The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  Buck grunted, waggled, frowned heavily at his ball, and laid the iron shot dead.

  “There, it’s all rot saying that to think of something puts you off,” said Toby. “Blast it all!” and his scudding half-topped ball ran very swiftly into the bunker.

  “Of course, talking is one worse,” said Buck, a little soothed.

  Fifty yards separated the first green from the second tee, and Toby recapitulated the salient points of the problem. The man of few words answered nothing, and immediately afterwards drove a screamer.

  These great sea-blown downs, over which the wind scours as shrill and salt as in a ship’s rigging, are admirably predisposing towards lucidity of thought. The northern airs cleanse and vivify the brain; they set the blood trotting equably through the arteries, they tone down overstrung nerves, and raise the slack to the harmonious mean, and in a naturally sane mind lodged in an extremely sane body they produce extraordinarily well-balanced results. And golf above all human pursuits gives full play to what is known as the subliminal self, a fine phrase, denoting that occult and ruling factor in man’s brain—unconscious thought. The body is fully and harmoniously occupied; so, too, the conscious mind. The eye measures a distance; the hand and muscles take its order, and direct the swinging of the club. Meantime that mysterious twin of entity, the inner brain, goes scenting along its private trails, without let or hindrance from the occupied conscious self. Each goes his own way, on roads, maybe, as diverse as those of Jekyll and Hyde, unharassed by the other. Once only in the round did Buck laugh in a loud and appreciative manner for no clear cause. His inner brain had caught a hare, and sent the message to the golfer.

  It was still only a little after five when they returned to the club-house, and Toby ordered tea in a sequestered corner.

  “Of course you’ll go and call on this worm now,” remarked Buck.

  “Yes, that is what I meant to do. Got anything for me to say?”

  “Toby, can you lie?”

  “Like the devil, in a good cause.”

  “Well, tell the Comber man that you are coming to stay at the Links Hotel with your sister-in-law by her invitation. Do the thing properly, and be prodigal of details. It’s a pity you have such a despicable imagination. Say that she wrote to you in despair because she would be bored to death with no one there to speak to, but that Conybeare insisted on her going. Nasty for the worm that? Eh?”

  Toby pondered a moment.

  “That’s not up to much, Buck,” he said. “It wouldn’t drive the man away unless he went simply from pique. And supposing he tells me Kit didn’t write to me? Perhaps he has had a letter from her saying what fun they’ll have.”

  “Oh, of course, if he says you lie,” said Buck suggestively.

  “Do you know the man?” asked Toby with rapture. “He is quite beautiful, with curly hair, rings, and scent, and I expect, if we knew all, stays.”

  Buck, it is idle to blink the fact, spat on the ground.

  “Yes, I know him,” he said. “Hell is full of such. By the way, I haven’t seen you since you were engaged to be married. What an idiotic thing to do!”

  “That happens to be your opinion, does it?” asked Toby mildly.

  “Yes. I’m delighted, really. Congratulations. But the plan doesn’t seem to suit you.”

  “No; it’s rotten,” said Toby. “I want something certain. This easily might not come off.”

  “He’s a real worm, is he?” asked Buck. “I only know him by sight.”

  “Genuine, hall-marked,” said Toby.

  “Well, then give him a chance. Oh, not a chance of getting off. I mean, give him a chance of lying to you. Tell him as news that Lady Conybeare is coming here tomorrow, and perhaps he may appear surprised to hear it. That will give you an opportunity. You can say things to him then.”

  “Yes, there’s more sense in that,” said Toby. “Oh! Come and dine tonight.”

  “All right. Is the She there?”

  “Yes; you’ll like her.”

  Buck looked at him enviously.

  “What infernal good luck you have, Toby!” he said.

  “Oh, I know I have,” said Toby. “Lily—”

  “Don’t know her yet. But about the worm. Probably there will be a row. You’ve got to frighten him away, remember that. Worms are always nervous.”

  “There’ll be a row afterwards with Kit, I’m afraid,” said Toby.

  “Oh, certainly. But it’s all for her good. Introduce me when she comes, and I’ll say I have been her guardian angel.”

  Toby looked at Buck’s strong brown face for a moment in silence.

  “You’d look nice with wings and a night-shirt,” he remarked. “Pity Raphael or one of those Johnnies isn’t alive.”

  “If by Johnnies you refer to the Italian school of painters,” said Buck, “it isn’t worth while saying so.”

  “I know; that’s why I didn’t say so. Good-bye; I’m off to the Links Hotel. Dinner at eight.”

  Lord Comber was in, and would Toby come up to his sitting-room? He met him at the top of the stairs, like a perfect hostess, and took him down the broad passage, stopping once opposite a big glass to smooth his carefully-crimped hair. Then he took Toby’s arm, and Toby bristled, for he did not thrust his hand inside the curve of his elbow and let it lie there, but inserted it very daintily and gently, as if he was threading a needle, with a slight pressure of his long fingers.

  “It’s quite too delightful to see you, Toby,” he said; “and how splendid you are looking! I wish I could get as brown as that. You must let me do a sketch of you. Yes, I’m here all alone, and I’ve been terribly bored. I wonder if your mother would allow me to come and see her. Is Miss Murchison there, too?”

  “Yes; she came a couple of days ago.”

  “How nice! I do want to see more of her. Everyone is frightfully jealous of you. And I hear your mother’s house is quite beautiful. Round to the right.”

  Ted Comber firmly held the creed that if you flatter people and make yourself pleasant you can do anything with them. There is quite an astonishing amount of truth in it, but, like many other creeds, it does not contain the whole truth. It does not allow for the possible instance of two personalities being so antagonistic that every effort, even to be pleasant, on the part of the one merely renders it more obnoxious to the other. This is a very disconcerting sort of exception, and the fact that it may prove the rule is a very slight compensation, practically considered.

  “You have some wonderful Burne-Jones drawings, someone told me,” went on Ted, innocently driving the exception up to the hilt, so to speak, in his own blood. “Your father must have had such taste! It is so clever of people to see twenty years before what is going to be valuable. I wish I had known him. Here’s my den.”

  Toby looked round the den in scarcely veiled horror. Daniel’s den with all its lions, he thought, would be preferable to this. There was a French writing-table, and on it signed photographs of two or three women in silver frames, an empty inkstand, a gold-topped scent-bottle (not empty), and a small daintily-bound volume of French verse. Against the wall stood a sofa, smothered in cushions, and on it a mandolin with a blue ribbon. A very big low armchair stood near the sofa, on the arm of which was cast a piece of silk embroidery, the needle still sticking in it, a damning proof of the worker thereof. There was a large looking-glass over the fireplace, and on the chimney-piece stood two or three Saxe figures. A copy of the Gentlewoman and the Queen lay on the floor.

  “I can’t get on without a few of my own things about me,” said Lord Comber, fussing gently about the room. “I always take some of my things with me if I am going to stay in a hotel. This place is quite nice; they are very civil, and the cooking isn’t bad. But it makes such a difference to have some of one’s things about; it makes your rooms so much more homey.”

  And he drew the curtain a shade more over the window to keep the sun out.

  “How long are you going to stop here?” asked Toby.

 
“Oh, another week, I expect,” said Comber, removing the embroidery, and indicating the armchair to Toby. “Of course, it is rather lonely, and I don’t know a soul here; but I’m out a good deal on these delicious sands, and another week alone will be quite bearable.”

  “I wonder you didn’t arrange to come with somebody,” said Toby quietly.

  Lord Comber took up the gold-topped scent-bottle and refreshed his forehead. This was a little awkward, but Kit had told him to tell none of the cottage-party that she would be there. He remembered vaguely that Kit had, one evening in July, announced her intention of coming to Stanborough, but he could not recollect whether Toby was there, and, besides, at the time she had not really meant to do anything of the kind. It was only afterwards that they had made their definite arrangements. The worst of it was, that there was a letter from Kit lying on the table, and Toby might or might not have seen it.

  “Everyone is engaged now,” he said. “It is hopeless trying to get people in August. Oh, I heard from Kit this morning,” he added, by rather an ingenious afterthought. “She asked me to come down to Goring in September.”

  “Was that all she said?” asked Toby.

  “Oh, you know what Kit’s letters are like,” said he. “A delicious sort of hash of all that has happened to everybody.”

  Toby paused a moment. God was good.

  “She didn’t happen to say by what train she was going to arrive tomorrow?” he asked.

  Lord Comber made a little impatient gesture, admirably spontaneous. He had often used it before.

  “Oh, how angry Kit will be!” he said. “She told me particularly not to tell anybody. How did you know, Toby?”

  “She wrote to my mother some days ago declining her invitation to come to the cottage,” he said. “Also the thing was discussed at length in my presence. There was no question of concealment. I remember you asked if you might come too, and she said no.”

  Lord Comber laughed, quite as if he was not annoyed.

  “Yes, I remember,” he said. “What fun Kit was that night! It was at the Haslemeres’, wasn’t it? I never saw her in such form.”

  Toby sat as stiff as a poker in the armchair.

  “I can’t quite reconcile your statement that you were going to be all alone with the fact that you knew Kit was coming tomorrow,” he said. “Not off-hand, at least.”

  Ted Comber began to be aware that the position was a sultry one. Kit had distinctly told him not to tell any of the people at the cottage that she was coming, and he had said that this was the wrong sort of precaution to take. They would be sure to know, and a failure in secrecy is a ghastly failure, and so difficult to explain afterwards, for people always think that if you keep a thing secret there is something to be kept secret. No doubt she had come round to his way of thinking, and had told them herself, forgetting the prohibition she had laid on him. Altogether it was an annoying business. However, this scene with the barbarous brother-in-law had to be gone through with at once. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Kit told me not to mention it,” he said. “We were going to have a rustic little time in all our worst clothes and no maid. That is all.”

  “You have lied to me—that is all,” said Toby, with incredible rudeness.

  “That is not the way for one man to speak to another, Toby,” said Lord Comber, feeling suddenly cold and damp. “I followed Kit’s directions.”

  “Of course, it is the fashion to say that it is the woman’s fault,” observed Toby fiendishly.

  Lord Comber was quite at a loss how to deal with such outrageous behaviour. People did not do such things.

  “Did you come here in order to quarrel with me?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t want to quarrel,” said Toby, “but I intend that you shall go away.”

  “That is so thoughtful of you,” said Comber.

  He was getting a little agitated, and had recourse to the scent-bottle again. He did not like fencing with the buttons off.

  Toby did not answer at once; he was thinking of the suggestion he had made to his mother. He determined to use it as a threat, at any rate.

  “Look here,” he said; “Kit may choose her own friends as much as she pleases, but she cannot go staying alone with you at a place like this. Either you go or I telegraph to Jack.”

  Lord Comber laughed.

  “Do you really suppose Jack would really mind?” he said.

  “And do you know that you are speaking of my brother?” asked Toby.

  “I’m sure that is not Jack’s fault,” remarked Comber.

  “No. Then, as you say, if Jack won’t mind, I’ll telegraph to him at once. Have you a form here? Oh, it doesn’t matter; I can get one in the office.”

  “The fact that you telegraph to Jack implies that there is something to telegraph about,” said Comber. “There is nothing.”

  Toby did not choose to acknowledge that there could be any truth in this.

  “I don’t care a damn,” he observed. “Either you go or I telegraph. Take your time, but please settle as soon as you can. I don’t want to make things unpleasant, and if you say that your only aunt is very ill, and that you have been sent for, I won’t contradict it—in fact, I’ll bear you out if Kit makes a fuss.”

  “That is extraordinarily kind of you,” said Lord Comber. “And since when have you become your sister-in-law’s keeper in this astounding manner?”

  Toby got quickly out of his chair, and stood very stiff and hot and uncompromising.

  “Now, look here,” he said: “my name is Massingbird, and so is Jack’s, and I don’t wish that it should be in everybody’s mouth in connection with yours. People will talk; you know it as well as I do, and there is going to be no Comber-Conybeare scandal, thank you very much.”

  “You seem to be doing your level best to make one,” said Lord Comber.

  “Oh, I don’t mind a Ted-Toby scandal,” said Toby serenely. “I can take care of myself.”

  “And of Kit, it seems.”

  “And of Kit—at least, it seems so, as you say.”

  There was a long silence, and Toby drew a vile briar pipe out of his pocket. He noticed that Lord Comber, even in his growing agitation, cast an agonized glance towards it, and, putting it back in his pocket, he lit a cigarette.

  “You don’t like pipes, I think?” he said. “I forgot for the moment.”

  Toby sat down again in the big chair and smoked placidly. He intended to get an answer, and if it was unsatisfactory (if the worm turned and refused to go), he would have to consider whether he should or should not telegraph to Jack. He felt that this would be an extreme step, and hoped he should not have to take it.

  Lord Comber’s reflections were not enviable. To begin with, Toby had a most uncomfortable, angular mind and an attitude towards life which will not consent to be fitted into round holes nor adapt itself to nice easy compromises and tactful smoothings over of difficult places. He was all elbows, mentally considered—elbows and unbending joints. If he intended to carry his point, he would not meet one half-way; he held horrible threats over one’s head, which, if defied, he might easily carry out. His own argument he considered excellent. To telegraph to Jack implied that there was something to telegraph about, but this square, freckled brute could not or would not see it. It really was too exasperating. He himself conducted his own life so largely by the employment of tact, finesse, diplomacy (Toby would have called these lies), that it was most disconcerting to find himself in conflict with someone who not only did not employ them, but refused to recognise them as legitimate weapons. Indeed, he was in a dilemma. It was impossible to contemplate a telegram being sent to Jack: it was equally impossible to contemplate what would happen if Kit came and found him gone. And the annoyance of going, of missing this week with her, was immense. It gave him a sort of cachet to be seen staying with Kit alone at a watering-place. She was more indisputably than ever on a sort of pinnacle in his world this year, and everyone would think it so very daring. That was the sort
of fame he really coveted—to be in the world’s eye doing rather risky things with an extremely smart woman.

  Moreover, in his selfish, superficial way, he was very fond of her. She was always amusing, and always ready to be amused; they laughed and chattered continually when they were alone, and a week with her was sure to be an excessively entertaining week. She had proposed that they should do this herself, and written a charming note, which he kept. “We shall be quite alone, and we won’t speak to a soul,” she had said. And that from Kit, who, as a rule, demanded a hundred thousand people around and about, was an immense compliment.

  But because all his thoughts as he debated these things, while Toby sat smoking, were quite contemptible, the struggle was no less difficult. A despicable man in a dilemma, though the motives and considerations which compose that dilemma are tawdry and ignoble, does not suffer less than a fine spirit, but, if anything, more, for he has no sustaining sense of duty to guide and reward him. Ted Comber’s happiness and pleasure in life, of which he had a great deal, was chiefly composed of trivial and unedifying ingredients, and to be intimate, not only privately, but also publicly, with Kit was one of them. And her unutterable brother-in-law sat smoking in his best armchair, after presenting his ultimatum. If a word from him would have sent Toby to Siberia, he would have gone. It would be a good deed to rid society of such an outrage.

  Again, yielding with a bad grace had its disadvantages, for though he had no personal liking for Toby, a great many people, with whom he desired to be on the best of terms, had. There were certain houses to which he liked to go where Toby was eminently at home, and though he had enemies in plenty, and thought little about them, Toby would be a most undesirable addition to them. He was perfectly capable of turning his back on one, assigning reasons, and of behaving with a brusqueness which ought, so Lord Comber thought, to be sufficient to ensure anybody’s being turned neck and crop out of those well-cushioned society chariots in which he lounged. But he knew very well, and cursed the unfairness of fate, that Toby’s social position was far firmer than his own, while, whereas he cared very much for it, Toby did not care at all. Ted made himself welcome because he took great pains to be pleasant and to amuse people, and had always a quantity of naughty little stories, which had to be whispered very quietly, and then laughed over very loud, but the whole affair was an effort, though its reward was worthy. Men, he knew, for the most part disliked him, and men are so terribly unreasonable. Once last year only, his name had been cut out of a house-party by his hostess’s absurd husband, and it was not well to multiply occasions for such untoward possibilities.