The Lee Shore | Page 8

or less appropriate to the contents. It's to be largely concerned with what Lord Evelyn calls 'charming things.' Things the visiting Englishman likes to hear about, you know. It aims at being the Complete Tourist's Guide. I have to get hold of people who'll write articles on the Duomo mosaics, and the galleries and churches and palaces and so on, and glass and lace and anything else that occurs to them, in a way calculated to appeal to the cultivated British resident or visitor. I detest the breed, I needn't say. Pampered hotel Philistines pretending to culture and profaning the sanctuaries, Ruskin in hand. Ruskin. Really, you know.... Well, anyhow, my mission in life for the present is to minister to their insatiable appetite for rhapsodising over what they feel it incumbent on them to admire."
"Rather fascinating," Peter said. It was a pity that Hilary always so disliked any work he had to do. Work--a terrific, insatiable god, demanding its hideous human sacrifices from the dawn of the world till twilight--so Hilary saw it. The idea of being horrible, all the concrete details into which it was translated were horrible too.
"If it was me," said Peter, "I should minister to my own appetite, no one else's. Bother the cultivated resident. He'd jolly well have to take what I gave him. And glass and mosaic and lace--what glorious things to write about.... I rather love Lord Evelyn, don't you."
Peter remembered him at Astleys, in Berkshire--Urquhart's uncle, tall and slim and exquisite, with beautiful waistcoats and white, attractive, nervous hands, that played with a monocle, and a high-pitched voice, and a whimsical, prematurely worn-out face, and a habit of screwing up short-sighted eyes and saying, with his queer, closed enunciation, "Quate charming. Quate." He had always liked Peter, who had been a gentle and amused boy and had reminded him of Sylvia Hope, lacking her beauty, but with a funny touch of her charm. Peter had loved the things he loved, too--the precious and admirable things he had collected round him through a recklessly extravagant life. Peter at fifteen, in the first hour of his first visit to Astleys, had been caught out of the incredible romance of being in Urquhart's home into a new marvel, and stood breathless before a Bow rose bowl of soft and mellow paste, ornamented with old Japan May flowers in red and gold and green, and dated "New Canton, 1750."
"Lake it?" a high voice had asked behind his shoulder. "Lake the sort of thing?" and there was the tall, funny man swaying on his heels and screwing his glass into his eye and looking down on Peter with whimsical interest. Little Peter had said shyly that he did.
"Prefer chaney to cricket?" asked Urquhart's uncle, with his agreeable laugh that was too attractive to be described as a titter, a name that its high, light quality might have suggested. But to that Peter said "No." He had been asked to Astleys for the cricket week; he was going to play for Urquhart's team. Not that he was any good; but to scrape through without disgrace (of course he didn't) was at the moment the goal of life.
Lord Evelyn had seemed disappointed. "If I could get you away from Denis," he said, "I'll be bound cricket wouldn't be in the 'also rans.'"
And at that moment Denis had sauntered up, and Peter's worshipping regard had turned from Lord Evelyn's rose bowl to his nephew, and it was Bow china that was not among the also rans. At that too Lord Evelyn had laughed, with his queer, closed mirth.
"Keep that till you fall in love," he had inwardly admonished Peter's back as the two walked away together. "I daresay she won't deserve it any better--but that's a law of nature, and this is sheer squandering. My word, how that boy does lake things--and people!" After all, it was hardly for any Urquhart to condemn squandering.
That was Lord Evelyn, as he lived in Peter's memory--a generous, whimsical, pleasant crank, touched with his nephew's glamour of charm.
When Peter said, "I rather love him, don't you," Hilary replied, "He's 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