by E. F. Benson
Sylvia had nothing apparently to add on the subject of Michael’s maturity. Instead she just raised her head, which was not quite high enough.
“Stuff another cushion under my head, Hermann,” she said. “Thanks; now I’m completely comfortable, you will be relieved to hear.”
Hermann gazed at the fire in silence.
“That’s a weight off my mind,” he said. “About Michael now. He’s been suppressed all his life, you know, and instead of being dwarfed he has just gone on growing inside. Good Lord! I wish somebody would suppress me for a year or two. What a lot there would be when I took the cork out again. We dissipate too much, Sylvia, both you and I.”
She gave a little grunt, which, from his knowledge of her inarticulate expressions, he took to mean dissent.
“I suppose you mean we don’t,” he remarked.
“Yes. How much one dissipates is determined for one just as is the shape of your nose or the colour of your eyes. By the way, I fell madly in love with that cousin of Michael’s who came with him tonight. He’s the most attractive creature I ever saw in my life. Of course, he’s too beautiful: no boy ought to be as beautiful as that.”
“You flirted with him,” remarked Hermann. “Mike will probably murder him on the way home.”
Sylvia moved her feet a little farther from the blaze.
“Funny?” she asked.
Instantly Falbe knew that her mind was occupied with exactly the same question as his.
“No, not funny at all,” he said. “Quite serious. Do you want to talk about it or not?”
She gave a little groan.
“No, I don’t want to, but I’ve got to,” she said. “Aunt Barbara—we became Sylvia and Aunt Barbara an hour or two ago, and she’s a dear—Aunt Barbara has been talking to me about it already.”
“And what did Aunt Barbara say?”
“Just what you are going to,” said Sylvia; “namely, that I had better make up my mind what I mean to say when Michael says what he means to say.”
She shifted round so as to face her brother as he stood in front of the fire, and pulled his trouser-leg more neatly over the top of his shoe.
“But what’s to happen if I can’t make up my mind?” she said. “I needn’t tell you how much I like Michael; I believe I like him as much as I possibly can. But I don’t know if that is enough. Hermann, is it enough? You ought to know. There’s no use in you unless you know about me.”
She put out her arm, and clasped his two legs in the crook of her elbow. That expressed their attitude, what they were to each other, as absolutely as any physical demonstration allowed. Had there not been the difference of sex which severed them she could never have got the sense of support that this physical contact gave her; had there not been her sisterhood to chaperon her, so to speak, she could never have been so at ease with a man. The two were lover-like, without the physical apexes and limitations that physical love must always bring with it. The complement of sex that brought them so close annihilated the very existence of sex. They loved as only brother and sister can love, without trouble.
The closer contact of his fire-warmed trousers to the calf of his leg made Hermann step out of her encircling arm without any question of hurting her feelings.
“I won’t be burned,” he said. “Sorry, but I won’t be burned. It seems to me, Sylvia, that you ought to like Michael a little more and a little less.”
“It’s no use saying what I ought to do,” she said. “The idea of what I ‘ought’ doesn’t come in. I like him just as much as I like him, neither more nor less.”
He clawed some more cushions together, and sat down on the floor by her. She raised herself a little and rested her body against his folded knees.
“What’s the trouble, Sylvia?” he said.
“Just what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Be more concrete, then. You’re definite enough when you sing.”
She sighed and gave a little melancholy laugh.
“That’s just it,” she said. “People like you and me, and Michael, too, for that matter, are most entirely ourselves when we are at our music. When Michael plays for me I can sing my soul at him. While he and I are in music, if you understand—and of course you do—we belong to each other. Do you know, Hermann, he finds me when I’m singing, without the slightest effort, and even you, as you have so often told me, have to search and be on the lookout. And then the song is over, and, as somebody says, ‘When the feast is finished and the lamps expire,’ then—well, the lamps expire, and he isn’t me any longer, but Michael, with the—the ugly face, and—oh, isn’t it horrible of me—the long arms and the little stumpy legs—if only he was rather different in things that don’t matter, that can’t matter! But—but, Hermann, if only Michael was rather like you, and you like Michael, I should love you exactly as much as ever, and I should love Michael, too.”
She was leaning forward, and with both hands was very carefully tying and untying one of Hermann’s shoelaces.
“Oh, thank goodness there is somebody in the world to whom I can say just whatever I feel, and know he understands,” she said. “And I know this, too—and follow me here, Hermann—I know that all that doesn’t really matter; I am sure it doesn’t. I like Michael far too well to let it matter. But there are other things which I don’t see my way through, and they are much more real—”
She was silent again, so long that Hermann reached out for a cigarette, lit it, and threw away the match before she spoke.
“There is Michael’s position,” she said. “When Michael asks me if I will have him, as we both know he is going to do, I shall have to make conditions. I won’t give up my career. I must go on working—in other words, singing—whether I marry him or not. I don’t call it singing, in my sense of the word, to sing ‘The Banks of Allan Water’ to Michael and his father and mother at Ashbridge, any more than it is being a politician to read the morning papers and argue about the Irish question with you. To have a career in politics means that you must be a member of Parliament—I daresay the House of Lords would do—and make speeches and stand the racket. In the same way, to be a singer doesn’t mean to sing after dinner or to go squawking anyhow in a workhouse, but it means to get up on a platform before critical people, and if you don’t do your very best be damned by them. If I marry Michael I must go on singing as a professional singer, and not become an amateur—the Viscountess Comber, who sings so charmingly. I refuse to sing charmingly; I will either sing properly or not at all. And I couldn’t not sing. I shall have to continue being Miss Falbe, so to speak.”
“You say you insist on it,” said Hermann; “but whether you did or not, there is nothing more certain than that Michael would.”
“I am sure he would. But by so doing he would certainly quarrel irrevocably with his people. Even Aunt Barbara, who, after all, is very liberally minded, sees that. They can none of them, not even she, who are born to a certain tradition imagine that there are other traditions quite as stiff-necked. Michael, it is true, was born to one tradition, but he has got the other, as he has shown very clearly by refusing to disobey it. He will certainly, as you say, insist on my endorsing the resolution he has made for himself. What it comes to is this, that I can’t marry him without his father’s complete consent to all that I have told you. I can’t have my career disregarded, covered up with awkward silences, alluded to as a painful subject; and, as I say, even Aunt Barbara seemed to take it for granted that if I became Lady Comber I should cease to be Miss Falbe. Well, there she’s wrong, my dear; I shall continue to be Miss Falbe whether I’m Lady Comber, or Lady Ashbridge, or the Duchess of anything you please. And—here the difficulty really comes in—they must all see how right I am. Difficulty, did I say? It’s more like an impossibility.”
Hermann threw the end of his cigarette into the ashes of the dying fire.
“It’s clear, then,” he said, “you have made up your mind not to marry him.”
She shook her head.
“Oh, Hermann, you fail me,” she said. “If I had made up my mind not to I shouldn’t have kept you up an hour talking about it.”
He stretched his hands out towards the embers already coated with grey ash.
“Then it’s like that with you,” he said, pointing. “If there is the fire in you, it is covered up with ashes.”
She did not reply for a moment.
“I think you’ve hit it there,” she said. “I believe there is the fire; when, as I said, he plays for me I know there is. But the ashes? What are they? And who shall disperse them for me?”
She stood up swiftly, drawing herself to her full height and stretching her arms out.
“There’s something bigger than we know coming,” she said. “Whether it’s storm or sunshine I have no idea. But there will be something that shall utterly sever Michael and me or utterly unite us.”
“Do you care which it is?” he asked.
“Yes, I care,” said she.
He held out his hands to her, and she pulled him up to his feet.
“What are you going to say, then, when he asks you?” he said.
“Tell him he must wait.”
He went round the room putting out the electric lamps and opening the big skylight in the roof. There was a curtain in front of this, which he pulled aside, and from the frosty cloudless heavens the starshine of a thousand constellations filtered down.
“That’s a lot to ask of any man,” he said. “If you care, you care.”
“And if you were a girl you would know exactly what I mean,” she said. “They may know they care, but, unless they are marrying for perfectly different reasons, they have to feel to the end of their fingers that they care before they can say ‘Yes.’”
He opened the door for her to pass out, and they walked up the passage together arm-in-arm.
“Well, perhaps Michael won’t ask you,” he said, “in which case all bother will be saved, and we shall have sat up talking till—Sylvia, did you know it is nearly three—sat up talking for nothing!”
Sylvia considered this.
“Fiddlesticks!” she said.
And Hermann was inclined to agree with her.
This view of the case found confirmation next day, for Michael, after his music lesson, lingered so firmly and determinedly when the three chatted together over the fire that in the end Hermann found nothing to do but to leave them together. Sylvia had given him no sign as to whether she wished him to absent himself or not, and he concluded, since she did not put an end to things by going away herself, that she intended Michael to have his say.
The latter rose as the door closed behind Hermann, and came and stood in front of her. And at the moment Sylvia could notice nothing of him except his heaviness, his plainness, all the things that she had told herself before did not really matter. Now her sensation contradicted that; she was conscious that the ash somehow had vastly accumulated over her fire, that all her affection and regard for him were suddenly eclipsed. This was a complete surprise to her; for the moment she found Michael’s presence and his proximity to her simply distasteful.
“I thought Hermann was never going,” he said.
For a second or two she did not reply; it was clearly no use to continue the ordinary banter of conversation, to suggest that as the room was Hermann’s he might conceivably be conceded the right to stop there if he chose. There was no transition possible between the affairs of every day and the affair for which Michael had stopped to speak. She gave up all attempt to make one; instead, she just helped him.
“What is it, Michael?” she asked.
Then to her, at any rate, Michael’s face completely changed. There burned in it all of a sudden the full glow of that of which she had only seen glimpses.
“You know,” he said.
His shyness, his awkwardness, had all vanished; the time had come for him to offer to her all that he had to offer, and he did it with the charm of perfect manliness and simplicity.
“Whether you can accept me or not,” he said, “I have just to tell you that I am entirely yours. Is there any chance for me, Sylvia?”
He stood quite still, making no movement towards her. She, on her side, found all her distaste of him suddenly vanished in the mere solemnity of the occasion. His very quietness told her better than any protestations could have done of the quality of what he offered, and that quality vastly transcended all that she had known or guessed of him.
“I don’t know, Michael,” she said at length.
She came a step forward, and without any sense of embarrassment found that she, without conscious intention, had put her hands on his shoulders. The moment that was done she was conscious of the impulse that made her do it. It expressed what she felt.
“Yes, I feel like that to you,” she said. “You’re a dear. I expect you know how fond I am of you, and if you don’t I assure you of it now. But I have got to give you more than that.”
Michael looked up at her.
“Yes, Sylvia,” he said, “much more than that.”
A few minutes ago only she had not liked him at all; now she liked him immensely.
“But how, Michael?” she asked. “How can I find it?”
“Oh, it’s I who have got to find it for you,” he said. “That is to say, if you want it to be found. Do you?”
She looked at him gravely, without the tremor of a smile in her eyes.
“What does that mean exactly?” she said.
“It is very simple. Do you want to love me?”
She did not move her hands; they still rested on his shoulders like things at ease, like things at home.
“Yes, I suppose I want to,” she said.
“And is that the most you can do for me at present?” he asked.
That reached her again; all the time the plain words, the plain face, the quiet of him stabbed her with daggers of which he had no idea. She was dismayed at the recollection of her talk with her brother the evening before, of the ease and certitude with which she had laid down her conditions, of not giving up her career, of remaining the famous Miss Falbe, of refusing to take a dishonoured place in the sacred circle of the Combers. Now, when she was face to face with his love, so ineloquently expressed, so radically a part of him, she knew that there was nothing in the world, external to him and her, that could enter into their reckonings; but into their reckonings there had not entered the one thing essential. She gave him sympathy, liking, friendliness, but she did not want him with her blood. And though it was not humanly possible that she could want him with more than that, it was not possible that she could take him with less.
“Yes, that is the most I can do for you at present,” she said.
Still quite quietly he moved away from her, so that he stood free of her hands.
“I have been constantly here all these last months,” he said. “Now that you know what I have told you, do you want not to see me?”
That stabbed her again.
“Have I implied that?” she asked.
“Not directly. But I can easily understand its being a bore to you. I don’t want to bore you. That would be a very stupid way of trying to make you care for me. As I said, that is my job. I haven’t accomplished it as yet. But I mean to. I only ask you for a hint.”
She understood her own feeling better than he. She understood at least that she was dealing with things that were necessarily incalculable.
“I can’t give you a hint,” she said. “I can’t make any plans about it. If you were a woman perhaps you would understand. Love is, or it isn’t. That is all I know about it.”
But Michael persisted.
“I only know what you have taught me,” he said. “But you must know that.”
In a flash she became aware that it would be impossible for her to behave to Michael as she had behaved to him for several months past. She could not any longer put a hand on his shoulder, beat time with her fingers on his arm, knowing that the physical contact meant nothing to her, and all—a
ll to him. The rejection of him as a lover rendered the sisterly attitude impossible. And not only must she revise her conduct, but she must revise the mental attitude of which it was the physical counterpart. Up till this moment she had looked at the situation from her own side only, had felt that no plans could be made, that the natural thing was to go on as before, with the intimacy that she liked and the familiarity that was the obvious expression of it. But now she began to see the question from his side; she could not go on doing that which meant nothing particular to her, if that insouciance meant something so very particular to him. She realised that if she had loved him the touch of his hand, the proximity of his face would have had significance for her, a significance that would have been intolerable unless there was something mutual and secret between them. It had seemed so easy, in anticipation, to tell him that he must wait, so simple for him just—well, just to wait until she could make up her mind. She believed, as she had told her brother, that she cared for Michael, or as she had told him that she wanted to—the two were to the girl’s mind identical, though expressed to each in the only terms that were possible—but until she came face to face with the picture of the future, that to her wore the same outline and colour as the past, she had not known the impossibility of such a presentment. The desire of the lover on Michael’s part rendered unthinkable the sisterly attitude on hers. That her instinct told her, but her reason revolted against it.