Across the Stream

by E. F. Benson

Archie sat for a few minutes on the hall-table, instead of going upstairs, for he meant, with a certain object in view, to go back to his father's room, on some trivial errand, and, as he waited, the big clock ticked him back into boyhood. There was the fire-place by which Abracadabra sat on the last of her appearances; there the screen behind which, as he had subsequently ascertained, William had hidden with a trumpet and the servants' dinner-bell, there the side-door into the gardens through which, pleasingly excited, he had hurried with the box for coffin of the dead bird which the cat had killed… A hundred memories crowded about him, and not one, save where Blessington was concerned, held any romance or tenderness for him. They were as meaningless as pictures taken out from the empty house and leaning against the railings in the street: in the house itself, his bitter, lonely spirit, there was nothing left but the places where once they hung.

He went back to his father's room, crossing the hall with light foot, and turning the handle of the door with swiftness and silence. There was his father by the table, filling his glass again. It was just that which Archie wished to verify.

"I only came back for a book," he said. "Good-night again."

CHAPTER X

Archie went straight up to his room: his brimming glass was difficult to carry quite steadily, and he reduced its contents half-way upstairs. William had orders always to put whisky and soda in his room in case he wanted to sit up and write; but sometimes William forgot, or, at any rate, did not obey, and Archie wondered if the man did it on purpose, with perhaps the same excellent intentions as those which flowered so decorously in his father's mind. But to-night all was as it should be, and, as it was very hot, Archie undressed and put on his pyjamas before settling down to work. Writing, the absorbing joy of creation, the delicate etching of sentences that bit into the plate, still possessed him when he had taken the requisite evening dose.

But to-night, though he had got his material ready, his hand could not accomplish the fashioning of it, and he got up and walked with bare feet, once or twice up and down the room, wondering why he could not link up his thoughts to his power of expression. He was nearly at the end of one of those sea-stories, which he had begun at Silorno, and he knew exactly what he meant to say. The brain-centre that dictated was charged, and sufficiently stimulated, and yet he could get nothing on to paper that was worth putting there, though he was ready to write, and wanted to write.

He had not drunk too much and made himself fuddled; he had not drunk too little, and left the bitter weeds of daily consciousness uncovered, like rocks at low tide.

He sat and thought, wrote and impatiently erased again, and at last put down his pen. Perhaps even this, the only living interest that just now existed for him, was being taken from him also, and was following down the channel which had emptied itself into Helena. She had taken from him everything else that meant life: it would be like her consistency to take that also, and leave him nude and empty. It was not that she wanted the gift which she—in his vague, excited thought—seemed to be robbing him of; it was only that she and the memory of how she had treated him was a vampire to his blood. She had sucked him empty, drained him dry of happiness, of joy of life, of human interests. More than that, his love, the best thing which he had to give her, and for which she had no use, she now seemed to have treated with some devilish alchemy, so that it turned bitter; hate, like some oozy scum, rose from the depths of it, and covered its crystal with poisonous growth.

This would never do; the rocks at low tide had become uncovered, and, while he slipped and stumbled among them, bruising himself at every step with the thought of Helena, he could never get that abstraction and detachment which he knew were the necessary conditions of his writing. And all power of achieving that seemed taken from him; he felt himself an impotent atom, unable to order the workings of his own brain, defenceless against any thoughts that might assault him.

The house was perfectly quiet; the stillness of the midsummer night had flowed into its open windows and drowned it deep in that profound tranquillity that was yet tense with the energy of the spinning world and the far-flung orbits of the myriad stars. The moon had long since sunk, but the galaxy of uncounted worlds flared on their courses, driven onwards by the inexhaustible eternity of creative forces that ran through the stars, even as it ran through the humblest herb that put forth its unnoticed blossom on the wayside. But Archie, in this bitter stagnation that paralysed him, seemed to himself to have no part in life: all that current of energy that bubbled through the world, with its impulses of good and evil, love and hate, seemed to have been cut off from him. He neither loved nor hated any more. There was the nightmare of this death in life: at any price, and under whatever inspiration, he longed to be in the current again. Tonight even drink had failed him.