ADVISORY BEN

E. V. LUCAS

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ADVISORY BEN

A Story

BY

E. V. LUCAS

NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

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COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

ADVISORY BEN —A— PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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ADVISORY BEN

I

In the lives of all, even the least enterprising or adventurous, moments now and then arrive when a decision has to be made; and our demeanour at such times throws a strong light upon our character. Many of us postpone action, either sheltering behind a natural reluctance to do anything emphatic, or feeling that the Fates ought to arrange our affairs for us. After all, it is their métier.

But my Ben was not like that. My Ben (to give her her full name, Benita Staveley) was instantly practical, and her disapproval of the pastoral process known as letting the grass grow under your feet was intense. All her actions were prompt, without, however, coming within the zone of impulse. Even at twenty-two she envisaged a situation with perfect clearness, and knew her mind; but why I should mention twenty-two as though it were a tender age, I can't explain, except as the result of pure want[Pg 8] of thought. To say of a man that he is twenty-two is often merely to accuse him of callowness; but in a woman twenty-two can be maturity in everything but actual physique; and this is especially the case with those who, like Ben, even from young girlhood have been relied upon by father, mother, brothers and sisters to solve their difficulties and make things smooth for them.

Ever since I have known Ben—and her mother and I were playfellows half a century and more ago—she has been a mixture of factotum and oracle, yet without ever for a moment declining into a drudge or losing gaiety. A Cinderella perhaps; but a Cinderella who went to the ball without any supernatural assistance; a Cinderella with a laugh and a retort; a Cinderella who won respect and as much chocolate as she wanted, both from those within the home and out of it. Not a few boxes, for instance, from my own hand.

But there had, as yet, been no glass slipper and no Prince, unless, of course, you count poor Tommy Clinton as one: Tommy, who has been coming home every summer from his billet in Madeira for the past six years with two mastering motives to impel him—one being the wish to carry off something, either in singles or doubles, at Wimbledon, and the other to propose again to[Pg 9] Ben—and so far has had no success in either enterprise.

Personally I am glad that she didn't marry Tommy, for he takes his defeats too sweetly, almost indeed as though he preferred them to victories. Such plastic and easy-going youths, although they may be agreeable enough during the time of courtship, and as dancing partners, or even as husbands for a little while, never grow into the sterner stuff that our Bens require, desire and deserve. But girls who have the Atlas habit run, of course, great risks of attracting the men who want to be treated as though they were the world.

Under the circumstances it is a little odd that Ben, save for the punctual, if casual, annual attack of Tommy Clinton, was unpursued; but one has to remember that Colonel Staveley did not like young men about the house. Not that that makes any difference when passion rules, for we know how Love treats locksmiths; but at the time this story opens Ben was heart-free. She might appear indeed to strangers to look like becoming one of those attractive girls who somehow or other seem to be insufficiently attractive ever to marry. But I never thought so. She had, however, no doubt, missed the first matrimonial[Pg 10] train, the one that conveys to the altar carriage-loads of immature, high-spirited couples on the edge of the twenties. Other trains come along later, but the service is not so good.

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II

When a girl has been keeping house for her father for three or four years and her father then (although sixty-three) marries again, her position is not easy, nor does it demand a blind belief in all the malignant tradition that surrounds stepmothers to admit this. As a matter of fact, Colonel Staveley's new wife would probably have been happier if her stepdaughter had remained in the house. Indeed, I am sure of it, for she is neither a jealous woman nor a meddlesome; and Ben's knowledge of her home and of its master's ways would have made life more simple, while the girl herself would have been a companion when that master was playing bridge at his club or informing such of his fellow-members as would still listen to him what the Government—if it had a grain of sense—would do.

For some time—we are now in the year 1921—Ben and her father had had the house to themselves, for her mother was dead. This lady, I ought to say, had displayed something like genius in the ordered way in which at definite intervals,[Pg 12] and with discreet alternations of sex, she had put her children into the world; first a girl and then a boy, and then a girl and then a boy, and so on—beginning with Alicia as long ago as 1883, and then Cecil in 1887, and then Merrill in 1890, and then Guy in 1894, until her youngest daughter's turn to arrive came in 1899, and Toby's, her youngest son's in 1902, and the tale was complete.

Of these six, when Colonel Staveley married again, only Ben was at home. Alicia had become Mrs. Bertrand Lyle and the mother of two boys and was now a widow; Cecil, who was a soldier in India, had married a French girl and was childless; Merrill had married a Hampshire vicar and was childless; Guy, also a soldier in India, was engaged to Melanie Ames, a friend of Ben's; and as for Toby, he was nominally imbibing learning at Oxford, but, like so many undergraduates of my acquaintance, seemed more often to be imbibing other things in London. I don't mean to excess, but dancing is a thirsty form of industry, and late hours have been known to lead to early restoratives.

Ever since Mrs. Staveley's death, the Colonel had counted on Ben, who was then eighteen, for everything that would promote his comfort. He knew—none better—that the first essential of a[Pg 13] selfish man is an entourage of unselfish people. And of these Ben was the chief. It must not be thought that the Colonel was a bully; rather, a martinet. He suffered from a too early retirement, aggravated by his wife's meekness and complacency, and as he had not thrown himself into any amateur work, and was, by nature, indolent and conversational, he was left with far too much leisure in which to detect domestic blemishes. A pedant for routine, his eye, when it came to any kind of disorder or novelty of arrangement, was like a gun. There was one place and one only for every article in the house, beginning with the hat-stand in the hall; and his first instinct, if not thought, on entering his front door was to look for something out of position. And so onwards, through whatever rooms he passed.

When he descried a fault it was, formerly, his wife, and latterly Ben, who was court-martialled; and not the actual offender. This probably, while fortunate for that person, was even more fortunate for the Colonel, who might otherwise have been without cooks and parlourmaids most of his life, for servants often put up a better resistance to martinets than the martinets' own flesh and blood. But whereas Mrs. Staveley had been reduced too often to tears, Ben bore the assaults with a courageous or stoical humour.

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"I can't conceive," the Colonel had exclaimed wrathfully, on the very day before this story begins, "why on earth people can't leave my umbrella alone."

"But it's there all right," Ben replied. "I noticed it in the stand a few minutes ago."

"Yes," he snapped, "but some idiot has rolled it up. That new girl, I suppose. I thought she looked an officious fool the moment I saw her."

"Well, father," said Ben, "if she did roll it up, it was purely through excess of zeal, that's all; and don't let us be too hard on excess of zeal in these times, when almost everyone is so slack."

"But what about her being too hard on my umbrella?" the Colonel demanded. "That's what I complain of. If I leave it unrolled—which I did very carefully and on purpose—it's no business of anyone else to roll it up. And no woman can roll an umbrella, anyway. It's an art."

"All right, father," said Ben, "it shan't happen again."

"I hope not," the Colonel barked back, "and it wouldn't have happened this time if you'd kept Atkinson. I can't think why you let her go."

"My dear father," said Ben, "I've told you again and again. She left in order to be married.[Pg 15] Surely a girl must be allowed to marry if she wants."

"Pooh!" said the Colonel, with infinite scorn. "Marriage!"

It was on the next day that he announced his own engagement, through which Ben was driven to come to a decision as to her career.

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III

When Belle Lorimer, the wealthy, merry, or at any rate not lachrymose, widow of Vincent Lorimer (of Lorimer and Lorimer, the stockbrokers), agreed to the Colonel's suggestion that together they should tie a second knot, the Colonel was probably assuming that Ben's capable control and intimate acquaintance with his needs and moods would still be available. Never an imaginative man, he had probably given no thought whatever to his daughter's temperament and character; enough that she was his daughter and he her father, that she was solicitous, remembering, and, above all, cheerful, and that she rarely provoked even the semblance of a scene. There had been scenes with her mother too often: the result less of mismanagement on Mrs. Staveley's part than on the Colonel's tendency to indulge an exacting nature to the full coupled with the advantage that the position of husband too often confers. For husbands are not merely husbands: they are also contemporaries; and as the predominant partners they have the great pull of[Pg 17] beginning right. Daughters are of another generation, with

fewer obligations, and the power actually to rebel, or, if it comes to the worst, bolt. Wives have stood at the altar and made promises; wives have brought money with them, and marriage settlements often very adroitly drawn up in the widower's interest; wives are too old to be influenced by detrimental new ideas. But daughters are different: daughters have made no promises, possess no financial resources, and are painfully susceptible to revolutionary notions. They are capable even of asking such upheaving questions as, "Why do I owe any duty to a father I didn't choose?"

The Colonel may have lacked imagination, but some self-protective instinct had worked in him to give Ben an easier time than her mother, poor woman, had ever had. But sweet as was Ben's nature, she was modernly conscious of certain duties and loyalties to one's own individuality, and, even before she came to talk to me about it, had quite determined that now was her opportunity to strike out a line for herself. And luckily she could to some extent afford it, for in addition to a little nest-egg consisting of the accumulation of interest in her minority, she now had, in common with her sisters and brothers, an income of two hundred a year from her maternal[Pg 18] grandmother, the terms of that shrewd old lady's last will and testament being the culmination of a long series of indignities which, in the Colonel's opinion, she had put upon him. Surely a daughter (named Mrs. Staveley), he had said, should come before grandchildren? But the dead hand distributed more wisely.

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IV

Alone one cannot do much on two hundred a year, but by pooling expenses two persons can exist without squalor on four hundred, especially if there is also a reserve in the bank, and this was Ben's idea. Her first step would be to join forces with her friend, Melanie Ames, to whom her brother Guy, now in India, had been engaged for the past three or four years, and share her rooms on Campden Hill—nice rooms too, right at the top, near the reservoir tower.

Melanie, who had also two hundred a year, was working at the moment as secretary to a Harley Street doctor; made his appointments; answered the telephone; saw to it (I suppose) that no current numbers of any illustrated papers ever got into the waiting-room (for someone must be in charge to maintain this inflexible custom); sent out all his accounts and as many receipts as were necessary; occasionally transacted commissions for the doctor's wife, who rarely came to town but did not like to think of the Sales going on without any of the doctor's fees to assist them;[Pg 20] and now and then, in the summer, spent Sunday with the family at their house at Weybridge, where there was an excellent hard court. For this she received a salary of four pounds a week, which, added to her private income, enabled Miss Ames to add butter to her bread as a regular habit and, in her own phrase, "On the top of the stearic matter now and then to superimpose a little jam, old dear."

In whatever way Ben was to augment her own private income, it certainly would not be by acting as any doctor's secretary. She felt herself to be more restless, more creative, more managing than that. Her nature demanded the things of the moment and constant activity, and it would gall her to have to suppress anything that was up to date. But as to what she was going to do, she had not yet a glimmering. The first thing was to transfer herself to those nice rooms and Melanie's comforting, languid society, and it was during the Colonel's protracted and lavish honeymoon (which the late Vincent Lorimer paid for) in the South of France that Ben took down the water-colours and photographs in her sitting-room in the great obsolete house in Hyde Park Gardens, with its myriad stairs and no lift, and, with such furniture and books as were hers, moved to Aubrey Walk.

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She then paid a long-promised visit to the country; and it was while she was staying there—with the Fred Lintots in Devonshire—that her great idea came to her. Like most of the best ideas, it came not with concentration and anxiety, but in a flash, and, also like most of the best ideas, it was the result of chance. I can refer to it with some authority because I was a fellow-guest and was in, so to speak, at the birth.

An American visitor being expected, the laws of hospitality (as well as those of his own country) decreed that a cocktail-shaker was essential. But there was none, nor could any shopkeeper within a radius of many miles produce one. No doubt, civilization having made inroads even on the desert, such articles might have been found on the sideboard of more than one Dartmoor mansion; but behind a counter, no; and the unfortunate New Yorker with his (alleged) vision of England as a promised land flowing with gin and whisky seemed to be in danger of heartbreak.

"What we who live in the depths of the country all need," said Mrs. Lintot, "is a London agent. Someone to do little jobs like this for us. I would cheerfully give five pounds a year to have a call on the services of anyone who would undertake London commissions for me. If I knew anyone[Pg 22] like that, I could telegraph and have that shaker and all the nasty ingredients for cocktails here by the evening train."

It was then that a brain wave swept over me.

"If you will tell me the nearest telephone," I said, "I will arrange it through the hall porter at the club," and I did so.

It was in the course of our conversation on the way back from this telephoning errand, on which Ben had accompanied me, that her future was practically decided: she would herself become the London representative of the Mrs. Fred Lintots of the country. Many other duties in excess of this one came to be hers, as we shall see; but the germ of her activities in the little business in which I have the honour to be an obscure partner was the difficulty set up by the absent shaker. The Apostle James in his Epistle asks us to behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth, and the minute origins of deeds that shape our ends have always been a source of interest to me; but I never thought that the lack of such an article as a cocktail-shaker in Devonshire would lead either to my speculating in business with my old playmate's youngest daughter or drive me to become its historian. And here, although it is outside the scope proper of this[Pg 23] narrative, it may be stated, as yet another example of the caprices of this illogical world, that when the American arrived he was found to be a

life-abstainer.

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V

Things on this planet are always happening at the same time; and it must follow (since it is only through meetings that the machinery is assembled which makes the world continue to exist) that, although parallels or divergences are the rule, now and then persons simultaneously start out upon lines of action which in due course arrive at the same point. It is fortunate that those persons are unaware of what the gods are doing with them. Life is not such fun that we can afford to dispense with the unexpected.

It chanced that at the very moment when Ben and I were discussing Mrs. Lintot's scheme at Dartmoor, Mr. John Harford, in the garden of Laycock Manor, was informing his startled mother that he had decided to chuck the law and open a second-hand book shop.

Mrs. Harford was properly horrified. The Harfords so far had been able to avoid trade.

"But this isn't trade," said her son. "This is a lark."

"Do you call it a lark," his mother inquired,[Pg 25] "to be covered with dust—for there's nothing so dusty as old books, and very likely to catch horrible diseases—for there are no germ carriers like old books either? And"—she went on, before he could reply—"do you call it a lark to have to bargain with customers, because no one ever gives as much for an old book as it is marked? Even I know that. That's not my notion of a lark, anyway. And you'll have to start early, and leave late, and your health will go, and your nice looks, and all the money spent on your legal career will be wasted, and all the money you are going to put into this absurd business will be wasted too. By the way, where is that money coming from?"

"I was thinking of you, darling," said her son.

"Of me! Is the boy mad?" she inquired of the flowerbeds, the trees and the universe at large. "Do you seriously think that, feeling as I do about this offensive shop, I am going to help you to open it?"

"Yes, darling," said Jack. "And it won't be quite so costly as you think," he added, "because I'm not going into it alone. I've got a partner. Who do you think is joining me?"

"I haven't the faintest notion," Mrs. Harford replied. "But I hope it's an honest man or you'll[Pg 26] be robbed. You're as much fitted to run an old book shop alone as I am to—to—well, these are the kind of sentences no one ought ever to begin. One used to say 'to fly' once, but everyone flies now, so there's nothing in it. But you know what I mean. Who is this partner, anyhow?"

"Patrick," said Jack.

"Patrick! Do you mean Mr. St. Quentin?"

"Of course. He's mad about it. And he's got some capital too."

"Well," said Mrs. Harford, "if Mr. St. Quentin thinks it's a good scheme, that's another matter. But only for himself. What is right for him, in his crippled condition, is one thing; what is right for you, is another. Let him run the shop alone, and you go on learning to be a distinguished K.C., there's a dear. Don't be changeable, my boy."