Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

“We must go in,” he said. “Granny will have finished her whist, and then my uncle likes a chat in the smoking-room. You never knew I was such a domestic character, did you, Pamela?”

“I always knew you were a dear,” she said. “And you do like me a little, don’t you?”

Colin, when he found himself alone—Uncle Ronald was gloomily consuming whisky to make up for the dearth of port—was as pleased with his terrace-talk as his companion had been. There was the little side-show (gratis) of representing himself as yearning for Violet, but that was only an antechamber, so to speak, which he and Pamela were passing through, and there she saw him, the gay trappings of his brilliance stripped off him, hungry for love. And already Pamela—how well he read her—was at his side. Closer and closer must she get till she could not exist without him. All the time she would be posing as the consoling friend, the healer of wounds, and all the time to the truer vision she would be the hunting leopard hungry for the hot blood of its prey. And just as she thought she had got it, it would be the prey somehow that turned on her with derision and mockery. With the exact manner of that furious turning of the tables, Colin did not trouble himself: it could not be settled now, for it must depend on developments. Before long he would be going out to Capri: he might ask her there perhaps, for at Capri everything always turned out well. How often had he made plans, lying there on the beach between the bathes, and how surely had their accomplishment justified the design! The fruit was not ripe yet, though the moonshine on the terrace had brought it on towards maturity. To-morrow ought to be a nice growing day, too....

What a high morality he would then exhibit, and how delightful would be the mockery of it! His plan, thus vaguely outlined to himself, was a derisive parody of morality, in which a decent married man would be seen resisting the improper seductress: what could be nicer? It would be a veritable tract about a Messalina and a Galahad. And then you looked closer, and saw that hate and the desire to hurt twitched in every gesture of Galahad. There was the cream and felicity of it, for it would all be a defiance of love, a campaign of hostility and rebellion.

Colin stood up, stretching himself slowly and luxuriously. He had taken out again from its locked drawer, the plan of that annex which his ancestor had never erected, to study it further, but there was really no need of that. He had sent for his architect to come here on Monday morning, who must get to work on this outlined sketch-plan, and devise something in the style of the house, using old brick and weathered stone and timber. That would all be talked out on Monday, and the building of it begun at once. For to-morrow’s employment there was church in the morning, where he always read the lessons if he was at home, and after that there were fruits to be ripened, and very soon after that, certainly during this week, he would go off with Nino to Capri, for a month of basking and bathing and, he made no doubt, a moral interlude, for he meant to ask Pamela to visit him there. And researches must be made in underground Naples: that red ridiculous Consul, Mr. Cecil, would have to lend his friendly offices. He would get him to come over for a night to the island.

Colin looked round his room. Just there the door would be pierced that led into the corridor communicating with the sanctuary.

CHAPTER IV

Colin woke from his siesta very gradually. He had not the slightest idea when the first faint glimmerings of consciousness began to return, where he was. He scarcely knew who he was, and with a deliberate quiescence of mind he tried to prolong this vague sense that what lay here was alive and happy, without orientating it or attaching it to any fixed point. Nirvana, he thought, must be like this, mere awareness of existence and content.

But this Nirvana began spontaneously to break up: from outside his window a whisper of wind and a stir of sun-winnowed air spiced with indefinable Southern odour flowed across to the bed where he lay in shirt and trousers, and at the end of his bed, very curiously, he saw two bare feet. It was still unconjecturable, to his drowsiness, to whom they belonged and what they were doing there, but now a fly settled on one of them, and he made the great discovery that it was his own foot which twitched to dislodge it. This snapped the chain of his identity round his neck and he knew he was Colin. Then the hot Southern scent and the whisper of wind in the pine outside localized him, for nowhere else, but in that beloved villa on Capri, did a pine whisper like that. Yes, he was in Capri: of course he was, for he had arrived late last night, and had spent the morning in the sea.

When once the sluices of sleep were raised, memories began to pour through, and he let them flow as they would without direction. He had come here first only two years ago with his father, and instantly his Italian blood had initiated him into the magic of the South; the lizards basking on the walls, the grey olives, the stone pines, the steep cobbled ways were as home-like, even when he saw them for the first time, as the thrushes that scudded across the lawn at Stanier, and the yew-hedge and the lake. Of course his father’s presence, and his father’s devotion to him, had been tedious at times, but he had borne that very indulgently. Then he had come here with Violet on his honeymoon, and here she had begun to learn something of his real nature, and that cold terror she had of him, which so inexplicably existed side by side with her love, had first laid a finger on her. Strange, to think how that hand of ice had never frozen her love, nor squeezed it out of her heart.... And then he had come here a third time, after Raymond had been drowned, but had stayed here only one night, for waiting him—welcoming him?—was the telegram to say his father was dead. He had not wanted his father to die exactly: he was quite content to wait a few years yet, but how his heart had leaped to know that already, while he was not yet of age, his great inheritance had come to him. Surely Capri was a lucky spot for him: yet was there, where he was concerned, such a thing as luck? Luck, as it was generally understood, was a fitful visitor, with rare capricious advents, and long absences. But with him it abided always.