I did many things in my early days which I’d scorn to do now. I did them only because they were necessary to my purpose. Walter has not the slightest provocation. When his mother says, “But he does those things because he’s afraid of you,” she talks nonsense. The truth is that he has a moral twist. It is one thing for a clear-sighted man of high purpose and great firmness, like myself, to adopt indirect measures as a temporary and desperate expedient; it’s vastly different for a Walter, with everything provided for him, to resort to such measures voluntarily and habitually.
Sometimes I think he must have been created during one of my periods of advance by ambuscade.
How ridiculous to fall out with honesty and truth when there’s any possible way of avoiding it! To do so is to use one’s last reserves at the beginning of a battle instead of at the crisis.
However, it’s Walter or nobody. I cannot abandon my life’s ambition, the perpetuation of my fortune and fame in a family line. Next to its shortness, life’s greatest tragedy for men of my kind is the wretched tools with which we must work. All my days I’ve been a giant, doing a giant’s work with a pygmy’s puny tools. Now, with the end—no, not near, but not so far away as it was—
Just as I got home from the Chamber of Commerce dinner two weeks ago to-night, my wife was coming down to go to Mrs. Garretson’s ball. The great hall of my house, with its costly tapestries and carpets and statuary, is a source of keen pleasure to me. I don’t think I ever enter it, except when I’m much preoccupied, that I don’t look round and draw in some such satisfaction as a toper gets from a brimming glass of whiskey. But, for that matter, all the luxuries and comforts which wealth gives me are a steady source of gratification. The children of a man who rose from poverty to wealth may possibly—I doubt it—have the physical gratification in wealth blunted. But the man who does the rising has it as keen on the last day of healthy life as on the first day he became the owner of a carriage with somebody in his livery to drive him.
As my wife came down the wide marble stairs the great hall became splendid. I had to stop and admire her, or, rather, the way she shone and sparkled and blazed, becapped and bedecked and bedraped with jewels as she was. I have an eye that sees everything; that’s why I’m accused of being ferociously critical. I saw that there was something incongruous in her appearance—something that jarred. A second glance showed me that it was the contrast between her rubies and diamonds, in bands, in clusters, and in ropes, and her fading physical charms. She is not altogether faded yet—she is fifty to my sixty-four—and she has been for years spending several hours a day with masseuses, complexion-specialists, hair-doctors, and others of that kind. But she has reached the age where, in spite of doctoring and dieting and deception, there are many and plain signs of that double tragedy of a handsome, vain woman’s life—on the one hand, the desperate fight to make youth remain; on the other hand, the desperate fight to hide from the world the fact that it is about to depart for ever.
Naturally it depressed me that I could no longer think with pride of her beauty, and of how it was setting off my wealth. I must have shown what I was thinking, for she looked at me, first with anxious inquiry, then with frightened suspicion, as if guessing my thoughts.
Poor woman! I felt sorry for her.
Her life, for the past twenty years, has been based wholly on vanity. The look in my face told her, perhaps a few weeks earlier than she would have learned it from her mirror or some malicious bosom friend, that the basis of her life was swept away, and that her happiness was ended. She hurried past me, spoke savagely to the four men-servants who were jostling one another in trying to help her to her carriage, and drove away in her grandeur to the ball, probably as miserable a creature as there was on Manhattan Island that night.
I went up to my apartment, half depressed, half amused—I have too keen a sense of humour not to be amused whenever I see vanity take a tumble. As I reached my sitting-room I was in the full swing of my moralisings on the physical vanity of women, and on their silliness in setting store by their beauty after it has served its sole, legitimate, really useful purpose—has caught them husbands. Only mischief can come of beauty in a married woman. She should give it up, retire to her home, and remain there until it is time for her to bring out and marry off her grown sons and daughters. If my wife hadn’t been handsome she might have done this, and so might have continued to shine in her proper sphere—the care of her household and her children, the comfort of her husband.