Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Of the elders it was Mollie who possessed it most abundantly: silent and observant, she had little to say to him, but something secret and incense, running like a torrent below black rocks in tumult of deep eddies, surged about her, and most mornings he would pay her a little visit very polite and chatty, as she sat knitting by the oven in the kitchen, in order to feel that force flowing round him. Lined and seamed was her face, grey her hair, and she walked stiffly and bent as she gathered her eggs and came back with a full basket to the fire, but in her black eyes, bent mostly on her knitting, there was something tingling and electric that braced him. At the same time a little of Mollie was enough, there was something sinister about her, “not quite comfortable,” so he phrased it to himself. But Nell and Dennis were not like that: they were just two fountains of life, flashing in the sun and spilling refreshment all round them. Like a thirsty little lapdog Willis licked it up.

  Here his essential feminity asserted itself, and of the two it was Dennis in particular who gave him the sense of being bathed in life. While the crop was being cut and gathered, he would spend an hour at a time watching the boy swing his scythe or pitch those great lumps of hay into the waggon, and he made countless little drawings of him in his sketch-hook. The sight of that unconscious vigour and exuberant youth nourished him, and when Dennis came back from the field he would be sitting at the open door of his studio like an eager little spider, to lure him in with the bait of a cigarette, in order to get a taste of his quality. In some perfectly sexless manner he loved the boy, much as an elderly spinster loves her yapping dog; he would have liked to stroke his smooth neck, to pat his big shoulders, to tweak his yellow hair, just for the touch of his youth and sappy elasticity. He wanted Dennis to be close to him, smelling of the stable or the hayfield, with tousled hair and chest dripping with the sweat of his toil. Once, in this greed for the contact of his rough vigour, he had thrown his arms round the boy’s chest, bold yet terrified, like a maiden aunt, of his boldness in giving such expression to his need.

  “You do like me a little, Dennis; don’t you?” he chattered at him.

  Dennis looked down on him with his white teeth lining his lips in sheer amusement, not pushing him away, nor feeling the slightest embarrassment.

  “Aw dear; if you beeant a fair little curiositee,” he said. “Best lemme go, Mr. Willis.”

  “But it’s so nice to hold you,” said the girlie. “I like to feel how strong you are.”

  “Just a little curiositee, that’s what you are,” Dennis repeated, untwining his arms, as if undoing a loosish knot in a hank of string. “I’ll be off to my dinner now, Mr. Willis.”

  “You shall. And then, when you’ve finished your work this evening, you’ll come in, won’t you, and let me get on with my picture?”

  He drew out a dainty little leather purse with his monogram on it in gold, and picked a ten-shilling piece from it.

  “That’s what I owe you already,” he said, “for our two sittings.”

  “Well, I’m sure, ’tis very handsome of you,” said Dennis. In this lengthening splendour of the June evenings I must let myself out of the house and go running in the dark and the wind and the wet. Lord, such a running as I had one day in March, half-stripped and dripping with rain and sweat. I ran the best of four miles to the wood above Penerth, and clung to the ground and bit the bracken-stems, and bathed in the brook. Just a craziness that comes to me.”

  Willis wriggled with pleasure. He was getting at something now; it was as if his ear were pressed to a tree trunk, and he could hear the sap boiling up within it at springtime.

  “Go on, dear fellow, go on!” he cried. “I love to hear about your craziness: I love to picture you running in the dark all alone, because you had to. Not a word will I say to anyone about it. What did you do next?”

  “Why, the craziness was sweated out of me by then, I reckon,” said Dennis, ct and I plodded home. ’Twas over for that time.”

  Willis got up for a box of cigarettes, and pirouetted across to the table.

  “It makes me gay to think of it,” he said, “it makes me want to dance. And talking of that, your mother said something to me when she served my dinner about the dancing to-morrow night in that circle of stones in the ploughed field below the garden, and about the bonfire. I must go and see it, she told me. Do you dance there that night, Dennis? Take a drop more port.”

  “Nay, I’ve never danced there yet, though maybe I shall some day,” said Dennis, filling his glass.

  “But you must dance with me,” cried the girlie. “You and Nell must both dance with me.”

  Dennis suddenly choked over his wine, and exploded with laughter and strangled coughing.

  “Eh, bless and save us all!” he said. “You’ll never beat that, Mr. Willis, not in a month o’ Midsummer Nights.”

  “But what have I said? Why shouldn’t I dance with you and Nell? What have I said that makes you laugh?”

  Dennis recovered himself, and when there was nothing left of his explosion but a hiccup and a hoarse voice, he explained.

  “Why, of course you couldn’t know,” he said, “and ’twas rude of me to guffaw. “’Tisn’t a thing we talk of, for all we know of it, and you mustn’t go saying I told you. You see, ’tis only them as want to get a baby that dance on Midsummer’s Eve. You’ll see the young folk just married as’ll be dancing there till they drop from weariness, and lie panting there, and you’ll see old folk too, maybe, as wants another child. To be sure, it was that made me laugh, when you asked if Nell or me ‘ud dance with you. A queer thing surely that would be.”

  Dennis began to laugh again, but pulled himself together.

  “Eh, there’s lots we know in this land which we Don’t speak of, because we know it,” he said. “It’ll sound strange, I reckon, to you foreigners, but you come and go, and the circle remains and the spring nights and the spells of them. Foreigners know naught, begging your pardon. And that’s a clean white spell, in the circle. Pass’n Allingham, he’ll come down and watch the dancing.”

  Dennis was sprawling along the sofa, talking of things he knew he had best be silent about, but the wine had loosened his tongue.

  “And then the bonfire?” asked Willis.

  Dennis laughed again.

  “That’s another spell;” he said. “You come down to-morrow night, and when the flames burn low, you’ll see dozens o’ coup1es leaping over it.”

  “But what does that mean.?” asked Willis. “Everything seems to mean something.”

  “Why, that means that the two’s got a fancy for each other, and if she says she’ll leap with you, and you both jump clear, you’ll be married ‘afore All Souls’ Eve. Sure it was time you married, Mr. Willis, for you’ll be thirty or forty years old, I dessay: about that, wouldn’t it be?”

  “Never mind me. Go on about the leaping.”

  “Aye, there’ll be a lot of leaping over the fire tomorrow,” said Dennis. “A sight of fellers and lassies from Penzance and the villages round ‘ull be taking the fire, as they call it, if they’re thinking of marrying and making bed together. ’Tis an old custom before ever the Romans came here, and sometimes it comes wonderful true. And then next year there’ll be those who have taken the fire, dancing together like mad in the circle, if so be they’re barren yet. Sometimes my grandmother, though she’s no real grannie of mine; tells powerful curious things of them as had meant naught but a foolishness by dancing together within the stones, and sure enough the child came, just a still-born as they say, that never lived, though a child it was. She fair scares me sometimes when she gets on the gabble, thought ’tis oftener she’s no word from dawn till evening. Secret ways she has, God Almighty knows, but she beeant afeared of Him.”

  Sleepy sweet stuff was this port, thought Dennis, but it purred in the head, and was mighty pleasant in the stomach. He didn’t mind what he said now. So she won’t be dancing on Midsummer Eve, any more than I shall,” said Willis. “She dance?” said Dennis. “No, I reckon her d
ancing days are over, though who can tell with such as she? There’s summat in her innards as makes her brisk and blithesome, and never’s she been like that not by what I remember. Something’s pleasing to her: there’s summat as tastes good in her mouth, and gives her joy. Surprising it is. She’s been walking a bit short and slow, like th’ould mare, of late, but then there’s times when she steps out brisk and frisky. But as for dancing, why, she knows what that means, and she’s past dancing surely.”

  Dennis sat up from his sprawling posture, and put a hand on Willis’s shoulder.

  “Yet not so many weeks ago,” he said, there she was in Kenrith copse skipping and dancing like a young mare on heat. I was coming home that way, and it fair scared me, and I skedaddled off quick as I might, for I don’t want to meddle with any doings there. Lord in Paradise, what’s that?”

  There sounded from close outside the half-closed door of the studio the call of an owl, and the great tawny bird hovered in the doorway.

  “There’s one ever about the house this year,” he said, “so bold, as if ’twas its own. Best shut the door, Mr. Willis, else they’ll mess you up fine with their belchings and their dumpings, if one happened to take a fancy to roost here. And for me it’s bedtime.”

  Willis went to the door, shut and bolted it, and drew the curtains over the glass pane. He felt he was getting drippings from some hidden secret spring which perhaps gave this amazing force to these silent, aloof folk. All of them, except Nancy, the most talkative of them all, had it: in her its place was taken by a mere Cockney vitality, the like of which you could see any evening in London, seething about the pavements and in the promenades of. music-halls. But it lay, deep and hot, below the surface-life of the others: the tipsy old grandfather, the bright-eyed, withered Mollie, Dennis with his spring-runnings, and Nell with her quiet ways had all some hidden life of their own, and now Dennis, off his guard with wine, was giving him hints about it.

  “Now, go on, dear fellow,” he said, “I’ve shut the owls out.”

  But the thread was broken: Dennis, who had been talking so heedlessly, stiffened into silence. Perhaps that sudden appearance of the owl had reminded him not to speak to foreigners about things that belonged to blood and birthright. If his reticence had not been melted out of him by so many glasses of port, guilefully supplied, he would not have said so much. He might even have just shooed the owl away, in the same contemptuous spirit in which he had derided Nell’s conjecture about the night-bird. As it was, the appearance of it just then served to close his lips, for there were many things in the magic of night and day which, though you did not believe them, had best be left untalked of. So when Willis, having shut the doors, bade him “go on,” Dennis gave him a shake of his head and a low whistle through pursed lips.

  “Best not,” he said. “I doubt I’ve been talking too free, so do ‘ee forget it all, Mr. Willis. But that liquor o’ yours seems to make a feller’s tongue go clacking like a hen as has laid an egg. Enough said!”

  He got up from the sofa, swaying a little on his feet.

  “God! I’m taking after Grandfather a’ready,” he said. “My head’s a-swim, and I’m damned if I can trust my legs. Where they’ll be gwain to I don’t know.”

  He tried to fix his eyes on the door, to which he wanted to get himself, but the walls jerked round him, as he attempted to hold it in focus.

  “Have a nap on my sofa, Dennis,” said the girlie. “You’ll soon sleep it off.”

  Dennis looked at him with sleep-shining eyes. “Well, that would be a fine plan, if I bain’t putting you out,” he said. “Don’t you mind me, Mr. Willis: you get to bed.”

  He dropped back on the sofa, and was almost instantly asleep. Once or twice his eyelids fluttered, but presently they closed themselves smooth and firm over his eyes, and his limbs lay soft and relaxed, but some aura of his superb youth seemed to spread round him like a tome tide, and Willis basked in it. But before five minutes were past, there came the flapping of wings against the studio door, and the sound of claws against the glass. Dennis sprang up.

  “There’s that damned bird again,” he said. “I’ll be off to bed,” and he shuffled across the room and went stumbling upstairs in the dark.

  Though no word was said between the members of the family on the subject of the bonfire, they all took a hand next day in the building of it: John Pentreath fetched a truss of straw from the stable, and carried it down into the field, just beyond where the stones stood from which the unploughed path between the rising corn led up to the circle. The lower field had already borne its hay crop, and in the middle of it was a strip of rough stone paving, black with the fire of immemorial years, and on this he dumped his straw. Mollie was already there: she had brought down a tin of paraffin, which would be poured on the fuel before the fire was lit, and she helped to spread the straw while he went back for a second load. On his way he passed Nell wheeling a barrowful of the dry tindery hay of last year: no need was there to ask what she was about. Half the village of St. Columb’s came up during the morning, and took part in this silent co-operation; some of the fishermen brought coils of old tarry rope, or broken thwarts and oar-blades; others dry garden refuse and faggots of wood and paraffin, and none made question or comment any more than they would have asked a man what he was at if they saw him smoking his pipe or eating his dinner. By midday there were a dozen men there with pitchforks for the spreading of the lighter stuff, while others handled the wood and small boughs of trees, laying them criss-cross. Their hands were busy, for now there were stacks of such material piled beside the pavement: it was fifty feet long and ten or twelve across, and the whole had to be piled high before it was ready for the firing. Parson Allingham paid a visit there: he tossed down a couple of fine bundles of brushwood, and had a word with Dennis for not being in church last Sunday.

  Before long there was a scare about the weather: a heavy bank of cloud was piling up in the south, moving against the light north wind, and that was the way that a thunderstorm approached. It would be a disaster indeed if the bonfire got soaked, and half a dozen men went down to the village to fetch some coverings, and Dennis up to the farm for the big tarpaulin that Mollie put on top of her hen-run in stormy weather. He was bent double under the weight of it, and in a bath of sweat, which would be the port wine coming out. Willie Polhaven helped him drag it into place, and up came Mr. Willis with his Malacca cane and his fawn-coloured London clothes, ever so anxious to be pleasant and useful.

  “So this is where the bonfire’s to be, Dennis,” he said. “What time shall I come down?”

  Dennis was not feeling very kindly towards the girlie this morning. That port had given him a prize headache when he woke: the girlie ought to have warned him instead of plying him with it. Besides, no foreigner might have a hand in the bonfire. He took not the least notice of him.

  “Hitch that corner a bit more towards you, Willie,” he said.

  “But let me help: let me help,” said the girlie, putting his stick down. Willie was another specimen of the dark native type: a great big black-eyed boy, not quite so tall as Dennis, but limbed like a young horse.

  “I can manage, sir, thank you,” said Willie. He had picked up the “sir” from domestic service: Dennis never called anyone “sir”

  “Oh, but let me help,” said Willie. “Please let me help. May I get some sticks and put them on the bonfire?”

  Dennis frowned, and gave a great tug to another corner of the tarpaulin.

  “We’ll do nicely, Mr. Willis,” he said. “Happen you’d best not meddle.”

  “How cross you are to me, Dennis,” said the girlie.

  Willie bent down to hide a broad grin. He had already been chaffing Dennis about his little curiositee, who paid him five shillings an hour for looking at his pretty face.

  “’Tis best you sit down and let be,” said Dennis.

  “We’ll be done presently.”

  Willis picked up his stick with a little titter of laughter: it gave him
an old-maidenly thrill to be ordered about like this.

  “Everybody spoils Dennis,” he said, sitting down on a pile of faggots. “Don’t they, Willie?”

  “I’m sure I couldn’t say as to that, sir,” said Willie with another grin. “Maybe you’ll know best.”

  “I could say who spoiled your face for you, Willie, once on a time,” observed Dennis.

  “What, did you two great fellows have a fight?” asked Willis. “What was it all about?”

  “Just some of our own affairs,” said Dennis. The tarpaulins were duly spread, and the bonfire safe from any rain that might come before night, and then all trusted that St. John would see to it, for never yet within memory had there been a wetting when, after sundown, it was kindled. The two boys walked off together for a dip in the sea to the cove where a fight had been the beginning of their friendship. That was in the heads of both of them as they stripped, sitting side by side on the sand, and Dennis, leaning shoulder to shoulder against Willie, stretched out his longer but slimmer arm along his.

  “’Tis a power of brawn you’ve got there,” he said. “I doubt you’d give me a walloping if happen we fought again.”

  “I’d do my best, but you’ve got more reach nor me. I reckon we’d hurt each other now, Dennis. Eh, that’s a ‘quisitive little gent of yours, sniffing after you like a little lap-dog.”

  “He wants to know too much,” said Dennis, “and damn me if he didn’t fill me up with some sweet liquor of his last night. Potent it was, though you’d think it was more like a syrup, and my tongue went crazy, and I told him bits of things that I never oughter. God, such a tipsy head I had this morning.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Just about taking the fire and the dancing. But it don’t signify. He’ll not let on.”