Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Then, more often than not would follow the explanation of this somewhat cryptic remark, and the whispered information of how much the emeralds had cost. Mrs. Osborne, as a matter of fact, had overheard, again and again, what the figure was, but she was still officially ignorant of it, and generally closed the subject by saying, “Mr. Osborne won’t never tell me what he paid for them. I believe he got them cheap, and that’s why.” But she secretly rejoiced to know that this was not the reason. The reason was just the opposite; they had been so enormously expensive. That expense would not be unreasonable now, but at the time, for she had worn the Land’s End necklace for twenty years, it had been preposterous. They had had no holiday one year in consequence, but had grilled in Sheffield throughout August and September. But during those months she had worn the emeralds every evening, and it had been a sort of renewal of the honeymoon. Though they had not been able to go away themselves, they had managed to send Percy and Claude to the seaside, and the two months in Sheffield, when every night she wore the emeralds which had been the cause of their remaining there, was still one of Mrs. Osborne’s most delightful memories, as a sort of renewed honeymoon. Since then times had considerably changed, and though to many the change from simplicity of life and not uncomfortable narrowness of means to the wider horizons which the rapid accumulation of an enormous fortune brings within the view, implies a loss of happiness rather than an extension of it, neither Edward nor she were of that Arcadian build. They both immensely enjoyed the wider horizon; the humble establishment with parlour maids had been all very well, but how much more enjoyable was the brown-stone house on the outskirts of Sheffield with footmen and a carriage. For Mrs. Osborne did not find it in the least interfered with her happiness to have men to manage, or “richer” things to eat. As a matter of fact she liked managing, and rejoiced in the building of a new wing to the brown stone house, in the acquisition of motor cars and in the drain on their time and resources by Edward being made Mayor of Sheffield. Neither of them ever thought that they had been happier when their means were more straitened and their establishment humbler. Both of them, in spite of an essential and innate simplicity of nature rejoiced in these embellishments, and were always ready to enlarge and embellish and rejoice. They had always made the most of their current resources — though in a merely financial sense they had always saved — and it was as great a pleasure to Mrs. Osborne to see her table plentifully loaded with the most expensive food that money could provide, and press second helpings on her guests, as it had been to have a solid four courses at midday dinner on Sunday in Sheffield and tell her friends that Mr. Osborne liked nothing better than to have a good dinner on Sunday, and see a pleasant party to share it with him. She still inquired if she might not “tempt” her neighbours at table to have another quail, just as she had tried to persuade them to have a second cut of roast lamb, when in season, while from the other end of the table she would hear as a hospitable echo her husband’s voice recommending Veuve Clicquot of 1884, just as in the old days he had recommended the sound whiskey which would hurt nobody, not if you drank it all afternoon.

  The year of the mayoralty of Sheffield had been succeeded by seven years fatter than even Joseph had dreamed of. Edward was as sound in his business as he was in the whiskey he so hospitably pressed on his guests, and by dint of always supplying goods of the best possible workmanship and material at prices that gave him no more than a respectable profit, the profits had annually increased till in the opinion of those who did not adopt so unspeculative a quality of goods, they had almost ceased to be respectable, and became colossal instead. Then, at the end of seven fat years, Edward had realized that he was sixty, though he neither looked nor felt more than an adolescent fifty, had turned the hardware business into a company, and as vendor had received ordinary shares to an extent that would insure him an income no less than that of the fat years. He had already put by a capital that produced some ten thousand pounds a year, and he was thus not disadvantageously situated. Percy, however, still held the Art Department in his own hands. The plant and profits of that had not been offered to the public, but had been presented to Percy by his father on the occasion of his marriage, an event now six years old. For the whole idea of ornamental tin ivy and the host of collateral ideas that emanated therefrom had been Percy’s and it was now a joke between his father and him that Mrs. P. would soon have an emerald necklace that would take the shine out of the Land’s End. “Land’s End will be Mrs. P.’s beginning,” said his father. “And the Sea is Britannia’s realm,” he added by a happy afterthought. “I’ll call her Mrs. C. instead of Mrs. P. Hey, Per?”

  Badinage had ensued. She was called Mrs. C. instantly and there were numerous conjectures as to who C. was. Mr. Osborne said that it was curious that C. was the first letter of Co-respondent; but that joke, though Edward was usually very successful in such facetiae, was not very well received. The momentary Mrs. C. ate her grapes with a studied air, and Mrs. Osborne from the other end of the table — this was still in Sheffield — said, “You don’t think, Eddie; you let your tongue run away with you.”

  On reflection Eddie agreed with her, and there was no more heard about Mrs. C. But he always thought that his badinage had been taken a little too seriously. “A joke’s a joke,” he said to himself as he shaved his chin next morning, leaving side-whiskers. “But if they don’t like one joke, we’ll try another. Lots of jokes still left.”

  So without sense of injury or of being misunderstood he tried plenty of others, which were as successful as humour should have any expectation of being. Humour comes from a well that is rarely found, but when found proves always to be inexhaustible. The numerical value, therefore, of Edward’s jokes had not been diminished and Percy inherited his father’s sense of fun.

  Still in Sheffield, Mr. Osborne had, after the formation of the company, seen an extraordinary increase in business, with the result that his income, already scarcely respectable, mounted and mounted. Years ago he had built a chapel of corrugated iron outside and pitch-pine inside in the middle of that district of the town which had become his and was enstreeted with the houses of his workmen, and now he turned the corrugated building into a reading room, as soon as ever the tall Gothic church with which he had superseded it was ready for use. A princess had come to the opening of it, and had declared the discarded church to be a reading room, and there was really nothing more to do in Sheffield, except to say that he did not wish to become a knight. Mr. Osborne had no opinion of knights: knighthood in his mind was the bottom shelf of a structure, where, if he took a place, it might easily become a permanent one. But he had no idea of accepting a bottom place on the shelves. With his natural shrewdness he said that he had done nothing to deserve it. But he winked in a manner that anticipated familiarity toward shelves that were higher. He had not done with the question of shelves yet, though he had nothing to say to the lowest one.

  It must not be supposed that because he had retired from active connection with the hardware business, his mind slackened. The exact contrary was the case. There was no longer any need for him to exercise that shrewd member on hardware, and it only followed that the thought he had previously given to hardware was directed into other channels. He thought things over very carefully as was his habit, before taking any step, summed up his work in Sheffield, settled that a knighthood was not adequate to reward him for what he had already done, but concluded that he had nothing more to do in Sheffield, just for the moment. And having come to that conclusion he had a long talk with Mrs. O. in her boudoir, where she always went after breakfast to see cook and write her letters. But that morning cook waited downstairs in her clean apron long after Mrs. Osborne had gone to her boudoir, expecting every moment to hear her bell, and no bell sounded. For more weighty matters were being debated than the question of dinner, and at first when Mr. Osborne broached the subject his wife felt struck of a heap.

  “Well, Mrs. O., it’s for you to settle,” he said, “and if you’re satisfi
ed to remain in Sheffield, why in Sheffield we remain, old lady, and that’s the last word you shall hear from me on the subject. But there’s a deal to be considered and I’ll just put the points before you again. There’s yourself to lead off with. You like seeing your friends at dinner and giving them of the best and so do I. Well, for all I can learn there’s a deal more of that going on in London where you can have your twenty people to dinner every night if you have a mind, and a hundred to dance to your fiddles afterward. And I’m much mistaken, should we agree to leave Sheffield and set up in town, if Mrs. O.’s parties don’t make some handsome paragraphs in the Morning Post before long.”

  “Lor’, to think of that,” said Mrs. Osborne reflectively. She did not generally employ that interjection, which she thought rather common, and even now, though she was so absorbed, she corrected herself and said “There, to think of that.”

  “But mind you, my dear,” continued Mr. Osborne, “if we go to town, and have a big house in the country, as per the scheme I’ve been putting before you, we don’t do it to take our ease, and just sit in a barouche and drive round the Park to fill up the time to luncheon. I shall have my work to do, and it’s you who must be helping me to get on, as you’ve always done, God bless you Maria, and fine and busy it will make you. There’s a county council in London as well as in Sheffield, and there’s a House of Parliament in London which there isn’t here. No, my dear, if we go to London it won’t be for a life of ease, for I expect work suits us both better, and there’s plenty of work left in us both yet. Give us ten years more work, and then if you like we’ll get into our Bath chairs, and comb out the fleece of the poodle, and think what a busy couple we are.”

  Mr. Osborne got up and shuffled to the window in his carpet slippers. They had been worked and presented to him by his wife on his last birthday and this had been a great surprise, as she had told him throughout that they were destined for Percy. At this moment they suggested something to him.

  “Look at me already, my dear!” he said. “What should I have thought ten years ago if I had seen myself here in your boudoir at eleven of the morning in carpet slippers instead of being at work in my shirt sleeves this last three hours. ‘Eddie,’ I should have said to myself, ‘you’re getting a fat, lazy old man with years of work in you yet.’ And, by Gad, Mrs. Ο., I should have been right. Give me a good dinner, but let me get an appetite for it, though, thank God, my appetite’s good enough yet.’ But let me feel I earn it.”

  Mrs. Osborne got up from her davenport and came and stood by her husband in the window. In front of her stretched the broad immaculate gravel walk bordered by a long riband bed of lobelias, calceolarias and geraniums. Beyond that was the weedless tennis lawn, with its brand new net, where one of the very numerous gardeners was even now marking out the court with the machine that Mr. Osborne had invented and patented the year before he retired from entire control of his business, and which sold in ever increasing quantities. Below, the ground fell rapidly away and not half a mile off the long straggling rows of workmen’s houses between which ran cobbled roads and frequent electric trams, stretched unbroken into the town. Of late years it had grown very rapidly in the direction of this brown stone house, and with its growth the fogs and smoky vapours had increased so that it was seldom, as on this morning, that they could see from the windows the tall and very solid tower of the Gothic church that had supplanted the one of corrugated iron. He looked out over this with his wife’s hand in his for a moment in silence.

  “I don’t know how it is with you, my dear,” he said, “but every now and then a feeling comes over me which I can’t account for or resist. And the feeling that’s been coming over me this last month agone, is that me and Sheffield’s done all the work we’re going to do together. But there are plenty of days of work for us both yet, but not together. Look at that there quarter, my dear, right from where the New Lane houses begin to where’s the big chimney of the works behind the church. I made that, as well you know, and it’s paid me well to do it, and it’s paid Sheffield to have me to do it. Not an ounce of bad material, to my knowledge, has gone into the factory gates, and not an ounce of bad workmanship has come out of them. I’ve paid high for first-class materials, and I seen that I got them. I’ve turned out none but honest goods what’ll do the work I guarantee them for, and last you ten times as long as inferior stuff, as you and cook know, since there’s not a pot or a pan in your kitchen, my dear, but what came from the shops. And I’ve made my fortune over it, and that’s over, so I take it, and what’s the sense of my sitting on top of a hill, just to look at my calceolarias and get an appetite for dinner by running about that court there? But if you’ve got a fancy for staying in Sheffield, as I say, this is the last word I speak on the subject.”

  Mrs. Osborne nodded at him and pressed his arm, as he poured out these gratifying recollections in his rather hoarse voice.

  “There’s more on your mind yet, Eddie, my dear,” she said. “Do you think I’ve lived with you these years and seen you off your victuals by day and heard you tossing and turning in your bed at night without getting to know when you’ve told me all, or when you’ve got something further unbeknown to me yet? It’s not me only you’re thinking of.”

  Mr. Osborne beamed on his wife.

  “Well, if you aren’t right every time,” he said. “You’ve guessed it all I reckon. Yes, it’s Claude. I doubt whether I didn’t make a mistake about Claude at the beginning, and whether we shouldn’t have done better to put him into the business like Percy, and let Alfred leave him his money or not just as he liked. But there, if we made a mistake, it’s our business to make the best we can of it now. But whenever I see the boy I think we did the right thing by him, and we’ve got to go on doing the right thing. And if a young fellow has been to Eton and Cambridge, and is going to be as rich a man and richer nor his father was, without having to do a stroke of work for it, I ask you, Mrs. O., what’s he to do with himself in Sheffield? Of course, he could go to London and work at the law or go into the Army or adopt any other of the ways of wasting time and doing nothing, without having it cast up at you, but think of the chance he gets, if you and I settle in London and have a country house as well, so that he can ask his friends down for a bit of shooting or whatever’s on, and bring them home to dine, and stop for his mother’s dance or concert, or whatever you have named for such a day.”

  He paused a moment.

  “He’ll be home for good now in a month’s time, and I should like to be able to say to him, ‘Claude, my boy, there’s no need for you to think how you’ll occupy yourself in Sheffield for your vacation, for we’ll soon be moving on. Mother and I’ — that’s what I shall say — you understand— ‘have come to an agreement, and there’ll be a house for you in Grosvenor Square, perhaps, or in Park Lane to bring your friends to, and a shooting box somewhere else, so that whether it’s Lord This or the Honourable That, you can bring them down and find a welcome, and a bird or two to shoot at, and the pick of the London girls for you to dance with.’”

  “Eh, Edward, you talk as if the thing was done,” said his wife.

  “Well, so it is, if you and I make up our minds to it. And you guessed right; it’s a particular feeling I’ve always had about Claude. Eton and Cambridge may have made a change in him, or it may be that he was something different all along. But to see him come into a room, into that smoking room for instance at the Club. Why, it’s as if the whole place belonged to him, it is, if only he cared to claim it. And the very waiters know the difference: and I warrant you there’s always an evening paper ready for him, whoever has to go without. But in London he’ll find friends, yes, and a girl to marry him, I wager you, whose folk came over with the Conqueror. Maria, I should like to speak of my son-in-law the Earl, or the Countess my boy’s mother-in-law. There’s a deal in a name if you can get hold of the right one.”

  Mrs. Osborne gave a great sigh, and looked at her rings, and as she sighed the row of pearls that hung over her am
ple bosom rose and fell. There was a great deal in what Edward had said, and that which concerned Claude appealed to her most. She had felt it all again and again, and again and again she had wished, content though she was with the very comfortable circumstances of her life, that they had some other house in which to welcome him home for his vacation. She felt he was her own son at heart, but his manners were such! It was Claude all over to behave as if the whole room belonged to him, should he choose to claim it. She was devoted to Percy, but Percy, she well knew, felt as she did when he was going out to dinner, and thought about what he should say, and looked to see if his hair was tidy, and hoped he hadn’t left his handkerchief behind. But Claude seemed to know that everything was all right, with him, or if it wasn’t he didn’t care. Once on a solemn occasion, when a Royal visitor was in Sheffield, the whole family had been bidden to lunch with the mayor, and Claude had discovered in the middle of lunch that he hadn’t got a pocket-handkerchief, and the day was enough to make anybody persp — . And then in thought Mrs. Osborne checked again, and said to herself “action of the skin.” But Claude, though hot, had been as cool as a cucumber. He just stopped a waiter who was going by and said, “Please send out to the nearest shop and get me a handkerchief.” Mrs. Osborne would never have dared to do that, and if she had, she felt that the handkerchief wouldn’t have come. But in five minutes Claude had his, “and never paid for it neither,” thought Mr. Osborne to himself in a mixed outburst of pride and misgiving. Claude wanted a handkerchief and it came. He didn’t bother about it.

  But the whole suggestion of giving up Sheffield where she was so friendly and pleasant with so many local magnates and their wives, and launching into the dim unplumbed sea of London was bewildering though exciting. She had no doubts about Edward; wherever Edward was he would do his part; she was only doubtful about her own. And these doubts were not of durable quality, while the reflections about Claude were durable in texture. Once a friend of Claude’s at Cambridge had come to stay at the brown stone house, and it had all been very awkward. He was an honourable, too, and his father was a lord, and though he was very quiet and polite, Mrs. Osborne had seen that something was wrong from the first. The most carefully planned dinners had been offered him, and Edward had brought out the Chateau Yquem, which was rarely touched, and this young man had eaten and drunk as if “it was nothing particular.” Mrs. Osborne had tried to console herself with the thought that he didn’t think much of his victuals, whatever they were, but it was not that he refused dishes. He just ate them all, and said no more about it. And he had been regaled with two dinner parties during the three days he was with them, to which all sorts of Aldermen and their wives and daughters had been bidden. She had not forgotten his rank either, for though there were two knights and their wives present at one of these dinners, and at the other two knights and a baronet, he had taken her in on both occasions. Nor was their conversation wholly satisfactory, for though Mrs. Osborne had the Morning Post brought up to her room with her early tea, while the young man was there, in order that she might be up to date with the movements and doings of the nobility, she had extraordinarily bad luck, since the bankruptcy case that was going on was concerned with the affairs of his sister and her husband, and the memorial service at St. James’s proved to be coincident with the obsequies of his great-uncle. Mrs. Osborne felt that these things would not happen when they were in the midst of everything in town.