The Osbornes

by E. F. Benson

“Now, I warn you, Dad,” she said. “In one moment Claude shall be called what I said he should be.”

“Then not a word more about it. Well, give my love to that rascal who’s got so much more than he deserves, bless him, and we expect you both to-morrow. Gone to see Uncle Alf, has he? Poor old Alf: a mass of lumbago he was when I saw him two days ago. And acid? I should scarce have thought that anyone could have felt so unkind. And a beautiful day it was, too, with the sun shining, and all nature, as you may say, rejoicing—all but poor old Alf, God bless him. But Claude always does him more good than a quart of liniment, or embrocation either, though what he spends on doctors’ stuff is beyond all telling.”

Such was Mr. Osborne’s plan, and, as has been said, the accomplishment of it gave Dora some rather bad moments. The party was terrifically ill-assorted: Lady Ewart, Mrs. Price, and one or two more like them and their husbands, being balanced against her mother and Austell, the Hungarian ambassador and his wife, and several others of that particular world in which both Mr. and Mrs. Osborne so much wished to be at home. Dora, in consequence, was positively tossed and gored by unremitting dilemma. She was obliged to make herself what she would have called both cheap and vulgar in order to convey at all to the Prices and Ewarts that particular pitch of cordiality to which they were accustomed. Alderman Price, for instance, habitually declined a second helping, not because he did not want (and intend) to have it, but because good manners made him say “No” the first time and “Yes” the second. As for asking for more, as Austell did, he would not have considered that any kind of behaviour. He was used to be pressed or “tempted,” and Dora had to press and tempt him—a thing which, though she would have been delighted if he had eaten a whole haunch of venison, she found difficult to do naturally. You had to call the footman back (Mrs. Osborne did it quite easily), and get him to put Mr. Price’s plate aside, and wait till he had given the affair a second thought. Then he said, “Well, I don’t know as if——” and the matter was brought to a triumphant conclusion. Yet it was not easy to manage if the procedure was new to you. Or, again, his wife particularly liked a glass of port after dinner, which after all was a completely innocent desire, but her gentility was such that she would never have thought of accepting it when it was casually offered her, but every night it had to be accepted in order to oblige Dora. Mrs. Osborne, before giving up the reins of government to her daughter-in-law, had imparted this diplomatic instruction, and Dora had been subsequently assured that her pressing and tempting was held to be the perfection of hospitality.

The flow of badinage, too, that went on incessantly from morning till night, and was almost exclusively matrimonial in character, was difficult to live up to, for whatever she or Claude did was construed by Mr. Osborne or Sir Thomas (with whom Dora, so she was assured by Lady Ewart, had become a favourite) into having some connubial bearing. If, as happened one day, Claude drove Mrs. Price home from the shooting, Lady Ewart, with an inflamed and delighted countenance, told Dora that she wouldn’t wonder if they lost their way, and said the motor had broken down, to explain their coming in late. Or again Dora was pompously asked by Sir Thomas, on a morning of streaming wet, when no shooting was possible, to have a game of billiards, and accepting this proposal was expected to be immensely amused by the suggestion that Claude would be found hiding in the window seat, to hear what went on. The joke was all-embracing; if she spoke to Claude somebody wondered (audibly) what she was saying; if she spoke to anyone else, it was, again audibly, imagined that Claude was looking jealous. And if, for the moment, she did not speak to anybody, wonder was expressed as to what was on her mind.

All this was trivial enough in itself, and, as she well knew, oceans and continents of kindliness lay behind it. Her guests—this section of them at any rate—were pleased and well entertained as far as her part was concerned, and were charmed with her. But during all those seven stricken days—for the party was of the most hospitable order, and embraced a complete week—she had to nail a brave face, so to speak, over her own, and set her teeth inside the smiling mouth. The Prices and the Ewarts had come here to enjoy themselves, and clearly they did. But there was a certain thick-skinned robustness which was necessary to anyone who had to enter into the spirit of their enjoyment. Had the party consisted entirely of Ewarts and Prices and “Pers,” Dora would have found her own conduct an affair of infinitely less difficulty. As it was, her mother and Austell were there, and some six or seven more of her own world who looked on with faint smiles at such times as humour was particularly abundant, and, to do the barest justice to it, it must be said that it seemed unfailingly ubiquitous. One night Sir Thomas had taken Madame Kodjek, the wife of the Hungarian ambassador, into dinner, and in an unusual pause in the conversation Dora had heard her say in her faint silvery voice: “How very amusing, Sir Thomas. What fun you must have in Sheffield.” Then she turned her back on him, put a barrier of a white elbow on the table between him and her, and talked to Dora herself, three places off, for the rest of dinner—a thing which, as Sir Thomas’s indignant face silently testified, was conduct to which he was unaccustomed. Clearly such breach of ordinary manners was a thing unheard of in Sheffield. Dora, halfway between giggles and despair at the incident, had not, though longing to know, the heart to ask Mimi afterward what was the particular incident that made her conclude that life in Sheffield was so humorous an affair; but Sir Thomas had confided in his favourite that he thought the Baroness a very haughty lady and without any sense of what was due “to the gentleman who took you in to dinner.”

It had been difficult, therefore, to steer a course, and, as in the case of those wandering channels in the lagoons, there were here no friendly groups of pali to guide her. She had to guess her way, turn her helm swiftly this way and that, to avoid running aground. Had she not been Dora Osborne she would, if she had found herself in a house party of this description, have had entrancing bedroom talks to Mimi and others about Sir Thomas and the Ewarts, and—the Osbornes. Such talks would not have been unkindly; she would have seen, even as she saw now, that all manner of excellent qualities underlay the irredeemable vulgarity, and, a thing more difficult in her present position, she would have seen the humorous side of affairs. But, as it was, she could not have any bedroom talks at all of this description. Indeed, Mimi and others pointedly avoided, as they were bound to do, any mention of these other guests from the amiable desire not to say things that would embarrass her. Dora had married an Osborne, and by that act had joined another circle. True, she had not in the least left her own, but she had taken on, by necessity, the relations and friends of her husband. Indeed, looking at the transaction as a whole, there was not one of her friends who did not think she had done right, and few who did not a little envy her. There were some slight inconveniences in marrying into such a family, but they weighed very light indeed if balanced against the consequent advantages, and it was the business of her friends to minimize these disadvantages for her, pretend that Sir Thomas made no particular impression on them, and be deaf to Dora’s insidiousness in getting Mrs. Price to have her glass of port. And the advantages were so great: she had gained superabundant wealth in exchange for crippling poverty, the Osbornes’ house was now one to which everybody of any sense, and many of no sense, went, if they were so fortunate as to be asked, and, above all, she had married that charming and quiet Adonis of a husband, who looked anyhow leagues away from and above his effusive parents.

And Claude? During all this week Dora had been filled with an almost ecstatic admiration of him. He took the place corresponding to that which she herself so difficultly occupied, with perfect ease and success, and without apparent effort. To Mrs. Price’s most outrageous sallies he found a reply that convulsed her with laughter, or made her, as the case might be, call him a “naughty man,” and the thing seemed to be no trouble to him. And for the time, anyhow, such replies gave her no jerks, or, if they did, they were jerks of relief. “I shall warn Sir Thomas, Lady Ewart,” he would say, “and you will find yourself watched,” and without pause or hint of discomfiture continue a Bach conversation with Madame Kodjek.

Dora had set herself with a heartfelt enthusiasm to study and find out the secret of this wonderful performance, and she came to the conclusion that it was consummate tact grafted on to a nature as kindly as his father’s or mother’s that produced this perfect flower of behaviour. And the tact—a rare phenomenon rather, for tact implies the tactician, the pleasant schemer—was apparently unconscious. At least if it was conscious, it was Claude’s delightful modesty that disclaimed the knowledge of it. One evening she had a word with him about it.

“Darling, I don’t know how you manage,” she said, “and oh, Claude, I wish you would teach me. Everyone’s delighted with you, and you do it all so easily. How can you flirt—yes, darling, flirt—with Mrs. Price one moment and without transition talk to Mimi on the other side?”

“Oh, the Price woman isn’t so bad,” said he. “She’s a kind old soul really, and if you chaff her a bit she asks no more.”