After which she opened the window, sat on the side of the bed, and screwed up her ripe red lips to produce a perplexed whistle.
CHAPTER VII
THE IDYL CONCLUDES
They fleeted the days delightfully, as men did in the golden world. They rode together on the rolling moors, they drove through the Devonshire lanes, they strolled through combe and copse, they climbed the tors, they fished the leys, they swam in the sea, and when it was cloudy and cold, and the wind wailed about the house like a woman in pain, they listened to the comedy which Herbert wrote in those dreary days when the ladies drove off to distant houses for lunch or tennis or croquet. For they had not quite hidden their retreat or detached themselves from their kind.
“There’s always scandal within a four-mile radius,” as Miss Regan put it. “Is there on earth a greater piece of philanthropy than to give your neighbors food for gossip? Man cannot live by bread alone.” Matthew asked her in concern if his and Herbert’s visits were causing any talk.
“My dear Mr. Matthew,” she replied, scornfully, “even an actress cannot escape scandal, especially if she goes into society. And truly society is so corrupt, I have often wondered that actresses’ mothers allow them to go into it!”
During one of these absences of the feminine element, when Herbert went over to the house to put the last touches to the painted costume, grumbling at the boredom of such finicking work, Matthew gladly relieved him of the brush, and worked up the whole portrait, while Herbert lay smoking and thinking out the comedy.
Partly out of bravado, partly to enjoy the series of lovely views of dark-green sea and broken crags and nestling villages, the cousins invariably arrived by the cliff-path, seeing the blackberries get riper every day. Sometimes they found the ladies sitting reading on the top of the cliff, which was furzy, with a road-side border of hemlock and dandelions and blue orchids, amid which their dainty parasols showed from afar like gigantic tropical flowers. Then while Matthew drowsed in the light of the sun and of Eleanor, inhaling the odors of bracken and thyme, lazily watching the white surf break far below, the brown trawlers glide across the horizon, the swallows swarm on the beach, and the wild ducks over the sea, Herbert and Olive would rattle away by the hour, often in verbal duels. Matthew Strang thought he had never tasted such pure intellectual joy. Art was often on the tapis; they classified the skies—to-day a Constable, and yesterday a Turner, and to-morrow a Corot. Herbert expounded glibly to the rapt Eleanor the Continental ideas, descanting on Manet and Monet. Nature lay all around them like a model to illustrate these theories, and Eleanor discovered all sorts of shadows and subtle effects she had never noticed before, all with the naïve joy of a child lighting on pretty treasures. She cried out that Art taught people to see Nature. And the Impressionists were right. Look over there! You couldn’t tell whether it was a pool or a pile of fish. And the colors of things changed incessantly! Matthew would sometimes put in a word when appealed to by her, but never when the subject was music, concerning which he was as ignorant as the rest of the party was learned. Once Herbert maintained that the musician was better off than the painter, because his work remained, while pictures perished, destroyed by the aniline and bitumen in their own colors. “Even Mona Lisa’s smile will fade,” he said. “The artist lingers a little longer on the stage than the actor. Pictures are but paltry things at best, and few artists have brains or any large outlook upon life. They’re a petty, quarrelsome clan.” Matthew did not deny it.
Olive cited sculpture as a more durable art than the musician’s, which only lived when performed. Mrs. Wyndwood was convinced that the joy of Art must be to the artist; she said she was fast acquiring a keen interest in the subjective side of Art, and feeling a growing desire to be an artist herself. The Spiritual was all very well, but it needed to be expressed through the Beautiful.
Olive playfully suggested an expedition to the Latin Quarter; Mrs. Wyndwood accepted it seriously and eagerly; she returned to the idea again and again, both in public and in private. Why should they not go to Paris for the winter, and Olive take up sculpture again, and initiate her into the divine mysteries? To judge by the Strangs, artists must be delightful creatures to live among, and sculpture seemed easier and simpler than painting. Olive continued to play with the project. Herbert sneered at the idea of Miss Regan’s return to the plaster of Paris. Literature was, after all, the only art, he said. It contained everything—music of words, painting of scenery, passion of drama. He almost converted Mrs. Wyndwood. She quoted ecstatically, “L’univers a été fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.” But a word from Matthew restored the balance.
They talked of life, too, of fate, free-will, and knowledge absolute, like Milton’s archangels. Herbert, as Lucifer, steadfastly took the lowest views of human nature; now and then Olive’s eye, twinkling with fun, met his as if in a secret understanding that Mrs. Wyndwood must be shocked at all hazards. He fought for the doctrine that sin was a human invention. “Let people have their fling. They exaggerate their powers of sinning. They think they can draw on a boundless internal reservoir of wickedness. As a matter of fact, their powers are singularly limited. They have too much original goodness. For my part, alas! I have found few opportunities of sinning.”