Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Mr. Carlingford expressed singular but original ideas on the subject of money.

  “I had the pleasure of giving your curate, a delightful young fellow I should say,” he began, “a small cheque this afternoon. So many clergymen, Mr. Markham, if you will excuse a criticism on your fellow-workers, are distinguished only for their superficial grasp of subtleties; but Mr. Douglas is distinguished for his wonderfully keen grasp of the obvious. I asked him for how much I should draw the cheque, and he said at once the sum he wished to receive. I hope you will always ask me when you want anything.”

  “You are very generous.”

  Mr. Carlingford finished his glass, and put it down on the chimney-piece.

  “Money may be the root of all evil,” he said, “but it is in itself a very necessary evil. It is one of those little snares without which we should be always tripping up. But it is a very troublesome thing. Tom, I know, detests money; perhaps that is why he spends it so quickly. However, there is always a chance of something smashing and his being left penniless, so he needn’t abandon all hope of being happy yet He is a great friend of your son, is he not?”

  “Yes, Ted saw a great deal of him at Cambridge, though he was a year or two the senior.”

  “I was so glad to see he had got his Fellowship. I suppose he will remain at Cambridge.”

  “Yes, he means to. He is fond of the place, and it is a pleasant life.”

  “And that, after all, is the best investment you can make of your time,” remarked Mr. Carlingford.

  “Not financially, I am afraid.”

  “My dear Mr. Markham, you are confusing the end and the means. The harmless necessary cash can at the best only secure you a pleasant life, and if the pleasant life comes to you without, it becomes not necessary, but superfluous.”

  “Well, there is no fear of cash ever being superfluous to Ted.”

  “Cash is always superfluous, except when you cannot get credit,” said his host. “If there were no cash in the world we should all live in our several stations on our credit with each other, and how much simpler that would be!”

  “I am afraid there would be complications ahead.”

  “There are always complications ahead,” said Mr. Carlingford, “but in the fulness of time they fall behind. Meanwhile one rubs along somehow. Shall we move into the next room?”

  It is to be feared that if Tom, in the new life that had opened for him at Athens, could have seen how Ted was spending his life at Cambridge, he would have been far from satisfied with him. It requires strong vitality or real originality to avoid the paralyzing effect which routine brings with it, and though Ted was original enough to give birth to some theories concerning patristic literature which were received in the most favourable manner by past masters of his craft, his horizons were imperceptibly narrowing around him. It is the peculiar property of such changes that they are imperceptible; to be alive to them would be to guard against them, for no thinking man acquiesces in limitations which he can see. He spent long mornings of steady work, he took gentle exercise in the afternoon, and played whist for an hour or two after hall; and any routine, when one is surrounded by men who are engaged in similar routines, is deadly. He let old acquaintances drop, he did not care to initiate new ones, and he lived with a few men who were in the same predicament as himself, and was perfectly happy. He worked not for fame’s sake, but for the sake of the work, and though his method of working is undoubtedly the more highly altruistic, yet it has to be paid for in other ways. A little personal ambition is a very human and therefore a very suitable thing for men, for it keeps one alive to the fact that one is one man among other men, not one machine for producing knowledge among other machines. A machine may very likely do the work better; a perfect machine would do it perfectly, but it will not become a man by so doing, though a man, as the higher of the two, may quite easily degenerate into a machine.

  Ted’s talk with May about parish work led to his taking a district in Barnwell, and doing work there. But, as he told her, he had no power of doing that sort of thing — he had none of the missionary spirit, nor any desire now to enter into the personal relation with his fellows, which distinguished, though in opposite ways, both his sister and Tom. The sight of dirt and squalor was productive in him, in the first instance, not of a desire to make it clean, but to go away. He realized to the full how deplorable a state of uncleanliness, physical or moral, was, and he would have been very uncomfortable to think that there were not well-endowed institutions the object of which was to rectify it.

  Before Tom had gone away in November, he completed a couple of statuettes, which he had made during the summer, had them cast in bronze by the cire perdue process, and sent them to a winter exhibition. He had only just received the news that they had been accepted before he went away, and had heard nothing of them since. But one day in the winter Ted had been turning over a current number of the Spectator, and found them mentioned in a notice of the exhibition with that high praise which is both rare and convincing, and felt a strong but unsympathetic pleasure, for, judging from his own point of view, he would have felt none himself that a casual critic thought them good. A few nights afterwards, by one of those coincidences which would be so strange if they were not so common, he met at dinner with the master of another college, the sculptor Wallingthorpe, who talked chiefly about himself, but a little about his art. He was a picturesque man, and his picturesqueness added a strong flavour to his conversation.

  “I seldom or never go to exhibitions,” he said. “ A beautiful subject badly treated warps one. One has to be convalescent after it. One’s artistic sense has been bruised, and it has to recover from the blow: the injured tissues have to heal.”

  Ted mentioned the name of the exhibition where Tom’s studies had appeared, and asked if he had been there.

  “Yes, I did go there — no wine, thanks; I never take wine, by the way. It is a stimulant, and I don’t require stimulating, I require soothing. I am glad you mentioned that exhibition; there were two studies there of extreme, unusual merit They produced in me that feeling that I could have done the thing myself, that I wished I had. That is the final excellence from one’s own point of view. They realized to me the vision I might have had.”

  “Whom were they by?” asked Ted.

  “By quite a young man, I believe; certainly by quite a new one. Carlingford was the name.”

  “Ah! I know him well,” said Ted.

  They were sitting over the wine after dinner, and Wallingthorpe, who did not care to talk to Ted exclusively any longer, but wanted a larger audience, bent forward and shook him warmly by the hand. This was done in a dramatic and fervid manner, and naturally drew the attention of the rest of the table.

  Wallingthorpe turned round to explain himself.

  “I was congratulating Mr. Markham on knowing a man of genius,” he said.

  The natural inference was that these felicitations were offered to Ted on the happy event of his having become acquainted with Wallingthorpe, but that gentleman was self-denying enough to dispel the idea.

  “I was speaking of two very remarkable little works in the Ashdon Gallery, by a young man called Carlingford, with whom Mr. Markham tells me he is intimate. They are very faulty in many ways, but faults matter nothing when there is the divine essential burning behind them. Mr. Carlingford is an uncut diamond. There are superficial flaws in the stone, which will be polished away. He has only got to work and to live.”

  “Carlingford,” said some one; “he was up at King’s till quite lately, was he not?”

  Mr. Marshall blinked intelligently behind his spectacles.

  “Yes, but we had no idea we were harbouring a genius. In fact, no one even suspected he had real talent of any kind. But he was not stupid.”

  “It is possible, even probable, that he had no talent,” exclaimed Wallingthorpe. “Genius and talent have nothing in common. You might as well expect to find a bird that had hands because it has wings. Genius flies, tal
ent — the metaphor breaks down — walks on its hands and feet. But what made you think he had no talent?”

  “His work was always very careless, and showed no very distinct promise.”

  Wallingthorpe beat the air with prophetic hands.

  “His Greek prose! His Latin verses! His ου and his μη! That is very likely. Did it not occur to any one that you might as well have set a wild Indian to hem handkerchiefs?”

  “You see we all have to hem handkerchiefs here,” said his host urbanely; “that is the reason why young men come to Cambridge.”

  “And you wonder when your thorns bear grapes and your thistles figs!” said Wallingthorpe. “Yet those are to blame who did not know that the thistle was a fig-tree.”

  Dr. Madeford laughed good-naturedly.

  “But we are all delighted when we find it bearing figs,” he said, “although, of course, we don’t allow that we thought it a thistle. We have a higher idea of what we study.”

  Wallingthorpe became pacific.

  “Consider me rebuked,” he said, “but think of the pity of it Four or five years ago that boy ought to have been alternately turned loose in Rome and shut up with a model and a mountain of clay. By now those defects would have vanished. They would never have been in his nature. Their possibility would have been taken out of him before they had birth.”

  “Then you have really a high opinion of his work?” asked Markham.

  “My dear young man, I have the highest. He has genius, and he has love of his work. Show me the man of whom I can say that, and I hail him as a brother.”

  Wallingthorpe’s egotism was too deep to call conceit; it was a conviction that was the mainspring of his nature, the driving-power of his work. It should not matter to the outside world what the driving-power is, if the result is admirable, and Wallingthorpe’s results certainly were admirable.

  But further conversation would seem bathos after this, and the party passed into the drawing-room.

  Wallingthorpe had a word or two more with Ted as he was leaving.

  “What is Carlingford doing now?” he asked.

  “He’s in Athens, working there.”

  “A dangerous experiment Is he much impressed by classical art?”

  “Very much indeed; he believes in nothing else, he says.”

  The sculptor frowned.

  “That means he will try to stand on tip-toe for a month or two instead of flying. However, he will get tired of that. He will soon learn that the only real art is realism.”

  “He says that a sculptor out there called Manvers is always impressing that on him.”

  “Manvers? Well, no one ever accused Manvers of not being a realist. That is about the only crime he has never been suspected of. Manvers is extremely talented, but he has not a touch of genius. However, for diabolical cleverness in his work he can’t be touched. On the other hand, any tendency in Carlingford to idealism might be encouraged by Manvers indirectly. He would find it impossible, if he had leanings that way, not to have his bias strengthened by anything so rampantly realistic as Manvers’ work.”

  “Tom Carlingford is coming back to England in a few weeks.”

  “I’m glad of that The future is in his own hands.”

  CHAPTER VIII.

  MANVERS’ good intention of taking a holiday had presumably gone to pave the worst of roads, for before a fortnight was up he was working hard at the new statuette. The solid ingot of inspiration which had been tossed in his path was only slightly responsible for this; the burden of it lay with Maud Wrexham.

  For Maud Wrexham was to him a new type of womanhood, common enough in England, but a type which does not foregather with young artists in Paris; and Manvers was beginning to think of the Paris days with a sort of disgusted wonder. To be received into the society of a well-bred English girl, to see her day after day, to be admitted by her into a frank, boyish sort of intimacy, was a proceeding he would have looked upon, a month or two ago, as a very doubtful privilege. He thought of our English marriageable maidenhood as a kind of incarnation of lawn tennis and district visiting, with a background of leaden domesticity, and when Maud began, somehow, to usurp an unreasonably large share of his spare thoughts, he was at first a little amused at himself, and, after a time, pulled up short and began to review the position.

  He had seen almost at once who it was who usurped her thoughts, though he felt sure that a casual observer, one whose own mind was fancy free, would not have noticed it. She was intensely conscious of Tom’s presence, and to Manvers she betrayed herself by a hundred tiny signs. When they were alone, she, as was most natural, for they were a trio of friends, often talked of Tom, and when he was there she evidently listened to all he said, and was intensely conscious of him, though she might be talking to some one else. As a rule, she behaved quite naturally; but once or twice she had exhibited towards him a studied unconsciousness, which to Manvers was a shade more convincing than her consciousness. He had a weakness for weaknesses, and the dramatic side of it all, her self-betrayal to him and Tom’s unconsciousness, would have given him a good deal of satisfaction, had he known that he was without a stake in the matter. But as the days went on, he became aware that it mattered a good deal to him, and the satisfaction he got out of the drama was a very poor wage for his own share in it.

  Besides, he distinctly did not wish to fall in love. “Love may or may not blind,” he said to himself, “but it plays the deuce with your eye, if you are a sculptor.” And so, by way of keeping his eye single, he set to work, with patient eagerness, on La dame qui s’amuse. The title itself brought a savour with it of Paris days, and Paris days could hardly help being antidotal to the feelings with which Maud Wrexham inspired him.

  There was yet one more factor which made him plunge into his work, and that was the thought of Tom. Tom just now was sublimely unconscious of anything so sublunary as falling in love with mortals, for he had lost his heart to antique goddesses, who again presented a fine contrast to Miss Wrexham. Manvers, as a rule, left morals to moralists, among whose numbers he had never enlisted himself; but a certain idea of loyalty, of letting Tom have fair play when he came to take his innings, made him avoid the idea of setting up personal relations with Miss Wrexham. Whether he would have taken the chivalrous line, if any one but Tom had been concerned, is doubtful, but Tom somehow exacted loyalty. His extraordinary boyishness made Manvers feel that it would be an act of unpardonable meanness to take any advantage of him. Besides, in a sense, the fortress to which he himself would have liked to lay siege was, he felt sure, ready to capitulate to another, but it struck him that it was likely to repel an attack from any other quarter but that with much vigour. To sit still and do nothing was more than flesh and blood could stand; it was hard enough to work, and the only thing to do was to work hard.

  Tom’s tendencies towards idealism were, as Wallingthorpe had suspected, encouraged rather than discouraged by Manvers. “If that,” he thought and often said, “is realism, God forbid that I should be a realist.”

  He said this to himself very emphatically one morning when he came to see Manvers after breakfast The latter was already at work, and Tom gazed at “La dame” for some moments without speaking. Manvers’ handling of the subject was masterly, and the result appeared to Tom quite detestable.

  “I quite appreciate how clever it is,” Tom said to Manvers, who was testing his powers of “doing” lace in terra-cotta with great success, “and I wonder that you don’t appreciate how abominable it is.”

  Manvers was at a somewhat ticklish point, and he did not answer, but only smiled. Nature had supplied him with a rather Mephistophelean east of features, and he had aided her design by the cultivation of a small pointed beard. At this moment Tom could fancy that he was some incarnation of that abstraction, dissecting a newly damned soul with eagerness and delicacy, in the search for some unusual depravity. After a moment he laid the tool down.

  “I appreciate it fully from a spiritual, or moral, or Greek, or purist po
int of view, he said. But I am not in the habit of taking those points of view, and in consequence I am — well, rather pleased with it.”

  “I think it’s a desecration,” said Tom. “Why you are not struck with lightning when you call it art, seems to me inexplicable!”

  Manvers laughed outright.

  “My dear Tom, I never called it art — I never even called it Art with a big A. That is not the way to get on. You must leave other people to do that. If you were an art critic, which I hope, for my sake, you some time may be, you would be immensely useful to me. One has only got to get an Art critic (with a big A) to stand by one’s work, and pay him so much to shout out, ‘This is the Abomination,’ and one’s fortune is made. I am thinking of paying some one a handsome salary to blackguard me in the Press. Criticism, as the critic understands it, would soon cease, you see, if every one agreed, and so the fact that one critic says it is abomination, implies necessarily that another critic will come and stand on the other side and bawl out, ‘This is Sublime ‘ (with a big S). Artists and critics are under a great debt to one another. Critics get as much as sixpence a line, I believe, for what they say about artists, and artists would never get a penny if it wasn’t for critics, whereas, at present, some of us get very considerable sums. What was I saying? Oh yes, one critic damns you and the other critic blesses you. Then, you see, every one runs up to find out what the noise is, and they all begin quarrelling about it. And the pools are filled with water,” he concluded piously.

  Tom did not answer, and Manvers went on with slow precision, giving each word its full value.