As I reached this point in my moralisings I caught sight of my own face by the powerful light over my shaving glass.
I’ve never taken any great amount of interest in my face, or anybody else’s. I’ve no belief in the theory that you can learn much from your adversary’s expression. In a sense, the face is the map of the mind. But the map has so many omissions and mismarkings, all at important points, that time spent in studying it is time wasted. My plan has been to go straight along my own line, without bothering my head about the other fellow’s plans—much less about his looks. I think my millions prove me right.
As I was saying, I saw my face—suddenly, with startling clearness, and when my mind was on the subject of faces. The sight gave me a shock—not because my expression was sardonic and—yes, I shall confess it—cruel and bitterly unhappy. The shock came in that, before I recognised myself, I had said, “Who is this old man?”
The glass reflected wrinkles, bags, creases, hollows—signs of the old age of a hard, fierce life.
Curiously, my first comment on myself, seen as others saw me, was a stab into my physical vanity—not a very deep stab, but deep enough to mock my self-complacent jeers at my wife. Then I went on to wonder why I had not before understood the reason for many things I’ve done of late.
For example, I hadn’t realised why I put five hundred thousand dollars into a mausoleum. I did it without the faintest notion that my instinctive self was saying, “You’d better see to it at once that you’ll be fittingly housed—some day.” Again, I hadn’t understood why it was becoming so hard for me to persuade myself to keep up my public gifts.
I have always seen that for us men of great wealth gifts are not merely a wise, but a vitally necessary, investment.
Jack Ridley insists that I exaggerate the envy the lower classes feel for us. “You rich men think others are like yourselves,” he says. “Because all your thoughts are of money, you fancy the rest of the world is equally narrow and spends most of its time in hating you and plotting against you. Why, the fact is that rich men envy one another more than the poor envy them.” There’s some truth in this. The fellow with one million enviously hates the fellow with ten; as for most fellows with twenty or thirty, they can hardly bear to hear the fellows with fifty or sixty spoken of. But, in the main, Jack is wrong. I’ve not forgotten how I used to feel when I had a few hundred a year; and so I know what’s going on in the heads of people when they bow and scrape and speak softly, as they do to me. It means that they’re envying and are only too eager to find an excuse for hating. They want me to think that they like me.
I used to give chiefly because I liked the fame it brought me—also, a little, because it made me feel that I was balancing my rather ruthless financial methods by doing vast good with what many would have kept selfishly to the last penny. Latterly my chief motive has been more substantial; and I wonder how I could have let wealth-hunger so blind me, as it has in the past four or five years, that I have haggled over and cut my public gifts.
The very day after I saw my face in the mirror I definitely committed myself to my long tentatively promised gift of an additional four millions to the university which bears my name. I also arranged to get those four millions—but that comes later. Finally, I began to hasten my son Walter’s marriage to Natalie Bradish.