there is a country house (as the english phrase goes) in the county of hereford, at a little distance from the river wye; the people who live in this house are very rich. they are not rich precariously, nor with doubts here and there, nor for the time, but in a solid manner; that is, they believe their riches to be eternal. their income springs from very many places, of which they have not an idea; it is spent in a straightforward manner, which they fully comprehend. it is spent in relieving the incompetence—the economic incompetence—of all those about them; in causing wine to come into england from ay, vosne, barsac, and (though they do not know it) from the rougher soil of algiers. it also causes (does the way in which they exercise what only pedants call their potential demand) tea to be grown in ceylon for their servants and in china for themselves, horses to be bred in ireland, and wheat to be sown and most laboriously garnered in western canada, ohio, india, south russia, the argentine, and other places. also, were you to seek out every economic cause and effect, you would find missionaries living where no man can live, save by artifice, and living upon artificial supply in a strange climate[46] by the strength of this potential demand rooted in the meadows of the welsh march.
then, also, if you were to follow the places whence their wealth is derived, it would interest you very much. you would see one man earning so much in the docks and handing on a saturday evening so much of his wages into their fund. you would see another clipping off cloth in manchester and offering it to them, and another plucking cotton in egypt and exchanging it, at their order, against something which they, not he, needed. altogether you would see the whole world paying tithe, and a stream flowing into hereford as into a reservoir, and a stream flowing out again by many channels.
these good people were at dinner; upon the 5th of october, to be accurate. parliament had not yet met, but football had begun, and there was shooting, also a little riding upon horses, though this is not to-day a popular amusement, and few will practise it. as for the women, one wrote and the other read—which was a fair division of labour; but the woman who wrote was not read by the woman who read, for the woman who wrote (and she was the daughter) preferred to write upon problems. but her mother, who did the reading, preferred what is called fiction, and mr. meredith was a favourite author of hers; but, indeed, she would read all fiction so only that it was in her native tongue.
now the men of the family were very different from this, and the things they liked were hunting of[47] a particular kind (which i shall not here describe), shooting of a similar kind, their country, and politics, which last interest it would have been abominable to deny them, for the two men, both father and son, were actively engaged in the making of laws, each in a different place; the laws they made (it is true in the company of, and with the advice of, others) are to be found in what is called the statute book, which neither you nor i have ever seen.
all these four, the father, the son, the mother, and the daughter, in different ways intelligent, but all four very kind and good, were at dinner upon this day of which i speak, the 5th of october, but they were not alone. they had to meet them several people who were staying in the house. the one was a satirist who had been born in lithuania. he was poor and proud and had learnt the english tongue, and he wrote books upon the pride of race and upon battling with the sea. he was an envious sort of man, but as he never had nor ever would have any home or lineage, england was much the same to him as any other place. he hated all our nations with an equal hatred.
another guest was a little man called copp. he was a lord; his title was not copp. only his name was copp, and even this name he hid, for old father copp, who had married a miss billings in the eighteenth century, had had a son john billings, since the billings were richer than the copps. and john billings had married mary steyning, who was the[48] squire’s daughter, and they had had a son john steyning, since john was by this time the hereditary name. now john steyning was in the parliament that worked for the regent, and a short one it was, and he became plain lord steyning, and then he and his son and his grandson married in all sorts of ways, and the title now was bramber, but the family name was steyning, and the real name was copp. so much for copp. he was as lively as a grig, he had travelled everywhere, and he knew about ten languages. he was peculiarly brave, and as a boy he had stoutly refused to go to the university.
then also there was the doctor, who was absurdly nervous and could ill afford to dine out, and there was a young man who was in parliament with the son of the family; this young man had been to oxford with him also, not at cambridge; he was a lawyer, and he was making three thousand pounds a year, but he said he was making six when he talked to his wife and mother, and most serious men believed that he was making ten. the women of these were also present with them, saving always that copp, who was called steyning, and whose title was bramber, was not married.
these then, sitting round the table, came to talk of something after all not remote from the interest of their lives. they talked of socialists, and it all began by copp (who called himself steyning, while his title was bramber) saying that his uncle gwilliam[49] had just missed being a socialist because he was too stupid.
the head of the family, who had most imperfectly caught the pronouncement of copp as to his relative, said, “yes, bramber; got to be pretty stupid to be that!” by which the head of the house meant that one had to be pretty stupid to be a socialist, whereas what copp had said was that his uncle had been too stupid to be a socialist. but it was all one.
the son of the house said that there were lots of socialists going about, and the young lawyer friend said there were a lot of people who said they were socialists but who were not socialists.
the daughter of the house said that it was very interesting the way in which socialism went up and down. she said: “look at the fabians!” the mother of the house looked all round, smiling genially, for she thought that her daughter was speaking of the name of a book.
the doctor said: “it’s all a pose, those sort of people.” but which sort he did not say, so the daughter of the house said sharply: “which sort of people?” for she loved to cross-examine struggling professional men, and the doctor got quite red, and said; “oh, all that sort of people!”
the young lawyer, who was quick to see a difficulty, helped him out by saying, “he means people like bensington!”
the doctor, who had never heard of bensington,[50] nodded eagerly, and the head of the house, frowning a healthy frown, said, “what, not john bensington, old william bensington’s son?”
“yes,” said the young lawyer. “that’s the kind of man he means,” and the doctor nodded again.
his enemy was dropping farther and farther behind him with every stride, but she made a brilliant rally. “do you mean john bensington?” she said. the doctor, in some alarm, and with his mouth full, nodded vigorously for the third time. the head of the house, still frowning, broke into all this with a solid roar: “i don’t believe a word of it.” he sat leaning back again, not relaxing his frown and trying to connect the son of his old friend with a gang of treasonable robbers. he remembered jock’s marriage—for it was a bad one—and a silly book of verses he had written, and how keen he had been against his father’s selling the bit of land along the coast, because it was bound to go up. he could fit jock in with many unpleasant things, but he couldn’t fit him in with the very definite picture that rose in his mind whenever he heard the word “socialist.” there was something adventurous and violent and lean about the word—something like a wolf. there was nothing of all that in jock. so much thought matured at last into living words, and the head of the house said, “why, he’s on the county council.”
the daughter of the house turned to the lawyer[51] and said, “how would you define a socialist, mr. layton?”
mr. layton defined a socialist, and his silent wife, who was sitting opposite, looked at him happily on account of the power of his mind. the lithuanian, who had said nothing all this while, but had been glancing with eyes as bright as a bird’s, now at one speaker, now at another, nerved himself to intervene. then there passed over his little soul the vivid pictures of things he had seen and known: the dens in riga, the pain, the flight upon a danish ship, the assumption first of german, then of english nationality, the easy gullibility of the large-hearted wealthy people of this land. he remembered his own confidence, his own unwavering talent, and his contempt of, and hatred for, other men. he could have trusted himself to speak, for he was in full command of his little soul, and there was not a trace of anything in his accent definitely foreign. but the virtue and the folly of these happy luxurious people about him pleased him too much and pleased him wickedly.
he went on tasting them in silence, until the daughter of the house, who felt awe for him alone of all those present—much more awe than she did for her strong and good father—said to him, almost with reverence, that he should take to writing now of the meadows of england, since he had so wonderfully described her battles at sea. and the lithuanian was ready to turn the talk upon letters,[52] his bright eyes darting all the while. the old man, the head of the house, sighed and muttered: “jock was no socialist.” that was the one thing that he retained; ... and meanwhile wealth continued to pour in from all corners of the world into his house, and to pour out again over the four seas, doing his will, and no one in the world, not even the chief victims of that wealth, hated it as the little lithuanian did, and no one in the world—not even of them who had seen most of that wealth—hungered bestially for it as did he.
