by Joan Smith
They had arrived on Friday. Tuesday morning the group was at the table taking a leisurely breakfast when the mail was brought in. This was a part of the routine. On this occasion, Prudence was surprised to receive a letter herself, forwarded by her mother. It was not an important document, from an ex-neighbor back home, but it lent a cozy feeling, to be sitting opening and perusing a letter amongst this prestigious crew. Lady Malvern generally received an impressive stack of letters, as she did this day. She flipped through them, lifting out one with some interest to scan over quickly. She looked pleased when she set it down, then glanced to Prudence with a questioning look.
“A note from Dammler. He means to look in on his way to Longbourne. He goes there tomorrow--no, today. Tuesday, he says. He usually stops off on his way by to bait his horses. He says he wants to speak to you, Mr. Moore, about something or other. How nice. We shall ask him to dinner.”
“Good!” Moore answered. “I have been looking him up without success for a week. He has been making himself too scarce of late.”
Prudence waited to hear Mr. Rogers introduce the subject of painting, but he had been prodded to reticence by Moore and the hostess. Not another word was said on the subject. It was to be treated as a matter of no importance then. She must accept it as a social trifle like the others.
"Miss Mallow and I are off to your excellent library, Constance,” Miss Burney said, intimately aware of what Prudence must be feeling. “We are interested in looking up that set of letters by Horace Walpole you have. They are not in circulation, I think you mentioned. I should adore to see them.”
Prudence was grateful for the woman’s tact, and happy to get into the quiet of the library to ponder how she should proceed. She wondered if Dammler knew she was there, or if it was Constance that brought him. That he came to see Moore never so much as entered her head, though it was the truth.
Dammler hadn’t the faintest notion Prudence was at Finefields. Not a word could he get out of Clarence on her doings, and quizzing was difficult with the throng always in the atelier. Nor was he interested in Constance either. For a few confused weeks he had dabbled a bit in physics and the novel, then become interested in Clarence’s studio. He first hoped Prudence would turn up there to see for herself that Miss Penny was her uncle’s model. He realized as the audience grew that there was no likelihood of that, but was too unsettled to write. He often spent an hour in the afternoon with Clarence, watching him daub away and explain all his new techniques. Lately, he spent more than an hour. Cybele had never ceased to attract Clarence. Again and again, he was pestered to arrange for her to pose for Clarence. Ever versatile, he had a million excuses to fob him off. Exxon wouldn’t allow it. Then Clarence learned from some other watchers that Exxon was gone home to his estate in Warwick, and it seemed the ideal time for it, to get it over with. Still disliking to do it, he claimed the Rembrandt style wouldn’t suit her.
“I know that! Obviously she must be done as Venus, in the style of Botticelli. I have thought it all out. There’s no shell in the world large enough for her to stand on, of course, and her hair ain’t long enough to trail around her body--’Birth of Venus,’ of course, will be the picture. Venus floating along the water on her shell, with Miss Penny and another gel from the theater to hold the cape and blow wind on her. I’ll stand her on a chair, and paint up a big picture of a shell, using a small one for a model. No trouble in it. Here, I have the cartoon sketched up in the way I mean to do her.”
A tracing of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” was thrust into Dammler’s hands. “I’m afraid Exxon wouldn’t like it,” he insisted, determined to leave it at that.
Cybele, however, heard of the new artist from her sister actresses, and was eager to be painted for posterity. Much she cared for Exxon! She was through with him. A much more dashing buck was ogling her, and besides, Exxon was always pestering her to drop out of the play. She adored that play. To be wearing the pretty chiffon costumes, and a black wig and dancing! It was like a party every night. And they paid her for it, too. With Clarence shouting in one ear and Cybele wheedling in the other, Dammler gave in and brought her to the studio, where Clarence, within the space of three seconds, realized he had finally met the woman to replace his late wife.
He would marry her. But first he would paint her half a dozen times. She would be Venus rising from the waves, and she would be Mona Lisa with that tantalizing smile. She would be Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary, as well, but Dammler knew nothing of all these plans. He saw Clarence was hypnotized by the girl, and sat faithfully protecting him until Venus had risen from the waves. She was such a troublesome model he never thought Clarence would tackle her again. Like a child, she required constant amusement. Work must stop while he procured ices for her. She brought her little pug along, to pester Clarence to distraction with his yapping and heel-nipping. She babbled and giggled throughout the sessions, never standing still a minute, and all the while Clarence fell deeper and deeper in love.
When the first picture was finished, Dammler realized he had been wasting a good deal of time, and with a guilty conscience decided that as he couldn’t write, he would go to Longbourne Abbey and oversee estate matters. Constance had invited him to her house party, and while he had no thought of wasting a week talking about writing, he would spend an afternoon with Moore, his old friend, and take him some notes he wanted on the east. He mistakenly thought Clarence’s long face indicated a disenchantment with Cybele, and hadn’t a single worry on that score when he left the city.
He went off to Finefields pretty well resigned to making a life for himself that was worthwhile and very dull. Why must the two go together? It could have been worthwhile and interesting with Prue.
Knowing he was coming, Prudence contrived to be well away from the house by late afternoon, when he was believed to be arriving. She took a run into the closest village with Miss Burney and Mr. Moore, to see what authors the bookshop was carrying. The expressed purpose was to buy a pair of silk stockings for Miss Burney, but they all three turned in at the first bookstore without the need of a word being spoken. It seemed an unnecessarily cruel prank on the shopkeeper’s part that Dammler’s Cantos from Abroad should reside side-by-side with Babe in the Woods mocking her and causing Burney and Moore to exchange a secret, laughing smile. The works of Miss Burney were also on prominent display, as was Mr. Moore’s The Two-penny Post Bag, so that the trip was thought to be well worthwhile despite the forgetting of the stockings.
Until dinnertime, Prudence kept away from Dammler, though she saw the tiger skin-seated curricle in the stable, and knew he was there. By then he had learned as well of her presence, had had time to wonder if she thought he was chasing her, and to determine he would show by his manner it was nothing of the sort. He considered an outrageous flirtation with Constance, made more difficult by the fact she had her latest conquest always at her heels, a very high-toned philosophical evening with Tom to show her how far beneath himself and the others she ranged intellectually, and lastly to get right down to it and wonder whether she would speak to him at all after the episode in the hat shop. He still hadn’t set on his course when he went below a quarter of an hour before dinner, to find her sitting with Fanny Burney in the saloon, sipping sherry and wondering together how they had forgotten the silk stockings. Tom Moore was with them, which provided Dammler an excellent reason--even Prudence couldn’t call it an excuse--to join them. He had come here for the sole purpose of speaking to Tom.
“Tom, I have been meaning to call on you,” Dammler said, walking to the sofa, nodding with an impartial smile to Tom and the two ladies, who nodded back in unison, like a pair of Siamese cats, Prudence thought.
“Thought you was dead,” Moore said in reply. “Sent half a dozen notes around to your place, and never got an answer from any of them.”
“You know I’m a shockingly bad correspondent, but I have the notes with me--the ones you asked about in your letters. What is it you’re writing that has to do wit
h details of oriental splendor? Planning to invade my territory and do something on the east?”
Miss Burney replied lightly, “If we any of us stray from a polite English saloon, Dammler, we are invading your territory. You write about the whole world.”
“Very true, but I don’t do it nearly so well as Tom. Just what is it you’re planning to write, Tom?” he asked, turning back to the man, to indicate who in the circle had drawn him.
“A hodgepodge thing--narrative verses set in the Orient, held together like raisins in a bun by a wad of prose. Lalla Rookh, I call it.”
“Ah ha, about a lady, I see. More stealing from Dammler.”
“Oh, I thought it must be about a blackbird--a rook,” Miss Burney intruded.
Dammler decided to let her join their discussion. “It is a name, Fan. Lalla Rookh is a name.”
“Daughter of an emperor, she is,” Tom added. “I set her off on a voyage as Fielding did with his character in Joseph Andrews, to while away the time on the trip with stories as Chaucer did in his Canterbury Tales. I borrow from all the very best sources, you see-- Dammler, Fielding and Chaucer.”
“You’ll mix up a better pudding than any of us,” Dammler said generously. “And now it’s time for you to ask me what I am doing.”
This had, to Prudence at least, the sound of an announcement. She listened without saying a word to hear it. “Hear you’re taking up painting,” Moore said in a quiet aside.
Dammler frowned him down, then proceeded. “I am going into politics,” he said. “My literary inspiration has deserted me, and I have been talked into introducing a bill in Parliament by Lord Holland.” The speech, once out, struck him as disastrous. “To Prudence, my inspiration,” was before his eyes, in letters two feet high. He daren’t glance towards her.
“Oh, Dammler, no!” Miss Burney lamented. “How can you say so, when your love sonnets are so widely acclaimed? They were marvelous. Any old prose-talker can introduce a bill in Parliament. You must continue writing your poetry.”
The love sonnets were not even officially out. He fell deeper and deeper into shame with every utterance, to hear them spoken of as “widely acclaimed.”
“Oh, they were drivel--puerile ramblings I did well to suppress,” he said quickly, then thought that was ill-advised, too. Prue was the inspiration; to suggest they were puerile might lead her to believe he had outgrown the sentiments, which was not at all what he meant to convey.
“They were excellent,” Moore took it up. “Nonsense to hold them back, but about politics, my lad, leave it to the professionals. It is no place for a babe in the woods like you.” Even this harmless suggestion must contain the title of her book! And used wrongly too, as she had used it herself. Probably not wrongly, if Tom said it. Language grew, changed subtly. “But did I not hear you are writing a novel?” Tom asked.
“No," he answered. Prudence looked at him in surprise. He couldn’t even answer a question today. “That is, I tried my hand at it, but found it impossible. I leave the field to the ladies, and of course Mr. Scott, the best of them all.” Oh, God! Why did he have to add that last, with two novelists staring at him.
“He is very condescending, is he not, Miss Mallow?” Miss Burney continued on in her playful vein. "Poetry is beyond our poor talents, you see. We are to leave it for the gentlemen, while we vex ourselves with the inferior chore of constructing mere novels, in emulation of Mr. Scott. Of course we daren’t aspire to equal him!”
“I didn’t mean anything of the sort!” he exclaimed in chagrin. “I couldn’t do it to save my soul. It requires too much planning and thinking. Poetry you have only to feel, a novel must be thought out as well.”
“There was a good deal of thought in your latest sonnets, I think,” Fanny continued.
“No, I felt them and transposed my thoughts to paper.”
“Without the intervening step of words having to be sorted out. I see how it is. It was done under the influence of opium, like Mr. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. We must try that technique, Miss Mallow. It will save us a deal of thinking. Shall we go and have a cup of opium? Or do you recommend a pipe, Lord Dammler?” Fanny asked roguishly.
“I don’t recommend it at all, ma’am. The use of drugs at least has never been laid in my dish.” This speech displeased him as much as the others. There was an inference in it that he had had all the other shattered commandments attributed to him. And why did Prudence sit there like a damned oyster, pretending to take no interest in the talk? He straightened his shoulders and turned towards her purposefully.
“How does Patience go on, Prudence?” he asked.
“We two dull virtues plod on as ever. I should perhaps add a little of your vice to liven it up.”
As bad as all the rest! The whole crew were out to roast him. “I can well spare it,” he answered with a cocky laugh that hid entirely his growing anger. “Which of my sorts do you think would add the right flavor? Drunkenness, sloth, avarice?”
“It was none of those I had in mind,” she answered offhandedly, and turned to Fanny, but he was not about to let her off the hook.
“No? Which have I omitted? You must let me know, so that I can get on with the job of ruining myself in good earnest.”
“You don’t appear to need any help in that pursuit, Lord Dammler.”
He glared at her, but Moore jumped in to forestall disaster. “Rogers is here somewhere. He has been lying in for four weeks, and has lately had the midwife in to deliver a couplet. Such a chore it is for him. He’ll want to be congratulated on it. Be sure you ask him how the delivery went. Ah, there he is off in the corner by himself, sulking. Come along, Allan, we’ll inquire for the infant’s health. Excuse us, ladies.” He got Dammler by the elbow and took him away, with just one angry glance at Prudence.
“Dammler can be quite the most charming man, but he is a sadly unstable character, don’t you think?” Miss Burney asked.
“He is very excitable,” Prudence answered mildly. She had found him more exciting than excitable. He had got her so excited she could hardly speak, and knew she wouldn’t be able to eat a bite of dinner--done it with no more than a glance and a few jibes. If he took into his head to come to cuffs with her, she would claim a migraine and go straight to her bed. He would know she was lying too, and say so to the whole group.
Chapter Fifteen
Lady Malvern had to do some juggling of her seating arrangement with the arrival of Dammler for dinner. Satisfied with her own current flirt, a Sir Lyle Wharton, she gave the poet to Fanny Burney. It was a dreadful waste to place him next a lady in her sixties, but, until she saw how they went on together these days, she would not inflict him on Miss Mallow, and he was too fast for her country guests. Fanny regaled him very satisfactorily over dinner with an account of her internment in France by Napoleon. So well, in fact, that he returned to her side when the gentlemen finished their port and joined the ladies in the gold saloon. That she was sitting with Prudence, as she usually was, was no reason he shouldn’t continue a particularly lively discussion they had been engaged in at the meal’s end.
He took up a chair at Miss Burney’s end of the sofa and said at once, “I think it a particularly barbarous custom that the ladies are shunted off to the saloon just when the meal is over, and some decent conversation is possible.”
“It is but one of the barbarous customs perpetrated against us,” Miss Burney replied, quite flattered at his attentions. She had of course no interest of a romantical nature in him, but always liked to be on terms with her fellow writers, and the best way to be on terms with Dammler was to provide a good argumentative partner in whatever he was in a mood to discuss.
“No, really! It is we men who suffer by it. I daresay you and Miss Mallow have been having an enlightened discourse on some matter of interest, while I have been subjected to an hour of politics.”
“Subjected! But surely you said not two hours ago that you meant to take the subject up full time,” Fanny pointed out.
He laughed uneasily, seeing that he was falling right back into idiocy, as soon as he was in Prue’s company again. “Caught me dead to rights! But I consider the new career as a duty. Very likely writing will remain my avocation. You were just telling me something about a cathedral in France, Fan, when you left.”
“Are you really interested in discussing churches, Dammler?” she asked with an arch smile.
“I am interested in massive architecture of all sorts,” he replied, refusing to recognize any slur on his morals in this shot. To fill the silence he went on with some interests in this line. “After having seen the Sphinx in Egypt, for instance, the Colosseum at Rome and the Parthenon in Greece, one is at a loss to imagine how they were constructed so long ago, with no knowledge of modern engineering. I doubt we could reproduce such mammoth things today in England, with all our technology.”
A few timid glances towards Prudence were attempted during this speech, and at its end his eyes settled on her, to include her in the discussion.
“I don’t know about today, but something similar was done in the past, was it not, at Stonehenge?” she asked, rather tentatively.
“Ah, Stonehenge!” he took it up eagerly. “A queer thing, a real mystery, those great monoliths standing in the middle of Salisbury Plain. Extraordinary! I often think of them when I see the lords standing around the grate at the House, talking mystical nonsense.”
“I suppose they were some sort of place of worship in their day,” Prudence suggested hesitantly, for she had no great interest in or knowledge of antiquity.