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. Does the coming of Sunday make that difference to you or to me? When night comes, does it mean to us that we are to sleep off into oblivion all we have done that day, and begin life afresh next morning? No-o! We are the tired people; the load is never lifted from our backs. Ah, do we not pay indeed!”
“Oh-ho!” ejaculated Thorpe. He had been listening with growing astonishment to the other's confession. He was still surprised as he spoke, but a note of satisfaction mounted into his voice as he went on. “You are unhappy, too! You are a young man, in excellent health; you have the wife you want; you understand good tobacco; you have a son. That is a great deal—but my God! think what else you've got. You're the Duke of Glastonbury—one of the oldest titles in England. You're one of the richest men in the country—the richest in the old peerage, at any rate, I'm told. And YOU'RE not happy!”
The other smiled. “Ah, the terms and forms survive,” he said, with a kind of pedagogic affability, “after the substance has disappeared. The nobleman, the prince, was a great person in the times when he monopolized wealth. It enabled him to monopolize almost everything else that was pleasant or superb. He had the arts and the books and the musicians and the silks and velvets, and the bath-tubs—everything that made existence gorgeous—all to himself. He had war to amuse himself with, and the seven deadly sins. The barriers are down now. Everything which used to be exclusively the nobleman's is now within everybody's reach, including the sins. And it is not only that others have levelled up to him; they have levelled him down. He cannot dress now more expensively than other people. Gambling used to be recognized as one of his normal relaxations, but now, the higher his rank, the more sharply he is scolded for it. Naturally he does not know what to do with himself. As an institution, he descends from a period when the only imaginable use for wealth was to be magnificent with it. But now in this business age, where the recognized use of wealth is to make more wealth, he is so much out of place that he has even forgotten how to be magnificent. There are some illustrated articles in one of the magazines, giving photographs of the great historic country-houses of England. You should see the pictures of the interiors. The furniture and decorations are precisely what a Brixton dressmaker would buy, if she suddenly came into some money.”
“All the same,” Thorpe stuck to his point, “you are not happy.”
The Duke frowned faintly, as if at the other's persistency. Then he shrugged his shoulders and answered in a lighter tone. “It hardly amounts to that, I think. I confess that there are alleviations to my lot. In the opinion of the world I am one of its most fortunate citizens—and it is not for me to say that the world is altogether wrong. The chief point is—I don't know if you will quite follow me—there are limits to what position and fortune can give a man. And so easily they may deprive him of pleasures which poorer men enjoy! I may be wrong, but it seems impossible to me that any rich man who has acres of gardens and vineries and glass can get up the same affection for it all that the cottager will have for his little flower-plot, that he tends with his own hands. One seems outside the realities of life—a mere spectator at the show.”