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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
E. F. Benson's 'Sheaves' is a compelling collection of fifteen short stories that delve into the complexities of human nature, relationships, and societal conventions. Written in a clear and concise prose with a touch of understated humor, Benson's work showcases his keen observations of the English middle-class society during the early 20th century. The stories are rich in character development and psychological insight, making them a captivating read for those interested in character-driven narratives. The thematic depth of the stories explores themes of love, betrayal, and social expectations, all delivered with Benson's trademark wit and charm. 'Sheaves' serves as a true reflection of Benson's talent for storytelling, leaving readers pondering over the intricacies of human behavior long after turning the final page.
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Sheaves
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
THE long and ferocious battle between those desperate wild Indians, Chopimalive and his squaw Sitonim (otherwise known as Jim and Daisy Rye) and the intrepid trader, Hugh Grainger, had come to an end, and the intrepid trader lay dead on the hayfield. He had still (which was a good deal to ask of a dead man) to carry on and direct the Indians’ subsequent movements, and with praiseworthy disregard of self and scorn of consequence, he had said that it was necessary to bury him with musical honours in the arid sands of the American desert, and “Rule Britannia” would do. He had, however, hinted that if his body and legs were buried, that would be quite sufficient in the way of ritual; but the Indians had thought otherwise, and had covered his head also. Then the Indians, being inconveniently hot, had sat down close to his tomb, with threats that unless he lay really dead they would bury him much deeper.
“Dead traders always have their faces uncovered,” said Hugh.
“This one didn’t,” remarked Chopimalive.
“But the squaw always came and uncovered his face afterward, immediately afterward,” said Hugh, “otherwise his ghost haunted them and woke them up about midnight with the touch of an icy hand.”
“Well, your hand wasn’t at all icy,” said Sitonim scornfully. “It was very hot—as hot as me. Besides, you’re dead, and you can’t talk.”
Hugh coughed away some bits of clover that had got into his mouth.
“I’m not talking,” he said; “it’s the voice from the tomb. And if you don’t take the tomb off my face, my ghost will let itself down to-night from the ceiling like a purple spider and eat your nose.”
Shrieks from Sitonim; and she clawed the hay away from his face, nearly putting out his eye.
“Promise you won’t!” she said.
“O Daisy, you funk!” said Chopimalive.
“Well, I don’t want my nose eaten,” said she.
The corpse continued:
“And then to make sure that the trader wouldn’t drop down from the ceiling, Chopimalive felt in the left-hand pocket of his coat, and put a cigarette which he found in a case there into his mouth. Yes. And there was a box of matches—— Oh, I forgot, they pulled his left-hand trouser down, so that the sand of the American desert didn’t get up above his sock and tickle his leg, because the Tickle-ghost is far the worst.”
Chopimalive had memories of the Tickle-ghost.
“Oh, which is your left leg?” he cried. “You’re upside down.”
“So’s the Tickle-ghost,” said Hugh.
“Oh, do tell me!” screamed Chopimalive.
“Well, it’s the other leg,” said Hugh.
“And who’s a funk now?” asked Sitonim.
Daisy was applying the match to the end of the cigarette, and after setting a little hay on fire and burning the trader’s nose, she succeeded in making sure that the spider would not drop down from the ceiling.
“Do ghosts always want such a lot of things?” she asked.
“The worst sort do,” said Hugh. “I’m the worst sort. You are only ten, you see. You haven’t seen all the ghosts yet. The worst come last.”
The minds of the Indians, however, were now relieved. The ritual demanded by the voice from the tomb had been performed, and they grew aggressive again.
“You musn’t talk,” said Chopimalive. “You’re dead.”
“Very well, then, it will all happen,” said Hugh mystically. “It happens most if one doesn’t talk.”
“The worst things? Oh, there’s mother on the lawn! She’s calling to us. Must we go, Hugh?”
Dead silence.
“Hugh, you may talk just this once, to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’”
“Yes or no,” said the corpse.
“It means bedtime for Jim,” said Daisy, “because he’s only nine. Yes, mummy, we’re here,” she shrieked.
“And is Hugh there?” called a distant voice.
“Yes, he’s dead. But he’s a voice from the tomb, and he’s telling us a story.”
“Well, five minutes more,” called the distant voice.
“Thank you, darling mummy!” shrieked Daisy.
“Oh, you little liar!” said Hugh.
“Well, but I said you were telling us a story because you were just going to. Weren’t you?”
“That’s no reason why you should tell mummy a story,” said he.
“Oh, then make it true! Do tell us a story!”
Chopimalive sat down heavily on the middle portion of the tomb, and the corpse gave a short, involuntary grunt.
“Oh, Hughie, just a short one!” he said. “We’ve got to go to bed. Do people go to bed later and later as they get older?”
“Yes. I never go to bed at all, because I’m ninety-nine.”
“You aren’t,” said Daisy. “You’re a corpse.”
“Oh, Daisy, don’t be stupid!” said Jim. “That’s finished. Hughie’s going to tell us a story.”
“Will it be silly?” asked Daisy anxiously.
“I can’t tell. It depends on internal evidence,” said Hugh.
Daisy sighed.
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“Nor do I,” said Hugh. “I’m a corpse, I am. You said so.”
“Oh, shut up!” said Jim, bounding up and down. “Now begin, Hugh. A minute’s gone.”
Hugh was far too sensible and serious to waste more of the time of the children, which is so infinitely precious when bedtime looms like a thunder-cloud, and began.
“Once upon a time,” he said, “there were three absurd old men, who lived together in an enormous castle built of strawberries.”
“I should have ate them!” said Jim.
“They did. When they felt the least hungry, and very often when they didn’t, they ate a piece of the wall, which instantly grew again. Sometimes they forgot, and ate the chairs on which they were sitting. Because the chairs never grew again, and so after a year or two they all had to sit on the floor.”
He paused, for to talk pure nonsense requires an effort of the imagination. It is fatal if any sense creeps in. In the pause Daisy brushed away the last remnants of hay from his face, because she thought she would hear better so. The face was very red and hot and extraordinarily young—the face of a man, it is true, but of a very boyish person.
“Oh, get on!” said Jim.
Hugh again gave an involuntary grunt.
“They were all, all three of them, very absurd people,” he said, “chiefly because they had never had any mothers, but had been found in gooseberry-bushes in the garden.”
Daisy gave a long appreciative sigh.
“Oh, were you found there, Hughie?” she said.
Hugh thought a moment.
“No. Otherwise I should have been an absurd person. None of us were found in gooseberry-bushes. Try to remember that, and don’t say I said anything about it. But these people were found there, so they were all very peculiar. One was so tall that he had to go up to the attics to brush his hair, and one was so short that he had to go down to the cellar to put on his boots; and the third had such long sight that he saw all round the world, and could thus see the back of his own head, because the world is round and he saw all round it. But he could see nothing nearer than America, unless—unless he wore spectacles. What’s that?”
“It isn’t anything,” said Daisy in a faltering tone.
Hugh thought he had heard some extraneous sound, but he did not trouble to look round.
“Now, though the castle was made of strawberries,” he said, “and there was no trouble about washing up or cleaning——”
“What happened to the stalks?” asked Jim.
“There weren’t any. They were the best strawberries, like those you see when you come down to tea with mummy.”
“Was there cream?” asked Daisy.
“Yes; it came out of sugar-taps in the wall, so that you held the strawberry under the tap and it was covered with cream and sugar, because the taps always melted very fast. That was all right. But what wasn’t all right was that the first absurd old man, whose name was Bang, was always running up to the attic to brush his hair, and the second silly old man was always sitting in the cellar to put on his boots. His name was Bing; and the third old man, whose name was Bong, was always putting on his spectacles, because he wanted to see something nearer than America. So after they had lived like this for rather more than two hundred years, it struck them that a system of coöperative and auxiliary mutualness——”
“What?” shrieked both the children together.
“I don’t know,” said Hugh. “So the tall man always lived up in the attic and brushed everybody’s hair, and the short man always lived in the cellar and tied everybody’s bootlaces, and——”
This time there was a distinct sound of suppressed laughter, and Hugh sat up.
“And the long-sighted man put on all the spectacles he could find in the garden and went to bed, because the five minutes were up, and he expected that a good long night, especially if he wore spectacles, would make him think of something in the morning.”
Daisy saw through this.
“Oh, mummy, you spoiled it all by laughing!” she said with deep reproach. “I know he wouldn’t have gone to bed quite at once.”
“More than five minutes, darlings,” said Lady Rye. “Say good night to Hugh.”
“And you’ll come and see us when you go down to dinner?”
“Yes, if you go at once.”
The two obedient little figures galloped off to the house, and Hugh dispossessed himself of the sand of the American desert and sat up.
“Dressing-time?” he asked.
“No, only dressing-bell,” said she. “I came to sit in the hay for five minutes. When did you get here?”
“About tea-time. You were all out on the river, so we played Indians.”
“Daisy said you played better than anybody she knew,” said Lady Rye. “I wish you’d teach me. They don’t think I play at all well.”
Hugh was combing bits of things out of his hair.
“No, I expect you are not quite serious enough,” he said. “You probably don’t concentrate your mind on the fact that you are an Indian and that this is an American desert. Heavens, I shall never get rid of this hay; I wish it wasn’t so prickly!”
“One has to suffer to be absurd,” said she.
“Oh, but surely it isn’t absurd to play Indians!” said Hugh. “Anyhow, it isn’t more absurd than it is for all us grown-up people to dress up every evening and go to parties. That is just as absurd as children’s dressing-up. In fact, they are more sensible; they dress up and are what they dress up as. We dress up, and behave exactly as usual.”
Lady Rye considered this.
“Why do you go to parties, then, if it’s absurd?” she asked.
“Why? Because it’s such fun. I play wild Indians with Daisy and Jim for the same reason. But in both cases it’s playing. If you come to think of it, it is ridiculous for some distinguished statesman or general to put on stars and ribands when he goes to see his friends. It’s dressing-up. So why not say so?”
“Well, it’s time for us to go and dress up. Oh, isn’t it nice just for a day or two to have a pause? There’s no one here but Edith and Toby and you, and I shall make no efforts, but only go out in a punt and fill my pond.”
“Fill your pond?” asked Hugh.
“Yes; you and Edith shall both help. Don’t you know the feeling, when you have been racketting about and talking and trying to arrange things for other people how one’s whole brain and mind seem to be just like an empty pond—no water in it, only some mud, in which an occasional half-stranded fish of an idea just flaps from time to time? Go and dress, Hugh, and don’t keep me talking.”
Lady Rye’s misguided parents had selected the name Cynthia for her. This was a pity, since there was nothing whatever in her appearance or disposition that could remind her friends of the moon, and while she was still of an early age they had taken the matter into their own hands, disregarded her baptismal name, and always called her Peggy, which suited her quite admirably. In her own opinion she was hideous, but this fact, for so she honestly and frankly considered it to be, did not in the least weigh on her mind, nor did she let that very acute instrument of perception dwell on it, for it was a mere waste of time to devote any thought to that which was so palpably inferior. She knew that her mouth was too big, and that her nose was too small, and that her hair, which might, if anybody wanted to be really candid, be called sandy, did not suit with her rather dark complexion. She knew, too, that her eyes were green, and since this was so, she considered, this time rather hastily, that they must therefore be ugly, which they certainly were not, for they had to a wonderful degree that sensitiveness and power of reflecting the mood of the moment, which green eyes above all others seem to possess. And since the moods which were reflected there were always shrewd, always kindly, and always humorous, it followed that the eyes were very pleasant to look upon. They indicated an extraordinary power of friendliness.
Her friends, it therefore followed, were many, and though their unanimous verdict was that “she looked charming,” she, with the rather severe commonsense which distinguished her, took this epithet as confirmation of her own opinion. For nobody (except one’s enemies) said one looked charming if it was ever so faintly possible to say that one was pretty or beautiful, and to her mind “you look charming” was rather a clumsy mode of indicating one’s plainness, accompanied by a welcome. But she was as far from quarrelling with her fate as she was from quarrelling with her friends; in this over-populated world, where there are so many people and so few prizes, she was more than content with what had been given her. She was well married, she had two adorable children, a “dear angel” of a husband—a position in its way quite unique, and entirely of her own making; also she had formed the excellent habit of enjoying herself quite enormously, without damage to others—an attitude toward life which is more to be desired than gold. It was, in fact, a large part of her gospel; with her whole nature, pleasant and mirthful and greatly alive, she passionately wanted people to be happy. It seemed to her the ideal attitude toward life, and she practised it herself.
The advent of her sister, Mrs. Allbutt, and herself on the London horizon had, twenty years ago, been quite a big event. Edith had been then a girl of twenty-two; she herself was three years younger. Much of the coal of Staffordshire was in their joint hands, and marriageable London was at their feet. Then, as usual, the unusual happened. Cynthia (or Peggy), the green-eyed, the sandy-haired, married at once, and married well; and though that was not in the least remarkable, the odd thing was that Edith, the elder, the beautiful, did not marry for two years later. And when she did marry she married that impossible little Dennis Allbutt. The only explanation was that she fell in love with him. She, at any rate—that proud, shy, silent girl of twenty years ago—had no other to give, for this was true and simple and sufficient, and as to the “why” that she had fallen in love with this bad subject she did not concern herself to enquire. It was so; something in her responded to something in him—to his quickness maybe, for she, beautiful mind and body alike, was rather slow of movement, and it was in vain that Peggy, wise from the heights of her two years’ knowledge of the domestic hearth, besought her to withdraw her hand before it was irrevocably given. Then, when pleading was of no use, when reasoning was vain, she had told her sister what people said of him—how he tipped and fuddled himself, so that he went to bed every night not sober, even if not drunk; that it was in the blood, that his father had died a drunkard’s death. And at that Edith had risen up in quiet, rather dreadful anger.
“It will be wiser of you not to go on, Peggy,” she had said. “Dennis has told me all about it. What you say about his father is true; what you say about him is false. It was true, however, at one time. He has completely got over it.”
“But—” began Peggy.
“I think you had better beg my pardon,” said Edith.
So, poor soul, she had her way, and the twelve years that followed had been for her a descent, steady and unremitting, into the depths of hell. Three years ago now the end had come, and these three years of her widowhood had been passed by her in a long heroic struggle to build up life again out of the wreck and ruin that he had made of her best years, when he chained her by his side, so to speak, in a cellar while outside June was in flower for her. It had been hard work, and often it was the mere fear of going mad if she allowed herself to pause to let her mind dwell on that frightful background of the years, that had kept her struggling and battling to make something of what remained to her. She had studied, she had worked, with the whole force of her quiet indomitable will she had held to that which she knew, even in the darkest hours, to be a fact—namely, that nobody could ruin your life for you, unless you acquiesced in the ruin; as long as she could say to herself “I do not allow it to be ruined,” it was not. And to-day she might fairly say that that attitude had become a habit to her; dark hours still came—hours of gloom and impotent revolt against the searing and burning years she had been through—but these were no longer habitual.
London, which never remembers anything clearly for long, never wholly forgets, and this spring when Edith Allbutt had appeared again, staying at Rye House with her sister, it faintly recollected these facts and commented on them. It really was almost worth while to live twelve years with a dreadful little man like that if at the end you came out at the age of over forty looking like Juno. She was so pleasant too, so agreeable, she had such distinction of a kind that was rather rare nowadays, when everybody played bridge with one hand while they played croquet with the other, and talked all the time with their mouths full of a vegetarian diet. She was the sort of person—magnetic, is it not?—of whom one is always conscious. In a way utterly opposite to Peggy’s, she gave the impression of immense vitality. What had she been doing with herself during these three years in the country, where nobody had seen her, to make her like that? Above all, what was she going to do with herself now?
It seemed then that, dissimilar as the two sisters were, the family likeness between them did exist somewhere very essentially, for if there was one thing for which Peggy was distinguished it was vitality of a kind that made everybody else seem rather like molluscs. And though very differently manifested, this vitality seemed to be equally characteristic of her sister, who had not retired to a bath-chair or a cemetery, but had come out again unimpaired and serenely splendid from what would have driven most women out of their minds.
The little house where this tiny party of four, not counting the two wild Indians, was assembled was Peggy’s own particular pied-à-terre, though, as she justly observed, there was on the whole less land about it than water. It stood separated only by its own lawn from the loveliest reach of all Thames-side, just below Odney Weir and opposite the woods of Cliveden, which rose in a hundred spires and finials of varied green up the steep hillside. The tow-path crossed the river to the other bank just below it, so that the lawn went down to the water’s edge, and no riband of dusty thoroughfare tarnished or smirched the liquidness of the place. On one side a hedge, no mere gauze of twigs and leaves as transparent as a wire fence, but a real compact growth of hawthorn eight feet high and a yard in solid, comfortable breadth, separated it from the meadow; while on the other a mill-stream, flowing strong and steady, and combing the soft green waterweeds as it passed over them in ropes of woven crystal, made an inviolable peninsula, on which stood paddock and house and garden. The house itself held not more than half a dozen guests, and it was just for this privacy and smallness that Peggy so loved it, and the very rarity of the occasions on which she could manage to escape from the businesses which her incredible energy involved her in made her feel like a child on a holiday. It had a veranda all along the front side of it, and a dozen climbing roses which had swarmed up to the very chimneys of the house made the walls and much of the roof invisible under the red and cream of their blossoming. On the lawn a thicket of lilac and syringa fenced off the paddock and kitchen garden, a couple of big elms offered their grave shade against the noonday heat, and lower down close to the mill-stream and facing the river stood a big plane with moulting bark, elbowed branches, and clean-cut, geometric leaf. Down the centre of the lawn strayed a narrow gravel path, bordered on each side by beds where Madonna lilies were just now beginning to open their wax-like petals and make the air swoon with heavy exquisite fragrance; while at their feet, turning dying eyes to their successors in the torch-race of flower-life, the irises of late spring were beginning to wither. And everywhere, here between the lilies in standards, and near the hedge in large square spaces of garden-bed, growing from the native root, the triumph of rose-time was assured. Spring had held no early promise, to be forsworn with frosts of May; no blight this year had come to the advanced buds the caterpillars had spared, and no intangible sickness—that despair of gardener-souls—had vexed the assurance of early summer. Week by week, from the first frail tentative buds to the swollen chalice that held the rose, and from the bursting chalice to the fullspread magical flower, the growth had gone on to the perfection that was now here. For a week before the weather had erred on the side of dryness, then had followed twelve hours of plumping rain, then had followed a hot, moist day, then had followed a day of pervading, beneficent sun. And, as if he was the conductor of some garden symphony, all the roses had responded, as when a hundred bows are ready resting on the strings, to that baton beat, and had leapt on to a fortissimo. There was old-fashioned cabbage-rose, homely to the eye but steadfast as a friend to the nostril; La France was there, perfect in line and scent; Baroness Rothschild was pinker and more perfect in form, but with no other appeal; Richardson sprawled, desiring fresh trellises, where he could wrestle with the loose carmine pillar; Beauté Inconstante showed copper, and yet maintained its value against the purer gold of Dijon; Captain Christie found an anchorage on this stormless margin of the Thames; and a company of alien ladies, Madame Vidal, Madame Rivot, Madame Résal, agreed with Lady Folkestone on the pleasantness of this Thames lawn. They all, like the human inhabitants of the house, felt so much at home there, and so, like all sensible people, being at home, they flowered and flourished.
But above all it was the liquidness, the coolness of shady moisture, the absence of dust that made the essential charm of the place. Half a mile only away ran the motor-tortured highway to Oxford, a place of scurrying monsters of steel, in which sat strange goggled drivers, plunging through these seas of dust; a place of hootings and acrid petroleum smells, where the grit of the road stood all day like a pillar of cloud above the much-travelled route, while where by the roadside there should have stretched green borders of grass, starred with meadow-sweet and ragged-robin and the bright gilt of the buttercups, a blanket of gray dust lay over everything, as if some volcano had strewn its dead ashes over the country. But here for the dust-ridden road there was the liquid waterway; for the gray roadside herbs the fresh velvet of the lawn; and for the hoarse metallic sounds of the flying traffic the scud and flutter of thrushes and their liquid outpouring of song, or on the river itself the cluck and gurgle and drip of oars and the whisper of the broad-faced punt as it was propelled leisurely along, or, when the winds were still, the low cool sound of the outpouring of the weir a hundred yards above. All this on those who, like Peggy when in London, crammed the work and movement of forty-eight hours into every twenty-four, acted like some soothing spell. Nature and running water were a cooling and tranquilising medicine to the fevered mind even as to the London-wearied body.
Moreover, the house, as has been said, was very small, and there was no possibility even if she had wished it, of Peggy’s asking any party down here. Consequently, the mental and emotional atmosphere of the place had for her, and for those who came here, a restful coolness which corresponded well with its physical characteristics. Nobody ever made any efforts here, unless his natural inclination was to make efforts, or attempted for any sake of social duty to entertain, or expected to be entertained. She only asked here those whom she ungrammatically but intelligibly called the “friendest of her friends,” who would without the slightest sense of restraint neither speak nor move all the time they were here, unless they wished to, and who were free, on the other hand, if they liked, to take their rest, as Hugh generally did, by beginning the day about six with a bath in Odney Weir, rowing or punting on the Thames for many violent hours, talking as if in a little time their lips were going to be dumb, and playing wild Indians with the children. That to her and also to her guests was, in a word, the charm of the place.
At the lower edge of the lawn and close to the margin of the river there was a big white tent, planted, like the righteous, by the water side, where, whenever the weather was warm, all meals were served. It was toward this, ten minutes after Hugh and Peggy had gone upstairs, that Mrs. Allbutt was walking across the grass, for the night was deliciously hot and still, and her maid had told her that dinner would be outside. And certainly there was some sense in the feeling that it was worth while to live a dozen years with an impossible husband if the effect at the age of forty-two was to render a woman in the least like her. She had her sister’s dark skin and her sister’s height, with an inch or an inch and a half perhaps—which makes a huge difference to those already tall—thrown in; but there the resemblance between them ceased with a very decided break. Nature had tried no experiments in dealing with her as she had in the case of Peggy, with her pale hair and dark skin, but had used one of her most marked though least common types. On her head she had set coils of hair so black that the lights in it, of which it was full, looked almost blue; she had given her the short nose, the short upper lip, the full generously carving mouth that usually speaks of southern blood; but then, a miracle of design, she had shown the Saxon race in the blue eyes that looked out with a child’s directness of gaze from below the straight line of eyebrow. They were blue of no uncertain hue, so that they seemed now gray and now hazel, but were of the colour that remains true and vivid even in the evil yellow of gaslight. And the years, those sore and tortured years that had passed over her head, had left there, now that her struggle was over, no trace of their trouble; they had but brought her to the full bloom and maturity of the type that had always been so beautiful. Her dark complexion, of the colour which so often after youth is past, tends to get grayish and of rather leathery texture, had still the clear freshness that as a rule only pale skins preserve at the age of forty. But age at this moment seemed to be a thing apart from her. She existed now in her full bloom of beauty, and the mere clumsy measure of years, you would have said, had no significance as regards her. She was poised at the midsummer of life, and the storms of spring that she had gone through, the storms and chills of autumn that might follow, seemed at this moment to stand off from her, just as on this perfect evening of mid-June winter and spring and autumn all seemed remote, beyond the horizon of circumstance.
So Juno went slowly across the lawn, pausing once or twice by this or that standard rose, and, when the little twilight breeze came to her from the bed of lilies, standing still for a long moment, drinking in the heavy swooning fragrance. It was already close on half-past eight, and the sun had set, and now the dusk, like some gentle, beautiful animal, was drinking up the colours of the sky, as stags drink when night comes on. It had drunk the green from the Cliveden woods opposite, leaving them gray till the sun should pour the river of colour over them again at dawn; it had drunk the blue from the sky, leaving it hueless, dove-coloured, and only in the west, like flaming dregs in the cup of the heavens, lingered on the horizon a streak of crimson that faded through yellow, through pale watery green into the velvet tonelessness of the sky. Very remotely the first stars glimmered there, which would move closer to the earth, so it seemed, as the layers of darkness were spread over the sky; and, as if to compensate for the withdrawal of light, a hundred delicate perfumes, imperceptible in the clang and triumph of sunshine, were born out of the flower-beds, out of the lawn, out of the liquid river, and streamed through the hedge from the shorn hay of the meadow beyond.
It seemed to her, too, that in this soft slow movement, so to speak, of dusk, as opposed to the brilliant allegro of sunshine, the sounds, as well as the lights, though slower and more subdued, were of the same delicate and subtle perfection. The chorus of birds, that half an hour ago were so busy over the rapture of their evensong, was still, or at the most from one bush or another some two or three notes were drowsily fluted by a thrush, or for a moment the shrill chiding of a company of swifts sounded and was silent. But the myriad noises of summer night, unheard during the clatter and triumph of day, now made themselves audible. Soft little ghost-like breezes stirred in the flower-beds, answering each other in whispered fugue-like passages; the subject was taken up and repeated, low but more sonorously, from tree to tree; the liquid note of the mill-stream soothing the sun-scorched banks was there; overhead the high harmonics of wheeling bats made staccato notes, and little unexplained rustlings in the bushes showed where the small furry night-feeders were already astir. Then suddenly from the woods opposite a nightingale broke into the full torrent of its song, and all the other noises of night became one long-sustained chord that but accompanied it.
Edith had now come to the river bank, and stood there in silence of soul, hardly listening to but just receiving into herself that magical song, which seemed to concentrate and kindle into one flow of melody all the music that the world held. It did not speak of, but it was the eternity of youth, the immutability of love; the everlasting beauty of the world was there, so that age and decay and death ceased to be. And that voice was the voice of all nature, and in silence she sang with it.
The moment, though it seemed infinite in import, was but short in duration; it but flickered and flashed across her, and the next minute she was conscious of the immediate world again. On her left and close to her was the tent where they were to dine, lit inside so that the canvas of it stood out a luminous square against the dusk. And even as she came to herself again—for that moment of nightingale’s song had banished the actual external world as by some anæsthetic—she saw Peggy coming out, a black blot, from the vividly-illuminated oblong of the open French window by which the drawing-room opened on to the lawn. Her husband had lingered inside to look at the evening papers, and Peggy turned and called to him.
“Darling Toby, do come,” she said. “It is so late, and I am so hungry, and we’ll begin and not wait for anybody. Hugh is sure to be late, for I heard him splashing about in the bath as I came downstairs. And Edith is always punctual, which is more than we are. Edith!” she called. “Ah, there she is; I told you so!”
Peggy hurried across the lawn as Edith came to meet her.
“And listeners—were you listening?—do hear good of themselves sometimes,” she said. “As if you could ever hear otherwise! Oh, Edith, what a divine night!”
Yet this sudden interruption was no jar to Edith; here was the human voice speaking as kindly and as sincerely as the nightingale. The world was not complete without its men and women.
“I am late,” went on Peggy; “but it was really Hugh’s fault, who is later. You don’t know him, do you? But his name is Mr. Grainger, and he was playing wild Indians with the children, and told them a fairy-story, the end of which I heard, which had no sense whatever in it, and was quite divine. Yes, we won’t think of waiting for him. It would make him feel so strange.”
Lord Rye followed his wife out, and the three of them sat down. He was a small, neat man, of extraordinary placidity, who regarded his wife rather as some philosophical citizen may regard a meteor that crosses the sky above his garden. He never ceased to admire and wonder at her, and it always seemed to him that her crossing over his own sky, so to speak, was an act of great friendliness on her part. He often looked up and wondered vaguely how fast she travelled, for the spectacle of her speed filled him with gentle mathematical pleasure at the thought of the pace she was going. He knew too that the sky-streaking meteor never failed to come home; that for all her lightning expeditions, she dropped there, to her husband and children. Naturally, also, she played about with other meteors, of whom was Hugh Grainger. He, too, lay about in hayfields and told the children fairy-stories, which they repeated to their father. In fact, there was never a couple who were so right in both liking and loving each other.
“I see that the Government majority on the fifth clause of the Education Bill—” began Toby, when he had received his soup.
“Oh, Toby, don’t!” said his wife.
“Very well,” said Lord Rye, and took up his spoon.
“Oh, you darling!” said Peggy. “Edith, isn’t he a darling? Tell him so.”
Edith looked gravely at her brother-in-law.
“You are a darling, Toby,” she said.
“I’m sure that’s very kind of you,” said Toby. “There’s a Christian Science case——”
But the meteor interrupted.
“Toby, don’t talk about things that have happened,” she said. “It’s so dull!”
“But it hasn’t happened. I was going to tell you what perhaps might be going to happen.”
“That’s better,” said Peggy. “Go on, dear.”
At that moment Hugh came around the corner of the tent.
“I had to wash,” he said, in defensive apology.
“Yes, I should think so, after the hay,” remarked Peggy. “We’ve only just finished soup, Hughie. You aren’t so very late.”
Hugh looked round, vividly, boyishly. Coming out of the thick dusk of the garden, his eyes were a little dazzled in the concentrated candle-light of the tent.
“How are you, Lord Rye?” he said, holding out his hand. But his eyes were elsewhere. “I don’t think—” he began.
“Oh, you don’t know Mrs. Allbutt, do you?” said Peggy. “Edie, this is Hugh Grainger.”
CHAPTER II
EDITH ALLBUTT went to her room that night feeling that she had passed a very pleasant but slightly astounding evening, and that she did not feel in the least sleepy or at all inclined to go to bed. And the astounding part of the evening, in the main, had been Hugh. All through dinner he and Peggy had fireworked away out of sheer good spirits and a matchless joy of living, and after dinner he had been very insistent on the necessity either of going on the river in a punt or playing ghosts in the garden. His huge high spirits were quite clearly natural to him—all the fireworking was quite obviously the direct result of that, and in no way at all a social duty. These squibs and rockets were as much part of him as his slight, slender frame, his quickness of movement and gesture, his thatch of thick, close-cropped hair, his vivid, handsome face, with its dark eyes and clear white skin. But all dinner-time that was all there was of him: he was just a boy with excellent health and an almost unlimited capacity for enjoying himself; and at the end of dinner she felt that she knew hardly more about him than she had at the beginning. She felt, however, though but dimly, and she was afraid rather ungratefully, for he had been really very entertaining, and it must have been a sour nature, which hers was not, to feel otherwise than exhilarated by the presence of so alert a vitality, that if he was always like that he would become rather fatiguing. Then at once she told herself that she was an old woman, and if she could not be young herself it should be a matter of rejoicing, not of fatigue, that other people could be. But that playing Indians with the children before dinner was a characteristic much more to her mind. That, too, he had not done, she felt, from any direct wish to amuse the children; he had done it because he enjoyed it so much himself. And though the first motive would have been the more altruistic and therefore, she must suppose, the more admirable, she liked the second one best.
Then after dinner had begun the surprises. The boats were locked up. Lord Rye had gone indoors, Peggy refused to play ghosts, and it was clearly impossible for her to play ghosts alone with Hugh. They had strolled, all three of them, up to the veranda outside the drawing-room, and Hugh had caught sight of the new Steinway grand over which Peggy had, as she explained, just ruined herself.
Then Hugh had said:
“I’ll sing to you if you like.”
And Peggy had thanked him almost reverently.
Edith remembered with extreme distinctness what she thought of this. There was something of the coxcomb about it; young men ought not to offer to sing however well they knew their hostess. It was just a little like Stephen Guest, and for that moment she wondered whether the fireworks after all partook, though ever so slightly, of the nature of “showing-off.” But Hugh went in at once, and as she and Peggy sat down in chairs on the veranda close to the open window she had said to her:
“Does he sing well?”
“Yes, fairly well,” said Peggy; and Edith thought she heard a little tremor of laughter in her voice.
Edith wondered as she sat down what he would sing. She was herself intensely musical, but rather seriously so, and she expected something of “Geisha” kind—a species of song with which she was not much in sympathy. Perhaps even it would be worse than that, more directly comic, which would be harder to bear. And she waited for the inevitable running up and down of the hands over the keyboard which usually precedes the melody of those who offer to sing. But it did not come. Instead there came the one bar of Introduction to Schumann’s “Widmung,” played with the quiet restraint of a real accompanist, and played quite simply and perfectly. And then he sang.
The song was perhaps just a shade low for him, for his voice was not that which so often does duty for a tenor—namely, a baritone, screwed up, as it were, and nailed firmly to its new pitch, but a real tenor, soft on its high notes, and with the intense purity of tone that is seldom heard except in a boy’s unbroken voice. But here there was the passion of the adult voice, passion in all its simplicity and noble sincerity. Also, so she knew instantly, that voice, so wonderful in itself, had been trained to the utmost pitch of perfection. Years of work, years of patient learning under some supreme teacher had gone to the making of it. All this she perceived almost at once, for the fine mind and the cultivated taste require but little on which to found their judgment; and then she thought no more either of the voice or the singer or the wonderful accompaniment so easily and surely handled. It was just the song that filled her: its first fine careless rapture, its more meditative sequel, its whole-hearted cry of love and devotion at the end. And on “Mein gute Geist, mein besseres Ich!” she just laughed; laughed aloud for the pure pleasure of it. Since the beginning of the scarred and maimed years she had not laughed quite like that. And from inside Hugh heard her laugh, and that pleased him enormously. He knew he was singing to some one who understood, and no applause, no words of thanks and praise could have spoken to him so directly.
And when he had finished, Edith sat still, saying nothing, for really there was nothing to say, her mouth smiling from that laugh, her eyes a little dim. And Peggy’s “Oh, Hugh!” which was all she said, was nearly as appreciative as her sister’s silence.
He sang a couple more songs, one by Brahms and the short one-versed “Am Jordan” from the “Meistersingers,” and then came and joined them on the veranda.
“And that’s the end of my parlour tricks this evening,” he said. “I promised Reuss not to sing much on days when I smoked much. And I have smoked much, and will now smoke more.”
“I wonder if you enjoyed it as much as I did?” said Edith.
“Oh, more probably, because it is such fun doing things oneself!” said he.
“You must have worked very hard. Did Reuss teach you entirely?”
At this moment the children’s nurse appeared in the drawing-room, and Peggy went in to see what she wanted. The interview seemed not to be satisfactory, for she went upstairs with her, leaving the other two alone.
“Yes, and the brute says he won’t give me any more lessons. Oh, not because I don’t need any more—he made that delightfully clear, though, of course, one knew it—but because I won’t take it up professionally!”
He lit his cigarette and turned around to Edith.
“Why should I?” he said. “We really had rather a row; he says it isn’t fair on him.”
Edith felt so keenly on this point that before she answered she had to remind herself that she had met this young man for the first time that evening.
“Ah, I see his point of view, I must say!” she said. “No voice is, as we both know, worth anything till it is trained. You owe him a good deal; everyone who hears you sing owes him a good deal.”
“But I don’t want to,” said Hugh, as if that quite settled the matter.
He paused a moment.
“Do let me consult you,” he said, “if it doesn’t bore you. You see, what has happened is that the Opera Syndicate have asked him if I would take an engagement for next year. That’s what we had a row about.”
“Did you definitely say you would not?”
“Yes, but he refused to take any answer until I had thought about it. He said I must take a fortnight to consider it.”
“And what were you to sing in?”
Hugh laughed again.
“Really it sounds quite ridiculous,” he said, “but they suggested ‘Tristan,’ ‘Meistersingers,’ and ‘Lohengrin.’ Of course, I have studied those particular parts though I should have to work hard all autumn and winter. I imagine Reuss told them that. In fact, I imagine he worked the whole thing.”
Edith looked at him gravely, and across her brain there came so vividly the impression of how he would look in the blue and silver of Lohengrin, of how that silken voice would sound in that dead silence of Lohengrin’s entry, when he turns to the swan with the “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan,” that it had almost the effect of actual hallucination. Again she had to remember that he was but a stranger to her, so intimate in that quarter of an hour when he sang had his voice made him.
“I don’t think it sounds ridiculous, Mr. Grainger,” she said. “Of course, it is your business and yours only whether you say ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ But—but I think we should all come and hear you,” she added.
“Then if you were me——”
“Ah, if I were you I should, of course, do whatever you do. But not being you, I can’t understand you refusing.”
She got up.
“Good gracious!” she said. “Haven’t you any desire, any instinct to make yourself felt? I have it so strongly. I should so love to impress myself on the world, to know that there were hundreds of people listening to me, to make them laugh or cry, to make them beside themselves with happiness or mute from pure misery.”
She paused a moment.
“You have consulted me, you know,” she said, “and so it is your own fault. I do see also Reuss’s point of view.”
Then suddenly she burst out laughing.
“And here am I advising you as to your career when a few hours ago I had never seen you!” she said.
Hugh went straight off on this tack.
“Oh, but it’s such dreadful waste of time getting to know people!” he said. “Either one knows a person in a couple of hours or so, or else one never knows him at all.”
Peggy came down again at this moment, looking as if she had been trying anyhow to be severe.
“Edith, it’s really bedtime,” she said. “Besides, I’m going to talk to you in your bedroom probably for hours.”
Edith got up.
“Nothing wrong, Peggy?” she asked. “Are the children all right?”
“Yes, only Daisy has announced her firm determination to sit up in bed and not go to sleep. That child can when she chooses be naughtier than all the rounds of the Inferno.”
“What does Daisy want?” asked Hugh.
“Oh, she heard you singing, and demanded that you should come up and sing to her, otherwise she was going to sit up in bed until morning!”
“That doesn’t sound a very good plan,” he observed.
“It’s a remarkably bad one, but her own. Daisy has great strength of character, and I’m sure I don’t know where she gets it from. Good night! Put the lights out, won’t you, when you come upstairs?”
It was a very hot night, and Hugh stood at the window for a minute or two, thinking over the evening. He felt somehow rather stirred and excited by his two-minute talk with Mrs. Allbutt, for it had literally not occurred to him at all to think of his decision as affecting anybody but himself, and the idea that he and his actions could affect other people meant an attitude of mind, egoistic, that was quite alien to him. Then close on the heels of that came the thought that upstairs, sitting up in bed, with firm determination on her features, was Daisy, waiting till he came to sing to her. That honestly seemed to matter much more than any operatic career, and he put out the lights, as he had been desired to do, and went upstairs.
The night nursery, as he knew, was just beyond his own room, which was opposite Mrs. Allbutt’s. She had turned into her sister’s bedroom on her way to her own to get a book, and so it happened that Hugh passed on to his room while she was still there. Just beyond was the door of the nursery, wide open, like its windows, for Lady Rye was of the open-window school, and Hugh, with a backward glance as if he were rather guilty, went into it. A night-light was burning, and dimly he saw a little night-shirted figure sitting straight as a grenadier up in bed, in performance of her vow. She hailed him with a little coo of delight.
“Oh, Hughie, have you come to sing?” she said. “How long you have been! And I am so sleepy!”
“Sitonim, you little brute,” said Hugh, “you really are too naughty! Why can’t you go to sleep properly like Chopimalive?”
“If you have come to scold me, like mummy,” announced Daisy, with dignity, “you needn’t have come at all I thought”—and her voice quivered a little with tired fretfulness—“I thought you had come to sing to me. I shall sit up just like this until you do, because I said so. And I am so sleepy!”
Mrs. Allbutt had found the book she wanted and was going to her room close by, when she heard the pipe of the childish treble. At that, though she was an honourable woman, she deliberately stopped and listened.
“But I’m sleepy too,” said Hugh.
A little suppressed sob was the answer.
“You’re not as sleepy as me,” said Daisy. “Nobody could be. And I must sit up because I said I would.”
The bed creaked, and Mrs. Allbutt guessed that Hugh had sat down on it.
“Won’t it do if I tell you a story?” he asked. “Or if I sit and wait here till you go to sleep? I’m tired too, and I don’t want to sing.”
“Then I shall go on sitting up,” said Daisy. “And I do so want to lie down!”
“Well, if I sing, will you promise to go to sleep properly every evening for—for ten years?” asked Hugh.
“Oh, yes—twenty!”
“Well, then, shall I shut the door? It might disturb mummy.”
“I don’t care,” said Daisy viciously. “Besides, she’s at the other end of the passage.”
“Well, then, lie down, and I’ll sing.”
Daisy gave a little chuckle of delight.
“Oh, Hughie, I do love you!” she said. “Now lie down by me and put your head on the pillow, same as if you were going to sleep. Oh, I told everybody—nurse, mummy, and everybody—that you would come. And they said you wouldn’t, and I said, ‘Oh, stuff!’”
“That wasn’t polite,” said Hugh.
“Well, they weren’t p’lite. Yes, put your head right down, like that. I’m afraid you’re too long for my bed, but it doesn’t matter. Oh, isn’t it comfortable? It was awful sitting up. You needn’t sing much you know, if you’re tired.”
“Thank you,” said Hugh.
“Now you’re horrid again. Oh, no, Hughie, you’re not! But I think being tired makes me cross.”
“And what’s it to be?” asked Hugh.
This roused Daisy again; her point was gained and her Hughie was going to sing, but at this she became an epicure.
“Oh, please, the—the ‘Shepherd’s Song’! Just the last verse. Because I don’t think I should be awake if you sing it all, and I like the last best.”
“How does it begin?” asked Hugh.
“Oh, you silly! ‘Sleep, baby, sleep.’ Though I’m not a baby.”
Mrs. Allbutt could not help it: she deliberately spied. There was a big chink in the hinge of the nursery door, and she looked through. Hugh was lying with his black head on the pillow, close to Daisy’s, but, as she had said, the bed was not big enough, and one foot was on the floor and the other leg thrown over it. Jim had not been awakened, it appeared, by Daisy’s deviltry, and the little yellow head on the pillow of his bed was sunk in sleep. Daisy had dropped the grenadier attitude and was lying down in her bed; her two pale little hands grasped one of Hugh’s.
“Just the last verse, then,” said Hugh—“‘Sleep, baby, sleep!’”
“Yes.”
Hugh turned a little, so that he could sing with the open throat, but softly. And he sang—
The tune was exquisite and simple, simple and exquisite were the words. And Hugh sang, as the artist always sings, as if this particular song was the one that he had longed and lived to sing. There was the same perfection as he had shown downstairs, and there was no more perfection possible.
“And now you’ll go to sleep, Sitonim?” he said.
“I couldn’t help it,” said Daisy.
At that Mrs. Allbutt went swiftly and silently to her room, and closed the door craftily.
It was all this she thought over, expecting the hair-brushing visit from Peggy. She could have given no precise account of why it should have so taken possession of her mind, except in so far that to the musical soul the marvel of a beautiful voice is a wonder that is ever new. But it was not Hugh’s singing alone that had so stirred her; more than all it was this little vignette seen through the chink of the nursery door of this radiant youth, with his radiant voice, lying with his head on Daisy’s pillow, singing in order to free this very obstinate child from her vow of sitting up until he sang to her, while all the time he knew quite well that he ought not to sing at all, even if the Pope asked him to—nor probably in the latter case would he have done so. And, like an artist, he had not mumbled or whispered, though he was only singing to one small girl by the illumination of a night-light; he had sung as if all the world was listening, as if his career hung on each note. Yet the same boy had rather turned up his nose at the idea of singing Walter, Tristan, and Lohengrin at Covent Garden; it appeared to be much better worth while, even in defiance of his master’s orders, to sing Daisy to sleep.
Peggy followed soon after, having peeped in at the nursery door and seen that Daisy was already fast asleep.
“Nurse doesn’t know how to manage that child,” she said, with an air of extreme superiority. “I went up and just said she had to go to sleep, and that there was no question of Hugh coming to sing to her. It’s what they call suggestion.”
Edith could not help laughing.
“But he did go and sing to her,” said she. “I heard and saw him.”
“Oh! The suggestion plan rather falls to the ground then. He oughtn’t to have done it, but it’s quite exactly like him. He wouldn’t sing any more for us, but Daisy is a different matter. He can sing fairly well, can’t he?”
“I feel rather the reverse of Daisy,” said Edith. “I feel as if I shan’t go to sleep because he sang. Oh, Peggy, if you have any influence with him, do use it and make him go on the stage! I really think that there is a moral duty attaching to a gift like that, just as there is a moral duty attaching to great wealth. Mr. Grainger can’t have been given that just to sing to you and me and Daisy.”
“I know, but the worst of it is that that is just the argument one cannot use to Hugh. It would make me blush purple to say that to him.”
“But why?”
“Because, whatever else he is, he is absolutely free from self-consciousness. And your argument, though undoubtedly a true one, suggests self-consciousness. Oh, I hate the word duty even! To say that a thing is one’s duty implies one is thinking about oneself, though no doubt from most excellent motives and for the sake of other people. But when you get a boy like Hugh, whose huge kindly instincts take the place of duty, it would be really like corrupting him to suggest that he had duties, or that talents were given him for reasons.”
Edith walked up and down the room considering this.
“Do you remember Comte’s remark when the doctors told him he was dying? He said ‘Quel per te irréparable,’” continued Peggy. “There’s the opposite of Hugh.”
“All the same, it was an irreparable loss,” said Edith, “and so are the years in which Mr. Grainger remains a private nightingale. He told me this evening that he had been asked whether he would sing in three Wagner operas next year. Oh, make him, Peggy! Or hasn’t he got stern parents of any description, or musical uncles who will cut him off with a penny if he doesn’t?”
“Well, we’ll try. I didn’t know they had made him a definite offer. But though you might not think it, Hugh is wonderfully obstinate. People clatter and shriek all around him, and he sits in the middle, brilliant and smiling and patient till they have quite finished. And then he goes on exactly as before.”
“He might do worse,” said Mrs. Allbutt. “By the way, will you ask him to the box for the first night of ‘Gambits’? You haven’t asked anybody else yet have you?”
