Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “And I can’t think how you allow Nadine to marry that — that jade,” said Edith.

  Dodo became momentarily serious.

  “If you were Nadine’s mother,” she said, “you would be delighted at her marrying anybody. She is the sort of girl who doesn’t want to marry, and afterwards wishes she had. I am not like that: I was continually marrying somebody and then wishing I hadn’t. But Nadine doesn’t make mistakes. She may do things that appear very odd, but they are not mistakes, she has thought it out very carefully first. You see, quite a quantity of eligible youths and several remarkably ineligible ones have wanted to marry her, and she has never felt any — dear me, what is it a man with a small income always feels when a post with a large income is offered him — oh, yes, a call: Nadine has never felt any call to marry any of them. There are many girls like that in whom the physical makes very little appeal. But what does appeal to Nadine very strongly is the mental, and Seymour however many times you call him a jade, is as clever as he can be. In him, also, I should say, the physical side is extremely undeveloped, and so I think that he and Nadine may be very happy. Now Hugh is not clever at all; he has practically no intellect and that to Nadine is an insuperable defect. Now don’t call her prig or blue stocking. She is neither the one nor the other. But she has a mind. So have you. So for that matter have I, and it has led me to do weird things.”

  Edith thrummed her double-bass again.

  “Dodo, I can’t tell you how I disapprove of you,” she said, “and how I love you. You are almost entirely selfish, and yet you have charm. Most utterly selfish people lose their charm when they are about thirty. I made sure you would. But I was quite wrong. Now I am utterly unselfish: I live entirely for my husband and my art. I live for him by seldom going near him, since he is much happier alone. But then I never had any charm at all. Now you have always lived, and do still, completely for your own pleasure—”

  Dodo clapped her hands violently in Edith’s face for it required drastic measures to succeed in interrupting her.

  “Ah, that is an astonishingly foolish thing for you to say,” she said. “If I lived for my pleasure, do you know what I should do? I should have a hot bath, go to bed and have dinner there. I should then go to sleep and when I woke up I should go for a ride, have another hot bath and another dinner and go to sleep again. There is nothing so pleasant as riding and hot baths and food and sleep. But I never have sought my pleasure. What I always have sought is my happiness. And that on the whole is our highest duty. Don’t swear. There is nothing selfish about it, if you are made like I am. Because the thing that above all others makes me happy is to contrive that other people should have their own way. That is why I never dream of interfering in what other people want. If they really want it, I do all I can to get it for them. I was not ever thus, as the hymn says, but I am so now. The longer I live the more clearly I see that it is impossible to understand why other people want what they want, but it seems to me that all that concerns me is that they do want. I can see how they want, but never why. I can’t think, darling, for instance, why you want to make those excruciating noises, but I see how. Here’s Jack. Jack, come and tell us about Utopia.”

  Edith had laid her double-bass down on the ground of the terrace.

  “Yes, but I want to sit down,” he said. “May I sit on it, Edith?”

  Edith screamed. He took this as a sign that he might not, and sat on the terrace wall.

  “Utopia?” he asked. “You’ve got to be a man to begin with and then you have to marry Dodo. It does the rest.”

  “What is It?”

  “That which does it, your consciousness. Dodo, it would send up rents in Utopia if Seymour went to a nice girls’ school. He is rather silly, and wants the nonsense knocked out of him.”

  “But there you make a mistake,” said she. “Almost every one who is nice is nice because the nonsense has not been knocked out of him. People without heaps of nonsense are merely prigs. Indeed that is the best definition of a prig, one who has lost his capability for nonsense. Look at Edith! She doesn’t know she’s nonsensical, but she is. And she thinks she is serious all the time with her great boots and her great double-bass and her French horns. Oh me, oh me! The reasonable people in the world are the ruin of it; they spoil the sunshine. Look at the abominable Liberal party with terrible, reasonable schemes for scullery-maids. They are all quite excellent, and it is for that reason they are so hopeless.

  “It is moreover a great liberty to take with people to go about ameliorating them. I should be furious if anybody wanted to ameliorate me. Darling, Bishop Algie the other day said he always prayed for my highest good. I begged him not to, because if his prayers were answered, Providence might think I should be better for a touch of typhoid. You can’t tell what strange roundabout ways Providence may have. So he promised to stop praying for me, because he is so understanding and knew what I meant. But when Lloyd George wants to give scullery-maids a happy old age with a canary in the window it is even worse. It is so sensible: I can see them sitting dismally in the room listening to their canary, when they would be much more comfortable in a nice work-house, with Edith and me bringing them packets of tea and flannel. Don’t let us talk politics: there is nothing that saps the intellect so much.”

  “Edith and I have not talked much yet,” observed Jack.

  “No, you are listening to Utopia, which as I said, consists largely of nonsense. If you are to be happy, you must play, you must be ridiculous, you must want everybody else to be ridiculous. But everybody must take his own absurdities quite seriously.”

  Dodo sat up, pulled Jack’s cigarette case from his pocket and helped herself.

  “The Greeks and Romans were so right,” she said, “they had a slave class, though with them it was an involuntary slave class. We ought to have a voluntary slave class, consisting of all the people who like working for a cause. There are heaps of politicians who naturally belong to it, and clergymen and lawyers and nationalists, all the people in fact who die when they retire, and are disappointed when they have not got offices and churches to go to. You can recognize a slave the moment you see him. He always, socially, wants to open the door or shut the window, or pick up your gloves. The moment you see that look in a man’s eye, that sort of itch to be useful, you should be able to give secret information and make him a slave at £200 a year, instead of making him a cabinet minister or a bishop or a director of a company. He wants work: let him have it. Edith, darling, you would be a slave instantly, and the State would provide you with double-basses and cornets. I haven’t thought it all completely out, since it only occurred to me this minute, but it seems to me an almost painfully sound scheme now that I mention it. Think of the financiers you would get! There would be poor Mr. Carnegie and Rockefeller and — and the whole of the Rothschild house, and Barings and Speyers all quite happy, because they are happy when they work. And all the millions they make — how they make it, I don’t know, unless they buy gold cheap and sell it dear, which I believe is really what they do — all the money they make would be at the disposal of those who know how to spend it. I suppose I am a Socialist.”

  Edith put her forehead in her hands.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.

  “I have my doubts myself,” said Dodo ingenuously. “It began about Nadine’s marriage and then drifted. You get to all sorts of strange places if you drift, both morally and physically. It really seems very unfair, that if you don’t ever resist anything, you go to the bad. It looks as if evil was stronger than good, but Algie shall explain it to me. He can explain almost anything, including wasps. Jack, dear, do make me stop talking; you and the sunshine and Edith have gone to my head, and given me the babbles.”

  “I insist on your going on talking,” said Edith. “I want to know how you can let Nadine marry without love.”

  “Because a great many of our unfortunate sex, dear, never fall in love, as I mean it, at all. But I would not have them not m
arry. They often make excellent wives and mothers. And I think Nadine is one of those. She is as nearly in love with Hugh as she has ever been with anybody, but she quite certainly will not marry him. Here she is; I daresay she will explain it all herself. My darling, come and talk matrimony shop to Edith, Jack and I are going for a short ride before lunch. Will you be in when Hugh comes?”

  Nadine sat down in the chair from which Dodo had risen. She was dressed in a very simple linen dress of cornflower blue, that made the whites and pinks of her face look absolutely dazzling.

  “Yes, I will wait for him,” she said. “Seymour thought it would be kinder if he went to meet him at the station, so that Hughie could get rid of some of the hate on the way up. He has perception — des aperçus très-fins. And I will explain anything to anybody in the interval. I want to be married, and so does Seymour, and we think it will answer admirably if we marry each other. There is very little else to say. We are not foolish about each other—”

  “I find you are extremely modern,” interrupted Edith.

  “You speak as if you did not like that,” said Nadine; “but surely somebody has got to be modern if we are going to get on at all. Otherwise the world remains stock-still, or goes back. I do not think it would be amusing to be Victorian again; indeed there would be no use in us trying. We should be such obvious forgeries, Seymour particularly. I consider it lucky that he was not born earlier; if he had grown up as he is in Victorian days, they would certainly have done away with him somehow. Or his mother would have exposed him in Battersea Park like Œdipus.”

  Edith leaned over the terrace wall, and took the double-bass bow out of the tall clump of sweet peas.

  “There are exactly two things in the world worth doing,” she said, “to love and to work. Certainly you don’t work, Nadine, and I don’t believe you love.”

  Nadine looked at her a moment in silent hostility.

  “That is a very comfortable reflection,” she observed, “for you who like working better than anything else in the world except perhaps golf. I wonder you did not say there were three things in the world worth doing, making that damned game the third.”

  Edith had spoken with her usual cock-sure breezy enthusiasm, and looked up surprised at a certain venom and bitterness that underlay the girl’s reply.

  “My dear Nadine!” she said. “What is the matter?”

  Nadine glared at her a moment, and then broke into rapid speech.

  “Do you think I would not give the world to be able to love?” she said. “Do you think I send Hugh marching through hell for fun? You say I am heartless, as if it was my fault! Would you go to a blind man in the street and say, ‘You beast, you brute, why don’t you see?’ Is he blind for fun? Am I like this for fun?”

  She got up from her seat and came and stood in front of Edith, flushed with an unusual color, and continued more rapidly yet, emphasizing her points by admirable gesticulations of her hands. Indeed they seemed to have speech on their own account: they were extraordinarily eloquent.

  “Do you know you make me lose my temper?” she said. “That is a rare thing with me; I seldom lose it; but when I do it is quite gone, and I don’t care what I say, so long as it is what I mean. For the minute my temper is absolutely vanished, and I shall make the most of its absence. Who are you to judge and condemn me? and give me rules for conduct, how work and love are the only things worth doing? What do you know about me? Either you are absolutely ignorant about me, or so stupid that the very cabbages seem clever by you. And you go telling me what to do! And what do you know about love? To look at you, as little as you know about me. Yes; no wonder you sit there with your mouth open staring at me, you and your foolish, great fat-bellied bloated violin. You are not accustomed to be spoken to like this. It never occurred to you that I would give the world to be able to love as Jill and Polly and Mary and Minnie love. I do not go about saying that any more than a cripple calls attention to his defect: he tries to be brave and conceal it. But that is me, a dwarf, a hunchback, a crétin of the soul. That is the matter with me, and you are so foolish that it never occurred to you that I wanted to be like other people. You thought it was a pose of which I was proud, I think. There! Now do not do that again.”

  Nadine paused, and then sighed.

  “I feel better,” she said, “but quite red in the face. However, I have got my temper back again. If you like I will apologize for losing it.”

  Edith jumped up and kissed Nadine. When she intended to kiss anybody she did it, whether the victim liked it or not.

  “My dear, you are quite delightful,” she said. “I thoroughly deserve every word. I was utterly ignorant of you. But I am not stupid: if you will go on, you will find I shall understand.”

  Suddenly Nadine felt utterly lonely. All she had said of herself in her sudden exasperation was perfectly genuine, and now when her equanimity returned, she felt as if she must tell somebody about this isolation, which for the moment, in any case, was sincerely and deeply hers. That she was a girl of a hundred moods was quite true, but it was equally true that each mood was authentically inspired from within. Many of them, no doubt, were far from edifying, but none could be found guilty of the threadbare tawdriness of pose. She nodded at Edith.

  “It is as I say,” she said. “I hate myself, but here I am, and here soon will Hugh be. It is a disease, this heartlessness: I suffer from it. It is rather common too, but commoner among girls than boys.”

  Then queerly and unexpectedly, but still honestly, her intellectual interest in herself, that cold egoism that was characteristic of another side of her, awoke.

  “Yet it is interesting,” she said, “because it is out of this sort of derangement that types and species come. For a million years the fish we call the sole had a headache because one of its eyes was slowly traveling through its head. For a million years man was uncomfortable where the tail once came, because it was drying up. For a million years there will be girls like me, poor wretches, and at the end there will be another type of woman, a third sex, perhaps, who from not caring about these things which Nature evidently meant them to care about have become different. And all the boys like Seymour will be approximating to the same type from the other side, so that eventually we shall be like the angels—”

  “My dear, why angels?” asked Edith.

  “Neither marrying nor giving in marriage. La, la! And I was saying only the other day to him that I wished to marry half-a-dozen men! What a good thing that one does not feel the same every day. It would be atrociously dull. But in the interval, it is lonely now and then for those of us who are not exactly and precisely of the normal type of girl. But if you have no heart, you have to follow your intelligence, to go where your intelligence leads you, and then wave a flag. Perhaps nobody sees it, or only the wrong sort of person, who says, ‘What is that idiot-girl waving that rag for?’ But she only waves it because she is lost, and hopes that somebody will see it.”

  Nadine laughed with her habitual gurgle.

  “We are all lost,” she said. “But we want to be found. It is only the stupidest who do not know they are lost. Well, I have — what is Hugh’s word? ah, yes, — I have gassed enough for one morning. Ah, and there is the motor coming back from the station. I am glad that Hugh has not thrown Seymour out, and driven forwards and backwards over him.”

  The motor at this moment was passing not more than a couple of hundred yards off through the park which lay at the foot of the steep garden terraces below them. From there the road wound round in a long loop towards the house.

  “I shall go to meet Hugh at once, and get it over,” said Nadine; and thereupon she whistled so shrilly and surprisingly on her fingers, that Hugh, who was driving, looked up and saw her over the terrace. She made staccato wavings to him, and he got out.

  “You whistled the octave of B. in alt,” remarked Edith appreciatively.

  “And my courage is somewhere about the octave of B. in profundis,” said Nadine. “I dread what Hugh may say to
me.”

  “I will go and talk to him,” said Edith. “I understand you now, Nadine. I will tell him.”

  Nadine smiled very faintly.

  “That is sweet of you,” she said, “but I am afraid it wouldn’t be quite the same thing.”

  Nadine walked down the steep flight of steps in the middle of the terrace, and out through the Venetian gate into the park. Hugh had just arrived at it from the other side, and they met there. No word of greeting passed between them; they but stood looking at each other. He saw the girl he loved, neither more nor less than that, and did not know if she looked well or ill, or if her gown was blue or pink or rainbowed. To him it was Nadine who stood there. But she saw details, not being blinded: he was big and square, he looked a picture of health, brown-eyed, clear of skin, large-mouthed, with a habit of smiling written strongly there. He had taken off his hat, as was usual with him, and as usual his hair looked a little disordered, as if he had been out on a windy morning. There was that slight thrusting outwards of his chin which suggested that he would meet argument with obstinacy, but that kind and level look from his eyes that suggested an honesty and kindliness hardly met with outside the charming group of living beings known as dogs. He was like a big, kind dog, polite to strangers, kind to friends, hopelessly devoted to the owner of his soul. But to-day his mouth did not indulge its habit: he was quite grave.

  “Why did you kiss me the other night?” he said.

  Nadine had already repented of that rash act. Being conscious of her own repentance, it seemed to her rather nagging of him to allude to it.

  “I meant nothing,” she said. “Hughie, are we going to stand like posts here? Shan’t we stroll—”

  “I don’t see why: let us stand like posts. You did kiss me. Or do you kiss everybody?”

  Nadine considered this for a moment.

  “No, I don’t kiss everybody,” she said. “I never kissed a man before. It was stupid of me. The moment after I had done it I wanted to kiss anybody to show you it didn’t mean anything. You are like the Inquisition. My next answer is that I have kissed Seymour since. I — I don’t particularly like kissing him. But it is usual.”