Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  There was some process of whitewash or window-cleaning going on in his dining-room, so he had told them on their arrival, which had caused their meal to be laid in the sitting-room on the floor above, and during lunch he had recounted how he had sat here one night in the summer while a raid was in progress. The next day, so he remembered, he had gone down to Merriby.

  At that moment his account came to an abrupt end. The subject had come up à propos of the raid last night, and the point of the story, not yet arrived at, was the difference your own mood made to your internal perception of external events. He had said that last night he had gone quietly on with his work, and had really taken no notice of the raid, whereas before it had come with a violent sense of interruption, breaking up the train of thought that he was engaged on. Probably on that first occasion he had been thinking about something very remote from mere material happenings.... Then before he completed the narrative, he had just added that he had gone down to Merriby next day.

  Violet had made a puzzled eyebrow at this abrupt conclusion, which left out all that he apparently was about to say.

  “What then?” she said. “You had a sense of violent interruption before, but last night when you were working at Turkey you hardly noticed the raid. What were you thinking about before, then? You were going to tell us that.”

  Bernard looked at her.

  “Was I?” he said.

  “Certainly. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten. Darling, was it because you were going down to Merriby next day, and were going to see me? It can’t have been you, Celia, whom he was thinking about, because he had never seen you at all.” Bernard’s mouth gave a queer little upward twitch. That was a new trick, so Violet considered, and privately she believed he had caught it from Celia. A man, so she had noticed, often catches a little facial trick from a woman with whom he is in love. A woman does the same: her mother, for instance, often fingered her upper lip; this the cynical Violet derived from her infatuation for Reeves, who had a budding moustache.

  “Yes, dear Violet, I was thinking of you,” said Bernard gravely. “That’s why the August raid came as such a terrible interruption.”

  “Oh, not well said,” remarked Violet. “No conviction. There was something else. I believe you lead a double life, Bernard. That’s what makes your single life so profoundly respectable. Nobody can possibly be as respectable as you appear to be.

  I believe you have a secret. Why else should you choose to live in Chelsea?”

  “Oh, you can have secrets without living in Chelsea,” said he. “Besides, everybody who is real has a secret life. It’s the secret life from which you get your impetus. You may not know it, but it is so. Celia agrees. We all write poetry in our insides.”

  At that moment Celia knew he was talking at her and about her. There was a challenge about it, that roused her independence.

  “I don’t agree,” she said. “In my inside there’s a nice clean notebook, labelled ‘Poetry,’ and there’s not a word written in it. On the title-page there’s the inscription, ‘The Poems of Celia Courthope,’ and then there’s nothing more. What’s your poetry, Bernard? Say some of it. I believe you were writing secret poetry when the raid came in August. I believe you’ve got a secret romance. I believe a panel goes back in this lovely room, and leads to a staircase which communicates with a secret passage under the Thames. It comes out at Clapham Junction—”

  “Any more?” asked Bernard.

  “Oh, I can’t go on all by myself. Am I on the right track?”

  “You were.”

  “Bernard, darling, I always knew you were married,” said Violet. “Where’s your wife? Produce her. Oh: is it really half-past two? I’ve got an engagement at three. I must fly!”

  On which Celia said she must be going too, and remained where she was.

  Bernard did not go to the formality of seeing a sister as far as the threshold, but joined Celia, who had taken her cup of coffee to the window-seat that overlooked the river, where a full tide was just beginning to turn seawards again. For a week now rain and chilly fogs had stupefied the town, but in the early hours of the morning a north wind had dispersed the heavy, indolent weather, and to-day the air sparkled with autumnal brightness, the “clear shining after rain.” Here in the southern aspect the sun was warm, and a crowd of chiding gulls, intensely white in the sunshine, wheeled and poised, and were blown down wind and returned again with swift, decisive strokes of their sharp wings. There were puddles in the roadway from the rain, but they and the mud there alike, reflecting the sky, were turned into a sheet of pale blue. The week’s rain had denuded the planes which edged the road of their foliage, and the angled boughs, naked but for their round seed-globes which swung in the wind, were sharply etched against the vivid air. The sun from above, and its strong reflection from the river below, blazed in at the window, and Celia, looking out, half closed her eyes against the dazzling radiance. The brightness flooded her face, which in this double light was expunged of all shadow; it glowed with the translucency of marble, and the searchingness of the illumination served but to accentuate and glorify her youth; she looked like some incarnation of an eternal dream. For the moment there was almost nothing human about her; mouth and eyes lost their individuality and were merged in a type, the living embodiment of sunlit presences.

  Bernard sat there sideways in the window-seat, not looking out on the autumnal glory, but at the glory of spring-time that was there with him. Then Celia, turning from the window for the prosaic purpose of drinking her coffee, found herself face to face with him. As she turned, one half of her face was cast into shadow, the other glowed with the permeating brightness. She was a little dazzled from her outward scrutiny, and his head outlined against the dark oak of the panelling was but a blur.

  “You said there was something you wanted to show me,” she said. “I hope it is nice. Whatever it is, don’t show it me this moment for I am half blind with sunlight.”

  “Shut your eyes then,” said he. “Turn your back on the window.”

  He had meant, with that touch of the academic that characterized him and his industry and his carefulness of thought, to take her up to the panel and withdraw it, disclosing the head. That seemed suitable and telling and dramatic.... But now all calculation, all value of a gambit, an opening to what he was going to say, was swept off his mind, and his mind itself was struck with paralysis, and he could think no more, but only felt.

  “Celia, I want to show you my heart,” he said. “To give it you, to ask you to take it. It’s yours, with everything else, all quite unworthy. But it is yours.”

  There she was, in the presence of the greatest thing in the world — blind, complete love. By instinct she knew it, and the perception of it, though it hovered in regions high above her, made her as completely honest.

  “You don’t know to whom you are giving it,” she said quietly.

  “To its owner,” said he.

  They were standing opposite each other, he facing the window; that “clear shining after rain” was lucent on him, and the immortality of his love turned his thirty years into an ageless boyhood. Just now she had seemed to him some incarnation of a type, scarcely human in the lustre of its completeness; now, for her part she saw in the selfless intensity that confronted her some glimpse of the white, unconsuming fire that moves the sun and the other stars. In her talk last night with her mother she had been presented with, and had grasped, the material aspect of this: now when she saw the simple and unspeakable reality of it, it imposed something of its self-effacing clarity upon her. She could not help being honest.... Her cool detachment from all but the superficial charm of the created world, her spiritual tissue, drowsing and not really willing to be disturbed, insisted on at least being known to him.

  “Bernard, my dear, I don’t love you,” she said. “I must tell you that. You know probably how much I like you: I don’t like anybody so well But... but that’s all I have to give you.”

  Not an atom of his radiance ab
ated.

  “I knew that,” he said. “I don’t really ask for your devotion. I ask you to allow me to love you. To accept my devotion.”

  She shook her head at him, still smiling.

  “But I must tell you,” she said. “I must tell you that you idealize me: you love your idea of “Because it is the true idea of you. I have found it already: it is there in you. I want you to let me to be the man to discover it for you. I want you to let me find yourself for you.”

  She thought over this for a moment, and thinking, put first one hand and then the other on to his level shoulders.

  “But if you are wrong,” she said. “What then? You will have given yourself to a phantom. You will starve. I know nothing that makes me think that you are right about me.”

  “I can’t agree about that,” said he. “I know that you are what I have looked for and found. The whole responsibility is mine. You’ve got to let me love you. You can’t help yourself.”

  His very certainty made her rebel.

  “Ah! I can resist your conviction,” she said. “I am mistress of my own soul.”

  “No, of mine,” said he. “You are born to it. It was always yours.”

  “And we only met last summer.”

  “What does that matter? We were there all the time. Perhaps before the world began I was eternally waiting for you. Why not?”

  She had the same smile for this, and then suddenly grew quite grave again. Though she had never thought of him as strong, the utter uselessness of struggling against him became suddenly evident to her. It was not that she wanted to struggle: she only obeyed the impulse of sincerity. She did not love him, and had said so: she had questioned his right — or so it seemed to him — of summary autocracy, and having made her protest, which he disallowed, there was suddenly nothing left to do but to acquiesce. He took her up, so to speak, as if she was a child, and placed her where it pleased him to place her.

  “All right, Bernard,” she said.

  Her hands were still on his shoulders as she spoke; the next moment they were struck down by the encirclement of his arms, and she was pressed close to him, feeling, with a sense of utter astonishment, the stringent brutality of a man’s embrace, the strength of lean arms, the flat bone of his breast, the masculinity of his lips. The end of his short moustache tickled her cheek, the roughness of his face gave her a new sensation. His knee was crooked against hers, and all this, though it was part of his love, was the mere physical expression of it, as far away from the reality as are the clicks of a telegraphic instrument from the purport of the message that they convey. And yet, though it was but a mere signal that made the communication mechanical (or so it struck her), it carried with it the tremendous signification of what it stood for. It was all quite inadequate for that, and yet this body of his was the instrument through which the message was transmitted.

  It was a riddle to her that he could feel like this, for she did not for a moment doubt the authenticity of the expression, and there flashed across her brain a wondering impatience, not of him, but of herself, who could feel no response. She accepted it more than willingly, even with some mysterious pleasure, but she knew that she did not give. And following on the heels of that impatience came another speculation, so fleeting that it had gone before she really grasped that it had been there, the speculation, namely, of whether she would not have been not only capable of response, but under an imperious inward compulsion to respond, if he had been not Bernard with his idealistic worship of her, but some one else brutally clear-sighted, who held her then.

  It was but for a second or two that his message, unintelligible to her, a mere stormy jargon and cipher of symbols, tingled through his arms and his lips. To him, however, from whom the message came, the moment was a hurricane of jubilant and definite expression. And there was only one word, and that but a label, a symbol in sound, by which he could express it, and yet all was said.

  “Celia!” he whispered.

  She drew herself a little away from him, not in such manner as to seem to repel him, but, so he took it, as a goddess cannot help asserting her divinity. Yet at once she disowned that interpretation of her.

  “You mustn’t idealize me,” she said. “You will have to learn what I am, not be content with what you think me. Do you realize that?”

  “I don’t realize anything,” he said, with a ringing joyfulness of utterance.

  She drew her finger up and down the seam of his coat above his shoulder.

  “But you must,” she said. “Oh, Bernard, are you sure you aren’t making a mistake? I should like to make you happy, but can I?”

  “You can’t avoid it. The fact of you makes me happy. If you had refused me, I should have been miserable, but that would have been only like a crust of ice over water. Underneath it there would have been you just the same. Don’t you understand that?”

  She shook her head.

  “I am utterly ignorant,” she said.

  He paused a moment.

  “Was I very rude that first night I saw you?” he asked. “When I stared and stared, and you asked whether there was a smut on your blessed face?”

  She smiled at the remembrance of that.

  “I suppose you were,” she said. “Why did you do it?”

  “I couldn’t help it. You realized something for me, the thing which I told you I wanted to show you. It’s a head I bought in Germany. Greek. And it’s you: you shall see it. By the way, Violet told me she had given you the history of it, so I needn’t repeat that. But now you shall see why I stared.”

  He went across to the door, lit the electric light behind the woodwork and drew back the panel. There was the head, with its archaic mysterious smile, and never till now when Celia stood opposite it, had Bernard realized how wholly was she the incarnation of it. Feature by feature it might have been she who sat for it, and surely, by a greater miracle even than his technical skill, the artist had divined the absolute quality of her mind, for the likeness, in the mysterious manner of supreme art, penetrated far below the mere configuration of skin and muscle and bone. Yet even as he looked, all the significance that the head had had for him, his passionate desire to possess it, his musings on it when he fitted it to Hellenic myth and phantasies, faded out of it with the fulfilment of the symbolism for which it had stood. Mutely and unerringly it had prophesied to him and it had inspired him, and now its work was over. It must always be to him a thing of wonderful beauty, but now that Celia stood there herself, it passed, so to speak, out of him, and was external to him, flawless and perfect as ever, but a mere piece of marble, and the desire of his soul no longer. He had worshipped the symbol: now the substance was there for his adoration. There it shone in the light of the concealed illumination just in front of it, which made the surface of it translucent, so that it appeared as if lit from within. But had he not, less than half an hour ago, seen Celia herself looking out into the sunshine of the real day, and now she was his....

  The girl stood immediately in front of it, grave and intent, quite absorbed in this ancient presentment of herself. Apart from the fidelity of it in line and feature to herself, what most amazed her was the divination of herself that she saw there. To her the smile on those lips, though kindly, was a little detached, a little indulgent, wondering, perhaps, at the stress of some excitement or rapture in which it did not share. How often had precisely a similar mild astonishment possessed her when her father putted his golf-ball about the lawn at Merriby, and demanded an enthusiastic interest in his antics! Or when Violet had been more than usually effusive in affection, or when her mother had made inconceivable muddle at her dinner-table, had not she herself felt just that whimsical indulgence of other people? Even more poignantly had not that same unsharing detachment been hers just now when Bernard, in physical expression of that love which she knew to be only faintly expressed by such means, held her close to him? If the head symbolized “Celia” to him, not less did it symbolize “Celia” to herself.

  “But how extra
ordinary,” she said at length. “Only... am I quite sure I wish to be like her? Doesn’t she mock a little? What do you think?”

  He turned to her.

  “No, the darling never mocked,” he said. “She was too fine for that. But she’s dead, do you know? She has passed on her life to you. She has been turned to stone.”

  Celia had not once taken her eyes off that elusive, smiling face, but now suddenly she turned her back on it.

  “I can’t agree,” she said. “I think she’s too much alive. Shut the door on her.”

  She heard the panel slide to, and turned to Bernard with a laugh.

  “My dear, what nonsense we talk!” she said. “How the man who sculptured her would laugh at us. Oh, Bernard, we are alive anyhow... and... and I want to make you happy. How shall I begin?”

  CHAPTER VI

  ALL that afternoon Celia had been unaware of anything approaching shyness in these first hours with her accepted lover, and though that one strong embrace of his had surprised her, neither rapture, repulsion nor embarrassment had formed any part of her impression. Her liking for Bernard had not diminished in the least at this first close handling of love, but it had not, on the other hand, been ever so faintly tinged with longing. Yet though she remained emotionally passive, she was intensely interested: she would have liked to fathom and comprehend that which gripped and shook him. This vivid scampering life of London, with its flow of multifarious interests always crowding in upon her, had sharpened the curiosity of her mind towards life to an acute point, and it was the keenness of that mind which she quite fruitlessly brought to bear on the analysis of a thing that had nothing to do with an intellectual problem. Useless though it was for this purpose of solution, it was certainly that which prevented her from feeling any shyness of him. She took it for granted that he expressed himself faithfully, and her interest was intensely aroused in endeavouring to interpret in terms known to her, this new tongue of gesture and bodily contact. It stood for something, it represented something more than the mere exhibition of itself. And this interest sprang from no cold-blooded impulse: she had spoken quite genuinely when she had said she wanted to love him.