Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The brandy revived Tom somewhat, and he stood up, still looking dazed and puzzled.

  “I don’t know what happened to me, father,” he said. “I never behaved like that before. I want to see May and — and my son. Say it again. What has happened exactly?”

  “My dear Tom, from the way you behave, I should have thought that such a thing as the birth of a child was a unique phenomenon, whereas it is one of the most common exhibitions of the forces of Nature. It occurs, I am told, many times every minute on this earth. You can’t see either of them now.”

  “The baby, just fancy!”

  Tom picked up his hat and stick, and stood looking into the fire. Even Mr. Carlingford was slightly shaken from the web of cynical observation, out of the meshes of which, like a kind of spider, he culled the weaknesses of mankind. Tom, with his smooth hairless face, looked so boyish himself, and for a moment the old man’s memory went back with a sudden feeling of tenderness to the time when Tom had been a soft helpless atom like that which was lying upstairs now at its mother’s breast “Tom, old boy, I’m so awfully pleased,” he said. “I always had an absurd wish — I don’t know why — to see you with a baby sitting on your knee. You are a good boy; you chose the wife I would have had you choose, and she has behaved as a wife should behave.” Tom turned round to his father with a beaming face. “Then we are all satisfied, father,” he said, “and now I’m going upstairs very quietly to see if I can see her — them. Them!”

  May was asleep, and he was told to delay any further visit till the morning. If she woke she had better not be disturbed; but she should be told that Tom had come in, and that he had been up to see her.

  Next day was Sunday, and Tom awoke very early in that most delicious way of all, slowly, with a vague growing consciousness of utter happiness. The window was open, and he lay a few minutes letting the cool breeze ruffle his hair before he stirred. Then rising and putting on a dressing-gown, he went to make inquiries as to whether May was awake, and whether he might see her. The nurse answered both questions affirmatively, and he went in. She was lying propped up by pillows, and by the bed was a little pink-and-white cot, in which Tom could just see a little crumpled red face.

  May welcomed him with a smile, and laid her finger on her lips.

  “Hush, Tom, he’s asleep,” she whispered, “but you may look at him.”

  Tom availed himself of the permission.

  “What a queer little thing it is!” he said.

  “Queer! It!” objected May. “It’s him, and he’s beautiful.”

  Tom knelt down by the bed.

  “My darling, my darling!” he whispered. “I didn’t know how happy I could be till I woke this morning. And it’s all real and true. I was almost afraid till I saw you that it was a dream or a wish of mine.”

  He raised himself and bent over her, and their lips met in a long kiss of passion purified by tenderness.

  He stood there for a moment, till the son and heir awoke and began to howl, bringing the nurse into the room, who incontinently dismissed Tom.

  He went back to his room and drew up the blind, letting a yellow splash of sunlight on to the floor. In the bushes below the window a thrush sang out of the fulness of his heart the wonderful repeated song which he always knew, and which no one else will ever learn. Through the soft air swept the first swallows of the new summer, flying high over the shrubs and trees in the garden. Tom looked out for some minutes, sniffing in the clear morning air, when from the village began the church bell for early communion. A sudden impulse, an irresistible need to thank some one for his happiness, as strong and urgent as his need the night before of commending May to some protection stronger than man, made him dress quickly and walk down to the church.

  It was almost empty. Ted and his father were at the altar, and a few parishioners were kneeling in the body of the church. The Ante-communion Service was nearly over, and Mr. Markham was reading the Prayer for the Church Militant as Tom entered. He went to the pew where he had knelt the night before, and soon the blessed command fell on his ears— “Draw near with faith, and take this holy sacrament to your comfort.”

  What did it mean? How could he draw near with faith? What was faith? And the grave, solemn voice from the altar answered him, that faith was to know that God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son.

  Was this, then, the answer to his strange unformulated desire to thank some one for his happiness? Did it all come from this, from the quiet, still church, from the memory of that sacrifice which sanctified love and all that is beautiful?

  He had wanted to vow a hecatomb of oxen the night before; he had longed to be able to promise something to any power which would give him what he had seen in May’s room that morning, and instead of that he himself was bidden to the feast, and with the others he went up and knelt at the table of Christ.

  Tom waited outside the church for Ted and his father, in order to give them news of May, and then turned homewards again. The desire to seek aid which had prompted him to come to the church the night before had given place to the desire to give thanks. He had come one step nearer to the unknown God; he approached Him, not as a power, but as a benefactor. The words of the great thanksgiving had thrilled him through and through. “ We praise Thee, we bless Thee.”

  That desire of the human creature, constant through all centuries, to seek for that which is outside itself, and stronger than itself, and passes understanding, had come to him. Some hand had knocked, so he thought, on the door of his soul, and wakened it from its sleep of indifference. Was it perhaps, after all, only the result of this sudden change from his deathly fears of the night before to the embracing happiness of this morning? He could not tell; he scarcely cared to ask himself.

  After breakfast he saw May again, and when the nurse put an end to their interview he went out under the cedar, filled with the double thought The bell for eleven o’clock church was ringing, but Tom had no intention of going. The sacredness of the morning demanded solitude. He watched the servants going down to church in their Sunday clothes, and marked two footmen stealing away towards the woods, and by degrees the house grew still. Tom went in and found a Bible with some little difficulty, and brought it out. He wanted to know more of that wonderful Life that had died, and had risen again for ever in men’s hearts, and he turned to the Gospel of the Apostle of Love. There he could learn all that a man need know, all that he had missed all his life.

  But how to get at it? How to know that those words were spoken for him? All he did know was that words and sentences which he had often heard before were meaningless no longer, that something which was very real and sacred to others had a sudden interest for him. He had never had doubts on such subjects; simply the belief in which he had been scantily brought up had faded and died a natural death, as leaves die in autumn when the sap no longer feeds them. So now the simple Gospel narrative struck him as so probable, so convincingly literal, that there was no question of sifting or examination possible. He remembered vaguely, and with some contempt, a book he had read not long before which seemed to deny the fundamental truths of Christianity because the writer could not bring himself to believe that Balaam’s ass really spoke. Even the literal truth of the Gospel did not seem to matter; the conception was divine; it was the best life that could have been lived: it was perfection, no less, and that which is perfect is not man, but God.

  Socrates warns us of the inutility of an unexamined belief, a statement which is not universally true. For a man who is gifted or saddled — for it is a dangerous bequest — with a critical nature the remark is profoundly true. To deliberately refuse to look a doubt in the face is an act of cowardice, a sacrifice and a stifling of our intellectual capacities. But there are many natures, highly developed intellectually, which are not critical, and to such religion is a matter of either indifference or conviction. Whether there ever was a Garden of Eden with a tree in the middle of it, round which was coiled a serpent, is a question which has no inter
est for them. If pressed they may say that some things are not meant to be taken literally, and dismiss the subject from their minds.

  The critical mind finds some slight but spurious consolation in shrugging its shoulders and labelling them as fools, but its consolations end there, for there is no doubt which is the happier of the two, and that an uncritical mind is synonymous with a foolish one is not the case.

  There is a certain experiment known to chemists as the solidification of a supersaturated solution. Some fluid is heated, and while hot there are dissolved in it large quantities of salt or alum. Now, a liquid when hot can hold more substance in solution than when it is cold, and when this surcharged liquid is allowed to cool quietly it actually holds more salt than it is theoretically capable of holding, and as long as it is left still it can do so. But if an atom of the same salt is put into it, the whole mass solidifies. Tom’s spiritual fluid had been subjected to a somewhat analogous experience. It had been surcharged with the salts of love and life, and then came the atom as momentous as the straw which breaks the camel’s back — the birth of the baby and the safety of May. It was necessary for him to have something to which he could refer, and from which he might derive his happiness; there must be for him a Superior Being. He did not wish to argue about it, to examine reasons for granting the existence of a first cause, or to split hairs over the precise way in which God became incarnate in man. Simply his happiness was too great for him to bear alone; his nature held more happiness than it could hold by itself, and he had to refer it to something outside his nature.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  TOM went back to London about a fortnight after the baby’s birth, and plunged into his work with more vigour and earnestness than ever. His new interest in religious matters was a thing apart from his work, just as was his love for May, and it did not get between him and his models, or interpose angular substances between his hand and eye. His religion was not fanatical or aggressive: it had come to him as the explanation of his human love, and inasmuch as the white heat of that had burned out of his life all that was sordid or impure, the conduct of his life was left unchanged. According to moralists, all sin partakes of the nature of decay, and Tom’s nature was very vital. And as his religion was not fanatical, it did not fill him with any half self-conscious and wholly morbid convictions of sin, either in himself or others, and he pursued his cleanly honest life much as he had done before.

  But as the days went on, and May got steadily stronger again, a doubt began to look him in the face. He remembered the Revivalist meeting at Cambridge, and his own rejection of the idea that one moment, one flash of seeming revelation could change any one. He himself had faced an anxiety blacker than death, had felt a relief purer than heaven. Did not that perhaps account for it all? Was not his own case as intelligible as that of the greengrocer who became a teetotaler? And because he was honest with himself he put himself a straightforward question: “Would he feel another and a fiercer anguish if he again got to believe that Christ was merely the best man who had ever lived and no more?” The question haunted him, but he was unwilling to answer it To his surprise Tom found Manvers waiting for him at home one evening when he came back from some party about a week after his arrival in London.

  The latter was sitting in the smoking-room consuming cigarettes until Tom returned.

  “I hear there are three to the ménage now,” he said. “I am delighted, of course. I should so like to have a baby. There can be nothing more interesting than to see a helpless thing with nothing it can call its own, except the tendencies it inherits from oneself, slowly acquiring intelligence.”

  “It’s a great responsibility,” said Tom, throwing himself into a chair and scratching his head with an air of wisdom.

  Manvers stared at him incredulously.

  “My dear fellow, the man who thinks about responsibilities is no longer a responsible being. It is a sign of mania or extreme old age. The age of responsibility begins at eighty-three or eighty-four, and I once knew a man of eighty-five who was still irresponsible. You are upset and excited. Go to Paris for a week. Paris is strangely regenerative, I always find.”

  Tom laughed.

  “Talking of Paris, why aren’t you there?”

  “I am staying with the Chathams,” said Manvers. “They were in Paris just before Easter, and they asked me to come to London and see them for a week or two, and as I had nothing to do I came. I always have a great success with middle-aged gentlemen. There is something peculiarly seductive about me to the mature male.”

  “I don’t care for mature males much,” said Tom.

  “Oh! that is a mistake. They make one feel so young. It is so easy to be seductive to them. You have to be very deferential, but imply at the same time that it is a very great compliment, and give them the impression that you yourself have vast stores of experience at your back, but prefer that they should produce theirs.”

  “Did you come here simply to make yourself seductive to Lord Chatham?”

  “No, I can’t say that was my object. My coming was only the effect of my having done so. I came to see other people.”

  “How is Maud? I haven’t seen her lately.”

  “As charming as ever,” said Manvers with some finality.

  “May is down in the country still,” said Tom, after a pause, “with my father and the baby.”

  “And are you ridiculously happy still?”

  “Quite ridiculously. But why still?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. We are limited, and so are our emotions. I have a natural tendency myself to get tired of the things I like.”

  “But you said just now that Maud was as charming as ever.”

  “Obviously then she is an exception.”

  He rose to go.

  “I must be off,” he said. “You came in so late, and I wanted to talk to you — but it’s after twelve, and they will all think it most unseductive of me to wake the house up at nameless hours. I suppose I shall see you again soon?”

  “Yes, I dare say I shall come to the Chathams’ at tea-time to-morrow. I haven’t seen them for an age.”

  In the thirty-two years of his life Manvers had been amused at many people, had liked a rather smaller proportion, was totally indifferent to most, and had loved none. It was consequently almost distressing to him to find that Maud Wrexham was losing none of her preponderance in his thoughts. He remembered how at Athens the thought that she was in love with Tom had galled him, but left him dumb, and he had been enormously relieved and pleased to hear of Tom’s marriage. He had not much experience of the ways of girls in the upper classes, but he supposed that in such well-regulated institutions a man who married went into a different orbit, and, ceasing to be a legitimate object of affection to all the world but one, naturally ceased being an object of affection at all. He gave himself not undeserved credit for having behaved really very well. He had made it quite clear to Tom that in his opinion Maud Wrexham was approachable, and Tom had rejected the notion theoretically then, and practically a short time after by marrying May. He had done” all that could be expected or demanded of him by the most Lycurgan codes of friendship and honour. Those claims were satisfied, and Maud was still free. His work had kept him in Paris during the year after Tom’s marriage, and he had himself felt that it would be wise to keep away for a time. He suspected that Maud had some private business to transact with her own emotions, and that, while she was doing that, she would not perhaps wish to be interrupted. She might, in fact, declare that she would not be interrupted. Manvers, who was essentially a reasonable being, had considered that a year was time enough for her to clear off her private business, and the year was now over. He disliked waiting very much, but he summoned to his aid that admirable common-sense which had stood him in such good stead at Athens, and had worked harder than ever.

  During the past week his intimacy with Maud had advanced a good deal. She evidently found considerable pleasure in his society, and he made himself uniformly entertaining and
agreeable. Lady Chatham also, in the intervals of what she called “the whirl of London life,” when her genius was not devoted to ordering carriages, and picking up people with mathematical inaccuracy at street corners, found time to talk to him, and make vague arrangements for him. Consequently next morning, after her orders had been sent to the stables, and she needed a little relaxation, when she found him alone in the library, reading papers, she sat down and began to talk.

  “My husband tells me you have to leave us on Saturday,” she said. “I suppose you are going back to Paris. What day of the month will that be?”

  “Saturday is the 26th, I think,” said Manvers.

  “No, I am sure you are wrong. Saturday is the 25th. Well then, as you meant to go on the 26th, you can stop here till Sunday. We shall be able to send you to the station.”

  “It’s very good of you,” said Manvers, “but I am afraid it is the day of the week that matters, and not the day of the month. I have to be in Paris on Saturday night.”

  “And what do you do then? You ought to be settling down, you know.”

  “I am afraid I shan’t settle down more than I have done already. I work very hard, you must know. But this holiday has been delightful.”

  “It must be very widening to live about from country to country as you do,” said Lady Chatham appreciatively, “but you ought to give us the benefit of your increasing width!”

  Manvers laughed.

  “In what way?”

  “You might write a book about the comparative tendencies of English and foreign life. Something useful — not like those little scrappy books that describe mimosa trees and amber necklaces and the Soudan, but something that really helped one to understand the difference between one nation and another, the influence of climate — climate has a great deal to do with character. Food too — the meat we eat in a day would last an Italian for a week. That must make a difference. And, as I said, you ought to settle down and marry, and become the centre of a little circle.”