Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He looked at her with the same glooming face.

  “I don’t unsay it,” he said, “I don’t unsay one single word of it. In proportion as both of them were dear to me, so is that which has happened detestable to me. I don’t want to talk about it — there is no use in that. I have got to begin my life again; that is what it comes to, and I have to begin it on a basis of hate and utter distrust. Two people who were the friends of my heart, people whom I could have trusted, so I should have thought, to the uttermost verge of eternity, have done this.”

  Then all his bitterness, and there was much of that, all his resentment and anger, all his love gone sour, rose in his throat.

  “For what guarantee have I now,” he cried, “that everyone else whom I trusted will not behave to me like that? You, mother, you, what plans and plots may you not have got against me? It is all very well to say that you cannot, that you are my friend. But what is my experience of friends? They are those who know one best, and can thus stab most deeply. God defend me from my friends — I would sooner shake hands with my enemies. Ah! I forgive them, for I might know that they were enemies; but, fool that I was, I never guessed that my friends were but enemies who sat at my table. They ate my food — I wish it had choked them; they drank my wine again and again — I wish I had poisoned it. For they have poisoned me, they have made my life impossible. Ah, don’t say I shall get over it! That is silly. How can I get over it? For if I could, I should not say these things to you. I should be silent, I hope, and trust to what is called the healing hand of Time. But there are certain things Time never heals. One of them is the infidelity of those whom one thought were friends.”

  He was speaking quickly now, the bile of bitterness overflowed.

  “Friends!” he said. “Madge and Evelyn and I were friends. But they two have done this accursed thing. And if I have another friend in this world, I shall now expect him to believe the chance word of any lying tongue. Apart from you, I have one friend left, and if Tom Merivale told me to-morrow that I had cheated at cards, and that in consequence he declined the pleasure of my further acquaintance, I should not be surprised. I believe nothing good of my friends, and I believe less harm of my enemies! They, anyhow, can hurt me less. I have had but four friends in my life, and yet even with four, fool that I was, I counted myself rich in them. Two have gone, and there are just two people in this world whom I hate. Till yesterday there were none.”

  Mrs. Home laid her hand timidly on his arm.

  “Philip, dear Philip,” she said, “is there any good in saying these things? Does it help in any way what has happened, or does it help you?”

  “No, it does no good,” said he. “I don’t want to do any good. I just choose to say what I am saying, and what I say, I assure you, is no exaggeration of what I feel — it does not even do justice to what I feel. One thing I have misstated, or it was but a mood of the moment. I said I was broken; I am nothing of the sort. I never did a better day’s work than to-day. But I don’t want to say these things again, and I have no intention of doing so. I beg you also never to refer to them. But I choose just this once to say what my feeling towards them is. I tried, indeed I tried my best, to forgive them, but I can’t. I can no more now conceive forgiving them than a blind man can conceive the colour of that rose. I loved them both, and in proportion as my love for them was strong, so is my hate for them.”

  He paused a moment.

  “That is all,” he said. “I wanted you to know that, and to be under no misconception as to what I felt. Let us never talk of either of them again. I have already given all necessary orders in London, and all I have to do here is to send back all wedding presents. I will do that to-night.”

  He looked at her a moment as she stood there with hands that trembled and eyes that were dim, pitying him to the bottom of her kind, loving soul, but imploring him, so he felt, not to be like this. And the pity reached and touched him, though the entreaty did not.

  “Poor mother,” he said. “I am sorry for you, indeed I am that. We have not kissed yet, or shaken hands.”

  But Mrs. Home, gentle and loving and pitiful as she was, could not do quite as he asked, though her hands and her lips yearned for him.

  “No, Philip,” she said; “but with whom do I shake hands, and whom do I kiss? You, the Philip who is my son, or the man who has said this? Indeed, dear, I know you well, and it is not you who have spoken.”

  He looked at her steadily.

  “Yes, it is I who have spoken,” he said. “This is now your son, the man who has said these things. Do you cast me off, too?”

  Unfair, unjust as the words were, she felt no pang of resentment with him, telling herself that he was not himself. And, whatever he was, her relationship to him, she knew, could never be altered. If he was lying in the condemned cell for some brutal murder, whatever he had done or been could never make any difference to that. He knew that, too, his best self knew it, and it was to his best self she spoke.

  “You know I can never cast you off,” she said, “and those were wild words but they are unsaid. Here is my hand, my darling, and here are my lips. You want me also never to say any more about it. I will not; but I must say this about you — that you will not always feel like this. I know you will not. And when the change comes, tell me. You cannot take that belief away from me.”

  He kissed her, holding both her hands in his, but his face did not relax.

  “Poor mother!” he said again.

  They walked back towards the house together, down the grassy walk between the yew hedges, where Mrs. Home had first heard his footstep, and Philip, according to contract, began at once to speak of other things. Dismal though this was, it was still perhaps better than silence; whatever had happened, the present was with them, and the present had to be lived through; ordinary human intercourse had got to be continued. Whether in the immediate future he would go abroad, and try by the conventional prescription of travelling to find, if not relief, at any rate the sense of unreality that travelling and change sometimes give, he had not yet determined, though the idea had occurred to him. He was still really incapable of making plans at all, he could not yet face the future, but, so far as he had considered it, he was not disposed to think that he would try it. For idleness to a man accustomed to lead a very busy life, a life, too, which every day demands concentration of thought and decisiveness of action, is in itself irksome, even though the panorama of foreign lands and skies is drawn by before him. To such a mind, even when it is at peace with itself, a holiday is generally only a means of recuperation, and the recuperation effected, such a man frets to be at work again, and to him now, with this dreadful background always with him, the idea of travel appealed very little. He would be better, so he thought, back at work, and the harder and more continuously he worked, the less intolerable, perhaps, would be the burden which he carried about with him. Truly, we make our own heaven and hell, and since the kingdom of God is within us, so also within us are the flames of the nethermost pit.

  But in those three minutes as they went back again to the house, Mrs. Home made her resolve. Whatever it cost her, and however difficult each minute might be, however much she might long herself to go and weep, or better still, to weep with him, she would do her very best to act as he had wished, and never in thought or word dwell on the past. A tragedy had happened; but it was necessary to go on, to begin life again, not to sit and bewail; nothing was ever cured, so she told herself, by thinking of what might have been avoided, if things had been different. But things were this way and not otherwise, and that which had not been avoided had already become part of the imperishable past, the hours of which are, indeed, reckoned up, but do not perish, since it is of them that the present is made.

  She left him after this to go round the garden; he had already sent for the head-gardener, who was waiting as bidden at the front door, in some trepidation of mind. Mrs. Home hated to have to scold and find fault, she hated also that Philip should do it, and she went indoors i
nstead of accompanying him. There was no sweeter and kinder soul in this world than she, and even now, when her heart bled for her son, no vindictiveness or desire for revenge on those who had made him suffer so had place in her mind. But forgiveness could not be there yet, and it was the most she could do to resolve not to think about either Madge or Evelyn. Philip’s sorrow and what faint consolation or palliation she could bring to that was enough to fill her thoughts; the authors of his sorrow she wished as far as was humanly possible to root out from her mind altogether. Resentment would do no good to anybody and only hurt herself, and since she knew that she could not wholly forgive, since there was no sign of sorrow or regret on their parts, the best thing she could cultivate in their regard was oblivion.

  She went, therefore, first to the smoking-room, where there hung the little water-colour sketch that Evelyn had once made of her; a photograph of him also stood there, and this she took with her also. The frames were her own, but she took the pictures out of each. Then, going to her bedroom, she unlocked her jewel-case and took from it the pearl brooch he had given her. No anger was in her mind; and even as she handled those dear and familiar things, she detached it from what she was doing. Then making a packet of them, she sealed and directed it to him. There was no need that any word of hers should go with it; indeed, there was no word she could say to him.

  But though she had resolved not to think about either of them, that was one of those resolutions which in the very nature of things cannot be kept, and afterwards when this business of returning his gifts was over, and she sat down with her piece of needlework, she could not keep her mind off them. But now, so far from vindictiveness being there, it was rather pity, pity deep and sincere, that filled it. Terrible though the practical result had been, bitter and deadly as was the blow dealt at the man whom she loved better than anyone else in the world, what other course had been open? Madge and Evelyn had found they loved each other, and that being so, how infinitely more wretched must any attempt to disregard or stifle that have proved! The thought of the girl as Philip’s wife secretly loving another was a situation which she knew well was far more terrible than this, far more rotten, far more insecure. There the foundation of their lives would be founded on a lie, their house would be built over a volcano which might break out and overwhelm with fire and burning the fabric that was reared upon it. At the best, what happiness could there be in it, and how could it be a home in any true sense? And since they two loved, what essential good was served by their waiting to join themselves together? Convention certainly would be shocked at the suddenness of it all, but Mrs. Home found as she thought about it that she, personally, was not. For what was Madge to do? Go home and continue to live with her mother? She herself knew Lady Ellington fairly well, and she knew that no girl could possibly stand it.

  So her resolve not to think about them at all had ended in this, that she thought about them with only pity for what in the inscrutable decrees of God had, so to speak, been forced on them. That necessity she deplored with all her heart, for it was pierced as it had never been pierced before with sorrow for her son, but even in these early hours of her knowledge of the tragedy, she could not blame them. Then, half-ashamed of her infirmity of purpose, she went quietly to the post-box, and took out the package she had just done up, and instead of sending it, locked it up.

  She did not see Philip again till dinner-time, and then this ghastly game of make-believe that nothing was wrong began again. She saw well what he felt, that as no words could possibly ameliorate the situation, it was best that no words should pass concerning it, and she guessed also with a woman’s intuition that drops unerringly on to the right place, even as a bird drops on to a twig, that any expression of pity or sympathy were, above all, what he could not stand. He could bear no hand, however gentle, to touch the wound, but winced at even the thought of it. So they spoke just of all those things except one, which they would naturally have spoken about, and they said the same things on such subjects as they would naturally have said. The drought, the Japanese war, the irritating particles of dust from wood-pavements, all the topics of the day were there, and there were no silences, not even any racking of the brain on the part of either to think what should be said next. That dreadful mechanical engine of habit was in full work, and just as Philip would have maintained normality though the City was in a depressed and depressing state, and just as Mrs. Home would have been quite herself to her guests though some below-stairs crisis was most critical between domestics, so now when the crisis was such that nothing could have touched her more keenly, it was easy, but dismal, to maintain the ordinary forms of life. Servants certainly, that relentless barometer of local disturbances, saw nothing that night which indicated trouble; no storm-cone was hoisted, the gardeners, too, had come off lightly, and Mr. Philip was pronounced to be at the utmost “rather silent about next week’s occurrences.” That was the phrase of “the room,” which crystallised any vague or fluid speech that might find utterance. “Just a little silent” — so well the prime actors in the dining-room played their parts.

  Yet yearning was on one side, the yearning of the mother for the break-down — for it was that it amounted to — of the son, and on the son’s side was a harshness which the mother could not yet believe existed. But his implacable speeches had been soberly and literally true, and the strength of his hate was proportionate to what the strength of his love had been. There was no denying the genuineness of that dreadful alchemy; love in a hard nature indeed may undergo that terrible transformation, whereas liking can scarcely be transmuted into anything more deadly than dislike, while it is most hard of all for mere indifference to struggle into the ranks of the more potent lords of the human soul. It is a matter of indifference or at most of reprisal, what are the doings of those who are indifferent to one. Action for damages may ensue, but hate still slumbers in its cave. But it is when those whom a man loves hurt him that the hurt festers and spreads poison through the soul. Indeed, it is only those whom such a man loves who have power to hurt him at all.

  After dinner, too, the daily round was continued in all its dismal unreality. Philip even asked, an old and quite uninteresting joke, whether he might smoke in the drawing-room, and on Mrs. Home’s saying “No!” threatened to go to the stables. It was never a good joke, or, indeed, anything approaching it, but to-night it came near to move tears on the poor lady’s part, for it was like speaking of the odd little ways of some loved one who is dead. Then, again, in the drawing-room the table for cards was placed out, with decorous wax candles burning at the corners, and Mrs. Home sat in her usual seat, and as usual Philip drew a chair sideways near her, so that he could watch without seeming to watch. And his mother announced Miss Milligan, with the usual futile determination not to cheat. So in silence Miss Milligan pursued her abhorred way; and during that silence the tears, the break-down inevitable for all her brave resolves, came close to the surface. Mrs. Home already could not speak, she had to clench her teeth to prevent the sobs coming. Then at last there came a hitch, she cheated, and Philip saw it.

  “Black nine,” he said; “not red nine.”

  Mrs. Home’s hands were already trembling, and at this they failed, and the cards were scattered over the table.

  “Oh, Philip!” she cried, “I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it. Oh, my darling! put your head on my lap as you used to do when you were a little boy and in trouble, and let me see if I cannot comfort you.”

  She looked up at him with tear-dimmed eyes, and not till then did she fully know how deep the iron had gone. Not a sign of relenting or softening was there. He got up and spoke in a perfectly hard, dry voice.

  “Not one atom can you comfort me,” he said. “We have both to bear what has to be borne, and as I have said, it is better to bear in silence. I think now I had better go; I have those matters to arrange to-night which I spoke to you of. Perhaps you would tell the servants that — that everything will go on just as usual here.”

  Mrs. Home sa
w the hopelessness of further appeal just now.

  “Yes, dear, go and do what you have to,” she said. “I will tell them. Will you come back to read prayers, Philip?”

  “No,” said he.

  Then he bent and kissed her, and as he held her hands the first faint sign in the trembling of his lip showed that for her, at any rate, he was not all adamant.

  “I am not sorry for myself,” he said, “but I am sorry for you, dear mother, that you cannot possibly help me. Breakfast as usual to-morrow? Good night.”

  THIRTEENTH

  BY Monday morning when he returned to town, Philip had quite made up his mind that all thought of travel by way of distraction was futile, and had determined to find in work, the hardest and most continuous, a succession of hours of forgetfulness, so far as he could secure it, of this blow that had fallen on him. Forgetfulness itself, he knew well he could not hope to secure, but by hard application of the brain to work, he hoped that for this hour and for that he would be able to put that which had so stricken and embittered him on a second and more remote plane of consciousness. True, at any relaxation, at any interval in which his brain was not actively employed, it would start out again like the writing on the wall; but for the working hours of the day, and these he determined should be long and fully filled, he believed he could to some extent crush the other out of his consciousness. In work, at any rate, he believed his best chance lay, and the attempt, though perhaps desperate, was one which none but a strong man could have made.

  He occupied at present while in London a flat in Jermyn Street, modest in dimensions, but containing all he wanted. There was a spare room there which his mother always used on her rather rare visits to town, but otherwise it held only the necessary accommodation for two servants and himself. He had already given his landlord notice that he was going to quit, but to-day he went to the estate office to ask if he could renew his tenancy since his bachelor days were not yet over. All this was horribly uncomfortable; he felt that the clerk in the office knew what had happened, and would, after his departure, talk it and him over with the other clerks, and though their criticism and comments could not possibly matter to him, he felt that some deformity, some malformation or scar of his own body was being publicly shown the world, and he hated the world for looking at it. Then also he had to say that he should not require the house for which he was in contract in Berkeley Square, to complete which nothing really remained except the signing of the lease. It was all a business so unexpectedly disagreeable that he wished he had conducted it by letter.