: The Osbornes by Benson E F Edward Frederic - Marriage Fiction; England Social life and customs 20th century Fiction; Families Fiction; Social classes England Fiction

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THE OSBORNES

BY E. F. BENSON

NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

THE OSBORNES

For the last five hours all the windows along the front of the newest and whitest and most pretentious and preposterous house in Park Lane had been blazing with lights, which were kindled while the last flames of the long July day had scarcely died down into the ash-coloured night, and were still shining when morning began to tinge the velvet gray of the sky with colour and extinguish the stars. The lights, however, in No. 92 seemed to be of more durable quality than the heavenly constellations and long after morning had come and the early traffic begun to boom on the roadway, they still burned with undiminished splendour. It was literally true, also, that all the windows in the long Gothic facade which seemed to have strayed from Nuremberg into the West End of London, had been ablaze; not only was the ground floor lit, and the first floor, where was the ballroom, out of which, all night, had floated endless webs of perpetual melody, but the bedrooms above, though sleep then would have been impossible, and, as a matter of fact, they were yet untenanted, had been equally luminous, while from behind the flamboyant balustrade the top of the house, smaller windows, which might be conjectured to belong to servants' rooms, had joined in the general illumination. This was strictly in accordance with Mrs. Osborne's orders, as given to that staid and remarkable person called by her Willum and Thoresby, and alluded to as "my major domo." "Willum" he had been in earlier and far less happy years, first as boot boy, then when the family blossomed into footmen, as third, second, and finally first of his order. Afterward came things more glorious yet and Thoresby was major domo. At the present time Mrs. Osborne had probably forgotten that there existed such officers as boot boys, and Willum probably had forgotten too. The rise of the family had been remarkably rapid, but he had kept pace with it, and to-night he felt, as did Mrs. Osborne, that the eminence attained by them all was of a very exalted order.

Mrs. Osborne had ordered that every window in the front of the house was to be lit, and this sumptuous edict not without purpose. She said it looked more joyful and what was a little electric light, and as the evening had been devoted to joy, it was right that the house should reflect this quality. For herself, she felt very joyful indeed; the last month or two had, it is true, been arduous, and in all London it is probable that there had been nobody, man or woman, more incessantly occupied. But had there been an eight hours bill introduced and passed, which should limit the hours of energy for hostesses, she would have scorned to take advantage of so pusillanimous a measure. Besides, the nature of her work necessitated continuous effort, for her work was to effect the siege and secure the capitulation of London. That, with her great natural shrewdness, she realized had to be done quickly, or it would never be done at all. London had, not to be starved, but to be stuffed into surrender. She had to feed it and dance it and ply it with concerts and plays and entertainments till its power of resistance was sapped. Long quiet sieges, conducted with regularity, however untiring, were, she knew well, perfectly incapable of accomplishing its fall. The enemy--at times, though she loved it so well, she almost considered London to be her enemy--must be given no quarter and no time to consider its plans. The assault had to be violent as well as untiring; the dear foe must be battered into submission. To "arrive" at all, you had to gallop. And she had galloped, with such success that on this night in July, or rather on this cool dewy morning in July, she felt that the capitulation was signed and handed her. But she felt no chill of reaction, as is so often the case even in the very moment of victory, when energies not only can be relaxed, but must be relaxed since there is nothing for them to brace themselves over any more. Her victory was of different sort: she knew quite well that she would have to go on being extremely energetic, else the capitulated garrison would by degrees rally again. But since the exercise of these energies was delightful to her, she was merely charmed that there would be a continual call for them.

There was no "casement jessamine" on the house, which could "stir to the dancers dancing in tune" but on the walls of the lowest story, growing apparently from large earthenware pots filled with mould, were enormous plants of tin ivy which swarmed up the walls of the house. But it was too strongly and solidly made to stir even to the vibration produced by the earthquaking motor-buses which bounced down Park Lane, and thus the dancers dancing in tune had no effect whatever on it. This stalwart ivy was indeed a sort of symbol of the solidity of the fortunes of the house, for it was made at the manufactories from which her husband derived his really American wealth. They covered acres of ground at Sheffield, and from their doors vomited forth all sorts of metallic hardware of the most reliable quality. The imitation ivy, of course, was but a froth, a chance flotsam on the stream of hardware, and was due to the inventive genius of Mrs. Osborne's eldest son Percy, who had a great deal of taste. His was no abstruse taste, like an appreciation of caviare or Strauss, that required an educated--or, as others might say--a vitiated palate or a jaded ear, but it appealed strongly and almost overwhelmingly, to judge by the order book of the Art Department, to the eye of that general public which goes in for forms of decoration which are known as both chaste and "handsome," and are catholic enough to include mirrors framed in plush on which are painted bunches of flowers and bead curtains that hang over doors. With shrewd commercial instinct Percy never attempted to educate the taste of his customers into what they ought to want, but gave them in "handsome" catalogues lists of the things they did want, and of a quality that they would be sure to find satisfactory. Though this ivy, for instance, was from the excellence of its workmanship and the elaborate nature of its colouring rather expensive, it was practically indestructible till the melting point of the best tin was reached, and it resembled ivy so closely that you might perfectly well prick your fingers on it before you found out the art that so closely imitated nature. Indeed, before now some very pretty jesting had taken place in the windows of the house with regard to it, when Percy, who liked his joke , asked a stranger to pick a leaf of it and examine the beauties of nature as illustrated in the manner in which the stalk of the leaf was joined to the parent stem. Also it had no inconvenient habits of growing over places on which you did not wish it to trespass , it harboured neither slugs nor any abominable insects and afforded no resting-place for birds, while it could be washed free from London dust by the simple application of the hand-syringe.

The ivy has been insisted on at some little length because it was typical of the fortunes and family of its inventor. It was solid, indestructible and new, and in just the same way the Osbornes were very strong and well, held large quantities of gilt-edged stock, and had no family history whatever. In one point only were they unlike the ivy that clung to the limestone wall of the house in Park Lane, but that was an important one. The point of the ivy was to deceive--it was often successful in so doing--while the Osbornes never intended to deceive anybody. There was, with regard at any rate to Mrs. Osborne, her husband, and Percy, no possibility of being taken in. You could see at once what they were like; a glance would save you any subsequent disappointment or surprises. And no one, it may be added at once, ever pricked his fingers over them. They were as kind as they were new. But since many strains of blood have gone to the making of each member of the human race, one strain prospering and predominating in this specimen while in another, though of the same blood, it scarcely shows a trace of existence, the divergence of type even in one generation is often very marked indeed. Thus, though Mr. Osborne felt that he both understood and admired his eldest son, his admiration for the younger was agreeably tempered with mystification. "Old Claude's a rum fellow," he often said, and Mrs. Osborne agreed with him. But, as will be seen, there was still much in common between Claude and them.

The house, like the ivy, was also new and solid and in point of fact none of its inhabitants, again with the curious exception of Claude, were quite used to it yet. This they concealed as far as they were able, but the concealment really went little further than the fact that they did not openly allude to it. They all agreed that the house was very handsome, and Mr. Osborne had a secret gratification not unmingled with occasional thrills of misgiving as to whether he had wasted his money in the knowledge of the frightful costliness of it. Outside, as has been said, it was of Gothic design; but if a guest thought that he was to pass his evening or listen to music in a Gothic interior, he would have been rudely undeceived. It had been unkindly said that you went through a Gothic door to find Vandals within, and if Vandalism includes the appropriation of beautiful things, the Vandalism exhibited here was very complete. But the destructive side of Vandalism had no counterpart; Mr. Osborne was very careful of his beautiful things and very proud of them. He admired them in proportion to their expensiveness, and having an excellent head for figures could remember how much all the more important pictures, articles of furniture, and tapestries had "stood him in." And he ran no risk of forgetting these items, for he kept them green in his memory by often speaking of them to his guests.

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