The "Goldfish" / Being the Confessions af a Successful Man

by Arthur Cheney Train

I could not change things! It was too late. I had brought up my son and daughters to live in a certain kind of way, had taught them that luxuries were necessities, had neglected them—had ruined them perhaps; but I had no moral right now to annihilate that life—and their mother's—without their consent. They might be poor things; but, after all, they were my own. They were free, white and twenty-one. And I knew they would simply think me mad!

I had a fixed place in a complicated system, with responsibilities and duties I was morally bound to recognize. I could not chuck the whole business without doing a great deal of harm. My life was not so simple as all that. Any change—if it could be accomplished at all—would have to be a gradual one and be brought about largely by persuasion. Could it be accomplished?

It now seemed insuperably difficult. I was bound to the wheel—and the habits of a lifetime, the moral pressure of my wife and children, the example of society, and the force of superficial public opinion and expectation were spinning it round and round in the direction of least resistance. As well attempt to alter my course as to steer a locomotive off the track! I could not ditch the locomotive, for I had a trainload of passengers! And yet—

I groaned and buried my face in my hands. I—successful? Yes, success had been mine; but success was failure—naught else—failure, absolute and unmitigated! I had lost my wife and family, and my home had become the resort of a crew of empty-headed coxcombs.

I wondered whether they were gone. I looked at the clock. It was half-past twelve—Sunday morning. I opened my bedroom door and crept downstairs. No; they were not gone—they had merely moved on to supper.

My library was in the front of the house, across the hall from the drawing room, and I went in there and sank into an armchair by the fire. The bridge party was making a great to-do and its strident laughter floated up from below. By contrast the quiet library seemed a haven of refuge. Here were the books I might have read—which might have been my friends. Poor fool that I was!

I put out my hand and took down the first it encountered—John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. It was a funny old volume—a priceless early edition given me by a grateful client whom I had extricated from some embarrassment. I had never read it, but I knew its general trend. It was about some imaginary miserable who, like myself, wanted to do things differently. I took a cigar out of my pocket, lit it and, opening the book haphazard, glanced over the pages in a desultory fashion.

"That is that which I seek for, even to be rid of this heavy Burden; but get it off myself, I cannot; nor is there any man in our country that can take it off my shoulders—"

So the Pilgrim had a burden too! I turned back to the beginning and read how Christian, the hero, had been made aware of his perilous condition.

"In this plight therefore he went home, and refrained himself as long as he could, that his Wife and Children should not perceive his distress, but he could not be silent long, because that his trouble increased: Wherefore at length he brake his mind to his Wife and Children; and thus he began to talk to them: 'Oh, my dear Wife,' said he, 'and you the Children of my bowels, I, your dear Friend, am in myself undone by reason of a Burden that lieth hard upon me.' … At this his Relations were sore amazed; not for that they believed that what he had said to them was true, but because they thought that some frenzy distemper had got into his head; therefore, it drawing toward night, and they hoping that sleep might settle his brains, with all haste they got him to bed: But the night was as troublesome to him as the day; wherefore, instead of sleeping, he spent it in sighs and tears."