Peter descended from these heights into the hot dusty well of the
streets, and soon was on his way home to dress and return to the Ritz,
where an early dinner preceded the opera and any other diversions that
might present themselves. On this sweltering June evening the top of a
bus was a cooler progression than a taxi, besides advancing the sacred
cause of economy, which he had just confessed was more real to him than
that of filial piety, and at Hyde Park Corner he could catch a
conveyance that would deposit him not fifty yards from his father’s
house. Coolness and economy were sufficiently strong of themselves to
make him board it with alacrity, and the detachment of a front seat just
suited the meditative mood which his talk with Nellie had induced.
Peter knew himself and her pretty well, and with the admirable
contributions she had made to their discussion there was little to
puzzle out, but much to appraise and estimate. The notion that the news
of her engagement had been a blow of any sharp or stunning quality could
be at once dismissed, for never had he known so well, as when she,
earlier in the day, had communicated the news of her engagement to him
over the telephone (that was like her), how whole-heartedly he was not
in love with her, and how unintelligibly alien to him, as she had
pointed out, was that emotion. During the last year which had witnessed
a very decent flowering of intimacy between him and her, there had never
been, on either side, the least attempt at love-making; their relations
had been wholly free from sentiment, and not once had either of them
tripped or stuttered over the foreign use of love-language. But in ways
wholly unsentimental they had certainly arrived at some extremely close
relation of intimacy; there had emphatically been a bond between them,
which to his mind her engagement, if it did not actually loosen it,
would shift, so to speak, on to a new place; the harness must be worn
elsewhere. If it was to be maintained, he, at any rate, must accustom
himself to its new adjustment. She had defined that comradeship this
afternoon in a way that was rather surprising, for the ideal relation of
him to her, apparently, was that of a brother, or, with greater
precision, that of a sister. That had not struck him before, but even
when first presented, it did not in the least puzzle him. Indeed, it
satisfactorily accounted for that elimination of sex which had always
marked their intimacy. She had not sought the male element in him, nor
he in her the female. So far he was in complete agreement with the
casual conclusion they had jointly arrived at, but at that point Peter
detected the presence of something that seemed to show a lurking fallacy
somewhere. For he had no doubt that if he had been rich, he would before
now have proposed to her, and in spite of her provision that, since
riches were an attribute of a man and not an external accident, they
turned him into a different person, and that thus she could not tell
whether she would have accepted him or not, he did not, for himself,
believe that she would have hesitated in doing so. Finally, as material
to meditate upon, came her firm statement that though Peter did not want
or intend to marry her, he objected to anybody else doing so. With the
extreme frankness with which he habitually judged any criticism on
himself, he instantly admitted that there was a great deal to be said
for Nellie’s assertion. When it was stated brutally like that, he
recognized the justice of her outline. She might have made a caricature
of him, but her sketch contained salient features, the identity of
which, as he contemplated this scribble of her inspired pencil, he could
not disclaim. Without doubt she had caught a likeness; more tersely she
had “got him.” Even as he acknowledged that, he felt a resentment that
she had so unerringly comprehended him, and shown him to himself. He
enjoyed, rather than otherwise, his own dissection of himself, without
bias or malice, but he felt less sure that when Nellie was the dissector
he welcomed so deft an exposure.
The retrospect had been sufficiently absorbing to make him unaware that,
somewhere in Knightsbridge, the top of the bus had become a strenuous
goal for travellers. Every seat was occupied, and beside him a young man
had planted himself in the vacant place and was talking to a girl who
had plumped herself into a seat two tiers behind his. Peter instantly
jumped up.
“Let me change places with your young lady,” he said, “and then you’ll
be together and talk more conveniently.”
The change was made with a tribute of simpering gratitude on the part of
the “young lady,” and Peter, with laurels of popularity round his straw
hat, took the single place. He knew perfectly well that he had disturbed
himself from no motive of kindliness; he did not in the least want to
please either the man or the girl. His motive had been only to appear
pleasant, to obtain cheaply and fraudulently the certificate of being a
“kind gentleman.” For himself, he did not care two straws if the pair of
sundered lovers bawled at each other from sundered seats....
And then as he took his new place it struck him that the quality which
had prompted the transference of himself from one seat on the top of a
bus to another, was precisely the same as had led him to resent Nellie’s
dissection of him. In the one case his vanity was gratified, in the
other his vanity was hurt.
“That’s it,” he said to himself, and mentally he prinked, like a girl,
in the glass that had so unerringly shown him to himself. Yet it did not
show him an aspect of himself that was in any way surprising, either for
pleasure or distaste, for he knew well how prolific a spring of native
vanity was in him. He would always take an infinity of trouble in order
to appear admirable, or, on the other hand, to conceal what was not so
admirable. He would always inconvenience himself in order to appear
kind, exert himself to appear amusing, bore himself, while preserving
the brightness of an attentive and interested eye, in order to confirm
his reputation for being sympathetic. But though vanity was the root of
such efforts, there was, at any rate, no trace of it in his
acknowledgment of it. He never deluded himself into thinking that he
suffered fools gladly, because he liked them, or desired to secure for
them a pleasant half-hour in which they could tediously inflict
themselves on him; he suffered them with the show of gladness in order
to be thought kind and agreeable in the abstract, and in the concrete to
pick up the gleanings of welcome and entertainment which, for such as
him, lie so thick on the fields of human intercourse, when the great
machines have gone by. He had no reason to complain of these gleanings;
there was no one among the youth of London who was more consistently in
request, or who more merited his mild harvestings. In a rather fatigued
and casual generation, tired with the strain of the last five years, and
now suddenly brought to book after the irresponsibility of wartime, when
for all young men each leave snatched from the scythe of the French
front might easily be their last, there was a certain license given,
Peter had always been a shining exception to such slack social conduct
of life. He did not, as he had told Nellie, expect much from it, but as
long as you were “on tap,” it was undeniably foolish not to present
yourself presentably. Your quality was certainly enhanced by a little
foam, a little effervescence. “That nice Mr. Peter, always so polite and
pleasant,” was his reward; and at this moment Nellie’s divination of his
true attitude towards her engagement was his punishment.
The bus hummed and droned along the Brompton Road; there was still a
solid stretch before it halted just opposite the side street which was
his goal, and there was time to consider her further criticism that he
went off, waving his tail, into the wet woods and saying nothing to
anybody. What had she meant exactly by that? He had, at any rate, his
own consciousness that she had hit on something extremely real and
vitally characteristic of him. Surely she meant his aloofness from any
intimate surrender of himself, the self-sufficiency that neither gave
nor sought strong affection. He had acknowledged the vanity as of a
be-ribanded cat, and now he added to that his desire for material
comfort, a quiet, determined selfishness, and the reservation to himself
of solitary expeditions in the wet woods with a waving tail. Probably
she meant no more than that, and though Peter quite acknowledged the
justice of these definitions, he again felt a certain resentment against
her clear-sightedness. She had a touch of these defects and qualities
herself; it was that which made the bond between them.
Peter let himself into his father’s house in the grilling, dusty street
nearly opposite the Oratory with the anticipation of finding a speedy
opportunity for a domestic exhibition of vanity, for he felt sure that
something ludicrous or tiresome and uncomfortable would await him;
something he would certainly tolerate with bland serenity and
agreeableness. The house, the front of which had been baking in the sun
all the afternoon, was intolerably hot and stuffy; the door at the head
of the kitchen stairs had, as generally happened, been left open, and
the nature of the dinner which would presently ascend could be
confidently predicted. Beyond, at the back of the hall, the door into
his father’s studio was also open, and a languid, odorous tide of
oil-paint and Virginian tobacco made a peculiarly deadly combination
with kitchen-smells, and indicated that Mr. Mainwaring had been occupied
with his audacious labours. Just now he was engaged on the perpetration
of a series of cartoons (suitable or not for mural decoration). The
practical difficulty, if these ever attained completion, would be the
discovery of the wall that should be large enough to hold them; indeed,
the great wall of China seemed the only destination which, though
remote, was sufficiently spacious. The subject of them was the European
war from a psychic no less than from a sanguinary point of view, for the
series (of which the sketches were complete) started with a prodigious
cartoon which depicted Satan whispering odious counsels into the ear of
the Emperor William II, who wore a smile of bland imperial ambition at
the very attractive prospects presented by the Father of Lies. In the
background an army corps of the hosts of Hell stretched from side to
side of the picture like some leering, malevolent flower-bed. Thereafter
the series was to traverse the annals of all kinds of frightfulness:
Zeppelins dropped bombs on Sunday-schools, submarine crews, agape with
laughter, shot down the survivors from torpedoed liners. All these
existed only in sketches; the first, however, as Peter knew, was rapidly
approaching completion on the monstrous scale, and took up the whole end
of the studio. Neither Peter nor his mother had as yet been permitted a
glimpse of it; the full blast of its withering force, so Mr. Mainwaring
had planned, was, on completion, to smite and stun them.
He had heard Peter’s entrance into the house, for an outburst of
jubilant yodelling came to the young man’s ears as he put down his hat.
“Tirra lirra, tirra lirra,” sang out the boisterous voice. “Is that my
Peter? Ha-de-ah-de-ho!”
Peter’s eyebrows went up, his mouth slackened to a long sigh, and his
slim shoulders shrugged. But his voice--all of him that at present could
convey his mood to his father--was brisk and cordial.
“Hallo, father,” he said. “Do you want me?”
“Yes, my dear; come in a moment. I have something to show you.”
Peter closed the door of the kitchen stairs and went into the studio.
His father was standing high on a stepladder in front of his canvas,
dashing the last opulent brushful of sombre colour on to the
thundercloud which, portending war, formed so effective a background of
Prussian blue to the Emperor’s head. He painted with swoops and dashes;
such things as “finish” were out of place in designs for the wall of
China.... Even as Peter entered he skipped down from the steps of the
ladder and laid aside his palette and brushes.
“_Finito, e ben finito!_” he cried. “Congratulate me, my Peter! I made
the last stroke as you entered, an added horror--is it not so?--in that
cloud. Ha! You have not seen it yet; sit down and drink it in for five
minutes. Does it make you hot and miserable to look at? Yes, you’ll see
more of that cloud and of what it holds for distracted Europe before I
come to the end of my cartoons. Bombs and torpedoes are in that cloud,
my Peter; devastation and destruction and damnation!”
He struck a splendid attitude in front of the tremendous canvas, and
with a sweep of his hand caused his thick crop of long, grey hair to
stand out in billows round his head. Physically, as regards height and
fineness of feature, Peter certainly owed a good deal to his father, for
John Mainwaring’s head--with its waves of hair, its high colour, its
rich exuberance--was like some fine manuscript now enriched with gilt
and florid illuminations, of which Peter was, so to speak, the neat,
delicate text unadorned by these flamboyant additions. Peter’s vanity,
doubtless, came from the same paternal strain, for never was there
anyone more superbly conscious of his own supreme merits than his
father. Highly ornamental, he knew that his mission was not only to
adorn the palace of art with his work, but to enlighten the dimness of
the world with his blazing presence. Like most men who are possessed of
extraordinary belief in themselves, of high colour and exuberant
spirits, he was liable to accesses of profound gloom, when, with
magnificent gestures, he would strike his forehead and wail over his
own wasted life and the futility of human endeavour. These attacks,
which were very artistic and studied performances, chiefly assailed him
when the Royal Academy had intimated that some stupendous canvas of his
awaited removal before varnishing day. Then, with bewildering rapidity,
his spirits would mount to unheard-of altitudes again, and, brush in
hand, he would exclaim that he asked no more of the world than to allow
him to pursue his art unrecognized and unhonoured, like Millet or Corot.
His temperament, in fact, was that of some boisterous spring day which,
opening with bright sunshine, turns to snow in the middle of the
afternoon, and draws to a close in lambent serenity; and whether
exalted, depressed, or normal, he was simply, though slangily, the
prince of “bounders.”
He clapped his hand on Peter’s shoulder.
“I need not point out to you the merits, or, indeed, the defects of my
composition,” he said, “for my Peter inherits something of his father’s
perceptions. Look at it then once more and tell me if my picture recalls
to you the method, even, perhaps, the inspiration of any master not,
like me, unknown to fame. Who, my boy, if we allow ourselves for a
moment to believe in psychic possession, who, I ask you--or, rather, to
cast my sentence differently--to whom do I owe the realization of
terror, of menace, of spiritual horror, which, ever so faintly,
smoulders in my canvas?”
He folded his arms, awaiting a reply, and Peter cudgelled his brains in
order to make his answer as agreeable as possible. The name of Blake
occurred to him, but he remembered that of late his father had been apt
to decry this artist for poverty of design and failure to render
emotional vastness. Then, with great good luck, his eye fell on some
photographic reproductions from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that
decorated the wall of the studio, and he felt he had guessed right.
“No one but Michael Angelo,” he said. “That’s all the influence I can
see, father.”
Mr. Mainwaring rested his chin on his hand and was gazing at his work
with frowning, seer-like scrutiny. It was difficult to realize that it
was he who had yodelled so jubilantly just now.
“Curious that you should have said that, Peter,” he said in a deep,
dreamy voice. “For days past, as I worked, it has seemed to me that
M.A.--Master of Art, as well as Michael Angelo, note you--that M.A. was
standing by me. At times, indeed, it seemed that not I, but another,
controlled my brush. I do not say he approved, no, no; that he was
pleased with me; but he was there, my boy. So, if there is any merit in
my work, I beseech you to attribute it not to me but to him. It was as
if I was in a trance....”
He closed his eyes for a moment and bowed his head, and then, as if at
the last “Amen” of some solemn service, he came out of the dim cathedral
into sunlight.
“Your mother!” he said. “We must not forget her in this great moment. Is
she in? Tirra lirra! Ha-de-ah-de-ho! My own!”
He pranced to the door, ringing the bell, as he passed, and repeated his
yodelling cries. From upstairs a quiet, thin voice gave some flat echo
of his salutation; from below a hot parlourmaid opened the door of the
kitchen stairs and set free a fresh gale of roastings.
“Three glasses,” he said to the latter. “Three glasses, please, and the
decanter of port. _Maria mia!_ Come down, my dear, and, if you love me,
keep shut your lustrous eyes and take my hand, and I will guide you to
the place I reserve for you. So! Eyes shut and no cheating!”
Mrs. Mainwaring, small in stature, with a porcelain neatness about her
as of a Dresden shepherdess, suffered herself to be led into the studio,
preserving the scrupulous honesty of closed eyelids. By her side her
rococo husband looked more than ever like some preposterous
dancing-master, and if it was correct to attribute to him Peter’s
inherited vanity, it was equally right to derive from the young man’s
mother that finish and precision which characterized his movements and
his manners. Easily, too, though with a shade more subtlety, a
psychologist might have conjectured where Peter’s habit of walking in
the wet woods and telling nobody was derived from, for it was not hard
to guess that Mrs. Mainwaring’s tranquil self-possession, her smiling,
serene indulgence of her husband’s whim, was the result of a quality
firm and deeply rooted. Self-repression had, perhaps, become a habit,
for her conduct seemed quite effortless; but in that tight, thin-lipped
mouth, gently smiling, there was something inscrutably independent. She
was like that, secret and self-contained, because she chose to be like
that; her serenity, her collectedness, were the mask she chose to wear.
Thus, probably, Peter’s inheritance from her was of more durable stuff
than the vanity he owed to his father, for how, if his mother had not
been somehow adamantine, could she have lived for nearly a quarter of a
century with this flamboyant partner, and yet have neither imbibed one
bubble of his effervescence nor lost any grain of her own restraint?
Indeed, she must have been like some piece of quartz for ever dashed
along by the turbulence of his impetuous flood, and yet all the effect
that this buffeting and bruising had produced on her had been but to
polish and harden her. She went precisely where the current dashed her,
but remained solid and small and impenetrable.
Such was her relation to the bounding extravagance of her husband; he
swept her along, quite unresisting, but never parting from her
self-contained integrity, and all his whirlings and waterfalls had never
stripped one atom off her nor roughened her surface. To him she appeared
transparently clear, though, as a matter of fact, not only had he never
seen into her, but, actually, he had never seen her at all. He bounced
her about, demanding now homage, when the exuberance of creation was
his, now sympathy when the rejection of a picture by the Royal Academy
made him a despairing pessimist; but she never varied with his feverish
temperature, and on the surface, at any rate, remained of an
unchangeable coolness. His trumpets never intoxicated her small, pink
ear; his despair of himself and the world in general never came within
measurable distance of sullying her serenity, any more than a
thunderstorm disturbs the effulgence of a half-moon that neither waxes
nor wanes. She still continued calmly shining behind his clouds, as was
obvious when those clouds had discharged their violence. John Mainwaring
never dreamed of considering what, possibly, might lie below that
finished surface; it was enough for him that she should always be ready
to pay a scentless homage to his achievements, or sit quietly like a
fixed star above the clouds of despair that occasionally darkened his
day. She was “_Maria mia_, my beloved,” when he was pleased with
himself, and, when otherwise, it was enough that she should repeat at
intervals: “Fancy their rejecting your picture. I am sure there are
hundreds in the exhibition not half so good.”
To Peter she was an enigma to which he never now attempted or desired to
find the key. She seemed to him quite impervious to external influences
behind that high wall of her reserve. Nothing, so far as he knew, roused
emotion in her; nothing excited, nothing depressed her. Sometimes, when
a boy, he had gone to her with a trouble to confide, and she would say:
“How tiresome for you, dear,” and perhaps suggest some sensible course
of action. But neither his troubles nor her own (if she had any) seemed
to touch her emotions; while, on the other hand, if there was something
agreeable to communicate, if his father sold a picture, or Peter had the
announcement of promotion in the Foreign Office, her sympathy and
pleasure (if she felt any) were just as iced as her condolence had been.
The event--to Peter’s apprehension--that most had power to move her was
the fact that somebody had left open the door at the top of the kitchen
stairs. When that was “quite shut,” and when all household cares had
their sunset after dinner, her habitual mode of self-employment was to
read a page or two of a novel (returning it to the library next day) and
then to take some sort of railway guide and scan the advertisements of
hotels situated in agreeable places on the south coast or among the
Derbyshire Highlands. Often and often had Peter returned from dinner to
find his mother thus employed. His father, when in the throes of
creation, went early to bed in order to be fresh and spry for the light
of the morning hours; but she slept badly, and slept best if she went
late to bed. There she would be then when Peter latch-keyed himself into
the house on his return from dining out, or even, occasionally, when he
returned far later from a dance, with the Bradshaw in her hand open
among the advertisements of hotels. She would put a paper-knife in the
leaves to keep her place while she exchanged a few words with him; then,
when he went to bed, she would resume her reading. Quite naturally and
warrantably he had always considered this a “sad narcotic exercise” on
her part, producing, it was to be hoped, the drowsiness which she was
wooing. A more promising device for dulling the activity of the brain,
than reading about unknown hotels at unvisited places, could hardly be
desired, and so reasonable a process provoked no curiosity on his part.
But the door at the top of the kitchen stairs was the most active of her
interests, and took precedence in her mind of any mood of her husband’s.
So when to-day he led her with a prancing processional movement to a
throne of Spanish brocade at a suitable focusing distance from the
finished cartoon, she, with nostrils open though with shut eyes, gave
the door to the kitchen stairs the first claim on her attention.
“That door has been left open again,” she said. “How careless Burrows
is! Please shut it, my dear. I will keep my eyes tightly shut.”
It struck Peter at this moment that both he and his mother treated his
father as if he had been a child. They both played his games, treating
them with due seriousness, lest they should damp the excited pleasure of
the young. She was playing now without collusion, for, led in as she
had been, with closed eyes, she had no idea that Peter was present.
Then, faintly up the kitchen stairs came the jingle of the glasses, and
Burrows entered with the tray that had been ordered, once more leaving
that fatal door agape. By some exercise of domestic intuition Mrs.
Mainwaring divined the sort of thing going on round her, and with eyes
still honourably closed said:
“Be sure you close the door at the top of the stairs, Burrows, when you
go down again.”
John Mainwaring, with a wealth of gesticulation in order to enjoin
silence on Peter, and with much stealthiness of action, completed his
festive preparations. Demanding from his wife steadiness of hand and no
questions, he thrust between her fingers a brimming glass of port, took
one himself, and filled a third for Peter. In obedience to his pantomime
Peter stood on one side of his enthroned mother and elevated his glass.
* * * * *
“Open your dear blue eyes, _Maria mia_!” exclaimed John Mainwaring, “and
before you say a single word drink to your husband’s offering to Art!”
Mrs. Mainwaring opened her eyes, and found as she had already guessed
from previous experience, her brimming glass.
“I couldn’t possibly drink all that, my dear,” she said, “but I will sip
it with pleasure before I say anything. There! Dear me, what a fine
great picture! All success to it! So that’s what has kept you so busy
all these days when I wasn’t allowed to come into your studio. Oh,
there’s Peter! Are you going to dine at home, dear? I thought you said
you were going out.”
“I’ve only come home to dress,” said he.
“I see. Now let me look at your father’s picture. Why, there’s the
German Emperor! And what a quantity of other people. Dear me! And who is
that whispering to the Emperor? What a horrid expression he has!”
The artist drank his glass of port at a gulp, and at another the rest of
hers.
“Horrid? I should think it was. If you had said devilish you would have
been even more on the bullseye. Now you shall be our Molière’s
housemaid. Speak, voice of the British public! Tell me and Peter what
you see before you.”
Mrs. Mainwaring, with the aid of her glasses, and the slight hint
already given, was perfectly certain that it must be Satan who was
whispering to the Emperor, and that all those dreadful faces behind must
have something to do with him. Then there was that huge dark cloud in
the background.
“The Emperor and Satan,” she said with a sort of placid excitement, like
an adult trying to guess a child’s riddle. “Now wait a minute, my dear.
Yes, I’m sure that dreadful thundercloud behind is the war, and if the
Emperor wouldn’t listen to Satan it would go away. But he’s looking
pleased and proud; he is listening. I suspect that Satan is telling him
that he will win the war and be Emperor of the earth, as you’ve always
said he would have been if the Germans had won. Well, I do think it’s
clever of you to have made me think of all that. Such a few weeks, too,
to paint such a big picture! How well you kept your secret! You only
told me that you were very busy, and that I mustn’t come into your
studio. I never thought that when you allowed me in again I should see
anything so large and remarkable. Most striking! Isn’t it, Peter?”
“Splendid!” said Peter. Then he wondered if he had put enough conviction
into his voice to satisfy the _gourmandise_ of his father.
“Quite splendid!” he said, rather louder.
Then it was Mrs. Mainwaring’s turn in this game.
“And it’s only the first of a series,” said she. “You must send it to
some exhibition at once, John, in order to make room for the rest. So
large, is it not? It fills up all the end of the studio. Such an
important picture. Dear me, how wicked the Emperor looks! And what will
the next picture be?”
“War. Picture of war. Allegorical. Shells bursting into shapes of
devilish malignity.”
He leaned on the back of the throne, regarding the picture intently.
“It will kill me, painting the rest of them,” he said with a fell
intensity. “I’ve got to go through the hell of it all myself before I
can paint them.”
The calm of Mrs. Mainwaring’s voice was untouched by this gloomy
prospect.
“No, dear, it won’t kill you,” she said consolingly. “That’s your
artistic temperament. You will have a good holiday afterwards. You must
be sure to do that. I see; the other pictures will all come out of that
dreadful thundercloud. Such a poetical idea! And I hope you’ll have a
picture of Peace for the last one. Everything quite serene again, and
the thundercloud vanished, and no Emperor at all, unless you paint a
very little figure of him in the background to show how small he has
become. Just him in the background, somewhere in Holland.”
John Mainwaring left his domestic position, leaning on the throne, and
strode up and down the studio.
“Ah, that intolerable happy ending!” he said. “That’s the convention
that spoils all art. Art’s a stern, bitter business; you mustn’t expect
to find a bit of sugar at the bottom of your cup. Art, as the Greeks
said, is meant to move pity and terror.”
Mrs. Mainwaring stepped from her throne.
“Well, I shall think of a peaceful picture for myself, then,” she said,
“and when I have looked at all yours I shall imagine my own. After all,
the war is over, and it’s had a happy ending for us, since the Germans
have been beaten and Peter has come back from it all safe and sound.
That’s my ending.”
He projected his fine grey hair again with a dexterous sweep of the
hand.
“Well, well,” he said, as if he was an adult playing with a child,
whereas certainly the relation was the other way about. “I will do my
best for you, Maria. But I make no promise, mind. Remember that.”
As Peter started off again for the various entertainments of the evening
he tried to imagine himself in serious sympathy with either of his
parents, and ruinously failed. Beginning with his father, he surveyed
with the critical clear-sightedness of his terribly sensible nature
those hysterical daubings of paint, those mysteries as to what his
father was engaged on, those prancing port wine ceremonies when his
labour was finished, that crystal confidence, never clouded, in the
worth of his fatuous achievements. Long ago it had soaked into his soul
that his father was a magnificent buffoon, who, decking himself in the
habiliments of Hamlet, had no idea that instead of being engaged in
heroic drama, he was a figure in a farce so outrageous that you could
not really laugh at him; you could only marvel. Had his pictures, every
one of them, been masterpieces, his own enthusiasm over them would have
verged on the grotesque. As it was they were preposterous and childish
performances, inspiring the observer with pity and terror for the
perpetrator rather than, in the sense of Aristotle, whom his father so
often quoted, for the works themselves. How was it possible to feel
sympathy with one whose impenetrable egoism burned radiantly unconsumed
like that? Yet, while he rejected that possibility, Peter found himself
somehow envying the temperament that transmuted life for its owner into
an endless orgy and carouse. Even the deepest despairs into which
reaction plunged his father were psychical feasts to him, served up with
the same sauce of transcendental egoism as were his raptures. That was
like some pungent essential oil of so ammoniacal an aroma that it
pervaded its whole accessible atmosphere. No neutral quality on the part
of others, no individual indifference was permitted to exist, or, if it
existed, it was either wholly unnoticed or, if noticed, sublimely
pitied. Peter’s father, so it struck the young man, galloped through
life “like a ramping and a roaring lion,” the king of the beasts.
It was no manner of good to attempt to sympathize with so predatory an
animal, and from the thought of his father Peter switched off to the
thought of his mother, who was the habitual prey. There he was
confronted with the mild enigma, of which he had not the faintest
comprehension, and for the hundredth time, guessing out of a dubious,
incurious twilight, he wondered if there was, could be, anything to
comprehend. He tried to sum up his knowledge of her. She ordered dinner,
she wore day and night some family inheritance of her own of splendid
pearls, she read advertisements in railway guides of hotels on Cornish
Rivieras and Derbyshire Switzerlands. That she should order dinner and
wear her own pearls was an accidental happening, because she was
mistress of a house and had some pearls, but beyond that she receded, as
far as Peter was concerned, into a dreamland without logic. Indeed, as
he devoted his mind to her now, the most illogical thing about her was
that for twenty-three years she had contrived to live with his father,
and had preserved a certain personality of her own. It seemed frankly
impossible that anyone who had lived so long with that maniacal egoist
should not have been in any way affected by him. But there she was. His
father had neither crushed her nor vitalized her, and whatever her real
personality might be, Peter felt sure that the ramping and the roaring
lion had not invaded an atom of it. If his father sustained himself on
the flamboyance of his own existence, she, none the less, was
self-sufficient, demanding neither sympathy nor comprehension from
others. The chasm that yawned between himself and his father was a mere
rabbit-scrape compared to the abyss on the other side of which there sat
his mother, delicate and immovable, covered with hoar frost and decked
with her pearls, and reading her railway guide.
Peter owed that deep-seated vanity of his to his father; to his mother
he owed that aloofness which was no less characteristic of him. But to
himself he seemed to have nothing to do with either of them; they both
appeared to him to be distant and ancient phenomena, and he waved a
mild salutation to them as acknowledgment of the debt of his own
existence. Between them they had projected him, but his own
individuality swamped that as completely as his father’s egoism drowned
all other flavours. Was it always like that nowadays? Were all the last
generation so far sundered from the adolescent present as he from his
father and mother?... Was there a new plan of life, a new outlook, a new
everything?