The Lee Shore Part 3

"My self-filling bath," Peter explained. "I invented it myself. Well--it did fill itself. Quite suddenly and all at once, you know. It was a very beautiful sight. But rather unrestrained at present. I must improve it.... Oh, this is my last term."

"Sent down?" Urquhart sympathetically enquired. It was what one might expect to happen to Peter.

"Dest.i.tute," Peter told him. "The Robinsons have it practically all.

Hilary told me to-day. I am thrown on the world. I shall have to work.

Hilary is dest.i.tute too, and Peggy has nothing to spend, and the babies insist on bathing in the ca.n.a.ls. Bad luck for us, isn't it. Oh, and Hilary is going to edit a magazine called 'The Gem,' for your uncle in Venice. That seems rather a nice plan. The question is, what am I to apply _my_ great gifts to?"

Urquhart whistled softly. "As bad as all that, is it?"

"Quite as bad. Worse if anything.... The only thing in careers that I can fancy at the moment is art dealing--picking up nice things cheap and selling them dear, you know. Only I should always want to keep them, of course. If I don't do that I shall have to live by my needle. If they pa.s.s the Sweated Industries Bill, I suppose one will get quite a lot.

It's the only Bill I've ever been interested in. My uncle was extremely struck by the intelligent way I took notice of it, when I had disappointed him so much about Tariff Reform and Education."

"You'd probably be among the unskilled millions whom the bill turns out of work."

"Then I shall be unemployed, and march with a flag. I shall rather like that.... Oh, I suppose somehow one manages to live, doesn't one, whether one has a degree or not. And personally I'd rather not have one, because it would be such a mortifying one. Besides," Peter added, after a luminous moment of reflection, "I don't believe a degree really matters much, in my profession. You didn't know I had a profession, I expect; I've just thought of it. I'm going to be a buyer for the Ignorant Rich.

Make their houses liveable-in. They tell me what they want--I get hold of it for them. Turn them out an Italian drawing-room--Della Robbia mantel-piece, Florentine fire-irons, Renaissance ceiling, tapestries and so on. Things they haven't energy to find for themselves or intelligence to know when they see them. I love finding them, and I'm practised at cheating. One has to cheat if one's poor but eager.... A poor trade, but my own. I can grub about low shops all day, and go to sales at Christie's. What fun."

Urquhart said, "You'd better begin on Leslie. You're exactly what he wants."

"Who's Leslie?" Peter was eating buns and marmalade, in restored spirits.

"Leslie's an Ignorant Rich. He's a Hebrew. His parents weren't called Leslie, but never mind. Leslie rolls. He also bounds, but not aggressively high. One can quite stand him; in fact, he has his good points. He's rich but eager. Also he doesn't know a good thing when he sees it. He lacks your discerning eye, Margery. But such is his eagerness that he is determined to have good things, even though he doesn't know them when he sees them. He would like to be a connoisseur--a collector of world-wide fame. He would like to fill his house with things that would make people open their eyes and whistle. But at present he's got no guide but price and his own pure taste. Consequently he gets hopelessly let in, and people whistle, but not in the way he wants. He's quite frank; he told me all about it. What he wants is a man with a good eye, to do his shopping for him. It would be an ideal berth for a man with the desire but not the power to purchase; a unique partnership of talent with capital. There you are. You supply the talent. He'd take you on, for certain. It would be a very nice little job for you to begin with. By the time you've decorated his town house and his country seat and his shooting-box and all his other residences, you'll be fairly started in your profession. I'll write to him about you."

Peter chuckled. "How frightfully funny, though. I wonder why anyone should want to have things unless they like to have them for themselves.

Just as if I were to hire Streater, say, to buy really beautiful photographs of actresses for me!... Well, suppose he didn't like the things I bought for him? Suppose our tastes didn't agree? Should I have to try and suit his, or would he have to put up with mine?"

"There's only one taste in the matter," Urquhart told him. "He hasn't got any. You could buy him any old thing and tell him it was good and he'd believe you, provided it cost enough. That's why he has to have a buyer honest though poor--he couldn't check him in the least. I shall tell him that, however many the things you might lie about, you are a George Washington where your precious bric-a-brac is concerned, because it's the one thing you care about too much to take it flippantly."

Peter chuckled again. Life, having for a little while drifted perilously near to the sh.o.r.es of dullness, again bobbed merrily on the waters of farce. What a lot of funny things there were, all waiting to be done!

This that Urquhart suggested should certainly, if possible, be one of them.

A week later, when Mr. Leslie had written to engage Peter's services, Urquhart's second cousin Rodney came into Peter's room (a thing he had never done before, because he did not know Peter much) and said, "But why not start a curiosity shop of your own? Or be a travelling pedlar? It would be so much more amusing."

Peter felt a little flattered. He liked Rodney, who was in his third year and had never before taken any particular notice of him. Rodney was a rather brilliant science man; he was also an apostle, a vegetarian, a fine football player, an ex-Fabian, and a few other things. He was a large, emaciated-looking person, with extraordinarily bright grey eyes, inspiring a lean, pale, dark-browed face--the face of an ascetic, lit by a flame of energising life. He looked as if he would spend and be spent by it to the last charred fragment, in pursuit of the idea. There was nothing in his vivid aspect of Peter Margerison's gentle philosophy of acquiescence; he looked as if he would to the end dictate terms to life rather than accept them--an att.i.tude combined oddly with a view which regarded the changes and chances of circ.u.mstance as more or less irrelevant to life's vital essence.

Peter didn't know why Rodney wanted him to be a travelling pedlar--except that, as he had anyhow once been a Socialist, he presumably disliked the rich (ignorant or otherwise) and included Leslie among them. Peter always had a vague feeling that Rodney did not wholly appreciate his cousin Urquhart, for this same reason. A man of means, Rodney would no doubt have held, has much ado to save his soul alive; better, if possible, be a bricklayer or a mendicant friar.

"Some day," said Peter politely, "I may have to be a travelling pedlar.

This is only an experiment, to see if it works."

He was conscious suddenly of two opposing principles that crossed swords with a clash. Rodney and Urquhart--poverty and wealth--he could not a.n.a.lyse further.

But Rodney was newly friendly to him for the rest of that term. Urquhart commented on it.

"Stephen always takes notice of the dest.i.tute. The best qualification for his regard is to commit such a solecism that society cuts you, or such a crime that you get a month's hard. Short of that, it will do to have a hole in your coat, or paint a bad picture, or produce a yesterday's handkerchief. He probably thinks you're on the road to that. When you get there, he'll swear eternal friendship. He can't away with the prosperous."

"What a mistake," Peter said. It seemed to him a singularly perverse point of view.

CHAPTER III

THE HOPES

It was rather fun shopping for Leslie. Leslie was a stout, quiet, ponderous person between thirty and forty, and he really did not bound at all; Urquhart had done him less than justice in his description. There was about him the pathos of the very rich. He was generous in the extreme, and Peter's job proved lucrative as well as pleasant. He grew curiously fond of Leslie; his att.i.tude towards him was one of respect touched with protectiveness. No one should any more "do" Leslie, if he could help it.

"He's let me," Peter told his cousin Lucy, "get rid of all his horrible Lowestoft forgeries; awful things they were, with the blue hardly dry on them. Frightful cheek, selling him things like that; it's so insulting.

Leslie's awfully sweet-tempered about being gulled, though. He's very kind to me; he lets me buy anything I like for him. And he recommends me to his friends, too. It's a splendid profession; I'm so glad I thought of it. If I hadn't I should have had to go into a dye shop, or be a weaver or something. It wouldn't have been good form; it wouldn't even have been clean. I should have had a day-before-yesterday's handkerchief and Rodney would have liked me more, but Denis would probably have cut me. As it is I'm quite good form and quite clean, and I move in the best circles. I love the Ignorant Rich; they're so amusing. I know such a nice lady. She buys potato rings. She likes them to be Dublin hall-marked and clearly dated seventeen hundred and something--so, naturally, they always were till I began to buy them for her. I've persuaded her to give away the most blatant forgeries to her G.o.d-children at their baptisms. Babies like them, sham or genuine."

Peter was having tea with his cousin Lucy and Urquhart in the White City.

Peter and Lucy were very fond of the White City. Peter's cousin Lucy was something like a small, gay spring flower, with wide, solemn grey eyes that brimmed with sudden laughters, and a funny, infectious gurgle of a laugh. She was a year younger than Peter, and they had all their lives gone shares in their possessions, from guinea-pigs to ideas. They admired the same china and the same people, with unquestioning unanimity. Lucy lived in Chelsea, with an elder sister and a father who ran at his own expense a revolutionary journal that didn't pay, because those who would have liked to buy it couldn't, for the most part, afford to, and because those who could have afforded to didn't want to, and because, in short, journals run by nice people never do pay.

Lucy played the 'cello, the instrument usually selected by the small in stature. In the intervals of this pursuit, she went about the world open-eyed to all new-burnished joys that came within her vision, and lived by admiration, hope and love, and played with Peter at any game, wise or foolish, that turned up. Often Urquhart played with them, and they were a happy party of three. Peter and Lucy shared, among other things, an admiration of Urquhart.

Peter was finding the world delightful just now. This first winter in London was probably the happiest time he ever had. He hardly missed Cambridge; he certainly didn't miss the money that the Robinsons had.

His profession was to touch and handle the things he loved; the Ignorant Rich were delightful; the things he bought for them were beyond all words; the sales he attended were revels of joy; it was all extremely entertaining, and Leslie a dear, and everyone very kind. The affection that always found its way to Peter through his disabilities spoke for something in him that must, it would seem, be there; possibly it was merely his friendly smile. He was anyhow of the genus comedian, that readily endears itself.

He and Urquhart and Lucy all knew how to live. They made good use of most of the happy resources that London offers to its inhabitants. They went in steamers to and fro between Putney and Greenwich, listening to concertinas and other instruments of music. They looked at many sorts of pictures, talked to many sorts of people, and attended many sorts of plays. Urquhart and Peter had even become a.s.sociates of the Y.M.C.A.

(representing themselves as agnostics seeking for light) on account of the swimming-baths. As Peter remarked, "Christian Young Men do not bathe very much, and it seems a pity no one should." On the day when they had tea at the White City, they had all had lunch at a very recherche cafe in Soho, where the Smart Set like to meet Bohemians, and you can only get in by being one or the other, so Peter and Lucy went as the Smart Set, and Urquhart as a Bohemian, and they liked to meet each other very much.

The only drawback to Peter's life was the bronchitis that sprang at him out of the fogs and temporarily stopped work. He had just recovered from an attack of it on the day when he was having tea at the White City, and he looked a weak and washed-out rag, with sunken blue eyes smiling out of a very white face.

"You would think, to look at him," Urquhart said to Lucy, "that he had been going in extensively for the flip-flap this afternoon. It's a pity Stephen can't see you, Margery; you look starved enough to satisfy even him. You never come across Stephen now, I suppose? You wouldn't, of course. He has no opinion of the Ignorant Rich. Nor even of the well-informed rich, like me. He's blindly prejudiced in favour of the Ignorant Poor."

Lucy nodded. "I know. He's nice to me always. I go and play my 'cello to his friends."

"I always keep him in mind," said Peter, "for the day when my patrons get tired of me. I know Rodney will be kind to me directly I take to street peddling or any other thoroughly ill-bred profession. The kind he despises most, I suppose, are my dear Ignorant Rich--the ill-bred but by no means breadless. (That's my own and not very funny, by the way.) Did I tell you, Denis, that Leslie is going to begin educating the People in Appreciation of Objects of Art? Isn't it a nice idea? I'm to help.

Leslie's a visionary, you know. I believe plutocrats often are. They've so much money and are so comfortable that they stop wanting material things and begin dreaming dreams. I should dream dreams if I was a plutocrat. As it is my mind is earthly. I don't want to educate anyone.

Well, anyhow we're going to Italy in the spring, to pick things up, as Leslie puts it. That always sounds so much as if we didn't pay for them.

Then we shall bring them home and have free exhibits for the Ignorant Poor, and I shall give free and instructive lectures. Isn't it a pleasant plan? We're going to Venice. There's a Berovieri goblet that some Venetian count has, that Leslie's set his heart on. We are to acquire it, regardless of expense, if it turns out to be all that is rumoured."

Urquhart scoffed here.

"Nice to be infallible, isn't it. You and your goblets and your Ignorant Rich. And your brother Hilary and my uncle Evelyn. Your great gifts seem to run in the family. My uncle, I hear, is ruining himself with buying the things your brother admires. My poor uncle, Miss Hope, is getting so weak-sighted that he can't judge for himself as he used, so he follows the advice of Margery's brother. It keeps him very happy and amused, though he'll soon be bankrupt, no doubt."

Lucy, as usual, laughed at the Urquhart family and the Margerison family and the world at large. When she laughed, she opened her grey eyes wide, while they twinkled with dancing light.

Then she said, "Oh, I want to go on the flip-flap. Peter mustn't come, because it always makes him sick; so will you?"

Urquhart said he would, so they did, and Peter watched them, hoping Urquhart didn't mind much. Urquhart never seemed to mind being ordered about by Lucy. And Lucy, of course, had accepted him as an intimate friend from the first, because Peter had said she was to, and because, as she remarked, he was so astonishingly nice to look at and to listen to.

Among the visitors who frequented Lucy's home, people whom she considered astonishingly pleasant to look at and to listen to did not abound; so Lucy enjoyed the change all the more.

The first time Peter took Urquhart down to Chelsea to call on his Hope uncle and cousins, one Sunday afternoon, he gave him a succinct account of the sort of people they would probably meet there.

"They have oddities in, you know--and particularly on Sunday afternoons.

They usually have one or two staying in the house, too. They keep open house for wastrels. A lot of them are aliens--Polish refugees, Russian anarchists, oppressed Finns, ma.s.sacred Armenians who do embroidery; violinists who can't earn a living, decayed chimney-sweeps and so forth.