Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He lay back on the dry grass.

  “Trouble coming, trouble coming,” he said.

  “Just the storm?” she asked. “Or is this more prophecy?”

  “Oh, just the storm,” he said. “I always feel depressed and irritated before a storm.”

  “Are you depressed and irritated?” she asked. “Sorry. I thought it was such a nice, calm morning.”

  Hugh took up a book at random, which proved to be Swinburne’s “Poems and Ballads.” At random he opened it, and saw the words:

  “And though she saw all heaven in flower above, She would not love.”

  “Oh, do read,” said Nadine. “Anything: just where you opened it.”

  Hugh sat up, a bitterness welling in his throat. He read:

  “And though she saw all heaven in flower above, She would not love.”

  Nadine flushed slightly, and was annoyed with herself for flushing. She could not help knowing what must be in his mind, and tried to make a diversion.

  “I don’t think she was to be blamed,” she said. “A quantity of flowers stuck all over the sky would look very odd, and I don’t think would kindle anybody’s emotions. That sounds rather a foolish poem. Read something else.”

  Hugh shut the book.

  “‘Though all we fell on sleep, she would not weep,’ is the end of another stanza,” he said.

  Nadine looked at him for a long moment, her lips parted as if to speak, but they only quivered; no words came. There was no doubt whatever as to what Hugh meant, but still, with love unawakened, and with her tremendous egotism rampant, she saw no further than he was behaving very badly to her. He had come down here to renew the freedom and intimacy of old days: till to-day he had been silent, stupid, but when he spoke like this, silence and stupidity were better. She was sorry for him, very sorry, but the quiver of her lips half at least consisted of self-pity that he made her suffer too.

  “You mean me,” she said, speaking at length, and speaking very rapidly. “It is odious of you. You know quite well I am sorry: I have told you so. I cried: I remember I cried when you made that visit to Winston, and the cow looked at me. I daresay you are suffering damned torments, but you are being unfair. Though I don’t love you — like that, I wish I did. Do you think I make you suffer for my own amusement? Is it fun to see my best friend like that? Is it my fault? You have chosen to love this heartless person, me. If I had no liver, or no lungs, instead of no heart, you would be sorry for me. Instead you reproach me. Oh, not in words, but you meant me, when you said that. Where is the book out of which you read? There, I do that to it: I send it into the sea, and when the gulls come back they will peck it, or the sea will drown it first, and the wind which you smell will blow it to America. You don’t understand: you are more stupid than the gulls.”

  She made one swift motion with her arm, and “Poems and Ballads” flopped in the sea as the book dived clear of the cliff into the high-water sea below.

  More imminent than the storm which Hugh had prophesied was the storm in their souls. He, with his love baffled, raged at the indifference with which she had given herself to another, she, distrusting for the first time, the sense and wisdom of her gift, raged at him for his rebellion against her choice.

  “Don’t speak,” she said, “for I will tell you more things first. You are jealous of Seymour—”

  Hugh threw back his head and laughed.

  “Jealous of Seymour?” he cried. “Do you really think I would marry you if you consented in the spirit in which you are taking him? Once, it is true, I wanted to. You refused to cheat me — those were your words — and I begged you to cheat me, I implored you to cheat me, so long as you gave me yourself.

  “I didn’t care how you took me, so long as you took me. But now I wouldn’t take you like that. Now, for this last week, I have seen you and him together, and I know what it is like.”

  “You haven’t seen us together much,” said Nadine.

  “I have seen you enough: I told you before that your marriage was a farce. I was wrong. It’s much worse than a farce. You needn’t laugh at a farce. But you can’t help laughing, at least I can’t, at a tragedy so ludicrous.”

  Nadine got up. The situation was as violent and sudden as some electric storm. What had been pent-up in him all this week, had exploded: something in her exploded also.

  “I think I hate you,” she said.

  “I am sure I despise you,” said he.

  He got up also, facing her. It was like the bursting of a reservoir: the great sheet of quiet water was suddenly turned into torrents and foam.

  “I despise you,” he said again. “You intended me to love you; you encouraged me to let myself go. All the time you held yourself in, though there was nothing to hold in; you observed, you dissected. You cut down with your damned scalpels and lancets to my heart, and said, ‘How interesting to see it beating!’ Then you looked coolly over your shoulder and saw Seymour, and said, ‘He will do: he doesn’t love me and I don’t love him!’ But now he does love you, and you probably guess that. So, very soon, your lancet will come out again, and you will see his heart beating. And again you will say, ‘How interesting!’ But there will be blood on your lancet. You are safe, of course, from reprisals. No one can cut into you, and see your blood flow, because you haven’t any blood. You are something cold and hellish. You often said you understood me too well. Now you understand me even better. Toast my heart, fry it, eat it up! I am utterly at your mercy, and you haven’t got any mercy. But I can manage to despise you: I can’t do much else.”

  Nadine stood quite still, breathing rather quickly, and that movement of the nostrils, which she had tried to copy from him, did not make her sneeze now.

  “It is well we should know each other,” she said with an awful cold bitterness, “even though we shall know each other for so little time more. It is always interesting to see the real person—”

  “If you mean me,” he said hotly, “I always showed you the real person. I have never acted to you, nor pretended. And I have not changed. I am not responsible if you cannot see!”

  Nadine passed her tongue over her lips. They seemed hard and dry, not flexible enough for speech.

  “It was my blindness then,” she said. “But we know where we are now. I hate you, and you despise me. We know now.”

  Then suddenly an impulse, wholy uncontrollable, and coming from she knew not where, seized and compelled her. She held out both her hands to him.

  “Hughie, shake hands with me,” she said. “This has been nightmare talk, a bad thing that one dreams. Shake hands with me, and that will wake us both up. What we have been saying to each other is impossible: it isn’t real or true. It is utter nonsense we have been talking.”

  How he longed to take her hands and clasp them and kiss them! How he longed to wipe off all he had said, all she had said. But somehow it was beyond him to do it. It was by honest impulse that the words of hate and contempt had risen to their lips; the words might be canceled, but what could not be quenched, until some mistake was shown in the workings of their souls, was the thought-fire that had made them boil up. She stood there, lovely and welcoming, the girl whom his whole soul loved, whose conduct his whole soul despised, eager for reconciliation, yearning for a mutual forgiveness. But her request was impossible. God could not cancel the bitterness that had made him speak. He threw his hands wide.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “I am sorry I said certain things, for there was no use in saying them. But I can’t help feeling that which made me say them. Cancel the speeches by all means. Let the words be unsaid with all my heart.”

  “But let us be prepared to say them again?” said Nadine quietly. “It comes to that.”

  “Yes, it comes to that. I am not jealous of Seymour. I laughed when you suggested it; and I am not jealous, because you don’t love him. If you loved him, I should be jealous, and I should say, ‘God bless you!’ As it is—”

  “As it is, you say ‘Damn you,’” said Nad
ine.

  Hugh shook his head.

  “You don’t understand anything about love,” he said. “How can you until you know a little bit what it means? I could no more think or say ‘Damn you,’ than I could say ‘God bless you.’”

  Nadine had withdrawn from her welcome and desire for reconciliation.

  “Neither would make any difference to me,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose they would, since I make no difference to you,” said he. “But there is no sense in adding hypocrisy to our quarrel.”

  Nadine sat down again on the sweet turf.

  “I cancel my words, then, even if you do not,” she said. “I don’t hate you. I can’t hate you, any more than you can despise me. We must have been talking in nightmare.”

  “I am used to nightmare,” said Hugh. “I have had six months of nightmare. I thought that I could wake; I thought I could — could pinch myself awake by seeing you and Seymour together. But it’s still nightmare.”

  Nadine looked up at him.

  “Oh, Hughie, if I loved you!” she said.

  Hugh looked at her a moment, and then turned away from her. Outside of his control certain muscles worked in his throat; he felt strangled.

  “I can say ‘God bless you’ for that, Nadine,” he said huskily. “I do say it. God bless you, my darling.”

  Nadine had leaned her face on her hands when he turned away. She divined why he turned from her, she heard the huskiness of his voice, and the thought of Hughie wanting to cry gave her a pang that she had never yet known the like of. There was a long silence, she sitting with hand-buried face, he seeing the sunlight swim and dance through his tears. Then he touched her on the shoulder.

  “So we are friends again in spite of ourselves,” he said. “Just one thing more then, since we can talk without — without hatred and contempt. Why did you refuse to marry me, because you did not love me, and yet consent to marry Seymour like that?”

  She looked up at him.

  “Oh, Hughie, you fool,” she said. “Because you matter so much more.”

  He smiled back at her.

  “I don’t want to wish I mattered less,” he said.

  “You couldn’t matter less.”

  He had no reply to this, and sat down again beside her. After a little Nadine turned to him.

  “And I said I thought it was such a calm morning,” she said.

  “And I said that storm was coming,” said he.

  She laid her hand on his knee.

  “And will there be some pleasant weather now?” she said. “Oh, Hughie, what wouldn’t I give to get two or three of the old days back again, when we babbled and chattered and were so content?”

  “Speak for yourself, miss,” said Hugh. “And for God’s sake don’t let us begin again. I shall quarrel with you again, and — and it gives me a pain. Look here, it’s a bad job for me all this, but I came here to get an oasis: also to pinch myself awake: metaphors are confusing things. Bring on your palms and springs. They haven’t put in an appearance yet. Let’s try anyhow.”

  Nadine sat up.

  “Talking of the weather—” she began.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were, before we began to exchange compliments.”

  She broke off suddenly.

  “Oh, Hughie, what has happened to the sun?” she said.

  “I know it is the moon,” said Hugh.

  “You needn’t quote that. The shrew is tamed for a time. It’s a shrew-mouse, a lady mouse with a foul temper; do you think? About the sun — look.”

  It was worth looking at. Right round it, two or three diameters away, ran a complete halo, a pale white line in the abyss of the blue sky. The little feathers of wind-blown clouds had altogether vanished, and the heavens were untarnished from horizon to zenith. But the heat of the rays had sensibly diminished, and though the sunshine appeared as whole-hearted as ever, it was warm no longer.

  “This is my second conjuring-trick,” said Hugh. “I make you a whirlwind, and now I make you a ring round the sun, and cut off the heating apparatus. Things are going to happen. Look at the sea, too. My orders.”

  The sea was also worth looking at. An hour ago it had been turquoise blue, reflecting the sky. Now it seemed to reflect a moonstone. It was gray-white, a corpse of itself, as it had been. Then even as they looked, it seemed to vanish altogether. The horizon line was blotted out, for the sky was turning gray also, and both above and below, over the cliff-edge, there was nothing but an invisible gray of emptiness. The sun halo spread both inwards and outwards, so that the sun itself peered like a white plate through some layer of vapor that had suddenly formed across the whole field of the heavens. And still not a whistle or sigh of wind sounded.

  Hugh got up.

  “As I have forgotten what my third conjuring trick is,” he said, “I think we had better go home. It looks as if it was going to be a violent one.”

  He paused a moment, peering out into the invisible sea. Then there came a shrill faint scream from somewhere out in the dim immensity.

  “Hold on to me, Nadine,” he cried. “Or lie down.”

  He felt her arm in his, and they stood there together.

  The scream increased in volume, becoming a maniac bellow. Then, like a solid wall, the wind hit them. It did not begin, out of the dead calm, as a breeze; it did not grow from breeze to wind; it came from seawards, like the waters of the Red Sea on the hosts of Pharaoh, an overwhelming wall of riot and motion. Nadine’s books, all but the one she had cast over the cliff’s edge, turned over, and lay with flapping pages; then like wounded birds they were blown along the hillside. The hat she had brought out with her, but had not put on, rose straight in the air, and vanished. Hugh, with Nadine on his arm, had leaned forward against this maniac blast, and the two were not thrown down by it. The path to the house lay straight up the steep hillside behind them, and turning they were so blown up it, that they stumbled in trying to keep pace to that irresistible torrent of wind that hurried them along. It took them but five minutes to get up the steep brae, while it had taken them ten minutes to walk down, and already there flew past them seaweed and sand and wrack, blown up from the beach below. Above, the sun was completely veiled, a riot of cloud had already obscured the higher air, but below, all was clear, and it looked as if a stone could be tossed upon the hills on the farther side of the bay.

  They had to cross the garden before they came to the house. Already two trees had fallen before this hurricane-blast, and even as they hurried over the lawn, an elm, screaming in all its full-foliaged boughs, leaned towards them, and cracked and fell. Then a chimney in the house itself wavered in outline, and next moment it crashed down upon the roof, and a covey of flying tiles fell round them.

  It required Hugh’s full strength to close the door again, after they had entered, and Nadine turned to him, flushed and ecstatic.

  “Hughie, how divine!” she said. “It can’t be measured, that lovely force. It’s infinite. I never knew there was strength like that. Why have we come in? Let’s go out again. It’s God: it’s just God.”

  His eyes, too, were alight with it and his soul surged to his lips.

  “Yes, God,” he said. “And that’s what love is. Rather — rather big, isn’t it?”

  And then for the first time, Nadine understood. She did not feel, but she was able to understand.

  “Oh, Hughie,” she said, “how splendid it must be to feel like that!”

  The section of the party which had gone to play golf on this changeable morning, were blown home a few minutes later, and they all met at lunch. Edith Arbuthnot had arrived before any of them got back, and asked if the world had been blown away. As it had not, she expressed herself ready to chaperone anybody.

  “And Berts is happy too,” said Seymour, when he came in very late for lunch, since he wished to change all his clothes first, as they ‘smelled of wind,’ “because Berts has at last driven a ball two hundred yards. Don’t let us mention the subject o
f golf. It would be tactless. There was no wind when he accomplished that remarkable feat, at least not more wind than there is now. What there was was behind him, and he topped his ball heavily. I said ‘Good shot.’ But I have tact. Since I have tact, I don’t say to Nadine that it was a good day to sit out on the hillside and read. I would scorn the suggestion.”

  A sudden sound as of drums on the window interrupted this tactful speech, and the panes streamed.

  “Anyhow I shall play golf,” said Edith. “What does a little rain matter? I’m not made of paper.”

  “That’s a good thing, Mother,” said Berts.

  “If you want to win a match, play with Berts,” said Seymour pensively. “But if you only want to be blown away and killed, anybody will do. I shall get on with my embroidery this afternoon, and my maid will sit by me and hold my hand. Dear me, I hope the house is well built.”

  For the moment it certainly seemed as if this was not the case, for the whole room shook under a sudden gust more appalling than anything they had felt yet. Then it died away again, and once more the windows were deluged with sheets of rain flung, it seemed, almost horizontally against them. For a few minutes only that lasted, and then the wind settled down, so it seemed, to blow with a steady uniform violence.

  Nadine had finished lunch and gone across to the window. The air was perfectly clear, and the hills across the bay seemed again but a stone’s-throw away. Overhead, straight across the sky, stretched a roof of cloud, but away to the West, just above the horizon line, there was an arch of perfectly clear sky, of pale duck’s-egg green, and out of this it seemed as out of a funnel the fury of the gale was poured. The garden was strewn with branches and battered foliage and the long gravel path flooded by the tempest of rain was discharging itself upon the lawn, where pools of bright yellow water were spreading. Across it too lay the wreck of the fallen trees, the splintered corpses of what an hour ago had been secure and living things, waiting, warm and drowsy, for the tingle of springtime and rising sap. Like the bodies of young men on a battlefield, with their potentialities of love and life unfulfilled, there, by the blast of the insensate fury of the wind they lay stricken and dead, and the birds would no more build in their branches, nor make their shadowed nooks melodious with love-songs. No more would summer clothe them in green, nor autumn in their liveries of gold: they were dead things and at the most would make a little warmth on the hearth, before the feathery ash, all that was left of them, was dispersed on the homeless winds.