Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Mr. Martin and his wife were the first to arrive, and, as usual, the vicar took up his place on the hearthrug with the air of temporary host. This, indeed, was his position at Mrs. Hancock’s, for it was he whom she always left in charge of the men in the dining-room when the ladies left them to their wine, with instructions as to where the cigarettes were, and not to stop too long. It was his business also, at which he was adept, to be trumpeter in general of the honour and glory of his hostess, and refer to any late acquisition of hers in the way of motor-cars, palings, or rambler roses. In this position of host he naturally took precedence of everybody else, and his mot “Round collars are more than coronets” when conducting the leading lady to the dining-room in the teeth, you may say, of a baronet, dazzled Heathmoor for weeks whenever they thought of it. His wife, a plump little Dresden shepherdess, made much use of the ejaculation, “Only fancy!” and at her husband’s naughtier sallies exclaimed, “Alfred, Alfred!” while she attempted to cover her face with a very small hand to hide her laughter. Soon they were joined by Mr. and Mrs. Dobbs, and shortly after by Mr. Beaumont, who looked, as was indeed the case, as if he had been running.

  Mrs. Hancock’s dinners were always admirable, and since Mrs. Williams kept a book of all her menus there was no risk of guests being regaled with dishes they had lately partaken of at the house. The conversation, if anything, was slightly less varied, since, apart from contemporaneous happenings that required comment, the main topics of interest were rather of the nature of hardy perennials. Mr. Beaumont’s sister was always inquired after, and usually the opinion of his uncle with regard to the latest iniquity of the Radical government. Weather, gardens, croquet were questions that starred the conversational heavens with planet-like regularity, moving in their appointed orbits, and Mr. Dobbs filled such intervals as he could spare from the mastication of his dinner with its praise.

  “Delicious glass of sherry, Mrs. Hancock,” he said, very early in the proceedings. “You can’t buy sherry like that now.”

  Mr. Martin’s evening clothes were not cut so as to suggest his profession. He based his influence not on his clothes, but on his human sympathy with the joys and sorrows of his friends. “There is a time to mourn, to weep, to repent,” he said once in a sermon; “but undoubtedly there is a time to be as jolly as a sand-boy.” He did not approve of teetotalism; any one could be a teetotaller. You are more of an example by partaking of the good things of this world in due moderation. He drank half his glass of sherry.

  “I always tell Mrs. Hancock that her wine would cause a Rechabite to recant,” he observed gaily.

  Mrs. Martin covered her face with her hand and gave a little spurt of laughter. This was an old joke, but social gaiety would speedily become a thing of the past if we never appeared to be amused at familiar witticisms.

  “Alfred, Alfred!” she said. “How can you? Is not Alfred wicked?”

  Conversation became general.

  “And have you begun croquet yet this year, Mr. Holroyd?” asked Mrs. Dobbs. “I suppose you will carry off all the prizes again, as you always do. I wish you would make Mr. Dobbs take to it instead of spending all his time catching slugs in the garden. So much better for him.”

  “Do not listen to Mrs. Dobbs, Holroyd!” cried the vicar. “I use my authority to forbid your listening to Mrs. Dobbs. The slugs spoil the flowers, and, like a greedy fellow, I want every flower in Heathmoor for Trinity Sunday.”

  “Alfred! Alfred!” said his wife.

  “Yes, my dear, and you will never guess what Mrs. Hancock has just promised me. While she is at Bath I may order Ellis to send a basket of her best flowers up to the church every Sunday. No limitation over the basket, mind you. It shall be a clothes-basket! And as for best flowers — well, all I can say is that any one who hasn’t seen Mrs. Hancock’s tulips this year doesn’t know what tulips can be.”

  Mr. Dobbs, who ate with his head perpendicularly above his plate, looked up at his wife.

  “I told you salmon could be got, my dear!” he said.

  “You shall have it,” she said, “but don’t blame me for the fishmonger’s book.”

  Mr. Martin laughed joyfully.

  “My wife tells me I mustn’t play golf so much,” he said, “because it gives me such an appetite that I eat her out of hearth and home. But I tell her it is one of my parochial duties. How can I get to know the young fellows of the place unless I join in their amusements? They will never tell me their difficulties and temptations unless they have found me in sympathy with their joys. And if when I am playing with them there is trouble in the long grass, and occasionally a little word, a wee naughty little word slips out — (“Alfred, Alfred!”) — you may be sure that I never seem to hear it.”

  “Well, I do call that tact!” said Mrs. Hancock genially. “But you must take a little cucumber with your salmon, Mr. Martin. This is the first cucumber Ellis has sent me in.”

  “A gourd — a positive gourd,” said Mr. Martin, taking a slice of this remarkable vegetable. “Jonah and his whale could have sat under it.”

  “Is not Alfred wicked?” said his wife.

  “And you are really off to Bath the day after to-morrow?” asked he. “And are going to drive all the way in your car? Though, of course, with a car like yours it is no distance at all. Sometimes I see your car on one horizon, and then, whizz, you are out of sight again over the other. But no noise, no dust, no smell. But the speed limit, Mrs. Hancock? I am tempted to say no speed limit, either.”

  He refrained from this audacious suggestion, and continued —

  “Such an excellent steady fellow, too, you have in Denton. I always see my friend Denton coming in during the Psalms after he has taken your car home, and if he has to leave again in the middle of the sermon, I’m sure he only does at the call of duty what half the congregation would do for pleasure if they had the courage. They have my sympathy. How bored I should get if I had to listen to a long-winded parson every Sunday.”

  Mrs. Hancock cast an anxious eye on the asparagus. But there was a perfect haystack of it.

  “How much I enjoyed your sermon last Sunday,” said she, “about the duty of being cheerful and happy, and doing all we can to make ourselves happy for the sake of others. Oh, you must take more asparagus! Ellis would be miserable if it was not all eaten. It is only the second time we have had it this year.”

  For the moment she thought of telling Mr. Martin to supply himself with asparagus while she was at Bath. But the duty of making herself happy prevailed, and she refrained, for it occurred to her that Ellis might dispatch daily bundles early in the morning in cardboard boxes, so that they would reach Bath in time to be cooked for dinner. The hotel commissariat would certainly not rise to asparagus so early in the season.

  Mrs. Martin in the meantime, with one sycophantic ear open to catch her husband’s jokes, was full of fancy ejaculations to Mr. Beaumont, who was describing to her the romantic history of the female oak-egger, which exercised so extraordinary a fascination on all young males for miles around. Here Mr. Dobbs was lacking in felicity, for he remarked that a great many unmarried young ladies would be glad to know how the female oak-egger did it. But Mr. Beaumont made it unnecessary for Mrs. Dobbs even to frown at him, so rapidly did he wonder whether it was called an oak-egger because it laid upwards of a million eggs. Then Mrs. Hancock called the attention of the table generally to the fact that the gooseberry tartlets were the produce of the garden — the first of the year — and Mr. Martin alluded to the Feast of the Blessed Innocents, saying that even massacre had a silver lining, though not for the massacred. A savoury of which Mr. Dobbs was easily induced to take a second helping brought dinner to what musicians call “a full close.”

  Then came the moment of the evening. Port was ruthlessly supplied by Lind to all the guests, whether they wanted it or not, and Mrs. Hancock rose with her kind brown eyes moist with emotion.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “I have a toast to propose. I ask you to drink th
e health of my dear daughter and of Edward Holroyd, my future son-in-law. Your health, my dear, dear children!”

  Mr. Beaumont instantly led off the musical honours on so high a note that those of the party who could sing followed with faint gasps and screams. And, under cover of the hubbub of comment and congratulation that followed, shyly and eagerly Edith’s eye sought her future husband. And when his eye met hers she felt her heart rap out a tumultuous dozen of unbidden beats, fast and sweetly suffocating. Then she blushed furiously at a sudden self-accusation of indelicacy, of unmaidenness. But her heart acquitted her of the indictment. Was it not right to give that tattoo of welcome?

  The start for Bath was made in strict accordance with the scheduled plan. Filson, with the heavy luggage on the top of the motor, accompanied by Lind, her lunch, and a freshly cut bundle of asparagus destined for Mrs. Hancock’s dinner in the evening, left the house in such good time that she had to wait twenty-five minutes at the station, which it took exactly three to reach. The motor returned in time for Lind to serve Mrs. Hancock’s breakfast with all the finish and decorum to which she was accustomed. Then the new nine-inch footstool — Mrs. Hancock had decided against the extravagance of two — the map of the route, the large luncheon-basket, the adjustable card-table, the writing-case, a couple of new volumes from Mudie’s, cloaks of varying thickness, and the great green russia leather travelling sack were conveniently bestowed, and full five minutes before the appointed time the car slid silently away from the door, with all possible provision made for a comfortable journey.

  The first five minutes were spent in verifying the presence of all these conveniences, and Mrs. Hancock sank back on her carefully adjusted cushions.

  “There!” she said. “We are in for it now, dear; and if all goes as well as it has begun we shall be at Bath by five. How much nicer than all the fuss of crossing London, and the risk of having somebody put into our carriage. Fancy our never having thought of motoring to Bath before! Oh, look, there is Mr. Martin going to play golf! How early we all are this morning! And perhaps we shall see Mr. Beaumont with his butterfly net. Then as soon as we get into the main road I shall have a look at the morning paper. There has not been a minute to glance at it yet; or perhaps you would look at it for me, dear Edith, and tell me what there is. The motion always makes the print dance a little before my eyes. I expect the time will slip by so that we shall be astonished when we find we are at Bath, and very likely not be at all tired. And you must be on the look-out for anything interesting, and write to Edward about it, in case, when he comes down for a Sunday, he comes by motor. Then he will be on the look-out and see it, too. Why, we are at Slough already! There is the Great Western line. Filson’s train will go along there. If she had started three or four hours earlier her train might have gone by as we passed, and she could have looked out of the window and seen us. That would have been a coincidence!”

  The car ran so smoothly on the excellent surface of the Bath road that Mrs. Hancock found that the print of her Morning Post had not the smallest tendency to “dance,” and reserving, as usual, the leaders and longer paragraphs for the digestive period after lunch, she soaked herself gently as in a warm bath, in the announcements of the arrival in London of people she had never seen, and the appearance at the opera of those she had never heard of. What taste exactly was gratified by these tit-bits of information it would be hard to say. Possibly the sense that so many people were moving backwards and forwards enhanced the enjoyment of her own leisure; she mentally contrasted the bustle that was incident to journeys from Paris with her own smooth, unhurrying progress to Bath. Edith, meantime following her mother’s suggestion that she should look out of the window in order to be able to communicate to Edward objects of interest to be seen by the road, soon passed from external observation to introspection.

  These last four or five days since she had so unemotionally accepted his offer of himself to her had about them something of the unconjectured surprises of dawn, when, after a night of travel, the darkness begins to lift off from the face of a new and unfamiliar country. It was he, in this image, who took the place of the light, and the country which its gradual illumination revealed, as it soaked through and dissolved the webs of darkness, was herself. For it is an undeniable truth that love, that absorption of self in another self, cannot take place till the giver has some notion of the nature of the gift that he brings, and Edith up till the present time was as ignorant of herself as are all girls whose emotions and womanhood have never been really roused. She had accepted her lover without knowing what devotion meant, or who it was who accepted him, except in so far that her name was Edith Hancock, her years twenty-four, and her complexion fair. For the arrows of love are at the least feathered with egotism; they will not fly unless a conscious personality enables them to steer straight, but flutter and dip and reach no mark.

  At first, frankly, she was appalled by the barrenness which the light of her lover showed. It appeared to be level land, without streams or inspiring hill-tops, a country uncovetable, a featureless, a mountainous acreage. But it was not stonily barren; even her eyes, unaccustomed to the light and that which it revealed, saw that. It was barren but from emptiness, and empty, perhaps only as the winter fields are bare. It was not an unkindly, an inhospitable land; the very soil of it cried out and told her that. All day the image of her empty country, but not unkindly, hung in her mind even as an unborn melody hovers a little above the brain of the musician, until condensing like dew it melts into it. And all day, but very gradually, for these dawns of love come seldom in a blinding flash of a sun upleaping over the horizon, but rather in a slow crescendo of illumination as of a waxing flame that shall mount to who knows what transmitted fire, the first wonderful twilight of the day grew rosy. And in that morning-rose, which showed her herself, she saw also him whom it welcomed. Eagerly and with strong sense of possession, she claimed him. It was to her that he belonged; he was hers, to be loved and adored, but also to be owned.

  Outwardly, she was the Edith whom her mother knew, though in her spirit were beginning those changes which must soon make her old self a thing unrecognizable to her clearer vision. But it was scarcely strange that Mrs. Hancock saw no hint of change, for, as may have been perceived, she had the gift, or limitation of being completely taken up with the surface of things; indeed, to her mind any inquiry into the mechanism of the spirit and its pulses was of the same indelicacy as discussion of the functions and operations of the human body. If your body was ill you went quickly to the doctor, and did not call your friends’ attention to your infirmity; if your soul was ill —— But Mrs. Hancock’s soul was never ill.