by E. F. Benson
“Peter! How lovely of you!” she said. “Come in.”
“Is she in?” he asked, putting down his coat and hat.
“Mother? No; she’s at a harpy party. Four women rooking each other at bridge. They’ll all be trembling and being frightfully polite by this time. Peter, bring your hat and coat in with you. If mother sees them there she will think Philip’s here and will come in to sit with us.”
“And if she thought they were mine—”
“She would come in twice. But if there are no signs of anybody she will probably go to bed and not interrupt us.”
The night was hot, with a thundery, overcast sky, and they sat together again in the window-seat. A hundred feet below the street was roaring and rolling along, thick with the discharge from theatres and music halls.
“The clever one! And how did you get rid of Philip?” asked Peter.
“Lied, darling,” said Nellie, succinctly.
“Did you, indeed? Nellie, I don’t think you’re getting on very well with your determination to be conventional.”
Nellie blew reproach at him in the shape of a ragged smoke-ring.
“I never heard anything so unjust,” she said. “Oh, Peter, it was just here we sat when I told you I was going to be quite conventional. Wasn’t it? Don’t say you don’t remember. Well, I’m being the model of conventionality.”
“Pleasant, is it?” asked Peter, in a wonderfully neutral voice. He did not vet quite know why Nellie had summoned him here, and he was greatly aloof still.
“Don’t make slightly acid comments,” said she, “about conventionality. It’s a fortnight, more than a fortnight, since I saw you last. Oh, I don’t count balls and that sort of thing. Your friends are invisible at balls. You can only see your acquaintances. What’s the use of just seeing a friend? You’ve got to be alone with a friend in order to see him.”
Nellie was still unaware of what course she was really meaning to steer. It was to be a safe course, anyhow, avoiding shoals and avoiding icebergs. Just at present Peter was making himself an iceberg. She went on, talking rapidly and quite naturally, with a view to bringing Peter out of his frozen aloofness.
“But my scheme for conventionality never went so far as to exclude my seeing my friends altogether,” she said. “And if, in order to see a particular friend, I have to tell lies to one person and — and tell the other not to leave his coat in the hall, that’s not my fault. It’s mother’s fault for not having gone to bed yet; it’s Philip’s fault for proposing to drop in.” Peter’s smile hovered over his face again, not quite breaking through.
“Brutes,” he said. “Perfect brutes.”
“I’m not sure that you aren’t the worst of them all,” remarked Nellie.
His smile broke through at that, and he laughed. “You may be quite sure I’m not a brute,” he said. “But I should like to know why you think so.” Nellie was sincere enough in her desire to re-establish a genuine, friendly relationship with him again. At present their grip on each other was clogged and rusted. If this rather unconventional meeting was to be of any use (what use she did not clearly define), the first essential was to wipe the wheels clean.
“You know perfectly well,” she said. “Ever since my engagement you have taken yourself completely away. You have shut yourself up. You have bolted your windows and barred your doors to me. Haven’t you?”
Peter weighed this accusation. It might possibly be true; but it contained an arguable point, which was easy to state.
“I never bolted the windows and barred the doors,” he said. “It was you who did that. I didn’t arrange that you should marry Philip. That’s what shut me up, if you choose to put it like that. I told you at the time that our relations must be changed.” She shook her head.
“No relations that ever existed between us need have been changed,” she said. “You speak as if we had been in love with each other.”
“Not at all. We never were in love with each other; that we both know. But—”
“What then?” she asked.
“I’ll take your simile,” he said. “My windows and doors were open to you. I might easily have fallen in love with you, or, for that matter, you with me. Our relationship, and the possibilities it held, were just those of open doors and windows. Then you came round and shut me up. And Philip drew the curtains.”
She took this in and turned it about before she answered.
“By which you mean,” she said, “that whatever our relationship might have ripened into, I nipped it off — like a frost.”
“Yes,” said he. “A latish frost.”
She got up and moved about the room, patting a cushion here and setting a chair straight there. Peter did not move; he did not even turn his head; but he was quite aware of her pondering restlessness. He was aware, too, that so long as he held his tongue he had the whip-hand. The evidence for that was soon apparent.
“I didn’t know that my engagement would have that effect,” she said. “I think it is unreasonable that it should have that effect. If you had been in love with me it would have been different; in that case I could have understood it. But, as it was, why should it have made any change in our friendship?”
“What’s the use of asking me?” said Peter, with a sudden touch of irritation. “I can’t tell you why. I don’t know the ‘why’ of anything under the sun. But put it the other way about. Suppose that it had been I who had got engaged to some girl, wouldn’t that have made any change in your sense of our friendship?”
Peter had spread himself a little over the window-seat when she got up. Now when she came back to her old seat she pushed his encroaching knee aside.
“That’s not the same thing,” she said. “A girl can’t be a very intimate friend of a married man in the same way that a man can be a very intimate friend of a married woman.”
“I won’t ask why,” said Peter gently, “because I’m aware that you don’t know.”
“What I say is perfectly true, though.”
“Not in the instance of you and me. You knew quite well that I wasn’t going to give myself a free rein to fall in love with you after you had settled to marry someone else. Besides, if you come to think of it, a man dangling after a married woman is just as ridiculous as a girl dangling after a married man. I don’t see why a man shouldn’t be allowed to retain his self-respect as much as a woman.”
Though, as far as the spoken word went, they had arrived at no agreement, no compromise even on which agreement could be based, they both felt that somehow in the region of unspoken treaties the ground had been cleared. Though the wheels did not yet revolve again, rust had been wiped off them. And in Peter’s next speech the scouring of the wash-leather was busy.
“You mustn’t think that I don’t regret what we’re suffering under, Nellie,” he said. “I regret it most awfully. I’ve been saying, and I stick to it still, that you are responsible for it. It was you who closed my windows and bolted my doors. It would be simply silly of me to pretend that I was brokenhearted about it, for that would imply that I had been or was in love with you. But that doesn’t prevent my being sorry, or my missing, which I acutely do, our old relationship. I don’t know if it’s any use trying to recapture it. ‘Trying,’ probably, hasn’t much effect on what you feel. It’s no use ‘trying’ to feel hot if you happen to feel cold, or trying to feel ill when you do feel well—”
“My dear, it makes the whole difference,” said Nellie quickly. “Will you try to — to feel yourself back in your relationship with me? I want it, too, Peter.” She pulled back his encroaching knee which just now she had pushed away and kept her hand on it. The very fact that this triviality was so instinctive constituted the significance of it.
“I hadn’t reckoned with losing you,” she went on. “No, I don’t excuse myself or account for myself. Probably I should have done just the same if I had reckoned with it. Probably, if it was all to do again now, I should do the same. Don’t let us labour the point; if you’ll try, t
hat’s all I ask. I’ll try, too, if that will be of any use. I put my nose in the air just as much as you did, as if my nose wasn’t sufficiently in the air already. But it always turns up at the end.”
“Not to matter; don’t mention it,” said Peter. “That’s the old style, Peter,” she said. “Keep it up; run with it till it works on its own account. Motor-cycle, you know.”
They were looking at each other now with something of the alert unconsciousness of two old friends alone together. But certainly the machine required running with at present.
“They’re heavy things to push when they won’t get going,” said he.
“How odious you are!”
“Hurrah for that word!” said Peter.
“Why?”
“I wonder how often we have told each other we were odious.”
Nellie was silent, and in that moment’s pause Peter was conscious that, real, no doubt, as had been her desire to uproot the antagonism that had grown up between them, that process had been no more than preliminary to something that should follow. The ground had to be cleared first, but the clearing, of the ground was not her ultimate objective. The moment he perceived that at all, he saw how obvious it was; how her appearance suddenly in Mrs. Wardour’s box that evening gave a clue to the nature of the further development. Then, quick as an echo, she began to reproduce the thought in his mind.
“Let’s pick up the thread again,” she said. “I can give you my weavings very simply. Trousseau, Philip; Philip, trousseau. How lucky men are! When a man is going to be married he doesn’t have to spend his days in buying things. He doesn’t have to buy anything.”
“Wedding-ring,” said Peter, in parenthesis. “Yes; but you can’t have occupied yourself with that unless you have had a private marriage behind the locked doors and curtained windows. We were telling each other what we had been doing in this long interval. It was your turn.”
“Oh, usual things,” said he. “Foreign Office, dinner; breakfast, Foreign Office.”
“And how’s May Trentham?” asked Nellie, wheeling in smaller circles round this objective. “You’ve left her out; she wouldn’t like that.”
“She left me out to-night,” said Peter. “She had that immense box for the play and never asked me to it.”
Nellie folded her wings and dropped.
“But you got there all right,” she said. “She saw you, too, sitting with Mrs. Wardour, who hasn’t asked her to the party for the Russian ballet. Blood, my dear; there’ll be blood over that. Do you know, I think Silvia is one of the most attractive girls I have ever seen.”
As she spoke there came from outside the tingle of the front door bell. Nellie got up with a finger on her lip.
“Who on earth can that be?” she whispered.
“It may be anybody,” said Peter, very prudently. “You can’t tell till you go and see. Perhaps it’s Philip; we may have got hold of each other’s hats by mistake, and he’s come here—”
Nellie suppressed a laugh.
“Probably mother,” she said. “She forgets her latchkey when she thinks she’ll be late home. I shan’t say you’re here, or she’d come in and spoil our talk.”
“Oh, what a tangled—” began Peter.
Nellie took the additional precaution of turning out the lights in the room where they were sitting and leaving the door open. Close outside was the entrance door from the stairs into the flat, and Peter, sitting in the window-seat, heard with an amusement that dimpled his cheeks Nellie’s unhesitating account of herself. It appeared that she had just come in and was just going to bed; she had already put out the lights in the sitting-room. There followed a triumphant announcement of her mother’s winnings, an affectionate good night, and the closing of a door down the passage. Sitting there in the dark Peter drew the conclusion that Nellie put a high premium on the pursuit of the conversation in which, as he infallibly conjectured, she had just got down to the bone. She would scarcely, for the æsthetic delight in tortuosity, have concealed the fact that he had dropped in, as he had done a hundred times before, for a few minutes’ chat on his way home. She wanted to talk about Silvia. For his part he was perfectly ready to talk about Silvia.
Just before the closing of the door, which must certainly be that of Mrs. Heaton’s bedroom, Nellie had said: “I’ll put out the lights; good night, dear. What a lovely last rubber,” and Peter, feeling his way, so to speak, into Nellie’s mind by the analogy of his own, knew exactly what she was doing. In a moment now there would be the click of the extinguished light in the hall, and she would very softly rustle back in the dark into the room where he was sitting, close the door of that, and then, perhaps, turn on the light inside again, or, as likely as not, shuffle back into the window-seat. So often had they sat there talking in the dark.
And as he waited for those five or ten seconds to pass, he was invaded by a sense of passionate rebellion against himself. ‘ There was the girl, whom for the last two years he had been interested in, fond of to the practical exclusion of anyone else, and now, at this moment she, engaged to a man whom she did not ever so remotely love, was presently stealing back, on the eve of her marriage, to spend a more than midnight hour with him. He ought to have been a balloon, rising into some stratum of sunlight high above the twi-lit earth, and instead he was bumping heavily over uneven ground, quite unable to get into the air. No matter what the ballast of worldly consideration he threw out, he could not feel himself lifting, and Nellie, when she came back, would only add to the weight.
His expectations were ruthlessly, even ruefully, fulfilled. She stole in, invisible in the darkened oblong of the doorway, closed it, and without turning up the light, established herself in the window-seat again.
“Mother’s gone to her room,” she said. “I did it so cleverly, Peter. I said I had just come in—”
“I know; I heard,” said Peter. “Brilliant.”
“Wasn’t it? Now we can talk without any fear of interruption. Where had we got to? Oh, I know. I think Silvia is perfectly fascinating. Don’t you?” Here was the bumping process, the added weight. Eager though Nellie had been to re-establish old relations between herself and him, there was a livelier eagerness to ascertain anything about new relations, between himself and Silvia. If Nellie, as he had affirmed, had shut his windows and bolted his doors for him, he now made a tour of the secure premises to see that she had done her work thoroughly.
“I don’t know if I should say perfectly fascinating,” he said.
“But you like her, don’t you?”
“Extremely, but—”
Nellie waited to hear the qualification. She liked the fact that there was a qualification, though at present she did not know what it was. As nothing, further came, she spoke again, quite in the old style.
“Oh, it’s so rude to say ‘but,’ and then not go on,” she said.
Peter jerked back his head.
“Let me be polite, then,” he said. “One can always observe the small decencies of life. What I nearly said was: ‘But I’m not in love with her.’ I stopped myself, Nellie, if you want to know, because it seemed to me very vividly that it wasn’t your business.”
There was an illumination cast on to her face from the street lamps from below. To his intense surprise he saw that her eyes, wide and unfocused, grew suddenly dim.
“That’s just what I, too, am beginning to realize,” she said. “Whatever you do now is none of my business. I’ve got a separate establishment. I’m bound to say that you have quite realized that. You haven’t asked me a single question about what goes on in mine. It doesn’t concern you any more; therefore, you don’t care. I shall learn to respect your privacy, too, Peter. Another snub or so will teach me.”
“That’s nonsense!” he said quickly.
“It isn’t nonsense. You treat me like a stranger because I happen to be marrying someone else. If you had been in love with me—”
“We’ve had that already,” said Peter.
“Then listen t
o it this time. You’ve absolutely been turning your back on me. You are piqued — horrid word — because I don’t want to remain an old maid for your sake. Mayn’t I feel interested in you without your resenting it? You object to my marrying Philip when you could have made it perfectly clear—”
“What could I have made clear?” he asked.
“You could have made yourself indispensable to me,” she said. “A single further turn of the screw—”
Again she broke off.
“No, I’m wronging you,” she said. “That final turn of the screw must be made mutually. It never came to us, though I was there, wasn’t I, with my screwdriver, and you with yours? It just didn’t happen. Let’s make the best of what remains. A good deal remains after all. We have everything that is of value between us, except that final turn of the screw. Good heavens, Peter, how I wish I adored you! I do all but that. And you do the same for me, darling, when all is said and done. If only you were masterful and masculine, or if only I were, the thing would be solved. As it is, we are like two oysters in the flow of the tide, just gaping at each other.”
Nellie’s ultimate objective, unless Peter had completely misunderstood her, had sunk out of sight for him.
“And all the time the tide is flowing,” he said; “that’s so maddening of it. I mean that the days and weeks and months are passing, and one doesn’t even think, still less does one feel; one only exists. I am an oyster, it’s quite true. But I don’t make pearls. Pearls, I believe, are only pieces of grit which the clever oyster covers up with iridescent stuff. All that stuff comes from the oyster’s inside, somehow. I can’t make; I can’t manufacture like that. The clever oyster does it, or the normal oyster, somewhere in the South Seas. I suppose I’m a northern oyster — only meant to be eaten. Just to be eaten. I really want somebody to come along and gobble me up. I’m nothing but a small piece of food.”
Nellie found herself hugely interested in this. It gave her what she wanted to know — namely, Peter’s own personal estimate as to how he stood to Silvia.
He had defined it negatively when he told her that he was not in love with her; but here was a more intimate revelation — namely, that of his willingness to be absorbed. There, too, was the difference, vital and essential, between herself and him, for she never contemplated the possibility of being, absorbed by Philip. There would certainly be no absorption there on either side; he, so she judged, was as little likely to make that surrender as she.
