Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  She wanted (and she knew this also) to defend herself from herself, and not less, from him. Other men — Jimmie was among them — talked to her far more directly: the boy’s open delight in her was far more patent But she wanted no defence from Jimmie: his was a certain outdoor sunny adoration of herself that needed no protection. But with Vincent is was different: she felt he was hunting her down in some jovial way, while she tried, with the chameleon-habit, to efface herself against protective colouring. She made effacement of herself as Bernard’s wife: she made effacement of herself against Vincent’s genial cynicism: she sought always to escape him by cleverness. And therein, precisely, she showed the weakness of her intention. It was, if not easy, at any rate possible for her to run away: she could, at the risk of his astonishment, have avoided him altogether, just refused to see him. But she had not the courage that alone inspires running away. If she had been braver, she would have done that, and merited the Victoria Cross for the moral valour of rescuing herself.

  As it was, she drew a Dutch courage from the fact that in the immediate future her father and Olga Lutloff were her guests. She would be forced to attend to her duties as a hostess, for no one was less capable of self-support than the Princess. She lived on the vitality of other people, remaining lean. She would absorb Vincent, it was to be hoped, bleeding him like veal. Or would he absorb her? Best of all would it be if they were like the two snakes which ate each other.

  Celia rose, thinking that this would be an admirable conclusion to her perplexities and, vaguely feeling that she had dropped something, saw Bernard’s letter lying on the grass at her feet. Some speck of sun, shining through the shadow of the firs, caught its white envelope, and for the moment it seemed to beckon to her like a signal flashed across a morass. She longed to go to its light, but, without wings, how was she to traverse the marsh? The child she was to bear him, the mother-sense, would they lift her into the air?

  Celia rallied her scattered hosts. Anything was better than to brood, to wonder, to analyse herself. It was better by far to join her father and help him to find flower-pots for his ridiculous game, to get a trowel and dig the silly holes, to take interest in the blue shirt, to efface herself against the protective colouring of his futility. She must devote herself to him, play games with him, admire his skill in putting, wrap herself up in things that did not matter, in order to deaden the touch of dangerous things, of realities....

  Philip, at dinner that night, amply fulfilled his promise of talking to Vincent about the state of Russia, and the impotent imbecility of the Allies in dealing with the situation, making it quite clear what he would have done if England had been so fortunate as to have secured his services as Prime Minister during these critical days. He held forth at great length, stringing together a gobble of political clichés, with an occasional lapse into French for the benefit of Olga Lutloff.

  “That was the great mistake,” he concluded. “We misunderstood the situation from the first. We wanted somebody of cosmopolitan importance to be in management. We took an insular view. We did not see that your country, chère madame, sang a tune that was strange to us. C’est le ton qui fait la musique, and we did not hear the tune. N’est pas? Hinc illæ lacrimæ: if I have made myself clear to you. That is what came of ‘wait and see!’”

  “Then I think we have finished with Russia,” said the Princess, with extreme politeness. “Let us talk of something else. All most interesting, Mr. Courthope. You should go into Parliament.”

  “Ha! I have often thought that,” said he. “But the waste of time, the procedure, the interminable discussions. I am accustomed to more direct methods. If I want a thing done at Merriby, I state my case, and they may take it or leave it. Do you remember about the marble pavements in the établissement des bains, Celia? It was very amusing: it was characteristic, too, of my methods.”

  “They are sure to be charming,” said the Princess, in a deadly voice. “I will have an apricot.” Vincent came to the rescue of the situation.

  “I don’t think I regret anything more in the world,” he said, “than the fact that I used to like apricots and now I don’t.”

  “Ah, now we’re talking,” said Olga. “The loss of a pleasure! There is nothing in Russia to compare with that. Go on, Mr. Douglas.”

  “There it is! Nothing can console one for the loss of a pleasure. Apricots and bull’s-eyes have passed from me. On the other hand, in Russia I learned to like the smell of stewing india-rubber overshoes when one came in from that bitter northeast wind and sat round a stove. I balance that against the apricots, for you can roast a piece of india-rubber any day, whereas apricots are only obtainable for a few weeks in the year.”

  “Pardon me: there are excellent preserved apricots which you can get all the year round,” said Philip.

  “No doubt you are right. But one ought to accumulate the taste for pleasures. So many pleasures vanish with youth — apricots and bull’s-eyes are the only two I have lost yet — but sight is one that will soon go, and hearing is another—”

  “I have just as good sight now as when I was twenty,” said Philip. “I can see my ball pitch after my longest drive.”

  “But you are exceptionally fortunate,” said Olga. “You are a marvel: let us hear about us poor normal people.”

  “Pardon,” said Philip. “La parole est à vous, monsieur.”

  Vincent put his elbows on the table, turning round a little to Celia.

  “We ought to glut our senses with pleasure,” he said, “while we have them, and at the same time to cultivate those that we have reason to believe will stay with us. You, for instance, ought to gorge your ears with music, because the edge of your taste will certainly vanish when you get older.”

  “Celia has a very good ear,” said her father, “and she reads music tolerably.”

  Vincent had got to the stage of taking no more notice of him.

  “Get an old man and an old woman, Celia,” he said, “to tell you what they enjoy most. Without exception, if they are honest, they will say the taste of food and saving money. Now it’s worth while taking that hint.”

  “In spite of the apricots and bull’s-eyes,” said Olga.

  “Yes. That is an unfortunate and abnormal experience of my own. All the happy old men I know love their dinner, and love being rich. I suppose it’s the final outcry of the flesh against extinction, for whatever the next world may be like, I do not suppose it will include beef and bank-notes.

  Besides—”

  He poured himself out another glass of port. “There are all sorts of theories about the next world,” he said, “and we have no means of testing them. But about this world there is a very sure test. Whatever pleasure you enjoy is a ‘score’ to you. You have attained it: you have got something.”

  “Rank materialism,” said Philip.

  Celia suddenly felt irritated.

  “Daddy, darling, let him tell us,” she said. “If you do not want to listen yourself, allow us to listen.”

  She turned to Vincent again.

  “It’s rank materialism,” she said, “as my father said. But let us have it in the round.”

  “It is in the round: it’s in the trivial round,” he said. “All we are certain about is our senses.

  If a thing pleases us, it is good for us, and it’s not only good for us but for every one with whom we come in contact. Asceticism is the opposite of the intelligent pursuit of pleasure, though in some abnormal manner the real ascetic finds his greatest pleasure in starving himself of pleasure. Lord! how often I have said that to Bernard, and how often he has failed to produce the smallest argument of weight on the other side! He’s a fine national idealist, revelling in unrealities. He is revelling now in the idea of Greece being as idealistic as he is.”

  He had made the diversion with consummate tact. He had seen Celia close up like a sea-anemone shrinking into itself, at his first mention of Bernard’s idealism, and without seeming to change his subject, but only to give an example of it
, he had diverted the general idealism of Bernard into his particular work abroad. It was so cunningly done that Celia told herself that he was not talking about Bernard’s idealism of her at all. But she told that to herself without authority, like the scribes and Pharisees.

  “Bernard is busy in idealizing Greece,” he continued, “and when he has finished with that he will idealize something else. I really don’t know why I have chosen Bernard out of all the swarm of idealists that surround us now: he was the first who occurred to me. Violet will do just as well: she is absorbed in the idealization of her husband.”

  He shifted his seat a little, turning more round towards Celia, conscious that she was listening with the “interior ear.” He, too, was speaking with the interior tongue.

  “I hate asceticism,” he said, “and I hate idealism, though I love idealists like Bernard. That is surely a Christian doctrine, to love the sinner and hate the sin. It is even more Christian to love the saint and hate the saintliness. Saintliness, in itself, cannot help being priggish. It invariably knows that it is saintly, whence the sinner is firmly convinced he is a sinner.”

  “Then you separate a man’s qualities from the man?” asked Celia.

  “Naturally. A man’s qualities, his aspirations and his dislikes are only a shade more intimate to him than his clothes. They are tastes: his nature is shown in the colour of his clothes not less surely than in the colour of his likes and dislikes. Both are largely affected by fashion, both are even more largely affected by education. If I chose to dress in a green shirt and a blue hat and orange trousers, it would be because I liked them or because I, probably mistakenly, thought they were becoming. They are an expression of a man’s tastes or of his pose. So are his qualities or, as I should call them, his adornment of his soul for public appearance. We all act to each other: we assume, in order to cover our naked souls, a certain clothing, suggested by our souls it is true, but only an expression of our souls, carefully chosen, like our dress. Sartor Resartus, in the rude Germanic method of Carlyle, pointed out that we judge people by their appearance, and told us that if we stripped them we should find a sort of radish, split into two, but still a radish. That was thought very penetrating and philosophical at the time, because psychology was in a sort of second childhood in the Victorian era, and accepted as startling anything that was obvious. But somehow this upheaval of the war has stripped us all a little more naked yet. We see that not only clothes but qualities are a mere clothing of the real personality. To take a collective instance, what of the qualities of Germans, their Kultur, their philosophy, their music, their beer? They were all only like shirts and stockings that could be stripped off, and when that was done we saw the brute that lay within. And what is true of the nation is true of the individual. We are all, we ourselves, utterly different from the qualities in which we clothe ourselves. They are only a shade less alien to us than our clothes. In a way they express us, just as our clothes do, but, good Lord, what monsters and what angels may lie within! The qualities, as we have to call them, are a result of education: we are drilled into them. What child, for example, had ever a sense of truth? The child is smacked if it tells lies to its parents, and so, as a purely defensive measure against the slipper, it learns to suppress its imagination. But who is so inept as to assert that the truthful quality which a child acquires from fear of being spanked is a millionth part as valuable as the imagination of a child? If only we could strip off what we have been clothed in, and show for one minute what we really are! People think that if we revealed ourselves without disguise, we should be pariahs to the eye of our fellows. But if we were all pariahs together, what would that matter? We should be honest for once, and that might be an advantage. Anyhow, I am going to set the example of honesty and say that I am a pure or impure brute, who wants the pleasure of a glass of port. I have already had two, and I want a third. I wish to secure a little more happiness, and I feel sure that port will give it me. But one should beware of being too happy: if one is too happy one tends towards idealism. Happiness is rather a blunting process really: it takes the edge off one’s mind. You must never confuse it with pleasures. Pleasures are sharpening and happiness is what the advertisements call a drowsy, coated feeling. I think I have contradicted myself somewhere, but who cares? I’m sure I don’t.”

  “Ha! I can put my finger on that,” said Philip triumphantly. “You said you wanted the pleasure of a glass of port because it produced happiness, and the moment afterwards warned us against confusing the two. You have just done so yourself!” Vincent seemed to wonder for a moment whether it was worth while explaining this. But as it gave him an opportunity for being ingenious he did.

  “You did not follow me quite,” he said. “The pleasure of a glass of port consists in its taste, the happiness in its effect. But, seriously, what a dreadful thing respectability is. What awful crimes it condones, and what white innocence it condemns! It is quite respectable for a man to have a foul, grousing temper that renders everybody about him miserable. No constituency would dream of being dissatisfied with its member for that. But if a constituency learns that its member gets drunk every night, it will get rid of him. It’s purely a matter of fashion, and is not based on any principle of morality. Of course, if a drunkard beats his wife, it’s another matter. But he is at liberty to make her completely miserable in every other way, and as long as he doesn’t break certain rules of the law, he is perfectly respectable. The awful qualities sanctioned and produced by this fetishism of respectability!”

  “How produced?” asked Olga.

  “Hypocrisy is the first that occurs to me, and I really don’t know anything lower in the scale of creation than the hypocrite who practises a morality that he doesn’t really believe in, and feigns suitable emotions.”

  Nothing could have been more impersonal than his manner of speech: he was letting off these fireworks, you would have thought, from sheer amusement at their sparks and cracklings, but once again Celia felt that he was talking at her. Yet there were so many caps, so to speak, lying about now that if she tried them all on there must be one to fit her.... And as for his catching her eye at that moment, he had done that half a dozen times before. She rose.

  “I’m feeling a little muddled,” she observed.

  “I’m sure I don’t wonder,” said Vincent genially.

  “And do you mean all you say?” she asked.

  “Oh, do you think that matters? The object of conversation is to suggest points of view rather than solidly support them.”

  “But there’s a virtue in sincerity,” she said.

  “There’s a virtue everywhere if you choose to look for it,” he said. “I read the other day that earwigs were excellent mothers. But to discover that must have involved a great waste of patient research. And one goes on killing the Cornelias just as much.”

  They all drifted out together into the drawingroom, where the door was open on to the clear dusk of early night. Celia moved towards this, hoping that Vincent would follow her, so that it would be natural for them, as if by accident, to stroll out. She knew the unwisdom of it: the very fact that she wanted to do it showed it was unwise. Then, next moment, when he joined her at the door, she told herself that if she really wanted to get her slate clean, she must behave naturally to him: this calculation, this weighing of words with regard to infinitesimal matters only exaggerated to herself the hold he had over her.... Indeed, there was no hold really, she but imagined it. The wisest thing she could do was to demonstrate the unreality of it.

  “Just as far as the gate?” she said over her shoulder.

  “Just as far as the end of the world, if you like,” said he. “I promise not to talk any more. Let’s go to the end of the world in silence, and look over.”

  “My dear, what should we see?” she asked.

  “The past all over again. There never will be any more than there is: doesn’t Whitman say that? All life comes out of existing life. Hot to-day, cold to-morrow, and hash on Wednesday; though the
re’s plenty of hash to-day. Sorry for talking, but when I’m with you I can’t help it. Sense, nonsense, anything. I wonder if it’s the stimulus of mutual sympathy or antipathy. I don’t mind which, so long as it’s there.”

  He had turned half away, sheltering the match he had lit from the breeze and nursing it in the cave of his hands. As he put his head down to kindle his cigar, the flame cast a strong reddish illumination on the firm clear line of his lips, and the muscles at the comers of his mouth, a little pronounced from the puckering of his lips to hold his cigar. Celia noticed that with a sudden, surprised vividness.

  “I think it’s both,” he said. “I delight in you, and you still dislike me.”

  They had come to the angle where, beneath the fir-trees, the drive joined the main road. At that moment the sharp ping of a bicycle-bell sounded, and a telegraph boy curved in through the gate. Celia, for a second, thought that she had one of those sensations that made her feel that just this had happened before. She knew, too, what would happen next, that the boy would see her, give her the telegram and ask if there was any answer. Then, still instantaneously, she remembered that this was a real recollection: she had received at this spot and in this manner the telegram from Bernard saying that Vincent had returned from Russia, and was coming down to Stonepitts with him. All happened now as it had happened then: it was a mere coincidence.

  Next moment the boy had dismounted and given her the telegram. There was just enough light still lingering to read it by.

  “No, no answer,” she said.