by E. F. Benson
There had been a general air of fatigued reaction abroad this evening. Mrs. Wardour, Silvia, and Nellie had gone to bed within a couple of hours of the termination of dinner, and he and his father had had but a short séance in the billiard-room before parting. Peter had an excuse for his early dispersal, for he must be at Whitehall by ten o’clock to-morrow morning, to deal with accumulations.
Yes; when that lump of coal collapsed he would go to Silvia. Sleepily he watched it, trying in some ill-defined manner to abstract himself from agitating thought, to give himself a rest before he plunged into some sort of breaking waves. He drowsed for a little, and, still looking at his fire between half-closed lids, he fell fast asleep.
The fire had gone out except for a glimmer of dying embers, and for the moment of bewildered awakening before he realized that he was still in his armchair in front of the grate he thought that he was back in his old room, and that the chimney was smoking. As he came to himself, he realized where he was, and even more keenly realized why his mind had caught hold of that idea of the smoking chimney. There was a strong smell of smoke in the room, and, jumping up, he turned on the switch of the electric light, which was close to his hand. He heard it click, but there was no illumination in answer. He had matches in his pocket, and, lighting one, kindled one of the candles that stood on the mantelpiece. Wide awake now, he was more than ever conscious of that smell of burning, and going to the door he opened it. A great swirl of smoke came in, bellying up from the main staircase on the left. Through it there came the noise of crackling wood, and a shoot of veiled flame.
Peter gripped his own mind. On his right, close at hand, were the rooms where his father and Nellie slept. Farther along to the right was a second staircase, communicating with the ground floor, and communicating also with the servants’ wing. Half shutting his eyes against the sting of the smoke, he groped his way first to Nellie’s door.
“Nellie,” he cried, throwing it open, “get up at once: there’s a fire in the house.”
He never felt more completely himself; all his brain was tingling awake, and behind his brain something else... As she started up in bed, he lit her candle for her, for here too the wires were fused.
“Don’t wait a moment,” he said. “Get along the passage and down the stairs. I’ll send my father to you.”
He saw her on her way and plunged into his father’s room.
“House on fire, father,” he said. “Go straight through to your right into the servants’ wing, and bang on every door. Wake Mrs. Wardour, two doors away. Then join Nellie downstairs. Don’t wait: I don’t know how serious it is.”
Away to the left, beyond the column of smoke and flame now pouring up the main staircase, was the baize door behind which were the rooms which he and Silvia had occupied, and where now she was alone. He tried to dash along the corridor to reach them, but the heat drove him back. Already tongues and swords of flame licked through the bannisters of the main staircase, past which he had to go in order to get to her. He was cut off from that access.
Suddenly and serenely he remembered another access. Along the front of the house below the windows of the room he at present occupied and those rooms behind the baize door beyond the flaming staircase, there ran externally the cornice which had reminded him of that which ran along the flat belonging to Nellie’s mother in London. He remembered in the same flash the discussion that Nellie and he had held: how she had told him that, if he ever loved, he would be forced to make the passage of such a road at the bidding of that divine compulsion. It would not concern him, so she had said, that he incurred a mortal and a useless risk. He might not be able to rescue (here was the thesis) the beloved of his soul. Any thought of rescue was outside the question. But, so she argued, he would not be able, if he loved, to resist the imperishable impulse.
Through the thick scorching air, with his candle guttering in the heat, he groped his way back to his room, and shutting the door against that burning blast, he went to the window. The gleam of the white stone cornice was just visible, and taking of his coat and waistcoat, so as to be able to get closer to the wall, and kicking off his shoes, so as to secure a better grip, he let himself down on to it. There it was some ten or twelve inches in width; by standing very straight up, with his arms flat out against the wall of the house, he had his balance well below him.
He moved his left foot first and brought the right foot up to it. He rocked for a moment at this first movement, and recovered himself.... And then when once he had started on his perilous way, the dawn and morning of it all broke on him. Cautiously and clingingly he advanced, but the caution — there was the sunlight of it — was no longer for himself, but for her whom he sought. For himself it seemed to matter not at all whether a step terminated his expedition: the object of it, the necessity, sheer as the drop below him, of reaching Silvia was utterly dominant. From outside now he could hear a dim roaring inside the house, but it neither delayed nor hastened him.
He had come to the window of her room, and now he could lean an elbow on the sill of it, while he rattled at the sash and tapped at the glass. Through her blind he saw her room spring into light, and found himself recording the fact that this electric circuit was still working. Immediately he heard her voice:
“Who is it?” she cried. “What is it?”
“Peter,” he said. “Open the window quickly.
The sash flew up, and she was there, close to him. “Give me a hand, darling,” he said. “Just pull me in. Don’t ask any questions.”
The window-sill was high above the cornice, but with her hands, firm and strong as a boy’s, on his arm, he scrambled into the room.
“The house is on fire,” he said. “We’re cut off. The main staircase is blazing. But it will be all right: don’t be frightened. My father will have roused the servants by now.”
He paused, panting from some retarded terror of his climb, unfelt while he made it.
“Silvia!” he said.
She stared at him a moment.
“But you were safe, Peter,” she said. “What good, was it that you came? Along that cornice, did you come, all the way from your room?”
“I’m here anyhow; good, broad cornice,” he said. “Now, can we do anything more? Let’s be practical: let’s think.”
For an immortal second she held him close.
“The big bell in the turret!’ she said. “The rope goes through the corner of the little lobby outside my bathroom.”
“Oh, good thought,” said he. “Come and help me to pull it. We’ll talk afterwards, when we’ve done all we can.”
The sound of that reached the little town a mile away; the glare on the sky endorsed the signal. Outside on the terrace, facing the lake, and now vividly illuminated, were the other occupants from the house, busy with rescuings, and presently, shouted up to the two through the open window by which Peter had climbed in, came the news, conveyed here by telephone, that the fire-engines were on their way. A ladder was being fetched from the stables.... Had they no rope?... Then, as the conflagration spread, the electric light snapped itself out.
They had gone back, when the bell had done its work, to Silvia’s room. The angry glare from outside shone in through the window, and smoke drifted in from below and around the baize door that shut them off the burning corridor. Already the fog of it obscured the glare.
“That’s all we can do,” said Peter. “Come close, my dear. You mustn’t be afraid. There’s no need.... We—”
She was clinging to him now.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
“You needn’t,” said he quickly. “I know it.”
“You can’t,” said Silvia.
“But I do: your baby you mean, bless you.” Suddenly her mouth began to quiver.
“Oh, my God, why did you come here?” she said. “You were safe.”
Outside beyond the baize door there was a crash of something falling, and she shrank into him. “Why did you come?” she repeated.
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“Because I couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t my fault. You don’t understand—”
“You had to, do you mean?” she asked.
He made no reply to this: his presence answered for him.
“Oh, go back,” she cried. “You can go back still. If you love me—”
He took her close into one great enfoldment.
The roaring of the burning house, the glare of its great beacon, grew momentarily more vivid. Then from outside came a yell of voices, and they went to the window.
“They’ve come,” said Peter, quietly.
A grinding of the gravel below, shouted orders, a raising of a ladder....
THE END
PAYING GUESTS
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER I
Bolton Spa, justly famous for the infamous savour of the waters which so magically get rid of painful deposits in the joints and muscles of the lame and the halt, and for the remedial rasp of its saline baths in which the same patients are pickled daily to their great relief, had been crammed all the summer, and the proprietors of its hotels and boarding houses had been proving that for them at least rheumatism and its kindred afflictions had a silver if not a golden lining. Never had Wentworth and Balmoral and Blenheim and Belvoir entertained so continuous a complement of paying guests, and even now, though the year had wheeled into mid-October, and the full season was long past, Mrs. Oxney was still booking rooms for fresh arrivals at Wentworth during the next two months. In fact she did not know when she would get off on her holiday, and as long as this prosperous tide continued to flow, she cared very little whether she got off at all. Though she did not want money, she liked it, and though she liked a holiday, she did not want it.
The existence, or rather the names, of Balmoral, Blenheim and Belvoir was a slight but standing grievance with Mrs. Oxney, the sort of grievance which occasionally kept her awake for half an hour should it perch in her drowsy consciousness as she composed herself to sleep and begin pecking at her mind. ‘For naturally,’ so she thought to herself in these infrequent vigils, ‘if a lady or gentleman was thinking of coming to Bolton Spa, and wanted comfort and, I may say, luxury when they are taking their cure, they would look at the Baths Guide-book, and imagine that Balmoral and Blenheim and Belvoir and Wentworth were all much of a muchness. And then if they chose any of the others they would find themselves in a wretched little gimcrack semi-detached villa down in the hollow, with only one bathroom and that charged extra, and the enamel all off, and cold supper on Sunday and nobody dressing for dinner. Not that it’s illegal to call yourself Balmoral, far from it; for there is nothing to prevent you calling your house “Boiled Rabbit” or “Castor Oil,” but those who haven’t got big houses ought to have enough proper feeling not to mis-call them by big names.’
Mrs. Oxney’s grievance was as well founded as most little vexations of the kind, for certainly Wentworth was a very different class of house from Balmoral and Blenheim and Belvoir, which, though it might possibly be libellous to call them gimcrack, could not be described as other than semi-detached. There could not be any divergence of opinion over that point or over the singleness of their bathrooms and the cold supper on Sunday. Wentworth, on the other hand, was so entirely and magnificently detached that nobody would dream of calling it detached at all: you might as well call a ship at sea detached. The nearest house to it was at least a hundred yards away, and on all sides but one more like a quarter of a mile, and the whole of that territory was ‘grounds.’ It had gardens (kitchen and flower) it had tennis courts (hard and soft) a croquet-lawn (hard or soft according to the state of the weather) and a large field in which Colonel Chase had induced Mrs. Oxney to make five widely sundered putting-greens, one in each corner and one in the middle, like the five of diamonds. The variety of holes therefore was immense, for you could play from any one hole to any other hole, and thus make a round of twenty holes, a total unrivalled by any championship course, which, so the Colonel told Mrs. Oxney, had never more than eighteen. As for bathrooms, Wentworth already had twice as many as any of the semi-detached villas with those magnificent but deceptive names, and Mrs. Oxney was intending to put in a third, while in contrast with their paltry cold supper on Sunday, the guests at Wentworth enjoyed on that day a dinner of peculiar profusion and delicacy, for there was a savoury as well as a sweet, and dessert. All these points of superiority made it a bitter thought that visitors could be so ill-informed as to class Wentworth with establishments of similar title.
But throughout this summer Mrs. Oxney had seldom brooded over this possible misconception, for, as she was saying to her sister as they sat out under the cedar by the croquet-lawn, she asked nothing more than to have Wentworth permanently full. She was a tall grey-haired woman, who, as a girl, with a mop of black hair, a quick beady eye, and a long nose had been remarkably like a crow. But now the black hair had turned a most becoming grey, the beady eye was alive with kindliness, and the long nose was rendered less beak-like by the filling out of her face. From her mouth, when she talked to her guests came a perennial stream of tactful observations, and she presented to the world a very comely and amiable appearance. Her sister, Amy Bertram, who, like herself, was a widow, and ran the house in rather subordinate partnership with her, was still crow-like, but, unlike Mrs. Oxney, had a remarkable capacity for seeing the dark side of every situation, and for suitably croaking over it.
She shook her head over Margaret’s contented retrospect.
“Things may not be so bad just for the moment,” she said, “and as most of the rooms are engaged up till Christmas, we may get through this year all right. But we must be prepared to be very empty from then onwards, for a good season like this is always followed by a very empty one. How we shall manage to get through the spring is more than I can tell you: don’t ask me. And I do hope, Margaret, that you’ll think twice before putting in that extra bathroom. It will be a great expense, and you must reckon on spending double the estimate.”
“Nonsense, my dear,” said Margaret. “They’ve contracted for a fixed sum — and high enough too — for doing everything down to a hot towel-rail, and they’ve got to carry it out.”
Amy shook her head again.
“Then you’ll find, if you keep them to the contract there’ll be bad workmanship somewhere. I know what plumbers are. The taps will leak, and the towel-rail be cold. Besides I can’t think what you want with a third bathroom. It seems to me that it’s just to humour Colonel Chase who would like one nearer his bedroom. I’m sure the other bathrooms are hardly used at all as it is. Most of our guests don’t want a bath if after breakfast they are going to soak for a quarter of an hour down at the establishment. I shouldn’t dream of putting another in. And Miss Howard is sure to make a fuss if there’s hammering and workmen going on all day and night next her room.”
Mrs. Oxney felt this point was worth considering, for though it was worth while to please Colonel Chase, it was certainly not worth while to displease Miss Howard. These two were not guests who came for a three weeks’ cure and were gone again, but practically permanent inmates of Wentworth, who had lived here for more than a year, and when their interests conflicted, it was necessary to be wary.
“I’m sure I don’t want to fuss Miss Howard,” she said, “though I don’t know how I can get out of it now. I’ve promised the Colonel, that there shall be a new bathroom put in, and I let him choose that white tile-paper—”
Amy gave a short hollow croak.
“That’s the most expensive of all the patterns,” she said.
“And lasts the longer,” said Mrs. Oxney. “But it might be as well to put it off till after Christmas, for Miss Howard is sure to go down to Torquay for a
couple of weeks then, and it could be done in her absence.”
“As like as not she won’t be able to get away,” said Mrs. Bertram, “for if the coal-strike goes on, the railways will all have stopped long before that. I saw a leader in the paper about it this morning, which said there wasn’t a ray of hope on the whole horizon. Not a ray. And the whole horizon. Indeed I don’t know what we shall do as soon as the cold weather begins, as it’s bound to do soon, for after a warm autumn there’s always a severe winter. How we shall keep a fire going for the kitchen I can’t imagine: I could wish there weren’t so many rooms booked up till Christmas. And as for hot water for the baths—”
“Oh, that’s coke,” said Mrs. Oxney. “As soon as we start the central heating, it and the bath water are run by the same furnace. You know that quite well, so where’s the use of saying that? There’s plenty of coke. You just try to get into the coke-cellar, and shut the door behind you. You couldn’t do it.”
