Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Frank felt exhausted and hungry, and he sat down and proceeded to cut the “sweet little grouse” of which Margery had spoken. He had a strange sense of having just awakened from a dream, or else having just fallen asleep and begun dreaming. He could not tell which seemed the most real — the hours he had just spent before the canvas, or the present moment with Margery in his thoughts. He only knew that the two were quite distinct and different.

  Suddenly he dropped his knife and fork with a crash, and turned to the picture again. Yes, there was no doubt about it. There was a curious look in the lines of the face, especially in the mouth, which suggested guilt; and yet, as Margery had said, it was very like him.

  Margery’s fears and doubts had returned to her for a moment with renewed force as she looked at the face Frank had drawn, but she had spent an hour out-of-doors, and the fresh autumn air had been hellebore to fantastic thoughts, and, by a violent effort, she had torn her vague disquiet out of her mind, and her manner to Frank had been perfectly natural. She soon returned with a teapot of fresh tea, and chatted to him while he breakfasted.

  “What part of your personality has gone this morning?’’ she asked. “It seems to me that you are just as sulky as you always are when you are painting. That’s unfortunate, because this afternoon we play tennis at the Fortescues’, and if you are sulky, why, there’ll be a pair of you — you and Mr. F. Oh, but what a dreadful man, Frank! I don’t love him one bit more than one Christian is bound to love another, and he’s a Presbyterian at that!”

  “Oh, I can’t go to the Fortescues’,” said Frank. “I want to get on with this. I’ve been working very hard, yet I haven’t finished drawing it yet.”

  “Don’t interrupt,” said Margery. “ Then we come home after tea, and the Rev. Mr. Greenock dines with us, and the Rev. Mrs. — particularly the Rev. Mrs.”

  “There are some people,” said Frank, “who make me feel as I imagine rabbits must feel when they find a ferret has been put into their burrow — I want to run away.”

  “Yes, dear, I know exactly what you mean. She’s got plenty of personality.”

  Margery’s presence was wonderfully soothing to Frank. She carried an atmosphere of sanity about with her which could not fail to make itself felt. He leaned back in his chair and thought no more of the portrait.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she went on. “Mother wants us both to come over to the Lizard and stay with her a couple of nights. She leaves on Thursday, you know, and I’ve hardly seen her.”

  “I can’t possibly go,” said Frank. “I can’t leave my painting when I’ve only just begun it.”

  “I wish you’d come,” said Margery.

  “Margery, how silly you are! I couldn’t possibly. But — but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go.”

  He suddenly sprang up. “ Margery, tell me not to go on with it,” he said, “and if you’ll do that I’ll come. But I can’t leave it.”

  “Frank, how silly you are. I shall do nothing of the kind. I wish you would leave it for a couple of days and come with me, but I know it’s no use arguing with you. I shall go, I think, for one night, not for two; so if I start to-morrow morning I shall get back on Friday evening. I must see mother again before she leaves Cornwall.” Frank walked back to the easel. “What’s the matter with it?” he said, impatiently.

  “You’ve only made yourself look very cross, dear,” said Margery, placidly. “You often do look cross, you know, but I should not advise you to paint yourself as cross as you are. Oh, Frank, I’ve got a brilliant idea!”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why, put all the crossness out of your personality into the picture, and then you’ll never be cross any more. Oh, I’m so glad I thought of that!” Frank had picked up the charcoal and put a few finishing lines to the face.

  “I’ve drawn it in carefully and freely, as if it was a black-and-white sketch,” he said. “There, that’s what I saw all morning, except just when you were breakfasting here.”

  “Oh, Frank, you do look a brute!” said Margery. “I’m not going to stop in the room with that, nor are you, because you are coming for a little walk till lunch-time. You have to see Hooper about mending that gate down to the rocks, and tell him, when he marks out the tennis-court, he must do it according to measurement, and not as his own exuberant fancy prompts. It’s about a hundred feet long. Come away out.”

  Frank turned from the easel.

  “Yes, I’ll come,” he said. “I can’t get on with that just now; I don’t know why; but unless I paint it as I see it I can’t paint it at all, and I see it like that.”

  “Well, nobody can say you’ve flattered yourself,” said Margery, consolingly.

  They strolled out through the sweetsmelling woods, full of scents after the night’s rain, and already beginning to turn gold and russet. A light mist still hung over the edges of the estuary, and five miles away, at Falmouth Harbor, the tall masts of the ships seemed to prick the skein of vapor like needles. The tide was up, and covered more than half of the little iron steps below the gate which had to be repaired, and long, brown-fingered sea-weed swung to and fro in the gentle swell of the water, like the hands of some blind man groping upward for light. Color, air, and sound alike seemed subdued and mellow, and with Margery by him Frank’s phantoms seemed to catch something of the prevailing tranquillity, and retired into the dim, aqueous mists, instead of hovering insistently round him, black - winged, scarlet-robed.

  “I think I’ll come to the Fortescues’, after all, this afternoon,” said Frank, as they turned homeward.

  “Why, of course you will.”

  “There’s no ‘of course’ about it, dear,” said Frank; “but I feel as if I couldn’t paint to-day.”

  “How dreadfully lazy you are!” said Margery, inconsistently. “You’d never do anything if it wasn’t for me. But you must promise to work very hard and sensibly to-morrow and next day, and when I come back I shall expect to see it more than half finished.”

  “Sensibly!” said Frank, impatiently; “there is no such thing. All good work is done in a sort of madness or somnambulism — I don’t know which. Everything worth doing is done by men possessed of demons.”

  “The demon of crossness seems to have haunted you this morning,” said Margery. “But you needn’t make yourself crosser than is consistent with truth.”

  “But supposing I can’t paint it in any other way than what you saw this morning?” asked Frank. “What am I to do, then?”

  “There! Now you are asking my advice,” said Margery, triumphantly, “although you always insist that I know nothing about art. Why, of course, you must paint it as you see it. You are forever saying that yourself.”

  “Well, you won’t like it,” said Frank. “If you’ll promise to eat your breakfast at nine and your lunch at two, and not work more than seven hours a day and go out not less than three, I will chance it. Mr. Armitage was so right when he said that good digestion was half the artistic sense.”

  “And the other half is bad dreams,” said Frank.

  “No; if you have good digestion, you don’t have bad dreams.”

  Frank walked on in silence.

  “If I only knew what was the matter with it,” he said, at length, “I could correct it. But I don’t, and I think it must be right. It’s very odd.”

  “It’s not a bit odd; it’s only because you didn’t eat your breakfast. And now you’ve got to eat your lunch.”

  Frank smoked a cigarette in his studio afterwards while Margery was getting ready. Soon he heard her calling, and got up to go. He stood for a moment in front of the portrait before leaving the room, and a momentary spasm of uncontrollable fear seized him.

  “My God!” he said, “she goes away to-morrow; and I — I shall be left alone with this!”

  CHAPTER V.

  FRANK got through his tennis-party without discredit. Margery’s presence seemed to have exorcised — for the time being, at any rate — the demon which he said pos
sessed him, and there was no apparent similarity between his nature and Mr. Fortescue’s. Ease of manner and a certain picturesqueness were natural to him, and Margery found herself forgetting the slightly disturbing events of the last twenty-four hours.

  Mr and Mrs. Greenock, who dined with them that evening, were gifted with oppressive personalities. Frank once said that he always felt as if Raphael’s clouds had descended on him when he talked to this gentleman. Raphael’s clouds, he maintained, were very likely big with blessing, but were somewhat solid in texture, and resembled benedictory feather-beds rather than benedictory clouds. The environment of benediction was possibly good for one in the long-run, but he himself considered it rather suffocating at the time. Mrs. Greenock, on the other hand, was an example of what Americans perhaps mean by a “very bright woman.” She was oppressively bright. She had bright blue eyes, which suggested buttons covered with shiny American cloth, and a nose like a ship’s prow, which seemed to cut the air when she moved. She asked artists questions about their art and musicians about their music, and if she had met a crossing-sweeper she would certainly have asked him questions about his crossing. This, she was persuaded, was the best way of improving an already superior intellect, as hers admittedly was. There is a great deal to be said for her view — there always was a great deal to be said for her views, and she usually said most of it herself. She always made a point of saying that she could remember anything you happened to tell her, in order to give Tom, or Harry, or Jane a really professional opinion in case they should happen to ask her questions on the subject in hand. She may, in fact, be described as a lioness-woman, who bore away all possible scraps to feed her whelps. Her methods of obtaining the scraps, however, as Frank had suggested, reminded one of a ferret at work. She had the same bright, cruel way of peering restlessly about.

  Mr and Mrs. Greenock were loudly and insistently punctual, and when Frank came into the drawing-room that evening he found his guests already there. Mrs. Greenock was snapping up pieces of information from Margery, and Mr. Greenock’s attitude gave the beholder to understand that the blessing of the Church hovered over this instructive intercourse.

  Mrs. Greenock instantly annexed Frank, as being able to give her more professional, and therefore more nutritive, scraps of intellectual food than his wife. She had a rich barytone voice and an impressive delivery.

  “I’m sure you’ll think me dreadfully ignorant,” she said; “but when dear Kate asked me when Leonardo died I was unable to tell her within ten years. Now, what was the date?”

  “I really could not say for certain,” said Frank; “ I forget the exact year, if I ever knew it.”

  Mrs. Greenock heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Thank you so much, Mr. Trevor,” she said. “Then may I tell dear Kate that even you don’t know for certain, and so it cannot have been an epoch-making year? When one knows so little and wants to know so much, it is always worth while remembering that there is something one need not know. Now, which would you say was the most epoch-making year in the history of Art?” —

  Frank felt helpless with the bright, cruel eyes of the ferret fastened on his face, and he shifted nervously from one foot to the other.

  “It would be hard to say that any one year was epoch-making,” he replied; “but I should say that the Italian Renaissance generally was the greatest epoch.

  May I take you in to dinner?”

  Mrs. Greenock turned her eyes up to the ceiling as if in a sudden spasm of gratitude.

  “Thank you so much for telling me that. Algernon dear, did you hear what Mr. Trevor said about the Italian Renaissance? He agrees with us.”

  Mrs. Greenock unfolded her napkin as if she were in expectation of finding the manna of professional opinion wrapped up in it, and was a little disappointed on discovering only a piece of ordinary bread.

  “And what, Mr. Trevor, if I may ask you this — what is the subject of your next picture? Naturally I wish to know exactly all that is going on round me. That is the only way, is it not, of being able to trace the tendencies of Art? Historical, romantic, realistic — what?”

  “I’ve just begun a portrait of myself,” said Frank.

  Mrs. Greenock laid down the spoonful of soup she was raising to her lips, as if the mental food she was receiving was more suited to supply her needs than potage à la bonne femme.

  “Thank you so much,” she ejaculated. “Algernon dear, Mr. Trevor is doing a portrait of himself. Remind me to tell Harry that as soon as we get home. Ah, what a revelation it will be! An artist’s portrait of himself — the portrait of you by yourself. That is the only true way for artists to teach us, to show us theirselves — what they are, not only what they look like.” Frank crumbled his bread with subdued violence.

  “You have hit the nail on the head,” he replied. “That is exactly what I mean to do.”

  Mrs. Greenock was delighted. This was a sort of testimonial to the superiority of her intellect, written in the hand of a professional.

  “Please tell me more,” she said, rejecting an entrée.

  “There is nothing to tell,” he said; “you have got to the root of the matter. A portrait should be, as you say, the man himself, not what he looks like. We are often very different to what we look like, and a gallery of real portraits would be a very startling thing. So many portraits are merely colored photographs. My endeavor is that this shall be something more than that.”

  “Yes!” said Mrs. Greenock, eagerly. “You shall see it if you wish,” said Frank, “but it will not be finished for a couple of days yet. My wife goes away to-morrow for a night, and as I shall be alone I shall work very hard at it. It—”

  Frank was speaking in his lowest audible tones, but he stopped suddenly. He was afraid for a moment that he would actually lose all control over himself. As he spoke all his strange dreams and fancies surged back over his mind, and he could hardly prevent himself from crying aloud. He looked up and caught Margery’s eye, and she, seeing that something was wrong, referred a point which she or Mr. Greenock had been discussing to his wife. Meantime Frank pulled himself together, but registered a solemn vow that never till the crack of doom should Mrs. Greenock set foot in his house again. He and Margery had had a small tussle over the necessity of asking the vicar to dinner, but Margery had insisted that every one always asked the vicar to dine, and Frank, of weaker will than she, had acquiesced. Poor Mrs. Greenock had unconsciously launched herself on very thin ice, and Frank inwardly absolved himself from all responsibility if she tried the experiment again.

  When the two ladies left the room Mr. Greenock’s feather-bed descents began in earnest. It was trying, but he was less likely to go in dangerous places than his predatory wife. He would not drink any more wine, and he would not smoke; but when Frank proposed that they should join the ladies, he said:

  “It so seldom happens, in this secluded corner of the world, that I can converse with men who have lived their lives in a sphere so different to mine, that I confess I should much enjoy a little longer talk with you.”

  “Yes, I suppose you get few visitors here,” said Frank.

  “The visitors we get here,” said Mr. Greenock, “are chiefly tourists who are not inclined for an interchange of thought and experience. Sometimes I see them in our little church-yard where so many men of note are buried, but they do not stop. Indeed, it would indicate a morbid tendency if they did.”

  “I have often noticed how many names one knows are on the graves in your church-yard,” said Frank.

  “It is a solemn thought,” said Mr. Greenock, “that in our little churchyard lies all that is mortal of so many brilliant intellects and exceptional abilities. ‘Green grows the grass on their graves,’ as my wife beautifully expressed it the other day in a little lyric.”

  “Dear me, I did not know that Mrs. Greenock wrote poetry,” said Frank.

  “She is a sonneteer of considerable power,” said the vicar.

  Frank, who had always thought of Mrs. Greenock
in the light of a Puritan rather than a sonneteer, gave a sudden choke of laughter. But Mr. Greenock was arranging his next sentence and did not hear it.

  “Her verses are always distinguished by their thoughtfully chosen similes,” he continued, “and their flow of harmonious language.”

  “You can hardly feel out of the world if you always have a poet by you.”

  “The career of a poet,” said Mr. Greenock, “is always beset with snares and difficulties. On the one hand, there is the danger of a too easily gained popularity, and, on the other, the discouraging effect of the absence of an audience.”

  “I am sure I can guess to which danger Mrs. Greenock is most exposed,” said Frank, rather wildly.

  “You are pleased to say so,” said the vicar, with an appreciative wave of his hand. “In point of fact, some verses of hers which have appeared from time to time in a local paper have attracted much not unmerited attention. She is preparing a small volume of verse-idyls for publication.”

  Mr. Greenock rose, as if further interchange of thought and experience could not but be bathos after this, and Frank and he joined the ladies.

  Mrs. Greenock was seized with sensitiveness when she heard that Frank had learned about the forthcoming verse -idyls, but soon recovered sufficiently to make some very true though not very original remarks on the beauty of the moonlit sea, and pressed Frank to tell her whether any one had ever painted a moonlit scene. Frank cast a glance of concentrated hatred at the unoffending moon, and proceeded to answer.

  “In this imperfect world,” he said, “it would surely be too much to expect that we can convince any one else. It is sufficient if we can convince ourselves. What on earth does the opinion of the foolish crowd matter to an artist? Their praise is almost more distasteful than their censure. Have you ever seen a critic? I met one once at dinner and — God forgive him, for I cannot — he admired my pictures. He admired them all, and he admired them for the wrong reasons. He admired just that which was intelligible to him. He added insult to injury by praising them in one of those penny-in-the-slot journals, as some one says. No man has a right to criticise a picture unless he knows more about Art than the man who painted it. Carry conviction to any one else? Wait till the day when your poems seem ugly to you, when all you write seems commonplace and trivial; you will not care about convincing other people then. Yon will say, ‘It is enough if I can write a line which seems to me only not execrable.’ Extremes meet, and contentment comes only to those who know nothing or who nearly know all.”