Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Ah, poor darling!” said Maud once, as his struggles grew less.

  And the voice answered her.

  “Yes, that’s just how I often feel,” it said.

  A minute or two more passed.

  “Isn’t your gillie here yet?” she asked.

  “Yes, he came ten minutes ago. Shall I gaff him for you, or shall he?”

  “Who is he?” asked Maud.

  “It’s Duncan Fraser, my lady,” said another voice.

  “Oh, then, Duncan, please,” she said. “Is that rude of me? I am so sorry. But, you see, I know Duncan: he has often gaffed fish for me. Get further down, Duncan, and lie down — get below him; don’t let him see you.”

  But there were several agitating moments yet. Each time the fish drifted with the stream she towed him a little nearer to the bank; but though he was very weak now and his protests feeble, he was still capable of momentary violences. But at last he was a mere log, floating with fin out of the water and broad silvery side shining. With a swift, crafty movement, Duncan had him on the bank.

  Maud laid down her rod and turned away.

  “Kill him quick, Duncan,” she said. “Is it done?” Then, with fine inconsistence: “Oh, what a darling!” she cried. “Quite fresh from the sea, too!”

  Then for the first time Maud turned to look at the owner of the voice, and found a tall, pleasant-looking young man smiling at her.

  “I am really extremely obliged to you,” she said. “I don’t see how I could have landed him without your gaff. There is nowhere in the pool where you can tail a fish.”

  He laughed at this.

  “Why, I think that is so,” he said. “But I am much more your debtor. I’ve never seen a fish so beautifully handled. Look at your tackle, too! Well, I never!”

  “Oh, I know the water,” she said, “and that makes so much difference, though I couldn’t explain how.”

  Then suddenly the conjunction of a total stranger — American, too, so she could hear — with a rod on her brother’s river, in company with one of her brother’s gillies, struck her as odd.

  “I am afraid my fish and I have detained you very long,” she said. “You are fishing at Scarsdale, I suppose.”

  “No, I am fishing here,” he said. “At least, I shall walk down a mile or two, and try the lower pools.”

  This was more solidly incomprehensible. Yet the man did not look in the least like a poacher or trespasser. And how did it come about that Duncan was with him? Maud grew just a shade dignified, though she was still quite cordial.

  “I’m sure you will excuse me,” she said; “but, you know, this is my brother’s river, Lord Thurso’s.”

  Again the stranger laughed with sincere and quiet merriment.

  “Oh yes, I know,” he said. “But, you see, he has been kind enough to let the fishing to me until the end of July.”

  Maud stood quite silent a moment. A situation so horrible was dawning on her that she was unable to speak. What had he said? That Thurso had let him the fishing? Then, what was she? A poacher, caught red-handed by the tenant himself.

  “What?” she said. “Say it again.”

  The stranger took off his hat.

  “May I introduce myself?” he said. “I am Mr. Bertie Cochrane. Excuse me; I really can’t help laughing. Why, it’s just killing!”

  Maud, already flushed with excitement and exercise, grew perfectly crimson.

  “Oh, what am I to do?” she said. “It is too awful! How can you laugh? I can never forgive myself.”

  She raised her eyes to his again, and saw there such genuine, kindly amusement that, in spite of her horror, she laughed too.

  “Oh, don’t make me laugh,” she said. “It is too dreadful. Poaching! I thought it was you who were going to poach, and it’s been me!”

  “Yes, it’s serious,” he said; “and it’s for me to make conditions.”

  Maud had one moment’s fleeting terror that he was going to make an ass of himself, as she phrased it: ask to kiss her hand or do something dreadful. But he did not look that kind of donkey.

  “Oh, my conditions are not difficult,” he said. “I only insist on your not cutting short your day’s fishing.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “I couldn’t fish any more. Thank you very much, but I really think I couldn’t.”

  “I think you should make an effort. You must consider me as insisting. You won’t get in my way, nor I in yours. I meant to go a couple of miles down — I did indeed.”

  The situation which five minutes ago was so appalling had quite lost its horror; it was no longer unfaceable. Had Maud been told that morning that in the inscrutable decrees of Fate she was going to be caught poaching before lunch, she would have wished the earth to open and swallow her sooner than that anything so unspeakable should happen to her, while even two minutes ago there was nothing in life so impossible as that she should continue her career of poaching. But her captor was so unaffectedly friendly, his amusement, also, at her horror and the cause of it so sincerely kind, that she was no longer horrified.

  “Really, Mr. Cochrane, it is too good of you,” she said. “But you must first put me at my ease about one thing. You do know — don’t you? — how dreadfully sorry I am, and that I hadn’t the very slightest idea that Thurso had let the fishing. Oh, by the way, I really am Lady Maud Raynham.”

  “Why, yes,” he said, and paused. “Then it’s all settled.”

  The whole situation had gone, vanished, before his perfect simplicity and kindliness, and she smiled back at him.

  “Thank you very much,” she said. “I shall love to have this day on the river.”

  “And Duncan?” he said. “Pray keep him if you wish; otherwise I shall send him home. His wife is ill of this — this typhoid.”

  “Oh no; please let him go home, then,” said Maud.

  Then Cochrane turned to the gillie.

  “Get along home with you, Duncan,” he said, “and be sure — tell yourself — that you will find the wife still improving. I think you’ll find she’s been getting better all morning. But if you give her any of that medicine you will be just helping her — helping her, mind — to get worse again. You understand? If you find when you get home she is worse, give it her by all means. But you won’t find that: you will find she is better. Yes, gaff, landing-net, lunch — I’ve got them all, thanks. So off with you, and let your heart go singing. God’s looking after her this morning, as He always did. She’s going to get quite well. Don’t lose sight of that, and don’t let her lose sight of it either.”

  He had apparently quite forgotten about Maud as he spoke, and had turned a side face to her as he talked to the gillie. And though, during this little speech, all the kindliness and merriment that had twinkled in his eyes and twitched in his mouth when “the situation” had been unfolded between Maud and himself was still there, yet there shone through it now some vital and intense seriousness. He had laid his hand on the rough homespun of Duncan’s shoulder, and spoke with a quiet and convinced air of authority. Then he nodded dismissal to him, and turned to Maud again, while Duncan trudged off down the riverbank.

  “I’m so sorry for you and Lord Thurso,” he said, “and I think it’s downright good of you to have come up here, right in the middle of the season, just because your folk were ill. It’s real kind of you.”

  Then suddenly his eye fell on the silver-mailed fish that still lay on the bank.

  “Hi, Duncan!” he called out after the retreating figure, “take her ladyship’s fish up to the house.”

  Duncan came back, and with difficulty folded the big fish into his bag, and shouldered it. But he paused a moment before he went again, looking at Cochrane with doglike eyes that, though they trust, yet beseech.

  “But the wife is better, sir?” he asked.

  “Ever so much. You are beginning to know that as well as I do. Now, off with you, for you’ve got to look after the baby, as she thinks she can’t. Make it happy. Give it a real good time, and le
t it pull that great beard of yours.”

  He watched Duncan tramp away again with his heavy, peasant-footed tread down the bank.

  “Dear blind soul,” he said, half to himself. “But it’s getting near dawn with his night.”

  Maud was already “arrested” with regard to her companion — she paid, that is to say, a good deal more attention to him than she paid to nine-tenths of casual strangers with whom she was, as now, accidentally brought into somewhat intimate contact. He had the arresting quality, whatever that is, which compels attention. It may be called animal magnetism, or vitality of a superior kind, but it has nothing to do with love or hate, like or dislike, though it may coexist, and often does, with any of these. It had not, for instance, even occurred to her to wonder whether she liked or disliked him, or was utterly indifferent to him; she only knew that he had the arresting quality. In manner he was very quiet, rather boyish, quite well-bred, and rather good-looking, and in none of these respects was he different from the casual crowd. But there was, and she knew it, something that distinguished him from all men and women that she had ever seen, and this pause of a second or two, as Duncan took up the fish, was sufficient for her to determine in what the distinction lay. And it was this: he was so happy. Happiness of a sort she had never yet seen surrounded him like an atmosphere of his own, which it was given to others to breathe. She herself had breathed it — it radiated from him. Hundreds of people were happy — thank God, that is a very common gift — but the happiness that she now encountered was on a different plane. It was happiness distilled, sublimated. He seemed normally to dwell on the heights to which others in fine moments can attain. He seemed happy in the way that some extraordinary good news makes others happy for a moment or two, or an hour or two. Yet this was no retrospective happiness, the happiness of vivid memory: it was his normally; it gushed from him as from some unquenchable spring.

  This impression was made, as all strong impressions are made, in a moment, and there was no pause between his parting speech to Duncan, the fish-laden, and her taking up again the casual thread of talk. Yet was the thread a casual one? For his last words to Duncan seemed to come from the very heart and soul of the man, from the spring of his happiness.

  “Do tell me,” she said, “why did you say to Duncan that his wife only thought she was ill?”

  The convinced happiness of his brown eyes looked at her a moment before he answered.

  “Doesn’t it come somewhere in Shakespeare?” he said. “‘There’s nothing but thinking makes it so?’ Or words to the same purpose?”

  “Yes, but if we take that literally,” said Maud, “we must conclude that if she could only think she was well, poor soul, she would be. It is hard to think that when you happen to have typhoid.”

  The brown eyes grew graver, but their happiness, as well as their gravity, seemed to deepen.

  “Certainly, it is hard,” he said. “Indeed, it is impossible, unless you can think right. But when you can do that, all the rest follows.”

  Maud suddenly felt slightly antagonistic to him. She remembered the few words she had had with Thurso last night about people who say they are always well, because they think they are, and his conclusion that they must be fools. She had tacitly agreed with him then, and was a little vexed with Mr. Cochrane because, honestly, he did not seem to be a fool.

  “Have you ever had toothache?” she asked briskly.

  “Never. And if I had, I shouldn’t. Sounds nonsense, doesn’t it? But it just expresses the truth.”

  Then the name she had been unable to remember last night came back to her.

  “Ah, you are a Christian Scientist!” she said. “You think all pain and illness is unreal.”

  He laughed.

  “I know it,” he said. “Now, I am sure you want to get on with your fishing. So there’s your rod, and please keep this gaff. You are far more likely to hook another salmon in these upper pools than I am down below.”

  He had changed the subject with such undisguised abruptness that she could not help remarking on it. Yet, sudden as it had been, there was no hint of ill-breeding or rudeness about it. He merely spoke quite courteously of something else.

  “Do you always change the subject as quickly as that?” she asked, smiling.

  “Always, if I think I may be led into a discussion about Christian Science with strangers, who —— Pray don’t think me rude, Lady Maud, but one can’t talk about the subject which means more to one than the whole world with people who ask questions about it out of a sort of — well, derisive curiosity. Also, I don’t proselytise. I think there are better ways of making the truth known.”

  The words were extremely direct, but again no hint of rudeness or want of courtesy was ever so faintly suggested, and though Maud still felt antagonistic, she knew that the most sensitive person in the world could not have found offence in them, so perfectly friendly and good-natured was his tone. He made this very plain statement without the least touch of resentment himself or fear of arousing it. And she, generous and fair-minded herself, gave in at once.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said. “You are quite right. There was a touch, though really not more, of what you so justly call derisive curiosity in my mind. I had no business either to feel or show it. But may I ask you a question with that touch left out — honestly left out?”

  “Why, of course — a hundred,” said he.

  “Then, why don’t you proselytise?” she asked. “As you are convinced of the truth of your doctrine, isn’t it your duty to spread it?”

  Cochrane let his eyes wander from her face over the hillside, fragrant with heather and murmurous with bees. Then they looked at her again, and for the first time she saw that they were different from any eyes she had ever seen in the face of man or woman, for they were unmistakably a child’s eyes, full of a child’s disarming frankness, and almost terrible honesty.

  “You can spread a thing in many ways,” he said. “But preaching was not the primary way He chose. ‘He went about doing good.’”

  Maud felt herself suddenly seized with that shyness which is instinctive to most Anglo-Saxons when “religion” puts in its appearance in conversation, and she was suddenly tongue-tied. With many people, no doubt, reticence on religious subjects is due to the fact that, since they have no religion, there is nothing for them to talk about. But it was not so with her. Religion formed a very vital and essential part of her life, but it was not a thing to be publicly trotted out like this. So, since the subject had so unexpectedly and profoundly deepened with this last remark, it was she who rather precipitately changed it now.

  “I see,” she said. “But please don’t leave me the gaff. I should immensely like, since you are so kind, to try for another sea-trout or two, but having poached one salmon without your leave, I couldn’t contemplate poaching another, even with it. So if I hook another he shall break me, and so I shall present your river with a fly and a cast by way of amende.”

  Maud felt vexed and annoyed with herself. She was not managing well; she thought she must be giving a quite false impression by chattering this stupid nonsense in order to get away from the subject of religion. But then a rather more natural topic suggested itself — namely, the idea of offering him hospitality, which had occurred to and been rejected by Thurso.

  “And do come and dine with us to-morrow,” she said, “and eat some of your own fish. Thurso and I would be delighted. We are just squatting in the house, you know, and eat and live in one room, and the caretaker’s wife cooks. Ah, how stupid of me! I forgot. Thurso is turning the rest of the house into a typhoid hospital, and by evening the place will be full of patients. So please say ‘No’ point-blank if you don’t like the thought. I shall quite understand.”

  Those childlike eyes looked at her in frank, unveiled admiration.

  “Why, that’s just splendid of you both,” he said; “and as for coming to dinner, I shall be delighted. We Scientists are often told we are inconsistent, but we are not quite so ba
d as to mind coming to a house where a few poor souls think they are ill. So, au revoir, Lady Maud, and many thanks.”

  Maud was a girl of great singleness of purpose, and generally, when she was out for a day’s fishing, the number of moments in which she thought about things unconnected in any way with fishing scarcely made any total at all, while any other subject that was present in her mind was there only in a very dim and distant fashion. But to-day, during the hour’s fishing which she indulged in between Mr. Cochrane’s departure and lunch, her thoughts persistently strayed from fishing, and when eventually she made herself a windless seat in the heather, overlooking the pool which she had just fished, even the brace of silvery sea-trout she had already caught, and the prospective brace or two that she promised herself before evening, occupied but a very small part of her meditations.

  Christian Science! She had indeed a “touch of derision” for that philosophy and its philosophers, though it was not worth while even to deride it. Nor was her derision founded on ignorance only, for last year Alice Yardly, a friend of hers, had joined the Church, and that had seemed to Maud a most suitable thing. For she had always thought that Alice, though a dear, was a fool, and now she knew it. Certainly, however, Mrs. Yardly did not in the least resemble Mr. Cochrane either in the matter of folly, because it was clearly impossible to think of him as a fool, or in the matter of proselytising, for Mrs. Yardly used to proselytise (with almost touching ill-success) by the hour, pouring out a perfect torrent of optimistic gabble about the nonexistence of pain and sickness, and be prostrated the moment afterwards by one of those nervous headaches to which she was subject. She would boldly, trying to nail a smile to her face, label this a “false claim” (though it was a pedantically accurate imitation of the real thing), and “demonstrate” over it, which, being interpreted, meant that she assured herself two or three million times that she could not have a nervous headache, since there was no nervous headache in Divine Love, and nothing existed except Divine Love. After that she would go to bed, and wake up next morning without any headache, and be delighted with the success of the demonstration that had banished it.