Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He thought of Vincent with a curious indifference; he did not appear like a dynamic factor at all, but was a mere wheel driven by another force. Bernard looked on him as having no volition in the matter, and not for a moment did he believe that he had made love to Celia. He had but stood there, boisterous and cynical and greedy of life, without a heartache in the world or the sense of need that makes a man dynamic. He felt as completely sure of this as he did of Celia’s integrity. He had absolutely no fear, no suspicion on these points; the situation and its hopelessness did not lie there, but in the fact that the woman he adored was his wife.

  The wind had fallen, and no longer hooted in the open chimney, as Bernard sat making this almost emotionless review, and the soft patter of the snow against the window had ceased. There had been a very heavy fall, and it was possible that Celia, who had intended to go up to town next day, would be obliged to stop until the roads had been cleared. She had been a week here now, and he had seen day after day how her father, with his restless exaltation and alternating depression, and his own companionship no less, were getting on her nerves. In consequence he had urged her to go back to town, saying that he himself would stop here for a few days longer, and he had met with a merely conventional opposition, which soon broke down and showed beyond all possibility of misconception how great was her relief at the idea of getting away. She tried to suppress it, but it leaked out. Then this snowstorm had come, and no less clearly had he seen her spirits sink again at the thought of postponement. There seemed the apex of his misery — that he, the devotion of whose body and soul was as utterly hers as ever, could serve her in no other way than by urging her to leave him, and must watch her disappointment when there was a fear of her being prevented from so doing.

  The fire had died down, and he went upstairs to the room he occupied next Celia’s, observing, as he felt for the electric switch, that there was a line of light below the door which opened into her room. It occurred to him that she might have fallen asleep leaving her light, still burning, for it must now be not less than three hours since she had gone to bed, and while he hesitated as to whether he should go in and extinguish it for her, he heard his name called.

  She was sitting up in bed; a book unopened lay by her, her eyes were bright and wakeful. She gave him that smile which had always contained for him sweet secret meanings to be interpreted by the lore of his own love.

  “My dear, how late you are!” she said. “Working all this time?”

  “Most of it. You are late, too, in going to sleep.” She indicated the side of her bed to him, and with a weakness irresistibly strong he sat down there.

  “Yes, I couldn’t sleep. I have been thinking what an utterly selfish brute I am, and I want to tell you that I know it.”

  “My dear, what’s all this about?” stud he.

  “It’s about my going away and leaving you here with Daddy,” she said. “I won’t go: I shall stop here. It would be too ugly if I went.”

  He smiled at her: clearly it was but the ungraceful, the unlovely aspect of selfishness that struck her.

  “I think you had better consent to be ugly,” he said, “if the snow doesn’t prevent you, and — and make you beautiful.”

  “But the contrast between you and me is so hopelessly to my disadvantage,” she said. “You are being ideally beautiful: I am being hideous.”

  She drew her bed-coverings higher up round her, shivering a little.

  “I am serious,” she said. “I want to tell you that I know I am ugly, that I know you are beautiful Your patience and gentleness with Daddy are exquisite. You mustn’t think I don’t appreciate it. I am not so hideous as that.”

  There was to him a nightmare side in all this: a sense of hidden horror. Celia lay there, half reclined, her hands behind her plaited hair, soft and, young and utterly adorable, while in her slow, husky voice she made this confession of her hideousness. He knew, as well as she, what and where was the underlying canker: the real hideousness was that she, thinking all the time of one man, should cloak that to her husband, who sat there on her bed in the silent hour, in these tawdry disguises of the perception of her selfishness over this matter of whether she stayed here with him or went back to London. She was not bewailing her real self, she was bewailing no more than the unbecoming aspect of the dress she had on, her shoes, her hat. They were ugly, that was quite true; she was loading him with a task that really belonged to her, and he took it, as she very well knew, as an easy yoke, a burden that was light because of his love for her. Had she loved him she might, without any hideousness at all, have told him that she would be glad of an escape. As it was, she was taking without giving, accusing herself of a superficial ugliness, while she concealed the radical disease which but lightly disfigured the surface. There was the real malady: of that she did not speak, unknowing that he had probed there already and knew.... Did not his heart know?

  “So I won’t go,” she said. “I can’t leave it all to you, for that would be hateful of me. Oh, Bernard, can’t I do something to my beastly nature? All the time that I say these things — and they are quite genuine — I think to myself that it would be splendid of me to stop with you. I pat myself on the back for determining to do so. Isn’t it horrible? And even worse than that is the knowledge that perhaps the thought of you here, being kind and patient and loving, would spoil my pleasure in getting away. I shall have deserted you.”

  He was silent a moment.

  “When did you think of all these things?” he said.

  “Since I came up to bed. I have been lying here, cursing and scolding myself. My nerves are all to bits for some reason. I hate being unreal and ugly. What’s to be done?”

  Again he was silent, conscious only of an overmastering longing that Celia should tell him where the real trouble lay. He would have welcomed nothing from her lips so much as the sheer confession that she did not love him. That would have shown a trust in him that he knew he merited. If she owed nothing else to him, she owed him that. She was not so bankrupt that she could not pay this bitter dividend.... And there all the time waiting for her were the uncountable riches of love.

  Once she drew a quick breath, opened her mouth as if to speak, and he waited with that patience which alone is immeasurable, for it springs from the infinite sources. Then, when it was dear that she would go no deeper than that, he came up to her level again.

  “It’s just because your nerves are all to bits that you make such mountains out of molehills,” he said. “What are we talking about, after all? Merely whether you will go to London to-morrow or wait for three days. What does it matter?”

  “You know it matters,” said she. “My going and my stopping are symbols. The meaning of an act.... What we do is nothing in comparison with what we mean by it.”

  “But, my dear, you made up your mind to go,” said he. “Your relief was unmistakable when we settled that. And your anxiety about the snow stopping you was equally clear. Nothing has occurred since that to alter your mind.”

  Internally his soul cried out to her: “Only tell me that you love him! Only tell me that you have never loved me at all!” But it cried to emptiness; not an echo answered it.

  “But something has occurred,” she said. “My perception of you has had... has had a jolt. I want, I want... oh, do you know Blake’s picture of the poor little people putting a ladder up to the moon, and saying, ‘I want: I want!’ So hopeless, so pathetic!”

  Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

  “The detestable thing I am!” she said. “And,. all the time, there’s your ladder put up towards me. Oh, I know that, and I want to go climbing, too, out of the muck.... I don’t think you realize that. You don’t think I want... the dust; the ignoble crawling there! Why haven’t I got wings, instead of being made to crawl? Has it ever struck you how I envy you?”

  Her self-control gave way altogether, and she smothered her face in her hands.

  “The bitter night,” she sobbed, “and the darkness and the
snow. No, don’t touch me: you can’t reach me. Please go, Bernard. Just leave me alone. I mean it.”

  There was no mistaking the sincerity of that, and he left her.

  Morning revealed the sheer impossibility of getting to the station at all, so thickly lay the drifts on the sunken road below the forest. During the day communication was re-established between the house and the village, and in the afternoon Bernard floundered there with his packet for the Foreign Office, to find that the morning train from town had only just got in, but that the line was now clear, and that his parcel would arrive in London next morning. The letters and papers that should have been delivered early that day had not yet reached the village, but should be sent on when they arrived. Probably they would not get through to him till next morning, but if he expected anything urgent an effort would be made. There was no need for that, and he set out again on his return.

  All day no word of private import had passed between him and Celia. She was utterly dumb on the subject of that strange, unreal midnight talk, in which, as it seemed to her now, they had both trafficked in shadows, keeping the substance locked up behind strong doors of silence, and she avoided being left alone with him by an assiduous attention to her father. The pointedness of that was unmistakable, the reason of it was divisable into two contradictory explanations. She might, on the one hand, be bringing herself up to the difficult point of further utterance, or she might be regretting that she had said so much. Either of these was consistent with her reticence to-day, and whichever it was, he could do no more than hold himself open to her, ready when she sought him. But something had broken in her last night: some partition-wall had given way. She had cloaked the aperture, hanging up that unexplained distress as concealment, but the breach was there....

  Bernard felt desperately tired, with a fatigue that came from within, and not from this laborious trudging through the high-piled drifts, nor yet from the fact that he had hardly slept that night. His fatigue, reflecting itself in his wearied steps and in his eyes, which longed for sleep, came from some much deeper source than the mere physical machine which ploughed its way along the familiar road where once he had passed in the winged chariot. Of all his returns to Stonepitts, one stood out from the rest, when, at the end of his two months in Greece, he had come back on the heels of his telegram to Celia. It was then that the first touch of frost, which now chilled him to the heart, had met him. He had wanned himself again at his own fire, but now, though his own fire burned as consumingly as ever, there were these drifts of snow around it. They wore powerless to put the fire out, but they enveloped it with the loneliness of a polar night: it burned and none warmed herself thereat. And all the time she shivered in that cold of the snow, longing for warmth. “Come, come!” he cried to her....

  Symbols: she had spoken of symbols last night, and he knew what lay below that word of hers. Only lately he had sent the head from London down hare, and it presided on the pedestal that stood in the hall, a tutelary deity to whom under an image his whole self was dedicated. She had said when first she saw it that it mocked. To-day he wondered if it mocked....

  Confused and confusing, even as these pallid snowdrifts, his thoughts, fatigued and insensitive, poured out their burden. The knowledge that she was suffering and bewildered made the worst part of his trouble, and even while he told himself that he would do anything to heal that, his personal bitterness surged back on him. In its very nature it was corrosive, and with all his power he resisted it, burning it with fire, washing it off with the pure waters. It was no more her fault that she did not love him than it was his that he loved her. He could judge, from his own consciousness, the inevitableness of it all. And all the time she wanted, with an honesty he could not doubt, to get away from her desire, to turn it round, to make a ladder of it, climbing, climbing....

  A self-abasement, sudden as some crash out of the sky, took possession of him. She wanted to climb to him... to him down there below. Her will reached out towards him, groping with blind hands....

  Sunset had come and darkness was falling fast when he passed up the avenue of firs towards the house. But the snow-clouds had discharged themselves and only thin vapours lingered, through which the faint starlight of a moonless night made a wan macabre glimmer on the drifts and the laden trees. The bitter cold that had preceded the fall had lost its rigour, and now and then some branch weighed down by the snow slipped from its burden and sprang upwards again. Then, turning the corner, he came within sight of the front of the house, where the windows were shuttered and curtained and no gleam welcomed him. In a moment now the door would have closed on his entry, and the long evening lay in front of the three of them. There would be picquet with Philip, and dissertations on the correct manner of play, and Celia would watch them a little, and then betake herself to a book, muffled as she had been all day underneath the trouble that lay thick and heavy over her.

  Celia looked up from the game of draughts in which she and her father were engaged as he entered, but said nothing and moved her piece.

  “Ha! I huff you!” said Philip delightedly. “That was a trap.”

  “Letters and papers haven’t come yet,” said Bernard. “We shall get them in the morning.”

  “I think the fall is over,” said she. “It is warmer, too. Will you ring the bell, Bernard, and we will have tea.”

  She passed her hand down the leg of his knickerbockers.

  “My dear, you are soaked,” she said. “Do go and change.”

  She met his eyes for a moment, and it seemed to him that something beckoned to him, that something struggled to reach him. But instantly it withdrew again, hiding itself, sinking into the drift from which it had momentarily emerged.

  “Yes, I will go,” he said, and went to the door, conscious all the time that Celia’s eyes followed him, that she was sitting tense and upright in her chair as if to rise and go with him. But again, when he looked round, she turned to the game again.

  “A crown, Daddy,” she said. “Give me a crown.”

  All evening the same impression was there. Once she followed Bernard into his room to tell him that the doctor who was looking after her father had been that afternoon while he was out, and had been astonished at the improvement in him. This modified form of rest-cure was evidently answering very well; he thought they might look forward to a speedy recovery. Certainly this good news would amply account for her coming to tell it to her husband, but even then he felt that there was something else which she had come to say, but which she could not say. Then for each of them there was a visit to the nursery, and dinner — a loquacious, elderly man, his daughter and his son-in-law, with conversation on the merest topics of the day, wearing a little thin, since the same trio had discussed them before. There was nothing that all the world might not have heard, nothing that ever so faintly indicated that below, and so little below, the aspect of humdrum, well-bred prosperity, there were yearnings and regrets and a hopelessness that touched despair. Then once again the crackle and glow of the wood fire, and picquet, and a peep through the shutters at bedtime to see that the snow had not begun again.

  To-night Celia was the first to go.

  “I’m dropping with sleep, Daddy,” she said. “I shall not wait for you.”

  “How’s that? Didn’t you sleep well last night?”

  “Only fairly. It will be different to-night. Are you going to sit up working, Bernard?”

  “For an hour perhaps. Good-night.”

  She paused by his side, and he looked up from his cards again.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Do you want to speak to me?”

  “No. I was only looking at your hand. Goodnight.”

  The letters and papers of two days came through next morning while Celia and her husband were at breakfast. There were some half-dozen for her, and she glanced at the envelopes, selecting one with a censor’s label and an Italian stamp to read first.

  “From Vincent,” she said rather deliberately as she opened it.

>   Bernard had left his letters unopened and had unfolded the copy of The Times which should have arrived yesterday.

  “Any news?” he asked. “Is he in Rome?”

  “No; he writes from Taranto: he is taking ship there for Athens.”

  Bernard had opened his paper at the middle page and a headline caught his eye.

  “Does he say what ship he is going in?” he asked. As he spoke, he put down the paper he had just opened and took up that of this morning. Celia turned over the page.

  “What ship?” she asked. “The Tunis.”

  Bernard searched in the second paper for a certain paragraph. He found it, and, getting up, came round the table to Celia.

  “I have very bad news for you,” he said. As he spoke he laid his hand on her shoulder, and she, with a movement sweet to him because it was purely instinctive, closed her own over it. Security, protection was there....

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “Yesterday’s Times gives a telegram that the Tunis has been torpedoed by a submarine,” he said. “Only a very few were saved; there is the list in to-day’s paper. He is not among them.”

  Celia got up.

  “I see,” she said, letting slip the protecting hand. “I’ll — I’ll go to my room, I think.”