Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He found his mother and Jessie at breakfast when he went down; his father, as usual, had not appeared, and again, as last night when he came out of the dining-room after a prolonged sitting, he felt kindly and affectionate. But this was not from the sottish satisfaction of wine: the light came from that subtle window in his soul, from which once more the shutters had been thrown back. The moment Jessie saw him she felt the quality of that change; he was like the Archie of Silorno again.

  “Good morning, mother darling,” he said, kissing her. “Good morning, Jessie. How bright and early we all are! And has everybody slept as serenely as I?”

  “You didn’t sleep very long, Archie, did you?” asked the girl, whose room was next his. “I heard you hammering at something after I had gone to bed, and I awoke once and heard you talking to somebody.”

  Archie, at the side-table helping himself to sausage, paused a moment. He made up his mind that for the present, anyhow, he preferred that Jessie should not know about the return of Martin. Perhaps he would tell her quietly when alone…

  “Hammering?” he said. “Yes, there was a despatch-case, and I couldn’t find the key. So I whacked it open. About talking — yes, I was writing last night, and I believe I read it aloud to myself before I went to bed. I never know what a thing is like unless I read it aloud.”

  “Oh, do read it aloud to me,” said the girl.

  “When it’s in order: it wasn’t quite in order when I read it over. But I was sleepy and went to bed.”

  Jessie said no more, but for some reason this account left her unsatisfied. The hammering had not sounded quite like the forcing of the lock of a despatch-case; it had been like sharp blows on wood, and for a moment she had thought that Archie was tapping loudly on the door that separated their rooms. It had stopped, and began again a little later. As for the talking, it had sounded precisely like two voices; one undeniably Archie’s, the other low and indistinct.

  Archie changed the subject the moment he had given this explanation, and made some very surprising observations.

  “Helena is married on the 10th of August, isn’t she?” he asked. “I must get her a wedding present. And I shall come to her wedding. That will convey my good wishes in the usual manner, won’t it? I want to assure her of them.”

  Both of the women looked at him in the intensest surprise. To Lady Tintagel he had never mentioned Helena’s name since the day she had accepted Lord Harlow, while to Jessie, only last night, he had loaded her with the bitterest reproaches, and had spoken of the abject despair and emptiness which had come upon him in consequence of what she had done. And he looked at each of them in turn with that vivid, brilliant glance which had been so characteristic of him.

  “Yes, I make a public recantation,” he said. “It suddenly dawned on me last night that I have been behaving just about as stupidly as a man can behave. I’ve said nothing to you, mother, but Jessie knows. I want her to try to forget what, for instance, I said to her last night. I can do better than that, and at any rate I propose to try. All the time that I haven’t been mad with resentment I’ve been dead. Well, I hereupon announce the resurrection of Archibald. That’s all I’ve got to say on the subject.”

  * * * * *

  At that moment, swift as an arrow’s flight, and certain as an intuition, there came to Jessie the odd idea that it was not Archie who was speaking at all. It might be his lips and tongue that fashioned the audible syllables, but it was not he in the sense that it had been he down by the lake last night. Savage and bitter as he had been there, he was authentic; now, all that he said, despite the absolute naturalness of his manner, seemed to ring false. She could not account for this impression in the least. It was not the suddenness of the change in his attitude, though that surprised her: it was some remoter quality, which her brain could not analyse. Something more intimate to herself than her brain had perceived it, and mere thought, mere reason, were blind to it.

  Archie did not accompany his mother and Jessie to church that morning, but waited for Lord Tintagel’s appearance, and the discussion of the good resolutions which were to be so beneficial to each of them. He sat in his father’s study, and, having to wait some time before he made a shaky and disastrous entrance, thought over, in connection with the events of last night, what he himself had said that morning at breakfast. That surely was the gist of Martin’s message to him: he must try to grow indifferent to that part of Helena which he hated; he must learn not to be miserable, to grasp the fact that the darkness in which he seemed to walk appeared to Martin no darkness at all, but a flood of light from the ineffable radiance. It was in the glow of that revelation that he had spoken at breakfast, trusting in the truth of it, and yet, as he sat now, waiting for his father, he knew he did not feel the truth of it. But, in obedience to Martin, that was how he had to behave. He must behave like that — this was what Martin meant — until he felt the soul within him grow up, like some cellar-sown plant, into the light. Hopefully and bravely had he announced his intention, but now, when in cooler mood he scrutinized it, he began to feel how tremendous was the task set him, how firmly rooted was that passionate resentment which must be alchemized into love. It had been true — Martin saw that so well — that it was the white statue, the fair form he had loved, and loved still with no less ardour than before. That, it seemed, according to his interpretation, Archie must keep: it was the other that must be transformed. But it would have been an easier task, he thought, to let his love slide into indifference, then raise his hate to the same level. But that was not the King’s road, the Royal Banners did not flame along such mean-souled ways as these. He must cling to such love for Helena as he had, and transform the hate. But, first and foremost, cling to the love…

  It was thus that he stated to himself the message that Martin seemed to have brought him last night, and, stated thus, it was a spiritual aspiration of high endeavour, and it did not occur to him how, stated ever so little differently, and yet following the lines of the communication, it assumed a diabolical aspect. The love which he had for Helena was a carnal love, that sprang from desire for her enchanting prettiness; that love he was to cling to, not sacrifice an iota of it. The hate that he felt for her, arising from her falseness, her encouragement of him for just so long as she was uncertain whether she could capture a man who was nothing to her, but whose position and wealth she coveted, Archie was to transform into indifference; he was to get over it. But, though it was hate, it had a spiritual quality, for it was hatred of what was mean and base, whereas his love for her had no spiritual quality: it was no more than lust, and to that under the name of love he was to cling… Here, then, was another interpretation of the words he had heard last night, and, according to it, it would have been fitter to attribute the message to some intelligence far other than the innocent soul of the brother who had so mysteriously communicated with him in childlike ways. But that interpretation (and here was the subtlety of it) never entered Archie’s head at all. A message of apparent consolation and hope had come to him when he was feeling the full blast of his bitterness, the wind that blew from the empty desert of his heart and his stagnant brain. He had called for help from the everlasting and unseen Cosmos that encompasses the little blind half-world of material existence, and from it, somewhere from it, a light had shone into his dark soul, no mere flicker, or so it seemed this morning, like that spurious sunshine which he and his father basked in together, but rays from a more potent luminary.

  Till now Archie, with the ordinary impulse of a disappointed man, had tried to banish from his mind (with certain exterior aids) the picture of the face and the form that he loved. But now he not only need not, but he must not, do that any longer: he had to cling to love. And while he waited for his father he kept recalling certain poignant moments in the growth of Helena’s bewitchment of him. One was the night when they sat together for the last time in the dark garden at Silorno, and he wondered whether the suggestion of a cousinly kiss would disturb her. What had kept him back was t
he knowledge that it would not be quite a cousinly kiss on his part… Then there was the moment when he had caught sight of her on the platform at Charing Cross: she had come to meet his train on his arrival from abroad… Best of all, perhaps, for there his passion had most been fed with the fuel of her touch, had been the dance at his aunt’s that same night, when the rhythm of the waltz and the melodious command of the music had welded their two young bodies into one. It was not “he and she” who had danced: it was just one perfect and complete individual. Here, on this quiet Sunday morning, the thought of that made him tingle and throb. It was that sort of memory which Martin told him he must keep alive… It was his resentment, his anger, that must die, not that. Helena had chosen somebody else, but he must long for her still.

  Lord Tintagel appeared, unusually white and shaky, and, as lunch-time was approaching, he rang for the apparatus of cocktails.

  “I sat up late last night, Archie,” he said, “bothering myself over those Russian shares. It’s really of you and your mother I am thinking. It won’t be long before all the mines in Russia will matter nothing to me, for a few feet of earth will be all I shall require. But, before I went to bed, I came to the conclusion that I was wrong to worry. I think the scare will soon pass, and the shares recover. Indeed, I think the wisest thing would be not to sell, and cut my loss, but to buy more, at the lower price. I shall telegraph to my broker to-morrow. But I got into no end of a perplexity about it, and I feel all to bits this morning.”

  He mixed himself a cocktail with a shaking hand, and shuffled back to his chair.

  “Help yourself, Archie,” he said. “Let me see, we were going to have a talk about something this morning. What was it? That worry about my Russians has put everything out of my head.”

  Once again, as last night, it struck Archie as immensely comical that this white-faced, shaky man, who was his father, should be pulling himself together with a strong cocktail in order to discuss the virtues of temperance, and make the necessary resolutions whereby to acquire them. He felt neither pity nor sympathy with him, nor yet disgust; it was only the humour of the situation, the farcical absurdity of it, that appealed to him.

  “We were going to make good resolutions not to drink quite so much,” he said.

  Lord Tintagel finished his cocktail and put the glass down.

  “To be sure; that was it,” he said. “It’s time we took ourselves in hand. Your grandfather gave me a warning, and I wish to God I had taken it. But we’ll help each other — eh, Archie? That will make it easier for both of us.”

  “I don’t care a toss whether I take alcohol or not,” said Archie. “As you remarked last night, father, I hardly touched it till a month ago.”

  Lord Tintagel laughed.

  “But you’ve shown remarkable aptitude for it since,” he said. “You found no difficulty at all in getting the hang of the thing.”

  Faintly, like a lost echo, there entered into Archie’s mind the inherent horror of such an interview between father and son. But it was drowned by the inward laughter with which the scene inspired him, and his spirit, whatever it was that watched the play, looked on as from some curtained box, where, unseen, it could giggle at unseemliness, at some uncensored farce. Last night the same thing had amused him, but then he was in that contented oblivion of his troubles which alcohol lent him, whereas now it was morning and the time when he was least likely to take any but the most bitter and savage view of a situation. But all morning he had been possessed by the sunny lightness of heart with which Martin’s communication of last night had inspired him. He must be patient, disperse and blow away by the great winds of love the hatred and intolerance that had been obscuring his soul. And surely it was not only for Helena that he must feel that nobler impulse: all that touched his daily life must be treated with the same manly tenderness. Nothing must shock him, nothing must irritate him, for such emotions were narrow and limited, incompatible with the oceanic quality of love. All this seemed directly inspired by Martin, who had brought him the first ray of true illumination. And yet, while he sunned himself in the light, there was something that apparently belonged to his bitter, his disappointed self that cried out for recognition, insisting that these dreams of love and tolerance were of a fibre infinitely coarser than its own rebellious attitude. It strove and cried, and the smooth edification of Martin’s voice silenced it again.

  The suggested compact between father and son soon framed itself into a treaty. There was to be nothing faddish or unreasonable about it: wine should circulate in its accustomed manner at dinner; but here, once and for all, was the end of trays brought to Lord Tintagel’s study. A glass or two of claret should be allowed at lunch, but the cocktails and the whiskies in the evening were to be closed from henceforth. And the arrangement entered into appeared to be of a quality that sacrificed the desire of each for the sake of the other, or so at least it passed in their minds. Archie stifled the snigger of his inward laughter, and thought how clear was his duty to save his father, even at this late day, from falling wholly into the pit he had digged, while to his father the compact represented itself as an effort to save Archie from the path he had begun to tread. But, even as they agreed on their abstemious proceedings, there occurred to the minds of both of them a vague, luminous thought, like the flash of summer lightning far away which might move nearer…

  Once again Archie was seized with the ironic mockery that all the time had quaked like a quick-sand below his seriousness.

  “I haven’t had my cocktail yet, father.” he said. “I’ll drink success to our scheme. You’ve had yours, you know. Our plan dates from now, when I’ve had mine. After that — no more.”

  His father’s eyes followed him as he mixed the gin and vermouth.

  “Well, upon my word, Archie,” he said, “you ought to ask me to have a drink with you.”

  Archie somehow clung to the fact that his father had had a cocktail and that he had not.

  “Have another by all means,” he said, “and I’ll have two. But do be fair, father.”

  And once again the horrible sordidness of these proceedings struck, as it seemed, his worse self, that part of himself that had all those weeks been uninspired by Martin. Martin was all love and tolerance: he gave no directions on such infinitesimal subjects as cocktails or whiskies. He, outside the material plane, was concerned only with the motive, the spiritual aspiration, with love and all its ineffable indulgences.

  * * * * *

  Jessie was leaving for town early next morning, and once again, as twenty-four hours ago, she and Archie strolled out after dinner into the dusk. But to-night, his father and he had followed the two ladies almost immediately into the drawing-room, and the two younger folk had left their elders playing a game of piquet together. That was quite unlike the usual procedure after dinner, for Lord Tintagel generally dozed for a little in his chair, and then retired to his study. But to-night he showed no inclination either to doze or to go away, and it was by his suggestion that the card-table had been brought out. He seemed to Jessie rather restless and irritable, and had said that it was impossible to play cards with chattering going on. That had been the immediate cause of her stroll with Archie. The remark had been addressed very pointedly to Archie and also very rudely. But Archie, checking his hot word in reply, almost without an effort, had apologized for the distraction, quietly and sufficiently.

  “Awfully sorry, father,” he had said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. Come out for a stroll, Jessie.”

  So there they were in the dusk again, and again Archie took Jessie’s arm.

  “Father’s rather jumpy to-night,” he said. “But I think he wanted to get rid of us: he may wish to talk to my mother. So it was best to leave them, wasn’t it?”

  Jessie’s heart swelled. She knew from last night all that Archie was suffering, but the whole day he had been like this — gentle, considerate, infinitely sensitive to others, incapable of taking offence.

  “Yes, much best,” she said. �
�You know, Archie, you do behave nicely.”

  He knew what she meant. He knew how easy it would have been to make some provocative rejoinder to his father. But simply, he had not wanted to. Martin, and Martin’s counsel, was still like sunlight within him.

  “Oh, bosh,” he said. “The gentle answer is so much easier than any other. I should have had to pump up indignation. But he was rather rude, wasn’t he? Isn’t it lucky that one doesn’t feel like that?”

  Archie drew in a long breath of the vigorous night-air. To himself it seemed that he drew in a long breath of the inspiration that had come to him last night.

  “Jessie, I’m going to save father,” he said. “We had an awfully nice talk this morning, and it was so pathetic. He has been a heavy drinker for years, you know. His father was so before him. So one mustn’t think it is his fault, any more than it was my fault that I had consumption when I was little. It isn’t a vice, it’s a disease. Well, I’ve made a compact with him. I found that he had got it into his head — God knows how — that I — I know you’ll laugh — was beginning to take to that beastly muck too. So I saw my opportunity. He’s fond of me, you know; he really is, and it had seriously occurred to him that I was getting the habit. So I took advantage of that. I said I wouldn’t have any more whiskies and cocktails if he wouldn’t. We made a bargain about it. Without swagger, it was rather a good piece of work, don’t you think?”

  Jessie knew exactly what she honestly felt, and what she honestly felt she could not possibly say. For though it was a good bargain on Archie’s part, the virtue of it would affect not only Lord Tintagel, but Archie himself. But the knowledge of this added to the sincerity of her reply.

  “Oh, Archie,” she said, “that was brilliant of you. Do you — do you think your father will keep to it?”

  “He can’t help it,” said Archie triumphantly. “I’m going to be down here, except when I go up to town for Helena’s wedding, and I’m always in and out of his room. I should know if he doesn’t keep to it.”