An Act in a Backwater

by E. F. Benson

The children did not have to wait long at the corner. The pace home was perfectly appalling.

CHAPTER IV

One evening, about a fortnight after the attack of congestion in Bolton Street, Canon and Mrs. Collingwood were sitting in their dining-room lingering over their dessert. The butler had filled their claret-glasses to the brim with water, and had left the room. It was a warm night in mid-July, and the French window opening on to the garden was flung wide, admitting breaths of soft and flower-scented air. The dusk was not yet passed the bounding line between day and night, and the eye was led over a cool, spacious square of grass, framed in flower-beds in which colour still lingered, to a red brick wall at the end of the garden over which rose the gray pinnacle of the Cathedral. It was still near enough to midsummer to dine without candles if your dinner-hour was 7.45, and the absence of them and decanters gave to the table a certain virginal and ascetic air. Both the Canon and his wife were teetotalers, she of the kind which we may call intemperate—that is to say, she regarded alcohol not only as poison, but as an essentially immoral thing. Mrs. Collingwood was a woman of strong will, and ruled her husband; and though his own inclination would have been to set wine before his guests when they were entertaining, her detestation of fermented liquids overruled hospitality, and, unless one particular person was dining with them, you would no more see a decanter on the table than you would see a roulette board. But the exception was made in favour of their Bishop, who was under doctor’s orders to drink the abominable thing, and on these occasions a half bottle of Burgundy blushed before Mrs. Collingwood’s eyes. How exactly it is possible to conceive of a natural and lifeless product as being in itself wicked is a problem at which the ordinary mind stumbles. But Mrs. Collingwood had solved it, and we should show a more becoming modesty if we lamented our mediocrity of grasp and silently envied Mrs. Collingwood’s extraordinary powers of conception, than if we called her point of view unreasonable. It is possible also that if a guest had produced a doctor’s certificate that he must drink wine, he would have been accorded some of the Bishop’s Burgundy, but his wine would be understood to be of the nature of medicine, which custom has ordained that we shall not indulge in at the dinner-table.

Now it was not the habit of Canon Collingwood or his wife to linger over the pleasures of the table, but they were discussing a subject which had probably been discussed at thirty or forty other tables that evening, namely, the advent of Jeannie and Arthur to Wroxton.

“I don’t feel certain that she will be helpful,” said Mrs. Collingwood; “to me she seemed not in earnest. There was no depth about her.”

And she put a hard piece of gingerbread into her rather wide mouth.

Canon Collingwood stroked his beard for a moment in silence.

“She is young,” he said, doubtfully.

“One can never be too young to be in earnest,” said his wife. “And I did not like the look of the drawing-room. There were several books on the table which I should never allow in my house, and there was an organ in the hall.”

Canon Collingwood had been married many years, but even now his wife occasionally puzzled him.