Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “You know the real name of this delicious house, darling,” Nellie had said. “Everyone calls it the New Jerusalem, because its gates are never shut day or night. Your mother brings light into the darkest homes of the upper classes. There’s such dreadful discontent among them: if it wasn’t for people — angels — like your mother, they would all go and live in converted garages or in country cottages, and pretend to be the proletariat. It’s being amused and entertained that keeps the upper class together; otherwise they would be the leaders of Bolshevism. The Order of the British Empire now! Why isn’t she the only Dame in it? The stability of the upper class depends on her, and the King depends on the upper class, and the Empire, in fact, if you see what I mean. I’m not quite sure that I do, but I do mean something. We should all have groaned and grumbled if your mother hadn’t set such a brilliant example.”

  With Nellie’s brilliant presence and charm to help out this engaging nonsense, it was a cheerful scintillation. Last June, so Silvia told herself, she would vastly have enjoyed such a month as she had just spent, and Nellie’s résumé of it made her wonder whether she — only she — had been dull and unappreciative....

  The snow was driven against the glass which Wilton had put up: she could hear it softly tap at the window....

  “And Peter!” Nellie had said. “What have you done to him, darling, or rather what haven’t you done to him? Everybody — I think I told you so once — used to be devoted to Peter: we used all to be in love with him, for he was so priceless, so marvellous, in not caring one atom for anybody. How long did it take you, do tell me, to discover his heart? Did you mine for it, and dredge for it, and blow up all the rocks round it? Or did you get an aeroplane and fly up to it Perhaps, after all, it was in the sky — so tremendously remote that nobody ever thought of looking for it there. You and Peter, up in the blue like the queen bee and her lover! How wildly romantic! Or were you there, and did he fly up to you? You met in the blue, anyhow, and left us all staring up after you till our eyes watered with the glare.”

  Silvia, as the car hooted its way through Kingston, did not concern herself to recall with what small accompaniment she had sustained those arpeggios. She must have said something, for Nellie had gone on talking, talking.... Silvia had blinked before that brilliant vitality, which so decorated all that lay under its beams; but for the first time, when she spoke like that about herself and Peter, the light hurt her. It dazzled rather than illuminated, and when it fell on certain dark places it did not illuminate them, it only showed up their blackness. She, with Nellie’s light, Nellie’s impressions, to help her, peered into them. Such glimpses as she caught between the dazzle and the darkness made her turn away with protest against this bull’s-eye that now seemed to intrude on privacy. What, after all, had her relations with Peter to do with Nellie?

  The streets were slippery with the newly-fallen snow, and at some corner, while they were still passing through houses, there was a furious hooting of the horn outside, which to Silvia at that moment was not so much a warning of danger ahead on the road, as of danger lying somewhere deep within herself. They came to a dead stop, which made Wilton scream faintly and clutch the jewel-case, and for a yard or two they did backwards. All that, too, seemed instantly translated in her mind into interior action, and, keeping pace with it, she slid a little farther back in her journey of thought.

  She brought out from the locked cupboard of her very soul, where she had turned the key on it, one particular moment. It was yesterday that she had put it there. She was in a room of a house in Welbeck Street, and at the end of the consultation the great man, jovial and kindly, had got up from his chair, and smoothed the pillow of a sofa on which she had lain just before.

  “Be quite active,” Dr. Symes summed up, “without overtiring yourself. Appetite good? That’s all right. Just go on with your ordinary life. What? No: no doubt of any kind. Your husband well? A cold? Everyone’s got a cold.”

  Silvia paused over that while a wheel of the car slipped or skidded. Soon it hit the ground again. But in that pause she faced the fact that she had not told Peter. She meant to last night, but — but... He had bewailed his cold: he had accepted her proposal that he should stop in London to-night. He had waved his hand at her and left her, not kissing her for fear of giving her his cold. But that was not the reason — it was only the excuse — for not telling him. She had welcomed it, at the time, as an adequate excuse; but if she had not found any such, she would have done without it.

  For a second or two her thought paused, merely contemplating this fact as if looking at some picture. It seemed quite incredible that she had not gone straight to him with her news, blurted it, whispered it, kissed him with it. Yet if he had been sitting here now instead of Wilton, in this privacy of snow and twilight-travel, she knew that she would again be struggling, and in vain, to tell him.

  From that point she swept back to one morning in October. It was then that some seed of knowledge which had previously lain dormant in her soul began to sprout. For two months now she had been conscious of its growth, and for two months she had steadily refused to acknowledge it. HER relations with him had been of the most normal and friendly, but the fact, as she saw now, of his content and tranquillity was sunshine and rain to the growth of it. Then, at the news Dr. Symes had given her, it burst into bitter blossom, and she could ignore it no longer.

  Peter had never loved her: he had never, in finding her, lost himself. Mentally and sympathetically she knew that he liked her — liked her, she was prepared to say, immensely; physically she attracted and satisfied him. To think that he had married her “for” her money would be an exaggerated and hysterical estimate; her wealth had not been a counterweight that overcame some opposing disadvantage, but it was, so she now believed, a determining factor. Without it he would not have sought her.

  It seemed odd to herself how little that mattered. Her wealth was an advantage — so, too, was her beauty; and even if he had married her “for” her wealth, that would have seemed to her no worse than if he had married her “for” her beauty, or “for” (had she been witty) her wit, or “for” any quality whatsoever of mind or body. All these were advantages, pleasant circumstances; but all of them, singly or together, compared with love, were no more than the bright shells on the seashore compared with the sea.

  It was just here that she blamed him with a bitterness that appalled her; it was this that had made it possible for her to accept any excuse (or if necessary to have done without one) for not telling him what she had learned yesterday. He had bidden her shut her eyes, and picking up a shell had held it to her ear, and had told her that what she heard there was the sea.... He had looked, he had spoken, he had acted as if he brought close to her that splendid shining vastness. She had trusted him, and had listened with all the rapture of love to that murmuring. Therein he had cheated her, passed off on her a “fake” which, had she not been blinded by his hand over her eyes, he knew she must have recognised as such.

  There was just one excuse for him; she hesitated to adopt it, because while it excused him, it far more terribly accused him. It was that he did not know what love meant. From the very first, from the day when he had asked her to marry him, he had not known. She had told him that all she wanted in the world was to be allowed to love him, and he had never seen that her surrender presupposed his own. He could not burn in her love without being alight himself. There was the root of it all, his ignorance.

  At that, compassion deep as love itself inundated her bitterness, not diluting it, but from its very nature neutralizing it. Sorrow was there, but “without sorrow” (who had said that?) “none liveth in love.” Not as by one drop out of the whole ocean was her love for him diminished; but, while he did not understand, he ploughed his way in drought and desert: he could not reach her.

  It was through his constant affection for her and his gentleness, rather than through any failure in these, that the realization of this had come to her. She did not believe that she
wearied him; she knew that she attracted him physically, that he was faithful to her not on principle, but by inclination, and yet all this was nothing. He had not begun (say for a minute or two) by loving her, and then dropped into mere affection, mere desire: simply he had never loved her at all as she understood loving. He did not love anybody else, and Silvia, so far from being consoled by that thought, found herself passionately wishing that he did. He might love Nellie, or that fool of a woman who screamed; for then, at any rate, he would know what love meant, and they would have common ground to meet on, though that very ground parted them. That might ruin her own life, which already she had given into his cool, careful hands; and if only, by smashing it to atoms, he could find his soul’s salvation!

  There were problems ahead, and how they should be solved she did not know: she only knew what the upshot must be. Inconceivably dear as the mere touch of his hand was to her, she knew that never again, unless he learned what love was, or she forgot it, could hand clasp hand and mouth meet mouth. Not again could she give him those symbols of the infinite as the playthings for enjoyment. All that she had or was, was his except just that; unless he loved her, the banners of her love must remain unfurled. Somehow she must let him know that, just as, somehow and soon, she must let him know about what she learned yesterday.

  As the car turned in through the park gates the snow beat in from the other window. It fell unheeded on her face and hands, till Wilton, encouraged to take care of her, drew up the sash.

  Peter’s head on her shoulder, his breath coming soft and slow through his mouth.... Peter’s eyes close to hers, so that if he winked his eyelashes brushed her cheek.... Peter’s arm lying languid and relaxed across her bosom.... She would give her body to be burned for him, but not with such burning as this. Anyone, not she alone, could supply such need as his; none could supply hers but he, and he only if he loved her. Loving him as she did, she could not (so the leaping firelight in her bedroom that night illuminated it for her), she could not shut out her ideal in some burning chamber of its own, and take the rest of her, in ordinary human manner, to him, nor could she take from him, even though it was the highest he could give, anything that made its approach on some other plane. He must want her as she wanted him, surrendered and lost, and found again in a new completeness, before they could come together as lovers. She conjectured that she was singular, exceptional in this: most men, most women gave what they could and got what they could. But there was no compromise possible for her that could produce this easily negotiable felicity. She could not, and if she could she would not, have accepted that in exchange for this drawn sword that lay between Peter and her. She had to tell him that.... She had to tell him also that the fruit of love on the one side, of affection on the other, was ripening. She must wait her occasion for that; some moment must be seized upon when he was most himself, most nearly, that is to say, what she had once thought him.

  She had nothing of her own; all was his. That was her one inestimable possession, that she had given him all. Whatever happened, her utter penury was the one thing she must cling to.

  Peter had rung up Dr. Symes before he left the Foreign Office that evening, asking for five minutes of his time at any hour of morning or afternoon next day. Perhaps it was rather fussy to consult a physician over a cold, but really there never had been such a cold. Dr. Symes gave you a cabalistic slip of paper which, being duly interpreted, proved to be some marvellous tonic stuff, or, when he had felt a pulse, and looked at a tongue, and tapped you on a stomach or made your knee jump in a curious manner, he even more probably told you that you had the constitution of an armadillo, and roared you out of his room for wasting his time. With a week of uncles and aunts ahead, even though Nellie was to partake in the secret joys of them, Peter felt he would like some robust reassurance of that sort. Or, on the other hand, since there never was such a cold —

  These speculations, as he drove to Welbeck Street next morning, were cut short by his arrival and his internment in a waiting-room. There were several persons with sad faces there, reading illustrated papers, who looked up when he entered, and thereafter regarded him with evident suspicion, fearing, so Peter figured it, that he might, though the latest arrival, be summoned before those who had waited longer. This, in fact, happened, and to the accompaniment of sour looks he was conducted down a long passage into the consulting room. As he went he considered whether he slept well, and whether he had a feeling of oppression on his chest, or a pain in his right side.

  “How-de-do?” said Dr. Symes. “I’ve managed to squeeze you in between two of my patients, and I can give you just a couple of minutes, which will be quite enough. Naturally you wanted to see me. Well, there’s nothing that should give you a moment’s anxiety at present. Don’t think about it at all, and don’t let your wife think you’re thinking about it.”

  He turned backwards over the leaves of his engagement book.

  “Yes, as you know, I saw her the day before yesterday,” he said. “All healthy and normal. But don’t be fussed yourself, and certainly spare her all fuss. Of course, as I told her, there’s no doubt at all. Let her — if she doesn’t want to make her — lead an ordinary active, normal life.”

  Peter had arrived by this time.

  “My wife?” he asked.

  Dr. Symes gave his great rollicking laugh.

  “Yes, and your grandmother, too, for that matter,” he said. “Don’t let her confuse child-bearing with invalidism. They’re radically opposed. Mind you, the way she spends these months is important. Make her go out, make her keep busy and employed. Don’t let her get fancies into her head that she must coddle herself; there’s no greater mistake.”

  “I see,” said Peter.

  “Just use your common sense,” said the doctor. “She’s got to bear a healthy child, and so she’s got to be just as fit as we can make her. But take care of her too. What’s her age now? Twenty-two, I suppose. Well, regard her as a woman of forty in robust health. Make her behave like an older woman than she is.”

  He rang a bell that stood on his table.

  “I’ve told you everything,” he said. “You look fit enough, anyway, though you’ve got a bit of a cold, haven’t you? Getting down into the country for Christmas, eh? Change of air. I wish I was going to get some.”

  He looked at his table of appointments.

  “Ask Mrs. Lucas to step this way,” he said to the maid. “Good-bye. Good luck.”

  As Peter drove down to Whitehall he kept detached, as by some dexterous jerk, such part of his mind as dealed in emotion, and contemplated with the same isolation, as through his closed car-window he looked out on the snow-slushy street, what he had just learned. He wanted to assimilate it before in any sense he studied it, and to do that he had first to wipe off his sheer surprise, which stood like condensed vapour on the glass of this astounding picture which had just been presented to him. Again and again he had to wipe that away before he could get any dear vision of the fact itself, that Silvia knew that she was with child and had not told him. When he had assimilated that he could perhaps arrive at what it meant.

  The glass was clear now; he had got it, and the enigma of it all stared him in the face; and the more he contemplated it the greater grew his bewilderment as to the meaning of it. How often, with the hesitation of an intensity that choked utterance, had she said a word or two, given him a glance, a smile that conveyed better than any stamped symbol of speech, what the incarnation of their union, his and hers, would be to her. She had wondered how, just how, she would tell him; no one knew into what shapes such joy would crystallize. And now it had come and she had not told him at all. Except for a trivial visit of his own, a superficial, unnecessary visit, he would still be ignorant. She had chosen to leave him in ignorance of what he had learned by accident.

  Nellie had often told him that he went walking in the wet woods and telling nobody, and Silvia, in some frank chaffing discussion, had affirmed that she knew precisely what Nellie meant. Certainl
y, thought Peter now, it was likely enough she did know. Had anyone ever gone solitary so far into the wet woods as Silvia? Had anyone ever so immeasurably told nobody?

  He searched back through his impressions and memories of these last two months to see if he could discover any clue that should lead him to an interpretation. As far as he knew their relations had been uniformly harmonious, without hitch or check; there had been so sign, no warning of any sort on her part of an emotional change. As for himself —

  Yes, there had been a change. A change was here, and as it was not in her it must be in him. Some psychical pigment, grain after grain, had been dropping, continually dropping, into his clean cup of life, each sinking down into it quietly, lying there at the bottom. Now it seemed that the astonishment of this morning’s discovery had violently stirred up the whole, and the whole, so he saw, was tinged with the colour of that which had been dissolving in the cool depths. For often and often, increasingly and ever more vividly — here was the dropping of those grains of colour — he had had the image of Silvia moving splendidly on sunny heights, the rays from which shone down on him through rent clouds and patches of blue. There those grains had settled, dissolving perhaps, but only locally tinging minute remote areas of his consciousness: they had not affected the full contents of the cup, that clear, cool, untroubled self of his. Now with this rough shaking and stirring, he was suffused with the colour of them. There, high above, was Silvia and her splendour, felt now, not only recognized. He had scrambled to his feet (was that it?), stung into standing, finger on mouth, instead of remotely contemplating. The ray that had merely shone on him now shone in him, and its light pierced the fogs of his egoism. It was the news itself, beyond doubt, not Silvia’s withholding of it, which gave him that enlightenment, for to his feminine nature the fact of his impending fatherhood struck more intimately than it would have done on one more virile. It evoked, too, a dormant virility; his fatherhood was the sequel of another relationship. Clearer shone the ray; he must climb, he must go to her, he must give....