III
I havenever been able to come to a satisfactory verdict as to the intelligence of the human race. Is it stupid, or is it, rather, sluggish? Is it unable to think, or does it refuse to think? Does it believe the follies it pretends to believe and usually acts upon, or is it the victim of its own willful prejudices and hypocrisies? Never have I decided that a certain man or woman was practically witless, but that he or she has confounded me by saying or doing something indicating shrewdness or even wisdom.
The women are especially difficult to judge. Take Edna, for example.
It was impossible to interest her in anything worth while. But as to the things in which she was interested, none could have thought more clearly or keenly, or could have acted with more vigor and effect. I have often made serious blunders—inexcusable blunders—in managing my own affairs. To go no further, my management of my family would have convicted me of imbecility before any court not made up of good-natured, indifferent, woman-worshiping, woman-despising American husbands. Yes, I have made the stupidest blunders in all creation. But I cannot recall a single notable blunder made by Edna in the matters whichalone she deemed worthy of her attention. She decided what she wanted. She moved upon it by the best route, whether devious or direct or a combination of the two. And she always got it.
You may say her success was due to the fact that her objects were trivial. But if you will think a moment, you will appreciate that a thing’s triviality does not necessarily make it easy to attain. As much energy and skill may be shown in winning a sham battle as in winning a real. Still, I suppose minds are cast in molds of various sizes, and one cast in a small mold can deal only with the small. And I guess that, from whatever cause, the minds of women are of diverse kinds of smaller molds. Perhaps this is the result of bad education. Perhaps better education will correct it. I do not know. I can speak only of what is—of Edna as she is and always has been.
Having made up her mind to fell the genealogical tree, that an artificial one might be stood up in its place, she lost no time in getting into action.
It was on the Sunday following our talk—the earliest possible day—that she took me for the first visit we had made our parents in nearly three years. We had sent them presents. We had written them letters. We had received painfully composed and ungrammatical replies—these received both for Edna and myself at my office, because she feared the servants would pry into periodically arriving exhibits of illiteracy. We had written them of coming and bringing Margot with us. We had received suggestions of their coming to see us, which Edna had evaded by such excuses as that we weremoving or that she or Margot was not well or that the cook had abruptly deserted. The world outside Passaic was a vague place to our old fathers and mothers. Their own immediate affairs kept them busy. So with no sense of deliberate alienation on their side and small and mildly intermittent sense of it on our side, the months and the years passed without our seeing one another.
Edna announced to me the intended visit only an hour before we started. It was a habit of hers—a clever habit, too—never to take anyone into her confidence about her plans until the right moment—that is, the moment when execution was so near at hand that discussion would seem futile. At a quarter before nine on that Sunday morning she said:
“Don’t dress for church. This is a good day to make that trip to Passaic.”
“We’ll go by Miss Ryper’s for Margot,” said I. “How the old people will stare when they see her!”
Edna looked at me as if I had suddenly uncovered unmistakable evidence of my insanity. Then I who had clean forgot her foolish notions remembered. “But why not?” I urged. “It will give them so much pleasure.”
“Trash!” ejaculated she. “They don’t care a rap about her. They can’t, as they’ve not seen her since she was a baby. And Margot would suffer horribly. I think it would be wicked to give a sweet, happy young girl a horrible shock.”
This grotesque view of the effect of the sight of grandparents upon a grandchild struck me as amusing. But there was no echo of my laughter in the disgustedface of my wife. I sobered and said: “Yes, it would give her a shock. We’ve made a mistake, bringing her up in that way.”
“Too late to discuss it now,” said Edna.
“I suppose so,” I could not but agree. “I guess the mischief’s done beyond repair.”
Said Edna: “Have you any sense of—of them beingyourfather and mother?”
“Rather,” said I. “My childhood is very vivid to me, and not at all disagreeable.”
“It seems to me like a bad dream—unreal, and to be forgotten as quickly as I can.”
She said this with a fine, spiritual look in her eyes, and I must say that Edna, refined, delicately beautiful, fashionably dressed, speaking her English with an elegant accent, did not suggest fusty-dusty, queer-looking Weeping Willie with his hearse and funeral coaches, his embalming apparatus and general appearance of animated casket, nor yet fat, sloppy Ma Wheatlands, always in faded wrappers and with holes cut in her shoes for her bunions.
“Wear your oldest business suit,” said Edna, coming back to earth from the contemplation of her own elevation and grandeur. “I shall dress as quietly as I dare. We mustn’t arouse the suspicions of the servants.”
Edna’s fooleries amused me. I didn’t then appreciate the dangers of tolerating and laughing at the bad habits of a fascinating child. If I had, little good I’d have accomplished, I suspect. However, I got myself up as Edna directed, and when I saw how it irritatedher I stopped making such remarks as: “Shall I wear a collar? Hadn’t I better sneak out the back way and join you at the ferry?” I should have liked to get some fun out of our doings; that would have taken at least the saw edge off my feelings of self-contempt. I am not fond of hypocrisy, yet for that one occasion I should have welcomed the familiar human shamming and faking in such matters. But Edna would put the thing through like one of her father’s funerals. As we, in what was practically disguise, issued forth, she said loudly enough for the cocking ear of a maid who chanced to be in the front hall:
“Anyhow, the country dust won’t spoil these clothes. I’m so glad it’s clear. How charming the woods will look.”
Just enough to deceive. Edna expanded upon her cleverness in never saying too much, because saying too much always started people, especially servants, to thinking. But she abruptly checked her flow of self-praise as we seated ourselves in the ferry and she looked about. There, not a dozen seats away, loomed our cook! Yes, no mistake, it was our Mary, “gotten up regardless” for a Sunday outing.
“Do you see Mary?” said my wife.
“She’s the most conspicuous female in sight,” said I. “She’s a credit to us.”
“I must have been mad,” groaned Edna, “to give her a holiday! Always the way. I never do a generous, kind-hearted thing that I don’t have to pay for it.”
“I don’t follow you,” said I.
“She hates us,” explained Edna. “Cooks—Irishcooks—invariably hate the families they draw wages from. She’s dogging us.”
“Nonsense,” said I. “She probably hasn’t even seen us.”
But Edna was not listening; she was contriving. “We must let her leave the boat ahead of us. Pretend not to see her.”
I obeyed orders. In the Jersey City train shed we, lagging behind, saw her take a train bound for a different destination from ours. Much relieved, Edna led the way to the Passaic train. Hardly were we seated when in at the door of the coach hurried our Mary, excited and blown. She came beaming down the aisle. Edna saluted her graciously and calmly.
“I got in the wrong train,” said Mary. “It’d never have took me nowheres near my cousin in Passaic.”
Edna’s composure was admirable. Said I, when Mary had passed on, “Now what, my dear?”
“You see sheisdogging us,” replied Edna. “I’ve not a doubt she knows all about us.”
“I don’tthinkshe’s got a camera,” said I. “Still, they make them very small nowadays.”
“We shall have to go on in the train, and return home from the station beyond,” said Edna.
“Do as you like,” said I. “But as for me, I get off at Passaic and go to see the old folks.”
“Please stop your joking,” said Edna. “If you had any pride you couldn’t joke.”
“I am serious,” said I. “I shall go to see mother and father.”
“No doubt her cousin lives in the same part of the slums,” said Edna. “Oh, it ishideous!”
I don’t know what possessed me—whether a fit of indigestion and obstinacy or a sudden access of sense of decency as I approached my old home. Whatever it was, it moved me to say: “My dear, this nonsense has gone far enough. We will do what we set out to do.”
“Not I,” said Edna.
“Then I’ll drop off at Passaic alone, and hire a trap, and give Mary a seat in it as far as her cousin’s. I’m not proud of my parents, the more shame to me. But there’s a limit to my ability to degrade myself.”
Edna and I had not lived together all those years without her learning the tone I use when I will not be trifled with. She did not argue. She sat silent and pale beside me. When the train stopped at Passaic she followed me from the car. Mary descended ahead of us and moved off at as brisk a pace as tight corsets and stiff new shoes would permit, in a direction exactly opposite that we were to take.
“Aren’t you glad we didn’t go on?” said I, eager to make it up.
She made no reply. She maintained haughty and injured silence until we were within sight of the houses. Then she said curtly:
“I’ll do the talking about our plans for them.”
“That’ll be best,” said I, most conciliatory.
I had not intended to say this. There had been a half-formed resolution in my mind to oppose those plans. But her anger roused in me such a desire to pacify herthat I promptly yielded, where, I must in honesty confess, I was little short of indifferent. American husbands have the reputation of being the most docile and the worst henpecked men in the world. All foreigners say so, and our women believe it. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The docility of American husbands is the good nature of indifference. A friend of mine has the habit of saying that his most valued and most valuable possession is his long list of things he cares not a rap about. It is a typically American and luminous remark. The men of other nations agitate over trifles, love to have the sense of being master at home—usually their one and only chance for a free swing at the joyous feeling of being boss. The American man, absorbed in his important work at office or factory, and not caring especially about anything else, lets thieving politicians rule in public affairs, lets foolish, incompetent women rule in domestic affairs. He has a half-conscious philosophy that he is shrewd enough, if he attends to his business, to make money faster than they can take it away from him, and that, if he does not attend to his business only, he will have nothing either for thieving politician and spendthrift wife or for himself. If you wish to discover how little there is in the notion of his docility, meddle with something he really cares about. Many a political rascal, many a shiftless wife, has done it and has gotten a highly disagreeable surprise.
Perhaps what I saw had as much to do with my tame acquiescence in my wife’s projects as my desire to have peace between her and me, when peace meantyielding what only a vague and feeble filial impulse moved me to contest. I had what I thought was a clear and vivid memory of my natal place and Edna’s—how the two houses looked, how small and shabby they were, how mean their surroundings, how plain their interiors. But as we drove up I discovered that memory had been pleasantly deceiving me. Could these squalid hovels, these tiny, hideous boxes set in two dismal weedy oblongs of unkempt yards—could these be our old homes? And the bent old laboring man and his wife—we had drawn up in front of my home—could they bemyfather andmymother?
A feeling of sickness, of nausea came over me. Not from repulsion for my parents—thank God, I had not sunk that low. But from abhorrence of myself, so degraded by the “higher world” into which prosperity and Edna’s ambitions had dragged me that I could look down upon the gentle old man and the patient, loving old woman to whom I owed life and a fair start in the world. My blood burned and my eyes sank as they greeted me, their homely old hands trembling, their mouths distorted by emotion and age and missing teeth. I turned away while they were kissing Edna, for I felt I should hate her and loathe myself if I saw the expression that must be in her face.
“There are my father and mother!” she cried in a suffocating voice. And we three Lorings were watching her hurry across the yard and through the gap in the fence between the two places. My sister came forward. We kissed each other as awkwardly as two strangers. I looked at her dazedly. Mary, our cook, was an imposinglooking lady beside this thin-haired, coarse-featured old maid. In embarrassed silence we four entered the house. I am not tall nor in the least fat, yet I had an uncontrollable impulse to stoop and to squeeze as I entered the squat and narrow doorway. That miserable little “parlor!”
As we sat silent my roving glance at last sought my mother’s face. Oh, the faces, the masks, with which freakish and so often savagely ironic fate covers and hides our souls, making fair seem foul and foul seem fair, making beauty repellent and ugliness seem beautiful. Suddenly through that plain, time- and toil-scarred mask, through those dim, sunken eyes, I saw her soul—her mother’s heart—looking at me. And the tears poured into my eyes. “Mother!” I sobbed in a choking voice, and I put my arms round her and nestled against her heart, a boy again—a bad boy with a streak of good in him. I felt how proud she—they all—were of me, the son and brother, who had gone forth and fulfilled the universal American dream of getting up in the world. I hoped, I prayed that they would not realize what a poor creature I was, with my snobbish shame.
There was an awkward, rambling attempt at talk. But we had nothing to talk about—nothing in common. I happened to think of our not having brought Margot; how shameful it was, yet how glad I felt, and how self-contemptuous for being glad. To break that awful silence I enlarged upon Margot—her beauty, her cleverness.
“She must be like Polly”—my sister’s name wasPolly—“like Polly was at her age,” observed my mother.
I looked at Polly Ann, in whose faded face and withered form—faded and withered though she was not yet forty, was in fact but seven or eight years older than I. Like Polly! I could speak no more of Margot, the delicate loveliness of a rare, carefully reared hot-house exotic. Yes, exotic; for the girls and the women brought up in the super-refinements of prosperous class silliness seem foreign to this world—and are.
A few minutes that seemed hours, and Edna came in, her father and mother limping and hobbling in her train. Edna was sickly pale and her eyelids refused to rise. I shook hands with old Willie Wheatlands, hesitated, then kissed the fat, sallow, swinging cheek of my mother-in-law. Said Edna in a hard, forced voice:
“I’ve explained that Margot isn’t well and that we’ve got to get back——”
“Mercy me!” cried my mother. “Ain’t you going to stay to supper?”
Supper! It was only half-past twelve. Supper could not be until five or half-past. We had been there half an hour and already conversation was exhausted and time had become motionless.
“We intended to,” said Edna. “But Margot wasn’t at all well when we left. We simply can’t stay away long. We’d not have come, but we felt we’d never get here if we kept on letting things interfere.”
“You didn’t leave Margyalone?” demanded Edna’s mother.
“Almost,” said Edna. “Only a—a servant.”
“Oh, you keep a nurse girl, too,” said Polly. “I thought Edna didn’t look as if she did any of her own work.”
“Yes, I have a—a girl, in addition to the cook,” replied Edna, flushing as she thus denied three of her five servants—flushing not because of the denial, but because in her confession she had almost forgotten about the numerous excuses based on the cook. “Godfrey has been doing very well, and we felt we could afford it.”
“Better get rid of her,” advised old Willie sourly. “And of the cook, too. Servant girls is mighty wasteful.”
“And she’ll teach Margy badness,” said my mother. “Them servants is full of poison. Even if yer pa’d had money I’d never have allowed no servant round my children, no more’n a snake in the cradle. I hope she’s a good Christian, and not a Catholic?”
“She’s all right,” declared Edna nervously. “But we’ll have to be going soon.”
“Yes; that there girl might git drunk,” said Mrs. Wheatlands.
“And set fire to the house maybe,” said my mother. “I heard of a case just last week.”
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” cried Edna, her tones of protest more like jubilation. “I’ll be wretched until I’m home again.”
Mother told in detail and with rising excitement the story of the drunken nurse girl who had burned up herself and her charges, a pair of lovely twins. From that moment our families were anxious for us to go. Thethree women could see the girl drunk and the house burning. The two grandfathers, while less imaginative, were almost as uneasy. Besides, no doubt our families found us full as tiring as we found them.
“But before we go,” said Edna, in a business-like tone, “there’s one thing we wanted to talk about. Godfrey has had—that is, he has done very well in business. And of course our first thought—one of our first thoughts—was what could we do for you all down here. We hate to think of your living in this unhealthful part of the town. We want to see you settled in some healthful place, up in the hills.”
We were watching the faces of our five kinsfolk. We could make nothing of their expression. It was heavy, dull—mere listening, without a hint of even comprehension behind.
“We thought you, father, and Mr.—father Loring—might look round and find a nice farm with a big comfortable house—plenty big enough for you all—and Godfrey will buy it, and will pay for a man and a woman to look after you. He has done well, as I said, and he can afford it. In fact, they’ve made him president of the railroad.”
My father, my mother, and my sister exchanged glances. A long, awed silence. Old Willie spoke in his squeaky, stingy voice: “I can’t leave my business. I ain’t footless like Loring there.Mybusiness pays.”
“You can sell it,” said Edna. “You know you ought to retire. You were telling me how bad your health had been.”
“Nobody else couldn’t make nothing like what Imake out of it. The men growing up nowadays ain’t no account. The no-account women with heads full of foolishness leads ’em off.”
Edna agreed with him, pointed out that he’d have to give up soon anyhow, appealed to his cupidity for real estate by expanding upon the size and value of the farm I was willing to give him. She made a strong impression. The women were converted by the prospect of having help with the work. My father had long dreamed of a home in the country. He had not the imagination to picture how he would be bored, away from the loafers with whom he talked politics and religion. “And,” said Edna, “you’ll have horses and things to ride in, so you can go where you please whenever you please.”
We had roused them. We had dazzled them. It was plain that if a purchaser could be found for the Wheatlands undertaking business, Edna would carry her point. “Godfrey will look for somebody to take the business,” said she to her father. “I want you and Father Loring to start out to-morrow morning, and not stop till you’ve found a farm.”
I understood an uncertain gleam in old Willie’s eyes. “About the price,” said I, speaking for the first time, “I’m willing to pay twenty-five thousand down for the place alone, and as I’ll pay cash, you ought to be able on mortgage to get a farm—or two or three adjoining farms—that would cost twice that.”
The two families were dumbfounded.
“I know I can trust you, Mr. Wheatlands, to get the money’s worth.”
“Buy a big place,” said Edna, of the unexpected timely shrewdnesses. “Go back from the main roads where land’s so dear.”
Wheatlands nodded. “That’s a good idea,” said he. “There’ll be plenty of roads after a while.”
Edna was ready to depart. “Then it’s settled?” said she.
Her father nodded. “I’m willing to see what can be done. But I’d rather not have Ben Loring along. He’d interfere with a good bargain.”
“Yes, you go alone, Willie,” said my father. “Anyhow, I’ve got to ’tend store. I can’t afford a boy any more.”
The mention of the, to them, enormous sum of money had put them in a state of awe as to Edna and me. It saddened me to observe how quickly the weed of snobbishness, whose seeds are in all human nature, sprang up and dominated the whole garden. They lost the sense of our blood kinship with them. They felt that we, able to dispense such splendid largess, were of a superior order of being. And I saw that my and Edna’s feeling of strangeness toward them was intimacy beside the feeling of strangeness toward us which they now had. In my dealings with my fellow beings I have often noted this sort of thing—that the snobbishness of those who look down is a weak and hesitating impulse which would soon die out but for the encouragement it gets from the snobbishness of those who look up. I read somewhere, “Caste is made by those who look up, not by those who look down.” That is a great truth, and like most great, simple, obvious truths is usually overlooked.
Looking back I see that my own first decisive impulse toward the caste feeling came that day, came when my people and Edna’s, discovering that we were rich, began to treat us as lower class treats upper class.
My mother had been scrutinizing me for signs of the majesty of wealth. “Why don’t you wear a beard, or leastways a mustache, Godfrey?” she finally inquired. “Then you wouldn’t seem so boyish like.”
“I used to wear a mustache,” said I, “but I cut it off because—I don’t recall why.”
In fact I did recall. I noted one day that I had a good mouth and better teeth than most men have. And it came to me how absurd it was to hang a bunch of hair from my upper lip to trail in the soup and to embalm the odors of past cigars for the discomfort of my nose. Edna kept after me for a time to let it grow again. But reading in some novel she regarded as authoritative that mustaches were “common,” she desisted. And I found my boyish appearance highly useful. It led men to underestimate me—a signal advantage in the contests of wit against wit in which I daily engaged with a view to wrenching a fortune for myself away from my fellow men.
My mother went on to urge me to make my face look older and more formidable. Now that she had learned what a grand person I was she feared others would not realize it. Edna, who, as I have said, was shrewdness personified where her own interests were involved, immediately saw the dangerous bearings of this newly aroused vanity of our kin. “I forgot to caution you,” said she, “not to mention our prosperity. If wewere talked about now, it might be lost entirely. The only reason Godfrey and I came to you so soon with the news of it was because we wanted to do something for you right away. And we knew we could trust you not to get us into trouble. Don’t talk about us. If you hear people talking, if they ask you questions, pretend you don’t understand and don’t know. You see, it may be spies from our enemies.”
One glance round that circle of eager faces was enough to convince that Edna had made precisely the impression she desired. I could see that my mother and old Weeping Willie, the shrewd of the five—the two to whom Edna and I owed most by inheritance—were prepared to deny knowing us if that would aid in safeguarding the precious prosperity. My father and sister were obviously disappointed that they could not go about boasting of our magnificence and getting from the neighbors the envy and respect due the near relations of a plutocrat. But there was no danger of their being indiscreet; Edna could breathe freely. And when the two families were tucked away in the midst of a large and secluded farm, she could tell what genealogical stories she pleased without fear of being confounded by the truth.
By three o’clock we were back in Brooklyn. Edna felt and looked triumphant. The crowning of the day’s work had been small but significant. A heavy rain storm that came up while we were on the way back must have made the servants think we had cut short our woodland outing. As we were going to bed that might Edna roused herself from deep study and brokea long silence with, “I hesitated whether to tell them you had become president of the road.”
I had noted that seeming slip of hers, so unlike her cautious reticence.
“Then I remembered they’d be sure to see it in the papers,” continued she. “And I decided it was best to tell and quiet them.”
While the old folks were industriously settling themselves in the New Jersey woods— Here let me relieve my mind by saying a few words in mitigation of the unfilial and snobbish conduct of Edna and me. I admit we deserve nothing but condemnation. I admit I am more to blame than she because I could have compelled her to act better toward our families, though of course I could not have changed her feelings—or my own, for that matter. But, as often happens in this world, the thing that was in motive shameful turned out well. We and our families had grown hopelessly apart. Intercourse with them could not but have been embarrassing and uncomfortable for both sides. When we got them the farm, got them away from the malarial and squalid part of Passaic into a healthful region where they lived in much better health and in a comfort they could appreciate, we did the best possible thing for them, as well as for ourselves. Do not think for a moment that because I am ashamed of my snobbish motives I am therefore advocating the keeping up of irksome and absurd ties merely out of wormy sentimentality. It has always seemed to me, when we have but the one chance at life, the one chance to make the best of ourtalents and opportunities, that only moral or mental weakness, or both, would waste the one chance in the bondage of outworn ties. When one has outgrown any association, lop it off relentlessly, say I. If the living lets the dying cling to it, the dying does not live but the living dies. If you are associated with anyone in any way—business, social, ties of affection, whatever you please—and if you do not wish to lose that one, then keep yourself alive and abreast of him or her. And if you let yourself begin to decay and find yourself cut away, whose is the fault, if fault there be? We—Edna and I—perhaps did not do all we might to make our outgrown families happy; I say perhaps, though I am by no means sure that we did not do all that was in our power, for they certainly would have got no pleasure out of seeing more of two people so uncongenial to them in every respect. At any rate, we did not leave our families to starve or to suffer. Hard though my charming, lovely wife was, I cannot conceive her sinking to that depth. On the whole, I feel that we could honestly say we took the right course with them. That is, we helped them without hindering ourselves. We did the right thing, though not in the right way.
While our families were choosing a farm, were fixing up the buildings to suit their needs and tastes, were moving themselves from their ancient haunts, Edna was as industriously busy making far deeper inroads on the new prosperity. She was planning the conquest of New York.
Every day in the year many a suddenly enrichedfamily is busy about the same enterprise. Families from the less fashionable parts of the city moving to the fashionable parts. Families from other cities and towns—east, west, north, and south—advancing to social conquest under the leadership of mammas and daughters tired of shining in obscure, monotonous, and unappreciative places. There are I forget how many thousands of millionaires on Manhattan Island; enough, I know, with the near millionaires and those living like millionaires, to make a city of three or four hundred thousand, not including servants and parasites. Not all of these have the fashionable craze; at least, they haven’t it in its worst form—the form in which it possessed my wife. All the acute sufferers must find suitable lodgments near Fifth Avenue if not in it.
Now New York is ever ready to receive and to “trim” the arriving millionaire. It has all kinds of houses and apartments to meet the peculiarities of his—or, rather, of his wife’s and daughter’s—notions of grandeur. It has a multitude of purveyors of furnishings and decorations likewise designed to catch crude and grandiose tastes. My wife was busy with these gentry.
“Don’t you think we’d better go a little slow?” said I. “Why not live in a hotel on Manhattan and look about us?”
I had respect for my wife’s capacity at the woman side of the game; she had thoroughly drilled me to more than generous appreciation of it. But at the same time I was not so blinded by her charm for me or so convinced by her insistent and plausible egotism that I had notnoted certain minor failures of hers due to her ignorance of the art of spending money. She was clever at learning. But often her vanity lured her into fancying she knew, when in fact her education in that particular direction was all miseducation. She dressed much more giddily in our first years in Brooklyn than she did afterwards. And in the later years she made still further discoveries as to dress that resulted in another revolution, away from quietness, not toward the gaudy but toward smartness—that curious quality which makes a woman’s toilet conspicuous without the least suggestion of the loud.
However, Edna scorned my suggestion that she make haste slowly. She had long been engaged in a thorough study of the mode of life in millionairedom. Newspapers, Sunday supplements, magazines, and society novels had helped her. She had examined the exteriors of the famous palaces. She had got into the drawing-rooms and ballrooms of two or three palaces by way of high-priced charity tickets. She had in one instance roamed into sitting rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms until caught and led back by some vigilant and unbribable servant. I wonder if she ever recalls that adventure now! Probably not. I think I have recorded her ability absolutely to forget whatever it pleases her not to remember. She had been educating herself, so when I suggested caution, she replied:
“Don’t you fret, Godfrey. I know what I’m about. I’ll get what we’ve got to have.”
And I’ll concede that she did—also, that I thought it overwhelmingly grand at the time. It was a housein a fashionable side street, between Madison avenue and Fifth—a magnificent house built for exactly such a family as mine. That is, it was built entirely for show and not at all for comfort; it fairly bristled with the luxuries and “modern conveniences,” but most of them were of the sort that looks comfortable but is not. The rent was some preposterous sum—thirty-five or forty thousand a year. We had room enough for the housing of nearly a hundred people, counting servants as people, which I believe is not the custom. It was fitted throughout in the fashion which those clever leeches who think out and sell luxuries have in all ages imposed upon the rich man because it means money in their pockets. Once in a while you find a rich man who has the courage to live as he pleases, but most of them live as the fashion commands. And many of them have no idea that there is any less comfortless and less foolish way to live. You imagine, gentle reader, that people with money live in beauty and comfort. You imagine that you could do it also if you had but the wealth. Believe me, you deceive yourself. Beyond question a certain amount of money is necessary to the getting of attractive and comfortable surroundings. But there is another, an equally indispensable and a far rarer factor. That factor, gentle reader, is intelligence—knowledge of the resources of civilization, knowledge of the realities as to comfort, luxury, and taste.
I am tempted to linger upon the details of the extravagance of that first big establishment of Edna’s. It was so astounding and so ridiculous. I saw that she had delivered us and our fortune over to hordes ofcrafty, thirsty bloodsuckers—merchants, tradesmen, servants. But her heart was set upon it, and all other rich people were living in that same way. “You want to do the right thing by Margot, don’t you?” said she.
“By you and Margot,” said I. “Go ahead. I guess I can find the money.”
I shan’t here go into the ways I discovered or invented for finding that money. They were not too scrupulous, but neither were they commercially dishonorable. I must smile there. Being of an inquiring and jocose mind I have often tried to find an action that, in the opinion of the most eminent commercial authorities, was absolutely dishonorable. Never yet have I found a single action, however wrong and even criminal in general, that they would not declare in certain circumstances perfectly honorable. And those “certain circumstances” could always be boiled down to the one circumstance—needing the money.
I can’t recall exactly how many servants we had to wait on us two, but it was about thirty-five. I remember hearing my wife say one month that our meat bill alone was about a thousand dollars. For a time I fancied we were living more grandly than anyone else in town. But it soon revealed itself to me that, as things went with “our class,” we were leading rather a simple life. Certainly nothing we did marked us out from the others in that region. The sum totals suggested that servants stood at the front windows all day long tossing money into the street. But nothing of the kind occurred. You would have said we ate the finest food in wholesale quantities. Yet never did I get a notably good meal atmy own house. The coffee was always poor. The fruit was below the average of sidewalk stands. We often had cold-storage fowls and fish on the table. We paid for the best; I’m sure we paid for it many times over. We got—what one always gets when the wife is too intellectual and too busy to attend to her business. But I assure you it was grandly served. The linen and the dishes were royal, the servants were in liveries of impressive color and form—though I could have wished that my wife had been as sensitive to odors as I was, and had compelled some of those magnificent gentry to do a little bathing. Throughout the establishment the same superb scale was maintained. We lived like the rest of the millionaires, neither better nor worse. We lived in grandeur and discomfort. But my wife was ecstatic, and I was therefore content. Yes, we were very grand. And, as in Brooklyn, the glasses came to the table with a certain sour odor not alluring as you lifted them to drink—the odor that causes an observant man or woman to say, “Aha—dirty rags in this perfect lady’s kitchen—dirty rags and all that goes with them.” But only a snarling cynic would complain of these vulgar trifles. There’s always at least a fly leg in the ointment.
“Didn’t I tell you I knew what I was about?” said Edna triumphantly.
“You did,” said I.
“Haven’t we got what we wanted?”
“We have,” said I, perhaps somewhat abruptly, for I was just then wondering how the devil we were going to keep it.
“And if it hadn’t been for me,” proceeded she “we’d still be living inBrooklyn!”
“Or in Passaic,” said I.
“Don’tspeakof Passaic,” she cried. “I’m trying to forget it.”
“We were very happy then,” said I.
“Iwas miserable,” retorted she.
“I could find it in my heart to wish we weren’talwaysattended by servants,” said I. “I almost never see you alone.”
“What a bourgeois you are,” laughed she. Then—after a thorough glance round to make sure housekeeper or maid or lackey wasn’t on watch—she patted my cheek and kissed me, and added: “But you do make me happy. I’msoproud of you! No matter what I want I’m never afraid to buy it, for I know you can get all the money you want to.”
I winced. Said I: “I’m afraid you’d not be proud of some of the ways I get the money.”
She frowned. “Don’t talk business, please,” she said. “You know we never have in all our married life. You’ve always respected my position as your wife. All business is low—is mere sordidness.”
“Yes, it’s all low,” said I. “Sometimes I think all living is low as well. Edna”—I put my arm round her—“don’t you ever feel that we’d bereallyhappy, that we’d get something genuine out of life—if you and Margot and I——”
She stopped my mouth with a kiss. “You never will grow up to your station, darling.”
I said no more. Indeed, it was on hastiest impulsethat I had said so much, an impulse sprung from a mood of depression.
The cause of that mood was a nasty reverse in Wall Street. It had rudely halted me in my triumphant way toward the security of the man of many millions. It had set me to wavering uncertainly, with the chances about even for resuming the march and for tumbling into the abyss of a discreditable bankruptcy.
There are in New York two well-defined classes of the rich—the permanently rich and the precariously rich. The permanently rich are those who by the vastness of their wealth or by the strength of their business and social connections cannot possibly be dislodged from the plutocracy. The precariously rich are those who have much money and are making more, but are not strong enough to survive a series of typhoons, and are without the support of indissoluble business and social connections. My friend G——, for example, head of the famous banking house, associated in business and by marriage with half the permanent plutocracy, was practically bankrupt in the late panic. Had he been a man of ordinary position he would have gone into bankruptcy, and, I more than suspect, into jail. But his fellow plutocrats dared not let him drop, much as they would have liked to see his arrogance brought low, much as they longed to divide among themselves his holdings of gilt-edged securities; if he had gone down it would have made the whole financial world tremble. He was saved. On the other hand, my friend J——, richer actually, was ruined, was plucked by his associates, was finally jailed for doing precisely thethings every man of finance did over and over again in that same period of stress—for, what invariably happens to moral codes in periods of stress?
I was at that time—but not now, gentle reader, so cheer up and read on—I was at that time in the class not of the permanently but of the precariously rich. And through a miscalculation I had laid myself open to the dangers that lie in wait for the man short of ready cash. The miscalculation was as to the extravagance of my wife’s undertakings. She, against my express request, had contracted without consulting or telling me several enormous bills. It is idle to say she ought not have done this. I knew her well; I should have been on guard. I had begun my married life wrong, as the young man very much in love is apt to do; so, to hold her love and liking, I had to keep on giving her taste for spending money free rein. If I had not, she would have thought me small and mean, would have made life at home exceedingly uncomfortable for me, for I am not of those men who can take from a woman what they wish whether she wishes to give or not. So the whole fault was mine. When the storm broke, in the light of its first terrific flash that illuminated for me every part of my affairs, I discovered that I was not prepared as I had been imagining. The big bills of my wife were presented, for the merchants knew I was heavily interested in the stocks that were tobogganing. Those bills had to be paid, and paid at once, or it would run like wildfire uptown and down that I was in difficulties; and when a man is known to be in financial difficulties, how the birds and beasts of prey from eaglesand lions to buzzards and jackals do come flapping and loping!
There followed several anxious days and nights. On one of those nights I rose from beside my wife—we still slept together—and went into the adjoining room. I turned on an electric light and began for the thousandth time, I dare say, to look at the critical papers and to grope for the desperate “way out.” I was startled by my wife’s voice—sleepy, peevish:
“Do turn out that light and come to bed, Godfrey. You know how it disturbs me for you to get up in the night. And I’ve such a hard day before me to-morrow with the upholsterers and curtain people.”
I obediently turned off the light. As I was about to throw myself into bed and draw the covers over me, a broad beam from the moon flooded the face of a portrait on the opposite wall—the face of my daughter Margot. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at that face—pure, sweet, with the same elevated expression her mother had in these days of refinement and climbing. Said I to Edna:
“Are you asleep, dear?”
“No,” she answered crossly. “I’m waiting for you to quiet down.”
“Then—let me talk to you a few minutes.”
“Oh, please!” she cried, flinging herself to the far edge of the bed. “You have no consideration for me—none at all.”
“Listen,” I said. “I’m face to face with ruin.”
She did not move or speak, but I could feel her intense attention.
“If I let matters take their course I can save my reputation and my official position. But for many years we’ll have to live quietly—about as we did in Brooklyn.”
“Ican’tdo that,” cried she. “The fall would kill me. You know how proud I am.... Just as I had everything ready for us to get into society! Godfrey, how could you! And I thought you were clever at business.”
I could not see her, nor she me, except in dimmest outline. I said: “But we’d have each other and Margot. And my salary isn’t so small, as salaries go.”
“Isn’t thereanyway to avoid it?” She was sitting up in bed, her nervous fingers upon my arm. “You mustthink, Godfrey. You mustn’t play Margot and me this horrible trick. You mustn’t give up so easily. You must think—think—think!”
“I have,” said I. “I’ve not slept for three days and nights. There’s no way—no honest way.”
“Then thereisa way!” she cried.
“But not an honest one.”
She laughed scornfully. “And you pretend to love me! When my life and Margot’s happiness are at stake you talk like a Sunday-school boy.”
“Yes,” said I. “And I’ve been thinking more or less that way lately for the first time in years. It wasn’t long after I started when I cut my business eye teeth. I found out that as the game lay I’d not get far if I stuck to the old maxims of the copy book and the Sunday school. Except by accident nobody ever got rich who followed them. To get rich you’ve got to makea lot of people work for you and work cheap, and you’ve got to sell what they make as dear as you can. Success in business means taking advantage of the ignorance or the necessities of your fellow men, or both.”
“Don’t waste time talking that kind of nonsense,” said she impatiently. “It doesn’t mean anything to me—or to anybody, I guess. The thing for you to do is to put your mind on the real thing—how to save your family and yourself.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” said I. “I’m talking about saving myself and my family. As I told you, my troubles—the first business troubles I’ve ever had—have set me to thinking. I’ve not been doing right all these years. It’s true, everybody does as I’ve been doing. It’s true I’ve been more generous and more considerate than most men with opportunities and the sense to see them. But I’ve been doing wrong.”
I paused, hoping for some sign of sympathy. None came. I went on:
“And I’ve been wondering these last few days if by doing it I haven’t been ruining myself and my family—not financially, but in more important ways. Edna, what’s the sense in this life we’re leading? What will be the end of it all? Is there any decency or happiness in it? Haven’t we been going backward instead of forward?”
All the time I was talking I could feel she was not listening. When I finished she said: “Godfrey, what is this way you can escape by?”
“I can sell out my partners in the deals that have gone bad.”
“Perhaps they’re sellingyouout,” she instantly suggested. “Why, of course they are doing that very thing!—whileyouare driveling about honesty like a backwoods hypocrite of a church deacon.”
“No, they’re not selling me out,” said I.
“How do you know?” cried she.
“I caught them at that trick in a former deal and in the early stages of this one. And I fixed things so that, while they have to trust me, I don’t trust them.”
She laughed mockingly. “Godfrey, I think your mind must be going. You talking about sacrificing your fortune and your wife and your child for men who’ve tried to ruin you—men who are even now thinking out some scheme for doing it.... Suppose you saved yourself and let them go—what then? Wouldn’t you be rich? And when you were secure again couldn’t you pay them back what they lost if you were still foolish enough to think it necessary?”
It was not the first time she had astonished me with the depth of her practical insight—and her skill at logic—when she cared to use her mind. “I had thought of saving myself and paying back afterwards,” said I. “But I’m not sure I’d save myself. It’s simply my one chance.”
“Then you’ve got to take that chance,” said she.
“I didn’t expect you to talk like this,” said I. “The only reason I haven’t spoken of my troubles before was that I feared you’d forbid me to do what I was being tempted to do.”
And that was the truth about my feeling. I had always heard—and had firmly believed—that womanwas somehow the exemplar of ideal morality, that it was she who kept men from being worse than they were, that the evil being done by men pursuing success was done without the knowledge of their pure, idealist wives and mothers and daughters. I can’t account for my stupidity in this respect. Had I not on every side the spectacle that gave the lie to the shallow pretense of feminine moral superiority? Was it not the women, with their insatiable appetite for luxury and splurge; was it not the women, with their incessant demands for money and ever more money; was it not the women, with their profound immorality of any and every class that earns nothing and simply spends; was it not the women, theladies, who were edging on the men to get money, no matter how? For whom were the grand houses, the expensive hotels, the exorbitant flimsy clothing, the costly jewelry, the equipages, the opera boxes, the senseless, spendthrift squandering upon the degrading vanities of social position?
I laughed somewhat cynically. “No wonder you’ve always refused to learn anything about business,” said I. “It’s a habit among big business men to refuse to know anything as to the details of a large transaction that can be carried through only by dirty work. If we don’t know, we can pretend that the dirty work isn’t being done by or for us—isn’t being done at all.”
“Now you are getting coarse,” said my wife. “Do you know what I think of you?” I could not see her expression, but the voice always betrays if there is insincerity, because we do not deal enough with the blind to learn to deceive perfectly with the voice. Her toneswere absolutely sincere as she answered her own question: “I think it is cowardly of you to come to me with your business troubles. If you were brave you’d simply have quietly done whatever was necessary to save your family. Yes, it is cowardly!”
“I didn’t mean it as cowardice,” said I, admiring but irritated by this characteristic adroitness. “In the stories and the plays that give such thrills, the husband, in the crisis and tempted to do wrong, appeals to his wife. And they are brought closer together, and she helps him to do right, and everything ends happily.” Again I laughed good-humoredly. “It doesn’t seem to be turning out that way, does it, dear? My heavenly picture of you and Margot and me living modestly and making up in love what we lack in luxury—it doesn’t attract you?”
She said in her patient, superior tone: “I suppose you never will understand me or my ideals. What you’ve been doing in annoying me with your business, it’s as if when I was giving a dinner I assembled my guests and compelled them to watch all the preparations for the dinner—the killing of the lambs and the fish and the birds, the cleaning, all those ugly and low things. Bringing business into the home and the social life, it’s like bringing the kitchen into the drawing-room.”
The obvious answer to this shallow but plausible and attractive cleverness of hers did not come to me then. If it had I’d not have spoken it. For of what use to argue with the human animal, female or male, about its dearest selfishnesses and vanities? Of what use to pointout to human self-complacence, greediness and hypocrisy that a “refined” and “cultured” existence of ease and luxury can be obtained only by the theft and murder of dishonest business—that for one man to be vastly rich thousands of men must somehow be robbed and oppressed, even though the rich man himself directly does no robbing and oppressing? If I have sucking pig for dinner, I kill sucking pig as surely as if my hand wielded the knife of the butcher. But the human race finds it convenient and comfortable not to think so. Therefore, let us not bother our heads about it.
At that period of my career I had not thought things out so thoroughly as I have since—in these days when events have compelled me to open my eyes and to see. In my hypocrisy, in my eagerness to save myself, I was not loth to take refuge behind the advice given by my wife partly in genuine ignorance of business, partly in pretended ignorance of it.
Said I: “I suppose you’re right. I ought to think only of my family. Heaven knows, my rascal friends aren’t thinking in my interest. If I don’t do it, no one will. There’s no disputing that—eh?”
No reply. She was asleep—or, rather, was pretending to be asleep. The matter had been settled, why discuss it further? Why expose herself longer than unavoidable to the danger of being unable to be, or to pretend to be, ignorant of business, of the foundation upon which her splendid, cultured structure of ambition proudly reared?
Often in her sleep her hand would seek mine, and when it was comfortably nestled she would give a littlesigh of content that thrilled me through and through. Her hand now stole into mine and the sigh of content came softly from her lips. “My love,” I murmured, kissing her cheek before I lay down. How could I for a minute have considered any course that would have made her unhappy, that might have lessened, perhaps destroyed, her love for me?