Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

The Southern smile broke through. Colin could always make Nino smile, even when the stepmother was in the picture.

“Sis-signor,” said Nino. “I will kiss the stoat and the gridiron.”

“We shoot stoats in England,” said Colin, “and hang their corpses upon trees.”

“Eh, she’d look nice on the pine there,” said Nino. “But, Dio, the stink, when the scirocco blew!”

Nino departed with the tea-things to kiss his stepmother or the gridiron or anything he chose. That was the true spirit in which to live here; you never bothered your head as to what you were proposing to do; you just did exactly as you liked whenever an amusing opportunity suggested itself. And yet it was a wonderful place in which to make plans, thought Colin. You lay on the beach after your bathe, and without effort your brain seethed with ideas. The sun seemed to liquefy the contents of its cells, and the secret juices, scarcely known to yourself, oozed out in the clear broth of thought. And fruitful too, was the night, when the wind whispered in the pine, and the great furry-bodied bats with wings of stretched black parchment wove silent circles in the air....

There was a power abroad then, Colin knew well, and if you were in tune with it, you caught, like some wireless receiver, strange messages from the midnight. Not less surely did he know that there was power abroad for those who sought it, whenever above the altar the lamp burned before the tabernacle that held the sacramental food, which is the Bread of Angels. But unless your heart lay open in faith and loving adoration, the power which in itself was infinite was no more than a fragment of wafer, or a sip of wine: faith set that vast engine of love and redemption at work, and across the sky, from horizon to zenith, the worshipper beheld how Christ’s blood ‘streamed in the firmament,’ and adored the divine miracle. So too with the power that whispered in the pine and poured itself out on the midnight: unless you believed in it and by faith laid hold on it, there was for you nothing there but the night wind and the wheeling bats.

There was the truth of the legend, a truth eternal and irrevocable, a matter of choice, not for him alone but for the whole world. He could not so passionately have loved evil, if he had not known there was a definite choice to be made. He might have drifted into any sort of sin and self-indulgence from the mere fact that they were pleasant, but the only thing that could have given him his furious zest for evil in itself, was the terrible conviction of the existence of God. If evil had been the dominant power in the world, he would, without the sense of choice, have lain and soaked indolently in it, but he chose it because he loved it, and because in its service he defied love.

Colin made no pretence of doubting the existence of good and evil and the original living causes of them. They were principles perhaps, but since they certainly lived, and daily and hourly manifested themselves, he could not conceive of them otherwise than as Persons. With the same faith that he believed in the power that inspired evil, he believed in the power that inspired good, which had once been incarnate in man, and in some mysterious way suffered for the redemption of those who desired it. For those who believed (and Colin was among them), He was Love, infinite in power, but choice was given to every man, and His Sacrament of Love, to those who abhorred Love, became the Sacrament of Hate and the adoration of evil. Those who had chosen thus could receive it in mockery of love, and to them their derision was an act of faith, through which they dedicated their powers and their will to the service of evil, and drew therefrom the strength that inspired them.

These thoughts were no more than the steam which ascended from the bubbling liquor of his mind, and he did no more than just watch, for this idle moment as he waited for Nino’s return, the familiar wreath. And here was Nino’s step on the stairs, and it was time to put these general principles into practical shape. He had come to Capri, no doubt, primarily, for a month of that basking amphibious life, which always put him into harmony with himself, but there were other projects as well which now, in strict accordance with these principles, presented themselves for execution, projects no less dedicatory than diverting.

“Nino, we’re going to have two visitors here,” he said, “and we must arrange about them. Mr. Cecil is coming from Naples to-morrow for two nights and next week there comes the pretty lady, who’ll bring a maid. Let’s go round and inspect.”