Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  An unusual impulse of candour took possession of her.

  “Besides,” she said, “it will be much more amusing and comfortable than at the hotel.”

  Elizabeth, as had now been settled, was to start for England the next week, and since, after the visit of the Commander-in-Chief, a quiet reaction settled down on Peshawar, Mrs. Fanshawe was at liberty to work herself to the bone, as she herself phrased it, to make preparations for her departure. As a matter of strict fact, her labours in this regard were to order her ayah to wash out a Thermos flask of hers, the possession of which, she declared, would make “all the difference” to Elizabeth’s comfort on her journey down to Bombay, and to determine to finish a woollen crochet scarf for her, which would make “all the difference” when she was on the boat. The necessity of finishing this — for her determination was invincible on the point — caused her to insist on a good deal of reading aloud in the evening, which she always enjoyed, while the breaking of the Thermos flask — quite irreplaceable in Peshawar — by her ayah gave her an excuse, which she had long been wanting, for dismissing her, since it was quite impossible to trust a woman who could be careless over such a treasure, and to keep a servant whom she could not trust, was to violate one of her most sound household laws. Under the stress of these duties it was only prudent to rest for rather longer hours than usual after lunch, with the crochet scarf put on a table by her sofa, in case her afternoon insomnia was persistent, and except for lunch, she was practically invisible until evening. Under these circumstances, though she continued to plan long quiet days for herself and Elizabeth before the wrench of parting came, the girl saw more than usual of her father, for, to speak frankly, it was impossible to have the sense of seeing anybody else when Mrs. Fanshawe was present. She was obtrusive in the faint but shrill trumpeting manner of a mosquito.

  To Elizabeth, therefore, and, though loyalty prevented his ever forming such a thought to himself, perhaps to her father, too, these days had a recaptured charm. It was now a couple of years since her stepmother had made the third — not shadowy — in her home; before that, for her mother had died in her infancy, she and her father had been inseparable companions. And in these two years Elizabeth had grown up; from the high romantic mists of childhood, she had stepped down into the level plains, and saw womanhood stretching out in front of her. As was natural, that expanse had come slowly and gradually into sight, and it was not till these few days of companionship with her father brought back the habit of earlier years that she began to realize how far she had travelled. She found, too, that the adequacy of the prattling companionship of childhood no longer satisfied her; her heart needed a more mature diet, her brain was awake and tingling with a hundred questions and surmises such as a few days before had inspired her wondering conjectures when she found him at work in his garden. Then, for the first time quite consciously, she had asked herself that momentous question as to the meaning, the principle that lay behind all the phenomena which she had taken for granted; then, too, she had realized that to her father the explanation lay in, or, at any rate, was bound up with, something inherent in the prayers and hymns at church. There to him was the finality which she had been consciously seeking, about which for the first time she felt any real curiosity.

  But she was as diffident about putting any question to him about it as he, all these years, had been of initiating any speech on the subject. A man’s religious convictions necessarily take the colour and texture, so to speak, of his mind, and this quiet, unassertive man was no more in the habit of speaking about them than about his loyalty to the King or his habits of personal cleanliness. Such subjects as these, rightly or wrongly, are the last to find vocal expression; he would have found it as difficult and as unnatural to speak to Elizabeth on religious topics as to discourse on the meaning of the National Anthem, or ask her at breakfast if she had performed her ablutions with thoroughness. In his own case, his conduct, his work, and his immaculate appearance bore witness to the reality of his convictions on these three respects, and, though he shared with no mother the responsibility of parentage, he assumed her welfare in these regards. It was not because the reality of them was faint to him that he was reticent, it was because the reality was a matter of instinct, deeply felt and inwardly imperative. Throughout the reigns of various governesses, he had from time to time reminded those ladies of his wish that a Bible lesson should inaugurate the labours of the day, and, having thus provided for the material of religious instruction, he believed that the child’s nature would, out of that pabulum, secrete, in the manner of well-nourished bodily glands, the secret essences that sustained and built. But there had resulted from this method of reticence, a symptom which should have troubled him if he wanted confirmation of its success, for Elizabeth, so open, so garrulous with him on all other subjects, had never spoken to him on this one. This he set down to the same instinct that made himself shy of speech on such subjects, namely, the inherent conviction that does not care to discuss matters like loyalty and cleanliness. It had never occurred to him that her silence was due to indifference, to incuriousness, and that religious instruction was to her no more than a part of the curriculum of the week-day church, an hour’s slightly distasteful feature of Sunday morning.

  But now Elizabeth’s curiosity was aroused. “The scheme of things entire” had begun to make audible to her its first faint flute-like call, a call that, before there has fallen on the spirit any experience of agony, of darkness, of loneliness, is as fascinating as the music of Pan or the voice of Sirens, and she longed to know how it sounded in the ears of others. For herself, she was confused, bewildered by the remote uncapturable melody, that at present only gave hints in broken phrases to her untrained ear.

  The two were riding back one day from a horseback saunter along the lanes among the fruit orchards. The blossom was beginning to fall, and when a puff of wind disturbed its uncertain clinging the ground below would be showered with snowy pear-blossom or pink with the flower of the peach. Elizabeth, in tune with the spring, was inclined to lament this.

  “I would almost go without peaches,” she said, “if that would save the blossom from falling.”

  He laughed.

  “Yet it would be a hard choice,” he said, “to determine whether one would look at a tree covered with blossom, instead of having dessert. I think I should let Nature take its course, Lizzie, after all.”

  “Is it meant that the blossom has to fall before the fruit comes?” she asked.

  “Well, yes. To want it otherwise would be parallel to wanting girls and boys not to grow up.”

  “And you do?”

  “Naturally, though it is at the expense of their rosy petals.” This seemed to give Elizabeth sufficient material for a pondering silence, which lasted a couple of minutes.

  “I want to grow up,” she observed, “and keep all my youth as well.”

  He smiled at her.

  “Hard, but worth attempting,” he said.

  “Oh ... do you mean it is possible, daddy?”

  “Certainly! You can keep all of youth that is really worth having. But, as I said, hard. For instance, you can continue to have all the glow of enthusiasm of youth till it is time to think about — about turning in.”

  “Dying? I don’t want ever to think about it. I think it is a perfectly disgusting prospect. Don’t you hate the idea of it, daddy?”

  He let his eyes dwell on her a moment.

  “I can’t say that I do, Lizzie,” he said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I enjoy life tremendously; I’m not in the least tired of it. But, as for hating the idea of death, why no! You see, you see, it’s only another stage in growing up, which is a process with which, as I said, I am in sympathy.”

  They were passing through a lane deeply sunk between its adjacent fields; a cool draught flowed down it, and Elizabeth shivered.

  “Oh, daddy, to be put in the cold earth!” she said. “That, anyhow, is a quite certain accompaniment of death; there is no doubt about that
. And about the rest, who knows?”

  “My dear, you don’t doubt, do you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know that I do. One is taught; I was taught. I suppose I believe in the arithmetic I learned, and in the geography I learned — —”

  She broke off suddenly as a little wind, as it were, blew across the placid sunlit sea of her consciousness, shattering the brightnesses.

  “But because I have learned a thing it does not become part of me, as people tell me,” she said. “You have to leaven a thing with love in order to assimilate it. I’ve always known that those things are bone of your bone to you, part of you, vital part of you, part that could not be amputated. Even the fact that you have never talked to me about them has shown that. You don’t tell me that you love me, simply because it is part of you to do so; nor do I remind you that I have ten fingers and ten toes.”

  She checked her horse as they emerged from the lane into the stream of the traffic that was passing into the native city.

  “That’s why we have never talked about it, daddy,” she said in sudden enlightenment. “It was too real to you, and it didn’t touch me.”

  She had never seen him so troubled.

  “Didn’t touch you?” he asked. “You don’t believe — —”

  Elizabeth laid her hand on his knee.

  “Daddy dear, I believe in all things living and beautiful, and true. Don’t take it to heart — pray don’t. Does — does the blossom know what fruit is coming? But surely the fruit comes.”

  Swiftly, suddenly at this supreme instant of sunset, all the world was changed; it was as if it passed into the heart of an opal. The dust of the main road into which the two had just turned was transfigured into mist of gold and rose; the wayfarers who passed along, plodding home with camels and mild-eyed buffaloes, were changed into citizens of some rainbow-kingdom. More brilliant grew the excellent opalescence, and then all the tints of it were sucked up into one soft crimson that flooded earth and sky. Then, as the darkness began to overlay it, it grew dusky and yet duskier, till the incarnadined air was robbed of its glories. But high above them northwards and eastwards flamed the rose-coloured snows.

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER III

  COMFORTABLE MRS. HANCOCK

  It is almost doubtful whether it is right to call Heathmoor a village, since there is something plebeian about the word, implying labourers’ cottages and public-houses and an admixture of corduroy in the trousers of the male inhabitants with strings tied, for reasons eternally inexplicable, below their knees. Even less is Heathmoor a town, if by a town we denote an assemblage of houses cheek to jowl, streets with tramways or omnibuses and a scarcity of trees and gardens. Indeed, no known word implying the collected domicile of human beings — which Heathmoor certainly is — will describe it, and the indication of it necessitates a more verbose method.

  It lies at so convenient a distance from the metropolis, and is served by so swift and proper a succession of trains at those hours when Heathmoor travels, that it combines, as its inhabitants unanimously declare, all the advantages of town with the pleasures and fine air of the country. Twenty minutes in a well-padded railway-carriage with bevelled mirrors and attractive photographs of beaches and abbeys and nice clear rivers lands the business men to whom Heathmoor almost entirely belongs in one of the main and central arteries of the London streets, and twenty-three minutes suffices to take them and their wives and daughters home again after they have dined in town and been to the play. The question of those extra minutes is a staple of conversation in Heathmoor, and there is a great deal of high feeling about it, for nobody can see, especially after hours of conversation on the subject, why the railway company should not quicken up the return trains in the evening. Another peculiarity of those otherwise admirable trains is that the first-class carriages are invariably full and the rest of the vehicles comparatively empty. Tickets, moreover — those mean little oblongs of cardboard — are seldom seen, and ticket collectors never make their demands. If some energetic young man, newly promoted, ventures to open a first-class carriage-door between Heathmoor and London, by the train that leaves Heathmoor at 9.6 a.m., for instance, or the later one at 9.42 a.m., its occupants look at him in disgusted astonishment. One, perhaps, sufficiently unbends to murmur, “Season,” but probably no notice is taken of him till the guard, hurrying up, gives him a couple of hot words, and apologizes to the gentlemen. On the whole, they are not made uncomfortable by such intrusions; interruption, in fact, rarely occurring, somewhat emphasizes the privileged aloofness of these Heathmoor magnates, just as an occasional trespasser in well-ordered domains makes to glow the more brightly the sense of proprietorship. The impertinence receives but a shrug, and a settlement behind the page of the Financial Times follows.

  The second of these trains, namely, the 9.42 a.m. from Heathmoor, performs a more sociable journey, for there is less of the Financial Times in it and more of the ladies of Heathmoor, who, with business to transact in the shops, go up to town in the morning with amazing frequency, returning, for the most part, by an equally swift transit, which lands them back at home again at twenty minutes past one. All the morning, in consequence, between those hours the roads at Heathmoor, which are level and well drained owing to its famous gravelly soil, which renders it so salubrious a settlement, are comparatively empty, for those who do not go to London find in their houses and gardens sufficient occupation to detain them there till lunch-time. Once again, between five and six the male population swarms homewards, and a row of cabs uniformly patronized awaits the arrival of the midnight train from town, which enables its travellers to have stayed to the very end of most theatrical performances.

  A small mercantile quarter clusters round the station, but the local shops are neither numerous nor, as Mrs. Hancock, Colonel Fanshawe’s widowed sister, sometimes laments, “choice.” Butcher, baker, and greengrocer supply the less “choice” comforts of life, but if you want a sweetbread in a hurry, or a bundle of early asparagus, it is idle to expect anything of the sort. A “Court milliner,” who lately set up there behind a plate-glass window and some elegant “forms,” has a great deal of time on her hands, and a tailor, who professes to have the newest suitings, and to be unrivalled in the matter of liveries, does little more than put an occasional patch in the garments of the male inhabitants, for Heathmoor, in general, gets its apparel from metropolitan markets, and prefers to be waited on by large and noiseless parlourmaids. In fact, the mercantile quarter forms but an insignificant fraction of Heathmoor residences, the bulk of which consists of admirably comfortable and commodious villas, each standing segregate in its acre or half-acre of garden. All along the well-kept roads — the roads at Heathmoor seem to be washed and dusted, like china, every morning — are situated these residences, so aptly described as desirable, each with its gate, its laurel hedge, and small plot of grass in front, each with its tennis-court or croquet-lawn at back, its tiled roofs, its “tradesmen’s entrance,” and its crimson rambler aspiring above the dining-room bow-window. The larger houses — those in fact which stand on acre plots — have a stable or garage attached to them, though all are in telephonic communication with the livery stables that are situated on the far side of the railway-bridge, and all are built in accordance with a certain English norm or rule, designed to ensure solid comfort and an absence of draughts. There is none that lacks the electric light, none in which rivers of hot and cold water are not laid on upstairs and downstairs, none that lacks a lavatory situated close to the front door, in which is hung up a convincing and lucid diagram of the system of drainage. But there is no monotony or uniformity in the appearance of these houses; some are of brick, some of rough-cast, and all have a certain mediocre individuality of their own — like the faces of a flock of sheep — which renders them to the observer as various as the high-sounding names that are so clearly printed on their front gates.

  Most of these exceedingly comfortable houses, designed for the complete convenience of couples w
ith or without small families, are, as has been said, built on half-acre or acre plots. They are all of modern construction, with a view to the saving of domestic labour, for Heathmoor as a place of residence for well-to-do City men is but of late discovery. But here and there a more spacious specimen can be encountered, and Mrs. Hancock, who found nothing choice in the Heathmoor shops, had some ten years ago, on the death of her husband, bought two of these acre plots, and had built thereon a house of larger rooms, a boudoir, and a stable with coachman’s quarters. Since then she had devoted nearly all her income to rendering herself completely and absolutely comfortable. An excellent cook, salaried at sixty pounds a year, a sum which, according to the regular Heathmoor standard, would be considered to be sufficient to pay the wages of a parlourmaid also, largely contributed to her well-being, and a maid, a serious butler with the deportment of a dean, a chauffeur, two housemaids, a kitchen-maid, a gardener, and a daughter were all devoted to the same mission. The daughter occupies the ultimate place in this list, not because Edith was not loving and loved, but because on the whole her contribution to her mother’s comfort was materially less than that of any of the others, though perhaps physically more. Indeed, she shared in rather than subscribed to it, drove with her in her motor, ate of the delicious food, while in the evenings she laid out her own game of patience, without being called upon to advise or condole or congratulate in respect of Mrs. Hancock’s. It is true that the window on Edith’s side of the car was put down if her mother required a little more air without being too close to its ingress, and put up if Mrs. Hancock in her seat wished to avoid a draught, but she was by no means enserfed to the ruling spirit that directed and controlled the movements of the other dependents. Naturally she drove and dined with her mother, read her into a comfortable doze after tea, and did all the duties of a daughter, but she had, even when with Mrs. Hancock, an existence and a volition of her own, which the others had not.