Buried Alive: a Tale of These Days - Arnold Bennett (books to read for self improvement txt) 📗

to know the worst.

She adored him more than ever.

There was a silence.

"No," she repeated, in the most matter-of-fact tone, "I should say nothing, in your place. I should forget it."

"You would?" He drummed on the table.

"I should! And whatever you do, don't worry." Her accents were the coaxing accents of a nurse with a child--or with a lunatic.

He perceived now with the utmost clearness that she did not believe a word of what he had said, and that in her magnificent and calm sagacity she was only trying to humour him. He had expected to disturb her soul to its profoundest depths; he had expected that they would sit up half the night discussing the situation. And lo!--"I should forget it," indulgently! And a mild continuance of darning!

He had to think, and think hard.


Tears


"Henry," she called out the next morning, as he disappeared up the stairs. "What are you doing up there?"

She had behaved exactly as if nothing had happened; and she was one of those women whose prudent policy it is to let their men alone even to the furthest limit of patience; but she had nerves, too, and they were being affected. For three days Henry had really been too mysterious!

He stopped, and put his head over the banisters, and in a queer, moved voice answered:

"Come and see."

Sooner or later she must see. Sooner or later the already distended situation must get more and more distended until it burst with a loud report. Let the moment be sooner, he swiftly decided.

So she went and saw.

Half-way up the attic stairs she began to sniff, and as he turned the knob of the attic door for her she said, "What a smell of paint! I fancied yesterday----"

If she had been clever enough she would have said, "What a smell of masterpieces!" But her cleverness lay in other fields.

"You surely haven't been aspinalling that bath-room chair?... Oh!"

This loud exclamation escaped from her as she entered the attic and saw the back of the picture which Priam had lodged on the said bath-room chair--filched by him from the bath-room on the previous day. She stepped to the vicinity of the window and obtained a good view of the picture. It was brilliantly shining in the light of morn. It looked glorious; it was a fit companion of many pictures from the same hand distributed among European galleries. It had that priceless quality, at once noble and radiant, which distinguished all Priam's work. It transformed the attic; and thousands of amateurs and students, from St. Petersburg to San Francisco, would have gone into that attic with their hats off and a thrill in the spine, had they known what was there and had they been invited to enter and worship. Priam himself was pleased; he was delighted; he was enthusiastic. And he stood near the picture, glancing at it and then glancing at Alice, nervously, like a mother whose sister-in-law has come to look at the baby. As for Alice, she said nothing. She had first of all to take in the fact that her husband had been ungenerous enough to keep her quite in the dark as to the nature of his secret activities; then she had to take in the fact of the picture.

"Did you do that?" she said limply.

"Yes," said he, with all the casualness that he could assume. "How does it strike you?" And to himself: "This'll make her see I'm not a mere lunatic. This'll give her a shaking up."

"I'm sure it's beautiful," she said kindly, but without the slightest conviction. "What is it? Is that Putney Bridge?"

"Yes," he said.

"I thought it was. I thought it must be. Well, I never knew you could paint. It's beautiful--for an amateur." She said this firmly and yet endearingly, and met his eyes with her eyes. It was her tactful method of politely causing him to see that she had not accepted last night's yarn very seriously. His eyes fell, not hers.

"No, no, no!" he expostulated with quick vivacity, as she stepped towards the canvas. "Don't come any nearer. You're at just the right distance."

"Oh! If you don't want me to see it close," she humoured him. "What a pity you haven't put an omnibus on the bridge!"

"There is one," said he. "That's one." He pointed.

"Oh yes! Yes, I see. But, you know, I think it looks rather more like a Carter Paterson van than an omnibus. If you could paint some letters on it--'Union Jack' or 'Vanguard,' then people would be sure. But it's beautiful. I suppose you learnt to to paint from your--" She checked herself. "What's that red streak behind?"

"That's the railway bridge," he muttered.

"Oh, of course it is! How silly of me! Now if you were to put a train on that. The worst of trains in pictures is that they never seem to be going along. I've noticed that on the sides of furniture vans, haven't you? But if you put a signal, against it, then people would understand that the train had stopped. I'm not sure whether there is a signal on the bridge, though."

He made no remark.

"And I see that's the Elk public-house there on the right. You've just managed to get it in. I can recognize that quite easily. Any one would."

He still made no remark.

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked gently.

"Going to sell it, my dear," he replied grimly. "It may surprise you to know that that canvas is worth at the very least L800. There would be a devil of a row and rumpus in Bond Street and elsewhere if they knew I was painting here instead of rotting in Westminster Abbey. I don't propose to sign it--I seldom did sign my pictures--and we shall see what we shall see.... I've got fifteen hundred for little things not so good as that. I'll let it go for what it'll fetch. We shall soon be wanting money."

The tears rose to Alice's eyes. She saw that he was more infinitely more mad than she imagined--with his L800 and his L1,500 for daubs of pictures that conveyed no meaning whatever to the eye! Why, you could purchase real, professional pictures, of lakes, and mountains, exquisitely finished, at the frame-makers in High Street for three pounds apiece! And here he was rambling in hundreds and thousands! She saw that that extraordinary notion about being able to paint was a natural consequence of the pathetic delusion to which he had given utterance yesterday. And she wondered what would follow next. Who could have guessed that the seeds of lunacy were in such a man? Yes, harmless lunacy, but lunacy nevertheless! She distinctly remembered the little shock with which she had learned that he was staying at the Grand Babylon on his own account, as a wealthy visitor. She thought it bizarre, but she certainly had not taken it for a sign of lunacy. And yet it had been a sign of madness. And the worst of harmless lunacy was that it might develop at any moment into harmful lunacy.

There was one thing to do, and only one: keep him quiet, shield him from all troubles and alarms. It was disturbance of spirit which induced these mental derangements. His master's death had upset him. And now he had been upset by her disgraceful brewery company.

She made a step towards him, and then hesitated. She had to form a plan of campaign all in a moment! She had to keep her wits and to use them! How could she give him confidence about his absurd picture? She noticed that naive look that sometimes came into his eyes, a boyish expression that gave the He to his greying beard and his generous proportions.

He laughed, until, as she came closer, he saw the tears on her eyelids. Then he ceased laughing. She fingered the edge of his coat, cajolingly.

"It's a beautiful picture!" she repeated again and again. "And if you like I will see if I can sell it for you. But, Henry----"

"Well?"

"Please, please don't bother about money. We shall have heaps. There's no occasion for you to bother, and I won't have you bothering."

"What are you crying for?" he asked in a murmur.

"It's only--only because I think it's so nice of you trying to earn money like that," she lied. "I'm not really crying."

And she ran away, downstairs, really crying. It was excessively comic, but he had better not follow her, lest he might cry too....


A Patron of the Arts


A lull followed this crisis in the affairs of No. 29 Werter Road. Priam went on painting, and there was now no need for secrecy about it. But his painting was not made a subject of conversation. Both of them hesitated to touch it, she from tact, and he because her views on the art seemed to him to be lacking in subtlety. In every marriage there is a topic--there are usually several--which the husband will never broach to the wife, out of respect for his respect for her. Priam scarcely guessed that Alice imagined him to be on the way to lunacy. He thought she merely thought him queer, as artists are queer to non-artists. And he was accustomed to that; Henry Leek had always thought him queer. As for Alice's incredulous attitude towards the revelation of his identity, he did not mentally accuse her of treating him as either a liar or a madman. On reflection he persuaded himself that she regarded the story as a bad joke, as one of his impulsive, capricious essays in the absurd.

Thus the march of evolution was apparently arrested in Werter Road during three whole days. And then a singular event happened, and progress was resumed. Priam had been out since early morning on the riverside, sketching, and had reached Barnes, from which town he returned over Barnes Common, and so by the Upper Richmond Road to High Street. He was on the south side of Upper Richmond Road, whereas his tobacconist's shop was on the north side, near the corner. An unfamiliar peculiarity of the shop caused him to cross the street, for he was not in want of tobacco. It was the look of the window that drew him. He stopped on the refuge in the centre of the street. There was no necessity to go further. His picture of Putney Bridge was in the middle of the window. He stared at it fixedly. He believed his eyes, for his eyes were the finest part of him and never deceived him; but perhaps if he had been a person with ordinary eyes he would scarce have been able to believe them. The canvas was indubitably there present in the window. It had been put in a cheap frame such as is used for chromographic advertisements of ships, soups, and tobacco. He was almost sure that he had seen that same frame, within the shop, round a pictorial announcement of Taddy's Snuff. The tobacconist had probably removed the eighteenth-century aristocrat with his fingers to his nose, from the frame, and replaced him with Putney Bridge. In any event the frame was about half-an-inch too long for the canvas, but the gap was scarcely observable. On the frame was a large notice, 'For sale.' And around it were the cigars of two hemispheres, from Syak Whiffs at a penny each to precious Murias; and cigarettes of every allurement; and the