Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  But it must not be imagined that all life’s inner workings, with regard to Craddock, were centred in this successful charming of Joyce to comradeship with him, nor in restraining himself from attempting to pluck the fruit while clearly unripe. Week by week there came to him the most satisfactory accounts from the box-office with regard to the reaped and ever-ripening harvest, so to speak, of “Easter Eggs.” But against that solid asset he had to set, not indeed a positive loss, but a sacrifice of what might have been a tremendous gain. For “The Long Lane that had Five Turnings” — was there ever so insolently careless a title? — had appeared early in January, and all London rocked with it. Akroyd had clearly made the biggest hit of his industrious career, and the author had leaped at this second spring over the heads of all other dramatists. Critics, even the most cautious of them, seemed to have lost their heads, and “Sheridan redivivus” was among their less extravagant expressions. His informant as to all this was Frank Armstrong himself, who very thoughtfully sent him a stout packet of these joyful cries, as supplied to him by a press-agency, and with it a letter that seemed to touch the pinnacles of impertinence.

  “You have often told me,” wrote this amiable young man, “of the great interest you take in my work, and so I am certain you will be pleased to hear of the success of the play. I have to thank you also for the hint you so kindly gave me about screwing Akroyd up to favourable terms, and I made a bargain for myself about the scale of royalties that really was stupendous. About the play itself — it is not being a very good theatrical season generally, and even Peter, I hear, isn’t panning out very well, but you should see the queues at the Pall-Mall. Golly! It’s the same in the stalls and boxes. Mrs. Fortescue has taken a box every night next week, and I think I have persuaded Akroyd to raise prices. He says it is illegitimate, but I rather think he will do it. After all the rule of supply and demand must affect prices. I’m afraid “Easter Eggs” is bound to suffer; indeed, it was distressingly empty the other night, but the box office says it will recover again... I see there is a flat vacant just below yours in Berkeley Square. I am thinking of taking it. It will be nice to be near you. I can never forget what you did for me over my first play.... Also, after an unpropitious beginning, I have struck up a friendship with Charles Lathom. He has told me, in confidence, how you played Providence to him. I hope you will do well over him. I should think you would, people are talking about him, and he has several sitters. I tried to tell him all you have done for me, but the recollection was too much. The words wouldn’t come, so I pretended to burn my finger over a pipe I was lighting, and said ‘Damn!’ Was not that clever and dramatic?

  “I enclose quantities of press-notices, and I wish I could see your delight over them. It was very vexing that you were not here for the first night, for I should have liked to have seen what you said. But perhaps when I saw it, I shouldn’t have liked it, as I remember you didn’t think very much of the play when I read it to you. Perhaps I shall take a long holiday now, not write again at all for a year or two. I am besieged with repeats, of course.”

  That threat did not much alarm Craddock. He felt as convinced, as he felt with regard to the rising of the sun, that the young man could not keep off it. But there was the very scorpion of a sting in the sentence immediately preceding, in which he was reminded of his own rejection of the play. His wits must have been wandering that night; his flair for anticipating public taste had never betrayed him with so desperate a lapse of perception. And somehow it gave him unease to think that an assured enemy of his, sharper than a serpent’s tooth, should have thus leaped into affluence as well as prominence. Nor did he like this growing friendship between Charles and the other — he did not like any of the letter, nor any of the press notices. His evening was completely spoiled and Mr. Wroughton beat him at bézique. But next morning, with that power which was not the least of his gifts, he switched his mind off these disturbances and fixed himself heart and soul on that which lay before him here and now.

  Thus passed for them at Luxor a complete moon, which among other celestial offices had magically illumined for them an hour of night among the ruins of Karnak. Then, too, they had gone about, and there up till then had come the hardest struggle in restraint for him. All the spell of the starry-kirtled night was woven round them while the huge monoliths and spent glory of the columned hall reminded him, urgently, insistently, how short life was, how soon for the generations of men nothing but the hard granite of their work remains, no joy, no rapture any more, for eyes are closed and mouths dumb, and the soft swift limbs laid to rest, where at the most they can but feel the grasses that wave over their graves, or, more horribly, injected and wrapped in cero-cloth and bitumen to be preserved as a parody and mocking of what they once were. And this — these few years — was his time, his innings before the silence that preceded closed in on him again. All he wanted stood in front of him now, as Joyce leaned on a fragment of wall white and tall in the moonlight, and let her great eyes wander over the outlined columns, with young fresh mouth a little parted, and hand almost resting on his.

  “Yes, it is all later than—” he heard his voice saying, and suddenly he stopped, feeling that to talk here and now and to her of Egyptian kings was a mere profanity, in this temple which his love had built, so much holier than all that had ever been made with hands.

  But at his sudden cessation, he saw Joyce withdraw herself a little, instinctively on guard. Bitterly he saw that.

  “It is all so woundingly sad,” he said, “this eternal glorious moon and sky, looking down on to what in so few years is but ruin and decay. And yet they thought that their houses would endure for ever—”

  Joyce instantly recovered her confidence, and flowed to meet him on this.

  “Oh, yes, oh yes,” she said, “all this month that has been haunting me. I think I hate the moon tonight It is like some dreadful imperishable governess, always presiding and watching us poor children.”

  That broke the tension.

  “Oh, Mistress Moon,” said Craddock laughing. “But she is a governess of remarkable personal attractions....”

  Then the last day of their sojourn came. Joyce, immensely reassured by her own mistaken conviction that he was going to speak that night at Karnak, and slightly ashamed of herself, had nothing left of the trouble she had anticipated at Cairo, and with regard to retrospect, that which had also been a conviction to her, though not absolutely vanished, was as remote as the imperishable governess. That day the two companions had settled to spend not in detailed study, for indeed they had gathered a most creditable crop, nor even in farewell visits to shrines, but in a general out-door survey and assimilation of river and temple and desert and sky, a long exposed photograph, so to speak, of panorama to take back to the fogs of a northern February. Soon after breakfast they took ferry over the Nile, and joining their donkeys there, rode straight away from the river, going neither to the right nor left, up the narrow path between fast-rising stretches of lengthening crops, past the two great silent dwellers on the plain, who, looking ever eastward, wait for the ultimate dawn that shall touch mute lips again to song, through the huddled mud-houses of Gûrnak, and up and beyond and out till the level green was left below them, and they met the sand-dried untainted air of the desert. Here on the brow of the sandstone cliffs they dismounted, while Josef bestowed their lunch in a cool shadow of a rock in this thirsty land.

  Joyce sat down on this bluff.

  “We can’t dispose of the flesh-pots of Egypt yet,” she said, nodding at the provision basket. “May we sit here a little, Mr. Craddock, and will you let me say my eighteenth dynasty catechism, and then—”

  Joyce turned to him.

  “We must plan out this day so carefully,” she said, “as it is the last. I want to sit here quite silent for about half-an-hour, and if it isn’t rude, out of sight of you, and everybody, and just look, look, get all that — the river, the crops, the sky, the temples, right deep down. Then let us have lunch, and then let us
go a long ride out into the desert, where there isn’t anybody or anything. And then, oh, oh, we shall have to go back, and the last day will be over. I promised father to go and call on the chaplain after tea with him. Chaplain! He’s a dear man, but think — chaplain on the last day!”

  Joyce’s desired menu of the mind was served to her. She said her eighteenth dynasty kings, and then strolled along the edge of the cliffs till she was out of sight and sound of donkey and donkey-boy and Craddock. The magic of the land indeed had made its spell for her, and now she wanted just to look, to absorb, to be wrapped in it. Then, just because she had planned this her mind grew restive and fidgetty.... She had determined on her own account to speak a grateful word to Mr. Craddock today for all he had done for her, and she felt she must thank him too for his unremitting attention to her father. He, she felt sure, would not do so, and Joyce felt that the family must discharge that indebtedness. It seemed a simple task enough to perform, but she could not in imagination frame a suitable sentence, either about that or her own debt to him, and insensibly beginning to worry about it, she lost the mood that she had come here to capture. Craddock and her imminent acknowledgment to him “drave between her and the sun” and her half hour alone proved a not very satisfactory item.

  She went back to him at the end of it, and found that he had already spread their lunch.

  “And you have had a ‘heart-to-heart’ talk with Egypt?” he asked. “I thought I heard sobs.”

  Joyce laughed.

  “They were sobs of rage then,” she said. “My plan broke down. I could think of everything under the sun except Egypt. Just because I meant to gaze and meditate, I could not meditate at all. But I am so hungry; that is something. How good of you to have made ready!”

  Hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches, however hungry the attack, do not need much time for their due disposition, and in a quarter of an hour Craddock had lit a cigarette, preparatory for their ride into the desert. And this seemed to Joyce a very suitable moment for the dischargal of her thanks and compliments.

  “I’ve had a burden on my mind so long, Mr. Craddock,” she said, “and that is to let you know just in so many words how I appreciate all that you have done for us. Your presence has made the whole difference to my father—”

  She had begun to speak, not looking at him, but at the hot sand at her feet. But here a sudden movement of his, a shifting of his place so that he sat just a little nearer her, made her look up. At the same moment she saw that he flung away the cigarette he had only just lit. Then she looked at his face, and saw that his mouth was a little open, and that his breath came quickly. And she knew the moment she had feared a month ago, but had allowed herself to think of as averted, hovered close to her.

  “And has my presence made any difference to you?” he asked.

  Joyce knew the futility of fencing, as everybody does who knows a crisis is inevitable. But until the end of the world everybody will continue to fence.

  “Of course it has,” she said. “I was just going to speak of that and thank you for it all.”

  He drew himself quite close to her.

  “There is just one way, and no more in which you can thank me,” he said, “and it is by letting me offer for your acceptance all my services and all my devotion.”

  The fire, the authentic primal need was there, and though she shrank from it, though instinctively she hated it, she could refuse it neither with respect nor sympathy. She could not interrupt him, either: what he had to say must come: it was his bare right to speak.

  He took up her hand, and clasped it with both of his, enclosing it, as it were, in a damp dark cavern. At that, without being able to help it, she drew back a little.

  “O stop: don’t,” she said.

  He seemed not to hear.

  “I offer you much more than I knew was mine to offer last June,” he said. “You were so right, Joyce, to refuse me. But it is so different now. You have woke in me, or created in me, a power for love which I did not know was mine. Surely you know that. You created it: it is yours. Take it, for what you made is me.”

  He paused a moment; then seemed suddenly to realize that he had said all that could be said.... A little wind drove upwards from the plain below, fluttering the papers which had held their sandwiches. Joyce hated herself for noticing that. Then she tried to withdraw her hand.

  “Oh! am so sorry, so sorry,” she said. “It is quite impossible, more impossible than ever. I mean — I don’t know what I mean. But I can’t.”

  She knew very well what she meant when she said “more impossible than ever.” And mixed with her regret which was wholly genuine, was a sort of nausea of her soul.... Once more she felt she knew who had spoken to her father of Charles. The motive, too, was as clear as the sunshine. She loathed this continued contact. But it only lasted a second more. The tone of her reply would have carried conviction to the most ardent of lovers. He dropped her hand.

  “I have done,” he said.

  He got up, and walked a few paces away, and stood there with his back to her. A quantity of disconnected pictures went through the blank impassivity of his mind. He remembered the look of the green packet of tickets for their passage down the Nile to-morrow, which he had seen on his table before he went out this morning. He heard Philip’s voice say, “Take care of my little Joyce!” He felt himself licking the envelope which contained Mr. Ward’s cheque for five thousand pounds. He had the vision of another cheque for ten thousand and one hundred pounds. He saw the sketch of Joyce that had stood beneath the lamp in her room on the evening the chimneys smoked at the Mill House. He heard himself console Charles for the “queer note” Philip Wroughton had written him. Collectively, these presented their whole case, his whole connection with the Wroughtons, succinctly and completely. And the curtain fell on them.

  He went back to Joyce, who was sitting by the side of the fluttering paper with her head in her hands.

  “What would you like to do?” he said. “Shall we take our ride into the desert or go home?”

  Joyce got up.

  “Oh, let us go home,” she said. “Please call Mohammed. And do realize I am sorry, I am very sorry.”

  But there was nothing in him now that could respond to or help the girl’s evident distress. It seemed that the wonderful flower that grew out of him had been plucked.... Only the soil out of which it grew remained, and that was exactly what it had always been.

  That night when Lady Crowborough went up to bed, she was not surprised to hear Joyce’s tap on her door a moment afterwards. She had felt the constraint that had hung over dinner like a thundercloud, though Philip, flushed with victory at the ideal disposition in the packing of his underclothing which had occurred to him as he dozed or slept, — he thought “slept,” — before dinner, had been unconscious of all else.

  “Come in, my dear,” she said, “and tell me all that’s happened.”

  “Oh, Granny, he has proposed again,” said Joyce.

  “Lor’, my dear, do you think I didn’t guess that? And you needn’t trouble to tell me that you refused him. Well, Joyce, I can’t say I’m sorry, though I suppose he’s rich and agreeable enough, for I never could stand stout white men myself. Give me one of my cigarettes, dear, and sit down and have a talk. There’s nothing I enjoy more than a cigarette and a talk about love just before going to bed. Gives such pleasant dreams.”

  Joyce could not help giggling. But she knew well the golden heart that beat behind these surprising flippancies.

  “But I’m sorry, Granny,” she said, “but — but I’m afraid I’m not sorry enough.”

  “No, my dear,” said this astute old lady, “if you were sorry enough you’d say ‘yes’ instead of ‘no.’ Let me see, this is the second go, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then I hope this time that you made it plain. The man whom you don’t mean to have gets tedious if he goes on. I used to tell them so.”

  Joyce had come here to do much more than merely a
nnounce the event to her grandmother. There was so much more she wanted to say, but she felt it would be easier if it came out in answer to questions. Probably Grannie was wise enough to ask the right questions....

  “I think I made it plain,” she said. “I said it was quite impossible: more impossible than ever.” Lady Crowborough in the dusk allowed herself to beam all over her face.

  “And what did you mean by that, my dear?” she said. “To me it sounds as if there was nobody else last June, but somebody else now.”

  “Oh, Grannie, it means just that,” said Joyce in a whisper.

  “And was it any of my flirts in Cairo?” asked Lady Crowborough, who liked a little joking even when her heart was most entirely tender and sympathetic. Quite truly, she believed it “helped things out” to grin over them.

  Joyce grinned.

  “No, not in Cairo,” she said.

  “Then it was that flirt of mine down at the Mill House, who’s going to paint my picture,” she exclaimed. “Don’t deny it, my dear. A nice boy, too, though he ain’t got a penny. However, we’ll talk about the pennies afterwards. Now do you think he fancies you at all? Don’t be so silly, Joyce, hiding your face like that.”

  “Yes, Grannie, I think he does. I can’t be sure, you know I — I haven’t had any experience.”

  “Lor’, my dear, what do you want with experience over that sort o’ thing?” asked Lady Crowborough. “And if you’re too modest to say, I’ll say it for you. He does like you and you know it. I saw him, the wretch, looking at you in the right way. So I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. You like him, and he likes you. Eh?”