A Reaping

by E. F. Benson

And here my portentous secret must burst from me. For the fact is that for the last three days the town has been convulsed, and I have been holding it all back, assuming an unnatural calm, so that it might all come in a deluge. For three days ago a Duchess came here to open a window, or shut a door in the town-hall, which had been put up in memory of something, and was entertained to luncheon afterwards by the Corporation. And on this eye-opening occasion Helen was sent in before the wife of the younger son of a Baronet. And in consequence the wife of the younger son of the Baronet cut her afterwards, as with a knife; yet knife was no word for it: the averted eye was more like a scimitar. Before the assembled company, when Helen went to shake hands with her after lunch, she cut her, and she turned from her, revolving on her own axis like the eternal stars. Upon which, very properly, after two days’ heated discussion, and a great demand for Debrett, public opinion sided with the wife of the younger son of the Baronet, on the ground that Helen took her husband’s rank, which in this case happened to be none at all. What made it worse was that the Duchess, who should have known better, being an old friend of Helen’s, came to tea with her afterwards in a motor-car covered with coronets for all the world to see.

You may imagine that the fat was in the fire after that. Helen had no idea why the wife of the Baronet’s younger son had cut her, and perhaps might never have known had not Mr. Holmes dropped in only yesterday and told her, adding that he was sure he could clear it up. I was not at home when this interview took place, but when he entered the room this afternoon, after having called only yesterday, it was certain that he must have come on this subject. He had a book in his pocket, which made an unusual bulge.

Legs was steeped in wide-eyed contemplation as Mr. Holmes had his tea. From time to time I glanced at him, and saw that the corners of his mouth were faintly twitching. His eye travelled from Mr. Holmes’s face to his jewelled hands; it lingered about his clothes, but came back, loverlike, to his face. In a few minutes we had learned about everybody—how the Lord-Lieutenant of the county had driven through in his motor—not the Daimler, but a new Panhard—yesterday afternoon, stopping only at the fishmonger’s, and taking the London road afterwards; how there had been a party at the barracks last night, at which there was music; but not very good music, Mr. Holmes was afraid; how the Bishop had not influenza at all, but only a bad cold; how The Pines had been taken by the Hon. Alice Accrington, who had a cork foot—so sad. A rhinoceros had trodden on the original one.

I had ceased to be able to look at Legs, but here I heard him give a little whimper, as a dog does when it wants a door to be opened for it. Helen all the time had been of impeccable behaviour. She had asked just the right questions, and appeared so genuinely interested that I felt I had never known before of what depth of hypocrisy she was capable. Then Mr. Holmes’s wealth of information began to grow thin, even as the stars burn thin at daybreak, and I knew that he was going to dawn, and that the true reason for which he came was going to break forth. He put down his cup on the tea-table, took a cigarette, and suddenly creaked.

If you can imagine a sneeze, a cough, a spit, the strangled wheeze caused by a fish-bone in the throat, and the noise an empty siphon of soda-water makes when you press the handle, all combined, you will faintly grasp what Legs did. His effort to swallow the whole of this mixed convulsion was most praiseworthy, though I should think dangerous, and it came to my ears only as if someone had done it half a mile away. Mr. Holmes, I am sure, heard nothing this time, and Legs left the room with his handkerchief to his mouth in the manner of mourners in the second coach at a funeral. There was no sound outside, but soon after a muffled tread overhead, where is his bedroom. Then for a moment I caught Helen’s eye. She looked so inexpressibly grave that I nearly asked her who was dead. Then dawn came. Mr. Holmes has a high cackling voice, and the bulgy volume in his pocket was ‘Whitaker’s Almanack.’

‘I should have come before,’ he said, ‘but I wanted to come to you last, and really the afternoon has flown. About Tuesday now. Dear lady, you only took your right place. There is no question about it. I have been to the Mayor, I have been to the Archdeacon. Look.’

He found a page in Whitaker, and gave Helen the volume. It was a table of precedence. I saw ‘Eldest sons of younger sons of peers’ underlined.

‘Look at the next column,’ he said. ‘The sister takes the rank of her husband or her elder brother. Now see where younger sons of Baronets and their wives come!’

Far away below eldest sons of younger sons of peers, in an outer darkness below even members of the fifth class of the Victorian Order, I saw that obscure relationship. My emotions of various kinds almost suffocated me. Helen was justified before all the world. It was her turn to cut the wife of the younger son of the Baronet if she chose.

So we talked very pleasantly for a quarter of an hour about the movements of the aristocracy, and then Mr. Holmes ‘rose to go.’ His cab was waiting, and I helped him on with a very magnificent fur coat in the hall, which in the somewhat indistinct light seemed to be made of the purest rabbit skin. In the dimness of the landing above I thought I could see an obscure shadow leaning over the banisters which resembled Legs.