Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The day was rather windy, and as she drove up Park Lane she had her work cut out for her in the matter of management. The cobs had been newly clipped, and all their nerves appeared to be outside their skins. This Mildred thoroughly enjoyed; she was conscious of the mastery over brute strength which makes the fascination of dealing with horses, and she loved to know that Box longed to bolt and could not manage it, and that Cox wanted to shy at every carriage that passed but did not dare, for that his nerves were outside his skin, and he was aware who sat behind him with whip alert. “The heavenly devils!” thought Mildred to herself as they avoided a curbstone on the one hand by a hair-breadth and a bicycle on the other by half that distance.

  Like all fine whips, she infinitely preferred to drive in the streets than in the Park, but to-day they were horribly crowded, and she turned in through Stanhope Gate with the idea of letting the cobs have a good trot through the Park and come out at the Albert Gate. The day was so divine that she thought she would perhaps go out of town, and lunch at Richmond or somewhere, returning in the afternoon. She was dining out that night at Blanche Devereux’s, who had a Mexican band coming, which, according to her account, was so thrilling that you didn’t know whether you were standing on your head or your heels. This sounded quite promising; she liked a décolleté evening.

  So Box and Cox had their hearts’ desire, and flew down the road inside the Park parallel to Park Lane. Here a motor-car, performing in a gusty and throbbing manner, was a shock to their sense of decency, and they made a simultaneous dash for the railings, until recalled to their own sense of decency by a vivid cut across their close-shaven backs and a steady pull on their mouths to show them that the whip was punitive, not suggestive of faster progress. The progress, indeed, was fast enough to satisfy even Mildred, who, however, was enjoying herself immensely. Both cobs had their heads free (she, like the wise woman she was in matters of horseflesh, abominating bearing-reins even for the brougham horses, and knowing that for speed they are death and ruin), necks arched, and were stepping high and long. Then, as they came to the bend of the road of the Ladies’ Mile, she indicated the right-hand road, and found that they were a little beyond her control. Simultaneously a wayward gust picked up a piece of wandering newspaper and blew it right across Box’s blinkers; from there it slid gradually on to Cox’s. The same moment both heads were up, and, utterly beyond her control, they bolted straight for the gate at Hyde Park Corner. It is narrow; outside the double tide of traffic roared and jostled.

  By good luck or bad luck — it did not seem at the moment to matter in the least — they were straight for the opening. If they had not been they would have upset over the posts or against the arch, but as they were they would charge at racing speed into an omnibus. A policeman outside, Mildred could see, had observed what had happened, and with frantic gesticulations was attempting to stem the double tide of carriages and open a lane for her, and it was with a curious indifference that she knew he would be too late. Passers-by also had looked up and seen, and just as they charged through the arch she saw one rush out full into the roadway in the splendid and desperate attempt, no doubt, to avert the inevitable accident. “What a fool!” she thought. “I am done; why should he be done, too?” Then for the millionth part of a second their eyes met, and they recognised each other.

  Then, though she had been cool enough before, she utterly lost her head. She knew that she screamed, “Jack, for God’s sake get out of the way!” and simultaneously he had met the horses as a man meets an incoming breaker, struggling to reach some wreck on a rocky shore. With one hand he caught something, rein or blinker, God knows which, with the other the end of the pole. Thus, dragging and scraping and impotently resisting, he was borne off his feet, and they whirled into the mid-stream of traffic.

  There was a crash, a cry, the man was jerked off like a fly; one cob went down, and Mildred was thrown out on to the roadway. She still held the reins; she saw a horse pulled up on its haunches just above her, within a yard of her head, and the next moment she had picked herself up unhurt.

  On the other side of her wrecked phaeton, jammed against her fallen cob, was an omnibus. Under the centre of it lay the man who had saved her.

  Suddenly, to her ears, the loud street hushed into absolute silence. A crowd, springing up like ants on a disturbed hill, swarmed round her, but she knew nothing of them. The omnibus made a half-turn, and slowly drew clear of her own carriage and of that which lay beneath its wheels. And though she had recognised him before in that infinitesimal moment as she galloped through the arch, she might have looked for hours without recognising him now. Hoof and wheel had gone over his head, stamping it out of all semblance of humanity.

  EPILOGUE

  Lady Ardingly was sitting on the veranda of the New Hotel at Cairo, on a clear bright February afternoon of the year following. The coloured life of the East went jingling by, and she observed it with a critical indifference.

  “We could all have blue gaberdines if we chose,” she thought to herself; “but they are not becoming. Also it would be quite easy to put sepia on one’s face instead of rouge.”

  And having thus dismissed the gorgeous East, she turned to the Egyptian Gazette. There were telegrams to be found in it, anyhow, which came from more civilized parts. She had not played Bridge for twenty-four hours, and felt slightly depressed. But whenever a carriage stopped at the hotel she looked up; it appeared that she expected some one.

  At length the expected happened, and she rose from her seat and went to the top of the half-dozen steps that formed the entrance from the street.

  “Ah, my dear,” she said, “my dear Marie, I have sat here all afternoon! I did not know when you might come. You are not dusty? You do not want to wash? Let us have immediately the apology for tea which they give one here.”

  Marie put up her veil and kissed the face that was presented to her. It was fearful and marvellous, but she was extraordinarily glad to see it.

  “It was charming of you to wait for me,” she said. “The train was very late. I think my maid has lost it. There was a sort of Babel at Alexandria, and the last I saw of her was that she was apparently engaged in a personal struggle with a man with ‘Cook’ on his cap.”

  “Then, it will be all right if you give her time,” said Lady Ardingly. “But meantime you have no luggage, no clothes? It does not matter. I will lend you all you want. Ah, my dear, you may smile, but I have all kinds of things.”

  The apology for tea was brought, and both accepted it, talking of trivialities. Then Lady Ardingly sat in a lower chair.

  “And now talk to me, my dear,” she said. “Tell me what news there is. I have not seen you since July!”

  Marie paused a moment.

  “I hardly know what to tell you,” she said, “for I suppose you do not ask me for just the trivial news that I have, as last-comer from England.”

  “No, my dear; who cares? Anybody can tell me that. About yourself.”

  “Well, I saw Mildred,” said Marie. “I saw her the same day as it happened. We went together to Jack’s room. And we shook hands. I have not seen her since.”

  “Ah, she did her best to ruin him in life, and she succeeded in killing him,” said Lady Ardingly very dryly. “I do not want news of her. She is a cook.”

  Marie bit her lip.

  “I also do not want to talk of her,” she said. “She is very gay this winter, I believe. She says it would look so odd if she didn’t do things, just because of that awful accident. She thinks people would talk.”

  “She has a horror of that, I know,” said Lady Ardingly, “except when they are not talking about her. If they are not talking about her, she joins in it. Did she, in confidence, tell you — —”

  “Yes, she told me in confidence that it was she who had started that silly story about me. She told me also that you knew it. So I am not violating her confidence.”

  Lady Ardingly made a noise in her throat which resembled gargling.

  “Th
at is enough,” she said. “What else, dear Marie?”

  Marie smiled.

  “You mean Jim, I suppose?” she said.

  “Yes, Jim.”

  “Well, Jim is coming out here in a week or so. He cannot get away any sooner. I have seen him a good deal.”

  “And you will in the future see him even oftener,” suggested Lady Ardingly.

  “Much oftener. I shall see him every day.”

  “I am very glad of that,” she said; “I have a great respect for Mr. Spencer. I see constantly that he is attacking my poor Ardingly. And I respect you also, my dear. You are the nicest good woman I know. Ah! my dear, when you are old like me, you will have pleasant back-pages to turn over.”

  “And to whom shall I owe them?” asked Marie.

  “To your own good sense. My dear, I am not often sentimental. But I feel sentimental when I think of one morning in last July. You were a good woman always, Marie, I should imagine. That day you were a grand one, too — superb! I admired you, and it is seldom that I admire people.”

  There was a long silence. With the swiftness of sunset in the South, the colours were struck from the gay crowds, and where ten minutes before had been a riot of blues and reds, there was only a succession of various gray. But overhead the stars burned close and large, and the pale northern heavens were here supplanted by a velvet blue.

  “And I admired Jack,” said Lady Ardingly at length. “He was weak, if you like, and, if you choose, he was wicked. But there was, how shall I say it? the possibility of the big scale about him. That is the best thing; the next is to know that you are small. The worst is not to know that you are small.”

  Again Marie made no reply. Outside the patter of bare feet went right and left, donkeys jingled their chains, and the odour of the Southern night got more intense.

  “Ah! my dear, we are lepers,” said Lady Ardingly. “We are all wrong and bad, and we roll over each other in the gutter like these Arabs scrambling for backshish. We strive for one thing, which is wealth, and when we have got it we spend it on pleasure. You are not so, and the odd thing is that the pleasure we get does not please us. It is always something else we want. I sit and I say ‘What news?’ and when I am told I say ‘What else?’ and still ‘What else?’ and I am not satisfied. Younger folk than I do this, and they do that, and still, like me, they cry, ‘What else? what else?’ It means that we go after remedies for our ennui, for our leprosy, and there is no such remedy unless we become altogether different. Now, you are not so. Tell me your secret. Why are you different? Why can you sit still while we fidget? Why is it you can always keep clean in the middle of that muck-heap?”

  Marie was moved and strangely touched. Her companion’s face looked very haggard in the glare of the electric lamp overhead, and her eyes were weary and wistful.

  “Dear Lady Ardingly,” she said, “why do you say these things? I suppose my nature is not to fidget. I suppose, also, that the pleasures you refer to do not seem to me immensely attractive. I suppose I happen to be simple and not complex.”

  “Ah! that is not all,” said the other. “Those are only little accidents.”

  Marie let her eyes wander a moment, then looked straight at Lady Ardingly.

  “I believe in God,” she said.

  THE END

  THE ANGEL OF PAIN

  CONTENTS

  FIRST

  SECOND

  THIRD

  FOURTH

  FIFTH

  SIXTH

  SEVENTH

  EIGHTH

  NINTH

  TENTH

  ELEVENTH

  TWELFTH

  THIRTEENTH

  FOURTEENTH

  FIFTEENTH

  SIXTEENTH

  SEVENTEENTH

  EIGHTEENTH

  NINETEENTH

  TWENTIETH

  TWENTY-FIRST

  TWENTY-SECOND

  TWENTY-THIRD

  EPILOGUE

  FIRST

  THE garden lay dozing in the summer sun, a sun, too, that was really hot and luminous, worthy of mid-June, and Philip Home had paid his acknowledgments to its power by twice moving his chair into the shifting shade of the house, which stood with blinds drawn down, as if blinking in the brightness. Somewhere on the lawn below him, but hidden by the flower-beds of the terraced walk, a mowing-machine was making its clicking journeys to and fro, and the sound of it seemed to him to be extraordinarily consonant to the still heat of the afternoon. Entirely in character also with the day was the light hot wind that stirred fitfully among the garden beds as if it had gone to sleep there, and now and then turned over and made the flowers rustle and sigh. Huge Oriental poppies drooped their scarlet heads, late wall-flowers still sent forth their hot, homely odour, peonies blazed and flaunted, purple irises rivalled in their fading glories the budding stars of clematis that swarmed up the stone vases on the terrace, golden rain showered from the laburnums, lilacs stood thick in fragrant clumps and clusters. Canterbury bells raised spires of dry, crinkly blue, and forget-me-nots — nearly over — made a dim blue border to the glorious carpet of the beds. For the warm weather this year had come late but determinedly, spring flowers still lingered, and the later blossoms of early summer had been forced into premature appearance. This fact occupied Philip at this moment quite enormously. What would the garden be like in July? There must come a break somewhere, when the precious summer flowers were over, and before the autumn ones began.

  It was not unreasonable of him to be proud of his garden, for any garden-lover would here have recognised a master-hand. Below, in the thick clay that bordered the Thames, were the roses kept apart, with no weed, no other flower to pilfer their rightful monopoly of “richness.” A flight of twelve stone steps led up from this garden to the tennis lawn, a sheet of velvet turf, unbordered by any flowers to be trampled by ball-seekers, or to be respected by ball-losers. Above again where he sat now a deep herbaceous border ran round three sides of the gravelled space, in the middle of which a bronze fountain cast water over Nereids and aquatic plants, and behind him rose the dozing house, sun-blinds and rambler rose, jasmine and red bricks.

  Certainly at this moment Philip was more than content with life, a very rare but a very enviable condition of affairs. The lines seemed to him to be laid not in pleasant but in ecstatic places, and youth, hard work, a well-earned holiday, keen sensibilities, and being in love combined to form a state of mind which might be envied by the happiest man God ever made. An hour’s meditation with a shut book which he had selected at random from the volumes on the drawing-room table had convinced him of this, and the interruption that now came to his solitary thoughts was as delightful in its own way as the thoughts themselves.

  Mrs. Home did everything in the way most characteristic of her, and if a Dresden shepherdess could be conceived as sixty years old she might possibly rival the clean, precise delicacy of Philip’s mother. She dressed in grey and Quakerish colours, but of an exquisite neatness, and her clothes smelled faintly but fragrantly of lavender and old-fashioned herbs. Even at sixty the china-prettiness of her face gave her pre-eminent charm; and her cheeks, wrinkled with no sharp lines of sudden shock, but with the long pleasant passage of time, were as pink and soft as a girl’s. Her hair was perfectly white, but still abundant, and, taken up in rather old-fashioned lines above her temples gave a roundness and youth to her face which was entirely in keeping with her. As she stepped out of the drawing-room window she put up her parasol, and walked quietly over the gravel to where her dark, long-limbed son was sitting.

  “Darling, would it not be wise of you to go for a row on the river?” she said. “Your holiday is so short. I want you to make the best of it.”

  Philip turned in his chair.

  “Darling, it would be most unwise,” he said. “The best holiday is to do nothing at all. People are so stupid! They think that if your brain, or what does duty for it, is tired, the remedy is to tire your body also.”

  “But a little walk
, perhaps, Philip,” said she. “I can explain to your guests when they come. Do you know, I am rather frightened of them. That extraordinary Mr. Merivale, for instance. Will he want to take off all his clothes, and eat cabbages?”

  Philip’s grave face slowly relaxed into a smile. He hardly ever laughed, but his smile was very complete.

  “I shall tell him you said that,” he remarked.

  Mrs. Home sat down with quite a thump at the horror of the thought.

  “Dear Philip,” she said, “you mustn’t — you really mustn’t.”

  He stretched out his hand to her.

  “Oh, mother,” he said, “what will cure you of being so indiscreet except threats, and putting those threats into execution if necessary? He will want to take off all his clothes, as we all shall, if it goes on being so hot. Only he won’t any more than we shall. He will probably be extremely well-dressed. No, the Hermit is only the Hermit at the Hermitage. Even there he doesn’t take off all his clothes, though he lives an outdoor life. You never quite have recognised what a remarkable person he is.”

  “I should remark him anywhere,” said Mrs. Home in self-defence. “And what age is he, Philip? Is he twenty, or thirty, or what?”

  Philip considered.

  “He must be a year or two older than me,” he said. “Yes, I should say he was thirty-one. But it’s quite true — he doesn’t look any age; he looks ageless. Entirely the result of no clothes and cabbages.”

  “They always seem to me so tasteless,” remarked Mrs. Home. “But they seem to suit him.”

  “Dear old Hermit!” said Philip. “I haven’t seen him for a whole year. It becomes harder and harder to get him away from his beloved forest.”

  “I can never understand what he does with himself, year in, year out, down there,” said Mrs. Home.

  “He thinks,” said Philip.

  “I should call that doing nothing,” remarked his mother.