The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  He was perfectly willing to do quite cheerfully all that was required of him, and he would have got back into his damp shooting clothes, and left this comfortable hall and Gertrude without a murmur.

  “No, never mind,” said he. “I think I shall go with them, because I couldn’t keep quiet at home. But I wish you’d remembered sooner.”

  Reggie had risen and was standing by the fireplace.

  “I wish you’d let me go, instead of you,” he said.

  “No; there’s no need whatever. I only go for my own sake.”

  Reggie was quite content. If he was not wanted to go, he was quite happy to stop. He was extremely fond of his mother, and the thought of her possible discomfort was most unpleasant to him, but what was the good of worrying? There was absolutely no danger. Mrs. Davenport was an eminently sensible person, and he could not lessen her discomfort by thinking about it. Let us be sensible by all means; let us take things as they come, without thinking about them when there is nothing to be done. Truly these boyish natures are a little irritating at times!

  Mr. Davenport left the hall, and Reggie resumed his place on the floor, and had another cup of tea.

  “Poor mother!” he said with sincerity; “how dreadfully wet and cold she will be.”

  Percy had retired to the smoking-room, and the two were alone.

  “Your father was rather vexed,” she said.

  “I’m afraid he was,” said Reggie. “I wish he’d let me go instead of him.”

  “Why don’t you go with him?”

  “That would do no good,” said Reggie. “He’s only going because he is anxious. I’m not the least anxious. Mother is sure to have turned in at some cottage to wait till the snow was over, or until she could get a carriage. If I could save her anything by going out, of course I’d go.”

  Gertrude was frowning at the fire.

  “I think I’ll ask him whether I may come with him,” she said.

  Reggie raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, nonsense,” he said. “He wouldn’t let you, anyhow. Sit down, Gerty, and talk.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, “I suppose it’s all right.”

  There was no need, however, for Mr. Davenport to go out, for before he came down again with thick boots, and rough clothes on, his wife had arrived.

  Reggie sprang up and welcomed her with great eagerness and affection.

  “Dear mother,” he cried, “I am so glad you have come. Oh! How wet you are.”

  He led her to the fire, and poured out a cup of tea with almost feminine tenderness.

  “I hope you and Gerty weren’t anxious,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” said Reggie, frankly, “not a bit. I knew it would be all right. But I’ll run to tell father. He was going out with two men to look for you.”

  “Reggie wanted to go instead of him,” said Gertrude, feeling that her lover’s conduct was capable of some slight justification.

  “Dear Reggie is never anxious,” said Mrs. Davenport, warming her hands. “It is a great comfort for him.”

  Gertrude was rather relieved. There was no need for her, apparently, to turn advocate.

  CHAPTER II.

  Theology, in theory, at any rate, teaches us that human beings are living things with souls; experience, on the other hand, which deals with facts capable of proof, insists that, whatever theological truth this statement may embody, for practical purposes, human beings are born without souls. The soul awakes, or, as experience says, is born at varying times. Some men and women reach maturity of body and mind without it, some, we cannot help thinking, reach death without it; some, on the other hand, are but children when that perplexing gift is handed over to their bewildered keeping. But the soulless human animal often has at its disposal and use a quantity of instincts which partake of the soul-like nature; the soul, at any rate, when it is born, takes them over entire. There is no need to adapt them, or to purify them, for they are already clean and pure; it hardly ever vitalises them, for they are already very living; it merely shows them their kinship to itself, and they are forthwith embodied in it.

  This birth of the soul, like all births, is the consummation of bitter pangs; it is brought forth in sorrow, through some rending asunder of the inmost fibre, not by any elegant musing on devotional books, nor in a flash of blinding ecstasy, but in silence, save, perhaps, for the bitter cry, in darkness, in solitary desolation, for the sufferer does not know what is happening until the end of his pain has come; the blind pangs get fiercer and fiercer, and are still unexplained till the light breaks.

  It would, perhaps, be an insult to the reader to state baldly the bearing of these remarks, for it will be already, we hope, obvious to him that, in this sense, Reggie, in spite of his frank charm, his susceptibility, his pretty face, his capacity for receiving and inspiring affection, was, at heart, soulless. His strong, hearty liking for his betrothed was of that genial, animal kind, which, however wholesome and satisfactory, has no more to do with the soul than his power of aiming straight at woodcock. Happily, or unhappily, for him, the abstruse side of life was scarcely less remote from Gertrude than it was from himself. She had at present no wish and no power to give anything but the same genial, hearty liking that she received, a thorough, wholesome affection in which the nature of both, as far as they were aware of their nature, shared to the full. Neither Reggie nor Gertrude had ever fallen in love with an idea, which is, perhaps, the most exacting lover that man or woman ever has, but which, being wholly abstract, is of an entirely different nature from the love of two young people who admire and like each other enormously, mind and body. This abstruser side of life was a complete puzzle to Reggie. To take a very small but wholly appropriate illustration; he could sympathise with his mother, who might, perhaps, be wandering on the High Croft in a snow-storm, with a good deal of feeling, but the instinct that made his father put on his damp shooting clothes, and prepare to go out, not for any assistance he could give, but for the eminently unpractical reason that his wife was in the snow and he was having tea, seemed inexplicable to his son. If he could have done a jot or a tittle of good by standing in the water butt for five minutes, there is not the shadow of doubt that he would have done so, shiveringly but contentedly and without question; but it would have seemed absurd to him to put his nose outside the hall door, if nothing was to come of it.

  With a less sweet disposition, he would have been a profound egoist; but in his manliness was salt enough, as the phrase is, to keep him sweet. The egoist rates himself higher than he rates the rest of the world; he thinks more of himself, consciously or unconsciously, as he thinks less of others, whereas Reggie, though he was incapable of those intricacies of feeling, which, for all practical purposes, are different, not merely in complexity but in kind, from the simpler forms, and which make the spectacle of the human race so vastly interesting, and produce, it may be, love of the complex order, never contemplated himself at all, and, however little he knew of others, at any rate he knew nothing of himself. His mind resembled, it is true, a being of two dimensions, which is unable to contemplate the existence of a third, but in its two dimensions it moved very smoothly, and had a very charming smile for its own plane horizon.

  Gertrude stopped with the Davenports nearly a fortnight—a fortnight of pleasant, quiet days, which are paradise to a mind content, and she was supremely content. Reggie was all that a lover, whom she would choose, should be; he was uniformly cheerful, affectionate, charming, full of the thought of her; and, ah! how much that means! Reggie was one of those who show their best side when they are in love; whereas many men, who are otherwise reasonable beings, behave like spoiled children when they are in that predicament; they become observant, jealous, exacting, when they should be serene, indulgent, large-hearted.

  But once, just at the end of that fortnight, there arose out of the sea a little cloud like a man’s hand, which broke the blue horizon, though Reggie was unconscious of it. A little hint of it had occurred once before, on that evening when
Mrs. Davenport lost her way over the High Croft, but on that occasion it had soon passed away.

  Percy, it must be owned, was not so jovially contented with the spectacle, as the days went on, as the actors themselves. He was a deductive young gentleman, and, to his mind, this affair resembled too strongly Reggie’s previous flutterings in the feminine dovecotes to strike him as something altogether different from a flirtation on a large scale. A flirtation, after all, is only a superficial exhibition of love, an attraction on one side, a liability to be attracted on the other; and the question occurred to him, whether it is possible to keep a flirtation up permanently, and what was left if it broke down? A strong, deep love, like the Nile in flood, leaves, like a sediment behind, which in so many cases renders marriages, from which the tumultuous stream has passed, happy and stable, an alluvial deposit, which makes the earth rich and fruitful in the sober green of friendship; but when the slender, light-hearted streamlet is dried up, the effect of its passage is only too often seen in the uncovering of ugly roots and stones, and a removal, not a deposit of sediment. Of course he knew more about those previous affairs, which, to do Reggie justice, were superficial and innocent enough, than did that gentleman’s mother. A young man, whatever his relations with his mother may be, will choose some other confidant in such cases. They argued, in fact, nothing more than a very great susceptibility on Reggie’s part to the influence of charming young women, and the sage Percy asked himself whether the constant propinquity of one specimen of this attractive product would necessarily secure him from the influence of the others. That unlucky resemblance between his previous skirmishes and this engagement seemed to him too close to be altogether satisfactory. A flirtation on a large scale, he argued, is not very different from a flirtation on a small scale.

  Mrs. Davenport had immense confidence in Percy. He was three years older than Reggie, and was possessed of a certain soundness, of which that young gentleman stood in need. He had been of great use to him in the thousand and one unconscious ways in which one young man can help another slightly younger than himself. He had a practical mastery of details that led him to reliable conclusions on their sum, which is a gift as useful as intuitive judgment, though less striking in its process, as it partakes of the nature of industry rather than brilliance. But Reggie’s mother did him justice, and found herself consulting him as she would have consulted an older man, with considerable respect for his opinion.

  “We are all so delighted about Reggie’s engagement,” she said to him one evening after dinner. “His father thought, and so did I, that a long engagement was better. You see they are both very young, and they ought to know each other well. No one should marry on an enthusiastic first impression, least of all Reggie, because he has so many of them.”

  “Certainly there are no signs of wavering yet,” said he. “They are as fond of each other as—as two children.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asked.

  “They are so healthfully fond of each other,” he said. “They were trying to read two of Browning’s lyrics this morning, about one way of love and another way of love, and they gave it up in about three minutes and read Pickwick instead.”

  “Poor Reggie, I’m afraid he’ll find that his way of love is neither one nor the other, but I think it’s a good way for all that.”

  “There’s no nonsense about it, anyhow,” said Percy, without meaning to make reflections on the lyrics in question.

  “It isn’t tumultuous exactly,” said Reggie’s mother, “but it’s very thorough. Still waters do run deep, you know, in spite of the proverb.”

  “But the stillness is not a proof of their depth.”

  “No; but when a stream is in the rapids, so to speak, it is. The rapids, I mean, which come just after the waterfall, the plunge into love.”

  “Oh, but Reggie’s always falling in love.”

  “So I gathered; though, of course, the boy wouldn’t tell me about that. But I don’t think that’s against his present engagement.”

  Percy was silent, and Mrs. Davenport adjusted her bracelet before she added—

  “I believe it’s a healthy thing for a young man to be in a chronic state of devotion. The vague adoration is all sucked into the particular adoration when that comes.”

  “But is falling in love with a series of particular girls to be called a vague adoration?”

  “Yes, certainly, just as a circle is an infinite number of straight lines. He falls in love with womanliness in many forms.”

  “I see. No doubt you are right. Certainly he is standing his long engagement very well.”

  “Poor boy! He wants to shorten it very much, which is just the very reason why I want it to be long.”

  “Miss Carston is satisfied, I gather?”

  “It looks like it,” said Mrs. Davenport, smiling, and indicating with her eye a shady corner of the room where the two lovers were sitting.

  “Old Lady Hayes was staying with us for a week in London last summer,” she continued, after a pause. “She was defeated in a great battle, apparently, with your sister, and came here to bind up her wounds by bullying us all. I have an immense admiration for anyone who can rout her.”

  Percy laughed.

  “I heard something about it. Eva behaved abominably, I expect.”

  “I met her several times in London,” said Mrs. Davenport. “She has a wonderful way of appearing to notice no one, and obliging every one to notice her.”

  “I never saw anyone so changed in a short time as Eva,” said Percy. “She has suddenly found men and women extraordinarily interesting. A year ago, she was exactly the reverse. She disliked most women, and never remembered any man.”

  “That was the impression she gave me in the summer.”

  “Ah! But that manner is only a survival. She is often silent; at other times she talks a great deal. In the old days she seldom talked at all.”

  “Poor Hayes is terribly afraid of her.”

  “I think most people are afraid of her. She can be very cruel.”

  “A woman with such beauty as that has an unfair advantage. Her shots must always tell.”

  “She is one of those people who always make an impression,” said Percy; “because she doesn’t care at all what impression she makes.”

  “That is the sort of impression that produces the deadliest results,” said Mrs. Davenport. “If a man sees that he is being made a fool of, he can be on his guard, but the effect of the other is that he is dazzled, piqued, maddened. The women who don’t care are always those for whom men care most passionately.”

  “I wonder if Eva will ever fall in love,” said Percy half to himself.

  “It will be a fine sight if she does; she will teach all these bloodless people how to do it. I think she has more force than anyone I know. Does she ever talk to you about her marriage?”

  “Oh! There’s nothing in the world she doesn’t talk about. She has begun to take an immense interest in herself, as well as in other people, and she watches her own development with much entertainment. She never forces anything; she quietly waits till the change is made, and then finds out exactly what has happened.”

  “Her scene with old Lady Hayes must have been wicked,” said Mrs. Davenport. “I can imagine her so well, lolling back in her chair with infinite languor, smoking cigarettes probably, and uttering slow, polished blasphemies about all her mother-in-law’s most cherished beliefs.”

  “They are out in Algiers now,” said Percy. “Eva suddenly expressed a wish to go there again. She likes the languid heat of the place. Jim Armine is with them.”

  “Ah!” said Mrs. Davenport, softly. “She is very cruel.”

  “She had the greatest distaste for her ordinary home life. Last year my father lost a lot of money, and we had to live very quietly at home in the country and retrench. Eva couldn’t endure it. She had quite made up her mind that she would never fall in love at all. She will do something sublime if she does. She is quite capable of sacrificing he
rself or anybody else.”

  “A clear stage and a crowd to see,” thought Mrs. Davenport, “and may I be in the stalls.”

  Meanwhile, the two lovers were talking at the very farthest corner of the drawing-room, but before the evening was over, the little cloud, which had just appeared over the horizon on the occasion when Reggie’s mother had lost her way in the snow, gathered again, and this time it seemed to Gertrude to leave a little film of mist behind. Like the other two, they had been talking about Percy’s sister, and Reggie had said suddenly—

  “She is perfectly lovely, I believe; they call her the most beautiful woman in London. Percy showed me her photograph. I want to see her very much.”

  This speech, made in absolute thoughtlessness, jarred somehow on Gertrude’s sensibilities.

  “I daresay there are many actresses as beautiful,” she said, rather unnecessarily. “I don’t think I should like her a bit. There was a man staying with us the other day who said she was perfectly reckless about what she did.”

  “Oh! A woman as beautiful as that can afford to be reckless,” said Reggie. “She sets the fashion.”

  “I don’t think recklessness is a good fashion to set, then,” said Gertrude, with some asperity.

  “Oh! Nor do I,” said Reggie. “I only meant that one excuses it more, somehow.”

  “I don’t see why you should excuse it because a woman is beautiful,” said she, seeing the cloud rising out of the sea.

  “I don’t know,” said Reggie. “You must take a person all round; beauty is an advantage, and you set it off against a corresponding disadvantage.”

  “Do you mean that an incomparably beautiful woman is excusable if she does unpardonably nasty things?”

  “I suppose it comes to that in extremities,” said he, doubtfully. “You see, it is impossible to believe that such a woman could do anything quite unpardonable.”

  “Reggie, you’re absurd,” she cried; “don’t talk such utter nonsense, and be thankful I don’t believe you mean what you say.”