Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “No, Frank, no,” said Margery; “don’t tell me.”

  “It is not pleasant,” said he. “It is not amusing to go to hell, as I have gone. This is not a nice book to read; I wish now I had never written it— ‘The Life and Adventures of Frank Trevor,’ by himself.”

  The horror of great darkness had come on Margery. She felt the physical result, which is stronger than all things in the world except love. She loved Frank and Frank loved her. There was still a chance.

  Frank had picked up from the table the little yellow programme which he had painted and held it in his hands, turning it over and over.

  “It won’t break,” he said, “it won’t bend. My God! what am I to do? But — but I have written my judgment book; yet there are some chapters which I have not written. I cannot remember them. They were some chapters you and I wrote together about — But you will have forgotten — you gave me up. Margy, cannot you remember what they were? There was one chapter we wrote down in that little creek where we went to-day.”

  Frank stopped, and looked about the room as if he were searching for something. In that pause love triumphed. Margery went to him quickly. The physical revolt was dead, for she loved him. She laid her hand on his shoulder.

  “Frank,” she said, “do you remember that you asked me whether I wished you to go on with that picture? I said I did, but I am here to tell you that I have changed my mind. I think you had better not go on with it. Tear it up, burn it. It is not good; it is devilish. And when you have done that we will go and find those chapters you spoke of, which we wrote together, you and I alone. Did you think they were lost? Could you not remember them? I remember them all. I have them quite safe. There are none of them lost.”

  For a moment a look of intense relief came over Frank’s face. Even in the darkness Margery could see that it had changed utterly. She glanced with sick horror at the portrait which only five minutes before she had thought was actually her husband. But almost immediately he shook his head.

  “No, I must finish it now,” he said. “I do not believe in death-bed repentance. There is very little more to do, for I have worked quickly to-day. Just one thing wants doing — a shadow is to be deepened in the mouth. Do you see what I mean? No, it is too dark for you to see it, though I can see it quite clearly. I wish I could explain to you what I mean, but you will never understand. Don’t you see it is I who stand there on that easel? This thing which you think is me is nearly dead. It is like Pygmalion, isn’t it, only the other way round? He made his statue come to life, but I have put my life into that picture. If ever the story of Pygmalion is true, I could have done that; it is easier than what I have done.”

  “Yes, dear,” said Margery, “I knew the picture would be a wonderful thing. But it is too dark to look at it now and too dark for you to paint. Let us come away, and we will find those chapters you spoke of. I have got them all, I tell you. They seem to me very good and very important — quite as important now, and much better, than the chapters you have written there.”

  She put her hand through Frank’s arm, and all her soul went into that touch.

  “Come,” she said; “they are not here.”

  For one moment she felt Frank’s arm tremble under the loving press of her fingers, but he said nothing and did not move.

  “You asked me to kiss you this afternoon,” she said; “and now, Frank, I ask you to kiss me. Kiss me on the lips, for we are husband and wife.”

  And standing by that painted horror he kissed her.

  “And now come out for a few moments,” said Margery, “for I cannot tell you here.”

  Frank obeyed, and together in silence they walked out on to the terrace.

  “Let us sit down here,” said she, “and I will tell you what you have forgotten.”

  “Those other chapters?” asked Frank. “I want them, for the picture is not complete.”

  “Yes, those other chapters. They are very short. Just this, Frank, that I loved you, and love you now. I see what your fear was: it was fear for me, not for yourself. You thought that if you painted this picture you would have to put something into it which I did not know — something you were afraid of my hearing. I know it, and I am not afraid. But the chapters we wrote together are still true; they are the truest part of all. Your picture is not complete. It wants the most essential part of all.”

  Once more she felt a tremor go through his arm, but still he said nothing.

  “You told me I did not understand what you meant,” she said, “but I understand now. And you too did not understand me if you thought that anything in the world could make any difference to my love for you. We have all of us in our natures something not nice to look at, but what we stand or fall by is our beautiful chapters. You cannot destroy them, Frank, though you thought you could, because they belong to me as well as you, and I will not have them destroyed. You thought you had lost them, but you have not. They are here. You may read them now with me.”

  Margery paused, and on the silence came the sudden, quick-drawn breath that opens the gates of tears. In a moment she felt Frank’s arms round her, and his hands clasped about her neck.

  “Margy! Margy!” he whispered, “have you got them now, even now? My God! how little I knew! You shrank from me, and I thought you had given me up; that there was nothing left to me but that — that horror. But what can I do? My judgment book is written. Is not that true too?”

  “Do you remember what you said?” asked Margery. “Did you not tell me that you loathed what you were painting? Why did you loathe it?”

  “Why did I loathe it? Why, because it was — something horrible, wretched!”

  “Let us go to the studio,” said Margery “No, no!” cried he; “anywhere but there.”

  “Come, Frank,” she said, “you must come with me.”

  In the passage hung a trophy made of knives and swords which Frank had once bought in the Soudan. Margery took down one of these, a thick steel dagger, short and two-edged. On the table below stood a lamp, and this she took in her other hand.

  “Open the door,” she said to Frank. Then she gave the dagger into his hand, and with the lamp, she stood opposite the picture.

  “Now!” she said.

  He stood for a moment feeling the edge of the dagger, looking at Margery. Then with a sudden movement he grasped the side of the easel with one hand, and with the other plunged the dagger through the face.

  “You devil, you devil!” he said.

  He cut and stabbed the picture in fifty places. The torn shreds he ripped off and threw on the ground, trampling on them or picking them up to tear them again, and in a few moments all that there was left was a few shreds hanging from the frame.

  Jack Armitage arrived next day. He never knew why Margery had sent for him, but she thanked him so genuinely for coming that he was not sorry he came.

  THE END

  LIMITATIONS

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  CHAPTER XV.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  EPILOGUE.

  CHAPTER I.

  TOM CARLINGFORD was sitting at his piano, in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, playing the overture to Lohengrin with the most indifferent success. It was a hot night in the middle of August, and he was dressed suitably, if not elegantly, in a canvas shirt, a pair of flannel trousers, and socks. He had no tie on, and he was smoking a meerschaum bowl of peculiarly spotted appearance, through a long cherry-wood stem. The remains of a nondescript meal laid coldly on the table, and a cricket-bag on the hearthrug, seemed to indicate that he had bee
n away playing cricket, and had got back too late for hall. The piano was almost as disreputable in appearance as its master, for it stood in a thorough draught, between the windows opening on to the front lawn and the door opening into the smaller sitting-room, and the guttering candle was making a fine stalactite formation of wax on D in alt Several good pictures and college photographs hung on the walls, and between the windows stood a small bookcase, suspiciously tidy. Tom played with the loud pedal down, and treated his hands in the way in which we are told we should bestow our alms. D in alt had stuck fast to C sharp and C, and the effect, when either of these three notes was played, was extremely curious. However, he finished the overture after a fashion, and got up. w This is a red-letter day for Wagner,” he remarked. “What do you do with pipes when they get leprous, Teddy?” he asked, looking dubiously at the meerschaum bowl.

  “I sit down and do Herodotus,” remarked a slightly irritated voice from the window-seat, behind the lamp.

  “I don’t think that’s any use,” said Tom.

  “Perhaps you’ve never tried it I wish to goodness you’d sit quiet for ten minutes, and let me work!”

  Tom walked up to the lamp, and examined the pipe more closely.

  “It is as spotted and ringstraked as Jacob’s oxen,” he remarked. “Teddy, do stop working! It’s after eleven, and you said you’d stop at eleven.”

  “And if you inquire what the reason for—” murmured Teddy.

  “I never inquired the reason,” interrupted Tom. “I don’t want to know. Do stop! You’re awfully unsociable!”

  “Five minutes more,” said Ted inexorably.

  Tom took a turn up and down the room, and whistled a few bars of a popular tune. Then he took up a book, yawned prodigiously, and read for the space of a minute and a quarter, lying back in a long basket-chair.

  “What the use of my learning classics is, I don’t know,” he remarked. “I’m not going to be a schoolmaster or a frowsy don.”

  “No, we can’t all be schoolmasters or frowsy dons, any more than we can all be sculptors,” said the voice from the window-seat vindictively.

  Tom laughed.

  “Dear old boy, I mean no reflection on you. You’ll be a capital don, if you succeed in getting a fellowship, and it will always be a consolation to you to know that you probably won’t be as frowsy as some of your colleagues. I can’t think how you can possibly contemplate teaching Latin prose to a lot of silly oafs like me for the remainder of your mortal life.”

  “You must remember that all undergraduates aren’t such fools as you.”

  “That’s quite true; but some are much more unpleasant They are, really; it’s no use denying it.” Ted shut his books, and looked meditatively out on to the court through the intervening flower-box, filling his pipe the while, and Tom, finding he got no answer, continued —

  “And I suppose, in course of time, they’ll make you a dean. That’s a jolly occupation! Eight a in on a winter’s morning. And the warming apparatus of the chapel is defective. Furthermore, you must remember that those are the dizzy heights to which you will rise, if you are successful; if not, you will have spent the six best years of your life in writing about the deliberative subjunctive, and, at the end, have the consolation of being told that the electors considered your dissertation very promising, but unfortunately there was no vacancy for you. They will also recommend you to publish it, and it will be cut up in the Classical Review, by a Dead Sea ape with bleary eyes and a bald head, who will say you are an ignoramus, and had better read his grammar before you write one of your own. Oh, it’s a sweet prospect! It is grammar you do, isn’t it?”

  “No; but it doesn’t matter,” said Ted. “Go on.”

  “How a sensible man can contemplate spending his life in a place like this, I cannot conceive,” said Tom. “It’s the duty of every man to knock about a bit, and learn that the outer darkness does not begin at Cambridge Station. There is a place called London, and there are other places called Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.”

  “And Australia. Do you propose to go to them all?” asked Ted. “It’s a new idea, isn’t it? Yesterday you said that, as soon as you went down, you were going to bury yourself at home for five years, and work. Why is Applethorpe so much better than Cambridge?”

  “Why?” said Tom. “The difference lies in me. I shall continue to be aware of the existence of other countries, and other interests. Great heavens! I asked Marshall to-day, in an unreflective moment, if he knew Thomas Hardy, and he said, ‘No; when did he come up? ‘ And Marshall is a successful, valuable man, according to their lights here. He’s a tutor, and he collects postmarks. That’s what you may become some day. My hat, what a brute you will be!”

  Ted Markham left the window-seat, and came and stood on the hearth-rug.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not necessary to vegetate because you live here, and it’s not necessary to be unaware of the existence of Hardy because you know Thucydides. I don’t want fame in the way you want it in the least I haven’t the least desire to make a splash, as you call it. It seems to me that one can become educated, in your sense of the word, simply by living and seeing people. It doesn’t really help you to live in a big town, and have five hundred acquaintances instead of fifty.”

  “No, I know,” said Tom, “but as a matter of experience, of men who settle down here, a larger proportion are vegetables than should be. They want to be the authorities on gerunds, or Thucydides, or supines in -um, or binomial theorems, or acid radicals, and they get to care for nothing else. If there were only a dozen fellowships reserved for men who didn’t mean to work at anything, it would be all right, but when every one cares for his own line more than anything else, you get a want of proportion. Collectively they care for nothing but lines, individually each for his own line. And, after all, lines are a very small part of life. What difference would it make to any one if there was no such thing as the deliberative subjunctive?”

  Markham did not reply for a moment “No one supposes it would,” he said, after a pause, “but you must remember that grammar is not necessarily uninteresting because it doesn’t interest you. In any case let’s walk down to the bridge.”

  “All right Where are my shoes, and my coat? Ah, I’m sitting on it!”

  Tom’s rooms were on the ground floor on the side of the court facing the chapel. The moon had risen in a soft blue sky, and as they stepped into the open air they paused a moment.

  The side of the chapel opposite them was bathed in whitest light, cast obliquely on to it, and buttresses and pinnacles were outlined with shadows. The great shield-bearing dragons perched high above the little side-chapels stood out clear-lined and fantastic from their backgrounds, and the great crowned roses and portcullis beneath them looked as if they were cut in ivory and ebony. The moon caught a hundred uneven points in the windows, giving almost the impression that the chapel was lighted inside. To the east and west rose the four pinnacles dreamlike into the vault of the sky. In front of them stretched the level close-cut lawn looking black beneath the moonlight, and from the centre came the gentle metallic drip of the fountain into its stone basin. Towards the town the gas-lit streets shot a reddish glare through the white light, and now and then a late cab rattled across the stone-lined rails of the tramway. From the left there came from the rooms of some musically minded undergraduate the sound of a rich, fruity voice, singing “I want no star in heaven to guide me,” followed by a confused noise within,” exactly as if some one had sat down on the piano.

  Tom murmured, “I want no songs by Mr. Tosti,” drew his hand through Markham’s arm, and they strolled down together towards the river.

  “Of course I don’t mean that you’ll become like Marshall,” he said, “but it does make me wild to think of the lives some of these people lead. They don’t care for anything they should care about, and even if they do care about it, they never let you know it, or talk of it. Oh, Teddy, don’t become a vegetable!”

&nb
sp; “And yet when I came up,” said Markham, “my father used to write me letters, asking me about my new impressions, and this fresh world that was opening round me, and there really wasn’t any fresh world opening round me, and I didn’t have any new impressions of any sort. It seemed to me like any other place — and I was expected to feel the bustle and the stir, and the active thought, and temptations, and I don’t know what beside.”

  “O Lord!” sighed Tom. “I know just the sort of thing. I don’t know if there is any bustle and stir, and active thought, but I certainly never came across them. Doesn’t the Cambridge Review call itself the ‘Journal of University Life and Thought?’ Meditate on that a moment. As for temptations, the only temptations I know of are not to be dressed by eight, not to go to Sunday morning chapel, and not to work from nine till two. But I’ve been acquainted with all those temptations all my life, except that one had to be up by 7.30 at Eton. The temptations, in fact, are less severe here.”

  “I don’t know how it is,” said Ted, “but whenever people write books about Cambridge, they make the bad undergraduates go to gambling hells on the Chesterton Road, and the good ones be filled with ennobling thoughts when they contemplate their stately chapel. Did you ever go to a gambling hell on the Chesterton Road, Tom?”

  “No; do you ever have ennobling thoughts when you look at the stately chapel? Of course you don’t. You think it’s deuced pretty, and so do I, and we both play whist with threepenny points; and as a matter of fact we don’t fall in love with each other’s cousins at the May races, nor do we sport deans into their rooms, nor do deans marry bedmakers. Oh, we are very ordinary!”

  “I feel a temptation to walk across the grass,” said Ted.

  “Yes, you’re the wicked B.A. who leads the fresh, bright undergraduate — that’s me — into all sorts of snares. What fools people are!”

  Tom sat on the balustrade of the bridge and lit a pipe. The match burned steadily in the still night air.