“I only think it’s a tremendous responsibility,” I defended myself.
“If the job’s too big, we can turn it down,” said O’Rane.
“The others thought that, too,” I warned him.
It was a strange discussion, which ultimately became a monologue of foreboding. As all the world knows, Aylmer Lancing made his first fortune by chance and then found that he could not help adding to it; after buying the site of a burnt city, he had to build a city on the site; he constructed railroads to feed his city and manufactured agricultural machinery to pay for the food. Daily, until his breakdown, he grew richer; and, in the long years of his dying, he was to find that, while the hospitals, the universities, the museums and galleries could live on his bounty for a year, after that he must invent new outlets.
“If your income’s too big, you can always reduce your capital,” Sam Dainton contributed. “I’ve been doing it for years.”
“With a capital of five-and-twenty million?,” I asked. “It’s not a simple question of dropping bags of gold into the sea.”
Early in his career, as I told them, Aylmer Lancing had tried to sell the New-Mexico-Montana Railroad when it was threatened by the South-Western Trunk. As he unloaded, the price fell; and, as the price fell, others unloaded too. A panic set in at one moment, to be ended the next by a rumour that Lancing was selling a bear. Up went the price; and Aylmer sold his last share on a soaring market, to find himself the richer by several million dollars.
In time I tired of my Cassandra prophecies. Unlike his predecessors, Raymond Stornaway was face to face with a world in which every one would for many years be trying to pay for the war; and I fancy the annual income of the trust had been handsomely exceeded before each of us had explained the best method of spending it. While my sister Beryl, with her hospital training, launched vague projects for stamping out phthisis and cancer, Gervaise rebuilt the more unsightly parts of England. Hornbeck petitioned for an arctic expedition; and Barbara threw the stock-markets into confusion by paying off the national debt.
“I don’t say it’s impossible,” I told them in conclusion, “but Lancing wasn’t the only multimillionaire in history. Other people have faced his problem, but none of them solved it.”