Читать книгу The Lee Shore - Macaulay Rose - Страница 4

Table of Contents

During the first week of Peter Margerison's first term at school, Urquhart suddenly stepped, a radiant figure on the heroic scale, out of the kaleidoscopic maze of bemusing lights and colours that was Peter's vision of his new life.

Peter, seeing Urquhart in authority on the football field, asked, "Who is it?" and was told, "Urquhart, of course," with the implication "Who else could it be?"

"Oh," Peter said, and blushed. Then he was told, "Standing right in Urquhart's way like that! Urquhart doesn't want to be stared at by all the silly little kids in the lower-fourth." But Urquhart was, as a matter of fact, probably used to it.

So that was Urquhart. Peter Margerison hugged secretly his two pieces of knowledge; so secret they were, and so enormous, that he swelled visibly with them; there seemed some danger that they might even burst him. That great man was Urquhart. Urquhart was that great man. Put so, the two pieces of knowledge may seem to have a certain similarity; there was in effect a delicate discrimination between them. If not wholly distinct one from the other, they were anyhow two separate aspects of the same startling and rather magnificent fact.

Then there was another aspect: did Urquhart know that he, Margerison, was in fact Margerison? He showed no sign of such knowledge; but then it was naturally not part of his business to concern himself with silly little kids in the lower-fourth. Peter never expected it.

But a few days after that, Peter came into the lavatories and found Urquhart there, and Urquhart looked round and said, "I say, you—Margerison. Just cut down to the field and bring my cap. You'll find it by the far goal, Smithson's ground. You can bring it to the lavatories and hang it on my peg. Cut along quick, or you'll be late."

Peter cut along quick, and found the velvet tasselled thing and brought it and hung it up with the care due to a thing so precious as a fifteen cap. The school bell had clanged while he was down on the field, and he was late and had lines. That didn't matter. The thing that had emerged was, Urquhart knew he was Margerison.

After that, Urquhart did not have occasion to honour Margerison with his notice for some weeks. It was, of course, a disaster of Peter's that brought them into personal relations. Throughout his life, Peter's relations were apt to be based on some misfortune or other; he always had such bad luck. Vainly on Litany Sundays he put up his petition to be delivered "from lightning and tempest, from plague, pestilence, and famine, from battle and murder, and from sudden death." Disasters seemed to crowd the roads on which he walked; so frequent were they and so tragic that life could scarcely be lived in sober earnest; it was, for Peter the comedian, a tragi-comic farce. Circumstances provided the tragedy, and temperament the farce.

Anyhow, one day Peter tumbled on to the point of his right shoulder and lay on his face, his arm crooked curiously at his side, remarking that he didn't think he was hurt, only his arm felt funny and he didn't think he would move it just yet. People pressed about him; suggested carrying him off the field; asked if he thought it was broken; asked him how he felt now; asked him all manner of things, none of which Peter felt competent to answer. His only remark, delivered in a rather weak and quavering voice, was to the effect that he would walk directly, only he would like to stay where he was a little longer, please. He said it very politely. It was characteristic of Peter Margerison that misfortune always made him very polite and pleasant in his manners, as if he was saying, "I am sorry to be so tiresome and feeble: do go on with your own businesses, you more fortunate and capable people, and never mind me."

As they stood in uncertainty about him, someone said, "There's Urquhart coming," and Urquhart came. He had been playing on another ground. He said, "What is it?" and they told him it was Margerison, his arm or his shoulder or something, and he didn't want to be moved. Urquhart pushed through the crowd that made way for him, and bent over Margerison and felt his arm from the shoulder to the wrist, and Margerison bit at the short grass that was against his face.

"That's all right," said Urquhart. "I wanted to see if it was sprained or broken anywhere. It's not; it's just a put-out shoulder. I did that once, and they put it in on the field; it was quite easy. It ought to be done at once, before it gets stiff." He turned Peter over on his back, and they saw that he was pale, and his forehead was muddy where it had pressed on the ground, and wet where perspiration stood on it. Urquhart was unlacing his own boot.

"I'm going to haul it in for you," he told Peter. "It's quite easy. It'll hurt a bit, of course, but less now than if it's left. It'll slip in quite easily, because you haven't much muscle," he added, looking at the frail, thin, crooked arm. Then he put his stockinged foot beneath Peter's arm-pit, and took the arm by the wrist and straightened it out. The other thin arm was thrown over Peter's pale face and working mouth. The muddy forehead could be seen getting visibly wetter. Urquhart threw himself back and pulled, with a long and strong pull. Sharp gasps came from beneath the flung-up left arm, through teeth that were clenched over a white jersey sleeve. The thin legs writhed a little. Urquhart desisted, breathing deeply.

"Sorry," he said; "one more'll do it." The one more was longer and stronger, and turned the gasps into semi-groans. But as Urquhart had predicted, it did it.

"There," said Urquhart, resting and looking pleased, as he always did when he had accomplished something neatly. "Heard the click, didn't you? It's in all right. Sorry to hurt you, Margerison; you were jolly sporting, though. Now I'm going to tie it up before we go in, or it'll be out again."

So he tied Peter's arm to Peter's body with his neck scarf. Then he took up the small light figure in his arms and carried it from the field.

"Hurt much now?" he asked, and Peter shook an untruthful head and grinned an untruthful and painful grin. Urquhart was being so inordinately decent to him, and he felt, even in his pain, so extremely flattered and exalted by such decency, that not for the world would he have revealed the fact that there had been a second faint click while his arm was being bound to his side, and an excruciating jar that made him suspect the abominable thing to be out again. He didn't know how the mechanism worked, but he was sure that the thing Urquhart had with such labour hauled in had slipped out and was disporting itself at large in unlawful territory. He said nothing, a little because he really didn't think he could quite make up his mind to another long and strong pull, but chiefly because of Urquhart and his immense decency. Success was Urquhart's rôle; one did not willingly imagine him failing. If heroes fail, one must not let them know it. Peter shut his eyes, and, through his rather sick vision of trespassing rabbits popping in and out through holes in a fence, knew that Urquhart's arms were carrying him very strongly and easily and gently. He hoped he wasn't too heavy. He would have said that he could walk, only he was rather afraid that if he said anything he might be sick. Besides, he didn't really want to walk; his shoulder was hurting him very much. He was so white about the cheeks and lips that Urquhart thought he had fainted.

After a little while, Urquhart was justified in his supposition; it was characteristic of Peter to convert, as promptly as was feasible, any slight error of Urquhart's into truth. So Peter knew nothing when Urquhart carried him indoors and delivered him into other hands. He opened his eyes next on the doctor, who was untying his arm and cutting his sleeve and saying cheerfully, "All right, young man, all right."

The next thing he said was, "I was told it had been put in."

"Yes," said Peter languidly. "But it came out again, I think."

"So it seems. Didn't they discover that down there?"

Peter moved his head limply, meaning "No."

"But you did, did you? Well, why didn't you say so? Didn't want to have it hauled at again, I suppose? Well, we'll have it in directly. You won't feel it much."

So the business was gone through again, and this time Peter not only half but quite groaned, because it didn't matter now.

When the thing was done, and Peter rigid and swathed in bed, the doctor was recalled from the door by a faint voice saying, "Will you please not tell anyone it came out again?"

"Why not?" The doctor was puzzled.

"Don't know," said Peter, after finding that he couldn't think of a reason. But then he gave the true one.

"Urquhart thought he'd got it in all right, that's all."

"Oh." The doctor was puzzled still. "But that's Urquhart's business, not yours. It wasn't your fault, you know."

"Please," said Peter from the bed. "Do you mind?"

The doctor looked and saw feverish blue lamps alight in a pale face, and soothingly said he did not mind. "Your shoulder, no one else's, isn't it?" he admitted. "Now you'd better go to sleep; you'll be all right directly, if you're careful not to move it or lie on it or anything."

Peter said he would be careful. He didn't at all want to move it or lie on it or anything. He lay and had waking visions of the popping rabbits. But they might pop as they liked; Peter hid a better thing in his inmost soul. Urquhart had said, "Sorry to hurt you, Margerison. You were jolly sporting, though." In the night it seemed incredible that Urquhart had stooped from Valhalla thus far; that Urquhart had pulled in his arm with his own hands and called him sporting to his face. The words, and the echo of the soft, pleasant, casual voice, with its unemphasised intonations, spread lifting wings for him, and bore him above the aching pain that stayed with him through the night.

Next morning, when Peter was wishing that the crumbs of breakfast that got between one's back and one's pyjamas were less sharp-cornered, and wondering why a dislocated shoulder should give one an aching bar of pain across the forehead, and feeling very sad because a letter from home had just informed him that his favourite guinea-pig had been trodden on by the gardener, Urquhart came to see him.

Urquhart said, "Hullo, Margerison. How are you this morning?" and Peter said he was very nearly all right now, thanks very much. He added, "Thanks awfully, Urquhart, for putting it in, and seeing after me and everything."

"Oh, that's all right." Urquhart's smile had the same pleasant quality as his voice. He had never smiled at Peter before. Peter lay and looked at him, the blue lamps very bright in his pale face, and thought what a jolly voice and face Urquhart had. Urquhart stood by the bed, his hands in his pockets, and looked rather pleasantly down at the thin, childish figure in pink striped pyjamas. Peter was fourteen, and looked less, being delicate to frailness. Urquhart had been rather shocked by his extreme lightness. He had also been pleased by his pluck; hence the pleasant expression of his eyes. He was a little touched, too, by the unmistakable admiration in the over-bright blue regard. Urquhart was not unused to admiration; but here was something very whole-hearted and rather pleasing. Margerison seemed rather a nice little kid.

Then, quite suddenly, and still in his pleasant, soft, casual tones, Urquhart dragged Peter's immense secret into the light of day.

"How are your people?" he said.

Peter stammered that they were quite well.

"Of course," Urquhart went on, "I don't remember your mother; I was only a baby when my father died. But I've always heard a lot about her. Is she … "

"She's dead, you know," broke in Peter hastily, lest Urquhart should make a mistake embarrassing to himself. "A long time ago," he added, again anxious to save embarrassment.

"Yes—oh yes." Urquhart, from his manner, might or might not have known.

"I live with my uncle," Peter further told him, thus delicately and unobstrusively supplying the information that Mr. Margerison too was dead. He omitted to mention the date of this bereavement, having always a delicate sense of what did and did not concern his hearers. The decease of the lady who had for a brief period been Lady Hugh Urquhart, might be supposed to be of a certain interest to her stepson; that of her second husband was a private family affair of the Margerisons.

(The Urquhart-Margerison connection, which may possibly appear complicated, was really very simple, and also of exceedingly little importance to anyone but Peter; but in case anyone feels a desire to have these things elucidated, it may here be mentioned that Peter's mother had made two marriages, the first being with Urquhart's father, Urquhart being already in existence at the time; the second with Mr. Margerison, a clergyman, who was also already father of one son, and became Peter's father later. Put so, it sounds a little difficult, chiefly because they were all married so frequently and so rapidly, but really is simplicity itself.)

"I live with my uncle too," Urquhart said, and the fact formed a shadowy bond. But Peter's tone had struck a note of flatness that faintly indicated a lack of enthusiasm as to the ménage. This note was, to Peter's delicately attuned ears, absent from Urquhart's voice. Peter wondered if Lord Hugh's brother (supposing it to be a paternal uncle) resembled Lord Hugh. To resemble Lord Hugh, Peter had always understood (till three years ago, when his mother had fallen into silence on that and all other topics) was to be of a charm. … One spoke of it with a faint sigh. And yet of a charm that somehow had lacked something, the intuitive Peter had divined; perhaps it had been too splendid, too fortunate, for a lady who had loved all small, weak, unlucky things. Anyhow, not long after Lord Hugh's death (he was killed out hunting) she had married Mr. Margerison, the poorest clergyman she could find, and the most devoted to the tending of the unprosperous.

Peter remembered her—compassionate, delicate, lovely, full of laughter, with something in the dance of her vivid dark-blue eyes that hinted at radiant and sad memories. She had loved Lord Hugh for a glorious and brief space of time. The love had perhaps descended, a hereditary bequest, with the deep blue eyes, to her son. Peter would have understood the love; the thing he would not have understood was the feeling that had flung her on the tide of reaction at Mr. Margerison's feet. Mr. Margerison was a hard liver and a tremendous giver. Both these things had come to mean a great deal to Sylvia Urquhart—much more than they had meant to the girl Sylvia Hope.

And hence Peter, who lay and looked at Lord Hugh Urquhart's son with wide, bright eyes. With just such eyes—only holding, let us hope, an adoration more masked—Sylvia Hope had long ago looked at Lord Hugh, seeing him beautiful, delicately featured, pale, and fair of skin, built with a strong fineness, and smiling with pleasant eyes. Lord Hugh's beauty of person and charm of manner had possibly (not certainly) meant more to Sylvia Hope than his son's meant to her son; and his prowess at football (if he had any) had almost certainly meant less. But, apart from the glamour of physical skill and strength and the official glory of captainship, the same charm worked on mother and son. The soft, quick, unemphasised voice, with the break of a laugh in it, had precisely the same disturbing effect on both.

"Well," Urquhart was saying, "when will they let you play again? You must buck up and get all right quickly. … I shouldn't wonder if you made a pretty decent three-quarter sometime. … You ought to use your arm as soon as you can, you know, or it gets stiff, and then you can't, and that's an awful bore. … Hurt like anything when I hauled it in, didn't it? But it was much better to do it at once."

"Oh, much," Peter agreed.

"How does it feel now?"

"Oh, all right. I don't feel it much. I say, do you think I ought to use it at once, in case it gets stiff?" Peter's eyes were a little anxious; he didn't much want to use it at once.

But Urquhart opined that this would be over-great haste. He departed, and his last words were, "You must come to breakfast with me when you're up again."

Peter lay, glorified, and thought it all over. Urquhart knew, then; he had known from the first. He had known when he said, "I say, you, Margerison, just cut down to the field … "

Not for a moment did it seem at all strange to Peter that Urquhart should have had this knowledge and given no sign till now. What, after all, was it to a hero that the family circle of an obscure individual such as he should have momentarily intersected the hero's own orbit? School has this distinction—families take a back place; one is judged on one's own individual merits. Peter would much rather think that Urquhart had come to see him because he had put his arm out and Urquhart had put it in (really though, only temporarily in) than because his mother had once been Urquhart's stepmother.

Peter's arm did not recover so soon as Urquhart's sanguineness had predicted. Perhaps he began taking precautions against stiffness too soon; anyhow he did not that term make a decent three-quarter, or any sort of a three-quarter at all. It always took Peter a long time to get well of things; he was easy to break and hard to mend—made in Germany, as he was frequently told. So cheaply made was he that he could perform nothing. Defeated dreams lived in his eyes; but to light them there burned perpetually the blue and luminous lamps of undefeated mirth, and also an immense friendliness for life and mankind and the delightful world. Like the young knight Agenore, Peter the unlucky was of a mind having no limits of hope. Over the blue and friendly eyes that lit the small pale face, the half wistful brows were cocked with a kind of whimsical and gentle humour, the same humour that twitched constantly at the corners of his wide and flexible mouth. Peter was not a beautiful person, but one liked, somehow, to look at him and to meet his half-enquiring, half-amused, wholly friendly and sympathetic regard. By the end of his first term at school, he found himself unaccountably popular. Already he was called "Margery" and seldom seen by himself. He enjoyed life, because he liked people and they liked him, and things in general were rather jolly and very funny, even with a dislocated shoulder. Also the great Urquhart would, when he remembered, take a little notice of Peter—enough to inflate the young gentleman's spirit like a blown-out balloon and send him soaring skywards, to float gently down again at his leisure.

Towards the end of the term, Peter's half-brother Hilary came to visit him. Hilary was tall and slim and dark and rather beautiful, and he lived abroad and painted, and he told Peter that he was going to be married to a woman called Peggy Callaghan. Peter, who had always admired Hilary from afar, was rather sorry. The woman Peggy Callaghan would, he vaguely believed, come between Hilary and his family; and already there were more than enough of such obstacles to intercourse. But at tea-time he saw the woman, and she was large and fair and laughing, and called him, in her rich, amused voice "little brother dear," and he did not mind at all, but liked her and her laugh and her mirthful, lazy eyes.

Peter was a large-minded person; he did not mind that Hilary wore no collar and a floppy tie. He did not mind this even when they met Urquhart in the street. Peter whispered as he passed, "That's Urquhart," and Hilary suddenly stopped and held out his hand, and said pleasantly, "I am glad to meet you." Peter blushed at that, naturally (for Hilary's cheek, not for his tie), and hoped that Urquhart wasn't much offended, but that he understood what half-brothers who lived abroad and painted were, and didn't think it was Peter's fault. Urquhart shook hands quite pleasantly, and when Hilary added, "We shared a stepmother, you and I; I'm Peter's half-brother, you know," he amiably agreed. Peter hoped he didn't think that the Urquhart-Margerison connection was being strained beyond due bounds. Hilary said further, "You've been very good to my young brother, I know," and it was characteristic of Peter that, even while he listened to this embarrassing remark, he was free enough from self-consciousness to be thinking with a keen though undefined pleasure how extraordinarily nice to look at both Hilary and Urquhart, in their different ways, were. (Peter's love of the beautiful matured with his growth, but in intensity it could scarcely grow.) Urquhart was saying something about bad luck and shoulders; it was decent of Urquhart to say that. In fact, things were going really well till Hilary, after saying, "Good-bye, glad to have met you," added to it the afterthought, "You must come and stay at my uncle's place in Sussex some time. Mustn't he, Peter?" At the same time—fitting accompaniment to the over-bold words—Peter saw a half-crown, a round, solid, terrible half-crown, pressed into Urquhart's unsuspecting hand. Oh, horror! Which was the worse, the invitation or the half-crown? Peter could never determine. Which was the more flagrant indecency—that he, young Margerison of the lower fourth, should, without any encouragement whatever, have asked Urquhart of the sixth, captain of the fifteen, head of his house, to come and stay with him; or that his near relative should have pressed half-a-crown into the great Urquhart's hand as if he expected him to go forthwith to the tuck-shop at the corner and buy tarts? Peter wriggled, scarlet from his collar to his hair.

Urquhart was a polite person. He took the half-crown. He murmured something about being very glad. He even smiled his pleasant smile. And Peter, entirely unexpectedly to himself, did what he always did in the crises of his singularly disastrous life—he exploded into a giggle. So, some years later, he laughed helplessly and suddenly, standing among the broken fragments of his social reputation and his professional career. He could not help it. When the worst had happened, there was nothing else one could do. One laughed from a sheer sense of the completeness of the disaster. Peter had a funny, extremely amused laugh; hardly the laugh of a prosperous person; rather that of the unhorsed knight who acknowledges the utterness of his defeat and finds humour in the very fact. It was as if misfortune—and this misfortune of the half-crown and the invitation is not to be under-estimated—sharpened all the faculties, never blunt, by which he apprehended humour. So he looked from Hilary to Urquhart, and, mentally, from both to his cowering self, and exploded.

Urquhart had passed on. Hilary said, "What's the matter with you?" and Peter recovered himself and said "Nothing." He might have cried, with Miss Evelina Anvill, "Oh, my dear sir, I am shocked to death!" He did not. He did not even say, "Why did you stamp us like that?" He would not for the world have hurt Hilary's feelings, and vaguely he knew that this splendid, unusual half-brother of his was in some ways a sensitive person.

Hilary said, "The Urquharts ought to invite you to stay. The connection is really close. I believe your mother was devoted to that boy as a baby. You'd like to go and stay there, wouldn't you?"

Peter looked doubtful. He was nervous. Suppose Hilary met Urquhart again. … Dire possibilities opened. Next time it might be "Peter must go and stay at your uncle's place in Berkshire." That would be worse. Yes, the worst had not happened, after all. Urquhart might have met Peggy. Peggy would in that case have said, "You nice kind boy, you've been such a dear to this little brother of ours, and I hear you and these boys used to share a mamma, so you're really brothers, and so, of course, my brother too; and what a nice face you've got!" There were in fact, no limits to what Peggy might say. Peggy was outrageous. But it was surprising how much one could bear from her. Presumably, Peter used to reflect in after years, when he had to bear from her a very great deal indeed, it was simply by virtue of her being Peggy. It was the same with Hilary. They were Hilary and Peggy, and one took them as such. Indeed, one had to, as there was certainly no altering them. And Peter loved both of them very much indeed.

When Peter went home for the holidays, he found that Hilary's alliance with the woman Peggy Callaghan was not smiled upon. But then none of Hilary's projects were ever smiled upon by his uncle, who always said, "Hilary must do as he likes. But he is acting with his usual lack of judgment." For four years he had been saying so, and he said it again now. To Hilary himself he further said, "You can't afford a wife at all. You certainly can't afford Miss Callaghan. You have no right whatever to marry until you are earning a settled livelihood. You are not of the temperament to make any woman consistently happy. Miss Callaghan is the daughter of an Irish doctor, and a Catholic."

"It is," said Hilary, "the most beautiful of all the religions. If I could bring myself under the yoke of any creed at all … "

"Just so," said his uncle, who was a disagreeable man; "but you can't," and Hilary tolerantly left it at that, merely adding, "There will be no difficulty. We have arranged all that. Peggy is not a bigot. As to the rest, I think we must judge for ourselves. I shall be earning more now, I imagine."

Hilary always imagined that; imagination was his strong point. His initial mistake was to imagine that he could paint. He did not think that he had yet painted anything very good; but he knew that he was just about to do so. He had really the artist's eye, and saw keenly the beauty that was, though he did not know it, beyond his grasp. His uncle, who knew nothing about art, could have told him that he would never be able to paint, simply because he had never been, and would never be, able to work. That gift he wholly lacked. Besides, like young Peter, he seemed constitutionally incapable of success. A wide and quick receptiveness, a considerable power of appreciation and assimilation, made such genius as they had; the power of performance they desperately lacked; their enterprises always let them through. Failure was the tragi-comic note of their unprosperous careers.

However, Hilary succeeded in achieving marriage with the cheerful Peggy Callaghan, and having done so they went abroad and lived an uneven and rather exciting life of alternate squalor and luxury in one story of what had once been a glorious roseate home of Venetian counts, and was now crumbling to pieces and let in flats to the poor. Hilary and his wife were most suitably domiciled therein, environed by a splendid dinginess and squalor, pretentious, tawdry, grandiose, and superbly evading the common. Peggy wrote to Peter in her large sprawling hand, "You dear little brother, I wish you'd come and live with us. We have such fun. … " That was the best of Peggy. Always and everywhere she had such fun. She added, "Give my sisterly regards to the splendid hero who shared your mamma, and tell him we too live in a palace." That was so like Peggy, that sudden and amused prodding into the most secret intimacies of one's emotions. Peggy always discerned a great deal, and was blind to a great deal more.