Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He was no lily-handed gardener, no finger-tip lover, who, with an ivory-handled sécateur, snips off minute dead twigs, and selects a rosebud for his buttonhole, but went about his business with the tender ruthlessness that true gardening demands. Up one of the pillars of the veranda there climbed together a great ramping mass of blue convolvulus and an Ard’s pillar; and the constricting plant was quietly intent on strangling the rose. Now, the convolvulus was an interloping adventuress, invading territories that were not her own, and regretfully but inexorably Colonel Fanshawe committed murder, snipping off the sappy stem at its root, and gently disentangling its voluted tendrils. As he stripped it down the new bull-pup came with sentimental sighs out of the house, and then, becoming aware, no doubt by some subtle brain-wave, that the murdered morning-glory was an enemy, flung himself on the bestrewn tendrils, and got tightly involved therein, and rolled away in a state of wild-eyed and bewildered entanglement, barking hoarsely. Upon which an observant pigeon on the roof remarked quite clearly, “Look at the fool! Look at the fool!” Simultaneously, with a loud false chord, the wild torrents of notes within ceased. There came a sound quite exactly as if somebody had banged down the lid of a piano, and Elizabeth came out on to the veranda. She was very tall, as tall almost as her father, and the long lines of her figure showed slim and boylike through the thin blouse and blue linen skirt against which the evening breeze pressed, moulding them to the limbs within. Her hair lay thick and low above her small face, and her mouth, in spite of the heightened colour of her cheeks and the vividness of her eyes, drooped a little as if fatigued. She had clasped her long-fingered hands behind her head, and she stood there a moment without seeing her father, with amusement gathering in her eyes as she observed the comedy of the constricted puppy. Then, turning her head, she saw him.

  “Oh, daddy!” she cried. “Are you back? And, if so, why didn’t you tell me? The fact is that you love your garden better than your only daughter.”

  Colonel Fanshawe had two nails and a piece of bass string in his mouth destined for the support of the disentangled rose, and could give no assurance beyond an incoherent mumbling.

  “It is true,” said Elizabeth. “And what makes me feel it more keenly is that I haven’t had any tea. Daddy, do leave your silly plants and talk to me. I haven’t spoken to a soul all day. Mamma had lunch in her room. She is saving up for this evening, and I haven’t seen anybody. In fact, it has all been rather dismal. I’ve been playing the piano, and I have come to the conclusion that I shall never be able to play at all. So I banged down the lid, and I shall never open it again. Do get down from that silly ladder and talk to me.”

  Colonel Fanshawe was methodical. He put the two nails in a box and looped up the spray of the rose in a manner which, though temporary, would last till he could get to work again.

  “That sounds rather a dismal little chronicle, Lizzy,” he said. “So if you feel that we can’t talk while I go on gardening — —”

  “It has nothing to do with my feelings,” remarked Elizabeth; “it is a mere question of external impossibilities. Have you had tea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then come and see me have mine. I shall eat quantities and quantities of tea, and not have any dinner, I think. One can’t dine alone, and you and mamma are dining out at the Residency and going to the dance. Daddy, I do think mamma might have let me go to the ball; I’m eighteen, and if one isn’t old enough to go to a dance at eighteen, I don’t know when one is.”

  Elizabeth paused a moment, and put her nose in the air.

  “I don’t believe mamma will want me to come out till it is time for me to go in again,” she remarked.

  Colonel Fanshawe had an admirable gift of silence. When he concluded that there was no advantage to be gained by speech he could refrain from it, instead of, like the most part of mankind, making a series of injudicious observations. At the bottom of Elizabeth’s remark, as he well knew, there lay stewing a herb of rather bitter infusion, which he had no desire to stir up. But Elizabeth, so it seemed, felt disposed to do the stirring herself.

  “Mamma will have the next eight months all to herself,” she said, “and she can dance all the time. I wish to state quite explicitly that I think she might have let me go to this dance. I have told her so, and so for fear she should tell you, I do it myself.”

  Elizabeth’s eye wandered on to the path, and she broke off suddenly.

  “Oh, my beloved Shah Jehan,” she said, “you will certainly strangle yourself.”

  This appeared highly probable, for Shah Jehan, the young and imperial bull-pup, had managed to entangle himself so strictly in the yards of strong convolvulus which the Colonel had cut down that his eyes were starting out of his head, and only the most remote sort of growl could escape from his enveloped throat. With the cake-knife, which she snatched up from the tea-table, Elizabeth ran to his rescue.

  “It’s such a blessing, daddy,” she said as she returned to him, “that you and I are so very much one person, because we can say anything we like to each other, and it is certain that the other one — how tiresome language is — the one I mean, who listens only really listens to his own thoughts.”

  “Ah, my dear Elizabeth!” said he suddenly, laying his hand on her arm. If Elizabeth’s mother lived again when Elizabeth played, masked behind her daughter’s face, she appeared with no guard of flesh in between when Elizabeth said that.

  She drew his hand through her arm and strolled with him up the path.

  “It is so, daddy,” she repeated; “and when I grumble to you it is only as if I grumbled to myself. Mamma might have let me go to this one dance, and she doesn’t, because she wants all the dancing she can get herself, and naturally doesn’t want to sit in a row instead. But she’ll have to let me come out next autumn. Oh, by the way, I had forgotten the most important thing of all. Have you settled when I am to go to England?”

  “Yes, dear; next week. I have telegraphed for your passage.”

  “What a loathsome and disgusting daddy,” remarked Elizabeth.

  “Possibly! But the loathsome daddy isn’t going to have a tired and white-faced daughter, if he can avoid it. I shall miss you more than you can possibly guess, Lizzie.”

  Elizabeth gave a great sigh.

  “I’m so glad!” she said. “I hope you will be thoroughly unhappy. I shan’t like it, either. But mamma won’t mind; that’s a comfort.”

  “Elizabeth, I wish — —”

  “Yes, I know, dear; so do I. You needn’t explain. I wish to begin to eat my enormous tea also, so let us sit down. I don’t want to go to England; and, besides, staying with Aunt Julia is exactly like lying on a feather-bed, with all the luxuries of the season on a table close to you, and the windows tightly shut. And Edith is like the clean lace-border to the pillow. I shall be so comfortable.”

  “Well, that’s something, Lizzie.”

  “It isn’t; it’s nothing and worse than nothing. I don’t want to be comfortable. Nothing that is really alive is ever comfortable. Aunt Julia and Edith and all Heathmoor generally are dead and buried. I am not sure they do not stink — —”

  “My dear — —”

  “As it says in the Bible,” said Elizabeth, “nobody there is ever hungry or thirsty, nobody is unhappy or happy, nobody wants. They are all like fishes in an aquarium; you can’t get at them because there is a sheet of strong glass in between. And there aren’t any tigers or burning ghats or cobras or cholera.”

  “I shouldn’t be particularly sorry if there were fewer of those blessings here,” remarked her father.

  “Perhaps; but they help to make things real. It is so easy to lose all sense of being alive if you are too comfortable.”

  Elizabeth pointed to the molten west.

  “There,” she said, “that’s a sunset. But in England for the most part they wrap it up in nice soft thick clouds, so that it isn’t a real sunset. And dear Aunt Julia wraps up her own life and the life of every one about her in the same way. S
he mops up every one’s vitality as with a sponge by thinking exclusively about not getting wet or tired. Oh, how I love this naked, tired, wicked, mysterious land, with all its deadliness and its dust and its sunsets and its secrets, which I shall never fathom any more than I can fathom Schumann! I’m a savage, you know. I love wild, unhappy things — —”

  Elizabeth broke off suddenly.

  “I don’t believe even you understand what I mean, daddy,” she said.

  “Yes, my dear, I do,” said he. “I could tell you exactly what you mean. But have your say first; you have not nearly done yet. I will tell you what you mean when you have finished.”

  Elizabeth laughed.

  “That will be a good thing,” she said, “because, though I know that I mean something, I often have not the least idea what it is. Daddy, I wish I was a boy so terribly sometimes, and I know you do too. If I was a boy I would get up now and kiss you, and walk straight off into the direction of where the moon is just going to rise. I would have adventures — oh, such adventures!”

  “My dear, you would get malaria, and come home next morning with a violent headache and ask me for some quinine.”

  She shook her head.

  “You are wrong,” she said. “I wouldn’t come back even to you for years, not until I had learned what it all means. I would be afraid of nothing; I would shrink from nothing. Perhaps I should see Malaria herself in the jungle down there by the Indus — a tall, white-faced woman, with golden irises to her eyes, and I would talk to her and learn about her. I would go into the temple of the Brahmins at Benares and listen to them preaching sedition. I would sit by the corpse as it burned by the river bank, watching it, oh, so quietly, and loving it. I would go into the opium dens and learn how to dream.... Learn how to dream! I wonder if that is what I want to do? I think it must be that. Sometimes when I am playing I begin to dream, and just as I am getting deep I strike a false chord and wake myself up, or mamma comes in and says it is time for me to go driving with her.”

  Elizabeth had forgotten about the enormous tea she had intended to eat, and still sat upright on the edge of her chair, looking out over the gathering night. Already in the swiftly darkening dusk the colours were withdrawn from the flower-beds, and only the heavy odours gave token of their blossoming. A streak of dwindling orange lingered in the west; above, in the fathomless blue, stars that five minutes before had been but minute pinpricks of luminance were grown to yellow lamps and globes of light. Somewhere in the lines a bugle suddenly blared out its message to the stillness and was silent again. A little farther off a tom-tom beat with endless iteration.

  Then she spoke again, more rapidly.

  “It is only by dreaming that you can get close to the world,” she said, “and hope to get at its meaning. People who are completely awake spend all their time in doing things that don’t matter. You, for instance, daddy — you and your inspections and reviews. What does it all come to? Would this world be one whit the worse if you didn’t do any of it? Yet perhaps I am wronging you, for, anyhow, you can go mooning about your garden for hours together. Let me see — where had I got to?”

  Colonel Fanshawe was watching Elizabeth a little uneasily. This strange mood of hers was not new to him. Half a dozen times before he had known her go off into these dim rhapsodies, and they somewhat disconcerted him. He made an effort to bring her back into realms less shadowy.

  “Where had you got to?” he asked. “Upon my word, my dear, I don’t think you had got anywhere particular. Wouldn’t it be well to begin that enormous tea of which you spoke?”

  But the girl was fathoms deep in this queer reverie of speculation. She shook her head at him.

  “No; you don’t understand yet,” she said. “One has to dream first before one can do any good while one is awake. Unless you call baking bread and milking cows doing good. You have to penetrate, penetrate. It is a kingdom with high walls round it, and I expect there are many gates. Perhaps we all have our own gates; perhaps mine is a gate made of music and yours is a garden-gate. Don’t misunderstand me, daddy, or think I am talking nonsense, or think, again, that what I mean is religion, though I dare say there is a religion-gate as well. All I know is that you have to pass dreaming through one of the gates in order to get inside the kingdom. And when you do get inside you find that it isn’t so much that you have got inside the kingdom as that the kingdom has got inside you. I know it must be so. Each of us, I expect, has to find himself, and when he has found himself.... Oh, God knows!”

  She broke off, and instantly poured herself out a cup of tea.

  “I am so hungry,” she said, “and I had quite forgotten. While I eat and drink, daddy, you shall keep your promise and tell me what I mean. You said you knew. Or have I been talking the most dreadful rubbish? But, if so, I am rubbish myself, for what I have said is Me.”

  Colonel Fanshawe lit a cigarette.

  “No, my dear, you haven’t been talking rubbish,” he said. “But if I had said exactly the same it would have been rubbish.” He meditated a moment or two, for, though he felt what he wanted to say, it was rather difficult for him to find the words for it. At the same time also there was that in what Elizabeth had said which strangely moved him; it recalled to him in this sunny afternoon of life something of what he had felt when he brought home, worshipping and loving, Elizabeth’s mother.

  “You have talked admirable sense, dear,” he said, “for the very simple reason that you are eighteen. But it would be rubbish in my mouth at forty-eight. You feel that you are surrounded by delicious mysteries, into the heart of which you mean to penetrate. You can do it too, and I so earnestly hope you will. While you are yet young you can fall in love.”

  Elizabeth looked at him in disappointed amazement.

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  “I assure you it is enough. You will not believe it now — —”

  “But fall in love?” said the girl again. “With a man? Just with a common man?”

  “Yes, just with a common man,” said he. “At least, it is quite certain that the immense majority of mankind will call him a common man. You will find that he makes everything beautiful.”

  “But I know how beautiful it all is already,” said she.

  “Yes, and it all puzzles you. You don’t know what it means. Well, it means what I have told you — love.”

  “Oh, daddy, is that all?” said the girl again.

  “In a way, it is. I mean that you can’t go beyond that. But — —”

  Again he paused, feeling a sudden shyness, even with his own daughter, in speaking of anything that concerned him so intimately.

  “But though you can’t go beyond love,” he said, “you can go into it — penetrate, penetrate, as you said just now, yourself. And the more you penetrate into it the more you will see that there is no end to it, and no beginning either. And then you will call it by another name.”

  He paused for a moment, and got up as he heard himself somewhat shrilly summoned from within the house.

  “It seems to you all rather dull, I am afraid, my dear,” he said, “but it isn’t.”

  Elizabeth rose also.

  “But why would it be nonsense for you to speak of it as I did?” she asked. “And why is it excellent sense for me to do so?”

  “Because when you are forty-eight, my dear, you will have had to learn a certain sort of patience and indulgence, which is quite out of place when you are eighteen. You will have seen that the people who bake bread and milk cows and review troops, as I do, may conceivably be doing — well, doing quite nicely. But you are quite right to think them useless old fogies at present!”

  Elizabeth gave him a quick little kiss.

  “You are a darling!” she said. “And now I am going to vanish swiftly round the corner of the veranda. Mamma has called you three times and you haven’t answered. You will get into trouble, and so I desert you.”

  Elizabeth’s amiable scheme was executed a little too late. She had barely got half-way do
wn the veranda when her stepmother rustled out of the drawing-room, already dressed for her party. Her light, slight figure was still like a girl’s — like a girl’s, too, was her evening dress, with its simple, straight cut. Nor did her face — smooth, delicate, and soft — belie the impression; but her forehead and the outer corners of her eyes were a little lined, as if a sleepless night had momentarily devitalized her youth. And her voice, when she spoke, was old — old and querulous.