It must be said that after breakfast--a meal which he found in an Italian restaurant of no great cleanliness or opulence of pretension, and ate with an almost novel relish--Thorpe took somewhat less gloomy views of his position. He still walked eastward, wandering into warehouse and shipping quarters skirting the river, hitherto quite unknown to him, and pursuing in an idle, inconsequent fashion his meditations. He established in his mind the proposition that since an excess of enjoyment was impossible--since one could not derive a great block of happiness from the satisfaction of the ordinary appetites, but at the most could only gather a little from each--the desirable thing was to multiply as much as might be those tastes and whims and fancies which passed for appetites, and thus expand the area of possible gratification.
This seemed very logical indeed, but it did not apply itself to his individual needs with much facility.
What did he want to do that he had not done? It was difficult for him to say. Perhaps it was chandlers' signs and windows about him, and the indefinable seafaring preoccupation suggested by the high-walled, narrow streets, which raised the question of a yacht in his mind.
Did he want a yacht? He could recall having once dwelt with great fondness upon such a project: doubtless it would still be full of attractions for him. He liked the water, and the water liked him--and he was better able now than formerly to understand how luxurious existence can be made in modern private ships. He decided that he would have a yacht--and then perceived that the decision brought no exhilaration. He was no happier than before.
He could decide that he would have anything he chose to name--and it would in no whit lighten his mood.
The yacht might be as grand as High Thorpe, and relatively as spacious and well ordered, but would he not grow as tired of the one as he had of the other?
He stopped short at this blunt self-expression of something he had never admitted to himself. Was he indeed tired of High Thorpe? He had assured his wife to the contrary yesterday. He reiterated the assurance to his own mind now. It was instead that he was tired of himself.
He carried a weariness about with him, which looked at everything with apathetic eyes, and cared for nothing.
Some nameless paralysis had settled upon his capacity for amusement and enjoyment, and atrophied it.
He had had the power to expand his life to the farthest boundaries of rich experience and sensation, and he had deliberately shrunk into a sort of herbaceous nonentity, whom nobody knew or cared about. He might have had London at his beck and call, and yet of all that the metropolis might mean to a millionaire, he had been able to think of nothing better than that it should send old Kervick to him, to help beguile his boredom with dominoes and mess-room stories! Pah! He was disgusted with himself.
Striking out a new course, with the Monument as his guide, he presently came into a part of the City which had a certain familiarity for him. He walked up St. Swithin's Lane, looking at the strange forms of foreign fruit exposed at the shop-doors, and finding in them some fleeting recurrence of the hint that travel was what he needed.
Then he stopped, to look through the railings and open gateway at an enclosure on the left, and the substantial, heavily-respectable group of early Victorian buildings beyond.
Some well-dressed men were standing talking in one of the porches. The stiff yellowish-stucco pilasters of this entrance, and the tall uniformed figure of the porter in the shadow, came into the picture as he observed it;they gave forth a suggestion of satisfied smugness--of orderly but altogether unillumined routine. Nothing could be more commonplace to the eye.
Yet to his imagination, eighteen months before, what mysterious marvels of power had lurked hidden behind those conventional portals! Within those doors, in some inner chamber, sat men whose task it was to direct the movements of the greatest force the world had ever known. They and their cousins in Paris and Frankfort, or wherever they lived, between them wielded a vaster authority than all the Parliaments of the earth.
They could change a government, or crush the aspirations of a whole people, or decide a question of peace or war, by the silent dictum of their little family council.
He remembered now how he had stood on this same spot, and stared with fascinated gaze at this quadrangle of dull houses, and pondered upon what it must feel like to be a Rothschild--and that was only a little over a year ago!
There was no sense of fascination whatever in his present gaze. He found himself regarding instead, with a kind of detached curiosity, the little knot of men in frock-coats and silk-hats who stood talking in the doorway.
It was barely ten o'clock, yet clearly business was proceeding within. One of these persons whom he beheld might be a Rothschild, for aught he knew; at any rate, it was presumable that some of them were on the premises.
He had heard it said that the very head of the house listened to quotations from the tape while he ate his luncheon, and interrupted his conversations with the most important of non-commercial callers, to make or refuse bargains in shares offered by brokers who came in. What impulse lay behind this extraordinary devotion to labour? Toward what conceivable goal could it be striving?
To work hard and risk great things for the possession of a fortune, in order to enjoy it afterward--he could understand how that attracted men. But to possess already the biggest of human fortunes, and still work--that baffled him. He wished he knew some of those men in there, especially if they belonged to the place.
It would be wonderfully interesting to get at the inner point of view of New Court.
