PETER

By E. F. BENSON Author of “Mike,” “The Countess of Lowndes Square,” etc. CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

{1}

First published 1922

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{2} 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 corre{3}sponding 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?{4}”

“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{5} 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,{6} 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{7} 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.{8}”

“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{9} 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{10} 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{11} 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,{12} 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——”