by E. F. Benson
Eva rose from the table.
“Then you don’t mind coming to Algiers?”
It was clearly impossible to say “No; but I do mind Jim Armine coming,” and so he proposed a date some ten days off for their departure.
“Why shouldn’t we go sooner?” asked Eva.
“There’s been some unpleasantness down at the ironworks,” he said, “and I think that, as owner, I ought to just wait till it’s settled in some form or another.”
“Do you mean down at Trelso?”
“Yes; the men are striking, or wanting to strike, for higher wages—more pay, in fact.”
“Couldn’t you go down there today, and see the agents or managers or whoever they are?”
“There is nothing definite yet; we only know that there is a good deal of discontent.”
“Surely, then, you can leave it with your manager to deal with, when it occurs. It is absurd waiting in England for a handful of miners to tell you what they want.”
“It would be better, I think, if I waited,” he said.
“I wish you would explain to me exactly why.”
“Simply because, as owner,” he said, “they would wish to consult me if anything went really wrong.”
“Surely there is a telegraph to Algiers. I should infinitely prefer starting in less than a week. I really cannot stand this sort of weather.”
“I feel sure I am right to stop,” he said. “It is certainly best.”
Eva hesitated a moment.
“Would you mind my going on without you, then? Perhaps that would be the best plan. I daresay Jim will come with me.”
Her husband looked at her narrowly. He felt he was playing a losing game.
“I will go down to Trelso today, and see exactly what the state of affairs is—how they stand, in fact.”
“Very good. I shall start on Thursday, then. I will write to Jim today. I hope you won’t lose any more money over this.”
He smiled rather grimly.
“I hope not. This last year has been very expensive. I don’t grudge it in the least; in fact, it is very interesting to me to see how much a woman can spend.”
He was conscious of an impotent desire to make it not quite pleasant for Eva, even if she did get her own way in the main, and he was pleased to see her flinch, just perceptibly. She was annoyed with herself for doing it.
“Yes, I suppose you find you spend much more now than you used.”
“About ten thousand a year more.”
“Dear me, that is a great deal. You can hardly have counted the cost.”
“I did not quite realise it at the time. That’s what I mean by saying it was more than I anticipated.”
“Ah! Of course you wouldn’t anticipate it,” said Eva. “Love is blind, you know.”
Lord Hayes was rather sorry he had begun. He was somewhat in the position of a dog which runs out from its shelter to bite a passer-by, and when it gets into the open, discovers that its intended victim carries a stick.
Eva waited long enough to give him time to reply if he wanted, but finding he said nothing, turned and left the room.
Two days after this, as they were sitting at dinner, Eva asked him what had happened about the ironworks.
“I am glad you reminded me,” he said. “I told them that I wished particularly to leave England at once, and asked them to telegraph to me in case I was wanted. It appears that they do not expect any immediate disturbance, so I shall be able to come with you on Thursday—in fact, there will be nothing to detain me.”
“You had better stop if you think you are wanted,” said Eva. “I can manage perfectly by myself, and Jim Armine will be with me; he wrote today. But if they don’t want you, of course you’ll go with me.”
“Armine is coming, then, is he?” asked her husband.
“Yes; you don’t object to him, I hope?”
“Not in the least.”
“If you do, it would have been better if you had said so at once,” said Eva, carelessly. “I’ve asked him now.”
“Why should you suppose I object to him?” he asked suddenly.
“You didn’t seem very cordial about it. Have you asked anybody else?”
“I mentioned it to my mother when I saw her in Trelso, but she said she wouldn’t come.”
“Ah!” said Eva, with the ghost of a smile, “did she say why?”
“Apparently it was for your sake—because of you, in fact.”
“I expect she meant for her own sake. I should be charmed to have her. There is a straightforwardness, a refusal to compromise, in her behaviour to me, that is very refreshing.”
“She speaks of you with bitterness—I might almost say rancour,” remarked Lord Hayes.
“I am more sinned against than sinning, then,” said Eva. “I always feel perfectly charitable towards her. She loathes me; but, after all, that is not her fault. Really, it is wonderful what a fine order of hatred is compatible with the most orthodox Christianity. But of course I am one of the works of the devil, which she has been led to renounce from a child.”
Thus it came about that, before the middle of December, Lord Hayes and his wife, and Jim Armine, were installed in the charming little villa at Algiers. The Gulf of Lyons was kinder on this occasion to the susceptibilities of Lord Hayes, and he produced his white umbrella, and sat on a deck chair in untroubled contemplation. He always wore a yachtsman’s cap and brown shoes on calm trips, which were, somehow, particularly aggravating to Eva.
She was sitting on deck when he came upstairs on the morning after their departure from Marseilles, and Eva had a long, malignant look at him as he approached her.
“You look completely nautical this morning,” she said slowly. “I hope it won’t get rough, for your sake, or you will have to retire. The commodore will be found groaning in his cabin. But, perhaps you are only a fighting sailor, like Lord Nelson, who was always ill, wasn’t he? In that case, I hope we sha’n’t meet any Moorish privateers. If we are attacked during a storm, you will be completely exposed.”
Eva had rarely said anything to him in such simple bad taste, and her husband was surprised. The childishness of her strictures, however, rather amused him than otherwise, for he thought he had the key to them, in a rather awkward little scene which had taken place the evening before. Eva had been arguing some point with Jim Armine, and he had got a little excited. She had just made an assertion which seemed to him to contradict what she had said a moment before, and by an unlucky slip he exclaimed—
“Why, Eva, you said just the opposite a minute ago.”
The mistake was pardonable enough: when a man is in love with a woman, he naturally thinks of her by her Christian name, and it is excusable if, in some momentary excitement, he uses it. Eva was startled. He had never called her that before, and, losing her self-control for one half second, she uttered a sudden exclamation of anger, and glanced at her husband. He was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, looking at the sunset. He turned to Jim Armine, and said politely—
“I think you must have misunderstood Lady Hayes.”
The poor young man flushed deeply, and Eva bit her lips, divided between her annoyance and a desire to laugh. But the annoyance conquered in the end, as the delicate, veiled insult of her husband’s speech dawned upon her. His words certainly bore another interpretation, though whether he had meant it or not she was not quite sure, and she could not ask him. But Jim Armine evidently took them in the obscurer sense and was horribly disconcerted, and Eva not unnaturally felt extremely annoyed. He was, possibly, trying to make a fool of her, and she had not the least intention of being treated in such a manner. After a few moments she found something to say, but the conversation was evidently over. Jim Armine soon strolled away to the other end of the deck, and Eva was left alone with her husband.
As soon as the other was out of hearing, she said to him—
“I do not wish you to speak of me in that way. Please remember that.”
“I regre
t having offended you,” replied he, “but I do not choose that Armine should call you by your Christian name, Eva, in fact.”
“Your speech implied more than that,” she said.
Lord Hayes determined to make a stand.
“You are very quick at finding meanings.”
“What you said was insulting.”
“It is insulting to you that he should call you Eva?”
“Do you admit, then, that your speech bore another meaning?”
Lord Hayes lit another cigarette.
“I admit nothing of the sort. Not at all.”
“You will be so good as to apologise to him.”
“I have no reason for supposing that he imagined it to bear any meaning but the obvious one—the one, in fact, which I meant to convey. Of course you are at liberty to explain to him that, if you choose.”
For the first time Eva was conscious of a slight disadvantage, and Lord Hayes distinctly saw it. As she sat still silent, he looked at his watch and remarked—
“I am afraid they propose to give us dinner at seven. It is a barbarous custom. Perhaps you would like to know that it is now five minutes to seven.”
He carefully furled his white umbrella, and walked down the deck to the saloon. He made in his mind a careful little note of the occurrence, against that possible contingency of suspicion coming down the avenue. It was characteristic of him that he was as evenly polite as ever to Jim Armine, and advised him to drink white wine and not red, and remarked to him at tea afterwards that the Albert biscuits were stale, but that it was interesting to observe that the English manufactories of biscuits held their own abroad; in fact, that the makers of the stale Albert biscuits were Huntly & Palmer.
This suggestive little scene accounted, in his mind, for Eva’s unusual want of politeness on the subject of his yachtsman’s cap and brown canvas shoes. But he did not consider that a reason for abandoning them; in fact, they became to him a sort of commemorative medal on the occasion of his victory. A force which has an unbroken record of defeat is apt to dwell on a single and unexpected victory. In the main he was right in attributing Eva’s irritation that morning to her slight discomfiture on the evening before, for though she had dismissed, or rather forgotten, the occurrence, there was still in her a latent resentment that unconsciously vented itself in this manner.
They had been at the villa four or five days, and Lord Hayes had got into the habit of observing his wife and Jim Armine somewhat closely. Eva was rather silent; to her husband she hardly spoke at all, though now and then at meals she would begin talking, more to herself than the others. Jim Armine was not a very wise young man, and he said things sometimes, that, with another woman, would have betrayed him, but Eva did not seem to notice them.
They were seated at lunch one day, when Eva took up her parable. She had said nothing at all, as her way was, for some minutes, and Lord Hayes had been describing to Jim how the eucalyptus oil was extracted from the tree.
“You must excuse my silence, Mr. Armine,” she said, “but, you know, I have all sorts of recollections about this villa. We were here, you know, on our wedding tour, after we had been on the Riviera—just Hayes and myself—and we used to sit out in the garden and listen to the nightingales singing of love. It was very romantic; no doubt Hayes has spoken to you of it, when you pour out your hearts in the smoking-room, after I have gone to bed. It is always odd to me that men choose that time for being confidential. I should have thought it would have disturbed your night’s rest.”
“How do you know that we are confidential, then?” asked Jim.
“Why, of course you are; there isn’t time to be confidential during the day. Besides, that is the only time when you are sure not to be invaded by women. I shall hide in the smoking-room some night and listen to what you say.”
“There is nothing you might not hear,” said her husband.
“You mean that, I suppose, in order to deter me from listening, assuming that, being a woman, I only care to hear what is not meant for my ears. But you said it very politely.”
“Not at all; it was a formal invitation,” said he, “an assurance of how entirely welcome you would be.”
“Thanks. Of course you and I are under a sort of mutual compact to delight in each other’s society at any time or place.”
Lord Hayes laughed.
“One eternal honeymoon. Surely the golden age will return.”
Jim Armine, not unnaturally, felt that this was distinctly a comedy à deux, and that the presence of a third person was unnecessary. But no man can leave his red mullet half eaten for such reasons. Everything goes to the wall before our material needs.
Lord Hayes’s punctilious little manner always vanished in anything like a scene. He began to be self-possessed at exactly that point when most self-possessed people begin to be nervous and flurried, for his punctiliousness was the result not of nervousness, but a desire not to be nervous, and when the occasion was interesting enough to allow him to forget this, his tinge of finished cynicism and indifference to his fellow men assumed its natural predominance. He rather enjoyed a little polite sparring match with his wife, until he began to get the worst of it; as long as the buttons were on the foils he could fence very decently, but the sight of the bare point distinctly discomposed him.
Eva flushed.
“Let us reserve our raptures for when we are alone,” she said. “They are slightly embarrassing to a third person.”
Lord Hayes smiled. For the second time the banner of victory seemed to wave over his head. He saw his wife flush, and knew that she was very angry. That desire to avenge herself which she had felt so strongly on her return from her honeymoon, the sense that she had been trapped, and was being exhibited as a rare bird in a cage, was very strong in her; the added insolence of the trapper pretending to be on intimate and loving terms with her made her furious, and the consciousness that she had brought it upon herself, did not tend to diminish her rage. For the second time he was trying to make a fool of her before a third person.
How far a scene that took place a day or two after this was brought on by Eva’s dislike of her husband and her thirst for vengeance, is not part of this narrative to determine. The chronicler’s mission is not to form conclusions, but to present data, and my immediate mission is to present some rather important data.
Even in December, in Algiers, it is often pleasant to sit out of doors at nine in the evening, for the air is cool but dry, and Eva often spent an hour in the little open passage which ran round the central courtyard of the house, and in which, a year before, she had talked to her husband on the position of women. This time it was Jim Armine who was her companion; Lord Hayes had gone upstairs to write to his mother, and he proposed to give her some accurate descriptions, based on observation, about the date palm.
His room looked out on to the aforementioned courtyard, and before beginning his letter, he went across to the window to close it, for he had heard that the night air of Algiers is unwholesome. Just as he was in the act of taking this little precaution, there lighted on his ear the grumbling noise of a basket chair being dragged in passive, grating resistance over a stone floor, followed by the sound of Eva’s voice. As he could not see her, he came to the very logical conclusion that she was sitting directly below his window, and where she could not see him, and as she was talking, and Jim Armine was the only person in the house, he pictured her talking to him. After all, the evening air was not unpleasant, and instead of closing the window he stood by it and listened. The emphatic deliberation of this manœuvre was, he felt vaguely, in its favour from a conventional point of view.
The voices, at first, were inaudible to him, for the sense of hearing requires focussing as much as the sense of sight, and he only caught a word here and there. But, for the sake of the reader, it will be necessary to give the inaudible part of the conversation.
The two seated themselves in their basket chairs, and Jim Armine lit a cigarette. There was a small lamp by him
, the flame of which burned steadily in the still air. It cast a square of brilliant light into the courtyard beyond, across which, as across a magic-lantern sheet, white moths wandered from time to time, losing themselves again in the surrounding dark. There were several moments’ silence, and then he looked at Eva, half of whose face was in brilliant illumination, and said—
“You look tired tonight.”
“No, I am not tired,” she said, “but I am feeling blank. Just now everything appears to me extremely uninteresting. I know from experience that things are not uninteresting really, and that is the worst of it. They are there, but I cannot touch them. I live in a grey fog; there is sunshine somewhere, quite close, but I cannot get to it. What else could I expect?”
Jim was attending eagerly.
“Of course I mayn’t say how sorry I am for you,” he said in a low voice.
Eva did not turn her head, but the least sparkle returned to her eyes. Perhaps things were going to be amusing, after all, for a few minutes.
“I am grateful, of course,” she said. “One is to be pitied when the fog is so palpably dense. Of course, it will lift again; fogs don’t last for ever. I am glad you are with us, though I don’t think you ought to be. After all, nothing matters much.”
Lord Hayes had by this time successfully focussed his ear to the indistinct sounds, and Eva’s last remark was perfectly audible.
“Ah! But things do matter,” said the young man earnestly. “And all men are not like some men.”
“By which I suppose you mean me to understand that you are not like some men. How can I know that? You have no halo round your head, no dawning of ineffable joy in your face. Why should I suppose you are more than others? You have spoken to me before now of your great aims, your enthusiasms for great causes, by which, as far as I know, you only mean Home Rule, or the Unionist policy—I forgot what your politics are—and even that seems to have been in abeyance lately. You have been with us a week or more, and what have you done, what have you thought about? You seem to prefer, after all, talking to me—”