Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He was very seldom at Aston; but in one of his visits there, he had met Eva and had been considerably struck by her. She was introduced to him, and bowed without smiling. He had asked her whether she played lawn-tennis, and she said, without simpering, that she did. He asked her whether she enjoyed the season, and she replied, without affectation, that she had got so tired of it by the middle of June that she had gone down into the country. He remarked that London was the loser, and she reminded him that, therefore, by exactly the same amount, the country was the gainer. Her eyes wandered vaguely over the green distance, and once met his, without shrinking from or replying to his gaze. She was astonishingly beautiful, and appeared quite unconscious of her charms. She looked so radically indifferent to all that was going on round her, that he had said, “These country parties are rather a bore!” and she replied candidly that she quite agreed with him. In a word, he felt that he might go farther and fare worse, and that he was forty-five years old.

  During the next few months, he had come across her not infrequently, both in the country and in London, and at the end of the season they had both met at the Brabizons, where two Miss Brabizons were alternately launched at his hand and heart — via brilliant execution on the piano and district-visiting — by their devoted mother, and Eva’s calm neutrality was rendered particularly conspicuous by the contrast. His attentions to her grew more and more marked, and Mrs. Brabizon metaphorically threw up the sponge when he changed the day of his departure without ceremony, in order to travel with Eva, and declared that she couldn’t conceive what he found in that girl.

  His mother always breakfasted alone, and spent the morning by herself, usually out of doors. Lord Hayes was vaguely grateful for this arrangement. Mr. Martin, as we know, had described her as an old witch, and even to her own son she seemed rather a terrific person. She was tall, very well preserved, and a rigid Puritan. Her hobby — for the most unbending of our race have their hobby — was Jaeger clothing. She wore large grey boots with eight holes in them, a drab-coloured dress, and a head-gear that reminded the observer of a volunteer forage cap. This hobby she varied by a spasmodic interest in homœopathy, and she used to walk about the lanes like a mature Medea, gathering simples from the hedges, which she used to administer with appalling firmness to the village people; but, to do her justice, she always experimented with them first in propriâ personâ, and declared she felt a great deal better afterwards. For the practice of medicine-taking generally, she claimed that it fortified the constitution, and it must be confessed that her own constitution, at the age of sixty-five, appeared simply impregnable.

  But in the morning her son was conscious of an agreeable relaxation. He was a neat, timid man, with a careful little manner, and he inherited from his mother a certain shrewdness that led him to grasp the practical issues of things with rapidity. For instance, on this present occasion, when he had finished his breakfast, he again read over Eva’s letter, put it carefully away, and was quite content to wait.

  Outside one of the dining-room windows opened a glass-covered passage leading into an orchid house, and he went down this passage with the heels of his patent leather shoes tapping on the tiles, and a large pair of scissors in his hand. Every morning he attended personally to the requirements of this orchid house; he snipped off dead sprays, he industriously blew tobacco smoke on small parasitic animals, and squirted them with soapy water, and this morning, being in a particularly good humour, he went so far as to tickle, with a wisp of hay, the back of the useful toad. That animal received his attentions with silent affability; it closed its eyes, and opened and shut its mouth like an old gentleman awaking from his after-dinner nap.

  It was a warm morning, and when he had finished attending to the orchids he strolled round outside the house, back to the front door. The house stood high above the river, and commanded a good view of the green valley; and, in the distance, two miles away, the red-roofed village slanted upwards from the stream towards the downs. He stood looking out over the broad, pleasant fields for some moments, and his eyes wandered across the river to where the red front of Mr. Grampound’s house, half hidden by the large cedar, stood, as if looking up to his. The flower-beds gleamed like jewels in the sunshine, and he could see two figures strolling quietly down the gravel path toward the river. One of them was a girl, tall, almost as tall as the man who walked by her side, and to whom she was apparently talking. Just as Lord Hayes looked, they stopped suddenly, and he saw her spread out her hands, which had been clasped in front of her, with a quick dramatic movement. The action struck him as slightly symbolical.

  He was roused by the sound of crunched gravel, and, turning round, saw his mother walking towards him. She was in her hygienic dress, and had a small, tin botanical case slung over her shoulders. In her hand she held a pair of eminently useful scissors, the sort of scissors with which Atropos might sever the thread of life. Lord Hayes wore a slightly exotic look by her side.

  “The under housemaid has fallen into a refreshing sleep,” she announced, “and the action of the skin has set in. In fact, she will do very well now. And how are you, dear James, this morning?”

  “I am very well,” said he; “very well indeed, thank you, mother.”

  His mother looked at him with interest.

  “You’ve got a touch of liver,” she remarked truculently.

  “No, I think not. I feel very well, thanks.”

  Lady Hayes snapped her scissors.

  “I’m afraid the harvest will be very bad this year,” she said. “There’s been no rain, and no rain means no straw.”

  “Yes, the farmers are in a bad way,” said Lord Hayes. “I shall have to make a reduction again.”

  “Well, dear,” said his mother, “all I can say is that we shall probably be beggars. But porridge is wonderfully sustaining.”

  “We’ve still got a few acres in London,” he remarked. “Really, in these depressed times, I don’t know how a man could live without an acre or two there.”

  Old Lady Hayes laughed a hoarse, masculine laugh, and strode off, snapping her scissors again. Half-way across the lawn she stopped.

  “The Grampounds are at home, I suppose,” she said. “I want to see Mrs. Grampound some time.”

  “Oh, yes; I travelled with Miss Grampound yesterday. She said they were all at home.”

  “Ha! She is very handsome. But a modern young woman, I should think.”

  “She’s not very ancient. She was staying with the Brabizons.”

  His mother frowned and continued her walk.

  Lord Hayes always felt rather like a naughty child under his mother’s eye. He did not at present feel quite equal to telling her what his relations with Eva were. Modernity was the one failing for which she had no sympathy, for it was a characteristic of which she did not possess the most rudimentary traces. To her it meant loss of dignity, Americanisms, contempt for orthodoxy, and general relaxation of all that is worthy in man. She preferred the vices of her own generation to the virtues of newer developments, and almost regretted the gradual extinction of the old three-bottle school, for they were, in her opinion, replaced by men who smoked while they were talking to women, while the corresponding women had given way to women who smoked themselves. For a man to drink port wine in company with other men was better, as being a more solid and respectable failing, than for him to talk to a woman with a cigarette between his lips.

  Eva, as Lord Hayes had guessed from his point of vantage by the front door of his house, had strolled out into the garden after breakfast with Percy. She had not told him of Lord Hayes’s offer, but she could not help talking to him with it in her mind. It was like a bracket preceded by a minus sign, which affected all that was within the bracket.

  “I wish you weren’t going away, Percy,” she said. “When I woke up this morning, I thought with horror of all the slow days that were coming. I don’t care a bit for doing all those things which ‘nice girls’ are supposed to do. I have no enthusiasms, and the enthusiasm
s of the people I see here are unintelligible to me. The sight of a dozen little boys in a Sunday school, with pomatum on their heads, inspires me with slight disgust — so do bedridden old women. I suppose I have no soul. That is quite possible. But, but—”

  “Yes, I’m luckier than you,” said Percy; “I like little quiet things. I like fishing, and reading the paper, and doing nothing.”

  “Yes, you’re luckier than I am just now,” said Eva, “but when I do get interested in things, I shall be in a better position than you. I’m sure there are lots of interests in the world, but I don’t realise it.”

  “Well, I daresay you will discover them sometime,” said Percy, consolingly.

  “Who can tell? There are lots of women who do not feel any interest in anything — though, perhaps, fewer women than men. But why does London interest you so? It seems to me just as stupid in its way as this place.”

  “I like the sense of there being loads of people about,” said Percy. “A lot of people together are not at all the same as a number of units.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, it’s just the same as with gunpowder. One grain of powder only spits if you set light to it, but if you were to throw a pound of gunpowder into the fire the result would be quite different from the effect of a thousand spits.”

  It was at this point that Lord Hayes was watching the two from his front door. Eva stopped suddenly in her walk, and spread out her hands, stretching her arms out.

  “That’s what I want,” she said. “I want to develop and open. I fully believe the world is very interesting, but I am like a blind man being told about a sunset. It conveys nothing to me. And I don’t believe that fifty million Sunday schools and mothers’ meetings would do it for me. It must touch me somehow else. Religion and philanthropy are not the keys. I long to find out what the keys are.”

  “It’s a pity you don’t want to marry,” said Percy.

  “How do you know I don’t want to marry?”

  “You’ve told me so yourself, plenty of times. You said only a few weeks ago that you thought all men most uninteresting.”

  “Yes, I know. But I’m not so egotistical as not to suspect that the fault is mine. I don’t know any men well, except you, and I don’t think that you are at all uninteresting. If only I could be certain—”

  Eva broke off suddenly, but Percy asked her what she wished to be certain about.

  “If I could be certain that I was right — right for me, that is — certain that for me life and men and women were quite uninteresting, I don’t think I should mind so much. I would cease thinking about it altogether. I might even teach in the Sunday school. If all things are uninteresting, I may as well do that, and cease to expect interest in anything.”

  “But aren’t you conscious of any change in yourself?” asked Percy; “and doesn’t the very fact that you are getting more and more conscious that everything is very dull go to prove it?”

  “I don’t quite understand.”

  Percy looked vaguely about, mentally speaking, for a parallel, and his eyes, sympathetically following his mind, lighted on an autumn-flowering bulb, which was just beginning to push its juicy, green spike above the ground.

  “There,” he said, “are you not, perhaps, like what that bulb was three days ago? If it were conscious it would have felt, not that it was growing, but that the earth round it was pressing it more closely. Perhaps you are on the point of sprouting. It couldn’t have known it was sprouting.”

  Eva stood thinking for a moment or two.

  “What an excitement it must be, after having seen nothing but brown earth and an occasional worm all your life, suddenly to come out into the open air and see other plants and trees and sky. If I am sprouting, I hope the sky will be blue when I see it first.”

  “I expect grey sky and rain makes the bulb grow quicker.”

  “Oh! but I don’t care what is good for me,” said Eva; “I only care for what is interesting. Otherwise, I should have done all sorts of salutary things, all my life — certainly a great number of unpleasant things; one is always told that unpleasant things are salutary.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Percy; “I think it’s one’s duty to be happy.”

  “Oh! but, according to the same idea, the salutary and unpleasant things produce ineffable joy, if you give them time,” said Eva.

  They walked back to the house in silence, but on the steps Eva stopped.

  “Perhaps you’re right, Percy,” she said; “perhaps I am sprouting, though I don’t know it. Certainly I feel more and more confined by all these dull days than I used to. I wonder what the world will look like when I get above ground. I hope you are right, Percy; I want to sprout.”

  “It is such a comfort to think that no crisis ever fails to keep its appointment,” said he. “When one’s nature is prepared for the crisis, the crisis comes. Anything will do for a crisis. It is not the incident itself that makes the difference, but the change that has been going on in oneself.”

  “Yes, that’s quite true. It is no use wanting a crisis to come, or thinking that one is ready for it, if one only had a chance. If one really is ready for it, anything is a crisis. People who get converted, as they think, by hearing a hymn sung, think it is the hymn that has done it, and they don’t realise that it is what has been going on in themselves first. Anything else would do as well.”

  For the next few days all Eva’s surroundings combined to strengthen her already existing bias. Percy went away; her father was more stern and exacting than usual; her mother, Eva felt, was watching her, as one watches a barometer the day before a picnic, and tapping her to see whether she was inclining to fine weather or stormy. Moreover, the little talk she had had with Percy strengthened her desire to see and judge the world. Perhaps she would always find it uninteresting. If that was so, the sooner she knew it the better; but the probability was strongly against it, and if it was not uninteresting to the core, she was simply wasting time. These August days were more tedious than ever; she read novels, but they bored her; she tried to paint, but got tired of her picture almost before she had drawn it in; all the neighbours — and there were not many of them — seemed to be away. Lord Hayes’s apparently was the only house open, and of him she naturally saw nothing.

  It was four days after Percy’s departure that Lord Hayes came to call. Eva was sitting on the lawn behind the house when he arrived; she saw him coming out through the open French window in the drawing-room, and down the little iron staircase. She rose to meet him, and told the footman to bring tea out. Her choice, she knew, was imminent, and she had one momentary impulse to stop him, to give herself more time, but the instant afterwards the other picture rose before her — that flat perspective of level days, a country without hill or stream, her own life at home, and, on the other hand, the possibilities of her new sphere — the world and all it contained. Was this man, perhaps, the owner of the key which would unlock it all to her? Among other men she ranked him high, perhaps the highest; he had never pestered her, or stared at her as if she was a picture; he had never bored her; perhaps he understood her need; perhaps he could supply it.

  They shook hands, and stood there for a moment silent. Then he said,

  “You promised to show me your beautiful garden. I can see it like a jewel among the trees from Aston.”

  “Yes; the flowers are very bright just now,” she said, speaking naturally. “Let us go down the terrace.”

  At the bottom of the terrace he stopped. The cedar hid them from the house, and they were alone.

  “Your father told me I might call here,” he said, “and tell you why I have come.”

  Eva was standing about three feet off him, with her hands clasped behind her. He made a step forward.

  “Eva, you know—”

  Still she made no sign.

  “I have come to ask you whether you care for me at all — whether you will be my wife?”

  “I will be your wife,” she said, witho
ut smiling, but letting her hands drop down by her side.

  He took one of her disengaged hands in his, and bent forward to kiss it. She looked at him steadily, as if questioning him — and the long perspective of level days had passed from her life for ever.

  CHAPTER III.

  The account of Eva’s wedding, the description of her dress, the dramatic tears which Mrs. Grampound shed as her daughter was led to the altar, the size of the celebrated family diamonds, are not these things written in the Morning Post? And as they are recorded there, by pens better fitted than mine to do honour to the glories of the old embroidery on Eva’s train, the Valenciennes lace on her dress, the tulle, the pearls, the white velvet and all the unfading splendours of the matrimonial rite, I will merely say that everything was performed on a scale of the utmost magnificence, that two princes were there, and several dukes, one of whom was heard remark out loud in church, “By gad! she’s exquisite,” that another exalted personage replied, “Lucky fellow, Hayes,” that the wife of the exalted personage fixed her lord with a stony stare and said “Sh-sh-sh-sh,” and that he, in spite of his strawberry leaves and his pedigree and his frock coat, trembled in his patent leather shoes, and in his confusion was vividly impressed with the idea that his prayer-book consisted entirely of the service for the visitation of those of riper years, to be used at sea on the occasion of the Queen’s accession. As these portentous facts are not recorded in the Morning Post, I have thought fit to mention them here, with one other little detail that escaped the vigilance of the newspaper reporters. It was merely that the bride smiled when she was asked whether she would love, honour and obey her husband. But she promised to do so in a firm, clear voice; so, of course, it was all right.