Rulers of kings: A novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Fessenden had flung himself half-way across the table. “I know what I will do with it,” he cried eagerly. “I never dreamed I could get to work so soon—but pardon me; go ahead, sir. Mine will keep.”

“I have no doubt that plans will come to you very thickly, but I want you to learn something of Europe before settling down. I shall take three secretaries on the yacht with me—I should break down if I relaxed altogether—and in the course of the journey you will learn a great deal about my affairs. After that preliminary course I want you to stay over there for a time, and apply yourself to the study of Europe. If churches and picture-galleries happen to interest you, polish them off as quickly as possible, and then get down beneath the surface. Study politics, governments, the financial and commercial conditions of the first-rate powers—make yourself master at first hand of national traits and idiosyncrasies; you will have letters that will carry you everywhere. There are going to be two controlling forces in the world in the next thirty years, yourself and William of Germany—if he lives!—if he lives! Keep a hawk-eye on him, and don’t make the common shallow mistake of underrating him. He alone can block the progress of the United States; all the other nations put together are not worth considering. He only needs certain conditions to scoop in Europe like another Charlemagne. It may be that he will create these conditions. It may be that you will help him to them, if you both happen to pull in the same direction. That of course is for the future. I will see that you meet him informally this summer. But if he fascinates you—as he probably will—make always this reserve: your future friendship for him depends upon his course towards the United States. It is not too soon to begin checkmating him, and it can always be done by this country; but it must be done by the individual. Washington is blind by too much occupation with other things. Would you like to walk down-town and see our offices? Historical landmarks, too—Washington—Hamilton— Let me hear your plans.”

XX

Fessenden walked slowly towards the rift in the great wall of rock which marked the land entrance to the fjord. Pocahontas was dancing just beyond that narrow gate, but although his fingers tingled for her sail, his step still halted; he knew that she would bring him swiftly within range of the keen thumping of a typewriter, possibly of more than one. He was dutifully and even deeply interested in his father’s vast affairs, and there were nights when he went to bed with the sensation that the Earth was his pillow; there were days when he dared to hope the time would come when he could with pleasure embroider the scenery with figures and puncture the silences of Nature with a typewriter. But the time was not yet. Four days since he had awakened his father at three in the morning, informed him that he was off for a solitary tramp into Norway, and promised to return at the end of a week. Conscience was driving him home sooner than he had intended, for he had revelled in the stillness and solitude of his wild and lonely tramp. He missed at first the friendliness of the Adirondacks, the only other mountains he knew; but the harsh and terrible grandeur about him companioned his mood—finally inspired him with a passionate sense of gratitude. For he was in a desperate state of rebellion. The philosophy he had invoked on the heels of Mr. Abbott’s revelation had but deferred the inevitable moment. He did not doubt that the future presented to him by his father would bring him power, but that future was—he sincerely hoped—far distant, and at present he was little more than a glorified clerk in training. His inheritance and his education permitted him to grasp the stupendous details with a sufficient facility, and there were moments when he was staggered and overwhelmed with the thought of such world-manipulating power, at others intoxicated with dreams of a future when himself should be a ruler of many times the strength of any monarch in Europe. In such moments he felt arrogant, and contemptuous of sovereigns who were but the tools of a people or a cabinet, no matter what the euphemisms, longed for the time to come when he could demonstrate to them the absolutism of concentrated capital in the hands of an uncrowned ruler of a great republic. But reaction under the lonely stars invariably chastened him. What did he amount to now? Who would recognize in him more than his famous father’s second? He was bursting with energy, with ambition for himself and the United States, and, in spite of his father’s love and sincere indulgence, he felt like a prisoner on parole. It is true that when he had confided his cherished ideal, the great and beneficent conception which was to have worked his fingers to the bone and made him old in his youth, Mr. Abbott had waved his golden wand. A Western desert hummed and echoed, and even now a huge building was rising on its foundations, and the first of the world’s electricians, for a yearly salary which made Fessenden’s head swim, had agreed to occupy this building with a corps of assistants and work upon the idea which a youth had conceived. The author of the idea felt no temptation to take charge himself. The mere fact that more experienced genius could be bought delivered him from the thrall of his ideal, although he still took a scientific and patriotic interest in its accomplishment.

Robbed of this dream of immortality, he had dropped the curtain upon his inner life and endeavored to fulfil his immediate destiny. As his powers of concentration were very great, he had succeeded for a time. During the fortnight before sailing, novelty and wonder had sustained him, and for a time at sea the long conversations with his father were agreeably varied by instructions in the science of yachting. But Fessenden was Fessenden—a personality, a young man bursting with precocious energy, ambition, independence. His reassertion was slow but persistent, and during one sleepless night alone on deck the naked truth confronted him that he was at the end of his endurance, that however he might conform to his father’s wishes in the future, for the present he must not only have an interval of personal liberty, but arrange his nebulous ambitions and satisfy them. He restrained his impatience until three o’clock, then awakened Mr. Abbott—who smiled and slept again—and plunged without a guide into Norway.

He bathed in streams, he slept under the stars, he saw no one but peasants, he hardly uttered a word for three days; and he was completely happy. When he was not in mountain gorges he was in pine forests; everywhere he had Nature in her magnificence, and he was alone. For two days he refused to think—it was enough to forget, to feel the freedom of the years when he believed himself innocent of fortune, with a glorious and self-made future stretching through infinite horizons. But on the evening of the third day he turned his back on the scenery, sat down on the grass, and thought.

That the prospect before him was hateful and hideous he admitted aloud, lest he should seem to blink any modicum of the truth. The abstract fact that he was a rich man instead of a poor one dwindled to comparative insignificance beside the million details which made up the sum of that fact. Had he been the author of those details, his inherited and financial instincts, so quick at college, would no doubt possess him and obliterate the dreams of his youth. But that mountain of particulars, massive and petty, had fallen upon him without a moment’s warning, and he was not its illustrious author, but its future custodian. The youth in him was rampant, and his strong vein of romance unsatisfied. He admitted—again aloud—that he was as romantic as he was practical. He would train to succeed his father, but meanwhile would distinguish himself in his own manner. He would use the wealth at his disposal, but the manner should be picturesque.

Without admitting that he intended to demand a period of liberty, his imagination in the past weeks had toyed with many plans. At first, when he learned of the more than thousands in his father’s employ, he had been fired with the desire to ameliorate the lot of the working-man; and in his enthusiasm had awakened his father from his afternoon nap on deck and talked to him for an hour. Mr. Abbott, who revelled in the very sound of Fessenden’s voice, and would have attempted to give him the North Pole had he wanted it, listened indulgently; but when his turn came to speak he was smiling grimly.

“My dear boy,” he had said, “what reason have I given you to think me a fool? There are those who will tell you that the day must come when the streets of our great cities will run red with blood, when not one stone on Fifth Avenue will remain upon another; that, in short, the great civil war between capital and labor can be delayed only until a strong leader of organized labor arises who cannot be bought. I do not go so far as to say that I—or you—can avert that calamity, for our rotten municipal governments have destroyed the respect of the thinking laboring man for authority, and these tremendous aggregations of capital I have in hand, which will make the United States strong and feared among nations, may be carried to an excess which will lessen the chances of individual achievement and curtail personal liberty. If rich men—that is to say, the manipulators—make fools of themselves, and in their greed for wealth and power reduce wages and sow further seeds of discontent, there is no telling what may happen. But although I make no denial of my own greed for wealth and power, and although these concentrations of many small industries into one huge enterprise will double my fortune, I make no such mistake as that. I have always maintained that a man may get rich and still share a certain portion of his gains with his assistants; and my working-men all receive good salaries, perquisites, heavy Christmas presents, and pensions in their old age. I make no pretence at philanthropy. There is no man who needs friends as the rich man does; there are no friends so valuable as an army of employés. I know many of mine personally; at some time or other I have managed to come into contact with most of them. They like me. They are content. They never go on strike. They are the one formidable bulwark against united labor in the country. When you return, I wish you to go about among those men, show them your personal interest in them as human beings, make them love you as much as they like me; then, if an industrial war ever comes, you will make yourself their leader and take whichever side you think wisest. But the thing to do is to avert war and use that great following for another purpose. Either with or without civil war the time must come for the reform of municipalities, the reduction of state power, and, possibly, an interval of benevolent despotism. There is the rôle I have cut out for you; but meanwhile work with me to avert the worst calamity which could visit this country—set it back a hundred years. My men are not overpaid; they receive strict justice, that is all. I have harangued for hours with almost every great employer in the country, appealing to his common-sense, even his cupidity, but in most cases in vain. The average rich man in the United States is lowly born. He has worked himself up from the ranks. There never was a real democrat who was not born an aristocrat. The risen plebeian is a tyrant, is insatiable in his greed, glories in the thought of grinding the life out of thousands of his own class, delights in the hatred and envy which are but another signal of his success; in short, he is a damned fool, and deserves to wake up and find his throat cut. I suppose all revolutions are the result of stupidity. Ours, if it comes, will arise from no other cause whatever. If you have the genius in you that I believe, you will avert this war or control it. Now I will sleep again if you will permit me.”

The words had kept Fessenden awake all night, but after several days his enthusiasm cooled. Again he was willing to take the helm whenever the time came, and with all his energies; but the idea was his father’s, not his. His young ego, uniquely developed, demanded creation.