by E. F. Benson
All, then, was going well in the assembling of this particular party. Everything always did go well, but with a rather touching humility Lady Grote never ceased to fear as Saturday afternoon became more populous, that her guests were not going to enjoy themselves. That was her main anxiety: she had no solid self-assurance that would permit her to think that they must enjoy themselves, since they formed her party. A tremendous under-tow of modesty lay below the surface of her nature: she never rated herself at the figure at which the whole of her world rated her. She was never dazzled by the brilliance that she shed. She could not get over the notion that it was very nice of others to appear to enjoy her hospitality.
With her admirable memory, long trained in the requirements needed by a hostess, she knew that soon after six all her guests had arrived with the exception of Robin and her husband. The boy had certainly said he would come to-day, but had not said how or when he would get there: that was rather like him. Perhaps he would swim down the river from Cambridge, and arrive at the steps by the bottom of the wood with no clothes of any description....
She mentioned this possibility to Geoffrey Bellingham, who was a late arrival, and was sitting by her with a cup of tea, a glass of hock-cup, a tea-cake and a peach on the table beside him. It did not seem that he wished to consume any of those items of provender: he bad but absently taken them from trays that were handed him, and they now formed a sort of phalanx of food ready to hand. Soon he added to them a glass of brandy-and-soda, a cigar and a cigarette. The last of these, without lighting it, he brandished as an instrument of gesticulation.
“But there is, in fact, my dear lady,” he said, “no apprehension justly founded which could lead you seriously to contemplate so unusual an occurrence as our dear Robin’s appearance here in that state which you so delicately allude to as nudity. Even if it were so, what sight could be more delectable to our overcivilized eyes than a young, unconscious Greek god, an Aphrodite, in fact, though of the more muscular sex, appearing suddenly from the wave in all the unashamedness of youthful beauty among our sophisticated frocks and frills? You would, if your maternal instincts prompted you, lend him a skirt, and I would hesitatingly offer him a coat more than ample for his slimness. Then, clad with a shoe of Lady Massingberd’s and a boot of our amiable Boyton’s is there any more alluring spectacle — in fact, we shall all be delighted to see Robin, irrespective of his position as the son of our dear hostess, whenever and however he arrives. But if, unless I am mistaken, it is the Cam that glides by his studious walls, there is no real chance of the aqueous phenomenon you have suggested, as he comes, I understand, from the banks of a river which suffers a sea-change in the Wash. Had Oxford the honour of claiming him as an alumnus, there would have been the chance of his debouching, so to speak, at Grote, which, I cannot believe I am mistaken in thinking, casts its spell over the Thames. In fact, Robin, if he comes by river in any form, will have to face a voyage down the North Sea, or German Ocean as the geography books, probably Teutonic in origin, so impudently call it, before he can win a footing on our beloved Thames. And even then he would have to swim up from Gravesend or some ill-defined settlement that enriches the estuary!”
His eyes suddenly fell on the peach, the teacake, the brandy-and-soda, the tea and the hock-cup.
“I had not been aware,” he said, “that so complete a paraphernalia of what would make the most sumptuous sort of dinner had been provided me. It is slightly embarrassing to be so beautifully equipped with what the Prayer-book calls the kindly fruits of the earth, without having had the slightest intention of claiming their benign aid to bridge over the chasm, as we may call it, which intervenes — in fact, the smallest possible selection from an apparently unlimited store would more than suffice for me. In short, a cup of tea and nothing more would be remarkably pleasant. I seem to have taken a cigar, too, a delicacy of desiccated foliage of which I am wholly unworthy. And so Robin is expected.”
That seemed to be the gist of it all, and Helen Grote took firm hold of this life-preserver that floated on the flood of Geoffrey Bellingham’s discourse. —
“He said he would come this afternoon,” she said, clinging to that which kept her head above water. “But one never knows about Robin.”
She was instantly swept off again into the sea.
“Therein you outline the most glorious of all relationships, I need not say — do not tell me that I need say — that I allude to that between mothers and sons. Had I been so fortunate as to have a son, granting the premiss that I had already gained the most essential of all conditions for that — namely, that of husbandhood — there is nothing that would delight me more than the existence of that supreme and entrancing uncertainty of how a son is going to behave. The younger generation, my dear lady, must inevitably be ahead of us in development, and, therefore, in incomprehensibility. If you could understand your dear Robin — may we say ‘our’ dear Robin? — it would imply that he was a generation behind his time. Nothing fills me with more delighted wonder and surfeits me with more entranced surmise than how the younger generation are going to govern the world. The reins are already slipping from our effete and rheumatic fingers — you will understand, of course, that no fingers of those which I see so gracefully round me are alluded to in any sort of implication, however remote — but, in point of fact, mothers and fathers, and the elderly bachelors and the even more elderly maids, are now, at this present moment, sitting round in a dusk and Dammcrung, and bright eyes, dimly seen, but sparkling with purpose, gleam from the corners of our crumbling habitations, and watch for the opportunity which must surely come, and come soon, of, in fact, scragging us.”
Lady Grote gave a little shiver, quite involuntary, quite sincere.
“You are horrible,” she said. “Do you mean that Robin is going to cut my throat? But you are more than fascinating. You are a Pied Piper; is he not, Mr. Kuhlmann?”
Kuhlmann, who was sitting on the other side of her, made a little purring noise in his throat like a contented cat.
“Also,” said he, “I do not understand a word of what Mr. Bellingham says. But I like the noise he makes. Ach, one word I did understand, and he says you are in the Dammerung. There is a dusk closing in on England. So?”
Mr. Bellingham remembered, with a sense of relief, the fact that Kuhlmann had not arrived till after his remarks about the sea so impudently called the German Ocean.
“A dusk closing in on England?” he said. “I must surely have expressed myself with more than my accustomed infelicity, if I have left that impression. The dusk, Mr. Kuhlmann, is but the dusk of certain expiring ashes, such as my own, which will rekindle in a nobler fire to light the ways of our world’s obscure transit through infinite space, than has ever yet been seen. The words that should convey to you how eagerly I make fuel of myself for that incomparable Phoenix immeasurably fail me. But if, in the ways of a stuttering tongue and a speech to which the babbling of a brook — any brook you please — is of the nature of speech more coherent than is given to me, I am capable of conveying the impression that is so irradicably fixed on my mind that no other picture is aught but colourless beside it, I would endeavour to make this at least plain.” Bellingham was now in full splendid blast.
He outlined and emphasized his point with strokes of his unlit cigar, using it like a brush against the canvas of the air, and his voice boomed out impressively.
“From a race of heroic fathers and mothers has come forth, with explosion as of gorse-seed, an infinitely more heroic offspring. The steadfast eyes of boys and girls to-day, I assure you, frighten me. They are steadfast on their pleasure, if you will, or on each other, or on those extraordinary games they play, in which you have to hit a small india-rubber ball, or so I take it to be, as few times as possible, putting it, at uncertain intervals, into a species of small jam-pot sunk in little lawns, in order to win this very serious game. Golf, I think, is the name of the sport which I am feeling for. Or, again, they fix those same steadfast eyes, unwittingly pe
rhaps, but in obedience to the life force, as poor Shaw put it, on the mist that assuredly now more than ever veils the future from us. The destiny of the world! Where does that lie but in the solar plexus of boys and girls? How commonplace to the verge of conspicuousness that sounds! But in the history of the world did ever the future lie — like, like this plucked peach, all pink with the sun that has ripened it, more fatefully, more conclusively, in the hands of the young? There it lies, as it were, a bomb built of fire and explosiveness, tame for the moment as this plucked peach, which it really would be a crime not to eat, and, as I am without criminal instincts, I forthwith proceed to plunge the spoon in it, thus and thus — and, in fact, may the future be as soft and as sweet.
“The fuse is attached; I image it for you, in fact, with what seems to be, and in fact is, if for the moment you will allow me to translate such imagery into the actual terms of what we may call, in the analogy of cutlery implying steel, argentery, implying silver, with this spoon, and push it into the peach which so beautifully awaits me. But the peach, irrespective of this consuming and already delighted mouth, must stand for us as the bomb which the Robins and the swimmers of fresh rivers hold in their hands, and will deal with, as the Dammerung of the older generation closes round it, and the clouds brighten with the dawning of a day that is, to the licence allowed to the self-made seer, the herald of the more serene than ever was yet day.”
Lord Thorley had made an inconspicuous entry during this monologue, and, after a rather incomprehensible greeting on the part of Mr. Bellingham, who hailed him as “our dear lantern,” joined the circle. This salutation was soon explained, for with a wealth of delicate and elusive imagery, Mr. Bellingham made it moderately clear that Lord Thorley’s intellect was the light that would illuminate the future for them. “No will-of-the-wisp, my dear friend,” he handsomely concluded, “but the beam of the steadfast lighthouse on menacing and broken seas. Tell us, then, ever so lightly indicate to us, that which for the incomparable brightness of your revolving reflectors that cast pencils of imperishable light — in fact, my dear Thorley, what do you make of the future as in the hands of the rising generation?”
Lord Thorley weighed his pince-nez a moment in his open hand.
“Really, there seems an epidemic of inquiry about that matter,” said he. “Only just now Lady Grote and I were discussing it.”
“I curse myself, I pour dust on my head, for not, in fact, coming by an earlier train,” said Mr. Bellingham.
“We disagreed,” began Lord Thorley.
“And I missed the chance of observing the exquisite thrust and riposte of those incomparable gladiators. Another round, I beseech you for another round, or at least the report of the contest.”
“Well, Helen was all for our being in a melting-pot, and in her richly-mixed metaphor wondered what kind of soup would come out of it. I cannot see that we are in a melting-pot at all, or in the soup, either. Every generation, so I ventured to suggest, has always fancied it lived in critical times: memoirs prove that. But the crisis passes, and except for the memoirs subsequent generations would never imagine there had been one.”
“But, in fact,” said Bellingham, “sometimes surely, as at the end of the eighteenth century, it was not only in memoirs subsequently proved guilty of wild exaggeration that France — in short, I allude to the French Revolution.”
“I am disposed even to dispute that. The French Revolution was not really a great event: it was only the last chapter of a process that had been going on for fifty years. And, again, as we were talking of the young generation, it is important to remember that it was not the young who had their hands on the levers. I don’t think the young, with the exception perhaps of poets, ever do anything much. Ibsen, is it not, tells us in one of his practically unreadable plays that the young are knocking at the door? That is as far as they get. They knock at the door and run away like mischievous street boys. They do not, as a matter of fact, come in till they have ceased to be young.”
“Our dear lantern, in fact,” remarked Mr. Bellingham, “shows us a calm sea and children playing on the sand. But I doubt whether it is not the peacefulness of your own effulgence, my dear Thorley, that makes the object on which it plays partake of the same serene quality.”
“You agree with Helen.”
“If I err, I err then in the most delightful company in the world. Indeed, one might prefer to stray from the high road and the direct path with so entrancing a guide, though, of course, I cannot consent to underrate the enthralling prospect of marching breast-forward, my dear Thorley, with you. You see me in a quandary. Whichever course I adopt, I must be widowed of the most amiable of companions. To your secret eyes, then, there is no Dammerung approaching, no brightness of youth ready to pounce on us from the dimness.”
“I cannot see it,” said Lord Thorley; “the political horizon, I am bound to say, seems to me very serene. I see no fresh bogies there, they are all the well-worn properties. A European war, a revolution in Ireland — I need not enumerate the old familiar faces. And, as regards the young, I see nothing more than I have always seen. Some clever boy from Oxford writes a book that makes a nine days’ wonder. Some clever group of artists evolves a new scheme of pictorial representation, and loads the walls of our exhibitions with crude and violent diagrams of a wholly puerile nature. Some excitable young women break shop windows and commit similar outrages in order to show us how fit they are to receive the franchise. But I must confess that I am unable to see any significance in such pranks. There are always, I am glad to say, clever young men and obstreperous young women keeping the world young. In a sense, of course, the future belongs to the young, because they will be alive when we are all dead. But when that not very regrettable day occurs, they will be no longer young. Emphatically, in my opinion, it is the middle-aged who matter.”
“A comfortable, a well-wadded and delightful doctrine,” exclaimed Mr. Bellingham. “But yet it seems to me that as with plastic clay the young are shaping the features of the future, each in his smock with slender finger-tips bedaubed with what we may call the materials of days yet unborn. We are being picked up, we older men — this at least to me is the secret lesson of which I am but learning the alphabet, and which in a sort of impotent babble I haltingly strive to express. In fact, in my own case I feel that the young just scoop me up like the lump of clay, and set me with pressing thumb and forefinger into the great image that grows beneath their hands. A very curious observer might possibly detect in that image a tuft of my already depleted hair, and say, ‘Surely this is a remnant, a capillary adjunct sadly grey and thin, of what once was Bellingham. Now with other past modes he is but a morsel of a rib or some other less honourable and expressive a portion of the entire anatomy.’”
He and Lord Thorley, an oddly contrasting pair, had strolled away from the loggia (leaving Mr. Bellingham’s provisions, all but the peach, unconsumed) across the lawn in front of the house. Bellingham’s sonorous voice fitted well with his thick-set form, his massive and powerful face; from that strong efficiency of body you might have conjectured a man of action, who dealt in practical matters and wielded a world that he had organized. Yet this was the artist, the dweller in visions, the discerner of nothing more material than the inward personality of his sitters, while the loose, languid man, who seemed to all bodily appearance to have but the slightest connection with the tangible things of the world, was the man of action who shaped the destinies of a nation. A stranger merely informed of the collective identities of the two must surely have given to each the name-label of the other, and yet the stranger who did so would have shown himself a person of imperfect perception. For Bellingham’s work was instinct with virile comprehension; he had the firmest of grasps upon the material world, while Lord Thorley, as he had always confessed, brought nothing of the brutal actuality of first-hand material considerations into his deft political weavings. He handled these with the delicate insight of a scholar brooding over obscure texts, the finesse and subtl
e observation of the philosopher in his study. Therein lay both his strength and weakness, for while the obscure seldom evaded his penetrative power, he was apt to overlook the obvious. It was by a great flaring torch, dripping with the pitch of humanity, and casting strong shadows and raising high lights, that Bellingham looked at the world he knew so well, and loved with all the veins and arteries that bucketed gallons of human blood through his body; it was almost with a grotesque appreciation of his kinship with it that he beheld it. But Lord Thorley, holding up his dry white light in his dry white hand, noted, like a doctor by a bedside, the less appreciable maladies of his patient.
They met friends on the terrace across the lawn, and the collective spirit of the party began to develop. Above all things, it was “up to date”; it dwelled, that is to say, with extraordinary vividness in the actual present moment, and cared as little for the past as it recked of the future. For most of them, a majority sufficient to form the prevailing note, the rose was now full-blown; it was enough to inhale the perfection of its fragrance without thought of the promise of its budding, or of the seeds that already were maturing in the womb from which the petals sprang. All appurtenances of extravagance and luxury were contained in the scent of it; so, too, was the sense that took all these things for granted. It was perfectly natural to those who assembled for dinner that Vandycks and Holbeins lived on the brocaded walls of the room, where they waited for the more tardy guests, that silk Persian rugs made feet noiseless, that Empire mirrors reflected the bare shoulders of beautiful women. That was how things “happened”; it was part of the indulgent constitution of the world that you moved quite naturally in so splendid a setting. It was natural also, a thing not to be considered, that a band played in the loggia with a discretion that did not mar conversation, that you ate off silver, that the masterpieces of Reynolds and Romney floated swimmingly on the walls.