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 Iwas 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 Imean 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.
