by E. F. Benson
CRANK STORIES
THE TRAGEDY OF OLIVER BOWMAN
Oliver Bowman was sitting opposite his sister after dinner, watching her cracking walnuts in her strong, firm hands. The wonder of it never failed: she put two walnuts in her palms, pressed her hands together as if in silent prayer, and then there was a great crash and pieces of walnut-shell flew about the table. It was a waste of energy, no doubt, since close beside her were the nut-crackers that gave the nut-eater so great a mechanical advantage; but then his sister had so much energy that it would have been not less ridiculous to accuse the sea of wasting energy because it broke in waves on the shore. Presently she would drink a couple of glasses of port and begin smoking in earnest.
“And then?” asked Oliver, who was exhibiting a fraternal interest in the way in which Alice had passed her day.
“Then I had tea at an A B C shop, and walked round the Park. Lovely day: you ought to have come out.”
“I had a little headache,” said Oliver. He spoke in a soft voice, which occasionally cracked and went into a high key, as when a boy’s voice is breaking. That had happened to him some fifteen years ago, since he was now thirty; but he had made a habit of dropping into falsetto tones, as being an engaging remnant of youthfulness.
“A good walk in the sun and wind would have made that better,” said his sister.
“But I don’t like the sun,” said he petulantly, “and you know I detest the wind.”
“What did you do, then?” she asked.
“I read a story by Conrad about a storm at sea. I quite felt as if I was going through it all without any of the inconveniences of it. That is the joy of a well-written book: it enlarges your experiences without paying you out for them.”
Alice dusted the fragments of walnut-shell from her fingers, poured out a glass of port, and lit a cigarette.
“I would sooner do any one thing myself than read about any twenty,” she observed. “I should hate to get my experiences secondhand, already digested for me, just as I should hate to wear secondhand clothes or eat peptonized food. They’ve got to be mine, and I’ve got to do them—I mean digest them—myself.”
Oliver refused port, and took a very little coffee with a good deal of hot milk in it.
“Considering Nature has been making men and women for so many million years, it’s odd how often she makes mistakes about them,” he said. “She constantly puts them into the wrong envelope: she puts a baby girl into a baby boy’s envelope, and a baby boy into a baby girl’s. You ought to have been a boy, Alice, and I ought to have been a girl.”
Alice could not resist another walnut or two, and the crashings began again.
“That may be true,” she said; “but that’s not really the point. A woman may be a real woman and yet want to do things herself. The real mistake that Nature makes is to give people arms and legs and a quantity of good red blood, and not give them the desire of using them.”
“Or to give them an imagination without the desire of using it,” remarked Oliver.
“I’m glad I have none,” said Alice firmly. “I never imagine what a thing is going to be like. I go and do the thing, and then I know.”
They passed into the drawing-room next door, which seemed to bear out Oliver’s criticism on Nature’s mistakes, because the room had been furnished and decorated in accordance with his tastes, and with one exception was completely a woman’s room. Everything in it was soft and shaded and screened sideways and draped. But in one corner was a turning-lathe with an unshaded electric light directly over it.
Oliver walked across to an easy-chair by the fireplace, and took down an embroidered bag that hung on a painted screen there. It contained a quantity of coloured wools, and an embroidery tambour. He was employed just now on making a chair-back in petit point, and could easily fill in areas of uniform colour by electric light, though daylight was necessary for matching shades of wool. The design was a perfectly unreal rustic scene with a cottage and a tree and a lamb and a blue sky and a slightly lighter blue lake. It realized completely to him what the country ought to be like, and what the country never was like. Instead of the lamb there was in real life a barking dog and a wasp; instead of a blue lake a marsh, which oozed with mud and dirtied your boots; instead of a clean white cottage, a pig-sty or a cowshed where stupid animals breathed heavily through their noses at you. Oliver hated the country in consequence, and never left town unless it was to immure himself from Saturday till Monday in a very comfortable house with central heating, or to spend a few weeks in some other town; but it was delightful to sit in his own pleasant room, and with coloured wools make a picture of what the country should be. In the foreground of his piece were clumps of daffodils, which he copied from those that stood on a table near him, for there ought always to be daffodils in the foreground.
Alice occupied herself for half an hour or so with an active foot on the treadle of her lathe, and made loud buzzing noises with steel tools and boxwood. Then, as usual, she went to bed very early, after a short struggle to read the evening paper, and left Oliver to himself. These were the hours which he liked best of all the day, for there was no chance of being interrupted and no prospect of having to go out of doors or perform any action in which he would come in contact with real life in any form. Alice’s lathe was silent, and all round him were soft, shaded objects and his piece of needlework. But though he disliked the rough touch of life more than anything in the world, there was nothing he liked better than to imagine himself in the hubbub and excitement of adventure without stirring from his chair.
Sometimes, as he had done this afternoon, he would read a story of the sea, and thus, without terror of shipwreck or qualms of nausea, listen to the crash of menacing waves and the throb of the racing screw. Sometimes he would spend an hour in the country, while his unerring needle made daffodils and lambs; or, with a strong effort of the imagination, travel across France to the delightful shores of the Riviera with a vividness derived from the Continental Bradshaw. A sniff at the lemon brought in with a tray of wafer biscuits and a siphon could give him the effect of a saunter through the lemon groves outside Nice, and the jingle of money in his pocket recalled the Casino at Monte Carlo, where he saw himself amassing a colossal fortune in a single night, and losing it all again. As a matter of fact, he never set foot in the real Temple of Chance, because there were so many bold females there who looked at his handsome face with such friendly, if not provocative, glances. For though in imagination he was a perfect Don Juan, the merest glance of interest from a female eye would send him scurrying back like a lost lamb to the protective austerity of Alice.
To-night it seemed to him that the habits and instincts of years came about him in crowds, asking him to classify them and construct a definite theory about them for use in practical life, and suddenly, in a flash of illumination, he saw the cohering principle on which he had acted so long without consciously formulating it. He had always hated real people, real experiences, the sun, the wind, the rain, but equally had he loved the counterfeits of them as presented by Art in its various forms, and by the suggestions that a lemon or a continental Bradshaw or a piece of wool-work could give him. The theory that held all these things together was that life for him consisted of imagination, not of experience, and the practical application of that was to study and soak himself in the suggestions that gave him the sting of experience, without any sordid contact with life. To make a fortune (or lose one) at Monte Carlo would have implied setting cheek to jowl with bold, bad people, and risking a great deal of money. It was infinitely better to study the time-table of the trains to Monte Carlo, sniff a lemon, and jingle his money in his pocket; while if he wanted the sense of the hot, smoke-laden, scent-heavy atmosphere, he must smoke a cigarette and sprinkle his handkerchief with musk or frangipane. A pack of cards thrown about the table would assist the illusion, and he could say, “Faites vos jeux, messieurs et mesdames,” in the chanting monotone of the croupiers.
From that night his horiz
ons began to expand, and he wondered at himself for the blindness in which he had hitherto spent his life. The London streets, in spite of the wind and the sun and the rain and the fog, woke into a teeming life of their own, and pelted suggestions at him as the crowd pelted confetti at mi-carême. He began not to dislike the crowded pavements, for he no longer took any notice of the real people who were there, so absorbing had become the shop windows which gave him the material which he translated into dreams. Hitherto, when he had passed a fish shop he had held his breath, so that the objectionable smell of it might not vex him; now, he inhaled it with a gusto as adding to the vividness of M. Pierre Loti’s “Pêcheur d’Islande,” He would stand before a fish shop for five minutes at a time, and be no longer in Bond Street, but in the hold of his boat or on the quay at Paimpol. Even the boy in the shop who went out with a flat tray on his shoulder was mon frère Yves, and Oliver almost spoke to him in French. Next door was a shop filled with Japanese screens and carved jade and branches of paper cherry-blossom, and lo! his fishing experiences were whisked away, and he was living in the land of Madame Chrysanthème.
But it was only for a short while that the shop windows were, so to speak, coloured illustrations in books written by other men, for he soon discarded these second-hand canvases, and constructed out of them and the wealth of suggestive material that lay broadcast round him new and amazing adventures of his own. His senses, and in particular his sense of smell, grew every day more acute, for daily he was keenly on the look out for a sight or sound, a touch or smell, that would be to him a hint out of which he could evolve some fantastic imagination that lived henceforth in his brain as the memory of an actual experience lives in the brain of those who, like his sister, must know that a thing has happened to them before they can call it their own.
But of all the senses, that of smell supplied him with the vividest hints: the aromatic odour, for instance, that came out of the door of a chemist’s shop would launch him on a brain adventure which lasted the whole length of a stroll down Piccadilly, in which he felt himself suffering from some acute and mysterious disease that baffled the skill of doctors, and led them to administer all manner of curious drugs in the hope of bringing him alleviation. Then when he had soaked the honey from this painful experience—for however disagreeable such an illusion would have been in real life, it had in those vivid unrealities the thrill and excitement of such without any of its inconveniences—the sight of a jeweller’s window blazing with gems would scatter the clouds of his approaching demise, and muffle the sound of his own passing bell with the strains of a ball-room band. He would spring from his death-bed, and, experiencing a new incarnation and a change of sex, would be the central figure, queen in her own right, of some great State ball.
She—he, that is to say—was unmarried, and as she wove the chain of the royal quadrille, the hands of half a dozen aspirants to be her prince-consort communicated their hopes in the pressure of finger-tips. A tiara to which the one in the shop window supplied the clue was on her golden-haired head, ropes of pearls clinked as she moved, a great diamond four times the size of the solitary splendour that winked on the dark blue velvet there, scintillated on her breast, and to each of her lovers, the Grand Duke Peter, the Archduke Francis, the Prince Ignatius, she gave the same mysterious little smile, that, while she disdained their passion, yet expressed some faint vibrating response. All men seemed rather alike to her, and she gave a little sigh, half contemptuous of their adoration, half curious about the desire that made them so divinely discontent. To-night she had determined to choose one of them, for, queen though she was, she must conform to the usage of the world, and besides—besides, the thought of bearing a child of her own made some secret nerve ecstatically ache within her. She must choose....
Then, even while Oliver was hesitating between the Archduke Francis and Prince Ignatius, he would catch sight of a flower-seller by the fountain in Piccadilly Circus, and straightway he would be in the country of his petit point again, where lambs were white and lakes blue; or the sight of a draped model with a waxwork head would switch him off into a new amorous adventure with a lady in an orange-coloured dress, just like that, and the point of an infinitesimal shoe peeping seductively from below its hem.
By degrees, this particular figure, standing in royal state alone behind the plate-glass window in Regent Street, began to exercise a controlling influence on his imagination, and he would hurry by the rows of shops which lay on his route without constructing independent romances out of the hints they gave him, and only glancing at them to see what suggestions they supplied as regards Her. He gave her, for instance, the tiara which he had worn when he was queen in his own right; he presented her with some lemon-coloured gloves that reached to her elbow; he bought her daffodils from Piccadilly Circus; and, rather more tentatively, he endowed her with a black hat with Gloire-de-Dijon roses in it; and standing there in front of her, he would hold up to his nose the handkerchief on which he had poured wallflower scent, which he was sure she would use, and inhale a sweetness that really seemed to come from her through the plate-glass window. All other shops which could not contribute to her embellishment became uninteresting again, and once more he would hurry with held breath past the fishmonger, for if was clearly unsuitable to present her with kippers, raw salmon, or even live lobsters. Then, standing a little sideways, not directly in front of her, her eyes met his, and though usually they seemed lost in reverie, occasionally they would meet his own in a way that sent his heart thumping in his throat. Always she wore the same faint, unfathomable smile, reminding him of Leonardo’s “Monna Lisa,” and it seemed to him that the reason for which Nature had brought him into the world was that he should penetrate into the thoughts that set that red mouth so deliciously ajar. It must surely be on his own lips that it would close.... Her loveliness, while she was kind, made the whole world lovely to him, and his whole nature seemed to awake.
His constant day-long walks about London had wonderfully improved his health; he no longer feared the sun and the wind, and got quite bronzed in complexion. Still more remarkable was, so to speak, the psychical bronzing of his mind, the suntan of virility that overspread it; everything was shot with interest for him, and he even got Alice to show him how to work the lathe. For this was no pining and lovelorn affection; it was quite a hopeful affair, and though, when alone, he might sigh and turn over and back again on his bed, the brilliance and upright carriage of the object of his adoration stung him into a manly robustness. She would not like him to go sighing and sheltering himself about the world.
It was no wonder that Alice noticed and applauded the change in him.
“Something has happened to you, Oliver,” she said one night at dinner, while they were cracking walnuts together, for he had aspired to that accomplishment, though it hurt his soft hands very much. “Something has happened to you. I wonder if I can guess what it is?”
He felt quite secure of the secrecy of his passion, and cracked two walnuts.
“I’m quite certain you can’t,” he said. “Lord, that did hurt!”
“Well, I shall do no harm then if I try,” said she. “I believe you’ve fallen in love.”
The convoluted kernels dropped from Oliver’s fingers.
“What makes you think that?” he asked.
“My dear, it’s obvious to a woman’s eyes. I always told you that what you needed was to fall in love. You don’t do wool-work any more; you walk instead of sitting in an easy-chair. Some day, if you go on like this, you will play golf.”
“Gracious! Am I as bad as that?” exclaimed he, startled into an irony that gave his case away.
Alice clapped her hands delightedly.
“Ah! I am right then!” she cried. “My dear, do tell me who she is? Shall I go and call on her? Have I ever seen her?”
Oliver felt a curious diplomatic pleasure in giving true information which he knew would deceive.
“Yes; I feel sure you have seen her,” he said, remembering th
at Alice had her dresses made at the shop where his divinity deified the window. “I can’t say that you know her.”
“Oh, who is she?” cried Alice. “Is she a girl? Is she a woman? Will she marry you?”
“No; I don’t suppose so,” said he.
Alice’s face fell.
“Is she somebody else’s wife, then?” she asked. “I hope not. But I don’t know that it matters. It is the fact of your having fallen in love which has improved you so immensely. I’ve noticed that an unhappy romance is just as good for people as a humdrum success which ends in christening mugs and perambulators.”
Oliver got up.
“You are rather coarse sometimes, dear Alice,” he observed.
Oliver’s romance and his growing robustness lasted for some few days after Alice had guessed his secret, and then an end came to it more horrible than any that his wildest imaginations could have suggested to him. One day he had seen in a celebrated furrier’s a sable stole that would most delightfully protect his lady’s waxen neck from the inclemencies of a shrewd May morning, and he hurried along, while that was still vivid to his eye, in order to visualize it round her neck. There was a crowd of women in front of her window, and he edged his way in with eyes downcast, as was his wont, so that she might burst splendidly upon him at short range. Then, full of devotion and sable stole, he raised them.
She was not there. In her place was a bold-faced creature in carmine, with lustful, wicked eyes like the females at Monte Carlo. His healthy outdoor life stood him in good stead at that moment, for he did not swoon or address shrill ejaculations to his Maker. He just staggered back one step, as if he had received a blow in the chest, then rallied his failing forces again....
All day he walked from dressmaker to dressmaker, seeking to find her; and when he was too much fatigued to pursue his way on foot any longer, he went to his club, and by the aid of a London directory ascertained the addresses of a couple of dozen more shops farther afield where she might possibly be found. These he visited in a taxi, but without success, and returned home to his flat a quarter of an hour before dinner, where, utterly exhausted, he went to sleep in his chair. Naturally, he dreamed about her, in a vague nightmarish manner, and she seemed to be in trouble.