by E. F. Benson
“You enjoyed it: you had a beano,” she repeated. “Why not say so?”
Peter hesitated, but for a reason that she had refused to entertain the existence of. The fact, now shiningly clear, that Silvia had never so remotely seen that he could easily have got down here in time for dinner, made it unintelligibly and unreasonably needful for him to tell her so. There was something sordid in not doing so. Had she shown the smallest suspicion of it, he would probably have explained it away in some ingenious manner.
“Yes, I enjoyed it,” he said. “That was why I did it. I could easily have got down here in time for dinner.”
Up went the blind at that with a snap and a whirr, and Silvia’s face, beaming and delighted, smiled out at him.
“Oh, Peter, how lovely of you to tell me,” she cried. “Of course, I guessed, only I wouldn’t guess. There’s just the joy of it all.”
That came from her like the stroke of a bird’s wing, that bore it through the sunny air. With another stroke she returned to him.
“Now you’ve got no excuse for refusing my beautiful plan,” she said. “And it was nice of you not to tell me at once: you knew you had to some time, and it was all the better for keeping. My dear, there’s the dressing-bell. Just go and see your father for a minute: you can talk to him in the smoking-room after mother and I have gone to bed.”
As Silvia heard through her bedroom door the splashings and the rinsings and the gurglings which regulated her own speed of dressing, she was absorbed in the perception of the one thing that was great, or its original manifestations. Up the trunk of the tree and through the branches and to the remotest ends of the twigs flowed the sap, and all — the firmness of the trunk, the vigour of the branches, the elasticity of the twigs, the decoration of flower and leaf and fruit which made the tree lovely — were manifestations and embodiments of the sap. If there was a wound in its bark, the sap healed it; if there was a nest among its boughs, an external loveliness of life which visited it, it was still the sap which had fashioned its anchorage. The remotest leaf of that tower of forest greenery was nurtured by it, and all the being and the beauty sprang from it.... There was nothing big or little, if you looked at it in that way, though just now she had decided that only one thing was big and all the rest was little....
Then came a rare, an unusual splash. Occasionally when Peter began to stand up in his bath after the hot soaking, he fell down again; his foot slipped on the smooth surface, and this made the rare and enormous splash. This always caused her a certain anxiety: he might hit his head against the edge of the bath....
“Just tap at the bathroom door, Wilton,” she said, “and ask if Mr. Mainwaring is all right.”... But before the chaste Wilton could get as far as the door, a new splashing began. “It doesn’t matter, Wilton,” she said.
“Your pearls, ma’am?” asked Wilton.
Then came the tap at the door, and Wilton slid out of the picture.
“I fell down,” said Peter. “I might have hurt myself, but I didn’t. I wish you weren’t so wonderful.”
“I can’t help that,” said she. “You should have thought of it before.”
Peter began drying his toes.
“I’ve had quite a long talk with my father,” he said. “He thinks you’re wonderful, too. He adores you: they all adore you, particularly Lord Poole.”
“Peter, don’t be tipsy,” said she.
“I shall be as tipsy as I like. I want to know one thing. Why weren’t you annoyed with me for saying that I couldn’t get back last night?”
Silvia held out the pearls for him to clasp round her neck.
“If you don’t understand that, you must be tipsy,” she said.
“And if I do?” he asked.
She leaned her head a little back.
“Why, then you understand it all,” she said. “You understand, for instance, why I insist on your having a night in town every week.”
“Yes, I see. Just that you shall get rid of me now and then,” he said.
“Quite right. You’re as sober as — as a commoner, I suppose.”
She moved in her chair, and one end of her necklace slipped from his fingers.
“Am I putting them on for dinner,” he asked, “or am I taking them off for bedtime?”
“Whatever you’re doing, you are being wonderfully clumsy,” said she, as his fingers, warm and soft from his bath, touched the back of her neck.
She was down before him next morning to give him his breakfast, and, waiting for him, strolled out on to the terrace. There had been one of those exquisite early October frosts, and in the air was that ineffable fragrance derived from absence of smell, the odourless odour of frosted dew. The sun was already warm with promise of a hot, cloudless day; but as yet the heat had not set in motion the weaving of the scents of earth and grass and flowers which would soon decorate and veil the virginal beauty of the morning. Last night, when she and Peter had lingered here in the end of the twilight, the air was not less clear and windless, but it had been charged with all the myriad scents distilled by the hot hours of autumn sun. Now there was a precision, a crystalline quality.... Some such sort of clear sparkle bathed her spirit also; her love basked in some such virginal beauty of young day, flamelike and scentless.
All the evening before, from the time when she met Peter by the lake, she, body and soul and spirit, had been rising towards some new peak of passion, and the true topmost summit seemed to her now to be where she stood in this cool brightness, able to see that the upward path which led here was below her. They had dined after Peter had clasped her necklace for her; there had been the usual piquet for her and Mr. Mainwaring, and for the latter a triumphant pæan of achievement over some effect of lightning in the second cartoon, which positively, as he stood aside as artist and became spectator, appalled him, and before they settled down to their cards he must needs conduct them to the masterpiece in question, and let them also feel the cold clutch of fear.
But whatever Mr. Mainwaring did or said, whatever her mother, it was Peter whom, in this rising tide of flame and self-surrender, Silvia watched, no longer looking for those signs of tenderness and affection which (owlish) she had missed, but in the rapturous contemplation of them. Often she had seen him charming to her mother and to his own father; but always, so she had thought, she could detect in him politeness and amenity, the controlling hand of breeding, the practice of pleasant behaviour. But this evening there had been no “behaviour” about him at all, he had been radiant with them both, divinely natural.... He had sat next Mrs. Wardour on the sofa, as the piquet was in progress, and entertained her with ludicrous but hopelessly recognizable caricatures of her and his father over their cards; he had held a skein of her wool, he had mixed her hot water and lemon juice for her. All these things he had often done before, and they were all trivial enough.... He was the same with his father, looking over his hand when so bidden, dutifully observing exactly how to play that puzzling game; eager to anticipate his wants, chaffing him sometimes, behaving to him — this again was the wrong word — being to him, rather, all that his own sonship implied, fulfilling in every word and gesture the welcome which he had given to the suggestion of his remaining with them till they went to London. And all that was “the world’s side” which anyone might see, and behind it in “lights and darks undreamed of” was that other aspect and reality of him, which was hers alone.... She was already in bed when she heard him, after his smoking-room chat with his father, come into his room, and presently, after tapping on her door, he looked in, coatless and shoeless. She pretended — in parody of what happened two nights before — to be asleep, and between her eyelids, nearly closed, she saw a broad smile overspread his face.
“I don’t believe a single word of it,” he remarked.
All this — all it was and all it meant — Silvia now, as she waited for him, looked at, looked down on even from this crowning pinnacle, as on upward ultimate slopes. Even, as in the cool scentless air of the morning, the mir
acle of the sunshine on the windless world was more itself than when its beams had drawn that response of fragrance from all living things, so shone for her, untroubled with passion and desire, the essence itself of love in its own crystal globe. Not less precious, now that it was conveyed to her in no material manifestation, would be the bodily presence of him through whom that essence was conveyed to her, who embodied love to her mortal sense, but for ever far more precious was it now that she, in this pause of content that crowned passion with a royal diadem, could for the moment see that in loving him she loved not him alone, but Love itself that “moved the sun and the other stars,” and being all, gave all....
The duration of the moment in which Silvia reached that point, not theoretically, but as a felt and experienced reality, was infinitesimal, just as in significance it was infinite.... At the sound of Peter’s step on the bare boards of the dining-room just within, the atmosphere of the summit where she stood grew laden and fragrant with the scents of the world. She did not come down from it: it did not rise up above her. She was there still, but she was there in body as well as in spirit, the fragrance of material sweetness was near her, even as when now she stepped back into the dining-room, a waft of rose-scent from the sun-warmed wall smothered her nostrils.
Peter was poking about among dishes on the side table, and turning round at her entry, gave her a grunt, neither more nor less, in answer to her salutation. He had said before now that to be in good spirits at breakfast-time was a symptom that could not be taken too seriously. By that test there was nothing wrong with him this morning.
He sat down with an ill-used sigh.
“I’ve got a headache,” he remarked.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said she. “Where?”
“In my left ankle, of course,” said he.
Silvia, passing behind him, just tweaked the short hair at the back of his neck.
“Oh, don’t finger me,” said Peter angrily.
He gave her so quick a glance that she could scarcely tell whether he had actually looked at her or not, and went on without pause and without hurry, clinking out his words like newly-minted coins, separate and crisply cut and hot.
“Just let me alone sometimes,” he said. “You know how I hate dabbing and pressing and grasping. You’re the limit, you know.”
He had got her stiff and staring, and still without pause and in precisely the same voice he went on:
“Don’t let me have to speak to you like that again,” he said. “And don’t be so owlish, but confess that you’ve fallen into that trap.”
Still she stood staring, and he took one step towards her and flung his arms close round her neck, pressing her face to his, and then, more directly, finding and claiming her mouth.
“You utterly divine girl,” he said. “I never dreamed I should take you in. I did. Kiss me three times to signify ‘Yes,’ and three times more to signify that you are a darling, and once more to — well, once more.”
“Peter, I thought you were cross with me,” said she, when she could say anything.
“How perfectly splendid! That joke did come off, didn’t it?”
She could smile again.
“You brute!” she said. “But never take me in over that again, darling. Anything else; not that.”
Once more before his motor came round they strolled on the terrace outside. It was thick now with the web of scents, for the sun’s weaving was busy. The late roses gave their fragrance, and the verbena and the mignonette, but these were but strung like beads on to the smell of the damp, fruitful earth. By now Silvia could laugh at herself about that fierce phantom moment, for never had Peter seemed more utterly hers. Usually in these early morning half-hours he was rather silent, rather morose; to-day, penitent perhaps, or, at any rate, consolatory for the fright — it was no less — that he had unwittingly given her, there was something of the bath-intoxication about him.
“If you were in any sense a devoted wife,” he said, “you would drive up with me, deposit me at the F.O., and then wait three hours for me in the motor till lunch time. I could give you an hour then, after which you would wait four hours more and drive back with me. Therefore shall a woman leave her father and her mother and cleave to her husband.”
“Yes, of course I’ll come,” said she, “if you want me to. You must just say you really want me.”
He took hold of her elbows from behind and ran her along the terrace.
“Motor-bike,” he observed. “Fm pushing you till you get your sense of humour working on its own account.”
“It’s working — I swear it’s working,” shrieked Silvia. “Don’t be such a bully.”
A seat on the balustrade of the terrace seemed indicated after this violent exercise.
“There’s another thing,” said Peter. “My mental power of association of ideas is decaying, which is a sign of softening of the brain. Aren’t you sorry?”
“Is that the brain in your head?” asked she.
“No; in the same place that ached when I had a headache. Left ankle. Don’t interrupt. But there’s something in this house front, and I believe it’s the cornice, or whatever they call it, which runs all along there underneath the windows on the first floor, which — that’s the cornice — reminds me of some other house.”
Peter pointed to the broad frieze-like band which projected some foot or so from the wall of the house. It was of Portland stone, amazingly carved with masks at intervals, and ran, as he had said, just below the first floor windows from end to end of the façade. Then he gave a yodel which, consciously or not, was a hoarse and surprising parody of his father’s favourite method of indicating a general sumptuousness of sensation.
“That’s done it,” he said. “Just speaking of it has reminded me what it was. It’s not so awfully like really, but that’s what I meant. And there’s the motor, bother and blight it, confound and curse it.”
“And what is the house it reminds you of?” she asked.
“The flat belonging to Nellie’s mother. Just below the windows there ran a band like that. I noticed it one day last summer. She had said something about it, but at that point there’s softening of the brain again. All I said about the motor holds, though.”
“Send it away. Walk up to town instead,” suggested Silvia.
“Likely with that headache in my ankle. But I would so much sooner sit here with you than do either.”
Silvia waved to him as he drove off, and waiting, waved again as he crossed the bridge over the lake. The air was thick with earthly fragrances now, and her mind with fragrant memories, and among them there was some new scent, not quite strange to her, but one from which she had always, whenever it presented itself, turned her head. Now it insisted on being analyzed, on being recognized.
When, half an hour ago, she had just tweaked his hair as she passed him, his remonstrance, to her ears, had been wholly instinctive and sincere; he objected to being “fingered.” He had piled that up, so she seemed to see, making of it a joke against her, until the joke grew preposterous. Then, ever so convincingly, he had smothered her with kisses. Yesterday evening, too, how convincing had been, on some other plane, his “dearness” — that word must serve — with her mother and Mr. Mainwaring. On one side were bright tokens of affection, and to her of so much more than affection; on the other that one little hot coin that clinked with a true ring before, with admirable mimicry of himself, he had showered out a whole flood of such.
Which was the more real? And where, in these mists, was that austere and shining summit?
CHAPTER XIII
JUST before Christmas, after three weeks in London, Silvia was driving down alone to Howes, in preparation for the party which was to arrive next day. Peter would come then: he had got a devastating cold, and it was far wiser, in this grim inclemency of weather, that he should not come down with her to-day, only to come up for his work again next morning. It was much more sensible — Silvia had suggested it — that he should nurse his cold that evening,
and, well wrapped up, make a single instead of a double journey to-morrow. It was quite subsidiary to that piece of good sense that she did not want, just for this evening, to be alone with him; even if his cold had not supplied an excellent argument in favour of this plan, she would have suggested her own solitary departure.
Wilton, the correct virginal Wilton, sat opposite her on the front seat. Wilton had, at the start, deposited herself next the chauffeur, but Silvia had made her come inside. But there was little use, so thought Wilton, in coming inside, if her mistress still kept both windows open.
The sleet had turned to uncompromising snow, and Silvia seemed to notice it no more than if she were a Polar bear. Eventually, as the car flowed up the long hill through Putney, Wilton had been able to stand the draught no longer.
“You’ll be catching a worse cold than Mr. Mainwaring’s, ma’am,” she said, “if you sit in that draught.”... That made it more comfortable. Silvia roused herself for a moment.
“His man doesn’t take such care of him as you do of me, Wilton,” she said.
“And so much pneumonia about, ma’am,” observed Wilton encouragingly.
Silvia began to think consecutively, starting not from far back, but from the immediate past. Nellie had lunched with her alone, just before she started, for Mrs. Wardour had been out, and Nellie had hailed this tête-à-tête as the most delightful thing that could have happened. Nellie had been at Wardour House, too, the night before for a concert; during this month of December, hardly yet three weeks old, she had been there a dozen times, for Mrs. Wardour, resuming with extraordinary vigour after four months in the country, her social activities, had, without the aid of any godmother, turned December into June.