Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “My dear, we mustn’t be in a hurry. We must think it over and see how we can contrive.”

  “We can contrive by stopping in town,” said Elizabeth. “Or couldn’t you drive down in your car afterwards?”

  “But, my dear, it might be a wet night, and if we drove back it would only be reasonable to drive up. Shall we have coffee in here now for an exception, and then we need not interrupt ourselves? Yes, Lind, coffee in here, not in the drawing-room, but here. It would only be reasonable, as I said, to drive up, for it would be no use going by train, while Denton took up the car empty, and if it was a wet night I should not like him hanging about all afternoon and evening, for his wife expects a baby.” This was aside to Edward, though since Edith was soon to be married she did not so much mind her hearing.

  “But his wife isn’t going to hang about all afternoon and evening,” said Elizabeth swiftly.

  “My dear, let me talk it over with Edward! And Denton would not know how to meet us at the opera — we might miss him, and then what would happen?”

  Edward laughed.

  “Then, Mrs. Hancock, you would have to sleep in town uncomfortably, without night things, instead of sleeping comfortably according to my plans.”

  “But I should have to take Filson,” said Mrs. Hancock, rather unwisely, since if you mean not to do a thing — and she had not the smallest wish to see “Siegfried” — it weakens the position to argue, however sensibly, about it.

  “Of course you would take Filson!” said Edward. “Take Lind as well, if you like! I will arrange it all.”

  “Well, it would be an event, wouldn’t it, to see the opera and sleep up in town,” said Mrs. Hancock, who, though she did not mean to go, a little hankered after anything of this sort, if it was to be had without any expense. “But there would be a great deal to think of and to plan. I always forget if you take cream, Edward. Yes? A great deal to plan, for if one is to go one must look tidy, and have a few jewels.”

  She formed a rapid mental picture of herself in the front of a box with the pearls, and perhaps the tiara. It rather attracted her, but she felt that if she stayed in a hotel she would not get a wink of sleep all night with thinking of those treasures. She rejected the picture, but simultaneously a bright idea struck her.

  “Wednesday next, did you say?” she asked guilefully.

  “No, Thursday.”

  Mrs. Hancock made a gesture of impatience.

  “Well, if that isn’t annoying,” she said, “when we were arranging it so nicely and getting over every difficulty. Because Thursday is Mrs. Martin’s garden-party, which I haven’t missed in all the years I have been at Heathmoor, and I mustn’t miss it! She would think it so unkind, for she always says she depends on me. I wonder if she could possibly change her day. Listen to the rain. I hope you have brought your mackintosh, Edward. No, I’m afraid it’s too late to ask her, for the invitations are already sent out. Well, that does knock our delightful plan on the head. How battered the garden will be, though we want rain. And ‘Siegfried,’ too; of all operas that is the one I should so like to see again. But I have an idea. Yes, pray light your cigarette, Edward! What if you took these two girls up to see it? Couldn’t they be supposed to chaperone each other, and Edith so nearly married, too? I don’t know what people would think, though!”

  Mrs. Hancock was the soul of good nature, and having so adroitly shown the impossibility of herself partaking in this plan, thought nothing of the disagreeableness of spending an evening alone.

  “But couldn’t you come after the garden-party, mother?” asked Edith.

  “My dear, I should be a rag! Mrs. Martin says that she feels no responsibility if I am there at her party, but I assure you I do. I have always said it is no use trying to listen to music unless you are fresh. It is an insult to the music. But I wonder if it is very wrong of me to suggest such a thing. Edith, darling, the candle-shade. Well done! You have saved it. But if you girls go up together and join Edward in town I don’t see who will know. Well, that will be a secret for us all to keep! Shall we all go into the drawing-room? Hark how the rain is falling! We must have some music.”

  “Then that’s settled?” asked Edward.

  “If these young ladies approve. But what a lot we have to arrange — where you are to go, and where they are to meet you, and the train they are to come back by in the morning.” She paused a moment as she took up her patience pack.

  “And Filson shall go up with them!” she proclaimed. “It will make me feel more comfortable if I know Filson is there. What a talk we have had! I declare it is half-past nine already! Do let us have some music! Edith, dear, I think you might open the window into the garden a little bit. If any of us feel it damp, we can close it again. Look, there are two aces out already. What a good beginning!”

  Edward turned to Elizabeth.

  “And you like the ‘Siegfried’ plan?” he asked.

  “But it’s too nice of you! I — —”

  She stopped.

  “Do go on,” he said, speaking low.

  Suddenly Elizabeth saw that Edith was observing them.

  “I suppose I shall have to forgive you,” she said, in a voice clearly audible, “now that you are taking me to ‘Siegfried.’”

  And the very fact that she spoke aloud, so that Edith could hear, falsified, so she felt, the truth of her light speech. She knew he would not take it quite lightly, and she allowed him to put one construction on it, so that Edith might put another.

  His eye quickened with the secret message he sent to her, and she did not refuse it.

  “But it wasn’t a bribe,” said he with his lips. “I made the plan before I sinned. So play your intermezzo.”

  A week afterwards Elizabeth was walking up and down the long garden-path while the morning was yet dewy. She had awoke early on this day that she and Edith were going up to town to see the opera, woke with a sense of ecstatic joy in life, of intense and rapturous happiness. For the last week she had been living in a storm of emotion, that seemed not to come from within her, but from without, beating and buffeting her, but giving her, from time to time, serene and wonderful hours. She had wrestled with and worked over the transcript of “Siegfried” until she had made the music her own, and she seemed to have come into a heritage that was waiting ready for her to claim it. The passionate excitement of the true musician, with all its flow of flooding revelations, its stream of infinite rewards was hers; she had entered that kingdom which, to all except those few who can say “we musicians know,” is but a beautiful cloudland and a place of bewildering mists. But now for her it had cleared; she had come into her own, and saw steadfastly what she had before but guessed at, of what she had heard but hints and seen images. Till now, with all her love of music, she had been but a speller of the mere words that made its language, knowing the words to be beautiful and feeling their nameless charm. But now it was as if the printed page of their poetry was open to her. There was meaning as well as beauty, coherence and romance in the sounds which had hitherto but suggested images to her.

  The revelation had not come singly; the golden gates had not swung open of their own accord. Well, she knew the hand which for her had thrown them open, the wind that had dispersed the mists. She was in love, in love, as she had once said indifferently and disappointedly, with “a common man.” Beyond any shadow of doubt it was that which had opened out the kingdom of music for her; thus quickened, her receptive nature had been enabled to receive. Hitherto she had been like a deaf man, vivid in imagination, to whom the magic of sound had been described. Her perceptions had been dormant; she had but felt the light as the bud of a folded flower may be imagined to feel it. Now she received it on expanded petals.

  About that love itself she had at present no qualms, she admitted no recognition of its hopelessness, she had no perception of its dangers. She was too full of the first wonder of its dawning to guess or to care what the risen day might bring forth. The fact that Edward was engaged to be married to her
cousin was a complete safeguard against dangers which she barely conjectured, and the very thought of hope or hopelessness made no imprint on her mind, for in the presence of the thing herself she could not bring herself to consider the possible issues of it. It exalted and possessed her; the fact that she loved filled her entire being, which already brimmed with her new perceptions of music. Each heightened the other, each was infinite, possessing the whole of her. She had no thought for the morrow, or for the day, or for herself. The whole of the eagerness of her youth was enslaved in a perfect freedom. She was blind and ecstatic, and in truth was running heedlessly, sightlessly between quicksands and deep seas and precipices, unconscious of them all, and above all, unconscious of herself, absorbed by love and melody, even as the dew on the lawn was being absorbed by the sun.

  Above, the sky was unflecked by cloud and as yet of pale and liquid blue; the warm air had still a touch of night’s coolness in it, and the young day seemed like a rosy child awakening from sleep. At the end of the garden the tall elms stood motionless, towers of midsummer leaf, and the smell of the evaporating dew that had lain all night in the bosom of red roses and among the thick-blade grass of the lawn, told her where it had slept. It hung thick on the threads of the netted fruit-trees, and glimmered on the red-brick wall that ran alongside the shining gravel walk. Already the bees had begun their garnerings, the birds were a-chuckle in the bushes, and suddenly the whole pervading sweetness and song of the morning smote on Elizabeth’s heart, already full to overflowing, and demanded the expression of her gratitude. She was compelled to thank somebody for it — not Ellis, not Aunt Julia, not Edward even.

  “Somebody, anyhow!” she said aloud.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE MOUNTAIN-TOP

  Edward, from long living at Heathmoor, had little to learn about comfort, and the arrangements he had made for the two girls were of a completeness that Mrs. Hancock could hardly have rivalled, even if she had been concerned with plans for herself. He had gone up to town by the 9.6 a.m. that morning, and had shown himself but briefly at his office, devoting the rest of his time to orders and inspection. He had been to see the rooms prepared for their reception at the Savoy, bedrooms for the two girls, with a sitting-room between, had shown in a practical way that he recollected Elizabeth’s ardour for sweet peas and Edith’s respect for roses, had ordered tea to be ready for their arrival, a table to be reserved in the restaurant for their dinner between the acts, and an entrancing little supper to be served in the sitting-room when the opera was over. Finally, he was waiting at the station with his motor for their arrival.

  It was not only the desire for their comfort that prompted this meticulous supervision, for the evening in prospect was symbolical to him of a parting, a farewell, and, with the spirit in which all farewells should be said, he wished to join hands with Elizabeth once more festally and superbly, not with lingering glances and secret signs, but to the sound of music and to the sight of a glorious drama. He had spent this last week among waves and billows of emotions, and, though his ship had not foundered, his lack of experience as a sailor in such seas had completely upset him in every other sense. But to-night, he had told himself, he would reach port; already he had rounded the pier-head, and within a few hours now he would put Elizabeth ashore. The pier was decorated for her reception, flags waved and bands played. He would part with her splendidly, and go back to his boat, where Edith would await him for their lifelong cruise in calm and pleasant waters.

  He had made, so he honestly believed, the honest decision, and though honesty is a virtue which is so much taken for granted that it is ranked rather among the postulates of life than among its acquirements, honest decisions are not always made without struggle and difficulty. He felt for Elizabeth, the actual flesh and blood and spirit of her, what he had only hitherto imagined in the dreams which, a few months before, he had settled to have done with. Bitterly, and with more poignancy of feeling than he had thought himself capable of, he regretted his precipitancy in their abandonment; in a few months more he would have seen them realized, he would have had his human chance, of an attractive boy with a girl, to have made them true. But he had not waited; he had shaken himself awake, and, with full sense of what he was doing, had made love to and been accepted by the girl he knew and liked and admired. To-day he acknowledged his responsibility and had no intention of shirking it. A week of what was not less than spiritual anguish had resulted in this decision. In one direction he was pulled by honour, in the other by love. He had a “previous engagement,” which, he had settled, took rank before anything else whatever. He believed, without the smallest touch of complacency, that Edith loved him, but he believed also (and again not a grain of that odious emotion entered into his belief) that had he been free Elizabeth would have accepted him. Since his deplorable lapse a week ago, she had treated him with a friendlier intimacy than ever; this, for they had had no further word on the subject, he interpreted to mean that out of the generosity of her nature she had completely forgiven him and obliterated the occurrence, and that her friendliness was meant to show how entirely she trusted him for the future. In this he was absolutely right; he was right also in the corollary he instinctively added, that she would not have adopted this attitude unless she was fond of him. She could quite correctly have kept him at arm’s length, she could have continued to manifest that slight hostility to him which had previously characterized her behaviour. But she had not; she had given him a greater warmth and friendliness than ever before.

  So far he could let his thoughts bear him without shame or secrecy. But there went on beneath them a tow, an undercurrent, which, though he suppressed and refused to regard it, was what had caused, in the main, the soul-storm in which he had been buffeted all this week. He believed there was more than friendliness in her regard for him, and with the terrible sharpsightedness of blind love (as if one of his eyes saw nothing, while the other was gifted with portentous vision) he had not missed the signs, little signs, a look, a word, a movement, which are the feelers of love, waving tentacles of infinite sensitiveness, that threadlike and invisible to the ordinary beholder, shrivel and spring and touch instinctively without volition on their owner’s part. No one, fairly and impartially judging, could say that Elizabeth had behaved to him except with friendly unreserve. But to him she seemed to reserve much, to reserve all.

  In spite of all this, Edward, as he waited on the platform for the arrival of their train, had no doubt that he was doing right in following the demands of honour. He had killed his dreams, so to speak, when he engaged himself to Edith; to-night, to the sound of flutes and violins, he was going to conduct their funeral, and did not see that in reality he was intending to bury them alive, and that dreams are not smothered by burial; rather, like the roots of plants, they grow and flourish beneath the earth, sending up the sap that feeds their blossoms. He did not contemplate the future with dismay; he believed that both he and Edith would have a very pleasant, comfortable life together, according to the Heathmoor pattern. And with a touch of cynicism, which was unusual with him, he added, as the train steamed in, that this was more than could be said for many marriages. Then, before the train stopped, he saw Elizabeth get out and look round for him with shining, excited eyes, and his heart beat quick at her recognition of him.

  The three met with jubilance, and drove straight to the Savoy, for there was not more than time to have tea and dress. The day, like the last dozen of its predecessors, had been dry and dusty, and the roadway in front of the hotel had been liberally watered. Stepping out of the motor, Edith slipped and fell heavily, her foot doubled under her. Bravely she tried to smile, bravely also she tried to get up. But the smile faded in the agony of her twisted ankle, and she was helped into the hotel.

  It seemed at first that it might be a wrench of little consequence, the pain of which would be assuaged by ten minutes’ rest. But all that ten minutes did for her was to give her a badly swollen ankle, and show the utter impossibility of her sett
ing foot to the ground. Then, swathed in wet bandages, and lying on the sofa in the sitting-room, she took a peremptory line with the others.

  “You two must go,” she said; “and if you wait here any longer you will be late. If you aren’t both of you ready to start in a quarter of an hour, I shall go myself, bandage and all, if I have to hop there.”

  “But you can’t spend the evening alone,” said Elizabeth. “And we — —”

  “I shan’t spend the evening alone, because we shall all have supper together. Dinner, too, if you will be awfully kind, Edward, and have it up here with me instead of in the restaurant.”

  Edward had already yielded in his heart — yielded with a secret exulting rapture. The Fates, though at Edith’s expense, were giving him a splendid farewell to Elizabeth. They would be alone together for it; he did not let his thoughts progress further than that.

  “If you insist — —” he began.

  “Am I not insisting? My dear, it is a dreadful bore, but we must make the best of it. Be kind, and order dinner here instead, and go to dress.”

  Elizabeth was left alone with her cousin.

  “But Aunt Julia!” she said. “What will she say?”

  “I have thought of that. Mother mustn’t know. You must coach me up when you come back, and — and I shall have sprained my ankle when we came back to the hotel at the end. Don’t forget! Oh, do go and get ready, Elizabeth; it’s all settled! I can’t bear that Edward should be disappointed in not seeing ‘Siegfried,’ nor, indeed, that you should. It would be perfectly senseless that you should stop at home because I can’t go!”

  It cost Elizabeth something to argue against this. She wanted passionately to see the opera, and if a dream-wish, a fairy-wish, for a thing that was impossible could have been presented to her that morning, she would have chosen to see the awakening of Brunnhilde alone with Edward. His wild-blurted speech when he intruded upon her practising a week ago she had buried, so complete since then had been his discretion, and if she thought of it at all, she thought of it only as a momentary lapse, an unguarded exaggeration. Since then she had not defended herself against him by any coldness of manner, any unspoken belittlement of him, and they had arrived at a franker and more affectionate intimacy than ever before. She did not inquire or conjecture what his secret emotional history was. She was safeguarded enough from him by his engagement to Edith; while from herself her own integrity of purpose seemed a sufficient shield. Yet she argued against Edith’s insistence on the fulfilment of the fairy-wish.