Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  How did the jargon run? “The pomps and vanities of this wicked world and all the sinful lusts of the flesh.” All that had been renounced for her, very solemnly. Surely her poor godmother had not perjured herself in guaranteeing these things. She had only hoped for the best, just in the same way as Germany had done when she promised not to invade Belgium. She hoped the necessity might not arise for her doing so, just as H.R.H., who had been so pleasant a guest at Lady Gurtner’s party the other day, had hoped for the best in promising that Helen Grote should renounce all the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. For both an internal necessity had arisen: it had become a condition of life that the promises, written or spoken, should become waste paper or wasted breath. It was ridiculous to keep a promise that was made in other circumstances. And it was over this that England had gone to war, that Moloch’s fires were heated. And yet it was this, neither more nor less, that had turned Robin into that grave-gay boy who had preferred to face shot and shell rather than be sensible and stay at home, and live at ease like a few other fortunate contemporaries who had taken advantage of the facilities which influence had procured for them.

  Well: she had done her best for him, and now she must look after herself a little, and learn to enjoy and to be alive again. It was no use, so she had lately ascertained, to care too much for other people; they left you and went after their own devices, and brought upon you this intolerable sense of loneliness and of absolute indifference to the manifold joys of the world. But in order to appreciate these she must put away from her the thought of the war, which spoiled every hour into which it was permitted to intrude. Her own individuality was the final court of appeal: she must satisfy its imperious need of banishing the things that wearied and distressed it. Surely there must be other people of intelligence, who, realizing their impotence to help or hinder, had got away from the ugliness of turmoil and the waste of profitless and anxious hours.

  There was Aline Gurtner, for instance, with whom she was to have stayed in that week when first war knocked all plans on the head. She had put her visit off, promising, however, to propose herself as soon as she could manage to get away from London. Aline, with her amazing joy in life, would be just the sort of person who would not permit international complications to get between her and her pleasures. Helen would telegraph to her at once and propose a visit.

  She hesitated a moment after her telegram was written before she rang the bell to order it to be sent, and stood looking out of the window on to the square that basked in the September sunlight. Some instinct within her lifted up a rebellious voice reminding her of tedious things like duty and the root from which duty sprang, not arid morality, but love....

  At this moment there crossed the road two wounded soldiers. One had his face bound round with bandages that crossed flat from cheek to cheek instead of projecting where his nose should be: the other, on crutches, trailed a dragging foot. Perhaps some day Robin would cross the square like that, or some day perhaps he would not cross it at all.... She turned back into the room with her written telegram in her hand, and rang the bell.

  CHAPTER X

  A LINE GURTNER had been more than pleased when she received Lady Grote’s telegram proposing a visit: she was entranced, for this was precisely the sort of person whom she most wanted in her house just now. During the past fortnight she had been trying to secure a gentle, cheerful trickle of visitors there, but refusals had come in rather disconcerting numbers. She could not get the tap to run. It was quite true, of course, that everyone was very busy, and that such an allegation as reason for regret might very likely be true, but she had begun to be vaguely uneasy that it was not going to be reserved for her to declare her sympathies and show an adoring England how intensely pro-English she was, but that her English friends were proceeding to demonstrate their own sympathies by omitting to flock to her biddings. As a matter of fact, her apprehensions were entirely ill-founded, such people as she had asked — they included members of the Government who really were not completely at leisure just now — had merely been too much occupied to spend perfectly idle days in the country. But the sequence of regrets had made her a little nervous. It was also unkind of people, who should have realized how beautifully she was behaving and how she felt the war, not to crowd round her and comfort her and praise her and admire her.

  She ran to announce to her husband this gratifying intelligence that Helen Grote proposed herself. Sir Hermann had successfully concluded the financial operations which he had planned on the night of Aline’s great party, when he gnawed his nails, while the drowsy world still slept to the imminence of war, and had netted even more than the half-million he had anticipated. Now, in the economical bouleversement that had occurred, when good businesses were tottering and sound credits upset, he was content to look serenely on, and wonder, as so often before, how it was that so many people seemed to make a point of being just too late when they decided on action. So many of his acquaintances, heads of firms in the city, had, on that Saturday when he was so busy, taken the day off as usual, put on knickerbockers and played golf. Now it was his turn for the knickerbockers, while they slaved all day in their offices trying to avert shipwreck, or if, as in so many cases, shipwreck had occurred, to pick up such bits of their cargoes as the storm washed ashore. Meantime the options in colliery shares and shipping which he had bought in England were maturing very satisfactorily, and he was quite happy to wait and observe this mellowing process with the same sense of well-earned leisure with which he had been strolling round the kitchen garden that morning, and observing the pears ripening on the red-brick walls. Some were ripe already, and he was eating one that he had picked when Aline came in.

  “My dear, Helen Grote has proposed to come and stay with us,” she cried. “Is not that delightful of her?”

  He did not care two straws whether Lady Grote came or not, for when he was not at work he knew of no better mode of life than to be with Aline and the children. But the news evidently pleased Aline: she had not looked so radiant since the day when he had playfully come into her bedroom with all the sables on, and asked her if she liked his new suit. What a good joke that had been!

  “I am very well satisfied to have my Aline and my imps,” said he, “but I am pleased that your friend will come.”

  “Of course you are, darling,” said she. “It is just what I want. I will take care to send a little paragraph to the Morning Post. And I was writing only this morning to Mr. Boyton: I think I will telegraph instead, and ask him to come for the Sunday anyhow. I hope he will stop longer, and then you must take him out shooting. There is shooting in September, isn’t there?”

  “And do you forget the fat partridges your Jaeger shot for you yesterday?” he asked.

  As a matter of fact the keeper had shot them, but Sir Hermann had been out shooting, though without the success he so easily attained into other lines. He was dressed now in homespun and knickerbockers and stockings with a sort of frill round the tops which reminded the observer of the decoration of crackers.

  “Are you going to shoot to-day?” she asked.

  “No; cannot you see that I have my golfing clothes on? I have gaiters on when I shoot, and thick boots. I am going to see the bailiff now and after lunch I shall play golf. Upon my word, this English country life with plenty of exercise and good fruit like this from my own garden is just as beneficial to me as Marienbad. There is no longer a trace of acidity in all me! I am your sweet Hermann.”

  Mr. Boyton, whether or no owing to the information that Lady Grote would be a fellow-guest, was delighted to reply favourably on the prepaid form his hostess provided him with, and the two arrived that evening, in an express that Sir Hermann had stopped for them at Ashmore Fen station. This was a privilege appertaining to the owner of Ashmore House, and it gave him considerable pleasure to exercise it, for it conveyed a sense of territorial rights. Aline went to the station to meet them (in the negligent country costume of a cotton dress and a tam-o’-shanter in which she oc
casionally hit the turf with a golf club), with the sables lying handy to put on in ease she was chilly. True to her English policy, she was very voluble about the war, and her sympathies with regard to it.

  “Dearest Helen,” she said, “it was too sweet of you to propose yourself; how-d’ye-do, Mr. Boyton, very pleased you were able to come. Have you brought a gun with you? No? Hermann will lend you one. And have you brought us the evening papers, Helen? We are so terribly out of the world here, just when one wants every moment to hear the latest possible news. I wish you had been able to bring Robin with you, but of course he is with his regiment now. How proud you must be of him. Sure you’ve got all your luggage out? because it will be whirled away to Lincoln if you haven’t, for the train doesn’t stop here unless Hermann sends an order. Oh, I must speak to the station master a moment. He had news yesterday that his son was killed, and I must tell him how sorry I am. Poor fellow, he was only eighteen! Is it not heart-breaking, though of course it’s wonderful to be young and fighting for your country.”

  She bound up the broken-hearted with a few bright words, promised to send a brace of partridges to his wife, thought how wonderful she was, and rejoined the others.

  “Prepare yourself for a humdrum life, Helen,” she said—” oh, yes, just give me my fur coat, Mr. Boyton, for I have only got a cotton frock on; yes, nice aren’t they? Hermann gave me them the other day — for there’s no one here but Hermann and the children, and yet somehow I’m as busy as ever I was in town. One has to read every word of the papers now-a-days, and the news is a little more encouraging, isn’t it? You never saw anyone so depressed as Hermann and I were during the retreat: how thankful you must have been that Robin was not in that. Yes, now we’re in the avenue: there’s the house at the end. I declare I feel as if I had been born here, there’s such a sense of home about it. I long for the war to be over: do you think we shall all be happy again by Christmas? It was touch and go, was it not, whether Paris fell?”

  This was not precisely the kind of diversion for which Helen Grote had sought refuge in the country, and she tried to stem this flow of patriotism.

  “My dear, what wonderful sables!” she said. “You do have the most beautiful things. They’re Russian, I suppose.”

  “Yes, and is it not wonderful the way the Russians are getting on? They’re pouring into Galicia, aren’t they? I see the papers call them the steam-roller pounding along to Berlin. Fancy seeing the Russian troops marching down the Unter den Linden. And what is your war-work being, Mr. Boyton?”

  Mr. Boyton was, for the time being, much in the same state as Lady Grote, desiring merely, with such powers of purpose as were left in a stunned mind, to escape, as far as possible, from all thoughts and mention of the war. All his autumn plans had been upset: his carefully arranged September and October with their succession of country-house parties had collapsed like a card-house, and instead he was obliged to spend those months at home in Hampstead.

  London, it is true, was very full, but all his friends were busy, like Lady Massingberd, over funds and associations and societies for purposes of providing luxuries or necessities for soldiers and sailors, and were not thinking of him at all, or giving him those little luncheon-parties and dinner-parties which were the light and decoration of his life. His engagement-book, and therefore his existence, was empty, and this eternal monotony of war-talk was bringing him sensibly nearer melancholia. He had accepted this invitation to Lady Gurtner’s with enthusiasm, thinking that this house, with its conflicting interests of blood, would at least be an oasis in the sea of windy patriots, and here was his hostess quite unable to get off the subject of the war, and expecting him to go out shooting with her husband. He hated and distrusted firearms, never knowing what they would do next; but Lady Gurtner, more English than the English, was expecting every man to be employed in war-work, and if he was too old to shoot Germans at the front, to occupy his leisure in shooting birds in the turnips. He answered her as with a playful touch of a cat’s velvet paw, in which the claws are conjectured though not quite visible.

  “Dear lady,” he said, “my war-work at the moment is to keep an English citizen sane, that citizen being myself. I thought it would be the best possible treatment for me to come down to your delicious and sequestered glades. May we forget for a little that there is anything in the world beyond this adorable domain of yours? I even shrink from the thought of shooting: there is a hint of destruction and death connected with it. I should be exceedingly unlikely to destroy anything except perhaps a beater or two, but when, as I gather, we need men so badly, I should be sorry to do even that. Peace and plenty! Let us take that for our text.”

  Oddly enough, the moment that he uttered sentiments which were so completely in accord with Helen Grote’s purpose in coming here, she felt herself disowning them as regards her own part, and disdaining them as regards his. It was really awful that a man should speak like that. Imagine Robin or her husband, who worked all day in the censor’s office, uttering these bloodless, boudoir sentiments! On the other hand, Aline’s war-talk was not a whit preferable, and it had been Aline’s war-talk that had provoked this polished little tirade. But whatever its demerits, it had the one merit of sincerity, whereas she had experienced a slight difficulty in accepting the complete genuineness of Aline’s rapture at the thought of the Russians marching down the avenues of Berlin. But there was no need for the moment of steering a fresh course, for they drew up at the great red-brick portico of the house. A big climbing-rose sprawled over it: bees hummed in the flower-beds, it basked in the serene afternoon sun.

  The place, when the mortgage was foreclosed by Sir Hermann, had belonged to some cousins of Helen’s: there were early memories connected with its shabby distinction: the fragrance of long-forgotten things was wafted out of its cool portals.

  “Ah, how delicious,” she said. “I quite share your feeling of being at home here, Aline. And here is Sir Hermann.”

  He came out of the hall to meet them, dressed in his golfing clothes which Aline had so mistakenly supposed to be a shooting-suit. He carried a golf club over his shoulder in the manner of a gun, and his homespun pockets bulged with balls. He looked like a biting caricature of an English squire as seen on the stage of a Parisian music-hall. From the hall inside came the cries and laughter of the children, who were seated on a rug which Freddy pulled across the slippery marble floor. Bertie, who when excited always talked German, was starting him with an “Ein, zwei, drei”...

  “Come and say how-do-you-do at once to Lady Grote,” called their mother, and the three jolly little boys ran out into the porch.

  “Ah, my chicks,” said Lady Gurtner, “have you been having a nice game? And did I hear you talking German? For shame! Yes, the right hand, Jackie, and shake hands with Mr. Boyton, too. Let us go straight out through the house, Helen, and have tea in the garden, where it will be ready.”

  “And you have brought fresh news and good, I hope, Lady Grote?” asked Sir Hermann, who was ignorant of Mr. Boyton’s pursuit of sanity. “What was the report from France this morning?”

  Aline took his arm in hers.

  “Now, Hermann,” she said, “we’ve settled to leave the war alone and pretend there’s nothing going on. Won’t that be nice? Look, Helen, I told you we had made an Italian hall. Does it not look deliciously cool on this hot day?”

  “Cool, yes: cooling room,” said Boyton below his breath. The powerful resemblance to a Turkish bath could scarcely be missed.

  Helen looked round, was stunned, and recovered.

  “How perfectly gorgeous, dear Aline,” she said.

  “Perfectly gorgeous! I never saw anything so magnificent.”

  This was quite true, it also convinced, and as it was no good getting anyone to sit down on the cunning hot-water pipes, since the central heating was not on, they went on past the cunning lift and through the most velvety drawing-room on to the lawn, where in a tent that flew a flag emblazoned with the Gurtner arms lately discovered
by the Heralds’ College, tea was waiting.

  There was a good deal of admiration that must be expended over the tidiness with which Freddy ate his bread and jam, and the neatness with which Bertie tucked his napkin in, and the propriety with which Jackie said his grace, but anyhow these were subjects right away from the war-zone. Gradually, thanks to the unconscious youth of the children, and the mellow stability of the house, the three hundred years old lawn, the ordered and secure serenity of trees and stretch of sun-hazed pastures, something of the peaceful outlook made feint of returning, and Mr. Boyton felt that the treatment suited the British citizen of whom he was in charge....

  “And you will shoot with me to-morrow?” asked Sir Hermann suddenly, not knowing that sport as well as war was abhorrent to his guest’s mind. “I can show you some good sport among my turnips.”

  For a moment Aline forgot her Englishness and spoke in German.

  “Dearest, Mr. Boyton does not care for sport,” she said. “We will eat your partridges when you have killed them.”

  For no very sound reason the “language of song” came as a slight shock to Helen Grote. She was perfectly well aware that the Gurtners spoke German to each other as often as English, but she did not expect to hear it just now. It rather altered the values of the setting. She covered it up, not too hurriedly, but did not fail to sec the frown of admonition which Sir Hermann gave his wife.