I haven’t had a night’s sleep in seven years, and for the last
year I have had only three hours’, pieced out with a nap in my carriage
on the way up-town.
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” But--it wears a crown!
VI
When I began to build my palace in New York City, in Fifth Avenue near
Fifty-ninth Street, I intended it to be the seat of my family for
many generations. My architect obeyed my orders and planned the most
imposing residence in the city; but, before it was finished--indeed,
before we had any considerable amount of furniture collected for it--no
less than seven palaces were under way, each excelling mine in every
respect--in extent, in costliness of site and structure, in taste, and
in spaciousness of interior arrangement. This was mortifying, for it
warned me that within a few years my palace would be completely, even
absurdly, in eclipse, for it would stand among towering flat-houses
and hotels--a second-class neighbourhood.
But, irritating and expensive though the lesson was, it was of
inestimable value to me with my ability to see and to profit. It taught
me my own ignorance and so set me to educating myself in matters most
important to the dignity of my family line. Also it taught me how I
was underestimating New York and its expansive power, and therefore
the expansive power of the whole country. I began to acquire large
amounts of real estate which have already vindicated my judgment; and
I made bolder and more sweeping moves in my industrial and railway
developments--those moves that have frightened many of my associates.
Naturally, to the short-sighted, the far-sighted seem visionary. A man
may stake his soul, or even his life, on something beyond his vision,
and therefore, to him, visionary; but he won’t stake enough of his
money in it seriously to impair his fortune if he loses. That’s why
large success is only for the far-sighted.
While I was debating the palace problem, along came the craze for
country establishments near New York--palaces set in the midst of
parks. I was suspicious of this apparently serious movement among
the people of my class, for I knew that at bottom we Americans of
all classes are a show-off people--that is, are human. Only the city
can furnish the crowd we want as a background for our prosperity and
as spectators of it; we are not content with the gaping of a few
undiscriminating, dull hayseeds. We like intelligent gaping--the kind
that can come pretty near to putting the price-marks on houses, jewels,
and dresses. We’d put them there ourselves, even the most “refined”
of us, if custom, made, by the way, by the poor people with their
so-called culture, did not forbid it. So, though I was too good a judge
of business matters to have much faith in the country-house movement, I
bought “Ocean Farm” and planned my house there on a vast scale. It is,
as a little study of it will reveal, ingeniously arranged, so that, if
the country-seat fashion shall ever revive, it can be expanded without
upsetting proportions, and splendid improvements can easily be made in
the handsome, five-hundred-acre park which surrounds it.
But just as I was taking up the problem of an establishment for Walter,
the shrewdness of my doubts about the country began to appear. I
had been investing in real estate in and near upper Fifth Avenue; I
determined to build myself a new palace there that would be monumental.
It will never be possible for a private establishment in New York to
cover more surface than a block, so I fixed on and bought the entire
block between ---- and ---- Streets and Fifth and Madison Avenues. Then
I ordered my architect to drop everything else and spend a year abroad
in careful study of the great houses of Europe, both old and new. This
detailing of a distinguished architect for a year might seem to be an
extravagance; in fact, it was one of those wise economies which are
peculiarly characteristic of me.
Money spent upon getting the best possible in the best possible way is
never extravagance. People incapable of thinking in large sums do not
see that to lay out five millions economically one must adopt methods
proportionately broader than those one would use in laying out five
thousand or five hundred thousand to the best advantage. It has cost me
hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, to learn that lesson.
I sent a man from my office along with my architect to act as an
auditor for his expense accounts, and to see that he did his work
conscientiously and did not use my money and my purchase of his time
in junketing “_au grand prince_.” In addition to planning the palace,
he was to settle upon interior decorations and to buy pictures,
tapestries, carvings, furniture, etc., etc.--of course, making no
important purchases without consulting me by cable. I believe he never
did a harder year’s work in his life--and I’m not easily convinced as
to what I haven’t seen with my own eyes.
When he came home and submitted the results of his tour, I myself took
them abroad and went over them with the authorities on architecture and
decoration in Paris. It was two years before the final plan was ready
for execution. In those two years I had learned much--so much that
my palace near Fifty-ninth Street, which I had imagined the acme of
art and splendour when I accepted its final plans, had become to me an
intolerable flaunting of ignorance and tawdriness. I had intended still
to retain it as the hereditary residence for the heirs-apparent of my
line, and, when they should succeed to the headship of the family,
the so-to-speak dowager-residence. But my education had made this
impossible. I was impatient for the moment to arrive when I could sell
it, or tear it down, and put in place of it a flat-house for people of
moderate wealth, or a first-class hotel.
Three years and a half from the sailing of my architect in quest of
ideas I took possession of the completed palace. First and last I had
spent nearly five millions and a half upon it; I was well content with
the result. Nor has the envious chatter of alleged critics in this
country disturbed me. There will be scores of houses as costly, and
many as imposing, before fifty years have passed; but, until there is a
revolution in the art of building, there will be none more dignified,
more conspicuous, or more creditable. I flatter myself that, as money
is spent, I got at least two dollars of value for every dollar I paid
out. I wished to build for the centuries, and I am confident that I
have accomplished my purpose. Only an earthquake or a rain of ruin from
the sky or a flood of riot can overthrow my handiwork.
But to go back a little. Just as we were about to move, my wife and
Ridley died within a few days of each other. At first these deaths were
a severe shock to me, as, aside from the sad, yet after all inevitable,
parting, there was the prospect of the complete disarrangement of my
domestic plans, and at a highly inconvenient moment. But, thanks to my
unfailing luck, my fears proved groundless. Helen came splendidly to
the rescue and displayed at once an executive ability that more than
filled the gap. My plans for the change of residence, for the expansion
of the establishment, and for my own comfort--everything went forward
smoothly, far more smoothly than I had hoped when my wife and Ridley
were alive and part of my calculation.
At first blush it may seem rather startling, but I missed poor old
Ridley far more than I missed my wife. A moment’s consideration,
however, will show that this was neither strange nor unnatural. For
twenty years he was my constant companion whenever I was not at work
down-town. During those twenty years I had seen little of my wife
except in the presence of others, usually some of them not members of
my family. Whenever we were alone, it was for the despatch of more or
less disagreeable business. She had her staff of servants, I mine; she
had her interests, I mine. Wherever our interests met, they clashed.
I think she was a thoroughly unhappy woman--as every woman must be
who does not keep to the privacy and peace of the home. I looked at
her after she had been dead a few hours, and was impressed by the
unusualness of the tranquillity of her face. It vividly recalled her
in the days when we lived in the little house in the side street away
down-town and talked over our business and domestic affairs every night
before going to sleep. After the first few years and until almost the
end she was a great trial to me. But I have no resentment. Indeed, now
that she is gone I feel inclined to concede that she was not so much to
blame as are these absurd social conditions that tempt women to yield
to their natural folly and give them power to harass and hamper men.
I’m inclined to despair of marriage, at least so far as we of the
upper and dominating, and example-setting, class are concerned. With
us what basis of common interest is there left between husband and
wife? He has his large business affairs which wholly absorb him, which
do not interest her--indeed, which he would on no account permit her
small, uninformed mind to meddle in. With all his energy and all his
intelligence enlisted elsewhere, what time or interest has he for home
and wife? And to her he seems dull, an infliction and a bore. Nor
has she any interest at home--governesses, a housekeeper, an army of
servants do her work for her. So far as I can see, except as a means
whereby a woman may disport herself in mischief-breeding luxury and
laziness, marriage has no rational excuse for persisting.
It was with genuine regret that I was compelled to deny my wife’s last
request. I say “deny,” but I was, of course, far too generous and
considerate to torment her in her last moments. When she made up her
mind that the doctors and nurses were deceiving her and that she wasn’t
to get well, she asked for me. When we were alone, she said: “James, I
wish to see our son--I wish _you_ to send for him.”
I did not pretend to misunderstand her. I knew she meant James. As
she was very feeble, and barely conscious, she was in no condition to
decide for herself. It was a time for me to be gentle; but there is
never a time for weakness. “Yes,” I said, humouring her, “I will have
him sent for.”
“I wish _you_ to send for him, James,” she insisted; “send right away.”
“Very well,” said I, “I’ll send for him.” And I rose as if to obey.
“Don’t go just yet,” she went on; “there’s something more.”
I sat in silence so long that I began to think she was asleep or
unconscious. But finally she spoke: “I got Walter’s permission this
morning. James, if I tell you of a great wrong he has done, a very
great wrong, will you forgive him for my sake?”
I thought over her request. Finally I said, “Yes.”
“Look at me,” she went on. Our eyes met. “Say it again.”
“Yes, I will forgive him,” I said, and I meant it--unless the wrong
should prove to be one of those acts for which forgiveness is
impossible.
She turned her face away, then said, slowly, each word coming with an
effort: “It wasn’t James who forged your name. It was Walter.”
I felt enormously relieved, for, while I shouldn’t have hesitated
to break my promise had it been wise to do so, I am a man who holds
his word sacred even to his own hurt, provided it is not also to the
jeopardy of vital affairs. “I’m not surprised,” said I. “It is like
Walter to hide behind any one foolish enough to shield him.”
“No--he’s not that way any more,” she pleaded, her passion for
shielding her children from my justice as strong as ever. “He told me
long ago--when you caught him in that speculation. And we talked it
over and then we went to see James, and he insisted that we shouldn’t
tell you.”
“Why?” I asked. “What reason did he give?”
“He said he had made his life and you yours, and that he knew you
didn’t want to be disturbed any more than he did.”
“He was right,” said I.
The forgery has long ceased to be important. James and his wife,
with their wholly different ideas and methods, could not possibly be
remoulded now to my purposes. I have educated Walter and Natalie to
the headship of the family; I’ve neither time nor inclination to take
up a couple of strangers and make an arduous and extremely dubious
experiment.
“So,” my wife went on, “I ask you to send for James. I wish to see him
restored to what is rightfully his before I die.”
“I’ll send for him,” said I. “It may take a little time, as he is out
of town. But be patient, and I’ll send for him.”
I learned that I had spoken more truthfully than I knew. He was camping
with his wife in the depths of the Adirondacks, several days away from
the mails. The next day I told Cress to write him a letter saying I’d
interpose no objection if he should try to see his mother, who was ill.
I ordered Cress to hold the letter until the following day. But that
night she died. She was not fully conscious again after her exhausting
talk with me.
The evening of the day of the funeral I took Walter into my
sitting-room and repeated to him what his mother had told me. “But,”
said I, “because I promised her, I forgive you. It would have been
more manly had you confessed to me, but I’ve learned not to expect the
impossible.”
“All I ask, sir,” said he, “is that you never let Natalie know. She’d
despise me--she’d leave me.”
I could not restrain a smile at this absurd exaggeration--at this
delusion of vanity that he was the important factor with Natalie, and
not I and my property.
“You can say,” he went on, “that you have changed your mind, and you
needn’t give a reason. And James can take my place, and, believe me,
she’ll not be at all surprised.”
I had no difficulty in believing him, for Natalie’s experience with her
dowry had no doubt put her in the proper frame of mind for any further
change of plan I might happen to make. I patted him on the shoulder.
“I promised your mother I’d forgive you,” said I, “and I’ll fulfil
my promise to the letter. James is best off where he is, and, if you
continue to try to please, your prospects shall remain as they are.”
He was overcome with gratitude and relief. But he was presently trying
to look sorry. “I feel ashamed of myself,” he said.
“You can afford to,” I replied, drily. “It will cost you nothing. But
I venture to suggest that instead of pretending to quarrel with good
fortune, you would better be planning to deserve it.”
The two deaths--my wife’s and Ridley’s--coming so close together made
a profoundly disagreeable impression upon me. My abhorrence of “the
end,” to which I have referred several times, then definitely became
a monomania with me. The thought of “the end” began to thrust itself
upon me daily--or, rather, nightly. I have never been a happy man.
Added to my natural incessant restlessness, which always characterises
a creative intellect, and which has kept me as well as every one around
me in a state of irritation, there is in me an absolute incapacity
to live in the present; and to be happy, I have long since seen, one
must live in the present. Occasionally, when my fame or my power or
my wealth has been suddenly and vividly revealed to me in moments of
triumph, I have lived in the present for a little while. But soon the
future, its projects, its duties, its possibilities, have stretched me
on the rack again. As for the much-talked-of happiness of anticipation,
that is possible only to children and childish persons. When the battle
is on--and when has the battle not been on with me?--the general is too
busy to indulge in any anticipations of victory. He has hardly time
even for anxieties about defeat.
I neglected to note, in its proper order, that my wife willed all
her jewels--a value of eight hundred thousand dollars--to James. I
consulted my lawyer and found that through carelessness, or, rather,
through ignorance of the law, I had given her a legal title to
them, a legal right to dispose of them by will. There was nothing
for it but to make the best bargain I could. After some roundabout
negotiations James declined my proposal that he accept a cash valuation
on fair appraisement. He then indulged his passion for theatrical
sentimentality and declined the legacy beyond a few trinkets worth
hardly a thousand dollars, I should say, which had belonged to his
mother in her girlhood and in the first years of her married life.
These Helen persuaded him to divide with her. Aurora at first insisted
on having part of the jewels; but I wished to keep them all for the
direct succession, and so induced her to take two hundred thousand
dollars for her claim--agreeing not to subtract it from her share under
my will. As she is a satisfactory child, I consider the promise binding.
I sold my old palace for two and a quarter millions to a _parvenu_,
dazzled by an accidental half a dozen millions and impatient to show
them off before they vanished. While effecting the merger of my three
railways, I made quadruple the balance of the cost of my new palace,
by extinguishing one minority interest at forty-seven and creating
another at one hundred and two. Given the capital, it is incomparably
harder to build a palace than to make a score of millions. A very
crude sort of man may get rich, but refinement and culture and taste
and custom of wealth and a sense of the difference between dignity and
ostentation are required to enable a man to demonstrate his fitness to
possess wealth. I cannot expect my envious contemporaries publicly to
admit that I have demonstrated my fitness. But--future generations will
vindicate me in this as in other respects.
I kept a sharp look-out for a house for Walter--or, rather, for the
hereditary principal heir of my line. Among the minority stockholders
in one of my three railways was Edward Haverford, grandson of that
Haverford who originated the secret freight rebate. By the very
timid use of it natural in a beginner, and at a time when railway
transportation was in its infancy, he had accumulated several millions.
I doubt if he had any great amount of brains. I know that his grandson
is as stupid as he is stingy. But he had a beautiful little palace
in East Seventieth Street, near Fifth Avenue--an ideal home for a
gentleman with expectations, the scion of a great family. In the
“squeeze” incident to my extinguishing the minority existing before the
merger, Haverford lost his fortune and was glad to dispose of his house
to me for a million in cash. I established Walter and Natalie there
and fixed their allowance from me at eight thousand a month. This is
enough to enable them to live in easy circumstances with an occasional
grant from me--a happy compromise between an independence that would
be dangerous and a dependence that would, in an heir-apparent, seem
undignified.
I have decided not to take them in to live with me when Helen is
married. I could not endure the daily espionage of those who are to
succeed me. They could not conceal from _my_ eyes their impatience for
me to be gone. I shall keep them waiting many a year--seventy is not
old for any man. For a man of my natural strength it is merely that
advanced period of middle life when one must make his health his prime
concern.
No, Helen shall stay on with me.
Her case is another instance of the folly of anticipating trouble. From
the day she came to me with her confession that she had defied me by
going to James at the crisis of his illness, I had been looking forward
to a sharp collision with her. Naturally, I assumed that the trouble
would come over her marriage. I pictured her falling in love with some
nobody with nothing and giving me great anxiety if not humiliation;
and, while my wife had a certain amount of capacity in social matters,
especially in the last two or three years of her life, I appreciated
that she had many serious shortcomings. Intellectually, she was so far
inferior to Helen that I could not but fear the worst. I had been,
therefore, impatient for her to find a suitable husband for Helen, and
so put an end to the peril of a severe blow to my pride and plans. As I
had a peculiar affection for Helen, it would have cut me to the quick
had she married beneath her.
I was luckier than I hoped. My wife disappointed me by rising to the
occasion. Old Mrs. Kirkby, having accepted the alliance with my family,
proceeded to make the best of it. She took up my wife and Helen and
put them in her own set--it seems to me the dullest in New York, if
not in the world, but the most envied, and is beyond question composed
of gentlefolk of the true patrician type. As my wife was careful that
Helen should meet no one outside that set, and should go nowhere
without herself or Mrs. Kirkby in watchful attendance, Helen was
completely safeguarded against acquaintance, however slight, with any
man of the wrong kind. So assiduous and careful was my wife--thanks,
no doubt, to sagacious Mrs. Kirkby’s teaching and example!--that she
even never permitted Helen to go either to Walter’s or to Aurora’s when
there were to be guests, without first making a study of the list. This
was a highly necessary precaution, for both Natalie and Aurora, being
safely married, admitted to their houses many persons who were all very
well for purposes of amusement, but not their social equals in the
sense of eligibility to admission into an upper-class family with a
position to maintain.
As everybody knows, the Kuypers are one of the best families in New
York. When the original Kirkby was clerk in a Whitehall grocery
before the Revolutionary War, a Kuyper kept the grocery--an eminently
respectable business in those simple days. He had inherited it from his
grandfather, and also a farm near where the Tombs prison now stands.
The Kuypers have been people of means and of social and political and
military and naval distinction for a century. About a year before my
wife died she and Mrs. Kirkby fixed upon Delamotte Kuyper for Helen;
and, although he was not rich, I approved their selection. With his
comfortable income and what he will inherit and what I intend to
leave Helen, they will be well established. In addition to family
and position and rank as the eldest son in the direct line, he has
the advantages of being a handsome fellow, a graduate of Groton, a
student at Harvard and at Oxford, and one of those men who do all sorts
of gentlemen’s pastimes surpassingly well. My wife was discreet in
concealing her purpose from Helen--so discreet that, when the climax
came, the poor child expected us to oppose the marriage. She had heard
me and her mother comment often on Delamotte’s comparatively small
fortune and expectations--large for an old New York family, but a mere
nothing among the fortunes of us newer and more splendid aristocrats. A
yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and the business was done.
The yachting trip was my suggestion.
I don’t recall ever having had a more agreeable sensation than when
she came to me just after her return--poor Ridley was in the room, I
remember. She threw her arms round my neck and said: “You dear splendid
old father! How happy you have made me. There never was a luckier girl
than I!”
That added half a million to what I’m leaving her in my will.
What a pity, what a shame that she’s a woman! She has my brains. She
has my courage. She has a noble character--yes, I admire even her
enthusiasms and sentimentalities. She has all the qualifications for
the succession except one. There fate cheated me.
I have a sick feeling every time I think what might have happened had
James remained in my family and been my principal heir. There’s not
the slightest doubt that he would have upset all my plans as soon as
I was gone. He would have done his best to recreate for my family the
conditions of the old America which made “three generations from shirt
sleeves to shirt sleeves” proverbial. How fortunate that he shouldered
the blame for Walter’s boyish folly! How fortunate that I did not learn
it at a time when I might have been tempted to take him back! I was
indeed born under a lucky star.
A lucky star! And yet what have I ever got out of it?--I, who have
spent my life in toil and sweat without a moment’s rest or happiness,
sacrificing myself to my future generations. Sometimes I look at all
these great prizes which I have drawn and hold, and I wonder whether
they are of any value, after all. But, valuable or worthless, it was
they or nothing, for what else is there beside wealth and power and
position?
Nothing!
* * * * *
It is curious how the human mind works--curious and terrible. Seven
months after my wife’s death, when we had put aside the mourning and
had resumed our ordinary course of life, I suddenly began to think of
her as I was shaving. “I wonder what brought _her_ into my mind?” said
I to myself, and I decided that my face with the white stubble on its
ridges had suggested my familiar black devil--“the end.” But one day
several months later, as I was driving from my office to lunch at a
directors’ meeting, I happened to notice the lower part of my face in
the small mirror in the brougham.
My attention became riveted upon the line of my mouth, thin and firm
and straight--with a queer sudden downward dip at the left corner.
“Strange!” said I to myself; “I never noticed _that_ before.”
Then I remembered I _had_ noticed it before, _once_ before and only
once--the morning when I was shaving and thought of my wife and “the
end.” I had noticed it then and--had I noticed it no morning since
because it had disappeared? Or had it been there all along, and had my
mind seen it and hidden the fact from me? When one has a well-trained,
obedient mind, it can and will hide from him almost anything he would
find disagreeable or inconvenient to know.
I tried to straighten that line, but, no matter how I twisted my mouth,
the drop at the left corner remained. I caught sight of my eyes in the
mirror and found myself staring into the depth of a Something which
had thus trapped me into letting it mock me. When my carriage stopped
at the Postal Telegraph Building, I was so weak that I could hardly
drag myself across the sidewalk and into the elevator. As I was shaving
the next morning I dared not look myself in the eyes. But there was
the droop, and--yes--a droop of the left eyelid! I gave an involuntary
cry--the razor cut me, and dropped to the floor. My valet rushed in.
“I--I only cut myself,” I stammered, apologetically. For the first time
in my life I was afraid of a human being, from pure terror of what he
might see and think.
How I have suffered in the three weeks that have passed since then!
Day and night, moment by moment, almost second by second, I find
myself listening for a footstep. Now I fancy I hear it, and the icy
sweat bursts from every pore; now I realise that I only imagined those
stealthy, shuffling, hideously creeping sounds coming along the floor
toward me from behind, and I give a gasp of relief.
What a mockery it all is! What a fool’s life I have led! When I am
not listening, I am fiercely hating these people round me. They are
listening, too--listening eagerly--yes, even my own children. I can
see from their furtive glances into my face that they, too, have seen
the droop in the line that was straight, the growing weakness in the
eye that never quailed. It is frightful, this being gently waited on
and soothingly spoken to and patiently borne with--as his gaolers treat
a man who is to be shot or hanged next sunrise.
Yet I dare not resent it. I can only cower and suffer.
My crown is slipping from me. No, worse--it is I that am slipping from
it. It remains; I, its master, must go. I--its master? How it has
tricked me! I have been its slave; it is weary of me; it is about to
cast me off.
It has been years since any one has said “must” to me. I had forgotten
what a hideous word it is. And if one cannot resent it, cannot resist
it! All to whom I have said “must” are revenged.
Every night for a week I have cried like a child. I put my handkerchief
under my head to prevent the tears from wilting my pillow and revealing
my secret to them as they keep the death-watch on me. Last night I
groaned so loudly that my valet rushed in, turned on the electric
lights, and drew back the curtains of my bed. When he saw me blazing at
him in fury, he shrank and stammered: “Oh, sir, I thought----”
“Get out!” I shrieked.
I knew only too well what he thought.
* * * * *
On the following day--or was it the second day?--Gunderson Kuyper
came to see me. Deaths in my family and in his, and other matters,
chiefly--at least so I had imagined--my unwillingness to have Helen
go away for a wedding trip, had delayed the marriage of my daughter
and his son. Then, too, there had been some attempt on the part of
his lawyer to find out my intentions in the matter of an allowance for
Helen. But, feeling that this was a true love match which ought not to
be spoiled by any intrusion of the material and the business-like, I
had waved the lawyer off with some vague politeness.
I was completely taken by surprise when, with an exceedingly small
amount of hemming and hawing for so aristocratic a despiser of
commercialism as Gunderson Kuyper, he flatly demanded a joint
settlement of five millions on his son and Helen!
It was particularly important that I should not be excited. The doctors
had warned me that rage would probably be fatal. But in spite of this
I could not wholly conceal my agitation. “You will have to excuse me,
Mr. Kuyper,” said I. “You see what a nervous state I am in. Discussion
about business would be highly dangerous. I can only assure you that,
as Helen is my favourite child, she and, of course, her husband will be
amply provided for. I must beg you not to continue the subject.”
“I understand. I am sincerely sorry.” The oily scoundrel spoke in tones
of the most delicate sympathy. “We will postpone the marriage until
your health is such that you are able to discuss it.” He rose and came
toward me to take leave.
“Instead of quieting my agitation, you have aggravated it,” I said.
“These young people have their hearts set on each other--at least I
have been led to believe that your son----”
“And you are right, my dear Galloway,” he said--he patronises me, drops
the “Mr.” in addressing me, and makes me feel too distant with him to
drop it in return. “But as my son has less than fifteen thousand a
year, he could not think of marriage with a woman brought up as your
daughter has been--unless there were assurance of some further income.
I am not in a position to make him an adequate allowance--I can only
double his present income. He will, of course, inherit a considerable
fortune at my death. But I feel it is only just that you should do your
share toward properly establishing the new family.”
“I shall, I shall,” I said, feebly, trying to make him see how unfit
I was for such a discussion. “Let them marry. Everything shall be
looked after. Only leave me in peace. Do not disturb me with these
mercenary----”
That word must have angered him, for his face whitened, and he said,
with suppressed fury: “It is perfectly well known, Mr. Galloway, that
you made no provision whatever for your other children, and that you
keep your son on a beggarly allowance, considering your fortune and
the social station which you are struggling to maintain. You have
given your elder daughter nothing. I speak plainly, sir, because
your dealings with your children and with Mr. Bradish’s daughter are
matters of common gossip. I will permit no evasion, no screening behind
illness. I must speak the only language you understand. It is a matter
of indifference to us----”
“I had no idea the Kuypers were so--so thrifty,” said I, myself in a
fury at this vulgar and insulting tirade.
“As I was saying,” he went on, “it is a matter of indifference to us
whether my son marries your daughter or not. His mother and I consented
only after he had made it plain to us that his happiness was involved.
My consent was conditioned on your acting the part of an honourable
and considerate father.”
“Our conceptions of a parent are evidently as wide apart as our
conceptions of the feeling a young man should entertain toward a young
woman he purposes to marry,” said I. “Your demand for five millions
is preposterous. The honour of marrying my daughter should be--shall
be--sufficient for your son--if I permit the marriage to go on.”
“Very well, sir. You may keep your daughter and your ill-got millions.”
“Strange that ill-got wealth should have such a fascination for you!”
“Everything is purified by passing to innocent hands,” he replied.
“But--enough! I am ashamed that my temper should have degraded me to
such a controversy with such a man. The longer we have had this matter
under advisement the more nauseating it has become. I might have known
that nothing but humiliation would result from even considering an
alliance with a family whose head is notorious throughout the length
and breadth of this land for chicanery, for impudent dishonesty, for
theft----”
I heard no more. I was now dimly conscious that his purpose throughout
had been, after a perfunctory attempt to arrange a settlement, to
provoke a quarrel that would make the marriage impossible. At his last
words I felt a pain shoot from my brain throughout my body--a pain so
frightful that I straightway lost consciousness.
At last my stealthy, shuffling, creeping enemy had stolen up behind me
and had struck me down.
When I came to myself on the third day, Helen was there. “Poor child!”
I said, “your dream is over, but----”
“No! No!” she protested.
“Yes--I know your heart was set on that young fellow.”
“Everything is all right now that you are getting well,” she replied,
and would not let me say anything more.
In two weeks I was well enough to go about again as before. I found
that Delamotte had defied his father and was only waiting for me to
consent. For Helen’s sake, I yielded. Why blame the boy? Why make my
child wretched? Let them have the chance I never had. Or, did I have
it and throw it away? No matter. To sacrifice them to revenge would be
petty.
Petty! What is not petty to me, seated in front of The Great Fact?
I must rearrange my will properly to provide for Helen.
How small and repulsive it all is to me!--all that has seemed so
stupendous these forty years. I am worn out. If I have not the courage
to die, still less have I the courage to go on--or the interest. I want
rest.
They tell me--what they always tell a man in my straits. But they know
better--and so do I!
Nor do I care.
* * * * *
Too late! Too late! For now, not the poorest, greediest pedlar that
cheats in rags for rags at the area-gate would change places with me.
Oh, vanity, how you have swindled me!
No doubt they think my mind is stunned. I have seen other men of my
class stricken as I am. I have watched them in this frightful wait for
the shaft they knew death had aimed and would not long delay. I know
now why their eyes were dull, why their ears seemed not to hear. I
know what they were thinking about. For, hour after hour, I too----
(_Here the manuscript ends_)
POSTSCRIPT
On the second day after James Galloway’s death, his eldest and outcast
son called at the Galloway palace and asked for his brother Walter.
Presently Walter, in dress and manner an ideal chief mourner and chief
beneficiary, came down to him in the library. The dead man lay in a
magnificent casket in the adjoining ball-room, which was half full of
funeral flowers. They were scenting the whole house with stifling,
suffocating perfume, sweet yet sickening.
“You came to see--father?” said Walter.
“No,” replied James. “I do not wish to be reminded. I am trying to
forgive him.” Then he looked into his brother’s eyes with the keen,
frank glance that is one of his many charms. “I’ve come to see you, to
ask you what you intend to do about the will.”
Walter’s eyes shifted. “I don’t understand you,” he answered.
“I mean--do you intend to break it?”
There was a long silence. Walter’s upper lip, in spite of his efforts
to control it, was twitching nervously. At length he said: “He is gone.
It is his will. It contains his--life ambition. I think it would be
wrong not to respect it.” He looked at his brother appealingly.
“Then I must warn you that, unless you break it and divide everything
equally among his heirs, I shall make a contest.”
“But you consented, Jim!” pleaded Walter, recovering from his stupor.
“Consented--to what?”
“To--to my staying--where I was.”
“While he lived. I said nothing about afterward. If you won’t break
the will, I shall. It will be easy enough. I can prove he made it in
the belief that I had forged his name. I can prove--that--I didn’t.”
“But you know, Jim, he heard the truth years before he died.”
James smiled cynically. “_How_ do I know it?”
“I told you that mother told him on her death-bed.”
“Would any jury believe you, or believe that I believed you?”
Walter flushed and looked indignantly at his brother. “You offered
to shield me for what I did when I was a boy. I was younger than
you--hardly more than a child. Now you want to punish me after making
me accept your offer. It ain’t like you, Jim!”
“More like father, ain’t it?” said James, sadly. “But--I can’t do
otherwise, Walt. I’m only helping you to do what’s just--what’s merely
decent.”
“You are trying to destroy our father’s life-work!”
“No--not his _life_-work. I can’t do that. I wish I could. I wish
I could destroy it even in myself. No, all I can hope to do is to
paralyse his dead hand--that awful hand he has plotted to keep on
ruling and ruining with for generations. And I _will_!”
“You sha’n’t do it, Jim Galloway!” exclaimed Walter, in a burst of
fury. He stood and waved his arms in a gesture as weak as it was wild.
“I won’t let you. I won’t be cheated. I won’t! I _won’t_!”
“Let’s send for your wife and see what she thinks,” said James.
Walter gasped and sank into his chair. “No!” he muttered. “This is
between you and me.” Then, with tears in his eyes, he added: “You
ought to be ashamed to take advantage of me. And after letting me alone
and letting me get used to the idea! I didn’t think you were mean and a
coward.”
“I admit I’m doing right in the wrong way--but it’s the only way
open to me. The will must be broken.” James rose to go. “Don’t let’s
quarrel, Walter. You know what’s honest and right; I’ve told you what I
shall do. Think it over. Talk it over with your wife. Either keep your
equal share, and devote the rest to a memorial to mother--colleges,
hospitals--anything--or else divide all equally among us four. Be
sensible, Walt--think what a hell his money and his ideas made for
himself and for the rest of us. If you get only your equal share,
you’ll have hard enough work keeping from not being like--him. Be
sensible, Walt--and be decent!”
And he left the room and the house; and a huge wave of that
suffocating-sweet perfume of funeral flowers poured out through the
opened street-door after him as if to overwhelm him--like subtle hate
on stealthy murder bent.
That same afternoon the will was opened. There were legacies of ten
millions to Walter and to Aurora, and of two millions to James’s
children. The rest of the estate, seventy millions, was left
unconditionally--to Helen. The will was just one month old.
Walter was beaten in a long contest to have it set aside, and have the
estate equally divided among the heirs. The lawyers got five millions.
When Helen was finally victorious, she devoted all, except eight
millions for James and ten millions for Delamotte and herself, to the
magnificent endowment of her father’s various public enterprises. The
huge palace she made over into the “James Galloway Memorial Museum of
Art.”
“I only carried out his real will,” she said, “for he was one of the
noblest men that ever lived--and nobody understood him but me.”
THE END
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