Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

“No, nothing is wrong,” she said, recovering herself a little. “But I ask you to do as I say. I can’t bear sitting for that portrait any more, and Mr. Dundas — he bores me.”

  That got said, also she managed to smile at him naturally.

  “That is all, dear Philip,” she added. “Pray don’t let us talk of it any more.”

  “And you wish me to tell Evelyn what you say?” he asked.

  “Yes, anything, anything,” she said. “I don’t want to sit to him again. But make it natural, if you can. Look at the portrait; tell him you don’t want it touched any more. Believe me, that is best.”

  She paused a moment.

  “I am excited and rather overwrought to-night somehow,” she said, “and you mustn’t indeed think that there is anything the matter. Indeed, there is nothing. Tell me you believe that?”

  “Why, dear, of course, if you tell me so,” he said.

  “I do tell you so.”

  As has been mentioned before, there were two Philips; one known only to the four people who knew him best, the other the Philip who showed a sterner and harder face to the world. And though, since he was with Madge, the Philip of the inner sanctum, where only the intimates were admitted, was in possession, yet the door of the sanctum, as it were, opened for a moment, and the other Philip, quick as a lizard, glanced in. His appearance was of the most momentary duration, but he did look in.

  She laid her hand on his arm as she said these last words, then left the back of the box, where they had been standing, and took a chair next Lady Ellington.

  “How full it is!” she said. “Look at the stalls too; they are like an ant-heap, covered with brilliant, crawling ants. How hard it is to recognise people if one is above them. I’m sure there are a hundred people I know, but the tops of heads are like nothing except the tops of heads. How many bald heads too! What a blessing we don’t go bald like men. Who is that walking up the gangway now? I’m sure I know him. Ah! it’s Mr. Dundas.”

  The sudden stream of her talk stopped, as if a tap had been turned on. Her eyes left the stalls and gazed vacantly over the boxes opposite. She was conscious of wondering what would happen next — whether she would speak, or her companion, or whether Philip would say something. Then it seemed to her nobody would say anything any more; there was to be this dreadful silence for ever. That possibility, at any rate, was soon averted, for Gladys signalled violently to Evelyn, and spoke.

  “Yes, he sees us,” she said. “Mr. Home, do put the door of the box open, it is so stuffy. And Mr. Dundas I am sure is coming up. He’s such a darling, isn’t he?”

  The greater part of her speech was justified by realities. Evelyn had seen them; the heat was undeniable; also, in answer to the violent signalling he had received, mere politeness, to say nothing of inclination, would have made him come. But he had seen too who sat in profile by Lady Ellington, and he took two and three steps in the stride as he mounted the staircases. And before Madge had time to put into execution her very unwise idea of asking Philip not to let him in, he was at the door of the box.

  “You lordly box-holder,” he said to him, “just let me in. How are you, Lady Ellington? Yes, I’m just back from the Hermitage, to-night only, from three days in the forest with Merivale. How are you, Miss Ellington? I had to come up to-night, or I shouldn’t have been able to keep the appointment to-morrow.”

  A sense of utter helplessness seized Madge; she could not even respond by a word to his greeting, for his presence merely was the only thing that mattered, the only thing she loved and dreaded. And he continued:

  “Half-past two, isn’t it?” he said. “I could have come up to-morrow, of course, but it was necessary for me to have a morning’s work at the background before I troubled you again.”

  Then Gladys broke in.

  “Too wonderful, isn’t it?” she said, “the portrait, I mean. But, Mr. Dundas, who is that just opposite with rubies? I’m sure you’ve painted her. That great pink thing there, who must have come from the west coast of Asia Minor. How naughty of me!”

  But Evelyn apparently condoned the naughtiness; he mentioned the name of the great pink thing, and turned to Madge again.

  “But by half-past two I shall be ready,” he said. “Please, if it is not an impossible request, please be punctual. Art takes so long, you know. Not that life is short. Nobody ever died too soon.”

  She turned to him, the diamond pendant that Philip had sent her that day glittering on the smooth whiteness of her bosom.

  “I am so sorry,” she said, “and I know I ought to have let you know before, Mr. Dundas. But I can’t come to-morrow. I wrote you this evening only, I did not know you were out of town, explaining — at least saying — I could not come.”

  Philip — the real, intimate Philip — heard this. And it was he only, the lover of this girl, who spoke in reply.

  “We have settled that I shall come instead,” he said. “So your time won’t be wasted, Evelyn. You have to paint me too, you know, and if you want it to be characteristic, make a study of a telephone and a tape-machine. Half-past two, I think you said.”

  There came a sudden hush over the crowded house as the lights went down. Philip laid his hand on Evelyn’s shoulder, as he sat in the front of the box between the two ladies.

  “Half-past two, then, to-morrow,” he repeated.

  The hint was plain enough, and Evelyn took it, and stumbled his way out of the box to regain his seat in the stalls. What had happened, what this all meant, he did not and could not know; he knew only what he was left with, namely, that Madge for some reason would not sit to him to-morrow. In his eager way he searched for a hundred motives, yet none satisfied him, and he was forced to fall back on the obvious and simple one, that she was busy. Nothing in the world could be more likely, his whole practical self assured him of that; but he felt somehow as if someone had leaned out of the window when he called at a house and had shouted stentoriously to the servant who opened the door, “I am not at home.” He was bound to accept a thing which he did not believe.

  Then he questioned himself as to whether the fault was his. Yet that was scarcely possible, for it was not till after he had last seen her that the knowledge of his love for her had dawned on him. It was impossible that he could have made that betrayal of himself, for until she had gone he had not known that there was anything to betray. He and she had always been on terms of the frankest comradeship, yet to-night her manner had somehow been subtly yet essentially different. All the good comradeship had gone from it, the indefinable feeling of “being friends” was no longer there. Was it that the “being friends” was no longer sufficient for him, and did the change really lie in himself? He felt sure it did not; Madge was different.

  Evelyn was not of an analytical mind; his inferences were based usually on instinct rather than reason, and reason was powerless to help him here and his instinct drew no inference whatever. However, Philip was coming to take her hour to-morrow, and he would try to find out something about this. Indeed, perhaps there was nothing to find, for he knew that now and for ever his own view of Madge would be coloured by the super-sensitiveness of love. Then a suspicion altogether unworthy crossed his mind. Was it possible that Philip had.... But, to do him justice, he instantly dismissed it.

  Gladys, like the stag at eve, had drunk her fill of the occupants of the boxes, and turned her attention to the stage during the second act. Her mind was rather like a sparrow, it hopped about with such extraordinary briskness, and apparently found something to pick up everywhere. The things it picked up, it is true, were of no particular consequence, but they were things of a sort, and at the end of the act she announced them.

  “Opera is really the best way of carrying on life,” she said. “You always sing, and at any crisis you sing a tune — a real tune. And if the crisis is really frightful, you make it the end of the act, pull the curtain down, and have some slight refreshment in privacy, and put on another frock. Mr. Home, is that Mrs. Israels there — that woman bound
in green? How nice to have a husband who is a magnate of South African affairs! You can even afford to be bound in green; it doesn’t matter how you look if you are rich enough.”

  Philip looked where she pointed; it certainly was Mrs. Israels.

  “Yes, that is she,” he said; “but I had no idea they were as rich as her appearance indicates.”

  Lady Ellington gave a little gasp of horror.

  “Good gracious, I forgot you were a magnate too!” she cried. “How rude of me! But, really, you are so unlike Mrs. Israels.”

  Then she sank her voice to a confidential whisper.

  “Dear Mr. Home,” she said, with all the brilliance of unpremeditated invention, “do talk shop with me for one minute. Ellington told me he had got a little sum of money — you know the sort of thing, not big enough to be of any real use — ah, you mustn’t tell him I asked you. He would be furious, quite furious. Yes, and if you could just casually mention some investment which might eventually cause it to be of some use — —”

  Philip — she could not see him, as he was sitting behind her, with his arm on the back of her chair — could not help frowning. He was delighted to be of any use to his friends, but sometimes, as now, his help was asked in a sideways, hole-and-corner manner. Why shouldn’t her husband know? He did not like intrigue at any time; purposeless intrigue was even more tiresome. But he expunged the frown from his voice anyhow when he answered:

  “Yes, I can certainly recommend you an investment or two,” he said, “but I can promise you no certainty. I can only say that I hold a stake in them myself. I suppose, as you have this — this sum of money, you will take up your shares — pay for them, I mean!”

  She gave a little laugh of surprise.

  “You are too delicious!” she said. “You mean we can buy them without paying for them, like a bill?”

  He laughed.

  “Well, I don’t recommend that,” he said. “But it can be done. However, that is not my concern, as I’m not a broker. I will send you a note in the morning.”

  “Too good of you!” she said. “And you won’t tell my husband I asked you?”

  “Certainly not,” said he, “though I really can’t imagine why not.”

  The unreal Philip — the one, that is to say, that Madge did not know — had had the door slammed pretty smartly in his face, and when the real Philip went to Evelyn’s studio the next afternoon he had not attempted to put in another appearance. Evelyn, when he arrived, was working at the background of Madge’s portrait, and he yelled to the other to keep his eyes off it.

  “You musn’t see it till it’s done!” he cried. “Just turn your back, there’s a good chap, till I put it with its face to the wall. I had no idea till I looked at it to-day how nearly it is finished. I do wish Miss Ellington could have come this afternoon instead of you — which sounds polite, but isn’t — and I really think I might have made it the last sitting. That sounds polite too. By the way, what an ass I am; I never made another appointment with her last night!”

  This was all sufficiently frank, for Evelyn had managed, with the healthy optimism of which she had so much, to reason himself out of his fantastic forebodings of the evening before. It was left, therefore, for Philip, a task which was not at all to his taste, to put them all neatly back again.

  “I really doubt if she could have given you an appointment off-hand,” he said, still fencing a little. “She is really so frightfully busy I hardly set eyes on her. Apparently, when you are to be married, you have to buy as many things as if you were going to live on a desert island for the rest of your life.”

  Evelyn checked for a moment at this; the healthy optimism weakened a little.

  “I must write and ask her,” he said, “or go and try to find her in. I must have the sitting soon; the thing won’t be half so good if I have to wait. It is all ready; it just wants her for an hour or two.”

  Philip was conscious of a most heartfelt wish that Madge had not entrusted him with this errand, and he cudgelled his head to think how least offensively to perform it. Then Madge’s own suggestion came to his aid.

  “I wish you would let me see it,” he said. “Pray do; I really mean it.”

  Evelyn hesitated; though he had been so peremptory in its removal before, the impulse, he knew, was rather childish, it being but the desire to let the finished thing be the first thing seen. Yet, on the other hand, he so intensely believed in the portrait himself that he now felt disinclined to defer the pleasure of showing it.

  “Well, you mustn’t criticise at all,” he said, “not one word of that, or I may begin to take your criticism into consideration, and I want to do this just exactly as I see it, not as anybody else does. Do you promise?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Very well; stand back about three yards — three yards is about its focus. Now!”

  He turned the easel back into the room again, where it stood fronting Philip. And the latter did not want to criticise at all; he felt not the smallest temptation to do so. Indeed, it was idle to do so; the picture was Madge, Madge seen by an unerring eye and recorded by an unerring brush. It stood altogether away from criticism; a man might conceivably reject the whole of it, if he happened not to care about Evelyn’s art, but he could not reject a part. As Evelyn had said to Merivale, he had put there what he meant to put there, but nothing that he did not. It was brilliant, superb, a master-work.

  Philip looked at it a long minute in silence.

  “It is your best,” he said.

  Evelyn laughed.

  “It is my only picture,” he said.

  Then Philip saw an opportunity, which was as welcome as it was unexpected.

  “I beg you not to touch Madge’s figure or face again,” he said. “It is absolutely finished; there is nothing more to be done to it. Please!”

  Evelyn gave a snort of disgust.

  “That is criticism,” he said.

  “Not at all; there is nothing to criticise. I mean it, really.”

  Now Philip was no bad judge, and Evelyn was well aware of that. He had been as he painted, intensely anxious that Philip should like it, and Philip more than liked it. The great pleasure that that knowledge gave him was sufficient for the time to banish the forebodings that had begun to creep back, and were in a way confirmed by Philip’s wish that it should not be touched.

  “Oh, Philip, is it really good?” he said. “I feel that I know it is, but I want so much that both you and she should think so.”

  “I can answer for myself,” said the other.

  With that the whole subject was dismissed for the time. Evelyn had given no promise that he would not touch the figure again, but Philip on his side was wise enough to dwell on that point no more, for he saw quite well that a certain inkling of the true state of things had been present, however dimly, to the other, and any further allusion would but tend to disperse that dimness and make things clearer. So the new canvas was produced, and Philip was put into pose after pose without satisfying the artist.

  “No, no,” he cried; “if you stand like that, you look like an elderly St. Sebastian, and, with your hand on the table, you look like a railway director. Look here, walk out of the room, come in whistling, and sit down. I am not going to paint you portrait, you are not going to be photographed. Just pretend I’m not here.”

  This went better, and soon, with inarticulate gruntings, Evelyn began to put in the lines of the figure with charcoal. At first he laboured, but before long things began to go more smoothly; his own knitted brow uncreased itself, and his hand began to work of itself. Then came a half hour in which he talked, telling his sitter of his visit to the Hermit, and the really charming days he had spent in the Forest. But that again suggested a train of thought which caused silence again and a renewal of the creased brow. But it was not at his sketch that he frowned.

  Eventually he laid his tools down.

  “I can’t go on any more,” he said. “Thanks very much! It’s all right.”

&
nbsp; He wandered to the chimney-piece, lit a cigarette, and came back again.

  “You mean Miss Ellington doesn’t want to give me any more sittings, don’t you?” he said. “For it is childish to expect me to believe that she can’t spare one hour between now and the end of the month.”

  The childishness of that struck Philip too.

  “But I ask you not to touch it any more, except of course the background,” he said. “Won’t that content you?”

  “Not in the least. It is not the real reason.”

  Philip was cornered, and knew it.

  “It is a true one,” he said rather lamely. “After seeing the picture, I should have said it, I believe, in any case.”

  “But it’s not the real reason,” repeated Evelyn. “Of course, you need not tell me the real reason, but you can’t prevent my guessing. And you can’t prevent my guessing right.”

  “Ah, is this necessary?” asked Philip.

  Evelyn flashed out at this.

  “And is it fair on me?” he cried. “I disagree with you; I want another sitting, and she really has no right to treat me like this. I’m not a tradesman. She can’t leave me because she chooses, like that, without giving a reason.”

  Philip did not reply.

  “Or perhaps she has given a reason,” said Evelyn, with peculiarly annoying penetration.

  Indeed, these grown-up children, boys and girls still, except in years, are wonderfully embarrassing, so Philip reflected — people who will ask childish questions, who are yet sufficiently men and women to be able to detect a faltering voice, an equivocation. Tact does not seem to exist for them; if they want to know a thing they ask it straight out before everybody. And, indeed, it is sometimes less embarrassing if there are plenty of people there; one out of a number may begin talking, and with the buzz of conversation drown the absence of a reply. But alone — tactlessness in a tête-à-tête is to fire at a large target; it cannot help hitting.

  This certainly had hit, and Philip knew it was useless to pretend otherwise. And, as the just reply to tactlessness is truth, also tactless, he let Evelyn have it.