Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  David’s shirt was half over his head, but he paused and spoke muffled.

  “Because why?” he asked.

  “Because a spondee is two long feet.”

  David gave a great splutter of laughter, as his shirt came off.

  “Oh, quite funny,” he said. “Wish I had guessed. Jove, doesn’t the sea look good? I’m glad it was made, and — and that I didn’t die in the night. You didn’t bring down anything to eat, did you? Isn’t it bad to bathe on an empty tummy? Or is it a full one?”

  “Don’t know. I’m going to bathe on my own, anyhow. David, there’s a sharp line round your neck, where your clothes begin, when you’ve got any, as if you’d painted your neck with the sprain-stuff, Iodine.”

  “I did,” said David fatuously, standing nude. “Come on; the ripping old sea’s waiting for us.”

  The tide was high and the beach steep, so that a few steps across the belt of sand all a-tremble in the heat, and a few strokes into the COOL, tingling water, were sufficient to snatch them away from all solid things, and give them the buoyancy of liquid existences. The sea slept in the windlessness of this August weather, and, as if with long-taken breaths, a silence and alternate whisper of ripple broke along its rims. Far out a fleet of herring-boats with drooping sails hovered like grey-winged gulls; above, an unclouded sun shone on the shining watery plains, and on the two wet heads, one black, one yellow, that moved out seawards with side-stroke flashings of white arms clawing the sea, amid a smother of foam. Farther and farther they moved out, till at last David rolled over in the water, and floated on his back.

  “Oh, ripping,” he said. “Good old mother sea!”

  Frank turned over also and lay alongside. “It’s like something I read yesterday,” he said. “‘As the heart of us — oh, something and something — athirst for the foam.’ I seem to remember it well, don’t I?”

  “Yes. What is it, anyhow? Who did it?”

  “Fellow called Swinburne. Good man is Swinburne, at times. Lord, you can lie down on the sea like a sofa, if you get your balance right. Oh, dear me, yes; Swinburne knows a trick or two. For instance, ‘when the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, the mother of months in meadow and plain fills the shadows and windy places with lisp of leaves and ripple of rain. And the bright brown nightingale’ — oh, how does it go?”

  He lay with head a-wash, and eyes half closed against the glare, and the spell of the magical words framed itself more distinctly in his mind. “O listen, David,” he said. “Drink it in!”

  “‘For winter’s rains and ruins are over,

  And all the season of snows and sins,

  The day dividing lover and lover,

  The light that loses, the night that wins:

  And time remembered is grief forgotten,

  And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

  And in green underwood and cover

  Blossom by blossom the spring begins.’”

  David would have appreciated this in any case, but never had any poem so romantic a setting as when Frank repeated it to him here, as they lay side by side right out away from land, away from anything but each other and this liquid Paradise of living water.

  “Oh-oh,” he said rapturously. “And what’s the name of it? Go on, though.”

  Frank thought a moment.

  “Can’t remember the next verse,” he said. “But it’s ‘Atalanta in Calydon.’”

  “Oh, she’s the chap that went out hunting with her maidens,” said David confidently.

  “She is. Look out, there’s a jelly-fish, All right, it’s floating by. I say, the water’s as warm as — as — I don’t know.”

  “I think you’re babbling,” said David. “Go on about Atalanta. Did she have good sport?” Maddox laughed, forgetting that he was balanced in a briny sea, and swallowed a large quantity of it.

  “What’s the row?” asked David. “What did I say?”

  Maddox ejected as much of the water as was accessible.

  “Oh, you are such a kid,” he said, “and I keep forgetting it.”

  David kicked himself into a perpendicular position and trod water.

  “Well, I’m getting older as quick as I can,” he said in self-defence. “Blast! I wish it could go on for ever.”

  “What?”

  “As if you didn’t know! Being in the sea, and being with you, and being alive, and so on.”

  “Same here,” said Frank. “Lord, but I wish I could be the sea as well.”

  “Rather jam. But I don’t think I’d allow everybody to bathe in me,” said David. “Dogs, yes, and some people, not all. Or should we charge a shilling, and let anybody?”

  Maddox pushed himself upright in the water.

  “‘Fraid we ought to come out,” he said. “It must be latish. I’ll race you to shore.”

  “Right oh. Give me twenty yards start.”

  “Measure them very carefully, “ said Frank. “Well, twenty strokes then,” said the wily David, shoving from Frank’s shoulder to get a movement on, and then, taking very long, slow strokes, letting his impetus exhaust itself. “Now,” he said.

  Both boys swam with the overhand side-stroke, breathing whenever their heads happened to be above water, and ploughed landwards with waves of bubble and broken water behind them. Frank overtook the other in the last thrilling ten yards, won by the length of an arm and a head, and panting, but still cool, they lay for a little in the shallow water, and then reluctantly went up over the beach to where their clothes lay. There the hot sun soon rendered superfluous the towels Frank had been at pains to fetch, and presently after they laboured up the sandy path to the house, slack and hungry and content, with the half of the wonderful day still in front of them. Once on the upward ascent David paused, his mind going back to the magic of words.

  “O-o-oh,” he said again rapturously. “‘Blossom by blossom the spring begins.’ I shall read some more of that after lunch.”

  Lunch took a considerable time, for David’s appetite, like his bones and muscles, seemed but to grow larger with the food he ate, and it was not till he had taken Frank’s evil advice and drunk a second bottle of ginger-beer that he declared himself able to turn his attention to literature again. They were going to play golf once more in half an hour, and David staggered out on to the lawn to lie on the shady terrace-bank for a short spell of Swinburne, which Frank went to fetch from his bedroom. Letters had arrived during lunch, and he found one for himself and one for David, which with Swinburne and the daily paper that would contain one important matter, namely, the result of the county match between Sussex and Surrey, he took out with him.

  “There’s a letter for you, “ he said,” and there’s Swinburne and the Daily Telegraph. What order of merit?”

  “Oh, Telegraph first,” said David. “I bet you that Surrey — oh, this letter’s from Margery. Might just see what’s going on. I say, I know exactly how a balloon feels. But it was jolly good ginger-beer.”

  Frank flopped down on the bank by him, and began opening his letter.

  “What else do you expect,” he said, “if you inflate yourself with gas, as you did at lunch?”

  “Don’t expect anything else,” said David thickly. “And it was you who suggested it. I think I must see what happened in the match first.”

  “Well, let’s have a look too, you selfish devil,” said Maddox, putting down his half-opened letter. “Can’t you turn over, and put the paper on the grass here, so that we can read it together?”

  “Lord, no,” said David. “At least it’d be a risk. But I can sit up if I do it slowly.”

  Sussex which had the good fortune to be David’s county, and for which he felt rather responsible, had done him credit on this occasion, and had won by half a dozen wickets. The rest of the paper did not seem to contain anything that mattered, and, throwing it aside, he and Frank began on their letters. Margery’s was quite short, though good of its kind, and, having finished it, David looked up, and saw that Frank was read
ing his, and that there was trouble in his face.

  “Oh, I say, is anything wrong?” he asked. Frank did not reply at once.

  “I’ve heard from Adams,” he said at length. “There’s been a row. Some letter has been found, and Hughes isn’t to be allowed to come back in September.”

  “Why? What sort of letter?” asked David. Then, as Frank was still silent:

  “Oh, something beastly, is it?” he asked. “What an ass Hughes is! He was such a nice chap, too, at my other school.”

  Frank had finished reading, and was looking out over the Surrey garden, biting his lip.

  “I say, Frank, what’s wrong with you?” said David.

  Frank gave Adams’s letter to him.

  “Read it,” he said.

  David took it. It spoke of the letter written by Hughes to a boy in the house, a letter disgusting and conclusive.... Then it spoke of the disgrace Hughes had brought on himself, and the misery he had brought on his father and mother. He read it and gave it back to Frank.

  “Well, I’m awfully sorry, just as you are,” he said; “but if fellows will be brutes — Old Adams seems no end cut up about it. But somehow, I’d ceased to be pals with Hughes. Where’s the Swinburne?”

  But still Frank did not answer, and David knitted puzzled brows.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  Maddox turned over on to his back, and tilted his hat over his eyes till his face was invisible.

  “I might have been Hughes,” he said.

  Again the memory of what David always turned his face from came into his mind.

  “Oh, rot,” he said lamely, hating the subject.

  Maddox was silent a moment.

  “’Tisn’t quite rot,” he said. “But then there came a thing, which I dare say you’ve forgotten, only I haven’t. You came in from playing squash one wet afternoon, and you and your innocence made me suddenly see what a beast I was.”

  David could not help giving a little shudder, but the moment after he was ashamed of it.

  “I don’t care what you were like before,” he said. “But what I’m perfectly sure of is that since then — I remember it very well — you’ve been all right.”

  “Yes.”

  “There you are, then!” said David.

  Frank was still lying with his hat over his face, but now he pushed it back and looked at David.

  “It’s all serene for you,” he said, “because you’ve always been a straight chap. But it’s different for me. I feel just rotten.”

  David scratched his head in some perplexity. The whole matter was vague and repugnant to him, and he did not want to hear more or know more. There were such heaps of jolly proper things in the world to be interested in and curious about. But he understood without any vagueness at all and with the very opposite of repulsion, that his friend was in trouble, and that he wanted sympathy with that. So the whole of his devoted little heart went out there. It was bad trouble, too, the worst trouble a fellow could have.

  “It must be perfectly beastly for you,” he said, “and I’m as sorry as I can be. But you’re sorry yourself, and what more can a chap do? If you weren’t sorry it would be different. There’s another thing too, to set against what you’ve done, and that’s how you’ve behaved to me. You’ve been an absolute brick to me. You’ve kept that sort of filth away from me: I know you have.”

  David paused for a moment. This morning alone on the hot beach his mind had dwelt long and eagerly on this wonderful friendship, and now, just when it was the very thing that was wanted to comfort Frank, this aspect of it struck him. He remembered how often Frank had, by a seemingly chance word, discouraged him from seeing much of certain fellows in the house; he remembered the night when Hughes came and sat on his bed, and with what extraordinary promptitude Frank had ejected him; he remembered how his dormitory had been changed, and he had been put in Frank’s, and had since then slept in the bed next him. All this with swift certainty started into his mind, and with it the policy that lay behind it. Frank had consistently kept nasty things away from him; here was his atonement.

  So he went on eagerly.

  “I know what you’ve done for me,” he said. “You’ve always — since then — had an eye on me, and kept filth away. I’m no end grateful. And since you’ve done that, chalk it up on the other side. You’ve made it easier for me to be decent. Oh, damn, I’m jawing.”

  David suddenly became aware of this, and stopped abruptly, rolling over on to his side, with his face to his friend.

  “Haven’t you been doing that on purpose?” he demanded. “I could give you heaps of instances.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Then let’s chuck the whole subject,” said David.

  “In a moment, I just want to tell you: I tried, instead of corrupting you, to uncorrupt myself. But you did it; it was all your doing. You made me ashamed.”

  David gave a shy little wriggle towards him.

  “I never heard of anything so ripping,” he said. “Though it sounds rather cheek.”

  Maddox sat up.

  “That’s what you’ve done,” he said. “And if it was cheeky, the other name of that is salvation.”

  There was silence a moment, and probable David had never known such intense happiness as he tasted then. And, just because he was feeling so deeply, the idea of anything approaching sentiment was impossible. It had been said, and the harvest was garnered.

  Frank felt that, too; they could not feel differently from each other just then, and away went the whole subject, a mountain a few minutes ago, and now light as thistledown on a summer wind.

  “It’s done,” he said. “Oh, what was the other thing we brought out? ‘Atalanta in Calydon,’ wasn’t it? First chorus.”

  “Yes, that would be ripping, “ said David. “At the same time it’s just struck three, and we were to play golf at three.”

  “Jove, so we were! How you must have jawed!”

  For one second David was not quite certain whether Frank was trying to get a rise out of him or not, with such naturalness did he speak. “Sorry,” he said quickly. “I’m afraid I did.” Frank laughed.

  “David, it’s no sport trying to get a rise out of you,” he said. “You simply rise at anything. I really didn’t think you’d rise at that.”

  “Oh, all right,” said David; “then it was a nice surprise for you. Come on. If you’ll give me a stroke hole, I’ll — I’ll probably get beaten,” he added, in a sudden accession of modesty most unusual. “I say, what a ripping day it’s being.”

  “‘Tain’t bad. And you’re not such a bad little devil.”

  This bordered on past conversation again, and he hastened away from it.

  “Go and get our clubs, David,” he said. “I lost the toss about the towels this morning.”

  “That’s not fair,” said David. “We tossed this morning, and that’s finished. We’ll toss again. Heads!”

  “Well, then, it isn’t. It’s tails. But I’ll go if you like!”

  It was still very hot, and the links, although the usual August crowd was at Naseby, were nearly deserted, since it seemed to most of the world to be the better part of wisdom to sit quiet till the heat had a little abated, and resume activities again after tea. The two boys, therefore, had an empty green before them, and since finance in both their cases happened to be precarious, and there was no need to keep their places on the green, they took no caddies. On the right along the first hole lay the sea, shimmering and still, so near that it was easily possible (to say the least of it) to slice a ball on to the beach, and in front lay the fairway of the course, stretches of velvet grass, interrupted by tossing seas of sand-dunes, fringed and bearded with coarse bents, while a flag planted thereon showed where lay the direction of the desired haven. Then came trudges through sandy places, with breathless suspense to see whether the balls had carried the last of the bunkers and in other cases the equally vivid conviction that they had done nothing of the sort, and would be found nestling
in little, steep, bare hollows and be-devilled hiding-places. David, in especial, found himself frequently in amazing and awful places, of which Satan had certainly been the architect.

  But, in spite of the intimate nature of all that had passed between the two so few minutes before, their unbroken solitude together did not produce in either of them the least wish to re-open the subject. It had been closed; a door had been triumphantly slammed on it, so that even if golf had not been so absorbing, they would neither of them have mentioned it again. And yet, deep down in each, and unknown to them, all that had passed had taken root, and was silently germinating, making fibre in their unconscious minds, building up the stem on which character bursts into blossom. Many words were consciously spoken, and many thoughts thought, and all the words and all the thoughts did not stray beyond the fortunes of the little white india-rubber balls.

  At Marchester golf was a recognised school game, played on their own links, for the two winter halves, when it did not interfere with cricket, and Frank — it was just like him, so thought David — had become a fine player with really no trouble at all. He had only played for two years, but at school he was a scratch player, and here at Naseby had just won a medal prize, starting from four. He confessed that it had come easy to him (everything seemed to), and to David’s observant eye he did not seem to do anything particular that caused him not to top one drive, and send the next spouting in the air like a geyser. When it came to approaching, it was with the same supple ease that he flicked the ball high with a little fid of turf flying after it. It all appeared so perfectly simple: you merely hit the ball with the middle of the club.

  At times, if you were playing against him, the thing became almost monotonous.

  Whatever could be said about David’s play, it could not be called monotonous. He gave an excellent example of his methods this afternoon at the third hole, slicing far and gorgeously from the tee out on to the sand. There had been no interest in Frank’s drive; it had merely gone straight, and a very long way, and so he came with David to walk up his ball, which was found to be lying fairly well.