when he had parted with semple, at a corner where the busy broker, who had walked out with him, obviously fidgeted to get away, thorpe could think of no one else in the city whom he desired to see. a call upon his bankers would, he knew, be made an occasion of extremely pleasant courtesy by those affable people, but upon reflection it seemed scarcely worth the trouble.
he was in a mood for indolent sauntering, and he made the long stretch of the holborn thoroughfare in a leisurely fashion, turning off when the whim seized him into odd courts and alley-ways to see what they were like. after luncheon, he continued his ramble, passing at last from st. giles, through avenues which had not existed in the london of his boyhood, to the neighbourhood of the dials. here also the landmarks seemed all changed, but there was still enough ostentatious squalor and disorder to identify the district. he observed it and its inhabitants with a certain new curiosity. a notable alteration for the better had come over his spirits. it might be the champagne at luncheon, or it might be the mere operation of a frank talk with semple, that had dissipated his gloom. at all events it was gone—and he strolled along in quite placid contentment, taking in the panorama of london's more intimate life with the interest of a londoner who has obtained a fresh country eye.
he who had seen most of the world, and not cared much about the spectacle, found himself now consciously enjoying observation as he had not supposed it possible to do. he surrendered himself to the experience with a novel sense of having found something worth while—and found it, moreover, under his very nose. in some dull, meaningless fashion he had always known this part of london, and been familiar with its external aspects. now suddenly he perceived that the power had come to him of seeing it all in a different way. the objects he beheld, inanimate and otherwise, had specific new meanings for him. his mind was stirred pleasurably by the things they said to him.
he looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed; at the barrows of the costers and hawkers crowding up the side-streets; at the coarse-haired, bare-headed girls and women standing about in their shawls and big white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or about the thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts; at the grimy, shuffling figures of their men-folk, against the accustomed background of the public-house corner, with its half-open door, and its fly-blown theatre-bills in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts, sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the near view as some survival from the age of mammoths, which pushed gingerly, ploddingly, their tufted feet over the greasy stones; at foul interiors where through the blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse; at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human appeal to him—faces blurred with drink, faces pallid with under-feeding, faces worn into masks by the tension of trouble, faces sweetened by resignation, faces aglow with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it were, into the pulsing heart of something which had scarcely seemed alive to him before.
eventually, he found himself halting at the door of his sister's book-shop. a new boy stood guard over the stock exposed on the shelf and stands outside, and he looked stonily at the great man; it was evident that he was as far from suspecting his greatness as his relationship. it pleased thorpe for a little to take up one book after another, and pretend to read from it, and force the boy to watch him hard. he had almost the temptation to covertly slip a volume into his pocket, and see what the lad would do. it was remarkable, he reflected with satisfaction—this new capacity within him to find drama in trifles.
there floated into his mind the recollection of some absurd squabble he had had with his sister about the sign overhead. he stepped back a few paces and looked up at it. there were the old words—“thorpe, bookseller”—right enough, but they seemed to stand forth with a novel prominence. upon a second glance, he saw that the board had been repainted. at this he laughed aloud. the details of the episode came back to him now. for some reason, or no reason at all—he could not now imagine what on earth could have prompted him—he had last spring caused his sister to be informed of his wish that her own name, dabney, should be substituted for that of thorpe on her sign. it was to julia that he had confided this mission, and it was julia who, in a round-about way, had disclosed to him presently her mother's deep resolution to do nothing of the sort. he laughed again at the added defiance that this refurbishing of the old sign expressed, and still was grinning broadly as he entered the shop and pushed his way along to the rear.
she stood beside her desk as she seemed to have stood ever since he could remember her—tall, placid, dull-eyed, self-sufficient, exhaling as it were a kind of stubborn yet competent listlessness. her long, mannish countenance expressed an undoubted interest in his presence, when she recognized him, but he had no clear perception whether it was pleased or otherwise. in their infrequent latter-day encounters he had dropped the habit of kissing her, and there was certainly no hint in her manner of expecting, much less inviting, its renewal now—but upon a sudden impulse he drew her to him with an arm flung round her gaunt waist, smacked his lips with effusion upon her cheek.
her surprise, as she withdrew herself somewhat forcefully from his embrace, was plain enough. “well!” she exclaimed vaguely, and then looked at him. “you're getting fatter.”
“no i'm not,” he rejoined, with the earnestness belonging to an important topic. “people think i am—but it's merely the looseness of these clothes. there's really no difference since i was here last.”
the glance they exchanged was so full of the tacit comment that this last visit was a long time ago, that thorpe put it into words. “let's see—that was just before christmas, wasn't it?” he said.
“something like that,” she responded. “you were going to get married in a week or two, i remember, and that was in january, wasn't it? i was taking stock, i know.”
he nodded in turn. the thought that his only sister recalled his marriage merely as a date, like a royal anniversary or a bank-holiday, and held herself implacably aloof from all contact with his domestic life, annoyed him afresh. “you're an awful goat, not to come near us,” he felt impelled, in brotherly frankness, to tell her.
she put out her lips, and wagged her head a little, in a gesture which it flashed across him his own mirror might often have recorded. “i thought that was all settled and done with long ago,” she said, moodily.
“oh, i won't worry you with it, lou,” he observed, with reassuring kindness of tone. “i never felt so much like being nice to you in my life.”
she seemed surprised at this, too, and regarded him with a heavy new fixity of gaze. no verbal comment, apparently, occurred to her.
“julia and alfred all right?” he queried, cheerfully.
“i daresay,” she made brief answer.
“but they write to you, don't they?”
“she does—sometimes. they seem to be doing themselves very well, from what she says.”
“she'd write oftener, if you'd answer her letters,” he told her, in tones of confidential reproach.
“oh, i don't write letters unless i've got something to say,” she answered, as if the explanation were ample.
the young people were domiciled for the time being at dusseldorf, where alfred had thought he would most like to begin his continental student-career, and where julia, upon the more or less colourable pretext of learning the language, might enjoy the mingled freedom and occupation of a home of her own. they had taken a house for the summer and autumn, and would do the same in dresden or munich, later on, for the winter.
“what i would really have liked,” thorpe confided to his sister now, “was to have had them both live with me. they would have been as welcome as the day is long. i could see, of course, in alfred's case, that if he's set on being an artist, he ought to study abroad. even the best english artists, he says, do that at the beginning. so it was all right for him to go. but julia—it was different with her—i was rather keen about her staying. my wife was just as keen as i was. she took the greatest fancy to julia from the very start—and so far as i could see, julia liked her all right. in fact, i thought julia would want to stay—but somehow she didn't.”
“she always spoke very highly of your wife,” mrs. dabney affirmed with judicial fairness. “i think she does like her very much.”
“well then what did she want to hyke off to live among those dutchmen for, when one of the best houses in england was open to her?” thorpe demanded.
“you mustn't ask me,” her mother responded. her tone seemed to carry the suggestion that by silence she could best protect her daughter's interests.
“i don't believe you know any more about it than i do,” was his impulsive comment.
“i daresay not,” she replied, with indifference. “probably she didn't fancy living in so big a house—although heaven knows her ideas are big enough about most things.”
“did she say so?” thorpe asked abruptly.
the widow shook her head with dispassionate candour. “she didn't say anything to me about it, one way or the other. i formed my own impressions—that's all. it's a free country. everybody can form their impressions.”
“i wish you'd tell me what you really think,” thorpe urged her, mildly persuasive. “you know how fond i am of julia, and how little i want to do her an injustice.”
“oh, she wouldn't feel that way,” louisa observed, vaguely. “if you ask me plain, i think it was dull for her.”
“well,” said thorpe, upon reflection, “i shouldn't be surprised if it was. i hadn't thought of that. but still—why she and my wife could be company for each other.”
“you talk as if life was merely a long railway journey,” she told him, in an unexpected flight of metaphor. “two women cooped up in a lonesome country house may be a little less lonely than one of them by herself would be—but not much. it's none of my business—but how your wife must hate it!”
he laughed easily. “ah, that's where you're wrong,” he said. “she doesn't care about anything but gardening. that's her hobby. she's crazy about it. we've laid out more in new greenhouses alone, not counting the plants, than would rebuild this building. i'm not sure the heating apparatus wouldn't come to that, alone. and then the plants! what do you think of six and eight guineas for a single root? those are the amaryllises—and if you come to orchids, you can pay hundreds if you like. well, that's her passion. that's what she really loves.”
“that's what she seizes upon to keep her from just dying of loneliness,” louisa retorted, obstinately, and at a sign of dissent from her brother she went on. “oh, i know what i'm talking about. i have three or four customers—ladies in the country, and one of them is a lady of title, too—and they order gardening books and other books through me, and when they get up to town, once a year or so, they come here and they talk to me about it. and there isn't one of them that at the bottom of her heart doesn't hate it. 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 i was 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 i mean 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.
“how do you know that that isn't what i've felt too—from the beginning?” he demanded of her, almost with truculence. “you say i sit on my money-bags and smile—you abuse me with doing no good with my money—how do you know i haven't been studying the subject all this while, and making my plans, and getting ready to act? you never did believe in me!”
she sniffed at him. “i don't believe in you now, at all events,” she said, bluntly.
he assumed the expression of a misunderstood man. “why, this very day”—he began, and again was aware that thoughts were coming up, ready-shaped to his tongue, which were quite strangers to his brain—“this whole day i've been going inch by inch over the very ground you mention; i've been on foot since morning, seeing all the corners and alleys of that whole district for myself, watching the people and the things they buy and the way they live—and thinking out my plans for doing something. i don't claim any credit for it. it seems to me no more than what a man in my position ought to do. but i own that to come in, actually tired out from a tramp like that, and get blown-up by one's own sister for selfishness and heartlessness and miserliness and all the rest of it—i must say, that's a bit rum.”
louisa did not wince under this reproach as she might have been expected to do, nor was there any perceptible amelioration in the heavy frown with which she continued to regard him. but her words, uttered after some consideration, came in a tone of voice which revealed a desire to avoid offense. “it won't matter to you, your getting blown-up by me, if you're really occupying your mind with that sort of thing. you're too used to it for that.”
he would have liked a less cautious acceptance of his assurances than this—but after all, one did not look to louisa for enthusiasms. the depth of feeling she had disclosed on this subject of london's poor still astonished him, but principally now because of its unlikely source. if she had been notoriously of an altruistic and free-handed disposition, he could have understood it. but she had been always the hard, dry, unemotional one; by comparison with her, he felt himself to be a volatile and even sentimental person. if she had such views as these, it became clear to him that his own views were even much advanced.
“it's a tremendous subject,” he said, with loose largeness of manner. “only a man who works hard at it can realize how complicated it is. the only way is to start with the understanding that something is going to be done. no matter how many difficulties there are in the way, something's going to be done! if a strong man starts out with that, why then he can fight his way through, and push the difficulties aside or bend them to suit his purpose, and accomplish something.”
mrs. dabney, listening to this, found nothing in it to quarrel with—yet somehow remained, if not skeptical, then passively unconvinced. “what are your plans?” she asked him.
“oh, it's too soon to formulate anything,” he told her, with prepared readiness. “it isn't a thing to rush into in a hurry, with half baked theories and limited information. great results, permanent results, are never obtained that way.”
“i hope it isn't any peabody model-dwelling thing.”
“oh, nothing like it in the least,” he assured her, and made a mental note to find out what it was she had referred to.
“the lord-rowton houses are better, they say,” she went on, “but it seems to me that the real thing is that there shouldn't be all this immense number of people with only fourpence or fivepence in their pocket. that's where the real mischief lies.”
he nodded comprehendingly, but hesitated over further words. then something occurred to him. “look here!” he said. “if you're as keen about all this, are you game to give up this footling old shop, and devote your time to carrying out my plans, when i've licked 'em into shape?”
she began shaking her head, but then something seemed also to occur to her. “it'll be time enough to settle that when we get to it, won't it?” she observed.
“no—you've got to promise me now,” he told her.
“well that i won't!” she answered, roundly.
“you'd see the whole—the whole scheme come to nothing, would you?”—he scolded at her—“rather than abate a jot of your confounded mulishness.”
“aha!” she commented, with a certain alertness of perception shining through the stolidity of her mien. “i knew you were humbugging! if you'd meant what you said, you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing because i won't do this or that. i ought to have known better. i'm always a goose when i believe what you tell me.”
a certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. “no you're not, lou,” he replied, coaxingly. “i really mean it all—every word of it—and more. it only occurred to me that it would all go better, if you helped. can't you understand how i should feel that?”
she seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions of sincerity, but she resisted all attempts to extract any promise. “i don't believe in crossing a bridge till i get to it,” she declared, when, on the point of his departure, he last raised the question, and it had to be left at that. he took with him some small books she had tied in a parcel, and told him to read. she had spoken so confidently of their illuminating value, that he found himself quite committed to their perusal—and almost to their endorsement. he had thought during the day of running down to newmarket, for the cesarewitch was to be run on the morrow, and someone had told him that that was worth seeing. by the time he reached his hotel, however, an entirely new project had possessed his mind. he packed his bag, and took the next train for home.