by E. F. Benson
May left the two friends together, and went off to pay some calls, and in her absence Manvers talked more freely. He had felt something of a traitor in her grey eyes when he had said that the Demeter was not in his line.
“It’s the best thing you’ve ever done, Tom,” he said, handing the statuette respectfully. “It really is abominably good, from the top of the forage cap down to the bootlace tag, and that bottom of the trouser rucking up slightly over the other boot is an inspiration. You really are an unfortunate devil to be saddled with the grand style. As for that horror in the studio — you call my things horrors, so why shouldn’t I call yours? — the sooner you pitch it out of the window the better. Not that I don’t think it good — I think it is admirable — and as I said, almost perfectly Greek, but it simply won’t do. If you are to do anything nowadays you must be intelligible — that is to say, modern. You must not produce exercises, however good, in an art that is past. You are like those estimable people — I think they are archdeacons as a rule — who are always writing Latin translations in elegiac verses of ‘ Hymns Ancient and Modern’ in the pages of the Guardian. Nobody cares for interesting survivals. Why should they? People will not cudgel their brains to see what things mean. You have to label them!”
“Yes, you have to label a thing like La Dame qui s’ amuse” said Tom, “or else no one would know whether it was meant for a woman of fashion or a cocotte “No, I don’t mean that,” said Manvers. “I don’t care what they call it, but you must make them understand the spirit of the thing. The spirit of Demeter is out of date. But that boy shooting is intelligible. Any one can see how good it is, and yet somehow it is not vulgar. To be vulgar is to be popular. You haven’t seen my ballet girl dancing. It is incomparably vulgar. I think it is the vulgarest thing I ever saw, and I’m not boasting when I say all Paris raves about it.”
“All Paris!” broke in Tom; “all the cities of the plain!”
“Not at all: all the most civilized people of the most civilized town in the world. You really had better smash the Demeter. What will you do with her? They will probably take her at the Academy — in fact, I should think they certainly would, and in the autumn they will send her back to you, or rather you will have to go with a drayman’s cart and fetch her. She’ll be very heavy. If you were an academician, and got a very good piece of Carrara for her, Pears might buy her, ‘after using our soap,’ you know.”
Tom grew more and more impatient, and could contain himself no longer.
“Don’t talk blasphemy here!” he shouted. “The only object of art, according to you, is to make fifty silly women look at the abortions you produce for five minutes while they are racking their brainless heads for a new piece of scandal. You are welcome to them. And if no one else cares for my Demeter, May does, and the rest of the world may go to the deuce for all we care. You are a rank heretic, and when you die you will go to a place entirely peopled with the types you love, while I shall sit at wine with gods and goddesses.”
“What will happen to your other people? The boy shooting, for instance?”
“If he shows so much as the muzzle of his ugly gun, I shall kick him downstairs to join you and your fellows.”
“Many thanks. I have your promise. He will be a charming addition, and I shall be delighted to see him.” Tom burst out laughing.
“Do you know I’m delighted to see you, heretic or no heretic. We won’t talk shop any more. Miss Wrexham is coming to dinner to-night. You remember her, don’t you?”
“Very well. She flattered me about my statuette. I never forget any one who flatters me.”
“You flattered yourself, you mean. She was fonder of the Parthenon.”
“I am not jealous of the Parthenon,” said Manvers; “she may flirt with the whole Acropolis if she likes. But you’ll have to let me go at ten. Wallingthorpe has a gathering. He is very refreshing.”
“He is a social Narcissus,” said Tom. “It is so silly to be Narcissus.”
“Not if other people agree with you.”
“But nobody admires Wallingthorpe as much as he admires himself.”
“No; but he never ceases to hope that they soon will. Hope springs eternal, you know. He is very sanguine. Whether they will or not has nothing to do with the question; the only point is whether he sincerely believes they will, and he certainly does that.”’
“His motto is, ‘ The proper study of mankind is me.
“That’s not grammar,” said Manvers.
“Possibly not; but the sublimity of the theme is sufficient excuse.”
Manvers took out a cigarette-case, and then paused.
“Is it allowed here?” he asked.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter if we open the windows afterwards,” said Tom; “but May doesn’t like smoke all over the house.”
Manvers shut his cigarette case up with a click. “My dear Tom, if one fails in the small decencies of life, one is lost Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”
“That’s a silly proverb,” said Tom; “it is tithing the mint and anise and cummin.”
“No; that’s just what it is not doing. It is keeping them intact, and not tithing them.”
Tom laughed.
“I don’t think that means anything,” he said. “But let’s go to the smoking-room; we’ll have tea sent there. No, you shan’t come to the studio; I don’t wish to force my uninteresting survivals on you. I’m quite delighted to see you again. And this evening it will be the dear old Athens party over again, only we shan’t have Arthur Wrexham to peck at!”
Maud Wrexham, as her custom was, came rather late, and began making excuses before she was well inside the room.
“It really wasn’t my fault this time,” she said; “all the conceivable accidents happened, and where the carriage in which I was to have come is now, I can’t say. Mother made a beautiful plan — it seemed to work all right on paper — that the brougham was to drop three of us in different parts of London at the same moment But the laws of time and space intervened. Ah! how do you do, Mr. Manvers?
It’s charming to see you again, and there was a block at the corner, and I had to go back for my gloves.”
Tom laughed “You must have started wonderfully early,” he said, “because you are only ten minutes late. May I take you in?”
Maud, Tom, and Manvers had much to say to each other, and May a good deal to listen to. They all rather tended to talk at once. Every now and then one of the others would drop out of the conversation and pick her up, but naturally enough Tom did not talk much to her; Manvers made several well-meaning efforts, but was unable to sustain the conversation long, as he was listening to what the other two were saying, and talking himself, and Maud sat on the opposite side of the table, and the candles and flowers made communication difficult. It must be confessed that May found the dinner a little wearisome, for in her somewhat isolated life she had not had any opportunities of acquiring that most useful accomplishment of talking nonsense, or of talking naturally and fluently about nothing particular.
Manvers was maintaining a new and startling theory that the only readable descriptions of any place on the face of the earth were written by people who had never set eyes on the place in question, and supported his theory by his own experiences at Athens.
“I knew,” he said, “as we all know, that there was an Acropolis with buildings of white marble on it, and when you looked out from it you gazed over the grey olive groves, and the plain of Attica, and the violet crown of mountains, and the sea, and Salamis. Before I went to Athens, I could have described it in beautiful language, and talked of the delicate air, and the rose gardens. But now I’ve been there it is all spoiled for me.”
“There aren’t any rose gardens,” objected Maud, “ and there is usually sirocco.”
“Exactly so. It is folly to be wise. The rose gardens are part of the spirit of Greece, just as much as the plane-trees by the Ilyssus and the soi-disant delicate air.”
�
�And there are no plane-trees,” said Maud.
Tom laughed.
“So much the worse for the Ilyssus. If there are not, there ought to be.”
“Yes; but when some one who has been to Athens reads your description,” said Maud, “he will know that it doesn’t resemble Athens at all.”
“But one doesn’t write descriptions for people who have been there, nor do people who have been there read them,” said Manvers. “ Books of travel are written for people who have never been abroad, and who will never go. Don’t you think so, Mrs. Carlingford?”
May crumbled her bread attentively.
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” she said; “but go on. Won’t you tell us more?”
Manvers frowned. If one never takes one’s self seriously, it is terribly disconcerting to find that other people do.
“What I mean is that the literal accuracy of a description does not matter at all,” he said. “When Turner painted a picture, he arranged Nature as suited him. He raised the level of the sea two hundred feet, and made a valley where there was a hill. He made the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.”
“So you would have Greek maidens and Greek youths walking about the streets in your description of Athens?” asked Maud.
“Yes, if I thought they should be there, but I don’t. They must have been so uncivilized. Fancy dressing in a yard and a half of bath-towelling.”
“Then all you do is to reconstruct Athens as it seems to you it ought to be?”
“Yes; that is just what I mean,” said Manvers. “Unfortunately, I have been there now, and I know that there are square, white hotels, and dirty streets, and ugly little boot-blacks, and horrible smells. All that warps the original and typical conception. I have an idea of what Athens ought to be, and if I write about it at all, it would be my duty to memorialize that.”
“All the same,” said Tom, “your conception of what it ought to be may not tally with that of any one else; and if such a person goes there, he will see that your conception is not only false, but, according to his ideas, not characteristic.”
“But if there is some one — and who shall assure me there is not? — who never has been, and never will go, whose conception tallies with mine, think of his infinite delight! It would more than counter-balance the cold accuracies of all those people who say I am a liar. He will say, ‘Here am I who never set eyes on Athens and never will, and behold, it is exactly as I hoped and thought it would be.’”
Tom laughed uproariously.
“I believe you are right,” he said. “I shall write a description of America.”
“Do, do,” said Manvers. “Describe New York, with 716 avenues, and telephones and telegraph wires making a fine network of the sky, and elevated roadways — whatever they are — every hundred yards, with Pullman cars, containing gentlemen playing lacrosse, running on them every hundred seconds at a hundred miles an hour. Describe the molasses-stores, and Vanderbilt driving Maud V. down Broadway, scattering gold to the Irish constabulary; describe the omnibuses in the street, and the omniboats on the river, with their cargo of hams, which but ten minutes before were pigs. And describe the backwoods, with the solitary redskin burying his tomahawk under a primeval banana tree against the sunset sky. America is a magnificent subject. Half England will say that it is exactly what they thought it was, and that there is no longer any need of going there. After all, the great point of books of travel is to save one going anywhere.”
May’s feeling of being out of all this was strong upon her. Manvers, she felt sure, was talking sheer nonsense, but how was it that Tom and Maud evidently felt amused by it all? As he was speaking, she found herself going rapidly over in her own mind what he had said — of course he did not mean it, but to her that was an argument in its disfavour. She had finished dessert, and glanced across at Maud. But Maud did not catch her eye, and was sitting with her elbows on the table, and evidently no thought of going into the next room had entered her head.
A man came in with coffee and cigarettes, and handed them round. Maud raised her hand to the box, but looked suddenly across to May, and dropped her hand again.
Tom caught and intercepted her look.
“May doesn’t mind — do you, May?” he said. “Miss Wrexham wants a cigarette. It was I who taught her to smoke out in Athens.”
“Yes, it’s quite true,” said Maud. “ Oh, please smoke if you want to,” said May. “ I don’t mind the smell in the least. Tom wanted to teach me, but he gave it up. But why shouldn’t we go into the studio or the library? It is more comfortable.”
“Oh, let’s stop here,” said Tom, “it’s just like Athens. We all used to sit with our elbows on the table after dinner, and drink coffee, while Manvers talked to us.”
But Maud interposed. Her passion for being nice to everybody had suffered no cooling. She saw, too, that May was rather put out at the possible transgression of that wonderful English custom of women leaving the men at the dinner-table not to drink wine. She pushed her chair back and got up.
“Oh, I think the library would be much nicer,” she said. “ Those big chairs you have got there are made for talking in. And it’s so nice and dark in there. Every one is more amusing in the dark.”
Tom and Manvers rose too, and they all went into the library. Maud looked round the room until she had found what she called “her chair,” and sank down into it with a little contented sigh.
“That’s so nice,” she said; “and now let’s go on exactly where we left off.”
The room was lighted by a couple of heavily shaded lamps on the table, which cast a small brilliant circle of light on to the near surrounding objects, and left the rest of the room in darkness. Maud was sitting opposite the fire; Manvers and Tom on a low settee on each side of it, and May at some little distance off.
“Really life is becoming beautifully simple and easy,” said Manvers. “One can get almost anything one wants if one pays for it And usually one has to pay so little. Look at Niagara in London! I am told by people who have been to the real one, that it is exactly like. You can see Niagara for a shilling, and allowing eighteenpence for a cab, you have seen one of the greatest marvels of Nature, purified by art, for the ridiculously small sum of two-and-six.”
“How purified by art?” asked Maud.
“Well, there are no mosquitoes, and no beggars, and no American tourists. And if only they would bottle up the noise of Niagara in a phonograph and have it sent to London, the thing would be quite perfect — a complete triumph of Art over Nature.”
“It’s all very well to talk about an equal distribution of wealth,” said Tom, “but an unequal distribution is the only possible working arrangement. If every one had enough, or was equally rich, you couldn’t get anything unpleasant done for you.”
“It’s too terrible to think of,” said Manvers. “You would have to brush your own boots, and cook your own dinner, and make your own bed. It is only because we hope to receive rewards, perishable or imperishable, that we ever do anything at all. Nirvana will be all very well when we don’t wear boots, or sleep in beds. If a man is poor enough he will do anything for a sovereign. It’s so nice that the pauper class should be so numerous.”
“But there’s plenty of room for improvement yet,” said Maud. “One can’t give a man a sovereign to go to the dentist for one, or have one’s hair cut. Those are the really unpleasant things.”
Manvers stared pensively at the fire.
“Of course one’s body is a most rough and ill-made machine,” he said. “An oculist told me the other day that the lens of the eye was a very imperfect instrument, and that they could make much better lenses nowadays. Our bodies are the only natural things there are left, and we see in them how very inferior Nature is.”
May sat silent. The whole tone of the conversation, especially Manvers’ last speech, grated on her. She longed to get up and say what she thought, but somehow she felt awkward and uncultivated. Manvers’ glib tongue and eas
y sentences seemed to her like the buzzing of a mosquito in the dark — a little thing, no doubt, but sufficient to make one very uncomfortable. Was life with its hopes, fears, aims, its possibilities and limitations, just food for an epigram or a paradox spoken between two cigarettes and a cup of coffee? Were the poor, the drudges, the unhappy of this world, no more to any of these three than a peg on which to hang an idle joke about the conveniences of modern life? If Manvers did not mean what he said, it was terrible enough, but if he did, it was more terrible still. And why did not Tom say something and stop this unseemly jesting? The feeling she had had at dinner that they were talking about things she did not understand or care for, had given place to a keener and more poignant indignation that they were talking of things of which they knew nothing, but which she loved and cared for with all her soul. Were the poor poor, simply in order to administer to the pleasures of the rich? Was there no mighty all-merciful plan working behind and through misery and poverty, and wealth and happiness?
At last she could bear it no longer, and she got up out of her chair and walked slowly up to the fireplace. Manvers instantly rose and drew a chair up for her.
“I was afraid you would find it cold over there,” he said.
“Thanks! Please don’t get up,” said May.
She stood warming her hands for a moment, and then turned to him.
“I think it is terrible to talk like that,” she said; “turning the frightful suffering and poverty we see around us into a mere jest Of course you did not mean what you said, but it is no subject for jesting.” Manvers was vexed and angry. To take things seriously appeared to him an almost unpardonable breach of social etiquette: it really was not decent.
“I assure you I meant all I said,” he replied; “though of course you are quite right about the terrible misery and poverty round us. I don’t deny the tragic side of it for a moment But I am an optimist; I prefer to look on the brighter ‘side of things, and instead of dwelling on the tragedy and horror of poverty, I like to dwell on its more cheerful aspect, namely, the immense conveniences which it affords to people who are not poor. In that I am bound to say I find a certain consolation.”