The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  Nadine looked at her a moment in silent hostility.

  “That is a very comfortable reflection,” she observed, “for you who like working better than anything else in the world except perhaps golf. I wonder you did not say there were three things in the world worth doing, making that damned game the third.”

  Edith had spoken with her usual cock-sure breezy enthusiasm, and looked up surprised at a certain venom and bitterness that underlay the girl’s reply.

  “My dear Nadine!” she said. “What is the matter?”

  Nadine glared at her a moment, and then broke into rapid speech.

  “Do you think I would not give the world to be able to love?” she said. “Do you think I send Hugh marching through hell for fun? You say I am heartless, as if it was my fault! Would you go to a blind man in the street and say, ‘You beast, you brute, why don’t you see?’ Is he blind for fun? Am I like this for fun?”

  She got up from her seat and came and stood in front of Edith, flushed with an unusual color, and continued more rapidly yet, emphasizing her points by admirable gesticulations of her hands. Indeed they seemed to have speech on their own account: they were extraordinarily eloquent.

  “Do you know you make me lose my temper?” she said. “That is a rare thing with me; I seldom lose it; but when I do it is quite gone, and I don’t care what I say, so long as it is what I mean. For the minute my temper is absolutely vanished, and I shall make the most of its absence. Who are you to judge and condemn me? and give me rules for conduct, how work and love are the only things worth doing? What do you know about me? Either you are absolutely ignorant about me, or so stupid that the very cabbages seem clever by you. And you go telling me what to do! And what do you know about love? To look at you, as little as you know about me. Yes; no wonder you sit there with your mouth open staring at me, you and your foolish, great fat-bellied bloated violin. You are not accustomed to be spoken to like this. It never occurred to you that I would give the world to be able to love as Jill and Polly and Mary and Minnie love. I do not go about saying that any more than a cripple calls attention to his defect: he tries to be brave and conceal it. But that is me, a dwarf, a hunchback, a crétin of the soul. That is the matter with me, and you are so foolish that it never occurred to you that I wanted to be like other people. You thought it was a pose of which I was proud, I think. There! Now do not do that again.”

  Nadine paused, and then sighed.

  “I feel better,” she said, “but quite red in the face. However, I have got my temper back again. If you like I will apologize for losing it.”

  Edith jumped up and kissed Nadine. When she intended to kiss anybody she did it, whether the victim liked it or not.

  “My dear, you are quite delightful,” she said. “I thoroughly deserve every word. I was utterly ignorant of you. But I am not stupid: if you will go on, you will find I shall understand.”

  Suddenly Nadine felt utterly lonely. All she had said of herself in her sudden exasperation was perfectly genuine, and now when her equanimity returned, she felt as if she must tell somebody about this isolation, which for the moment, in any case, was sincerely and deeply hers. That she was a girl of a hundred moods was quite true, but it was equally true that each mood was authentically inspired from within. Many of them, no doubt, were far from edifying, but none could be found guilty of the threadbare tawdriness of pose. She nodded at Edith.

  “It is as I say,” she said. “I hate myself, but here I am, and here soon will Hugh be. It is a disease, this heartlessness: I suffer from it. It is rather common too, but commoner among girls than boys.”

  Then queerly and unexpectedly, but still honestly, her intellectual interest in herself, that cold egoism that was characteristic of another side of her, awoke.

  “Yet it is interesting,” she said, “because it is out of this sort of derangement that types and species come. For a million years the fish we call the sole had a headache because one of its eyes was slowly traveling through its head. For a million years man was uncomfortable where the tail once came, because it was drying up. For a million years there will be girls like me, poor wretches, and at the end there will be another type of woman, a third sex, perhaps, who from not caring about these things which Nature evidently meant them to care about have become different. And all the boys like Seymour will be approximating to the same type from the other side, so that eventually we shall be like the angels—”

  “My dear, why angels?” asked Edith.

  “Neither marrying nor giving in marriage. La, la! And I was saying only the other day to him that I wished to marry half-a-dozen men! What a good thing that one does not feel the same every day. It would be atrociously dull. But in the interval, it is lonely now and then for those of us who are not exactly and precisely of the normal type of girl. But if you have no heart, you have to follow your intelligence, to go where your intelligence leads you, and then wave a flag. Perhaps nobody sees it, or only the wrong sort of person, who says, ‘What is that idiot-girl waving that rag for?’ But she only waves it because she is lost, and hopes that somebody will see it.”

  Nadine laughed with her habitual gurgle.

  “We are all lost,” she said. “But we want to be found. It is only the stupidest who do not know they are lost. Well, I have—what is Hugh’s word? ah, yes—I have gassed enough for one morning. Ah, and there is the motor coming back from the station. I am glad that Hugh has not thrown Seymour out, and driven forwards and backwards over him.”

  The motor at this moment was passing not more than a couple of hundred yards off through the park which lay at the foot of the steep garden terraces below them. From there the road wound round in a long loop towards the house.

  “I shall go to meet Hugh at once, and get it over,” said Nadine; and thereupon she whistled so shrilly and surprisingly on her fingers, that Hugh, who was driving, looked up and saw her over the terrace. She made staccato wavings to him, and he got out.

  “You whistled the octave of B. in alt,” remarked Edith appreciatively.

  “And my courage is somewhere about the octave of B. in profundis,” said Nadine. “I dread what Hugh may say to me.”

  “I will go and talk to him,” said Edith. “I understand you now, Nadine. I will tell him.”

  Nadine smiled very faintly.

  “That is sweet of you,” she said, “but I am afraid it wouldn’t be quite the same thing.”

  * * * *

  Nadine walked down the steep flight of steps in the middle of the terrace, and out through the Venetian gate into the park. Hugh had just arrived at it from the other side, and they met there. No word of greeting passed between them; they but stood looking at each other. He saw the girl he loved, neither more nor less than that, and did not know if she looked well or ill, or if her gown was blue or pink or rainbowed. To him it was Nadine who stood there. But she saw details, not being blinded: he was big and square, he looked a picture of health, brown-eyed, clear of skin, large-mouthed, with a habit of smiling written strongly there. He had taken off his hat, as was usual with him, and as usual his hair looked a little disordered, as if he had been out on a windy morning. There was that slight thrusting outwards of his chin which suggested that he would meet argument with obstinacy, but that kind and level look from his eyes that suggested an honesty and kindliness hardly met with outside the charming group of living beings known as dogs. He was like a big, kind dog, polite to strangers, kind to friends, hopelessly devoted to the owner of his soul. But today his mouth did not indulge its habit: he was quite grave.

  “Why did you kiss me the other night?” he said.

  Nadine had already repented of that rash act. Being conscious of her own repentance, it seemed to her rather nagging of him to allude to it.

  “I meant nothing,” she said. “Hughie, are we going to stand like posts here? Shan’t we stroll—”

  “I don’t see why: let us stand like posts. You did kiss me. Or do you kiss everybody?”

  Nadine cons
idered this for a moment.

  “No, I don’t kiss everybody,” she said. “I never kissed a man before. It was stupid of me. The moment after I had done it I wanted to kiss anybody to show you it didn’t mean anything. You are like the Inquisition. My next answer is that I have kissed Seymour since. I—I don’t particularly like kissing him. But it is usual.”

  “And you are going to marry him?”

  Nadine’s courage which she had confessed was a B. in profundis, sank into profundissima.

  “Yes, I am going to marry him,” she said.

  “Why? You don’t love him. And he doesn’t love you.”

  “I don’t love anybody,” said Nadine quickly. “I have said that so often that I am tired of saying it. Girls often marry without being in love. It just happens. What do you want? Would you like me to go on spinstering just because I won’t marry you? That I will not do. You know why. You love me. I can’t marry you unless I love you. Ah, mon Dieu, it sounds like Ollendorf. But I should be cheating you if I married you, and I will not cheat you. You would expect from me what you bring to me, and it would be right that I should bring it you, and I cannot. If you didn’t love me like that, I would marry you tomorrow, and the trousseau might go and hang itself. Mama would give me some blouses and stockings, and you would buy me a tooth-brush. Yes, this is very flippant, but when serious people are goaded they become flippant. Oh, Hughie, I wish I was different. But I am not different. And what is it you came down here about? Is it to ask me again to marry you, and to ask me not to marry my dear little Seymour?”

  “Little?” he asked.

  “It was a term of endearment. Besides, it is not his fault that he does not weigh fourteen stones—”

  “Stone,” said he with the tremor of a smile.

  “No, stones,” said Nadine. “I choose that it should be stones: fourteen great square lumps. Hughie, don‘t catch my words up and correct me. I am serious and all you can answer is ‘stone’ instead of ‘stones.’”

  “I did it without thinking,” he said. “I only fell back into the sort of speech there used to be between us. It was like that, serious one moment and silly the next. I spoke without thinking, as we used to speak. I won’t do it again.”

  “And why not?” demanded Nadine.

  “Because now that you tell me you really are going to marry Seymour, everything is changed between us. This is what I came to tell you. I am not going to hang about, a mixture between a valet and an ami de la maison. You have chosen now. When you refused me before, there was always in my mind the hope that some day you would give me a different answer. I waited long and patiently and willingly for that chance. Now the chance no longer exists. You have scratched me—”

  Nadine drew her eyebrows together.

  “Scratched you?” she said. “Oh, I see, a race: not nails.”

  “And I am definitely and finally out of it.”

  “You mean you are no longer among my friends?” asked Nadine.

  “I shall not be with you so much or so intimately. We must talk over it just this once. We will stroll if you like. It is too hot for you standing in the sun without a hat.”

  “No, we will settle it here and now,” said she quickly. “You don’t understand. My marriage with Seymour will make no difference in the quality of affection I have always had for you. Why should I give up my best friend? Why should you?”

  “Because you are much more than my best friend, and I am obliged to give up, at last, that idea of you. You have forced me to see that it is not to be realized. And I won’t sit about your house, to have people pointing at me, and saying to each other, ‘That’s the one who is so frightfully in love with her.’ It may sound priggish, but I don’t choose to be quite so unmanly as that. Nor would you much respect me if I did so choose.”

  “But I never did respect you,” said Nadine quickly. “I never thought of you as respectable or otherwise. It doesn’t come in. You may steal and cheat at cards, and I shall not care. I like whom I like: I like you tremendously. What do you mean you are going to do? Go to Burmah or Bengal? I don’t want to lose you, Hughie. It is unkind of you. Besides, we shall not marry for a long time yet, and even then— Ah, it is the old tale, the old horror called Me all over again—I don’t love anybody. Many are delightful and I am so fond of them. But the other, the absorption, the gorgeous foolishness of it all, it is away outside of me, a fairy-tale and I am grown up now and say, ‘For me it is not true.’”

  Hugh came a step nearer her.

  “You poor devil,” he said gently.

  Tears, as yet unshed, gathered in Nadine’s eyes. They were fairly creditable tears: they were not at any rate like the weepings of the great prig-prince and compounded merely of “languor and self-pity,” but sorrow for Hugh was one ingredient in them. Yet in the main they were for herself, since the only solvent for egoism is love.

  “Yes, I am that,” she said. “I’m a poor devil. I’m lost, as I said to that foolish Arbuthnot woman with her feet and great violin. Hark, she is playing it again: she is a big ‘C major’! She has been scolding me, though if it comes to that I gave it her back with far more gamin in my tongue. And now you say you will not be friends any longer, and Mama does not like my marrying Seymour, though she does not argue, and there is no one left but myself, and I hate myself. Oh, I am lost, and I wave my flags and there is no one who sees or understands. I shall go back to Daddy, I think, and he and I will drink ourselves drunk, and I shall have the red nose. But you are the worst of them all, Hugh! It is a very strange sort of love you have for me, if all it can do is to desert me. And yet the other day I felt as you feel; I felt it would only be fair to you to see you less. I am a damned weathercock. I go this way and that, but the wind is always cold. I am sorry for you, I want you to be happy, I would make you happy myself, if I could.”

  Nadine’s eyes had quite overflowed, and as she poured out this remarkable series of lamentations, she dabbed at her moistened cheeks. Yet Hugh, though he was so largely to blame, as it seemed, for this emotion, and though all the most natural instincts in him longed to yield, knew that deep in him his determination was absolutely unsoftened. It, and his love for Nadine were of the quality of nether mill-stones. But all the rest of him longed to comfort her.

  “Oh, Nadine, don’t cry,” he said. “I’m not worth crying about, to begin with.”

  “It is not you alone I cry about,” said Nadine with justice. “I cry a little for you, every third drop is for you. The rest is quite for myself.”

  “It is never worth while to cry for oneself,” he said.

  “Who wants it to be worth while? I feel like crying, therefore I cry. Hardly anything I do is worth while, yet I go on doing, and I get tired of it before it is done. Already I am tired of crying, and besides it gives me the red nose without going to Daddy. Not you and I together are worth making myself ugly for. But you are so disagreeable, Hughie: first I wanted to stroll, and you said ‘no,’ and then when I didn’t want to stroll you said ‘yes,’ and you aren’t going to be friends with me, and I feel exactly as I used to feel when I was six years old, and it rained. Come, let us sit down a little, and you shall tell me what you mean to do, and how it will be between us. I will be very good: I will bless any plan you make, like a bishop. It shall all be as you will. I owe you so much and there is no way by which I can ever repay you. I don’t want to be a curse to you, Hughie; I don’t indeed.”

  She sat down, leaning against a great beech trunk, and he lay on the coarse meadow-grass beside her.

  “I know you don’t,” he said.

  He looked at her steadily, as she finished mopping her cheeks. Her little burst of tears had not made her nose at all red; it had but given a softness to her eyes. Never before had he so strongly felt her wayward, irresistible charm, which it was so impossible to analyse or explain. Indeed, if it came to analysis there were strange ingredients there; there was egoism as complete, and yet as disarming, as that of a Persian kitten; there was the unreasonablen
ess of a spoilt child; there was the inconsiderateness and unreliability of an April day, which alternates its gleams of the saffron sun of spring with cold rain and plumping showers.

  Yet he felt that there was something utterly adorable, wholly womanly that lay sheathed in these more superficial imperfections, something that stirred within them conscious of the coming summer, just as the life embalmed within the chrysalis stirs, giving token of the time when the husk shall burst, and that which was but a gray crawling thing shall be wafted on wings of silver emblazoned with scarlet and gold. Then there was her beauty too, which drew his eyes after the wonder of its perfection, and was worthy of the soul that he divined in her. And finally (and this perhaps to him was the supreme magnet) there was the amazing and superb quality of her vitality, that sparkled and effervesced in all she did and said, so that for him her speech was like song or light, and to be with her was to be bathed in the effulgence of her spirit. And Hugh, looking at her now, felt, as always, that his self slipped from him, so that he was conscious of her only; she possessed him, and he lay like the sea with the dazzle of sunlight on it that both reflects the radiance and absorbs it.

  Then he sat up: and half turned from her, for there were things to be said yet that he could scarcely say while he looked at her.

  “I know you don’t mean to be a curse to me,” he said, “and you couldn’t be if you tried. Whatever you did, and you are going to do a pretty bad thing now in marrying that chap, must be almost insignificant compared to the love which you have made exist in me.”

  He paused a moment.

  “I have thought it all out,” he said, “but it is difficult, and you must give me time. I’m not quick like you as you know very well, but sometimes I get there. It is like this.”

  She was watching him and listening to him, with a curious intentness and nervousness, as a prisoner about to receive sentence may watch the judge. Her hands clasped and unclasped themselves, her breath came short and irregular. It seemed as if she, for once, had failed to understand him whom she had said she knew too fatally well. Just now, at any rate, and on this topic, it was clear she did not know what he was going to propose. Yet it was scarcely a proposal she waited for; she waited for his word, his ultimatum. Till now she had dominated him completely with her quick wit, her far more subtle intelligence, her beauty, her vitality. But for once now, he was her master: she felt she had to bow to his simplicity and his uncomplicated strength, his brute virility. It was but faintly that she recognized it; the recognition came to her consciousness but as an echo. But the voice that made the echo came from within.