Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The custodian ebbed sadly away.

  As dusk fell and closing time for the Green Salon approached, the custodian rendered his financial statement. There had been nineteen visitors, not including a deaf old gentleman who could not for a long time be made to understand that there was an entrance fee, and then retreated in high indignation, entirely declining to pay, but the toilet-roll showed that twenty sections had been detached from it. This was accounted for by the custodian’s confession that he had torn one off, not realising that each symbolised sixpence, in order to roll himself a cigarette, for which purpose it was admirably fitted. Miss Howard paid him his shilling out of the takings of the day and enjoined on him to revere the toilet-roll. With the exception of Mrs. Oxney and Colonel Chase, all Wentworth had visited the Green Salon, and Florence had been twice. Colonel Chase, so Miss Howard ascertained on her arrival there at tea-time, had gone up to London after breakfast and had not yet returned.

  She was hailed with numerous congratulations, and by Mrs. Oxney with a profusion of valid excuses for her not having visited the Green Salon.

  “Such a worry it has been to me all day, Miss Howard, that I haven’t been able to get down. First there was the usual Monday morning settling-up, and that took all my morning and half an hour after lunch as well. And then such a fuss in the kitchen for the boot-and-knife boy, so good at his work but peppery, came late to his dinner, and Cook refused to have the cold beef back, but said he must be content with bread and cheese, if he couldn’t keep time. So there were words, and Cook came to me to know if it was by my wish that the boot-and-knife boy swore at her. Fancy! As if I had ever wished anything of the sort. And then when that was over, there were the hot-water pipes in the smoking-room leaking, just when I was thinking of putting on my hat and starting, and by the time the plumber had put them to rights, it was getting dark.”

  “Then, oh, what a pleasure you will have tomorrow,” said Mrs. Bliss. “I’m sure I could have spent all day in the Green Salon, going round and round it and seeing fresh beauties every time. Such refreshment! I went quite early, as I knew it would be crowded all day. How many visitors did you have, dear?”

  “Nineteen, no twenty,” said Miss Howard.

  “I call that wonderful for the first day. Just wait a few days till people have had time to tell each other what a treat is in store for them! There’ll be quite a queue outside of those waiting to get in.”

  “And I hope my Pussy isn’t sold yet,” said Mrs. Oxney. “I should be miserable if anybody else got that.”

  “Let me see!” said Miss Howard, pressing her finger to her forehead. “No, I don’t think it is. I can’t remember seeing a red star on it.”

  “My favourite is Evening Bells,” said Mrs. Bliss. “Such peace and poetry. How they’ll all be snapped up!”

  Florence liked Healing Springs best; her father could not understand her preference for that over Bethesda. The discussion grew quite animated, and though it was gratifying to find them all taking such interest and pride in her work (Mrs. Bertram had cut out the notice in the Bolton Gazette and was meaning to paste it into her scrap-book as a compliment to Wentworth) Miss Howard could have wished that just one of them had guarded against the certainty of a favourite being snapped up, by snapping first. There seemed to be a lack of prudence in neglecting the opportunities of to-day, which might be gone tomorrow.

  Next morning could scarcely rank as a morning at all, so dense and dark were the volleying clouds which swept down from the East, discharged their broadsides of rain on Bolton and hurried on to make room for fresh assailants. Colonel Chase had returned the night before, all smiles and no whistles, and it was evident that his business in town had been satisfactory. But even an old campaigner like himself, as he told Miss Howard at breakfast, could not face the wrath of such weather, and, after the cold that had threatened him last week, he felt it wiser to postpone the pleasure of seeing her delightful pictures. Mrs. Oxney was full of similar lamentations, and though distraught at the notion of Pussy’s picture being snapped up by somebody else, it still did not occur to her to telephone to the Baths and bid the custodian affix the adhesive star to the treasure. Even Mr. Kemp preferred to miss a morning of Bethesda, and see whether Mind would not do something striking for him as he sat close to the log fire in the lounge and the bus went down with only two passengers in it, Mrs. Bliss who for the sake of her husband was willing to brave any erroneous inclemency, particularly as it could not possibly hurt her, and Miss Howard.

  The Green Salon was absolutely empty of art lovers, and the skylight was leaking a little on to Mrs. Oxney’s nice carpet. Patients from neighbouring hotels and from Belvoir, Blenheim and Balmoral came through the vestibule in dripping mackintoshes, and how much nicer it would be, thought Miss Howard, if it was they who were dripping on to Mrs. Oxney’s carpet instead of the skylight. In fact the only focus of cheerfulness about the Green Salon was its custodian who felt certain everyone would come flocking in as soon as the weather cleared: no one in his opinion could ‘have the heart to look at pictures, miss’, on such a day. Miss Howard paid him his shilling before lunch, not meaning to return if the down-pour continued, and inspected the sad integrity of the toilet-roll. But it would never do to present the appearance of a down-hearted exhibitor and after lunch she established herself in the lounge to make an indoor sketch. The perspective of the staircase was a most intricate problem, and no amount of sympathetic colour would make it look other than unscaleable.

  Though the old campaigner could not face the weather for the ten minutes walk to the Baths to see the pictures he faced it that afternoon for a solid six miles by his pedometer, leaving and returning to Wentworth by the back door, so that Miss Howard, sketching in the lounge close to the front door should be ignorant of his perfidy. A good deal of diplomacy was needed in these manœuvres, for he had to get his mackintosh from the hall, and take it up to his bedroom for the purpose of sewing a button on, and on his return from his walk, convey it by a round-about route to the hot-water pipes outside the dining-room in order to dry it. This done, he came thumping down to tea, flushed and rosy with exercise and successful trickery.

  “I’m not one to complain of an occasional wet day,” he said, “for I’ve got through some arrears, and had a good spell of reading in my room — wonderful author, Macaulay: he gives you something solid to think about. And if anyone asked if I’d had a snooze as well, I should change the subject.”

  “Nothing to be ashamed of, Colonel,” said Mr. Kemp. “A nap during the afternoon has often been recommended to me. After the wear and tear of the morning nature needs a restorative. I get sounder sleep sometimes in half an hour after lunch, than I do in the whole course of the night. At Buxton it was part of my régime.”

  “Well, it freshens one up,” said Colonel Chase, who always interrupted Mr. Kemp’s experiences at Spas, “I feel brisk enough for anything now. We might have a rubber perhaps before dinner now the day’s work is over. The evenings are drawing in now: we can play with a good conscience, and not feel we’re wasting the daylight. Cards and candles, I always say.”

  Mrs. Oxney had entered as he spoke. She had just come along from the dining-room, where she had been distributing the menu cards for dinner, and had seen Colonel Chase’s mackintosh spread over the radiator and sending up clouds of steam.

  “Well, that would be very comfortable,” she said, “and if you want me to take a hand, I’m ready. But to think of your having gone out on this miserable afternoon, Colonel. I’ll be bound you had to make your pedometer tick briskly to keep yourself warm. And your mackintosh, why, you might have thrown it into the river: a button off, too, letting the wet in.” Mrs. Holders caught Tim’s eye, who, trying to strangle a laugh, swallowed a crumb of cake by an unusual route and violently choked. This happily changed the subject, which Colonel Chase would certainly have had to do for Mr. Kemp who was an authority on false passages of all sorts begged everybody not to pat Tim on the back, for such a well-meant tr
eatment only made matters worse. He ought to sit bolt upright, breathe deeply in through the nose and expel the air vigorously through the mouth. Everyone’s attention was therefore diverted to Tim, and they watched him recover by degrees. Mrs. Bliss had clearly been demonstrating during his fit, so it was uncertain whether Mind or Mr. Kemp was responsible.

  But though there was then no definite further exposure of Colonel Chase’s rank duplicity, everyone was aware of it, for no one could possibly forget that he had told Miss Howard that the weather was too bad for even so old a campaigner to venture out. It was no wonder that she moistened her lips several times and determined that nothing should drag from her the smallest comment on his most deceitful behaviour. What made his falsehoods more revolting to the feelings of a lady was the hearty and rollicking manner in which he said he had been reading in his bedroom and perhaps snoozed. But she scorned to return to the subject and ask how many miles he had walked.

  Morning brought a renewal of tranquil and sunny weather, and had it not been for her exhibition, Miss Howard would certainly have returned to lunch at Wentworth with a veritable ‘Ode to Autumn’ in water-colour to display on the chimney-piece of the lounge. But she could not bear in these critical days to absent herself so long from the Green Salon, and she longed to know whether her custodian’s optimism was justified in expecting an influx of visitors now that the improved weather conditions would give them the heart to look at pictures. At present, when she arrived there soon after breakfast, there was only one visitor, a rather odious looking young man, who, so the custodian secretly informed her, had refused to pay for admission on the grounds that he was the press. Instantly she was divided between high hopes and low suspicions. Was he (rapturous thought!) ‘our own correspondent’ of some influential London paper, sent down to study the contents of the Green Salon, which the Bolton Gazette had found so exquisite, or was he some clever thief who intended, when the custodian’s small back was turned to cut out from their frames some of the choicest gems and dispose of them to shady dealers? He did not look like her idea of our own correspondent: on the other hand it would have been unlike a clever thief to have called attention to himself by saying that he was the press. In either case, he had better know who she was, for if he was the press he might like to have an interview, while if he was a thief he would know that the artist had taken note of him. So she tripped up to him, and gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  “The press, I believe,” she said. “I am Miss Howard. These little things of mine—”

  The press had not very good manners: it did not remove from the corner of its mouth a cigarette whose fumes mingled strangely with the odour of the waters, perceptible this morning, and that of Souvenir d’Orient.

  “Pleased to meet you, miss,” he said, “and pleased to have given you a leg up in our organ the Bolton Gazette. I laid it on thick, didn’t I? Just looked in to see what sort of a show you’d got. Very pretty, I’m sure.”

  “I thought your article was most sympathetic,” she said. “And so pleased you’ve paid my little exhibition a second visit, after studying it so closely.”

  He looked much surprised.

  “No, I’ve not been here before,” he said. “I just had a look at the catalogue, and wrote my stuff on that.”

  Poor Miss Howard felt her last support slip from her. Hitherto she had clung to the comforting knowledge that though visitors might be few and purchasers completely non-existent, the trained eye of the professional critic had appreciated and admired. Now that consolation was gone.

  “You don’t seem to have had any purchasers as yet,” went on this dreadful young man, “but I’ll give you a tip about that, miss. You tell that young buttons who wanted me to pay sixpence, to fix labels on to half of them to say they’re sold, see? You bet other people will begin buying them then, for fear they should be too late. Just make them think that if they’re not slippy everything’ll be gone, see? I must be off though: wish you luck.”

  For some time after the departure of this dreadful young man there were no other visitors, and the optimism of the leap-frog boy had to exert its ingenuity, and he supposed that on such a fine morning gents would want to be out of doors. It seemed in fact as if gents required very unusual weather to make them feel drawn to picture exhibitions; neither fine nor wet suited them. Miss Howard had one or two bill-paying errands in the town, and on her return she found that Mrs. Oxney had been in, though there was no token of her visit on the glass of Pussy-dear, but only a message of ardent appreciation. Colonel Chase evidently was one of the gents who wanted to be out of doors, for the custodian had seen him riding by on his bicycle, as if for a wager, and Miss Howard supposed she would be asked to guess at lunch-time what the new record was. Though she had no malice (or very little) in her spiritual outfit, she determined to guess either that he had been eighty miles, which would make his actual accomplishment appear a very paltry feat, or ten miles, which would show that she had a very poor idea of his powers.

  Meanwhile the diabolical tip given her by the press, continued to leaven her thoughts. She had rejected the notion at first with scorn as being a dishonest trick, but soon she began to wonder whether there was any harm in it. As long as no one bought her pictures, she might be considered to have bought them herself for they were hers, and certainly she had bought and paid for the frames. She did not know what the custodian would think of her if she suddenly told him to put little red stars on half the pictures, but after all, it mattered very little what the custodian thought of her. On the other hand it would be a great chagrin if after having starred ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s here’ some visitor took a violent fancy to it and found it was sold. She hated deceit, at least she had felt that Colonel Chase had made himself truly contemptible, when he had said yesterday that the inclement weather prevented his going to see her pictures, and was detected in having gone out for a walk instead, but was it deceit to put red stars on pictures? She did not actually state that they were sold, though the custodian, if asked what this decoration meant, would doubtless tell enquirers that such was its significance. But again if nobody further came to see the pictures (a contingency which was beginning to look lamentably likely) nobody would be deceived. Her fingers itched for the pill box, but she could not quite face asking the boy for it. She would wait one day more, and if by that time there were still no purchasers, she would buy five or six herself. . . .

  It was getting on for lunch-time: all the morning patients at the Baths had passed and repassed the open door of the Green Salon, but only one of them, an elderly lady like a horse had even paused there. Instantly the custodian, who was beginning to wonder whether a shilling a day compensated him for so much inactivity, sprang to attention with the toilet-roll, but the horse only tossed its head with a sort of neigh, and muttered, ‘Only pictures’, in a tone of deep disgust. Miss Howard felt she could not stand the kindly and cheerful enquiries that would be put to her, if she drove up with the Wentworth bathers in the bus, and she started to walk. Outside on the wall of the porch was a type-written advertisement of the exhibition which the rain yesterday had partly detached, so that the upper half of it drooped over the lower and the print had run: she had hardly the spirit to fix it up again. She was thoroughly depressed, for apart from the expense, and from the approaching difficulty of knowing what to do with a stack of nearly fifty framed pictures there was the far more bitter loss of prestige. As long as she had not tempted Fate in this manner, she had been the accredited fount of artistic authority at Wentworth: she could shake her head over Sargent’s slap-dash methods, and say that of course he was marvellously clever, but she personally admired a more detailed and highly finished technique: careful work was what lived. No doubt if she had the heart to continue putting her sketches on the chimney-piece of the lounge, Wentworth would still say that they were exquisite, but at the back of everybody’s mind would be the knowledge that a roomful of such gems had been on view, and had attracted but few visitors and no
t a single purchaser, even at prices immeasurably below Sargent’s. She had piped, but nobody had danced: the Muse felt her insignia slipping from her.

  These gloomy reflections so occupied her that she had not seen that she was catching up a woman walking ahead of her up the hill, and it was not till she had got quite close that she saw it was Mrs. Bliss, limping slightly and leaning on her stick, but able to proceed at a very respectable pace. In the ten days that she had been at Bolton she had indeed made the most marvellous progress. “But however much she calls it Mind,” thought Miss Howard in a spasm of revolt, “I call it brine.”

  Mrs. Bliss turned round when she was quite close. It struck Miss Howard that the smile was whisked on when she saw who it was.

  “Sweet one!” said Mrs. Bliss. “How fortunate I am to have such a dear companion for the rest of my walk. I’ll be bound that your lovely picture-show was crowded with visitors this morning and probably most of them sold. How I demonstrated about it in my bath this morning! How Mind looks after us all! See how I’m flitting along to-day.”

  That certainly was wonderful, though ‘flit’ was still slightly on the optimistic side of accuracy. And it wasn’t Mind: it was brine.

  “No; there wasn’t any crowd at all,” said the sweet one firmly. “In fact there was no one there at all. And I haven’t sold a single picture yet.”

  A wave of bitter illumination swept over her, calling for her protest.