“I am taking the retaining fee of the people,” said he; “I must serve their interests just as I served you when I took your retainers.” This was his plea at the end of a two hours’ talk in which I had exhausted argument and inducement. I felt that gentleness and diplomacy were in vain. I released my temper—temper with me is not waste steam, but powder to be saved until it can be exploded to some purpose.
“We put you in office, sir,” I replied, “and we will put you out. You owe your honours to us, not to this mob you’re pandering to now in the hope of getting something or other. We’ll punish you for your treachery if you persist in it. We’ll drop you back into obscurity, and you’ll see how soon your ‘people’ will forget you.”
He paled and quivered under the lash. “If the people were not so sane and patient,” said he, “they’d act like another Samson. They’d pull the palace down upon themselves for the pleasure of seeing you banqueting Philistines get your deserts.”
“Don’t inflict a stump speech on me,” said I, going to the door—it just occurred to me that he might publicly eject me from his house and so make himself too strong to be dislodged immediately. “Within six months you’ll be out of office—unless you come to your senses.”
So I left him. A greater fool I never knew. I can understand the out-in-the-cold fellow snapping his fangs; but for the life of me I can’t understand a man with even a job as waiter or crumb-scraper at the banquet doing anything to get himself into trouble. He proved not merely a fool, but a weak fool as well; for, after a few days of thinking it over, he switched round, withdrew his objection, and explained it away—and so my bill was signed. But we are done with him. A man may be completely cured of an attack of insanity, but who would ever give him a position of trust afterward? Not I, for one. Too many men who have never gone crazy are waiting, eager to serve us.
Still, looking back over the incident, I am not satisfied with myself. I won, but I played badly. I must be careful—I am becoming too arrogant. If he had been a little stronger and cleverer, he would have had me thrown out of his house, and I don’t care to think what a position that would have put me in, not only then, but also for the future. As long as I was engaged in hand-to-hand battle and had personally to take what I got, it was well to have an outward bearing that frightened the timid and made the easy-going anxious to conciliate me. But, now that I employ others to retrieve the game I bring down, it is wiser that I show courtesy and consideration. I get better service; I cause less criticism. Enemies are indispensable to a rising man—they put him on his mettle and make people look on him as important. But to a risen man they are either valueless or a hindrance, and, at critical moments, a danger.
It is one of the large ironies of life that when one has with infinite effort gained power, one dares not indulge in the great pleasure of openly exercising it, for fear of losing it. Not even I can eat my cake and have it. Sometimes success seems to me to mean rising to a height where one can more clearly see the things one cannot have.
And now luck, plus strong rowing and right steering, swept me on to another success—this time a brilliant marriage. The element of luck was particularly large in this instance, as in any matter where one of the factors is feminine. Every wise planner reduces the human element in his projects to the minimum, because human nature is as uncertain as chance itself. But while one can always rely, to a certain extent, upon the human element where it is masculine, where it is feminine there’s absolutely no more foundation than in a quicksand. The women not only unsettle the men, but they also unsettle themselves; and, acting always upon impulse, they are as likely as not to fly straight in the face of what is best for them. Women are incapable of cooperation. The only business they understand or take a genuine interest in is the capture of men—a business which each woman must pursue independently and alone.
Fortunately, Aurora, like most of the young women of our upper class, had been thoroughly trained in correct ideas of self-interest.
She was born in the purple. When she came into the world I had been a millionaire several years, and my wife and I had changed our point of view on life from that of the lower middle class in which we were bred (though we didn’t know it at the time, and thought ourselves “as good as anybody”), to that of the upper class, to which my genius forced our admission. Aurora was our first child to have a French nurse, the first to have teachers at home—a French governess and a German one.