Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Claude happened to be hatless, but he passed his hand over his head instead, as if to recapture the sensation of ordering hats. “I suppose I order mine,” he said. “I’m sure I never made one. I shouldn’t know how to set about it.”

  “No, darling, you don’t wear two feathers — and — nothing else. A hat of two feathers is fearfully smart.”

  “Are these the big things you proposed to talk about?” asked Claude.

  “No, as if hats mattered. Oh, Claude, you’re moulting. A short black hair! And there’s another sticking out. May I pull?”

  He bent his head a little down: she pulled, and he screamed. The hair remained where it was.

  “And is that a big thing?” asked he again.

  “No, donkey; darling donkey. You will interrupt so about hats. As if anybody cared where you got your hats, and you haven’t got one. How did you lead the conversation round to hats? Let’s see, it was Austell first, and then... then, oh, yes, I said you were safe. And now I think I’ll go on. You may sit down here, if you like. There’s room for us both. Let’s be common, as May said about — about people like us, the other day. I would change hats with you, if you had one. As it is—”

  Dora pulled the thick black curls.

  “Oh, I wish you had a wig,” she said, “and nobody knew but me. I shouldn’t mind, and everybody would say what beautiful hair you had, and I should know it wasn’t real, and shouldn’t tell. It would be such fun. Then some day you would annoy me, and I should tell everybody it was only a wig. Claude, when I am old and wrinkly and quite, quite ugly, do you suppose you will care the least little bit any more for me? Oh, dear, I felt so extraordinarily gay all the morning, and now I’ve gone sad all in a minute! Oh, do comfort me! There is such a lot of gray-business in life, unless one dies quite young, which it would immensely annoy me to do. I wonder how we shall stand the gray-business, you and I, when we see each other getting older and more wrinkled and stiffer, stiffer not only in limb, and that is bad enough, but stiffer in mind, which is infinitely worse. No, don’t look at me like that, but sit up and be sensible. It has got to be faced.”

  Unconsciously, or at the most half consciously, she was sounding him; she knew quite well that there were beautiful things to be said and said truly about what she had called the gray-business of life, and she wondered, longing that it might be so, whether there was within him that divine alchemy which could see how the gray could be changed into gold. Never had she felt his physical charm so potent as now, when he sat up obedient to her orders and leaned forward toward her, with a look, a little puzzled, a little baffled in his eyes. Almost she was tempted to say to him, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, nothing matters beside this exquisite day and you, you, as I know you already,” but some very deep-lying vein of curiosity wholly feminine, and very largely loving, made her not interrupt her own question, but wait, with just a touch of anxiety, for his reply. She and Claude, she felt, would have some day to be far more intimately known by each other than they were now. Of him she knew little but his personal beauty, though she felt sure that, as she had said to May, he was good, and as she had said to him, that he was safe. And of her she guessed that he knew no more; that he loved her she had no doubt, but she felt that she had shown him as yet but little beyond that which all the world saw, her quick and eager attitude toward life, the iridescent moods of her effervescent nature. There was something that sat below these, her real self. She wanted Claude to know that, even as she wanted to know his real self.

  This was all vague to her though real, instinctive rather than describable, and flashed but momentarily through her mind as she waited for his reply. But that reply came at once: Claude seemed to find no difficulty about the facing of the gray-business.

  “There’s no cause to worry,” he said. “Just look at Dad and the mater! Isn’t he in love with her still? And I expect what you call the gray-business for a woman cannot begin while her husband loves her. I don’t suppose either of them ever gave a look, so to say, at anybody else. Think of the way he proposed her health last night! Not much gray-business about that! Why it was as if she was his best girl still, and that he’d just come a-courting her, instead of their having been married over thirty years. And she is his best girl still, just as you will ever be mine. And as for her, why he’s her man still. How’s that for the gray-business?”

  Dora felt one dreadful moment’s inclination to laugh. She had asked for a sign that he could turn the gray into gold, and for reply she got the assurance that she might put her mind at rest with the thought of what Mr and Mrs. Osborne were to each other! She knew that for that moment she only saw the ludicrous side of it, and that a very real and solid truth was firm below it, but somehow it was not what she wanted. She wanted... she hardly knew what, but something of the spirit of romance that triumphantly refuses to acquiesce in the literal facts of life, and see all things through the many-coloured blaze of its own light. She wanted the gray-business laughed at, she wanted the assurance that she could never grow old, given with a lover’s superb conviction, to be received with the unquestioning credulity of a child. No doubt it ought to have been very comforting to think that the years would leave with them the very warm and comfortable affection which the father and mother had for each other, and she ought to be glad that Claude felt so sure of that. But, to her mind, there was about as much romance in it as in a suet pudding.

  He saw the eagerness die from her face, and the shadow of her disappointment cross it.

  “And what is it now, dear?” he asked.

  Dora tossed her head back, a trick she had caught from him.

  “It isn’t anything now,” she said, “it all concerns years that are centuries away. I think it was foolish of me to ask at all.”

  “I don’t think it was in the least,” said he. “You said it had to be faced, and I think I’ve given it a facer, at least the example of the governor and the mater has. Besides, there are other things that will colour up the gray-matter, children, we hope, sons going to school and daughters growing up.”

  Again Dora knew that he spoke with excellent sense, but again she felt that it was not sense she wanted, so much as lovers’ nonsense, which is more essentially real than any sense. She wanted something airy, romantic, golden.... And then she looked at him again, and her wants faded from her. He brought her himself. She gave a little sigh and raised herself till her face was on a level with his.

  “O Claude, I should be a donkey, if I was not content,” she said.

  “Lord, there’d be a pair of us then, if I wasn’t,” said he.

  Sunday succeeded and breakfast in consequence was put an hour earlier so that any servant in the house could go to church. Mr. Osborne himself, though the day was already of scorching heat, came down in a black frock-coat suit of broadcloth, and his wife rustled in black satin. It was clearly expected that all their guests would go also, for at half-past ten a stream of vehicles drove to the door past the window of the smoking-room.

  “Got to start early,” said he, “so that the men may put up the cattle and come too, but there’s no call for you gentlemen to put out your cigars. The ladies won’t mind a whiff of tobacco in the open air, Sir Thomas, and the church is but a step outside the Park gates, so that you can sit and finish there. There are the ladies assembling. Time to go: never keep the fair sex waiting, hey? or else the most indulgent of them will turn a cold shoulder.”

  The church, as Mr. Osborne had said, was but a stone’s throw beyond the Park gates, and as they all arrived at twenty minutes to eleven there was time, before the groaning of the organ summoned them in, to have a turn under the trees and finish the cigars that had barely been begun.

  It had been so taken for granted that everybody was coming to church that out of all the party there was only one absentee, namely, Austell, to whose room Mir. Osborne had sent with inquiries if he was ready, and the suggestion to send back the motor for him if he was not. But he certainly was not ready and the motor had not gone back
for him, since he had said that he was not very well. Otherwise the whole of the party were there, and by degrees strayed into church. Mrs. Osborne had gone there at once from the carriage with Lady Austell, in order to escape from the heat, and they were already seated in the big square family pew which belonged to the house, when the others began to come in. Sir Thomas and Mr. Osborne were the last, because they had been discussing the recent rise in the price of tin up till the last moment. They entered, indeed, so shortly before the procession of four choir boys, two men and the vicar, that Mr. Osborne had barely time to sit down by his wife in the place she always kept for him next her in church, after standing up and putting his face in his hat, before he had to stand up again. Sir Thomas sat next Lady Austell. The two looked rather like a codfish in conjunction with a withered lily.

  The pew was four-sided, the fourth side opening into the body of the church through the easternmost of the arches of the south aisle. In the centre of it was a very beautiful alabaster monument to the first earl and his wife, while the window was of exquisite early German glass to the memory of the second. Elsewhere in numbers round the walls were other smaller tablets, some bearing medallions, others merely catalogues of the cardinal virtues with which the deceased were blessed, but the whole place was historical, established. And here this morning sat Mr. Osborne and his family and friends, among whom were Lady Austell and her daughter, who was going to join together the two families. She sat just opposite Claude, and of them all, he alone to the most observant eye was ambiguous. He might as well, so far as appearance went, have been of the Austells as of the Osbornes.

  Dora, it was to be feared, was not very attentive, and her face wore that peculiarly rapt look, which, as May Thurston had once told her, was a certain indication that she was not thinking about what was going on. As far as the service of the church went that was true; she was completely occupied with the occupants of the pew. The sermon was in progress and her mother sat with eyes mournfully fixed on the Elizabethan monument in the centre, just as if the first earl had been her husband, while next her Sir Thomas had his eyes fixed on nothing at all, for they were tightly closed. His wife, next to him, and round the comer, made futile little attempts to rouse him to consciousness again, by pretending to put her parasol in a more convenient place, so that it should incidentally hit his foot. This, eventually, she succeeded in doing, and he opened one eye and rolled it drowsily and reproachfully at Lady Austell, as if she had interrupted some celestial reverie. Then he closed it again.

  Claude, as Dora felt, had observed this, and was looking at her, so she passed over him, for fear of catching his eye, and went on to Uncle Alfred, who sat next him. He was closely wrapped up in a shawl that went over his shoulders, and a certain stealthy movement of his lower jaw caused her to suspect that he was eating some sort of lozenge. Then came Mrs. Osborne: Dora could hear her rather tight satin bodice creak to her breathing. She had the Bible in which she had verified the text open in her lap, and she was listening intently to the sermon, which was clearly to her mind, for her plump, pleasant face was smiling, and her eyes fixed on the preacher were a little dim: her smile was clearly one of those smiles of very simple happiness which are allied to tenderness and tears. And then Dora focussed her ear and heard what was being said:

  “So this earthly love of ours,” said the preacher, “is of the same immortal quality. Years do not dim it; it seems but to grow stronger and brighter as the mere purely physical part of it—”

  And then Dora’s eye was focussed again by a movement on the part of Mrs. Osborne, and her ear lost the rest of the sentence. Mrs. Osborne gave a great sigh and her dress a great creak, and simultaneously she took away the hand that was supporting the Bible in which she had verified the text, so that it slid off the short and steeply inclined plane between her body and her knee, and fell face downward on the floor. She did not heed this: she laid her hand, making kaleidoscopic colours in her rings as she moved it, on the hand of her husband, who sat next her.

  He, too, had been following the sermon with evident pleasure, and it was hard to say to which of them the movement came first. For within the same fraction of a second his hand also let fall the silk hat which he had already gathered up in anticipation of the conclusion, and in the same instant of time it was seeking hers. His head turned also to her, as hers to him, and a whispered word passed between them. Then they smiled, each to the other, and the second whisper was audible right across the monument of Francis, first earl, to Dora, where she sat opposite to them.

  “Maria, my dear,” whispered Mr. Osborne, “if that isn’t nice!”

  Then Mrs. Osborne’s belated consciousness awoke; she withdrew her hand and picked up her Bible.

  Mr. Osborne’s instinct in taking up his hat had been quite correct; the doxology followed, and a hymn was given out. He and his wife, so it was clear to Dora, had no consciousness except for each other and the hymn. She was the first to find it in her hymn-book, while he still fumbled with his glasses, and when they all stood up he shared the book with her and put down his own.

  Then the organ indicated the first lines of the tune, and again the two smiled at each other, for it was a favourite, as it had been sung at the service for the dedication of the church in Sheffield. They both remembered that, but that did not wholly account for their pleasure: it had been a favourite long before.

  Mrs. Osborne sang what is commonly called “second.” That is to say, she made sounds about a third below the air. Mr. Osborne sang bass: that is to say, he sang the air an octave or thereabouts below the treble. They both sang very loudly; so also did Percy, so also did Mrs. Per, who sang a real alto.

  And then without reason Dora’s eyes grew suddenly dim. In the last verse Mrs. Osborne dosed the large gilt-edged hymn-book with tunes, and looked at her husband. He moistened his lips as the last verse began, and coughed once. Then Mrs. Osborne’s rings again caught the light as she sought her husband’s hand. And she started fortissimo, a shade before anybody else:

  “And so through all the length of days—”

  Mr. Osborne did not sing: his fat fingers closed on his wife’s rings, and he listened to her. He would not have listened then to Melba. He would not have been so completely absorbed if the seraphim had sung to him.

  And then finally Dora looked at Claude. She thought she understood a little more. But she only saw a little more.

  CHAPTER V.

  IT WAS about two of the afternoon in the last week of May, and this sudden heat wave which had spread southward over Europe had reached Venice, making it more than ever a place to dream and be still in and less than ever a place to see sights in. So at any rate thought its foreign visitors, for the Grand Canal even and the more populous of the waterways were empty of pleasure-seeking and church-inspecting traffic, and but little even of the mercantile or more necessary sort was on the move. Here and there a barge laden with coke and wood fuel was being punted heavily upstream, clinging as far as might be to the side of the canal, where it would feel less of the tide that was strongly setting seaward, or here another carrying the stacked-up furniture of some migratory household passed down midstream so as to get the full aid and current of the tide avoided by the other. But apart from such traffic and the passage of the gray half-empty steamers that churned and troubled the water at regular intervals, sending the wash of their slanting waves against the walls of the white palaces, and making the moored and untenanted gondolas slap the water with sudden hollow complaints, and grind their sides uneasily against the restraining pali, there was but little stir of movement or passage. No lounger hung about on the steps of the iron bridge, and the sellers of fruit, picture postcards, and tobacco had taken their wares into the narrow strip of shade to the north of the Accademia, and waited, unexpectant of business, till the cool of the later hours should bring the forestieri into the street again.

  Even the native population shunned the glare of the sun, and preferred, if it was necessary to go from one place to anoth
er, to seek the deep shadows of the narrow footways rather than face the heat and glare of the canals, and the boatmen in charge of the public ferries had moored their craft in the shade if possible, or, with heads sheltered beneath their discarded coats, passed the long siesta-hour with but little fear of interruption or call on their services. The domes and towers of the town glittered jewel-like against the deep blue of the sky, and their outlines trembled in the quiver of the reverberating air. On the north side of the Grand Canal the southward-facing houses dozed behind lattices closed to keep out the glare and the heat, and the air was still and noiseless but for the staccato chiding of the swallows which pursued their swift and curving ways with nothing of their speed abated. Over the horizon hung a purplish haze of heat, so that the edge of the sea melted indistinguishably into the sky, and Alps and Euganean hills alike were invisible.

  Dora had lunched alone to-day, for Claude had gone to Milan to meet his father and mother, who were coming out for a fortnight and would arrive this evening; and at the present moment she was looking out from the window of her sala on to the lower stretch of the Grand Canal, which, as her intimacy with it deepened, seemed ever to grow more inexplicably beautiful. The flat which they occupied was on the south side of the canal, and though no doubt it would have left the room cooler to have closed all inlet of the baked air, she preferred to have the windows open, and lean out to command a larger view of the beloved waterway. Deep into her heart had the magic of the city of waters entered, a thing incomparable and incommunicable. She only knew that when she was away from Venice the thought of it caused her to draw long breaths, which hung fluttering in her throat; that when she was in it her eyes were never satisfied with gazing or herself with being soaked in it. She loved what was splendid in it, and what was sordid, what was small and what was great, its sunshine, its shadows, its moonlight, the pleasant Italian folk, and whether she sat in the jewelled gloom of St. Mark’s or shot out with the call of her gondolier from some dark waterway into the blaze of ivory moonlight on the Grand Canal below the Rialto, or whether the odour of roasting coffee or the frying of fish came to her as she passed some little caffe ristorante in the maze of mean streets that lie off the Merceria, or whether she lay floating at ease in the warm sustaining water of the Lido, or watched in the church of St. Georgio the mystic wreaths of spirits and archangels assembled round the table of the Last Supper, peopling the beamed ceiling of the Upper Chamber and mingling mistlike in the smoke of the lamp with which it was lit — she knew that it was Venice, the fact of Venice, that lay like a gold thread through these magical hours, binding them together, a circle of perfect pearls.