E. F. Benson

by E. F. Benson

  His constant day-long walks about London had wonderfully improved his health; he no longer feared the sun and the wind, and got quite bronzed in complexion. Still more remarkable was, so to speak, the psychical bronzing of his mind, the suntan of virility that overspread it; everything was shot with interest for him, and he even got Alice to show him how to work the lathe. For this was no pining and lovelorn affection; it was quite a hopeful affair, and though, when alone, he might sigh and turn over and back again on his bed, the brilliance and upright carriage of the object of his adoration stung him into a manly robustness. She would not like him to go sighing and sheltering himself about the world.

  It was no wonder that Alice noticed and applauded the change in him.

  “Something has happened to you, Oliver,” she said one night at dinner, while they were cracking walnuts together, for he had aspired to that accomplishment, though it hurt his soft hands very much. “Something has happened to you. I wonder if I can guess what it is?”

  He felt quite secure of the secrecy of his passion, and cracked two walnuts.

  “I’m quite certain you can’t,” he said. “Lord, that did hurt!”

  “Well, I shall do no harm then if I try,” said she. “I believe you’ve fallen in love.”

  The convoluted kernels dropped from Oliver’s fingers.

  “What makes you think that?” he asked.

  “My dear, it’s obvious to a woman’s eyes. I always told you that what you needed was to fall in love. You don’t do wool-work any more; you walk instead of sitting in an easy-chair. Some day, if you go on like this, you will play golf.”

  “Gracious! Am I as bad as that?” exclaimed he, startled into an irony that gave his case away.

  Alice clapped her hands delightedly.

  “Ah! I am right then!” she cried. “My dear, do tell me who she is? Shall I go and call on her? Have I ever seen her?”

  Oliver felt a curious diplomatic pleasure in giving true information which he knew would deceive.

  “Yes; I feel sure you have seen her,” he said, remembering that Alice had her dresses made at the shop where his divinity deified the window. “I can’t say that you know her.”

  “Oh, who is she?” cried Alice. “Is she a girl? Is she a woman? Will she marry you?”

  “No; I don’t suppose so,” said he.

  Alice’s face fell.

  “Is she somebody else’s wife, then?” she asked. “I hope not. But I don’t know that it matters. It is the fact of your having fallen in love which has improved you so immensely. I’ve noticed that an unhappy romance is just as good for people as a humdrum success which ends in christening mugs and perambulators.”

  Oliver got up.

  “You are rather coarse sometimes, dear Alice,” he observed.

  Oliver’s romance and his growing robustness lasted for some few days after Alice had guessed his secret, and then an end came to it more horrible than any that his wildest imaginations could have suggested to him. One day he had seen in a celebrated furrier’s a sable stole that would most delightfully protect his lady’s waxen neck from the inclemencies of a shrewd May morning, and he hurried along, while that was still vivid to his eye, in order to visualize it round her neck. There was a crowd of women in front of her window, and he edged his way in with eyes downcast, as was his wont, so that she might burst splendidly upon him at short range. Then, full of devotion and sable stole, he raised them.

  She was not there. In her place was a bold-faced creature in carmine, with lustful, wicked eyes like the females at Monte Carlo. His healthy outdoor life stood him in good stead at that moment, for he did not swoon or address shrill ejaculations to his Maker. He just staggered back one step, as if he had received a blow in the chest, then rallied his failing forces again.…

  All day he walked from dressmaker to dressmaker, seeking to find her; and when he was too much fatigued to pursue his way on foot any longer, he went to his club, and by the aid of a London directory ascertained the addresses of a couple of dozen more shops farther afield where she might possibly be found. These he visited in a taxi, but without success, and returned home to his flat a quarter of an hour before dinner, where, utterly exhausted, he went to sleep in his chair. Naturally, he dreamed about her, in a vague nightmarish manner, and she seemed to be in trouble.

  He awoke with a start, and for a moment thought that, like Pygmalion, he had brought his Galatea to life, for there she stood in front of him in the dusk. At least, her orange dress stood there.

  “My dear Oliver,” said Alice’s voice, “aren’t you ready for dinner yet? Make me some compliment on my new tea-gown.…”

  After that miserable adventure he resolved to have no more to do with the serious or emotional side of life, and in the words of one of our modern bards “he held it best in living to take all things very lightly.” He had consecrated all the power of his imagination on one great passion, and now his dream was exploded and Alice had got the teagown! Almost worse than that was that the divine orange vesture of his beloved had begun to multiply in a most unseemly manner in the shops of quite inferior dressmakers, and half a dozen times a day he could feel his breath catch in his throat as for a moment he thought he saw in some other window the wraith of her who was for ever lost to him. But while this stung and wounded him, it yet probably helped to cure him, and a few weeks later he was immersed again in the minor joys of life, visiting Capri and the Bay of Naples, when he saw the cages of quails in the poulterers’ shops, going again to Court balls opposite the jeweller’s, tossing with the fishing fleet on moonlit nights off the Cornish coast opposite the fishmonger’s, or spending hours in the country over his embroidery frame.

  One day a smart shower drove him into the portals of Micklethwait’s Stores in Knightsbridge, where the most exotic of purchasers can find their curious wants supplied, and all at once it struck him that these incessant peregrinations of the streets made up a very diluted form of life. Here all possible fountains of desire and adventure scintillated under one roof, and you had but to take a step out of the Arctic winter of the fur department to find yourself in the hot summer weather of straw hats, or playing a match against the heads of the profession in the room where billiard balls and tables were sold.

  Though he would never fall seriously in love again, he could have some pleasant flirtations in the ladies’ underwear department, or, if his mood was Byronic, he would go to the games department and think of the nursery he would have furnished for his growing family if the beloved in the orange dress had remained faithful to him, and not given her teagown to Alice, whom it strangely misbecame. With a stifled groan he would tear himself away from that, and, surrounded by paper and envelopes and red-tape and sealing-wax, spend an hour as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, conducting abstruse diplomatic operations with the perfidious Turk, and worsting him at every turn in the tangled game.

  So underneath those lofty roofs and terra-cotta cupolas, he began to live a life of which the variety and extravagance baffles description. A chance shower had originally taken him there (for on such small accidents does our destiny depend), but now rain or fine, hot or cold, he was the first in the morning to pass through the swing doors and, with a couple of hurried intervals for meals, the last to leave in the evening. Whether August burned the torrid pavements outside, or whether the fog gripped the town in its grimy hand, there was always the same warm, calm atmosphere inside laden with a hundred aromatic scents and teeming with rich suggestions of love and athletics and chemistry and travel. Often in the morning he would be tempted to go straight to the department of tea-gowns and other more intimate feminine apparel, but he kept a firm hold on himself and transacted business in the stationery department, or spent a studious hour in the book-room first.

  Nor did he neglect his exercise, and in the games department he knocked up a hundred runs at cricket, or had a brisk game of hockey, or played a round of golf, a pursuit to which he was now passionately attached owing to the strang
e suggestive forms of niblicks and brassies. Or, artistically inclined, he would wander among paint-boxes, palettes, and sketching umbrellas by the shore of some windless sea, and then hurry away to a counter behind which were discreet bathing costumes for both sexes, and spend a pleasant quarter of an hour in mixed bathing. This always gave him an appetite, and he tripped off to the cooked foods department, popping in at the bakery on the way, and had a delicious lunch off crisp country bread, with a pot of caviare and a couple of slices of galantine, washed down with a glass of Chablis from the wine department. Then perhaps after a whiff of roasting coffee from the grocery department, he would put on some clean ducks with a grey silk tie (haberdashery), in which he put a pear-shaped pearl pin (jewellery), and then, fresh and cool, spent a half-hour of airy badinage with the agreeable ladies, “whose presence,” as he recollected Mr. Pater saying, “so strangely rose” beside the chiffon and millinery. His constant passage through the various departments provoked no suspicion in the minds of the shop-walkers and attendants that he was one of the light-fingered brigade, for from time to time he made small purchases and always paid ready cash, and it occurred to no one that here was an opportunity of studying, first-hand, the rapid development of one of the strangest and most harmless monomaniacs who had ever pursued his innocent way outside the protective walls of a lunatic asylum.

  After such a delicious lunch it was no wonder that when he went back to his flat he could make but small pretence at eating, for in imagination he had fared so delicately and well that the lumps of muscular mutton and robust beef provided by Alice’s catering made no appeal to him. She might wonder at the smallness of his appetite, but she could not feel the slightest anxiety about that, so bright of eye and alert of limb was he under the spell of the happy busy life crowded with incident, that now was his.

  After lunch he would sit with her a little, talking in the most vivid and interesting manner on the topics of the moment, and then, looking at his watch, would silently remind himself that he was giving a pianoforte recital at three, and, if he was already a little late, would call a taxi to take him back to the Stores, while he suppled and gave massage to his fingers as he drove.

  He was by this time in an advanced state of his agreeable insanity, for he had lost all control over his imagination, the workings of which were entirely in the hands of the suggestions that external objects made to it. It was just in this that the completeness of his enjoyment of life lay. It was in this, too, that there lay such discomfort and suffering as was his. The sight of a “dental case” in a window, with its rows of gleaming teeth and rose-coloured gums and palates, was sufficient to give him a violent stab of pain in his teeth, for the suggestion implied that he would have to get them all taken out before he attained to the acquisition of those foreign splendours. But he had learned by this time the position of all the shops between his flat and the Stores which displayed these and similar dolorous exhibitions, and his eye would instinctively avert itself from doctors’ doorplates or shops where were sold ear-trumpets, and pitch, with the precision of a bird on a twig, on cheerful and harmonious windows. He no longer, in fact, lived a self-governing life of his own, but was no more than thistledown in a wind before the suggestions that the outside world made to his disordered senses. And then, as was bound to happen sooner or later, came the crash.

  That day he saw for the first time, close beside the lift in the boot department, through which he passed by accident, for boots conveyed nothing at all to him, a black door slightly ajar, and thinking, with a pang of delight, that some fresh world of experiences might be about to burst upon him, he entered. His first impression was of some lovely garden full of white flowers arranged in wreaths, as if in garden beds, and all covered with glass cases. Then he saw that though his first impression had been of gleaming whites, the predominant note was black. There were black cloaks, black scarves, black hats, black-edged cards.… And then, with a sudden icy pang at his heart, he saw straight in front of him a large oblong box with glass sides, on the top of which were nodding ostrich plumes. Simultaneously there advanced out of the gloom a small man in black clothes, with neat side-whiskers, clearly dyed. He came towards him, rubbing his hands in a professional and sympathetic manner.

  “Is there anything we can do for you, sir?” he asked.

  Oliver’s teeth chattered in his head, and his eyes rolled heavenwards. Then he spun round and fell in a heap on the floor. He was dead.

  Philip’s Safety Razor

  Table of Contents

  Up to the time of Philip’s obsession there cannot have been in all the world a happier couple than he and his wife. As everybody knows, the ecstasy of life has its home in the imagination, and Philip and Phcebe Partington lived almost exclusively in those realms which were illumined by the light that never was on sea or land. I do not absolutely affirm that sea and land would have been the better for that light; all that I insist on was that the Partington effulgence certainly never was there. It was a remunerative light also, and out of the proceeds they bought a quantity of false Elizabethan furniture and a motor-car. A spin in the motor-car after the ecstatic labour of the morning cleared Phoebe’s head, and they dined together in an Elizabethan room with rushes on the floor. That cleared Phoebe’s head, too, for nothing in the world could be remoter from the setting of her imaginative life than anything Elizabethan. She and her husband lived in an opulent and lurid present, which, in its turn, was just as remote from contemporary life as most people know it, as were the “spacious days” that had left their spurious traces on the diningroom.

  They were the most industrious of artists, and often had as many as three feuilletons running simultaneously in provincial papers, and the manner of their activity was this. Every morning, directly after breakfast, Philip sat in the dining-room, and until one o’clock proceeded to turn into narrative the very complete and articulated skeleton of the tale which Phoebe manufactured in the drawing-room. The imaginative gift was hers; there was not a situation in the world which she could not contemplate unwinking, like an eagle staring into the sun, and these she passed on to her husband, whose power of putting them into narrative was as unrivalled as his wife’s in conceiving them.

  Picture him, then, with his plump, amiable face bent over Phoebe’s imaginings, a perennial pipe in his mouth, and, invariably, two or three little tufts of cotton-wool struck on to his cheek or chin, where he had cut himself shaving that morning. Occasionally, but very rarely, he had to go into the drawing-room to ask the elucidation of some situation: how, for instance, was Algernon Montmorency to leap lightly out of the window, and so regain his motor-car, when Phcebe had laid the scene in the top room of the moated tower of Eagles Castle? But Phcebe could always suggest a remedy which cost the minimum of readjustment, and ten minutes afterwards Algernon would be thundering along the road with the lurid Semitic moneylender in close pursuit. But for such occasional interruption and the periodical lighting of his pipe he would not pause for a second till the morning’s work was over. He never hesitated for a word, for he had at his command the entire vocabulary of English cliches, and he often got through two instalments before lunch. At one precisely the parlourmaid came in, and groping through the fog of tobacco-smoke, opened all the windows and began to lay the table. Upon which Philip washed off his tufts of cottonwool, snatched Phcebe from her imaginative visions, and strolled in the garden with her till the gong summoned them to the recuperative spell of a mutton chop and a glass of blood-making Australian Burgundy.

  After lunch they drove in the motor-car, returning for tea, and from tea till dinner they read over aloud and discussed their morning’s work. In this way Philip made acquaintance with the subjectmatter he would be employed on next morning, and Phcebe learned how that which she had written yesterday had turned out. Philip had never any criticism to make: his wife’s imagination seemed to him one of the most glorious instruments ever devised for the delectation of the literary, and she often said that of all contemporary novel
ists her husband was the only man capable of handling the situations she poured out in this unending flood. After dinner they played patience, went early to bed, and awoke with an unquenchable zest for the labour and rewards of another day.

  It is impossible to figure a happier or a more harmonious existence. In imagination they roamed over the entire world without the expense or inconvenience of foreign travel: their spirits ranged through the whole gamut of human emotion, and whatever adversities the Algernon and Eva of the moment went through, their creators and interpreters knew in their heart of hearts that all was going to end well, for otherwise they would speedily have lost their pinnacled eminence as writers of serial stories in the daily press. It is true that Philip’s voice often shook as he read, and that Phoebe’s eyes were dim as she listened to the written tale of the remarkable disasters and misunderstandings through which the children of her brain had to pass; but these were but luxurious and sterile sorrows. In fact, the greatest trial that ever came to them during these halcyon years was when the editor of one of the papers in which the tale was running wrote to say that it was so popular that he insisted on having at least another fortnight of it, instead of bringing it to an end in two more instalments.

  That entailed a vast deal of work, for Phoebe had to search the file to find out by what constructive carpentering she could engineer an episode that would be of the requisite length; for the last instalment of all, when the severed were reunited, must naturally be left for the end. But she never failed to manage it somehow, and even when tribulation was great, and for the moment she could not conceive how to spin the story out, her cloud had a silver lining, for all this difficult work was due to the story’s amazing popularity. Or sometimes some ill-mannered reader would write to the newspaper office to point out that St. Peter’s Church at Rome did not stand on a “commanding eminence,” or ask more information about the “glittering spires” on the Acropolis at Athens, or demur to the “pellucid waters of the Nile in flood, as it rolled down in blue cataracts studded with milk-white foam.” But otherwise their life flowed on in an unbroken succession of literary triumphs and domestic happiness.