“We are both going to stay with Mr. Manley,” Lady Varens went on. “I had just let my villa and was going to friends in Rome when David’s letter came; but I didn’t want to lose any time by bringing him round all that way so I came here and Mr. Manley wants us both to go to him. We must settle finally with the Prices whether we take Aldwych back next year or whether I go out with David to the Argentine. He has a charming house there.”
“Oh,” said Teresa, “and which do you think you will do?” Her heart seemed to have stood still for a year, waiting for the answer, before it came.
“I don’t know at all, but old Bessie, David’s nurse, who writes to me sometimes from the village, says they are all longing for him to come back. The Prices seem to have put everybody’s back up. None of the outside people will stay if he buys the place and he makes all sorts of mischief with the bailiff and the farmers, imagining he is being robbed of sixpence somewhere or other. He says that if he buys it he is going to get an American expert over to run it all on some new system by which everything is organised and checked automatically, and the output, as they call it, of every grain and cow and rabbit and man and boy on the place is ascertained, and if it doesn’t work out at the maximum the animal is destroyed and the man is sacked.”
“Oh, David must come back,” said Teresa. “It sounds too horrible.”
“Very well then, dear, tell him so,” said Lady Varens, drinking her tea peacefully without a hint of intention in her voice.
“I can’t think why the man in the Bible was told to give all his money to the poor if it wasn’t the right thing to do,” said Teresa. She put her chin on her hands and puckered her brow over some inner problem.
“I think it was probably suggested more for his benefit than for that of the poor,” said Lady Varens. “It is the giving that matters much more than who gets the stuff.”
“Do you really think so?” said Teresa.
“Yes, personally I do. People can only be governed by the qualities that are in them, and a state can’t make them equal, because it is made up itself of inequalities. It can never be made into an automatic machine; it is alive—made of live things. I can’t understand how even decent socialists can expect it to act as if it were a machine. Of course one knows what bad communists are after. They are just criminal tyrants who want to be beasts in control instead of controlled beasts. But the good ones make me desperate. It is so impossible to imagine anything but disaster coming from their innocent idiocy. They seem to go on blindly hoping that human intelligence can devise a scheme that is proof against human intelligence. They are dear things but I do wish they would take their hobby horses to some place where the bad boys couldn’t harness them to the cart that will land us all in the ditch. They think they can out-theorise history and all forms of religion.”
Two little tears rolled at last down Teresa’s cheeks and were lost in the cup with which she tried in vain to hide them. Their salt taste symbolised to her the bitterness of her failure.