Master Eustace (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1920)/Benvolio/Part 5
V
You will say that my description of Benvolio has done him injustice, and that, far from being the sentimental weathercock I have depicted, he is proving himself a model of constancy. But mark the sequel. It was at this moment, precisely, that, one morning, having gone to bed the night before singing pæans to divine philosophy, he woke up with a headache, and in the worst of humors with it. He remembered Scholastica telling him that she never had headaches, and the memory quite annoyed him. He was in the mood for declaring her a neat little mechanical toy, wound up to turn pages and write a pretty hand, but with neither a head nor a heart that was capable of human ailments. He fell asleep again, and in one of those brief but vivid dreams that sometimes occur in the morning hours, he had a brilliant vision of the Countess. She was human beyond a doubt, and duly familiar with headaches and heartaches. He felt an irresistible desire to see her and to tell her that he adored her. This satisfaction was not unattainable, and before the day was over he was well on his way toward enjoying it. He found the Countess holding her usual court, and making a merry world of it. He had meant to stay with her a week; he stayed two months—the most entertaining months of his life. I cannot pretend, of course, to enumerate the diversions of this fortunate circle, nor to say just how Benvolio spent every hour of his time. But if the summer had passed quickly with him, the autumn moved with a tread as light. He thought once in a while of Scholastica and her father—once in a while, I say, when present occupations suffered his thoughts to wander. This was not often, for the Countess had always, as the phrase is, a dozen irons on the fire. You see the negative, with Benvolio, always implied as distinct a positive, and his excuse for being inconstant on one side was that he was at that time very constant on another. He developed at this period a talent as yet untried and unsuspected: he proved himself capable of writing brilliant dramatic poetry. The long autumn evenings, in a great country house, offered the ideal setting for the much-abused pastime known as private theatricals. The Countess had a theatre, and abundant material for a troupe of amateur players; all that was lacking was a play exactly adapted to her resources. She proposed to Benvolio to write one; the idea took his fancy; he shut himself up in the library, and in a week produced a masterpiece. He had found the subject one day when he was pulling over the Countess's books in an old MS. chronicle written by the chaplain of one of her late husband's ancestors. It was the germ of an admirable drama, and Benvolio enjoyed vastly the work of bringing it to maturity. All his genius, all his imagination went into it. This was their proper mission, he cried to himself—the study of warm human passions, the painting of rich dramatic pictures, not the bald excogitation of cold metaphysical formulas. His play was acted with brilliant success, the Countess herself representing the heroine. Benvolio had never seen her act, and had no idea she possessed the talent; but she was inimitable, she was a natural artist. What gives charm to life, Benvolio hereupon said to himself, is the element of the unexpected, the unforeseen; and this one finds only in women of the Countess's type. And I should do wrong to imply that he here made an invidious comparison, because he did not even think of Scholastica. His play was repeated several times, and people were invited to see it from all the country round. There was a great bivouac of servants in the castle court; in the cold November nights a bonfire was lighted to keep the servants warm. It was a great triumph for Benvolio, and he frankly enjoyed it. He knew he enjoyed it, and how great a triumph it was, and he felt every disposition to drain the cup to the last drop. He relished his own elation, and found himself excellent company. He began immediately another drama—a comedy this time—and he was greatly interested to observe that when his work was fairly on the stocks he found himself regarding all the people about him as types and available figures. Everything paid tribute to his work; everything presented itself as possible material. Life, really, on these terms was becoming very interesting, and for several nights the laurels of Molière kept Benvolio awake.
Delightful as this was, however, it could not last forever. At the beginning of the winter the Countess returned to town, and Benvolio came back with her, his unfinished comedy in his pocket. During much of the journey he was silent and abstracted, and the Countess supposed he was thinking of how he should make the most of that capital situation in his third act. The Countess's perspicuity was just sufficient to carry her so far—to lead her, in other words, into plausible wrong conjectures. Benvolio was really wondering what in the name of mystery had suddenly become of his inspiration, and why his comedy had turned stale on his hands as the cracking of the post-boy's whip. He looked out at the scrubby fields, the rusty woods, the sullen sky, and asked himself whether that was the world to which it had been but yesterday his high ambition to hold up the mirror. The Countess's dame de compagnie sat opposite to him in the carriage. Yesterday he thought her, with her pale, discreet face, and her eager movements that pretended to be indifferent, a finished specimen of an entertaining genus. To-day he could only say that if there was a whole genus, it was a thousand pities, for the poor lady struck him as miserably false and servile. The real seemed hideous; he felt homesick for his dear familiar rooms between the garden and the square, and he longed to get into them and bolt his door and bury himself in his old arm-chair and cultivate idealism for ever more. The first thing he actually did on getting into them was to go to the window and look out into the garden. It had greatly changed in his absence, and the old maimed statues, which all summer had been comfortably muffled in verdure, were now, by an odd contradiction of propriety, standing white and naked in the cold. I don't exactly know how soon it was that Benvolio went back to see his neighbors. It was after no great interval, and yet it was not immediately. He had a bad conscience, and he was wondering what he should say to them. It seemed to him now (though he had not thought of it sooner) that they might accuse him of neglecting them. He had cultivated their friendship, he had professed the highest esteem for them, and then he had turned his back on them without farewell, and without a word of explanation. He had not written to them; in truth, during his sojourn with the Countess, it would not have been hard for him to persuade himself that they were people he had only dreamed about, or read about, at most, in some old volume of memoirs. People of their value, he could now imagine them saying, were not to be taken up and dropped in that summary fashion; and if friendship was not to be friendship as they themselves understood it, it was better that he should forget them at once, for all time. It is perhaps too much to affirm that he could imagine them saying all this; they were too mild and civil, too unused to acting in self-defence. But they might easily receive him in a way that would irresistibly imply it, for a man of any delicacy. He felt profaned, dishonored, almost contaminated; so that perhaps when he did at last return to his friends, it was because that was the simplest way to be purified. How did they receive him? I told you a good way back that Scholastica was in love with him, and you may arrange the scene in your fancy in any manner that best accords with this circumstance. Her forgiveness, of course, when once that chord was touched, was proportionate to her resentment. But Benvolio took refuge both from his own compunctions and from the young girl's reproaches, in whatever form these were conveyed, in making a full confession of what he was pleased to call his frivolity. As he walked through the naked garden with Scholastica, kicking the wrinkled leaves, he told her the whole story of his sojourn with the Countess. The young girl listened with bright intentness, as she would have listened to some thrilling chapter of romance; but she neither sighed, nor looked wistful, nor seemed to envy the Countess, or to repine at her own dull fashion of life. It was all too remote for comparison; it was not, for Scholistica, among the things that might have been. Benvolio talked to her about the Countess, without reserve. If she liked it, he found on his side that it eased his mind; and as he said nothing that the Countess would not have been flattered by, there was no harm done. Although, however, Benvolio uttered nothing but praise of this distinguished lady, he was very frank in saying that she and her way of life always left him at the end in a worse humor than when they found him. They were very well in their way, he said, but their way was not his way, or could not be in the long run; for him, he was convinced, the only happiness was in seclusion, meditation, concentration. Scholastica answered that it gave her extreme pleasure to hear this, for it was her father's belief that Benvolio had a great aptitude for philosophical research, and that it was a sacred duty with him to devote his days and his nights to it.
"And what is your own belief?" Benvolio asked, remembering that the young girl knew several of his poems by heart.
Her answer was very simple: "I believe you're a poet."
"And a poet oughtn't to run the risk of turning pedant?"
"No," she answered; "a poet ought to run all risks—even that one which for a poet, perhaps, is the most cruel. But he ought to evade them all!"
Benvolio took great satisfaction in hearing that the Professor deemed that he had in him the making of a philosopher, and it gave an impetus to the zeal with which he returned to work.