Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  For herself, even as bees build up in walls of impenetrable gluelike wax some intruder and enemy to their hive, Edith had walled away from her life all thought of her cousin. She had built her up into a separate chamber of her brain, so that her worker-bees, the conscious denizens of her mind, should have no access to her. Her love for Edward (that nipped and unexpanded bud, which had never blown), which had claimed possession of him, instead of giving him his liberty and seeking his happiness at the cost of the last drop of her heart’s blood, had starved on its comfortless food, and the leanness of her desire had entered into her soul. For seven months she had been his wife, sharer in name in all that nominally was his, recipient of his unwearied kindness and affection, but never for a single moment possessing his essential self. She had no word or thought of complaint of him in his conduct or in his feelings towards her; he gave all that was his to give. She had demanded of him the fulfilment of his bargain, and to the full extent of his solvency, so to speak, he had paid it. But now she knew that he was absolutely insolvent towards her with regard to the coinage of the only true mint. She had thought that her love with its hopeless limitations could make his reef of gold hers. She had thought that they could settle down into a sham that would cheat both himself and her, that the mask of his face would either be withdrawn or would deceive her into the belief of its reality. Neither had happened; he must always wear a mask for her, and that mask would never grow so like the human face below it (so little way below, and yet withdrawn into impenetrable depths) that it would deceive her into believing in it. And now, before long, she would bear a child to him, and it seemed to her, in the enlightenment that these smooth, prosperous months of misery had brought her, that her baby would be no better than a bastard.

  It must not be supposed that this misery was acute or the degree of enlightenment it brought clear and cloudless. Her perceptions were not of the kind that admit great poignancy either of wretchedness or of bliss. Once only perhaps in all her life had the engines of her being worked up to their full power, and that was when she claimed the fulfilment of Edward’s promise. She had felt intensely and acutely then the impossibility of giving him up, but since that flash of deplorable intensity she had fallen back on to her normal levels, where the ground, so to speak, was solid and rather clayey, where there were neither peaks nor precipices. But it declined slowly and unintermittently into a place of featureless gloom. Yet, except to any one who was gifted with the divine intuition of love towards her, there were no signs in her normal behaviour of this inward wretchedness, and for poor Edith there was nobody thus inspired. She had always been rather reserved and silent, and even Mr. Martin, that brilliant seeker after the joys and sorrows of others, had neither missed in her the steady placidity that he knew nor had detected any other change. As for her mother, Edith’s invariable punctuality, her quiet recognition of objects of interest like the towers of Windsor Castle and the trains on the Great Western Railway, were sufficient evidence of contentment, especially since Edward always got home by the dinner train and she was going to have a baby. Here were adequate causes for thankfulness, and she was sure that Edith, who had so strong a sense of duty, appreciated them.

  Edith’s enlightenment was of the same order, no noonday blaze, but only a diffused luminance that came veiled through those clouds, not dispersing them. But she no longer groped in darkness as she had done when she decided that she could not voluntarily give Edward his liberty. She could see more now. Not only could she see the utter unreality at which she had grasped, but that there was in existence a real light different altogether from the phantasmal will-o’-the-wisp which she had blindly followed into the quagmire. She had sought her own, thinking that it was love she followed. She would have sought her own no longer, if it had been possible for her to make choice again.

  Vaguely, as she sat this morning by the window, these things passed before her mind, as the pictures of some well-known and familiar book pass before the eye of one who listlessly turns the leaves. At the end of the book, she knew, there were pictures she had not seen yet. It was as if Edward’s finger as well as hers was on the page, doubting whether to turn on or not. Nearly an hour wore away thus, outwardly like many other hours, but in reality an hour of poise and expectancy. Then on the road outside the gate she saw pass, as she had so often seen, her mother’s motor. Mrs. Fanshawe was with her, and next door Elizabeth was alone.

  “Mother going out for her drive,” she said mechanically.

  She did not look round, but heard the paper flutter in Edward’s fingers.

  “Alone?” he asked. “Or with whom?”

  “With Mrs. Fanshawe,” said she. And again the silence fell.

  Suddenly a desire and a doubt came to her. She did not know how they came, for the impulse that prompted them seemed to have taken no part in her thoughts. Apparently something behind that wall of gluelike wax had stirred — stirred imperatively, giving her quickness and decision. She rose.

  “I shall go across and see Elizabeth,” she said. “I know you have been wanting to do that all morning, Edward. But you couldn’t say it. I understood.”

  He got up also.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “What are you saying?”

  “Something perfectly simple. Of course you want to see Elizabeth, and of course you find a difficulty in telling me so. Do you know that we haven’t mentioned Elizabeth’s name, except as a stranger might mention it, ever since our marriage, ever since the night, in fact, that — that I settled to marry you.”

  “No; and that was natural, wasn’t it?”

  Certainly something stirred behind the sealed-up partition. The bees themselves, the thoughts and workers in Edith’s mind, were tearing the partition away.

  “I suppose it was,” she said. “But I want to see Elizabeth now. That is natural, too, because I was always fond of Elizabeth, and I don’t blame her because you loved her. You see, she never loved you; she told me that herself.”

  He came close to her.

  “Why do you speak of Elizabeth now,” he said, “after all these months of silence?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know. Why does one do anything? It occurred to me, I suppose, to speak of Elizabeth because she is here, and because I was going across to see her. She never loved you, Edward.”

  “No. You told me that.”

  He spoke quietly and reassuringly, but it occurred to him that for some reason Edith was beginning to doubt that, for she looked at him, so it seemed, with a certain question and challenge in her eye. It was as if she weighed his answer, or took it, like a doubtful coin, and rang it to test its genuineness.

  “I shall go now,” she said, still lingering. “Or do you not wish me to go?”

  She paused a moment.

  “Why do you not wish me to go, Edward?” she said.

  “I want you to do just as you wish, dear,” he said.

  For the moment a certain cloud of trouble and restlessness, quite alien to her normal reasoning, had seemed to disturb her. But it cleared, and she spoke naturally again.

  “We lunch there, do we not?” she said. “I dare say I shall not come again before that. Till lunch-time, then.”

  She traversed the hall, hesitated as to whether she should take a hat, decided against it, and went out into the cool spring sunshine. The gate of communication between the two gardens (Mrs. Hancock had eventually decided that since Edith and Edward used it so much more than she did it was only reasonable that he should pay for half of it) had been made, and she went through it, leaving it aswing, with a tinkling latch. As she had said to Edward, she scarcely knew why the idea of Elizabeth and the desire to see her had taken hold of her mind. All these months she had deliberately and of set purpose put the idea of Elizabeth from her, consciously segregating it, refusing it admittance into the current of her thoughts. That had been natural enough, for it was on the elimination of Elizabeth from their joint lives that the success of their marriage, she had se
en, must depend. And to-day she had registered, had contemplated and admitted the fact of its failure. Elizabeth had not been eliminated from their lives; when just now Edith had alluded, casually almost, to the fact of Edward’s being in love with her, saying she did not blame Elizabeth for that, he had let that pass without challenge. It had not occurred to him, however lamely, to take exception to it. That had shown with a convincingness that she had not known before how her cousin was knitted into Edward’s heart. It would have to be cut to bits before she could be disentangled from it.

  Quietly, insensibly, throughout those months that conviction had been growing on her. It had been like some bulb buried in the earth; she had known in her inner consciousness, though there was no outward evidence of the fact, that it was growing. To-day the green, vigorous horn of its sprouting showed above the ground. It was not a shock to her any more than is a letter that confirms the bad news conveyed in a telegram. But its authenticity now was quite beyond dispute. In those seven months of their marriage Elizabeth’s spell had lost none of its potency, and Edith stood between them just as she had done on the day when she had decided she could not give him up, holding them apart.

  To-day, too, a definite doubt had come into her mind, and she knew that her desire to see Elizabeth was connected with its possible resolution. Months ago Elizabeth had told her that no idea of love for Edward had ever been hers; that she had never thought of him in such a light. To-day, for no definite reason, but by process probably of the general enlightenment that her misery had brought her, she wondered if that was true. At first when Elizabeth had told her that, she had implicitly believed it. Now she wondered whether Elizabeth had not said that for her sake; whether, seeing that she herself was determined not to give Edward up, Elizabeth had not splendidly lied. Certainly that statement, true or not, had had the effect of making Edith quite comfortable, as her mother would say. A dozen and a hundred dozen times she had told herself, relying on that, that Edward would have been no nearer his happiness if she had given him up. But Edith did not so far deceive herself as to say that it would have made any difference to her decision, even if Elizabeth had loved him. She knew herself but poorly, but she knew herself sufficiently well to be aware that nothing in the world just then would have induced her voluntarily to give him his freedom. It had been open to him to break his word, and not marry her, but it had not seemed morally possible for her to let him go.

  Elizabeth was just coming out of the long window of the drawing-room when Edith passed through the gate, and the two cousins met on the croquet-lawn. These warm days of May had made it possible to play already, and Edward, at his wife’s wish, had had several games in preparation for the Heathmoor Tournament. Ellis this morning had moved several seats out of the summer-house on to the grass, and the “Croquet set No. 1, complete in tin-lined box” (the most expensive set of all that could be bought at the stores), which had been Mrs. Hancock’s wedding-present to Edward, stood open in case anybody wished to play. Just a year ago, as it now occurred to Edith, she had sat here when Elizabeth on the morning after her arrival from India had come out. She remembered how almost on the first mention of Edward’s name, Elizabeth had guessed their engagement.

  Edith greeted her with her usual precise and restrained manner.

  “I heard you and Mrs. Fanshawe arrived yesterday,” she said. “Mother was looking forward to your coming.”

  Elizabeth kissed her.

  “I was glad to come,” she said. “I was beginning to be afraid I should never see Heathmoor again.”

  Edith looked at her a moment in silence.

  “Did you want to?” she asked.

  “Yes. I wanted to see you, too, Edith. I — I hope you are happy.”

  Edith laughed a wretched little jangle of a laugh.

  “I am very comfortable, mother will tell you,” she said. “Edward is always very kind to me. He has made a great deal of money this year. He comes back from town every evening by the dinner train. And I am going to have a baby.”

  The semblance of ordinary conversation had to be kept up as long as Edith chose. If the talk was going to get more intimate, the deepening of it had to come from her. Quite suddenly it came.

  “I am very unhappy, Elizabeth,” she said. “I have not had a single happy moment since I married. It has all turned out different to what I expected. I wanted Edward so much that I could not give him up, and I thought that by degrees he would turn to me, and — and love me. He never loved me. He proposed to me and I accepted him because we both thought that we should be very comfortable together. So we should have been if he had not — had not fallen in love with you.”

  Elizabeth laid her hand on Edith’s knee.

  “My dear, is there any need to speak of that?” she said.

  Edith turned quickly on her. All her secret self, suppressed through those months which by rights should have been months of such wonderful and magical expansion, fell on her, struggling to be allowed utterance. When she came here, with no more than her vague desire to see Elizabeth, she had not guessed how like highwaymen with cudgels and bludgeons her secret walled-up life would attack her, fighting to express itself.

  “I think there is need to speak of it,” she said, “and I have no one whom I can speak to but you. If I told mother, she would — she would recommend me to see Mr. Martin; if I told Edward, he would only try to be kinder to me. Elizabeth, his kindness chokes me. I can’t breathe in it. It has all been an utter, utter failure. I thought that he would get to love me, so that it would be enough for me to be with him always; I thought I should be satisfied to be his wife. I thought, too, that he would be happy as well as I, for I was not, so I thought then, entirely selfish. I should not have refused to give him up, if I had thought that it would turn out so hopelessly. Then there was this as well; you did not love him, and so I was not standing in the way of his happiness.”

  Elizabeth felt her face go suddenly white. Had she, too, made an awful, a lifelong, mistake? She knew the integrity of her purpose, when she had told Edith she did not love him, how she had said that simply and solely for Edith’s sake, so that having definitely and irrevocably chosen not to give Edward up she might not be the prey of back-thoughts and gnawings. But what if all this misery, all this hunger, this unslaked thirst could have been avoided? What if she had rejected her great renunciation, had avowed her love for Edward, had given rein to the steeds of desire? Had her renunciation been no more than some savage heathen rite, some mutilation of herself and him? For a moment the very foundations of her world seemed to sway, and all its noble superstructure to totter. But Edith did not notice the blanching of her face, nor saw her quivering eyelids. She was looking fixedly at the spot in the lawn in front of her with an intent and absent air, and went on speaking in the same unemotional voice.

  “I may as well be honest,” she said, “because there does not seem to be much else left. As a matter of fact, I should not have done differently even if you had loved him. I did not care two straws for your happiness, nor for his, but only for my own. And yet I did love him; I was passionately fond of him. I thought I could make him love me, or at any rate that he would forget you. I told myself anyhow that it was but a sudden wild fancy he had for you, that he had fallen in love with your music. I did not care what I told myself, so long as I got him. And now at this present moment, I would give anything in the world if it could be made possible that I should still love him. I don’t love him any more. I am not even jealous that he loves you. He may do as he likes, if only he could cease being kind to me. If only I could go right out of his life, and never see him again. But that’s impossible. Soon I shall be the mother of his child. And, besides, mother would think it so odd. So would Mr. Martin. They would call me wicked, but I think it is really much wickeder to go on living with him. Yes, all the time that I was trying to get his love I was only poisoning my own. I was poisoning that which was dearer to me than anything in the world. I am sorry for it now. It lies before me quite dead, k
illed by me. Well, I can say truthfully that I am sorry. When you have committed a crime like that, the only possible palliation is that you are sorry. But I did love him; even when I gave my love that first dose of poison in refusing to let him go, I loved him.”

  She got up in agitation.

  “Let no one say I did not love him!” she cried in a voice suddenly strained and shrill.

  Elizabeth got up also, forcing down her terror at this tragic figure suddenly revealed to her, and full of growing pity.

  “Edith, dear, you are talking wildly,” she said. “You don’t know what you are saying.”

  Edith put up both hands to her head.

  “It is not wild talk,” she said, “it is sober truth. But I express it badly; I get confused. And there was something I wanted to ask you. Was it really true what you told me?”

  Then her face changed. The hardness and restraint faded from it; it became humanized again by suffering.

  “Elizabeth, I feel so ill,” she said. “I am in pain, in great pain!”

  Elizabeth was sitting in the window of Edward’s smoking-room where two mornings ago he and Edith had sat talking and reading before she came over to the house next door. Late that night her baby, a seven-months child, had been born, flickering faintly into life and out again, and now in the room overhead Edith lay dying. An hour ago she had asked to see Elizabeth, but had passed into a state of unconsciousness before the girl could come to her. So now Elizabeth waited near at hand in case her cousin rallied again and again wished to see her. Edward, in the room upstairs, had promised to call her at once; Mrs. Hancock watched with him.