Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

The large Indian gong had already boomed through the house, announcing that lunch was ready, and next moment Mr. Osborne came into her “boudoir,” announcing that he was ready too. Venetian habit still lingered with him.

  “Well, lunch is pronto, my lady,” he said, “but you’re busy yet, and still at the plan of campaign for the summer. But in your plan of campaign don’t forget the commissariat; and here’s your lieutenant Marie come to tell you that my lady is served. Balls, concerts, dinners; dinners, balls, concerts; my lady is a regular Whiteley to the élite: she gives them all there’s to be had. You’ll be pauperizing the dukes and duchesses, my dear; they’ll be thinking of nothing but the amusements you provide for them.”

  Mrs. Osborne was not without the rudiments of diplomacy, though, it may be remarked, nothing in the least advanced in that line was necessary with her husband. Still it was better that, if possible, he should suggest Dora and Claude coming to them than that she should. She laughed dutifully at Mr. O.’s joke about the dukes and duchesses, and proceeded.

  “I had a note from Dora this morning,” she said, as they sat down.

  “Bless her heart,” said Mr. Osborne parenthetically. “For what we are going to receive, my lady.”

  “Amen, my dear. There’s some of that rice with bits of chicken in it as I got the recipe of from Pietro, and I could fancy a bit myself. Well, she wrote and said she was very well, and she’d seen — she’d been to call in Harley Street.”

  Mr. Osborne again interrupted.

  “And was anything said about September?” he asked.

  “There was some mention of September. And there was something else, too. Oh yes, she finds that pokey little flat in Mount Street hotter than Venice, she says.”

  “Well, then, why don’t she and Claude take a cab round to No. 92, and let the luggage follow?” said Mr. Osborne rather hotly. “Claude’s not got a grain of sense: he should have thought of it long ago, if Dora feels it stuffy and hot there, and suggested their installing themselves there, cool and comfortable. Bless the boy, all the same. But after I’ve had my lunch I’ll get one end of the telephone and him the other, and see if you don’t hear the front door slam and them drive away to Park Lane before I’ve lit my cigar. That’ll suit you, my lady, will it? You’ll like to have them dear children in the house, I know.”

  “Bless them, let them come,” said Mrs. Osborne, “and the longer they stop the better I shall be pleased. Dora will be a help too: she will help me with the dinners and what not.”

  The two were alone on this their last day at Grote, but all six wasp-coloured footmen marshalled by Thoresby formed a sort of frieze round the table, occasionally changing a plate or handling a dish. Generous though he was with money, Mr. Osborne had very distinct notions about getting his money’s worth when he had paid it, and since the house required six footmen he saw no reason why they should not all wait at table, even when only he and Mrs. O. were having their lunch. Nor was the number of dishes curtailed because they were alone; Mr. Osborne always ate of them all, and because there was “no company” that was no reason why he should go starved. It was not, therefore, for nearly an hour after the time they sat down that he went to the telephone — so accurately depicted by Sabincourt — and rang up Claude.

  He joined Mrs. Osborne on the terrace a minute or two afterwards.

  “Claude’s willing enough, and thank you,” he said, “but he says he must speak to Dora first. So you’d better telephone to 92, my lady, and tell them to make ready whatever rooms you think right. Give them a nice sitting-room, my dear, so that they can feel independent.”

  “Better hear from Dora first,” said Mrs. Osborne. “Just as you please; but when the girl says as the flat in Mount Street is hot and stuffy, and there’s the coolest house in London waiting for her just round the comer, I don’t see there’s much call to wait. Well, my lady, I must be off. There’s a committee been sitting in the Lords on the Bill about the Employers’ Liability Act, and I must get all they’ve talked about at my fingers’ ends. Who knows, but Mrs. O., but that I’ll be able to tell them a thing or two in that chamber before the summer’s out? It’s a strange thing to me how clever men, such as have taken degrees and fellowships at Oxford, should have so little common sense on other matters. As if there wasn’t a difference between one sort of risk and another, and they want to lump them all on to the employer. I doubt most of them Liberals are either Socialists or afraid of the Socialists. But there! the noble lords have had a committee and I must see what’s been said and done.”

  “Just to think of it! And have you got any idea about your new name yet?”

  “No, I daresay something will suggest itself. After all, I shall smell as sweet by any other name, hey?”

  “Lor’, my dear,” said Mrs. Osborne with a slight accent of reproof; for Thoresby had come to see if there were any orders, and must have heard.

  The question, however, about this move of Dora and Claude to Park Lane was not so foregone a conclusion as Mr. Osborne had anticipated. Claude had gone to the telephone when he was rung up, and came back beaming to tell Dora of this delightful offer.

  “Dad and the mater invite us to go to Park Lane till the end of July,” he said. “I’m blowed if there are many fathers who would want a son and daughter-in-law in the house all the time. Of course I said that I must consult you first; that was only proper.”

  “Oh, Claude,” said she, “of course it’s awfully kind. But, but do you think so?”

  “But why not? It’s just like the governor to have guessed that we should feel stuffy and cramped in the flat during this hot weather.”

  Dora remembered her letter.

  “I’m afraid I may be responsible for that,” she said. “At least I wrote to your mother yesterday saying it was very hot and airless here. Oh dear, I hope she won’t think I hinted at this.”

  “Not she. You don’t catch her imputing motives, specially when there weren’t any. She’s got more to think about than that. I say, Dora, are you sure you didn’t have that in your mind? Awfully sharp of you if you did.”

  Dora resented this; indignant that he could have supposed her capable of it, and a little of this indignation coloured her words.

  “I’m afraid that I can’t lay claim to sharpness,” she said, “because the fact is that if I had thought such an offer was possible, I should have said it was cool and airy here.”

  Claude’s profile was outlined against the hot, hard blue of the sky outside, and Dora noticed how perfect it was. But she noticed it in some detached sort of way; it did not seem to concern her. At this he turned round, and came across the room to her.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” he said. “Why is it you don’t want to go?”

  “Oh, Claude, if you don’t see, you wouldn’t understand if I explained,” she said. “And I can’t quite explain, either.”

  “Try,” he said.

  “Well, I married you, do you see, and you are master of the house, and I’m mistress, and it isn’t quite the same thing if we go and live with other people. They are angelic, of course, to suggest it. But oh, I wish people wouldn’t be quite so kind — or, rather, that they would mix a little tact with their kindness. They’ve made it hard to refuse, telephoning like that. It’s — it’s like a word-of-mouth invitation for a month ahead. You’ve got to say ‘Yes.’”

  Claude took up a rather listless hand of hers that lay on the arm of her chair.

  “Ah, then I do understand,” he said, “and I love your reasons. I guessed it before you said it; you want to be alone with me. Well, it’s the same here. But I’ve no doubt they’ll give us a sitting room and all that.” Though Dora had meant something very like that, it sounded rather dreadful to hear Claude say it, and say also that he had guessed. He oughtn’t to have guessed, although he assured her it was “the same here.” There was an unconscious complacency about his guessing that she did not like. But he went on without pause.

  “As for its being tactless,” he said
, “I think you’re rather hard on the governor. When a man’s as kind as he can be, and as devoted as he is to you, I don’t think you should say that.”

  Claude stuck out his chin a little over this, and Dora, though she knew he was right from his point of view, knew that she had been right too. Kindness, even the most sincere, can easily be embarrassing: it needs refining, like sugar. But that was the sort of thing that Claude could not understand: the tact of good nature had been left out of him just as it had been left out of his father. So her reply was sincere.

  “Yes, dear; it was a pity I said that,” she said.

  But somehow the admission was bitter; the truth was that it was a pity to say it, because she ought to have been more careful in what she said to him, not because the impulse that prompted her speech was a mistaken one. But all that was unconjectured by him.

  “My darling,” he said, “you are so sweet with me. If I have to criticise anything you do, you never take it amiss. And now I’ll tell you another reason why I think we had better go, apart from the comfort and convenience of it. It is that I don’t think the mater is very strong, for all that she eats so heartily. She gets very easily tired, and she’s laid down a programme for the next six weeks which might well knock anybody out. Now it would be awfully good of you if you would help her with it.”

  That appealed to Dora much more.

  “Oh, then, let’s go, let’s go,” she said. “Telephone at once. No, I think I will. I think Dad would like me to.”

  “You think of everything,” he said. “I hoped you would think of that. He’ll be so pleased at your telephoning. ‘8003 Lewes,’ you know.”

  Claude had a meeting at Brentwood that afternoon and had to leave immediately, taking a cab to the station and the train from there, so that Dora might use the motor if she wished. He felt that this was a perfectly natural and ordinary thing to do, but at the same time he had to tell her he had done it.

  “It takes but a very little longer,” he said in answer to her urging him to take the motor himself, “and a walk from the station at the other end will do me good. I wish I was going to prowl about with you all afternoon. But men must work, you know. Though when I come back I hope I shan’t find that you’ve been weeping. But you wouldn’t like your ‘Claudius Imperator’ to be a drone. Good-bye, my darling; I shall be back in time to dine and take you to the play.”

  He lingered a moment still.

  “If you haven’t got anything special to do, you might go down to Richmond and have tea with Uncle Alf,” he said. “He’d like it, and you haven’t seen him for some time.”

  “Yes, I’ll go by all means,” she said.

  “Thanks dear. You see, after all, he gives us fifteen thou, a year.”

  Dora ordered the motor, and set off on her drive to Richmond at once. The day was exceedingly hot, and the reverberation of the sun from the grilling pavements struck like a blow when she went out. A languid, airless wind raised stinging grit from the wood pavements, and the reek of the streets hung heavy in the air. She longed with an aching sense of physical want for the soft, dustless atmosphere of Venice, the cluck and ripple of its green waterways, and with no less an ache and thirst of the spirit for all that those things had once symbolized to her. Yet this last visit had not been the rapturous success of the one before. Venice was there unchanged, with the gold mist of romance that Claude had woven for her about it, but he, the magical weaver, or she, the woman for whom it had been woven, had altered somehow, and perhaps even in the enchanted city a certain vague but growing trouble that was in her mind would not be completely dissipated. In general outline she knew what it was, but hitherto she had not focussed her vision on it. But now she felt that it had better be examined, for it cried out to her from the darkness of her mind where she had been at pains to hide it. Perhaps on examination it might prove to be imagination only, to have no real existence except in her own mind. And the trouble was Claude.

  It seemed to her ages ago, though in point of fact it was still scarcely twelve months, that she had told May Franklin that sometimes he said things that gave her a check. But it seemed almost longer ago, though it was only a few weeks, that she had sat alone one afternoon, when Claude was at Milan meeting his father and mother, and registered the fact that he again gave her checks. Between those two occasions lay romance, a golden dream, an experience which, common though it may be in this world of men and women, was none the less marvellous, miraculous. He, his love for her, and her love for him, had lifted life out of the levels on which it had hitherto moved, had made of it a winged and iridescent thing, which had soared many-coloured into sunlight and moonlight. And that marvel, the enchantment of it, had seemed to her then to be a thing indestructible and eternal. While she was she, and while Claude was Claude, it could never change, nor shed one feather from its rainbow wings. Often had she whispered to him, or he to her: “It will be like this for ever”; more often had the tense silence testified with greater authority than any voice, even his. In those months whatever her senses perceived was glorified: she looked at the world through the radiance of love.

  That conviction that their romance would last for ever was part of the divine madness of love: she saw that now clearly enough. She who had believed that they, and they alone, were different from all others, had not been truly sane when she believed it: she had been living in a world, real no doubt while it existed, yet not only capable of being extinguished but doomed to extinction. Once, before their marriage, she had talked to Claude about what she called “the gray-business” of life, and he, she remembered, had given the gray-business a “facer,” to use his words, by pointing to the example of his father and mother. That had seemed to Dora, already ripening for romance, to fall very short of the reply she wanted. She had wanted lover’s nonsense which would assure her that for them romance could never fade. But it had faded: it always faded. The question now was concerned with what was left. Did even the consolation of Claude’s “facer” remain to her? Had she, to put her part of it baldly and brutally, got as great an admiration, respect, and affection for her husband as Mrs. Osborne had for hers? She knew she had not.

  To-day she could look undazzled at the materials out of which her romance had been constructed and analyse them. It was made of her passion for beauty. She had fallen in love with his good looks. And she was getting used to them: she had got used to them. What else was there? What was left to learn, now she had that by heart?

  There was a great deal left. So she told herself, but without emotion. There was his character left, which was sterling; his qualities, which were excellent; his kindness, his safeness, his — to go to purely material things — his wealth. And his vulgarity.

  The word was coined: her thought for the first time definitely allowed it to pass into currency, and she had to reckon with it.

  What a topsy-turvy affair it had been! How strikingly different a disposition from that which she had contemplated had come about! She had told herself that she must for ever be in love with that beautiful face, that slim, active body, those deft, decided movements; and she had told herself that his vulgarities were things of no moment, things to which she would swiftly get used. But events had been evolved otherwise. She was used to his beauty; his vulgarities were cumulative in their effect on her; instead of getting used to them she was daily more irritated by them and — more ashamed of them. She had imagined even that it would be easy to cure them, to eradicate them. But it proved to be a task like that of emptying a spring with a teacup. She had thought that they lay, so to speak, like casual water on the surface of the ground, a mere puddle that the sun would swiftly drink up. It was not so; they sprang from his nature, and came welling up bubbling and plenteous and inexhaustible.

  And there was something about them, so it seemed to her now, that tinged and made unpalatable all the good qualities in which he was so rich. You could draw a gallon of pure fresh kindness from that well-spring which was inexhaustible, but even before you had time to p
ut your lips to it, and drink of it, some drop — quite a little drop — would trickle in from the source of his vulgarity and taint it all. It was even worse than that; there was a permanent leak from the one into the other, the kindness was tainted at the source.

  Dora did not indulge in these reflections from any spirit of idle criticism or morbid dissection. She wanted to see how they stood, how bad things were, and what chance there was of their righting themselves. They were no longer mere surface vulgarities in him (or so she believed) that got on her nerves: she no longer particularly minded whether he said “handsome lady” or not; what she did mind was the impulse that prompted him, for instance, to suggest that she might go down and see Uncle Alf because he gave them “fifteen thou.” a year. She minded his saying he had guessed the reason why she did not want to establish herself in Park Lane; namely, because she wanted to be alone with him. She minded the suggestion that she had written to say the flat was stuffy, in order to be asked there. It was all common, common; he judged her by impossible standards, standards that were inconceivable. And yet all the time he was good, he was kind, he had all the qualities that should make her love him, make her devotion an imperishable thing. As it was, they had been married scarcely six months, and already she knew that at times he so got on to her nerves that she could have screamed. Already, as she began to look closely at these things, she felt she was glad they were going to Park Lane; she was glad that limitations were placed on her being alone with him.

  It was a little cooler out of town, and Richmond Park was in the full luxuriance of its summer beauty. They had entered by the Roehampton Gate; she had still half an hour to spare before the time she had said she would be at Uncle Alfred’s, and she directed her driver to turn up to the left, past the White Lodge, and go round by Robin Hood Gate and Kingston Gate. A delicious smell of greenness and coolness came from the noble groves of trees, beneath the clear shade of which, knee-deep in the varnished green of the young bracken, stood herds of fallow deer with twitching ears and switching tails, warding off the persistence of the flies. All the sweet forest sights and sounds were there: the air was full of the buzz of insects, and hidden birds called to each other from among the branches. Distantly on the right she could see gleams of water, where the Pen Ponds lay basking in the sunlight, and the flush of mauve and red from the great rhododendron thickets above them. All the triumph of summer time was there; all the joy of the ripeness and maturity of the year, of the kindled and immortal vitality of the world. But for herself, though every day brought nearer to her the miracle of motherhood, it seemed as if summer had stopped.