That luncheon was the latest and the most profound of a long series of
impressions which had been influencing my mental attitude towards the
excellent, the successful, the entirely agreeable Mr. Alpha. I walked
home, a distance of some three miles, and then I walked another three
miles or so on the worn carpet of my study, and at last the cup of my
feelings began to run over, and I sat down and wrote a letter to my
friend Alpha. The letter was thus couched:
"My Dear Alpha,
"I have long wanted to tell you something, and now I have decided to
give vent to my desire. There are two ways of telling you. I might
take the circuitous route by roundabout and gentle phrases, through
hints and delicately undulating suggestions, and beneath the soft
shadow of flattering cajoleries. Or I might dash straight ahead. The
latter is the best, perhaps.
"You are a scoundrel, my dear Alpha. I say it in the friendliest and
most brutal manner. And you are not merely a scoundrel--you are the
most dangerous sort of scoundrel--the smiling, benevolent scoundrel.
"You know quite well that your house, with all that therein is, stands
on the edge of a precipice, and that at any moment a landslip might
topple it over into everlasting ruin. And yet you behave as though
your house was planted in the midst of a vast and secure plain,
sheltered from every imaginable havoc. I speak metaphorically, of
course. It is not a material precipice that your house stands on the
edge of; it is a metaphorical precipice. But the perils symbolized by
that precipice are real enough.
"It is, for example, a real chauffeur whose real wrist may by a single
false movement transform you from the incomparable Alpha into an item
in the books of the registrar of deaths. It is a real microbe who may
at this very instant be industriously planning your swift destruction.
And it is another real microbe who may have already made up his or her
mind that you shall finish your days helpless and incapable on the
flat of your back.
"Suppose you to be dead--what would happen? You would leave debts,
for, although you are solvent, you are only solvent because you have
the knack of always putting your hand on money, and death would
automatically make you insolvent. You are one of those brave, jolly
fellows who live up to their income. It is true that, in deference to
fashion, you are now insured, but for a trifling and inadequate sum
which would not yield the hundredth part of your present income. It is
true that there is your business. But your business would be naught
without you. You are your business. Remove yourself from it, and the
residue is negligible. Your son, left alone with it, would wreck it in
a year through simple ignorance and clumsiness; for you have kept him
in his inexperience like a maiden in her maidenhood. You say that you
desired to spare him. Nothing of the kind. You were merely jealous, of
your authority, and your indispensability. You desired fervently that
all and everybody should depend on yourself....
"Conceive that three years have passed and that you are in fact dead.
You are buried; you are lying away over there in the cold dark. The
funeral is done. The friends are gone. But your family is just as
alive as ever. Disaster has not killed it, nor even diminished its
vitality. It wants just as much to eat and drink as it did before
sorrow passed over it. Look through the sod. Do you see that child
there playing with a razor? It is your eldest son at grips with your
business. Do you see that other youngster striving against a wolf with
a lead pencil for weapon? It is your second son. Well, they are males,
these two, and must manfully expect what they get. But do you see
these four creatures with their hands cut off, thrust out into the
infested desert? They are your wife and your daughters. You cut their
hands off. You did it so kindly and persuasively. And that chiefly is
why you are a scoundrel. ...
"You educated all these women in a false and abominable doctrine. You
made them believe, and you forced them to act up to the belief, that
money was a magic thing, and that they had a magic power over it. All
they had to do was to press a certain button, or to employ a certain
pretty tone, and money would flow forth like water from the rock of
Moses. And so far as they were concerned money actually did behave in
this convenient fashion.
"But all the time you were deceiving them by a conjuring-trick, just
as priests of strange cults deceive their votaries.... And further,
you taught them that money had but one use--to be spent. You
may--though by a fluke--have left a quantity of money to your widow,
but her sole skill is to spend it. She has heard that there is such a
thing as investing money. She tries to invest it. But, bless you, you
never said a word to her about that, and the money vanishes now as
magically as it once magically appeared in her lap.
"Yes, you compelled all these four women to live so that money and
luxury and servants and idleness were absolutely essential to them if
their existence was to be tolerable. And what is worse, you compelled
them to live so that, deprived of magic money, they were incapable of
existing at all, tolerably or intolerably. Either they must expire in
misery--after their splendid career with you!--or they must earn
existence by smiles and acquiescences and caresses. (For you cut their
hands off.) They must beg for their food and raiment. There are
different ways of begging.
"But you protest that you did it out of kindness, and because you
wanted them to have a real good time. My good Alpha, it is absurd for
a man to argue that he cut off a woman's hands out of kindness. Human
beings are so incredulous, so apt to think evil, that such arguments
somehow fail to carry conviction. I am fairly credulous myself, but
even I decline to accept the plea. And I say that if your conduct was
meant kindly, it is a pity that you weren't born cruel. Cruelty would
have been better. Was it out of kindness that you refused to allow
your youngest to acquire the skill to earn her own living? Was it out
of kindness that you thwarted her instinct and filled her soul with
regret that may be eternal? It was not. I have already indicated, in
speaking of your son, one of the real reasons. Another was that you
took pride in having these purely ornamental and loving creatures
about you, and you would not suffer them to have an interest stronger
than their interest in you, or a function other than the function of
completing your career and illustrating your success in the world. If
the girl was to play the piano, she was to play it in order to perfect
your home and minister to your pleasure and your vanity, and for
naught else. You got what you wanted, and you infamously shut your
eyes to the risks.
"I hear you expostulate that you didn't shut your eyes to the risks,
and that there will always be risks, and that it is impossible to
provide fully against all of them.
"Which is true, or half true, and the truth or half-truth of the
statement only renders your case the blacker, O Alpha! Risks are an
inevitable part of life. They are part of the fine savour and burden
of life, and without the sense of them life is flat and tasteless. And
yet you feigned to your women that risk was eliminated from the magic
world in which you had put them. You deliberately deprived them of the
most valuable factor in existence--genuine responsibility. You made
them ridiculous in the esteem of all persons with a just perception of
values. You slowly bled them of their self-respect. Had you been less
egotistic, they might have been happier, even during your lifetime.
Your wife would have been happier had she been permitted or compelled
to feel the weight of the estate and to share understandingly the
anxieties of your wonderful business. Your girls would have been
happier had they been cast forcibly out of the magic world into the
real world for a few hours every day during a few years in order to
learn its geography, and its customs, and the terms on which food and
raiment and respect can be obtained in it, and the ability to obtain
them. And so would you have been happier, fool! You sent your girls on
the grand tour, but you didn't send them into the real world.
"Alpha, the man who cuts off another man's hands is a ruffian. The man
who cuts off a woman's hands is a scoundrel. There is no excuse for
him--none whatever. And the kinder he is the worse he is. I repeat
that you are the worst sort of scoundrel. Your family mourns you, and
every member of it says what an angel of a father you were. But you
were a scoundrel all the same. And at heart every member of the family
knows it and admits it. Which is rather distressing. And there are
thousands just like you, Alpha. Yes, even in England there are tens of
thousands just like you....
"But you aren't dead yet. I was only asking you to conceive that you
were.
"Believe me, my dear Alpha,
"Yours affectionately."
A long and violent epistle perhaps. You inquire in what spirit Alpha
received it. The truth is, he never did receive it.