Across the Stream

by E. F. Benson

* * * * *

Three days afterwards William left. He came to say good-bye to Archie, who did not look up from the paper he was reading. Archie was suffering inconvenience from his departure, and this was the best way of making William feel it. But when the door had shut again, and William was gone, he felt a sudden horror of the thing that seemed to be himself, and he ran out, and called William back. All these days he had not had a word or kindly gesture for him…

"Good-bye, William," he said. "I wish you all good luck. I've treated you like a beast these last days, and I'm awfully sorry. You're the best fellow a man could have, and you must try to forget the horrid way I've behaved."

William stood with his hand in Archie's for a moment.

"You're always my Master Archie, sir," he said.

* * * * *

Well, there was an end of William: before he had got back to his paper again Archie wondered what had possessed him to throw a kind word to a dog like that, who had left him at three days' notice to join this ridiculous military conspiracy. William did not care how much he inconvenienced Archie, who had always treated him more like a subordinate friend than a servant. He had helped William in a hundred ways: had given him old clothes, had constantly asked after his mother, had left his letters about for William to read if he chose. It seemed rank treachery…

Others were treacherous too; his mother, for instance, was immediately going up to town, to take charge of the house in Grosvenor Square, which was to be turned into a hospital for wounded officers. She was to become a sort of housekeeper, so Archie figured it, and merely superintend domestic arrangements. She would have nothing to do with the nursing and the surgery, which had a certain fascination… He could picture a sort of pleasure in seeing a man's leg cut off, or in standing by while doctors pulled bandages off festering wounds. To feel well and strong while others were suffering had an intelligible interest: to witness decay and corruption and pain was a point that appealed to him now. But Lady Tintagel was going to do nothing of the sort: she was just going to be a housekeeper. It was very selfish of her; Archie would certainly want, from time to time, to go up to town and spend a night or two there, and now he would have to go to a hotel or a club, instead of profiting by the spacious privacy of his father's house. Charity begins at home; and his mother had started charity on most extraneous lines. Jessie had followed this lead, "the lead of so-called trumps," as Archie framed a private phrase. She would start by being not even a housekeeper, but a sort of kitchen-maid at the same hospital. She had an insane desire to work, to do something that cost her something, instead of engaging a kitchen-maid, and paying her wages to go to some hospital or other. There was a craze for "personal service," instead of getting other people to do work for you, if you felt work had to be done. People wanted to "do their bit," to employ an odious expression which was beginning to obtain currency. The nation was going to be mobilized; hand and heart had to serve some vague national idea. Occasionally, as on the night when war was declared, Archie saw an aesthetic beauty in the notion of upholding rights and liberties; but he had not then reckoned with the fact that personal inconvenience might result from that quixotic revolution. Quixotism was fine in theory, but it was a dream, not to be encouraged in waking hours, when far more important and realizable commodities, like whisky and absinthe, engaged the true attention.

But, whoever else was treacherous, his father at least was loyal, and showed no sign of becoming a butler or a footman, to correspond with his wife and Jessie. Occasionally some grave report concerning the German advance through Belgium used to reach his brain, and he would walk up and down his room in the evening with a martial tread, and a glance at a sword that hung above his writing-table, and wish he was younger and able to "have a go" at those invading locusts. But invariably this mood, which was always short, was succeeded by another, not bellicose but domestic.

"This damned war is going to break up home-life in England," he would say, "and I've no doubt that was what the Germans aimed at. And they're succeeding too. Look at this house: there's you mother going to leave us, and there's Helena's husband expecting every day to be sent to France, and there's Jessie leaving her father to wash up dishes. What's going to become of our English homes if that goes on?—for, mark you, they are the root of our national life. It's digging up the trees' roots to break up English homes. You and I, Archie, are the only ones who are staunch to our homes. Pass me that bottle, will you?"