Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “I do that to relax my mind,” said Nadine. “Berts is quite right. Nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the negative of sense, just as sugar is the negative of salt. To get non-salt with your egg, you must eat sugar with it, not only abstain from salt.”

  “You will get a remarkably nasty taste,” remarked John.

  “Dear John, nobody ever wronged you so much as to suggest that you would like nonsense. When was Leonardo born? And how old was he when he died? And how many golden crowns did Francis of France give him for the ‘Gioconda’? Your mind is full of interesting facts. That is why you are so tedious. You are like the sand they used to put on letters, which instantly made it dry.”

  Berts got up.

  “We will go and bathe again,” he said, “and John shall remain on the beach and look older than the rocks he sits among. The rocks by the way are old red sandstone. They will blossom as the rose when Granite John sits among them. His is the head on which all the beginnings of the world have come, and he is never weary. Dear me, if I was not a teetotaller I should imagine I was drunk. I think it is the sea. What a heavenly time the man who stole the ‘Gioconda’ must have had. He just took it away. I can imagine him going to the Abbey at the Coronation, and taking away the King’s crown. There is genius, and it is also nonsense. It is pure nonsense to imagine going to the Louvre and taking ‘la Gioconda’ away.”

  “I wonder what he has done with it,” said Nadine. “I think he must be a jig-saw puzzle maniac, and have felt compelled to cut it up. Probably the Louvre will receive bits of it by registered post. The nose will come, and then some rocks, and then a rather weary eyelid. I think John stole it: he was absorbed in jig-saw puzzles all morning. Now that seems to me nonsense.”

  “Wrong again,” said Berts. “When it is put together it is sense. If people cut up the pictures and then threw the bits away, it might be nonsense. But they keep the pieces and these become the picture again.”

  “The process of cutting it up is nonsense,” said Nadine.

  “Yes, and the process of putting it together is nonsense,” said Esther.

  “And the two make sense,” said Berts. “Let’s go and bathe. Nadine, take down some proper book, and read to us in the intervals.”

  “‘Pride and Prej?’” said Nadine.

  “Oh, do you think so? Not good for the sea-shore. Why not ‘Poems and Ballads’?”

  “John will be shocked,” said Nadine.

  “Not at all. He will be old red sandstone. I know Aunt Dodo has a copy. I think Mr. Swinburne gave it her,” said Esther.

  “She may value it,” said Nadine. “And it may fall into the sea.”

  “Not if you are careful. Besides, that would be rather suitable. Swinburne loved the sea, and also understood it. I think his spirit would like it, if a copy was drowned.”

  “But Mama’s spirit wouldn’t,” said Nadine.

  On the moment of her mentioned name Dodo appeared at the long window of the drawing-room that opened upon the lawn. Simultaneously there was heard the buzz of a motor-car stopping at the front door just round the corner.

  “Oh, all you darlings,” said Dodo, in the style of the ‘Omnia opera,’ “are you going to bathe, or have you bathed? Berts, dear, we know that above the knee comes the thigh, without your showing us. Surely there are bigger dressing-gowns somewhere? Of course it does not matter: don’t bother, and you’ve got beautiful legs, Berts.”

  “Aren’t they lovely?” said Esther. “They ought to be put in plaster of Paris.”

  “But if you have bathed, why not dress?” said Dodo; “and if you haven’t, why undress at present?”

  “Oh, but it’s both,” said Berts, “and so is Esther. We have bathed, and are going to do it again, as soon as we’ve eaten enough tea.”

  Dodo looked appreciatively round.

  “You refreshing children!” she said. “If I bathed directly after tea I should turn blue and green like a bruise. I have wasted all afternoon in looking at a box of novels from Melland’s. I don’t know what has happened to the novelists: their only object seems to tell you about utterly dull and sordid people. There is no longer any vitality in them: they are like leaders in the papers, full of reliable information. One instance shocked me: the heroine in ‘No. 11 Lambeth Walk’ went to Birmingham by a train that left Euston at 2:30 p. m. and her ticket cost nine shillings and twopence halfpenny. An awful misgiving seized me that it was all true and I rang for an A.B.C. and looked out Birmingham. It was so: there was a train at that hour and the tickets cost exactly that.”

  “How wretched!” said Nadine in a pained voice.

  “Darling, don’t take it too much to heart. And one of those novels was about Home Rule and another about Soap, and another about Tariff Reform, and a fourth about Christianity, which was absolutely convincing. But one doesn’t go to a novel in order to learn Christianity, or soap-making. One reads novels in order to be entertained and escape from real life into the society of imaginary and fiery people. Another one—”

  Dodo stopped suddenly, as a man came out of the drawing-room window. Then she held both her hands out.

  “Ah, Jack,” she said. “Welcome, welcome!”

  A very kind face, grizzled as to the hair and mustache, looked down on her from its great height, a face that was wonderfully patient and reasonable and trustworthy. Jack Chesterford wore his years well, but he wore them all; he did not look to be on the summer side of forty-five. He was spare still: life had not made him the unwilling recipient of the most voluminous and ironic of its burdens, obesity, but his movements were rather slow and deliberate, as if he was tired of the senseless repetition of the days. But there seemed to be no irritation mingled with his fatigue: he but yawned and smiled, and turned over fresh pages.

  But at the moment, as he stood there with both Dodo’s hands in his, there was no appearance of weariness, and indeed it would have been a man of dough who remained uninspired by the extraordinary perfection and cordiality of her greeting. It was almost as if she welcomed a lover: it was quite as if she welcomed the best of friends long absent. That she had thought out the manner of her salutation, said nothing against its genuineness, but she could have welcomed him quite as genuinely in other modes. She had thought indeed of putting pathos, penitence, and shamefacedness into her greeting: she could with real emotion to endorse it have just raised her eyes to his and let them fall again, as if conscious of the need of forgiveness. Or (with perhaps a little less genuineness) she could have adopted the matronly and ‘too late’ attitude; but this would have been less genuine because she did not feel at all matronly, or think that it was in the least ‘too late.’ But warm and unmixed cordiality, with no consciousness of things behind, was perhaps the most genuine and least complicated of all welcomes, and she gave it.

  She did not hold his hands more than a second or two, for Nadine and others claimed them. But after a few minutes he and Dodo were alone again together, for Jack declined the invitation to join the bathers, on the plea of senility and feeling cold like David. Then when the noise of their laughter and talk had faded seawards, he dropped the trivialities that till now had engaged them, and turned to her.

  “I have been a long time coming, Dodo,” he said. “Indeed, I meant never to come at all. But I could not help it. I do not think I need explain either why I stopped away or why I have come now.”

  Apart from the perfectly authentic pleasure that Dodo felt in seeing her old friend again, there went through her a thrill of delight at Jack’s implication of what she was to him. She loved to have that power over a man; she loved to know how potent over him still was the spell she wielded. In days gone by she had not behaved well to him; it would be truer to acknowledge that she had behaved just as outrageously as was possible for anybody not a pure-bred fiend. But he had come back. It was unnecessary to explain why.

  And then suddenly with the rush of old memories revived, memories of his unfailing loyalty to her, his generosity, his unwearying loving-kindn
ess, her eyes grew dim, and her hands caught his again.

  “Jack dear,” she said, “I want to say one thing. I am sorry for all I did, for my — my treachery, my — my damnedness. I was frightened: I have no other excuse. And, my dear, I have been punished. But I tell you, that what hurts most is your coming here — your forgiveness.”

  She had not meant to say any of this; it all belonged to one of the welcomes of him which she had rejected. But the impulse was not to be resisted.

  “It is so,” she said with mouth that quivered.

  “Wipe it all out, Dodo,” he said. “We start again to-day.”

  Dodo’s power of rallying from perfectly sincere attacks of emotion was absolutely amazing and quite unimpaired. Only for five seconds more did her gravity linger.

  “Dear old Jack,” she said. “It is good to see you. Oh, Jack, the gray hairs. What a lot, but they become you, and you look just as kind and big as ever. I used to think it would be so dreadful when we were all over forty, but I like it quite immensely, and the young generation are such ducks, and I am not the least envious of them. But aren’t some of them weird? I wonder if we were as weird; I was always weirdish, I suppose, and I’m too old to change now. But I’ve still got one defect, though you would hardly believe it: I can’t get enough into the day, and I haven’t learned how to be in two places at once. But I have just had three telephone lines put into my house in town. Even that isn’t absolutely satisfactory, because the idea was to talk to three people at once, and I quite forgot that I hadn’t three ears. I really ought to have been one of the people in the Central Exchange, who give you the wrong number. You must feel really in the swim, if you are the go-between of everybody who wants to talk to everybody else; but I should want to talk to them all. Have you had tea? Yes? Then let us go down to the sea, because I must have a bathe before dinner. — Oh, by the way, Edith is coming to-night. I have not seen her yet. You and she were the remnant of the old guard who wouldn’t surrender, Jack, but went on sullenly firing your muskets at me. I forgot Mrs. Vivian, but her ear-trumpet seems to make her matter less.”

  They went together across the lawn, which that morning had been so sweetly bird-haunted, and down the steep hillside that led across the sand-dunes to the sea. Here a mile of sands was framed between two bold headlands that plunged steeply into the sea, and Jack and Dodo walked along the firm, shining beach towards the huge boulders which had in some remote cataclysm been toppled down from the cliff, and formed the rocks than which John was so much older. Like brown amphibious sheep with fleeces of seaweed they lay grazing on the sands, and dotted about in the water, and from the end of them a long reef of cruel-forked rocks jutted out a couple of hundred yards into the sea. Higher up on the beach were more monstrous fragments, as big as cottages, behind which the processes of dressing and undressing of bathers could discreetly and invisibly proceed. Dodo had forgotten about this and talking rapidly was just about to advance round one of them when an agonized trio of male voices warned her what sight would meet her outraged eyes. The tide was nearly at its lowest and but a little way out, at the side of the reef, these rocks ended altogether, giving place to the wrinkled sand, and in among them were delectable rock-pools with torpid strawberry-looking anemones, and sideways-scuttling crabs with a perfect passion for self-effacement, which, if effacement was impossible, turned themselves into wide-pincered grotesques, and tried to make themselves look tall. Bertie and Esther who were already prepared for the bathe were pursuing marine excavations in one of these, and Dodo ecstatically pulled off her shoes and stockings, one of which fell into the rock-pool in question.

  “Oh, Jack, if you won’t bathe you might at least paddle,” she said. “Berts, do you see that very red-faced anemone? Isn’t it like Nadine’s maid? Esther, do take care. There’s an enormous crab crept under the seaweed by your foot. Don’t let it pinch you, darling: isn’t cancer the Latin for crab? It might give you cancer if it pinched you. Here are the rest of them: I must go and put on my bathing-dress. It’s in the tent. I put up a tent for these children, Jack, at great expense, and they none of them ever use it. Nadine, are you going to read to us all in the water? Do wait till I come. What book is it? ‘Poems and Ballads?’ And so suspiciously like the copy Mr. Swinburne gave me. Don’t drop it into the water more often than is necessary. You shall read us ‘Dolores, our Lady of Pain,’ as we step on sharp rocks and are pinched by crabs. How Mr. Swinburne would have liked to know that we read his poems as we bathed. And there’s that other delicious one ‘Swallow, my Sister, oh, Sister Swallow.’ It sounds at first as if his sister was a pill, and he had to swallow her. Jack, dear, you make me talk nonsense, somehow. Come up with me as far as the tent, and while I get ready you shall converse politely from outside. It is so dull undressing without anybody to talk to.”

  Jack, though cordially invited to take part in the usual Symposium in Nadine’s room that night at bed-time, preferred to go to his own, though he had no intention of going to bed. He wanted to think, to ascertain how he felt. He imagined that this would be a complicated process; instead he found it extraordinarily simple. That there were plenty of things to think about was perfectly true, but they all faced one way, so to speak, one dominant emotion inspired them all. He was as much in love with Dodo as ever. He did not, because he could not, consider how cruelly she had wronged him: all that she had done was but a rush-light in the mid-day sun of what she was. He was amazed at his stupidity in letting a day, not to speak of a year, elapse without seeing her since she was free again; it had been a wanton waste of twelve golden months to do so. Often during these last two years, he had almost fancied himself in love with Nadine; now he saw so clearly why. It was because in face and corporal presence no less than in mind she reminded him so often of what Dodo had been like. She reproduced something of Dodo’s inimitable charm: But now that he saw the two together how utterly had the image of Nadine faded from his heart. In his affection, in his appreciation of her beauty and vitality she was still exactly where she was, but out of the book of love her name had been quite blotted out. Blotted out, too, were the years of his anger and the scars of a bleeding heart, and years of indignant suffering. But he had never let them take entire possession of him: in his immense soul there had ever been alight the still, secret flame that no winds or tempests could make to flicker. And to-day, at the sight of her, that flame had shot up again, a beacon that reached to heaven.

  Hard work had helped him all these years to keep his nature unsoured. His great estates were managed with a care and consideration for those who lived on his land, unequaled in England, and politically he had made for himself a name universally respected for the absolute integrity of which it was the guarantee. But all that, so it seemed to him now, had been his employment, not his life. His life, all these years, had lain like some enchanted and sleeping entity, waiting for the spell that would awaken it again. Now the spell had been spoken.

  For a moment his thought paused, wondering at itself. It seemed incredible that he should be so weak, so wax-like. Yet that seemed to matter not at all. He might be weak or wax-like, or anything else that a man should not be, but the point was that he was alive again.

  For a little he let himself drift back upon the surface of things. He had passed a perfectly amazing evening. Edith Arbuthnot had arrived, bringing with her a violinist, a viola-player and a ‘cellist, but neither maid nor luggage. Her luggage, except her golf-clubs and a chest containing music (as she was only coming for a few days) was certainly lost, but she was not sure whether her maid had ever meant to come, for she could not remember seeing her at the station. So the violinist had her maid’s room and the viola-player and ‘cellist, young and guttural Germans, had quarters found for them in the village, since Dodo’s cottage was completely crammed. But they had given positively the first performance of Edith’s new quartette, and at the end the violinist had ceremoniously crowned her with a wreath of laurels which he had picked from the shrubbery before dinner. Then they wen
t into wild ecstasies of homage; and drank more beer than would have been thought possible, while Edith talked German even more remarkably than Dodo, and much louder. With her laurel wreath tilted rakishly over one ear, a mug of beer in her hand, and wearing an exceedingly smart dinner-gown belonging to Dodo, and rather large walking-boots of her own, since nobody else’s shoes would fit her, she presented so astounding a spectacle, that Jack had unexpectedly been seized with a fury of inextinguishable laughter, and had to go outside followed by Dodo who patted him on the back. When they returned, Edith was lecturing about the music they had just heard. Apparently it was impossible to grasp it all at one hearing, while it was obviously essential that they must all grasp it without delay. In consequence it was performed all over again, while she conducted with her wreath on. There was more homage and more beer. Then they had had charades by Dodo and Edith, and Edith sang a long song of her own composition with an immense trill on the last note but one, which was ‘Shake’; and her band played a quantity of Siegfried, while Dodo with a long white beard made of cotton-wool was Wotan, and Edith truculently broke her walking-stick, and that was ‘Spear,’ and they did whatever they could remember out of Macbeth, which wasn’t much, but which was ‘Shakespeare.’

  It was all intensely silly, but Jack knew that he had not laughed so much during all those years which to-night had rolled away.

  Then he left the surface and dived down into his heart again.... There was no question of forgiving Dodo for the way in which she had treated him: the idea of forgiveness was as foreign to the whole question as it would have been to forgive the barometer for going down and presaging rain. It couldn’t help it: it was like that. But in stormy weather and fine, in tempest and in the clear shining after rain, he loved Dodo. What his chances were he could not at present consider, for his whole soul was absorbed in the one emotion.