Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Amy sighed: there was resignation more than relief in her sigh.

  “Anyhow the coal is getting low enough,” she said to console herself. “I’m sure I don’t see how we shall keep the house open at all, when we have to begin fires in the rooms, unless you mean to burn coke in them. There’s Miss Howard: she likes the drawing-room to be nothing else but an oven by after breakfast, and there’s the Colonel as grumpy as a bear if the smoking-room isn’t fit to roast an ox in after tea. I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be better to shut Wentworth up altogether when the frosts begin. There’s nothing that makes guests so discontented as a cold house. Once get the reputation for chilliness, and ruin stares at you. People coming here for the cure won’t stand it. They’ll pack up and go to the Bolton Arms or to Balmoral. Better say that we’re closed. Belvoir too: I was walking along the road to the back of it yesterday, and the coal-cellar door was open. Crammed: I shouldn’t like to say how many tons. Where they get it from I don’t know: some underhand means, I’m sadly afraid.”

  Mrs. Oxney had not been attending much to her sister’s familiar litanies, but the thought of those semi-detached hovels, suggested by the mention of Belvoir, put a bright idea into her head.

  “I’ll tell you what I shall do,” she said. “I shall take a whole page in the Baths Guide-book to Bolton, and advertise Wentworth properly, so that everybody shall know that it isn’t an ordinary boarding house in a row with the butcher’s opposite. Golf links, twenty holes, two tennis courts, one hard, croquet-lawn, kitchen- and flower-gardens, and a tasteful view of the lounge.”

  “It will be very expensive,” said Mrs. Bertram, who was really enthusiastic about this idea of her sister’s, but was compelled by all the dominant instincts of her nature to see the objection to any course of action.

  “Not a bit,” said Mrs. Oxney. “It will pay for itself ten times over. Let people know they can play lawn-tennis all the winter—”

  “Not if it snows,” said Mrs. Bertram.

  “Amy, let me finish my sentence. Tennis all the winter, and the breakfast lounge as well as the drawing-room and central heating and no extras for baths and three bathrooms, and standing in its own grounds—”

  “But they all stand in their own grounds,” said Mrs. Bertram.

  “Stuff and nonsense, Amy. Grounds mean something spacious, not a gravel path leading round a monkey-puzzle. And no cold supper on Sundays. I shall say that too.”

  That point was debated: to say that there was no cold supper on Sunday night implied, so Mrs. Bertram sadly surmised, that there was cold supper all the week, and nothing at all on Sundays, and such a misconception would be lamentably alien to the effect that this sumptuous advertisement was designed to produce. Mrs. Oxney therefore agreed to word this differently or omit altogether, and hurried indoors to find the most tasteful view of the lounge for the photographer.

  The morning hours between breakfast and lunch were always the least populated time of the day at Wentworth, for the majority of its guests were patients who went down to the baths in the morning to drink the abominable waters or lie pickling in tubs of brine, and returned, some in the motor-bus, and the more stalwart on their feet, in time to have an hour’s prescribed rest before lunch. The two permanent inmates of the house, Colonel Chase and Miss Alice Howard were, so far from being patients, in the enjoyment of the rudest health, but they too, were never at home on fine mornings like this, for Miss Howard had left the house by ten o’clock with her satchel of painting apparatus and a small folding stool, which when properly adjusted never pinched her anywhere or collapsed, and sketched from Nature till lunch-time. On her return she put up on the chimney-piece of the lounge the artistic fruit of her labours for the delectation and compliments of her fellow-guests. These water-colour sketches were, for the most part, suave and sentimental, and represented the church tower of St. Giles’s, seen over the fields, or trees with reflections in the river, or dim effects of dusk (though painted by broad daylight, since it was impossible to get the colours right otherwise) with scattered lights gleaming from cottage windows, and possibly a crescent moon (body-colour) in the west. Garden-beds, still-life studies of petunias and Mrs. Oxney’s cat were rarer subjects, but much admired.

  Colonel Chase’s occupations in the morning were equally regular and more physically strenuous, for either he bicycled seldom less than thirty miles, or walked not less than eight as recorded by his pedometer. He had two pedometers, one giddily affixed to the hub of his bicycle’s hind-wheel, and the other, for pedestrian purposes, incessantly hung by a steel clip into his waistcoat pocket: this one clicked once at each alternate step of his great strong legs, and it was wonderful how far he walked every day. Thus, though his fellow-guests at Wentworth could not, as in Miss Howard’s case, feast their eyes on the actual fruit of his energy since this would have implied the visualization of so many miles of road, they could always be (and were) informed of the immense distances he had traversed. This he felt sure, was a source of admiring envy to the crippled and encouraged them to regain their lost activity. Mrs. Holders, for instance, who, a fortnight ago, had only just been able to hobble down to the Bath establishment on two sticks and was always driven up again in the motor-bus, and who now was able, on her good days, to walk both ways, with the assistance of only one stick, had great jokes with him about her increasing mobility. She used to say that when she came back in the spring, she would go out with him for his walk in the morning, and take her treatment in the afternoon when he was resting. She seemed to take the greatest interest in his athletic feats, and used to drink in all he said with an air of reverent and rapt attention. Occasionally, however, when Colonel Chase was least conscious of being humorous (though no one could be more so if he wished) she gave a little mouse-like squeak of laughter and then became intensely serious again. This puzzled him till he thought of what was no doubt the right explanation, namely, that Mrs. Holders had suddenly thought of something amusing, which had nothing to do with him and his conversation. For the rest, she was a middle-aged, round-about little personage, with a plain vivacious face and highly-arched eyebrows, so that she looked in a permanent state of surprise though nobody knew what she was surprised about. Miss Howard thought of her as ‘quaint’ and Mrs. Holders did not think of Miss Howard at all.

  There had lately been a tree felled in the field where the twenty-hole golf links lay, and when her sister went indoors to select a tasteful view of the lounge, Mrs. Bertram walked through the garden and out on to the links to see what it was worth in the way of logs for the fires in this shortage of coal. The tree had been dead for more than a year, and she had repeatedly urged Margaret to have it cut down while it was still sound, and had not degenerated into touchwood. But Mrs. Oxney had been very obstinate about it, weak but obstinate, for a green woodpecker had built in it and she said it would be such a shame to cut it down, and completely upset the poor dickie-bird’s domestic arrangements. Then, when the woodpecker had quite finished with it, Colonel Chase said it made a first-rate hazard for the seventeenth and nineteenth holes (the long diagonals across the field) which meant that he was the only player who could loft his ball over it without going round, and it was not till yesterday that Mrs. Oxney had steeled herself to the destruction of this magnificent bunker. Now, of course, as Mrs. Bertram had woefully anticipated, the tree was no more than a great cracknell kept together by bark, and the Colonel might just as well have been left to go on soaring over it or hitting into it as before.

  As she walked back to the house from this depressing expedition she heard the hoot of the motor-bus which brought back the patients from the baths, announcing its return. There were the usual three occupants (since Mrs. Holders had taken to walking up) Mr. Kemp and his down-trodden daughter Florence, both habitual guests at Wentworth, and Mr. Bullingdon who was paying his first visit to Bolton Spa. Though he was quite a young man, Mrs. Bertram felt sure that a bath chair would soon be his only mode of locomotion, but in spite of his poor knees, which
made him move as if he was performing a cake-walk with his two sticks for a partner, he was full of jokes and gaiety. He laughed at himself in the most engaging manner, and said that he really wasn’t sure that he wanted to get better, since he attracted so much flattering attention, wherever he went, by reason of his antics. Apart from these flippant allusions to his own afflictions, he never talked about arthritis at all, which was a great contrast to Mr. Kemp whose idea of pleasant conversation was to pin a listener into a corner from which escape was difficult, and, beginning with the 3rd of March, 1920, which was the date on which he first felt a throbbing in his left hip, recount the progress of his rheumatisms. He had visited Harrogate, Buxton, Bath, Droitwich, Aix and Marienbad, and none of these had really done him any good, but there was still a chance that Bolton in combination with some of the others and Bournemouth for the winter, might benefit him. Just as Mrs. Bertram reached the door, he was balanced on the step of the motor-bus, and warning Mr. Bullingdon about a certain malignant masseur at Aix.

  “Don’t let him touch your knees with the tips of his fingers,” he said, “if you’re thinking of going to Aix. I was getting on nicely there, as my daughter will tell you, when my doctor recommended me to have treatment at the hands of this villain. In a week or two he had undone all the good I had derived from Aix, and when I left I wasn’t walking much better than you. What was his name, Florence?”

  “Jean Cuissot,” said Florence in a monotonous voice. She knew her father would ask her that.

  “Nonsense: Jean Cuissot was the masseur I went to the year before. No, I believe you’re right, it was Jean Cuissot. Judas Iscariot would be a better name for him. Give me your arm, please, unless you want me to stand on this step for the rest of my life. Ah, dear me, I’ve got a new pain in my ankle this morning. I woke in the night and felt it wasn’t comfortable, and expected I should have trouble. Why, there’s Mrs. Holders already. She has walked all the way up from the baths. I haven’t been able to walk back after my bath since I was at Harrogate two seasons ago, and the hill there is neither so long nor so steep as this. But I used to think nothing of it then. What wouldn’t I give to be able to walk up such a hill now!”

  Mrs. Bertram who was lending a firm shoulder to Mr. Kemp while his daughter disentangled his sticks which had got muddled up in some inexplicable manner between his legs and the door of the bus, sighed heavily.

  “Yes, indeed,” she said. “We so seldom appreciate our blessings till they are taken from us, and then we haven’t got them to appreciate. But Bolton may set you up yet, Mr. Kemp, you never can tell.”

  Mr. Bullingdon, now that the doorway of the bus was clear, performed a sort of mystic dance down the steps and on to the ground.

  “There we are,” he said cheerfully. “You know they ought to engage Mrs. Holders and Mr. Kemp and me for a short turn at a music-hall. It would have an immense success: screams of laughter. There would be a glass of champagne on one side of the stage, and we three toeing the mark on the other. Then at the word ‘go’, we would start off and see who could grab it first. Mrs. Holders would have to be handicapped though, you and I wouldn’t stand a chance against her, Mr. Kemp.”

  Mr. Kemp was inclined to be offended at the suggestion of his appearing at a music-hall, and his daughter and Mrs. Bertram closed in behind him and propelled him into the house. Besides, as everybody ought to know, champagne was poison to him: you might as well expect him to race for a glass of prussic acid.

  With the dispersal of the passengers by the ambulance waggon (as Mr. Bullingdon always flippantly called the bus) to their rooms to rest before lunch, the house was quiet again till the arrival of Miss Howard with her satchel and her camp-stool. The twilight scene on which she had been engaged this sunny morning had been giving her a great deal of trouble, for the dusk, even to her indulgent eye was of a strange soupy quality, as if some dark viscous fluid had been emitted from an unknown source (for she had not intended it) on to the landscape, and the lights from the cottages looked like some curious eruption of orange spots. It was very disappointing, for she had hoped great things from this sketch, but now when she put it up on the chimney-piece of the lounge, the effect was puzzling rather than pleasing. Luckily however, she found that a small flat parcel had arrived for her; this she knew could be nothing else than Evening Bells, which she had sent a week ago to be framed by Mr. Bowen. That, up till now, was certainly her chef-d’œuvre: Mrs. Oxney had declared that she could positively hear the bells, and so Miss Howard had caused to be printed on the mount of this masterpiece, ‘The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells’. There was the tower of St. Giles’ church reflected in the river, which had caused that pretty thought to come into Mrs. Oxney’s mind, and Miss Howard was sure that everybody would like to see ‘Evening Bells’ again in its gilt frame. So she replaced the soupy twilight in her satchel, and determined to put it under the tap when she went upstairs to see if a thorough washing-down would not render it more translucent. There was half an hour yet before lunch-time, and she tripped into the drawing-room to get a good practise on the mellow but elderly piano.

  Miss Alice Howard was a pathetic person, though she would have been very much surprised if anyone had told her so. She had been an extremely pretty girl, lively and intelligent and facile, but by some backhanded stroke of fate she had never married, and now at the age of forty, though she had parted with her youth, she had relinquished no atom of her girlishness. She hardly ever walked, but tripped, she warbled little snatches of song when she thought that anyone might be within hearing in order to refresh them with her maidenly brightness, and sat on the hearth-rug in front of the fire, even though there was a far more comfortable seat ready. It was not that she felt any profound passion for tripping, warbling and squatting, but from constantly telling herself that she was barely out of her teens she had got to believe in her girlishness and behaved accordingly. Her imagination (here was the root of the matter) was incessantly exercised on herself, and she imagined all sorts of things about herself that had little or no foundation in fact. She could scarcely have told you how or when, for instance, she began to believe that she was closely connected with a noble house, but certainly all Wentworth believed it now. They could have had no other informant but her, and Miss Howard very nearly believed it, too, so constantly had she made rich little allusions which implied it. She had a commodious semi-detached villa of her own, conveniently close to the station at Tunbridge Wells, but it was lonely work to live there by herself, and she had let it furnished for the last year, and hoped to do so again for the next. The occupant was a gentleman on the Stock Exchange called Mr. Gradge, who lived there with his sister, but she always referred to them as “my tenants,” and to the semi-detached villa as ‘my little place’ in Kent. She thus contrived to produce the impression that the villa was a small ancestral manor-house, and sometimes lamented that the monstrously swollen taxes of late years had caused so many country houses to be shut up or let: she thought herself very lucky to be able to let her little place in Kent near (though it really was ‘at’) Tunbridge Wells. Miss Howard, in fact, though girlish, suffered from the essentially middle-aged disease of fabrication, and whether she looked at her physical image in the tall looking-glass in her bedroom, or contemplated herself in the mirror of her mind, she now saw what she had got to believe about herself.

  She was quite alone in the world without near relations or any intimate friend, and, with the little place in Kent let to her tenants, she lived at Wentworth for the greater part of the year, spent a month at a similar boarding house at Torquay which she called her Christmas holidays, and had another holiday in a third boarding-house in South Kensington for a fortnight of the London season. From there she came back to Wentworth quite worn out with gaiety; everyone had been so kind and pleased to see her, and how her cousins had scolded her for insisting on going back to Bolton after so short a visit. But she was much happier at Wentworth than anywhere else, for she had come to be, not only in her own eyes, but in
Mrs. Oxney’s and those of the other guests a sort of incarnation of all the Muses. She painted, she sang and played, she danced to the strains of the gramophone with any sound pair of legs among the guests, or, if there happened to be none, she was quite willing to execute a pas seul in the lounge after dinner, which Mrs. Oxney, who always said the agreeable thing, considered equal to the best Russian dancing. And then there was her lawn-tennis, though she shook her head at the suggestion that she should enter at Wimbledon next year, for that would mean giving up so much of her sketching and her music. And then there was her croquet and her golf . . .

  She sat down at the piano after removing her hat (shaped like an inverted waste-paper basket and trimmed with three sorts of grapes, pink, blue and orange) and deftly encouraged her pale brown hair to drop in rebellious disorder over her forehead and nearly conceal the ear that was like a pink shell. She ran her hands over the keys: someone had told her — or had she invented it for herself? — that she had a ‘butterfly touch,’ and when the butterflies alighted on one or two flowers where the careless things were trespassing, Miss Howard said ‘Naughty’! to them, and made them do it again. She was supposed to have an amazing power of improvisation, and these industrious little practices with the soft pedal down, while everyone was resting upstairs, certainly developed her gift. There were some fragments from Chopin which were landmarks for the improvisation when it seemed to be wandering and put it back on the road again. Miss Howard could scarcely tell sometimes whether certain bits belonged to her own butterflies or Chopin’s, and if she couldn’t tell she felt sure that nobody else at Wentworth could. Presently the gong in the lounge announced that lunch was ready (Miss Howard would have winced at that brazen booming if anyone had been present) but she took no notice of the summons, for she knew that Mrs. Oxney would probably come tiptoeing in, and find her quite lost in her music, sitting there with dreamy eyes fixed on the ceiling, and a smile hovering — just that — on her mouth.