by E. F. Benson
“As long as anything amuses you,” she had said, “it is not waste of time; but when you begin to wonder if it really amuses you, it shows that it does not. Darling Mama, may I go down to Meering for a week or ten days? I do not want any one to come, but if anybody likes to come, we might have a little cheerful party. Besides it is Coronation next week, and great corvée! I think it is likely that Esther would wish to escape and perhaps one or two others, and it would be enchanting at Meering now. It would be a rest cure; a very curious sort of rest, since we shall probably never cease bathing and talking and reading. But anyhow we shall not be tired over things that bore us. That is the true fatigue. You are never tired as long as you are interested, but I am not interested in the Coronation.”
Nadine’s solitary week had proved in quality to be populous, and in quantity to exceed the ten days, and it was already beginning to be doubtful if July would see any of them settled in London again. Dodo’s house in Portman Square had been maintained in a state of habitableness with a kitchen-maid to cook, and a housemaid to sweep, and a footman to wait, and a chauffeur to drive, and an odd man to do whatever the other servants didn’t, and occasionally one or two of the party made a brief excursion there for a couple of nights, if any peculiar attraction beckoned. The whole party had gone up for a Shakespeare ball at the Albert Hall, but had returned next day, and Dodo had hurried to St. Paul’s Cathedral to attend a thanksgiving service, especially since she, on leaving London, had taken a season ticket, being convinced she would be continuously employed in rushing up and down. Subsequently she had defrauded the railway-company by lending it, though strictly non-transferable, to any member of the party who wished to make the journey, with the result that Bertie had been asked by a truculent inspector whether he was really Princess Waldenech. His passionate denial of any such identity had led to a lesser frequency of these excursions.
Nadine with the same sincerity had mapped out for herself a course of study at Meering, and she read Plato every afternoon in the original Greek, with an admirable translation at hand, from three o’clock till five. During these hours she was inaccessible, and when she emerged rather flushed sometimes from the difficulty of comprehending what some of the dialogues were about, she was slightly Socratic at tea, and tried to prove, as Dodo said, that the muse of Mr. Harry Lauder was the same as the muse of Sir George Alexander, and that she ought to be rude to Hugh if she loved him. She was extremely clear-headed in her reason, and referred them to the Symposium and the dialogue on Lysis, to prove her point. But as nobody thought of contradicting her, since the Socratic mood soon wore off, they did not attempt to find out the Hellenic equivalents for those amazing doctrines.
She was markedly Socratic this afternoon, when the whole party were having tea on the lawn. Esther and Bertie had been down to bathe after lunch, and since everybody was going to bathe again after tea, they had left their clothes behind different rocky screens above the probable high-water level on the beach, and were clad in bathing-dress, moderately dried in the sun, with dressing-gowns above. Berts had nothing in the shape of what is called foot-gear on his feet, since it was simpler to walk up barefoot, and he was wriggling his toes, one after the other, in order to divest them of an excess of sand.
“But pain and pleasure are so closely conjoined,” said Nadine, in answer to an exclamation of his concerning stepping in a gorse-bush. “It hurts you to have a prickle in your foot, but the pleasure of taking it out compensates for the pain!”
“That’s Socratic,” said Hugh, “when they took off his chains just before they hemlocked him. You didn’t think of that, Nadine.”
“I didn’t claim to, but it is quite true. There is actual pleasure in the cessation of pain. If you are unhappy and the cause of your unhappiness is removed, your happiness is largely derived from the fact that you were unhappy. For instance, did you ever have a fish-bone stick in your throat, Hugh?”
“As a matter of fact, never,” said Hugh. “But as I am meant to say ‘yes,’ I will.”
“And did you cough?”
“Violently,” said Hugh.
“Upon which the fish-bone returned to your mouth?”
“No,” said Hugh. “I swallowed it. It never returned at all.”
“It does not matter which way it went,” said Nadine; “but your feeling of pleasure at its going was dependent on the pain which its sticking gave you.”
“Is that all?” said Hugh.
“Does it not seem to you to be proved?”
“Oh, yes. It was proved long ago. But it’s a pedantic point. The sort of point John would have made.”
He absently whistled the first two lines of “Am Stillen Herd,” and Nadine was diverted from her Platonisms.
“Ah, that is so much finer than the finished ‘Preislied,’” she said; “he has curled and oiled his verse like an Assyrian bull. He and Sachs had cobbled at it too much: they had brushed and combed it. It had lost something of springtime and sea-breeze. A finished work of art has necessarily less quality of suggestiveness. Look at the Leonardo drawings. Is the ‘Gioconda’ ever quite as suggestive? I am rather glad it was stolen. I think Leonardo is greater without it.”
John drew in his breath in a pained manner.
“‘Mona Lisa’ was the whole wonder of the world,” he said. “I had sooner the thief had taken away the moon. Do you remember—perhaps you didn’t notice it—the painting of the circle of rock in which she sat?”
“You are going to quote Pater,” said Nadine. “Pray do not: it is a deplorable passage, and though it has lost nothing by repetition—for there was nothing to lose—it shows an awful ignorance of the spirit of the Renaissance. The eyelids are not a little weary: they are a little out of drawing only.”
Esther looked across at Berts.
“Berts is either out of drawing,” she said, “or else his dressing-gown is. I think both are: he is a little too long, and also the dressing-gown is too short. They ought to proceed as far as the ankles, but Berts’ got a little weary at his knees.”
“I barked my knees on those foul rocks,” said Berts, examining those injured joints.
“Barking them is worse than biting them,” said Nadine.
“I never bite my knees,” said he. “It is a greedy habit. Worse than doing it to your nails.”
“If you are not careful you will talk nonsense,” said Nadine.
“I don’t agree. If you are not careful you can’t talk nonsense. If you want to talk nonsense, you’ve not got to be not careful.”
“There are too many ‘nots,’” remarked Nadine.
“Not at all. If you are careless some sort of idea creeps into what you say, and it ceases to be nonsense. There are lots of creeping ideas about like microbes, any of which spoil it. Hardly anybody can be really meaningless for five minutes. That is why the Mad Tea Party is a supreme work of art: you can’t attach the slightest sense to anything that is said in it.”
“The question is what you mean by nonsense,” said Nadine. “Is it what Mr. Bernard Shaw writes in his plays, or what Mrs. Humphry Ward writes in her books? They neither mean anything but they are not at all alike. In fact they are as completely opposed to each other as sense is to nonsense.”
Berts threw himself back on the turf.
“True,” he said. “But they are neither of them nonsense. The lame and the halt and the blind ideas creep into both. They both talk sense mortally wounded.”
Esther gave her appreciative sigh.
“Oh, Berts, how true!” she said. “I went to a play by Mrs. Humphry Ward the other day, or else I read a book by Bernard Shaw, I forget which, and all the time I kept trying to see what the sense of it had been before it had its throat cut. But no one ever tried to see what Alice in Wonderland meant, or what Aunt Dodo means.”
“Mama is wonderful,” said Nadine. “She lives up to what she says, too. Her whole life has been complete nonsense. I do hope Jack will persuade her to do the most ridiculous thing of all, and marry him.�
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“Is that why he is coming?” asked Esther.
“Oh, I hope so. It would be the greatest and most absurd romance of the century.”
Hugh was eating sugar meditatively out of the sugar basin.
“I don’t see that you have any right to lay down the law about nonsense, Nadine,” he said. “You are constantly reading Plato, and making arguments, which are meant to be consecutive.”
“I do that to relax my mind,” said Nadine. “Berts is quite right. Nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the negative of sense, just as sugar is the negative of salt. To get non-salt with your egg, you must eat sugar with it, not only abstain from salt.”
“You will get a remarkably nasty taste,” remarked John.
“Dear John, nobody ever wronged you so much as to suggest that you would like nonsense. When was Leonardo born? And how old was he when he died? And how many golden crowns did Francis of France give him for the ‘Gioconda’? Your mind is full of interesting facts. That is why you are so tedious. You are like the sand they used to put on letters, which instantly made it dry.”
Berts got up.
“We will go and bathe again,” he said, “and John shall remain on the beach and look older than the rocks he sits among. The rocks by the way are old red sandstone. They will blossom as the rose when Granite John sits among them. His is the head on which all the beginnings of the world have come, and he is never weary. Dear me, if I was not a teetotaller I should imagine I was drunk. I think it is the sea. What a heavenly time the man who stole the ‘Gioconda’ must have had. He just took it away. I can imagine him going to the Abbey at the Coronation, and taking away the King’s crown. There is genius, and it is also nonsense. It is pure nonsense to imagine going to the Louvre and taking ‘la Gioconda’ away.”
“I wonder what he has done with it,” said Nadine. “I think he must be a jig-saw puzzle maniac, and have felt compelled to cut it up. Probably the Louvre will receive bits of it by registered post. The nose will come, and then some rocks, and then a rather weary eyelid. I think John stole it: he was absorbed in jig-saw puzzles all morning. Now that seems to me nonsense.”
“Wrong again,” said Berts. “When it is put together it is sense. If people cut up the pictures and then threw the bits away, it might be nonsense. But they keep the pieces and these become the picture again.”
“The process of cutting it up is nonsense,” said Nadine.
“Yes, and the process of putting it together is nonsense,” said Esther.
“And the two make sense,” said Berts. “Let’s go and bathe. Nadine, take down some proper book, and read to us in the intervals.”
“‘Pride and Prej?’” said Nadine.
“Oh, do you think so? Not good for the sea-shore. Why not ‘Poems and Ballads’?”
“John will be shocked,” said Nadine.
“Not at all. He will be old red sandstone. I know Aunt Dodo has a copy. I think Mr. Swinburne gave it her,” said Esther.
“She may value it,” said Nadine. “And it may fall into the sea.”
“Not if you are careful. Besides, that would be rather suitable. Swinburne loved the sea, and also understood it. I think his spirit would like it, if a copy was drowned.”
“But Mama’s spirit wouldn’t,” said Nadine.
* * * *
On the moment of her mentioned name Dodo appeared at the long window of the drawing-room that opened upon the lawn. Simultaneously there was heard the buzz of a motor-car stopping at the front door just round the corner.
“Oh, all you darlings,” said Dodo, in the style of the ‘Omnia opera,’ “are you going to bathe, or have you bathed? Berts, dear, we know that above the knee comes the thigh, without your showing us. Surely there are bigger dressing-gowns somewhere? Of course it does not matter: don’t bother, and you’ve got beautiful legs, Berts.”
“Aren’t they lovely?” said Esther. “They ought to be put in plaster of Paris.”
“But if you have bathed, why not dress?” said Dodo; “and if you haven’t, why undress at present?”
“Oh, but it’s both,” said Berts, “and so is Esther. We have bathed, and are going to do it again, as soon as we’ve eaten enough tea.”
Dodo looked appreciatively round.
“You refreshing children!” she said. “If I bathed directly after tea I should turn blue and green like a bruise. I have wasted all afternoon in looking at a box of novels from Melland’s. I don’t know what has happened to the novelists: their only object seems to tell you about utterly dull and sordid people. There is no longer any vitality in them: they are like leaders in the papers, full of reliable information. One instance shocked me: the heroine in ‘No. 11 Lambeth Walk’ went to Birmingham by a train that left Euston at 2:30 P.M. and her ticket cost nine shillings and twopence halfpenny. An awful misgiving seized me that it was all true and I rang for an A.B.C. and looked out Birmingham. It was so: there was a train at that hour and the tickets cost exactly that.”
“How wretched!” said Nadine in a pained voice.
“Darling, don’t take it too much to heart. And one of those novels was about Home Rule and another about Soap, and another about Tariff Reform, and a fourth about Christianity, which was absolutely convincing. But one doesn’t go to a novel in order to learn Christianity, or soap-making. One reads novels in order to be entertained and escape from real life into the society of imaginary and fiery people. Another one—”
Dodo stopped suddenly, as a man came out of the drawing-room window. Then she held both her hands out.
“Ah, Jack,” she said. “Welcome, welcome!”
* * * *
A very kind face, grizzled as to the hair and mustache, looked down on her from its great height, a face that was wonderfully patient and reasonable and trustworthy. Jack Chesterford wore his years well, but he wore them all; he did not look to be on the summer side of forty-five. He was spare still: life had not made him the unwilling recipient of the most voluminous and ironic of its burdens, obesity, but his movements were rather slow and deliberate, as if he was tired of the senseless repetition of the days. But there seemed to be no irritation mingled with his fatigue: he but yawned and smiled, and turned over fresh pages.
But at the moment, as he stood there with both Dodo’s hands in his, there was no appearance of weariness, and indeed it would have been a man of dough who remained uninspired by the extraordinary perfection and cordiality of her greeting. It was almost as if she welcomed a lover: it was quite as if she welcomed the best of friends long absent. That she had thought out the manner of her salutation, said nothing against its genuineness, but she could have welcomed him quite as genuinely in other modes. She had thought indeed of putting pathos, penitence, and shamefacedness into her greeting: she could with real emotion to endorse it have just raised her eyes to his and let them fall again, as if conscious of the need of forgiveness. Or (with perhaps a little less genuineness) she could have adopted the matronly and ‘too late’ attitude; but this would have been less genuine because she did not feel at all matronly, or think that it was in the least ‘too late.’ But warm and unmixed cordiality, with no consciousness of things behind, was perhaps the most genuine and least complicated of all welcomes, and she gave it.
She did not hold his hands more than a second or two, for Nadine and others claimed them. But after a few minutes he and Dodo were alone again together, for Jack declined the invitation to join the bathers, on the plea of senility and feeling cold like David. Then when the noise of their laughter and talk had faded seawards, he dropped the trivialities that till now had engaged them, and turned to her.
“I have been a long time coming, Dodo,” he said. “Indeed, I meant never to come at all. But I could not help it. I do not think I need explain either why I stopped away or why I have come now.”
Apart from the perfectly authentic pleasure that Dodo felt in seeing her old friend again, there went through her a thrill of delight at Jack’s implication of what she wa
s to him. She loved to have that power over a man; she loved to know how potent over him still was the spell she wielded. In days gone by she had not behaved well to him; it would be truer to acknowledge that she had behaved just as outrageously as was possible for anybody not a pure-bred fiend. But he had come back. It was unnecessary to explain why.
And then suddenly with the rush of old memories revived, memories of his unfailing loyalty to her, his generosity, his unwearying loving-kindness, her eyes grew dim, and her hands caught his again.
“Jack dear,” she said, “I want to say one thing. I am sorry for all I did, for my—my treachery, my—my damnedness. I was frightened: I have no other excuse. And, my dear, I have been punished. But I tell you, that what hurts most is your coming here—your forgiveness.”
She had not meant to say any of this; it all belonged to one of the welcomes of him which she had rejected. But the impulse was not to be resisted.
“It is so,” she said with mouth that quivered.
“Wipe it all out, Dodo,” he said. “We start again today.”
Dodo’s power of rallying from perfectly sincere attacks of emotion was absolutely amazing and quite unimpaired. Only for five seconds more did her gravity linger.
“Dear old Jack,” she said. “It is good to see you. Oh, Jack, the gray hairs. What a lot, but they become you, and you look just as kind and big as ever. I used to think it would be so dreadful when we were all over forty, but I like it quite immensely, and the young generation are such ducks, and I am not the least envious of them. But aren’t some of them weird? I wonder if we were as weird; I was always weirdish, I suppose, and I’m too old to change now. But I‘ve still got one defect, though you would hardly believe it: I can’t get enough into the day, and I haven’t learned how to be in two places at once. But I have just had three telephone lines put into my house in town. Even that isn’t absolutely satisfactory, because the idea was to talk to three people at once, and I quite forgot that I hadn’t three ears. I really ought to have been one of the people in the Central Exchange, who give you the wrong number. You must feel really in the swim, if you are the go-between of everybody who wants to talk to everybody else; but I should want to talk to them all. Have you had tea? Yes? Then let us go down to the sea, because I must have a bathe before dinner—Oh, by the way, Edith is coming tonight. I have not seen her yet. You and she were the remnant of the old guard who wouldn’t surrender, Jack, but went on sullenly firing your muskets at me. I forgot Mrs. Vivian, but her ear-trumpet seems to make her matter less.”