He looked as if he expected me to flinch. But I did not. Was not my conscience clear?
“I know how basely you have betrayed me,” he went on. “I thank you for not taking everything. I confess your generosity puzzles me. However, you have done nothing for which the law can touch you. What you have stolen is securely yours. I wish you joy of it.”
My temper is not of the sweetest—dealing with the trickeries and stupidities of little men soon exhausts the patience of a man who has much to do in the world, and knows how it should be done. But never before or since have I been so insanely angry. I burst into a torrent of abuse. He rang the bell; and, when the servant came, calm and clear above my raging rose his voice, saying, “Robert, show this person to the door.” For the moment my mind seemed paralysed. I left, probably looking as base and guilty as he with his wounded vanity and his sufferings from the loss of all he had thrown away imagined me to be.
I confess that that was a very bad quarter of an hour. But, to make a large success in this world, and in the brief span of a lifetime, one must submit to discomforts of that kind occasionally. There are compensating hours. I had one last week when I attended the dedication of the splendid two-million-dollar recitation hall I have given to —— University.
Not until I was several blocks from Judson’s did the sense of my wrongs sting me into rage again. I remember that I said: “Infamous ingratitude! I save this fine gentleman from bankruptcy, and my reward is that he calls me a thief—me, a millionaire!”
Millionaire! In that word there was a magic balm for all the wounds to my pride and my then supersensitive conscience—a justification of the past, a guarantee of the future.
With my million safely achieved, I looked about me as a conqueror looks upon the conquered. A thousand dollars saved is the first step toward a competence; a million dollars achieved is the first step toward a Crœsus; and, in matters of money, as in everything else, “it is the first step that counts,” as the French say. I was filled with the passion for more, more, more. I felt myself, in imagination, growing mightier and mightier, lifting myself higher and more dazzlingly above the dull mass of work-a-day people with their routines of petty concerns.
In the days of our modesty my wife used to plan that we would retire when we had twenty thousand a year—enough, she then thought, to provide for every want, reasonable or unreasonable, that we and the children could have. Now, she would have scorned the idea of retiring as contemptuously as I would. She was eager to do her part in the process of expansion and aggrandisement, was eager to see us socially established, to put our children in the position to make advantageous marriages. We would be outshone in New York by none!
To win a million is to taste blood. The million-mania—for, in a sense, I’ll admit it is a mania—is roused and put upon the scent, and it never sleeps again, nor is its appetite ever satisfied or even made less ravenous.
A few years, and I left dry-goods for finance, where the pursuit of my passion was more direct and more rapidly successful. Every day I fixed my thoughts upon another million; and, as all who know anything about the million-mania will tell you, the act of fixing the thought upon a million, when one has earned the right to acquire millions, makes that million yours, makes all who stand between you and it aggressors to be clawed down and torn to pieces. As I grew my rights were respected more and more deferentially. Men now bow before me. They understand that I can administer great wealth to the best advantage, that I belong to one of that small class of beings created to possess the earth and to command the improvident and idealess inhabitants thereof how and where and when to work.