You've set out to live the life of a rich country squire--and it hasn't come off. It couldn't come off! Inever 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.
