It’s not very original, you know, it’s the sort of picture that every dealer has a dozen of in his store-room, but you’ve never had a lesson in your life and it’s a very creditable piece of work.
You’ve evidently inherited some of your grandfather’s talent.
You have seen his pictures, haven’t you?”
“I hadn’t for years.
Mummy wanted to find something in the box-room and she showed them to me.
They’re awful.”
“I suppose they are.
But they weren’t thought so in his own day.
They were highly praised and they were bought.
Remember that a lot of stuff that we admire now will be thought just as awful in fifty years’ time.
That’s the worst of art; there’s no room for the second-rate.”
“One can’t tell what one’ll be till one tries.”
“Of course not, and if you want to take up painting professionally your mother and I are the last people who’d stand in your way.
You know how much art means to us.”
“There’s nothing I want to do in the world more than paint.”
“With the share of the Mason Estate that’ll come to you eventually you’ll always have enough to live on in a modest way, and there’ve been several amateurs who’ve made quite a nice little reputation for themselves.”
“Oh, but I don’t want to be an amateur.”
“It’s not so easy to be anything else with a thousand to fifteen hundred a year behind you.
I don’t mind telling you it’ll be a bit of a disappointment to me.
I was keeping this job as secretary to the Estate warm for you, but I daresay some of the cousins will jump at it.
I should have thought myself it was better to be a competent business man than a mediocre painter, but that’s neither here nor there.
The great thing is that you should be happy and we can only hope that you’ll turn out a better artist than your grandfather.”
There was a pause.
Leslie looked at his son with kindly eyes.
“There’s only one thing I’m going to ask you to do.
My grandfather started life as a gardener and his wife was a cook.
I only just remember him, but I have a notion that he was a pretty rough diamond.
They say it takes three generations to make a gentleman, and at all events I don’t eat peas with a knife.
You’re a member of the fourth.
You may think it’s just snobbishness on my part, but I don’t much like the idea of you sinking in the social scale.
I’d like you to go to Cambridge and take your degree, and after that if you want to go to Paris and study painting you shall go with my blessing.”
That seemed a very generous offer to Charley and he accepted it with gratitude.
He enjoyed himself very much at Cambridge.
He did not find much opportunity to paint, but he got into a set interested in the drama and in his first year wrote a couple of one-act plays.
They were acted at the A.D.C. and the Leslie Masons went to Cambridge to see them.
Then he made the acquaintance of a don who was a distinguished musician.
Charley played the piano better than most undergraduates, and he and the don played duets together.
He studied harmony and counterpoint.
After consideration he decided that he would rather be a musician than a painter.
His father with great good humour consented to this, but when Charley had taken his degree, he carried him off to Norway for a fortnight’s fishing.
Two or three days before they were due to return Venetia Mason received a telegram from Leslie containing the one word Eureka.
Notwithstanding their culture neither of them knew what it meant, but its significance was perfectly clear to the recipient and that is the primary use of language.
She gave a sigh of relief.
In September Charley went for four months into the firm of accountants employed by the Mason Estate to learn something of book-keeping and at the New Year joined his father in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
It was to reward the application he had shown during his first year in business that his father was now sending him, with twenty-five pounds in his pocket, to have a lark in Paris.
And a great lark Charley was determined to have.
ii
THEY WERE NEARLY THERE.
The attendants were collecting the luggage and piling it up inside the door so that it could be conveniently handed down to the porters.
Women put a last dab of lipstick on their mouths and were helped into their furs.