Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Are we going up or down the river?” asked Joyce.

  Charles looked wildly round: the bows of the punt seemed if anything to be pointing down stream.

  “Down,” he said.

  The punt thought not: it yawed in a slow half circle and directed itself up-stream.

  “That is down-stream, isn’t it?” said he... and they slowly slid into the bank.

  A swift circular motion began, and a fool-hardy swan coming within range narrowly escaped decapitation. Then Lady Crowborough, having made her visit, appeared at the edge of the lawn, and Charles rashly promised to pick her up.... But they moved westward instead into the crimson pools of reflected sunset. Joyce had never ached so much in all her healthy life.

  Yet even these inanities brought them nearer.... Love has a use for laughter.

  Six months ago on an evening of gale and autumn storm, when the chimneys smoked and the rain made fierce tattoo on the streaming window panes, Joyce had gone up to her bedroom leaving her father and another guest together, and had felt some wild primaeval instinct stirring in her blood, that made her long to go out alone into the blackness and hurly-burly of the streaming heavens, to be herself, solitary and unencumbered by the presence and subtle silent influence of others. And to-night, when she and Lady Crowborough left Philip and Charles talking together — Philip’s cold had miraculously almost, encouraged by eucalyptus, vanished altogether — she again felt herself prey to the same desire. But tonight, it was no pall of streaming blackness that drew her, but the still starry twilight, and the warm scents of spring. But now, even as then, she wanted to be alone, hidden and unsuspected in the deep dusk of the star-shine, to wander through the fresh-fallen dew in the meadows, to finger the new leaves on riverside willows, to lie, perhaps face downwards in the growing hay-fields, to listen to the mysterious noises of the night, to learn — to learn what? She did not know, or at any rate did not formulate the answer, but it was something that the dark and the spring-time were ready to tell her: something that concerned the Spirit of life that kept the world spinning on its secular journey, and made bright the eyes of the wild creatures of the wood, and set the rose a-budding, and made in her the red blood leap on its joyous errands.... Surely, somehow, in the dark of the spring night she could link the pulse that beat in her with the great indwelling rhythm of the world, make herself realise that all was one, she and the singing-bird whose time was come, and the rose that tingled on its stem with the potential blossoms.

  She had taken off her dinner-dress and put on a dressing gown, and now, blowing out her light, she went across to her open window, drew up the blind and leaned out into the night. And then in a flash of newly-awakened knowledge, she was aware that she wanted to be alone no longer. She wanted a teacher who also would learn with her, one more human than the star-light, and dearer to her heart than the fragrant hay-fields. But leaning out into the dark, she was nearer him than in the house, and she opened her heart... it stood wide.

  Just below her the gravel path that bordered the lawn was illuminated by the light that came in yellow oblongs of glow from the long windows of her father’s study. She heard some little stir of movement below, the sound of voices dim and unintelligible inside, and presently after the tread of a foot-step on the stairs and so along the passage past her room, where her father slept. Then the window below was thrown open and Charles stepped out onto the gravel. Like her, perhaps, he felt the call of the night; she wondered if, like her, he needed more than the night could give him. She could look out without risk of detection: from outside, her window would appear a mere black hole in the wall. He paused a moment, and then strolled onto the dewy lawn. And as he walked away towards the river, she heard him whistle softly to himself, the song he had sung last year to his guitar. “See the chariot at hand here of Love....”

  Joyce lay long awake, when she got to bed, not tossing nor turning nor even desiring sleep, but very quiet with wide open eyes. She did not seem to herself to be thinking at all, it was no preoccupation that kept her awake: she but lived and breathed, was part of the spring night. But it seemed to her that she had never been alive till then. Sometimes for a little while she dozed, nonsense of some sort began to stir in her brain, but the drowsy moments were no more than moments. From the stable-clock not far away she heard the faint clanging of the hours and half-hours, which seemed to follow very rapidly, the one after the other. By her dressing-table in the window there came a very faint light through the unblinded casement from the remote noon-day of the shining stars, the rest of the room was muffled in soft darkness.

  Then she missed the sound of one half-hour, and when she woke again, the light in her room was changed. Already the faint illumination by the window had spread over the rest of it, and there was a more conspicuous brightness on the table that stood there. Then from outside she heard the first chirruping of one bird, and the light grew, a light hueless and colourless, a mere mixture of white with the dark. More birds joined voices to the first heard in the earliest welcome of the day, and a breeze set some tendrill of creeper tapping at her panes. Colour began to steal into the hueless light; she could guess there in the East were cloud-wisps that caught the morning.

  Joyce got out of bed and went to the window, and the lure of the sunrise irresistibly beckoned her out. The message the night had seemed to hold for her, though contradicted afterwards, had been authentically transmitted to the dawn — something certainly called her now. She dressed herself quickly in some old boating-costume, went quietly along the passage, and down stairs. At the foot Huz was sleeping, but awoke at her step, and found it necessary to give a loud and joyful bark of welcome. It seemed to him an excellent plan to go out.

  She crossed the lawn with her dog, for the river seemed to beckon, and would have taken her canoe, except that that meant that Huz must be left behind. She did not want Huz, but Huz wanted, and she stepped into the punt, that puzzled victim of Charles’ aimlessness, and pushed off. The boom of Thorley Weir — that, or was it something else about Thorley Weir — determined her direction, and she slid away upstream. It was still not yet the hour of sunrise, and she would be at the weir before that.

  A few minutes before, Charles had wakened also. He, too, had slept but little, and his awaking was sudden: he felt as if some noise had roused him, the shutting of a door perhaps, or the barking of a dog.

  The early light that preceded dawn was leaking into his room, and he got out of bed to draw up the blind. The magic of the hour, breeze of morning, chirruping of birds seized and held him, and into his mind — brighter than the approaching dawn — there came flooding back all that had kept sleep from him. Sleep was far away again now, and the morning beckoned.

  He dressed and went out, and it was in his mind to wrestle with the punt, perhaps, to spring on Joyce a mysteriously-acquired adeptness. And then suddenly he saw that steps had preceded him across the lawn, wiping away the dew, and his heart leaped. Could it be she who had passed that way already? Would they meet — and his heart hammered in his throat — in this pearly and sacred hour, when only the birds were awake? It was not quite sunrise yet; should day, and another day lit by the dawn that from everlasting had moved the sun and the stars, dawn together? But where had she gone, where should he seek and find her?

  The punt was gone: the canoe lay tapped by the ripples from the mill-stream. Right or left? Down stream or up? Then the boom of Thorley Weir decided him — that, or something else, some quivering line that she had left to guide him.

  The imperfect chirrupings were forming themselves into “actual song”; on the smooth-flowing river reflections of the blue above began to stain the grey steel-colour, and the willow leaves were a-quiver with the breeze of morning. He hardly noticed these things as he plied his paddle round bend and promontory of the stream. Louder sounded the boom of the outpoured weir, and the last corner was turned, and on the spit of land where a year ago his tent had been pitched stood Joyce.

  She had just tied her punt to t
he bank and stood looking up towards the weir itself. Huz was by her and hearing the splash of the paddle, turned and waved a welcoming tail that beat against Joyce’s skirt. At that she turned also, and saw him. But she gave him no word of welcome, nor did he speak to her. In silence he ran the boat into the soft ground beside the punt, and stepped ashore. He had left his coat in the canoe and came towards her, hatless like herself, bare-armed to the elbow.

  She looked at him, still silent, yet flooding him with her self, and his own identity, his very self and being, seemed to pass utterly away from him. He was conscious of nothing more than her.

  “It had to be like this,” he said.... “Joyce, Joyce.”

  Still she did not answer, but, quivering a little, bent towards him, as a young tree leans before the wind. Then her lips parted.

  “Oh, Charles,” she said, “have you come to me? I was waiting for you.”

  THE END

  ARUNDEL

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  BOOK THREE

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER I

  THE CALL FROM WITHOUT

  Colonel Fanshawe was riding slowly back to his bungalow about an hour before the sunset of a hot and brilliant day in the middle of March. He had spent a long day in the saddle, for the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Forces was at Peshawar on a visit of inspection, and he had reviewed and inspected and inspected and reviewed and given medals and colours and compliments and criticism till the whole garrison, who had been under arms on the parade ground since an early hour that morning, was ready to drop with a well-earned fatigue. That evening there was to be a great dinner-party followed by a dance at the house of the Resident. To-morrow the Commander-in-Chief was to go up the Khyber pass, returning just in time to catch the night train to Lahore, arriving there at daybreak, and prepared to spend another day similar to this. And yet, so reflected Colonel Fanshawe, he was made, to all appearance, of flesh and blood, exactly like anybody else: indeed, he was endowed with flesh to a somewhat phenomenal extent; for, though not of unusual height, he swung a full eighteen stone into his saddle, ate and drank in perfectly amazing quantities, and, without doubt, would to-night prance genially and colossally from beginning to end of every dance with a succession of the prettiest girls in Peshawar. It was equally certain that at the conclusion he would go in person to the bandmaster and beg as a personal favour for an extra or two.... And Colonel Fanshawe, lean and slight and in excellent condition, felt himself a pigmy and an invalid in contrast with this indefatigable elephant who all day had seemed only to wax in energy and boisterousness and monumental briskness. It was as if some huge Government building had burst into active life: John Bull himself, as in the pages of some patriotic print, had become incarnate, commanding and guffawing and perspiring.

  But the day, though fatiguing to everybody else except the Commander-in-Chief, had been highly satisfactory. Twice had he complimented Colonel Fanshawe on the smartness of his Pathan regiment, and since the regiment was one of the two institutions for which the Colonel lived and loved, it followed that in retrospect his habitual content, which at all times was of a very sterling quality, had been lifted to the levels of the sublime. And anticipation was up to the level of retrospect, for the second of these institutions which engaged all his energies and affection was the home towards which he was now ambling along the dusty roads. In the imperturbable fashion of a man who was not gifted with much imagination, he enjoyed what he had to the almost complete exclusion of desiring that which he had not; and though, if a genuine wishing-cap had been put ready to his hand, he would certainly have had a request or two to make, he never, in the absence of that apocryphal piece of headgear, let his mind dwell on what it might have brought him. His wife, the second of that name, and Elizabeth, the daughter of the first, almost completely exiled from his mind all desires connected with his home, and were sufficient to satisfy the emotional needs of a love which was not the less luminous because it lacked the iridescence of romance. It burned with a steady and unwinking flame, without rockets and multi-coloured stars, and was eminently suited to light a man’s way, so that he should go without stumbling through the dusk of a hazardous world. For the sake of his wife or of Elizabeth he would have given his life unquestioningly and with cheerfulness, regretting the necessity should such arise, but he would have done so without any of the ecstasy of self-sacrifice that inspired the hymns and the beatitudes on the lips of martyrs. In this sunny afternoon of middle age which had come to him there were none of the surprising flames that glorify the hour of dawn.

  The road from the parade ground through cantonments lay level and dusty; carob-trees, dense and varnished of foliage, with the long scimitar-shaped seed-pods of last year still clinging to them, met and mingled their branches together overhead, giving a vault of shadow from a midday sun, but now, as the day drew near to its close, the level rays poured dazzling between the tree-trunks, turning the dust-ridden air into a mist of dusky gold. In front, seen through the arching trees, the huddled native town rose dim and amorphous through the haze, and the acres of flowering fruit-trees were a flush of pink and white petals. Southwards, level and infinite as the sea, the Indian plain stretched to the farthest horizons, to the north rose the hills shoulder over shoulder till they culminated in fleecy clouds, among which, scarcely distinguishable, there glistened the immemorial whiteness of the eternal snows. Here, down in the plain, the very existence of those frozen cliffs seemed incredible, for, though there were still a dozen days of March to run, it seemed as if the powers of the air, in whose control is the great oven of India, had drawn the damper, so to speak, out of that cosmetic furnace during the last week, to see if the heating apparatus was all in order for the approaching hot season, and Colonel Fanshawe’s decision, against which there had been the growlings of domestic mutiny, that Elizabeth should start for England the next week, crystallized itself into the inexorable. He had gone so far in the freshness of the morning hours to-day as to promise her to reconsider his decision, but he determined now to telegraph for her passage as soon as he got home.

  He quickened his pace a little as he approached his gate, at the lure of the refreshing hours that he had promised himself in his garden before it was necessary to dress for the dinner and the ball. The hot weather had already scorched to a cinder the herbs and grasses of unwatered places, but no such tragedy had yet overtaken this acre of green coolness, with its ditches and channels of unlimited irrigation, where the unusual heat had but caused the expansion, in a burst of premature luxuriance, of all the flowers that should have decorated April. So brilliant was this galaxy, that Colonel Fanshawe could hardly regret it, though it meant that even now the days of the garden were numbered, and that through April it would sleep unblossoming, till the rains of May stirred it into that brief and delirious frenzy of flowering again that lasts but for a day or two, in some sultry intermission of the streaming skies that so soon open their flood-gates again, and cover the steaming earth with disjected petals. But at present, though April would pay the price in barrenness and withered leaf, summer and spring were in flower together, and tulips and petunias, marigolds and flame-flower, morning-glory and bougainvillæa made a jubilance of many-coloured carpet, while, more precious than all to the Colonel’s soul, his rose hedges of crimson ramblers, Gloire de Dijon, and the briars of Peshawar flared with innumerable fragrance. A few days before, reluctantly, and with some inkling of the sentiments of a murderer who plans a crime, he had abandoned, marooned, so to speak, his tennis-court to die of drought, but the motive of his
deed really gave a verdict of nothing more bloodthirsty than justifiable grassicide, for the well had given unmistakable signs that it was not capable of keeping the whole garden alive. Besides — and here for a moment his content was clouded again — Elizabeth was starting for England next week, and the tennis-court became an investment that paid no dividends in pleasure. His wife never played; she would as soon have thought of coming downstairs to breakfast, and certainly she never did that. She preferred dancing all night.

  He gave his horse into the charge of his orderly at the gate, and, a little stiff and bow-legged from so many hours in the saddle, walked up the short drive that lay between the abandoned tennis-court and the rose-garden which was in full effervescence of flower and fragrance. Between him and his garden there was a relation as intimate almost and as comprehending as that between two personalities, and had some one with the gift of vivid yet easily intelligible eloquence presented his feeling towards it, as towards some beautiful dumb creature with a living identity of its own, the Colonel, though it had never struck him in that light before, would have acknowledged the truth of the imagery. Just now this silent sweet-smelling creature had begun to make a stir again after the hot windlessness of the day, for the breeze of sunset, invigorating as wine, had just sprung up, and wafted the evidence of its fragrant life in sheets and webs of perfume through the sibilant air, while as evidence of Elizabeth there came through the open windows of the drawing-room as complicated a mêlée of sound from the grand piano. Devoted and affectionate as father and daughter were to each other, Colonel Fanshawe felt slightly shy of Elizabeth when she was at the piano, for Elizabeth playing was Elizabeth transformed. A sort of fury of passion and intentness possessed her; she evoked from the strings a personality as real to herself as was his garden to the Colonel, and all this intensity, as her bewildered father occasionally said to himself, was born from the compositions of “some German Johnny.” In that rapt adoration of melody Elizabeth’s mother lived again, just as she seemed to glow again from within Elizabeth’s flushed face and sparkling eyes as she played. So, refraining from interrupting his daughter in her ecstatic communings with the particular German Johnny who engaged her attention at the moment, the Colonel stepped softly round the corner, and ordered himself a cup of tea in his bedroom, with which he refreshed himself as he adopted a garden-garb for his hot and close-fitting uniform. His wife, as he well knew, would be resting in her sitting-room in anticipation of the fatigue of the dinner and dance which were to close the day. Had there been no dance or dinner in prospect, she would be doing the same thing in repair of previous fatigue. She was one of those women who are capable of exertion as long as that over which they exert themselves furnishes them with amusement; an hour’s uncongenial occupation tired her completely out. But she was able to do anything she wanted to, and such a performance under such circumstances seemed but to invigorate her. Her husband rejoiced in her strength, and sympathized with her weakness with equal sincerity.