"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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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