Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  He paused, thinking out further checks on his father.

  “There’s William, too,” he said. “William’s devoted to me, simply, as far as I can tell, because he saved my life when I was a tiny kid. If I ask William to tell me whether my father gets drinks through him quietly when I’m not there, I’m sure he will let me know. How would that be?”

  Jessie had an uncomfortable moment. The idea of getting a servant to report to Archie on his father’s proceedings was as repugnant to her as, she thought, it must be to Archie. Possibly his main motive, that of taking care of his father, was so dominant in him that he did not pause to consider the legitimacy of any means. But, somehow, it was very unlike Archie to have conceived so backstairs an idea.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t quite do that,” she said. “You wouldn’t either, Archie.”

  “I don’t see why not. The cure is more important than the means.”

  Jessie suddenly felt a sort of bewilderment. It could scarcely have been Archie who said that, according to her knowledge of Archie.

  “But surely that’s impossible,” she said. “What would you feel if you found your father had been setting William to spy and report on you?”

  Archie’s voice suddenly rose.

  “Oh, what nonsense!” he said. “You speak as if I was going to break my bargain with my father. I never heard such nonsense.”

  Once again the sense of bewilderment came over Jessie. That wasn’t like Archie…

  “I don’t imply anything of the kind,” she said. “But I do feel that it’s impossible for you to get William to have an eye on your father, and report to you. And I’m almost certain that you really agree with me.”

  Archie considered this, and then laughed.

  “I suppose I do,” he said. “But the ardour of the newly born missionary was hot within me. Are missionaries born or made, by the way? Anyhow, I’m a missionary now. Nobody could have guessed that I was going to be a missionary.”

  Their stroll to-night was only up and down the broad gravel walk in front of the windows. It was very hot and all the drawing-room windows were open, so also were those of Lord Tintagel’s study and the windowed door that led into the garden. As they passed this Archie saw a footman bring in a tray on which were set the usual evening liquids, and he guessed that his father had forgotten or had omitted to say that the syphon and some ice was all that would be needed. He thought for a moment, intently and swiftly.

  “Jessie, they’ve brought in that beastly whisky again,” he said. “I must tell them to take it away: my father mustn’t see it. Just go down opposite the drawing-room windows, will you, and make sure my father is still playing cards, while I take the bottle away. Make me a sign.”

  Archie waited outside till this was given, and then went into his father’s room. The man had gone away, and he took up the whisky-bottle with the intention of putting it back in the dining-room. But, even as his fingers closed on it, without warning, his desire for drink swooped down on him like the coming of a summer storm. He half filled a glass with the spirit, poured soda-water on the top and gulped it down. That was what he wanted, and then, with a swift cunning, he rinsed out the glass with soda-water, drank that also, and, filling it half up again with water, put it on the table by the chair where he usually sat. Then there was the bottle to dispose of, and he went out into the hall to take it to the dining-room. But, even as he crossed the foot of the stairs, another notion irresistibly possessed him, and up he went three steps at a time, and concealed it behind some clothes in his chest of drawers. He had discovered an excellent reason for doing that, for, if he left it in the dining-room, his father might find it there. It was much safer in his room. Then, tingling and content, and feeling that Martin would approve (indeed it seemed that he had prompted) this missionary enterprise, he rejoined Jessie again, his eyes sparkling, his mouth gay and quivering.

  “I’ve done it,” he said. “I thought at first of taking the bottle to the dining-room, but my father might have found it there.”

  “What did you do with it?” asked Jessie.

  Archie took no time to consider.

  “I rang the bell and told James to take it away again to the pantry,” he said.

  “That was clever of you, Archie.”

  “I know that. They’re still playing cards, aren’t they? Let’s have one more turn, then. Jessie, I wish you weren’t going away to-morrow.”

  “I must. I promised my father to get back. And Helena wants me.”

  “Oh well, that settles it,” said Archie. “Helena must have all she wants. That is part of Helena, isn’t it?”

  For a moment Jessie thought that he was speaking with the bitterest irony, but immediately afterwards she withdrew that, for it struck her that Archie was, in some inexplicable way, perfectly sincere: there was the unmistakable ring of truth in his voice; he meant what he said. And, as if to endorse that, he went on:

  “We all do what Helena wants: you, I, the Bradshaw, all of us. She wants to be loved, isn’t that it? and to want to be loved is a royal command; all proper people must obey. I have been a rebel you know, and, — oh Jessie, how awfully ashamed I am! I let myself hate Helena; I encouraged myself to hate her. But I’ve returned to my allegiance, thank God.”

  She turned an enquiring face to him.

  “Archie, dear,” she said, “I am so thankful that you are so changed. You’re utterly different from what you have been. Last night you were bitter and terrible: you made my heart ache. But all to-day you’ve been absolutely your old self again. And it’s so immense and so sudden. Can’t you tell me at all what caused it? I should love to know, if you feel like telling me.”

  He took her arm again.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “You did me a lot of good last night when you made me realize your friendship. That helped; I do believe that helped.”

  Jessie could not quite accept this, though it warmed her heart that Archie thought of that.

  “But you always knew my friendship,” she said.

  “I know I did. But I appreciated it most when I felt absolutely empty. There’s something more than that, though…”

  He paused.

  “Ah, do tell me,” said Jessie.

  He could not make up his mind on the instant, for he knew Jessie’s repugnance to the whole idea of those supernatural communications. But he felt warm and alert and expansive; besides, her friendship, which he truly valued, yearned for his confidence, which is the meat and drink of friendship. Sometimes it was necessary to deceive your friends; it had been necessary for him to deceive her about the disposal of the whisky-bottle; but, though she might not approve, he could at least tell her what had made sunshine all day for him, and what was making it now.

  “It’s this,” he said. “Martin came to me last night. I talked to him; I saw him. It has put me right: he has made me see things quite differently. He told me to be patient, to cling to love always, to let my hate be turned into love. I can’t express to you at all what a difference that made to me. I felt he knew; he could see, as he said, that the darkness in which I thought I walked was not darkness at all. I know you have no sympathy with his coming to me: it seems to you either nonsense or something very dangerous. But I know you have sympathy with the result of it.”

  Suddenly his explanation of the voices she had heard last night occurred to him.

  “When you told me this morning that you had heard talking in my room,” he said, “I did not mean to tell you about Martin, and so I invented something — oh yes, that I had been reading aloud what I had written, to account for it. It wasn’t true, but I had to tell some fib. And did you really hear conversation going on? That’s awfully interesting.”

  “I thought I did,” said she. “And there was knocking or hammering. Did you invent something about that too?”

  “Oh yes,” said Archie. “But I don’t really know what the knocking was. As I was going off into trance, I heard loud knocking of some sort, but I didn’t let i
t disturb the oncoming of the trance. It deepened, and then Martin came, and I talked with him and saw him.”

  “Oh Archie, how do you know it was he?” she cried, wildly enough, hardly knowing what she meant, but speaking from the dictate of some nightmare that screamed and struggled in her mind.

  “Why, of course it was he,” said Archie. “I recognized him, superficially, that is to say, from my knowledge of my own face, just as I recognized the photograph in the cache at Grives from its likeness to me. But I know it was he in some far more essential and inward manner. It was Martin.”

  “Will he come again?” asked the girl.

  “I hope so, many times. Indeed, he promised to. I needed him, he got permission to come to me in my need. Is he not ministering to it? Haven’t you seen the immense change in me?”

  Undeniably she had seen that, and for a moment a little pang of human disappointment came over her.

  “I’m afraid, then, the knowledge of my friendship hasn’t had much to do with it,” she said.

  “Jessie, don’t think I undervalue that,” said Archie, speaking quite frankly and sincerely. “I thank you for it tremendously; I love to know it is there. I may count on it always, mayn’t I?”

  They still stood a moment under the star-swarming sky, sundered by the night from all other presences.

  “I needn’t assure you of that,” she said. “And, Archie, I may be utterly wrong in what I feel about Martin’s communications to you. Who knows what conditions exist for the souls of those we have loved, and whom we neither of us believe have died with the decay of the perishable body? But, my dear, do be careful. If in some miraculous way you have been given access which is denied to almost all mankind, do use it only in truth and love and reverence.”

  “You’re frightened about it,” said Archie.

  “I know I am. If Martin can come to you, why should not other spirits? Other spirits, intelligences terrible and devilish, might deceive you into thinking that they were he. You remember at Silorno he said he couldn’t come again.”

  “I know; but I wasn’t in sore need then,” said he.

  They had again come opposite Lord Tintagel’s study, and, even as they passed, Archie saw him with his finger on the bell. Instantly he guessed that he was ringing to know why the whisky had not been brought. The footman would come and say that he had brought it…

  Archie felt an exhilarated acuteness of brain: the situation had only to be put before him for him to see the answer to it. In his presence, remembering the contract of the morning, his father could not ask for the whisky.

  “Come in and say good-night to my father, Jess,” he said.

  They entered together and immediately afterwards the footman came in from the hall-door. Lord Tintagel looked at him, then back at Archie, who was watching.

  “It’s nothing, James,” he said. “I rang for something, but it doesn’t matter.”

  The man left the room and immediately afterwards Jessie said good-night and went also. Archie turned to his father with a broad, kindly smile.

  “Father, I believe I’m a great thought-reader,” he said. “I believe I can tell you what you rang for.”

  His father’s grim face relaxed.

  “You young devil,” he said.

  Archie laughed.

  “I’ve guessed right, then,” he said. “You surely don’t want to drink success to our contract again.”

  “But I don’t know why James didn’t bring the whisky as usual,” said he. “I — I forgot to tell him not to.”

  “But I didn’t,” said Archie.

  “I see. Well, a bargain’s a bargain. Only now there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason for not going to bed.”

  Archie yawned rather elaborately, and went to the table where, earlier in the evening, he had put down his glass half filled with soda. He drank it, sniffing to see if there was any taint of spirit about it. But he had rinsed it thoroughly.

  “I came in during my stroll with Jessie and took some soda,” he said. “Not a bad drink, but I think it makes one sleepy. I shall go to bed, too.”

  * * * * *

  Jessie left early next morning, expecting to be gone before anybody else made an appearance. But, just as she got into the motor, Archie, rosy and suffused with sleep, like a child that has lain still and grown all night, came flying downstairs in dressing-gown and pyjamas.

  “Had to come down and say good-bye, Jessie,” he said. “Do come back; come down for next Sunday, and we’ll go up together for Helena’s wedding. Promise!”

  Jessie looked at that “morning face” which glowed with the exuberance of boyish health and happiness. She herself had slept very badly, dozing for a little and then being awakened by the sound of talking next door, and of peremptory resounding tappings. And here was Archie, radiant and fresh and revitalized, and her love glowed at the thought that he wanted her, even though it was but friendship that he sought and friendship that he had to offer.

  “Yes, Archie, I should love to come,” she said.

  “That’s ripping. I say, shall I drive with you to the station just as I am? Why shouldn’t I? Pyjamas and dressing-gown are perfectly decent if William will fetch me my slippers, which I seem to have forgotten, unless he lends me his boots.”

  “Your bath’s ready, my lord,” said William with a broad grin.

  “Well, perhaps I’ll have it then. Good-bye, Jess. Come early on Saturday.”

  CHAPTER XI

  Archie was lying on the turf in front of the enclosed bathing-place where the stream debouched into the lake. There was a good stretch of deep water free from weeds, and for the last half-hour he had been swimming and diving in it. Now, with hair drying back into its crisp curls under the hot sun, he lay on the short warm turf, with his chin supported on his hands, in an ecstasy of animal content. At this edge of the water the bank was made firm and solid with wooden boarding that went down into deep water, but across the estuary of the stream, broadening out into the lake, the shallow margin was fringed with bulrushes and loosestrife. A strip of low-lying meadow land behind was pink with campion and ragged-robin and starred with meadow-sweet, the scent of which mingled with the undefinable cool smell of running water. A bed of gravel made the bottom of the stream, and through the sunlit water the pebbles gleamed like topazes through some liquid veil.

  Never before had Archie been so permeated with the sense of the amazing loveliness of the world, and of the ineffable joy of living and of being part of it. He had wrestled with the swiftness of the stream as it narrowed, had clung to rocks and tree-roots below the surface, letting the current comb over and around and almost through him, then, letting go of his anchorage, had been floated down into the lake again with arms and legs outspread, and now, lying close-pressed to the turf with wet chest and dripping shoulders, he seemed to be part of the triumph of the summer, and of the immortal youth of the world. Surely there was no further heaven than this possible, namely, to be young and to desire and to have desire gratified, and whet the appetite for more. There was no clearer duty in the day than to be bathed in the bliss of life, to suck out the last drop of sweetness from the world which had been created for the joy of men and the glory of God. There was no such thing as evil; evil was but the label attached by the sour-minded to the impulses and acts for which they had not sufficient vitality… And it was Martin who had taught him all this.

  Archie had come back home this morning after a day and a couple of nights in town. He had bought Helena her wedding present, he had taken his completed manuscript to his publishers, he had dined and danced and supped, and filled the hours of day and night with the extravagant excesses in which up till now he had never indulged. Some innate fastidiousness or morality had led him to look on the looser pleasures of youth with disdain or disgust; now he smiled indulgently at himself for his narrow priggishness. How utterly wrong he had been to think that such things stained or soiled a boy; they had but caused him to realize himself and intensified existence for him.
They were the exercise of the faculties and possibilities with which God had endowed him, and which were not meant to rust in disuse. It was right for him “richly to enjoy,” as Martin had said: it was a crime against love and life to starve on a meatless diet… Above all, he had seen Helena again, had confessed and recanted the bitterness he had felt towards her, and she had forgiven him, and welcomed him back “with blessings on the falling out, that all the more endears,” as the prim little poem said.

  Archie laughed quietly to himself and said aloud:

  ”When we fall out with those we love,

  And kiss again with tears.”

  “But there weren’t many tears,” he added.

  He understood Helena now. She wanted, so sensibly, to make herself quite comfortable for this journey through life. If Marquises with millions desired her to go shares with them, naturally she consented. But to do that was not the least the same as taking vows and going into a nunnery. It was the nunnery that she was coming out of. Of course, just for the present Archie understood he would not see her, for she and the Bradshaw were going a yachting tour in the Norwegian fjords. But they would be back again before the end of September. So much and no more had her voice told him, but her eyes said much more intimate things, though naturally she did not express them, and when he asked if he might kiss her (that cousinly kiss which she had wanted at Silorno) her lips agreed with what her eyes said. She had never been so adorably pretty, and she had never been so demurely clever. She had said nothing which a girl who was to become another man’s wife in a few days should not say, and yet Archie felt that he understood perfectly all the things she did not say. Most brilliant perhaps of all was her warning, “I shall tell the Bradshaw that I allowed you to kiss me,” she cried. “But I’m not frightened: he is such a dear.”

  Gone, then, were all Archie’s troubles and bitternesses on this point. He had love to cling to, and he scarcely felt jealous of the Bradshaw. For, if things had been the other way about, and Helena had been engaged to him, would she have allowed the Bradshaw to kiss her? He knew very well that she would not.