by E. F. Benson
“My dear Oliver,” said Alice’s voice, “aren’t you ready for dinner yet? Make me some compliment on my new tea-gown....”
After that miserable adventure he resolved to have no more to do with the serious or emotional side of life, and in the words of one of our modern bards “he held it best in living to take all things very lightly.” He had consecrated all the power of his imagination on one great passion, and now his dream was exploded and Alice had got the tea-gown! Almost worse than that was that the divine orange vesture of his beloved had begun to multiply in a most unseemly manner in the shops of quite inferior dressmakers, and half a dozen times a day he could feel his breath catch in his throat as for a moment he thought he saw in some other window the wraith of her who was for ever lost to him. But while this stung and wounded him, it yet probably helped to cure him, and a few weeks later he was immersed again in the minor joys of life, visiting Capri and the Bay of Naples, when he saw the cages of quails in the poulterers’ shops, going again to s — Court balls opposite the jeweller’s, tossing with the fishing fleet on moonlit nights off the Cornish coast opposite the fishmonger’s, or spending hours in the country over his embroidery frame.
One day a smart shower drove him into the portals of Micklethwait’s Stores in Knightsbridge, where the most exotic of purchasers can find their curious wants supplied, and all at once it struck him that these incessant peregrinations of the streets made up a very diluted form of life. Here all possible fountains of desire and adventure scintillated under one roof, and you had but to take a step out of the Arctic winter of the fur department to find yourself in the hot summer weather of straw hats, or playing a match against the heads of the profession in the room where billiard balls and tables were sold.
Though he would never fall seriously in love again, he could have some pleasant flirtations in the ladies’ underwear department, or, if his mood was Byronic, he would go to the games department and think of the nursery he would have furnished for his growing family if the beloved in the orange dress had remained faithful to him, and not given her tea-gown to Alice, whom it strangely misbecame. With a stifled groan he would tear himself away from that, and, surrounded by paper and envelopes and red-tape and sealing-wax, spend an hour as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, conducting abstruse diplomatic operations with the perfidious Turk, and worsting him at every turn in the tangled game.
So underneath those lofty roofs and terra-cotta cupolas, he began to live a life of which the variety and extravagance baffles description. A chance shower had originally taken him there (for on such small accidents does our destiny depend), but now rain or fine, hot or cold, he was the first in the morning to pass through the swing doors and, with a couple of hurried intervals for meals, the last to leave in the evening. Whether August burned the torrid pavements outside, or whether the fog gripped the town in its grimy hand, there was always the same warm, calm atmosphere inside laden with a hundred aromatic scents and teeming with rich suggestions of love and athletics and chemistry and travel. Often in the morning he would be tempted to go straight to the department of tea-gowns and other more intimate feminine apparel, but he kept a firm hold on himself and transacted business in the stationery department, or spent a studious hour in the book-room first.
Nor did he neglect his exercise, and in the games department he knocked up a hundred runs at cricket, or had a brisk game of hockey, or played a round of golf, a pursuit to which he was now passionately attached owing to the strange suggestive forms of niblicks and brassies. Or, artistically inclined, he would wander among paint-boxes, palettes, and sketching umbrellas by the shore of some windless sea, and then hurry away to a counter behind which were discreet bathing costumes for both sexes, and spend a pleasant quarter of an hour in mixed bathing. This always gave him an appetite, and he tripped off to the cooked foods department, popping in at the bakery on the way, and had a delicious lunch off crisp country bread, with a pot of caviare and a couple of slices of galantine, washed down with a glass of Chablis from the wine department. Then perhaps after a whiff of roasting coffee from the grocery department, he would put on some clean ducks with a grey silk tie (haberdashery), in which he put a pear-shaped pearl pin (jewellery), and then, fresh and cool, spent a half-hour of airy badinage with the agreeable ladies, “whose presence,” as he recollected Mr. Pater saying, “so strangely rose” beside the chiffon and millinery. His constant passage through the various departments provoked no suspicion in the minds of the shop-walkers and attendants that he was one of the light-fingered brigade, for from time to time he made small purchases and always paid ready cash, and it occurred to no one that here was an opportunity of studying, first-hand, the rapid development of one of the strangest and most harmless monomaniacs who had ever pursued his innocent way outside the protective walls of a lunatic asylum.
After such a delicious lunch it was no wonder that when he went back to his flat he could make but small pretence at eating, for in imagination he had fared so delicately and well that the lumps of muscular mutton and robust beef provided by Alice’s catering made no appeal to him. She might wonder at the smallness of his appetite, but she could not feel the slightest anxiety about that, so bright of eye and alert of limb was he under the spell of the happy busy life crowded with incident, that now was his.
After lunch he would sit with her a little, talking in the most vivid and interesting manner on the topics of the moment, and then, looking at his watch, would silently remind himself that he was giving a pianoforte recital at three, and, if he was already a little late, would call a taxi to take him back to the Stores, while he suppled and gave massage to his fingers as he drove.
He was by this time in an advanced state of his agreeable insanity, for he had lost all control over his imagination, the workings of which were entirely in the hands of the suggestions that external objects made to it. It was just in this that the completeness of his enjoyment of life lay. It was in this, too, that there lay such discomfort and suffering as was his. The sight of a “dental case” in a window, with its rows of gleaming teeth and rose-coloured gums and palates, was sufficient to give him a violent stab of pain in his teeth, for the suggestion implied that he would have to get them all taken out before he attained to the acquisition of those foreign splendours. But he had learned by this time the position of all the shops between his flat and the Stores which displayed these and similar dolorous exhibitions, and his eye would instinctively avert itself from doctors’ doorplates or shops where were sold ear-trumpets, and pitch, with the precision of a bird on a twig, on cheerful and harmonious windows. He no longer, in fact, lived a self-governing life of his own, but was no more than thistledown in a wind before the suggestions that the outside world made to his disordered senses. And then, as was bound to happen sooner or later, came the crash.
That day he saw for the first time, close beside the lift in the boot department, through which he passed by accident, for boots conveyed nothing at all to him, a black door slightly ajar, and thinking, with a pang of delight, that some fresh world of experiences might be about to burst upon him, he entered. His first impression was of some lovely garden full of white flowers arranged in wreaths, as if in garden beds, and all covered with glass cases. Then he saw that though his first impression had been of gleaming whites, the predominant note was black. There were black cloaks, black scarves, black hats, black-edged cards.... And then, with a sudden icy pang at his heart, he saw straight in front of him a large oblong box with glass sides, on the top of which were nodding ostrich plumes. Simultaneously there advanced out of the gloom a small man in black clothes, with neat side-whiskers, clearly dyed. He came towards him, rubbing his hands in a professional and sympathetic manner.
“Is there anything we can do for you, sir?” he asked.
Oliver’s teeth chattered in his head, and his eyes rolled heavenwards. Then he spun round and fell in a heap on the floor. He was dead.
PHILIP’S SAFETY RAZOR
UP to
the time of Philip’s obsession there cannot have been in all the world a happier couple than he and his wife. As everybody knows, the ecstasy of life has its home in the imagination, and Philip and Phoebe Partington lived almost exclusively in those realms which were illumined by the light that never was on sea or land. I do not absolutely affirm that sea and land would have been the better for that light; all that I insist on was that the Partington effulgence certainly never was there. It was a remunerative light also, and out of the proceeds they bought a quantity of false Elizabethan furniture and a motor-car. A spin in the motor-car after the ecstatic labour of the morning cleared Phoebe’s head, and they dined together in an Elizabethan room with rushes on the floor. That cleared Phœbe’s head, too, for nothing in the world could be remoter from the setting of her imaginative life than anything Elizabethan. She and her husband lived in an opulent and lurid present, which, in its turn, was just as remote from contemporary life as most people know it, as were the “spacious days” that had left their spurious traces on the diningroom.
They were the most industrious of artists, and often had as many as three feuilletons running simultaneously in provincial papers, and the manner of their activity was this. Every morning, directly after breakfast, Philip sat in the dining-room, and until one o’clock proceeded to turn into narrative the very complete and articulated skeleton of the tale which Phoebe manufactured in the drawing-room. The imaginative gift was hers; there was not a situation in the world which she could not contemplate unwinking, like an eagle staring into the sun, and these she passed on to her husband, whose power of putting them into narrative was as unrivalled as his wife’s in conceiving them.
Picture him, then, with his plump, amiable face bent over Phoebe’s imaginings, a perennial pipe in his mouth, and, invariably, two or three little tufts of cotton-wool struck on to his cheek or chin, where he had cut himself shaving that morning. Occasionally, but very rarely, he had to go into the drawing-room to ask the elucidation of some situation: how, for instance, was Algernon Montmorency to leap lightly out of the window, and so regain his motor-car, when Phoebe had laid the scene in the top room of the moated tower of Eagles Castle? But Phoebe could always suggest a remedy which cost the minimum of readjustment, and ten minutes afterwards Algernon would be thundering along the road with the lurid Semitic moneylender in close pursuit. But for such occasional interruption and the periodical lighting of his pipe he would not pause for a second till the morning’s work was over. He never hesitated for a word, for he had at his command the entire vocabulary of English clichés, and he often got through two instalments before lunch. At one precisely the parlourmaid came in, and groping through the fog of tobacco-smoke, opened all the windows and began to lay the table. Upon which Philip washed off his tufts of cottonwool, snatched Phoebe from her imaginative visions, and strolled in the garden with her till the gong summoned them to the recuperative spell of a mutton chop and a glass of blood-making Australian Burgundy.
After lunch they drove in the motor-car, returning for tea, and from tea till dinner they read over aloud and discussed their morning’s work. In this way Philip made acquaintance with the subject-matter he would be employed on next morning, and Phoebe learned how that which she had written yesterday had turned out. Philip had never any criticism to make: his wife’s imagination seemed to him one of the most glorious instruments ever devised for the delectation of the literary, and she often said that of all contemporary novelists her husband was the only man capable of handling the situations she poured out in this unending flood. After dinner they played patience, went early to bed, and awoke with an unquenchable zest for the labour and rewards of another day.
It is impossible to figure a happier or a more harmonious existence. In imagination they roamed over the entire world without the expense or inconvenience of foreign travel: their spirits ranged through the whole gamut of human emotion, and whatever adversities the Algernon and Eva of the moment went through, their creators and interpreters knew in their heart of hearts that all was going to end well, for otherwise they would speedily have lost their pinnacled eminence as writers of serial stories in the daily press. It is true that Philip’s voice often shook as he read, and that Phoebe’s eyes were dim as she listened to the written tale of the remarkable disasters and misunderstandings through which the children of her brain had to pass; but these were but luxurious and sterile sorrows. In fact, the greatest trial that ever came to them during these halcyon years was when the editor of one of the papers in which the tale was running wrote to say that it was so popular that he insisted on having at least another fortnight of it, instead of bringing it to an end in two more instalments.
That entailed a vast deal of work, for Phoebe had to search the file to find out by what constructive carpentering she could engineer an episode that would be of the requisite length; for the last instalment of all, when the severed were reunited, must naturally be left for the end. But she never failed to manage it somehow, and even when tribulation was great, and for the moment she could not conceive how to spin the story out, her cloud had a silver lining, for all this difficult work was due to the story’s amazing popularity. Or sometimes some ill-mannered reader would write to the newspaper office to point out that St. Peter’s Church at Rome did not stand on a “commanding eminence,” or ask more information about the “glittering spires” on the Acropolis at Athens, or demur to the “pellucid waters of the Nile in flood, as it rolled down in blue cataracts studded with milk-white foam.” But otherwise their life flowed on in an unbroken succession of literary triumphs and domestic happiness.
Then suddenly without any warning whatever the curtain was rung up on a psychological tragedy; for Philip, by some species of spiritual infection from his wife, began to develop an imagination. It did not at first threaten to attack what Phoebe in a Gallic moment had once called their “vie intérieure,” by which she meant their literary labours, but was directly concerned only with the present of a safety razor which she had made him on his birthday, in order to save cotton-wool and his life-blood. This safety razor consisted of a neat little sort of a rake into which razor blades were fitted. Each of these, when blunted by use, was to be thrown away and a fresh one inserted, and that morning, Philip, finding that his blade had begun to lose its edge, tossed it lightly and airily out of his dressing-room window, from which it fell into a herbaceous border which ran along the house. The new blade gave the utmost satisfaction, and precisely at nine-thirty he lit his first pipe and began his work for the day on Phœbe’s scenario.
The dining-room was just below his dressing-room, and at that moment there came a rustle from the herbaceous bed, and Phœbe’s adorable Persian cat leaped on to the window-sill from outside, and proceeded to make its toilet in the warm May sunshine. And at that precise and fatal moment Philip Partington’s imagination began to work. It stirred within him like the first faint pang of a toothache. For some quarter of an hour he refused to recognize its existence, and proceeded to clothe in suitable language the flight of Eva up the frozen Thames in an ice-ship. Not knowing exactly what an ice-ship was, and being aware that his readers would be similarly ignorant, he evolved a beautiful one out of his inner consciousness that “skimmed along” on a single runner like a skate. It was not, he reflected, any less likely that it should keep its balance than that a bicycle should....
Suddenly he laid down his pen. His imagination was beginning to hurt him. It would be a terrible thing if Phœbe’s cat, while it prowled though the herbaceous bed, stepped on the blade of the safety razor. Blunt though it was for shaving purposes, it would easily inflict a cruel wound on Tommy’s paw. When his work was done, he must really hunt for the blade, and bestow it in some safer place.
He took up his pen again and wrote, “Ever faster through the deepening winter twilight sped the ice-ship, and Eva controlling the tiller in her long taper fingers, watched the dusky banks fly past her. ‘Oh, God,’ she murmured, ‘grant that I may be in time!’ The woods
of Richmond...”
The cat had finished its toilet and jumped down again into the herbaceous bed. Philip heard a faint mew, and his awaking imagination told him that Tommy had cut his foot already. With a spasm of remorse he ran out into the garden and began a frenzied search for the razor-blade which with such culpable carelessness he had thrown away. A quarter of an hour’s search was rewarded by its discovery, and as there was no blood on the edge of it he thankfully assumed that he had not been punished (nor Tommy either) for his thoughtlessness. He unfortunately stepped on a fine calceolaria, and regained the gravel path with the blade in his hand.
He locked it up in the drawer of his knee-hole table, where he kept his will and his pass-book and his cheque book, and with a free mind returned to Eva, perilously voyaging on the ice past the woods of Richmond, and praying that she should be “in time.” But suddenly, and for the first time in their dual and prosperous career as feuilleton writers, Philip found himself finding a certain want of actuality in Phoebe’s imaginings. They lacked the bite of such realism as he had found illustrated in the poignancy of his own search for the discarded razor-blade in the herbaceous border. There was emotion, real human emotion, though only concerned with the paws of a cat and a razor, whereas Eva’s taper fingers on the tiller of this remarkable craft seemed to want the solidity of mortal experience. But it would never do to lose faith in Phoebe’s inventions, for it was his faith in them that lent him his unique skill as interpreter and chronicler of them. And, anyhow, the razor-blade was safely inaccessible now to any cat on its pleasure excursions, and he turned his mind back to the woods of Richmond.
With the unexpectedness of a clock loudly chiming, his imagination began to work again. What if he should suddenly die even as he sat there at his table! Phoebe alone knew where his will was kept, and he saw her, blind with tears, unlocking the drawer and groping with trembling hand among its contents. Suddenly she would start back with a cry of pain, and withdraw her hand, on which the fast-flowing blood denoted that she had severed an artery or two, and would bleed to death in a few seconds, as had happened to a most obnoxious Marquis in the tale, “Kind hearts are more than coronets.”