Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Temple is,” said Vernon. “There’s no mistaking that longing glance of his.”

  “As a competent professor I make you my bow of gratitude,” said Temple, “but I should never have the courage to criticise the work of nine fair ladies.”

  “You needn’t criticise them all at once,” said a large girl from Minneapolis, “nor yet all in the gaudy eye of heaven. We’ll screen off a corner for our Professor — sort of confessional business. You sit there and we’ll go to you one by one with our sins in our hand.”

  “That would scare him some I surmise,” said Miss Voscoe.

  “Not at all,” said Temple, a little nettled, he hardly knew why.

  “I didn’t know you were so brave,” said the Minneapolis girl.

  “Perhaps he didn’t want you to know,” said Miss Voscoe; “perhaps that’s his life’s dark secret.”

  “People often pretend to a courage that they haven’t,” said Vernon. “A consistent pose of cowardice, that would be novel and — I see the idea developing — more than useful.”

  “Is that your pose?” asked Temple, still rather tartly, “because if it is, I beg to offer you, in the name of these ladies, the chair of Professor-behind-the-screen.”

  “I’m not afraid of the nine Muses,” Vernon laughed back, “as long as they are nine. It’s the light that lies in woman’s eyes that I’ve always had such a nervous dread of.”

  “It does make you blink, bless it,” said the Irish student, “but not from nine pairs at once, as you say. It’s the light from one pair that turns your head.”

  “Mr. Vernon isn’t weak in the head,” said the shy boy suddenly.

  “No,” said Vernon, “it’s the heart that’s weak with me. I have to be very careful of it.”

  “Well, but will you?” said a downright girl.

  “Will I what? I’m sorry, but I’ve lost my cue, I think. Where were we — at losing hearts, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” said the downright girl, “I didn’t mean that. I mean will you come and criticise our drawings?”

  “Fiddle,” said Miss Voscoe luminously. “Mr. Vernon’s too big for that.”

  “Oh, well,” said Vernon, “if you don’t think I should be competent!”

  “You don’t mean to say you would?”

  “Who wouldn’t jump at the chance of playing Apollo to the fairest set of muses in the Quartier?” said Temple; “but after all, I had the refusal of the situation — I won’t renounce—”

  “Bobby, you unman me,” interrupted Vernon, putting down his cup, “you shall not renounce the altruistic pleasure which you promise to yourself in yielding this professorship to me. I accept it.”

  “I’m hanged if you do!” said Temple. “You proposed me yourself, and I’m elected — aren’t I, Miss Voscoe?”

  “That’s so,” said she; “but Mr. Vernon’s president too.”

  “I’ve long been struggling with the conviction that Temple and I were as brothers. Now I yield — Temple, to my arms!”

  They embraced, elegantly, enthusiastically, almost as Frenchmen use; and the room applauded the faithful burlesque.

  “What’s come to me that I should play the goat like this?” Vernon asked himself, as he raised his head from Temple’s broad shoulder. Then he met Betty’s laughing eyes, and no longer regretted his assumption of that difficult role.

  “It’s settled then. Tuesdays and Fridays, four to six,” he said. “At last I am to be—”

  “The light of the harem,” said Miss Voscoe.

  “Can there be two lights?” asked Temple anxiously. “If not, consider the fraternal embrace withdrawn.”

  “No, you’re the light, of course,” said Betty. “Mr. Vernon’s the Ancient Light. He’s older than you are, isn’t he?”

  The roar of appreciation of her little joke surprised Betty, and, a little, pleased her — till Miss Voscoe whispered under cover of it:

  “Ancient light? Then he was the three-polite-word man?”

  Betty explained her little jest.

  “All the same,” said the other, “it wasn’t any old blank walls you were thinking about. I believe he is the one.”

  “It’s a great thing to be able to believe anything,” said Betty; and the talk broke up into duets. She found that Temple was speaking to her.

  “I came here to-day because I wanted to meet you, Miss Desmond,” he was saying. “I hope you don’t think it’s cheek of me to say it, but there’s something about you that reminds me of the country at home.”

  “That’s a very pretty speech,” said Betty. He reminded her of the Café d’Harcourt, but she did not say so.

  “You remind me of a garden,” he went on, “but I don’t like to see a garden without a hedge round it.”

  “You think I ought to have a chaperon,” said Betty bravely, “but chaperons aren’t needed in this quarter.”

  “I wish I were your brother,” said Temple.

  “I’m so glad you’re not,” said Betty. She wanted no chaperonage, even fraternal. But the words made him shrink, and then sent a soft warmth through him. On the whole he was not sorry that he was not her brother.

  At parting Vernon, at the foot of the staircase, said:

  “And when may I see you again?”

  “On Tuesday, when the class meets.”

  “But I didn’t mean when shall I see the class. When shall I see Miss Desmond?”

  “Oh, whenever you like,” Betty answered gaily; “whenever Lady St. Craye can spare you.”

  He let her say it.

  CHAPTER XVI. “LOVE AND TUPPER.”

  “Whenever Vernon liked” proved to be the very next day. He was waiting outside the door of the atelier when Betty, in charcoal-smeared pinafore, left the afternoon class.

  “Won’t you dine with me somewhere to-night?” said he.

  “I am going to Garnier’s,” she said. Not even for him, friend of hers and affianced of another as he might be, would she yet break the rule of a life Paula had instituted.

  “Fallen as I am,” he answered gaily, “I am not yet so low as to be incapable of dining at Garnier’s.”

  So when Betty passed through the outer room of the restaurant and along the narrow little passage where eyes and nose attest strongly the neighborhood of the kitchen, she was attended by a figure that aroused the spontaneous envy of all her acquaintances. In the inner room where they dined it was remarked that such a figure would be more at home at Durand’s or the Café de Paris than at Garnier’s. That night the first breath of criticism assailed Betty. To afficher oneself with a fellow-student — a “type,” Polish or otherwise — that was all very well, but with an obvious Boulevardier, a creature from the other side, this dashed itself against the conventions of the Artistic Quartier. And conventions — even of such quarters — are iron-strong.

  “Fiddle-de-dee,” said Miss Voscoe to her companions’ shocked comments, “they were raised in the same village, or something. He used to give her peanuts when he was in short jackets, and she used to halve her candies with him. Friend of childhood’s hour, that’s all. And besides he’s one of the presidents of our Sketch Club.”

  But all Garnier’s marked that whereas the habitués contented themselves with an omelette aux champignons, sauté potatoes and a Petit Suisse, or the like modest menu, Betty’s new friend ordered for himself, and for her, “a real regular dinner,” beginning with hors d’oeuvre and ending with “mendiants.” “Mendiants” are raisins and nuts, the nearest to dessert that at this season you could get at Garniers. Also he passed over with smiling disrelish the little carafons of weak wine for which one pays five sous if the wine be red, and six if it be white. He went out and interviewed Madame at her little desk among the flowers and nuts and special sweet dishes, and it was a bottle of real wine with a real cork to be drawn that adorned the table between him and Betty. To her the whole thing was of the nature of a festival. She enjoyed the little sensation created by her companion; and the knowledge which she thought sh
e had of his relations to Lady St. Craye absolved her of any fear that in dining with him tête-à-tête she was doing anything “not quite nice.” To her the thought of his engagement was as good or as bad as a chaperon. For Betty’s innocence was deeply laid, and had survived the shock of all the waves that had beaten against it since her coming to Paris. It was more than innocence, it was a very honest, straightforward childish naiveté.

  “It’s almost the same as if he was married,” she said: “there can’t be any harm in having dinner with a man who’s married — or almost married.”

  So she enjoyed herself. Vernon exerted himself to amuse her. But he was surprised to find that he was not so happy as he had expected to be. It was good that Betty had permitted him to dine with her alone, but it was flat. After dinner he took her to the Odeon, and she said good-night to him with a lighter heart than she had known since Paula left her.

  In these rooms now sometimes it was hard to keep one’s eyes shut. And to keep her eyes shut was now Betty’s aim in life, even more than the art for which she pretended to herself that she lived. For now that Paula had gone the deception of her father would have seemed less justifiable, had she ever allowed herself to face the thought of it for more than a moment; but she used to fly the thought and go round to one of the girls’ rooms to talk about Art with a big A, and forget how little she liked or admired Betty Desmond.

  She was now one of a circle of English, American and German students. The Sketch Club had brought her eight new friends, and they went about in parties by twos and threes, or even sevens and eights, and Betty went with them, enjoying the fun of it all, which she liked, and missing all that she would not have liked if she had seen it. But Vernon was the only man with whom she dined tête-à-tête or went to the theatre alone.

  To him the winter passed in a maze of doubt and self-contempt. He could not take what the gods held out: could not draw from his constant companionship of Betty the pleasure which his artistic principles, his trained instincts taught him to expect. He had now all the tête-à-têtes he cared to ask for, and he hated that it should be so. He almost wanted her to be in a position where such things should be impossible to her. He wanted her to be guarded, watched, sheltered. And he had never wanted that for any woman in his life before.

  “I shall be wishing her in a convent next,” he said, “with high walls with spikes on the top. Then I should walk round and round the outside of the walls and wish her out. But I should not be able to get at her. And nothing else would either.”

  Lady St. Craye was more charming than ever. Vernon knew it and sometimes he deliberately tried to let her charm him. But though he perceived her charm he could not feel it. Always before he had felt what he chose to feel. Or perhaps — he hated the thought and would not look at it — perhaps all his love affairs had been just pictures, perhaps he had never felt anything but an artistic pleasure in their grouping and lighting. Perhaps now he was really feeling natural human emotion, didn’t they call it? But that was just it. He wasn’t. What he felt was resentment, dissatisfaction, a growing inability to control events or to prearrange his sensations. He felt that he himself was controlled. He felt like a wild creature caught in a trap. The trap was not gilded, and he was very uncomfortable in it. Even the affairs of others almost ceased to amuse him. He could hardly call up a cynical smile at Lady St. Craye’s evident misapprehension of those conscientious efforts of his to be charmed by her. He was only moved to a very faint amusement when one day Bobbie Temple, smoking in the studio, broke a long silence abruptly to say:

  “Look here. Someone was saying the other day that a man can be in love with two women at a time. Do you think it’s true?”

  “Two? Yes. Or twenty.”

  “Then it’s not love,” said Temple wisely.

  “They call it love,” said Vernon. “I don’t know what they mean by it. What do you mean?”

  “By love?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t exactly know,” said Temple slowly. “I suppose it’s wanting to be with a person, and thinking about nothing else. And thinking they’re the most beautiful and all that. And going over everything that they’ve ever said to you, and wanting—”

  “Wanting?”

  “Well, I suppose if it’s really love you want to marry them.”

  “You can’t marry them, you know,” said Vernon; “at least not simultaneously. That’s just it. Well?”

  “Well that’s all. If that’s not love, what is?”

  “I’m hanged if I know,” said Vernon.

  “I thought you knew all about those sort of things.”

  “So did I,” said Vernon to himself. Aloud he said:

  “If you want a philosophic definition: it’s passion transfigured by tenderness — at least I’ve often said so.”

  “But can you feel that for two people at once?”

  “Or,” said Vernon, getting interested in his words, “it’s tenderness intoxicated by passion, and not knowing that it’s drunk—”

  “But can you feel that for two—”

  “Oh, bother,” said Vernon, “every sort of fool-fancy calls itself love. There’s the pleasure of pursuit — there’s vanity, there’s the satisfaction of your own amour-propre, there’s desire, there’s intellectual attraction, there’s the love of beauty, there’s the artist’s joy in doing what you know you can do well, and getting a pretty woman for sole audience. You might feel one or two or twenty of these things for one woman, and one or two or twenty different ones for another. But if you mean do you love two women in the same way, I say no. Thank Heaven it’s new every time.”

  “It mayn’t be the same way,” said Temple, “but it’s the same thing to you — if you feel you can’t bear to give either of them up.”

  “Well, then, you can marry one and keep on with the other. Or be ‘friends’ with both and marry neither. Or cut the whole show and go to the Colonies.”

  “Then you have to choose between being unhappy or being a blackguard.”

  “My good chap, that’s the situation in which our emotions are always landing us — our confounded emotions and the conventions of Society.”

  “And how are you to know whether the thing’s love — or — all those other things?”

  “You don’t know: you can’t know till it’s too late for your knowing to matter. Marriage is like spinach. You can’t tell that you hate it till you’ve tried it. Only—”

  “Well?”

  “I think I’ve heard it said,” Vernon voiced his own sudden conviction, very carelessly, “that love wants to give and passion wants to take. Love wants to possess the beloved object — and to make her happy. Desire wants possession too — but the happiness is to be for oneself; and if there’s not enough happiness for both so much the worse. If I’m talking like a Sunday School book you’ve brought it on yourself.”

  “I like it,” said Temple.

  “Well, since the Dissenting surplice has fallen on me, I’ll give you a test. I believe that the more you love a woman the less your thoughts will dwell on the physical side of the business. You want to take care of her.”

  “Yes,” said Temple.

  “And then often,” Vernon went on, surprised to find that he wanted to help the other in his soul-searchings, “if a chap’s not had much to do with women — the women of our class, I mean — he gets a bit dazed with them. They’re all so nice, confound them. If a man felt he was falling in love with two women at once, and he had the tiresome temperament that takes these things seriously, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for him to go away into the country, and moon about for a few weeks, and see which was the one that bothered his brain most. Then he’d know where he was, and not be led like a lamb to the slaughter by the wrong one. They can’t both get him, you know, unless his intentions are strictly dishonourable.”

  “I wasn’t putting the case that either of them wished to get him,” said Temple carefully.

  Vernon nodded.

  “Of course not. T
he thing simplifies itself wonderfully if neither of them wants to get him. Even if they both do, matters are less complicated. It’s when only one of them wants him that it’s the very devil for a man not to be sure what he wants. That’s very clumsily put — what I mean is—”

  “I see what you mean,” said Temple impatiently.

  “ — It’s the devil for him because then he lets himself drift and the one who wants him collars him and then of course she always turns out to be the one he didn’t want. My observations are as full of wants as an advertisement column. But the thing to do in all relations of life is to make up your mind what it is that you do want, and then to jolly well see that you get it. What I want is a pipe.”

  He filled and lighted one.

  “You talk,” said Temple slowly, “as though a man could get anyone — I mean anything, he wanted.”

  “So he can, my dear chap, if he only wants her badly enough.”

  “Badly enough?”

  “Badly enough to make the supreme sacrifice to get her.”

  “?” Temple enquired.

  “Marriage,” Vernon answered; “there’s only one excuse for marriage.”

  “Excuse?”

  “Excuse. And that excuse is that one couldn’t help it. The only excuse one will have to offer, some day, to the recording angel, for all one’s other faults and follies. A man who can help getting married, and doesn’t, deserves all he gets.”

  “I don’t agree with you in the least,” said Temple,—”about marriage, I mean. A man ought to want to get married—”

  “To anybody? Without its being anybody in particular?”

  “Yes,” said Temple stoutly. “If he gets to thirty without wanting to marry any one in particular, he ought to look about till he finds some one he does want. It’s the right and proper thing to marry and have kiddies.”

  “Oh, if you’re going to be Patriarchal,” said Vernon. “What a symbolic dialogue! We begin with love and we end with marriage! There’s the tragedy of romance, in a nut-shell. Yes, life’s a beastly rotten show, and the light won’t last more than another two hours.”