PETER

By
E. F. BENSON
Author of “Mike,” “The Countess of Lowndes Square,” etc.

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

First published 1922

PETER

CHAPTER I

The two who mattered were lounging on the cushioned seat in the low window, of which the lower panes had been pushed quite up in order to admit the utmost possible influx of air. Little came in, for the afternoon was sultry and windless, but every now and then some current moved outside, some trickle of comparative coolness from the grass and trees of the Green Park, sufficient to stir the girl’s hair. On this high floor of the house of flats London seemed far remote; the isolation as of an aeroplane, as of a ship at sea, protected them from external intrusion.

Inside the room a party of four were assembled round the tea-table; the hostess, mother of the girl who sat in the window-seat, was wondering, without impatience, as was becoming to so chinned and contented a face, when Mrs. Alston would cease gesticulating with her sandwich and eat it, instead of using it as a conductor’s baton to emphasize her points in the discourse to which nobody was listening. The sandwich had already a large semicircular bite out of it, which penetrated well past its centre, and one more application (if she would only make it) to that capacious mouth would render it reasonable to suppose that she had finished her tea. Mrs. Heaton herself had done so; so also had the stout grey-haired man with the varnished face, and as for Mrs. Underwood, she had long ago drunk her cup of hot water and refused any further nourishment. But while Mrs. Alston brandished her crescent of a sandwich, and continued talking as if somebody had contradicted her, it was impossible to suggest a move to the bridge-table that stood ready with new packs and sharpened pencils a couple of yards away. To the boy and girl in the window that quartette of persons seemed of supreme unimportance both by reason of their age and of the earnest futility of their conversation. They talked eagerly about dull things like politics and prices instead of being flippant, in the modern style, about interesting things. Between them and the younger generation there was the great gulf digged by the unrelenting years, and set on fire by the war. It was not flaring and exploding any longer, but lay there in smouldering impassable clinkers.

“High prices and high wages!” asserted Mrs. Alston. “That’s what is going to be the ruin of the country. I’ve said over and over again, ‘Why not have an Act of Parliament to halve the price of food and coal and that sort of thing, and another Act, unless you could get it into the same one, to reduce wages by a half also?’ High prices, so everybody allows, are the cause of high wages, and if miners and that sort of person could buy their food and their clothes at half the price they pay for them now, there would not be the slightest difficulty in reducing wages by a half, instead of multiplying them by two every time that they threaten to strike. Coal! The root of all the trouble is the price of coal. Reduce the price of coal by half, and instantly the price of transport and gas and electricity will go down in a corresponding manner. Steel, too, and linen; it all depends on coal. The English sovereign has to-day hardly more than half the buying power it used to have. Hardly more than half! Restore it, then, by reducing the price of everything else, including wages. Including wages, mind! Otherwise you will find yourselves in a fine mess!”

She put the rest of her sandwich into her mouth, precisely as Mrs. Heaton had hoped and even foreseen. That made her mouth quite full, and for the moment she was as dumb as the adder. Her hostess, alert for this psychological occasion, gave a short, judicial and fulsome summing-up, addressed to the court in general.

“Well, dearest Mary,” she said. “You have made me understand it all now, a thing which I never did before. So well put, was it not, Mr. Steel, and I’m sure quite unanswerable. We must none of us attempt to argue with dearest Mary, because she would show us at once how stupid it was of us, and I, for one, hate to be made a fool of. What a good explanation! Quite brilliant! So now shall we get to our bridge? I expect we’re all going to the opera to-night, and so we shall all want to dress early. Dear me, it’s after half-past five already! Will nobody have any more tea? Quite sure? Shall we cut, then? Oh, there are Nellie and Peter in the window. Wouldn’t you like to cut in, too, dear?”

“No, mother, we shouldn’t!” said Nellie.

The four others swooped to the bridge-table, with the swift sure flight of homing pigeons, and hastily cut their cards in order to give no time for repentance on the part of the two others.

“You and I, Mr. Steel,” said Mrs. Heaton hastily. “Quite sure you wouldn’t like to play, Peter?”

“Quite,” said Peter gently. “I should hate it; thanks awfully.”

“Well, if you’re quite sure you won’t—my deal I think, partner. Shall it be pennies?”

Mr. Steel had a whimsical idea.

“Oughtn’t we to halve our points, too, Mary?” he said. “Like wages and coal?”

For a moment he was sorry he had been so rashly humorous, for Mrs. Alston opened her mouth and drew in her breath as if to speak on a public platform to the largest imaginable audience. Then, luckily, she found something so remarkable in her hand that her fury for political elucidation was quenched, and she devoted the muscles of her athletic mind to considering what she would do if the dealer was so rash as to call no trumps. Thereafter the great deeps, dimly peopled with enemies ready to pounce out of the subaqueous shadows and double you, completely submerged the four of them. They lit cigarettes as in a dream, and smoked them in alternate hells and heavens.

Nellie looked at them once or twice, as an anæsthetist might look at his patient to see whether he was quite unconscious. The third glance was convincing.

“It must be rather sweet to be middle-aged, Peter,” she said. “For the next two hours they’ll think about nothing but aces and trumps!”

“Sign of youth,” said Peter.

“Why?”

“Because they’re absorbed, like children. When you were little, you could only think about one thing at a time. It might be dentist or it might be hoops. But you and I can’t think about anything for more than five minutes together, or care about anything for more than two. I suppose that when you’re old you recapture that sort of youthfulness.”

He paused a moment.

“Go on: tell me about it all,” he said.

Nellie did not reply at once, but began plaiting her fingers together with the little finger on the top. They were slender and small like her face, which narrowed very rapidly from the ears downwards to a pointed chin. Loose yellow hair, the colour of honey, grew low over her forehead, and just below it, her eyebrows, noticeably darker than her hair, made high arches, giving her face an expression of irony and surprise. Her forehead ran straight into the line of her nose, and a short upper lip held her mouth in imperfect control, for it hinted and wondered, and was amused and contemptuous as its mood took it. Now it half-smiled; now it was half serious, but always it only hinted.

Peter apparently grew impatient of her silence and her finger plaiting.

“You’re making them look like bananas on a street-barrow,” he observed.

Nellie smoothed them out and gave an appreciative sigh.

“Oh, I bought two to-day,” she said, “and ate them in the street. I had to throw the skins away, and then I was afraid that somebody would slip on them and break his leg.”

“So you picked them up again,” suggested Peter.

“No, I didn’t. I was only sorry for anybody who might slip on them. I couldn’t tell who it was going to be, and probably I shouldn’t know him——”

“Get on,” he said.

“Oh, about Philip. Well, there it was. He asked me, you see, and—of course, he’s rather old, but he’s tremendously attractive. And it’s so safe and pleasant, and I like being adored. After all, you and I have talked it over often enough, and you knew just as well as I did that I was going to accept him if he wanted me.”

Nellie suddenly felt that she was justifying what she had done, and she did not mean to do that. What she had done justified itself by its own inherent good sense. She changed her tone, and began counting on those slim fingers which just now had introduced the extraneous subject of bananas.

“Peter, darling,” she said. “If his grandfather and an uncle and two children of the uncle die, there is no doubt whatever that I shall be a peeress. Won’t that be fun? I feel that Uncle Robert and the two children may easily die; they’re the sort of people who do die, but I doubt whether grandpapa ever will. He’s like the man with the white beard; do I mean the Ancient Mariner or the Ancient of Days, who comes in Ezekiel?”

Peter Mainwaring rocked backwards in the window-seat with a sudden little explosion of laughter that made all the bridge players look up as if their heads were tied to the same tweaked string. Then they submerged again.

“Not Ezekiel, anyhow,” he said. “It’s either Daniel or Coleridge. I expect Coleridge.”

“Yes, I mean Coleridge,” she said. “The man who stops the wedding guest; wedding guest was what suggested it. Grandpapa always wanted Philip to marry one of those cousins of his, who look like tables with drawers in them. Long legs and bumps on their faces like the handles of the drawers. But Philip wouldn’t.”

Peter ran his fingers along the line of his jaw as if to be sure that he had shaved that morning. His face for a man of twenty-two was ridiculously smooth and hairless; it did not much matter whether he had shaved or not.

“Naturally Philip wouldn’t,” he said, “but that’s got nothing to do with it. I don’t want to know why Philip didn’t do something, but why you did. I want to see your point, to do you justice. At present I feel upset about it. You know quite well that there’s only one person you ought to marry.”

“You?” asked Nellie, feeling that the question was quite unnecessary.

“How clever of you to guess. You are clever sometimes. Oh, I know we’ve talked it over enough and seen how impossible it was, but when it comes to your marrying someone else——”

He lit a match and blew it out again.

“I know,” he said. “You’ve got threepence a year, and I’ve got twopence, so that in the good old times we should have been able to buy one pound of sugar every Christmas. Even then we should have had nothing to eat with it. But what you haven’t sufficiently reckoned with is the fact that by the time I am a hundred and fifty years old, I shall get a pension of a hundred and fifty pounds from the Foreign Office. But it’s rather a long time to wait.”

Nellie’s eyes suddenly grew fixed and rapt.

“Oh, Peter, one moment!” she whispered. “Look quickly at mamma’s face. When that holy expression comes on it, it always means that she is intending to declare no trumps. So when I’m playing against her, if it’s my turn first I always declare one no trumps, and then she has to declare two. Wait one second, Peter.”

“No trumps,” said Mrs. Heaton.

“There, I told you so!” said Nellie. “Yes; it is rather long to wait, though I don’t mean to say that a hundred and fifty isn’t a very pleasant age, dear. The people in Genesis usually lived five hundred years before they married, and begat sons and daughters. Anyhow, I shall be a widow before you’re a hundred and fifty, and then we shall be engaged for three hundred and fifty years more, and then we shall totter to the altar. I can’t help talking drivel; it’s all too serious to take seriously. By the way, I shall be richer than you eventually, for when mamma dies I shall have two thousand a year, but that won’t be for two thousand years. We have been born too soon, Peter!”

Peter thought this not worth answering, but lifting one of his knees, nursed it between his clasped hands in silence. For her loose honey-coloured hair, he had a crisp coal-blackness; he was tall for her small slim stature, and his lips were set to definite purposes, whereas hers were malleable to adapt themselves to any emotion that might waywardly blow on her. But both, in compensation for differences that were complementary, were triumphantly alike in the complete soullessness of their magnificent youth; without violation of any internal principle they might, either of them, shoot up singing with the lark, or pad and prowl with the ruthless hunger of the tiger, or burrow with the mole. They were Satyr and Hamadryad, some ancient and eternally young embodiment of life, with whim to take the place of conscience, and the irresponsible desire of wild things to do duty for duty, and impulse to take the place of reason. Each, too, had developed to an almost alarming degree that modern passion for introspection, which is an end in itself, and like a barren tree, yields no fruit in the ways of action or renunciation.

Peter hugged his knee, and his eye grew hazy and unfocused in meditation.

“Am I in love with you, do you think?” he asked at length.

She laughed, quite disregarding the ears of the bridge players. With Peter she was more herself than with anyone else, or even than when alone.

“Oh, that’s so like you,” she said, “and so wonderfully like me. Certainly you’re not in love with me; you’re not in love with anybody. You never have been; you never will be. You’re fonder of me than of anybody else, but that’s a very different thing.”

“But how do you know I’m not in love with you?” he asked. “I may be. You’re not so unattractive. Why shouldn’t I be in love with you?”

“It’s obvious you aren’t. To begin with, you don’t feel the smallest jealousy of Philip. Besides, though you so kindly say that I’m not so unattractive, you’re the one person who really sees and notes and mentions my imperfections. You wouldn’t be so critical of me if you were in love. And then, as I said, you’re not jealous of Philip.”

“Good Lord, how could I be jealous of Philip?” asked he. “I should have to want to be Philip before I could be jealous of him, and I wouldn’t be Philip, even as things stand, for anything in the world. Besides, you don’t really think him so tremendously attractive though you said so just now. You said that out of pure conventionality, not out of conviction.”

Some momentary perplexity, like a cloud on a sunny windy day of spring bowled its shadow over her face, and creased a soft perpendicular furrow between her eyebrows.

“Peter, I think I want to become conventional,” she said, “and, if you wish, I will confess I was practising for it when I said that. Oh, my dear, we’re all human, cast in a mould and put in a cage, if you don’t mind mixed metaphors. I’m going to marry in the ordinary way, just because girls do marry. Mamma married, so did my two grandmammas, and four great-grandmammas, and eight great-great-grandmammas. In fact the further you go back, the commoner marriage seems to have been. Some awful human hereditary spell has been cast on me.”

Peter leaned forward, bright-eyed and faun-like.

“Break it!” he said. “Exorcise it! Spells don’t exist except for those who allow themselves to be bound by them. The fact is we all weave our own spells.”

“But if I did refuse now, what then?” said she. “If you don’t obey conventions, you must have conviction to take their place, and I haven’t got any. Besides, if I don’t marry I shall become an old maid, unless I die young. Oh, we are all in a trap, we girls. There are three awful alternatives to choose from, and I dislike them all. I don’t want to die young, but if I live to be sixty I’ve got to be a grandmother or a stringy old maid.”

“You’ve got to be stringy, anyhow, at sixty,” said Peter.

“Not at all. Grandmothers are usually plump and comfortable: it is great aunts who are stringy. And grandmothers remain young, I notice, whereas elderly maiden ladies are only sprightly. I think that it’s because they cling to youth, and there’s nothing so ageing as to cling to anything. If you want to retain anything, the best plan is to drop it, and then it clings to you instead.”

“That’s rather ingenious,” said Peter. “You may go on about it for a minute.”

“I was going to. It’s perfectly true. All the people who don’t eat potatoes and sweets for fear of getting fat become elephants, like mamma, who lives on cracknel biscuits.”

“Does she?” said Peter with deep interest. “How wonderful of her.”

“And all the people who take immense care of themselves die at the age of forty, because they are clinging to life, while those who break every ordinance of health never die at all. And all the people who lay themselves out to be brilliant are crashing bores——”

“Oh yes; proved,” said Peter. “Let’s go on to something else. What’s to happen to me when you marry?”

“Nothing,” said Nellie. “Why should it? You’ll go on being quite different from anybody else. That’s a career in itself. You aren’t human, anyhow, however many great-grandmammas you may have had. You’re a wild thing, partly domesticated, and when you’re tired of us all, you go waving your tail, and walking in the wet woods, and telling nobody. Kipling, you know. Then you come back rather sleepy and pleased, and allow us to put a blue riband round your neck and tickle you under the chin, and then you lie down on a cushion in front of the fire and purr. You don’t purr at us, though, you purr at yourself.”

“Lor!” said Peter. “All that about me!”

Nellie pushed back her hair from her forehead, and again plaited her fingers together. But this time it was no deliberative, meditative process, but a swift unconscious action.

“Yes, my dear, and there’s more, too,” she said. “It’s my swan-song, remember, for soon I am going to become ordinary and conventional. I used to go in the wet woods, too, you know, though we never met each other there. But that has been the bond between us, up till now we have been completely independent. You’re going to remain so, but not I. Oh, Peter, there was a bond! My dear, do you think that I’m rather mad? I have serious doubts about it myself.”

“You always were rather mad,” said he. “But go on; sing your swan-song.”

“Then don’t look as if you had taken a guinea stall to hear me,” she said. “Where had I got to? Oh, yes. There was a bond; you know it yourself. I’ve never been conscious of anybody else as I’ve been conscious of you, nor have you ever been conscious of anyone else as you’ve been conscious of me. You’ve never been in the least in love with me, nor have I with you. But we’re the same kind of person, and one doesn’t often see the same kind of person as oneself. Do you understand at all, or am I simply reading out of my own book?”

He was silent a moment.

“Nellie, would you marry me if I were rich?” he asked.

She made a gesture of impatience.

“How on earth can I tell?” she said. “If you were rich you would be quite a different person.”

“No, I shouldn’t——”

“Oh, Peter, how stupid you are,” she said. “And how frightfully Victorian. That is so shallow. Wealth is just as much part of a man or a woman as brains or beauty. I don’t say that a girl loves a man for his brains, or his money, or his beauty, but they all make a part of him. Wealth isn’t an accident; it’s an attribute. A poor man—I’m not talking about you and me, but only speaking in the abstract—may be the same in character and charm as a rich man, but what a gulf money makes between them! Let one man be poor, and another, his absolute double in every way, be rich. They cease to be doubles at once.”

“But if you happened to love the costermonger——“ began Peter.

“We can leave that out, because neither of us has the slightest idea what love means.”

“How about the bond you spoke of, then?” asked he. “Hasn’t that got anything to do with it?”

She considered this, and then laid her hand on his arm.

“If I could choose now, this minute,” she said, “in what relationship we should stand to each other, I would choose you as my brother. I haven’t got one; I should like to have one tremendously. And yet, if I might have it all just the way I liked, I think I should have you for my sister. I don’t so much want you to take care of me as I want to take care of you. I want——”

“Oh, come now,” said Peter.

“It’s true, though.”

They had turned themselves about in the window-seat, so as to secure for this surprising conversation a greater privacy from the party at the bridge-table, and were leaning out of the window. A hundred feet below Piccadilly roared and rattled, but here the clatter of it was shorn of its sharp edges; it was as if a stir of bees was swarming in some hive down there. Seen like this from above, passengers and vehicles alike were but crawling dots and blots; everything, from the swiftest motor down to the laziest loiterer, seemed to be drowsily and soundlessly sauntering. Often had Peter and Nellie leaned out here looking on the traffic at the base of the cliff, capturing for themselves a certain sense of isolation. Even leaning out they could see nothing of the precipitous cliff side of the house, for a couple of feet below the window a stone cornice jutted out some ten or twelve inches, and beyond the edge of that the nearest visible objects below were the tops of motor buses and the hats of the foot passengers along the pavements. So still was the air that now, when Peter flicked the ash off his cigarette, it floated down, still cohering, till it dwindled into invisibility. He followed its fall with that detached intentness which the surface mind gives to the ticking of a clock or the oscillation of some flower-head, when the whole psychic attention is focused elsewhere; and it seemed that Nellie, as far as her surface mind went, was trotting in harness with him, for though he had not hinted at what occupied his eyes, scarcely knowing it himself, she was equally intent.

“I’ve lost sight of it, Peter,” she said, breaking the silence of a whole minute.

“Of what?” he asked.

“Of your cigarette end. You were watching it too. Don’t pretend that you weren’t.”

“Well, if I was, what then?” he asked.

“Nothing particular. I only felt you were watching it—just the bond.”

He shifted himself again. Hitherto, as they leaned out, his left shoulder touched hers. Now he broke the contact.

“I think that’s about the extent of the bond,” he said. “And your marrying Philip shows precisely what sort of value you put on it. You’ve made it clearer than you know, for you’ve defined your feelings for me as being a desire to have a brother, or rather a sister to take care of. I don’t think that’s worth much. You defined it further by saying that you couldn’t tell whether you would marry me or not if I were rich, because if I were, I should be a quite different person. If the quality of the bond would be affected by that, it must be of remarkably poor quality, and you’re quite right to break it. When you began talking about the bond I thought you might be going to say something interesting, something I didn’t know, something that, when you stated it, I should recognize to be true. If that’s all your swan has got to sing it might as well have been a goose.”

Nellie’s eyebrows elevated themselves up under the loose yellow of her hair.

“Peter dear, are you quarrelling with me?” she asked.

“Yes. No. No, I’m not quarrelling. But the whole thing is such a bore. Where’s my tail, and where are the wet woods?”

She leaned her chin on her hands, that lay along the window sill.

“I wish you were in love with me,” she said.

“I’m extremely glad that I’m not,” said he. “Otherwise I suppose I should want to be Philip, or, as the madrigal says, some other ‘favoured swain.’ But for you to talk about a bond between us is the absolute limit. You want everything your own way, and expect everybody else to immolate himself, thankfully and ecstatically, on your beastly altar.”

“So do you,” murmured Nellie. “We all do.”

“I? How do you make that out?” demanded Peter.

“Because you object to my marrying Philip when you haven’t the smallest desire to have me yourself. If you knew that I should say ‘Yes,’ supposing you asked me to jilt Philip and marry you, you wouldn’t ask me to. You want me to marry nobody and not to marry me yourself. That’s not good enough, you know.”

Peter’s mouth lengthened itself into a smile, and broadened into a laugh.

“It’s a putrid business,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I take a neat header from the window and have done with it? I’m twenty-two, and already I think the whole affair is rot. And if it doesn’t amuse me now, when is it going to amuse me? It was even more amusing during the war, when one came back for a fortnight’s leave before going out to that hell again. One did grab at pleasure then, because in all probability one would be blown to bits very soon afterwards. But now that one is not going to be blown to bits very soon afterwards the whole seasoning has gone out of it. No, not quite. I want to be admired. What is love? Good Lord, what is love? As I haven’t the slightest idea, the best thing I can do is to grab at pleasures.”

“Or the worst,” suggested Nellie, rather sententiously.

“Now get off the high horse,” said Peter. “Or, rather, don’t attempt to get on it. You can’t, any more than I. Let’s be comfortable. Marry your silly Philip, and I’ll—I’ll—— Shall I take to drink? No, that wouldn’t do, for people would say I was trying to drown my despair at your marriage. I haven’t got feelings of that sort, and I should hate anybody to think that I had. I loathe being pitied, anyhow, and to be pitied for something you don’t suffer from would be intolerable. And though you will remain just the same to me after you’re married, and I shall certainly remain the same, our relations will be altered.”

Nellie let her eyes flit over him, never quite alighting. They skimmed over his crisp hair, over the handsome, smooth, soulless profile, over his shoulders, over the knee he was nursing, over the hiatus where white skin showed between his rucked-up trouser and a drooping sock. At this moment she, with the knowledge of the definite step that she had taken in life by engaging herself to Philip Beaumont, felt far older and more experienced than he. She, anyhow, could look ahead and see a placid, prosperous life in front of her, whereas Peter, a year older than she, was still as experimental as a boy. All the same, if he wanted anything, he had remarkable assiduity in the pursuit of it until he caught it, but nothing beyond the desire of the moment was to him worth bothering about. Her own prudence, her own commitment of herself she knew to be a development of to-day and yesterday, and now it seemed suddenly to have aged and consolidated her. But she had no answer for that voice crying in the wilderness “What is love?” Or was there some sort of signpost by the wayside enveloped in mist? She passed over that point.

“If it really all seems to you so putrid,” she said, “I can’t imagine why you don’t, as you say, take a header into the street. But you’ve no intention of doing anything of the sort. You would firmly resist any attempt of mine to tip you out. You like life quite passably as it is, you know, and also you do expect something more from it. In fact, I never saw anyone so thoroughly unlikely to give up living or to run any risk that could reasonably be avoided. You say it’s a putrid business, but really you find it a pleasant one.”

Peter sighed.

“Oh, yes, it will have to do,” he said. “Don’t tip me out, Nellie. But don’t, on the other hand, think that I cling so desperately to life.”

“Not desperately, but instinctively. It would be silly of anybody to throw up a hand that may contain some glorious ace without looking very carefully through it. Everyone goes on playing and clutching at the new deals until he is sure that there isn’t an ace in the pack for him. Indeed, it’s when you’ve found the ace that you don’t value the rest of the hand so much.”

“I don’t follow. Explain,” said Peter.

“Well, this kind of thing. For instance, if you found the ace, that is to say, if you fell tremendously in love, you might not care about the rest of the hand. If the adorable was in my bedroom, two windows off, and if she was locked in there, and if the house was on fire——”

“Any more ‘ifs’?” asked Peter.

“Not one. But supposing all these things, you would instantly get out on to that cornice, at peril of your life, and shuffle your way along it. You would have to be with her. You wouldn’t give two thoughts as to what might happen to you.”

Peter thought this over.

“I should be a consummate ass, then,” he remarked. “A fellow with a grain of sense would go down the passage and bash the door in.”

“But let’s pretend that for some reason you couldn’t. If the only way of reaching the room was along the cornice you would go.”

Peter looked at the ledge.

“And if I got there in safety, what then?” he asked. “I couldn’t carry her back along the ledge.”

“But that wouldn’t prevent your going,” said she. “Whatever the risk to yourself was, and however useless your going was, you would go.”

Peter was silent a moment, frowning.

“I feel as if all this has happened before,” he said. “Do you know that feeling? Did we ever sit here before and talk about just this?”

“Not that I remember. No, I’m sure we never have. Isn’t it odd, that sensation? Does it seem to you like remembrance of a previous occasion, or a presentiment of a future one?”

“Or a slightly faulty action of the two lobes of the brain?” said Peter. “What were we talking about? Aces?”

“Yes. That’s what I mean about throwing the rest of your hand away for the sake of an ace.”

Peter looked at his watch.

“I must go,” he said. “I’ve got to get home to dress, and rush back to the Ritz to dine early before the opera.”

“Oh, not just yet,” said she. “But I wish you wouldn’t live in South Kensington. Why do you?”

Peter had a direct glance and a direct answer for this.

“Because it’s cheaper living with my father and mother than being on my own,” he said. “Also——”

“Well?” she asked.

“I was going to say because they like having me with them,” said he. “But I don’t think that’s true, so I didn’t say it. I mean, if I had plenty of money I should take a flat of my own, quite regardless of whether they liked to have me with them.”

Nellie gave a little sigh, with a click of impatience at the end of it.

“There’s an odd kind of honesty about you,” she said. “You state that sort of thing quite baldly, whereas I should conceal it. If I had been you I should have said that I lived at home because my mother liked having me with her. It wouldn’t have been true, but I should have said it. Very likely by saying it often I should have got to believe it.”

“Nobody else would have,” remarked Peter.

“You’re rather a brute, my dear,” said she. “Go away to South Kensington.”

“I’m going. But about aces for one second more. Have you found your ace, Nellie? Don’t bother to answer.”

“That is spoken like a rather spiteful woman,” was Nellie’s perfectly justifiable rejoinder.

“Maybe. I’m your spiteful sister,” said Peter.

He walked gracefully and gently over to the card-table.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Heaton,” he said. “Nellie and I have had a lovely talk. I hope you’ve won every rubber.”

“And three aces, thirty,” said Mrs. Heaton. “Good-bye, dear Peter. I suppose you’ll be at the Opera to-night. Parsifal. My deal? So it is.”

CHAPTER II

Peter descended from these heights into the hot dusty well of the streets, and soon was on his way home to dress and return to the Ritz, where an early dinner preceded the opera and any other diversions that might present themselves. On this sweltering June evening the top of a bus was a cooler progression than a taxi, besides advancing the sacred cause of economy, which he had just confessed was more real to him than that of filial piety, and at Hyde Park Corner he could catch a conveyance that would deposit him not fifty yards from his father’s house. Coolness and economy were sufficiently strong of themselves to make him board it with alacrity, and the detachment of a front seat just suited the meditative mood which his talk with Nellie had induced.

Peter knew himself and her pretty well, and with the admirable contributions she had made to their discussion there was little to puzzle out, but much to appraise and estimate. The notion that the news of her engagement had been a blow of any sharp or stunning quality could be at once dismissed, for never had he known so well, as when she, earlier in the day, had communicated the news of her engagement to him over the telephone (that was like her), how whole-heartedly he was not in love with her, and how unintelligibly alien to him, as she had pointed out, was that emotion. During the last year which had witnessed a very decent flowering of intimacy between him and her, there had never been, on either side, the least attempt at love-making; their relations had been wholly free from sentiment, and not once had either of them tripped or stuttered over the foreign use of love-language. But in ways wholly unsentimental they had certainly arrived at some extremely close relation of intimacy; there had emphatically been a bond between them, which to his mind her engagement, if it did not actually loosen it, would shift, so to speak, on to a new place; the harness must be worn elsewhere. If it was to be maintained, he, at any rate, must accustom himself to its new adjustment. She had defined that comradeship this afternoon in a way that was rather surprising, for the ideal relation of him to her, apparently, was that of a brother, or, with greater precision, that of a sister. That had not struck him before, but even when first presented, it did not in the least puzzle him. Indeed, it satisfactorily accounted for that elimination of sex which had always marked their intimacy. She had not sought the male element in him, nor he in her the female. So far he was in complete agreement with the casual conclusion they had jointly arrived at, but at that point Peter detected the presence of something that seemed to show a lurking fallacy somewhere. For he had no doubt that if he had been rich, he would before now have proposed to her, and in spite of her provision that, since riches were an attribute of a man and not an external accident, they turned him into a different person, and that thus she could not tell whether she would have accepted him or not, he did not, for himself, believe that she would have hesitated in doing so. Finally, as material to meditate upon, came her firm statement that though Peter did not want or intend to marry her, he objected to anybody else doing so. With the extreme frankness with which he habitually judged any criticism on himself, he instantly admitted that there was a great deal to be said for Nellie’s assertion. When it was stated brutally like that, he recognized the justice of her outline. She might have made a caricature of him, but her sketch contained salient features, the identity of which, as he contemplated this scribble of her inspired pencil, he could not disclaim. Without doubt she had caught a likeness; more tersely she had “got him.” Even as he acknowledged that, he felt a resentment that she had so unerringly comprehended him, and shown him to himself. He enjoyed, rather than otherwise, his own dissection of himself, without bias or malice, but he felt less sure that when Nellie was the dissector he welcomed so deft an exposure.

The retrospect had been sufficiently absorbing to make him unaware that, somewhere in Knightsbridge, the top of the bus had become a strenuous goal for travellers. Every seat was occupied, and beside him a young man had planted himself in the vacant place and was talking to a girl who had plumped herself into a seat two tiers behind his. Peter instantly jumped up.

“Let me change places with your young lady,” he said, “and then you’ll be together and talk more conveniently.”

The change was made with a tribute of simpering gratitude on the part of the “young lady,” and Peter, with laurels of popularity round his straw hat, took the single place. He knew perfectly well that he had disturbed himself from no motive of kindliness; he did not in the least want to please either the man or the girl. His motive had been only to appear pleasant, to obtain cheaply and fraudulently the certificate of being a “kind gentleman.” For himself, he did not care two straws if the pair of sundered lovers bawled at each other from sundered seats....

And then as he took his new place it struck him that the quality which had prompted the transference of himself from one seat on the top of a bus to another, was precisely the same as had led him to resent Nellie’s dissection of him. In the one case his vanity was gratified, in the other his vanity was hurt.

“That’s it,” he said to himself, and mentally he prinked, like a girl, in the glass that had so unerringly shown him to himself. Yet it did not show him an aspect of himself that was in any way surprising, either for pleasure or distaste, for he knew well how prolific a spring of native vanity was in him. He would always take an infinity of trouble in order to appear admirable, or, on the other hand, to conceal what was not so admirable. He would always inconvenience himself in order to appear kind, exert himself to appear amusing, bore himself, while preserving the brightness of an attentive and interested eye, in order to confirm his reputation for being sympathetic. But though vanity was the root of such efforts, there was, at any rate, no trace of it in his acknowledgment of it. He never deluded himself into thinking that he suffered fools gladly, because he liked them, or desired to secure for them a pleasant half-hour in which they could tediously inflict themselves on him; he suffered them with the show of gladness in order to be thought kind and agreeable in the abstract, and in the concrete to pick up the gleanings of welcome and entertainment which, for such as him, lie so thick on the fields of human intercourse, when the great machines have gone by. He had no reason to complain of these gleanings; there was no one among the youth of London who was more consistently in request, or who more merited his mild harvestings. In a rather fatigued and casual generation, tired with the strain of the last five years, and now suddenly brought to book after the irresponsibility of wartime, when for all young men each leave snatched from the scythe of the French front might easily be their last, there was a certain license given, Peter had always been a shining exception to such slack social conduct of life. He did not, as he had told Nellie, expect much from it, but as long as you were “on tap,” it was undeniably foolish not to present yourself presentably. Your quality was certainly enhanced by a little foam, a little effervescence. “That nice Mr. Peter, always so polite and pleasant,” was his reward; and at this moment Nellie’s divination of his true attitude towards her engagement was his punishment.

The bus hummed and droned along the Brompton Road; there was still a solid stretch before it halted just opposite the side street which was his goal, and there was time to consider her further criticism that he went off, waving his tail, into the wet woods and saying nothing to anybody. What had she meant exactly by that? He had, at any rate, his own consciousness that she had hit on something extremely real and vitally characteristic of him. Surely she meant his aloofness from any intimate surrender of himself, the self-sufficiency that neither gave nor sought strong affection. He had acknowledged the vanity as of a be-ribanded cat, and now he added to that his desire for material comfort, a quiet, determined selfishness, and the reservation to himself of solitary expeditions in the wet woods with a waving tail. Probably she meant no more than that, and though Peter quite acknowledged the justice of these definitions, he again felt a certain resentment against her clear-sightedness. She had a touch of these defects and qualities herself; it was that which made the bond between them.

Peter let himself into his father’s house in the grilling, dusty street nearly opposite the Oratory with the anticipation of finding a speedy opportunity for a domestic exhibition of vanity, for he felt sure that something ludicrous or tiresome and uncomfortable would await him; something he would certainly tolerate with bland serenity and agreeableness. The house, the front of which had been baking in the sun all the afternoon, was intolerably hot and stuffy; the door at the head of the kitchen stairs had, as generally happened, been left open, and the nature of the dinner which would presently ascend could be confidently predicted. Beyond, at the back of the hall, the door into his father’s studio was also open, and a languid, odorous tide of oil-paint and Virginian tobacco made a peculiarly deadly combination with kitchen-smells, and indicated that Mr. Mainwaring had been occupied with his audacious labours. Just now he was engaged on the perpetration of a series of cartoons (suitable or not for mural decoration). The practical difficulty, if these ever attained completion, would be the discovery of the wall that should be large enough to hold them; indeed, the great wall of China seemed the only destination which, though remote, was sufficiently spacious. The subject of them was the European war from a psychic no less than from a sanguinary point of view, for the series (of which the sketches were complete) started with a prodigious cartoon which depicted Satan whispering odious counsels into the ear of the Emperor William II, who wore a smile of bland imperial ambition at the very attractive prospects presented by the Father of Lies. In the background an army corps of the hosts of Hell stretched from side to side of the picture like some leering, malevolent flower-bed. Thereafter the series was to traverse the annals of all kinds of frightfulness: Zeppelins dropped bombs on Sunday-schools, submarine crews, agape with laughter, shot down the survivors from torpedoed liners. All these existed only in sketches; the first, however, as Peter knew, was rapidly approaching completion on the monstrous scale, and took up the whole end of the studio. Neither Peter nor his mother had as yet been permitted a glimpse of it; the full blast of its withering force, so Mr. Mainwaring had planned, was, on completion, to smite and stun them.

He had heard Peter’s entrance into the house, for an outburst of jubilant yodelling came to the young man’s ears as he put down his hat.

“Tirra lirra, tirra lirra,” sang out the boisterous voice. “Is that my Peter? Ha-de-ah-de-ho!”

Peter’s eyebrows went up, his mouth slackened to a long sigh, and his slim shoulders shrugged. But his voice—all of him that at present could convey his mood to his father—was brisk and cordial.

“Hallo, father,” he said. “Do you want me?”

“Yes, my dear; come in a moment. I have something to show you.”

Peter closed the door of the kitchen stairs and went into the studio. His father was standing high on a stepladder in front of his canvas, dashing the last opulent brushful of sombre colour on to the thundercloud which, portending war, formed so effective a background of Prussian blue to the Emperor’s head. He painted with swoops and dashes; such things as “finish” were out of place in designs for the wall of China.... Even as Peter entered he skipped down from the steps of the ladder and laid aside his palette and brushes.

“Finito, e ben finito!” he cried. “Congratulate me, my Peter! I made the last stroke as you entered, an added horror—is it not so?—in that cloud. Ha! You have not seen it yet; sit down and drink it in for five minutes. Does it make you hot and miserable to look at? Yes, you’ll see more of that cloud and of what it holds for distracted Europe before I come to the end of my cartoons. Bombs and torpedoes are in that cloud, my Peter; devastation and destruction and damnation!”

He struck a splendid attitude in front of the tremendous canvas, and with a sweep of his hand caused his thick crop of long, grey hair to stand out in billows round his head. Physically, as regards height and fineness of feature, Peter certainly owed a good deal to his father, for John Mainwaring’s head—with its waves of hair, its high colour, its rich exuberance—was like some fine manuscript now enriched with gilt and florid illuminations, of which Peter was, so to speak, the neat, delicate text unadorned by these flamboyant additions. Peter’s vanity, doubtless, came from the same paternal strain, for never was there anyone more superbly conscious of his own supreme merits than his father. Highly ornamental, he knew that his mission was not only to adorn the palace of art with his work, but to enlighten the dimness of the world with his blazing presence. Like most men who are possessed of extraordinary belief in themselves, of high colour and exuberant spirits, he was liable to accesses of profound gloom, when, with magnificent gestures, he would strike his forehead and wail over his own wasted life and the futility of human endeavour. These attacks, which were very artistic and studied performances, chiefly assailed him when the Royal Academy had intimated that some stupendous canvas of his awaited removal before varnishing day. Then, with bewildering rapidity, his spirits would mount to unheard-of altitudes again, and, brush in hand, he would exclaim that he asked no more of the world than to allow him to pursue his art unrecognized and unhonoured, like Millet or Corot. His temperament, in fact, was that of some boisterous spring day which, opening with bright sunshine, turns to snow in the middle of the afternoon, and draws to a close in lambent serenity; and whether exalted, depressed, or normal, he was simply, though slangily, the prince of “bounders.”

He clapped his hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“I need not point out to you the merits, or, indeed, the defects of my composition,” he said, “for my Peter inherits something of his father’s perceptions. Look at it then once more and tell me if my picture recalls to you the method, even, perhaps, the inspiration of any master not, like me, unknown to fame. Who, my boy, if we allow ourselves for a moment to believe in psychic possession, who, I ask you—or, rather, to cast my sentence differently—to whom do I owe the realization of terror, of menace, of spiritual horror, which, ever so faintly, smoulders in my canvas?”

He folded his arms, awaiting a reply, and Peter cudgelled his brains in order to make his answer as agreeable as possible. The name of Blake occurred to him, but he remembered that of late his father had been apt to decry this artist for poverty of design and failure to render emotional vastness. Then, with great good luck, his eye fell on some photographic reproductions from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that decorated the wall of the studio, and he felt he had guessed right.

“No one but Michael Angelo,” he said. “That’s all the influence I can see, father.”

Mr. Mainwaring rested his chin on his hand and was gazing at his work with frowning, seer-like scrutiny. It was difficult to realize that it was he who had yodelled so jubilantly just now.

“Curious that you should have said that, Peter,” he said in a deep, dreamy voice. “For days past, as I worked, it has seemed to me that M.A.—Master of Art, as well as Michael Angelo, note you—that M.A. was standing by me. At times, indeed, it seemed that not I, but another, controlled my brush. I do not say he approved, no, no; that he was pleased with me; but he was there, my boy. So, if there is any merit in my work, I beseech you to attribute it not to me but to him. It was as if I was in a trance....”

He closed his eyes for a moment and bowed his head, and then, as if at the last “Amen” of some solemn service, he came out of the dim cathedral into sunlight.

“Your mother!” he said. “We must not forget her in this great moment. Is she in? Tirra lirra! Ha-de-ah-de-ho! My own!”

He pranced to the door, ringing the bell, as he passed, and repeated his yodelling cries. From upstairs a quiet, thin voice gave some flat echo of his salutation; from below a hot parlourmaid opened the door of the kitchen stairs and set free a fresh gale of roastings.

“Three glasses,” he said to the latter. “Three glasses, please, and the decanter of port. Maria mia! Come down, my dear, and, if you love me, keep shut your lustrous eyes and take my hand, and I will guide you to the place I reserve for you. So! Eyes shut and no cheating!”

Mrs. Mainwaring, small in stature, with a porcelain neatness about her as of a Dresden shepherdess, suffered herself to be led into the studio, preserving the scrupulous honesty of closed eyelids. By her side her rococo husband looked more than ever like some preposterous dancing-master, and if it was correct to attribute to him Peter’s inherited vanity, it was equally right to derive from the young man’s mother that finish and precision which characterized his movements and his manners. Easily, too, though with a shade more subtlety, a psychologist might have conjectured where Peter’s habit of walking in the wet woods and telling nobody was derived from, for it was not hard to guess that Mrs. Mainwaring’s tranquil self-possession, her smiling, serene indulgence of her husband’s whim, was the result of a quality firm and deeply rooted. Self-repression had, perhaps, become a habit, for her conduct seemed quite effortless; but in that tight, thin-lipped mouth, gently smiling, there was something inscrutably independent. She was like that, secret and self-contained, because she chose to be like that; her serenity, her collectedness, were the mask she chose to wear. Thus, probably, Peter’s inheritance from her was of more durable stuff than the vanity he owed to his father, for how, if his mother had not been somehow adamantine, could she have lived for nearly a quarter of a century with this flamboyant partner, and yet have neither imbibed one bubble of his effervescence nor lost any grain of her own restraint? Indeed, she must have been like some piece of quartz for ever dashed along by the turbulence of his impetuous flood, and yet all the effect that this buffeting and bruising had produced on her had been but to polish and harden her. She went precisely where the current dashed her, but remained solid and small and impenetrable.

Such was her relation to the bounding extravagance of her husband; he swept her along, quite unresisting, but never parting from her self-contained integrity, and all his whirlings and waterfalls had never stripped one atom off her nor roughened her surface. To him she appeared transparently clear, though, as a matter of fact, not only had he never seen into her, but, actually, he had never seen her at all. He bounced her about, demanding now homage, when the exuberance of creation was his, now sympathy when the rejection of a picture by the Royal Academy made him a despairing pessimist; but she never varied with his feverish temperature, and on the surface, at any rate, remained of an unchangeable coolness. His trumpets never intoxicated her small, pink ear; his despair of himself and the world in general never came within measurable distance of sullying her serenity, any more than a thunderstorm disturbs the effulgence of a half-moon that neither waxes nor wanes. She still continued calmly shining behind his clouds, as was obvious when those clouds had discharged their violence. John Mainwaring never dreamed of considering what, possibly, might lie below that finished surface; it was enough for him that she should always be ready to pay a scentless homage to his achievements, or sit quietly like a fixed star above the clouds of despair that occasionally darkened his day. She was “Maria mia, my beloved,” when he was pleased with himself, and, when otherwise, it was enough that she should repeat at intervals: “Fancy their rejecting your picture. I am sure there are hundreds in the exhibition not half so good.”

To Peter she was an enigma to which he never now attempted or desired to find the key. She seemed to him quite impervious to external influences behind that high wall of her reserve. Nothing, so far as he knew, roused emotion in her; nothing excited, nothing depressed her. Sometimes, when a boy, he had gone to her with a trouble to confide, and she would say: “How tiresome for you, dear,” and perhaps suggest some sensible course of action. But neither his troubles nor her own (if she had any) seemed to touch her emotions; while, on the other hand, if there was something agreeable to communicate, if his father sold a picture, or Peter had the announcement of promotion in the Foreign Office, her sympathy and pleasure (if she felt any) were just as iced as her condolence had been. The event—to Peter’s apprehension—that most had power to move her was the fact that somebody had left open the door at the top of the kitchen stairs. When that was “quite shut,” and when all household cares had their sunset after dinner, her habitual mode of self-employment was to read a page or two of a novel (returning it to the library next day) and then to take some sort of railway guide and scan the advertisements of hotels situated in agreeable places on the south coast or among the Derbyshire Highlands. Often and often had Peter returned from dinner to find his mother thus employed. His father, when in the throes of creation, went early to bed in order to be fresh and spry for the light of the morning hours; but she slept badly, and slept best if she went late to bed. There she would be then when Peter latch-keyed himself into the house on his return from dining out, or even, occasionally, when he returned far later from a dance, with the Bradshaw in her hand open among the advertisements of hotels. She would put a paper-knife in the leaves to keep her place while she exchanged a few words with him; then, when he went to bed, she would resume her reading. Quite naturally and warrantably he had always considered this a “sad narcotic exercise” on her part, producing, it was to be hoped, the drowsiness which she was wooing. A more promising device for dulling the activity of the brain, than reading about unknown hotels at unvisited places, could hardly be desired, and so reasonable a process provoked no curiosity on his part.

But the door at the top of the kitchen stairs was the most active of her interests, and took precedence in her mind of any mood of her husband’s. So when to-day he led her with a prancing processional movement to a throne of Spanish brocade at a suitable focusing distance from the finished cartoon, she, with nostrils open though with shut eyes, gave the door to the kitchen stairs the first claim on her attention.

“That door has been left open again,” she said. “How careless Burrows is! Please shut it, my dear. I will keep my eyes tightly shut.”

It struck Peter at this moment that both he and his mother treated his father as if he had been a child. They both played his games, treating them with due seriousness, lest they should damp the excited pleasure of the young. She was playing now without collusion, for, led in as she had been, with closed eyes, she had no idea that Peter was present. Then, faintly up the kitchen stairs came the jingle of the glasses, and Burrows entered with the tray that had been ordered, once more leaving that fatal door agape. By some exercise of domestic intuition Mrs. Mainwaring divined the sort of thing going on round her, and with eyes still honourably closed said:

“Be sure you close the door at the top of the stairs, Burrows, when you go down again.”

John Mainwaring, with a wealth of gesticulation in order to enjoin silence on Peter, and with much stealthiness of action, completed his festive preparations. Demanding from his wife steadiness of hand and no questions, he thrust between her fingers a brimming glass of port, took one himself, and filled a third for Peter. In obedience to his pantomime Peter stood on one side of his enthroned mother and elevated his glass.

“Open your dear blue eyes, Maria mia!” exclaimed John Mainwaring, “and before you say a single word drink to your husband’s offering to Art!”

Mrs. Mainwaring opened her eyes, and found as she had already guessed from previous experience, her brimming glass.

“I couldn’t possibly drink all that, my dear,” she said, “but I will sip it with pleasure before I say anything. There! Dear me, what a fine great picture! All success to it! So that’s what has kept you so busy all these days when I wasn’t allowed to come into your studio. Oh, there’s Peter! Are you going to dine at home, dear? I thought you said you were going out.”

“I’ve only come home to dress,” said he.

“I see. Now let me look at your father’s picture. Why, there’s the German Emperor! And what a quantity of other people. Dear me! And who is that whispering to the Emperor? What a horrid expression he has!”

The artist drank his glass of port at a gulp, and at another the rest of hers.

“Horrid? I should think it was. If you had said devilish you would have been even more on the bullseye. Now you shall be our Molière’s housemaid. Speak, voice of the British public! Tell me and Peter what you see before you.”

Mrs. Mainwaring, with the aid of her glasses, and the slight hint already given, was perfectly certain that it must be Satan who was whispering to the Emperor, and that all those dreadful faces behind must have something to do with him. Then there was that huge dark cloud in the background.

“The Emperor and Satan,” she said with a sort of placid excitement, like an adult trying to guess a child’s riddle. “Now wait a minute, my dear. Yes, I’m sure that dreadful thundercloud behind is the war, and if the Emperor wouldn’t listen to Satan it would go away. But he’s looking pleased and proud; he is listening. I suspect that Satan is telling him that he will win the war and be Emperor of the earth, as you’ve always said he would have been if the Germans had won. Well, I do think it’s clever of you to have made me think of all that. Such a few weeks, too, to paint such a big picture! How well you kept your secret! You only told me that you were very busy, and that I mustn’t come into your studio. I never thought that when you allowed me in again I should see anything so large and remarkable. Most striking! Isn’t it, Peter?”

“Splendid!” said Peter. Then he wondered if he had put enough conviction into his voice to satisfy the gourmandise of his father.

“Quite splendid!” he said, rather louder.

Then it was Mrs. Mainwaring’s turn in this game.

“And it’s only the first of a series,” said she. “You must send it to some exhibition at once, John, in order to make room for the rest. So large, is it not? It fills up all the end of the studio. Such an important picture. Dear me, how wicked the Emperor looks! And what will the next picture be?”

“War. Picture of war. Allegorical. Shells bursting into shapes of devilish malignity.”

He leaned on the back of the throne, regarding the picture intently.

“It will kill me, painting the rest of them,” he said with a fell intensity. “I’ve got to go through the hell of it all myself before I can paint them.”

The calm of Mrs. Mainwaring’s voice was untouched by this gloomy prospect.

“No, dear, it won’t kill you,” she said consolingly. “That’s your artistic temperament. You will have a good holiday afterwards. You must be sure to do that. I see; the other pictures will all come out of that dreadful thundercloud. Such a poetical idea! And I hope you’ll have a picture of Peace for the last one. Everything quite serene again, and the thundercloud vanished, and no Emperor at all, unless you paint a very little figure of him in the background to show how small he has become. Just him in the background, somewhere in Holland.”

John Mainwaring left his domestic position, leaning on the throne, and strode up and down the studio.

“Ah, that intolerable happy ending!” he said. “That’s the convention that spoils all art. Art’s a stern, bitter business; you mustn’t expect to find a bit of sugar at the bottom of your cup. Art, as the Greeks said, is meant to move pity and terror.”

Mrs. Mainwaring stepped from her throne.

“Well, I shall think of a peaceful picture for myself, then,” she said, “and when I have looked at all yours I shall imagine my own. After all, the war is over, and it’s had a happy ending for us, since the Germans have been beaten and Peter has come back from it all safe and sound. That’s my ending.”

He projected his fine grey hair again with a dexterous sweep of the hand.

“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?”

“My father and my mother,” said Peter. “He has just finished the largest picture in the world.”

“How sweet of him! Ah, they have brought some cocktails at last.”

She waited till the servant was well out of hearing.

“But how stupid the waiter is,” she said. “I am sure I told him to bring three not four. Shall I taste it? Shall I like it, do you think?”

It seemed not too optimistic to hope that she would, for, otherwise, she would long ago have ceased not only tasting the fourth cocktail which she was sure she had not ordered, but consuming it so completely that the strip of lemon-peel overbalanced against the tip of her pretty nose.

“My dear, how strong!” she exclaimed. “I feel perfectly tipsy, and one of you must give me your arm, as if you were a nephew or something if I stagger or reel. Let us go in to dinner at once. I promised Ella we would get to Mrs. Wardour’s box by the beginning of the opera.”

“Who is Mrs. Wardour?” asked Charlie Harman.

“Oh, quite new,” said Mrs. Trentham. “Hardly anyone has seen her yet. Rich, fabulously rich. Her husband was one of the hugest profiteers—not eggs at fourpence, but steamers at a quarter of a million. He bought up everything that floats and sold it to the Government, and most of it got sunk. He died a couple of years ago. Too sad.”

“More about her, please,” said Peter.

“I haven’t seen her yet, my dear, but Ella Thirlmere is being her godmother—sponsor, you know—and she asked me to take people to her box and her dinners and her dances. Her name’s Lucy: it would be. I shall begin by calling her Lucy almost immediately. There’s no time nowadays to get to know people. You have to pretend to know them intimately almost the moment you set eyes on them.”

“And pretend not to know them afterwards, if necessary,” said Peter.

May Trentham gave a hasty glance round the room and, becoming aware that quite a sufficient number of people were looking at her and her party, slapped the back of Peter’s hand with the tips of her fingers, and gave a scream of laughter to show what a tremendously amusing time she was having.

“You naughty boy!” she said. “Is he not cynical about Lucy? I shan’t talk to you any more. Tommy, my dear, tell me what you’ve been doing. You look flushed. I believe you’re in love.”

“No. I’ve been playing squash,” said Tommy.

“What is squash? I believe it’s one of your horrid new words and means flirting. Who is she?”

“She is Charlie. At least, I was playing squash with Charlie,” said Tommy, with laborious precision. “He didn’t like it.”

Charlie fingered two little tails of blond hair that grew directly below his nostrils and formed his moustache. Otherwise his face was completely feminine—plain and pink and plump. He gesticulated a good deal with his hands, flapping and dabbing with them.

“Odious game,” he said, showing a great many teeth between his red lips. “You go on hitting a ball against a putrid wall until you’re too tired to hit it any more, and then Tommy says ‘One love.’ When you’ve done that fifteen times, he says ‘Game,’ and then you begin another one. I hoped I should never hear of it again.”

“You shan’t, my dear; but don’t be such a cross-patch. I know you’re annoyed with me for not getting you some pretty girl to talk to. You must talk to Peter. He’s in disgrace with me. Oh, Peter, is it true about Nellie Heaton’s engagement?”

“Perfectly,” said Peter.

“Then why aren’t you broken-hearted? I don’t believe any of you young men have got hearts nowadays.”

“That accounts for their not being broken,” said Peter.

It was time to laugh loudly again in order to remind the rest of the diners what a brilliant time she was having, and May Trentham did this.

“There he goes again!” she said. “Is he not shocking? My dear, have you had a dreadful scene with her?”

“No. I only had tea with her.”

“Oh, don’t pretend you weren’t desperately in love with her. But never mind. I will find some other girl for you, who will adore you so violently that you will lose your heart to her, though you say you haven’t got one. She shall be rich and lovely, and we shall all be frantically jealous of her. And you shall both call me Aunt May, because I have brought you together.”

“Thank you, Aunt May,” said Peter. “Go on about her, please.”

“No, I’ve talked to you long enough. Tommy is feeling left out. When the opera is over, by the way, I want you all to come on to Ella Thirlmere’s dance. I promised to bring you all. Mrs. Wardour is sure to be coming, and she will certainly have plenty of motor-cars to take us. Oh, there is that marvellous Spanish boxer, is it not, dining alone with Ella. How gentle and kind he looks! Darling Ella! I wonder if she will have six rounds with him in the middle of her dance. I would certainly back her: look at her chest. But how daring of her to dine with him here! They say he marries again after each of his fights and settles all the money he has won on his new wife. But, after all, I suppose it’s just as daring of me to dine with three such attractive young men as for her to dine with just one Solomon like that!”

Tommy puzzled over this for a moment. He was very good-looking, but there was no other reason for him.

“Solomon?” he asked.

“Yes, my dear; think of his wives. I was talking to Anthony Braille to-day, who makes all those wonderful tables about population, and what encourages and hinders it. He said the only chance for England was to close all the music-hall bars and introduce polygamy. Every Englishman, after this dreadful war—you know I was a nurse during the war—must have fifty children a year for two years—or did he say two children a year for fifty years?—in order to bring up the population again to its proper level. It was all most interesting—if he only didn’t stutter so much!”

“He seems to have stuttered out the main facts,” said Peter.

“Oh, I couldn’t tell a young man half the things he said to me. We ought all to be Patagonians and polygamists. The birth-rate among Patagonians is colossal. They behead all women of the age of thirty-five who aren’t married, and all bachelors at the age of forty. It has something to do with eugenics.”

The intoxication of a restaurant now crowded with people had gained complete ascendancy over Peter’s hostess. She never felt quiet and contented unless she was surrounded by a host of friends, acquaintances, and people she knew by sight, and had to shout at the top of her voice in order to be heard above the roar of other conversations and the blare of a band. It was equally necessary for the establishment of this tranquil frame of mind that several young men, and, if possible, no women, should be with her, and that she should constantly be convulsed by shrieks of laughter, and should have both her elbows on the table. A finer nuance in success was that she must appear wholly absorbed in the brilliance of her own table, and quite unconscious of the hubbub round her, though presently, when she got up, she would seem to awake to the fact that she was in a crowded restaurant, and would blow kisses all over the room, and have dozens of little smiles and words for all those whose position between her and the door she had unerringly noted. Just a sentence or two for each, reminding her “my dears” of a meeting to-morrow, or a meeting yesterday with a phrase of flattery and a bit of whispered scandal and the conclusion: “I must fly; those boys will be so cross with me if I keep them waiting. Meet you at dearest Ella’s? Yes? Lovely!”... All this was faithfully performed on her part, and her face, with its pretty little features all bunched together in the middle of it, like the markings in a pansy, had expanded and contracted again sufficient times before she reached the door of the restaurant to enable a weary conclave to express itself as it waited for her.

“Parsifal, too,” said Charlie. “Thank God we’ve missed the first act. Aged stunt—flower-maidens and grails. Can’t we get away, Peter? Come home with me. Say we’re busy at the F.O. German complications. Bolshevists on the Rhine.”

Tommy stood first on one leg scratching a slim calf with the other instep, and then on the other leg scratching in a corresponding manner.

“You simply can’t,” he said. “How am I to deal with her and Lucy? And Parsifal?”

“Polygamy and Patagonians,” said Peter, with a vague remembrance of the preposterous conversation that had garlanded their dinner. “Flirt, Tommy. Can you flirt? Hold hands. Sigh. Beam. Can’t you manage it?”

“No,” said Tommy.

“Then Tommy and I will go away,” said Charlie. “After all, she doesn’t want us, except as a stage crowd. She wants you most, Peter. I say, I like your studs. Who?”

“Nobody. I liked them, too, so I got them. But we’ve all got to go on. After all, we’ve had dinner.”

“All the more reason for not going on,” said Charlie.

“That’s no good. It doesn’t pay. Besides, she’s awfully decent——”

“Don’t be priggish, Peter. I say, is Nellie really going to marry Philip Beaumont? Do you mind?”

This atrocious conversation was interrupted by the sprightly tripping advent of their hostess, who put her fingers in her ears, which she knew were “shell-like,” as she passed through the direct blast of the band, and consoled them for her want of appreciation of their professional functions by distributing more of her little smiles.

“Now I know you are all going to scold me,” she said, “because I’ve kept you waiting. But there were so many dears who insisted on my having a word with them. They nearly tore my frock off. Let’s all cram into one taxi, and I will sit bodkin. And after Ella’s dance we’ll all go on to Margie Clifford’s. She specially told me to bring all of you, and scold you well first for not having talked to her on your way out. I don’t know what everybody will think when I appear at the Ritz and the Opera, and two dances with the same young men. I shall have to tell my darling Bob that the Morning Post hasn’t come, or he’ll storm at me. What a lovely white lie.”

There flashed through Peter’s consciousness at that moment an insane wonder as to what would happen if he said calmly and clearly and genuinely, “My good woman, who cares? As for the compromising young men who accompany you, they are all dying to get away, and only the debt of the excellent dinner you gave us, of which I reminded them, prevents us from doing so.” There was the truth of the matter, and it was all rather mean and miserable. Her guests were spending the evening with her and ministering to her hopeless delight in daring situations simply because she had, on her side, administered the nosebag. They consented, with a grudging sense of honourable engagement, to plough their way in her wake merely because she had fed them. If she had asked them severally or collectively to drop in after dinner, in the way of a friend, for conversation and soda water, none of them would have dreamed of gratifying her. And now, when they had fed deliciously at her expense, they would all have preferred to go back to Charlie’s rooms in Jermyn Street, or to Tommy’s flat (Peter’s house was handicapped by the presence of parents), rather than trail along to Parsifal, and to a dance, and yet another dance. The dances, perhaps, might be amusing, for there would be girls there, and some sitting about on stairs, and some sliding about on slippery floors, and an irresponsible atmosphere, and certainly some more champagne. You had to get through the night somehow, and nowadays you could smoke while you were dancing, and you needn’t dance much. The nuisance—rather a serious one—was that Mrs. Trentham would be there all the time, screaming and dabbing at them to show how amusing and brilliant they all were, keeping them firmly planted round her while she told them that they must go away and dance and make themselves agreeable to others rather than hang round an old woman like her, and continually whistling them back if they attempted to do anything of the sort. She would take up a position where she could most advantageously be seen and heard, and get them all plastered about her, swiftly talking to each in turn, so that he could not possibly go away as long as she so volubly told him to. She had that artless art to perfection; no one had such a gift for making young men adhesive as she, while all the time she was scolding them for wasting their time on an old woman. There was no semblance of sentiment in these proceedings; the entire objective of the manœuvres was to demonstrate to the world that these boys insisted on crowding round her and not leaving her. That was her notion of a successful evening, and since they had signed their bond by eating her dinner, she managed to exact the full pound of flesh.

The curtain went down on the first act of Parsifal precisely as Mrs. Trentham led her shrill way into one of the two boxes that bore the name of Mrs. Wardour. She tripped in, all feather fan and stockings, like some elegant exotic hen, proudly conscious of the brood of most presentable chicks, though not of her rearing, which followed her. The house at that moment started into light again, and black against the oblong of brightness were the backs of two female heads, both of which turned round at the click of the opened door. One of them had a great tiara on, sitting firmly on a desert of pale sandy hair.

May Trentham advanced with both hands held out.

“My dear, how late we are,” she said. “You must scold these boys, for they kept me in such shrieks of laughter at dinner that I had no idea of the time. Dearest Ella has so often talked to me about you; always asking: ‘Haven’t I met Mrs. Wardour yet? Was it possible I had not met her great friend Lucy Wardour?’ Charmed!”

In the hard light of the theatre, Mrs. Wardour’s face appeared to her to be quite flat; the shadows on it looked like dark smudges applied to the surface with a brush, rather than markings derived from projections and depressions. This apparition of a diamond-crowned oval of meaningless flesh was slightly embarrassing, and she turned to the second occupant of the box. There, in the younger face, she saw what Lucy might, perhaps, once have been like, before the years had flattened her out. Obviously this was a daughter, though Ella Thirlmere had altogether omitted to mention such a thing. Then, with her rather short-sighted eyes growing accustomed to the staring light, Mrs. Trentham observed that her first impression of her hostess’s face was an illusion, though founded on fact; just as when the figure of a man resolves itself into a hat and coat hanging on the wall. There was nothing, in fact, abnormal about Mrs. Wardour’s countenance: it was just blankish. She had large cheeks of uniform surface, a nose of small elevation, no eyebrows, and eyes set in very shallow sockets. Then another shadow came on to her face; but this time, without delay, May Trentham saw that it was her mouth opening. When she had opened it, she spoke, but she did not conduct both processes simultaneously.

“Well, I’m pleased to see you,” she said; “but there are so many friends of Lady Thirlmere—Ella, I should say; she told me always to say Ella—there are so many of Ella’s friends visiting me to-night that I don’t quite seem to know your name.”

May Trentham felt that her brain was giving way. Here was a perfectly empty box, except for Mrs. Wardour and her daughter, and yet here was Mrs. Wardour assuring her that so many friends of Ella were here.... Where were the friends? Were they invisible? Was the box in reality crowded with unseen presences?...

“I’m Mrs. Trentham,” she said, clinging firmly to that sure and certain fact. “May Trentham. Ella told me you would expect me.”

Mrs. Wardour appeared to be making an effort of recollection. This, in a few moments, seemed successful.

“That’s correct,” she said. “I remember; and this is my daughter Silvia.”

For a moment her face slipped off its sheath of meaninglessness, and something homely and kindly and simple gleamed in it.

“I’ve got two boxes to-night, Mrs. Trentham,” she said. “This and the next, as Lady Thirlmere—Ella—so kindly sent along such a quantity of her friends. That’s what it is; and so Silvia and I (didn’t we, Silvia?) we left the other box, seeing that it was so full, and came in here, for, naturally, I wanted to put my guests where they could see the play, and Silvia and I, we wanted to see, too. Mrs. Trentham was it? And I’m sure I’m very glad to see you and your young friends. I should like them all to be introduced to me and Silvia.”

Charlie had hung up his hat and coat during this amazing conversation, and now came forward.

“How-de-do?” he said.

“I haven’t caught the name yet,” said Mrs. Wardour. The sheath had gone back over her face again.

“This is Lord Charles Harmer,” said Mrs. Trentham.

“Indeed. The son of the Marquis of Nairn?” asked Mrs. Wardour.

Charlie opened his mouth very wide.

“Brother!” he exclaimed, as if he were saying “Murder!” on the Lyceum stage.

Tommy and Peter were less important; the latter, when the introductions were over, found himself sitting between Silvia and her mother. On the further side of Mrs. Wardour was May Trentham between the other two young men and already absorbed in identifying the occupants of boxes opposite and blowing kisses.

“There! There’s just room for all of us,” said Mrs. Wardour, “without squeezing each other. We were too squeezed in the other box, weren’t we Silvia? There’s six in the other box, and now we’re six here. Let me think; there’s Lord Poole and there’s Lady Poole. There’s Mrs. Heaton, and there’s Miss Heaton, and there’s Mr. Philip Beaumont. That’s five. Miss Heaton is engaged to Mr. Beaumont; isn’t that it, Silvia? I want to get it clear.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Peter.

“Indeed! Do you know Miss Heaton?” asked Mrs. Wardour.

“Yes, very well,” said he.

“That’s what’s so pleasant,” said she. “Just to sit here and know everybody. That’s what we want, Silvia, isn’t it? Just to sit and know everybody. But that only makes five. Who’s the other one? His name began with F, and he was very fat.”

“Perhaps that was his name,” said Peter. He was beginning to enjoy himself; the whole thing was such complete nonsense. What kept up the high level of it was that Mrs. Wardour replied with seriousness:

“No; if his name had been Fat, I should have remembered it,” she said. “It wasn’t Mr. Fat, nor Lord Fat. He seemed to know everybody, too. He just sat there and knew everybody.”

From Peter’s other side, where Silvia sat, there came some little tremor of a laugh, hardly audible, and turning, he saw that her face dimpled with amusement. It was singularly sexless; the curve of her jaw, the lines of her mouth were more like a boy’s than a girl’s; boyish, too, was her sideways cross-legged attitude. If she was laughing at her mother’s remark, her amusement was clearly of the most genial kindliness.

Mrs. Wardour continued in a perfectly even voice that almost intoned the words, so void was it of inflection.

“It’s a pity your party has missed so much of the opera,” she said. “There’s been a lot of pretty music; some of it reminded me of being in church and hymns. It’ll seem quite strange going to a dance afterwards. A lot of knights singing hymns. Parsifal, you know. Some say it’s the best opera Wagner ever wrote.”

This time Silvia certainly laughed, and again her laugh had not the smallest hint of satirical enjoyment; she was just amused. Peter found himself, though he had scarcely yet glanced at her, somehow understanding her. He recognized in her amusement all that he himself failed to feel with regard to his father’s cartoons and his mother’s readings in Bradshaw. He knew intuitively that Silvia had got hold of the right way to regard absurdities; to see comedy without contempt. Whether she knew it or not (it was quite certain that she did not), she had given him a glimpse, a hint, an enlightenment, not only of what she was, but of what he was not. Looking at her now directly for the first time, his handsome face caught some reflection of her boyish brightness.

“And what do you think of Parsifal?” he asked.

She raised her eyebrows.

“How can I tell?” she asked. “I never saw an opera before.”