Read Ebook: Sheaves by Benson E F Edward Frederic

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Ebook has 2306 lines and 124084 words, and 47 pages

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.

"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.

"What?" shrieked both the children together.

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.

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 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 , 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?

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