It has been two years and five months since I expelled James, yet my dissatisfaction with Walter has not decreased.
No doubt this is due in part to the grudge a man of my age who loves power and wealth must have against the impatient waiter for his throne and sceptre. No doubt, also, age and long familiarity with power have made me, perhaps, too critical of my fellow-beings and too sensitive to their shortcomings. But, after all allowances, I have real ground for my feeling toward Walter.
My principal heir and successor, who is to sustain my dignity after I am gone, and to maintain my name in the exalted position to which my wealth and genius have raised it, should have, above all else, two qualifications—character and an air of distinction.
Walter has neither.
My wife defends him for his lack of distinction in manner and look by saying that I have crushed him. “How could he have the distinction you wish,” she says, “when he has grown in the shadow of such a big, masterful, intolerant personality as yours?” There is justice in this. I admire distinction, or individuality, but at a distance. I cannot tolerate it in my immediate neighbourhood. There it tempts me to crush it. I suspect that it would have exasperated me even in one of my own flesh and blood. Indeed, at bottom, that may have had something to do with the beginnings of my break with James.
But whatever excuse there may be for Walter’s shifty, smirking, deprecating personality, which seems to me, at times, not a peg above the personality of a dancing-master, there is no excuse whatsoever for his lack of character.
I rarely talk to him so long as ten minutes without catching him in a lie—usually a silly lie, about nothing at all. In money matters he is not sensibly prudent, but downright miserly. That is not an unnatural quality in age, for then the time for setting the house in order is short. An avaricious young man is a monstrosity. I suppose that avarice is almost inseparable from great wealth, or even from the expectation of inheriting it. Just as power makes a man greedy of power, so riches make a man greedy of riches. But, granting that Walter has to be avaricious, why hasn’t he the wit to conceal it? It gives me no pleasure, nowadays, to give; in fact, it makes me suffer to see anything going out, unless I know it is soon to return bringing a harvest after its kind. Yet, I give—at least, I have given, and that liberally. Walter need not have made himself so noted and disliked for stinginess that he has been able to get into only one of the three fashionable clubs I wished him to join—and that one the least desirable.
His mother says he was excluded because the best people of our class resent my having elbowed and trampled my way into power too vigorously, and with too few “beg pardons,” and “if you pleases.” Perhaps my courage in taking my own frankly wherever I found it may have made his admission difficult, just as it has made our social progress slow. But it would not have excluded him—would not have made him patently unpopular where my money and the fear of me gains him toleration. A very few dollars judiciously spent would have earned him the reputation of a good fellow, generous and free-handed.
Your poor chap has to fling away everything he’s got to get that name, but a rich man can get it for what, to him, is a trifle. By means of a smile or a dinner I’d have to pay for anyhow, or perhaps by allowing him to ride a few blocks beside me in my brougham or victoria, I send a grumbler away trumpeting my praises. I throw an industry into confusion to get possession of it, and then I give a twentieth of the profits to some charity or college; instead of a chorus of curses, I get praise, or, at worst, silence. The public lays what it is pleased to call the “crime” upon the corporation I own; the benefaction is credited to me personally.
Nor has Walter the excuse for his lying and shifting and other moral lapses that a man who is making his way could plead.