"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.