The Persian Price by Evelyn Anthony Read Free Book Online

toothbrush, shaving kit and pyjamas. Enough to see him through one night. He had been brought up with what he described as ‘things’. His mother collected ornaments; the house in Cleveland was like an obstacle course, strewn with her expensive, maddening knick-knacks. His father had cars, a workroom full of gadgets; for his eighteenth birthday they had given him an elaborate hi-fi system which he had never used. They were ‘thing’ people, obsessed with what they owned or wanted to buy. They couldn’t understand his contempt for material possessions. There were three children, an older sister and another boy, described by his mother as an afterthought. Peters thought this the most humiliating thing he had ever heard; the fact that it was always said with an arch smile and a pat on the boy’s head only made it seem worse. He had resented it, but his brother didn’t seem to mind.
    He was the odd one out, the silent introverted child, the withdrawn hostile adolescent; a sharp stone in the family sandpit. His sister had gone through college and business school, married a keen young advertising man and moved to San Francisco. Peters hadn’t seen or heard of her since he left America. His younger brother was going through school when he took off; he seemed cast in the same plastic mould as his parents and his sister.
    Peters had never explained to them why he diverged; he had found it impossible to communicate because their words didn’t mean the same thing as his. When they talked of freedom, he saw it as conservative repression; his freedom was nothing but anarchy to them. Morals meant sexual behaviour to them; to him they were an ethical approach to humanity which didn’t include copulation. Success was a word that they used like a weapon. He had to succeed. At school, at college, with the neighbours’ daughters. He had to compete and be better. The effort not only repelled him but with all his soul he rejected the prize. He didn’t want to better his friends in order to win the approval of a generation which he despised and whose standards he refused to accept. He had worked at school and taken his degree at college, but not for any of the reasons put forward by his parents. He wanted to study life and history, to understand the riddle of the world he lived in without accepting ready answers. He never discussed anything with them or confided in them. They complained, sometimes to his face, that he was a stranger. Peters had long recognized this and adjusted to it. Birth was an accident; he had been left at the wrong doorstep.
    He was not aware of being lonely until he went to Kent State University. He didn’t mix readily with the other students, although he found the atmosphere the most congenial he had experienced so far. There was a revolutionary spirit on the campus, a liberality of thought and a lack of convention which stimulated him. He made a few friends, discontented intellectuals from similar backgrounds to himself, and formed the first deep relationship of his life. Andrew Barnes was his thesis adviser in political science; he was twenty-six years old, and Peters just eighteen. Barnes was slight and limped after an attack of polio as a boy; he was quiet and serious, with a sense of humour that was usually at his own expense. By contrast, his favourite student was powerful, with a talent for athletics which would have brought a different character into the top ranks of college football; Peters was reserved and silent, Andrew Barnes loved talking. He initiated Peters into the pleasures of debate; he taught him to think and to express his thoughts. He overcame the younger boy’s inclination to hold back from things and people that he disapproved of, and he preached the gospel of change through attack. Attack through education, debate, ideas. And as a last resort, through confrontation. Barnes was a Marxist; he would have rejected in horror the accusation that he