An Autumn Sowing

by E. F. Benson

‘But I do mind that. It was idiotic of me, and it was ungrateful of me. I should have known you better than that.’

She came a step closer.

‘Will you forgive me?’ she said. ‘I adored that moment when your name was announced. I felt so proud of serving you.’

He held out his hand.

‘That is very friendly of you,’ he said. ‘But we are friends, aren’t we?’

And again she looked at him with that brightness and radiance in her face that he had seen once before only.

CHAPTER IX

It is perhaps hardly necessary to state that Mrs Keeling on the eve of the ceremony for the opening of the Keeling wing had subscribed to a press cutting agency which would furnish her with innumerable accounts of all she knew so well. But print was an even more substantial joy than memory, and there appeared in the local press the most gratifying panegyrics on her husband. These were delightful enough, but most of all she loved the account of herself at that monumental moment when she presented the Princess with the bouquet of daffodils and gypsophila. She was never tired of the perusal of this, nor of the snapshot which some fortunate photographer had taken of her in the very middle of her royal curtsey, as she was actually handing the bouquet. This was reproduced several times: she framed one copy and kept all the rest, with the exception of one with regard to which she screwed herself up to the point of generosity that was necessary before she could prevail on herself to send it to her mother.

Then, while still the industrious press-cutters had not yet come to the end of those appetising morsels, the packets on her breakfast table swelled in size again, and she was privileged to read over and over again that the honour of a baronetcy had been conferred on her husband. She did not mind how often she read this; all the London papers reproduced the gratifying intelligence, and though the wording in most of these was absolutely identical, repetition never caused the sweet savour to cloy on her palate. She was like a girl revelling in chocolate-drops; though they all tasted precisely alike, each tasted delicious, and she felt she could go on eating them for ever. Even better than those stately clippings from the great London luminaries were the more detailed coruscations of the local press. They gave biographies of her husband, magnanimously suppressing the fish-shop, and dwelling only on the enterprise which had made and the success which had crowned the Stores, and many (these were the sweetest of all) gave details about herself and her parentage and the number of her children. She was not habitually a great reader, only using books as a soporific till they tumbled from her drowsy grasp, but now she became a wakeful and enthusiastic student. The whole range of literature, since the days of primeval epics, had never roused in her one tithe of the emotion that those clippings afforded.

Keeling himself had no such craving to see in print all that he was perfectly well aware of, and even looked undazzled at the cards which his wife had ordered, on one set of which he appeared alone as ‘Sir Thomas Keeling, Bart.,’ to differentiate him from mere knights, whilst on the other the Bart. appeared in conjunction with her. But the events themselves filled him with a good deal of solid satisfaction, due largely to their bearing on the approaching election at the County Club. Never from a business point of view had there been a more successful ‘timing’ of an enterprise: it was as if on the very day of his getting out his summer fashions, summer had come, with floods of hot sunshine that made irresistible to the ladies of Bracebridge the muslins and organdies and foulards that floated diaphanously in the freshly dressed windows. The summer of his munificence and his honours had just burst on the town, and, in spite of Lord Inverbroom’s warning, he felt, as he walked down to his office on the morning of the day on which the election took place, that every member of the Club would be, so to speak, a customer for his presence in future in those staid bow-windows. During these months of his Mayoralty, he had come into contact with, and had been at civic functions the host of a quantity of members of the County Club whose suffrages he sought to-day, and there was none among them who had not shown him courtesy and even deference. That no doubt was largely due to his position as mayor, but this Thomas Keeling who was a candidate for the Club was the mayor, he who had given the new wing to the hospital, thereby averting a very unpleasant financial mess, he, too, whom his King had delighted to honour. To the business mind nothing could have happened more opportunely, and the business mind was his mind. He could not see how he could fail, after this bouquet of benefits and honours, to be ‘an attractive proposition’ to any club. As he walked down to his office that morning he swept the cobweb of Lord Inverbroom’s apprehensions away, and wondered at himself for having allowed them to infect him with a moment’s uneasiness, or to make him consider, even at the very back of his brain, what he should do if he were not elected. This morning he did not consider that at all: he was sure that the contingency for which he had provided would not arrive. The provision was filed away, and with it, shut up in the dusty volume, was the suggestion his agent had made that he might quite reasonably raise the rent that the Club paid for the premises which were now his property. That business was just concluded; he proposed to inform Lord Inverbroom at once of the fact that he was now the landlord of the County Club, and that the question of a rise in the rental might be considered as shelved. Lord Inverbroom would be in Bracebridge this morning, since he would be presiding at the election at the Club at twelve o’clock, and had promised to communicate the result at once. Very likely Keeling would drop in at the club to have a bit of lunch there, and he could get a chat with Lord Inverbroom then.... But as he slid upwards in the droning lift that took him to the floor where his office was, the Club, the election, and all connected with it, vanished from his brain like the dispersing mists on a summer morning, for a few steps would take him along the corridor to the room where Norah was opening his letters.