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.
There is a shallow fashion of describing this or that as peculiarly New York, usually snobbishness or domestic unhappiness or wealth worship, dishonest business men or worthless wives. It is time to have done with such nonsense. New York is in no way peculiar, nor is any other place, beyond trifling surface differences. New York is nothing but the epitome of the whole country, just as Chicago is. If you wish to understand America, study New York or Chicago, our two universal cities. There you find in one place and in admirable perspective a complete museum of specimens of what is scattered over three and a half million square miles. For, don’t forget, New York is not the few blocks of fashionable district alone. It is four million people of all conditions, tastes, and activities. And the dominant force of struggle for money and fashion is no more dominant in New York than it is in the rest of America. New York is more truly representative of America than is Chicago, for in Chicago the Eastern and Southern elements are lacking and the Western element is strong out of proportion.
I was telling of my wife’s blossoming as Lady Bountiful in search not of a heavenly crown, but of what human Lady Bountiful always seeks—social position. Charity covers a multitude of sins; the greatest of them is hypocrisy. I have yet to see a charitable man or woman or child whose chief and only noteworthy object was not self-glorification. The people who believe in brotherhood do not go in for charity. They wish to abolish poverty, whereas charity revels in poverty and seeks to increase it, to change it from miserable poverty which might die into comfortable pauperism which can live on, and fester and breed on, and fawn on and give vanity ever more and more exquisite titillations. Holy Cross, my wife’s new spiritual guide, was past master of the pauper-making and pauper-utilizing arts. Its rector and his staff of slimy sycophants had the small standing army of its worthy poor trained to perfection. When my wife went down among them, she returned home with face aglow and eyes heavenly. What a treat those wretches had given her! And in the first blush of her enthusiasm she dispensed lavishly, where the older members of the church exacted the full measure of titillation for every dollar invested and awarded extra sums only to some novelty in lickspittling or toadeating.