Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “And you think about nothing but Greek art; you have said so yourself. Is it quite certain that you are broader than he?”

  Tom stood for a moment thinking.

  “Do you think I’m narrow?” he asked at length.

  “That is beside the point,” she said. “If I did not, it might only show that I was narrow in the same way as you.”

  “No, that can’t be,” said Tom, plunging at the only opening he could see. “You must remember you like Manvers’ statuettes.”

  “Well, from that standpoint I do think you narrow,” she said. “It seems to me very odd that you shouldn’t see how good they are.”

  “Do you mean how clever they are?”

  “It is the same thing, as far as this question goes. You don’t recognize their cleverness even, since you dislike them so.”

  Tom drew a sigh of relief.

  “Oh well, then, you are wrong about it. I fully recognize how clever they are.”

  “Then you don’t admire cleverness, which is a great deficiency.”

  “On the contrary, I do admire cleverness; but Manvers’ seems to me perverted cleverness. I admire ingenuity as an abstract quality, though I don’t care for those diabolical little puzzles which every one used to play with last year.”

  Maud shut up her paint-box, and rose.

  “It’s no use arguing,” she said. “An argument never comes to anything if you disagree; no argument ever converted any one.”

  “But I’m quite willing to be converted,” said Tom. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not at all sure that I want to convert you. I like you better as you are. Who is it who speaks of the ‘ genial impulses of love and hate’? Your hatred for Mr. Manvers’ things is so intensely genial, so natural to you.”

  They walked down the steps together, and stood for a moment looking over the broad plain, with its fields of corn already sprouting, stretching up towards the grey mass of Parnes.

  “This place suits me,” said Maud shall be sorry to go.”

  “Have you settled when you are going?” asked Tom.

  “Not precisely; why?”

  “Because I shall come with you, if you will allow me: I must be going soon.”

  Maud’s face flushed a little, and she turned towards him.

  “That will be charming. I shall go in about ten days or a fortnight, as I said last night. You know, now and then, even here with all this winter sun, and the Acropolis there, I want a grey English sky and long green fields.”

  “So do I; and cart-horses, and big green trees — even snow and frost, for the sake of the clean frosty smell on cold mornings. Here’s Manvers coming under a large white umbrella. I wonder what he wants to come to the Acropolis for.”

  Manvers came up to them, and paused.

  “I am taking a little walk,” he explained. “Mrs. Trachington has been paying me a little visit, or rather, I have been paying her a little visit.”

  “Who is Mrs. Trachington?” asked Maud.

  “Mrs. Trachington is a female staying at our hotel,” said Manvers, gently wiping his face. “She has praying-meetings. This morning I was walking past her room, when she came out and asked me to look at some picture she had just got. It was a charming landscape by Giallina; of delicious tone. But after a moment I looked up and caught her eye. There was a prayer in it. It is wicked that a woman with blatant prayer in her eye should possess such a picture. So I ran away. I came up here for safety.”

  Tom laughed uproariously.

  “Manvers is fanciful,” he said. “His is a morbidly sensitive nature.”

  “My dear fellow, you would have done just the same,” he said. “I don’t think Mrs. Trachington’s methods are at all straightforward. They are Jesuitical. Besides, I can’t go praying about all over the hotel.”

  “Well, you’d better come down with us,” said Tom.

  Manvers looked at Maud a moment.

  “No, I’m going to stop here a little. Of old sat Freedom on the heights. I shall be free here.”

  “But she stepped down, you know,” said Tom.

  “So shall I by-and-by,” said Manvers. “That was after she sat on the heights.”

  Maud and Tom walked down past the theatre and into the low-lying streets to the east of the Acropolis. The fresh oranges had come in from the country and they passed strings of heavily laden mules and donkeys, driven by dirty, picturesque boys, barefooted, black-haired, and black-eyed. It was a festal day, and the women had turned out in bright Albanian costumes, and the streets were charged with southern colour, and brilliant with warm winter sun and cloudless sky. Through open spaces between the houses they could see the tawny columns of the Parthenon standing clear-cut and virgin against the blue; for the moment the earlier and later civilizations seemed harmonious.

  Tom and Manvers met later in the day, and Tom retailed his decision of the morning.

  “We were both utterly wrong,” he said. “It makes me grow hot all over to think of what we said last night. I acted just as a man of that class which I detest so much would act.”

  “I drew the inferences demanded by common sense,” said Manvers, who was not convinced.

  “By your common sense!” rejoined Tom. “You can’t talk of common sense as a constant quality; it varies according to the man who exercises it. There are certain occasions when one’s inferences are based on instinct, which is a much surer thing than common sense. One of these occasions occurred this morning.”

  “Ah, but your instinct may be wrong, and nobody can convince you of it. It is a much more dangerous thing to trust to. If you base your action on reasons which can be talked out lengthways, you can make certain whether you are right or not.”

  Tom rose with some irritation.

  “My dear fellow, I don’t believe you know what I mean by instincts,” he said, and strolled away.

  Manvers found a certain delicate pleasure in this exhibition of human weakness on the part of Tom, and the reason by which he accounted for it in his own mind was clearly a very likely one. He argued that Tom was not quite so certain that he was right as he had hoped, and such a state of mind, Manvers allowed, was very galling.

  Meantime Maud had gone home, lunched with her brother, and announced that she was going home in about a fortnight in company with Tom. Arthur Wrexham had a vague feeling that this was not quite proper, and indicated it.

  “Is that the sort of thing people do now?” he asked. “I really only ask for information.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Maud.

  “I mean girls travelling alone with young men.”

  Maud laughed.

  “Don’t be anxious on my account,” she said. “I shall outrage no one’s sense of propriety.”

  Arthur felt he had done his share, and subsided again.

  “Of course you know best,” he said. “I only suggested it in case it had not occurred to you. So Carlingford is going too, is he? I thought he meant to stop here longer?”

  “No, he’s going to begin work at once. He says he has got hold of the spirit of the thing. He is so delightfully certain about everything.”

  “A little dogmatic sometimes, isn’t he?” asked Arthur.

  “No; dogmatists have always the touch of the prig about them. He has none of that.”

  Arthur Wrexham put his feet upon a chair.

  “I think he is just a little barbarous,” he said. “ Doesn’t he ever make your head ache?”

  “No, I can’t say that he does,” said Maud slowly “I think he is one of the most thoroughly satisfactory people.”

  “He is so like a sort of mental highwayman sometimes,” said her brother. “He makes such sudden inroads on one’s intelligence. He catechizes one about the Propylæa. That is so trying, especially if you know nothing about it.”

  Maud laughed.

  “Oh well, if your purse is empty, you need not fear highwaymen,” she said.

  A fortnight afterwards they both left for Marseilles by the same boat. She
sailed on Sunday morning, and Arthur Wrexham and Manvers came down to the Piraeus to see them off. Manvers and Tom took a few turns about the upper deck and talked, while Arthur sat down in Maud’s deck-chair and was steeped in gentle melancholy.

  “So in about a year’s time you will see me,” said the former. “I shall be in London next winter. At present I feel like an Old Testament prophet in his first enthusiasm of prophecy. I wonder if they ever j had any doubts about the conclusiveness of their remarks. I at least have none. I won’t exactly name the day when you will become a convert, but I will give you about a year. Consequently, when you see me next, our intercourse may be less discordant.”

  “I hope it won’t,” remarked Tom; “and I don’t believe it will.”

  “It’s always nice to disagree with people, I know,” said the other; “it adds a sauce to conversation. But I don’t mind abandoning that. You really will do some excellent work when you come round.”

  “I am going to do an excellent Demeter mourning for Persephone,” said Tom.

  Manvers lit another cigarette from the stump of his old one.

  “I did an Apollo, I remember,” he said. “ I wish you would do an Apollo too. I have mine still; it serves as a sort of milestone. It has finely developed hands and feet, just like all those Greek statues.”

  “And you prefer neat shoes now,” said Tom.

  “Why, yes. Whether Apollo has finely developed feet or not, he wears shoes or boots, the neater the better. I hate seeing a man with untidy boots. But even untidy boots are better than none at all. Ah, there’s that outrageous bell warning me to leave the boat. Good-bye, Tom. Athens will be very dull without you. I shall cultivate Mrs. Trachington.”

  “Do, and make a statuette of her. She is a very modern development. Good-bye, old boy.”

  It was a raw December day when their train slid into Victoria Station, and a cold thick London fog was drifting sluggishly in from the streets. Any desire that Maud may have felt for English grey was amply realized. The pavement under the long glass vault was moist with condensed vapour, and the air was cold in that piercing degree which is the peculiar attribute of an English thaw. The Chathams were in London, and Lady Chatham had “worked in” the landau with such success that she just arrived at the platform when the train drew up. She was immensely friendly to Tom, and remarked how convenient it was that they had arranged to come together.

  Tom said good-bye to them at their carriage door. Just as they drove off Maud leant out of the window.

  “You’ve no idea how I have enjoyed the journey,” she said. “You are at Applethorpe, aren’t you? Come and see us soon.”

  CHAPTER IX.

  THE weather signalized Tom’s return to England by a blizzard from the north, which for twenty-four hours spread sheet after sheet of snow on the ground, till one would have thought that the linen-presses of the elements were empty. He had caught a slight cold, and the only possible course was to sit by the fire, talk to his father, who seemed actually pleased to see him, and think of the Acropolis. But during the second night the soft snow-laden outlines of the hills and trees suddenly crispened and crystallized, and a still, windless frost gripped the white earth. A winter’s sun hung like a burnished copper plate low in the south, and the sight of the keeper with his round cheery face, asking if there were any orders, rendered the house impossible.

  “Yes, I’ll come out in half an hour,” said Tom. “Get a few beaters, and we’ll just walk through the woods. And send down to the vicarage to ask Mr. Markham if he’d care for a tramp. They don’t have pheasants in Greece, Kimberley: there’s a country for you!”

  “Mr. Ted’s not at home, sir,” said Kimberley.

  “I know, but his father is. He shoots very well, Send at once, will you? I want to start.”

  May had already left the house when the keeper came to bring Tom’s message to her father, and Mr. Markham left a note for her saying where he had gone, and that he would not be in for lunch. He was devoted to shooting, but of late years had not been able to indulge his taste; so some parish work which could easily be put off, as well as the chance of a quiet hour at his Aristophanes, fell into their proper places in the scheme of things.

  It was about half-past twelve, and Tom was standing alone at the end of a small clump of fir-trees, round which he had stolen with infinite precautions in order to avoid startling the pigeons. He had studied the habits of pigeons in this particular spot with much care for several years, and the keeper always alluded to it as “Master Tom’s cover.” It stood on a knoll of rising ground, some quarter of a mile away from the house, and by dint of long experience and frequent failure Tom had found that if the pigeons were artfully disturbed by beaters entering towards the centre from opposite sides they always broke cover at two particular points at opposite ends of the knoll, and that one gun stationed at each of these points became a fiery sword, turning, as far as the pigeons were concerned, every way. Tom was standing at one end of the cover, having seen Mr. Markham to his place, and was expecting every moment to hear the tapping of the beaters’ sticks and the swan-song of the pigeons’ wings. He was on the edge of a little footpath which led across the park from the village, half hidden from it by a thick bramble bush, behind which he had placed himself so that he could see without being seen. But at this most critical of all moments he heard with some impatience the sound of a footstep coming crisply and quickly along the frozen path. The path took a sudden bend almost exactly as it came opposite to him, and simultaneously he heard the faint tapping of the beaters’ sticks and saw a figure come round the corner.

  For one moment Time stopped, and he stared blankly, wonderingly. Then half to himself, half aloud, he said —

  “Oh, all ye gods, she is a goddess!”

  The next moment he recognized her, and springing out from his bramble bush he took off his hat to May Markham, and wondered if she remembered him.

  The beaters beat, and the pigeons started from the branches, and flew out in the pre-ordained manner, threading their way between the tops of the thick trees, as they and their deceased relations had often done before. Mr. Markham had one of the most delightful five minutes that falls to the lot of sportsmen, and straight over Tom’s head as he stood in the path the steely targets tacked and swerved. But Tom heeded not; the swan-song of their clapping wings for once was unheard and unfulfilled, for in his heart there was another song, no last song of birds’ wings, but the first maddening music which a man’s heart offers to a woman, the song of a youth to a maid, the song of the lover to the beloved, which rises up day by day, and hour by hour, and keeps this old earth young.

  May replied that of course she remembered him, and supposed that he had just come back from Greece, and a golden silence descended again. Tom was standing on ground an inch or two lower than the girl, and their faces were on a level: if anything, she appeared the taller of the two, and as his eyes rested on hers they were inclined slightly upwards, so that a thin rim of white showed below his honest brown iris. May was with her back to the low southern sun, but it just caught a few outlying hairs which strayed from beneath her hat, and turned them into spun gold. Her lips were slightly pouted, and through the length of her mouth ran a thin even line showing the white edge of her upper teeth. She had been walking quickly, and her nostrils swelled and receded with each breath, and one could just see the rise and fall of her bosom beneath her blue tightly buttoned jacket She met Tom’s eager gaze with unembarrassed, unaverted looks. They had been excellent friends when Tom had stayed with them not long ago at Chesterford, and this seemed simply a continuation of their early comradeship, for it was evident that he was quite a boy still. But almost immediately something in his look, or some half-conscious reminiscence of that moment, a fortnight ago, when she had looked at herself in the glass in Mr. Carlingford’s drawingroom, caused her to turn her eyes down, and for the first time she noticed that Tom was carrying a gun. The desire for an intelligible reason why he should have been found standing
in a bramble bush on a cold winter’s morning had not appealed to her before.

  “Have you had good sport?” she asked, pointing to the gun.

  Tom followed the direction of her finger, and to him also apparently it occurred for the first time that he was out shooting.

  “Yes, very fair,” said Tom. “By the way, what’s happened to the pigeons?”

  Almost as he spoke the head keeper emerged from the bracken, proud in the consciousness of a skilfully executed duty. He touched his hat to May, and turned to Tom.

  “Wonderful lot of pigeons in this morning, sir,” he said. “Didn’t hear you shooting, Master Tom.”

  “No, I didn’t see any birds. Did any come out over me?”

  “Ten or twelve at least, sir, and the same over Mr. Markham.”

  “Oh, well, it can’t be helped,” said Tom, rather confusedly. “We’ll go home to lunch now, Kimberley, and come out again after. We’re quite close to the house.”

  “Is my father out with you?” asked May.

  “Yes, I suppose you had gone out when I sent down. You can’t come through here — the brambles are so bad. Wait a moment, though.”

  Tom gave his gun to the keeper, and trampled down the mixed bramble and bracken. There was one long spray which kept asserting itself again and again straight across the path, waving about two or three feet from the ground. In a fit of sudden impatience Tom seized it in his hand and bent it back among the other bushes. As a natural and inevitable consequence his hand was covered with large prickles.

  “Oh, why did you do that?” asked May; “I’m sure you’ve hurt yourself.”

  Tom laughed.

  “The will is destiny,” he said. “I wish to go this way, and the bramble was in the light. That I got pricked was destiny, but another kind of destiny. We shall meet your father if we go this way.”

  To the intensest annoyance of Tom they did meet Mr. Markham in a few moments, walking towards them. The rational thing for him would have been to go round by the path instead of taking a short cut and poor Tom had pricked his fingers for nothing.