30
Floyd woke up the next morning, his head aching, his limbs weary. The experience had battered his body, but shook up his mind. His share of the “boodle” lay on the table—three five-dollar bills. He examined them curiously, turning them over and over—the first money he had ever earned. Was it money? No—he threw away much more than that paltry sum every day. But this was different; he had worked for it with the “sweat of his brow.” He felt the pressure of the masses, who were earning their bread. This meant money to them. He remembered how the Colonel looked at him, when he told him to sell something—they were needing more and more. “You’re destroying capital,” said the Colonel. “You should preserve it, it’s your only source of income.”
Capital! capital! He wondered if they had blown in all his father had left—blown in, where?—into the air like soap bubbles, which glittered for a moment in the sun, then burst and disappeared.
He put his hand to his head. Where could he go to pass the morning? Julie was not visible until twelve. She was lucky; the day was only half as long for her. Then that queer feeling came again; he went to see Dr. McClaren.
“How’s your wife?” said the doctor.
“Very well, as far as I can see. I want to speak to you about myself—my mind wanders—I cannot concentrate, nothing interests me; I go back always to the past; the things I have lived through haunt me.”
“You are trying too hard to forget.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t. If we wipe out memory, we throw into the dust heap of oblivion the best part of our life, experience.”
“But if that experience is unbearable?”
“We can make it bearable. We must work it the right way.”
“But I cannot see how! Father Cabello spoke about the ‘gift of forgetting.’”
The doctor smiled. “I am not for such narcotics. We shouldn’t go about hypnotizing ourselves. A man of mind should be able to deal with the complications of his nature in an intelligent manner.”
This meant nothing to Floyd; the doctor was talking “over his head.”
“I’ll try to make it clearer to you. You have got yourself tangled up. What you think so terrible one day will be precious to you in years to come. How do you stand financially?”
“I don’t know, I’m not sure—badly, I think.”
The doctor knew; he had seen the Colonel.
“I want you to try to get rich.”
Floyd had a shock. He looked sharply at the doctor; there was no glare in his eyes, but he was fingering a paper cutter—no, he wasn’t mad—but he was a mind reader. Floyd had been thinking of money—in a vague way, wondering that so many people whose names he had never heard had bobbed up as millionaires.
“The pursuit of wealth may be sordid, but if we succeed, we are compensated by a gratifying sense of self-confidence, authority, power, not speaking of the good we can do with our ‘ill gotten’ gains. As for the spiritual side being starved, well, we don’t think so; if we concentrate on the world of the spirit, it will demoralize us in our practical life, which is our end of it. We must uphold that, for the sake of bankrupt Europe.”
“Doctor, I dreamt last night that I was enormously rich.”
“Good! make it a complex. It will drive more harmful ideas out of your mind. Come and see me again. I am curious to know how my prescription’s going to work....”
Floyd found the Colonel, erect, well satisfied; he had no complexes, he wasn’t married.
“How do I stand?”
The Colonel hesitated.
“Come, out with it; I want the truth.”
“Well, you’ll have to practice strict economy to make up for your enormous expenditure of the last few years. Do you want to sell your house?”
“Economy? Sell the house? Julie!—impossible.”
“Nowadays a man can’t live on interest.”
Floyd snapped his fingers.
“Economy, bah! We’ll have to create new capital.” The Colonel opened a drawer, took out a card of the Garrison estate, kept as a physician does the history of a patient’s disease; then he placed a map on the table. It was interlaced with red lines designating the shrinkage. Floyd looked over it.
“The entire water-front is crossed off, I see.”
“Yes, the Martin Steele Corporation bought it for investment. By the way, that was a great thing young Steele did.”
“What thing?”
“He left his entire business to his employees, equal shares, and the money to keep it going. Waldbridge told me about it with tears in his eyes, the other day, at the memorial service they gave for him.”
“Memorial service?”
“Didn’t you know? I saw Mrs. Garrison there, but she was gone before I could get through the crowd.”
Julie there? She hadn’t told him. He thought he knew all her movements.
“It was wonderful; I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. They are going to screen it. It was a queer mixed crowd—artists he had saved from starvation, musicians he had sent abroad, women he had started right—they all got up and told their stories. It was like a Christian Science service. A man sang, a barber named Hippolyte, well-known on Fifth Avenue, a wonderful voice. They say an opera manager has engaged him. He sang psalms in Greek and Hebrew, wails in the minor key, just tore at your entrails. He set them all crying. One poor cripple made a scene; swore he saw the dead man’s spirit. Of course, that hypnotized the others; they all saw it. There was a tall man in a corner—the light struck him for a moment. I tell you, Garrison, I’ve got the hide of a rhinoceros, but it made my flesh creep. Now there are two left of those river shanties, we’ll pull them down and build one big office building—”
Floyd didn’t hear him; he was in the church listening to the voice of Hippolyte, the cries, the prayers for Martin—the philanthropist, the good man. He forced himself to say something.
“I knew Martin Steele all my life, but had no idea of that side of him.”
“Nor I, but most men keep the best part of them hidden.”
“Yes,” said Floyd, tracing lines on the map. “I’ll go down with you and look at those shanties. I want money and lots of it; every fool’s got it. I can be as big a fool as the next one.”
The Colonel didn’t contradict him, but he doubted if Garrison would ever be that kind of a fool.
BOOK III
Future—the hidden meanings of Past and Present, a dark picture. Imagination flashes the light of Prophecy, foretells life’s realization or disillusion, the Soul’s victory or defeat.
“Fiction, my Masters! All is Fiction!”