by E. F. Benson
Jim flushed. The whip tingled unpleasantly on his shoulders.
“It was your husband who rescued the fly out of his honey,” he said.
“Was it?” asked Eva, negligently. “I thought it was you.”
She did not feel angry with him. He had made a mistake and had been punished for it. Justice had been done.
“It’s getting rather cold,” she went on. “Take me for a stroll, and give me your arm if you care for convention as little as you say you do. I am a little tired.”
They walked up and down the gay street in front of the hotel for half-an-hour or so. Eva felt a vague stimulus in the homage of this presentable young man, in spite of his slight awkwardnesses. She felt he was not a man whom it was easy to make a fool of, but she was making a somewhat complete fool of him, and it pleased her. For the first time, perhaps, she caught a glimpse of her own power as a beautiful and attractive woman. That glimpse roused no vanity in her, but considerable interest. The sense of personal power is always pleasant; no man or woman who is alive, in any sense of the word, will acquiesce in being a unit among units, or will fail to feel a delicate growing love of power. We brought nothing into the world, and we shall assuredly take nothing out; but while we are in the world, how we cling, with a persistence that no creed will shake, to the passionate desire for more and more and more. Eva was, in fact, on the threshold of the house called “Know Thyself.” It is a house of varying size. To her it appeared large and well furnished.
They walked along the sea-wall westwards, and Eva sat down on the low balustrade. The air was still and windless, and forty feet below lay the smooth, grey backs of the rocks still shining with the salt water.
“What a frightful coward one is,” she said, “not to throw oneself down and see what happens next. I always flatter myself that I’m brave; but I am not brave enough to risk anything, really. I think a year ago I might have thrown myself down if it had occurred very strongly to me, because I had nothing to risk. But now things are beginning to be interesting. I should risk a certain amount of amusement and pleasure if I just stepped over that wall. I wish you would step over and see, Mr. Armine; only that would be no good, you couldn’t come and tell me about it afterwards.”
“Of course, lots of things are a bore,” said he, “but I can’t imagine any existence where that wouldn’t be the case. I couldn’t frame a life in my mind where one wouldn’t be bored.”
“Well, I sympathise with you. I probably am incapable—in fact, I know I am incapable—of many emotions, but I feel bored no longer. I used to feel nothing else.”
Armine was sitting near her, looking the other way.
“What emotions can’t you feel?” he asked suddenly.
Eva laughed.
“Oh! Plenty, and perhaps the most important of all. That is why I fully expect not to feel all the emotions that Algiers should inspire in me.”
Armine thought this remark much less inconsequent than it sounded, but he kept his reflections to himself.
Two days afterwards, Eva and her husband left Mentone for Marseilles. Jim walked down with them to the station, accounting for his action by saying that he expected a box from England, and it had not arrived, though it was two days overdue. To Eva this appeared the most shallow and unnecessary of subterfuges. There was some slight delay in starting, and he stood by their carriage window with his arms on the sill until the train moved.
Eva was leaning back in her corner, talking slowly but somewhat continuously.
“I hope your box will have come,” she was saying with fine cruelty. “You must have been very eager about it to come down through these dusty streets, when you might be having a sail. I really thought you were coming to see us off till you explained about the box. I think I should have been rude enough to ask you to stop at home if it had been so. I hate being seen off. There is never anything to say; you feel as if you ought to make pretty little farewell speeches, but the farewell speeches always hang fire, I notice. And no one can continue an ordinary, rational, desultory conversation with fifty engines screaming at him. It is much better for everyone to pretend they are not going till the last moment, and then jump up quickly, say good-bye, and bundle into the cab. But at a railway station it is impossible to pretend you are not going. The apparatus of going is too obvious. Everyone is fussy and stupid at a station. Ah! We are really off, are we? Good-bye! I wish you were coming with us.”
Eva smiled rather maliciously. The first impertinent remark had been settled with now, and they were quits again.
Jim Armine stood on the platform watching the smoke of the receding train. He made a monosyllabic remark which is not worth setting down, and went back to the hotel. The box which he was expecting might languish alone in the parcel office for all that he cared.
The bridal pair crossed in one of the French Trans-atlantique steamers, which are built long and narrow for the sake of speed, and the accurate observation of the effect of a cross sea. Eva, with her serene immunity from human weaknesses, was sitting near the bows of the vessel, enjoying the warm, winter sun, and watched the great heaving masses of water, rushing up against the side of the vessel, with a sympathetic gladness in their glorious unrestraint. The position presented itself in a somewhat different light to her husband, who retired, under the influence of the same glorious unrestraint, with anything but sympathetic gladness in his heart. Eva felt a little contemptuous pity for him, but enjoyed being alone. It was drawing near that supreme hour when the sun just touches the horizon of water, and the depth of colour in southern sea and sky grows almost unbearable in its cruel fulness, in its air of knowing something, of being able to tell one, if one could only hear its message, some mystery that would make things plain. Eva was sitting on the windward side of the vessel, looking west, and her eyes were filled with a still, questioning wonder. She had arrived at that most agonising stage of feeling sure that a mystery was there, without grasping what it was to which she wanted any answer. Her mind was full of a vague wonder and expectancy—the wonder and expectancy of a mind just awakened from its dreamless sleep of indifference. One arm was thrown back, and her hand grasped the taffrail to steady herself. She had taken off her hat, and her hair was blown about in the singing breeze. The human interest which had begun to dawn in her, which had stirred and woke from its sleep with a sudden, startled cry, a few weeks ago, would not let the other wonder slumber. The sense of the eternal mystery of things watched side by side with the sense of the eternal mystery of men. But for this half-hour she was alone with it; she was unconscious of the heaving and tossing of the vessel; all she knew was that she questioned, with something like passionate eagerness, the great walls of wine-dark water with their heraldry of foam, the hissing monsters that rose and fell round her, the luminous miracle that was sinking in the west.
In the meantime, Lord Hayes had got, so to speak, his second wind, had emerged from the privacy of his cabin, and was walking along the deck towards her with a battered, dishevelled air. The punctuation of his steps was rigidly but irregularly determined by the laws of gravity as exhibited by a vessel pitching heavily in a fluid medium. Eva had not seen him coming, and he stood by her a few moments in silence.
“I feel a little better,” he remarked at length, in precise, well-modulated tones.
Eva started and frowned as if she had been struck. She turned on him with angry impatience.
“Ah, you have spoiled it all,” she cried.
She looked at him a moment, and then broke out into a mirthless laugh. He had wrapped a grey shawl round his shoulders, and on his head was a brown, deerstalker cap.
“My dear Hayes,” she said, “you are in vivid contrast with the sunset, and you startled me. I was thinking about the sunset. However, it is nearly over now. You look like a sea-sick picture of twilight. That grey shawl is very twilighty. Come into the saloon and get me some tea.”
That gentleman was in too enfeebled a condition to feel resentment, even if he had been by nature resentfu
l. It is notorious that certain emotions of the mind cannot exist under certain conditions of the body. No normal man feels a tendency to anger after a good dinner, or a tendency to patience in the ten minutes preceding that function. No one feels spiritually exalted in the middle of the morning, or heroic when suffering from slight neuralgia, and I venture to add that no one has spirit enough to feel resentful after an hour or two of sea-sickness.
The villa at Algiers was a charming, Moorish house, with a predominance of twisted pilasters and shining tiles, and bold, purple-belled creepers flaunting it over the white walls. It stood on the hills of Mustapha Supérieure, above the Eastern-looking town, surrounded by a rich, melodious garden, where the winter nightingales sang in the boughs of orange groves, which were bright with flower and fruit together, and where tall, listless eucalyptus trees shed their rough, odorous fruits thick on the path. But this soft beauty suited Eva’s mind not so well as the bold, golden sun dropping into a wine-dark sea; in fact, she cordially detested the place. How much of her hatred was due to the fact that she was alone with her husband she did not care to ask herself. Certainly, the even monotony of one face, one low, well-modulated voice, was displeasing to her.
She found a malicious pleasure in giving him surprises. Her freshly-awakened interest in the human race sometimes took the bit in its teeth and ran riot, and, when it ran riot in his presence, she took no care to check it, but talked in a voluble, rather vicious vein, that startled him. For instance, at dinner one day, she had discussed certain books which he did not know women even read, and announced, somewhat vividly, views on life and being which were scarcely conventional. After dinner, they had sat out in the little passage that ran round the open square in the centre of the house, supported on twisted pillars, and Eva continued her newly-found confession of faith.
“Men seem to expect that women should be sexless replicas of themselves,” she said. “All they would allow them is the inestimable privilege of being good. Virtue is its own reward, they say—so they cultivate their own pleasure with a fine disregard of virtue, and a curious pride in performing actions which certainly will lay up for them no store of virtuous and ineffable joy, while to the women they say, ‘Be good; here is a blank cheque on the bank of Providence. The bigger the better. Au revoir.’ A delightfully simple arrangement.”
Lord Hayes gave a little cough, and added sugar to his coffee.
“I should always wish,” he said, with the air of an after-dinner speaker; “I should always wish women to fulfil to the uttermost their own duties, which none but women can do.”
“The duty of being good,” said Eva. “Exactly so.”
“I fail to see the justice of your remarks about the tendencies of men to regard women as sexless replicas of themselves,” he said. “The province of women is quite different from that of men.”
“Ah! Let me explain,” said Eva. “Men are bad and good mixed. Whether the bad or the good predominates is beside the point. Leave out the bad, and introduce no vivid good, and you get the sexlessness, and what remains is a sexless goodness, which is, as I say, the sexless replica of the man. That is a man’s woman.”
“No doubt it is my own stupidity,” said Lord Hayes politely, “but I still fail to agree with you. You do not take into account what I ventured to call the province of women, which, I say again, is quite different from the province of men.”
“Da capo,” murmured Eva. “Let us agree to differ, Hayes. I am rather sleepy; I think I shall go to bed.”
Lord Hayes lighted a candle for her, and waited till it had burned up.
“Good-night,” said Eva, nodding at him.
He bent forward to kiss her, and, as before, she surrendered her face to be kissed.
The length of these episodes calls for an apology, but there is just this to be said. Life, for most of us, consists of episodes, of interruptions, of parentheses. We can few of us keep up the epic vein and go sublimely on, building up from great harmonious scenes a great harmonious whole. The scene-shifter perspires and tugs at his mighty cardboard trees and impossible castles in the forest; they are stiff, they will not turn round. And he sits down—does this irresponsible and wholly unbusinesslike scene-shifter—and meditates. After all, is life really surrounded by these giants of the theatrical forest? Do we go into remote and virgin woods and chant our love in irreproachable epics? When we have made our great scene, when we stand in the pure, unselfish, heroic, villain-massacreing, devoted climax of our existence, are we quite sure that some one will throw the ethereal oxy-hydrogen light on to us at the right moment? Will the audience recognise how great we are: and, even if they do, will not the slightest accident with the oxy-hydrogen light turn our climax into an ante-climax? The irresponsible scene-shifter begins to see a more excellent way. Roll off your forest trees; send the manager of the oxy-hydrogen light home, give him eighteenpence to get drunk on—he will like it better than your heroic vein—let us have no scenery even. Just a few chairs and tables, a plain, grey sky, and no herpics. A few little episodes dealing of men who are not saints or silver kings, a few women who are not abbesses or Portias, who are in no epic mood, but in the mood of the majority of weak, unsatisfactory, careless, human beings, who can be unselfish and pure, but who are at times a little uncertain about the big riddle, unscrupulous, unkind, worldly. Besides, we are only in the first act at present. Perhaps the gigantic forest trees and the white light will come on later, but we do not promise. The irresponsible scene-shifter is right. So much, then, in praise of episode.
To return from the point at which we started before these unconscionable episodes found their way into the text, the honeymoon was over, the month was April, and Lord and Lady Hayes had returned to England. They were to spend a few days at Aston, and, after Easter, to go straight up to London. Old Lady Hayes was staying with her niece, who had married a certain Mr. Davenport, and had one son. Reggie Davenport was a favourite with the dowager, who bullied him incessantly, and who sometimes got furious, because he never lost his temper with her. She was to spend a fortnight in London with the Hayes, as a great concession, in order to make Eva’s acquaintance, and would join them as soon as they had settled. It may be stated at once, that she regarded her son’s marriage as a most unprincipled and selfish act, and as an insult levelled directly at herself.
Mrs. Grampound came up to see her daughter on the first day after their arrival.
“Your father would have come with me,” she explained, “but he and Percy are away. I am quite alone at home. You are looking wonderfully well, dear, and I’m sure I needn’t ask you whether you are happy?”
“Of course,” said Eva, “those are the things that are taken for granted.”
“I’ve come to have a little cosy talk with you,” said Mrs. Grampound, settling herself in a chair and taking off her gloves.
A cosy little soliloquy would perhaps have been a more accurate description. She wandered on in a sort of pious intoxication at the contemplation of her daughter.
“The mistress of a great house like this has very great responsibilities, my darling,” she said. “If dear James were not such a thoroughly able and upright man, I confess I should feel a wee bit nervous at seeing my darling whirled away into such a circle. Be very sure exactly how you are going to behave. There seems to me something very beautiful in the life of all those dear last-century, great ladies, whose husbands used to treat them with such charming old-fashioned courtesy, and lock them up whenever they went away, which must have been most tedious. Yes, and send a servant to tell the groom of the chambers to ask my lady if she would receive him. Dear me, yes.”
“I don’t think Hayes means to lock me up whenever he goes away,” said Eva. “We haven’t got a groom of the chambers, either.”
“No, dear,” said Mrs. Grampound; “I was just saying, wasn’t I, that all that was changed. Husbands lounge in their wives’ boudoirs now, and smoke cigarettes there. So much more human and natural. You don’t mind the smell of smoke, do yo
u, dear?”
“On the contrary,” said Eva; “I smoke myself.”
“Gracious, how shocking! What a wicked child. Of course, there’s no harm in it, dear; lots of nice women smoke. I should not let Hayes know that. When a difficult time comes—there will be difficult times, of course, my Eva—there is no rose without its thorns—Let me see, what was I saying—ah! Yes, those little indulgences, like letting a husband have a cigarette in the drawing-room every now and then, are very much appreciated. A little womanly tenderness,” continued Mrs. Grampound, getting rather breathless, and volubly eloquent, “a little tact, a little wifely sympathy, just a look, the ‘I know, I know,’ which women can put into one little look, is all that is required to make those difficulties real advantages—concealed facilities, one might really call them; real renewals of the marriage vow; the rough places shall be plain, in fact, if we may use those words.”
“We get on admirably together,” said Eva; “he is most considerate for me, and most kind.”
“I declare I positively love him,” cried her mother. “Of course, in any case, I should teach myself—should compel myself—to love the man of your choice, but the first time I saw him, I said to myself, that is the husband for my Eva. It was one June evening,” continued Mrs. Grampound with an impressional vagueness, “and we were dining somewhere, I can’t remember where, and he was there too; dear me, I recollect it all as clearly as if it was yesterday. I remember old Lady Hayes telling us all that brown sherry was rank poison, and that she would as soon think of drinking a glass of laudanum. We all laughed a great deal, because our host had very famous brown sherry.”
“It must have been very pleasant,” said Eva.
“Dear old Lady Hayes,” said Mrs. Grampound; “such a wonderful woman, such strong, shrewd common sense; I wonder if she will go on living with you, Eva? I don’t think it’s a very good plan myself—there is sure to be some little unpleasantness now and then.”