Wynchcombe Friars was a singularly perfect relic of the Tudor period.
It rambled, it blossomed into irrelevant gables, it took you to its
heart. The lordly spaciousness of an eighteenth-century mansion seemed
dull, featureless, by contrast with its individuality, its friendly
charm. And of all its beautiful old rooms was none more individual than
Mark’s studio, with its oak-panelled walls, deep window-seats and leaded
casements that opened upon the sea of pinetops he had described to Bel.
For him and his mother, it was the soul of the house; and in nothing
was their intimacy more evident than in the fact that this, his holy of
holies, was hers also. A certain square bay window that caught the last
of the sun upon the pines held her armchair of dull blue brocade, her
book-case and elbow table. Blue prevailed also in the window-seats, the
casement curtains and the Turkish rugs on the polished floor.
The studio itself contained little beyond Mark’s paraphernalia, his
writing-table and a few pieces of priceless old furniture. The spirit
of Michael Angelo pervaded the place:—models of his statues and groups,
sepia studies by Mark from the great friezes; and a portrait of the
Florentine’s rugged head occupied the place of honour above the
mantelpiece. The blue-tiled fireplace beneath was flanked by Mark’s first
two essays in statuary: symbolic figures of Triumph and Defeat. Triumph,
a splendid nude, stood poised upon a rock; arms uplifted, head flung
back. Defeat, a fallen Lucifer, still sullenly defiant, leaned upon his
battered sword; a figure of sombre strength. The Viking, who accompanied
Mark on his moves, was set in a dark oak niche that served for frame and
threw him into strong relief.
Still, beneath all the beauty and friendliness of the room, there lurked
the same unobtrusively ascetic note that had been more marked in the
simpler studio at Inveraig.
So at least thought Maurice Lenox, who lounged smoking in an armchair,
wondering, secretly, how Mark could bring himself to leave it all,
patriotism or no. He, personally, had found it quite enough of a wrench
to shut up his modest rooms in Chelsea—till when? God, or the devil,
alone could tell.
He had gone straight from Inveraig to his home in Surrey, wondering what
possible use there could be for such as he in this terrible _galère_:—he,
who had small knowledge of firearms and so heartily detested taking life
that he could not even find pleasure in fishing. Mark had suggested
enlisting in the Artists’ Rifles: a suggestion since confirmed by Sir
Eldred Lenox, with a blunt admonition to look sharp about it. Sir Nevil
Sinclair, of Bramleigh Beeches, commanded them. He would send the boy’s
name up for a commission the moment he was reasonably fit for it: and on
the whole Maurice found it a relief to have the question of choice taken
out of his hands. He had stipulated for a few days of his promised visit
to Wynchcombe Friars, before taking the plunge; and those few days—with
Macnair for the only other guest—had laid the foundation of a genuine
friendship with Forsyth, whose finer qualities shone out notably in this
hour of crisis.
Whereas at Inveraig he had at times seemed selfish and a trifle
dictatorial, here, as responsible landowner, his mastery and force of
character showed in a new light. And as for selfishness—his whole mind
seemed set upon the welfare of his people and his place in the coming
time of stress. Now, at the very moment when he was most needed, and
most longed to be on the spot, he was cheerfully and actively engaged in
transferring the reins of government into other hands. To Maurice—a man
of random moods and many points of view—such strength and singleness of
purpose seemed enviable as it was admirable; and the fact that Forsyth
had remained unshaken even by Miss Alison’s defection had made a deep
impression on the lighter nature of his friend. Since then, he had
learnt a good deal more, not only of Sir Mark in a fresh manifestation,
but of England’s greatest asset—sadly misprized in a democratic age—the
hereditary lords of the land.
To-day his brief respite was over.
At the moment, he and Mark had effected their escape from the infliction
of war-talk, as perpetrated by Mrs. Melrose and the Vicar’s wife, at
the tea-table on the terrace. Sir Mark’s sudden engagement, by the way,
had been a severe shock to Mrs. Melrose, who suspected that Sheila must
have played her cards remarkably ill. But that, after all, was how one
might expect her to play cards of any worldly value. She was her Melrose
grandmother all over. Not a drop of Burlton blood in her veins. But the
war had dwarfed that personal disappointment: and the good lady was
brimming with benevolent schemes for herself and the whole neighbourhood.
Meantime the Vicar’s wife held the field. Having come in quest of a
subscription, she had stayed to murmur decorous and very premature
lamentations over the undesirable features of billeting and of the
Territorial camps: the sort of thing that reduced Lady Forsyth to
speechless exasperation. Mark, divided between sympathy and amusement,
had watched her holding herself in, till the assertive voice of Mrs.
Melrose created a diversion and dubious murmurs were drowned in a flood
of propositions for the local housing of Belgians and the conversion of
Wendover Court into a luxurious hospital for officers.
‘_You_, Lady Forsyth, with this heavenly place, ought to specialise on
convalescents or nerve-cases’—Mrs. Melrose dearly loved making other
people’s plans—‘If we all take a _distinctive_ line, there’ll be no
muddle or overlapping. And of course _dear_ little Lady Sinclair will
devote herself to the Indians—when they come.’
Privately Helen reflected that if her neighbours continued so to afflict
her, the first nerve-case for Wynchcombe Friars would be its own mistress.
It was at this point that Mark had given up waiting for the Sinclairs.
Not even the presence of Sheila—who had come over with her mother and was
staying on to discuss ‘War plans’—could detain him, once Mrs. Melrose
held the field. Basely deserting Lady Forsyth he left word that Sir
Nevil, if he should turn up, would be very welcome in the studio.
Now, while Maurice lounged and reflected, he sat at his littered
writing-table, a pipe between his teeth, two deep furrows in his
forehead. Beyond that littered table the room held no other signs of
work. Easel and modelling pedestal stood empty. A woeful tidiness
prevailed, and Mark himself looked older, Maurice thought. Small wonder,
seeing all that he must forgo at a stroke when his name appeared in the
‘Gazette.’
So, throughout Great Britain, in the same casual unemotional fashion,
men of every grade were making the supreme sacrifice, cheerfully putting
behind them all that made life worth living—possessions, talents, hardly
earned distinction, cherished hopes and still more cherished homes. No
doubt many of them, like Maurice, privately rebelled; but they, too,
were carried forward by the infection of brave example, if by no higher
motive. In Mark’s company, Maurice had felt that infection strongly:
but on this his last evening of freedom the artist in him raged afresh
against the hideousness and waste and cruelty of modern war.
For ten minutes Mark had been smoking steadily and silently. He had a
difficult letter on his mind. Maurice, who had the horrors of Tirlemont
on his nerves, felt suddenly impelled to more candid speech than he had
hitherto indulged in, lest he be misjudged.
‘I don’t know what your private feelings are, Forsyth,’ he plunged
boldly; and Mark started as if he had been waked from a dream. ‘But the
more I look at this business of enlisting and going out to slaughter
Germans—not to mention the chance of their returning the compliment—the
more heartily I hate the whole thing. It’s nothing so simple as mere
funk. And it’s not that I’m shirking—you understand.’
‘Oh, yes. I understand,’ Mark rejoined, setting his teeth on the stem of
his pipe.
But he did not seem disposed to enlarge on his understanding of his
private feelings; and Maurice, whose mixed emotions were clamouring for
expression, went on: ‘Mere funk would at least give one something to
tackle and overcome. It’s this cursed inferno going on inside one’s head
that does the damage. And the beastly thing seems quite independent of
one’s thoughts or attention. Just keeps on automatically at the back of
my brain. Even when I’m reading or talking, I can hear those infernal
guns and shells. I can see the mangled fragments that once were men—the
wounds—the blood—the slopes of the Liége forts—’
‘Damn you! Shut _up_!’ Mark leaned forward suddenly, a spark of anger
in his eyes. ‘D’you suppose you’re the only one that’s plagued with an
imagination?’
Maurice sighed.
‘Sorry, old chap,’ he said, disappointed, but contrite. ‘It’s a relief
all the same. And I thought—you understood—’
‘Of course I do: a long sight too well.’ Mark’s tone was gentler now. ‘If
it’s relief you’re after, you’ll get that most effectively by going out
yourself; seeing things with your actual eyes: doing things with your
actual hands that’ll give you no time for cinematographs in your head.
You can thank your stars you’re a _man_. It’s the women given that way
who’ll have the devil’s own time of it. My mother’s one, worse luck; and
it’ll come hard on her—when I’m gone.’
Maurice ventured no comment on a subject so poignantly intimate as Lady
Forsyth’s anxiety for her one remaining son; nor did Mark seem to expect
any. He took a few pulls at his pipe, then reverted to generalities.
‘Don’t write me down an unfeeling brute, Maurice,’ he said with his
friendly smile. ‘War’s the roughest game on earth and we’ve got to be a
bit rough with ourselves if we’re to play it to any purpose. I’m horribly
well aware that the “sorrowful great gift of imagination” is the very
deuce on these occasions. A shade less of it in us, who have to do the
killing, and a shade more of it in our Westminster Olympians—who have to
do the foreseeing and forestalling—would be a pleasanter business for
ourselves and a better look-out for the country. They’re an agile crew
with their tongues; and if words were bullets, we might be in Berlin the
week after next! Personally, I’d like to see most of ’em scrapped “for
the duration of the war.” Kitchener paramount, with a picked Council,
would pull us through in half the time. But that’s not my business nor
yours. It’s for us to play up all we can; thank God for one real Man, and
not waste our precious energies in grumbling. There’s a sermon for you.
And you brought it on yourself!’
Maurice rose, flung away his cigarette end, and strolled down the length
of the room and back.
‘It’s done me a power of good being here,’ he said, coming to a
standstill by the mantelpiece and contemplating Mark’s ‘Triumph.’ ‘You’re
a man as well as an artist, Forsyth; and the bulk of us are not; I,
personally, am cursed with too much of Uncle Michael in my composition.’
Mark laughed.
‘Confound your Uncle Michael! You run along and enlist and kill every
German you can lay hands to and your composition will take care of
itself. A wee bit stiffening’s all you want; and a wee bit taste of
red-hot reality will put some backbone into your studio-bred art,
that ennobles nothing and nobody and doesn’t even want to make itself
understood. It’s just on the cards that this war—when we’re through with
it—may give us an altogether saner and more robust revival of art that
will spring naturally from a more robust conception of life: an art that
will genuinely reflect the spirit of the age, as Michael Angelo reflects
the Renaissance. Our present age of machinery and money-getting has
precious little spirit to reflect. No collective convictions. Practically
no faith, except in success. Consequently life has no vital use for art:
and we’re ousted by the cinematograph. A few, like myself and Sinclair,
still hang on to beauty and the classics. The rest, like the bulk of your
advanced friends, say “Ugliness, be thou my beauty” and proceed to make
a little hell of their own in the Grafton Galleries! Just at present,
Maurice, the mere artist is the most superfluous creature on God’s
earth....’
He suddenly laughed and checked himself. ‘Off on my hobby-horse again!
Why the deuce don’t you chuck a book at me, old chap? Too much spouting
at these recruiting shows will make me an infliction to my friends.
Ah—there goes Mrs. Melrose! Joy for Mother! Likewise the devout Mrs.
Clutterbuck, who thinks to advertise her own virtue by maligning better
folk than herself. Come on down. We’ll get the tail-end of tea and the
poor dears will need cheering up.’
They found the poor dears in very fair spirits—considering. Helen was
delighted at recapturing Sheila; and the girl herself made no secret of
her distaste for the restless superficial activities of her own home. A
telegram from Sir Nevil Sinclair explained his non-appearance and begged
Mark not to fail him at the Bramleigh meeting next day. Then, tea being
removed and the others dispersed, Mark found himself alone with Sheila,
whom he had scarcely seen since the day of Bel’s regeneration.
‘It’s good to get you back again, Mouse,’ he said, with brotherly
directness: and as she merely smiled without looking up, he allowed his
eyes to linger on her face. ‘But I’m not sure I approve of the massage
plan, specially if it means careering off to France with Miss Videlle.’
Sheila hesitated. ‘I thought—if you married—there might be Bel. But if
Mums really needs me, I’d leave anything, anyone ... for her. She knows
that.’ The girl’s voice throbbed with feeling and a faint colour showed
in her cheeks. ‘I’m very doubtful, though, whether she could or would
stay here long—without you.’
Mark started and frowned.
‘She must! She’ll be safe here; and there’s no end of useful work for her
on the spot. All the same—’ he paused, looking deep into the heart of the
wood, at pine-stems rosy with shafts of light. ‘I believe you know best.
She won’t stop. She’d break her heart. War comes cruel hard on the women.’
Sheila said nothing: but the set of her lips showed a faint line of
strain that he had not noticed before. ‘Come for a quarter-deck prowl
with me, Mouse,’ he said.
They paced the wide-flagged terrace, veined with moss, till near
dinner-time; and only at the last did Mark speak the thought uppermost in
his mind. They had reached the far end when he came to a standstill and
faced her squarely.
‘Sheila—it goes against the grain asking favours for Bel, even of you and
Mother; but you were such a brick before; and now—it’s a bit of an ordeal
for her facing you all after—what happened up there. Otherwise she’d have
been here sooner. Of course I’ll make her speak to Mums straight away,
which may clear the air, between them. But I want you all to be ever
so kind and not let her feel a shadow of awkwardness. Just pick up the
threads again as if nothing had happened. Will you—for my sake?’
Sheila was leaning now against the balustrade, her hands pressed palm
downwards on the stone work.
‘Yes, Mark,’ she said in an odd, contained voice, ‘I’ll do anything I can
for your sake. But in my heart—’ she suddenly looked up at him with her
clear honest eyes, ‘I can’t forgive her—_ever_!’
‘_You?_’ His surprise brought the blood to her cheeks. ‘But when it
happened you were so—understanding. It was you who took the edge off my
bitterness.’
‘Because then—I didn’t understand,’ Sheila explained with difficulty.
‘I thought she had really lost you through her own blindness; and—I was
sorry for her. But afterwards, one couldn’t help suspecting it was all
... that perhaps she was simply ... putting on the screw.’
‘She admitted as much,’ he said, looking away across the rose garden.
‘Mark! How _could_ she?’ Her low tone vibrated like a smitten harp-string.
‘That’s the mystery to a masculine brain. It hurt—considerably. But it
seems women do these things.’
Sheila checked a natural impulse to repudiate the sweeping assertion. She
saw him deliberately erecting a screen for Bel, at the expense of others;
but she had already been candid enough, and she would not permit herself
to insinuate disparagement.
Her enigmatical silence urged Mark to add: ‘Bel’s had her share of
unhappiness, anyhow. She didn’t enjoy those three days much more than I
did and she’s lost more than a week down here. So just be good to her,
you deceptive little bit of adamant—and I’ll bless you from my heart.’
‘That’s bribery!’ Sheila said laughing, and straightening her shoulders.
‘I don’t take payment for my services. But it’s time to go and dress for
dinner!’
As they strolled back to the house she caught herself reflecting quite
philosophically on the impunity with which the Bels of this world may
steal horses, while their less privileged sisters dare not cast a glance
over the hedge.
But in spite of her excuse about dressing for dinner, she seemed in no
such hurry after all. A sudden longing came over her to see the studio,
to sit alone for a few minutes in that shrine of blessed memories: and,
having seen Mark safely vanish into his bedroom, she made bold to venture
in.
Sinking into Lady Forsyth’s armchair, she let the crowding memories sweep
through her brain, while her eyes ranged from picture to picture, from
statue to statue, as it were learning them by heart, because in future
the right of entry she so prized would belong to another. For her, Mark
and his art were one and indivisible; and, by an unerring instinct, she
dreaded the effect of Bel’s demoralising influence on both.
Dearly she loved the virile figure of Triumph; more dearly still, the
Viking. Him, she saw and felt as Mark had hoped that Bel might see and
feel him. She had been at Wynchcombe Friars during those wonderful days
when he came to life under Mark’s hands; and in her private heart she saw
him as the symbol of his creator’s unquenchable spirit.
In all these children of his hand and brain, she found the quintessence
of the man, and it was her instinct to seek the essence of things.
Mark himself, without and within, was all that she would have a man
be—she, who seemed fated to attract only the ‘poor things’ of earth.
Since Ailsa’s death and his return from Europe, she had worshipped him,
with the still intensity of her northern nature. So felicitous had been
their relation, and she so young, so happy in a home atmosphere the very
antithesis of her own, that no afterthought had troubled her unclouded
content.
For this reason, she had been able to accept, loyally, uncritically,
his sudden and bewildering infatuation for a girl obviously unworthy of
him; an infatuation that could survive even his knowledge of the motive
which had prompted Bel to such unsparing use of her power. Entirely one
with him in spirit, she could not choose but will what he willed: and
conviction that Bel honestly loved him had mitigated the pain of her own
hidden disappointment in him.
But now even that faint consolation was gone: and here, where
associations were more intimate than at Inveraig, the shock to her belief
in him seemed infinitely harder to bear. Here the question forced itself
upon her—how _could_ he, being what he was?
And his fresh appeal on behalf of Bel had badly shaken her innate
capacity for acceptance.
Because of that appeal—which would also be made to the others—this girl,
who had so cruelly tormented him for her own ends, must not be allowed to
suffer a twinge of the discomfort she so richly deserved. For the first
time, Sheila was goaded almost to the point of rebellion. For the first
time her will was at odds with his: and it hurt more than she chose to
admit. From a child she had invented her own private code of courage that
never allowed her to say ‘I can’t bear it.’ And she would not say it now.
She would do what he asked, under protest, because he asked it. Her
attitude, she was convinced, would matter nothing to Bel, who obviously
looked down on her, from the attitude of her twenty-nine years, with a
mild good-humoured contempt. But it would matter greatly to Mark;—and
that sufficed.
She rose at last and wandered round the beloved room. Before the Viking
she stood a long while, trying to draw the valiant soul of him into her
own soul: then she went reluctantly out.
As she closed the door behind her, Mark opened his own and smilingly
confronted her. ‘Hullo! Is that the way you dress for dinner?’
She coloured a little under his gaze.
‘I couldn’t resist going in—just to greet them all.’
‘Well—you might have let me come too! Are they such very special friends?’
‘A part of me—almost,’ she said very low. ‘I’ve known most of
them—haven’t I?—ever since they were born.’
Then she went quickly down the passage; and for several seconds Mark
stood looking after her. The sudden softening of his whole face, could
she have seen it, would have been balm to her heart.