The Lee Shore | Page 9

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 his room and put an egg on to boil. He lay back in his most comfortable chair to watch it; he needed comfort rather. He was going down. It had been so jolly--and it was over.
He had not got much to show for the good time he had had. Physically, he was more of a wreck than he had been when he came up. He was slightly lame in one leg, having broken it at football (before he had been forbidden to play) and had it badly set. He mended so badly always. He was also at the moment right-handed (habitually he used his left) and that was motor bicycling. He had not particularly distinguished himself in his work. He was good at nothing except diabolo, and not