The Lee Shore | Page 9

a
fearful old spendthrift."
Peter demurred at the old. It jarred with one's conceptions of Lord
Evelyn. "I don't suppose he's much over fifty," he surmised.
"No, I daresay," Hilary indifferently admitted. "He's gone the pace, of
course. Drugs, and all that. He soon won't have a sound faculty left. Oh,
I'm attached to him; he's entertaining, and one can really talk to him,
which is exceptional in Venice, or, indeed, anywhere else. Is his
nephew still up here, by the way?"
"Yes. He's going down this term."
"You see a good deal of him, I suppose?"
"Off and on," said Peter.
"Of course," said Hilary, "you're almost half-brothers. I do feel that the
Urquharts owe us something, for the sake of the connexion. I shall talk
to Lord Evelyn about you. He was very fond of your mother.... I am
very sorry about you, Peter. We must think it over sometime,
seriously."
He got up and began to walk about the room in his nervous, restless
way, looking at Peter's things. Peter's room was rather pleasing.
Everything in it had the air of being the selection of a personal and
discriminating affection. There was a serene self-confidence about
Peter's tastes; he always knew precisely what he liked, irrespective of
what anyone else liked. If he had happened to admire "The Soul's
Awakening" he would beyond doubt have hung a copy of it in his room.
What he had, as a matter of fact, hung in his room very successfully

expressed an aspect of himself. The room conveyed restfulness, and an
immense love, innate rather than grafted, of the pleasures of the eye.
The characteristic of restfulness was conveyed partly by the fat green
sofa and the almost superfluous number of extremely comfortable
arm-chairs, and Peter's attitude in one of them. On a frame in a corner a
large piece of embroidery was stretched--a cherry tree in blossom
coming to slow birth on a green serge background. Peter was quite
good at embroidery. He carried pieces of it (mostly elaborately
designed book-covers) about in his pockets, and took them out at
tea-parties and (surreptitiously) at lectures. He said it was soothing, like
smoking; only smoking didn't soothe him, it made him feel ill. On days
when he had been doing tiresome or boring or jarring things, or been
associating with a certain type of person, he did a great deal of
embroidery in the evenings, because, as he said, it was such a change.
The embroidery stood for a symbol, a type of the pleasures of the
senses, and when he fell to it with fervour beyond the ordinary, one
understood that he had been having a surfeit of the displeasures of the
senses, and felt need to restore the balance.
Hilary stopped before a piece of extremely shabby, frayed and dingy
tapestry, that had the appearance of having once been even dingier and
shabbier. It looked as if it had lain for years in a dusty corner of a dusty
old shop, till someone had found it and been pleased by it and taken
possession, loving it through its squalor.
"Rather nice," said Hilary. "Really good, isn't it?"
Peter nodded. "Gobelin, of the best time. Someone told me that
afterwards. When I bought it, I only knew it was nice. A man wanted to
buy it from me for quite a lot."
Hilary looked about him. "You've got some good things. How do you
pick them up?"
"I try," said Peter, "to look as if I didn't care whether I had them or not.
Then they let me have them for very little. The man I got that tapestry
from didn't know how nice it was. I did, but I cheated him."

"Well," Hilary said, passing his hand wearily over his forehead, "I must
go to your detestable station and catch my train.... I've got a horrible
headache. The strain of all this is frightful."
He looked as if it was. His pale face, nervous and strained, stabbed at
Peter's affection for him. Peter's affection for Hilary had always been
and always would be an unreasoning, loyal, unspoilably tender thing.
He went to the station to help Hilary to catch his train. The enterprise
was a failure; it was not a job at which either Margerison was good.
They had to wait in the detestable station for another. The annoyance of
that (it is really an abnormally depressing station) worked on Hilary's
nervous system to such an extent that he might have flung himself on
the line and so found peace from the disappointments of life, had not
Peter been at hand to cheer him up. There were certainly points about
young Peter as a companion for the desperate.
Peter, having missed hall, as well as Hilary's train, went back to