The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  * * * *

  Of all hours in the day Blessington loved best this evening visit of Archie’s, when he sat among the tokens of his childhood, the play-table which now scarcely reached up to his knees, the little arm-chair, with its bar of wood strung through the arms so as to imprison and guard the sitter, the box of oak-bricks with which he used to build houses of amazing architecture, the depleted regiments of lead-soldiers which still stood on the mantel-shelf. Her great delight was to recall to him the days of his childhood, his naughtiness, the scrapes he got into, the whole patchwork of memories that retained still such lively and beloved colouring. And for him, too, during this last week, there had been in these talks a way of escape from this nightmare of his present experience; it was he himself, after all, who had put the coals on his mother’s hearthrug, had fished for pike with William, had attended, in rapturous trepidation, the advents of Abracadabra. These days seemed much further off from him than they did from her, for a bitter impassable water lay between them and him, while for her they had only receded a little further into the placid and sunny distance of her days. But, when he talked them over with her, he could recapture a dreamlike illusion of getting back into a life of which the most alarming feature was the presence of his father. Over everything else there hung enchantment.

  He was sitting now in Blessington’s rocking-chair, having tried without success to squeeze himself into the imprisoning seat of his childhood, and she was recalling the awful episode of the burnt rug.

  “Eh, whatever possessed you to go and do it,” she said, “I can’t understand to this day, Master Archie. I’m speaking of when you set fire to your mamma’s rug.”

  “Tell me about that,” said Archie.

  “Well, it was on an afternoon when you had a cold, and your mamma had allowed you to sit in her room while she went out driving. And what must you do but empty all the fire from the hearth on to her rug. You nearly got a whipping for that from your papa!”

  Archie remembered that moment quite well, and how he had stood in his father’s study, frightened but defiant, and refusing to say he was sorry when he was not. Then his mother had come in and had pointed to a bottle on the table, and told his father that he ought to learn his lesson first before he gave Archie one… That had puzzled him at the time, though it was clear enough now. His father still had that lesson to learn, and Archie, during this last week, had begun to understand a little why his father had not yet learned it, if learning it implied the giving up of all that battles stood for.

  He recalled himself with a jerk: he wanted to get back into the enchanted land which Blessington’s reminiscences outlined for him.

  “Yes, that hearthrug,” he said. “That was a bad business, wasn’t it, Blessington? What do you think put it into my head to empty the fire on to it?”

  “Bless the boy, I don’t know,” said Blessington. “It was just mischief.”

  “Yes, but what’s mischief?” asked Archie.

  Blessington was a simple and direct theologian.

  “Well, I shouldn’t wonder if it’s doing what Sapum wants you to do,” said she, Sapum being her equivalent for the arch-enemy.

  “I shouldn’t wonder either,” said Archie. “But it’s rather beastly of Sapum to take possession of a very small boy with a bad cold in the head.”

  “Eh, he takes possession of us all, if we let him,” observed Blessington. “But that was the naughtiest thing you ever did, dear. I wouldn’t lay it up to you now.”

  “Was I good as a rule?” asked he.

  “Yes, Master Archie, for a boy you were,” said Blessington. “Boys are more trouble than girls, as is natural and proper.”

  “But doesn’t Sapum enter into girls, too?” asked he, with another thought in his mind.

  “Yes, to be sure, but not so violent-like. And when after that you were took ill, and we all went out to—eh, what’s the name of that place in Switzerland—I must say you were wonderfully good. It was as if some angel took possession of you, not one of Sapum’s flibertigibbits. You were no trouble at all; and see how quick you got well.”

  Archie rocked himself backwards and forwards for a minute in silence.

  “I wish I could remember Martin,” he said at length. “Tell me something about Martin.”

  “Eh, dear lamb!” said she. “Couldn’t he be naughty too, when the fit took him! But then he got ill, and many’s the time when I’ve longed for him to be naughty again, and he hadn’t the spirit for it. He didn’t want to die, and right up to the end he thought he’d get better. You papa never loved any one like he loved him, and nobody could help loving him. He was like a April morning, dear—sunshine one minute and squalls the next. And there was months, Master Archie, when we thought you would follow him.”

  Blessington grew a little tearful, with the sweet, easy tears of old-age over this, and Archie changed the subject.

  “And Abracadabra, now?” he asked. “What evenings those birthdays evenings were, weren’t they? I wish Abracadabra came still, bringing all we wanted. What would you choose, Blessington?”

  Blessington beamed again.

  “Eh, I know what I’d choose,” she said. “I’d choose a nice young lady to come here, and you and she take a fancy to each other, dear. That’s what I’d choose. Isn’t there some nice young lady, Master Archie?”

  Archie stopped his rocking for a moment, and a bitter word was on the end of his tongue. Then he smiled back at his nurse’s radiant face.

  “I’m going to marry you, Blessington,” he said, “when you’re old enough. Don’t you go flirting with anybody else now.”

  Blessington gave a little cackle of soft, toothless laughter.

  “Well, I never,” she said. “Who ever heard such a thing?”

  “Well, you’ve heard of it now,” said he. “Blessington, I believe there’s somebody else after you. I say, did you ever have any lovers once upon a time?”

  Blessington looked solemn again.

  “Well, there was your papa’s game-keeper once,” she said, “who made a silly of himself, as if I’d got nothing better to do than go and marry him. I didn’t suffer any of his nonsense… And there’s the sound of the motor. That’ll be your mamma and Miss Jessie coming. There’s a nice young lady now!”

  “Do you like her better than Miss Helena?” asked Archie.

  Blessington nodded her head very emphatically.

  “Not that I say she isn’t a nice young lady, too,” she said mysteriously.

  “What’s the matter with her then?” asked Archie.

  Blessington looked the incarnation of discretion.

  “I say nothing,” she said. “But there’s some as are artful, and some as are not. Now, my dear, you must go and see your mamma, or she’ll be wondering where you are.”

  “I’m with my young woman,” said Archie.

  “There! Get along with you,” said Blessington. “Eh, Master Archie, I love a talk over old times with you.”

  * * * *

  Archie went reluctantly away to greet his mother and Jessie, for these talks with Blessington had become to him a sort of oasis in this weary wilderness of scorching sand through which he had to travel all day and for many hours of the night. She was the comforter of the troubles of his earliest childhood; it was she who had always been by him if some nightmare snatched him from sleep, or if the dark developed terrors, and that habit of calling on her for aid, established among the mists of dawning consciousness he found still alive as an instinct, when there came on him now the maturer woes of love and manhood. Throughout his school life and his three years at Cambridge, he had never quite let go of Blessington’s hand, which had been the first to direct and sustain his tottering attempts at locomotion. Now, too, she was the only member of his immediate circle who did not know of his trouble, and it was an unutterable relief to feel that he was not being pitied and sympathized with by somebody. For, though there is nothing in the world better than sympathy and pity, no sufferer smarting from a recent
wound wants to live exclusively in such surroundings. Pity and sympathy, though they heal, yet touch the wound, and he never got over the impression when he was with his mother, for instance, that his wound was being dressed…Jessie did not force that on him so much, yet with her he was always being reminded of the fact that she was Helena’s sister. But with Blessington he could go back into the sunlight of the past: talk with her, and another occupation, temporary, he told himself, to tide him over those days, enabled him to get away to some extent, from himself.

  He met his mother in the hall, and instantly those anxious eyes of love, which, for all his affection for her, he found irritating, were on him. She was at his wound again, taking off the bandages, seeing how it was getting on…

  “And how are you, darling?” she said, looking at him with the tenderness that got on his nerves.

  Archie kissed her.

  “I am quite well, thanks,” he said. “I have just been having a talk with Blessington.”

  “My dear, how she would like that!” said Lady Tintagel with eager cordiality. “That was thoughtful of you.”

  Archie jerked himself away from her: though his mother said nothing direct, he felt that pity filled her mind. He was in its presence, and longed to get away from it. All the time another distinct piece of his mind wanted to hear about Helena. But he could not ask any question about her.

  “How are you, Archie?” said Jessie quietly.

  Archie’s exasperation suddenly flared up.

  “I have just told my mother I am very well,” he said. “I am still very well, thank you.”

  Jessie laughed; she managed better than Lady Tintagel.

  “In that case, come and have a game of golf-croquet with me,” she said. “There’s time before we need dress, isn’t there? I do want some air so badly after town.”

  Archie glanced at the clock; he usually went to his father’s study about this time, when they celebrated the approaching advent of dinner with a cocktail or two. That was the beginning of the tolerable part of the day: there was plenty of wine at dinner, and afterwards a succession of whiskies and sodas, and to be alive became quite a bearable condition again. On that first evening when Helena had told him her news and paid her half-crowns he had found that alcohol broke down his sense of being stunned, of being made of wood. Now he drank for another reason: by drink he got rid of the misery of normal consciousness and emerged into some sort of life again. It stimulated his brain, he could by its means escape for a little from that one perpetual thought of Helena that went round in his head like a stick in a backwater, and get into the current again. Sometimes he would go to his room, taking a whisky and soda with him, and wrestle with the sea-sketches he had so enthusiastically worked at at Silorno. By degrees the liquid in his glass ebbed, and his pile of cigarette-ends mounted, and he would go back for fresh supplies. But, while these hours lasted, he lived, and what tomorrow should bring he did not in the least care. He could escape for a few hours now, and that was sufficient. Also, when he went to bed, he could sleep heavily and dreamlessly.

  There was still time for a game with Jessie, before going in to his father; Jessie would take longer to dress for dinner than he, and there would be a few minutes to spare after she went upstairs. But, even as they were strolling across the lawn to get the croquet-balls from their box, she a little ahead of him as he nursed a match for his cigarette, he looked up, and there in front of him might have been Helena. The two were of the same height and build, they moved like each other. It was Jessie, of course, but just for a second, while his match burned up in the hollow of his hand, it was not she at all…

  He threw the match away.

  “Get the balls out, will you?” he said. “I’ve left my cigarette-case in my father’s room.”

  He ran back to the house, and went in through the garden door of his father’s study. Lord Tintagel was sitting in the big leather arm-chair, with his feet up on another, and a glass beside him.

  “Just come for a cocktail, father,” said Archie. “Hullo, they’re not here yet. It doesn’t matter; I’ll take a glass of whisky and soda.”

  “By all means; take what you like,” said the other drowsily. “You mother’s come, hasn’t she?”

  “Yes, mother and Jessie,” said Archie, pouring himself out some whisky. The soda-water was nearly exhausted, but the dregs of it gurgled pleasantly over the spirit. He drank it in a couple of gulps.

  “What are you going to do now?” asked his father.

  “Only have a game with Jessie.”

  “All right. Call in here when it’s time to go up and dress. There’ll be a cocktail for you then. Infernal lazy fellows the servants are not to bring them in earlier. Chuck me over the evening paper, will you?”

  The evening remission from deadness and dulness and misery had begun for Archie. He played his game with Jessie, drank his cocktail, and by the end of dinner had risen to such naturalness of good spirits again, that his mother commended herself for the wisdom of her plan that he should leave London and seek a change of mind in a change of scene. He had done some writing since he had been here; he seemed pleased with the way it was going, and she talked hopefully to Jessie when they held a rather protracted sitting in the drawing-room before the two men joined them. Perhaps they had both overrated the strength of Archie’s attachment: certainly tonight he did not appear like a boy who had so lately suffered an overwhelming disappointment in his affections.

  “And Blessington says he has been just as delightful and affectionate to her as usual,” said Lady Tintagel. “He goes and talks to her every evening as he always did. I think you must have been wrong, dear Jessie, when you thought he was so mortally hurt.”

  Jessie did not reply at once: she felt sure that she, with the insight of that love which is more comprehending than any mother’s love, was somehow right about that point. It was not the mere lapse of a week that had restored Archie. Besides, Blessington did not know about his troubles. She could easily conjecture what a relief he might find in that. She knew that she would feel the same in his place; she could understand how much easier it was to behave normally with those who did not know than with those who did. Yet Archie’s father knew, and all through dinner she had seen how friendly and intimate the two had become. Archie used to be constrained and awkward with his father, while his father used to be rather contemptuous of him. But this evening there had been none of that on either side, and now they lingered together a long time over their talk and their cigarettes. It was as if some bond of sympathy was springing up between them. But she shrank from admitting the explanation to herself: it might be that a man, who had been so bitterly disappointed about a girl, found something in another man that suited his mood. Women would remind him of a woman…

  There was a shout of laughter in the hall outside, and Archie came in, followed by his father. He did not communicate the grounds for his merriment, but, looking a little flushed, very handsome, and very content, sat down on the sofa by his mother.

  “Well, mother darling?” he said.

  Instantly her love yearned forth to him.

  “My dear, it is good to hear you laugh,” she said. “What have you and your father been talking about?”

  The sense of being watched, the love that irritated did not trouble Archie now. The sunny hours would stretch unclouded until he fell into bed. He laughed again, looking across to his father.

  “I say, father,” he said, “shall I tell her, or would she think it not quite…?”

  “Just as you like,” said Lord Tintagel.

  The door into the garden, already ajar, swung gently open, admitting a breath of cool night-air into the room. It stirred in Jessie’s hair as it passed her, and moved across to Archie, making the flowers in a vase near him vibrate. And for just that moment some impulse from the untainted tranquillity stirred in his soul, and his overheated, stimulated brain drank it thirstily in. His own laughter, and the subject of his laughter, the whole contents of the last hour or t
wo, seemed stale and stuffy. The air of them was thick with the fumes of wine, with the fancies and images that it evoked, smoke-wreaths that hung heavy in the atmosphere, swirling and turning like dancers and melting into other shapes. But for that moment when the night-air came in from the crystal-clear dusk outside, that liquid tabernacle of sapphire in the holy night, where stars sang together and nightingales burned, the hot fumes dispersed, and he drew in long, tranquillizing breaths. This physical impression had, too, its psychical counterpart, for even as the air that stirred in Jessie’s hair brought a coolness and a refreshment to him, so from the girl herself there seemed to stream into it a current of something wholesome and human and unfevered, unvexed by desire, and untouched by bitterness…