“But why did he tell me that particular lie?”
“I think I know, Morris. He wanted to prove to you that old friends are best. He’d tried to get money from a new friend, me, but that new friend hadn’t come through.”
“Yes, that’s it, Locky. A devil, wasn’t he? Diabolically clever, to no good purpose. A bullet in the brain.”
“Would you object to telling me how much you lent him?”
Morris Homestead hesitated. “If you’ll treat this as confidential— seventy-five thousand dollars.”
The impression Homestead had been giving was that he had lost a sizable chunk of the Homestead millions. “Seventy-five thousand,” said Abraham Lockwood. “Well, that didn’t hurt you much, did it?”
“Not judged as a sum of money, no. Not in relation to what I have left. But I’ve never experienced a total loss before, Locky. When I’ve been the loser I could always salvage something. I hate to lose money, that’s why I never lend money unsecured. Never. Except to Harry, I did. And he proved the wisdom of my lifelong rule. Lend money unsecured, say goodbye to it then and there, all of it.”
“You give away a lot of money.”
“We do our share. But when we give away, let’s say fifty thousand dollars, we know what the money’s to be used for. We take a good long time before we decide, and the beneficiaries have to prove to us that the money isn’t going to be wasted. So in a sense we retain control of the money, even when it’s an outright gift. But if a man came to me for fifty thousand dollars, partly secured, I would refuse him. Unsecured, partly secured, or fully secured, I seldom lend money, because money you lend becomes money that you relinquish control of. The borrower can do what he pleases with your money. And you might find that you’d lent a man money to destroy you. A man could borrow $50,000 from you, then use that money to, say, buy control of a company you were interested in.”
“Has that ever happened to you?”
“Oh, no. It never has, but it could. It never will if I can help it. Money is power, Locky. You know that. But it’s power that can be turned against you, even your money, if you don’t control it. We’ve given money to charity in the form of securities, many times, but we always retain the voting rights. How easy it would be for some trustee to vote my stock against my best interest, and regrettably how many trustees there are that would do just that.”
Abraham Lockwood was full of new admiration and respect for his old friend. It was a pleasant as well as a vaguely chilling surprise to discover that Morris Homestead thought about money; pleasant, because it put them on common ground; chilling, because in the thirty years he had known Morris Homestead, Abraham Lockwood might easily have antagonized Morris in some money matter, and they would not now be where they were, about to get together in a business venture. “You’re a very shrewd man, Morris,” said Abraham Lockwood.
“I have nothing else to do.”
“Nothing else to do? Why, you’re a sporting man, and an art collector. A philanthropist. All those things. A social leader.”
“There are twenty-four hours in a day, Locky. Some of the activities I’m best known for take only a matter of minutes of my time. But uppermost in my mind is always—I’ve never talked about this. Well, I’ve said this much, I might as well finish. Our money, the family money, I’ve never thought of as my own, only my own. It came to me from both sides of my family, you know. When I was thirty-seven years old a very considerable sum was concentrated in my care. My capital was doubled, and it was no mean sum before. Until then you would have been right to say that I didn’t care much for business affairs. I had more than ample means, more than enough for a man of my tastes and my few extravagances. But then I came into a second large inheritance, and the money ceased to be what it had been—the wherewithal to live as I liked to live. All that new money, that extra money, was a responsibility, and put together with the other money, the whole thing became responsibility, if you see what I mean. Until then, it was my fortune, that had come to me from my father. But when I inherited from my mother, the two fortunes becames one, and all my responsibility. Not only did I stop thinking of it as wherewithal, money to pay my bills. But it was suddenly not my money at all, I was only the custodian of it. There were my children to think of. The very least I could do was take care that that money went to them intact. Stewardship, they call it in the Bible.” He smiled. “The first thing I did, the first thing that happened to me, soon after I came into the second inheritance—I became stingy. All my life I’d been given, or bought, the best of everything. I’d been raised, as they say, in the lap of luxury. But overnight I became stingy, and that lasted for a couple of years. Although I was twice as rich as I’d ever been, I didn’t buy a new suit of clothes, a new pair of boots, a new hat, for two years. I went over household bills with a fine-tooth comb. Why was our meat bill so high last month? When did we drink all that wine? That sort of thing. We’d always paid our bills quarterly, but for two years I paid them annually so that I’d have the benefit of that interest. For almost two years I gave no money to any new charity, only charities that I’d been contributing to and that my mother had contributed to in her lifetime. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be thought an easy mark. It was just that I couldn’t bear to spend money.
“Then I began to see what the trouble was. I was afraid of that money. Afraid of money? No. Afraid of the responsibility. Afraid I would do something wrong or foolish. And then I realized that I had been doing something very foolish, if not exactly wrong. In my stingy period I had also been so timid that I hadn’t been investing my income. One of my managers—I have several who manage various things for me—finally came to me and pleaded with me. Invest that cash, he said. Money that’s not promptly reinvested is dead money. Dead. Dead. Dead, he kept repeating. And then he made me realize that instead of accepting my responsibility, I’d been shirking it. He proved to me that my timidity, my caution and stinginess, had cost me several hundred thousand dollars, at least. He knew what I’d been going through. A man named Leon Spruance, a very understanding fellow. ‘Morris,’ he said. He knows me well enough to call me by my first name. Worked for my father. ‘Morris, it’s time you did something constructive with this money.’ And then he showed me that I not only had failed to make proper use of my income from my own point of view, but that I’d been retiring large sums of money from the general welfare of the country. That was some years after Cooke’s failed, but greenbacks were still untrustworthy, and Spruance showed me that I was unpatriotic not to put my cash to work. Unpatriotic, and taking a risk with those greenbacks. Property, that was the thing. Property, not cash. Property, whether it was securities, real estate, mortgages. But property, not cash.
“Ever since then I’ve known what I want to do, and more or less how to do it. Reinvest, reinvest. No risky speculations, but keep putting the money back to work. I wouldn’t go into Nichols Sugar with you, Locky. I can afford not to speculate, but I know you’re not satisfied with what you have, so you must take some chances. Right?”
“Right.”
“When you have as much as you want, the goal you’ve set for yourself, I might be able to let you in on some less speculative things that come our way now and then. But I think I’m correct in assuming that you haven’t quite reached your goal. What is it? Five million?”
“A bull’s eye,” said Abraham Lockwood. His goal until that moment had been three million, but he was m a mood to flatter Morris Homestead.