An Autumn Sowing

by E. F. Benson

He laid the sheet down with an impatient exclamation at himself, and thought over the incident of Norah’s meeting the party of ladies in the hall. Mrs Fyson had thought it odd, had she? So much the more mistaken was Mrs Fyson. There was nothing odd about it at all. His wife had been disposed to take Mrs Fyson’s view, and he had given her his opinion on that point pretty sharply. Nothing had ever passed between Norah and himself that might not with perfect propriety have taken place in the middle of the market-square with Mrs Fyson and all the ladies of Bracebridge straining their eyes and ears to detect anything which could have given one of them a single thing to think about. But the complete truth of that was not the whole truth. A situation which was in process of formation underlay that truth, and just now that situation had expressed itself in eloquent silence when he took up the blotting-paper and read what Norah had written on the cards. He had not given a thought to the titles of the books and their authors, though probably his eyes had observed them: his mind had been wholly occupied with the knowledge that it was she who had written them.

It was that which his wife had expressed in her manner and her words: it was that for which he had chosen to swear at her. He had given her a good knock for hinting at it, and had followed up that knock by the stupid sort of joke about the superiority of her charms to those of Alice, which she was sure to appreciate. She had done so; she had said, ‘For shame!’ and gone simpering to bed. Perhaps that would take her mind off the other affair. He sincerely hoped it would, but he distrusted her stupidity. A cleverer woman would have probably accepted the more superficial truth that there had never passed between him and Norah a single intimate word, but a stupid one might easily let a dull unfounded suspicion take root in her mind. It was difficult to deal with stupid people: you never knew where their stupidity might break out next. Emmeline had a certain power of sticking, and Mrs Fyson had a brilliant imagination. Together they might evolve some odious by-product, one that would fumble and shove its way into the underlying truth.

He got up with a shrug of the shoulders. There was no use in making conjectures about it all. Perhaps if he gave Emmeline a pearl-pendant for her birthday, which fortunately occurred next week, he could distract her mind. But it was impossible to tell about Emmeline: her stupidity was an incalculable item.

He went to the front door in order to make sure he had put the chain on, and then taking it off, opened the door and looked out into the night. The snow was still falling fast, and the prints of wheels and footsteps outside were already obliterated. Mr Silverdale had walked home, light-heartedly predicting a ‘jolly good snowballing match’ with his boys next day, and Keeling found himself detesting Mr Silverdale with acute intensity. Norah had walked home also.... In a moment he was back in the hall, putting on a mackintosh. He would have liked to put on boots as well but for that he would have had to go up to his dressing-room next door to his wife’s bedroom. Then gently closing the door behind him, he went out into the night. He must just walk as far as her house to make sure she was not still tramping her way through the snow, and traverse the streets she had traversed. It was absolutely necessary to satisfy himself about that, and he did not care how unreasonable it was—rational considerations had no application; an emotional dictate made him go. There was but a mile of gas-lit thoroughfare between his house and hers, but he, striving to smother the emotion he would not admit, told himself that he must be satisfied she was not still out in this frozen inclement night. He gave that as a sop to his rational self; but he knew he threw it as to some caged wolf, to keep it from growling.

There was a moon somewhere above the snow-clouds that already were beginning to grow thin from the burden they had discharged, and the smug villas on each side of the road were clearly visible. She had to go up the length of Alfred Road, then turn down the street that led by St Thomas’s Vicarage, and emerge into West Street, where she lived with her brother. Already, a fortnight ago he had ascertained the number of their house, not asking for it directly, but causing her to volunteer the information, and since then he had half a dozen times gone through the street, on his way to and from the Stores in order to take a glance at it as he passed. He had wanted to know what the house looked like; he had wanted to construct the circumstances of her life, to know the aspect of her environment, to see the front-door out of which she came to her duties as his secretary. That all concerned her, and for that reason it concerned him. He knew the house well by now: he knew from chance remarks that he had angled for that her bedroom looked into the street, that Charles’s looked on to an old disused graveyard behind. There was the dining-room and the sitting-room in front, and a paling behind which Michaelmas daisies flourished in a thin row. She cared for flowers, but not for flowers in a six-inch bed. They rather provoked her: they were playing at being flowers. She liked them when they grew in wild woodland spaces, and were not confined between a house-wall and a row of tiled path.

The empty streets, dumb with snow, flitted silently by him, and as they passed, he seemed to himself to be standing still while some circular movement of the earth carried him past the silly Vicarage and into West Street. It brought him up to the house: it showed him a red blind on the first floor lit from within. That was what he had come to see, and he waited a moment on the white pavement opposite watching it. She had got home, that was all right then, yet still he looked at the blind.

He turned and retraced his steps. Now that the object of his expedition was secured he was conscious of all the discomforts and absurdity of what he had been doing. The snow was deep, his evening shoes were wet through, his mackintosh heavy with clinging flakes, and his rational self made its voice heard, telling him what a fool’s errand was in progress. He heard, but his emotional self heeded nothing of that: it would not argue, it would not answer, it was well satisfied with what he had done, telling him, now that he was going homewards again, that he would find there the blotting paper on which she had pressed the wet ink of her catalogue slips, reminding him that at nine next morning he would see her again. It would attend to no interruptions, its thoughts sufficed for itself. But he knew that his reason, his prudence were ringing him up, as it were, on the telephone. The bell tinkled with repeated calls for him to listen to what they had to say. But he refused to take the receiver down; he would not give his ear to their coherent message, and let them go on summoning him unheeded. He knew all they had to say, and did not want to hear it again. They took an altogether exaggerated view of his affairs, when they told him that the situation might easily develop into a dangerous one. He, with his emotional self to back him up, knew better than they, and had assured them that his self-control had the situation well in hand. They need not go on summoning him, he was not going to attend. In the leafless elms above there sang in this wintry and snow-bound night the shy strong bird of romance: never in his life had he heard such rapture of melody.

Despite his fifty years, and the hard dry business atmosphere of his life, there was something amazingly boyish in the inward agitation in which Keeling, arriving ten minutes before his time at his office next morning, awaited Norah’s coming. His midnight excursion, dictated by some imperative necessity from within had, even if it was not a new stage in his emotional history, revealed a chapter already written but not yet read by him. He expected too, quite irrationally, that some corresponding illumination must have come to the girl, that she, like himself, must have progressed along a similar stage. He pictured himself telling her how he had left his house in order to have the satisfaction of seeing her lit window; he had a humorous word to say about the state of his dress shoes (in place of which he must not forget to order a pair from the boot and shoe department this morning). He could see her smile with eyes and mouth in answer to his youthful confession, as she always smiled when, as often happened now, some small mutual understanding flitted to and fro between them, and could easily imagine the tone of her reply, ‘Oh, but how dreadfully foolish of you, Mr Keeling. You want to be laid up too, like Charles.’ She would not say more than that, but there would be that glimmer of comprehension, of acceptance, that showed she had some share in the adventure, that she allowed it, looked on it with the kind eye of a friend.

There was never a swifter disillusionment than when she came in, and he stood up, as he had now learned to do, at her entrance. He had heard her step along the passage, and the bird of romance, hidden perhaps behind the sofa or in the case of files, gave out a great jubilant throatful of song. But next moment it was as if some hand, Mrs Fyson’s perhaps, had wrung its neck and stopped its singing. She had a perfectly friendly smile for him, but the smile was not one shade more friendly than usual, her eyes did not hold lit within them a spark of closer intimacy than had habitually been there for the last fortnight. Whatever had happened to him last night, he saw that nothing whatever had happened to her. No sixth sense had conveyed to her the smallest hint of his midnight walk: she had been through no nocturnal experiences that the most sanguine could construe into correspondence with that, and on the moment he could no more have told her about his midnight walk, or have been humorous on the subject of disintegrated shoes than he could have taken her into his arms and kissed her. And by the standard of how incredibly remote she seemed, he could judge of the distance of his spirit’s leap towards her, when he stood outside her window last night. The very absence of any change in her was the light by which he saw the change in himself.

She had his letters opened for him with her usual speed, but as she worked he could see by the soft creased line between her eyebrows, even as he had seen it yesterday morning, when she was anxious about her brother, that something troubled her. To-day, however, he did not question her: she might tell him if she felt disposed, and guessing that it was connected with the events of last night, his instinct told him that it was for her to speak or be silent. Then, when she had opened the letters, she placed them by him, and without a word, took up her writing-block and pencil for the shorthand dictation. But still her brow did not clear, the smudge of shadow lay perpendicularly between her eye-brows, as fixed as if it was some soft pencil mark on the skin.