Simon Called Peter, Robert Keable [read e books online free txt] 📗

from the bathroom to fasten her dress. When it was done, she stood back for him to examine her.

"That all right?" she demanded, putting a touch here and there.

Not every woman could have worn her gown. It was a rose pink with some rich flame-coloured material in front, and was held by two of the narrowest bands on her shoulders. In the deep décolleté she pushed two rosebuds from the big bunch, and hung round her neck a pendant of mother-of-pearl and silver. She wore no other jewellery, and she needed none. She faced him, a vision of loveliness.

They went down the stairs together and out into the crush of people, some of the women in evening dress, but few of the men. The many uniforms looked better, Peter thought, despite the drab khaki. They had to stand for awhile while a taxi was found, Julie laughing and chatting vivaciously. She had a wrap for her shoulders that she had bought in Port Said, set with small metallic points, and it sparkled about her in the blaze of light. She flattered him by seeming unconscious of anyone else, and put her hand on his arm as they went out.

They drove swiftly through back-streets to the restaurant that Peter had selected, and stopped in a quiet, dark, narrow road off Greek Street. Julie got out and looked around with pretended fear. "Where in the world have you brought me?" she demanded. "However did you find the place? It's worse than some of your favourite places in Havre."

Inside, however, she looked round appreciatively. "Really, Peter, it's splendid," she said under her breath—"just the place," and smiled sweetly on the padrone who came forward, bowing. Peter had engaged a table, and they were led to it.

"I had almost given you up, sir," said the man, "but by good fortune, some of our patrons are late too."

They sat down opposite to each other, and studied the menu held out to them by a waiter. "I don't know the meaning of half the dishes," laughed Julie. "You order. It'll be more fun if I don't know what's coming."

"We must drink Chianti," said Peter, and ordered a bottle. "You can think you are in Italy."

Elbows on the table as she waited, Julie looked round. In the far corner a gay party of four were halfway through dinner. Two officers, an elderly lady and a young one, she found rather hard to place, but Julie decided the girl was the fiancée of one who had brought his friend to meet her. At other tables were mostly couples, and across the room from her, with an elderly officer, sat a well-made-up woman, very plainly demimonde. Immediately before her were four men, two of them foreigners, in morning dress, talking and eating hare. It was evidently a professional party, and one of the four now and again hummed out a little air to the rest, and once jotted down some notes on the back of a programme. They took no notice of anyone, but the eyes of the woman with the officer, who hardly spoke to her, searched Julie unblushingly.

Julie, gave a little sigh of happiness. "This is lovely, Peter," she said. "We'll be ages over dinner. It's such fun to be in nice clothes just for dinner sometimes and not to have to worry about the time, and going on elsewhere. But I do wish my friends could see me, I must say. They'd be horrified. They thought I was going to a stodgy place in West Kensington. I was must careful to be vague, but that was the idea. Peter, how would you like to live in a suburb and have heaps of children, and dine out with city men and their wives once or twice a month for a treat?"

Peter grimaced. Then he looked thoughtful. "It wouldn't have been any so remarkable for me at one time, Julie," he said.

She shook her head. "It would, my dear. You're not made for it."

"What am I made for, then?"

She regarded him solemnly, and then relaxed into a smile. "I haven't a notion, but not that. The thing is never to worry. You get what you're made for in the end, I think."

"I wonder," said Peter. "Perhaps, but not always. The world's full of square pegs in round holes."

"Then they're stodgy pegs, without anything in them. If I was a square peg I'd never go into a round hole."

"Suppose there was no other hole to go into," demanded Peter.

"Then I'd fall out, or I wouldn't go into any hole at all. I'd sooner be anything in the world than stodgy, Peter. I'd sooner be like that woman over there who is staring at me so!"

Peter glanced to one side, and then back at Julie. He was rather grave.
"Would you really?" he questioned.

The waiter brought the Chianti and poured out glasses. Julie waited till he had gone, and then lifted hers and looked at Peter across it. "I would," she said. "I couldn't live without wine and excitement and song. I'm made that way. Cheerio, Solomon!"

They drank to each other. Then: "And love?" queried Peter softly.

Julie did not reply for a minute. She set her wine-glass down and toyed with the stem. Then she looked up at him under her eyelashes with that old daring look of hers, and repeated: "And love, Peter. But real love, not stodgy humdrum liking, Peter. I want the love that's like the hot sun, and the wide, tossing blue sea east of Suez, and the nights under the moon where the real world wakes up and doesn't go to sleep, like it does in the country in the cold, hard North. Do you know," she went on, "though I love the cities, and bands, and restaurants, and theatres, and taxis, and nice clothes, I love best of all the places where one has none of these things. I once went with a shooting-party to East Africa, Peter, and that's what I love. I shall never forget the nights at Kilindini, with the fireflies dancing among the bushes, and the moon glistening on the palms as if they were wet, and the insects shrilling in the grass, and the hot, damp air. Or by day, up in the forest, camped under the great trees, with the strange few flowers and the silence, while the sun trickled through the leaves and made pools of light on the ground. Do you know, I saw the most beautiful thing I've ever seen or, I think, shall see in that forest."

"What was that?" asked Peter, under her spell, for she was speaking like a woman in a dream.

"It was one day when we were marching. We came on a glade among the trees, and at the end of it, a little depression of damp green grass, only the grass was quite hidden beneath a sheet of blue—such blue, I can't describe it—that quivered and moved in the sun. We stood quite still, and then a boy threw a little stone. And the blue all rose in the air, silently, like magic. It was a swarm of hundreds and hundreds of blue butterflies, Peter. Do you know what I did? I cried—I couldn't help it. It was too beautiful to see, Peter."

A little silence fell between them. She broke it in another tone.

"And the natives—I love the natives. I just love the all but naked girls carrying the water up to the village in the evening, tall and straight, like Greek statues; and the men, in a string of beads and a spear. I wanted to go naked myself there—at least, I did till one day I tried it, and the sun skinned me in no time. But at least one needn't wear much—cool loose things, and it doesn't matter what one does or says."

Peter laughed. "Who was with you when you tried the experiment?" he demanded.

Julie threw her head back, and even the professional four glanced up and looked at her. "Ah, wouldn't you like to know?" she laughed. "Well, I won't tease you—two native girls if you want to know, that was all. The rest of the party were having a midday sleep. But I never can sleep at midday. I don't mind lying in a hammock or a deck-chair, and reading, but I can't sleep. One feels so beastly when one wakes up, doesn't one?"

Peter nodded, but steered her back. "Tell me more," he said. "You wake something up in me; I feel as if I was born to be there."

"Well," she said reflectively, "I don't know that anything can beat the great range that runs along our border in Natal. It's different, of course, but it's very wonderful. There's one pass I know—see here, you go up a wide valley with a stream that runs in and out, and that you have to cross again and again until it narrows and narrows to a small footpath between great kranzes. At first there are queer stunted trees and bushes about, with the stream, that's now a tiny thing of clear water, singing among them, and there the trees stop, and you climb up and up among the boulders, until you think you can do no more, and at the last you come out on the top."

"And then?"

"You're in wonderland. Before you lies peak on peak, grass-grown and rocky, so clear in the rare, still air. There is nothing there but mountain and rock and grass, and the blue sky, with perhaps little clouds being blown across it, and a wind that's cool and vast—you feel it fills everything. And you look down the way you've come, and there's all Natal spread out at your feet like a tiny picture, lands and woods and rivers, till it's lost in the mist of the distance."

She ceased, staring at her wine-glass. At last the chatter of the place broke in on Peter. "My dear," he exclaimed, "one can see it. But what do you do there?"

She laughed and broke the spell. "What would one do?" she demanded. "Eat and drink and sleep, and make love, Peter, if there's anybody to make love to."

"But you couldn't do that all your life," he objected.

"Why not? Why do anything else? I never can see. And when you're tired—for you do get tired at last—back to Durban for a razzle-dazzle, or back farther still, to London or Paris for a bit. That's the life for me, Peter!"

He smiled: "Provided somebody is there with the necessary, I suppose?" he said.

"Solomon," she mocked, "Solomon, Solomon! Why do you spoil it all? But you're right, of course, Peter, though I hate to think of that."

"I see how we're like, and how we're unlike, Julie," said Peter suddenly, "You like real things, and so do I. You hate to feel stuffy and tied up in conventions, and so do I. But you're content with just that, and I'm not."

"Am I?" she queried, looking at him a little strangely.

Peter did not notice; he was bent on pursuing his argument. "Yes, you are," he said. "When you're in the grip of real vital things—nature naked and unashamed—you have all you want. You don't stop to think of to-morrow. You live. But I, I feel that there is something round the corner all the time. I feel as if there must be something bigger than just that. I'd love your forest and your range and your natives, I think, but only because one is nearer something else with them than here. I don't know how to put it, but when you think of those things you feel full, and I still feel empty."

"Peter," said Julie softly, "do you remember Caudebec?"

He looked up at her then. "I shall never forget it, dear," he said.

"Then you'll remember our talk in the car?"

He nodded. "When you talked about marriage and human nature and men, and so on," he said.

"No, I don't mean that. I did talk of those things, and I gave you a little rather bitter philosophy that is more true than you think; but I don't mean that. Afterwards, when we spoke about shams and playing. Do you remember, I hinted that a big thing might come along—do you remember?"

He nodded again, but he did not speak.

"Well," she said, "it's come—that's all."

"Another bottle of Chianti, sir?" queried the padrone at his elbow.

Peter started. "What? Oh, yes, please," he said. "We can manage another bottle, Julie? And bring on the dessert now, will you?