Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  There was a shout of laughter in the hall outside, and Archie came in, followed by his father. He did not communicate the grounds for his merriment, but, looking a little flushed, very handsome, and very content, sat down on the sofa by his mother.

  “Well, mother darling?” he said.

  Instantly her love yearned forth to him.

  “My dear, it is good to hear you laugh,” she said. “What have you and your father been talking about?”

  The sense of being watched, the love that irritated did not trouble Archie now. The sunny hours would stretch unclouded until he fell into bed. He laughed again, looking across to his father.

  “I say, father,” he said, “shall I tell her, or would she think it not quite…?”

  “Just as you like,” said Lord Tintagel.

  The door into the garden, already ajar, swung gently open, admitting a breath of cool night-air into the room. It stirred in Jessie’s hair as it passed her, and moved across to Archie, making the flowers in a vase near him vibrate. And for just that moment some impulse from the untainted tranquillity stirred in his soul, and his overheated, stimulated brain drank it thirstily in. His own laughter, and the subject of his laughter, the whole contents of the last hour or two, seemed stale and stuffy. The air of them was thick with the fumes of wine, with the fancies and images that it evoked, smoke-wreaths that hung heavy in the atmosphere, swirling and turning like dancers and melting into other shapes. But for that moment when the night-air came in from the crystal-clear dusk outside, that liquid tabernacle of sapphire in the holy night, where stars sang together and nightingales burned, the hot fumes dispersed, and he drew in long, tranquillizing breaths. This physical impression had, too, its psychical counterpart, for even as the air that stirred in Jessie’s hair brought a coolness and a refreshment to him, so from the girl herself there seemed to stream into it a current of something wholesome and human and unfevered, unvexed by desire, and untouched by bitterness…

  “It’s rather hot in here,” he said. “Will you come for a stroll, Jessie?”

  They went out together… The heavens were full of stars, and a slip of a moon was near to its setting. Over the beds below the windows there hovered the fainter fragrance of sleeping flowers that stood with hanging heads and leaves that glimmered with the falling dew. Beyond lay the dimmed mirror of the lake, and beside it rose the dark mass of the wood in which the nightingales were singing. The scene seemed prepared for some human love-duet, when lovers fancy that nature is arranging her most sensuous effects for their benefit, though in reality she is but pursuing the path ordained for her by the wheeling seasons, and predicted by barometers and apparatus that is concerned only with heat and movements of the moon. And, of lovers, there was one of each pair absent, as the two walked quietly towards the wood of the nightingales; for Jessie there was no eager mate, and for Archie none… Two hungry souls, both longing, both unsatisfied, went forth on that twilit pilgrimage. Spring still stirred in them, and there burned above them the everlasting choir of the stars. But that helped in no way: had they been lovers, an autumn squall or a winter snow-storm would have served their purpose just as well.

  Archie chattered for a little while, comparing the moon to a clipped finger-nail, the dimmed mirror of the lake to a frozen rink in Switzerland, with all the hollowness of superficial talk, when the tongue speaks from habit, which is as lightly rooted as the seed on stony ground. Heart-whole, he had often chattered like that, and Jessie had sunned herself and responded to those silly things; but now she knew, as well as he, that the babble was no more than blown sea-foam. It made her heart ache that he should talk it to her, for, though she made no claim on his love, it was miserable that he could not recognize how true a friend it was who was by his side in this song-haunted darkness. She knew — none better — that he had no love to give her, but her love that was so disciplined to go hungry without crying out, starved for a word from him that should fly the flag of friendship, noblest of all ensigns that are not of royal emblazonment.

  They had come to the edge of the lake, and a moor-hen steered its water-logged flight across the surface. And then Archie’s foolish chatter died, and he was silent as he watched the rayed ripple of water. The wash died away in the reeds, and chuckled on the bank, and at last he spoke.

  “Why did Helena treat me like that?” he said. “It wasn’t fair on me. Why did she encourage me? She might so easily have shown me that she didn’t care. She knew: don’t tell me she didn’t know! Do answer me. Didn’t she know? All the time that we were in town together she knew. And she let me go on. She was waiting to see if she could catch the Bradshaw. If she couldn’t, perhaps she would have taken me. Was it so? You ought to know: you’re her sister.”

  His voice had risen from the first reproach of his speech to a fury of indignation.

  “Did she love me or didn’t she?” he cried. “Do tell me if you know.”

  His passion had found combustible material in her: she flamed with it.

  “Helena doesn’t love anybody,” she said. “Oh, Archie, poor Helena!”

  “Poor Helena!” said he. “Why ‘poor’? Surely it’s far more comfortable to love nobody. Oh, don’t remind me of that stupid rot about it being better to have loved and lost. Anyhow, a worse thing is to have loved and not found. That’s what has happened to me, and she made me think I had found. She meant to make me think that. Damned well she succeeded, too. And, if you’re right about her not loving anybody, do you mean that she doesn’t love the Bradshaw?”

  Archie had closed a grip on her arm: now she shook his hand off, though loving to have it there.

  “I can’t answer you that,” she said. “And I oughtn’t to have said that Helena loves nobody. I withdraw that entirely.”

  “The saying of it, you mean,” said he. “You don’t withdraw your belief in it.”

  “I don’t know the truth of it. What I said was only my opinion, and I withdraw it. I oughtn’t to have said it.”

  “But you keep your opinion?” asked he.

  “You shouldn’t ask me that. I have withdrawn what I said. Please accept that.”

  In this high noon of stars she could see his face very clearly. It was not angry any longer: it was just empty, as if there was no one there behind the eyes and the mouth. It was a face empty, swept, and garnished, ready for any occupant who might take possession. The sweet, clean water of his nature must have run out on to desert sands; the cistern of the body into which it had so swiftly and boyishly bubbled all these years was empty. Just for one second that impression lasted, inscrutably frightening her, with some nightmare touch.

  “Archie,” she cried, “are you there? Is it you?” She heard a dreary little laugh for answer.

  “Oh, I suppose so,” he said. “I answer to my name, don’t I?”

  She longed, with a force of passion quite new to her, to be able to reach him in some way, to let her love be coined into the commoner metal of friendship, if only that could get to him, and give him the sense that he had something in his pocket worth having, even though it was not gold. She would have gleefully melted all her love into a currency that could have enriched him, for he did not want her love, and she had no other use for it except to help him in some way. And, as if to answer her yearning, he took her arm again, not angrily now, but with the quiet pressure of a man with a sympathetic friend.

  “You’re a good pal, Jessie,” he said. “I’m awfully grateful to you. You won’t play me false with your friendship, will you?”

  “No, my dear,” said she, stumbling a little on the words. “I’m — I’m not like that. The more you count on me the better I shall be pleased. I’m stupid at saying things, but, oh Archie, if a friend is any use to you, you’ve got one. And let me say, just once, how sorry I am for all this miserable business.”

  “Thanks, Jessie,” said he.

  They had turned back towards the house, and Jessie, unconscious of anything else except Archie, saw that they were already half acros
s the lawn that lay dripping with dew. Her thin satin shoes were soaked, and the hem of her dress trailed on the grass. But she regarded that no more than she would have regarded it had she been walking in the dark with her lover.

  Then Archie spoke again — there was no more emotion in his voice than if he had been speaking through a telephone.

  “Do keep on trying to be friends with me, Jessie,” he said. “I’m nothing at all just now; I’m dead, but will you watch by the corpse? It likes to know you are there. There’s no complaint if you go away, but when sometimes you have nothing to do, you might just sit with it.”

  “Archie, dear, don’t talk such nonsense,” she said.

  “I daresay it is nonsense, but it seems to me sense. I don’t feel as if I was anybody… I can imagine what a house feels like that has been happily lived in for years, when the family goes away, and leaves it empty. There’s a board up ‘To let, unfurnished,’ and the windows get dirty, and the knocker and door-handle, which were so well rubbed and polished, get dull. There used to be curtains in the windows, and in the evening passers-by in the street could see chinks of light from within, and perhaps hear sounds of laughter. But now there are no curtains, and the pictures have gone from the walls, leaving oblong marks where they used to hang. And the spirit of the house stares mournfully out, thinking of the days when there was laughter and love within its walls. Haven’t you ever seen a house like that? They’re common enough.”

  She pressed the hand that lay loose in the crook of her elbow.

  “Oh, Archie, you give me such a heartache,” she said.

  “Well, I won’t again. But if you think me wanting in affection to mother, or you, or anybody, just remember that I’m an empty house for the present. I daresay somebody will take me again.”

  Jessie felt that this was a truer Archie than he who had stopped so long in the dining-room and come in afterwards with a shout of laughter over something that he would not recount. But by now their stroll had taken them close to the long grey front of the house, and for the present Archie had no more to say, and was evidently meaning to go indoors again. Upstairs all was dark, but below, the five windows of the drawing-room, uncurtained and open, cast oblongs of light on to the gravel, and next to them the two windows of Lord Tintagel’s study were lit. Even as they stepped from the grass on to the walk, and their footsteps became audible again, his figure, silhouetted against the light, appeared there, and the window-sash rattled as he opened it wider.

  “Is that you, Archie?” he called. “Come in and see me before you go upstairs.”

  “All right, father,” said he, “we’re just coming in.”

  Jessie heard a fresh vigour in his quickened voice, and in the light from the windows she could see that his face was alert again. And it was with a sense of certainty that she guessed what had given him this sudden animation. Perhaps it was only the knowledge of his father’s habits that informed her, perhaps it was a brain-wave passing from him to her that told her that inside his father’s room were the things for which he craved, the cool hiss of bubbling water on to the ice that swam in the spirits…

  “You’re not going to sit up long, are you?” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. My father and I often have a talk in the evening. And sometimes I do some writing before I go to bed. It’s quite a good time for writing when every one has gone to bed and the house is quiet.”

  “You always used to say at Silorno that you wrote best in the morning.”

  “Yes, but that was at Silorno, where I could lie on the beach, and go for a swim at intervals. Lord! What jolly days they were! It’s a pity they are all dead.”

  They went through the French window into the drawing-room, and found that Lady Tintagel had already gone upstairs. Archie stood by Jessie, shifting from one foot to the other, in evident impatience at her lingering.

  “Well, you’ll be wanting to go to bed,” he said. “I daresay you’ll go in and have a talk with my mother. And, do you know, my father’s waiting for me; I think I’ll join him. I shall soon come upstairs, I expect. I feel rather like writing to-night.”

  “I’m glad you’re going on with that,” she said. “That’s something left, isn’t it? The house isn’t quite empty, Archie.”

  He laughed.

  “No, I can trace my name in the dust on the window-panes,” he said. “But I’ll go to my father. Good-night, Jessie.”

  * * * * *

  Lord Tintagel, rather unusually, was deep in the evening paper when Archie entered. Archie noticed, with some surprise, that his glass still stood untouched on the tray.

  “Rather nasty news,” he said, not looking up. “Give me my drink, Archie, there’s a good fellow. Plenty of ice and not much soda.”

  “And what’s the news?” asked Archie.

  “Well, it looks as if there might really be trouble brewing. Servia has appealed to Russia against the Austrian ultimatum. I wonder if Germany can really be at the bottom of it all. And the city takes a gloomy view of it. All Russian securities are heavily down.”

  “Does that affect you?” asked Archie, bringing him his drink.

  “Yes, I’ve got a big account open in them. I wonder if I had better sell. Of course there won’t be war; we’re always having these scares, and they always come to nothing. But if dealers are anxious, prices may fall a good bit yet, and I should find it difficult to pay my differences.”

  Archie poured himself out his first tumbler. He held it in his hand a moment, not tasting it, now that he had got it. Delay, when the delay was voluntary, would but add deliciousness to the moment when his mouth and throat would feel that cold sting…

  “I don’t understand,” he said, watching the bubbles stream up from the sides and bottom of his glass.

  His father threw down the paper.

  “It’s as simple as heads and tails,” he said. “I’ve bought a quantity of Russian mining shares, without paying for them, in the hope that they will go up. If they do, I shall sell at the higher price and pocket the difference. But if they go down I shall have to pay the difference at the next account. If the shares are each worth L8 now, and at the next account are only standing at L6, I shall have to pay L2 on each share. If I like, I can telegraph to my broker to sell now, while they’re at L8. I shall have a loss because I bought them at L9, but I shall no longer be running any risks. But it’s thirsty work talking. Just fill my glass again.”

  “But then, if the scare dies down again, I suppose your shares will go up,” said Archie.

  His father laughed.

  “Sound business head you’ve got, Archie,” he said. “You’ve got the hang of it; it’s just heads and tails. Never you speculate: it’s a rotten business. I’ve got into the habit now, but I recommend you not to take to it. It’s easy enough to take to it, but it’s the devil to break it. Same with other things. Make a habit of virtue, and you’ll never go to the deuce.”

  He watched Archie a moment, who with head thrown back, and young, strong throat throbbing as he swallowed, was reaping the rewards of his delay in drinking. And when, with brightened eyes, he put his glass down, he stood there like some modern incarnation of Dionysus, his face pure Greek from the low-growing brown curls to the straight nose and the short round chin. With a cloak over his shoulders in exchange for his dress-clothes, with sandals for his patent leather shoes, and a wine-cup for his tall glass, he might have stepped straight from some temple-frieze, and his father wondered how any girl in her senses could have chosen the precise, pedantic man whom she was soon going to marry, when Archie was but waiting, as she must have known, for his moment. He, poor fellow, was often a very dreary and dispirited boy all day; but in the evening he came to himself again, and was what he used to be. And yet, though it seemed to Lord Tintagel a cruel thing to wish to deprive him of the few hours of the joy of living that were his during the day, he was smitten, with the easy and vague remorse of a man only half-sober, to see the effect that alcohol had on Archie, who, all his life ti
ll now, had scarcely tasted it. But he remembered when he himself had been at that stage; he remembered also his father giving him just such a warning as he now proposed to give Archie. He wished he had taken notice of it, and he hoped that Archie would.

  That evening, thirty years ago, he recalled now with extreme distinctness. The scene had taken place in this very room, and his father, already half-tipsy, as his habit was, had warned him of the dangers of drink, and he remembered how laughable and grotesque such a warning had seemed coming from lips that had lost all precision of utterance. But he told himself that he was not going to commit any such absurdity: he was perfectly sober, indeed it seemed very likely that it had never entered Archie’s head to think of him as a drunkard. Sometimes he stumbled a little going upstairs at night, sometimes he had an impression that his pronunciation was not quite distinct; but he never became incapable, as he could remember his father becoming, and being carried off to bed by two perspiring footmen.

  He put down his second glass without tasting it.

  “There’s something I want to speak to you about, Archie,” he said, “and you mustn’t be vexed with me, because I’m only doing what I believe to be my duty. You won’t be vexed, will you?”

  Archie looked at him in surprise.

  “No, I don’t suppose I shall, father,” he said. “What is it?”

  His father got up and stood by his chair quite steadily, for he leaned back against the high chimney-piece.

  “Well, I want to you be careful about that stuff,” he said, pointing to the bottle. “That’s one of the habits I was speaking about, which they say is so easy to keep clear of, but so hard to break. You drink rather freely, you know, whereas a few months ago you never touched wine or spirits. It’s an awful snare — you may get badly entangled in it before you know you are caught at all.”