Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  But there was one point which troubled her: she had quite unaccountably shrunk from him when he ran to meet her across the studio, and she had shrunk from him again when she saw his face. She told herself that this was her own silliness, not his, and that it was ridiculous of her to try to cure Frank of his absurdities while she was so absurd herself. She had shrunk back involuntarily, as if from an evil thing.

  “How absurd and ridiculous of me,” she said to herself, as she settled herself in bed. “Frank is Frank, and it is his idea that he is ceasing or will cease to be Frank which I have thought all along is so supremely silly, and which I think supremely silly still. Yet I shrank from him as I would from a man who had committed a crime.”

  Then suddenly another thought came to join this one in her brain: “What crimes? What do you know of my crimes?”

  The contact and the electric spark had been instantaneous, for she wrenched the two thoughts apart. But they had come together, and between them they had generated a spark of light.

  And so, without knowing it, she knew for a moment what was Frank’s secret which he dared not tell her.

  CHAPTER VII.

  FRANK got up, as his custom was, very early next morning, and went straight to the studio; and Margery, keeping to the resolve of the night before, left him alone all morning. She had sent his breakfast in to him, but ate hers alone in her morning-room.

  The knowledge that she was with him had had a quieting effect on Frank, and he had slept deep and dreamlessly. As he walked along the passage to his studio he felt that he hardly feared what he would find there. How could the ghost of what was dead in him have any chance, so to speak, against the near, living reality of Margery and Margery’s love? Was not good more powerful than evil? But when he entered the studio and had wheeled the portrait back into its place, the supremacy of one side of his nature over the other was reversed instantaneously — almost without consciousness of transition. The power which the thing his hands had been working out for the last few days had acquired was becoming overwhelming. When Margery was with him, actually with him, she still held up his better part; but when he was alone with this, all that was good sank like lead in an unplumbed sea. He was like some heathen who makes with his own hands an idol of stone or wood, and then bows down before that which he himself made, believing that it is lord over him.

  All morning Margery successfully fought against her inclination to go to Frank, for she was clear in her own mind that he had to work out his salvation alone. He was afraid of being alone, and the only way to teach him not to be afraid was to let him learn in solitude that there was nothing to be afraid of. So she yawned an hour away over a two-volume novel by a popular author, wrote a letter to her mother, ordered dinner, and tried to think she was very busy. But it was with a certain sense of relief that she heard the clock strike one, and, shutting up her book, she went to the studio.

  Frank was standing with his back to the door, and did not look up from his work when she entered. She came up behind him and saw what he had wished her not to see the night before, and understood why. He always worked rapidly though never hurriedly, and she knew at once what the finished picture would be like. The “idea” was recorded.

  She gave a sudden start and a little cry as sharp and involuntary as the cry of physical pain, for the meaning of the first rough sketch which had puzzled her was now worked out, and she saw before her the face of a guilty man. She shrank and shuddered as she had shrunk when her husband ran to meet her across the studio the night before, and as she had shrunk from him when she saw his face, for the face that looked out from that canvas was the same as her husband’s face which had so startled and repelled her. It was the face of a man who has wilfully stifled certain nobler impulses for the sake of something wicked, and who was stifling them still. It was the face of a man who has fallen, and when she turned to look at Frank she saw that he had in the portrait seized on something that stared from every line of his features.

  “Ah, Frank,” she cried, “but what has happened? It is horrible, and you — you are horrible, too!”

  Frank did not seem to hear, for he went on painting; but she heard him murmur below his breath:

  “Yes, horrible, horrible!”

  For the moment Margery lost her nerve completely. She was incontrollably frightened.

  “Frank, Frank!” she cried, hysterically.

  Then she cursed her own folly. That was not the way to teach him. She laid one hand on his arm, and with her voice again in control, “Leave off painting,” she said— “leave off painting at once and look at me!”

  This time he heard. His right hand, holding a brush filled with paint, dropped nervelessly to his side, and the brush slid from his fingers on to the floor.

  In that moment his face changed. The vicious, guilty lines softened and faded, and his expression became that of a frightened child.

  “Ah, Margery,” he cried, “what has happened? Why were you not here? What have I been doing?”

  Margery had got between him and the picture, and before he had finished speaking she had wheeled it round with its face to the wall.

  “You’ve been working long enough,” she said, “and you are coming out for a bit.”

  “Yes, that will be nice,” said Frank, picking up the brush he had dropped and examining it. “Why, it is quite full of paint,” he added, as if this remarkable discovery was quite worth comment.

  “You dear, how extraordinary!” said Margery. “You usually paint with dry brushes, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I’ve been painting all morning, so I have!” said Frank, in the same listless, tired voice, and his eye wandered to the easel which Margery had turned round.

  “NO, you’ve got to let it alone,” said she, guessing his intention. “You are not going to work any more till this afternoon.”

  Frank passed his hands over his eyes. “I’m rather tired,” he said. “I think I won’t go for a walk. I’ll sit down here if you will stop with me.”

  “Very good, for ten minutes; and then you must come out. It’s a lovely morning, and we’ll only stroll.”

  Frank looked out of the window.

  “My God! it is a lovely morning,” he said— “it is insolently lovely. I’ve been dreaming, I think. Those trees look as if they were dreaming, too. I wonder if they have such horrible dreams as I? I think I must have been asleep. I feel queer and only half awake, and I’ve had bad dreams — horrid dreams.”

  “Did he have nasty dreams?” said she, sympathetically. “He said he was going to work so hard, and he’s dreamed instead.”

  Frank seemed hardly to hear her.

  “It began by my wondering whether I ought to go on with that portrait or not,” he said. “I kept thinking—”

  “You shall go on with it, Frank,” broke in Margery, suddenly, afraid of letting herself consent— “I tell YOU that you must go on with it.’’

  Frank roused himself at the sound of her eager voice.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I know that I am running a certain risk if I do. I told you about one of those risks I was running, didn’t I? It was that, partly, I was drawing about all morning. I thought I was in danger all the time. I was running the risk of losing myself, or becoming something quite different to what I am. I ran the risk of losing you, myself — all I care for, except my Art.”

  “And with a big ‘A,’ dear?” asked Margery.

  “With the very biggest ‘A,’ and all scarlet.”

  “The Scarlet Letter,” said Margery, triumphantly, “which you were reading last week? That accounts for that symptom. Go on and be more explicit!”

  “I know you think it is all absurd,” said Frank, “but I am a better judge than you. I know myself better than you know me — better, please God, than you will ever know me. However, you won’t understand that. But with regard to what I told you: when I paint a picture, you think the net result is I and a picture, instead of I alone. But you are wrong. There is only I just a
s before; and inasmuch as there is a picture, there is less of myself here in my clothes.”

  “A picture is oil-paint,” said Margery, “and you buy that at shops.”

  “Yes, and brushes too,” said Frank; “but a picture is not only oil-paint and brushes.”

  “Go on,” said Margery.

  “Well, have I got any right to do it? In other pictures it has not mattered because one recuperates by degrees, and one does not put all one’s self into them. But painting this I feel differently. I am going into it, slowly but inevitably. I shall put all I am into it — at least, all I know of while I am painting; and what will happen to this thing here” (he pointed to himself) “I can’t say. All the time I was painting, that thought with others was with me, as if it had been written in fire on my brain. Have I got any business to run risks which I can’t estimate? I know I have a certain duty to perform to you and others, and is it right for me to risk all that for a painted thing?”

  He stood up.

  “Margery,” he said, “that is not all. Shall I tell you the rest? There is another risk I run much more important, and much more terrible. May I tell you?”

  “No, you may not,” said Margery, decidedly. “It simply makes these fantastic fears more real to you to speak of them. You shall not tell me. And now we are going out. But I have one thing to tell you. Listen to me, Frank,” she said, standing up and facing him. “As you said just now, you know nothing of the risk you run. All you do know is that it is in your power, as you believe, and as I believe, to do something really good if you go on with that picture. I don’t say that I shall like it, but it may be a splendid piece of work without that. Are you an artist, or a silly child, frightened of ghosts? I want you to finish it because I think it may teach you that you have a large number of silly ideas in your head, and when you see that none of them are fulfilled it may help you to get rid of them — in fact, I believe I want you to finish it for the same reason for which you are afraid to finish it. You say you will lose your personality, or some of your personality. I say you will get rid of a great many silly ideas. If you lose that part of your personality I shall be delighted — in fact, it is the best thing that could happen to you. As for your other fears, I don’t know what they are, and I don’t want to know. To speak of them encourages you to believe in them. There! Now you’ve worked enough for the present, and we’ll go for a stroll till lunch; and after lunch we’ll go out again, and you can work for another hour or two before it gets dark.” It required all Margery’s resolution and self-control to get through this speech. It was not a pretty thing that had looked out at her from the easel, and the look she had seen twice on Frank’s face, and felt once, was not pretty either. That his work had a very definite and startling effect on him she knew from personal experience, but that anything could happen to him she entirely declined to believe. He was cross, irritable, odious, as she often told him, when he was interested in his work, but when it was over he became calm, unruffled, and delightful again. She was fully determined he should do this portrait, and to himself she allowed that it would be a relief when it was finished.

  Frank got up at once with unusual docility. As a rule, he scowled and snarled when she fetched him away from his work, and made himself generally disagreeable. This uncommon state of things gave Margery great surprise.

  “Well, why don’t you say you’ll be blessed if you come?” she asked, moving towards the door.

  “Ah, I’m quite willing to come,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I come? I always would come anywhere with you.”

  He followed her towards the door, and in passing suddenly caught sight of the easel. He looked round like a child afraid of being detected in doing something it ought not, and before Margery could stop him he had taken two quick steps towards it and turned it round. In a moment his mood changed.

  “Do you see that?” he said in a whisper, as if the thing would overhear him. “That’s what I was all the morning when you were not here, and I knew I oughtn’t to be painting. Wait a minute, Margy; I want to finish a bit I was working at!”

  His face grew suddenly pale, and the look of guilt descended on it like a mist, blotting out the features.

  “That’s what you are making of me,” he said. “Give me my palette. Quick! I sha’n’t be a minute.”

  But Margery caught up, as she had often done before, his palette and brushes from the table where he had left them, and fled with them to the door.

  “Give them to me at once!” shouted Frank, holding out his hand for them, but still looking at the picture.

  Margery gave one long-drawn breath of pain and horror when she looked at Frank’s face, and then, a blessed sense of humor coming to her aid, she broke out into a light laugh — half hysterical and half amused.

  “Oh, Frank,” she cried, “you look exactly like Irving in ‘Macbeth’ when he says, ‘This is a sorry sight! I never saw a sorrier.’”

  At the sound of her voice, more particularly at the sound of her laugh, he turned and looked at her, and the horror faded from his face.

  “What have I been saying?” he asked. “You said, ‘Give me the daggers!’ — oh no, Lady Macbeth says that. Well, here they are. Come to me, Frank, and I’ll give you them.”

  Frank walked obediently up to her, as she stood in the entrance to the passage, and as soon as he was outside the studio she banged the door and stood in front of it triumphantly.

  “Here are the daggers,” she said, “but you are not going to use them now. You shall finish that picture, but not like a madman. And if you look like Macbeth any more I shall simply die of it; or I shall behave like Lady Macbeth, and then there will be a pair of us. I shall walk in my sleep down to the sea, and wash my hands all day till it gets quite red. Now you’re coming out. March!”

  CHAPTER VIII.

  AFTER lunch Frank and Margery went down to the river and cruised about in a little boat, exploring, as they had explored a hundred times before, the unexpected but well-known little creeks which ran up between the hummocks of the broad-backed hills, shut in and shadowed by delicate-leaved beech-trees. When the tide was high it was possible to get some way up into these wooded retreats, and by remaining very still, or going quickly and silently round a corner, you might sometimes catch sight of a kingfisher flashing up from the shallows and darting along the lane of flecked sunlight like a jewel flung through the air. There had been a frost, the first of the year, the night before, and the broad - leaved docks and hemlocks lining the banks had still drops of moisture on their leaves like pearls or moon-stones semées on to green velvet. The woods had taken a deeper autumnal tint in the last two days, and already the five-ribbed chestnut leaves, the first of all to fall, were lying scattered on the ground. Every now and then a rabbit scuttled away to seek the protection of thicker undergrowth, or a young cock pheasant, as yet unmolested, stood and looked at the intruders.

  Margery was surprised to find how great the relief of getting Frank away from his picture was. The horrible guilty look on the portrait’s face, and, more than that, the knowledge that it was a terribly true realization of her husband’s expression, disturbed her more than she liked to admit even to herself.

  But nothing, she determined — not if all the ghosts out of the Decameron sat in her husband’s eyes — should make her abandon her resolution of compelling Frank to finish it. She did not believe in occult phenomena of this description; no painting of any portrait could alter the painter’s nature. To get tired and anxious was not the same as losing your personality; the first, if one was working well and hard, was inevitable; the second was impossible, it was nonsense. Decidedly she did not believe in the possibility of his losing his personality. But with all her resolutions to the contrary, she could not help wondering what the other fear, which she had forbidden him to tell her, was. Vaguely in her own mind she connected it with that strange shudder she had felt when she saw him the night before; and quite irrelevantly, as it seemed to her, the image came into her mind of som
ething hidden rising to the surface — of the sea giving up its dead....

  It was on this point alone she distrusted herself and all the resolutions she had made. She did not yet know clearly what she feared, but she realized dimly that there was a possibility of its becoming clearer to her, and that when it became clearer she would have to decide afresh. At present her one desire was that he should finish the portrait, and finish it as quickly as possible. But at any rate she had Frank with her now, as she had known him and loved him all their life together. That love she would not risk, but at present she did not see where the risk could come in. With her, and away from the portrait, he was again completely himself. He looked tired and was rather silent, and often when she turned from her place in the bow (where she was looking for concealed snags or roots in the water) to him, as he punted the boat quietly along with an oar, for the stream was narrow to row in, she saw him standing still, oar in hand, looking at her, and when their eyes met he smiled.

  “It is like that first afternoon we were here, Margy, isn’t it?” he said on one of these occasions. “Do you remember? We got here on a September morning, after travelling all night from London, and after lunch we came up this very creek.”

  “‘Yes, Frank, and I feel just as I did then.”

  “What did you feel?”

  “Why — why, that I had got you all to myself at last, and that I did not care about anything else.”