Chapter 26

Peter soon picked up his strength at Hamingburgh. Three weeks passed and he thought of returning to London. Then came a letter from Marbury.

His uncle had applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, and Marbury was to stand at once in a contested by-election. He lightly but cordially asked Peter to come and stay with him through the fight and meet some of the distinguished people it would draw into the constituency.

Peter eagerly accepted. Next day he met Marbury at York, leaving the train to avoid a tedious slow journey of forty miles.

Lord Haversham's principal seat was at Highbury Towers, a lonely house on the edge of a moor. The nearest town was ten miles away.

It was a fortress of civilisation planted in a wilderness. In a bad winter, with snow lying deep, it was sometimes cut off for days from the world outside.

"There's something impudent about the place," said Marbury, as the car rushed over the moors. "It flies in the face of Nature. The Towers is the most comfortable home in England, and it is in a desert."

"A very beautiful desert," said Peter. He was[Pg 185] feasting on the superb line of a moor-end, red with the heather.

"You must see it in the winter. I went through last election with my uncle. It was December, and we did well if we managed to keep half our appointments."

"Tell me about your uncle."

"He's dying, Peter." Marbury conveyed this as a simple fact. He did not intend an effect.

"You mean that he's very ill," suggested Peter.

"I mean that he's dying. The doctors give him six months or a year in Egypt. Here they allow him till the autumn."

"When is he going away?"

"He isn't going away," answered Marbury. "He thinks it worth while to die at home." Again Marbury spoke without insisting in the least on the heroic implication of his words.

"But six months of life and the sun," protested Peter.

"Six months is not long. We have lived at Highbury for a thousand years. Besides, my uncle wants things to go smoothly when he dies. He is posting me up in the estate—all the small traditional things."

Marbury talked of these things with a curious tranquillity. He simply recorded them. He fell very silent; and at the journey's end looked with interest at the large old house at which they had arrived.

Marbury took Peter upstairs to a room beside[Pg 186] his own, and left to dress quickly for dinner. He would come back for Peter and show him the way down. When Peter was ready, he stood for a few minutes at the window. He looked on to a terrace and a garden which ended abruptly and fell suddenly to the moor. At the end of the terrace, magnificently poised and fronting desolation, was the copy of a famous statue by a contemporary sculptor, audaciously asserting the triumph of art—the figure of a naked youth superbly defiant.

Soon Marbury joined Peter at the window and put a hand affectionately on his shoulder.

"That's what I mean," he said, following Peter's look towards the statue in silhouette against the moor, "when I say that this place seems to fly in Nature's face. He's insolent, don't you think? He's looking over thirty miles of moor—not a house between himself and the open sea. In the winter the snow piles up against him, and storms bang into him from the German Ocean. He is the last exquisite word of the twentieth century asserting our mastery over all that."

Marbury waved his arm towards the open moor, and laughed an apology:

"He usually works me up like that. Let's have some dinner."

They went down, and Peter was made acquainted with many people whose names he tried to remember. His mind was whirling with impressions, unable to settle upon anything definite[Pg 187] till, at dinner, he had had time to recover from a sensation of being too much honoured. This sensation had invaded him at being introduced by Marbury to an exquisite young woman.

"Peter," he said, "this is my sister. Look after him, Mary, and tell him who everybody is."

Then Marbury had disappeared, leaving Peter shyly rising to her light chatter.

"The house is packed, and there are beds at the home-farm," she said as they sat to the table. "Everybody is rushing to help Antony."

"Antony?" Peter echoed in a puzzled way.

"Don't you know his name?" she asked, looking towards Marbury.

"I'm afraid not," Peter confessed.

"But he called you Peter."

"Everybody calls me Peter."

"Why does everybody do that?"

"I don't know. Everybody does."

Peter was beginning to enjoy himself. Lady Mary smiled into his frank eyes, liking the direct way in which they looked at her.

They paused as Haversham came in to dinner. His empty chair always stood at the head of the table. Sometimes he was unable at the last moment to come down, but he never allowed anyone to wait or to inquire.

Peter looked at him with interest. He was yet at the prime, but grey and frail. His features were proud and delicate, his voice gravely penetrating. He was too far from Peter for his [Pg 188]conversation to be heard, but he talked with lit face and a frequent smile. Sometimes, however, he fell silent, and Peter thought he detected the strained inward look of one struggling with physical pain.

"You don't know Uncle Eustace?" said Lady Mary, following Peter's look.

"Not yet."

"He will do you good."

"Antony was telling me about him on the way down."

They talked through dinner of indifferent things. The accent of conscious culture which Peter now cordially hated was missing. Yet the talk was alive—happily vivid and agreeable. No one seemed anxious to make an effort or to press home a conviction. Nor was Peter aware of words anxiously picked. He was unable yet to name his impression. He only knew that he talked more frankly of small things than he had talked before.

He noticed in a series of pleasant discoveries how beautiful was the setting of their talk. Lord Haversham had at Highbury brought the art of fine living to perfection. He had filled the place with costly things, without anywhere suggesting unreasonable luxury. Highbury Towers grew upon the visitor. Even as a guest began to wonder why he never seemed to have dined so well and been less brutally aware of it, he perceived that the glass he fingered was lovely and[Pg 189] rare, that it consonantly set off the china bowl which neighboured it, and the ancient candlesticks to left and right. Haversham had always held that true luxury was not insistent, and he was never so disappointed as when his guest broke into a compliment of a particular object. Had it perfectly agreed, fitting its environment, the mood of the conversation, the temperament of the party for which it was designed, it would, he urged, have passed unnoticed. It would have made its effect without directly speaking.

Peter was filled with an adventurous sense of novelty. He had not met people quite like these before. What was it which so clearly distinguished this company from any he had yet frequented? Clearly it was not their manners. Opposite Peter was a peer who took most of his soup indirectly by way of a long moustache, who wisely sat with his napkin well tucked in at the neck. His face reminded Peter of the farmer with whom he had lately laboured in the field; his talk was mostly of dogs, his vocabulary limited and racy. Yet he quite obviously went with the silver, whereas Peter could think of a dozen men he knew—men who had not only learned to feed with discretion, but had read all the most refined literature in three or four languages, and could talk like people in a stage drawing-room—who quite obviously would have jarred.

Peter comfortably surrendered to the charm of an atmosphere quietly genial and free. The[Pg 190] machinery alone of this new life pleased and fascinated. He felt that a beautifully ordered system had taken charge of him, that henceforth he had only to suffer himself to be moved comfortably through the day, that life was now a series of artfully arranged opportunities for free expression in suitable surroundings. This feeling had first invaded him as at York he had seen his baggage mysteriously vanishing, by no act of his own, into a strange car which started off even as he himself was being wrapped in warm rugs for the race to Highbury. It was confirmed later, when, reaching his room with Marbury, he had found the things which had so swiftly vanished at York faultlessly spread for his evening wear. Peter was rapidly putting forth roots in this new soil. Every moment some unexpected thing appeared, to be at once included in his total impression of a new life, to become part of the common round.

There was nothing snobbish in Peter's delight. He already desired to know these people better. But he was not in the least aware of anything which could be described as a social aspiration. He liked his new friends because they were new; and because they behaved differently from any he had as yet encountered. They were continually surprising him in small ways. More particularly he was startled by the intimacy and freedom of their talk. Their conversation was innocent of periphrasis and free from uncomfortable reserve.[Pg 191] Peter had heard nothing like it since he had talked with the old farmer under the hedge of his seven acre field.

When the men were alone, Marbury called Peter to the head of the table and introduced him to his uncle. Peter looked with an ardent respect at one who already had touched his imagination.

"I've heard of you," said Lord Haversham as Peter felt for a chair. "You're the man who forcibly removed the Lord Chamberlain's trousers."

"It wasn't the Lord Chamberlain," said Peter nervously.

Lord Haversham turned to Marbury: "I'm sure you told me it was a protest against the censorship of stage plays."

"That, Uncle, was another small affair."

"Then whose were the trousers?" persisted Haversham.

"They belonged to a Junior Prior," said miserable Peter.

"What was the protest this time?"

"Equality of treatment under the law," suggested Marbury. "But you're making Peter uncomfortable. He doesn't like to remember that he was once a man of ideas."

Haversham looked meditatively at Peter: "It must be splendid to believe so thoroughly in an idea that you are ready to remove the trousers of a Junior Prior."

"I was drunk," said Peter bluntly.

[Pg 192]

"Does that also explain the Lord Chamberlain?" asked Haversham, beginning to be interested.

"No," said Peter. "Then I was only a fool."

"I don't believe a word of it." Lord Haversham turned to Marbury: "Why does he say these things?"

"Peter is a bad case, Uncle. He runs all his ideas to death, and sickens at sight of the corpse. I read Peter two years ago. He was born young."

"I'm afraid he'll very soon exhaust Highbury," said Lord Haversham, smiling.

"No," blurted Peter.

"We haven't any ideas," said Haversham quaintly. "We grow on the soil here, labourers and landlords. Tony," he went on, putting his hand affectionately on Marbury's arm, "is almost perfectly the Radical's notion of a stupid squire. You never think, do you, Tony? You're just choked full of prejudices you can't explain. I'm ashamed of you, Tony. You remind me so perfectly of the sort of fool I was myself thirty years ago."

Lord Haversham looked at his nephew. There was a beautiful tenderness in his address. Almost as he spoke, an expression of great pain came into his eyes.

"I must leave you now," he said. "We will talk again."

He quietly slipped from the room, and the conversation was broken up.

[Pg 193]

Peter, in the later solitude of his room, sat meditating at length upon his evening. He could not yet define what he liked in Marbury's friends, but he felt his personal need of it. He lacked the frank nature and ease, the lightness and dexterity of these people. He trod too heavily, delivering his sentiments with a weight which was out of keeping. He felt he must get out of the habit—a habit which did not express or become him—of taking too seriously the frequent appeal for his views on this or that. What, after all, were these views that had always mattered so much? He saw his late companions at dinner as merry figures seated about a pool, idly throwing in pebbles to keep the water agreeably astir. Conversation, it seemed, was not something to be captured and led. It was an agreeable adventure in which the universe was sociably explored. The final word, which Peter so frequently was tempted to deliver, should never be spoken, for, after the final word, what more could decently be said?