Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Oh, I say, I’m bleeding in my mouth,” he said. “That’s just as good as Jeannie’s nose.”

  Even while he spoke he felt rather giddy, and instantly Blessington’s arm was round him.

  “Eh, my dear,” she said. “That’ll never do. You lean against me, and we’ll go home very quietly. You mustn’t chase any more shadders this morning.”

  As a matter of fact, Archie did not want to. He felt a rather enjoyable lightness in his head, but he felt weak also, and disinclined to run.

  “Oh, here it is again,” he said, and once more, now with a sensation of choking, he coughed up blood.

  He saw Blessington’s tender, anxious face above him, exactly as it had appeared in the earliest of all his memories, and, as then, felt absolutely comfortable in the thought that she was there. Her arm was close round his neck now, and with her other hand she made a sign to Jeannie.

  “Run straight back home, dear,” she said, “and tell your mamma to come out here at once, and bring William. Master Archie and I are going to sit down quietly till she comes.”

  Archie rather enjoyed all this. He was completely in Blessington’s hands, and utterly content to be so. Then Blessington did a very odd thing.

  “Well, I’m so hot with seeing you and Miss Jeannie running about,” she said, “that I’m going to sit down, and wait for a bit. And you’ll wait with me, dear, won’t you? There! Put your head on my knee and lie down. I know you’re hot with running about.”

  As by a conjuring trick, Archie knew that Blessington’s cloak with its collar of rabbit’s fur was tucked round him. It was rather odd to be lying with his head on Blessington’s knee out of doors in the winter, but he had no desire to question the propriety of all this, for it fitted in so well with his main desire, which was to stop still. A couple of minutes ago he had been running about at top-speed; now he had no wish except to do as he was told, to put himself into responsible hands. It was all rather dreamlike; his mother and William were coming here soon, but that seemed quite natural. And it was still rather grand to bleed at the mouth. Then came a gentle singing in his ears, a pleasant sense of complete indolence, that never quite passed into unconsciousness, and presently it was just as natural to find himself in William’s arms. Out of a half-opened eye he saw William was in livery, for the blue and white stripes of his low waistcoat were close to him, and his cheek rested on William’s shirt-front. And then he saw that there was a bright red stain there which certainly was not part of William’s ordinary livery.

  “Oh, William, I’ve messed you,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  “That’s all right, Master Archie,” said William. “It wasn’t a new shirt this morning.”

  Some dim reminiscence about something William had told him concerning beer-money and washing came into his head. William had beer-money or washing; he could not remember which.

  “I shall pay for it anyhow,” he said.

  Still feeling rather dizzy, he had the impression of his own room with Blessington and his mother near him. Apparently he had been laid on the floor, for his bed looked tall beside him. Then he was not on the floor any more, but in his bed, and whether it was at once or later, he never knew, but presently there was in the room the stranger who once had made him play the pointless game of saying “ninety-nine!” Here he was again with a plug against Archie’s chest, and two other plugs in his own ears. Archie remembered him quite distinctly: he was a doctor who didn’t give any medicine.

  “Shall I say ‘ninety-nine’?” he asked.

  “No, just think ‘ninety-nine,’ and don’t talk. If you think ‘ninety-nine’ it will do just as well.”

  Archie had no desire to do anything beyond what he was told to do. He thought “ninety-nine,” and the stranger smiled very kindly at him.

  “That’s capital,” he said. “Now just go on thinking ‘ninety-nine’…” and whether he floated out of the window, or vanished like the Cheshire cat, or walked away in the ordinary manner, Archie was quite unaware.

  Then he was hungry, and, behold, there was Blessington with boiled rabbit, and he was sleepy and hungry again, and again sleepy. Sometimes his mother was there, and sometimes his father, who looked rather odd, and sometimes William brought coals, though the housemaid usually did that; and there was Blessington again, who washed his face, and then, uncovering him limb by limb, washed these also. Archie could not understand why he acquiesced in this odd state of things, or why he did not ask to get up and run about and play the shadow-game again. But merely he was quite content to lie still, and he hoped that when Jeannie came and talked to him she would not suggest the resumption of the game that had been so ecstatic but had been interrupted so suddenly. And Miss Bampton came in, and read to him something she had been writing. He noticed that she read from printed pages, not like the pages of an ordinary book, but long strips. It appeared that it was a story she had written which had got printed, and he asked whether his story about “the merderer” would ever get printed. They all came in, and talked gently and melted away again.

  Then arrived a memorable morning when, instead of being gently awakened by Blessington, he awoke entirely of his own accord, and felt strong and cross. Cross he certainly proved to be, for when the morning washing began, which hitherto had been a pleasant and luxurious performance, he found that Blessington could do nothing right. She put soap into his eyes, she tickled his feet and scratched his shoulder with her disgusting flannel. Archie made firm complaints against each of these outrages, of a sort that would usually lead to rebuke on Blessington’s part. Indeed, he had not been nearly so rude on the occasion when he had been told to apologize to her.

  But now she merely beamed at each disagreeable remark, and, instead of scolding him, she made a most cryptic answer.

  “Eh, my darling,” she said. “Thank God you feel like blaming me again.”

  “What do you mean, Blessington?” said Archie angrily. “Oh, do take care of my little toe. You’ve nearly pulled it off once already.”

  “Well then, I’ll kiss it,” said Blessington. And did.

  Archie looked at her.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked, wriggling his foot away from her. He did not want it to be kissed.

  “Crying? I’m just laughing,” said Blessington. And that was true; she was laughing. But she was crying also.

  An idea struck Archie which had not occurred to him before.

  “Am I ill, Blessington?” he asked. “Am I going to die?”

  At that there was no question of what Blessington was doing. Her laughing quite ceased, and she gave a great sob.

  “No, my darling, you’re not going to die,” she said. “Get that out of your silly head. You’re not…”

  And then she broke down altogether, and hid her face in the towel with which she had been washing Archie’s left foot. He saw her shoulders shaking; he knew that, for some reason, she could not speak. But she was crying, and was not cross with him for being cross. It behoved a man to administer consolation.

  “Oh, don’t cry, Blessington,” he said. “What is there to cry about? Unless it’s because I’m so cross.”

  “I don’t mind your crossness,” she said. “You let me finish wiping your foot. And then I’ll go down and tell your mamma—”

  “Oh, don’t say I was cross,” said Archie. “I’m sorry I was cross.”

  “Nay, I’ll just tell her how much better you feel this morning. And I shouldn’t wonder if there was a great treat coming, something you’ll like ever so much.”

  “Is it another train?” asked Archie.

  “Bless the boy!” said she. “How you think about trains!”

  * * * * *

  Archie ate his breakfast, and passed an entrancing morning. Everybody seemed desirous of congratulating him, as if he had done something particularly meritorious, as on the occasion of his not getting drowned when he jumped out of the boat after the pike. He held a sort of levee, the most remarkable incident of which was the appearance
of Miss Bampton with a piece of white chalk, with which she drew on the green drugget by his bed, so that he could easily see it, a great map of England and Central Europe. There was the South of England, with London written large, and here was Lacebury also conspicuously marked. Then there was the English Channel with France below it, and Paris in the middle, and away to the right, some distance below, the Lake of Geneva. Then, still explaining, she made marks like caterpillars which were mountains, and said that now the mountains were covered with snow, even down to the tails of the caterpillars and below was the Lake of Geneva, quite blue. All the roads were covered with snow up by the caterpillars’ tails, and there were no wheels on the carriages, but they slid over the frozen snow instead. There was skating up there, for they made lakes which were covered with ice. They just put water into flat places, and there was your lake, and it instantly froze. It never rained there, but if it wanted to do anything, it just snowed. Usually it didn’t want to do anything, and there was the sun and the snow, and wouldn’t it be jolly to go there?

  This presented itself to Archie’s mind as a purely abstract proposition. Of course it would be jolly to go to a place where you saw the real mountains and had a glimpse of the real Lake of Geneva, and slid instead of walking; but what next? Did any one ever go there?

  Apparently. Right at the tail of the caterpillar was a place called Grives. There it was, written down: the railway only went as far as Bex, and there the sledges began. And always the sun shone, so that you sat out of doors with the snow all round you, and felt perfectly warm.

  Suddenly Archie could stand it no longer. It was like talking to a starving man about roast beef. There was roast beef somewhere in the world, and he wanted it so badly. In the same way something inside Archie starved for sun and snow and thin air.

  “Oh, shut up, Miss Bampton,” he said. “I want it so frightfully.”

  His mother was sitting on the edge of his bed watching the map of Europe.

  “Archie, we’re going to Grives in a few days,” she said. “You and Blessington and Jeannie and I.”

  * * * * *

  It was memorable moment when the boat rose up and then curtsied to the big seas that were jostling each other up the Channel. Archie’s only knowledge of the sea was culled from a single visit to Brighton two years ago, and the sea to him then appeared but one among an assembly of unusual bright objects: nigger-minstrels and tin buckets and piers and penny-in-the-slot machines. But on this bright winter day he hailed a new and glorious creature, when he saw the steep white-capped waves, grey in the bulk but lit with lovely green where they grew thin, come streaming up to the ship’s side and fall away again in puffs of white smoke and squirts of high-flung foam. Warmly wrapped up in his new fur-coat, he sat on deck sheltered from the weather and watched with ecstatic wonder the rollicking, untamed creatures that sent the boat now over on one side, now on the other, and threw it up and caught it again within their firm, liquid embrace. Behind it lay a wake of white foam, like a long string still tying them to dazzling chalk cliffs and the wave-smothered pier, and overhead the masts, thrumming to the wind, struck right and left across a wide arc of the sky, and their shadows sped across the deck. These swervings and upliftings and descents of the ship as she whacked her way across the shifting mountains produced in him no physical discomfort, but only the sense that a new and glorious being had come into his life.

  All too soon, even as the jig-saw puzzle of the map of Europe had warned him by the narrowness of the straits, the shores of France began to rear themselves up above the wave-moulded horizon, and presently another pier received them, and men spoke a strange tongue (probably French, though it might have been Hebrew) and made novel gestures, and wore blouses, and boots that turned up at the toes more than was usual in England. There were no platforms: you had to climb the sheer carriage side from ground-level, and the engines were altogether different, and the movement of the train was other than that he was accustomed to. Then, sure enough, they came after nightfall to a great town, and drove across it, keeping firmly to the wrong side of the road, though, as everybody else did the same, there were not so many collisions as might have been expected. Then came the novelty of eating dinner in a restaurant perched up in another station, from the windows of which you could romantically observe train after train sliding out into the winter night. Before long Archie’s train did the same, and then came the glorious experience of undressing in a train, while it was going at full speed. There was never so remarkable a bedroom, all gold and looking-glass and stamped leather, and instead of his bed and Blessington’s being put on the floor, one, which Archie begged to have, was put above the other. Close by him in the roof of the carriage was the electric light which, when you turned a small handle the requisite distance, dwindled to a mere speck. At some timeless hour he woke up, and found a very polite stranger in his bedroom, to whom Blessington explained that they had neither spirits nor lace nor tobacco in their luggage. And the total stranger then apparently guessed that he had been misinformed, for he went away again without another word.

  The clever train found its way without any mistake through the darkness of the long winter’s night, for next morning it was skimming along by the edge of a lake so large that no wonder it appeared on the jig-saw map of Europe. The lake at home, once an almost boundless sheet of water, was no more than a wayside puddle to this; the hills at home were no more than the tunnelled earth of moles compared with those slopes on which the rows of pines looked smaller than the edging of a table-cloth against the blue. Blue? Archie thought he had never known what blue was till now, not what sunshine was until he saw the dazzle of it on those sparkling slopes. And they, so his mother told him, were not mountains at all: they were only hills; but soon he should see what mountains meant. As they passed through the glittering towns that stood on the edge of the lake, he could see the sleighs sliding over the streets with jingle of bells crisply sounding in the alert air. Other smaller sleighs were drawn by pleased, smiling dogs. There was never such a morning of discoveries. The only drawback was that, though it ought only to have been ten o’clock, the Swiss chose that it should be eleven, and thus an hour of this immortal day was lost; but his mother told him that the French had taken care of it, and would give it back to them when they returned.

  All this was romantic enough, but the romance grew more deep-hued yet when, in the early afternoon, Archie was packed into a sleigh and the journey up through the pine-woods began. White-capped and white-cloaked stood the red-trunked trees, and now and then, with a falling puff of snow, a laden branch, free of its burden, sprang upwards again. Then the pines were tired of climbing, and the sleigh left them and came out on to a plateau high above the valley. And could that have been sunshine down there? For the valley seemed choked with grey fog, and here above was real sunshine and air that refreshed you as with wine. The hills that had appeared so gigantic had sunk below them, but behind them rose the spears and precipices, remote and blue, of the real mountains, and, as they went upwards, these soared ever above them, and presently the blue on them was tinged with apricot and rose in the glow of the declining sun. And the driver cracked his whip, and the horses jingled their bells in response, and, pointing with it to a row of toy houses still far above them, he grinned at Archie and said “Grives.”

  The rose of sunset had faded and the snows were turned to ivory-crystal beneath the full moon when they entered the long, lit village street, with its old carved wooden houses, deep-balconied towards the south, and the modern hotels now just opening again for the winter season. These, too, they left behind them, and again mounting a steep slope, came to where, round a sudden corner, stood the big chalet which Archie’s mother had taken.

  “And here we are,” she said.

  Archie sat staring. Somehow he felt he knew the house; perhaps it was a house he had dreamed of. There were pines to right and left of it, just as there were in this picture of a house that existed somewhere in his mind; it had the same broad bal
conies, where you could lie all day in the sun, and look over the village roofs below and across the valley from which all afternoon they had climbed. He felt he knew it inside too: there would be rooms with wooden walls, and china stoves — where had he heard of china stoves? — and the smell of pine-wood haunting all the house. It was extraordinarily interesting…

  A big, genial woman had turned up the electric light outside the door when she heard the crack of the driver’s whip, and stood bareheaded, ready to welcome them. Archie felt that he knew something about her too.

  “Ah, miladi,” she said to his mother in very crisp good English, yet with a funny precision, as if she had learned it as a lesson, “I give you welcome back to Grives. And how is my dear Madame Blessington?”

  Archie thought his mother interrupted these greetings rather suddenly.

  “How are you madame Seiler?” she said. “And here is my daughter Jeannie and Archie” — and she added something in an undertone, which sounded like the language Miss Schwarz used to talk.

  Madame Seiler whisked round with renewed cordiality.

  “And such lovely weather you have come to,” she said. “The sun all day and the frost all night. But we keep out the frost and let the sun in.”

  They passed into the entrance-hall, aromatic and warm, heated by a big china stove that roared pleasantly, and instantly, without any reason, there came into Archie’s mind the remembrance of the words his hand had scribbled one morning with the signature “Martin.” It came out of the darkness like a light seen distantly at night; it flashed like a signal and vanished again. But for one second it had been there, remote, but visible and luminous.

  Lady Davidstow, for some obscure and grown-up reason, thought good at supper that night to explain incidentally that she had written to Madame Seiler that Blessington was coming, and that was how she had known Blessington’s name. Archie had a very strong and wholesome confidence in his mother, but he knew that grown-up people sometimes made statements which have got (by the rules) to be accepted, but which do not always convince. Blessington’s saying that she could not run any more because she had a bone in her leg was an instance of this class of statement, as also was the occasion when his mother spoke, a year ago, about Abracadabra’s sneezings. This mode of accounting for Madame Seiler’s knowing Blessington’s name came under the same head: as far as it went it might be true, and though it did not particularly interest him whether it was true, so to speak, all the way, he felt that there was something mildly mysterious about it. And, having made this unconvincing statement, his mother at once passed on to more interesting topics.