Thursday Evenings

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Pears's Annual, 23rd November 1920
Collected in More Spook Stories, 1934
4,385 words
(First read 14/01/2013) 

Frith's Derby Day (1856-58), featured in this story

Mrs Wallace has been holding her artistic salons (her Thursday evenings) since the height of the Victorian era.  When she dies in her eighties in 1920, the last link between that world and the modern is broken.  Her flat, including the piano at which she used to sing her favourite song "in a faint far-away voice which sounded as if it came from the next house but one", is sold to a pair of consummately modern artists, Mr Humphrey Lodge (composer of symphonies featuring 'siren whistles, pieces of emery-paper rubbed together, watchman's rattles, and penny whistles') and his wife Julia (painter of Cubist portraits whose faces looked like 'a series of planes separated from each other by coloured lines').  It's only natural that the recently departed spirit of Mrs W should be disgusted with all this tomfoolery.
Thursday Evenings is a fun spook story: EFB derives as much pleasure from satirizing the two artistic sensibilities ~ the worst excesses of High Victorianism, in particular the song The Lost Chord, and the idiotic garbled pretentions of the modern ~ as he does from describing the antics of La Wallace's 'Poltergeist' ~ his word.  So, very definitely designed to amuse ~ which it does ~ rather than appal ~ which it doesn't. 
The story's available online here. 

The Jamboree

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Tatler, 1st December 1922
Collected in Fine Feathers and Other Stories, 1994
Approx. 3,100 words
(First read 23/12/1994)

In which arch-bitch-and-snob and Victorian-to-boot Caroline Lady Camber spars with her thoroughly-modern new American niece-in-law Margaret over a 'jamboree' to be held by the latter.  Caroline will not have it that her former home shall be the scene of young gels with bobbed hair, young chaps in their braces, the stars of the Ballet Russe, etc. sitting on cushions on the floor drinking cocktails and laughing, etc.  When her aunt (no relation to the new Lord Camber [Tony] and certainly none to Margaret) dies she insists that the jamboree be called off.  To keep the peace, Tony and Mags agree to this, but go ahead with it all the same, never imagining that the old dragon might actually show up in the middle of it.  It goes without saying that the dowager Camber ends up thoroughly bested. Quite a jolly jape.

QUOTABLES

Opening sentence:

Caroline Lady Camber took it almost as a personal insult when her nephew, who, on the death of her husband, had succeeded to the title and the house and the impoverished estates and the famous Camber pearls, succeeded to the pigs also by his marriage with Margaret Joicey, daughter and heiress of the Chicago millionaire.

More on our delightful 'heroine':

Caroline had an apt and acid wit and a soft, dreamy, meditative way of saying the nastiest things, which made them doubly telling, and her murmuring enunciation when she realized that the pearls would no longer be worn by her was peculiarly venomous.  "So suitable," she said, "that Margaret should have the pearls, for 'Margaret' means 'pearls', does it not?  And the pigs!  Isn't there some text about pearls and swine?"

A smidgeon of social commentary:

[...] while Margaret stood for the present in the society of today, Caroline Camber quite as typically stood for the past, and for the order of things that had vanished.

 

Music

Fiction ~ short story
First published in The Windsor Magazine, December 1924
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991)
Approx. 3,100 words
(First read 19/05/1992) 

Music is, to use a favourite word of E. F. Benson characters, delicious: charming light satire from front to back and side to side.  Just listen to our introduction to this canny, cunning, ruthless social climber:

When Elizabeth Nutter¹ came to London with a view to perching herself on the very topmost bough of the pleasant tree of Society which grows by the Thames, she possessed the usual equipment of such amiable invaders.  She had an amusing face, gowns from Paris, pearls from the Orient, an iron, inflexible will, any amount of money, a variety of complexion to suit all lights, and no husband.

I'd love to quote the whole thing but this will have to do ... oh no, go on, Ewie, let's have a bit more.  Here's E.N. on the possibilities of picking up a new husband in London (she's already disposed of one such back in the 'Argentine Republic'):

[...] it would be well to make herself at home in London before she chose this permanent addition to her life's appurtenances, otherwise he might not suit her social colour scheme, which at present was undetermined, and it was well to see what sort of possible husbands were stocked just now in London before she selected one.

Anyway, she launches herself into the fray and is moderately successful, but soon realizes she's climbing horizontally rather than vertically: she wants to reach the pinnacle rather than content herself with collecting dull Cabinet politicians and uninspiring aristocrats ("For being a duchess," thought the astute Elizabeth, "doesn't prevent your being a dowdy.")  What she needs is a stunt.  It's a bit of a risk but, despite her innate dislike of music, she

The Divine Novello, without piano

decides to 'adopt' a young ~ and blond, and handsome ~ pianist who's a countryman of hers².  This chap, known professionally as Smirkowski³, has just one drawback: he can't play a note.  Still, thinks Our Liz, that won't matter, she can pass his style off as 'modern' and Society won't know any better.  And lo! ... well, you can probably guess the rest.
When, as here, Benson is at his very best, his comic stories are twenty times more amusing than his ghost stories are spooky or his dramas are dramatic.
Not one single word of Music goes to waste: it's perfect.

(Daft, obviously ... but perfectly daft.)

 

¹ A couple of hundred years ago I had a great-great-great-great-aunt who was née Elizabeth Nutter.  Not relevant ~ just thought I'd mention it.
² E.N. and her protégé are obviously ex-members of the English 'beef barony' of Argentina: there's nothing remotely Hispanic about them.
³ Stokowski was Big Stuff in 1924.

 

The Hapless Bachelors

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Pearson's Magazine, March 1921
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories 1991
Approx. 4,600 words
(First read 18/05/1992) 

A bit of a mishmash of a story: part lament over changing post-War attitudes; part hymn in praise of modern gadgetry cum condemnation of folk's dumb dependence on same¹; and part gentle comedy of very English manners.
Mr Bradley and Mr Beaumont ~ 'two gentlemen sharing' ~ 'lose' their utterly indispensable housekeeper and, falling victim to the serious shortage of domestic staff that followed on the end of WWI, are subjected to a herd of incompetent cooks, maids, gardeners, etc.  In despair they decide to invest in a whole host of modern appliances, from the miraculous 'Ichabod' oven to an electric duster. 

'Course, being middle-aged hapless Englishmen, they haven't much of a clue how to work all this marvellous machinery ... but in the nick of time rescue arrives in the shape of Beaumont's widowed sister Mrs Glover², or rather in the shape of Mrs G's perfect French maid Hortense.  Order is restored and the story ends in the blink of an eye.
Most of the comedy is: (a) at the expense of the crap servants, who include a "crippled soldier with the resounding name of Fotheringay [who] would make beds and empty slops [into the bath], which was sordid employment"³; and (b) derived from the 'pathetic obstinacy' with which our two gents try to get to grips with all this new kit.
Verdict: fun, but perhaps not as much fun as it might have been had it been written by someone more used to writing about fun.  (If you see what I mean.) 

QUOTABLES
Bradley and Beaumont on the merits of femalepersons:

"Women may be, in fact, they are, ornamental little things; they have a brightness, a charm about them.  For the purposes of the propagation of the species, they seem to be essential."

"Doubtless; but you and I do not propose to propagate the species."

¹ Heaven only knows what EFB would make of today's world.
² Who Bradley ends up by marrying.
³ It seems not to occur to Beaumont and Bradley (or possibly to EFB) that a large part of the reason servants became so rare is that they finally woke up to the sordidness of so much domestic service.  Fotheringay, you'll be pleased to hear, eventually melts away and is no more seen.