by E. F. Benson
Peter became aware, more consciously than through the hints he had previously been cognizant of, how, though Silvia’s level was some sun-basked plateau far above him, he welcomed and spread himself in the gleams that came to him. There was a splendour in being loved like that, and at this moment the inherent falsity o? his position was just burned out by that consuming ray. Her love, not in the least masculine, was yet male in its adoring self surrender; his, as regards her, though not in the least feminine, was female in its reception of it. There was an ecstasy in being adored by so magnificent a lover. Even as in material ways, she showered herself on the Danae for whom, in their drama, he was cast, so in the subtler and splendid beauty of the soul, she poured herself out in a love that passed the love of woman. And that very quality, here triumphantly shining, drew out the essential fragrance of his.
“More,” he said, “more nothing at all.”
She seemed to step from her height at that, diving down to him, entrancingly tender.
“That’s all there is, my darling,” she said. “If you want more than I’ve got, you must teach it me. Now I won’t be absurd any longer. Look, there’s a moorhen!”
This was quite in the habitual manner. Like a lark, she sang for so long as she was in the air, then folded her wings and dropped to her nest. The singing was over, and it left her panting with the ecstasy of it. But Peter, to continue that metaphor, received something of a shock; he had not known she would so swiftly come to ground. Yet that sudden dip was equally characteristic of him; he probably had shown her the trick of it, for often he had done just that. The sky, after all, extended to the actual ground: there was no intermediate element.
“It’s a coot,” he said.
“I don’t care. I only hope it’s happy,” said she. “Oh, my dear, there’s the bell for lunch, and we’re half a mile from the house. The Jackdaw will peck us for being late.”
“Not our fault. The lake shouldn’t have been so long.”
“We might fill some of it up,” said she. “Let’s talk sensibly. What were we saying before you began to talk nonsense? Oh, yes, pictures, pittance—”
“Papa,” said he.
“Peter.... I can’t think of any more.”
“Peter’s papa purchases the picture he sold for a pittance,” said he. “American headlines. Make another.”
This sort of monkey-gymnastics of the mind, at which Peter and Nellie and all the rest of them so fluently excelled, was always productive in Silvia of an intense gravity; she made her contributions with effort, struggle, and bewilderment, amazed at how quickly everybody else — everybody else was so clever — made words out of words, and reeled off the names of eminent men which began with an X....
“Something about mother,” said she with knitted brows. “I must manage — oh, Peter, isn’t that good? — I must manage to make mother—”
Peter giggled.
“That’s not the right form,” he said. “You must get the right form. Let’s see. ‘Millionaire mother manages to make — to make — oh, yes — money on Mr. Mainwaring’s monstrosity,’” he finished up in a great hurry.
“Oh, Peter, how lovely!” said she. “How do you do it? And why can’t I?”
Mr. Mainwaring rose magnificently to his tenancy of the state-rooms, feeling that it had been a very proper arrangement to put him there. Here was the father of the master of Howes paying a visit to his son; here, too, in the same earthly vesture, was the creator of the great cartoons which, among all the futile crosses and cenotaphs and hysterical verse and prose, were not unworthy of the heroic history which they commemorated. With the same abandoned thoroughness with which he could be, when suitable, the rollicking, jovial boy, hungry for his tea, or the light-hearted robust-throated Toreador, sa now he saw in the assignation of the state-rooms to his occupancy a very proper and touching homage on the part of Peter and Silvia, or Mrs. Wardour (or more probably on their joint acclamation) to the sovereignty of his Art. These pleasant reflections that accompanied the appreciative exploration of his territory suggested that there was, so to speak, a little state business to be done, the nature of which he believed he had adequately indicated to Peter. Peter, good lad, would no doubt have attended to it, and it would be well for him to give his report.
Probably it was as much the desire of having this conversation with Peter secure from interruption as anything else that caused him to send a message to his son that Mr. Mainwaring would be much obliged if he would spare him a few minutes in the staterooms before dressing time; but it certainly fitted in pleasantly with his sovereignty that Peter should be requested to present himself, and that Mr. Mainwaring should be stationed on a Spanish throne of brocade and gilded wood-work.
He waved Peter to a seat. Peter seemed to prefer to perch himself on the tall steel fireguard. He divined with sufficient accuracy his father’s pose, and was partly amused, partly irritated. Silvia would have been wholly amused.
“Hope you’ll be comfortable here, father,” he said.
Mr. Mainwaring glanced round him.
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “I shall do very well. Ah, by the way, before we get to business, I have a letter from your mother which she asked me to give you. Perhaps you would hand me my despatch case.... Here it is.”
Peter was lighting a cigarette, and spoke between the puffs.
“Right. I’ll take it when I go,” he said.
His father looked at the tapestried walls.
“My dear boy,” he said, “I don’t know if I am right to allow you to smoke here.”
Peter dropped his match on the carpet. He did that on purpose.
“Oh, don’t bother about that,” he said. “I allow myself. Now I suppose you want to talk to me about that cartoon?”
“You got my letter? You have arranged what I indicated?”
Peter felt his irritation gaining on him.
“Well, your letter was rather — rather involved, rather vague and magnificent,” he said. “What Silvia and I made out of it was that you had been offered a higher price for work that Mrs. Wardour had commissioned you to do for her, and wanted to call it off. That seemed to be the general drift of it.”
“No; there was no definite commission,” said he. “I mentioned that.”
“Mrs. Wardour was under the impression that there was. But that, I think, can be arranged, for the series was intended — commissioned or not doesn’t matter — to hang in the gallery here. This is Silvia’s house, you see, and in a way mine, so that if we consent there will be — under certain conditions — no difficulty with my mother-in-law. Silvia has talked to her about it. We cordially consent, father. We are both quite willing that you should paint the rest of the series for somebody else.”
Mr. Mainwaring could find no fault with the substance of the speech; indeed, it gave him precisely what he was wanting. But, in spite of Peter’s neutrality of statement, he found it dealing some dastardly wound to his vanity.
“Ha! You and Silvia, it appears, don’t want the great series,” he remarked.
“But apparently somebody else does,” said Peter. “And you said in your letter that they were exciting a stupendous interest in artistic circles. That’s all right, then; we are very glad.”
“Yes, glad to get rid of them,” said the insatiable one.
Peter practically never lost his temper. He used it as a stored-up force. But certainly the sight of his father, looking like Zeus on the Spanish throne, did not predispose him to exert his habitual pleasantness.
“You are, of course, at liberty to make any comments you choose,” he said. “You are vexed with me because I give you your way quite willingly instead of reluctantly. By the way, don’t tell me, and in particular don’t tell Mrs. Wardour, whether the ‘artistic circles’ is another expression for Lady Darley. If it is, I think it highly probable that she would refuse to let you have back the first cartoon, if that is part of your plan. You would, in that case, I suppose, have to copy it if she allowed you to.”
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Mr. Mainwaring rose to a splendour of pomposity. “Copy?” he said. “And could I copy the fiery execution of it? You speak of pictures, my Peter, as if they could be produced like boots or hats. The intending purchaser — I do not say whether or no I refer to Lady Darley — wants no cold replica. She insists on the one that came hot and terrible from the furnace of my imagination.”
“Then on certain conditions,” said Peter, “Lady Darley — I mean the purchaser — may have it.”
“Name them,” said his father, looking like a captive king.
“The first is that you completely withdraw, and if possible regret, the use of the expression ‘pittance,’ in connection with the price you received for it.
There’s an implication of meanness about it with regard to Mrs. Wardour.”
Mr. Mainwaring clicked his thumb and finger as if to say, “That for what I sold it for.”
“I make no such implication,” he said. “Mrs. Wardour or anybody else is well within her rights in acquiring fine work at such prices as the artist is obliged from straitened circumstances to accept.”
“The point is,” said Peter, “that you hadn’t often, if ever, been obliged to accept a thousand guineas before for any picture.”
“And may not an artist, after years of unremitting endeavour, be allowed to come into his own and enjoy the appreciation he has long merited?” asked Mr. Mainwaring.
“Certainly he may: we are all delighted. But when he does — when, that is to say, you at length receive a high price for a picture, you shouldn’t, because you are offered immediately afterwards a higher price, talk of a pittance as applied to the first. You thought yourself, father,” continued Peter pleasantly and inexorably, “remarkably fortunate to get a thousand guineas.”
Mr. Mainwaring, at this, displayed the versatility of a quick-change artist. It was pretty well demonstrated that Peter was not impressed by the majestic attitude, and he yodelled and burst into a laugh.
“Well, well, my Peter,” he said, “you shall have it your own way. It was no pittance. I ought not to have called it a pittance — mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Pittance it is — let us distinguish, my dear — when I contrast it with the subsequent offer that has reached me, but at the time a thousand guineas seemed to me a very fair remuneration. I had been too modest about my value, it appears now. Ah, yes, but recognition is pleasant enough, and when the brush slips from my hand, and my spirit flies” (he made a circular motion of his arms as if swimming) “to join the mightier dead, the Mainwaring estate will be found not too inconsiderable to place beside the fortunes of the Wardours. But that will not, I hope, be for a long time yet,” he added, as the notion of picturing himself in front of some great canvas with the brush slipping from his nerveless hands, supported by Silvia and Peter, occurred to him with an almost ominous vividness.
“Quite,” said Peter in general acknowledgment of this magnificence. “There remains then one thing to settle, and that is the price at which you repurchase the cartoon of which Mrs. Wardour is the present possessor.”
Mr. Mainwaring did not for the moment see the bearing of this, and remained splendid.
“I should not dream of repaying her one penny less than what I received for it,” he said. “The full price, Peter: assure her of that.”
Peter thought it better to let another aspect of the case strike his father, without suggesting it, and was silent till Mr. Mainwaring spoke again.
“H’m. I see what you mean,” he said.
“I hoped you would, because really there doesn’t seem to be any reason why she should let you have for a thousand guineas a thing which is now indubitably hers, and which you will immediately sell for a considerably higher sum.”
Mr. Mainwaring began to regret that he had said quite so much about the utter impossibility of recapturing the fire of the original in a copy.
“You would be offering her, you must remember,” Peter added, “a pittance for her picture.”
“You think I ought to give her what I shall receive for it?” asked Mr. Mainwaring.
Peter kept steadily before him his distaste of his father “scoring off” Mrs. Wardour. The whole thing, though humorous, was rather sordid; but he knew that he rather liked himself in the part he was playing in it.
“I think the justice of that view will appeal to you,” he said. “You couldn’t very well do otherwise.”
Mr. Mainwaring was silent a moment, and then decided to be completely superb.
“I have no experience in business or in bargaining,” he said. “If you tell me that is right and fair and proper, I yield.”
“I think it’s your only means of getting the picture,” said Peter. “So that’s settled, is it? Oh, the letter from my mother. Thanks. Dinner at half past eight.”
CHAPTER X
PETER, as he strolled down the corridor, knew that he had been rather signorial — if that was the word — and designedly so, in this interview. In spite of Mr. Mainwaring’s magnificent occupation of the state-rooms, for which, after all, he had his son to thank, Peter was pleased to feel that he had been putting his father in his place. It had certainly been with this object in view that he had smoked his cigarette, and dropped the expired match on the carpet, not exactly calling attention to his position, but casually assuming it. Again, in the matter of the picture, he had, ever so quietly, ever so indulgently, just hinted at the right course, and like a lamb — a great vain rococo, farcical lamb — his father had bleated his way into the proper fold.
Peter confessed to himself — he seldom confessed to anybody else — that the motive which inspired these manoeuvres was an unamiable one. He might easily have obtained the results that he now, together with his mother’s unopened letter, carried away from this interview, by tact, by pleasantness, by the general small change of sympathy. Hitherto he had been accustomed to use such lubrications to make the wheels of life run smoothly in domestic dealings; but now that no further domestic lubrication was necessary on his part (his father, it is true, might have to flourish the oil-can with desperate agility, if he was to ensure smooth working) Peter knew that he had just driven ahead and let the wheels, if so they felt disposed, squeak and squeal, and grind and grumble. While that small, smelly house off the Brompton Road had been his home, it had paid to make the bearings run easily; but now, when he thought with incredulous wonder that he could have “stuck” all that small stuffiness so long, he detachedly admired his own past deftness and patience in dealing with the daily situation there. He saw in the mirror of his own vanity the incomparable crudeness of his father’s, and discovered, almost with a sense of shock, how cordially he disliked him.
For the present his sense of humour with regard to him was in total eclipse; the type of quality which Silvia hugged as being the lovable queerness which makes for individuality, he saw only as tiresome and contemptible eccentricity, a thing to be contemplated baldly without comment, whenever contemplation of it was necessary, and to be dealt with summarily. The vexing affair was that Peter caught some broken image of himself in all this. One glimpse of himself in especial was irritating; that, namely, in which he looked with great distaste on his father’s profiting by the wealth of the Wardour’s without giving a due return for his depredations on it.
It was natural that when, as now, he was so acutely aware of his father’s unique capability for rubbing him up the wrong way, he should wonder afresh at the placid, unruffled tolerance that had enabled his mother to spend a quarter of a century with him. Women, of course, so ran his reflections, have a greater gift of patience with men than a man can be expected to have. Sex, no doubt, had something to do with it, for on the other hand men were more tolerant of a tiresome woman than were other women. Yet that could not wholly explain his mother; she was quite inexplicable, for Silvia even, gifted as Peter ever so cordially recognized with the power of putting herself into the position and realizing the identity of other people, had fallen back like a spent wave from the hard, smooth impe
netrability of his mother. She had confessed herself baffled, had no idea whether there was something, somebody, hermetically sealed up behind that neat porcelain face by the inexorable will of its occupant, or if there was nothing beyond that blank imperturbability that cared only whether the door at the head of the kitchen stairs was “quite shut” and had no desire except to be left alone and allowed to read advertisements of hotels in railway guides. Had his mother been driven into that small, but apparently impregnable, fortress by his father’s colossal and ludicrous personality, or was there indeed no one there at all, no beleaguered garrison grimly holding out?
Peter wandered on to the terrace for a minute of composing dusk and quietness. He half expected to find Silvia there, and felt a little ill-used that she was not. She knew what was the nature of his interview with his father, and Peter would have welcomed the warmth of her applause at his masterly conduct of it. But in her absence he could read the certainly placid communication from his mother. She would hope he was well, she would hope Silvia was well, she would let it be assumed that she was well. She would certainly also say that she was so sorry she could not come to Howes with his father, but that she hoped to do so some time during the autumn. She would undoubtedly wind up by saying that it was nearly post-time, that she had other letters.... Peter drew the letter from his pocket, and prepared to let his eyes slide smoothly over the lines of it. She wrote a wonderfully clear hand: you could take a whole sentence in at a glance.
“MY DEAREST PETER, — I am sending this letter to you by your father, because I want it to reach you without fail. Letters go wrong by post sometimes, and I don’t want this to go wrong. When I have finished it, I shall put it into his despatch-box myself.