The Countess of Lowndes Square, and Other Stories

by E. F. Benson

Up to the time of Philip’s obsession there cannot have been in all the world a happier couple than he and his wife. As everybody knows, the ecstasy of life has its home in the imagination, and Philip and Phœbe Partington lived almost exclusively in those realms which were illumined by the light that never was on sea or land. I do not absolutely affirm that sea and land would have been the better for that light; all that I insist on was that the Partington effulgence certainly never was there. It was a remunerative light also, and out of the proceeds they bought a quantity of false Elizabethan furniture and a motor-car. A spin in the motor-car after the ecstatic labour of the morning cleared Phœbe’s head, and they dined together in an Elizabethan room with rushes on the floor. That cleared Phœbe’s head, too, for nothing in the world could be remoter from the setting of her imaginative life than anything Elizabethan. She and her husband lived in an opulent and lurid present, which, in its turn, was just as remote from contemporary life as most people know it, as were the “spacious days” that had left their spurious traces on the dining-room.

They were the most industrious of artists and often had as many as three feuilletons running simultaneously in provincial papers, and the manner of their activity was this. Every morning, directly after breakfast, Philip sat in the dining-room, and until one o’clock proceeded to turn into narrative the very complete and articulated skeleton of the tale which Phœbe manufactured in the drawing-room. The imaginative gift was hers; there was not a situation in the world which she could not contemplate unwinking, like an eagle staring into the sun, and these she passed on to her husband, whose power of putting them into narrative was as unrivalled as his wife’s in conceiving them.

Picture him, then, with his plump, amiable face bent over Phœbe’s imaginings, a perennial pipe in his mouth, and, invariably, two or three little tufts of cotton-wool struck on to his cheek or chin, where he had cut himself shaving that morning. Occasionally, but very rarely, he had to go into the drawing-room to ask the elucidation of some situation: how, for instance, was Algernon Montmorency to leap lightly out of the window, and so regain his motor-car, when Phœbe had laid the scene in the top room of the moated tower of Eagles Castle? But Phœbe could always suggest a remedy which cost the minimum of readjustment, and ten minutes afterwards Algernon would be thundering along the road with the lurid Semitic moneylender in close pursuit. But for such occasional interruption and the periodical lighting of his pipe he would not pause for a second till the morning’s work was over. He never hesitated for a word, for he had at his command the entire vocabulary of English clichés, and he often got through two instalments before lunch. At one precisely the parlourmaid came in, and groping through the fog of tobacco-smoke, opened all the windows and began to lay the table. Upon which Philip washed off his tufts of cotton-wool, snatched Phœbe from her imaginative visions, and strolled in the garden with her till the gong summoned them to the recuperative spell of a mutton chop and a glass of blood-making Australian Burgundy.

After lunch they drove in the motor-car, returning for tea, and from tea till dinner they read over aloud and discussed their morning’s work. In this way Philip made acquaintance with the subject-matter he would be employed on next morning, and Phœbe learned how that which she had written yesterday had turned out. Philip had never any criticism to make: his wife’s imagination seemed to him one of the most glorious instruments ever devised for the delectation of the literary, and she often said that of all contemporary novelists her husband was the only man capable of handling the situations she poured out in this unending flood. After dinner they played patience, went early to bed, and awoke with an unquenchable zest for the labour and rewards of another day.

It is impossible to figure a happier or a more harmonious existence. In imagination they roamed over the entire world without the expense or inconvenience of foreign travel: their spirits ranged through the whole gamut of human emotion, and whatever adversities the Algernon and Eva of the moment went through, their creators and interpreters knew in their heart of hearts that all was going to end well, for otherwise they would speedily have lost their pinnacled eminence as writers of serial stories in the daily press. It is true that Philip’s voice often shook as he read, and that Phœbe’s eyes were dim as she listened to the written tale of the remarkable disasters and misunderstandings through which the children of her brain had to pass; but these were but luxurious and sterile sorrows. In fact, the greatest trial that ever came to them during these halcyon years was when the editor of one of the papers in which the tale was running wrote to say that it was so popular that he insisted on having at least another fortnight of it, instead of bringing it to an end in two more instalments.

That entailed a vast deal of work, for Phœbe had to search the file to find out by what constructive carpentering she could engineer an episode that would be of the requisite length; for the last instalment of all, when the severed were reunited, must naturally be left for the end. But she never failed to manage it somehow, and even when tribulation was great, and for the moment she could not conceive how to spin the story out, her cloud had a silver lining, for all this difficult work was due to the story’s amazing popularity. Or sometimes some ill-mannered reader would write to the newspaper office to point out that St. Peter’s Church at Rome did not stand on a “commanding eminence,” or ask more information about the “glittering spires” on the Acropolis at Athens, or demur to the “pellucid waters of the Nile in flood, as it rolled down in blue cataracts studded with milk-white foam.” But otherwise their life flowed on in an unbroken succession of literary triumphs and domestic happiness.

Then suddenly without any warning whatever the curtain was rung up on a psychological tragedy; for Philip, by some species of spiritual infection from his wife, began to develop an imagination. It did not at first threaten to attack what Phœbe in a Gallic moment had once called their “vie intérieure,” by which she meant their literary labours, but was directly concerned only with the present of a safety razor which she had made him on his birthday, in order to save cotton-wool and his life-blood. This safety razor consisted of a neat little sort of a rake into which razor blades were fitted. Each of these, when blunted by use, was to be thrown away and a fresh one inserted, and that morning, Philip, finding that his blade had begun to lose its edge, tossed it lightly and airily out of his dressing-room window, from which it fell into a herbaceous border which ran along the house. The new blade gave the utmost satisfaction, and precisely at nine-thirty he lit his first pipe and began his work for the day on Phœbe’s scenario.

The dining-room was just below his dressing-room, and at that moment there came a rustle from the herbaceous bed, and Phœbe’s adorable Persian cat leaped on to the window-sill from outside, and proceeded to make its toilet in the warm May sunshine. And at that precise and fatal moment Philip Partington’s imagination began to work. It stirred within him like the first faint pang of a toothache. For some quarter of an hour he refused to recognize its existence, and proceeded to clothe in suitable language the flight of Eva up the frozen Thames in an ice-ship. Not knowing exactly what an ice-ship was, and being aware that his readers would be similarly ignorant, he evolved a beautiful one out of his inner consciousness that “skimmed along” on a single runner like a skate. It was not, he reflected, any less likely that it should keep its balance than that a bicycle should....

Suddenly he laid down his pen. His imagination was beginning to hurt him. It would be a terrible thing if Phœbe’s cat, while it prowled though the herbaceous bed, stepped on the blade of the safety razor. Blunt though it was for shaving purposes, it would easily inflict a cruel wound on Tommy’s paw. When his work was done, he must really hunt for the blade, and bestow it in some safer place.

He took up his pen again and wrote, “Ever faster through the deepening winter twilight sped the ice-ship, and Eva controlling the tiller in her long taper fingers, watched the dusky banks fly past her. ‘Oh, God,’ she murmured, ‘grant that I may be in time!’ The woods of Richmond....”