A SOCIAL SUCCESS.
Arthur Holyoke was making his way. Despite Charlie’s admonitions to
the contrary, he had succeeded in living within his income; and, after
a six months’ trial at the office, the firm put him upon a salary. It
was small, to be sure; but it was a distinct step toward the home that
he was hoping to build. He had joined one club, recognizing that after
the initiation the expense was trifling; and that he must be put in a
way to meet men. Here he spent much of his time; bachelor lodgings are
cheerless.
Business was, on the whole, a disillusion. The firm of Townley & Tamms
had formerly carried large banking and investment accounts; but these
had not increased of late years; and it gradually became evident to
Arthur that all this legitimate business would hardly pay their office
expenses. Where they really made their money was either in buying large
blocks of securities at less than their value, or, more commonly,
in selling new issues, after a long course of artificial demand and
advertisement, at very much more than they had ever paid for them.
Tamms was the light and soul of the firm. He never went up-town
into society; he never sought to shine in the fashionable world, and
pretended that he did not want to. His largest social orbit did not
transcend the society of the Brooklyn church to which he belonged; in
the city of churches he lived and had his being; and he was in all
respects a most reputable citizen. Old Mr. Townley might come down at
eleven or at nine; Arthur might leave at three or at five; but they
always met Tamms at the office, or left him there, curled up over his
private desk, silent, in his formal black coat, with his restless eyes
shining like a spider’s; and he seemed to have a spider’s capacity for
living without fresh air and exercise. The deacons entrusted to him
the church funds, and even, occasionally, made a long or short sale of
stocks, on private account, at his advice; for Tamms, even by these
aspirants for the kingdom of heaven, was reputed a man of remarkable
business sagacity on earth. And in these days, when even the church
must have its secular foundation and its corner lots, the laying up
of treasure on earth is not to be avoided; what we need, therefore,
is some really sure preventive of moth and rust, and some wholly
efficacious precaution against those thieves that break in and steal.
Although there is, I believe, no text telling us that thieves need be
always with us.
But the tendency of the times is toward a fiercer battle in the
struggle for existence, and weaker laws to keep the rapacious in check.
Of the ever smaller surplus that the world’s work wins, a larger share
is every year being demanded by the laborer, and aggregated capital,
organized monopoly, growing hungrier as it has to take less, thirsts
each year more greedily for all that is left. And the middle class,
which has ruled the world so long, is being ground to pieces by these
warring Titans.
Tamms perceived this, not so dithyrambically, but more practically,
and he profited by it. No one could turn in and out of corporations
more cleverly than he; or turn them more adroitly to private ends,
or drop out of them more apropos. Such an ingenious contrivance for
clever men are these; more ingenious than the law which governs them.
Indeed, the law has now dropped far behind, standing where it stood in
the Middle Ages, when corporations were few and simple, and it stares
agape at the Frankensteins of its own creation. But these same soulless
monsters afford to their masters unlimited power, without interest or
responsibility; and Tamms revelled in them. And Tamms was a self-made
man, and a smart one; and the public deified him for both attributes,
as is its wont; and his church would have canonized him, had his
business needed a saintship instead of a seat in the Stock Exchange.
Arthur’s head grew dizzy at the corporations, and syndicates, and pools
and other unnamed enterprises that Tamms’s busy life was wound up in.
Head and chief was, of course, the great Allegheny Central Railroad;
this was the chief gold-mine that they worked; for in it Tamms could
make his own market and buy and sell at his own price. But there were
many others. And of these, the stock of the Silas Starbuck Oil Company
had grown lately prominent.
The Stock Exchange was no longer a strange sight to Arthur; he
had grown familiar with it, with its moods, its dialect, its very
battle-cries and interjections. And here he had seen the Allegheny
Central bought and sold, and bought again; and of late he had been sent
to out-of-the-way holes and corners, auctions, and even to the up-town
houses of retired merchants (Mrs. Gower’s among the number, only Mrs.
Gower would not sell) in search of the share certificates of the
Starbuck Oil.
“Governor’s up to something,” said Charlie. “Don’t believe anybody
knows what--not even the old man.” The “governor” was Mr. Tamms; Mr.
Townley was the “old man.” And it was true the latter had little to do
with the business of the firm. He had been a conservative, prominent
banker in his day; and still carried much weight with the multitude;
but, though he bore his gray head with much dignity behind his white
choker, there was little in it--as Townley might have said. Little
remained of the once active spirit behind it but a fixed belief in
Allegheny Central and a strong taste for landscape paintings of the
French school. However, no one had found this out but Tamms, not even
Mr. Townley himself, though Charlie, as we have seen, suspected it.
And Mr. Townley was a merchant of the old school, whom all the world
delighted to make trustee for its posterity. He had a great box in the
Safety Deposit Vaults, crammed with the stocks and bonds upon which
others lived; and these he administered carefully and well.
But one great day there was a “corner” in Starbuck Oil stock; for some
mysterious reason the once common certificates had disappeared, like
partridges on the first of September. Madder and more extravagant grew
the demand for it at the board; scantier still the supply offering;
one per cent. a day was bid, even for its temporary possession, so
highly were the shares suddenly prized. There were vague rumors of
“plums,” “melons,” and consolidations; meantime the Starbuck Oil stock
had disappeared from human vision. Then, one morning, came the news;
the Allegheny Central had absorbed the Silas Starbuck Oil Company; two
shares were to be given for one, and in addition, to cover terminal
facilities, connection, etc., five millions of six per cent. bonds were
to be issued. Townley & Tamms, it was announced, had taken them all,
and offered them to the eager public for 105 and interest. “Thought the
governor was up to something,” said Charlie. “What do you suppose we
paid for them?--the bonds, I mean,” said he to Arthur; and he put his
tongue in his cheek and looked very knowing.
Arthur was kept busy, writing personal letters to the more valued
clients of the firm, calling attention to the merits of the bonds in
question; and preferred not thinking of the matter at all. He solaced
himself with human sympathy; that is to say, the delights of society
as offered in balls and dinners; and soon grew so accustomed to the
stimulant as to take much pleasure in it.
For do we not see every day, gentle reader--that is to say,
fashionable, fascinating, admired reader--how great and potent is
the charm of this life? Do we not see men ruining themselves, girls
giving themselves, for this alone? How dull, how short-sighted must our
forefathers have been, who flattered themselves that we, their clever
children, would content ourselves with the rights of man! What we
desire is the envy of mankind.
Humanity has indeed labored over a thousand years for these simpler
things, ever since that crowd of uncultivated Dutchmen came down on
Rome, and the feudal system adopted Christianity unto itself and
strangled it, or sought to do so. We have tried with brain and sinew,
through blood and fire, to get this boon, that our lives may be
respected, and our liberty of person not constrained. And now, in the
nineteenth century, we have got it; and lo! society is bored. Languid
and dull--too dull to hear, in its liberal mass, that low and distant
murmur, too skeptical, indifferent, to see the dark low cloud, just
forming, now, to the West and East--is it a mighty swarm of locusts, or
is it merely storm and rain? Here and there a tory sees it, dreading
it; here and there a radical, dreaming of it; their imagination aiding
both. And the multitude, who are not indifferent, and who are never
bored, have little time to look at the weather, still less to read and
think; or, if they read, it is no longer now the Bible, which, they are
told, is but a feudal book, a handy tool of bishops and of premiers.
Moreover, modern enlightenment teaches that it is a lie; there never
were twelve basketfuls of fragments left from loaves and fishes on the
Mountain; therefore what words were spoken on the Mountain cannot be
true.
The world is free; and ninety-nine per cent. are miserable, and the
other one is bored. So, we remember, Flossie Gower was bored, when she
got all her wishes, and had liberty to do what thing she chose. But
surely, liberty being the greatest good, it follows she must choose
to do good things? But to-day the light of the sun does not content
us, nor the fragrance of the woods and fields, the breath of free
air and the play of mind and body, love and friendship, and health
and sympathy. These are but the tasteless water of life; the joys of
possession and of envy are the wine. The early pagans were happy with
these indeed, benighted creatures; but what though the ancient text
says, What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose
his own soul? Others will envy us the world; but our own souls pall
with us. We moderns have invented _amour-propre_. What matters being
happy? The true bliss is, that others think you so. We have realized
equality; and all these good people (even to Jem Starbuck’s sister)
struggle to escape from it. Jem Starbuck was a nihilist, and their
logical counterpart. What did Flossie care for her two horses and
Russian sleigh and silver mountings and black and white furs and waving
scarlet plumes? If Central Park were the wastes about the Northern
Pole, do you suppose she would care to take her sleigh-ride there, and
show off to old John Franklin’s whitened bones alone? Is it the light,
and the air, and the motion, that makes her pleasure; is it the mere
child’s delight in brilliant colors that makes her flaunt her trailing
scarlet plumes; or is it the subtile intoxication of the world’s notice
of those things the world desires? And Mrs. Gower’s equals see these
things and do homage; and their daughters wed for these, and their
husbands work; and in pretty Jenny Starbuck’s head, walking on the
roadside, the homage turns to envy; and in James her brother’s heart,
to gall.
Arthur went in this sleigh many times, and enjoyed it, and said pretty
things to Mrs. Gower in exchange. He had a poet’s delight in rich and
beautiful things, in show and speed and glitter. Shine, not light,
attracts your women, says Goethe; and the old courtier-poet might have
said the same of men, himself included. And Mrs. Gower lolled back,
beautiful, her yellow hair shining strangely through the snow; so Helen
in the Greek sunlight; so Faustina in the streets of noble Rome; so
Gutrune, by whose wiles twelve thousand heroes and the gods went down
to darkling death. All these were blondes, and smiled and charmed and
had their adoration and their joy of life. What call had Flossie to
trouble herself with the eternal verities, or man’s past or future?
She was not eternal. She was, furthermore, a skeptic and a cynic--if a
butterfly can be said to be skeptic of eternal life. She had no real
knowledge of the things she won. She would have liked the sword of
Siegfried for a panoply, to put the Grail in her cabinet of rare china.
She would have liked to possess these things, and money and fans and
dresses, and have other women know that she possessed them. She would
have liked to possess men’s hearts.
Not that she was wicked. She was no tragedy queen, no evil heroine of
romance; she had no desire, so far as she knew, to injure anyone. She
would have paid a fortune for a picture that other people admired; but
she would have exchanged it for a ball-dress, had there been but one
ball-dress in the world; and she simply did not believe in the Holy
Grail, or the sword of Siegfried, or men’s hearts. So a rude conqueror
thirsts for the great King’s talisman, and barters it for an ounce of
colored glass, and wears the latter on a ring in his nose. But yet this
glass is not the ultimate reality, despite its wearer’s pride.
So some air-dwelling German has told us, long time the world slumbered
unconscious, wrapped in a dreamless sleep. And the gold of the Rhine
still slumbered in its waters, and the gods kept guard. Then all things
broke to consciousness, after a myriad of cycles of years; and their
first awakening was a joy; and men arose, and lived in the light of
the earth. But shortly, after some few centuries, this consciousness
became a blight; and they turned, and knew themselves. And the gold was
wrested from the deep waters by an evil race of men, forswearing love
forever; and the love of the world turned to avarice, and the love of
man to the love of self, and the love divine was forgotten and whelmed
in the dusk of the gods. And so the pessimists of the day must follow
out the old myth, and tell us that the end and cure of all is this
darkness of the gods, the death of all things, the black waters that
well again from earth, the rising waves of the dreamless sea.
But behind Zeus and Prometheus and Hera lay Fate, a power not
themselves, to whom both gods and men must bow. And beneath Wotan and
Loge sits Erda, in the heart of Earth, silent; and the web of things to
come is spun, slowly, by the silent Norns.