Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Their hostess, Mrs. Streatham, was a very rich and gloriously pushing woman, with no nonsense about her, and but little sense. She was engaged in pushing her way steadily upwards through what is known as the top-crust of society, and if she wanted anybody particularly to come to her house, gave him or her the choice of some six dinners and ten lunches, further facilitating matters by requesting the desired object to drop in any time. It was Lord Lindfield’s first appearance at her house, and she was already pinning him down for a further lunch some time next week, with a grim tenacity of purpose that made it difficult to evade her. He did not propose to leave his post of observation at the ballroom door till this dance came to an end; and as she had as good a right there (since it was her own house) as he, it was likely that she would get her way. He had begun — which was a tactical error — by saying he was not free till the end of the week, and this gave her an advantage. She gave her invitation in a calm, decided manner — rather in the manner of a dentist making appointments.

  “Thursday, Friday, or Saturday will suit me equally well, Lord Lindfield,” she was saying. “I shall have a few people to lunch on all those days, and you can take your choice. Shall we say Friday?”

  “It’s awfully kind of you,” said he, “but I’m really not quite sure about Friday. I rather think I’m already engaged.”

  “Saturday, then,” said Mrs. Streatham, “at one-thirty.”

  “Very kind of you, but I’m away for the week-end, and shall probably have to leave town in the morning.”

  “Then let us make it Thursday,” said Mrs. Streatham. “And if two o’clock suits you better than half-past one, it is equally convenient. That will be delightful.”

  At the moment the dance came to an end, and Lindfield, to his dismay, saw Daisy leaving by a further door.

  “Very good of you,” he said. “I’ll be sure to remember. Excuse me.”

  Mrs. Streatham was quite ready to excuse him now, since she had her hook in him, and went on to Gladys, who was just passing out.

  “Miss Hinton,” she said, “do lunch with me on Thursday next. Lord Lindfield is coming, and, I hope, a few more friends. Or Friday would suit me equally well. I hope Miss Hanbury will come too. Would you ask her? — or perhaps it is safer that I should send her a note. Thursday, then, at two. — Ah! Lord Quantock, I have been looking for you all evening. Pray lunch here on Thursday next. Lord Lindfield and Miss Hinton, and that very pretty Daisy — let me see, what is her name? — oh, yes! — Daisy Hanbury are coming. Or, if you are engaged that day, do drop in on Friday at the same time.”

  Lord Lindfield meantime had found Daisy and firmly taken her away from her partner. Before now, as has been said, the affair was a matter of common discussion, and her engagement believed to be only a matter of time; to-night it looked as if the time would be short.

  “And I’m coming down to Bray this week-end,” he said, going on at the point at which their conversation was interrupted. “It was so good of Lady Nottingham to ask me. You’ve got such nice aunts! I expect that accounts for a lot in you. Ever seen my aunts, Miss Daisy? They’ve got whiskers, and take camomile.”

  “It sounds delicious, and I’m sure I should love them,” said Daisy.— “So sorry, Mr. Tracy, but I seem to have made a mistake, and I’m engaged for the next. So very stupid of me. — I know, Lord Lindfield; isn’t Aunt Alice a darling? But, although I adore her, I think I adore Aunt Jeannie more. Do you know her — Mrs. Halton?”

  Lindfield gave a little appreciative whistle.

  “Know her? By Jove! I should think I did. So she’s your aunt, too! I never heard such luck! But she’s a bit young to be an aunt, isn’t she?”

  Daisy laughed.

  “She began early. She was my mother’s sister, but ever so much younger. She was an aunt when she was eight. My eldest sister, you know — —”

  “Didn’t know you had one.”

  “Very likely you wouldn’t. She died some years ago, and before that she didn’t live in England. She was married to a Frenchman. But Aunt Jeannie — isn’t she an angel? And she came back from Italy, where she has been for a whole year, only to-day. It’s the nicest thing that has happened since she went away.”

  “You mean that was nice?”

  “Oh, don’t be so silly! It is quite clear what I mean. You’ll see her next week; she is coming down to Bray.”

  “Wonder if she’ll remember me? The people I like most hardly ever do. Rather sad! I say, Miss Daisy, I’m looking forward to that visit to Bray like anything. I don’t know when I’ve looked forward to anything so much. Are you good at guessing? I wonder if you can guess why?”

  The room where they sat had somewhat emptied of its tenants, since the next dance had just begun, and something in his tone, some sudden tremble of his rather deep voice, some brightness in those merry grey eyes, suddenly struck Daisy, and just for the moment it frightened her. She put all her gaiety and lightness into her reply.

  “Ah, but clearly,” she said, “it is quite easy to guess. It is because you will see Aunt Jeannie again. You have told me as much.”

  “Not quite right,” he said, “but pretty near. Bother! Here’s that woman coming to ask me to lunch again.”

  The good humour quite vanished from his face as Mrs. Streatham came rapidly towards them. She had so much to think about with all her invitations that she very seldom remembered to smile. And it was without a smile that she bore rapidly down upon them.

  “Oh, Miss — Miss Hanbury,” she said, “do come to lunch on Thursday next at one-thirty — or is it two, Lord Lindfield? Yes, two. Lord Lindfield is coming, and I hope one or two other friends.”

  “Why, that is charming of you,” said Daisy. “I shall be delighted.”

  “And do persuade Lady Nottingham to come, will you not?” continued Mrs. Streatham. “She is your aunt, is she not?”

  Somehow the moment had passed, but Daisy, as she stood talking, felt that something new had come to her. She had seen Tom Lindfield for a moment in a new light: for that second she felt that she had never known him before. He struck her differently, somehow, and it was that which momentarily had frightened her, and caused her to make that light, nonsensical reply. But next moment she saw that it was not he who had altered, it was herself.

  All this was very faint and undefined in her own mind. But it was there.

  CHAPTER VI.

  Jeannie Halton, going up to her bedroom that night, felt very keenly that ineffable sense of coming home which makes all the hours spent in alien places seem dim and unreal. She could hardly believe that it was she who had been so long away from so many friends, still less that it was she who, a year ago, tired and weary, had gone southwards in search of that minimum of health and peace which makes existence tolerable. Yet that time abroad could never have become dim to her, since it was there, in the winter spent in Rome, that her old friendship with Victor Braithwaite had ripened into intimacy and burst into love. Rome would always be knit into her life.

  It was not only in affairs of the mind and affections that her perception was acute. Like most highly-organized people, her body, her fine material senses, were vivid messengers to her soul; and as she went upstairs she contrasted with a strong sense of content her purely physical surroundings with those in which she had lived for the last forty-eight hours. For two days and nights she had been hurried across Europe, over the jolt and rattle of the racing wheels; by day the blurred landscape, wreathed in engine-smoke, had streamed by her; by night she had seen nothing but the dull, stuffed walls of her sleeping compartment, and it was an exquisite physical pleasure to have the firm, unshaken floor underfoot, to be surrounded by the appointments of a beautiful house, to be able to move of one’s own volition again, and not to be taken like a parcel in a van from one end of Europe to the other. And how delicious also it was to be clean, to have revelled in soap and water, instead of being coated and pelted at by dust and coal-grime! On the surface of life this was all pleasant; it all added to her
sense of security and well-being.

  She had enjoyed a charming evening, which was not nearly over yet, since Alice was coming to her room for a talk — no little talk, no few good-night words, but a real long talk, which should wipe off the arrears of a twelve months’ abstinence. Alice had demurred at first, saying she knew that journeys were fatiguing things, but Mrs. Halton had truthfully said that she had never felt less tired. For when one is happy there is no time to be fatigued; being happy engrosses the whole attention. It was early yet also, scarcely after ten, for two or three old friends only, a party of women, had dined, and these had gone away early, with the fatigue of the traveller in their minds. Mrs. Halton had let that pass; the fact was that to-night she wanted above all things to talk to Lady Nottingham. There was one thing — a very big one — which she meant to tell her, and there was also a great deal she wished to learn.

  Lady Nottingham followed her after a minute or two; and a maid bearing a tray with an enormous jug of hot water and a glass followed Lady Nottingham, for she was one of those people who seem to keep permanently young by always doing the latest thing. Just now there was a revival of hot-water drinking, and with avidity (as if it tasted nice) Lady Nottingham drank hot water.

  “Excellent thing, Jeannie,” she said. “Can’t I persuade you to try? You dear person, I don’t know that I will even attempt to. It might have some effect on you, and I don’t want anything to have any effect on you. I prefer you exactly as you are. Now I want to make myself quite comfortable, in order that I may enjoy myself as much as possible, and then you shall tell me all that has happened to you this last year. — No, Hendon, you needn’t wait up. Yes; plenty of hot water. Go to bed.”

  “Let me pull the blinds up and open the windows,” said Jeannie; “I want to let London in. Ah! Clip-clop! Clip-clop! Girls and boys going to dances, and falling in love with one another, and keeping the world young. God bless them!”

  She leant out into the soft warm night a moment, and then turned back into the room again, her face so brimming with happiness and youth that Alice for a moment was almost startled.

  “They or something else seems to have kept you young, you dear!” she said. “And now sit down and tell me all about yourself from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot. You are so tall, too, Jeannie; it will take a nice long time.”

  Jeannie sat down.

  “So it is ‘me next,’ is it, as the children say?” she asked. “Very well, me. Well, once upon a time, dear, a year ago, I was an old woman. I was twenty-nine, if you care to know, but an old woman. For the measure of years is a very bad standard to judge by; it tells you of years only which have practically nothing to do with being old or young. Well, the old woman of twenty-nine went away. And to-day she came back, a year older in respect of years, since she is thirty now, but, oh! ever so much younger, because —— Do you guess at all?”

  Lady Nottingham put down her hot water.

  “Ah! my dear,” she said, “of course I guess. Or rather I don’t guess; I know. There is somebody. It is only Somebody who can interfere in our age and our happiness. Who is it?”

  “No; guess again,” said Jeannie.

  But again it was hardly a case of guessing. Lady Nottingham knew quite well who it was, who in those years of Jeannie’s married life had been her constant and quiet support and stand-by, and who had found his reward in the knowledge that he helped her to bear what had to be borne.

  “Victor Braithwaite,” she said, without pause. “Oh, Jeannie, is it so? You are going to marry him? Oh, my darling, I am so glad. What a happy man, and how well he deserves it!”

  Lady Nottingham was stout and comfortable; but with extraordinary alertness she surged out of her chair to kiss Jeannie, and upset the table on which was her glass and her boiling water, breaking the one and deluging the carpet with the other — a perfect Niagara of scalding fluid. She paid not the least attention to the rising clouds of steam nor to the glass which crashed on to the floor and was reduced to shards and exploded fragments.

  “My dear, how nice!” she said. “And he has been in love with you so long! He will have told you that now, but I insist on the credit of having seen it also. He behaved so splendidly, and was such a good friend to you, without ever letting you see — for I will wager that you did not — that he loved you.”

  “No, I never knew until he told me,” said Jeannie, simply.

  “Of course you didn’t, because he is a nice man and you are a nice woman. Oh, Jeannie, don’t you hate those creatures who keep a man dangling — wives, I mean — who like knowing that a man is eating his poor silly heart out for them, who don’t intend to lead — well, double lives, and yet keep him tied to their apron-strings? Such vampires! They put their dreadful noses in the air the moment he says something to them that he shouldn’t, and all the time they have been encouraging him to say it! They are flirts, who will certainly find themselves in a very uncomfortable round of the Inferno! I should torture them if I were Providence! I am sure Providence would prefer —— Dear me, yes.”

  Alice kissed her again.

  “Isn’t it so?” she demanded, vehemently.

  “About flirts? Why, of course. A flirt is a woman who leads a man on and leads him on, and then suddenly says, ‘What do you mean?’ Surely we need not discuss them.”

  Lady Nottingham went over to the window-seat.

  “No, I know we need not,” she said. “I was led away. Darling, Victor Braithwaite is coming to Bray on Saturday. Did you ever hear of anything more apt? Till this moment I was not sure that you would ever marry him, though I longed for you to do so. You shall have a punt all to yourselves — a private particular punt — and he shall — well, he shall punt you about. Oh, Jeannie, I too love the youth of the world.”

  Jeannie drew her chair a little nearer to the window-seat, in which Lady Nottingham had taken her place after the catastrophe of the hot water.

  “I know. He told me he was coming to Bray to-day.”

  “Oh, he met you at Victoria?” she asked.

  “No, dear; a little further down the line — at Dover, in fact. Yes, Alice, his was the first face I saw as we came alongside. And how my heart went out to him! What a good homecoming it has been, and how absolutely unworthy I feel of it! You have no idea how I used to rebel and complain in — in those past years, wondering what I had done to have my life so spoilt. Spoilt! Yes, that was the word I used to myself, and all the time this was coming nearer.”

  “Tell me more, dear.”

  “About him?” asked Jeannie.

  “About him and you.”

  “Well, all the autumn I was on the Italian lakes. Oh, Alice, such dreadful months, and all the more dreadful because of the maddening beauty of the place. I looked at it. I knew it was all there, but I never saw it; it never went inside me, or went to make part of me. I was very sleepless all that time, and depressed with a blackness of despair. And as I got stronger in physical health, the depression seemed more unbearable, because, in all probability, so many years lay before me, and nothing in life seemed the least worth while. I often thought of you, and often — every day — of Daisy, longing, in a way, to see you both, but knowing that it would be no use if I did, for you would have been to me like the corpses, the husks of what I loved once. And I did not see any possibility of getting better or of getting out of this tomb-like darkness. It was like being buried alive, and getting more alive from week to week, so that I grew more and more conscious of how black the tomb was. Every now and then the pall used to lift a little, and that, I think, was the worst of all.”

  Lady Nottingham laid her plump, comfortable hand on Jeannie’s.

  “You poor darling!” she said. “And you would not let either Daisy or me come to you. Why did you not?”

  “Because there are certain passages, I think, which the human soul has to go through alone. Dear Alice, you don’t know all that went to make up the gloom of those dreadful months! There was one thing in particular that cast
a blacker shadow than all the rest. I hope you will never know it. It concerns some one who is dead, but not my husband. It was that which made the darkness so impenetrable. I know you will not ask me about it. But, as I said, when the pall lifted a little, that was the worst of all, because then, for a moment it might be, or for an hour or two, I knew that life and youth and joy were just as dominant and as triumphant as ever in the world, and that it was I who had got on the wrong side of things, and saw them left-handed, and could be only conscious of this hideous nightmare of suffering.”

  Jeannie paused again, pushing back the thick coils of black hair from her forehead.

  “Quite little things would make the pall lift,” she said. “Once it was the sudden light of the sun shining on one of those red sails; once it was the sight of a little Italian contadina dancing with her shadow on the white sunny road, all by herself, for sheer exuberance of heart; once it was a man and a maid sitting close to each other in the dusk, and quietly singing some little love-song, so — so dreadfully unconscious of the sorrow of the world. Oh, that was bad — that was dreadful! Just one little verse, and then in the darkness they kissed each other. I knew they were darlings, and I thought they were devils. And once Victor wrote to me, saying that he was passing through on his way to Venice and Rome, and asking if he might come to see me. I did not answer him even; I could not.

  “But during all those weeks I suppose I was getting better, and when I went south to Rome in November, though I still could not look forward or contemplate the future at all, I knew better how to deal with the present hour and the present day. There was no joy in them, but there was a sort of acquiescence in me. If life — as seemed the only possible thing — was to be joyless for me, I could at least behave decently. Also a certain sort of pride, I think, came to my help. I felt that it was bad manners to appear as I felt — just as when one has a headache one makes an effort to appear more brilliantly well than usual. One doesn’t like people to know one has a headache, and in the same way I settled that I didn’t like them to know I had a heartache.