Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Edith shook hands so warmly with the doctor, that he felt he must have been an old friend of hers, and that the fact had eluded his memory. But it was only the general zeal which a long musical morning gave her.

  “I’m sure you came to see our poor Hugh,” she said. “Do tell me, is there the slightest chance of his ever walking again?”

  “Not the smallest,” said Dodo; “I’ve just been to break the news to him, and he has telegraphed to Nadine to come at once — I can’t keep it up. Edith, he is going to be perfectly well again, and he has telegraphed to Nadine just the same.”

  Edith looked a little disappointed.

  “Then I suppose we must resign ourselves to a perfectly conventional and Philistine ending,” she said. “There was all the makings of a twentieth century tragedy about the situation, and now I am afraid it is going to tail off and be domestic and happy and utterly inartistic. I had better hopes for Nadine, she always looked as if there might be some wild destiny in store for her, and when she engaged herself to Seymour without caring two straws for him, I thought I heard a great fate knocking at the door—”

  This was too gross an inconsistency for even Dodo to pass over.

  “And you said at the time you thought the engagement was horrible and unnatural and me a wicked mother for permitting it,” she cried.

  “Very possibly. No doubt then I was being a woman, now I am talking as an artist. You always confuse the two, Dodo, for all your general acumen. When I have been playing all morning—”

  “Scales,” said Dodo.

  “A great deal of the finest music in the world is based on scale passages, and the second movement of my symphony is based on them too. When I have been playing all morning, I see things as an artist. I know Dr. Cardew will agree with me: sometimes he sees things as a surgeon, sometimes as a man. As a surgeon if a hazardous operation is in front of him, he says to himself, ‘This is a wonderful and dangerous thing, and it thrills me.’ As a man he says, ‘Poor devil, I am afraid he may die under the knife.’ As for you, Dodo, artistically speaking, you spoiled a situation as — lurid as a play by Webster. ‘Princess Waldenech’ might have been as classical in real life as the ‘Duchess of Malfi.’ Artistically an atmosphere as stormy as the first act of the Valkyries surrounded you. And now instead of the ‘Götterdämmerung’ you are going to give us ‘Hänsel und Gretel’ with flights of angels.”

  Dodo exploded with laughter.

  “And while I was still giving you ‘Princess Waldenech’,” she said, “you cut me for a year.”

  “As a woman,” cried Edith; “as an artist I adored you. You were as ominous as Faust’s black poodle. Of course your first marriage to a man who adored you, for whom you did not care one bar of the ‘Hallelujah chorus,’ was a thing that might have happened to anybody; but when, as soon as he was mercifully delivered, you got engaged to Jack, and at the last moment jilted him for that melodramatic drunkard, I thought great things were going to happen. Then you divorced him, and I waited with a beating heart. And now, would you believe it, Dr. Cardew!” cried Edith, pointing a carving fork with a slice of ham on the end of it at him. “She has married Lord Chesterford, as you know, and is going to have a baby. And all that wealth of potential tragedy is going to end in a silver christening-mug. The silly suffragette with her hammer and a plate-glass window has more sense of drama than you, Dodo. And now Nadine is going to take after you, and marry the man she loves. Hugh is just as bad: instead of dying for the sake of that blear-eyed child who comes up to enquire after him every day, he is going to live for the sake of Nadine. Drama is dead. Of course it has long been dead in literature, but I hoped it survived in life.”

  Dodo turned anxiously to Dr. Cardew.

  “She isn’t mad,” she said reassuringly. “You needn’t be the least frightened. She will play golf immediately after lunch.”

  Edith had been brought her large German pewter beer-mug, and for the moment she had put her face into it, like old-fashioned gentlemen praying into their hats on Sunday morning before service. There was a little froth on the end of her rather long nose when she took it out.

  “Why not?” she said. “All artistic activity is a sort of celestial disease, and its antidote is bodily activity which is a material disease. A perfectly healthy body, like mine, does not need exercise, except in order to bring down the temperature of the celestial fever. When I am playing golf, my artistic soul goes to sleep and rests. And when I am composing, I should not know a golf-ball from an egg. That is me. You might think I am being egoistic, but I only take myself as an instance of a type. I speak for the whole corporate body of artists.”

  “Militant here on earth,” remarked Dodo.

  “Militant? Of course all artists are militant, and they fight against blind eyes and deaf ears. They scream and lighten, and hope to shake this dull world into perception. But it is fighting against prodigious odds. The drama that seems to interest the world now is a presentation of the hopeless lives of suburban people. Any note of romance or distinction is sufficient to secure a failure. It’s the same in music: Debussy when he tells us of rain in the garden makes the rain fall into a small backyard with sooty blighted plants growing in it, out of a foggy sky. When he gives us ‘reflets dans l’eau’ the water is a little cement basin in the same backyard, with anemic goldfish swimming about in it. As for Strauss, he began and finished with that terrible ‘domestic symphony.’ It went from the kitchen into the scullery, and back again. Fiction is the same. Any book that deals with entirely dull people, provided that they, none of them, ever show a spark of real fire or are touched by romance or joy or beauty, makes success. They must have the smell of oilcloth and Irish stew around them, and then the world says, ‘This is art’ or ‘This is reality.’ There’s the mistake! Art is never real: it is fantasy, a fairy-story, a soap-bubble sailing into the sunset. It is Art because it takes you out of reality. Of course artists are militant; they fight against dullness, and they will fight forever, and they will never win. As for their being militant here on earth, you must be militant somewhere. I shall be militant in heaven by and by. I wonder if you understand. As I said, I was disappointed in Nadine artistically, but I am enraptured with her humanly. On that same plane I am enraptured with you, Dodo. Humanly speaking, I have watched you with sobs in my throat, battling perilously on the great seas. And now you are like a battered ship, having weathered all storms, and putting into port, with all the piers and quays shouting congratulation. Artistically speaking, you are a derelict, and I should like to have you blown up. Hullo, what has happened to Dr. Cardew?”

  Dodo looked quickly round. The thought just crossed her mind that he might be asleep or having a fit. But there was no Dr. Cardew there, nor anywhere about, to be seen.

  “He has gone away while we weren’t attending, just as a conjurer changes a rabbit to an omelette while you aren’t attending,” she said, “and I’m sure I don’t wonder. Oh, Edith, at last the ‘Hunting of the Snark’ has come true. I see now that we are Boojums. People softly and silently vanish away when you and I are talking, poor dears. They can’t stand it, and I’ve noticed it before. Dear old Chesterford used to vanish sometimes like that, and I never knew until I saw he wasn’t there. I’m sure Bertie vanishes too sometimes. I suppose we ought to vanish also, as the table must be laid again for dinner to-night.”

  Edith finished her beer.

  “I had breakfast, lunch and dinner on the same cloth once,” she said. “I was composing all day, and at intervals things were stuck in front of me while I ate or drank. I didn’t move from nine in the morning till half-past eight in the evening, and I wrote forty pages of full score, and the inspiration never flagged for a moment. I wonder why artists are so fond of writing what they call ‘My Memories’; they ought to be content, as I am, to stand or fall by what they have done. Thank God, I have never had any doubts about my standing. Oh, I see a telegraph-boy coming up the drive. It is sure to be for me. I am expecting a quantity.”

&
nbsp; This particular one happened to be for Dodo. Edith was disposed to take it as a personal insult.

  Nadine during the days she had spent at Winston had not done much looking after Papa Jack, which had been the face-reason of her going there; and it is doubtful whether the real reason had found itself fulfilled, since there was substituted for the strain of seeing Hugh daily, the strain of wanting to see him. Dodo, with her own swift recuperative powers, and the genius she had for being absorbed in her immediate surroundings, had not reckoned with Nadine’s inferior facility in this respect, nor had she realized how completely the love which had at last touched Nadine drained and dominated her whole nature. All her zest for living, all her sensitiveness and intelligence seemed to have been, as by some alchemical touch, transformed into the gold which, all her life, had been missing from her. She explained this to Esther, who, with an open-mindedness that might have appeared rather unsisterly, ranged her sympathies in opposition to Seymour.

  “How long I shall be able to stop here,” she said, “I don’t know. I promised Mama I would go away for at least a week, unless Hughie wanted me, but after that I think I shall go back whether he wants me or not. I can’t attend to anything else, and last night when I was playing billiards I carefully put the chalk into my coffee, which is not at all the sort of thing I usually do. It is very odd: all my life I have been quite unaware of this one thing, now I am not really aware of anything else. You are rather dream-like yourself to me: I am not quite sure if you have really happened, or are part of a general background.”

  “I am not part of any background,” said Esther firmly.

  “No, so you say; but perhaps it is only the background that tells me so. And I suppose I ought to think a great deal about Seymour. I try to do that, but when I’ve thought about him for about a minute and a quarter, I find my thoughts wander, and I wonder if Hughie has had his beef-tea or not. I do hope that he is not unhappy, but having hoped it, I have finished with that, and remember that just at this moment Hughie is being made comfortable for the night. But do pin me down to Seymour. Did you see him in town, and does he mean to tell me what he thinks?”

  “Yes, I saw him. He was exceedingly cross, but I don’t think his crossness came from temper; it came from his mind’s hurting him. He told me he had meant to come down here and have it out with you, but presently he said you weren’t worth it. So I took your side.”

  “That was darling of you,” said Nadine; “but I am not sure that Seymour is not right.”

  “How can he be right? You haven’t changed towards him.”

  “Oh, doesn’t jilting him make a change?” asked Nadine hopefully.

  “No, that is an accident, as I told him. You didn’t do it on purpose. You might as well say that to be knocked down by a motor-car is done on purpose. You get knocked down by Hughie. You hadn’t ever loved Seymour at all, and really you said you would marry him largely because you wanted Hughie to stop thinking about you. It was chiefly for Hughie’s sake you said you would marry Seymour, and it was so wonderful of you. Then came another accident and Seymour fell in love with you. I warned him when we were on the family improvement tour in the summer that he was doing rather a risky thing—”

  Nadine got up.

  “Risky?” she said. “Oh, how risky it is. It is that which makes it so splendid! You risk everything: you go for it blind. Do you think Seymour went for it blind? I don’t believe he did. I think he had one eye open all the time. He couldn’t be quite blind I think: his intelligence would prevent it. And I don’t think he would be cross now, if he had been quite blind. So I am not properly sorry for him.”

  “I went to lunch with him,” said Esther. “He ate an enormous lunch, which I suppose is a consoling sign. But then Seymour would eat an enormous breakfast on the morning he was going to be hung. He would feel that he would never have any more breakfasts, so he would eat one that would last forever. I think we have given enough time to Seymour. It is much more important that you shouldn’t think of me as a background.”

  Nadine apparently thought differently.

  “But I want to be nice to Seymour,” she said, “and I don’t see how to begin. And — and he’s part of the background, too. He doesn’t seem really to matter. But if he was really fond of me, like that, it’s hateful of me not to care. But how can I care? I’ve tried to care every day, and often twice a day, but — oh, a huge ‘but.’”

  The two were talking in Dodo’s sitting-room, which Nadine had very wisely appropriated. At this moment the door opened, and Seymour stood there.

  “I made up my mind not to come and see you,” he said to Nadine, “and then I changed it.”

  Esther sprang up.

  “Oh, Seymour, how mean of you,” she said, “not to ask Nadine if you might come.”

  “Not at all. She was bound to see me. But I didn’t come to see you. You had better go away.”

  “If Nadine wishes—” she began.

  “It does not matter what Nadine wishes. Nadine, please tell her to go.”

  Seymour spoke quite quietly, and having spoken he turned aside and lit a cigarette he held in his hand. By the time he had finished doing that the door had closed behind Esther. He looked round.

  “What a charming room!” he said. “But if you are going to sit in a room like this, you ought to dress for it.”

  Nadine felt that all the sorrow she had been conscious of for him was being squeezed out of her. He tiptoed about, now looking at a picture, and now fingering an embroidery. He stopped for a moment opposite a Louis Seize tapestry chair, and gently flicked off it the cigarette ash that he had let drop there. He looked at the faded crimson of the Spanish silk on the walls, and examined with extreme care a Dutch picture of a frozen canal with peasants skating, that hung above the mantelpiece. There was an Aubonne carpet on the floor, and after one glance at it he went softly off it, and stood on the hearth-rug.

  “I should put three-quarters of this room into a museum,” he said, “and the rest into a dust-bin. You are going to ask me what I should put into the dust-bin. I should put that sham Watteau picture there, and that bureau that thinks it is Jacobean.”

  “And me?” asked Nadine.

  “I am not sure. No: I am sure. I don’t put you anywhere. I want to know where you put yourself. Perhaps you think you don’t owe me an explanation. But I disagree with you. I think you owe it me. Of course I know you haven’t got an explanation. But I should like to hear your idea of one.”

  Standing on the hearth-rug he pointed his toe as he spoke, looking at the well-polished shoe that shod it. Nadine was just on the point of telling him that he was thinking not about her, but about his shoe, but he was too quick for her.

  “Of course I’m thinking about my shoe,” he said. “I was wondering how it is that Antoinette polishes shoes better than any one in the world.”

  “Is that what you have come to talk about?” asked Nadine.

  “That is a very foolish question, Nadine. You have quibbled and chattered so incessantly that sometimes I think you can do nothing else. You might retort with a tu quoque, but it would not be true. I was capable anyhow of falling in love with you, I regret to say.”

  Seymour paused a moment, and then raised his eyes, which had been steadily regarding the masterpieces of Antoinette, to Nadine.

  “I am wrong: I don’t regret it,” he said.

  Suddenly his sincerity and his reality reached and touched Nadine. He stepped out of the background, so to speak, and stood firmly and authentically beside her.

  “I regret it very much,” she said, “and I am as powerless to help you, as I am to help myself.”

  “You seem to have been helping yourself pretty freely,” said he in a sudden exasperation. But she, usually so quick to flare into flame, felt no particle of resentment.

  “There is no good in saying that,” she said.

  “I did not mean there to be. Good? I did not come down here to do you good.”

  “Why did you come?
Just to reproach me?”

  “Partly.”

  Again Seymour paused.

  “I came chiefly in order to look at you,” he said at length. “You are quite as beautiful as ever, you may like to know.”

  It was as if a further light had been turned on him, making him clearer and more real. She had confessed to Esther her inability to be “properly sorry” for him, but now found herself not so incapable.

  “I can’t help either you or myself,” she said again. “We have both been taken in control by something outside ourselves, which never happened to either of us before. You feel that I have behaved atrociously to you, and any one you ask would agree with you. But the atrocity was necessary. I couldn’t help it. Only you must not think that I am not sorry for the effect that such necessity has had on you. I regret it very much. But if you ask me whether I am ashamed of myself, I answer that I am not.”

  She went on with growing rapidity and animation.

  “If you have been in love with me, Seymour,” she said, “you will understand that, for you will know that compulsion has been put upon me. How was it any longer possible for me to marry you, when I fell in love with Hughie? I jilted you: it is a word quite hideous, like flirt, but just as never in my life did I flirt, so I have not jilted you in the hideous sense. It was not because I was tired of you, or had a fancy for some one else. There was no getting away from what happened. Hughie enveloped me. My walls fell down, and went to Jericho. It wasn’t my fault. The trumpets blew, just that.”