The Market-Place

CHAPTER XXIII

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.