Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Her degenerate daughter finished her sigh.

  “Go on about your horrible family,” she said to Nadine. “I think it’s so illustrious of you to see them as they are.”

  The door opened without any premonitory knock, and Tommy Freshfield entered with a large black cigar in his mouth. He was rather short, and had the misfortune to look extremely dissipated, whereas he was hopelessly, almost pathetically, incapable of anything approaching dissipation. He put down his bedroom candle and lay down on the bed next Esther Sturgis.

  “Have you been comforting Hughie?” she asked.

  “Yes, until he went to play billiards with the Bish-dean. He used to be a bishop but subsequently became a dean. I think Aunt Dodo believes he is a bishop still. Lots of bishops do it now, he told me; it is the same as putting a carriage-horse out to grass: there is no work, but less corn. Hughie’s coming up here when he’s finished his game.”

  The appreciative Esther sat up.

  “It’s too wonderful of him,” she said. “Nadine, Hugh is coming up here soon. Do be nice to him.”

  Nadine sat up also.

  “Of course,” she said. “Hughie has such tact, and I love him for it. Berts has none: he would sulk if I had just refused to marry him and very likely would not speak to me till next day.”

  “You haven’t had the chance to refuse me yet,” remarked Berts.

  “That is mere scoring for the sake of scoring, Berts darling,” said she. “But Hugh—”

  “O Nadine, I wish you would marry him,” said Esther. “It would make you so gorgeously complete and golden. Did you refuse him absolutely? Or would you rather not talk about it?”

  Nadine turned a little sideways on the bed.

  “No, we will not talk of it,” she said. “What else were we saying? Ah, my family! Yes, it is a wonder that I am not a horror. Daddy is the pick of the bunch, but such a bunch, mon Dieu, such wild flowers; and poor Daddy always gets a little drunk in the evening now; and to-night he was so more than a little. But he is such an original! Fancy his coming to stay with Mama here only a year after she divorced him. I think it is too sweet of her to let him come, and too sweet of him to suggest it. She is so remembering, too: she ordered him his particular brandy, without which he is never comfortable, and it is most expensive, as well as being strong. Well, that’s Daddy: then there are my uncles: such histories. Uncle Josef murdered a groom (there is no doubt whatever about it) who tried to blackmail him. I think he was quite right; and I daresay the groom was quite right, but it is a horrible thing to blackmail; it is a cleaner thing to kill. Then there is Uncle Anthony who ought to have been divorced like Daddy, but he was so mean and careful and sly that they could do nothing with him. There was never anything careful about Daddy.”

  She was ticking off these agreeable relations on her white fingers.

  “Then Grandpapa Waldenech committed suicide,” she said, “and Grandpapa Vane fell into a cauldron at his own iron-works and was utterly burnt. So ridiculous; they could not even bury him, there was nothing left, except the thick smoke, and they had to open the windows. Then the aunts. There was Aunt Lispeth who kept nothing but white rats in her house in Vienna, hundreds and hundreds there were, the place crawled with them. Daddy could not go near it: he was afraid of their not being real, whereas I was afraid because they were real. Then there is Aunt Eleanor who stole many of Daddy’s gold snuff-boxes and said the Emperor had given them her. Of course it was a long time before she was ever suspected, for she was always going to church when she was not stealing; she made quite a collection. Aunt Julia is more modern: she only cares about the music of Strauss and appendicitis.”

  Berts gave a sympathetic wriggle.

  “I had appendicitis twice,” he said, “which was enough, and I went to Electra once which was too much. How often did Aunt Julia have appendicitis?”

  “She never had it,” said Nadine. “That is why she is so devoted to it, an ideal she never attains. It is about the only thing she has never had, and the rest fatigue her. But she always goes to the opera whenever there is Strauss, because she cannot sleep afterwards, and so lies awake and thinks about appendicitis. I go to the opera too, whenever there is not Strauss, in order to think about Hugh.”

  “And then you refuse him?”

  “Yes, but we will not talk of it. There is nothing to explain. He is like that delicious ginger-beer I drank at dinner in stone bottles. You can’t explain! It is ginger-beer. So is Hugh.”

  “I had a bottle of it too,” said Bertie. “More than one, I think. I hate wine. Wine is only fit for old women who want bucking up. There’s an old man in the village at home who’s ninety-five, and he never touched wine all his life.”

  “That proves nothing,” said Nadine. “If he had drunk wine he might have been a hundred by now. But I like wine: perhaps I shall take after Daddy.”

  A long ash off Tommy Freshfield’s cigar here fell into Esther’s camomile tea. It fizzed agreeably as it was quenched, and she looked enquiringly into the glass.

  “Oh, that’s really dear of you, Tommy,” she said. “I can’t drink any more. John always insists upon my taking a glass of it to go to bed with.”

  “Your brother John is a prig, perhaps the biggest,” said Nadine.

  Esther reached out across Tommy, who did not offer his assistance and put down her glass on the small table at the head of the bed.

  “I hope there’s no doubt of that,” she said. “John would be very much upset if he thought he wasn’t considered a prig. He is a snob too, which is so frightfully Victorian, and thinks about lineage. Of course he takes after mother. I found him reading Debrett once.”

  “What is that?” asked Nadine.

  “Oh, a red book about peers and baronets,” said Esther rather vaguely. “You can look yourself up, and learn all about yourself, and see who you are.”

  “Poor John!” said Nadine. “He had his camomile tea brought into the drawing-room to-night while he was talking to the bishop about Gothic architecture and the, well — the state of Piccadilly. He was asking if confirmation was found to have a great hold on the masses. The bishop didn’t seem to have the slightest idea.”

  “John would make that all right,” said his sister. “He would tell him. Nadine, why does darling Aunt Dodo so often have a bishop staying with her?”

  Nadine sighed.

  “Nobody really understands Mama except me,” she said. “I thought perhaps you did, Esther, but it is clear you don’t. She is religious, that’s why. Just as artistic people like artists in their house, so religious people like bishops. I don’t say that bishops are better than other people, any more than R.A.’s are finer artists, but they are recognized professionals. It is so: you may think I am laughing or mocking. But I am not. Give me more pillow, and Berts, take your face a little further from my feet. Or I shall kick it, if I get excited again, without intending to, but it will hurt you just the same.”

  Bertie followed this counsel of commonsense.

  “That seems a simple explanation,” he said.

  Esther frowned; she was not quite so well satisfied.

  “But is darling Aunt Dodo quite as religious when a bishop doesn’t happen to be here?” she asked. “I mean does she always have family prayers?”

  “No, not always, nor do you go to your slums if there is anything very amusing elsewhere.”

  “But what have they got to do with religion?” asked Bertie.

  “Haven’t they something to do with it? I thought they had. I know Esther looks good when she has been to the slums; though of course, it’s quite delicious of her to go. Still if it makes you feel good, it isn’t wholly unselfish. There is nothing so pleasant as feeling good. I felt good the day before yesterday. But after all there are exactly as many ways of being religious as there are people in the world. No one means quite the same. I feel religious if I drive home just at dawn after a ball when all the streets are clean and empty and pearl-colored. Darling Daddy feels religious when he
doesn’t eat meat on Thursday or Friday, whichever it is, and he has his immediate reward because he has the most delicious things instead — truffles stuffed with mushrooms or mushrooms stuffed with truffles. Also he drinks a good deal of wine that day, because you may drink what you like, and he likes tremendously. He has a particular chef for the days of meager, who has to sit and think for six days like the creation, and then work instead.”

  Nadine gurgled again.

  “I suppose I shock you all,” she said; “but English people are so unexpected about getting shocked that it is no use being careful. But they don’t get shocked at what they do or say themselves. Whatever they do themselves they know must be all right, and they take hands and sing ‘Rule Britannia.’ They are the enfant terrible of Europe. They put their big stupid feet into everything and when they have spoiled it all, so that nobody cares for it any longer, they ask why people are vexed with them! And then they go and play golf. I am getting very English myself. Except when I talk fast you would not know I was not English.”

  Esther, since her camomile tea was quite spoiled, took a cigarette instead, which she liked better.

  “Well, darling, you know every now and then you are a shade foreign,” she said. “Especially when you talk about nationalities. As a nation I believe you positively loathe us. But that doesn’t matter. It’s he and she who matter, not they.”

  Bertie had sat up at the mention of golf and was talking to Tommy.

  “Yes, I won at the seventeenth,” he said. “I took it in three. Two smacks and one put.”

  “Gosh,” said Tommy.

  “I wish I hadn’t mentioned that damned game,” said Nadine very distinctly. “You will talk about golf now till morning.”

  “Yes, but you needn’t. Go on about Daddy,” said Esther.

  “Certainly he is more interesting than golf, and gets into just as many holes. He is a creature of Nature. He falls in love every year, when the hounds of spring—”

  A chorus interrupted her.

  “Are on winter’s traces, the mother of months—”

  “Oh, ripping!” said Bertie.

  “Yes. How chic to have written that and to have lived at Putney,” said Nadine. “Mama once took me to see Mr. Swinburne and told me to kiss his hand as soon as ever I got into the room. So when we got in, there was one little old man there, and I kissed his hand; but it was not Mr. Swinburne at all, but somebody quite different.”

  Again the door opened, and a woman entered, tall, beautiful, vital. There was no mistaking her. The others had not been lacking in vitality before, but she brought in with her a far more abundant measure. She was forty-five, perhaps, but clearly her age was the last thing to be thought about with regard to her. You could as well wonder what was the age of a sunlit wave breaking on the shore, or of a wind that blew from the sea. Everybody sat up at once.

  “Mama darling, come here,” said Nadine, “and talk to us.”

  Princess Waldenech looked round her largely and brilliantly.

  “I thought I should find you all here,” she said. “Nadine dear, of course you know best, but is it usual for a girl to have two young gentlemen lying about with her on one bed? I suppose it must be, since you all do it. Are they all going to bed here? Have they brought their tooth-brushes and nighties? Berts, is that you, Berts? Really one can hardly see for the smoke, but after all this used to be the smoking-room, and I suppose it has formed the habit. Berts, you fiend, you made me laugh at dinner just when Bishop Spenser was telling me about the crisis of faith he went through when he was a young man so that he nearly became a Buddhist instead of a bishop. Or do Buddhists have bishops, too? Wasn’t it dreadful? He’s a dear, and he gives all his money away to endow other bishops, both black and white — like chess. Of course he isn’t a bishop any more, but only a dean, but he keeps his Bible like one. Hugh is playing billiards with him now, and told me in a whisper that he marked three for every cannon he made. Of course Hughie couldn’t tell him it only counted two. It would have seemed unkind. Hugh has such tact.”

  “What I was saying,” said Nadine. “Mama, he proposed to me again this evening, and I said ‘no’ as usual. Is he depressed?”

  “No, dear, not in the least except about the cannons. Probably you will say ‘yes,’ sometime. And I want a cigarette and something to drink, and to be amused for exactly half an hour, when I shall take myself to pieces and go to bed. I hate going to bed and it adds to the depression to know that I shall have to get up again. If only I could be a Christian Scientist I should know that there is no such thing as a bed, and that therefore you can’t go there. On the other hand that would be fatiguing I suppose.”

  Tommy gave her a cigarette, and Nadine fetched her mother her bedroom bottle of water out of which she drank freely, having refused camomile tea with cigar ash in it.

  “Too delicious!” she said. “Nadine darling, do marry Hugh before you are twenty-two. Nowadays if girls don’t marry before that they take a flat or something and read at the British Museum till they are thirty and have got spectacles, without even getting compromised—”

  “Compromised? Of course not,” cried Nadine. “You can’t get compromised now. There is no such thing as compromise. We die in the ditch sooner, like poor Lord Halsbury. Being compromised was purely a Victorian sort of decoration like — like crinolines. Oh, do tell us about those delicious Victorian days about 1890 when you were a girl and people thought you fast and were shocked.”

  “My dear, you wouldn’t believe it,” said Dodo; “you would think I was describing what happened in Noah’s Ark. Bertie and Tommy, for instance, would never have been allowed to come and lie on your bed.”

  “Oh, why not?” asked Esther.

  “Because you and Nadine are girls and they are boys. That sounds simple nonsense, doesn’t it? Also because to a certain extent boys and girls then did as older people told them to, and older people would have told them to go away. You see we used to listen to older people because they were older; now you don’t listen to them, for identically the same reason. We thought they were bores and obeyed them; you are perfectly sweet to them, but they have learned never to tell you to do anything. You would never do what I told you, dear, unless you wanted to.”

  “No, Mama, I suppose not. But I always do what you tell me, as it is, because you always tell me to do exactly what I want to.”

  Dodo laughed.

  “Yes, that is just what education means now. And how nicely we get along. Nobody is shocked now, in consequence, which is much better for them. You can die of shock, so doctors say, without any other injury at all. So it is clearly wise not to be shocked. I was shocked once, when I was eight years old, because I was taken to the dentist without being told. I was told that I was to go for an ordinary walk with my sister Maud. And then, before I knew where I was, there was my mouth open as far as my uvula, and a dreadful man with a mirror and pincers was looking at my teeth. I lost my trust in human honor, which I have since then regained. I think Maud was more shocked than me. I think it conduced to her death. You didn’t remember Auntie Maud, Nadine, did you? You were so little and she was so unrememberable. Yes; a quantity of worsted work. But that’s why I always want the bishop to come whenever he can.”

  “I don’t see why, even now,” said Nadine.

  “Darling, aren’t you rather slow? Bishop Spenser, you know, who was Auntie Maud’s husband. Surely you’ve heard me call him Algie. Who ever called a bishop by his Christian name unless he was a relation? Maud knew him when he was a curate. She fluffed herself up in him, just as she used to do in her worsted, and nobody ever saw her any more. But I loved Maud, and I don’t think she ever knew it. Some people don’t know you love them unless you tell them so, and it is so silly to tell your sister that you love her. I never say I love you, either, and I don’t say I love Esther, and that silly Berts, and serious Tommy. But what’s the use of you all unless you know it? Nadine, ring the bell, please. It all looks as if we were going to talk, and I had
no dinner to speak of, because I was being anxious about Daddy. I thought he was going to talk Hungarian; he looked as if he was, and so I got anxious, because he only talks Hungarian when he is what people call very much on. Certainly he wasn’t off to-night; he is off to-morrow. And so I want food. If I am being anxious I want food immediately afterwards, as soon as the anxiety is removed. At least I suppose Daddy has gone to bed. You haven’t got him here, have you? Fancy me being as old as any two of you. You are all so delightful, that you mustn’t put me on the shelf yet. But just think! I was nice the other day to Berts’ sister, and she told her mother she had got a new friend, who was quite old. ‘Not so old as Grannie,’ she said, ‘but quite old!’ And all the time I thought we were being girls together. At least I thought I was; I thought she was rather middle-aged. How is your mother, Berts? She doesn’t approve of me, but I hope she is quite well.”

  Bertie also was a nephew by affection.

  “Aunt Dodo,” he said, “I think mother is too silly for anything.”

  “I knew something was coming,” said Dodo; “what’s she done now?”

  “Well, it is. She said she thought you were heartless.”

  “Silly ass,” said Esther. “Go on, Berts.”

  Berts felt goaded.

  “Of course mother is a silly ass,” he said. “It’s no use telling me that. Your mother is a silly ass, too, with her coronets and all that sort of fudge. But altogether there is very little to be said for people over forty, except Aunt Dodo.”

  “Beloved Berts,” remarked Dodo. “Go on about Edith.”

  “But it is so. They’re all antiques except you, battered antiques. Let’s talk about mothers generally. Look at Esther’s mother. She doesn’t want me to marry Esther because my father is only an ordinary Mister. There’s a reason! And I don’t want to marry Esther because her mother is a marchioness. After all, mine has done more than hers, who never did anything except cut William the Conqueror when he came over, and tell him he was of very poor, new family. But my mother wrote the ‘Dods Symphony’ for instance. She’s something; she was Edith Staines, and when she has her songs sung at the Queen’s Hall, she goes and conducts them.”