Possession (Bromfield)/Chapter 4
THE father of May Seton was rich according to standards. He was not so wealthy as the Harrison family which owned the Mills, or as Julia Shane, Mrs. Tolliver's Aunt Julia, a great and proud lady who lived in Shane's Castle, a gloomy house, relic of a past day, which stood isolated now upon a low hill in the midst of the clamorous and ascendant Mills. There were some who said that Harvey Seton was richer than Julia Shane, but it was impossible to know. The Seton wealth was public property. The wealth of Julia Shane, except for the land which she owned, lay concealed in the vaults of banks in Paris, in New York, in Pittsburgh, in Chicago. No one could gage it; and from the old woman's mode of living, it was impossible to make any estimate. There had been a day when Shane's Castle was the great house of the Town, even of the state. Great people stopped there, politicians, artists, musicians, even a President or two. But for years now, ever since Lily went to live in Paris, the famous drawing-room, glittering with crystal and silver and glowing with tapestries and paintings, had been closed and muffled in cheese-cloth. In the big house, beneath the unceasing fall of soot from the furnaces, Julia Shane with her spinster daughter, Irene, lived in three rooms. It was this state of affairs which led people in the Town to believe that her fortune had decreased in some mysterious way. The old woman alone knew that she could have bought up Harvey Seton, tossed his corset factory into the midst of the Atlantic Ocean and never missed the money. She lived upon the income of her income. The Town, so far as she was concerned, no longer existed.
These things played an important part in the life of the Town. No one ever tired of discussing them. It was by these standards that citizens were judged; and there were no better standards in a town which had emerged less than a century before from a complete wilderness. There was nothing unusual in them, for it is the man of property after all whom most people, in their heart of hearts, honor most profoundly.
The success of Harvey Seton was, in itself, not especially interesting. It paralleled very closely the tale of any successful middle-western manufacturer. The interest lay in what he manufactured and in his character. He was born and brought up in what people call straitened circumstances. At twenty-one he entered a pharmaceutical school and upon being graduated, started life as a clerk in a pharmacy of the Town. For eight years he lived rigorously and saved his money. He was a Methodist and attended church regularly, despising card-playing and the theater as implements of the devil. In this there is nothing unusual. It is here that the bizarre makes its appearance.
There came a day when he learned that Samuel Barr, a brother of Julia Shane and of Mrs. Tolliver's father, had invented a combination of gutta percha and steel which served as an admirable substitute for whalebone. Now Samuel Barr was always inventing something. He invented a cash-carrier, a patent rocker, and had even meddled with the idea of perpetual motion. He had invented a machine which he set up in a field on the farm of his brother-in-law, because he said the contrivance, once it was started, would not stop until it flew into pieces of its own velocity; therefore one must have an open space about it so that no one might be injured by the flying fragments. With his brother-in-law, Colonel John Shane, he waited behind a tree for the machine to fly to bits. It revolved a few times and presently came to an abrupt halt. No fragments flew through space. The machine was a failure.
It is standing there to-day, in the midst of a field now cultivated by Bohemian immigrants. It is too bulky to be moved. It remains, like a gigantic rock, in the midst of waving corn, the single monument to Samuel Barr's inventive genius. The other things,—the cash-carrier, the patent rocker, the synthetic whalebone have survived. With a few variations they whiz coins through gigantic department stores in a hundred cities; they support the tired backs of a million exhausted housewives; and they enclose the swelling forms of even more millions of too plump women. But Samuel Barr made no money out of these things. Others made the money and stole the credit. It was the perpetual motion machine which was the apple of his eye, the great creative effort of his soul. No one wanted that, so no one stole it from him. It remained, the single possession of his trusting soul. The weather is eating it slowly away. Sometimes people stop along the road and walk into the field to regard the strange Gargantuan engine. "Sam Barr's Perpetual Motion Machine" exists, the only monument to his name.
Samuel Barr is important to this tale because it was he who founded Harvey Seton's fortune, and because it was his machine which stands as a superb symbol for the taint which ran through all his family. It was the taint of a family of great energy which had fantastic visions, which gambled high, staking everything to win or lose. It was a curious taint, rare and unhappy, but out of it there sometimes rose a sudden genius—an artist, an adventurer, a philosopher, an inventor. The taint was in all of them. His sister Julia risked her fortune a dozen times and, winning, increased it a dozen times. His niece Hattie Tolliver never ceased to plan great undertakings which would make her husband rich. She risked her fortune a dozen times and, losing, saw it vanish into a mass of debts. His great-niece Ellen Tolliver had it strongly, though few would have suspected it. She was subtle like old Julia Shane. She told her affairs to no one.
When Harvey Seton, twenty-nine, rather pallid and ambitious in a cold-blooded fashion, heard of Samuel Barr's invention, he set about to gain possession of it. This he accomplished in time, by methods not entirely honest, at the cost of one hundred and fifty dollars. Then he secured a partner and the Eureka Reinforced Corset Factory came to raise its walls in the factory district under the windows of Shane's Castle.
In justice to Harvey Seton, it must be said that he struggled for a time with his conscience. He was not a bad man. His fault lay in a too great desire for wealth; that is to say, wealth in the abstract, for its own sake alone, and not for what it could bring to him of this world's pleasures. He had some pangs over his treatment of Samuel Barr, but they were as nothing to the pangs he endured from the nature of his enterprise. . . . A Methodist corset manufacturer might seem a contradiction in terms, a combination of two elements which are in no way soluble, the one in the other; but somehow, Harvey Seton—perhaps because he was really shrewd—managed to unite them. He continued to sing in the church choir; and, on the left hand, he manufactured corsets. He knew, no doubt, that some of the most devout of his Methodist sisters wore stays beneath their clothes. Perhaps if they had been forced to wear them on the outside, the corset business would have suffered. The world being what it is, Harvey Seton prospered. His corsets became known in remote lands for their durability and their restrictive values. Eureka Reinforced Corsets came to be worn by the great ladies of New York and London, by the housewives of the Middle West, by the demi-mondaines of Paris and Brussels, by professors' fat wives in Germany. They were introduced at length even among the bisque ladies of Polynesia and the black ladies of brothels in Mozambique. In 1897 Harvey Seton opened a branch factory at St. Denis on the outskirts of Paris. It brought him nearer to his continental markets.
Meanwhile Harvey Seton's life followed a narrow path to and from the corset factory, and presently he married one of the plumpest of Methodist sisters who presented him after a hesitation of three years with a daughter, May. Then followed an hiatus of ten years and there appeared a thin anemic little boy. These are the facts of Harvey Seton's life. There was nothing more and nothing less. It was the thin sickly little boy, now grown precocious and somewhat spiteful, who brought the note through the pouring autumn rain to Ellen's doorstep and thus played his tiny, anemic part in the drama of her life.
But May and Ellen were friends, or as near friends as it was possible for any one to be with such a girl as Ellen. May frankly adored her. She admired her straight, slim figure, so different from her own vague softness, and her handsome dark hair. She envied her ability to play the piano. What Ellen said or believed, to May was gospel. And in this there was nothing extraordinary. It was the worship of a weak, good-natured soul for a strong, self-willed one. May was pretty in a plump, blonde, pale fashion. She giggled a great deal and liked the companionship of the Town boys. Ellen did neither of these things. In fact she hated the boys with a kind of savage resentment, as if it were presumptuous of them even to fancy they might interest her. She permitted May to worship her, since there seemed nothing to be done about it; yet the adoration annoyed her at times so profoundly that she wanted to strike the blonde, silly girl, to really hurt her, to destroy her as she might destroy some pale, stupid worm. She hated her because May had those things which would have made her own way easy. But her pride kept her silent. She smiled at May in her cold, aloof fashion and permitted her to continue worship.