THE COMPLETE SHOPPER
Six months later Peter called at the Hopes' to say good-bye before he
went to Italy. He found Lucy in, and Urquhart was there too, talking
to her in a room full of leaping fire-shadows. Peter sat down on the
coal-scuttle (it was one of those coal-scuttles you can sit on
comfortably) and said, "Leslie's taking me to Italy on Sunday. Isn't
it nice for me. I wish he was taking you too."
Lucy, clasping small hands, said, "Oh, Peter, I wish he was!"
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-class 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 attitude, 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, reassuring
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 passed 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 glass? 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 glass; 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 glass
And on it rests his eye,
because glass 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 glass 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 pricklier 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 passed 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, illustrated 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.
"Then," said Peter dreamily, "we shall be able to go to sleep again."
Rodney pulled him out of his bag and firmly rolled it up.
"Twelve kilometres from breakfast. Thirty from tea. No, we don't tea
before Florence. Go and wash."
They washed in a copper bucket that hung beside a pulley well. It was
rather fun washing, till Peter let the bucket slip off the hook and
gurgle down to the bottom. Then it was rather fun fishing for it with
the hook, but it was not caught, and they abandoned it in sudden alarm at
a distant sound, and hastily scrambled out of the olive garden onto the
white road.
Beneath their feet lay the thick soft dust, unstirred as yet by the day's
journeyings. The wayfaring smell of it caught at their breath. Before
them the pale road wound and wound, between the silver secrecy of the
olive woods, towards the journeying moon that dipped above a far and
hidden city in the west. Then a dim horizon took the dipping moon, and
there remained a grey road that smelt of dust and ran between shadowed
gardens that showed no more their eternal silver, but gnarled and twisted
stems that mocked and leered.
One traveller stepped out of his clear circle of illumined values into
the shrouded dusk of the old accustomed mystery, and the road ran faint
to his eyes through a blurred land, and he had perforce to take up
again the quest of the way step by step. Reality, for a lucid space of
time emerging, had slipped again behind the shadow-veils. The ranks of
the wan olives, waiting silently for dawn, held and hid their secret.
The other traveller murmured, "How many tones of grey do you suppose
there are in an olive tree when the moon has set? But there'll be more
presently. Listen...."
The little wind that comes before the dawn stirred and shivered, and
disquieted the silence of the dim woods. Peter knew how the stirred
leaves would be shivering white, only in the dark twilight one could not
see.
The dusk paled and paled. Soon one would catch the silver of up-turned
leaves.
On the soft deep dust the treading feet of the travellers moved quietly.
One walked with a light unevenness, a slight limp.