Colin II: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

“She gives me the creeps, my dear,” said Aunt Hester, “though I know she’s my own mother. But there it is! Ever since I can remember she was cold and dead: the iceberg your Uncle Philip and I used to call her. A beautiful woman she was, too: it’s strange that your Uncle Philip and your father were such plain men.”

“You took all her good looks, Aunt Hester,” said Violet. Aunt Hester loved firm little compliments, laid on with the full spade.

“Well, I had my share of them,” she said, “but beauty ran to prettiness in me, and that’s a sad seeding. The Stanier style skipped my generation, and I daresay that’s why it came out strong in the next. Your Uncle Philip and your father, as I say, two plain men if ever there was one, and yet one was the father of Colin, and the other of you. You two have got it all: that’s what’s happened. There was never such a pair of Staniers as you, and as like as two peas. Make haste, my dear, and have a dozen sons and daughters, and there’ll be a dinner-table worth photographing when you’ve got your family growing up. Let them all be as wicked as hell, and as long as they have the good looks of their mother and father I’ll forgive ’em. There are enough plain folk in the world already who can be models of piety, but when I see a handsome boy, I want to see him kissing a pretty girl, as I’m too old for him now.”

“Aunt Hester, you’re a pagan,” observed Violet.

“I always was, my dear,” said she, “and it’s pagans who make the world go round. It ain’t for long that anyone’s fit to look at, so, while youth lasts, for God’s sake let them make the most of it. There’ll be time for them to lead a godly life when no-one asks them to do anything else. That’s what I say.”

With which atrocious sentiments, Aunt Hester walked briskly off to get her good perspiration to prepare her for her cold tub and her dinner.

The Staniers had always been patriarchal folk, and indeed in that immense house there was room for the exercise of this family virtue, without any inconvenient jostling of the generations: it was an asylum and almshouse for the antiquated members of the family. Four generations indeed were now installed there: old Lady Yardley represented the earliest, and next in succession came her two children, Lady Hester and Ronald Stanier with his wife, all of whom inhabited what Colin called the Dowager-wing. If he wished to say something special about Violet’s father, he called it the Home for Inebriates, or if her mother had to be characterized, the Home for Decayed Gentlewomen. Old Lady Yardley was a permanent inmate: since her husband’s death twenty-one years ago, she had never left Stanier, and Ronald, Violet’s father, was scarcely less constant, for he only absented himself for a curative month at Aix or Marienbad every August, which should enable him to continue eating and drinking too much for the remainder of the year, or passed an occasional fortnight in his much less comfortable flat in town. When there he spent most of his time at his Club presenting the back of his head to St. James’s Street, and dozing over a succession of morning and evening papers: the morning and evening papers were for him the current day. When Colin and his wife were in London, he would still stay on here, dining nightly in silence with his mother, and sitting with her afterwards, nodding and snorting under her steady and malevolent gaze till she was wheeled off by her nurse, and he would fuddle the rest of the evening away over a couple of cigars and the whisky bottle.

Ronald’s wife, Margaret, also was usually in residence here, an eclipsed and negligible presence, whom it was difficult to be aware of, and impossible to miss. There had never been any real parental or filial relationship between her and Violet. She behaved with controlled propriety on all occasions, sad or festive, and emotion withered in her immaculate vicinity. The Stanier frost which falls on those who marry into that family had long ago congealed her: there was no telling what (if anything) lay beneath that cold chalky surface. She drank hot water with her meals (though it never thawed her), always replied if spoken to, took a walk every morning in the Park, if the day was fine, and if not, sat in her sitting-room in the Dowager’s wing and played Patience. Her career in life was to write out the menu-cards for the dinner-table in French, with accents where required. Violet made occasional efforts to get in touch with her, but there was nothing to touch; her hand merely became numb with the cold mist in which it groped. Margaret Stanier went with her husband to Aix for his yearly cure: she kept house for him in London, but for the greater part of the year they were here, not welcome exactly, but not unwelcome, merely part of the house like stair-carpets in unfrequented passages which were sometimes taken up, and then laid down again. It had always been so at Stanier: brothers and sons of earlier generations were part of the house, if they chose to make themselves so, until the day came when they were borne on their short journey to the family vault in the church that stood not two hundred yards away.

Lady Hester was the fourth but less chronic inhabitant of the Dowager’s wing, for she had still a lively appreciation of the gaieties and stir of life, and chiefly confined her visits to the times when “that wretch” Colin made things “go a bit.” “For where’s the use, my dear,” she used to say, “in my sitting to be stared at by Mamma, or in watching poor Ronald fuddle himself? I like a bit more spunk than that.” But she, like Violet, like Colin, like her brother, had that feeling about Stanier, just the place itself, which for generations all the family have shared. To them all it meant something intimate and indefinable, something for which Violet, for instance, had been willing to marry the dark uncouth Raymond, if, by that, she might become mistress of the house. True, that had not been required of her: she had married Hyperion instead of the Satyr, and had harvested love and that deep-set terror that prowled about in the darkness below these magnificent surfaces. Had she been challenged as to whether she believed in the legend in any literal sense, she would perhaps have denied it, but she would have given her soul to deny that, as regards Colin, there was no spiritual significance in it. Whether it was actually true or not, did not matter: that belonged to the dust of mediævalism. But there was a darkness deeper than that.... None of the others, not Aunt Hester with her gay paganism, not old Lady Yardley with her half-closed eyes and steady gaze, knew Colin as she knew him. They saw the charm of him, the beauty, the sunshine of his gaiety, and just occasionally winced under the quick lash of his tongue. But none of them shuddered at what lay below his sunshine.

There came out of the gallery door that presence which alone had power to scare off these black ill-omened birds of thought from Violet’s mind. Here was the fourth of the generations that inhabited the house, Dennis in his perambulator being wheeled out for his evening airing and for whatever fresh discoveries about the use of legs might reward his daring. Just as he came out, the bath-chair with its withdrawn and antique occupant was passing the door, and dramatically enough, so it seemed to Violet, the two were face to face across the gulf of eighty years which divided them, both attended and conveyed, the one owing to the infirmity of faded energies, the other from the immaturity of them. Occasionally old Lady Yardley seemed to take some notice of Dennis; the faint dawning of the smile with which she looked on his father, would begin to hover on her mouth, and the heavy eyelids lifted a little. To-day, as Violet saw, that blink of recognition was there, but immediately Lady Yardley’s face clouded again. “No, that’s not Colin,” she said to her nurse, “but he’s coming.” Then as the bath-chair in its peregrinations came close to the tea-table again her eyes were alert to see if he was there, but for Violet they had no spark of recognition. It was always for Colin that she searched: no-one else could reward that silent scrutiny.