The Adventure of the Beautiful Things

by Hugh Walpole

THE ADVENTURE OF THE
BEAUTIFUL THINGS

By HUGH WALPOLE

AMONG the many episodes with which during this year I was concerned, this is, perhaps, the only shameful one. When I say shameful, I mean that I have still, looking back, scruples of conscience about it. From the æsthetic point of view these scruples are unjustified; from the moral—well, I don't know. You shall judge for yourself. The case centres round Mrs. Hartington, who was a very remarkable woman. Her real name, of course, was not Hartington, but it is only her death, some six months ago, that enables to tell this story. Even now her friends may perhaps recognise this account of her, and if they don't recognise her, they will possibly recognise her still more remarkable husband.

Charles Hartington died in the autumn of 1923. He had some business of some sort—what it was does not matter. He was never, I should fancy, very wealthy, but he had a passion for collecting beautiful things, and, with his exquisite taste, his very great knowledge, and the freedom that his business allowed him for travel, he managed to gather things around him as every man can manage if he really cares enough and has sufficient leisure. Cares! Charles Hartington did not, I suppose, care for anything else except his beautiful things. I saw him only once, when he was showing an aunt of mine over his house in Evelyn Gardens. I was with her. The things that he showed us were so lovely that I paid very little attention, I am afraid, to himself; but that is as he would have had it. He was like the voice of his possessions, and you felt that if they were not there he would not be there either. This question of the living and breathing vitality of concrete objects is acknowledged by some people and entirely denied by others; you either feel it or you don't. It is one of the really great divisions between people, and the exact essence of this division has never been better put, I imagine, than by Henry James in his exquisite "Spoils of Poynton." I must ever apologise to that great man for this little ghost of his magnificent art.

Hartington was not a collector of any especial kind or period; if a thing was beautiful enough, and he could afford it, he got it. And yet the house in Evelyn Gardens in no way resembled a museum. The true drawback, I take it, to any museum is that the things therein do not really belong to anybody. They feel themselves that lack, and I am entirely in sympathy with De Goncourt when he said that he would leave his wonderful collection to the auctioneer's hammer to be broken up and scattered once again among private individuals rather than to the cold, indifferent chastity of a vast impersonal building. On that day when I visited Hartington with my aunt I remember that he picked up a Tang horse with a deep blue saddle and held it, stroking its gleaming patina very much as my aunt herself would cherish her trembling Pekinese. He was, I think, a long, thin man with a ragged grey moustache and a stammer. I had the impression, I remember, that he wanted us to be gone; my aunt, of course, said all the wrong things.

Mrs. Hartington I came to know rather well because I was a friend of her son David. David was, at the time of his father's death, about thirty years of age, a long, thin, shy man, very inarticulate, hiding deeply his feelings.

I had not become his friend until, one day a few weeks after his father's death, meeting me somewhere, he took me aside and begged to speak to me. "I want your advice," he, began shyly, but with great earnestness.

"Rather," I answered, "if there is anything I can do?"

"It's like this," he went on. "You know my father died some weeks ago. He left everything to my mother."

"Yes," I said. It seemed such an unlikely thing for him to have done.

"He made a will on the day he married her, and never another afterwards."

He hesitated and then came out with it. I found to my surprise that he loved his father's things passionately, had always loved them since he was a child. He wasn't, he explained to me, in any sense a collector, didn't want to acquire more things. He didn't care for these things for their monetary value, nor for their rarity, simply for themselves. He had had them round him since he was a baby; he had come, he explained to me, to feel about them personally, so personally that he didn't want any other friends—he didn't think that he would ever find any other friends half so good. He told me this nervously, obviously expecting that I would think him an awful fool; but when he saw that I did not, he sighed with relief; he perceived that I had something of the same sort of feeling myself. He then went on to explain his mother to me. This was difficult for him, because he wanted to be loyal to her, had a deep affection for her, and understood her point of view much better probably than she did herself. The point was that she had never cared for her husband's possessions, not only not cared, but had been continually exasperated and irritated by them. I understood that this question had been, from the very beginning of their married life, the one great division between them. Mrs. Hartington must, when she was a girl, have been very beautiful, and I imagine that Hartington had added her to his collection with a great deal of æsthetic enjoyment; but Mrs. Hartington had, of course, been broadened and thickened and hardened by daily living, and as her spirit had never been æsthetic—far from it, indeed—there was soon nothing left in her to respond to Hartington's kind of beauty. That is, of course, the great advantage that beautiful things have over beautiful people. I don't imagine that Hartington ever cared greatly for moral qualities or splendid principles.

The point now was that Mrs. Hartington intended to sell everything. She was going to move into a flat, and would retain only the quite essential furniture. The discovery of this intention had come to David with a shock of the completest surprise. He had never dreamt for a moment that there would ever be a time when these things would not be with him and he with them. He told me that the morning, after breakfast, when his mother had told him quite casually that everything would be sold, had been the most frightful morning of his life. He had made, he was afraid, an awful scene. He had taken his mother, of course, by complete surprise, she never having known him make a scene before; they had always been the best of friends. I suppose that all through her married life subconsciously she had been looking forward to the time when she would be able to sell everything. She was not a cruel woman nor a revengeful—she had cared for her husband in a pitying, maternal sort of fashion—but she had looked on his purchases as desperate extravagances, justified only by their becoming one day excellent investments. It must have seemed to her a kind of insanity that a grown man should go all the way to Pekin, neglecting his proper business, to buy a blue plate, and now, to her amazement, here was her only child giving an exhibition of the same sort of insanity. I imagine that even though she had not before been determined to sell everything, now, after this hysterical exhibition of her son's, she was absolutely resolved.

What it came to, after further talk, was that I should take luncheon with Mrs. Hartington and see whether I could make any impression upon her. It was rather pathetic, this idea of David's that I should be able to make an impression. His belief was, poor dear, that anyone would be able to make a better impression than he. He had great confidence in me. I had on this occasion very little in myself. However, the matter was arranged. Mrs. Hartington would be very glad to see any friend of David's and show him her husband's things. Part of her message to me was that I had better hurry up, because they wouldn't be there to show very much longer.

As I stood rather nervously waiting in the drawing-room of the house in Evelyn Gardens, I realised that everything was the same as it ever had been, everything had a permanent look about it, and you needed, I reflected, a great deal of ruthless determination and a complete absence of sensitive imagination to dare to uproot this perfectly adjusted beauty. But when Mrs. Hartington came in I saw that she was exactly the woman to effect these changes. She was an exceedingly English type. America produces determined women, but they are determined for certain very definite purposes; they have their work to do in the world and know it. But Mrs. Hartington was determined and resolute simply because she was Mrs. Hartington; it had never occurred to her that she should not have her way about everything, nor that her way would be anything but the absolutely right one. In physical appearance she was square, ruddy-faced, with eyes that were good-natured, but that never questioned anything. I suspect that she had never shown surprise nor remorse nor apprehension nor desire; it was impossible to conceive her in love. She was not so much a woman as a fact. She would be honest and honourable, and would be one of those persons who would tell you just what they thought of you, and then be sure that they had done you a service. She would be excellent on committees, and would have clear views about everything. If she knew aches and pains, she would never say so. If you were in trouble, she would be an excellent person to go to for advice, but you would never dream of going to her.

She greeted me with kindly patronage. I was David's young friend, she was David's mother, and so she would be kind to me, but without considering me at all. I was to her, I fancy, something like a very easy problem in algebra. I found it difficult at first to think about her at all because of the things in the room. I have, as I have already said, been terribly susceptible to beauty; I say terribly because if you care very much you will be for ever wanting more than you can get, not possessively wanting, of course, but imaginatively. There were so many lovely things in the room that I was bewildered. The Tang horse with the blue saddle on the mantelpiece, the small Constable study for his picture "A Summer Afternoon After a Shower," an exquisite jewelled crucifix, two Rembrandt etchings, the "De Jonghe" and "The Artist Sitting at a Window Drawing"—these were some of the things that I especially noticed. The room must sound to you something of a jumble, but the extraordinary thing was that there was no confusion at all. Hartington had obviously studied deeply the exact position of everything in the room, and in some way had transmuted them all into a general pattern of colour and symmetry. When we went into the dining-room to luncheon, I began to feel, against my will, a hostility to the good lady. I have always felt envious of those lucky people who are so insensitive to personality that they can pursue their purpose without prejudice. I suppose it was my conceit that irritated me with Mrs. Hartington. I was so inconsiderable to her that if the pretty servant maid had brushed me aside with the crumbs she would have scarcely realised that I was gone. She asked me questions about myself in that kindly and indifferent manner that charitable ladies use when they are visiting the neglected poor—where had I been to school, and had I been to Cambridge or Oxford. She supposed I played games, like most English young men. It was such a pity that David didn't play games better; she believed in young men playing games. Had I got a father, mother, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts? Where did I live, and didn't I find the English winter absurdly long? I answered all these things as well as I could, and then, towards the end of the meal, most foolishly burst into an ecstasy about the lovely things on every side of us. It was the worst move I could have made, but I expect that that was one of Mrs. Hartington's attributes; she was for ever forcing people into absurd situations because she was herself so calm and so indifferent. From the moment of my enthusiasm I was lost as far as she was concerned.

"I am glad you like them," she said; "they have been, of course, very greatly admired. For myself, I don't understand this passion for collecting. It gave my husband pleasure, and so I acquiesced in it, but what I say is that there are plenty of museums, there are better things, you know, to spend one's money on." She was so sure of this that I was bound to contradict her.

"I don't agree," I burst out, cursing myself at the same time subconsciously. "There is nothing I envy anybody so much as being able to have such things near them. A museum is such a cold place. Why, that Forain would be nothing in a museum; there would be fifty others as good, and thousands of other wonderful etchings as well, but here, all by itself, it knows that you care for it, and it responds and is grateful."

At least after this I had forced her to consider me. She looked at me with the gravest suspicion. "I do hope you haven't been telling my son these things," she said. "I am going to sell everything."

"You're going to sell everything!" I exclaimed. "Oh, Mrs. Hartington, how can you? Of course I agree that it's better to sell them than to send them to a museum; but they belong here—you'll miss them yourself terribly after they're gone."

I had cooked my goose with a vengeance. She took me over the house with a speed that showed that she wanted to get rid of me as soon as possible. There was a room upstairs, with some Corots, a Daubigny, and a Sisley, that seemed to me the most perfect place of rest that I had ever seen. The walls were a very faint primrose, the curtains some soft silver grey, there was a little cabinet holding some pale blue porcelain, and the Daubigny had in it a wood and a stream of such perfect peace and contentment that I could have gazed at it for ever. I was allowed the merest glimpse; it seemed to me that the room sighed behind me as I left it.

In the hall, as she said good-bye to me, these were her parting words: "Please don't encourage David in his extravagant ideas; now that his father is gone, he must realise facts." She said "facts" as though she were slamming the door to on all the exquisite things that life contains. She was wearing, I remember, a dress of dark green that encased her square hard figure like a sheet of armour. I am sorry to say that I had a strong mad impulse to pinch her and see whether she would scream. How relieved I was when I found myself in the street without having created a scandal! I had been a complete failure, but now I was resolved, as I had never been resolved about anything before, that the matter should not end here.

My next conversation with David was distressing; he had had such great confidence in my success. "But why should I have succeeded?" I asked him. "I had never seen your mother before. There was no reason why I should influence her; she had the greatest contempt for me from the first moment she saw me."

"Not contempt," said David quietly; "she isn't contemptuous—she's indifferent."

"Those are the hardest people to influence," I said. "You may as well make your mind up to it. So far as I am concerned, I shall only influence her the wrong way."

We sat staring at one another blankly; then, in his gentle, hesitating voice, he came out with his awful proposal. "We shall have to steal the things," he said.

You can imagine my surprise and almost consternation. There are some people from whom one expects desperate suggestions, and there are others who we know have no moral principle at all, and for these people, let us deny it as we may, if we like them we often shift our own moral code. If anyone had ever told me that David Hartington would one day calmly suggest that he should rob his own mother, I would, of course, have given him the lie.

"I know it sounds bad," David went on, not at all apologetically, "but I can't help that. Mother's got heaps of money. If she loses some of these things, she won't financially feel the difference—in fact," he continued excitedly, "I don't think she will even realise that they're gone, and that's the test. If we take them away, and she looks round and doesn't know they're not there, it will mean that they've meant so little to her that she's got absolutely no right to dispose of them. That's an immoral theory, but æsthetically it's just. If someone has a beautiful thing, and doesn't even know he has it, then he's got no right to it whatever."

"Don't be so foolish," I answered him. "You mean to tell me that if you took that Tang horse away from the mantelpiece she wouldn't miss it? Of course she would."

"That's my belief," he answered. "I know my mother better than you do. She's astoundingly blind about some things. She never would listen to my father when, in the old days, he tried to tell her about his acquisitions—she made a point of not listening. The Tang horse doesn't mean more to her than a soup tureen, and not so much; she's never looked at the thing individually at all. She never looks at anything unless it's so bright in colour that she simply can't escape it. That's the test—that's the test. Of course we won't take everything—we couldn't if we wanted to—only a few of the most beautiful things."

I stared at him in amazement, he said it so calmly. "You," I cried, "you to talk like this! And why we? You can commit your own burglaries."

"All right," he answered. "It is my affair; you shan't be dragged into it if you don't want to be."

And then, most perversely, I did want to be, simply, I think, because I had had luncheon with Mrs. Hartington. I wanted to pay her back a little of her indifferent patronage. "Well, I'll see," I answered cautiously. "Tell me your plan."

"I shan't tell you my plan," he said, "unless you agree to come in with me. It's much better you should know nothing about it unless you're going to share in it."

"I'll help you," I agreed. "I am ready to go to prison for those things."

He was greatly relieved. "That's fine," he answered. "The thing's quite simple. We will go one day when she's away in the country, have a car outside, put the things into it, and go off with them. More than that, I shall put the things up in my flat, ask her to tea, let her look round and take it all in, and if then she doesn't say anything, I am justified completely."

"It's impossible she shouldn't notice," I answered.

"You don't know my mother," he told me.

I was, after this, strangely haunted by some of these possessions—the Tang horse, the blue plate, the jewelled crucifix, the Daubigny, were present to me as though I had them in my own room. You may say that these things had no life. I say that they had, and am convinced that the Tang horse was fully aware that its future was at stake. You know how a dog, when his master is going away, will be conscious of this for days beforehand; so was the Tang horse conscious, and I am sure that he hated Mrs. Hartington with a deadly hatred. On the day of our adventure—a Saturday—there was a fog, one of those especial London fogs that are never still, but creep up and down the town like an invading army. It collects all its forces in one especial spot, has great fun there, choking everything and everybody, bewildering the unimaginative, exciting the romantic, aggravating the practical, delaying the amorous, throttling the avaricious, and then, when it has had its fun, moving on, with a throaty chuckle, somewhere else and beginning its games all over again.

It was not very thick when we arrived outside Evelyn Gardens. The houses there stood out of it as though they were surrounded by water; spirals and whorls of yellow mist played about the walls. Here there was a shining knocker, there a pair of nice clean steps; here three peering windows, there a crooked chimney. Only a little way there was blackness, with shouts and lighted flares and discordant hootings. The nice little maid, Elsie, opened the door for us, and of course showed no surprise at David's presence. Mrs. Hartington had gone for the week-end. At first she had thought she would not go, the fog was so bad, but at last she had made up her mind. She would be back on Monday for luncheon.

"That's right, Elsie," David said kindly. "We shan't want you any more. I have got something to do for my mother."

We went into the drawing-room, dim with a sort of grey mist, turned on the electric light, and considered things. There was no hurry—we had two days if we pleased. David had been quite clear as to what he wanted, but now, when he faced the room, he was not so sure. Everything pleaded to be taken—of that there could be no possible doubt; it was as though they had all crowded around us and besought us. Only the Tang horse was quiet and composed, because he knew that he would not be left.

"Well, then," said David, looking about him, "there's the horse and those plates, the Constable, the two Rembrandts, the Forain upstairs, the amber box, the Georgian sugar castor, the porphyry bowl——"

"The Daubigny," I interrupted.

"Yes, the Daubigny, the crucifix——" And he went on enumerating one thing after another until I called on him to stop.

"This is absurd," I said. "We can't take more than a dozen things at the most. Your mother may be blind, but if the whole house was stripped she must notice something."

"Well, then," he began again, "there's the Tang horse, the Daubigny, the two Rembrandt etchings, those two plates——" And so he went on with a list as large as the first one.

"We shall not take more than eight things," I said firmly. "If you won't agree, I'll leave the house instantly, and will have nothing more to do with it."

He saw reluctantly the justice of this, and we spent then a most pathetic half-hour, taking things up, putting them down, stroking them, holding them under the light from every possible angle, sighing and exulting and sighing again. At last, however, we got to work. We chose the Tang horse, the two Rembrandts, the two plates, the Daubigny, the Constable and the jewelled crucifix. Fortunately these things left no very striking spaces. The pictures hung from a cornice, and a very little shifting of other pictures filled the empty spaces. We put a Chinese camel in the place of the horse, and a lovely dark red bowl where the plates had been. The real trouble then began. About the Forain—he must take it, he loved it better than anything there. It was the exquisite "Return of the Prodigal Son," and if anything was ever vocal in its appeal to be considered, that was. But I was firm. No more than eight, I said. I knew that if this was admitted, there would be trouble about something else—we should be there all day. "I'll leave the crucifix and take the Forain," he said. And then he looked at the beautiful ivory Christ, so pale and gentle and appealing. He shook his head. "No, I must have the crucifix. It's been there ever since I was a kid; it belongs to me more than anything else in the house."

Meanwhile I had wrapped up the pictures and etchings and put them in the car. I was holding the Tang horse in my arms, and just about to wrap it up, when the door opened and we heard a voice: "David, you here! I have been at that station a whole hour. There's no hope of the train. It's too provoking! How do you do?"—rather stiffly to me. My heart hammered. I had mechanically put the horse back on the mantelpiece, where it stood rather indignantly beside the camel, and then gazed like a fool, with my mouth open.

David, however, was marvellous; he rose to the situation as though he had never known any other. "So sorry about the train, mother," he said; "it is bad luck. But you'll have a nice quiet Sunday, with no engagements with tiresome people whom you don't really want to see."

"That's all very well," she answered impatiently, looking about her. "How foggy this room is! It seems to get in everywhere. Where's Elsie? I must have something to eat. You've had your lunch, I suppose?"

"Yes, mother," said David calmly, "we have. We're just off."

She looked about her, and, as it seemed to me, most penetratingly; it was the fog that disturbed her. She walked up and down, indignant that anything should dare to interfere with her well-arranged plans. My heart seemed to stop beating; she actually went up to the mantelpiece and in an absent-minded way laid her hand on the camel. Then she walked off again and, to my horror, stared straight at the place where the two Rembrandts ought to be. "This fog makes everything so filthy," she said. "I can't imagine why they haven't discovered something to stop it. How stupid people are!"

There was worse to follow. She turned towards us with that determined jerk of her head that I was already beginning to know so well. "I know what I'll do," she said. "I suppose that's your car I saw standing outside. If you're going off now, you shall take me as far as the Women's Constitutional; I'll have something to eat there."

Even now David didn't lose his head. "All right, mother," he said. "You'd better speak to Elsie about your being here over the week-end, then come along with us."

"Yes, I will," she answered, and moved out of the room.

He turned to me. "We haven't a moment to lose. You take the horse; I've got the plates." In another moment we had everything in the back of the car, had covered up the parcels with a rug, and I sat firmly beside them. "She'll have to sit in front with me," he said grimly, "otherwise I'll strangle her!"—a most regrettable thing for a son to say about his mother. So we sat in the car waiting, the fog whirling about us, driven by a cold and biting wind, and behaving exactly as though it knew what we were doing, and was malignantly delighted with our wickedness. Mrs. Hartington came out. She made as though she were going to get into the back of the car.

"No, mother," said David, "you sit in front with me; it'll be warmer for you."

Here I think her dislike of me assisted us; she would rather not sit with me if she could help it, and she planted herself in her solid, determined ruthless fashion beside her son.

Once she looked back, "Have you been shopping?" she asked. "What are all those things under the rug?"

"Yes, I've been shopping," David answered. "Please don't talk, mother, if you don't mind; this fog makes driving so difficult."

We did indeed have a most helter-skelter journey, and took a long time to reach the Women's Constitutional. When she had at last disappeared behind those gloomy portals, I could have cried with relief.

"You see, I was right," he said excitedly as we drove towards his flat; "she didn't notice a thing."

"You didn't give her much chance," I replied. "The test will be when you've got them up in your flat."

As we approached the final climax, my excitement became terrific. There seemed to me to be very much more in this than Mrs. Hartington's anger or David's disappointment. It was a test for the whole of humanity. Could it really be that there were people in the world, healthy, normal, intelligent people, who cared so little for beautiful things that they simply did not see them when they were right in front of their noses? I had myself known something of this. I was in my own way a small collector—some etchings and prints, a few rare books, some bronzes—and I had realised what every collector realises, the disappointment when some friend who appears to regard life very much as you do sees nothing at all in something that stirs the very depths of your being. "Well, I do think that's pretty," a lady had once said of my Meryon "Morgue," a rather poor impression, because, of course, I couldn't afford a good one. The Meryon "Morgue" pretty! It certainly takes all sorts to make a world.

But here would be the supreme unquestionable test. Here were some of the most beautiful things in the world, things she had known all her life; we surely could not escape.

As you may imagine, we had an exciting time arranging them in David's flat. The flat was small, but the sitting-room was a nice, square chamber with a high ceiling. What he had in it was good, but not so good, of course, as these new possessions.

"If you put the Tang horse on the mantelpiece," I said, "you're simply asking for it; it's impossible that she should not notice it."

But he was determined; his conscience could not be appeased unless he set himself the uttermost test. The Daubigny was in his bedroom, the jewelled crucifix on his writing-table, the blue plates in his dining-room. Then he asked his mother to lunch, and asked me, too.

"Oh, I'm not coming," I answered. "For one thing, I couldn't bear the suspense; for another, if there is a row, it would be so awkward, my being there."

"Of course you've got to come," he answered irritably; the strain was getting on his nerves. "The very fact that she doesn't like you will take her attention off the room. You can't desert me now." And I couldn't; my curiosity was too strong.

The fatal day was beautiful, spring-like, warm and full of sun; everything showed up as clearly as could be. I couldn't believe but that in the first minute she would exclaim at the Tang horse. She stood there looking about her; she obviously had something on her mind. She looked around, her eyes lighting first here, then there. She went up to the mantelpiece, stared straight at the horse, gazed and gazed at it. Well, now, of course, we were done. I know that David thought so; I could see it in his eyes. Well, what of it? He was, after all, her own son. She could not put him into gaol; she could only indignantly have the things sent back again, and sell them immediately. It would mean ignominy for me and bitter disappointment for him—indeed, I saw that it could in a way ruin his whole life. He would always be longing for these things; they would persistently destroy, by their absence, his pleasure in any other of his possessions. He would never be able to afford to buy them back; he was, in a way, a ruined man.

She turned round; we waited for our doom. Her eyes rested on the two Rembrandts. "David," she said, her voice passionately determined, "I want another word of five letters for mantelpiece; you must help me."

"You want what?" David gasped.

"Another word of five letters for mantelpiece. I have nearly done the thing. I have been at it all the morning. Now, just think." She produced a crossword puzzle, cut from an evening paper, out of her little bag. "You see," she explained, "table's all right, and it must be 'Sahara,' but 41 down beats me altogether."

He threw at me a look of triumph. "All right, mother, we'll see what we can do." His man murmured something at the door; we all went in to luncheon.