Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  CHAPTER IV

  ONE afternoon, half-way through November, Celia was sitting by the fire in her own sitting-room in her mother’s house. It had been autumnally dark all day, but it seemed perfectly suitable that the weather outside should be so inclement, from the fact that the odious conditions there but gave a spice to the warmth and cheerfulness within. She did not precisely want other people to be wet and uncomfortable, but the knowledge of the dreary skies, with drippings of cold, half-congealed moisture, of the wet pavements, the roadways deep in puddles, the hurrying foot-passengers with umbrellas slanted against the rain, the crowded mouths of tube-stations, the turned-up collars and the glistening mackintoshes, gave an added lustre to her fire of logs, an added softness to the thick rugs on the floor and her cushioned chair. She expected that a friend or two might drop in to tea, and as there were people coming to dinner that night she would not stir out of the house again. But there was half an hour yet to tea-time, and she was too content and comfortable as she was to go across to her table and write a few notes that must be done some time, or occupy herself with a book. No book, indeed, just now interested her as much as her thoughts.

  The growth of the mind consists largely of unconscious and subterranean processes, unknown to the consciousness of the individual in question. Just as a bulb in spring-time begins its sprouting underground, bursting its brown sheath, and putting up a sappy horn of stem towards the light, while above ground no hint of the change is as yet apparent, so the conscious self, the director of limbs, of reasoned action and responsible emotions, is unaware at first that within and below a similar expansion of vitality is going on. It is not till the growth penetrates the surface soil that it can be consciously registered.

  To-day this growth in herself was for the first time visible to Celia, and, as she sat by her log fire, she was absorbed in registering it. She had been living with her mother here in town for no more than six weeks, but now it seemed to her that her very identity was not the same as it had been when at the end of September she left Merriby. The whole quality of her vitality had altered: the change was as great as that between the dormant immobile life of the chrysalis and the swift flight of the butterfly, between the brown sheath that had encircled it then and the present iridescence of its wings. It was not merely that here there were a thousand more interests surrounding her, while at Merriby there were but few, but she felt now that if by some backward wave of an enchanter’s wand she was restored in her old surroundings she would find there, by virtue of her awakened vitality, a similar vividness. Externally, the change in her circumstances had been great, but the internal change was greater and more significant. In those years she had but let the days pass in mild amusement at any entertainment they might bring her, in mild toleration at its absence; but now, whether a particular day was amusing or not, judging by the standard of London, there was nothing mild in her scrutiny of it. She tasted with gusto, she observed with keenness, she heard with attention. She was vastly more critical than she had been, and also far more appreciative. In one respect, however, she had not changed at all: the quality of her affections had never been stirred from its tranquillity. It might perhaps be deeper, but it showed no sign of agitation.

  Violet Matcham was the first visitor to arrive. She came, as was her wont, some quarter of an hour before her time, and interrupted Celia’s perfectly just conclusions about herself.

  “Darling, are you glad to see me?” she asked. “Do pretend you are: I will believe anything you say.”

  Celia rang for tea.

  “Of course I am. I’ve been thinking about myself. I hadn’t quite finished, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Ah, go on thinking about yourself aloud,” said Violet, settling herself on the hearth-rug.

  “Willingly: I was being rather entertained by myself. Do you know I’ve changed enormously since I came to town? Or is it only a fresh coat of paint that makes me seem different? I don’t think it’s paint. In other words, I don’t think it’s London.”

  “London has changed,” said this devout lover. “You’ve given it a fresh coat of paint.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that,” said Celia with the greatest calmness. “It’s clearly not true, and it only confuses me. When you are thinking about yourself, you must keep the light dry. You mustn’t put in coloured slides, which, however becoming — Oh, there’s the telephone! Most people say ‘Bother the telephone!’ I never do: I like it. I wish it would ring all day.”

  Celia went across to it and listened.

  “Yes, it’s me,” she said.... “Oh, by all means, Tommy: come along at once. Violet’s here. Au revoir!”

  “Which Tommy?” asked Violet.

  “The tall one, Bridges. Yes: coloured slides — I am beginning to talk like my mother. You put coloured slides in for all your friends, you know, Violet. If you like them, you put nice colours in; if you dislike them, you put in greens and browns to make them look ghastly. But it’s a mistake in any case. They all look unreal, chromolithographie.”

  “In parenthesis, I don’t dislike my friends—” began Violet.

  “Also in parenthesis, there are only about two that you like. Bernard is one and I’m the other. Oh, no; you like Tommy, and you’ll end by marrying him.”

  “I wish you would begin by marrying Bernard.”

  “When he asks me, I will begin by thinking about it. Coloured slides, I repeat. You’ve no idea how unreal all your notions about people are. I was wrong, by the way, when I said you only like two. You begin by liking everybody. After a week or so you take the rose-coloured slide out and substitute an unbecoming one. Why not look through plain white glass the whole time?”

  Celia had risen to get her tea, and was dropping saccharine into it as she spoke, apparently mistaking it for small lumps of sugar. Then a misgiving seized her, and she tasted it with great caution in a teaspoon.

  “Devastating!” she said. “And tubes of saccharine have been wasted. The happy days when sugar was sugar! Happy, happy days! Coloured slides! Why coloured?”

  Violet considered this.

  “I pause, not because I don’t know, nor because my mouth is full of toast,” she said, “but because I am sorting out what I do know. It’s this. There’s no possible means of finding out what people really are like, so the best thing to do is to confine yourself to whether you love them or not. If you do, exaggerate their loveliness by every means in your power. If you don’t, make guys of them.”

  “But that’s not fair,” said Celia.

  “I don’t want to be fair: I want to be excited. I like emphasizing and magnifying and belittling. If I dislike a particular person, he’s odious. If I like him, he’s incomparably wonderful and priceless I hate common-sense moderation and fair views.”

  “My distinguishing characteristics,” remarked Celia.

  “I know they are, but I don’t adore you for your characteristics. Besides, your lights are not as dry as you think. You’ve got enthusiasms, and though they aren’t enthusiasms of the emotions, enthusiasm is a coloured slide. Some day you’ll put a coloured slide in your heart.”

  The door was very softly opened and a tall, round-faced young man came in. He was dressed in khaki and had the riband of the D.S.O. on his coat. He sank down in the nearest chair, and put his feet up on another.

  “Is there any possibility of getting a taxi?” he asked.

  “Now?” asked Celia.

  “Not yet, thank you. It was general conversation. Is Violet coming to dine with you to-night? If so, may I? Oh, no, I can’t; I forgot. Sorry!”

  “What a pity!” said Celia. “Violet is coming in after. Do come too. But you can go on now, just as if I wasn’t here, as Tilda said.”

  “Tilda who?”

  “Price. Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens.”

  “Never read any. Recommended?”

  “Yes: utterly priceless. All the characters blazing with life, and not in the least like any one you ever saw. Blacks and white
s. The villains and heroes. The heroes are prigs, and you leave them out.”

  “Dickens, Dickens,” said Tommy, as if to get the name by heart. “I shall take some back to France. Lord, what a beastly country. Life consists of ten days’ foredoom and ten minutes’ terror, over and over again.”

  He yawned heavily.

  “I should like to be wounded,” he said. “Some gentle, painless wound. In the — I don’t know where. Somewhere where it wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Where are you dining to-night that you can’t come and meet me?” asked Violet.

  “Oh, a pot-house in Soho. Me and a flying-boy.”

  “Who is he? May I come too?” asked Violet. “Then we’ll all come on here together.”

  “Certainly not. It would spoil it all. Jimmie Broadbent. He downed the Zepp., do you remember? He’s just eighteen. I utterly adore him.”

  “So you do me,” said Violet.

  “I know. But then you’re not Jimmie. He’s a god: you’re only a girl. Different sort of thing. Look at my new riband.”

  “Just for a riband to put in his coat,” quoted Celia. “All that trouble! Tell me about it. I want to hear it all.”

  “Oh, there’s nothing to tell. I only said ‘riband’ for general conversation. I didn’t happen to be frightened that morning: that’s all. If I had been, I should have stopped where I was. More tea, please. It doesn’t happen to have got any hotter since my last cup, does it? My last cup was bitterly cold.”

  “Ring then,” said she. “We were talking about coloured slides before you came.”

  “Magic lantern?” asked Tommy.

  “Quite. Violet puts everybody into her magic lantern, and throws them with coloured lights on to the sheet.”

  “What sheet? Oh, I see. But what else are you to do? If your emotions don’t supply you with colour, you never see anything at all. Same with microbes. You’ve got to stain them before you can see them.”

  “Tommy, I would shake hands with you if I wasn’t sitting on the floor,” said Violet. “Celia says you ought to take fair views.”

  “Oh, damn fair views! What is a fair view? There isn’t one. It’s one’s own view all the time. Besides, in the evening you take an optimistic view, and early in the morning you take a pessimistic view. Which is the fair view?”

  “Quite,” said Violet. “If—”

  “Not at all quite,” interrupted Celia. “People are just as much certainties as mathematical conclusions. I dare say you think two and two are five in the evening—”

  “Eight, if you’re seeing double,” said Tommy. “I’m not. And the same two and two look like three in the morning. But it is really four. You ought to have a sort of Greenwich time in your head, something absolutely regular. I was always slow down at Merriby. There must be a Greenwich time.”

  “Why? What you really want,” said Tommy, “is to be Greenwich time yourself. Probably you thought you were Greenwich time down at Merriby. Now you go faster, and strike louder, and think you’re Greenwich time still. You’re frightfully slow with regard to people still, and that’s because you’re a complete egoist. You don’t care about people — I’m sure I don’t know why you should — and in consequence you don’t know anything about them.”

  “You brute,” said Celia slowly.

  “That’s what you think: I’m not a brute at all, really. All the same, it must be rather fun not to care about people at all. It’s frightfully attractive. We all know, with you, that there’s nobody else, and so we want to be the one. Badly expressed.”

  “Rottenly,” said Celia.

  “I said so. But wait till you fall in love. Nobody knows anything real about people till he or she, specially she, falls in love. Then you see truly for the first time, just because you’re illusioned. I’m in love with you and Violet and Jimmie, and it’s just because I see you all wrong that I love you all so much. Violet is really a sentimental schoolgirl with a passion for you; you are really a cynical old man with a passion for yourself. Jimmie is — well, he’s a pal. We’re all worms in the sight of God. But if two people adore each other, they cease to be worms and become stars.”

  “Mutual illusion,” said Celia.

  “Of course. Why make chestnuts?”

  Celia gave a great sigh.

  “Oh, Tommy,” she said. “I wish you had seen me at Merriby, and then you would know how I’ve got on. I used not to want to care for anything or anybody: I used to sit there vaguely amused and nothing else. If my father told me to ask people to dinner, I only hoped they would go away early. I just saw that people were boring or amusing or ridiculous or fat, and left it at that. Now, anyhow, I’m interested in their being something. I look at them closely, I like them if they are nice, and I dislike them if they are not. I”

  “Wait a minute: I’ve lost count of the I’s,” said the brutal Tommy.

  “There were eight. I — that makes nine — just sat and smiled. I can’t help smiling: it’s the corners of my mouth. But I don’t see why I should get illusions about people.”

  Tommy got up.

  “I have already explained it,” he said, “and since you are not stupid, you will understand it if you think it over. It is the worst illusion of all to think you can possibly take fair views. Nobody takes fair views: if he did he would die of acute common sense. Where are the cigarettes?”

  The door opened, and Vincent Douglas came in. “Wiser not to ring up,” he said, “or you might have said you were out. So I asked at the door and found you were in. It’s Violet: it’s Tommy. It will be Bernard in ten minutes. You all look heated. Argument, I suppose.”

  “Vincent, take my side,” said Celia. “I am up against two idealists, or illusionists:”

  “One,” said Tommy. “I’m off.”

  He nodded generally and left the room.

  Vincent Douglas, who seemed to fill up the whole room, felt the side of the teapot and apparently rejected the idea of tea.

  “What I really want is a glass of port,” he said. “But don’t bother, if it would be more inconvenient for you to procure it than for me to go without it. Poor Tommy! But, after all, why poor? I wish I despised anybody as much as he despises me. I envy anybody a strong emotion. He was rather insolent the other night, and I should have quarrelled with him if I had dared.”

  “But why?” asked Celia.

  “Because I am quite frank about my cushy job. I say straight out that I would far sooner carry dispatches to Rome than be in those damned trenches. Other people like me talk about the responsibility of their post and observe quite truly that it has got to be done, and that a Staff appointment is an honourable appointment. I dare say it is, but I don’t bother about that. I prefer the risk of travelling backwards and forwards to the risk of being in the trenches. But illusionists and idealists can’t bear frankness.”

  “Go on,” said Celia.

  “Well: a lot of people are being killed. The idealists say that it is nobler to risk being killed than to do something where you are probably not killed, though they allow that that something has got to be done. I don’t agree at all: I would sooner that anybody else was killed than I. And it’s just because I don’t talk balderdash about it, but state that fact quite firmly, that ridiculous people like Tommy insinuate, when pressed, that I am a coward. Of course I am: so is he. We’re all cowards. But the worst cowardice of all is being afraid of being thought a coward. If I hadn’t got this appointment, I should have gone into the trenches and done exactly what most other people are doing. I should have been just as brave as anybody else. But it would be the rankest hypocrisy on my part to pretend that I wasn’t delighted that I haven’t got to go there. Idealists can’t bear the truth. They like Nannie with a bag of sweets. I’m sure I don’t grudge it them. I want everybody to have precisely what he likes and not to interfere with me. I only object to being told I ought to like what I don’t, or oughtn’t to like what I do.”

  Violet had apparently been counting something on her fingers as Vincent spo
ke.

  “I think what you have said contains six lies,” she remarked. “The one that matters most is that Tommy is a coward.”

  “But he is. If Tommy knew that he had to go down to the House this evening, as I have, and make a speech, he would melt with fright. But I don’t melt with fright at all: I’m looking forward to it. I like fighting with words and brains: that’s my form of bravery and his form of cowardice. He apparently revels in taking a nest of machine-guns, which I should loathe. But I’m not such an ass as to put my nose in the air because Tommy couldn’t face the House of Commons.”

  “Well, allow that you are a physical coward and Tommy a moral coward,” began Violet.

  “I won’t allow anything of the sort. Keeping your head clear when you have to make a speech instead of getting confused and frightened is a matter of nerves, just as facing a nest of machine-guns is. They are both physical The mind also inspires both, and the inspiration is patriotism in both cases. He wants to inconvenience the Germans: I want to defend the rights of English miners.”

  “But he at personal ride,” said Violet.

  “And I at personal risk. Unless I am quick and agile, I shall get sniped.”

  “I hope you will,” said Violet.

  “And if I said that I hoped Tommy would get sniped next time he went for machine-guns, you would think me absolutely outside the pale. So I should be.”