Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “He is right,” she said aloud. “Ah, my God! he is quite right.”

  Jim Armine looked up as Reggie left the box, but as his chair was towards the stage he saw nothing except that he had gone. But when Eva rose, he turned half round, and caught her words. It would not have required much penetration to see that something had happened, and it was not unnatural that he hesitated to ask Eva what was the matter. But the next moment she had picked up her fan, and had seated herself in her old place. She opened her mouth to speak once, and Jim waited, but she said nothing.

  “Where’s Reggie gone?” asked he at length.

  Eva summoned her wonderful power of self-control, and spoke in her natural voice.

  “I think he has gone home,” she said with a certain finality. “Isn’t the scene charming? Really, they mount these things very well in England.”

  The evening passed on; men from other boxes came and paid their respects to Lady Hayes, and, as usual, she snubbed some, was a little amused by others, and appeared indifferent to all.

  Towards the end of the third act, Lord Hayes made his appearance and made some true remarks on the state of the weather and the prevalent influenza. Eva listened to his remarks with somewhat unusual attention, and went so far as to inquire how his mother was, who, in spite of her fortified condition, was “down” with the epidemic. But when the curtain fell for the last time, and Tannhäuser had died in “the odour of sanctity,” she turned to Jim.

  “I wonder if that ending is really natural,” she said. “Do you think any man leaves Venusberg so utterly behind after he has been a habitué there? I wish Reggie had stopped. He would have given us some very spontaneous criticisms on the subject.”

  “Do you think spontaneous criticisms are the most valuable?” he asked.

  “Perhaps not; but they are very interesting. After all, experience may vitiate one’s judgment as much as it matures it.”

  “What a very odd doctrine,” laughed Jim. “But I don’t suppose you really believe it yourself.”

  “Oh no, probably I don’t,” she replied, “but I don’t know what I do believe, and what I don’t. Will you give me my cloak? Do you want a lift? No? Good-night!”

  When Eva got home she went straight up to her room, and her husband followed her and sat down on a chair opposite to her, as if waiting for her to speak. But Eva had quite as successful a power of silence as he, and sat saying nothing, till he found it unbearable and, in a fatal fit of fidgeting, went across to the mantelpiece, where Reggie’s photograph was standing. Eva’s eyes followed him slowly, with a still impatience.

  He took up the photograph and looked at it for a moment.

  “Ah! this is your young friend Reggie Davenport, is it not?”

  Eva yawned slightly and nodded assent.

  “I thought he was at the opera with you to-night?”

  “He was.”

  “But surely he was not there when I came.”

  “No, he had gone away.”

  “Ah! I suppose he got tired of it. It is possible to get tired of Wagner.”

  Eva stood up suddenly. Her self-control was beginning to break down, and the knowledge of what had happened, the entire success of her own scheme of letting Reggie know the truth about her, was being supplanted in her own mind by a great sense of loss. She felt reckless, at revolt with the world, intolerably intolerant of her position. As she stood there, watching her husband leaning on the back of a chair with the photograph of Reggie in his hands, the desire to fling the truth of it at him became too strong to resist.

  She made a quick, silent step to his side, and plucked the photograph out of his hands.

  “I should not touch that again if I were you,” she said, speaking in a low, rapid voice. “You had better leave it alone for the future. Oh! my meaning is clear enough. I am in love with Reggie Davenport. Yes — in love with him. He is not at all like a second Jim Armine, as you suggested the other day. No, this is quite a different thing. And he is in love with me, while he is engaged to that girl whose photograph stood next his there. It is a sweet position, is it not? Here am I married to you — in love with a young man who is engaged to someone else who is in love with him, while he is in love with me. Ah! Hayes, I lost a great deal when I married you, while you got what you wanted. You wanted to be my owner, did you not? You wished to be master of my beauty. I know how beautiful I am; there is not another woman in London who can touch me. You wanted someone who would give that stamp to your dinner parties and country house parties that I give it. You have had the best of it. And I married you because I wanted position, because I wanted to know the world. That I have got — I know it by heart. It is as dull as a week-old newspaper. Ah, God! how I know it. I did not know what it was to fall in love; I was inexperienced, ignorant. No, I don’t blame you. I pity myself.”

  Eva stopped for a moment, and put Reggie’s photograph down on the mantelpiece again, next Gertrude’s. She looked at them for a single second, and then took the girl’s photograph, and, with a sudden, ungovernable frenzy, tore it to bits, and threw the pieces in the grate. That wild-animal burst of jealousy would not be smothered. Then she went on, still speaking rapidly, —

  “You need not be afraid of scandal, Hayes, or anything else of that sort. I have broken with Reggie for good. He thought me kind and good, and all that is womanly, and so I wished him to know the truth about me. Have you ever been in love? If so, you will understand it. I shocked him horribly by explaining to him about Tannhäuser, and at the end of the overture, he suddenly understood what I meant, and he got up and left the box, having told me that I was a wicked woman. It was very fine. I admired him immensely for it. But that sort of thing is rather trying. I managed to behave decently while the play lasted, but I have broken down. That is all there is to tell you. I don’t really know why I told you at all.”

  Lord Hayes listened to his wife with much composure.

  “Dear me, how very sensational!” he said, “and how very Quixotic of you. I should not have thought you were capable of Quixotism. You are a most remarkable woman. I think I shall go to bed. The new story by Paul Bourget which I am reading will seem quite flat after your little romance. Good-night!”

  Eva felt a sudden sense that he was justified in his quiet scorn of her. How was it to be expected, she reasoned to herself, that he should behave to her, as far as in him lay, otherwise than she behaved to him? Her regret at all she had lost was not entirely resentment towards him. For the first time since she had known him, she was generous to him, showed a willingness to meet him half-way.

  “Wait a moment,” she said, “I have not quite done.”

  He paused in an uncompromising attitude with his hand on the handle of the door, ready for some fine return shot. But Eva’s impulse was strong within her, and she spoke.

  “I do not blame you,” she said; “I assure you of that. I only blame myself. You were willing to be very kind to me, and I believe you are willing still. In fact, I am very sorry for you, just as I am very sorry for myself. I do not wish to make it worse for either of us. I want to make a bad job as good as it can be made. I did not tell you what I have told you, in order to disgust you or pain you. We are travellers in the same compartment in this very tiresome journey called life. We are inevitably shut in here until it is time for one of us to get out. Do not let us quarrel; it will only make the journey worse.”

  Lord Hayes came a step closer.

  “Do you find this journey called life so tiresome?” he asked. “I should have thought you would have enjoyed it.”

  “I wish I was dead,” said she, simply.

  Then, quite suddenly, all her self-control gave way. She dropped her face in the sofa cushions and sobbed as if her heart would break. Lord Hayes was by no means a fool, and he saw very plainly what the reason for this sudden outburst was, and obviously it was not very complimentary to him, however complimentary it might be to another.

  He closed the door quietly, and sat down in a chair a little
way from her. He had no notion of being tender, and he lit a cigarette till she was herself again. The sobs grew quieter after a while, and in a few minutes Eva sat up again. Lord Hayes chucked the end of his cigarette into the fireplace.

  “My dear Eva,” he said very calmly and quietly, “I know quite well, of course, what this all means. You are in love with that young fellow, and that quite accounts for your very — your very extraordinary behaviour. But I don’t mind that at all, I assure you. You may be in love with him as much as ever you like. The only thing I should mind would be any scandal on the subject, and I feel quite sure that nothing of the sort will happen. You have been very candid to me — very candid indeed, and I will follow your lead. I know perfectly well that your position and title and wealth are much too dear to you to let you risk any possibility of losing them. You would lose everything by a scandal, and I do not believe you would gain anything. This young man is engaged to another girl, as you say, and he is obviously a very good young man, and will do nothing he should not. In any case, you would have to live at Boulogne or Dieppe, or some of those hideous little French towns, among a set of second-rate people. That is absurd on the face of it. No, I am sure this ‘tedious journey called life,’ to quote your own words again, would be much more tedious there. For the rest, I fail to see how I am to prevent our quarrelling. It never has been a wish of mine that we should. So once more, good-night!”

  Eva was sitting up looking at her husband, with an intensity that was not pleasant to contemplate. He felt it perhaps, for once, when he met her eyes, he looked away again immediately and he faltered in his speech. The utter, entire absence of generosity, of anything like manly feeling in what he said, seemed to Eva to be a new revelation of meanness, the like of which she had never encountered. He turned and left the room at these last words, and Eva was left sitting there.

  CHAPTER VII.

  Mrs. Davenport had spent the evening alone. Her husband was away for the night, and Reggie, as we have seen, had gone to the opera.

  Whatever Reggie was he was not secretive, and his obvious pleasure that afternoon at Lady Hayes’s invitation did not savour of the sweetness of consciously forbidden fruit. But his very frankness, which, as has been mentioned before, was capable of dealing unpleasant back-hand blows, had also a dazzling power about it, which, like the rays from a noon-day sun, renders it impossible to tell what lies behind, though it would be very false to describe it as partaking of the nature of dissimulation. It seemed to say, “I am not responsible for the weakness of your eyesight; I show my mystery or my want of mystery to you with all my heart, and you are at fault if you cannot form any conclusion which it is.” To continue the metaphor, Mrs. Davenport would have felt not ungrateful to some abatement in its brilliance partaking of the nature of an eclipsed frankness, a shadow cast on the disc by some external object, or, at any rate, she would have been glad to take the opinion of someone who was possessed of smoked glasses, or a natural tendency to observe correctly. Had she known it, Lord Hayes would have been exactly the individual required, but it was no discredit to her acuteness that the idea never entered her head, quite apart from the impracticability of putting it into execution.

  She had just dined and was glancing through the pages of a novel from Mudie’s, when the drawing-room door opened, and Reggie appeared. He paused a moment when he saw his mother, and then advanced into the room. His attempt to look unconcerned and contented was singularly unsuccessful.

  Mrs. Davenport laid down her book, frightened.

  “Ah! Reggie, what’s the matter? What has happened?”

  Reggie turned away from her, and fingered a small ornament on the mantelpiece.

  “Nothing,” he said hoarsely. “I came away from the opera. I—”

  He turned round again, and knelt by his mother’s chair.

  “Don’t ask me just now,” he said. “There has been a scene, and I came away. Lady Hayes said things that disgusted me. I didn’t think she was like that.”

  Mrs. Davenport offered a short mental thanksgiving. Until the relief had come, she had not known how much Reggie’s intimacy with Lady Hayes had weighed on her. She waited for a moment to see if Reggie would say more. Then —

  “Won’t you tell me more, dear, or would you rather not?”

  “Yes, I want to tell you,” said he. “At dinner she told me all about Tannhäuser and Venusberg, and I didn’t understand her. Then, when the overture was played, I suddenly understood it all. It was horrible; it was wicked. If anybody else had said that, I should simply have thought it was very bad form, but that she should!”

  Mrs. Davenport had not quite realised before how serious it was, and Reggie’s tone, even in his renunciation of Eva, was a shock to her.

  “That she should say those things!” repeated Reggie. “But when I understood it, I couldn’t stop there. I don’t remember very clearly what happened. I told her she was a wicked woman, and then I came away.”

  The excessive baldness of his narrative struck Mrs. Davenport as convincing, and she felt a little reassured. But Reggie had not meant to reassure her, and he soon undeceived her.

  “Why should she have said those things to me?” he went on, getting up, and walking about the room. “Why, if she was like that, couldn’t she have kept it from me? I should have been content to know only half of her, and to have adored that.”

  “Ah!”

  Mrs. Davenport winced as with a sudden spasm of pain; then pity for Gertrude bred in her anger for Reggie. “What do you mean?” she said sharply. “I do not understand you in the least. You adored her, then; why not say love?”

  “I didn’t know it before,” said he, “until this thing came, or, of course, I should have gone away. I am not a villain. But I know it now; I adored her, and I loved her — and—”

  “And you do still?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long silence, and the hum of the London streets came in at the open window. Mrs. Davenport found herself noticing tiny things, among others that Reggie had placed the ornament he had been fingering perilously near the edge of the mantelpiece. In a great crisis our large reflective and thinking powers get choked for a moment, and the ordinary surface perceptions, which are as instinctive and unnoticed as breathing, are left in command of our mind. The sight of that ornament there assumed an overwhelming importance to her, and she got up from her seat and put it back in a safer place. Then she turned to Reggie, who was standing still in the middle of the room, with his back towards her.

  “Sit down here, Reggie,” she said quietly. “I think we had better talk a little. Do you quite realise what that means?”

  “Ah, don’t talk to me like that,” he burst out. “As if I was not in hell already, without being reminded of it. Mummy, I don’t mean that. You are all that is good and loving. You know that I know it. You are very gentle with me. I won’t be angry again.”

  Mrs. Davenport’s anxiety for Gertrude made her very tender.

  “Ah, my dear,” she said, “I do not care for myself. It is very immaterial that you speak like that to me. I should be a very selfish woman if I thought of myself just now. There are others to think of, you and — and Gertrude.”

  “Yes, I know, I know. But what am I to do? Tell me that, and I will do it.”

  “Go to Aix,” said his mother promptly, “and go at once.”

  “Go to Aix!” said he. “Why, that’s just what I couldn’t possibly do. God knows, I have done Gertrude injury enough, without insulting her!”

  “Your waiting here in London is the worst insult you could do her. You must see that.”

  “I can’t do it!” he cried. “You know I can’t. How can I leave Eva — Lady Hayes — like this?”

  Mrs. Davenport got up, and waited a moment till her voice was more under her control. But when she spoke, her anger vibrated through it so strongly, that even Reggie, in his almost impenetrable self-centred wretchedness, was startled.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that th
ere is another concerned in this besides yourself?” she said. “Are you aware that Gertrude loves you in a way that it honours any man to be loved? Do you mean to make no effort to repair the injury you have done her? Be a man, Reggie; you have been a boy too long. Dare you say you ever loved Gerty, if you treat her like this — now? You wish to behave like a fool, and, what is worse, like a coward. I never thought I should be ashamed of you, as I shall be now, if you stop in London after what has happened.”

  Once more there was a dead silence. Mrs. Davenport, as she knew, had played her ace of trumps; she had brought to bear the strongest motive that she could think of to influence Reggie. If he would not listen to her because she was his mother, if he cared nothing about the effect his action would have on her opinion of him, she knew that there was no more to be done by her.

  Reggie flushed suddenly, as if he had been struck.

  “But what good will it do if I go?” he cried; “and where am I to go to? I can’t go to Gertrude now.”

  “Your place is with her,” said Mrs. Davenport. “If it is all over between you, it is your business to tell her. I don’t wish you to tell her at once, but go there and wait a week. Don’t be a coward, and don’t think that it will be any the better for putting it off. What do you propose to do in the interval — to wait here? She will write to you, and you will not answer, or will you pretend that you are hers, as she is yours? That would not be a very honourable position, would it? Don’t disgrace yourself and bring dishonour on us all. Have you no pride, even?”