The House of Defence v. 1

by E. F. Benson

The room itself was parquetted with oak and walnut, and the floor, as befitted the heat and the season, was left bare, except for some half-dozen of silk Persian rugs that made shimmering islands on the sea of its shining surface. The wall which faced the Park was, indeed, rather window than wall, and was unadorned but for the brocaded curtains which were looped back from the windows; but the other three walls glowed with the presentments of bygone Raynhams. The first Lord Thurso was there, and his son, the first Earl, a portrait in peer’s robes by Reynolds, who had also painted the superb picture of his wife, and the great family group of them, with their two sons and a daughter, which hung over the Italian chimney-piece. The second Earl was there, too, the eldest boy in the family group, grown to man’s estate, and painted by Gainsborough. The picture of his wife was a Romney, with the red jewelled shadows of that master, while Lawrence was the artist for the next generation. Then, after a gap, bridged over in part by the elder Richmond, came the present Thurso and his wife, two brilliant and startling canvases, claiming kinship by right of their exquisite art with the earlier masters.

In other respects—for nothing could spoil these glorious decorations or the more smouldering brilliance of the painted ceiling—the room did not at this moment appear at the level of its best possibilities, for the floor was “star-scattered” with a multitude of small round tables in preparation for the supper of the ball that was to take place that night; while at the end, in front of the chimney-piece, was a long, narrow table, laid on one side only, for the very elect. Though numerous, they were to be very elect indeed, and whole constellations of stars and yards of garters would not find a place there to-night, but shine at the small round tables. In any case, however, so Catherine Thurso had arranged, everybody was going to have proper things to eat and drink, which should be presented to her guests’ notice in decent fashion. There was to be no buffet-supper for the mere rank and file, where, as at the refreshment-room of a railway-station, her friends would scramble for sandwiches and pale yellow drinks, with mint and anise and cummin floating about in them, among footmen who jogged their elbows with plates of strawberries, while the elect, Olympian-wise, refreshed themselves behind closed doors. To-night, in fact, Thurso House was to be reopened with a due regard for its stateliness and the huge hospitality that it ought to exercise after a period of ten lean years, so to speak, in which the late lord had lived alone here, with half the rooms closed, a secret and eccentric life. He had not even been wicked and held infamous revel, which would have been picturesque and full of colour; but he had only been morose, and shut himself up; miserly, and had not entertained anybody; gouty, and devoted to port. He had died just a year ago, and to-night the house was going to be launched again, after its period of dry-dock. Lady Thurso would almost have liked to rechristen it too. It was associated in her mind and in the mind of everybody else with such a very disagreeable old gentleman.

Lady Thurso, during these ten lean years, in which she and her husband had “pigged it,” as she expressed it, in a poky little house in Grosvenor Square, owing to the tightness of the purse-strings, had laid very solid foundations for the position she meant to occupy when she should be installed here. She fully intended to be magnificent, and to fill the place of mistress of this house in a manner worthy of it. But no one had a greater contempt than she for the modern hostess, who makes use of her time and money and position only to give enormous caravanserai entertainments, and to spend the rest of her days in going to similar functions provided by her friends. Such methods were futile: they never led to anything worth doing, while those who thought that by lavish entertainment they could get, socially speaking, anywhere that was worth getting to, made an even greater error. She had seen during these last ten years the incessant invasion of London by those whose sole invasive power was money and the willingness to spend it to any extent in order to be considered what is called “smart.” And she entirely disagreed with those ignorant and old-fashioned moralists who shook their heads and lifted up their voices in lamentations over the capitulation of London to the almighty dollar. London—all London that was worth anything, that is to say—had not, with all due deference to the loud crowings from Farm Street, capitulated in the very least to the almighty dollar, and those—there were many of them—who imagined that they were making a great splash in the world, and were becoming of social importance, merely because they were rich and willing to spend their money on bands and prima-donnas and ortolans, made a mistake almost pathetic in its ineptitude. Such folk never got anywhere really. They never became intime with the society they coveted, however many weird parties they gave, where one met the latest African explorer, or looked at magic-lantern slides of the bacillus of cholera, or turned out all the lights and observed the antics of radium, or listened (this was rather popular this year, for everybody was bent on improving his mind) to short lectures on the ideals of England or the remoteness of the stars. The poor dears thought they were laying the foundation of what they considered “smartness,” whereas they were only turning their houses into free restaurants, where the world, with the merest commonsense, went to be fed, if it had nothing better to do. There were, of course, others who had some further capacity than that of mere spending—people who were witty, agreeable, and with the power to charm. Certainly, their wealth helped such of them as desired, for some inexplicable reason, to have the details of their parties in the Morning Post; but it was not their wealth that gave them success, but their wit. As if anybody of sense cared whether the latest sensation of the music-halls came and did conjuring tricks or not, or whether they ate cold beef or picked and pecked through a two-hour dinner! What made going out to dinner pleasant was the intercourse with pleasant people, not the screeching of an operatic tenor or performing dogs. Of course, many people would go anywhere in order to be fed, if the food was decent; but then they “wiped their mouths and went their journey,” leaving the poor self-deceived hostess to think that she was going hand over hand up the social ladder.

Catherine Thurso, being half American by birth, was a compatriot of many of these, and her short, perfectly modelled nose went instinctively into the air when she thought of them. In London, she was sure, you could not become of any importance merely by spending money, though many people thought you could, and, indeed, thought they had. In New York, it is true, such a thing was not only possible, but easy, for there, so it seemed to her, the standard of social success was the preposterous character of your extravagance. But those who thought that the same recipe was good in London were wanting in the sense of moral geography. Wealth in London brought to your house shoals of the Hon. Mrs. Not-quite-in-it, second-rate pianists, and the crowd of everybody else who wanted to get on. Or if you flew a little higher in the way of intelligence, you could get harmless little connoisseurs who were full of second-rate information about the world in general and their own branch of art, who picked up mouldy Correggios and doubtful Stradivariuses. The cream of the second-rate could be skimmed by the wealthy, but unless they were something more, they got no higher than that. Your wealth could give you that and publicity, and the fatal error these pathetic climbers fell into lay in thinking that publicity meant celebrity, and that the fact that you had “been seen in the Park, looking charming,” meant anything at all. Her “ten lean years” had certainly not been spent in these futile strivings.

At this moment she was sitting with Jim Raynham, her husband’s younger brother, and Ruby Majendie—who, she hoped, would soon persuade Jim to marry her, for the sake of the happiness of them both—having lunch at one of those little round tables in the dining-room, in order to direct the decoration of the room for the supper this evening. Time, as usual, was precious with her to-day, and the minutes in which it was necessary to sit at a table and eat could thus be used. She had just given orders that all the hydrangeas, pale pink and pale blue, of which a perfect copse had been made at the far end of the room, should be taken away again, for really the Italian fireplace was much more decorative.

“Besides, hydrangeas always remind me of Mr. James Turner,” she said in parenthesis.

“And who is he?” asked Jim.

“He isn’t he—he’s it. It’s a little art gentleman, plump, like a bullfinch, with a little grey moustache. You must know him, because, when one lunches or dines out, he is invariably there, and he is invariably the one person whom one can’t remember. Hydrangeas remind me of him, because he looks as if he had been grown in a pot in a moderately warm greenhouse. He is like a hydrangea beginning to get stout, just as those dreadful shrubs are. He always opens conversation by saying that I cut him the other day in Bond Street. I explain that I didn’t see him, which is quite true. I never can see him.”

The florist had removed all the hydrangeas except a small group that screened the centre of the grate. These were the “choicest,” and he waited for further orders.

“No, take them all away,” called out Lady Thurso. “All, every one. Isn’t it so, Ruby?”