Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “And I want it so frightfully,” she said. “It is a pity I don’t know what it is. Because then I should probably get it. One gets what one wants if one wants enough.”

  “A convenient theory,” he said, “and if you don’t get it, you account for it by saying you didn’t want it enough. I don’t think it’s true. In any case the converse isn’t; one gets a quantity of things which one doesn’t want in the least. Whereas you ought not to get, on the same theory, the things you passionately desire not to have.”

  Nadine finished her sugar and lit a cigarette.

  “Oh, don’t upset every theory,” she said. “I am really rather serious about it.”

  He regarded her with his head on one side for a moment. “What has happened is that somebody has asked you to do something, and you have refused. You are salving your conscience by saying that he doesn’t want it enough, or you would not have refused.”

  She laughed.

  “You are really rather uncanny sometimes,” she said.

  “Only a guess,” he said.

  “Guess again then: define,” she said.

  “The obvious suggestion is that Hugh has proposed to you again.”

  “You would have been burned as a witch two hundred years ago,” said she. “I should have contributed fagots. Oh, Seymour, that was really why I came to see you. I didn’t care two straws about the foolish lace. They all tell me I had better marry Hugh, and I wanted to find somebody to agree with me. I hoped perhaps you might. He is such a dear, you know, and I should always have my own way: I could always convince him I was right.”

  “Most girls would consider that an advantage.”

  “In that case I am not like most girls; I often wish I was. I wrote an article a month or two ago about Tolstoi, and read it him, and he thought it quite wonderful. Well, it wasn’t. It was silly rot: I wrote it, and so of course I know. It came out in a magazine.”

  “I read it,” remarked Seymour in a strictly neutral voice.

  “Well, wasn’t it very poor stuff?” asked Nadine.

  “To be quite accurate,” said Seymour, “I only read some of it. I thought it very poor indeed. If was ignorant and affected.”

  Nadine gave him an approving smile.

  “There you are then! And with Hugh it would be the same in everything else. He would always think what I did was quite wonderful. They say love is blind, don’t they? So much the worse for love. It seems to me a very poor sort of thing if in order to love anybody you must lose, with regard to her, any power of mind and judgment that you may happen to possess. I don’t want to be loved like that. I want people to sing my praises with understanding, and sit on my defects also with discretion. If I was perfectly blind too, I suppose it would be quite ideal to marry him. But I’m not, and I’m not even sure that I wish I was. Again if Hugh was perfectly critical about me, it would be quite ideal. It seems to me you must have the same quality of love on both sides, or at any rate the same quality of affection. People make charming marriages without any love at all, if they have affection and esteem and respect for each other.”

  They had gone back to the drawing-room and Seymour was handing pieces of his most precious jade to Nadine, who looked at them absently and then gave them back to him, with the same incuriousness as people give tickets to be punched by the collector. This Seymour bore with equanimity, for Nadine was interesting on her own account, and he did not care whether she looked at his jade or not. But at this moment he screamed loudly, for she put a little round medallion of exquisitely carved yellow jade up to her mouth, as if to bite it.

  “Oh, Seymour, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t attending to your jade, which is quite lovely, and subconsciously this piece appeared like a biscuit. Tell me, do you like jade better than anything else? It is part of a larger question, which is: ‘Do you like things better than people?’ Personally I like people so far more than anything else in the world, but I don’t like any particular person nearly as much. I like them in groups I suppose. If I married at all, I should probably be a polyandrist. Certainly if I could marry four or five people at once, I should marry them all. But I don’t want to marry any one of them.”

  Seymour put the priceless biscuit back into its cabinet.

  “Who,” he asked, “are this quartette of fortunate swains?”

  “Well, Hugh of course would be one,” said she, “and I think Berts would be another. And if it won’t be a shock to you, you would be the third, and Jack the R. would be the fourth. I should then have a variety of interests: this would be the world and the flesh and the devil, and a saint.”

  “St. Seymour,” said he, as if trying how it sounded, like a Liberal peer selecting his title.

  “I am afraid you are cast for the devil,” said Nadine candidly. “Berts is the world because he thinks he is cynical. And Jack is the flesh—”

  “Because he is so thin?”

  “Partly. But also because he is so rich.”

  Seymour turned the key on his jade. This interested him much more. But he had to make further inquiries.

  “If every girl wanted four husbands,” he said, “there wouldn’t be enough men to go round.”

  “Round what?” asked Nadine, still entirely absorbed in what she was thinking.

  “Round the marriageable females. Or does your plan include poly-womany, whatever the word is, for men?”

  “But of course. There are such lots of bachelors who would marry if they could have two or three wives, just as there are such lots of girls who would marry if they could have two or three husbands. All those laws about ‘one man, one wife’ were made by ordinary people for ordinary people. And ordinary people are in the majority. There ought to be a small county set apart for ridiculous people, with a rabbit fence all round it, and any one who could be certified to be ridiculous in his tastes should be allowed to go and live there unmolested. That would be much better than your plan of going to the Sahara with Antoinette. You would have to get five householders to certify you as ridiculous, in order to obtain admission. Then you would do what you chose within the rabbit fence, but when you wanted to be what they call sensible again you would come out, and be bound to behave like anybody else, as long as you were out, under penalty of not being admitted again.”

  Seymour considered this.

  “There’s a lot in it,” he said, “and there would be a lot of people in the rabbit fence. I should go there to-morrow and never come out at all. But a smaller county would be no use. I should start with Kent, not Rutlandshire, and be prepared to migrate to Yorkshire. I accept the position of one of your husbands.”

  “That is sweet of you. I think—”

  He interrupted.

  “I shall have some more wives,” he said. “I should like a lunch wife and a dinner wife. I want to see a certain kind of person from about mid-day till tea-time.”

  “Is that a hint that it is time for me to go?” asked Nadine.

  “Nearly. Don’t interrupt. But then, if one is not in love with anybody at all, as you are not, and as I am not, you want a perfectly different kind of person in the evening. To be allowed only one wife, has evolved a very tiresome type of woman; a woman who is like a general servant, and can, so to speak, wait at table, cook a little, and make beds. You look for somebody who, on the whole, suits you. It is like buying a reach-me-down suit, which I have never done. It probably fits pretty well. But if it is to be worn every day until you die, it must fit absolutely. If it doesn’t, there are fifty other suits that would do as well.”

  “Translate,” said Nadine.

  “Surely there is no need. What I mean is that occasionally two people are ideally fitted. But the fit only occurs intermittently: it is not common. Short of that, as long as people don’t blow their noses wrong, or walk badly, or admire Carlo Dolci, or fail to admire Bach, so long, in fact, as they do not have impossible tastes, any phalanx of a thousand men can marry a similar phalanx of a thousand women, and be as happy, the one with the other, as w
ith any other permutation or combination of the thousand. There is a high, big, tremulous, romantic attachment possible, and it occasionally occurs. Short of that, with the limitation about Carlo Dolci and Bach, anybody would be as happy with anybody else, as anybody would be with anybody. We are all on a level, except the highest of all, and the lowest of all. Life, not death, is the leveler!”

  “Still life is as bad as still death,” said she.

  Seymour groaned and waved his hands.

  “You deserve a good scolding, Nadine, for saying a foolish thing like that,” he said. “You are not with your Philistines now. There is not Esther here to tell you how marvelous you are, nor Berts to wave his great legs and say you are like the moon coming out of the clouds over the sea. I am not in the least impressed by a little juggling with words such as they think clever. It isn’t clever: it is a sort of parrot-talk. You open your mouth and say something that sounds paradoxical and they all hunt about to find some sense in it, and think they do.”

  Seymour got up and began walking up and down the room with his little short-stepped, waggling walk. “It is the most amazing thing to me,” he said, “that you, who have got brains, should be content to score absurd little successes with your dreadful clan, who have the most ordinary intelligences. I love your Philistines, but I cannot bear that they should think they are clever. They are stupid, and though stupid people are excellent in their way, they become trying when they think they are wise. You are not made wise by bathing all day in the silly salt sea, and reading a book—”

  “How did you know?” asked Nadine.

  “I didn’t: it is merely the sort of thing I imagine you do at Meering. Aunt Dodo is different: there is no rot about Aunt Dodo, nor is there about Hugh. But Esther, my poor sister, and the beautiful Berts!”

  Nadine took up the cudgels for the clan.

  “Ah, you are quite wrong,” she said. “You do us no justice at all. We are eager, we are, really: we want to learn, we think it waste of time to spend all day and night at parties and balls. We are critical, and want to know how and why. Seymour, I wish we saw more of you. Whenever I am with you, I feel like a pencil being sharpened. I can make fine marks afterwards.”

  “Keep them for the clan,” he said. “No, I can’t stand the clan, nor could they possibly stand me. When Esther squirms and says, ‘O Nadine, how wonderful you are,’ I want to be sick, and when I wave my hands and talk in a high voice as I frequently do, I can see Berts turning pale with the desire to kill me. Poor Berts! Once I took his arm and he shuddered at my baleful touch. I must remember to do it again. Really, I don’t think I can be one of your husbands if Berts is to be another.”

  “Very well: I’ll leave out Berts,” said she.

  “This is almost equivalent to a proposal,” said Seymour in some alarm.

  She laughed.

  “I won’t press it,” she said. “And now I must go. Thanks for sharpening me, my dear, though you have done it rather roughly. I am going down to Meering again to-morrow: London is a mere rabble of colonels and colonials. Come down if you feel inclined.”

  “God forbid!” said Seymour piously.

  Nadine had spent some time with him, but long after she had gone something of her seemed to linger in his room. Some subtle aroma of her, too fine to be purely physical, still haunted the room, and the sound of her detached crisp speech echoed in the chambers of his brain. He had never known a girl so variable in her moods: on one day she would talk nothing but the most arrant nonsense; on another, as to-day, there mingled with it something extraordinarily tender and wistful; on a third day she would be an impetuous scholar; on the fourth she threw herself heart and soul (if she had a heart) into the gay froth of this London life. Indeed “moods” seemed to be too superficial a word to describe her aspects: it was as if three or four different personalities were lodged in that slim body or directed affairs from the cool brain in that small poised head. It would be scarcely necessary to marry other wives, according to their scheme, if Nadine was one of them, for it was impossible to tell even from minute to minute with which of her you were about to converse, or which of her was coming down to dinner. But all these personalities had the same vivid quality, the same exuberance of vitality, and in whatever character she appeared she was like some swiftly acting tonic, that braced you up and, unlike mere alcoholic stimulant, was not followed by a reaction. She often irritated him, but she never resented the expression of his impatience, and above all things she was never dull. And for once Seymour left incomplete the dusting of the precious jade, and tried to imagine what it would be like to have Nadine always here. He did not succeed in imagining it with any great vividness, but it must be remembered that this was the first time he had ever tried to imagine anything of the kind.

  Edith had left Meering with Dodo two days before and was going to spend a week with her in town since she was rather tired of her own house. But she had seen out of the railway-carriage window on the north coast of Wales, so attractive-looking a golf-links, that she had got out with Berts at the next station, to have a day or two golfing. The obdurate guard had refused to take their labeled luggage out, and it was whirled on to London to be sent back by Dodo on arrival. But Edith declared that it gave her a sense of freedom to have no luggage, and she spent two charming days there, and had arrived in London only this afternoon. She had gone straight to Dodo’s house, and had found Jack with her and then learned the news of their engagement which had taken place only the day before. Upon which she sprang up and remorselessly kissed both Dodo and Jack.

  “I can’t help it if you don’t like it,” she said; “but that’s what I feel like. Of course it ought to have happened more than twenty years ago, and it would have saved you both a great deal of bother. Dodo, I haven’t been so pleased since my mass was performed at the Queen’s Hall. You must get married at once, and must have some children. It will be like living your life all over again without any of those fatal mistakes, Dodo. Jack — I shall call you Jack now — Jack, you have been more wonderfully faithful than anybody I ever heard of. You have seen all along what Dodo was, without being put off by what she did—”

  Dodo screamed with laughter.

  “Are these meant to be congratulations?” she said. “It is the very oddest way to congratulate a man on his engagement, by telling him that he is so wise to overlook his future wife’s past. It is also so pleasant for me.”

  Edith was still shaking hands with them both, as if to see whether their hands were fixtures or would come off if violently agitated.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “It is useless my pretending to approve of most things you have done: it is useless for Jack also. But he marries the essential you, not a parcel of actions.”

  Jack kept saying “Thanks awfully” at intervals, like a minute gun, and trying to get his hand away. Eventually Edith released it.

  “I am delighted with you both,” she said. “And to think that only a fortnight ago I was still not on speaking terms with you, Dodo. And Jack wasn’t either. I love having rows with people if I know things are going to come straight afterwards, because then you love them more than ever. And I knew that some time I should have to make it up with you, Dodo, though if I was Jack I don’t think I could have forgiven — well, you don’t wish me to go on about that. Anyhow, you are ducks, and I shall leave the young couple alone, and have a wash and brush-up. I have been playing golf quite superbly.”

  Edith banged the door behind her, and they heard her shrilly whistling as she went off down the passages.

  Then Dodo turned to Jack.

  “Jack, dear, I thought I should burst when Edith kissed you,” she said. “You half shut your eyes and screwed up your face like a dog that is just going to be whipped. But I love Edith. Now come and sit here and talk. I have hardly seen you, since — well, since we settled that we should see a good deal more of each other in the future. I want you to tell me, oh, such lots of things. How often a month on the average have you thought
about me during all these years? Jack, dear, I want to be wanted, so much.”

  “You have always been wanted by me,” he said. “It is more a question of how many minutes in the month I haven’t thought about you. They are easily counted.”

  He sat down on the sofa by her, as her hand indicated.

  “Dodo,” he said, “I don’t make demands of you, except that you should be yourself. But I do want that. We are all made differently: if we were not the world would be a very stupidly simple affair. And you must know that in one respect anyhow I am appallingly simple. I have never cared for any woman except you. That is the fact. Let us have it out between us just once. I have never worn my heart on my sleeve, for any woman to pluck at, and carry away a mouthful of. There are no bits missing, I assure you. It is all there, and it is all yours. It is in no way the worse for wear, because it has had no wear. I feel as if—”

  Jack paused a moment: he knew the meaning of his thought, but found it not so easy to make expression of it.

  “I feel as if I had been sitting all my life at a window in my heart,” he said, “looking out, and waiting for you to come by. But you had to come by alone. You came by once with my cousin. You came by a second time with Waldenech. You were bored the first time, you were frightened the second time. But you were not alone. I believe you are alone now: I believe you look up to my window. Ah, how stupid all language is! As if you looked up to it!”

  Dodo was really moved, and when she spoke her voice was unsteady.

  “I do look up to it, Jack,” she said. “Oh, my dear, how the world would laugh at the idea of a woman already twice married, having romance still in front of her. But there is romance, Jack. You see — you see you have run through my life just as a string runs through a necklace of pearls or beads: beads perhaps is better — yet I don’t know. Chesterford gave me pearls, all the pearls. A necklace of pearls before swine shall we say? I was swine, if you understand. But you always ran through it all, which sounds as if I meant you were a spendthrift, but you know what I do mean. Really I wonder if anybody ever made a worse mess of her life than I have done, and found it so beautifully cleaned up in the middle. But there you were — I ought to have married you originally: I ought to have married you unoriginally. But I never trusted my heart. You might easily tell me that I hadn’t got one, but I had. I daresay it was a very little one, so little that I thought it didn’t matter. I suppose I was like the man who swore something or other on the crucifix, and when he broke his oath, he said the crucifix was such a small one.”