Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  There was little time next morning, until the 11.35 had irrevocably left Bolton Spa station for embarrassment or anything else except the concerns of Mr. Kemp. Excitement had caused him to pass a night not less troubled than Alice’s, and it was not till he had taken his temperature for the second time with encouraging results, that he decided he could undertake the journey. But during these dark watches he had made a further list of memoranda in faint pencillings, and having finished his breakfast by nine, he sat in the lounge and tried to decipher them, with the travelling suitcase open by him on the floor, and Florence ready to perform these last offices.

  “Umbrella,” he read out. “Yes, as it’s fine I want you to take charge of my umbrella, and hand it to me when I am in the train. I will have my two sticks, the pair with crutch handles. Aspirin: I must take ten grains half-an-hour before I start, and then sit quiet till the bus comes. Otherwise all these movings about and going up and down steps into buses and trains will be agony. Really I ought to have insisted that Nurse Babbit should come here: I do not know how we shall get through without her. Ten grains will be two tablets, Florence; you had better make a note of that. Umbrella, Aspirin: I will cross those out. Monkey . . . It can’t be Monkey: I should not dream of taking a monkey in my suitcase. What can that be? And it is a very dark morning. I wonder if it will rain before I am safe in the train. Or is it that my eyes are worse this morning?”

  In this very natural agitation about monkey, he got up from his chair and walked straight across to the window without using his sticks.

  “Ah, I see now,” he said. “It is not monkey, it is Mrs. Oxney. I want you, Florence, to get Mrs. Oxney to have my room thoroughly searched after I have gone, to see if you have forgotten to pack anything: last year it was a flannel belt. Now let us get on: we have not too much time.”

  Mrs. Bliss who was sitting by the fire, suddenly jumped up with a cry of rapture.

  “Oh, Mr. Kemp!” she said, “I knew it would come. You have walked to the window and half-way back again to your chair without your sticks. Mind has conquered Error. Didn’t I tell you that you were perfectly well? Now you know it.”

  Mr. Kemp immediately clutched at the back of a sofa, and heavily leaning on it got back to his chair.

  “Dear me, I did walk there without my sticks,” he said, “and felt no twinge at all. But then why did I begin to hobble again?”

  “Error’s last effort to deny health and harmony,” chanted Mrs. Bliss. “Oh, how pleased I am that you know you are well. But I must say good-bye as I am to have one more bath for my dear husband’s sake. When next we meet, I know I shall see you running about like a boy.”

  Mr. Kemp shook hands.

  “Indeed it was most remarkable, most gratifying,” he said. “I must have my manual of Mental Science to read in the train, Florence. Please get it out of the green portmanteau, and put it in the suitcase. . . . Now let us get on: Mrs. Oxney, we’ve done that. Carpet slippers. You can put them in one of the portmanteaux instead of in the suitcase, for I have decided not to change into them in the train. Daily paper: that explains itself. Pencil: ah, yes, I shall partly occupy my time with a cross-word puzzle. If I get through it, I can ink it in at Bournemouth. . . . Florence, do you realise that I walked to the window without a twinge? Shall I trust to Mind and not have my aspirin?”

  “I think I should have the aspirin, Papa,” said Florence. “You can trust to Mind just the same, and tell yourself that the aspirin can’t have any effect. Mrs. Bliss has her baths and massage for her husband’s sake.”

  “True,” said Mr. Kemp, much relieved to be excused from this great trial of faith. “So as you wish me to take my aspirin, I will do so for your sake.”

  “Thank you, Papa,” said Florence, and went to get a wine-glass and some newly-decanted water.

  The list of agenda and addenda was finished in time to enable Mr. Kemp to sit quiet for a full half-hour before the bus came round, and then once more he walked right across the lounge without assistance.

  “It was a mistake to have had any aspirin,” he said reproachfully to Florence, “for I am convinced that I am walking so well entirely owing to Mind. But I took it for your sake: remember to tell Mrs. Bliss.”

  The bus had been ordered in time to give the traveller a full quarter of an hour at the station: this would not be a moment too much to enable Mr. Kemp to confer with Nurse Babbit, to settle finally and irrevocably what baggage was to come into the carriage with him and what to travel in the van, and rest for a little after these decisions. Florence meanwhile would see the heavier pieces labelled, and after a pause make sure that all the labels were duly adhering. Then she had to put a second porter in charge of suitcase, rugs, coats, air-cushions, hot-water bottle, daily paper, and all else that was to be handed in to the travellers after Mr. Kemp had taken his seat. Mrs. Oxney, who had also come to the station, made herself very useful, as soon as the train came in, by ascertaining that the conductor of the luncheon car had reserved a table for two. Though all went off without a hitch, as far as could at present be ascertained, Mr. Kemp’s face looked drawn and anxious as Nurse Babbit adjusted the window precisely to his liking, and he shook his head sadly at them through the glass, as the train moved out of the station.

  CHAPTER IX

  The full and glorious noon of the Green Salon had evidently passed: collectors who were anxious to secure Howards for their galleries must have satisfied themselves, and when, on the morning of the day preceding its closing, neither visitors nor purchasers had entered its pictured walls the friends decided to occupy the remainder of the hours in beginning the packing of the works with little red stars on them. The pill box with these brevets inside was now found to be unaccountably empty, and the custodian when pressed acknowledged that, despairing of employing them for their ordained purpose, he had used them up (so that they should not be wasted) by affixing to the wall behind the door his own initials executed in red stars. There indeed his initials were, and Alice and Florence had to spend a considerable time in soaking them off. That was a matter of difficulty for they proved to be of first rate adhesive quality. But it was done now, and Florence in her homespun Norfolk jacket with no hat had hurried off into the town to purchase strong corrugated cardboard and brown paper.

  Alice was feeling on edge: she had spent a sticky hour in detaching the custodian’s odious initials, she was disappointed that the last few days of the Green Salon had been fruitless and she was worried over the deception she had been driven to practise on Florence about the ancestral home. That figured itself to her as a black hole in the fabric of life out of which at any moment might pop out something surprisingly unpleasant. So while her friend had gone on her useful errand, she had nagged at the custodian (on the lines of a wage-earning man behaving like a child) for giving them so much trouble and the custodian had grown sulky and sat perched on his stool like a ruffled bird in livery with the pip, instead of the brightest boy in Bolton. Yet after all the exhibition had been a great success, and she thought with fortitude how narrowly she had escaped acting on the diabolical counsel of the young man from the Bolton Gazette, who had criticised her pictures without ever seeing them, and had advised her to put a quantity of stars on virgin frames in order to encourage purchasers. She had nearly done so: had it not been for Tim and Mrs. Holders and those mysterious ladies and gentlemen about whom the custodian could remember nothing, she would surely have fallen. Nowadays she knew something of the tangled web of deceit over her fabulous ancestral home, and she was thankful to have been spared further complications over the Green Salon. If she had succumbed, she would now be in the power of the sulky custodian.

  This Pharisaical reflection had hardly entered her head when there strolled into the Green Salon just as if he had been the proprietor of the place the odious young man to whom Miss Howard had in effect said ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’. But here was Satan in front of her again, and as he looked round at the walls, on which twinkled this red milky way, he broke
into a broad grin and quite distinctly winked at the artist in a most familiar manner. The moulting bird slipped off his stool and produced the roll of toilet-paper.

  “Sixpence,” he said sullenly.

  “Press,” said the critic.

  He turned to Miss Howard.

  “Well miss, you’ve had a rare success,” he said, “I see you took that tip I gave you. I remember telling you to make believe to have sold half a dozen pictures and you’d bring the buyers in all right. Very pleased to have been of assistance, for that tip and my little article did the trick for you. I’m not too proud, I may add, to accept any little recognition you might care to make me.”

  Miss Howard gasped with indignation. It was really no use attempting, as Mrs. Bliss had recommended her to do, to broadcast thoughts of love in every direction, for Mrs. Bliss had clearly no idea how some situations could play the deuce with atmospherics. But though powerless to broadcast loving thoughts, she could still remember she was a Howard, and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.

  “I do remember your advising me to commit that most dishonourable action,” she said, “but I am glad to say that your suggestion only appalled me.”

  This appeared to nettle Satan.

  “Oh, come!” he said. “I gave you a friendly tip which I’m sure you took, and now you call me dishonourable. Nasty of you, miss.”

  Trembling in every limb with the effort of being a Howard, she turned to the custodian.

  “Give me the list of the names and addresses of purchasers,” she said. “I want to show it to that (she did not pause at all) gentleman.”

  A situation of peculiar psychological intensity had arisen. There was Miss Howard in the consciousness of virgin innocence, tempted but unfallen, there was Satan blandly certain that she had fallen, and was a liar too, there was the brightest boy in Bolton sulky from his scolding who knew that there had been some amazing hocus-pocus about the cataract of sales on the first day when purchasers appeared, and had been bribed to silence by half-a-crown. As he produced the list of purchasers he began to think about revenge.

  Miss Howard spread this register in front of Satan. All the entries were in order, number of pictures sold, purchasers, addresses, and ‘paid’.

  Satan sniffed.

  “Well, some do it direct, and some by deputy,” he jeeringly observed.

  At that, as the custodian thought of the two invisible ladies who had bought two pictures each, and the two invisible gentlemen who had done the same, the whole case became clear to his powerful intellect: he no longer entertained the slightest doubt that Miss Howard had bought the pictures herself by deputy.

  “Will you kindly tell this gentleman,” said Miss Howard, “how you personally sold all these pictures to different ladies and gentlemen and that I made no private arrangements of any sort with you.”

  He hesitated: vengeance was sweet. It was on the tip of his tongue to say what had actually happened. But some of that half-crown was still in his pocket, for his daily shillings nearly sufficed for his simple needs.

  “That’s so,” he said. “Ladies and gents came in here one after the other and made their buys, and Miss Howard never said a word to me.”

  At the moment Miss Howard saw through the open door, the approaching figure of Florence carrying the contents of a stationer’s shop. She turned her back on Satan, and gave a little silvery laugh.

  “Such fun, dear,” she said. “This gentleman once advised me to buy some of the pictures myself in order to encourage others, and now he tells me that I took his dishonest advice and wants me to give him something for his suggestion. A little like blackmail.”

  She turned to Satan again.

  “Miss Kemp is one of the purchasers,” she said. “You will find her name there. I’m afraid that without notice I cannot produce more of them. So if this is all now quite clear, perhaps you would pay sixpence for admission, if you want to look at my pictures again. Please do not offer me your apologies which no doubt you are anxious to do, because I could not accept them. Good morning.”

  “Lor, that’s a knock-out,” said the brightest boy in Bolton, in enthusiastic admiration of this superb effrontery. (Of course Miss Howard had bought her pictures herself.).

  “A little off his head poor fellow,” said Alice, as soon as Satan had gone back presumably to his own place. “Now let us begin our packing, dearest.”

  “What a monster,” said Florence. “I wish I had been here to tackle him.”

  “Quite unnecessary, darling,” said Alice, still trembling with passion. “Oh, what lovely corrugated cardboard. I always feel it is a shame to use it.”

  The work of packing so many purchases and making them safe for travel was lengthy, and conduced to meditation except when Alice sat on the scissors or Florence lost the pen for the direction of labels, when it conduced merely to frenzied search. Florence meditated about Alice, and said ‘Liebster’ to her now and then, when she could not repress her feelings, so that the custodian should not understand. Alice occasionally warbled a phrase of song but the undercurrent of her mind was occupied with the perfidy of men in general as exemplified by her late visitor. Above that ran a stream of thought concerned with the eternal and infernal subject of the ancestral home, which was daily getting more embarrassing. Only last night she had been practically compelled, in answer to a most inquisitive question of Colonel Chase’s, to say that the stables were at some little distance from the house, for short of saying there were no stables at all (which would have been incredible in a spacious Queen Anne mansion) there was nothing else to be said. Then too, Mrs. Oxney hoped before long to spend a day or two with a cousin close to Tunbridge Wells, and she wanted to know if the public were admitted to the Park on any particular day of the week, and whether ‘The Croft’ was visible from the line. Miss Howard had to give a guarded answer to that; she said that her tenants made their own arrangements about admission, and that she did not know what they were. She added (which was absolutely true) that you could see ‘The Croft’ on the left of the line as you approached Tunbridge Wells, and in answer to a further pestering from the Colonel (how she used to enjoy such pestering once!) that there was no pheasant-shooting. It was really a detestable situation for anyone who was not a professional liar, and it seemed to her thoroughly undeserved. She had just let slip a few hints (all founded on fact) about her little place, and it was her audience, not she, who had distorted them into these monstrous splendours. Colonel Chase was much the worst offender: poor Alice would have been ready to take her oath that she had never mentioned stables at all till he asked about them, or alluded to the shooting, and now her little place had stables at some distance from the house, and though she had flatly denied that there was any pheasant-shooting, she felt that she had given the impression that there was plenty of room for it. All the good that had come out of the growth of her little place was that it had enabled her to make up her mind that, with the Colonel’s present conception of it, it was quite impossible to marry him. Below these uncomfortable meditations there continued to flow the undercurrent of thought about the perfidy of men, and suddenly it burst up like a geyser on to the surface of her mind, startling her so much that the ball of string with which she was tying up Lady Appledore’s Curfew leapt from her lap and rolled away across the floor. She saw it all . . . this violent interest of the Colonel’s in her little place was contemporary with his industrious wooing of her affections. The base wretch wanted to find out what (as well as whom) he would be marrying.

  She gave a hoarse cry.

  “Oh, the wickedness of him,” she exclaimed. “I will never speak to him again.”

  Florence thought she was speaking of Satan, and laughed as she retrieved the ball of string.

  “I ought to have been here to settle him,” she said. “But you did it pretty well, liebster.”

  “No, I don’t mean him,” said Alice gasping. “I mean that base wicked Colonel. You know how he’s been questioning me about my dear lit
tle home. I see it all. He wanted to find out about it before asking me to marry him. I couldn’t have believed it of him, as I hate thinking evil of anybody, but I feel sure it’s true. I am never wrong about the sudden intuitions which sometimes come to me.”

  Though Florence had repeatedly asserted that Colonel Chase was crazy about Alice for her own sake, she soon began to share this intuition, and the wooing which had been to her up till now a huge joke, assumed a sinister aspect. She had intuitions too, and now she remembered that she had never trusted the Colonel from the first moment that she set eyes on him, and she was never wrong about her first impressions. She would not quite give up her belief that he was crazy about Alice, but he was certainly crazy to live in her lovely house, and shoot over — no there weren’t any pheasant-covers — and be the Squire of the countryside. He deserved — what did he not deserve — as punishment for his baseness?

  “Punished, punished, he must be punished,” said Florence, fiercely folding corrugated cardboard round Geraniums. And look darling, at this very moment I’m packing his picture for him. I do call that a coincidence! You mustn’t mind about him: he isn’t worth it. Punished.”

  “But it hurts me,” said Alice.

  “Only because you’re so good, and it hurts you that a man can have been so wicked,” said Florence. “They’re like that you know, I’ve often heard of men wanting to marry girls because of their money. Base creatures! But it isn’t as if you had ever cared about him: you never dreamed of marrying the fat old bicyclist. What are we to do to punish him? That’s the point. For myself I shall simply cut him, though I’m afraid he won’t think that much of a punishment. In fact he’ll prefer it. We must think of something better than that.”

  Alice again remembered, but with difficulty, that she was a Howard. She moistened her lips.

  “I beg you to drop any such idea altogether,” she said. “Because he has behaved like — well, like a cad, that is all the more reason that we should behave like ladies. It will mark the distance between us. If he actually tells me he wants to marry me, I shall permit myself a little scorn in refusing him, but that will be all.”