“Some of dem are all right,” he would say. “You know!”—with a constricted accent of his high, strained voice. “Dey’re not all basteds. Dis guy”—with a jerk of his head towards the policeman who had nodded and let him pass—“dis guy’s all right. I know him—sure! sure!—he’s a bruddeh of me sisteh-in-law!”
The unnatural and unwholesome energy of his driver evoked in his master’s mind an image of the world he lived in that was theatrical and phantasmal. Instead of seeing himself as one man going to his work like countless others in the practical and homely light of day, he saw himself and his driver as two cunning and powerful men pitted triumphantly against the world; and the monstrous architecture of the city, the phantasmagoric chaos of its traffic, the web of the streets swarming with people, became for him nothing more than a tremendous backdrop for his own activities. All of this—the sense of menace, conflict, cunning, power, stealth, and victory, and, above everything else, the sense of privilege—added to Mr. Jack’s pleasure, and even gave him a heady joy as he rode downtown to work.
And the feverish world of speculation in which he worked, and which had now come to have this theatrical cast and colour, was everywhere sustained by this same sense of privilege. It was the privilege of men selected from the common run because of some mysterious intuition they were supposed to have—selected to live gloriously without labour or production, their profits mounting incredibly with every ticking of the clock, their wealth increased fabulously by a mere nod of the head or the shifting of a finger. This being so, it seemed to Mr. Jack, and, indeed, to many others at the time—for many who were not themselves members of this fortunate class envied those who were—it seemed, then, not only entirely reasonable but even natural that the whole structure of society from top to bottom should be honeycombed with privilege and dishonesty.
Mr. Jack knew, for example, that one of his chauffeurs swindled him constantly. He knew that every bill for petrol, oil, tyres, and overhauling was padded, that the chauffeur was in collusion with the garage owner for this purpose, and that he received a handsome percentage from him as a reward. Yet this knowledge did not disturb Mr. Jack. He actually got from it a degree of cynical amusement. Well aware of what was going on, he also knew that he could afford it, and somehow this gave him a sense of power and security. If he ever entertained any other attitude, it was to shrug his shoulders indifferently as he thought:
“Well, what of it? There’s nothing to be done about it. They all do it. If it wasn’t this fellow, it would be someone else.”
Similarly, he knew that some of the maids in his household were not above “borrowing” things and “forgetting” to return them. He was aware that various members of the police force as well as several red-necked firemen spent most of their hours of ease in his kitchen or in the maids’ sitting-room. He also knew that these guardians of the public peace and safety ate royally every night of the choicest dishes of his own table, and that their wants were cared for even before his family and his guests were served, and that his best whisky and his rarest wines were theirs for the taking.
But beyond an occasional burst of annoyance when he discovered that a case of real Irish whisky (with rusty sea-stained markings on the bottles to prove genuineness) had melted away almost overnight, a loss which roused his temper only because of the rareness of the thing lost, he said very little. When his wife spoke to him about such matters, as she occasionally did, in a tone of vague protest, saying: “Fritz, I’m sure those girls are taking things they have no right to. I think it’s perfectly dreadful, don’t you? What do you think we ought to do about it?”—his usual answer was to smile tolerantly, shrug, and show his palms.