Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Gertrude stopped with the Davenports nearly a fortnight — a fortnight of pleasant, quiet days, which are paradise to a mind content, and she was supremely content. Reggie was all that a lover, whom she would choose, should be; he was uniformly cheerful, affectionate, charming, full of the thought of her; and, ah! how much that means! Reggie was one of those who show their best side when they are in love; whereas many men, who are otherwise reasonable beings, behave like spoiled children when they are in that predicament; they become observant, jealous, exacting, when they should be serene, indulgent, large-hearted.

  But once, just at the end of that fortnight, there arose out of the sea a little cloud like a man’s hand, which broke the blue horizon, though Reggie was unconscious of it. A little hint of it had occurred once before, on that evening when Mrs. Davenport lost her way over the High Croft, but on that occasion it had soon passed away.

  Percy, it must be owned, was not so jovially contented with the spectacle, as the days went on, as the actors themselves. He was a deductive young gentleman, and, to his mind, this affair resembled too strongly Reggie’s previous flutterings in the feminine dovecotes to strike him as something altogether different from a flirtation on a large scale. A flirtation, after all, is only a superficial exhibition of love, an attraction on one side, a liability to be attracted on the other; and the question occurred to him, whether it is possible to keep a flirtation up permanently, and what was left if it broke down? A strong, deep love, like the Nile in flood, leaves, like a sediment behind, which in so many cases renders marriages, from which the tumultuous stream has passed, happy and stable, an alluvial deposit, which makes the earth rich and fruitful in the sober green of friendship; but when the slender, light-hearted streamlet is dried up, the effect of its passage is only too often seen in the uncovering of ugly roots and stones, and a removal, not a deposit of sediment. Of course he knew more about those previous affairs, which, to do Reggie justice, were superficial and innocent enough, than did that gentleman’s mother. A young man, whatever his relations with his mother may be, will choose some other confidant in such cases. They argued, in fact, nothing more than a very great susceptibility on Reggie’s part to the influence of charming young women, and the sage Percy asked himself whether the constant propinquity of one specimen of this attractive product would necessarily secure him from the influence of the others. That unlucky resemblance between his previous skirmishes and this engagement seemed to him too close to be altogether satisfactory. A flirtation on a large scale, he argued, is not very different from a flirtation on a small scale.

  Mrs. Davenport had immense confidence in Percy. He was three years older than Reggie, and was possessed of a certain soundness, of which that young gentleman stood in need. He had been of great use to him in the thousand and one unconscious ways in which one young man can help another slightly younger than himself. He had a practical mastery of details that led him to reliable conclusions on their sum, which is a gift as useful as intuitive judgment, though less striking in its process, as it partakes of the nature of industry rather than brilliance. But Reggie’s mother did him justice, and found herself consulting him as she would have consulted an older man, with considerable respect for his opinion.

  “We are all so delighted about Reggie’s engagement,” she said to him one evening after dinner. “His father thought, and so did I, that a long engagement was better. You see they are both very young, and they ought to know each other well. No one should marry on an enthusiastic first impression, least of all Reggie, because he has so many of them.”

  “Certainly there are no signs of wavering yet,” said he. “They are as fond of each other as — as two children.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked.

  “They are so healthfully fond of each other,” he said. “They were trying to read two of Browning’s lyrics this morning, about one way of love and another way of love, and they gave it up in about three minutes and read Pickwick instead.”

  “Poor Reggie, I’m afraid he’ll find that his way of love is neither one nor the other, but I think it’s a good way for all that.”

  “There’s no nonsense about it, anyhow,” said Percy, without meaning to make reflections on the lyrics in question.

  “It isn’t tumultuous exactly,” said Reggie’s mother, “but it’s very thorough. Still waters do run deep, you know, in spite of the proverb.”

  “But the stillness is not a proof of their depth.”

  “No; but when a stream is in the rapids, so to speak, it is. The rapids, I mean, which come just after the waterfall, the plunge into love.”

  “Oh, but Reggie’s always falling in love.”

  “So I gathered; though, of course, the boy wouldn’t tell me about that. But I don’t think that’s against his present engagement.”

  Percy was silent, and Mrs. Davenport adjusted her bracelet before she added, —

  “I believe it’s a healthy thing for a young man to be in a chronic state of devotion. The vague adoration is all sucked into the particular adoration when that comes.”

  “But is falling in love with a series of particular girls to be called a vague adoration?”

  “Yes, certainly, just as a circle is an infinite number of straight lines. He falls in love with womanliness in many forms.”

  “I see. No doubt you are right. Certainly he is standing his long engagement very well.”

  “Poor boy! he wants to shorten it very much, which is just the very reason why I want it to be long.”

  “Miss Carston is satisfied, I gather?”

  “It looks like it,” said Mrs. Davenport, smiling, and indicating with her eye a shady corner of the room where the two lovers were sitting.

  “Old Lady Hayes was staying with us for a week in London last summer,” she continued, after a pause. “She was defeated in a great battle, apparently, with your sister, and came here to bind up her wounds by bullying us all. I have an immense admiration for anyone who can rout her.”

  Percy laughed.

  “I heard something about it. Eva behaved abominably, I expect.”

  “I met her several times in London,” said Mrs. Davenport. “She has a wonderful way of appearing to notice no one, and obliging every one to notice her.”

  “I never saw anyone so changed in a short time as Eva,” said Percy. “She has suddenly found men and women extraordinarily interesting. A year ago, she was exactly the reverse. She disliked most women, and never remembered any man.”

  “That was the impression she gave me in the summer.”

  “Ah! but that manner is only a survival. She is often silent; at other times she talks a great deal. In the old days she seldom talked at all.”

  “Poor Hayes is terribly afraid of her.”

  “I think most people are afraid of her. She can be very cruel.”

  “A woman with such beauty as that has an unfair advantage. Her shots must always tell.”

  “She is one of those people who always make an impression,” said Percy; “because she doesn’t care at all what impression she makes.”

  “That is the sort of impression that produces the deadliest results,” said Mrs. Davenport. “If a man sees that he is being made a fool of, he can be on his guard, but the effect of the other is that he is dazzled, piqued, maddened. The women who don’t care are always those for whom men care most passionately.”

  “I wonder if Eva will ever fall in love,” said Percy half to himself.

  “It will be a fine sight if she does; she will teach all these bloodless people how to do it. I think she has more force than anyone I know. Does she ever talk to you about her marriage?”

  “Oh! there’s nothing in the world she doesn’t talk about. She has begun to take an immense interest in herself, as well as in other people, and she watches her own development with much entertainment. She never forces anything; she quietly waits till the change is made, and then finds out exactly what has happened.”

  “Her scene with
old Lady Hayes must have been wicked,” said Mrs. Davenport. “I can imagine her so well, lolling back in her chair with infinite languor, smoking cigarettes probably, and uttering slow, polished blasphemies about all her mother-in-law’s most cherished beliefs.”

  “They are out in Algiers now,” said Percy. “Eva suddenly expressed a wish to go there again. She likes the languid heat of the place. Jim Armine is with them.”

  “Ah!” said Mrs. Davenport, softly. “She is very cruel.”

  “She had the greatest distaste for her ordinary home life. Last year my father lost a lot of money, and we had to live very quietly at home in the country and retrench. Eva couldn’t endure it. She had quite made up her mind that she would never fall in love at all. She will do something sublime if she does. She is quite capable of sacrificing herself or anybody else.”

  “A clear stage and a crowd to see,” thought Mrs. Davenport, “and may I be in the stalls.”

  Meanwhile, the two lovers were talking at the very farthest corner of the drawing-room, but before the evening was over, the little cloud, which had just appeared over the horizon on the occasion when Reggie’s mother had lost her way in the snow, gathered again, and this time it seemed to Gertrude to leave a little film of mist behind. Like the other two, they had been talking about Percy’s sister, and Reggie had said suddenly, —

  “She is perfectly lovely, I believe; they call her the most beautiful woman in London. Percy showed me her photograph. I want to see her very much.”

  This speech, made in absolute thoughtlessness, jarred somehow on Gertrude’s sensibilities.

  “I daresay there are many actresses as beautiful,” she said, rather unnecessarily. “I don’t think I should like her a bit. There was a man staying with us the other day who said she was perfectly reckless about what she did.”

  “Oh! a woman as beautiful as that can afford to be reckless,” said Reggie. “She sets the fashion.”

  “I don’t think recklessness is a good fashion to set, then,” said Gertrude, with some asperity.

  “Oh! nor do I,” said Reggie. “I only meant that one excuses it more, somehow.”

  “I don’t see why you should excuse it because a woman is beautiful,” said she, seeing the cloud rising out of the sea.

  “I don’t know,” said Reggie. “You must take a person all round; beauty is an advantage, and you set it off against a corresponding disadvantage.”

  “Do you mean that an incomparably beautiful woman is excusable if she does unpardonably nasty things?”

  “I suppose it comes to that in extremities,” said he, doubtfully. “You see, it is impossible to believe that such a woman could do anything quite unpardonable.”

  “Reggie, you’re absurd,” she cried; “don’t talk such utter nonsense, and be thankful I don’t believe you mean what you say.”

  Reggie turned round in surprise.

  “Why, Gerty, what’s the matter?” he asked.

  “You hurt me when you talk like that,” she said.

  “Oh! what have I been saying?” said he, with an air of perplexity. “You know the worst of me is, I never know what I’m talking about. When I begin talking I get dreadfully puzzled.”

  “Most people explain what they mean by talking, not obscure it.”

  “Well, it’s just the opposite way with me,” said he, serenely. “I know what I think all right before I begin to say it, but as soon as I begin to say it, I begin not to know what I think.”

  This confident assertion failed to satisfy Gertrude.

  “You said you didn’t mind a woman being immoral, if she was only beautiful,” she said.

  “Oh! I never said a word about immorality,” exclaimed Reggie. “I don’t think it’s right to talk about such things. Gerty, what do you mean. As if I should say such things to you, especially since I never think them at all.”

  The open candour of her lover’s face had its due effect.

  “Well, you’re quite sure you meant nothing of the sort, are you?” she asked, ready to be mollified.

  “Of course I am,” said he with sincerity. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “What did you say, then?”

  The cloud had begun to drift, but the horizon was not clear yet.

  “Oh! don’t ask me,” he said tragically. “I tell you I never know what I say, and I get so dreadfully confused. I said — Oh, Lord! what did I say. I said that an ugly woman — oh, dear! — that an ugly woman can’t do the things which, if a beautiful woman did, she wouldn’t be thought a beast,” he explained, with a fine disregard of coherency.

  “Oh! but, Reggie, that’s exactly what you said you didn’t say.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Reggie, who, though not exactly bored, wanted to talk about something else. “I said something about a beautiful woman being the fashion, which an ugly woman can’t be.”

  “What do you mean by the fashion?”

  “Why, I mean the fashion,” said Reggie; “the rage, the comme il something, the thing everybody else does — balloon sleeves and dachshunds, you know.”

  “Are you sure you only meant that sort of fashion?” asked she.

  “Oh! yes, of course I am. Oh! do let’s talk about something else.”

  But Gertrude was vaguely dissatisfied. The cloud had left a little drift of mist behind.

  And Reggie? Well Reggie’s cleanly, honest instincts gave him no directions on this subject; they drew in their feelers like sea anemones when a foreign substance touches them. A soul would have had a word or two to say to him about it, but Reggie unfortunately knew nothing about that.

  They sat silent for a minute or two, Reggie trying to think of something to say which should be sufficiently remote from this puzzling topic, Gertrude still rather troubled in her mind. In after years, she remembered that night as the first occasion on which a certain, vague pain had begun, the first of a series of blind pangs that stirred a new sort of feeling in her, that tore asunder some fibre in her inmost being. An elegant musing over devotional books is, as I have mentioned before, the accredited source of such an awakening.

  The unerring instinct of a lover in Reggie, divined, though very dimly, that some little change had taken place. He felt that Gertrude had felt something that he had not felt. In spite of his recent sense of irresponsibility, of utter contentedness on his own part, he could see that the edge had been taken, ever so slightly, off hers. You may observe something like this in the case of the more human animals. A dog sometimes will know that it does not understand, if the bond between itself and its human friend is very strong. Its inability to understand is something quite different; it is the knowledge of this inability that is rare, and Reggie felt this now.

  As is natural, he recovered himself first. After a twinge of pain, one is prone to sit quiet a minute or two, and regain one’s normal level. But the pain had been all on one side, and Gertrude required a little space to steady herself in.

  “Gerty, let’s play a game of some sort. Come and see what the others are going to do.”

  He got up and stood in front of her.

  “Pull me up,” she said.

  Her white hands lay in his great brown paws, like little patches of snow in some sheltered nook of the hills. But they were warm with life and love, and she was very fair. He bent down and kissed them gently, first one and then the other.

  “You sha’n’t kiss my hands,” she said. “Come, let’s go to the others.”

  The troubled look had gone from her face, but Mrs. Davenport, with a woman’s swift, infallible intuition, saw that something, ever so small, had happened. There was still in her eyes the shadow of a vague wonder.

  Ladies, I believe, have a bad habit of going to each other’s bedrooms when they are thought to have gone to bed, and sitting by the fire, talking things over. It is a bad plan to talk things over at night, because, while you are talking, there forms in the air, without your seeing it, a little grey ghost, to which your words give birth. There are no such
things as barren words; all words uttered by you go to make up a little series of figures, who come and talk to you when nobody else is there. And the sort of conversation that Gertrude and Mrs. Davenport had that night gave rise to a little, pale, anxious, grey ghost, that sat by Gertrude’s bedside, and, as soon as her body had had enough sleep — the ghost always allows his victims the necessary minimum — it tapped fretfully on her shoulder, and said, “Come, wake up, let us go on talking!” And Gertrude stirred in her dreamless sleep, and knew that the little ghost had come to talk to her.

  It is a time-honoured custom for an author to describe the personal appearance of any character when he decides to lay his reflections before a discriminating public, and the neglect of this custom is a red rag to the stupid, furious bull called criticism. So, since this little ghost’s personal appearance is only to be described by retailing the conversation which took place between Gertrude and Mrs. Davenport the night before, this obedient and peace-loving author complies with the eminently English demand.

  Gertrude was sitting before her fire in her dressing-gown, when Mrs. Davenport came in. Her eyes still wore a troubled look, and the pictures in the fire were not so pleasant as she had known them.

  Mrs. Davenport noticed it at once. It was the same look as she had seen before that evening, a little intensified.

  “Are you tired, dear?” she asked. “Would you rather I left you to go to bed instead of talking?”

  Gertrude looked up.

  “No, I want to talk very much.”

  “Gerty, dear, is anything the matter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a short silence. Mrs. Davenport was far too wise to press her. Then Gertrude said, —

  “Do you know Lady Hayes?”

  Mrs. Davenport was puzzled. The carrier-pigeon always takes a few wide circles before he sets out on his unerring flight home.