Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  CHAPTER XII. THE COTTAGE BY THE SEA

  Toby was sitting on the edge of an old weather-beaten breakwater, now running out lop-sidedly and burying its nose in the sand, some three miles north of Stanborough-on-Sea, making an exceedingly public toilet after his swim.

  His mother, old Lady Conybeare, had a charming house down here, which had, so to speak, risen from the ranks; in other words, it had originally been two cottages, and was now a sort of rustic palace. Her husband had been a man of extraordinary good taste, and both his idea and execution of this transformation was on the high-water mark of felicity. Brick with rough-cast was the delectable manner of it, and the old cottage chambers had been run one into another like the amalgamation of separate drops of quicksilver, to produce irregular-shaped rooms with fireplaces in odd corners. He had built out a wing on one side, a block on another, a dining-room on a third; the front-door was reached through a cloister open to the sea, and supported on brick pillars; and big green Spanish oil-jars and Venetian well-tops lined the terraced walk. Opposite the front-door, on the other side of the carriage sweep, was a monastic-looking, three-sided courtyard, bounded by low-arched cloisters, and an Italian tower, square and tapering towards the top, bisected the middle side. Close abutting on this was a charming huddled group of red roofs, with beaten ironwork in the windows, suggestive of the refectory of this seaside monastery. In reality it comprised a laundry, a bakehouse, and the dynamos which supplied the electric light. For there was in reality nothing unpleasantly monastic about the place; the cloisters were admirable shelters from sun or wind, and were heavily cushioned; the bell in the tower rang folk not to prime, but to dinner; and the peas were not put in visitors’ boots, but boiled and put in dishes. The house, in fact, was as habitable as it was picturesque, a high degree of merit; it was no penance at all to stay there; the electric light seemed to brighten automatically as dusk fell, even as the moon and stars begin to shine without visible lamplighter in the high-roofed hall of heaven; and there were about as many bathrooms, with hot and cold water, as there were bedrooms.

  Toby was putting on his socks very leisurely; he had been down for a dip in the sea before lunch, and having lit the post-ablutive cigarette, sweetest of all that burn, he threw his towel round his neck, took his coat on his arm, and walked slowly up the steep sandy pathway to the top of the fifty-foot cliff on which the house and garden stood. Several old fishermen were standing about at the top in nautical attitudes, hitching their trousers, folding their arms, and scanning the horizon like the chorus in light opera. One had a lately-taken haul, and Toby inspected his wares with much interest. There were lobsters in blue mail — angry and irritable, which glanced sideways at one like vicious horses looking for a good opening to kick — feebly-flapping soles, anæmic whiting, a few rainbow mackerel, and, oh, heavens! crabs.

  Now, temptation and crab were the two things in the world which Toby found it idle to attempt to resist, and he ordered that the biggest and best should be sent instantly up to the house. Perhaps it would be safer if he took it himself, for the mere possibility of its miscarrying was not to be borne, and grasping it gingerly by the fourth leg, he carried it, not without nervousness, wide angry pincers all agape, up across the lawn.

  He went through the cloister and in at the door leading to the servants’ parts, where he met a stern, stark butler.

  “Oh, Lowndes,” he said, “for lunch, if possible. By the hind-leg. For the cook, with my compliments, and dressed.”

  The transference was effected, much to Toby’s relief, and he put down his towel and on his coat. There was still half an hour to wait for lunch, but that cloud had now its proverbial silver lining. Half an hour seemed an impossible time, but the silver lining was the possibility of the crab being ready by then. How long a crab took dressing Toby did not know, but if it took no longer than he did himself — and there was more of him to dress — half an hour should be sufficient for two.

  Lily, who, like himself, held firmly the wholesome creed that it is impious to stop indoors while it is possible to be out, was sure to be in the garden somewhere, and Toby walked out again in his white, sea-stained tennis-shoes to find her.

  The cottage had risen from the ranks, but not less remarkable had been the promotion of the garden. What a few years ago had been an unprofitable acreage of wind-swept corn, and more suggestive, by reason of its fine poppy-bearing qualities, of an opium rather than a wheat-field, was become a flowery wilderness of delight. Buckthorn, gray and green like the olives of the South, and bearing berries as if of a jaundiced holly, had been planted in shrubberies in the centre of garden-beds as screens from the wind, robbing the sea-gales of their bitter saltness before they passed over the flowers, and letting the bracing quality alone reach the plants. Mixed with the buckthorn were the yellow flames of the golden elder, noblest of the English shrubs, and rows of aspen all a-quiver with nervous feminine energy. Thus sheltered, there ran on each side of a broad space of grass away from the house an avenue of herbaceous border. Hollyhocks and sunflowers stood up behind, like tall men looking over the heads of an average crowd; shoulder-high to them were single dahlias and scarlet salvias; below them again a row of Shirley poppies, delicate in tint and texture as Liberty fabrics, and in a happy plebeian crowd at the edge mignonette, love-lies-a-bleeding, London-pride, and double daisies.

  Toby sauntered silent-footed over the velvet carpet of grass up to the summer-house, faced with split planks of pollarded elm, which stood at the end, but drew an unavailing cover. Thence crossing the broad gravel walk, he tried the tennis-court, and went down the steps past flowering fuchsia-trees, where two great bronze storks of Japanese work turned a world-weary eye skywards, and explored the rose-garden. This lay in a natural dip of the land, studiously sheltered, and the wirework pergola which ran through it was on these August days one foam of pink sherbet petals. On either side were rockeries covered with creeping stonecrops, mountain-heaths, and Alpine gentians, those remote sentinels of the vegetable world. And strange to their blue eyes, accustomed to see morning break on paths untrodden of man and fields of flashing snow, must have been the soft hint of dawn in this land of tended green. But Toby saw them not, for there in a nook at the end, below an ivy-trained limb of tree, sat the queen of the rosebud garden.

  Lily was not reading, in spite of the seeming evidence of an open book on her lap, for the breeze turned its leaves backwards and forwards like some student distractedly hunting up a reference. For a moment the page would lie open and unturned; then a scud of flying leaves would end in a long pause at ; then one leaf would be turned very slowly, as if the unseen reader was perusing the last words very carefully, while his fingers pushed the page over to be ready for the next. Then with a bustle and scurry he would hurry on and study the advertisements at the end, and as like as not go suddenly back to the title-page.

  Lily had been thinking pleasantly and idly about Toby, and the many charming things in this delightful world, when he appeared. She welcomed him with a smile in those adorable dark eyes.

  “Had a nice dip?” she asked, as he sat down by her. “Oh, Toby, when we are married I shall devote my whole life to getting your hair tidy for once. Then I shall turn my face to the wall and softly expire.”

  “If that’s your object you’ll be aiming at the impossible,” remarked Toby, “like that silly school-master you read me about in Browning who aimed at a million.”

  “Grammarian,” corrected Lily, “and I’ll read you no more Browning.”

  “Well, it does seem to be a bit above my head,” said Toby, without regret. “And I bought a crab on my way up, and, oh, I love you!”

  Lily laughed.

  “I thought you were going to say, ‘Oh, I love crab!’” she said.

  “And that would be true, too,” said Toby. “What a lot of true things there are, if one only looks for them!” he observed.

  “That’s what the Christian scientists say,” remarked Lily. “They say there is no such thing a
s lies or evil or pain.”

  “Who are the Christian scientists?” asked Toby. “And what do they make of toothache?”

  Lily meditated a moment.

  “The Christian scientists are unsuccessful female practitioners,” she observed at length. “And there isn’t any toothache; it’s only you who think so.”

  “Seems to me it’s much the same thing,” said Toby. “And how about lies? Supposing I said I didn’t love you?”

  “Or crab?”

  “Or crab, even. Would that be true, therefore?”

  Lily leaned forward, and put down Toby’s tie, which was rising above his collar.

  “Well, I think we’ve disposed of them,” she said. “Oh dear, I wish I was a man!”

  “I don’t,” said Toby.

  “Why not? Oh, I see. Thanks. But I should like to be able to bathe from a breakwater, and buy crabs from fishermen, and have very short, untidy straight-up hair, and a profession, Toby.”

  “Yes,” said Toby, wincing, for he knew or suspected what was coming.

  “Don’t say ‘yes’ like that. Say it as if you meant it.”

  Toby took a long breath, and shut his eyes.

  “Yes, so help me God!” he said, very loud.

  “That’s better. Well, Toby, I want you — I really want you — to have a real profession. What is the use of your being secretary to your cousin? I don’t believe you could say the names of the men in the Cabinet, and, as you once told me yourself, all you ever do there is to play stump-cricket in the secretary’s room.”

  “You should have warned me that whatever I said would be used against me,” said the injured Toby. “But I saw after the flowers in Hyde Park last year.”

  “The work of a life-time,” said Lily. “I wonder they don’t offer you a peerage.”

  “You see, I’m not a brewer,” said Toby.

  “Beer, beerage — a very poor joke, Toby.”

  “Very poor, and who made it? Besides, I think you are being sarcastic about the flowers in Hyde Park. If there’s one thing I hate,” said Toby violently, “it is cheap sarcasm.”

  “Who wouldn’t be sarcastic when a great tousle-headed, able-bodied, freckle-faced scion of the aristocracy tells one that he is employed — employed, mark you — in looking after the flowers in Hyde Park?” asked Lily, with some warmth. “Why, you didn’t even water them!”

  “I did the organization, the head work of the thing,” said Toby. “That’s the rub.”

  “Bosh!”

  “Lily, you are really very vulgar and common in your language sometimes,” said Toby. “I have often meant to speak to you about it; it makes me very unhappy.”

  “Indeed! Try and cheer up. But really, Toby, and quite seriously, I wish you would settle to do something; I don’t care what. Go into the Foreign Office.”

  “Languages,” said Toby; “I don’t know any.”

  “Or some other office, or buy a farm, and work it properly, and try to make it pay. Give your mind seriously to something. I hate a loafer. Besides, a profession seems to me the greatest luxury in the world.”

  “Plain folk like me don’t care for luxuries,” said Toby. “I’m not like Kit. Kit is perfectly happy without the necessaries of life, provided she has the luxuries.”

  This diversion was more successful. Lily was silent a moment.

  “Toby, I’m afraid I don’t like your sister-in-law,” she said at length.

  Toby plunged with fervour into the new topic.

  “Oh, there you make a great mistake,” he said. “I allow Kit is not exactly a copy-book-virtue person, but — well, she’s clever and amusing, and she is never a bore.”

  “I don’t trust her.”

  “There, again, you make a mistake. I don’t say that everybody should trust her, but I am sure she would never do a shabby thing to you or me, or — —”

  “Or?” said Lily, with the straightforwardness which Kit labelled “uncomfortable.”

  “Or anybody she really liked,” said Toby. “Besides, Lily, I owe her something; she brought us together. As I have told you, she simply insisted on introducing me, though I didn’t want to be introduced at all.”

  Lily made the sound which is usually written “pshaw!”

  “As if we shouldn’t have met!” she said. “Toby, our meeting was in better hands than hers.”

  “Well, she hurried the better hands up,” said Toby, “and I am grateful for that. If it had not been for her, we should not have been introduced at that dance at the Hungarians, and I shouldn’t probably have dined at Park Lane the night after; I should have gone to the Palace instead, so there would have been one, perhaps two, evenings wasted.”

  “Well, I’ll make an effort to like her more,” said Lily.

  “Oh, but that’s no manner of use,” said Toby. “You may hold your breath, and shut your eyes, and try with both hands, and never get a yard nearer liking anybody for all your trying. And it’s the same with disliking.”

  “Do you dislike anyone, Toby?” asked Lily, with a touch of wistfulness, for Toby’s habit of universal friendliness always seemed to her extremely enviable.

  Toby considered a moment.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Who is that?”

  “Ted Comber,” said Toby.

  Lily drew her brows together. Toby’s promptness in singling out this one person seemed hard to reconcile with his wide forbearance.

  “Now why?” she asked. “Tell me exactly why.”

  “He ain’t a man,” said Toby gruffly. “Surely, Lily, we can talk about something pleasanter.”

  “Yes, I’m sure we can,” she replied fervently. “I quite share your view. Oh, Toby, promise me something!”

  “All right,” said Toby, taken off his guard.

  “Hurrah! that you will instantly get a profession of some sort. Dear Toby, how nice of you! There’s the gong, and I’m simply ravenous.”

  Toby got up rather stiffly.

  “If you consider that fair,” he remarked, “I wonder at you. At least, I don’t wonder, for it’s extraordinary how little sense of honour women have.”

  “I know. Isn’t it terrible?” said Lily. “Toby, it was nice of you to order that crab. I adore crab. Oh, there’s mamma! I suppose she must have crossed last night. I didn’t expect her till this evening.”

  Mrs. Murchison had been to the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth, and was very communicative and astounding about it. She began by saying how delicious it had been at Beyrout, and Lily, whose real and tender affection for her mother did not blunt her sense of humour, began to giggle helplessly.

  “Bayreuth, I should say,” continued Mrs. Murchison without a pause. “Lily dearest, if you laugh like that you’ll get a piece of crab in your windgall. Well, as I was saying, Lady Conybeare, it was all just too beautiful. You may be sure I studied the music a good deal before each opera; it is impossible to grasp it otherwise — the life-motive and all that. Siegfried Wagner conducted; they gave him quite an ovarium. But some people go just in order to say they have been, without thinking about the music. Garibaldi to the general, I call it.”

  Lady Conybeare, a fresh-faced, dark-eyed woman of not more than fifty, healthy as a sea-wind, and in her wholesome way as tyrannical, cast an appealing look at Toby. Toby was one of the few people who did not in the least fear her, and she was proportionately grateful. She had tried to spoil him as a child, and now depended on him. He had warned her what calls would be made on her gravity during Mrs. Murchison’s visit, and she had promised to do her best.

  “So few people appreciate Garibaldi,” she said with emphatic sympathy.

  “Yes it is so,” said Mrs. Murchison, flying off at a tangent. “When I was a girl I used to adore him, and wore a photograph of him in a locket. But that is all gone out; it went out with plain living and high thinking;” and she helped herself for the second time to Toby’s crab and drank a little excellent Moselle.

  “But Bayreuth was very fatiguing,” she went on; �
��or is it Beyrout? Until one has heard the operas once, it is a terrible effort of attention. C’est le premier fois qui coûte. Really, I felt quite exhausted at the end of the circle, and I was so glad to get back to dear, delightful, foggy old London again, where one never has to attend to anything. And it looked so beautiful this morning as I drove down the Embankment. I see they have put up a new statue at the corner of Westminster Bridge — Queen Casabianca, or some such person.”

  Toby choked suddenly and violently.

  “I’ve said something wrong, I expect,” remarked Mrs. Murchison genially. “Tell me what it is, Lord Evelyn, or I should say Lord Toby.”

  “Toby, please.”

  “Well, Toby —— Dear me! how funny it sounds, considering I only saw you first in June! Ah, dear me, since first I saw your face, what a lot has happened! But if it’s not Casabianca, who is it?”

  “Boadicea, I think,” said Toby.

  “Dear me! so it is. How stupid of me! She comes in the Anglo-Saxon history, does she not? and she used to bleed beneath the Roman rods in the blue poetry book — or was it pink? I never can remember. But how it all comes back to one! Caractacus, too, and Alfred and the cakes, and the seven hills.”

  Mrs. Murchison beamed with happiness. She knew very well the difference between being a unit among a large house-party, and staying as an only guest, and this cottage by the sea seemed to her to be the very incarnation of the taste and culture of breeding. She knew also that several rich and aspiring acquaintances of hers were spending a week at Stanborough, and she proposed after lunch to stroll along the beach towards there, and perhaps call at the hotel on the links. Her friends were sure to ask where she was staying, and it would be charming to say: