Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  For a moment she thought over what he had said, instantly finding herself unable to accept it.

  “I can imagine your being very indigestible,” she remarked. “I don’t really think, nor, perhaps, do you, that you will allow yourself to be assimilated. I can’t imagine you giving up your wet woods.”

  “I shall always remain selfish, you mean,” said he. “Self-centred; whatever you like to call it.”

  She frowned over this.

  “What I suppose I really mean is that I don’t understand you,” she said. And, getting up, she fumbled for the switch of the light by the door. “Let’s throw some light on you.”

  He got up, too.

  “I must go to bed,” he said. “It’s any hour of the night.”

  She stood in front of him, stretching her arms, which were a little cramped with leaning on the window-sill, and looked at him gravely.

  “You’re going to ask Silvia to marry you, then?” she said.

  “I am, as soon as I think she will accept me.”

  Nellie received this point-blank. She had fully expected it, and now, when it came, there was nothing in her that ever so faintly winced. Then she took two steps forward, put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

  “Peter, darling, what good friends we’ve been,” she said, “and we’ll carry all that forward into the future. There’s no one like you. That’s just what I meant by kissing you, that, and to wish you all good luck. Perhaps your son will marry my daughter; wouldn’t that be nice; and then we can envy them both, and be wildly jealous. As for asking Silvia — well, what about to-morrow? Perhaps it’s rather late to ask her to-night.”

  He tiptoed his way out, and Nellie closed the door very cautiously behind him. At that moment, when she kissed him, she had given him all of the very best of her. She exulted in having done it, but assuredly virtue had gone out of her. Restless and unquiet in her bed, she thought over what was left for her.

  CHAPTER VII

  JOHN MAINWARING had prepared his studio for the visit of Mrs. Wardour and Silvia next day with the utmost dramatic completeness, employing for their reception the scenery and the setting which suggested itself as being most likely to impress and astound. With this end in view he had littered the room with all possible properties, bringing down from the attics stacks of his own pictures, which he disposed in careless profusion round the walls. Sketch books and paint boxes littered the tables, lay figures peeped from behind easels, robes trailed over sofa-backs, and he, when his visitors were announced, had designed that he himself should be found, in his oldest velveteen coat and morocco slippers, at the top of the step-ladder which he had put into position again in front of the great canvas representing Satan odiously whispering to the German Emperor. There, absorbed in his inspired labours, he was to be giving the last, the crowning, the positively final terrific touch to it as his visitors (and, as he hoped, his victims) entered.

  Since the work had actually been finished at least a month ago, and on that occasion had been toasted in glasses of port wine by himself, his wife and Peter, he had thought it prudent to inform her that more last touches were to be applied to it again to-day. Visitors, he had added, were dropping in that afternoon, and she would, no doubt, be sitting upstairs in the drawing-room when they arrived, with tea prepared for their refreshment. When the time came he would yodel for her, and she would come down, be presented to Mrs. Wardour and her daughter, and would scold him for keeping these ladies looking at his stupid pictures instead of bringing them up to tea....

  Such was the general idea of the opening of a manoeuvre from which he, with a quite incurable optimism, expected very gratifying results. Peter had already alluded to the surprising dawn of Mrs. Wardour on the town, and he himself, at the play the night before, had paved the way for a commission to execute a portrait of Silvia. He had no idea whether or not Mrs. Wardour inserted any of these golden tentacles with which, like an octopus, she appeared to be enveloping London, into the domain of art, but it was worth while hoping that her sense of completion would not be satisfied unless she had Silvia’s portrait painted. That, so he had ascertained, had not been done, and he had, so to speak, left a card “soliciting the favour of a call.” The call certainly was to be made that afternoon, and his imagination now, bit in teeth and wildly galloping, foresaw another possible commission in the portrait of Mrs. Wardour herself. Perhaps — here was the rosiest of the summits yet in view — he might profitably dispose of that great cartoon which Mrs. Wardour would so soon be privileged to see receiving its finishing touches. Farther than that his vision did not definitely project itself, but in sunlit and shining mists he could vaguely see himself working for all he was worth (and for much of what Mrs. Wardour was worth) at more of these stupendous canvases, and berthing each, as soon as possible, in the same remunerative harbourage.

  The ring at the bell of the street door warned him to scamper up his step-ladder, and absorb himself in finishing touches at the top of the thundercloud of war. In due time the studio door opened and Burrows, announcing his visitors, had to raise her voice to the pitch of a vendor of street-wares and recite the names again before she was so fortunate as to attract his attention. Then Mr. Mainwaring turned slowly round with a dazed expression and, shading his eyes, perceived the expected presences. Then with brush in one hand and palette in the other, he gave an ecstatic cry of welcome (not to be confused with the yodelling summons for his wife), and came bounding down the step-ladder. Divesting himself of his palette and brush, he held out both hands.

  “Ah, my dear friends,” he said, “but this is charming. I am ashamed of myself to be found in such dishevelment, but — well, we artists are like that, silly donkeys as we are, and I had forgotten, for the moment I had forgotten the advent of my delightful visitors.”

  He held a hand of each of them for a moment, with pressure and expression, and then withdrew his left hand, holding it to his forehead.

  “A finishing touch,” he said. “I was at that very moment putting the last touch of paint on to my canvas. Let me forget that: give me a moment to forget it. You are here, that is the great point.”

  He made a splendid obeisance, and as he recovered thrust back his hair, and embarked on a period.

  “You find me, dear Mrs. Wardour,” he said, “in a moment of triumph, of jubilation even. Little as that can possibly mean to others, this is one of my red letter days. A moment ago my brush touched my canvas for the last time. My picture is done, all but for the obscure initials, which, in vermilion, I shall humbly inscribe in the corner. Would it, by chance, be of the smallest, interest to you to see that little rite performed? I take my brush then, I squeeze out a morsel of paint, I trace those obscure initials.”

  No inspiration could have been happier. Mrs. Wardour’s eye was already travelling over the huge canvas with rapture and astonishment, and it was thrilling that she should have come just in time to see the artist testify in vermilion that this great thing was of his own creation. Naturally she could not be expected to know that if she had arrived half an hour ago, or had not arrived for half an hour to come, she would have been just in time for this ceremony. She turned to Silvia.

  “Well, if that isn’t interesting, Silvia,” she said (as if Silvia had denied it). “Weren’t we saying to each other as we came along that perhaps we should find Mr. Mainwaring painting? And what a work of art too! My!”

  John Mainwaring having recorded himself as creator, became showman and spectator in one, and moved the step-ladder aside so that he should both get and give an uninterrupted view. Then, losing himself once more as spectator, he propped his chin on his hand and gazed at the work.

  “Finished! Finished!” he said with a magnificent detachment. “Now let us see what we think of it.”

  Mrs. Wardour gazed too, and the more she gazed the more powerful — that was exactly the word she would have used — appeared the significance of this tremendous presentment. She had no great taste for pictures, but if you were i
n pursuit of pictures (and pictures had certainly been the objective of this expedition), here was what she meant by a picture. Not long before his death her husband had bought what he called “a picture or two,” destined to adorn the walls of the gallery which was so great a feature in the castellated residence which he had built on the ridge of Ashdown Forest. It ran the whole length of the house, and when complete as to embellishment, was to be a lane of pictures from end to end hung on red Spanish brocade. To her mind, no less than his, real pictures, true pictures, pictures worth looking at, were brightly (or sombrely) coloured illustrations of famous personages, of well-known places, or told a story; best of all were those that told a story. A few such had already been plucked and gathered there; there was a very splendid record of the coronation of Queen Victoria, the rock of Gibraltar, with a P. and O. steamer to the left and a sunset to the right, an execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and, in lighter mood, a delicious immensity called “Knights of the Bath,” in which a small boy and a large puppy shared a sponging-tin. Here then and now the image of the walls of the great picture-gallery, at present insufficiently clad, and crying out for covering, like a bather who has lost his clothes, flashed into her mind. The image was not sufficiently clearly realized to admit of a definite association of ideas between it and the allegory at which they were all gazing, but certainly as she looked at the size — particularly the size — of Mr. Mainwaring’s masterpiece, the gallery at Howes occurred to her. If there were to be pictures, here or elsewhere, she liked to know what such pictures were “about,” and she instantly perceived what this one was about. Now that the war was won, and the German Emperor, for all practical purposes, annihilated (he had served his turn because the destruction of ships by his submarines had brought her so excessive a fortune), she could, perceiving the message of the picture, unreservedly gloat over the realism of it.

  “If that isn’t the German Emperor,” she loudly enunciated, “and if that isn’t Satan whispering to him about the war. Satan’s saying that he would help, and, to be sure, he tried to. I do call that a picture. And there’s the war coming up behind, like a thunderstorm. There’s a subject for a picture, and how beautifully you’ve done it, Mr. Mainwaring.”

  He leaned his chin still more heavily against his hand.

  “Ah, you think so?” he asked. “I wish I thought so!”

  “But what is there to want?” asked Mrs. Wardour. “It’s all as clear as day. We saw nothing, so striking at the Royal Academy, did we, Silvia, even at the Private View.”

  “The Academy? The Academy?” murmured Mr. Mainwaring, as if he wondered whether he had heard that name before. Then he shook his head gently, as if abandoning the attempt to remember what the Academy was.

  “And I see lots of guns and bayonets underneath the thundercloud,” said Mrs. Wardour unerringly. “They’re coming up.”

  The artist still gazed, and, smoothing his chin with his hand, he repeated:

  “Yes; they’re coming up, coming up.”...

  He gave a great start, and seemed to shake himself like a big retriever emerging from the water, where he had brought some thrown token to land.

  He did not know of the great gallery at Howes, which starved for decoration; but even if he had, he would have bounded out of the water just like that.

  “Basta! Basta!” he cried. “I am boring you, dear ladies, I am wearying you, I am making myself a most unutterable tedium for you. Where is my wife? Why is she not here to tap me on the shoulder and say ‘Tea’?”

  He gave the preconcerted signal of a yodel, and opening the door of the studio, repeated it. A faint cry from upstairs answered him, and on the heels of that cry Mrs. Mainwaring came downstairs. The introductions were floridly effected, and she shook her finger at her husband, and explained her reproof to her visitors.

  “I always tell him that when he is at his painting he never knows the time,” she said. “John, it is very wrong of you to have kept Mrs. Wardour and Miss Wardour down here.”

  She turned to Mrs. Wardour, as her husband vented himself in contrition and apology to Silvia.

  “Of course I’m no judge,” she said, “for I always think that everything my husband does is so striking. But is not that a wonderful thing? The Emperor, Satan. Yes. Such expressive faces! Now I must insist on your coming to have a cup of tea. I always have to drive my husband away from his easel. Look at him in his old coat, too. John, I’m ashamed of you! Go and put on something more tidy.”

  Silvia felt somehow, as Mrs. Mainwaring gave this skilful rendering of the general hints that she had received, as if she was listening to some automaton wound up to emit through a mask-like face | certain words, certain sentences that formed its accomplishment. That was the immediate effect, but immediately afterwards followed the conjecture that it was not a mere automaton that spoke. It said, so she seemed to gather, what it had been told (or thereabouts) to say, but probably Mrs. Mainwaring was capable of saying and doing things for herself. Though she had been pulled through the funnel of Mr. Mainwaring’s personality, she had not lost her own individual self. But what that individual self was she could form no conjecture. It was as if a voice came from inside a window over which a blind had been completely drawn. She could arrive at no perception of who it was who talked behind the blind, nor was the room lit within so that, at the least, there came a shadow on the blind, suggesting features. All this was no more than the details of the first impression made by a new acquaintance, her instinctive valuation of her hostess, something to work upon provisionally. Mrs. Mainwaring was only repeating her lessons, which she seemed to know so excellently well; she gave at present no indication of what she was like when her lessons were over. But that she existed Silvia had no doubt whatever. There were people like that, people who had an aloof, sequestered life of their own. Then, without being conscious of the transition, she knew that she was thinking of Mrs. Mainwaring no longer, but of Peter.

  More yodelling proclaimed that the artist had put on his tidy coat, and he pranced back, and led the way upstairs with Mrs. Wardour, saying that he was as hungry as a hunter, and hoping that his wife had provided them with a good tea. Mrs. Mainwaring, on the other hand, seemed a little to be detaining Silvia; she pointed out other of the works of art that so plentifully bestrewed the room, and this struck the girl, somehow, as being part of a manœuvre in no way connected with the lesson she had so faultlessly repeated. The blind had been ever so slightly pushed aside; someone was looking out.

  “Yes, there’s a picture my husband painted of my son last year,” she said. “I think you’ve met Peter, haven’t you, Miss Wardour? That was considered to be very like him. I hope he will be home for tea; he said he thought he could get away from the Foreign Office early to-day. Very interesting for him to be in the Foreign Office.”

  Silvia said something amiable about the portrait, which was quite recognizable.

  “So pleased you think it like,” continued Mrs. Mainwaring. “Yes, Peter is at the Foreign Office all day, and he is generally out in the evening. I do not go out very much. I sit at home mostly in the evening and read.”

  Silvia welcomed a new topic. Though the blind had been distinctly twitched aside she could not see in; she was only conscious of being observed. But this seemed an encouraging opportunity of getting a glimpse.

  “What do you read most?” she asked. “Novels? Memoirs?”

  “No, what I like reading about is places I have never been to,” said Mrs. Mainwaring. “I wonder, when I read, what life is like in those places, and how I should enjoy it.”

  If that was a glimpse for the girl it was a very momentary one, lit, so to speak, not by any clear illumination, but rather by some vague dim phosphorescence. Silvia, by some whimsical association of ideas, found herself thinking of a phosphorescent match-box; if you felt for it in the dark, you might find matches there which would produce something more illuminating.

  “Ah, I, too, love new places,” she said. “I love waking in a new place, w
here I have arrived after dark, and wondering what it is going to be like.”

  The glimpse grew a little more definite.

  “I should like that, too,” said Mrs. Mainwaring. “But my husband’s work keeps him in London, and I do not get away very often. Shall we go upstairs to tea?”

  As they turned, Mrs. Mainwaring cast one glance at the great cartoon. For the moment, infinitesimal in duration, her neat smooth porcelain face grew hostile and malevolent.

  No sooner did Silvia appear in the doorway of the little drawing-room facing the street, than Mr. Mainwaring, to her immense surprise, bounded from his seat, chasséed across the room to her, and fell on his knees before her.

  “Behold me in an attitude of abject entreaty!” he said. “Your mother, subject to your acquiescence, dear Miss Silvia, has asked me to attempt to use my best endeavours, feeble as they may be, to render you the eager homage of an artist’s skill. She has asked me, subject to your consent, I repeat, to paint your portrait for her.”

  Even as he spoke there came the quick light step on the stairs, the identity of which Silvia, seldom as she had heard it, knew with a certainty that surprised her, and Peter came in.

  “Kneel, Peter, my dear,” said his father, enjoying himself tremendously and putting up hands of supplication. “Maria, my angel, I beseech you to kneel too. We are entreating Miss Silvia; we are urging the sacred claims of Art.”

  Silvia gave a laugh of sheer amusement at this ludicrous situation. Amusement was the only possible solvent for it.

  “Oh please, let nobody kneel!” she said. “And you, Mr. Mainwaring, please get up. Yes, of course, if my mother wishes it, and if Mr. Mainwaring will be very patient and tell me what to do—”