Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  It was as a serviceable though savage brute that Eva employed her anger against her husband; she spurred it and lashed it into fury, but never gave it its head. That cruel, governed anger of women is a very terrible thing; the hot, blustering anger of a man is like a squib that bursts and jumps here and there, sometimes singeing its immediate surroundings and, perhaps, breaking something, but it wastes its force in childish, cracker-like explosions that hurt nothing but sensitive nerves, which regard such exhibitions as a lamentable want of taste. But Eva’s anger could not have offended the most fastidious; it gave no annoying little bangs, no unexpected leaps, no fizzing, no unmomentous crackling; it was still, deep, intense, not pleasant to fight with.

  Eva and Jim sat in the little courtyard for some half-hour more, which was rather a hard burden for the young man. To Eva it appeared to be no effort to talk as usual. She had required just one moment in which to steady herself, to dismount her quivering, indignant steed, and then for her, as she had told her husband, it was over. She had been angry, furious, insulted, and she had used the whip with a vengeance. The offence and the punishment were past, and she threw the whip into a corner. But Jim was silent, which was not altogether unnatural. He had no taste for scenes, and his great coup, his ace of trumps, which, to his shame, had been forced from him, seemed to have fallen very flat. He had played it, and Eva had seen it, but that was all — it had simply been wasted. Naturally enough he felt he had spoiled his hand. Eva had laughed at him, but she had not been offended. Surely such an attitude was almost unprecedented.

  When she went upstairs half-an-hour later, she turned into her husband’s room to get a book she wanted, and found him sitting by the window, as if expecting her. He rose as she entered, and stood like a servant waiting for orders. But Eva gave no orders, and, having found her book, only remarked that it was growing a little chilly. He did not reply, and she turned to look at him. There was something miserably shrunken about his appearance which was rather pitiful.

  “You look tired,” she said. “I should go to bed if I were you.”

  He did not meet her eyes, but continued to look out of the window.

  “It has been a terrible night,” he said.

  Eva frowned.

  “It has been nothing of the sort,” she said. “Don’t be absurd, Hayes. You made a very bad mistake; you did not treat me in the way I wish to be treated, and I was intensely angry with you. But I assure you I am angry no longer. It is quite over, as far as I am concerned. Don’t let us quarrel more than is necessary. Just now, it is quite unnecessary to quarrel.”

  Lord Hayes had a certain potentiality for being malignant.

  “It is not the quarrelling,” he said; “it is the mutual position that I find we occupy to each other.”

  She grew a little impatient.

  “Let that be enough,” she said. “We only waste words.”

  She came a step nearer to him, and laid her hand on his shoulder, as if he had been a woman, or she a man.

  “Come,” she said, “be sensible. There is nothing more to say about it. You had better go to bed. Good-night!”

  CHAPTER IV.

  The little grey ghost which visited Gertrude Carston in the early morning, soon became a habitué of her waking hours. He was a very importunate little ghost, and having once been given the entrée, he concluded that he was always welcome. But, though he was unpleasant enough at the time, he was slightly medicinal in character, or rather, not so much medicinal as health-giving. He did not exactly correct existing defects, but opened fresh springs within her. So far, however, he was medicinal, in that he was operative after the dose, which always continued bitter to the taste. But the bitterness was a good bitterness, and occasioned not discontent with Reggie, but discontent with herself, and it is always worth a good deal of bitterness to become wholesomely, not morbidly, discontented with oneself. She began to see in her nature unsuspected limitations, a thing quite as salutary, though not perhaps so pleasant, as the sight of unsuspected distances. A consciousness of unsuspected distance is liable to breed content, which is more injurious to the average mind — and she was quite average — than the discouraging discovery of a near horizon of unsuspected limitations, for the latter cause a revolt of something within us — which some call pride, and others spiritual aspiration — which refuses to acquiesce, and insists on those limitations becoming merely landmarks and milestones.

  And, indeed, to see such a limitation is a long step towards correcting it. The young mind, to which growth is as natural as it is to the young body, if it has any of that irrepressible, unconscious elasticity, which is the main characteristic of its divine remoteness from age, will never acquiesce in a limitation it sees. It will, somehow or other, clamber over that horizon’s rim, and though it may get many a fall, though it may be benighted and foot-sore and weary, that same divine youthfulness, which heals its physical fibres when they are bruised or cut, will repair its mental fibres. Its potentialities for recuperation are as strong as its refusal to be bounded. Youth may be crude, exaggerated, headstrong, but when the advocates of a temperate and bloodless senility have said all they can against it, they must confess that it is young.

  What made this inward struggle so trying to Gertrude was, that she was unable, from the essential nature of it, to guess what was happening. All she knew was the sense of tangible limitations and dim tracts beyond, and an imperative necessity to flounder, as best she could, towards them. But she found much comfort in her love for Reggie, and in the knowledge of his love for her; she felt as if she was following some thin golden thread through a maze of bewildering twilight, but while that was secure in her hand, the maze and the twilight and the bewilderment were comparatively unimportant.

  The Davenports had moved up to London in April, and Gertrude was with them again for a week before she went abroad to Aix with her mother in May. Mrs. Carston was a weak, fretful invalid, who always insisted on her daughter’s cheerful and robust support while she went through a course of somewhat unnecessary baths and massages. The great city was just beginning to settle down to its great effort of amusing itself for three months, and the Morning Post recorded, morning by morning, some fresh additions to the big fair. The Davenports, in virtue of Mr. Davenport’s modest contribution to the task of governing the nation, had been duly entered on the books for the year, and their blinds in Grosvenor Square testified to the accuracy of the announcement.

  Reggie and Gertrude were sitting in the dining-room about half-past ten one morning. Reggie was apt to treat breakfast as a movable feast, and this morning he had been out riding till after ten, and had only just come back. It was a hot, bright day, and he had taken the liberty, which had broadened down from precedent to custom, to ride in a straw hat. This particular straw hat was new, and had a very smart I. Z. ribbon round it, and Gertrude was seeing how it would look on her. She was suffering from a slight cold, and had not gone out with him, but she found it pleasant enough to wait, after she had finished breakfast, and skim the daily papers till he returned.

  She was deeply absorbed in the total disappearance of a French poodle when Reggie entered after dressing, and she laid down the paper to pour out tea for him.

  “The Row was fuller this morning,” said he, “and the Parliamentary train was in great force.”

  “What’s the Parliamentary train?”

  “Oh! the string of people who walk up and down very slowly, with a row of grooms behind; you know the sort.”

  “Any one there you knew?”

  “Yes; several people. Gerty, give me another bit of sugar. Percy was there, looking for his sister. Apparently they’ve come back. Jim Armine was there too, also looking for Percy’s sister.”

  “Lady Hayes?”

  “Yes,” said Reggie, eating steadily on. “I went and looked too. But we couldn’t find her. By the way, Percy wants us to go there to lunch.”

  Gertrude had a sudden sense that all this had happened before, that she was going to act aga
in in a rather distasteful scene. She had a sudden, instinctive desire not to go there, a quite irrational dislike to the idea.

  “Oh! I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got a cold.”

  Reggie looked up innocently.

  “Oh! I’m so sorry for not asking. Is it worse? Poor dear!”

  Gertrude had a quite unusual dislike of white, excusable lies.

  “No, it’s not worse; it’s rather better,” she said.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Oh! I don’t want to, Reggie,” she said. “I want to go to the concert at St. James’. They’re going to do the Tannhäuser overture.”

  “That’s Wagner, isn’t it?” said Reggie, doubtfully. “I think Wagner is ugly.”

  “Oh, you exceedingly foolish boy,” said Gertrude. “You might as well call a storm at sea ugly.”

  “I don’t care,” said Reggie, “I think it is hideous. Besides, I want to go to the Hayes.”

  “Oh, well, then you just sha’n’t,” said Gertrude. “Really, I want to go awfully to this.”

  “But it’ll be much worse for your cold than going out to lunch.”

  “Oh, I give up my cold,” said she. “I haven’t got one, really.”

  Reggie ate marmalade attentively.

  “Do take me to the concert,” said Gertrude. “I’m going away in two days. You can go and lunch with the Hayes then. It’s a waste of time going out to lunch.”

  “You see, I promised to go to the Hayes,” he said.

  “Oh, nonsense! Send a note to say you have got to go to the concert. It’s quite true; you have got to go.”

  “Of course, if I have got to—” said he slowly.

  “That’s right. It begins at three, doesn’t it? No; don’t say we can do both, because it is quite impossible. You’re very good to me, Reggie.”

  Gertrude felt intensely relieved, but she could not have told why. There had been something in the conversation she had held with Reggie, six months before, on the subject of Eva, which remained in her mind, and gave her a sense, not of danger, but of distrust. A sensitive mind need not, usually is not, the most analytical, and for this reason, to apply analysis to her unwillingness to see Eva, would yield either no results, or false ones. There is an instinct in animals which enables them to discriminate between their friends and their foes, and the keener that instinct is, the more instantaneous it is in its working. The anatomist can tell us the action of the heart with almost absolute accuracy; he can say how the blood gets oxydised in the lungs, how it feeds the muscles and works the nerves — but the one thing he cannot tell us is, why it does so. And these instincts, like the action of the heart, can be noted and expressed, but the reason of their working we shall not know just yet. An action may be pulled to pieces like a flower, and divided into its component parts, and labelled with fifty crack-jaw names, but the life of the flower ceases not to be a delicate, insoluble mystery to us.

  Reggie was very fond of music, but it was compatible, or rather essential, that his particular liking for it prompted him to say that Wagner seemed to him to be “awfully ugly.” Nor was it such a far cry that he should assert, that same evening to Gertrude, that he had thought the “Overture to Tannhäuser” “awfully pretty.”

  Gertrude had been rather silent as they drove back. But something had prompted her to say to Reggie that evening, as they sat in the drawing-room before dinner:

  “Ah! Reggie, I am so glad you are good.”

  Reggie’s powers of analysis were easily baffled, and it is no wonder that he felt puzzled.

  “I don’t like bad people,” he said.

  “Nor do I, a bit,” said Gertrude. “I am glad you don’t either. I thought of that this afternoon at the concert.”

  “Oh! I listened to the music,” said Reggie. “I liked it awfully.”

  “Yes, I know, but it suggested that to me. Half of the overture — all that rippling part seemed so wicked. I think Wagner must have been a bad man. He evidently meant it to be much more attractive than the other.”

  “I don’t see how you can say some parts are wicked and some good. It’s all done on the fiddles, you know.”

  Gertrude laughed.

  “I hope you’ll never understand, then,” she said. “I prefer you as you are. After all, that matters a great deal.”

  The gong had sounded, and Mrs. Davenport, as she entered the room, heard the last words.

  “What doesn’t Reggie understand?” she asked.

  “Gertrude said she thought some of the overture was wicked,” said he, “and I said I didn’t know what she meant. Is it very stupid of me?”

  Mrs. Davenport looked up quickly at Gertrude.

  “No, dear; I think it’s very wise of you,” she said.

  Reggie jumped up.

  “I didn’t know I was ever wise,” he said. “It’s really a delightful discovery. Thank you, mummy. Gerty, you’ll have to respect me for ever, now you know I’m wise. I shall invest in a sense of dignity.”

  “I never said you were wise,” remarked Gertrude, “and I refuse to be responsible for any opinions but my own.”

  “Oh, I’ll be responsible,” murmured Mrs. Davenport.

  Reggie looked from one to the other with the air of an intelligent dog.

  “I daresay it’s all right,” he said, “but I don’t know what it’s all about.”

  “Oh! Reggie, you do understand,” said Gertrude; “don’t be ridiculous.”

  Reggie looked at her with the most genuine frankness.

  “I don’t understand a word, but I should like you to explain it very much.”

  Gertrude frowned and turned away to greet Jim Armine, who was dining with them. The vague pain which she had felt before was with her now. Somehow, she and Reggie seemed to have got on to different levels. It was his moral, not his intellectual, understanding which appeared to her every now and then as almost entirely wanting. What puzzled her was that she had been entirely unconscious of any such defect till a few months ago, and her present knowledge of it struck her somehow as not being the natural outcome of increased intimacy, but rather as if her own moral understanding, by which she judged Reggie, had been developed and showed the want of it in him. But here again the vague instinctiveness of the feeling in her mind precluded analysis. All she knew was that she viewed things rather differently from him, and that this difference had not always been there. But pity is akin to love, and love, when joined with pity, is not less love, but love joined to the most human protective instinct, which, if anything, adds tenderness to passion.

  Jim Armine had been lunching with the Hayes, and brought a minatory message for Reggie. Why had he said he would come to lunch and bring Miss Carston, and then never turned up.

  Reggie behaved in the most unchivalrous manner.

  “It was all Gerty’s fault,” he said. “She made me go to hear music.”

  “But you wrote to say so, didn’t you, Reggie?”

  Reggie began to wish he had taken the blame on himself.

  “Yes, I wrote,” he said.

  “And forgot to send it,” interpolated Mrs. Davenport. “Reggie, you are simply abominable. You must go to call, and explain.”

  “Oh, you can write a note to say how sorry you are,” said Gertrude, suddenly.

  The remark was insignificant enough, but to Gertrude it was the outcome of a feeling not at all insignificant. She felt as if she had inadvertently said something she did not mean to say, without reflecting that, to the others, the words were capable of a much less momentous interpretation. She looked up quickly at Mrs. Davenport, fearing for a moment that her self-betrayal was patent. Mrs. Davenport also remembered at the moment a certain conversation which she and Gertrude had had one night some months ago, and their eyes met. That look puzzled the elder woman; she had not fathomed Gertrude’s feeling on the subject of Lady Hayes, when she spoke to her about her, and the mystery remained still unsolved. The idea that Gertrude was in any way the prey of a jealous fear was too ridiculous
to be entertained.

  The Dowager Lady Hayes, who was staying with them, entered somewhat opportunely at this moment, followed by Mr. Davenport, and they all went in to dinner. That veteran lady appeared to be in a state of mind which, when it occurs in children, is called fractiousness.

  She always took a homœopathic dose in globular form before dinner, which was placed in a little wooden box by her place, but to-night the dose had not been set out, and she disconcerted everybody horribly by saying, during the first moment of silence, inevitable, when English people meet to dine together, and in a voice of stentorian power, —

  “My dinner pills.”

  A hurried consultation took place among the flunkies, and, after a few moments’ search, the box was found, and handed to her on a salver. Old Lady Hayes held them up a moment and rattled them.

  “Pepsine,” she announced; “obtained from the gastric juices of pigs. An ostrich couldn’t eat the food we eat, and at these hours, without suffering from indigestion. I would sooner eat a box of tin tacks than an ordinary English dinner at half-past eight, without my pepsine.”

  Mrs. Davenport cast a responsible eye over the menu, which, to the ordinary mind, appeared sufficiently innocent. She was always divided between the inclination to laugh and to be polite when dealing with Lady Hayes, which produced an inability to say anything.

  Eva, as we have seen, adopted a different method; she neither laughed nor was she polite, but she was respectfully insolent, which is a very different matter. The utter indifference of her manner produced a sort of chemical affinity in those widely-sundered qualities, just as electricity produces a chemical affinity between oxygen and hydrogen, which turns them into pure water, though both gases seem sufficiently remote, to the unchemical mind, from their product.