The Relentless City

by E. F. Benson

'What were you going to say, Sybil?' said he. 'On oath, mind.'

She leaned over the banisters.

'Premature,' she whispered, and rustled up the remaining steps.

Charlie did not smoke another cigarette after she had gone, for the simplest of all reasons, but he broke another rule of health by sitting up much later than he should. He listened, in the way a man does, for the sound of the closing of her door, hoping, for some hopeless, groundless reason, that she would come back. Then, because the room was hot, and to him, in his open-air sojournings, airless with the closed windows, he opened one and sat by it, looking out into the still, starry night. And even as the coolness and breeze of air refreshed his body, so the thought of the talk he had had with her refreshed and was wine to his soul. At present he hoped for nothing; it was not necessary for him to tell himself not to be sanguine, for she had done nothing for him that she would not have done for a hundred other friends. She had, in fact, told him no more than others when she had said that his life did not belong entirely to himself; and she had told him no more than a penny newspaper might have told him when she had said she was not going to marry Bilton. Yet the imminent knife had gone; whether her mere presence again was tonic to him, or whether it was that there was again for him a loophole for hope—something possibly his to win—he did not stop to inquire. The upshot was that life (his life, that is to say, which is all that the most altruistic philosophers really mean when they talk of life) was again interesting, worthy of smiles or tears, as the case might be. Whether it was to be smiles or tears he did not at this moment care; the fact that it merited emotion was enough. 'The chequer-board of nights and days' was still in movement; he was not yet a taken piece. For the last three months he had thought of himself as exactly that, and simultaneously with that conviction had come the conviction that the chequer-board and the game played thereon was utterly without interest. His part in it was over; he no longer cared. And, as has been said, even the most altruistic and the most philosophical cannot do much better. 'Quelle perte irréparable!' was Comte's exclamation when he was told that he had to die.

'How premature!' Was not that, too, an indication, however veiled, that it was not premature? She would not have said that his holocaust of the cigarettes was premature if it was so; she would merely have thought to herself, 'Poor fellow!' But the hopelessness of the thought was neutralized by its announcement. Not the most matter-of-fact physicians broke news of fatal illness like that.... And again he reminded himself that he must not be sanguine. Anyhow, she had reminded him (like everybody else, no doubt) that his life was not entirely his own. She had told him also (there was nothing secret about it) that she was not going to marry Harold Bilton. But it was she who had told him.

Bilton, meantime, with the speed of his race, had completed his contract for the lease of the Coronation Theatre for the next season, and had finished, on behalf of Lewis S. Palmer, the purchase of the Molesworth property. It was quite characteristic of him that he should postpone for these affairs which were really imminent the piece of private business which had, more than either of them, perhaps more than both, brought him to England. Consequently, it was not till the afternoon of the next day that he called at Judy's and asked to see Mrs. Massington. Sybil had spent the morning at Brighton, and had arrived only some half-hour before he called. But, with the instinct of the autumn perhaps strong in her, she had said she would see him, rejecting Judy's offer to put herself in the way of a tête-à-tête.

He was shown into the room where Judy usually sat, a sitting-room off the drawing-room. It had been furnished with her unerring bizarre taste, and looked like nothing whatever except Judy's room. There was a bearskin on the floor because somebody had given it her.' Two execrable water-colours were on the wall for the same reason, and on the same walls were three wonderful prints of Reynolds' engraved by Smith. There was a grand piano there, making locomotion difficult, because Judy played much and badly, and Steinway, so she always said, knew what she meant better than anybody. There was some good French furniture there because it was hers, and some hopeless English armchairs because they were comfortable. Finally, there was Sybil there because she was her sister, and at this moment there had entered Harold Bilton because she had said she would see him.

She got up, and advanced to him.

'This is quite unexpected,' she said. 'I thought you were in America. Pray sit down. What has happened? Has Mrs. Emsworth also come back?'

Bilton sat down. He brought his hat and stick with him, according to the custom of his countrymen, and Sybil, who had never noticed it there, noticed it in London. She noticed it more particularly since the stick fell down from the angle where he had propped it with a loud clatter.