“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 our talents 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 enriched family 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 not
noted 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 house in 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 of crafty, 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
at my 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 in
_Brooklyn_!”
“Or in Passaic,” said I.
“Don’t _speak_ of Passaic,” she cried. “I’m trying to forget it.”
“We were very happy then,” said I.
“_I_ was miserable,” retorted she.
“I could find it in my heart to wish we weren’t _always_ attended 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’m _so_ proud 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 be
_really_ happy, 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 impulse that 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 the things 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 eagles and 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.”
“I _can’t_ do 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 there _any_ way to avoid it?” She was sitting up in bed, her
nervous fingers upon my arm. “You must _think_, 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 there _is_ a 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 make a 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.”