Colin

by E. F. Benson

Colin was lying on the beach of the men’s bathing-place at Capri after an hour’s swim. A great wave of heat had swept over Europe, and now, though it was late in October, the conditions of summer still prevailed. It might have been June still, and he here with his father, quietly making the plans that had turned out so well. On this beach it was that he lay, pondering his reply to Violet’s letter which told him she was engaged to Raymond. He had thought out his reply here, that congratulatory reply, saying how delightful her news was, and as for feeling hurt.... That had been a thorn to Violet, which had pricked and stung her, as she had confessed. She had confessed it to him between dusk and dawn on their marriage-night.

He knew all about it; that casual kiss in the dusk of the yew-hedge the night before he and his father left for Italy had begun it; his indifference to her had made her ache, and his arrival back in England had made the ache intolerable. To be mistress at Stanier had become worthless to her, and to reward her sense of its worthlessness, had come the news that she would not be that only....

Colin stirred his sun-stained body to get a fresh bed of hot sand and pebbles for his back. He had absorbed the heat of those on which he had been lying, but a little kneading movement of his elbow brought him on to another baked patch. That was gloriously hot; it made him pant with pleasure, as he anticipated one more cool rush into the sea. He purred and thought of the lovely days that had passed, of the lovely day that was here, of the lovely days that awaited him. Quite methodically, he began at the beginning.

Violet and he had been married in the first week of October, on the very day indeed that had been arranged for her marriage with Raymond. There was a suave brutality about that; he had made Raymond, under some slight hint of pressure, advocate it. Raymond (under that same hint) had become marvellously agreeable; he had been almost sentimental and had urged Violet to be married on that day. He himself would be best man, if Colin would allow him, instead of being bridegroom. Her happiness, it appeared, was of greater import to him than his own.

Little conversations with Colin in the smoking-room, before Colin went up to say good-night to Violet, were responsible for this Scotch sentimentality. Raymond had been quite like a noble character in a sloshy play. He had understood and entered into the situation; he had given up without bitterness; he had rejoiced at his brother’s happiness and had been best man. The happy pair had left that afternoon for Italy.

The attitude which he had forced on Raymond gave Colin the most intense satisfaction. He had been made to appear to be affectionate and loving, high-minded and altruistic, and Colin knew what wormwood that must be to him. It was tiresome enough, as he knew from his experience of the last fortnight, to be supposed to love when you only liked, but how infinitely more galling it must be to be supposed to love when you hated. But he did Raymond justice; a mere hint at publicity for that paper which lay at his bankers together with his mother’s letters and that confirmatory line from Uncle Salvatore, produced wonderful results. Raymond could be bridled now with a single silken thread.

Colin’s thought turned over that leaf of the past, and pored over the present—this delightful, actual present. There was the sun baking his chest and legs, and the hot sand and pebbles warm to his back, while the cool, clear sea awaited him when the rapture of heat became no longer bearable. Violet had not come down with him to-day. She had taken to the rather more sophisticated bathing establishment at the Marina, where more complete bathing-dresses were worn, and men did not dress and undress in the full eye of day. Colin quite agreed with her that the Marina was more suitable for her; this bay was really the men’s bathing-place and though women could come here if they chose, they were rather apt to be embarrassing and embarrassed. She would find the huts at the Marina more satisfactory and still more satisfactory to him was to be rid of her for a few hours.

There was a stern, pitiless insistency about love which bored him. He could not be quite tranquil when, from moment to moment, he had to make some kind of response. A glance or a smile served the purpose, but when Violet was there he had, unless he betrayed himself, always to be on the look out. This love was a foreign language to him, and he must attend, if he were to reply intelligently. He liked her, liked her quite immensely, but that which was a tireless instinct to her was to him a mental effort. It was no effort, on the other hand, to be with Raymond, for there his instinct of hatred functioned flawlessly and automatically.

Colin turned over that page of the present, and cast his eyes over the future. At the first glance all seemed prosperous there. His father had aged considerably during the last few months, and just before their marriage had had a rather alarming attack of vertigo, when, after a hot game of tennis, he had gone down with Colin to the bathing-pool to swim himself cool. The boy had not been the least frightened; he had brought his father to land without difficulty, and on his own responsibility had telephoned for his father’s doctor to come down to Stanier. The report had been quite reassuring, but a man who had left his sixtieth birthday behind him must not over-exert himself at tennis and then bathe. Nature, the wise old nurse, protested.

This suggested eventualities for the future; no doubt his father would now be more prudent and enjoy a long ripe old age. Colin quite acquiesced; his father had been so consistently good to him that he scarcely felt any impatience about that. But what this morning occupied him with regard to the future was the idea, not of his father’s death, but of Raymond’s. In this uncertain world accidents or illness might carry off even the strongest and sulkiest, and he himself would then be in a very odd position. Supposing (as was natural) his father died first, Raymond (on the strong case that could be built on the evidence of his mother’s letter to Salvatore and the erasure in the Consulate archives), would, no doubt, be incontinently “hoofed out” of his promised land, and Violet be in possession, with him as husband to the owner. But if Raymond died first, Colin by his juggling would merely have robbed himself of the birthright which would be rightfully his. It had been a great stroke to provide at his father’s death for Raymond’s penniless illegitimacy, and, by himself marrying Violet, to submerge his own. Not possibly could he have provided for the eventuality of Raymond’s pre-deceasing his father as well, but now that he had married Violet it was worth while brooding and meditating over the other. Something might conceivably be done, if Raymond died first, though he could not as yet fashion the manner of it.