Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He picked up the paper, and turned to the money-market.

  “And here’s the cruel part of it all,” he said, “for both of us: Carmel is up to four pounds again. If they had only given him another month, he would have been as rich as ever, instead of having to declare bankruptcy; and I — well, I should have had a pound or two more. Lord! on what small things life depends!”

  Toby was silent.

  “About the Park Lane house,” he said, after a pause. “I talked it over with Lily, and if you’ll let us have it at that price, we shall be delighted to take it. We only have our present house on a yearly lease, which expires in July.”

  “You’re a good fellow, Toby.”

  “Oh, that’s all rot!” said Toby. “Lily and I both want your house. It isn’t as if we were doing you a kindness — it isn’t really, Jack. But it’s such rough luck on you having to turn out. Of course, you and Kit will always come there whenever you like.”

  Jack lit another cigarette, flicking the end of the old one out of the window.

  “I think I will have a drink, Toby,” he said; “my throat is as dry as dust answering so many pertinent and impertinent questions, as to what I received as director, and what I made over Carmel East and West. They let me off nothing, and the Radical papers will be beautiful for the next week or two. They’ll be enough to make one turn Radical.”

  “Poor old Jack! Whisky? Whisky-and-soda, waiter — two. Well, it’s all over.”

  “Ted Comber was in court to-day,” continued Jack, “all curled, and dyed, and brushed, and manicured. He watched me all the time, Toby. Upon my word, I think that was the worst part of the whole show.”

  Toby showed his teeth for a moment.

  “I’ve made it up with him, I’m sorry to say,” he remarked. “Lily insisted on it. We shook hands, and I was afraid he was going to kiss me.”

  “By the way, how is Lily?”

  “Happy as a queen when I left her this morning, and the boy, oh! Jack, a beauty. He was shouting fit to knock the house down: you could have heard him in Goring. I left early, but Kit got up and breakfasted with me. Knowing how she hates getting up early, I put that down at its proper value. But she didn’t attend to me much: she has no thoughts except for Lily and the boy.”

  “Kit has behaved like a real trump all through this,” said Jack. “Never a word or a look of reproach to me. She’s just been cheery, and simple, and splendid. You know, Toby, she is utterly changed since — since that time before Easter. We had a long talk the day after you and Lily left us there two months ago. I was never so surprised in my life.”

  “At what?”

  “At what she said, and at what I said — perhaps most of what I said. She told me she was going to try not to be such a brute. And, upon my soul, I thought it was an excellent plan. I said I would try too.”

  Toby laughed.

  “There’s your whisky,” he said. “Hang it all! I haven’t got any money. You’ll have to pay for it yourself, Jack — and mine, too. So you and Kit made a bargain?”

  Jack glanced round the room, which had emptied of all its well-dressed, weary occupants. He and Toby were alone.

  “Yes, we made a bargain. The worst of it was that neither of us know how to try, so we consulted Lily. Did it ever occur to you, Toby, that you have married the nicest girl that ever breathed?”

  “I had an idea of it. It was Kit’s doing, too. Funny, that.”

  “Well, Lily told us. She said some damned clever things. She said that turning over a new leaf meant not even looking back once to the old one. You know, Toby, that’s devilish good. I thought she’d tell us to think what brutes we had been, and repent. Not a bit of it. We’ve just got to go straight on. Don’t grin; I’m perfectly serious.”

  “I’m sure you are. I was only grinning at the notion of Lily telling you to repent. You know, if there are two things that girl is not, Jack, they are a preacher and a prig.”

  “You’re quite right, and I always thought that to be good you had to be either one or the other, and probably both. She tells me it is not necessarily so, and so Kit and I are going to set to work. We are not going to run up any more huge bills which we can’t pay; we are not going to invent or to listen to scandalous stories about other people; and we are going to flirt. We suggested that, and Lily thought it would do to begin upon. Also I was to tell the truth about Alington’s bankruptcy. I did that. Really, Toby, it’s very easy to tell the truth: it requires no effort of the imagination. But the truth is a brute when it comes out.”

  Toby looked up smiling, but Jack was perfectly grave and serious.

  “Yes, you may think I don’t mean it,” he said, “but I do. We mean to reform, in fact; God knows it is high time. Kit and I have lived in what I suppose you would call rather a careless manner all these years, and we have come to an almighty, all-round smash. We had a very serious talk — we had never talked seriously before, as far as I can remember — and we are going to try to do better.”

  Jack got up and went to the window, and leaned out for a moment into the warm summer night. Then he turned into the room again.

  “We are indeed,” he said. “Good-night, Toby;” and he walked off.

  Ted Comber had been to the opera that night, and was going on to a dance. They had been doing the “Meistersingers,” and it was consequently after twelve when he got out. The dance was in Park Lane, and he turned into the Bachelors’ Club to freshen himself before going on. He had spent a really delightful day; for he had lunched with amusing people, had sat an hour listening to Jack Conybeare’s examination in the Alington bankruptcy case, and had had the opportunity of telling a very exalted personage about it afterwards, making him laugh for ten minutes, and Ted, who had a fine loyal regard for exalted personages — some people called him a snob — was proportionately gratified. Of course it was too terrible for poor Jack, but it was absurd not to see the light side of it when properly considered.

  “I was really so sorry for him I didn’t know what to do,” he had said to Lady Coniston at dinner. “Isn’t it too terrible?” and they had both burst into shrieks of laughter, and discussed the question from every point and wondered how dear Kit took it.

  The freshening up in the lavatory of the Bachelors’ Club meant some little time and delicacy of touch. He had to be careful how he washed his face, for he had taken pains with it. Certainly the effect was admirable; for the least touch of rouge on the cheek-bone, and positively only the shadow of an antimony pencil below his eyes had given his face the freshness of a boy’s. He looked at himself quite candidly in the glass, and said, “Not a day more than twenty-five.” For he was no friend of false modesty, and any modesty he might have assumed about himself would have been undeniably false.

  All this care for one’s appearance, it is true, made a terrible hole in one’s time; but if it lengthened one’s youth, it was an excellent investment of hours. There was nothing that could weigh against that paramount consideration. He dried his hands, still looking at himself, and put on his rings. A touch of the hairbrush was necessary, and for his hands the file of the nail-scissors. Then he put on his coat again and went into the hall. Jack Conybeare was in the act of coming out of the smoking-room.

  Ted had only a short moment for reflection, and almost without a pause he went on, meeting Jack.

  “Good-evening, Jack,” he said; “are you coming to the Tauntons’? Kit is in the country still, is she not?”

  Jack had stopped on seeing him, and looked him over slowly from head to heel; then he walked by him without speaking, and went out.

  Ted was only a little amused, and more than a little annoyed. Just now it did not matter much what Jack did, but, being wise in his generation, he did not care about being cut by anybody. The Conybeares would probably pick up again in a year or two, and to be cut by the master of quite one of the nicest houses in London was a bore. Besides, he was in an acme of good-fellowship after his amusing day.

  He went on into the smokin
g-room to look round before proceeding to his dance. Toby was still sitting in the window where Jack had left him. Since their reconciliation a day or two before, Ted had felt most friendly towards him, and he went delicately across the room to him, looking charming.

  “I just met Jack in the hall,” he said; “he looks terribly tired and old.”

  Toby bristled like a large collie dog.

  “Naturally,” he said.

  “In fact, he was rather short with me,” said Ted plaintively.

  This was too much. Toby got up.

  “Naturally,” he said again.

  The poor little butterfly felt quite bruised. Really, the Conybeares had not any manners. It serves so little purpose to be rude to anyone, and it was so easy and repaying to be pleasant. He knew this well, for the whole of his nasty little life was spent in reaping the fruits of being constantly pleasant to people. They asked you to dinner, they asked you to stay at their country houses, and having asked you once they asked you again, because you took the trouble to talk and amuse people. What more can a butterfly want than a sunny garden with flowers always open? Such a simple need! so easy to satisfy!

  Well, there was a delicious flower open in Park Lane, and he went on to his dance. He must really give up the Conybeares, he thought; they were becoming too prickly. He had written twice to Kit, and had received no answer. Jack had given him a dead cut; Toby was a bear. And he sighed gently, thinking how stupid it was of the flowers to shut themselves up.

  As soon as he had gone, Toby resumed his seat by the window. During the last few months he had touched life in a way he had never done before. To him this business of living had hitherto been a cheery, comfortable affair; the question of taking it seriously, even of taking it at all, had never formally presented itself to him. Then quite suddenly, as it were, as he paddled pleasantly along, he had got out of his depth. The great irresistible forces of life had swept him away, the swift current of love had borne him far out into the great ocean of human experience. Then, still encircled by that, he had seen storm-clouds gather, grim tempests had burst in hail and howling wind, the sea had grown black and foam-flecked. He had seen the tragedy of his brother’s home — sin and its wages ruthlessly paid. There were such things as realities. And after that what? Into what new forms would the wreckage be fashioned, these riven planks of a pleasure-boat? But underneath the lightness of Jack’s words to-night there had lain, Toby felt, a seriousness which was new. And the change in Kit was more marked still.

  Outside, the world rolled on its way, and each unit in the crowd moved to his appointed goal, some of set purpose, others unconscious of it, but none the less on an inevitable way. In the brains of men stirred the thoughts which, for good or ill, should be the heritage of the next generation, part of their instinctive equipment. The vast design was being worked out, unerringly, unceasingly, unhurried and undelayed, through the sin of one, the virtue of another. To fall itself and to fail was but a step towards the ultimate perfection; behind all worked the Master-hand. By strange pathways and chance meetings, by the death of the scarcely born and the innocent, by the unscathed life and health of the guiltiest, by love and beautiful things and terrible things, had all reached the spot where they stood to-day. Devious might be the paths they should hereafter follow, but He who had led them thus far knew.

  And as Toby thought on these things, moved beyond his wont, he looked out, and saw with a strange quickening of the blood that in the east already there were signs that out of night was shortly to be born another day.

  THE END

  SCARLET AND HYSSOP

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER I

  It has been ordained by the wisdom of Nature that the same fact shall strike the majority of her foolish children almost simultaneously. This phenomenon can hardly have escaped the most casual observer; the majority of swallows, for instance, in any given area will agree, practically in the same week, that our English autumn is no longer tolerable, and with consenting twitterings set their heads southwards; or in the spring, again, one may observe that in any given field daisies and buttercups will determine, only to be nipped by unpunctual frosts, that it is now time to come out, while even man, that most vacillating and least uniform of all created things, has a certain sympathy in his sensations; the sap stirs with moderately equal effervescence in the most dissimilar units; and without further preamble, to take the case in point, London settles without consultation, but with considerable unanimity, when spring may be considered to have stopped and summer to have begun. It is hardly necessary to state that London is, if not always, at any rate very frequently, completely deceived — like the buttercups and daisies — about a point so apparently palpable as even this, and a few biting frosts about mid-May usually send it back to its furs again; but the fact remains that on or about the same day the streets suddenly wear a completely different garb. On all sides the chrysalises burst, and butterflies gay or sober, according to their temperaments, hover and try their wings over a ground strewn, so to speak, with the brown husks of the “winter weeds outworn.” Nor is this bursting of the chrysalis confined to externals: the time has come; the tides of vitality turn and flow through the town, and the reopened houses, newly decked window-boxes, and the flush of colour in the streets, are but symptomatic of the inward conviction of their inhabitants that a fresh season for doing a quantity of things they should not do, and as great an opportunity for leaving undone many things that they should do, has been turned up by the spade of Time, that irresponsible farmer of years.

  Though not usually given to prosing, Lady Alston had been making remarks somewhat to this effect as she sat with Mrs. Brereton after lunch in a balconied window of her drawing-room in Park Lane looking over the haze and warmth of the Park. Being for the moment, at any rate, in a pessimistic mood, she accounted for it by a belittling explanation.

  “We are so obvious; that is why we all do things simultaneously,” she said; “and a thing that everybody does is not in itself worth doing at all. I don’t suppose there ever was a race so utterly deficient in originality.”

  The sun was not very hot, and Mrs. Brereton put down her parasol, and pointed dramatically with it down Park Lane.

  “What do you call that?” she asked. “Did you ever see anything so wildly and colossally original? You have travelled, dear Marie, and have seen Aztecs and wigwams and the gorgeous East in fee, whatever that may mean. But have you ever seen anything to approach Park Lane?”

  Lady Alston laughed.

  “I don’t call nightmares original,” she said.

  “I’m sure I don’t know why not. I see nothing in the nature of a nightmare which is incompatible with originality. Just look: there we have a Gothic façade, followed by a very plain English erection which reminds me of beef and beer and Sunday. A little further down you will observe a kind of kiosk, and after that the front of the Erechtheum and something from the slums of Nürnberg. If one could look round the corner, we would see a rustic cottage, a bit of Versailles, a slice of Buckingham Palace as pièce de resistance, and some Pompeian frescoes by way of a savoury. There’s richness for you.”

  “Scraps only, scraps from other places. It always reminds me of a dog’s dinner,” said Lady Alston; “and all of us who live here are like scraps for a dog’s dinner, too. Bits of things, remnants, a jumble sale, with everything priced above its proper value.”

  Mildred Brereton leaned back in her chair, so that the sun did not catch her hair. The particular Titian shade she af
fected was so difficult to please in a strong light, and she felt sure that at this moment there was a sort of metallic iridescence on it. She would have to go to the hair-dresser’s again to-day.

  “Dear Marie, what possesses you this lovely morning?” she asked. “Why is the world so stupid?”

  “Probably only because I had a very short night. I am quite aware that when one is dissatisfied with things in general, it means that one’s vie interieure, shall we say? is dissatisfied with something particular.”

  “And what form does the dissatisfaction take?”

  Lady Alston threw her hands wide with an admirably graceful gesture.

  “I despair of the human race of the day,” she said, “but I have enough grace to include myself. Do you suppose there ever was such a stupid class of people — especially we, Mildred, the women! We have all, literally all, we should want to make ourselves happy in an animal way — good health, sufficient money, and a deep abiding selfishness. But we can’t amuse ourselves; we are not happy; we are like dogs out for a walk, we must continually have sticks thrown for us. We can none of us invent anything ourselves. We can none of us stand solitude, which is in itself a complete confession of our stupidity, our parasitic nature. We go and hear people sing and act, and make music; and go and see horses race; we play cards for hours because we have not got the wit to talk — they say Bridge killed conversation. What nonsense! there was none to kill. Our whole brains, such as they are, are occupied in devising things to do to make the time pass. And we devise very badly: we are always glad when each thing is over. We go to a concert. How long! We live three months in London. How nice it will be to get down to the country again! We play Bridge. Will the rubber never end? We spend the autumn in the country. Will November never be over? On the top of that we do all in our power to make it appear that time has not passed with us. We dye our hair and paint our faces, in order to appear young, but the moment we open our mouths it is obvious we are tired, withered old women! There!”