The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “And I said that storm was coming,” said he.

  She laid her hand on his knee.

  “And will there be some pleasant weather now?” she said. “Oh, Hughie, what wouldn’t I give to get two or three of the old days back again, when we babbled and chattered and were so content?”

  “Speak for yourself, miss,” said Hugh. “And for God’s sake don’t let us begin again. I shall quarrel with you again, and—and it gives me a pain. Look here, it’s a bad job for me all this, but I came here to get an oasis: also to pinch myself awake: metaphors are confusing things. Bring on your palms and springs. They haven’t put in an appearance yet. Let’s try anyhow.”

  Nadine sat up.

  “Talking of the weather—” she began.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were, before we began to exchange compliments.”

  She broke off suddenly.

  “Oh, Hughie, what has happened to the sun?” she said.

  “I know it is the moon,” said Hugh.

  “You needn’t quote that. The shrew is tamed for a time. It’s a shrew-mouse, a lady mouse with a foul temper; do you think? About the sun—look.”

  It was worth looking at. Right round it, two or three diameters away, ran a complete halo, a pale white line in the abyss of the blue sky. The little feathers of wind-blown clouds had altogether vanished, and the heavens were untarnished from horizon to zenith. But the heat of the rays had sensibly diminished, and though the sunshine appeared as whole-hearted as ever, it was warm no longer.

  “This is my second conjuring-trick,” said Hugh. “I make you a whirlwind, and now I make you a ring round the sun, and cut off the heating apparatus. Things are going to happen. Look at the sea, too. My orders.”

  The sea was also worth looking at. An hour ago it had been turquoise blue, reflecting the sky. Now it seemed to reflect a moonstone. It was gray-white, a corpse of itself, as it had been. Then even as they looked, it seemed to vanish altogether. The horizon line was blotted out, for the sky was turning gray also, and both above and below, over the cliff-edge, there was nothing but an invisible gray of emptiness. The sun halo spread both inwards and outwards, so that the sun itself peered like a white plate through some layer of vapor that had suddenly formed across the whole field of the heavens. And still not a whistle or sigh of wind sounded.

  Hugh got up.

  “As I have forgotten what my third conjuring trick is,” he said, “I think we had better go home. It looks as if it was going to be a violent one.”

  He paused a moment, peering out into the invisible sea. Then there came a shrill faint scream from somewhere out in the dim immensity.

  “Hold on to me, Nadine,” he cried. “Or lie down.”

  He felt her arm in his, and they stood there together.

  The scream increased in volume, becoming a maniac bellow. Then, like a solid wall, the wind hit them. It did not begin, out of the dead calm, as a breeze; it did not grow from breeze to wind; it came from seawards, like the waters of the Red Sea on the hosts of Pharaoh, an overwhelming wall of riot and motion. Nadine’s books, all but the one she had cast over the cliff’s edge, turned over, and lay with flapping pages; then like wounded birds they were blown along the hillside. The hat she had brought out with her, but had not put on, rose straight in the air, and vanished. Hugh, with Nadine on his arm, had leaned forward against this maniac blast, and the two were not thrown down by it. The path to the house lay straight up the steep hillside behind them, and turning they were so blown up it, that they stumbled in trying to keep pace to that irresistible torrent of wind that hurried them along. It took them but five minutes to get up the steep brae, while it had taken them ten minutes to walk down, and already there flew past them seaweed and sand and wrack, blown up from the beach below. Above, the sun was completely veiled, a riot of cloud had already obscured the higher air, but below, all was clear, and it looked as if a stone could be tossed upon the hills on the farther side of the bay.

  They had to cross the garden before they came to the house. Already two trees had fallen before this hurricane-blast, and even as they hurried over the lawn, an elm, screaming in all its full-foliaged boughs, leaned towards them, and cracked and fell. Then a chimney in the house itself wavered in outline, and next moment it crashed down upon the roof, and a covey of flying tiles fell round them.

  It required Hugh’s full strength to close the door again, after they had entered, and Nadine turned to him, flushed and ecstatic.

  “Hughie, how divine!” she said. “It can’t be measured, that lovely force. It’s infinite. I never knew there was strength like that. Why have we come in? Let’s go out again. It’s God: it’s just God.”

  His eyes, too, were alight with it and his soul surged to his lips.

  “Yes, God,” he said. “And that’s what love is. Rather—rather big, isn’t it?”

  And then for the first time, Nadine understood. She did not feel, but she was able to understand.

  “Oh, Hughie,” she said, “how splendid it must be to feel like that!”

  * * * *

  The section of the party which had gone to play golf on this changeable morning, were blown home a few minutes later, and they all met at lunch. Edith Arbuthnot had arrived before any of them got back, and asked if the world had been blown away. As it had not, she expressed herself ready to chaperone anybody.

  “And Berts is happy too,” said Seymour, when he came in very late for lunch, since he wished to change all his clothes first, as they ‘smelled of wind,’ “because Berts has at last driven a ball two hundred yards. Don’t let us mention the subject of golf. It would be tactless. There was no wind when he accomplished that remarkable feat, at least not more wind than there is now. What there was was behind him, and he topped his ball heavily. I said ‘Good shot.’ But I have tact. Since I have tact, I don’t say to Nadine that it was a good day to sit out on the hillside and read. I would scorn the suggestion.”

  A sudden sound as of drums on the window interrupted this tactful speech, and the panes streamed.

  “Anyhow I shall play golf,” said Edith. “What does a little rain matter? I’m not made of paper.”

  “That’s a good thing, Mother,” said Berts.

  “If you want to win a match, play with Berts,” said Seymour pensively. “But if you only want to be blown away and killed, anybody will do. I shall get on with my embroidery this afternoon, and my maid will sit by me and hold my hand. Dear me, I hope the house is well built.”

  For the moment it certainly seemed as if this was not the case, for the whole room shook under a sudden gust more appalling than anything they had felt yet. Then it died away again, and once more the windows were deluged with sheets of rain flung, it seemed, almost horizontally against them. For a few minutes only that lasted, and then the wind settled down, so it seemed, to blow with a steady uniform violence.

  Nadine had finished lunch and gone across to the window. The air was perfectly clear, and the hills across the bay seemed again but a stone’s-throw away. Overhead, straight across the sky, stretched a roof of cloud, but away to the West, just above the horizon line, there was an arch of perfectly clear sky, of pale duck’s-egg green, and out of this it seemed as out of a funnel the fury of the gale was poured. The garden was strewn with branches and battered foliage and the long gravel path flooded by the tempest of rain was discharging itself upon the lawn, where pools of bright yellow water were spreading. Across it too lay the wreck of the fallen trees, the splintered corpses of what an hour ago had been secure and living things, waiting, warm and drowsy, for the tingle of springtime and rising sap. Like the bodies of young men on a battlefield, with their potentialities of love and life unfulfilled, there, by the blast of the insensate fury of the wind they lay stricken and dead, and the birds would no more build in their branches, nor make their shadowed nooks melodious with love-songs. No more would summer clothe them in green, nor autumn in their liveries of gold: they were dead things and at t
he most would make a little warmth on the hearth, before the feathery ash, all that was left of them, was dispersed on the homeless winds.

  But the pity of this blind wantonness of destruction was more than compensated for in the girl’s mind by the savagery and force of the unlooked-for hurricane, and she easily persuaded Hugh to come out with her and be beaten and stormed upon. Always sensitive to the weather, this portentous storm had aroused in her a sort of rapture of restlessness: she rejoiced in it, and somehow feared it for its ruthlessness and indifference.

  They took the path that led downward to the beach, for it was the tumult and madness of the sea that Nadine especially wished to observe. Though as yet the gale had been blowing only an hour or two, it had raised a monstrous sea, and long before they came down within sight of it, they heard the hoarse thunder and crash of broken waters penetrating the screaming bellow of the gale, and the air was salt with spray and flying foam. To the West there was still clear that arch of open sky through which the gale poured; somewhere behind the clouds to the left of it, the sun was near to its setting, and a pale livid light shone out of it, catching the tops of the breakers as they streamed landwards. Between these foam-capped tops lay gray hollows and darknesses, out of which would suddenly boil another crest of mountainous water. The tide was only at half flood, but the sea, packed by the astounding wind, was already breaking at the foot of the cliffs themselves, while in the troughs of the waves as they rode in, there appeared and disappeared again the scattered rocks from some remote cliff-fall, that were strewn about the beach. Sometimes a wave would strike one of these full, and be shattered against it, spouting heavenwards in a column of solid water; oftener the breakers swept over them unbroken, until with menace of their toppling crests they flung themselves with huge tongues of hissing water on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs. Then with the scream of the withdrawn shingle the spent water was furiously dragged back to the base of the next incoming wave, and was caught up again to hurl itself against the land. Sometimes a sudden blast of wind would cut off the crest of the billow even as it curled over, and fling it, a monstrous riband of foam, through the air, sometimes two waves converging rose up in a fountain of water, and fell back without having reached the shore. This way and that, rushing and rolling, in hills and valleys of water, the maddened sea crashed and thundered, and every moment the spray rose more densely from the infernal cauldron. Then as the tide rose higher, the waves came in unbroken, and hurled their tons of water against the face of the cliff itself. Above, continuous as a water-fall, rose the roar and scream of the gale, ominous, insensate, bewildering: it was as if the elements were being transferred back into the chaos out of which they came.

  Nadine and Hugh, clinging together for support, stood there for some minutes, half-way down the side of the cliff, watching the terror and majesty of the spectacle, she utterly absorbed in it and cruelly unconscious of him. Then, since they could no longer get down to the base of the cliff, they skirted along it till they came to the sandy foreshore of the bay. There from water-level they could better see the hugeness of the tumult, the strange hardness and steepness of the wave-slopes. It was as if a line of towers and great buildings were throwing themselves down upon the sands, and breaking up into walls and eddies of foam-sheeted water, while behind them there rose again another street of toppling buildings, which again shattered itself on the beach. Great balls of foam torn from the spent water trundled by them on the sands, and bunches of brown seaweed torn from the rocks were flung in handfuls at their feet. Once from the arch in the sky westwards, a dusky crimson light suddenly burned, turning the wave crests to blood, and then as the darkness of the early winter sunset gathered, they turned, and were blown up the steep cliff-path again, wet and buffeted. Conversation had been altogether impossible, and they could but communicate with pointing finger, and nodding head. Yet, somehow, to be together thus, cut off by the rise of winds and waves, from all sense of the existence of others, in that pandemonium of tempest, gave to Hugh at least a closer feeling of intimacy with Nadine, than he had ever yet known. She clung to him, she sheltered under his shoulder, unconsciously, instinctively, as an animal trusts his master, without knowing it is trusting. And that to his aching hunger for her was something.…

  But the gale was to bring them closer together yet.

  CHAPTER X

  All the evening and all night long the gale continued. Now and then the constant scream of it would leap upwards a couple of octaves as a shriller blast struck the houses and again for a moment the mad chant would drop into silence. From time to time like a tattoo of drums the rain battered at the window-panes, but through it all, whether in hushes of the wind or when its fiercest squall descended, the beat of the surf sounded ever louder. And all through the night, the result perhaps of his agitated talk with Nadine in the morning, or of his intimate gale-encompassed isolation with her in the afternoon, Hugh turned and tossed midway between sleeping and waking. Sometimes he seemed to himself to be yelling round the house among the spirits of the air seeking admittance, sometimes it seemed to him that he was being beaten on by the hammer of the surf, and whether he was homelessly wandering outside among the spirits of the wind, or was being done to death by those incessant blows of the beating waves, it was Nadine that he sought. And as the night went on the anguish of his desire grew ever more acute, and the beating of the waves a more poignant torture, until while yet no faintest lightening of winter’s dawn had touched the gross blackness of the night, he roused himself completely, and sat up in bed and turned on his light.

  To him awake the riot outside was vastly magnified compared with the dimmer trouble of his dream; so was his yearning for Nadine. His windows looked eastwards away from the quarter of the gale, and getting out of bed, he lifted a sash, and peered out. Nothing whatever could be seen; it was as if he gazed into the darkness of the nethermost pit, out of which blown by the blast of the anger of God came the shrieks of souls that might not rest, driven forever along, drenched by the river of their unavailing tears. Even though he was awake the strange remote horror of nightmare was on him, and it was in vain that he tried to comfort himself, by saying, like some child repeating a senseless lesson, “A deep depression has reached us traveling eastwards from the Atlantic.” He tried to read, but still the nightmare-sense possessed him, and he fancied he had to read a whole line, neither more nor less, between the poundings of the waves. Then as usually happens towards the end of these Walpurgis nights, he got back to bed again, and slept calmly and dreamlessly.

  He and Seymour alone out of the party put in an appearance at breakfast time: it seemed probable that the others were compensating themselves for a disturbed night by breakfasting upstairs, and afterwards the two went out together to look at the doings of the night. By this time the wind had considerably moderated, the rain had ceased altogether, and the thick pall of cloud that had last night overlain the sky was split up into fragments and islands, and flying vapors, so that here and there pale shafts of sunlight shone upon land and sea. But the thunder of the surf had immeasurably increased, and when they went to the cliff-edge which he and Nadine had passed down yesterday afternoon, they looked upon an indescribable confusion of tremendous waters. The tide was low, but the bay was still packed with the sea heaped-up by the wind, and the end of the reef with its big scattered rocks was out beyond the walls of breaking water. The sea appeared to have been driven distraught by the stress of the night; cross currents carried the waves in all directions: it almost seemed that some, shrinking from the wall of cliff in front, were trying to beat out to sea again. Quite out, away from land, they jousted and sparred with each other, not jestingly, but, it seemed, with some grim purpose, as if they were practising their strength for deeds of earnest violence, as for some fierce civil war among themselves. It was round the furthest rocks of the reef that this sport of billowy giants most centered: right across the bay ran some current that set on to the end of the reef, and there it met with the waves coming st
raight in-shore from the direction of the blowing of the gale. Then they spouted and foamed together, yet not in play: some purpose, so regular were these rounds of combat, seemed to underlie their wrestlings.

  Hugh threw away a charred peninsula of paper, once a cigarette, which the wind had smoked for him. He never had felt much sense of comradeship in the presence of Seymour, and their after-breakfast stroll had no more virtue than was the reward of necessary politeness.

  “There is something rather senseless in this display of wasted energy,” said Seymour. “Each of those waves would probably cook a dinner, if its force was reasonably employed.”

  Hugh, in spite of his restless night, had something of Nadine’s thrilled admiration for the turmoil, and felt slightly irritated.

  “They would certainly cook your goose or mine,” he remarked.

  Seymour wondered whether it would be well to say, “Do you allude to Nadine as our goose?” but, perhaps wisely, refrained.

  “That would be to the good,” he said. “Goose is a poor bird at any time, but uneatable unless properly roasted.”

  Hugh did not attend to this polite rejoinder, for he had caught sight of something incredible not so far out at sea, and he focused his eyes instantly on it. For the moment, what he thought he had seen completely vanished; directly afterwards he caught sight of it again, a fishing-boat with mast broken, reeling drunkenly on the top of a huge wave. His quick, long-sighted eye told him in that one moment of slewing deck that it presented to them, before it was swallowed from sight in the trough of the next wave, that there were two figures on it, clinging to the stump of the broken mast.

  “Look,” he said, “there is a boat out there.”

  It rose again to the crest of a wave and again plunged giddily out of sight. The incoming tide was bearing it swiftly shorewards, swiftly also the cross-current that set towards the end of the reef was bearing it there.