THE THREE FATES
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[Illustration]
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THE THREE FATES
BY
F. MARION CRAWFORD
AUTHOR OF “MR. ISAACS,” “DR. CLAUDIUS,” “SARACINESCA,” ETC.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1893
_All rights reserved_
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COPYRIGHT, 1891,
BY MACMILLAN AND CO.
_Set up and electrotyped January, 1892._
_Reprinted April, May, October, 1892._
TYPOGRAPHY BY J. S. CUSHING & CO., BOSTON, U.S.A.
PRESSWORK BY BERWICK & SMITH, BOSTON, U.S.A.
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To
FREDERICK MACMILLAN
AN EXPRESSION OF GRATITUDE
FROM AN AUTHOR TO HIS PUBLISHER
AND OF HIGH ESTEEM ENTERTAINED
BY ONE MAN FOR ANOTHER
ROME, _February 21, 1892_
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THE THREE FATES.
CHAPTER I.
Jonah Wood was bitterly disappointed in his son. During five and twenty
years he had looked in vain for the development of those qualities in
George, which alone, in his opinion, could insure success. But though
George could talk intelligently about the great movements of business in
New York, it was clear by this time that he did not possess what his
father called business instincts. The old man could have forgiven him
his defective appreciation in the matter of dollars and cents, however,
if he had shown the slightest inclination to adopt one of the regular
professions; in other words, if George had ceased to waste his time in
the attempt to earn money with his pen, and had submitted to becoming a
scribe in a lawyer’s office, old Wood would have been satisfied. The
boy’s progress might have been slow, but it would have been sure.
It was strange to see how this elderly man, who had been ruined by the
exercise of his own business faculties, still pinned his faith upon his
own views and theories of finance, and regarded it as a real misfortune
to be the father of a son who thought differently from himself. It would
have satisfied the height of his ambition to see George installed as a
clerk on a nominal salary in one of the great banking houses. Possibly,
at an earlier period, and before George had finally refused to enter a
career of business, there may have been in the bottom of the old man’s
heart a hope that his son might some day become a financial power, and
wreak vengeance for his own and his father’s losses upon Thomas Craik or
his heirs after him; but if this wish existed Jonah Wood had honestly
tried to put it out of the way. He was of a religious disposition, and
his moral rectitude was above all doubt. He did not forgive his enemies,
but he sincerely meant to do so, and did his best not to entertain any
hope of revenge.
The story of his wrongs was a simple one. He had formerly been a very
successful man. Of a good New England family, he had come to New York
when very young, possessed of a small capital, full of integrity,
industry, and determination. At the age of forty he was at the head of a
banking firm which had for a time enjoyed a reputation of some
importance. Then he had married a young lady of good birth and
possessing a little fortune, to whom he had been attached for years and
who had waited for him with touching fidelity. Twelve months later, she
had died in giving birth to George. Possibly the terrible shock weakened
Jonah Wood’s nerves and disturbed the balance of his faculties. At all
events it was at this time that he began to enter into speculation. At
first he was very successful, and his success threw him into closer
intimacy with Thomas Craik, a cousin of his dead wife’s. For a time
everything prospered with the bank, while Wood acquired the habit of
following Craik’s advice. On an ill-fated day, however, the latter
persuaded him to invest largely in a certain railway not yet begun, but
which was completed in a marvellously short space of time. In the course
of a year or two it was evident that the road, which Craik insisted on
running upon the most ruinous principles, must soon become bankrupt. It
had of course been built to compete with an old established line; the
usual war of rates set in, the old road suffered severely, and the young
one was ruined. This was precisely what Craik had anticipated. So soon
as the bankruptcy was declared and the liquidation terminated, he bought
up every bond and share upon which he could lay his hands. Wood was
ruined, together with a number of other heavy investors. The road,
however, having ceased to pay interest on its debts continued to run at
rates disastrous to its more honest competitor, and before long the
latter was obliged in self-defence to buy up its rival. When that
extremity was reached Thomas Craik was in possession of enough bonds and
stock to give him a controlling interest, and he sold the ruined railway
at his own price, realising a large fortune by the transaction. Wood was
not only financially broken; his reputation, too, had suffered in the
catastrophe. At first, people looked askance at him, believing that he
had got a share of the profits, and that he was only pretending poverty
until the scandal should blow over, though he had in reality sacrificed
almost everything he possessed in the honourable liquidation of the
bank’s affairs, and found himself, at the age of fifty-seven, in
possession only of the small fortune that had been his wife’s, and of
the small house which had escaped the general ruin, and in which he now
lived. Thomas Craik had robbed him, as he had robbed many others, and
Jonah Wood knew it, though there was no possibility of ever recovering a
penny of his losses. His nerve was gone, and by the time people had
discovered that he was the most honest of men, he was more than half
forgotten by those he had known best. He had neither the energy nor the
courage to begin life again, and although he had cleared his reputation
of all blame, he knew that he had made the great mistake, and that no
one would ever again trust to his judgment. It seemed easiest to live in
the little house, to get what could be got out of life for himself and
his son on an income of scarcely two thousand dollars, and to shut
himself out from his former acquaintance.
And yet, though his own career had ended in such lamentable failure, he
would gladly have seen George begin where he had begun. George would
have succeeded in doing all those things which he himself had left
undone, and he might have lived to see established on a firm basis the
great fortune which for a few brief years had been his in a floating
state. But George could not be brought to understand this point of view.
His youthful recollections were connected with monetary disaster, and
his first boyish antipathies had been conceived against everything that
bore the name of business. What he felt for the career of the
money-maker was more than antipathy; it amounted to a positive horror
which he could not overcome. From time to time his father returned to
the old story of his wrongs and misfortunes, going over the tale as he
sat with George through the long winter evenings, and entering into
every detail of the transaction which had ruined him. In justice to the
young man it must be admitted that he was patient on those occasions,
and listened with outward calm to the long technical explanations, the
interminable concatenation of figures and the jarring cadence of phrases
that all ended with the word dollars. But the talk was as painful to him
as a violin played out of tune is to a musician, and it reacted upon his
nerves and produced physical pain of an acute kind. He could set his
features in an expression of respectful attention, but he could not help
twisting his long smooth fingers together under the edge of the table,
where his father could not see them. The very name of money disgusted
him, and when the great failure had been talked of in the evening it
haunted his dreams throughout the night and destroyed his rest, so that
he awoke with a sense of nervousness and distress from which he could
not escape until late in the following day.
Jonah Wood saw more of this peculiarity than his son suspected, though
he failed to understand it. With him, nervousness took a different form,
manifesting itself in an abnormal anxiety concerning George’s welfare,
combined with an unfortunate disposition to find fault. Of late, indeed,
he had not been able to accuse the young man of idleness, since he was
evidently working to the utmost of his strength, though his occupations
brought him but little return. It seemed a pity to Jonah Wood that so
much good time and so much young energy should be wasted over pen, ink,
paper, and books which left no record of a daily substantial gain. He,
too, slept little, though his iron-grey face betrayed nothing of what
passed in his mind.
He loved his son in his own untrusting way. It was his affection,
combined with his inability to believe much good of what he loved, that
undermined and embittered the few pleasures still left to him. He had
never seen any hope except in money, and since George hated the very
mention of lucre there could be no hope for him either. A good man, a
scrupulously honest man according to his lights, he could only see
goodness from one point of view and virtue represented in one dress.
Goodness was obedience to parental authority, and virtue the imitation
of parental ideas. George believed that obedience should play no part in
determining what he should do with his talent, and that imitation,
though it be the sincerest flattery, may lay the foundation for the most
hopeless of all failures, the failure to do that for which a man is best
adapted. George had not deliberately chosen a literary career because he
felt himself fitted for it. He was in reality far too modest to look
forward from the first to the ultimate satisfaction of his ambitions.
His lonely life had driven him to writing as a means of expressing
himself without incurring his father’s criticism and contradiction. Not
understanding in the least the nature of imagination, he believed
himself lacking in this respect, but he had at once found an immense
satisfaction in writing down his opinions concerning certain new books
that had fallen into his hands. Then, being emboldened by that belief in
his own judgment which young men acquire very easily when they are not
brought into daily contact with their intellectual equals, he had
ventured to offer the latest of his attempts to one editor and then to
another and another. At last he had found one who chanced to be in a
human humour and who glanced at one of the papers.
“It is not worthless,” said the autocrat, “but it is quite useless.
Everybody has done with the book months ago. Do you want to earn a
little money by reviewing?”
George expressed his readiness to do so with alacrity. The editor
scribbled half a dozen words on a slip of paper from a block and handed
it to George, telling him where to take it. As a first result the young
man carried away a couple of volumes of new-born trash upon which to try
his hand. A quarter of what he wrote was published in the literary
column of the newspaper. He had yet to learn the cynical practice of
counting words, upon which so much depends in dealing with the daily
press, but the idea of actually earning something, no matter how little,
overcame his first feeling of disgust at the nature of the work. In time
he acquired the necessary tricks and did very well. By sheer
determination he devoted all his best hours of the day to the drudgery
of second class criticism, and only allowed himself to write what was
agreeable to his own brain when the day’s work was done.
The idea of producing a book did not suggest itself to him. In his own
opinion he had none of the necessary gifts for original writing, while
he fancied that he possessed those of the critic in a rather unusual
degree. His highest ambition was to turn out a volume of essays on other
people’s doings and writings, and he was constantly labouring in his
leisure moments at long papers treating of celebrated works, in what he
believed to be a spirit of profound analysis. As yet no one had bestowed
the slightest attention upon his efforts; no serious article of his had
found its way into the press, though a goodly number of his carefully
copied manuscripts had issued from the offices of various periodicals in
the form of waste paper. Strange to say, he was not discouraged by these
failures. The satisfaction, so far as he had known any, had consisted in
the writing down of his views; and though he wished it were possible to
turn his ink-stained pages into money, his natural detestation of all
business transactions whatsoever made him extremely philosophical in
repeated failure. Even in regard to his daily drudgery, which was
regularly paid, the least pleasant moment was the one when he had to
begin his round from one newspaper cashier to another to receive the
little cheques which made him independent of his father so far as his
only luxuries of new books and tobacco were concerned. Pride, indeed,
was now at the bottom of his resolution to continue in the uninteresting
course that had been opened before him. Having once succeeded in buying
for himself what he wanted or needed beyond his daily bread he would
have been ashamed to ever go again for pocket-money to his father.
The nature of this occupation, which he would not relinquish, was
beginning to produce its natural effect upon his character. He felt that
he was better than his work, and the inevitable result ensued. He felt
that he was hampered and tied, and that every hour spent in such labour
was a page stolen from the book of his reputation; that he was giving
for a pitiful wage the precious time in which something important might
have been accomplished, and that his life would turn out a failure if it
continued to run on much longer in the same groove. And yet he assumed
that it would be absolutely impossible for him to abandon his drudgery
in order to devote himself solely to the series of essays on which he
had pinned his hopes of success. His serious work, as he called it, made
little progress when interrupted at every step by the necessity for
writing twaddle about trash.
It may be objected that George Wood should not have written twaddle, but
should have employed his best energies in the improvement of second
class literature by systematically telling the truth about it.
Unfortunately the answer to such a stricture is not far to seek. If he
had written what he thought, the newspapers would have ceased to employ
him; not that it is altogether impossible to write honestly about the
great rivers of minor books which flow east and west and north and south
from the publishers’ gardens, but because the critic who has the age,
experience, and talent to bestow faint praise without inflicting
damnation commands a high price and cannot be wasted on little authors
and their little publications. The beginner often knows that he is
writing twaddle and regrets it, and he very likely knows how to write in
strains of enthusiastic eulogium or of viciously cruel abuse; but though
he have all these things, he has not yet acquired the unaffected charity
which covers a multitude of sins, and which is the result of an ancient
and wise good feeling entertained between editors, publishers and
critics. He cannot really feel mildly well disposed towards a book he
despises, and his only chance of expressing gentle sentiments not his
own, lies in the plentiful use of unmitigated twaddle. If he remains a
critic, he is either lifted out of the sphere of the daily saleable
trash to that of serious first class literature, or else he imbibes
through the pores of his soul such proportional parts of the editor’s
and the publisher’s wishes as shall combine in his own character and
produce the qualities which they both desire to find there and to see
expressed in his paragraphs.
It could not be said that George Wood was discontented with what he
found to do, so much as with being constantly hindered from doing
something better. And that better thing which he would have done, and
believed that he could have done, was in reality far from having reached
the stage of being clearly defined. He had never felt any strong liking
for fiction, and his mind had been nourished upon unusually solid
intellectual food, while the outward circumstances of his life had
necessarily left much to his imagination, which to most young men of
five and twenty is already matter of experience. As a boy he had been
too much with older people, and had therefore thought too much to be
boyish. Possibly, too, he had seen more than was good for him, for his
father had left him but a short time at school in the days of their
prosperity, and, being unable to leave New York for any length of time,
had more than once sent him abroad with an elderly tutor from whom the
lad had acquired all sorts of ideas that were too big for him. He had
been wrongly supposed to be of a delicate constitution, too, and had
been indulged in all manner of intellectual whims and fancies, whereby
he had gained a smattering of many sciences and literatures at an age
when he ought to have been following a regular course of instruction.
Then, before he was thought old enough to enter a university, the crash
had come.
Jonah Wood was far too conscientious a man not to sacrifice whatever he
could for the completion of his son’s education. For several years he
deprived himself of every luxury, in order that George might have the
assistance he so greatly needed while making his studies at Columbia
College in his native city. Then only did the father realise how he had
erred in allowing the boy to receive the desultory and aimless teaching
that had seemed so generous in the days of wealth. He knew more or less
well a variety of subjects of which his companions were wholly ignorant,
but he was utterly unversed in much of their knowledge. And this was not
all, for George had acquired from his former tutor a misguided contempt
for the accepted manner of dealing with certain branches of learning,
without possessing that grasp of the matters in hand which alone
justifies a man in thinking differently from the great mass of his
fellows. It is not well to ridicule the American method of doing things
until one is master of some other.
It was from the time when George entered college that he began to be a
constant source of disappointment to his father. The elderly man had
received a good, old-fashioned, thoroughly prejudiced education, and
though he remembered little Latin and less Greek, he had not forgotten
the way in which he had been made to learn both. George’s way of talking
about his studies disturbed his father’s sense of intellectual
propriety, which was great, without exciting his curiosity, which was
infinitesimally small. With him also prevailed the paternal view which
holds that young men must necessarily distinguish themselves above their
companions if they really possess any exceptional talent, and his peace
of mind was further endangered by his sense of responsibility for
George’s beginnings. If he had believed that George was stupid, he would
have resigned himself to that dispensation of Providence. But he thought
otherwise. The boy was not an ordinary boy, and if he failed to prove it
by taking prizes in competition, he must be lazy or his preparation must
have been defective. No other alternative was to be found, and the fault
therefore lay either with himself or with his father.
George never obtained a prize, and barely passed his examinations at
all. Jonah Wood made a point of seeing all his examiners as well as the
instructors who had known him during his college life. Three-quarters of
the number asserted that the young fellow was undeniably clever, and
added, expressing themselves with professorial politeness, that his
previous studies seemed to have taken a direction other than that of the
college “curriculum,” as they called it. The professor of Greek presumed
that George might have distinguished himself in Latin, the professor of
Latin surmised that Greek might have been his strong point; both
believed that he had talent for mathematics, while the mathematician
remarked that he seemed to have a very good understanding, but that it
would be turned to better account in the pursuit of classical studies.
Jonah Wood returned to his home very much disturbed in mind, and from
that day his anxiety steadily increased. As it became more clear that
his son would never accept a business career, but would probably waste
his opportunities in literary dabbling, the good man’s alarm became
extreme. He did not see that George’s one true talent lay in his ready
power of assimilating unfamiliar knowledge by a process of intuition
that escapes methodical learners, any more than he understood that the
boy’s one solid acquirement was the power of using his own language. He
was not to be too much blamed, perhaps, for the young man himself was
only dimly conscious of his yet undeveloped power. What made him write
was neither the pride of syntax nor the certainty of being right in his
observations; he was driven to paper to escape from the torment of the
desire to express something, he knew not what, which he could express in
no other way. He found no congenial conversation at home and little
abroad, and yet he felt that he had something to say and must say it.
It should not be supposed that either Jonah Wood’s misfortunes or his
poverty, which was after all comparative, though hard to bear, prevented
George from mixing in the world with which he was connected by his
mother’s birth, and to some extent by his father’s former position. The
old gentleman, indeed, was too proud to renew his acquaintance with
people who had thought him dishonourable until he had proved himself
spotless; but the very demonstration of his uprightness had been so
convincing and clear that it constituted a patent of honour for his son.
Many persons who had blamed themselves for their hasty judgment would
have been glad to make amends by their cordial reception of the man they
had so cruelly mistaken. George, however, was quite as proud as his
father, and much more sensitive. He remembered well enough the
hard-hearted, boyish stare he had seen in the eyes of some of his
companions when he was but just seventeen years old, and later, at
college, when his father’s self-sacrifice was fully known, and his old
associates had held out their hands to his in the hope of making
everything right again, George had met them with stony eyes and scornful
civility. It was not easy to forgive, and with all his excellent
qualities and noble honesty of purpose, Jonah Wood was not altogether
displeased to know that his son held his head high and drew back from
the renewal of fair weather friendships. Almost against his will he
encouraged him in his conduct, while doing his best to appear at least
indifferent.
George needed but little encouragement to remain in social obscurity,
though he was conscious of a rather contemptible hope that he might one
day play a part in society, surrounded by all the advantages of wealth
and general respect which belong especially to those few who possess
both, by inheritance rather than as a result of their own labours. He
was not quite free from that subtle aristocratic taint which has touched
so many members of American society. Like the wind, no man can tell
whence it comes nor whither it goes; but unlike the ill wind in the
proverb it blows no good to any one. It is not the breath of that
republican inequality which is caused by two men extracting a different
degree of advantage from the same circumstances; it is not the
inevitable inequality produced by the inevitable struggle for existence,
wealth and power; but it is the fictitious inequality caused by the
pretence that the accident of a man’s birth should of itself constitute
for him a claim to have special opportunities made for him, adapted to
his use and protected by law for his particular benefit. It is a fallacy
which is in the air, and which threatens to produce evil consequences
wherever it becomes localised.
Perhaps, at some future time yet far distant, a man will arise who shall
fathom and explain the great problems presented by human vanity. No more
interesting study could be found wherewith to occupy the greatest mind,
and assuredly none in the pursuit of which a man would be so constantly
confronted by new and varied matter for research. One main fact at least
we know. Vanity is the boundless, circumambient and all-penetrating
ether in which all man’s thoughts and actions have being and receive
manifestation. All moral and intellectual life is either full of it and
in sympathy with it, breathing it as our bodies breathe the air, or is
out of balance with it in the matter of quantity and is continually
struggling to restore its own lost equilibrium. It is as impossible to
conceive of anything being done in the world without also conceiving the
element of vanity as the medium for the action, as it is to imagine
motion without space, or time without motion. To say that any man who
succeeds in the race for superiority of any sort is without vanity, is
downright nonsense; to assert that any man can reach success without it,
would be to state more than any one has yet been able to prove. Let us
accept the fact that we are all vain, whether we be saints or sinners,
men of action or men of thought, men who leave our sign manual upon the
page of our little day or men who trudge through the furrows of a
nameless life ploughing and sowing that others may reap and eat and be
merry. After all, does not our conception of heaven suggest to us a life
from which all vanity is absent, and does not our idea of hell show us
an existence in which vanity reigns supreme and hopeless, without
prospect of satisfaction? Let us at least strive that our vanity may
neither do injury to our fellow-men, nor recoil and become ridiculous in
ourselves.
Enough has been said to define and explain the character and life of the
young man whose history this book is to relate. He himself was far from
being conscious of all his virtues, faults, and capabilities. He neither
knew his own energy nor was aware of the hidden enthusiasm which was
only just beginning to make itself felt as a vague, uneasy longing for
something that should surpass ordinary things. He did not know that he
possessed singular talents as well as unusual defects. He had not even
begun to look upon life as a problem offered him for solution, and upon
his own heart as an object for his own study. He scarcely felt that he
had a heart at all, nor knew where to look for it in others. His life
was not happy, and yet he had not tasted the bitter sources of real
unhappiness. He was oppressed by his surroundings, but he could not have
told what he would have done with the most untrammelled liberty. He
despised money, he worked for a pittance, and yet he secretly longed for
all that money could buy. He was profoundly attached to his father, and
yet he found the good man’s company intolerable. He shrank from a
society in which he might have been a welcome guest, and yet he dreamed
of playing a great part in it some day. He believed himself cynical when
he was in reality quixotic, his idols of gold were hidden behind images
of clay, and he really cared little for those things which he had
schooled himself to admire the most. He fancied himself a critic when he
was foredestined by his nature and his circumstances to become an object
of criticism to others. He forced his mind to do what it found least
congenial, not acting in obedience to any principle or idea of duty, but
because he was sure that he knew his own abilities, and that no other
path lay open to success. He was in the darkest part of the transition
which precedes development, for he was in that period during which a man
makes himself imagine that he has laid hold on the thread of the future,
while something he will not heed warns him that the chaos is wilder than
ever before. In the dark hour before manhood’s morning he was journeying
resolutely away from the coming dawn.