Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Eva started and frowned as if she had been struck. She turned on him with angry impatience.

  “Ah, you have spoiled it all,” she cried.

  She looked at him a moment, and then broke out into a mirthless laugh. He had wrapped a grey shawl round his shoulders, and on his head was a brown, deerstalker cap.

  “My dear Hayes,” she said, “you are in vivid contrast with the sunset, and you startled me. I was thinking about the sunset. However, it is nearly over now. You look like a sea-sick picture of twilight. That grey shawl is very twilighty. Come into the saloon and get me some tea.”

  That gentleman was in too enfeebled a condition to feel resentment, even if he had been by nature resentful. It is notorious that certain emotions of the mind cannot exist under certain conditions of the body. No normal man feels a tendency to anger after a good dinner, or a tendency to patience in the ten minutes preceding that function. No one feels spiritually exalted in the middle of the morning, or heroic when suffering from slight neuralgia, and I venture to add that no one has spirit enough to feel resentful after an hour or two of sea-sickness.

  The villa at Algiers was a charming, Moorish house, with a predominance of twisted pilasters and shining tiles, and bold, purple-belled creepers flaunting it over the white walls. It stood on the hills of Mustapha Supérieure, above the Eastern-looking town, surrounded by a rich, melodious garden, where the winter nightingales sang in the boughs of orange groves, which were bright with flower and fruit together, and where tall, listless eucalyptus trees shed their rough, odorous fruits thick on the path. But this soft beauty suited Eva’s mind not so well as the bold, golden sun dropping into a wine-dark sea; in fact, she cordially detested the place. How much of her hatred was due to the fact that she was alone with her husband she did not care to ask herself. Certainly, the even monotony of one face, one low, well-modulated voice, was displeasing to her.

  She found a malicious pleasure in giving him surprises. Her freshly-awakened interest in the human race sometimes took the bit in its teeth and ran riot, and, when it ran riot in his presence, she took no care to check it, but talked in a voluble, rather vicious vein, that startled him. For instance, at dinner one day, she had discussed certain books which he did not know women even read, and announced, somewhat vividly, views on life and being which were scarcely conventional. After dinner, they had sat out in the little passage that ran round the open square in the centre of the house, supported on twisted pillars, and Eva continued her newly-found confession of faith.

  “Men seem to expect that women should be sexless replicas of themselves,” she said. “All they would allow them is the inestimable privilege of being good. Virtue is its own reward, they say — so they cultivate their own pleasure with a fine disregard of virtue, and a curious pride in performing actions which certainly will lay up for them no store of virtuous and ineffable joy, while to the women they say, ‘Be good; here is a blank cheque on the bank of Providence. The bigger the better. Au revoir.’ A delightfully simple arrangement.”

  Lord Hayes gave a little cough, and added sugar to his coffee.

  “I should always wish,” he said, with the air of an after-dinner speaker; “I should always wish women to fulfil to the uttermost their own duties, which none but women can do.”

  “The duty of being good,” said Eva. “Exactly so.”

  “I fail to see the justice of your remarks about the tendencies of men to regard women as sexless replicas of themselves,” he said. “The province of women is quite different from that of men.”

  “Ah! let me explain,” said Eva. “Men are bad and good mixed. Whether the bad or the good predominates is beside the point. Leave out the bad, and introduce no vivid good, and you get the sexlessness, and what remains is a sexless goodness, which is, as I say, the sexless replica of the man. That is a man’s woman.”

  “No doubt it is my own stupidity,” said Lord Hayes politely, “but I still fail to agree with you. You do not take into account what I ventured to call the province of women, which, I say again, is quite different from the province of men.”

  “Da capo,” murmured Eva. “Let us agree to differ, Hayes. I am rather sleepy; I think I shall go to bed.”

  Lord Hayes lighted a candle for her, and waited till it had burned up.

  “Good-night,” said Eva, nodding at him.

  He bent forward to kiss her, and, as before, she surrendered her face to be kissed.

  The length of these episodes calls for an apology, but there is just this to be said. Life, for most of us, consists of episodes, of interruptions, of parentheses. We can few of us keep up the epic vein and go sublimely on, building up from great harmonious scenes a great harmonious whole. The scene-shifter perspires and tugs at his mighty cardboard trees and impossible castles in the forest; they are stiff, they will not turn round. And he sits down — does this irresponsible and wholly unbusinesslike scene-shifter — and meditates. After all, is life really surrounded by these giants of the theatrical forest? Do we go into remote and virgin woods and chant our love in irreproachable epics? When we have made our great scene, when we stand in the pure, unselfish, heroic, villain-massacreing, devoted climax of our existence, are we quite sure that some one will throw the ethereal oxy-hydrogen light on to us at the right moment? Will the audience recognise how great we are: and, even if they do, will not the slightest accident with the oxy-hydrogen light turn our climax into an ante-climax? The irresponsible scene-shifter begins to see a more excellent way. Roll off your forest trees; send the manager of the oxy-hydrogen light home, give him eighteenpence to get drunk on — he will like it better than your heroic vein — let us have no scenery even. Just a few chairs and tables, a plain, grey sky, and no herpics. A few little episodes dealing of men who are not saints or silver kings, a few women who are not abbesses or Portias, who are in no epic mood, but in the mood of the majority of weak, unsatisfactory, careless, human beings, who can be unselfish and pure, but who are at times a little uncertain about the big riddle, unscrupulous, unkind, worldly. Besides, we are only in the first act at present. Perhaps the gigantic forest trees and the white light will come on later, but we do not promise. The irresponsible scene-shifter is right. So much, then, in praise of episode.

  To return from the point at which we started before these unconscionable episodes found their way into the text, the honeymoon was over, the month was April, and Lord and Lady Hayes had returned to England. They were to spend a few days at Aston, and, after Easter, to go straight up to London. Old Lady Hayes was staying with her niece, who had married a certain Mr. Davenport, and had one son. Reggie Davenport was a favourite with the dowager, who bullied him incessantly, and who sometimes got furious, because he never lost his temper with her. She was to spend a fortnight in London with the Hayes, as a great concession, in order to make Eva’s acquaintance, and would join them as soon as they had settled. It may be stated at once, that she regarded her son’s marriage as a most unprincipled and selfish act, and as an insult levelled directly at herself.

  Mrs. Grampound came up to see her daughter on the first day after their arrival.

  “Your father would have come with me,” she explained, “but he and Percy are away. I am quite alone at home. You are looking wonderfully well, dear, and I’m sure I needn’t ask you whether you are happy?”

  “Of course,” said Eva, “those are the things that are taken for granted.”

  “I’ve come to have a little cosy talk with you,” said Mrs. Grampound, settling herself in a chair and taking off her gloves.

  A cosy little soliloquy would perhaps have been a more accurate description. She wandered on in a sort of pious intoxication at the contemplation of her daughter.

  “The mistress of a great house like this has very great responsibilities, my darling,” she said. “If dear James were not such a thoroughly able and upright man, I confess I should feel a wee bit nervous at seeing my darling whirled away into such a circle. Be very sure exactly how you are going
to behave. There seems to me something very beautiful in the life of all those dear last-century, great ladies, whose husbands used to treat them with such charming old-fashioned courtesy, and lock them up whenever they went away, which must have been most tedious. Yes, and send a servant to tell the groom of the chambers to ask my lady if she would receive him. Dear me, yes.”

  “I don’t think Hayes means to lock me up whenever he goes away,” said Eva. “We haven’t got a groom of the chambers, either.”

  “No, dear,” said Mrs. Grampound; “I was just saying, wasn’t I, that all that was changed. Husbands lounge in their wives’ boudoirs now, and smoke cigarettes there. So much more human and natural. You don’t mind the smell of smoke, do you, dear?”

  “On the contrary,” said Eva; “I smoke myself.”

  “Gracious, how shocking! What a wicked child. Of course, there’s no harm in it, dear; lots of nice women smoke. I should not let Hayes know that. When a difficult time comes — there will be difficult times, of course, my Eva — there is no rose without its thorns — Let me see, what was I saying — ah! yes, those little indulgences, like letting a husband have a cigarette in the drawing-room every now and then, are very much appreciated. A little womanly tenderness,” continued Mrs. Grampound, getting rather breathless, and volubly eloquent, “a little tact, a little wifely sympathy, just a look, the ‘I know, I know,’ which women can put into one little look, is all that is required to make those difficulties real advantages — concealed facilities, one might really call them; real renewals of the marriage vow; the rough places shall be plain, in fact, if we may use those words.”

  “We get on admirably together,” said Eva; “he is most considerate for me, and most kind.”

  “I declare I positively love him,” cried her mother. “Of course, in any case, I should teach myself — should compel myself — to love the man of your choice, but the first time I saw him, I said to myself, that is the husband for my Eva. It was one June evening,” continued Mrs. Grampound with an impressional vagueness, “and we were dining somewhere, I can’t remember where, and he was there too; dear me, I recollect it all as clearly as if it was yesterday. I remember old Lady Hayes telling us all that brown sherry was rank poison, and that she would as soon think of drinking a glass of laudanum. We all laughed a great deal, because our host had very famous brown sherry.”

  “It must have been very pleasant,” said Eva.

  “Dear old Lady Hayes,” said Mrs. Grampound; “such a wonderful woman, such strong, shrewd common sense; I wonder if she will go on living with you, Eva? I don’t think it’s a very good plan myself — there is sure to be some little unpleasantness now and then.”

  “In spite of her strong, shrewd common sense?” asked Eva.

  “Dear child, how you catch one’s words up! Of course, her presence would be invaluable to you, if she stopped, and with such a guest constantly by you, of course you would learn a great deal. But I should make it quite plain what your relative positions must be. You are the mistress of the house, Eva; she is your husband’s pensioner. Be very kind, very courteous, but very firm. Your rights are your rights. I daresay she will go to live at Brighton or Bournemouth or Bath, all those watering-places begin with a B; no doubt she has money of her own. You didn’t think of asking Lord Hayes what would be done about that, did you, Eva? You might suggest it very gently and feelingly some time soon. Of course, you needn’t express any opinion till you see what she is likely to do. Then, if it appears that she is proposing to live with you, just say very quietly that you will be very glad to have her. That will show, I think, that you know and are ready to insist on her occupying her proper position in the house. And you went to Algiers, did you not?” continued her mother; “that dear, white town set like a pearl and all that on the sapphire sea. I forget who said that about it, but it seems to me a very poetical description. I could almost find it in my heart to envy you, dearest.”

  “Yes, it’s a very pretty place,” assented Eva.

  “Darling, why do you tell me so little,” said Mrs. Grampound, more soberly. “I have been thinking so continuously about you all the time you have been away; you have lived in all my thoughts. I have said to myself, ‘Eva will be at home in four weeks, three weeks, two days, one day; to-day I shall see my dearest again.’”

  “What is there to tell you?” said Eva, slowly. “You assume I am happy, and I don’t deny it. I am also amused and interested. I find things very entertaining. If you like I will show you some photographs of Mentone and Algiers. I lost two thousand francs at Monte Carlo. Hayes is very generous about money matters, and he has the further requirement of being very rich. He is bent on my being magnificent, and so, for that matter, am I. You shall see some fine things. I have, as you told me before my marriage, great natural advantages in the way of beauty. Diamonds suit me very well, and I have quantities of diamonds.”

  Poor Mrs. Grampound’s mental intoxication was passing away rapidly, leaving behind a feeling of depression. At no time did her thoughts present themselves to her with distinctness; they were like seaweeds waving about close to the surface of the water. Sometimes, after a big wave had passed, sundry little ends of them appeared above the sea for a second or two, and Mrs. Grampound made anxious little grabs at these before they disappeared again. Consequently, her descriptions of them, as reflected in her conversation, were somewhat scrappy and inorganic.

  She appeared, in the short silence that followed Eva’s remarks, to have got hold of a new sort of sea-weed — a bitter, prickly fragment. At any rate she said, somewhat piteously, —

  “Eva, Eva, tell me you are satisfied. You don’t blame me, do you, for urging it on you?”

  Eva could be very cruel. The foam-born Aphrodite, when she came “from barren deeps to conquer all with love,” had, we may be sure, many undesirable suitors, and to these, I expect, she did not show any particular kindness or sympathy. She was, to judge by her face, too divine to be cruel in petty, irritating ways, but she was too divine not to be very human.

  Eva raised her eyebrows.

  “Why should I blame you? I am amused and interested. After all, that is more important than anything else. Surely I ought to be grateful to you. But to speak quite frankly, I did not marry to please you; I married to please myself, and Hayes, of course,” she added.

  Mrs. Grampound was very nearly shedding a few vague tears, but the appearance of Lord Hayes made her decide to postpone them.

  “My charming mother-in-law,” he said, “I am delighted to see you. Very much delighted, in fact. And am I not to see my father-in-law? How do you think Eva is looking?”

  “Eva is looking wonderfully well,” said she briskening herself up a little. “She has been giving me the most delightful accounts of your honeymoon. Mentone, Algiers, all those charming, romantic places. But Monte Carlo! Really, I was shocked. And Eva tells me she lost two hundred thousand francs — or was it two thousand, Eva? In any case, it is quite shocking, and I feel I ought to scold you for leading my child into bad ways.”

  “He didn’t lead me,” said Eva. “I went by myself. I think you remonstrated, didn’t you, Hayes? You didn’t play yourself, I know. However, I got a good deal of fun out of it. It was really exciting sometimes. After all, that is the chief thing. Two thousand francs was cheap. Tell mother about the new villa. I must go — I’ve got a hundred things to do.”

  Old Lady Hayes also made inquiries of her son as to what was to happen to her. She was a direct old lady, and she said, —

  “And what is to become of me?”

  Lord Hayes quailed under these unmasked batteries and felt most thankful that he would not have to meet them alone any longer. He had great confidence in Eva’s courage, and felt that she would be quite up to the mark on such occasions. But he had, for the present, to trust to his own forces, and, with the idea of making the scene as little unpleasant as possible, he replied, —

  “Of course, dear mother, you will do whatever suits you best. Your posit
ion in the house will necessarily be somewhat changed.”

  “Necessarily,” said Lady Hayes.

  Her son found no pertinent reply ready.

  CHAPTER IV.

  There is something peculiarly substantial and English about those houses which our aristocracy brighten with their presence, in the more fashionable parts of London, during several months of the year. Those lords of the earth, who cannot manage to breathe unless they have a thousand or more acres round their houses in the country, being sensible folk, are content to live, shoulder by shoulder, in rows of magnificent barracks, when they are in London. A porch supported by Ionic pillars, with a line of Renaissance balustrade along the top, a sprinkling of Japanese awnings, a couple of dozen large, square windows looking out on to what is technically known as “the square garden,” partly because it is round, and partly because it is sparsely planted with sooty, stunted bushes, scattered about on what courtesy interprets to be grass, and surrounded by large, forbidding railings, are the characteristics of the best London houses. They may not be distinguished by any striking, artistic beauty, but they are eminently habitable.

  Along one of these rows, one June afternoon, a smart victoria was being driven rapidly. It was hung on the best possible springs, and the wheels were circumscribed with the best possible india-rubber tires. A water-cart had just passed up the street, and the air was full of that indescribable freshness which we associate in the country with summer rain, and which, in London, makes us feel that art is really doing a great deal to rival Nature. The progress of the well-appointed victoria was therefore as free from noise, jolts, and dust as locomotion is permitted to be in this imperfect world. There was only one occupant of this piece of perfection — for, of course, the coachman and footman are part of the carriage — and she was as perfect as her equipment. In other words, Lady Hayes was going home to tea.

  The carriage drew up with noiseless precision at the curb-stone, and Lady Hayes remained apparently unconscious of the stoppage till the powdered footman had rung the bell, and turned back the light crimson rug that covered her knees. Then she rose languidly and trailed her skirts across the pavement to the house. Above the porch was a square, canvas tent, with one side, away from the sun, open to admit the breeze, and Eva, as she passed upstairs, said to the man standing in the hall, “Tea upstairs, above the porch.” This tent opened out of a low window in the drawing-room, through which Eva passed, and in which was sitting, as gaunt and forbidding as ever, her respected mother-in-law. That lady had grudgingly complied with the popular but misguided prejudices of London with regard to the skins wherewith the human animal clothes itself, but her stiff, black silk gown was as awe-inspiring as her grey, Jaeger dress and the boots with eight holes a-piece in them.