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

must stay for a little while within reach of this. It has something ..."

Mr. Russell swallowed something that he had thought of saying, and instead drew his Hound's attention to a yellow square of mustard-field which made brilliant the distance.

Kew said nothing, but he felt choked with a lost remembrance of a very old childhood. He seemed to taste the quiet taste of youth here, there was even a feeling of going home through a damp evening to a nursery tea. It was the nursery of all Secret Worlds. Gods had been born there. No surprise could live there now, no wonder, no protest. The years like minutes fled between those trees, dynasties might fall during the singing of a bird. I think the thing that haunted the wood was a thing exactly as old and as romantic as the first child that tracked its Secret Friend across the floor of a forest.

Oh, friend of childlike mind, what is it that these two years have taken from us, what is it that we have lost, oh friend, besides contentment?

All the way home Kew sang very loudly the first tune he ever knew.

When the Family (including Mr. Russell) got back to the inn, the lamb and the gooseberry tart and Cousin Gustus were all waiting for them. But they were delayed in the hall. A stout young woman with a pleasant face of small vocabulary turned from the visitors' book and stopped Mrs. Gustus.

"Are you THE Mrs. Augustus Martin?" she asked.

"I am she," replied Anonyma. Her grammar in moments of emergency always impressed Kew.

I cannot say that Mrs. Gustus seemed surprised. She was the sort of person to hide even from herself the fact that this thing had never happened before. She remained perfectly calm as if repeating a hackneyed experience. Kew was astonished. Mr. Russell shared this feeling. Having a certain personal admiration for Mrs. Gustus, he had tried on more than one occasion to find pleasure in her books, but without success.

The stout young lady said nothing more than "Oh" for the moment, but she breathed it in such a manner that Mrs. Gustus saw at once the duty of asking her to dine with the Family.

When the admirer was introduced to Cousin Gustus, she said, "Oh, so this is your husband ..." and gazed on that melancholy man with eagerness. When she saw Mr. Russell's Hound she said, "And this is your dog," and was about to crown him with a corresponding halo when Mrs. Gustus disclaimed the connection.

"It is wonderful to meet you, of all people, in this romantic place," said the admirer as she pursued her peas. "Do you know, whenever I finish one of your books, I feel so romantic I want to kiss everybody I meet. Oh, those courtly heroes of yours!"

A heavy silence fell for a moment.

"And your descriptions of nature," continued the admirer. "That sunset seen from the west coast of Ireland that you describe in _The Courtship of Hartley Casey_. You must know Ireland very well."

"I have never been there," said Mrs. Gustus. "I evolve my scenery. After all, Nature lives in the heart of each one of us. I think we all have a sort of Secret World of our own, out of which all that is best in us comes. One does not need to see with one's outward eyes."

"Oh, goodness me, how true that is," said the admirer. "But you must write a book about the downs, won't you? Do you take notes on your travels?"

"My notebook is never out of my hand," answered Mrs. Gustus. "I jot down whatever occurs to me, wherever I may be. I write by moonlight in the night, I have had to pause in the middle of my prayers in Church, I have stood transfixed in the full flow of a London street. I always hope that people will think I am suddenly remembering that I forgot to order to-morrow's dinner."

But really she knew that no one could ever be deceived in the purpose of the notebook.

"Oh, mustn't it be wonderful!" breathed the admirer, and Cousin Gustus, who was always properly impressed by his wife when the example was set by strangers, nodded with a proprietary smile. "And are you writing now?" she continued.

"I am always writing," said Mrs. Gustus, who had seldom enjoyed herself so much, "my pen never rests. A lifetime is too short to allow of rest. But I am not here primarily for inspiration. We are on a quest."

"Oh, how romantic," moaned the admirer.

"It is a quest with a certain amount of romance in it," agreed Anonyma. "We are seeking a House By The Sea. We know very little about it except that it exists. We know that its windows look west, and that the sun sets over the sea. We know that it stands ungardened on the cliff and has a great view. We know that it is seven hundred years old, and full of inspiration ..."

"We know," continued Kew, "that you can--and often do--drop a fishing-line out of the window into the sea when you are tired of playing the goldfish in the water-butt. We know that the owner of the house is a rotten shot, and that the stone balls from the balustrade are not at this moment where they ought to be. We know that aeroplanes as well as seagulls nest in those cliffs...."

"We know--" began Mr. Russell, but this was too much for Mrs. Gustus. After all, the lady was her admirer.

"What's all this?" said Mrs. Gustus. "What do you people know about it?"

"I just thought I would talk a little now," said Kew. "I get quickly tired of hearing other people giving information without help from me."

"At any rate, Russ," continued Mrs. Gustus, "you can't know anything whatever about the matter. You have hardly listened when I read Jay's letters."

"I told you that I remembered," said Mr. Russell. "I don't know how. I remember sitting on a high cliff and seeing three black birds swim in a row, and dive in a row, and in a row come up again after I had counted hundreds."

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Gustus, trying not to appear cross before the visitor, "you're thinking of something else. You can see such a sight as that at the Zoo any day."

"You all seem to know quite a lot about the place," said the admirer, "yet not much of a very practical nature, if I may say so."

"Everything practical is unromantic," said Mrs. Gustus. "There is nothing true or beautiful in the world but poetry. If we seek in real simplicity of mind, we shall find what we seek, for simplicity is poetry, and poetry is truth."

"Also, of course, England has only one west coast," added Kew, "and if we don't find the place we shall have found a good many other things by the time we have finished."

"It may be in Ireland," suggested the admirer.

"No, because she answers our letters so quickly."

"She?"

"My young cousin, the object of our search."

"Did she run away?" asked the admirer, in a voice strangled with excitement.

To admit that a young relation of Anonyma's should run away from her would be undignified.

"You mustn't take us too seriously," said Mrs. Gustus lightly. "It isn't a case of an elopement, or anything like that. Just an excuse for a tour, and a rest from wearisome war work. A wild-goose chase, nothing but fun in it."

"Wild goose is a good description of Jay," said Cousin Gustus. It was rather.

Next morning the admirer, twittering with excitement, came in upon the Family while it was having its breakfast.

"Oh, I had such an idea in the night," she said. "I couldn't sleep, of course, after such an exciting day. I believe I have been fated to help you in your quest. I know of a house near here, and the more I think of it the more sure I feel that it is the place you want."

"Who lives there?"

"A young man with his mother. I forget the name."

"Place we want's west," objected Mr. Russell.

"You never can tell," said Anonyma. "This place may stand on a salient, facing west. Our search must be thorough."

"It's such a lovely walk," said the admirer. "I should be so much honoured if you would let me show you the way. Oh, I say, do you think me very presumptuous?"

Her self-consciousness took the form of a constant repentance. In the night she would go over her day and probe it for tender points. "Oh, that was a dreadful thing to say," was a refrain that would keep her awake for hours, wriggling and giggling in her bed over the dreadfulness of it. She had too little egoism. The lack gave her face a look of littleness. A lack of altruism has the same outward effect. A complete face should be full of something, of gentleness, of vigour, of humour, of wickedness. The admirer's face was only half full of anything. All the same there was charm about her, the fact that she was an admirer was charming. Mrs. Gustus reassured her.

"We shall be most grateful for a guide."

"We should be even more grateful for an excuse to call on this inoffensive young man and his mother at eleven o'clock in the morning," objected Kew.

"He ought to be at the Front," was the excuse provided by Cousin Gustus.

"So ought I," sighed Kew.

"Oh, but you're a wounded, aren't you?" asked the admirer. There were signs of a possible transfer of admiration, and Mrs. Gustus interposed with presence of mind.

"We'll start," she said. "Don't let's be hampered in the beginning of our quest by social littleness."

She was conscious that she looked handsome enough for any breach of convention. She wore an unusual shaped dress the colour of vanilla ice. Instead of doing her hair as usual in one severe penny bun at the back, she had constructed a halfpenny bun, so to speak, over each ear. This is a very literary way of doing the hair, and the remembrance of the admirer, haunting Anonyma's waking thoughts, had inspired the change.

Their way lay through the beechwood that embroiders the hem of the down's cloak. There are only two colours in a beechwood after rain, lilac and green. A bank of violets is not more pure in colour than a beech trunk shining in the sun. The two colours answered one another, fainter and fainter, away and away, to the end of one's sight, and there were two cuckoos, hidden in the dream, mocking each other in velvet voices. The view between the trees was made up of horizons that tilted one's chin. The bracken, very young, on an opposite slope, was like a cloud of green wings alighting. But the look of their destination disappointed them.

"This house faces south," said Kew.

"I feel sure--" began Mr. Russell, but Mrs. Gustus said:

"As we are here, we might ask. To be sure, the cliff is rather tame."

"But there is an aeroplane," persisted the admirer.

"Now pause, Anonyma," Kew warned her. "Pause and consider what you are going to say."

"Consideration only unearths difficulties," laughed Anonyma. "Best go forward in faith and fearlessness."

She was under the impression that she constantly laughed in a nicely naughty way at Kew's excessive conventionality.

As they