The Thirteen Travellers. Hugh Walpole
will you? You went to Eton and Oxford and learnt nothing at all, and then waited for things to tumble into your hands. That's why commercial Germany beat us all round the world. Well, it won't be so any longer. The new world isn't made for you boys. You've got to win your way into it."
"You're quite right," Clive blushed. "Thank you very much."
Maradick looked at him, and his heart warmed to him.
"Take my tip and do a working-man's job. What about house-painting, for instance, or driving a taxi? They're getting big money. Just for a bit—to try your hand."
"Not a bad idea," said Clive. They shook hands in a most friendly fashion. Maradick spoke to his partner (at lunch) about him. "Nice boy," he said. "We'll have him in here later."
Clive went back to Hortons and met there the temptation of his life in the shape of his mother.
She was looking lovely in grey silk, Parma violets, and a little black hat. She was in one of her most sentimental moods. She cried a good deal and asked Clive what he intended to do. When she asked him that, what she really wanted was that he should say that he loved her. This he did in a hurried fashion, because he wanted to tell her about Maradick. She had, however, her own things that she wanted to say, and these were, in the main, that he was "her all," that it was too awful about Dronda, that John (Lord Dronda) had simply been losing thousands over his stupid old agriculture, and, finally, that she had money of her own on which dear Clive should live to the end of his days. All this nonsense about his working, as though he hadn't done enough already with his poor arm and everything. They should go away together and have a lovely time.
Clive was tempted. For ten minutes there raged a fierce battle. He knew that what she said could be true enough. That they could go away together and spend money together, and that she would give him everything that she had, and only want him in return to say over and over again that he loved her. They would wander about, and probably he would find some rich girl who would marry him, and then he would live on her. …
While he thought this out, words poured from his mother's lips in tattered confusion. No words used by his mother ever meant what she intended them to mean. Nevertheless, the last question held the substance of them all. "And you do really love me, Clive boy, don't you?"
The "Clive boy" really settled it, although I hope and believe that it would have been settled without that. But he could not wander about Europe as "Clive boy." …
So he said: "Thanks, mother. You're a brick, wantin' me to have everything and all that. But I really won't. I'm going to settle down and work."
"Whatever at, you poor foolish darling?" asked his mother.
"At anything I can get," he replied.
She left him at last, having cried just enough to show her real emotion without damaging her unreal complexion. Her Parma violets were also intact.
He was an unkind, ungrateful son, and her heart was broken, but at the same time he was "her all," and would he lunch with her to-morrow at Claridge's?
This he said that he would do. "My last good meal," he murmured to himself rather histrionically.
His mother departed.
He had a bad quarter of an hour after she had gone. The sacred precincts of Hortons contained at least one honest soul that afternoon. He saw himself exactly as he was—spoilt, useless, idle, and conceited. He swore to himself that he would find work of some kind before the day was done.
He went out. It was a lovely afternoon early in May. Mr. Bottome, the newsagent, had fine copies of Colour showing in his window, the top of Duke Street gazed straight into the huge naked-looking statue of a horse in the courtyard of the Academy. Everything seemed to be having a spring cleaning.
He turned back and down into Jermyn Street. Next to the Hamman Baths they were painting a house light green. A nice young fellow in overalls stepped off a ladder as Clive passed.
He smiled at Clive. Clive smiled back.
"Is that an easy job?" Clive asked him.
"Oh yes, sir," the young fellow answered.
"Could you manage it with one arm?" Clive asked.
"Why, yes," the man said.
"Could I pick it up quickly?"
"Lord, yes!"
"Will you teach me?"
A week later Mr. Nix, in a hurry as usual, was pattering up Duke Street. Bottome's paper shop was having a new coat of paint. A young workman in yellow overalls perched on a ladder managed his brush adroitly with one arm.
"Poor fellow!" said Mr. Nix, a compassionate man always, but doubly so now because he had lost his son in the war. "Left the other in France, I suppose."
The workman looked down, and revealed to the astonished countenance of Mr. Nix the laughing eyes of his late tenant, the Hon. Clive Torby.
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