“Well, well,” he said, as if he was an adult playing with a child, whereas certainly the relation was the other way about. “I will do my best for you, Maria. But I make no promise, mind. Remember that.”
As Peter started off again for the various entertainments of the evening he tried to imagine himself in serious sympathy with either of his parents, and ruinously failed. Beginning with his father, he surveyed with the critical clear-sightedness of his terribly sensible nature those hysterical daubings of paint, those mysteries as to what his father was engaged on, those prancing port wine ceremonies when his labour was finished, that crystal confidence, never clouded, in the worth of his fatuous achievements. Long ago it had soaked into his soul that his father was a magnificent buffoon, who, decking himself in the habiliments of Hamlet, had no idea that instead of being engaged in heroic drama, he was a figure in a farce so outrageous that you could not really laugh at him; you could only marvel. Had his pictures, every one of them, been masterpieces, his own enthusiasm over them would have verged on the grotesque. As it was they were preposterous and childish performances, inspiring the observer with pity and terror for the perpetrator rather than, in the sense of Aristotle, whom his father so often quoted, for the works themselves. How was it possible to feel sympathy with one whose impenetrable egoism burned radiantly unconsumed like that? Yet, while he rejected that possibility, Peter found himself somehow envying the temperament that transmuted life for its owner into an endless orgy and carouse. Even the deepest despairs into which reaction plunged his father were psychical feasts to him, served up with the same sauce of transcendental egoism as were his raptures. That was like some pungent essential oil of so ammoniacal an aroma that it pervaded its whole accessible atmosphere. No neutral quality on the part of others, no individual indifference was permitted to exist, or, if it existed, it was either wholly unnoticed or, if noticed, sublimely pitied. Peter’s father, so it struck the young man, galloped through life “like a ramping and a roaring lion,” the king of the beasts.
It was no manner of good to attempt to sympathize with so predatory an animal, and from the thought of his father Peter switched off to the thought of his mother, who was the habitual prey. There he was confronted with the mild enigma, of which he had not the faintest comprehension, and for the hundredth time, guessing out of a dubious, incurious twilight, he wondered if there was, could be, anything to comprehend. He tried to sum up his knowledge of her. She ordered dinner, she wore day and night some family inheritance of her own of splendid pearls, she read advertisements in railway guides of hotels on Cornish Rivieras and Derbyshire Switzerlands. That she should order dinner and wear her own pearls was an accidental happening, because she was mistress of a house and had some pearls, but beyond that she receded, as far as Peter was concerned, into a dreamland without logic. Indeed, as he devoted his mind to her now, the most illogical thing about her was that for twenty-three years she had contrived to live with his father, and had preserved a certain personality of her own. It seemed frankly impossible that anyone who had lived so long with that maniacal egoist should not have been in any way affected by him. But there she was. His father had neither crushed her nor vitalized her, and whatever her real personality might be, Peter felt sure that the ramping and the roaring lion had not invaded an atom of it. If his father sustained himself on the flamboyance of his own existence, she, none the less, was self-sufficient, demanding neither sympathy nor comprehension from others. The chasm that yawned between himself and his father was a mere rabbit-scrape compared to the abyss on the other side of which there sat his mother, delicate and immovable, covered with hoar frost and decked with her pearls, and reading her railway guide.
Peter owed that deep-seated vanity of his to his father; to his mother he owed that aloofness which was no less characteristic of him. But to himself he seemed to have nothing to do with either of them; they both appeared to him to be distant and ancient phenomena, and he waved a mild salutation to them as acknowledgment of the debt of his own existence. Between them they had projected him, but his own individuality swamped that as completely as his father’s egoism drowned all other flavours. Was it always like that nowadays? Were all the last generation so far sundered from the adolescent present as he from his father and mother?... Was there a new plan of life, a new outlook, a new everything?
CHAPTER III
Peter’s dinner at the Ritz was no dinner-party, and there were but three young men, of whom he was one, and their hostess who assembled in the Yawning-place. People always yawned there; they were either waiting for somebody to come, or they were waiting for somebody to go away....
His hostess to-night was the perennial Mrs. Trentham, with whom a party of herself and three young men was a favourite form of entertainment. She always professed a coquettish contrition at not having been able to get some girls to meet her young men—which, indeed, she had been quite wonderfully unable to do, since it never occurred to her to take the preliminary step of asking them, and no nice girl would come to dine with Mrs. Trentham without being asked. So the girls, not being asked, stayed away, and Mrs. Trentham apologized.
She was considerably older than the rest of her youthful assemblage; but she looked almost as young as any of them, and might charitably have been supposed to be a sister, or a wife, or something. She had only one real passion in her excited life, and that was to dine as publicly as possible with several young men, sending her husband, to his great contentment, to amuse himself comfortably at his club. There he talked politics and played Bridge, and the very number of these public entertainments on the part of his wife, and the diversity of the youths who partook of them, were guarantee against any breath of scandal sullying herself or anybody else. With perfect justice, nobody believed anything against her; yet this delightful immunity from gossip rather annoyed her. But, in order to give colour to compromise, she would have been obliged to descend to duets in quiet corners, which would have been no fun at all. The loss of publicity, the loss, too, of the pleasing phenomenon that batch after batch of young men, in groups of two or three, so constantly accompanied her to one of the most strategic tables at the Ritz, would not have been compensated for by the added chance of scandalous talkings. After all, London was not so violently likely to care what she did, especially since she did not care either, and it was far more agreeable to continue doing what she liked rather than gain an entirely spurious loss of reputation by less enjoyable methods. She had a pleasant, prurient mind, and her morals were beyond reproach. She called attention to her age, when she was with the young, in a somewhat excessive manner, and often alluded to her beautiful hair, which had been grey before she was thirty. “Such an old woman as me,” was an ungrammatical phrase which she often affected, and this was a preventive measure against anybody else thinking of such a thing. Her favourite subject of conversation was love.
Mrs. Trentham was not really quite so silly as she sounded, though her immense sprightliness often seemed to plunge her into the nethermost depths of fatuousness. During the war she had taken to dressing in the uniform of a nurse, which she discovered suited her, though, for fear of witnessing distressing sights, she kept well away from hospitals; since then, having realized the decorative value of black and white, she had adopted a garb which seemed to indicate that she was a widow, though not quite recently bereaved. An occasional bright note of colour in her hair or round her charming waist seemed to have forgotten about her widowhood and was extremely becoming.... So garbed, so minded, she awaited Peter, who was the last of her conspicuous party of young men. He was certainly late for her appointed hour, but she did not dislike that as the Yawning-place was full, and, instead of scolding him, she had her usual apologetic greetings volubly ready.
“My dear, you will be furious with me, I know,” she said, “but I simply couldn’t get hold of any girls, so you and Charlie and Tommy will just have to put up with an old woman until we go to the opera, and then you will breathe loud sighs of relief, and I shall see you no more. Why are you so late, Peter? Whom have you been flirting with?”