Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  She stood there with her wrists in his hands, his strong fingers bruising and crushing them. She could have screamed for the pain of it.

  “No, and a thousand times no,” she said. “I won’t cheat.”

  “I ask you to cheat.”

  “And I won’t. Hughie dear, press harder, hurt me more, so that you may see I am serious. You may bite the flesh off me, you may strangle me, and I will stand quite still and let you do it. But I won’t marry you. I won’t cheat you. My will is stronger than your body, and I would die sooner.”

  “Then your marriage is a pure farce,” said he.

  “Come and laugh at it,” she said.

  CHAPTER VII

  Hugh’s intention had been to stay several days, at the least, with the Chesterfords, and he had brought down luggage that would last any reasonable person a fortnight. Unluckily he had not foreseen the very natural effect that the sight of Seymour would have on him, and as soon as lunch was over he took his hostess into a corner and presented the situation with his usual simplicity.

  “It is like this, Aunt Dodo,” he said. “I didn’t realize exactly what it meant to me till I saw Seymour again. He drove me up from the station, and it got worse all the time. I thought perhaps since Nadine had chosen him, I might see him differently. I think perhaps I do, but it is worse. It is quite hopeless: the best thing I can do is to go away again at once.”

  Dodo had lit two cigarettes by mistake, and since, during their ride Jack had (wantonly, so she thought) accused her of wastefulness, she was smoking them both, holding one in each hand, in alternate whiffs. But she threw one of them away at this, and laid her hand on Hugh’s knee.

  “I know, my dear, and I am so dreadfully sorry,” she said. “I was sure it would be so, and that’s why I didn’t want you to come here. I knew it was no good. I can see you feel really unwell whenever you catch sight of Seymour or hear anything he says. And about Nadine? Did you have a nice talk with her?”

  Hugh considered.

  “I don’t think I should quite call it nice,” he said. “I think I should call it necessary. Anyhow, we have had it and — and I quite understand her now. As that is so, I shall go away again this afternoon. It was a mistake to come at all.”

  “Yes, but probably it was a necessary mistake. In certain situations mistakes are necessary: I mean whatever one does seems to be wrong. If you had stopped away, you would have felt it wrong too.”

  “And will you answer two questions, Aunt Dodo?” he asked.

  “Yes, I will certainly answer them. If they are very awkward ones I may not answer them quite truthfully.”

  “Well, I’ll try. Do you approve of Nadine’s marriage? Has it your blessing?”

  “Yes, my dear: truthfully, it has. But it is right to tell you that I give my blessings rather easily, and when it is clearly no use attempting to interfere in a matter, it is better to bless it than curse it. But if you ask me whether I would have chosen Seymour as Nadine’s husband, out of all the possible ones, why, I would not. I thought at one time that perhaps it was going to be Jack. But then Jack chose me, and, as we all know, a girl may not marry her stepfather, particularly if her mother is alive and well. But I should not have chosen you either, Hughie, if your question implies that. I used to think I would, but when Nadine explained to me the other day, I rather agreed with her. Of course she has explained to you.”

  Hugh looked at her with his honest, trustworthy, brown eyes.

  “Several times,” he said. “But if I agreed, I shouldn’t be worrying. Now another question: Do you think she will be happy?”

  “Yes, up to her present capacity. If I did not think she would be happy, I would not bless it. Dear Edith, for example, thinks it is a shocking and terrible marriage. For her I daresay it would be, but then it isn’t she whom Seymour proposed to marry. They would be a most remarkable couple, would they not? I think Edith would kill him, with the intention of committing suicide after, and then determine that there had been enough killing for one day. And the next day suicide would appear quite out of the question. So she would write a funeral march.”

  Dodo held the admirable sensible view that if discussion on a particular topic is hopeless, it is much better to abandon it, and talk as cheerfully as may be about something different. But this entertaining diversion altogether failed to divert Hugh.

  “You said she would be happy up to her present capacity?” he reminded her.

  “Yes: that is simple, is it not? We develop our capacity for happiness; and misery, also, develops as well. Whether Nadine’s capacity will develop much, I cannot tell. If it does, she may not be happy up to it. But who knows? We cannot spend our lives in arranging for contingencies that may never take place, and changes in ourselves that may never occur.”

  Dodo looked in silence for a moment at his grave reliable face, and felt a sudden wonder at Nadine for having chosen as she had done. And yet her reason for rejecting this extremely satisfactory youth was sound enough, their intellectual levels were such miles apart. But Dodo, though she did not express her further thought, had it very distinct in her mind. “If she does develop emotionally like a woman,” she said to herself, “there will not be a superfluity of happiness about. And she will look at you and wonder how she could have refused you.”

  But necessarily she did not say this, and Hugh got up.

  “Well, then, at the risk of appearing a worse prig than John Sturgis,” he said, “I may tell you that as long as Nadine is happy, the main object is accomplished. My own happiness consists so largely in the fact of hers. Dear me, I wonder you are not sick at my sententiousness. I am quite too noble to live, but I don’t really want to die. Would it make Nadine happier if I told Seymour I should be a brother to him?”

  Dodo laughed.

  “No, Hughie; it would make her afraid that your brain had gone, or that you were going to be ill. It would only make her anxious. Is the motor around? I am sorry you are going, but I think you are quite right to do so. Always propose yourself, whenever you feel like it.”

  “I don’t feel like it at present,” said he. “But thanks awfully, Aunt Dodo.”

  Dodo felt extremely warmly towards this young man, who was behaving so very well and simply.

  “God bless you, dear Hugh,” she said, “and give you your heart’s desire.”

  “At present my heart’s desire appears to be making other plans for itself,” said Hugh.

  Esther had said once in a more than usually enlightened moment, that Nadine’s friends did her feeling for her, and she observed them, and put what they felt into vivacious and convincing language and applied it to herself. Certainly Hugh, when he drove away again this afternoon, was keenly conscious of what Nadine had talked about to Edith: he felt lost, and the flag he had industriously waved so long for her seemed to be entirely disregarded. He hardly knew what he had hoped would have come of this ill-conceived visit, which had just ended so abruptly, but a vague sense of Nadine’s engagement being too nightmare-like to be true had prompted him to go in person and find out. Also, it had seemed to him that when he was face to face with Nadine, asking her at point-blank range, whether she was going to marry Seymour, it was impossible that she should say “Yes.” Something different must assuredly happen: either she would say it was a mistake, or something inside him must snap. But there was no mistake about it, and nothing had snapped. The world proposed to proceed just as usual. And he could not decline to proceed with it; unless you died you were obliged to proceed, however intolerable the journey, however unthinkable the succession of days through which you were compelled to pass. Life was like a journey in an express train with no communication-cord. You were locked in, and could not stop the train by any means. Some people, of course, threw themselves out of the window, so to speak, and made violent ends to themselves; but suicide is only possible to people of a certain temperament, and Hugh was incapable of even contemplating such a step. He felt irretrievably lost, profoundly wretched, and yet quite apar
t from the fact that he was temperamentally incapable of even wishing to commit suicide, the fact that Nadine was in the world (whatever Nadine was going to do) made it impossible to think of quitting it. That was the manner and characteristic of his love: his own unhappiness meant less to him than the fact of her.

  Until she had suggested it, the thought of traveling had not occurred to him; now, as he waited for his train at the station, he felt that at all costs he wanted to be on the move, to be employed in getting away from “the intolerable anywhere” that he might happen to be in. Wherever he was, it seemed that any other place would be preferable, and this he supposed was the essence of the distraction that travel is supposed to give. His own rooms in town he felt would be soaked with associations of Nadine, so too would be the houses where he would naturally spend those coming months of August and September. Not till October, when his duties as a clerk in the Foreign Office called him back to town, had he anything with which he felt he could occupy himself. An exceptional capacity for finding days too short and few, even though they had no duties to make the hours pass, had hitherto been his only brilliance; now all gift of the kind seemed to have been snatched from him: he could not conceive what to do with to-morrow or the next day or any of the days that should follow. An allowance of seven days to the week seemed an inordinate superfluity; he was filled with irritation at the thought of the leisurely march of interminable time.

  He spent the evening alone, feeling that he was a shade less intolerable to himself than anybody else would have been; also, he felt incapable of the attention which social intercourse demands. His mind seemed utterly out of his control, as unable to remain in one place as his body. Even if he thought of Nadine, it wandered, and he would notice that a picture hung crooked, and jump up to straighten it. One such was a charming water-color sketch by Esther of the beach at Meering, with a splash of sunlight low in the West that, shining through a chimney in the clouds, struck the sea very far out, and made there a little island of reflected gold. Esther had put in this golden islet with some reluctance: she had said that even in Nature it looked unreal, and would look even more unreal in Art, especially when the artist happened to be herself. But Nadine had voted with Hugh on behalf of the golden island, just because it would appear unreal and incredible. “It is only the unreal things that are vivid to us,” she had said, “and the incredible things are just those which we believe in. Isn’t that so, Hughie?”

  How well he remembered her saying that; her voice rang in his ears like a haunting tune! And while Esther made this artistic sacrifice to the god of things as they are not, he and Nadine strolled along the firm sandy beach, shining with the moisture of the receding tide. She had taken his arm, and just as her voice now sounded in his ears, so he could feel the pressure of her hand on his coat.

  “You live among unrealities,” she said, “although you are so simple and practical. You are thinking now that some day you and I will go to live on that golden island. But there is no island really, it is just like the rest of the sea, only the sun shines on it.”

  The bitter truth of that struck him now as applied to her and himself. Though she had refused him before, the sun shone on those days, and not until she had engaged herself to Seymour did the gold fade. Not until to-day when he had definite confirmation of that from her own lips, had he really believed in her rejection of him. He well knew her affection for him; he believed, and rightly, that if she had been asked to name her best friend, she would have named none other than himself. It had been impossible for him not to be sanguine over the eventual outcome, and he had never really doubted that some day her affection would be kindled into flame. He had often told himself that it was through him that she would discover her heart. As she had suggested, he would some day crack the nut for her, and show her her own kernel, and she would find it was his.

  And now all those optimisms were snuffed out. He had completely to alter and adjust his focus, but that could not be done at once. To-night he peered out, as it were upon familiar scenes, and found that his sight of them was misty and blurred. The whole world had vanished in cold gray mists. He was lost, quite lost, and ... and there was a letter for him on the table which he had not noticed. The envelope was obviously of cheap quality, and was of those proportions which suggest a bill. A bill it was from a bookseller, of four shillings and sixpence, incurred over a book Nadine had said she wanted to read. He had passed the bookseller’s on his way home immediately afterwards and of course he had ordered it for her. She had not cared for it; she had found it unreal. “The man is meant to arouse my sympathy,” she had said, “and only arouses my intense indifference. I am acutely uninterested in what happens to him.” Hugh felt as if she had been speaking of himself, but the moment after knew that he did her an injustice. Even now he could not doubt the sincerity of her affection for him. But there was something frozen about it. It was like sleet, and he, like a parched land, longed for the pity of the soft rain.

  Hugh had a wholesome contempt for people who pity themselves, and it struck him at this point that he was in considerable danger of becoming despicable in his own eyes. He had been capable of sufficient manliness to remove himself from Nadine that afternoon, but his solitary evening was not up to that standard; he might as well have remained at Winston, if he was to endorse his refusal to dangle after her with nothing more virile than those drawling sentimentalities. She was not for him: he had made this expedition to-day in order to convince himself on that point, and already his determination was showing itself unstable, if it suffered him to dangle in mind though not in body. And yet how was it possible not to? Nadine, physically and tangibly, was certainly going to pass out of his life, but to eradicate her from his soul would be an act of spiritual suicide. Physically there was no doubt that he would continue to exist without her, spiritually he did not see how existence was possible on the same terms. But he need not drivel about her. There were always two ways of behaving after receiving a blow which knocked you down, and the one that commended itself most to Hugh was to get up again.

  Lady Ayr at the end of the London season had for years been accustomed to carry out some innocent plan for the improvement and discomfort of her family. One year she dragged them along the castles by the Loire, another she forced them, as if by pumping, through the picture galleries of Holland, and this summer she proposed to show them a quantity of the English cathedrals. These abominable pilgrimages were made pompously and economically: they stayed at odious inns, where she haggled and bargained with the proprietors, but on the other hand she informed the petrified vergers and custodians whom she conducted (rather than was conducted by) round the cathedrals or castles in their charge, that she was the Marchioness of Ayr, was directly descended from the occupants of the finest and most antique tombs, that the castle in question had once belonged to her family, or that the gem of the Holbeins represented some aunt of hers in bygone generations. Here pomp held sway, but economy came into its own again over the small silver coin with which she rewarded her conductor. On English lines she had a third class carriage reserved for her and beguiled the tedium of journeys by reading aloud out of guide-books an account of what they had seen or what they were going to visit. Generally they put up at “temperance” hotels, and she made a point of afternoon tea being included in the exiguous terms at which she insisted on being entertained. John aided and abetted her in those tours, exhibiting an ogreish appetite for all things Gothic and mental improvement; and her husband followed her with a white umbrella and sat down as much as possible. Esther’s part in them was that of a resigned and inattentive martyr, and she fired off picture postcards of the places they visited to Nadine and others with “This is a foul hole,” or “The beastliest inn we have struck yet” written on them, while Seymour revenged himself on the discomforts inflicted on him, by examining his mother as to where they had seen a particular rose-window or portrait by Rembrandt, and then by the aid of a guide-book proving she was wrong. Why none of them revolted and r
efused to go on these annual journeys, now that they had arrived at adult years, they none of them exactly knew, any more than they knew why they went, when summoned, to their mother’s dreadful dinner-parties, and it must be supposed that there was a touch of the inevitable about such diversions: you might grumble and complain, but you went.

  This year the tour was to start with the interesting city of Lincoln and the party assembled on the platform at King’s Cross at an early hour. The plan was to lunch in the train, so as to start sight-seeing immediately on arrival, and continue (with a short excursion to the hotel in order to have the tea which had been included in the terms) until the fading light made it impossible to distinguish ancestral tombs or Norman arches. Lady Ayr had not seen Seymour since his engagement, and, as she ate rather grisly beef sandwiches, she gave him her views on the step. Though they were all together in one compartment the conversation might be considered a private one, for Lord Ayr was sleeping gently in one corner, John was absorbed in the account of the Roman remains at Lincoln (Lindum Colonia, as he had already announced), and Esther with a slightly leaky stylograph was writing a description of their depressing journey to Nadine.

  “What you are marrying on, Seymour, I don’t know,” she said. “Neither your father nor I will be able to increase your allowance, and Nadine Waldenech has the appearance of being an expensive young woman. I hope she realizes she is marrying the son of a poor man, and that we go third class.”

  “She is aware of all that,” said Seymour, wiping his long white finger-tips on an exceedingly fine cambric handkerchief, after swallowing a sandwich or two, “and we are marrying really on her money.”

  “I am not sure that I approve of that,” said his mother.

  “The remedy is obvious,” remarked Seymour. “You can increase my allowance. I have no objection. Mother, would you kindly let me throw the rest of that sandwich out of the window? It makes me ill to look at it.”