Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “I never heard of the situation in which up-to-date diplomats did not use gibberish as a means of communication,” remarked Vincent. “My dear Bernard, consider the Foreign Office of the field, which toils not, neither does it spin. Consider the polite gestures, the holding of the lapels of the coat! The — the tosh of it all. Up-to-date diplomacy says it lays its cards on the table. That is because it hasn’t got any. Edgar Antrobus: let’s take Edgar Antrobus; where are his cards, except when he plays bridge?”

  Mrs. Courthope broke in.

  “Oh, dear Edgar, not a word against him, Vincent. You don’t know what dreadful difficulties he has got the Allies out of.”

  “Yes, dear lady, and who got us into them? Antrobus Edgar. The whole Foreign Office is individually employed in getting other members of it out of scrapes. Then what’s that other Ministry? Ministay of Information. I went there this morning. I reminded a polite gentleman in khaki that we had made certain promises to Poland. He said that many things had been said by the Allied statesmen during the war, which we do not wish to pin ourselves down to. Then why all this indignation about Germany and the scrap of paper? Is that comic or isn’t it? I suppose it depends on one’s sense of humour. Don’t let us talk about Departments any more. I am as dry as a dust-kiln with so much speechifying. If there is a whisky and soda, Bernard, I will promise you there shall not be one the moment you show it to me.”

  No less than in his speech about Russia had he talked at Celia during this spurt of impatience at Departmental methods, for Bernard was of the essence of Department, and he guessed that just then he had Celia in a receptive, quasi-hypnotic condition, liable to receive suggestions. She might, as indeed she presently did, say that Departments were only an organized system of brain power. Some organization was necessary; why did he not offer his services and assist, instead of criticizing? But this was all defence of Bernard, and had come second in her thoughts. Primarily she had thought of him. Effort always seemed to develop his horsepower. His vitality was never so compelling as when he had been exercising it. With his whisky and soda in his hand, he dropped into the chair next hers.

  “What we really want is women’s brains,” he said. “People say that women are incapable of consecutive thought —— —”

  “Mamma, darling, this is about you,” said Celia in parenthesis.

  “Certainly it is. Who ever saw Florence climbing down one twig and climbing labouriously up the next? She jumps from one to the other and gets there. Why go round, if you can fly?”

  “My dear,” said Mrs. Courthope, enthusiastically “you’ve done it! You’ve explained me too beautifully. That’s the truth about me. I just pitch like a bird on a twig, where I want to go, while everybody else is climbing about. So comforting! All the time I puzzle people to know what I mean. So slow of them. Bed! One ought to go to bed early in the country. I shall never forget about me and Russia. Oh, here are the raiders. Such a failure, darling Violet. Nobody believed it was a raid. But what a clever imitation—”

  Tommy interrupted.

  “This is my trick,” he said, with his hands spread gropingly in front of him. “I don’t know, at least you would think I didn’t, where Celia is, but I’m going to sit down next her. Don’t speak, Celia! I’m developing an instinct. God! that’s Jimmie’s bath-chair. Stop me if I’m walking into the fire.” He shuffled across the room, groped with his hands along Bernard’s chair, passed on and came to Violet’s.

  “There!” he said.

  Celia was not watching Tommy’s manœuvre but Violet’s face, which was all alight with the unintelligible. As he steered an undeviating course towards her, she beckoned to Celia to take her place. The two chairs were not far apart, and Celia slid noiselessly into the one which Violet had occupied. Tommy’s questing hands felt her shoulder.

  “Yes, that’s Celia,” he said triumphantly. “I came straight to her.”

  “Bravo, old chap,” said Jimmie. “I believe you looked.”

  “Wrong again,” said Tommy. “And you can’t do that sort of thing comparatively speaking. I mean, you couldn’t run across the room.”

  “All right, one up to you,” said Jimmie.

  Tommy went on with his trick.

  “There’s some whisky and soda there,” he said, pointing rather wildly, “and Bernard’s going to give me some. After that, shall I play to you?”

  “No,” said Celia.

  “Very well then, I won’t. Pearls before Celias. And a cigarette, please.”

  Violet got up and took one from a box on the table.

  “Open,” she said.

  “Like a dentist,” observed Tommy.

  A trailing movement towards bed again. Celia went upstairs with her mother, half intending to come down again, but then thinking otherwise, went to her room. Bernard’s dressing-room communicated with hers, and hearing him come up, she dismissed her maid. Presently there came his tap on the door, and he looked in, and then came across the room to where she sat in front of her mirror finishing the plaiting of her hair. He took the long braid out of her hands and finished it for her.

  “Vincent interested you,” he said. “At dinner I thought I had made a mistake in bringing him. I ought to have asked you whether you would like me to.”

  “I was delighted,” said she. “He was tremendously interesting.”

  “He talked rather nonsense about Departmental work. As you well said, the work must be organized. I believe he is right about Russia, but unless he is dictator, how are his views to be put into practise? What a tongue! I wish I could speak.”

  Celia pinned the finished braid up to her head. She intended to tell Bernard to-night the news she had received yesterday, but at the moment she shunned the tenderness, the joy that must follow. In the looking-glass she saw his eager face, the brightness of his eyes, his alert love. He laid his hand on her head, when she did not speak.

  “Tired are you, darling?” he said.

  “I am rather. Or am I only sleepy?”

  “Sleep then,” he said. “Whichever it is, you had better sleep. Good-night, you treasure of my heart.”

  He went back and passed into his dressing-room next door. She had remembered his liking for wallflowers and had put a vase of them on the table by his bed, and now, she supposed, he noticed them for the first time, for presently the door opened again.

  “Delicious flowers” he said. “Thank you, darling.”

  Celia sat in front of her glass for five minutes more, hearing him softly stirring in his room. There was the thud of one shoe and then another on the carpet, and presently a rustle as of a discarded shirt. She went to the door and opened it.

  “I just wanted to tell you something,” she said.

  He was standing there in thin silk vest and trousers, his hair ruffled by the passage of his shirt. She saw the buttons on his vest, his unlooped braces, his bare feet half hidden in the long wool of a white rug that lay by his bed, and still speechless, conscious only of these trivialities, she stood there, astonished at her own reticence, her imperception....

  “What is it?” he said. “Nothing wrong is there?”

  “No, nothing: something very right,” she said, knowing that in a moment that tender anxiousness would melt like night before the face of dawn.

  “Bernard,” she said. “I only learned it yesterday.... I am going to bear you a child.”

  CHAPTER II

  IT was in the clear twilight which precedes dawn that Celia woke out of dreamless sleep into full consciousness. There was no fumbling in her mind for threads of misty memory, no groping after dormant impressions; the whole network of little circumstances, the meshes through which the stream of living flowed, hung distinct and unentangled before her. To lie still in bed became instantly impossible, and she rose, went to the window and drew up her blind.

  Below her lay the lawn enclosed by the red brick walls and bordered with flower-beds. The dew lay thick on it, covering it with a mantle of pearly-grey; the moisture hung heavy on the fl
owers, bowing their leaves and blossoms, and the brickwork shimmered with it. The scent of damp earth and wet grass mounted to where she sat, and for the moment an intense silence lay over the world. The first half-awakened tunings of the birds with which they had hailed the light was over, and not quite yet was the hour for day-song. That would come when the sun, a little nearer to its rising, flooded the empty spaces of the sky with illuminated blue: as yet there was spread over it the dove colour that broods between the blue of night and the blue of day. One star alone hung there among the branches of the walnut-tree outside the iron gate, burning dim with half-quenched brightness. For this moment the infinite energy of love that feeds the sparrows and opens the buds of flowers, and flings a myriad worlds through unending space, paused in the manifestation of its workings.

  The clear, crystallized immobility held Celia’s mind in an untrembling focus, and she seemed to see into herself without passion, desire or any impulse to cloud the vision. All was minutely visible and clear-cut: she did not look back or forward, and was concerned only with what she actually was at that still moment. In the centre of the picture was the huge mistake of her having married Bernard without love. Just now she did not regret nor bewail it: she simply contemplated it and the situation which it entailed. The whole total, added together and indefinitely multiplied, of her liking, affection and admiration of him during all these six months of her marriage had not the dynamic force of a single minute’s space of his love for her. Faintly also, but with a cast-iron clarity as through the stillness of the air before a thunderstorm, she saw that her feeling for a man whom she did not even like was more akin to Bernard’s love for her than her affection for him. It had, at least, the quality that took her out of herself, and that was the root and spring of love.

  It appeared that no effort of her own could supply a single volt of this dynamic energy for her to direct as she would. Last night, if ever, when she told Bernard of her expectations, it should have begun to stir and sparkle in her. She had longed with the utmost desire of which she was capable to feel with actual experience one atom of that which made him a white-hot furnace of pure love for her. No personal element seemed to exist in that, or if there was any it was consumed and but added to the fire that glowed for her. But nothing of that had really reached her, or it must surely have communicated something of its ardour: instead she could only be conscious of the vest, his ruffled hair, could only wait, with the patience and the little caresses which were signs to him of the infinite thing, and to her were but the tokens with which she deceived him, for the moment which soon came, when he remembered that it was late, and that he must not keep her up. She had determined that she would in no way suggest this to him: it should be he who thought of it for himself. And this very patience of hers had an ugly quality about it; she knew quite well that it controlled an impatience of his tenderness, it kept down an inward revolt at his blindness in not detecting the inherent falsity which deceived him and only wearied her.

  Outside, the breeze of morning stirred, whispering in the walnut and shaking the leaves and flowers of the dew-drenched plants, and, penetrating into her room, it set the blind-cord tapping against the window-sill. The dove colour of the sky in the hour before dawn was shot with the living blue of day, though the sun not yet risen on the earth sent out no direct ray here. But dawn was coming fast now, creeping earthwards down the sky, and in the bushes the birds hailed it no longer with tentative chirrupings but with “actual song.” The pause was over, the stir of day began, and Celia, ceasing to contemplate merely, looked back with regret, looked forward searching for the wisdom which should repair, as best it might, a sickness of soul which was remediable only by an elixir that she did not possess.

  All her fairness, as well as all her common sense, were enlisted on Bernard’s behalf. It was true that he was partner in the original error, for she had told him when he proposed to her that she did not love him. But she could understand so much of love as informed her that love could not but believe in its own sovereignty. His love, so it must have seemed to him, insisted that it would create love: out of her liking for him, out of her will to love him, that other must follow. So, though he was partner in the mistake, he was an unwilling partner. Since then, up to this day, she had done her best to confirm him in his mistake. This morning he would awake in that wonderment of content and happiness which her news last night had brought him. The least she owed him, and the most she could do for him, was to keep him there. Implied in that was the necessity that she should hold at arm’s length from her anything like regret that she had not waited till love touched her, anything like speculation as to what would be her course if to-day she was free to turn where she would. She must accept the full responsibility for the situation, and for her own sake (she still came first), as well as for Bernard’s, make the best of it. Regret, remorse in themselves were utterly sterile: it was only when they were productive by their sting into lashing you forward that they could be of service. Love, perhaps, was even now beginning to dawn on the still, silent night of her indifference, in some lurid sort of trouble and tempest, but she was no longer free even to glance there. If there was one atom of honesty in her, that was not for her. But to think — she could not help allowing herself that moment’s wonder — to think that once, perhaps only grimly jesting, Vincent had said to her, “Throw over Bernard and marry me....”

  The proverbial fate of good resolutions has a certain cynical truth concealed in it, in the fact that a good resolution is always made to correct some already existing tendency which is becoming formidable, rather than to avoid the establishment of it. There is no need to “resolve” unless there is already something to resolve about, the existence of which has the red flag of danger waving, and thus, though no doubt a good resolution is better than none at all, the mere necessity of one presupposes something approaching a habit, or if not that the probability of the recurrence of a temptation pulls in the direction ascribed to good resolutions.... Six months ago Celia had gone to meet her fate with the sense of seeking security against danger. She had thought that when she was Bernard’s wife she would, with her liking and sympathy for him, settle down into sheltered quarters, so secure, so comfortable that she would find a species of drowsed content which might readily be construed into happiness. Now she found that her security depended not so much on him, but on the defences of her own building, and her good resolution of setting about them without delay was quickened by the clear prudence of so doing. She must build the walls of her garden higher and higher yet, so that none could overlook her. Bernard must help her construction, the child that was coming to her must help; she must occupy herself with a tenacity that would refuse to be distracted by any demolishing influence. Whatever interested her must be pursued: she must find interests in things that at present had no appeal to her. She knew well now what was ready to inhabit any vacant place in the house of her emotions which had only just opened its doors to her; that house must be so peopled that there was no room for any but the guests she invited. Above all, Bernard must be everywhere: there must be Bernard himself or some imagined shape of him always present to her. Never must she take her eyes or attention off him, and yet — and yet when only a few hours ago she had possessed him with a completeness she had never yet attained to she could but see his ruffled hair and the mere accessories of him. From him — him himself — she had been so glad to escape.

  She had risen from her seat in the window as the breeze of dawn came into her room, and was walking up and down, wondering how, most immediately, most strenuously she could train and fortify the power of her resolution. And then, even as she thought over that, there was no need for her to use her imagination any more, for the clear opportunity, fresh as the sunbeam that now smote the dewy lawn outside, was given her. A tap came from the door into his dressing-room.

  “Come in,” she said, and he entered.

  “I heard your step, darling,” he said. “Are you like me? I could not sleep for happine
ss. I have been awake all night... and then I heard you walking about.”

  She had paused as he came across the room to her, opposite the window, and the sun just risen vividly illuminated the side of her face that was turned towards it. Just so, once in November, she had been opposite him in the window of his house in Chelsea; but then she had seemed scarcely individual, rather the embodiment of that untroubled, eternal Grecian type round which his dreams had weaved themselves. But now to him the magic of that sweet fancy had given place to a reality far more magical, for here in the early sunlight of this still hour there stood by him she who had emerged from myth and was the beloved of his human heart, holy to him as never before in her coming motherhood. A spoken word, the touch of her even, would cause that wondrous white flame of love to tremble: for that one moment silence only....

  The silence passed into something greater yet, withdrawing itself like the star she had watched just now into the light of day, absorbed in a greater splendour....

  “God’s love, Celia,” he said. “It is all one.”

  “Out of the blue,” as is the phrase, had that come. She knew quite well, with Violet for original informant, and certain summits of emotion in Bernard for witness of the same, that below and above and around all the happenings of life lay for him that great vastness of love from which all came and into which all went. With her reason Celia believed that too: she foresaw the irrefutable logic of the first cause, that could not conceivably be evil, the no less irrefutable logic of its immortality. But never had the thought of it touched her with emotion. The logic of it was as unanswerable as a proposition of Euclid: you argued yourself a fool if you troubled to argue about it. For her it ranked with things like the multiplication table, readily admitted but not in themselves interesting. But for Bernard this logical first cause was the source of all that was lovely: so much did he take it for granted that he but seldom alluded to it, any more than he would have alluded to the fact that he drew breath into his lungs and so lived instead of dying. It was only when he was quite outside himself that the acknowledgment of it found expression. He happened to call it God: that was a more compendious term than the eternal first cause. Or he called it love.... There to him lay the final explanation of everything small and great of his love for her, of his industry in his Turkish work, of the chirruping of the sparrows about the eaves....