The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  Meantime, as the days went on, if Eva was beginning to be a little anxious about herself, Mrs. Davenport was not at her ease about Reggie. Gertrude’s letters came regularly, and he liked to let his mother read them, and they, at any rate, betrayed no dissatisfaction. But in one of these which arrived soon after the last interview recorded between Lady Hayes and Reggie, Mrs. Davenport suddenly felt frightened. It was a very short sentence which gave rise to this feeling, and apparently a very innocent one:—

  “What on earth does Lady Hayes want my photograph for?”

  Reggie was sitting by the open window after a particularly late breakfast, smoking into the window box. His back was turned to the room, and he was apparently absorbed in his occupation. He had read Gertrude’s letter as he was having breakfast, and when he had finished, he had given it to his mother, saying—

  “Such a jolly note from Gerty; you will like to see it, mummy.”

  Mrs. Davenport read it and looked up with some impatience at the lounging figure in the window seat.

  “What’s this about Gerty’s photograph and Lady Hayes?” she asked. “I don’t understand.”

  Reggie did not appear to hear, and continued persecuting a small, green fly that was airing itself on a red geranium, and was consequently conspicuous.

  “You may smoke in here, Reggie,” said Mrs. Davenport, raising her voice a little; “come in and sit down.”

  Reggie turned round somewhat unwillingly. He had heard his mother’s first question, and it had suddenly struck him that it was rather an awkward one. A very frank nature will, on occasions, use extreme frankness to cover the deficiency of it, and he decided that the whole truth, very openly stated, was less liable to involve him in difficulties than the subtlest prevarication.

  “Oh, Lady Hayes said she wanted Gerty’s photograph and mine,” he said, walking towards his mother. “Of course, I gave them her, and she gave me hers in exchange. I told Gerty all about it in a letter.”

  Mrs. Davenport looked up at him, and observed that his face was flushed.

  “What an odd request,” she said.

  “I don’t see why. I know her quite well, somehow, though I have only known her such a short time.”

  There was a short silence. Mrs. Davenport was casting about in her mind as to how she might learn what she wanted, without betraying her desire to know it.

  “Did you write to Gerty yesterday?” she asked at length.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Reggie, frankly. “I was out all day and then I went to the Hayes in the evening.”

  “Are you going out to Lucerne at the end of the month?”

  “No, I think not; somebody told me—Lady Hayes, I think—that it was awfully slow. I told Gerty the Arbuthnots were going out, and suggested she should leave Mrs. Carston with them and come back to London. I like London, somehow, this year.”

  Mrs. Davenport was beginning to understand. She could have found it in her heart at that moment to label Eva with some names that would have astonished her.

  “Does Lady Hayes talk about Gerty much?”

  “Oh, yes, a good deal; at least, she lets me talk about her whenever I want to.”

  “Is that a good deal?”

  Reggie frowned. He had been acting for this last week or so with such spontaneity, obeying so instantaneously his inclinations, that he found it hard to answer questions about these things. It is always harder to recall what we have done unthinkingly, than what has been the result of thought or conscious effort.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “We talk about her now and then, but we talk about a thousand things. I don’t know what you mean. Lady Hayes said the other day that she was sure Gerty would detest her.”

  “I think Lady Hayes is probably quite right.”

  “Then it would be very unreasonable of Gerty,” said Reggie, frowning again, “and I don’t know why you think so. Why should Gerty detest her?”

  “Does she strike you as the sort of woman Gerty would like?”

  “I don’t think I ever thought about it till Lady Hayes mentioned it, and I disagreed with her.”

  “You told me the other day that you and Gerty agreed that you only liked good people. I don’t think Gerty would think her good.”

  Reggie flushed angrily.

  “I don’t really see what you are driving at,” he said rather vehemently, because he did see. “I think I won’t talk about her any more if you don’t mind, mummy. You see she’s very kind and delightful to me, and that’s all that I have any right to judge by, and I’m sure she’d be just as nice to Gerty.”

  He sauntered out of the room with rather exaggerated slowness, feeling a little uneasy. He was just conscious that this new element which had come into his life was a very absorbing one, and he wondered a little how absorbing it was in proportion to other things. Eva showed to him a different side to that she showed to the world; she was careful when he was there not to say quite what she was in the habit of saying, when she was with others. She regarded him as a child—a very charming, delightful child—and she knew that the greatest respect, as one of the most finished artists of human life has said, was due to children. In fact, according to his data, Reggie’s glowing, adoring picture of her was faithful enough. Why Eva behaved like that to him is a question which concerned her alone, and of which the answer was even now working out in her mind. She had tried the world for two years, and had found it distinctly wanting. It amused her at times, but it bored her more frequently. The frantic interest which she had taken in men and women was beginning to pall a little; even the interest she had taken in herself was not so deep as it had been. It must be remembered that the world, as she knew it, was a certain section of society which, however much its units differ in individuality, is, to a certain extent, all dulled and choked in the limitations of its class, the inexorable need to be well dressed, to be successful, to be smart. Diversity of interest is the only thing that will make interest long lived; and diversity was exactly what was wanting. The gossip, the whispered scandals, the scheming, the jostling, were new to her at first, and she had drunk them down eagerly, but in her heart of hearts she knew that she was just a little tired of it all, and she was beginning to behave as others behaved, not because it was the most amusing thing that could be done, but because others behaved so. On this stale, gas-lit atmosphere Reggie had come like a whiff of fresh air. He had not the smallest interest in scandal or gossip, or any of those things in which her world found its entire interest settled. He was new, he was fresh, and he was young.

  Just now that meant a good deal to Eva, for it was the type to her of all she had missed. He was, again, distinctly of her own class—he could not offend the most fastidious taste—Eva would never have cultivated a grocer’s assistant, however fresh—and he was extremely handsome and attractive in appearance. Her feeling for him was made out of one large factor, and several small ones; for his pleasant manner, his frank good breeding, his beauty, she liked him; for his serene, stainless youth she had a sort of liking that was quite new to her.

  That the conception he had formed of her was very far from representing her, she knew well. She had deliberately held the reckless, cynical, unprincipled part of her nature rigorously in check when she was with him. She was sympathetic, simple, divinely kind to him because she liked him so much and knew that he would detest the other half of her. But now a mixture of motives led her to determine to let him know all. It had come to this, that she felt that inevitable longing to throw her nature open to him, to drop this elaborate suppression, to let him see her as she was, and judge her. Our deeper emotions are thickly entwined with the fibres of honesty, which makes even those who are least honest, in ordinary life, scrupulously truthful and open when those deeper emotions are touched. To say that Eva was in love with Reggie would be both overstating it and understating it. He was the symbol to her of her lost ideals, which she found she had loved now she had lost them; and, humanly speaking, she found him very attractive as a substantial e
mbodiment of these.

  Eva was sitting in her room one morning, a few days after the talk Reggie had had with his mother, wondering how she had better carry her resolve out, when an idea struck her. She got up and wrote a short note to him:—

  “I wonder if you would care to come to the opera tonight with me,” she said. “Tannhäuser is being played, and I think I remember your saying you thought the overture very pretty. Do come. Dine here first.”

  “Jim Armine shall come too,” thought Eva. “He shall chaperone us. Besides, I can’t be worldly all alone with Reggie. I must have some one to be worldly with. Decidedly that is the best plan.”

  CHAPTER VI.

  The opera began at half-past eight, and Eva, in her note to Reggie, had mentioned “seven sharp” as the hour for dinner, because she wanted to hear the overture. Reggie had routed up an “arrangement” of the music that afternoon, and had got his mother to play it to him, but whether it was that Mrs. Davenport’s musical education had been conducted in her youth on the same principles of æsthetics that used to instil into the young idea the system of “touches” to indicate foliage, or that Reggie did not attend much—in any case, he pronounced it totally unintelligible, and, in his mind, reconsidered his previous verdict of it.

  Reggie’s “seven sharp” partook of the nature of “seven,” but in a less degree of the nature of “sharp,” and Jim Armine had already arrived and was talking to Eva. As he opened the door—he was already sufficiently at home to dispense with the formula of being shown up—Eva felt her resolve waver, but determined, if she could, to do what she had intended. She wheeled her chair a few inches further round, so as to be with her back to the door, and began talking in a hard, cold voice.

  “Of course, there will be a tremendous scandal about it,” she said to Jim, “but you know what the woman is like. Didn’t you see her here a fortnight ago? Hayes thought her divine. Of course, men are always blind in such matters. If a woman is beautiful enough, they think she must be good. Now, women do just the opposite. If a woman is beautiful enough, they think she must be a villain. They are, probably, much more likely to be right than men. Ah! Reggie, you’ve come, have you? I know what your seven sharp is.”

  Reggie shook hands with her, and looked inquiring.

  “Whom were you talking about?” he demanded.

  “Oh! It would have been applicable to most women,” said Eva. “There has been, or will be, a tremendous scandal about most of us, and it seems to me that most women have been here during this last fortnight. We have been having a week of parties, and Hayes will have to sell one of his villas, I expect. The parties have all been very stupid, but so are the villas, for that matter. Come, let’s go in to dinner. Which of you gentlemen will take me in? You’re the nephew of a marquis, are you not, Jim? Then you shall go in first, and Reggie and I will follow.”

  “I’ve been making my mother play the overture to me,” remarked Reggie, as they sat down, “and I can’t understand a note of it.”

  “Oh! The overture is the epitome to the play,” said Eva; “you have to know the plot, and then the overture is easy enough. Let’s see, I’ll give you a little sketch of it. Tannhäuser is a good young man, Reggie—something like you—and he goes to Venusberg. Well, Venusberg is not at all the place for a good young man. There is no propriety of any sort observed there, and they are very lax about etiquette and other things. Never go to Venusberg, Reggie, or, if you do, take Mrs. Reggie with you. If she won’t come—and I don’t expect she will—you had better not go at all. It is said to be very unsettling.”

  Jim Armine laughed. Lady Hayes was inclined to be talkative, and he always thought it worth while listening to her when she was talkative, because she always had something to say whenever she said anything. He wondered a little why she had taken it into her head to say this just now, but she always talked with a purpose, and he was content to assume the purpose. But Reggie was wofully puzzled. He had not known her like this, and he very much wanted explanations.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “You know I’m very stupid. Do tell me what you mean.”

  Eva cast one look at his anxious, frowning face, and trifled with her fish.

  “I must do it,” she said to herself; “I cannot let things continue as they have been.”

  “Oh! It gets easier further on,” she continued, “as Humpty Dumpty said; and you’ll understand it all when you hear the overture again, according to your new lights. Of course, the Venusberg is only an interlude in Tannhäuser’s life, and everyone has interludes in their lives, or else they would not be human. Tannhäuser is a pilgrim, and the pilgrims march about to slow music all the time. Venus, of course, does not go about to slow music—quite the contrary, in fact; and, when you hear the two together, the contrast is very striking. Tannhäuser goes away from Venusberg, you know, before the end, and dies in the odour of sanctity.”

  Eva stopped for a moment, and Jim Armine laughed again.

  “You are admirably lucid,” he said. “You seldom explain yourself so well.”

  “Thanks for the compliment,” said Eva. “And you, Reggie, do you find me lucid?”

  Reggie was listening to her with a puzzled air.

  “I expect I shall understand better when I’ve seen it,” he said.

  “Yes; you can’t fail to understand it then,” said Eva, “or, if you don’t, you will be even more charming than I thought you. I wonder if you are capable of it. I am talking nonsense tonight; you must forget it tomorrow.”

  “As long as you remember it just during the opera,” said Jim maliciously.

  Eva’s mind was thoroughly made up, and she choked the rising misgivings.

  “He must know some time,” she thought, “and it is best I should tell him.”

  “You are going to be Adam in the garden of Eden, possibly for the last time,” she said with mock solemnity, which covered her own earnestness; “tonight the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will be offered you—”

  “By the woman?” asked Jim, indicating Eva.

  “On the contrary,” said she, “by Augustus Harris. Every man since Adam has had it offered him sooner or later, Reggie, and the majority of them eat it. The apple, in this case, is Tannhäuser, accompanied by my comments on it. It’s a funny sort of apple. I’m giving you the core first, which is rather dry, probably, and the fruit comes afterwards, like dessert after savouries.”

  “The core is rather hard,” remarked Reggie unceremoniously.

  “Oh, it will taste quite different when you chew it up with the fruit.”

  “Give us some more of the core,” asked Jim.

  “Well, there’s Venus, of course,” said Eva, “about whom I haven’t told you anything yet. She is just the opposite to the pilgrim’s march; she regards things from an entirely different standpoint, you know. I’m always a little sorry for Venus. Tannhäuser goes away just when she has got very fond of him.”

  Eva stopped a moment and looked at Reggie.

  “But, of course, you mustn’t consider her at all. Tannhäuser is usually done on Saturdays, you know, and Venus would not go at all well with Sunday morning service. Poor dear, how the Litany would bore her! She stops in the porch, when you go into church, and when you come out she is gone. She hasn’t gone, really, you know; she is only having a stroll, and she always comes back, very often before Monday. If she doesn’t come back, most men go to look for her, and they usually find her again.”

  Reggie stifled a sudden sense of misgiving with staunch loyalty, and smiled at Eva.

  “I told you I was stupid,” he said, “the first time I saw you, and I confess to being absolutely stupid now. I don’t understand you a bit.”

  Jim regarded Reggie as a successful interloper, and could not resist the temptation to be slightly malicious.

  “After all, it is the most delightful thing in the world to be able to keep up our mysteries,” he said. “Nothing intelligible is so charming as what is mysterious. When you
understand anything, the charm is gone.”

  “Nonsense, Jim,” said Eva; “don’t pay any attention to what he says, Reggie. It is very easy to be unintelligible.”

  “Yes, it seems to be,” said Reggie, rather absently, but resenting Jim’s remark, which savoured of patronising.

  Eva laughed.

  “You won’t get any change out of him, Jim,” she said. “He has often assured me he is very stupid, which no stupid person is capable of doing. I must go and put on a cloak. There is just time for you to smoke a cigarette before the carriage comes.”

  Eva got up and left the room, and Reggie lit a cigarette, and strolled to the window. He had no particular liking for Jim Armine, and Eva’s words had disturbed him. He was growing more conscious of the fact that his life was beginning to find a new centre, and a mystery which was quite new to it. His strong, genuine liking and admiration for Gertrude had not diminished a whit, but he did not conceal from himself that he thought with more excitement about Eva. But he felt himself able to retain both these interests without any sense of compromise. He was engaged to marry Gertrude, and he would have been genuinely puzzled if it had been suggested to him that such an engagement, to some minds, limited his liberty in becoming indefinitely interested in another woman. In fact, the extreme simplicity of his character appeared to be going to land him among some perilously complicated and unknown shoals. He was young, ardent and unreflective, and these divine gifts are capable of dealing back-handed blows in the most inopportune and unexpected ways.

  But Eva’s words this evening had startled and perplexed him, and his bewilderment was touched with distrust. He expected, as Eva had told him, to find the key to his perplexity in the opera tonight, and he half realised that the explanation might be appallingly significant. Years afterwards he remembered those few minutes, which he spent looking out of the window, with much greater clearness than he remembered what followed. A mental, like a physical shock, often produces a dimness in the memory. Men who have been in great peril of death will remember with great vividness the most insignificant circumstances just before that peril; how they were walking round the slippery corner of rocks coated with ice, how a little purple gentian grew just above the crevice where they found a handhold, how at their feet was a trickle of water, where the sun had melted the snow. Then came the slip, and the activity of the mind seems suddenly quiescent. As they slid powerlessly down the icy stair, they noticed nothing, even the bitterness of death was passed—they were inanimate arrows from the bow of natural laws.