Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  But if he came in now — he might or might not — : she knew that to-night she would be involved, so to speak, with him; his character, the essence of him, as exhibited in such account as he might give her of the interview with his father, would come like a cloud or a brightness that would obstruct this purely spectator-like view of him. He would not only be the clean, lithe animal, which, for these few minutes, she could look at without passion, without love, without friendship even, and be absorbed in the mere joy that there should be in this world so young and wild and perfect a creature....

  There came his knock, and the usual inquiry, and he entered while her maid, with chaste, averted face, rustled out, not waiting to be dismissed, through the other door. He sat down in the big low chair by her dressing-table.

  “Oh, the simplest pleasures are so much the best,” he said. “Just washing, you know, just being hungry and sleepy. I never enjoy a play or a book or a joke nearly so well as a bath and food and getting my head well down into the pillow. But I hate sponges. Why should I scrub my nose with a piece of dead seaweed?”

  Listen as she might, with all the delicacy of divination that love had given to her ear, she could find in his voice no inflection, no hesitation, nor, on the other hand, any glibness (as of a lesson learned and faultlessly repeated) that showed that he was speaking otherwise than completely naturally. The topics of bath and dinner and bed came to his lips with quite spontaneous fluency, as if he had not in this last hour been the bearer: to his father of a tragic situation — one that, at least, must wound the vanity which was so predominant a passion in him. Or had Mr. Mainwaring taken it with the same ruthlessness, the same cynical amusement as Peter had appeared to? Silvia could not believe that: he must have been hurt, been astounded. But why, in pity’s name, did not Peter tell her about that interview? He must have known how she longed to be told, whether there was good or bad to tell....

  “A revolving brush covered with wash-leather,” continued Peter, “like a small boxing glove. You would cover it with soap and work it with your foot. But a sponge! Odious in texture, dull in colour, and full of horrible dark holes which probably contain the pincers of defunct crabs and the fins of dead fish.... Oh, by the way, I quite forgot! I did really, darling; I was thinking so much about substitutes for sponges.”

  Silvia could not doubt the sincerity of this: he had been thinking about sponges; there was the full statement of the case. And with his acknowledgment of that, his mere physical presence, the mere glamour of his radiant animalism, which, after all, was part of his essence and his charm, captured her again, whisking away for the moment all possibility of criticism, or of wishing that he could be other than he was. She knew that her misgivings — they amounted to that — would come flooding back, but just for the moment they were like some remote line of the low tide, lying miles away across shining levels.

  “Oh, Peter,” she cried, “if you can design a small revolving wash-leather boxing-glove to use for a sponge, I’ll promise to have it made for you. But you must explain just how it’s to work....”

  She broke off.

  “And about your father?” she said.

  “Yes, I was just going to tell you when you interrupted about the sponge-plan,” said he. “By the way, I’ll draw you the revolving boxing-glove. A foot-pedal below — below, mind — the water, so that your foot doesn’t get cold. And, of course, you hold the socket of the boxing-glove — the wrist, so to speak — in your hand, and it goes buzzing round as you work with your foot, and you apply it, well soaped, to your face. No more dead seaweed and lobster claws! My father now!”

  Peter gathered up his knees in his arms, and sat there nursing them. His dressing-gown had fallen off his shoulder; he looked like some domesticated Satyr, wild with the knowledge of the woodland, but tamed to this sojourn — enforced or voluntary — in human habitations.

  “I went to him, as you told me to do,” he began.

  Silvia interrupted him. She wanted him to do himself justice.

  “No, my dear; you went quite of your own accord,” she said. “I never urged you.”

  Peter’s eyelids hovered and fell and raised themselves again. Often and often had Silvia noticed that shade of gesture on Nellie’s face; but never, so it struck her, had she seen a man do just that. The gesture seemed to imply acquiescence without consent.

  “Well, I went anyhow,” he said. “I tapped on his door, and as there was no answer I went in. He was standing in front of that big Italian mirror in — well, in an attitude. He is intending to paint his own portrait, when he has finished that daub of you.”

  Silvia leaned forward towards him.

  “Oh, don’t talk like that!” she said. “Don’t be ironical — not that quite: don’t feel ironical.”

  Peter turned on her a face of mild, injured innocence.

  “I was telling you the bald facts,” he said.

  “The balder the better,” said she.

  “I told him I had read my mother’s letter,” he continued, “and that there was news in it which he had better know at once. I got him to sit down, and I got hold of his hand. And then I told him just the fact that she had gone away.”

  Peter shifted himself a little further back in his chair and drew his legs more closely towards him, so that his chin rested on the plateau of his knees.

  “I am not being ironical,” he said. “I am trying to tell you precisely what happened. He made a noise — a gurgle, I think I should call it — and he asked who the damned villain was with whom she had gone. And, to be quite bald, that seemed to me to be unreal I said that there wasn’t any damned villain, and that she had gone just because she felt she must be free. He wanted to see the letter, and I told him that I had torn it up. Then he began throwing his hair-brushes and dress-clothes into a bag, in order to start off and look for her, and asked me where she was. When I told him that I hadn’t the slightest idea, he accused me of collusion with her. I merely denied that, and said that her letter was as great a surprise to me as it was to him.”

  Peter threw away the end of his cigarette.

  “Then he began to guess why she had gone. Now the point of my tearing up my mother’s letter was that he shouldn’t know, wasn’t it, darling?”

  Silvia heard herself assent. There was a sickness of the heart coming over her, something too subtle for her to diagnose as yet.

  “So he began to guess,” continued Peter, “and as he tried to guess I was sorry for him — really sorry, you understand?”

  Silvia’s heart began to thrive again.

  “Yes, yes; I knew you would be!” she cried.

  “He soon hit on the reason,” said Peter quietly. “There could only have been one reason, so he thought, and it filled him with the utmost remorse. He had been too big for her, that was what it came to — too great. He had not, in the exaltation of his art — this is quite what he said — remembered the limitations of — of the rest of us. She had fainted before the furnace of his genius. It was all his fault: he hadn’t made allowance for the prodigious strain on her — for the effects, cumulative no doubt, of the high pressure. He strode about the room, he knocked over a chair—”

  Some fierce antagonism to his narrative blazed up in Silvia. She had wanted the facts, and here they were, but she had not allowed for the baldness of their presentation, though she had asked for it, “Ah, don’t talk like that, Peter,” she said. “You’re not a newspaper reporter.”

  Peter gave no reply at all. There he sat with his chin on his knees, quite silent.... If Silvia chose to speak to him like that it was clear that she must either go on or draw back; anyhow, the next word was with her. But all the time that he thus tacitly insisted on his rights, resenting what she had said, there was within him some little focus of light breaking through from her sunlit altitudes that illumined and justified her protest. Good Lord, wasn’t she right? Wasn’t his sentiment towards his father immeasurably ignoble compared to the comprehension of her love? And that very fact — his
own unavowable condemnation of himself, that is to say — irritated him. If she was like that there was no use in his continuing his story.

  Silvia spoke first. Humanely, she could not bear this silence in which Peter seemed to mock her, but divinely she must be ever so humble... Humble? How love sanctified humility and transformed it into an ineffable pride! She pushed back her chair and knelt by his. She longed to unclasp the brown lean hands that enclosed him in himself and make them embrace her also. But that might annoy Peter: there was a suggestion of “claiming” him about it. She did not want to claim him.

  “I don’t know why I spoke like that,” she said. “I asked you what happened, and you are telling me. Will you forgive me and go on?”

  Peter had never seemed so remote from her as then. In the frantic telegraphy of her spirit, which seemed to be sending all the love that the waves of ether would bear, there came no response from him, in spite of his answer, “I never heard such nonsense,” he said. “We should be a pretty pair if we had to forgive. How silly — you know it — to ask me to forgive you.”

  “Show you do, by going on,” she said.

  It was clear to him that what she wanted was to know not his father’s part in this interview, but his own. Whether she liked it or not, he was going to be perfectly honest about it.

  “When he knocked over a chair and strode about,” he repeated, “and found out the reason for my mother’s going away, I began to be less sorry for him. He enjoyed himself: it was all a tribute to his impossible greatness. From then onwards I acted, because he was acting. The alternative was to tell him that my mother simply found his egoism intolerable. That wouldn’t have done any good, so I agreed with him: that was the best thing to do. He is in despair, a rather luxurious despair. I had either to explode that or let him enjoy it. So it was no use being sorry for him any longer.”

  Silvia broke out again; it was her love for Peter that spoke.

  “My dear, you ought to have been a million times sorrier,” she cried. “If he had been just simply broken-hearted about it, it would have been so much better. Can’t you see that? Can you help feeling it?”

  She was shedding the gleam on him.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “But I’m tolling you what happened. I was less sorry for him when he began to console himself. I suppose I’m made like that.”

  Silvia bit her lip.

  “Indeed you are not,” she said. “You’re making yourself out to be hard and unloving.”

  At the moment the clang of the dinner-bell from the turret just above Silvia’s room broke in.... The whole neighbourhood must know when the family at Howes were warned that it was time to dress, and that three-quarters of an hour later it was time to dine. Peter, on the first evenings he had spent here with Silvia, had asked whether, like a Court Circular, such publicity need be given to their domestic affairs; but Silvia, confessing herself sentimental, had told him that her father had delighted in the installation of that sonorous announcement. The brazen proclamation “hurt” nobody, and “Daddy liked it.”... Certainly it served a purpose now, and Peter jumped up.

  “Lord, there’s dinner!” he said. “And I haven’t begun to dress. My father, by the way, wants to dine upstairs. Will you tell them, as you are so much more advanced than I, to send up his dinner? I must fly.”

  Peter stood for a moment looking at her. If a situation between them had not actually laid hold of them, it had thrown a shadow over them, and he wanted to get out into sunlight again.

  “Ah, you darling!” he said with a blend of envy and of admiration somewhere gushing up. Envy at her immense nobility — he could think of no other, word for it — and admiration at that shrine of love which rose from the ground of her heart. It was so beautiful an edifice: he despaired of being worthy of it, and at times, so he confessed to himself, he wearied of its white stainless purity.... Somehow this evening there seemed to have opened a little crack on its soaring vault, which he must mend somehow.

  “Give me a kiss, then,” he said.

  CHAPTER XI

  PETER, though he often hung a veil over the real workings and processes of his mind for the benefit and admiration of others, before whom he was anxious to present a charming appearance, was honest with himself, and found, during the next fortnight, without any desire to dissimulate, that he was distinctly grateful to Silvia’s insistence that he should not resign his place in the Foreign Office, for in the present conditions and environments at Howes, it was certainly preferable to spend the solidity of the day in London rather than enjoy uninterrupted leisure at home. Even then the evenings were full of crashes and crises and intolerable ludicrousness....

  His father, who still majestically occupied the state-rooms (and showed no indications of vacating them) moved along peaks and summits of the ridiculous, which his son really believed had never before been trodden by foot of man. That he was enjoying himself immensely Peter made no doubt whatever, living as he did on the heights of egoism, and free to indulge in the most extravagant exhibition of it. His standard (victoriously raised), his principle, his determination (announced with magnificent gestures once if not more, during the evening) was that he would remain rock-like and immovable, fulfilling the destiny of his own supreme will, whatever bombs Fate might choose to drop on him. That his whole soul was bitter with remorse for his failings and failures he did not deny. He should not have isolated himself, as he had done, in the supernal realms of Art; he should have remembered that he was a man as well as an artist, and had a wife as well as the celestial mistress of his soul. He ought to have been kinder, more tender, more indulgent to the frailty and the weakness of his Carissima. But remorse (so waved his standard), if it was the genuine article, must express itself not in idle repinings, but in a manful facing of the consequences of past error. His remorse (the right kind of remorse) did not weaken, but strengthened a man to go forward. He must not lose touch with the joy of life; he must not get from the severe spanking that remorse gave him only a smarting and a humiliation of the flesh. He must draw the lesson from his punishment, and proceed more tenderly but not less sublimely than before....

  It must not be supposed that Mr. Mainwaring used such expressions as “spanking” in actual speech, or that the ironical account of his sublimity, as given above, was verbally his. But such, anyhow, was the manner in which these great tirades, delivered to Peter when he went up to see his father on his daily arrival at Howes an hour or so before dinner, impressed themselves on his mind. Usually there was a note for him on the table in the hall, which ran something like this:

  “MY PETER, — I am very low and despondent tonight, and I do not know if I can face a sociable evening. Come up to see me, my dear, for you are the only link which is left to me of those happy — far too happy — years, and see if your sweet spirit will not, like David playing before Saul, exorcise the demons of remorse and regret which shriek and gibber round the head of your unhappy father. I have tried so hard — ah, so hard — all day not to make myself a burden and a shadow to your dear ones, but I fear I have acquitted myself very ill. Come and cheer me up, Peter.”

  Peter, to do him justice, always went, and in the majesty of egoism, his father, without any encouragement at all, would talk himself into a splendid courage. At whatever cost to himself, at whatever effort from worn and debilitated nerve-strings, he would show that there was some music yet left in him. He would twang his mental guitar, arid if the frayed string snapped — well, his lawyer would know that his affairs were in order.... Then, sooner or later, to Peter’s great relief, the sonorous dressing-bell would ring, and he could go and have his bath. As likely as not, before he definitely quitted the room, his father would allude to the magnificent 1896 port which formed so admirable a feature in the cellars of Howes.