Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

In view of the extreme importance of ascertaining the attitude of the Turkish Government towards the German control, these facts seem to merit the serious consideration of His Majesty’s Government.

  As he passed the room where the King’s Messengers delivered their bags, the door opened and there came out Vincent Douglas, a Cambridge friend of Bernard’s. He was a tall, square fellow, handsome in the prize-fighter style, and heavy and strong in movement.

  “Hullo, Bernard,” he said. “I’ve just got in. Boat five hours late owing to one of those submarines which was flittering about. Ought to have been here at half-past seven. You’re late too, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I wanted to finish a report to-night.”

  Douglas laughed.

  “I should have thought any time next year would have done as well,” he said. “But I suppose you’ve got to try them with all sorts of flies, like salmon. Half-past one, and not a taxi to be had. I let mine go, like a fool.”

  “I’ve got a car,” said Bernard. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Good man! I think Mrs. Courthope’s would be a very pleasant place to go to. She’s got a party, I know, because she asked me to dine, and stop on for breakfast. I like a comprehensive invitation. Why don’t you come too?”

  “Not dressed,” said Bernard.

  Douglas laughed again.

  “Well, most of the girls haven’t got much on nowadays, nor the women either. Princess Lutloff was there the other night: she had a muff and a tiara, nothing else I assure you. I like the modem style, where you can wear as little and do as much as you like. Really, Florence Courthope is a wonder. Parties all August: they ought to make her a Dame of the British Empire!”

  “You are a voluptuous sensualist,” remarked Bernard, as the car moved silently away.

  “We all are, in our different lines. It’s voluptuous sensualism to have a Rolls-Royce waiting for you all night, because you want to finish a report, when, as I say, next year would have done as well. Every one sets out to do what he likes best; he may call it duty, or living for others, or idealism, but that’s the way he gets his fun!”

  “I think I’ve heard that before,” said Bernard. “Naturally. But you’ve never heard an intelligent refutation of it. If you had thought it would amuse you to go to Florence’s party you would have gone, instead of keeping your chauffeur waiting for you to finish your report.”

  “Oh, come! If one takes up any sort of career, one has to do the work as well as possible.”

  Douglas shook his head.

  “You’re only shifting the ground,” he said. “You took up your diplomatic career because you thought you would be happier doing something like that than doing nothing, and having taken it up, because you liked it best, it is only natural that you want to make the most of it, just as the gourmets by profession want to have as many good dinners as possible. You didn’t take up diplomacy because you thought it an unpleasant duty, which you would have liked to shirk. You knew that shirking would make you more uncomfortable than being a diplomat.”

  “But there’s a scale: an ambassador has done more for the good of the world than the finest of gourmets!” said Bernard.

  “I’m not so sure of that. Take a case in point. What good were our ambassadors with regard to the war? The whole raison d’être of them was to avert it. Did our diplomacy at Constantinople do much for us? But a company of exquisite gourmets do a great deal for the world. They improve the standard of cooking, and certainly a good dinner appeals to any one who isn’t an idiot. Good food improves the temper: it is also remarkably pleasant to any one with taste.”

  “I don’t know that it’s a particularly high mission to overeat every day,” said Bernard.

  “Ah, my little slim friend, you have a confused mind. You are confusing greediness with the appreciation of fine flavours. You will tell me next that the devout lover is merely a sensualist. But talking of that in connection with duty, why don’t you marry?”

  “If it comes to that, why don’t you?” asked Bernard.

  “Because the admirable Mahomet is not a prophet in this country. I could name you a harem of girls without the slightest difficulty, but when it comes to one, every sensible fellow will pause.”

  Bernard laughed.

  “I shake hands with you over that, Vincent,” he said. “I want the only right one, and I haven’t found her yet.”

  “And probably when you do, she’ll be an idealist also, and you won’t be the only right one. But here we are. There’ll be lots here who are almost exactly right. Why don’t you come in?”

  “Because I prefer the sensualism of going home.”

  “That’s egoistic. Will you dine with me tomorrow? I don’t go back to Rome till Saturday.”

  “I can’t, I’m afraid. I’m going to Merriby tomorrow: I ought to have gone to-night, but I wanted to finish a bit of a job.”

  “Merriby? The voluptuous Merriby? Lord! I’m told that half the butterflies of England are at Merriby.”

  Bernard became slightly pompous.

  “I’m going to stay with my mother and sister,” he said.

  Douglas waved his hand, and broke into a broad grin as he stood in the porch of Mrs. Courthope’s house, waiting for the door to be opened. He did not in the least despise Bernard for spending half the summer night in finishing a report, and the rest of it in bed, because, as he had said, that was Bernard’s way of taking his pleasure, and his grin was a tribute of pure amusement to Bernard’s notion that one way of getting your fun was in itself any better than another way. Of course there were foolish ways of behaving: if you habitually drank too much, you would speedily spoil your power of pleasurable sensation altogether. Indeed, excess of any kind was foolish; the wise thing was to find out, by a few simple experiments, how much you could stand, and limit yourself in all ways to your abilities; but not to live up to your full capacity of enjoyment was even a greater mistake than excess, for your faculties were thus allowed to rust in disuse: Douglas rather thought there was a parable bearing on that. The more you enjoyed yourself, the wiser you were, and Douglas, large and young with the charm of strength about him, and his arteries flowing with buckets of hot brisk blood, had a very remarkable capacity in that direction. And his vitality was not merely physical; before the war he had already made a notable mark as one of the most brilliant of the younger members of the House of Commons, for he was incisive and ready of speech, and had a most formidable faculty for pulling an opponent’s motley to atoms and holding up the piteous rags of it to ridicule. Though he never allowed his profession to interfere with his pleasures, he was even more careful not to allow his pleasures to interfere with his profession, or to risk his reputation in adventures that were not reasonably safe. With regard to morality he was a complete cynic, and held that cowardice was at the base of what other people called conscience, rather than that conscience was responsible for cowardice.... The door was opened, and he ran upstairs; in spite of the lateness of his boat, which had fleeced him of so many hours, there was quite a useful amount of the night left. Poor Bernard! What an excellent, respectable fellow!

  On his side, Bernard indulged in no grinnings as he slid away through the silent streets, but only put down the second window of his car, so that the night air blew freely through it. This ventilation was fully justified by the amount of cigar-smoke with which Douglas had filled the carriage, but, though he meant no symbolism, symbolism of a subconscious sort there certainly was in his desire for air. For, in spite of his sufficiently dear-cut convictions, Douglas’s philosophy with regard to the world in which he so richly lived had the effect of clouding the crystal, as if hot breath had been breathed on its coolness. That would soon evaporate in the solitude of the night air, and he knew he would find the hard clarity of his own convictions uninjured, but while they were thus bedewed, he could not help wondering whether some slight blurring of the surface did not enhance their fitness for the usage of everyday life. He had, partly owing to his innate idealism, partl
y to a merely physical fastidiousness, no desire for such pleasures as had nothing more than the needs of the moment to recommend them, but he was conscious of a certain inhumanity in the cold eye which he turned on them. “I suppose I am a prig,” he said to himself, as his motor drew up at his own door, and the very fact that he could sincerely say that recommended him to mercy, if he was guilty on this count.

  Bernard let himself in, after apologizing with punctiliousness though not with charity to the chauffeur, for having kept him waiting so long after the hour at which he said he would require him, and found his frugal supper of sandwiches and soda-water waiting for him in his sitting-room. This house had originally been the family dower-house in days when Chelsea was a village severed by fields from the rest of London, but Bernard had let the great Georgian house in Mayfair when he succeeded, and provided his mother and sister with an abode far more to their liking than this remoter residence, which suited him so admirably. It had but small accommodation, but it amply sufficed for the rather studied simplicity in which he preferred to live, and his conscience quite approved the deafness of the ear which he turned to his mother’s representations that he would be living more in accordance with his position if he “ran” the big house again, or, in other words, gave her carte blanche to run it at his expense. Up till now he had been abroad at the Embassy to which he was attached for ten months out of the year, and he supposed he would resume his post at Petrograd if Russia emerged from chaos again or at some other foreign capital In the meantime it was consonant both with common sense and his own inclination, to live without the effort and expense incident on throwing open Matcham House. If you lived in a palace, it was necessary to behave palatially, and the unsuitability of entertaining largely in war-time — with all respect to Mrs. Courthope — marched with his private tastes. There were sure to be people who labelled him, in view of his great wealth, mean or miserly, but he had a complete indifference, as is the habit of those of his quality of mind, to any verdict of the sort, when it was not endorsed by his own.

  He looked round with a sigh of content as he finished his supper, and congratulated himself on not having gone to Mrs. Courthope’s night-club. His windows looked on to the Thames, and though in accordance with the lighting orders his blinds had to be down, an air smelling of moisture and coolness streamed in through the uncurtained windows. Outside, the moon was full: there had been a first warning of hostile air-craft earlier in the evening, but nothing had come of it, and it had been called off again long before he left the Foreign Office. Inside, the panelled walls unbroken by any pictorial decoration gleamed darkly in the shaded light: in the spaces between the three windows tall bookcases, of the same date as the panelling, were loaded from floor to ceiling. A couple of Bokhara rugs were on the floor; there was a big Queen Anne table with writing apparatus, another with papers and a vase of flowers, and a few chairs. The room contained in fact just those things which he wanted, and, which was even more important, no others that would fuss him by their unnecessary presence. Hidden, but presently to be looked at, was one more object, the secret sense of which to him permeated the room.

  Presently he rose, and turning on a switch by the door, which did not, however, make any visible change in the lighting of the room, he drew aside a sliding panel just above the chimney-piece. This disclosed a small oblong recess, brightly lit inside. In the middle of it, set into a dark wood stand, was a marble head, slightly under life-size. It was of archaic style, clearly Greek to the trained eye, though with some of the immobility of Egyptian sculpture still lingering in its serene severity. To the expert there would instantly have occurred its affinity, if not its identity, with those figures of priestesses dug up in the Erechtheum on the Acropolis at Athens. The head was quite undamaged, and represented a girl on the threshold of womanhood. Her mouth, a little turned up at its outer corners, wore that elusive, mysterious smile, characteristic of the age when the artist still put something of what he knew into that which he saw, and the head hovered tentatively between the unreality of idealistic portraiture and the literalness of mere realism. The eyes followed the suggestion of the mouth and the mouth’s suggestiveness: the same mirth had drawn up, ever so slightly, their outer comers, and high above them, marking where the eyebrows would be, rose the curved home of the eye-socket. The forehead was high also, of the shape of a half-moon, and the hair, braided back, grew on the curve of the circle of which the two opposite points were the springing of the small ears set rather high and half-hidden beneath the braids. The upper lids of the eyes were large and drooped a little in the centre: below on the surface of the eye itself lingered some traces of colour, a dark pupil, and faintly round it, a tawny-brown iris. There was a hint of red on the lips and of copper colour in the hair: across the front of that were set a couple of bronze studs showing where a fillet had been attached. The finish of the surface was exquisite, cheek-muscles, eye-muscles, mouth-muscles formed impalpable curves beneath the soft-flowing skin, but the artist had sacrificed nothing of his portrait to mere smoothness. That smoothness gave the youth to it, but what lay below the smoothness gave the individuality.

  The nostrils, set wide under the short, straight nose, were a little inflated, as if some exertion or agitation possessed her. Had she been playing, like Nausicaa with her maidens, in the temple court, and was she a little out of breath with her exercise? Then there was the smile to account for. Perhaps one of them had bungled in the catching of the ball so deftly sent her, and Nausicaa had not quite laughed, but had smiled and wondered at her awkwardness. Yet the eyes, though smiling also, hid some gravity, some serious matter in the folds of their heavy lids, which would scarcely have been occasioned by a comrade’s want of neatness in the game at ball, even though it was played in the sacred enclosures of the temple, and thus perhaps partook of the nature of a rite.... But what, if when the sculptor had studied her face with a view to this reproduction of it, it had been the birthday of the Goddess Athene, when the maidens of the Erechtheum gave the Lady Pallas the new robe that they had been embroidering for the past year, and if, when on that day, the high-born young men from Athens rode in procession in honour of Athene up the winding road until they came to the temple, she had caught a glance from him between whom and the goddess her heart divided its allegiance? Decorum and maidenliness would veil the fuller smile her heart gave him; at the most she could not permit herself more than that faint raising of her Ups, but that she could not deny herself, when he, nude, but for the mantle blowing backwards off his shoulders, and slim and altogether lovely, used a boy’s licence, and eagerly scanned the demure faces of the young priestesses who stood in so orderly a row, with the new mantle for Athene delicately held in their fingers, and he sought her face out of all the others, and smiled boldly and openly at her. Or given the same scene, perhaps when the young man rode by she had not caught his eye, nor he hers, for he was in trouble over the restiveness of his horse. It had capered and plunged and tried to rear, and the boy, with his broad hat against the stroke of the summer sun fallen back on to his neck and suspended there by its riband, had been wholly occupied with the refractory brute, for he must not break rank or let himself prove servant to his steed. But his horsemanship prevailed, though it taxed the whole of his skill, while he rode past the priestesses, and he had no eyes for her. Her pleasure in the beauty of his seat, in the mastery of those firm hands, backed by the strength of his strong arms, would account for her smile of pleasure as the procession passed her; and as for the protest of the raised eyebrows, had she not warned him not to ride the chestnut, so fierce was it, but to make a less dashing but a securer appearance on the grey? Of course he had not listened to her, the hot-headed boy, so intent on the smartest possible equipment.

  But Pheidias and Theocritus, one with his procession of deathless youth, one with a realistic idyll, could weave for Bernard these fantasies about his head: he owed to them at least the suggestions that inspired his secret fairy tales. Or, with the tonic of Greek myth still b
ubbling in his brain, he could fit to her other tragic or sunlit pictures; but all this took place but in the ante-chamber of the temple where he truly worshipped and it was no more than the gossip of contemporary talk about her. But now he passed from the chattering fore-court, and went alone into the shrine.

  The head had passed for him into the region of symbolism and of worship. In itself, as far as the mere workmanship, the mere material aspect of it was concerned, it was to him no more than it was perhaps to its lately deceased Prussian owner, given that he had, as seemed probable, a sufficient appreciation of its exquisite, unintelligible beauty. But for Bernard it was something far more than that: it embodied, symbolically to him, the eternal search which the spirit of man, unless he is mere brute and sensualist, everlastingly pursues. It was the symbol to him of that which Whitman sought in his “Lover divine and perfect comrade,” of her whom Dante sought through Hell and Purgatory, the which when he found he knew to be the Love that moved the sun and the other stars. Shakespeare sought it in his Sonnets, Keats in his seven Odes, Shelley in his Elegy on Keats, Wordsworth in the “impulse from a vernal wood.” It — whatever it was — had a thousand faces, and all veiled; each in turn of those who had sought it, had never wholly realized it, for by its very nature, its spirit transcended the gropings of humanity. Yet each in turn — the incomparable poets who could record their search, but, not less, the crossing-sweeper and the rag-and-bone man, who could record nothing at all — had seen the symbol take material shape, or had found it embodied in daffodils by a lake or in sunlit mists. For himself, Bernard was completely certain that he would find his symbol translated into flesh and blood and into a living spirit. What further stages there might be in his search mattered not now: he might find that what he worshipped became in turn a symbol, and like Dante’s merged into the Infinite Love. But now what he sought was the human transcription of what the Greek head meant to him.