Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  They had the satisfaction of seeing a great many more Great Western trains at Reading, and passed out into the delectable country beyond. Then totally unexpected difficulties began to occur with regard to the spot where they should stop and take their lunch. Just outside Reading, indeed, there was seen an entirely suitable place, secluded, shady, out of the wind, and strongly recommended by Denton, but unfortunately it was then only a quarter-past one, and Mrs. Hancock had not intended to lunch till half-past. Therefore they pushed on, going rather slow so as not to miss any really proper encamping ground. Ten minutes later they were again favoured by an oak-tree and a sheltering hedge, but here unfortunately a tramp was asleep by the wayside. At any moment he might wake, and prove to be intoxicated, and Mrs. Hancock was quite sure she could not enjoy her lunch in his vicinity. Further on again there was a wayside cottage too near a proposed halting-place, for children might come out of it and stare, and the cottage was succeeded by a smell of brick fields. Before long Tilehurst began to show up roofs, and it was necessary to get clear of Tilehurst on the far side before any sort of serenity could be hoped for. Then for nearly a mile they had to follow an impenetrable flock of sheep, and it was imperative to get well ahead of them. Pangbourne appeared, and it was already after two o’clock. It will hardly be credited that they had scarcely got free of this contaminating village when a tyre punctured. A halt was inevitable while it was being repaired, but then Denton could not eat while he was mending it, and since they would have to stop again for Denton to have his lunch (since he could not drive during that process), it was better to make a halt for general refreshments when the tyre trouble was overpast.

  Mrs. Hancock looked despairingly round.

  “It is most annoying,” she said. “I do not know that we should not have done better to have had lunch at an inn at Reading, or to have stopped at that first place. Remember to tell Edward, dear, to look out for that first place if he drives down; there is positively nowhere after that where he can find a quiet spot. I wonder if we had better eat a couple of biscuits now in case we can’t find a suitable place soon. Dear me, here come those sheep again! They ought not to be allowed to drive sheep along a road that is meant for carriages. Put the window up, dear, against the dust.”

  Suddenly illumination like a cloud-piercing ray shone on Edith. It struck her that all her life had been spent in looking for a place to have lunch in, so to speak, in putting up windows for fear of the dust, in avoiding the proximity of tramps. Infinitesimal as was the occasion, it seemed to throw an amazing light on to her life. Up till the present it was hardly an exaggeration to say that anything more important, anything more directly concerned with existence had never happened to her. Was it this comfortable ordered life in which an infinite agglomeration of utterly trivial things made up the sum total that caused her lately discovered country to appear so barren? She looked at her mother’s face; it was flushed with childish annoyance, just as it had been about three years ago when a perfectly satisfactory housemaid gave notice because she was going to be married. Since then she could remember nothing that had so disconcerted her mother, except when once Denton shut the corner of the new fur carriage-rug into the hinge of the motor-door. On both these previous occasions she had been impressed with the magnitude of the moment; now she felt slightly inclined to laugh. Even if the unthinkable, the supreme disaster happened, and they did not lunch at all, would the world come completely to an end?

  But a second glance at her mother’s face checked her tendency to laugh, and encouraged a feeling that was quite as novel to her. She felt suddenly and overwhelmingly sorry that this drive, this lunch which her mother had planned with such care and with such pleased anticipation of comfort, should have disappointed her. It was like a child’s disappointment over the breakage of a toy or the non-fulfilment of some engaging expedition. There was laughter in her heart no longer; only a tenderness, a commiseration that sympathized in womanly fashion with a childish trouble.

  It is darkest before dawn, and this Cimmerian gloom, composed of puncture and the absence of a possible luncheon place, began to lift. Denton was handy with his tools; the sheep were herded through a gate into a field by the roadside, so that when they went on again there was no further passage through the flock to be negotiated. Goring streamed swiftly by them, and hardly were they quit of its outlying houses when a soft stretch of grass by the roadside, uncontaminated by tramp and untenanted by child, spread itself before their eyes. And Mrs. Hancock, as she finished the last jam puff, was more beaming than the sun of this lovely May afternoon.

  “I’m not sure that it was not worth while going through all these annoyances and delays,” she said, “to have found such a lovely place and to have enjoyed our lunch so much. I was afraid the jam might have run out of the puffs; but it was as safe as if they had just come up from the kitchen. I wish Edward was here to have enjoyed it with us. You must tell him what a good lunch we had!”

  And Edith found her mother’s enjoyment as tenderly pathetic as her disappointment had been.

  CHAPTER V

  COMFORTABLE SETTLEMENTS

  Edward Holroyd had arranged to go down to Bath for a certain Saturday till Monday, some fortnight after the safe arrival there (on the stroke of five) of Mrs. Hancock’s motor. He had spent a couple of rather lonely weeks at Heathmoor since the departure of his neighbours, and he was pleased to find how much he missed Edith. His failure to achieve poignant emotion over his engagement had troubled him; he was distressed about the indolence of his temperament. He had never yet seen a girl whom he so much admired and liked, but the very fact that he was able to contemplate her image and tell himself how charming she was, seemed to him part of that failure. She affected him with the same degree of emotion that a spring morning or a melodious song stirred in him. He could, while basking in her charm, tell himself that he basked; he was not by the exquisitiveness of the conditions rendered in the least oblivious of himself; his sensations had not any overpowering mastery over him. Duly he sat and thought about her when he got home in the evening from his day in the City, duly and honestly he told himself how delightful her perpetual presence would be to him. But he did not dream and doat; he never lost himself in haze of rapture; he was not blinded by any intolerable brightness. But he wanted immensely to see her again; he missed her as much as he was capable of missing anything. But his industry at his office and his appetite at his dinner were wholly unaffected, though they would quite certainly have been impaired if for any reason his engagement had been broken off. She was the nicest girl he had ever seen, and in the autumn she was going to marry him.

  To-night, on the eve of his departure to Bath, he reminded himself many times of his great good fortune. He had known friends who had suffered the torments of the lost over the obduracy or the indifference of girls whom they wanted to marry, and his sympathy with such men was tinged with jealousy that they felt so keenly. She had been neither indifferent nor obdurate; she had at once granted him his heart’s desire. And then he faced the question that arose out of his fortunate situation. Would he have suffered unutterable torments if she had refused him? He knew he would not.

  The night was warm; a full moon rode high in an unclouded heaven; and he let himself out of the French windows of his drawing-room into the small lawn behind the house. A windless calm reigned, and the shadow of the trees that bounded his lawn fell in sharp unwavering outline on the dewy grass. Next door the black mass of Mrs. Hancock’s house, unpierced by any lights except the small illuminated square from servants’ rooms in the top story, stood with blinds drawn down over the windows, solid, concrete, comfortable, a brick and mortar rendering of the ordered life that was lived there. No roofs, he felt sure, leaked; no windows stuck; no door squealed on its hinges; and its inhabitants, whom he knew so well, to whom he was so sincerely attached, were equally strangers to squealing and leaking. Soul and body they were watertight; undesirable emotions no more percolated into their souls than did rainwater into the
ir roofs; they stood with their well-built walls cool in summer and warm in winter; their windows never rattled when gales bugled outside. And he himself, he knew also, was in the same excellent state of repair; it was a characteristic of Heathmoor to be in an excellent state of repair. They all stood like that, side by side in detached residences, with small though charming gardens behind.

  For the moment he was in revolt against this deadly respectability; then, with a comical despair, he knew that he was not even in revolt. He could not do more than imagine being in revolt. Rightly or wrongly, he connected all this well-ordered comfort, those eggs and bacon for breakfast and buttered toast for tea with his inability to feel keenly. Life had never stung or prodded him any more than it appeared to have stung or prodded Mrs. Hancock; and that she could be stung or prodded by anything was beyond the bounds of the most fantastic imagination. There were no wasps’ nests in all Heathmoor; the gardens were too well looked after. And there were no psychical wasps or gadflies either; the gospel of Mr. Martin, preached so regularly and convincingly every Sunday, made it a sin to be otherwise than cheerful and contented and well-fed. No disturbing influence ever came down in those first-class carriages; not even Mrs. Grundy ever paid them a visit; she left her own dear children to look after themselves with a complete and untroubled confidence in their good behaviour.

  As for Edward, his conduct had from boyhood upwards been such as to justify that lady’s absence. In life he was a natural Grundyite, indisposed to the venial if unjustifiable violences of youth, not so much from a lack of vitality or, on the other hand, from high principle, but from a sheer, innate respectability which beat in his blood. He had been one of those boys who never have given their parents a moment’s anxiety, not from any stern sense of right behaviour, but because he was that exceedingly rare product in a world that is almost entirely composed of exceptions — a perfectly normal young man, one, that is, who lies just about upon the mean which is fixed resultantly by contending forces. He was that lusus naturæ, an average young man, a sport, an exception, a rare variety (to be collected by the Mr. Beaumont of human moths), an instance in himself of the average, which in the sum is made up of qualities of specimens, none of which is average. He was in life and conduct what the average young man is supposed to be and, in the mass, not individually, is. He was neither milksop nor adventurer, neither celibate by nature nor debauchee. He was not miserly with money or spendthrift, neither devout nor irreligious. In two points only did he depart from the perfect specimen of the average: he was exceedingly good-looking, and he had been a dreamer, though his dream blossoms as yet had borne no fruit. Indeed, as has been already stated, he had largely acquiesced in their barrenness, and in the matter of the ideal She had shaken himself awake. Round one subject only did they linger, that was music, in regard to which, so far as he performed at all, he was so atrocious a practitioner.

  It was long past midnight as he stood there in his garden and surveyed the solidity of the house next door, and the novelty (to him) of his reflections about it had been perhaps induced by his listening that night to that out of which his dreams were made, for he had just come back — motoring down in great comfort — from a performance at the opera of the “Gotterdämmerung.” All evening he had been wrapped and absorbed in the immense tragedy of its portentous people, and just now they and their woes and their loves seemed to him more real, more essentially existent than all the actual and tangible things with which he was surrounded. They were the substance of which this moonlight, this square house next door, the remembrance of Edith even, were but the shadows of the spaces they moved among, even as the shadows on the grass were but an accident of light occurring to the trees that cast them. On such a night after the uproar of cosmic cataclysm the moon shone on the waters of the Rhine with their restored treasure; through a hundred and a thousand such nights Brunnhilde slept below her breast-plate on the mountain-top, maiden, but goddess no more, till to Siegfried’s soul she resumed a nobler divinity.... And that divine duet, with its webs of melody passing through and through it like a shuttle of pure light, was but the expression of love, such love as it had been given to man to feel, since a man wrote and recorded it. It was such music now that his soul should be making when he thought of Edith. But he knew that no such frenzy of fire inspired him; if his soul sang it was but a cheerful little tune, admirably adapted to the domestic hearth. And that was the best music he could make. Anyhow, it had no wrong notes in it; it had no wild cadences or broken and sobbing rhythms. It was just a cheerful little tune such as they sang in church about morning gilding the skies. You only had to substitute “moon” for “morning” ... and you were as jolly and comfortable as possible.

  Edward began to be aware that his brain was dictating thoughts which his conscious mind did not endorse. They resembled the tissue of confused images which lie on the borderland which intervenes between the sheer incoherence of sleeping dreams and the drowsiness which precedes it. But there was an uneasy, though only momentary, wonder in his mind whether these disordered images sprang not from the poppy soil of sleep but from a gradually awakening brain, whether they were not the light at the end of a tunnel rather than the dimness of its entrance. The cool cells of thought had grown feverish with the excitement of the drama he had just seen ... or had they begun to stir to their own proper activity? Which was real, in fact, the white cool flame of the moonlight as it shone on still trees and dewy grass, or the song of Siegfried, which burned the sunset air and blinded with rapture the eyes of Brunnhilde, when she woke, goddess no more, and by that the more divine?

  Heathmoor, the essential spirit of Heathmoor, in the incarnation of the striking of the clock at the livery stables, came to his rescue, for it unmistakably reminded him that the hour was two in the morning — a time which probably occurred every night, but a time of which the evidence was a matter of inference rather than experience. He hailed it as a navigator driving before the wind in rock-sown and dangerous waters might hail a harbour light that betokened an inlet in a wave-beaten and inexorable cliff. He could “put in,” and escape from these threats of wave-crest and storm. It was long past the proper time to go to bed, or, in Heathmoor phrase, he would “never” get up in the morning.

  But that waiting in the still moonlight shadowed by the unwavering trees had been a moment of revelation. A little light, coming from the realms of music where alone his imagination worked, had been blinked into the windows of the dark and tidy room where otherwise he lived. It was like a distant lightning flash coming at night to a room where in a cool clean bed a man lay drowsy but awake. He wondered whether the storm would move nearer. And before he slept he wondered whether Edith would understand. She knew he was “fond of music.” Would she understand that “fond of music” was a mere phrase of nonsense if meant to convey what it held for him?

  He fell into a slightly priggish sleep.

  He arrived at the admirable Star Hotel at Bath next afternoon, and found a room had been engaged for him by Mrs. Hancock, who, with Edith, welcomed him at the station. He had been uncertain whether he was her guest or not, but she at once put and end to all doubt on this point by telling him that she had bargained with the manager on his behalf, and that he had granted him the reduced terms on which she, making a long stay, was entertained, which saved him half-a-crown a day, and included the unlimited use of the bathroom. Of course he would use their sitting-room quite freely, just as if it was his own.

  “And I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you, dear Edward,” she said, laying a cordial hand on his knee. “We will have tea at once, as my bath is at half-past five, and I like to reach the establishment a full ten minutes before the hour, and so after tea you and Edith will be left to your own devices. What a lot you will have to tell each other, for it’s a fortnight and three days since we left home, though I’m sure it doesn’t seem more than a week. Ellis sends us a bundle of asparagus every morning, and says it will last another ten days at least. They are most civil about
having it cooked, and don’t charge a penny for it or for giving melted butter with it. I quite expected they would charge for the melted butter!”

  This seemed to be the sum of Mrs. Hancock’s news, and shortly after tea (she had brought her own tea with her, which, perhaps, served to counterbalance the munificence of the management as regards the melted butter) she went off to her bath, leaving the two together.

  Edward had occupied a chair, while Edith sat on the sofa; now he came beside her.

  “Well?” he said, capturing her hand.

  Edith looked at him as she had never looked before; her eyes sought and held and embraced him.

  “Tell me all you have been doing,” she said, “especially the little things. I think the little things matter most. They are more intimate.”

  “But I want your news,” said he.

  She flushed a little.

  “I have wanted you,” she said simply. “What a little thing!”

  Not till then did he understand the change that had come over her in this last fortnight — the change that concerned him alone. It was clear that the music which her soul made was no cheerful little chant. Inarticulate, it sang and soared. A little of that fire leaped across to him, kindling him.

  “That was sweet of you!” he said. “But it makes me feel rather nervous. What if you are disappointed?”

  She came a little closer to him.

  “I’ve got an awful confession to make!” she said. “When — when you asked me first, I was so pleased and glad, but I didn’t care. Not care. But since then — —” She looked up at him.