Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Maud rose.

  “I will do my best to worry no more,” she said. “And will you help me?”

  Her voice had a wonderful sweetness and tenderness about it. Violet got up too and stood close to her.

  “Why, that’s charming of you,” she said. “I don’t think I could ever help anybody; but I will promise never to worry, if that is any use, Miss Wrexham.”

  “The utmost use,” said Maud; “and I am not Miss Wrexham. I have left Miss Wrexham in London. I have done with her. May you never see her: she is a wicked little fool.”

  “Well, Maud, then,” said the girl.

  Maud woke next morning slowly and blissfully, conscious of a new interest in life, of a step taken. To be quit of London and all its fuss and worry was the step taken, but the new interest was the more vital of the two.

  She and Violet had sat up late the night before talking, and Maud found something exquisitely sweet in being able to look at almost a facsimile of all that had made life bitter to her, to be able to talk and almost hear Tom answering, to be able to see his eyes looking into hers with affection and tenderness. For Maud had told Violet, without of course mentioning the name, the story of her worry and break-down; that she had loved a man and that he had married another, and that the desire of meeting him and the strain of doing so had made London unbearable and had affected her health.

  Maud was one of those people who do not often make friends of their own sex, and the relief merely of telling some one about it was great. But when she felt she was almost telling it to Tom, as Violet sat opposite her, the bitterness and struggle she had been enduring so many months seemed quenched at last Already her perplexities seemed capable of a solution which she could not have anticipated.

  And the new interest was Violet She felt as if Manvers had been wrong when he remarked cynically that Nature did not happen to have given us two people to love in case one got married. She felt as if she had almost cheated Fate, as if a substitute had been provided for her to love. “I shall be with her all day,” thought Maud, as she watched her maid moving about the room, “and I must, I will make her fond of me. If I can do that I shall feel as if at last Tom cared.”

  Indeed this seemed no very hard task. Maud had a great power of attraction when she cared to attract, and she had already won Violet’s heart by her confidence of the night before. There is nothing so exquisite as to feel that one is trusted.

  The friendship a man may have for a man, or a woman for a woman, is often closer and more intimate than even between husband and wife. However close a man may be to a woman, there still stands between them the barrier of sex, which no one has yet succeeded in annihilating. Members of two different sexes must look at things with different eyes, and the attempt of the woman to become like the man seems only to emphasize the difference. Certainly Violet could do for Maud what no man could possibly do. A girl can say to a girl what no wife could say to her husband, for there are certain things a man can never understand, simply because he is not a woman, nor a woman because she is a woman.

  It would have been impossible for Maud to tell the story of her trouble to any one but a girl, and it seemed to her that the very telling of it had taken away half its burden. And the burden removed, her body was able to recuperate itself, for when the body is hurt through the soul it cannot be cured until the soul is convalescent Living all day in the open air drinking in the fresh saltness of the sea, returning to the first principles of healing, began to have their legitimate effect And if the air was bracing, Violet was still more bracing. The convalescence of her body and soul kept pace with each other.

  They had been playing tennis one morning, and had gone down to bathe afterwards, and the two were sitting on the edge of the beach, Violet with her hat off trying to persuade her hair to behave reasonably. Maud had already dried hers and was absorbed in attempting to hit the pug, who had accompanied them down to the sea, but absolutely refused to wash, with small pebbles and shells.

  “I hate that dog,” remarked Violet. “ I wish you could hit it.”

  “I wish I could,” said Maud. “There! No, it went over it.”

  “I think I can forgive any one anything,” said Violet, “except laziness and want of interest. Not to be interested in things, not to be thoroughly alive, is the only unpardonable sin.”

  “I’ve been sinning unpardonably for the last six months. What a fool I have been making of myself!”

  Violet wrinkled her nose.

  “You poor darling! I didn’t refer to you. All the same it was foolish of you.”

  “But the world is so hard,” said Maud.

  Violet held up a forefinger warningly.

  “Now you know that is one of the things you are not allowed to say. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “For how many years did you say you had been completely happy?”

  “Twenty-three and a half.”

  Violet flicked the warm sea-scented air with the end of her towel.

  “Well, then, I should be ashamed, Maud, I should be ashamed, especially when you know you are beginning to be happy again.”

  “That’s your doing.”

  “We are talking about you, not me” — Violet’s voice came out of the middle of the towel—” and you’ll please keep to the subject. Just fancy my ever being good for anybody. How funny it seems!” Maud lay back on her rug tilting her hat over her eyes.

  “It’s a very nice, warm, kind world just now,” she added; “but oh, Violet, will it last? Man is a creature of moods, especially woman!”

  “Especially you, you mean. I never had a mood in my life.”

  “But what would you do supposing something went wrong, supposing something happened to you like what happened to me?”

  “I should send for you to come and stay with me at Aunt Julia’s,” said Violet, “and I should throw pebbles at that loathsome dog, and I should hit it too.” Violet’s towel flapped through the air and descended on Flo’s head.

  Maud laughed as the dog got up, shook herself free of the towel, and then lay down pathetically on the top of it.

  “But seriously,” she went on, “if you wanted something very badly and couldn’t get it, what would you do?”

  Violet rescued the towel and resumed her seat “I haven’t got many wants, you know,” she said, “so I can’t tell. But I hope I should be reasonable. I hope I should make a real effort to cease to want it. And then, you know, one gets over things; it takes time, no doubt, but everything worth doing takes time.”

  “Ah, but that’s so terrible,” said Maud. “It just shows how limited we are. If we were only stronger we should never get used to being without the things we want. It is because we are weak and feeble that we begin to forget I want to know how we are to be strong and yet to forget.”

  Violet stared absently at the sea.

  “I understand what you mean,” she said, “but I think you are wrong. After all we are human; we can’t get over that; and I think the woman who can’t make an effort to forget, who goes on nursing her sorrow, is feebler than the one who can. Of course time helps both. Oh yes, of course I am right. I am very old-fashioned, you know. I don’t care about dissecting myself and analyzing my tendencies, and thinking about limitations and aspirations. It seems to me that if you are inexperienced as I am you may kill yourself, as it were, in your analysis, or blind yourself altogether by peering too closely.” —

  “Go on,” said Maud, “you are so healthy.”

  Violet turned to her and lay down close beside her. “Yes, I want to be healthy anyhow,” she said, “and that is the main point. I think the way people dissect their own morbid selves, and put themselves in three-volumed pickle-jars, so to speak, for their friends to look at, is simply indecent. If you have a decayed tooth you don’t show it to all your friends and say, ‘ It is much worse since last week’; you go to the dentist and have it stopped.”

  “You dear dentist,” said Maud, “I’m so glad I came to
you!”

  “To tell yourself that life is hard and complicated,” continued Violet, “is to make it so, because one always believes one’s self. To say that it is simple simplifies it Of course some people like it complicated, and so I suppose they are right to tell themselves that it is. But to tell yourself that it is complicated, and then be sorry for it, is foolishness.”

  “I hate complications,” said Maud. “ I hate them as much as you hate that pug. But supposing you find simple things dull; at least, supposing after your complications you find the simple things which you liked before bore you? Complications change one, you know.”

  “I don’t know,” remarked Violet. “ Do you mean that you are bored with this place?”

  “I mean nothing of the sort,” said Maud. “I was only speculating. And the bell for lunch went ten minutes ago.”

  “The simplest lunch wouldn’t bore me to-day,” said Violet.

  “Nor me.”

  Violet whistled to the pug and stood for a moment with her head a little on one side looking at him disgustedly.

  “You are most astonishingly like Tom,” said Maud; “he looked just like that when he was examining Mr. Manvers’ statuette.”

  “And how did Mr. Manvers look when he looked at Tom’s statue?” she asked.

  “He looked as the pug looks — rather hurt, but able to do without Tom’s appreciation.”

  “How utterly different they must be!”

  “All the difference in the world,” said Maud. Then to herself: “ One is the man who loves me, the other” — she pulled herself up—” the man I used to love.”

  CHAPTER XVI.

  MAY was driving home one afternoon towards the end of June with a sense of great well-being. The baby was thriving as heartily as the fondest mother could wish, and Tom was as lovable as ever. He had got rather tired of going out to dine or dance, and of late had more frequently spent his evenings alone with May. Two days before he saw her opening a note which obviously was an invitation, and before she had read it he said —

  “May, if that is for dinner any time in the next week, I am engaged to dine with you at home.”

  His guess had been correct, and they were going to spend this evening alone at home. There were always certain pieces of ritual connected with baby cult to be gone through, and though Tom expressed impatience sometimes at the length of the services, he knew that the sight of May bending over their first-born was a very pretty one, and often wished he were a painter as well as a sculptor. Demeter had passed through the hands of the pointers, and Tom was at work again on her, for he meant to finish her himself. Day after day he spent, chisel in hand, working down the whole surface, till he “found” the statue. Various people, remembering the two statuettes which Tom had exhibited eighteen months ago, wanted to know if there were any more to be had, for the two had sold at once for high prices, though Tom had, after his conversion, expressed an unmercenary intention of throwing the cheques into the fire. But when they asked whether he was working at anything, and were shown the Demeter, they became thoughtful and said, “Good morning.”

  Altogether May was more than satisfied, and she went quickly up the steps and into the house, thinking how terrible it was that she had not set eyes on Tom or the baby since half-past eleven that morning. There was a note for her on the hall table, and she saw with a sudden spasm of anxiety that it was from her husband. She tore it open quickly, and read— “Father’s business has failed. He heard this morning, and he has had a stroke. I have gone down there at once. You had better follow me.” May read the note through twice before she thoroughly grasped its meaning. She waited only one moment to steady herself, and then went quickly upstairs to give orders for a small trunk to be packed for her, and to say good-bye to the baby.

  Tom had received the news just after lunch, and was quite unable to remember where May had gone. She had come in to tell him that she would not be in till six, and that she was lunching somewhere, and then going somewhere else, but Tom was finishing a vein on the back of Demeter’s drooping hand, and had only said, “Yes, dear, yes,” without looking up. May felt one moment of slight pique, and had not repeated her message, saying to herself that if he did not care to know she did not care to tell him.

  He had arrived at Applethorpe two hours afterwards, and there learned that there was probably no hope. His father was lying quite unconscious. They thought perhaps he might rally for a few minutes before the end, and so Tom sat and waited. The sun moved slowly round to the west, and it was not till the golden light had begun to be tinged with red that his father moved. He opened his eyes, saw Tom sitting by him, and snapped his fingers in the face of the King of Terrors.

  “I’m stone broke, Tom,” he said, “and it’s lucky for you that you learned to break stones.”

  And with a jest on his lips he went out without hope or fear into the Valley of the Shadow.

  The suddenness of what had happened for a time stunned and obliterated thought in Tom’s mind. Though his father was old, no blurring decay had touched him with forewarning hand, and it was in a half-dream that Tom went down from the death chamber into the library. The telegram which announced the failure had fluttered down on to the floor, and the warm garden-scented breeze which streamed in through the open window stirred it every now and then as if it was twitched by some unseen hand. The book his father had been reading was still standing open on the desk of his reading-chair, where he had been sitting when the news came.

  Everything was pitilessly unchanged. The servants had come in to draw down the blinds, but Tom stopped them. What was the use of that unmeaning decorum? Tom had been very fond of his father, but the thought of May and the baby could not but make a picture in his mind. His father, like many very rich men, seldom or never spoke of his money, and Tom wondered vaguely, but with growing anxiety, how complete the smash was. The delights of poverty, of being out at elbows, and working passionately for a living at the work he loved, presented themselves in rather different colours to a man with a wife and infant son, from the glowing difficulties he had painted for himself as an ardent bachelor of twenty-two. What if the worst he feared were true — if they were absolute paupers!

  His thoughts went back again to his father lying dead upstairs. Tom remembered so vividly the last time he had seen him, standing with May and the baby in the porch when he went up to London. He had taken an extraordinary interest in the baby, and used to hazard cynical speculations as to its future. He used to allude to it as Mr. Thomas, in order to differentiate it from Tom. “Mr. Thomas’s solemnity is overpowering,” he said once; “he makes me feel as if I was a small boy talking to a wise old gentleman, or a juvenile offender waiting for an awful judge to pronounce sentence on me. And he makes me realize what is meant by rich silences.” Mr. Thomas at the moment broke into his own rich silence by a very creditable howl, and his grandfather added, “And mark how opulently he cries.”

  Tom met May at the door, and they went together up to the room where his father lay. He did not tell her what the old man’s last words had been. They found Mr. Markham waiting for them below when they came down, and the three talked together till it grew late. He stopped to dinner, and afterwards, when May had gone to bed, Tom mentioned the subject of the smash.

  Mr. Markham shook his head gravely.

  “Do either the London house or Applethorpe belong to you?” he asked.

  “No, we rent them both.”

  “My poor boy! I am sure I am right in telling you to prepare for the worst. I remember from a talk I had with your father once, that the greater part of his money was in this business, and the rest in two Australian banks which broke last year.”

  Tom stood up and frowned.

  “He never told me that. He never spoke about money, you know. I had not an idea of it.”

  “He probably thought it was unnecessary, for I believe he had the most utter confidence in his partners. I have seen the evening papers, and it appears that there has never been so com
plete a smash, except perhaps the Argentines.”

  “Have you got the paper?” asked Tom.

  “Not with me. But don’t look at the papers about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there are some very unjust things said about your father. Of course we all know quite well that he had nothing to do with the management of the company.”

  “What an infernal slander!” said Tom, hotly.

  “And do you mean you think I have nothing — literally nothing?”

  “It is possible it may mean that.”

  “What is to happen to the bills I haven’t paid?” demanded Tom.

  “You have a profession,” said Mr. Markham. “Ted told me Wallingthorpe’s opinion of your work.”

  “Ah, those horrors!” said Tom, impatiently. “I shall not earn a penny by those.”

  “But you say you have unpaid bills?”

  “Yes, I suppose I have — every one has. Of course they must be paid. The furniture here belongs to us.”

  “That is your father’s. Have you nothing except your income from him?”

  “I have £1500 left me by my godmother, and May has £500, has she not? Eighty pounds a year between us — a ridiculously insignificant sum. But I have my profession, as you say. I shall work for my living, work for her and the baby. I long to do that. My God! how I shall work! The Demeter is nearly finished.”

  “Are you doing it for an order?” asked Mr. Markham, tentatively.

  “No. Why?”

  “My dear Tom, you must be practical. It is a luxury for rich people only to work six months or a year at a thing if it has no market. I know nothing about art, but there is a practical point of view, which now you must take into consideration. Your work is not only the thing you love, but the thing which has to keep you in bread and cheese.”

  “Well, we shall see,” said Tom. “Perhaps we are counting our cobras before they are hatched. Anyhow, I have now — what I always longed for — the opportunity to work for May.”