Colin

by E. F. Benson

One morning, within a month of his departure from Stanier, Philip was coming slowly up from his bathing and basking on the beach, pleasantly fatigued, agreeably hungry, and stupefied with content. He had swum and floated in the warm crystal of the sea, diving from deep-water rocks into the liquid caves, where the sunlight made a shifting net of luminous scribbles over the jewelled pebbles; he had lain with half-shut eyes watching the quivering of the hot air over the white bank of shingle, with the sun warm on his drying shoulders and penetrating, it seemed, into the marrow of his bones and illuminating the very hearth and shrine of his spirit.

The hours had passed but too quickly, and now he was making his leisurely way through vineyards and olive-farms back to the road where a little jingling equipage would be waiting to take him up to his villa on the hill above the town of Capri. On one side of the path was a sun-flecked wall, where, in the pools of brightness, lizards lay as immobile as the stones themselves; the edges of these pools of light bordered by continents of bluish shadow wavered with the slight stirring of the olive trees above them. Through the interlacement of these boughs he caught glimpses of the unstained sky and the cliffs that rose to the island heights. On the other side the olive groves declined towards the edge of the cliff, and through their branches the sea, doubly tinged with the sky’s blueness, was not less tranquil than the ether.

Presently, still climbing upwards, he emerged from the olive groves, while the vineyards in plots and terraces followed the outline of the hill. Mingled with them were orchards of lemon trees bearing the globes of the young green fruit together with flower; and leaf and flower and fruit alike reeked of an inimitable fragrance. There were pomegranates bearing crimson flowers thick and waxlike against the wall of an ingle house that bordered the narrow path; a riot of morning-glory was new there every day with fresh unfoldings of blown blue trumpets. Out of the open door came an inspiriting smell of frying, and on the edge of the weather-stained balcony were rusty petroleum tins in which carnations bloomed. A space of level plateau, with grass already bleached yellow by this spell of hot weather, crowned the hill, and again he descended between lizard-tenanted walls through vineyards and lemon groves.

His rickety little carriage was waiting, the horse with a smart pheasant’s feather erect on its head, the driver with a carnation stuck behind his ear; the harness, for the sake of security, was supplemented with string. The whip cracked, the horse tossed its pheasant’s feather and jingled its bells, and, followed by a cloud of dust, Philip creaked away up the angled road, musing and utterly content.

He could scarcely believe, as the little equipage ambled up the hill, that the individual known by his name, and wearing his clothes, who had lived darkly like a weevil in that joylessness of stately gloom, was the same as this sun-steeped sprawler in the creaking carriage. He had come out of a nightmare of tunnel into the wholesome and blessed day, and was steeped in the colour of the sun. It was but a few weeks ago that, without anticipation of anything but relief from an intolerable situation, he had stolen out of Stanier, but swift æons of evolution had passed over him since then. There was not more difference between the darkness of those English winter days that had brooded in the halls and galleries of Stanier and this caressing sun that pervaded sea and sky, than there was between his acceptance of life then and his embrace of life now. Now it was enough to be alive: the very conditions of existence spelled content, and at the close of every day he would have welcomed a backward shift of the hours so that he might have that identical day again, instead of welcoming the close of each day in the assurance of that identical day not coming again. There would be others, but from the total sum one unit had been subtracted. It had perished: it had dropped into the well of years.

Philip had no need to ask himself what constituted the horror of those closed years, for it was part of his consciousness, which called for no catechism, that it was his father’s existence; just the fact of him distilled the poison, thick as dew on a summer night, which made them thus. He had to the full the Stanier passion for the home itself, but as long as his father lived, the horror of the man so pervaded the place, so overrode all other sentiments with regard to it, that he could not think of the one apart from the other, for hatred, acid and corrosive, grew like some deadly mildew on the great galleries and the high halls.

It was no mere passive thing, an absence of love or affection, but a positive and prosperous growth: a henbane or a deadly nightshade sprouted and flowered and flourished there. Dwelling on it even for the toss of his horse’s head, as they clattered off the dusty road on to the paved way outside the town, Philip felt his hands grow damp.

He had come straight through to Rome and plunged himself, as in a cooling bath, in the beauty and magnificence of the antique city. He had wandered through galleries, had sat in the incense-fragrant dusk of churches, had spent long hours treading the vestiges of the past, content for the time to feel the spell of healing which the mere severing himself from Stanier had set at work. But soon through that spell there sounded a subtler incantation, coming not from the haunts of men nor the achievements of the past, but from the lovely heart of the lovely land itself which had called forth these manifestations.

He had drifted down to Naples, and across the bay to the enchanted island hanging like a cloud on the horizon where the sea and sky melted into each other. As yet he wanted neither man nor woman, the exquisite physical conditions of the southern summer were in themselves the restoration he needed, with a truce from all human entanglements. Potent, indeed, was their efficacy; they ran through his heart like wine, rejuvenating and narcotic together, and to-day he could scarcely credit that a fortnight of eventless existence had flowed over him in one timeless moment of magic, of animal, unreflecting happiness.

Curious good fortune in elementary material ways had attended him. On the very day of his arrival, as he strolled out from his hotel in the dusk up the moon-struck hill above the town, he had paused beneath the white garden wall of a villa abutting on the path, and even as in imagination he pictured the serenity and aloofness of it, his eye caught a placard, easily legible in the moonlight, that it was to let, and with that came the certainty that he was to be the lessee.