Part 7

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.”

I paused, hoping for some sign of sympathy. None came. I went on:

“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?

IV

It is hardly necessary to say that I threw overboard my partners and saved myself. Indeed, I emerged from the crisis--liberally bespattered with mud, it is true--but richer than when I entered it. Since I was doing the act that was the supreme proof of my possessing the courage and the skill for leadership in business--since I was definitely breaking with the old-fashioned morality--I felt it was the part of wisdom to do the thing so thoroughly, so profitably, that instead of being execrated I should be admired. There were attacks on me in the newspapers; there were painful interviews with my partners--not so painful to me as they would have been had I not been able to remind them of their own unsuccessful treacheries and to enforce the spoken reminder with the documentary proof. But on the whole I came off excellently well--as who does not that “gets away with the goods?”

In these days of increased intelligence and consequent lessened hypocrisy, the big business man is the object of only perfunctory hypocrisies from outraged morality. It has been discovered that the farmer watering his milk or the grocer using solder-“mended” scales is as bad as the man who “reorganizes” a railway or manipulates a stock--is worse actually because the massed mischief of the million little business rascals is greater than the sensational misdeeds of the few great rascals. It has been discovered that human nature is good or bad only according to the opportunities and necessities, not according to abstract moral standards. And the cry is no longer, “Kill the scoundrel,” but, “That fellow had the sense to outwit us. We must learn from him how to sharpen our wits so that we won’t let ourselves be robbed.” A healthful sign this, that masses of men are ceasing from twaddle about vague ideals and are educating themselves in practical horse sense. It may be that some day the honest husbandman will learn to guard his granary not only against the robber with the sack in the dark of the morn, but also against the rats and mice who pilfer ten bushels to every one that is stolen. Of one thing I am certain--until men learn to take heed in the small, they will remain easy prey in the large.

Far from doing me harm, my bold stroke was of the greatest benefit--from the standpoint of material success, and that is the only point of view I am here considering. It did me as much good with the world as it has done me with you, gentle reader. For while you are exclaiming against my wickedness you are in your secret heart confessing that if I had chosen the ideally honest course, had retired to obscurity and poverty, you would have approved--and would have lost interest in me. Why, if I had chosen that ideal course, I doubt not I should have lost my railway position. My directors would have waxed enthusiastic over my “old-fashioned honesty,” and would have looked round for another and shrewder and stronger man to whom to intrust the management of their railway--which would not pay dividends were it run along the lines of old-fashioned honesty. The outburst of denunciation soon spent itself, like a summer storm beating the giant cliffs of a mountain. Of what use to rage futilely against my splendid immovable fortune? The attacks, the talk about my bold stroke, the exaggerations of the size of the fortune I had made, all served to attract attention to me, to make me a formidable and an interesting figure. I leaped from obscurity into fame and power--and I had the money to maintain the position I had won.

* * * * *

Long before, indeed as soon as we moved to Manhattan, my wife had joined fashionable and exclusive Holy Cross Church and had plunged straightway into its charity work. A highly important part of her Brooklyn education had been got in St. Mary’s, in learning how to do charity work and how to make it count socially. Edna genuinely loved charity work. She loved to patronize, loved to receive those fawning blessings and handkissings which city poverty becomes adept at giving the rich it lives off of. The poor family understands perfectly that the rich visit and help not through mere empty sentimental nonsense of brotherhood, but to have their vanities tickled in exchange for the graciousness of their condescending presence and for the money they lay out. As the poor want the money and have no objection to paying for it with that cheap and plentiful commodity, cringing--scantily screening mockery and contempt--rich and poor meet most comfortably in our cities. Not New York alone, but any center of population, for human nature is the same, city and country, San Francisco, Bangor--Pekin or Paris, for that matter.