Parliament met early that year, and when Tom and May migrated to London the two Houses were already sitting. London was consequently fairly full, and the Wrexhams, among others, were installed there. Lord Chatham was one of those quietly effective men whose opinion is held to be safe and reliable, chiefly because they support everything of the old order, and oppose, not vehemently, but steadily, everything of the new. Lady Chatham and Maud were with him, and the excellent arrangements which her ladyship was in the habit of making were very frequently thrown completely out of gear by the fog. In fact, she had serious thoughts now and then of permanently allowing twenty minutes extra per mile for the carriage, and fifteen for pedestrians.
Maud was very well pleased to be in London again. Measures of considerable material import were being debated, and she liked to feel the heart of the country beating. She had never been more interested in life generally, and the Chathams’ house was becoming famous in a manner for the large number of clever people whom she collected round her. She had a certain gift of making people talk, without letting them know they were being made. The autumn she{197} would have confessed was dull, but the reason why she found it so she would not have confessed, even to herself. She had attended Tom’s wedding, and had behaved delightfully, but when it was over she found herself, as it were, facing a blank wall. Blank walls are not inspiriting things to contemplate, and after a few weeks of contemplation she arrived at the sensible conclusion that she would face it no longer, and she had spent the autumn in demolishing it stone by stone. And now by dint of real exertion, which was almost heroic in its untiringness, she could conscientiously say there was not one stone left on another, and in consequence the advent of May and Tom was an event which she regarded with pure pleasure. In other words, she considered she had “got over it.” Tom, she felt sure, was completely unconscious of what had been going on, and they could meet again with perfect frankness and unreserve. She had met May once or twice before the marriage, and thought of her as a sort of exceedingly beautiful cow.
Maud was just writing a note to accept Mrs. Carlingford’s invitation to dinner. There were only to be four of them, the fourth being Manvers, who had come to England for a week or two, and whom May thought Maud had met at Athens. May had got a slight cold and was going to wear a tea-gown, and would Maud do the same? She called her “Dear Miss Wrexham,” and remained “hers truly.”
Manvers had been to see Tom already that day immediately on his arrival in London, and Tom had scouted the idea of his going to a hotel, and insisted on his staying with them. Manvers made sundry{198} efforts to talk to May and make himself agreeable to her, but he did not think he had succeeded very well. Like Maud, he thought of her as a sort of cow, and he did not appreciate her style of beauty. But Tom was as nice as ever, and still quite mad, which was, he confessed, disappointing, but it would certainly pass off.
The three had gone together to see Tom’s studio and the herald of the Golden Age in clay. The pose he had chosen was admirably simple and wonderfully successful. The goddess stood with one foot trailing behind, the heel off the ground, resting on her foremost foot; the arms hung limply by her sides, and her head was drooped in sorrow for her lost child. The face was the face of his wife, subtly idealized, but preserving the look of portraiture. Tom had been working very hard at it, and in the clay it was sufficiently finished to allow one to see what it would be like. He worked in his old desultory manner, with fits of complete idleness and spells of almost superhuman exertion, with the difference that the fits of complete idleness were now the exception, not the rule.
The studio was an enormous room at the top of the house, with an admirable north light. It had been furnished by Tom without the least regard to expense or coherency. Things of all ages and styles were jumbled up together, but everything was good of its kind. It was the sort of room which, if you did not happen to think it perfectly hideous, you would think entirely charming. The furniture itself was Louis Quinze, for Tom’s taste told him that there was no{199} furniture but French; the walls were hung with Algerian and Cairene embroideries; in one corner of the room stood a cast of the Hermes, in another a bronze Japanese dragon. Two wide shelves ran round three sides of the room, and on these were massed together, with fine artistic catholicity, spoils from half the world. There were Tanagra statuettes from Greece, blue hawk-headed porcelain gods from Egypt, earthenware from Cabylia, a great copper Russian samovar, “laborious orient ivory” from India, plates from Rhodes, and embroidery from Arachova, a bronze helmet fished out of the river at Olympia, a great tortoiseshell box from Capri, a bronze Narcissus from Naples, blue-bead mummy nets, hideous German silver pipes, and amber and arrows from the Soudan. The platform where the model stood was covered with a great tiger skin, with grinning jaws and snarling teeth, and in the middle of the room stood the clay sketch of the mourning goddess. The incongruity of the whole touched completeness when May, Tom, and Manvers stood there side by side and looked at it.
Manvers’s first impulse was to laugh. His appreciation of contrasts was strong, and the contrasts here were really picturesque. What was this poor passée goddess doing in this atmosphere of complete modernity? She was as much out of place as a Quaker at a music-hall. But he was far too much of an artist not to admire and wonder at the extraordinary power of the thing. Tom seemed to have learned technique not by experience, but by instinct. He was an artist by nature, not by practice; like{200} Walter, he sang because he must. To Manvers this was puzzling, because he held firmly to the creed that an artist makes beautiful things because he chooses to, not because his artistic nature compels him. They stood silent for some moments, and then Manvers spoke.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “It seems to me almost perfectly Greek.”
Though the prophet has no honour in his own country, it is at least gratifying for him to find it in another. Tom had been almost painfully anxious that he should say that, but now it was said he had an unreasoning fear that Manvers had not meant it.
“Do you mean that?” he cried. “Are you sure you are not saying it to please me?”
“My dear Tom, I am saying it neither to please you nor myself. I don’t like Greek things, you know.”
May turned on him gravely.
“Surely it is admirable?” she asked.
“It is admirable surely,” replied Manvers, “but it is my nature not to admire it. You should hear Tom heap abuse on my little things. His tongue was an unruly member whenever he looked at La Dame qui s’amuse,—by the way, she is finished, Tom. It would have pleased him in what he calls his unregenerate days, and I his Paradisiacal days, before the fall.”
“We’ve got a little statuette of his downstairs which I’ll show you,” said May. “It is of a boy shooting. He never quite finished it.”
“That beast of a thing which was in my room at Applethorpe?” said Tom. “I shall smash it.{201}”
“No, dear, you won’t: you gave it me. I shall go and get it.”
“No, it shan’t come up here,” said Tom. “We’ll all go down. This Temple is no place for Manvers.”
But Manvers was interested, and he stayed some minutes more, advising, suggesting, and praising. It was as impossible for him not to admire the prodigious skill of the work, as it was not to dislike the spirit of it. The whole thing he regarded as a most lamentable waste of time and skill which might have been most profitably employed.
But before the statuette of the boy shooting his praise was of a very different order. It was thoroughly modern, and though not ugly, was undeniably pretty. The figure represented a lad in volunteer uniform, lying on the ground, shooting, or rather aiming, with a rifle. The head was bent over to the back-sight of the gun, the mouth slightly open, one eye shut, and one leg lightly crossing the other just above the ankle. The thing was marvellously fresh and unstudied. May claimed it as her possession, and showed it with just pride. Tom really had succeeded, as he had vowed he would, in making trousers beautiful.
May left the two friends together, and went off to pay some calls, and in her absence Manvers talked more freely. He had felt something of a traitor in her grey eyes when he had said that the Demeter was not in his line.
“It’s the best thing you’ve ever done, Tom,” he said, handing the statuette respectfully. “It really is abominably good, from the top of the forage cap down to the bootlace tag, and that bottom of the{202} trouser rucking up slightly over the other boot is an inspiration. You really are an unfortunate devil to be saddled with the grand style. As for that horror in the studio—you call my things horrors, so why shouldn’t I call yours?—the sooner you pitch it out of the window the better. Not that I don’t think it good—I think it is admirable—and as I said, almost perfectly Greek, but it simply won’t do. If you are to do anything nowadays you must be intelligible—that is to say, modern. You must not produce exercises, however good, in an art that is past. You are like those estimable people—I think they are archdeacons as a rule—who are always writing Latin translations in elegiac verses of ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’ in the pages of the Guardian. Nobody cares for interesting survivals. Why should they? People will not cudgel their brains to see what things mean. You have to label them!”
“Yes, you have to label a thing like La Dame qui s’amuse,” said Tom, “or else no one would know whether it was meant for a woman of fashion or a cocotte.”
“No, I don’t mean that,” said Manvers. “I don’t care what they call it, but you must make them understand the spirit of the thing. The spirit of Demeter is out of date. But that boy shooting is intelligible. Any one can see how good it is, and yet somehow it is not vulgar. To be vulgar is to be popular. You haven’t seen my ballet girl dancing. It is incomparably vulgar. I think it is the vulgarest thing I ever saw, and I’m not boasting when I say all Paris raves about it.{203}”
“All Paris!” broke in Tom; “all the cities of the plain!”
“Not at all: all the most civilized people of the most civilized town in the world. You really had better smash the Demeter. What will you do with her? They will probably take her at the Academy—in fact, I should think they certainly would, and in the autumn they will send her back to you, or rather you will have to go with a drayman’s cart and fetch her. She’ll be very heavy. If you were an academician, and got a very good piece of Carrara for her, Pears might buy her, ‘after using our soap,’ you know.”
Tom grew more and more impatient, and could contain himself no longer.
“Don’t talk blasphemy here!” he shouted. “The only object of art, according to you, is to make fifty silly women look at the abortions you produce for five minutes while they are racking their brainless heads for a new piece of scandal. You are welcome to them. And if no one else cares for my Demeter, May does, and the rest of the world may go to the deuce for all we care. You are a rank heretic, and when you die you will go to a place entirely peopled with the types you love, while I shall sit at wine with gods and goddesses.”
“What will happen to your other people? The boy shooting, for instance?”
“If he shows so much as the muzzle of his ugly gun, I shall kick him downstairs to join you and your fellows.”
“Many thanks. I have your promise. He will be{204} a charming addition, and I shall be delighted to see him.”
Tom burst out laughing.
“Do you know I’m delighted to see you, heretic or no heretic. We won’t talk shop any more. Miss Wrexham is coming to dinner to-night. You remember her, don’t you?”
“Very well. She flattered me about my statuette. I never forget any one who flatters me.”
“You flattered yourself, you mean. She was fonder of the Parthenon.”
“I am not jealous of the Parthenon,” said Manvers; “she may flirt with the whole Acropolis if she likes. But you’ll have to let me go at ten. Wallingthorpe has a gathering. He is very refreshing.”
“He is a social Narcissus,” said Tom. “It is so silly to be Narcissus.”
“Not if other people agree with you.”
“But nobody admires Wallingthorpe as much as he admires himself.”
“No; but he never ceases to hope that they soon will. Hope springs eternal, you know. He is very sanguine. Whether they will or not has nothing to do with the question; the only point is whether he sincerely believes they will, and he certainly does that.”
“His motto is, ‘The proper study of mankind is me.’”
“That’s not grammar,” said Manvers.
“Possibly not; but the sublimity of the theme is sufficient excuse.”
Manvers took out a cigarette-case, and then paused.{205}
“Is it allowed here?” he asked.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter if we open the windows afterwards,” said Tom; “but May doesn’t like smoke all over the house.”
Manvers shut his cigarette case up with a click.
“My dear Tom, if one fails in the small decencies of life, one is lost. Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”
“That’s a silly proverb,” said Tom; “it is tithing the mint and anise and cummin.”
“No; that’s just what it is not doing. It is keeping them intact, and not tithing them.”
Tom laughed.
“I don’t think that means anything,” he said. “But let’s go to the smoking-room; we’ll have tea sent there. No, you shan’t come to the studio; I don’t wish to force my uninteresting survivals on you. I’m quite delighted to see you again. And this evening it will be the dear old Athens party over again, only we shan’t have Arthur Wrexham to peck at!”
Maud Wrexham, as her custom was, came rather late, and began making excuses before she was well inside the room.
“It really wasn’t my fault this time,” she said; “all the conceivable accidents happened, and where the carriage in which I was to have come is now, I can’t say. Mother made a beautiful plan—it seemed to work all right on paper—that the brougham was to drop three of us in different parts of London at the same moment. But the laws of time and space intervened. Ah! how do you do, Mr. Manvers?{206} It’s charming to see you again, and there was a block at the corner, and I had to go back for my gloves.”
Tom laughed.
“You must have started wonderfully early,” he said, “because you are only ten minutes late. May I take you in?”
Maud, Tom, and Manvers had much to say to each other, and May a good deal to listen to. They all rather tended to talk at once. Every now and then one of the others would drop out of the conversation and pick her up, but naturally enough Tom did not talk much to her; Manvers made several well-meaning efforts, but was unable to sustain the conversation long, as he was listening to what the other two were saying, and talking himself, and Maud sat on the opposite side of the table, and the candles and flowers made communication difficult. It must be confessed that May found the dinner a little wearisome, for in her somewhat isolated life she had not had any opportunities of acquiring that most useful accomplishment of talking nonsense, or of talking naturally and fluently about nothing particular.
Manvers was maintaining a new and startling theory that the only readable descriptions of any place on the face of the earth were written by people who had never set eyes on the place in question, and supported his theory by his own experiences at Athens.
“I knew,” he said, “as we all know, that there was an Acropolis with buildings of white marble on it,{207} and when you looked out from it you gazed over the grey olive groves, and the plain of Attica, and the violet crown of ............