Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Elizabeth found the natural manner perfectly easy.

  “He came in,” she said, “and went back to his house again, I think. I was practising.”

  Suddenly she found herself wondering whether her manner was quite natural, and she glanced at Edith, who was “touching” the bell.

  “No doubt he did not want to disturb your practice,” said Mrs. Hancock, who always liked to remind herself of the comforts she showered on other people, “for I have given strict orders, dear, that you are not to be disturbed when you are practising. Perhaps he is in the garden. We will call to him over the wall. I want him to come in to dine, and you shall both play to us afterwards. I wonder if we could not get some nice duets with an easy part for you, dear, which you could play together. Look, it has begun to rain already; Denton was quite right. I am glad he advised us to turn, though it was Edith who saw the big black cloud first. There is an end to our going into the garden and to your croquet, I am afraid, but I will send a note round to Edward. I think that was a flash of lightning. Perhaps you would write the note for me, Edith, and give it to Lind. Oh yes, Lind, there will be a note. Yes, there is the thunder. Quite a loud clap. What a blessing we turned!”

  Lind’s wooden face looked inquiringly round when he was told that there was a note for Edward to be taken round, as if he expected to find him concealed under the piano.

  “I thought Mr. Edward was here, ma’am,” he said. “Perhaps he is in the garden. He said he would wait.”

  Elizabeth, gathering her music together, made a sudden awkward movement and spilled it.

  “No, he went back home, Aunt Julia,” she said. “He came in when I was practising, as I told you.”

  “I told him you were out, ma’am,” repeated Lind, “and he said he would wait.”

  Elizabeth felt a wild exasperation. There was nothing to explain, and yet she had to go on explaining.

  “But he went away again,” she repeated.

  “Yes, dear; I quite understand,” said Mrs. Hancock. “He saw you were practising. Did he say he would come back? If so, I need not send this note!”

  It all seemed like a plot of the Inquisition.

  “No, he said nothing,” remarked Elizabeth rather shortly, feeling that this perfectly straightforward visit was somehow becoming suspicious.

  “Did he stop long?” asked Edith, quite casually.

  “No, five minutes — ten, perhaps,” said Elizabeth. “I really did not time him.”

  Mrs. Hancock always kept a feather in a small vase of water on her writing-table. With this she smeared the gum on the flap of envelopes in preference to the more ordinary use of the tongue on such occasions. It seemed to her slightly indelicate to put out her tongue — even the tip of it — in public; and besides, who knew what the gum was made of or who had been touching it? This genteel observance singularly annoyed Elizabeth, and it was her privilege to snatch away envelopes from her aunt and lick them herself, with, so to speak, yards of tongue protruding, rather than allow the use of the horrible feather. Here she saw her opportunity, and with a complete resumption of her natural manner, which up to that moment had not been a complete success, upset the feather’s water and brought an end to the senseless catechism.

  Lind was obliging enough to take the note himself, and prepared for this expedition of about forty yards by putting on a cap, a mackintosh, and goloshes, and providing himself with an umbrella. There was need only for a verbal answer, but he waited some five minutes before an acceptance came. By this time the rain had completely ceased, but Edward, from his window, saw him put up his umbrella again — no doubt to guard against drippings from the trees. He observed this with a very minute detached feeling of interest. Then he sprang up to call to Lind and substitute “regrets” for his “delight.” Then that impulse died also, and he sat down to think over what had happened.

  He did not fall into the mistake of considering it a little thing, though the incident in itself was nothing. It was, at the least, a feather of carded cloud high up in the heavens, that told, though so insignificant and remote a thing, of the great wind that blew there. He had not spoken idly; rather, he scarcely knew that he had spoken at all until his own words sounded in his ears. He had not addressed pretty words to a pretty girl; it seemed to him that they had been squeezed, as it were, by some force infinitely superior to his power of will out of his resisting mouth. His whole conduct, from the chance hearing of the Brahms’ intermezzo in his garden, leading on to his ill-bred and silent intrusion into the room where Elizabeth played and his words, all seemed to have been dictated by an irresistible power that arose out of the sense of his incarnate dream. It had been perfectly true that for the last fortnight he had thought of nothing else but her, that the affairs of every day had for him moved like shadows across that solid background.... In the meantime he had promised his substance and his life to one of the shadows, and, as far as he knew or guessed, he was nothing more than a shadow, rather a distasteful one, to the girl who for him was the only reality.

  Then the practical side of the situation, the “what next” which always hastens to stir the boiling pottage of our emotions with its bony fingers, held his attention, even as it had held Elizabeth’s. He came to the same conclusions, but with an important reservation. She had consigned the whole affair to complete oblivion, whether or no the consignment lay in her power; he was as glad as she to consign it also, until and unless, in legal phrase, something modified the existing conditions. He knew very well what he connoted by that modification: it meant some sign, some signal from Elizabeth that should confirm the secret welcome that her amazement had so instantly smothered. Just now he had told himself that he was but a distasteful shadow to her; now again the remembrance of her soul’s leap towards him told that he was not that. Yet he had had no right to see that smothered welcome any more than he had a right to intrude himself privately into her presence. But in his heart of hearts he was ashamed of neither feat. Only his surface, his sense of breeding, his respect for things like conduct and convention rebuked him. He himself, the seer of dreams, cared not at all; rather, he hugged himself on it.

  He had drifted away from practical considerations and wrenched himself back to them. On the eighth of October next, as matters stood, he was to be married to Edith, and his conduct — again with that reservation — must be framed on the lines demanded by that condition. He felt no doubt whatever that Elizabeth would breathe no word of what had passed to her aunt or Edith, for, if she did so, it would imply wanton mischief on her part, of which he knew her to be incapable, or the determination to stop his marriage for — for other reasons.... She would only speak if she intended to spoil or to stop. She might, it was very likely that she would, interpose between herself and him that screen of manner, invisible as a sheet of glass, which yet cuts off all rays of heat from a fire, while it suffers to pass through it the sparkle of its brightness. She would probably appear to others to shine on him as before, but he, poor shivering wretch, would know that all warmth had been cut off from him.

  For a moment his passion blazed up within him, and he felt himself barbarian and primitive man without code of morals, without regard for honour and environment. He who spent his innocuous days in an office making money, wearing a black coat, living the dull, respectable, stereotyped life, who spent his leisure in reading papers about affairs that he cared not one drop of heart’s blood about, in tapping foolish croquet balls through iron hoops, in playing the piano at Heathmoor dinner-parties, in enveloping himself and his soul in the muffled cotton-wool of comfort and material ease, knew that within this swathed cocoon of himself, that lay in a decorous row of hundreds of other similar cocoons, there lurked, in spite of all contrary appearance, an individual life. He found himself capable of love and utterly indifferent to honour or obligations, regarding them only as arbitrary rules laid down for the pursuance of the foolish game of civilized existence. In essentials he believed himself without morals, without religion, without any of the b
onds that have built up corporate man and differentiate life from dreams. And this flashed discovery did not disconcert him; he felt as if he had found a jewel in the muddy flats of existence.

  Then, in another flash, he was back in his cocoon again, prisoner in this decorous roomful of things which he did not want. There was a silver cigarette-box on a polished table; there was an ivory paper-knife stuck into the leaves of a book he was reading, a parquetted floor spread with Persian rugs, and all these things were symbols of slavery, chains that bound him, or, at the best, bright objects by which a baby is diverted from its crying for the moon. And the clock chiming its half-hour after seven told him he must conform to the prison rules and go to dress for dinner at Mrs. Hancock’s.

  He took out of his coat-pocket an envelope about which, up to this moment, he had completely forgotten. It contained the ticket for a box at the opera, which he had bought that day for a performance of “Siegfried” in a week’s time. He hoped to persuade the ladies next door to be his guests, and since the pursuance of this formed part of the resumption of ordinary normal life he meant to propose his plans to them. But both when he bought the ticket and now, he saw that it might bear on the life that lay within the cocoon. More than all the material diversion or business of the world he wanted to go with Elizabeth to “Siegfried.” And, with his hat, when he started to dinner, he took the book of the music with him.

  He was a little late as judged by the iron punctuality of Arundel, and he found the ladies assembled. He had one moment of intense nervousness as he entered, but it was succeeded by an eagerness not less intense when he saw Elizabeth’s cordial and welcoming smile. That set the note for him; he had already determined on the same key, and he knew himself in tune with it.

  As he shook hands with the girl he laughed and turned to Mrs. Hancock, involuntarily detaining Elizabeth’s hand one second, not more, than was quite usual.

  “I was rather nervous,” he said. “I intruded on Elizabeth’s practice this afternoon. Perhaps she has told you. In fact, I meant to stay to wait for your return and Edith’s, but I found it quite impossible.”

  “Dear!” said Mrs. Hancock. “Yes, Lind has told us dinner is ready. Did Elizabeth scold you?”

  Elizabeth, equally relieved, laughed.

  “You behaved very rudely, Edward,” she said; “and, as a matter of fact, I didn’t tell them. I wanted to screen you. But as you don’t seem in the least ashamed of yourself I shall give you up.”

  “What revelations we are going to have!” said Mrs. Hancock. “Yes, your favourite soup, Edward. Mrs. Williams thought of it when she heard you were coming. She sent out for the cream. Now let us hear all about it. I thought there was some mystery.”

  This was not quite true. Mrs. Hancock had not thought anything whatever about it. But this phrase of purely dinner conversation disconcerted Elizabeth for a moment. Edith, suddenly looking up, perceived this obscure embarrassment.

  “No, Aunt Julia, there was no mystery,” said Elizabeth. “There was merely my mistaken kindness in sparing Edward. Now I shall sacrifice and expose him. He came in when I was practising quietly, so that I didn’t hear him, and sat down to listen. And when I had finished my piece I turned round and saw him, and, of course, I was startled and annoyed. Wasn’t it caddish of him! Do say it was caddish!”

  That should have been sufficiently robust to have carried off and finished with the subject. But it so happened that Mrs. Hancock went on.

  “My dear, what words to use!” she said. “Edith will be up in arms. Look, there is another flash of lightning! We shall have a regular storm, I am afraid. And what did you say to him?”

  “She told me to go away,” said Edward, “which I did. And I asked her to forgive me. I don’t know if she’s done that yet.”

  The desire for secret communication with her prompted and impelled him.

  “I shall ask her later if she has,” he said, raising his eyes to her face. “Her screening me was a sign of her softening.”

  “But her giving you away now shows signs of hardening again,” said Edith.

  “Perhaps she doesn’t know her own mind,” said Edward, still looking at her, and knowing but not caring that he had no business to force replies on her, so long as he could talk with a meaning that was clear to her alone.

  This time the secret look that leaped out to him below her amazement showed again through the trouble and brightness of her face.

  “I know my mind perfectly,” she said. “I will forgive you if you are sorry.”

  “I am. But I liked hearing you play when you didn’t know any one was there.”

  Mrs. Hancock looked vaguely and beamingly round.

  “But I always thought that people played best when there was an audience to listen to them,” she said.

  “There was an audience,” remarked Edward.

  Mrs. Hancock saw the fallacy without a moment’s hesitation, and enlarged on it till it became more clear than the sun at noonday.

  “But she didn’t know there was,” she said lucidly, “and so it would count as if there wasn’t. Listen, there is the rain beginning again, like that beautiful piece of Edward’s which always makes me feel sad. He shall play it to us after dinner. Was it one of your pieces that Elizabeth was playing before, Edward?”

  Mrs. Hancock always spoke of immortal works by classical masters as if Edward’s atrocious renderings of them gave him the entire right and possession of them.

  “No,” said he, “it was her own. I shall always think of it as the Elizabintermezzo.”

  Mrs. Hancock turned an attentive eye on the asparagus dish.

  “Finish it, Edward,” she said; “it is the last you will get from my garden this year, and what an amusing conversation we are having about Elizabeth and you! Elizabintermezzo — the intermezzo which Elizabeth plays! What a good word! Quite a portmanteau!”

  All this private signalling of Edward to her, all his double-edged questions as to whether she had forgiven him, seemed to Elizabeth in the worst possible taste. She had just now announced, so frankly that she could not be imagined to be serious, that he had behaved caddishly that afternoon, and his behaviour now seemed to endorse her judgment. And yet she, by her outspokenness perhaps, had set the fashion of double-edged speech; it was justifiable in him to think that she meant to allude to what neither of them openly alluded to. But he was caddish; she felt irritated and disgusted with him. She looked at him with eyebrows that first frowned and then were raised in expostulation.

  “Haven’t we all had enough of my practice this afternoon?” she said.

  As she looked at him she noticed what she had noticed a hundred times before, how his hair above his forehead grew straight and then fell over in a plume. And while her mind was ruffled with his behaviour, she suddenly liked that enormously. She wondered if it was elastic, that thickness of erect hair, like a spring-mattress; she wanted to put her hand on it. And that radical and superficial emotion called physical attraction had begun — superficial because it concerns merely the outward form and colour of face and limbs, radical because all the sex-love in the world springs from its root which is buried in the beating heart of humanity. Afterwards, no doubt, those roots may dissolve and become part of the life-blood, red corpuscles of love, but without them there has never yet opened the glorious scarlet of the flowers of passion, nor the shining foliage that keeps the world green.

  Thus, at the very moment when he was indifferent to her except that she was a little nauseated by his behaviour, he began to become different to all others, and very faintly but authentically it was whispered to her that he and she “belonged,” that they fitted, entwined and interlacing, into this great Chinese puzzle of a world. Instantly she shut her ears to the whisper. But she had heard it.

  He had the decency, she allowed, to change the subject.

  “No encore for the intermezzo,” he said; “but ‘Siegfried’ is being given this day week, and I have got a box for it. I want you all to come.”

/>   “Well, that would be a treat,” said Mrs. Hancock. “These are the first white-heart cherries we’ve had from the garden, Edward. You must take some! ‘Siegfried!’ That is by Wagner.”

  Elizabeth banished from her mind caddishness and springy hair alike.

  “Oh, Aunt Julia!” she exclaimed.

  “That is capital, then!” said Edward, knowing the value of an atmosphere of certainty. “We had better all sleep in town so that we can stop to the end without any sense of being hurried, which would spoil it all. I’ll see to all that, and, of course, it’s my treat.”

  Mrs. Hancock’s face changed, but brightened again as she caught the full flavour of the first white-heart.

  “Sleep in town!” she said. “I never —— Aren’t the cherries good? I shall tell Ellis he was quite right when he wanted extra manure. Delicious! But sleep in town, Edward! Is that necessary? Can’t we come away before the end, for I quite agree with you that it is no use stopping in your seat grasping a fan in one hand and your dress in the other, waiting for the curtain to go down. And even then, they all come on and bow. Wouldn’t it be better if we all slipped out in plenty of time to catch the theatre-train, as we always do?”

  Elizabeth sighed.

  “Aunt Julia, I would sooner not go at all than come away before the end,” she said. “It’s the love duet, you know, and oh! I’ve never seen it!”

  Aunt Julia looked mild reproof.