The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories


By and by Aleck subscribed to a Chicago daily and for the WALL
STREET POINTER. With an eye single to finance she studied these
as diligently all the week as she studied her Bible Sundays.
Sally was lost in admiration, to note with what swift and sure strides
her genius and judgment developed and expanded in the forecasting and
handling of the securities of both the material and spiritual markets.
He was proud of her nerve and daring in exploiting worldly stocks,
and just as proud of her conservative caution in working her
spiritual deals. He noted that she never lost her head in either case;
that with a splendid courage she often went short on worldly futures,
but heedfully drew the line there--she was always long on the others.
Her policy was quite sane and simple, as she explained it to him:
what she put into earthly futures was for speculation, what she put
into spiritual futures was for investment; she was willing to go into
the one on a margin, and take chances, but in the case of the other,
"margin her no margins"--she wanted to cash in a hundred cents per
dollar's worth, and have the stock transferred on the books.

It took but a very few months to educate Aleck's imagination
and Sally's. Each day's training added something to the spread
and effectiveness of the two machines. As a consequence, Aleck made
imaginary money much faster than at first she had dreamed of making it,
and Sally's competency in spending the overflow of it kept pace with
the strain put upon it, right along. In the beginning, Aleck had
given the coal speculation a twelvemonth in which to materialize,
and had been loath to grant that this term might possibly be shortened
by nine months. But that was the feeble work, the nursery work,
of a financial fancy that had had no teaching, no experience,
no practice. These aids soon came, then that nine months vanished,
and the imaginary ten-thousand-dollar investment came marching
home with three hundred per cent. profit on its back!

It was a great day for the pair of Fosters. They were speechless
for joy. Also speechless for another reason: after much watching
of the market, Aleck had lately, with fear and trembling, made her
first flyer on a "margin," using the remaining twenty thousand of
the bequest in this risk. In her mind's eye she had seen it climb,
point by point--always with a chance that the market would break
--until at last her anxieties were too great for further endurance
--she being new to the margin business and unhardened, as yet--and she
gave her imaginary broker an imaginary order by imaginary telegraph
to sell. She said forty thousand dollars' profit was enough.
The sale was made on the very day that the coal venture had returned
with its rich freight. As I have said, the couple were speechless.
they sat dazed and blissful that night, trying to realize that they were
actually worth a hundred thousand dollars in clean, imaginary cash.
Yet so it was.

It was the last time that ever Aleck was afraid of a margin;
at least afraid enough to let it break her sleep and pale her cheek
to the extent that this first experience in that line had done.

Indeed it was a memorable night. Gradually the realization that they
were rich sank securely home into the souls of the pair, then they
began to place the money. If we could have looked out through
the eyes of these dreamers, we should have seen their tidy little
wooden house disappear, and two-story brick with a cast-iron fence
in front of it take its place; we should have seen a three-globed
gas-chandelier grow down from the parlor ceiling; we should have seen
the homely rag carpet turn to noble Brussels, a dollar and a half
a yard; we should have seen the plebeian fireplace vanish away and
a recherche, big base-burner with isinglass windows take position
and spread awe around. And we should have seen other things,
too; among them the buggy, the lap-robe, the stove-pipe hat, and so on.

From that time forth, although the daughters and the neighbors
saw only the same old wooden house there, it was a two-story
brick to Aleck and Sally and not a night went by that Aleck did
not worry about the imaginary gas-bills, and get for all comfort
Sally's reckless retort: "What of it? We can afford it."

Before the couple went to bed, that first night that they were rich,
they had decided that they must celebrate. They must give a party
--that was the idea. But how to explain it--to the daughters and
the neighbors? They could not expose the fact that they were rich.
Sally was willing, even anxious, to do it; but Aleck kept her head
and would not allow it. She said that although the money was as
good as in, it would be as well to wait until it was actually in.
On that policy she took her stand, and would not budge.
The great secret must be kept, she said--kept from the daughters and
everybody else.

The pair were puzzled. They must celebrate, they were determined
to celebrate, but since the secret must be kept, what could
they celebrate? No birthdays were due for three months.
Tilbury wasn't available, evidently he was going to live forever;
what the nation COULD they celebrate? That was Sally's way
of putting it; and he was getting impatient, too, and harassed.
But at last he hit it--just by sheer inspiration, as it seemed to him
--and all their troubles were gone in a moment; they would celebrate
the Discovery of America. A splendid idea!

Aleck was almost too proud of Sally for words--she said SHE never would
have thought of it. But Sally, although he was bursting with delight
in the compliment and with wonder at himself, tried not to let on,
and said it wasn't really anything, anybody could have done it.
Whereat Aleck, with a prideful toss of her happy head, said:

"Oh, certainly! Anybody could--oh, anybody! Hosannah Dilkins,
for instance! Or maybe Adelbert Peanut--oh, DEAR--yes! Well, I'd like
to see them try it, that's all. Dear-me-suz, if they could think
of the discovery of a forty-acre island it's more than _I_ believe
they could; and as for the whole continent, why, Sally Foster,
you know perfectly well it would strain the livers and lights
out of them and THEN they couldn't!"

The dear woman, she knew he had talent; and if affection made
her over-estimate the size of it a little, surely it was a sweet
and gentle crime, and forgivable for its source's sake.



CHAPTER V


The celebration went off well. The friends were all present,
both the young and the old. Among the young were Flossie and
Gracie Peanut and their brother Adelbert, who was a rising young
journeyman tinner, also Hosannah Dilkins, Jr., journeyman plasterer,
just out of his apprenticeship. For many months Adelbert and Hosannah
had been showing interest in Gwendolen and Clytemnestra Foster,
and the parents of the girls had noticed this with private satisfaction.
But they suddenly realized now that that feeling had passed.
They recognized that the changed financial conditions had raised
up a social bar between their daughters and the young mechanics.
The daughters could now look higher--and must. Yes, must. They need
marry nothing below the grade of lawyer or merchant; poppa and momma
would take care of this; there must be no mesalliances.

However, these thinkings and projects of their were private,
and did not show on the surface, and therefore threw no shadow
upon the celebration. What showed upon the surface was a serene
and lofty contentment and a dignity of carriage and gravity of
deportment which compelled the admiration and likewise the wonder
of the company. All noticed it and all commented upon it, but none
was able to divine the secret of it. It was a marvel and a mystery.
Three several persons remarked, without suspecting what clever
shots they were making:

"It's as if they'd come into property."

That was just it, indeed.

Most mothers would have taken hold of the matrimonial matter in the
old regulation way; they would have given the girls a talking to,
of a solemn sort and untactful--a lecture calculated to defeat its
own purpose, by producing tears and secret rebellion; and the said
mothers would have further damaged the business by requesting
the young mechanics to discontinue their attentions. But this
mother was different. She was practical. She said nothing to any
of the young people concerned, nor to any one else except Sally.
He listened to her and understood; understood and admired.
He said:

"I get the idea. Instead of finding fault with the samples on view,
thus hurting feelings and obstructing trade without occasion,
you merely offer a higher class of goods for the money, and leave
nature to take her course. It's wisdom, Aleck, solid wisdom,
and sound as a nut. Who's your fish? Have you nominated him yet?"

No, she hadn't. They must look the market over--which they did.
To start with, they considered and discussed Brandish, rising young
lawyer, and Fulton, rising young dentist. Sally must invite them
to dinner. But not right away; there was no hurry, Aleck said.
Keep an eye on the pair, and wait; nothing would be lost by going
slowly in so important a matter.

It turned out that this was wisdom, too; for inside of three
weeks Aleck made a wonderful strike which swelled her imaginary
hundred thousand to four hundred thousand of the same quality.
She and Sally were in the clouds that evening. For the first
time they introduced champagne at dinner. Not real champagne,
but plenty real enough for the amount of imagination expended on it.
It was Sally that did it, and Aleck weakly submitted. At bottom both
were troubled and ashamed, for he was a high-up Son of Temperance,
and at funerals wore an apron which no dog could look upon and retain
his reason and his opinion; and she was a W. C. T. U., with all that
that implies of boiler-iron virtue and unendurable holiness. But there
is was; the pride of riches was beginning its disintegrating work.
They had lived to prove, once more, a sad truth which had been proven
many times before in the world: that whereas principle is a great
and noble protection against showy and degrading vanities and vices,
poverty is worth six of it. More than four hundred thousand
dollars to the good. They took up the matrimonial matter again.
Neither the dentist nor the lawyer was mentioned; there was no occasion,
they were out of the running. Disqualified. They discussed the son
of the pork-packer and the son of the village banker. But finally,
as in the previous case, they concluded to wait and think, and go
cautiously and sure.

Luck came their way again. Aleck, ever watchful saw a great
and risky chance, and took a daring flyer. A time of trembling,
of doubt, of awful uneasiness followed, for non-success meant absolute
ruin and nothing short of it. Then came the result, and Aleck,
faint with joy, could hardly control her voice when she said:

"The suspense is over, Sally--and we are worth a cold million!"

Sally wept for gratitude, and said:

"Oh, Electra, jewel of women, darling of my heart, we are free
at last, we roll in wealth, we need never scrimp again. It's a
case for Veuve Cliquot!" and he got out a pint of spruce-beer
and made sacrifice, he saying "Damn the expense," and she rebuking
him gently with reproachful but humid and happy eyes.

They shelved the pork-packer's son and the banker's son, and sat
down to consider the Governor's son and the son of the Congressman.



CHAPTER VI


It were a weariness to follow in detail the leaps and bounds the Foster
fictitious finances took from this time forth. It was marvelous,
it was dizzying, it was dazzling. Everything Aleck touched turned
to fairy gold, and heaped itself glittering toward the firmament.
Millions upon millions poured in, and still the mighty stream flowed
thundering along, still its vast volume increased. Five millions
--ten millions--twenty--thirty--was there never to be an end?

Two years swept by in a splendid delirium, the intoxicated Fosters
scarcely noticing the flight of time. They were now worth three hundred
million dollars; they were in every board of directors of every
prodigious combine in the country; and still as time drifted along,
the millions went on piling up, five at a time, ten at a time,
as fast as they could tally them off, almost. The three hundred
double itself--then doubled again--and yet again--and yet once more.

Twenty-four hundred millions!

The business was getting a little confused. It was necessary
to take an account of stock, and straighten it out. The Fosters
knew it, they felt it, they realized that it was imperative;
but they also knew that to do it properly and perfectly the task
must be carried to a finish without a break when once it was begun.
A ten-hours' job; and where could THEY find ten leisure hours
in a bunch? Sally was selling pins and sugar and calico all day
and every day; Aleck was cooking and washing dishes and sweeping
and making beds all day and every day, with none to help,
for the daughters were being saved up for high society. The Fosters
knew there was one way to get the ten hours, and only one.
Both were ashamed to name it; each waited for the other to do it.
Finally Sally said:

"Somebody's got to give in. It's up to me. Consider that I've
named it--never mind pronouncing it out aloud."

Aleck colored, but was grateful. Without further remark, they fell.
Fell, and--broke the Sabbath. For that was their only free
ten-hour stretch. It was but another step in the downward path.
Others would follow. Vast wealth has temptations which fatally
and surely undermine the moral structure of persons not habituated
to its possession.

They pulled down the shades and broke the Sabbath. With hard
and patient labor they overhauled their holdings and listed them.
And a long-drawn procession of formidable names it was!
Starting with the Railway Systems, Steamer Lines, Standard Oil,
Ocean Cables, Diluted Telegraph, and all the rest, and winding
up with Klondike, De Beers, Tammany Graft, and Shady Privileges
in the Post-office Department.

Twenty-four hundred millions, and all safely planted in Good Things,
gilt-edged and interest-bearing. Income, $120,000,000 a year.
Aleck fetched a long purr of soft delight, and said:

"Is it enough?"

"It is, Aleck."

"What shall we do?"

"Stand pat."

"Retire from business?"

"That's it."

"I am agreed. The good work is finished; we will take a long rest
and enjoy the money."

"Good! Aleck!"

"Yes, dear?"

"How much of the income can we spend?"

"The whole of it."

It seemed to her husband that a ton of chains fell from his limbs.
He did not say a word; he was happy beyond the power of speech.

After that, they broke the Sabbaths right along as fast as they
turned up. It is the first wrong step that counts. Every Sunday
they put in the whole day, after morning service, on inventions
--inventions of ways to spend the money. They got to continuing this
delicious dissipation until past midnight; and at every seance Aleck
lavished millions upon great charities and religious enterprises,
and Sally lavished like sums upon matters to which (at first)
he gave definite names. Only at first. Later the names gradually
lost sharpness of outline, and eventually faded into "sundries,"
thus becoming entirely--but safely--undescriptive. For Sally
was crumbling. The placing of these millions added seriously
and most uncomfortably to the family expenses--in tallow candles.
For a while Aleck was worried. Then, after a little, she ceased
to worry, for the occasion of it was gone. She was pained,
she was grieved, she was ashamed; but she said nothing, and so became
an accessory. Sally was taking candles; he was robbing the store.
It is ever thus. Vast wealth, to the person unaccustomed to it,
is a bane; it eats into the flesh and bone of his morals.
When the Fosters were poor, they could have been trusted with
untold candles. But now they--but let us not dwell upon it.
From candles to apples is but a step: Sally got to taking apples;
then soap; then maple-sugar; then canned goods; then crockery.
How easy it is to go from bad to worse, when once we have started upon a
downward course!

Meantime, other effects had been milestoning the course of the Fosters'
splendid financial march. The fictitious brick dwelling had
given place to an imaginary granite one with a checker-board
mansard roof; in time this one disappeared and gave place to a
still grander home--and so on and so on. Mansion after mansion,
made of air, rose, higher, broader, finer, and each in its turn
vanished away; until now in these latter great days, our dreamers
were in fancy housed, in a distant region, in a sumptuous vast
palace which looked out from a leafy summit upon a noble prospect
of vale and river and receding hills steeped in tinted mists
--and all private, all the property of the dreamers; a palace swarming
with liveried servants, and populous with guests of fame and power,
hailing from all the world's capitals, foreign and domestic.

This palace was far, far away toward the rising sun, immeasurably remote,
astronomically remote, in Newport, Rhode Island, Holy Land
of High Society, ineffable Domain of the American Aristocracy.
As a rule they spent a part of every Sabbath--after morning service
--in this sumptuous home, the rest of it they spent in Europe,
or in dawdling around in their private yacht. Six days of sordid
and plodding fact life at home on the ragged edge of Lakeside
and straitened means, the seventh in Fairlyand--such had been
their program and their habit.

In their sternly restricted fact life they remained as of old
--plodding, diligent, careful, practical, economical. They stuck
loyally to the little Presbyterian Church, and labored faithfully
in its interests and stood by its high and tough doctrines with all
their mental and spiritual energies. But in their dream life they
obeyed the invitations of their fancies, whatever they might be,
and howsoever the fancies might change. Aleck's fancies were not
very capricious, and not frequent, but Sally's scattered a good deal.
Aleck, in her dream life, went over to the Episcopal camp, on account
of its large official titles; next she became High-church on account
of the candles and shows; and next she naturally changed to Rome,
where there were cardinals and more candles. But these excursions
were a nothing to Sally's. His dream life was a glowing and continuous
and persistent excitement, and he kept every part of it fresh and
sparkling by frequent changes, the religious part along with the rest.
He worked his religions hard, and changed them with his shirt.

The liberal spendings of the Fosters upon their fancies began
early in their prosperities, and grew in prodigality step by step
with their advancing fortunes. In time they became truly enormous.
Aleck built a university or two per Sunday; also a hospital or two;
also a Rowton hotel or so; also a batch of churches; now and then
a cathedral; and once, with untimely and ill-chosen playfulness,
Sally said, "It was a cold day when she didn't ship a cargo of
missionaries to persuade unreflecting Chinamen to trade off twenty-four
carat Confucianism for counterfeit Christianity."

This rude and unfeeling language hurt Aleck to the heart, and she
went from the presence crying. That spectacle went to his own heart,
and in his pain and shame he would have given worlds to have
those unkind words back. She had uttered no syllable of reproach
--and that cut him. Not one suggestion that he look at his own record
--and she could have made, oh, so many, and such blistering ones!
Her generous silence brought a swift revenge, for it turned his
thoughts upon himself, it summoned before him a spectral procession,
a moving vision of his life as he had been leading it these past
few years of limitless prosperity, and as he sat there reviewing
it his cheeks burned and his soul was steeped in humiliation.
Look at her life--how fair it was, and tending ever upward; and look
at his own--how frivolous, how charged with mean vanities, how selfish,
how empty, how ignoble! And its trend--never upward, but downward,
ever downward!

He instituted comparisons between her record and his own. He had found
fault with her--so he mused--HE! And what could he say for himself?
When she built her first church what was he doing? Gathering other
blase multimillionaires into a Poker Club; defiling his own palace
with it; losing hundreds of thousands to it at every sitting,
and sillily vain of the admiring notoriety it made for him.
When she was building her first university, what was he doing?
Polluting himself with a gay and dissipated secret life in the
company of other fast bloods, multimillionaires in money and paupers
in character. When she was building her first foundling asylum,
what was he doing? Alas! When she was projecting her noble Society
for the Purifying of the Sex, what was he doing? Ah, what, indeed!
When she and the W. C. T. U. and the Woman with the Hatchet,
moving with resistless march, were sweeping the fatal bottle from
the land, what was he doing? Getting drunk three times a day.
When she, builder of a hundred cathedrals, was being gratefully
welcomed and blest in papal Rome and decorated with the Golden Rose
which she had so honorably earned, what was he doing? Breaking the
bank at Monte Carlo.

He stopped. He could go no farther; he could not bear the rest.
He rose up, with a great resolution upon his lips: this secret
life should be revealing, and confessed; no longer would he live
it clandestinely, he would go and tell her All.

And that is what he did. He told her All; and wept upon
her bosom; wept, and moaned, and begged for her forgiveness.
It was a profound shock, and she staggered under the blow, but he
was her own, the core of her heart, the blessing of her eyes,
her all in all, she could deny him nothing, and she forgave him.
She felt that he could never again be quite to her what he had
been before; she knew that he could only repent, and not reform;
yet all morally defaced and decayed as he was, was he not her own,
her very own, the idol of her deathless worship? She said she
was his serf, his slave, and she opened her yearning heart and took
him in.



CHAPTER VII


One Sunday afternoon some time after this they were sailing the
summer seas in their dream yacht, and reclining in lazy luxury under
the awning of the after-deck. There was silence, for each was busy
with his own thoughts. These seasons of silence had insensibly
been growing more and more frequent of late; the old nearness and
cordiality were waning. Sally's terrible revelation had done its work;
Aleck had tried hard to drive the memory of it out of her mind,
but it would not go, and the shame and bitterness of it were
poisoning her gracious dream life. She could see now (on Sundays)
that her husband was becoming a bloated and repulsive Thing.
She could not close her eyes to this, and in these days she
no longer looked at him, Sundays, when she could help it.

But she--was she herself without blemish? Alas, she knew she was not.
She was keeping a secret from him, she was acting dishonorably
toward him, and many a pang it was costing her. SHE WAS BREAKING
THE COMPACT, AND CONCEALING IT FROM HIM. Under strong temptation
she had gone into business again; she had risked their whole
fortune in a purchase of all the railway systems and coal and steel
companies in the country on a margin, and she was now trembling,
every Sabbath hour, lest through some chance word of hers he find
it out. In her misery and remorse for this treachery she could
not keep her heart from going out to him in pity; she was filled
with compunctions to see him lying there, drunk and contented,
and ever suspecting. Never suspecting--trusting her with a perfect
and pathetic trust, and she holding over him by a thread a possible
calamity of so devastating a--

"SAY--Aleck?"

The interrupting words brought her suddenly to herself. She was
grateful to have that persecuting subject from her thoughts,
and she answered, with much of the old-time tenderness in her tone:

"Yes, dear."

"Do you know, Aleck, I think we are making a mistake--that is,
you are. I mean about the marriage business." He sat up, fat and
froggy and benevolent, like a bronze Buddha, and grew earnest.
"Consider--it's more than five years. You've continued the same
policy from the start: with every rise, always holding on for five
points higher. Always when I think we are going to have some weddings,
you see a bigger thing ahead, and I undergo another disappointment.
_I_ think you are too hard to please. Some day we'll get left.
First, we turned down the dentist and the lawyer. That was all right
--it was sound. Next, we turned down the banker's son and the
pork-butcher's heir--right again, and sound. Next, we turned
down the Congressman's son and the Governor's--right as a trivet,
I confess it. Next the Senator's son and the son of the Vice-President
of the United States--perfectly right, there's no permanency about
those little distinctions. Then you went for the aristocracy;
and I thought we had struck oil at last--yes. We would make
a plunge at the Four Hundred, and pull in some ancient lineage,
venerable, holy, ineffable, mellow with the antiquity of a hundred
and fifty years, disinfected of the ancestral odors of salt-cod
and pelts all of a century ago, and unsmirched by a day's work since,
and then! why, then the marriages, of course. But no, along comes
a pair a real aristocrats from Europe, and straightway you throw over
the half-breeds. It was awfully discouraging, Aleck! Since then,
what a procession! You turned down the baronets for a pair
of barons; you turned down the barons for a pair of viscounts;
the viscounts for a pair of earls; the earls for a pair of marquises;
the marquises for a brace of dukes. NOW, Aleck, cash in!
--you've played the limit. You've got a job lot of four dukes
under the hammer; of four nationalities; all sound in the wind
and limb and pedigree, all bankrupt and in debt up to the ears.
They come high, but we can afford it. Come, Aleck, don't delay
any longer, don't keep up the suspense: take the whole lay-out,
and leave the girls to choose!"