Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “That’s right, Mr. Graves,” she said. “I like to see my patients irritable. It always shows they are getting better.”

  “I should have thought you might have seen that without annoying me,” said Hugh.

  “Well, well, I don’t mind your having one cigarette to keep Lady Chesterford company,” said the nurse. “But you’ll be disappointed.”

  Dodo took out her case as Nurse Bryerley left the room. “Here you are, Hughie,” she said.

  Hugh lit one, and blew a cloud of smoke through his nostrils.

  “Are they quite fresh, Aunt Dodo?” he said.

  “Yes, dear, quite. Doesn’t it taste right?”

  “Yes, delicious,” said Hugh, absolutely determined not to find it disappointing. “I say, what a sunny morning!”

  “Is it too much in your eyes?”

  “It is rather. Will you ask Nurse Bryerley to pull the blind down? Why should you?”

  “Chiefly, dear, because it isn’t any trouble.”

  Dodo pulled down the blind too far on the first attempt to be pleasing, not far enough on the second. Hugh felt she was very clumsy.

  “Isn’t Nadine coming to see me this morning?” he asked. “But I daresay she is tired of sitting with me every day.”

  Dodo came back to her chair by the bed again.

  “She went off with Jack to Winston this morning,” she said. “Just for a change. She was very much tired and overdone. You’ve been a fearful anxiety to her, you dear bad boy.”

  Hugh put his cigarette down and shut his mouth, as if firmly determined never to speak again.

  “She came in to say good-by to you,” she said, “but you were asleep and they didn’t want to wake you.”

  There was still dead silence on Hugh’s part.

  “It was only settled she should go yesterday,” she continued, “and she had to be persuaded. But Jack wanted one of us, and, as I say, she was very much overdone. Now I’m not the least overdone. So I stopped. But I wish she could have seen how much more yourself you were when you woke to-day.”

  At length Hugh spoke.

  “What is the use of telling me that sort of tale?” he said. “She is going to be married to Seymour in a few days. She has gone away for that. I suppose in some cold-blooded way she thought it better to sneak off without telling me. No doubt it was very tactful of her.”

  Dodo turned round towards him.

  “No, Hughie, you are quite wrong,” she said. “Nadine is not going to marry Seymour at all.”

  Hugh lifted his right hand, and examined it cursorily. A long cut, now quite healed, ran up the length of his forefinger.

  “I see,” he said. “She said she would marry Seymour in order to get rid of me, and now that I have been got rid of in other ways, she has no further use for him. Isn’t that it?”

  His face had become quite white, and the hand with the healed wound trembled so violently that the bed shook.

  “No, that is not it,” said Dodo quietly. “And don’t be so nervous and fidgety, my dear.”

  Suddenly the trembling ceased.

  “Aunt Dodo, if it is not that, what is it?” he asked, in a voice that would have melted Rhadamanthus.

  She turned a shining face on him, and laid her hand on his.

  “Oh, Hughie, lie still and get well,” she said. “And then ask Nadine herself. She will come back when you want her. She told Nurse Bryerley to tell you so, if you asked.”

  Hugh moved across his other hand, so that Dodo’s lay between his.

  “I must ask you one more thing,” he said. “Is it because of me in any way that she chucked Seymour? I entreat you to say ‘no’ if it is ‘no.’”

  “I can’t say ‘no,’” said Dodo.

  Hugh drew one long sobbing breath.

  “It’s mere pity then,” he said. “Nadine always liked me, and she was always impulsive like that. I daresay she won’t marry him till I’m better, if I am ever better. She will wait till I am strong enough to enjoy it thoroughly.”

  Dodo interrupted him.

  “Hughie, don’t say bitter and untrue things like that,” she said. “And don’t feel them. She is not going to marry Seymour, either now or afterwards.”

  Once again Hugh was silent, and after an interval Dodo spoke, divining exactly what was in his irritable convalescent mind.

  “I have never deceived you before, Hughie,” she said, “and you have no right to distrust me now. I am telling you the truth. I also tell you the truth when I say you must get bitter thoughts out of your mind. Ah, my dear, it is not always easy. There’s a beast within each of us.”

  “There’s a beast within me,” said Hugh.

  “And there’s a dear brave fellow whom I am so proud of,” said Dodo.

  Hugh’s lip quivered, but there was a quality in his silence as different from that which had gone before, as there was between his callings for Nadine on the night when she fought death for him.

  “And now that’s enough,” said Dodo. “Shall I read to you, Hughie, or shall I leave you for the present?”

  He held her hand a moment longer.

  “I think I will lie still and — and think,” he said.

  “Good luck to your fishing, dear,” said she, rising.

  “Good luck to your fishing?” he said. “It’s on a picture. Small boy fishing, kneeling in the waves.”

  Dodo beat a strategic retreat.

  “Is it?” she said.

  But it seemed to Hugh that her voice lacked the blank enquiry tone of ignorance.

  Hugh settled himself a little lower down on his backing of pillows, after Dodo had left him, and tried to arrange his mind, so that the topics that concerned it stood consecutively. But Dodo’s last remark, which certainly should have stood last also in his reflections, kept on shouldering itself forward. She had wished him “good luck to his fishing,” and he could not bring himself to believe that, consciously or unconsciously, there was not in her mind a certain picture, of a little winged boy, kneeling in the waves, who dropped a red line into the unquiet sea. He could not, and did not try to remember the painter, but certainly the picture had been at some exhibition which he and Nadine had attended together. A little winged boy.... The title was printed after the number in the catalogue.

  Nadine was not to marry Seymour now or afterwards.... There came a black speck again over his thoughts. He himself had been got rid of by this crippling accident, and now she had expunged Seymour also. ‘And though she saw all heaven in flower above, she would not love.’ The lines came into his mind without any searching for them; for the moment he could not remember where he had heard them. And then memory began to awake.

  Hitherto, he had not been able to recall anything of the day or two that preceded his catastrophe. A few of the immediate events before it he had never forgotten. He remembered Nadine calling out, “No Hugh, not you,” he remembered her cry of “Well done”; he remembered that he had toppled in on that line of toppling waters with a small boy on his back. But now a fresh line of memory had been awakened: some connection in his brain had been restored, and he remembered their quarrel and reconciliation on the day the gale began; how she had said, “Oh, Hughie, if only I loved you!” Soon after came the portentous advent of the wind, with the blotting out of the sun, and the transformation of the summer sea.

  He heard with unspeakable irritation the entry of Nurse Bryerley. That seemed an unwarrantable intrusion, for he felt as if he had been alone with Nadine, and now this assiduous grenadier broke in upon them with a hundred fidgety offices to perform. She restored to him a fallen pillow, she closed a window through which a breeze was blowing rather freely, she brought him a cup of chicken-broth. It seemed an eternity before she asked him if he was comfortable, and made her long-delayed exit. Even then she reminded him that the doctor was due in half-an-hour.

  But for half-an-hour he would be alone now, and for the first time since his accident he found that he wanted to think. Hitherto his mind had sat vacant, like an
idle passenger who sees without observation or interest the transit of the country. But Dodo’s visit this morning and her communications to him had made life appear a thing that once more concerned him; till now it was but a manœuver taking place round him, but outside him. Now the warmth of it reached him again, and began to circulate through him. And what she had told him was being blown out, as it were, in his brain, even as a lather of soapsuds is blown out into an iridescent bubble, on which gleam all the hues of sunset and moonrise and rainbow. The rainbow was not one of the vague dreams in which, lately, his mind had moved; it was a real thing, not receding but coming nearer to him, blown towards him by some steady breeze, not idly vagrant in the effortless air. Should it break on his heart, not into nothingness, but into the one white light out of which the sum of all lights and colors is made?

  He could not doubt that it was this which Dodo meant. Nadine had thrown over Seymour and that concerned him. And then swift as the coming of the storm which they had seen together, came the thought, clear and precise as the rows of thunder-clouds, that for all he knew a barrier forever impenetrable lay between them. For he could never offer to her a cripple; the same pride that had refused to let him take an intimate place beside her after she, by her acceptance of Seymour, had definitely rejected him, forbade him, without possibility of discussion, to let her tie herself to him, unless he could stand sound and whole beside her. He must be competent in brain and bone and body to be Nadine’s husband. And for that as yet he had no guarantee.

  Since his accident he had not up till now cared to know precisely what his injuries were, nor whether he could ever completely recover from them. The concussion of the brain had quenched all curiosity, and interest not only in things external to him, but in himself, and he had received the assurance that he was going on very well with the unconcern that we feel for remote events. But now his thoughts flew back from Nadine and clustered round himself. He felt that he must know his chances, the best or the worst ... and yet he dreaded to know, for he could live for a little in a paradise by imagining that he would get completely well, instead of in a shattered ruin which the knowledge of the worst would strew round him.

  But this morning the energy of life which for those two weeks had lain dormant in him, began to stir again. He wanted. It seemed to him but a few moments since his nurse left him that Dr. Cardew came in. He saw the flushed face and brightened eyes of his patient, and after an enquiry or two took out the thermometer which he had not used for days, and tested Hugh’s temperature. He put it back again in its nickel case with a smile.

  “Well, it’s not any return of fever, anyhow,” he said. “Do you feel different in any way this morning?”

  “Yes. I want to get well.”

  “Highly commendable,” said Dr. Cardew.

  Hugh fingered the bed-clothes in sudden agitation.

  “I want to know if I shall get well,” he said. “I don’t mean half well, in a Bath-chair, but quite well. And I want to know what my injuries were.”

  Dr. Cardew looked at him a moment without speaking. But it was perfectly clear that this fresh color and eagerness in Hugh’s face was but the lamp of life burning brighter. There was no reason that he should not know what he asked, now that he cared to know.

  “You broke your hip-bone,” he said. “You also had very severe concussion of the brain. There were a quantity of little injuries.”

  “Oh, tell me the best and the worst of it quickly,” said Hugh with impatience.

  “I can tell you nothing for certain for a few days yet about the fracture. There is no reason why it should not mend perfectly. And to-day for the first time I am not anxious about the other.”

  Quite suddenly Hugh put his hands before his face and broke into a passion of weeping.

  CHAPTER XIII

  A week later, Dodo was interviewing Dr. Cardew in her sitting-room at Meering. He had just spoken at some little length to her, and she had time to notice that he looked like a third-rate actor, and recorded the fact also that Edith seemed to have gone back to scales and the double-bass. This impression was conveyed from next door. He spoke like an actor, too, and said things several times over, as if it was a play. He talked about fractures and conjunctions, and X-ray photographs, and satisfaction, and the recuperative powers of youth and satisfaction and X-rays. Eventually Dodo could stand this harangue no longer.

  “It is all too wonderful,” she said, “and I quite see that if science hadn’t made so many discoveries, we couldn’t tell if Hughie would have a Bath-chair till doomsday or not. But now, Dr. Cardew, he is longing to hear, and dreading to hear, poor lamb, and won’t you let me be the butcher, or I suppose I should say, ‘Mary’? You’ve been such a clever butcher, if you understand, and I do want to be Mary, who had a little lamb” — she added in desperation, lest he should never understand her allusive conversation. “Of course he’s not my little lamb, but my daughter’s, and he wants to know so frightfully. Yes: I understand about his intellect, too. It seems to me as bright as it ever was, and I notice no change whatever. He always spoke as if he was excited. May I go?”

  Dodo intended to go, whether she might or not, but just at the door, she seemed to herself to have treated this distinguished physician with some abruptness. She unwillingly paused.

  “Do stop to lunch,” she said, “it will be lunch in ten minutes, and you will find me not so completely distracted. I shall be quite sensible, and would you ring the bell and tell them you are stopping? Don’t mind the scales and the double-bass, dear Dr. Cardew; it is only Mrs. Arbuthnot, of whom you have heard. She will not play at lunch. I know you think you have come to a mad-house, but we are all quite sane. And I may go and tell Hughie what you have told me? If you hear loud screams of joy, it will only be me, and you needn’t take any notice.”

  Dodo slid along the passage, upset a chair in Nurse Bryerley’s room, and knelt down on the floor by Hugh’s bed. She clawed at something with her eager hands, and it was chiefly bed-clothes.

  “Oh, praise God, Hughie,” she said. “Amen. There! Now you know, and there won’t be any crutches, my dear, or the shadow of a Bath-chair, whatever that is like. You won’t have chicken-broth, and a foolish nurse; not you, dear Nurse Bryerley, I didn’t mean you, and you will walk again and run again, and play the fool, just like me, for a hundred years more. I told Dr. Cardew you weren’t ever very calm or unexcited, and your poor broken hip has mended itself, and your kidneys aren’t mixed up with your liver and lights, and you’ve — you’ve got your strong young body back again, and your silly young brain. Oh, Hughie!”

  Dodo leaned forward and clutched a more satisfactory handful of Hugh’s shoulders.

  “I couldn’t let anybody but myself tell you,” she said. “I had to tell you. But nobody else knows. You can tell anybody else you want to tell.”

  Hugh was paying but the very slightest attention to Dodo.

  “Telegraph-form,” he said rather rudely to Nurse Bryerley.

  Dodo loved this inattention to herself. There was nothing banal about it. He had no more thought of her than he would have had for a newspaper that contained ecstatic tidings. He did not stroke or kiss or shake hands with a mere newspaper that told him such great things.

  “It’s so funny not to have telegraph-forms handy,” he said.

  “I know, dear. They ought always to be in every room. But servants are so forgetful. Talk to me until Nurse Bryerley gets one.”

  Hugh looked at her with shining eyes.

  “How can I talk?” he said. “There’s nothing to say. I want that telegraph-form.”

  Dodo, human and practical and explosive, yearned for the statement of what she knew.

  “Whom are you going to telegraph to?” she asked.

  Hugh had time for one contemptuous glance at her.

  “Oh, Aunt Dodo, you ass!” he said. “Oh, by Jove, how awfully rude of me, and I haven’t thanked you for coming to tell me. Thanks so much: I am so grateful to you for all your goodness to me �
�� ah!”

  He took a telegraph-form and scribbled a few words.

  “May it go now?” he said.

  Dodo was almost embarrassingly communicative at lunch, at which meal Edith did not appear, and the continued booming of the double-bass indicated that Art was being particularly long that morning. Consequently Dodo found herself alone with an astonished physician.

  “If only a man could be a clergyman and a doctor,” she said, “you could tell him everything, because clergy know all about the soul and doctors all about the body, and when you completely understand anything, you can’t be shocked at it. I think I should have poisoned you, Dr. Cardew, if you had said that Hughie would never be the same man again: anyhow I shouldn’t have asked you to lunch. Ah, in that case I couldn’t have poisoned you! How difficult it must be to plan a crime really satisfactorily. I always have had a great deal of sympathy with criminals, because my great-grandfather was hanged for smuggling. Do have some more mutton, which calls itself lamb. I certainly shall. I’m going to have a baby, you know, or perhaps you didn’t. Isn’t it ridiculous at my age, and he’s going to be called David.”

  “In case—” began Dr. Cardew.

  “No, in any case,” said Dodo. “I mean it certainly is going to be a boy. You shall see. What a day for January, is it not? The year has turned, though I hope that doesn’t mean it will go bad. I wish you had seen Hughie’s face when I told him he wasn’t going to have a Bath-chair. He looked like one of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ angels with a three weeks’ beard, which I shouldn’t wonder if he was shaving now, since, as I said, there aren’t going to be any Bath-chairs.”

  “I don’t quite follow,” said Dr. Cardew politely but desperately.

  “I’m sure I don’t wonder,” said Dodo cordially, “although it’s so clear to me. But you see, he’s going to propose to my daughter now that it’s certain he will be the same man again and not a different one, and no eligible young man ever has a beard. What a good title for a sordid and tragic romance ‘Beards and Bath-chairs’ would be. Of course Hughie instantly called for a telegraph-form, and when I asked him who he was telegraphing to, he called me an ass, in so many words, or rather so few. After all I had done for him, too! Oh, here’s Edith; Dr. Cardew and I have not been listening to your playing, but we’re sure it has been lovely. Do you know Dr. Cardew? And it’s Mrs. Arbuthnot, or ought I to say ‘she’s Mrs. Arbuthnot’? Edith, if you don’t mind our smoking, Dr. Cardew and I will wait and talk to you for a little, but if you do, we won’t.”