The Goldfish | Page 2

or a driver with a vigor and
accuracy that placed me well out of the duffer class.
Yes; I flattered myself that I looked like a boy of thirty, and I felt like
one--except for things to be hereinafter noted--and yet middle-aged
men called me "sir" and waited for me to sit down before doing so
themselves; and my contemporaries were accustomed to inquire
jocularly after my arteries. I was fifty! Another similar stretch of time
and there would be no I. Twenty years more--with ten years of physical
effectiveness if I were lucky! Thirty, and I would be useless to
everybody. Forty--I shuddered. Fifty, I would not be there. My room
would be vacant. Another face would be looking into the mirror.

Unexpectedly on this legitimate festival of my birth a profound
melancholy began to possess my spirit. I had lived. I had succeeded in
the eyes of my fellows and of the general public. I was married to a
charming woman. I had two marriageable daughters and a son who had
already entered on his career as a lawyer. I was prosperous. I had
amassed more than a comfortable fortune. And yet--
These things had all come, with a moderate amount of striving, as a
matter of course. Without them, undoubtedly I should be miserable; but
with them--with reputation, money, comfort, affection--was I really
happy? I was obliged to confess I was not. Some remark in Charles
Reade's Christie Johnstone came into my mind--not accurately, for I
find that I can no longer remember literally--to the effect that the only
happy man is he who, having from nothing achieved money, fame and
power, dies before discovering that they were not worth striving for.
I put to myself the question: Were they worth striving for? Really, I did
not seem to be getting much satisfaction out of them. I began to be
worried. Was not this an attitude of age? Was I not an old man, perhaps,
regardless of my youthful face?
At any rate, it occurred to me sharply, as I had but a few more years of
effective life, did it not behoove me to pause and see, if I could, in what
direction I was going?--to "stop, look and listen"?--to take account of
stock?--to form an idea of just what I was worth physically, mentally
and morally?--to compute my assets and liabilities?--to find out for
myself by a calm and dispassionate examination whether or not I was
spiritually a bankrupt? That was the hideous thought which like a
deathmask suddenly leered at me from behind the arras of my
mind--that I counted for nothing--cared really for nothing! That when I
died I should have been but a hole in the water!
The previous evening I had taken my two distinctly blasé daughters to
see a popular melodrama. The great audience that packed the theater to
the roof went wild, and my young ladies, infected in spite of
themselves with the same enthusiasm, gave evidences of a quite
ordinary variety of excitement; but I felt no thrill. To me the heroine
was but a painted dummy mechanically repeating the lines that some

Jew had written for her as he puffed a reeking cigar in his rear office,
and the villain but a popinjay with a black whisker stuck on with a bit
of pitch. Yet I grinned and clapped to deceive them, and agreed that it
was the most inspiriting performance I had seen in years.
In the last act there was a horserace cleverly devised to produce a
convincing impression of reality. A rear section of the stage was made
to revolve from left to right at such a rate that the horses were obliged
to gallop at their utmost speed in order to avoid being swept behind the
scenes. To enhance the realistic effect the scenery itself was made to
move in the same direction. Thus, amid a whirlwind of excitement and
the wild banging of the orchestra, the scenery flew by, and the horses,
neck and neck, raced across the stage--without progressing a single
foot.
And the thought came to me as I watched them that, after all, this
horserace was very much like the life we all of us were living here in
the city. The scenery was rushing by, time was flying, the band was
playing--while we, like the animals on the stage, were in a breathless
struggle to attain some goal to which we never got any nearer.
Now as I smoked my cigarette after breakfast I asked myself what I had
to show for my fifty years. What goal or goals had I attained? Had
anything happened except that the scenery had gone by? What would
be the result should I stop and go with the scenery? Was the race
profiting me