Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Then a feat of marvellous execution began. Michael had taken an evil pleasure in giving his master, for whom he slaved with so unwearied a diligence, something that should tax his powers, and he gave a great crash of laughter when for a moment Hermann was brought to a complete standstill in an octave passage of triplets against quavers, and the performer exultantly joined in it, as he pushed his hair back from his forehead, and made a second attempt.

  “It isn’t decent to ask a fellow to read that,” he shouted. “It’s a crime; it’s a scandal.”

  “My dear, nobody asked you to read it,” said Sylvia.

  “Silence, you chit! Mike, come here a minute. Sit down one second and play that. Promise to get up again, though, immediately. Just these three bars — yes, I see. An orang-outang apparently can do it, so why not I? Am I not much better than they? Go away, please; or, rather, stop there and turn over. Why couldn’t you have finished the page with the last act, and started this one fresh, instead of making this Godforsaken arrangement? Now!”

  A very simple little minuet measure followed this outrageous passage, and Hermann’s exquisite lightness of touch made it sound strangely remote, as if from a mile away, or a hundred years ago, some graceful echo was evoked again. Then the little dirge wept for the memories of something that had never happened, and leaving out the number he disapproved of, as reminiscent of the Handel theme, Hermann gathered himself up again for the assertion of the original tune, with its bars of scale octaves. The contagious jollity of it all seized the others, and Sylvia, with full voice, and Aunt Barbara, in a strange hooting, sang to it.

  Then Hermann banged out the last chord, and jumped up from his seat, rolling up the music.

  “I go straight home,” he said, “and have a peaceful hour with it. Michael, old boy, how did you do it? You’ve been studying seriously for a few months only, and so this must all have been in you before. And you’ve come to the age you are without letting any of it out. I suppose that’s why it has come with a rush. You knew it all along, while you were wasting your time over drilling your toy soldiers. Come on, Sylvia, or I shall go without you. Good night, Lady Barbara. Half-past ten to-morrow, Michael.”

  Protest was clearly useless; and, having seen the two off, Michael came upstairs again to Aunt Barbara, who had no intention of going away just yet.

  “And so these are the people you have been living with,” she said. “No wonder you had not time to come and see me. Do they always go that sort of pace — it is quicker than when I talk French.”

  Michael sank into a chair.

  “Oh, yes, that’s Hermann all over,” he said. “But — but just think what it means to me! He’s going to play my tunes at his concert. Michael Comber, O. O Lord! O Lord!”

  “And you just met him in the train?” said Aunt Barbara.

  “Yes; second class, Victoria Station, with Sylvia on the platform. I didn’t much notice Sylvia then.”

  This and the inference that naturally followed was as much as could be expected, and Aunt Barbara did not appear to wait for anything more on the subject of Sylvia. She had seen sufficient of the situation to know where Michael was most certainly bound for. Yet the very fact of Sylvia’s outspoken friendliness with him made her wonder a little as to what his reception would be. She would hardly have said so plainly that she and her brother were devoted to him if she had been devoted to him with that secret tenderness which, in its essentials, is reticent about itself. Her half-hour’s conversation with the girl had given her a certain insight into her; still more had her attitude when she stood by Michael as he played for her, and put her hand on his shoulder precisely as she would have done if it had been another girl who was seated at the piano. Without doubt Michael had a real existence for her, but there was no sign whatever that she hailed it, as a girl so unmistakably does, when she sees it as part of herself.

  “More about them,” she said. “What are they? Who are they?”

  He outlined for her, giving the half-English, half-German parentage, the shadow-like mother, the Bavarian father, Sylvia’s sudden and comet-like rising in the musical heaven, while her brother, seven years her senior, had spent his time in earning in order to give her the chance which she had so brilliantly taken. Now it was to be his turn, the shackles of his drudgery no longer impeded him, and he, so Michael radiantly prophesied, was to have his rocket-like leap to the zenith, also.

  “And he’s German?” she asked.

  “Yes. Wasn’t he rude about my being a toy soldier? But that’s the natural German point of view, I suppose.”

  Michael strolled to the fireplace.

  “Hermann’s so funny,” he said. “For days and weeks together you would think he was entirely English, and then a word slips from him like that, which shows he is entirely German. He was like that in Munich, when the Emperor appeared and sent for me.”

  Aunt Barbara drew her chair a little nearer the fire, and sat up.

  “I want to hear about that,” she said.

  “But I’ve told you; he was tremendously friendly in a national manner.”

  “And that seemed to you real?” she asked.

  Michael considered.

  “I don’t know that it did,” he said. “It all seemed to me rather feverish, I think.”

  “And he asked quantities of questions, I think you said.”

  “Hundreds. He was just like what he was when he came to Ashbridge. He reviewed the Yeomanry, and shot pheasants, and spent the afternoon in a steam launch, apparently studying the deep-water channel of the river, where it goes underneath my father’s place; and then in the evening there was a concert.”

  Aunt Barbara did not heed the concert.

  “Do you mean the channel up from Harwich,” she asked, “of which the Admiralty have the secret chart?”

  “I fancy they have,” said Michael. “And then after the concert there was the torchlight procession, with the bonfire on the top of the hill.”

  “I wasn’t there. What else?”

  “I think that’s all,” said Michael. “But what are you driving at, Aunt Barbara?”

  She was silent a moment.

  “I’m driving at this,” she said. “The Germans are accumulating a vast quantity of knowledge about England. Tony, for instance, has a German valet, and when he went down to Portsmouth the other day to see the American ship that was there, he took him with him. And the man took a camera and was found photographing where no photography is allowed. Did you see anything of a camera when the Emperor came to Ashbridge?”

  Michael thought.

  “Yes; one of his staff was clicking away all day,” he said. “He sent a lot of them to my mother.”

  “And, we may presume, kept some copies himself,” remarked Aunt Barbara drily. “Really, for childish simplicity the English are the biggest fools in creation.”

  “But do you mean—”

  “I mean that the Germans are a very knowledge-seeking people, and that we gratify their desires in a very simple fashion. Do you think they are so friendly, Michael? Do you know, for instance, what is a very common toast in German regimental messes? They do not drink it when there are foreigners there, but one night during the manoeuvres an officer in a mess where Tony was dining got slightly ‘on,’ as you may say, and suddenly drank to ‘Der Tag.’”

  “That means ‘The Day,’” said Michael confidently.

  “It does; and what day? The day when Germany thinks that all is ripe for a war with us. ‘Der Tag’ will dawn suddenly from a quiet, peaceful night, when they think we are all asleep, and when they have got all the information they think is accessible. War, my dear.”

  Michael had never in his life seen his aunt so serious, and he was amazed at her gravity.

  “There are hundreds and hundreds of their spies all over England,” she said, “and hundreds of their agents all over America. Deep, patient Germany, as Carlyle said. She’s as patient as God and as deep as the sea. They are working, working, while our toy soldiers play go
lf. I agree with that adorable pianist; and, what’s more, I believe they think that ‘Der Tag’ is near to dawn. Tony says that their manoeuvres this year were like nothing that has ever been seen before. Germany is a fighting machine without parallel in the history of the world.”

  She got up and stood with Michael near the fireplace.

  “And they think their opportunity is at hand,” she said, “though not for a moment do they relax their preparations. We are their real enemy, don’t you see? They can fight France with one hand and Russia with the other; and in a few months’ time now they expect we shall be in the throes of an internal revolution over this Irish business. They may be right, but there is just the possibility that they may be astoundingly wrong. The fact of the great foreign peril — this nightmare, this Armageddon of European war — may be exactly that which will pull us together. But their diplomatists, anyhow, are studying the Irish question very closely, and German gold, without any doubt at all, is helping the Home Rule party. As a nation we are fast asleep. I wonder what we shall be like when we wake. Shall we find ourselves already fettered when we wake, or will there be one moment, just one moment, in which we can spring up? At any rate, hitherto, the English have always been at their best, not their worst, in desperate positions. They hate exciting themselves, and refuse to do it until the crisis is actually on them. But then they become disconcertingly serious and cool-headed.”

  “And you think the Emperor—” began Michael.

  “I think the Emperor is the hardest worker in all Germany,” said Barbara. “I believe he is trying (and admirably succeeding) to make us trust his professions of friendship. He has a great eye for detail, too; it seemed to him worth while to assure you even, my dear Michael, of his regard and affection for England. He was always impressing on Tony the same thing, though to him, of course, he said that if there was any country nearer to his heart than England it was America. Stuff and nonsense, my dear!”

  All this, though struck in a more serious key than was usual with Aunt Barbara, was quite characteristic of her. She had the quality of mind which when occupied with one idea is occupied with it to the exclusion of all others; she worked at full power over anything she took up. But now she dismissed it altogether.

  “You see what a diplomatist I have become,” she said. “It is a fascinating business: one lives in an atmosphere that is charged with secret affairs, and it infects one like the influenza. You catch it somehow, and have a feverish cold of your own. And I am quite useful to him. You see, I am such a chatterbox that people think I let out things by accident, which I never do. I let out what I want to let out on purpose, and they think they are pumping me. I had a long conversation the other day with one of the German Embassy, all about Irish affairs. They are hugely interested about Irish affairs, and I just make a note of that; but they can make as many notes as they please about what I say, and no one will be any the wiser. In fact, they will be the foolisher. And now I suppose I had better take myself away.”

  “Don’t do anything of the kind,” said Michael.

  “But I must. And if when you are down at Ashbridge at Christmas you find strangers hanging about the deep-water reach, you might just let me know. It’s no use telling your father, because he will certainly think they have come to get a glimpse of him as he plays golf. But I expect you’ll be too busy thinking about that new friend of yours, and perhaps his sister. What did she tell me we had got to do? ‘To her garlands let us bring,’ was it not? You and I will both send wreaths, Michael, though not for her funeral. Now don’t be a hermit any more, but come and see me. You shall take your garland girl into dinner, if she will come, too; and her brother shall certainly sit next me. I am so glad you have become yourself at last. Go on being yourself more and more, my dear: it suits you.”

  CHAPTER VIII

  Some fortnight later, and not long before Michael was leaving town for his Christmas visit to Ashbridge, Sylvia and her brother were lingering in the big studio from which the last of their Sunday evening guests had just departed. The usual joyous chaos consequent on those entertainments reigned: the top of the piano was covered with the plates and glasses of those who had made an alfresco supper (or breakfast) of fried bacon and beer before leaving; a circle of cushions were ranged on the floor round the fire, for it was a bitterly cold night, and since, for some reason, a series of charades had been spontaneously generated, there was lying about an astonishing collection of pillow-cases, rugs, and table-cloths, and such articles of domestic and household use as could be converted into clothes for this purpose. But the event of the evening had undoubtedly been Hermann’s performance of the “Wenceslas Variations”; these he had now learned, and, as he had promised Michael, was going to play them at his concert in the Steinway Hall in January. To-night a good many musician friends had attended the Sunday evening gathering, and there had been no two opinions about the success of them.

  “I was talking to Arthur Lagden about them,” said Falbe, naming a prominent critic of the day, “and he would hardly believe that they were an Opus I., or that Michael had not been studying music technically for years instead of six months. But that’s the odd thing about Mike; he’s so mature.”

  It was not unusual for the brother and sister to sit up like this, till any hour, after their guests had gone; and Sylvia collected a bundle of cushions and lay full length on the floor, with her feet towards the fire. For both of them the week was too busy on six days for them to indulge that companionship, sometimes full of talk, sometimes consisting of those dropped words and long silences, on which intimacy lives; and they both enjoyed, above all hours in the week, this time that lay between the friendly riot of Sunday evening and the starting of work again on Monday. There was between them that bond which can scarcely exist between husband and wife, since it almost necessarily implies the close consanguinity of brother and sister, and postulates a certain sort of essential community of nature, founded not on tastes, nor even on affection, but on the fact that the same blood beats in the two. Here an intense affection, too strong to be ever demonstrative, fortified it, and both brother and sister talked to each other, as if they were speaking to some physically independent piece of themselves.

  Sylvia had nothing apparently to add on the subject of Michael’s maturity. Instead she just raised her head, which was not quite high enough.

  “Stuff another cushion under my head, Hermann,” she said. “Thanks; now I’m completely comfortable, you will be relieved to hear.”

  Hermann gazed at the fire in silence.

  “That’s a weight off my mind,” he said. “About Michael now. He’s been suppressed all his life, you know, and instead of being dwarfed he has just gone on growing inside. Good Lord! I wish somebody would suppress me for a year or two. What a lot there would be when I took the cork out again. We dissipate too much, Sylvia, both you and I.”

  She gave a little grunt, which, from his knowledge of her inarticulate expressions, he took to mean dissent.

  “I suppose you mean we don’t,” he remarked.

  “Yes. How much one dissipates is determined for one just as is the shape of your nose or the colour of your eyes. By the way, I fell madly in love with that cousin of Michael’s who came with him to-night. He’s the most attractive creature I ever saw in my life. Of course, he’s too beautiful: no boy ought to be as beautiful as that.”

  “You flirted with him,” remarked Hermann. “Mike will probably murder him on the way home.”

  Sylvia moved her feet a little farther from the blaze.

  “Funny?” she asked.

  Instantly Falbe knew that her mind was occupied with exactly the same question as his.

  “No, not funny at all,” he said. “Quite serious. Do you want to talk about it or not?”

  She gave a little groan.

  “No, I don’t want to, but I’ve got to,” she said. “Aunt Barbara — we became Sylvia and Aunt Barbara an hour or two ago, and she’s a dear — Aunt Barbara has been talking to me
about it already.”

  “And what did Aunt Barbara say?”

  “Just what you are going to,” said Sylvia; “namely, that I had better make up my mind what I mean to say when Michael says what he means to say.”

  She shifted round so as to face her brother as he stood in front of the fire, and pulled his trouser-leg more neatly over the top of his shoe.

  “But what’s to happen if I can’t make up my mind?” she said. “I needn’t tell you how much I like Michael; I believe I like him as much as I possibly can. But I don’t know if that is enough. Hermann, is it enough? You ought to know. There’s no use in you unless you know about me.”

  She put out her arm, and clasped his two legs in the crook of her elbow. That expressed their attitude, what they were to each other, as absolutely as any physical demonstration allowed. Had there not been the difference of sex which severed them she could never have got the sense of support that this physical contact gave her; had there not been her sisterhood to chaperon her, so to speak, she could never have been so at ease with a man. The two were lover-like, without the physical apexes and limitations that physical love must always bring with it. The complement of sex that brought them so close annihilated the very existence of sex. They loved as only brother and sister can love, without trouble.

  The closer contact of his fire-warmed trousers to the calf of his leg made Hermann step out of her encircling arm without any question of hurting her feelings.

  “I won’t be burned,” he said. “Sorry, but I won’t be burned. It seems to me, Sylvia, that you ought to like Michael a little more and a little less.”

  “It’s no use saying what I ought to do,” she said. “The idea of what I ‘ought’ doesn’t come in. I like him just as much as I like him, neither more nor less.”

  He clawed some more cushions together, and sat down on the floor by her. She raised herself a little and rested her body against his folded knees.

  “What’s the trouble, Sylvia?” he said.

  “Just what I’ve been trying to tell you.”