Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Kit dropped her eyes and went on hurriedly.

  “I am in unutterable distress and perplexity,” she said; “and I dread — oh, I dread what lies before me! For days and nights, ever since that snow-storm down at Goring, I have thought only of what I have to go through — what is within a few months inevitable. I have tried to conceal it from Jack. But you guess, Lily. You know, I even went to a doctor to ask if anything could be done — —”

  Lily looked up with a glance of astonished horror.

  “Stop, stop,” she said; “you are saying horrible things!”

  “Yes, I am saying horrible things,” went on Kit, with a strange calmness in her voice; “but I am telling you the truth, and the truth is horrible. The truth about a wicked person like me cannot be nice. You interrupted me. I went, as I told you, but when I got there I drove away again. I was not so wicked as I thought I was.”

  Lily gave a great sigh of relief. But she had not seen the Other Thing yet.

  “Oh, my poor Kit,” she said; “I am so sorry for you; but — but you see the same thing lies before me. But fear it? I thank God for it every moment of my life. Cannot you forget pain, risk, danger of death, even in that? Nothing in this world seems to me to matter when perhaps soon one will be a mother. A mother — oh, Kit! I would not change places with anyone in earth or heaven.”

  Kit did not look up.

  “It is different for you,” she said.

  “Different? How different?” she asked; but a sudden misgiving shook her voice. Outlines of the Other Thing were discernible.

  A sudden spasm of impatience seized Kit.

  “Ah, you are stupid!” she cried. “You good people are always stupid.”

  There was a long silence, and during that silence Lily knew Kit’s secret, and as with everyone the world of trivial things swarmed into her mind. She heard the ticking of the clock, the low boom of life outside, the rustle of Kit’s dress as she moved slightly. Something perfectly direct had to be said by the one or the other; anything else would be as out of place as a remark on the weather to a dying man.

  “What am I to do?” asked Kit at length simply.

  And the answer was as simple:

  “Tell your husband.”

  “I think Jack would kill me if I told him,” said Kit.

  “I am very sure he would not. Besides, what does that matter? Oh, what does that matter?”

  Kit looked up at her in silence, but after a moment Lily went on.

  “Don’t you see what I mean?” she said. “There are some situations in life, Kit, and this is one, where no side-issue, like being killed, comes in. There is, as God is above us, absolutely only one thing to be done, though there are a hundred arguments against it. What is the use of telling him? you might ask. Use? Of course there is no use. Why tell the disgrace? why make him miserable? why make him hate you, perhaps? Simply because you must — you must! Oh, my poor, poor Kit, I am so glad you told me! It must be something to tell anyone, even a feeble little fool like me. How could you have borne it alone? Oh, Kit, Kit!”

  Again there was silence. Lily sat leaning forward in her chair, bending towards the other, with all the pure sweet womanliness of her nature yearning in her eyes. Perhaps she should have been shocked. She was not, for pity swallowed up the very ground on which censure should have stood. The two women, as asunder as the poles, were for the moment brought close by the Divine identical experience of their sex; yet what was to be to one the flower of her life and the crown of her womanhood, was to the other a bitterness ineffaceable, a shuddering agony.

  “Oh, it is difficult, it is difficult!” went on Lily; “but when was anything worth doing easy? Does not all in you that you know to be best point one way? You cannot imagine going on living with Jack, day by day, week by week, without telling him. And when it comes — —”

  Lily broke off suddenly. Here was no question of words. What could argument do in a case that admitted of none? There was one thing — one thing only — to be done; all else was impossible. If Kit did not feel that in her very blood and bones, no words could conceivably make her. She had been sitting quite still and silent, apathetic apparently, during Lily’s speech. After her outbreak at the beginning, such entire composure was unnatural. The two might have been talking of Danish politics for all the interest Kit seemed to take in the subject. Inwardly storm and tempest raged; old voices, memories, all that was innocent, called to her; the gales of her soul bugled and shook the foundations of her building, but as yet the moment had not come. Then suddenly the slightest tremor seemed to shake her, and Lily saw that she was beginning to feel, and that some fibre long dormant or numb was still vital.

  “All I say to you seems nothing more than platitude, perhaps?” she went on; “but platitudes are worth consideration when one touches the great things of life — when interest, tact, inclination, cleverness, are all sunk, and we are left with the real things, the big things — goodness, wickedness, what is right, what is wrong.”

  Her tone had a pleading wistfulness in it, her eyes were soft with tenderness, and the simple, homely words had the force of their simplicity. Kit was drawing on her gloves very slowly, still not looking up.

  “Tell me two things more,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “Do you shrink from me? And the wrong I have done to — to your unborn child, what of that?”

  Lily rose and kissed her on the forehead.

  “I have answered you,” she said.

  Kit got up, hands trembling and with twitching mouth.

  “Let me go,” she said. “Let me go at once. Come if I send for you.”

  She hurried from the room without further good-bye, and Lily was too wise to try to detain her. Her carriage was still waiting, and she stepped quickly into it.

  “Home,” she said.

  Outside the air was brisk with spring, the streets clean and dry, and populous with alert faces. Shop-windows winked and sparkled in the lemon-coloured sunshine; at a corner was a barrow full of primroses from the country, and the news of the day lay on the cobbles of the crossing, with stones to keep it from flying, in scarlet advertisement. A shouting wind swept down Piccadilly, hats flapped and struggled, errand-boys whistled and chaffed, buses towered and nodded, hansoms jingled and passed, but for once Kit was blind to this splendid spectacle of life. Her own brougham moved noiselessly and swiftly on its India-rubber tires, and she knew only, and that with a blank heaviness of spirit, that each beat of the horses’ hoofs brought her a pace nearer to her home, to her husband — a step closer to what she was going to do.

  She got out at her own door, and, to her question whether her husband was in, was told that he was up in his room. He had ordered the carriage, however, which brought her back, to wait, as he was going out.

  Kit went quickly up the staircase and along the parquetted floor of the passage, not loitering for fear she should not go at all. Jack was standing in front of his fireplace, an opened letter in his hand. As she came in he looked up.

  Kit had advanced a few steps into the room, but stopped there, looking at him with eyes of mute entreaty. She had not stopped to think over what she should say, and though her lips moved she could not speak.

  “What is it?” he said.

  Kit did not reply, but her eyes dropped before his.

  “What is the matter?” he asked again. “Are you ill, Kit?”

  Then the inward storm broke. She half ran across the room and flung her arms round his neck.

  “I wish I were dead!” she cried. “Jack, Jack — oh, Jack!”

  CHAPTER IV. THE DARKENED HOUSE

  Toby was just turning into the Bachelors’ Club next morning after another terrible wrestle with the Screamer, when he ran into Ted Comber. They had met a dozen times since their interview in the Links Hotel at Stanborough last August; indeed, they were both of the snowed-up party which went to the cottage in Buckinghamshire in the winter. Toby, still in ignorance that his interference had only changed the scene of the week by
the seaside, bore him no ill-will at all; in fact, having been extremely rude and dictatorial to him, he felt very much more kindly disposed to him afterwards, and, as usual, on meeting him to-day, he said “Hulloa!” in a genial and meaningless manner as they passed.

  But this morning there was something comparatively dishevelled about Ted; the knotting of his tie was the work of a mere amateur, and he had no button-hole. As soon as he saw Toby he stopped dead.

  “How is she?” he asked.

  Toby stared.

  “How is who?”

  “Kit. Haven’t you heard?”

  Toby shook his head.

  “I called there this morning,” he said, “for Kit and I were going to an exhibition, and they told me she was ill in bed. And Jack would not see me.”

  “No, have heard nothing,” said Toby. “Kit called on my wife yesterday, but I did not see her. Lily did not say anything about her being ill.”

  Lord Comber looked much relieved.

  “I suppose it is nothing, then,” he said; “I do hope so. It would be terrible for Kit to be ill, just when the season is beginning.”

  Toby stood for a moment thinking.

  “Did you say Jack refused to see you?” he asked.

  “Yes; I dare say he was very busy. No one sets eyes on him now that he has become a gold-miner. I am told he lives in the City, and plays dominoes in his leisure hours with stockbrokers. Probably he was only busy.”

  Toby bit his glove.

  “Why else should he refuse to see you?” he asked.

  “I can’t think, because I’m really devoted to Jack. Well, good-bye, Toby. I’m so glad to have seen you. If there was anything serious, I’m sure they would have told you. Isn’t the morning too heavenly?”

  Lord Comber waved his hand delicately, and turned briskly into Piccadilly. He had really had rather a bad moment before he met Toby, and it was a great relief that that red-headed barbarian knew nothing of Kit’s illness. It could scarcely be anything serious. One way and another he had seen almost nothing of her since he was down at the cottage in December, for he himself had been out of England, and in the country, until this week, whereas the Conybeares had been almost entirely in London.

  It was a delicious spring morning, and his spirits rose quickly as he went eastwards. He was proposing to do a little shopping in Bond Street, since Kit could not come to the exhibition, and visit his hairdresser and his tailor. A play had just come out at the Haymarket, in which the men wore very smart coats with a great deal of thick braid about them, and he intended to order a coat with thick braid at once. He remembered having seen in an old fashion-book of 1850 pictures of men with heavily braided coats, and had often thought how smart they looked. But they belonged to the crinoline age, and till now he had never seriously thought of getting one made. But this new play had quite convinced him; though they were the fashion when crinolines were in, they were not of the same ephemeral stamp as their feminine counterparts, and the late nineties should see them again.

  Just at the corner of Half-Moon Street was a flower-seller, with bunches and button-holes of spring flowers. The girl who sold them was pretty, and he looked at her a moment deftly twisting the wire round the stalks, wondering where the lower orders got their good looks from. There were yellow jonquils, breathing a heavy incense; creamy narcissi with flaming orange-coloured centres; exquisite single daffodils, most classic of all flowers, pure and girlish-looking; double daffodils, which reminded him of the same girls grown older and rather stout, overdressed, with fringes; and small fragrant bunches of violets. For violets, except in so far as they were of a lovely colour, he did not care; they were as formless as cotton-wool when put together for a button-hole (the object of flowers), and the scent of them was so precisely like essence of violets as to be banale. But as he was dressed in dark blue serge, with a violet satin tie and a sapphire pin, he bought a bunch, and put it in his button-hole, completing his scheme of colour. He gave the girl a shilling, and when she would have offered him a heavy copper change, told her to keep it, and walked on with a little warm charitable feeling, unencumbered by the dead weight of so many pennies.

  After his tailor’s, a visit to Perrin’s was necessary. He had a very particular hairdresser there, whom he must really take into serious consultation about certain gray hairs. There were at least a dozen of them above each of his ears, and they had appeared there during the last two or three months. All his family went gray early, and it was as well to face it. It was no use getting hair dyes, which might either ruin one’s hair or be the wrong colour; it was only wise to consult the very best authorities, and if hair dye was necessary, let it be put on, at any rate directed, by a professional hand.

  These were gloomy reflections; the shadow of age was beginning to peer over his shoulder, and he did not like it at all. He was as yet only thirty, but already ten years of being a young man, the only thing in the world worth being, were gone from him. Five years ago, men of forty, young for their age, were objects of amusing horror to him; their whole life, so he thought, must be one effort to retain the semblance of youth, and their antics were grotesque to the vraie jeunesse. But now both the amusement and the horror were gone; it would soon be worth while trying to learn a wrinkle or two from them. At twenty-five forty had seemed beyond the gray horizons; at thirty it had come so near that already, and without glasses (which he did not need yet), one could see the details of that flat, uninteresting land. What he would do with himself when he was forty he could not imagine. Marry very likely.

  But forty was still ten years off, thousands of days, and this morning was a jewel of spring, and he was so happy to think that probably Kit had nothing much amiss. Really, he had had some bad minutes, but Toby must have known if there had been anything wrong. So his spirits rebounded, and he resumed his reflections on age with a strong disposition towards cheerfulness as regards the outlook. When he looked over his contemporaries in his own mind, he candidly found himself younger than they. There was Tom Abbotsworthy, for instance, whose forehead was already nearly one with the top of his head, separated only by the most scrannel isthmus of hair, and corrugated with wrinkles on its lower parts, smooth and shining above. There was Jack Conybeare, with a visible tinge of gray in his hair, and lines about his eyes which were plain even by candlelight. Ted congratulated himself, when he thought of Jack, on his having so promptly gone to the face masseur on his return from Aldeburgh in September. It had meant a week of tedious mornings, and an uncomfortable sort of mask at night over the upper part of the face two or three times a week ever since, but the treatment had been quite successful. “Not only,” as the somewhat sententious professor of massage had said to him, “had the growth and spread of the lines been arrested, but some had actually been obliterated.” He congratulated Ted on his elastic skin. Again, his teeth were good, and really the only reconnoitring-parties of age at present in sight were this matter of gray hairs and a tendency to corpulency. For the former he was going to take prompt steps this morning, and he had already begun a course of gritty biscuits, most nutritious, but entirely without starch, which promised success in point of the latter.

  But while he was making his butterfly way down Piccadilly, occasionally sipping at a jeweller’s, or hovering lightly over a print-shop, Toby, after a long meditation on the top step of the club, during which time the hall-porter had held the door open for him, turned away instead of going in, and went up Park Lane to his brother’s house. Kit’s bedroom was directly over the front-door, and, looking up, he saw that the blinds were still down. Jack was coming into the hall from his room when Toby entered, and, seeing him, stopped.

  “I was just coming to see you, Toby,” he said. “I am glad you have come.”

  Jack’s face looked curiously aged and drawn, as if he had spent a week of sleepless nights, and Toby followed him in silence, with a heart sunk suddenly into his boots. There was deadly presage in the air. Jack preceded him into the smoking-room, and threw himself down in a chair.


  “Oh, Jack, what is it?” asked Toby.

  The two remained together for nearly an hour, and at the end of that time came out together again. Toby took his hat and gloves from the hall-table, and was putting on his coat, when the other spoke.

  “Won’t you go and see her?” he asked, and his voice was a little trembling.

  “I think I can’t,” said Toby.

  “Why not?”

  Toby had thrust one hand through the arm of his coat, and with it dangling remained a moment thinking.

  “For two reasons: she is your wife — yours,” he said, “and I am your brother; also you were a brute, Jack.”

  “For both reasons see her,” he said; and his voice was sorry and ashamed.

  “And it will do no good,” said Toby, still irresolute.

  “But it will be a pleasure to Kit,” said Jack. “Don’t, for God’s sake, be always thinking about doing good, Toby! Oh, it maddens me!”

  Toby disengaged the coated arm, and leaned against the hall-table.

  “I shouldn’t know what to say,” he replied.

  “You needn’t know; just go and see her.” Jack spoke with some earnestness. “Go and see her,” he went on. “I can’t, and I must know how she is. Toby, I believe you are sorry for both of us. Well, if that is so, I am sure Kit would like to see you, and certainly I want you to go. She was asking for you, her maid told me, an hour ago.”