by E. F. Benson
All this was instantaneous: she seemed to read it between the lines of Helena’s letter. She recalled, too, between the lines, the tokens that she knew. Archie would look at Harry, as they sat at dinner, then at his mother, then at her, in order that in due time he might look at Helena. And when he spoke to any of them they never got more than one ear and an inattentive mind from him. The other ear and the attention were always with Helena. Helena knew that quite well: no woman or girl could fail to know it, and, by way of response, she had made this Scythian retreat to England. No doubt that was clever of her, but in Jessie’s opinion clever people are found out even sooner than stupid ones. The only inexplicable folk are the wise, and wisdom has very little to do with cleverness. Wisdom is perhaps the cleverness of the soul, that looks down with pity on the manoeuvres of the mind.
Archie made his absurd entry. He had a dressing-gown on, perhaps some sort of abbreviated bathing-dress, and canvas-shoes.
“I didn’t dress,” he said, “for where’s the use of dressing if you are going to undress again almost immediately?”
“Aren’t you going to work this morning?” asked Jessie.
“No. This one day, as Mr. Wordsworth said, we’ll give to idleness. I’m going to bathe all the morning instead of half the morning. I want a holiday. I think I’m overworked. What’s happening in that foolish England, if you’ve read the papers?”
“I haven’t,” said she.
Suddenly his face changed; he began to talk the secret language, which Jessie understood and Helena counterfeited.
“And what other news?” he asked. “You had a letter from somebody.”
Jessie pretended not to understand what she knew so well.
“Yes, I did have a letter,” she said, determined that Archie should be more direct than this.
“From Helena or mother?” he said carelessly. “I haven’t heard from either of them, except that telegram to say they had got home safely.”
He was talking the secret language still; the very carelessness of his tone betrayed it.
“I heard from them both,” she said. “The letter was from Helena, and there was an enclosure from Cousin Marion.”
Archie said nothing in answer to this, but it seemed to the girl that his silence was just as eloquent in the language without words. Eventually he remarked that Harry was very late, and Jessie knew that he had beaten her. He always did, just because he had nothing, with regard to her, at stake.
“Archie, I want to talk to you about what they have written to me,” she said.
“Talk away,” said Archie. “I say, what good little fishes!”
Jessie was not proposing to yield like that. If he, in the code of the secret language, professed an indifference to what he was longing to hear, she would be indifferent too.
To Archie’s intense irritation she continued to talk about little fishes, in a tone of great interest, till Harry’s entrance. She agreed they were very good; probably they were fresh sardines caught last night by the fishers. Or were they… and she could not remember the Italian name of the other little fish which were so like sardines.
Archie’s serene brow clouded, and he but grunted a greeting to Harry. And next moment her heart smote her. She knew how easily Archie could put the sun out for her without meaning to do it, but she had, out of a sort of piqued femininity, intentionally done the same for him. She felt as if she had spoiled a child’s pleasure. He was so like a child, but lovers were made of child-stuff. He got up almost immediately, and, full of a tender penitence, she followed him.
One behind the other they went out into the garden, where Archie, in a superb unconsciousness of her presence, became instantly absorbed in the despised English papers.
“Archie!” she said.
He rustled with his paper.
“Oh, er—what?” he answered.
“I wanted to talk to you about Helena’s letter,” she said, “only you would talk about sardines. Put that paper down; I can’t talk through the paper.”
She noticed that he kept his finger on a paragraph, and she would have betted her last shilling that he had no idea what that paragraph was about. And, though a moment before she had been penitent, now she stiffened herself and determined that he should meet her more gracefully than that.
“I’m sorry; I’m interrupting you,” she said. “I’ll tell you some other time.”
Archie suddenly threw the paper into the air.
“Oh, aren’t we behaving like idiots?” he said. “At heart I am, and so are you really. But I’ll confess: I’m just longing to know what Helena writes about. But aren’t you an idiot, too? I shall like it enormously if you say you are.”
“I am an idiot, too,” said the girl. “And Cousin Marion wants Helena and me to live with her till father comes home. She told me to ask you if you approved.”
He leaned forward to her.
“Ah, do, Jessie,” he said. “I hope you will. I can’t see why you shouldn’t. Can you?”
She looked straight into the eager blue eyes that were so close to hers. For her there was a wealth of frankness and friendliness, but the light in them was not for her, and she knew it.
“Helena wants to,” she said.
“Does that mean that you don’t?” he asked. “I’m sorry if that is so.”
She got up.
“No, it doesn’t mean that a bit,” she said. “It’s delightful of you and Cousin Marion to want us. Of course we’ll come.”
Archie rose too.
“That’s perfectly ripping of you,” he said. “We shall be a jolly party, we four.”
Quite suddenly a pause fell, very awkwardly, very constrainedly.
“You see, my father doesn’t appear much,” he said at length. “That’s what I meant. He is very often in the country, and—well, we don’t see him much.”
Archie soon took himself off to the sea, armed with paper and pencils, for, with four hours in front of him, there would be much basking to be done between his bathes. Already another of those sea-sketches was beginning to take shape in his mind, and he found that there was no hour so fruitful in inspiration as when, after a swim, he returned to this empty, sandy beach, and lay spread out to the sun to be dried and browned and made eager for another dip. So, today, after the first swim, he lay for a while on his back with his arms across his face to shield his eyes from the glare, and opened his brain, so to speak, to let the sea-thoughts invade it. They came swarming in at his invitation, and presently he turned over and propped himself on his elbow and began to catch them and pin them to his paper. The rim of the sea, with its weed-fringed rocks, its diaper of moving light in the shallow water, the shoals of little fishes, almost invisible one moment, the next, as they turned, becoming a shield of silver flakes, were all ready to be hammered into sentences; and yet the hammer paused…
Somehow at the back of his mind was a topic that inhibited his hand, or would not allow the connection between hand and brain to be made, and he thought he knew what this was, for only this morning he had heard that Helena was to be an inmate of their house in London. Yet it did not seem to be that which was preventing him, and he wondered whether it was the thought of his father and his habitual intoxication, which was always like a black background at home, and which just for a moment had popped out into his conversation with Jessie, that hindered him. But that again did not seem a sufficient cause for his inability to start the mechanism which translated thought into language.
And then he became aware that his fingers itched and ached to write with a compelling force which he knew well. And yet only yesterday Martin had said that he should not come to him again. But the quality of the force seemed unmistakable, and presently he yielded to that which he really had not the power to resist and wrote as his hand bade him write.
There were but a few sentences scribbled, and then his pencil, as usually happened when the message was complete, gave a dash. He had no notion what he had written, and when it was finished he read it thr
ough.
“Archie, I have come through this once more,” it said, “to repeat that you have been warned. But I can’t get through again—MARTIN.”
So here again was this inexplicable mention of a warning, and Archie’s conscious mind was blank with regard to any such warning. But the repetition of it did not long occupy him, for immediately he found that the inhibition between his brain and his hand was gone, and sentence after sentence of his sea-sketch flowed through his fingers. By degrees, but not till a couple of his pages were full, did the inspiration exhaust itself, and then he lay back on the sand again full of the ecstasy that always accompanies the completion of a piece of work that has been done as the creator meant to do it. Bad or good, it has fulfilled his intention.
His brain brooded over that for a little, and then slipped back to the incident that had preceded it. He could make nothing at all of it, and, determining to dismiss it from his mind, and speak of it to nobody, he tore up the sheet that contained the message, buried the fragments in the sand, and lay back again roasting himself in the sun. Soon that delectable warmth would increase on his bare limbs, till they cried out for the cool embraces of the sea again, and he would fling himself into it. But just for a little longer he would stew and stupefy himself in the sun and with half-closed eyes watch the vibration of the hot air over the beach and listen to the hiss of the ripples. Except for them the morning was extremely quiet, the sun poured down over his outspread limbs, the sea waited for him. And, as he lay there and dozed, the memory of his evil dream went across his brain like a flash, and vanished again.
* * * *
Already the Italian days were beginning to draw to their sunny end; they were numbered and could be easily counted. Both Archie and Jessie counted them when they woke in the morning, and in the evening both said to themselves, “Another day gone.” But their reflections on this diminishing tale and the colour of their emotions were absolutely opposed, for while they both intensely enjoyed these Italian hours, Jessie counted them with the grudging sense of a school-boy who enumerates the remaining days of his holiday; but to Archie they were the days of term-time which still (though enjoyable) must be got through before the holidays began. Never before had he contemplated a stay in town with eagerness; but now, as he thought of her who would be living with them, he had never been so expectantly enamoured of London.
At the close of their last day the divine serenity of June weather was troubled, and, as evening drew on, the clouds, which for a few hours past had been weaving wisps and streamers over the sky, grew to a thick curtain that stretched from horizon to horizon. It was of opaque grey, but here and there in it were lines and patches of much darker texture, as if it had been rent, and had been darned again with a blacker thread. Instead of the coolness which succeeded sunset, the heat, clear no longer, but impure like the air of a closed room, got ever sultrier, and, for the refreshment of the evening breeze from the sea, there was exchanged a stifling stagnation. All life had gone out of the atmosphere: it was as if some immense Othello was smothering the world. The air was heavy and charged with electricity, but as yet no remote winking of lightning nor rumble of thunder showed that there was relief coming.
They had dined out in the garden, where the candles burned unwaveringly in the stillness, and afterwards had strolled to the far angle of the supporting wall of the fortress, where, if anywhere, they might find some hint of movement in this intolerable calm. But no breath visited them even there, and the very bamboos that grew at the corner of the garden-bed were as motionless as if they had been made of lead.
Archie mopped his streaming forehead.
“If it interests anybody,” he remarked, “I may say that I am going to die. I can’t bear it any longer. I think I shall die in about half an hour.”
Jessie fanned herself. That did not do a particle of good, it only seemed to make her hotter, as when you stir the water in a hot bath. But she tried to interest herself in Archie’s approaching decease.
“And are we to take your corpse back to England tomorrow?” she asked.
“Just as you like. I shall have no more use for it. Lord, and I haven’t finished packing yet. Fancy having to pack in this heat.”
“You needn’t, surely, if you’re going to die.”
“I must. My immortal manuscript would be lost in the general confusion caused by my death. Or shall I go to bed? It can’t be hotter in my hammock than here. Yes, I shall get into my pyjamas, go to bed, and do my packing in the morning.”
He trailed off into the house, and presently appeared again attired for bed and strolled across to them.
“Well, I’ll wish you a good-night,” he said, “but I very much doubt whether you’ll get it. You needn’t do the same to me, for I know I shan’t, and your wishes would be hollow.”
He moved away again towards the stone-pine where his hammock was hung, a pale tall ghost of a figure against the blackness.
Then, quite suddenly, some panic impulse seized Jessie, the result perhaps of her overstrung nerves and the overcharged atmosphere, and she sprang up, not knowing why.
“Wait a moment, Archie,” she cried. “Don’t go—something is going to happen.”
Even as she spoke the whole world seemed enveloped in fire, and the core of the fire, a white-hot line, plunged downwards into the stone-pine, which was rent from top to bottom. Absolute blackness filled with the deafening roar of the thunder and deluging rain succeeded, and they rushed towards the shelter of the house.
For a moment they all three stood there recovering their balance from that tremendous crash and convulsion. Then Archie, with his soaked silk clinging close to his shoulders and legs, turned to Jessie.
“I wonder why you called out to me,” he said. “What made you do it? You saved my life, I expect.”
Jessie laughed; little as she was given to hysteria that laugh was half-way towards uncontrollable tears.
“Why, I didn’t want you to die in half an hour,” she said lightly.
* * * *
But she remembered that moment when it came for her to save Archie’s life indeed. Some inexplicable signal from love had flashed upon her that night, and should flash upon her again.
CHAPTER VII
Helena was having breakfast by the open window of her bedroom in her cousin’s house. It was not yet nine in the morning, and, though she had been dancing till three o’clock, she had already had her bath, and was feeling as fresh as if she had had eight instead of hardly more than four hours in bed. Outside the square was still empty of passengers, and the pale primrose-coloured sunshine of a London June shone on a wet roadway and rain-refreshed trees, for a shower had fallen not long ago, and through the open window there came in the delicious smell of damp earth. But she gave little heed to that or to the breakfast she was eating with so admirable an appetite, for her brain, cool and alert in this early hour, was very busy over her own concerns. Soon she would have to go down to Cousin Marion and see if she could be of any use to her, for it was quite worth while doing jobs for Cousin Marion, as she always paid kindnesses back with a royal generosity. And she must get some flowers to give a welcoming air to Archie’s room, who with Jessie was expected back today. That also would not be a waste of the time she might have spent more directly on herself. She would get some for Jessie, too, for she had the character of unselfish thoughtfulness to keep up. It would be unnecessary to pay for them, for she could get them at the shop where Cousin Marion dealed.
Helena had enjoyed the most entrancing fortnight, during which time she had occasionally thought of Silorno, and had oftener talked of it to Cousin Marion, for she had that valuable social gift of appearing to talk with keen attention of one thing while she was thinking about something quite different. She could easily interject “Dear Archie, it will be nice to have him back,” or “Darling Jessie wrote me such a delicious letter: she is enjoying herself!” and if Cousin Marion expressed a wish to see the letter, it was equally easy to say that she had torn it up.
Meantime her brain would be busy with recollections of the day before, as they bore on her plans for the day to come. They might go off on to tangents for brief spaces, but her well-ordered and singly-purposed mind was never long in recalling them to their main topic.
Helena had made something of a sensation during these last weeks. She was not beautiful, but she was quite enchantingly pretty, and her mind had the qualities which might rightly be supposed to underlie that delicious face and inform those slim, graceful limbs. Nothing seemed to mar her good-nature and her superb gift of enjoying herself. It was worth while being agreeable to everybody, and if her lot happened for an hour or two a day to be cast with elderly bores, she was indefatigable in her attention to them at the time, and in telling their friends afterwards how immensely she had enjoyed talking to them. It paid to do that sort of thing, provided that it was done with a gaiety that made it appear genuine and spontaneous: if your appreciation came bubbling out of you, no one suspected you of design, and she seemed the most designless, delicious girl in London, for it is next to impossible to see through an object that dazzles you. To crown all these gifts, she had the intensest power of enjoying herself, and there is not another key that unlocks so many doors. In this whirl and mill-race of entertainment which characterized the last gay summer that London would see for long, there was no time to make friends, but only to take the scalps of enthusiastic acquaintances. That perhaps was lucky for her.
But Helena, as she finished her breakfast, recalled her mind from these shining experiences, except in so far as they bore on the theme that insistently occupied her. There was no doubt, especially after that quiet talk in the paved garden outside the ball-room last night, that Bertie Harlow was dazzled, according to plan. Heaven only knew when he had last been to a ball, for he was close on forty (Helena had naturally looked him up in a Peerage, since she liked to know about her friends), and she felt pretty certain that he had danced with no one but her. You could perhaps hardly call his share of the performance dancing; he had “stepped a measure,” and twice trodden on her toe; but, after all, it did not matter whether your husband danced or not, since naturally, when those relations had been arrived at, he would not dance with you. Many women no doubt, when they were married, would think it an advantage that their husbands did not dance, since then they would not dance with anybody else. But it was not in Helena’s nature prospectively to grudge him such amusements, should he desire them, when once she had got him. But she had to get him first, and to do that she had to keep him dazzled. He must not get accustomed to her.