Limitations: A Novel

by E. F. Benson

So through the quiet country weeks their two young lives flowed inevitably towards each other, like two streams which, rising on distant ranges of hills, yet must some day meet in the valley between them. Though their natures sprang from widely distant sources, it was inevitable they would some time join.

But to continue the metaphor, the bed over which Tom’s stream flowed was a bright gravelly soil, on which the water danced gaily and light-heartedly down to the valley, pursuing a straight swift course, whereas May had many rocks and sandy places to get over, and, what was worse, she could not understand, and half rebelled against, the course her stream seemed to be taking. The traditions in which she had been brought up had become part of her nature; for her, she thought, was the sheltered life, busy in little deeds of love, in caring for her own corner of the world, and bringing it nearer to God, and when at first the stream began to flow in this unconjectured direction, she was bewildered, almost frightened. Was there anything in this world so certain as her own duty? Could anything rightly come between her and this other life she had planned and dedicated humbly and gratefully to God? What call was there so clear as that still small voice which said, “Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least, ye have done it unto me?” And when she had come to argue about it, even to herself, the end was already inevitable. As soon as a moral question becomes a thing to argue about, it is already without force. No argument will convince a man that it is better being good than bad; it is a matter, not for dispute, but of knowledge, and the man who disputes about it is bad.

Meantime Tom had turned a large roomy attic into a studio, and worked with all an artist’s regularity, which the world is accustomed to call irregularity. He went constantly to London, made great friends with Wallingthorpe, and caused that eminent sculptor many fits of divine despair, but followed his advice about not immediately setting up a mourning Demeter, though for other reasons than his. A mourning Demeter, he announced frankly, should soon be set up, but not at once. He was merely waiting, so he told Wallingthorpe, for that particular spark of divine fire to descend, and till it descended he was willing and eager to gain greater facility with his hand. He also cordially agreed that no studio could exist in England except in London, but said that there were reasons why he could not live in London just now. “Perhaps before the summer is over,” he began, and his face flushed all over, and he asked if anything had been heard of Manvers.

Ted was at Cambridge, and during the Lent Term Tom went up there to see him. He arrived at the close of a lovely day in March, and though the lawns and lower roofs of buildings were already in shade, the four tall pinnacles of King’s Chapel burned like rosy flames against the tender green of the evening sky.

Markham had not seen Tom since he came to England, and he looked forward to his visit with something like passionate eagerness, for Tom was to him the connecting link with the outer world of movement and eagerness from which he had voluntarily banished himself, but towards which even now he sometimes looked back with something like regret. Though his nature was one that hugs the shore, and prefers the quiet monotonous safety of the land-locked creeks and soft-sanded beaches to the risks and possibilities of the open seas, he sometimes cast his eyes to the great horizon where the ocean-going steamers passed and repassed, with their strange cargoes and dead and living freight from those dim mysterious countries whose very existence was becoming a fable to him.

And Tom came, with the seal of art and love upon him, but was his old boyish self, and sat on the arm of Ted’s armchairs, and inveighed against scholiasts, and wondered if Ted had ever heard of Pheidias. After tea they strolled down together through the gathered dusk, and sat on the bridge, and once more Tom dropped a match in the river, and waited to hear it fizz. But the difference was there, and Ted wondered if Tom would speak of it. Once he seemed on the point of it. The willow which overhangs the river had just begun to break into tender leaf, and the delicate foliage hung round it like a green mist. Tom paused a moment, and grew serious.

“Look at it,” he said, “it’s like the loveliest thing on earth; it is youth bursting into——” and he broke off suddenly.

Once again later in the evening he grew serious, and it was so odd for Tom to be serious twice in a day, that Markham wondered.

“How I can have been such a fool when I was here I don’t know,” he said. “Somebody told me once that I thought Cambridge narrow simply because I wasn’t broad enough to appreciate it. Well, I think she was right. Mind, I don’t go back on anything I said this afternoon about scholiasts. You are narrow, old boy, so don’t misunderstand me.”

“Who was it said that?” asked Markham.