Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “It’s only three years since I saw you last,” he said at length, “but you look more than three years older.” Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and blew away a cloud of blue smoke.

  “I feel eighty-four,” he said. “Prosperity isn’t so soothing as I was led to believe. I think worrying and fighting would have kept me young. You are the only person who always remains twenty-five. How have you managed it?”

  “Growing old is absolutely a matter of will,” said Manvers. “It is like Alice eating the mushroom to make her grow tall or short. You can eat which side of it you like: one side makes you old, the other keeps you young. No one need grow old unless he likes. The secret is to take nothing seriously. I only once took anything seriously, and it made me three years older in a single night. Consequently I am twenty-eight, not twenty-five.”

  “What was that?” asked Tom, listlessly.

  “I took Miss Wrexham seriously. I asked her to marry me. That was just three years ago.”

  “Poor old boy! Why didn’t you tell me? Are you going to try your fate again? She is coming down here in a week.”

  Manvers looked up.

  “The deuce she is! No; the incident is closed.”

  “Were you badly hurt?”

  “I found everything distasteful for a time, but I recovered. Life is so amusingly improbable. Fancy my doing that sort of thing! However, it was very useful; I learned several lessons.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “I learned that nothing can really damage one’s capacity for enjoyment. Don’t think I wasn’t in earnest about it; I was in deadly earnest. The second was that homme propose. It is a truism, of course, but it is useful to find by experience that a truism is true. I have yet to learn who disposes,” he added. “I must say I have never personally experienced the last part of the proverb. By the way, I was talking to an old model the other day who was sitting to me for my ‘ Fourth Act’ — the thing of the woman with the fan — and she said, ‘ Man appoints, God disappoints.’ But woman usually disappoints. And the third thing I learned was that the most foolish thing in the world is to be serious. While one can certainly amuse one’s self it is idle to forego that bird in the hand for a problematic bird in the bush.”

  “I wish I could learn one thing a year,” said Tom, “as you have been doing. I should be getting confoundedly wise by now.”

  “You always used to be learning things,” remarked the other. “I remember you used to discover the secret of life about every other day.”

  “I have unlearned a good many things, unfortunately.”

  “It’s my turn to catechise. What have you unlearned?”

  “I have unlearned my theory that I could do all I wanted. I have unlearned my conviction that one made one’s own limitations — that one could ever be certain about anything. In a way, I have all a reasonable man could want. I have May, I have three healthy children, I have fame — fame of a damnable kind, it is true — but there was a time when I shouldn’t have been satisfied with anything. I longed to stretch out my arms round the whole world, to take the whole world into my grasp. But now I know I cannot do it, and, what is worse, I do not want to do it. I acquiesce in my own limitations. What can be sadder than that?”

  “If you are happy nothing matters.”

  “I might once have been happier. I gave up what I believed I could do, and what I believed was supremely well worth doing. I am an apostate. Apostates may be very happy — they are rid of the thumbscrew and the boiling lead — but I wonder if they ever lose that little cankerworm of shame.”

  “My dear Tom, what nonsense! You tried to fly, and before you had succeeded some one took your apparatus away. Of course it is only natural for you to think that you might have flown if you had been left with your apparatus, but you never could have. Besides, you are rich now; you have your apparatus again.”

  Tom frowned.

  “Cannot you understand? “ he said, impatiently “Good God, it is so simple! Stevenson says somewhere that three pot-boilers will destroy any talent I must have made twenty pot-boilers at least. Don’t you see that what I am regretting is that I no longer want to fly? The chances are a thousand to one that I never could have. But that blessed illusion that I could fly has gone.”

  “You took it too seriously.”

  “I did, much too seriously. I don’t take things seriously now; I have lost the trick. But how I long to be able to! I was mad, no doubt: you often told me so. But it was a very sweet madness. All enthusiasm is madness according to you. But according to enthusiasts, enthusiasm is the only sanity. I oughtn’t to complain. I sail closer to the shore. It is really much safer and pleasanter. Indeed, we are thinking of taking a house at Cambridge. It will be nice to have Ted near. If one wants to be happy, one ought to have no ill-balanced enthusiasms. They are very disturbing while they last, and they leave one as flat as a pancake. But when you have once tasted them, though you may have lost them entirely, you can never wholly forget their wonderful intoxication. One of those French enthusiasts says that one must be drunk on something — on life or love, or virtue or vice, it does not matter which.”

  “I, too, am very catholic,” murmured Manvers. “I appreciate virtue as little as I dislike vice. It is all a question of temperament.”

  “Yes, temperament. That is another thing I have unlearned. There was a time when I was convinced that no man need be in the clutch of his temperament I believed that one was free. One is not. One is in endless, hopeless bondage to one’s temperament.”

  “You are pessimistic this afternoon.”

  “It is a relative term. I am really optimistic, though I allow my optimism would have seemed pessimism to me three years ago.”

  “I don’t quite see from what standpoint you can be considered optimistic,” remarked Manvers.

  “I appreciate fully all I have got I think the lines are laid for me in pleasant places. That is surely the whole essence of optimism. I believe that everything is for the best, and that if the best seems second-rate to me, it is I who am wrong. I love May more than I love any one in this world, and she is my wife. I have money, which is a hateful necessity, but as necessary as it is hateful. And I have a good digestion.” Tom leant back and beat out the ashes from his pipe against the side of the boat They would not come out at first, but eventually the whole dottel of the pipe fell into the water with a subdued hiss. Some vague note of thought twanged in his brain, and he paused for a moment, frowning slightly, and trying to catch the remembrance which the sound had stirred. After a little he smiled rather sadly, and not with the completeness which a smile of pure amusement or of pure happiness has in it “I used to do that over King’s bridge at Cambridge,” he said irrelevantly; “and I thought it seemed so like what I was going to do myself. I meant to go through darkness, and then make a splash.”

  “The end of your pipe made a very little splash,” said Manvers.

  “Oh yes, a very little splash. All splashes are little; but splashes are rare. Most people slide into the water anyhow, and are content to be seen swimming.”

  “The world would count you singularly happy.”

  “Of course it would; it would be wrong if it did not. But — but what I mean is that I might have been happier, and May might have been happier.” Manvers looked up in surprise.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  Tom sat up and played rather nervously with the tassel of the cushion on which he was sitting.

  “Surely it is simple enough,” he said. “I have acquiesced in limitations. May is devoted to me — as much devoted to me as I am to her, I think. But don’t you see there is less of me than there might have been. There is less of me to love and to be loved — God knows, it is all perfect enough in its own scale. But there might have been another scale. And now” — he dropped his hands and sat upright, looking at Manvers—” and now we are measured by yards, not by metres.”

  A little wind stirred suddenly in the elm trees by the bank and
ruffled the surface of the water. A fish rose in mid-stream beyond the boat, and the current carried the concentric ripples down with it Behind, the little rambling red-brick house stood sunning its southern front, and on the lawn, in the shadow of a tall copper beech, they could see the glimmer of a figure in a white dress sitting in a low basket chair. Tom turned as he spoke and looked half involuntarily at it.

  “Come,” he said; “May will be waiting for us. We are going to have tea early, and then go for a row up the river. We are going to do many pleasant things.”

  The boat was anchored among some flowering rushes; a few strokes of the punt pole sent it back to the bottom of the lawn. They strolled up together to where May was sitting, and she welcomed them with that brilliant smile which was so natural to her.

  “Tom has been so sombre this last day or two” she said to Manvers. “I hope you have been cheering him up.”

  “I don’t think there is much the matter with him,” said Manvers. “He says he feels optimistic.”

  “Manvers called me pessimistic,” remarked Tom; “but that is only a most flagrant instance of his own pessimism. He sees everything through his own spectacles.”

  May raised her eyebrows.

  “What frightfully contradictory accounts,” she said. “Oh, Tom, by the way, there is a man here who has come from the station to have the carriage of the Demeter paid. It is fifteen pounds. Surely that is an awful lot. I thought I had better ask you before I paid it.” Manvers looked inquiringly at Tom.

  “Have you the Demeter here?” he asked.

  “Yes; I bought it back from Lord Henderson. He was very nice about it. He saw I really wanted it, and he let me have it for what he had paid for it. He bought it, you know, as a piece of cultured lumber, perhaps also as a species of charity, and he has sold it for charity. It came two days ago. I told them to unpack it this morning. Where have you had it put, May?”

  “In your study, dear, where you said you wanted it. They unpacked it to-day. But surely fifteen pounds is too much for the carriage, Tom?”

  Tom’s eyes wandered over the lawn, but came back to May.

  “Yes, it seems a good deal. But I wanted it, you know, and one pays anything for what one wants; in fact, one often pays a good deal for what one doesn’t want.”

  “You can’t say that that speech is optimistic,” said Manvers, triumphantly.

  “No, I don’t defend it,” said Tom. “May dear, let’s come in and have tea now. It is getting much cooler, and then we can start in half an hour.”

  May rose and walked with Manvers towards the house. Tom strolled on a few steps ahead of them. As they reached the terrace which ran along the front of the house he turned.

  “I don’t think you ever saw the Demeter finished,” he said to Manvers. “Come with me and look at it.”

  “Yes, let’s all go and see it,” said May. “It looks so nice in that corner, with the dark red paper behind, Tom. I went to see it just before I came out.”

  Tom’s room opened out of the hall, opposite the drawing-room. Just as they got to the door he stopped and spoke to May without looking at her.

  “Then will you have us told when tea is ready, dear?” he said.

  May had intended to come in with them, but something in Tom’s voice made her hesitate.

  “Yes; don’t be long,” she said; “and don’t get to talking shop about it. We shall never start if you do.”

  Tom opened the door for Manvers and shut it again after they had entered. The sun was already getting low, and a great blaze of light came in almost horizontally through the open window and shone full on the statue. Tom sat down opposite it, and Manvers stood near him. In the ruddy glow of the evening the white marble was flushed with delicate red, and for the first time Manvers really appreciated the noble conception of it — about the execution he had never had any doubt.

  They sat there in silence for some time, and then Tom got up.

  “Do you see,” he said rather huskily, “do you see what I mean when I say that I might have — might have—”

  He turned abruptly. On the floor was lying the sheet in which the statue had been wrapped. He took it up quickly and flung it over it.

  “We all have ghosts in our houses,” he said; “but we can at least veil them a little. Besides,” he added, “to go back to what I was saying about my optimism, I have had three crises, three revelations — unimportant little revelations no doubt — in my life. I think I told you and Maud Wrexham about them one evening, oh, ever so long ago!”

  “I remember,” said Manvers.

  “Well, to have had a crisis is in itself a most delightful experience, but if your crisis remains, so to speak, critical, you ought to be perfectly happy. Two of my crises were still-born. The crisis I had when I saw the Hermes at Olympia has come to nothing.”

  “Do you call that nothing?” said Manvers, pointing to the shrouded Demeter.

  “Worse than nothing. It is a dead child. It had better never have been born. And the crisis I had, or thought I had, when the baby was born is — is yet unfulfilled. But my third crisis remains critical. I met May, I loved her, I love her. But the ghosts, the ghosts—”

  They left the room. In the hall was the three-year-old Thomas, being towed sideways across the hall by his nurse, going out for a walk. Tom took the youngster up in his arms and turned to Manvers with a smile.

  “I am a fool if I cannot lay my ghosts,” he said.

  THE END

  THE BABE, B.A.

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION.

  I. — TO INTRODUCE.

  II. — IN FELLOWS’ BUILDINGS.

  III. — THE BABE.

  IV. — vs. BLACKHEATH.

  V. — THE WORK-CLUB.

  VI. — THE BABE’S PICNIC.

  VII. — THE BABE’S “SAPPING.”

  VIII. — A GAME OF CROQUET.

  IX. — TEA AT THE PITT.

  X. — ROYAL VISITORS.

  XI. — THE REHEARSAL.

  XII. — A COLLEGE SUNDAY.

  XIII. — KING’S CHAPEL.

  XIV. — A VARIETY ENTERTAINMENT.

  XV. — CLYTEMNESTRISMOS.

  XVI. — AFTER LUNCH.

  XVII. — A LITTLE GAME.

  XVIII. — THE CONFESSION.

  XIX. — IN THE FIFTIES.

  XX. — THE BABE’S MINOR DIVERSIONS.

  XXI. — A DAY IN THE LENT TERM.

  XXII. — BEFORE THE TRIPOS.

  XXIII. — THE LISTS.

  DEDICATION.

  DEAR TOBY:

  It is fitting, and I hope you will not feel it otherwise, that your name should appear on the forefront of this little book, for you know best how much good humour went to the making of it, and how when it was read piecemeal, as it was written, to you, your native politeness, which I cannot admire too much, more than once prompted you to laugh. (Advt.) You will remember, too, when I first mentioned the idea of it to you, that with some solemnity we procured a large sheet of foolscap paper, and a blue pencil, and then and there set ourselves to put down all the remarkable and stirring events which happened to us in those four years we spent together at Cambridge; how we failed egregiously to recollect anything remarkable or stirring — pardon me, we remembered one stirring event, but decided not to treat the world to it — which had come within our personal experience, and thereupon cast, or as you said, “speired” about for any remarkable and stirring incident, which had happened, not, alas, to us, but to anybody else soever. Here again I may recall to you that we drew blank, and our sheet of paper was still virgin white, our blue pencil as sharp as ever, and the book no nearer conception than before.

  Then it was that the uncomfortable conviction dawned on us, gradually illuminating our minds as some cloudy rain-slanted morning grows clear to half wakened eyes, that in the majority of cases, remarkable and stirring events do not befall the undergraduate, and that if the book was to be made at all, it must be made of homely, and I hope wholesome, ingredients, a cricke
t ball, a canoe, a football, a tripos, a don, a croquet mallet, a few undergraduates, a Greek play, some work, and so forth. For it seemed to us that the superficial enquirer — and you, I vow, are even more superficially-minded than I — finds that these things are common to the experience of most men, but that when you begin to deal in spiritualities, heroes, century-making captains of eleven, chess blues, and higher aspirations, you desert the normal plane for the super-normal, where people like you and me have no business to intrude.

  So that, it is complete, will find therein neither births, deaths, marriages, and though the Babe himself may have waxed a little out of proportion to our original scheme — ought, instance, never to have played Rugby for his University, as savouring too much of the hero — I have retained for him to the end that futility of mind, and girt him about with that flippant atmosphere, in which the truly heroic chokes and stifles. About the other characters I have no such confessions to make; they have successfully steered clear of all distinctions, bodily or mental; I have even omitted to state Ealing s place in the tripos, and for this reason. He ought to have done better than the Babe, but the Babe got a second, and this leaves only one class where Ealing’s name would reasonably appear, and I altogether refuse to let him take a first.

  Good-bye for the present: but you will be home for leave, will you not, in a month? Believe me, my dear Toby, Ever your sincere friend,

  E. F. BENSON.

  P. S. — I apologise for what I have said about your superficialness. It is, however, perfectly true.

  I. — TO INTRODUCE.

  The time has come, the showman said,

  To look at many things.

  At Deans and tea and men and Babes

  At Cambridge and at King’s.

  LIGHT-BLUE LYRICS.

  “And I maintain,” said Reggie, flourishing the Britannia-metal teapot (in order, it is supposed, to lend a spurious emphasis to the banalité of his sentiment), “that it’s better to have played and lost than never—”