This Is the End by Stella Benson (best novels of all time .TXT) 📕

in the society of medical boards, three months of light duty consisting of weary instruction of fools in an East coast town, and now an interval of leave at the end of which the battalion to which he had lately been attached hoped to go to France. In one way it was a pity he ever joined the Army, for khaki clashed badly with most of Mrs. Gustus's colour theories. But he had never noticed that: his eye and his ear and his mind were all equally slow to appreciate clashings of any kind. He was rather aloof from comparison and criticism, but not on principle. He had no principles--at least no original ones, just the ordinary stuffy old principles of decency and all that. He never turned his eyes inward, as far as the passer-by could see; he lived a breezy life outside himself. He never tried to make a fine Kew of himself; he never propounded riddles to his Creator, which is the way most of us make our reputations.

Mr. Russell, the host and adopted member of the Family, was fifty-two. He did not know Jay, having only lately been culled by Mrs. Gustus--that assiduous collector--and placed in the bosom of the Family. She had found him blossoming unloved in the wilderness of a War Work Committee. He was well informed, yet a good listener; perhaps he possessed both these virtues to excess. At any rate Mrs. Gustus had decided that he was worthy of Family friendship, and, being naturally extravagant, she conferred it upon him with both hands. Mr. Russell was married to a woman who had not properly realised the fact that she was Mrs. Russell. She spent her life in distant lands, helping the world to become better. At present she was understood to be propagating peace in the United States, and was never mentioned by or to her husband. My first impression of Mr. Russell was that he was rather fat, but I never could trace this impression to its origin. He had not exactly a double chin, but rather a chin and a half, and the rest of him followed this moderate example. His grey hair retired in a pronounced estuary over each temple, leaving a beautifully brushed peninsula between. He had no sense of humour, but hid this deformity skillfully. Hardly anybody knew that he was a poet, except presumably his dog. He often talked to his dog; he told it every speakable thought that he had. This was his only bad habit. Occasionally his dog was heard to reply in a small curious voice proceeding also from Mr. Russell.

These four people looked out at Kensington Gardens, which were rejoicing in the very babyhood of the year. The naked trees were like pillars in the mist, the grass was grey and whitened to the distance, the world had mislaid its horizon, and one's eye slid up without check between the trees to where the last word of a daylight moon whispered in the sky.

"I glory in a view that dispenses with colour," said Mrs. Gustus severely. She always spoke as though she were sure of the whole of what she intended to say. When she did hesitate, it only meant that she was seeking for the simplest word, and she would cap her pause with a monosyllable as curt as an explosion.

But glory is the right word, I think, for London in some moods. Do you know the feeling of a heart beating too high, when you see the great cliffs of London under rain or vague sunshine, or rising out of yellow air? Do you ever want, as I do, to stand with arms out against the London wind, and shout your own unmade poetry on the top of a 'bus? With this sort of grotesque glorying does London inspire me, so that I spend whole days together feeling that the essential _I_ is too big for what encloses it.

Anonyma never felt like this. She often spoke the right word, but she nearly always spoke it coldly.

"This morning," said Kew, "when I looked out, I felt the futility of bed, so I made an assignation with the Hound when I met it trooping along with Russ in single file to the bathroom. Why does your Hound always accompany you there, Russ? Dogs must think us awfully irrational beasts, and yet--does that Hound really think you could elope for ever and be no more seen, with nothing on but pyjamas and a towel? I suppose he thinks 'You can't be too careful.' It makes one humble to live with a dog. I always blush when I see a dog dreaming, because I'm afraid they give us an undignified place in their dreams. Your Hound, Russ, dreams of you plunging into the Serpentine after a Canadian Goose, with your topper floating behind you, or Anonyma with her tongue hanging out, scratching at a little mousehole in Piccadilly. It is humiliating, isn't it? Anyway, before breakfast, Russ's Hound and I went and jumped over things in the Gardens. The park-keeper mistook us for young lambs."

Russell's Hound was called so by courtesy, in order to lend him a dignity which he lacked. He may have been twelve inches high at the shoulder, and he thought that he was exactly like a lion, except for a trifling difference in size. Dignity is not, of course, incompatible with small stature, but I think it was the twinkling gait of Mr. Russell's Hound that robbed him of moral weight, and prevented you from attaching great importance to his views.

"Young lambs!" exclaimed Mrs. Gustus. "Really, my good Kew, had you nothing better to do?"

"Not at that time," replied Kew. "You weren't up." And he sang to drown her sigh. Kew was the only person I ever knew who really sang to the tune of his moods. He sang Albert Hall sort of music very loudly when he was happy, and when he was extremely happy he roared so that his voice broke out of tune. When he was silent it was almost always because he was asleep, or because some other member of the Family was talking. When, by some accident, the whole Family was simultaneously silent, you could not help noticing what an oppressively still place London was. The sound of Russell's Hound sneezing in the hall was like a bomb.

But at the present moment Kew only sang a few bars of Beethoven in a small voice. He was rather sad, because of Jay. He had not realised till he came home how very thoroughly Jay had disappeared. He led the conversation to Jay. It often happened that Kew led conversations, because conversations, like the public, generally follow the loudest voice.

"Why so sudden?" asked Kew, apparently of the Round Pond, so loud was his voice. "That's what I can't make out. She used to be such a human sort, and anybody with half an ear could hear the decisions bubbling about under the lid for weeks before they boiled over."

Everybody--even Cousin Gustus--knew that he was talking of Jay. Kew said so much that he might be excused for forgetting occasionally what he had not said. Besides, he had talked of little else but Jay since he rejoined his Family two days before.

"She used to be a good girl," sighed Cousin Gustus. "So few girls are good."

Cousin Gustus is an expert pessimist. Vice, accidents, and terrible ends are his speciality. All virtue is to him an exception, and by him is immediately forgotten. In sudden deaths you cannot catch him out. If you were tossed from the horns of a bull into the jaws of a crocodile, and died of pneumonia contracted during the flight, you would not surprise Cousin Gustus. He is never at a loss for a precedent. The only way you could really astonish him would be by living a blameless life without adventure, and dying of old age in your bed.

"There were warnings," said Anonyma. "Little disagreements with Gustus."

"She wanted to bring vermin into the house," mourned Cousin Gustus.

Kew suggested: "White mice?"

"Not vermin unattended," Anonyma explained. "She wanted to adopt Brown Borough babies. She had been working desultorily in the Brown Borough since War broke out."

"That might explain the peculiar and un-Jay-like remark in her letter to you--that she would settle in no home except the Perfect Home. I hate things in capital letters."

"Why didn't she get married?" grumbled Cousin Gustus. "She was engaged for nearly three weeks to young William Morgan, a most respectable young man. So few young men--"

"She wrote to me that she couldn't keep up that engagement," said Kew. "Not even by looking upon it as War Work. She called him a 'Surface young man,' and that again seemed unlike her. She usen't to mind surfaceness. The War seems to have turned her upside down. But then, of course, the War has turned us all upside down, and in that position you generally get a rush of brains to the head. We're all feverish, that's what's the matter with us. When I was in hospital I lived for three weeks on the top of a high temperature, laughing. I want to laugh now.... It's a damn funny world."

"I once knew a man who died of apoplexy while swearing," sniffed Cousin Gustus.

"You have been damned unlucky in your friends, Cousin Gustus," said Kew. He paused, and then added: "Besides, I hardly ever say Damn without saying Un-damn to myself afterwards. It seems a pity to waste a precious word on an inadequate cause, and I always retrieve it if I can."

"Before you came down to breakfast this morning, Kew," said Anonyma, "we had an idea."

"Only one between you in all that time?" said Kew. "I was half an hour late."

"Now, Kew, be an angel and agree with the idea. I've set my heart on it," said Mrs. Gustus.

When Mrs. Gustus talked in a womanly way like this, the change was always unmistakable. She was naturally an unnatural talker, and when she mentioned such natural things as angels, you knew she was resorting deliberately to womanly charm in order to attain her end. There was something very cold-blooded about Anonyma's womanly charm.

"Good Lord," said Kew, "I wish angels had never been invented. I never am one, only people always tell me to be one. I never get officially recognised in heaven. What is the plan?"

"There is Russell's car doing nothing," began Mrs. Gustus.

"Do you mean Christina?" interrupted Kew, shocked at such formality. "Don't call her Russell's car, it sounds so cold."

"There is Russell's Christina doing nothing," compromised Anonyma. "And petrol isn't so bad as it will be. And it's a beautiful time of year. And you are not strong yet, really. And we want Jay back."

"A procession of facts doesn't make a plan," objected Kew.

"It may lead to one, eventually," said Mrs. Gustus. "Oh, Kew, I want to go out into the country, I want to thread the pale Spring air, and hear the lambs cry. I want to brush my face against the grass, and wade in a wave of bluebells. I want to forget blood and Belgians and kiss Nature."

"Take a twenty-eight 'bus, and kiss Hampstead Heath," suggested Kew. "The Spring has got there all right."

Anonyma, behind the coffee-pot, was jotting down in a notebook the salient points in her outburst. She always placed her literary calling first. And anyway, I should be rather proud if I could talk like that about the Spring without any preparation.

"The idea originally," began Mr. Russell tentatively, "was not only formed to allow