The Golden Vanity

by Isabel Paterson

  "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.

  "Bill says the worst is over now," Polly said resiliently. "He says it's wonderful how the bankers got together and supported the market. If we had any money now we could get in on the rise again; it's just our luck to be broke. And Bill will have to give up that Greenland expedition he was planning to join next summer."

  "That is too bad," Mrs. Siddall agreed, overlooking the suggestion. "Though why anyone should want to go to Greenland— Wasn't it snowing this morning?" She looked toward the window. Even if her eyesight had been keen, it would have told her nothing. She was cut off from the weather. Her boudoir was ventilated by invisible hygienic flues. Between the heavy window draperies of amber satin the net glass-curtains softened the bleakness of the street with a delicate illusion that left no hard surfaces or sharp edges. A lively wood-fire burned beneath a mantel of yellow faïence tiles. On an Italian table of yellow marble pale bronze-pink roses unfurled in a cloud of white gypsophila from a cloisonné vase. In furniture as in clothes Mrs. Siddall was faithful to her own era, when money was expected to show. She found the decor of Polly's apartment incomprehensible: black velvet divans built against silver-painted walls, a silver-grey rug on a red-lacquered floor, a black marble mantel, and two pictures of angular nudes with dislocated hips. Polly had had it done over only a year ago, at preposterous expense. It wouldn't last, Mrs. Siddall thought firmly.

  "Only a flurry," said Polly. "Spring snow."

  "The winters used to be much more severe," Mrs. Siddall recalled. "After a snowstorm we drove out in cutters; you could hear the bells all along Fifth Avenue."

  Yet she had a conviction that she had lived in a world of permanence, which had mistakenly changed, very much for the worse, only temporarily. It would have to go back. . .. Healthily incapable of introspection, she did not perceive that to herself she was simultaneously and miraculously the six-year-old child with red-tasseled shoes; and the dashing young woman in a sealskin coat, holding a sealskin muff to her face to shelter a bunch of violets from a spray of snow in the Park; and her immediate self, a repository of ripe wisdom and authority. The permanence she felt consisted in whatever secret and persistent filament of flesh or spirit preserved those continuous memories.

  "That must have been fun," said Polly. "You'd have to go to Greenland now. Thank you, Aunt Charlotte, I'm sorry but I can't stay to lunch; I promised to go to a bridge luncheon for the Unemployed." She kissed her aunt, with moderate gratitude and affection, and departed.

  The month's accounts were waiting; Mrs. Siddall checked them thoroughly. "We shall have to economize, Mrs. Enderby," she said. "Yes, madam," the housekeeper agreed. "I don't think I shall open the Bar Harbor cottage this summer," Mrs. Siddall said. She told her secretary to make a note about the greenhouses on the Long Island estate. Perhaps one could be shut down, dispensing with a couple of under-gardeners. There were so many calls for charity. To do her justice, Mrs. Siddall did not consider reducing her regular contributions; there was her favorite hospital, and St. Stephen's parish fund, and a settlement house, and an orphanage, to all of which she subscribed generously; they had long since become fixed charges. They were appealing urgently for larger benefactions; she decided to increase the various amounts, say ten per cent, this year. Unemployment relief—yes, that was a duty, in the present emergency. She paid a number of small private pensions—old servants, and remote poor relations to whom she was not inaccessible for extra sums when there were children to send to college, or in case of illness. None of them was nearer than second cousinship; several she had never seen; the law of averages had kept the total fairly constant for many years by death and birth and superannuation. Disaster seemed to be hereditary. Mr. Lützen had told her that young Mr. Fraser, in the estate office, had tuberculosis. Fraser was the grandson of one of Heber Crane's early associates who inexplicably ruined himself backing inventions which were afterward successful. Mrs. Siddall had employed the grandson out of sentiment. He had been doing well enough, was married and had a child; now he was stricken, with no resources. Mrs. Siddall gave instructions that he should be sent to Colorado on full pay, with his family, until he recovered. She was a genuinely kind woman, one of the limited percentage of the rich who give as a matter of course. If she had been a farmer's wife she would never have refused food
to a tramp, and though she would have required him to chop wood in return, she wouldn't have been astonished if he had evaded the chore. Her sympathy was practical and unimaginative; she did not suffer vicariously over social injustice. Her comfortable benevolence was of the type which rouses the scorn of idealists and the fury of social revolutionaries. She would have driven either or both to apoplexy by listening to their arguments and then replying that if all the money in the world were divided, in six months there would once more be rich and poor. Neither she nor her opponents would have realized that both sides were assuming their own axioms. Few people do perceive that all logic proceeds from axioms.

  After Polly had gone, Julius Dickerson arrived for lunch. Business was not discussed at the table, but later, in the library, Julius discussed the financing of the Siddall Building. His characteristic mode of conversation was soothing and encouraging; only a thoughtful listener would have observed that it was impossible to recollect subsequently exactly what he had said or not said. One was left with the general impression that all was for the best.

  About half the bonds for the construction of the Siddall Building remained unsold. Some of those which had been sold were not fully paid. The building corporation was legally empowered to pledge the unsold bonds for seventy per cent of face value. Mrs. Siddall owned none of the bonds, and held no shares of the building corporation, to which she had leased the land. Money must be found if the work were to go forward. The depression made it practically a public duty to proceed, and since building costs were down, Mrs. Siddall could acquire a majority ownership in the building at a reduced price, by assuming the unsold bonds, and taking over at a discount some of the bonds which were not fully paid. She would thus protect herself on the lease also; an unfinished building couldn't pay ground rent, and bankruptcy of the building corporation would be prejudicial to the immediate enterprise and the Siddall name. Julius Dickerson forgot to stress the point that ultimate returns depended upon rentals when the building was completed. In fact, he never thought of that. Of course there would be tenants.