The "Goldfish"
by
Arthur Train

Part 1 out of 4






THE "GOLDFISH"

Being the Confessions af a Successful Man

EDITED BY

ARTHUR TRAIN

1921






[Illustration: Arthur Train from the drawing by S.J. Woolf]




"They're like 'goldfish' swimming round and round in a big bowl. They
can look through, sort of dimly; but they can't get out?"--_Hastings_,
p. 315.





CONTENTS



MYSELF

MY FRIENDS

MY CHILDREN

MY MIND

MY MORALS

MY FUTURE

"We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who
elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have
lost the power of even imagining what the ancient idealization of
poverty could have meant--the liberation from material attachments; the
unbribed soul; the manlier indifference; the paying our way by what we
are or do, and not by what we have; the right to fling away our life at
any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic trim, in short the moral
fighting shape.... It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty
among the educated class is the worst moral disease from which our
civilization suffers."

William James, p. 313.




CHAPTER I

MYSELF


"My house, my affairs, my ache and my religion--"


I was fifty years old to-day. Half a century has hurried by since I
first lay in my mother's wondering arms. To be sure, I am not old; but I
can no longer deceive myself into believing that I am still young. After
all, the illusion of youth is a mental habit consciously encouraged to
defy and face down the reality of age. If, at twenty, one feels that he
has reached man's estate he, nevertheless, tests his strength and
abilities, his early successes or failures, by the temporary and
fictitious standards of youth.

At thirty a professional man is younger than the business man of
twenty-five. Less is expected of him; his work is less responsible; he
has not been so long on his job. At forty the doctor or lawyer may still
achieve an unexpected success. He has hardly won his spurs, though in
his heart he well knows his own limitations. He can still say: "I am
young yet!" And he is.

But at fifty! Ah, then he must face the facts! He either has or has not
lived up to his expectations and he never can begin over again. A
creature of physical and mental habit, he must for the rest of his life
trudge along in the same path, eating the same food, thinking the same
thoughts, seeking the same pleasures--until he acknowledges with grim
reluctance that he is an old man.

I confess that I had so far deliberately tried to forget my approaching
fiftieth milestone, or at least to dodge it with closed eyes as I passed
it by, that my daughter's polite congratulation on my demicentennial
anniversary gave me an unexpected and most unpleasant shock.

"You really ought to be ashamed of yourself!" she remarked as she joined
me at breakfast.

"Why?" I asked, somewhat resenting being thus definitely proclaimed as
having crossed into the valley of the shadows.

"To be so old and yet to look so young!" she answered, with charming
_voir-faire_.

Then I knew the reason of my resentment against fate. It was because I
was labeled as old while, in fact, I was still young. Of course that was
it. Old? Ridiculous! When my daughter was gone I gazed searchingly at
myself in the mirror. Old? Nonsense!

I saw a man with no wrinkles and only a few crow's-feet such as anybody
might have had; with hardly a gray hair on my temples and with not even
a suggestion of a bald spot. My complexion and color were good and
denoted vigorous health; my flesh was firm and hard on my cheeks; my
teeth were sound, even and white; and my eyes were clear save for a
slight cloudiness round the iris.

The only physical defect to which I was frankly willing to plead guilty
was a flabbiness of the neck under the chin, which might by a hostile
eye have been regarded as slightly double. For the rest I was strong and
fairly well--not much inclined to exercise, to be sure, but able, if
occasion offered, to wield a tennis racket or a driver with a vigor and
accuracy that placed me well out of the duffer class.

Yes; I flattered myself that I looked like a boy of thirty, and I felt
like one--except for things to be hereinafter noted--and yet middle-aged
men called me "sir" and waited for me to sit down before doing so
themselves; and my contemporaries were accustomed to inquire jocularly
after my arteries. I was fifty! Another similar stretch of time and
there would be no I. Twenty years more--with ten years of physical
effectiveness if I were lucky! Thirty, and I would be useless to
everybody. Forty--I shuddered. Fifty, I would not be there. My room
would be vacant. Another face would be looking into the mirror.

Unexpectedly on this legitimate festival of my birth a profound
melancholy began to possess my spirit. I had lived. I had succeeded in
the eyes of my fellows and of the general public. I was married to a
charming woman. I had two marriageable daughters and a son who had
already entered on his career as a lawyer. I was prosperous. I had
amassed more than a comfortable fortune. And yet--

These things had all come, with a moderate amount of striving, as a
matter of course. Without them, undoubtedly I should be miserable; but
with them--with reputation, money, comfort, affection--was I really
happy? I was obliged to confess I was not. Some remark in Charles
Reade's Christie Johnstone came into my mind--not accurately, for I find
that I can no longer remember literally--to the effect that the only
happy man is he who, having from nothing achieved money, fame and power,
dies before discovering that they were not worth striving for.

I put to myself the question: _Were_ they worth striving for? Really, I
did not seem to be getting much satisfaction out of them. I began to be
worried. Was not this an attitude of age? Was I not an old man, perhaps,
regardless of my youthful face?

At any rate, it occurred to me sharply, as I had but a few more years of
effective life, did it not behoove me to pause and see, if I could, in
what direction I was going?--to "stop, look and listen"?--to take
account of stock?--to form an idea of just what I was worth physically,
mentally and morally?--to compute my assets and liabilities?--to find
out for myself by a calm and dispassionate examination whether or not I
was spiritually a bankrupt? That was the hideous thought which like a
deathmask suddenly leered at me from behind the arras of my mind--that I
counted for nothing--cared really for nothing! That when I died I should
have been but a hole in the water!

The previous evening I had taken my two distinctly blase daughters to
see a popular melodrama. The great audience that packed the theater to
the roof went wild, and my young ladies, infected in spite of themselves
with the same enthusiasm, gave evidences of a quite ordinary variety of
excitement; but I felt no thrill. To me the heroine was but a painted
dummy mechanically repeating the lines that some Jew had written for her
as he puffed a reeking cigar in his rear office, and the villain but a
popinjay with a black whisker stuck on with a bit of pitch. Yet I
grinned and clapped to deceive them, and agreed that it was the most
inspiriting performance I had seen in years.

In the last act there was a horserace cleverly devised to produce a
convincing impression of reality. A rear section of the stage was made
to revolve from left to right at such a rate that the horses were
obliged to gallop at their utmost speed in order to avoid being swept
behind the scenes. To enhance the realistic effect the scenery itself
was made to move in the same direction. Thus, amid a whirlwind of
excitement and the wild banging of the orchestra, the scenery flew by,
and the horses, neck and neck, raced across the stage--without
progressing a single foot.

And the thought came to me as I watched them that, after all, this
horserace was very much like the life we all of us were living here in
the city. The scenery was rushing by, time was flying, the band was
playing--while we, like the animals on the stage, were in a breathless
struggle to attain some goal to which we never got any nearer.

Now as I smoked my cigarette after breakfast I asked myself what I had
to show for my fifty years. What goal or goals had I attained? Had
anything happened except that the scenery had gone by? What would be the
result should I stop and go with the scenery? Was the race profiting me
anything? Had it profited anything to me or anybody else? And how far
was I typical of a class?

A moment's thought convinced me that I was the prototype of thousands
all over the United States. "A certain rich man!" That was me. I had
yawned for years at dozens of sermons about men exactly like myself. I
had called them twaddle. I had rather resented them. I was not a
sinner--that is, I was not a sinner in the ordinary sense at all. I was
a good man--a very good man. I kept all the commandments and I acted in
accordance with the requirements of every standard laid down by other
men exactly like myself. Between us, I now suddenly saw, we made the law
and the prophets. We were all judging ourselves by self-made tests. I
was just like all the rest. What was true of me was true of them.

And what were we, the crowning achievement of American civilization,
like? I had not thought of it before. Here, then, was a question the
answer to which might benefit others as well as myself. I resolved to
answer it if I could--to write down in plain words and cold figures a
truthful statement of what I was and what they were.

I had been a fairly wide reader in my youth, and yet I did not recall
anywhere precisely this sort of self-analysis. Confessions, so called,
were usually amatory episodes in the lives of the authors, highly spiced
and colored by emotions often not felt at the time, but rather inspired
by memory. Other analyses were the contented, narratives of supposedly
poverty-stricken people who pretended they had no desires in the world
save to milk the cows and watch the grass grow. "Adventures in
contentment" interested me no more than adventures in unbridled passion.

I was going to try and see myself as I was--naked. To be of the
slightest value, everything I set down must be absolutely accurate and
the result of faithful observation. I believed I was a good observer. I
had heard myself described as a "cold proposition," and coldness was a
_sine qua non_ of my enterprise. I must brief my case as if I were an
attorney in an action at law. Or rather, I must make an analytical
statement of fact like that which usually prefaces a judicial opinion. I
must not act as a pleader, but first as a keen and truthful witness and
then as an impartial judge. And at the end I must either declare myself
innocent or guilty of a breach of trust--pronounce myself a faithful or
an unworthy servant.

I must dispassionately examine and set forth the actual conditions of my
home life, my business career, my social pleasures, the motives
animating myself, my family, my professional associates, and my friends
--weigh our comparative influence for good or evil on the community and
diagnose the general mental, moral and physical condition of the class
to which I belonged.

To do this aright, I must see clearly things as they were without regard
to popular approval or prejudice, and must not hesitate to call them by
their right names. I must spare neither myself nor anybody else. It
would not be altogether pleasant. The disclosures of the microscope are
often more terrifying than the amputations of the knife; but by thus
studying both myself and my contemporaries I might perhaps arrive at the
solution of the problem that was troubling me--that is to say, why I,
with every ostensible reason in the world for being happy, was not!
This, then, was to be my task.

* * * * *

I have already indicated that I am a sound, moderately healthy, vigorous
man, with a slight tendency to run to fat. I am five feet ten inches
tall, weigh a hundred and sixty-two pounds, have gray eyes, a rather
aquiline nose, and a close-clipped dark-brown mustache, with enough gray
hairs in it to give it dignity. My movements are quick; I walk with a
spring. I usually sleep, except when worried over business. I do not
wear glasses and I have no organic trouble of which I am aware. The New
York Life Insurance Company has just reinsured me after a thorough
physical examination. My appetite for food is not particularly good, and
my other appetites, in spite of my vigor, are by no means keen. Eating
is about the most active pleasure that I can experience; but in order to
enjoy my dinner I have to drink a cocktail, and my doctor says that is
very bad for my health.

My personal habits are careful, regular and somewhat luxurious. I bathe
always once and generally twice a day. Incidentally I am accustomed to
scatter a spoonful of scented powder in the water for the sake of the
odor. I like hot baths and spend a good deal of time in the Turkish bath
at my club. After steaming myself for half an hour and taking a cold
plunge, an alcohol rub and a cocktail, I feel younger than ever; but
the sight of my fellow men in the bath revolts me. Almost without
exception they have flabby, pendulous stomachs out of all proportion to
the rest of their bodies. Most of them are bald and their feet are
excessively ugly, so that, as they lie stretched out on glass slabs to
be rubbed down with salt and scrubbed, they appear to be deformed. I
speak now of the men of my age. Sometimes a boy comes in that looks like
a Greek god; but generally the boys are as weird-looking as the men. I
am rambling, however. Anyhow I am less repulsive than most of them. Yet,
unless the human race has steadily deteriorated, I am surprised that the
Creator was not discouraged after his first attempt.

I clothe my body in the choicest apparel that my purse can buy, but am
careful to avoid the expressions of fancy against which Polonius warns
us. My coats and trousers are made in London, and so are my
underclothes, which are woven to order of silk and cotton. My shoes cost
me fourteen dollars a pair; my silk socks, six dollars; my ordinary
shirts, five dollars; and my dress shirts, fifteen dollars each. On
brisk evenings I wear to dinner and the opera a mink-lined overcoat, for
which my wife recently paid seven hundred and fifty dollars. The storage
and insurance on this coat come to twenty-five dollars annually and the
repairs to about forty-five. I am rather fond of overcoats and own half
a dozen of them, all made in Inverness.

I wear silk pajamas--pearl-gray, pink, buff and blue, with frogs, cuffs
and monograms--which by the set cost me forty dollars. I also have a
pair of pearl evening studs to wear with my dress suit, for which my
wife paid five hundred and fifty dollars, and my cuff buttons cost me a
hundred and seventy-five. Thus, if I am not an exquisite--which I
distinctly am not--I am exceedingly well dressed, and I am glad to be
so. If I did not have a fur coat to wear to the opera I should feel
embarrassed, out of place and shabby. All the men who sit in the boxes
at the Metropolitan Opera House have fur overcoats.

As a boy I had very few clothes indeed, and those I had were made to
last a long time. But now without fine raiment I am sure I should be
miserable. I cannot imagine myself shabby. Yet I can imagine any one of
my friends being shabby without feeling any uneasiness about it--that is
to say, I am the first to profess a democracy of spirit in which clothes
cut no figure at all. I assert that it is the man, and not his clothes,
that I value; but in my own case my silk-and-cotton undershirt is a
necessity, and if deprived of it I should, I know, lose some attribute
of self.

At any rate, my bluff, easy, confident manner among my fellow men, which
has played so important a part in my success, would be impossible. I
could never patronize anybody if my necktie were frayed or my sleeves
too short. I know that my clothes are as much a part of my entity as my
hair, eyes and voice--more than any of the rest of me.

Based on the figures given above I am worth--the material part of me--as
I step out of my front door to go forth to dinner, something over
fifteen hundred dollars. If I were killed in a railroad accident all
these things would be packed carefully in a box, inventoried, and given
a much greater degree of attention than my mere body. I saw Napoleon's
boots and waistcoat the other day in Paris and I felt that he himself
must be there in the glass case beside me.

Any one who at Abbotsford has felt of the white beaver hat of Sir Walter
Scott knows that he has touched part--and a very considerable part--of
Sir Walter. The hat, the boots, the waistcoat are far less ephemeral
than the body they protect, and indicate almost as much of the wearer's
character as his hands and face. So I am not ashamed of my silk pajamas
or of the geranium powder I throw in my bath. They are part of me.

But is this "me" limited to my body and my clothes? I drink a cup of
coffee or a cocktail: after they are consumed they are part of me; are
they not part of me as I hold the cup or the glass in my hand? Is my
coat more characteristic of me than my house--my sleeve-links than my
wife or my collie dog? I know a gentlewoman whose sensitive, quivering,
aristocratic nature is expressed far more in the Russian wolfhound that
shrinks always beside her than in the aloof, though charming,
expression of her face. No; not only my body and my personal effects but
everything that is mine is part of me--my chair with the rubbed arm; my
book, with its marked pages; my office; my bank account, and in some
measure my friend himself.

Let us agree that in the widest sense all that I have, feel or think is
part of me--either of my physical or mental being; for surely my
thoughts are more so than the books that suggest them, and my sensations
of pleasure or satisfaction equally so with the dinner I have eaten or
the cigar I have smoked. My ego is the sum total of all these things.
And if the cigar is consumed, the dinner digested, the pleasure flown,
the thought forgotten, the waistcoat or shirt discarded--so, too, do the
tissues of the body dissolve, disintegrate and change. I can no more
retain permanently the physical elements of my personality than I can
the mental or spiritual.

What, then, am I--who, the Scriptures assert, am made in the image of
God? Who and what is this being that has gradually been evolved during
fifty years of life and which I call Myself? For whom my father and my
mother, their fathers and mothers, and all my ancestors back through the
gray mists of the forgotten past, struggled, starved, labored, suffered,
and at last died. To what end did they do these things? To produce me?
God forbid!

Would the vision of me as I am to-day have inspired my grandfather to
undergo, as cheerfully as he did, the privations and austerities of his
long and arduous service as a country clergyman--or my father to die at
the head of his regiment at Little Round Top? What am I--what have I
ever done, now that I come to think of it, to deserve those sacrifices?
Have I ever even inconvenienced myself for others in any way? Have I
ever repaid this debt? Have I in turn advanced the flag that they and
hundreds of thousands of others, equally unselfish, carried forward?

Have I ever considered my obligation to those who by their patient
labors in the field of scientific discovery have contributed toward my
well-being and the very continuance of my life? Or have I been content
for all these years to reap where I have not sown? To accept, as a
matter of course and as my due, the benefits others gave years of labor
to secure for me? It is easy enough for me to say: No--that I have
thought of them and am grateful to them. Perhaps I am, in a vague
fashion. But has whatever feeling of obligation I may possess been
evidenced in my conduct toward my fellows?

I am proud of my father's heroic death at Gettysburg; in fact I am a
member, by virtue of his rank in the Union Army, of what is called The
Loyal Legion. But have I ever fully considered that he died for me? Have
I been loyal to him? Would he be proud or otherwise--_is_ he proud or
otherwise of me, his son? That is a question I can only answer after I
have ascertained just what I am.

Now for over quarter of a century I have worked hard--harder, I believe,
than most men. From a child I was ambitious. As a boy, people would
point to me and say that I would get ahead. Well, I have got ahead. Back
in the town where I was born I am spoken of as a "big man." Old men and
women stop me on the main street and murmur: "If only your father could
see you now!" They all seem tremendously proud of me and feel confident
that if he could see me he would be happy for evermore. And I know they
are quite honest about it all. For they assume in their simple hearts
that my success is a real success. Yet I have no such assurance about
it.

Every year I go back and address the graduating class in the high
school--the high school I attended as a boy. And I am "Exhibit A"--the
tangible personification of all that the fathers and mothers hope their
children will become. It is the same way with the Faculty of my college.
They have given me an honorary degree and I have given them a drinking
fountain for the campus. We are a mutual-admiration society.

I am always picked by my classmates to preside at our reunions, for I am
the conspicuous, shining example of success among them. They are proud
of me, without envy. "Well, old man," they say, "you've certainly made
a name for yourself!" They take it for granted that, because I have made
money and they read my wife's name in the society columns of the New
York papers, I must be completely satisfied.

And in a way I _am_ satisfied with having achieved that material success
which argues the possession of brains and industry; but the encomiums of
the high-school principal and the congratulations of my college mates,
sincere and well-meaning as they are, no longer quicken my blood; for I
know that they are based on a total ignorance of the person they seek to
honor. They see a heavily built, well-groomed, shrewd-looking man, with
clear-cut features, a ready smile, and a sort of brusque frankness that
seems to them the index of an honest heart. They hear him speak in a
straightforward, direct way about the "Old Home," and the "Dear Old
College," and "All Our Friends"--quite touching at times, I assure
you--and they nod and say, "Good fellow, this! No frills--straight from
the heart! No wonder he has got on in the city! Sterling chap! Hurrah!"

Perhaps, after all, the best part of me comes out on these occasions.
But it is not the _me_ that I have worked for half a century to build
up; it is rather what is left of the _me_ that knelt at my mother's side
forty years ago. Yet I have no doubt that, should these good parents of
mine see how I live in New York, they would only be the more convinced
of the greatness of my success--the success to achieve which I have
given the unremitting toil of thirty years.

* * * * *

And as I now clearly see that the results of this striving and the
objects of my ambition have been largely, if not entirely, material, I
shall take the space to set forth in full detail just what this material
success amounts to, in order that I may the better determine whether it
has been worth struggling for. Not only are the figures that follow
accurate and honest, but I am inclined to believe that they represent
the very minimum of expenditure in the class of New York families to
which mine belongs. They may at first sight seem extravagant; but if the
reader takes the trouble to verify them--as I have done, alas! many
times to my own dismay and discouragement--he will find them
economically sound. This, then, is the catalogue of my success.

I possess securities worth about seven hundred and fifty thousand
dollars and I earn at my profession from thirty to forty thousand
dollars a year. This gives me an annual income of from sixty-five
thousand to seventy-five thousand dollars. In addition I own a house on
the sunny side of an uptown cross street near Central Park which cost
me, fifteen years ago, one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and is
now worth two hundred and fifty thousand. I could sell it for that. The
taxes alone amount to thirty-two hundred dollars--the repairs and annual
improvements to about twenty-five hundred. As the interest on the value
of the property would be twelve thousand five hundred dollars it will be
seen that merely to have a roof over my head costs me annually over
eighteen thousand dollars.

My electric-light bills are over one hundred dollars a month. My coal
and wood cost me even more, for I have two furnaces to heat the house,
an engine to pump the water, and a second range in the laundry. One man
is kept busy all the time attending to these matters and cleaning the
windows. I pay my butler eighty dollars a month; my second man
fifty-five; my valet sixty; my cook seventy; the two kitchen maids
twenty-five each; the head laundress forty-five; the two second
laundresses thirty-five each; the parlor maid thirty; the two housemaids
twenty-five each; my wife's maid thirty-five; my daughter's maid thirty;
the useful man fifty; the pantry maid twenty-five. My house payroll is,
therefore, six hundred and fifty dollars a month, or seventy-eight
hundred a year.

We could not possibly get along without every one of these servants. To
discharge one of them would mean that the work would have to be done in
some other way at a vastly greater expense. Add this to the yearly sum
represented by the house itself, together with the cost of heating and
lighting, and you have twenty-eight thousand four hundred dollars.

Unforeseen extras make this, in fact, nearer thirty thousand dollars.
There is usually some alteration under way, a partition to be taken out,
a hall to be paneled, a parquet floor to be relaid, a new sort of
heating apparatus to be installed, and always plumbing. Generally, also,
at least one room has to be done over and refurnished every year, and
this is an expensive matter. The guest room, recently refurnished in
this way at my daughter's request, cost thirty-seven hundred dollars.
Since we average not more than two guests for a single night annually,
their visits from one point of view will cost me this year eighteen
hundred and fifty dollars apiece.

Then, too, styles change. There is always new furniture, new carpets,
new hangings--pictures to be bought. Last season my wife changed the
drawing room from Empire to Louis Seize at a very considerable outlay.

Our food, largely on account of the number of our servants, costs us
from a thousand to twelve hundred dollars a month. In the spring and
autumn it is a trifle less--in winter it is frequently more; but it
averages, with wine, cigars, ice, spring water and sundries, over
fifteen thousand dollars a year.

We rent a house at the seashore or in the country in summer at from five
to eight thousand dollars, and usually find it necessary to employ a
couple of men about the place.

Our three saddle-horses cost us about two thousand dollars for
stabling, shoeing and incidentals; but they save me at least that in
doctors' bills.

Since my wife and daughters are fond of society, and have different
friends and different nightly engagements, we are forced to keep two
motors and two chauffeurs, one of them exclusively for night-work. I pay
these men one hundred and twenty-five dollars each a month, and the
garage bill is usually two hundred and fifty more, not counting tires.
At least one car has to be overhauled every year at an average expense
of from two hundred and fifty to five hundred dollars. Both cars have to
be painted annually. My motor service winter and summer costs on a
conservative estimate at least eight thousand dollars.

I allow my wife five thousand dollars; my daughters three thousand each;
and my son, who is not entirely independent, twenty-five hundred. This
is supposed to cover everything; but it does not--it barely covers their
bodies. I myself expend, having no vices, only about twenty-five hundred
dollars.

The bills of our family doctor, the specialists and the dentist are
never less than a thousand dollars, and that is a minimum. They would
probably average more than double that.

Our spring trip to Paris, for rest and clothing, has never cost me less
than thirty-five hundred dollars, and when it comes to less than five
thousand it is inevitably a matter of mutual congratulation.

Our special entertaining, our opera box, the theater and social
frivolities aggregate no inconsiderable sum, which I will not
overestimate at thirty-five hundred dollars.

Our miscellaneous subscriptions to charity and the like come to about
fifteen hundred dollars.

The expenses already recited total nearly seventy-five thousand dollars,
or as much as my maximum income. And this annual budget contains no
allowance for insurance, books, losses at cards, transportation,
sundries, the purchase of new furniture, horses, automobiles, or for any
of that class of expenditure usually referred to as "principal" or
"plant." I inevitably am obliged to purchase a new motor every two or
three years--usually for about six thousand dollars; and, as I have
said, the furnishing of our city house is never completed.

It is a fact that for the last ten years I have found it an absolute
impossibility to get along on seventy-five thousand dollars a year, even
living without apparent extravagance. I do not run a yacht or keep
hunters or polo ponies. My wife does not appear to be particularly
lavish and continually complains of the insufficiency of her allowance.
Our table is not Lucullan, by any means; and we rarely have game out of
season, hothouse fruit or many flowers. Indeed, there is an elaborate
fiction maintained by my wife, cook and butler that our establishment is
run economically and strictly on a business basis. Perhaps it is. I
hope so. I do not know anything about it. Anyhow, here is the smallest
budget on which I can possibly maintain my household of five adults:

ANNUAL BUDGET--MINIMUM--FOR FAMILY OF FIVE PERSONS

Taxes on city house $ 3,200
Repairs, improvements and minor alterations 2,500
Rent of country house--average 7,000
Gardeners and stablemen, and so on 800
Servants' payroll 7,800
Food supplies 15,000
Light and heat--gas, electricity, coal and wood 2,400
Saddle-horses--board and so on 2,000
Automobile expenses 8,000
Wife's allowance--emphatically insufficient 5,000
Daughters' allowance--two 6,000
Son's allowance 2,500
Self--clubs, clothes, and so on 2,500
Medical attendance--including dentist 1,000
Charity 1,500
Travel--wife's annual spring trip to Paris 3,500
Opera, theater, music, entertaining at restaurants,
and so on 3,500
_____
Total $74,200

A fortune in itself, you may say! Yet judged by the standards of
expenditure among even the unostentatiously wealthy in New York it is
moderate indeed. A friend of mine who has only recently married glanced
over my schedule and said, "Why, it's ridiculous, old man! No one could
live in New York on any such sum."

Any attempt to "keep house" in the old-fashioned meaning of the phrase
would result in domestic disruption. No cook who was not allowed to do
the ordering would stay with us. It is hopeless to try to save money in
our domestic arrangements. I have endeavored to do so once or twice and
repented of my rashness. One cannot live in the city without motors, and
there is no object in living at all if one cannot keep up a scale of
living that means comfort and lack of worry in one's household.

The result is that I am always pressed for money even on an income of
seventy-five thousand dollars. And every year I draw a little on my
capital. Sometimes a lucky stroke on the market or an unexpected fee
evens things up or sets me a little ahead; but usually January first
sees me selling a few bonds to meet an annual deficit. Needless to say,
I pay no personal taxes. If I did I might as well give up the struggle
at once. When I write it all down in cold words I confess it seems
ridiculous. Yet my family could not be happy living in any other way.

It may be remarked that the item for charity on the preceding schedule
is somewhat disproportionate to the amount of the total expenditure. I
offer no excuse or justification for this. I am engaged in an honest
exposition of fact--for my own personal satisfaction and profit, and for
what lessons others may be able to draw from it. My charities are
negligible.

The only explanation which suggests itself to my mind is that I lead so
circumscribed and guarded a life that these matters do not obtrude
themselves on me. I am not brought into contact with the maimed, the
halt and the blind; if I were I should probably behave toward them like
a gentleman. The people I am thrown with are all sleek and well fed; but
even among those of my friends who make a fad of charity I have never
observed any disposition to deprive themselves of luxuries for the sake
of others.

Outside of the really poor, is there such a thing as genuine charity
among us? The church certainly does not demand anything approximating
self-sacrifice. A few dollars will suffice for any appeal. I am not a
professing Christian, but the church regards me tolerantly and takes my
money when it can get it. But how little it gets! I give
frequently--almost constantly--but in most instances my giving is less
an act of benevolence than the payment of a tax upon my social standing.
I am compelled to give. If I could not be relied upon to take tickets to
charity entertainments and to add my name to the subscription lists for
hospitals and relief funds I should lose my caste. One cannot be _too_
cold a proposition. I give to these things grudgingly and because I
cannot avoid it.

Of course the aggregate amount thus disposed of is really not large and
I never feel the loss of it. Frankly, people of my class rarely
inconvenience themselves for the sake of anybody, whether their own
immediate friends or the sick, suffering and sorrowful. It is trite to
say that the clerk earning one thousand dollars deprives himself of more
in giving away fifty than the man with an income of twenty thousand
dollars in giving away five thousand. It really costs the clerk more to
go down into his pocket for that sum than the rich man to draw his check
for those thousands.

Where there is necessity for generous and immediate relief I
occasionally, but very rarely, contribute two hundred and fifty or five
hundred dollars. My donation is always known and usually is noticed with
others of like amount in the daily papers. I am glad to give the money
and I have a sensation of making a substantial sacrifice in doing so.
Obviously, however, it has cost me really nothing! I spend two hundred
and fifty dollars or more every week or so on an evening's entertainment
for fifteen or twenty of my friends and think nothing of it. It is part
of my manner of living, and my manner of living is an advertisement of
my success--and advertising in various subtle ways is a business
necessity. Yet if I give two hundred and fifty dollars to a relief fund
I have an inflation of the heart and feel conscious of my generosity.

I can frankly say, therefore, that so far as I am concerned my response
to the ordinary appeal for charity is purely perfunctory and largely, if
not entirely, dictated by policy; and the sum total of my charities on
an income of seventy-five thousand dollars a year is probably less than
fifteen hundred dollars, or about two per cent.

Yet, thinking it over dispassionately, I do not conclude from this that
I am an exceptionally selfish man. I believe I represent the average in
this respect. I always respond to minor calls in a way that pleases the
recipient and causes a genuine flow of satisfaction in my own breast. I
toss away nickels, dimes and quarters with prodigality; and if one of
the office boys feels out of sorts I send him off for a week's vacation
on full pay. I make small loans to seedy fellows who have known better
days and I treat the servants handsomely at Christmas.

I once sent a boy to college--that is, I promised him fifty dollars a
year. He died in his junior term, however. Sisters of Mercy, the
postman, a beggar selling pencils or shoelaces--almost anybody, in
short, that actually comes within range--can pretty surely count on
something from me. But I confess I never go out of my way to look for
people in need of help. I have not the time.

Several of the items in my budget, however, are absurdly low, for the
opera-box which, as it is, we share with several friends and which is
ours but once in two weeks, alone costs us twelve hundred dollars; and
my bill at the Ritz--where we usually dine before going to the theater
or sup afterward--is apt to be not less than one hundred dollars a
month. Besides, twenty-five hundred dollars does not begin to cover my
actual personal expenses; but as I am accustomed to draw checks against
my office account and thrust the money in my pocket, it is difficult to
say just what I do cost myself.

Moreover, a New York family like mine would have to keep surprisingly
well in order to get along with but two thousand dollars a year for
doctors. Even our dentist bills are often more than that. We do not go
to the most fashionable operators either. There does not seem to be any
particular way of finding out who the good ones are except by
experiment. I go to a comparatively cheap one. Last month he looked me
over, put in two tiny fillings, cleansed my teeth and treated my gums.
He only required my presence once for half an hour, once for twenty
minutes, and twice for ten minutes--on the last two occasions he filched
the time from the occupant of his other chair. My bill was forty-two
dollars. As he claims to charge a maximum rate of ten dollars an
hour--which is about the rate for ordinary legal services--I have spent
several hundred dollars' worth of my own time trying to figure it all
out. But this is nothing to the expense incident to the straightening of
children's teeth.

When I was a child teeth seemed to take care of themselves, but my boy
and girls were all obliged to spend several years with their small
mouths full of plates, wires and elastic bands. In each case the cost
was from eighteen hundred to two thousand dollars. A friend of mine with
a large family was compelled to lay out during the tooth-growing period
of his offspring over five thousand dollars a year for several years.
Their teeth are not straight at that.

Then, semioccasionally, weird cures arise and seize hold of the female
imagination and send our wives and daughters scurrying to the parlors of
fashionable specialists, who prescribe long periods of rest at expensive
hotels--a room in one's own house will not do--and strange diets of mush
and hot water, with periodical search parties, lighted by electricity,
through the alimentary canal.

One distinguished medico's discovery of the terra incognita of the
stomach has netted him, I am sure, a princely fortune. There seems to be
something peculiarly fascinating about the human interior. One of our
acquaintances became so interested in hers that she issued engraved
invitations for a fashionable party at which her pet doctor delivered a
lecture on the gastro-intestinal tract. All this comes high, and I have
not ventured to include the cost of such extravagances in my budget,
though my wife has taken cures six times in the last ten years, either
at home or abroad.

And who can prophesy the cost of the annual spring jaunt to Europe? I
have estimated it at thirty-five hundred dollars; but, frankly, I never
get off with any such trifling sum. Our passage alone costs us from
seven hundred to a thousand dollars, or even more and our ten-days'
motor trip--the invariable climax of the expedition rendered necessary
by the fatigue incident to shopping--at least five hundred dollars.

Our hotel bills in Paris, our taxicabs, theater tickets, and dinners at
expensive restaurants cost us at least a thousand dollars, without
estimating the total of those invariable purchases that are paid for out
of the letter of credit and not charged to my wife's regular allowance.
Even in Paris she will, without a thought, spend fifty dollars at
Reboux' for a simple spring hat--and this is not regarded as expensive.
Her dresses cost as much as if purchased on Fifth Avenue and I am
obliged to pay a sixty per cent duty on them besides.

The restaurants of Paris--the chic ones--charge as much as those in New
York; in fact, chic Paris exists very largely for the exploitation of
the wives of rich Americans. The smart French woman buys no such dresses
and pays no such prices. She knows a clever little modiste down some
alley leading off the Rue St. Honore who will saunter into Worth's,
sweep the group of models with her eye, and go back to her own shop and
turn out the latest fashions at a quarter of the money.

A French woman in society will have the same dress made for her by her
own dressmaker for seventy dollars for which an American will cheerfully
pay three hundred and fifty. And the reason is, that she has been
taught from girlhood the relative values of things. She knows that mere
clothes can never really take the place of charm and breeding; that
expensive entertainments, no matter how costly and choice the viands,
can never give equal pleasure with a cup of tea served with vivacity and
wit; and that the best things of Paris are, in fact, free to all
alike--the sunshine of the boulevards, the ever-changing spectacle of
the crowds, the glamour of the evening glow beyond the Hotel des
Invalides, and the lure of the lamp-strewn twilight of the Champs
Elysees.

So she gets a new dress or two and, after the three months of her season
in the Capital are over, is content to lead a more or less simple family
life in the country for the rest of the year. One rarely sees a real
Parisian at one of the highly advertised all-night resorts of Paris. No
Frenchman would pay the price.

An acquaintance of mine took his wife and a couple of friends one
evening to what is known as L'Abbaye, in Montmartre. Knowing that it had
a reputation for being expensive, he resisted, somewhat
self-consciously, the delicate suggestions of the head waiter and
ordered only one bottle of champagne, caviar for four, and a couple of
cigars. After watching the dancing for an hour he called for his bill
and found that the amount was two hundred and fifty francs. Rather than
be conspicuous he paid it--foolishly. But the American who takes his
wife abroad must have at least one vicarious taste of fast life, no
matter what it costs, and he is a lucky fellow who can save anything out
of a bill of exchange that has cost him five thousand dollars.

After dispassionate consideration of the matter I hazard the sincere
opinion that my actual disbursements during the last ten years have
averaged not less than one hundred thousand dollars a year. However, let
us be conservative and stick to our original figure of seventy-five
thousand dollars. It costs me, therefore, almost exactly two hundred
dollars a day to support five persons. We all of us complain of what is
called the high cost of living, but men of my class have no real
knowledge of what it costs them to live.

The necessaries are only a drop in the bucket. It is hardly worth while
to bother over the price of rib roast a pound, or fresh eggs a dozen,
when one is smoking fifty-cent cigars. Essentially it costs me as much
to lunch off a boiled egg, served in my dining room at home, as to carve
the breast off a canvasback. At the end of the month my bills would not
show the difference. It is the overhead--or, rather, in housekeeping,
the underground--charge that counts. That boiled egg or the canvasback
represents a running expense of at least a hundred dollars a day. Slight
variations in the cost of foodstuffs or servants' wages amount to
practically nothing.

And what do I get for my two hundred dollars a day and my seventy-five
thousand dollars a year that the other fellow does not enjoy for, let us
say, half the money? Let us readjust the budget with an idea to
ascertaining on what a family of five could live in luxury in the city
of New York a year. I could rent a good house for five thousand dollars
and one in the country for two thousand dollars; and I would have no
real-estate taxes. I could keep eight trained servants for three
thousand dollars and reduce the cost of my supplies to five thousand
almost without knowing it. Of course my light and heat would cost me
twelve hundred dollars and my automobile twenty-five hundred. My wife,
daughters and son ought to be able to manage to dress on five thousand
dollars, among them. I could give away fifteen hundred dollars and allow
one thousand for doctors' bills, fifteen hundred for my own expenses,
and still have twenty-three hundred for pleasure--and be living on
thirty thousand dollars a year in luxury.

I could even then entertain, go to the theater, and occasionally take my
friends to a restaurant. And what would I surrender? My saddle-horses,
my extra motor, my pretentious houses, my opera box, my wife's annual
spending bout in Paris--that is about all. And I would have a cash
balance of forty-five thousand dollars.

REVISED BUDGET

Rent--City and country $7,000
Servants 3,000
Supplies 5,000
Light and heat 1,200
Motor 2,500
Allowance to family 5,000
Charity 1,500
Medical attendance 1,000
Self 1,500
Travel, pleasure, music and sundries 2,300
______
Total $30,000

In a smaller city I could do the same thing for half the money--fifteen
thousand dollars; in Rome, Florence or Munich I could live like a prince
on half the sum. I am paying apparently forty-five thousand dollars each
year for the veriest frills of existence--for geranium powder in my
bath, for fifteen extra feet in the width of my drawing room, for a seat
in the parterre instead of the parquet at the opera, for the privilege
of having a second motor roll up to the door when it is needed, and that
my wife may have seven new evening dresses each winter instead of two.
And in reality these luxuries mean nothing to me. I do not want them. I
am not a whit more comfortable with than without them.

If an income tax should suddenly cut my bank account in half it would
not seriously inconvenience me. No financial cataclasm, however dire,
could deprive me of the genuine luxuries of my existence. Yet in my
revised schedule of expenditure I would still be paying nearly a hundred
dollars a day for the privilege of living. What would I be getting for
my money--even then? What would I receive as a _quid pro quo_ for my
thirty thousand dollars?

I am not enough of a materialist to argue that my advantage over my less
successful fellow man lies in having a bigger house, men servants
instead of maid servants, and smoking cigars alleged to be from Havana
instead of from Tampa; but I believe I am right in asserting that my
social opportunities--in the broader sense--are vastly greater than his.
I am meeting bigger men and have my fingers in bigger things. I give
orders and he takes them.

My opinion has considerable weight in important matters, some of which
vitally affect large communities. My astuteness has put millions into
totally unexpected pockets and defeated the faultily expressed
intentions of many a testator. I can go to the White House and get an
immediate hearing, and I can do more than that with judges of the
Supreme Court in their private chambers.

In other words I am an active man of affairs, a man among men, a man of
force and influence, who, as we say, "cuts ice" in the metropolis. But
the economic weakness in the situation lies in the fact that a boiled
egg only costs the ordinary citizen ten cents and it costs me almost its
weight in gold.

Compare this de-luxe existence of mine with that of my forebears. We are
assured by most biographers that the subject of their eulogies was born
of poor but honest parents. My own parents were honest, but my father
was in comfortable circumstances and was able to give me the advantages
incident to an education, first at the local high school and later at
college. I did not as a boy get up while it was still dark and break the
ice in the horsetrough in order to perform my ablutions. I was, to be
sure, given to understand--and always when a child religiously
believed--that this was my father's unhappy fate. It may have been so,
but I have a lingering doubt on the subject that refuses to be
dissipated. I can hardly credit the idea that the son of the village
clergyman was obliged to go through any such rigorous physical
discipline as a child.

Even in 1820 there were such things as hired men and tradition declares
that the one in my grandparents' employ was known as Jonas, had but one
good eye and was half-witted. It modestly refrains from asserting that
he had only one arm and one leg. My grandmother did the cooking--her
children the housework; but Jonas was their only servant, if servant he
can be called. It is said that he could perform wonders with an ax and
could whistle the very birds off the trees.

Some time ago I came upon a trunkful of letters written by my
grandfather to my father in 1835, when the latter was in college. They
were closely written with a fine pen in a small, delicate hand, and the
lines of ink, though faded, were like steel engraving. They were
stilted, godly--in an ingenuous fashion--at times ponderously humorous,
full of a mild self-satisfaction, and inscribed under the obvious
impression that only the writer could save my father's soul from hell or
his kidneys from destruction. The goodness of the Almighty, as
exemplified by His personal attention to my grandfather, the efficacy of
oil distilled from the liver of the cod, and the wisdom of Solomon, came
in for an equal share of attention. How the good old gentleman must have
enjoyed writing those letters! And, though I have never written my own
son three letters in my life, I suppose the desire of self-expression is
stirring in me now these seventy-eight years later. I wonder what he
would have said could he read these confessions of mine--he who married
my grandmother on a capital of twenty-five dollars and enough bleached
cotton to make half a dozen shirts! My annual income would have bought
the entire county in which he lived. My son scraped through Harvard on
twenty-five hundred dollars a year. I have no doubt that he left
undisclosed liabilities behind him. Most of this allowance was spent on
clothes, private commons and amusement. Lying before me is my father's
term bill at college for the first half year of 1835. The items are:

To tuition $12.00
Room rent 3.00
Use of University Library 1.00
Servants' hire, printing, and so on 2.00
Repairs .80
Damage for glass .09
Commons bill, 15-1/2 weeks at $1.62 a week 25.11
Steward's salary 2.00
Public fuel .50
Absent from recitation without excuse--once .03
-------
Total $46.53

The glass damage at nine cents and the three cents for absence without
excuse give me joy. Father was human, after all!

Economically speaking, I do not think that his clothes cost him
anything. He wore my grandfather's old ones. There were no amusements in
those days, except going to see the pickled curios in the old Boston
Museum. I have no doubt he drove to college in the family chaise--if
there was one. I do not think that, in fact, there was.

On a conservative estimate he could not have cost my grandfather much,
if anything, over a hundred dollars a year. On this basis I could, on my
present income, send seven hundred and fifty fathers to college
annually! A curious thought, is it not?

Undoubtedly my grandfather went barefoot and trudged many a weary mile,
winter and summer, to and from the district school. He worked his way
through college. He married and reared a family. He educated my father.
He watched over his flock in sickness and in health, and he died at a
ripe old age, mourned by the entire countryside.

My father, in his turn, was obliged to carve out his own fate. He left
the old home, moved to the town where I was born, and by untiring
industry built up a law practice which for those days was astonishingly
lucrative. Then, as I have said, the war broke out and, enlisting as a
matter of course, he met death on the battlefield. During his
comparatively short life he followed the frugal habits acquired in his
youth. He was a simple man.

Yet I am his son! What would he say could he see my valet, my butler, my
French cook? Would he admire and appreciate my paintings, my _objets
d'art,_ my rugs and tapestries, my rare old furniture? As an intelligent
man he would undoubtedly have the good taste to realize their value and
take satisfaction in their beauty; but would he be glad that I possessed
them? That is a question. Until I began to pen these confessions I
should have unhesitatingly answered it in the affirmative. Now I am
inclined to wonder a little. I think it would depend on how far he
believed that my treasures indicated on my own part a genuine love of
art, and how far they were but the evidences of pomp and vainglory.

Let me be honest in the matter. I own some masterpieces of great value.
At the time of their purchase I thought I had a keen admiration for
them. I begin to suspect that I acquired them less because I really
cared for such things than because I wished to be considered a
connoisseur. There they hang--my Corots, my Romneys, my Teniers, my
Daubignys. But they might as well be the merest chromos. I never look at
them. I have forgotten that they exist. So have the rest of my family.

It is the same way with my porcelains and tapestries. Of course they go
to make up the _tout ensemble_ of a harmonious and luxurious home, but
individually they mean nothing to me. I should not miss them if they
were all swept out of existence tomorrow by a fire. I am no happier in
my own house than in a hotel. My pictures are nothing but so much
furniture requiring heavy insurance.

It is somewhat the same with our cuisine. My food supply costs me forty
dollars a day. We use the choicest teas, the costliest caviar and
relishes, the richest sterilized milk and cream, the freshest eggs, the
choicest cuts of meat. We have course after course at lunch and dinner;
yet I go to the table without an appetite and my food gives me little
pleasure. But this style of living is the concrete expression of my
success. Because I have risen above my fellows I must be surrounded by
these tangible evidences of prosperity.

I get up about nine o'clock in the morning unless I have been out very
late the night before, in which case I rest until ten or later. I step
into a porcelain tub in which my servant has drawn a warm bath of water
filtered by an expensive process which makes it as clear and blue as
crystal. When I leave my bath my valet hands me one by one the garments
that have been carefully laid out in order. He is always hovering round
me, and I rather pride myself on the fact that I lace my own shoes and
brush my own hair. Then he gives me a silk handkerchief and I stroll
into my upstairs sitting room ready for breakfast.

My daughters are still sleeping. They rarely get up before eleven in the
morning, and my wife and I do not, as a rule, breakfast together. We
have tried that arrangement and found it wanting, for we are slightly
irritable at this hour. My son has already gone downtown. So I enter the
chintz-furnished room alone and sit down by myself before a bright wood
fire and glance at the paper, which the valet has ironed, while I nibble
an egg, drink a glass of orange juice, swallow a few pieces of toast and
quaff a great cup of fragrant coffee.

Coffee! Goddess of the nerve-exhausted! Sweet invigorator of tired
manhood! Savior of the American race! I could not live without you! One
draft at your Pyrenean fountain and I am young again! For a moment the
sun shines as it used to do in my boyhood's days; my blood quickens; I
am eager to be off to business--to do, no matter what.

I enter the elevator and sink to the ground floor. My valet and butler
are waiting, the former with my coat over his arm, ready to help me into
it. Then he hands me my hat and stick, while the butler opens the front
door and escorts me to my motor. The chauffeur touches his hat. I light
a small and excellent Havana cigar and sink back among the cushions. The
interior of the car smells faintly of rich upholstery and violet
perfume. My daughters have been to a ball the night before. If it is
fine I have the landaulette hood thrown open and take the air as far as
Washington Square--if not, I am deposited at the Subway.

Ten o'clock sees me at my office. The effect of the coffee has begun to
wear off slightly. I am a little peevish with my secretary, who has
opened and arranged all my letters on my desk. There are a pile of
dividend checks, a dozen appeals for charity and a score of letters
relating to my business. I throw the begging circulars into the
waste-basket and dictate most of my answers in a little over half an
hour. Then come a stream of appointments until lunchtime.

On the top floor of a twenty-story building, its windows commanding a
view of all the waters surrounding the end of Manhattan Island, is my
lunch club. Here gather daily at one o'clock most of the men with whom
I am associated--bankers, railroad promoters and other lawyers. I lunch
with one or more of them. A cocktail starts my appetite, for I have no
desire for food; and for the sake of appearances I manage to consume an
egg Benedictine and a ragout of lamb, with a dessert.

Then we wander into the smoking room and drink black coffee and smoke
long black cigars. I have smoked a cigar or two in my office already and
am beginning, as usual, to feel a trifle seedy. Here we plan some piece
of business or devise a method of escaping the necessity of fulfilling
some corporate obligation.

Two or half-past finds me in my office again. The back of the day is
broken. I take things more easily. Later on I smoke another cigar. I
discuss general matters with my junior partners. At half-past four I
enter my motor, which is waiting at the Wall Street entrance of the
building. At my uptown club the men are already dropping in and
gathering round the big windows. We all call each other by our first
names, yet few of us know anything of one another's real character. We
have a bluff heartiness, a cheerful cynicism that serves in place of
sincerity, and we ask no questions.

Our subjects of conversation are politics, the stock market, "big"
business, and the more fashionable sports. There is no talk of art or
books, no discussion of subjects of civic interest. After our cocktails
we usually arrange a game of bridge and play until it is time to go home
to dress for dinner.

Until this time, usually, I have not met my wife and daughters since the
night before. They have had their own individual engagements for
luncheon and in the afternoon, and perhaps have not seen each other
before during the day. But we generally meet at least two or three times
a week on the stairs or in the hall as we are going out. Sometimes,
also, I see my son at this time.

It will be observed that our family life is not burdensome to any of
us:--not that we do not wish to see one another, but we are too busy to
do so. My daughters seem to be fond of me. They are proud of my success
and their own position; in fact they go out in the smartest circles.
They are smarter, indeed, than their mother and myself; for, though we
know everybody in society, we have never formed a part of the intimate
inner Newport circle. But my daughters are inside and in the very center
of the ring. You can read their names as present at every smart function
that takes place.

From Friday until Monday they are always in the country at week-end
parties. They are invited to go to Bermuda, Palm Beach, California,
Aiken and the Glacier National Park. They live on yachts and in private
cars and automobiles. They know all the patter of society and everything
about everybody. They also talk surprisingly well about art, music and
international politics. They are as much at home in Rome, Paris and
London as they are in New York, and are as familiar with Scotland as
Long Island. They constantly amaze me by the apparent scope of their
information.

They are women of the world in a sense unheard of by my father's
generation. They have been presented at court in London, Berlin and
Rome, and have had a social season at Cairo; in fact I feel at a great
personal disadvantage in talking with them. They are respectful, very
sweet in a self-controlled and capable sort of way, and, so far as I can
see, need no assistance in looking out for themselves. They seem to be
quite satisfied with their mode of life. They do as they choose, and ask
for no advice from either their mother or myself.

My boy also leads his own life. He is rarely at home except to sleep. I
see less of him than of my daughters. During the day he is at the
office, where he is learning to be a lawyer. At wide intervals we lunch
together; but I find that he is interested in things which do not appeal
to me at all. Just at present he has become an expert--almost a
professional--dancer to syncopated music. I hear of him as dancing for
charity at public entertainments, and he is in continual demand for
private theatricals and parties. He is astonishingly clever at it.

Yet I cannot imagine Daniel Webster or Rufus Choate dancing in public
even in their leisure moments. Perhaps, however, it is better for him to
dance than to do some other things. It is good exercise; and, to be fair
with him, I cannot imagine Choate or Webster playing bridge or taking
scented baths. But, frankly, it is a far cry from my clergyman
grandfather to my ragtime dancing offspring. Perhaps, however, the
latter will serve his generation in his own way.

It may seem incredible that a father can be such a stranger to his
children, but it is none the less a fact. I do not suppose we dine
together as a family fifteen times in the course of the winter. When we
do so we get along together very nicely, but I find myself conversing
with my daughters much as if they were women I had met casually out at
dinner. They are literally "perfect ladies."

When they were little I was permitted a certain amount of decorous
informality, but now I have to be very careful how I kiss them on
account of the amount of powder they use. They have, both of them,
excellent natural complexions, but they are not satisfied unless their
noses have an artificial whiteness like that of marble. I suspect,
also, that their lips have a heightened color. At all events I am
careful to "mind the paint." But they are--either because of these
things or in spite of them--extraordinarily pretty girls--prettier, I am
forced to admit, than their mother was at their age. Now, as I write, I
wonder to what end these children of mine have been born into the
world--how they will assist in the development of the race to a higher
level.

For years I slaved at the office--early, late, in the evenings, often
working Sundays and holidays, and foregoing my vacation in the summer.

Then came the period of expansion. My accumulations doubled and trebled.
In one year I earned a fee in a railroad reorganization of two hundred
thousand dollars. I found myself on Easy Street. I had arrived--achieved
my success. During all those years I had devoted myself exclusively to
the making of money. Now I simply had to spend it and go through the
motions of continuing to work at my profession.

My wife and I became socially ambitious. She gave herself to this end
eventually with the same assiduity I had displayed at the law. It is
surprising at the present time to recall that it was not always easy to
explain the ultimate purpose in view. Alas! What is it now? Is it other
than that expressed by my wife on the occasion when our youngest
daughter rebelled at having to go to a children's party?

"Why must I go to parties?" she insisted.

"In order," replied her mother, "that you may be invited to other
parties."

It was the unconscious epitome of my consort's theory of the whole duty
of man.




CHAPTER II

MY FRIENDS


By virtue of my being a successful man my family has an established
position in New York society. We are not, to be sure--at least, my wife
and I are not--a part of the sacrosanct fifty or sixty who run the show
and perform in the big ring; but we are well up in the front of the
procession and occasionally do a turn or so in one of the side rings. We
give a couple of dinners each week during the season and a ball or two,
besides a continuous succession of opera and theater parties.

Our less desirable acquaintances, and those toward whom we have minor
social obligations, my wife disposes of by means of an elaborate "at
home," where the inadequacies of the orchestra are drowned in the roar
of conversation, and which a sufficient number of well-known people are
good-natured enough to attend in order to make the others feel that the
occasion is really smart and that they are not being trifled with. This
method of getting rid of one's shabby friends and their claims is, I am
informed, known as "killing them off with a tea."

We have a slaughter of this kind about once in two years. In return for
these courtesies we are invited yearly by the elite to some two hundred
dinners, about fifty balls and dances, and a large number of
miscellaneous entertainments such as musicales, private theatricals,
costume affairs, bridge, poker, and gambling parties; as well as in the
summer to clambakes--where champagne and terrapin are served by
footmen--and other elegant rusticities.

Besides these _chic_ functions we are, of course, deluged with
invitations to informal meals with old and new friends, studio parties,
afternoon teas, highbrow receptions and _conversaziones_, reformers'
lunch parties, and similar festivities. We have cut out all these long
ago. Keeping up with our smart acquaintances takes all our energy and
available time. There are several old friends of mine on the next block
to ours whom I have not met socially for nearly ten years.

We have definitely arrived however. There is no question about that. We
are in society and entitled to all the privileges pertaining thereto.
What are they? you ask. Why, the privilege of going to all these balls,
concerts and dinners, of course; of calling the men and women one reads
about in the paper by their first names; of having the satisfaction of
knowing that everybody who knows anything knows we are in society; and
of giving our daughters and son the chance to enjoy, without any effort
on their part, these same privileges that their parents have spent a
life of effort to secure.

Incidentally, I may add, our offspring will, each of them--if I am not
very much mistaken--marry money, since I have observed a certain
frankness on their part in this regard, which seems to point that way
and which, if not admirable in itself, at least does credit to their
honesty.

Now it is undubitably the truth that my wife regards our place among the
socially elect as the crowning achievement--the great desideratum--of
our joint career. It is what we have always been striving for. Without
it we--both of us--would have unquestionably acknowledged failure. My
future, my reputation, my place at the bar and my domestic life would
have meant nothing at all to us, had not the grand cordon of success
been thrown across our shoulders by society.

* * * * *

As I have achieved my ambition in this respect it is no small part of my
self-imposed task to somewhat analyze this, the chief reward of my
devotion to my profession, my years of industrious application, my
careful following of the paths that other successful Americans have
blazed for me.

I must confess at the outset that it is ofttimes difficult to determine
where the pleasure ends and work begins. Even putting it in this way, I
fear I am guilty of a euphemism; for, now that I consider the matter
honestly, I recall no real pleasure or satisfaction derived from the
various entertainments I have attended during the last five or ten
years.

In the first place I am invariably tired when I come home at night--less
perhaps from the actual work I have done at my office than from the
amount of tobacco I have consumed and the nervous strain attendant on
hurrying from one engagement to another and keeping up the affectation
of hearty good-nature which is part of my stock in trade. At any rate,
even if my body is not tired, my head, nerves and eyes are distinctly
so.

I often feel, when my valet tells me that the motor is ordered at ten
minutes to eight, that I would greatly enjoy having him slip into the
dress-clothes he has so carefully laid out on my bed and go out to
dinner in my place. He would doubtless make himself quite as agreeable
as I. And then--let me see--what would I do? I sit with one of my
accordion-plaited silk socks half on and surrender myself to all the
delights of the most reckless imagination!

Yes, what would I choose if I could do anything in the world for the
next three hours? First, I think, I would like an egg--a poached egg,
done just right, like a little snowball, balanced nicely in the exact
center of a hot piece of toast! My mouth waters. Aunt Jane used to do
them like that. And then I would like a crisp piece of gingerbread and a
glass of milk. Dress? Not on your life! Where is that old smoking-jacket
of mine? Not the one with Japanese embroidery on it--no; the old one.
Given away? I groan aloud.

Well, the silk one will have to do--and a pair of comfortable slippers!
Where is that old brier pipe I keep to go a-fishing? Now I want a
book--full of the sea and ships--of pirates and coral reefs--yes,
Treasure Island; of course that's it--and Long John Silver and the Black
Spot.

"Beg pardon, sir, but madam has sent me up to say the motor is waiting,"
admonishes my English footman respectfully.

Gone--gone is my poached egg, my pipe, my dream of the Southern Seas! I
dash into my evening clothes under the solicitous guidance of my valet
and hastily descend in the electric elevator to the front hall. My wife
has already taken her seat in the motor, with an air of righteous
annoyance, of courteously suppressed irritation. The butler is standing
on the doorstep. The valet is holding up my fur coat expectantly. I am
sensible of an atmosphere of sad reproachfulness.

Oh, well! I thrust my arms into my coat, grasp my white gloves and cane,
receive my hat and wearily start forth on my evening's task of being
entertained; conscious as I climb into the motor that this curious form
of so-called amusement has certain rather obvious limitations.

For what is its _raison d'etre_? It is obvious that if I know any
persons whose society and conversation are likely to give me pleasure I
can invite them to my own home and be sure of an evening's quiet
enjoyment. But, so far as I can see, my wife does not invite to our
house the people who are likely to give either her or myself any
pleasure at all, and neither am I likely to meet such people at the
homes of my friends.

The whole thing is a mystery governed by strange laws and curious
considerations of which I am kept in utter ignorance; in fact, I rarely
know where I am going to dine until I arrive at the house. On several
occasions I have come away without having any very clear idea as to
where I have been.

"The Hobby-Smiths," my wife will whisper as we go up the steps. "Of
course you've heard of her! She is a great friend of Marie Van Duser,
and her husband is something in Wall Street."

That is a comparatively illuminating description. At all events it
insures some remote social connection with ourselves, if only through
Miss Van Duser and Wall Street. Most of our hosts are something in Wall
Street. Occasionally they are something in coal, iron, oil or politics.

I find a small envelope bearing my name on a silver tray by the
hatstand and open it suspiciously as my wife is divested of her wraps.
Inside is a card bearing in an almost illegible scrawl the words: Mrs.
Jones. I hastily refresh my recollection as to all the Joneses of my
acquaintance, whether in coal, oil or otherwise; but no likely candidate
for the distinction of being the husband of my future dinner companion
comes to my mind. Yet there is undoubtedly a Jones. But, no! The lady
may be a divorcee or a widow. I recall no Mrs. Jones, but I visualize
various possible Miss Joneses--ladies very fat and bursting; ladies
scrawny, lean and sardonic; facetious ladies; heavy, intelligent ladies;
aggressive, militant ladies.

My spouse has turned away from the mirror and the butler has pulled back
the portieres leading into the drawing room. I follow my wife's composed
figure as she sweeps toward our much-beplumed hostess and find myself in
a roomful of heterogeneous people, most of whom I have never seen before
and whose personal appearance is anything but encouraging.

"This is very _nice_!" says our hostess--accent on the nice.

"So _nice_ of you to think of us!" answers my wife.

We shake hands and smile vaguely. The butler rattles the portieres and
two more people come in.

"This _is_ very nice!" says the hostess again--accent on the is.

It may be here noted that at the conclusion of the evening each guest
murmurs in a simpering, half-persuasive yet consciously deprecatory
manner--as if apologizing for the necessity of so bald a
prevarication--"Good-night! We have had _such_ a good time! _So_ good
of you to ask us!" This epilogue never changes. Its phrase is cast and
set. The words may vary slightly, but the tone, emphasis and substance
are inviolable. Yet, disregarding the invocation good-night! the fact
remains that neither have you had a good time nor was your host in any
way good or kind in asking you.

Returning to the moment at which you have made your entrance and been
received and passed along, you gaze vaguely round you at the other
guests, greeting those you know with exaggerated enthusiasm and being
the conscious subject of whispered criticism and inquiry on the part of
the others. You make your way to the side of a lady whom you have
previously encountered at a similar entertainment and assert your
delight at revamping the fatuous acquaintanceship. Her facetiousness is
elephantine, but the relief of conversation is such that you laugh
loudly at her witticisms and simper knowingly at her platitudes--both of
which have now been current for several months.

The edge of your delight is, however, somewhat dulled by the discovery
that she is the lady whom fate has ordained that you shall take in to
dinner--a matter of which you were sublimely unconscious owing to the
fact that you had entirely forgotten her name. As the couples pair off
to march to the dining room and the combinations of which you may form a
possible part are reduced to a scattering two or three, you realize with
a shudder that the lady beside you is none other than Mrs. Jones--and
that for the last ten minutes you have been recklessly using up the
evening's conversational ammunition.

With a sinking heart you proffer your arm, wondering whether it will be
possible to get through the meal and preserve the fiction of interest.
You wish savagely that you could turn on her and exclaim honestly:

"Look here, my good woman, you are all right enough in your own way, but
we have nothing in common; and this proposed evening of enforced
companionship will leave us both exhausted and ill-tempered. We shall
grin and shout meaningless phrases over the fish, entree and salad about
life, death and the eternal verities; but we shall be sick to death of
each other in ten minutes. Let's cut it out and go home!"

You are obliged, however, to escort your middle-aged comrade downstairs
and take your seat beside her with a flourish, as if you were playing
Rudolph to her Flavia. Then for two hours, with your eyes blinded by
candlelight and electricity, you eat recklessly as you grimace first
over your left shoulder and then over your right. It is a foregone
conclusion that you will have a headache by the time you have turned,
with a sensation of momentary relief, to your "fair companion" on the
other side.

Have you enjoyed yourself? Have you been entertained? Have you profited?
The questions are utterly absurd. You have _suffered_. You have strained
your eyes, overloaded your stomach, and wasted three hours during which
you might have been recuperating from your day's work or really amusing
yourself with people you like.

This entirely conventional form of amusement is, I am told, quite
unknown in Europe. There are, to be sure, occasional formal banquets,
which do not pretend to be anything but formal. A formal banquet would
be an intense relief, after the heat, noise, confusion and
pseudo-informality of a New York dinner. The European is puzzled and
baffled by one of our combined talk-and-eating bouts.

A nobleman from Florence recently said to me:

"At home, when we go to other people's houses it is for the purpose of
meeting our own friends or our friend's friends. We go after our evening
meal and stay as long as we choose. Some light refreshment is served,
and those who wish to do so smoke or play cards. The old and the young
mingle together. It is proper for each guest to make himself agreeable
to all the others. We do not desire to spend money or to make a fete.
At the proper times we have our balls and _festas_.

"But here in New York each night I have been pressed to go to a grand
entertainment and eat a huge dinner cooked by a French chef and served
by several men servants, where I am given one lady to talk to for
several hours. I must converse with no one else, even if there is a
witty, beautiful and charming woman directly opposite me; and as I talk
and listen I must consume some ten or twelve courses or fail to do
justice to my host's hospitality. I am given four or five costly wines,
caviar, turtle soup, fish, mousse, a roast, partridge, pate de fois
gras, glaces, fruits, bonbons, and cigars costing two francs each. Not
to eat and drink would be to insult the friend who is paying at least
forty or fifty francs for my dinner. But I cannot enjoy a meal eaten in
such haste and I cannot enjoy talking to one strange lady for so long.

"Then the men retire to a chamber from which the ladies are excluded. I
must talk to some man. Perhaps I have seen an attractive woman I wish to
meet. It is hopeless. I must talk to her husband! At the end of
three-quarters of an hour the men march to the drawing room, and again I
talk to some one lady for half an hour and then must go home! It may be
only half-past ten o'clock, but I have no choice. Away I must go. I say
good-night. I have eaten a huge dinner; I have talked to one man and
three ladies; I have drunk a great deal of wine and my head is very
tired.

"Nineteen other people have had the same experience, and it has cost my
host from five hundred to a thousand francs--or, as you say here, from
one hundred to two hundred dollars. And why has he spent this sum of
money? Pardon me, my friend, if I say that it could be disbursed to much
better advantage. Should my host come to Florence I should not _dare_ to
ask him to dinner, for we cannot afford to have these elaborate
functions. If he came to my house he would have to dine _en famille_.
Here you feast every night in the winter. Why? Every day is not a feast
day!"

I devote space and time to this subject commensurate with what seems to
me to be its importance. Dining out is the metropolitan form of social
entertainment for the well-to-do. I go to such affairs at least one
hundred nights each year. That is a large proportion of my whole life
and at least one-half of all the time at my disposal for recreation. So
far as I can see, it is totally useless and a severe drain on one's
nervous centers. It has sapped and is sapping my vitality. During the
winter I am constantly tired. My head aches a large part of the time. I
can do only a half--and on some days only a third--as much work as I
could at thirty-five.

I wake with a thin, fine line of pain over my right eye, and a heavy
head. A strong cup of coffee sets me up and I feel better; but as the
morning wears on, especially if I am nervous, the weariness in my head
returns. By luncheon time I am cross and upset. Often by six o'clock I
have a severe sick headache. When I do not have a headache I am usually
depressed; my brain feels like a lump of lead. And I know precisely the
cause: It is that I do not give my nerve-centers sufficient rest. If I
could spend the evenings--or half of them--quietly I should be well
enough; but after I am tired out by a day's work I come home only to
array myself to go out to saw social wood.

I never get rested! My head gets heavier and heavier and finally gives
way. There is no immediate cause. It is the fact that my nervous system
gets more and more tired without any adequate relief. The feeling of
complete restedness, so far as my brain is concerned, is one I almost
never experience. When I do wake up with my head clear and light my
heart sings for joy. My effectiveness is impaired by weariness and
overeating, through a false effort at recuperation. I have known this
for a long time, but I have seen no escape from it.

Social life is one of the objects of living in New York; and social life
to ninety per cent of society people means nothing but eating one
another's dinners. Men never pay calls or go to teas. The dinner, which
has come to mean a heavy, elaborate meal, eaten amid noise, laughter and
chatter, at great expense, is the expression of our highest social
aspirations. Thus it would seem, though I had not thought of it before,
that I work seven or eight hours every day in order to make myself
rather miserable for the rest of the time.

"I am going to lie down and rest this afternoon," my wife will sometimes
say. "We're dining with the Robinsons."

Extraordinary that pleasure should be so exhausting as to require rest
in anticipation! Dining with these particular and other in-general
Robinsons has actually become a physical feat of endurance--a _tour de
force_, like climbing the Matterhorn or eating thirteen pounds of
beefsteak at a sitting. Is it a reminiscence of those dim centuries when
our ancestors in the forests of the Elbe sat under the moss-hung oaks
and stuffed themselves with roast ox washed down with huge skins of
wine? Or is it a custom born of those later days when, round the blazing
logs of Canadian campfires, our Indian allies gorged themselves into
insensibility to the sound of the tom-tom and the chant of the
medicine-man--the latter quite as indispensable now as then?

If I should be called on to explain for what reason I am accustomed to
eat not wisely but too well on these joyous occasions, I should be
somewhat at a loss for any adequate reply. Perhaps the simplest answer
would be that I have just imbibed a cocktail and created an artificial
appetite. It is also probable that, in my efforts to appear happy and at
ease, to play my part as a connoisseur of good things, and to keep the
conversational ball in the air, I unconsciously lose track of the number
of courses I have consumed.

It is also a matter of habit. As a boy I was compelled to eat everything
on my plate; and as I grew older I discovered that in our home town it
was good manners to leave nothing undevoured and thus pay a concrete
tribute to the culinary ability of the hostess. Be that as it may, I
have always liked to eat. It is almost the only thing left that I enjoy;
but, even so, my palate requires the stimulus of gin. I know that I am
getting fat. My waistcoats have to be let out a little more every five
or six months. Anyhow, if the men did not do their part there would be
little object for giving dinner parties in these days when slender women
are the fashion.

After the long straight front and the habit back, social usage is
frowning on the stomach, hips and other heretofore not unadmired
evidences of robust nutrition. Temperance, not to say total abstinence,
has become _de rigueur_ among the ladies. My dinner companion nibbles
her celery, tastes the soup, waves away fish, entree and roast, pecks
once or twice at the salad, and at last consumes her ration of ice-cream
with obvious satisfaction. If there is a duck--well, she makes an
exception in the case of duck--at six dollars and a half a pair. A
couple of hothouse grapes and she is done.

It will be observed that this gives her all the more opportunity for
conversation--a doubtful blessing. On the other hand, there is an
equivalent economic waste. I have no doubt each guest would prefer to
have set before her a chop, a baked potato and a ten-dollar goldpiece.
It would amount to the same thing, so far as the host is concerned.

* * * * *

I had, until recently, assumed with some bitterness that my dancing days
were over. My wife and I went to balls, to be sure, but not to dance. We
left that to the younger generation, for the reason that my wife did not
care to jeopardize her attire or her complexion. She was also conscious
of the fact that the variety of waltz popular thirty years ago was an
oddity, and that a middle-aged woman who went hopping and twirling about
a ballroom must be callous to the amusement that followed her gyrations.

With the advent of the turkey trot and the tango, things have changed
however. No one is too stout, too old or too clumsy to go walking
solemnly round, in or out of time to the music. I confess to a
consciousness of absurdity when, to the exciting rhythm of Tres
Moutard, I back Mrs. Jones slowly down the room and up again.

"Do you grapevine?" she inquires ardently. Yes; I admit the soft
impeachment, and at once she begins some astonishing convolutions with
the lower part of her body, which I attempt to follow. After several
entanglements we move triumphantly across the hall.

"How beautifully you dance!" she pants.

Aged roisterer that I am, I fall for the compliment. She is a nice old
thing, after all!

"Fish walk?" asks she.

I retort with total abandon.

"Come along!"

So, grabbing her tightly and keeping my legs entirely stiff--as per
instructions from my son--I stalk swiftly along the floor, while she
backs with prodigious velocity. Away we go, an odd four hundred pounds
of us, until, exhausted, we collapse against the table where the
champagne is being distributed.

Though I have carefully followed the directions of my preceptor, I am
aware that the effect produced by our efforts is somehow not the same as
his. I observe him in a close embrace with a willowy young thing,
dipping gracefully in the distance. They pause, sway, run a few steps,
stop dead and suddenly sink to the floor--only to rise and repeat the
performance.

So the evening wears gaily on. I caper round--now sedately, now
deliriously--knowing that, however big a fool I am making of myself, we
are all in the same boat. My wife is doing it, too, to the obvious
annoyance of our daughters. But this is the smartest ball of the season.
When all the world is dancing it would be conspicuous to loiter in the
doorway. Society has ruled that I must dance--if what I am doing can be
so called.

I am aware that I should not care to allow my clients to catch an
unexpected glimpse of my antics with Mrs. Jones; yet to be permitted to
dance with her is one of the privileges of our success. I might dance
elsewhere but it would not be the same thing. Is not my hostess' hoarse,
good-natured, rather vulgar voice the clarion of society? Did not my
wife scheme and plot for years before she managed to get our names on
the sacred list of invitations?

To be sure, I used to go to dances enough as a lad; and good times I had
too. The High School Auditorium had a splendid floor; and the girls,
even though they were unacquainted with all these newfangled steps,
could waltz and polka, and do Sir Roger de Coverley. Good old days! I
remember my wife--met her in that old hall. She wore a white muslin
dress trimmed with artificial roses. I wonder if I properly appreciate
the distinction of being asked to Mrs. Jones' turkey-trotting parties!
My butler and the kitchen-maid are probably doing the same thing in the
basement at home to the notes of the usefulman's accordion--and having a
better time than I am.

It is a pleasure to watch my son or my daughters glide through the
intricacies of these modern dances, which the natural elasticity and
suppleness of youth render charming in spite of their grotesqueness. But
why should I seek to copy them? In spite of the fact that I am still
rather athletic I cannot do so. With my utmost endeavor I fail to
imitate their grace. I am getting old. My muscles are stiff and out of
training. My wind has suffered. Mrs. Jones probably never had any.

And if I am ridiculous, what of her and the other women of her age who,
for some unknown reason, fatuously suppose they can renew their lost
youth? Occasionally luck gives me a debutante for a partner when I go
out to dinner. I do my best to entertain her--trot out all my old jokes
and stories, pay her delicate compliments, and do frank homage to her
youth and beauty. But her attention wanders. My tongue is stiff, like my
legs. It can wag through the old motions, but it has lost its
spontaneity. One glance from the eye of the boy down the long table and
she is oblivious of my existence. Should I try to dance with her I
should quickly find that crabbed middle-age and youth cannot step in
time. My place is with Mrs. Jones--or, better, at home and in bed.

Apart, however, from the dubious delight of dancing, all is not gold
that glitters socially. The first time my wife and I were invited to a
week-end party at the country-house of a widely known New York hostess
we were both much excited. At last we were to be received on a footing
of real intimacy by one of the inner circle. Even my valet, an
imperturbable Englishman who would have announced that the house was on
fire in the same tone as that my breakfast was ready, showed clearly
that he was fully aware of the significance of the coming event. For
several days he exhibited signs of intense nervous anxiety, and when at
last the time of my departure arrived I found that he had filled two
steamer trunks with the things he regarded as indispensable for my
comfort and well-being.

My wife's maid had been equally assiduous. Both she and the valet had no
intention of learning on our return that any feature of our respective
wardrobes had been forgotten; since we had decided not to take either of
our personal servants, for the reason that we thought to do so might
possibly be regarded as an ostentation.

I made an early getaway from my office on Friday afternoon, met my wife
at the ferry, and in due course, but by no means with comfort, managed
to board the train and secure our seats in the parlor car before it
started. We reached our destination at about half-past four and were
met by a footman in livery, who piloted us to a limousine driven by a
French chauffeur. We were the only arrivals.

In my confusion I forgot to do anything about our trunks, which
contained our evening apparel. During the run to the house we were both
on the verge of hysteria owing to the speed at which we were
driven--seventy miles an hour at the least. And at one corner we were
thrown forward, clear of the seats and against the partition, by an
unexpected stop. An interchange of French profanity tinted the
atmosphere for a few moments and then we resumed the trajectory of our
flight.

We had expected to be welcomed by our hostess; but instead we were
informed by the butler that she and the other guests had driven over to
watch a polo game and would probably not be back before six. As we had
nothing to do we strolled round the grounds and looked at the shrubbery
for a couple of hours, at the end of which period we had tea alone in
the library. We had, of course, no sooner finished than the belated
party entered, the hostess full of vociferous apologies.

I remember this occasion vividly because it was my first introduction to
that artificially enforced merriment which is the inevitable concomitant
of smart gatherings in America. The men invariably addressed each other
as Old Man and the women as My Dear. No one was mentioned except by his
or her first name or by some intimate diminutive or abbreviation. It
seemed to be assumed that the guests were only interested in personal
gossip relating to the marital infelicities of the neighboring
countryside, who lost most at cards, and the theater. Every remark
relating to these absorbing subjects was given a feebly humorous twist
and greeted with a burst of hilarity. Even the mere suggestion of going
upstairs to dress for dinner was a sufficient reason for an explosion of
merriment. If noise was an evidence of having a good time these people
were having the time of their lives. Personally I felt a little out of
my element. I had still a lingering disinclination to pretend to a
ubiquity of social acquaintance that I did not really possess, and I had
never learned to laugh in a properly boisterous manner. But my wife
appeared highly gratified.

Delay in sending to the depot for our trunks--the fault of the butler,
to whom we turned over our keys--prevented, as we supposed, our getting
ready in time for dinner. Everybody else had gone up to dress; so we
also went to our rooms, which consisted of two huge apartments connected
by a bathroom of similar acreage. The furniture was dainty and
chintz-covered. There was an abundance of writing paper, envelopes,
magazines and French novels. Superficially the arrangements were wholly
charming.

The baggage arrived at about ten minutes to eight, after we had sat
helplessly waiting for nearly an hour. The rooms were plentifully
supplied with buttons marked: Maid; Valet; Butler's Pantry--and so on.
But, though we pressed these anxiously, there was no response. I
concluded that the valet was hunting or sleeping or otherwise occupied.
I unpacked my trunks without assistance; my wife unpacked hers. But
before I could find and assemble my evening garments I had to unwrap the
contents of every tray and fill the room knee-high with tissue-paper.

Unable to secure any response to her repeated calls for the maid, my
wife was nearly reduced to tears. However, in those days I was not
unskillful in hooking up a dress, and we managed to get downstairs, with
ready apologies on our lips, by twenty minutes of nine. We were the
first ones down however.

The party assembled in a happy-go-lucky manner and, after the cocktails
had been served, gathered round the festive board at five minutes past
nine. The dinner was the regulation heavy, expensive New York meal,
eaten to the accompaniment of the same noisy mirth I have already
described. Afterward the host conducted the men to his "den," a
luxurious paneled library filled with rare prints, and we listened for
an hour to the jokes and anecdotes of a semiprofessional jester who took
it on himself to act as the life of the party. It was after eleven
o'clock when we rejoined the ladies, but the evening apparently had only
just begun; the serious business of the day--bridge--was at hand. But
in those days my wife and I did not play bridge; and as there was
nothing else for us to do we retired, after a polite interval, to our
apartments.

While getting ready for the night we shouted cheerfully to one another
through the open doors of the bathroom and, I remember, became quite
jolly; but when my wife had gone to bed and I tried to close the blinds
I discovered that there were none. Now neither of us had acquired the
art of sleeping after daylight unless the daylight was excluded. With
grave apprehension I arranged a series of makeshift screens and
extinguished the lights, wandering round the room and turning off the
key of each one separately, since the architect had apparently forgotten
to put in a central switch.

If there had been no servants in evidence when we wanted them before
dinner, no such complaint could be entered now. There seemed to be a
bowling party going on upstairs. We could also hear plainly the rattle
of dishes and a lively interchange of informalities from the kitchen end
of the establishment. We lay awake tensely. Shortly after one o'clock
these particular sounds died away, but there was a steady tramp of feet
over our heads until three. About this hour, also, the bridge party
broke up and the guests came upstairs.

There were no outside doors to our rooms. Bells rang, water ran, and
there was that curious vibration which even hairbrushing seems to set
going in a country house. Then with a final bang, comparative silence
descended. Occasionally still, to be sure, the floor squeaked over our
heads. Once somebody got up and closed a window. I could hear two
distant snorings in major and minor keys. I managed to snatch a few
winks and then an alarm-clock went off. At no great distance the
scrubbing maid was getting up. I could hear her every move.

The sun also rose and threw fire-pointed darts at us through the
windowshades. By five o'clock I was ready to scream with nerves; and,
having dug a lounge suit out of the gentlemen's furnishing store in my
trunk, I cautiously descended into the lower regions. There was a rich
smell of cigarettes everywhere. In the hall I stumbled over the feet of
the sleeping night-watchman. But the birds were twittering in the
bushes; the grassblades threw back a million flashes to the sun.

Not before a quarter to ten could I secure a cup of coffee, though
several footmen, in answer to my insistent bell, had been running round
apparently for hours in a vain endeavor to get it for me. At eleven a
couple of languid younger men made their appearance and conversed
apathetically with one another over the papers. The hours drew on.

Lunch came at two o'clock, bursting like a thunder-storm out of a
sunlit sky. Afterward the guests sat round and talked. People were
coming to tea at five, and there was hardly any use in doing anything
before that time. A few took naps. A young lady and gentleman played an
impersonal game of tennis; but at five an avalanche of social leaders
poured out of a dozen shrieking motors and stormed the castle with
salvos of strident laughter. The cannonade continued, with one brief
truce in which to dress for dinner, until long after midnight. _Vox, et
praeterea nihil!_

I look back on that house party with vivid horror. Yet it was one of the
most valuable of my social experiences. We were guests invited for the
first time to one of the smartest houses on Long Island; yet we were
neglected by male and female servants alike, deprived of all possibility
of sleep, and not the slightest effort was made to look after our
personal comfort and enjoyment by either our host or hostess.
Incidentally on my departure I distributed about forty dollars among
various dignitaries who then made their appearance.

It is probable that time has somewhat exaggerated my recollections of
the miseries of this our first adventure into ultrasmart society, but
its salient characteristics have since repeated themselves in countless
others. I no longer accept week-end invitations;--for me the quiet of my
library or the Turkish bath at my club; for they are all essentially
alike. Surrounded by luxury, the guests yet know no comfort!

After a couple of days of ennui and an equal number of sleepless nights,
his brain foggy with innumerable drinks, his eyes dizzy with the pips of
playing cards, and his ears still echoing with senseless hilarity, the
guest rises while it is not yet dawn, and, fortified by a lukewarm cup
of faint coffee boiled by the kitchen maid and a slice of leatherlike
toast left over from Sunday's breakfast, presses ten dollars on the
butler and five on the chauffeur--and boards the train for the city,
nervous, disgruntled, his digestion upset and his head totally out of
kilter for the day's work.

Since my first experience in house parties I have yielded weakly to my
wife's importunities on several hundred similar occasions. Some of these
visits have been fairly enjoyable. Sleep is sometimes possible. Servants
are not always neglectful. Discretion in the matter of food and drink is
conceivable, even if not probable, and occasionally one meets congenial
persons.

As a rule, however, all the hypocrisies of society are intensified
threefold when heterogeneous people are thrown into the enforced contact
of a Sunday together in the country; but the artificiality and
insincerity of smart society is far less offensive than the
pretentiousness of mere wealth.

* * * * *

Not long ago I attended a dinner given on Fifth Avenue the invitation to
which had been eagerly awaited by my wife. We were asked to dine
informally with a middle-aged couple who for no obvious reason have been
accepted as fashionable desirables. He is the retired head of a great
combination of capital usually described as a trust. A canopy and a
carpet covered the sidewalk outside the house. Two flunkies in cockaded
hats stood beside the door, and in the hall was a line of six liveried
lackeys. Three maids helped my wife remove her wraps and adjust her
hair.

In the salon where our hostess received us were hung pictures
representing an outlay of nearly two million dollars--part of a
collection the balance of which they keep in their house in Paris; for
these people are not content with one mansion on Fifth Avenue and a
country house on Long Island, but own a palace overlooking the Bois de
Boulogne and an enormous estate in Scotland. They spend less than ten
weeks in New York, six in the country, and the rest of the year abroad.

The other male guests had all amassed huge fortunes and had given up
active work. They had been, in their time, in the thick of the fray. Yet
these men, who had swayed the destinies of the industrial world, stood
about awkwardly discussing the most trivial of banalities, as if they
had never had a vital interest in anything.

Then the doors leading into the dining room were thrown open, disclosing
a table covered with rosetrees in full bloom five feet in height and a
concealed orchestra began to play. There were twenty-four seats and a
footman for each two chairs, besides two butlers, who directed the
service. The dinner consisted of hors-d'oeuvre and grapefruit, turtle
soup, fish of all sorts, elaborate entrees, roasts, breasts of plover
served separately with salad, and a riot of ices and exotic fruits.

Throughout the meal the host discoursed learnedly on the relative
excellence of various vintages of champagne and the difficulty of
procuring cigars suitable for a gentleman to smoke. It appeared that
there was no longer any wine--except a few bottles in his own
cellar--which was palatable or healthful. Even coffee was not fit for
use unless it had been kept for six years! His own cigars were made to
order from a selected crop of tobacco he had bought up entire. His
cigarettes, which were the size of small sausages, were prepared from
specially cured leaves of plants grown on "sunny corners of the walls of
Smyrna." His Rembrandts, his Botticellis, his Sir Joshuas, his Hoppners,
were little things he had picked up here and there, but which, he
admitted, were said to be rather good.

Soon all the others were talking wine, tobacco and Botticelli as well as
they could, though most of them knew more about coal, cotton or creosote
than the subjects they were affecting to discuss.

This, then, was success! To flounder helplessly in a mire of
artificiality and deception to Tales of Hoffmann!

If I were asked what was the object of our going to such a dinner I
could only answer that it was in order to be invited to others of the
same kind. Is it for this we labor and worry--that we scheme and
conspire--that we debase ourselves and lose our self-respect? Is there
no wine good enough for my host? Will God let such arrogance be without
a blast of fire from heaven?

* * * * *

There was a time not so very long ago when this same man was thankful
enough for a slice of meat and a chunk of bread carried in a tin
pail--content with the comfort of an old brier pipe filled with cut plug
and smoked in a sunny corner of the factory yard. "Sunny corners of the
walls of Smyrna!"

It is a fine thing to assert that here in America we have "out of a
democracy of opportunity" created "an aristocracy of achievement." The
phrase is stimulating and perhaps truly expresses the spirit of our
energetic and ambitious country; but an aristocracy of achievement is
truly noble only when the achievements themselves are fine. What are the
achievements that win our applause, for which we bestow our decorations
in America? Do we honor most the men who truly serve their generation
and their country? Or do we fawn, rather, on those who merely serve
themselves?

It is a matter of pride with us--frequently expressed in disparagement
of our European contemporaries--that we are a nation of workers; that to
hold any position in the community every man must have a job or
otherwise lose caste; that we tolerate no loafing. We do not conceal our
contempt for the chap who fails to go down every day to the office or
business. Often, of course, our ostentatious workers go down, but do
very little work. We feel somehow that every man owes it to the
community to put in from six to ten hours' time below the residential
district.

Young men who have inherited wealth are as chary of losing one hour as
their clerks. The busy millionaire sits at his desk all day--his ear to
the telephone. We assume that these men are useful because they are
busy; but in what does their usefulness consist? What are they busy
about? They are setting an example of mere industry, perhaps--but to
what end? Simply, in seven cases out of ten, in order to get a few
dollars or a few millions more than they have already. Their exertions
have no result except to enable their families to live in even greater
luxury.

I know at least fifty men, fathers of families, whose homes might
radiate kindliness and sympathy and set an example of wise, generous and
broad-minded living, who, already rich beyond their needs, rush
downtown before their children have gone to school, pass hectic,
nerve-racking days in the amassing of more money, and return after their
little ones have gone to bed, too utterly exhausted to take the
slightest interest in what their wives have been doing or in the
pleasure and welfare of their friends.

These men doubtless give liberally to charity, but they give
impersonally, not generously; they are in reality utterly selfish,
engrossed in the enthralling game of becoming successful or more
successful men, sacrificing their homes, their families and their
health--for what? To get on; to better their position; to push in among
those others who, simply because they have outstripped the rest in the
matter of filling their own pockets, are hailed with acclamation.

It is pathetic to see intelligent, capable men bending their energies
not to leading wholesome, well-rounded, serviceable lives but to gaining
a slender foothold among those who are far less worthy of emulation than
themselves and with whom they have nothing whatsoever in common except a
despicable ambition to display their wealth and to demonstrate that they
have "social position."

In what we call the Old World a man's social position is a matter of
fixed classification--that is to say, his presumptive ability and
qualifications to amuse and be amused; to hunt, fish and shoot; to ride,
dance, and make himself generally agreeable--are known from the start.
And, based on the premise that what is known as society exists simply
for the purpose of enabling people to have a good time, there is far
more reason to suppose that one who comes of a family which has made a
specialty of this pursuit for several hundred years is better endowed by
Nature for that purpose than one who has made a million dollars out of a
patent medicine or a lucky speculation in industrial securities.

The great manufacturer or chemist in England, France, Italy, or Germany,
the clever inventor, the astute banker, the successful merchant, have
their due rewards; but, except in obvious instances, they are not
presumed to have acquired incidentally to their material prosperity the
arts of playing billiards, making love, shooting game on the wing,
entertaining a house party or riding to hounds. Occasionally one of them
becomes by special favor of the sovereign a baronet; but, as a rule his
so-called social position is little affected by his business success,
and there is no reason why it should be. He may make a fortune out of a
new process, but he invites the same people to dinner, frequents the
same club and enjoys himself in just about the same way as he did
before. His newly acquired wealth is not regarded as in itself likely to
make him a more congenial dinner-table companion or any more delightful
at five-o'clock tea.

The aristocracy of England and the Continent is not an aristocracy of
achievement but of the polite art of killing time pleasantly. As such it
has a reason for existence. Yet it can at least be said for it that its
founders, however their descendants may have deteriorated, gained their
original titles and positions by virtue of their services to their king


 


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