The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  There were still four or five hours to get through before it would be reasonable to think about dinner, after which, even if he started alone, the hours would take care of themselves very pleasantly; but he had to fill the interval somehow. There were some proofs of his book waiting for him at home, and, hoping to get interested in this first-born public child of his brain, he sat down with a view to correcting them. But he found himself reading the pages as if there was nothing intelligible printed on them. True, if he forced himself to attend, he could see that grammatical sentences succeeded each other; but they conveyed no further impression. There was a lot about the sea, but why on earth had he taken the trouble to write it? He could remember writing it; he could call up an image of himself sitting in the garden at Silorno, eagerly writing, conscientiously erasing, walking up and down in the attempt to frame a phrase that should exactly reproduce some mood of his mind. But what had inspired those strivings and despairs and exultations?

  Here was the record of them, and it seemed now to be about nothing. “The rain in the night had washed the white soil into the rim of the sea, and it was clouded like absinthe.” He could well remember the search for, and the finding of that particular simile. He and Harry had been into Genoa a week before, and, out of curiosity, had ordered absinthe at a cafe. The drink, qua drink, was mildly unpleasant, resembling aniseed, but it had been worth while having it, merely to have got that perfectly fitting simile. The effect, too, had been rather remarkable; it produced a sort of heady lightness and sense of well-being; colours seemed strangely vivid and intensified, and…

  Archie got up from his meaningless proofs. It was absinthe that would help him to fill up those dull hours till dinner-time, and he remembered having seen in some little French restaurant in Soho the stuff he wanted. Very likely you could get it anywhere, but he wanted it from that particular place, for there had come in one evening, when he dined there, a most melancholy-looking person who had ordered it and sat and sipped. Somehow the man’s face had made an impression on him, so unhappy was it. He remembered also his face half an hour afterwards, when he began his dinner, and no serener, more contented countenance could have been imagined… So he must have his absinthe from that restaurant; clearly they had a very good brand of it there.

  As he drove out alone that evening to dine, he heard the newsvenders shouting out the English ultimatum to Germany, and saw the placards in the streets. The shouting sounded wonderfully musical, and below the roar of the street traffic was a muffled harmony as of pealing bells. The drab colours of London were shot with prismatic hues; never had the streets appeared so beautiful. There was even beauty in the fact of the outbreak of war, for England was going to war for the sake of liberty, which was a fine, a noble adventure. And how lovely the English girls and boys were, who crowded the pavements! They were like beds of exquisite flowers. For himself, he was going back to dine at the French restaurant in Soho, for that would be in the nature of supporting our new Allies. Afterwards there were the streets and the music-halls, and all the mysteries of the short summer night. Then dawn would break, rose-coloured dawn, with her finger on her lips, and sweet, silent mouth, a little ashamed of her sister, night, but sympathetic at heart. Dawn was always a little prudish, a little Quakerish.

  * * * *

  The days of a divine August went by, and the line of German invasion swept forward like a tide that knows no ebb over all Belgium and North-East France. The British Expeditionary Force started, and was swept back like the flotsam on the seashore. The call came for the raising of an army, and east and west, north and south, the recruiting offices were like choked waterways, and still the flood of men, in whose hearts the fact of England had awoke, poured in. Hospitals were gorged with the returning wounded; women by the hundred and by the thousand volunteered as nurses, and went to hospitals to be trained. The whole of comfortable England, intent hitherto on its sports, its leisure, its general superiority to the rest of the world, suddenly became aware that an immense and vital danger threatened it. A chorus of objurgation arose from the brazen-throated press, each organ striving to shout the loudest, at the unpreparedness of the country, and much valuable energy was spent in headlines and recriminations. There was a shortage of guns, a shortage of ammunition, a shortage of everything which constitutes the sinews of war. The only thing of which there was not a shortage was of those who threw aside all other considerations, such as income and secure living and life itself, and gave themselves to assist, in what manner they could, the cause for which England had gone to war.

  To Archie this all seemed a very hysterical and uncomfortable attack of nerves. In several ways it affected him personally, for William, than whom there was no more reliable servant, was among the first to leave his well-paid situation and present himself at a recruiting office. Archie hated that: there would be the nuisance of getting a new servant, who did not know where precisely he ought to put Archie’s tooth-powder, and how to arrange his clothes. William had announced the fact too, in the suddenest of manners; he brought it out as he brought in Archie’s morning tea.

  “And if you can spare me at once, my lord,” he said, “I had better go on Saturday.”

  Archie felt peculiarly devilish that morning; it rained, and the absinthe that should have arrived last night had not come.

  “I think it’s very inconsiderate of you, William,” he said. “But I suppose you expect to get on well, and draw higher pay than you get here. So I shall have to raise your wages. All right; I’ll give you a pound a month more, and don’t let me hear any more about it.”

  He knew perfectly well that this was not William’s reason, but it amused him to suggest it. He wanted to see how William would take it. The fact that he knew that the man was devoted to him made the point.

  William busied himself with razors and tooth-brushes, replying nothing.

  “Can’t you hear what I say?” asked Archie, pouring himself out his tea.

  William faced round.

  “Yes, Master Archie,” he said. “I heard. But I knew you didn’t mean that. You know how I’ve served you and worked for you all these years. You would scorn to think that of me, I should say.”

  Archie had noticed the “Master Archie” instead of “my lord”; both William and Blessington often forgot that he was “my lord,” and it always used to please him that to the sense of love he was still a young boy. And, in spite of his irritation and peevish morning temper, it touched some part of him that still loved below the corruption that was spreading over him like some jungle-growing lichen. But he had to force his way through that to reply.

  “You must do as you think right, William,” he said.

  William had finished the arrangements of his dressing, and stood for a moment by his bedside with Archie’s evening clothes bundled on to his arm.

  “Yes, Master Archie,” he said. “And you’ll be joining up too before long, won’t you? I should dearly love to be your soldier-servant, sir, if you could manage it.”

  All Archie’s ill-humour returned at that unfortunate suggestion.

  “Perhaps you had better not be impertinent,” he said. “That’ll do.”

  William’s face fell.

  “I had no thought of impertinence, my lord,” he said. “I only thought—”

  “I told you that would do,” said Archie.

  * * * *

  Three days afterwards William left. He came to say good-bye to Archie, who did not look up from the paper he was reading. Archie was suffering inconvenience from his departure, and this was the best way of making William feel it. But when the door had shut again, and William was gone, he felt a sudden horror of the thing that seemed to be himself, and he ran out, and called William back. All these days he had not had a word or kindly gesture for him…

  “Good-bye, William,” he said. “I wish you all good luck. I’ve treated you like a beast these last days, and I’m awfully sorry. You’re the best fellow a man could have, and you must try to forget the horrid way
I’ve behaved.”

  William stood with his hand in Archie’s for a moment.

  “You’re always my Master Archie, sir,” he said.

  * * * *

  Well, there was an end of William: before he had got back to his paper again Archie wondered what had possessed him to throw a kind word to a dog like that, who had left him at three days’ notice to join this ridiculous military conspiracy. William did not care how much he inconvenienced Archie, who had always treated him more like a subordinate friend than a servant. He had helped William in a hundred ways: had given him old clothes, had constantly asked after his mother, had left his letters about for William to read if he chose. It seemed rank treachery…

  Others were treacherous too; his mother, for instance, was immediately going up to town, to take charge of the house in Grosvenor Square, which was to be turned into a hospital for wounded officers. She was to become a sort of housekeeper, so Archie figured it, and merely superintend domestic arrangements. She would have nothing to do with the nursing and the surgery, which had a certain fascination… He could picture a sort of pleasure in seeing a man’s leg cut off, or in standing by while doctors pulled bandages off festering wounds. To feel well and strong while others were suffering had an intelligible interest: to witness decay and corruption and pain was a point that appealed to him now. But Lady Tintagel was going to do nothing of the sort: she was just going to be a housekeeper. It was very selfish of her; Archie would certainly want, from time to time, to go up to town and spend a night or two there, and now he would have to go to a hotel or a club, instead of profiting by the spacious privacy of his father’s house. Charity begins at home; and his mother had started charity on most extraneous lines. Jessie had followed this lead, “the lead of so-called trumps,” as Archie framed a private phrase. She would start by being not even a housekeeper, but a sort of kitchen-maid at the same hospital. She had an insane desire to work, to do something that cost her something, instead of engaging a kitchen-maid, and paying her wages to go to some hospital or other. There was a craze for “personal service,” instead of getting other people to do work for you, if you felt work had to be done. People wanted to “do their bit,” to employ an odious expression which was beginning to obtain currency. The nation was going to be mobilized; hand and heart had to serve some vague national idea. Occasionally, as on the night when war was declared, Archie saw an aesthetic beauty in the notion of upholding rights and liberties; but he had not then reckoned with the fact that personal inconvenience might result from that quixotic revolution. Quixotism was fine in theory, but it was a dream, not to be encouraged in waking hours, when far more important and realizable commodities, like whisky and absinthe, engaged the true attention.

  But, whoever else was treacherous, his father at least was loyal, and showed no sign of becoming a butler or a footman, to correspond with his wife and Jessie. Occasionally some grave report concerning the German advance through Belgium used to reach his brain, and he would walk up and down his room in the evening with a martial tread, and a glance at a sword that hung above his writing-table, and wish he was younger and able to “have a go” at those invading locusts. But invariably this mood, which was always short, was succeeded by another, not bellicose but domestic.

  “This damned war is going to break up home-life in England,” he would say, “and I’ve no doubt that was what the Germans aimed at. And they’re succeeding too. Look at this house: there’s you mother going to leave us, and there’s Helena’s husband expecting every day to be sent to France, and there’s Jessie leaving her father to wash up dishes. What’s going to become of our English homes if that goes on?—for, mark you, they are the root of our national life. It’s digging up the trees’ roots to break up English homes. You and I, Archie, are the only ones who are staunch to our homes. Pass me that bottle, will you?”

  “May I help myself on the way?” said Archie.

  “Yes, of course, my dear boy. I say, it was a funny state of things when you and I used to have our evening drinks alone, instead of enjoying them and chatting over them together. Your man, William, too, he’s gone and enlisted, hasn’t he? The old bulwarks of England are going fast: the homes are being broken up, and the very servants come and go as they choose. An establishment was an establishment in the old days: it all stood and fell together, if you see what I mean. But I wish I was young enough to have a go at the Boches.”

  “I’m thinking of going,” Archie would say, merely in order to enjoy his father’s reply.

  “Well, in my opinion, you’ll be doing a very wrong thing, then,” said Lord Tintagel. “I hope you won’t seriously think of that. I tell you your duty is here, with your poor old father. When I’m gone you may do what you please, and I daresay you won’t have very long to wait. But, while I’m here, I hope you’ll remember that they say in church ‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’ You can’t go behind the commandments, or the psalms, whichever it is.”

  But these sessions in Lord Tintagel’s room of an evening, with the liquid in the decanter sinking steadily like a well in time of drought, were becoming rather tedious to Archie. Since his discovery of absinthe they had even become rather gross, and he congratulated himself on having seen the sordidness of mere swilling. That sort of thing was only fit for coarse, rough tastes; it seemed to him to lack all delicacy and aesthetic value, and he often left his father, who congratulated him on his abstemiousness after no more than a friendly glass of good fellowship, and went upstairs to his room to enjoy subtler and more refined sensations. Indeed, his chief interest in that half-hour or so in his father’s room was derived from the sight of his father’s heavy potations, the struggle of his maundering thoughts to emerge into language, much as a tilted half-moon struggles to pierce the flying clouds on some tempestuous night. The sight of his father’s deterioration and gradual wreck somehow fascinated him; there was decay and corruption there, and those no longer aroused in him that horror with which in dream he had observed the emergence of the writhing worms from the white statue of Helena. Such things were no longer disgusting and repulsive: they claimed kinship with something in his soul that was very potent. Once Martin had alluded to that vision as a warning, and he had not taken that warning, in consequence of which he had passed an utterly miserable month after Helena’s rejection of him. Now values had altogether changed: decay no longer revolted him. But, with a hypocrisy that had become characteristic of him, he told himself that the sight of his father’s nightly intoxication was a lesson to himself. He must observe that degrading spectacle, and learn from it what the result of too much whisky was. And then he retired to his bedroom to think it over as he sipped the clouded aroma of his absinthe.

  Jessie came down for another week-end before she took her kitchen-maid situation, and brought the news that a fresh draft of Lord Harlow’s regiment was ordered to the front, and that he would leave for France within the next day or two.

  Archie felt a wild desire to laugh, to skip, to show his intense appreciation of these tidings. But he remembered that Jessie was not his confidante to that extent, and checked his exuberant inclination.

  “Poor Helena!” he said, with an accent of great sincerity. “She must be broken-hearted. Why, they’ve only been married a fortnight, if as much.”

  It was excellently said, and Jessie felt she would have shown herself an infidel, with regard to the general decency of the human race, if she had not accepted those words with the sincerity with which they surely must have been uttered. She resolutely put away from her all those misgivings that had assailed her when first she knew of Archie’s changed attitude towards her sister.

  “You have been a brick about Helena,” she said. “I want to tell you that. Your forgiveness of the way she treated you seems to me beyond all praise.”

  “Oh, nonsense,” said he lightly. “Besides, it was so dreadfully uncomfortable being always angry and miserable. Martin showed me that. But about Helena: how is she bearing it?”

  It
was now Jessie’s turn to be obliged to cloak her meaning.

  “Very calmly and bravely,” she said.

  “She would,” said Archie enthusiastically. “One always felt there was a steel will behind all Helena’s gentleness. What will she do, do you think? Would she perhaps like to come down here? There isn’t much to offer her, but then London in August doesn’t offer much either.”

  Suddenly all Jessie’s mistrust stirred and erected itself. She could not believe that this scheme, which would throw Helena and Archie completely together, could be made with the apparent innocence with which it was put forward. How was it possible that Archie, who so few weeks ago was in such depths of misery and bitterness, could honourably suggest so dangerous a plan? It could not be Archie who suggested it: it came from that smiling white presence which she had seen in his room not many nights ago. And it was just that which she could not say to him.

  “It’s nice of you to think of that,” she said.

  “Not a bit: it would be nice for me, not nice of me. And besides,” he added, with an amazing cynicism, “it would be my way of ‘doing my bit,’ which everybody is talking about, if I could make things cheerfuller for pretty women like poor Helena, whose husband has gone out to fight.”