Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “And in walked Hugh,” said Seymour.

  “I am not sure about that,” said Nadine. “I think he was there all the time, walled up.”

  Seymour was silent a moment.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  “He is going on well. They do not know more than that yet. He is getting over the concussion, but they cannot tell yet whether he will be able to walk again.”

  “And are you going to marry him in any case, if he is a cripple, I mean?” he asked.

  “If Hughie will have me. I daresay I shall propose to him, and be refused, just as used to happen the other way round in the old days. Oh, I know what his soul is like so well! He will say that he will not let me spend all my life looking after a cripple. But I shall have my way in the end. I am much stronger than he.”

  Seymour saw and understood the change in her face when she spoke of Hugh. Admirable as her beauty always was, he had not dreamed that such tender transformation could come to it, or that it was capable of assuming so inward-burning and devoted a quality and yet shining with its habitual brilliance uneclipsed. The love which he had dreamed would some day awake there for him, he saw now in the first splendor of its dawning, and from it he could guess what would be the glory of its full noonday, and with how celestial a ray she would shine on her lover. For the moment it seemed to him not to matter that it was another, not he, on whom that dawn should break, for whom it should grow to noonday, and sink at last in the golden West of a life truly and lovingly lived without fear of the lengthening shadows and the night that must inevitably close as it had preceded it; for by the power of his own love, he could detach himself from himself, and though only momently reach that summit of devotion far below which, remote and insignificant, lies the mere husk and shell of the world that spins through the illimitable azure. So Dante saw the face of Beatrice, when he passed into the sweetness of the Earthly Paradise, and there came to him she whom the chariot with its harnessed griffins drew. And not otherwise, in his degree and hers, Seymour looked now at Nadine’s face, glorified and made tender by her love, and in the perception that his own love gave him, he hailed and adored it....

  “I came to scold and reproach,” he said, “but I also came just to see you, to look at you. There is no harm in that. And if there is I can’t help it. Nadine, I used to wonder what you would look like when you loved. You have shown me that. I — I didn’t guess. There’s a poem by Browning which ends ‘Those who win heaven, blest are they.’ The man who speaks was just in my case. But he managed to say that. I say it too, very quickly, because I know this unnatural magnanimity won’t last. I agree with all you have said: it wasn’t your fault. I hope you won’t be tied to a cripple all your life, or, if he has to be a cripple, I hope you will be tied to him. There! I’ve said it, and it is true, but it rather reminds me of holding my breath. Give me a kiss, please, and then I’ll climb swiftly down out of this rarefied atmosphere.”

  He kissed her on the mouth, as his right had been, and for a moment held her to him in an embrace more intimate than he had ever yet claimed from her. Edith, it may be remembered, had once seen him kiss her, and had pronounced it an anemic salutation. But it was not anemic now: his blood was alert and virile; its quality was not inferior to that which, one day in the summer, made Hugh seize her wrists, demanding the annulment of the profanation of her marriage with Seymour. In both, too, was the same fierceness of farewell.

  For a few seconds Seymour held her close to him, and felt her neither shrink from him nor respond. Her willing surrender to his right was the utmost she could give, and he knew there was nothing else for him.

  And then he proceeded to descend from what he had called the rarefied atmosphere with the speed of a yet-unopened parachute.

  “Damn Hugh,” he said. “Yes, damn him. For God’s sake, don’t tell him I asked after him, or hoped he was getting better. I don’t want him to die, since I don’t suppose that would do me any good, nor do I want him to be crippled for life, since that also would be quite useless after what you have told me. But if you said to him that I had asked after him, I should sink into the earth for shame. He would think it noble and nice of me, and I’m not noble or nice. I should hate to be thought either. His good opinion of me would make me choke and retch. I should not be able to sleep if I thought Hugh was thinking well of me. So hold your tongue.”

  Nadine had never been able quite to keep pace with Seymour: she always lagged a little behind, just as Hugh lagged so much more behind her. She was still gasping from the violence of his seizure of her, when he had descended, so to speak, a thousand feet or so. Tenderness still clung about her like soaked raiment.

  “Oh, Seymour,” she said. “I didn’t realize you felt like that: I didn’t, really. What are you going to do?”

  His clever handsome face wore an uncompromising look, but there was humor in his eyes.

  “I may take to drink,” he said, “like your angelic father. Very likely I shan’t, because I notice that it spoils your breakfast if you are intoxicated the evening before. I shall certainly try to get some more jade, and I shan’t marry Antoinette, because she is buxom. If I marry, I shall marry some girl who reminds me of asparagus, like you. Not the stout French asparagus, of course, but the lean English variety. I should not wonder if I came to your wedding, and wrote an account of it to a ladies’ newspaper. I shall say you were looking hideous. I haven’t got any other plans, except to go away from this place. You are a sort of chucker-out, Nadine, at Winston. You chucked out Hugh in the summer, and now in the winter you chuck me out. You are a vampire, I think. You suck people dry, and then you throw them away like orange skins. Don’t argue with me: if you argued I should become rude. I was rude to Aunt Dodo the other day, when she showed me you sleeping on the floor by Hugh’s bed. It was a sickening spectacle: I told her so at the time, and I tell you so now.”

  Poor complicated Nadine! Her complications had been canceled like vulgar fractions, and she was left in a state of the most deplorable simplicity. There was a numerator, and that was Hugh; there was a nought below and that was she. The simplest arithmetician could see that the nought “went into” the numerator an infinite number of times. The result was that there was Hugh and nothing else at all. Her surrendered reply indicated this: it indicated also her knowledge of it.

  “But it was Hughie there,” she said.

  And then suddenly Seymour’s unexpanded parachute opened, and he floated in liquid air, with the azure encompassing him.

  “Your Hughie,” he said.

  “Mine,” said Nadine.

  There came an interruption. A footman entered with a telegram which he gave to Nadine. And once again the ineffable light came into her face, coming from below, transfiguring it.

  “That’s from the cripple,” said Seymour unerringly.

  She passed him the words Hugh had written that morning. They could not have been simpler, nor could he, by any expenditure of separate half-pennies have said more.

  “Come back,” he had written, “important. Good news.”

  Seymour got up.

  “So you are going,” he said.

  Nadine did not seem to hear this. She addressed the footman.

  “Tell them to send round the Napier car at once,” she said.

  “Yes, Miss. But his lordship ordered the Napier to meet the shooters—”

  “Has it gone?”

  “No, Miss: it was to pick up Lady Esther—”

  “Then I want it at once, instead. I am going to start instantly. Tell them to send the car round at once. And tell my maid to pack a bag for me, and follow with the rest of my luggage.”

  “Yes, Miss. Where to, shall I say?”

  “Meering, of course. She will go by train.”

  She turned her unclouded radiance to Seymour again, and held out both her hands.

  “Oh, Seymour,” she said. “I feel such a brute, such a brute. But it’s my nature to.”

  “Clearly. Go and put on your hat.”
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  “Will you let me hear of you sometimes?” she asked.

  “I don’t see why I should write to you, if you mean that,” he said.

  “Nor do I, now I come to think of it. I made a conventional observation. Will you let them know if you want lunch, or want to be taken to the station?”

  “Yes. Thanks. Good-by. And good luck.”

  She lingered one moment more.

  “Thank you,” she said. “And don’t think of me without remembering I am sorry.”

  It was still an hour short of sunset when the car emerged from the mountainous inland on to the coast. The plain and the line of sand-dunes that bordered the sea slept under a haze of golden winter sun; a few wisps of light cloud hung round the slopes of Snowdon, but otherwise the sky was of pale unflecked blue, from rim to rim, and the sea was as untroubled as the turquoise vault which it reflected. Though January had still a half-dozen of days to run, a hint and promise of spring was in the air, and Nadine sat in the open car unchilled by its headlong passage. They had taken but five hours to come from the midlands, and they seemed to have passed for her in one throb of eager consciousness, so that she looked bewildered to find that the familiar landmarks of home were close about her, and that they were already close to their journey’s end. Soon they began to climb out of the plain again up the outlying flank of hill that formed the south end of the bay, and culminated in the steep bluff of rock at the top of which she and Hugh had sat and quarreled and been reconciled on the morning of the gale. To-day no tumult of maddened water beat at the base of it, nor did thunder of surges break into spray and flying foam, and the line of reef that ran out from it lay, with its huge scattered rocks, as quiet as a herd of sea-beasts grazing. As they got higher she could see over the sand-dunes the beach itself; no ramparts and towers of surf or ruins of shattered billows fringed it now; a child could have played on that zone of shattering and resistless forces. Of its dangers and menaces nothing was left; the great gift that it had brought to Nadine’s heart alone remained, and flowered there like the rose-pink almond blossom in spring. Nature had healed where she had hurt, and what had seemed but a blind and wanton stroke, had proved to be the smiting of the rock, so that the spring burst forth, and rivers ran in the dry places.

  The house, gray and welcoming, stood dozing in the afternoon sun, and Nadine, suddenly conscious that they had arrived without a halt, said a contrite word to the chauffeur on the subject of lunch. She recollected also that she had sent no reply to Hugh’s telegram, and that her arrival would be unexpected. Unexpected it certainly was, and Dodo, who had just seen Edith off to play golf better than anybody else had ever done, jumped up with a scream as she entered.

  “But, my darling, is it you?” she cried. “We have been expecting to hear from you, but seeing is better than hearing. Oh, Nadine, such news! Of course you guess it, so I shall not tell you, as it is unnecessary, and besides Hughie must do that. He has been shaved, and looks quite clean and young again. Will you go up to see him at once? Perhaps it is equally unnecessary to ask that. Shall I come up with you? My darling, there’s a third unnecessary question. Of course I shall do nothing of the kind. Ask the great grenadier if you may go in to him without his being told you are coming. It might be rather a shock, but personally I believe shocks of joy are always good for one. At least they have never hurt me. Go upstairs, dear, and after an unreasonable time you might ring for me.”

  The nurse’s room was a dressing-room attached to the bedroom where Hugh lay. Nadine went in through this, and the door into the room beyond being open, she saw that Nurse Bryerley was in there. At this moment she looked up and saw Nadine. She turned towards Hugh’s bed.

  “Here’s a visitor for you,” she said, and beckoned to Nadine to enter. She heard Hugh ask “Who?” in a voice that sounded somehow expectant, and she went in. In the doorway she passed Nurse Bryerley coming out, and the door closed behind her.

  Hugh had raised himself on his elbow in bed, and the light in his eyes showed that, though he had asked who his visitor was, his heart knew. He neither spoke nor moved while Nadine came across the room to his bedside. Then in a whisper:

  “It is Nadine,” he said.

  She knelt down by the bed.

  “Yes, Hughie. You wanted me,” she said.

  “I always want you,” he answered.

  For a moment Nadine hid her face in her hands without replying. Then she raised it again to him.

  “Hughie, you have always got me,” she said.

  She drew that beloved head down to hers.

  “And the news?” she said presently.

  “Oh, that!” said Hugh. “It’s only that I am going to get quite well and strong again. That’s all.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  Dodo was sitting in her room in Jack’s house in Eaton Square, one morning towards the end of May, being moderately busy. She was trying to engage in a very intimate conversation with her husband, and simultaneously to conduct communication through the telephone, to smoke a cigarette, and to write letters. Considering the complicated nature of the proceeding viewed as a whole, she was getting on fairly well, but occasionally became a little mixed up in her mind, and spoke of intimate things to Jack in the determined telephone voice habitually used, or puffed cigarette smoke violently into the receiver. She had just done this and apologized to the Central exchange.

  “I never knew you could send smoke down a telephone,” remarked Jack.

  “Double one two four Gerrard,” said Dodo. “In these days of modern science you can’t tell what is going to happen, and it’s well to anticipate anything. No, you fool, I mean Miss, I said double one two four, eleven hundred and twenty four, if that makes it simpler. As I was saying, Jack, I don’t see why I shouldn’t stop in town, and have my baby here. You can put lots of straw down, like Margery Daw, and that always looks so interesting. I should like to have straw down permanently, why don’t we? Darling, how are you, and as Jack’s going out to lunch, and I shall be quite alone, do come round—”

  Dodo’s face suddenly became seraphically blank.

  “Oh, are you?” she said. “Then will you tell Mrs. Arbuthnot that I hope she will come round to lunch with Lady Chesterford. Jack, I said all that to Edith’s footman, who always smiles at me. I wonder if he will come to lunch instead, and say I asked him, which after all is quite true. But Edith talks so much like a man, that of course I thought it was she, whereas it was he. Yes, I don’t see why I should go down to Winston for it. Babies born in London are just as healthy as babies born in Staffordshire, and people will drop in more easily afterwards. Besides I must go to Nadine’s wedding if I possibly can. It would be like reading a story that you know quite well is going to end happily, and finding that the last chapter of all, which you have been saving up for, so to speak, is torn out. I shall have the most enormous lump in my throat when I see her and Hughie go up to the altar-rails together, and I love lumps in the throat. Don’t you? I don’t mean quinzy.”

  “I’ll tell you all about the last chapter,” said Jack.

  “That would be very dear of you, but it wouldn’t be the same thing at all. I want to see it, to see Hugh walking as if he had never been smashed into ten thousand smithereens, and Nadine, as if she had never thought about anybody else since her cradle. Oh, by the way, they have settled at last that they would like to go on the yacht for their honeymoon. They are both bad sailors, but I suppose there are lots of harbors or breakwaters about, and they think it is the only plan by which they can be certain of being undisturbed. If it is rough, they will find a sort of pleasure in being sick into one basin: I really think they will. They are in that sort of foolishness, that whatever they do together will be in the Garden of Eden. And they are just forty-five years old between them which is exactly what I am all by myself. It seems quite a coincidence, though I have no idea what it coincides with. So let them have the yacht, Jack, as you suggested, and the moon will be lovely, honey, and they will be exceedingly unwell!”

>   Dodo finished her letter, and having telephoned enough for the present, came and sat in a chair by her husband, in order to continue the intimate conversation.

  “Jack, dear,” she said, “I never do behave quite like anybody else, as you have known, poor wretch, for I don’t know how many years. So you must be prepared for surprises when I give you that darling David. Something ridiculous will happen. There’ll be two or three of them, and the papers will say I have had a litter, or I shall die, or David will arrive quite unexpectedly like a flash of lightning, and I shall say, ‘Good heavens, David, is it you?’ I should be exceedingly annoyed if I died—”

  “So should I,” said Jack.

  “I really believe you would. But it would be more annoying for me, because however nice the next world is going to be, I haven’t had enough of this. I want years and years more, because eternity is there just the same, and if I live to be a hundred there won’t be anything the less of that. Eternity is safe, so to speak: it is invested in the bank, but time is just pocket-money, of which you always say I want such a lot. Eternity will always be on tap, or else it wouldn’t be eternal. But this particular brew will come to an end, and I shall be so sorry when the last gurgle sounds, and one knows there is no more. It couldn’t come more nicely, if when it sounded, I had given you a son. I can’t imagine any nicer way to die. On the other hand, there’s no reason anywhere near as nice for living.”

  Jack put a great hand on her arm.

  “Dodo, if you talk about dying, I shall be — shall be as sick as Hughie and Nadine together,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t. But you see since we are us — is that right? — there is nothing I can’t say to you, because I am only talking to myself. I wonder if I had better write a quantity of letters to my son, as some woman, I believe a spinster, did. David shall read them when he has learned how to read. Oh, I could tell him so well how to make love, I know exactly what women like a man to be. Luckily, so few men really know it, otherwise the world would go round much quicker, and we should all be blown off it. Oh, Jack, fancy a woman who had never known what child-bearing meant attempting to describe it! You might as well sit down at your bureau and write letters to David.”