The Quest of the Simple Life | Page 6

for
making any question of whether he was getting the best or most out of
life, Arrowsmith was as incapable as a kitten.
The virtues of Arrowsmith, which were in their way quietly heroic,

impressed me a good deal; but his abject contentment with the
limitations of his lot appalled me. I felt a dread grow in me lest I should
become subdued to the element in which I worked as he was. I asked
myself whether a life so destitute of real interests and pleasures was life
at all? I made fugitive attempts to allure the little man into some realms
of wider interest, but with the most discouraging results. I once insisted
on taking him with me for a day in Epping Forest. He came reluctantly,
for he did not like leaving his wife at home, and it seemed that no
persuasion could induce her to undertake so adventurous a jaunt. He
was no walker, and half a dozen miles along the Forest roads tired him
out. By the afternoon even his cheerfulness had vanished; he gazed
with blank and gloomy eyes upon the wide spaces of the woodland
scenery. He did not regain his spirits till we drew near Stratford on the
homeward journey. At the first sight of gas-lit streets he brightened up,
and I am persuaded that the rancid odours of the factories at Bow were
sweeter in his nostrils than all the Forest fragrances. I never asked him
again to share a pleasure for which I now perceived he had no faculty;
but I often asked myself how long it would take for a city life to
extirpate in me the taste by which Nature is appreciated, as it had in
Arrowsmith.
I have taken Arrowsmith as an example of the narrowness of interest
created by a city life, and it would be easy to offer an apology for him,
which I, for one, would most heartily endorse. The poor fellow was
very much the creature of his circumstances. But this was scarcely the
case with another man I knew, whose circumstances, had he known
how to use them, might have afforded him the opportunity of many
cultivated tastes. He was the son of a small farmer, born in the same
village as myself. By some curious accident he was flung into the
vortex of London life at seventeen, and became a clerk in a reputable
firm of stockbrokers in Throgmorton Street. He rose rapidly, speculated
largely and successfully for himself, became a partner, and was rich at
thirty. I used to meet him occasionally, for he never forgot that we had
sat upon the same bench at school. I can see him still; well-fleshed and
immaculately dressed; his waistcoat pockets full of gold; a prop of
music-halls, a patron of expensive restaurants; flashing from one to the
other in the evening hours in swift hansoms; a man envied and admired

by a host of clerks in Throgmorton Street to whom he appeared a kind
of Napoleon of finance. I will confess that I myself was a little dazzled
by his careless opulence. When he took me to dine with him he thought
nothing of giving the head waiter a sovereign as a guarantee of careful
service, or of sending another sovereign to the master of the orchestra
with a request for some particular piece of music which he fancied. He
once confided to me that he had brought off certain operations which
had made him the possessor of eighty thousand pounds. To me the sum
seemed immense, but he regarded it as a bagatelle. When I suggested
certain uses for it, such as retirement to the country, the building of a
country house, the collection of pictures or of a library, he laughed at
me. He informed me that he never spent more than a single day in the
country every year; it was spent in visiting his father at the old farm.
He loathed the quiet of the country, and counted his one day in the year
an infliction and a sacrifice. Books and pictures he had cared for once,
but as he now put it, he had 'no use for them.' It seemed that all his
eighty thousand pounds was destined to be flung upon the great roulette
table of stock and share speculations. It was not that he was avaricious;
few men cared less for money in itself; but he could not live without
the excitement of speculation. 'I prefer the air of Throgmorton Street to
any air in the world,' he observed. 'I am unhappy if I leave it for a day.'
So far as knowledge of or interest in London went, he was not a whit
better than poor shabby Arrowsmith. His London stretched no further
than from the Bank