Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  It was a blow, when Blessington called him next morning, to be told that he was tired with the journey and must stop in bed for breakfast. That was a perfectly unfounded statement, but, like those others, had grumblingly to be accepted, though Archie knew quite well that he had never felt less tired.

  “You mayn’t feel it, dear,” said Blessington, “but you are.”

  “I should think I ought to know best,” said Archie.

  “No, I know best,” said Blessington firmly. “And your mamma says so, too.”

  Archie began to wonder they were not right. He did not feel tired, as he had told Blessington, but something inside him said that it did not want to run about, or even skate, but it was very well pleased that his body, well wrapped up, should sit up in bed, and bask in the sun which blazed in through the opened French window communicating with the big balcony outside his room. Then, after breakfast, there came in his mother with a big jovial man, whose name was Dr. Dobie.

  “I never saw such a lazy fellow,” exclaimed this rather attractive person. “Fancy not being up yet!”

  “They wouldn’t let me,” said Archie.

  “Well, as soon as I’ve had a look at you, up you shall get,” said the doctor. “But I can’t wait till you’re dressed. Now, undo your coat a minute.”

  Once again the instrument with plugs was produced, and the ninety-nine game played.

  “That’s capital,” said the doctor, “and now in a minute I’ll have done with you. Just put that into your mouth with the end under your tongue. There, like that.”

  This was a very short process, and Dr. Dobie got up.

  “Now, my plan for you is this,” he said. “You shall dress and lie out in the sun on your balcony. And, after you’ve had dinner, you shall go for a sleigh drive, and walk a little on your way back. Then balcony again, till it’s dark.”

  “But mayn’t I skate?” asked Archie, who didn’t really want to.

  “No, not just yet. We’ll have you skating before long, but not at present. The more you do as you’re told, the sooner you’ll skate.”

  During the next week, but so gradually that at no moment was it a discovery, it dawned on Archie that he was ill, and that his illness dated from the time when his mouth bled. The knowledge did not in the least depress him, because with it came the absolute certainty in his own mind that he was going to get quite well again. For the most part he did not feel ill, though there was often an uncomfortable period towards evening when he felt sometimes hot and sometimes cold, and one moment would want another coat on, and soon would have liked to throw off all the clothes he had. These odd feelings were accompanied by a sort of extra vividness in his perceptions: he felt tingling and alert, and the lights seemed brighter than their wont. But when this had been more marked than usual in the evening, he always felt very tired next day, and more than once he did not get up at all but had his bed pulled out on to the balcony. Then, as the weeks passed on, there was less of this, and before long he was allowed to tie his toboggan to the back of the sleigh, and be towed up-hill through the pine-wood that climbed the slopes behind the village. That was a delightful experience; on each side stood the snowy trees frosted like a Christmas cake, now almost meeting above the narrow track, and then standing away from it again, so that the deluge of sun poured down as into a pool, while from in front came the jingle of the horse’s bells, and from below him the squeak of his runners. Then they came out again on to the ski-ing slopes, where visitors to Grives played the entrancing game of seeing, apparently, who could fall down most often in the most complicated manner. Where the slope was steepest there was erected a sort of platform, so that the runner, flying down the slope above, was shot into the air, touching ground again yards below. Or, on other mornings, when things went well, and there had been no hot-and-cold period the evening before, he tobogganed down the slope below the house to the edge of the skating-rink and sat there in the snow, with everything round frozen hard, yet feeling perfectly warm, so potent were the beams of this ineffable sun through the thin, dry air. Jeannie was learning to skate and progressed, in wobbling half-circles, and shrilly announced that this and no other was the outside edge. Or four of the experts in a railed-off and hallowed place at the end of the huge rink would put down an orange, and proceed to weave a mystic dance in obedience to the shouted orders of one of them. At one moment all four would be swiftly converging on a back-edge to their orange, and, just at the moment when a complicated collision seemed imminent, would somehow change their direction, and, lo, all four were sailing outwards and forwards again in big, sweeping curves. Then there were the hoarse, angry cries of the curlers to listen to, and the pleasant sight of the stone sliding swiftly down the ice and butting, with a hollow chunk, into any other that stood in its way. And then a slow sliding stone would come down, and people swept violently in front of it to encourage it not to lie down and die, which for the most part it did. But always too soon, his mother or Blessington would come to tell him that it was time to go home again and he would tie his toboggan to the back of the sleigh, and be pulled up-hill to the house. That was a tiresome moment, and Archie found himself wondering, with a pang of jealousy, why, when so many were hale and hearty round him, it should be just he who was obliged to go and lie down on the roofed balcony, instead of skating or curling. But even when he had set-backs, and had to lie all day on the balcony, he never faltered in his belief that he was going to get well.

  Here then, in brief, were the outward aspects of Archie’s life at Grives, new and attractive and full of sun and dry, powdery snow. He took no active part in the activities, and was but an observer, but all the time there were inward aspects of his life, which no one shared with him, and which no one ever observed. He was always on the alert, even on those mornings of tiredness after he had had a rise of temperature the evening before, for the development of a certain thing, the existence of which came to him only in hints and whispers. But the thing itself was always there, though he had no control over its manifestations. He could no more bring it into the exterior life of the senses, he could no more see or hear it or produce any evidence of it, as he willed, than he could make the sun pierce and scatter the clouds, which for a whole week in January alternately rained and snowed on to Grives. All he could do was to wait for it, and he waited in a perpetual serene excitement. It came always when he was alone: he got to think of solitude, in this present stage, as an essential for its manifestation. And, as the weeks went on, he associated it more and more with the balcony on which he lay for the greater part of the day. It, the thing he waited for, and was completely silent about even when he had intimate good-night talks with his mother, was no other than “Martin” (whoever Martin might be) whose presence had come into his mind with such unexpected vividness when first he saw the chalet. Never was the idea of “Martin” absent from his mind: it might lurk concealed behind the excitement of trailing after the sleigh, or of watching the skaters on the ice, but at all times it was ready to enfilade him. And, among all the diversions of the snow and the ice and the sun, he had an inward eye turned towards this inscrutable “Martin” — no winged nester in the sand-cliffs, but somebody, somebody…

  Lessons in a mild way had begun again before this wretched rainy and snowy week, and Miss Bampton sent out from home the most entrancing and topical copies. “Hot outside-edge for lunch,” was one, in allusion to the news of Jeannie’s skating; “Cold inside-edge for dinner” was another. Whatever the weather was, Archie was out of doors all day, and Jeannie, during lesson-time, used to sit out on his balcony and do her more advanced tasks, which, with his, were taken in to Lady Davidstow for correction. More often his mother used to sit on the balcony, too, but during this damp, abominable week she suffered from a heavy cold, and the lessons were brought to her by Jeannie. And on this particular morning, Jeannie had finished her French translation first, and so went in to her mother to have it corrected, leaving Archie to finish the last three lines of his copy.

 
; Ever since his first entry into the house, there had been for him nothing more than the perception of Martin’s presence. With the patience of a child who wants something, a thing only equalled by the patience of a cat watching a mouse-hole, he had never taken his inward eye off this. He was always ready for it. As Jeannie went in with her completed French lesson, he laid down his pen, and looked for a moment at the streaming icicles on the eaves of his shelter, and listened with a sense of depression to the drip of the melted water that formed grey pits in the whiteness of the snow below. Because there was a thaw, the air felt colder than when there were twenty degrees of frost, and the blanket on his couch was studded with condensed moisture. “It is warmer,” thought Archie to himself, “so it ought to be warmer. But it’s colder.”

  At this moment he felt a sudden thrill in his right wrist, and thought that a melted drop had fallen on it. But he saw there was no drop there, and wondered at this sensation of touch. Then he saw his fingers begin to twitch, and instantly recognized the sensation he had felt once before. He swept his incomplete copy off his pad of blotting-paper, and took his pen up again. Surely he could write on his blotting-paper.

  At first the meaningless scribbles appeared, made more grotesque and senseless by the running of the ink. There was a pencil on the table by him, and he took that up instead of the pen, while his hand twitched and jerked to be at its task again. The day before he had pinched his finger in the hinge of a slamming window, and he saw the moon-shaped blot of blood below the nail quivering as his fingers starved to hold an instrument of writing again. Then his hand settled down, like a hovering bird on to a bough, as he picked up the pencil.

  For a little while the scribbles went on: then, watching the marks on the blotting-paper just as an excited spectator watches the action of a play, he saw words coming. His brain did not know what they were till they appeared on the paper.

  “Archie, Archie,” said the pencil, “I want to talk to you. I can’t always, but sometimes I can. Dear Archie, try to be ready when I get through. Lovely to talk to you. Can’t to mother.”

  An incontrollable excitement seized the boy. “Oh, who is it?” he said aloud. “Is it Martin?”

  He felt the twitching die away in his fingers, and presently he was left sitting there, his copy on the floor and the scrawl on the blotting-paper. But he had, somewhere inside him, a sense of extraordinary satisfaction. Something or somebody had “got through,” whatever that meant. The words in pencil on his blotting-paper had “got through.” And he turned it over hastily, and picked up the unfinished copy, as the door-handle into his room rattled, and Jeannie came out on to the balcony again with her corrected French exercise.

  Several days of this chilly dripping weather, with the foehn wind from the south went by, and when that ceased, and the wind veered to the north, blowing high over Grives, and raising feathers of snowdust on the peaks to the north, while the sheltered valley basked in calm and sunlight again, there were eventful days of carting the snow from the rinks before any further development took place in Archie’s secret life. This carting of the snow was splendid fun, for, when a hand-sleigh of it was piled high, Archie would squat on the front of it (thereby adding considerably to the weight) and in a shrill voice direct the men who pushed it to right or left, in order to reach the steep bank down which they discharged their burden. When they were come to the edge of it, some large, strong man lifted Archie off his perch, and waited with him, while the sleigh was pushed to the very brink, and its burden overturned in a jolly lumpy avalanche that poured down the built-up bank of the rink. Then Archie mounted his throne again and was pulled back to where the men with spades loaded up again… When the sleigh seemed to be sufficiently full he called out “Stop,” and made the return journey to the side of the rink. This was all tremendously grand, and he had an idea that the clearing of the rink could never have taken place without him. Certainly his sleigh worked much faster than any other, for, in his honour, those who pushed always ran to discharge their burden at top speed, instead of going slowly like the others.

  “Oh, that was a pace,” he would say as somebody lifted him off. “Look, mummy, they’re going to turn it over.”

  The rink then was clear again (thanks to Archie’s great exertions) before his secret life made any step forward. But one afternoon, when he had been watching the skating from his balcony, something further occurred. He was alone, for his mother had gone down with Jeannie to the rink, and Blessington had gone shopping, and there was a bell by him, by means of which he could summon Madame Seiler if he wanted anything. But he had no thoughts of summoning Madame Seiler; he was extremely content to lie in the sun, and watch the rink sometimes, and sometimes to read a fascinating book called The Rose and the Ring, which his mother had given him. There were absurd pictures of Prince Bulbo, an enormously fat young gentleman, whom Archie did not wish to resemble, but was rather afraid of resembling, since Dr. Dobie at his last visit had told him he was getting fat…

  It was all very peaceful and happy, and he had lost interest in Jeannie’s falls and even in Prince Bulbo’s executions, and was staring placidly at a very bright spot of glistening snow which caught the sun at the edge of the rink, when lines of shadow began to pass over the field of his vision, exactly as they used to pass over the green-lit ceiling of his night-nursery at home. This was interesting: he did not feel in the least sleepy, but very wide awake, and was conscious of sinking down through this lovely luminous air, with the bright spot of light getting every moment higher above him, when he suddenly heard his name called.

  “Archie, Archie,” said the voice, which was close to him, and wonderfully friendly. And at the same moment he felt on the back of his hand the touch of another hand that was smooth and young and somehow familiar, though he had never felt it before.

  He tried not to disturb the impression. There was some sort of spell on him, light as a gossamer-web, which the slightest movement, physical or mental, on his part, might break.

  “Yes, I’m Archie,” he said.

  But, the moment he spoke, he knew that he had spoken somehow in the wrong way. Another part of him, not his lips and their voluntary movements, should have answered. He ought to have thought the answer with that part of him that saw the lines of shadow passing across the bright steel surface of the rink below, that felt himself sinking down and down beneath the bright spot opposite… He could not have explained, but he knew it was so, and instantly there was he back on his balcony again with The Rose and the Ring in his hand, and Jeannie on the rink. Madame Seiler clattering dishes in the kitchen, and himself all alone, lying in the sunshine. He knew that something inside him had been tremendously happy when his name was called and his hand touched in that intimate manner, and, now that the touch and the voice were gone, he felt something akin to what he felt when he was feverish, and Blessington had said “good-night” and left him. But then, he always knew that Blessington had only gone into the next room, and could be summoned. And he could not summon him who had called “Archie” to him. He had not the least doubt that it was Martin who had called, that it was Martin’s hand that had been laid on his. But who was this dear person called “Martin,” and where was Martin? Secure in the knowledge that it was Martin who had come to him, and touched him and called to him, he put down his book, and shut his eyes so that his feeling of being alone should be intensified.

  “Martin,” he whispered. “Oh, Martin!”

  He lay there tense and excited, sure that Martin would come again. Then in a dim, child-like manner, not formulating anything to himself, but only feeling his way, he knew he had called wrong. He must call differently, if he hoped to have any reply, call from inside. But, the more earnestly he attempted to “call from inside,” the further he got away from that “inside” mood, which he knew, but could not recapture.

  “Oh, what rot!” he said at length, and picked up The Rose and the Ring again to ascertain whether Bulbo was really going to be executed on this second occasion whe
n he piled his table on his bed and his chair on his table, and his hat-box on his chair, and peeped out of the window from his horrid cell, to see whether it was eight o’clock yet…

  Every day, in this return of frost and sunshine, Archie felt stronger, and soon the desire to skate took firm hold of him. Oddly enough, the pleasant Dr. Dobie began to agree with him, and within a day or two of the time when Archie’s desire to skate became a pressing need, Dr. Dobie sanctioned it, and Archie had a humiliating hour or two. He had seen Jeannie lean outwards, and announce the outside edge, he had seen Jeannie lean a little inwards and proclaim the inside edge and round she went in curves that Archie could not but envy. He had only got to lean outwards and inwards like that, and surely he was master of his curves. But he found that his curves were master of him, and tumbled him down instead, or would have done so if a kind Swiss on skates had not always been on hand to prevent any disaster of this kind. But then Jeannie had learned, so it seemed to Archie, by falling down, and he resented the hand that saved him from falling.

  “Do let me fall down,” he said. “I can’t learn unless I fall down.”