Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  The month was extremely hot, but of the stifling air, of the emptiness of town, of the economy that Madge insisted on being observed, what a game their love made! They were stranded on a desert island, so ran the silly tale that was made up from day to day, in the midst of the tropics. A huge town was (unexplainedly) there, in which they dwelt; but though cabs jingled about it, it was forbidden, as in an allegory, to get into a cab. A mile away there were restaurants, which both in a dreamlike fashion seemed to know; in these, too, it was forbidden to set foot, for a lion called Ellesdee guarded the doors. Ellesdee, who gradually grew more elaborate, also crouched on the tops of the cabs they would otherwise have driven in, and lay in wait at the main terminuses which would have taken them out of town. Ellesdee could assume various forms; sometimes he became quite little, and crouched behind a box of hot-house peaches, which would have been pleasant for dinner; at other times he was an apparently bland attendant at the door of theatres. He even, this was Madge’s contribution, nearly prevented Evelyn buying a couple of very expensive brushes which he wanted, but impassioned argument on his part convinced her that it was not Ellesdee at all who had taken the form of the shopman, and consequently the brushes were bought. He certainly guarded the furniture shops, where Evelyn was inclined to linger, and though he had an eye on what came in at the area gate, into the house itself he never penetrated. Nor was he to be found in Battersea Park, nor on the Embankment, where they used to walk in the cool of the evening.

  But the Ellesdee who had been responsible for the disaster in Metiekull never showed his face. That had been a big and a dead loss, but Evelyn had shaken it off from his mind, just as some retriever puppy shakes off the water after a swim, dispersing it over yards of grass in a halo. And if Madge on the day when they sat on the sands at Paris-plage had had disquieting thoughts as to whether it was a man she had married or a mere boy, here at any rate was some consolation if it proved to be the latter. For Evelyn had certainly that divinest gift of youth in being able to utterly expunge from the present and from his view of the future all that had been unpleasant in the past. The moment a thing was done, if the result was not satisfactory, it ceased to be; if consequences called, as now they called, in the shape of rigid economies, he was simply not at home to them. The results he accepted with cheerful blandness, but he never went back to the cause. Whether it might or might not have been avoided no longer mattered, since it had not been avoided. The cause, however, was done with; it belonged to the mistlike texture of the past. Meantime his exuberant spirits made the very most of the present.

  One afternoon some business had taken him towards the city, and he returned hot, dusty, but irresistibly buoyant shortly before dinner. Madge was sitting in the studio, where, with its north aspect, coolness was never wholly absent, and though her heart went out to meet even his step on the stairs, she looked suspiciously at a small parcel under his arm as he entered.

  “Yes, champagne,” he said. “One bottle, half for you and half for me. Oh, let me explain. I got a dividend this morning of eight shillings and sixpence from twenty-five shares in something which I had forgotten, and which had therefore ceased to exist. Oh, Madge, don’t scream! What use is eight shillings? But we both want champagne, so its equivalent in champagne is of use. No, it’s no use trying to make me feel sorry, because I’m not. I just had to. Oh, you darling!”

  He sat down on the sofa by her.

  “I’m hot, I know,” he said, “but you might kiss just the end of my nose. I haven’t seen you for five hours.”

  She kissed him.

  “But you are simply abominable,” she said.

  “Yes, that probably is so. Another thing happened to-day, too. I saw Philip. He was driving to Waterloo. In a hansom. Luggage was behind with his servant in a cab. He didn’t see me; at least if he did, he appeared not to.”

  Evelyn paused a moment.

  “Poor devil!” he said. “I don’t know how you feel, but I am awfully sorry for him. But how could I help it? Are you a fatalist, Madge?”

  “If I am, what then?”

  “Nothing; but you’ve got to listen to a little sermon, whether you are or not. It’s dreadful about Philip; you see, he was my friend. But what else was to be done? Wasn’t the whole thing inevitable? How could it have been otherwise but that you and I should be here?”

  “Otherwise?” she said, “what otherwise was there? Yet — yet, oh, Evelyn, on what little accidents it all depended. The thunderstorm down in the New Forest, your atrocious — —”

  “What?”

  “Your atrocious behaviour. And then that it was he who asked me to give you one more sitting, and that my mother should have opened my letter! Is life all accidents? Are you and I the prey of any future accidents? May we be marred and maimed by what is as fortuitous as all this?”

  Evelyn shifted slightly in his seat. This summing up of the past was a thing he was not inclined to. It was summed up and finished with, except in so far as the present was the finished past. Why go over the accounts again? There was no doubt as to their correctness.

  “I don’t know whether it was all accidents,” he said, “but if you begin to call things accidents, there is no stopping. If one thing is an accident, everything is. That I stayed at his house at Pangbourne when you were there you may call an accident. That we made friends there you will call an accident also, if you call the first an accident. And if you are consistent you will call the fact that we loved each other an accident. Only, if you call that an accident, you are using the word in a different sense to that which I use it in.”

  “Then nothing is an accident?” she asked.

  “Yes, my buying this bottle of champagne was an accident, because I didn’t mean to. But as it has happened, we may as well drink it.”

  But a sudden stab of disappointment somehow pierced Madge. She had been serious, and so to a certain point had he. But now, when their talk seemed to be becoming fruit-bearing, he could dismiss it all with a jest. Her wifehood, for a month or two ago she would have done likewise, had developed her in a way that marriage had not developed him. He was still the bright-eyed boy. She, on the other hand, was no longer a girl but a woman. All the sub-consciousness of this twanged in her answer.

  “You are so undeveloped,” she said suddenly.

  But to his ears there was no reproach in this; it concerned the future, not the past. And his bright eyes but grew brighter.

  “Surely,” he said, “but the development is in your hands. And I lay it — whatever it is — at your feet.”

  That, too, Madge felt was so extraordinarily genuine; small as was the tribute, it could not be but graceful. Everywhere he was that, in no relation of life was he otherwise — the beautiful, undeveloped manhood put out buds everywhere, yet at present no bud was expanded into a flower. There was brilliant promise, no promise could be fairer or more sincere, for he was incapable of insincerity, yet it was the “imperishable child” with whose fate she had bound herself up. Everything was there, except one, and that was the man. His talent was brilliant, and she could not have parted with the constant companionship any more than she could have parted with the light of day, yet something was missing.

  It was not less definite, this sense or quality which was missing in Evelyn, because it was indefinable; one could not know another person, whether man or woman, without knowing whether it was there or not, and indeed almost everybody was possessed of it. Philip had it to a notable degree — indeed it was that which, if she searched her heart, had in its extraordinary abundance in him made her originally accept the possibility of her becoming his wife. It had nothing to do with the ardour of love, since the man for whom she alone had experienced that had nothing of it. Nor was it brilliant in any way, since all that was his also. Only it was bed-rock; it was something quite secure and responsible, and willing to take all responsibility, and human. It co-existed with dulness, it existed in people who were frankly intolerable. It was probably bourgeois, but she felt the possibi
lity, as yet far off, so far off that she would only strain her eyes if she tried to focus them on it, of its being necessary, just as food and drink were necessary. The little ghost at Le Touquet, in fact, had apparently begged its way across, and had established itself in the King’s Road. But ghosts of this kind do not mind prosaic surroundings; the discerning reader will perceive they have no need of tapestry or panels, for they are concerned in no way with what is past and ancestral, but with what is alive and knitted into the fabric of the present.

  But after thus dismissing the question of the accidents and essentials of life with this ill-timed little jest about the champagne, Evelyn quite suddenly returned to a matter as serious.

  “You called me undeveloped just now,” he said, “and I expect you are right in a way that you did not think. Tom Merivale told me once that I had not the rudiments of a conscience, and I have often thought of that, and believe it is quite true. That is where I am really undeveloped, and I expect it is that” — and his face lit up even more with this piece of intuition— “I expect it is that which you miss in me. He also said I had no depth. You miss that too, probably.”

  Evelyn announced these discoveries with a perfectly serene and unclouded air; perturbation that he was lacking in so large a piece of moral equipment as a conscience would do no manner of good; nor, because his wife missed it, would it help matters that he should mourn with her over his deficiency. But the unshadowed brightness of his face, his frank acceptance of this so genially and generously made, was something of a reproach to her. All the sunshine of his beautiful nature was hers, all the brilliance of his talent, his extraordinary personal charm, his blithe acquiescence in all that happened was hers, and yet she was discontent. And with a pang of self-reproach she contrasted all he gave her with what she had herself thought good enough to give to Philip when she promised to be his wife, affection, respect, esteem, just a platter of frigid odds and ends, compared to this great feast and glorious banquet of love.

  But there was no doubt as to the accuracy of the diagnosis which Evelyn had made as to what she missed in him. He had risen from the sofa, and was standing in front of her, and at this she rose too, and laid her hands on his shoulder.

  “Ah, I’m an ungrateful little brute,” she said; “but I believe that is a woman’s way. Whatever you give a woman, she always wants more, and you — you, dear, whatever I give you, you always say you did not know so much was possible. So I confess, and am sorry.”

  He looked at her still smiling, but without speaking, and the warmth of her contrition cooled a little. He ought to have known, so she told herself, that what she had said was not very easy to say; he ought to have met the warmth of her amende with welcome and acceptation, and even acknowledgment of her generosity, for she had been generous.

  “Well,” she said at length, “have you nothing to say to that?”

  He put his head a little on one side, as he did so often when he was painting.

  “Yes, I was just arranging it in my head in beautiful language,” he said, “but the beautiful language won’t come, so you will have to hear it plain, not coloured. It’s just this. I don’t think one does any good by pulling oneself open to see what’s inside — oh, yes, rosebud, that’s part of the beautiful language — like a rosebud. One flowers best, I expect, by leaving oneself alone, by just living. Surely life is good enough! I suppose some people are naturally analytical, people who write books, for instance, about other people’s moral insides. But I’m quite certain that I’m not like that. I paint pictures, you see, of other people’s outsides. And if I went on painting your face for years, Madge, I should never get to the end of all it is, or all it is to me. Well, that’s Evelyn Dundas: I beg to introduce him. And you are Evelyn Dundas, let me tell you. You are me; you can’t get away from that. So don’t make either the best or the worst of me; don’t let us regard our relations like that. They are what they are, and want no interpretation or examination. Let them just burn, and not examine their light under a spectroscope. Dear me, there’s more beautiful language. I apologise.”

  She could not help laughing at this conclusion; his earnestness, for he was absolutely earnest, was all of one piece with utter flippancy, and from one he passed to the other without break or transition. How that could be she did not know, only it was all he. And as far as any one person can convince any other, she was convinced. Indeed, it was tearing flowers open to behave and to think as she had been doing, and she answered him in his own manner.

  “Take care of the habit of beautiful language, dear,” she said. “It grows on you without your knowing it. And surely it’s dinner time.”

  Evelyn cast a tragic glance round.

  “Ah, there it is,” he cried. “I really had completely forgotten — you needn’t believe it unless you like — about the dividend we are going to drink. I suppose a little ice now wouldn’t be possible? I would go and get it.”

  “Yes, but I don’t officially know about it,” said she.

  Storms in the physical and material sense are variously supposed to have two diametrically opposite effects; they may be regarded as likely to clear the air, or, on the other hand, to cause a general unsettlement in the weather. And mental or spiritual storms can in the same way either be the precursors and causes of serene blue weather, or they can produce a disturbance of equilibria which is not easily or immediately adjusted again; the violent agitation sets everything shaking and jarring. And the worst of it is that there is no barometer known which will reliably predict which of these effects is likely to be produced. To speak of a thing, “to have it out” as the phrase goes, may get rid of it altogether; it may be pricked like a puff-ball and vanish in a little dust and smoke, leaving an empty bladder, and again “to have it out” may but emphasise and make its existence more real. The “having it out,” in fact, is but a sort of preliminary examination, which proves whether there is something there or whether there is nothing.

  This talk between Evelyn and his wife had its distinct analogy to a storm. Things had been gathering up — indeed they were clouds — in Madge’s mind ever since Le Touquet, and though their bursting had been unaccompanied by rain or explosions, yet to-night they had been undeniably discharged, and it remained only to see whether the air should prove to have been cleared, or whether the disturbance had upset the moral atmosphere. Again, they had “had it out,” she had indicated where her trouble lay, or rather he had laid an unerring finger on it, and as physician had said “Leave it alone; that is my suggestion. Don’t let us hear any more about it.” She fully intended to follow his advice, but half-consciously she made a reservation, for she knew that some time — next week, next month, next year — she must know that either he had been right, and that the trouble had vanished, or that he had been wrong and the trouble had grown worse. And so some secret sense of uncertainty and unsatisfiedness sat somewhere deep in the shadows of her heart. It did not often obtrude its presence, but she knew it was there.

  On Evelyn, however, this same scene appeared to leave no trace of any kind — and, indeed, there was no reason why it should, because it had contained nothing that was new to him, and also because it had ended so thoroughly satisfactorily. Madge had agreed with him about the advisability of letting analysis alone for the future. He had, indeed, this evening indulged in a little, and he found that there was nothing in their mutual relations which he wanted altering, nothing which alteration would not have spoiled. Not for a moment did he say that there were not things in himself which he should have preferred vastly different, but with a certain good sense he considered that in shaping one’s course in life one had to accept certain tendencies and limitations in oneself, and, having granted them, to do one’s best. And he did not see that any perseverance or thought or pains on his part could create in him what Merivale had called a conscience. His life was honest, sober, and clean, not, it must be confessed, because morality indicated that it should be, but because his artistic sense would be hurt by its being other t
han that. It was sheer waste of time for him to sit down and think about duty, because it really meant nothing to him; he might as well have sat down and thought about Hebrew. But from the kindliness and warmth of his nature his conclusions as regards conduct were extraordinarily like those which the very finest sense of duty would have dictated. Yet now and then, as when he had said that he was sorry for Philip, but that nothing could have happened differently, though Madge in word agreed with him, yet she, with her fine feminine sense, knew that she agreed with him, but agreed somehow on a plane quite different from his. That nothing could have happened differently she knew in another way than his: deeply, fiercely, and whole-heartedly as he loved her. For all her life up till now, her whole nature had lain dormant; it had awoke all at once, and awoke to find that one person only was there, even as Brunnhilde woke on the mountain top and saw Siegfried. That awakening had been long delayed, but when it came it was complete, like that thunder-clap when he had declared his love for her, it deafened and paralysed all other senses; there was only one thing in the world for her, and that was her love.