DIANA, ACTÆON, AND LORD EVELYN
Hilary and Peter gondoled to Lord Evelyn Urquhart's residence, a rather
exquisite little old palace called Ca' delle Gemme, and were received
affectionately by the tall, slim, dandified-looking young-old man, with
his white ringed hands and high sweet voice and courtly manner. He had
aged since Peter remembered him; the slim hands were shakier and the
near-sighted eyes weaker and the delicate face more deeply lined with the
premature lines of dissipation and weak health. He put his monocle in his
left eye and smiled at Peter, with the old charming smile that was like
his nephew's, and tilted to and fro on his heels.
"Not changed at all, as far as I can see," he said to Peter, with the
same mincing, finicking pronunciation that had pleased the boy Peter
eight years ago. "Only my sight isn't what it was. _Are_ you changed at
all? Do you still like Bow rose-bowls better than anything except Denis?
Denis is coming here soon, you know, so I shall be able to discover. Oh,
I beg pardon--Mr. Peter Margerison, Mr. Cheriton."
Mr. Cheriton was a dark, sturdy young man with an aggressive jaw, who
bowed without a smile and looked one rather hard in the face. Peter was
a little frightened of him--these curt, brisk manners made him nervous
always--and felt a desire to edge behind Hilary. He gathered that Hilary
and Cheriton did not very much like one another. He knew what that slight
nervous contraction of Hilary's forehead meant.
Dinner was interesting. Lord Evelyn told pleasant and funny stories in
his high, tittering voice, addressing himself to all his guests, but
looking at Peter when he came to his points. (People usually looked at
Peter when they came to the points of their stories.) Hilary talked a
good deal and drank a good deal and ate very little, and was obviously
on very friendly terms with Lord Evelyn and on no terms at all with Mr.
Cheriton. Cheriton looked a good deal at Peter, with very bright and
direct eyes, and flung into the conversation rather curt and spasmodic
utterances in a slightly American accent. He seemed a very decided and
very much alive young man, a little rude, thought Peter, but possibly
that was only his trans-Atlantic way, if, as his voice hinted, he came
from America. Once or twice Peter met the direct and vivid regard fixed
upon him, and nearly was startled into "I beg your pardon," for there
seemed to him an odd element of accusation in the look.
"But it isn't my fault," he told himself reassuringly. "I've not done
anything, I'm sure I haven't. It's just the way he's made, I expect. Or
else people have done him badly once or twice, and he's always thinking
it's going to happen again. Rough luck on him; poor chap."
After dinner they went into what Lord Evelyn called the saloon. "Where
I keep my especial treasures," he remarked to Peter. "You'd like to walk
round and look at some of them, I expect. These bronzes, now--," he
indicated two statuettes on brackets by the door.
Peter looked at them, then swiftly up at Lord Evelyn, who swayed at his
side, his glass screwed into one smiling eye.
Lord Evelyn touched the near statuette with his light, unsteady,
beautifully-ringed hand.
"Rather lovely, isn't she," he said, caressing her. "We found her and the
Actæon in a dusty hole of a place in a miserable little _calle_ off the
Campo delle Beccarie, kept by a German Jew. Quite a find, the old sinner.
What an extortioner, though! Eh, Margerison? How much has the old
Schneller got out of my pocket? It was your brother who discovered him
for me, young Peter. He took me there, and we found the Diana together.
Like her? Giacomo Treviso, a pupil of Verrocchio's. Heard of him? The
Actæon's not so good now. Same man, but not so happy."
He turned the Diana about; he posed her for Peter's edification. Peter
looked from her to the Actæon, from the Actæon to Lord Evelyn's face. He
opened his lips to say something, and closed them on silence. He looked
past Lord Evelyn to Hilary, who stood in the background, leaning a little
against a chair. It seemed to Peter that there was a certain tensity, a
strain, in his face.
Then Peter met full the bright, hard, vivid gaze of the alert Cheriton.
It had an odd expression at this moment; unmistakably inimical,
observantly curious, distinctly sardonic. A faint ironic smile just
touched the corners of his determined mouth. Peter returned the look
with his puzzled, enquiring eyes that sought to understand.
This much, anyhow, he seemed to understand: his rôle was silence. If
Cheriton didn't speak (and Cheriton's expression showed that he knew) and
if Hilary didn't speak ... well, he, Peter, couldn't speak either. He
must acquiesce in what appeared to be a conspiracy to keep this pathetic,
worn-out dilettante in a fool's paradise.
The pathos of it gripped Peter's heart. Lord Evelyn had once known so
well. What havoc was this that one could apparently make of one's
faculties? It wasn't only physical semi-blindness; it was a blindness of
the mind, a paralysis of the powers of discrimination and appreciation,
which, was pitiful. Peter was angry. He thought Hilary and Cheriton so
abominably, unmitigatedly wrong. And yet he himself had said, "If it
makes them happy"--and left that as the indubitable end. Ah, but one
didn't lie to people, even for that.
Peter was brought up sharply, as he had often been before, against
Hilary's strange Hilaryish, perverted views of the conduct of life's
businesses. Then, as usual when he should have felt furthest from
mirth, he abruptly collapsed into sudden helpless laughter.
Lord Evelyn turned the eye-glass on him.
"Eh?" he queried. "Why so? But never mind; you always suffered in that
way, I remember. Get it from your mother, I think; she did, too. Never
explain jokes; they lose so in the telling. Now I want to show you
something over here."
Peter crossed the room, his laughter dead. After all, funny wasn't what
it really was. Mainly, it was perplexing. Till he could have it out with
Hilary, he couldn't understand it at all.
He saw more of Lord Evelyn's treasures, and perplexity grew. He did not
laugh again; he was very solemn and very silent and very polite where he
could not admire. Where he could he did; but even here his admiration was
weighed down to soberness by the burden of the things beyond the pale.
Lord Evelyn found him lukewarm, changed and dulled from the vivid
devotee of old, who had coloured up all over his pale face at the sight
of a Bow rose-bowl. He coloured indeed now, when Lord Evelyn said "Like
it?"--coloured and murmured indistinguishable comments into his collar.
He coloured most when Lord Evelyn said, as he frequently did, "Your
brother's find. A delicious little man in some _sotto-portico_ or
other--quite an admirable person. Eh, Margerison?"
Hilary in the background would vaguely assent. Peter, who looked at him
no more, felt the indefinable challenge of his tone. It meant either,
"I've as much right to my artistic taste as you have, Peter, and I'm
not ashamed of it," or, "Speak out, if you want to shatter the illusions
that make the happiness of his ridiculous life; if not, be silent."
And all the time the vivid stare of Jim Cheriton was turned like a
search-light on Peter's face, and his odd smile grew and grew. Cheriton
was watching, observing, taking in something new, trying to solve some
problem.
At the end of half an hour Lord Evelyn said, "Peter Margerison, you've
lost some of the religious fervour of your youth. The deceitfulness of
riches and the cares of this world--is that it? What's come to you that
you're so tepid about this Siena chalice? Don't be tepid, young Peter;
it's the symptom of a ruined soul."
He polished his glass, screwed it into his left eye, and looked down on
Peter with his whimsical, kindly scrutiny. Peter did not return the look;
he stood with bent head, looking vaguely down at the Sienese chalice.
That too was one of Hilary's finds. Hilary it seemed, had approved its
seller in an article in the Gem.
"Damme," said Lord Evelyn suddenly, with unusual explosiveness, "if I
didn't like you better when you were fifteen! Now, you _blasé_ and
soulless generation, I suppose you want to play bridge. Do you play as
badly as ever, Peter? A remarkable player you were, I remember--quite
remarkable. Denis always told you so. Now Cheriton will tell you so,
because he's rude."
Bridge was a relief to Peter, though he was still a rather remarkable
player. He played with Cheriton, who was not rude, because he was
absolutely silent. It was an absurd game. Cheriton was a brilliant
player, even when he was only giving half his mind to it, as he seemingly
was to-night. Lord Evelyn had been a brilliant player once, and was now
brilliant with alternations of eccentricity; he talked most of the time,
making the game the centre of his remarks, from which he struck out along
innumerable paths of irrelevancy. The Margerisons too were irrelevant;
Hilary thought bridge a bore, and Peter, who thought nothing a bore, was
always a little alarmed by anything so grown-up. But to-night he didn't
much mind what he did, so long as he stopped looking at Lord Evelyn's
things. Peter only wanted to get away; he was ashamed and perplexed and
sorry and angry, and stabbed through with pity. He wanted to get out of
Lord Evelyn's house, out of the range of his kindly, whimsical smile and
Cheriton's curious hostile stare; he wanted to be alone with Hilary, and
to understand.
The irony of Cheriton's look increased during bridge; it was certainly
justified by the abstraction of Peter's play.
Lord Evelyn laughed at him. "You need Denis to keep you in order, young
Peter. Lord, how frightened you used to be when Denis was stern. Smiled
and pretended you weren't, but I knew...." He chuckled at the painted
ceiling. "Knew a man at Oxford, Peter ... well, never mind that story
now, you're too young for it.... Anyhow I make it no trumps."
At eleven o'clock Hilary and Peter went home. Lord Evelyn shook hands
with Peter rather affectionately, and said, "Come and see me again soon,
dear boy. Lunch with me at Florian's to-morrow--you and your wealthy
friend. Busy sight-seeing, are you? How banal of you. Morning in the
Duomo, afternoon on the Lido, and the Accademia to fill the spare hours;
I know the dear old round. Never could be worried with it myself; too
much else to do. But one manages to enjoy life even without it, so don't
overwork. And come and see my toys again by daylight, and try to enthuse
a little more over them next time. You're too young to be _blasé_.
You'd better read the Gem, to encourage yourself in simple pleasures.
Good-night. Good-night, Margerison."
He shook hands with them both again, possibly to make up for Cheriton,
who did not shake hands at all, but stood with his own in his pockets,
leaning against the wall, his eyes still on Peter's face.
"Queer manners you have, dear Jim," was what they heard Lord Evelyn say
as they stepped into the Ca' delle Gemme gondola, that was taking them
back to the Rio delle Beccarie.
They swung out into the faintly-shining darkness of the water-road, into
which the climbing moon could not look--a darkness crossed and flecked by
the red gleamings of the few gondola and sandolo lights abroad at this
hour in the quiet street. They sent their own red path before them as
they softly travelled; and round it the stars flickered and swam, deep
down. Peter could have sworn he heard their thin, tinkling, submerged,
funny song, somewhere above or beneath the soft and melodious "Chérie
Birri-Bim," that someone (not Lord Evelyn's beautifully trained and
taciturn _poppe_) was crooning near at hand.
The velvet darkness of a bridge drowned the stars for a moment; then,
with a musical, abrupt cry of "Sta--i!" they swung round a corner into
a narrow way that was silver and green in the face of the climbing moon.
The musically lovely night, the peace of the dim water-ways, the
shadowing mystery of the steep, shuttered houses, with here and there a
lit door or window ajar, sending a slant of yellow light across the deep
green lane full of stars and the moon, the faint crooning of music far
off, made a cool marvel of peace for strung nerves. Peter sat by Hilary
in silence, and no longer wanted to ask questions. In the strange,
enveloping wonder of the night, minor wonders died. What did it matter,
anyhow? Hilary and Venice--Venice and Hilary--give them time, and one
would explain the other.
It was Hilary who began to talk, and he talked about Cheriton, his
nervous voice pitched on a high note of complaint.
"I do intensely dislike that man. The sort of person I've no use for, you
know. So horribly on the spot; such sharp, unsoftened manners. All the
terrible bright braininess of the Yankee combined with the obstreperous
energy of the Philistine Briton. His mother is a young American, about to
be married for the third time. The sort of exciting career one would
expect from a parent of the delightful Jim. I cannot imagine why Lord
Evelyn, who is a person of refinement, encourages him. Really, you know!"
He grew very plaintive over it. Peter really did not wonder.
Peter's subconscious mind registered a dim impression that this was
defensive talk, to fill the silence. Hilary was a nervous person, easily
agitated. Probably the evening had agitated him. But he was no good at
defence. His complaint of Jim Cheriton broke weakly on an unsteady laugh.
Peter nodded assent, and looked up the street of dim water, his chin
propped in his hands, and thought how extraordinarily pleasant was the
red light that slanted across the dark water from green doors ajar in
steep house-walls.
Hilary tried to light a cigar, and flung broken matches into spluttering
darkness. At last he succeeded; and then, when he had smoked in silence
for two minutes, he turned abruptly on Peter and said, "Well?"
Peter, dreamily turning towards him, felt the nervous challenge of his
tone, and read it in his pale, tired face.
Peter pulled himself together and collected his thoughts. After all, one
might as well know.
"Oh, well ... what? Yes, what about those ghastly statuettes, and all the
rest of them? Why, when, how ... and what on earth for?"
Hilary, after a moment of silence, said, with a rather elaborate
carelessness, "I saw you didn't like them."
At that Peter started a little, and the dreaminess of the night fell away
from him.
"You saw ... oh." For a moment he couldn't think of anything else to say.
Then he laughed a little. "Why, yes, I imagine you did.... But what's the
object of it all? Have you and Cheriton (by the way, why does he glare at
us both so?) come to the conclusion that it's worth while playing that
sort of game? If you have, I can't tell you how utterly wrong I think you
are. Make him happy--oh, I know--but what extraordinary cheek on your
part! I as near as possible gave you away--I did really. Besides, what
did he mean by saying you'd advised him to buy the things--praised them
in the Gem, and all that? You can't have gone so far as that--did you?"
After a moment of silence, Hilary turned abruptly and looked Peter in the
face, taking the long cigar out of his mouth and holding it between two
white, nervous fingers.
"Upon my word," said Hilary, speaking rather slowly, "Talk of cheek!
Do you know what you're accusing me of? You and your precious taste!
Leslie and your other fool patrons seem to have given you a fair
opinion of yourself. Because you, in your omniscience, think a thing bad,
which I ... which I obviously consider good, and have stated so in
print ... you don't so much as deign to argue the question, but get upon
your pedestal and ask me why I tell lies. You think one thing and I think
another; of course, you must know best, but I presume I may be allowed to
hold my misguided and ill-informed opinion without being accused blankly
of fraud. Upon my word, Peter ... it's time you took to some other line
of life, I think."
His high, unsteady voice trailed away into silence. Peter, out of all the
dim beauty of the night, saw only the pale, disturbed, frowning face, the
quivering hand that held the lean cigar. All the strangeness and the
mystery of the mysterious world were here concentrated. Numbly and dully
he heard the soft, rhythmic splashing of the dipping oar, the turning
cry of "Premié!" Then, sharper, "Sciar, Signori, sciar!" as they nearly
jostled another gondola, swinging round sharply into a moonless lane of
ancient palaces.
Peter presently said, "But ..." and there stopped. What could he say,
beyond "but?"
Hilary answered him sharply, "Well?" and then, after another pause,
Peter pulled himself together, gave up trying to thread the maze of his
perplexity, and said soberly, "I beg your pardon, Hilary. I'm an ass."
Hilary let out his breath sharply, and resumed his cigar.
"It's possible, of course," he said, more quietly, "that you may be right
and I wrong about the things. That's another question altogether. I may
be a fool: I only resent being called a knave. _Really_, you know!"
"I never meant that," Peter hopelessly began to explain. And, indeed, now
that Hilary disclaimed it, it did seem a far too abominable thing that he
had implied. He had hurt Hilary; he deserved to be kicked. His anger with
himself rose. To hurt anyone was atrocious; to hurt Hilary unforgivable.
He would have done a great deal now to make amends.
He stammered over it. "I did think, I'm afraid, that you and Cheriton
were doing it to make him happy or something. I'm awfully sorry; I was
an ass; I ought to have known. But it never occurred to me that you
didn't kn--that you had a different opinion of the things. I say,
Hilary--Cheriton knows! I saw him know. He knew, and he was wondering
what I was going to say."
"Knew, knew, knew!" Hilary nervously exploded. "There you go again.
You're intolerable, Peter, really. All the spoiling you've had has gone
to your head."
"I beg your pardon," said Peter again. "I meant, Cheriton agreed with me,
I'm sure.... But, Hilary--those statuettes--you can't really.... They're
mid-Victorian, and positively offensive!" His voice rose shrilly. They
had been so horrible, Diana and Actæon. He couldn't forget them, in their
podgy sentimentality. "And--and that chalice ..." he shuddered over
it--"and--"
"That'll do, thanks," Hilary broke in. "You can say at once that you
disagree with me about everything I admire, and leave it there. But, if
I may ask you, don't say so to Lord Evelyn, if you can resist the
temptation to show me up before him. It will only bother and disturb him,
whichever of us he ends by agreeing with. He's shown that he trusts my
taste more or less, by giving me his paper to edit, and I should think
we might leave it at that."
"Yes, the paper"--Peter was reminded of it, and it became a distracting
puzzle. Hilary thought Diana and Actæon and the Siena chalice good
things--and Hilary edited an art paper. What in the name of all that was
horrible did he put in it? A light was shed on Signor Leroni, who was,
said the Gem, a good dealer in plaques, and who was, Peter had thought,
a bare-faced purveyor of shams. Peter began to question the quality of
the _osele_, that Leslie had purchased from Signor Sardi.
How curious it was; and rather tragic, too. For Hilary, like Lord Evelyn,
had known once. Had Hilary too, in ruining much else of himself, ruined
his critical faculties? And could one really do that and remain ignorant
of the fact? Or would one rather have a lurking suspicion, and therefore
be all the more defiantly corroborative of one's own judgment? In either
case one was horribly to be pitied; but--but one shouldn't try to edit
art papers. And yet this couldn't be conveyed without a lacerating of
feelings that was unthinkable. There was always this about Hilary--one
simply couldn't bear to hurt him. He was so easily hurt and so often;
life used him so hardly and he felt it so keenly, that it behoved Peter,
at least, to insert as many cushions as possible between him and the
sharp edges of circumstance. Peter was remorseful. He had taken what
he should have seen before was an unforgivable line; he had failed
abominably in comprehension and decent feeling. Poor Hilary. Peter
was moved by the old impulse to be extraordinarily nice to him.
They turned out of the Rio della Madonnetta into the narrow rio that was
the back approach to the Palazzo Amadeo. It is a dark little canal, a rio
of the poor. The doors that stood open in the peeling brick walls above
the water let out straggling shafts of lamplight and quarrelling voices
and singing and the smell of wine. The steep house walls leant to meet
one another from either side; from upper windows the people who hadn't
gone to bed talked across a space of barely six feet.
The gondola crept cautiously under two low bridges, then stopped outside
the water-washed back steps of the Palazzo Amadeo.
One pleasant thing about Lord Evelyn's exquisitely mannered _poppe_ was
that one didn't feel that he was thinking "I am not accustomed to taking
my master's visitors to such low haunts." In the first place, he probably
was. In the second, he was not an English flunkey, and not a snob. He was
no more a snob than the Margerisons were, or Lord Evelyn himself. He
deposited them at the Palace back door, politely saluted, and slipped
away down the shadowy water-street.
Hilary and Peter stepped up two water-washed steps to the green door, and
Peggy opened it from within. Peggy (Peter occasionally wondered when, if
ever, she went to bed) was in the hall, nursing Illuminato, who couldn't
sleep--a small bundle of scarlet night-shirt and round bullet head,
burrowing under his mother's left arm and staring out from that place of
comfort with very bright and wakeful eyes. When, indeed, it might have
been asked, did any of the Margerison family take their rest? No one of
them ever felt or expressed any surprise at finding any other awake and
active at any hour of the night.
Peggy looked at her three male infants with her maternal serenity touched
with mirth. There were nearly always those two elements in Peggy's
look--a motherly sympathy and desire to cheer and soothe, and a glint
from some rich and golden store of amusement.
She patted Peter on the arm, softly.
"Was it a nice evening, then? No, not very, I think. Dear, dear! You both
look so unutterably tired. I wonder had you better go to bed, quite
straight?"
It seemed to be suggested as a last resource of the desperate, though the
hour was close on midnight.
"And the children have been pillow-fighting, till Mr. Vyvian--the
creature--came down with nothing in particular on, to complain to me
that he couldn't sleep. Sleep, you know! It wasn't after ten--but it
seems he had a headache, as usual, because Mrs. Johnson had insisted
on going to look at pictures with him and Rhoda, and her remarks were
such--Nervous prostration, poor Mr. Vyvian. So I've had Illuminato
down here with me since then. He wants to go to you, Peter, as usual."
Peter took the scarlet bundle, and it burrowed against his shirt-front
with a contented sigh. Peggy watched the two for a moment, then said to
the uncle, "You poor little boy, you're tireder than Hilary even. You
must surely go to bed. But isn't Lord Evelyn rather a dear?"
"Quite a dear," Peter answered her, his face bent over the round cropped
head. "Altogether charming and delightful. Do you know, though, I'm not
really fond of bridge. Jig-saw is my game--and we didn't have it. That's
why I'm tired I expect. And because there was a Mr. Cheriton, who stared,
and seemed somehow to have taken against us--didn't he, Hilary? Or
perhaps it was only his queer manners, dear Jim. Anyhow, he made me feel
shy. It takes it out of one, not being liked. Nervous prostration, like
poor Mr. Vyvian. So let's go to bed, Hilary, and leave these two to watch
together."
"Give me the froglet." She took it from his arms, gently, and kissed
first one then the other.
"Good night, little Peter. You are a darling entirely, and I love you.
And don't worry, not over not being liked or anything else, because it
surely isn't worth it."
She was always affectionate and maternal to Peter; but to-night she was
more so than usual. Looking at her as she stood in her loose, slatternly
_negligé_, beneath the extravagantly blazing chandelier, the red bundle
cuddling a round black head into her neck, her grey eyes smiling at him,
lit with love and laughter and a pity that lay deeper than both, Peter
was caught into her atmosphere of debonair and tranquil restfulness, that
said always, "Take life easy; nothing's worth worrying over, not problems
or poverty or even one's sins." How entirely true. Nothing _was_ worth
worrying over; certainly other people's strange points of view weren't.
It was a gospel of ease and _laissez-faire_ well suited to Peter's
temperament. He smiled at Peggy and Hilary and their son, and went up
the marble stairs to bed. He was haunted till he slept by the memory of
Hilary's nervous, tired face as he had seen it in the moonlight in the
gondola, and again in the hall as he said good night. Hilary wasn't
coming to bed yet. He stayed to talk to Peggy. If anything could be good
for Hilary's moods of depression, thought Peter, Peggy would. How jolly
for Hilary to be married to her! She was such a refreshment always. She
was so understanding; and was there a lapse somewhere in that very
understandingness of her that made it the more restful--that made her
a relaxation to strained minds? To those who were breaking their moral
sense over some problem, she would return simply, "There isn't any
problem. Take things as they come and make the best of them, and don't,
don't worry!" "I'm struggling with a temptation to steal a purse," Peter
imagined himself saying to her, "What can I do about it?" And her swift
answer came, with her indulgent, humorous smile, "Dear little boy, if it
makes you any happier--do it!" And then she would so well understand
the ensuing remorse; she would be so sympathetic, so wholly dear and
comforting. She would say anything in the world to help, except "Put it
back." Even that she would say if one's own inclinations were tending in
that direction. But never if they weren't. She would never be so hard, so
unkind. That sort of uncongenial admonition might be left to one's
confessor; wasn't that what confessors were there for?
But why think of stealing purses so late at night? No doubt merely
because it was late at night. Peter curled himself up and drew the sheet
over his ears and sighed sleepily. He seemed to hear the rich, pleasant
echoes of Peggy's best nursery voice far off, and Hilary's high,
plaintive tones rising above it.
But above both, dominant and insistent, murmured the lapping voice of the
wonderful city at night. A faint rhythm of snoring beyond a thin wall
somehow suggested Mrs. Johnson, and Peter laughed into his pillow.