Читать книгу Peter Jameson - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 29

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To comprehend the deliberate sacrifice which Peter Jameson made for the cause of humanity, it is essential that you should realize both the man and the offering he brought. It was not, primarily, the sacrifice of money, but the giving-up of a great ambition. For money, regarded purely as the purchase price of material comfort, he cared very little. As a spender, he had small sympathy with the exotic luxury of his time. His amusements were essentially simple—a gun, a trout-rod, a horse, a good glass of wine. All these, he might have possessed without working.

But Peter had been picked up, while still a boy, into the fascinating game of business; and in that game he had found both work (which was vital to his temperament) and enjoyment. His personal qualities—resoluteness, concentration on the immediate job, a certain creative instinct, clear thinking, moral courage and a controlled imagination—fitted him eminently for the sport of commerce.

Nirvana Limited, which would have been to the average individual merely a machine for the making of an income, represented to Peter Jameson—at the outbreak of war—the ultimate aim in life. He loved that business, not only for the sake of what it might eventually bring him, but for itself. He loved it, like a good gardener loves his garden, as much for the labour as for the result. He had seen it grow, in six years, from starved plant to a goodly tree—fruit almost ripe for the plucking. He felled that tree deliberately, in cold blood, under no compulsion save that of his own soul. And he waved no flags to console him for the felling!

For the man was, despite the admixture of Miraflores strain, an Anglo-Saxon: responded—though he knew it not—to the blind spirit of that race which came out of Italy through France, welded itself to dour Saxon and berserk Viking, and so spread, fighting always but always fighting as an ultimate issue for Independence, to Virginia and Quebec, to the Falkland Islands and the Hebrides, to South Africa and Australasia; till it became—scarcely conscious of its own oneness—the final arbiter in the great world-struggle of Decency against the filthy doctrines of the Beasts in Gray.

And behind the man, equally resolute, equally blind to the spirit which moved her, stood Patricia, the Anglo-Saxon woman—thoroughbred, unflinching.