Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  A week had passed since her scene with Jack on the evening of the thunderstorm, and she had left London three days after in obedience to an instinct which she felt she could not disobey. That scene had unfocused her; she had to adjust herself to a new view of things, and the need to go away and be alone for a day or two had been overmastering. For the one thing which she had always regarded as impossible had happened to her: the snowflake — herself — was supposed to have melted. And, from the fact that this slander affected her so deeply, she knew, for the first time fully, how utterly different she was to the rest of the world. Some months ago she had heard Lady Ardingly say in her slow, sensible voice: “Ah, my dear, there are so many people who can lose their reputation, but so few who know how valuable the loss is! They were perfectly capable of valuing it when it existed, but they cannot appreciate its loss at the proper figure.” At the time she had laughed, as she would have laughed at any outrageous piece of cynicism in some modern play. Now she choked at it; it was gall to her.

  So, then, according to the world’s view, she was in the position of many women who held their heads high, and thought of the world generally as their playground, the place kindly provided for the amusement of their spare time, of which they had twenty-four hours every day. Whether the disrepute of all these was as reliable as that which she had herself just gained was not the immediate point to be considered; but certainly, if one took a man like Arthur Naseby into a corner, he would, with no encouragement at all, tell an intimate and abominable history of half the folk he knew. For herself, she was not in the habit of taking this stout and poisonous gentleman into corners. Scandalous stories did not amuse her, particularly if they were true, and immorality she thought to be a thing not only wicked, but vulgar. Wickedness, as she had once said, seemed to the world in which she lived merely an obsolete term, describing a moral condition which had no appreciable existence; and sometimes she wondered whether vulgarity was not passing into the category of words without significance. And now it appeared that people were saying about her what they said about so many others, with no sense of condemnation, but — and here lay the nausea of the thing — with amusement. She could almost hear Arthur’s voice stridently declaiming: “After all, poor thing, why shouldn’t she amuse herself like everybody else? It was the one thing wanted to make her perfectly charming. But I think we shall hear less about the stupidity and vulgarity of the world. Artistically speaking, she ought to have modulated the change more. Just a shade too abrupt — a little Wagnerian in its change of key;” and roars of laughter would follow.

  But this new condition in her life had by no means constituted the sum of these three days’ meditation in the country. With the elasticity inherent in human nature, the moment the new condition had been made, her mental fibres set themselves automatically to adjust themselves to it. Doctors say that any patient adjusts himself to the most fatal sentence in twenty-four hours; the thing becomes a part of life. It was so with her, and now she felt, though not reconciled, at any rate used to the thing. Though highly introspective, she was not, in the ordinary sense of the word, self-conscious, and she no longer believed that the changed glances of the world at her would affect her very seriously. Surely she could manage to take them at their correct and worthless valuation. At first the thought of that had seemed intolerable; but after three days she was beginning to feel she cared very appreciably less.

  So far her solitude had been successful, but beyond that it had been a complete failure. For the larger of the two reasons which had induced her to come here remained, and she could not even now conjecture what in the future should be her attitude to Jim. With this problem she had wrestled and struggled in vain, and it seemed to her, in these first days of her consciousness as to her essential relations to him, that all her life-long consistency of thought and habit on such a point were cancelled and worthless. The truth was that she had not known at all before that she was really capable of passion. Her nature, including something far deeper and stronger than mere physical nature, had till quite lately been dormant; she had been ignorant all her life of what the longing for another meant; all her life she had judged men and women by a blind standard which did not really measure that to which it was applied. All her life she had labelled immorality as vulgar, and, as such, she shrugged her shoulders at it and passed by. But now it was beginning to be burned into her that it was not her fastidiousness that labelled things vulgar, but her ignorance. She had thought Blanche Devereux vulgar because she herself had not understood. Now she was afraid she was beginning to understand, and with the gradual comprehension came growing bewilderment. And step by step with the bewilderment marched an inward tumult of ecstasy, of which she had not known herself capable. A sort of horrified wonder at herself was there, and withal a singing in her heart. It had awoke, and, like the roar of the sea which drowns the idle clatter of the Corniche road, it made a huge soft tumult.

  This, then, was the problem she had brought unsolved from London, and which, she was afraid, she would bring back there without solution. The knowledge of it had burst upon her on the evening when Jack had told her what he had heard said of her, and her first conscious utterance that showed she knew of its existence was when that involuntary cry, “Ah, don’t touch me!” came uninvited to her lips. Her long and gradual estrangement from her husband had immeasurably widened at that moment. In an instant his figure had leaped to remote horizons, and she had but to turn her head to see how close beside her stood another, he of whom her husband had spoken. This she had not known before; but the knowledge had come in a flash, staining backwards, as it were, through the past pages of her life, so that it seemed to her that she had loved him since the time when they were boy and girl together, and it made her view her married life with an incredulous horror. And by what sinister revelation had she gained this knowledge? For it was the fact that people spoke of Jim as her lover that had made her definitely aware she loved him. And it had been Jack through whom this knowledge was conveyed.

  It was this knowledge that made her distrust herself as utterly as if her own soul and spirit had just been introduced to her among a crowd of strangers. She had thought she had known herself, and now this thing had started out upon her as if she had been asleep in a dark room, and had been wakened to find the chamber blazing with lights. Whether she had the will or the strength to resist she did not yet know; the purpose alone she could utterly answer for. But she realized that if again she saw him in such sort as she had seen him on the Sunday afternoon by the river, or on that afternoon when she had told him of her conversation with Maud Brereton, it would be a more difficult task to make him keep silence. She felt she could scarcely answer for her own silence. How much less, then, for her power of stopping the speech which a word from her would have even then brought to utterance! And now ——

  She rose, feeling that the only hope of victory lay in turning away from thoughts like these, and not, under the specious pretext of consciously fighting them, in reality making them familiar to her mind; for familiarity in such things breeds, not contempt, but acquiescence, half contemptuous it may be, but half consenting, and she knew that in face of certain temptations it is cowardice not to run away. The sun was already off the lawn, and a cooler breeze had begun to stir the intense heat of the afternoon. Tea had long been waiting for her under the cedar, and she walked slowly along the terrace and down the ten steps which led on to the lawn. This terrace had been an expensive whim of Jack’s grandfather; it ran the length of the house, and was paved and balustraded with rose-coloured Numidian marble; urns, wreathed in delicate creepers which spilt splashes of vivid colour, stood at intervals along it; and below it blossomed a superb riband flower-bed bordering the lawn where stood the cedar.

  On this restful velvet she walked up and down, again taken up and possessed by the absorption of that which lay before her. Her pride shied and jibbed at the thought of refusing to see any more of Jim Spencer because some slanderous tongue had started a vile fa
lsehood about her, and she told herself that to do this would but confirm these inventions in the minds of such people as could ever have entertained them. She knew well enough the form the story would take. It would be supposed that the report had got to Jack’s ears, and that he forbade her to see him. This would be intolerable; intolerable also was the thing itself, that she should not see him. So much she confessed frankly to herself. But one thing, one thing above all, was certain, and the thought brought to her the glow which is inseparable from all honest endeavour. She had been slandered in a way that touched her with deep resentment, but never should she give that lie a moment’s harbourage, even on the threshold of her thoughts. The vileness of it, indeed, was a safeguard, and she could not without shuddering picture herself touching the subject-matter of it.

  She had not walked long before a servant came out and approached her.

  “Mr. Spencer wants to know if your ladyship will see him,” he said.

  Marie paused, feeling suddenly that this had happened before, but was unable to recollect what came next.

  “Mr. Spencer?” she repeated.

  “Yes, my lady.”

  Marie turned away from the man without replying, and walked a pace or two from him. Her mind seemed to be making itself up without any volition on her part. Then, without turning her head, “Ask him to come out,” she answered, and the sound of the utterly commonplace words conveyed to her the nature of her own decision; for she had yielded, and knew it, not to be the imperative demand of her pride, which insisted that she should show not the smallest change of behaviour towards him, just because people had lied about her, but to her imperative desire to see the man.

  She walked back to where the tea-table still stood, with the shining points of sunlight that filtered through the cedar making stars on the silver, and sat there a moment listening with a sort of incredulous wonder to the hammer of her pulse, and observing with the same incapacity for belief that these were her hands which trembled. But the interval was a short one, for in a moment his step sounded crisp on the terrace, and then became noiseless on the lawn. She was sitting with her back to the quarter of advance, but turned her head as he approached.

  “Where in the world have you sprung from?” she asked. “Have some tea, Jim, or whisky-and-soda? I am delighted to see you, though it was not in my programme to see anybody.”

  “I am an intruder then, I fear,” said he. “No sugar, thanks.”

  “Yes, but not unwelcome. I left London three days ago, and am going back to-morrow. I am eccentric, as you know, and, what is more useful, I have the reputation of being so. Thus, nobody wonders if I disappear for a few days.”

  To her great relief and her hardly less surprise, Marie found not the slightest difficulty in assuming a perfectly natural manner, and even mentally classed it under the heading of phenomena which show that ordinary people in trying circumstances for the most part behave normally. It was natural to her, in fact, to be natural. But even as she drew these comforting conclusions, she had leisure to observe that Jim, too, was in the grip of some inward struggle. Its nature she did not try to guess, but continued talking under a sense of stress, a fear of silences.

  “You know my gospel, do you not?” she said, “or, rather, I am sure you do not, as I have only formulated it to myself during this last day or two. There are two halves to the world, which make the whole, and each is the antidote to the other. One half is people; the other half is things. Now, the country is the place of things, and London of people. Cows, flowers, hay, all these are a certain antidote to the poisoning which unmixed people give one. In the same way, one flies from the country to town to take the antidote to the poison, a narcotic one, of things. Dipsomaniacs, so to speak, live entirely in London. They die young; it is a quick poison. The opposite dipsomaniacs live entirely in the country; it is a slow poison, and they live, or, at any rate, do not die, until a very advanced age. But oh, Jim, what a difference there is between living and not dying! They sound the same thing, but there is all the difference in the world between them.”

  Jim stirred his sugarless tea slowly, then drank it quickly and put down the cup. Being a man, airy nothings were not part of his stock in trade, a deficiency from a merely social standpoint.

  “And so you have been poisoned with people?” he said directly. “I feel uncomfortable; I am afraid I have interrupted the cure.”

  “Not a bit. The treatment is over, and I am going back to London to-morrow. You are the junction, so to speak, where some one gets in, where one first sees the smoke and the sea of houses. But who told you I was here?”

  “Jack told me,” he said. “Why?”

  On his words Marie suddenly became conscious that definite drama had entered. From this point she saw herself as she might see a character in a play, with a feeling of irresponsibility. The author of the play was responsible. It was, in fact, overwhelmingly interesting to know the manner in which Jack had said this.

  “When did you see him?” she asked.

  “This morning only, and by accident. He suggested I should come here, in fact, and escort you back to London.”

  “But I am not going to-day,” said Marie.

  “No; he expects you back to-morrow. He suggested I should spend the night here, and come back with you then.”

  “Ah, that is charming!” said she. “You have told them you are stopping?”

  “But I am not. I must get back to-night.”

  Marie felt and knew that the words were wrung from him, that they had been difficult to speak. But, well as she knew it, Jim knew it infinitely better. His tongue, so to speak, he had to tie like a galley-slave to its oar, and it made its monotonous strokes, which, unwilling as they were and mutinously inclined, yet moved the vessel towards its safety in harbour. Then a pause which both dreaded was broken by the crisp sound of the trodden terrace, and the servant again approached Marie.

  “Which room shall I put Mr. Spencer’s things in, my lady?” he asked, and again the commonplace words had a hideous momentousness.

  The temptation in her mind to give him merely the number of a room was almost overwhelming, for she felt morally certain that, had she done so, Jim would have said nothing. Furthermore, Jack had suggested his coming, and within herself she bore the conscious witness of her own rectitude. Only — and this was the reason for her decision — she knew that her desire that he should stop, that events should then take their course, was stronger than could have been accounted for by her desire to have a companion at dinner, even the most desirable, and a companion during her journey the next day. Further, he had come down here with the intention of stopping. But her purpose held.

  “Mr. Spencer will go back to-night,” she said. “But you will stop for dinner, Jim!”

  “Thanks. I should like to. There is a train back at nine.”

  “Then, we must dine at eight instead of half-past. Let us have dinner on the terrace. We often dine there when it is warm.”

  The man took the tea-tray and retired with it. Then Jim leaned forward in his chair.

  “Thank you,” he said to Marie.

  Again her hands so trembled that she had to catch hold of both arms of her chair, lest it should be apparent. And her voice, as she felt to her rebellious impotence, shook as she answered.

  “For the dinner?” she said. “Indeed it will not be much, Jim — soup and a cutlet, I expect.”

  Great emotion has its moments of calm and hurricane, like the sea. It may lie glassy and level, though deep; again, with the speed of tropical storm, it may have its surface lashed to mountainous billows, against which no ship can make way, but must run before them. And the pitiless and intentional lightness of her words made an upheaval in him of all he was trying to suppress. He had come down here meaning to stop till the next day, but somehow the sight of her, and some deep abiding horror — the root of morality — of that for which his flesh cried out, had revealed to him the grossness of, not his design, but his acquiescence. Thus he had not ev
en told her that he had his luggage with him; but of this blind Fate, in the shape of a liveried servant, had informed her. She knew as well as he what he had intended to do. And looking at her hands as they clutched the wickerwork of her basket chair, he could see that she, too, wrestled with, and tried to throttle, some secret enemy. Then came her light words, interpreted by the quivering of the tense hands, and his passion surged and overwhelmed him.

  “Let me change my mind, Marie,” he said, “and stop.”

  Again she told herself that it was perfectly right and natural that he should do so, but again her clear, clean judgment, recognising the force of the desire that he should, overruled her; but she was tired and nerve-jangled from the struggle, and her voice, pitched high and entreatingly, was no longer under her command.

  “No, no, Jim!” she cried. “You must go.”

  The word she was afraid she would not be able to speak was spoken. The operation was over; she had only to keep quiet and recuperate. But she had betrayed herself to him: both knew it. A barrier had been broken down between them; each soul in its secret place was visible to the other, and in the awe and amazement of that the cries and strivings of the debatable were for the moment stilled. There was no satisfaction in the world that could equal the self-surrender that each had already made; there was nothing that either could do or say which would not spoil and degrade that which had passed between them. Jim, on his part, though he knew why he had asked to change his mind and stop, could not yet regret it, so tremendous and soul-filling was that which lay behind her refusal; and she could not find it in her heart to blame him, since his weakness had ended so gloriously. Thus in silence for a long moment each looked at the other, unashamed, acknowledging by that look, without fear or regret, the great bond that bound them indissolubly together, the great renunciation that irrevocably divided them.