“Quite beautifully. And you used beautiful language about the golden river. But——”
“Well?” asked Peggy.
“Oh, nothing particular! I was only going to suggest that it would have been simpler to have advised me at once to accept their offer; or at any rate, to have asked me whether I intended to, instead of suggesting that I should go in for punt-racing. Mrs. Allbutt also advises me to accept. But I have practically made up my mind not to. Here we are again at home; what a pleasant morning.”
CHAPTER III
PEGGY RYE, probably one of the happiest people in London, was unquestionably one of the busiest, and, as is the habit of really busy people, could always find time for everything. She pursued her myriad schemes of philanthropy and kindness not only with a sense of duty, but brought to them a lively and genuine interest that made unshrinkable homespuns, innocuous wallpapers, unphosphorescent matches and leadless glaze things in themselves attractive and absorbing. If she was not opening a bazaar she was triumphantly closing some factory in which the conditions of work were injurious to the employés; and there were but few days when she was in town on which her great barrack of a house in Pall-Mall was not open to something of an alleviating and charitable nature. The house, in fact, as Hugh had once remarked, was a sort of Clapham Junction of philanthropy, and relief trains ran screaming through it in all directions and at the shortest possible intervals, while she, like a general pointsman for all the lines, tugged at her levers and sent the trains all on their various ways. Her levers, it may be remarked, were of various kinds, and it was firstly her own energies, her position, her time, her wealth that she cheerfully and eagerly devoted to her charitable deeds; but secondly she used the time, position, and money of her friends, plundering them with the utmost avidity and mercilessness. She insisted on their putting up new wallpapers—even though those they had were still recent—which, though perhaps ugly, were not stained with the blood of work-people. She made them buy homespun and tweeds which they did not want in order that Irish peasants should not want either; and she compelled them to load their dinner-tables with new services, which it was possible to eat off, she explained, in comfort, without the feeling at the back of your mind that every time you took a spoonful of soup you were really—so dreadful was the mortality at some of these china factories—committing an act of cannibalism. She even saw the bright side of the extreme friability of these uncannibal plates, because it so soon became necessary to order some more.
In the same way too she used her friends’ gifts; those who were musical had to play the piano or the violin or sing at her concerts at Rye House, while the less-gifted might confine themselves to taking guinea tickets; those with histrionic gifts were expected to place them at her service, and even go so far as to buy the dresses in which they would appear, and pay their fares to distant parts of the country in order to assist deserving objects in the manufacturing districts; poets, major and minor alike, wrote odes which the less poetical had to buy at really scandalous prices; those with gardens filled her bazaars with the finest orchids and all that was best and rarest in their greenhouses; and though Peggy was ruthless, persistent, and merciless in her demands nobody ever resented or refused them, and only when goaded past all bearing—as, for instant, when she wanted to give a bazaar during Ascot week—told her that, though she appeared not to know it, there were limits. For, as has been said, she had the most valuable of all social gifts—namely, the habit of enjoying herself, which is quite irresistible, and though she did not spare them, she was even more merciless to herself.
It must be remarked too that without taking a cynical view of the efforts and services of her friends, it was unquestionably a very comfortable thing for those of otherwise worldly inclinations to be friends of Peggy’s, for she did not confine herself, as might be gathered, to making the lower classes more comfortable at the cost of all comfort to the upper, but she ministered with the same eager unwearying kindness to their tastes, and if those who were musical, for instance, lent her their talents in aid of her schemes, she on her side was always ready to lend them her opera-box, and entertained largely both in town and country. She was also in this caravanserai of London one of the very few people who really “mattered,” and though her wealth and the way in which she spent it might be supposed to have something to do with this, such a supposition would be entirely false where there were so many more wealthy than she who would spend their uttermost farthing to “matter,” yet never succeeded in doing so. What mattered was her wisdom and her charm, and the cachet so seldom won, of a woman of this kind who instead of spending a busy life in amusing herself, spent it seriously in ameliorating the condition of the people, while at the same time she gave and went to dances, entertained and was entertained and was entertaining. Socially she enjoyed herself immensely, and with her big house, her genius as hostess, her deep-rooted desire that other people should enjoy themselves, especially at her expense, she was on a pinnacle in her own world, while, like some skilful circus-rider of two horses, she used all this to sell her guinea tickets and make people buy the leadless glaze of her innocuous dinner-services. She would, in fact, couple her invitation to a week-end party—not at the sequestered cottage at Cookham, but at the big house at Kingston—with a request for a couple of pianoforte solos from some renowned player at the forthcoming concert in aid of some specialised sort of cripples in a manner of which the significance could scarcely be missed.
Peggy had the rather rare and wholly enviable faculty of being able to sit down and think, and when sitting to arrange her thoughts, and having arranged the particular strain of them which occupied her, to dismiss them again. Thus when she left Cookham the following day in order to open a bazaar at the Waynfleet Hall in the afternoon, she lunched in the train, arranged her thoughts, which were concerned with the speech she was going to make, and when she arrived at Paddington was at leisure again, and able to give herself up to that most entrancing form of entertainment—namely, the mere watching of the busy, jostling life of the streets.
But how that spectacle enthralled her! To her keen and vivid mind there was no such delectable pasture on which to browse, and not even the liquid, dustless lawn and river were so entrancing. Much as she loved the swift play of mind on mind, much as she loved the mere quietude of Thames and green forest, or the idle, nonsensical, vivid intercourse with friends, or with friends the grave note that was often struck, there was nothing more attune to her than this sight of the eager crowded streets, alive with strangers, each an enigma to her and not less an enigma to himself. Hugh had once said to her that he always got up early even in this London of late hours for fear of missing something, and that sentiment appeared to her wholly admirable. What he was afraid of “missing” neither he nor she knew; indeed, had it been a definite “missing” it must have been an engagement or appointment of some sort, which would have been devoid of romance. It was the very vagueness of it that to her half-practical, half-Celtic mind was so attractive. “Something might have happened,” he had said, “and how dreadful to have been asleep like a pig!” That was so like him, and yet it was like him too, though unsatisfactory, that he should do nothing definite with this life, that he should refuse this wonderful offer to sing at Covent Garden. Artist-like, he had for the last four years absolutely devoted himself to the cultivation of his voice, spending the five winter months in every year in the desolating town of Frankfort, so as to allow no distraction to interfere with his lessons, and now when a practical reward for his industry was offered him he refused it. To her, as to Edith, it seemed almost a crime; a miracle of a voice had been given him, and also part, though not all, of the artistic temperament which, like genius, has unlimited capacities for taking pains. But what had been left out was ambition; he had, strong as an instinct, the internal need of learning all he could of the art of singing, but not the wish to dazzle and hold the world. It was for singing’s sake that for five months in every year he had cheerfully undergone the incomparable tedium of Frankfort, not for the sake of knowing that on the other side of the footlights the huge hushed house, packed from stall to gallery, was holding its breath in expectation while he stood before the masters in the meadow by the Pegnitz, or, as Tristan, strained dying eyes over the untenanted blue of the Cornish sea for the ship that came not,