Britannia Mews Page 27

  Mr. Culver returned to Surbiton almost as to a refuge.

  He trusted it was not to be his sole refuge.

  For the motive of Treff’s repatriation was in fact twofold, and beneath the official motive, the motive he gave Alice, lay another and a far more important. Treff had no objection to picking up a commission or two in London, but what he chiefly desired was to be missed in Florence. A sudden coolness, for the first time in ten years, marred the relations between himself and his patroness; he had carelessly bought a Tiepolo for her which was not only not the work of Tiepolo, but which could be proved to be the work of someone else. Treff hadn’t lived thirty years in Florence without making enemies; rival art-experts rose on all sides to deride him. He looked a fool, and so did Mrs. Van Thal. She reproached him with incompetence, dishonesty, and a too warm admiration of her serving-maid Bianca—this last thrown in at first as a mere makeweight, but later developing into a major charge. Life in the Palazzo Venezia became very uncomfortable. Bianca was dismissed, and no one else could manage Mrs. Van Thal’s hair; on the evening of the Principessa’s ball, Treff strolled into Mrs. Van’s dressing-room (such was his naïf habit) and saw Fury mirrored in the glass. “Look at me!” cried Mrs. Van Thal: she was indeed a heart-rending spectacle. One side of her hair was up, the other down; before her on the dressing-table lay a number of the wire frames known as “rats,” a dozen combs, hundreds of hairpins; the new maid was weeping into her apron. “An hour’s work!” cried Mrs. Van Thal, “and look at me!”

  Treff, however, glanced first at the maid, who thankfully fled. Then he advanced towards the dressing-table, smiling at Mrs. Van Thal through the glass. In the early days of their acquaintance her beauty had been opulent—already verging on the over-blown, but still able to command admiration. Italian cooking and Italian siestas had made her gross. Her big cheeks ballooned, she had three chins; as she now sat—her dressing-jacket flung open in the heat of despair, her stays still unlaced—betrayed by nature, abandoned by art—she had all the dreadful pathos, without the dignity, of a stranded whale.

  “You always look beautiful to me,” said Treff.

  Mrs. Van Thal turned and faced him. Above her fat mottled cheeks her eyes were suddenly shrewd.

  “You’ll have to do better than that, Treff Culver!” said she.

  Treff at once recognized a crisis. A little roughness, a little highhandedness, he was used to; never before had his patroness addressed him in precisely that voice. He said lightly:—

  “I don’t call you a pretty young girl, Madonna, but as something of an expert—”

  “Expert, indeed! What about my Tiepolo?”

  Treff Culver’s was hot a courageous character—he did not reply, “Oh, damn your Tiepolo!”—but he did make a swift and in the circumstances an almost heroic decision. He said:—

  “I’m going to London. It’s time I looked up some of my editors; and there’s family business I ought to settle on the spot. You won’t mind if I leave early next week?”

  “You can leave to-morrow!” snapped Mrs. Van Thal.

  Treff in fact did so. He was luckily in funds, for he had made fifty pounds commission on the Tiepolo deal, and managed to hang on to it. Mrs. Van Thal relented so far as to come and see him off—her countenance already the ample battleground of conflicting emotions. In another couple of days, thought Treff, regretfully, she would have relented altogether; as it was, he had to pin his hopes on her knowledge of his Surbiton address.

  The saddest part of the whole affair was that Treff, when he paid that fatal compliment, had been speaking the truth. He possessed the rare quality of gratitude. Gratitude and affection blurred, or rather reduced, Mrs. Van Thal’s current shape, and fixed her appearance as it had been when he first saw her. (When he told her she was like a magnolia: her full smooth curves and white skin made the simile not inapt.) How foolish of Mrs. Van Thal to quarrel with such true, nay blind devotion! How damnably unfortunate for Treff, to have his truth taken for the grossest flattery! Now Treff was alone in Surbiton, and Mrs. Van Thal alone, or so he hoped, in the Palazzo Venezia. He hoped this very much. He hoped she wasn’t making a fool of herself. Above all he hoped that she would soon write to him and tell him to come back.

  3

  It was inevitable that, between her brother and her cousin, Adelaide’s name should be mentioned.

  It was mentioned, indeed, within half an hour of Treff’s arrival, while he was taking his first cup of English tea. Freddy Baker had not come home, and Dodo was out of the room, when Alice rather hurriedly enquired whether he ever heard from his sister.

  “From Adelaide? Never a line,” said Treff. “I don’t even know whether she’s still alive.”

  “Nor do I,” confessed Alice. “It does seem dreadful, but it’s her own doing. She knows where we live, and she’s never made the slightest move …”

  “Do you want her to?” asked Treff shrewdly.

  “I naturally dislike losing sight of a first cousin.”

  “I dare say it would be natural in me to dislike losing sight of a sister. In fact, I feel nothing but relief. When we were children, Adelaide used to bully me; even at the time of my father’s funeral I could see her working up to bully me again; she would certainly attempt to bully me if we met to-day. I’m very glad you don’t see her.”

  Alice looked up, hearing her daughter’s step in the hall; but Dodo went into the dining-room. The movement was not lost on Treff. His stay abroad seemed to have developed in him a quite feminine power of intuition.

  “Does Dodo …?”

  “No,” said Alice. “It simply hasn’t arisen.” She paused. Should she mention that odd little incident, Dodo’s night in Britannia Mews? She had never questioned her daughter on the subject; first Treff’s letter, then Miss Hambro’s munificence, drove it from her mind; afterwards she told herself that if the Mews had become a smart address Adelaide certainly wouldn’t be living there, and that in any case questions would only point Dodo’s interest in an undesirable direction.…

  “It simply hasn’t arisen,” repeated Alice, “and I don’t imagine it will.”

  CHAPTER IV

  1

  The days passed, and no letter came with an Italian stamp. Treff wrote once, a chatty casual note—containing nevertheless the names of two editors—and then pride forbade him to write again, and every day his anxiety grew. Surbiton, for all its creature comforts, did not suit him; he caught cold out shopping with Alice; he had nothing to say to Freddy; and there was something about young Dodo which positively worried him. Pretty as she was, and quite surprisingly attentive, he had the uneasy feeling that she was about to call his bluff. Treff was a Culver as well as an art-expert: there were moments, usually very early in the morning, when the Culver hard-headedness in him blew away his slender achievements in print, and blew cold on Mrs. Van Thal’s loyalty, and left him naked—friendless, incomeless—in a world of Philistines.

  In point of fact, he misread Dodo’s attitude. Her eager eye was beseeching, not critical; it was a growing anxiety to her that none of the tunes her uncle played—and Tommy had really hit on quite a clever simile—was the one she wanted. In variations on the twin themes of art and Florence he was inexhaustible, one had only to pronounce the name Botticelli, or Perugino, or the Brownings, and out came a perfectly polished (perhaps perfectly practised) little disquisition, lasting several minutes and in its way admirable; but other key-words, such as “family,” “marriage,” “stagnation,” and “suburbia,” found him mute. Dodo was baffled. Could one who had himself escaped from the Philistines really look so indifferently upon a kindred spirit still struggling to be free? Could it be possible that he did not recognize a kindred spirit? Dodo, by being extremely short with her mother, unkind to Tommy, and curt with Aunt Ellen, did all in her power to prove herself one. But the object of these manoeuvres remained obtuse, and at last Dodo determined on a frontal attack.

  The occasion was propitious: it was the night of the Police Con
cert. Alice and Freddy, like all prudent householders, took tickets; their originality lay in attending the concert. (Alice believed that the Force would be gratified, and come more quickly in case of burglars. Freddy honestly enjoyed the comic songs.) Treff and Dodo stayed at home, and after dinner took their coffee tête-à-tête.

  “Uncle Treff,” began Dodo at once, “have you had a happy life?”

  Treff did not much care for her use of the past tense; but it was a question he could answer.

  “Yes, my dear. It’s been spent in beautiful surroundings, studying beautiful things. No one could ask more.”

  “Oh,” said Dodo. “Yes, I see that. But I’m not particularly artistic. I mean, I went to the Slade, but it’s not my whole life. Uncle Treff, if you were me, would you marry Tommy?”

  “Yes,” said Treff promptly. “He seems a very nice young fellow.”

  Dodo jumped up and stamped her foot.

  “Of course he’s nice! But is that enough?”

  “Well, what else would you do?”

  “Exactly.” Dodo took a quick turn round the room—she had her mother’s habit of walking about when under any emotional stress—and Treff prudently drew in his feet. “I’m to marry Tommy because otherwise there’s nothing for me to do but stay messing about at home. It isn’t good enough. The trouble with me,” said Dodo violently, “is that I’m too old and too young. I’m too old to marry Tommy blindly, as I might have done two years ago, only we had to wait till he got more money, and I’m too young to settle down for life. I feel my life’s just beginning. I want to take a flat in town with Sonia Trent. You don’t know her, but she’s wonderful. I want to make a fresh start. I’ve exhausted Surbiton, Uncle Treff! I don’t want to live here all my life! I want something big and real and tremendous!”

  Treff sighed. He found the company of his niece very tiring. If she hadn’t been so pretty—if she hadn’t turned to him now with such a sparkle of admiration—he would really have had to go upstairs.

  “That’s why I admire you, Uncle Treff,” went on Dodo rapidly. “Because you didn’t just drift. You had enough of Farnham—do you know we used to go to Mr. Vaneck’s garden-party every year?—and so you cleared out to Italy. I can just imagine the struggle it meant.”

  Treff could not but remember his mother’s eager acquiescence in his slightest wish; but after fifty the admiration of the young is very precious. He said sententiously:—

  “Most things worth having must be struggled for. I was fortunate in that I had a definite vocation.”

  “All the same, I can’t think how you did it. I couldn’t even make Mother and Dad move into town. And as for letting me take a flat …! But I suppose you had your own money?”

  “I was soon earning some.”

  “Of course, your generation doesn’t like to talk about money. Or sex.” Dodo flashed him a quick, considering glance. Repressed? Was Uncle Treff repressed? Could one put the straight question? One could try.… “You can talk to me just as though I were a man,” said Dodo. “Have one of Dad’s cigars. Uncle Treff, don’t you think sex is terribly important?”

  Mr. Culver stiffened. His hand, reaching towards the cigar box, halted in mid-air. But it was not because of his niece’s straight question: it was because he had just heard, crunching up the path, the tread of the postman bringing the last delivery. The next moment a loud double-knock resounded through the house; before it died away Treff was on his feet and making for the hall.

  There was no letter for him, only a postcard, but it had an Italian stamp. Treff read it in one burning glance:—

  Amico mio, will you get Bumpus or Hatchards to send me A Sabine Farm by T. Fowler Cox, Oxford University Press, also anything else he has written. Best love, M. VAN THAL.

  Impatient of the interruption, Dodo appeared behind him in the drawing-room door.

  “Uncle Treff—”

  “Oh, hold your tongue!” cried Treff violently.

  “Uncle Treff!”

  Under her astonished gaze he pulled himself together, thrust the card into his pocket, and turned back to her with a pallid smile.

  “I’m sorry, my dear; I’ve just found that all my correspondence has been sent to the wrong address. What were you saying?”

  Dodo hesitated a moment, wishing that he would come back and sit down. But he looked as though he might be going upstairs.… She said uncertainly:—

  “Well, I’d just asked you what you thought about sex.…”

  “Sex!” Treff smiled again. “No sane man wastes much time on it.” Inside his pocket his fingers were busy at the pasteboard, crumpling and twisting it into a bit of rubbish. “Women and flowers are both very charming things, my dear; neither men nor bees could do without them; personally I’ve always considered the bee a very sensible fellow.”

  Dodo looked at him sombrely. A tune on a music-box! Without another word she turned her back on him and walked into the drawing-room; and Treff Culver crept upstairs.

  2

  At breakfast next morning Alice was very cheerful, and full of the concert; Dodo and her uncle were both rather silent, and ready to be disagreeable. It rained hard. Freddy Baker armed himself with umbrella and mackintosh and splashed gamely down the path, every inch a bread-winner. No sooner had he disappeared, and Alice returned to her description of Constable Bright singing “Old Black Joe,” than Treff announced that he was going up to town himself.

  “In this weather! Nonsense, Treff,” cried Alice. “You’ll catch cold.”

  Treff pointed out that he had a cold already.

  “Then you’ll make it worse.”

  Treff got up with a defiant sneeze and asked if he might borrow an umbrella.

  “Have mine,” said Dodo gloomily. “It’s got a hole in it.”

  “If you must go,” cried Alice, now really annoyed, “why couldn’t you have gone with Freddy? And anyway, can’t you telephone?”

  “I happen to have an appointment with an editor.”

  “Have my mackintosh,” added Dodo. “It’s green silk.”

  In the end Treff went off wearing his own overcoat and two scarves, under an umbrella which had belonged to Mr. Hambro. It was a handsome silk one with a gold band.

  “I expect he’ll lose it,” said Dodo.

  She herself spent an hour or two pottering about, rang up Sonia, got no answer, and finally drifted into the morning-room. Alice was sitting at the bureau, doing her accounts, and when Dodo asked to look at Uncle Treff’s articles, very willingly produced the big Manila envelope in which she piously preserved them. Dodo sat down on the floor with it and began to examine the contents with great attention.

  The result was surprising. Treff Culver had reached Florence in 1893. His first article—“A Stroll round the Pitti”—appeared in the World of Art in May, 1894. In September of the same year appeared “Some Notes on Perugino.” Between 1894 and 1900 he apparently published some half-dozen articles a year; in 1901 the high water mark was reached with eight. After that his output—or at any rate his printed output—declined, until in 1914 only one article saw the light. Then came a gap, no doubt due to the war. In 1919 the Connoisseur printed “A Stroll through the Pitti.” In 1921 appeared “A Note on Botticelli”; and that was the last. Dodo sat back on her heels and gathered all the cuttings together; they made a noticeably slender sheaf.

  “Mother, is this all?”

  “I believe so, dear,” said Alice absently.

  “But he can’t have lived on this!”

  “People asked his advice as well, and I dare say paid him for it. Treff always managed to get along.…”

  “Do you mean he sponged on people?”

  “Dodo, I will not have you speak of your uncle in that way!”

  “I’m simply curious,” said Dodo reasonably. “I just want to know how he got enough to eat.”

  Now, this was something Alice had wondered about, herself; and putting down her pen she said thoughtfully:—

  “I did hear—from Mrs. Ambro
se, you know—that that Palazzo place Treff wrote from wasn’t a guest-house at all. It belonged to a rich American lady. Perhaps Treff was staying with her.…”

  “I bet he was staying with her!”

  “Dodo!”

  “Well, how long has he been using that address?”

  “Oh, for years and years,” admitted Alice vaguely.

  “Then I bet he was her lover.”

  “Dodo!”

  “I hope he was her lover!” cried Dodo furiously. “It would be the only excuse! And he’s quite capable of not—I can just see him living there like a cat on a cushion and lapping up the cream and being too terribly æsthetic and sneering about sex! And now he’s simply deserted the poor old thing just because he thinks he’d like to come back to England! I call it disgusting!”

  There were moments when Alice Baker surprised everyone by her clear-headedness. No one could have run a house as well as she did without mental ability, as a rule the house absorbed it—her smalltalk was woolly, and any serious conversation with her daughter fogged by emotion; but now, looking straight from her accountbooks to her daughter, she said deliberately:—