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Title: The Man Who Missed the 'Bus
Author: Benson, Stella (1892-1933)
Date of first publication: 1928
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1928
   (first edition)
Date first posted: 27 February 2009
Date last updated: 27 February 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #269

This ebook was produced by:
The Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe
at http://dp.rastko.net




This is number six of the Woburn Books, being The Man who Missed the
'Bus, a Story by Stella Benson: published at London in 1928 by Elkin
Mathews & Marrot.

Five hundred and thirty numbered copies of this story have been set by
hand in Imprint Shadow, and printed by Robert MacLehose & Co. Ltd., at
the University Press, Glasgow, of which Nos. 1-500 only are for sale and
Nos. 501-530 for presentation.

This is copy No. _160_




THE MAN WHO MISSED THE 'BUS.


Mr. Robinson's temper was quite sore by the time he reached St. Pierre.
The two irritations that most surely found the weak places in his
nervous defences were noise and light in his eyes. And, as he told
Monsieur Dupont, the proprietor of Les Trois Moineaux at St. Pierre, "If
there is one thing, monsieur, that is offensive--essentially
offensive--that is to say, a danger in itself--I mean to say noise
doesn't have to have a meaning ... What I mean is, monsieur, that
noise--" "Numero trente," said Monsieur Dupont to the chasseur. Mr.
Robinson always had to explain things very thoroughly in order to make
people really appreciate the force of what he had to say--and even then
it was a hard task to get them to acknowledge receipt, so to speak, of
his message. But he was a humble man, and he accounted for the
atmosphere of unanswered and unfinished remarks in which he lived by
admitting that his words were unfortunately always inadequate to convey
to a fellow-mortal the intense interest to be found in the curiosities
of behaviour and sensation. His mind was overstocked with bye-products
of the business of life. He felt that every moment disclosed a new thing
worth thinking of among the phenomena that his senses presented to him.
Other people, he saw, let these phenomenal moments slip by unanalysed,
but if he had had the words and the courage, he felt, he could have
awakened those of his fellow-creatures whom he met from their trance of
shallow living. As it was, the relation of his explorations and
wonderings sounded, even to his own ears, flat as the telling at
breakfast of an ecstatic dream. What he had meant to say about noise,
for instance, had been that noise was _in itself_ terrifying and
horrible--not as a warning of danger, but as a physical assault. Vulgar
people treat noise only as a language that _means_ something, he would
have said, but really noise could not be translated, any more than rape
could be translated. There was no such thing as an ugly harmless noise.
The noise of an express train approaching and shrieking through a quiet
station--the noise of heavy rain sweeping towards one through a
forest--the noise of loud, concerted laughter at an unheard joke--all
benevolent noises if translated into concrete terms, were _in
themselves_ calamities. All this Mr. Robinson would have thought worth
saying to Monsieur Dupont--worth continuing to say until Monsieur Dupont
should have confessed to an understanding of his meaning--but, as usual,
the words collapsed as soon as they left Mr. Robinson's lips.

Monsieur Dupont stood in the doorway of Les Trois Moineaux with his back
to the light. Mr. Robinson could see the shape of his head set on
stooping shoulders, with a little frail fluff of hair beaming round a
baldness. He could see the rather crumpled ears with outleaning lobes
bulging sharply against the light. But between ear and ear, between bald
brow and breast, he could see nothing but a black blank against the
glare. Mr. Robinson had extremely acute sight--perhaps too acute, as he
often wanted to tell people, since this was perhaps why the light in his
eyes affected him so painfully. "If my sight were less acute," he would
have said, "I should not mind a glare so much--I mean to say, my eyes
are so extremely receptive that they receive too much, or, in other
words, the same cause that makes my eyes so very sensitive is ..." But
nobody ever leaned forward and said, "I understand you perfectly, Mr.
Robinson, and what you say is most interesting. Your sight includes so
much that it cannot exclude excessive light, and this very naturally
irritates your nerves, though the same peculiarity accounts for your
intense powers of observation." Nobody ever said anything like that, but
then, people are so self-engrossed. Mr. Robinson was not
self-engrossed--he was simply extravagantly interested in _things_, not
people. For instance, he looked round now--as the chasseur sought in the
shadows for his suitcase--and saw the terrace striped by long beams of
light--broad flat beams that were strung like yellow sheets from every
window and door in the hotel to the trees, tall urns and tables of the
terrace. A murmur of voices enlivened the air, but there were no human
creatures in any beam--only blocked dark figures in the shadows--and, in
every patch of light, a sleeping dog or cat or two. Dogs and cats lay
extended or curled comfortably on the warm, uneven pavingstones, and Mr.
Robinson's perfect sight absorbed the shape of every brown,
tortoiseshell or black marking on their bodies, as a geographer might
accept the continents on a new unheard-of globe. "It's just like
geography--the markings on animals," Mr. Robinson had once said to an
American who couldn't get away. "What I mean to say is that the markings
on a dog or rabbit have just as much sense as the markings on this world
of ours--or, in other words, the archipelagoes of spots on this pointer
puppy are just as importantly isolated from one another as they could be
in any Adriatic sea--"But the American had only replied, "Why, no, Mr.
Robinson, not half so important; I am taking my wife--with the aid of
the American Express Co.--to visit the Greek islands this summer, and we
shall be sick on the sea and robbed on the land; whereas nobody but a
flea ever visits the spots on that puppy, and the flea don't know and
don't care a damn what colour he bites into." Showing that nobody except
Mr. Robinson ever really studied things impersonally.

Mr. Robinson, a very ingenious-minded and sensitive man with plenty of
money, was always seeking new places to go to, where he might be a
success--or rather, where his unaccountable failures elsewhere might not
be known. St. Pierre, he thought, was an excellent venture, although the
approach to it had been so trying. As soon as he had heard of
it--through reading a short, thoughtless sketch by a popular novelist in
the _Daily Call_ --he had felt hopeful about it. A little Provenal
walled town on a hill, looking out over vineyards to the blue
Mediterranean--a perfect little hotel, clean and with a wonderful
cook--frequented by an interesting few....

"By the time I get downstairs," thought Mr. Robinson, as he carefully
laid his trousers under the mattress in his room and donned another
pair, "the lights will be lit on the terrace, and I shall be able to see
my future friends. I must tell someone about that curious broken
reflection in the river Rhone...." He went downstairs and out on to the
terrace where the tinkle of glasses and plates made him feel hungry. He
could hear, as he stood in the doorway looking out, one man's voice
making a series of jokes in quick succession, each excited pause in his
voice being filled by a gust and scrape of general laughter--like waves
breaking on a beach with a clatter and then recoiling with a thin,
hopeful, lonely sound. "Probably all his jokes are personalities,"
thought Mr. Robinson, "and therefore not essentially funny. No doubt
they are slightly pornographic, at that. When will people learn how
interesting and exciting _things_ are...."

A waiter behind him drew out a chair from a table in one of the squares
of light thrown from a window. Mr. Robinson, after sitting down
abstractedly, was just going to call the waiter back to tell him that
his eyes were ultra-sensitive to light, and that he could see nothing in
that glare, when a large dog, with the bleached, patched, innocent face
of a circus-clown, came and laid its head on his knee. Mr. Robinson
could never bear to disappoint an animal. He attributed to animals all
the hot and cold variations of feeling that he himself habitually
experienced, identifying the complacent fur of the brute with his own
thin human skin. So that when the waiter, coming quietly behind him, put
the wine list into his hand, Mr. Robinson merely said, "Thank you,
garon, but I never touch alcohol in any form--or, for the matter of
that, tobacco either. In my opinion--"--and did not call the rapidly
escaping waiter back to ask him to move his table. The dog's chin was
now so comfortably pressed against his knee, and the dog's paw hooked in
a pathetically prehensile way about his ankle.

Mr. Robinson made the best of his position in the dazzle and tried to
look about him. The Trois Moineaux was built just outside the encircling
wall of the tightly corseted little town of St. Pierre, and, since St.
Pierre clung to the apex of a conical hill, it followed that the inn
terrace jutted boldly out over a steep, stepped fall of vineyards
overhanging the plain. The plain was very dim now, overlaid by starlit
darkness, yet at the edge of the terrace there was a sense of _view_,
and all the occupied tables stood in a row against the low wall,
diluting the food and drink they bore with starlight and space. The men
and women sitting at these tables all had their faces to the world and
their backs to Mr. Robinson. He could not see a single human face. He
had come down too late to secure one of the outlooking tables, and his
place was imprisoned in a web of light under an olive tree. In the
middle of the table peaches and green grapes were heaped on a one-legged
dish. And on the edge of the dish a caterpillar waved five-sixths of its
length drearily in the air, unable to believe that its world could
really end at this abrupt slippery rim. Mr. Robinson, shading his eyes
from the light, could see every detail of the caterpillar's figure, and
it seemed to him worth many minutes of absorbed attention. Its colour
was a pale greenish fawn, and it had two dark bumps on its brow by way
of eyes. "How unbearably difficult and lonely its life would seem to
us," thought Mr. Robinson, leaning intensely over it. "How frightful if
by mistake the merest spark of self-consciousness should get into an
insect's body--(an accidental short-circuit in the life current,
perhaps)--and it should know itself absolutely alone--appallingly
free--" He put his finger in the range of its persistent wavings, and
watched it crawl with a looping haste down his fingernail, accepting
without question a quite fortuitous salvation from its dilemma. He laid
his finger against a leaf, and the caterpillar disembarked briskly after
its journey across alien elements. When it was gone, Mr. Robinson looked
about him, dazed. "My goodness," he thought, "that caterpillar's face
was the only one I have seen to-night."

The noise of chatter and laughter went up like a kind of smoke from the
flickering creatures at the tables near the edge of the terrace. At each
table the heads and shoulders of men and women leaned together--were
sucked together like flames in a common upward draught. "My dear, she
looked like a.... Oh, well, if you want to.... he's the kind of man
who.... _No_, my dear, not in my _bedroom_.... A rattling good yarn....
Stop me if I've told you this one before...." One man, standing up a
little unsteadily, facing the table nearest to Mr. Robinson, made a
speech: "... the last time ... delightful company ... fair sex ...
happiest hours of my life ... mustn't waste your time ... us mere men
... as the Irishman said to the Scotsman when ... happiest moments of
all my life ... one minute and I shall be done ... always remember the
happiest days of all my ... well, I mustn't keep you ... I heard a
little story the other day...." And all the time his audience leaned
together round their table, embarrassed, looking away over the dark
plain or murmuring together with bent heads. The only woman whose face
Mr. Robinson might have seen was shielding her face with her hands and
shaking with silent laughter. The speaker was wavering on his feet, very
much as the caterpillar had wavered on its tail, and his wide gestures,
clawing the air in search of the attention of his friends, suggested to
Mr. Robinson the caterpillar's wild gropings for foothold where no
foothold was. "Yes," thought Mr. Robinson, "the caterpillar was _my_
host. No other face is turned to me."

However, as he thought this, a man came from a further table and stood
quite close, under the olive tree, between Mr. Robinson and the lighted
doorway, looking down on him. The man stretched out his hand to the tree
and leaned upon it. A freak of light caught the broad, short hand,
walnut-knuckled and brown, crooked over the bough. Mr. Robinson could
not see the man's face at all, but he felt that the visit was friendly.
To conciliate this sympathetic stranger, he would even have talked about
the weather, or made a joke about pretty girls or beer, but he could not
think of anything of that kind to say to a man whose hand, grasping an
olive bough, was all that could be known of him. All that Mr. Robinson
could do for the moment was to wonder what could have sent the man here.
"It could not have been," thought Mr. Robinson humbly, "that he was
attracted by my face, because nobody ever is." And then he began
thinking how one man's loss is nearly always another man's gain, if
considered broadly enough. For one to be forsaken, really, means that
another has a new friend. "This young man," thought Mr. Robinson, gazing
at the black outline of the stranger's head, "has probably come here
blindly, because of some sudden hurt, some stab, some insult, inflicted
by his friends at that table over there--probably by a woman. Perhaps he
thinks he has a broken heart (for he has young shoulders)--nothing short
of a wound that temporarily robbed him of his social balance could make
him do so strange a thing as suddenly to leave his friends and come here
to stand silent by me in the shade. Yet if he only could--as some day, I
am convinced, we all shall--know that the sum remains the same--that
some other lover is the happier for this loss of his--and that if he had
gained a smile from her, the pain he now feels would simply have been
shifted to another heart--not dispelled.... We only have to think
impersonally enough, and even death--well, we are all either nearly dead
or just born, more or less, and the balance of birth and death never
appreciably alters. Personal thinking is the curse of existence. Why are
we all crushed under the weight of this strangling ME--this snake in our
garden...?" So he said to the young man, "Isn't it a curious thing,
looking round at young people and old people, that it doesn't really
matter if they are born or dead--I mean to say, it's all the same
whatever happens, if you follow me, and so many people mind when they
needn't, if people would only realise--" At this moment there was a
burst of clapping from the far table, and the young man bounded from Mr.
Robinson's side back to his friends, shouting, "Good egg--have you
thought of a word already? Animal, vegetable or mineral--and remember to
speak up because I'm rather hard of hearing...."

Mr. Robinson suddenly felt like Herbert Robinson, personally affronted.
The sum of happiness (which of course remained unaltered by his
set-back) for a moment did not matter in the least. He pushed back his
chair and walked away, leaving his cheese uneaten and the clownfaced dog
without support. He went to his bedroom and sat down opposite his
mirror, facing the reflection of his outward ME. There sat the figure in
the mirror, smooth, plump, pale, with small pouched eyes and thick,
straight, wet-looking hair. "What is this?" asked Mr. Robinson, studying
the reflection of his disappointed face--the only human face he had seen
that evening. "Look at me--I _am_ alive--I am indeed very acutely
alive--more alive, perhaps, than all these men and women
half-blind--half-dead in their limitations of greed and sex.... It is
true I have no personal claim on life; I am a virgin and I have no
friends--yet I live intensely--and there are--there _are_--_there are_
other forms of life than personal life. The eagle and the artichoke are
equally alive--and perhaps my way of life is nearer to the eagle's than
the artichoke's. And must I be alone--must I live behind cold shoulders
because I see _out_ instead of _in_--the most vivid form of life
conceivable, if only it could be lived perfectly?"

He tried to see himself in the mirror, as was his habit, as a mere
pliable pillar of life, a turret of flesh with a prisoner called _life_
inside it. He stared himself out of countenance, trying, as it were, to
dissolve his poor body by understanding it--poor white, sweating,
rubbery thing that was called Herbert Robinson and had no friends. But
to-night the prisoner called _life_ clung to his prison--to-night his
body tingled with egotism--to-night the oblivion that he called wisdom
would not come, and he could not become conscious, as he longed to, of
the live sky above the roof, the long winds streaming about the valleys,
the billions of contented, wary or terrified creatures moving about the
living dust, weeds and waters of the world. He remained just Herbert
Robinson, who had not seen any human face while in the midst of his
fellow-men.

He began to feel an immediate craving--an almost revengeful lust--to be
alone, far from men, books, mirrors and lights watching, all his life
long, the bodiless, mindless movements of animals--ecstatic living
things possessing no ME. "I should scarcely know I was alive, then, and
perhaps never even notice when I died...." He decided he would go away
next day, and give no group again the chance to excommunicate him.

He remembered that he had seen a notice at the door of the hotel, giving
the rare times at which an omnibus left and arrived at St. Pierre. "I
will leave by the early 'bus, before anyone is awake to turn his back on
me."

He could not sleep, but lay uneasily on his bed reading the
advertisements in a magazine he had brought with him. Advertisements
always comforted him a good deal, because advertisers really, he
thought, took a broad view; they wrote of--and to--their fellow-men
cynically and subtly, taking advantage of the vulgar passion for
personal address, and yet treating humanity as an intricate mass--an
instrument to be played upon. This seemed the ideal stand-point, to Mr.
Robinson, and yet he was insulted by the isolation such an ideal
involved.

He dressed himself early, replaced in his suitcase the few clothes he
had taken out, put some notes in an envelope addressed to Monsieur
Dupont, and leaned out of the window to watch for the 'bus. St. Pierre,
a sheaf of white and pink plaster houses, was woven together on a hill,
like a haycock. The town, though compact and crowned by a sharp white
belltower, seemed to have melted a little, like a thick candle; the
centuries and the sun had softened its fortress outlines. The other
hills, untopped by towns, seemed much more definitely constructed; they
were austerely built of yellow and green blocks of vineyard, cemented by
the dusky green of olive trees. Gleaming white, fluffy clouds peeped
over the hills--"like kittens," thought Mr. Robinson, who had a fancy
for trying to make cosmic comparisons between the small and the big. On
the terrace of the inn, half-a-dozen dogs sprawled in the early sun.
Over the valley a hawk balanced and swung in the air, so hungry after
its night's fast that it swooped rashly and at random several times,
and was caught up irritably into the air again after each dash, as
though dangling on a plucked thread. Mr. Robinson leaned long on his
sill looking at it, until his elbows felt sore from his weight, and he
began to wonder where the 'bus was that was going to take him away to
loneliness. He went down to the terrace, carrying his suitcase, and
stood in the archway. There was no sound of a coming 'bus--no sound at
all, in fact, except a splashing and a flapping and a murmuring to the
left and right of him. A forward step or two showed him that there were
two long washing troughs, one on each side of the archway, each trough
shaded by a stone gallery and further enclosed in a sort of trellis of
leaning kneading women. Mr. Robinson noticed uneasily that he could not
see one woman's face; all were so deeply bent and absorbed. After a
moment, however, a woman's voice from the row behind him asked him if he
was waiting for the 'bus. He turned to reply, hoping to break the spell
by finding an ingenuous rustic face lifted to look at him. But all the
faces were bent once more, and it was another woman behind him again who
told him that the 'bus had left ten minutes before. Once more the
speaker bent over her work before Mr. Robinson had time to turn and see
her face. "What a curious protracted accident," he thought, and had time
to curse his strange isolation before he realised the irritation of
being unable to leave St. Pierre for another half-dozen hours. He flung
his suitcase into the hall of the inn, and walked off up a path that led
through the vineyards. As if the whole affair had been prearranged, all
the dogs on the terrace rose up and followed him, yawning and stretching
surreptitiously, like workers reluctantly leaving their homes at the
sound of a factory whistle.

Mr. Robinson, true to his habit, concentrated his attention on--or
rather diffused it to embrace--the colours about him. The leaves of the
vines especially held his eye; they wore the same frosty bloom that
grapes themselves often wear--a sky-blue dew on the green leaf. Two
magpies, with a bottle-green sheen on their wings, gave their
police-rattle cry as he came near and then flew off, flaunting their
long tails clumsily. A hundred feet higher, where the ground became too
steep even for vines, Mr. Robinson found a grove of gnarled old olive
trees, edging a thick wood of Spanish chestnuts. Here he sat down and
looked between the tree-trunks and over the distorted shadows at the
uneven yellow land and the thin blade of matt blue sea stabbing the
furthest hills. The dogs stood round him, expecting him to rise in a
minute and lead them on again. Seeing that he still sat where he was,
they wagged their tails tolerantly but invitingly. Finally they resigned
themselves to the inevitable and began philosophically walking about the
grove, sniffing gently at various points in search of a makeshift
stationary amusement. Mr. Robinson watched them with a growing sense of
comfort. "Here," he thought, "are the good, undeliberate beasts again; I
knew they would save me. They don't shut themselves away from life in
their little individualities, or account uniquely for their lusts on the
silly ground of personality. Their bodies aren't prisons--they're just
dormitories...." He delighted in watching the dogs busily engrossed in
being alive without self-consciousness. After all, he thought, he did
not really depend on men. (For he had been doubting his prized
detachment most painfully.)

One of the dogs discovered a mousehole, and, after thrusting his nose
violently into it to verify the immediacy of the smell, began digging,
but not very cleverly, because he was too large a dog for such petty
sports. The other dogs hurried to the spot and, having verified the
smell for themselves, stood restively round the first discoverer,
wearing the irritable look we all wear when watching someone else bungle
over something we feel (erroneously) that we could do very much better
ourselves. Finally, they pushed the original dog aside, and all began
trying to dig in the same spot, but finding this impossible, they tapped
different veins of the same lode-smell. Soon a space of some ten feet
square was filled with a perfect tornado of flying dust, clods, grass
and piston-like forepaws. Hindlegs remained rooted while forelegs did
all the work, but whenever the accumulation of earth to the rear of each
dog became inconveniently deep, hindlegs, with a few impatient, strong
strokes, would dash the heap away to some distance--even as far as Mr.
Robinson's boots. Quite suddenly, all the dogs, with one impulse,
admitted themselves beaten; they concluded without rancour that the area
was unmistakeably mouseless. They signified their contempt for the place
in the usual canine manner, and walked away, sniffing, panting, sniffing
again for some new excitement. Mr. Robinson, who had been, for the
duration of the affair, a dog in spirit, expecting at every second that
a horrified mouse would emerge from this cyclone of attack, imitated his
leaders and quietened down with an insouciance equal to theirs. But he
had escaped from the menace of humanity; he was eased--he was sleepy....

He slept for a great many hours, and when he awoke the sun was slanting
down at the same angle as the hill, throwing immense shadows across the
vineyards. The dogs had gone home. And there, on the space of flattened
earth between two spreading tree-roots, was a mouse and its family. Mr.
Robinson, all mouse now, with no memory of his canine past, lay quite
still on his side. The mother mouse moved in spasms, stopping to quiver
her nose over invisible interests in the dust. Her brood were like
little curled feathers, specks of down blown about by a fitful wind.
There seemed to be only one license to move shared by this whole mouse
family; when mother stopped, one infant mouse would puff forward, and as
soon as its impulse expired, another thistledown brother would glide
erratically an inch or two. In this leisurely way the family moved
across the space of earth and into the grass, appearing again and again
between the green blades. Mr. Robinson lay still, sycophantically
reverent.

Between two blades of grass the senior mouse came out on to a little
plateau, about eighteen inches away from Mr. Robinson's unwinking eyes.
At that range Mr. Robinson could see its face as clearly as one sees the
face of a wife over a breakfast table. It was a dignified but greedy
face; its eyes, in so far as they had any expression at all, expressed a
cold heart; its attraction lay in its texture, a delicious velvet--and
_that_ the mouse would never allow a human finger, however friendly, to
enjoy. It would have guarded its person as a classical virgin guarded
her honour. As soon as Mr. Robinson saw the mouse's remote expression,
he felt as a lost sailor on a sinking ship might feel, who throws his
last rope--and no saving hands grasp it.

He heard the sound of human footsteps behind him. There was a tiny
explosion of flight beside him--and the mouse family was not there.
Through the little grove marched a line of men in single file, going
home from their work in the vineyards over the hill. Mr. Robinson sat
up, and noticed, with a cold heart, that all the men wore the rush hats
of the country pulled down against the low last light of the sun, and
that not one face was visible.

Mr. Robinson sat for some time with his face in his hands. He felt his
eyes with his finger, and the shape of his nose and cheekbone; he bit
his finger with his strong teeth. Here was a face--the only human face
in the world. Suddenly craving for the sight of that friend behind the
mirror, he got up and walked back to the Trois Moineaux. He found
himself very hungry, having starved all day, but his isolation gave him
a so much deeper sense of lack than did his empty stomach that, although
dinner was in progress among the bands of light and shade on the
terrace, his first act was to run to his room and stand before the
mirror. There was a mistiness in the mirror. He rubbed it with his hand.
The mistiness persisted--a compact haze of blankness that exactly
covered the reflection of his face. He moved to a different angle--he
moved the mirror--he saw clearly the reflection of the room, of his
tweed-clad figure, of his tie, of his suitcase in the middle of the
floor--but his face remained erased, like an unsatisfactory charcoal
sketch. Filled with an extraordinary fear, he stood facing the mirror
for some minutes, feeling with tremulous fingers for his eyes, his lips,
his forehead. There seemed to him to be the same sensation of haze in
his sense of touch as in his eyesight--a nervelessness--a feeling of
nauseating contact with a dead thing. It was like touching with an
unsuspecting hand one's own limb numbed by cold or by an accident of
position.

Mr. Robinson walked downstairs, dazed, out on to the terrace. As before,
the shadowed tables looking out over the edge of the terrace were
already surrounded by laughing, chattering parties. Mr. Robinson took
his seat, as before, under the olive tree. "Bring me a bottle of ...
Sauterne," he said to the waiter (for he remembered that his late
unmarried sister used to sustain upon this wine a reputation for wit in
the boarding-house in which she had lived). "And, waiter, isn't there a
table free looking out at the view? I can't see anything here." It was
not the view he craved, of course, but only a point of vantage from
which to see the faces of his mysterious, noisy neighbours. His need for
seeing faces was more immediate than ever, now that his one friend had
failed him. "There will be tables free there in a moment," said the
waiter. "They are all going to dance soon. They're only waiting for the
moon." And the waiter nodded his shadowed face towards a distant hill,
behind which--looking at this moment like a great far red fire--the moon
was coming up. "Look, the moon, the moon, the moon, look ..." everyone
on the terrace was saying. And a few moments later, the moon, now
completely round, but cut in half by a neat bar of cloud, took flight
lightly from the top of the hill.

There was a scraping of chairs, the scraping of a gramophone, and
half-a-dozen couples of young men and women began dancing between the
tall Italian urns and the olive trees on the terrace. Mr. Robinson
poured himself out a large tumbler of Sauterne. "Waiter, I don't want a
table at the edge now--I want one near the dancers--I want to see their
faces."

"There are no tables free in the centre of the terrace now. Several are
vacant at the edge."

"I can see a table there, near the dancers, with only two chairs
occupied. Surely I could sit with them."

"That table is taken by a large party, but most of them are dancing.
They will come back there in a moment."

Mr. Robinson, disregarding the waiter, and clutching his tumbler in one
hand and his bottle in the other, strode to the table he had chosen.
"I'm _too_ lonely--I _must_ sit here."

"So lonely, po-oo-or man," said the woman at the table, a stout,
middle-aged woman with high shoulders and a high bosom, clad in
saxe-blue sequins. She turned her face towards him in the pink light of
the moon. Mr. Robinson, though desperate, was not surprised. Her face
was the same blank--the same terrible disc of nothingness that he had
seen in his mirror. Mr. Robinson looked at her companion in dreadful
certainty. A twin blank faced him.

"Sh-lonely, eh?" came a thick young voice out of nothingness. "Well,
m'lad, you'll be damn sight lonelier yet in minute 'f y' come buttn' in
on--"

"Ow, Ronnie," expostulated his frightful friend--but at that moment the
gramophone fell silent, and the dancers came back to their table. Mr.
Robinson scanned the spaces that should have been their faces one by
one; they were like discs of dazzle seen after unwisely meeting the eye
of the sun.

"This old feller sayzzz-lonely--pinched your chair, Belle."

"Never mind, duckie," said Belle, and threw herself across Mr.
Robinson's knee. "Plenty of room for little me."

The white emptiness of her face that was no face blocked out Mr.
Robinson's view of the world.

"Oh, my God!" she cried, jumping up suddenly. "I know why he's
lonely--why--the man's not alive. Look at his face!"

"I am--I am--I am!--" shouted Mr. Robinson in terror. "I'll show you I
am...." He lurched after her and dragged her among the dancers as the
music began again. He shut his eyes. He could hear her wild animal
shrieks of laughter, and feel her thin struggling body under his hands.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Robinson sat, quite still but racked by confusion, excitement and
disgust, beside the road on the wall of the vineyard, watching the last
stars slip down into the haze that enhaloed the hills. The moon had gone
long ago. All Mr. Robinson's heart was set on catching the 'bus this
morning; to him the dawn that was even now imperceptibly replacing the
starlight was only a herald of the 'bus and of escape. He had no
thoughts and no plans, beyond catching the 'bus. He knew that he was
cold--but flight would warm him; that he was hungry and thirsty--but
flight would nourish him; that he was exhausted and broken-hearted--but
flight would ease and comfort him.

A white glow crowned a hill, behind which the sky had long been pearly,
and in a minute an unbearably bright ray shot from the hill into Mr.
Robinson's eyes. The dazzling domed brow of the sun rose between a tree
and a crag, and a lily-white light rushed into the valley.

The 'bus, crackling and crunching, waddled round the bend. Mr. Robinson
hailed it with a distraught cry and gesture.

"Enfin.... trs peu de place, m'sieu--n'y a qu'un tout p'tit coin par
ici...."

Mr. Robinson had no need now to look at the face of the driver, or at
the rows of senseless sunlit ghosts that filled the 'bus. He knew his
curse by now. He climbed into the narrow place indicated beside the
driver. The 'bus lurched on down the narrow, winding road that overhung
the steep vineyards of the valley. Far below--so far below that one
could not see the movement of the water--a yellow stream enmeshed its
rocks in a net of plaited strands.

Mr. Robinson sat beside the driver, not looking at that phantom,
faceless face--so insulting to the comfortable sun--but looking only at
the road that was leading him to escape. How far to flee he did not
know, but all the hope there was, he felt, lay beyond the furthest turn
of the road. After one spellbound look at the sun-blinded face of St.
Pierre, hunched on its hivelike hill, he looked forward only at the
winding, perilous road.

And his acute eyes saw, in the middle of the way, half-a-dozen specks of
live fur, blowing about a shallow rut.... The 'bus' heavy approach had
already caused a certain panic in the mouse family. One atom blew one
way, one another; there was a sort of little muddled maze of running
mice in the road.

Mr. Robinson's heart seemed to burst. Before he was aware, he had sprung
to his feet and seized the wheel of the 'bus from the driver. He had
about twenty seconds in which to watch the mice scuttering into the
grass--to watch the low, loose wall of the outer edge of the road
crumble beneath the plunging weight of the 'bus. He saw, leaning
crazily towards him, the face--the _face_--rolling eyes, tight grinning
lips--of the driver, looking down at death. There, far down, was the
yellow net of the river, spread to catch them all.




[End of _The Man Who Missed The 'Bus_ by Stella Benson]