by E. F. Benson
All this, which was part of the habitual environment of Dora’s mind, part of the data under which she lived, passed through it or was presented to it, like a familiar picture, in the space of the sigh that concluded her last speech. It was no longer any use thinking about these things; Grote had been let to the Osbornes, the bungalow at Deal had also been let for August, and till September she and her mother were going to “live in their boxes.”
After all, they had done that, as everybody else had, often before, and for much longer periods than one month, but it was the first time that they had been compelled to live in their boxes with no house (except Eaton Place in August) to flee, unto. And, at this moment the change struck Dora. For week after week before now, she had stayed with friends, knowing (though not thinking of it) that all the time there was home behind it all. True, now that Grote had been let, it would have been possible to live in the bungalow at Deal, but the latter had been let while the former was still uncertain, and Dora suddenly felt a sense of homelessness that was not quite comfortable. In two weeks from now they went to the Thurstons, then there were three more visits, then, no doubt, if they chose, many more visits, but there was nothing behind; there was no home. Meantime, the Osbornes grabbed homes wherever they chose, they built a palace in Park Lane, they took Grote from her own impecunious family, and as Mrs. Osborne had told her mother last night, Mr. O. had a fancy for a bit of stalking for self and mends in the autumn, and had taken a little box up in Sutherlard. She, however, was going to settle down at Grote at the end of the season, and did not intend to go North. There had been badinage over this, it appeared, between her and Mr. O.; and he threatened her with an action for divorce on the grounds of desertion. And Dora felt much less socialistic and far more inclined to agree with May on the iniquity of common people having all they wanted simply because they invented a button. If only she could invent a button.
Dora, as has already been seen, was apt to be slightly discursive. She had one of those effervescent minds to which every topic as it comes on the board instantly suggests another, and in half a dozen sentences she was apt to speak of half a dozen totally different things, each in turn being swiftly abandoned for some fresh and more absorbing topic which each opened up. She had begun a moment before with telling May that she wanted her advice, and before that was asked or offered, before indeed, the subject on which it was desired was so much as mentioned, she had darted away afresh, poising, dragon-fly fashion, in the direction of Grote, and the letting of it to the Osbornes. The Osbornes indeed had been the connecting link, and now she went straight back via the Osbornes to the point from which she had started.
“Yes, I want your advice May,” she repeated, “or I think I do. It’s quite serious, at least it’s beginning to be quite serious, and there are so many dreadfully funny things connected with it. Yes, Mr. Osborne has asked leave to call upon mother this afternoon at six, and it’s half-past five now. Oh, dear, oh, dear! I suppose he found out in a book that that sort of thing was done a hundred years ago, and he wishes to be correct. The Osbornes are absolutely correct if you think of it. Every one went in to supper in the right order last night, which never happens at any other house I have ever been to, and where does he get those extraordinary good looks from? Oh, I don’t mean Mr. Osborne. How can you be so silly — but him. Yes, I’m telling it all very clearly, aren’t I, so I hope you understand. Perhaps Mrs. Osborne was a beauty once, you can’t tell.”
That May perfectly understood this extraordinary farrago of observations said less for her powers of perspicacity than might have been supposed, for Dora was not alluding to any new thing, but to a subject that had often before been mentioned between them. And Dora went on, still discursively but intelligibly.
“It’s coming to the crisis, you see,” she said. “Mr. Osborne’s call on mother is of a formal nature. He is going to ask permission for Claude to pay his addresses to me. He will use those very words, unless mother says ‘yes’ before he gets so far. And then I shall have to make up my mind. At least I’m not sure that I shall; I believe it’s made up already. And yet I can’t be sure. May, I feel just like a silly sentimental girl in an impossible feuilleton. He thrills me, isn’t it awful? But he does. Thrills! I don’t believe any boy was ever so good-looking. And then suddenly in the middle of my thrill, it all stops with a jerk, just because he says that somebody is a very ‘handsome lady.’ Why shouldn’t he say ‘handsome lady’? He said he thought mother was such a handsome lady, and I nearly groaned out loud. And then I looked at him again or something, and I didn’t care what he said. And he’s nice too. I know he’s nice, and he’s got excellent manners, and always gets up when a lady, handsome or not, comes into the room, instead of lounging in his chair as Austell does and all other young men nowadays except a few like Claude who aren’t exactly our sort. And he’s kind and he’s good. Am I in love with him? For heaven’s sake, tell me.”
! Dora paused a moment and then took a cigarette from a box that stood on the mantelpiece, and lit it. She never smoked cigarettes; she only lit them, and the mere fact that she lit one was indicative of extreme absorption in something else.
“You’re engaged, May,” she said, “so you ought to know. Else what is the use of your being engaged. What do you feel when that angel Harry comes into the room?”
May could answer that quite easily.
“Oh, I feel as if it was me coming into the room,” she said. “I feel as if I am not in the room, since you put it like that, unless he is.”
The conversation had been flippant enough up till this moment, though, as a matter of fact, Dora, being inconsequential by nature, often gave the note of flippancy, when she was in earnest. Both of the girls, in any case, were quite serious now. And out of the depth of her twenty years’ wisdom, May proceeded to draw a bucket full for Dora, who was only nineteen.
“Oh, I expect you are in love,” she said. “At least I expect you are feeling as if you were. I understand perfectly about the thrill, though it sounds so dreadfully Family Herald when it is said. But one does thrill. I believe that thrill is a pretty good guide. I don’t usually thrill, in fact I never had thrilled till I saw Harry. But I always thrill at him. I suppose all girls feel the same when they fall in love. I suppose people on bank holidays thrill when they change hats, or eat winkles. We are all common then. At least you may call it common if you choose. I don’t see why you should. It’s IT.”
“You haven’t told me about me,” remarked Dora.
May Thurston shifted her position slightly. It was not done with any idea of manœuvre. She was the least dramatic of girls, and she only shifted because she felt a little uncomfortable. It was new to her also to take the lead. Dora usually strode ahead.
“I can’t advise you about things of that sort,” she said.
“I’m old-fashioned, you see—”
“Oh, are you, darling?” murmured Dora. “Nobody would have guessed it.”
“But I am over things like that, old-fashioned and romantic. I think love in a cottage would be quite ideal, not because a cottage is ideal — I would much sooner not live in one — but because love is. And, oh, Dora, I can just advise you not to marry him unless you are in love with him. I daresay heaps of girls make very nice sensible marriages, where there’s lots of money, and where they each like the other, but you do miss, such a lot by not falling in love. You miss — you miss it all.”
Dora scrutinized her friend for a moment, her head a little on one side, with something of the manner of a bright-eyed thrush listening for the movement of the worm that it hopes to breakfast on.
“But there’s something in your mind, which you are not saying, May,” she remarked. “I can hear it rustling.”
“Yes. There are just two little things that make me wonder whether you are in love with him. The first is you said you were sure he was good! That is no reason at all. You don’t fall in love with a person because he’s good. You esteem and like him — or it’s possible to con
ceive doing so — because he’s good, but you don’t love him for that reason.”
Dora gave a little purr of laughter.
“Oh, May, you are heavenly,” she said. “But surely it’s an advantage if your promesso is good.”
“Oh, certainly, but nobody in love stops to think about that.”
“I see. Well, what is the second thing that makes you wonder?”
May looked at her with her large, serious blue eyes. “What you said about being brought up with a jerk in the middle of your thrill, when he spoke of a handsome lady. As if it mattered! Yet somehow it does to you, or it would not bring you up with a jerk!”
“And you think it doesn’t matter?” asked Dora.
“Of course not if you love him, and if you don’t, in the name of all that is sensible, don’t marry him. That sort of marriage is called sensible, I know. It is really the wildest and most awful risk.”
Dora stared.
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Of course I know, simply because I’m in love with Harry. Fancy being tied to a man for life without that! Gracious, it’s nearly six, and he was to call for me at home at six.”
“Oh, you can keep him waiting ten minutes,” said Dora. “We’ve only just begun to talk about the great point.” May shook her head.
“I could keep him waiting,” she said, “but I couldn’t keep myself. I must go. Darling, I long to hear more, only you see I can’t stop now. Come and see me tomorrow morning. I shall be in till lunch time.”
Dora shrugged her shoulders, not in the least naturally but of design.
“I think it’s a pity to fall in love then, if it makes one so selfish,” she remarked.
“No doubt you are right, darling. Good-bye,” said May.
It was, as May had said, close on six, and in anticipation of Mr. Osborne’s arrival, Dora removed herself from the little fore-and-aft drawing room which looked out in front through two windows on to Eaton Place, and at the back through one on to the little square yard behind the house, and went upstairs to her bedroom, taking the hat with one swan feather fixed in it and the other still unplaced, with her. But even the hat, though in this extraordinarily interesting condition with regard to its trimming, failed at the moment to make good any footing in her mind. It was not that hats were less interesting than before (especially to the maker and wearer) but that during this last month something else had grown infinitely more interesting than anything else had ever been; the standard of interest possible in this world which Dora found so full of enchanting things, had been immeasurably raised. Life hitherto had been brilliantly full of surface brightnesses, but it seemed to her now as if life, the sunlike spirit of life, which shone with so continuous a lustre on her, struck the surface of herself no longer, but penetrated down into depths that she had not yet dreamed of. There, in those depths, so it seemed to her, she sat now, while on the surface, so to speak, there floated all the pleasant and humorous and friendly things of life. The hat she held in her hand floated there, dogs swam about there and flowers sparkled, May Thurston was there and friends innumerable. But as in the exquisite picture of the birth of Eve by Watts, a big photograph of which hung over her bed, it was as if all these were but a skin, a rind which even now was peeling off her, showing beneath the form and the wonder of the woman herself.
She sat in the window seat, and the hot air of the tired afternoon streamed slowly and gently in, just lifting and letting lie again the bright brown of her hair. Outside the hundred noises of the busy town mingled and melted together, and seemed to her to form, even as the blending of all colours forms the apparently colourless white, a general hush and absence of noise. Rousing herself for a moment, and consciously listening, she could detect and name the ingredients of it; there was the sharp clip of horses’ hoofs, the whirr of motors, the chiding of swifts, the agitated chirp of sparrows over some doubtful treasure of the roadway, the tapping of heels on the hot pavement, the cool whisper of cleansing from a water cart, and the noise of news being cried round the comer. But all these were blended together and formed not confused noise but quietness, and from the quietness of her face, and the immobility of her hands which were usually so active, you might have guessed that she was tired or bored, and found this hour pass heavily. But a second glance would have erased so erroneous an impression: there was a smouldering brightness in her eye, and ever and again a little trembling at the comers of her mouth which might develop into a smile, or, equally easily almost, be the precursor of flooded eyes.
For the last month now she had had moods like this, when she dived down from the froth and effervescence of her surface mind and sat below in deep and remote waters. It was not that she had lost the power of living on the surface, for this afternoon with her friend she had been quite completely there, until toward the end of their talk she had felt that she was being beckoned down again and knew that when May left her she would sink into these depths that till lately she had not known existed. Yet the path that had led to them had been quite natural; all her life she had above all things loved beauty, whether of waves or birds or sunsets, or human beings. Thus it was without any sense of a strange or unusual thing happening to her that she had admired frankly and naturally the dark merry face of this young man. He had taken her into dinner once or twice; he had danced with her a half dozen times. And then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, he belonged to the surface of things no longer as far as she was concerned. Something smote at her heart, and the flowers and birds peeled away like rind as from Eve when she was born, and the woman shone within.
And indeed, there was little in all this to wonder at, for in spite of crabbed and cynical proverbs about beauty being only skin-deep, it remains and will remain to those who have eyes themselves, the wand of the enchanter. No doubt the enchantment can be made without the wand, but when eyes are keen, and blood is young, how vastly more easily is the enchantment effected with the aid of that weapon. And Claude to her thinking, before ever she even wondered if she was falling in love with him, was certainly not without the wand. He was dark, a potent colour to her who was so fair; hair nearly black grew low and crisp on the forehead, and eyebrows quite black met above his brown eyes. Then came the lean, smooth oval of his face, a mouth rather full-lipped, and a squarish chin. Often before he spoke, especially if he had, as not infrequently happened, some rather determined remark to make, he jerked his head a little back and put out his chin. It was a gesture of extraordinary decision, and “oh,” said Dora to herself now, as she thought of it, “I do like a man to know his mind.”
The same signs of knowing his mind were visible, too, in his movements. He never strayed about a room, or leaned against anything. If he purposed to stand up, up he stood; if he wished for support he sat down. But as far as Dora had seen, he seldom wished for support; those rather long slim limbs and boyish figure appeared remarkably capable of supporting themselves. He moved quickly and with a certain neatness that was attractive; once — these tiny details were important in making up her impression of him — she had seen him strike a match in a windy place to light his cigarette; one quick stroke had kindled it and his thin brown fingers made a cavern for it, in which it burned unwaveringly as in a room. And he could dance, really dance, not slide about in a crowded ballroom with an avoidance of collision which was really magical, and without — doubtless these things were all of the surface, but they caused the whole image to sink down with her into those depths — without having to mop his face when they stopped, which in general was not before the music stopped.
Suddenly, from the combined quietness of the noises outside, a sound detached itself and made itself very clear to her ear. It was a motor just preparing to start somewhere dose below her in the street, and Dora, feeling instinctively, somehow, that this was significant to her, got up and leaned out of the window. Her instinct was correct enough; a big, short, broad man with an extremely shiny top-hat was just stepping into the big Napier car that stood at her mother’s doo
r. Even as she looked out the chauffeur nipped into his place again, and in answer to the footman’s inquiry she heard Mr. Osborne say “‘Ome” quite distinctly. Then he lifted his shiny hat and carefully wiped the top of his bald head. Upon which Dora had, no doubt in reaction from her really serious half hour of thought, a slight fit of the giggles.
But the giggles soon stopped; they were but of the nature of coming to the surface to breathe, and she was already beginning to sink back toward the depths again, when there came a tap at her door, and her mother entered.
Lady Austell was very tall, and one felt at once that there was not the slightest doubt that she was not a countess; it seemed somehow far too suitable a thing to have really occurred. But in the endless surprises of this world, in which everything unconjecturable happens, and everyone is what he should not be, the ideally fit thing had occurred, and a countess she was in spite of the obviousness of the fact that she must be. That she was dowager was no less easy a guess, for though eighteen years had elapsed since her husband’s death, there was something about her dress, a little strip of crape insertion in the violet of her gown, it may be, or the absence of any jewels except an amethyst cross, or at other times a cap very Dutch and becoming with a ribbon of black in it that sat loosely on her abundant hair, that suggested, though it did not notify, widowhood. These insignia, it must be noted, she did not wear simultaneously, but there was never a day on which one at least of them, or others like them, was not present. No doubt also her manner gave confirmation to the impression conveyed by her dress, for it was one from which all exuberance had departed, though it suggested and reminded you (like a clear sunset) that a brilliant day had preceded it. Her voice also was rather faint and regretful, the voice of a widow with an unsatisfactory son and an unmarried daughter. But those who knew her best had in their minds the very distinct knowledge that it was difficult if not impossible to silence that faint voice, or make it say anything different to what it had already said. Lady Austell, when her views were in conflict with those of others, never said very much, but she never changed her tune, nor indeed ceased faintly chanting it, until the opposition had been borne down by her quiet persistence. As for the regretfulness, of which her gentle accents were full, it may have been composed of grief for the fact that others, not she, would eventually be obliged to yield.