The Return of the Probationer

by E. F. Benson

THE RETURN
of the
PROBATIONER

By E. F. BENSON

[Illustration: “WHY DO YOU SEND ME AWAY LIKE THIS, THEN?”

AT 11.25 p.m. Miss Waynfleete decided that she had done her duty. Lord Waynfleete had been giving a rather political dinner, and it had been followed by a very political “At Home,” and his daughter had acted as hostess in her mother’s absence, had talked to a quantity of dull old gentlemen, and stood at the top of the stairs for an hour and a quarter, after which time she came to the conclusion that there were limits even to the duties demanded of the daughter of a Minister. Besides, Jim Arbuthnot had come to say good-bye to her, and she wanted to talk to him.

There is no privacy so complete as the privacy surrounded by a crowd. One is girt about with a self-engrossed humanity that cuts one off from it and the whole world in the most complete manner possible. So when Miss Waynfleete fled from the top of the stairs at 11.25 p.m and found Jim, and made him find a couple of places in a deep window-seat, she talked to him quite confidentially.

“So you really are going?” she said. “Well, you take my blessing with you, and I wish I was coming too.”

“Come, then,” said Jim.

“Jim, don’t be foolish! When a woman says she wishes she was coming it means that she is not. You know that quite well.”

“What does she say when she is coming then? That she wishes she was not?”

“Yes, probably,” said Violet; “in fact she often does say so. But as a rule she says nothing. She just comes.”

“That holds for a man as well,” said Jim. “I’m sure I don’t wish I was going.”

“That is precisely why it is good for you to go,” said Violet. “You are much too fond of stopping in one place——”

“And seeing one person,” put in Jim.

Violet flushed.

“It’s very silly of you to say those things,” she said. “What is the good of going over all that again?”

“Why do you send me away like this, then?”

“I don’t send you away,” she said, “I only made the suggestion. You won’t lose anything by going. I simply gave you your chance. I said you might say—well, certain things—to me in a year’s time. I didn’t bind myself or commit you. You needn’t say them unless you like, and I needn’t say ‘Yes’ unless I like.”

Jim sat silent, until Violet found it unbearable.

“Oh, good gracious, don’t behave like that, Jim,” she said. “I came to have a friendly little chat with you, and I can’t chat by myself. You’ve got to improve your mind, you’ve got to see the leaning tower of Pisa, and the Sistine Madonna, and the Acropolis, and the Malay Peninsula. That will be very good for you. You will be a sort of Waring; every one will ask to-morrow or the next day what has happened to you, and I shall say that you’ve travelled East away.”

“And some one will find me in Trieste harbour,” said Jim.

“It’s very easy to be Waring nowadays,” said Violet, meditatively. “You’ve only got to do nothing in England for a few years except look rather distinguished, and then buy a ticket to Benares from Cook.”

“Ah, but it’s not so easy to continue being Waring.”

Violet leaned back with her arm on the open window sill. The light breeze just ruffled her hair, and in the darkness, for her face was turned towards the window, her features were faintly illuminated by the light from the street, and lamps of the fifty carriages waiting at the door. Her gray eyes looked almost black in the half-light, and her mouth seemed more serious than usual.

“How stupid it is of one to travel, after all,” she said. “One travels to see new people and different kinds of men. Any one with the least power of observation need only walk about London to do that. What does one know about cab men and newspaper boys, for instance? They are probably quite different from each other and from us.”

“Cabmen all seem to me exactly alike,” said Jim. “They all grumble if you give them sixpence more than their proper fare.”

“That just shows how superficial you are, as I’ve often told you,” said Violet. “You might just as well say that they were all alike because they all had noses, or that I was like you because we both had dinner every night.”

“Well, shall I travel among the cabmen instead?” said Jim.

“No, because you’d be always telling them to come to 23, Cadogan Crescent. You wouldn’t get a new atmosphere that way.”

“I don’t want a new atmosphere,” said Jim.

Violet groaned tragically.

“You’ve said that before about two minutes ago,” she remarked, “and I told you that it was because you didn’t want a new atmosphere that it was good for you to have one. If you didn’t feel that you wanted a new atmosphere, that would show that you weren’t narrow, and so you probably would not need one.”

“What an unpleasant gospel,” said Jim.

“Oh, it’s not a gospel,” said she, “it’s more like an epistle. It is good advice.”

“I doubt whether it is one of the genuine epistles,” said Jim, “there is no warrant for its authority.”

Violet stared.

“I am the warrant for its authority, I made it up myself.”

“That’s just exactly what I mean,” said Jim; “of course the fact that you made it is in its favour, but you have not got many generations of men to back you up. Your epistle hasn’t always been considered an epistle.”

“Of course it hasn’t, Jim,” remarked she, “or else I couldn’t have made it up myself. Besides, it is quite a new idea. People, especially English people, always seem to think that it is sufficient to know your own national anthem, whereas my point is that you ought to know all the national anthems.”

“I don’t like any national anthem,” said Jim, “not even our own. I——”

“That’s the third time you’ve said that,” interrupted Violet, “it’s just because you don’t like them that you are going to hear them. Besides, I don’t believe you’ve even heard them.”

“They haven’t got a national anthem in the Malay Peninsula,” said Jim.

“Now you are getting ridiculous. Also, it’s time for you to go. Come, every one is clearing out. I will walk with you to the top of the stairs.”

At the stairs she halted, and held out her hand.

[Illustration: “AH, DON’T GO,” SHE SAID SUDDENLY

}

“This is the last I see of you then?” said Jim.

“Yes. Positively the last appearance, till next year. Good-bye.”

The staircase turned at right angles after eight or nine steps, and Jim looked back at her once more. She was still standing where he had left her, and as their eyes met he paused.

“Ah, don’t go,” she said suddenly.

He came a step or two up.

“Do you mean that?” he said.

Violet frowned.

“No, of course I don’t. It was stupid of me to say it, and even stupider of you to ask if I meant it.”

“What did you mean then?”

“I meant I was sorry you were going,” she said. “I meant—I meant nothing at all. Good-bye.”

She turned from him again, and passed into one of the rooms without looking back.

 

Violet was conscious of a strong sense of relief when she woke next morning and remembered that Jim was off. She liked him very much—most people did; in fact she liked him more than most people. It had really been a very unpleasant surprise to her when, a few weeks before, he had offered her his hand and his heart, for, to tell the truth, she was quite at a loss to know what to do with them. His pleasant presence, his vague homage, was very grateful to her; but the idea of his constant presence and his particular homage was another matter. At the same time she was not sure about it; she could not contemplate the constant presence of any man she knew with any thing approaching rapture, and this dubitable state of things had led her to propose, and him to accept, a compromise. The compromise was that he should not allude to the matter, either to herself or to any one else for the present, and that she should preserve the same reticence. In the meantime was not this an obvious opportunity for him to do his duty, and make himself acquainted with the fons et origo of his patrimony, to wit tea-plantations in Ceylon? He was already in his father’s business; he would soon be the head of the firm. Incidentally, he could see the Sistine Madonna, Vesuvius, the Golden Horn, the leaning tower of Pisa, and, as Ceylon to the insular mind appeared to be near Siam, as many Siamese twins as possible, and the Malay Peninsula generally. Afterwards let him come back to England with an enlarged mind.

She was glad to find that she had committed herself to nothing. All that she had said was that he would not lose by going away, which was quite true. If she had had to say “Yes” or “No” now, she would have said “No.” After a year, she felt, there was still the possibility of a “No,” but there was also the possibility of a “Yes.” The proposition that out of sight was out of mind seemed quite counterbalanced by an equally strongly supported theory that absence made the heart grow fonder.

But though her line of conduct was so clear to herself, it throws no discredit upon Jim’s astuteness that it was not quite so clear to him. He recognised her right to send him actually or virtually away for a year, but he did not allow any more than she did for the force of circumstances, which it would be idle to suppose would not intervene. But the 11 a.m. train from Victoria whirled him away next morning through the hop-gardens and clustering villages of Kent, and he began a letter to Violet as soon as he got on the boat, which he put hastily away at the distance of two or three miles from Dover pier.

The season danced to its close, and though to Jim there was only one Violet, to Violet there seemed to be many Jims. It was only her second season in London, but the Jims were quite remarkably numerous. They played a sort of “old maid” with each other, and in process of time they had all, so to speak, paired themselves out, until there was only one left. He came to stay with them in October in Norfolk, and enjoyed himself very much. Violet was extremely nice to him.

One morning it was very wet, and Violet found herself hoping that they would not go out shooting. But Lord Waynfleete protested roundly that it was just going to clear, and they went. The post had been very late that morning, and the letters did not arrive till after they had set out. Violet had only one, with a foreign stamp. She was beginning to hate foreign stamps.

Jim had gone southwards from Germany in September, and he wrote from Ceylon, where he had just arrived. Colombo was a picturesque town, but dirty; tea-plantations were pretty to look at, and they all seemed very flourishing. His mind, he supposed, was being very much enlarged, but he couldn’t tell. Finally, by the time this reached her it would be near the end of October, and May would see him back in England.

His letters grew more and more distasteful to her. What did she care about Colombo and the tea-plantations? What, above all, did she care——

Lady Waynfleete came rustling in.

“Ah, there you are, dear,” she said, “I was just going to ask you—why, what’s the matter, Violet?”

Violet was tearing the letter she had just received into little bits. Her forehead was gathered into an unmistakable frown, but the corners of her mouth “looked sorry.”

“What’s the matter Vi?” asked her mother again, sitting down by her.

Violet looked up.

“It’s nothing. At least you couldn’t help me.”

“Won’t you let me try, dear? If I can’t help you, you are none the worse, and if I can, well, so much the better.”

“But I promised I wouldn’t tell any one.”

Lady Waynfleete caught sight of the envelope on the floor.

“Violet, I always fancied last summer that there was something between you and Jim Arbuthnot. Is that it?”

“Well, you have guessed half, so you may as well know all. Yes, there was: and I told him that he might ask me again in a year. He is so stupid about it. It’s very selfish of him. He might make it easier for me to tell him what I shall have to tell him.”

Lady Waynfleete felt very much in her element. She was fond of giving advice, which resembled Turner’s pictures, being hazy, but brilliantly coloured.

“I’m so glad you told me, dear,” she said, “though I think I really had guessed it all. But it was very sweet and dear of you to tell me. It is a very momentous time for you. I often think that our moral decisions are just as complicated as our mental decisions, whereas they ought to be so simple. Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and if you love a man you love him, and if you don’t of course you couldn’t possibly marry him. It sounds so simple when it is all stated. But it is not so simple to state it in one given instance, is it?”

“Well?” said Violet doubtfully.

“Well, dear, it is all just comprised in that. When you have to decide you may be sure that your moral vision will be quite clear. When the crisis comes we are prepared for it. Before it comes we never are. Bless you, darling!”

Lady Waynfleete beamed delightedly on her, in the proud consciousness of having put the matter in a brilliant and lucid light. She had stated undeniable truths which bore directly on the question in point. Who can do more?

The letter and its subsequent fate had spoiled Violet’s day. She was quite clear that she was sorry that she had torn it up, but what was not so obvious was why she had torn it up. The fact that a traveller in foreign lands had written her a few lines about Colombo, and a few lines about tea-plantations, and a short description of a thunderstorm in the Red Sea was surely no reason at all. She disliked, as most moderately intelligent people do, books of travels concerning countries which she had never seen, but the only redeeming feature about such books was exactly that for which this letter had been conspicuous. If she had been obliged to read a book of travels she would have hailed the thunderstorm in the Red Sea with delight; and that Jim should write in the travel-book style had been entailed on him by herself. She had told him to write, and she had forbidden him to write on intimate subjects. Perhaps the letter was distasteful to her not for what it held but because it lacked something else. And when her mother had gone she collected the fragments and put them back in the envelope.

Even the return of the shooting party at lunch time, who had despaired of Lord Waynfleete’s cheerful prophecies being fulfilled within any reasonable length of time, did not console her. She had thought her decision so certain; she had been quite willing to be as sorry as possible for Jim in anticipation, but second-hand emotions of that sort are comparatively cheap. Her indecision was what weighed on her mind so heavily; why, if she had felt so certain what her answer would be, had she either torn his letter up, or collected the fragments afterwards? She found that it did not satisfy her in the least to assure herself that she had torn his letter up because she was bored with thunderstorms in the Red Sea, or that she had collected the pieces afterwards because she had concluded that such thunderstorms were not so uninteresting as she had at first thought them. A merely uninteresting subject would not have warranted either the one treatment or the other.

The suppositious Jim did not seem to mind the villainous weather. He sat some time over coffee after lunch, and Violet found herself thinking that men ought to take themselves off as soon as lunch was over, and smoke or sleep, or do whatever men did on rainy afternoons. But Lord Barwell appeared to think that men ought to make themselves agreeable in some way on such occasions, and waited for orders. He was conscious in a good-natured and uncritical manner that Violet was not quite so cordial as usual, but he put this down to the bad weather, to the fact that her cat had been shot that morning in the covers before it had been recognised—and a cat in the covers, he reflected, ought to be shot, under any circumstances—to any trivial cause which may vex a feminine mind.

“We were all so dreadfully sorry,” he said, “when Lord Waynfleete said it was your cat. The keeper was standing next Buxton, and I heard him say, ‘Kill that cat, sir,’ and no one had any idea it was yours.”

Violet roused herself. “Poor beastie,” she said, “it was its own fault, I'm afraid. It was always going poaching.”

Clearly it was not the cat.

“It was no use going on after lunch,” he said, “just look at the weather, isn’t it awful?”

“Oh, I rather like this sort of day now and then,” said she. “It is so nice and cosy in the house when it’s raining like that outside. They do know how to keep houses warm in England.”

She drew her chair a few inches nearer the fire, and drove the poker among the great logs burning in the open grate.

“Isn’t that nice?” she continued; “look at the sparks roaring up the chimney. Oh, I’m so glad I’m in England on a day like this!”

“I hate an English winter,” said Lord Barwell. “I spent a winter in India one year, and it was simply delicious.”

“Do you know Ceylon at all?”

“Oh yes, I’ve been there. It’s a dull place.”

So I should think. Were you ever in Colombo?”

“Yes, I passed through it. It’s picturesque, but rather dirty. However, some dirt is picturesque.”

“It’s not picturesque because it’s dirty,” remarked Violet; “it would be just as picturesque if it was clean.”

“Yes, perhaps it would. All the same you do not get that particular sort of picturesqueness in clean places.”

Violet stood up.

“That’s a horrid doctrine,” she said, “and I don’t believe it. Did you go to the tea-plantations?” she asked suddenly.

With the best intentions in the world Lord Barwell was rather surprised.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “they are pretty, but not picturesque. Neither are they dirty.”

Violet had lit a long cedar wood spill, and was watching it burn with intense interest.

“Ah yes, that must be so nice,” she said appreciatively, “so much nicer than the picturesque dirt.”

There was a short silence, and the spill burned itself out. Then Violet looked up, as if she had just become aware of the presence of the people. She broke out into a light laugh. “Why do we waste this delicious rainy afternoon in doing nothing,” she said, “and in talking about Colombo, or whatever the place is? What shall we do? It’s not three yet, and there are five and a half hours to dinner. What shall we do? Let’s amuse ourselves somehow. Let’s have charades. You shall be the beast, Lord Barwell, and I’ll be beauty. Or the other way round if you like. Probably you want to smoke.”

“That’s being the beast,” remarked Lord Barwell. “What does beauty do with herself meanwhile?”

“Oh, beauty usually smokes too, I notice,” said Violet, “so I sha’n’t do for beauty, because I never smoke. I think it’s beastly—you understand—to smoke.”

Lord Waynfleete put down the Times.

“I knew it was going to be fine,” he remarked at random.

“Then you just knew wrong,” said Violet. “Dear old father, you are awfully wise in your own lines, but you really know nothing at all about the weather. Look at it.”

“Well, it’s a clearing shower,” said he.

“Very good, dear father; then if you go and get a stick and a straw hat it will be nice and fine by that time, and we’ll send you out your tea on to the lawn. You must sit in the very middle of the lawn you know, where you will get the mellow autumn sun. It will be excessively mellow.”

 

During the winter Lady Waynfleete had several opportunities of impressing on Violet, in the vaguest yet most brilliant colours, her duty as the only child of her father. The one thing that can be said for advice of this nature is that it is never without its effect. It may, it is true, drive the recipient in the diametrically opposite direction, or it may lead him in the way he is meant to go, but at any rate it will produce the one effect or the other. It never produces no effect. In Violet’s case, it so happened that her mother’s wholly sincere wishes drove her to just the opposite conclusions, but exactly why they had this effect rather than the other is a subtlety of too intimate a nature to discuss lightly. One can only give Lady Waynfleete’s advice as it was given.

“I often think of your future, darling,” she said one day, when Lord Barwell loomed more imminently than usual, “and I wonder, oh, I wonder what it will be. Happiness, of course, is the one thing I desire for you, but I cannot help wondering what form that happiness will take. Of course your own heart will guide you, absolutely and entirely, but it is only right that you should be told what you cannot know of yourself. Ah, dear me, yes!”

c|Illustration: WHEN A HANSOM STOPPED AT THE HOUSE.}}

Lady Waynfleete paused a moment, and looked out on to the yellow London fog, which was just beginning to drift a little. Lord Waynfleete had come up to London early in February, and his wife and daughter had come with him. Lord Barwell was also in town, having suddenly discovered, apparently, that his duties as a legislator in the Upper House demanded his presence. After all he was the best judge of such matters.

The London fog produced inspiration in Lady Waynfleete, and she continued—she had been reading Œnone that morning:

“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, and so on,” she said, “of course it is perfectly true they lead to sovereign power, but as Tennyson says that comes all by itself, uncalled for. What you have to decide is where you are most likely really to know yourself. And the more opportunities you have, the more you can test yourself and so know yourself.”

“I don’t quite know what you mean by opportunities,” she said.

“Dear child, the opportunities which only a position of this sort——”

“Of what sort?” asked Violet, brought to bay.

“The position which is yours both by birth and position and wealth, dear,” said her mother. “The position you will naturally have as your father’s daughter and only child.”

Violet flushed angrily.

“Yes, I think I see what you mean,” she said. “Look, the fog is clearing rapidly. If you will let me, I shall order the carriage; I’ve got a lot of things to do.”

“Lord Barwell is coming to tea,” said her mother. “I suppose you will be in by five.”

“I am going to tea with Milly Cornish,” said Violet, “I’m afraid I shall hardly be back. Never mind, I dare say Lord Barwell will be looking in again soon.”

One evening towards the end of May Violet was sitting in her mother’s room after tea, not being quite able to make up her mind whether to go out or not; summer had begun early, and a leaden heat-laden sky brooded over the town. A little while before Lord Barwell had said to her what he had been wanting to say for so long, and he had received his answer. In this state of affairs Violet felt it a relief to be alone, for her mother was not very cordial. She was willing to admit all the hundred good points in Lord Barwell, but this did not affect the grand impossibility.

She was looking out of the window, taking unconscious note of the people and carriages passing, when a hansom stopped at the house. A moment afterwards Violet was standing in the middle of the room, facing the door, and waiting for the footman to announce somebody. She was not thinking consciously, but she was conscious of feeling acutely.

“Mr. Arbuthnot is here, miss,” said the man.

“Yes, I will see him, show him up here.”

Violet continued to stand just where she was, and in process of time she was left alone with Jim. She did not advance to meet him, and he stood opposite her near the door.

“So you have come back,” she said at length.

“Yes, have I done wrong?”

Violet looked up for the first time, and the absurdity of the situation suddenly struck her.

“Why should we stand here like two gate-posts?” she said. “Let’s sit down. Have you seen any Siamese twins?”

“No, there weren’t any,” said Jim gravely. “I inquired particularly. And the leaning tower of Pisa doesn’t lean so much as I hoped it would.”

“Where have you come from last?”

“From India, by P. and O. India is an abominable place. I think I mentioned that in my letter.”

“Yes, your letters were very uniform and instructive. I quite feel as if I had been there myself.”

Jim leaned forward and spoke low.

“Isn’t that rather hard on me?” he asked. “Didn’t you lay that on me yourself?”

Violet made a gesture of impatience.

“Yes, it was my fault, I own. Don’t talk to me about that. Do you want some tea?”

“No thanks, I’ve had tea.”

He sat there for a few minutes more, and then rose to go. A sudden thought seemed to strike Violet.

“1 will come with you to the top of the stairs,” she said.

At the corner of the first flight he paused, and looked up at her. She was standing just where he had seen her stand once before, and was looking at him gravely, and their eyes met.

“Ah, don’t go,” she said.