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The Lee Shore

by Rose Macaulay · English · Gutenberg #16612 · 522,880 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lee Shore

Author: Rose Macaulay


        
Release date: August 28, 2005 [eBook #16612]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LEE SHORE ***


E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/



THE LEE SHORE

by

R. MACAULAY

1912







TO P.R.




That division, the division of those who have and those who have not,
runs so deep as almost to run to the bottom.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
A Hereditary Bequest

CHAPTER II
The Choice of a Career

CHAPTER III
The Hopes

CHAPTER IV
The Complete Shopper

CHAPTER V
The Splendid Morning

CHAPTER VI
Hilary, Peggy, and the Boarders

CHAPTER VII
Diana, Actæon, and Lord Evelyn

CHAPTER VIII
Peter Understands

CHAPTER IX
The Fat in the Fire

CHAPTER X
The Loss of a Profession

CHAPTER XI
The Loss of an Idea

CHAPTER XII
The Loss of a Goblet and Other Things

CHAPTER XIII
The Loss of the Single State

CHAPTER XIV
Peter, Rhoda, and Lucy

CHAPTER XV
The Loss of a Wife

CHAPTER XVI
A Long Way

CHAPTER XVII
Mischances in the Rain

CHAPTER XVIII
The Breaking-Point

CHAPTER XIX
The New Life

CHAPTER XX
The Last Loss

CHAPTER XXI
On the Shore




THE LEE SHORE




CHAPTER I

A HEREDITARY BEQUEST


During the first week of Peter Margerison's first term at school,
Urquhart suddenly stepped, a radiant figure on the heroic scale, out of
the kaleidoscopic maze of bemusing lights and colours that was Peter's
vision of his new life.

Peter, seeing Urquhart in authority on the football field, asked, "Who is
it?" and was told, "Urquhart, of course," with the implication "Who else
could it be?"

"Oh," Peter said, and blushed. Then he was told, "Standing right in
Urquhart's way like that! Urquhart doesn't want to be stared at by all
the silly little kids in the lower-fourth." But Urquhart was, as a
matter of fact, probably used to it.

So that was Urquhart. Peter Margerison hugged secretly his two pieces of
knowledge; so secret they were, and so enormous, that he swelled visibly
with them; there seemed some danger that they might even burst him. That
great man was Urquhart. Urquhart was that great man. Put so, the two
pieces of knowledge may seem to have a certain similarity; there was in
effect a delicate discrimination between them. If not wholly distinct one
from the other, they were anyhow two separate aspects of the same
startling and rather magnificent fact.

Then there was another aspect: did Urquhart know that he, Margerison, was
in fact Margerison? He showed no sign of such knowledge; but then it was
naturally not part of his business to concern himself with silly little
kids in the lower-fourth. Peter never expected it.

But a few days after that, Peter came into the lavatories and
found Urquhart there, and Urquhart looked round and said, "I say,
you--Margerison. Just cut down to the field and bring my cap. You'll find
it by the far goal, Smithson's ground. You can bring it to the lavatories
and hang it on my peg. Cut along quick, or you'll be late."

Peter cut along quick, and found the velvet tasselled thing and brought
it and hung it up with the care due to a thing so precious as a fifteen
cap. The school bell had clanged while he was down on the field, and he
was late and had lines. That didn't matter. The thing that had emerged
was, Urquhart knew he was Margerison.

After that, Urquhart did not have occasion to honour Margerison with his
notice for some weeks. It was, of course, a disaster of Peter's that
brought them into personal relations. Throughout his life, Peter's
relations were apt to be based on some misfortune or other; he always had
such bad luck. Vainly on Litany Sundays he put up his petition to be
delivered "from lightning and tempest, from plague, pestilence, and
famine, from battle and murder, and from sudden death." Disasters seemed
to crowd the roads on which he walked; so frequent were they and so
tragic that life could scarcely be lived in sober earnest; it was, for
Peter the comedian, a tragi-comic farce. Circumstances provided the
tragedy, and temperament the farce.

Anyhow, one day Peter tumbled on to the point of his right shoulder and
lay on his face, his arm crooked curiously at his side, remarking that he
didn't think he was hurt, only his arm felt funny and he didn't think he
would move it just yet. People pressed about him; suggested carrying him
off the field; asked if he thought it was broken; asked him how he felt
now; asked him all manner of things, none of which Peter felt competent
to answer. His only remark, delivered in a rather weak and quavering
voice, was to the effect that he would walk directly, only he would like
to stay where he was a little longer, please. He said it very politely.
It was characteristic of Peter Margerison that misfortune always made him
very polite and pleasant in his manners, as if he was saying, "I am sorry
to be so tiresome and feeble: do go on with your own businesses, you more
fortunate and capable people, and never mind me."

As they stood in uncertainty about him, someone said, "There's Urquhart
coming," and Urquhart came. He had been playing on another ground. He
said, "What is it?" and they told him it was Margerison, his arm or his
shoulder or something, and he didn't want to be moved. Urquhart pushed
through the crowd that made way for him, and bent over Margerison and
felt his arm from the shoulder to the wrist, and Margerison bit at the
short grass that was against his face.

"That's all right," said Urquhart. "I wanted to see if it was sprained or
broken anywhere. It's not; it's just a put-out shoulder. I did that once,
and they put it in on the field; it was quite easy. It ought to be done
at once, before it gets stiff." He turned Peter over on his back, and
they saw that he was pale, and his forehead was muddy where it had
pressed on the ground, and wet where perspiration stood on it. Urquhart
was unlacing his own boot.

"I'm going to haul it in for you," he told Peter. "It's quite easy. It'll
hurt a bit, of course, but less now than if it's left. It'll slip in
quite easily, because you haven't much muscle," he added, looking at the
frail, thin, crooked arm. Then he put his stockinged foot beneath Peter's
arm-pit, and took the arm by the wrist and straightened it out. The other
thin arm was thrown over Peter's pale face and working mouth. The muddy
forehead could be seen getting visibly wetter. Urquhart threw himself
back and pulled, with a long and strong pull. Sharp gasps came from
beneath the flung-up left arm, through teeth that were clenched over a
white jersey sleeve. The thin legs writhed a little. Urquhart desisted,
breathing deeply.

"Sorry," he said; "one more'll do it." The one more was longer and
stronger, and turned the gasps into semi-groans. But as Urquhart had
predicted, it did it.

"There," said Urquhart, resting and looking pleased, as he always did
when he had accomplished something neatly. "Heard the click, didn't
you? It's in all right. Sorry to hurt you, Margerison; you were jolly
sporting, though. Now I'm going to tie it up before we go in, or it'll
be out again."

So he tied Peter's arm to Peter's body with his neck scarf. Then he took
up the small light figure in his arms and carried it from the field.

"Hurt much now?" he asked, and Peter shook an untruthful head and grinned
an untruthful and painful grin. Urquhart was being so inordinately decent
to him, and he felt, even in his pain, so extremely flattered and exalted
by such decency, that not for the world would he have revealed the fact
that there had been a second faint click while his arm was being bound
to his side, and an excruciating jar that made him suspect the abominable
thing to be out again. He didn't know how the mechanism worked, but he
was sure that the thing Urquhart had with such labour hauled in had
slipped out and was disporting itself at large in unlawful territory. He
said nothing, a little because he really didn't think he could quite make
up his mind to another long and strong pull, but chiefly because of
Urquhart and his immense decency. Success was Urquhart's rôle; one did
not willingly imagine him failing. If heroes fail, one must not let them
know it. Peter shut his eyes, and, through his rather sick vision of
trespassing rabbits popping in and out through holes in a fence, knew
that Urquhart's arms were carrying him very strongly and easily and
gently. He hoped he wasn't too heavy. He would have said that he could
walk, only he was rather afraid that if he said anything he might be
sick. Besides, he didn't really want to walk; his shoulder was hurting
him very much. He was so white about the cheeks and lips that Urquhart
thought he had fainted.

After a little while, Urquhart was justified in his supposition; it was
characteristic of Peter to convert, as promptly as was feasible, any
slight error of Urquhart's into truth. So Peter knew nothing when
Urquhart carried him indoors and delivered him into other hands. He
opened his eyes next on the doctor, who was untying his arm and cutting
his sleeve and saying cheerfully, "All right, young man, all right."

The next thing he said was, "I was told it had been put in."

"Yes," said Peter languidly. "But it came out again, I think."

"So it seems. Didn't they discover that down there?"

Peter moved his head limply, meaning "No."

"But you did, did you? Well, why didn't you say so? Didn't want to have
it hauled at again, I suppose? Well, we'll have it in directly. You won't
feel it much."

So the business was gone through again, and this time Peter not only half
but quite groaned, because it didn't matter now.

When the thing was done, and Peter rigid and swathed in bed, the doctor
was recalled from the door by a faint voice saying, "Will you please not
tell anyone it came out again?"

"Why not?" The doctor was puzzled.

"Don't know," said Peter, after finding that he couldn't think of a
reason. But then he gave the true one.

"Urquhart thought he'd got it in all right, that's all."

"Oh." The doctor was puzzled still. "But that's Urquhart's business, not
yours. It wasn't your fault, you know."

"Please," said Peter from the bed. "Do you mind?"

The doctor looked and saw feverish blue lamps alight in a pale face, and
soothingly said he did not mind. "Your shoulder, no one else's, isn't
it?" he admitted. "Now you'd better go to sleep; you'll be all right
directly, if you're careful not to move it or lie on it or anything."

Peter said he would be careful. He didn't at all want to move it or lie
on it or anything. He lay and had waking visions of the popping rabbits.
But they might pop as they liked; Peter hid a better thing in his inmost
soul. Urquhart had said, "Sorry to hurt you, Margerison. You were jolly
sporting, though." In the night it seemed incredible that Urquhart had
stooped from Valhalla thus far; that Urquhart had pulled in his arm with
his own hands and called him sporting to his face. The words, and the
echo of the soft, pleasant, casual voice, with its unemphasised
intonations, spread lifting wings for him, and bore him above the aching
pain that stayed with him through the night.

Next morning, when Peter was wishing that the crumbs of breakfast that
got between one's back and one's pyjamas were less sharp-cornered, and
wondering why a dislocated shoulder should give one an aching bar of pain
across the forehead, and feeling very sad because a letter from home had
just informed him that his favourite guinea-pig had been trodden on by
the gardener, Urquhart came to see him.

Urquhart said, "Hullo, Margerison. How are you this morning?" and Peter
said he was very nearly all right now, thanks very much. He added,
"Thanks awfully, Urquhart, for putting it in, and seeing after me and
everything."

"Oh, that's all right." Urquhart's smile had the same pleasant quality as
his voice. He had never smiled at Peter before. Peter lay and looked at
him, the blue lamps very bright in his pale face, and thought what a
jolly voice and face Urquhart had. Urquhart stood by the bed, his hands
in his pockets, and looked rather pleasantly down at the thin, childish
figure in pink striped pyjamas. Peter was fourteen, and looked less,
being delicate to frailness. Urquhart had been rather shocked by his
extreme lightness. He had also been pleased by his pluck; hence the
pleasant expression of his eyes. He was a little touched, too, by the
unmistakable admiration in the over-bright blue regard. Urquhart was not
unused to admiration; but here was something very whole-hearted and
rather pleasing. Margerison seemed rather a nice little kid.

Then, quite suddenly, and still in his pleasant, soft, casual tones,
Urquhart dragged Peter's immense secret into the light of day.

"How are your people?" he said.

Peter stammered that they were quite well.

"Of course," Urquhart went on, "I don't remember your mother; I was only
a baby when my father died. But I've always heard a lot about her. Is
she..."

"She's dead, you know," broke in Peter hastily, lest Urquhart should make
a mistake embarrassing to himself. "A long time ago," he added, again
anxious to save embarrassment.

"Yes--oh yes." Urquhart, from his manner, might or might not have known.

"I live with my uncle," Peter further told him, thus delicately and
unobstrusively supplying the information that Mr. Margerison too was
dead. He omitted to mention the date of this bereavement, having always
a delicate sense of what did and did not concern his hearers. The decease
of the lady who had for a brief period been Lady Hugh Urquhart, might be
supposed to be of a certain interest to her stepson; that of her second
husband was a private family affair of the Margerisons.

(The Urquhart-Margerison connection, which may possibly appear
complicated, was really very simple, and also of exceedingly little
importance to anyone but Peter; but in case anyone feels a desire to have
these things elucidated, it may here be mentioned that Peter's mother had
made two marriages, the first being with Urquhart's father, Urquhart
being already in existence at the time; the second with Mr. Margerison, a
clergyman, who was also already father of one son, and became Peter's
father later. Put so, it sounds a little difficult, chiefly because they
were all married so frequently and so rapidly, but really is simplicity
itself.)

"I live with my uncle too," Urquhart said, and the fact formed a shadowy
bond. But Peter's tone had struck a note of flatness that faintly
indicated a lack of enthusiasm as to the ménage. This note was, to
Peter's delicately attuned ears, absent from Urquhart's voice. Peter
wondered if Lord Hugh's brother (supposing it to be a paternal uncle)
resembled Lord Hugh. To resemble Lord Hugh, Peter had always understood
(till three years ago, when his mother had fallen into silence on that
and all other topics) was to be of a charm.... One spoke of it with a
faint sigh. And yet of a charm that somehow had lacked something, the
intuitive Peter had divined; perhaps it had been too splendid, too
fortunate, for a lady who had loved all small, weak, unlucky things.
Anyhow, not long after Lord Hugh's death (he was killed out hunting) she
had married Mr. Margerison, the poorest clergyman she could find, and the
most devoted to the tending of the unprosperous.

Peter remembered her--compassionate, delicate, lovely, full of laughter,
with something in the dance of her vivid dark-blue eyes that hinted at
radiant and sad memories. She had loved Lord Hugh for a glorious and
brief space of time. The love had perhaps descended, a hereditary
bequest, with the deep blue eyes, to her son. Peter would have understood
the love; the thing he would not have understood was the feeling that
had flung her on the tide of reaction at Mr. Margerison's feet. Mr.
Margerison was a hard liver and a tremendous giver. Both these things
had come to mean a great deal to Sylvia Urquhart--much more than they
had meant to the girl Sylvia Hope.

And hence Peter, who lay and looked at Lord Hugh Urquhart's son with
wide, bright eyes. With just such eyes--only holding, let us hope, an
adoration more masked--Sylvia Hope had long ago looked at Lord Hugh,
seeing him beautiful, delicately featured, pale, and fair of skin, built
with a strong fineness, and smiling with pleasant eyes. Lord Hugh's
beauty of person and charm of manner had possibly (not certainly) meant
more to Sylvia Hope than his son's meant to her son; and his prowess at
football (if he had any) had almost certainly meant less. But, apart from
the glamour of physical skill and strength and the official glory of
captainship, the same charm worked on mother and son. The soft, quick,
unemphasised voice, with the break of a laugh in it, had precisely the
same disturbing effect on both.

"Well," Urquhart was saying, "when will they let you play again? You must
buck up and get all right quickly.... I shouldn't wonder if you made a
pretty decent three-quarter sometime.... You ought to use your arm as
soon as you can, you know, or it gets stiff, and then you can't, and
that's an awful bore.... Hurt like anything when I hauled it in, didn't
it? But it was much better to do it at once."

"Oh, much," Peter agreed.

"How does it feel now?"

"Oh, all right. I don't feel it much. I say, do you think I ought to use
it at once, in case it gets stiff?" Peter's eyes were a little anxious;
he didn't much want to use it at once.

But Urquhart opined that this would be over-great haste. He departed, and
his last words were, "You must come to breakfast with me when you're up
again."

Peter lay, glorified, and thought it all over. Urquhart knew, then; he
had known from the first. He had known when he said, "I say, you,
Margerison, just cut down to the field ..."

Not for a moment did it seem at all strange to Peter that Urquhart should
have had this knowledge and given no sign till now. What, after all, was
it to a hero that the family circle of an obscure individual such as he
should have momentarily intersected the hero's own orbit? School has this
distinction--families take a back place; one is judged on one's own
individual merits. Peter would much rather think that Urquhart had come
to see him because he had put his arm out and Urquhart had put it in
(really though, only temporarily in) than because his mother had once
been Urquhart's stepmother.

Peter's arm did not recover so soon as Urquhart's sanguineness had
predicted. Perhaps he began taking precautions against stiffness too
soon; anyhow he did not that term make a decent three-quarter, or any
sort of a three-quarter at all. It always took Peter a long time to get
well of things; he was easy to break and hard to mend--made in Germany,
as he was frequently told. So cheaply made was he that he could perform
nothing. Defeated dreams lived in his eyes; but to light them there
burned perpetually the blue and luminous lamps of undefeated mirth, and
also an immense friendliness for life and mankind and the delightful
world. Like the young knight Agenore, Peter the unlucky was of a mind
having no limits of hope. Over the blue and friendly eyes that lit the
small pale face, the half wistful brows were cocked with a kind of
whimsical and gentle humour, the same humour that twitched constantly
at the corners of his wide and flexible mouth. Peter was not a beautiful
person, but one liked, somehow, to look at him and to meet his
half-enquiring, half-amused, wholly friendly and sympathetic regard.
By the end of his first term at school, he found himself unaccountably
popular. Already he was called "Margery" and seldom seen by himself. He
enjoyed life, because he liked people and they liked him, and things in
general were rather jolly and very funny, even with a dislocated
shoulder. Also the great Urquhart would, when he remembered, take a
little notice of Peter--enough to inflate the young gentleman's spirit
like a blown-out balloon and send him soaring skywards, to float gently
down again at his leisure.

Towards the end of the term, Peter's half-brother Hilary came to visit
him. Hilary was tall and slim and dark and rather beautiful, and he lived
abroad and painted, and he told Peter that he was going to be married to
a woman called Peggy Callaghan. Peter, who had always admired Hilary from
afar, was rather sorry. The woman Peggy Callaghan would, he vaguely
believed, come between Hilary and his family; and already there were more
than enough of such obstacles to intercourse. But at tea-time he saw the
woman, and she was large and fair and laughing, and called him, in her
rich, amused voice "little brother dear," and he did not mind at all,
but liked her and her laugh and her mirthful, lazy eyes.

Peter was a large-minded person; he did not mind that Hilary wore no
collar and a floppy tie. He did not mind this even when they met Urquhart
in the street. Peter whispered as he passed, "_That's_ Urquhart," and
Hilary suddenly stopped and held out his hand, and said pleasantly, "I am
glad to meet you." Peter blushed at that, naturally (for Hilary's cheek,
not for his tie), and hoped that Urquhart wasn't much offended, but that
he understood what half-brothers who lived abroad and painted were, and
didn't think it was Peter's fault. Urquhart shook hands quite pleasantly,
and when Hilary added, "We shared a stepmother, you and I; I'm Peter's
half-brother, you know," he amiably agreed. Peter hoped he didn't think
that the Urquhart-Margerison connection was being strained beyond due
bounds. Hilary said further, "You've been very good to my young brother,
I know," and it was characteristic of Peter that, even while he listened
to this embarrassing remark, he was free enough from self-consciousness
to be thinking with a keen though undefined pleasure how extraordinarily
nice to look at both Hilary and Urquhart, in their different ways, were.
(Peter's love of the beautiful matured with his growth, but in intensity
it could scarcely grow.) Urquhart was saying something about bad luck and
shoulders; it was decent of Urquhart to say that. In fact, things were
going really well till Hilary, after saying, "Good-bye, glad to have met
you," added to it the afterthought, "You must come and stay at my uncle's
place in Sussex some time. Mustn't he, Peter?" At the same time--fitting
accompaniment to the over-bold words--Peter saw a half-crown, a round,
solid, terrible _half-crown_, pressed into Urquhart's unsuspecting hand.
Oh, horror! Which was the worse, the invitation or the half-crown? Peter
could never determine. Which was the more flagrant indecency--that he,
young Margerison of the lower fourth, should, without any encouragement
whatever, have asked Urquhart of the sixth, captain of the fifteen, head
of his house, to come and stay with him; or that his near relative should
have pressed half-a-crown into the great Urquhart's hand as if he
expected him to go forthwith to the tuck-shop at the corner and buy
tarts? Peter wriggled, scarlet from his collar to his hair.

Urquhart was a polite person. He took the half-crown. He murmured
something about being very glad. He even smiled his pleasant smile. And
Peter, entirely unexpectedly to himself, did what he always did in the
crises of his singularly disastrous life--he exploded into a giggle. So,
some years later, he laughed helplessly and suddenly, standing among the
broken fragments of his social reputation and his professional career. He
could not help it. When the worst had happened, there was nothing else
one could do. One laughed from a sheer sense of the completeness of the
disaster. Peter had a funny, extremely amused laugh; hardly the laugh of
a prosperous person; rather that of the unhorsed knight who acknowledges
the utterness of his defeat and finds humour in the very fact. It was as
if misfortune--and this misfortune of the half-crown and the invitation
is not to be under-estimated--sharpened all the faculties, never blunt,
by which he apprehended humour. So he looked from Hilary to Urquhart,
and, mentally, from both to his cowering self, and exploded.

Urquhart had passed on. Hilary said, "What's the matter with _you_?" and
Peter recovered himself and said "Nothing." He might have cried, with
Miss Evelina Anvill, "Oh, my dear sir, I am shocked to death!" He did
not. He did not even say, "Why did you stamp us like that?" He would not
for the world have hurt Hilary's feelings, and vaguely he knew that this
splendid, unusual half-brother of his was in some ways a sensitive
person.

Hilary said, "The Urquharts ought to invite you to stay. The connection
is really close. I believe your mother was devoted to that boy as a baby.
You'd like to go and stay there, wouldn't you?"

Peter looked doubtful. He was nervous. Suppose Hilary met Urquhart
again.... Dire possibilities opened. Next time it might be "Peter must go
and stay at _your_ uncle's place in Berkshire." That would be worse. Yes,
the worst had not happened, after all. Urquhart might have met Peggy.
Peggy would in that case have said, "You nice kind boy, you've been such
a dear to this little brother of ours, and I hear you and these boys used
to share a mamma, so you're really brothers, and so, of course, _my_
brother too; and _what_ a nice face you've got!" There were in fact,
no limits to what Peggy might say. Peggy was outrageous. But it was
surprising how much one could bear from her. Presumably, Peter used to
reflect in after years, when he had to bear from her a very great deal
indeed, it was simply by virtue of her being Peggy. It was the same with
Hilary. They were Hilary and Peggy, and one took them as such. Indeed,
one had to, as there was certainly no altering them. And Peter loved both
of them very much indeed.

When Peter went home for the holidays, he found that Hilary's alliance
with the woman Peggy Callaghan was not smiled upon. But then none of
Hilary's projects were ever smiled upon by his uncle, who always said,
"Hilary must do as he likes. But he is acting with his usual lack of
judgment." For four years he had been saying so, and he said it again
now. To Hilary himself he further said, "You can't afford a wife at all.
You certainly can't afford Miss Callaghan. You have no right whatever to
marry until you are earning a settled livelihood. You are not of the
temperament to make any woman consistently happy. Miss Callaghan is the
daughter of an Irish doctor, and a Catholic."

"It is," said Hilary, "the most beautiful of all the religions. If
I could bring myself under the yoke of any creed at all ..."

"Just so," said his uncle, who was a disagreeable man; "but you can't,"
and Hilary tolerantly left it at that, merely adding, "There will be no
difficulty. We have arranged all that. Peggy is not a bigot. As to the
rest, I think we must judge for ourselves. I shall be earning more now,
I imagine."

Hilary always imagined that; imagination was his strong point. His
initial mistake was to imagine that he could paint. He did not think that
he had yet painted anything very good; but he knew that he was just about
to do so. He had really the artist's eye, and saw keenly the beauty that
was, though he did not know it, beyond his grasp. His uncle, who knew
nothing about art, could have told him that he would never be able to
paint, simply because he had never been, and would never be, able to
work. That gift he wholly lacked. Besides, like young Peter, he seemed
constitutionally incapable of success. A wide and quick receptiveness,
a considerable power of appreciation and assimilation, made such genius
as they had; the power of performance they desperately lacked; their
enterprises always let them through. Failure was the tragi-comic note
of their unprosperous careers.

However, Hilary succeeded in achieving marriage with the cheerful Peggy
Callaghan, and having done so they went abroad and lived an uneven and
rather exciting life of alternate squalor and luxury in one story of what
had once been a glorious roseate home of Venetian counts, and was now
crumbling to pieces and let in flats to the poor. Hilary and his wife
were most suitably domiciled therein, environed by a splendid dinginess
and squalor, pretentious, tawdry, grandiose, and superbly evading the
common. Peggy wrote to Peter in her large sprawling hand, "You dear
little brother, I wish you'd come and live with us. We have _such_
fun...." That was the best of Peggy. Always and everywhere she had such
fun. She added, "Give my sisterly regards to the splendid hero who shared
your mamma, and tell him we too live in a palace." That was so like
Peggy, that sudden and amused prodding into the most secret intimacies
of one's emotions. Peggy always discerned a great deal, and was blind
to a great deal more.




CHAPTER II

THE CHOICE OF A CAREER


Hilary, stretching his slender length wearily in Peter's fat arm-chair,
was saying in his high, sweet voice:

"It's the merest pittance, Peter, yours and mine. The Robinsons have it
practically all. The _Robinsons_. Really, you know ..."

The sweet voice had a characteristic, vibrating break of contempt. Hilary
had always hated the Robinsons, who now had it practically all. Hilary
looked pale and tired; he had been settling his dead uncle's affairs for
the last week. The Margerisons' uncle had not been a lovable man; Hilary
could not pretend that he had loved him. Peter had, as far as he had been
permitted to do so; Peter found it possible to be attached to most of the
people he came across; he was a person of catholic sympathies and
gregarious instincts. Even when he heard how the Robinsons had it
practically all, he bore no resentment either against his uncle or the
Robinsons. Such was life. And of course he and Hilary did not make wise
use of money; that they had always been told.

"You'll have to leave Cambridge," Hilary told him. "You haven't enough to
keep you here. I'm sorry, Peter; I'm afraid you'll have to begin and try
to earn a living. But I can't imagine how, can you? Has any paying line
of life ever occurred to you as possible?"

"Never," Peter assured him. "But I've not had time to think it over yet,
of course. I supposed I should be up here for two years more, you see."

At Hilary's "You'll have to leave Cambridge," his face had changed
sharply. Here was tragedy indeed. Bother the Robinsons.... But after
a moment's pause for recovery he answered Hilary lightly enough. Such,
again, was life. A marvellous two terms and a half, and then the familiar
barred gate. It was an old story.

Hilary's thoughts turned to his own situation. They never, to tell the
truth, dwelt very long on anybody else's.

"We," he said, "are destitute--absolutely. It's simply frightful, the
wear and strain of it. Peggy, of course," he added plaintively, "is _not_
a good manager. She likes spending, you know--and there's so seldom
anything to spend, poor Peggy. So life is disappointing for her. The
babies, I needn't say, are growing up little vagabonds. And they will
bathe in the canals, which isn't respectable, of course; though one is
relieved in a way that they should bathe anywhere."

"If he was selling any pictures," Peter reflected, "he would tell me," so
he did not enquire. Peter had tact as to his questions. One rather needed
it with Hilary. But he wondered vaguely what the babies had, at the
moment, to grow up upon, even as little vagabonds. Presently Hilary
enlightened him.

"I edit a magazine," he said, and Peter perceived that he was both proud
and ashamed of the fact. "At least I am going to. A monthly publication
for the entertainment and edification of the Englishman in Venice. Lord
Evelyn Urquhart is financing it. You know he has taken up his residence
in Venice? A pleasant crank. Venice is his latest craze. He buys glass.
And, indeed, most other things. He shops all day. It's a mania. When he
was young I believe he had a very fine taste. It's dulled now--a fearful
life, as they say. Well, his last fancy is to run a magazine, and I'm to
edit it. It's to be called 'The Gem.' 'Gemm' Adriatica,' you know, and
all that; besides, it's more or less appropriate to the contents. It's to
be largely concerned with what Lord Evelyn calls 'charming things.'
Things the visiting Englishman likes to hear about, you know. It aims at
being the Complete Tourist's Guide. I have to get hold of people who'll
write articles on the Duomo mosaics, and the galleries and churches and
palaces and so on, and glass and lace and anything else that occurs to
them, in a way calculated to appeal to the cultivated British resident or
visitor. I detest the breed, I needn't say. Pampered hotel Philistines
pretending to culture and profaning the sanctuaries, Ruskin in hand.
_Ruskin_. Really, you know.... Well, anyhow, my mission in life for
the present is to minister to their insatiable appetite for rhapsodising
over what they feel it incumbent on them to admire."

"Rather fascinating," Peter said. It was a pity that Hilary always
so disliked any work he had to do. Work--a terrific, insatiable god,
demanding its hideous human sacrifices from the dawn of the world till
twilight--so Hilary saw it. The idea of being horrible, all the concrete
details into which it was translated were horrible too.

"If it was me," said Peter, "I should minister to my own appetite, no one
else's. Bother the cultivated resident. He'd jolly well have to take what
I gave him. And glass and mosaic and lace--what glorious things to write
about.... I rather love Lord Evelyn, don't you."

Peter remembered him at Astleys, in Berkshire--Urquhart's uncle, tall
and slim and exquisite, with beautiful waistcoats and white, attractive,
nervous hands, that played with a monocle, and a high-pitched voice, and
a whimsical, prematurely worn-out face, and a habit of screwing up
short-sighted eyes and saying, with his queer, closed enunciation, "Quate
charming. Quate." He had always liked Peter, who had been a gentle and
amused boy and had reminded him of Sylvia Hope, lacking her beauty, but
with a funny touch of her charm. Peter had loved the things he loved,
too--the precious and admirable things he had collected round him through
a recklessly extravagant life. Peter at fifteen, in the first hour of his
first visit to Astleys, had been caught out of the incredible romance of
being in Urquhart's home into a new marvel, and stood breathless before a
Bow rose bowl of soft and mellow paste, ornamented with old Japan May
flowers in red and gold and green, and dated "New Canton, 1750."

"Lake it?" a high voice had asked behind his shoulder. "Lake the sort
of thing?" and there was the tall, funny man swaying on his heels and
screwing his glass into his eye and looking down on Peter with whimsical
interest. Little Peter had said shyly that he did.

"Prefer chaney to cricket?" asked Urquhart's uncle, with his agreeable
laugh that was too attractive to be described as a titter, a name that
its high, light quality might have suggested. But to that Peter said
"No." He had been asked to Astleys for the cricket week; he was going to
play for Urquhart's team. Not that he was any good; but to scrape through
without disgrace (of course he didn't) was at the moment the goal of
life.

Lord Evelyn had seemed disappointed. "If I could get you away from
Denis," he said, "I'll be bound cricket wouldn't be in the 'also rans.'"

And at that moment Denis had sauntered up, and Peter's worshipping regard
had turned from Lord Evelyn's rose bowl to his nephew, and it was Bow
china that was not among the also rans. At that too Lord Evelyn had
laughed, with his queer, closed mirth.

"Keep that till you fall in love," he had inwardly admonished Peter's
back as the two walked away together. "I daresay she won't deserve it any
better--but that's a law of nature, and this is sheer squandering. My
word, how that boy does lake things--and people!" After all, it was
hardly for any Urquhart to condemn squandering.

That was Lord Evelyn, as he lived in Peter's memory--a generous,
whimsical, pleasant crank, touched with his nephew's glamour of charm.

When Peter said, "I rather love him, don't you," Hilary replied, "He's a
fearful old spendthrift."

Peter demurred at the old. It jarred with one's conceptions of Lord
Evelyn. "I don't suppose he's much over fifty," he surmised.

"No, I daresay," Hilary indifferently admitted. "He's gone the pace, of
course. Drugs, and all that. He soon won't have a sound faculty left. Oh,
I'm attached to him; he's entertaining, and one can really talk to him,
which is exceptional in Venice, or, indeed, anywhere else. Is his nephew
still up here, by the way?"

"Yes. He's going down this term."

"You see a good deal of him, I suppose?"

"Off and on," said Peter.

"Of course," said Hilary, "you're almost half-brothers. I do feel that
the Urquharts owe us something, for the sake of the connexion. I shall
talk to Lord Evelyn about you. He was very fond of your mother.... I am
very sorry about you, Peter. We must think it over sometime, seriously."

He got up and began to walk about the room in his nervous, restless way,
looking at Peter's things. Peter's room was rather pleasing. Everything
in it had the air of being the selection of a personal and discriminating
affection. There was a serene self-confidence about Peter's tastes; he
always knew precisely what he liked, irrespective of what anyone else
liked. If he had happened to admire "The Soul's Awakening" he would
beyond doubt have hung a copy of it in his room. What he had, as a matter
of fact, hung in his room very successfully expressed an aspect of
himself. The room conveyed restfulness, and an immense love, innate
rather than grafted, of the pleasures of the eye. The characteristic of
restfulness was conveyed partly by the fat green sofa and the almost
superfluous number of extremely comfortable arm-chairs, and Peter's
attitude in one of them. On a frame in a corner a large piece of
embroidery was stretched--a cherry tree in blossom coming to slow birth
on a green serge background. Peter was quite good at embroidery. He
carried pieces of it (mostly elaborately designed book-covers) about in
his pockets, and took them out at tea-parties and (surreptitiously) at
lectures. He said it was soothing, like smoking; only smoking didn't
soothe him, it made him feel ill. On days when he had been doing tiresome
or boring or jarring things, or been associating with a certain type of
person, he did a great deal of embroidery in the evenings, because, as he
said, it was such a change. The embroidery stood for a symbol, a type of
the pleasures of the senses, and when he fell to it with fervour beyond
the ordinary, one understood that he had been having a surfeit of the
displeasures of the senses, and felt need to restore the balance.

Hilary stopped before a piece of extremely shabby, frayed and dingy
tapestry, that had the appearance of having once been even dingier and
shabbier. It looked as if it had lain for years in a dusty corner of
a dusty old shop, till someone had found it and been pleased by it and
taken possession, loving it through its squalor.

"Rather nice," said Hilary. "Really good, isn't it?"

Peter nodded. "Gobelin, of the best time. Someone told me that
afterwards. When I bought it, I only knew it was nice. A man wanted to
buy it from me for quite a lot."

Hilary looked about him. "You've got some good things. How do you pick
them up?"

"I try," said Peter, "to look as if I didn't care whether I had them or
not. Then they let me have them for very little. The man I got that
tapestry from didn't know how nice it was. I did, but I cheated him."

"Well," Hilary said, passing his hand wearily over his forehead, "I must
go to your detestable station and catch my train.... I've got a horrible
headache. The strain of all this is frightful."

He looked as if it was. His pale face, nervous and strained, stabbed at
Peter's affection for him. Peter's affection for Hilary had always been
and always would be an unreasoning, loyal, unspoilably tender thing.

He went to the station to help Hilary to catch his train. The enterprise
was a failure; it was not a job at which either Margerison was good. They
had to wait in the detestable station for another. The annoyance of that
(it is really an abnormally depressing station) worked on Hilary's
nervous system to such an extent that he might have flung himself on the
line and so found peace from the disappointments of life, had not Peter
been at hand to cheer him up. There were certainly points about young
Peter as a companion for the desperate.

Peter, having missed hall, as well as Hilary's train, went back to his
room and put an egg on to boil. He lay back in his most comfortable chair
to watch it; he needed comfort rather. He was going down. It had been so
jolly--and it was over.

He had not got much to show for the good time he had had. Physically, he
was more of a wreck than he had been when he came up. He was slightly
lame in one leg, having broken it at football (before he had been
forbidden to play) and had it badly set. He mended so badly always. He
was also at the moment right-handed (habitually he used his left) and
that was motor bicycling. He had not particularly distinguished himself
in his work. He was good at nothing except diabolo, and not very good at
that. And he had spent more money than he possessed, having drawn
lavishly on his next year's allowance. He might, in fact, have been
described as an impoverished and discredited wreck. But for such a one
he had looked very cheerful, till Hilary had said that about going down.
That was really depressing.

Peter, as the egg boiled, looked back rather wistfully over his year.
It seemed a very long time ago since he had come up. His had been an
undistinguished arrival; he had not come as a sandwich man between two
signboards that labelled his past career and explained his path that was
to be; he had been unaddressed to any destination. The only remark on his
vague and undistinguished label had perhaps been of the nature of
"Brittle. This side up with care." He had no fame at any game; he did not
row; he was neither a sporting nor, in any marked degree, a reading man.
He did a little work, but he was not very fond of it or very good. The
only things one could say of him were that he seemed to have an immense
faculty of enjoyment and a considerable number of friends, who knew him
as Margery and ate muffins and chocolates between tea and dinner in his
rooms.

He had been asked at the outset by one of these friends what sort of
things he meant to "go in for." He had said that he didn't exactly know.
"Must one go in for anything, except exams?" The friend, who was
vigorously inclined, had said that one certainly ought. One could--he had
measured Peter's frail physique and remembered all the things he couldn't
do--play golf. Peter had thought that one really couldn't; it was such a
chilly game. Well, of course, one might speak at the Union, said the
persevering friend, insisting, it seemed, on finding Peter a career.
"Don't they talk about politics?" enquired Peter. "I couldn't do that,
you know. I don't approve of politics. If ever I have a vote I shall sell
it to the highest female bidder. Fancy being a Liberal or a Conservative,
out of all the nice things there are in the world to be! There are
health-fooders, now. I'd rather be that. And teetotallers. A man told me
he was a teetotaller to-day. I'll go in for that if you like, because
I don't much like wine. And I hate beer. These are rather nice
chocolates--I mean, they were."

The indefatigable friend had further informed him that one might be a
Fabian and have a red tie, and encourage the other Fabians to wash. Or
one might ride.

"One might--" Peter had made a suggestion of his own--"ride a motor
bicycle. I saw a man on one to-day; I mean he had been on it--it was on
him at the moment; it had chucked him off and was dancing on him, and
something that smelt was coming out of a hole. He was such a long way
from home; I was sorry about it."

His friend had said, "Serve him right. Brute," expressing the general
feeling of the moment about men who rode motor bicycles.

"Isn't it funny," Peter had reflectively said. "They must get such an
awful headache first--and then to be chucked off and jumped on so hard,
and covered with the smelly stuff--and then to have to walk home dragging
it, when it's deformed and won't run on its wheels. Unless, of course,
one is blown up into little bits and is at rest.... But it is so awfully,
frightfully ugly, to look at and to smell and to hear. Like your
wallpaper, you know."

Peter's eyes had rested contentedly on his own peaceful green walls. He
really hadn't felt in the least like "going in for" anything, either
motor bicycling or examinations.

"I suppose you'll just footle, then," his friend had summed it up, and
left him, because it was half-past six, and they had dinner at that
strange hour. That was why they were able to run it into their tea,
since obviously nothing could be done between, even by Peter's energetic
friend. This friend had little hope for Peter. Of course, he would just
footle; he always had. But one was, nevertheless, rather fond of him.
One would like him to do things, and have a sporting time.

As a matter of fact, Peter gave his friend an agreeable surprise. He went
in, or attempted to go in, for a good many things. He plunged ardently
into football, though he had never been good, and though he always got
extremely tired over it, which was supposed to be bad for him, and
frequently got smashed up, which he knew to be unpleasant for him. This
came to an abrupt end half way through the term. Then he took, quite
suddenly, to motor bicycling. All this is merely to say that the
incalculable factor that sets temperament and natural predilection at
nought had entered into Peter's life. Of course, it was absurd. Urquhart,
being what he was, could successfully do a number of things that Peter,
being what _he_ was, must inevitably come to grief over. But still he
indomitably tried. He even profaned the roads and outraged all æsthetic
fitness in the endeavour, clacking into the country upon a hired
motor-bicycle and making his head ache badly and getting very cold, and
being from time to time thrown off and jumped upon and going about in
bandages, telling enquirers that he supposed he must have knocked against
something somewhere, he didn't remember exactly. The energetic friend had
been caustic.

"I've no intention of sympathising with you," he had remarked; "because
you deserve all you get. You ass, you know when it's possible to get
smashed up over anything you're safe to do it, so what on earth do you
expect when you take up a thing like this?"

"Instant death every minute," Peter had truly replied. (His nerves had
been a little shaken by his last ride, which had set his trouser-leg on
fire suddenly, and nearly, as he remarked, burnt him to death.) "But I
go on. I expect the worst, but I am resigned. The hero is not he who
feels no fear, for that were brutal and irrational."

"What do you _do_ it for?" his friend had querulously and superfluously
demanded.

"It's so frightfully funny," Peter had said, reflecting, "that I should
be doing it. That's why, I suppose. It makes me laugh. You might take to
the fiddle if you wanted a good laugh. I take to my motor-bicycle. It's
the only way to cheer oneself up when life is disappointing, to go and do
something entirely ridiculous. I used to stand on my head when I'd been
rowed or sat upon, or when there was a beastly wind; it cheered me a lot.
I've given that up now; so I motor-bicycle. Besides," he had added, "you
said I must go in for something. You wouldn't like it if I did my
embroidery all day."

But on the days when he had been motor-bicycling, Peter had to do a great
deal of embroidery in the evenings, for the sake of the change.

"I don't wonder you need it," a friend of the more æsthetically cultured
type remarked one evening, finding him doing it. "You've been playing
round with the Urquhart-Fitzmaurice lot to-day, haven't you? Nice man,
Fitzmaurice, isn't he? I like his tie-pins. You know, we almost lost him
last summer. He hung in the balance, and our hearts were in our mouths.
But he is still with us. You look as if he had been very much with you,
Margery."

Peter looked meditative and stitched. "Old Fitz," he murmured, "is one of
the best. A real sportsman.... Don't, Elmslie; I didn't think of that, I
heard Childers say it. Childers also said, 'By Jove, old Fitz knocks
spots out of 'em every time,' but I don't know what he meant. I'm trying
to learn to talk like Childers. When I can do that, I shall buy a tie-pin
like Fitzmaurice's, only mine will be paste. Streater's is paste; he's
another nice man."

"He certainly is. In fact, Margery, you really are _not_ particular
enough about the company you keep. You shun neither the over-bred nor the
under-bred. Personally I affect neither, because they don't amuse me. You
embrace both."

"Yes," Peter mildly agreed. "But I don't embrace Streater, you know. I
draw the line at Streater. Everyone draws the line at Streater; he's of
the baser sort, like his tie-pins. Wouldn't it be vexing to have people
always drawing lines at you. There'd be nothing you could well do, except
to draw one at them, and they wouldn't notice yours, probably, if they'd
got theirs in first. You could only sneer. One can always sneer. I
sneered to-day."

"You can't sneer," Elmslie told him brutally; "and you can't draw lines;
and what on earth you hang about with so many different sorts of idiots
for I don't know.... I think, if circumstances absolutely compelled me to
make bosom friends of either, I should choose the under-bred poor rather
than the over-bred rich. That's the sort of man I've no use for. The sort
of man with so much money that he has to chuck it all about the place to
get rid of it. The sort of man who talks to you about beagles. The sort
of man who has a different fancy waistcoat for each day of the week."

"Well," said Peter, "that's nice. I wish I had."

His friend turned a grave regard on him. "The sort of man who rides a
motor-bicycle.... You really should, Margery," he went on, "learn to be
more fastidious. You mustn't let yourself be either dazzled by fancy
waistcoats or sympathetically moved by unclean collars. Neither is
interesting."

"I never said they were," Peter said. "It's the people inside them...."

Peter, in brief, was a lover of his kind, and the music life played to
him was of a varied and complex nature. But, looking back, it was easy to
see how there had been, running through all the variations, a dominant
motive in the piece.

As Peter listened to the boiling of his egg, and thought how hard it
would be when he took it off, the dominant motive came in and stood by
the fire, and looked down on Peter. He jingled things in his pockets and
swayed to and fro on his heels like his uncle Evelyn, and he was slim in
build, and fair and pale and clear-cut of face, and gentle and rather
indifferent in manner, and soft and casual in voice, and he was in his
fourth year, and life went extremely well with him.

"It boils," he told Peter, of the egg.

Peter took it off and fished it out with a spoon, and began rummaging for
an egg-cup and salt and marmalade and buns in the locker beneath his
window seat. Having found these things, he composed himself in the fat
arm-chair to dine, with a sigh of satisfaction.

"You slacker," Urquhart observed. "Well, can you come to-morrow? The drag
starts at eleven."

"It's quite hard," said Peter, unreasonably disappointed in it. "Oh, yes,
rather; I'll come." How short the time for doing things had suddenly
become.

Urquhart remarked, looking at the carpet, "What a revolting mess. Why?"

"My self-filling bath," Peter explained. "I invented it myself. Well--it
did fill itself. Quite suddenly and all at once, you know. It was a very
beautiful sight. But rather unrestrained at present. I must improve
it.... Oh, this is my last term."

"Sent down?" Urquhart sympathetically enquired. It was what one might
expect to happen to Peter.

"Destitute," Peter told him. "The Robinsons have it practically all.
Hilary told me to-day. I am thrown on the world. I shall have to work.
Hilary is destitute too, and Peggy has nothing to spend, and the babies
insist on bathing in the canals. Bad luck for us, isn't it. Oh, and
Hilary is going to edit a magazine called 'The Gem,' for your uncle in
Venice. That seems rather a nice plan. The question is, what am I to
apply _my_ great gifts to?"

Urquhart whistled softly. "As bad as all that, is it?"

"Quite as bad. Worse if anything.... The only thing in careers that I
can fancy at the moment is art dealing--picking up nice things cheap and
selling them dear, you know. Only I should always want to keep them, of
course. If I don't do that I shall have to live by my needle. If they
pass the Sweated Industries Bill, I suppose one will get quite a lot.
It's the only Bill I've ever been interested in. My uncle was extremely
struck by the intelligent way I took notice of it, when I had
disappointed him so much about Tariff Reform and Education."

"You'd probably be among the unskilled millions whom the bill turns out
of work."

"Then I shall be unemployed, and march with a flag. I shall rather like
that.... Oh, I suppose somehow one manages to live, doesn't one, whether
one has a degree or not. And personally I'd rather not have one, because
it would be such a mortifying one. Besides," Peter added, after a
luminous moment of reflection, "I don't believe a degree really matters
much, in my profession. You didn't know I had a profession, I expect;
I've just thought of it. I'm going to be a buyer for the Ignorant Rich.
Make their houses liveable-in. They tell me what they want--I get hold
of it for them. Turn them out an Italian drawing-room--Della Robbia
mantel-piece, Florentine fire-irons, Renaissance ceiling, tapestries and
so on. Things they haven't energy to find for themselves or intelligence
to know when they see them. I love finding them, and I'm practised at
cheating. One has to cheat if one's poor but eager.... A poor trade,
but my own. I can grub about low shops all day, and go to sales at
Christie's. What fun."

Urquhart said, "You'd better begin on Leslie. You're exactly what he
wants."

"Who's Leslie?" Peter was eating buns and marmalade, in restored spirits.

"Leslie's an Ignorant Rich. He's a Hebrew. His parents weren't called
Leslie, but never mind. Leslie rolls. He also bounds, but not
aggressively high. One can quite stand him; in fact, he has his good
points. He's rich but eager. Also he doesn't know a good thing when he
sees it. He lacks your discerning eye, Margery. But such is his eagerness
that he is determined to have good things, even though he doesn't know
them when he sees them. He would like to be a connoisseur--a collector of
world-wide fame. He would like to fill his house with things that would
make people open their eyes and whistle. But at present he's got no guide
but price and his own pure taste. Consequently he gets hopelessly let in,
and people whistle, but not in the way he wants. He's quite frank; he
told me all about it. What he wants is a man with a good eye, to do his
shopping for him. It would be an ideal berth for a man with the desire
but not the power to purchase; a unique partnership of talent with
capital. There you are. You supply the talent. He'd take you on, for
certain. It would be a very nice little job for you to begin with. By
the time you've decorated his town house and his country seat and his
shooting-box and all his other residences, you'll be fairly started in
your profession. I'll write to him about you."

Peter chuckled. "How frightfully funny, though. I wonder why anyone
should want to have things unless they like to have them for themselves.
Just as if I were to hire Streater, say, to buy really beautiful
photographs of actresses for me!... Well, suppose he didn't like the
things I bought for him? Suppose our tastes didn't agree? Should I have
to try and suit his, or would he have to put up with mine?"

"There's only one taste in the matter," Urquhart told him. "He hasn't got
any. You could buy him any old thing and tell him it was good and he'd
believe you, provided it cost enough. That's why he has to have a buyer
honest though poor--he couldn't check him in the least. I shall tell him
that, however many the things you might lie about, you are a George
Washington where your precious bric-a-brac is concerned, because it's
the one thing you care about too much to take it flippantly."

Peter chuckled again. Life, having for a little while drifted perilously
near to the shores of dullness, again bobbed merrily on the waters of
farce. What a lot of funny things there were, all waiting to be done!
This that Urquhart suggested should certainly, if possible, be one of
them.

A week later, when Mr. Leslie had written to engage Peter's services,
Urquhart's second cousin Rodney came into Peter's room (a thing he had
never done before, because he did not know Peter much) and said, "But why
not start a curiosity shop of your own? Or be a travelling pedlar? It
would be so much more amusing."

Peter felt a little flattered. He liked Rodney, who was in his third year
and had never before taken any particular notice of him. Rodney was a
rather brilliant science man; he was also an apostle, a vegetarian, a
fine football player, an ex-Fabian, and a few other things. He was a
large, emaciated-looking person, with extraordinarily bright grey eyes,
inspiring a lean, pale, dark-browed face--the face of an ascetic, lit by
a flame of energising life. He looked as if he would spend and be spent
by it to the last charred fragment, in pursuit of the idea. There was
nothing in his vivid aspect of Peter Margerison's gentle philosophy of
acquiescence; he looked as if he would to the end dictate terms to life
rather than accept them--an attitude combined oddly with a view which
regarded the changes and chances of circumstance as more or less
irrelevant to life's vital essence.

Peter didn't know why Rodney wanted him to be a travelling pedlar--except
that, as he had anyhow once been a Socialist, he presumably disliked the
rich (ignorant or otherwise) and included Leslie among them. Peter always
had a vague feeling that Rodney did not wholly appreciate his cousin
Urquhart, for this same reason. A man of means, Rodney would no doubt
have held, has much ado to save his soul alive; better, if possible, be
a bricklayer or a mendicant friar.

"Some day," said Peter politely, "I may have to be a travelling pedlar.
This is only an experiment, to see if it works."

He was conscious suddenly of two opposing principles that crossed swords
with a clash. Rodney and Urquhart--poverty and wealth--he could not
analyse further.

But Rodney was newly friendly to him for the rest of that term. Urquhart
commented on it.

"Stephen always takes notice of the destitute. The best qualification for
his regard is to commit such a solecism that society cuts you, or such a
crime that you get a month's hard. Short of that, it will do to have a
hole in your coat, or paint a bad picture, or produce a yesterday's
handkerchief. He probably thinks you're on the road to that. When you
get there, he'll swear eternal friendship. He can't away with the
prosperous."

"What a mistake," Peter said. It seemed to him a singularly perverse
point of view.




CHAPTER III

THE HOPES


It was rather fun shopping for Leslie. Leslie was a stout, quiet,
ponderous person between thirty and forty, and he really did not bound
at all; Urquhart had done him less than justice in his description. There
was about him the pathos of the very rich. He was generous in the
extreme, and Peter's job proved lucrative as well as pleasant. He grew
curiously fond of Leslie; his attitude towards him was one of respect
touched with protectiveness. No one should any more "do" Leslie, if he
could help it.

"He's let me," Peter told his cousin Lucy, "get rid of all his horrible
Lowestoft forgeries; awful things they were, with the blue hardly dry on
them. Frightful cheek, selling him things like that; it's so insulting.
Leslie's awfully sweet-tempered about being gulled, though. He's very
kind to me; he lets me buy anything I like for him. And he recommends me
to his friends, too. It's a splendid profession; I'm so glad I thought
of it. If I hadn't I should have had to go into a dye shop, or be a
weaver or something. It wouldn't have been good form; it wouldn't even
have been clean. I should have had a day-before-yesterday's handkerchief
and Rodney would have liked me more, but Denis would probably have cut
me. As it is I'm quite good form and quite clean, and I move in the best
circles. I love the Ignorant Rich; they're so amusing. I know such
a nice lady. She buys potato rings. She likes them to be Dublin
hall-marked and clearly dated seventeen hundred and something--so,
naturally, they always were till I began to buy them for her. I've
persuaded her to give away the most blatant forgeries to her god-children
at their baptisms. Babies like them, sham or genuine."

Peter was having tea with his cousin Lucy and Urquhart in the White City.
Peter and Lucy were very fond of the White City. Peter's cousin Lucy was
something like a small, gay spring flower, with wide, solemn grey eyes
that brimmed with sudden laughters, and a funny, infectious gurgle of a
laugh. She was a year younger than Peter, and they had all their lives
gone shares in their possessions, from guinea-pigs to ideas. They admired
the same china and the same people, with unquestioning unanimity. Lucy
lived in Chelsea, with an elder sister and a father who ran at his own
expense a revolutionary journal that didn't pay, because those who would
have liked to buy it couldn't, for the most part, afford to, and because
those who could have afforded to didn't want to, and because, in short,
journals run by nice people never do pay.

Lucy played the 'cello, the instrument usually selected by the small
in stature. In the intervals of this pursuit, she went about the world
open-eyed to all new-burnished joys that came within her vision, and
lived by admiration, hope and love, and played with Peter at any game,
wise or foolish, that turned up. Often Urquhart played with them, and
they were a happy party of three. Peter and Lucy shared, among other
things, an admiration of Urquhart.

Peter was finding the world delightful just now. This first winter in
London was probably the happiest time he ever had. He hardly missed
Cambridge; he certainly didn't miss the money that the Robinsons had.
His profession was to touch and handle the things he loved; the Ignorant
Rich were delightful; the things he bought for them were beyond all
words; the sales he attended were revels of joy; it was all extremely
entertaining, and Leslie a dear, and everyone very kind. The affection
that always found its way to Peter through his disabilities spoke for
something in him that must, it would seem, be there; possibly it was
merely his friendly smile. He was anyhow of the genus comedian, that
readily endears itself.

He and Urquhart and Lucy all knew how to live. They made good use of
most of the happy resources that London offers to its inhabitants. They
went in steamers to and fro between Putney and Greenwich, listening to
concertinas and other instruments of music. They looked at many sorts of
pictures, talked to many sorts of people, and attended many sorts of
plays. Urquhart and Peter had even become associates of the Y.M.C.A.
(representing themselves as agnostics seeking for light) on account of
the swimming-baths. As Peter remarked, "Christian Young Men do not
bathe very much, and it seems a pity no one should." On the day when they
had tea at the White City, they had all had lunch at a very recherché
café in Soho, where the Smart Set like to meet Bohemians, and you can
only get in by being one or the other, so Peter and Lucy went as the
Smart Set, and Urquhart as a Bohemian, and they liked to meet each other
very much.

The only drawback to Peter's life was the bronchitis that sprang at him
out of the fogs and temporarily stopped work. He had just recovered from
an attack of it on the day when he was having tea at the White City, and
he looked a weak and washed-out rag, with sunken blue eyes smiling out of
a very white face.

"You would think, to look at him," Urquhart said to Lucy, "that he had
been going in extensively for the flip-flap this afternoon. It's a pity
Stephen can't see you, Margery; you look starved enough to satisfy even
him. You never come across Stephen now, I suppose? You wouldn't, of
course. He has no opinion of the Ignorant Rich. Nor even of the
well-informed rich, like me. He's blindly prejudiced in favour of the
Ignorant Poor."

Lucy nodded. "I know. He's nice to me always. I go and play my 'cello to
his friends."

"I always keep him in mind," said Peter, "for the day when my patrons get
tired of me. I know Rodney will be kind to me directly I take to street
peddling or any other thoroughly ill-bred profession. The kind he
despises most, I suppose, are my dear Ignorant Rich--the ill-bred but by
no means breadless. (That's my own and not very funny, by the way.) Did
I tell you, Denis, that Leslie is going to begin educating the People in
Appreciation of Objects of Art? Isn't it a nice idea? I'm to help.
Leslie's a visionary, you know. I believe plutocrats often are. They've
so much money and are so comfortable that they stop wanting material
things and begin dreaming dreams. I should dream dreams if I was a
plutocrat. As it is my mind is earthly. I don't want to educate anyone.
Well, anyhow we're going to Italy in the spring, to pick things up, as
Leslie puts it. That always sounds so much as if we didn't pay for them.
Then we shall bring them home and have free exhibits for the Ignorant
Poor, and I shall give free and instructive lectures. Isn't it a pleasant
plan? We're going to Venice. There's a Berovieri goblet that some
Venetian count has, that Leslie's set his heart on. We are to acquire
it, regardless of expense, if it turns out to be all that is rumoured."

Urquhart scoffed here.

"Nice to be infallible, isn't it. You and your goblets and your Ignorant
Rich. And your brother Hilary and my uncle Evelyn. Your great gifts seem
to run in the family. My uncle, I hear, is ruining himself with buying
the things your brother admires. My poor uncle, Miss Hope, is getting so
weak-sighted that he can't judge for himself as he used, so he follows
the advice of Margery's brother. It keeps him very happy and amused,
though he'll soon be bankrupt, no doubt."

Lucy, as usual, laughed at the Urquhart family and the Margerison family
and the world at large. When she laughed, she opened her grey eyes wide,
while they twinkled with dancing light.

Then she said, "Oh, I want to go on the flip-flap. Peter mustn't come,
because it always makes him sick; so will you?"

Urquhart said he would, so they did, and Peter watched them, hoping
Urquhart didn't mind much. Urquhart never seemed to mind being ordered
about by Lucy. And Lucy, of course, had accepted him as an intimate
friend from the first, because Peter had said she was to, and because, as
she remarked, he was so astonishingly nice to look at and to listen to.

Among the visitors who frequented Lucy's home, people whom she considered
astonishingly pleasant to look at and to listen to did not abound; so
Lucy enjoyed the change all the more.

The first time Peter took Urquhart down to Chelsea to call on his Hope
uncle and cousins, one Sunday afternoon, he gave him a succinct account
of the sort of people they would probably meet there.

"They have oddities in, you know--and particularly on Sunday afternoons.
They usually have one or two staying in the house, too. They keep open
house for wastrels. A lot of them are aliens--Polish refugees, Russian
anarchists, oppressed Finns, massacred Armenians who do embroidery;
violinists who can't earn a living, decayed chimney-sweeps and so forth.
'Disillusioned (or still illusioned) geniuses, would-bes, theorists,
artistic natures, failed reformers, knaves and fools incompetent or
over-old, broken evangelists and debauchees, inebriates, criminals,
cowards, virtual slaves' ... Anyhow it's a home for Lost Hopes. (Do you
see that?) My uncle is keen on anyone who tries to revolt against
anything--governments, Russians, proprieties, or anything else--and
Felicity is keen on anyone who fails."

"And your other cousin--what is she keen on?"

"Oh, Lucy's too young for the Oddities, like me. She and I sit in a
corner and look on. It's my uncle and Felicity they like to talk to. They
talk about Liberty to them, you know. My uncle is great on Liberty. And
they give them lemon in their tea, and say how wicked Russians are, and
how stupid Royal Academicians are, and buy the Armenians' embroidery,
and so forth. Lucy and I don't do that well. I disapprove of liberty for
most people, I think, and certainly for them; and I don't like lemon in
my tea, and though I'm sure Russians are wicked, I believe oppressed
Poles are as bad--at least their hair is as bushy and their nails as
long--and I prefer the embroidery I do myself; I do it quite nicely, I
think. And I don't consider that Celtic poets or Armenian Christians wash
their hands often enough.... They nearly all asked me the time last
Sunday. I was sorry about it."

"You feared they were finding their afternoon tedious?"

"No; but I think their watches were up the spout, you see. So I was
sorry. I never feel so sorry for myself as when mine is. I'm really
awfully grateful to Leslie; if it wasn't for him I should never be able
to tell anyone the time. By the way, Leslie's awfully fond of Felicity.
He writes her enormous cheques for her clubs and vagabonds and so on. But
of course she'll never look at him; he's much too well-off. It's not low
to tell you that, because he makes it so awfully obvious. He'll probably
be there this afternoon. Oh, here we are."

They found the Hopes' small drawing-room filled much as Peter had
predicted. Dermot Hope was a tall, wasted-looking man of fifty-five, with
brilliant eyes giving significance to a vague face. He had very little
money, and spent that little on "Progress," whose readers were few and
ardent, and whose contributors were very cosmopolitan, and full of zeal
and fire; several of them were here this afternoon. Dermot Hope himself
was most unconquerably full of fire. He could be delightful, and
exceedingly disagreeable, full of genial sympathy and appreciation, and
of a biting irony. He looked at Urquhart, whom he met for the first time,
with a touch of sarcasm in his smile. He said, "You're exactly like your
father. How do you do," and seemed to take no further interest in him.
He had certainly never taken much in Lord Hugh, during the brief year of
their brotherhood.

For Peter his glance was indulgent. Peter, not being himself a reformer,
or an idealist, or a lover of progress, or even, according to himself, of
liberty, but an acceptor of things as they are and a lover of the good
things of this world, was not particularly interesting to his uncle, of
course; but, being rather an endearing boy, and the son of a beloved
sister, he was loved; and, even had he been a stranger, his position
would have been regarded as more respectable than Urquhart's, since he
had so far failed to secure many good things.

Felicity, a gracious and lovely person of twenty-nine, gave Peter and
Urquhart a smile out of her violet eyes and murmured "Lucy's in the
corner over there," and resumed the conversation she was trying to divide
between Joseph Leslie and a young English professor who was having a
holiday from stirring up revolutions at a Polish university. The division
was not altogether easy, even to a person of Felicity's extraordinary
tact, particularly as they both happened to be in love with her. Felicity
had a great deal of listening to do always, because everyone told her
about themselves, and she always heard them gladly; if she hastened the
end a little sometimes, gently, they never knew it. She, in fact, wanted
to hear about them as much--really as much, though the desire in these
proportions is so rare as to seem incredible--as they wanted to let her
hear. Her wish to hear was a temptation to egotism; those who disliked
egotism in themselves had to fight the temptation, and seldom won.
She did not believe--no one but a fool (and she was not that) could have
believed--all the many things that were told her; the many things that
must always, while pity and the need to be pitied endure, be told to the
pitiful; but she seldom said so. She merely looked at the teller with her
long and lovely violet eyes, that took in so much and gave out such
continual friendship, and saw how, behind the lies, the need dwelt
pleading. Then she gave, not necessarily what the lies asked for, but
what, in her opinion, pity owed to that which pleaded. She certainly
gave, as a rule, quite too much, in whatever coin she paid. That was
inevitable.

"You give from the emotions," Joseph Leslie told her, "instead of
from reason. How bad for you: how bad for them. And worse when it is
friendship than when it is coin that you can count and set a limit to.
Yes. Abominably bad for everyone concerned."

"Should one," wondered Felicity, "give friendship, as one is supposed to
give money, on C.O.S. principles? Perhaps so; I must think about it."

But her thinking always brought her back to the same conclusion as
before. Consequently her circle of friends grew and grew. She even
included in it a few of the rich and prosperous, not wishing her chain
of fellowship, whose links she kept in careful repair, to fail anywhere.
But it showed strain there. It was forged and flung by the rich and
prosperous, and merely accepted by Felicity.

Leslie, though rich and prosperous, stepped into the linked circle led
by Peter, who was neither. Having money, and a desire to make himself
conscious of the fact by using it, he consulted Miss Hope as to how
best to be philanthropic. He wanted, it seemed, to be a philanthropist as
well as a collector, and felt incapable of being either otherwise than
through agents. His personal share in both enterprises had to be limited
to the backing capital.

Miss Hope said, "Start a settlement," and he had said, "I can't unless
you'll work it for me. Will you?" So he started a settlement, and she
worked it for him, and he came about the place and got in the way and
wrote heavy cheques and adored Felicity and suggested at suitable
intervals that she should marry him.

Felicity had no intention of marrying him. She called him a rest. No one
likes being called a rest when they desire to be a stimulant, or even a
gentle excitement. Felicity was an immense excitement to Mr. Leslie
(though he concealed it laboriously under a heavy and matter-of-fact
exterior) and it is of course pleasanter when these things are
reciprocal. But Mr. Leslie perceived that she took much more interest
even in her young cousin Peter than in him. "Do you find him a useful
little boy?" she asked him this afternoon, before Peter and Urquhart
arrived.

Leslie nodded. "Useful boy--very. And pleasant company, you know. I don't
know much about these things, but he seems to have a splendid eye for a
good thing. Funny thing is, it works all round--in all departments.
Native genius, not training. He sees a horse between a pair of shafts in
a country lane; looks at it; says 'That's good. That would have a fair
chance for the Grand National'--Urquhart buys it for fifty pounds
straight away--and it _does_ win the Grand National. And he knows nothing
special about horses, either. That's what I call genius. It's the same
eye that makes him spot a dusty old bit of good china on a back shelf of
a shop among a crowd of forged rubbish. I've none of that sort of sense;
I'm hopeless. But I like good things, and I can pay for them, and I give
that boy a free rein. He's furnishing my house well for me. It seems to
amuse him rather."

"He loves it," said Felicity. "His love of pleasant things is what he
lives by. Including among them Denis Urquhart, of course."

"Yes." Leslie pursed thoughtful lips over Denis Urquhart. He was perhaps
slightly touched with jealousy there. He was himself rather drawn towards
that tranquil young man, but he knew very well that the drawing was
one-sided; Urquhart was patently undrawn.

"Rather a flash lot, the Urquharts, aren't they?" he said; and Peter, who
liked him, would have had to admit that the remark was perilously near to
a bound. "Seem to have a sort of knack of dazzling people."

"He's an attractive person, of course," Miss Hope replied; and she didn't
say it distantly; she was so sorry for people who bounded, and so many of
her friends did. "It's pleasing to see, isn't it--such whole-souled
devotion?"

Mr. Leslie grunted. "I won't say pearls before swine--because Urquhart
isn't a swine, but a very pleasant, ordinary young fellow. But worship
like that can't be deserved, you know; not by anyone, however
beautifully he motors through life. Margerison's too--well, too nice,
to put it simply--to give himself to another person, body and soul, like
that. It's squandering."

"And irritates you," she reflected, but merely said, "Is squandering
always a bad thing, I wonder?"

It was at this point that Peter and Urquhart came in. Directed by
Felicity to Lucy in an obscure corner, they found her being talked to by
one of the Oddities; he looked rather like an oppressed Finn. He was
talking and she was listening, wide-eyed and ingenuous, her small hands
clasped on her lap. Peter and Urquhart sat down by her, and the oppressed
Finn presently wandered away to talk to Lucy's father.

Lucy gave a little sigh of relief.

"_Wish_ they wouldn't come and talk to me," she said. "I'm no good to
them; I don't understand; and I hate people to be unhappy. I'm dreadfully
sorry they are. I don't want to have to think about them. Why can't they
be happy? There are so many nice things all about. 'Tis such _waste_."
She looked up at Urquhart, and her eyes laughed because he was happy and
clean, and shone like a new pin.

"It's nicest," she said, "to be happy and clean. And it's not bad to be
happy and dirty; or _very_ bad to be unhappy and clean; but ..." She shut
her lips with a funny distaste on the remaining alternative. "And I'm
horribly afraid Felicity's going to get engaged to Mr. Malyon, that young
one talking to her, do you see? He helps with conspiracies in Poland."

"But he's quite clean," said Urquhart, looking at him.

Lucy admitted that. "But he'll get sent to Siberia soon, don't you see,
and Felicity will go too, I know."

Peter said, "If I was Felicity I'd marry Leslie; I wouldn't hesitate for
a moment. I wish it was me he loved so. Fancy marrying into all those
lovely things I'm getting for him. Only I hope she won't, because then
she'd take over the shopping department, and I should be left unemployed.
Oh, Lucy, he's let me buy him the heavenliest pair of Chelsea
_jardinières_, shaped like orange-tubs, with Cupids painted on blue
panels. You must come and see them soon."

Lucy's eyes, seeing the delightful things, widened and danced. She loved
the things Peter bought.

Suddenly Peter, who had a conscience somewhere, felt a pang in it, and,
to ease it, regretfully left the corner and wandered about among his
uncle's friends, being pleasant and telling them the time. He did that
till the last of them had departed. Urquhart then had to depart also, and
Peter was alone with his relatives. It was only after Urquhart had gone
that Peter realised fully what a very curious and incongruous element he
had been in the room. Realising it suddenly, he laughed, and Lucy laughed
too. Felicity looked at them indulgently.

"Babies. What's the matter now?"

"Only Denis," explained Peter.

"That young man," commented Dermot Hope, without approbation, "is
remarkably well-fed, well-bred, and well-dressed. Why do you take him
about with you?"

"That's just why, isn't it, Peter," put in Lucy. "Peter and I _like_
people to be well-fed and well-bred and well-dressed."

Felicity touched her chin, with her indulgent smile.

"Baby again. You like no such thing. You'd get tired of it in a week."

"Oh, well," said Lucy, "a week's a long time."

"He's got no fire in all his soul and body," complained Dermot Hope.
"He's a symbol of prosperous content--of all we're fighting. It's people
like him who are the real obstructionists; the people who don't see, not
because they're blind, but because they're too pleased with their own
conditions to look beyond them. It's people like him who are pouring
water on the fires as they are lit, because fires are such bad form,
and might burn up their precious chattels if allowed to get out of hand.
Take life placidly; don't get excited, it's so vulgar; that's their
religion. They've neither enthusiasm nor imagination in them. And so ..."

And so forth, just as it came out in "Progress" once a month. Peter
didn't read "Progress," because he wasn't interested in the future, being
essentially a child of to-day. Besides, he too hated conflagrations,
thinking the precious chattels they would burn up much too precious for
that. Peter was no lover either of destruction or construction; perhaps
he too was an obstructionist; though not without imagination. His uncle
knew he had a regrettable tendency to put things in the foreground and
keep ideas very much in the background, and called him therefore a
phenomenalist. Lucy shared this tendency, being a good deal of an artist
and nothing at all of a philosopher.




CHAPTER IV

THE COMPLETE SHOPPER


Six months later Peter called at the Hopes' to say good-bye before he
went to Italy. He found Lucy in, and Urquhart was there too, talking
to her in a room full of leaping fire-shadows. Peter sat down on the
coal-scuttle (it was one of those coal-scuttles you can sit on
comfortably) and said, "Leslie's taking me to Italy on Sunday. Isn't
it nice for me. I wish he was taking you too."

Lucy, clasping small hands, said, "Oh, Peter, I wish he was!"

Urquhart, looking at her said, "Do you want to go?" and she nodded, with
her mouth tight shut as if to keep back floods of eloquence on that
subject. "So do I," said Urquhart, and added, in his casual way, "Will
you and your father come with me?"

"You paying?" said Lucy, in her frank, unabashed way like a child's; and
he smiled down at her.

"Yes. Me paying."

"'Twould be nice," she breathed, her grey eyes wide with wistful
pleasure. "I would love it. But--but father wouldn't, you know. He
wouldn't want to go, and if he did he'd want to pay for it himself,
and do it his own way, and travel third-class and be dreadfully
uncomfortable. Wouldn't he, Peter?"

Peter feared that he would.

"Thank you tremendously, all the same," said Lucy, prettily polite.

"I shall have to go by myself, then," said Urquhart. "What a bore. I
really am going, you know, sometime this spring, to stay with my uncle
in Venice. I expect I shall come across you, Margery, with any luck. I
shan't start yet, though; I shall wait for better motoring weather. No,
I can't stop for tea, thanks; I'm going off for the week-end. Good-bye.
Good-bye, Margery. See you next in Venice, probably."

He was gone. Lucy sat still in her characteristic attitude, hands clasped
on her knees, solemn grey eyes on the fire.

"He's going away for the week-end," she said, realising it for herself
and Peter. "But it's more amusing when he's here. When he's in town, I
mean, and comes in. That's nice and funny, isn't it."

"Yes," said Peter.

"But one can go out into the streets and see the people go by--and that's
nice and funny too. And there are the Chinese paintings in the British
Museum ... and concerts ... and the Zoo ... and I'm going to a theatre
to-night. It's _all_ nice and funny, isn't it."

"Yes," said Peter again. He thought so too.

"Even when you and he are both gone to Italy," said Lucy, reassuring
herself, faintly interrogative. "Even then ... it can't be dull. It can't
be dull ever."

"It hasn't been yet," Peter agreed. "But I wish you were coming too to
Italy. You must before long. As soon as ..." He left that unfinished,
because it was all so vague at present, and he and Lucy always lived in
the moment.

"Well," said Lucy, "let's have tea." They had it, out of little Wedgwood
cups, and Lucy's mood of faint wistfulness passed over and left them
chuckling.

Lucy was a little sad about Felicity, who was now engaged to the young
professor who was conspiring in Poland.

"I knew she would, of course. I told you so long ago. He's quite sure
to get arrested before long, so that settled it. And they're going to
be married directly and go straight out there and plot. He excites the
students, you know; as if students needed exciting by their
professors.... I shall miss Felicity horribly. _'Tis_ too bad."

Peter, to cheer her up, told her what he and Leslie were going to do in
Italy.

"I'll write, of course. Picture post cards, you know. And if ever I've
twopence halfpenny to spare I'll write a real letter; there'll be a lot
to tell you." Peter expected Leslie to be rather funny in Italy, picking
things up.

"A great country, I believe, for picking things up," he had said.
"Particularly for the garden." He had been referring to his country seat.

"I see," said Peter. "You want to Italianise the garden. I'm not quite
sure.... Oh, you might, of course. Iron-work gates, then; and carved
Renaissance oil-tanks, and Venetian well-heads, and such-like. All right;
we'll see what we can steal. But it's rather easy to let an Italianised
garden become florid; you have to be extremely careful with it."

"That's up to you," said Mr. Leslie tranquilly.

So they went to Italy, and Peter picked things up with judgment, and
Leslie paid for them with phlegm. They picked up not only carved
olive-oil tanks and well-heads and fifteenth-century iron-work gates from
ancient and impoverished gardens, but a contemporarily copied Della
Robbia fireplace, and designs for Renaissance ceilings, and a rococo
carved and painted altar-piece from a mountain church whose _parroco_ was
hard-up, and a piece of 1480 tapestry that Peter loved very much, whereon
St. Anne and other saints played among roses and raspberries, beautiful
to behold. These things made both the picker-up and the payer exceedingly
contented. Meanwhile Peter with difficulty restrained Leslie from
"picking up" stray pieces of mosaic from tessellated pavements, and other
curios. Oddly together with Leslie's feeling for the costly went the
insane and indiscriminate avidity of the collecting tourist.

"You can't do it," Peter would shrilly and emphatically explain. "It's
like a German tripper collecting souvenirs. Things aren't interesting
merely because you happen to have been to the places they belong to. What
do you want with that bit of glass? It isn't beautiful; when it's taken
out of the rest of its pattern like that it's merely ridiculous. I
thought you wanted _beautiful_ things."

Leslie would meekly give in. His leaning on Peter in this matter of
what he wanted was touching. In the matter of what he admired, where no
questions of acquisition came in, he and his shopping-man agreed less.
Leslie here showed flashes of proper spirit. He also read Ruskin in the
train. Peter had small allegiance there; he even, when irritated, called
Ruskin a muddle-head.

"He's a good man, isn't he?" Leslie queried, puzzled. "Surely he knows
what he's talking about?" and Peter had to admit that that was so.

"He tells me what to like," the self-educator said simply. "And I try to
like it. I don't always succeed, but I try. That's right, isn't it?"

"I don't know." Peter was puzzled. "It seems to me rather a funny way of
going about it. When you've succeeded, are you much happier? I mean, what
sort of a liking is it? Oh, but I don't understand--there aren't two
sorts really. You either like a thing, or ... well."

At times one needed a rest from Leslie. But outside the province of art
and the pleasures of the eye he was lovable, even likeable, having here
a self-dependence and a personality that put pathos far off, and made
him himself a rest. And his generosity was limitless. It was almost an
oppression; only Peter, being neither proud nor self-conscious, was not
easily oppressed. He took what was lavished on him and did his best to
deserve it. But it was perhaps a little tiring. Leslie was a thoroughly
good sort--a much better sort than most people knew--but Italy was
somehow not the fit setting for him. Nothing could have made Peter
dislike things pleasant to look at; but Leslie's persevering,
uncomprehending groping after their pleasantness made one feel desirous
to dig a gulf between them and him. It was rather ageing. Peter missed
Urquhart and Lucy; one felt much younger with them. The thought of their
clean, light, direct touch on life, that handled its goods without
fumbling, and without the need of any intervening medium, was as
refreshing as a breath of fresh air in a close room.

Rodney too was refreshing. They came across him at Pietrasanta; he was
walking across Tuscany by himself, and came to the station, looking very
dusty and disreputable, to put the book he had finished into his bag that
travelled by train and get out another.

"Come out of that," he said to Peter, "and walk with me to Florence.
Trains for bags; roads for men. You can meet your patron in Florence.
Come along."

And Peter, after a brief consultation with the accommodating Leslie, did
come along. It was certainly more than amusing. The road in Tuscany is
much better than the railway. And Rodney was an interesting and rather
attractive person. Since he left Cambridge he had been pursuing abstruse
chemical research in a laboratory he had in a Westminster slum. Peter
never saw him in London, because the Ignorant Rich do not live in slums,
and because Rodney was not fond of the more respectable quarters of the
city.

Peter was set speculating vaguely on Rodney's vivid idealism. To Peter,
ideas, the unseen spirits of life, were remote, neither questioned nor
accepted, but simply in the background. In the foreground, for the
moment, were a long white road running through a river valley, and little
fortress cities cresting rocky hills, and the black notes of the
cypresses striking on a background of silver olives. In these Peter
believed; and he believed in blue Berovieri goblets, and Gobelin
tapestries, and in a great many other things that he had seen and saw at
this moment; he believed intensely, with a poignant vividness of delight,
in all things visible. For the rest, it was not that he doubted or
wondered much; he had not thought about it enough for that; but it was
all very remote. What was spirit, apart from form? Could it be? If so,
would it be valuable or admirable? It was the shapes and colours of
things, after all, that mattered. As to the pre-existence of things and
their hereafter, Peter seldom speculated; he knew that it was through
entering the workshop (or the play-room, he would rather have said) of
the phenomenal, where the idea took limiting lines and definite shape and
the tangible charm of the sense-apprehended, that life for him became
life. Rodney attained to his real by looking through the manifold veils
of the phenomenal, as through so much glass; Peter to his by an adoring
delight in their complex loveliness. He was not a symbolist; he had no
love of mystic hints and mist-veiled distances; he was George Herbert's

  Man who looks on glass
  And on it rests his eye,

because glass was so extremely jolly. Rodney looked with the mystic's
eyes on life revealed and emerging behind its symbols; Peter with the
artist's on life expressed in the clean and lovely shapes of things,
their colours and tangible sweetness. To Peter Rodney's idealism would
have been impossibly remote; things, as things, had a delightful concrete
reality that was its own justification. They needed to interpret nothing;
they were themselves; no veils, but the very inner sanctuary.

Both creeds, that of things visible and that of the idea, were good, and
suited to the holders; but for those on whom fortune frequently frowns,
for those whose destiny it is to lose and break and not to attain,
Peter's has drawbacks. Things do break so; break and get lost and are no
more seen; and that hurts horribly. Remains the idea, Rodney would have
said; that, being your own, does not get lost unless you throw it away;
and, unless you are a fool, you don't throw it away until you have
something better to take its place.

Anyhow they walked all day and slept on the road. On the third night
they slept in an olive garden; till the moon, striking in silver slants
between silver trees, lit on Rodney's face, and he opened dreamy eyes on
a pale, illumined world. At his side Peter, still in the shadows, slept
rolled up in a bag. Rodney slept with a thin plaid shawl over his knees.
He glanced for a moment at Peter's pale face, a little pathetic in sleep,
a little amused too at the corners of the lightly-closed lips. Rodney's
brief regard was rather friendly and affectionate; then he turned from
the dreaming Peter to the dreaming world. They had gone to sleep in a
dark blue night lit by golden stars, and the olive trees had stood dark
and unwhispering about them, gnarled shapes, waiting their
transformation. Now there had emerged a white world, a silver mystery,
a pale dream; and for Rodney the reality that shone always behind the
shadow-foreground dropped the shadows like a veil and emerged in clean
and bare translucence of truth. The dome of many-coloured glass was here
transcended, its stain absorbed in the white radiance of the elucidating
moon. So elucidating was the moon's light that it left no room for
confusion or doubt. So eternally silver were the still ranks of the
olives that one could imagine no transformation there. That was the pale
and immutable light that lit all the worlds. Getting through and behind
the most visible and obvious of the worlds one was in the sphere of true
values; they lay all about, shining in unveiled strangeness, eternally
and unalterably lit. So Rodney, who had his own value-system, saw them.

Peter too was caught presently into the luminous circle, and stirred, and
opened pleased and friendly eyes on the white night--Peter was nearly
always polite, even to those who woke him--then, half apologetically,
made as if to snuggle again into sleep, but Rodney put out a long thin
arm and shoved him, and said, "It's time to get up, you slacker," and
Peter murmured:

"Oh, bother, all right, have you made tea?"

"No," said Rodney. "You can do without tea this morning."

Peter sat up and began to fumble in his knapsack.

"I see no morning," he patiently remarked, as he struck a match and lit
a tiny spirit-lamp. "I see no morning; and whether there is a morning or
merely a moon I cannot do without tea. Or biscuits."

He found the biscuits, and apparently they had been underneath him all
night.

"I thought the ground felt even pricklier than usual," he commented. "I
do have such dreadfully bad luck, don't I. Crumbs, Rodney? They're quite
good, for crumbs. Better than crusts, anyhow. I should think even you
could eat crumbs without pampering yourself. And if crumbs then tea, or
you'll choke. Here you are."

He poured tea into two collapsible cups and passed one to Rodney, who had
been discoursing for some time on his special topic, the art of doing
without.

Then Peter, drinking tea and munching crumbs, sat up in his bag and
looked at what Rodney described as the morning. He saw how the long,
pointed olive leaves stood with sharp edges against pale light; how
the silver screen was, if one looked into it, a thing of magic details
of delight, of manifold shapes and sharp little shadowings and delicate
tracery; how gnarled stems were light-touched and shadow-touched and
silver and black; how the night was delicate, marvellous, a radiant
wonder of clear loveliness, illustrated by a large white moon. Peter
saw it and smiled. He did not see Rodney's world, but his own.

But both saw how the large moon dipped and dipped. Soon it would dip
below the dim land's rim, and the olive trees would be blurred and
twisted shadows in a still shadow-world.

"Then," said Peter dreamily, "we shall be able to go to sleep again."

Rodney pulled him out of his bag and firmly rolled it up.

"Twelve kilometres from breakfast. Thirty from tea. No, we don't tea
before Florence. Go and wash."

They washed in a copper bucket that hung beside a pulley well. It was
rather fun washing, till Peter let the bucket slip off the hook and
gurgle down to the bottom. Then it was rather fun fishing for it with
the hook, but it was not caught, and they abandoned it in sudden alarm at
a distant sound, and hastily scrambled out of the olive garden onto the
white road.

Beneath their feet lay the thick soft dust, unstirred as yet by the day's
journeyings. The wayfaring smell of it caught at their breath. Before
them the pale road wound and wound, between the silver secrecy of the
olive woods, towards the journeying moon that dipped above a far and
hidden city in the west. Then a dim horizon took the dipping moon, and
there remained a grey road that smelt of dust and ran between shadowed
gardens that showed no more their eternal silver, but gnarled and twisted
stems that mocked and leered.

One traveller stepped out of his clear circle of illumined values into
the shrouded dusk of the old accustomed mystery, and the road ran faint
to his eyes through a blurred land, and he had perforce to take up
again the quest of the way step by step. Reality, for a lucid space of
time emerging, had slipped again behind the shadow-veils. The ranks of
the wan olives, waiting silently for dawn, held and hid their secret.

The other traveller murmured, "How many tones of grey do you suppose
there are in an olive tree when the moon has set? But there'll be more
presently. Listen...."

The little wind that comes before the dawn stirred and shivered, and
disquieted the silence of the dim woods. Peter knew how the stirred
leaves would be shivering white, only in the dark twilight one could not
see.

The dusk paled and paled. Soon one would catch the silver of up-turned
leaves.

On the soft deep dust the treading feet of the travellers moved quietly.
One walked with a light unevenness, a slight limp.




CHAPTER V

THE SPLENDID MORNING


"Listen," said Peter again; and some far off thing was faintly jarring
the soft silence, on a crescendo note.

Rodney listened, and murmured, "Brute." He hated them more than Peter
did. He was less wide-minded and less sweet-tempered. Peter had a gentle
and not intolerant æsthetic aversion, Rodney a fervid moral indignation.

It came storming over the rims of twilight out of an unborn dawn, and the
soft dust surged behind. Its eyes flamed, and lit the pale world. It was
running to the city in the dim west; it was in a hurry; it would be there
for breakfast. As it ran it played the opening bars of something of
Tchaichowsky's.

Rodney and Peter leant over the low white wall and gazed into grey
shivering gardens. So could they show aloof contempt; so could they
elude the rioting dust.

The storming took a diminuendo note; it slackened to a throbbing murmur.
The brute had stopped, and close to them. The brute was investigating
itself.

"Perhaps," Rodney hoped, but not sanguinely, "they'll have to push it all
the way to Florence." Still contempt withheld a glance.

Then a pleasant, soft voice broke the hushed dusk with half a laugh, and
Peter wheeled sharply about. The man who had laughed was climbing again
into his seat, saying, "It's quite all right." That remark was extremely
characteristic; it would have been a suitable motto for his whole career.

The next thing he said, in his gentle, unsurprised voice, was to the
bare-headed figure that smiled up at him from the road.

"You, Margery?... What a game. But what have you done with the Hebrew?
Oh, that's Stephen, isn't it. That accounts for it: but how did he get
you? I say, you can't have slept anywhere; there's _been_ nowhere, for
miles. And have you left Leslie to roam alone among the Objects of Beauty
with his own unsophisticated taste for guide? I suppose he's chucked
you at last; very decent-spirited of him, I think, don't you, Stephen?"

"I chucked him," Peter explained, "because he bought a sham Carlo Dolci.
I drew the line at that. Though if one must have a Carlo Dolci, I suppose
it had better be a sham one, on the whole. Anyhow, I came away and took
to the road. We sleep in ditches, and we like it very much, and I make
tea every morning in my little kettle. I'm going to Florence to help
Leslie to buy bronze things for his grates--dogs, you know, and shovels
and things. Leslie will have been there for three days now; I do wonder
what he's bought."

"You'd better come on in the car," Urquhart said. "Both of you. Why is
Stephen looking so proud? I shall be at Florence for breakfast. _You_
won't, though. Bad luck. Come along; there's loads of room."

Rodney stood by the wall. He was unlike Peter in this, that his
resentment towards a person who motored across Tuscany between dusk and
dawn was in no way lessened by the discovery of who it was.

Peter stood, his feet deep in dust, and smiled at Urquhart. Rodney
watched the two a little cynically from the wall. Peter looked what he
was--a limping vagabond tramp, dust-smeared, bare-headed, very much
part of the twilight road. In spite of his knapsack, he had the air of
possessing nothing and smiling over the thought.

Peter said, "How funny," meaning the combination of Urquhart and the
motor-car and Tuscany and the grey dawn and Rodney and himself; Urquhart
was smiling down at them, his face pale in the strange dawn-twilight.
The scene was symbolical of their whole relations; it seemed as if
Urquhart, lifted triumphantly above the road's dust, had always so smiled
down on Peter, in his vagabond weakness.

"I don't think," Urquhart was saying, "that you ought to walk so far in
the night. It's weakening." To Urquhart Peter had always been a brittle
incompetent, who could not do things, who kept breaking into bits if
roughly handled.

"Rodney and I don't think," Peter returned, in the hushed voice that
belonged to the still hour, "that you ought to motor so loud in the
night. It's common. Rodney specially thinks so. Rodney is sulking; he
won't come and speak to you."

Urquhart called to his cousin: "Come with me to Florence, you and
Margery. Or do you hate them too much?"

"Much too much," Rodney admitted, coming forwards perforce. "Thank you,"
he added, "but I'm on a walking tour, and it wouldn't do to spoil it.
Margery isn't, though. You go, Margery, if you like."

Urquhart said, "Do, Margery," and Peter looked wistful, but declined. He
wanted horribly badly to go with Urquhart; but loyalty hindered.

Urquhart said he was going to Venice afterwards, to stay with his uncle
Evelyn.

"Good," said Peter. "Leslie and I are going to do Venice directly we've
cleared Florence of its Objects of Beauty. You can imagine the way Leslie
will go about Florence, his purse in his hand, asking the price of the
Bargello. 'Worth having, isn't it? A good thing, I think?' If we decide
that it is he'll have it, whatever the price; he always does. He's a
sportsman; I can't tell you how attached I am to him." Peter had not told
even Urquhart that one was ever glad of a rest from Leslie.

Urquhart said, "Well, if you _won't_ come," and hummed into the paling
twilight, and before him fled the circle of golden light and after him
swept the dust. Peter's eyes followed the golden light and the surging
whiteness till a bend in the road took them, and the world was again dim
and grey and very still. Only the little cool wind that soughed among the
olive leaves was like the hushed murmuring of quiet waves. Eastwards,
among the still, mysterious hills and silver plains, a translucent dawn
was coming.

Peter's sigh was very unobtrusive. "After all," he murmured, "motoring
does make me feel sick."

Rodney gave half a cynical smile with the corner of his mouth not
occupied with his short and ugly pipe. Peter was pipeless; smoking,
perhaps, had the same disastrous effect.

"But all the same," said Peter, suddenly aggrieved, "you might be
pleasant to your own cousin, even if he is in a motor. Why be proud?"

He was really a little vexed that Rodney should look with aloofness
on Urquhart. For him Urquhart embodied the brilliance of life, its
splendidness and beauty and joy. Rodney, with his fanatical tilting at
prosperity, would, Peter half consciously knew, have to see Urquhart
unhorsed and stripped bare before he would take much notice of him.

"Too many things," said Rodney, indistinctly over his thick pipe.
"That's all."

Peter, irritated, said, "The old story. The more things the better; why
not? You'd be happy on a desert island full of horrid naked savages. You
think you're civilised, but you're really the most primitive person
I know."

Rodney said he was glad; he liked to be primitive, and added, "But
you're wrong, of course. The naked savages would like anything they could
get--beads or feathers or top hats; they're not natural ascetics; the
simple life is enforced.... St. Francis took off all his clothes in the
Piazza and began his new career without any."

"Disgusting," murmured Peter.

"That," said Rodney, "is what people like Denis should do. They need to
unload, strip bare, to find themselves, to find life."

"Denis," said Peter, "is the most alive person I know, as it happens.
He's found life without needing to take his clothes off--so he scores
over St. Francis."

Denis had rushed through the twilight vivid like a flame--he had lit it
for a moment and left it grey. Peter knew that.

"But he hasn't," Rodney maintained, "got the key of the thing. If he
did take his clothes off, it would be a toss-up whether he found more
life or lost what he's got. That's all wrong, don't you see. That's what
ails all these delightful, prosperous people. They're swimming with
life-belts."

"You'll be saying next," said Peter, disgusted, "that you admire
Savonarola and his bonfire."

"I do, of course. But he'd only got hold of half of it--half the gospel
of the empty-handed. The point is to lose and laugh." For a moment Rodney
had a vision of Peter standing bare-headed in the dust and smiling. "To
drop all the trappings and still find life jolly--just because it _is_
life, not because of what it brings. That's what St. Francis did. That's
where Italy scores over England. I remember at Lerici the beggars
laughing on the shore, with a little maccaroni to last them the day.
There was a man all done up in bandages, hopping about on crutches and
grinning. Smashed to bits, and his bones sticking out of his skin for
hunger, but there was the sun and the sea and the game he was playing
with dice, and he looked as if he was saying, '_Nihil habentes, omnia
possidentes_; isn't it a jolly day?' When Denis says that, I shall begin
to have hopes for him. At present he thinks it's a jolly day because he's
got money to throw about and a hundred and one games to play at and
friends to play them with, and everything his own way, and a new
motor.... Well, but look at that now. Isn't it bare and splendid--all
clean lines--no messing and softness; it might be cut out of rock. Oh,
I like Tuscany."

They had rounded a bend, and a spacious country lay there stretched to
the morning, and over it the marvel of the dawn opened and blossomed like
a flower. From the basin of the shining river the hills stood back, and
up their steep sides the vine-hung mulberries and close-trimmed olives
climbed (olives south of the Serchio are diligently pruned, and lack the
generous luxuriance of the north), and against the silver background the
sentinel cypresses stood black, like sharp music notes striking abruptly
into a vague symphony; and among the mulberry gardens and the olives and
the cypresses white roads climbed and spiralled up to little cresting
cities that took the rosy dawn. Tuscany emerging out of the dim mystery
of night had a splendid clarity, an unblurred cleanness of line, an
austere fineness, as of a land hewn sharply out of rock.

Peter would not have that fine bareness used as illustration; it was too
good a thing in itself. Rodney the symbolist saw the vision of life in
it, Peter the joy of self-sufficient beauty.

The quiet road bore them through the hushed translucence of the
dawn-clear land. Everything was silent in this limpid hour; the little
wind that had whitened the olives and set the sea-waves whispering
there had dropped now and lay very still.

The road ran level through the river basin. Far ahead they could see it
now, a white ribbon laid beside a long golden gleam that wound and wound.

Peter sighed, seeing so much of it all at once, and stopped to rest on
the low white wall, but instead of sitting on it he swayed suddenly
forward, and the hill cities circled close about him, and darkened and
shut out the dawn.

The smell of the dust, when one was close to it, was bitter and odd.
Somewhere in the further darkness a voice was muttering mild and
perplexed imprecations. Peter moved on the strong arm that was supporting
him and opened his eyes and looked on the world again. Between him and
the rosy morning, Rodney loomed large, pouring whisky into a flask.

It all seemed a very old and often-repeated tale. One could not do
anything; one could not even go a walking-tour: one could not (of this
one was quite sure) take whisky at this juncture without feeling horribly
sick. The only thing that occurred to Peter, in the face of the dominant
Rodney, was to say, "I'm a teetotaller." Rodney nodded and held the flask
to his lips. Rodney was looking rather worried.

Peter said presently, still at length in the dust, "I'm frightfully
sorry. I suppose I'm tired. Didn't we get up rather early and walk rather
fast?"

"I suppose," said Rodney, "you oughtn't to have come. What's wrong, you
rotter?"

Peter sat up, and there lay the road again, stretching and stretching
into the pink morning.

"Thirty kilometres to breakfast," murmured Peter. "And I don't know that
I want any, even then. Wrong?... Oh ... well, I suppose it's heart. I
have one, you know, of a sort. A nuisance, it's always been. Not
dangerous, but just in the way. I'm sorry, Rodney--I really am."

Rodney said again, "You absolute rotter. Why didn't you tell me? What in
the name of anything induced you to walk at all? You needn't have."

Peter looked down the long road that wound and wound into the morning
land. "I wanted to," he said. "I wanted to most awfully.... I wanted to
try it.... I thought perhaps it was the one thing.... Football's off
for me, you know--and most other things.... Only diabolo left ... and
ping-pong ... and jig-saw. I'm quite good at those ... but oh, I did want
to be able to walk. Horribly I wanted it."

"Well," said Rodney practically, "it's extremely obvious that you aren't.
You ought to have got into that thing, of course. Only then, as you
remarked, you would have felt sick. Really, Margery...."

"Oh, I know," Peter stopped him hastily. "_Don't_ say the usual things;
I really feel too unwell to bear them. I know I'm made in Germany and all
that--I've been hearing so all my life. And now I should like you to go
on to Florence, and I'll follow, very slow. It's all very well, Rodney,
but you were going at about seven miles an hour. Talk of motors--I
couldn't see the scenery as we rushed by. That's such a Vandal-like
way of crossing Tuscany."

"Well, you can cross the rest of Tuscany by train. There's a station at
Montelupo; we shall be there directly."

Peter, abruptly renouncing his intention of getting up, lay back giddily.
The marvellous morning was splendid on the mountains.

"How extremely lucky," remarked Peter weakly, "that I wasn't in this
position when Denis came by. Denis usually does come by at these crucial
moments you know--always has. He probably thinks by now that I am an
escaped inhabitant of the Permanent Casualty Ward. Bother. I wish he
didn't."

"Since it's obvious," said Rodney, "that you can't stand, let alone walk,
I had better go on to Montelupo and fetch a carriage of sorts. I wonder
if you can lie there quietly till I come back, or if you'll be having
seizures and things? Well, I can't help it. I must go, anyhow. There's
the whisky on your left."

Peter watched him go; he went at seven miles an hour; the dust ruffled
and leapt at his heels.

Peter sat very still leaning back against the rough white wall, and
thought what a pity it all was. What a pity, and what a bore, that one
could not do things like other people. Short of being an Urquhart, who
could do everything and had everything, whose passing car flamed
triumphant and lit the world into a splendid joy, and was approved under
investigation with "quite all right"--short of that glorious competence
and pride of life, one might surely be an average man, who could walk
from San Pietro to Florence without tumbling on the road at dawn. Peter
sighed over it, rather crossly. The marvellous morning was insulted by
his collapse; it became a remote thing, in which he might have no share.
As always, the inexorable "Not for you" rose like a barred gate between
him and the lucid country the white road threaded.

Peter in the dust began to whistle softly, to cheer himself, and because
he was really feeling better, and because anyhow, for him or not for him,
the land at dawn was a golden and glorious thing, and he loved it. What
did it matter whether he could walk through it or not? There it lay,
magical, clear-hewn, bathed in golden sunrise.

Round the turn of the road a bent figure came, stepping slowly and with
age, a woodstack on his back. Heavier even than a knapsack containing a
spirit kettle and a Decameron and biscuit remainders in a paper bag, it
must be. Peter watched the slow figure sympathetically. Would he sway and
topple over; and if he did would the woodstack break his fall? The whisky
flask stood ready on Peter's left.

Peter stopped whistling to watch; then he became aware that once more the
hidden distances were jarring and humming. He sat upright, and waited; a
little space of listening, then once again the sungod's chariot stormed
into the morning.

Peter watched it grow in size. How extremely fortunate.... Even though
one was again, as usual, found collapsed and absurd.

The woodstack pursued its slow advance. The music from Tchaichowsky
admonished it, as a matter of form, from far off, then sharply,
summarily, from a lessening distance. The woodstack was puzzled, vaguely
worried. It stopped, dubiously moved to one side, and pursued its
cautious way a little uncertainly.

Urquhart, without his chauffeur this time, was driving over the
speed-limit, Peter perceived. He usually did. But he ought to slacken
his pace now, or he would miss Peter by the wall. He was nearing the
woodstack, just going to pass it, with a clear two yards between. It was
not his doing: it was the woodstack that suddenly lessened the distance,
lurching over it, taking the middle of the road.

Peter cried, "Oh, don't--oh, _don't_," idiotically, sprawling on hands
and knees.

The car swung sharply about like a tugged horse; sprang to the other side
of the road, hung poised on a wheel, as near as possible capsized. A less
violent jerk and it would have gone clean over the woodstack that lay in
the road on the top of its bearer.

By the time Peter got there, Urquhart had lifted the burden from the old
bent figure that lay face downwards. Gently he turned it over, and they
looked on a thin old face gone grey with more than age.

"He can't be," said Urquhart. "He can't be. I didn't touch him."

Peter said nothing. His eyes rested on the broken end of a chestnut-stick
protruding from the faggot, dangling loose by its bark. Urquhart's glance
followed his.

"I see," said Urquhart quietly. "That did it. The lamp or something must
have struck it and knocked him over. Poor old chap." Urquhart's hand
shook over the still heart. Peter gave him the whisky flask. Two minutes
passed. It was no good.

"His heart must have been bad," said Urquhart, and the soft tones of his
pleasant voice were harsh and unsteady. "Shock, I suppose. How--how
absolutely awful."

How absolutely incongruous, Peter was dully thinking. Urquhart and
tragedy; Urquhart and death. It was that which blackened the radiant
morning, not the mercifully abrupt cessation of a worn-out life. For
Peter death had two sharply differentiated aspects--one of release to
the tired and old, for whom the grasshopper was a burden; the other of
an unthinkable blackness of tragedy--sheer sharp loss that knew no
compensation. It was not with this bitter face that death had stepped
into their lives on this clear morning. One could imagine that weary
figure glad to end his wayfaring so; one could even imagine those steps
to death deliberately taken; and one did imagine those he left behind
him accepting his peace as theirs.

Peter said, "It wasn't your fault. It was his doing--poor chap."

The uncertain quaver in his voice brought Urquhart's eyes for a moment
upon his face, that was always pale and was now the colour of putty.

"You're ill, aren't you?... I met Stephen.... I was coming back anyhow;
I knew you weren't fit to walk."

He muttered it absently, frowning down on the other greyer face in the
grey dust. Again his hand unsteadily groped over the still heart, and lay
there for a moment.

Abruptly then he looked up, and met Peter's shadow-circled eyes.

"I was over-driving," he said. "I ought to have slowed down to pass him."
He stood up, frowning down on the two in the road.

"We've got to think now," he said, "what to do about it."

To that thinking Peter offered no help and no hindrance. He sat in the
road by the dead man and the bundle of wood, and looked vaguely on the
remote morning that death had dimmed. Denis and death: Peter would have
done a great deal to sever that incredible connection.

But it was, after all, for Denis to effect that severing, to cut himself
loose from that oppressing and impossible weight.

He did so.

"I don't see," said Denis, "that we need ... that we can ... do anything
about it."

Above the clear mountains the sun swung up triumphant, and the wide river
valley was bathed in radiant gold.




CHAPTER VI

HILARY, PEGGY, AND HER BOARDERS


When Leslie and Peter went to Venice to pick up Berovieri goblets and
other things, Leslie stayed at the Hotel Europa and Peter in the Palazzo
Amadeo. The Palazzo Amadeo is a dilapidated palace looking onto the Rio
delle Beccarie; it is let in flats to the poor; and in the sea-story
suite of the great, bare, dingy, gilded rooms lived Hilary and Peggy
Margerison, and three disreputable infants who insisted on bathing in the
canals, and the boarders. The boarders were at the moment six in number;
Peter made seven. The great difficulty with the boarders, Peggy told him,
was to make them pay. They had so little money, and such a constitutional
reluctance to spend that little on their board.

"The poor things," said Peggy, who had a sympathetic heart. "I'm sure I'm
sorry for them, and I hate to ask them for it. But one's got to try and
live."

She was drying Illuminato (baptized in that name by his father's
desire, but by his mother called Micky) before the stove in the great
dining-room. Illuminato had just tumbled off the bottom step into the
water, and had been fished out by his uncle Peter; he was three, and had
humorous, screwed-up eyes and a wide mouth like a frog's, so that Hilary,
who detested ugliness, could really hardly be fond of him. Peggy was; but
then Peggy always had more sense of humour than Hilary.

A boarder looked in to see if lunch was ready. It was not, but Peggy
began preparations by screaming melodiously for Teresina. They heard the
boarder sigh. He was a tall young man with inspired eyes and oily hair.
Peter had observed him the night before, with some interest.

"That's Guy Vyvian," Peggy told him, looking for Illuminato's dryer suit
in the china cupboard.

"Fancy," said Peter.

"Yes," said Peggy, pulling out a garment and dropping a plate out of its
folds on the polished marble floor. "There now! Micky, you're a tiresome
little ape and I don't love you. Guy Vyvian's an ape, too, entirely; his
one merit is that he writes for 'The Gem,' so that Hilary can take the
rent he won't pay out of the money he gives him for his articles. It
works out pretty well, on the whole, I fancy; they're neither of them
good at paying, so it saves them both bother. ("È pronto, Teresina?"
"Subito, subito," cried Teresina from the kitchen.) "I can't abide
Vyvian," Peggy resumed. "The babies hate him, and he makes himself horrid
to everyone, and lets Rhoda Johnson grovel to him, and stares at the
stains on the table-cloth, as if his own nails weren't worse, and turns up
his nose at the food. Poor little Rhoda! You saw her? The little thin
girl with a cough, who hangs on Vyvian's words and blushes when her
mother speaks. She's English governess to the Marchesa Azzareto's
children. Mrs. Johnson's a jolly old soul; I'm fond of her; she's the
best of the boarders, by a lot. Now, precious, if you tumble in again
this morning, you shall sit next to Mr. Vyvian at dinner. You go and tell
the others that from me. It isn't respectable, the way you all go on.
Here's the minestra at last."

Teresina, clattering about the marble floor with the minestra, screamed
"Pronto," very loud, and the boarders trailed in one by one. First came
Mr. Guy Vyvian, sauntering with resignedly lifted brows, and looking as
if it ought to have been ready a long time ago; he was followed by Mrs.
Johnson, a stout and pleasant lady, who looked as if she was only too
delighted that it was ready now, and the more the better; her young
daughter, Rhoda, wearing a floppy smocked frock and no collar but a bead
necklace, coughed behind her; she looked pale and fatigued, and as if it
didn't matter in the least if it was never ready at all. She was being
talked to by a round-faced, fluffy-haired lady in a green dress and
pince-nez, who took an interest in the development of her deplorably
uncultured young mind--a Miss Barnett, who was painting pictures to
illustrate a book to be called "Venice, Her Spirit." The great hope for
young Rhoda, both Miss Barnett and Mr. Vyvian felt, was to widen the gulf
between her and her unspeakable mother. They, who quarrelled about
everything else, were united in this enterprise. The method adopted
was to snub Mrs. Johnson whenever she spoke. That was no doubt why, as
Peggy had told Peter, Rhoda blushed on those frequent occasions.

The party was completed by a very young curate, and an elderly spinster
with mittens and many ailments, the symptoms of which she lucidly
specified in a refined undertone to any lady who would listen; with
gentlemen, however, she was most discreet, except with the curate, who
complained that his cloth was no protection. Finally Hilary came in and
took the head of the table, and Peggy and the children took the other
end. Peter found himself between Mrs. Johnson and Miss Barnett, and
opposite Mr. Vyvian and Rhoda.

Mrs. Johnson began to be nice to him at once, in her cheery way.

"Know Venice?" and when Peter said, "Not yet," she told him, "Ah, you'll
like it, I know. So pleasant as it is. Particlerly for young people. It
gives me rheumatics, so much damp about. But my gel Rhoder is that fond
of it. Spends all her spare time--not as she's got much, poor gel--in the
gall'ries and that. Art, you know. She goes in for it, Rhoder does. I
don't, now. I'm a stupid old thing, as they'll all tell you." She nodded
cheerfully and inclusively at Mr. Vyvian and Rhoda and Miss Barnett. They
did not notice. Vyvian, toying disgustedly with his burnt minestra, was
saying in his contemptuous voice, "Of course, if you like _that_, you may
as well like the Frari monuments at once and have done."

Rhoda was crimson; she had made another mistake. Miss Barnett, who
disputed the office of mentor with Vyvian, whom she jealously disliked,
broke in, in her cheery chirp, "I don't agree with you, Mr. Vyvian. I
consider it a very fine example of Carpaccio's later style; I think you
will find that some good critics are with me." She addressed Peter,
ignoring the intervening solidity of Mrs. Johnson. "Do you support me,
Mr. Margerison?"

"I've not seen it yet," Peter said rather timidly. "It sounds very nice."

Miss Barnett gave him a rather contemptuous look through her pince-nez
and turned to Hilary.

"Lor!" whispered Mrs. Johnson to Peter. "They do get so excited about
pictures. Just like that they go on all day, squabblin' and peckin' each
other. Always at Rhoder they are too, tellin' her she must think this and
mustn't think that, till the poor gel don't know if she's on her head or
her heels. She don't like _me_ to interfere, or it's all I can do
sometimes not to put in my word and say, 'You stick to it, Rhoder my
dear; you stand up to 'em and your mother'll back you.' But Rhoder don't
like that. 'Mother,' she says, quite sharp, 'Mother, you don't know a
thing about Art, and they do. You let be, and don't put me to shame
before my friends.' That's what she'd like to say, anyhow, if she's too
good a gel to say it. Rhoder's ashamed of my ignorance, that's what it
is." This was a furtive whisper, for Peter's ear alone. Having thus
unburdened herself Mrs. Johnson cleared her throat noisily and said very
loud, "An' what do you think of St. Mark's?" That was a sensible and
intelligent question, and she hoped Rhoda heard.

Peter said he thought it was very nice. That Rhoda certainly heard, and
she looked at him with a curious expression, in which hope predominated.
Was this brother of the Margerisons another fool, worse than her? Would
he perhaps make her folly shine almost like wisdom by comparison? She
exchanged a glance with Vyvian; it was extraordinarily sweet to be able
to do that; so many glances had been exchanged àpropos of _her_ remarks
between Vyvian and Miss Barnett. But here was a young man who thought St.
Mark's was very nice. "The dear Duomo!" Miss Barnett murmured, protecting
it from Tourist Insolence.

Mrs. Johnson agreed enthusiastically with Peter.

"I call it just sweet. You should see it on a Sunday, Mr. Margerison--Mr.
Peter, as I should say, shouldn't I?--all the flags flying, and the sun
shining on the gilt front an' all, and the band playing in the square;
an' inside half a dozen services all at once, and the incense floatin'
everywhere. Not as I'm partial to incense; it makes me feel a bit
squeamish--and Miss Gould there tells me it affects her similarly, don't
it, Miss Gould? Incense, I say--don't it give you funny feelin's within?
Seem to upset you, as it were?"

Miss Gould, disturbed in her intimate conversation with the curate, held
up mittened hands in deprecating horror, either at the delicacy of the
question called across the table with gentlemen present, or at the memory
it called up in her of the funny feelings within.

Mrs. Johnson took it as that, and nodded. "Just like me, she is, in that
way. But I like to see the worship goin' on, all the same. Popish, you
know, of course," she added, and then, bethinking herself, "But perhaps
you're a Roman, Mr. Peter, like your dear brother and sister? Well, Roman
or no Roman, I always say as how Mrs. Margerison is one of the best. A
dear, cheery soul, as has hardships to contend with; and if she finds the
comforts of religion in graven images an' a bead necklace, who am I to
say her no?"

"Peggy," said Hilary wearily across the table, "Illuminato is making a
little beast of himself. Put him out."

Peggy scrubbed Illuminato's bullet head dry with her handkerchief (it had
been lying in his minestra bowl), slapped him lightly on the hands, and
said absently, "Don't worry poor Daddy, who's so tired." She was wishing
that the _risotto_ had been boiled a little; one gathered from the
hardness of the rice that that process had been omitted. Vyvian, who
was talking shop with Hilary, sighed deeply and laid down his fork. He
wondered why he ever came in to lunch. One could get a much better one
nearly as cheap at a restaurant.

Miss Barnett, with an air of wishing to find out how bad a fool Peter
was, leaned across Mrs. Johnson and said, "What are you to Venice, Mr.
Margerison, and Venice to you? What, I mean, are you going to get out
of her? Which of her aspects do you especially approach? She has so
infinitely many, you know. What, in fact, is your connecting link?" She
waited with some interest for what Peter would say. She had not yet
"placed" him.

Peter said, "Oh, well ... I look at things, you know ... much the same
as anyone else, I expect. And I go in gondolas; and then there are the
things one would like to buy."

Mrs. Johnson approved this. "Lovely, ain't they! Only one never has the
money to spend."

"I watch other people spending theirs," said Peter, "which is the next
best thing, I suppose ... I'm sorry I'm stupid, Miss Barnett--but it's
all so jolly that I don't like to be invidious."

"Do you write?" she enquired.

"Sometimes," he admitted. "You're illustrating a book about Venice,
aren't you? That must be awfully interesting."

"I am trying," she said, "to catch the most elusive thing in the
world--the Spirit of Venice. It breaks my heart, the pursuit. Just
round the corner, always; you know Browning's 'Love in a Life'?

  Heart, fear nothing, for heart, thou shalt find her,
  Next time herself!--not the trouble behind her ...
  Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
  Spend my whole day in the quest;--who cares? ...

It's like that with me and my Venice. It hurts rather--but I have to go
on."

"You shouldn't, my dear," Mrs. Johnson murmured soothingly. "I'm sure you
should be careful. We mustn't play tricks with our constitutions."

Rhoda kicked Peter under the table in mistake for her mother, and never
discovered the error.

"Can you tell me," Miss Barnett added abruptly, in her cheerful voice,
"where it hides?"

Peter looked helpful and intelligent, and endeared himself to her
thereby. She thought him a sympathetic young man, with possibilities,
probably undeveloped.

Vyvian, who regarded Miss Barnett and "Venice, Her Spirit," with
contemptuous jealousy, thought that Rhoda was paying them too much
attention, and effectually called her away by saying, "If you care to
come with me to the Schiavoni, I can better explain to you what I mean."

Rhoda kindled and flushed and looked suddenly pretty. Peter heard a
smothered sigh on his left.

"I don't like it," Mrs. Johnson murmured to him. "No, I don't. If it was
you, now, as offered to take her--But there, I daresay you wouldn't be
clever enough to suit Rhoder; she's so partic'lar. You and me, now--we
get on very well; seems as if we liked to talk on the same subjects, as
it were; but Rhoder's different. When we go about together, it's always,
'Mother, not so loud! Oh, mother, you mustn't! Mother, that ain't really
beautiful at all, and you're givin' of us away. Mother, folks are
listening.' Let 'em listen is what I say. They won't hear anything that
could hurt 'em from me. But Rhoder's so quiet; she hates a bit of notice.
Not that she minds when she's with _him_; he talks away at the top of his
voice, and folks do turn an' listen--I've seen 'em. But I suppose that's
clever talk, so Rhoder don't mind."

She raised her voice from the thick and cautious whisper which she
thought suitable for these remarks, and addressed Peggy.

"Well, we've had a good dinner, my dear--plenty of it, if the rice _was_
a bit underdone."

"A grain," Miss Gould was murmuring to the curate, "a single grain would
have had unspeakable effects...."

Peggy was endeavouring to comb Caterina's exceedingly tangled locks with
the fingers of one hand, while with the other she slapped Silvio's
(Larry's) bare and muddy feet to make him take them off the table-cloth.
Not that they made much difference to the condition of the table-cloth;
but still, there are conventions.

"It is a disgrace," Hilary remarked mechanically, "that my children can't
behave like civilised beings at a meal ... Peter, what are you going to
do this afternoon?"

The boarders rose. Mrs. Johnson patted Peter approvingly on the arm, and
said, "I'm glad to of had the pleasure. One day we'll go out together,
you and me. Seem as if we look at things from the same point of view, as
it were. You mayn't be so clever as some, but you suit me. Now, my dear,
I'm goin' to help you about the house a bit. The saloon wants dustin', I
noticed."

Peggy sighed and said she was sure it did, and Teresina was hopeless, and
Mrs. Johnson was really too kind, but it was a shame to bother her, and
the saloon could go another while yet. She was struggling with the
children's bibs and rather preoccupied.

The boarders went out to pursue their several avocations; Rhoda and Mr.
Vyvian to the church of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, that Mr. Vyvian
might the better explain what he meant; Miss Barnett, round-about and
cheerful, sketch-book in hand, to hunt for "Venice, Her Spirit," in the
Pescaria; Miss Gould to lie down on her bed and recover from lunch; the
curate to take the air and photographs for his magic lantern lectures
to be delivered in the parish-room at home; and Mrs. Johnson to find a
feather broom.

Hilary sat down and lit a cigar, and Illuminato crawled about his legs.

"I'm going out with Leslie," said Peter. "We're going to call on the
prince and see the goblet and begin the haggling. We must haggle, though
as a matter of fact Leslie means to have it at any price. It must be a
perfectly ripping thing.... Now let me have a number of 'The Gem' to
read. I've not seen it yet, you know."

"It's very dull, my dear," Peggy murmured, rinsing water over the place
on the table-cloth where Silvio's feet had been.

Hilary was gazing into the frog-like countenance of his youngest son. It
gave him a disappointment ever new, that Illuminato should be so plain.
"But your mother's handsome, frog," he murmured, "and I'm not worse than
my neighbours to look at." (But he knew he was better than most of them).
"Let's hope you have intellect to make up. Now crawl to your uncle Peter,
since you want to."

Illuminato did want to. He adored his uncle Peter.

"The Gem, Peter?" said Hilary. "Bother the Gem. As Peggy remarks, it's
very dull, and you won't like it. I don't know that I want you to read
it, to say the truth."

Peter was in the act of doing so. He had found three torn pages of it on
the floor. He was reading an article called "Osele." Hilary glanced at
it, with the slight nervous frown frequent with him.

"What have you got hold of?... Oh, that." His frown seemed to relax
a little. "I really don't recommend the thing for your entertainment,
Peter. It'll bore you. I have to provide two things--food for the
interested visitor, and guidance for Lord Evelyn's mania for purchasing."

"So I am gathering," Peter said. "I'm reading about _osele_, marked with
the Mocenigo rose. Signor Antonio Sardi seems to be a man worth a visit.
I must take Leslie there. That's just the sort of thing he likes. And
sixteenth-century visiting cards. Yes, he'd like those too. By all means
we'll go to your friend Sardi. You wrote this, I suppose?"

Hilary nodded. His white nervous fingers played on the arm of his chair.
It seemed to be something of an ordeal to him, this first introduction of
Peter to the Gem.

Peggy, assisting Teresina to bundle the crockery off the table, shot a
swift glance at the group--at Hilary lying back smoking, with slightly
knitted forehead, one unsteady hand playing on his chair; at Peter
sitting on the marble floor with the torn fragments of paper in his hands
and Illuminato astride on his knee. Peggy's grey, Irish eyes were at the
moment a little speculative, touched with a dispassionate curiosity and a
good deal of sisterly and wifely and maternal and slightly compassionate
affection. She was so fond of them all, the dear babes.

Peter had gone on from _osele_ to ivory plaques. He was not quite so much
interested in reading about them because he knew more about them for
himself, but he took down the name of a dealer who had, according to
the Gem, some good specimens, and said he should take Leslie there too.

Hilary got up rather suddenly, and jerked his cigar away into a corner
(marble floors are useful in some ways) and said, "Is Leslie going to buy
the whole place up? I'm sick of these wealthy Jews. They're ruining
Venice. Buying all the palaces, you know. I suppose Leslie'll be wanting
to do that next. There's altogether too much buying in this forsaken
world. Why can't people admire without wanting to acquire? Lord Evelyn
can't. The squandering old fool; he's ruining himself over things he's
too blind even to look at properly. And this Leslie of yours, who can't
even appreciate, still must get and have, of course; and the more he gets
the more he wants. Can't you stop him, Peter? It's such a monstrous
exhibition of the vice of the age."

"It's not my profession to stop him," Peter said. "And, after all, why
shouldn't they? If it makes them happy--well--" His finality conveyed his
creed; if it makes them happy, what else is there? To be happy is to have
reached the goal. Peter was a little sad about Hilary, who seemed as far
as ever from that goal. Why? Peter wondered. Couldn't one be happy in
this lovable water-city, which had, after all, green ways of shadow and
gloom between the peeling brick walls of ancient houses, and, beyond, the
broad spaces of the sea? Couldn't one be happy here even if the babies
did poise muddy feet on a table-cloth, not, after all, otherwise clean;
and even if the poor boarders wouldn't pay their rent and the rich Jews
would buy palaces and plaques? Bother the vice of the age, thought Peter,
as he crossed the sun-bathed piazza and suddenly smelt the sea. There
surely never was such a jolly world made as this, which had Venice in it
for laughter and breathless wonder and delight, and her Duomo shining
like a jewel.

"An' the sun shinin' on the gilt front an' all," murmured Peter. "I call
it just sweet."

He went in (he was to meet Leslie there), and the soft dusk rippled about
him, and beyond the great pillars stretched the limitless, hazy horizons
of a dream.

Presently Leslie came. He had an open "Stones of Venice" in his hand, and
said, "Now for those mosaics." Leslie was a business-like person, who
wasted no time. So they started on the mosaics, and did them for an hour.
Leslie said, "Good. Capital," with the sober, painstaking, conscientious
appreciation he was wont to bestow on unpurchasable excellence; and Peter
said, "How jolly," and felt glad that there were some excellences
unpurchasable even by rich Jews.

They then went to the Accademia and looked at pictures. There Leslie had
a clue to merit. "Anything on hinges, I presume," he remarked, "is worth
inspection. Only why don't they hinge _more_ of the good ones? They ought
to give us a hint; they really ought. How's a man to be sure he's on the
right tack?"

After an hour of that they went to see the prince who had the goblet.
Half an hour's conversation with him, and the goblet belonged to Leslie.
It was a glorious thing of deep blue glass and translucent enamel and
silver, with the Berovieri signature cut on it. Peter looked at it much
as he had seen a woman in the Duomo look up at her Lady's shrine, much
as Rodney had looked on the illumined reality behind the dreaming silver
world.

Peter said, "My word, suppose it broke!" It was natural that he should
think of that; things so often broke. Only that morning his gold watch
had broken, in Illuminato's active hands. Only that afternoon his
bootlace had broken, and he had had none to replace it because Caterina
had been sailing his other boots in the canal. Peter sighed over the
lovely and brittle world.

Then he and Leslie visited Signor Sardi's shop and looked at _osele_ and
sixteenth-century visiting cards. Peter said he knew nothing about either
personally, but quoted Hilary in the Gem, to Leslie's satisfaction.

"Your brother's a good man," said Leslie. "Knows what's what, doesn't he?
If he says these are good _osele_, we may take it that they _are_ good
_osele_, though we don't know one _osele_ from another. That's right,
isn't it?"

Peter said he supposed it was, if one wanted _osele_ at all, which
personally he didn't care about; but one never knew, of course, what
might come in useful. Anyhow Leslie bought some, and a visiting card
belonging to the Count Amadeo Vasari, which gave him much satisfaction.
Then they visited the person who, the Gem had said, had good plaques, and
inspected them critically. Then they had tea at Sant' Ortes' tearoom, and
then Peter went home.

Hilary, who was looking worried, said, "Lord Evelyn wants us to dine with
him to-night," and passed Peter a note in delicate, shaky handwriting.

"Good," said Peter. Hilary wore a bored look and said, "I suppose we must
go," and then proceeded to question Peter concerning Leslie's shopping
adventures. He seemed on the whole more interested in the purchase of
_osele_ than of the Berovieri goblet.

"But," said Peter presently, "your plaque friend wasn't in form to-day.
He had only shams. Rather bright shams, but still--So we didn't get any,
which, I suppose, will please you to hear. Leslie was disappointed. I
told your friend we would look in on a better day, when he had some of
the real thing. He wasn't pleased. I expect he passes off numbers of
those things on people as antiques. You ought to qualify your remarks
in the Gem, Hilary--add that Signor Leroni has to be cautiously dealt
with--or you'll be letting the uncritical plaque-buyer through rather
badly."

"I daresay they can look after themselves," Hilary said, easily; and
Peggy added:

"After all, so long as they _are_ uncritical, it can't matter to them
what sort of a plaque they get!" which of course, was one point of view.




CHAPTER VII

DIANA, ACTÆON, AND LORD EVELYN


Hilary and Peter gondoled to Lord Evelyn Urquhart's residence, a rather
exquisite little old palace called Ca' delle Gemme, and were received
affectionately by the tall, slim, dandified-looking young-old man, with
his white ringed hands and high sweet voice and courtly manner. He had
aged since Peter remembered him; the slim hands were shakier and the
near-sighted eyes weaker and the delicate face more deeply lined with the
premature lines of dissipation and weak health. He put his monocle in his
left eye and smiled at Peter, with the old charming smile that was like
his nephew's, and tilted to and fro on his heels.

"Not changed at all, as far as I can see," he said to Peter, with the
same mincing, finicking pronunciation that had pleased the boy Peter
eight years ago. "Only my sight isn't what it was. _Are_ you changed at
all? Do you still like Bow rose-bowls better than anything except Denis?
Denis is coming here soon, you know, so I shall be able to discover. Oh,
I beg pardon--Mr. Peter Margerison, Mr. Cheriton."

Mr. Cheriton was a dark, sturdy young man with an aggressive jaw, who
bowed without a smile and looked one rather hard in the face. Peter was
a little frightened of him--these curt, brisk manners made him nervous
always--and felt a desire to edge behind Hilary. He gathered that Hilary
and Cheriton did not very much like one another. He knew what that slight
nervous contraction of Hilary's forehead meant.

Dinner was interesting. Lord Evelyn told pleasant and funny stories in
his high, tittering voice, addressing himself to all his guests, but
looking at Peter when he came to his points. (People usually looked at
Peter when they came to the points of their stories.) Hilary talked a
good deal and drank a good deal and ate very little, and was obviously
on very friendly terms with Lord Evelyn and on no terms at all with Mr.
Cheriton. Cheriton looked a good deal at Peter, with very bright and
direct eyes, and flung into the conversation rather curt and spasmodic
utterances in a slightly American accent. He seemed a very decided and
very much alive young man, a little rude, thought Peter, but possibly
that was only his trans-Atlantic way, if, as his voice hinted, he came
from America. Once or twice Peter met the direct and vivid regard fixed
upon him, and nearly was startled into "I beg your pardon," for there
seemed to him an odd element of accusation in the look.

"But it isn't my fault," he told himself reassuringly. "I've not done
anything, I'm sure I haven't. It's just the way he's made, I expect. Or
else people have done him badly once or twice, and he's always thinking
it's going to happen again. Rough luck on him; poor chap."

After dinner they went into what Lord Evelyn called the saloon. "Where
I keep my especial treasures," he remarked to Peter. "You'd like to walk
round and look at some of them, I expect. These bronzes, now--," he
indicated two statuettes on brackets by the door.

Peter looked at them, then swiftly up at Lord Evelyn, who swayed at his
side, his glass screwed into one smiling eye.

Lord Evelyn touched the near statuette with his light, unsteady,
beautifully-ringed hand.

"Rather lovely, isn't she," he said, caressing her. "We found her and the
Actæon in a dusty hole of a place in a miserable little _calle_ off the
Campo delle Beccarie, kept by a German Jew. Quite a find, the old sinner.
What an extortioner, though! Eh, Margerison? How much has the old
Schneller got out of my pocket? It was your brother who discovered him
for me, young Peter. He took me there, and we found the Diana together.
Like her? Giacomo Treviso, a pupil of Verrocchio's. Heard of him? The
Actæon's not so good now. Same man, but not so happy."

He turned the Diana about; he posed her for Peter's edification. Peter
looked from her to the Actæon, from the Actæon to Lord Evelyn's face. He
opened his lips to say something, and closed them on silence. He looked
past Lord Evelyn to Hilary, who stood in the background, leaning a little
against a chair. It seemed to Peter that there was a certain tensity, a
strain, in his face.

Then Peter met full the bright, hard, vivid gaze of the alert Cheriton.
It had an odd expression at this moment; unmistakably inimical,
observantly curious, distinctly sardonic. A faint ironic smile just
touched the corners of his determined mouth. Peter returned the look
with his puzzled, enquiring eyes that sought to understand.

This much, anyhow, he seemed to understand: his rôle was silence. If
Cheriton didn't speak (and Cheriton's expression showed that he knew) and
if Hilary didn't speak ... well, he, Peter, couldn't speak either. He
must acquiesce in what appeared to be a conspiracy to keep this pathetic,
worn-out dilettante in a fool's paradise.

The pathos of it gripped Peter's heart. Lord Evelyn had once known so
well. What havoc was this that one could apparently make of one's
faculties? It wasn't only physical semi-blindness; it was a blindness of
the mind, a paralysis of the powers of discrimination and appreciation,
which, was pitiful. Peter was angry. He thought Hilary and Cheriton so
abominably, unmitigatedly wrong. And yet he himself had said, "If it
makes them happy"--and left that as the indubitable end. Ah, but one
didn't lie to people, even for that.

Peter was brought up sharply, as he had often been before, against
Hilary's strange Hilaryish, perverted views of the conduct of life's
businesses. Then, as usual when he should have felt furthest from
mirth, he abruptly collapsed into sudden helpless laughter.

Lord Evelyn turned the eye-glass on him.

"Eh?" he queried. "Why so? But never mind; you always suffered in that
way, I remember. Get it from your mother, I think; she did, too. Never
explain jokes; they lose so in the telling. Now I want to show you
something over here."

Peter crossed the room, his laughter dead. After all, funny wasn't what
it really was. Mainly, it was perplexing. Till he could have it out with
Hilary, he couldn't understand it at all.

He saw more of Lord Evelyn's treasures, and perplexity grew. He did not
laugh again; he was very solemn and very silent and very polite where he
could not admire. Where he could he did; but even here his admiration was
weighed down to soberness by the burden of the things beyond the pale.

Lord Evelyn found him lukewarm, changed and dulled from the vivid
devotee of old, who had coloured up all over his pale face at the sight
of a Bow rose-bowl. He coloured indeed now, when Lord Evelyn said "Like
it?"--coloured and murmured indistinguishable comments into his collar.
He coloured most when Lord Evelyn said, as he frequently did, "Your
brother's find. A delicious little man in some _sotto-portico_ or
other--quite an admirable person. Eh, Margerison?"

Hilary in the background would vaguely assent. Peter, who looked at him
no more, felt the indefinable challenge of his tone. It meant either,
"I've as much right to my artistic taste as you have, Peter, and I'm
not ashamed of it," or, "Speak out, if you want to shatter the illusions
that make the happiness of his ridiculous life; if not, be silent."

And all the time the vivid stare of Jim Cheriton was turned like a
search-light on Peter's face, and his odd smile grew and grew. Cheriton
was watching, observing, taking in something new, trying to solve some
problem.

At the end of half an hour Lord Evelyn said, "Peter Margerison, you've
lost some of the religious fervour of your youth. The deceitfulness of
riches and the cares of this world--is that it? What's come to you that
you're so tepid about this Siena chalice? Don't be tepid, young Peter;
it's the symptom of a ruined soul."

He polished his glass, screwed it into his left eye, and looked down on
Peter with his whimsical, kindly scrutiny. Peter did not return the look;
he stood with bent head, looking vaguely down at the Sienese chalice.
That too was one of Hilary's finds. Hilary it seemed, had approved its
seller in an article in the Gem.

"Damme," said Lord Evelyn suddenly, with unusual explosiveness, "if I
didn't like you better when you were fifteen! Now, you _blasé_ and
soulless generation, I suppose you want to play bridge. Do you play as
badly as ever, Peter? A remarkable player you were, I remember--quite
remarkable. Denis always told you so. Now Cheriton will tell you so,
because he's rude."

Bridge was a relief to Peter, though he was still a rather remarkable
player. He played with Cheriton, who was not rude, because he was
absolutely silent. It was an absurd game. Cheriton was a brilliant
player, even when he was only giving half his mind to it, as he seemingly
was to-night. Lord Evelyn had been a brilliant player once, and was now
brilliant with alternations of eccentricity; he talked most of the time,
making the game the centre of his remarks, from which he struck out along
innumerable paths of irrelevancy. The Margerisons too were irrelevant;
Hilary thought bridge a bore, and Peter, who thought nothing a bore, was
always a little alarmed by anything so grown-up. But to-night he didn't
much mind what he did, so long as he stopped looking at Lord Evelyn's
things. Peter only wanted to get away; he was ashamed and perplexed and
sorry and angry, and stabbed through with pity. He wanted to get out of
Lord Evelyn's house, out of the range of his kindly, whimsical smile and
Cheriton's curious hostile stare; he wanted to be alone with Hilary, and
to understand.

The irony of Cheriton's look increased during bridge; it was certainly
justified by the abstraction of Peter's play.

Lord Evelyn laughed at him. "You need Denis to keep you in order, young
Peter. Lord, how frightened you used to be when Denis was stern. Smiled
and pretended you weren't, but I knew...." He chuckled at the painted
ceiling. "Knew a man at Oxford, Peter ... well, never mind that story
now, you're too young for it.... Anyhow I make it no trumps."

At eleven o'clock Hilary and Peter went home. Lord Evelyn shook hands
with Peter rather affectionately, and said, "Come and see me again soon,
dear boy. Lunch with me at Florian's to-morrow--you and your wealthy
friend. Busy sight-seeing, are you? How banal of you. Morning in the
Duomo, afternoon on the Lido, and the Accademia to fill the spare hours;
I know the dear old round. Never could be worried with it myself; too
much else to do. But one manages to enjoy life even without it, so don't
overwork. And come and see my toys again by daylight, and try to enthuse
a little more over them next time. You're too young to be _blasé_.
You'd better read the Gem, to encourage yourself in simple pleasures.
Good-night. Good-night, Margerison."

He shook hands with them both again, possibly to make up for Cheriton,
who did not shake hands at all, but stood with his own in his pockets,
leaning against the wall, his eyes still on Peter's face.

"Queer manners you have, dear Jim," was what they heard Lord Evelyn say
as they stepped into the Ca' delle Gemme gondola, that was taking them
back to the Rio delle Beccarie.

They swung out into the faintly-shining darkness of the water-road, into
which the climbing moon could not look--a darkness crossed and flecked by
the red gleamings of the few gondola and sandolo lights abroad at this
hour in the quiet street. They sent their own red path before them as
they softly travelled; and round it the stars flickered and swam, deep
down. Peter could have sworn he heard their thin, tinkling, submerged,
funny song, somewhere above or beneath the soft and melodious "Chérie
Birri-Bim," that someone (not Lord Evelyn's beautifully trained and
taciturn _poppe_) was crooning near at hand.

The velvet darkness of a bridge drowned the stars for a moment; then,
with a musical, abrupt cry of "Sta--i!" they swung round a corner into
a narrow way that was silver and green in the face of the climbing moon.

The musically lovely night, the peace of the dim water-ways, the
shadowing mystery of the steep, shuttered houses, with here and there a
lit door or window ajar, sending a slant of yellow light across the deep
green lane full of stars and the moon, the faint crooning of music far
off, made a cool marvel of peace for strung nerves. Peter sat by Hilary
in silence, and no longer wanted to ask questions. In the strange,
enveloping wonder of the night, minor wonders died. What did it matter,
anyhow? Hilary and Venice--Venice and Hilary--give them time, and one
would explain the other.

It was Hilary who began to talk, and he talked about Cheriton, his
nervous voice pitched on a high note of complaint.

"I do intensely dislike that man. The sort of person I've no use for, you
know. So horribly on the spot; such sharp, unsoftened manners. All the
terrible bright braininess of the Yankee combined with the obstreperous
energy of the Philistine Briton. His mother is a young American, about to
be married for the third time. The sort of exciting career one would
expect from a parent of the delightful Jim. I cannot imagine why Lord
Evelyn, who is a person of refinement, encourages him. Really, you know!"

He grew very plaintive over it. Peter really did not wonder.

Peter's subconscious mind registered a dim impression that this was
defensive talk, to fill the silence. Hilary was a nervous person, easily
agitated. Probably the evening had agitated him. But he was no good at
defence. His complaint of Jim Cheriton broke weakly on an unsteady laugh.
Peter nodded assent, and looked up the street of dim water, his chin
propped in his hands, and thought how extraordinarily pleasant was the
red light that slanted across the dark water from green doors ajar in
steep house-walls.

Hilary tried to light a cigar, and flung broken matches into spluttering
darkness. At last he succeeded; and then, when he had smoked in silence
for two minutes, he turned abruptly on Peter and said, "Well?"

Peter, dreamily turning towards him, felt the nervous challenge of his
tone, and read it in his pale, tired face.

Peter pulled himself together and collected his thoughts. After all, one
might as well know.

"Oh, well ... what? Yes, what about those ghastly statuettes, and all the
rest of them? Why, when, how ... and what on earth for?"

Hilary, after a moment of silence, said, with a rather elaborate
carelessness, "I saw you didn't like them."

At that Peter started a little, and the dreaminess of the night fell away
from him.

"You saw ... oh." For a moment he couldn't think of anything else to say.
Then he laughed a little. "Why, yes, I imagine you did.... But what's the
object of it all? Have you and Cheriton (by the way, why does he glare at
us both so?) come to the conclusion that it's worth while playing that
sort of game? If you have, I can't tell you how utterly wrong I think you
are. Make him happy--oh, I know--but what extraordinary cheek on your
part! I as near as possible gave you away--I did really. Besides, what
did he mean by saying you'd advised him to buy the things--praised them
in the Gem, and all that? You can't have gone so far as that--did you?"

After a moment of silence, Hilary turned abruptly and looked Peter in the
face, taking the long cigar out of his mouth and holding it between two
white, nervous fingers.

"Upon my word," said Hilary, speaking rather slowly, "Talk of cheek!
Do you know what you're accusing me of? You and your precious taste!
Leslie and your other fool patrons seem to have given you a fair
opinion of yourself. Because you, in your omniscience, think a thing bad,
which I ... which I obviously consider good, and have stated so in
print ... you don't so much as deign to argue the question, but get upon
your pedestal and ask me why I tell lies. You think one thing and I think
another; of course, you must know best, but I presume I may be allowed to
hold my misguided and ill-informed opinion without being accused blankly
of fraud. Upon my word, Peter ... it's time you took to some other line
of life, I think."

His high, unsteady voice trailed away into silence. Peter, out of all the
dim beauty of the night, saw only the pale, disturbed, frowning face, the
quivering hand that held the lean cigar. All the strangeness and the
mystery of the mysterious world were here concentrated. Numbly and dully
he heard the soft, rhythmic splashing of the dipping oar, the turning
cry of "Premié!" Then, sharper, "Sciar, Signori, sciar!" as they nearly
jostled another gondola, swinging round sharply into a moonless lane of
ancient palaces.

Peter presently said, "But ..." and there stopped. What could he say,
beyond "but?"

Hilary answered him sharply, "Well?" and then, after another pause,
Peter pulled himself together, gave up trying to thread the maze of his
perplexity, and said soberly, "I beg your pardon, Hilary. I'm an ass."

Hilary let out his breath sharply, and resumed his cigar.

"It's possible, of course," he said, more quietly, "that you may be right
and I wrong about the things. That's another question altogether. I may
be a fool: I only resent being called a knave. _Really_, you know!"

"I never meant that," Peter hopelessly began to explain. And, indeed, now
that Hilary disclaimed it, it did seem a far too abominable thing that he
had implied. He had hurt Hilary; he deserved to be kicked. His anger with
himself rose. To hurt anyone was atrocious; to hurt Hilary unforgivable.
He would have done a great deal now to make amends.

He stammered over it. "I did think, I'm afraid, that you and Cheriton
were doing it to make him happy or something. I'm awfully sorry; I was
an ass; I ought to have known. But it never occurred to me that you
didn't kn--that you had a different opinion of the things. I say,
Hilary--Cheriton knows! I saw him know. He knew, and he was wondering
what I was going to say."

"Knew, knew, knew!" Hilary nervously exploded. "There you go again.
You're intolerable, Peter, really. All the spoiling you've had has gone
to your head."

"I beg your pardon," said Peter again. "I meant, Cheriton agreed with me,
I'm sure.... But, Hilary--those statuettes--you can't really.... They're
mid-Victorian, and positively offensive!" His voice rose shrilly. They
had been so horrible, Diana and Actæon. He couldn't forget them, in their
podgy sentimentality. "And--and that chalice ..." he shuddered over
it--"and--"

"That'll do, thanks," Hilary broke in. "You can say at once that you
disagree with me about everything I admire, and leave it there. But, if
I may ask you, don't say so to Lord Evelyn, if you can resist the
temptation to show me up before him. It will only bother and disturb him,
whichever of us he ends by agreeing with. He's shown that he trusts my
taste more or less, by giving me his paper to edit, and I should think
we might leave it at that."

"Yes, the paper"--Peter was reminded of it, and it became a distracting
puzzle. Hilary thought Diana and Actæon and the Siena chalice good
things--and Hilary edited an art paper. What in the name of all that was
horrible did he put in it? A light was shed on Signor Leroni, who was,
said the Gem, a good dealer in plaques, and who was, Peter had thought,
a bare-faced purveyor of shams. Peter began to question the quality of
the _osele_, that Leslie had purchased from Signor Sardi.

How curious it was; and rather tragic, too. For Hilary, like Lord Evelyn,
had known once. Had Hilary too, in ruining much else of himself, ruined
his critical faculties? And could one really do that and remain ignorant
of the fact? Or would one rather have a lurking suspicion, and therefore
be all the more defiantly corroborative of one's own judgment? In either
case one was horribly to be pitied; but--but one shouldn't try to edit
art papers. And yet this couldn't be conveyed without a lacerating of
feelings that was unthinkable. There was always this about Hilary--one
simply couldn't bear to hurt him. He was so easily hurt and so often;
life used him so hardly and he felt it so keenly, that it behoved Peter,
at least, to insert as many cushions as possible between him and the
sharp edges of circumstance. Peter was remorseful. He had taken what
he should have seen before was an unforgivable line; he had failed
abominably in comprehension and decent feeling. Poor Hilary. Peter
was moved by the old impulse to be extraordinarily nice to him.

They turned out of the Rio della Madonnetta into the narrow rio that was
the back approach to the Palazzo Amadeo. It is a dark little canal, a rio
of the poor. The doors that stood open in the peeling brick walls above
the water let out straggling shafts of lamplight and quarrelling voices
and singing and the smell of wine. The steep house walls leant to meet
one another from either side; from upper windows the people who hadn't
gone to bed talked across a space of barely six feet.

The gondola crept cautiously under two low bridges, then stopped outside
the water-washed back steps of the Palazzo Amadeo.

One pleasant thing about Lord Evelyn's exquisitely mannered _poppe_ was
that one didn't feel that he was thinking "I am not accustomed to taking
my master's visitors to such low haunts." In the first place, he probably
was. In the second, he was not an English flunkey, and not a snob. He was
no more a snob than the Margerisons were, or Lord Evelyn himself. He
deposited them at the Palace back door, politely saluted, and slipped
away down the shadowy water-street.

Hilary and Peter stepped up two water-washed steps to the green door, and
Peggy opened it from within. Peggy (Peter occasionally wondered when, if
ever, she went to bed) was in the hall, nursing Illuminato, who couldn't
sleep--a small bundle of scarlet night-shirt and round bullet head,
burrowing under his mother's left arm and staring out from that place of
comfort with very bright and wakeful eyes. When, indeed, it might have
been asked, did any of the Margerison family take their rest? No one of
them ever felt or expressed any surprise at finding any other awake and
active at any hour of the night.

Peggy looked at her three male infants with her maternal serenity touched
with mirth. There were nearly always those two elements in Peggy's
look--a motherly sympathy and desire to cheer and soothe, and a glint
from some rich and golden store of amusement.

She patted Peter on the arm, softly.

"Was it a nice evening, then? No, not very, I think. Dear, dear! You both
look so unutterably tired. I wonder had you better go to bed, quite
straight?"

It seemed to be suggested as a last resource of the desperate, though the
hour was close on midnight.

"And the children have been pillow-fighting, till Mr. Vyvian--the
creature--came down with nothing in particular on, to complain to me
that he couldn't sleep. Sleep, you know! It wasn't after ten--but it
seems he had a headache, as usual, because Mrs. Johnson had insisted
on going to look at pictures with him and Rhoda, and her remarks were
such--Nervous prostration, poor Mr. Vyvian. So I've had Illuminato
down here with me since then. He wants to go to you, Peter, as usual."

Peter took the scarlet bundle, and it burrowed against his shirt-front
with a contented sigh. Peggy watched the two for a moment, then said to
the uncle, "You poor little boy, you're tireder than Hilary even. You
must surely go to bed. But isn't Lord Evelyn rather a dear?"

"Quite a dear," Peter answered her, his face bent over the round cropped
head. "Altogether charming and delightful. Do you know, though, I'm not
really fond of bridge. Jig-saw is my game--and we didn't have it. That's
why I'm tired I expect. And because there was a Mr. Cheriton, who stared,
and seemed somehow to have taken against us--didn't he, Hilary? Or
perhaps it was only his queer manners, dear Jim. Anyhow, he made me feel
shy. It takes it out of one, not being liked. Nervous prostration, like
poor Mr. Vyvian. So let's go to bed, Hilary, and leave these two to watch
together."

"Give me the froglet." She took it from his arms, gently, and kissed
first one then the other.

"Good night, little Peter. You are a darling entirely, and I love you.
And don't worry, not over not being liked or anything else, because it
surely isn't worth it."

She was always affectionate and maternal to Peter; but to-night she was
more so than usual. Looking at her as she stood in her loose, slatternly
_negligé_, beneath the extravagantly blazing chandelier, the red bundle
cuddling a round black head into her neck, her grey eyes smiling at him,
lit with love and laughter and a pity that lay deeper than both, Peter
was caught into her atmosphere of debonair and tranquil restfulness, that
said always, "Take life easy; nothing's worth worrying over, not problems
or poverty or even one's sins." How entirely true. Nothing _was_ worth
worrying over; certainly other people's strange points of view weren't.
It was a gospel of ease and _laissez-faire_ well suited to Peter's
temperament. He smiled at Peggy and Hilary and their son, and went up
the marble stairs to bed. He was haunted till he slept by the memory of
Hilary's nervous, tired face as he had seen it in the moonlight in the
gondola, and again in the hall as he said good night. Hilary wasn't
coming to bed yet. He stayed to talk to Peggy. If anything could be good
for Hilary's moods of depression, thought Peter, Peggy would. How jolly
for Hilary to be married to her! She was such a refreshment always. She
was so understanding; and was there a lapse somewhere in that very
understandingness of her that made it the more restful--that made her
a relaxation to strained minds? To those who were breaking their moral
sense over some problem, she would return simply, "There isn't any
problem. Take things as they come and make the best of them, and don't,
don't worry!" "I'm struggling with a temptation to steal a purse," Peter
imagined himself saying to her, "What can I do about it?" And her swift
answer came, with her indulgent, humorous smile, "Dear little boy, if it
makes you any happier--do it!" And then she would so well understand
the ensuing remorse; she would be so sympathetic, so wholly dear and
comforting. She would say anything in the world to help, except "Put it
back." Even that she would say if one's own inclinations were tending in
that direction. But never if they weren't. She would never be so hard, so
unkind. That sort of uncongenial admonition might be left to one's
confessor; wasn't that what confessors were there for?

But why think of stealing purses so late at night? No doubt merely
because it was late at night. Peter curled himself up and drew the sheet
over his ears and sighed sleepily. He seemed to hear the rich, pleasant
echoes of Peggy's best nursery voice far off, and Hilary's high,
plaintive tones rising above it.

But above both, dominant and insistent, murmured the lapping voice of the
wonderful city at night. A faint rhythm of snoring beyond a thin wall
somehow suggested Mrs. Johnson, and Peter laughed into his pillow.




CHAPTER VIII

PETER UNDERSTANDS


On the shores of the Lido, three days later, Peter and Leslie came upon
Denis Urquhart. He was lying on the sand in the sun on the Adriatic side,
and building St. Mark's, rather well. Peter stood and looked at it
critically.

"Not bad. But you'd better let us help you. We've been studying the
original exhaustively, Leslie and I."

"A very fine and remarkable building," said Leslie, ponderously, and
Peter laughed for the sheer pleasure of seeing Urquhart's lazy length
stretched on the warm sand.

"Cheriton's somewhere about," said Urquhart. "But he wouldn't help me
with St. Mark's. He was all for walking round the island at a great pace
and seeing how long it took him. So superfluously energetic, isn't he?
Fancy being energetic in Venice."

Peter was thankful that he was. The thought of Cheriton's eyes upon him
made him shudder.

"He has his good points," Urquhart added; "but he excites himself too
much. Always taking up some violent crusade against something or other.
Can't live and let live. Another dome here, I think."

Peter wondered if Cheriton's latest crusade was against Hilary's taste
in art, and if so what Urquhart thought on that subject. It was an
uncomfortable thought. He characteristically turned away from it.

"The intense blue of the sea, contrasted with the fainter blue of the
Euganean Hills," said Leslie suddenly, "is most remarkable and beautiful.
What?"

He was proud of having noticed that. He was always proud of noticing
beauty unaided. He made his remark with the simple pleasure of a child
in his own appreciation. His glance at Peter said, "I am getting on, I
think?"

The others agreed that he was correct. He then bent his great mind to the
completion of St. Mark's, and Urquhart discovered what Peter had long
known, that he could really play in earnest. The reverse art--handling
serious issues with a light touch--he was less good at. Grave subjects,
like the blue of the sea or the shape of a goblet, he approached with the
same solidity of earnestness which he brought to bear on sand cathedrals.
It was just this that made him a little tiring.

But the three together on the sands made a happy and congruous party of
absorbed children, till Cheriton the energetic came swinging back over
the sand-hills. Peter saw him approaching, watched the resolute lunge
of his stride. His mother was about to be married for the third time: one
could well believe it.

"I hope he is going to be nicer to me to-day," Peter thought. Even as he
hoped it, and before Cheriton saw the party on the sands, Peter saw the
determined face stiffen, and into the vivid eyes came the blank look of
one who is cutting somebody. Peter turned and looked behind him to see
who it was, and saw Mr. Guy Vyvian approaching. It was obvious from his
checked recognition that he thought he knew Cheriton, and that Cheriton
did not share the opinion. Peter saw Vyvian's mortified colour rise; he
was a vain and sensitive person.

Cheriton came and sat down among them. His words as he did so, audibly
muttered, were, "The most unmitigated cad!" He looked angry. Then he saw
Peter, and seemed a little surprised, but did not cut him; he hardly
could. Peter supposed that he owed this only to the accident of
Urquhart's presence, since this young man seemed to go about the world
ignoring everyone who did not please his fastidious fancy, and Peter
could not hope that he had done that.

Peter looked after Vyvian's retreating figure. He could detect injured
pride in his back.

He got up and brushed the sand from him.

"I must go and talk to that man," he said. "He's lodging with my
brother."

The situation for a moment was slightly difficult. Leslie and Urquhart
had both heard Cheriton's description of Peter's brother's lodger.
Besides, they had seen him, and that was enough.

It was unlike Peter to make awkward situations. He ended this one
abruptly by leaving it to itself, and walking away after his brother's
lodger.

Vyvian greeted him huffily. It needed all Peter's feeling for a hurt man
to make him anything but distantly aloof. Cheriton's description was so
manifestly correct. The man was a cad--an oily bounder with a poisonous
mind. Peter wondered how Hilary could bear to have his help on the Gem.

Vyvian broke out about Cheriton.

"Did you see that grand fellow who was too proud to know me? Driven you
away too, has he? We don't know people in boarding-houses--we're in our
private flat ourselves! It makes me sick!"

But his vulgarity when he was angry was a shade less revolting, because
more excusable, than when he wasn't. So Peter bore it, and even tried to
be comforting, and to talk about pictures. Vyvian really knew something
about art; Peter was a little surprised to find that he knew so much,
remembering certain curious blunders of his in the Gem.

He did not talk about the Gem to Vyvian; instinctively he avoided it.
Peter had a rather useful power of barring his mind against thoughts that
he did not desire to have there; without reasoning about it, he had
placed the Gem in this category.

He was absently watching the dim blue of the Euganean Hills against the
clearer blue of the sky when he discovered that Vyvian was talking about
Rhoda Johnson.

"A dear little gurl, with real possibilities, if one could develop them.
I do my best. She's fond enough of me to let me mould her atrocious
taste. But what can one do to fight the lifelong influence of a home like
that--a mother like that? Oh, frightful! But she _is_ fond of me, and
there's her hope--"

"Good-bye," said Peter. "I must go." He could not for the life of him
have said any of the other things he was thinking. He would have given
a lot to have been Cheriton for the moment, so that he wouldn't mind
being rude and violent. It was horribly feeble; all he could say was
"Good-bye." Having said it, he went abruptly.

He sighed as he went back to Urquhart and Leslie. Things were so
difficult to manage. One left one's friends to comfort a hurt bounder;
that was all very well, but what if the bounder comforted was much more
offensive than the bounder hurt? However, it was no good reasoning about
these things. Peter knew that one had to try and cheer up the hurt, in
the face of all reason, simply because one felt so uncomfortable
oneself if one didn't.

But it was almost worth while to have a few rather revolting people
about; they threw the others into such glorious relief. As long as there
were the nice people, who laughed at life and themselves, playing about
the world, nothing else in particular mattered. And it was really
extraordinarily good luck that Urquhart should happen to be playing about
Venice at the same time as Peter. In spite of Cheriton, they would have
a good time together. And Cheriton would perhaps become friendly in
time--dear Jim, with his queer manners. People mostly did become
friendly, in quite a short time, according to Peter's experience.

That the time, as far as Cheriton was concerned, had not yet arrived, was
rather obvious, however. His manners to Peter on the sands were still
quite queer--so queer that Peter and Leslie only stayed a few minutes
more. Peter refused Urquhart's suggestion that they should have tea
together on the island, and they crossed over to the lagoon side and got
into their waiting gondola.

The lagoon waters were smooth like glass, and pale, and unflushed as yet
with the coming sunset. Dark lines of stakes marked the blue ship-ways
that ran out to open sea, and down them plied the ships, spreading
painted wings to the evening breeze.

Leslie said, "I see in the Gem that there is a good old well-head to be
had from a man on the Riva Ca' di Dio. I want well-heads, as you know.
We'll go and see, shall we?"

The crystal peace of the lagoon was shattered for Peter. He had been
getting into a curious mood of late; he almost disliked well-heads, and
other purchasable forms of beauty. After all, when one had this limpid
loveliness of smooth water and men walking on its surface like St. Peter,
why want anything more? Because, Leslie would say, one wants to possess,
to call beauty one's own. Bother, said Peter, the vice of the age, which
was certainly acquisitiveness. He was coming to the conclusion that he
hated buying things. And it was so awkward to explain to Leslie about
Hilary and the Gem. He had spent the last few days in trying, without too
much giving Hilary away, to restrain Leslie from following his advice. He
said now, "All right; we'll go and see. But, to say the truth, I'm not
sure that Hilary is a very good authority on well-heads." He blushed a
little as he said it; it seemed to him that he had been saying that sort
of thing very often of late. Leslie was so persistent, so incorrigibly
intent on his purpose.

Leslie looked at him now over his large cigar a little speculatively.

"According to you," he remarked placidly after a moment, "your brother
is uncommonly little of an authority on anything he mentions. Fraternal
scepticism developed to its highest point."

Peter nodded. "Our family way," he said; and added, "Besides, that Vyvian
man does as much of the Gem as Hilary. There's a young man, Leslie! My
word, what a dog! Talks about gurls. So I left him. I turned upon him and
said, 'Sir, this is no talk for a gentleman to listen to.' I said it
because I knew it was what he would expect. Then I turned on my heel
and left him without a word. He ground his teeth and hissed, 'A time will
come.' But Cheriton seems rather a rude man, all the same. He hurts my
feelings too, whenever I meet him. I too hiss, 'A time will come.' But
I don't believe it ever will. Do you suppose the water is shallow over
there, or that the men walking on it are doing miracles? It must be fun,
either way. Let's do it instead of buying well-heads, Leslie. The fact
is, buying so many things is rather demoralising, I think. Let's decide
to buy no more. I'm beginning to believe in the simple life, like Rodney.
Rodney hates men like you and Urquhart--rolling plutocrats. He wanted me
to leave you and the other plutocrats and be a travelling pedlar. I'm not
sure that I shan't, before long."

"Can't spare you," Leslie grunted.

Peter flattered himself that he had successfully turned the conversation
from well-heads.

When, after having tea with Leslie at Florian's, he returned to the
Palazzo Amadeo, Teresina told him that someone had called to see the
Signore, and the Signore, being out, was waiting in the saloon. Peter
went to the saloon to see if he would do instead of the Signore, and
found a stout gentleman with a black moustache and up-brushed hair,
spitting on the saloon floor. A revolting habit, as Hilary was wont
wearily to remark; but Peter always accepted it with anyhow outward
equanimity.

"My brother is unfortunately away from the house," he explained, with
his polite smile and atrocious Italian. "But perhaps I can give him a
message?"

The visitor gave him a sharp look, bowed ceremoniously, and said, "Ah!
The Signore is the brother of Signor Margerison? Truly the brother?"

Peter assured him, not even halving the relationship; and indeed, he
seldom did that, even in his thoughts.

The visitor gave him a card, bearing the name of Signor Giacomo Stefani,
sat down, at Peter's request, spat between his feet, and said, "I have
had various affairs with your Signor brother before. I am come to solicit
his patronage in the matter of a pair of vases. If he would recommend
them for me in his paper, as before. They are good; they might easily be
antiques."

"You wish my brother to mention them in his paper?" Peter gathered. He
was correct.

"Exactly so," Signor Stefani told him. "Of course, on the same terms as
before, if the Signor would be satisfied with them."

"Terms?" Peter repeated after him.

Signor Stefani became more explicit. He named the terms.

"That was what I paid Signor Margerison before, for an article on a
pseudo-Sienese chalice. But the vases are better; they are good; they
might deceive an expert. Truly, they might be antiques!"

He continued to talk, while Peter listened. He was taking it in rather
slowly. But at last, not being stupid, he no longer thought Hilary so. He
understood.

He stood up presently, looking a little dazed.

"It appears," he said slowly, in his broken Italian, to Signor Stefani,
"that you are making a rather bad mistake, which is a pity. I think you
had better go home."

Signor Stefani gave a startled upward twist to his moustache, and stood
up too.

"Excuse me," he said rather angrily, "there is no mistake. Your brother
and I have very frequently had affairs together."

Peter looked at him, frowning doubtfully as he collected his words.

"I am right, I think," he said slowly, "that you are offering my brother
a bribe to publish a fraudulent article on fraudulent goods of yours?
That is so? Then, as I said, you are making a very serious mistake,
and ... and you had better go home. Will you come this way, please?"

Signor Stefani continued to talk, but so rapidly and loudly now that
Peter couldn't follow him. He merely shook his head and opened the door,
saying, "This way, please. I can't understand you when you talk so fast."

Signor Stefani, with a final angry shrug and expectoration, permitted
himself to be ushered out of the room.

On the stairs outside they met Vyvian coming up, who nodded affably to
both of them. Signor Stefani, as he passed, shrugged his shoulders up to
his ears and spread his two hands wide, with a look of resigned despair
over his shoulder at Peter, and Vyvian's brows went up at the gesture.
Peter ushered his guest out at the street entrance. Signor Stefani's last
words were, "I shall return shortly and see your brother in person. I
have made a foolish mistake in thinking that you were in his confidence.
Good evening."

So they parted, more in sorrow than in anger.

Peter met Vyvian again on the stairs. He was passing on, but Vyvian
stopped and said, "What have you been doing to Stefani to put him out
so?"

Peter stopped and looked at him for a moment. He felt rather dazed, as
if someone had hit him a blow on the head. He had to remember what was
this funny bounder's place in the newly-revealed scheme of things. Not
merely a funny bounder after all, it seemed, but just what Cheriton had
called him. But one couldn't let him know that one thought so; one was
ostensibly on Hilary's side, against honesty, against decency, against
all the world.

So Peter, having located Vyvian and himself in this matter, said nothing
at all, but went on upstairs.

Vyvian, staring after him in astonishment (none of Hilary's boarders had
seen Peter discourteous before), raised his eyebrows again, and whistled
beneath his breath.

"So we're too fine for our brother's dirty jobs! I'm dashed if I don't
believe it's that!"

Peter went upstairs rather too quickly for his heart. He returned to the
saloon and collapsed suddenly into a chair, feeling giddy. Mrs. Johnson
came in a moment later and found him leaning back with closed eyes. She
was disturbed about his complexion.

"The colour of putty, poor Mr. Peter! You've bin excitin' yourself,
tearin' about sight-seein', _I_ know. Tell me now just how you feel. I'm
blest if I don't believe you've a-bin in the Cathedral, smellin' at that
there choky incense! It takes me like that, always; and Miss Gould says
she's just the same. Funny feelin's within, haven't you now?"

"Yes," said Peter, "just exactly that"; and they so overcame him that he
began to laugh helplessly.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Johnson," he said presently. "I'm an ass. But I'm all
right now. I came upstairs in a hurry, that's all. And before that a man
talked so loud and so fast that it took my breath away. It may be silly,
but I _am_ like that, as Miss Barnett says. My brother and sister-in-law
are both out, aren't they?"

Mrs. Johnson, sitting down opposite him and studying the returning tints
of his complexion, nodded.

"That's it," she said, more cheerfully. "You're gettin' a wholesome white
again now. I didn't like that unhealthy greeny-grey. But you've none of
you any colour, you gentlemen--not you nor your brother nor that pasty
Vyvian. None of you but the little curate; he had a nice little pink
face. I'm sure I wish some gals cared more for looks, and then they
wouldn't go after some as are as well let alone." This cryptic remark was
illuminated by a sigh. Mrs. Johnson, now that she saw Peter improving in
complexion, reverted to her own troubles.

Peter replied vaguely, "No, I suppose they wouldn't. People ought to
care for looks, of course. They matter so much more than anything else,
really."

"Without goin' all that way with you, Mr. Peter," said Mrs. Johnson, "and
with all due respect to Great Minds (which I haven't got and never shall
have, and nor had my poor dear that's gone, so I'm sure I don't know
where Rhoder got her leanin's from), I will say I do like to see a young
man smart and well-kept. It means a respect for himself, not to mention
for those he takes out, that is a stand-by, at least for a mother. And
the young fellows affect the gals, too. Rhoder, now--she'd take some
pains with herself if she went out with a smart fellow, that was nicely
turned out himself and expected her to be the same. But as it is--hair
dragged and parted like a queer picture, and a string of green beads for
a collar, as if she was a Roman with prayers to say--and her waist, Mr.
Peter! But there, I oughtn't to talk like this to a gentleman, as Miss
Gould would say; (I do keep on shockin' Miss Gould, you know!) But I find
it hard to rec'lect that about you, Mr. Peter; you're so sympathetic, you
might be a young lady. An' I feel it's all safe with you, an' I do
believe you'd help me if you could."

"I should be glad to," said Peter, wondering whether it was for the
improvement of Rhoda's hair, waist, or collar that his assistance might
be acceptable.

Mrs. Johnson was looking at him very earnestly; it was obvious that
something was seriously amiss, and that she was wondering how much she
could venture to say to this sympathetic young man who might be a
young lady. She made a sudden gesture with her stout hands, as if
flinging reticence to the winds, and leant forward towards him.

"Mr. Peter ... I don't hardly like to say it ... but could you take my
gal out sometimes? It does sound a funny thing to ask--but I can't abide
it that she should be for ever with that there Vyvian. I don't like him,
and there it is. And Rhoder does ... And he's just amusin' himself, and
I can't bear it for my little gal, that's where it is.... Mr. Peter, I
hate the fellow, though you may say I'm no Christian for it, and of
course one is bidden not to judge but to love all men. But he fair gives
me the creeps, like a toad.... Do you know that feelin'?"

"Oh, yes," said Peter readily. "And of course, I should like immensely to
go out with Miss Rhoda sometimes, if she'll let me. But do you think she
will? I'm afraid she would be dreadfully bored with me. I haven't a Great
Mind, you know."

"Rhoder likes you," said Mrs. Johnson, a smile of relief overspreading
her jolly face. "She was sayin' so only the other day. She has a great
respect for your knowledge of art, too. 'You wouldn't think it just to
talk with him,' she said, 'but he knows the most surprisin' things. Knows
them for himself'--that was how she put it--'without needin' to depend on
any books, or what anyone else says. I wish I was like that, mother,' she
says, and sighs. And of course, I knew why she wished that, and I said to
her, 'Rhoder, my dear, never you mind about knowin' things; gals don't
need to bother their heads about that. You look after the _outside_ of
your head,' I said, chaffing her about her hair, you know, 'and leave the
inside to look after itself.' I made her cross, of course; I'm for ever
makin' Rhoder cross without meanin' it. But that just shows what she
feels towards you, you see. And you'd talk healthy-like to her, which
is more than some does, if I know anythin'. One feels that of you, Mr.
Peter, if you'll excuse my sayin' it, that your talk is as innocent as
a baby's prattle, though it mayn't always mean much."

"Thank you very much," said Peter. "I will certainly prattle to Miss
Rhoda whenever she will let me. I should enjoy it, of course."

"Then that's settled." Mrs. Johnson rose, and shook out her skirts with
relief. "And a weight off my mind it will be.... You could make a third
with Rhoder and that Vyvian to-morrow afternoon, if you were so good and
not otherwise employed. They're off together somewhere, I know."

"Making a third" was a little beyond even Peter's readiness to be
helpful, and he looked dubious.

"I wonder if Mr. Vyvian would let me do that. You see, he doesn't much
like me. I expect I give him the creeps, like a toad...." Then, seeing
Mrs. Johnson's relieved face cloud, he added, "Oh, well, I'll ask them to
take me," and she smiled at him as at a good child. "I knew you would!"

Hilary didn't come in to dinner. That was as well; it gave Peter more
time. Perhaps it would be easier late at night to speak of the hopeless,
weary, impossible things that had suddenly risen in the way; easier to
think of things to say about them that wouldn't too much hurt Hilary or
himself.

At dinner Peter was very quiet and polite to everyone. Vyvian's demeanour
towards him was touched with irony; his smile was a continual reference
to the fellowship of secrecy that bound them. Rhoda was very silent;
Peter supposed that Vyvian had been snubbing her.

Hilary came home late. Peter and Peggy and Vyvian were sitting in the
dimly-lighted saloon, and the ubiquitous Illuminato was curled up, a
sleepy ball, on the marble top of a book-case. Peggy had a habit of
leaving him lying about in convenient corners, as a little girl her doll.

"You look tired to death, my dear," she commented, as Hilary came in. Her
kindly grey eyes turned from him to Peter, who had looked up from the
book he was reading with a nervous movement. Peter's sweet-tempered
companionableness had been oddly obscured this evening. Perhaps he too
was tired to death. And poor little Rhoda had been so unmercifully
snubbed all the evening that at last she had crept up to bed all but in
tears. Peggy felt very sorry for everyone to-night; they all seemed to
need it so much.

Vyvian, as usual, had a headache. When Hilary came in, he rose and said
he was going upstairs to try and get some sleep--an endeavour seldom
successful in this noisy and jarring world, one gathered. Before he
embarked on it he said to Peter, squirting soda into a large tumbler
of whisky, "Stefani want anything particular to-day?"

He had waited to say it till Hilary came in. Peter supposed that he said
it merely out of his general desire to be unpleasant, and perhaps to
revenge himself for that unanswered enquiry on the stairs. Or possibly he
merely wished to indicate to Peter how entirely he was privy to Stefani's
business with Hilary, and that it might just as well be discussed in his
presence. Or again, he might be desirous of finding out how far Peter
himself was in the know.

Peter said, "Nothing very particular," and bent over Illuminato, that
he might not meet Hilary's eyes or Peggy's. He knew that Hilary was
violently startled, and he heard Peggy's softly let out breath, that
might have been a sigh or a gentle whistle, and that conveyed in either
case dismay touched with a laugh.

Vyvian, who had been watching the three with a covert smile, drained his
glass and said, "Well, it's supposed to be partly my business, you know.
But since you don't think so, I'll say good-night."

He included the three in a supercilious nod, and left the room.

He left a queer silence behind him. When it had lasted for a moment,
Peter looked up from his inspection of Illuminato's screwed-up face, with
an effort, and met Hilary's eyes searching his own. Peggy was in the
background; later she would be a comforting, easing presence; but for the
moment the situation held only these two, and Peter's eyes pleaded to
Hilary's, "Forgive me; I am horribly sorry," and in Hilary's strained
face shame intolerably grew, so that Peter looked away from it, bending
over Illuminato in his arms.

It was Peggy who broke the silence with a tearful laugh.

"Oh, don't look like that, you poor darling boys! Peter, little dear
Peter ... you must try and understand! You're good at understanding, you
know. Oh, take it easy, my dear! Take it easy, and see how it's nothing
to matter, how it's all one great joke after all!" Her arm was round his
shoulders as he sat on the table's edge; she was comforting him like a
child. To her he was always about Illuminato's age, a most beloved
infant.

Peter smiled a little at her. "Why, yes, of course it's a joke.
Everything is, isn't it. But ... but...."

He was more than ever a child, stammering unwordable protest, blindly
reaching out for help.

Hilary stood before him now, with his hands in his pockets, nervous,
irritable, weary, shame now masked by self-defence. That was better; but
still Peter kept his eyes for the curled-up child.

"My dear boy," said Hilary, in his sweet, plaintive tones, edged with
irritation, "if people like to be taken in, is it my business?"

And Peggy echoed, "Yes, Peter darling, _is_ it Hilary's business?"

Then Peter laughed suddenly. After all, it was all too hopeless, and too
absurd, for anything else.

"You can't go on, you know," he said then. "You've got to resign." And
Peggy looked at him in surprise, for he spoke now like a man instead of
a child, with a man's finality. He wasn't giving a command, but stating
an obvious fact.

"Darling--we've got to live!" Peggy murmured.

"You mayn't see the necessity," Hilary ironically put the approved answer
into Peter's mouth, "but we, unfortunately, do."

"Oh, don't be silly," said Peter unusually. "You _are_ being silly, you
know; merely absurd. Because, of course, it's simply a question between
resigning and being chucked out before long. You can't go on with this
sort of thing indefinitely. You see," he explained, apologetic now, "it
isn't even as if you did it well. You really don't. And it's an awfully
easy thing to see through, if once anyone gets on the track. All that
rubbish you've saddled Lord Evelyn with--anyone who isn't as blind as
a bat can spot it in a minute. I did; Cheriton has (that's why he's so
queer-mannered, by the way, I suppose); probably Denis has. Well, with
everyone knowing about it like that, someone is bound before long to
ferret out the real facts. Cheriton won't be long, I fancy, before he
gets hold of it all. And then--and then it will be so frightfully
awkward. Oh, you can't go on, Hilary; you've got to drop it."

"You're talking very lightly," said Hilary, "of throwing up one's entire
income."

Peter sighed. "Not lightly; I'm really not. I know what a bore it will
be--but not such a bore as the other thing.... Well, then, don't throw it
up: simply chuck Stefani and the rest, and run the thing on different
lines. I'd help, if you'd let me. I'd chuck Leslie and stay on here and
write for you. I would love to. I made a start to-day, you see; I told
Stefani he was out of his reckonings, so he'll be prepared. We'll tell
all the rest the same.... I suppose Vyvian's in it, too? Can't you get
rid of the man? I do so dislike him, you know. Well, never mind; anyhow,
we'll tell him he's got to run on new lines now. Oh, we'll make a decent
thing of the Gem after all; Hilary, do let's. Peggy, don't you think that
would be jolly?"

He looked up into his sister-in-law's face, and met smiling eyes suddenly
tear-dimmed. She smiled down at him.

"Very jolly, you beloved child.... So you'll chuck your Mr. Leslie and
your own profession and help to run the Gem? I don't think we can let him
do that, Hilary, can we?"

Hilary's strained face had softened and relaxed.

"I confess," he said, "that it would be in many ways a great relief to me
to drop that side of the business, if I could see my way to it. But it
won't be easy now, Peter. It will mean a certain amount of going back on
former statements, for one thing."

"Oh, that'll be all right. Papers are always doing that. We'll manage all
right and put a good face on it. And we'll make the thing sell--make it
funny and interesting and nice. Of course, if Leslie is willing for me to
give part of my time to it, there's no reason why I should leave him, as
long as he stays in Venice. It will be all in his interests really,
because he can get tips from the Gem. I've warned him off it lately
because I thought you were such an awful muddler, Hilary. By the way,
it's rather a relief that you aren't quite so wanting as I was beginning
to fear; seriously, I was wondering how on earth you were going to get
through this difficult world. There's no remedy for a muddler; he can't
mend."

But a swindler can; a swindler certainly must, that was conveyed by the
appeal in Peter's tired face. So tired it was that Peggy gently took
Illuminato from his uncle's arms and said, "And now we'll all go to bed.
My beloved little brother--you're an angel in the house, and we'll all do
just as you say, if it's only to make you smile again. Won't we, Hilary?"

She leant a soft cheek against Hilary's shoulder, smiling at Peter; but
Peter waited for Hilary's reply before he smiled back.

Hilary's reply came after a moment.

"Of course, if Peter can contrive a way of keeping our heads above water
without having recourse to these detestable methods, I shall be only too
relieved. I loathe having to traffic with these dirty swindlers; it's
too insufferably wearying and degrading.... By the way, Peter, what did
Stefani want to-day?"

Peter said, "Oh, bother Ste

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