An Act in a Backwater

by E. F. Benson

“I met Miss Avesham a day or two ago at the Lindsays’,” he said. “She seemed to me a nice, pleasant girl, and very full of life.”

Mrs. Collingwood folded her napkin up in silence. Her husband’s remark seemed to her fatuous. Either a person was earnest and helpful or not. Any other quality, particularly that very dangerous quality known as “life,” was only trimming, and a possible temptation. Earnestness and helpfulness were to be rated by the desire to aid in good works. But as she rose she made a great concession.

“If you mean energy by life, William,” she said, “I agree with you that it is admirable as an instrument if properly used. You have not said grace.”

To do her justice, Mrs. Collingwood’s time was spent in good works, and her thoughts (when not thus occupied) in passing judgments on other people. Her favourite text, the text by which her life was conducted, was, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” In her youth she must have been remarkably handsome, but she had got over that, which was lucky, since she now tended to consider that good looks, if not actually the invention of the evil one, were an open door by which he entered, bringing with him pride, vanity, and self-esteem. Like alcohol and tobacco, she regarded them as almost more than dangerous, as something in themselves not right. But with what might be hastily considered as inconsistent, she thought it her duty to admire the beauties of nature when not exhibited in human beings. The green of forest trees, the level lines of the sunset, the Gothic architecture, particularly when seen from a Cathedral close, and thus, as it were, chastely framed, she thought were meant to lead one’s aspirations heavenward. These things (the trees and light, at any rate) had been at the Creation pronounced good, and that was enough for Mrs. Collingwood, who, if she could pin a text on to any conclusion, put it away in a drawer as proved. Her drawers were full of such. Similarly, man had fallen, and his face was the face of a fallen thing.

Thus this evening, when she and her husband left the dining-room, and he retired to his study to finish his sermon for the next day, she stood a full minute at the open window of the drawing-room looking at the view. Then she sat down at her davenport to finish writing a paper on the Downward Tendency of Modern Fiction, which she was to read at a meeting of the Wroxton Ladies’ Literary Union next week. She proposed to deal more particularly with novels which discuss theological problems, and were so upsetting to the faith of the weaker, for what is known as the Higher Criticism seemed to Mrs. Collingwood to be synonymous with the temptation of the devil. But she was a just woman, and one of her sentences began, “What a very clever book we all feel this to be, but how immoral!” Mrs. Collingwood found literary composition presented no difficulties, and she looked upon it, provided the motive of it was earnest and helpful, as an agreeable relaxation. Her style was conversational, and there was a good deal of “dear friends” in it.

The view on which she so resolutely turned her back in order to give this timely warning to the literary ladies of Wroxton against theological, or rather infidel, novels, justified her minute’s contemplation. The lawn, a cool, restful space of sober green, sloped down to a prattling tributary of the chalk stream which ran through the town, and in the dusk the flower-beds (the Canon’s hobby was gardening) glowed with subdued and darkening colour. The scent of the tobacco-plant (like Adam and Eve, still in its garden innocence) came floating in through the window, dominating all other perfumes. Thrushes still called to each other from the bushes, or crossed the lawn with quick, scudding steps, and an owl floated by with a flute-like note. To the right rose the gray piled mass of the Cathedral in all the dignity and sobriety of Norman work, set there, it might seem, like the rainbow, a pledge to the benignity of the circling seasons, serene and steadfast with centuries of service. From here, too, for the drawing-room was on the second floor, it was possible to see over the bounding garden-wall, and westward the river lay in sheets and pools of cloud-reflected crimson. Patches of light mist lay like clothes to dry over the water-meadows through which it ran, but beyond the great chalk down lay clear and naked. The sky at the horizon was cloudless, and the evening star hung like a jewel on blue velvet. Peaceful, protected stability was the keynote of the scene.

Canon Collingwood had been at Wroxton for twenty mildly useful but not glorious years. From the years between the ages of twenty and forty he had lived entirely at Cambridge as Fellow and subsequently classical tutor of his college. The effect, if not the object, of his life had been uneventfulness, and twenty years of looking over pieces of Latin verse and prose had been succeeded by twenty years of busy indolence as Canon of Wroxton. To keep one’s hands and heart moderately clean in this random business of life is a sufficient task for the most of mankind, and if Canon Collingwood had not experienced the braver joys of adventure, or even the rapture of mere living, it is not to be assumed that his life was useless. He set an admirable pattern of unruffled serenity and complete inoffensiveness, and though he could never set the smallest stream on fire, his passage through the world was bordered with content. At Wroxton, apart from the merely animal needs of sleep and exercise, his time was fairly equally divided between hardy annuals and an extensive though not profound study of patristic literature. Eight times in the year he delivered a sermon from the Cathedral pulpit, and never failed to give careful preparation to it. In the summer he and his wife always spent a month at the lakes, but otherwise they seldom slept a night outside their own house. He got up every morning at half past seven, and breakfasted at a quarter past eight. He attended Cathedral service at ten, and read or wrote in his study till a quarter past one. Three-quarters of an hour brought him to lunch-time, and a walk along one of three roads or two hours among his flowers prepared him for tea. His dinner he earned by two hours’ more reading, and his rest at night was the natural sequel to this wholesomely spent day, rounded off by three-quarters of an hour’s Patience in the drawing-room, or, if the game proved very exciting, it sometimes extended to a full hour.

Mrs. Collingwood, as has been stated, was somewhat given to passing judgment on other people, but these judgments were never of a gossipy or malicious nature, and she judged without being in any way critical. Her judgments were straightforward decisions, of the jury rather than the judge, as to whether the prisoner at the bar was guilty or not guilty. To be not guilty, it need hardly be indicated, meant to be earnest and helpful. Now, whether she could, with her hand on her heart, say that her husband was earnest or helpful is doubtful, but no decision was necessary, and for this reason: Though he took no part in her good works, nor even organized Christian associations, he was a Canon. To be a Canon implied to live in a close, and to live in a close (if we run Mrs. Collingwood to ground) meant to be not guilty. Furthermore, in what we may call her more Bohemian moments, she would have acknowledged that life could be looked at from more than one point of view. She would even have allowed that it might be possible to live otherwise than she lived, and yet be saved at the last. Yet some people had been known to think her narrow!

Mrs. Collingwood, it must be considered, was not ill content with living. Her aims were too definite, and her devotion to them too complete to allow her to indulge in any vague dissatisfactions. She could lament the wickedness of the world, yet find the antidote for the sorrow the thought had caused in efforts to remedy it. Further, in the sphere of inevitable and intimate things, she and her husband had perhaps only one weak spot, so to speak, in the armour in which they met the world. She, at any rate, went armed like a dragoon through the routine of life, armed against danger and difficulty and snares of the evil one. But this weak spot was in a vital place. She had a son, now some twenty-five years old, who did not live in a close, or anywhere near one. He was an artist—not a landscape painter, for Mrs. Collingwood could have borne that—but a painter of men and women, a recorder of human beauty. That he was rising and successful in his profession was no consolation to his mother, but rather the reverse, and she had before now hesitated whether the text, “I also have seen the wicked in great prosperity,” was not to be pinned to him, for that he was essentially sober and straight in his life she could scarcely believe. He seldom came to Wroxton, for his profession, at which he worked very hard, naturally kept him in London, but he was going to spend a week or two with them in September, after their return from the lakes, and she always found his visits trying. In the first place, it was quite certain that, though he did not smoke in the house out of deference to his mother’s abhorrence of the act, he did smoke in the garden; and in the second, though he never alluded to wine at lunch or dinner, a half-empty bottle of whisky had been found in his bed-room after he had gone. It often seemed cruel to Mrs. Collingwood that she should have had such a son, and in her own mind she was disposed to regard him as but a dubious gift, partaking more of the nature of a cross than of a crown.

Jeannie Avesham that afternoon had spoken of him to his mother, saying that, though she did not know him personally, he had been at Oxford with her brother, and the mention of those Oxford days had roused terrible memories in the mind of Mrs. Collingwood, and made her attack on modern fiction bitter and incisive. For he had gone to Oxford with the object of reading theology, and eventually of taking orders, but a day came when he wrote to his father saying he could not do so. He wanted to talk it all over with him, but he feared his decision was irrevocable.