Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Manvers remained silent for a few moments, balancing in his mind his disinclination to appear officious or meddling, and his desire to perhaps do Tom a service. As a matter of fact he had heard the question which had accompanied that look on Miss Wrexham’s face, and it had confirmed the idea he had long entertained that she was falling in love with Tom, and Tom was not consciously in love with her. His tone of absolute indifference to the subject might be either assumed or natural.

  “You see a good deal of her, don’t you?” he went on. “She’s clever, I think, and she’s certainly got a good eye. She made several suggestions about my little figure which were admirable.”

  “She told me she admired it,” said Tom, “and I told her she couldn’t admire it if she admired Greek work.”

  “She wouldn’t agree with that. She thinks that she can appreciate both. It must be so nice to have that belief in yourself, to think that you are all sorts of people, instead of one sort of person. But it breaks down in practice—”

  Manvers paused a moment, and decided to risk it. “That look on her face this evening was of a woman who had broken down. I have often wondered, by the way, whether you ever have guessed how fortunate you are.”

  Tom sat up.

  “Did you hear what she said?” he asked.

  “Certainly, or I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “Look here,” Tom said, “it was quite accidental that either of us ever saw that look. She couldn’t have foreseen that a flash of lightning would come at that moment. I have tried to keep myself from thinking of it, but it won’t do. I hate conceited fools who are always imagining things of that sort, but as you have spoken of it, it is absurd for me to pretend not to know what you mean. Damn it all! She looked — she looked as if my going away made a difference to her.”

  Manvers drew a puff of smoke very slowly, and held his breath a moment. Then he began to speak, and it seemed to Tom slightly appropriate that his words should be, as it were, visible. They seemed a concrete embodiment of practical advice.

  “I think she is very fond of you,” he said.

  “What am I to do?” demanded Tom.

  “Do?” he said. “I really don’t understand you. If you are in love with her, I imagine your course is not so difficult; if not, you may be sure you soon will be.”

  “I should think it was the most unlikely thing in the world,” returned Tom. “If I had thought that, it is hardly likely I should have asked you what to do.”

  “Pardon me, you never asked me, except under pressure. I made it quite clear that I wanted to be asked; you did not wish to ask me at all. I have my opinion to deliver. Listen. You are very fond of her, whether you know it or not. Just now you are stark mad about heathen gods. You say to yourself or you would say to yourself if you formulated your thought, that you could only fall in love with a girl in the grand style. That is quite ridiculous. They may or may not be very good as statues, but they would certainly not answer as wives. In the natural course of things you will get over that. Try to do so as quickly as possible. Look at Miss Wrexham instead of the Parthenon. You can’t marry the Parthenon. That flash of lightning occurring when it did gave me a stronger belief in the existence of a beneficent Providence than I have ever felt before.

  It is only a superstitious idea, I know, but when a chance falls so divinely pat as that, you feel inclined to applaud somebody.”

  Tom did not look at all inspired by these practical suggestions.

  “It won’t do,” he said. “You take an admirably sensible view of the situation, if it happened to be you, but unfortunately it’s I.”

  “I may be a knave,” said Manvers resignedly, “but, thank God, I am not a fool. I don’t suppose you will deny that you are a fool, Tom; and you really should give my advice a great deal of consideration. It is not every day that a flash of lightning shows you how high an opinion a perfectly charming heiress has of you, and it is, I think, both folly and wickedness not to suppose that it was sent, you for some good or clever purpose. You really can’t help feeling that it was a very clever thing to send the lightning just then. You must have a special Providence who looks after you.”

  “I hope you don’t think you will convince me,” said Tom.

  “Oh dear, no, but I had to ease my — my conscience by entering a strong protest I feel better now, thanks.”

  “That’s right But to descend to practical details, won’t the fact that she suspects I saw what I did make it rather awkward for us to meet?”

  “Are you sure she suspects it?”

  “No, not sure, or I should go away at once. I may be a fool, but I am not a knave.”

  Manvers extended his hand in the air deprecatingly.

  “Oh, don’t make repartees during a thunderstorm. They so seldom mean anything, in fact the better a repartee is, the less it means; and they give a nervous shock to the reparteee — if I may coin a word. Also he is bound in mere politeness to cudgel his brains to see if they do mean something. When you have an opportunity you must say she looked so awfully tired last night, and that you noticed her face once in a blaze of lightning, and you were quite frightened; she looked so out of sorts, or done up, or run down, or something. It’s very simple. But is there no chance—”

  “No, not a vestige,” said Tom. “Besides, I don’t believe that you really advise what you say.”

  “Tom, you’ve never heard me give advice before, and you must attach the proper weight to it as a rare product.”

  “Why, you are always giving me advice about turning realist.”

  “No, you’re wrong there; I only prophesy that you will. That I often prophesy, I don’t deny. There is nothing so amusing to one’s self, or so unconvincing to other people. It is the most innocent of amusements. Besides, you can always compare yourself to Cassandra — she was classical — when people don’t believe you.”

  “Yes, that must be a great comfort,” said Tom slowly, who was thinking about Miss Wrexham.

  Manvers got up.

  “You are falling into a reverie. You ought to know that reveries are an unpardonable breach of manners. I shall go to my statuette. That is the best of being up to date in your art; you never need be without companions.”

  “Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height,” quoted Tom, half mock-heroically.

  “My dear boy, it won’t do,” said Manvers. “She won’t come down for that. You have to fetch her down, and she is very like the rest of us really.

  She soon assimilates. Besides, luckily, maids on mountain heights are rare. They find it doesn’t pay.”

  Tom left the room, and Manvers went to the window. The rain had come on again, and was falling hot and heavy through the night. Manvers dropped a steadfast oath into the storm, and then, instead of going to his statuette, went to bed, and lay awake till the darkness grew grey.

  “The world is damnably awry,” was the burden of his thoughts. “I suppose it is to teach us not to set our affections on things below. They might have chosen a less diabolical method of teaching us. Providence is really very vulgar sometimes.”

  Maud woke next morning in the rationalizing mood, and the event of the thunderstorm, which had made her disposed to be uneasy the night before, fell back into its proper place in the scheme of things. The absence of the sirocco no doubt contributed to this calmer attitude, for, as a philosopher found out very long ago, it is possible to reach the soul through the subtle gateways of the body, and a thin light Athenian north wind is one of the subtlest physicians of the mind, and can find out the most tortuous and intricate passages through the house of our body. This acting on a naturally rational mind had produced its legitimate effect. Probably Tom had not noticed it; in any case, if he had, there were much less metaphysical reasons which would lend themselves to a much more obvious inference. She was tired, the lightning had dazzled her, Miss Vanderbilt was on her nerves; all these things were so likely, and the real reason so unlikely. Consequently, when she left the house after breakfast
, to go up to the Acropolis and finish a sketch, with the almost certain probability of seeing Tom there, she felt that their intercourse would be as easy as usual.

  The view she had chosen was of the little Niké temple seen through two headless columns of the Propylæa, with a glimpse behind of the sea and the hills of Argolis, and she painted on for half an hour or so without thinking of anything but what she was doing. But by degrees her glances at the far hills became longer, and the acts of painting shorter, her eyes saw less and less of what she was looking at, though they rested more intently on the scene, and at last she put down her palette and leant against the white marble wall behind her.

  What was the matter with her? Why had she this unfathomable feeling for a man who was perhaps less unfathomable than any one she had ever seen? A frank English face, a keen boyish vitality, an almost comical self-sufficiency, demanding as its only food the contemplation of Greek sculpture — it all seemed fathomable enough. She half wished he would go back to England at once, yet even with that view in front of her, for the sake of which she nominally climbed up to the Acropolis, she felt that another factor was wanting, a nought, she told herself, which had the inexplicable trick of turning her units into tens. In any case she would go back to England not with him, but by herself. He was spoiling everything for her. Then came the reaction. “How ridiculous it will be! I asked him when he was going back, and hoped we might go together, and now I am deciding not to go with him. He is a most pleasant companion, and what is he to me” — the next thought came like an echo—” or I to him?”

  Her thoughts had taken the bits in their mouths, and were running away, and so, metaphorically speaking, she jumped off the runaway vehicle and came into serious collision with terra firma; literally, she took up her palette and went on with her painting.

  To Tom, also, his visits to the Acropolis distinctly gained something by the constant expectation of meeting Maud there. She had run him to ground the other day when she had made him confess that he cared for nothing but his art, and though the conclusion had been forced from his mouth, he knew it was not quite true. What he cared for was life and its best possibilities in the way of beauty, and his enthusiasm, he knew, saw and tended to state everything too violently. He found Maud sympathetic, eager and charming as a companion, and no other thought had entered his head about her, until the incident of the thunderstorm, which had been unexpected and very bewildering. And in his deep perplexity as to what he had better do, he took the eminently straightforward and most promising course of doing nothing at all, of behaving normally. He had, as it were, taken a tentative mental sounding of his feelings towards her for his own satisfaction, but he found that the bottom was soon reached. In any case the depths were not unplumbable, which would have been the only reason for doing anything. He was in love with life, with all of life that was best, and the idea of falling in love with any particular little bit of it would have seemed to him as incredible as writing sonnets, in the style of the eighteenth-century poets, to women’s finger-nails; and these always appeared to him most profitless performances. To fall in love must always seem slightly ridiculous until one falls in love.

  Then it came about that not long after Maud had begun painting again, Tom walked up the steps as usual, and sat with his hands clasped round one knee, on the steps at Maud’s feet, and talked as usual, and absorbed the beauty of the scene.

  “It’s the only way,” he said on this particular morning. “to hope to get hold of the spirit of Greek art. You can never arrive at the spirit of a thing through its details — the details shape themselves if you know the spirit. You see artists in the Louvre copying Raphael all their lives, but they never really remind you of him. If they were to go to Umbrian villages and live the life he lived among the people, and to feast — I don’t mean literally — on the ox-eyed faces of peasant women and then come back, they might be able to copy him with some success, or still better, if they had genius, produce original pictures which were like Raphael’s. They go the wrong way about it.”

  Maud was painting intently, and did not answer for a moment.

  “Yes, I think you are right,” she said. “It’s no use copying merely. A mere copy only, at its best approximates to a coloured photograph.”

  “It’s so utterly the wrong way to go about it,” said Tom. “To arrive at the right results, you have to follow the right method from the beginning. For instance, when I go back to England, and am shut up in a dingy studio under a grey sky, and my work looks hideous and dead, I shall bring back the inspiration not by thinking only of Hermes, but of the time I have spent here on these steps, looking out over the Propylæa to Salamis.”

  He leant back on the step where he was sitting, and looked up at Maud for a moment She put down the brush she held and was looking at him, as if she was waiting eagerly to hear something more. But Tom apparently was unconscious of her look, and she took up her brush again.

  Tom tilted his hat a little more over his eyes, and took out his cigarette-case.

  “It’s becoming real to me at last,” he said. “I think I am beginning to know what it all means.”

  “You’ll have to show us,” said Maud. “A man who is a sculptor, and who knows what this means, is certainly bound to produce statues which are really like Greek statues.”

  Tom sat up.

  “I don’t care how conceited it sounds,” he said excitedly, “but I am going to try to do no less. It is astonishing how little I care what happens. That is my aim, and if I don’t realize it, it will be the fault of something I can’t control.”

  “But what is there which a man who is earnest cannot control?” she asked.

  “There is only one question in the world which is even harder to answer,” said Tom, “and that is, what is there in the world which he can control? What is to happen to me if some morning I wake up to find that I think Manvers’ statuettes ideal, and Greek art passé? How do I know it will not happen to me? Who will assure me of it?”

  “Oh well, how do you know that you won’t wake up some morning, and find that your nose has disappeared during the night, and a hand grown in its place?” asked Maud. “The one is as unnatural to your mind as the other is to the body.”

  “But all sorts of unnatural things happen to your mind,” said Tom. “That I should have suddenly felt that nothing but Greek art was worth anything was just as unnatural. It is just as unnatural that, at a given moment, a man falls in love—”

  He stopped quite suddenly and involuntarily, but Maud’s voice broke in.

  “Not at all,” she said. “You see, it happens to most men; it is the rule rather than the exception, whereas the disappearance of one’s nose would be unique, I should think.”

  Her voice was so perfectly natural, so absolutely unaffected, that Tom made a short mental note, to the effect that Manvers was the greatest idiot in the world except one, which was a more consoling thought than he would have imagined possible. His determination to be quite normal had become entirely superfluous — a billetless bullet.

  “Yes, but because it happens constantly, it makes it none the less extraordinary,” he said.

  “Certainly not; but you can no longer call it unnatural.”

  “I call everything unnatural that seems to me unintelligible,” remarked Tom, with crisp assurance.

  Maud began to laugh.

  “What a great many unnatural things there must be,” she said, “according to your view. Why, the sun rising in the morning is unnatural. But it would be much more unnatural if it did not.”

  “If I go on, I shall soon begin to talk nonsense,” said Tom, concessively, “and that would be a pity.”

  “Well, let’s get back on to safe ground,” said Maud. “Come and tell me what to do with that column. It isn’t right.”

  Tom picked up his stick, and shoved his hat back on his head.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said, after looking at the picture for a moment. “I believe you know what the spirit of al
l this is — at least, your picture, which is admirable, looks as if you did — and yet you like Manvers’ statuettes. I think you are unnatural.”

  “Do you remember a talk we had, when we were staying with you, about being broad?”

  “Yes, perfectly. Why?”

  “Because I think you are being narrow. I dare say this is the best, but that doesn’t prevent other things from being good.”

  Maud bent over her painting again, because she wanted to say more, and it is always easier to criticize if one is not biassed by the sight of the person whom one is criticizing.

  “You seem to think you can see all round a truth. If the truth is big enough to be worth anything, it is probable that you can only see a little bit of it.”

  “Why — why—” began Tom.

  “Yes, I know. I am thinking of what you yourself said the other day about religion, when you told me what passed between you and Mr. Markham after the revivalist meeting. I am quoting your own words. They seem to me very true!”

  “But how is it possible in this instance?” said Tom, striking the marble pavement with his stick. “ If one of the two is good, the other is bad. They are utterly opposed.”

  Maud turned round on him suddenly.

  “Ah, I thought you would say that,” she said. “It would be as reasonable for you to say that because there is sunshine here now, there is sunshine all over the world. Yet in Australia it is about midnight. Light is utterly opposed to darkness. Yet this is one world. You don’t allow of there being more of it than you can see.”

  Tom shifted his position.

  “Go on,” he said. “I am not so limited that I do not wish to be told so.”

  “You showed just the same smallness when you talked to me about Cambridge,” she said. “You thought that you were broad, because you thought that it was narrow. Did it never occur to you that you thought it was narrow simply because you were not broad enough to take it in? The one explanation is as simple as the other.”

  “I’m quite convinced I’m broader than Markham,” said Tom, frankly. “He thinks about nothing but snuffy old scholiasts.”