Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Bertie, in a short skirt and boots with enormous nails,” said Esther.

  “And why not? She may be a silly ass in some things, but she’s done something.”

  Bertie uncoiled all his yards of height and stood up.

  “You began,” he said. “I’m only answering you back. Lady Ayr has never done anything at all except talk about her family. She doesn’t think about anything but family: she’s the most antiquated and absurd type of snob there is. And your ridiculous brother John is exactly the same. You’re the most awful family, and make one long for grocers, like Nadine.”

  “Darling, what do you want a grocer for?” asked Dodo.

  But Berts had not finished yet.

  “And as for your brother Seymour, all that can be said about him is that he is a perfect lady,” he said, “but he ought to have been drowned when he was a girl, like a kitten.”

  Esther shouted with laughter.

  “Oh, Berts, I wish you would be roused oftener,” she said; “I absolutely adore you when you are roused. But you aren’t quite right about Seymour. He isn’t a lady any more than he’s a gentleman. And after all he has got a brain, a real brain.”

  “Well, it takes all sorts to make a world,” said Dodo, “and, Esther dear, I’m often extremely grateful to Seymour. He will always come to dinner at the very last moment—”

  “That’s because nobody else ever asks him,” said Bertie, still fizzing and spouting a little. “That’s one of the objections to marrying you, Esther, you will always be letting him come to dinner.”

  “Be quiet, Berts. As I say, he never minds how late he is asked, and he invariably makes himself charming to the oldest and plainest woman present. Here, for instance, he would be making himself pleasant to me.”

  “Poor chap!” said Berts, lighting another cigarette, and lying down again.

  A tray with some cold ham, a plate of strawberries, and a small jug of iced lemonade which had been ordered by Nadine for her mother was here brought in by a perfectly impassive footman, and placed on the bed between her and Nadine. No servants in Dodo’s house ever felt the smallest surprise at anything which was demanded of them, and if Nadine had at this moment asked him to wash her face, he would probably have merely said, “Hot or cold water, miss?”

  Nadine had not contributed anything to this discussion on Seymour, because she was almost inconveniently aware that she did not know what she thought about him. Certainly he had brains, and for brains she had an enormous respect.

  “Seeing things to eat always makes me feel hungry,” said Nadine, absently taking strawberries, “just as the sight of a bed makes me very wide-awake. It is called suggestion. Really the chief use of going to bed is that you are alone and have time to think.”

  “And that is so exhausting that I instantly go to sleep,” remarked Tommy.

  “You get — how do you call it — into training, if you practise, Tommy,” said Nadine. “People imagine that because they have a brain they can think. It isn’t so: you have to learn to think. You have a tongue, but you must learn to talk: you have arms and yet you must learn how to play your foolish golf.”

  “You don’t learn it, darling,” said Dodo.

  “Mama, you are eating ham and have not been following. Really it is so. Most people can’t think. Esther can’t: she confesses it.”

  “It’s quite true,” said Esther. “I felt full of ideas this morning, and so I went away all alone along the beach to think them out. But I couldn’t. There were my ideas all right, and that was all. I couldn’t think about them. There they were, ideas: just that, framed and glazed.”

  Tommy rose.

  “I’m worse than that,” he said. “I never have any ideas. In some ways it’s an advantage, because if we all had ideas, I suppose we should want to express them. As it is I am at leisure to listen.”

  Dodo took a long draught of lemonade.

  “I have one idea,” she said, “and that is that it’s bed-time. I shall go and exhaust myself with thought. The process of exhaustion does not take long. Besides, if I sit up much later than twelve, my maid always pulls my hair, and whips my head with the brush instead of treating me kindly.”

  “I should dismiss her,” said Nadine.

  “I couldn’t, dear. She is so imbecile that she would never get another situation. Ah, there’s Hugh! Hugh, did poor Algie Balearic-isles beat you?”

  A very large young man had just appeared in the doorway. He held in his hand a sandwich out of which he had just taken an enormous semi-circular bite. The rest of it was in his mouth, and he spoke with the mumbling utterance necessary to those who converse when their mouths are quite full.

  “Oh, is that where he comes from?” he asked.

  “No, my dear, that is where he went to; then of course since he is here he did come from them in a sense. Dear me, if he had been bishop there about fifty years earlier, he might have copied Chopin. How thrilling!”

  “Yes, the Isles won,” said Hugh, his voice clearing as he swallowed. “Oh, Aunt Dodo” — this again was a relationship founded only on affection— “he said your price was beyond rubies. So I said ‘What price rubies?’ and as he didn’t understand nor did I, we parted. What a lot of people there seems to be here! I came to talk to Nadine. Oh, there she is. Or would it be better taste if I didn’t? Perhaps it would. I shall go to bed instead.”

  “Then what you call taste is what I call peevishness,” said Nadine succinctly.

  “I don’t understand. What is better peevishness, then?”

  “You take me at the foot of the letter,” said she. “You see what I mean.”

  “Yes. I see that you mean ‘literally.’ But in any case there are too many people, chiefly upside down from where I am. That’s Esther, isn’t it, and Berts? Tommy is the right way up. Nadine upside down also.”

  Esther got up.

  “Why, of course, if you want to talk to Nadine, we’ll go,” she said.

  Bertie gave a long sigh.

  “I shall lie here,” he said, “like the frog-footman on and off for days and days—”

  “So long as you lie off now,” said Hugh.

  Bertie got up.

  “You can all come to my room if you like,” he said, “as long as you don’t mind my going to bed. Good-night, Nadine; thanks awfully for letting me lie down. It has made me quite sleepy.”

  Hugh Graves went to the window as soon as they had gone and threw it open.

  “The room smells of smoke and stale epigrams,” he said in explanation.

  “That’s not very polite, Hugh,” said she, “since I have been talking most, and not smoking least. But I suppose you will answer that you didn’t come here to be polite.”

  In a moment, even as the physical atmosphere of the room altered, so also did the spiritual. It seemed to Nadine that she and Hugh took hands and sailed through the surface foam and brightnesses in which they had been playing into some place which they had made for themselves, which was dim and sub-aqueous. The foam and brightness was all perfectly sincere, for she was never other than sincere, but it had no more than the sincerity of soap-bubbles.

  “No. I didn’t come here to be polite,” said Hugh, “though I didn’t come here to be rude. I came to ask you a couple of questions.”

  Nadine had lain down on the bed again, having put all the pillows behind her, so that she was propped up by them. Her arms were clasped behind her head, and the folds of her rainbow dressing-gown fell back from them leaving them bare nearly to the shoulder. The shaded light above her bed fell upon her hair, burnishing its gold, and her face below it was dim and suggested rather than outlined. The most accomplished of coquettes would, after thought, have chosen exactly that attitude and lighting, if she wanted to appear to the greatest advantage to a man who loved her, but Nadine had done it without motive. It may have been that it was an instinct with her to appear to the utmost advantage, but she would have done the same, without thought, if she was talking to a middle-aged dentist. Hu
gh had seated himself at some little distance from her, and the same light threw his face into strong line and vivid color. He had still something of the rosiness of youth about him, but none of youth’s indeterminateness, and he looked older than his twenty-five years. When he was moving, he moved with a boy’s quickness; when he sat still he sat with the steadiness of strong maturity.

  “You needn’t ask them,” she said. “I can answer you without that. The answer to them both is that I don’t know.”

  “How? Do you know the questions yet?” said he.

  “I do. You want to know whether my answer to you this evening is final. You want also to know why I don’t say ‘yes.’”

  His eyes admitted the correctness of this: he need not have spoken.

  “After all, there was not much divination wanted,” he said. “I am as obvious as usual. And you understand me as well as usual.”

  She shook her head at this, not denying it, but only deprecating it.

  “I always understand you too well,” she said. “If only I didn’t understand you, just as I don’t understand Seymour, you have suggested a reason for why I don’t say ‘yes.’ I think it is correct. Ah, don’t quote silly proverbs about love’s being complete understanding. Most of the proverbs are silly; Solomon was so old when he wrote them.”

  His mouth uncurled from its gravity.

  “That wasn’t one of Solomon’s,” he said.

  “Then it might have been. In any case exactly the opposite is true. If love is anything at all beyond the obvious physical sense of the word, it is certainly not understanding. It is the not-understanding—”

  “Mis-understanding?”

  “No. The not-understanding, the mysterious, the unaccountable—” Nadine gathered her legs up under her and sat clasping them round the knees, and her utterance grew more rapid. Her face, young and undeveloped, and white and exquisite, was full of eager animation.

  “That is what I feel anyhow,” she said. “Of course I can’t say ‘this is love’ and ‘this is not love,’ and label other people’s emotions. There is one way of love and another way of love, and another and another. There are as many modes of love, I suppose, as there are people who are capable of it. And don’t tell me everybody is capable of it. At least, tell me so if you like, but allow me to disagree. All I am certain of is that I look for something which you don’t give me. Perhaps I am incapable of love. And if I was sure of that, Hughie, I would marry you. Do you see?”

  She, as was always the case with her, made him forget himself. When he was with her, she absorbed his consciousness: his only desire was to follow her, not caring where she led. This desire to apprehend her corrugated his forehead into the soft wrinkles of youth, and narrowed his eyes.

  “Tell me why that is not a bad reason,” he said.

  “Because I should see that the highest would be denied me,” she said. “Look what quantities of people marry quite without love. I don’t refer to the obvious reason of marrying for position or wealth, but to the people who marry from admiration or from fear. Mama, for instance: she married Daddy because she was afraid of him. Then she learned he was a bogey with a brandy bottle.”

  “I am neither,” said he.

  Nadine gave a little sigh, and he saw his stupidity.

  “I am supplying the answer to my own question,” he said. “Another answer is that I don’t understand you.”

  Somehow to Nadine this was unexpected, but almost instantly she recognized the truth of it.

  “That is true,” she said. “I want to be the inferior, mentally, spiritually, of the man I marry. I am just the opposite of those terrible people who want a vote, and say they are the equal of men. That is so bourgeois an idea. What woman with any self-respect could stand being her husband’s equal if she felt herself capable of loving? It is that. You are too easy, Hugh. I understand you, and you don’t understand me. I wish it was the other way round.”

  “Oh, you do wish that?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course, my dear.”

  “Then you have answered the other question. Your answer to me to-day is not final. I’ll puzzle you yet.”

  “You speak of it all as if it was a conjuring trick,” she said. “Don’t make conjuring tricks. Don’t let me see your approaching engagement to somebody else be announced. That would not puzzle me at all. I shall simply see that it was meant to. Conjuring tricks don’t mystify you: you know you have been cheated and don’t care.”

  “No, I shan’t make conjuring tricks,” he said.

  Nadine unclasped her knees, and got up, and began walking to and fro across the big room.

  “Hugh, I wish I was altogether different,” she said. “I wish I was like one of those simple girls whom you never by any chance meet outside the covers of six-shilling novels. They are quite human, only no human girl was ever like them. They like music and food and sentiment and sea-bathing and playing foolish games, just as we all do. But there is nobody behind them: they are tastes without character. If only one’s character was nothing more than the sum total of one’s tastes, how extraordinarily simple it would all be. We should spend our lives in making ourselves pleasant and enjoying ourselves. But there is something that sits behind all our tastes, and though those tastes express it, they do not express it all, nor do they express its essence. I am something beyond and back of the things I like, and the people I like. Something inside me says ‘I want: I want.’ I daresay it wants the moon, and has as much chance of getting it as I have of reaching up into the sky and pulling it down. Oh, Hugh, I want the moon, and what will the moon be like? Will it be hard and cold or soft and warm? I don’t care. I shall slip it between my breasts and hold it close.”

  She paused a moment opposite him.

  “Am I talking damned rot?” she asked. “I daresay I am. I am a rotter then, because all I say is me. Another thing, too: morally, I am not in the least worthy of you. I don’t know any one who is. I don’t really, and I’m not flattering you, because I don’t rate the moral qualities very high. They are compatible with such low organizations. Earwigs, I read the other day, are excellent mothers. How that seems to alter one’s conception of the beauty of the maternal instinct! It does not alter my conception of earwigs in the least, and I shall continue to kill any excellent mothers that I find in my room.”

  Hugh laughed suddenly and uproariously and then became perfectly grave again.

  “Your moral organization is probably extremely low,” he said. “But I settled long ago to overlook that.”

  “Ah, there we are again,” said Nadine. “You deliberately propose to misconceive me, with the kindest intentions I know, but with how wrong a principle. You shut your eyes to me, as if — as if I was a smut! You settle to overlook the fact that I have no real moral perception. Could you settle to overlook the fact if I had no nose and only one tooth? I assure you the lack of a moral nature is a more serious defect. But, poor devil that I am, how was I to get one? We were talking about heredity before you came in—”

  Nadine paused a moment.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I was telling them that there was no truth in heredity. We will now take the other side of the question. How was I, considering my family, to have moral perceptions?”

  “Are you being quite consistent?” asked Hugh.

  “Why should I be consistent? Who is consistent except those simple people whom you buy so many of for six shillings, and they are consistently tiresome. How, I said, was I to have got moral perception? There is Daddy! If I was a doctor I would certify any one to be insane who said Daddy was a moral organism. There is darling Mama! I would horse-whip any one who said the same of her, for his gross stupidity and insolence. The result is me; I am more pagan than Heliogabalus. I do not think that anything is right or that anything is wrong. I want the moon, but I am afraid you are not the man in it.”

  “And now you are flippant.”

  “Flippant, serious, moral, immoral,” cried Nadine, “do not label me like lu
ggage. You will tell me my destination next, shall we call it Abraham’s bosom? Dear Hugh, you enrage me sometimes. Chiefly you enrage me because you have such an angelic temper yourself. I am not sure that an angelic temper is an advantage: it is always set fair, and there are no surprises. Ah, how it all leads round to that: there are no surprises: I understand you too well. I am very sorry. Do me the justice to believe that. Really I believe that I am as sorry that I can’t marry you as you are.”

  Hugh got up.

  “I don’t think I do quite believe that,” he said. “And now as regards the immediate future. I think I shall go away to-morrow.”

  This time he succeeded in surprising her.

  “Himmel, but why?” she said.

  “If you understood me as well as you say, you would know,” he said. “I don’t find my own heart a satisfactory diet. Of course, if I thought you would miss me—”

  Nadine was quite silent for a moment.

  “You shall go if you like, of course,” she said. “But you do me the most frightful injustice: you understand nothing about me if you think I should not miss you. You cannot be so dull as not to know that I should miss you more than if everybody else went, literally everybody, leaving me alone. But go if you wish.”

  She walked across to the window, which Hugh had thrown open, and leaned out. A moon rode high in mid-sky, and to the West a quarter of a mile away and far below the sea glimmered like a shield of dim silver. Below the window the ground sloped sharply away down to the gray tumbled sand dunes that fringed the coast, and all lay blurred and melted under the uncertain light. And when she turned round again Hugh saw that her eyes were blurred and melted also.