Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “And care more!” suggested Madge.

  “Infinitely more. Are they not clearly more attractive?”

  Madge looked at him curiously.

  “I believe you really think so,” she said. “And that is so odd. Doesn’t the scheming, the calculation, the foresight required in financial things interest you enormously?”

  “Certainly; but I scheme just as much over the roses. Whether this one is to have — well, a whisky-and-soda, or whether it is rheumatic and wants a lowering treatment; that is just as interesting in itself as whether South Africans want lowering or screwing up.”

  “You mean you can do that? You can send things up or down? You can say to us, to mother: ‘You shall be poorer to-morrow or richer’?”

  Philip laughed.

  “I suppose so, to some extent. Pray don’t let us talk about it. It sounds rather brutal, and I am afraid it is brutalising. Yet, after all, a landlord may put up the rent of his houses.”

  Madge Ellington walked on for a few paces without replying.

  “How odd of you,” she said at length, “not to feel the fascination of power. I don’t mean to say that one would necessarily want to use it, but it must be so divine to know it is there. Well, if you wish, I won’t talk about it.”

  Philip turned to her, his brown thin face looking suddenly eager.

  “Ah, I would sooner hear you talk about what you please than about what I please,” he said.

  She laughed.

  “Can’t I manage to combine the two?” she said. “The river, for instance, I think we both love that. Will you promise to let me live on the river while I am here?”

  “I warn you that you will have a good deal of my company, then,” said he.

  She laughed again.

  “But as you are my host I can’t decently object,” she said. “Oh, tell me, Mr. Home, what is Mr. Dundas like? You are a great friend of his, are you not? He was at tea, and asked a series of the silliest riddles, which somehow made me giggle. Giggle hopelessly, do you understand; they were so stupid. And he is the Mr. Dundas, who paints everybody as if they were so much more interesting than they are?”

  “Yes, evidently the same,” said Philip. “And what you say is quite true. Yet, again, as you say, his conversation is futile beyond words.”

  Madge walked on again in silence a little.

  “I think that combination is rather charming,” she said. “People don’t laugh enough, and certainly he makes one laugh. I wish I laughed more, for instance.”

  “And has Merivale come?” asked Philip.

  “Yes; he was at tea, too. What does he do?”

  “He doesn’t do anything. He just thinks.”

  “Good heavens! how frightfully fatiguing. All the time, do you mean?”

  “Yes, all the time. Have you never met him before? Yet, how should you? He lives in the New Forest, and communes with birds and animals. People think he is mad, but he is the sanest person I know.”

  “Why?” asked she.

  “Because he has had the wit to find out what he likes, and to do it all the time.”

  “And what is that?” asked the girl.

  “He sits by a stream and looks at the water. Then he lies on his back and looks at the sky. Then he whistles, chuckles, what you please to call it, and the thrushes come scudding out of the bushes and chuckle back at him.”

  “Is that not rather uncanny?” asked Madge.

  “Most uncanny. Some day, as I tell him, he will see Pan. And I shall then have to attend a funeral.”

  The girl’s eyebrows wrinkled into a frown.

  “Pan?” she said.

  “Yes; he is the God of ‘Go as you please!’ And his temple is a lunatic asylum. But don’t be alarmed. The Hermit won’t go into a lunatic asylum yet awhile.”

  “The Hermit?”

  “Yes, the Hermit is Merivale. Because he lives quite alone in the New Forest. He never reads, he hardly ever sees anybody, he never does anything. He used to write at one time.”

  Madge shivered slightly.

  “How intensely uncomfortable!” she said. “I think I shall like Mr. Dundas best.”

  “You are sure to like him.”

  “Because everybody does? That is the worst of reasons. I always distrust very popular people.”

  “The judgment of the world is usually wrong, you mean. But occasionally one stumbles on an exception.”

  The four had turned back towards the house, and as Philip spoke, he and his companion gained the top step of the gravelled square bordered by flower-beds, where he had sat two hours ago with his mother. The shadow of the house had swung over it, and in the gathering dusk the flower-beds glowed with a dim subaqueous radiance. Philip’s mother and Lady Ellington had already passed into the open French window of the drawing-room, but on the stout balustrade of the terrace there sat a young man. One long slim leg rested on the gravel, the other was crooked round the lead vase at the head of the steps. His face, extraordinarily boyish, was clean-shaven, or rather so boyish was it, that it looked as if it was still untouched by razor. He held a cigarette in one hand, and the other, long-fingered and white as a woman’s, grasped his knee.

  “Oh, Philip!” he cried; “how are you? Oddly enough, I am quite well. I always was, like Sydney Smith and his great coat. Isn’t there time for a game of croquet before dinner? Let’s all be late, and so we shall all be punctual; it is only a question of degree. Miss Ellington, do come and play. Why did the barmaid champagne, and — oh, I asked you that. Stout, porter is rather good though. I do believe you know it, Philip.”

  SECOND

  TOM MERIVALE did not, as Mrs. Home had feared he might, appear without clothes at dinner, nor did he make clamorous demands for cabbage. It is true that he ate no meat of any kind, but he was not of the preaching sort of vegetarians, and did not call attention to his abstinence. Instead, he and Evelyn Dundas between them managed to turn the meal into a ridiculous piece of gaiety by sheer exuberance of animal spirits, and even Lady Ellington forgot to examine the dishes with her usual magisterial air, and really ate and drank without criticising.

  There was an extraordinary superficial resemblance in certain ways between the two men. Both, at any rate, were glorious examples of the happiness that springs from health, a happiness which is as inimitable as it is contagious. By health, it must be premised, is not meant the mere absence of definite ailments, but that perfect poise between an active mind and an exuberant body which is so rare.

  It was on this very subject that Merivale was speaking now.

  “Ah, no, Lady Ellington,” he was saying, “to be able to get through the day’s work, day after day and year after year, is not health. Perfect health implies practically perfect happiness.”

  “But how if you have a definite cause of worry?” she said.

  “You can’t worry when you are well. One knows, for example, that if one is definitely unwell, the same cause produces greater worry and discomfort than if one is not. And my theory is, that if one is absolutely well, if your mind and soul, that is to say, as well as your body, are all in accord with each other and with their environment, worry is impossible.”

  Lady Ellington, to do her justice, always listened to that were really new to her. She always assumed, by the way, that they were not.

  “My theory exactly,” she said. “I could scarcely have lived through these last years unless I had made up my mind never to let any anxiety take hold of me.”

  Evelyn Dundas laughed. Dinner was nearing its end and conversation was general.

  “My mind and my body are not in absolute accord this moment,” he said, “and I am rather anxious. My body demands some more ice-pudding; my mind tells me it would be extremely unwise. Which am I to listen to, Tom?”

  “Give Mr. Dundas some more ice-pudding,” remarked Philip to a footman.

  “The laws of hospitality compel me to fall in with my host’s suggestions,” said Evelyn. “Tom, where you are wrong lies in thinking that it
is worth while spending all your time in keeping well. He lives in the New Forest, Lady Ellington, and if when you are passing you hear the puffs of a loud steam-engine somewhere near Brockenhurst you will know it is Tom doing deep breathing. He expects in time to become a Ram-jam or something, by breathing himself into Raj-pan-puta.”

  Tom Merivale laughed.

  “No, I don’t want to become a Ram-jam,” he said, “whatever that may be. I want to become myself.”

  “No clothes,” murmured Mrs. Home.

  “Become yourself?” asked Lady Ellington.

  “Yes, most of us are stunted copies of our real selves,” he said. “Imitations of what we might be. And what might one not be?”

  The talk had got for him, at any rate, suddenly serious, and he looked up at Lady Ellington with a sparkling eye.

  “Explain,” she said.

  “Well, it seems to me one cripples oneself in so many ways. One allows oneself to be nervous, and to be angry, and to be bound by conventions that are useless and cramping.”

  “Tall hats, frock-coats?” asked she.

  “No, certainly not, because they, at any rate, are perfectly harmless. But, to take an example of what I mean, it seems to me a ridiculous convention that we should all consider ourselves obliged to know what is going on in the world. It does not really do one any good to know that there is war between China and Japan. What does do us good is not to be ill-tempered, and never to be sad. Sadness and pessimism are the worst forms of mental disease I know. And the state will not put sad and pessimistic people in asylums, or isolate them at any rate so that their disease should not spread. Such diseases are so frightfully catching, and they are more fatal than fevers. People die of them, soul and body!”

  Lady Ellington felt that Mrs. Home was collecting her eye, and rose.

  “What a fascinating theory,” she said. “Just what I have always thought. Ah, I have caught my dress under my chair. You should have castors, Mr. Home, on your dining-room chairs.”

  * * * * * * *

  Evelyn moved up next to Tom Merivale after the others had left them.

  “Dear old Hermit!” he said. “Now, you’ve got to give an account of yourself. Neither Phil nor I have seen you for a year. What have you been doing?”

  Tom let the port pass him.

  “I suppose you would call it nothing,” said he.

  “Ah, but in real life people don’t go and live in the New Forest and do nothing. What have you written in the last year?”

  “Not one line. Seriously, I have been doing nothing except a little gardening and carpentering; just manual labour to keep one sane.”’

  “Well, it looks as if it suited you. You look well enough, and what is so odd, you look so much younger.”

  Tom laughed again.

  “Ah, that strikes you, does it?” he said. “I suppose it could not have been otherwise, though that wasn’t my object in going to live there.”

  “Well, tell us, then!” said Evelyn, rather impatiently. He had begun to smoke, and smoked in a most characteristic manner; that is to say, that in little more than a minute his cigarette was consumed down one side, and was a peninsula of charred paper down the other, while clouds of smoke ascended from it. Perceiving this, he instantly lit another one.

  But Philip rose.

  “Tell us afterwards, Tom,” he said. “Lady Ellington likes to play bridge, I know, as soon as dinner is over.”

  Evelyn rose also.

  “Ah, she is like me,” he said. “She wants to do things not soon, but immediately, Philip, how awfully pretty Miss Ellington is. Why wasn’t I told? I should like to paint her.”

  Philip paused by the door.

  “Really, do you mean that?” he said. “And have you got time? I hear you always have more orders than you can ever get through.”

  Evelyn tossed his head with a quick, petulant gesture.

  “You talk as if I was a tailor,” he said. “But you suggest to me the advisability of my getting apprentices to paint the uninteresting people for me, and I will sign them. That would satisfy a lot of them. Yes, I have more than I can do. But I could do Miss Ellington remarkably well. Shall I ask her to sit for me?”

  “That would be rather original, the first time you saw her.”

  “A good reason for doing it,” said Evelyn, hastily drinking another glass of port.

  “But it would certainly give her a good reason for saying ‘No,’” remarked Philip.

  Madge, it appeared, did not play bridge; her mother, at any rate, said she did not, and Evelyn Dundas, rather to his satisfaction, cut out. That feat happily accomplished, he addressed himself to Madge.

  “Fancy a hermit playing bridge!” he said. “Does it not seem to you very inconsistent? Patience is the furthest he has any right to go.”

  Madge got up.

  “Patience, both in cards and in real life, seems to me a very poor affair,” she said. “How are we going to amuse ourselves while they play? Will you go out of the room while I think of something, and then you can come in and guess it?”

  An amendment occurred to Evelyn.

  “We might both go out,” he said. “It is deliciously warm; just out on to the terrace.”

  “And when we come in they can guess where we have been,” said Madge.

  The night, as he had said, was deliciously warm, and the moon, a day or two only from full, shone with a very clear light. Below them lay the dim, huddled woods, and beyond, shining like a streak of silver, slept the Thames. Somewhere far away a train was panting along its iron road, and to the left scattered lights showed where Pangbourne stood. Odours of flowers were wafted from the beds, and pale-winged moths now and then crossed the illuminated spaces of light thrown by the drawing-room window on to the gravel.

  “Ah, what a pity to be indoors!” said the girl as they stepped out. “I suppose I must be of Gipsy blood; I always want to go somewhere.”

  “Where particularly?” asked he.

  “That doesn’t matter; the going is the point. If you asked me to go to the Black Hole of Calcutta I should probably say ‘Yes.’ What a pity we can’t go on the river!”

  “Ah, let us do that!” said he.

  Madge laughed.

  “It would be quite unheard-of,” she said. “I don’t live in the New Forest like Mr. Merivale, and cast conventions aside. No, we will walk up and down a little, and then you shall go and play. Do you know, I am really so pleased to have met you I have admired your pictures so. Do you find it a bore having that sort of thing said to you?”

  Evelyn thought over this for a moment.

  “Well, I think my pictures bore me when they are done,” he said, “though the opinion of other people never does. A picture is — is like a cold in the head. It possesses you while it is there, and you have to throw it off. And when it is thrown off, one never thinks of it again. At least, I don’t.”

  They had come to the end of the terrace, and the girl stopped as they turned.

  “And then you do another. Ah, how delightful to know that probably to the end of your life you will have things to do!”

  “I don’t think you would say that if you had to do them,” said he. “Yet, I don’t know. Of course creating a thing is the biggest fun in the world. But how one tears one’s hair over it!”

  Madge looked at his thick black thatch.

  “You seem to have got some left,” she remarked.

  “Yes, but I’m looking thinner. Mrs. Home told me so. Oh, look at the moon! What a dreadful thing to say, too! But it really is out of drawing — it is far too big!”

  “Perhaps we are far too small,” said she.

  Evelyn shook his head.

  “It is impossible to be small if that occurs to you,” he said.

  They walked in silence after this for a dozen yards or so, Madge feeling, somehow, strangely attracted by her companion. There was nothing, it is true, particularly brilliant about his conversation; it was boyish rather than brilliant; but she felt, as mo
st people did, that she was in the presence of a personality that was rather unusual. And this personality seemed to her to be very faithfully expressed in his pictures; there was something daringly simple about both him and them. He evidently said whatever came into his head, and her experience was that so many people only talked about such things as were supposed to be of interest. Also, in spite of this moonlight solitude, he evinced not the smallest tendency to notice the fact that she was a very good-looking girl; no hint of it appeared in his talk or his attitude to her. There was not the very slightest suspicion of that even in his desire to go on the river with her. That ridiculous suggestion she felt, with unerring instinct, had been made simply from comrade to comrade; there were two of them together, cut out from a table of bridge, and he had proposed it just as he might have proposed it to a man, instead of a girl, of his own age. And to Madge this was something of an exception in her experience of the other sex, for most unmarried men of her acquaintance had shown a tendency towards tenderness. Her beauty made it perhaps excusable in them, but she found it rather trying. It was a relief, at any rate, to find a young man who took her frankly, who could say “Look at the moon,” only to point out that it was out of drawing. For in the matter of emotion Madge was strangely unfeeling, or, at any rate, strangely undeveloped; and if her mother had let any anxiety dwell upon her hard and polished mind, the doubts about Madge’s future would, perhaps, have pressed as heavily there as any. As a good mother should, she had brought to her daughter’s notice, not to say thrown at her head, a large variety of young men, to none of whom had Madge responded at all satisfactorily. And it was almost intensely pleasing to her at this moment to find someone matrimonially quite impossible to her mother’s mind, who was both so attractive to her personally, and who did not show the smallest desire to treat her otherwise than a man should treat a man. He was perfectly natural, in fact, perfectly simple, and quite an exception to her experience of moonlight walkers. And this paragon continued his peerless way.

  “Have you met Tom Merivale before?” he asked. “No? Of course he would think it almost profane to say the moon was too large. He takes any fact in nature and then proceeds to fit himself to it. Whatever untutored nature does is right, in his view. I wonder what he would make of slugs eating the faces of pansies slowly away. I shall ask him.”