Alice Marling.
Next day brought an answer:
Dearest Alice,
A thousand apologies! I couldn’t come yesterday because I was expecting—who do you think? Mr. Blandfoot! He had proposed himself for that day, but he never turned up. He sent me quite a civil note saying he had been caught in a shower at the ninth hole, and had to take shelter, as he dare not risk getting wet. I wonder why: he looks quite a strong man. He has taken ‘Heather Patch’ at the bottom of our garden and is putting in some orange-and-blue curtains. More than that? and his golf, dearest, I simply do not know! I expect we shall all see the picture when his house is straight—I don’t suppose he has even hung it yet. Horace thinks it may be of the Dutch School, as Mr. Blandfoot is said to have been something in Java. I wish I could be more helpful, dearest.
Yours,
E. S.
Such information as Mrs. Marling gleaned about the newcomer was always fragmentary and unsatisfactory. The days passed, and still the polite society of Settlemarsh awaited in vain a signal from its leader.
Meanwhile, there was no doubt of it, Mr. Blandfoot was making headway; he joined clubs, was a fugitive visitor at tea-parties, he went out in the evening and played bridge. In spite of Mrs. Marling’s withheld permission, he seemed to be establishing himself. To those in whom awe of Mrs. Marling was still as second nature, he seemed to go about with a furtive air, like a foreigner without a passport. At any moment, it was felt, some official, acting on her instructions, would come up and ask for his credentials. It was observed that Mrs. Marling’s immediate circle still held aloof, and Mrs. Stornway never repeated the indiscretion of inviting him to tea. But people began to ask themselves, was his case still sub judice? Had Mrs. Marling rejected him, or had she not? And this uncertainty was new to Settlemarsh. For whatever else Mrs. Marling might be she was never indifferent, nor had she ever shirked the responsibility of saying yes or no. In this matter of maintaining the standard of Settlemarsh society her conscience and her honour were involved. Her inactivity was inexplicable.
More than that, it was dangerous; dangerous to Mrs. Marling, dangerous to Settlemarsh. There had always been rebellious provinces on the fringe of Mrs. Marling’s dominion, and these, as the central authority seemed to weaken, began to hold up their heads. Mrs. Peets had to order a new tea-service, so thronged was her table, and there were some who preferred its vigorous blue and yellow stripes to Mrs. Marling’s gold and white, just as there were some who preferred her house with its tiers of wooden balconies painted white to the Victorian exterior of The Grove. Everyone acknowledged that The Grove had been a good house in its day and for its time. But now even its habitués began to look at it with purged and critical eyes. They saw the brickwork, once yellow, now dingy with smoke, relieved by string-courses, also brick, of a hard, dark, metallic blue. They observed that the serviceable and decorative magnolias which swarmed the walls and were cut back (so Mrs. Peets said) to exhibit the blue-brick arabesque did not really conceal the scaffolding of drain-pipes with which Mrs. Marling’s grandfather, at the coming of the bathroom age, had fortified the walls. At Mrs. Peets’s you had air and light and virgin soil. But when you went to The Grove you were conscious that the trees from which it took its name, a respectable cluster, larger than a shrubbery but smaller than a spinney, were on their last legs, and that one was trying to do duty for two; that the soil was sour and impoverished and, like an old coat, looked the more threadbare for its careful raking and tending; that every shrub would be an elderberry if it could, every flower a lobelia, every fern an aspidistra.
‘And how many of them have had their wish!’ thought Mrs. Stornway, as she trod lightly over the earthy gravel of the drive, her eyes still dazzled by the remembrance of Mrs. Peets’s carriage sweep, a veritable shingle-bank for depth and glitter. Poor Alice! Sooner or later she had to become a back number. How could she hope to keep pace, Mrs. Stornway ruminated, as a blue-slated turret of vaguely ogee outline burst into view, with the growth of the town, the newcomers who gave you cocktails at tea, and whose baths filled in a moment, so fierce and sudden was the rush of water? How could she make herself felt, exert her authority over a society whose members dropped in casually on each other, who might as easily as not precede the servant into the drawing-room, whose very clothes had a different aim from hers? How easily people of to-day moved! Just as the whim took them, they got up, they sat down, they sprawled, lounged, and smoked; their conversation was short, sharp, and informal, familiar and pert. Mrs. Marling’s words, like her attitudes, were poured into a mould; they had no elasticity, no give-and-take! She had ruled, indeed, by getting people into her house and making them feel so strange, so tense, so awkward, so incapable of movement, that she could do anything she liked with them! She had no notion of how to make her guests feel relaxed and comfortable. ‘Poor Alice!’ thought Mrs. Stornway again. ‘The sap of her mind is dried up. She can’t absorb fresh subjects. Look how hide-bound she is about Mr. Blandfoot’s picture! She affects not to take any interest in it. I really must speak to her seriously!’
But as she confronted Mrs. Marling’s slightly ecclesiastical porch, smothered in soiled ivy and surmounted by crockets and finials, her brave thoughts began to change colour. And when, in response to her inquiry, the butler had gone to find out whether Mrs. Marling was in and Mrs. Stornway remembered that rarely as Mrs. Marling left her home, as rarely was she at it, those thoughts died completely. She waited; the sombre trophies from India and the Boxer Rebellion, scraps of armour without faces, scraps of faces without armour, pallid wooden hands projecting from hollow sleeves supporting flower pots, completed her discomfiture. She watched the butler returning from the far end of the long hall, his advancing figure silhouetted against a large window, enclosed in an oblong frame of stained glass. Till the man spoke, she could not tell, no one could have told, whether Mrs. Marling was at home or not. And as he conducted her towards the drawing-room, walking a little in front and a little to one side, he might have been taking one ghost to interview another.
At first Mrs. Marling did not seem to notice her visitor; she stretched her work out in front of her and peered over the edge in an abstracted fashion. Then suddenly she rose.
‘My dear Eva, to think of you coming all this way, and in this heat, to talk to a poor imbecile like me! I can tell you how flattered I feel. Nobody ever comes to see me now.’
The slightly complacent tone in which she said this bewildered Mrs. Stornway.
‘Of course they will always come, dearest Alice,’ she ventured. ‘You are our chief place of pilgrimage.’
But she had taken the wrong tack. Mrs. Marling seemed able to read what was in her mind.
‘Oh, believe me I am quite démodée,’ she said, more to the needlework than to her friend. ‘And do you know, I like it? I hear of Mrs. Peets giving parties; Mrs. Pepperthwaite has At Homes; you, yourself, are organizing a garden fête, they tell me, and no doubt Mr. Blandfoot will soon be giving a ball. And here I sit, quite happy to be out of it all.’
‘Everyone has missed you so much,’ Mrs. Stornway murmured.
‘How nice of you to say that! I have missed you, dear Eva, more than once: but the others——! No. I am really meant for solitude. Do you like my picture?’ she went on, presenting to her friend’s view a remarkable seascape. In a violet sea a man of war of the Nelson period, all square lines and portholes, had heeled over away from the spectator, and was sinking with all sail set. ‘It’s an emblem of my life, dearest Eva,’ she continued. ‘Do you think it would be considered more of a masterpiece if I left it unfinished? Or better still, I might hide it away and just talk about it, and then I should make quite a name for myself, like your Mr.—Mr.——’
‘Blandfoot,’ put in Mrs. Stornway eagerly.
‘Like him,’ said Mrs. Marling, disdaining to repeat the name. ‘Have you been seeing a lot of him, my dear?’
Mrs. Stornway would only admit to having seen him once or twice. Like most
people, she could not tell a disagreeable truth to Mrs. Marling. ‘But to-morrow I and one or two others thought of going in about tea-time to help him hang his pictures. Poor fellow, he is very helpless, like all men, and has no one in the house to lend a hand.’
‘I suppose he invited you,’ Mrs. Marling suddenly remarked.
‘We sort of decided it between us,’ said Mrs. Stornway hastily. ‘And, of course,’ she added, taking a run at it, and adopting the slightly self-conscious air that everyone who talked to Mrs. Marling sooner or later fell into—‘we hope to be shown the picture.’
‘What picture?’ inquired Mrs. Marling.
‘Why, the one everybody is talking about,’ exclaimed Mrs. Stornway. ‘You mentioned it yourself a moment ago.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Mrs. Marling. ‘I don’t think that exists. Oh, no. It’s just an idea that people have got into their heads. But I do pity you, my dear, heaving aloft those large photographic reproductions of the Blandfoot family portraits. I shall think of you, as I sit here listening to poor Mr. Hesketh. He does tire me.’
‘Hesketh!’ exclaimed Mrs. Stornway in awed tones. ‘Not the Hesketh, the novelist? Is he coming to stay with you?’
‘He is already here,’ said Mrs. Marling, ‘only as I wanted the pleasure of talking to you alone I sent him out for a walk. And now,’ she went on briskly, relishing the visible pang of disappointment that crossed her visitor’s face, let us have some tea. But don’t forget to come and tell me what the picture is like, who painted it, and what it is worth.’
The conversation passed into other channels. Mrs. Stornway listened abstractedly, hoping that Mr. Hesketh would appear. But the minutes passed and he did not come.
Punctually at half-past four Mrs. Stornway was shown into the drawing-room of Heather Patch. She was, as she meant to be, the first to arrive; Mrs. Peets and Mrs. Pepperthwaite were still unannounced, and her host himself lingered somewhere in the interior. Yes, there were the pictures, numbers of them, leaning against each other, their strings and wires sticking out untidily, their faces turned to the wall. Mrs. Stornway studied their brown backs with passionate interest. Which of them would be it? A friend had once told her that she was psychic beyond ordinary women. Surely she could use this special power to pierce Mr. Blandfoot’s secret? She stood still, emptied her mind of thought, and tried to let the brown shapes before her pass into it. At first she saw nothing but knowing-looking dogs with heads cocked sideways and pipes in their mouths. Then one picture began to oust the others: its subject remained obscure, but she recognized its material form and, tiptoeing across the room, took hold of the frame and began to draw it slowly backwards.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Stornway.’ The voice startled her so much that she let go the picture, which subsided with a thud. She rose awkwardly, her feet imprisoned by the picture-cords.
‘Oh, Mr. Blandfoot, forgive me! I couldn’t resist taking a look!’
‘How charming of you to be so interested,’ he said, coming forward, his large figure blocking up the light and casting a soft gloom before it. ‘Tell me which one you were looking at.’
Mrs. Stornway’s impulse was always to lie.
‘This one,’ she said, indicating one of the smaller pictures.
Mr. Blandfoot pulled it out.
‘Ah, Jake,’ he said, looking at it. ‘Poor old Jake with a bandaged head.’
They went to the window. It was a dog—a dog with his head on one side and tied up in a handkerchief.
‘Why, what’s happened to him?’ she said, looking from Mr. Blandfoot to the picture and back to Mr. Blandfoot again.
He was a tall man, put together so loosely that one or other of his limbs always seemed on the verge of dislocation. His hair, which was thin and pale, the same colour as his face, seemed to cling together, as though for protection, in half a dozen long lank wisps, showing pink tracts between. His face was bony, his features were irregular, and his eyes so light they seemed to have been bleached. He could never give an effect of neatness, thought Mrs. Stornway: even the skin on the hand which held the picture was unevenly tinted, it looked coarse and porous without being firm and hardly seemed to fit him.
‘What’s happened to the dog?’ she repeated.
‘Why,’ he said slowly, ‘dogs will be dogs. I had to teach him——’
But what the lesson was Mr. Blandfoot had sought to inculcate Mrs. Stornway never knew; Mrs. Peets and Mrs. Pepperthwaite arrived simultaneously, and they had tea in the bow-window, flanked by the orange-and-blue curtains. Outside could be seen the patches of heather which gave the house its name. It flowered with a commendable persistence, although in the forefront of villadom’s advance—trenches, incipient walls, overturned wheelbarrows, splodges of whitewash, moist spots for mixing mortar. It looked as dry and wiry and tenacious as the owner of Heather Patch, only more beautiful, thought Mrs. Stornway unwillingly.
The work went on apace, and of the forty-odd pictures only a mere handful remained to be hung. Many of them had been photographs of the Far East, representing, as often as not, severe, thin men in shirtsleeves, standing very erect outside their temporary dwellings, putting, as it seemed, the thought of tiffin behind them. Others showed native women holding their babies, or naked warriors in open formation holding spears. No one ever seemed to sit down. All the pictures suggested a sort of flimsy precarious verticality. For contrast there were views of English interiors, the dreams of nostalgia, where everyone was sitting or lying or reclining. The largest of these, a picture displaying a group of couchant rich people watching their children, dressed in costumes of a bygone age, resting from a game of Ring-a-ring of Roses, Mrs. Stornway hung over the piano. The picture and the instrument were exactly the same length.
‘I believe,’ she murmured, ‘that Mrs. Marling has a copy of this, only not such a fine one, at The Grove. Do you remember it, Mrs. Peets?’
‘You forget,’ said Mrs. Peets, ‘I’ve never seen the inside of the good lady’s house.’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs. Stornway, with well-assumed confusion, ‘I thought everyone——You remember it, Muriel?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Pepperthwaite, ‘in the dining-room.’
‘No, not in the dining-room,’ Mrs. Stornway remarked complacently, ‘it’s upstairs, the second passage you come to, on the right, if my memory serves me. He really ought to see the house, oughtn’t he, Mrs. Peets? Alice Marling has such interesting pictures.’
‘You forget, I haven’t had the privilege of going,’ said Mrs. Peets again, busying herself with a picture. Only three remained unhung. The exaltation Mrs. Stornway had felt as one by one the pictures were disposed of in the various rooms deepened into ecstasy. She persuaded herself that the last of the three was the one she was examining when Mr. Blandfoot interrupted her. They were back in the drawing-room; it was the largest room, and it’s walls still had empty spots, though they had thought it finished when they left it. In the intoxication that possessed her, as the moment of revelation drew near, Mrs. Stornway felt that there was no limit to her powers: she could say anything, do anything: she could bring Mahomet to the mountain, Mr. Blandfoot to Mrs. Marling, and everything she did would become her.
‘I always think,’ she said, ‘that in all Settlemarsh there’s no one so really worth while as Alice Marling.’ To make this declaration she stopped working, came into the middle of the room and clasped her hands in front of her.
There was a pause. Then Mr. Blandfoot took another picture and, mounting the steps with the cord in his mouth, muttered, ‘Why are you always talking about this Mrs. Marling?’
‘Oh,’ Mrs. Stornway exclaimed, her eyes aglow with the fire of evangelizing the heathen, ‘she stands for all that is best in Settlemarsh—so it seems to me. There was a time when she used to keep open house.’
‘She doesn’t keep open house for me,’ said Mrs. Peets.
‘Nor for me,’ Mr. Blandfoot echoed. Again his utterance was impeded, this time, as Mrs. Stornway saw when he turned his
head, by a long nail that he held clamped between his teeth.
There they both stood, Mrs. Peets and Mr. Blandfoot, the rejected of Mrs. Marling, their faces to the wall and the silence deepening round them. Mrs. Pepperthwaite, who had taken the last picture but one, a study of Highland cattle in a mist, and was carrying it about while she gazed inquiringly but helplessly at the crowded picture-rail, flung herself into the breach.
‘Why, there’s only one more left!’ she cried nervously. ‘It must be the picture that everyone’s been talking about! Now, let’s all guess what it is.’
Her intervention was a complete success. The cloud cleared from the brow of Mrs. Peets; Mrs. Stornway’s face lost its Sibylline look; and Mr. Blandfoot turned round and sat on the top of the steps, his knees projecting enormously, his chin supported by his hands while he looked down at them with an enigmatic smile.
‘First of all, how did you get hold of it?’ demanded Mrs. Peets.
‘Yes,’ echoed Mrs. Stornway a little wanly, ‘how did it come into your possession?’
‘Perhaps we ought not to ask him that,’ said Mrs. Pepperthwaite coyly. Her success as a peacemaker had given a sense of power which she seldom enjoyed.
‘Well, then, where did you get it? He can’t mind telling us that,’ said Mrs. Peets in her decided tone.
Fascinated, they stared at the medium-sized oblong of brown paper, Mrs. Stornway still convinced that it was the one her second sight had revealed to her.
‘I got it in Java,’ said Mr. Blandfoot from the steps.
They all three nodded at each other, as if a secret suspicion was at last openly confirmed.
‘And how did you get it?’ persisted Mrs. Peets. ‘After everything we’ve done for you, three tired perspiring women, I think you might tell us.’
Mr. Blandfoot paused a moment. ‘It was given me by a man I met,’ he said at last. ‘He painted it specially for me.’
‘Ah, then, it’s a portrait of you,’ put in Mrs. Pepperthwaite quickly, as though to get her say in before the others could speak. ‘Just the head, perhaps?’ she suggested, scrutinizing the back of the picture which looked too small for a full length.