Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Marie reached out her hand for her ivory silver-handled stick, which had fallen by her chair.

  “Come and stroll for half an hour before dinner,” she said. “See whether I am not right about the antidote to people which one can find in the country.”

  He rose, too.

  “But who has been poisoning you in town?” he asked.

  “Who? The six million people who live there. No, I will except you. I do not find you are poisonous here, at least.”

  “Thank you. But what have you done with yourself these three days?”

  “Ah, that is the secret of the country! In town one has to do things one’s self; the country does them all for you. You sit and you walk; you pick long feathery pieces of grass, and chew them like a cow; you think very intently for long periods, and at the end find that you have been thinking about nothing whatever. There is nothing so restful; and I have been wanting rest. I was a good deal worried about a certain matter before I left town.”

  He looked at her.

  “I will subscribe to any institution that will guarantee you freedom from worry,” he said.

  “That is very kind of you, but the only way your institution could be of use would be by giving me a painless death; and I do not wish to die at all. No, you must spend your money some other way. Talking of that, have you made up your mind to stand for Parliament? It looks as if I accused you prospectively of bribery and corruption. I do not mean to.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about that. That was — one of the reasons why I came down to-day. I have been asked to stand for East Surrey, but by the Liberals.”

  She stopped suddenly.

  “By the Liberals?” she said. “That will come as a great surprise to your friends, will it not?”

  “Possibly. Of course, rich people are as a rule Conservative; in fact, it seems sufficient for a man that he should acquire a large fortune to make a Conservative of him. Personally I detest party politics, though no doubt they are a necessity. For myself, I only recognise one party just now, whose sole object is efficiency, not effectiveness.”

  She resumed walking again, with a quicker pace.

  “Have you told Jack?” she asked.

  “Yes. He approves warmly. He added, however, that he couldn’t do anything for me, that he was bound to do all he could against me, in fact, during the election. That must be so. He is the land-owner here and a Conservative, and he does not see sufficient reason for ratting. There is nowhere to rat to, he says.”

  “I know Jack’s view. He thinks both parties are in a hopeless state, but, belonging to one, he has no reason to join the other. Dear me, Jim, this is news! You have a subject in South Africa; so if the Conservatives get in, you will, I suppose, be among those who make it warm for them.”

  “I have no intention of taking politics up as a recreation,” he said; “it is to be my profession, you understand.” He paused a moment. “That is, given I get in.”

  Instantly her woman’s pride in the man awoke.

  “Of course you will get in!” she said; and not till she had said it did she know what she said, for no sense of his political fitness had prompted it, only her love for him.

  They walked on a little way in silence, past the end of the riband bed, and into the rose-garden beyond.

  “Yes, there is a cry for efficiency,” he said. “John Bull is touched in his tender point, which is his purse. The tax-payer wants to know what he is getting for his increased income-tax, and the fact that he puts only one lump of sugar instead of two into his two instead of three cups of tea. He accepts the necessity, I believe, quite willingly; but as a shareholder in that very large concern, the British Empire, he wishes to see the balance-sheet, with explanations. So many millions for the South African War seem to him a large item. He does not dispute it, but he wants to have details given him, and through the mouths of his representatives he proposes to see that he gets them.”

  “That is called an unpatriotic attitude,” remarked Marie with singular acidity.

  “Ah, you are a Liberal, too! Of course Jack is.”

  “Certainly, if you take the utterance of the Conservative leaders as official. Jack, for instance, looks upon the Boer War as a war with a Power that was no Power at all, but the Government officially alludes to it as ‘the great Boer War.’ There is the party note. Oh, there is no such strong Conservative as the man who has once been a Radical! Conversion is always followed by exaggeration.”

  Marie stopped, plucked a couple of tea-roses and pinned them into the front of her dress. Then, looking up, she saw his eyes fixed on her face, and though they both had been speaking honestly about a subject that honestly interested them, she knew how superficial their talk had been; speeches had been made correctly, but automatically — no more. She was glad to know about his future plans; he, on his side, liked to speak of them, for, as he said, he was going to make a profession of politics. But they had both been talking “shop”; and as she raised her eyes to his, “shop” became suddenly impossible.

  “Another rose,” he said, “and give it me.”

  She did not answer. Then she drew one from the two she had fastened in her dress.

  “Flowers to a friend,” she said, holding it out to him. “It is an Italian proverb, Jim. Do you know the response?”

  “You will tell it me.”

  “And honour from the friend,” she replied.

  He was cut to the quick, yet a phantom of self-justification was up in arms.

  “When did I not give you that?” he said.

  “You have always given it me,” she answered. “Give it me every hour, Jim, until I cease entirely to deserve it.”

  Thereat he bent and kissed her hand.

  CHAPTER XII

  In the course of the next week or so Lady Brereton began to almost believe the slander that she had herself sown over the very congenial soil of London drawing-rooms; but though the town was soon as thick with it as is a cornfield in May with the green springing spears, she was afraid that her amiable object of revenging herself on Marie for the ill turn she had done her in the matter of Maud’s marriage had not been blessed with the success which that masterly design deserved. Indeed, had she not known from Jack that he had told his wife what he had overheard at the “Deuce of Spades,” Mildred could not have believed that Marie knew anything at all about it, so utterly unaltered was her demeanour to the world at large, and in particular to Jim Spencer. They were constantly together, but, somehow, Marie’s attitude to him and his to her seemed in the eyes of people in general to contradict every moment the possibility of there being any dessous des cartes at all; in fact, Mildred’s springing blades had rather the appearance of having been sown on stony ground: they seemed to her eye to look curiously without stamina. Yet, as already stated, although in less than the traditional nine days the world in general had ceased to concern itself with so misbegotten a scandal, Lady Brereton almost began to believe it herself. Her own invention, in fact, appeared probable to her; but its effect on Marie, from which she had hoped so much, was entirely unfruitful.

  Lady Ardingly about this time, like an old war-horse now turned out to grass, had begun to prick up her ears at the trumpets which resounded through the land on the approach of the General Election. She, like many other people, had a great belief in Jack’s powers of awakening the Government from the self-congratulatory torpor which had fallen on them.

  “They sit in a somnolent circle,” she said to him one day, “and awake at intervals to shake hands with each other; then they go to sleep again. Ardingly, perhaps, is the most sensible. He sleeps as soundly as anybody, but he doesn’t congratulate his noble colleagues.”

  Jack laughed.

  “I almost wish I had always been a Liberal,” he said.

  “You always have been,” said she; “but now is not the time to say so. Get your seat in the Cabinet, Jack; the Conservative Cabinet is the only opening for a Liberal nowadays. That is where Mr. Spencer makes his mistake. To be
a Liberal, however prominent, is nowadays to be perfectly ineffective. You are put in a box and locked up, and the key is put in the key-basket at — well, at a certain country-house. But if you are a Conservative you are let out and given your own key. That is your chance.”

  “And if they don’t give me a seat in the Cabinet?”

  “There will be no question about that. They do not like you, but they are afraid of you. The country, on the other hand, likes you a good deal. You have a way with plebeians. I don’t know how you manage it. They think you are a practical man, and just now they want practical men, and they intend to get them. But you will have to be very careful about certain things. I wanted to talk to you about those; that was why I sent for you to have lunch with me alone. People were coming, but, in fact, I put them off. We will go to my room.”

  Lady Ardingly rose, and Jack followed her. He was not quite sure that he would like what was coming, but he was far too sensible to quarrel with her, for he considered her quite the worst person in the world to quarrel with.

  “Yes, I am going to speak plainly,” she said. “It is, I think, certain that you will be offered the War Office. Now, you have a very clever wife, who will be admirably useful to you; but you have a great friend who is stupider than a mule, with all her soi-disant brilliance. She is au fond a really vulgar woman, and it is vulgar people who make the stupid mistakes. She has already made one, which might have damaged you seriously, but I do not think it will. Of that presently. I was saying that they will probably give you the War Office; but you cannot with any usefulness retain the post for a day if there is a scandal connected with you — a scandal, that is to say, of the wrong sort.”

  Jack leaned forward in his chair.

  “I don’t know why I do not resent this, Lady Ardingly,” he said, “or why I do not leave the room; but I do neither.”

  “Because you are a selfish, or at any rate an ambitious man,” she said. “Every one who is worth his salt is. Now I will put names to my advice.”

  She paused a moment to take some coffee, and waited till the man had left the room.

  “Mildred is a very vulgar woman,” she said, “and her vulgarity shows itself in the nature of her mistakes. Silly Billy came here the other day, and I asked him about his scene with you. You did not score there, and if he had not been a clever little fellow in a small sort of bird-like manner, you would have involved yourself in a row of monstrous proportions. He managed you in his microscopical way very successfully. That is so. He also told me that it was Mildred who had suggested that absurd canard to him. There is the stupidity of the woman. There was no grain of sense in it all. Nobody who knows, would believe such things about Marie for ten days together. But supposing some gutter-rag of a paper had got hold of it! The wife of the man who was in the running for the Cabinet prosecuting an intrigue with the Liberal candidate of his division of Surrey! How charming! If I had wanted to ruin you, I should have tried to think of something as damaging as that. If I had thought of that I should have been quite content. Did you not see that, my poor fellow?”

  “We did not know he was standing at the time,” said Jack rather feebly.

  “Doubtless. But the secret of success in this world is not to make blunders where one does not know. Any one can avoid blunders if he knows everything. In any case, here is the position. It is sedulously circulated that your wife has an intrigue with Jim Spencer. And who circulates it? This cook! Luckily I did something to stop people talking.”

  “What was that?”

  “I told them I happened to know that Mildred had quarrelled with your wife, and had invented this story out of revenge. That is the case, is it not?”

  “It certainly happens to be true. But I don’t see how you knew.”

  “I guessed it was so,” said Lady Ardingly. “It was the only reasonable supposition. There is not another which holds water. Besides, if it had not been true, what does it matter? Now, this is the first way in which Mildred might have ruined you. The second concerns you also.”

  “I don’t think we need discuss that,” said Jack, who kept his temper only by the knowledge that he would lose a great deal more if he lost it.

  “But we had better. You are a decent fellow, Jack; also it will amuse me to see you in the Cabinet, which I shall not, unless you are careful. Now, you have had an affair with Mildred for many years. At least, so we all suppose; that we all suppose it is the important thing. I do not mind that, morally speaking, because I am in no way responsible for your morals. It is your own business. She happens to stimulate you. Everybody knows about it except one person — your wife. Now, why not tell her?”

  “For what reason?” asked Jack, far too much surprised to resent anything.

  “Simply for fear she should find out, and — and blow your ships out of the water!” said Lady Ardingly. “You have fallen into a grave mistake. You have treated your wife as a negligible quantity, whereas hardly anybody is a negligible quantity, and certainly not she. That is by the way. At present we are considering your career. Now, if Marie finds out, either while you are still not yet in the Cabinet, or even after that, before you have made yourself clearly felt to be indispensable, you go. For if the middle class gets hold of a scandal about a Minister, not yet proven, that man is beyond hope. He cannot weather the storm. The middle class, who are, after all, the people, distrust his public measures because they disapprove of his private life.”

  “Idiotic on their part,” observed Jack.

  “No doubt; but the cause of success is to estimate correctly and to take advantage of the idiocy of others. None of us are clever in the way Napoleon was clever. All we can do is to be slightly less idiotic than the rest of mankind. Now you must go. I have a hundred things to do and a thousand people to see. If I can be of any further help to you, let me know.”

  Jack got up, then paused, indecisive.

  “You mean you will tell Marie?” he asked.

  “If you wish me to. But there is a simpler plan.”

  “What is that?” asked Jack.

  “Show Mildred the door — the back-door,” she added.

  “I can’t.”

  “Very good; that is your affair,” said she. “But make up your mind soon what you will do. Any line is better than none, as it was always.”

  At the moment a footman entered.

  “Ask her to wait in the drawing-room,” said Lady Ardingly, before he had spoken. Then, without pausing: “Good-bye, Jack. Send me a line; or we shall meet at Ascot, shall we not?”

  Jack hesitated a moment.

  “She is very obstinate,” he said.

  “Your wife?” asked Lady Ardingly.

  “No; the person you asked to wait in the drawing-room.”

  Lady Ardingly laughed. She never minded being found out.

  “So am I,” she said. “Don’t meet her on the stairs.”

  “Oh, I am not a fool!” said Jack, almost with gaiety.

  “That may be true. But do not take your own wisdom as a working hypothesis,” said that immovable woman.

  After he had left, Lady Ardingly proceeded to take her maximum exercise for the day. This consisted in walking four times up and down the long gallery of portraits which ran by the reception-rooms. It was nearly a hundred yards in length, and as she stopped once to swallow a small digestive pill, which was presented to her with a wine-glass of water by her maid, it was nearly ten minutes before she returned to her room and sent a message that the person who was waiting should be shown up. The interval sufficed to pull her auburn wig straight and settle herself with her back to the light.

  Mildred was more accustomed to be waited for than to wait, and neither Lady Ardingly’s message that she wished to see her at 3.30 nor the period of inaction in this drawing-room had improved a naturally irritable temper. Her determination, in fact, when the tardy summons came, was to be very effusive and full of engagements — a delighted-to-see-you — how-well-you-are-looking — such-a-pleasure — must-go attitude. La
dy Ardingly often rubbed her up the wrong way, but she more often gave her advice which, when she was cool, she knew to be right. She conjectured, if no more, that the subject which was going to be discussed was Jack, but was more than half decided not to discuss it. In her mind, in fact, she labelled Lady Ardingly as an impotent old meddler. Thus she entered.

  “Ah, my dear,” said Lady Ardingly, “you have been kept waiting, I am afraid. It was an idiotic footman, who thought I was engaged, and did not tell me you were here. How are you, Mildred?”

  Mildred sat down. Her dress rustled incredulously.

  “Driven,” she said— “simply driven! How foolish one is to make a hundred engagements a day, and not enjoy any because one is always thinking about the next!”

  “Yes, very foolish,” said Lady Ardingly, “especially when one does not enjoy them. Now tell me the news, dear Mildred. I do not go out and I see nobody. You are always everywhere. I never saw a woman who sat in the mainspring so much. Tell me all about everybody.”

  Insensibly Mildred felt mollified. She knew perfectly well that, though Lady Ardingly did not rush about to see everybody, it was only because everybody rushed about to see her; but still there was to her a faint aroma of compliment about the speech. She disentangled a misshapen Yorkshire terrier from her muff.

  “Who, for instance?” she said. “Now, Jack — he is a friend of yours, I know.”

  “Of both of ours,” said Lady Ardingly with an intonation far more confirmatory, than correcting.