Limitations: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

Why not leave all this behind and go back to Paris as it was? The hours were still hours, minutes in which to live and enjoy. But it seemed impossible. Some change had come. He was puzzled and bewildered with himself. He had always thought he knew himself as well as he knew his modelling tools, but he had given himself a great surprise. Time would heal everything, would it? He would go back to Paris and get over it by degrees, and become what he had been before, thanks to Time! But for that he thought not the better of Time and of himself, but the worse.

And what of Tom? He would sit here again and again, talking to Maud with intimate freedom, amusing himself, laying down the law about art with a big A, and she would sit opposite him with her uncommunicated incommunicable secret, longing, loving, rejecting. Why had he gone to Athens, why had that series of a hundred trivial events happened, which had forged together this double iron chain, pulling two ways, yielding in neither? Damn Tom!

There was no conclusion. To-morrow he went to Paris. He was going to a little dinner given by one of the cleverest and most realistic artists of the day, to celebrate the admission of a picture to the Luxembourg. He had promised himself an amusing evening. Paris was the only place fit to dine in. Then he had to set to work again. He congratulated himself that his work sprang from the head, not the heart. It was summer in Paris by now. The cafés would have their rows of little tables in the street, and their green tubs of oleanders. There would be the smell of asphalt in the boulevards. The new advertisements of the year would be out. Chéret had done two at least, which were quite admirable: one was a Parisienne of the Parisiennes in a long black boa, and balloon sleeves in the new mode; the other a woman in a yellow dress carrying a red lamp. How stupid and distasteful it all seemed!

One by one the stars paled, as the first colourless light of dawn crept from the east over the sky. It was morning already. There came the sound of heavy wheels, and a string of vans passed eastwards with their loads of flowers and fruit to Covent Garden. They left behind them in the still air a vague perfume of flowers and ripe fruit and vegetables, which floated even up to where he was sitting. How very short, how infinitely long the night had been! It was impossible to go to bed; he would go out. He went to his room, and put on a grey coat instead of his dining-jacket, and let himself silently out of the house.

It was exactly at that hour when night and morning meet; cabs and carriages went westwards with women in ball dresses yawning dismally, while eastwards trailed the vans and carts. A woman at the street corner accosted him. Manvers gave her ten shillings, and told her to get home for God’s sake. Then he fairly laughed at himself. He was giving himself all sorts of surprises. But he could not bear the thought that one of the sex to which the one woman belonged should stand there.

And in the cool temperate dawn he faced his life and himself temperately. His old life was impossible for reasons which he could not grasp. He had no feeling that it was wrong or immoral; he approached it from a different side. His taste simply revolted against it. He had said once that he could not possibly feel the least liking for a man who ate cheese with his knife. The two were on the same footing. The old life was out of the question, but where was the new? And for that he had no answer ready.

He walked eastwards for an hour or so and then turned back, and as he reached the door the pitiless day had broken in a flood of yellow sunshine over the drowsy town.

CHAPTER XIV.

Tom, as he had mentioned on the previous evening, had come to a difficult place in his statue, and he could not get on. He was puzzled to know what the fault was, or where the difficulty was. He saw in his own mind what he wanted to do, but he could not visualize the vision. And when May arrived on the following day she found him inclined to rail at clay, models, drapery and himself. He had seen Manvers off in the morning at Victoria, and that evening he dined alone with May.

“I’m so sorry he’s gone,” he said to her. “He is so extraordinarily inspiring in a sort of back-handed way. He puts his own point of view so brilliantly, that I realize how diabolical it is, and that spurs me to work for mine. He has the same effect on me as the sight of a drunken man was supposed to have on Spartan boys. Their fathers used to make a slave drunk and then bring him in, and say, ‘Look at that. Isn’t it horrible! Take warning!’”