The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “Then you were afraid even where no fear was, mother darling,” said he, “and if you would like to sit out in the garden I’ll take a chair out for you, and a table and candles. Let’s all sit out; it’s a divine hour, this hour after sunset. There are but a score of days in the whole year when the hour after sunset is warm like this. It’s such a pity to waste one indoors. The young people”—and he pointed to Sylvia and Michael—“will gaze into each other’s hearts, and Mamma’s will beat in unison with Lady Ursula’s, and I will sit and look at the sky and become profoundly sentimental, like a good German.”

  Hermann and Michael bestirred themselves, and presently the whole little party had encamped on chairs placed in an oasis of rugs (this was done at the special request of Mrs. Falbe, since Lady Ursula had caught a chill that developed into consumption) in the small, high-walled garden. Beyond at the bottom lay the road along the embankment and the grey-blue Thames, and the dim woods of Battersea Park across the river. When they came out, sparrows were still chirping in the ivy on the studio wall and in the tall angle-leaved planes at the bottom of the little plot, discussing, no doubt, the domestic arrangements for their comfort during the night. But presently a sudden hush fell upon them, and their shrillness was sharp no more against the drowsy hum of the city. The sky overhead was of veiled blue, growing gradually more toneless as the light faded, and was unflecked by any cloud, except where, high in the zenith, a fleece of rosy vapour still caught the light of the sunken sun, and flamed with the soft radiance of some snow-summit. Near it there burned a molten planet, growing momentarily brighter as the night gathered and presently beginning to be dimmed again as a tawny moon three days past the full rose in the east above the low river horizon. Occasionally a steamer hooted from the Thames and the noise of churned waters sounded, or the crunch of a motor’s wheels, or the tapping of the heels of a foot passenger on the pavement below the garden wall. But such evidence of outside seemed but to accentuate the perfect peace of this secluded little garden where the four sat: the hour and the place were cut off from all turmoil and activities: for a moment the stream of all their lives had flowed into a backwater, where it rested immobile before the travel that was yet to come. So it seemed to Michael then, and so years afterwards it seemed to him, as vividly as on this evening when the tawny moon grew golden as it climbed the empty heavens, dimming the stars around it.

  What they talked of, even though it was Sylvia who spoke, seemed external to the spirit of the hour. They seemed to have reached a point, some momentary halting-place, where speech and thought even lay outside, and the need of the spirit was merely to exist and be conscious of its existence. Sometimes for a moment his past life with its self-repression, its mute yearnings, its chrysalis stirrings, formed a mist that dispersed again, sometimes for a moment in wonder at what the future held, what joys and troubles, what achings, perhaps, and anguishes, the unknown knocked stealthily at the door of his mind, but then stole away unanswered and unwelcome, and for that hour, while Mrs. Falbe finished with Lady Ursula, while Hermann smoked and sighed like a sentimental German, and while he and Sylvia sat, speaking occasionally, but more often silent, he was in some kind of Nirvana for which its own existence was everything. Movement had ceased: he held his breath while that divine pause lasted.

  When it was broken, there was no shattering of it: it simply died away like a long-drawn chord as Mrs. Falbe closed her book.

  “She died,” she said, “I knew she would.”

  Hermann gave a great shout of laughter.

  “Darling mother, I’m ever so much obliged,” he said. “We had to return to earth somehow. Where has everybody else been?”

  Michael stirred in his chair.

  “I’ve been here,” he said.

  “How dull! Oh, I suppose that’s not polite to Sylvia. I’ve been in Leipzig and in Frankfort and in Munich. You and Sylvia have been there, too, I may tell you. But I’ve also been here: it’s jolly here.”

  His sentimentalism had apparently not quite passed from him.

  “Ah, we’ve stolen this hour!” he said. “We’ve taken it out of the hurly-burly and had it to ourselves. It’s been ripping. But I’m back from the rim of the world. Oh, I’ve been there, too, and looked out over the immortal sea. Lieber Gott, what a sea, where we all come from, and where we all go to! We’re just playing on the sand where the waves have cast us up for one little hour. Oh, the pleasant warm sand and the play! How I love it.”

  He got out of his chair stretching himself, as Mrs. Falbe passed into the house, and gave a hand on each side to Michael and Sylvia.

  “Ah, it was a good thing I just caught that train at Victoria nearly a year ago,” he said. “If I had been five seconds later, I should have missed it, and so I should have missed my friend, and Sylvia would have missed hers, and Mike would have missed his. As it is, here we all are. Behold the last remnant of my German sentimentality evaporates, but I am filled with a German desire for beer. Let us come into the studio, liebe Kinder, and have beer and music and laughter. We cannot recapture this hour or prolong it. But it was good, oh, so good! I thank God for this hour.”

  Sylvia put her hand on her brother’s arm, looking at him with just a shade of anxiety.

  “Nothing wrong, Hermann?” she asked.

  “Wrong? There is nothing wrong unless it is wrong to be happy. But we have to go forward: my only quarrel with life is that. I would stop it now if I could, so that time should not run on, and we should stay just as we are. Ah, what does the future hold? I am glad I do not know.”

  Sylvia laughed.

  “The immediate future holds beer apparently,” she said. “It also hold a great deal of work for you and me, if it is to hold Leipzig and Frankfort and Munich. Oh, Hermann, what glorious days!”

  They walked together into the studio, and as they entered Hermann looked back over her into the dim garden. Then he pulled down the blind with a rattle.

  “‘Move on there!’ said the policeman,” he remarked. “And so they moved on.”

  The news about the murder of the Austrian Grand Duke, which, for that moment at dinner, had caused Hermann to peer with apprehension into the veil of the future, was taken quietly enough by the public in general in England. It was a nasty incident, no doubt, and the murder having been committed on Servian soil, the pundits of the Press gave themselves an opportunity for subsequently saying that they were right, by conjecturing that Austria might insist on a strict inquiry into the circumstances, and the due punishment of not only the actual culprits but of those also who perhaps were privy to the plot. But three days afterwards there was but little uneasiness; the Stock Exchanges of the European capitals—those highly sensitive barometers of coming storm—were but slightly affected for the moment, and within a week had steadied themselves again. From Austria there came no sign of any unreasonable demand which might lead to trouble with Servia, and so with Slavonic feeling generally, and by degrees that threatening of storm, that sudden lightning on the horizon passed out of the mind of the public. There had been that one flash, no more, and even that had not been answered by any growl of thunder; the storm did not at once move up and the heavens above were still clear and sunny by day, and starry-kirtled at night. But here and there were those who, like Hermann on the first announcement of the catastrophe, scented trouble, and Michael, going to see Aunt Barbara one afternoon early in the second week of July, found that she was one of them.

  “I distrust it all, my dear,” she said to him. “I am full of uneasiness. And what makes me more uneasy is that they are taking it so quietly at the Austrian Embassy and at the German. I dined at one Embassy last night and at the other only a few nights ago, and I can’t get anybody—not even the most indiscreet of the Secretaries—to say a word about it.”

  “But perhaps there isn’t a word to be said,” suggested Michael.

  “I can’t believe that. Austria cannot possibly let an incident of that sort pass. There is mischief brewing. If she was merely inte
nding to insist—as she has every right to do—on an inquiry being held that should satisfy reasonable demands for justice, she would have insisted on that long ago. But a fortnight has passed now, and still she makes no sign. I feel sure that something is being arranged. Dear me, I quite forgot, Tony asked me not to talk about it. But it doesn’t matter with you.”

  “But what do you mean by something being arranged?” asked Michael.

  She looked round as if to assure herself that she and Michael were alone.

  “I mean this: that Austria is being persuaded to make some outrageous demand, some demand that no independent country could possibly grant.”

  “But who is persuading her?” asked Michael.

  “My dear, you—like all the rest of England—are fast asleep. Who but Germany, and that dangerous monomaniac who rules Germany? She has long been wanting war, and she has only been delaying the dawning of Der Tag, till all her preparations were complete, and she was ready to hurl her armies, and her fleet too, east and west and north. Mark my words! She is about ready now, and I believe she is going to take advantage of her opportunity.”

  She leaned forward in her chair.

  “It is such an opportunity as has never occurred before,” she said, “and in a hundred years none so fit may occur again. Here are we—England—on the brink of civil war with Ireland and the Home Rulers; our hands are tied, or, rather, are occupied with our own troubles. Anyhow, Germany thinks so: that I know for a fact among so much that is only conjecture. And perhaps she is right. Who knows whether she may not be right, and that if she forces on war whether we shall range ourselves with our allies?”

  Michael laughed.

  “But aren’t you piling up a European conflagration rather in a hurry, Aunt Barbara?” he asked.

  “There will be hurry enough for us, for France and Russia and perhaps England, but not for Germany. She is never in a hurry: she waits till she is ready.”

  A servant brought in tea and Lady Barbara waited till he had left the room again.

  “It is as simple as an addition sum,” she said, “if you grant the first step, that Austria is going to make some outrageous demand of Servia. What follows? Servia refuses that demand, and Austria begins mobilisation in order to enforce it. Servia appeals to Russia, invokes the bond of blood, and Russia remonstrates with Austria. Her representations will be of no use: you may stake all you have on that; and eventually, since she will be unable to draw back she, too, will begin in her slow, cumbrous manner, hampered by those immense distances and her imperfect railway system, to mobilise also. Then will Germany, already quite prepared, show her hand. She will demand that Russia shall cease mobilisation, and again will Russia refuse. That will set the military machinery of France going. All the time the governments of Europe will be working for peace, all, that is, except one, which is situated at Berlin.”

  Michael felt inclined to laugh at this rapid and disastrous sequence of ominous forebodings; it was so completely characteristic of Aunt Barbara to take the most violent possible view of the situation, which no doubt had its dangers. And what Michael felt was felt by the enormous majority of English people.

  “Dear Aunt Barbara, you do get on quick,” he said.

  “It will happen quickly,” she said. “There is that little cloud in the east like a man’s hand today, and rather like that mailed fist which our sweet peaceful friend in Germany is so fond of talking about. But it will spread over the sky, I tell you, like some tropical storm. France is unready, Russia is unready; only Germany and her marionette, Austria, the strings of which she pulls, is ready.”

  “Go on prophesying,” said Michael.

  “I wish I could. Ever since that Sarajevo murder I have thought of nothing else day and night. But how events will develop then I can’t imagine. What will England do? Who knows? I only know what Germany thinks she will do, and that is, stand aside because she can’t stir, with this Irish mill-stone round her neck. If Germany thought otherwise, she is perfectly capable of sending a dozen submarines over to our naval manoeuvres and torpedoing our battleships right and left.”

  Michael laughed outright at this.

  “While a fleet of Zeppelins hovers over London, and drops bombs on the War Office and the Admiralty,” he suggested.

  But Aunt Barbara was not in the least diverted by this.

  “And if England stands aside,” she said, “Der Tag will only dawn a little later, when Germany has settled with France and Russia. We shall live to see Der Tag, Michael, unless we are run over by motor-buses, and pray God we shall see it soon, for the sooner the better. Your adorable Falbes, now, Sylvia and Hermann. What do they think of it?”

  “Hermann was certainly rather—rather upset when he read of the Sarajevo murders,” he said. “But he pins his faith on the German Emperor, whom he alluded to as a fire-engine which would put out any conflagration.”

  Aunt Barbara rose in violent incredulity.

  “Pish and bosh!” she remarked. “If he had alluded to him as an incendiary bomb, there would have been more sense in his simile.”

  “Anyhow, he and Sylvia are planning a musical tour in Germany in the autumn,” said Michael.

  “‘It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,’” remarked Aunt Barbara enigmatically.

  “Why Tipperary?” asked Michael.

  “Oh, it’s just a song I heard at a music-hall the other night. There’s a jolly catchy tune to it, which has rung in my head ever since. That’s the sort of music I like, something you can carry away with you. And your music, Michael?”

  “Rather in abeyance. There are—other things to think about.”

  Aunt Barbara got up.

  “Ah, tell me more about them,” she said. “I want to get this nightmare out of my head. Sylvia, now. Sylvia is a good cure for the nightmare. Is she kind as she is fair, Michael?”

  Michael was silent for a moment. Then he turned a quiet, radiant face to her.

  “I can’t talk about it,” he said. “I can’t get accustomed to the wonder of it.”

  “That will do. That’s a completely satisfactory account. But go on.”

  Michael laughed.

  “How can I?” he asked. “There’s no end and no beginning. I can’t ‘go on’ as you order me about a thing like that. There is Sylvia; there is me.”

  “I must be content with that, then,” she said, smiling.

  “We are,” said Michael.

  Lady Barbara waited a moment without speaking.

  “And your mother?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “She still refuses to see me,” he said. “She still thinks it was I who made the plot to take her away and shut her up. She is often angry with me, poor darling, but—but you see it isn’t she who is angry: it’s just her malady.”

  “Yes, my dear,” said Lady Barbara. “I am so glad you see it like that.”

  “How else could I see it? It was my real mother whom I began to know last Christmas, and whom I was with in town for the three months that followed. That’s how I think of her: I can’t think of her as anything else.”

  “And how is she otherwise?”

  Again he shook his head.

  “She is wretched, though they say that all she feels is dim and veiled, that we mustn’t think of her as actually unhappy. Sometimes there are good days, when she takes a certain pleasure in her walks and in looking after a little plot of ground where she gardens. And, thank God, that sudden outburst when she tried to kill me seems to have entirely passed from her mind. They don’t think she remembers it at all. But then the good days are rare, and are growing rarer, and often now she sits doing nothing at all but crying.”

  Aunt Barbara laid her hand on him.

  “Oh, my dear,” she said.

  Michael paused for a moment, his brown eyes shining.

  “If only she could come back just for a little to what she was in January,” he said. “She was happier then, I think, than she ever was before. I can’t help wondering
if anyhow I could have prolonged those days, by giving myself up to her more completely.”

  “My dear, you needn’t wonder about that,” said Aunt Barbara. “Sir James told me that it was your love and nothing else at all that gave her those days.”

  Michael’s lips quivered.

  “I can’t tell you what they were to me,” he said, “for she and I found each other then, and we both felt we had missed each other so much and so long. She was happy then, and I, too. And now everything has been taken from her, and still, in spite of that, my cup is full to overflowing.”

  “That’s how she would have it, Michael,” said Barbara.

  “Yes, I know that. I remind myself of that.”

  Again he paused.

  “They don’t think she will live very long,” he said. “She is getting physically much weaker. But during this last week or two she has been less unhappy, they think. They say some new change may come any time: it may be only the great change—I mean her death; but it is possible before that that her mind will clear again. Sir James told me that occasionally happened, like—like a ray of sunlight after a stormy day. It would be good if that happened. I would give almost anything to feel that she and I were together again, as we were.”

  Barbara, childless, felt something of motherhood. Michael’s simplicity and his sincerity were already known to her, but she had never yet known the strength of him. You could lean on Michael. In his quiet, undemonstrative way he supported you completely, as a son should; there was no possibility of insecurity.…

  “God bless you, my dear,” she said.

  CHAPTER XIII

  One close thundery morning about a week later, Michael was sitting at his piano in his shirtsleeves, busy practising. He was aware that at the other end of the room the telephone was calling for him, but it seemed to be of far greater importance at the minute to finish the last page of one of the Bach fugues, than to attend to what anybody else might have to say to him. Then it suddenly flashed across him that it might be Sylvia who wanted to speak to him, or that there might be news about his mother, and his fingers leaped from the piano in the middle of a bar, and he ran and slid across the parquet floor.