Эдвард Бенсон
Scarlet and Hyssop: A Novel
"But I am so glad you have come back, Jim!" she said.
CHAPTER VII
Tea – or, rather, the modern substitute for tea, which consistes of most things except tea, from caviare sandwiches to strawberry ice, and whisky-and-soda to iced coffee – had just been brought out when the two returned to the lawn, and Mildred Brereton's guests had fallen upon it with the most refreshingly healthy appetites, and were fluttering about the tables like a school of gulls fishing. Every one, according to the sensible modern plan, foraged privately and privateerly for himself, and there were no rows of patient women agonizing for things to eat and drink, until some man languidly brought them something they did not want, instead of that which they desired. Nor, on the other hand, were there rows of men parading slowly up the female line, like sightseers at an exhibition, with teacups slipping and gliding over the saucers, and buns being jerked from their plates by neighbouring elbows. Instead, every one flocked to the tables, seized what he wanted, and retired into corners to eat it. Anthony Maxwell in particular, who had a wonderful gift for mimicry, was loading up with great care and solidity. Something in his air might have reminded an observer of a steamer coaling for a trip. He had had, in fact, a little conversation with both Mrs. Brereton and Lady Ardingly during the afternoon.
"Yes, dear Mr. Anthony," Mildred had said. "You received my note, did you not? And I am delighted you could come here to-day! Of course, it is a dreadful thing to me to think that my little girl will be taken away so soon. But that is what every mother has to go through. Dear me! it seems only yesterday that she came into my room, a little toddling mite, to announce that when she was grown up she was going to marry the groom, because then she could always live among horses."
"Oh, that'll be all right," said Anthony. "She can have plenty of them."
"How generous of you to say that! You have not – ah – spoken to her yet?"
"No. I've been trying to all the afternoon, but I couldn't get an opportunity."
"Dear Maud! She is – how shall I say it? But, anyhow, it is so characteristic of her."
"She seemed to want to avoid me," said Anthony with a bluntness that rather distressed Mrs. Brereton.
"Yes, it would seem like it," said she; "but indeed – What I wanted to say to you was this: You must be patient with her, and I expect you will need a little perseverance. It is a rare thing, you know, to come and see and conquer, like Julius Cæsar, or whoever it was. Dear Maud perhaps scarcely knows her own mind. I am sure I do not know it. You see, she is young, very young, and I do not think that hers is a nature that expands very early."
The young man's rather heavy, commonplace face flushed; for the moment it was lit up, as it were, by a flame from within.
"Oh, I'm not going to be impatient," he said. "And as for perseverance, why, there's nothing I would not do, nor any number of years I would not wait, to get her."
Mrs. Brereton looked at him critically for a half-moment. "Why, he's in love!" she said to herself. Then aloud, "Dear Mr. Anthony! I am convinced of it," she said. "And bear that in mind when you speak to Maud. Also bear in mind that there is no marriage which either her father or I so much desire. Ah, there is the Duchess of Bolton just come! I must go and speak to her."
His interview with Lady Ardingly had been briefer, but, he felt, more to the point.
"She will probably refuse you," said that lady. "In that case you had better wait a month and ask her again. You have everything on your side and everybody – except, perhaps, the girl. But eventually she will do what is good for her. Here is a fourth. Let us play Bridge immediately."
This particular game of Bridge had rather taken it out of Anthony, for he had been Lady Ardingly's partner, and had had the misfortune to revoke in playing a sans-à-tout hand. Her remarks to him were direct.
"You might just as well pick my pocket of twenty pounds," she said to him, "as do that. Do you not see it so? By your gross carelessness you have lost us the rubber, a mistake which one intelligent glance at your hand would have avoided. Come, there are other pursuits, are there not, in which you wish to be engaged? You will, perhaps, follow them with better attention."
Then, seeing the young man's discomfiture, her admirable good-nature returned. "Croquet, for instance," she added. "I hear you are a great player. Ah! there is Lord Alston. No doubt he will make our fourth."
Maud, it is true, had spent the hours since lunch in flying before her admirer, but her reasons, it must be confessed, were not those which one would be disposed to think natural on the part of a young girl. There was not, in fact, one atom of shyness or shirking about her; she had not the least objection to hear impassioned speeches or blunt declarations, whichever mode Anthony should choose to adopt, nor did the thought of him in any way fill her with horror. She had listened very attentively to her mother's advice when they drove down to Windsor earlier in the week; she had also listened with the same consideration to Lady Ardingly's far more convincing and sensible remarks when she had lunched with her on Friday, and her only reason for refusing Anthony an opportunity all the afternoon was that she really had not the slightest idea whether she should say yes or no. She did not, as she had told her mother, love him; she did not, either, dislike him. He was merely quite indifferent to her, as, indeed, all men were. Men, in fact, as far as she thought about them at all, seemed to her to be unattractive people; she could not conceive what a girl should want with one permanently in the house. They were for ever either putting tobacco or brandy into their mouths or letting inane remarks out, and they stared at her in an uncomfortable and incomprehensible manner. On the other hand, she knew perfectly well that it was the natural thing for girls to marry; every one always did it, and they were probably right. She supposed that she also would ultimately marry, but was this – this utter absence of any emotion – the correct thing? She was aware that tremblings and raptures were in the world of printed things supposed to be the orthodox signals flown by the parties engaged; she should be a creature of averted eyes and deep blushes. But she did not feel the least inclined to either; there was nothing in Anthony that would make her wish to avert her eyes, nor, as far as she knew, did he ever say things which would make her blush. He was simply indifferent to her, but so, for that matter, were all men. Was she, then, to be a spinster? That was equally unthinkable.
There were other things as well. A great friend of hers, with whom she had been accustomed to spend long days in the saddle, or in the company of dogs in endless walks over moors, had been married only a month ago, for no other reason, as far as Maud or Kitty Danefield herself knew, but the one that every girl married if possible, that it was the natural thing to do. Maud had seen her again only two days ago for the first time since her marriage, and had found quite a different person. Kitty had become a woman, radiantly happy, with an absorbing interest in life which seemed quite to have eclipsed the loves of earlier days. She still liked horses, dogs, great open country, Maud herself; but all these things which had been the first ingredients of existence had gone into a secondary place, and the one thing that made life now was her husband. To Maud this was all perfectly incomprehensible – would Anthony, if she accepted him, ever fill existence like that? She could not help feeling that existence would be a much narrower thing if he did. Kitty, in fact, had just arrived, and had rushed at Maud.
"Darling, I am so pleased to see you!" she said, "and we'll have a nice long talk. Where's Arthur! Arthur is really too tiresome; he asked Tom Liscombe to come down with us when I had counted on a nice quiet empty carriage all to ourselves. He didn't want him, nor did I; but that is so like Arthur, to do good-natured things from a sort of vague weakness. He saw Tom, and asked him without thinking what he was doing. You look rather careworn, Maud. What is it now?"
"Oh, come for a stroll, Kitty," said the other; "I want to talk."
"Very well; I must say good-bye to Arthur."
Maud laughed.
"Oh, you ridiculous person," she said; "you will be away ten minutes. Would you like to make your will, too?"
"Well, if it's only ten minutes – oh, he's looking. There!" and she waved a tiny morsel of a handkerchief to him.
Maud looked at her with grave attention.
"Now, I cannot understand that," she said.
"No, dear, of course not. You're not married. I should have thought it as ridiculous as you before. By the way, Maud – oh, that's why you look careworn. Is it true you are going to marry Anthony Maxwell? Darling, how nice, and simply rolling!"
"You think that is important?" asked Maud.
"Why, of course. It's the only crumpled rose-leaf Arthur and I have. It makes us quite miserable; there's always that little ghost in the corner. Can we afford this? Can we spare the money for that? But you haven't answered me. Is it true?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said Maud.
Kitty laughed.
"You absurd creature!" she said; "you must know. Has he proposed to you?"
"No, but he has told mother he wants to. And he has been stalking me all the afternoon."
Kitty turned quickly back.
"He shall stalk you no longer," she said. "Really, Maud, you are behaving very unfairly to him. If you are going to marry him, say so; if not – well, if not, you will be a very foolish person, but still say so. He has a mother, I know that, but really his mother matters very much less than the man himself. He's all right, isn't he? Behaves nicely – I mean, hasn't a vice about him – looks decent?"
"Moderately," said Maud.
"Oh, my dear, what do you want? Every one can't be an Adonis, and, as the copybooks used to say, human nature is limited. I dare say he's not a genius; well, no more are you. As for beauty, you've got enough for two, and he's got money enough for three – baby, as well, do you see? Oh yes, I am indelicate, I know, but it's far better than being delicate. Being delicate never pays; on the other hand, you have to pay for it, and I haven't got enough money for it. You are lucky, Maud."
"Why? I want to talk to you about it."
"My dear girl, there is nothing to say. You will be a fool if you don't marry him, as I told you. There is simply nothing else to talk about. I was in a state of blank indifference about Arthur before I married him. My mother – and I bless her for it – absolutely obliged me to accept him. So will yours do if she has any sense, and I am certain she has heaps. Unless you are a visionary or a fanatic of some kind, you will be glad to be married. Glad? Good gracious! it is much more than that."
She turned sharply on her heel, Maud following.
"Then, why are there so many unhappy marriages?" asked the latter.
"Ah, in books, only. They are there because the author does not know what else to say. 'You can't write about happy marriages,' so an author assured me. 'They are so dull. Happy people have no history.'"
Maud was silent a moment.
"You have changed very much, Kitty," she said at length.
"Thank goodness, I have! Oh, Maud, I don't mean to be nasty to you. Those old days were really dear days. But one can't always remain a girl, Maud. It is mercifully ordained that girls become women. And the door by which they enter is marriage."
"It means all that?"
"All. More – "
Maud found herself struggling for utterance. The blush and the downcast eye which she had thought Anthony could never have produced in her were hers now.
"You mean a man – the fact of a man?" she said stammeringly.
Kitty laughed the laugh of a newly-married woman, which is as old as Eve.
"Put it that way if you like," she said. "But there is another – the fact of a woman."
"But I am content," she said almost piteously. "Why does everybody – you, mother – want me to marry?"
"You have left out Anthony," remarked Kitty rigorously. "I and your mother, because we are women; he, because he is a man."
They had come to the populated lawn again, and further intimate conversation would next moment be impossible. Kitty turned to her hurriedly.
"Oh, my dear, it is like having a tooth out," she said. "No doubt it is a shock. But it no longer aches. There is Mr. Anthony; let him ask you, anyhow. That is bare justice; and remember what I have said."
"I shall not forget it," said Maud.
Under no circumstances would Kitty have bitten out her tongue, so it would be a mere figure of speech to say that she would have even been inclined to had she known precisely what effect her volubility would have had on her friend. But it is certain that she would sooner have bitten it very hard – so that it hurt, in fact – could she have foreseen in how opposite a direction to that intended her words had inclined her. As it was, she left the two together in a small solitude encompassed by company, and went to join her husband with a light heart and an approving conscience – a delicious and rare combination. Anthony, at any rate, was primed and ready.
"Do take me to see the rose-garden," he said to Maud, with a banalité that seemed to him unavoidable. He was quite aware of it, and regretted the necessity, for, to do him justice, he had tried many other lures that afternoon. "I hear it is quite beautiful," he went on; "and Mrs. Brereton promised me you should show it me after tea. And it is after tea," he added.
Maud was slightly taller than he, and had the right to drop her eyelids a little as she looked at him. Of the adventitious advantage she took more than her justifiable measure, and beheld the back of his collar-stud.
"By all means," she said. "A promise is a promise, whoever gave it."
"You are rather hard on me," observed Anthony.
"Hard? Surely not."
"Well, on your mother, then."
Maud thought a moment.
"It is natural for you to think so," she said, "since she agrees with you."
They had left the lawn behind them, and threaded a dusky lane set in rhododendrons. Anthony stopped.
"She agrees with me," he said. "In one thing, anyhow, she agrees with me – we both love you."
In spite of herself Maud gave him a round of internal applause. She was still so indifferent that she could easily judge him, as if he had been an actor on a stage. Outwardly, with the tongue she could say nothing, and stood, having walked on a pace or two, with her back to him. His voice made her turn round.
"Maud, Maud!" he said. "Maud, they were crying and calling."
"Ah!" she said, with a sudden interest, "you learned that."
He shook his head.
"I read it three months ago," he said. "It has stuck in my memory. Because everything cries 'Maud, Maud!' to me."
The blush and the averted eye were hers. Quite unconsciously she began to know what Lady Ardingly had meant – what Kitty had meant.
"I am sorry," she said. "I ought never to have come here with you. I thought I should laugh at you merely. I do not laugh; I would sooner cry."
"Thank you for that," said he. "I understand that you do not accept my devotion. What I do not understand is whether you definitely refuse it. Do you refuse it?"
"Do not press me to answer you," she said.
"You postpone your answer!"
"Please."
Meantime dusk had begun to fall, the sounds of rejoicing Cockneys came more faintly from the river, the glow in the western sky faded into saffron, and overhead the vault of velvet blue grew infinitely more infinite. Birds chuckled and scurried through the bushes, bats extended angled wings for the preliminary trials of their nameless ghoulish errands, a nightingale bubbled suddenly, and a large yellow star swung into sight over the dim edge of the earth. But the lawn itself, save for a fine carpet of dew, that was spread without hands on the close-napped turf, reflected none of the evening influences. Servants hurried noiselessly about lighting the lamps that hung in the trees, and soon the tents where dinner was laid began to shimmer with white linen and gleam with silver. Jack was back from his golf, and Mrs. Brereton from an extremely short walk (for she had been recommended plenty of exercise), a few people had left to dine in town, but more people arrived from town to dine here, and Andrew Brereton, having succeeded in wresting four shillings and sixpence from the reluctant Mr. Maxwell, felt that he had earned his dinner. And as night became deeper, the animation of the party grew louder and their laughter more frequent; the moon and the stars everlastingly set in heaven were to them but the whitewash of the ceiling of the rooms where they dined, the trees and infinite soft spaces of the dusk but the paper on the walls of their restaurant, the miracle of the dewy lawn a carpet for unheeding feet. Wine and food concerned them perhaps most, but in a place hardly inferior must have been put the charms of screaming and scandalous conversation. Dinner, in fact, was a great success. By midnight all the guests for the day who were not staying over the Sunday had left, and the stables, which had been a packed mass of broughams, victorias, dogcarts, motor-cars, and bicycles, were once more empty; and Lady Ardingly, whose rubber had most unjustifiably been interrupted by Mrs. Brereton's adieus to her guests, picked up her hand again with some acidity.
"Now, perhaps, we shall get on with our Bridge," she said. "I have declared no trumps. Nobody doubles! That is a very masterly inactivity on our adversaries' part."
The four consisted of the two Breretons, Lady Ardingly, and Jack Alston; at another table were four more, who, however, abandoned their game at about half-past one, again interrupting Lady Ardingly with their superfluous good-nights, for she was having a very good night indeed. Marie and Maud Brereton had long ago gone to bed, but the other four still played on, in silence for the most part. Occasionally the dummy rose, and refreshed his inner self with something from a side-table, and from time to time the note of a cigarette would sound crisply, as it were, on the soft air of the night. At last a strange change began to pass over the sky, from which the moon had now long set, hardly visible there at first, but making the faces of the players look suddenly white and wan. Then the miracle grew; the dark blue of the sky brightened into dove colour, the stars grew pale, and a little wind stirred in the trees.
"You played that abominably, dear Mildred," said Lady Ardingly. "We should have saved it if you had had any sense. What does that make?"
She pulled her cloak round her neck as Jack added it up.
"The night is growing a little chilly," she said.
Mildred, who had been following the figures, looked up.
"The night?" she said. "Why what is happening? It is day, is it not?"
"Very likely," said Lady Ardingly. "How much is it, Jack? Never mind, tell me to-morrow. I will pay you to-morrow?"
Jack rattled his pencil-case between his teeth.
"Thirty pounds exactly, Lady Ardingly," he said.
They rose and walked across the lawn towards the house, Jack sauntering a little behind, his hands in his pockets, smiling to himself. Mildred dropped behind with him, the other two walking on a few paces ahead.
"The most odious hour in the twenty-four!" said Lady Ardingly, looking ghastly in the dawn.
"Very trying," said Andrew.
"But we have spent the night very well," said the other, as they parted at the foot of the stairs. "A charming Sunday, Mr. Brereton. You and Mildred are great benefactors!"
And she hurried upstairs, conscious that she was looking awful, and, in that hour of low vitality which comes with the dawn, not wishing to appear thus before anybody, however insignificant.
CHAPTER VIII
It was about a fortnight after this Sunday at Richmond that the list of Birthday honours came out, and it was a surprise to nobody that Mr. Brereton's name appeared as the recipient of a peerage. For respectability and cash are things that in themselves confer such nobility on their fortunate possessor that it is only right and proper to stamp him with a coronet like writing-paper. Respectability no doubt has been, and will again be, dispensed with, but cash cannot be replaced except by exceptional achievements of some kind, of which Andrew was hopelessly incapable. And as it would clearly be absurd to bar a man from his birth from the possibility of attaining to the ranks of hereditary legislators, custom, slowly broadening down, has brought it about that since achievement in great deeds is within the reach but of the few, plenty of good gold, bestowed on plenty of good or party institutions, paves the way, so to speak, to what has been called by politicians who wrangle hotly in another place "the upper snows."
Marie Alston, who had known of the impending honours some days before, was talking it over with Jim Spencer.
"I don't say I like the principle," she was saying; "but, things being as they are, I think it a most suitable thing. Oh, my dear Jim, you know me sufficiently well to know that I think such a system all wrong from top to bottom. But, after all, it is in a piece with the rest. Plutocracy, not the King nor the Houses of Parliament, rules us, and naturally plutocracy says, 'I will have all that is within reach.' Why not? And peerages are certainly within reach. Of course the list is rather pronounced. Mr. Maxwell, I see, has been made a Baronet. But, after all, who else is there? Can you think of any eminent men whom one would wish to see peers? I can't. And there are few people richer than the Maxwells, I believe. It is no use screaming."
Jim shrugged his shoulders.
"At that rate, I could be made a peer," he said.
"Are you rich enough? How nice for you! And vice versâ, perhaps, Jack should be made a commoner. No doubt that reform will follow next. At least, perhaps Jack shouldn't because he really has the makings of an eminent man, but half the House of Peers, anyhow, should be made commoners. No doubt they would be if it were not for the innate snobbishness of the average Englishman. The average Englishman knows quite well that there is nothing whatever remarkable or admirable about quantities of peers except their peerages; yet, because they are peers, he loves and reverences them, and reserves them compartments, and incidentally takes toll off them as well."
Jim Spencer raised his eyebrows.
"Of course you are right," he said, "but you say these things, and don't take them seriously. You used to be serious, Marie."
"Ah, you do me an injustice," she said quickly. "I am just as serious as ever I was, but I realize that it is no use being serious in public. People have no time to spare from their amusements nowadays for anything serious. But in private I am serious. I was serious in private to-day, for instance."
"Well, be serious now, and tell me what you were serious about."
"Oh, nothing. I beg your pardon, this is not in public. Indeed, it was something – something big, as it seems to me. I am not sure that I shall tell you about it."
They were both silent a moment – he unwilling to ask a question on a subject where she hesitated, she weighing in her mind whether or not she should tell him. At last she spoke.
"It is about Maud Brereton," she said, "She came to me yesterday, calm as a summer sea, to ask my advice as to whether she should marry Anthony Maxwell, just as I might ask your advice as to whether I should have a picture framed in gold or white. I did not ask her any questions as to whether she loved him, because I believe that there are many girls who have no idea what that means, and I think Maud is one of them."
Jim got up and began to walk up and down the room. He heard Marie with his ear speaking of Maud, but his inward ear translated, so it seemed to him, all she said of Maud into things she was saying about herself.
"Now, I am sufficiently modern," she went on, "not to wish all girls who do not feel passion to abstain from marrying. I believe that quite happy marriages often take place without it. Either the man or the woman may not feel it, yet by marrying they are both happier than they would have been if they had remained single. The ultimate sum of happiness is a large factor, Jim. Do you not think so?"
Again she seemed to be talking of herself, but now he could not decide whether she was speaking with complete sincerity. Her opinions, at any rate, appeared to him monstrous.
"Finish the exposition first," he said. "After all, whether I agree with you or not is a small matter. Maud Brereton asked your advice, not mine."
Something in his tone startled her for a moment, and instinctively that afternoon walk they had taken down by the river a fortnight ago came into her mind; but she went on without a pause.
"I seem cold-blooded to you," she said; "and I dare say I am – it is highly probable, in fact. Then, there is a further thing to be considered: many girls, I feel sure, have their passion awakened by marriage. Now, that constitutes a great danger, I admit, in passionless marriages. Who can tell – well, that need not be discussed. But it remains certain, I am afraid, that there are many women to whom the becoming as one flesh with their husbands has not meant anything before they married them."
"And less afterwards," remarked Jim.
"And less afterwards. Their physical nature is awakened, and – But, and here I am less modern than you at present are inclined to give me credit for."
"Credit for?" asked Jim.
"Yes, because you are not modern at all. Oh, Jim, it is a great puzzle! Supposing every girl had to feel that there was absolutely only one man in the world for her, and supposing every man had to feel that here, and here alone was his destiny, before he married, do you think we should have an increase of the marriage returns? I am afraid not. And people being what they are, do you think that this celibacy would have a good effect on morals? It is no use advocating counsels of perfection when you are dealing with the human race and its obvious imperfections. At least, that, I suppose, may eventually come; but for practical purposes the highest motive does not always secure such good results as a lower one."
"So you advised her to marry him," said Jim slowly.
"No, I advised her not to. All the excellent reasons which I have given you why she should marry him were present in my mind; I even told them her. But at the back of my mind – mind or soul, call it what you will – there was a great 'but.' I dare say it was unreasonable; it was certainly not clear to me what it was. But whatever it was, it said 'No.' It wanted me not to impose what I called my experience of the world on a girl. After all, what does one's experience amount to? The recollection of one's mistakes."
She spoke the last words more to herself than him as she leaned back in her low chair, her violet-coloured eyes looking "out and beyond," focused, not by the limit of her vision, but that of her thoughts. Quick, uneven breaths disturbed the slow rise and fall of her bosom, and the rose she had fastened in her dress shed half its fragrant petals on her lap. And because he was a man, he looked at her with kindled eye; and because he was a man who loved her, his blood also was kindled. More than ever before he knew how idle had been his flight from her; the cælum non animum suddenly leaped in his mind from the dingy ranks of truisms to the austere array of the things that are true. He drew his chair a little closer to hers and laid his hand on its arm.
"Your mistakes, Marie?" he said.
It took her an appreciable fraction of time to recall herself, and realize what was meant by his burning look; but it took her no time at all, when once she had realized that, to answer him.
"Yes, one's mistakes," she said – "all the occasions on which one has failed to grasp the true import of what one was doing, and, in particular, all the mistakes one has seen other people making and their consequences. I always think that one's experience means much more what one has observed in other people than what one has done one's self. Of course, all observation passes through the crucible of one's personality, whether one observes things in one's self or other people, and that certainly transforms it, crystallizes it, what you will. But if one has a grain of imagination, other people's experiences are as vivid to one's self as one's own, and as potentially profitable. Don't you think so?"
She rose as she spoke, trembling slightly, and brushed the fallen petals from her dress. She was just enough not to blame him for what he had said; she was, indeed, just enough to commend him for his reticence, since her words had necessarily for him such a significance, and the need to stop him saying more was imperative. She could see what inward excitement moved him, and in her soul she thanked him for the love he bore her; but that any word of it should pass between them was impossible – merely, it could not be. This being so, she desired with a fervency of desire that she had not known for years not to lose her friend, and words of such a kind as she knew were rising to his lips would have meant this loss. Indeed, at this moment the world seemed to hold for her nothing so desired as that friendship, which a word might rob her of.
To him, her reply was both sobering and bracing. It showed him how close he had been walking to the edge of a precipice. As Marie had just told him, he was old-fashioned; he believed that "good" and "bad," "noble" and "wicked," were not yet words of obsolete meaning, words like "arquebus," which had no significance in the vocabulary of the day. A temptation had come and gripped him by the throat – the temptation to suggest to her that she should say that her marriage with Jack was, among her experiences, a mistake. He knew also – and was honest enough to confess that his desire to hear her say this was due to the fact that her confession would necessarily open certain vistas – it would be the first step, at any rate, down a path that a certain part of him had during his past fortnight longed to tread with a fervour and a passion that shook his whole nature, as a wind shakes and tosses a curtain. He knew in what sort Jack had kept his marriage vow, and he had begun to ask himself whether such conduct did not give emancipation, so to speak, to the wife – had begun to tell himself that it was no use setting up exceptional codes of morality. One lived in the world, the world did this and that; but this douche of cold water was bracing. It recalled him to sanity, to his better and his normal self, and he replied in a voice still shaken with his own overwhelming though momentary tumult.