Manvers’ good intention of taking a holiday had presumably gone to pave
the worst of roads, for before a fortnight was up he was working hard at
the new statuette. The solid ingot of inspiration which had been tossed
in his path was only slightly responsible for this; the burden of it lay
with Maud Wrexham.
For Maud Wrexham was to him a new type of womanhood, common enough in
England, but a type which does not foregather with young artists in
Paris; and Manvers was beginning to think of the Paris days with a sort
of disgusted wonder. To be received into the society of a well-bred
English girl, to see her day after day, to be admitted by her into a
frank, boyish sort of intimacy, was a proceeding he would have looked
upon, a month or two ago, as a very doubtful privilege. He thought of
our English marriageable maidenhood as a kind of incarnation of lawn
tennis and district visiting, with a background of leaden domesticity,
and when Maud began, somehow, to usurp an unreasonably large share of
his spare thoughts, he was at first a little amused at himself, and,
after a time, pulled up short and began to review the position.
He had seen almost at once who it was who usurped her thoughts, though
he felt sure that a casual observer, one whose own mind was fancy free,
would not have noticed it. She was intensely conscious of Tom’s
presence, and to Manvers she betrayed herself by a hundred tiny signs.
When they were alone, she, as was most natural, for they were a trio of
friends, often talked of Tom, and when he was there she evidently
listened to all he said, and was intensely conscious of him, though she
might be talking to some one else. As a rule, she behaved quite
naturally; but once or twice she had exhibited towards him a studied
unconsciousness, which to Manvers was a shade more convincing than her
consciousness. He had a weakness for weaknesses, and the dramatic side
of it all, her self-betrayal to him and Tom’s unconsciousness, would
have given him a good deal of satisfaction, had he known that he was
without a stake in the matter. But as the days went on, he became aware
that it mattered a good deal to him, and the satisfaction he got out of
the drama was a very poor wage for his own share in it.
Besides, he distinctly did not wish to fall in love. “Love may or may
not blind,” he said to himself, “but it plays the deuce with your eye,
if you are a sculptor.” And so, by way of keeping his eye single, he set
to work, with patient eagerness, on _La dame qui s’amuse_. The title
itself brought a savour with it of Paris days, and Paris days could
hardly help being antidotal to the feelings with which Maud Wrexham
inspired him.
There was yet one more factor which made him plunge into his work, and
that was the thought of Tom. Tom just now was sublimely unconscious of
anything so sublunary as falling in love with mortals, for he had lost
his heart to antique goddesses, who again presented a fine contrast to
Miss Wrexham. Manvers, as a rule, left morals to moralists, among whose
numbers he had never enlisted himself; but a certain idea of loyalty, of
letting Tom have fair play when he came to take his innings, made him
avoid the idea of setting up personal relations with Miss Wrexham.
Whether he would have taken the chivalrous line, if any one but Tom had
been concerned, is doubtful, but Tom somehow exacted loyalty. His
extraordinary boyishness made Manvers feel that it would be an act of
unpardonable meanness to take any advantage of him. Besides, in a sense,
the fortress to which he himself would have liked to lay siege was, he
felt sure, ready to capitulate to another, but it struck him that it was
likely to repel an attack from any other quarter but that with much
vigour. To sit still and do nothing was more than flesh and blood could
stand; it was hard enough to work, and the only thing to do was to work
hard.
Tom’s tendencies towards idealism were, as Wallingthorpe had suspected,
encouraged rather than discouraged by Manvers. “If that,” he thought and
often said, “is realism, God forbid that I should be a realist.”
He said this to himself very emphatically one morning when he came to
see Manvers after breakfast. The latter was already at work, and Tom
gazed at “La dame” for some moments without speaking. Manvers’ handling
of the subject was masterly, and the result appeared to Tom quite
detestable.
“I quite appreciate how clever it is,” Tom said to Manvers, who was
testing his powers of “doing” lace in terra-cotta with great success,
“and I wonder that you don’t appreciate how abominable it is.”
Manvers was at a somewhat ticklish point, and he did not answer, but
only smiled. Nature had supplied him with a rather Mephistophelean cast
of features, and he had aided her design by the cultivation of a small
pointed beard. At this moment Tom could fancy that he was some
incarnation of that abstraction, dissecting a newly damned soul with
eagerness and delicacy, in the search for some unusual depravity. After
a moment he laid the tool down.
“I appreciate it fully from a spiritual, or moral, or Greek, or purist
point of view, he said. But I am not in the habit of taking those points
of view, and in consequence I am--well, rather pleased with it.”
“I think it’s a desecration,” said Tom. “Why you are not struck with
lightning when you call it art, seems to me inexplicable!”
Manvers laughed outright.
“My dear Tom, I never called it art--I never even called it Art with a
big A. That is not the way to get on. You must leave other people to do
that. If you were an art critic, which I hope, for my sake, you some
time may be, you would be immensely useful to me. One has only got to
get an Art critic (with a big A) to stand by one’s work, and pay him so
much to shout out, ‘This is the Abomination,’ and one’s fortune is made.
I am thinking of paying some one a handsome salary to blackguard me in
the Press. Criticism, as the critic understands it, would soon cease,
you see, if every one agreed, and so the fact that one critic says it is
abomination, implies necessarily that another critic will come and stand
on the other side and bawl out, ‘This is Sublime’ (with a big S).
Artists and critics are under a great debt to one another. Critics get
as much as sixpence a line, I believe, for what they say about artists,
and artists would never get a penny if it wasn’t for critics, whereas,
at present, some of us get very considerable sums. What was I saying? Oh
yes, one critic damns you and the other critic blesses you. Then, you
see, every one runs up to find out what the noise is, and they all begin
quarrelling about it. And the pools are filled with water,” he concluded
piously.
Tom did not answer, and Manvers went on with slow precision, giving each
word its full value.
“Of course it is chiefly due to the capital letters. Whether the
criticism is favourable or not matters nothing as long as it is
emphatic. In this delightful age of sky signs, the critics must be large
and flaring to attract any notice. Therefore they shout and use capital
letters. They write on the full organ with all the stops out, except the
Vox Angelica. And the artist blesses them. Like Balaam, their curses are
turned into blessings for him, so he blesses them back. A most Christian
proceeding.”
“But, honestly,” asked Tom, “does the contemplation of that give you
any artistic pleasure? Do you try to do for your age what Phidias and
Praxiteles did for theirs?”
“Certainly I do. I try to represent to people what their age is. I have
no doubt that ancient Greeks were excessively nude and statuesque. We
are not statuesque or nude. Apollo pursuing Daphne through the Vale of
Tempe, through thickets where the nightingales sing! What does Apollo do
now? He arranges to meet Daphne at Aix-les-Bains, where they have
mud-baths, and drink rotten-egg water. She wears an accordion-pleated
skirt, and he a check suit. In their more rural moments they sit in the
hotel-garden. It really seems to me that this little Abomination here is
fairly up to date.”
“Oh, it’s up to date enough!” said Tom. “But is that the best of what is
characteristic of our age?”
“That doesn’t concern me,” said Manvers blandly; “worst will do as well.
What I want is anything unmistakably up to date. Your gods and
goddesses, of course, are more beautiful from an ideal point of view. By
the way, that reminds me, I want to look at some of those early figures;
the drapery is very suggestive. I am going to do a statuette of a nun
who has once been--well, not a nun, and I want archaic folds; but if I
produced them now, they would be nothing more than uninteresting
survivals. And to produce an uninteresting survival seems to me a most
deplorable waste of time.”
“Why don’t you make a statuette of a sewing-machine?” asked Tom
savagely.
“Oh, do you think sewing-machines are really characteristic of the
age?” said Manvers. “I don’t personally think they are, any more than
Homocea is. Sewing-machines are only skin-deep. I wonder when you will
be converted again--become an apostate, as you would say now. You really
had great talent. Those statuettes of yours at the Ashdon Gallery are
attracting a great deal of attention.”
“I wish I had thrown them into the fire before I sent them there!”
“Well, when you come round again, you will be glad you didn’t,” said
Manvers consolingly.
Tom took a turn or two up and down the room.
“You don’t understand me a bit,” he said suddenly. “Because I think that
the Parthenon frieze is more beautiful than women with high-heeled
shoes, you think I’m an idealist. I am a realist, just as much as you
are, only I want to produce what I think is most beautiful. A beautiful
woman has much in common with Greek art--and you want to produce what
men, who are brutes, will say is most lifelike. You work for brutes, or
what I call brutes, and I don’t.”
“But if I have come to the conclusion that what you call brutish appeals
to more men than what you call beautiful, surely I am right to work for
them? Of course most artists say they work for the few, but I, like
them, confess that I wish the few to be as numerous as possible.”
“The greatest evil for the greatest number, I suppose you mean,” burst
in Tom. “I call it pandering to vicious tastes.”
Manvers paused, then laid down the tool he was working with.
“You are overstepping the bounds of courtesy,” he said quietly. “You
assume that my nature is vicious. That you have no right to do.”
Tom frowned despairingly.
“I know. It is quite true. I hate the men who always tell you that they
say what they think, but I am one of them.”
Manvers laughed.
“I don’t mind your thinking me vicious,” he said. “I dare say I am
vicious from your point of view, but you shouldn’t tell me so. It
savours of Billingsgate, and it is quite clear without your telling me
of it. You insult my intelligence when you say so.”
“In that I am sorry,” said Tom. “I never meant to do that. I wish you
would leave your--well, your Muse alone, and come out.”
Manvers looked out of the window.
“I suppose I shall have to come,” he said. “But you are so violent, you
never will consent to take carriage exercise. Luckily you can’t ask me
to play outdoor games here, as there are no outdoor games to play.
Dominoes is the only outdoor game I can play--I have done so outside
French cafés. I’m afraid I can’t say it’s too cold.”
“I should insult your morality if you did,” said Tom.
“Well, that’s not so bad as insulting my intelligence.”
“And that is exactly where we differ,” said the other.
* * * * *
Arthur Wrexham was giving a small party the next evening, of a very
_recherché_ order, the dinner being served frothily in paper frills,
shells, or on silver skewers, and the candles shaded in so cunning a
manner that it was barely possible to see what the food was. He lived in
a somewhat sumptuous set of rooms on the upper square of the town, and
for a week or more, as the sirocco had been blowing, had been in a state
of apparently irretrievable collapse.
A little balcony opening out of his dining-room overlooked the square,
and as the night was very hot, the glass-door on to it was left open,
and the noises of the town came up to the guests as they sat at dinner,
like a low accompaniment to their own voices. It had been one of those
days when the divine climate of Athens gives way to all the moods of an
angry woman. The morning had dawned bright and hot, but before ten
o’clock sirocco had sprung up, and whoso walks in the face of sirocco is
bathed through and through in a fine white dust, most gritty. The
sirocco had brought the clouds from seawards, and about one o’clock the
rain came down, and laid the dust. Then the sun shone violently till
nearly five, and the air was like to a sticky warm bath. Later on it had
clouded over again, and Tom remarked in a pause in the conversation that
it had begun to lighten.
It was quite a small party, the two younger sisters of the American
_chargé d’affaires_ balancing Tom and Manvers, Arthur and his sister
making up the six. The two Miss Vanderbilts both talked as much as
possible, sighed for “Parrus,” and referred to the Acropolis as “those
lonely old ruins,” but agreed that Athens was “cunning.”
“Well, I’m right down afraid of an electric storm,” remarked Miss
Vanderbilt, to whom Tom’s remark about the lightning had been addressed,
“and as for Bee, she won’t be comfortable until she’s said her prayers
and is safe in the coal-store.”
“The doctor at Parrus told me I’d a nervous temperament,” remarked Bee,
“and we all knew that before, but he made Popper pay up for saying so.”
“‘Speech is silver,’” remarked Manvers.
“Well, his speech was gold,” said Miss Vanderbilt.
“Don’t you dread electric storms, Miss Wrexham?”
Maud was sitting at the head of the table fanning herself. She had borne
up against sirocco, but the sticky bath stage had finished her, and she
felt, as Bee would have expressed it, as if they’d omitted to starch her
when she was sent from the wash.
“No, I love them,” said Maud. “I wish it would begin at once. It may
make the air less stifling.”
“Well, I’d sooner be stifled than lightning-struck,” said Bee, “it’s so
sudden. Popper”--she referred to her father--“Popper says that an
average electric storm discharges enough electric fluid to light Chicago
for ten days. I think the table is just too elegant, Mr. Wrexham: where
do you get your flowers from?”
Things improved a little as dinner went on, and after fish Maud felt
better.
“What a dreadful materialist one is, after all,” she said. “Before
dinner I was feeling that life was a failure in general, and I was a
failure in particular, and now that I’ve had some soup and fish and half
a glass of champagne, not only do I feel better bodily, but mentally and
morally.”
“Why, I think that’s just beautifully put,” said Miss Vanderbilt. “When
I feel homesick and lonesome, Bee says, ‘It’s all stomach.’”
“It’s quite true,” said Manvers. “I’ve only felt homesick once this
year, and that was when Tom and I went to Ægina. It was fearfully hot,
and all the lunch they had given us was hard-boiled eggs and cold greasy
mutton. At that moment my whole soul, like Ruth’s, was ‘sick for home,’
and the little cafés with oleanders in tubs, and awnings. I say my soul,
but I suspect it was what Miss Vanderbilt tells us.”
“Have I said anything wrong?” asked Miss Vanderbilt, looking round
inquiringly. “I was only telling you what Bee said.”
Tom laughed.
“It’s easy enough to assure one’s self that one is only an animal,” he
said. “I wish any one would prove to us that we are something more. When
Manvers says his soul was sick, he is quite right to correct himself,
and suspect that he meant the other thing.”
“My dear fellow, the soul epidemic has ceased,” said Manvers, “though I
believe certain cliques try to keep it up. When you have looked at one
of your gods or goddesses for an hour, you think you have been enjoying
it with your soul, but you haven’t really. At the end of the hour you
feel tired, and after eating a mutton chop you can look at it again. The
mutton chop feeds that part of you which has been spending tissue on the
gods and goddesses. Well, we know what the mutton chop feeds.”
“I won’t assure you that you have a soul,” said Tom, “but I assure you
that I have.”
“It’s a most comfortable belief,” murmured Manvers. “I don’t grudge it
you--I envy you. I wish you would do the same for me.”
The storm was getting closer, and every now and then the pillars on the
balcony were thrown into vivid blackness against the violet background
of the sky. The balcony was deep and covered with the projecting eaves
of the third story, and after dinner they all sat out on it. The air was
absolutely still, and apparently all the population of Athens were in
the square, making the most of the evening air before the storm broke.
Tom was sitting on the balustrade of the balcony, and Maud in a low
chair near him. She leant forward suddenly.
“Do you remember hearing the hum of London one night, and saying it was
the finest thing in the world?”
“Yes, very well. It was at the Ramsdens’ dance. I shall hear it again
soon.”
“Ah, you are going almost immediately, I suppose, now?”
As she spoke, the sky to the south became for a moment a sheet of blue
fire, with an angry scribble running through the middle of it, and Miss
Vanderbilt ejaculated in shrill dismay.
Tom turned as Maud spoke, and the lightning illuminated her face
vividly.
The glimpse he had of her was absolutely momentary, for just so long as
that dazzling streamer flickered across the sky. But in the darkness and
pause that followed he still saw her face before him, phantom-like, as
when we shut our eyes suddenly in a strong light we still preserve on
the retina the image of what we were looking at.
The phantom face slid slowly into the surrounding darkness, but it was
not till the answering peal had burst with a sound as of hundreds of
marbles being poured on to a wooden floor overhead that Tom answered the
question which her voice had translated, but her eyes had asked.
“Well, I hardly know,” he said. “When are you thinking of going home?”
In that moment, when the thunder was crackling overhead, a flood of
shame and anger had come over Maud. Of her voice she had perfect
command, as she knew, but that the lightning should have come at that
moment and showed Tom her face was not calculable. But the absolute
normalness of his tone reassured her.
“I shall go back in about a fortnight,” she said.
“Why, that’s just about when I am going,” he said cheerfully. “I hope we
shall travel together.”
And with the unhesitatingness of well-bred delicacy he got off the
balustrade and began to talk to Miss Vanderbilt.
Tom was far too much of a gentleman to let his mind consciously dwell on
what he had seen during that flash of lightning. He regarded it like a
remark accidentally overheard, of which he had no right to profit. In
this case the wish was also absent, for though he liked Maud Wrexham
immensely, he was already in the first stage of his love of idealism,
which at present allowed no divided allegiance. Had Maud been an
idealist herself, she might have appeared to him merely as the
incarnation of the spirit of idealism, in which case he would have
fallen down and worshipped. Tom had experienced a great shock the day
before, when she had expressed admiration for Manvers’ _Dame qui
s’amuse_.
They were on the Acropolis together when Tom mentioned it, and asked if
she had seen it.
“Yes, he showed it me this morning. I think it’s extraordinarily good.”
“But you don’t like it?” asked Tom.
“Is it so terrible if I do? I don’t like it as I like this”--and she
looked round largely at the Propylæa--“but it gives me great pleasure to
look at it. It’s so fearfully clever.”
“No man can serve two masters,” he said. “If you like this, as you tell
me you do, you loathe the other necessarily.”
“Oh, but you’re just a little too fond of dogmatising,” said Maud. “What
you lay down as a necessity may be only a limitation in your own nature.
How do you know I can’t appreciate both? As a matter of fact I do.”
“Well, if you admire _La dame_ you can’t possibly think of this--this
which we see here--as supreme and triumphant,” said Tom.
“I’m not sure that I do. I think perhaps that I have a touch of the
scepticism you had--oh, ever so long ago; six weeks, isn’t it?--when you
expected to find that the grand style was obsolete. How we shall quarrel
when we manage the world, as we said we proposed to do.”
“It’s quite certain that we shall never manage together, if there is
this difference between us. I shall be wanting to celebrate Olympic
games while you are laying out boulevards.”
“Well, there’s room for both,” said Maud.
“No, no,” said Tom, “there is never enough room for the best, far less
for the worst.”
“You are so splendidly illogical, Mr. Carlingford,” she said suddenly;
“you see, you assume one is the best, and one the worst, and then build
upon it. It is all very well to do that for one’s self, but one becomes
unconvincing if one does it for other people.”
“It was better than if I had said at once that we differed
fundamentally.”
Maud turned away.
“Yes, perhaps. But what is the use of saying unpleasant things at all?”
“Unpleasant?” asked Tom, wrinkling his forehead. “Why, I differ from all
my best friends diametrically on every conceivable topic.”
That classification of her with his best friends was exactly the
attitude of his nature towards her, and what he saw during that flash of
lightning was naturally extremely surprising, for, as he reflected to
himself, despair should not look from one’s eyes when one hears that
one’s best friends are going away. But, as he was bound in honour to do,
he dismissed it as far as possible from his mind, and listened to Miss
Vanderbilt’s scientific discourse about lightning.
“I should really feel much more comfortable if you would turn that big
reflector round,” she was saying to Arthur Wrexham. “They say it
attracts the thunderbolts, and I’m sure we don’t want to lay ourselves
out to attract thunderbolts.”
Arthur Wrexham remonstrated gently.
“Oh, it really has no effect whatever on it,” he said. “In fact, glass
is an insulator.”
This entirely vague statement was found to be consoling, and Miss
Vanderbilt continued--
“I should be ashamed to be as silly as Bee about it,” she said. “Bee
took off all her rings the last electric storm we had, and of course she
couldn’t recollect where she put them, and you should have seen the
colour of her frock when she came out of the coal-store. Oh, gracious!
why, that flash went off quite by my hand here.”
Manvers was looking meditatively out into the night.
“The chances of being struck are so infinitesimal, Miss Vanderbilt, that
I think it must have had a shot at you that time and missed. So by the
law of probabilities it will not even aim at you again for a year or
two. It really is a great consolation to know that one wouldn’t hear the
thunder if one was struck.”
“Why, if you could hear the thunder, it would be all over,” said Miss
Bee, with a brilliant inspiration.
“So after each flash we must wait anxiously for the thunder,” said Tom,
“and then we shall know we’ve not been struck.”
“I guess there’s no great difficulty in finding out if you’ve been
struck,” said Bee. “Popper saw a man struck once, and he went all
yellow. Tell me if I am going all yellow, Mr. Manvers. I shan’t try to
conceal it.”
“No amount of dissimulation would conceal the fact that one had gone all
yellow,” said Manvers.
The worst of the storm was soon over, but the clouds took possession of
Hymettus, and continued growling and rumbling there. The two Americans
took advantage of the lull to make their way home. “For nothing,” Miss
Vanderbilt protested, with shrill vehemence, “will make me get into a
buggy during an electric storm;” and Tom and Manvers followed their
example, and walked back to their hotel.
Manvers had seen that look on Miss Wrexham’s face at the moment of the
flash of lightning, and he determined, wisely or unwisely, to mention it
to Tom.
They were the only occupants of the smoking-room, and after getting his
cigar under way, he asked the other lazily--
“By the way, what were you saying to Miss Wrexham that made her look
like an image of despair? I caught sight of her face for a moment during
a flash of lightning, and it looked extraordinary.”
“Yes, I noticed it too,” said Tom carelessly, “and wondered what was the
matter. She had been rather upset by sirocco, she said.”
“My dear fellow, girls don’t look like petrified masks of despair
because sirocco has been blowing for a couple of hours in the morning.”
“Well, I suppose it must have been something else then,” said Tom.
“What a brilliant solution! I am inclined to agree with you.”
Manvers remained silent for a few moments, balancing in his mind his
disinclination to appear officious or meddling, and his desire to
perhaps do Tom a service. As a matter of fact he had heard the question
which had accompanied that look on Miss Wrexham’s face, and it had
confirmed the idea he had long entertained that she was falling in love
with Tom, and Tom was not consciously in love with her. His tone of
absolute indifference to the subject might be either assumed or natural.
“You see a good deal of her, don’t you?” he went on. “She’s clever, I
think, and she’s certainly got a good eye. She made several suggestions
about my little figure which were admirable.”
“She told me she admired it,” said Tom, “and I told her she couldn’t
admire it if she admired Greek work.”
“She wouldn’t agree with that. She thinks that she can appreciate both.
It must be so nice to have that belief in yourself, to think that you
are all sorts of people, instead of one sort of person. But it breaks
down in practice----”
Manvers paused a moment, and decided to risk it.
“That look on her face this evening was of a woman who had broken down.
I have often wondered, by the way, whether you ever have guessed how
fortunate you are.”
Tom sat up.
“Did you hear what she said?” he asked.
“Certainly, or I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“Look here,” Tom said, “it was quite accidental that either of us ever
saw that look. She couldn’t have foreseen that a flash of lightning
would come at that moment. I have tried to keep myself from thinking of
it, but it won’t do. I hate conceited fools who are always imagining
things of that sort, but as you have spoken of it, it is absurd for me
to pretend not to know what you mean. Damn it all! She looked--she
looked as if my going away made a difference to her.”
Manvers drew a puff of smoke very slowly, and held his breath a moment.
Then he began to speak, and it seemed to Tom slightly appropriate that
his words should be, as it were, visible. They seemed a concrete
embodiment of practical advice.
“I think she is very fond of you,” he said.
“What am I to do?” demanded Tom.
“Do?” he said. “I really don’t understand you. If you are in love with
her, I imagine your course is not so difficult; if not, you may be sure
you soon will be.”
“I should think it was the most unlikely thing in the world,” returned
Tom. “If I had thought that, it is hardly likely I should have asked you
what to do.”
“Pardon me, you never asked me, except under pressure. I made it quite
clear that I wanted to be asked; you did not wish to ask me at all. I
have my opinion to deliver. Listen. You are very fond of her, whether
you know it or not. Just now you are stark mad about heathen gods. You
say to yourself, or you would say to yourself if you formulated your
thought, that you could only fall in love with a girl in the grand
style. That is quite ridiculous. They may or may not be very good as
statues, but they would certainly not answer as wives. In the natural
course of things you will get over that. Try to do so as quickly as
possible. Look at Miss Wrexham instead of the Parthenon. You can’t marry
the Parthenon. That flash of lightning occurring when it did gave me a
stronger belief in the existence of a beneficent Providence than I have
ever felt before. It is only a superstitious idea, I know, but when a
chance falls so divinely pat as that, you feel inclined to applaud
somebody.”
Tom did not look at all inspired by these practical suggestions.
“It won’t do,” he said. “You take an admirably sensible view of the
situation, if it happened to be you, but unfortunately it’s I.”
“I may be a knave,” said Manvers resignedly, “but, thank God, I am not a
fool. I don’t suppose you will deny that you are a fool, Tom; and you
really should give my advice a great deal of consideration. It is not
every day that a flash of lightning shows you how high an opinion a
perfectly charming heiress has of you, and it is, I think, both folly
and wickedness not to suppose that it was sent you for some good or
clever purpose. You really can’t help feeling that it was a very clever
thing to send the lightning just then. You must have a special
Providence who looks after you.”
“I hope you don’t think you will convince me,” said Tom.
“Oh dear, no, but I had to ease my--my conscience by entering a strong
protest. I feel better now, thanks.”
“That’s right. But to descend to practical details, won’t the fact that
she suspects I saw what I did make it rather awkward for us to meet?”
“Are you sure she suspects it?”
“No, not sure, or I should go away at once. I may be a fool, but I am
not a knave.”
Manvers extended his hand in the air deprecatingly.
“Oh, don’t make repartees during a thunderstorm. They so seldom mean
anything, in fact the better a repartee is, the less it means; and they
give a nervous shock to the reparteee--if I may coin a word. Also he is
bound in mere politeness to cudgel his brains to see if they do mean
something. When you have an opportunity you must say she looked so
awfully tired last night, and that you noticed her face once in a blaze
of lightning, and you were quite frightened; she looked so out of sorts,
or done up, or run down, or something. It’s very simple. But is there no
chance----”
“No, not a vestige,” said Tom. “Besides, I don’t believe that you really
advise what you say.”
“Tom, you’ve never heard me give advice before, and you must attach the
proper weight to it as a rare product.”
“Why, you are always giving me advice about turning realist.”
“No, you’re wrong there; I only prophesy that you will. That I often
prophesy, I don’t deny. There is nothing so amusing to one’s self, or
so unconvincing to other people. It is the most innocent of amusements.
Besides, you can always compare yourself to Cassandra--she was
classical--when people don’t believe you.”
“Yes, that must be a great comfort,” said Tom slowly, who was thinking
about Miss Wrexham.
Manvers got up.
“You are falling into a reverie. You ought to know that reveries are an
unpardonable breach of manners. I shall go to my statuette. That is the
best of being up to date in your art; you never need be without
companions.”
“Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height,” quoted Tom, half
mock-heroically.
“My dear boy, it won’t do,” said Manvers. “She won’t come down for that.
You have to fetch her down, and she is very like the rest of us really.
She soon assimilates. Besides, luckily, maids on mountain heights are
rare. They find it doesn’t pay.”
Tom left the room, and Manvers went to the window. The rain had come on
again, and was falling hot and heavy through the night. Manvers dropped
a steadfast oath into the storm, and then, instead of going to his
statuette, went to bed, and lay awake till the darkness grew grey.
“The world is damnably awry,” was the burden of his thoughts. “I suppose
it is to teach us not to set our affections on things below. They might
have chosen a less diabolical method of teaching us, Providence is
really very vulgar sometimes.”
Maud woke next morning in the rationalizing mood, and the event of the
thunderstorm, which had made her disposed to be uneasy the night before,
fell back into its proper place in the scheme of things. The absence of
the sirocco no doubt contributed to this calmer attitude, for, as a
philosopher found out very long ago, it is possible to reach the soul
through the subtle gateways of the body, and a thin light Athenian north
wind is one of the subtlest physicians of the mind, and can find out the
most tortuous and intricate passages through the house of our body. This
acting on a naturally rational mind had produced its legitimate effect.
Probably Tom had not noticed it; in any case, if he had, there were much
less metaphysical reasons which would lend themselves to a much more
obvious inference. She was tired, the lightning had dazzled her, Miss
Vanderbilt was on her nerves; all these things were so likely, and the
real reason so unlikely. Consequently, when she left the house after
breakfast, to go up to the Acropolis and finish a sketch, with the
almost certain probability of seeing Tom there, she felt that their
intercourse would be as easy as usual.
The view she had chosen was of the little Niké temple seen through two
headless columns of the Propylæa, with a glimpse behind of the sea and
the hills of Argolis, and she painted on for half an hour or so without
thinking of anything but what she was doing. But by degrees her glances
at the far hills became longer, and the acts of painting shorter, her
eyes saw less and less of what she was looking at, though they rested
more intently on the scene, and at last she put down her palette and
leant against the white marble wall behind her.
What was the matter with her? Why had she this unfathomable feeling for
a man who was perhaps less unfathomable than any one she had ever seen?
A frank English face, a keen boyish vitality, an almost comical
self-sufficiency, demanding as its only food the contemplation of Greek
sculpture--it all seemed fathomable enough. She half wished he would go
back to England at once, yet even with that view in front of her, for
the sake of which she nominally climbed up to the Acropolis, she felt
that another factor was wanting, a nought, she told herself, which had
the inexplicable trick of turning her units into tens. In any case she
would go back to England not with him, but by herself. He was spoiling
everything for her. Then came the reaction. “How ridiculous it will be!
I asked him when he was going back, and hoped we might go together, and
now I am deciding not to go with him. He is a most pleasant companion,
and what is he to me”--the next thought came like an echo--“or I to
him?”
Her thoughts had taken the bits in their mouths, and were running away,
and so, metaphorically speaking, she jumped off the runaway vehicle and
came into serious collision with _terra firma_; literally, she took up
her palette and went on with her painting.
To Tom, also, his visits to the Acropolis distinctly gained something by
the constant expectation of meeting Maud there. She had run him to
ground the other day when she had made him confess that he cared for
nothing but his art, and though the conclusion had been forced from his
mouth, he knew it was not quite true. What he cared for was life and its
best possibilities in the way of beauty, and his enthusiasm, he knew,
saw and tended to state everything too violently. He found Maud
sympathetic, eager and charming as a companion, and no other thought had
entered his head about her, until the incident of the thunderstorm,
which had been unexpected and very bewildering. And in his deep
perplexity as to what he had better do, he took the eminently
straightforward and most promising course of doing nothing at all, of
behaving normally. He had, as it were, taken a tentative mental sounding
of his feelings towards her for his own satisfaction, but he found that
the bottom was soon reached. In any case the depths were not
unplumbable, which would have been the only reason for doing anything.
He was in love with life, with all of life that was best, and the idea
of falling in love with any particular little bit of it would have
seemed to him as incredible as writing sonnets, in the style of the
eighteenth-century poets, to women’s finger-nails; and these always
appeared to him most profitless performances. To fall in love must
always seem slightly ridiculous until one falls in love.
Then it came about that not long after Maud had begun painting again,
Tom walked up the steps as usual, and sat with his hands clasped round
one knee, on the steps at Maud’s feet, and talked as usual, and absorbed
the beauty of the scene.
“It’s the only way,” he said on this particular morning, “to hope to get
hold, of the spirit of Greek art. You can never arrive at the spirit of
a thing through its details--the details shape themselves if you know
the spirit. You see artists in the Louvre copying Raphael all their
lives, but they never really remind you of him. If they were to go to
Umbrian villages and live the life he lived among the people, and to
feast--I don’t mean literally--on the ox-eyed faces of peasant women and
then come back, they might be able to copy him with some success, or
still better, if they had genius, produce original pictures which were
like Raphael’s. They go the wrong way about it.”
Maud was painting intently, and did not answer for a moment.
“Yes, I think you are right,” she said. “It’s no use copying merely. A
mere copy only, at its best approximates to a coloured photograph.”
“It’s so utterly the wrong way to go about it,” said Tom. “To arrive at
the right results, you have to follow the right method from the
beginning. For instance, when I go back to England, and am shut up in a
dingy studio under a grey sky, and my work looks hideous and dead, I
shall bring back the inspiration not by thinking only of Hermes, but of
the time I have spent here on these steps, looking out over the Propylæa
to Salamis.”
He leant back on the step where he was sitting, and looked up at Maud
for a moment. She put down the brush she held and was looking at him, as
if she was waiting eagerly to hear something more. But Tom apparently
was unconscious of her look, and she took up her brush again.
Tom tilted his hat a little more over his eyes, and took out his
cigarette-case.
“It’s becoming real to me at last,” he said. “I think I am beginning to
know what it all means.”
“You’ll have to show us,” said Maud. “A man who is a sculptor, and who
knows what this means, is certainly bound to produce statues which are
really like Greek statues.”
Tom sat up.
“I don’t care how conceited it sounds,” he said excitedly, “but I am
going to try to do no less. It is astonishing how little I care what
happens. That is my aim, and if I don’t realize it, it will be the fault
of something I can’t control.”
“But what is there which a man who is earnest cannot control?” she
asked.
“There is only one question in the world which is even harder to
answer,” said Tom, “and that is, what is there in the world which he can
control? What is to happen to me if some morning I wake up to find that
I think Manvers’ statuettes ideal, and Greek art _passé_? How do I know
it will not happen to me? Who will assure me of it?”
“Oh well, how do you know that you won’t wake up some morning, and find
that your nose has disappeared during the night, and a hand grown in its
place?” asked Maud. “The one is as unnatural to your mind as the other
is to the body.”
“But all sorts of unnatural things happen to your mind,” said Tom. “That
I should have suddenly felt that nothing but Greek art was worth
anything was just as unnatural. It is just as unnatural that, at a
given moment, a man falls in love----”
He stopped quite suddenly and involuntarily, but Maud’s voice broke in.
“Not at all,” she said. “You see, it happens to most men; it is the rule
rather than the exception, whereas the disappearance of one’s nose would
be unique, I should think.”
Her voice was so perfectly natural, so absolutely unaffected, that Tom
made a short mental note, to the effect that Manvers was the greatest
idiot in the world except one, which was a more consoling thought than
he would have imagined possible. His determination to be quite normal
had become entirely superfluous--a billetless bullet.
“Yes, but because it happens constantly, it makes it none the less
extraordinary,” he said.
“Certainly not; but you can no longer call it unnatural.”
“I call everything unnatural that seems to me unintelligible,” remarked
Tom, with crisp assurance.
Maud began to laugh.
“What a great many unnatural things there must be,” she said, “according
to your view. Why, the sun rising in the morning is unnatural. But it
would be much more unnatural if it did not.”
“If I go on, I shall soon begin to talk nonsense,” said Tom,
concessively, “and that would be a pity.”
“Well, let’s get back on to safe ground,” said Maud. “Come and tell me
what to do with that column. It isn’t right.”
Tom picked up his stick, and shoved his hat back on his head.
“I don’t understand you,” he said, after looking at the picture for a
moment. “I believe you know what the spirit of all this is--at least,
your picture, which is admirable, looks as if you did--and yet you like
Manvers’ statuettes. I think you are unnatural.”
“Do you remember a talk we had, when we were staying with you, about
being broad?”
“Yes, perfectly. Why?”
“Because I think you are being narrow. I dare say this is the best, but
that doesn’t prevent other things from being good.”
Maud bent over her painting again, because she wanted to say more, and
it is always easier to criticize if one is not biassed by the sight of
the person whom one is criticizing.
“You seem to think you can see all round a truth. If the truth is big
enough to be worth anything, it is probable that you can only see a
little bit of it.”
“Why--why----” began Tom.
“Yes, I know. I am thinking of what you yourself said the other day
about religion, when you told me what passed between you and Mr. Markham
after the revivalist meeting. I am quoting your own words. They seem to
me very true!”
“But how is it possible in this instance?” said Tom, striking the marble
pavement with his stick. “If one of the two is good, the other is bad.
They are utterly opposed.”
Maud turned round on him suddenly.
“Ah, I thought you would say that,” she said. “It would be as
reasonable for you to say that because there is sunshine here now, there
is sunshine all over the world. Yet in Australia it is about midnight.
Light is utterly opposed to darkness. Yet this is one world. You don’t
allow of there being more of it than you can see.”
Tom shifted his position.
“Go on,” he said. “I am not so limited that I do not wish to be told
so.”
“You showed just the same smallness when you talked to me about
Cambridge,” she said. “You thought that you were broad, because you
thought that it was narrow. Did it never occur to you that you thought
it was narrow simply because you were not broad enough to take it in?
The one explanation is as simple as the other.”
“I’m quite convinced I’m broader than Markham,” said Tom, frankly. “He
thinks about nothing but snuffy old scholiasts.”
“And you think about nothing but Greek art; you have said so yourself.
Is it quite certain that you are broader than he?”
Tom stood for a moment thinking.
“Do you think I’m narrow?” he asked at length.
“That is beside the point,” she said. “If I did not, it might only show
that I was narrow in the same way as you.”
“No, that can’t be,” said Tom, plunging at the only opening he could
see. “You must remember you like Manvers’ statuettes.”
“Well, from that standpoint I do think you narrow,” she said. “It seems
to me very odd that you shouldn’t see how good they are.”
“Do you mean how clever they are?”
“It is the same thing, as far as this question goes. You don’t recognize
their cleverness even, since you dislike them so.”
Tom drew a sigh of relief.
“Oh well, then, you are wrong about it. I fully recognize how clever
they are.”
“Then you don’t admire cleverness, which is a great deficiency.”
“On the contrary, I do admire cleverness; but Manvers’ seems to me
perverted cleverness. I admire ingenuity as an abstract quality, though
I don’t care for those diabolical little puzzles which every one used to
play with last year.”
Maud shut up her paint-box, and rose.
“It’s no use arguing,” she said. “An argument never comes to anything if
you disagree; no argument ever converted any one.”
“But I’m quite willing to be converted,” said Tom.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not at all sure that I want to convert
you. I like you better as you are. Who is it who speaks of the ‘genial
impulses of love and hate’? Your hatred for Mr. Manvers’ things is so
intensely genial, so natural to you.”
They walked down the steps together, and stood for a moment looking over
the broad plain, with its fields of corn already sprouting, stretching
up towards the grey mass of Parnes.
“This place suits me,” said Maud. “I shall be sorry to go.”
“Have you settled when you are going?” asked Tom.
“Not precisely; why?”
“Because I shall come with you, if you will allow me: I must be going
soon.”
Maud’s face flushed a little, and she turned towards him.
“That will be charming, I shall go in about ten days or a fortnight, as
I said last night. You know, now and then, even here with all this
winter sun, and the Acropolis there, I want a grey English sky and long
green fields.”
“So do I; and cart-horses, and big green trees--even snow and frost, for
the sake of the clean frosty smell on cold mornings. Here’s Manvers
coming under a large white umbrella. I wonder what he wants to come to
the Acropolis for.”
Manvers came up to them, and paused.
“I am taking a little walk,” he explained. “Mrs. Trachington has been
paying me a little visit, or rather, I have been paying her a little
visit.”
“Who is Mrs. Trachington?” asked Maud.
“Mrs. Trachington is a female staying at our hotel,” said Manvers,
gently wiping his face. “She has praying-meetings. This morning I was
walking past her room, when she came out and asked me to look at some
picture she had just got. It was a charming landscape by Gialliná, of
delicious tone. But after a moment I looked up and caught her eye. There
was a prayer in it. It is wicked that a woman with blatant prayer in her
eye should possess such a picture. So I ran away. I came up here for
safety.”
Tom laughed uproariously.
“Manvers is fanciful,” he said. “His is a morbidly sensitive nature.”
“My dear fellow, you would have done just the same,” he said. “I don’t
think Mrs. Trachington’s methods are at all straightforward. They are
Jesuitical. Besides, I can’t go praying about all over the hotel.”
“Well, you’d better come down with us,” said Tom.
Manvers looked at Maud a moment.
“No, I’m going to stop here a little. Of old sat Freedom on the heights.
I shall be free here.”
“But she stepped down, you know,” said Tom.
“So shall I by-and-by,” said Manvers. “That was after she sat on the
heights.”
Maud and Tom walked down past the theatre and into the low-lying streets
to the east of the Acropolis. The fresh oranges had come in from the
country, and they passed strings of heavily laden mules and donkeys,
driven by dirty, picturesque boys, bare-footed, black-haired, and
black-eyed. It was a festal day, and the women had turned out in bright
Albanian costumes, and the streets were charged with southern colour,
and brilliant with warm winter sun and cloudless sky. Through open
spaces between the houses they could see the tawny columns of the
Parthenon standing clear-cut and virgin against the blue; for the moment
the earlier and later civilizations seemed harmonious.
Tom and Manvers met later in the day, and Tom retailed his decision of
the morning.
“We were both utterly wrong,” he said. “It makes me grow hot all over to
think of what we said last night. I acted just as a man of that class
which I detest so much would act.”
“I drew the inferences demanded by common sense,” said Manvers, who was
not convinced.
“By your common sense!” rejoined Tom. “You can’t talk of common sense as
a constant quality; it varies according to the man who exercises it.
There are certain occasions when one’s inferences are based on instinct,
which is a much surer thing than common sense. One of these occasions
occurred this morning.”
“Ah, but your instinct may be wrong, and nobody can convince you of it.
It is a much more dangerous thing to trust to. If you base your action
on reasons which can be talked out lengthways, you can make certain
whether you are right or not.”
Tom rose with some irritation.
“My dear fellow, I don’t believe you know what I mean by instincts,” he
said, and strolled away.
Manvers found a certain delicate pleasure in this exhibition of human
weakness on the part of Tom, and the reason by which he accounted for it
in his own mind was clearly a very likely one. He argued that Tom was
not quite so certain that he was right as he had hoped, and such a state
of mind, Manvers allowed, was very galling.
Meantime Maud had gone home, lunched with her brother, and announced
that she was going home in about a fortnight in company with Tom.
Arthur Wrexham had a vague feeling that this was not quite proper, and
indicated it.
“Is that the sort of thing people do now?” he asked. “I really only ask
for information.”
“I don’t understand,” said Maud.
“I mean girls travelling alone with young men.”
Maud laughed.
“Don’t be anxious on my account,” she said. “I shall outrage no one’s
sense of propriety.”
Arthur felt he had done his share, and subsided again.
“Of course you know best,” he said. “I only suggested it in case it had
not occurred to you. So Carlingford is going too, is he? I thought he
meant to stop here longer?”
“No, he’s going to begin work at once. He says he has got hold of the
spirit of the thing. He is so delightfully certain about everything.”
“A little dogmatic sometimes, isn’t he?” asked Arthur.
“No; dogmatists have always the touch of the prig about them. He has
none of that.”
Arthur Wrexham put his feet upon a chair.
“I think he is just a little barbarous,” he said. “Doesn’t he ever make
your head ache?”
“No, I can’t say that he does,” said Maud slowly. “I think he is one of
the most thoroughly satisfactory people.”
“He is so like a sort of mental highwayman sometimes,” said her brother.
“He makes such sudden inroads on one’s intelligence. He catechizes one
about the Propylæa. That is so trying, especially if you know nothing
about it.”
Maud laughed.
“Oh well, if your purse is empty, you need not fear highwaymen,” she
said.
A fortnight afterwards they both left for Marseilles by the same boat.
She sailed on Sunday morning, and Arthur Wrexham and Manvers came down
to the Piræus to see them off. Manvers and Tom took a few turns about
the upper deck and talked, while Arthur sat down in Maud’s deck-chair
and was steeped in gentle melancholy.
“So in about a year’s time you will see me,” said the former. “I shall
be in London next winter. At present I feel like an Old Testament
prophet in his first enthusiasm of prophecy. I wonder if they ever had
any doubts about the conclusiveness of their remarks. I at least have
none. I won’t exactly name the day when you will become a convert, but I
will give you about a year. Consequently, when you see me next, our
intercourse may be less discordant.”
“I hope it won’t,” remarked Tom; “and I don’t believe it will.”
“It’s always nice to disagree with people, I know,” said the other; “it
adds a sauce to conversation. But I don’t mind abandoning that. You
really will do some excellent work when you come round.”
“I am going to do an excellent Demeter mourning for Persephone,” said
Tom.
Manvers lit another cigarette from the stump of his old one.
“I did an Apollo, I remember,” he said. “I wish you would do an Apollo
too. I have mine still; it serves as a sort of milestone. It has finely
developed hands and feet, just like all those Greek statues.”
“And you prefer neat shoes now,” said Tom.
“Why, yes. Whether Apollo has finely developed feet or not, he wears
shoes or boots, the neater the better. I hate seeing a man with untidy
boots. But even untidy boots are better than none at all. Ah, there’s
that outrageous bell warning me to leave the boat. Good-bye, Tom. Athens
will be very dull without you. I shall cultivate Mrs. Trachington.”
“Do, and make a statuette of her. She is a very modern development.
Good-bye, old boy.”
It was a raw December day when their train slid into Victoria Station,
and a cold thick London fog was drifting sluggishly in from the streets.
Any desire that Maud may have felt for English grey was amply realized.
The pavement under the long glass vault was moist with condensed vapour,
and the air was cold in that piercing degree which is the peculiar
attribute of an English thaw. The Chathams were in London, and Lady
Chatham had “worked in” the landau with such success that she just
arrived at the platform when the train drew up. She was immensely
friendly to Tom, and remarked how convenient it was that they had
arranged to come together.
Tom said good-bye to them at their carriage door. Just as they drove off
Maud leant out of the window.
“You’ve no idea how I have enjoyed the journey,” she said. “You are at
Applethorpe, aren’t you? Come and see us soon.”