Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Have I made it poetical?” she said. “How dear of you to think that! I painted it as I felt it was. And I didn’t feel the station, so I left it out.”

  “You made a perfect poem of it,” said Florence. “You always put yourself into your sketches. Oh, the station. May we pop in for a moment, as we’re so close and then I can find out about poor Papa’s train. How I hate trains that go away from Bolton while you are here. But perhaps, who knows—”

  She broke off.

  “Why do you stop?” said Alice. “Oh I guess! What you were going to say concerns the plan. Doesn’t it now?”

  But Flo was just as obstinate as ever, and Alice again pretended to be cross, and wouldn’t let O. F. take her arm, and was very cold and polite. Indeed there was quite a quarrel for exactly two minutes, at the end of which obstinate Flo admitted that she had stopped because what she was going to say did concern the plan in a sort of a way, but that it would be very mean of Alice to try to guess it. So Alice relented, and said she would not bully her any more, and they skipped and sang again. Then, going into the station they found that a portion of the 11.35 train went to Bournemouth every day, without any changing just as it had done for the last ten or twelve years, so that Mr. Kemp need never have gone up to London at all. They tripped back to Wentworth, where Colonel Chase was getting quite anxious about Miss Howard being out so late, but appeared not to care at all how late Miss Kemp was out.

  Her father had gone to his room where he was resting after the visit of his masseur. He gave her one glance, and then in dead silence continued his search in Bradshaw. The silence, rightly considered, was a chorus of reproaches.

  “You need not bother about that train any more,” she said. “I went to the station and found out about it. It leaves here at 11.35 and there’s a through carriage to Bournemouth.”

  His sombre face brightened.

  “That is good news,” he said. “But are you quite certain? Who told you?”

  “The station-master.”

  He handed her the open Bradshaw.

  “He ought to be reliable,” he said. “But my mind would be easier if I saw it confirmed in Bradshaw.”

  “But you found it there yourself,” said she.

  “I certainly thought I did. But it is very mysterious that I could not find it again. Take the book carefully and don’t drop it this time, and go on, please from the page at which it is open. My eyes are aching sadly, and I had no tea to speak of. Is it a new train?”

  “No; it’s been running for years.”

  “You mean to say that we might have gone by it last year and the year before, and have saved me all the agitation and fatigue of crossing London?”

  “Yes,” said Florence.

  Mr. Kemp felt justly indignant.

  “I do not expect much from you, Florence,” he said, “and if I did, I shouldn’t get it. But considering my condition, my utter helplessness, I do think you might have taken the trouble to find this out before. You would have saved me much. Last year I remember, it was a full week before I recovered from the fatigue of the journey. But I make no complaints. And is there a luncheon car on the train, or shall I have to take my lunch with me?”

  “I didn’t ask,” said Florence. “There is plenty of time to find out. You are not going till the day after tomorrow week.”

  “A rusk, please,” he said. “I had no tea. I am surprised you did not think of ascertaining that. These rusks are not quite fresh. No crispness . . . Florence, I am not sure, but I think my knee is moving a shade more easily. Do you consider that is the effect, if I am right about it, of Mind or massage?”

  “Perhaps a little of both,” said Florence cautiously. “Mind may be doing it, and massage helping you to believe it, or it may be the other way round. They seem to go together in Mrs. Bliss’s case.”

  Mr. Kemp closed his eyes for a moment. His masseur had already been treating him, so now it was Mind’s turn.

  “Yes, I think they do,” he said, “so why shouldn’t they go together in my case? Let me see: Mind denies evil, pain: there is no pain in Mind, there is no Mind in pain. Mind is all, all is Mind. Hence there is no pain. . . . Certainly Mrs. Bliss’s improvement has been marvellous. I am not sure that I should like to progress quite so quickly as that, for I should be afraid that something else was developing. But I feel sure that I have been on the up-grade this last week, though it would be more satisfactory if I knew exactly what caused it. I could then have more Mind or more massage accordingly. I think that at Bournemouth I shall have no massage at all for a week but work at Mind, and note very carefully if any change takes place.”

  He thought over this, still muttering incantations, then he shook his head.

  “Even then it will be very difficult to be certain,” he said. “If there is improvement, it may only be the after effect of Bolton. Or indeed, if I seem to be worse, that may be after effect. The first week after the cure is over is sometimes very discouraging. I do not know what to do.”

  Florence had been turning over the pages of Bradshaw. At this moment she found the long-sought train.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “And there’s an asterisk opposite it which means luncheon car.”

  Mr. Kemp gave a sigh of relief.

  “That’s a great weight off my mind,” he said. “I was almost beginning to fear I had had a hallucination and that the train did not exist. I ought to have trusted Mrs. Bliss who told us she knew all would be well. You had better go to the station again tomorrow and see about engaging a place in the luncheon car. It would never do to leave that to chance, for if the luncheon car happened to be full when we joined the train, it would be no better than if there was none at all. Get one of those tables for two. They give more room than two places at a table for four. And you never know who may be next you.”

  Florence turned down the corner of the page, for her father would certainly want to verify this all over again for himself, and, reinforcing her courage with the thought of Alice, divulged the plan.

  “I’m going to make a proposal to you, Papa,” she said, “which I think may surprise you a good deal.”

  “Then I beg you will not,” said Mr. Kemp nervously. “A surprise always means something unpleasant and agitating.”

  “It needn’t agitate you at all,” said Florence, “if you just keep calm, and talk it over quietly. I don’t believe you will find it unpleasant.”

  He clenched his hands tightly.

  “Make haste then,” he said hoarsely. “Suspense as you ought to know, wears me out more than anything.”

  “I don’t want to come to Bournemouth with you,” said Florence. “I want you to take a nurse instead. A nice one who would be a companion to you as well.”

  Mr. Kemp shut his eyes. Some idea of invoking Mind occurred to him, but he knew he could not manage it.

  “Quite impossible,” he said.

  “No, not at all impossible,” said Florence. “She would look after you much more skilfully than I can and she would have nothing else to do.”

  “But you have nothing else to do,” said he.

  “We won’t argue about that,” she said. “But I really believe a good nurse would suit you much better than I do. I think you would soon find yourself much more comfortable.”

  He opened his eyes again: Florence was speaking in a calm confident voice which impressed him.

  “Do you really think I should?” he asked.

  “I think it is quite worth trying.”

  He felt he could now summon Mind to his aid. Naturally, if he would really be more comfortable, Florence’s idea was not impossible at all: it was, on the contrary highly likely. And if the nurse did not suit him, Florence could come back at once. But there were other things to be considered too.

  “But then there is the expense,” he said. “I should have to pay her wages, should I not, and there’s her keep as well. That will be a great drain. You have your own money to pay for your keep, as your poor dear mother left you ha
lf her fortune. I should be very poor indeed if I had to pay for a nurse: indeed I don’t think I could do it. Of course, if you think that I should be more comfortable with a nurse, we must consider it very carefully, but we must not let the idea run away with us, and not consider the expense.”

  “I will help you with that,” said Florence.

  “Well, that is very generous of you, though perhaps it is no more than fair, considering how your poor mother left her fortune. By the way, what will you do with yourself?”

  “I should stop on here for a little,” said she, “and then very likely I should go to live in my flat in Kensington Square. There are a couple of servants there all the time and we’ve not been there for more than a few weeks during this last year. Let us try my plan. I don’t mean to cut myself off from you at all: I will come down to Bournemouth when you are there, and often pay you visits in your hotels. But I want to have some sort of life of my own.”

  Mr. Kemp suddenly remembered he had not been pathetic, for his brain had been entirely occupied in trying to picture all that this change would mean. Of course a trained nurse would listen to the recital of his symptoms with much more perception and insight than poor Florence: if he felt that tiresome numbness in his right arm she would be able to reassure with real authority that it was not the approach of general paralysis, whereas Florence could only recommend him to think about something else. And she had no true understanding of his endless symptoms: her robust uninteresting health did not realise the many possible significances of a pain in his left side or a throbbing in his throat. But she must not imagine that he was not deeply hurt at her proposed desertion of him. Desertion: that was the keynote.

  “You have wounded me,” he said. “I had thought that you and I were so happy together, and that you felt it to be a privilege to minister to the needs of your crippled old father. It would not have been for long: I know that my life hangs by a thread. But I was wrong: you want to be quit of me, before my death releases you.”

  Florence got up. She knew quite well what she was about.

  “If you feel like that, Papa,” she said, “I give up the idea altogether. We go to Bournemouth together the day after to-morrow week by the luncheon car train. I will see to the seats.”

  Mr. Kemp saw he had gone too far. The notion of a pleasant nurse, to whose maintenance Florence contributed had begun to assume attractive colours in his mind. He visualised a comprehending woman, who entered into his sufferings and who would bring novelty into Buxton and Bath. Dear Florence often bored him: she listened in a most perfunctory manner to the recital of ailments that were familiar to her, and could not guess from her ignorance of medical knowledge what new complication they might foreshadow. He must push in that bleating Vox Humana: it had been too loud.

  “I beg you not to be so hasty, dear,” he said. “Anything in the nature of hurry always unsettles me. Take the two seats in the luncheon car of course: we shall want two seats for me and another however we settle this. You have told me that you think a trained nurse will be able to look after me better than you can do, and we must not reject your idea in that off-hand manner. We will think it over quietly to-night, and tomorrow morning while I am having my reclining bath, you must talk it over with Dr. Dobbs and get his view. You had better ring him up at once and make an appointment with him for tomorrow. Tell him it is very urgent, for indeed we have not got too much time, if this all has to be settled in nine days: and say you will come at whatever hour suits him. You could slip across after dinner to-night, if he is booked up all morning tomorrow. Indeed that might be the best plan: you had better telephone to him at once. Very urgent. I will try to get a little rest now, but my hour for resting after massage has been sadly encroached on. At dinner you shall tell me what you have arranged.”

  Florence was at the door when her father called her back.

  “My rusks,” he said. “They have quite lost their crispness. The tin should be placed open for half an hour in front of a good fire, but not too close.”

  There was much suppressed excitement and sense of unrest at Wentworth after dinner when it was known on what errand Florence was going to see Dr. Dobbs that very evening: Mrs. Oxney said that the atmosphere reminded her of that of the three days before the beginning of the Great War, for momentous decisions were being made which might alter the whole course of people’s lives and nobody could be certain what would happen next. Mr. Kemp felt strongly that Mind should be consulted as well as Dr. Dobbs, and accordingly went into the pros and cons of the scheme very carefully with Mrs. Bliss, and then asked her whether she could obtain any guidance from Mind. It was clear from the way he put the case that so far from thinking it impossible any longer, his personal inclination was all for it: the idea of having a trained listener always at hand whom he could regale with his symptoms, and who was paid (by Florence) to listen to them now strongly attracted him. It was equally clear that Florence was eager to resign these privileges which had been hers for so long. Father and daughter Mrs. Bliss had also observed, were bored to death with each other, and this state of Error no doubt was an impediment to the clear shining forth of Mind. So when she retired to a quiet corner of the lounge, where she closed her eyes and realised that all was harmonious, it took very little time for her to be convinced that Mind was in favour of the scheme. Mr. Kemp was delighted to know that, and by the time Florence came back from her consultation with Dr. Dobbs, it would have needed strong disapproval on his part to have put him off the idea. But as she brought the glad tidings that Dr. Dobbs thought the scheme well worth trying, there was no struggle or antagonism between materia medica and Mind. All, as Mrs. Bliss had known, was indeed harmonious.

  Mind, in fact, during the last few days had been going strong at Wentworth, and Mrs. Bliss had emerged brilliantly from the slight cloud that hung over her on the discovery of how she had got hold of Colonel Chase’s pedometer. For since then, during those black days when from morning till night neither visitor nor purchaser came near the Green Salon, Mrs. Bliss had continued serenely confident that Mind was turning a special smile on the unpopulated exhibition, and was preparing a peculiarly rich harmony with regard to it. That had triumphantly proved to be the case, and now purchasers had come forward in such number that instead of the Green Salon closing at the end of this week, Miss Howard had determined to keep it open for another similar period. Then again, there was Mrs. Bliss’s own amazing recovery as a further witness of Mind’s beneficent functioning, and so her repeated assurance that Mr. Kemp, though apparently as lame as ever, was quite well, must be received with respect. Truth was nibbling away hard at his Error, and he would very soon find that it was so. This added to the general excitement.

  But more thrilling even than the news that Mr. Kemp was quite well, and was therefore going to take a trained nurse with him to Bournemouth and that Florence was to remain here for the present, was the conjectured state of Colonel Chase’s heart with reference to Miss Howard. Mrs. Oxney had long felt certain that from time to time he had ‘had his eye’ on her, and had been ‘considering it’, but nothing as yet had come of it and indeed a week ago she had almost given up the notion when he called her exhibition a blackmailing project, and had thrown doubt on the extempore character of her improvisations.

  “I’m afraid he has settled against it, Amy,” she had said to her sister on the occasion of his using that unlover-like expression, “for a gentleman doesn’t talk like that about the lady of his choice. It would have been a treat to have had a courtship at Wentworth, and perhaps a marriage too.”

  “We should have lost two of our permanent guests,” Amy had said, for she saw the gloomier side of all situations however romantic. “They’d both have gone away.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” had been Mrs. Oxney’s reply. “They might have taken the end of that wing, and made a little flat of it, seeing that Miss Howard’s country seat is let, and she couldn’t have gone to live in the Colonel’s club. That new bath-room would have c
ome in convenient then. But now I’m afraid it’s all over. He asked me only just now whether there was no means of stopping Miss Howard chirping all over the house like a canary.”

  Then suddenly the whole attitude of the Colonel towards the lady had changed. Not only had he paid a visit to the exhibition, in which, as a protest against blackmail, he had sworn he would never set foot, but he had bought two of the blackmailer’s pictures, and had asked no end of respectful questions about her little place.

  “And if there’s as much as a note sounded on the piano,” said Mrs. Oxney to-night, as she and her sister had their usual chat when the guests had gone to their rooms, “you’ll hear a door opening somewhere, if the Colonel is within hearing, and he’ll tiptoe into the drawing-room. Why, this morning I was just dusting the keys, and made a scale up and down with my duster, like one of Miss Howard’s commencements, and he came peeping in. What disappointment there was in his face when he saw it was only me, and out he went again in a jiffy! He’s after her now and no mistake.”

  Mrs. Bertram finished her patience: there had been no bridge to-night, for the Colonel had sat the whole evening in the lounge talking to Miss Howard and snubbing Florence.

  “You may be right, Margaret,” Mrs. Bertram said, “and I’m sure it would be pleasant to let the end of that wing for ever, as you may say, and I should be the last to want you not to put in the new bathroom if that was the way of it. But he can’t get a word alone with her these days. There’s always Miss Kemp sticking to her like plaster. I call it want of tact not to see that she’d be better away. She won’t give him a chance.”

  “Such faces as he makes at her too,” said Mrs. Oxney, “when he finds them together, as they always are now. They would scare me out of the room quick enough, not to mention the snubbings. And now Miss Kemp is settling to leave her Papa to go to Bournemouth with a nurse, and is stopping on here. I can’t but be glad she’s staying, for a guest is a guest, but I do wish she’d have the sense to let the Colonel have a turn without her. Such friends as she’s become lately with Miss Howard, I never saw the like. They go skipping about together like two school-girls and if it isn’t ‘Alice this’ it’s ‘Flo that’. It would be only friendly if she made herself scarce sometimes. But I wager the Colonel’s in earnest now, and ‘Love will find out the way’ as Mr. Oxney used to whistle when he was after me. Why, if it isn’t close on midnight! Just crush the fire down, while I put the burglar alarm on the shutters. You mark my words: Cupid will be busy in Wentworth yet. Such a fine man as the Colonel is too. I wouldn’t hesitate long if I was Miss Howard. She’s not likely to get such a chance again.”