The Master Rogue: The Confessions of a Croesus
9781465668448
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
I cannot remember the time when I was not absolutely certain that I would be a millionaire. And I had not been a week in the big wholesale dry-goods house in Worth Street in which I made my New York start, before I looked round and said to myself: “I shall be sole proprietor here some day.” Probably clerks dream the same thing every day in every establishment on earth—but I didn’t dream; Iknew. From earliest boyhood I had seen that the millionaire was the only citizen universally envied, honoured, and looked up to. I wanted to be in the first class, and I knew I had only to stick to my ambition and to think of nothing else and to let nothing stand in the way of it. There are so few men capable of forming a definite, serious purpose, and of persisting in it, that those who are find the road almost empty before they have gone far. By the time I was thirty-three years old I had arrived at the place where the crowd is pretty well thinned out. I was what is called a successful man. I was general manager of the dry-goods house at ten thousand a year—a huge salary for those days. I had nearly sixty thousand dollars put by in gilt-edged securities. I had built a valuable reputation for knowing my business and keeping my word. I owned a twenty-five-foot brownstone house in a side street not far from Madison Avenue, and in it I had a comfortable, happy, old-fashioned home. At thirty-two I had gone back to my native town to marry a girl there, one of those women who have ambition beyond gadding all the time and spending every cent their husbands earn, and whoknow how to make home attractive to husband and children. I couldn’t exaggerate the value of my family, especially my wife, to me in those early days. True, I should have gone just as far without them, but they made my life cheerful and comfortable; and, now that sentiment of that narrow kind is all in the past, it’s most agreeable occasionally to look back on those days and sentimentalise a little. That I worked intelligently, as well as hard, is shown by the fact that I was made junior partner at thirty-eight. My partner—there were only two of us—was then an elderly man and the head of the old and prominent New York family of Judson—that is not the real name, of course. Ours was the typical old-fashioned firm, doing business on principles of politeness rather than of strict business. One of its iron-clad customs was that the senior partner should retire at sixty. Mr. Judson’s intention was to retire in about five years, I to become the head of the firm, though with the smaller interest, and one of his grandsons to become the larger partner, though with the lesser control—at least, for a term of years. It was called evidence of great friendship and confidence that Mr. Judson thus “favoured” me. Probably this notion would have been stronger had it been known on what moderate terms and at what an easy price he let me have the fourth interest. No doubt Mr. Judson himself thought he was most generous. But I knew better. There was no sentimentality about my ideas of business, and my experience has been that there isn’t about any one’s when you cut through surface courtesy and cant and get down to the real facts. I knew I had earned every step of my promotion from a clerk; and, while Mr. Judson might have selected some one else as a partner, he wouldn’t have done so, because he needed me. I had seen to that in my sixteen years of service there.
