The Golden Vanity (20 page)

In the morning, at breakfast, though Leonard was quiet, she fancied he was more cheerful. They read the reviews of Jake's play, which were highly favorable. Geraldine was glad. If somebody could still be lucky, then anybody might. Leonard might again . . . She refrained from following the thought to its conclusion; he could succeed only by luck . . . After he was gone to work, Geraldine made telephone enquiries and went downtown herself, to insure her life for the benefit of the children. She must take care of them.

17

M
RS
. S
IDDALL
was not altogether surprised when Polly Brant came to her for financial assistance. She guessed the object when Polly telephoned. She also knew that Polly was still abed, at ten in the morning. Mrs. Siddall had risen at eight, her regular hour, and breakfasted in the morning room, armored for the day in unyielding corsets and a garnet velvet gown of majestic amplitude which made no concession to either fashion or informality. Her hair was firmly coiffed; and she sat upright in a straight armchair, before a damask-spread table loaded with heavily embossed Georgian silver. Mrs. Siddall's tradition did not permit a lady to be seen in déshabille except by her personal maid; and breakfast in bed, unless in case of illness, suggested other, more reprehensible laxities. She tolerated the custom for guests; but as mistress of the household she felt bound to set an example to the servants. Mrs. Siddall was an admirable example of good conscience and a good appetite. She had disposed of two hours' work with her correspondence before Polly arrived.

Polly's explanation of her situation struck the older woman as fantastic, like viewing a familiar object through a refracting medium.

"You mortgaged your house to speculate in the stock market?"

"No," said Polly, reciprocally astonished, "we bought it on mortgage."

"But that was nine or ten years ago," Mrs. Siddall reminded her, "when your father-in-law's estate was settled; I thought Bill's share paid for the house. You said it was a great bargain."

"So it was," said Polly. "Real estate went up like mad around Southampton afterward; we could have sold last year for twice what we paid. Of course you can't sell anything now. Bill only got fifty thousand from the estate. We paid half down on the house and left the rest on mortgage, only twenty-five thousand. Now it has to be renewed, and the mortgage company insists we should reduce it at least five thousand. Everyone said it was better to have a mortgage."

"Better to have a mortgage?" Mrs. Siddall echoed.

"It keeps down the taxes."

"But you have to pay interest, far more than the taxes."

"I don't know exactly; that's what they said," Polly repeated. "Everyone said so. I don't know much about it; Bill's secretary always looked after that sort of thing, at the office. Bill has drawn his salary three months in advance now, and the way things are, he doesn't like to ask them to do anything more. I tried to get a loan on my trust fund, but the trust company says I can't; but the income seems to be cut in half, I don't see how they could do that, if it mustn't be touched, only they said some of it is in foreign bonds and there was a default. The rest is guaranteed mortgage bonds; they say those are safe," Polly was happily unaware of any discrepancy in her summary of prospects. Her trust fund had been two thousand a year, a perfectly miserable sum in her estimation. If she went abroad even for a couple of months, it barely covered traveling expenses, and left nothing for clothes. "Even if we shut up our town apartment, the maintenance goes on, with those cooperatives. Bill says he'd sell his polo ponies, but I don't want him to; what would he do? and besides, who would buy them? We can't afford to keep them either. I don't know what has happened to
everything!'

Mrs. Siddall did know, so far as Polly was concerned. She could add and subtract. She was not to realize yet awhile that "everything" was a strictly accurate term. She persisted: "The twenty-five thousand you lost in the stock market would have paid off the mortgage. That was very reckless."

"Well, we made a lot more than that," said Polly, with what she considered extreme reasonableness. "Everyone did; Julius Dickerson bought Kennecott Copper himself. We had to have something to live on. Bill's salary is only fifteen thousand, and he says that may be cut any day. Because the accounts he handles are mostly invested in City National Bank stock and things; he says those bear raids oughtn't to be allowed."

"Yes, perhaps, but Julius Dickerson could afford the risk," Mrs. Siddall said, not unkindly. She looked at her niece with absent-minded appraisal.

Polly was forty-three, but even in the cold light of noon she could have passed for thirty, to the superficial gaze. Riding, swimming and dancing had preserved her figure, all but the resilience and grace of youth. Her gypsy coloring was coaxed to maintain its natural tone by sunbaths and oil rubs. If she had taken off her hat, one would have seen that her dead-black hair had changed to a silvery-lead color; she was too clever to resort to dye, knowing it would coarsen her face, so she dressed to the frosted high light of her coiffure, especially for evening. Her legs, delicately emphasized by rose-beige stockings of cobweb thinness, justified the shortness of her skirt. She had tossed off a brown ermine coat as she sat down. Her frock, of black crêpe with a tiny green flower, made with a little jacket, couldn't have used more than five yards of material, and cost not less than two hundred dollars. With every stitch of her undergarments added, the lot would have weighed under two pounds. A close black felt hat was pulled down over her ears; it was untrimmed except for a triangle of jade, to match the clasp of her handbag and her imitation jade costume jewelry, expensive but valueless.

Mrs. Siddall remembered distinctly that at forty—that was in 1897—she dressed in a manner suitable to her age and position. Gowns from Worth, of the heaviest silk, stiffly boned, with skirts nine yards around the hem, and gigot sleeves puffed out with buckram. Two or three petticoats, rustling with taffeta ruffles; and velvet hats loaded with ostrich tips. She had rejected the tailored fashions which were introduced about that time. And jewels were jewels, sets of diamonds, rubies,, emeralds; they showed the money invested in them, and at the Opera one recognized the famous adornments of the acknowledged leaders of Society.

Mrs. Siddall was seventy-two, and all her life she had been rich, securely and enormously rich. The panic and the depression did not shake her mind immediately. She had seen several depressions. Though she might have talked nonsense if required to defend her position, she had a genuine practical intelligence, consistent with her experience. Her natural and instinctive morality was so fully accordant with her time, place and circumstances that she had never needed to formulate it. In a complex society there are many moralities. They do not necessarily conflict, being complementary. There would be no virtue in ascetic or voluntary poverty if there were no wealth or luxury to reject. Any morality is posited upon choice and freewill. Confusion arises only in the mind of the individual who professes a morality at variance with his way of life, refusing to meet the terms. He asks instead that it shall be imposed by force, through a vast uniformity, abdicating as a moral being. This is the way of death. Mrs. Siddall's life was logical and all of a piece, proceeding from the axioms of property, the virtues of which are thrift, tenacity, and faith in the visible world.

The great and durable fortunes, accumulated by men such as her father, Heber Crane, had been made in bad times as well as good. Mrs. Siddall held her father's memory in respect and affection, the only decent sentiments as long as she benefited by his money. It would have been easy to turn his careful and laborious career to satire. During the Civil War he hired a substitute for four hundred dollars, made large gains out of army contracts, and afterward subscribed half the cost of the local Soldiers' Monument. His brother James, who was "wild," volunteered and died in Libby Prison. Heber considered himself more useful at home. Satire could readily compute that he was worth four hundred dollars to his country and four hundred thousand to himself. Yet if the glory is to be stripped from war, James fares no better as cannon fodder. One must commend either prudence or valor, else the satirist too is out of employment, for want of any measure; he must go to the ant and praise only anonymous negation.

There was no hypocrisy in Heber Crane's condemnation of the first Wyman Helder, founder of the firm, who bought up obsolete and defective army rifles, cast equipment, and resold them to the War Department at a profit. Crane considered Helder's trick immoral because it undermined the basis of business. For the same reason he denounced Jim Fisk and Jay Gould; they destroyed business, left only wreckage. Speculation he considered allowable for a man at the beginning of a career if the odds justified the hazard of being compelled to start over again. Having once acquired a competence, it was wrong to imperil it; his dealings were confined to what he could afford to lose. No gain without risk; cut a loss quickly and take a profit before it vanished. He regarded material possessions as the ground anchor of wealth, and got out of money into merchandise in time to profit by the inflation after the Civil War. Therefore he supported the sound money candidates; one might cross by a rotten bridge once or twice or even a dozen times, but in the end it would break, and those upon it would go down, and traffic cease.

Gradually, as the great corporations came into being, he let go his foundries and oil-wells on good terms to the nascent trusts; he saw that the big fish were going to eat the little fish anyhow. His caution served him as a social conscience; the Pullman and Homestead strikes alarmed him. Something wrong, too much pressure, dangerous. They were going too fast. He did not want power but possessions; the two are inimical to each other. He was building what was perhaps the last of the great private fortunes, gathered mainly by personal ventures and personal risks, and concentrated in such form as a man might hold under his hand, pass on to his descendants. One could not do that with corporate control, which is the instrument of power.

Charlotte was his only child, and it gratified his fond vanity, the egotism of the proud parent, to think of her as the richest girl in America, as perhaps she was for a time. He lived to see the upturn after the mid-Nineties, and reckoned his wealth conservatively at twenty millions when he died. In the next twenty years it tripled with rising prices and the unearned increment, and Heber Crane rested in peace.

Mrs. Siddall was shocked by Polly's talk of "only fifty thousand," only twenty-five thousand, only fifteen thousand. Her grandfather, her mother's father, too thoroughly Pennsylvania Dutch to become a millionaire, had left an estate of fifty thousand dollars, which in 1873, the date of his death, ranked him as one of the first citizens of Lancaster. On her sixth birthday he had given her a silver mug; she still owned it. Strange, she remembered that birthday party, a timeless moment of it, vividly; she had red-tasseled shoes, which Grandfather did not altogether approve; and a round-necked cashmere frock trimmed with narrow bands of velvet ribbon, and a birthday cake with candles; and it must have been in 1863, in the dark years of the Civil War, but there was no Civil War in her memory. That occurred in the mysterious lives of older people; it was an abstraction.

Twenty-five thousand dollars is a large sum of money. . . .

"However, I daresay we can arrange—" Mrs. Siddall conceded. Polly was down in her will for fifty thousand; the mortgage could be taken over and deducted from that, without mentioning the contingency to Polly. "I'll speak to Mr. Lützen," Mrs. Siddall's lawyer for estate transactions; "you can tell Bill to make an appointment with him," Mrs. Siddall considered it her duty to assist her family, and equally her duty to do so in a manner which should discourage extravagance.

"It's awfully good of you, Aunt Charlotte," Polly said, much relieved though not beyond her expectations. "Anyhow, we're lucky that our place is small; the big estates are eating their heads off. You know the Marston Stukeleys aren't opening their Florida place this year, and they've laid up their yacht and dismissed most of their servants, and Mrs. Stukeley is having a nervous breakdown, with five trained nurses. They had a million dollars a year income, and Bill says it has shrunk ninety-five per cent—isn't that awful?"

"Five trained nurses," Mrs. Siddall repeated, unconscious of any humor, "what does she do with the odd one? The Stukeley income was from railroad stock, wasn't it? My father always said railroads were too speculative; they suffer first in a depression, besides watered stock and radical legislation. Like the Erie; that was a shocking scandal. And what good did the money do? squandered by that horrid little French count, and a family law-suit after everything."

Polly hadn't the slightest notion what Mrs. Siddall was talking about; and even if she had been fully informed, she would have been unable to understand Mrs. Siddall's inherited conviction that "tainted money" brought a curse.
Pecunia non olet
was Polly's creed. Money, to her, did not come from any specific source, or physical origin. It materialized out of the ether, by a benevolent dispensation. It was privilege without responsibility. And she spent it mostly for intangibles, for things perishable and fragile, for the evanescent quality of smartness, for speed, for exclusiveness. Mrs. Siddall in turn would have been puzzled by Polly's idea of exclusiveness, crowding with dubious strangers in some expensive speakeasy, to drink bad gin in a stale atmosphere shattered by jazz.

"Well, they say Conant Hacker was completely wiped out, and he was worth a hundred and fifty million last year. That's the second time; he made two hundred millions once before and lost it."

"Hacker?" The name meant nothing to Mrs. Siddall.

"Motors. Of course he made most of his money in stock-market pools."

"My father said that a gambler always dies poor," Mrs. Siddall commented. She did not believe in two hundred million dollars made in the stock market. That was not real money. Gambling was immoral; how could it pay? Not in the long run. . . . But Mrs. Siddall did not perceive, as her father did in his time, that power is a shifting stream, forever finding new channels. He had seen that the railroads signified the obsolescence of inland waterways; she did not realize that Hacker's incredible millions from motors presaged the obsolescence of railroads; nor did she suspect that gambling on a scale so vast might overbalance the property basis of wealth, leaving the prudent minority to be held for ransom for the spendthrifts.