Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

Now if there was one thing on which Mrs. Oxney prided herself even more than on her house-keeping it was the honesty of her staff, and she answered him with unusual sharpness.

  “I’d trust them all with a bag of money and never think to count it before or after,” she said. “You might as well suspect me or Mrs. Holders.”

  Colonel Chase could not understand why they all looked at each other and then bent their heads over the cards.

  The terrible news went abroad at tea-time that the valuable instrument was missing, and everybody walked about with Agag-delicacy, peering at the places where they proposed to set their feet, for fear of trampling on this pearl. Once Tim Bullingdon’s dastardly heart leaped for joy when he planted one of his sticks on a fragment of coal which cracked beneath it, much as the valuable instrument might have done, but his pleasure was short-lived; it wasn’t It. Miss Howard had not seen it, she was sure, gleaming on the road between Wentworth and the town. Every spot over which Colonel Chase could have passed since he came in this morning had been systematically searched, and the dreadful surmise that he must have dropped it somewhere on the other side of Bolton was probably only too true. And all the time (what anxiety the knowledge of this would have saved) it was safely reposing on the fender of Mr. Amble’s shop, where Miss Howard had ordered quinine and thermogene. His honest lad, bicycling back from an errand along the road where the Colonel had dropped it, saw it gleaming in the miry roadway, and picked it up. A suspicious yellowness below the plating of the valuable instrument had convinced him that it was not silver, and having never seen a pedometer before, it appeared to him to be an unusual type of watch, which was no use for telling the time, and might possibly be traced if he pawned it. So he gave it to Mr. Amble who put it to dry on the parlour fender, and shortly after Miss Howard’s departure displayed a notice in his shop window to say a pedometer had been found, apply within. The honest lad then discounted any merit he might have acquired by not retaining a suspicious and useless object, by forgetting to take the quinine and thermogene to Wentworth. Instead he put up the shutters as dark was drawing on, spent the sixpence that Mr. Amble had given him in cigarettes, and Mr. Amble gave the pedometer a brush up.

  Tea was always served at Wentworth in the drawing-room. A small dinner-waggon with teapots of Indian and China was wheeled in, solid refreshment was arranged on a convenient table, and usually this was a very pleasant and chatty meal, and one at which Colonel Chase made himself most entertaining. He had a fund of stories, which he lavishly recounted, and often he sat there for nearly an hour before he went upstairs to read, telling them about the Curate’s egg and the little boy who took a sip of his father’s whiskey and soda, and not liking the taste, put it back in the glass. Then there was the thrilling tale of the man-eating tiger which Mrs. Oxney said she could never hear without trembling, though she knew that it ended all right and the tiger did not eat this man, and the story about the ghost which the Colonel had seen in the dak-bungalow somewhere near Agra, and which was far more terrifying than anything Mr. Kipling had written. Then when he had terrified them so much that Mrs. Oxney said that she, for one, wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink that night, he restored confidence and gaiety by the tale of the Dean who gargled with port wine by mistake and told his doctor he thought it would suit him very well taken internally in larger quantities. But to-night Colonel Chase had no such titbits for them; he sneezed and scowled and was silent and made sudden excursions beneath the piano to see whether the pedometer had not secreted itself under the pedals. A great many heads were shaken over his chances of recovering it, and Mrs. Bliss alone was optimistic. She after hearing about it just closed her eyes and then said she was sure that everything would prove to be happy and harmonious. It was very pleasant to know that Mrs. Bliss had no fears about the pedometer, but it did not really help matters.

  Colonel Chase roused himself from his melancholy when the parlour-maid came in to clear away tea, to question her sharply as to whether anything had been heard of It, and whether a parcel had arrived for him from the chemist’s. The double negative of her answer seemed to intensify the prevailing gloom, and even the drawing of the curtains and the kindling of all the electric lights made but a hollow mockery of cheerful cosiness. Miss Howard, also sharply questioned, was quite sure she had given the order that the packet was to be sent up at once.

  “That was all you asked me to do, Colonel Chase,” she said with some dignity, “and I did it.”

  That gave Mrs. Bliss a cue.

  “Dear girl,” she said, “I’m going to ask you to do something nice, and oh, please do it. Won’t you run your hands over the piano? Just one of those sweet little fragments. How dear of you! How you spoil me.”

  This was better than nothing, for there was a reason for silence if Miss Howard was playing, and she gave them several sweet little fragments, during one of which Colonel Chase left the room and was heard bawling down the telephone in the lounge. Everybody of course had only half an ear for the sweet fragments while this was going on, and Miss Howard very considerately played with the soft pedal down, for she was as interested as anybody. He was heard to give a number to the exchange, which Mrs. Oxney whispered was Mr. Amble’s, and presently called out, “Perfectly disgraceful and if your shop’s shut up and your boy’s gone home, you ought to bring it up yourself now. Shameful!” Mr. Amble, thereupon, so it was easy to make out, must have got a little heated too, and replaced the receiver at his end, for Colonel Chase after saying ‘Hullo’ eight or nine times in a crescendo of fury, put his receiver back (as anybody could hear) and went upstairs. He walked with a heavy thumping tread, as if he had quite forgotten that every one else was still enjoined to step carefully, for fear of pulverising the pedometer. . . . It was all dramatic enough, but no one knew the full splendour of the situation, for even as Colonel Chase went thumping upstairs, Mr. Amble went back to his parlour and finished polishing up the Colonel’s pedometer.

  Miss Howard released the soft pedal and trod on the other one: there was nothing now for which to listen elsewhere, so they all concentrated themselves on the long shake with the crossing arpeggios. Florence had stolen to the chair which Colonel Chase had vacated close to the piano and rapturously followed Miss Howard’s twinkling fingers. How nimble and slender they were, and those same fingers had been so still and steady when they held the brush which picked out the reflections in the river. Life was becoming exciting for Florence. When the arpeggio passage came to an end, as usual in three crashing chords, everyone felt much better, for Colonel Chase had gone up to his room, and the eclipse for the present was over, and there was Miss Howard at the piano. Mrs. Oxney heaved a sign of relief and rapture.

  “I wish the Colonel had heard that,” she said. “He is a little worried, isn’t he, with the cold and no quinine or pedometer. Most aggravating for him, but please don’t get up, Miss Howard. Mayn’t we have ‘O rest in the Lord’, though it isn’t Sunday.”

  Miss Howard let them have it, very slowly and with great feeling, accentuating the melody. She gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling, and all her audience gazed thoughtfully at other inappropriate spots, and Florence gazed at Miss Howard. Mrs. Oxney found herself thinking of the late Mr. Oxney, and Mrs. Bertram thought about coke, and Mrs. Holders thought about the enquiry she had sent to the Sunday Gazette about their bridge last night, and Mr. Kemp with closed eyes thought about his left hip, and Mrs. Bliss thought about Mind, and Miss Howard thought about the cost of the frames for her pictures, but all wore precisely the same dreamy and wistful expression. A perfect gale of sighs succeeded the last note and a subdued chorus of ‘Thank you, Miss Howard’. Mrs. Bertram had determined to get some more coke in at any cost, Mrs. Holders had calculated that Slam would have plenty of time to answer her enquiry in next Sunday’s issue, Mrs. Oxney had regretted that her late husband had sold his shares in the Bolton Electric Company, and Mr. Kemp had lifted his left legquite high and found that it certainly moved more easily. . . . But something had to be done, for
this pious hour could not go on until dinner-time, and Mrs. Holders mercifully put an end to it by staggering towards the door. Tim followed suit, and as the wet and cold of the day had dismally affected them both, she groped her way along the piano and Tim cake-walked more prancingly than ever along the opposite wall. They collided at the door, for each of them tried to open it for the other, and reviled each other’s clumsiness. They groped their way across the lounge, and established themselves in the smoking-room.

  “That’s better,” she said. “Now let’s be real. Don’t let us rest in the Lord: let’s — oh Tim, let’s contemplate Colonel Chase. I would sooner have twenty colds in the head by the way, and lose a hundred pedometers than ache as I’m aching to-night. You’re pretty bad my dear, aren’t you? Poke the fire.”

  Tim poked the fire with one of his sticks. It had an india-rubber ferule which, when he withdrew it, was fizzling and giving off a perfectly sickening smell.

  “There!” he said triumphantly. “I made that smell, and all because you told me to poke the fire. You made it, in fact. About aches: don’t let us talk about such a boring subject. Nor about the Colonel; what really interests me is Mrs. Bliss. She’s holding a sort of healing class. They close their eyes and smile. Did you ever see Kemp smile before? I never did. They close their eyes and smile, I tell you, and assert that they are quite well. I wish his smile didn’t make me feel so morose.”

  “Oh Tim, how thrilling,” she said. “I hadn’t grasped what they were about. I only thought they looked boiled. I hope she’ll leave me and my aches alone, I should consider it great impertinence if she attempted to interfere with them.”

  This robust view made him laugh.

  “I quite agree,” he said. “I’ve got a strong sense of property too. My aches are my own, and they’re quite real, and I should resent it very much if anybody denied it. Lord, what bosh! And she has baths too, just like the rest of us. But here we are on the boring topic again. Much better not to think about it and play piquet.”

  “Come on, then. How I hate my vile body to-day.”

  “Loathsome, isn’t it? But you’ll feel better if you rook me.”

  Mrs. Oxney and her sister meantime had gone back to their sitting-room. Miss Howard (after playing ‘O rest in the Lord’ again, which Mrs. Bliss sang sotto voce in a small buzzing voice like a blue-bottle with a broad smile) went to get on with her catalogue, and the three students of Mental Science were left to their studies. Mr. Kemp refused to be interested in its larger aspects: it existed as far as he was concerned for the purpose of making him better. They all sat with eyes closed realising Omnipotent Mind for a little, and then he stretched out his left leg which was the worst. Encouraged by the absence of pain, he got up and with only one stick hobbled across the room and back again.

  “I’m convinced that the joint is moving more freely,” he said excitedly. “I don’t believe I’ve walked so easily since that good week I had at Bath in the spring. At Buxton I never stirred a yard without two sticks, did I, Florence?”

  “You’re walking as well as anybody else can walk, dear Mr. Kemp,” said Mrs. Bliss, to whom the most atrocious lies on this subject were beautiful truths.

  “If you only chose, you could jump on to that chair like a bird hopping on to a branch.”

  He looked at this formidable altitude, and even bent his knees as if about to spring.

  “I almost believe I could,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t, Papa,” exclaimed Florence. “You know that Dr. Dobbs said that any improvement must come slowly. I mean—”

  “Dear child!” said Mrs. Bliss. “Naughty! That’s the false idea we’re working to destroy.”

  “I know. I forgot for a moment,” said Florence. “But he’d much better not try to jump, had he?”

  Mr. Kemp thought so himself, but he was much encouraged by his long walk across the room.

  “Really I’m not sure that I shall have my reclining bath tomorrow,” he said. “I shall only have my masseur. And yet, I don’t know. You mean to go on with your baths, don’t you, Mrs. Bliss?”

  “Yes, for the sake of my dear husband, as I told you,” said she, “and there’s no harm in doing it, so long as you’re perfectly certain it can’t possibly do you any good. All the time I was in my bath this morning, so warm and restful, I fixed all my thoughts on Mind.”

  Mr. Kemp’s walking tour had not ended quite as felicitously as it began, and a few sharp twinges made him glad to get back to his chair.

  “And what shall I do next?” he asked. “I’ve had a good twenty minutes self-treatment, and you and Florence were treating me too.”

  Mrs. Bliss leaned forward and warmed her hands at the fire. They were not cold, of course.

  “We should all spend much of our time in helping others,” she said. “We get strength that way. Poor Colonel Chase now: my heart bleeds for him with all his false claims about losing his pedometer and having a bad cold and lumbago. Shall we help him?”

  Mr. Kemp did not feel any real spiritual compulsion to help Colonel Chase, whose false claims were such petty little disturbances, but if he could get strength that way which would enable him to treat himself more powerfully, he was quite willing to help him. He would have to rest before dinner and glanced at the clock.

  “Well, for ten minutes,” he said.

  “Dear of you,” said Mrs. Bliss. “The poor Colonel is so full of illusions this afternoon, which make him feel worried and ill and anxious. Let us all give him absent treatment.”

  “Mustn’t we send up and tell him?” asked Florence. “I don’t think I should like to do that.”

  “No, dear, it makes no difference whether he knows it or not. Let us deny his worries and chilly feelings. Let us see him healthy and happy and full of sunshine.”

  This required a good deal of imaginative effort on the part of those who knew Colonel Chase, for it was no use saying that sunshine was one of his characteristic attributes. Mr. Kemp and Florence had to close their eyes very tight on many past memories in their efforts to realise a sunny Colonel. As for seeing him healthy and happy one glance at him when he came down to dinner that evening was enough to make that internal conception very difficult to cling to, for he had a cold of the most violent kind, he incessantly coughed and sneezed, he had a poor appetite, he was bent and stiff with lumbago and looked the picture of misery. Luckily he was extremely hoarse, being hardly able to speak above a whisper, and so the scarifying remarks he addressed to the parlour-maid, who served him, complaining of his food and his drink, and the draught, and his napkin, and the light and the knives and forks could not be made out with any clearness, but the growling noises which accompanied poor Mabel’s visits to his table, could not reasonably be interpreted as the utterances of a happy man. There was no news of the pedometer, the infamous Amble had not sent his quinine and thermogene, and when, after sitting almost on the hob of the smoking-room fire for half an hour, he went up to bed without even suggesting a game of bridge, it was felt by those who had tried to see him happy and full of sunshine, that their visions were as yet unfulfilled. Further, Mr. Kemp’s hip had suffered a bad relapse and there was no longer any doubt in his mind that he would have his bath as usual next day. He was much disappointed at the general results of the evening’s séance, and wondered if his hip had ever been so bad before. Mind, in his view, was of very doubtful value.

  But none of these mutinous ideas had the smallest effect on Mrs. Bliss’s complete confidence, or diminished the splendour of her smile. She knew, and soon everybody else would know, that all was well with Mr. Kemp’s hip and the Colonel’s cold and her own arthritis and the missing pedometer.

  CHAPTER IV

  It has been said that miracles don’t happen. This one did. The morning broke warm and sunny again, and Miss Howard who came downstairs, warbling the chorale of her improvisation, a few minutes before the breakfast gong sounded, observed that there was a nice parcel for Colonel Chase on the table of the lounge with perfidious A
mble’s label. It needed no ingenuity to surmise that this contained quinine and thermogene, and Mrs. Oxney who had been looking at the proofs of her Wentworth advertisement, thought she had better send it up to his room.

  “He’s sure to stop in bed all morning,” she said, “and the best place too for such a nasty cold as he’s got, and he can wrap himself up in that wool and dose himself at pleasure. I’ll send one of the maids up with it to make sure he’ll have his breakfast in bed, and light his fire for him.”

  At that moment the miracle manifested itself. The words were hardly out of Mrs. Oxney’s mouth when a loud cheerful whistle sounded from above and Colonel Chase came tramping downstairs. His face was rosy from the cold bath, which was one of the reasons why Englishmen were stronger than anybody else, and he stronger than any other Englishman, and his whistle betokened his distinguished approval of the dealings of Providence.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he said standing at the salute. “You observe that Richard is himself again. Most extraordinary thing! When I have a cold like that I had yesterday, I know I shall have two days in hell, if you’ll excuse the expression, and three in purgatory. Now I was never worse in my life than I was when I went up to bed last night. Very unwell indeed. I went asleep at once. And I awoke this morning as chirpy as a cricket, and not a trace of my cold left.”

  “Well, isn’t that wonderful!” said Mrs. Oxney. “I know your colds, Colonel, and I always say that nobody I ever saw has such colds as you. Terrific!”

  “And I took no remedies at all,” said he. “That monstrous chemist — ah, there’s the parcel. I shall send it back for I’m no more in need of his muck than I am of prussic acid. It’s a miracle, I tell you, a sheer miracle. Such a recovery was never known before. My colds were famous in India. ‘Look out for squalls when Colonel Chase has a cold,’ was what my officers used to say to the subs when they joined the regiment. Lumbago gone, too: I did my dumb-bell exercises this morning with a boy’s suppleness. I declare, if it wasn’t for the loss of my pedometer, that I never felt happier in my life.”