IN the early morning, long before any of the hotel people had made themselves heard moving about, Thorpe got up.
It was a long time since he had liked himself and his surroundings so little. The bed seemed all right to the eye, and even to the touch, but he had slept very badly in it, none the less. The room was luxuriously furnished, as was the entire suite, but it was all strange and uncomfortable to his senses. The operation of shaving and dressing in solitude produced an oppression of loneliness. He regretted not having brought his man with him for this reason, and then, upon meditation, for other reasons. A person of his position ought always to have a servant with him. The hotel people must have been surprised at his travelling unattended—and the people at High Thorpe must also have thought it strange. It flashed across his mind that no doubt his wife had most of all thought it strange. How would she explain to herself his sudden, precipitate journey to London alone? Might she not quite naturally put an unpleasant construction upon it? It was bad enough to have to remember that they had parted in something like a tiff; he found it much worse to be fancying the suspicions with which she would be turning over his mysterious absence in her mind.
He went downstairs as speedily as possible and, discovering no overt signs of breakfast in the vicinity of the restaurant, passed out and made his way to the Embankment. This had been a favourite walk of his in the old days—but he considered it now with an unsympathetic eye. It seemed a dry and haggard and desolate-looking place by comparison with his former impressions of it. The morning was grey-skied, but full of a hard quality of light, which brought out to the uncompromising uttermost the dilapidated squalor of the Surrey side. The water was low, and from the mud and ooze of the ugly opposite shore, or perhaps from the discoloured stream itself, there proceeded a smell which offended his unaccustomed nostril. A fitful, gusty wind was blowing from the east, and ever and again it gathered dust in eddying swoops from the roadway, and flung it in his face.
He walked on toward the City, without any conscious purpose, and with no very definite reflections. It occurred to him that if his wife did impute to him some unworthy motive in stealing off to London, and made herself unhappy in doing so—that would at least provide the compensation of showing that she cared. The thought, however, upon examination, contained very meagre elements of solace. He could not in the least be sure about any of the workings of her mind. There might be more or less annoyance mixed up this morning with the secret thoughts she had concerning him—or she might not be bothering her head about him at all. This latter contingency had never presented itself so frankly to him before. He looked hard at it, and saw more semblances of probability about it than he liked. It might very well be that she was not thinking about him one way or the other.
A depressing consciousness that practically nobody need think about him pervaded his soul. Who cared what he said or did or felt? The City had forgotten his very existence. In the West End, only here and there some person might chance to remember his name as that of some rich bounder who had married Lady Cressage. Nowhere else in England, save one dull strip of agricultural blankness in a backward home county, was there a human being who knew anything whatever about him. And this was his career! It was for this that he had planned that memorable campaign, and waged that amazing series of fortnightly battles, never missing victory, never failing at any point of the complicated strategy, and crowning it all with a culminating triumph which had been the wonder and admiration of the whole financial world! A few score of menials or interested inferiors bowed to him; he drove some good horses, and was attentively waited upon, and had a never-failing abundance of good things to eat and drink aud smoke. Hardly anything more than that, when you came to think of it—and the passing usufruct of all these things could be enjoyed by any fool who had a ten-pound note in his pocket!
What gross trick had the fates played on him? He had achieved power—and where was that power? What had he done with it? What COULD he do with it? He had an excess of wealth, it was true, but in what way could it command an excess of enjoyment? The very phrase was a paradox, as he dimly perceived. There existed only a narrow margin of advantage in favour of the rich man. He could eat and drink a little more and a little better than the poor man; he could have better clothes, and lie abed later in the morning, and take life easier all round—but only within hard and fast bounds. There was an ascertained limit beyond which the millionaire could no more stuff himself with food and wine than could the beggar. It might be pleasant to take an added hour or two in bed in the morning, but to lie in bed all day would be an infliction. So it ran indefinitely—this thin selvedge of advantage which money could buy—with deprivation on the one side, and surfeit on the other. Candidly, was it not true that more happiness lay in winning the way out of deprivation, than in inventing safeguards against satiety? The poor man succeeding in making himself rich—at numerous stages of the operation there might be made a moral snap-shot of the truly happy man. But not after he had reached the top. Then disintegration began at once. The contrast between what he supposed he could do, and what he finds it possible to do, is too vast to be accepted with equanimity.
It must be said that after breakfast—a meal which he found in an Italian restaurant of no great cleanliness or opulence of pretension, and ate with an almost novel relish—Thorpe took somewhat less gloomy views of his position. He still walked eastward, wandering into warehouse and shipping quarters skirting the river, hitherto quite unknown to him, and pursuing in an idle, inconsequent fashion his meditations. He established in his mind the proposition that since an excess of enjoyment was impossible—since one could not derive a great block of happiness from the satisfaction of the ordinary appetites, but at the most could only gather a little from each—the desirable thing was to multiply as much as might be those tastes and whims and fancies which passed for appetites, and thus expand the area of possible gratification.
This seemed very logical indeed, but it did not apply itself to his individual needs with much facility. What did he want to do that he had not done? It was difficult for him to say. Perhaps it was chandlers' signs and windows about him, and the indefinable seafaring preoccupation suggested by the high-walled, narrow streets, which raised the question of a yacht in his mind. Did he want a yacht? He could recall having once dwelt with great fondness upon such a project: doubtless it would still be full of attractions for him. He liked the water, and the water liked him—and he was better able now than formerly to understand how luxurious existence can be made in modern private ships. He decided that he would have a yacht—and then perceived that the decision brought no exhilaration. He was no happier than before. He could decide that he would have anything he chose to name—and it would in no whit lighten his mood. The yacht might be as grand as High Thorpe, and relatively as spacious and well ordered, but would he not grow as tired of the one as he had of the other?
He stopped short at this blunt self-expression of something he had never admitted to himself. Was he indeed tired of High Thorpe? He had assured his wife to the contrary yesterday. He reiterated the assurance to his own mind now. It was instead that he was tired of himself. He carried a weariness about with him, which looked at everything with apathetic eyes, and cared for nothing. Some nameless paralysis had settled upon his capacity for amusement and enjoyment, and atrophied it. He had had the power to expand his life to the farthest boundaries of rich experience and sensation, and he had deliberately shrunk into a sort of herbaceous nonentity, whom nobody knew or cared about. He might have had London at his beck and call, and yet of all that the metropolis might mean to a millionaire, he had been able to think of nothing better than that it should send old Kervick to him, to help beguile his boredom with dominoes and mess-room stories! Pah! He was disgusted with himself.
Striking out a new course, with the Monument as his guide, he presently came into a part of the City which had a certain familiarity for him. He walked up St. Swithin's Lane, looking at the strange forms of foreign fruit exposed at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed. Then he stopped, to look through the railings and open gateway at an enclosure on the left, and the substantial, heavily-respectable group of early Victorian buildings beyond. Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of this entrance, and the tall uniformed figure of the porter in the shadow, came into the picture as he observed it; they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied smugness—of orderly but altogether unillumined routine. Nothing could be more commonplace to the eye.
Yet to his imagination, eighteen months before, what mysterious marvels of power had lurked hidden behind those conventional portals! Within those doors, in some inner chamber, sat men whose task it was to direct the movements of the greatest force the world had ever known. They and their cousins in Paris and Frankfort, or wherever they lived, between them wielded a vaster authority than all the Parliaments of the earth. They could change a government, or crush the aspirations of a whole people, or decide a question of peace or war, by the silent dictum of their little family council. He remembered now how he had stood on this same spot, and stared with fascinated gaze at this quadrangle of dull houses, and pondered upon what it must feel like to be a Rothschild—and that was only a little over a year ago!
There was no sense of fascination whatever in his present gaze. He found himself regarding instead, with a kind of detached curiosity, the little knot of men in frock-coats and silk-hats who stood talking in the doorway. It was barely ten o'clock, yet clearly business was proceeding within. One of these persons whom he beheld might be a Rothschild, for aught he knew; at any rate, it was presumable that some of them were on the premises. He had heard it said that the very head of the house listened to quotations from the tape while he ate his luncheon, and interrupted his conversations with the most important of non-commercial callers, to make or refuse bargains in shares offered by brokers who came in. What impulse lay behind this extraordinary devotion to labour? Toward what conceivable goal could it be striving?
To work hard and risk great things for the possession of a fortune, in order to enjoy it afterward—he could understand how that attracted men. But to possess already the biggest of human fortunes, and still work—that baffled him. He wished he knew some of those men in there, especially if they belonged to the place. It would be wonderfully interesting to get at the inner point of view of New Court.
A little later, in Colin Semple's office, he sat down to await the coming of that gentleman. “Then he doesn't get here so early nowadays?” he suggested to the head-clerk who, with instant recognition and exaggerated deference, had ushered him into this furthermost private room. It pleased him to assume that prosperity had relaxed the Scotchman's vigilance.
“Oh yes, sir,” the clerk replied. “A bit earlier if anything, as a rule. But I think he is stopping at his solicitors on his way to the City. I hope you are very well, sir.”
“Yes—I'm very fit—thanks,” Thorpe said, listlessly, and the other left him.
Mr. Semple, when at last he arrived, bustled into the room with unaffected gratification at the news he had heard without. “Well, well, Thorpe man!” he cried, and shook hands cordially. “This is fine! If I'd only known you were in town! Why wouldn't you have told me you were coming? I'd never have kept you waiting.”
Thorpe laughed wearily. “I hardly knew I was in town myself. I only ran up last night. I thought it would amuse me to have a look round—but things seem as dull as ditchwater.”
“Oh no,” said Semple, “the autumn is opening verra well indeed. There are more new companies, and a better public subscription all round, than for any first week of October I remember. Westralians appear bad on the face of things, it's true—but don't believe all you hear of them. There's more than the suspicion of a 'rig' there. Besides, you haven't a penny in them.”
“I wasn't thinking of that,” Thorpe told him, with comprehensive vagueness. “Well, I suppose you're still coining money,” he observed, after a pause.
“Keeping along—keeping along,” the broker replied, cheerfully. “I canna complain.” Thorpe looked at him with a meditative frown. “Well, what are you going to do with it, after you've got it?” he demanded, almost with sharpness.
The Scotchman, after a surprised instant, smiled. “Oh, I'll just keep my hands on it,” he assured him, lightly.
“That isn't what I mean,” Thorpe said, groping after what he did mean, with sullen tenacity, among his thoughts. His large, heavy face exhibited a depressed gravity which attracted the other's attention.
“What's the matter?” Semple asked quickly. “Has anything gone wrong with you?”
Thorpe slowly shook his head. “What better off do you think you'll be with six figures than you are with five?” he pursued, with dogmatic insistence.
Semple shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to have grown much brighter and gayer of mood in this past twelvemonth. Apparently he was somewhat stouter, and certainly there was a mellowed softening of his sharp glance and shrewd smile. It was evident that his friend's mood somewhat nonplussed him, but his good-humour was unflagging.
“It's the way we're taught at school,” he hazarded, genially. “In all the arithmetics six beats five, and seven beats six.”
“They're wrong,” Thorpe declared, and then consented to laugh in a grudging, dogged way at his friend's facial confession of puzzlement. “What I mean is—what's the good of piling up money, while you can't pile up the enjoyments it will buy? What will a million give you, that the fifth of it, or the tenth of it, won't give you just as well?”
“Aye,” said Semple, with a gleam of comprehension in his glance. “So you've come to that frame of mind, have you? Why does a man go on and shoot five hundred pheasants, when he can eat only one?”
“Oh, if you like the mere making of money, I've nothing more to say,” Thorpe responded, with a touch of resentment. “I've always thought of you as a man like myself, who wanted to make his pile and then enjoy himself.”
The Scotchman laughed joyously. “Enjoy myself! Like you!” he cried. “Man, you're as doleful as a mute at a laird's funeral! What's come over you? I know what it is. You go and take a course of German waters——”
“Oh, that be damned!” Thorpe objected, gloomily. “I tell you I'm all right. Only—only—God! I've a great notion to go and get drunk.”
Colin Semple viewed his companion with a more sympathetic expression. “I'm sorry you're so hipped,” he said, in gentle tones. “It can't be more than some passing whimsy. You're in no real trouble, are you?—no family trouble?”
Thorpe shook his head. “The whole thing is rot!” he affirmed, enigmatically.
“What whole thing?” The broker perched on the edge of his desk, and with patient philosophy took him up. “Do you mean eighty thousand a year is rot? That depends upon the man who has it.”
“I know that well enough,” broke in the other, heavily. “That's what I'm kicking about. I'm no good!”
Semple, looking attentively down upon him, pursed his lips in reflection. “That's not the case,” he observed with argumentative calmness. “You're a great deal of good. I'm not so sure that what you've been trying to do is any good, though. Come!—I read you like large print. You've set out to live the life of a rich country squire—and it hasn't come off. It couldn't come off! I never believed it would. You haven't the taste for it inbred in your bones. You haven't the thousand little habits and interests that they take in with their mother's milk, and that make such a life possible. When you look at a hedge, you don't think of it as something to worry live animals out of. When you see one of your labourers, you don't care who his father was, or which dairymaid his uncle ought to have married, if he had wanted to get a certain cottage. You don't want to know the name of everybody whose roof you can see; much less could you remember them, and talk about them, and listen to gossip about them, year after year. It isn't a passion in your blood to ride to hounds, and to shoot, and all that. It doesn't come to you by tradition—and you haven't the vacancy of mind which might be a substitute for tradition. What are you doing in the country, then? Just eating too much, and sitting about, and getting fat and stupid. If you want the truth, there it is for you.”
Thorpe, putting out his lips judicially, inclined upon reflection to the view that this was the truth. “That's all right, as far as it goes,” he assented, with hesitation. “But what the hell else is there?”
The little Scotchman had grown too interested in his diagnosis to drop it in an incomplete state. “A year ago,” he went on, “you had won your victories like a veritable Napoleon. You had everything in your own hands; Napoleon himself was not more the master of what he saw about him than you were. And then what did you do? You voluntarily retired yourself to your Elba. It wasn't that you were beaten and driven there by others; you went of your own accord. Have you ever thought, Thorpe, of this? Napoleon was the greatest man of his age—one of the greatest men of all ages—not only in war but in a hundred other ways. He spent the last six years of his life at St. Helena—in excellent health and with companions that he talked freely to—and in all the extraordinarily copious reports of his conversations there, we don't get a single sentence worth repeating. If you read it, you'll see he talked like a dull, ordinary body. The greatness had entirely evaporated from him, the moment he was put on an island where he had nothing to do.”
“Yes-s,” said Thorpe, thoughtfully. He accepted the application without any qualms about the splendour of the comparison it rested upon. He had done the great things, just as Semple said, and there was no room for false modesty about them in his mind. “The trouble is,” he began, “that I did what I had always thought I wanted to do most. I was quite certain in my mind that that was what I wanted. And if we say now that I was wrong—if we admit that that wasn't what I really wanted—why then, God knows what it is I DO want. I'll be hanged if I do!”
“Come back to the City,” Semple told him. “That's where you belong.”
“No—no!” Thorpe spoke with emphasis. “That's where you're all off. I don't belong in the City at all. I hate the whole outfit. What the devil amusement would it be to me to take other men's money away from them? I'd be wanting all the while to give it back to them. And certainly I wouldn't get any fun out of their taking my money away from me. Besides, it doesn't entertain me. I've no taste at all for it. I never look at a financial paper now. I could no more interest myself in all that stuff again than I could fly. That's the hell of it—to be interested in anything.”
“Go in for politics,” the other suggested, with less warmth.
“Yes, I know,” Thorpe commented, with a lingering tone. “Perhaps I ought to think more about that. By the way, what's Plowden doing? I've lost all track of him.”
“Abroad somewhere, I fancy,” Semple replied. His manner exhibited a profound indifference. “When his mother died he came into something—I don't know how much. I don't think I've seen him since—and that must have been six months and more ago.”
“Yes. I heard about it at the time,” the other said. “It must be about that. His sister and brother—the young Plowdens—they're coming to us at the end of the week, I believe. You didn't hit it off particularly with Plowden, eh?”
Semple emitted a contemptuous little laugh. “I did not quarrel with him—if you mean that,” he said, “but even to please you, Thorpe, I couldn't bring myself to put my back into the job of making money for him. He was treated fairly—even generously, d'ye mind. I should think, all told, he had some thirty thousand pounds for his shares, and that's a hundred times as much as I had a pleasure in seeing him get. Each man can wear his own parasites, but it's a task for him to stand another man's. I shook your Lord Plowden off, when the chance came.”
“THAT'S all right,” Thorpe assured him, easily. “I never told you that he was any good. I merely felt like giving him a leg up—because really at the start he was of use to me. I did owe him something....It was at his house that I met my wife.”
“Aye,” said Semple, with dispassionate brevity.
WHEN he had parted with Semple, at a corner where the busy broker, who had walked out with him, obviously fidgeted to get away, Thorpe could think of no one else in the City whom he desired to see. A call upon his bankers would, he knew, be made an occasion of extremely pleasant courtesy by those affable people, but upon reflection it seemed scarcely worth the trouble.
He was in a mood for indolent sauntering, and he made the long stretch of the Holborn thoroughfare in a leisurely fashion, turning off when the whim seized him into odd courts and alley-ways to see what they were like. After luncheon, he continued his ramble, passing at last from St. Giles, through avenues which had not existed in the London of his boyhood, to the neighbourhood of the Dials. Here also the landmarks seemed all changed, but there was still enough ostentatious squalor and disorder to identify the district. He observed it and its inhabitants with a certain new curiosity. A notable alteration for the better had come over his spirits. It might be the champagne at luncheon, or it might be the mere operation of a frank talk with Semple, that had dissipated his gloom. At all events it was gone—and he strolled along in quite placid contentment, taking in the panorama of London's more intimate life with the interest of a Londoner who has obtained a fresh country eye.
He who had seen most of the world, and not cared much about the spectacle, found himself now consciously enjoying observation as he had not supposed it possible to do. He surrendered himself to the experience with a novel sense of having found something worth while—and found it, moreover, under his very nose. In some dull, meaningless fashion he had always known this part of London, and been familiar with its external aspects. Now suddenly he perceived that the power had come to him of seeing it all in a different way. The objects he beheld, inanimate and otherwise, had specific new meanings for him. His mind was stirred pleasurably by the things they said to him.
He looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed; at the barrows of the costers and hawkers crowding up the side-streets; at the coarse-haired, bare-headed girls and women standing about in their shawls and big white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or about the thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts; at the grimy, shuffling figures of their men-folk, against the accustomed background of the public-house corner, with its half-open door, and its fly-blown theatre-bills in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts, sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the near view as some survival from the age of mammoths, which pushed gingerly, ploddingly, their tufted feet over the greasy stones; at foul interiors where through the blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse; at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human appeal to him—faces blurred with drink, faces pallid with under-feeding, faces worn into masks by the tension of trouble, faces sweetened by resignation, faces aglow with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it were, into the pulsing heart of something which had scarcely seemed alive to him before.
Eventually, he found himself halting at the door of his sister's book-shop. A new boy stood guard over the stock exposed on the shelf and stands outside, and he looked stonily at the great man; it was evident that he was as far from suspecting his greatness as his relationship. It pleased Thorpe for a little to take up one book after another, and pretend to read from it, and force the boy to watch him hard. He had almost the temptation to covertly slip a volume into his pocket, and see what the lad would do. It was remarkable, he reflected with satisfaction—this new capacity within him to find drama in trifles.
There floated into his mind the recollection of some absurd squabble he had had with his sister about the sign overhead. He stepped back a few paces and looked up at it. There were the old words—“Thorpe, Bookseller”—right enough, but they seemed to stand forth with a novel prominence. Upon a second glance, he saw that the board had been repainted. At this he laughed aloud. The details of the episode came back to him now. For some reason, or no reason at all—he could not now imagine what on earth could have prompted him—he had last spring caused his sister to be informed of his wish that her own name, Dabney, should be substituted for that of Thorpe on her sign. It was to Julia that he had confided this mission, and it was Julia who, in a round-about way, had disclosed to him presently her mother's deep resolution to do nothing of the sort. He laughed again at the added defiance that this refurbishing of the old sign expressed, and still was grinning broadly as he entered the shop and pushed his way along to the rear.
She stood beside her desk as she seemed to have stood ever since he could remember her—tall, placid, dull-eyed, self-sufficient, exhaling as it were a kind of stubborn yet competent listlessness. Her long, mannish countenance expressed an undoubted interest in his presence, when she recognized him, but he had no clear perception whether it was pleased or otherwise. In their infrequent latter-day encounters he had dropped the habit of kissing her, and there was certainly no hint in her manner of expecting, much less inviting, its renewal now—but upon a sudden impulse he drew her to him with an arm flung round her gaunt waist, smacked his lips with effusion upon her cheek.
Her surprise, as she withdrew herself somewhat forcefully from his embrace, was plain enough. “Well!” she exclaimed vaguely, and then looked at him. “You're getting fatter.”
“No I'm not,” he rejoined, with the earnestness belonging to an important topic. “People think I am—but it's merely the looseness of these clothes. There's really no difference since I was here last.”
The glance they exchanged was so full of the tacit comment that this last visit was a long time ago, that Thorpe put it into words. “Let's see—that was just before Christmas, wasn't it?” he said.
“Something like that,” she responded. “You were going to get married in a week or two, I remember, and THAT was in January, wasn't it? I was taking stock, I know.”
He nodded in turn. The thought that his only sister recalled his marriage merely as a date, like a royal anniversary or a bank-holiday, and held herself implacably aloof from all contact with his domestic life, annoyed him afresh. “You're an awful goat, not to come near us,” he felt impelled, in brotherly frankness, to tell her.
She put out her lips, and wagged her head a little, in a gesture which it flashed across him his own mirror might often have recorded. “I thought that was all settled and done with long ago,” she said, moodily.
“Oh, I won't worry you with it, Lou,” he observed, with reassuring kindness of tone. “I never felt so much like being nice to you in my life.”
She seemed surprised at this, too, and regarded him with a heavy new fixity of gaze. No verbal comment, apparently, occurred to her.
“Julia and Alfred all right?” he queried, cheerfully.
“I daresay,” she made brief answer.
“But they write to you, don't they?”
“SHE does—sometimes. They seem to be doing themselves very well, from what she says.”
“She'd write oftener, if you'd answer her letters,” he told her, in tones of confidential reproach.
“Oh, I don't write letters unless I've got something to say,” she answered, as if the explanation were ample.
The young people were domiciled for the time being at Dusseldorf, where Alfred had thought he would most like to begin his Continental student-career, and where Julia, upon the more or less colourable pretext of learning the language, might enjoy the mingled freedom and occupation of a home of her own. They had taken a house for the summer and autumn, and would do the same in Dresden or Munich, later on, for the winter.
“What I would really have liked,” Thorpe confided to his sister now, “was to have had them both live with me. They would have been as welcome as the day is long. I could see, of course, in Alfred's case, that if he's set on being an artist, he ought to study abroad. Even the best English artists, he says, do that at the beginning. So it was all right for him to go. But Julia—it was different with her—I was rather keen about her staying. My wife was just as keen as I was. She took the greatest fancy to Julia from the very start—and so far as I could see, Julia liked her all right. In fact, I thought Julia would want to stay—but somehow she didn't.”
“She always spoke very highly of your wife,” Mrs. Dabney affirmed with judicial fairness. “I think she does like her very much.”
“Well then what did she want to hyke off to live among those Dutchmen for, when one of the best houses in England was open to her?” Thorpe demanded.
“You mustn't ask me,” her mother responded. Her tone seemed to carry the suggestion that by silence she could best protect her daughter's interests.
“I don't believe you know any more about it than I do,” was his impulsive comment.
“I daresay not,” she replied, with indifference. “Probably she didn't fancy living in so big a house—although heaven knows her ideas are big enough about most things.”
“Did she say so?” Thorpe asked abruptly.
The widow shook her head with dispassionate candour. “She didn't say anything to me about it, one way or the other. I formed my own impressions—that's all. It's a free country. Everybody can form their impressions.”
“I wish you'd tell me what you really think,” Thorpe urged her, mildly persuasive. “You know how fond I am of Julia, and how little I want to do her an injustice.”
“Oh, she wouldn't feel THAT way,” Louisa observed, vaguely. “If you ask me plain, I think it was dull for her.”
“Well,” said Thorpe, upon reflection, “I shouldn't be surprised if it was. I hadn't thought of that. But still—why she and my wife could be company for each other.”
“You talk as if life was merely a long railway journey,” she told him, in an unexpected flight of metaphor. “Two women cooped up in a lonesome country house may be a little less lonely than one of them by herself would be—but not much. It's none of my business—but how your wife must hate it!”
He laughed easily. “Ah, that's where you're wrong,” he said. “She doesn't care about anything but gardening. That's her hobby. She's crazy about it. We've laid out more in new greenhouses alone, not counting the plants, than would rebuild this building. I'm not sure the heating apparatus wouldn't come to that, alone. And then the plants! What do you think of six and eight guineas for a single root? Those are the amaryllises—and if you come to orchids, you can pay hundreds if you like. Well, that's her passion. That's what she really loves.”
“That's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying of loneliness,” Louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign of dissent from her brother she went on. “Oh, I know what I'm talking about. I have three or four customers—ladies in the country, and one of them is a lady of title, too—and they order gardening books and other books through me, and when they get up to town, once a year or so, they come here and they talk to me about it. And there isn't one of them that at the bottom of her heart doesn't hate it. They'd rather dodge busses at Charing Cross corner all day long, than raise flowers as big as cheeses, if they had their own way. But they don't have their own way, and they must have something to occupy themselves with—and they take to gardening. I daresay I'd even do it myself if I had to live in the country, which thank God I don't!”
“That's because you don't know anything about the country,” he told her, but the retort, even while it justified itself, had a hollow sound in his own ears. “All you know outside of London is Margate.”
“I went to Yarmouth and Lowestoft this summer,” she informed him, crushingly.
Somehow he lacked the heart to laugh. “I know what you mean, Lou,” he said, with an affectionate attempt at placation. “I suppose there's a good deal in what you say. It is dull, out there at my place, if you have too much of it. Perhaps that's a good hint about my wife. It never occurred to me, but it may be so. But the deuce of it is, what else is there to do? We tried a house in London, during the Season——”
“Yes, I saw in the papers you were here,” she said impassively, in comment upon his embarrassed pause.
“I didn't look you up, because I didn't think you wanted much to see me”—he explained with a certain awkwardness—“but bye-gones are all bye-gones. We took a town house, but we didn't like it. It was one endless procession of stupid and tiresome calls and dinners and parties; we got awfully sick of it, and swore we wouldn't try it again. Well there you are, don't you see? It's stupid in Hertfordshire, and it's stupid here. Of course one can travel abroad, but that's no good for more than a few months. Of course it would be different if I had something to do. I tell you God's truth, Lou—sometimes I feel as if I was really happier when I was a poor man. I know it's all rot—I really wasn't—but sometimes it SEEMS as if I was.”
She contemplated him with a leaden kind of gaze. “Didn't it ever occur to you to do some good with your money?” she said, with slow bluntness. Then, as if fearing a possible misconception, she added more rapidly: “I don't mean among your own family. We're a clannish people, we Thorpes; we'd always help our own flesh and blood, even if we kicked them while we were doing it—but I mean outside, in the world at large.”
“What have I got to do with the world at large? I didn't make it; I'm not responsible for it.” He muttered the phrases lightly enough, but a certain fatuity in them seemed to attract his attention when he heard their sound. “I've given between five and six thousand pounds to London hospitals within the present year,” he added, straightening himself. “I wonder you didn't see it. It was in all the papers.”
“Hospitals!”
It was impossible to exaggerate the scorn which her voice imported into the word. He looked at her with unfeigned surprise, and then took in the impression that she was upon a subject which exceptionally interested her. Certainly the display of something approaching animation in her glance and manner was abnormal.
“I said 'do some GOOD with your money,'” she reminded him, still with a vibration of feeling in her tone. “You must live in the country, if you think London hospitals are deserving objects. They couldn't fool Londoners on that point, not if they had got the Prince to go on his hands and knees. And you give a few big cheques to them,” she went on, meditatively, “and you never ask how they're managed, or what rings are running them for their own benefit, or how your money is spent—and you think you've done a noble, philanthropic thing! Oh no—I wasn't talking about humbug charity. I was talking about doing some genuine good in the world.”
He put his leg over the high stool, and pushed his hat back with a smile. “All right,” he said, genially. “What do you propose?”
“I don't propose anything,” she told him, after a moment's hesitation. “You must work that out for yourself. What might seem important to me might not interest you at all—and if you weren't interested you wouldn't do anything. But this I do say to you, Joel—and I've said it to myself every day for this last year or more, and had you in mind all the time, too—if I had made a great fortune, and I sat about in purple and fine linen doing nothing but amuse myself in idleness and selfishness, letting my riches accumulate and multiply themselves without being of use to anybody, I should be ASHAMED to look my fellow-creatures in the face! You were born here. You know what London slums are like. You know what Clare Market was like—it's bad enough still—and what the Seven Dials and Drury Lane and a dozen other places round here are like to this day. That's only within a stone's throw. Have you seen Charles Booth's figures about the London poor? Of course you haven't—and it doesn't matter. You KNOW what they are like. But you don't care. The misery and ignorance and filth and hopelessness of two or three hundred thousand people doesn't interest you. You sit upon your money-bags and smile. If you want the truth, I'm ashamed to have you for a brother!”
“Well, I'm damned!” was Thorpe's delayed and puzzled comment upon this outburst. He looked long at his sister, in blank astonishment. “Since when have you been taken this way?” he asked at last, mechanically jocular.
“That's all right,” she declared with defensive inconsequence. “It's the way I feel. It's the way I've felt from the beginning.”
He was plainly surprised out of his equanimity by this unlooked-for demonstration on his sister's part. He got off the stool and walked about in the little cleared space round the desk. When he spoke, it was to utter something which he could trace to no mental process of which he had been conscious.
“How do you know that that isn't what I've felt too—from the beginning?” he demanded of her, almost with truculence. “You say I sit on my money-bags and smile—you abuse me with doing no good with my money—how do you know I haven't been studying the subject all this while, and making my plans, and getting ready to act? You never did believe in me!”
She sniffed at him. “I don't believe in you now, at all events,” she said, bluntly.
He assumed the expression of a misunderstood man. “Why, this very day”—he began, and again was aware that thoughts were coming up, ready-shaped to his tongue, which were quite strangers to his brain—“this whole day I've been going inch by inch over the very ground you mention; I've been on foot since morning, seeing all the corners and alleys of that whole district for myself, watching the people and the things they buy and the way they live—and thinking out my plans for doing something. I don't claim any credit for it. It seems to me no more than what a man in my position ought to do. But I own that to come in, actually tired out from a tramp like that, and get blown-up by one's own sister for selfishness and heartlessness and miserliness and all the rest of it—I must say, that's a bit rum.”
Louisa did not wince under this reproach as she might have been expected to do, nor was there any perceptible amelioration in the heavy frown with which she continued to regard him. But her words, uttered after some consideration, came in a tone of voice which revealed a desire to avoid offense. “It won't matter to you, your getting blown-up by me, if you're really occupying your mind with that sort of thing. You're too used to it for that.”
He would have liked a less cautious acceptance of his assurances than this—but after all, one did not look to Louisa for enthusiasms. The depth of feeling she had disclosed on this subject of London's poor still astonished him, but principally now because of its unlikely source. If she had been notoriously of an altruistic and free-handed disposition, he could have understood it. But she had been always the hard, dry, unemotional one; by comparison with her, he felt himself to be a volatile and even sentimental person. If she had such views as these, it became clear to him that his own views were even much advanced.
“It's a tremendous subject,” he said, with loose largeness of manner. “Only a man who works hard at it can realize how complicated it is. The only way is to start with the understanding that something is going to be done. No matter how many difficulties there are in the way, SOMETHING'S GOING TO BE DONE! If a strong man starts out with that, why then he can fight his way through, and push the difficulties aside or bend them to suit his purpose, and accomplish something.”
Mrs. Dabney, listening to this, found nothing in it to quarrel with—yet somehow remained, if not skeptical, then passively unconvinced. “What are your plans?” she asked him.
“Oh, it's too soon to formulate anything,” he told her, with prepared readiness. “It isn't a thing to rush into in a hurry, with half baked theories and limited information. Great results, permanent results, are never obtained that way.”
“I hope it isn't any Peabody model-dwelling thing.”
“Oh, nothing like it in the least,” he assured her, and made a mental note to find out what it was she had referred to.
“The Lord-Rowton houses are better, they say,” she went on, “but it seems to me that the real thing is that there shouldn't be all this immense number of people with only fourpence or fivepence in their pocket. That's where the real mischief lies.”
He nodded comprehendingly, but hesitated over further words. Then something occurred to him. “Look here!” he said. “If you're as keen about all this, are you game to give up this footling old shop, and devote your time to carrying out my plans, when I've licked 'em into shape?”
She began shaking her head, but then something seemed also to occur to her. “It'll be time enough to settle that when we get to it, won't it?” she observed.
“No—you've got to promise me now,” he told her.
“Well that I won't!” she answered, roundly.
“You'd see the whole—the whole scheme come to nothing, would you?”—he scolded at her—“rather than abate a jot of your confounded mulishness.”
“Aha!” she commented, with a certain alertness of perception shining through the stolidity of her mien. “I knew you were humbugging! If you'd meant what you said, you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing because I won't do this or that. I ought to have known better. I'm always a goose when I believe what you tell me.”
A certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. “No you're not, Lou,” he replied, coaxingly. “I really mean it all—every word of it—and more. It only occurred to me that it would all go better, if you helped. Can't you understand how I should feel that?”
She seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions of sincerity, but she resisted all attempts to extract any promise. “I don't believe in crossing a bridge till I get to it,” she declared, when, on the point of his departure, he last raised the question, and it had to be left at that. He took with him some small books she had tied in a parcel, and told him to read. She had spoken so confidently of their illuminating value, that he found himself quite committed to their perusal—and almost to their endorsement. He had thought during the day of running down to Newmarket, for the Cesarewitch was to be run on the morrow, and someone had told him that that was worth seeing. By the time he reached his hotel, however, an entirely new project had possessed his mind. He packed his bag, and took the next train for home.