It cost him a great deal of money to keep his family provided with shelter, clothing, service, food, and entertainment, but the fact that a considerable part of it was wasted or actually filched from him by his retainers caused him no distress whatever. All of this was so much of a piece with what went on every day in big business and high finance that he hardly gave it a thought. And his indifference was not the bravado of a man who felt that his world was trembling on the brink of certain ruin and who was recklessly making merry while he waited for the collapse. Quite the contrary. He gave tolerant consent to the extravagance and special privilege of those who were dependent on his bounty, not because he doubted, but because he felt secure. He was convinced that the fabric of his world was woven from threads of steel, and that the towering pyramid of speculation would not only endure, but would grow constantly greater. Therefore the defections of his servants were mere peccadillos, and didn’t matter.
In all these ways Mr. Frederick Jack was not essentially different from ten thousand other men of his class and position. In that time and place he would have been peculiar if these things had not been true of him. For these men were all the victims of an occupational disease—a kind of mass hypnosis that denied to them the evidence of their senses. It was a monstrous and ironic fact that the very men who had created this world in which every value was false and theatrical saw themselves, not as creatures tranced by fatal illusions, but rather as the most knowing, practical, and hard-headed men alive. They did not think of themselves as gamblers, obsessed by their own fictions of speculation, but as brilliant executives of great affairs who at every moment of the day “had their fingers on the pulse of the nation.” So when they looked about them and saw everywhere nothing but the myriad shapes of privilege, dishonesty, and self-interest, they were convinced that this was inevitably “the way things are”.
It was generally assumed that every man had his price, just as every woman had hers. And if, in any discussion of conduct, it was suggested to one of these hard-headed, practical men that So-and-So had acted as he did for motives other than those of total self-interest and calculating desire, that he had done thus and so because he would rather endure pain himself than cause it to others whom he loved, or was loyal because of loyalty, or could not be bought or sold for no other reason than the integrity of his own character—the answer of the knowing one would be to smile politely but cynically, shrug it off, and say:
“All right. But I thought you were going to be intelligent. Let’s talk of something else that we both understand.”
Such men could not realise that their own vision of human nature was distorted. They prided themselves on their “hardness” and fortitude and intelligence, which had enabled them to accept so black a picture of the earth with such easy tolerance. It was not until a little later that the real substance of their “hardness” and intelligence was demonstrated to them in terms which they could grasp. When the bubble of their unreal world suddenly exploded before their eyes, many of them were so little capable of facing harsh reality and truth that they blew their brains out or threw themselves from the high windows of their offices into the streets below. And of those who faced it and saw it through, many a one who had been plump, immaculate, and assured now shrank and withered into premature and palsied senility.
All that, however, was still in the future. It was very imminent, but they did not know it, for they had trained themselves to deny the evidence of their senses. In that mid-October of 1929 nothing could exceed their satisfaction and assurance. They looked about them and, like an actor, saw with their eyes that all was false, but since they had schooled themselves to accept falseness as normal and natural, the discovery only enhanced their pleasure in life.
The choicest stories which these men told each other had to do with some facet of human chicanery, treachery, and dishonesty. They delighted to match anecdotes concerning the delightful knaveries of their chauffeurs, maids, cooks, and bootleggers, telling of the way these people cheated them as one would describe the antics of a household pet.
Such stories also had a great success at the dinner-table. The ladies would listen with mirth which they made an impressive show of trying to control, and at the conclusion of the tale they would say: “I—think—that—is—simp-ly—priceless!” (uttered slowly and deliberately, as if the humour of the story was almost beyond belief), or: “Isn’t it in-cred-ible!” (spoken with a faint rising scream of laughter), or: “Stop! You know he didn’t!” (delivered with a ladylike shriek). They used all the fashionable and stereotyped phrases of people “responding” to an “amusing” anecdote, for their lives had become so sterile and savourless that laughter had gone out of them.