SHEAVES
By
E. F. BENSON
Author of “The Angel of Pain,” “Dodo,” etc.
[Illustration: colophon]
_FOURTH EDITION_
New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
Copyright, 1907, by
Doubleday, Page & Company
Published, October, 1907
All Rights Reserved
Including that of Translation into Foreign Languages
Including the Scandinavian
SHEAVES
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.”