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PETER
By
E. F. BENSON
Author of “Mike,” “The Countess of Lowndes Square,” etc.
[Illustration: colophon]
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
First published 1922
PETER
CHAPTER I
The two who mattered were lounging on the cushioned seat in the low
window, of which the lower panes had been pushed quite up in order to
admit the utmost possible influx of air. Little came in, for the
afternoon was sultry and windless, but every now and then some current
moved outside, some trickle of comparative coolness from the grass and
trees of the Green Park, sufficient to stir the girl’s hair. On this
high floor of the house of flats London seemed far remote; the isolation
as of an aeroplane, as of a ship at sea, protected them from external
intrusion.
Inside the room a party of four were assembled round the tea-table; the
hostess, mother of the girl who sat in the window-seat, was wondering,
without impatience, as was becoming to so chinned and contented a face,
when Mrs. Alston would cease gesticulating with her sandwich and eat it,
instead of using it as a conductor’s baton to emphasize her points in
the discourse to which nobody was listening. The sandwich had already a
large semicircular bite out of it, which penetrated well past its
centre, and one more application (if she would only make it) to that
capacious mouth would render it reasonable to suppose that she had
finished her tea. Mrs. Heaton herself had done so; so also had the
stout grey-haired man with the varnished face, and as for Mrs.
Underwood, she had long ago drunk her cup of hot water and refused any
further nourishment. But while Mrs. Alston brandished her crescent of a
sandwich, and continued talking as if somebody had contradicted her, it
was impossible to suggest a move to the bridge-table that stood ready
with new packs and sharpened pencils a couple of yards away. To the boy
and girl in the window that quartette of persons seemed of supreme
unimportance both by reason of their age and of the earnest futility of
their conversation. They talked eagerly about dull things like politics
and prices instead of being flippant, in the modern style, about
interesting things. Between them and the younger generation there was
the great gulf digged by the unrelenting years, and set on fire by the
war. It was not flaring and exploding any longer, but lay there in
smouldering impassable clinkers.
“High prices and high wages!” asserted Mrs. Alston. “That’s what is
going to be the ruin of the country. I’ve said over and over again, ‘Why
not have an Act of Parliament to halve the price of food and coal and
that sort of thing, and another Act, unless you could get it into the
same one, to reduce wages by a half also?’ High prices, so everybody
allows, are the cause of high wages, and if miners and that sort of
person could buy their food and their clothes at half the price they pay
for them now, there would not be the slightest difficulty in reducing
wages by a half, instead of multiplying them by two every time that they
threaten to strike. Coal! The root of all the trouble is the price of
coal. Reduce the price of coal by half, and instantly the price of
transport and gas and electricity will go down in a corresponding
manner. Steel, too, and linen; it all depends on coal. The English
sovereign has to-day hardly more than half the buying power it used to
have. Hardly more than half! Restore it, then, by reducing the price of
everything else, including wages. Including wages, mind! Otherwise you
will find yourselves in a fine mess!”
She put the rest of her sandwich into her mouth, precisely as Mrs.
Heaton had hoped and even foreseen. That made her mouth quite full, and
for the moment she was as dumb as the adder. Her hostess, alert for this
psychological occasion, gave a short, judicial and fulsome summing-up,
addressed to the court in general.
“Well, dearest Mary,” she said. “You have made me understand it all now,
a thing which I never did before. So well put, was it not, Mr. Steel,
and I’m sure quite unanswerable. We must none of us attempt to argue
with dearest Mary, because she would show us at once how stupid it was
of us, and I, for one, hate to be made a fool of. What a good
explanation! Quite brilliant! So now shall we get to our bridge? I
expect we’re all going to the opera to-night, and so we shall all want
to dress early. Dear me, it’s after half-past five already! Will nobody
have any more tea? Quite sure? Shall we cut, then? Oh, there are Nellie
and Peter in the window. Wouldn’t you like to cut in, too, dear?”
“No, mother, we shouldn’t!” said Nellie.
The four others swooped to the bridge-table, with the swift sure flight
of homing pigeons, and hastily cut their cards in order to give no time
for repentance on the part of the two others.
“You and I, Mr. Steel,” said Mrs. Heaton hastily. “Quite sure you
wouldn’t like to play, Peter?”
“Quite,” said Peter gently. “I should hate it; thanks awfully.”
“Well, if you’re quite sure you won’t--my deal I think, partner. Shall
it be pennies?”
Mr. Steel had a whimsical idea.
“Oughtn’t we to halve our points, too, Mary?” he said. “Like wages and
coal?”
For a moment he was sorry he had been so rashly humorous, for Mrs.
Alston opened her mouth and drew in her breath as if to speak on a
public platform to the largest imaginable audience. Then, luckily, she
found something so remarkable in her hand that her fury for political
elucidation was quenched, and she devoted the muscles of her athletic
mind to considering what she would do if the dealer was so rash as to
call no trumps. Thereafter the great deeps, dimly peopled with enemies
ready to pounce out of the subaqueous shadows and double you, completely
submerged the four of them. They lit cigarettes as in a dream, and
smoked them in alternate hells and heavens.
Nellie looked at them once or twice, as an anæsthetist might look at his
patient to see whether he was quite unconscious. The third glance was
convincing.
“It must be rather sweet to be middle-aged, Peter,” she said. “For the
next two hours they’ll think about nothing but aces and trumps!”
“Sign of youth,” said Peter.
“Why?”
“Because they’re absorbed, like children. When you were little, you
could only think about one thing at a time. It might be dentist or it
might be hoops. But you and I can’t think about anything for more than
five minutes together, or care about anything for more than two. I
suppose that when you’re old you recapture that sort of youthfulness.”
He paused a moment.
“Go on: tell me about it all,” he said.
Nellie did not reply at once, but began plaiting her fingers together
with the little finger on the top. They were slender and small like her
face, which narrowed very rapidly from the ears downwards to a pointed
chin. Loose yellow hair, the colour of honey, grew low over her
forehead, and just below it, her eyebrows, noticeably darker than her
hair, made high arches, giving her face an expression of irony and
surprise. Her forehead ran straight into the line of her nose, and a
short upper lip held her mouth in imperfect control, for it hinted and
wondered, and was amused and contemptuous as its mood took it. Now it
half-smiled; now it was half serious, but always it only hinted.
Peter apparently grew impatient of her silence and her finger plaiting.
“You’re making them look like bananas on a street-barrow,” he observed.
Nellie smoothed them out and gave an appreciative sigh.
“Oh, I bought two to-day,” she said, “and ate them in the street. I had
to throw the skins away, and then I was afraid that somebody would slip
on them and break his leg.”
“So you picked them up again,” suggested Peter.
“No, I didn’t. I was only sorry for anybody who might slip on them. I
couldn’t tell who it was going to be, and probably I shouldn’t know
him----”
“Get on,” he said.
“Oh, about Philip. Well, there it was. He asked me, you see, and--of
course, he’s rather old, but he’s tremendously attractive. And it’s so
safe and pleasant, and I like being adored. After all, you and I have
talked it over often enough, and you knew just as well as I did that I
was going to accept him if he wanted me.”
Nellie suddenly felt that she was justifying what she had done, and she
did not mean to do that. What she had done justified itself by its own
inherent good sense. She changed her tone, and began counting on those
slim fingers which just now had introduced the extraneous subject of
bananas.
“Peter, darling,” she said. “If his grandfather and an uncle and two
children of the uncle die, there is no doubt whatever that I shall be a
peeress. Won’t that be fun? I feel that Uncle Robert and the two
children may easily die; they’re the sort of people who do die, but I
doubt whether grandpapa ever will. He’s like the man with the white
beard; do I mean the Ancient Mariner or the Ancient of Days, who comes
in Ezekiel?”
Peter Mainwaring rocked backwards in the window-seat with a sudden
little explosion of laughter that made all the bridge players look up as
if their heads were tied to the same tweaked string. Then they submerged
again.
“Not Ezekiel, anyhow,” he said. “It’s either Daniel or Coleridge. I
expect Coleridge.”
“Yes, I mean Coleridge,” she said. “The man who stops the wedding guest;
wedding guest was what suggested it. Grandpapa always wanted Philip to
marry one of those cousins of his, who look like tables with drawers in
them. Long legs and bumps on their faces like the handles of the
drawers. But Philip wouldn’t.”
Peter ran his fingers along the line of his jaw as if to be sure that
he had shaved that morning. His face for a man of twenty-two was
ridiculously smooth and hairless; it did not much matter whether he had
shaved or not.
“Naturally Philip wouldn’t,” he said, “but that’s got nothing to do with
it. I don’t want to know why Philip didn’t do something, but why you
did. I want to see your point, to do you justice. At present I feel
upset about it. You know quite well that there’s only one person you
ought to marry.”
“You?” asked Nellie, feeling that the question was quite unnecessary.
“How clever of you to guess. You are clever sometimes. Oh, I know we’ve
talked it over enough and seen how impossible it was, but when it comes
to your marrying someone else----”
He lit a match and blew it out again.
“I know,” he said. “You’ve got threepence a year, and I’ve got twopence,
so that in the good old times we should have been able to buy one pound
of sugar every Christmas. Even then we should have had nothing to eat
with it. But what you haven’t sufficiently reckoned with is the fact
that by the time I am a hundred and fifty years old, I shall get a
pension of a hundred and fifty pounds from the Foreign Office. But it’s
rather a long time to wait.”
Nellie’s eyes suddenly grew fixed and rapt.
“Oh, Peter, one moment!” she whispered. “Look quickly at mamma’s face.
When that holy expression comes on it, it always means that she is
intending to declare no trumps. So when I’m playing against her, if it’s
my turn first I always declare one no trumps, and then she has to
declare two. Wait one second, Peter.”
“No trumps,” said Mrs. Heaton.
“There, I told you so!” said Nellie. “Yes; it is rather long to wait,
though I don’t mean to say that a hundred and fifty isn’t a very
pleasant age, dear. The people in Genesis usually lived five hundred
years before they married, and begat sons and daughters. Anyhow, I shall
be a widow before you’re a hundred and fifty, and then we shall be
engaged for three hundred and fifty years more, and then we shall totter
to the altar. I can’t help talking drivel; it’s all too serious to take
seriously. By the way, I shall be richer than you eventually, for when
mamma dies I shall have two thousand a year, but that won’t be for two
thousand years. We have been born too soon, Peter!”
Peter thought this not worth answering, but lifting one of his knees,
nursed it between his clasped hands in silence. For her loose
honey-coloured hair, he had a crisp coal-blackness; he was tall for her
small slim stature, and his lips were set to definite purposes, whereas
hers were malleable to adapt themselves to any emotion that might
waywardly blow on her. But both, in compensation for differences that
were complementary, were triumphantly alike in the complete soullessness
of their magnificent youth; without violation of any internal principle
they might, either of them, shoot up singing with the lark, or pad and
prowl with the ruthless hunger of the tiger, or burrow with the mole.
They were Satyr and Hamadryad, some ancient and eternally young
embodiment of life, with whim to take the place of conscience, and the
irresponsible desire of wild things to do duty for duty, and impulse to
take the place of reason. Each, too, had developed to an almost alarming
degree that modern passion for introspection, which is an end in
itself, and like a barren tree, yields no fruit in the ways of action or
renunciation.
Peter hugged his knee, and his eye grew hazy and unfocused in
meditation.
“Am I in love with you, do you think?” he asked at length.
She laughed, quite disregarding the ears of the bridge players. With
Peter she was more herself than with anyone else, or even than when
alone.
“Oh, that’s so like you,” she said, “and so wonderfully like me.
Certainly you’re not in love with me; you’re not in love with anybody.
You never have been; you never will be. You’re fonder of me than of
anybody else, but that’s a very different thing.”
“But how do you know I’m not in love with you?” he asked. “I may be.
You’re not so unattractive. Why shouldn’t I be in love with you?”
“It’s obvious you aren’t. To begin with, you don’t feel the smallest
jealousy of Philip. Besides, though you so kindly say that I’m not so
unattractive, you’re the one person who really sees and notes and
mentions my imperfections. You wouldn’t be so critical of me if you were
in love. And then, as I said, you’re not jealous of Philip.”
“Good Lord, how could I be jealous of Philip?” asked he. “I should have
to want to be Philip before I could be jealous of him, and I wouldn’t be
Philip, even as things stand, for anything in the world. Besides, you
don’t really think him so tremendously attractive though you said so
just now. You said that out of pure conventionality, not out of
conviction.”
Some momentary perplexity, like a cloud on a sunny windy day of spring
bowled its shadow over her face, and creased a soft perpendicular
furrow between her eyebrows.
“Peter, I think I want to become conventional,” she said, “and, if you
wish, I will confess I was practising for it when I said that. Oh, my
dear, we’re all human, cast in a mould and put in a cage, if you don’t
mind mixed metaphors. I’m going to marry in the ordinary way, just
because girls do marry. Mamma married, so did my two grandmammas, and
four great-grandmammas, and eight great-great-grandmammas. In fact the
further you go back, the commoner marriage seems to have been. Some
awful human hereditary spell has been cast on me.”
Peter leaned forward, bright-eyed and faun-like.
“Break it!” he said. “Exorcise it! Spells don’t exist except for those
who allow themselves to be bound by them. The fact is we all weave our
own spells.”
“But if I did refuse now, what then?” said she. “If you don’t obey
conventions, you must have conviction to take their place, and I haven’t
got any. Besides, if I don’t marry I shall become an old maid, unless I
die young. Oh, we are all in a trap, we girls. There are three awful
alternatives to choose from, and I dislike them all. I don’t want to die
young, but if I live to be sixty I’ve got to be a grandmother or a
stringy old maid.”
“You’ve got to be stringy, anyhow, at sixty,” said Peter.
“Not at all. Grandmothers are usually plump and comfortable: it is great
aunts who are stringy. And grandmothers remain young, I notice, whereas
elderly maiden ladies are only sprightly. I think that it’s because they
cling to youth, and there’s nothing so ageing as to cling to anything.
If you want to retain anything, the best plan is to drop it, and then it
clings to you instead.”
“That’s rather ingenious,” said Peter. “You may go on about it for a
minute.”
“I was going to. It’s perfectly true. All the people who don’t eat
potatoes and sweets for fear of getting fat become elephants, like
mamma, who lives on cracknel biscuits.”
“Does she?” said Peter with deep interest. “How wonderful of her.”
“And all the people who take immense care of themselves die at the age
of forty, because they are clinging to life, while those who break every
ordinance of health never die at all. And all the people who lay
themselves out to be brilliant are crashing bores----”
“Oh yes; proved,” said Peter. “Let’s go on to something else. What’s to
happen to me when you marry?”
“Nothing,” said Nellie. “Why should it? You’ll go on being quite
different from anybody else. That’s a career in itself. You aren’t
human, anyhow, however many great-grandmammas you may have had. You’re a
wild thing, partly domesticated, and when you’re tired of us all, you go
waving your tail, and walking in the wet woods, and telling nobody.
Kipling, you know. Then you come back rather sleepy and pleased, and
allow us to put a blue riband round your neck and tickle you under the
chin, and then you lie down on a cushion in front of the fire and purr.
You don’t purr at us, though, you purr at yourself.”
“Lor!” said Peter. “All that about me!”
Nellie pushed back her hair from her forehead, and again plaited her
fingers together. But this time it was no deliberative, meditative
process, but a swift unconscious action.
“Yes, my dear, and there’s more, too,” she said. “It’s my swan-song,
remember, for soon I am going to become ordinary and conventional. I
used to go in the wet woods, too, you know, though we never met each
other there. But that has been the bond between us, up till now we have
been completely independent. You’re going to remain so, but not I. Oh,
Peter, there was a bond! My dear, do you think that I’m rather mad? I
have serious doubts about it myself.”
“You always were rather mad,” said he. “But go on; sing your swan-song.”
“Then don’t look as if you had taken a guinea stall to hear me,” she
said. “Where had I got to? Oh, yes. There was a bond; you know it
yourself. I’ve never been conscious of anybody else as I’ve been
conscious of you, nor have you ever been conscious of anyone else as
you’ve been conscious of me. You’ve never been in the least in love with
me, nor have I with you. But we’re the same kind of person, and one
doesn’t often see the same kind of person as oneself. Do you understand
at all, or am I simply reading out of my own book?”
He was silent a moment.
“Nellie, would you marry me if I were rich?” he asked.
She made a gesture of impatience.
“How on earth can I tell?” she said. “If you were rich you would be
quite a different person.”
“No, I shouldn’t----”
“Oh, Peter, how stupid you are,” she said. “And how frightfully
Victorian. That is so shallow. Wealth is just as much part of a man or
a woman as brains or beauty. I don’t say that a girl loves a man for his
brains, or his money, or his beauty, but they all make a part of him.
Wealth isn’t an accident; it’s an attribute. A poor man--I’m not talking
about you and me, but only speaking in the abstract--may be the same in
character and charm as a rich man, but what a gulf money makes between
them! Let one man be poor, and another, his absolute double in every
way, be rich. They cease to be doubles at once.”
“But if you happened to love the costermonger----“ began Peter.
“We can leave that out, because neither of us has the slightest idea
what love means.”
“How about the bond you spoke of, then?” asked he. “Hasn’t that got
anything to do with it?”
She considered this, and then laid her hand on his arm.
“If I could choose now, this minute,” she said, “in what relationship we
should stand to each other, I would choose you as my brother. I haven’t
got one; I should like to have one tremendously. And yet, if I might
have it all just the way I liked, I think I should have you for my
sister. I don’t so much want you to take care of me as I want to take
care of you. I want----”
“Oh, come now,” said Peter.
“It’s true, though.”
They had turned themselves about in the window-seat, so as to secure for
this surprising conversation a greater privacy from the party at the
bridge-table, and were leaning out of the window. A hundred feet below
Piccadilly roared and rattled, but here the clatter of it was shorn of
its sharp edges; it was as if a stir of bees was swarming in some hive
down there. Seen like this from above, passengers and vehicles alike
were but crawling dots and blots; everything, from the swiftest motor
down to the laziest loiterer, seemed to be drowsily and soundlessly
sauntering. Often had Peter and Nellie leaned out here looking on the
traffic at the base of the cliff, capturing for themselves a certain
sense of isolation. Even leaning out they could see nothing of the
precipitous cliff side of the house, for a couple of feet below the
window a stone cornice jutted out some ten or twelve inches, and beyond
the edge of that the nearest visible objects below were the tops of
motor buses and the hats of the foot passengers along the pavements. So
still was the air that now, when Peter flicked the ash off his
cigarette, it floated down, still cohering, till it dwindled into
invisibility. He followed its fall with that detached intentness which
the surface mind gives to the ticking of a clock or the oscillation of
some flower-head, when the whole psychic attention is focused elsewhere;
and it seemed that Nellie, as far as her surface mind went, was trotting
in harness with him, for though he had not hinted at what occupied his
eyes, scarcely knowing it himself, she was equally intent.
“I’ve lost sight of it, Peter,” she said, breaking the silence of a
whole minute.
“Of what?” he asked.
“Of your cigarette end. You were watching it too. Don’t pretend that you
weren’t.”
“Well, if I was, what then?” he asked.
“Nothing particular. I only felt you were watching it--just the bond.”
He shifted himself again. Hitherto, as they leaned out, his left
shoulder touched hers. Now he broke the contact.
“I think that’s about the extent of the bond,” he said. “And your
marrying Philip shows precisely what sort of value you put on it. You’ve
made it clearer than you know, for you’ve defined your feelings for me
as being a desire to have a brother, or rather a sister to take care of.
I don’t think that’s worth much. You defined it further by saying that
you couldn’t tell whether you would marry me or not if I were rich,
because if I were, I should be a quite different person. If the quality
of the bond would be affected by that, it must be of remarkably poor
quality, and you’re quite right to break it. When you began talking
about the bond I thought you might be going to say something
interesting, something I didn’t know, something that, when you stated
it, I should recognize to be true. If that’s all your swan has got to
sing it might as well have been a goose.”
Nellie’s eyebrows elevated themselves up under the loose yellow of her
hair.
“Peter dear, are you quarrelling with me?” she asked.
“Yes. No. No, I’m not quarrelling. But the whole thing is such a bore.
Where’s my tail, and where are the wet woods?”
She leaned her chin on her hands, that lay along the window sill.
“I wish you were in love with me,” she said.
“I’m extremely glad that I’m not,” said he. “Otherwise I suppose I
should want to be Philip, or, as the madrigal says, some other ‘favoured
swain.’ But for you to talk about a bond between us is the absolute
limit. You want everything your own way, and expect everybody else to
immolate himself, thankfully and ecstatically, on your beastly altar.”
“So do you,” murmured Nellie. “We all do.”
“I? How do you make that out?” demanded Peter.
“Because you object to my marrying Philip when you haven’t the smallest
desire to have me yourself. If you knew that I should say ‘Yes,’
supposing you asked me to jilt Philip and marry you, you wouldn’t ask me
to. You want me to marry nobody and not to marry me yourself. That’s not
good enough, you know.”
Peter’s mouth lengthened itself into a smile, and broadened into a
laugh.
“It’s a putrid business,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I take a neat header
from the window and have done with it? I’m twenty-two, and already I
think the whole affair is rot. And if it doesn’t amuse me now, when is
it going to amuse me? It was even more amusing during the war, when one
came back for a fortnight’s leave before going out to that hell again.
One did grab at pleasure then, because in all probability one would be
blown to bits very soon afterwards. But now that one is not going to be
blown to bits very soon afterwards the whole seasoning has gone out of
it. No, not quite. I want to be admired. What is love? Good Lord, what
is love? As I haven’t the slightest idea, the best thing I can do is to
grab at pleasures.”
“Or the worst,” suggested Nellie, rather sententiously.
“Now get off the high horse,” said Peter. “Or, rather, don’t attempt to
get on it. You can’t, any more than I. Let’s be comfortable. Marry your
silly Philip, and I’ll--I’ll---- Shall I take to drink? No, that
wouldn’t do, for people would say I was trying to drown my despair at
your marriage. I haven’t got feelings of that sort, and I should hate
anybody to think that I had. I loathe being pitied, anyhow, and to be
pitied for something you don’t suffer from would be intolerable. And
though you will remain just the same to me after you’re married, and I
shall certainly remain the same, our relations will be altered.”
Nellie let her eyes flit over him, never quite alighting. They skimmed
over his crisp hair, over the handsome, smooth, soulless profile, over
his shoulders, over the knee he was nursing, over the hiatus where white
skin showed between his rucked-up trouser and a drooping sock. At this
moment she, with the knowledge of the definite step that she had taken
in life by engaging herself to Philip Beaumont, felt far older and more
experienced than he. She, anyhow, could look ahead and see a placid,
prosperous life in front of her, whereas Peter, a year older than she,
was still as experimental as a boy. All the same, if he wanted anything,
he had remarkable assiduity in the pursuit of it until he caught it, but
nothing beyond the desire of the moment was to him worth bothering
about. Her own prudence, her own commitment of herself she knew to be a
development of to-day and yesterday, and now it seemed suddenly to have
aged and consolidated her. But she had no answer for that voice crying
in the wilderness “What is love?” Or was there some sort of signpost by
the wayside enveloped in mist? She passed over that point.
“If it really all seems to you so putrid,” she said, “I can’t imagine
why you don’t, as you say, take a header into the street. But you’ve no
intention of doing anything of the sort. You would firmly resist any
attempt of mine to tip you out. You like life quite passably as it is,
you know, and also you do expect something more from it. In fact, I
never saw anyone so thoroughly unlikely to give up living or to run any
risk that could reasonably be avoided. You say it’s a putrid business,
but really you find it a pleasant one.”
Peter sighed.
“Oh, yes, it will have to do,” he said. “Don’t tip me out, Nellie. But
don’t, on the other hand, think that I cling so desperately to life.”
“Not desperately, but instinctively. It would be silly of anybody to
throw up a hand that may contain some glorious ace without looking very
carefully through it. Everyone goes on playing and clutching at the new
deals until he is sure that there isn’t an ace in the pack for him.
Indeed, it’s when you’ve found the ace that you don’t value the rest of
the hand so much.”
“I don’t follow. Explain,” said Peter.
“Well, this kind of thing. For instance, if you found the ace, that is
to say, if you fell tremendously in love, you might not care about the
rest of the hand. If the adorable was in my bedroom, two windows off,
and if she was locked in there, and if the house was on fire----”
“Any more ‘ifs’?” asked Peter.
“Not one. But supposing all these things, you would instantly get out on
to that cornice, at peril of your life, and shuffle your way along it.
You would _have_ to be with her. You wouldn’t give two thoughts as to
what might happen to you.”
Peter thought this over.
“I should be a consummate ass, then,” he remarked. “A fellow with a
grain of sense would go down the passage and bash the door in.”
“But let’s pretend that for some reason you couldn’t. If the only way of
reaching the room was along the cornice you would go.”
Peter looked at the ledge.
“And if I got there in safety, what then?” he asked. “I couldn’t carry
her back along the ledge.”
“But that wouldn’t prevent your going,” said she. “Whatever the risk to
yourself was, and however useless your going was, you would go.”
Peter was silent a moment, frowning.
“I feel as if all this has happened before,” he said. “Do you know that
feeling? Did we ever sit here before and talk about just this?”
“Not that I remember. No, I’m sure we never have. Isn’t it odd, that
sensation? Does it seem to you like remembrance of a previous occasion,
or a presentiment of a future one?”
“Or a slightly faulty action of the two lobes of the brain?” said Peter.
“What were we talking about? Aces?”
“Yes. That’s what I mean about throwing the rest of your hand away for
the sake of an ace.”
Peter looked at his watch.
“I must go,” he said. “I’ve got to get home to dress, and rush back to
the Ritz to dine early before the opera.”
“Oh, not just yet,” said she. “But I wish you wouldn’t live in South
Kensington. Why do you?”
Peter had a direct glance and a direct answer for this.
“Because it’s cheaper living with my father and mother than being on my
own,” he said. “Also----”
“Well?” she asked.
“I was going to say because they like having me with them,” said he.
“But I don’t think that’s true, so I didn’t say it. I mean, if I had
plenty of money I should take a flat of my own, quite regardless of
whether they liked to have me with them.”
Nellie gave a little sigh, with a click of impatience at the end of it.
“There’s an odd kind of honesty about you,” she said. “You state that
sort of thing quite baldly, whereas I should conceal it. If I had been
you I should have said that I lived at home because my mother liked
having me with her. It wouldn’t have been true, but I should have said
it. Very likely by saying it often I should have got to believe it.”
“Nobody else would have,” remarked Peter.
“You’re rather a brute, my dear,” said she. “Go away to South
Kensington.”
“I’m going. But about aces for one second more. Have you found your ace,
Nellie? Don’t bother to answer.”
“That is spoken like a rather spiteful woman,” was Nellie’s perfectly
justifiable rejoinder.
“Maybe. I’m your spiteful sister,” said Peter.
He walked gracefully and gently over to the card-table.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Heaton,” he said. “Nellie and I have had a lovely talk.
I hope you’ve won every rubber.”
“And three aces, thirty,” said Mrs. Heaton. “Good-bye, dear Peter. I
suppose you’ll be at the Opera to-night. _Parsifal._ My deal? So it
is.”