“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 selling _you_ out,” she instantly suggested. “Why, of
course they are doing that very thing!--while _you_ are 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 woman was 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, the _ladies_, 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 tones were
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 point out 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 little sigh 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?