Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Two threads indeed ran through them all: they were doubly strong, for it was in Venice last autumn that she and Claude had passed three weeks of honeymoon and with the glory of the place was mingled the glory of her lover. It was that perhaps that gave to details and such sights and sounds as were not remarkable in themselves their ineffaceable character. It was because she and Claude had wandered, pleased to find themselves momentarily lost, in the high-eaved labyrinths of narrow streets, that the dingy little interiors, the trattorias with their smell of spilt wine, and their vine-leaf-stoppered bottles, their sharp savour of cooking and sawdust-sprinkled floors were things apart from anything that could be seen or perceived in any other town in the world. A spire of valerian sprouted from mouldering brickwork, the reflection of a marble lion’s head on snow-white cornice quivered in the gray-green water below, little sideway-scuttling crabs bustled over the gray mud of the lagoons, bent on private and oblique errands of their own, seagulls hovered at the edge of the retiring water; gray-stemmed pali with black heads leaned together, marking the devious course of deep-dug channels; there came a cry of “Stali” and a gondola with high-arching neck (some beautiful black swan) shot out of a canal by the bridge where they lingered, and these sights and sounds, trivial in themselves, were stamped in her mind with the royal mint-mark that belonged to those weeks when she and Claude were in Venice after their marriage. Her emotion had streamed from her, soaking them with it: they were part of Venice, part of herself, and so wholly hers.

  Some seal had been set on those things then that could never be melted out. It was Claude who had set it there, and he had so imprinted that seal upon Venice that to her now all that was Venice had the memory of her honeymoon upon it like a hallmark on silver. That time had been a score of divine days, luminous with the southern sun, warm with stillness or clement wind, and yet made vigorous with the youth and freshness of the immortal sea. And here, six months afterward, she had returned with Claude to spend a month of late May and early June before the weeks of London. In the autumn she had come home under the enchantment and by way of a neat Christmas present Mr. Osborne had prospectively given her the rent, the journey, the expenses of food and wine, the servants and their journeys and their wages of a month, “or call it five weeks, my dear, and you won’t find me pulling you up short,” he had said, “of that house on the Grand Canal that took your fancy, Palazzo — but there, I’ve no head for foreign names. You leave London, you do, with your maid and your cook, and your housemaid and what not, and don’t forget Claude, hey? or he’ll be quarrelling with you, and me taking his side too, though its only my fun. And you take a few English servants with you, as you can fall back upon, and you send me in a bill for all the tickets and the wages, and your living bills, and your gondolas, and that’s my Christmas present to you. Don’t you bother, but make yourself comfortable. You go as you please, as we used to say, for a month, or call it five weeks, and enjoy yourself, and let me know how much it’s all stood you in. I shouldn’t wonder if Mrs. O. and I didn’t come and join you, oh, not to make you uncomfortable, no fear, but to take another piazza, ah, palazzo you call it, and have a look at the Italians, and see what’s to be seen.”

  Dora had an excellent aural memory, and as she sat at her window to-day, watching the flickering reflection in the water of the sunstruck houses opposite, she could almost hear Mr. Osborne’s voice saying these hospitable and free-handed things. But they did not get between her and her memory of the weeks in October. She was aware that during the last six months she had seen things differently to the way in which they were presented to her during those weeks, but it was not Venice that had altered. It was still Venice “as per last October,” as her father-in-law might have said.

  They had rowed out to Malamocco one day, and another they had gone to Torcello, the ancient mother of Venice, and she had found there a sort of tenderness for the earlier and now ruined and fevered town, just as —— just as she found a tenderness for her husband’s mother. Torcello was the beginning of the magic, from Torcello the creation of what she so loved had come. On another day they had taken dinner out on to the great lagoon, had tied up to a clump of hoary gray-headed Pali, notching the ferro of their gondola into the disc of the setting sun. Then some tide had slowly swung them a little sideways, so that they still faced toward the brightness of the West, long after the sun had gone, and the glory of its departing had been infused into and flooded the heavens. A great cumulus cloud reared itself out of the western horizon, in tower and pinnacle of ineffable rose, with transparent aqueous blue dwelling in the folds of it and at the base of it lay the campaniles and roofs of Venice. And Claude had been beside her, he whose beauty intoxicated her, so that she interpreted all he said or did through the medium of that. He had often yawned at things that engrossed her, he had often felt that long lingering before certain pictures was tedious, but his reason for it had ever been the same, and the reason was an intoxicating one. Then pictures and campaniles absorbed her, and in consequence he, so he complained, got the less of her. “Put me down in Clapham Junction,” he had said once, “and if I find you there I shan’t ask for Venice. Tintoret. Yes, No. 20 is by Tintoret. How did you guess? I see no label on the frame: they should have them all labelled. What a handsome frame!”

  On another day, the only one on which the halcyon weather had played them a trick, they had gone out in the morning to Burano, rowing at full tide over the shadows and water of oily calm, with above them a sky that was turquoise, but for a few pale combed wisps of cloud. Northward it had been very clear, and the white range of snow mountains so sharp cut that it seemed that even on an autumn day they could row across and ascend those cliffs of white. Then — Claude had noticed it first — a great tattered edge of gray vapour streamed southward off the Alps, and spread with the swiftness of spilt water along the floor, in pool and promontory of vapour over the northern heavens. He and she had been talking Italian in ridiculous fashion to their head gondolier, and now Claude pointed dramatically northward and said, “Curioso cloudo.” On which all the gaiety and laziness of that child of the south vanished, and he and his poppe put the boat about and rowed top speed for Venice. They had come in expectation of fine weather, with no felse, but before they were halfway home a squall of prodigious wind and blinding rain struck them, and for an hour she and Claude nestled close beneath one mackintosh, hearing the squeal of the wind, the buffet of the rain, and by degrees the gradual rising of waves. They made a bolt for it across the last open water between San Michele and Venice, narrowly escaping being swamped.

  Somehow to Dora now, that seemed the best of all the days. The gondola was three inches deep in savage spray-blown water. She knew there was danger of some sort abroad, when they had already started, and had gone too far in the maniac wind that descended on them to get back, but crouching beneath the one mackintosh with Claude, with the rain streaming in from a hundred points, and with the danger of capsize imminent, she found a glory and triumph in the moment, which, indeed, was independent, or almost so, of Venice, and was pure Claude. He had lit a cigarette, after succeeding in striking a match with infinite trouble, saying, “Now for the last smoke this side the grave,” and Dora found a sublimity of sangfroid in this remark. But at that time all he said or did was golden: he gilded all things for her.

  In those days she was incapable of criticism with regard to anything that concerned him, for to her, lover of beauty as she was, his beauty, which now was a possession of hers, was a thing of dazzling and blinding quality.

  It blinded her still, but it must be supposed that the enthrallment of it was quite absolute no longer, since now, at any rate, she knew it was that which had taken the very command and control of herself out of her hands. She was in love with him, that was perfectly true, but it was with his beauty (an inextricable part of him) that she was in love. And now, to-day, as she leaned out of her window over the summer stillness, she found that she was beginning to be able to look undazzled at him, to see
the qualities and nature of her husband as they were themselves, not as they had appeared to her in the early months of her marriage, when she could not see him at all except through the enchanted haze which surrounded him. Before she married him she had been able to do as she did to-day, to know that at times something (trivial it always was, as when he spoke of some woman as a “handsome lady”) made her check suddenly. But when they were married, when he and his wonderful beauty were hers, and she was his, that power of criticism had altogether left her, and it was only with a sort of incredulous wonder that she could remember that she had ever been capable of it. To-day, now that he was absent, for she had not seen him for over twenty-four hours, she for the first time consciously registered the fact that the power of judgment and criticism as regards him had come back to her.

  Dora drew herself in from her leaning out of the window, and settled herself in a chair. This discovery rather startled her. Insignificant as it might sound, if she had described it to May Franklin or some other friend, it seemed to herself to be indicative of some essential and radical change in her relation to her husband. And it concerned itself not with the present only and with the future, but reached back into the past, so that a hundred little scenes and memories bore a different aspect to her now from that which they had hitherto borne. It had been enchanting to her, for instance, that he had said he would as soon be at Clapham Junction as at Venice, provided she was with him. At the time she had only thrilled with ecstatic wonder that she could be so much to him: now she made the comment that he did not really care for Venice. That was a pity; it was a defect in him, that he was indifferent to the exquisite beauties with which he was surrounded. She had not seen that before. It made him, so to speak, have no part in her Venice, which, strangely enough, he had created for her. It was as if a father disowned, did not recognize his own child.

  Dora had no desire to pursue this train of thought, for there was something vaguely uncomfortable at the back of it at which she did not wish to look closer. So she mentally brushed it aside, and, a thing that was a daily if not an hourly habit of hers, took her mind back to the first days in which they had been together, and let it float her slowly down the enchanted weeks that had followed till it landed her at the present day again. Such retrospect had, indeed, passed out of the range of voluntary thought: it was like the pillow on which her mind, when at rest, instinctively reposed itself. After Venice they had wandered a week or two longer in North Italy, until toward the end of October a foretaste of winter caught them on the Italian lakes, and they had started for home, arriving there at the beginning of November. They had but passed through London, spending a couple of days at Claude’s little flat in Mount Street, and had then gone down to Grote for the first big pheasant shoot of the year. She found both her mother and Austell there.

  Dora was essentially appreciative of all the delightful things in life which can only be obtained by abundant money, and hitherto very few of these had been within her reach. True, she was sensible enough to enjoy pictures that were not hers, to look at beautiful things exposed for the public in museums and art collections; but she did not belong to that slightly unreal class of enthusiasts who say that as long as they are able to see fine pictures and fine statues they get from them all the pleasure which such things are capable of giving. Nor again was she deficient in her appreciation of comfort, and she knew that it was infinitely nicer to telephone from the flat at Mount Street, as they had done on the two evenings they were there, and get a box at the theatre, than getting seats at the back of the dress circle, or, if times were exceptionally bad, having an egg with her tea and taking her humble place in the queue for the pit. She was humorist enough and of a sufficiently observant type to find entertainment of a kind while waiting in the queue, but it seemed to her insincere to say that you preferred going to a theatre in such mode. Similarly, though you had such a beautiful view and got so much air on the top of a motor bus that such a mode of progression along the London streets was quite enjoyable, it was really far more enjoyable to have your own motor, though your outlook was not from so elevated a perch and there was probably not quite so much air. And she was perfectly aware that she took the keenest pleasure in all the ease and comfort with which she had been surrounded since her engagement. Pierre Loti, as she had once quoted to May Franklin, had said that it was exquisite to be poor, but for herself she found it (having had long experience of poverty) much more exquisite to be rich. But there were things about that shooting week, in spite of her newly awakened love and her newly found opulence, which was in such resounding evidence there, which gave her bad moments: moments when she was between bitterness and laughter, nearer perhaps to laughter than the other, but to laughter in which bitterness would have found the reflection, at any rate, of itself.

  A rather ponderous plan, evolved by the geniality and kindness of her father-in-law, underlay that week. He had been in London for the inside of one of the days that she and Claude had stopped in town after their return from Venice, en route for Grote, and had lunched with her. Claude had been out: Uncle Alf had sent for him — rather peremptorily, so it seemed to Dora — to come down to Richmond, and since Uncle Alf was purseholder for them both, and had intimated that he wished to see him on matters connected with the purse, the invitation had the authority of a command. Consequently she and Mr. Osborne lunched alone.

  “And you look rarely, my dear,” her father-in-law had said, giving her a loud smacking kiss. “Claude seems to agree with you, bless his heart and yours, for there is nothing like being married, is there, when all’s said and done, provided you find him as your heart points out to you? And you’ll give old Dad a bit of lunch, and leave to smoke his cigar with you afterward, and tell him about Venice. My dear, I’ve looked forward to your return with that boy of mine, so as never was, and I’m blessed if I don’t believe Mrs. O. wouldn’t be jealous of you if it wasn’t that you were his wife. But she thinks nought’s too good for Claude, even if it’s you. She says I run on about you like a clock that won’t stop striking! and I dare say she’s in the right of it.”

  It was not very easy to “tell” Mr. Osborne about Venice, because it was hard to think of any common ground on which he and Venice might conceivably meet and appreciate each other, but the description seemed to satisfy him, for it was largely “Claude and I.” And what satisfied him even more was the evident happiness of the girl: she was in love with life, with love and with Claude and with beautiful things. Claude he had given her, beautiful things he could give her, and he asked if it was possible to pick up a Tintoret or two. Then came the plan, unfolded to her with almost boisterous enjoyment.

  “Mrs. O. and I have put our heads together,” he said, “and I’m her ambassador, accredited, don’t they say? by her, and with authority to put propositions before you. Well, it’s just this: when that dear boy and you come down to Grote to-morrow, we want you to be master and mistress of the house, and Mrs. O. and me and Per and all the rest of them to be your guests. It’ll be for you to say what time we breakfast, and to see cook, and Claude will arrange the shoots, and give us a glass of wine after dinner if he thinks it won’t hurt us, and it’ll be found it won’t, if he sticks to the cellar as I’ve laid down for myself and of which I’ll give him the key. It’ll give you a sort of lesson, like, my dear, as to how to make your guests comfortable, as I’ll be bound you will.”

  It required no gifts of perception whatever to be able to appreciate the kindness and affection of that speech, and Dora did them full justice. At the same time she could not help being conscious of many little jerks. She remembered also the party there had been at Grote shortly after her engagement, wondered if the same sort of gathering would be assembling again, and tried to think of herself as hostess to Mrs. Price, Lady Ewart, and Mrs. Per. They were really very terrible people, and on this occasion of her home-coming with Claude it was beyond all question that the badinage would be of the most superlative order. She remembered with fatal distinctness how
her mother-in-law had alluded to Mrs. Per, before Dora met her, as very superior, and it seemed to her that no long and conscientious analysis of character could have arrived at a report so definitely and completely true as was the verdict conveyed by those two words. Yet she had married Claude, she loved Claude: to accept the burden of this honour was clearly one of the obligations entailed upon her, for it was Mr. Osborne’s wish, his very kindly wish, backed and originated by his wife, and there was no shadow of excuse to shelter under for declining it. So her pause before replying was not greater than could be well filled by the smile with which she greeted the proposal.