Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Of course it is chiefly due to the capital letters. Whether the criticism is favourable or not matters nothing as long as it is emphatic. In this delightful age of sky signs, the critics must be large and flaring to attract any notice. Therefore they shout and use capital letters. They write on the full organ with all the stops out, except the Vox Angelica. And the artist blesses them. Like Balaam, their curses are turned into blessings for him, so he blesses them back. A most Christian proceeding.”

  “But, honestly,” asked Tom, “does the contemplation of that give you any artistic pleasure? Do you try to do for your age what Phidias and Praxiteles did for theirs?”

  “Certainly I do. I try to represent to people what their age is. I have no doubt that ancient Greeks were excessively nude and statuesque. We are not statuesque or nude. Apollo pursuing Daphne through the Vale of Tempe, through thickets where the nightingales sing! What does Apollo do now? He arranges to meet Daphne at Aix-les-Bains, where they have mud-baths, and drink rotten-egg water. She wears an accordion-pleated skirt, and he a check suit. In their more rural moments they sit in the hotel-garden. It really seems to me that this little Abomination here is fairly up to date.”

  “Oh, it’s up to date enough!” said Tom. “But is that the best of what is characteristic of our age?”

  “That doesn’t concern me,” said Manvers blandly; “worst will do as well. What I want is anything unmistakably up to date. Your gods and goddesses, of course, are more beautiful from an ideal point of view. By the way, that reminds me, I want to look at some of those early figures; the drapery is very suggestive. I am going to do a statuette of a nun who has once been — well, not a nun, and I want archaic folds; but if I produced them now, they would be nothing more than uninteresting survivals. And to produce an uninteresting survival seems to me a most deplorable waste of time.”

  “Why don’t you make a statuette of a sewing-machine?” asked Tom savagely.

  “Oh, do you think sewing-machines are really characteristic of the age?” said Manvers. “I don’t personally think they are, any more than Homocea is. Sewing-machines are only skin-deep. I wonder when you will be converted again — become an apostate, as you would say now. You really had great talent. Those statuettes of yours at the Ashdon Gallery are attracting a great deal of attention.”

  “I wish I had thrown them into the fire before I sent them there!”

  “Well, when you come round again, you will be glad you didn’t,” said Manvers consolingly.

  Tom took a turn or two up and down the room.

  “You don’t understand me a bit,” he said suddenly. “Because I think that the Parthenon frieze is more beautiful than women with high-heeled shoes, you think I’m an idealist I am a realist, just as much as you are, only I want to produce what I think is most beautiful. A beautiful woman has much in common with Greek art — and you want to produce what men, who are brutes, will say is most lifelike. You work for brutes, or what I call brutes, and I don’t.”

  “But if I have come to the conclusion that what you call brutish appeals to more men than what you call beautiful, surely I am right to work for them? Of course most artists say they work for the few, but I, like them, confess that I wish the few to be as numerous as possible.”

  “The greatest evil for the greatest number, I suppose you mean,” burst in Tom. “I call it pandering to vicious tastes.”

  Manvers paused, then laid down the tool he was working with.

  “You are overstepping the bounds of courtesy,” he said quietly. “You assume that my nature is vicious. That you have no right to do.”

  Tom frowned despairingly.

  “I know. It is quite true. I hate the men who always tell you that they say what they think, but I am one of them.”

  Manvers laughed.

  “I don’t mind your thinking me vicious,” he said. “I dare say I am vicious from your point of view, but you shouldn’t tell me so. It savours of Billingsgate, and it is quite clear without your telling me of it. You insult my intelligence when you say so.”

  “In that I am sorry,” said Tom. “I never meant to do that. I wish you would leave your — well, your Muse alone, and come out.”

  Manvers looked out of the window.

  “I suppose I shall have to come,” he said. “But you are so violent, you never will consent to take carriage exercise. Luckily you can’t ask me to play outdoor games here, as there are no outdoor games to play. Dominoes is the only outdoor game I can play — I have done so outside French cafés. I’m afraid I can’t say it’s too cold.”

  “I should insult your morality if you did,” said Tom.

  “Well, that’s not so bad as insulting my intelligence.”

  “And that is exactly where we differ,” said the other.

  Arthur Wrexham was giving a small party the next evening, of a very recherché order, the dinner being served frothily in paper frills, shells, or on silver skewers, and the candles shaded in so cunning a manner that it was barely possible to see what the food was. He lived in a somewhat sumptuous set of rooms on the upper square of the town, and for a week or more, as the sirocco had been blowing, had been in a state of apparently irretrievable collapse.

  A little balcony opening out of his dining-room overlooked the square, and as the night was very hot, the glass-door on to it was left open, and the noises of the town came up to the guests as they sat at dinner, like a low accompaniment to their own voices. It had been one of those days when the divine climate of Athens gives way to all the moods of an angry woman. The morning had dawned bright and hot, but before ten o’clock sirocco had sprung up, and whoso walks in the face of sirocco is bathed through and through in a fine white dust, most gritty. The sirocco had brought the clouds from seawards, and about one o’clock the rain came down, and laid the dust. Then the sun shone violently till nearly five, and the air was like to a sticky warm bath. Later on it had clouded over again, and Tom remarked in a pause in the conversation that it had begun to lighten.

  It was quite a small party, the two younger sisters of the American chargé d’affaires balancing Tom and Manvers, Arthur and his sister making up the six. The two Miss Vanderbilts both talked as much as possible, sighed for “Parrus,” and referred to the Acropolis as “those lonely old ruins,” but agreed that Athens was “cunning.”

  “Well, I’m right down afraid of an electric storm.” remarked Miss Vanderbilt, to whom Tom’s remark about the lightning had been addressed, “and as for Bee, she won’t be comfortable until she’s said her prayers and is safe in the coal-store.”

  “The doctor at Parrus told me I’d a nervous temperament,” remarked Bee, “and we all knew that before, but he made Popper pay up for saying so.”

  “‘ Speech is silver,’” remarked Manvers.

  “Well, his speech was gold,” said Miss Vanderbilt.

  “Don’t you dread electric storms, Miss Wrexham?” Maud was sitting at the head of the table fanning herself. She had borne up against sirocco, but the sticky bath stage had finished her, and she felt, as Bee would have expressed it, as if they’d omitted to starch her when she was sent from the wash.

  “No, I love them,” said Maud. “I wish it would begin at once. It may make the air less stifling.”

  “Well, I’d sooner be stifled than lightning-struck,” said Bee, “it’s so sudden. Popper” — she referred to her father— “Popper says that an average electric storm discharges enough electric fluid to light Chicago for ten days. I think the table is just too elegant, Mr. Wrexham: where do you get your flowers from?” Things improved a little as dinner went on, and after fish Maud felt better.

  “What a dreadful materialist one is, after all,” she said. “Before dinner I was feeling that life was a failure in general, and I was a failure in particular, and now that I’ve had some soup and fish and half a glass of champagne, not only do I feel better bodily, but mentally and morally.”

  “Why, I think that’s just beautifully put,” said Miss Vanderb
ilt “When I feel homesick and lonesome, Bee says, ‘It’s all stomach.’”

  “It’s quite true,” said Manvers. “I’ve only felt homesick once this year, and that was when Tom and I went to Ægina. It was fearfully hot, and all the lunch they had given us was hard-boiled eggs and cold greasy mutton. At that moment my whole soul, like Ruth’s, was ‘ sick for home,’ and the little cafés with oleanders in tubs, and awnings. I say my soul, but I suspect it was what Miss Vanderbilt tells us.”

  “Have I said anything wrong?” asked Miss Vanderbilt, looking round inquiringly. “I was only telling you what Bee said.”

  Tom laughed.

  “It’s easy enough to assure one’s self that one is only an animal,” he said. “I wish any one would prove to us that we are something more. When Manvers says his soul was sick, he is quite right to correct himself, and suspect that he meant the other thing.”

  “My dear fellow, the soul epidemic has ceased,” said Manvers, “though I believe certain cliques try to keep it up. When you have looked at one of your gods or goddesses for an hour, you think you have been enjoying it with your soul, but you haven’t really. At the end of the hour you feel tired, and after eating a mutton chop you can look at it again. The mutton chop feeds that part of you which has been spending tissue on the gods and goddesses. Well, we know what the mutton chop feeds.”

  “I won’t assure you that you have a soul,” said Tom, “but I assure you that I have.”

  “It’s a most comfortable belief,” murmured Manvers. “I don’t grudge it you — I envy you. I wish you would do the same for me.”

  The storm was getting closer, and every now and then the pillars on the balcony were thrown into vivid blackness against the violet background of the sky. The balcony was deep and covered with the projecting eaves of the third story, and after dinner they all sat out on it. The air was absolutely still, and apparently all the population of Athens were in the square, making the most of the evening air before the storm broke.

  Tom was sitting on the balustrade of the balcony, and Maud in a low chair near him. She leant forward suddenly.

  “Do you remember hearing the hum of London one night, and saying it was the finest thing in the world?”

  “Yes, very well. It was at the Ramsdens’ dance. I shall hear it again soon.”

  “Ah, you are going almost immediately, I suppose now?”

  As she spoke, the sky to the south became for a moment a sheet of blue fire, with an angry scribble running through the middle of it, and Miss Vanderbilt ejaculated in shrill dismay.

  Tom turned as Maud spoke, and the lightning illuminated her face vividly.

  The glimpse he had of her was absolutely momentary, for just so long as that dazzling streamer flickered across the sky. But in the darkness and pause that followed he still saw her face before him, phantom-like, as when we shut our eyes suddenly in a strong light we still preserve on the retina the image of what we were looking at.

  The phantom face slid slowly into the surrounding darkness, but it was not till the answering peal had burst with a sound as of hundreds of marbles being poured on to a wooden floor overhead that Tom answered the question which her voice had translated, but her eyes had asked.

  “Well, I hardly know,” he said. “When are you thinking of going home?”

  In that moment, when the thunder was crackling overhead, a flood of shame and anger had come over Maud. Of her voice she had perfect command, as she knew, but that the lightning should have come at that moment and showed Tom her face was not calculable. But the absolute normalness of his tone reassured her.

  “I shall go back in about a fortnight,” she said.

  “Why, that’s just about when I am going,” he said cheerfully. “I hope we shall travel together.”

  And with the unhesitatingness of well-bred delicacy he got off the balustrade and began to talk to Miss Vanderbilt.

  Tom was far too much of a gentleman to let his mind consciously dwell on what he had seen during that flash of lightning. He regarded it like a remark accidentally overheard, of which he had no right to profit. In this case the wish was also absent, for though he liked Maud Wrexham immensely, he was already in the first stage of his love of idealism, which at present allowed no divided allegiance. Had Maud been an idealist herself, she might have appeared to him merely as the incarnation of the spirit of idealism, in which case he would have fallen down and worshipped. Tom had experienced a great shock the day before, when she had expressed admiration for Manvers’ Dame qui s’amuse.

  They were on the Acropolis together when Tom mentioned it, and asked if she had seen it.

  “Yes, he showed it me this morning. I think it’s extraordinarily good.”

  “But you don’t like it?” asked Tom.

  “Is it so terrible if I do? I don’t like it as I like this” — and she looked round largely at the Propylaea—” but it gives me great pleasure to look at it. It’s so fearfully clever.”

  “No man can serve two masters,” he said. “If you like this, as you tell me you do, you loathe the other necessarily.”

  “Oh, but you’re just a little too fond of dogmatisingsaid Maud. “What you lay down as a necessity may be only a limitation in your own nature. How do you know I can’t appreciate both? As a matter of fact I do.”

  “Well, if you admire La dame you can’t possibly think of this — this which we see here — as supreme and triumphant,” said Tom.

  “I’m not sure that I do. I think perhaps that I have a touch of the scepticism you had — oh, ever so long ago; six weeks, isn’t it? — when you expected to find that the grand style was obsolete. How we shall quarrel when we manage the world, as we said we proposed to do.”

  “It’s quite certain that we shall never manage together, if there is this difference between us. I shall be wanting to celebrate Olympic games while you are laying out boulevards.”

  “Well, there’s room for both,” said Maud.

  “No, no,” said Tom, “there is never enough room for the best, far less for the worst.”

  “You are so splendidly illogical, Mr. Carlingford,” she said suddenly; “you see, you assume one is the best, and one the worst, and then build upon it. It is all very well to do that for one’s self, but one becomes unconvincing if one does it for other people.”

  “It was better than if I had said at once that we differed fundamentally.”

  Maud turned away.

  “Yes, perhaps. But what is the use of saying unpleasant things at all?”

  “Unpleasant?” asked Tom, wrinkling his forehead. “Why, I differ from all my best friends diametrically on every conceivable topic.”

  That classification of her with his best friends was exactly the attitude of his nature towards her, and what he saw during that flash of lightning was naturally extremely surprising, for, as he reflected to himself, despair should not look from one’s eyes when one hears that one’s best friends are going away. But, as he was bound in honour to do, he dismissed it as far as possible from his mind, and listened to Miss Vanderbilt’s scientific discourse about lightning.

  “I should really feel much more comfortable if you would turn that big reflector round,” she was saying to Arthur Wrexham. “They say it attracts the thunderbolts, and I’m sure we don’t want to lay ourselves out to attract thunderbolts.”

  Arthur Wrexham remonstrated gently.

  “Oh, it really has no effect whatever on it,” he said. “In fact, glass is an insulator.”

  This entirely vague statement was found to be consoling, and Miss Vanderbilt continued —

  “I should be ashamed to be as silly as Bee about it,” she said. “Bee took off all her rings the last electric storm we had, and of course she couldn’t recollect where she put them, and you should have seen the colour of her frock when she came out of the coal-store. Oh, gracious! why, that flash went off quite by my hand here.”

  Manvers was looking meditatively out into the night.

  “The
chances of being struck are so infinitesimal, Miss Vanderbilt, that I think it must have had a shot at you that time and missed. So by the law of probabilities it will not even aim at you again for a year or two. It really is a great consolation to know that one wouldn’t hear the thunder if one was struck.”

  “Why, if you could hear the thunder, it would be all over,” said Miss Bee, with a brilliant inspiration.

  “So after each flash we must wait anxiously for the thunder,” said Tom, “and then we shall know we’ve not been struck.”

  “I guess there’s no great difficulty in finding out if you’ve been struck,” said Bee. “Popper saw a man struck once, and he went all yellow Tell me if I am going all yellow, Mr. Manvers. I shan’t try to conceal it.”

  “No amount of dissimulation would conceal the fact that one had gone all yellow,” said Manvers.

  The worst of the storm was soon over, but the clouds took possession of Hymettus, and continued growling and rumbling there. The two Americans took advantage of the lull to make their way home. “For nothing,” Miss Vanderbilt protested, with shrill vehemence, “will make me get into a buggy during an electric storm;” and Tom and Manvers followed their example, and walked back to their hotel.

  Manvers had seen that look on Miss Wrexham’s face at the moment of the flash of lightning, and he determined, wisely or unwisely, to mention it to Tom.

  They were the only occupants of the smoking-room, and after getting his cigar under way, he asked the other lazily —

  “By the way, what were you saying to Miss Wrexham that made her look like an image of despair? I caught sight of her face for a moment during a flash of lightning, and it looked extraordinary.”

  “Yes, I noticed it too,” said Tom carelessly, “and wondered what was the matter. She had been rather upset by sirocco, she said.” —

  “My dear fellow, girls don’t look like petrified masks of despair because sirocco has been blowing for a couple of hours in the morning.”

  “Well, I suppose it must have been something else then,” said Tom.

  “What a brilliant solution! I am inclined to agree with you.”