Part 6

She made no reply. She maintained haughty and injured silence until we were within sight of the houses. Then she said curtly:

“I’ll do the talking about our plans for them.”

“That’ll be best,” said I, most conciliatory.

I had not intended to say this. There had been a half-formed resolution in my mind to oppose those plans. But her anger roused in me such a desire to pacify her that I promptly yielded, where, I must in honesty confess, I was little short of indifferent. American husbands have the reputation of being the most docile and the worst henpecked men in the world. All foreigners say so, and our women believe it. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The docility of American husbands is the good nature of indifference. A friend of mine has the habit of saying that his most valued and most valuable possession is his long list of things he cares not a rap about. It is a typically American and luminous remark. The men of other nations agitate over trifles, love to have the sense of being master at home--usually their one and only chance for a free swing at the joyous feeling of being boss. The American man, absorbed in his important work at office or factory, and not caring especially about anything else, lets thieving politicians rule in public affairs, lets foolish, incompetent women rule in domestic affairs. He has a half-conscious philosophy that he is shrewd enough, if he attends to his business, to make money faster than they can take it away from him, and that, if he does not attend to his business only, he will have nothing either for thieving politician and spendthrift wife or for himself. If you wish to discover how little there is in the notion of his docility, meddle with something he really cares about. Many a political rascal, many a shiftless wife, has done it and has gotten a highly disagreeable surprise.

Perhaps what I saw had as much to do with my tame acquiescence in my wife’s projects as my desire to have peace between her and me, when peace meant yielding what only a vague and feeble filial impulse moved me to contest. I had what I thought was a clear and vivid memory of my natal place and Edna’s--how the two houses looked, how small and shabby they were, how mean their surroundings, how plain their interiors. But as we drove up I discovered that memory had been pleasantly deceiving me. Could these squalid hovels, these tiny, hideous boxes set in two dismal weedy oblongs of unkempt yards--could these be our old homes? And the bent old laboring man and his wife--we had drawn up in front of my home--could they be _my_ father and _my_ mother?

A feeling of sickness, of nausea came over me. Not from repulsion for my parents--thank God, I had not sunk that low. But from abhorrence of myself, so degraded by the “higher world” into which prosperity and Edna’s ambitions had dragged me that I could look down upon the gentle old man and the patient, loving old woman to whom I owed life and a fair start in the world. My blood burned and my eyes sank as they greeted me, their homely old hands trembling, their mouths distorted by emotion and age and missing teeth. I turned away while they were kissing Edna, for I felt I should hate her and loathe myself if I saw the expression that must be in her face.

“There are my father and mother!” she cried in a suffocating voice. And we three Lorings were watching her hurry across the yard and through the gap in the fence between the two places. My sister came forward. We kissed each other as awkwardly as two strangers. I looked at her dazedly. Mary, our cook, was an imposing looking lady beside this thin-haired, coarse-featured old maid. In embarrassed silence we four entered the house. I am not tall nor in the least fat, yet I had an uncontrollable impulse to stoop and to squeeze as I entered the squat and narrow doorway. That miserable little “parlor!”

As we sat silent my roving glance at last sought my mother’s face. Oh, the faces, the masks, with which freakish and so often savagely ironic fate covers and hides our souls, making fair seem foul and foul seem fair, making beauty repellent and ugliness seem beautiful. Suddenly through that plain, time- and toil-scarred mask, through those dim, sunken eyes, I saw her soul--her mother’s heart--looking at me. And the tears poured into my eyes. “Mother!” I sobbed in a choking voice, and I put my arms round her and nestled against her heart, a boy again--a bad boy with a streak of good in him. I felt how proud she--they all--were of me, the son and brother, who had gone forth and fulfilled the universal American dream of getting up in the world. I hoped, I prayed that they would not realize what a poor creature I was, with my snobbish shame.

There was an awkward, rambling attempt at talk. But we had nothing to talk about--nothing in common. I happened to think of our not having brought Margot; how shameful it was, yet how glad I felt, and how self-contemptuous for being glad. To break that awful silence I enlarged upon Margot--her beauty, her cleverness.

“She must be like Polly”--my sister’s name was Polly--“like Polly was at her age,” observed my mother.

I looked at Polly Ann, in whose faded face and withered form--faded and withered though she was not yet forty, was in fact but seven or eight years older than I. Like Polly! I could speak no more of Margot, the delicate loveliness of a rare, carefully reared hot-house exotic. Yes, exotic; for the girls and the women brought up in the super-refinements of prosperous class silliness seem foreign to this world--and are.

A few minutes that seemed hours, and Edna came in, her father and mother limping and hobbling in her train. Edna was sickly pale and her eyelids refused to rise. I shook hands with old Willie Wheatlands, hesitated, then kissed the fat, sallow, swinging cheek of my mother-in-law. Said Edna in a hard, forced voice:

“I’ve explained that Margot isn’t well and that we’ve got to get back----”

“Mercy me!” cried my mother. “Ain’t you going to stay to supper?”

Supper! It was only half-past twelve. Supper could not be until five or half-past. We had been there half an hour and already conversation was exhausted and time had become motionless.

“We intended to,” said Edna. “But Margot wasn’t at all well when we left. We simply can’t stay away long. We’d not have come, but we felt we’d never get here if we kept on letting things interfere.”

“You didn’t leave Margy _alone_?” demanded Edna’s mother.

“Almost,” said Edna. “Only a--a servant.”

“Oh, you keep a nurse girl, too,” said Polly. “I thought Edna didn’t look as if she did any of her own work.”

“Yes, I have a--a girl, in addition to the cook,” replied Edna, flushing as she thus denied three of her five servants--flushing not because of the denial, but because in her confession she had almost forgotten about the numerous excuses based on the cook. “Godfrey has been doing very well, and we felt we could afford it.”

“Better get rid of her,” advised old Willie sourly. “And of the cook, too. Servant girls is mighty wasteful.”

“And she’ll teach Margy badness,” said my mother. “Them servants is full of poison. Even if yer pa’d had money I’d never have allowed no servant round my children, no more’n a snake in the cradle. I hope she’s a good Christian, and not a Catholic?”

“She’s all right,” declared Edna nervously. “But we’ll have to be going soon.”

“Yes; that there girl might git drunk,” said Mrs. Wheatlands.

“And set fire to the house maybe,” said my mother. “I heard of a case just last week.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” cried Edna, her tones of protest more like jubilation. “I’ll be wretched until I’m home again.”

Mother told in detail and with rising excitement the story of the drunken nurse girl who had burned up herself and her charges, a pair of lovely twins. From that moment our families were anxious for us to go. The three women could see the girl drunk and the house burning. The two grandfathers, while less imaginative, were almost as uneasy. Besides, no doubt our families found us full as tiring as we found them.

“But before we go,” said Edna, in a business-like tone, “there’s one thing we wanted to talk about. Godfrey has had--that is, he has done very well in business. And of course our first thought--one of our first thoughts--was what could we do for you all down here. We hate to think of your living in this unhealthful part of the town. We want to see you settled in some healthful place, up in the hills.”

We were watching the faces of our five kinsfolk. We could make nothing of their expression. It was heavy, dull--mere listening, without a hint of even comprehension behind.

“We thought you, father, and Mr.--father Loring--might look round and find a nice farm with a big comfortable house--plenty big enough for you all--and Godfrey will buy it, and will pay for a man and a woman to look after you. He has done well, as I said, and he can afford it. In fact, they’ve made him president of the railroad.”

My father, my mother, and my sister exchanged glances. A long, awed silence. Old Willie spoke in his squeaky, stingy voice: “I can’t leave my business. I ain’t footless like Loring there. _My_ business pays.”

“You can sell it,” said Edna. “You know you ought to retire. You were telling me how bad your health had been.”

“Nobody else couldn’t make nothing like what I make out of it. The men growing up nowadays ain’t no account. The no-account women with heads full of foolishness leads ’em off.”

Edna agreed with him, pointed out that he’d have to give up soon anyhow, appealed to his cupidity for real estate by expanding upon the size and value of the farm I was willing to give him. She made a strong impression. The women were converted by the prospect of having help with the work. My father had long dreamed of a home in the country. He had not the imagination to picture how he would be bored, away from the loafers with whom he talked politics and religion. “And,” said Edna, “you’ll have horses and things to ride in, so you can go where you please whenever you please.”

We had roused them. We had dazzled them. It was plain that if a purchaser could be found for the Wheatlands undertaking business, Edna would carry her point. “Godfrey will look for somebody to take the business,” said she to her father. “I want you and Father Loring to start out to-morrow morning, and not stop till you’ve found a farm.”

I understood an uncertain gleam in old Willie’s eyes. “About the price,” said I, speaking for the first time, “I’m willing to pay twenty-five thousand down for the place alone, and as I’ll pay cash, you ought to be able on mortgage to get a farm--or two or three adjoining farms--that would cost twice that.”

The two families were dumbfounded.

“I know I can trust you, Mr. Wheatlands, to get the money’s worth.”

“Buy a big place,” said Edna, of the unexpected timely shrewdnesses. “Go back from the main roads where land’s so dear.”

Wheatlands nodded. “That’s a good idea,” said he. “There’ll be plenty of roads after a while.”

Edna was ready to depart. “Then it’s settled?” said she.

Her father nodded. “I’m willing to see what can be done. But I’d rather not have Ben Loring along. He’d interfere with a good bargain.”

“Yes, you go alone, Willie,” said my father. “Anyhow, I’ve got to ’tend store. I can’t afford a boy any more.”

The mention of the, to them, enormous sum of money had put them in a state of awe as to Edna and me. It saddened me to observe how quickly the weed of snobbishness, whose seeds are in all human nature, sprang up and dominated the whole garden. They lost the sense of our blood kinship with them. They felt that we, able to dispense such splendid largess, were of a superior order of being. And I saw that my and Edna’s feeling of strangeness toward them was intimacy beside the feeling of strangeness toward us which they now had. In my dealings with my fellow beings I have often noted this sort of thing--that the snobbishness of those who look down is a weak and hesitating impulse which would soon die out but for the encouragement it gets from the snobbishness of those who look up. I read somewhere, “Caste is made by those who look up, not by those who look down.” That is a great truth, and like most great, simple, obvious truths is usually overlooked.

Looking back I see that my own first decisive impulse toward the caste feeling came that day, came when my people and Edna’s, discovering that we were rich, began to treat us as lower class treats upper class.

My mother had been scrutinizing me for signs of the majesty of wealth. “Why don’t you wear a beard, or leastways a mustache, Godfrey?” she finally inquired. “Then you wouldn’t seem so boyish like.”

“I used to wear a mustache,” said I, “but I cut it off because--I don’t recall why.”

In fact I did recall. I noted one day that I had a good mouth and better teeth than most men have. And it came to me how absurd it was to hang a bunch of hair from my upper lip to trail in the soup and to embalm the odors of past cigars for the discomfort of my nose. Edna kept after me for a time to let it grow again. But reading in some novel she regarded as authoritative that mustaches were “common,” she desisted. And I found my boyish appearance highly useful. It led men to underestimate me--a signal advantage in the contests of wit against wit in which I daily engaged with a view to wrenching a fortune for myself away from my fellow men.

My mother went on to urge me to make my face look older and more formidable. Now that she had learned what a grand person I was she feared others would not realize it. Edna, who, as I have said, was shrewdness personified where her own interests were involved, immediately saw the dangerous bearings of this newly aroused vanity of our kin. “I forgot to caution you,” said she, “not to mention our prosperity. If we were talked about now, it might be lost entirely. The only reason Godfrey and I came to you so soon with the news of it was because we wanted to do something for you right away. And we knew we could trust you not to get us into trouble. Don’t talk about us. If you hear people talking, if they ask you questions, pretend you don’t understand and don’t know. You see, it may be spies from our enemies.”

One glance round that circle of eager faces was enough to convince that Edna had made precisely the impression she desired. I could see that my mother and old Weeping Willie, the shrewd of the five--the two to whom Edna and I owed most by inheritance--were prepared to deny knowing us if that would aid in safeguarding the precious prosperity. My father and sister were obviously disappointed that they could not go about boasting of our magnificence and getting from the neighbors the envy and respect due the near relations of a plutocrat. But there was no danger of their being indiscreet; Edna could breathe freely. And when the two families were tucked away in the midst of a large and secluded farm, she could tell what genealogical stories she pleased without fear of being confounded by the truth.

By three o’clock we were back in Brooklyn. Edna felt and looked triumphant. The crowning of the day’s work had been small but significant. A heavy rain storm that came up while we were on the way back must have made the servants think we had cut short our woodland outing. As we were going to bed that might Edna roused herself from deep study and broke a long silence with, “I hesitated whether to tell them you had become president of the road.”

I had noted that seeming slip of hers, so unlike her cautious reticence.

“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.”