The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “I have received my dismissal from you,” he said, “as head of your house, as your possible husband. As I said, I won’t take the place of the tame cat instead. God knows I don’t want to cut adrift from you, and I can’t cut adrift from you. But my aspiration is rendered impossible, and therefore both my mental attitude to you and my conduct must be altered. I daresay Berts and Tommy and Esther and all the rest of them will go lying about on your bed, and smoking in your bedroom just as before. Well, I can’t be intimate in that sort of way any longer. You said you never reckoned whether you respected me or not, and that may be so. But without wanting to be heavy about it, I have got to respect myself. I can’t help being your lover, but I can help tickling my love, so to speak, making it squirm and wriggle. Whether I am respectable or not, it is, and I shan’t—as I said—I shan’t tickle it. Also though I would be hurt in any other way for your sake, I won’t be hurt like that. Don’t misunderstand me. It is because my love for you is not one atom abated, that I won’t play tricks with it. But when it says to me, ‘I can’t bear it,’ I shall not ask to bear it. You always found me too easy to understand: I think this is another instance of it.”

  He paused a moment and Nadine gave a little sobbing sigh.

  “Oh, Hughie,” she began.

  “No, don’t interrupt,” he said. “I want to go through with it, without discussion. There is no discussion possible. I wouldn’t argue with God about it. I should say: ‘You made me an ordinary human man, and you’ve got to take the consequences. In the same way, you have chosen Seymour, and I am telling you what is the effect. Now—you are tired of hearing it—I love you. And therefore I want your happiness without reservation. You have decided it will conduce to your happiness to marry Seymour. Therefore, Nadine—this is quite simple and true—I want you to do so. I may rage and storm on the surface, but essentially I don’t. Somewhere behind all I may say and do, there is, as you once said to me, the essential me. Well, that says to you, ‘God bless you.’ That’s all.”

  He unclasped his hands from round his knees, and stood up.

  “I’m going away now,” he said. “I thought when I came down it might take a long time to tell you this. But it has taken ten minutes only. I thought perhaps you would have a lot to say about it, and I daresay you have, but I find that it doesn’t concern me. Don’t think me brutal, any more than I think you brutal. I am made like this, and you are made otherwise. By all means, let us see each other, often I hope, but not just yet. I’ve got to adjust myself, you see, and you haven’t. You never loved me, and so what you have done makes no difference in your feelings towards me. But I’ve got to get used to it.”

  She looked up at him, as he stood there in front of her with the green lights through the beech-leaves playing on him.

  “You make me utterly miserable, Hugh,” she said.

  “No, I don’t. There is no such thing as misery without love. You don’t care for me in the way that you could—could give you the privilege of being miserable.”

  For one half-second she did not follow him. But immediately the quickness of her mind grasped what came so easily and simply to him.

  “Ah, I see,” she said, her intelligence leading her away from him by the lure of the pleasure of perception. “When you are like that, it is even a joy to be miserable. Is that so?”

  “Yes, I suppose that is it. Your misery is a—a wireless message from your love. Bad news, perhaps, but still a communication.”

  She got up.

  “Ah, my dear,” she said, “that must be so. I never thought of it. But I can infer that you are right. Somehow you are quickened, Hughie. You are giving me a series of little shocks. You were never quite like that before.”

  “I was always exactly like that,” he said. “I have told you nothing that I have not always known.”

  Again her brilliant egoism asserted itself.

  “Then it is I who am quickened,” she said. “There is nothing that quickens me so much as being hurt. It makes all your nerves awake and active. Yes; you have hurt me, and you are not sorry. I do not mind being hurt, if it makes me more alive. Ah, the only point of life is to be alive. If life was a crown of thorns, how closely I would press it round my head, so that the points wounded and wounded me. It is so shallow just to desire to be happy. I do not care whether I am happy or not, so long as I feel. Give me all the cancers and consumptions and decayed teeth, and gout and indigestion and necrosis of the spine and liver if there is such a thing, so that I may feel. I don’t feel: it is that which ails me. I have a sane body and a sane mind, and I am tired of sanity. Kick me, Hughie, strike me, spit at me, make me angry and disgusted, anything, oh, anything! I want to feel, and I want to feel about you most particularly, and I can’t, and there is Edith playing on her damned double-bass again. I hear it, I am conscious of it, and it is only the things that don’t matter which I am conscious of. I am conscious of your brown eyes, my dear, and your big mouth and your trousers and boots, and the cow that is wagging its tail and looking at us as if it was going to be sick. Its dinner, I remember, goes into its stomach, and then comes up again, and then it becomes milk or a calf or something. It has nine stomachs, or is it a cat that has nine lives, or nine tails? I am sure about nine. Oh, Hughie, I see the outside aspect of things, and I can’t get below. I am a flat stone that you send to make—chickens is it?—no, ducks and drakes over a pond: flop, flop, the foolish thing. And somehow you with your stupidity and your simplicity, you go down below, and drown, and stick in the mud, and are so uncomfortable and miserable. And I am sorry for you: I hate you to be uncomfortable and miserable, and oh, I envy you. You suffer and are kind, and don’t envy, and are not puffed up, and I envy your misery, and am puffed up because I am so desirable, and I don’t really suffer—you are quite right—and I am not kind. Hugh, I can’t bear that cow, drive it away, it will eat me and make milk of me. And there, look, are Mama and Papa Jack, coming back from their ride. Papa Jack loves her; his face is like a face in a spoon when he looks at her, and I know she is learning to love him. She no longer thinks when she is talking to him, as to whether he will be pleased. That is a sure sign. She is beginning to be herself, at her age too! She doesn’t think about thinking about him any more: it comes naturally. And I am not myself: I am something else: rather, I am nothing else: I am nothing at all, just some intelligence, and some flesh and blood and bones. I am not a real person. It is that which is the matter. I long to be a real person, and I can’t. I crawl sideways over other things like a crab: I wave my pincers and pinch. I am lost: I am nothing! And yet I know—how horribly I know it—there is something behind, more than the beastly idol with the wooden eye, which is all I know of my real self. If only I could find it! If only I could crack myself up like a nut and get to a kernel. For God’s sake, Hughie, take the nut-crackers, and crack me. It is idle to ask you to do it. You have tried often enough. You will have to get a stronger nut-cracker. Meantime I am a nut, just a nut, with its hard bright shell. Seymour is another nut. There we shall be.”

  Hugh caught her by the wrists.

  “I can’t stand it, Nadine,” he said. “You feel nothing for him. He is nothing to you. How can you marry him? It’s profane: it’s blasphemous. You say you can give nothing to anybody. Well, make the best of yourself. I can give all I am to you. Isn’t that better than absolute nil? You can’t give, but let me give. It’s worship, it’s all there is—”

  She stood there with her wrists in his hands, his strong fingers bruising and crushing them. She could have screamed for the pain of it.

  “No, and a thousand times no,” she said. “I won’t cheat.”

  “I ask you to cheat.”

  “And I won’t. Hughie dear, press harder, hurt me more, so that you may see I am serious. You may bite the flesh off me, you may strangle me, and I will stand quite still and let you do it. But I won’t marry you. I won’t cheat you. My will is stronger than your body, and I would die sooner.”

  “Then your marriag
e is a pure farce,” said he.

  “Come and laugh at it,” she said.

  CHAPTER VII

  Hugh’s intention had been to stay several days, at the least, with the Chesterfords, and he had brought down luggage that would last any reasonable person a fortnight. Unluckily he had not foreseen the very natural effect that the sight of Seymour would have on him, and as soon as lunch was over he took his hostess into a corner and presented the situation with his usual simplicity.

  “It is like this, Aunt Dodo,” he said. “I didn’t realize exactly what it meant to me till I saw Seymour again. He drove me up from the station, and it got worse all the time. I thought perhaps since Nadine had chosen him, I might see him differently. I think perhaps I do, but it is worse. It is quite hopeless: the best thing I can do is to go away again at once.”

  Dodo had lit two cigarettes by mistake, and since, during their ride Jack had (wantonly, so she thought) accused her of wastefulness, she was smoking them both, holding one in each hand, in alternate whiffs. But she threw one of them away at this, and laid her hand on Hugh’s knee.

  “I know, my dear, and I am so dreadfully sorry,” she said. “I was sure it would be so, and that’s why I didn’t want you to come here. I knew it was no good. I can see you feel really unwell whenever you catch sight of Seymour or hear anything he says. And about Nadine? Did you have a nice talk with her?”

  Hugh considered.

  “I don’t think I should quite call it nice,” he said. “I think I should call it necessary. Anyhow, we have had it and—and I quite understand her now. As that is so, I shall go away again this afternoon. It was a mistake to come at all.”

  “Yes, but probably it was a necessary mistake. In certain situations mistakes are necessary: I mean whatever one does seems to be wrong. If you had stopped away, you would have felt it wrong too.”

  “And will you answer two questions, Aunt Dodo?” he asked.

  “Yes, I will certainly answer them. If they are very awkward ones I may not answer them quite truthfully.”

  “Well, I’ll try. Do you approve of Nadine’s marriage? Has it your blessing?”

  “Yes, my dear: truthfully, it has. But it is right to tell you that I give my blessings rather easily, and when it is clearly no use attempting to interfere in a matter, it is better to bless it than curse it. But if you ask me whether I would have chosen Seymour as Nadine’s husband, out of all the possible ones, why, I would not. I thought at one time that perhaps it was going to be Jack. But then Jack chose me, and, as we all know, a girl may not marry her stepfather, particularly if her mother is alive and well. But I should not have chosen you either, Hughie, if your question implies that. I used to think I would, but when Nadine explained to me the other day, I rather agreed with her. Of course she has explained to you.”

  Hugh looked at her with his honest, trustworthy, brown eyes.

  “Several times,” he said. “But if I agreed, I shouldn’t be worrying. Now another question: Do you think she will be happy?”

  “Yes, up to her present capacity. If I did not think she would be happy, I would not bless it. Dear Edith, for example, thinks it is a shocking and terrible marriage. For her I daresay it would be, but then it isn’t she whom Seymour proposed to marry. They would be a most remarkable couple, would they not? I think Edith would kill him, with the intention of committing suicide after, and then determine that there had been enough killing for one day. And the next day suicide would appear quite out of the question. So she would write a funeral march.”

  Dodo held the admirable sensible view that if discussion on a particular topic is hopeless, it is much better to abandon it, and talk as cheerfully as may be about something different. But this entertaining diversion altogether failed to divert Hugh.

  “You said she would be happy up to her present capacity?” he reminded her.

  “Yes: that is simple, is it not? We develop our capacity for happiness; and misery, also, develops as well. Whether Nadine’s capacity will develop much, I cannot tell. If it does, she may not be happy up to it. But who knows? We cannot spend our lives in arranging for contingencies that may never take place, and changes in ourselves that may never occur.”

  Dodo looked in silence for a moment at his grave reliable face, and felt a sudden wonder at Nadine for having chosen as she had done. And yet her reason for rejecting this extremely satisfactory youth was sound enough, their intellectual levels were such miles apart. But Dodo, though she did not express her further thought, had it very distinct in her mind. “If she does develop emotionally like a woman,” she said to herself, “there will not be a superfluity of happiness about. And she will look at you and wonder how she could have refused you.”

  But necessarily she did not say this, and Hugh got up.

  “Well, then, at the risk of appearing a worse prig than John Sturgis,” he said, “I may tell you that as long as Nadine is happy, the main object is accomplished. My own happiness consists so largely in the fact of hers. Dear me, I wonder you are not sick at my sententiousness. I am quite too noble to live, but I don’t really want to die. Would it make Nadine happier if I told Seymour I should be a brother to him?”

  Dodo laughed.

  “No, Hughie; it would make her afraid that your brain had gone, or that you were going to be ill. It would only make her anxious. Is the motor around? I am sorry you are going, but I think you are quite right to do so. Always propose yourself, whenever you feel like it.”

  “I don’t feel like it at present,” said he. “But thanks awfully, Aunt Dodo.”

  Dodo felt extremely warmly towards this young man, who was behaving so very well and simply.

  “God bless you, dear Hugh,” she said, “and give you your heart’s desire.”

  “At present my heart’s desire appears to be making other plans for itself,” said Hugh.

  * * * *

  Esther had said once in a more than usually enlightened moment, that Nadine’s friends did her feeling for her, and she observed them, and put what they felt into vivacious and convincing language and applied it to herself. Certainly Hugh, when he drove away again this afternoon, was keenly conscious of what Nadine had talked about to Edith: he felt lost, and the flag he had industriously waved so long for her seemed to be entirely disregarded. He hardly knew what he had hoped would have come of this ill-conceived visit, which had just ended so abruptly, but a vague sense of Nadine’s engagement being too nightmare-like to be true had prompted him to go in person and find out. Also, it had seemed to him that when he was face to face with Nadine, asking her at point-blank range, whether she was going to marry Seymour, it was impossible that she should say “Yes.” Something different must assuredly happen: either she would say it was a mistake, or something inside him must snap. But there was no mistake about it, and nothing had snapped. The world proposed to proceed just as usual. And he could not decline to proceed with it; unless you died you were obliged to proceed, however intolerable the journey, however unthinkable the succession of days through which you were compelled to pass. Life was like a journey in an express train with no communication-cord. You were locked in, and could not stop the train by any means. Some people, of course, threw themselves out of the window, so to speak, and made violent ends to themselves; but suicide is only possible to people of a certain temperament, and Hugh was incapable of even contemplating such a step. He felt irretrievably lost, profoundly wretched, and yet quite apart from the fact that he was temperamentally incapable of even wishing to commit suicide, the fact that Nadine was in the world (whatever Nadine was going to do) made it impossible to think of quitting it. That was the manner and characteristic of his love: his own unhappiness meant less to him than the fact of her.

  Until she had suggested it, the thought of traveling had not occurred to him; now, as he waited for his train at the station, he felt that at all costs he wanted to be on the move, to be employed in getting away from “the intolerable anywhere” that he might happen to be in. Wherever
he was, it seemed that any other place would be preferable, and this he supposed was the essence of the distraction that travel is supposed to give. His own rooms in town he felt would be soaked with associations of Nadine, so too would be the houses where he would naturally spend those coming months of August and September. Not till October, when his duties as a clerk in the Foreign Office called him back to town, had he anything with which he felt he could occupy himself. An exceptional capacity for finding days too short and few, even though they had no duties to make the hours pass, had hitherto been his only brilliance; now all gift of the kind seemed to have been snatched from him: he could not conceive what to do with tomorrow or the next day or any of the days that should follow. An allowance of seven days to the week seemed an inordinate superfluity; he was filled with irritation at the thought of the leisurely march of interminable time.

  He spent the evening alone, feeling that he was a shade less intolerable to himself than anybody else would have been; also, he felt incapable of the attention which social intercourse demands. His mind seemed utterly out of his control, as unable to remain in one place as his body. Even if he thought of Nadine, it wandered, and he would notice that a picture hung crooked, and jump up to straighten it. One such was a charming water-color sketch by Esther of the beach at Meering, with a splash of sunlight low in the West that, shining through a chimney in the clouds, struck the sea very far out, and made there a little island of reflected gold. Esther had put in this golden islet with some reluctance: she had said that even in Nature it looked unreal, and would look even more unreal in Art, especially when the artist happened to be herself. But Nadine had voted with Hugh on behalf of the golden island, just because it would appear unreal and incredible. “It is only the unreal things that are vivid to us,” she had said, “and the incredible things are just those which we believe in. Isn’t that so, Hughie?”