Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Just as they were going down to dinner Tom said to her —

  “I am glad you went, May; you made it easier for the poor old fellow. How real it all is to you!”

  “Yes, Tom,” she said, “it is the realest thing in the world.”

  Unluckily, at that moment Tom’s candle fell out of the candle-stick he was carrying, spattering his trousers with wax, and making it absolutely imperative to speak of the annoying ways of wax candles, and the possible opportunity passed, and it became harder to take advantage of the next.

  Old Mr. Carlingford was not very well. He was suffering from a slight attack of gout, and the man who behaves cheerfully and equably under such an infliction has yet to be found. Consequently at dinner he spent his irritation by being less amiably cynical than usual, and he discussed questions of ethics in a somewhat unpleasant manner.

  “Good and bad is a very poor division to make of the human race,” he said. “How is one to know in ninety cases out of a hundred if a man is good or not? He doesn’t wear a certificate round his neck. You might as well divide the race, for any practical purpose, into those who have got strawberry marks on their left arm and those who have not Fools and wise is the only proper classification.” —

  “But they don’t wear certificates round their necks,” said Tom.

  “No, Tom, and people don’t wear certificates round their necks to say whether they’ve got noses or not. The fact is so patent.” —

  “Only to the wise,” said Tom.

  “Exactly so, and the fools don’t matter. Whereas about good and bad, the better a man is the more easily is he deceived, because it is impossible to know much of this wicked world and remain good.

  “Keep yourself unspotted from the world!’ Yes, you can do that if you seal yourself hermetically up in a convent or monastery, in which case it is hard to see why you have been born at all. To live like that casts a stigma on the intelligence of the Creator.”

  Tom unthinkingly laughed, for the conviction which his father threw into this last remark amused him, but looking up he saw May flush deeply and bend her eyes over her plate. Dessert was on the table, and she ate her orange quickly, and rose to leave.

  Tom saw the trouble in her face, but did not see how to remedy it. He and his father drew their chairs up to the fire, and the latter, abstaining for hygienic reasons from port, “took it out” in cynicism.

  “I don’t mind saying these things to you, Tom,” he said, “because I don’t think you are a fool. Do you remember when you told me you were going to be a sculptor, how I warned you against folly? A dislike of folly is the one thing I have successfully cultivated, and I should like put on my tombstone: ‘He hated a fool.’ Especially I hate those fools who talk about their consciences. Conscience is simply ecclesiastical argot for digestion. No man with a good digestion has a bad conscience. The health of the conscience varies with the health of the digestion.”

  “But people with bad digestions have good consciences sometimes,” said Tom.

  “Yes, because their health is so inferior that they cease thinking about their bodies, and as they have to think about something, they think about an imaginary existence which they call their souls.”

  “Is that all your creed?” asked Tom. “I believe in my digestion.”

  “No, it’s not my creed at all. It is a self-evident proposition; nobody makes creeds of self-evident propositions, or we should all say twice two are four every morning. My creed is, I believe in nothing, but I am amused at everything except the gout” Tom laughed and helped himself to some more port.

  “I wish you had the gout, Tom,” went on the old gentleman; “it is perfectly loathsome to see you drinking port when I can’t I never am quite sure whether I would sooner have port and gout or neither, but I believe that if one goes on drinking port when one has gout one dies. That would annoy me immensely. Any one can die.”

  “Yes, it’s very easy,” said Tom. “I suppose that’s why every one does it.”

  “It’s sheer laziness in most cases,” said his father; “people die when they cease to be interested in things. Unless, of course, they catch small-pox or cholera, but gentlemen don’t do such things.”

  “Poor old Lambert is dead,” said Tom, after a pause; “he died this evening. May was with him.”

  “That wife of yours is an angel,” remarked Mr. Carlingford. “I really begin to believe in angels, at least in one angel, when I think of her. If I was Providence I should be immensely proud of myself for having invented her. I suppose she helped him through it?”

  “Yes, she did help him,” said Tom eagerly; “he had been asking for her all the afternoon, and she prayed with him, and he died quietly instead of being afraid.”

  “What did she say to him?”

  “Ah, don’t ask me, father,” said Tom, rising. “It was all very strange to me, because it was so real to them both.”

  “But what was real to them?” asked his father. “ Don’t you suppose that the mere presence of May was what soothed the old man? — it would soothe me, I know. I hope May will be with me when I die. But I shan’t want soothing — I shan’t die until I no longer want to live. I am sure of that, and it is a most comforting thought, and as soon as I no longer want to live I am quite content that the powers of hell should do their worst, as that hymn we had on Easter Sunday says.”

  “No, it wasn’t her mere presence,” said Tom; “it was that she reminded him of what they both believed.”

  “Well, if he believed it, why did he need to be reminded of it?” demanded his father. “It is so odd that Christians send for clergymen on their death-beds, especially as those particular Christians who do so seem to me to look upon God Himself as a sort of immeasurable clergyman. It ought to be the one time they do not want them. No, you may depend on it, it was simply her presence. Have you finished drinking liquid gout? If so, we’ll go.”

  When May went to bed Mr. Carlingford kissed her very affectionately.

  “My dear, I wonder whether you are as nice to Tom as you are to me,” he said. “I don’t believe you can be, or else I should be jealous of him. Good-night, dear; you’ve had a tiring day.”

  The two were moving up to London the next week, whither old Mr. Carlingford absolutely and entirely declined to accompany them. “London only tolerable,” he said, “when it is quite full of fools. I dare say there are plenty, even in January, but I can’t go to the New Cut to look for them. The New Cut smells of cabbages and Salvation armies.”

  “You’d much better come with us, father,” said Tom. “You know you will feel awfully lonely without us.”

  “I would sooner be lonely than live in that barrack in Grosvenor Square in January,” said he; “ besides, the house will be full of models and clay. I believe we are all clay, and I don’t want to associate with models.”

  “There will soon be clay models too,” added Tom. “I’m going to work hard.”

  His father looked meditatively out of the window. The carriage had come round, and they were putting in the luggage.

  “If all men had to work and all women had to weep, every self-respecting man would cut his throat this moment, and every self-respecting woman would drown herself in her tears. What charming things family parties would be, you know! Perhaps it’s right for you to work, though I don’t see why you should; but don’t let May weep. Ah, here she is! Well, good-bye. I suppose one or both of you will be coming down here soon.”

  May’s inclination had been to stop down in the country longer, but Tom represented that he really had to begin to work at once, and that no one in the world — not even himself — could work in the country. The Golden Age was going to return — the earth was again to be peopled with gods and goddesses; a shining procession was to begin to walk out of his studio. The grand style was possible. While the Hermes stood still and smiled at the baby on his arm nothing was impossible. Art ruled the world. He thought of the old paradox that nature copied art, and found that it contained its grai
n of truth. Until Turner painted golden liquid sunsets, they did not exist, or at any rate no one saw them, whereas now any one who had seen a first-rate Turner could find one on any clear summer’s evening in the country; and until he saw the Hermes he did not know there were such people, but as a matter of fact he met half a dozen of them now in every street in London. They were there all the time, but one had to be taught how to see them. And he finished up with “Ars longa.”

  This last argument appealed to May. Tom was ready to begin working; it was criminal to delay. The herald of the Golden Age, the Iris who was to bring it down from heaven, was a statue of Demeter mourning for her lost child. Tom had already made a small clay sketch of it, and he could wait no longer. Besides, there was Wallingthorpe to be confuted. That eminent artist had used all his powers of eloquence in abuse, persuasion, and lament over Tom, who had heard him unmoved, and merely asked him as a personal favour to wait until he saw what could be done. Wallingthorpe talked about civilization and advance, and the torchlight procession of artists who ran and handed on the flaring brand from the one to the other until it reached the goal. The torch was in Tom’s hands, and instead of running on with it towards the goal, he was deliberately running backwards and laying it at the feet of Praxiteles. It was a Vandalism.

  Tom roared with laughter over that brilliant tirade, and vowed he would make a heroic group, in which he himself was kneeling before Praxiteles and handing him the torch of Art, while Wallingthorpe in a frock coat and tall hat was trying to snatch it away. It was a fine subject Many thanks for the suggestion.

  So May yielded, and paid farewell visits among all the old parishioners, and one snowy afternoon in January, as has been stated, they drove away from Applethorpe up to London, and Tom started his work as an artist seriously and with set purpose.

  CHAPTER XI.

  PARLIAMENT met early that year, and when Tom and May migrated to London the two Houses were already sitting. London was consequently fairly full, and the Wrexhams, among others, were installed there. Lord Chatham was one of those quietly effective men whose opinion is held to be safe and reliable, chiefly because they support everything of the old order, and oppose, not vehemently, but steadily, everything of the new. Lady Chatham and Maud were with him, and the excellent arrangements which her ladyship was in the habit of making were very frequently thrown completely out of gear by the fog. In fact, she had serious thoughts now and then of permanently allowing twenty minutes extra per mile for the carriage and fifteen for pedestrians.

  Maud was very well pleased to be in London again. Measures of considerable material import were being debated, and she liked to feel the heart of the country beating. She had never been more interested in life generally, and the Chathams’ house was becoming famous in a manner for the large number of clever people whom she collected round her. She had a certain gift of making people talk, without letting them know they were being made. The autumn she would have confessed was dull, but the reason why she found it so she would not have confessed, even to herself. She had attended Tom’s wedding, and had behaved delightfully, but when it was over she found herself, as it were, facing a blank wall Blank walls are not inspiriting things to contemplate, and after a few weeks of contemplation she arrived at the sensible conclusion that she would face it no longer, and she had spent the autumn in demolishing it stone by stone. And now by dint of real exertion, which was almost heroic in its untiringness, she could conscientiously say there was not one stone left on another, and in consequence the advent of May and Tom was an event which she regarded with pure pleasure. In other words, she considered she had “got over it” Tom, she felt sure, was completely unconscious of what had been going on, and they could meet again with perfect frankness and unreserve. She had met May once or twice before the marriage, and thought of her as a sort of exceedingly beautiful cow.

  Maud was just writing a note to accept Mrs. Carlingford’s invitation to dinner. There were only to be four of them, the fourth being Manvers, who had come to England for a week or two, and whom May thought Maud had met at Athens. May had got a slight cold and was going to wear a tea-gown, and would Maud do the same? She called her “Dear Miss Wrexham,” and remained “hers truly.”

  Manvers had been to see Tom already that day immediately on his arrival in London, and Tom had scouted the idea of his going to a hotel, and insisted on his staying with them. Manvers made sundry efforts to talk to May and make himself agreeable to her, but he did not think he had succeeded very well. Like Maud, he thought of her as a sort of cow, and he did not appreciate her style of beauty. But Tom was as nice as ever, and still quite mad, which was, he confessed, disappointing, but it would certainly pass off.

  The three had gone together to see Tom’s studio and the herald of the Golden Age in clay. The pose he had chosen was admirably simple and wonderfully successful. The goddess stood with one foot trailing behind, the heel off the ground, resting on her foremost foot; the arms hung limply by her sides, and her head was drooped in sorrow for her lost child. The face was the face of his wife, subtly idealized, but preserving the look of portraiture. Tom had been working very hard at it, and in the clay it was sufficiently finished to allow one to see what it would be like. He worked in his old desultory manner, with fits of complete idleness and spells of almost superhuman exertion, with the difference that the fits of complete idleness were now the exception, not the rule.

  The studio was an enormous room at the top of the house, with an admirable north light It had been furnished by Tom without the least regard to expense or coherency. Things of all ages and styles were jumbled up together, but everything was good of its kind. It was the sort of room which, if you did not happen to think it perfectly hideous, you would think entirely charming. The furniture itself was Louis Quinze, for Tom’s taste told him that there was no furniture but French; the walls were hung with Algerian and Cairene embroideries; in one corner of the room stood a cast of the Hermes, in another a bronze Japanese dragon. Two wide shelves ran round three sides of the room, and on these were massed together, with fine artistic catholicity, spoils from half the world. There were Tanagra statuettes from Greece, blue hawk-headed porcelain gods from Egypt, earthenware from Cabylia, a great copper Russian samovar, “laborious orient ivory” from India, plates from Rhodes, and embroidery from Arachova, a bronze helmet fished out of the river at Olympia, a great tortoiseshell box from Capri, a bronze Narcissus from Naples, blue-bead mummy nets, hideous German silver pipes, and amber and arrows from the Soudan. The platform where the model stood was covered with a great tiger skin, with grinning jaws and snarling teeth, and in the middle of the room stood the clay sketch of the mourning goddess. The incongruity of the whole touched completeness when May, Tom, and Manvers stood there side by side and looked at it Manvers’s first impulse was to laugh. His appreciation of contrasts was strong, and the contrasts here were really picturesque. What was this poor passée goddess doing in this atmosphere of complete modernity? She was as much out of place as a Quaker at a music-hall. But he was far too much of an artist not to admire and wonder at the extraordinary power of the thing. Tom seemed to have learned technique not by experience, but by instinct He was an artist by nature, not by practice; like Walter, he sang because he must. To Manvers this was puzzling, because he held firmly to the creed that an artist makes beautiful things because he chooses to, not because his artistic nature compels him. They stood silent for some moments, and then Manvers spoke.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “It seems to me almost perfectly Greek.”

  Though the prophet has no honour in his own country, it is at least gratifying for him to find it in another. Tom had been almost painfully anxious that he should say that, but now it was said he had an unreasoning fear that Manvers had not meant it.

  “Do you mean that?” he cried. “ Are you sure you are not saying it to please me?”

  “My dear Tom, I am saying it neither to please you nor myself. I don’t like Greek things, you know.”
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  May turned on him gravely.

  “Surely it is admirable?” she asked.

  “It is admirable surely,” replied Manvers, “but it is my nature not to admire it. You should hear Tom heap abuse on my little things. His tongue was an unruly member whenever he looked at La Dame qui s’amuse, — by the way, she is finished, Tom. It would have pleased him in what he calls his unregenerate days, and I his Paradisiacal days, before the fall.”

  “We’ve got a little statuette of his downstairs which I’ll show you,” said May. “It is of a boy shooting. He never quite finished it.”

  “That beast of a thing which was in my room at Applethorpe?” said Tom. “I shall smash it.”

  “No, dear, you won’t: you gave it me. I shall go and get it.”

  “No, it shan’t come up here,” said Tom. “We’ll all go down. This Temple is no place for Manvers.”

  But Manvers was interested, and he stayed some minutes more, advising, suggesting, and praising. It was as impossible for him not to admire the prodigious skill of the work, as it was not to dislike the spirit of it. The whole thing he regarded as a most lamentable waste of time and skill which might have been most profitably employed.

  But before the statuette of the boy shooting his praise was of a very different order. It was thoroughly modern, and though not ugly, was undeniably pretty. The figure represented a lad in volunteer uniform, lying on the ground, shooting, or rather aiming, with a rifle. The head was bent over to the back-sight of the gun, the mouth slightly open, one eye shut, and one leg lightly crossing the other just above the ankle. The thing was marvellously fresh and unstudied. May claimed it as her possession, and showed it with just pride. Tom really had succeeded, as he had vowed he would, in making trousers beautiful.