CHAPTER 62
I decided that I owed it to my dead parents to obtain a detailed understanding of the house and property that I had until then left for my uncle to look after. My uncle presented himself as living a hectic life. He bustled endlessly between the town house and the country estate, spending perhaps one in three nights in town. Forever on the move, he made a great fuss about how busy he was. I had always taken him at his word, although I sometimes cynically suspected that he was following the modern fashion to appear busy. But now, with my newfound desire to find a time to talk through the question of property, I could only interpret this endless rush as an excuse to avoid me. I never had a chance to pin him down.
A friend from my middle-school days told me that my uncle kept a mistress in town. Knowing the sort of man he was, I had no reason to doubt that he might have a mistress, but I had no memory of such talk while my father was alive, so the rumor startled me. The friend also passed on to me various other rumors that were circulating about my uncle. Among them was the story that his business had been generally thought to be going under, but in the last two or three years it had suddenly revived and prospered. This tale heightened my own suspicions.
I finally managed to open negotiations with my uncle. Perhaps the word negotiations is a little harsh, but as we talked, the tenor of our relations sank to such a low level that only this word can express what took place. My uncle persisted in treating me as a child, while I viewed him through the jaundiced eyes of suspicion. Under these circumstances, the chances of a peaceful resolution were nil.
Unfortunately, my need to press on with my story prevents me from describing the details of those negotiations for you. To tell the truth, there is another, more important matter I have yet to speak of, one that I have with difficulty restrained my pen from writing all this time. I have lost forever the chance to talk quietly with you, and now I am also forced to omit some of what I would like to write—not only because I lack the skill to express myself on the page but also because time is precious to me.
You may remember I once said to you that no one is inherently bad by nature, and I warned you to be careful because most honest folk will suddenly turn bad when circumstances prompt it. You warned me I was becoming excited and upset, and you asked me what kind of circumstances provoked good people to become wicked. When I answered with the single word money, you looked dissatisfied. I well remember that look. I can reveal to you now that I was thinking at that moment of my uncle. I was thinking of him with hatred, as an example of an ordinary, decent person who will suddenly turn bad when he sees money, and I was thinking of the fact that no one in this world is to be trusted.
Probably my reply dissatisfied you because you were bent on seeing things in terms of philosophical questions, and you found my answer trite. But I spoke from experience. I was upset at the time, I agree. But I believe that a commonplace idea stated with passionate conviction carries more living truth than some novel observation expressed with cool indifference. It is the force of blood that drives the body, after all. Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects.