The Duke did not go about in society, in the ordinary sense of the word, and he would not have come to High Thorpe to meet a large party. He was here as a kinsman and friend of his hostess for a quiet week; and the few other guests fitted readily enough into the picture of a family gathering.
The spirit of domesticity had indeed so obviously descended upon the little group in the drawing-room, an hour or so after dinner, that Thorpe felt it quite the natural thing to put his arm through that of the Duke and lead him off to his personal smoking-room. He even published his intention by audibly bidding the Hon. Balder Plowden to remain with the ladies.
When the two had seated themselves in soft, low easy-chairs, and the host had noted with pleasure that his guest had no effeminate qualms in the matter of large rich cigars, a brief silence ensued.
"I am very anxious to get your views on a certain subject,"Thorpe was inspired to begin, bluntly pushing preliminaries aside. "If a man of fortune wishes to do genuine good with his money, here in England, how should he best go about it?"The Duke looked up at his questioner, with a sudden flash of surprise on his dark, mobile face. He hesitated a moment, and smiled a little. "You ask of me the sum of human wisdom," he said. "It is the hardest of all problems;no one solves it."
Thorpe nodded his big head comprehendingly. "That's all the more reason why it ought to be solved," he declared, with slow emphasis.
The other expressed by look and tone an augmented consciousness of the unexpected. "I did not know,"he remarked cautiously, "that this was a matter in which you were specially concerned. It pleases me very much to hear it.
Even if the solution does not come, it is well to have as many as possible turning the problem over in their minds.""Oh, but I'm going to solve it!" Thorpe told him, with round confidence.
The Duke pulled contemplatively at his cigar for a little.
"Do not think me a cynic," he began at last.
"You are a man of affairs; you have made your own way;you should be even more free from illusions than I am.
If you tell me that these good things can be done, I am the last one to dispute you. But I have seen near at hand experiments of exceptional importance, on a very grand scale, and the result does not encourage me.
I come to doubt indeed if money has any such power in these affairs as we think it has--for that matter, if it has any power at all. The shifting of money can always disorganize what is going on at the moment--change it about and alter it in many ways--but its effect is only temporary. As soon as the pressure is released, the human atoms rearrange themselves as they were before, and the old conditions return. I think the only force which really makes any permanent difference is character--and yet about even that I am not sure. The best man I have ever known--and in many respects the ablest--devoted untold energy and labour, and much money, too, to the service of a few thousand people in Somerset, on land of his own, upon a theory wonderfully elaborated and worked out.
Perhaps you have heard of Emanuel Torr and his colony, his System?"Thorpe shook his head.
"He had worked tremendously for years at it. He fell ill and went away--and in a day all the results of his labours and outlay were flat on the ground. The property is mine now, and it is farmed and managed again in the ordinary way, and really the people there seem already to have forgotten that they had a prophet among them.
The marvelous character of the man--you look in vain for any sign of an impress that it left upon them.
I never go there. I cannot bear those people. I have sometimes the feeling that if it were feasible I should like to oppress them in some way--to hurt them.""Oh! 'the people' are hogs, right enough," Thorpe commented genially, "but they ARE 'the people,' and they're the only tools we've got to work with to make the world go round.""But if you leave the world alone," objected the Duke, "it goes round of itself. And if you don't leave it alone, it goes round just the same, without any reference whatever to your exertions. Some few men are always cleverer or noisier or more restless than the others, and their activity produces certain deviations and peculiarities in their generation. The record of these--generally a very faulty and foolish record--we call history.
We say of these movements in the past that some of them were good and some were bad. Our sons very likely will differ totally from us about which were good and which were bad;quite possibly, in turn, their sons may agree with us.
I do not see that it matters. We cannot treat anything as final--except that the world goes round. We appear out of the darkness at one edge of it; we are carried across and pitched off into the darkness at the other edge of it.
We are certain about nothing else."
"Except that some of us have to pay for our ride, and others don't," put in Thorpe. The tone in which he spoke made his meaning so clear that his Grace sat up.
"Ah, you think we do not pay?" he queried, his countenance brightening with the animation of debate. "My dear sir, we pay more than anyone else. Our fares are graduated, just as our death-duties are. No doubt there are some idle and stupid, thick-skinned rich fellows, who escape the ticket-collector. But for each of them there are a thousand idle poor fellows who do the same. You, for example, are a man of large wealth. I, for my sins, carry upon my back the burden of a prodigious fortune. Could we not go out now, and walk down the road to your nearest village, and find in the pub. there a dozen day-labourers happier than we are? Why--it is Saturday night. Then I will not say a dozen, but as many as the tap will hold. It is not the beer alone that makes them happy. Do not think that.
It is the ability to rest untroubled, the sense that till Monday they have no more responsibility than a tree-toad.
