Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Your brother Alfred came yesterday,” she said, “and you must be careful how you behave to him Eddie. He’s got a touch of the lumbago, and it makes him worried.”

  “Poor old Alf — cross as two sticks, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mr. Osborne, sipping his tea loudly. “Never mind, there’s Claude to look after him, and Claude manages him as never was. He’s wrapped up in that lad, Maria, my dear, and I’m sure I don’t wonder. Where is the boy? And my lady Dora will be here this evening. Lord, Mrs. O., my tongue can’t say ‘Dora’ yet: it keeps saying ‘my lady.’ I seem as if I can’t get used to it. And what other of the lords and ladies have you got coming?”

  “Well, there’s Lady Austell and the Earl, and there’s Lady Thurs — Lady May Thurston and Mr. Franklin, to whom she’s engaged—”

  “Why, we’re a houseful of lovers,” said Mr. Osborne, beaming delightedly.

  “That we are. Then there’s Alderman Price and lady, just run down from Sheffield, and Sir Thomas Ewart and lady—”

  “Remind me to get out the’40 port,” said Mr. Osborne. “Sir Thomas likes a glass of that.”

  “He likes a dozen glasses of that,” remarked Mrs. Osborne, “but pray-a-don’t sit for ever over your wine at table, Mr. O., for there’s the — the — I never can remember the name of that quartette, but they’re going to give us a bit of music after—”

  “Lashing out, lashing out,” said her husband, “you’ll make a pauper of me yet, Mrs. O.”

  “Never you fear, but Dora loves music, and nothing would content Claude but that I must get the quartette down; and don’t you look at the bill, Mr. O., because it’s a scandal to pay that for a bit of music. And then there’s Percy and Catherine, and your brother.”

  “Just a family party,” said Osborne, “that’s what I like. Family party and an old friend or two like Sir Thomas and lady. Times change, don’t they, Mrs. O.? There was a time when you and me felt so flustered at being bid to dinner with Sir T. that we were all of a tremble. Not much trembling now, eh? Ah, Maria, for what we have received the Lord make us truly thankful!” Mrs. Osborne did not at once follow this.

  “And since when have you said your grace after your tea, Eddie?” she asked.

  “Oh, it wasn’t for my tea,” said he, “I was just thinking of everything, teas and breakfasts and luncheons and dinners and work and play and enjoyment alike. I’m thankful, I am thankful for it all.”

  Then Mrs. Osborne understood and held out her plump hand with its large knuckles and immense jewelled rings to her husband.

  “Eddie, my love,” she said, “and Lor’, here comes Alfred. Don’t go kissing my hand before him. He’d think it so silly.”

  “Silly or not, Mrs. O., here goes,” said her husband, and imprinted a resounding caress on it.

  Round the corner of the house had come a queer wizened little figure. Alfred, for all the heat of the day, was dressed in black broadcloth, wore a species of buckled goloshes over his shoes and had a plaid mg over his shoulders. From above the garish colours of this rose a very small head, which would have been seen to be bald had not its owner worn over it a cap of Harris tweed, the peak of which almost came over his eye. Below that appeared a thin little aquiline nose, a mouth so tight and thin-lipped that it looked as if it was not meant to open, and cheeks so hollow that they looked as if they were being sucked in by voluntary contraction. His walk was peculiar as his dress: he moved one foot a little forward and then put the other level with it. The same process repeated led to an extraordinarily deliberate progression.

  Alfred was Mr. Osborne’s elder brother, older than him by some ten years. He had entered a broker’s office as clerk at the age of fifteen, and in the intervening years had, by means of careful and studied speculation, amassed a fortune, that had made Mr. Osborne on a former occasion remark that Claude would be a richer man than his father without ever having done a stroke of work for it. For Alfred (unmarried as yet) had made Claude his heir, a benefaction in return for which he “took it out” of Claude’s father and mother. By one of those strange fantasies of Nature which must supply her with so great a fund of amusement, he united to an unrivalled habit of being right with regard to the future movements of the stock market, an equally unrivalled eye for the merits of pictures, and had for years bought very cheaply such works as dealers and connoisseurs would run up and wrangle for at Christie’s a few years later. Here the inimitable humour of the construction of his nature came in, for well as he loved a picture, he loved a financial transaction a little more dearly, and sometimes he had collected works of an artist of no particular merit, In the consciousness that when dealers knew that he was buying them, they would begin to put the price up. Then he would gently unload, and leave them with unmarketable wares on their hands. He delighted in dealers, because they ministered to his recondite sense of fun; they did not delight in him, because they never knew whether he was collecting because he saw merit in an artist, or because his design was to make them think that such merit existed. One or two had tried to make friends with him, and asked him to dinner. He ate their dinners with a great appreciation, and scored off them worst of all. By some further strange freak of fancy, Nature had made it easy for him to acquire all that which his brother and sister-in-law could not acquire at all, for brother Alfred, in spite of his ridiculous clothes had the manner, the voice, and the ways of an eccentric and high-lineaged duke, cynical if you will, and of amazing ill-temper, a fancy which Mrs. Osborne delicately alluded to as being worried. He also gave the impression of infernal wickedness, a quality which he was quite lacking in, except as regards his ill-tempers. It was an undoubted fact that he invariably got the better of other competitors in speculating and picture dealing and such perfectly legitimate pursuits which they might be inclined to attribute to diabolical alliances.

  He crept toward the tea table, looked at his brother’s hand, which was held out in salutation, as if it was an insect, rejected it, and sat down pulling his shawl more closely about his shoulders.

  “Fresh from your triumphs in the House, my dear Edward!” he said. “You positively reek of prosperity. You seem to be hot.”

  “Well, I’m what I seem then,” said Mr. Osborne with great good nature. He could not possibly be other than polite to brother Alfred, who was to make Claude his heir, even if he had been tempted to do so. As a matter of fact, he was not so tempted. “Rum old Alf” was his only comment on his brother, when he had been more than usually annoying.

  “I gather that the aristocracy assembles before dinner,” went on Alfred. “Maria, my dear, after giving me tea for forty years at frequent intervals, it is strange that you do not remember that I take milk and not cream. Another cup, please.”

  “Well, and how’s the lumbago, Alf?” asked his brother. “Plumbago I call it: weighs as heavy as lead round the loins. Not but what I’ve only once had a touch of it myself.”

  “Very humorous indeed,” said Alfred. There was certainly no doubt that brother Alfred was a good deal worried, and Mr. Osborne made the mental note that his lumbago must be very bad indeed to make him like this. Acid he always was, but not always vitriolic. But luckily both Mr. Osborne and his wife were proof against either acid or vitriol. They only felt sorry that brother Alf was so worried.

  “Well, well, take your mind off it, Alf,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of fair dames coming down to cheer you up. Lord, Maria, what a rip brother Alf was when he was a young one. Opera every night and bouquets to the ladies on the stage—”

  “Libel,” remarked Alfred.

  Libel it was, but Mr. Osborne had intended it for a pleasant sort of libel. As the libel and not the pleasantness struck Alfred, he abandoned the topic.

  “Bought any pictures lately, Alf?” he said.

  “No, but there are two I should like to have sold. You and Maria; never saw such daubs. What did you pay for them? Twenty-five pounds apiece?”

  Mrs. Osborne laughed, quite good humouredly.

  “Why, if he�
�s not trying to buy them cheap off us,” she said, “and sell them expensive. Twenty-five pounds apiece! as if you didn’t know that the frames came to more. You and your joking, Alfred! Take a cucumber sandwich, which I know you like, though how you digest such cold vegetables at tea passes me. Why, I am reminded of a cucumber sandwich for hours after.”

  “Where are you going to hang them?” asked brother Alfred.

  “And if we weren’t just going indoors when we’ve finished our tea to look!” said Mrs. Osborne cordially. “Do come with us, Alfred, and give your advice.”

  “I should recommend the coal cellar,” said Alfred. “They want toning.”

  “Why, and he’s at his joke again!” said Mrs. Osborne, with placid admiration.

  There is probably nothing more aggravating to a man in a thoroughly bad temper than to fail in communicating one single atom of it to others, but to have your most galling attacks received with perfect good humour. Such was the case with poor Alfred now; he could no more expunge the satisfaction from Eddie’s streaming countenance, or strike the smile from his sister-in-law’s powdered face, than he could make a wax doll cease smiling, except by smashing its features altogether. He tried a few further shafts slightly more poisoned.

  “It’s odd to me, Maria,” he said, “that you don’t see how Sabincourt, or whatever the dauber’s name is—”

  “Yes, Mr. Sabincourt, quite correct,” said Mrs. Osborne.

  “How he has simply been making caricatures of you and my poor brother, making you sit with your rings and bracelets and necklaces and tiaras, just to show them off. And you, too, Edward, there you sit at your table with a ledger and a cash box and a telephone, just for all the world as if you were saying, ‘This is what honest hardware has done for me!’”

  Mrs. Osborne was slightly nettled by this attack on her husband, but still she did not show it.

  “And I’m sure Mr. Sabincourt’s done the telephone beautiful,” she said. “Why, when I stand and look at the picture, I declare I think I hear the bell ringing. And as for my necklace and tiaras, Alf, my dear, why it was Eddie who bade me put them on. No, we’ve got no quarrel with Mr. Sabincourt, I do assure you.”

  Alfred gave her one glance of concentrated malevolence, and gave it up. Whether he would have tried it again after a short period for reflection is uncertain, but at this moment Claude came out of the house. “Hullo, father!” he said. “I thought I heard the motors. But I was changing.”

  “Glad to see you, my boy. Been having a ride?”

  “Yes, on the new mare Uncle Alf gave me. She’s a ripper, Uncle Alf. I’m ever so much obliged to you. And how’s the lumbago?”

  Alfred’s face had changed altogether when Claude appeared, and for the look of peevish malignancy in his eyes there was substituted one of almost eager affection. And certainly, as Mr. Osborne had said, there was little wonder, for Claude’s appearance might have sweetened the most misanthropic heart. He was dressed quite simply and suitably in white flannels and white lawn tennis shoes, and the contrast between him and his father in his thick, heavy London clothes was quite amazing. His brown clean-shaven face was still a little flushed by his ride, and his hair was even now just drying back into its crisp curls after his bath. He did not bother his mother to pour him out tea, and instead made a bowl of it for himself in an unused slop-basin, moving the tea things with his long-fingered brown hands with a quick deftness that was delightful to watch.

  “Four lumps of sugar, Claude?” asked his father. “You’ll be getting stout, my boy, and then what’ll your young lady say to you?”

  Alfred turned a glance of renewed malignancy on to his brother as Claude laughed.

  “She’ll say I’m taking after my father,” he remarked. Alfred gave a little thin squeak of amusement. He had entirely failed to annoy his brother, but he hoped that Claude would have better luck. But again he was doomed to disappointment; Mr. Osborne’s watch chain only stirred and shook, as it did when he laughed internally.

  Claude looked about for a teaspoon, took his mother’s, and stirring his slop-basin of tea, which was half milk, had a long drink at it.

  “Father, I thought I’d drive the Napier over to meet Lady Austell and Dora,” he said, “if you don’t mind.”

  “Why, there’s the two landaus going, and the brougham, and the bus for the servants,” said Mrs. Osborne. “What for do you want the car?”

  Claude flushed a little.

  “Oh, I only thought I should like to drive it,” he said. “It’s a smart turnout, too, and Dora likes motors.”

  Mr. Osborne’s watch chain again responded to ventral agitations.

  “Blest if he doesn’t want to give his girl a drive in his dad’s best car, to show off the car and his driving,” he said with some jocosity, which drew on him brother Alfred’s malignancy again.

  “It’s a good thing you haven’t got to do the driving, Edward,” he observed. “Why shouldn’t the boy have the car out? I’ll pay for the petrol.”

  The suggestion conveyed here was not quite a random libel. Alfred, with his inconvenient habit of observation, had seen that the cost of petrol was a thing that worried his brother and promised to be a pet economy, like the habit of untying parcels to save string, or lighting as many cigarettes as possible at the same match, or the tendency shown by Lady Austell to traverse miles of dusty streets in order to leave a note instead of posting it. And Mr.

  Osborne got up a little more hastily than he would otherwise have done if this remark had not been made.

  “Oh, take the car, take the car, Claude,” he said. “Very glad you should, my boy. Now, Mrs. O., you and I will go in and see where we’ll hang our likenesses.” Mr. Alfred waited till they had gone, and then drew his plaid a little closer round his shoulders with another squeak of laughter.

  “I thought that would get the car for you, Claude,” he said; “that vexed your father.”

  Claude finished his tea.

  “I know it did, Uncle Alfred,” he said. “Why did you say it?”

  “Why, to get you the car. That’s what I’m here for, to learn what you want and see you get it. There’s some use in me yet, my lad. Usually I can’t make your father annoyed with me, but I touched him up that time.” Claude could not help smiling at his uncle’s intense satisfaction, as he sat there with shoulders hunched up, like a little malevolent ape, still grinning over the touch-up he had so dexterously delivered. He himself had got up after finishing his slop-basin of tea and was balanced on the arm of his chair, one slim leg crossed over the other, and his hands clasping his knees. His smile caused those great dark eyes nearly to close with the soft wrinkling up of the flesh at their outer comers, but closing them it opened his lips and showed the even white teeth between them. Then, with that gesture which was frequent with him, he tossed back his head and broke into a laugh.

  “Well, it’s too bad of you,” he said, “but thanks for getting me the car. It’s a handsome bit of work; they told me at Napier’s there wasn’t such another on the road anywhere. And what if I do want to run Dora up in style? It’s natural, isn’t it?”

  Somehow when Claude was with his father and mother he appeared to be a perfectly well-bred boy. But in spite of his extraordinary good looks and the perfect ease of his manner, the moment they had gone, and there was no standard of that kind to judge him by, he seemed different.

  “It’ll be a pleasant change for her finding the house comfortable,” he went on, “with servants to answer the bells, and half a dozen bathrooms where there wasn’t one before, and no holes in the carpets to trip yourself over. The place was like an old dust heap when the lease was signed three weeks ago. But you may bet I made the furnishers and decorators put their best feet foremost, and I must say they’ve done it all in the best style. It’s a nice comfortable English house, that is what it is. Mother wanted to have no end of gilding and kickshaws. I put my foot on that and Per backed me up.”

  Alfred shuffled to the house after Claude had g
one, and made his way to the dining room, where he expected to find the portraits of his brother and sister-in-law in process of being placed. The gallery through which he had first to pass had been left more or less in the state the Osbornes had found it in, though it was with difficulty that Mrs. Osborne had been persuaded not to put down a carpet on the polished oak boards. But she had had her way with regard to a few Persian rugs which had been there, and which she pronounced not fit to be seen, and had got some nice thick pieces of the best Kidderminster instead. Otherwise the Jacobean oak of its chairs, tables and book-cases had been allowed to abide, nor had she interfered with the portraits of Wests that hung on its oak-panelled walls. But with the hall it was different; and she had made several striking changes here. There had not even been a hatrack in it, which did not matter much before, since the Wests had not entertained there for years, and you could put your hat down on one of the low oak chests. But Mrs. Osborne intended to entertain a great deal, and the first thing she did was to order two large mahogany hatstands with a sort of dock for umbrellas beneath, which she had placed one on each side of the door. On the white plaster walls between the oak pillars that ran up to the roof she had put up a couple of dozen stags’ heads (ordered from Roland Ward) and half a dozen foxes’ masks, which gave the place a baronial and sporting air. The light from the two old bronze lamps similarly was quite insufficient, and she had put up four very solid yet elegant (such was their official description) electric standards, one in each corner of the hall, while over the central table she suspended another from the rafters above, slightly ecclesiastic in design, though indeed it might suggest an earthly coronet of overwhelming proportions as much as a heavenly crown. A few stuffed tarpons, killed by Per in Florida, carried on the sporting note, which was further borne out by a trophy of spears and battle axes and bead aprons which he had brought with him from the same tour. Finally, she had introduced an enormous early Victorian mahogany sideboard for laying a cloak or a coat on, and on this also stood a stuffed crocodile-lizard sitting up on its hind-legs, and carrying in its fore paws a tray for cards. This had been a birthday present to her from Mrs. Alderman Price, who was expected that evening, and even Percy, who had such taste, had said it was very quaint. So there it stood in the middle of the mahogany sideboard, carrying in its tray only the card of the clergyman of the parish. But Mrs. Osborne had no fear about callers; she was long past all that, and surveying the hall only this morning, she had said to herself with great satisfaction, “I declare I shouldn’t have known it, when I think what it was when I first see it.”