The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  In the same way the little details of those few minutes when he waited for Eva to put on her opera cloak were engraved indelibly on Reggie’s mind. Years afterwards the faint, acrid smell of red geraniums brought back the whole evening with a throb of sudden awakening. The window was open, and the flower-box outside was in full scent and colour. A canary creeper climbed the trellis-work at the sides of the windows, and twined its green, muscular stalks round the painted wooden squares. Between, a row of gaudy geraniums grew up from a groundwork of low mignonette, not yet in full flower, and in the front of the box a fringe of dark blue lobelias shivered on their hair-like stalks in the evening air. Beyond lay the grimy, dusty, square garden, and over the road, between the house and it, bowled silent, smooth-running carriages, within which he caught sight of the shimmering of silk and jewels, and over all brooded the hot, weary sky, exhausted with the long, sultry hours, but beginning to grow a little more serene, a little less stifled in the cool of the evening.

  Reggie looked at these things not knowing he was noticing them, and forbearing to guess what Eva meant. He was surprised to hear the door in the room behind open, and to find that Eva was ready, and his cigarette was nearly smoked out. He had not thought that she had been gone more than a few seconds.

  “Well, Reggie,” she said, “have you been thinking it all over? Are you prepared for the great change. I think it is coming tonight, but, of course, there is nothing so easy as prophesying, and nothing so inconclusive. Well! We shall see. At present the carriage is waiting, and we must be off.”

  It was still early when they arrived at the opera house, and the orchestra were just beginning to tune up. The house was still comparatively empty, but it was beginning to fill rapidly, for all London had suddenly discovered that Wagner was worth listening to, and that an overture was not necessarily as dispensable as a preface.

  But at last the tuning was over, the violins had caught their A’s correctly, and had hit the “four perfect fifths,” the drums had been screwed up to the necessary tension, and the wind instruments were in their places, pregnant with the miraculous birth of sound. For these five strings, these tubes of brass were going not to interpret, but to present the actual mysteries which passed through the artist’s brain. Music is, as it were, the speaker in the first person, whereas painting only deals with the vision secondhand. The painter represents a blaze of light by certain pigments—yellow, red, white—but these are only the symbols of what he wishes to tell us. He may not take liquid sunlight and place it on the canvas. His art is but a symbol, an algebra of tints to express certain other things. No colour he can use is in itself luminous, the resemblance it bears to light is only imagined by the spectator, in proportion as the artist presents us with contrasts, with sombre shadows or brooding clouds, and it is only by the aid of what he tries to represent that we can see his vision at all. But with the musician it is different—he deals with his materials direct; he takes sound pure, not a symbol of sound; his vision is woven of the waves of air which are eternal and original, not of chemical combinations of white lead, or the blood of cuttlefish. He mixes pure sound in his thought, and out of it “frames not a sound but a star.” And Wagner, above all other musicians of all time, has taught an incredulous world what can be done with sound, his beautiful slave and master, just as Stevenson taught his faithless generation what could be done with steam. The emotions and passions of humanity are his harp, and this harp, touched by a master’s finger, tells us what it knows. Thus in Tannhäuser he has presented us with the great problem of all time—the war between the lower, the bestial side of man, and something which mankind itself has declared to be higher—the pure, steadfast soul. He tears the hearts out of the breasts of Galahad and Messalina, bleeding and palpitating; he threads them together on his golden string, and then, the artist’s work being over, he tosses them to us, and says “Choose.” The materials for choice are all there, the whole of the data are before us, and as Tannhäuser chose once, so “chance” has ordained that each of us should choose, and the same thing called “chance” ordained that Reggie should choose that night.

  There was a pause, a silence after the conductor had entered, and then the wooden instruments gave out half the problem. The slow, deep notes of the “Pilgrim’s March” rose and fell, walking steadfastly on in perilous place, weary yet undismayed. Then followed the strange chromatic passage of transition, without which even Wagner did not dare to show us the other side of the picture, and then the great animal, which had lain as if asleep, began to stir; its heart beat with the life of its waking moments, and it started up. The violins shivered and smiled and laughed as Venusberg came in sight; they rose and fell, as the march before had done, but rising higher and laughing more triumphantly with each fall—careless, heedless, infinitely beautiful. But below them, not less steadfast than before, moved the pilgrims. The riot was at its highest, the triumph of Venus and her train seemed complete, when suddenly Reggie started up. He stood at his full height a moment, watching the curtain rise on Venusberg.

  “I see, I see,” he cried.

  Then he turned to Eva.

  “You are a wicked woman,” he said, and next moment the door of the box closed behind him.

  Eva had been seated opposite him, and she had watched his face during the overture. Before he spoke, she knew what would happen, but she did not repent of her resolve. As he left the box, she made two hurried steps as if to follow him, and then stopped, turning round again towards the stage. The electric light fell full on her diamonds, on the gleam of her white dress, on her incomparable beauty. The fan that she had held had slipped down and lay at her feet, and her hands were clenched together.

  “He is right,” she said aloud. “Ah, my God! He is quite right.”

  Jim Armine looked up as Reggie left the box, but as his chair was towards the stage he saw nothing except that he had gone. But when Eva rose, he turned half round, and caught her words. It would not have required much penetration to see that something had happened, and it was not unnatural that he hesitated to ask Eva what was the matter. But the next moment she had picked up her fan, and had seated herself in her old place. She opened her mouth to speak once, and Jim waited, but she said nothing.

  “Where’s Reggie gone?” asked he at length.

  Eva summoned her wonderful power of self-control, and spoke in her natural voice.

  “I think he has gone home,” she said with a certain finality. “Isn’t the scene charming? Really, they mount these things very well in England.”

  The evening passed on; men from other boxes came and paid their respects to Lady Hayes, and, as usual, she snubbed some, was a little amused by others, and appeared indifferent to all.

  Towards the end of the third act, Lord Hayes made his appearance and made some true remarks on the state of the weather and the prevalent influenza. Eva listened to his remarks with somewhat unusual attention, and went so far as to inquire how his mother was, who, in spite of her fortified condition, was “down” with the epidemic. But when the curtain fell for the last time, and Tannhäuser had died in “the odour of sanctity,” she turned to Jim.

  “I wonder if that ending is really natural,” she said. “Do you think any man leaves Venusberg so utterly behind after he has been a habitué there? I wish Reggie had stopped. He would have given us some very spontaneous criticisms on the subject.”

  “Do you think spontaneous criticisms are the most valuable?” he asked.

  “Perhaps not; but they are very interesting. After all, experience may vitiate one’s judgment as much as it matures it.”

  “What a very odd doctrine,” laughed Jim. “But I don’t suppose you really believe it yourself.”

  “Oh no, probably I don’t,” she replied, “but I don’t know what I do believe, and what I don’t. Will you give me my cloak? Do you want a lift? No? Good-night!”

  When Eva got home she went straight up to her room, and her husband followed her and sat down on a chair opposite to her,
as if waiting for her to speak. But Eva had quite as successful a power of silence as he, and sat saying nothing, till he found it unbearable and, in a fatal fit of fidgeting, went across to the mantelpiece, where Reggie’s photograph was standing. Eva’s eyes followed him slowly, with a still impatience.

  He took up the photograph and looked at it for a moment.

  “Ah! This is your young friend Reggie Davenport, is it not?”

  Eva yawned slightly and nodded assent.

  “I thought he was at the opera with you tonight?”

  “He was.”

  “But surely he was not there when I came.”

  “No, he had gone away.”

  “Ah! I suppose he got tired of it. It is possible to get tired of Wagner.”

  Eva stood up suddenly. Her self-control was beginning to break down, and the knowledge of what had happened, the entire success of her own scheme of letting Reggie know the truth about her, was being supplanted in her own mind by a great sense of loss. She felt reckless, at revolt with the world, intolerably intolerant of her position. As she stood there, watching her husband leaning on the back of a chair with the photograph of Reggie in his hands, the desire to fling the truth of it at him became too strong to resist.

  She made a quick, silent step to his side, and plucked the photograph out of his hands.

  “I should not touch that again if I were you,” she said, speaking in a low, rapid voice. “You had better leave it alone for the future. Oh! My meaning is clear enough. I am in love with Reggie Davenport. Yes—in love with him. He is not at all like a second Jim Armine, as you suggested the other day. No, this is quite a different thing. And he is in love with me, while he is engaged to that girl whose photograph stood next his there. It is a sweet position, is it not? Here am I married to you—in love with a young man who is engaged to someone else who is in love with him, while he is in love with me. Ah! Hayes, I lost a great deal when I married you, while you got what you wanted. You wanted to be my owner, did you not? You wished to be master of my beauty. I know how beautiful I am; there is not another woman in London who can touch me. You wanted someone who would give that stamp to your dinner parties and country house parties that I give it. You have had the best of it. And I married you because I wanted position, because I wanted to know the world. That I have got—I know it by heart. It is as dull as a week-old newspaper. Ah, God! How I know it. I did not know what it was to fall in love; I was inexperienced, ignorant. No, I don’t blame you. I pity myself.”

  Eva stopped for a moment, and put Reggie’s photograph down on the mantelpiece again, next Gertrude’s. She looked at them for a single second, and then took the girl’s photograph, and, with a sudden, ungovernable frenzy, tore it to bits, and threw the pieces in the grate. That wild-animal burst of jealousy would not be smothered. Then she went on, still speaking rapidly—

  “You need not be afraid of scandal, Hayes, or anything else of that sort. I have broken with Reggie for good. He thought me kind and good, and all that is womanly, and so I wished him to know the truth about me. Have you ever been in love? If so, you will understand it. I shocked him horribly by explaining to him about Tannhäuser, and at the end of the overture, he suddenly understood what I meant, and he got up and left the box, having told me that I was a wicked woman. It was very fine. I admired him immensely for it. But that sort of thing is rather trying. I managed to behave decently while the play lasted, but I have broken down. That is all there is to tell you. I don’t really know why I told you at all.”

  Lord Hayes listened to his wife with much composure.

  “Dear me, how very sensational!” he said, “and how very Quixotic of you. I should not have thought you were capable of Quixotism. You are a most remarkable woman. I think I shall go to bed. The new story by Paul Bourget which I am reading will seem quite flat after your little romance. Good-night!”

  Eva felt a sudden sense that he was justified in his quiet scorn of her. How was it to be expected, she reasoned to herself, that he should behave to her, as far as in him lay, otherwise than she behaved to him? Her regret at all she had lost was not entirely resentment towards him. For the first time since she had known him, she was generous to him, showed a willingness to meet him half-way.

  “Wait a moment,” she said, “I have not quite done.”

  He paused in an uncompromising attitude with his hand on the handle of the door, ready for some fine return shot. But Eva’s impulse was strong within her, and she spoke.

  “I do not blame you,” she said; “I assure you of that. I only blame myself. You were willing to be very kind to me, and I believe you are willing still. In fact, I am very sorry for you, just as I am very sorry for myself. I do not wish to make it worse for either of us. I want to make a bad job as good as it can be made. I did not tell you what I have told you, in order to disgust you or pain you. We are travellers in the same compartment in this very tiresome journey called life. We are inevitably shut in here until it is time for one of us to get out. Do not let us quarrel; it will only make the journey worse.”

  Lord Hayes came a step closer.

  “Do you find this journey called life so tiresome?” he asked. “I should have thought you would have enjoyed it.”

  “I wish I was dead,” said she, simply.

  Then, quite suddenly, all her self-control gave way. She dropped her face in the sofa cushions and sobbed as if her heart would break. Lord Hayes was by no means a fool, and he saw very plainly what the reason for this sudden outburst was, and obviously it was not very complimentary to him, however complimentary it might be to another.

  He closed the door quietly, and sat down in a chair a little way from her. He had no notion of being tender, and he lit a cigarette till she was herself again. The sobs grew quieter after a while, and in a few minutes Eva sat up again. Lord Hayes chucked the end of his cigarette into the fireplace.

  “My dear Eva,” he said very calmly and quietly, “I know quite well, of course, what this all means. You are in love with that young fellow, and that quite accounts for your very—your very extraordinary behaviour. But I don’t mind that at all, I assure you. You may be in love with him as much as ever you like. The only thing I should mind would be any scandal on the subject, and I feel quite sure that nothing of the sort will happen. You have been very candid to me—very candid indeed, and I will follow your lead. I know perfectly well that your position and title and wealth are much too dear to you to let you risk any possibility of losing them. You would lose everything by a scandal, and I do not believe you would gain anything. This young man is engaged to another girl, as you say, and he is obviously a very good young man, and will do nothing he should not. In any case, you would have to live at Boulogne or Dieppe, or some of those hideous little French towns, among a set of second-rate people. That is absurd on the face of it. No, I am sure this ‘tedious journey called life,’ to quote your own words again, would be much more tedious there. For the rest, I fail to see how I am to prevent our quarrelling. It never has been a wish of mine that we should. So once more, good-night!”

  Eva was sitting up looking at her husband, with an intensity that was not pleasant to contemplate. He felt it perhaps, for once, when he met her eyes, he looked away again immediately and he faltered in his speech. The utter, entire absence of generosity, of anything like manly feeling in what he said, seemed to Eva to be a new revelation of meanness, the like of which she had never encountered. He turned and left the room at these last words, and Eva was left sitting there.

  CHAPTER VII.

  Mrs. Davenport had spent the evening alone. Her husband was away for the night, and Reggie, as we have seen, had gone to the opera.

  Whatever Reggie was he was not secretive, and his obvious pleasure that afternoon at Lady Hayes’s invitation did not savour of the sweetness of consciously forbidden fruit. But his very frankness, which, as has been mentioned before, was capable of dealing unpleasant back-hand blows, had also a dazzling power about it, which, like the
rays from a noon-day sun, renders it impossible to tell what lies behind, though it would be very false to describe it as partaking of the nature of dissimulation. It seemed to say, “I am not responsible for the weakness of your eyesight; I show my mystery or my want of mystery to you with all my heart, and you are at fault if you cannot form any conclusion which it is.” To continue the metaphor, Mrs. Davenport would have felt not ungrateful to some abatement in its brilliance partaking of the nature of an eclipsed frankness, a shadow cast on the disc by some external object, or, at any rate, she would have been glad to take the opinion of someone who was possessed of smoked glasses, or a natural tendency to observe correctly. Had she known it, Lord Hayes would have been exactly the individual required, but it was no discredit to her acuteness that the idea never entered her head, quite apart from the impracticability of putting it into execution.

  She had just dined and was glancing through the pages of a novel from Mudie’s, when the drawing-room door opened, and Reggie appeared. He paused a moment when he saw his mother, and then advanced into the room. His attempt to look unconcerned and contented was singularly unsuccessful.