Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Oh, is Nadine telling John what she thinks?” she asked.

  “Nadine is!” said Tommy.

  Nadine meantime collected her thoughts. When she talked she ascertained for herself beforehand what she was going to say. In that respect she was unlike her mother, who ascertained what she thought when she found herself saying it. But the result in both cases had the spontaneous ring.

  “John, somehow or other you are a dear,” she said, “though we find you detestable. You think, anyhow. That gives you the badge. Anybody who thinks—”

  Hugh, like Mr. Longfellow with his arrow, flung his racquet into the air, without looking where it went. He had a moment previously sent a fast drive into the corner of the court, which raised whitewash in a cloud, and won him the set.

  “Nadine, are you administering the oath of the clan?” he said. “You haven’t consulted either Berts or me.”

  Nadine looked pained.

  “Did you really think I was admitting poor John without consulting you?” she said. “Though he complies with the regulations.”

  Hugh, streaming with the response that a healthy skin gives to heat, threw himself down on the grass.

  “I vote against John!” he said. “I would sooner vote for Seymour. And I won’t vote for him. Also, it is surely time to go and bathe.”

  “I don’t know what you are all talking about,” said John. “I daresay it doesn’t matter. But what is the clan?”

  Hugh sat up.

  “The clan is nearly prigs,” he said, “but not quite. But you are, quite. We are saved because we do laugh at ourselves—”

  “And you are not saved because you don’t,” added Nadine.

  “And is the whole object of the clan to think?” asked John.

  “No, that is the subject. Also you speak as if we all had said, ‘Let there be a clan, and it was so,’” said Nadine. “You mustn’t think that. There was a clan, and we discovered it, like Newton and the orange.”

  “Apple, surely,” said John.

  Nadine looked brilliantly round.

  “I knew he would say that,” she said. “You see you correct what I say, whereas a clansman would be content to understand what I mean.”

  “Bishop Algie is clan, by the way,” said Hugh. “I went down to bathe before breakfast, and found him kneeling down on the beach saying his prayers. That is tremendously clannish.”

  “I don’t see why,” said John.

  Esther sighed.

  “No, of course you wouldn’t see,” she said.

  “Try him with another,” said Nadine.

  Esther considered.

  “Attend, John,” she said. “When the last Stevenson letters came out, Berts bought them and looked at one page. Then he took a taxi to Paddington and took a return ticket to Bristol.”

  “Swindon,” said Berts.

  “The station is immaterial, so long as it was far away. I daresay Swindon is quite as far as Bristol.”

  John smiled.

  “There you are quite wrong,” he said. “Swindon comes before Bath, and Bristol after Bath. No doubt it does not matter, though it is as well to be accurate.”

  Esther looked at him with painful anxiety.

  “But don’t you see why Berts went to Swindon or Bristol?” she said. “Poor dear, you do see now. That is hopeless. You ought to have felt. To reason out what should have been a flash, is worse than not to have understood at all.”

  John, again like all other prigs, was patient with those not so gifted as himself.

  “I daresay you will explain to me what it all amounts to,” he said. “All I am certain of is that Berts wanted to read Stevenson’s letters and so got into a train, where he would be undisturbed. Wouldn’t it have answered the same purpose if he had taken a room at the Paddington hotel?”

  Nadine turned to Berts.

  “Oh, Berts, that would have been rather lovely,” she said.

  “Not at all,” said he. “I wanted the sense of travel.”

  John got up.

  “Then I should have recommended the Underground,” he said. “You could have gone round and round until you had finished. It would have been much cheaper.”

  Nadine waved impotent arms of despair.

  “Now you have spoiled it,” she said. “There was a possibility in the Paddington hotel, which sounds so remote. But the Underground! You might as well say, why do I bathe, I who cannot swim? I can get clean in a bath, though I only get dirty in the sea, and if I want the salt I can put Tiddle-de-wink salt or whatever the name is in my bath—”

  “Tidman,” said John.

  “I am sure you are right, though who cares? I am knocked down by cold waves, I am cut by stones on my soles. I am pinched by crabs and homards, at least I think I am; the wind gnaws at my bones, and my hair is as salt as almonds. Between my toes is sand, and bits of seaweed make me a plaster, and my stockings fall into rock-pools, but do I go with rapture to have a bath in the bathroom? I hate washing. There is nothing so sordid as to wash my face, except to brush my teeth. But to bathe in the sea makes me think: it gives me romance. Poor John, you never get romance. You amass information, and make a Blue Book. But we all, we make blue mountains, which we never reach. If we reached them they would probably turn out to be green. As it is, they are always blue, because they are beyond. It is suggestion that we seek, not attainment. To attain is dull, to aspire is the sugar and salt of life. Don’t you see? To realize an ideal is to lose the ideal. It is like a man growing rich: he never sees his sovereigns: when he has gained them he flings them forth again into something further. If he left them in a box, the real sovereigns, under his bed, what chance would there be for him to grow rich? But out they go, he never uses them, except that he makes them breed. It is the same with the riches of the mind. An idea, an ideal is yours. Do you keep it? Personally you do. But we, no. We invest it again. It is to our credit, at this bank of the mind. We do not hoard it, and spend it piecemeal. We put it into something else. What I have perceived in music, I put into plays: what I have perceived in plays I put into pictures. I never let it remain at home. But when I shall be a millionaire of the mind, what, what then? Yes, that makes me pause. Perhaps it will all be converted, as they convert bonds, is it not, and I shall put it all into love. Who knows, La-la.”

  Nadine paused a moment, but nobody spoke. Hugh was watching her with the absorption that was always his when she was there. But after a moment she spoke again.

  “We talk what you call rot,” she said. “But it is not rot. The people who always talk sense arrive at less. There are sparks that fly, as when you strike one flint with another. Your English philosophers — who are they? — Mr. Chesterton I suppose, is he not a philosopher? — or some Machiavelli or other, they sit down soberly to think, and when they have thought they wrap up their thought in paradox, as you wrap up a pill for your dog, so that he swallows it, and his inside becomes bitter. That is not the way. You must start with pure enjoyment, and when a thought comes, you must fling it into the air. They hit a bird, or turn into a rainbow, or fall on your head — but what matter? You others sit and think, and when you have thought of something you put it in a beastly book, and have finished with it. You prigs turn the world topsy-turvy that way. You do not start with joy, and you go forth in a slough of despondent information. Ah, yes: the child who picks up a match and rubs it against something and finds it catches fire removes the romance of the match, more than Mr. Bryant and May and Boots is it? who made the match. Matches are made on earth, but the child who knows nothing about them and strikes one is the person who is in heaven. You are not content with the wonder and romance of the world, you prefer to explain the rainbow away instead of looking at it. It is a sort of murder to explain things away: you kill their souls, and demonstrate that it is only hydrogen.”

  She looked up at Hugh.

  “We talked about it last night,” she said. “We settled that it was a great misfortune to understand too well—”

  A footman a
rrived at this moment with a telegram which he handed to Berts, who opened it. He gave a shout of laughter and passed it to Nadine.

  “What shall I say?” he asked.

  “But of course ‘yes,’” she said. “It is quite unnecessary to ask Mama.”

  Berts scribbled a couple of words on the reply-paid form.

  “It’s only my mother,” he said in general explanation. “She wants to come over for a day or two, and see Aunt Dodo again, but she doesn’t feel sure if Aunt Dodo wants to see her. Are you sure there’s a room, Nadine?”

  “There always is some kind of room,” said Nadine. “She can sleep in three-quarters of my bed, if not.”

  “I’m so glad she is tired of being a silly ass, as we settled she was last night,” said Berts. “Perhaps I ought to ask Aunt Dodo, Nadine.”

  “Pish-posh,” said Nadine.

  John got up, and prig-like had the last word.

  “I see all about the clan,” he said. “You have a quantity of vague enthusiasm, and a lack of information. You swim like jelly-fish without any sense of direction, and admire each other.”

  Nadine considered this.

  “I do see what he means,” she said.

  “And don’t live what you mean,” added John.

  CHAPTER III

  This sojourn at Meering in the month of June, when London and its diversions were at their midmost, was Nadine’s plan. Whatever Nadine was or was not, she was not a poseuse, and her contention that it was a waste of time to spend all day in talking to a hundred people who did not really matter, and in dancing all night with fifty of them, was absolutely genuine.

  “As long as anything amuses you,” she had said, “it is not waste of time; but when you begin to wonder if it really amuses you, it shows that it does not. Darling Mama, may I go down to Meering for a week or ten days? I do not want any one to come, but if anybody likes to come, we might have a little cheerful party. Besides it is Coronation next week, and great corvée! I think it is likely that Esther would wish to escape and perhaps one or two others, and it would be enchanting at Meering now. It would be a rest cure; a very curious sort of rest, since we shall probably never cease bathing and talking and reading. But anyhow we shall not be tired over things that bore us. That is the true fatigue. You are never tired as long as you are interested, but I am not interested in the Coronation.”

  Nadine’s solitary week had proved in quality to be populous, and in quantity to exceed the ten days, and it was already beginning to be doubtful if July would see any of them settled in London again. Dodo’s house in Portman Square had been maintained in a state of habitableness with a kitchen-maid to cook, and a housemaid to sweep, and a footman to wait, and a chauffeur to drive, and an odd man to do whatever the other servants didn’t, and occasionally one or two of the party made a brief excursion there for a couple of nights, if any peculiar attraction beckoned. The whole party had gone up for a Shakespeare ball at the Albert Hall, but had returned next day, and Dodo had hurried to St. Paul’s Cathedral to attend a thanksgiving service, especially since she, on leaving London, had taken a season ticket, being convinced she would be continuously employed in rushing up and down. Subsequently she had defrauded the railway-company by lending it, though strictly non-transferable, to any member of the party who wished to make the journey, with the result that Bertie had been asked by a truculent inspector whether he was really Princess Waldenech. His passionate denial of any such identity had led to a lesser frequency of these excursions.

  Nadine with the same sincerity had mapped out for herself a course of study at Meering, and she read Plato every afternoon in the original Greek, with an admirable translation at hand, from three o’clock till five. During these hours she was inaccessible, and when she emerged rather flushed sometimes from the difficulty of comprehending what some of the dialogues were about, she was slightly Socratic at tea, and tried to prove, as Dodo said, that the muse of Mr. Harry Lauder was the same as the muse of Sir George Alexander, and that she ought to be rude to Hugh if she loved him. She was extremely clear-headed in her reason, and referred them to the Symposium and the dialogue on Lysis, to prove her point. But as nobody thought of contradicting her, since the Socratic mood soon wore off, they did not attempt to find out the Hellenic equivalents for those amazing doctrines.

  She was markedly Socratic this afternoon, when the whole party were having tea on the lawn. Esther and Bertie had been down to bathe after lunch, and since everybody was going to bathe again after tea, they had left their clothes behind different rocky screens above the probable high-water level on the beach, and were clad in bathing-dress, moderately dried in the sun, with dressing-gowns above. Berts had nothing in the shape of what is called foot-gear on his feet, since it was simpler to walk up barefoot, and he was wriggling his toes, one after the other, in order to divest them of an excess of sand.

  “But pain and pleasure are so closely conjoined,” said Nadine, in answer to an exclamation of his concerning stepping in a gorse-bush. “It hurts you to have a prickle in your foot, but the pleasure of taking it out compensates for the pain!”

  “That’s Socratic,” said Hugh, “when they took off his chains just before they hemlocked him. You didn’t think of that, Nadine.”

  “I didn’t claim to, but it is quite true. There is actual pleasure in the cessation of pain. If you are unhappy and the cause of your unhappiness is removed, your happiness is largely derived from the fact that you were unhappy. For instance, did you ever have a fish-bone stick in your throat, Hugh?”

  “As a matter of fact, never,” said Hugh. “But as I am meant to say ‘yes,’ I will.”

  “And did you cough?”

  “Violently,” said Hugh.

  “Upon which the fish-bone returned to your mouth?”

  “No,” said Hugh. “I swallowed it. It never returned at all.”

  “It does not matter which way it went,” said Nadine; “but your feeling of pleasure at its going was dependent on the pain which its sticking gave you.”

  “Is that all?” said Hugh.

  “Does it not seem to you to be proved?”

  “Oh, yes. It was proved long ago. But it’s a pedantic point. The sort of point John would have made.”

  He absently whistled the first two lines of “Am Stillen Herd,” and Nadine was diverted from her Platonisms.

  “Ah, that is so much finer than the finished ‘Preislied,’” she said; “he has curled and oiled his verse like an Assyrian bull. He and Sachs had cobbled at it too much: they had brushed and combed it. It had lost something of springtime and sea-breeze. A finished work of art has necessarily less quality of suggestiveness. Look at the Leonardo drawings. Is the ‘Gioconda’ ever quite as suggestive? I am rather glad it was stolen. I think Leonardo is greater without it.”

  John drew in his breath in a pained manner.

  “‘Mona Lisa’ was the whole wonder of the world,” he said. “I had sooner the thief had taken away the moon. Do you remember — perhaps you didn’t notice it — the painting of the circle of rock in which she sat?”

  “You are going to quote Pater,” said Nadine. “Pray do not: it is a deplorable passage, and though it has lost nothing by repetition — for there was nothing to lose — it shows an awful ignorance of the spirit of the Renaissance. The eyelids are not a little weary: they are a little out of drawing only.”

  Esther looked across at Berts.

  “Berts is either out of drawing,” she said, “or else his dressing-gown is. I think both are: he is a little too long, and also the dressing-gown is too short. They ought to proceed as far as the ankles, but Berts’ got a little weary at his knees.”

  “I barked my knees on those foul rocks,” said Berts, examining those injured joints.

  “Barking them is worse than biting them,” said Nadine.

  “I never bite my knees,” said he. “It is a greedy habit. Worse than doing it to your nails.”

  “If you are not careful you will talk nonsense,�
�� said Nadine.

  “I don’t agree. If you are not careful you can’t talk nonsense. If you want to talk nonsense, you’ve not got to be not careful.”

  “There are too many ‘nots,’” remarked Nadine.

  “Not at all. If you are careless some sort of idea creeps into what you say, and it ceases to be nonsense. There are lots of creeping ideas about like microbes, any of which spoil it. Hardly anybody can be really meaningless for five minutes. That is why the Mad Tea Party is a supreme work of art: you can’t attach the slightest sense to anything that is said in it.”

  “The question is what you mean by nonsense,” said Nadine. “Is it what Mr. Bernard Shaw writes in his plays, or what Mrs. Humphry Ward writes in her books? They neither mean anything but they are not at all alike. In fact they are as completely opposed to each other as sense is to nonsense.”

  Berts threw himself back on the turf.

  “True,” he said. “But they are neither of them nonsense. The lame and the halt and the blind ideas creep into both. They both talk sense mortally wounded.”

  Esther gave her appreciative sigh.

  “Oh, Berts, how true!” she said. “I went to a play by Mrs. Humphry Ward the other day, or else I read a book by Bernard Shaw, I forget which, and all the time I kept trying to see what the sense of it had been before it had its throat cut. But no one ever tried to see what Alice in Wonderland meant, or what Aunt Dodo means.”

  “Mama is wonderful,” said Nadine. “She lives up to what she says, too. Her whole life has been complete nonsense. I do hope Jack will persuade her to do the most ridiculous thing of all, and marry him.”

  “Is that why he is coming?” asked Esther.

  “Oh, I hope so. It would be the greatest and most absurd romance of the century.”

  Hugh was eating sugar meditatively out of the sugar basin.

  “I don’t see that you have any right to lay down the law about nonsense, Nadine,” he said. “You are constantly reading Plato, and making arguments, which are meant to be consecutive.”