"I was born," Peter began, "in a little town called Treliss on the borders of Cornwall and Glebeshire in '84. I had a very rotten childhood. I won't bore you with all that, but my mother was frightened into her grave by my father who hated me and everybody else. He sent me to a bad school, and at last I ran away up to London. I had one friend, a Treliss fisherman, who was the best human being I've ever known, and he came up to London with me. Things went from bad to worse the first years, but looking back on it I can only see everything that happened in the most ridiculously romantic light—absurd things that I'd like to tell you more about in detail some time. They were so absurd; you simply wouldn't believe me if I told you. I was mixed up for instance with melodramatic theatrical anarchists who tried to blow up poor old Victoria when she was out riding. Looking back now I can't be sure that those things ever really happened at all.
"I never seem to meet such people now or to see such things. Was it only my youth perhaps that made me fancy it all like that? You and Henry, may be, are imagining things in just that way now. Stephen, for instance, my fisherman friend. I've never met any one like him since—so good, so simple, so direct, so childlike. I knew magnificent men in the War as direct and simple as Stephen, but they didn't affect me in the way he did—that may have been my youth again.
"Whatever it was we went lower and lower. We couldn't get any work and we were just about starving, when I got ill, so ill that I should have died if the luck hadn't suddenly turned, an old school friend of mine appeared and carried me off to his home. Yes, luck turned with a vengeance then. I had written a story and it was published and it had a little success. One thinks you know that that little success is a very big one the first time it comes—that every one is talking about one and reading one when really it is a few thousand people at the most.
"Anyway that first success put me on my feet. It was during those years after the Boer War when I think literary success was easier to get than it is now—more attention was paid to writing because the world was quieter and had leisure to think about the arts and money to pay for them. I don't mean that genius, real genius, wouldn't find it just as easy now as then to come along and establish itself, but I wasn't a genius, of course, nor anything like one. Well, I had friends and a home and work and everything should have been well, but I always felt that something was working against me, some bad influence, some ill omen—I've felt it all my life, I feel it now, I shall feel it till I die. Lucky, healthy people can laugh at those things, but when you feel them you don't laugh. You know better. Then I married—the daughter of people who lived near by in Chelsea; I was terribly in love; although I felt there was something working against us, yet I couldn't see how now it could touch us. I was sure that she loved me—I knew that I loved her. She was such a child that I thought that I could guide her and form her and make her what I wanted. From the first there was something wrong; I can see that now looking back. She had been spoilt because she was an only child and had a stupid silly mother, and she was afraid of everything—of being ill, of being hurt, of being poor. She was conventional too, and only liked the people from the class she knew, people who did all the same things, spoke the same way, ate the same way, dressed the same way. I remember that some of my Glebeshire friends came to see me one day and frightened her out of her life. Poor Clare! I should understand her now I think, but I don't know. One has things put into one and things left out of one before one's born and you can't alter them, you can only restrain them, keep them in check. I had something fundamentally wild in me, she something tame in her. If we had both been older and wiser we might have compromised as all married people have to, I suppose, but we were both so young that we expected perfection, nay, we demanded it. Perfection! Lord, what youth! . . . Then a baby was born, a boy—I let myself go over that boy!" . . . Peter paused. . . . "I can't talk much about that even now. He died. Then everything went wrong. Clare said she'd never have another child. And she was tired of me and frightened of me too. I can see now that she had much justice there. I must have been a dull dog after the boy died, and when I'm dull I am dull. I get so easily convinced that I'm meant to fail, that I've no right in the world at all. Clare wanted fun and gaiety.
"We hadn't the means for it anyway. I was writing badly. I couldn't keep my work clear of my troubles; I couldn't get right at it as one must if one's going to get it on to paper with any conviction. My books failed one after another and with justice.
"People spoke of me as a failure, and that Clare couldn't endure. She hadn't ever cared very much for my writing, only for the success that it brought. Well, you can see the likely end of it all. She ran off to Paris with my best friend, a man who'd been at school with me, whom I'd worshipped."
"Oh," Millie said, "I'm sorry."
"I only got what I deserved. Another man would have managed Clare all right—made a success out of the whole thing. There's something in me—a kind of blindness or obstinacy or pride—that sends people away from me. You know it yourself. You recognized it in me from the first. Henry didn't, simply because he's so ingenuous and so warm-hearted. He forgets himself entirely; you and I think of ourselves a good deal. I went back to Treliss. I had a friend there, a woman, who showed me a little how things were. I wanted to give everything up and just booze my time away and sink into a worthless loafer as my father had done. She prevented me, and I had, too, a strange revelation one night out on the hills beyond Treliss when I saw things clearly for an hour or two.
"I determined to come back and fight it out. I could show pluck even though I couldn't show anything else. Now I can see that there was something false in that as there was in so many of the crises of my life, because I was thinking only of myself set up against all the world and the devil and all the furies, making a fine figure while the armies of God stood by admiring and whispering one to another, 'He's a fine fighter—there's something in that fellow.'
"It was in just that mood that I came back to London. I went over to Paris and searched for Clare, couldn't hear anything of her, then came back and buried myself.