‘I’m afraid,’ said his tormentor, ‘that Modern Art wouldn’t be quite suitable … just a little beyond us at present. It’s only simple village folk, Mr Ervine. No! But I was wondering if you could manage to give us a paper on Dante. That would be a splendid subject!’
‘Dante! But, my dear lady, I know nothing about him.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you do! All people interested in art must. Such a subject for great pictures … Burne-Jones, you know … and all those. And you’ve lived in Italy so much. I’m sure you could tell us a great deal which we do not know.’
Hubert wondered if he looked as ill as he felt. In a sickish voice he protested. He said he knew nothing about Italy before the Renaissance. He offered to lecture upon modern Italian novels if she liked. But Lady Clewer, who was a little suspicious of all continental novels, stuck to Dante. She would have nothing else. She bore him down and he dropped the subject until he could argue it out in a less public place. He was deeply disturbed and felt that she must have done it on purpose. She could have hit upon no surer means of making a fool of him and his intellect, which was very hard when he could be clever in so many ways. He wondered miserably whether he could entreat Lois not to come and listen to him, supposing he was forced to read this wretched paper. He looked at her and caught a glance of amused sympathy. Directing her regard to her mother, she assumed for an instant an expression of despair. This confidential by-play relieved him and he began to hope that he might carry the thing off creditably.
The meal drew to an end and some of the players returned to the courts. James, the artist, having finished his substantial tea, brought his cup and plate and placed them on the tray in front of his sister-in-law. She greeted this ceremony with a smile and a murmur of thanks.
‘Are you going to work, this lovely evening?’ she asked with some commiseration.
He nodded and shambled off towards the house.
‘He works too hard,’ she said, turning to Hubert. ‘I’ve never seen anyone work so. He uses an attic with a large north window and he simply lives up there. He should take more exercise. But Lady Clewer,’ with a nod at the dowager, ‘finds a good many energetic little things for him to do.’
‘What’s his line?’ asked Hubert. ‘In Paris, wasn’t he? Who did he work with?’
Lady Clewer considered for a moment and then recollected a name which galvanized Hubert slightly.
‘Oh! … He can draw then …’ he stated thoughtfully.
‘Can he?’
Lady Clewer looked amused.
‘Who? James?’ cried the dowager, who had been busy telling Sir Thomas that he must lecture on Blake at her Reading Union. ‘Oh, yes! James can draw. He could draw when he was quite little, couldn’t you, James? Where is he? Has he gone? How tiresome! I wanted him to take a note down to the village for me. And now he will be up all those stairs. Miss Barrington, kindly run up to his studio and tell him to come and speak to me, please. In my sitting-room.’
She hastened into the house, driving her secretary before her. Sir Thomas turned to his hostess with renewed gusto. Hubert felt a faint distaste at seeing them side by side. So fair a nymph and so foul a satyr were too striking an essay in contrast. These blatant tributes of admiration should have sickened her, but they obviously did not. She looked at Sir Thomas with palpable amusement, as though she perceived in his regard something to which she was but too well accustomed, and which, in him, diverted her by its obviousness. The same amusement was reflected upon the face of her husband as he strolled away towards the house a moment later. Hubert surmised that the possessor of such a wife must get used to a good deal.
‘All the same,’ he said to himself, ‘I’d put my foot down if any man looked at my wife like that. But I suppose Clewer knows his own business.’
A short sojourn in that household proved to him that Clewer knew his own business perfectly well. That very evening he routed Sir Thomas completely in the matter of a canoe. The night was exceptionally warm and after dinner it was agreed that a turn on the river would be pleasant. Lady Clewer and Sir Thomas led the way to the lowest terrace of the rose garden, where a small landing-stage had been put up. A punt and a canoe strained gently at their moorings and Sir Thomas, with crackling shirt-front and many stertorous breathings, stooped at once to the latter and began to pile it with gay cushions. The proceeding took some time since the current continually carried the frail craft beyond his reach. Lady Clewer, on the landing-stage, watched in brooding silence the last streaks of sunset smouldering on the edge of the water meadow. At length her cavalier, having prepared a resting-place for her, straightened himself for the delicate, delicious business of placing her in the canoe. There was no lady. Her husband, joining them, had with silent determination handed her into the punt, upon the deck of which he now stood, arrogantly wielding a pole. Sir Thomas made a chagrined attempt to plant himself upon the cushions at her side but was frustrated by the dowager.
Marian was not intending to accompany them, as she had important letters to write. But she had pursued them thus far expressly, so Hubert believed, to wreck his chances of an interview with Lois. She drove’ Sir Thomas back to the canoe and gave him Cynthia by way of consolation. Lois and Hubert were put into the punt and the party pushed off into midstream, leaving the matron upon the rose terrace. Her voice boomed down the dusky reaches after them, warning them not to stay out if the dew was heavy.
They slipped between green banks, sniffing the new-mown hay in wide, silent fields. Far ahead the canoe, with its ill-assorted freight, disappeared into the gloaming beneath some tall trees which overhung the stream. Wild roses, close to the water’s edge, splashed the darkness like little moons, their faint sweetness lost in the rich savour of Sir John’s cigar. Lady Clewer talked to Hubert in a voice pitched low to match the space and leisure of the night.
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘we have something rather terrible to break to you. I’m afraid it will be a shock. You will have to lecture on Dante at the Village Room next Friday, for it has been already billed.’
‘What! Since tea?’
‘No! The bills were up before you came.’
‘It’s a little way she has,’ observed Lois. ‘I expect she’ll make Mr Blair give a lecture.’
‘If she’ll let him lecture on neurosis I’m sure he won’t mind, for he can talk of nothing else.’
‘Oh … is he a nerve specialist?’ asked Hubert.
‘More or less; though he seems to dabble in diseases of the brain. I can never remember quite what his official line is. It’s all so modern.’
‘Quite young, isn’t he?’
‘Oh, yes. Young as they go, I suppose.’
‘Very young to have got so far as he has, Agatha,’ put in Sir John.
‘Married?’ asked Hubert carelessly.
The lady started slightly and paused a second before saying: ‘No. Not married.’
They fell silent, pushing through a reedy backwater, while far off, across the flat, mysterious fields, the bells of Oxford rang down the evening. When at last they returned to the landing-stage, they found the dowager wandering impatiently in the gathering night.
‘I came to call Cynthia,’ she cried. ‘There’s a heavy dew and she has only that thin muslin. Where is she? What? Somewhere in the canoe with Sir Thomas? How tiresome of them to be so late!’
‘Poor Cynthia,’ whispered Lois to Hubert, as they walked up through the garden. ‘How awful to spend this heavenly evening alone in a canoe with Sir Thomas!’
2.
Hubert’s execution on the pianoforte was energetic and skilful. He could go on playing, rapidly and accurately, for a long time. Lois, as she listened to him, was glad that he had not heard her Sussex Cycle. She knew now that he would see through it. He would be very polite and tell her that her work was effective, and adjective which, three weeks ago, she would have accepted as a compliment. But she had learnt a good deal lately. Beholding her compositions with new eyes she blushed for them. She had
become aware that the few really great works of art in the world are all relentlessly professional, and the others are scarcely worth mention.
In the past week she had begun to grasp in detail her new friend’s attitude towards the arts. She thought it austere yet fascinating. Despite her mother’s vigilance they had enjoyed several long and enchanting conversations and she found herself adopting many of his views. He was so delightfully arrogant in the laws he laid down; she longed to be able to speak with that assurance, that air of initiation. He had confessed to her the history of his own inner life, and how, in his fear of producing work which might be second-rate, he had decided that it would be better to do none at all. Rather than betray himself as the gifted amateur, he preferred to remain the mere critic, the friend of great men. His attitude struck her as very noble. Also it possessed undoubted compensations.
Beyond the window she could hear fragments of a prolonged conversation. Agatha was sitting on the terrace with that disagreeable cousin of hers. Lois and Hubert did not like Mr Blair. They thought him a dreary fellow, and his reputed brilliance in medicine did not excuse his lack of humour. He trod heavily on their witty conversation; indeed, he could scarcely open his mouth without saying something which contravened the taste of the house. He was serious, to the point of ill-temper, when they jested, and then he was unjustifiably flippant. His ill-judged sarcasms looked very shabby beside the agreeable audacities which flowed so easily from Hubert. Nobody had any patience with him but Agatha who was, after all, his cousin. And it had been her mother who had sent him there.
Mrs Cocks, now a widow, was enjoying a popularity as conspicuous as ever. Her activities were innumerable and so were her friends. These she was in the habit of sending to Lyndon whenever they were recovering from an illness. The place, she said, was as good as a hydro; John and Agatha were so lazy themselves that they required almost nothing from their guests. The cooking was perfect and nobody need come down before lunch-time. Meeting Gerald one day in town she had been shocked at his look of fatigue. Under cross-examination he had admitted to sleeplessness and overwork. Forthwith she had proffered an invitation to Oxfordshire on her daughter’s behalf. Despite his earnest protests she had insisted upon his going, and, once planted at Lyndon, he seemed too much exhausted to go away, though he liked little that he found there. Hubert was especially uncongenial to him, and all the while, as he talked to Agatha, he was frowning irritably because of the din in the drawing-room. At last he broke off to exclaim:
‘Isn’t that fellow playing much too fast?’
‘He always does,’ replied Agatha. ‘He belongs to that generation. Mrs Gordon Glewer, John’s great-aunt, explained it to me once. Have you met her?’
‘No. But I’ve heard her quoted.’
‘One does, doesn’t one? Well, she says that about twenty years ago there was a great reaction against young ladies’ drawing-room music. It was felt to be amateurish and inefficient. All the clever young men took to playing very fast, just to show that they could do it. Nowadays there is no particular merit in pace, as people don’t usually play at all unless they can do it well. So the most modern performers try to go more or less by what the composers obviously intended. But there is still a school which believes that there is something intrinsically a little vicious in Largos and Andantes.’
She laughed as Hubert galloped with evident embarrassment through the pathos of a slow movement and crashed joyfully into a finale conveniently marked Presto. But her cousin did not laugh: his scowl of annoyance deepened. He was sitting well forward in his deck chair, ignoring the cushions which stretched away untenanted behind him. His attitude irritated her; she thought that no one else at Lyndon would so use a chair meant for relaxation. John and Hubert could lounge very effectively, giving an attractive picture of muscularity in repose. Sir Thomas would sag heavily, straining to their utmost the frail canvas and tintacks. But Gerald did not seem to know how to take his ease and had sometimes a very lofty air towards the comfort of other people. She had once asked him, teasingly, if he never leant back in his chair; he had laughed and adopted an easier posture, but, a moment later, she was aware that he surveyed her own graceful lassitude with a detached severity.
This detachment was beginning to alarm her. She had observed it on the rare occasions when they met in town, but she had never thought that it meant very much. At Lyndon, however, it became uncomfortably obvious that he belonged to another world, and it did not please her that he made no attempt to adjust himself. She was disappointed in him. He looked unkempt and he said the wrong things. Four years had changed him unbelievably. He had lost his vitality and wit. He was becoming intolerant and dogmatic. She missed the personable, audacious companion of her childish escapades. And she was sure that he criticized her.
She knew that his hateful, mysterious work, the career to which he had prematurely sacrificed his youth, had done all this to him. She had asked him about it, anxious to discover something of the grim world which had absorbed him and made him a stranger. And he began to tell her, with a growing eagerness, of his work in a Parisian clinic. She thought it all rather horrible, shivering at the images he conjured up—the whitewashed walls, the smell of antiseptics, the bleak exposure of human agony, the alien standards of relentless toil. Yet these things were his life, just as Lyndon was hers, so she must listen.
Hubert ran down at last and the piano in the drawing-room was silent. Lyndon was hushed save for the perpetual humming of mowing machines on distant lawns. The musician and his lady came out on to the terrace. They both seemed to be very pleased with themselves and Hubert was humming:
‘Non mi dir
Bell’ idol mio
Che son io
Crudel con te.’
Lois hoped, with a faint suggestion of superiority, that the music had not disturbed anyone.
‘Not at all,’ rejoined Agatha sweetly. ‘We liked listening. But we were wondering why Mr Ervine always plays so fast.’
‘Do I play fast?’ parried Hubert, looking pleased.
‘It seemed to us that we had never heard that Beethoven played so fast before.’
‘Most people play it too slowly,’ he stated.
‘Yes? I wonder why that is?’
‘Of course, it’s a matter of taste,’ Lois told them.
‘Why yes, I thought it might be that,’ considered Agatha.
Hubert looked unhappy and she instantly said something which restored his equanimity, for it gave him an opportunity of displaying his knowledge of the moderns. He took her lead and they began a discussion which made Lois a little jealous. It was unfair that Agatha should be able to talk so well about things of which she really knew nothing at all. It was not as if she even pretended to knowledge or to any settled standards of taste. Her levity was shocking; she admitted to ignorances which would have covered Lois with mortification, and dismissed an acknowledged masterpiece airily as being too long and apt to bore her. Yet Hubert did not crush her, or lay down the law, he merely exerted himself to be amusing. It was strange how beauty could make a man forget himself. But perhaps he was secretly so contemptuous that he did not think her worth snubbing. Lois, remembering how didactic he could be in other company, trusted that this was so.
Gerald also was puzzled. He perceived that his cousin was talking with unexpected ability and it occurred to him that she might be wasting a very exceptional brain in this futile life of hers. Ervine was evidently the sort of man she liked, since she was so ready to use her wits when she talked to him. She was looking animated and amused. She did not see what a mountebank the fellow really was. Strange creature!
Agatha thought that the silent pair must be brought back into the conversation and turned to Lois, saying:
‘Has Mr Ervine heard you sing that religious song you have? You know! The one about the procession.’
Lois was alarmed, wondering which of the songs she would rather not sing to Hubert was about to be disinterred. Agatha, however, recollected the name and
it was quite a safe one. Hubert leapt at it delightedly and began to hum:
‘La foule autour d’un chêne antique
S’incline, en adorant.’
‘Wonderful, that octave descent!’ he told them. ‘Have you ever heard Mass in a Breton church? Have you seen the wave that goes over the people when the Host is raised? Like the wind over a sea of corn…. It’s thrilling. He’s got it exactly. That’s devotional, if ever music was.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ put in Gerald, seizing his opportunity. ‘I don’t agree with you at all. When first I heard that thing it struck me as being absolutely false. Music can’t be devotional unless it’s written devotionally. That fellow isn’t on his knees himself. He’s outside the thing, thinking how effective it all is. It may be a magnificent song, but it’s too self-conscious to be devotional. It doesn’t in the least remind me of Mass in a Breton church; at least, I’m sure it wouldn’t if I’d ever heard Mass in a Breton church. But it does convey an excellent impression of you, Ervine, being thrilled at the simple faith of the peasant.’
‘It’s always interesting,’ said Hubert in a nasty voice, ‘to entrap the scientific mind into an opinion on the arts. You especially, Blair, are generally so cautious. You stray so rarely beyond the fields of medical science and social economics. It’s a treat to hear you give yourself away.’
‘I expect he includes music in social economics,’ said Agatha, who was entertained by the antagonism between the men. ‘They are so amazingly elastic, you know. They can be made to include almost anything.’
‘Not music,’ Hubert assured her. ‘Dear lady, music at least has nothing economic about it. We may thank Heaven for that!’
Agatha frowned, not at Hubert’s piety, but because she did not like people who said ‘dear lady.’ She was quite pleased with Gerald for replying contentiously:
Ladies of Lyndon Page 7
