Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  For his part Bernard was amazed at this sudden explosion of feeling in Celia, not knowing what lay below it. He knelt by her on the hearthrug.

  “But, my darling, you are quite absurd,” he said. “Look at it from my point. Supposing you were very poor, and had a brother whose education was a problem to your father, because he could not afford to send him to Sandhurst or the University. Should not I be mulishly unperceptive, if, when I had the extraordinary happiness to claim you, I did not claim the right of looking after him? If it had been I who was poor and you who were rich, would not you have thought it your right to look after my people? Naturally you would: I should not have had to remind you of it. You would have been ashamed of yourself if you had not thought of that before I did. So, in exactly the same way, should I have been ashamed if I had let your father draw my attention — no, not that—”

  “Ah, it was that,” said Celia.

  All Bernard’s adroitness, that surface quality in which he was adept, was awake. That Philip should have hinted at his needs (or his desires) distressed Celia, and all his brain was alert to remove that distress.

  “You will not let me finish,” he said, laughing. “I think Vincent’s spectacles which made him put the lowest possible interpretation on everything, must have descended on your delicious nose. It was inevitable, as your father and I were talking about business matters, that your father’s circumstances came on to the board. I didn’t want, as a matter of fact, to talk business with him. His lawyer would have disclosed his circumstances to mine. And then, believe me, I should have done what it was my privilege to do, without consulting you at all. Go back to the imaginary case of your having a brother. Wouldn’t it be infamous if I didn’t anticipate any request for help from him?”

  “You put it quite beautifully,” said Celia, in her most neutral voice.

  “There is no question of putting it beautifully: I only want to put it sensibly. A man of your father’s interests and abilities ought to have the opportunity of making more of them.... Do you know, I hate this discussion? It is a dreadful waste of time. I have said what I wanted to say.”

  Celia felt the first completely spontaneous impulse of admiration for him that she had ever experienced. She knew, internally, from her knowledge of her father, how essentially sordid his appeal must have been. If he had not actually made the appeal, he had certainly hinted at it in a manner which to Bernard was unmistakable and revolting. Yet here was Bernard valiantly championing him. She made no mistake, either, as to the cause of his so doing. It was merely for her sake, and in that conviction she got another glimpse of him, as of some summit....

  It was with this in her mind that she spoke.

  “Oh, I wish I was big,” she said. “Shall I grow, Bernard?”

  Bernard congratulated himself, his surface self, on his adroitness. A flurry of words, all well chosen, seemed to have done their work by the mere splash that they made. He had hated his interview with Philip, but he hated infinitely more the notion that it was on Celia that the burden of its unpleasantness was cast. But her last speech looked as if she had got rid of it again: she had acquiesced, it appeared, and swam away from the splash.

  “Big!” he said. “Oh, you immense thing! And there’s something more. Vincent alluded to it. Would it bother you if I asked you? Victims, you know. The question was ‘when’?”

  Celia’s mind took just one broad sweep, scouting round the horizons. All round there was fear and nightmare, black gulfs below precipices, dangerous uplands. When she poised again, she saw below a secure valley a quiet harbourage.

  “Oh, my dear, as soon as possible,” she said. “A fortnight from now? Three weeks? What are banns? As soon as they will let us.”

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER I

  ONE day in June Celia was sitting on the lawn in front of Stonepitts, a small house belonging to Bernard, that stood on the edge of Blair Forest in Sussex. It couched below the ridge over which there passed the main road to Brighton, and looked southwards towards the downs that ran like some long serge rampart across the horizon. Between it and them the ground declined sharply across meadows’ tall with hay into the Weald, which lay shimmering below the heat haze of this still afternoon. Northwards, across the yew hedges and brick walls of the garden, the slope mounted gently upwards to tracts of gorse and heather, set with occasional clumps of pines, to where, a mile away, Matcham Place spread its wings and courtyards above its long white terrace. A Gothic tower rather terribly reared itself in the centre of the pile, over the gateway, and on the top of it was a flag-staff bearing the ensign of the Red Cross. Up there some westerly current of wind was moving, for the flag fluttered and sometimes wholly displayed itself.

  The lawn, at the edge of which Celia sat, was backed by the red-brick Elizabethan house, lately converted by Bernard from a farm into a dwelling house, convenient to inhabit for week ends, and for the last three years, since the big house had been given up to national needs, he had repeatedly used it, and more especially during these six months since his marriage. On two other sides of the lawn ran low brick walls, in the centre of one of which stood an iron gate which gave on to the road. On the fourth side, a steep grass bank fringed with a hedge of rambler roses gave access, by means of stone steps, to an orchard of apple-trees growing from rougher meadow grass which in spring was starred with narcissus and daffodil. Along the side of this, set in a short avenue of firs, and separated from it by a yew hedge, ran the road which passed outside the brick walls of the garden where Celia sat, and curled round the house to the entrance at the far side. From lack of labour the flower-beds that lined the house and the garden walls were a little riotous and rather more jungle-like than a stricter supervision would have permitted, but that accorded well enough with the mellow brick and the air of dignified leisure that the house presented. It took its ease in the country and a little homespun shabbiness was quite in place.

  Celia was alone for the moment on this Saturday afternoon. Her mother, who had come down with her yesterday, was somewhere in the house: probably the sound just now of a window sharply closed indicated that she was in her bedroom and had shut out the mephitic poison of the country air. It was seldom that she left London at all, and when she did she immured herself as far as possible from the foul miasma of flowers and hay-scent that might steal in through a window. For a few minutes after lunch she had strolled with Celia about the lawn, making sharp indentations in the grass with her high heels, and that surely had been enough sacrifice to the pagan deities of the country. Tommy Bridges was indoors too: the rather irritating noise of a tune being picked out on the piano probably indicated his whereabouts. But it would never do to be irritated with anything that Tommy did nowadays, for he was blind. A noise of quarrelling voices mingled with the tune: Tommy and his nurse, or, to put it another way round, Jimmie and his nurse were at variance.

  “No. It’s a flat,” said Jimmie.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “But it’s written there. I can see it, and you can’t,” roared Jimmie.

  “If you weren’t a one-legged cripple,” said Tommy, “I would knock you down. There goes the music-book. Pick it up, swine!”

  Then followed loud laughter, and the resumption of the music-hall tune.... Celia knew that those two were “splendid” — there was really no other word for them — but she could not feel it: her head was aware of it, but not her heart One of them wore large black spectacles with wire at the side, like meat-safes. The other moved himself about in a bath-chair, the wheels of which he spun with amazing dexterity with one hand while he steered himself by means of a small front wheel with the other, and an apron was strapped across him to conceal the double amputation. Their very splendour got on her nerves, their bravery and cheerfulness made her wince. She could wholly admire this with her head, but she got no further than that. Sometimes Tommy’s spectacles fell off, sometimes the apron of Jimmie’s chair came unbuttoned, and she hated herself for hating it....

  Th
e noise was really rather intolerable; it was impossible to read, and presently Celia strolled away round the house to find some more sequestered study. Violet, who was nursing in the officers’ hospital at Matcham Place, would soon be here, for she had secured three days’ leave, after a long, strenuous spell of work, and was to spend them with Celia, or rather with Tommy, to whom she had been engaged just before he was wounded. Celia had scarcely seen Violet since then, for she herself had been almost entirely in town while the other had been nursing and she wanted a talk with her. She wanted to comprehend, for instance, how it was that Violet had seemed to have experienced a passionate access of devotion to her lover since his blindness: she had certainly been very fond of him before, but now her letters to Celia were intoxicated products. Could pity ever be distilled into such an elixir of love? No doubt pity was akin to love, but only a poor relation surely, not the head of the whole clan....

  The breeze that had been stirring the flag up at the hospital had now flowed down into the valley here, and it blew across Celia’s face as she stood at the end of the garden looking up towards the edge of the forest, spiced with the aroma of the heather-scent and the cocoa-nut sweetness of the gorse. There was a bank of the latter just across the road outside, where the open forest began, and she could hear the constant minute explosions of the seed-pods as the sun fired them. Spring had been cold and late, with snow at Easter, but May, a warm, belated month of spring had dropped down from heaven in a shower of golden days, and on its heels while yet spring lingered had followed the full luxuriance of summer. Never had the outward visible world shown so riotous an exuberance of blossoming life, and yet once again as Celia looked, she knew that she saw but with her eyes; she was aware, but she did not feel. There seemed to be a barred door between her brain and her heart: her intelligence, her perception knocked at it, but there came no answer.

  As she sat there, a realization of her own loneliness suddenly seethed round her, bubbling out of the consciousness of her emotional sterility. She had not the emptiness and ache which comes sometimes to those who have loved and suffered and whose sap has run dry; she had the sheer blankness of one who has never comprehended at all. For more than six months now she had lived with an adoring husband, whom she thoroughly liked, but who was no more than a sympathetic figure in a play which had never yet gripped her....

  This simile which had occurred to her as she stood looking out over the heathery upland, just fitted her essential emptiness. There were charming settings to the scenes: there were little side-issues that amused, interested and even for the time absorbed her: there were little humours of minor situations, occasional wit, pieces of neat dialogue in which she joined or to which she listened, but that which to her should have been the thread that bound all these fragments together, the plot round which they were grouped and to which they supplied decoration, namely, the fact of her married life, failed to reach her at all. Bernard, for instance, was coming down here this evening, and her heart went out not a single step to meet him on the way. It sat here in its cool cave, ready to regard him with kindliness when he appeared, and hoping, perhaps, that he would not make too many demands on it.

  It was indeed from that direction, if any, that danger threatened; his intense devotion to her was precisely that which taxed her most. In those six months she, with her quick perceptions and intelligent adaptability, had learned to speak a language of little signs and similes and phrases, which constituted for him a sweet and satisfying passivity that seemed to welcome and treasure his devotion. Never yet had she shown him one single gesture of impatience or irritability: she was like the blue-robed image of the Madonna whose smile was a miracle of divine tenderness to its worshipper. It would be an omission of great stupidity if she ever ceased to smile, and of really criminal idiocy, if instead of smiling she frowned. She felt reasonably convinced that she could always keep the smile going, but she did not conceal from herself that the thing had become an effort She had to be alert: it was something of a strain if she was alone with Bernard for long, and that situation she took pains to avoid. Originally, as regards this week end, he had suggested that he and she should be alone here, and she (in accordance with wisdom) had given a cordial welcome to his proposition.

  “Ah, you do think of nice things,” she had said. “That will be lovely. Put it down in your engagement book, Bernard, or you’ll forget, and ask somebody else as well, and I shall sulk.”

  His eye lit up: that kind of rejoinder, so easy to make, completely satisfied him: the Madonna even winked as well as smiled. But, without making any effort to get anybody else to break the projected solitude, she waited for something to turn up. Something always turned up if you waited. On this occasion Tommy’s release from hospital served her turn, and she went to Bernard again.

  “Darling, Tommy Bridges — that jolly blind boy — is just out of hospital,” she said, “and there’s Violet, you know, down at Matcham. She is getting a couple of days’ leave for that Sunday, which you and I had ear-marked just for ourselves. Tommy wants to get out of London, and... oh, my dear, isn’t it a bore? But I think it would be kind if I took Tommy’s extremely broad hint, and asked him and Violet down to Stonepitts.”

  Bernard hit the table with his fist “Certainly not,” he said. “We’re engaged. It’s an engagement to each other.”

  Celia gave a little sigh.

  “Very well,” she said. “That is clever of you. How lovely it will be. I will tell Tommy, shall I, that we want to be alone? I dare say Violet can get leave again soon.”

  He hesitated.

  “What a nuisance people are,” he said. “And what an infernal thing your beastly unselfishness is, Celia!”

  “Ah, but I’m going to be selfish for this Sunday,” said she. “I’ll put Tommy off somehow. I wish I lied better.”

  “What do you want to do?” he said.

  Celia raised her eyebrows, and up went the corners of her mouth.

  “I think I should be a little more comfortable if we let Tommy and Violet come,” she said....

  In London they were seldom alone, for Celia, with his eager encouragement, had blossomed into a great hostess. They had, on their return from a short honeymoon, moved from Bernard’s riverside residence into the big Georgian house, and the occupation of it implied a splendid hospitality. All the youth of town on leave from France congregated there, and evening after evening dances succeeded dinners. Abroad that spring, the fortunes of battle were critical, and like Queen Elizabeth in the time of the country’s peril, Celia acted on the “need for mirth in England now.” Anxious faces brought no help in time of stress, and it was a poor return for the gallantry and steadfastness of those in France, and on the other wide-flung battle fronts, if the gallant and the steadfast, in their few hours of release, found but gloom and pensiveness at home. Nor did she neglect the more solid side of hospitality: Bernard’s work at the Foreign Office, his knowledge of Eastern affairs were already making their mark, and the house, in the absence of official entertainment, was rapidly becoming a place of pleasant meeting for diplomatists and foreign visitors to London. She worked hard for Bernard’s interests, for she was certainly ambitious for him, attracting there those who would be of use to him, and those to whom his undoubted talents could be of use, in preparation for the peace-table. All that a clever woman of beauty and great tact and wealth could do, she did for him, and that was no small service, and yet, when she was busiest of all, when the length of a long dinner-table divided them, or when side by side at the head of the great stairs they received their guests, she had always a glance for him that told him of the other side of the moon, which was his — a whispered word or two in a pause, that made a wonder the more about her. Brighter than the winking splendour of her jewels were those “silent silver lights,” and even while the world chattered and danced round them, he “blessed himself with silence.”

  It was exactly this which she knew, and it was on this she traded. In the affairs of the world, in the posi
tion, in the cachet which she was already beginning to give his house, she worked hard and honourably: she fulfilled him, she raised his value in an extraordinary degree by the skill with which she made the house a centre not only of youth or gaiety, but of the interests which are ready to be attracted towards a man of brains and position and great wealth if he has by his side a woman who can appreciate their values, and be the hostess of a salon, rather than the maîtresse d’hôtel of a restaurant. Somehow, in spite of the supreme success of her mother as a maîtresse d’hôtel, Celia’s talents in her own line were not a matter of heredity. She aimed at something entirely different: her mother’s target was yards away from her own, and never did she shoot an arrow there. Mrs. Courthope owned the most charming social club in London: every one went there, and was vastly amused, and sat at ease, with a bell by his side, to order what he wanted. If he was of sufficient eminence, he could with perfect ease, and pleasure to his hostess, order the company he wanted as well. If a Cabinet Minister asked her if he might dine with her a week hence and meet a man or woman he wanted to see on neutral ground, he would be sure that Mrs. Courthope was delighted — literally delighted — to arrange that for him. But no one arranged her parties for Celia: she arranged them herself with a keen eye to Bernard.

  Here, then, was the essence of her trading. She paid him, in these public matters, the coinage that was of use to him in his career, knowing that her cleverness and her tact on his behalf would be construed by him into a personal tribute. As Cæsar’s wife, she gave tribute to Cæsar, not in her relation to him as wife, but in his relation to her as Cæsar. She meant to make a great man of him, in so far as that lay within her power, not because she was his wife but because he was her husband. Her brain, her faculties, her unerring flair were all at his service; she only withheld from him the love which she was incapable of giving, and for the sake of which he would have given up all that she might otherwise bring in.