Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “But what on earth has it all got to do with you?” she said, while with a certain dismay she heard that her voice was trembling, and knew that it was not anger that caused this unsteadiness, though it would be well if he thought so.

  Instantly that illusion went the way of others.

  “Are you angry with me?” he asked. “I don’t believe you are.”

  “You deserve that I should be. I want to know what my affairs and Bernard’s have got to do with you?”

  “That’s a fair question. They have this to do with me. I hate seeing a girl like you — shall I describe you, so as to inform you what I mean by a ‘girl like you’?”

  “No: don’t bother about that,” said she.

  “Well, I hate to see Celia Courthope let herself be turned into an idol, or rather a doll. I can’t bear blue eyes and flaxen hair and red lips and a wax face, and the crime of it is that you’re not a doll at all. Some women are: it’s rather nice to kiss them and give them some chocolates, and go away. The people worth stopping with are selfish, greedy, disgusting, entrancing human beings. If you want real romance, not sham romance, come and knock about with them. You’re on the point of shutting yourself up in one of the artificial paradises we talked about in this very room. God, how sick you’ll get of it, and how disillusioned poor Bernard will be!”

  Celia had got complete control of herself again.

  “And are you saying all these remarkable things, for the purely altruistic motive of sparing Bernard and me unhappiness?” she asked.

  “Of course I’m not. I hope that some day you and I will fall in love with each other without any idealization at all. That we shall find we want each other. It wouldn’t be an ideal marriage according to the idealists, but it would be an extremely real one. How often does the ideal marriage happen? How often in a hundred years do two people fall in love with each other in the abandoned, second-rate-novelist fashion and remain like that adoring each other through the decades? Once in a blue moon, and then there’s a raid.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Celia.

  He laughed with the open mouth, red-tongued, white-toothed —

  “I don’t know,” he said, it seemed to finish the sentence. “It’s the sort of rot I talk in the House, and the fools think that it’s an epigram. I treated you like a fool and I apologize. Don’t interrupt. What does a man want when he marries? He wants a pal who excites his passions, instead of all that Dante-nonsense. What does a woman want? A man, who gives her children and is her intellectual superior. Those are the two sides to a real marriage. The idealizing stunt ends in smoke. Pillar of smoke by day and pillar of fire by night, and they think that will lead them into the Land of Promise. Very soon the smoke and its mystery only gets into their eyes, and as for the pillar of fire that becomes a pillar of smoke too. Nor does it lead into the Land of Promise: it leads into the Land of Compromise. Man and woman alike are disillusioned and disappointed, and they agree, bitterly but silently, to seek what they thought they had got, somewhere else, or to do without it. You’re the wrong wife for Bernard, and he’s the wrong husband for you. You haven’t even got a mutual idealization to start with. You’ve confessed that yourself. If you had, there would be no use in arguing with you.”

  “Oh, is this an argument?” asked Celia. “What is the point?”

  “Throw Bernard over, and marry me,” said Vincent. “I know you dislike me, but you’ll get over that. I don’t suppose I’m in love with you, but you excite me. You’re a puzzle, and a pretty one.”

  It seemed to Celia that, at that moment, he unclenched his hand, and there was the piece of the puzzle of him for which she had been searching. For one second, as inquisitive as a mongoose, she wondered what would happen if she took him at his word, and promised to marry him. As she hesitated, his arm was round her, and that handsome, animal mouth close to hers.

  “You divine riddle,” he said, “and how divinely human you’ll be when I’ve solved you.”

  She broke away from him, again with an effort, but this time it was not only herself, the need of an action of her will, but his physical strength that detained her. In that moment her fear and dislike of him increased tenfold, so also did the inimitable fascination of fear, the mere fact of the strong emotion. All her life she had looked at emotion, as from the retirement of a curtained box at a play. Now for that crisis, she was plucked out, and put in the very maelstrom of it. Bernard had never done that to her: he had made of her no more than an interested and sympathetic spectator, for all the fine power of his love. Now a mere brute, so she told herself, a mere nightmare invading her peace, had made her struggle and feel. The sensation, only dimly hinted at before, was wholly new and wholly detestable. It was also quite absorbing.

  He had not even risen from the tall fireguard on which he sat, and she stood there, well away from him, with her breath a little quickened, which he could see, and her heart hammering, which she hoped was private to herself. But when she spoke, she spoke without any indication of that unintelligible emotion, chiefly fear and repulsion, that was clamourous about her.

  “If you have any sense of decency,” she said, “you had better beg my pardon and go away.”

  “For what am I to beg your pardon?” he asked. “For being a cad.”

  “Not at all. For asking you to marry me,” said he.

  “That is a shade more caddish yet, as coming from Bernard’s friend.”

  “Can’t you leave Bernard out of the question?” he asked. “Just for the moment it is you and me.”

  “You know I am engaged to Bernard,” she said. “Yes: the French call that cliché. I want you to get away from the stage.”

  Some insistent, unsilenceable voice from some region in Celia’s soul, discovered just now by an intrepid traveller, cried aloud to her to admit the justice of his claim. She was acting a part that had been given her to learn, which, to do her justice, she had been trying to “get by heart.” This voice told her to forget her part, and say anything that came from herself. Desperately she stopped her ears to it, calling on her brain to give her a rapier against this attack, neat in play, unbreakable in defence.

  “That is an odd request,” she said, “to ask me to get away from the stage, where you are so intent on your clumsy farce. It is purely comic in you to request me to be real, when all I am capable of is to hope that you are not. Can’t you see what a cad you have been? Go away, Vincent, and think it over.”

  He was impenetrable at that point.

  “I prefer talking it over,” he said.

  “You will have to talk alone. Besides, I expect Bernard at any moment now: he is always punctual. If you are here when he comes, I shall tell him exactly what you have done.”

  He laughed, quite good-humouredly, rather contemptuously.

  “Oh, no, you won’t,” he said cheerfully.

  “Why not?”

  “There are a hundred reasons: I shan’t have time to give you all of them. In the first place, you know quite well that I shouldn’t have played the cad — oh yes, I admit that, if it’s any good to you — unless you had made it possible for me. Bernard would know quite well that I shouldn’t have done such a thing unless I had been granted facilities. One isn’t a cad out of a clear sky. Again, your telling him would be rather degrading to you, and that would spoil the wax-doll stunt. Again, you don’t really want to quarrel with me: you may think you do for the moment, but — ah, I could wish him unpunctual for once.”

  There was a step on the landing outside, and a knock at the door. That was so characteristic of Bernard. Dozens of Celia’s friends just walked in:

  Bernard alone, who had the best right of all to enter, invariably asked for admittance....

  Vincent got up as he entered.

  “Celia warned me of your beastly punctuality,” he said. “Kiss her, Bernard. Don’t mind me.” Bernard looked rather neatly displeased, and did exactly as he was told.

  “My dear chap,” he said, “thanks tremendously for
the permission. Eh, Celia?”

  She pulled him to her.

  “I am glad you have come,” she said. “Sit down on the arm of my chair. If it isn’t comfortable, sit on the floor. Cigarette? Oh, Vincent, I’ve never offered you any port. Darling, when Vincent comes to see me, he usually asks for port. What’s been happening? Where is everybody? How is Turkey? Go on.”

  “Sick man,” said Vincent. “So am I.”

  He looked straight at Celia, challenging her, markedly, unmistakably to fulfil her absurd promise of telling Bernard “what he had done.” He saw that challenge comprehended by her and declined with the droop of her eyelids. He proceeded to take up his own challenge himself.

  “Yes, I’m a sick man too,” he said. “I’m knocked out by your engagement to Celia. Why doesn’t she marry me instead? That’s what I asked her just before you came in. No reasonable reply of course. She just drivelled. I hate people being contented. It’s a shirking of the human burden. We ought all to be miserable, considering what a fake the whole world is.”

  “Fake, is it?” said Bernard, letting his hand drop on to Celia’s arm. “Fake, I think you said. Fake! Celia, he says, ‘Fake.’

  ‘The world’s a fake.’” Vincent gave a great yawn.

  “Good Heavens, man,” he said. “If you say any word over often enough, it sound silly. If you say ‘love’ twenty times over, you’ll find it becomes perfectly meaningless. I’ll leave you to do it, for I must be off. The little victims shall play.”

  “Victims,” said Bernard, in a strictly neutral tone. “Yes. When is the altar going to be decked? Make it when I’m away.”

  Celia in the shelter of Bernard became natural again without an effort.

  “My dear, I’ll promise not to ask you,” she said. “Then it won’t matter if you are here or not.”

  “That’s perfect of you. Good-bye.”

  The door closed behind him, and they heard his brisk and heavy step descending the stairs before either spoke. Just as Bernard’s entry had restored the sense of protection to the girl, so Vincent’s exit removed the danger that had threatened her. In that first sense of its removal, it was simply sufficient that he was no longer here: the exciting oppression of his personality was gone, and the mere deliverance from that brought a relief that did not look beyond the moment. She sat close to her lover, her hand in his, seeking the comfort of his proximity. She had certainly looked into the eyes of danger just now, and that made the present security sweeter than its wont. She wrapped it round her, folding it about her... she sat in the broad shadow of it, protected from the brazen heat.

  “Oh, what an odd creature,” she said. “And really, my dear, the oddest thing about him is that he is a friend of yours.”

  “It’s a friendship of antipathies springing from proximity,” began Bernard.

  Celia was still conscious of the enormous relief of Vincent’s departure: she pulled Bernard down into her chair, revelling in the cessation of the strain. Had he been a dog, she would have caressed him just like that.

  “Oh, you force me to translate,” she said, “before I get your meaning. You were at school and college with him, and saw a great deal of him and disliked him all the time. Do say you dislike him.”

  “I can’t do that quite. Antipathy isn’t dislike: it’s more a distance of tastes and principles. Vincent’s rather like snuff: he produces spasms, he makes you sneeze. On the whole it’s rather pleasant.”

  “I shan’t take any more snuff,” said Celia. Bernard was silent a moment.

  “I thought there was something frictional when I came in,” he said. “What had he been saying? Oh, yes, and what did he mean by telling me that he had asked you to marry him?”

  It was brought home to Celia how exquisitely right Vincent had been when he told her that she would not tell Bernard what had passed.

  “Oh, that was just his extravagant way of congratulating you,” she said. “He congratulated me too in that sort of manner. He said I was not nearly up to your mark.”

  Bernard stiffened a little.

  “Nobody has yet accused him of good taste,” he said drily.

  Celia still felt disposed to chatter from mere sense of relief, but into her chatter there crept a certain advocacy for Vincent.

  “Was that bad taste?” she said. “I really don’t see why. He puts things more directly than other people, that is all. He doesn’t wrap them up and present them on silver salvers: he chucks them at you. What could be a more vivid way of saying that he congratulated you, than by saying he wanted to marry me himself, or of congratulating me then by saying I wasn’t worthy of you?”

  “Bad taste,” said Bernard.

  Celia wrinkled her eyebrows: a soft perpendicular crease inserted itself between them.

  “I don’t see it,” she said.

  “Surely.”

  She wondered at the strange contradictions that one mind can hold simultaneously. Just now she had been fleeing to Bernard for protection: a moment afterwards, even as she nestled to him, she was standing up for the influence from which she had sought refuge. It seemed that she might dislike a man herself... but would not permit others to criticize him. Certainly she disliked him, she was sure of that; she disliked and feared him. For her own protection she must remember that, and cease thinking about him whether for his defence or her own.

  “Oh, Bernard,” she said. “I love your attitude when you have quite made up your own mind. You don’t want to argue, you don’t even want to see your opponent’s view, you draw your own view down over your face like a visor. Put up your visor, dear. I’m not going to argue either. And why,” she said dramatically, addressing the fireguard, “why are we talking about Vincent? What’s Hecuba to Vincent, or we to Hecuba? And perhaps you’ll tell me what that means.”

  He laughed, putting his arm round her.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said. “But if you want to know, I’ll think about it. My darling, I find such lovely meanings in all you do or say. I often wonder when you will cease dawning on me. You keep dawning on me the whole time. It’s one eternal sunrise to be with you. I don’t believe it will ever fade into the light of common day. Lord, how I wish I was a poet. I would tell the world what you are.”

  She smiled at him, shaking her head.

  “Oh, don’t idealize,” she said. “I shall disappoint you if you do.”

  “I am a grovelling realist,” said he. “I made a vision to myself, decking it with all the glory and wonder of a dream, and you make it grindingly, inexorably real by just being yourself. I’ve done with idealization. I’m no more than a crabbed, spectacled old student of you. Go on being what you are.”

  Celia found her brain saying, “It’s I of whom he’s talking.” Never once did it say “It’s he who is talking.” She knew that an unmeasurable chasm isolates every single human soul from every other, and here was he throwing a rainbow-bridge across to her, and with ecstatic security walking on it. Daily the miracle took place before her eyes, and yet she could not believe it. She looked wildly around, so to speak, for a rainbow-bridge of her own, but found no such article. As so often before, she had to find some stepping-stones, and paint them with the colours that seemed to match the rainbow.... Yet she wanted the rainbow, she did her best to reproduce it.

  She was tracing with her finger a blue vein on the back of his hand.

  “That’s Bernard,” she said. “And the finger is me. And where they touch, that’s us. Oh, what about grammar? What will the crabbed, spectacled student think? He will say ‘This ridiculous specimen that I’m studying doesn’t even know grammar.’ So he’ll tear me up into little bits in his fingers and throw me into the waste-paper basket. I shall help to light the fire to boil his kettle next morning.... Now, if I go on, I shall be silly.”

  “Be silly.”

  “No: it’s ally to be silly. Besides, you told me there was something you wanted to ask me.” Bernard made no pretence of not recollecting. “Yes, I wanted to ask you somet
hing,” he said. “It’s rather bald, and as uninteresting as anything that concerns you can be. But I really want to know. Can you tell me what your father’s income is? There or thereabouts?”

  Celia did not reply directly.

  “Has poor Daddy been asking you for money?” she asked.

  Bernard could answer with truth and reassurance as to this. Philip had certainly not asked him for money, for he had been quick enough to anticipate that request while it was only imminent.

  “He has done nothing of the kind,” he said. “Please do not think that.”

  “What am I to think, then?” she said.

  “You are not to think at all, darling,” he said. “You are to answer me what I asked you, if you will be so kind.”

  Celia stared in front of her, without speech, but busy searching for some memory.

  “It was the night of the last air-raid,” she said at length, “when poor Daddy went alone into the cellar. You and he stopped behind the other men after dinner to have a talk. If he didn’t ask you for money, he said something that made you offer it him. I apologize for him, Bernard.”

  “He would be very much astonished if he knew,” said Bernard, trailing a red herring.

  “You don’t deny it then?” said the girl. “I could argue it.”

  “My dear, spare your trouble. Now I will tell you. Daddy has plenty of money: he and I lived quite comfortably. On the top of that, he sold my companionship to my mother. She gave him more to let me go. He set up a motor-car on it, and a butler. It’s all too degrading. And now he has sold me again. He is wretched. Kindly idealize Daddy for me. I should be truly grateful.”

  She turned away from him, and stabbed at a log in the grate.

  “I hope you won’t give him anything,” she said. “He is trafficking in me.”

  She held the poker up, with its next blow undelivered. Was she much better, after all, than her bargaining Daddy? Was she not even much worse? He was only taking advantage of Bernard’s wealth, while she was taking advantage of something beyond wisdom or the price of rubies. At that moment she could more easily have apologized for herself than for him.