A LONG WAY
Lord Evelyn Urquhart dined with his nephew on the last evening in
February. It was a characteristic Urquhart dinner-party; the guests were
mostly cheerful, well-bred young people of high spirits and of the
worldly station that is not much concerned with any aspect of money but
the spending of it. High living, plain thinking, agreeable manners and
personal appearance, plenty of humour, enough ability to make a success
of the business of living and not enough to agitate the brain, a light
tread along a familiar and well-laid road, and a serene blindness to
side-tracks and alleys not familiar nor well-laid and to those that
walked thereon--these were the characteristics of the pleasant people
who frequented Denis Urquhart's pleasant house in Park Lane.
Lucy was among them, small and pale, and rather silent, and intensely
alive. She, of course, was a native not of Park Lane but of Chelsea; and
the people who had frequented her home there were of a different sort.
They had had, mostly, a different kind of brain, a kind more restless and
troublesome and untidy, and a different type of wit, more pungent and
ironic, less well-fed and hilarious, and they were less well-dressed and
agreeable to look at, and had (perhaps) higher thoughts (though how shall
one measure height?) and ate (certainly) plainer food, for lack of
richer. These were the people Lucy knew. Her father himself had been of
these. She now found her tent pitched among the prosperous; and the study
of them touched her wide gaze with a new, pondering look. Denis hadn't
any use for cranks. None of his set were socialists, vegetarians,
Quakers, geniuses, anarchists, drunkards, poets, anti-breakfasters, or
anti-hatters; none of them, in fine, the sort of person Lucy was used to.
They never pawned their watches or walked down Bond Street in Norfolk
coats. They had, no doubt, their hobbies; but they were suitable,
well-bred hobbies, that did not obtrude vulgarly on other people's
notice. Peter had once said that if he were a plutocrat he would begin
to dream dreams. Lucy supposed that the seemingly undreaming people
who were Denis's friends were not rich enough; they hadn't reached
plutocracy, where romance resides, but merely prosperity, which has fewer
possibilities. Lucy began in these days to ponder on the exceeding evil
of Socialism, which the devil has put it into certain men's hearts to
desire. For, thought Lucy, sweep away the romantic rich, sweep away
the dreaming destitute, and what have you left? The prosperous; the
comfortable; the serenely satisfied; the sanely reasonable. Dives, with
his purple and fine linen, his sublime outlook over a world he may
possess at a touch, goes to his own place; Lazarus, with his wallet for
crusts and his place among the dogs and his sharp wonder at the world's
black heart, is gathered to his fathers: there remain the sanitary
dwellings of the comfortable, the monotonous external adequacy that
touches no man's inner needs, the lifeless rigour of a superintended
well-being. Decidedly, thought Lucy, siding with the Holy Roman Church,
a scheme of the devil's. Denis and his friends also thought it was rot.
So no doubt it was. Denis belonged to the Conservative party. Lucy
thought parties funny things, and laughed. Though she had of late taken
to wandering far into seas of thought, so that her wide forehead was
often puckered as she sat silent, she still laughed at the world. Perhaps
the more one thinks about it the more one laughs; the height and depth of
its humour are certainly unfathomable.
On this last night of February, Lord Evelyn, when the other guests had
gone, put his unsteady white hand under Lucy's chin and raised her small
pale face and looked at it out of his near-sighted, scrutinising eyes,
and said:
"Humph. You're thinner."
Lucy's eyes laughed up at him.
"Am I? I suppose I'm growing old."
"You're worrying. What's it about?" asked Lord Evelyn.
They were in the library. Lord Evelyn and Denis sat by the fire in
leather chairs and smoked, and Lucy sat on a hassock between them, her
chin in her hands.
She was silent for a moment. Then she looked up at Denis, who was reading
Punch, and said, "I've had a letter from Peggy Margerison this morning."
Denis gave a sound between a grunt and a chuckle. The grunt element was
presumably for Peggy Margerison, the chuckle for Punch.
Lord Evelyn, tapping his eye-glass on the arm of his chair, said, "Well?
Well?" impatiently, nervously.
Lucy drew a note from her pocket (she was never pocketless) and spread it
on her knees. It was a long letter on crinkly paper, written in a large,
dashing, sprawling hand, full of curls, generosities, extravagances.
"She says," said Lucy, "(Please listen, Denis,) that--that they want
money."
"I somehow thought that would be what she said," Denis murmured, still
half preoccupied. "I'm sure she's right."
"A woman who writes a hand like that," put in Lord Evelyn, "will always
spend more than she has. A hole in the purse; a hole in the purse."
"She says," went on Lucy, looking through the letter with wrinkled
forehead, "that they're all very hard-up indeed. Of course, I knew that;
I can see it whenever I go there; only Peter will never take more than
silly little clothes and things for Thomas. And now Peggy says they're in
great straits; Thomas is going to teethe or something, and wants better
milk, all from one cow, and they're all awfully in debt."
"I should fancy that was chronic," remarked Denis, turning to Essence of
Parliament.
"A hole in the purse, a hole in the purse," muttered Lord Evelyn, tapping
with his eye-glass.
"Peggy says that Peter won't ask for help himself, but he's let her,
it seems. And their boarders are nearly all gone, one of them quite
suddenly, without paying a sixpence for all the time he was there."
"I suppose he didn't think he'd had sixpence worth," said Denis. "He was
probably right."
"And Thomas is still very delicate after his bronchitis, and Peter's got
a bad cold on the chest and wants more cough-mixture than they can afford
to buy; and they owe money to the butcher and the fishmonger and the
baker and the doctor and the tailor, and Hilary's lost his latest job and
isn't earning anything at all. So I suppose Peter is keeping the family."
"Scamps; scamps all," muttered Lord Evelyn. "Deserve all they get, and
more. People like the Margerisons an't worth helping. They'd best go
under at once; best go under. Swindlers and scamps, the lot of them.
I daresay the woman's stories are half lies; of course, they want money,
but it's probably only to spend on nonsense. Why can't they keep
themselves, like decent people?"
"Oh," said Lucy, dismissing that as absurd, "they can't. Of course they
can't. They never could ... Denis."
"Lucy." Denis absently put out a hand to meet hers.
"How much shall we give them, Denis?"
Denis dropped Punch onto the floor, and lay back with his hands clasped
behind his fair head. Lucy, looking at his up-turned, foreshortened,
cleanly-modelled face, thought with half of her mind what a perfect
thing it was. Sudden aspects of Denis's beauty sometimes struck her
breathless, as they struck Peter.
"The Margerison family wants money, I understand," said Denis, who hadn't
been listening attentively.
"Very badly, Denis."
Denis nodded. "They always do, of course.... Well, is it our business to
fill the bottomless Margerison purse?"
Lucy sat very still, looking up at him with wide eyes.
"Our business? I don't know. But, of course, if Peter and Peter's people
want anything, we shall give it them."
"But I gather it's not Peter that asks? Peter never asks, does he?"
"No," said Lucy. "Peter never asks. Not even for Thomas."
"Well, I should be inclined to trust Peter rather than his charming
family. Peter's name seems to be dragged into that letter a good deal,
but it doesn't follow that Peter sanctioned it. I'm not going to annoy
Peter by sending him what he's never asked for. I should think probably
Peter knows they can get on all right as they are, and that this letter
must be taken with a good deal of salt. I expect the egregious Hilary
only wants the money for some new enterprise of his own, that will fail,
as usual. Anyhow, I really don't fancy having any further dealings with
Hilary Margerison or his wife; I've had enough there. He's the most
impossible cad and swindler."
"Swindlers all, swindlers all," said Lord Evelyn, getting up and pacing
up and down the room, his hands behind his back.
Lucy, after a moment, said simply, "I shall give them something, Denis.
I must. Don't you see? Whoever it was, I would. Because anyhow, they're
poor and we're rich, and they want things we can give them. It's so
obvious that when people ask one for things they must have them if one
can give them. And when it's Peter who's in want, and Peter's baby, and
Peter's people ..."
"You see," said Denis, "I doubt about Peter or the baby benefiting by
anything we give them. It will all go down the drain where Hilary
Margerison's money flows away. Give it to Peter or give it to his
relations, it'll come to the same thing. Peter gives them every
penny he gets, I don't doubt. You know what Peter is; he's as weak as
a baby in his step-brother's hands; he lets himself be dragged into the
most disgraceful transactions because he can't say no."
Lucy looked up at him, open-eyed, pale, quiet.
"You think of Peter like that?" she said, and her voice trembled a
little.
Lord Evelyn stopped in his walk and listened.
"I'm sorry, Lucy," said Denis, throwing away his cigar-end. "I don't want
to say anything against Peter to you. But ... one must judge by facts,
you know. I don't mean that Peter means any harm; but, as I say, he's
weak. I'm fond of Peter, you know; I wish to goodness he wouldn't play
the fool as he does, mixing himself up with his precious relations and
helping them in their idiotic schemes for swindling money out of
people--but there it is; he will do it; and as long as he does it I don't
feel moved to have much to do with him. I should send him money if he
asked me personally, of course, even if I knew it would only go into his
brother's pocket; but I'm not going to do it at his sister-in-law's
command. If you ask me whether I feel inclined to help Hilary Margerison
and his wife, my answer is simply no I don't. They're merely scum; and
why should one have anything to do with scum?"
Lucy looked at him silently for a while. Then she said slowly, "I see.
Yes, I see you wouldn't want to, of course. They _are_ scum. And you're
not. But I am, I think. I belong to the same sort of people they do. I
could swindle and cheat too, I expect. It's the people at the bottom who
do that. They're my relations, you see, not yours."
"My dear Lucy, only Peter is your relation."
"Peter and Thomas. And I count the rest too, because they're Peter's. So
let me do all that is to be done, Denis. Don't you bother. I'll take them
money."
"Let them alone, Lucy. You'd better, you know. What's the good?"
"I don't know," said Lucy. "None, I expect. None at all; because Peter
wouldn't take it from me without you."
She came a little nearer him, and put her hand on his knee like a wistful
puppy.
"Denis," she said, "I wish _you_ would. They know already that I care.
But I wish _you_ would. Peter'd like you to. He'd be more pleased than if
I did; much more. Peter cares for you and me and Thomas extraordinarily
much; and you can't compare carings, but the way he cares for you is the
most wonderful of all, I believe. If you went to him ... if you showed
him you cared ... he'd take it from you. He wouldn't take it from me
without you, because he'd suspect you weren't wanting him to have it.
Denis, won't you go to Peter, as you used to do long ago, before he was
in disgrace and poor, before he was scum? Can't you, Denis?"
Denis had coloured faintly. He always did when people were emotional.
Lucy seldom was; she had a delicious morning freshness that was like the
cool wind on the hills in spring.
"Peter never comes here, Lucy, does he. If he wanted to see me, I suppose
he would."
Lucy was looking strangely at the beautiful face with the faint flush
rising in it. She apparently thought no reply necessary to his words, but
said again, "_Can't_ you, Denis? Or is it too hard, too much bother, too
much stepping out of the way?"
"Oh, it's not the bother, of course. But ... but I really don't see
anything to be gained by it, that's the fact.... Our meetings, on the
last few occasions when we have met, haven't been particularly
comfortable. I don't think Peter likes them any better than I do.... One
can't force intercourse, Lucy; if it doesn't run easily and smoothly, it
had better be left alone. There have been things between us, between
Peter's family and my family, that can't be forgotten or put aside by
either of us, I suppose; and I don't think Peter wants to be reminded of
them by seeing me any more than I do by seeing him. It's--it's so beastly
uncomfortable, you know," he added boyishly, ruffling up his hair with
his hand; and concluded didactically, "People _must_ drift apart if their
ways lie in quite different spheres; it's inevitable."
Denis, who had a boyish reticence, had expanded and explained himself
more than usual.
Lucy's hand dropped from his knee on to her own.
"I suppose it _is_ inevitable," she said, beneath her breath. "I
suppose the distance is too great. 'Tis such a long, long way from
here to there ... such a long, long way.... Good-night, Denis; I'm
going to bed."
She got up slowly, cramped and tired and pale. It was not till she was
on her feet that she saw Lord Evelyn sitting in the background, and
remembered his presence. She had forgotten him; she had been thinking
only of Denis and Peter and herself. She didn't know if he had been
listening much; he sat quietly, nursing his knee, saying nothing.
But when Lucy had gone he said to Denis, "You're right, Denis; you're
utterly right, not to have anything to do with those swindlers," and, as
if in a sudden fresh anger against them, he began again his quick, uneven
pacing down the room.
"False through and through," he muttered. "False through and through."
Lucy's face, as she had risen to her feet and said "Good night, Uncle
Evelyn," had been so like Peter's as he had last seen it, when Peter had
passed him in the doorway at Astleys, that it had taken his breath away.