“You will be an ass,” said Francis Gordon, newly returned from two years of aimless wandering on the Continent, “if you go on slaving away in that office of yours.”
“Can’t stand doing nothing,” Peter had answered, “and, if I wanted to get married, twelve hundred a year wouldn’t be enough.” With both of which ends in mind, he signed a rather peculiar ten years’ partnership deed with Simpson, and resumed his hardly interrupted activities in Lime Street.
§ 6
That same year, 1905, Francis’s own parents both died, leaving him master undisputed of a five-figure income; and the two cousins very nearly decided on living together, till Peter vetoed the idea on the grounds that “as Francis never got up before lunch or came home to dinner, he didn’t see much sense in the proposed arrangement.”
Nevertheless, bachelor existence in that barrack of a house at Lowndes Square, soon began to pall. “I shan’t be dining at home to-night, Smith,” became the almost daily word to the elderly, dignified, parlour maid as she handed our Mr. Jameson his top-hat of a morning; and on the rare evenings when he did dine at home, it was usually in company—business acquaintances, school friends, old cronies of his father’s, or—and this frequently—the Baynets.
Heron Baynet, the Harley Street diagnostician who was knighted in the 1918 Birthday List for his research-work in the treatment of shell-shock and other nervous disorders, had been one of the consultants attending Jameson senior in his illness. He had taken an instinctive liking to the young man; asked him to call. Peter, accepting the invitation, met a married daughter, Violet; a son in the Army; and Patricia—tall, blond, twenty-one, dignified, rather reserved in her speech, tolerably contemptuous of the average young man, cultivating alternately the critique of pure reason at home and the outside edge at Prince’s skating-rink. . . . Twelve months after their first meeting, in March, 1906, these two married.
A marriage of affection, kindred tastes and mutual respect. A marriage which appealed to them (both had a strong, youthful contempt for sentiment) as “eminently reasonable.” A marriage into which both entered with the definite certainty that there would be no passion, no misunderstandings, no petty economies, no vital divergences of opinion. A marriage which—as most marriages—ended by utterly confuting all their original ideas about it.
§ 7
Followed two years of palship; at the end of which their first daughter, Evelyn, was born. Peter, who had hoped for a son, felt disappointment; showed it, perhaps a little too plainly: thereby heightening his wife’s love for the kiddie. But the disappointment faded; the easy relationship renewed itself.
About this time, Ivan Turkovitch became a frequent visitor to the Lime Street warehouse. A quaint man—born in some nameless province of Austria-Hungary; speaking English with an amazing accent; small; paunchy; tawny-bearded; very neat in his clothes, in his habits,—he had come to England with nothing but his wits; and built up in some subterranean manner the struggling firm of “I. Turkovitch, manufacturers of Nirvana Cigarettes.”