The Challoners

by E. F. Benson

The letter was not difficult to write, though the final determination to write it was so hard that when it came to the paper and ink she sat long with pen undipped, unable to begin. But the memory of the bewildered misery in her father’s face that morning as he sat looking out of the window in the Room had given her a real sense of responsibility towards him. It was her business to find some anodyne for that. Perhaps the proof before his eyes, kept there day after day and week after week, that she wanted to do her best, might serve. Anyhow, at the moment it had awakened his humanity and his fatherhood; his hand had reached to her across the gulf; two puzzled, blind folk had clasped hands in the darkness.

Nor was the waiting for Frank’s answer difficult,—she knew him so well. And she was not disappointed here; the very brevity of the reply was honey to her.

“Dearest,—You must do as you must do. Magda says so, and so do I. But I am rather low, though she tells me not to be.

“Frank.”

But it was then, when she had made the difficult determination, and Frank had so ungrudgingly consented, that Helen’s difficulties began. Each day was an endless series of infinitesimal knots, not to be cut, but each to be patiently, cheerfully unravelled. Each singly she could tackle, but she had to avert her eyes from the future, for the series of knots stretched into dim distance. All day, too, there was with her the desire to see Frank, just once to see him, and perhaps cry a little on his shoulder; all day, too, there was the face of her father, always sunless, always grave. He had never, it is true, been other than austere in his domestic life, but then Helen had always known how deep was his love for her. But now it seemed to her sometimes as if he was trying to stifle and extinguish it; that knowing, as he did, there was soon to be an irrevocable rupture between them, a rupture that would divide them further than death divides, he was schooling himself to get used to it, as a man may school himself, when he sees one he loves in the pangs of mortal illness, to adjust himself beforehand to the loss that is coming. The marks of his suffering, too, were pathetically plain, and again and again she asked herself whether she had not only increased it by doing that which cost herself so much. Was it only an impulse of barren sentimentality that she had followed? Was she like a surgeon who gives an ineffective anæsthetic which should not deaden or mitigate the wrench and shock that was coming?

The encouragement she could find was but small. But it was this, that in any case she had done what was most difficult and what seemed, not only to her, but to Aunt Susan, to be right, and as such was fully accepted by her lover. Yet what if, after all, this was a mere senseless mutilation of herself, an objectless asceticism?

It was this doubt that day after day most troubled her. Had she seen the least sign of bud on the barren stem she would have been much more than content. But the days became weeks, and there was still none, not even any return of the moment’s tenderness her father had shewn at their first talk. She could not see that any practical good was coming of her renunciation. Like a wrecked sailor on a raft, she watched, as for a sail, for any horizon-distant sign that her father accepted her marriage and gave her credit—though she did not want the credit herself, but only longed for the evidence of it—for doing her best. But there was no such sign. He continued to use the prayer for Turks, infidels, and heretics.

What made things worse was that Martin, the beloved twin, with whom disagreement was a thing unthinkable, radically disapproved of what she was doing, and his disapproval, she was afraid, was terribly practical,—namely, that it was quite certainly no use. Two things, however, after some three weeks of what seemed fruitless endeavour, kept her to it. One was a letter from Aunt Susan, to whom she had sent a despairing sheet, containing a memorable sentence: “God does not always pay on Saturday, Helen,” she had said. The other was an innate pride that forbade her to accept defeat. Here she feared also to lose the respect not only of her father, but of Frank.

“Yes, my darling, you tried it,” she imagined him saying, “and you found it was doing no good.”

And that he should say that was somehow intolerable to her. Whatever she might be, she would not be feeble. “The lame and the blind that are hated of David’s soul” seemed to her a very legitimate object of detestation. She would not give a thing up because she mistrusted her power of doing it.