Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  They had all been in London nearly a month, and the excellent old lady was living in a permanent equipment of heavy armour, with which to repel, assault, and batter her daughter-in-law. Eva, on the contrary, despised the old methods of warfare, and met these attacks, or led them, with no further implements than her own unruffled scorn, and a somewhat choice selection of small daggers and arrows, in the shape of a studied delicacy of sarcasm and polite impertinences. She resembled, in fact, an active and accomplished pea-shooter, who successfully pelted the joints of a mature and slowly-moving Goliath. The dowager glanced up as she entered. One of her laborious mottoes was “Punctuality is the root of virtue,” and Eva, in consequence, held the view that punctuality is the last infirmity of possibly noble minds. She was quite willing to believe that her mother-in-law had an incomparably noble mind; she did not underrate her antagonist’s strong points; in fact, her whole system was to emphasize them.

  “Ah, you’ve come at last,” said old Lady Hayes. “And pray, when are we to have tea?”

  “I am late,” said Eva. “I always am late, you know. Why didn’t you have tea without me? Is Hayes in?”

  “The servants have quite enough to do with the dance to-night without bringing up tea twice.”

  “Ah, that is so thoughtful and charming of you,” said Eva, drawing off her long gloves. “The merciful man considers his beast. That is so good of you.”

  “And he considers his servants as well,” said the dowager.

  “Oh! I think servants are meant to be classed as a sort of beast. The good ones are machines, with volition; and if they are bad servants, of course they are beasts.”

  The dowager turned over the leaves of the current number of the Lancet with elaborate unconsciousness.

  Eva finished taking off her gloves, and whistled a few bars of a popular tune.

  “I don’t know if it’s customary for women to whistle now-a-days,” said the old lady, for whistling, as Eva knew, was a safe draw, “but in my time it was thought most improper.”

  “Isn’t there a French proverb — I daren’t pronounce French before you — about ‘we have changed all that?’ That is a very silly proverb. It is the older generation who changed it themselves. They made their own system of life impossible. They reduced it to an absurdity.”

  The dowager, who spoke French with a fine Scotch accent, and knew it, finished buckling on, as it were, her greaves and cuirass, and presented arms.

  “I confess I don’t understand you. No doubt I am very stupid — I should like very much to know how we have reduced our life to an absurdity.”

  “I don’t say the modern generation are not quite as absurd,” said Eva, “but the difference is that they have not yet learned their absurdity. You see, the whole race of men, since b. c. 4004 — that is the correct date, is it not? — have been devoting themselves to the construction of any theory of life which would hold water, and one by one they have been abandoned. The new theory, that nothing matters at all, has not yet been disproved, and considering that no theory hitherto has ever been permanent, it would be absurd to abandon this one till it is disproved in as convincing a manner as all its predecessors.”

  “I imagine that no previous age has ever sunk so deep in mere sensuous gratifications,” said the dowager, lunging heavily.

  “Ah, do you think so?” said Eva. “Of course, it is impertinent in me to try to argue the matter with you, as experience is the only safe guide in such matters, and you have experience of at least one more generation than I. But that seems to me altogether untrue. As we know from the Bible, desire shall fail, because it has been gratified to the utmost that human desire can conceive, I imagine. Well, I think desire has failed to a great extent. The men of your generation, for instance, and the generation before, drank so much port wine that this generation drink none. The daily three bottles that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers indulged in, has fulfilled the desire of port to the uttermost. No one gets drunk now. I don’t think I ever saw a man drunk. They used to fall under the table, did they not? What a charming state of things! But it has at least produced a fastidiousness in us, which considers heavy drinking coarse and low.

  “My father was a teetotaler, and so was my husband,” said the old lady, rather wildly.

  “I think that the habit of drinking in men,” continued Eva, “is really the fault of the women; you, of course, are an instance in point. Your husband was a teetotaler — surely, through your influence. If the men of the last generation were vile, the women, I think, were viler still. What is the word? Oh! yes, vicarious. The men sinned vicariously for the women.”

  “It is easy to speak lightly of the virtues of your forefathers,” remarked the dowager; “much easier than to practice them yourself.”

  “Ah! you misunderstand me,” said Eva. “Heaven forbid that I should speak lightly of them! Their virtues were as gigantic and as loathsome to them, as their vices are to me. They used to go to church with the most appalling regularity, and eat salt fish in Lent, and have their clergyman to dinner on Sunday, which meant no port wine to speak of. Of course, they made up for it by having a little quiet cock-fighting on Sunday afternoon, but you cannot expect perfection.”

  “Cock-fighting seems to me no more brutal than butchering hand-reared pheasants,” said the dowager.

  “Ah! that is the war-cry of people who don’t know anything about shooting,” said Eva. “The hand-reared pheasant comes over the guns at the height of about sixty feet, at forty miles an hour. I watched them shooting last year at home. There was a big wind, and Hayes missed seventeen birds in succession. Take a gun and try for yourself. Of course, you say the same thing about partridge-driving. You say the manly thing is to walk your partridges up instead of having them driven to you. The truth is that one of the reasons why men go partridge-driving now is because it is so much more difficult than walking them up. Certainly Hayes’s butchery of hand-reared pheasants was a most humane proceeding. Did you ever see a cock-fight?”

  “Cock-fighting improved the breed,” said the other, “though I disapprove of it entirely.”

  “Well,” said Eva, “it killed off the weak ones. The survival of the fittest, of course. And we reap the benefits by having particularly large eggs to eat; at least, I suppose a stalwart chicken begins life in a stalwart egg.”

  Old Lady Hayes rose with dignity.

  “I think tea must be ready,” she said. “In fact, it is probably cold by this time.”

  “Time does pass so in conversation,” said Eva, languidly. “Ah! they have sent some orchids. How nice and cool they look.” She snapped off a spray of the delicate, cultured blossoms, and fastened them, in her dress. “I think tea is put in the room above the porch. I rather expect Jim Armine,” she said, as she settled herself in a low, basket chair. “I wonder when the absurd custom of women pouring out tea will go out; why a woman should have that abominable trouble I cannot think. Of course, when tea was rather a rarity, a sort of up-to-date luxury, it was natural. The hostess gave her guests a smart little present.”

  Old Lady Hayes accepted the challenge. She said:

  “It used to be held to be the province of women to be matronly and womanly and domestic. They were in their places at the fireside, at the tea-table, not in the smoking-room and in grand stands.”

  “I am referring to the manual labour of pouring out tea,” said Eva; “but whatever the province of women may be, they seem to me to fill it very inadequately when their husbands go to bed drunk every night. It is such a comfort to know that your father and husband were teetotalers, for I can say these things without being personal. Your father was a Presbyterian minister, was he not? How do you call it in the dear Scotch language — meenister, isn’t it?”

  “He was a learned, upright man.”

  “How nice!” said? Eva. “I can add a meenister to my ancestry. Do you know who my great-grandfather was? He was a crossing-sweeper, originally, in New York. Then he went West, you know, and, being ‘cut
e, made a pile.”

  “You have very distinct traces of your American origin,” said the old lady with asperity.

  “And you of the dear Scotch talk,” said Eva. “I always like the Scotch so much. They are so honest and sterling and serious. Hoots, mon!” she added meditatively.

  The dowager took a second cup of tea. She had been accustomed to consider tea as a destructive agent in the days of seven o’clock dinner, but as Eva refused personally to dine till half-past eight, she found that, though perhaps destructive, it was less unpleasant than pure inanition. She had enunciated some startling warnings as to what would happen to people who dined at half-past eight earlier in her sojourn in London, and Eva had told her, with great courtesy, that she was quite at liberty to dine at seven or half-past six, or six if she liked, but she was afraid that her daughter-in-law would be unable to share the meal with her. Whether her mother-in-law’s constitution had become so strongly fortified by the use of drugs that she could now afford to play tricks with it, we are not called upon to say; at any rate, the half-past eight dinner had, at present, made no perceptible inroads on her digestive or vital powers.

  Eva had finished tea, and proceeded to light a cigarette.

  “After our dreadfully keen encounter,” she explained, “I want soothing. Argument is very trying to the nerves. Tobacco, on the other hand, is eminently soothing. Permit me to soothe myself.”

  Old Lady Hayes watched these proceedings through eyelids drooped over vigilant, irritated eyes.

  Eva’s whole personality was radically abhorrent to her. Her complete modernity seemed to her an epitome of all that is unsuitable to woman. Even her best points — her extreme tolerance, her cold purity — were repugnant, because they were the outcome of what she considered a wrong principle. Tolerance, according to the old lady’s code, was the fruit of charity — Eva’s tolerance was the fruit of indifferences. In the same way, the purity, the utter stainlessness of Eva’s mind was the result of fastidiousness, which, according to the other, was the sinful opposite of charity. Purity via fastidiousness, not morality, was to her the fig on the thistle, the grape on the thorn, which, however excellent in itself, could not be good because it must partake of the nature of its parent stem.

  “Of course, I know how utterly you must disapprove of me,” continued Eva with sincerity; “my whole system, or rather want of system, of life, must seem to you to be utterly inexcusable. Life is a complicated business and rather tiresome at the best. It is continually fractious and annoying and irritating. Its whole object seems to be to make one angry. But my plan is to bear with it; to treat it as a tiresome child, not to let it irritate and annoy me, to avoid all possible collisions with it — and, to do all this, you mustn’t be serious or too particular.”

  “I was brought up to believe in moral responsibilities,” said the old lady, “in some idea of duty, in a notion that it was not our mission simply to amuse ourselves and disregard others.”

  “Just so,” said Eva; “that illustrates very well what I mean by reducing things to an absurdity. Duty dominated everything, and the port wine affairs were merely regarded as interludes. Of course, if men are brought up to believe in these ponderous responsibilities, they must have interludes. We have done away, or rather you made it inevitable that we should do away, with responsibilities and interludes alike.”

  “And not unnaturally you have nothing left.”

  “Quite so. We are human beings who find themselves in a state of consciousness, and a state of consciousness demands that you should do something or think something. We fulfil those demands to a certain extent, but we do not make a mumbo-jumbo of them. You see there have always been a certain number of people with a desire to do certain things — to be kind, to be respectable and reasonable; and a certain number of these have a tendency — we all have tendencies — to construct a theory about what they do. They have, to begin with, a genius for doing their duty, and doing your duty is an unremunerative occupation in this wicked world. Then there comes in their inexorable need of making a theory. Duty is unremunerative here, but amusing oneself is remunerative. Therefore there must be a place and a time when the balance is struck, when to have done your duty is remunerative, and not to have done your duty is unremunerative; and the Paradiso and the Inferno are already made.”

  The blood of all the clans was up.

  “Do you mean to say,” gasped the dowager, “that you deny the existence of—’

  “Ah, my dear lady,” said Eva, “do not let us say things we shall be sorry for afterwards. I deny nothing, and I affirm nothing. I am only pointing out that many people do deny and affirm a great many things. The fault lies with them. If they had affirmed nothing, and denied nothing, would the fact that I did the same seem so horrible to you? Would you have evolved all your system of denials and affirmations out of your own inner consciousness?”

  This was a little too much. Old Lady Hayes surged up out of her chair and confronted her.

  “You believe nothing — you fear nothing — you love nothing. All you care for, are your wretched little hair-splittings about tendencies, and the modern view of life. When you call my beliefs superstitions and inventions, you think you have annihilated them.”

  “Excuse me,” said Eva, “I have no wish to annihilate them, nor do I pretend to do so. I wish I shared them. It must make everything so very easy if it is labelled right or wrong; if every choice is like a cross road with a sign-post, ‘Heaven and Hell.’ It must be so like those little allegories about children with bare feet walking along a dusty road, with flowers by the side, and lions and tigers hiding among the flowers. Having read the allegories, of course, you know that if you only keep to the road, it will soon become flowery, and beautiful boots will mysteriously grow on to your feet. And you have the inestimable satisfaction of seeing the lions and tigers gnawing at the bones of the people who go to pick flowers, and of reflecting that not only do they have no beautiful boots, but that the lions and tigers have eaten them up, so that the beautiful boots would be no use to them even if they had them. No doubt you expect me to be seized upon soon, and eaten. It must be very unpleasant. I notice that you never go to help them; you are too much occupied in walking along your tight-rope road.”

  “This is mere burlesque.”

  “And who is the author of this burlesque?” asked Eva.

  “Perhaps it is another characteristic of your generation to ridicule the most sacred beliefs of others,” she replied. “I should have thought any code of good manners would have forbade that. Jews take off their hats when they come into a Christian church.”

  Eva rose without any show of haste or impatience.

  “Au revoir,” she said. “You will excuse me, I know. I have half-a-hundred things to do.”

  She went through the open window into the drawing-room. As she passed the head of the stairs, she saw a well-known figure coming up, preceded by a footman.

  “Ah, Jim,” she cried, “how late you are. Come to my room. I have been discussing religious questions with my mother-in-law, and, well — and so we parted in more senses than one. Have you had tea? No? Bring Mr. Armine some tea to my room.”

  “She’s rather a powerful old lady, isn’t she?” asked Jim, who, since the Hayes’ return from abroad, had managed to establish himself on a fairly intimate footing.

  “She has been abusing me with immense power and vigour,” said Eva. “I am the incarnation of all that is horrible in her eyes. The one incomprehensible thing to that generation is this generation.”

  “The converse holds, too,” said he.

  “No; I understand them perfectly. Their nature is the basis of ours; we are the heirs of all previous ages, just as they were. The later development has incorporated the earlier, but it is contrary to the nature of the earlier to understand the later. Just in the same way, I understand what I was a year ago, though, if I saw now what I should be in another year, it would probably be incomprehensible to me.”

  “I sho
uldn’t have thought you would change much.”

  Eva took a book from a small table near her, and opened it with a quick, dramatic movement.

  “It is like that,” she said. “Whether I have changed, or only discovered, I don’t know. But a year ago the book was shut, and now I have read the first chapter.”

  “At any rate, you have some ideas about the last chapter, then; I suppose all the characters have come on the stage?”

  “Ah! but who can tell what will happen to them? No character can be uninfluenced by circumstances. If it is a book worth reading, they will have altered by the end. Circumstances have led me to open the book, they will determine my subsequent career; and circumstances, in the shape of gout or cancer or something, will make me close it.”

  “Is it interesting reading?”

  Eva looked at him, with a smile gathering on her mouth.

  “Particularly interesting,” she said. “I am sure you are interested too.”

  In the silence that followed, a tap came at the door, which was repeated, and Lord Hayes entered. He was irreproachably dressed in a black frock coat, with a fine gardenia in his button-hole. He was rather short-sighted, and blinked in the manner of a small, tame owl.