Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  In this instance, certainly, the subtlest diplomatist could not with all his scheming have produced a more complete result. Mr. Dennison, as has been seen, had on the tip of his tongue a conclusion disparaging in the highest degree to Evelyn and his art. Gladys Ellington had let things even more bitter pass the tip of her tongue, Madge’s mother had felt not so long ago that the shipwreck was total, and that there was no salvage. Yet Lady Dover, with just a little repetition of the same sentence or two, had swept all these things away, as a broom with a couple of strokes demolishes all the weavings of spiders, and through the unobscured windows the sun again shines. In fact the volte-face of Society had been begun at any rate with immense precision and certainty; on the word of Lady Dover, who was in command, this particular company had turned right about with the instantaneousness which is the instinct of a well-drilled troop.

  In effect the whole social balance of power was changed from the moment of their appearance. Evelyn, as natural in his way, but that a more vivacious one, than Lady Dover, gave a brilliant sketch of their arrival — third class — at Golspie Station, and the adjustment of social distinction consequent. Also, he had prophesied it, Madge would bear him out in that, and he reproduced admirably Madge’s face from behind the Scotsman which had been so kindly lent her. Mr. Osborne made one attempt to reconstitute himself the life and soul of the party when he addressed Gladys as Lady Grilse, and unfolded to Madge, who sat next him, the history of that remarkable piece of wit, meaning to follow it up by the sequel (sequels were usually disappointing, but this was an agreeable exception) of the true circumstances under which her mother had been called Lady Salmon. But Madge had cut the sequel short, without any ironical purpose, but simply because she wanted to listen to and contradict the libels Evelyn was telling of her conduct on the opposite side of the table.

  “How very amusing,” she said. “You called her Lady Grilse (I see, do I not), because she had caught one. Evelyn, I said nothing of the kind; I only said that I rather liked the smell of a cigarette.”

  But her quite literal and correct explanation of Mr. Osborne’s joke was fatal to the joke; it was a pricked bladder, it would never be repeated any more.

  Then came the deposition of the Royal Academician. Mr. Dennison had finished his picture of the upper glen only that afternoon, and the occasion was therefore solemn. So was he.

  “Yes, Lady Dover,” he was saying, “I only touched the canvas a dozen times to-day, yet I have done, as I said, a full day’s work. C’est le dernier pas qui coûte; it is on those last touches that the whole thing depends. I knew when I went out this morning that I had not got what I meant; I knew, too, that it was nearly there, and it is that “nearly” that is yet so far. There was the shadow of a cloud, if you remember, over the bank of gorse.”

  “Oh, I thought that shadow was quite perfect,” said Lady Dover. “I hope you have not touched it.”

  “It has gone,” said Mr. Dennison, as if announcing the death of a near relation who had left him money, for though his voice was mournful, there was a hint of something comfortable coming. “Gone. I saw I could not do it so as to make it true.”

  He looked up at this tragic announcement and caught Evelyn’s eye.

  “Mr. Dundas, I am sure, will bear me out,” he said. “We poor artists are bound, however it limits us, to put down only what we know is true. We are not poets but chroniclers.”

  “Oh, Evelyn, and you’ve been telling such lies about me,” said Madge, from the other side.

  “Chroniclers,” resumed Mr. Dennison. “When we feel sure we are right we record our impression. But unless that certainty of vision comes to us, we must be honest, we must not attempt a vague impression merely. Is it not so?”

  Evelyn’s face looked extraordinarily vital and boyish as he leaned forward.

  “Oh, I don’t agree in the least,” he said. “I think we always ought to try to record just those suggestions — those vaguenesses — which you say you leave out. Look at ‘La Gioconda.’ What did Andrea mean us to think about that sphinx? I don’t know, nor do you. And, what is more certain than even that, nor did he know. Did he mean what Walter Pater said he meant? It again is quite certain he did not. No, I think every picture ought to ask an unanswerable riddle, any picture, that is to say, which is a picture at all, a riddle like ‘Which came first, the hen or the egg?’ Surely anything obvious is not worth painting at all.”

  Mr. Dennison had clearly not thought of things in this light. It was not thus that the ordnance map of Sutherland would be made.

  “An amusing paradox,” he said. “Nobody is to know anything about a picture, especially the man who painted it. Is that correct?”

  His tone had something slightly nettled about it, and Evelyn’s imperturbable good humour and gaiety might perhaps represent the indifference of the nettles towards the hand they had stung.

  “Yes, just that,” he said. “Take any of the arts. Surely it is because a play has a hundred interpretations that it is worth seeing, and because a hundred different people will experience a hundred different emotions that an opera is worth listening to. And the very fact that when we hear ‘The jolly roast beef of old England’ we are all irresistibly reminded of the jolly roast beef of old England shows that it is a bad tune.”

  Mr. Dennison waved his hand in a sketchy manner.

  “I have not the pleasure of knowing that tune,” he said; “but when I paint the upper glen here, I mean it to produce in all beholders that perception of its particular and individual beauty which was mine when I painted it. And when you exercise your art, your exquisite art, over a portrait, you, I imagine, mean to make the result produce in all beholders the beauty you saw yourself.”

  Evelyn laughed.

  “Oh, dear, no,” he said. “You see, I so often see no beauty in my sitters, because most people are so very plain. But I believe that the finest portraits of all are those which, when you look at them, make you feel as you would feel if you were on intimate terms and in the presence of the people they represent. Besides, people are so often quite unlike their faces; in that case you have to paint not what their faces are like but what they are like.”

  Mr. Dennison’s tone was rising a little; that impressive baritone could never be shrill, but it was as if he wanted to be a tenor.

  “Ah, that explains a great deal,” he said; “it explains why sometimes I find your portraits wholly unlike the people they represent. And the conclusion is that if I knew them better, I should find them more like.”

  “That is exactly what I mean,” said Evelyn.

  But here Lady Dover broke in.

  “You must have some great talks, Mr. Dundas,” she said, “with Mr. Dennison; it is so interesting to hear different points of view. One cannot really grasp a question, can one, unless one hears both sides of it. I think Lady Ellington has finished. Let us go.”

  But the verdict over this little passage of arms was unanimous; Mr. Dennison was no longer in anyone’s mind the pope and fountain-head of all art and all criticism thereon. His impressiveness had in the last ten minutes fallen into the disrepute of pomposity, his grave pronouncements were all discredited; a far more attractive gospel had been enunciated, far more attractive, too, was this new evangelist. And as Lady Dover passed him on the way out she had one more word.

  “That is a delightful doctrine, Mr. Dundas,” she said. “You must really do a portrait of yourself, and if we think it is unlike, the remedy will be that we must see more of you.”

  Evelyn drew his chair next to the Academician; he had heard the rise of voice and seen the symptoms of perturbation, to produce which there was nothing further from his intention.

  “I’m afraid I talk awful rot,” he said, with the most disarming frankness.

  Now Mr. Dennison was conscious of having been rather rude and ruffled, he was also conscious that Evelyn’s temper had been calmer than the moon. He felt, too, the charm of this confession, which was so evidently not premeditated but natural. />
  “But that does not diminish my pleasure in meeting you, Mr. Dundas,” he said.

  Afterwards the same triumphant march continued. Mr. Dennison even showed to Madge how a couple of his most astounding conjuring tricks were done, and Lady Ellington talked to her son-in-law in a corner about Madge, until the council of war summoned them to debate. Then, when it was decided that Madge should join the fishmongers on the river, Mr. Osborne instantly suggested that she would be Mrs. Sea-Trout, and though a cavilling mind might find in this but a futile attempt to establish himself once more as the life and soul of the party, it was not indeed so, but meant merely as a compliment, a tribute to Madge. Then, when the council of war was over, more remarkable things happened, for the whole party played Dumb-Crambo till long after half-past ten, quite forgetful, apparently, how important it was to get a good rest after all the day spent in the open air. How such a subversion of general usage occurred no one knew, but certainly there was something in Evelyn which conduced to silly gaiety. And nobody was a whit the worse for it, while the effects of the moon-light on the hills opposite, which had nightly been the admiration of the whole party, went totally unheeded, and all the exquisite lights and shadows, the subtlety of which it had become the office of Mr. Dennison to point out and Lady Dover to appreciate, might never have been in view at all.

  Lady Ellington went with Madge to her room when the women retired; she had not really meant to do so, but Lady Dover’s “Good night” had made this necessary.

  “Dear Madge,” she had said, “I know your mother will want to talk to you, so I shall not come to see you to your room. I hope you have everything you want. Breakfast at a quarter to ten, or would you rather have it in your room after your journey? We have been so late to-night too. How excellent Mr. Dundas’s last charade was. Only Mr. Dennison guessed. Good night, dear.”

  Lady Ellington was thus, so to speak, forced into Madge’s room; she carried with her her glass of hot water, she carried also, which was even more warming, the memory of the undisguised welcome that not only Madge but the impossible artist had received. She almost, in fact, reconsidered her valuation of wealth; had Philip Home appeared in Evelyn’s place this evening, she knew quite well he would not have been able to stir the deadly gentility of this house half so well as the impossible artist. He could not have piped so as to make them dance, yet this, this key to the sort of set which she knew really mattered most, the solid, stolid, respectable upper class, had been just rats to his piping. His natural enjoyment, his animal spirits, to put that influence at its lowest, had simply played the deuce with the traditions of the house, where she herself never ventured to lift her voice in opposition or amendment to what was suggested. But Evelyn’s “Oh, let’s have one more Dumb-Crambo” had revised the laws of the Medes and Persians, and another they had. Even at the formal council of war he had refused to say what he would like to do to-morrow, a thing absolutely unprecedented.

  “Oh, may I go and shoot if it is fine,” he had said, “and do nothing at all if it is wet? Don’t you hate shooting, Lord Dover, if your barrels are covered with rain? And birds look so awfully far away in the rain. But I should love to shoot in any case,” he added. “My goodness, Madge, think of the King’s Road and the ‘buses.”

  Yet all this revolt against the established laws, so Lady Ellington felt, had somehow not transgressed those laws of propriety which she was so careful about here. Evelyn, from ignorance, no doubt, rode rough-shod, and no one resented his trespasses. Even Lord Dover had been stirred into speech, a thing he did not usually indulge in except on the subject of the grouse that had been shot and the fish that had been killed that day.

  “My dear boy,” he said, “you shall do exactly what you like to-morrow. There is a rod for you on the river, or we should like another gun on the moor. Tell us at breakfast.”

  All this Lady Ellington took up to Madge’s room with her hot water; that Lady Dover would be as good as her word, and that, having asked these two to Glen Callan, would give them a genuine welcome, she had never doubted, but what was surprising she was the extreme personal success of her once better-forgotten son-in-law. This stronghold and central fortress of what was correct and proper had received him as if he was almost a new incarnation of what was correct and proper, or if that was putting it too strongly, at any rate as if no question of his correctness and propriety had ever arisen. Surprising though it was, it was wholly satisfactory.

  “We are so late, dear Madge,” she said, “that I can only stop a minute. Has it not been a delightful evening?”

  The desire to say something salutary struggled long in her mind. She wanted so much to indicate that it was for the sake of her feelings, even in consequence of her own intervention, that so charming a welcome had been extended to Madge and her husband. And to be quite truthful, it was not the instinct for truth that prevented her, but the quite certain knowledge that Madge would not stand anything that suggested a hint of patronisation. Besides the house was Lady Dover’s, that person who, as Lady Ellington was beginning to learn, was natural because she happened to be natural, and was quite truthful, not because this was a subtler sort of diplomacy. That naked dagger of truth was an implement that required a deal of mail-coat to ward off. Any moment Lady Dover might wreck any scheming policy with one candid word, and the corresponding surprise and candour of her eyes. But the welcome had been so warm that Madge could not but be warmed by it, even to the point of confession.

  “Oh, mother,” she said, “I have been disquieting myself in vain. All this last month I have been wondering secretly whether people were going to be horrid to us. How senseless it all was! I have been thinking all sorts of things.”

  She put down her candle and drew a couple of chairs to the fire.

  “I have had all sorts of thoughts,” she said. “You see, you did not write to me. I thought you might — well, might have washed your hands of me. I thought that people like Lady Dover would think I had been heartless and Evelyn worse than heartless. I was hopelessly wrong; everybody is as nice as possible. But, heavens, how I have eaten my heart out over that all this month in London!”

  She poked the fire with a certain viciousness, feeling that she pricked these bubbles of senseless fear as she pricked the bubbling gas of the burning coal.

  “All in vain,” she said; “I have been making myself — no, not miserable, because I can’t be otherwise than happy, but disquieted with all sorts of foundationless fears. I thought people would disregard — yes, it is that — would disregard Evelyn and me; would talk of the fine day instead. And then, you see, Evelyn would also have nothing to do, nobody would want to be painted by him. We should be miserably poor; he would have to paint all sorts of things he had no taste for just to get a guinea or two and keep the pot boiling. Ah, I shouldn’t have minded that — the poverty, I mean — but what I should mind would be that he should have to work at what he felt was not worth working at. Don’t you see?”

  Never perhaps before had Madge so given herself away to her mother. Lady Ellington’s system had been to snip off all awkward shoots, and train the plant, so to speak, in such a way as should make it most suitable as a table ornament. The table for which it was destined, it need hardly be remarked, was an opulent table. There was to be no wasting of sweetness on the desert air; Mayfair was to inhale its full odour. And as things now stood, the destination of this flower was as likely to be Mayfair as ever. Lady Ellington respected success, nobody more so, nor was there anything she respected so much, and on a rapid review of the evening, the success she felt inclined to respect most was that of her impossible son-in-law. If a plebiscite for popularity had knocked at the doors of the occupied bedrooms, she had no doubt as to the result of the election. There was nothing left for her but to retract, wholly and entirely, all her own resentment and rage at the marriage. And since this had to be done, it was better done at once.

  “Dearest Madge,” she said, “how foolish of you to make yourself miserable! Of course a
t first I was vexed and troubled at it all, and I was, and am still, very sorry for Philip. But though I did wish that certain things had not happened, and that others had — I mean I wish that you had been in love with Philip, for I am sure you would have been very happy, yet since it was not to be so, and since you fell in love with Evelyn, what other issue could I have desired?”

  Suddenly, quick as a lizard popping out and in again of some hole in the wall, there flashed through Madge’s mind the impression— “I don’t believe that.” She could not be held responsible for it, for it was not a thought she consciously entertained. It just put its head out and said “Here I am.” What, however, mattered more was that this was her mother’s avowed declaration now; these were the colours anyhow she intended to sail under. She had been launched anew, so to speak, with regard to her attitude towards her daughter, and Lady Dover had christened her, and broken a bottle of wine over her for good luck.

  But having made her declaration, Lady Ellington thought she had better be moving. From a child Madge had been blessed with a memory of hideous exactitude, which enabled her, if she choose, to recall conversations with the most convincing verbal accuracy, and Lady Ellington did not feel equal, off-hand, to explaining some of those flower-like phrases which had, she felt certain, fallen from her in her interview with Madge after the thunderstorm in the New Forest, if perchance the fragrance of them might conceivably still linger in her daughter’s mind. Nor did she wish to be reminded, however remotely (and as she thought of this she made the greater speed) of the letter from Madge to Evelyn which had lain in the hall one afternoon as she came in, with regard to which her maternal instinct had prompted her to take so strong a line. So she again referred to the lateness of the hour, “all owing to those amusing games,” and took the rest of her hot water to finish in her own room.