Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Madge ceased smiling altogether.

  “Oh, Evelyn, I am so happy, too!” she said. “But I can’t forget all the scaffolding, as it were, in which our house of love was built, which now lies scattered about in bits.”

  Evelyn sat up quickly, demolishing the altar he had made with such care.

  “Ah! don’t think of that,” he said. “We agreed that what has happened had to happen. Now pity and sorrow when you can’t help in any way seems to me a wasted thing.”

  “But if you can’t help pitying and being sorry?” she asked.

  Evelyn gave a little click of impatience.

  “You must go on trying till you do help it,” he said. “Of course, if one dwells on the matter, one is sorry for Philip; I am awfully sorry for Philip when I think of him. I hate the idea of anybody being wounded and hurt as he must have been, and since he was my friend, it is the more distressing. Only it is an effort for me to think of him at all. I can only think of one person, and of one thing — you and my love for you.”

  This time Madge’s smile was more satisfactory, and with his bright eager eyes he looked at her as the eagle to the sun.

  “Ah, you are absolutely adorable!” he cried.

  The wind, such as there was of it, had veered round at the time of high tide, and blew no longer off the sea, but breathed gently from the land. A mile away on the right were the tall, dun-coloured houses of Paris-plage, perched at the edge of the sea, and the sands there were dotted with the costumes of the bathers, like polychromatic ants who crawled about the beach. The sea itself was full of shifting greens and blues, and far out a fleet of boats like grey-winged gulls hovered, fishing. Even the shrill ecstasies of the bathers of Paris-plage, whose bathing appeared to be of a partial description, but who made up for that by dancing in the ripples, and splashing each other with inimitable French gaiety, were inaudible here; nothing stirred but the light, noiseless wind, warm with its passage over the sand-dunes, and faintly aromatic with the pungent scent of the fir-woods over which its pleasant path had lain. All things paused in this hour of the glory of the fulfilled noontide, that seemed equally remote from both past and future, so splendid and so real was the one present moment. If there had been hurricane in the morning, it was forgotten now; if there was to be a tempest to-night, it would be time to think about tempests when the winds began to blow, and it was mere futility to waste a moment of what was so perfect in contemplation, whether retrospective or anticipatory, of what had been or yet might be. There was just the hushed murmur of blue, breaking ripples, their sh-sh as they were poured out on to the golden sand, white gulls hung in the air, white boats drifted over the sea. And by Madge’s side sat her lover, the man whom her whole nature hailed as its complement, its completion. Whatever he did, whatever he said, she felt that she had herself dreamed that in remote days. Various and unexpected as were his moods, they were all fiery; the sand-castle as it first stood triumphant against the incoming tide had been to him a monument of more than national import, its gradual fall a tragedy that beggared Euripides. The bee, too — if he had been burying her he could not have shown a tenderer interest. But she was not so sure that she agreed with the sermon that had been preached over the grave. And in spite of the completeness of the noonday, she could not help going back to it.

  “Evelyn,” she said, “were you really serious when you said that the honey-gatherer, who looked only for what was sweet, was the example of our lives? Something like that you said, anyhow.”

  But he continued just looking at her, as he looked when he said: “You are adorable,” with eyes gleaming and mouth a little open. He did not even seem to hear that she had asked him a question. But she repeated it.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “How am I to know whether I am serious or not? I suppose one says a hundred stupid things that are based on something one believes. I am only serious about one thing in the world.”

  She did not affect not to know his meaning.

  “I know — we love each other,” she said. “But we have breakfast and lunch just the same.”

  He looked doubtful.

  “Do we?” he asked. “But they don’t matter!”

  Suddenly to Madge the hush of the noonday and the arrest of “before and after” ceased. It was as if she had been asleep and was suddenly awakened from a dream by a hand that shook her. The dream was still there, but also, dimly, there was the wall-paper, a brass knob at the end of the bed, a counterpane.

  “Ah! with all my heart I wish they didn’t matter. I wish nothing mattered, I ask for nothing better than to sit here with you, to go on living as we have lived this last week. But the time must come when we shall have to consider what we shall do next. Are we going back to London, or what?”

  “It is August,” said he. “London in August — —”

  “What then? Shall we stop here?”

  Then Evelyn was puerile.

  “Of course, if you are tired of this,” he began.

  But she let the puerilities go no further.

  “Oh, don’t be a baby,” she said. “Ah, such a dear baby, I grant you! But, Evelyn, it is life we are living.”

  Evelyn stroked his chin with a hugely pompous air.

  “‘Life is real,’” he said, “‘life is earnest.’ Now, Madge, Poet Longfellow said that, therefore he must be right.”

  “And so Painter Dundas agrees with him?” she said.

  “Oh, certainly! Life is undoubtedly real and earnest, but what then? Am I never to talk nonsense any more? Shall we unbury the bee? Dear me, the unburial of the bee. How unspeakable pathetic and terrible! But what I have buried I have buried. So I shall draw your profile in the sand with one finger and all my heart.”

  But she still remained serious.

  “Tell me when you have finished,” she said.

  Evelyn was already absorbed.

  “With a helmet on,” he remarked, “because she has to meet and defeat the realities of life, and the corners of her mouth turned down because life is earnest, and just winking with the other eye; the one you see, in fact, because she wants to signal to her friend, which is me, that it’s all a huge joke really, only she mustn’t talk in church.”

  There was a compelling fascination for her in the nimble finger that traced a big outline so deftly in the sand, and since she was upside down to it, where she sat, it followed that she got up, and went round to see what manner of a caricature this was. Hopelessly funny she found it, and hopelessly like, so much so that she danced a war-dance all over the outline, and sat down again on the middle of her own face.

  “Now attend!” she said to her husband.

  “After you have ruined the picture of my life,” said he. “It was more like you than anything. You are being consumed with moral responsibility for me. I object to that, you know; you can be consumed by your own moral responsibility, or you can consume it, like you consume your own smoke, but mine is mine.”

  “Evelyn, am I your wife?” she asked.

  “I have reason to believe so. I was told so in church.”

  “Very well — your conscience is kept in the kitchen; when I go to order dinner I look at it — I order more if we are likely to run short. So give me the cheque, please, there is a bill for conscience owing, and we must have a fresh supply.”

  “I don’t understand one word,” said Evelyn, rubbing the sand off his legs preparatory to turning his trousers down again. “Not one word. Does it matter?”

  Madge’s face grew quite grave again; smiles had spurted as with explosions from eyes and mouth when she saw his sand-sketch of her, but these had ceased.

  “Yes, it does matter,” she said, “for unless you propose that we should remain at Le Touquet quite indefinitely, it will be necessary some day to become definite. I suggest that we should become definite now. Everything,” and she dug impatiently in the sand with scooping fingers— “everything has been left at a tag-end. We can’t forever leave things frayed like that — —”

  Ev
elyn interrupted her.

  “Oh, I know so well!” he exclaimed; “the metal thing comes off the end of a lace, and you have to push it through the holes; a little piece only comes through, and what does not come through gets thicker and won’t follow. Then one has to take it out and begin again.”

  Madge leaned forward.

  “Yes, it is exactly that,” she said. “That has happened to us. When that happens, what do you do?”

  “I take off the boot in question,” said Evelyn gravely, “and ring the bell. When answered, I tell them to take away the boot and put in another lace. That is done: then I put the boot on. But I don’t wrestle with laces which have not tags. You are wrestling, you know.”

  For the second time this morning a feeling as if she was dealing with a child seized Madge. The child was a very highly-developed man, too. This was a handicap to her; a heavier handicap was that she loved him. Even now, as he sat most undignifiedly wiping the sand from his feet, preparatory to getting his socks on again, she felt this immensely.

  “The sand will be rubbed through the skin, and cause mortification,” he remarked to himself.

  Madge turned on him with some indignation.

  “Ah, can’t you see,” she cried, “that I am serious? And you talk about the sand between your toes! You are rather trying.”

  Evelyn paused in his toilet.

  “Dearest, I am sorry,” he said. “I thought we were still playing the fool! But we are not — you, at any rate, are not. What is it then?”

  This completeness of surrender was in itself disarming, and her tone was gentle.

  “It is just this,” she said— “that you and I are lost in a golden dream. But the dream can’t go on forever. What are we to do? Shall we go back to London? Will you go on painting just as usual? People, perhaps, will be rather horrid to us, you know.”

  Everything now, even to him, had become serious.

  “Do you mind that?” he asked.

  “No, of course not, if you don’t,” she said. “But I have been wondering, dear, whether if by your marriage with me you have hurt your career.”

  “You mean that pink Jewesses who want to be fashionable won’t come to ask me to paint their portraits any more?” he said.

  “No, not that, of course. What does that matter?”

  Evelyn finished putting his shoes and socks on.

  “Then, really, I don’t understand what you do mean,” he said, “by my career, if you don’t refer to the class of person who thinks it a sort of cachet to be painted by me — though Heaven knows why she can think that. What are we talking about? How otherwise can my career, which is only my sense of form and colour, be touched?”

  Madge’s eyes dreamed over the sea for a little at this.

  “No, I was wrong,” she said. “Taken like that, it can’t matter. But we must (though I was wrong there, I am right here) — we must settle what we are going to do. We must go back some time; you must begin working again.”

  Evelyn finished tying the last lace.

  “Romney painted Lady Hamilton forty-three times,” he said. “I could paint forty Madges of the last hour. You never look the same for two minutes together, and I could paint all of you. Let’s have an exhibition next spring called ‘Some Aspects of the Honourable Mrs. Dundas. Artist — her husband.’”

  “They would all come,” said Madge.

  There was no more discussion on this present occasion about the future. Evelyn being again properly clothed, they went back by a short cut across the sand-dunes to the clearing in the forest behind, which was known as Le Touquet. For a space of their way, after they had got out of the pitiless sun on the sand, their path led through the primeval pine forest, where the air was redolent and aromatic, and the footfall went softly over the carpet of brown needles. Then other growths began, the white poplar of France shook tremulous leaves in fear of the wind that might be coming, young oak-trees stood sturdy and defiant where poplars trembled, and away from the pines the bare earth showed a carpet of excellent green. Then, as they approached the hotel, neat white boards with black arrows displayed signs in all directions, and a rustic bridge over a pond, by which stretched a green sward of lawn on which it was ‘defended to circulate,’ led to the gravel sweep in front of the hotel.

  A broad verandah in the admirable French style sheltered those who lunched there from the sun; small tables were dotted about it, and from the glare of the gravel sweep it was refreshment to be shielded from the heat. Their table was ready spread for them, and the obsequious smile of the head-waiter hailed them.

  But for the first time Madge was not content. Evelyn still sat opposite her; all was as it had been during the last week. Yet when he said: “Oh, how delicious, I am so hungry!” she felt she was hungry, too, but not in the way he meant. She was hungry, as women always are and must be, for the sense of largeness in the man, and she asked herself, but quenched the question before it had flamed, if she had given herself to just a boy. Yet how she loved him! She loved even his airy irresponsibility, though at times, as this morning, she had found it rather trying. She had lived so much in a world that schemed and planned, and was for ever wondering what the effect of doing this or avoiding that would be, that his utter want of calculation, of considering the interpretation that might be placed on his acts, was as refreshing as the breath of cool night air on one who leaves the crowded ball-room. And for very shame she could not go on just now pressing him to make decisions; she would return to that again to-morrow, for to-day seemed so made for him and his huge delight in all that was sunny and honey-gathering. To-morrow, also, she would have to mention another question that demanded consideration, namely, that of money. They were living here, with their big sitting-room and the motor-car they had hired — and, as a matter-of-fact, did not use — on a scale that she knew must be beyond their means; and since she was perfectly certain that Evelyn had never given a thought to this question of expense, any more than the price of the wine which he chose to drink concerned him, it was clearly time to remind him that things had to be paid for. He had loaded her, too, with presents; she felt that if she had expressed a desire for the moon, he would have ordered the longest ladder that the world had ever seen in order, anyhow, to make preliminary investigations with regard to the possibility of securing it. He apparently had not the slightest notion of the value of money, no ideas of his were connected with it, and though this argued a certain defective apparatus in this money-seeking world, as if a man went out to walk in a place full of revolver-armed burglars with no more equipment than a penny cane, she could not help liking his insouciance. Once she taxed him with his imprudence, and he had told her, with great indignation, how he had read nothing but financial papers for a whole week earlier in the summer, and at the end, instead of spending a couple of thousand pounds in various delightful ways, he had invested it in some South African company in which — well, a man who was very acute in such matters was much interested. And yet she called him imprudent!

  After lunch they strolled across to the lawn where circulation was forbidden.

  “We won’t be breaking any rules,” said he, “unless the word applies to the currents of the blood, because we will sit under a tree and probably sleep. I can think of nothing which so little resembles circulation as that.”

  Letters and papers had arrived during lunch, and Evelyn gave a great laugh of amusement as he opened one from Lady Taverner, asking if he would be in London during October, and could resume — this was diplomatic — the sittings that had been interrupted.

  “Even that branch of my career hasn’t suffered,” he observed.

  There was nothing more of epistolary interest, and he opened the paper. There, too, the world seemed to be standing still. There had been a skirmish between Russian and Japanese outposts at a place called something like Pingpong, fiscalitis seemed to be spreading a little, but otherwise news was meagre.

  “Is there nothing?” asked Madge, when he had read out these headings.
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  “No, not a birth or death even. Oh, by-the-way, you called me imprudent the other day! Now we’ll find the money-market, and see what my two thousand pounds is worth. Great Scott, what names they deal in — Metiekull, that’s it.”

  There was a long silence. Then Evelyn laughed, a sudden little, bitter laugh, which was new to Madge’s ears.

  “Yes, I bought them at 4,” he said. “They are now 2. That was a grand piece of information Philip gave me.”

  He got up.

  “Oh, Evelyn, how horrible!” she cried. “Where are you going?”

  “Just to telegraph to them to sell out,” he said. “I can’t afford to lose any more. I’ll be back in a minute. And when I come back, dear, please don’t allude to this again. It is unpleasant; and that is an excellent reason for ceasing to think about it. In fact, it is the best reason.”

  FOURTEENTH

  IT was perhaps lucky as regards the future of Madge and her husband that this debacle had taken place so near to the end of the season. Many people, indeed, had waited in London only for the marriage, for the season was already over, and for the last three days there had been nothing but this to detain them. Genuine sympathy was at first felt for Philip, but it very soon was known that he was at his office again every day and all day, worked just as hard if not harder than usual, and was supposed, by way of signalising his own disappointment, to have made some great coup over a South African company, thereby inflicting a quantity of very smart disappointments on the gentlemen of the Stock Exchange. He had dealt these blows out with an impartial hand; first there had been some staggering smacks which had sent the bulls flying like ninepins, while the bears stood round and grinned, and profited by the experience of their fraternal enemies. Then Philip, it seemed, had seen them grinning, and had done the same for them.

  In other words, things had come off in exactly the way he had anticipated. The knowledge that he had bought a very large option had induced many operators less substantial than he to buy also, and the sudden news that he had received a detailed report from the spot, and had subsequently not exercised his option, landed many of these buyers in awkward places. Then, as was natural, the bears saw their opportunity, sold largely, on the strength of the inference that Philip’s report was highly unfavourable, bringing prices down with a run. Then, with the same suddenness with which he had decided not to take up his option, he bought at this very much lower price a vastly increased number of shares, and within a week of the original slump Metiekull was considerably higher than it had ever been. The £7,000 he had forfeited over not taking up his option was but a bagatelle to his subsequent gains, and the market generally at this conclusion remarked, among other things not worth repeating, that there was a good deal to be said in favour of long spoons; while that not inconsiderable part of more westerly London which is always burning its fingers in this City fire of the Stock Exchange, said with a somewhat cynical smile that since Philip could still hit so hard, he had not, perhaps, been so hard hit himself. Perhaps, in fact, Madge had not made such a very terrible mistake, after all, for Mr. Dundas was undeniably the most fascinating person, whereas Philip, so it appeared, did not let the most dreadful affair of the heart interfere in the slightest with the stuffing of the money-box.