by E. F. Benson
This morning he was particularly anxious that his jade should show to advantage, for Nadine was coming to lunch with him, to ask his advice about something which she thought was old Venetian-point lace. He had taken particular pains also about the lunch: everything was to be en casserole; there were eggs in spinach, and quails, and a marvelous casseroled cherry tart. He could not bear that anything about him, whether designed for the inside or the outside, should be other than exquisite, and he would have been just as sedulous a Martha, if that strange barbarian called Berts was coming, only he would have given Berts an immense beefsteak as well.
The bell of his flat tinkled announcing Nadine. He did not like the shrill treble bells, and had got one that made a low bubbling note like the laugh of Sir Charles Wyndham; and Nadine came in.
“Enchanted!” he said. “How is Philistia?”
“Not being the least glad of you,” she said. “I wish I could make people detest me, as Berts detests you. It shows force of character. Oh, Seymour, what jade! It is almost shameless! Isn’t it shameless jade I mean? Is any one else coming to lunch?”
“Of course not. I don’t dilute you with other people; I prefer Nadine neat. Now let’s have the crisis at once. Bring out the lace.”
Nadine produced a small parcel and unfolded it.
“Pretty,” said he.
Then he looked at it more closely, and tossed it aside. “I hoped it was more like Venetian point than that,” he said. “It’s all quite wrong: the thread’s wrong: the stitch is wrong: it smells wrong. Don’t tell me you’ve bought it.”
“No, I shan’t tell you,” she said.
He took it up again and pondered.
“You got it at Ducane’s,” he said. “I remember seeing it. Well, take it back to Ducane, and tell him if he sold it as Venetian, that he must give you back your money. My dear, it is no wonder that these dealers get rich, if they can palm off things like that. C’est fini—Ah, but that is an exquisite aquamarine you are wearing. Those little diamond points round it throw the light into it. How odd people usually are about jewelry. They think great buns of diamonds are sufficient to make an adornment. You might as well send up an ox’s hind-leg on the table. What makes the difference is the manner of its presentation. Who is that lady who employs herself in writing passionate love-novels? She says on page one that he was madly in love with her, on page two that she was madly in love with him, on page three that they were madly in love with each other, and then come some asterisks. (How much more artistic, by the way, if they printed the asterisks and left out the rest! Then we should know what it really was like.) You can appreciate nothing until it is framed or cooked: then you can see the details. The poor lady presents us with chunks of meat and informs us that they are amorous men and women. I will write a novel some day, from the detached standpoint, observing and noting. Then I shall go away, abroad. It is only bachelors who can write about love. Do you like my tie?”
Seymour had a trick of putting expression into what he said by means of his hands. He waved and dabbed with them: they fondled each other, and then started apart as if they had quarreled. Sometimes one finger pointed, sometimes another, and they were all beautifully manicured. Antoinette did that, and as she scraped and filed and polished, he talked his admirable French to her, and asked after the old home in Normandy, where she learned to make wonderful soup out of carrots and turnips and shin-bones of beef. At the moment she came in to announce the readiness of lunch.
“Oh, is it lunch already?” said Nadine. “Can’t we have it after half an hour? I should like to see the jade.”
“Oh, quite impossible,” said he. “She has taken such pains. It would distress her. For me, I should prefer not to lunch yet, but she is the artist now. They are fragile things, Nadine, eggs in spinach. You must come at once.”
“How greedy you are,” she said.
“For you that is a foolish thing to say. I am simply thinking of Antoinette’s pride. It is as if I blew a soap-bubble, all iridescent, and you said you would come to look at it in ten minutes. You shall tell me news: if you talk you can always eat. What has happened in Philistia?”
Nadine frowned.
“You think of us all as Philistines,” she said, “because we like simple pleasures, and because we are enthusiastic.”
“Ah, you mistake!” he said. “You couple two reasons which have nothing to do with each other. To be enthusiastic is the best possible condition, but you must be enthusiastic over what is worth enthusiasm. Is it so lovely really, that Aunt Dodo has settled to marry the Ripper? Surely that is a rechauffée. You wrote me the silliest letter about it. Of course it does not matter at all. Much more important is that you look perfectly exquisite. Antoinette, the spinach is sans pareil: give me some more spinach. But it is slightly bourgeois in Jack the R. to have been faithful for so many years. It shows want of imagination, also I think a want of vitality, only to care for one woman.”
“That is one more than you ever cared for,” remarked Nadine.
“I know. I said it was bourgeois to care for one. There is a difference. It is also like a troubadour. I am not in the least like a troubadour. But I think I shall get married soon. It gives one more liberty: people don’t feel curious about one any more. English people are so odd: they think you must lead a double life, and if you don’t lead the ordinary double life with a wife, they think you lead it with somebody else and they get curious. I am not in the least curious about other people: they can lead as many lives as a piano has strings for all I care, and thump all the strings together, or play delicate arpeggios on them. Nadine, that hat-pin of yours is simply too divine. I will eat it pin and all if it is not Fabergé.”
Nadine laughed.
“I can’t imagine you married,” she said. “You would make a very odd husband.”
“I would make a very odd anything,” said he. “I don’t find any recognized niche that really fits me, whereas almost everybody has some sort of niche. Indeed in the course of hundreds of years the niches, that is the manners of life, have been evolved to suit the sorts of types which nature produces. They live in rows and respect each other. But why it should be considered respectable to marry and have hosts of horrible children I cannot imagine. But it is, and I bow to the united strength of middle-class opinion. But neither you nor I are really made to live in rows. We are Bedouins by nature, and like to see a different sunrise every day. There shall be another tent for Antoinette.”
That admirable lady was just bringing them their coffee, and he spoke to her in French.
“Antoinette, we start for the desert of Sahara tomorrow,” he said. “We shall live in tents.”
Antoinette’s plump face wrinkled itself up into enchanted smiles.
“Bien, m’sieur,” she said. “A quelle heure?”
Nadine crunched up her coffee-sugar between her white teeth.
“You are as little fitted to cross the desert of Sahara as any one I ever met,” she said.
“I should not cross it: I should—”
“You would be miserable without your jade or your brocade and the sand would get into your hair, and you would have no bath,” she said. “But every one who thinks has a Bedouin mind: it always wants me to go on and find new horizons and get nearer to blue mountains.”
“The matter with you is that you want and you don’t know what you want,” said he.
Nadine nodded at him. Sometimes when she was with him she felt as if she was talking to a shrewd middle-aged man, sometimes to a rather affected girl. Then occasionally, and this had been in evidence today, she felt as if she was talking to some curious mixture of the two, who had a girl’s intuition and a man’s judgment. Fond as she was of the friends whom she had so easily gathered round her, gleeful as was the nonsense they talked, serious as was her study of Plato, she felt sometimes that all those sunny hours concerned but the surface of her, that, as she had said before, the individual, the character that sat behind was not really concerned in them. And Se
ymour, when he made mixture of his two types, had the effect of making her very conscious of the character that sat behind. He had described it just now in a sentence: it wanted it knew not what.
“And I want it so frightfully,” she said. “It is a pity I don’t know what it is. Because then I should probably get it. One gets what one wants if one wants enough.”
“A convenient theory,” he said, “and if you don’t get it, you account for it by saying you didn’t want it enough. I don’t think it’s true. In any case the converse isn’t; one gets a quantity of things which one doesn’t want in the least. Whereas you ought not to get, on the same theory, the things you passionately desire not to have.”
Nadine finished her sugar and lit a cigarette.
“Oh, don’t upset every theory,” she said. “I am really rather serious about it.”
He regarded her with his head on one side for a moment. “What has happened is that somebody has asked you to do something, and you have refused. You are salving your conscience by saying that he doesn’t want it enough, or you would not have refused.”
She laughed.
“You are really rather uncanny sometimes,” she said.
“Only a guess,” he said.
“Guess again then: define,” she said.
“The obvious suggestion is that Hugh has proposed to you again.”
“You would have been burned as a witch two hundred years ago,” said she. “I should have contributed fagots. Oh, Seymour, that was really why I came to see you. I didn’t care two straws about the foolish lace. They all tell me I had better marry Hugh, and I wanted to find somebody to agree with me. I hoped perhaps you might. He is such a dear, you know, and I should always have my own way: I could always convince him I was right.”
“Most girls would consider that an advantage.”
“In that case I am not like most girls; I often wish I was. I wrote an article a month or two ago about Tolstoi, and read it him, and he thought it quite wonderful. Well, it wasn’t. It was silly rot: I wrote it, and so of course I know. It came out in a magazine.”
“I read it,” remarked Seymour in a strictly neutral voice.
“Well, wasn’t it very poor stuff?” asked Nadine.
“To be quite accurate,” said Seymour, “I only read some of it. I thought it very poor indeed. If was ignorant and affected.”
Nadine gave him an approving smile.
“There you are then! And with Hugh it would be the same in everything else. He would always think what I did was quite wonderful. They say love is blind, don’t they? So much the worse for love. It seems to me a very poor sort of thing if in order to love anybody you must lose, with regard to her, any power of mind and judgment that you may happen to possess. I don’t want to be loved like that. I want people to sing my praises with understanding, and sit on my defects also with discretion. If I was perfectly blind too, I suppose it would be quite ideal to marry him. But I’m not, and I’m not even sure that I wish I was. Again if Hugh was perfectly critical about me, it would be quite ideal. It seems to me you must have the same quality of love on both sides, or at any rate the same quality of affection. People make charming marriages without any love at all, if they have affection and esteem and respect for each other.”
They had gone back to the drawing-room and Seymour was handing pieces of his most precious jade to Nadine, who looked at them absently and then gave them back to him, with the same incuriousness as people give tickets to be punched by the collector. This Seymour bore with equanimity, for Nadine was interesting on her own account, and he did not care whether she looked at his jade or not. But at this moment he screamed loudly, for she put a little round medallion of exquisitely carved yellow jade up to her mouth, as if to bite it.
“Oh, Seymour, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t attending to your jade, which is quite lovely, and subconsciously this piece appeared like a biscuit. Tell me, do you like jade better than anything else? It is part of a larger question, which is: ‘Do you like things better than people?’ Personally I like people so far more than anything else in the world, but I don’t like any particular person nearly as much. I like them in groups I suppose. If I married at all, I should probably be a polyandrist. Certainly if I could marry four or five people at once, I should marry them all. But I don’t want to marry any one of them.”
Seymour put the priceless biscuit back into its cabinet.
“Who,” he asked, “are this quartette of fortunate swains?”
“Well, Hugh of course would be one,” said she, “and I think Berts would be another. And if it won’t be a shock to you, you would be the third, and Jack the R. would be the fourth. I should then have a variety of interests: this would be the world and the flesh and the devil, and a saint.”
“St. Seymour,” said he, as if trying how it sounded, like a Liberal peer selecting his title.
“I am afraid you are cast for the devil,” said Nadine candidly. “Berts is the world because he thinks he is cynical. And Jack is the flesh—”
“Because he is so thin?”
“Partly. But also because he is so rich.”
Seymour turned the key on his jade. This interested him much more. But he had to make further inquiries.
“If every girl wanted four husbands,” he said, “there wouldn’t be enough men to go round.”
“Round what?” asked Nadine, still entirely absorbed in what she was thinking.
“Round the marriageable females. Or does your plan include poly-womany, whatever the word is, for men?”
“But of course. There are such lots of bachelors who would marry if they could have two or three wives, just as there are such lots of girls who would marry if they could have two or three husbands. All those laws about ‘one man, one wife’ were made by ordinary people for ordinary people. And ordinary people are in the majority. There ought to be a small county set apart for ridiculous people, with a rabbit fence all round it, and any one who could be certified to be ridiculous in his tastes should be allowed to go and live there unmolested. That would be much better than your plan of going to the Sahara with Antoinette. You would have to get five householders to certify you as ridiculous, in order to obtain admission. Then you would do what you chose within the rabbit fence, but when you wanted to be what they call sensible again you would come out, and be bound to behave like anybody else, as long as you were out, under penalty of not being admitted again.”
Seymour considered this.
“There’s a lot in it,” he said, “and there would be a lot of people in the rabbit fence. I should go there tomorrow and never come out at all. But a smaller county would be no use. I should start with Kent, not Rutlandshire, and be prepared to migrate to Yorkshire. I accept the position of one of your husbands.”
“That is sweet of you. I think—”
He interrupted.
“I shall have some more wives,” he said. “I should like a lunch wife and a dinner wife. I want to see a certain kind of person from about mid-day till tea-time.”
“Is that a hint that it is time for me to go?” asked Nadine.
“Nearly. Don’t interrupt. But then, if one is not in love with anybody at all, as you are not, and as I am not, you want a perfectly different kind of person in the evening. To be allowed only one wife, has evolved a very tiresome type of woman; a woman who is like a general servant, and can, so to speak, wait at table, cook a little, and make beds. You look for somebody who, on the whole, suits you. It is like buying a reach-me-down suit, which I have never done. It probably fits pretty well. But if it is to be worn every day until you die, it must fit absolutely. If it doesn’t, there are fifty other suits that would do as well.”
“Translate,” said Nadine.
“Surely there is no need. What I mean is that occasionally two people are ideally fitted. But the fit only occurs intermittently: it is not common. Short of that, as long as people don’t blow their noses wrong, or walk badly, or admire Carlo Dolci, or fail to
admire Bach, so long, in fact, as they do not have impossible tastes, any phalanx of a thousand men can marry a similar phalanx of a thousand women, and be as happy, the one with the other, as with any other permutation or combination of the thousand. There is a high, big, tremulous, romantic attachment possible, and it occasionally occurs. Short of that, with the limitation about Carlo Dolci and Bach, anybody would be as happy with anybody else, as anybody would be with anybody. We are all on a level, except the highest of all, and the lowest of all. Life, not death, is the leveler!”
“Still life is as bad as still death,” said she.
Seymour groaned and waved his hands.
“You deserve a good scolding, Nadine, for saying a foolish thing like that,” he said. “You are not with your Philistines now. There is not Esther here to tell you how marvelous you are, nor Berts to wave his great legs and say you are like the moon coming out of the clouds over the sea. I am not in the least impressed by a little juggling with words such as they think clever. It isn’t clever: it is a sort of parrot-talk. You open your mouth and say something that sounds paradoxical and they all hunt about to find some sense in it, and think they do.”
Seymour got up and began walking up and down the room with his little short-stepped, waggling walk. “It is the most amazing thing to me,” he said, “that you, who have got brains, should be content to score absurd little successes with your dreadful clan, who have the most ordinary intelligences. I love your Philistines, but I cannot bear that they should think they are clever. They are stupid, and though stupid people are excellent in their way, they become trying when they think they are wise. You are not made wise by bathing all day in the silly salt sea, and reading a book—”