The Lee Shore Part 5

Urquhart, looking at her said, "Do you want to go?" and she nodded, with her mouth tight shut as if to keep back floods of eloquence on that subject. "So do I," said Urquhart, and added, in his casual way, "Will you and your father come with me?"

"You paying?" said Lucy, in her frank, unabashed way like a child's; and he smiled down at her.

"Yes. Me paying."

"'Twould be nice," she breathed, her grey eyes wide with wistful pleasure. "I would love it. But--but father wouldn't, you know. He wouldn't want to go, and if he did he'd want to pay for it himself, and do it his own way, and travel third-cla.s.s and be dreadfully uncomfortable. Wouldn't he, Peter?"

Peter feared that he would.

"Thank you tremendously, all the same," said Lucy, prettily polite.

"I shall have to go by myself, then," said Urquhart. "What a bore. I really am going, you know, sometime this spring, to stay with my uncle in Venice. I expect I shall come across you, Margery, with any luck. I shan't start yet, though; I shall wait for better motoring weather. No, I can't stop for tea, thanks; I'm going off for the week-end. Good-bye.

Good-bye, Margery. See you next in Venice, probably."

He was gone. Lucy sat still in her characteristic att.i.tude, hands clasped on her knees, solemn grey eyes on the fire.

"He's going away for the week-end," she said, realising it for herself and Peter. "But it's more amusing when he's here. When he's in town, I mean, and comes in. That's nice and funny, isn't it."

"Yes," said Peter.

"But one can go out into the streets and see the people go by--and that's nice and funny too. And there are the Chinese paintings in the British Museum ... and concerts ... and the Zoo ... and I'm going to a theatre to-night. It's _all_ nice and funny, isn't it."

"Yes," said Peter again. He thought so too.

"Even when you and he are both gone to Italy," said Lucy, rea.s.suring herself, faintly interrogative. "Even then ... it can't be dull. It can't be dull ever."

"It hasn't been yet," Peter agreed. "But I wish you were coming too to Italy. You must before long. As soon as ..." He left that unfinished, because it was all so vague at present, and he and Lucy always lived in the moment.

"Well," said Lucy, "let's have tea." They had it, out of little Wedgwood cups, and Lucy's mood of faint wistfulness pa.s.sed over and left them chuckling.

Lucy was a little sad about Felicity, who was now engaged to the young professor who was conspiring in Poland.

"I knew she would, of course. I told you so long ago. He's quite sure to get arrested before long, so that settled it. And they're going to be married directly and go straight out there and plot. He excites the students, you know; as if students needed exciting by their professors.... I shall miss Felicity horribly. _'Tis_ too bad."

Peter, to cheer her up, told her what he and Leslie were going to do in Italy.

"I'll write, of course. Picture post cards, you know. And if ever I've twopence halfpenny to spare I'll write a real letter; there'll be a lot to tell you." Peter expected Leslie to be rather funny in Italy, picking things up.

"A great country, I believe, for picking things up," he had said.

"Particularly for the garden." He had been referring to his country seat.

"I see," said Peter. "You want to Italianise the garden. I'm not quite sure.... Oh, you might, of course. Iron-work gates, then; and carved Renaissance oil-tanks, and Venetian well-heads, and such-like. All right; we'll see what we can steal. But it's rather easy to let an Italianised garden become florid; you have to be extremely careful with it."

"That's up to you," said Mr. Leslie tranquilly.

So they went to Italy, and Peter picked things up with judgment, and Leslie paid for them with phlegm. They picked up not only carved olive-oil tanks and well-heads and fifteenth-century iron-work gates from ancient and impoverished gardens, but a contemporarily copied Della Robbia fireplace, and designs for Renaissance ceilings, and a rococo carved and painted altar-piece from a mountain church whose _parroco_ was hard-up, and a piece of 1480 tapestry that Peter loved very much, whereon St. Anne and other saints played among roses and raspberries, beautiful to behold. These things made both the picker-up and the payer exceedingly contented. Meanwhile Peter with difficulty restrained Leslie from "picking up" stray pieces of mosaic from tessellated pavements, and other curios. Oddly together with Leslie's feeling for the costly went the insane and indiscriminate avidity of the collecting tourist.

"You can't do it," Peter would shrilly and emphatically explain. "It's like a German tripper collecting souvenirs. Things aren't interesting merely because you happen to have been to the places they belong to. What do you want with that bit of gla.s.s? It isn't beautiful; when it's taken out of the rest of its pattern like that it's merely ridiculous. I thought you wanted _beautiful_ things."

Leslie would meekly give in. His leaning on Peter in this matter of what he wanted was touching. In the matter of what he admired, where no questions of acquisition came in, he and his shopping-man agreed less.

Leslie here showed flashes of proper spirit. He also read Ruskin in the train. Peter had small allegiance there; he even, when irritated, called Ruskin a muddle-head.

"He's a good man, isn't he?" Leslie queried, puzzled. "Surely he knows what he's talking about?" and Peter had to admit that that was so.

"He tells me what to like," the self-educator said simply. "And I try to like it. I don't always succeed, but I try. That's right, isn't it?"

"I don't know." Peter was puzzled. "It seems to me rather a funny way of going about it. When you've succeeded, are you much happier? I mean, what sort of a liking is it? Oh, but I don't understand--there aren't two sorts really. You either like a thing, or ... well."

At times one needed a rest from Leslie. But outside the province of art and the pleasures of the eye he was lovable, even likeable, having here a self-dependence and a personality that put pathos far off, and made him himself a rest. And his generosity was limitless. It was almost an oppression; only Peter, being neither proud nor self-conscious, was not easily oppressed. He took what was lavished on him and did his best to deserve it. But it was perhaps a little tiring. Leslie was a thoroughly good sort--a much better sort than most people knew--but Italy was somehow not the fit setting for him. Nothing could have made Peter dislike things pleasant to look at; but Leslie's persevering, uncomprehending groping after their pleasantness made one feel desirous to dig a gulf between them and him. It was rather ageing. Peter missed Urquhart and Lucy; one felt much younger with them. The thought of their clean, light, direct touch on life, that handled its goods without fumbling, and without the need of any intervening medium, was as refreshing as a breath of fresh air in a close room.

Rodney too was refreshing. They came across him at Pietrasanta; he was walking across Tuscany by himself, and came to the station, looking very dusty and disreputable, to put the book he had finished into his bag that travelled by train and get out another.

"Come out of that," he said to Peter, "and walk with me to Florence.

Trains for bags; roads for men. You can meet your patron in Florence.

Come along."

And Peter, after a brief consultation with the accommodating Leslie, did come along. It was certainly more than amusing. The road in Tuscany is much better than the railway. And Rodney was an interesting and rather attractive person. Since he left Cambridge he had been pursuing abstruse chemical research in a laboratory he had in a Westminster slum. Peter never saw him in London, because the Ignorant Rich do not live in slums, and because Rodney was not fond of the more respectable quarters of the city.

Peter was set speculating vaguely on Rodney's vivid idealism. To Peter, ideas, the unseen spirits of life, were remote, neither questioned nor accepted, but simply in the background. In the foreground, for the moment, were a long white road running through a river valley, and little fortress cities cresting rocky hills, and the black notes of the cypresses striking on a background of silver olives. In these Peter believed; and he believed in blue Berovieri goblets, and Gobelin tapestries, and in a great many other things that he had seen and saw at this moment; he believed intensely, with a poignant vividness of delight, in all things visible. For the rest, it was not that he doubted or wondered much; he had not thought about it enough for that; but it was all very remote. What was spirit, apart from form? Could it be? If so, would it be valuable or admirable? It was the shapes and colours of things, after all, that mattered. As to the pre-existence of things and their hereafter, Peter seldom speculated; he knew that it was through entering the workshop (or the play-room, he would rather have said) of the phenomenal, where the idea took limiting lines and definite shape and the tangible charm of the sense-apprehended, that life for him became life. Rodney attained to his real by looking through the manifold veils of the phenomenal, as through so much gla.s.s; Peter to his by an adoring delight in their complex loveliness. He was not a symbolist; he had no love of mystic hints and mist-veiled distances; he was George Herbert's

Man who looks on gla.s.s And on it rests his eye,

because gla.s.s was so extremely jolly. Rodney looked with the mystic's eyes on life revealed and emerging behind its symbols; Peter with the artist's on life expressed in the clean and lovely shapes of things, their colours and tangible sweetness. To Peter Rodney's idealism would have been impossibly remote; things, as things, had a delightful concrete reality that was its own justification. They needed to interpret nothing; they were themselves; no veils, but the very inner sanctuary.

Both creeds, that of things visible and that of the idea, were good, and suited to the holders; but for those on whom fortune frequently frowns, for those whose destiny it is to lose and break and not to attain, Peter's has drawbacks. Things do break so; break and get lost and are no more seen; and that hurts horribly. Remains the idea, Rodney would have said; that, being your own, does not get lost unless you throw it away; and, unless you are a fool, you don't throw it away until you have something better to take its place.

Anyhow they walked all day and slept on the road. On the third night they slept in an olive garden; till the moon, striking in silver slants between silver trees, lit on Rodney's face, and he opened dreamy eyes on a pale, illumined world. At his side Peter, still in the shadows, slept rolled up in a bag. Rodney slept with a thin plaid shawl over his knees.

He glanced for a moment at Peter's pale face, a little pathetic in sleep, a little amused too at the corners of the lightly-closed lips. Rodney's brief regard was rather friendly and affectionate; then he turned from the dreaming Peter to the dreaming world. They had gone to sleep in a dark blue night lit by golden stars, and the olive trees had stood dark and unwhispering about them, gnarled shapes, waiting their transformation. Now there had emerged a white world, a silver mystery, a pale dream; and for Rodney the reality that shone always behind the shadow-foreground dropped the shadows like a veil and emerged in clean and bare translucence of truth. The dome of many-coloured gla.s.s was here transcended, its stain absorbed in the white radiance of the elucidating moon. So elucidating was the moon's light that it left no room for confusion or doubt. So eternally silver were the still ranks of the olives that one could imagine no transformation there. That was the pale and immutable light that lit all the worlds. Getting through and behind the most visible and obvious of the worlds one was in the sphere of true values; they lay all about, shining in unveiled strangeness, eternally and unalterably lit. So Rodney, who had his own value-system, saw them.

Peter too was caught presently into the luminous circle, and stirred, and opened pleased and friendly eyes on the white night--Peter was nearly always polite, even to those who woke him--then, half apologetically, made as if to snuggle again into sleep, but Rodney put out a long thin arm and shoved him, and said, "It's time to get up, you slacker," and Peter murmured:

"Oh, bother, all right, have you made tea?"

"No," said Rodney. "You can do without tea this morning."

Peter sat up and began to fumble in his knapsack.

"I see no morning," he patiently remarked, as he struck a match and lit a tiny spirit-lamp. "I see no morning; and whether there is a morning or merely a moon I cannot do without tea. Or biscuits."

He found the biscuits, and apparently they had been underneath him all night.

"I thought the ground felt even p.r.i.c.klier than usual," he commented. "I do have such dreadfully bad luck, don't I. Crumbs, Rodney? They're quite good, for crumbs. Better than crusts, anyhow. I should think even you could eat crumbs without pampering yourself. And if crumbs then tea, or you'll choke. Here you are."

He poured tea into two collapsible cups and pa.s.sed one to Rodney, who had been discoursing for some time on his special topic, the art of doing without.

Then Peter, drinking tea and munching crumbs, sat up in his bag and looked at what Rodney described as the morning. He saw how the long, pointed olive leaves stood with sharp edges against pale light; how the silver screen was, if one looked into it, a thing of magic details of delight, of manifold shapes and sharp little shadowings and delicate tracery; how gnarled stems were light-touched and shadow-touched and silver and black; how the night was delicate, marvellous, a radiant wonder of clear loveliness, ill.u.s.trated by a large white moon. Peter saw it and smiled. He did not see Rodney's world, but his own.

But both saw how the large moon dipped and dipped. Soon it would dip below the dim land's rim, and the olive trees would be blurred and twisted shadows in a still shadow-world.