Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Tom always fills me with the envy for married life,” said he; “he really is ridiculously happy. But as regards the other, I don’t think I am made for a centre. I prefer circling myself.”

  Lady Chatham rose to go.

  “Well, it is five minutes to eleven,” she said, “and I must be off. You must think over all I have said.”

  “I will think it over very seriously,” he replied. Lord Chatham was dining at the House that night, and Maud sent a note to Tom asking him to make the fourth with Manvers and her mother. There was no one else coming, and little coats and black ties were the order of the evening.

  The night was beautifully warm, and after dinner they all sat on the little terrace outside the drawingroom window.

  Tom was in rather a sombre mood. His account of himself was that he had unaccountably stuck in his work and had been unable to get on. Manvers administered consolation.

  “That is one of the chiefest pleasures of being an artist,” he said: “one has the sort of feeling that one is really a channel through which inspiration flows. Now a solicitor or a clerk can go on copying briefs or making a digest or a précis in any mood. He is a mere machine. No doubt his work is more distasteful at one time than it is at another, tut it goes on just the same. Nothing comes between him and it except death or very severe toothache, which shows he works without conviction, and is consequently a very feeble sort of animal It is the same with all mankind except artists and clergymen.”

  “But what is one to do in the meanwhile?” asked Tom. “I don’t find these intervals, when some one cuts off the inspiration, at all inspiriting.”

  “Why, do nothing,” said Manvers; “don’t think about it You can’t force a mood. The mood forces you.”

  “I can’t acquiesce in that,” said Tom. “ I am not going to be ordered about by my own temperament.”

  “Ah, my dear fellow, what are you going to be ordered about by if you are not to be ordered about by your temperament? The temperament is the only thing that can order one about In everything else, if one wants a thing enough one gets it.”

  Maud leaned forward.

  “I don’t believe that. At least it is not true for all people. Some pass their whole lives in failing to do what they want But they have a consolation; for they are exactly the people who for the most part give other people what they want Personally I hardly ever get what I want, and that is why I have a passion for making other people like me.”

  At the least hint of anything so superlunary as the mildest metaphysics, Lady Chatham always recorded a protest “Maud dear,” she said deprecatingly.

  But “Maud dear” was interested, and so to judge by his face was Manvers. His dark eyes had lost their look of slight amusement, and he leaned forward eagerly to hear what Maud had to say next “It is the old story,” she said; “half the world is active, and the other half passive.”

  “But you exert yourself to be passive.”

  “Oh, certainly; one is simply nothing if one doesn’t exert one’s self. My mission, I am sure, is to be material for the active people.”

  “But you told me once you wanted to take the world into your hand,” said Tom, “and make its heart beat fast or slow as you wished.”

  “I know I did, but I have changed.”

  “Radically, completely?”

  Maud lifted her eyes for a moment and looked at Tom, then dropped them again.

  “My desire has not changed, but I now know I can’t do it It’s not my line at all.”

  Tom looked up.

  “Do you mean you acquiesce in defeat?” he asked. “Can you contemplate wanting a thing and not getting it?”

  “He is monarch of all he surveys,” remarked Manvers.

  “Of course I am,” said Tom, “so is everybody.”

  “Oh, but we can’t all be monarchs of all we survey,” said Maud.

  “But we can,” replied Tom, “simply because we survey so very little. All our horizons are limited. As a matter of fact, of course we are terribly limited, all of us, but we have a beautiful gift of not believing that We can be monarchs of all we understand, which is what I mean by survey, and that is why people marry. Two people understand each other, and so as they are both monarchs of each other, it is a law of nature that they should then be no longer two, but one.”

  This remarkable statement was received in silence. “Then what do you make of people who are failures — real failures?” said Maud at length.

  “God help them!” replied Tom; “they have tried to get what they did not understand. There is nothing so pathetic as that.”

  “Why did you acquiesce, Miss Wrexham?” asked Manvers.

  Maud hesitated a moment, but assuming with perfect good faith that neither Tom nor Manvers could possibly guess what she meant, replied —

  “Because I could not get a thing I wanted, and therefore I assumed that I was not made to get what I wanted.”

  “That is a hasty generalization,” said Tom; “ perhaps you did not understand it.”

  “Well, I thought I did, and either I am not meant to get what I want, or I am one of those pathetic figures you alluded to.”

  Tom laughed.

  “I don’t think of you as a pathetic figure,” he said. “Oh, one can’t appear as a pathetic figure in public,” she said. “Don’t let us forget that it is a comedy we are all acting.”

  She spoke bitterly, and Tom was astonished at the hard ring of her voice. But before the pause became awkward Manvers broke it “There is nothing more serious than taking things seriously,” he said. “I never took anything seriously yet.”

  “What a frightfully risky thing to say!” exclaimed Maud. “It’s as dangerous as saying you never had the toothache!”

  Tom got up from his chair and perched himself on the edge of the balcony, and at that moment there came into Manvers’ mind the evening at Athens, when Tom had sat on the edge of the balcony, and the flash of lightning had illuminated Maud’s face. For the first moment he thought it was only one of those strange throbs of double consciousness which we all know so well, but the moment afterwards he recollected the prototype of the scene. And as if to confirm it in his mind, Maud went on —

  “My acquiescence came quite suddenly, as suddenly as a flash of lightning.”

  “When did it come?” asked Tom, innocently. Manvers waited, in the act of flicking the ash off his cigar, for the reply, and Maud looking up saw he was watching her.

  “Lord Byron woke one morning and found himself famous,” she said, “but I doubt whether a year afterwards he could have told you whether it was a Monday or a Tuesday.”

  “But the occasion,” persisted Tom: “he could have told one that.”

  “One occasion doesn’t change one,” said Maud, fencing; “it is always a whole string of things, half of which one forgets afterwards. It is so untrue to speak of a crisis being the effect of one moment.” Lady Chatham rose.

  “How terribly metaphysical you young people are!” she said. “I must go in and write two notes, and then I think I shall go to the House in the carriage which is to fetch Chatham. Maud dear, you look rather tired. Go to bed early.”

  Lady Chatham said good night and went indoors.

  “That is quite true about crises,” said Tom, after a pause. “I have had one, two, three in my life, and though they all seemed the results of single moments, they were only the culmination of what had been going on before.”

  “But the apex of a pyramid remains the highest point. There would be no pyramid without it,” objected Manvers.

  “But still less would an apex be a pyramid by itself!”

  “It’s your turn, Tom,” said Maud. “I’ve been talking about myself, and now you shall talk about yourself. Begin at the beginning. What were your crises?”

  “The first was when I saw the Hermes at Olympia,” began Tom.

  “And a most disastrous crisis it was,” observed Manvers. “I hope they weren’t all as cheerless as that.”

&
nbsp; “Be quiet, Mr. Manvers,” said Maud. “It’s his turn.”

  “Of course that seemed to me the whole crisis,” said Tom, “but it wasn’t. It was only the apex of the effect Athens had on me.”

  “Yes, I think that’s reasonable,” said Maud. “Go on to the next.”

  “The next was when I was standing in a bramble bush waiting for pigeons to come over, and saw May walking down the path. She looked as if she had just stepped out from among the gods and goddesses on the Parthenon frieze. You see the first crisis was really part of the second.”

  Maud said nothing, so Manvers took up the part of catechist.

  “And the third?”

  “Oh, about that I can’t talk. But I know now that the whole of my life from the time of the second crisis, since I fell in love with May, was part of the third.”

  “Oh, but do tell us,” said Maud. “I believe you have forgotten what it was.”

  “It was when I first thought I was a Christian,” said Tom simply. “But—” He stopped.

  If Tom had said that it was when he first began to hate May, he could not have startled them more. Manvers felt very keenly the indecency of being serious. Maud sat still for a moment. Her knack of turning awkward conversation on to safer lines seemed to have entirely deserted her.

  “No wonder you are perfectly happy,” she said at length, and stopped. They sat there for a few minutes in silence, and Tom fidgeted.

  “It was a crisis no doubt,” he went on; “for the time it made a most wonderful difference to me, but somehow it has faded. Why are we all so damnably limited, or rather why are we cursed with that horrible sense of proportion, which makes us realize how limited we are? The happiest moment of my life was that on the morning after the baby had been born, when I went to early celebration. It was the best moment I have ever had, and I was even content I had been horribly anxious and frightened the day before, and the relief and the joy were so immense that for the moment I was forced, so I thought then, to believe. Unhappily, common-sense is for ever telling me that it was relief and not belief that I experienced. Yet it was a crisis, for I now believe in the possibility of such convictions some day becoming mine, for for a little while they were mine, and what has happened to me temporarily may happen to me permanently. And now,” he added, “I have committed what Manvers considers the one unpardonable breach of manners. I have been serious!”

  Again there was silence, and neither Maud nor Manvers saw exactly how to break it. But a neighbouring clock striking eleven gave Tom an opportunity.

  “It is time for me to go,” he said; “I had no idea how late it was. May comes up to-morrow, I hope.” The other two sat where they were till the wheels of Tom’s retreating hansom had merged themselves in the distant muffled roar of the further streets. To Maud it suddenly seemed that malignant hands were building up again in front of her that blank wall she had been at such pains to demolish, and that her work of the autumn was all undone. Tom’s presence, mingled with his absolute unconsciousness of its effect, had again reasserted its unreasonable power over her. She felt again as she had begun to feel at Athens, that she was miserable in his presence and incomplete in his absence. But her efforts at self-control had become with her a habit, and though she was dully conscious that her blank wall had rebuilt itself, she did not dash at it with dumb unavailing hands. It had to be picked down again stone by stone from the top to the bottom. The prospect was not a cheering one. She was also more than half conscious that Manvers was standing, as it were, on the other side of the wall, hidden from her by its intervening mass, and she dreaded that he would call to her, and assure her of it That he was in love with her she could not but know, and she was quite aware that she liked him almost to any extent; but the limitations of the human race forbid us to love two people at once. Nature has provided us with two eyes, two ears, two arms, two legs, two hands, in case some accident happens to one of them, but her wise precaution has not gone so far as to provide us with two people to love simultaneously, in case one of them gets married.

  She was sitting in the chair Tom had left, and Manvers, who had been sitting a little way off, moved up and took the chair next her. She had one mad impulse to ask him not to speak, for she saw he meant to. However, if the scene was to come, it was to come, and he had the right, as a man, to know his fate. But though she knew it was to come, she wanted to put it off if only for a minute or two. She rose from her chair again, and leant on the balustrade of the balcony.

  “I feel depressed and worried and strung up and run down to-night,” she said. “Do you remember that admirably sensible American girl at Athens, who said that all such feelings were stomach? I expect it is quite true, but I don’t see how it helps one. I don’t feel sure of myself. Tom very often makes me feel like that He’s so wonderfully sure of himself.” Manvers’ hands fidgeted with the arms of his chair, and he lit a cigarette, and threw it away. This sort of experience was new to him.

  “And now as we’ve finished talking about Tom,” he said at length, “it is time that we should talk about me.”

  Maud rushed for the loophole. She might as well have hoped to have stopped an express by stretching a piece of string across the line.

  “I should like to talk a little more about him,” she said. “I was so surprised at that third crisis.”

  “Tom is so honest with his crises,” said Manvers, “he faces them like a man.”

  “Well, it’s no use running away from a crisis,” said Maud; “you might as well run away from a flash of lightning.”

  “And I too think it is best to face a crisis,” said he, “and... and... my crisis has come.”

  Maud sat still, waiting for the inevitable.

  “It is this,” he said suddenly, “that I love you. That I would die for you, or live for you: that I offer you myself to take into your hand.”

  Maud stood up. The crisis had come, and she knew what she was going to say. It was best to leave no misunderstanding.

  “It is impossible,” she said, “absolutely impossible. I will not give you any hope. I can’t encourage you by telling you to wait It can never be. Stop, don’t speak yet I am sorry for you, more sorry than I can say; but I am perfectly certain of it.”

  Manvers stood up too.’

  “How can you be certain?” he said. “I will take my answer like a gentleman, and not hope to win you by making myself importunate; but how is there no hope?”

  “It is quite impossible,” said Maud again.

  For the moment he had forgotten about the existence of Tom and all the world, but as Maud repeated “It is quite impossible,” the cruelty of her position and of his stung him intolerably, and forced from him an involuntary protest, as sudden physical pain forces a cry from the most stoical.

  “Ah, God help us both!” he said.

  Maud turned and looked at him. She was standing with her back to the street, and he was opposite her, so that her face was in darkness, his in light. And in his face she saw pity, love, tenderness and the knowledge of her secret mingled together.

  She had one moment of furious indignation with him for even letting her know that he knew all. But he came a step nearer and held out both hands to her.

  “Oh, you poor dear! you poor dear!” he said. “Without a thought of any possible gain, I would give my right hand to spare you this. It is much worse for you than for me.”

  The shadow of convention which had stood between them sank away into nothingness, for convention is born of the head, not of the heart, and when heart meets heart, there is no place for head. Maud took his two outstretched hands and pressed them.

  “You are a man,” she said, “and that is the highest praise of all. I have tried very hard to be a woman, but I have not succeeded so well.”

  “You have succeeded very well,” he said. “ No one has guessed it.”

  Pride is not a dominant emotion, and is driven off the field as soon as the greater magnates appear.

  “After all,” she thought w
earily, “what does it matter?” And then because her passion was strong and she was young, she broke down utterly. “My God, what shall I do?” she cried, “and what are you to think of me? I have thrown overboard self-respect, and reticence, and decency. I have nothing left but the hope that he knows nothing of it.”

  Manvers lied bravely.

  “I am sure he has never had an inkling of it,” he said. “It has been hard for you.”

  “And all the time there is the horrible consciousness that one may break down.”

  “You will not break down. When one has great physical pain, one thinks one cannot endure it a moment longer. But as a matter of fact one can and does. One endures it until it stops.”

  “But who is to assure me of that? Not you, of all men, who have guessed my secret.”

  “It was no fault of yours that I guessed it. It was because I fell in love with you myself.”

  His voice assumed its usual tone of gentler cynicism. “And love,” he added, “which is usually considered blind, is on the contrary extremely clear sighted. Man is a wonderful creature, as one of Tom’s Greek poets says, and we are beautifully adapted for bearing things without breaking. There is no last straw for us. We go on hoping that each straw is going to be the last, that we shall break, but we can always bear some more. And there usually are some more.”

  “Don’t say bitter things, Mr. Manvers. One may say bitter things to strangers, but never to friends. There’s father’s carriage; I must go upstairs. I told mother I should go to bed early. You leave us to-morrow, don’t you? I needn’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  “You are very good to me,” said poor Manvers.

  “I am intensely sorry for you. Spare a little sorrow for me. And you have behaved admirably. Good night.”

  Manvers heard the front door close, and a few minutes afterwards the voices of Lord and Lady Chatham as they went upstairs. A servant came in to put out the lamps; but, seeing Manvers there, would have retreated. He told the man to leave him a candle, and put the lamps out; he needn’t wait up.