Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He bounded up again, ecstatic at the granting of his petition.

  “To do?” he asked. “Dear young lady, you have only got to be. Be! Be just as you are now.” Again he supported his head on his hand, as when he gazed at the cartoon, and with the other shaded his eyes, staring at her in an embarrassing manner. He gave a gay yodelling cry.

  “I see it — I see it!” he announced. “My superb picture is already flaming in my brain. Madam” — he turned to Mrs. Wardour— “you shall have a masterpiece, and I, John Mainwaring, will have created it.”

  He took his hand from his forehead, and made a movement as if to cast something away.

  “Enough!” he said. “Let us descend to earth again. My angel, give us our tea. We are exhausted by our adventures.”

  Peter, so Silvia noticed, was looking at his father with eyebrows ever so little raised, as if in contemplation of some phenomenon that, however familiar, was still remarkable, and his lips were faintly smiling. When he turned to Silvia, as he now did, that expression still remained there, and she felt that, wordlessly, he had somehow taken her into his confidence. Certainly his father amused him; his raised eyebrows and half-smiling mouth told her that. And was there a touch of indulgent contempt in it?

  John Mainwaring continued to claim the attention of the little party in a boisterous rollicking fashion; it was like being out in a high wind, where shouting was the only means of communication. He assuaged the hunger which he confessed was prodigious, with incredible quantities of tea-cakes; he ate cherries backwards, beginning with the stem. He roared with laughter at his own jokes, he apologized for his boyishness, and whispered to Mrs. Wardour that he was “in for” a scolding afterwards from his wife for making such a noise.... And there, all the time, far more potently vital was Peter blowing off no steam like his father, but quietly, self-containedly reserving it. There was something inscrutable about that smooth handsome face, though now and then, as their eyes casually met, Silvia felt that she was looking into clear dark beckoning water, and if her eyes could not fathom it, that was no fault of his transparence, but only of her own purblind penetration.....

  Mr. Mainwaring was, just now, launched on a story, the very recollection of which made him laugh in anticipation of what was coming, and Silvia could let her eyes roam at will. She looked at her mother, at the narrator, at Mrs. Mainwaring, all in turn, in order, for the purposes of strict impartiality, to look at Peter as well. Mrs. Mainwaring with wifely and domestic devotion had managed to attach to her face some faint semblance of interest in the story, as if it were new to her. Then came Peter’s turn, and that handsome inscrutability suddenly seemed to Silvia to be like a reflecting surface, which, when you looked at it, showed you not itself, but presented your own image. She saw not at all how he stood to her, but how she stood to him. Her own subjective relation, the image of herself regarding him was flashed back at her. Looking at him, in some mysterious way, she saw herself. His dark clear water gave back to her her own soul.... She whisked her eyes away, forgetting the impartiality of her rotation, and found herself met by Mrs. Mainwaring. And there, so it seemed, she found comprehension of this bewildering impression. As regards Mrs. Mainwaring herself, the blind was still drawn, but from behind the blind Silvia heard inwardly and unmistakably that quiet, precise voice saying, “The girl’s in love with my Peter.” Mrs. Mainwaring, by some divination as mysterious as herself, was in possession of that; she and Silvia shared the secret knowledge. And then, before the girl’s eyes could shift themselves to Mr. Mainwaring, who, it seemed clear, from his thumping with his fist on the tea-table, was now at the climax of his narrative, there peeped out from his wife’s face that same secret malevolence, with which, as they left the studio, she had looked at the great work of art that hung there, while she admitted that her husband’s work kept him and her in London.

  The point of Mr. Mainwaring’s story entailed the use of the falsetto voice, and Peter at its conclusion got up on the pretext of handing cigarettes, and reseated himself next Silvia.

  “It is good of you,” he said.

  That was fragmentary enough, undetached from any context, but Silvia found herself understanding him perfectly.

  “My mother and Mr. Mainwaring arranged it,” she said. “I couldn’t very well say no, could I? Not that I wanted to; I don’t mean that.”

  “My father’s delighted,” said Peter.

  He paused a moment.

  “He’s in great form,” he added. “You’ve delighted him. Aren’t we a weird family?”

  There seemed no direct reply possible to this. Silvia could not imagine herself assenting, and it seemed banal as well as untrue to say, “No, you’re quite ordinary.” But she found herself not wanting and not even needing to reply at all. She wanted, and for that matter she needed no more than to have Peter there and be wonderfully happy. He shifted himself a little in his very low chair as he turned to get a match for his cigarette, and she again just found herself noticing little things about him. His fingers were very long and smooth, the nails very neatly sheathed in the skin that held them: they grew beautifully. Best of all was the short, closely-clipped hair which, when he bent his head forward towards the match, stopped just above his collar.

  “You needn’t answer that,” he said. “Tell me, instead, what you thought of the play last night. Are people sentimental — girls particularly — like that when they are really moved? I should have thought that emotion killed sentimentality. But it may be different in Scotland.”

  Peter, at the conclusion of this ridiculous speech, suddenly found himself in the dilemma of talking nonsense without the co-operation and backing of the person whom he was talking nonsense to. Silvia, at any rate, did not contribute any soap-bubbles of her own, and, quick to perceive that, he turned to his mother.

  “What sort of hotels are there in Scotland, mother?” he asked. “Oh, I must explain to Miss Wardour. My mother loves reading the advertisements of hotels in Bradshaw. It gives her the sense of travel, doesn’t it, mother?”

  He paused no more than infinitesimally and went on again in the same breath.

  “I love the sense of travel, too, and I got it by going to the Foreign Office. Guatemala has been my après-midi Silvia triumphantly applauded his quickness. She had seen on Mrs. Mainwaring’s face a protest at the invasion of her privacy; but Peter had done more than merely see it, he had slammed the door again with allusions to himself and Guatemala. That, somehow, a perception as quick as intuition, seemed to her extraordinarily characteristic of him. There was no stumbling, no hesitation, where she would have drawn attention to a similar mistake by a bungling silence. His mind was like the hair on his neck — abrupt and crisp.

  The ball was with Peter again.

  “I nearly fell asleep over Guatemala,” he said. “Surely Guatemala is very remote; there are many things more immediately interesting. Nellie’s wedding, by the way. It’s less than a week ahead, and every young man I know is buying new pocket-handkerchiefs to weep into. I’ve bought an extremely large one. There’ll be room for you to cry into one half of it, Miss Silvia, while I cry into the other. They promised to send it round on a hand trolley, like a sack of coals.”

  Silvia laughed.

  “Ah, I shall want some of that handkerchief,” she said, “but not to cry into, only to wave. She is going to be tremendously happy, isn’t she? What’s he like? I hardly know him.”

  Peter considered this.

  “He’s like — he’s like a very tidy room,” he said, “Solid furniture and not a speck of dust.”

  “And the person who sits in it?” asked the girl.

  “Nobody sits in it. At least I never found anyone there. Philip is the room. There’s The Times warmed and folded; there’s letter-paper, big and little, and envelopes, big and little. Perhaps Nellie has found someone there. Philip may get under the sofa when anybody else comes in.”

  “And she’s very much in love with him?” asked Silvia.

  “You ough
t to know. She takes you out to Richmond Park and sits on the grass with you all afternoon.”

  Silvia wrinkled up her eyes as if she were focusing that afternoon.

  “Nellie dazzles me,” she said. “She’s like the sun on water. I expect she’ll make his room, that tidy room, look lovely. But I shall never understand what Nellie does. I shall only understand the effect of what she has done. She has a spell. She makes you see what she has seen.”

  She was conscious now of receiving from Peter a more direct answer of eyes than she had ever done before. She knew they were talking about the same things now. They might, each of them, though they were talking of Nellie (superficially the same thing), have been regarding her, have been framing their remarks about her from different angles. Given that, as Silvia had said, she was a dazzle of sunlight as well, one of them, owing to the prismatic process, might have been seeing blue, another seeing yellow. But Peter’s answer convinced her that they were both seeing Nellie from the same standpoint.

  “That’s hit her,” he said. “Nellie says and does nothing trivial; one is continually discovering that. She waves her fingers, and she mutters, and then, afterwards, you find she has been making a spell. Isn’t she uncanny? Or she tells you something about yourself that you didn’t know, or scarcely knew, and you find that it is quite solidly true. Is she a witch, do you think?”

  Silvia leaned forward towards him. It was impossible not to “close up” with this.

  “That’s just what I said to her once,” she said. “I said that she was a witch. She told me something about myself that I never had known. It was true; it had been true all the time. But, literally, I had never had the smallest notion of it till she told me.” Indeed, as Silvia acknowledged to herself, the truth of what Nellie had said on that occasion was receiving a firm endorsement at this moment. Etched and bitten-in to her consciousness from the moment of that prophetic babbling had been the image of herself in love, singing, so Nellie had said, in a boy’s key; eager to be allowed to give homage rather than receive it; eager to be allowed to love rather than permitting love with whatever ardency of welcome. And here was Peter repeating on general grounds exactly what she had found, and in especial was finding now, to be magically true.

  “Since we both agree she is a witch,” said he, “we ought surely to collect evidence against her. What was it she said to you, that something unknown to you, which you found to be true when she said it?

  I have evidence also; she said something to me last night which I didn’t know, but which—”

  What went through his brain at that moment, with the sureness of a surgeon’s incision, was just that which Nellie had said when he told her that he was intending to ask Silvia to marry him. He had hedged that with the reservation that he would do so when he thought that he had a chance of success, and witch-like, with swift incontinent prophecy, she had told him that it was rather late already as regards to-night. The prophecy had been encouraging at the time, but not convincing. Now he suddenly felt himself convinced. Why or how — their conversation had only been about Nellie — he did not know. But it seemed that Nellie had penetrated where he had not....

  There was his father sitting on the sofa beside Mrs. Wardour; there was his mother veiled and shrouded from him as she had ever been, doing something with a teapot, doing something with crumbs left on plates, for which she made some concoction, placed in the balcony outside, for birds.... Had he been alone with Silvia, he would have proposed to her, fortified with Nellie’s encouragement, fortified even more by his present sense of its reliability, then and there. But unless he knelt on the floor to her, as he had found his father doing when he came in...

  “Oh, what did Nellie say to you last night?” asked the girl. “Let’s collect evidence, as you say.”

  “And have her burned outside St. Margaret’s, instead of letting her marry Philip inside?” suggested Peter.

  Silvia gave a parenthetic gasp.

  “I suggested that she ought to be burned, too,” she said. “More evidence, please.”

  Peter found her entrancing at that moment. There was some keen boyish kind of frank enthusiasm about her that attacked and challenged instead of merely provoking. She asked for no effort: you only had to allow yourself to be caught up.

  “But it’s your turn,” he said. “You first suggested that Nellie told you things you didn’t know.”

  “No; it was you who said that.”

  “It may have been; but it was you who suggested the witch-like quality. You said that she makes you see what she has seen. You know you did.”

  Silvia, ever so slightly, withdrew herself.

  “Did I?” she asked.

  “Of course you did. Now do be fair. You began, and therefore it’s your turn to bring out the first piece of evidence. It was in Richmond Park, you know, and she told you something about yourself which you didn’t know.”

  Peter put his hand in some judicial manner through that short crisp hair above his neck.

  “I am prepared to hear your evidence,” he said. “You’re on oath. Get on, Miss Silvia. Don’t keep the court waiting.”

  Silvia shot a chance arrow.

  “If I promise to tell you,” she said, “will you promise to tell me your evidence?”

  Peter laughed.

  “I think we’re both better at cross-examination than at confession,” he remarked.

  “Oh, but that’s no answer,” she said.

  “I know it isn’t. It wasn’t meant to be.”

  “Then be serious. Will you tell me your evidence against Nellie in her character of a witch?”

  Peter, quite clearly, let his eyes rest on the other occupants of the room. One by one he looked at them.

  “No!” he said. “I suppose the trial is adjourned owing to the inexplicable coyness of the witnesses. So there we are. Nellie will marry her Philip without a stain on her blessed character.”

  In his glance round the room Peter had observed that Mrs. Wardour was trying to catch Silvia’s eyes. She would certainly succeed in doing so before long, and then, as her custom was, she would make some faint little clucking noises, like a hen that mildly wants to be let out. She was incapable of going away, however much she wanted to do so, unless Silvia took the initiative. She clucked, and then Silvia said that it was time to go....

  But Peter did not want Silvia to go just yet; on the other hand, if they were all to sit here until the clucking became perceptible to Silvia, their visitors might just as well, for any practical purpose, go away at once. Besides, it was impossible to forget that Nellie last night had prophesied, and it had struck another as well as himself, that she was a reliable seer.

  He got up rather slowly, rather tentatively, and fixed in his mind was the idea that Silvia would make some sort of initial step. It seemed to him that they were both hand in hand: it was just a question of who lifted a foot first....

  Silvia did not turn her head to look at her mother. If she had, she would have been bound to attend to the duckings; but what she wanted, more precisely what she needed, was to get away from a masked fire of elderly eyes and, with Peter of course, just to be natural. There was smouldering in this room some ember of supervision; she felt herself (and him) under a magnifying glass being looked at, being noted, being examined. It would answer her need perfectly well to go with him on to the balcony outside the room, to see if the evening was likely to be fine, to be sure that the motor was waiting.... Here, there was Mr. Mainwaring visualizing her portrait; worse than that, here was the more gimlet-like attention of his wife, who, ostensibly, was making a sloppy saucer of food for the London sparrows. Certainly she would sooner go out on the balcony alone than remain here, but when she thought of that it did not in the least satisfy her. After all, she did not want to “sit out” alone. What girl would want that? But she wanted to sit out.... There was no sort of embarrassment in her voice when she spoke to Peter.

  “May we go down to your father’s studio again?” she asked. “I
haven’t seen all I wanted to.”

  Surely his glance met hers with a comprehension that seemed immeasurably marvellous.

  “Yes; do come down,” he said The clucking became inarticulate.

  “We ought to be going, Silvia,” said her mother.

  Peter took this up.

  “Oh, you must give Miss Silvia five minutes, Mrs. Wardour,” he said. “It’s only fair that she should know the sort of thing that father’s going to make of her.”

  Mr. Mainwaring gave a great shout of laughter.

  “The impertinence of youth!” he cried. “Peter, I disown you. I would cut you off with a shilling if I had one!”

  The two went down the stairs in silence. In silence also they came into the studio. The huge cartoon filled up one end of it; on the other three sides was the stacked débris from the attics; landscapes and portraits and sketches littered the tables.

  “That’s rather jolly,” said Peter, pointing to one at random. “And, O Lord, my father has brought out a thing he did of me last year. Rather like a hair-dresser.”

  “Not a bit,” said Silvia. “But it’s very like you.”

  Peter wheeled about and faced her.

  “Evidence!” he said. “Do you know what Nellie said to me last night? Of course you don’t, but I’ll tell you now. We were talking about you. She said — she encouraged me to think I had a chance—”

  Silvia stood stock still, every fibre of her stiff and arrested.

  “About you. A chance,” said Peter again. “Is it true? Was she right? Was she being a witch?”

  Silvia had been looking at him when this spell of stillness struck her. Now her eyelids fluttered and drooped, then once more she looked at him as steadily as before.

  “All true,” she said. “And Nellie told me something. She said that when I loved anybody, I — I should love just as I love now. Just as I love now, Peter.”

  CHAPTER VIII