Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Perfectly, and he is charming about it,” said Nadine. “And I practise every morning being in love with him like that. I think I am getting on very well. I dreamed about him last night. I thought he gave me a great box of jade and when I opened it, there was a rabbit inside—”

  “That shows great progress,” said Dodo.

  “Mama, I think you are laughing at me. But what would you have? I am very fond of him, he is handsome and clever and charming. I expected to find it tiresome when he told me he was in love like that, but it is not the least so.”

  Memories of the man she had married when she was even younger than Nadine, came unbidden into Dodo’s mind: she remembered her first husband’s blind, dog-like devotion and her own ennui when he strove to express it, to communicate it to her.

  “Nadine,” she said, “treat it reverently, my dear. There is nothing in the world that a man can give a woman that is to be compared to that. It is better than a rabbit in a jade-box. When I was even younger than you, Papa Jack’s cousin gave it me, and — and I didn’t reverence it. Don’t repeat my irreparable error.”

  “Weren’t you nice to him?” asked Nadine.

  “I was a brute beast to him, my darling.”

  “Oh, I shan’t be a brute beast to Seymour,” said Nadine. “Besides, I don’t suppose you were. You didn’t know: wasn’t that all?”

  Dodo wiped the mist from her eyes.

  “No, that wasn’t nearly all. But be tender with it, and pray, oh, my dear, pray, that you may catch that — that ‘noble fever.’ Who calls it that? It is so true. And Hughie? I never saw him last night.”

  Nadine made a little gesture of despair.

  “Ah, dear Hughie,” she said. “That is not very happy. That is so largely why I wanted to marry Seymour quickly, in January instead of later, so that it may be done, and Hughie will not fret any more. I hate seeing him suffer, and I can’t marry him. It would not be fair: it would be cheating him, as I told him before.”

  “But you are not cheating Seymour?” asked Dodo.

  “Not in the same way. He is not simple, like Hugh. Hugh has only one thought: Seymour has plenty of others. He has such a mind: it is subtle and swift like a woman’s. Hughie has the mind of a great retriever dog, and the eyes of one. There is all the difference in the world between them. Seymour knows what he is in for, and still wants it. Hugh thinks he knows, but he doesn’t. I understand Hugh so well: I know I am right. And I would have given anything to be able to be in love with him. It was a pity!”

  There was something here that Dodo had not known and there was a dangerous sound about it.

  “Do you mean you wish you were in love with him?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes, Mama, but I’m not. I used to practice trying to be for months and months, just as I am practising for Seymour now. La, la, what a world!”

  Nadine paused a moment.

  “Of course I’ve quite stopped practising being in love with Hugh since I was engaged to Seymour,” she said with an air of the most candid virtue. “That would be cheating.”

  Nadine got up looking like a tall white lily.

  “Seymour is so good for me,” she said. “He doesn’t think much of my brain, you know, and I used to think a good deal of it. He doesn’t say I’m stupid, but he hasn’t got the smallest respect for my mind. I am not sure whether he is right, but I expect seeing so much of Hugh made me think I was clever. I wonder if being in love makes people stupid. He himself seems to me to be not quite so subtle as he was, and perhaps it’s my fault. What do you think, Mama?”

  CHAPTER IX

  It was the morning after Christmas Day, and Dodo and Jack had just driven off from Meering on their way to Winston, where a shooting-party was to assemble that day, leaving behind them a party that regretted their departure, but did not mean to repine. Edith Arbuthnot had promised to arrive two days before, to take over from Dodo the duty of chaperone, but she had not yet come, nor had anything whatever been heard of her.

  “Which shows,” said Berts lucidly, “that nothing unpleasant can have happened to mother, or we should have heard.”

  Until she came Nadine had very kindly consented to act as regent, and in that capacity she appeared in the hall a little while after Dodo had gone, with a large red contadina umbrella, a book or two, and an expressed determination to sit out on the hillside till lunch-time.

  “It is boxing-day, I know,” she said, “but it is too warm to box, even if I knew how. The English climate has gone quite mad, and I have told my maid to put my fur coat in a box with those little white balls until May. Now I suppose you are all going to play the foolish game with those other little white balls till lunch.”

  Seymour was seated in the window-sill, stitching busily at a piece of embroidery which Antoinette had started for him.

  “I am going to do nothing of the sort,” he said. “It is much too fine a day to do anything so limited as to play golf. Besides there is no one here fit to play with. Nadine, will you be very kind and ring for my maid? I am getting in a muddle.”

  Berts, who was sitting near him, got up, looking rather ill. Also he resented being told he was not fit to play with.

  “May I have my perambulator, please, Nadine?” he asked.

  Seymour grinned.

  “Berts, you are easier to get a rise out of than any one I ever saw,” he remarked. “It is hardly worth while fishing for you, for you are always on the feed. And if you attempt to rag, I shall prick you with my needle.”

  Nadine lingered a little after the others had gone, and as soon as they were alone Seymour put down his embroidery.

  “May I come and sit on the hillside with you?” he asked. “Or is the — the box-seat already engaged?”

  “Hugh suggested it,” she said. “I was going out with him.”

  Seymour picked up his work again.

  “It seems to me I am behaving rather nicely,” he said. “At the same time I’m not sure that I am not behaving rather anemically. I haven’t seen you much since I came down here. And after all I didn’t come down here to see Esther.”

  Nadine frowned, and laid her hand on his arm. But she did not do it quite instinctively. It was clear she thought it would be appropriate. Certainly that was quite clear to Seymour.

  “Take that hand away,” he said. “You only put it there because it was suitable. You didn’t want to touch me.”

  Nadine removed her hand, as if his coat-sleeve was red-hot.

  “You are rather a brute,” she said.

  “No, I am not, unless it is brutal to tell you what you know already. I repeat that I am behaving rather nicely.”

  It was owing to him to do him justice.

  “I know you are,” she said, “you are behaving very nicely indeed. But it is only for a short time, Seymour. I don’t mean that you won’t always behave nicely, but that there are only a limited number of days on which this particular mode of niceness will be required of you, or be even possible. Hugh is going away next week; after that you and I will be Darby and Joan before he sees me again. You are all behaving nicely: he is too. He just wanted one week more of the old days, when we didn’t think, but only babbled and chattered. I can’t say that he is reviving them with very conspicuous success: he doesn’t babble much, and I am sure he thinks furiously all the time. But he wanted the opportunity: it wasn’t much to give him.”

  “Especially since I pay,” said Seymour quickly.

  He saw the blood leap to Nadine’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I oughtn’t to have said that, though it is quite true. But I pay gladly: you must believe that also. And I’m glad Hugh is behaving nicely, that he doesn’t indulge in — in embarrassing reflections. Also, when does he go away?”

  “Tuesday, I think.”

  “Morning?” asked Seymour hopefully.

  Nadine laughed: he had done that cleverly, making a parody and a farce out of that which a moment before had been quite serious.

  “You deserve it
should be,” she said.

  “Then it is sure to be in the afternoon. Now I’ve finished being spit-fire — I want to ask you something. You haven’t been up to your usual form of futile and clannish conversation. You have been rather plaintive and windy—”

  “Windy?” asked Nadine.

  “Yes, full of sighs, and I should say it was Shakespeare. Are you worrying about anything?”

  She looked up at him with complete candor.

  “Why, of course, about Hughie,” she said. “How should I not?”

  “I don’t care two straws about that,” said Seymour, “as long as your worrying is not connected with me. I mean I am sorry you worry, but I don’t care. Of course you worry about Hugh. I understand that, because I understand what Hugh feels, and one doesn’t like one’s friends feeling like that. But it’s not about — about you and me?”

  Nadine shook her head and Seymour got up.

  “Well, let us all be less plaintive,” he said. “I have been rather plaintive too. I think I shall go and take on that great foolish Berts at golf. He will be plaintive afterwards, but nobody minds what Berts is.”

  Whatever plaintiveness there was about, was certainly not shared by the weather, which, if it was mad, as Nadine had suggested, was possessed by a very genial kind of mania. An octave of spring-like days, with serene suns, and calm seas, and light breezes from the southwest had decreed an oasis in midwinter, warm halcyon days made even in December the snowdrops and aconites to blossom humbly and bravely, and set the birds to busy themselves with sticks and straws as if nesting-time was already here. New grass already sprouted green among the grayness of the older growths, and it seemed almost cynical to doubt that spring was not verily here. Indeed where Hugh and Nadine sat this morning, it was May not March that seemed to have invaded and conquered December; there lay upon the hillside a vernal fragrance that set a stray bee or two buzzing round the honied sweetness of the gorse with which the time of blossoming is never quite over, and to-day all the winds were still, and no breeze stirred in the bare slender birches, or set the spring-like stalks of the heather quivering. Only, very high up in the unplumbed blue of the zenith thin fleecy clouds lay stretched in streamers and combed feathers of white, showing that far above them rivers of air swept headlong and swift.

  Nadine had a favorite nook on this steep hillside below the house, reached by a path that stretched out to the south of the bay. It was a little hollow, russet-colored now with the bracken, of the autumn, and carpeted elsewhere by the short-napped velvet of the turf. Just in front, the cliff plunged sheer down to the beach, where they had so often bathed in the summer, and where the reef of tumbled sandstone rocks stretched out into the waveless sea, like brown amphibious monsters that were fish at high tide and grazing beasts at the ebb. Down there below, a school of gulls hovered and fished with wheelings of white wings, but not a ripple lapped the edges of the rocks. Only the sea breathed softly as in sleep, stirring the fringes of brown weed that had gathered there, but no thinnest line of white showed breaking water. Along the sandy foreshore of the bay there was the same stillness: heaven and earth and ocean lay as if under an enchantment. The sand dunes opposite, and the hills beyond, lay reflected in the sea, as if in the tranquillity of some land-locked lake. There was a spell, a hush over the world, to be broken by God-knew-what gentle awakening of activity, or catastrophic disturbance.

  The two had walked to this withdrawn hollow of the hill almost in silence. He had offered to carry her books for her, but she had said that they were of no weight, and after pause he had announced a fragment of current news to which she had no comment to add, but had noticed the windless, unnatural calm of the day. Something in this unusual stillness of weather had set her nerves a-quiver, and perhaps the position she was in, bound as she was to Seymour, not struggling against it, but quite accepting it, made ordinary intercourse difficult. For she had it all her own way, Hugh was behaving with exemplary discretion, Seymour was behaving with admirable tolerance, and just because they both made her own part so easy for her, she, womanlike, found the smoothed-out performance of it to be difficult. Had she instructed each of them how to behave, her instructions were carried out to the letter’s foot: they were impeccable as lover and rejected lover, and therefore she wanted something different. The situation was completely of her own making: her actors played their parts exactly as she would have them play, and yet there was something wanting. They were too well-drilled, too word-perfect, too certain to say all she had designed for them from the right spot, and in the right voice. True, for a moment just now Seymour had shown signs of individualism when he called attention to the fact that he was behaving very nicely, and that he would be glad when the scene was over, but Hugh had shown none whatever, except for the fact that he had been asked to be allowed a few days like the old days agone before he left England. He had assured her in the summer that he would never seek to get back into the atmosphere of unthinking intimacy again, but, poor fellow, when there were to be so few days left him, before the situation was sealed and made irrevocable, his heart had cried out against the edict of his will and, foolish though it might be, he had asked for this week of Meering days. But from his point of view, no less than from hers, they had been but a parody of what he had hoped for, they had been frozen and congealed by the reserve and restraint that he dared not break. Below that surface-ice, he knew how swiftly ran the torrent in his soul, but the ice quite stretched from shore to shore. It was this which disappointed Nadine: for she equally with Hugh had expected that he could realize the impossible, and that he, loving her as he did and knowing that she was so soon to give herself to another man, could cast off the knowledge of that, and resume for a space the unshackled intimacy of old. The Ethiopian and the leopard would have found their appropriate feats far easier, for it was Hugh’s bones and blood he had to change, not mere skin and hair, and the very strength of the bond that bound him to her made the insuperableness of the barrier. He felt every moment the utter failure of his attempt, while she, who thought she understood him so well, had no notion how radical the failure was. Not loving, she could not understand. He knew that now, and thought bitterly of the little fireworks of words she had once lit for him on that same text, believing that by the light of those quick little squibs, she could read his heart.

  So, when they were settled in their nook, once again she tried to recapture the old ease. She pointed downwards over the edge of the cliff.

  “Oh, Hughie, what a morning,” she said. “Quiet sea and gulls, and bees and gorse. What a summer in December, a truce with winter, isn’t it? I’ve brought a handful of nice books. Shall I read?”

  “Oh, soon,” said he. “But your summer in December isn’t going to last long. There is a wind coming, and a big one. Look at the mare’s-tails of clouds up above. Can’t you smell the wind coming? I always can. And the barometer has dropped nearly an inch since last night.”

  He put back his head and sniffed, moving his nostrils rather like a horse.

  “Oh, how fascinating,” said Nadine. “If I do that shall I smell the wind?”

  It made her sneeze instead.

  “I don’t think much of that,” she said. “I expect you looked at the barometer before you smelt the wind. Besides, how is it possible to smell the wind before there is any wind to smell? And when it comes you feel it instead.”

  “It will be a big storm,” said Hugh.

  Even as he spoke some current of air stirred the surface of the sea below them, shattering the reflections. It was as if some great angel of the air had breathed on the polished mirror of the water, dimming it. Next moment the breath cleared away again, and the surface was as bright and unwavering as before. But some half-dozen of the gulls that had been hovering and chiding there, rose into the higher air, leaving their feeding-ground, and after circling round once or twice, glided away over the sand dunes inland. Almost immediately afterwards, another relay followed, and another, till the bay that had been so populous w
ith birds was quite deserted. They did not pause in their flight, but went straight inland, in decreasing specks of white till they vanished altogether.

  “The gulls seem to think so, too,” said Hugh.

  “Then they are perfectly wrong,” said Nadine. “The instincts Nature implants in animals are almost invariably incorrect. For instance, the Siberian tigers at the Zoo. For several years they never grew winter coats, and all the naturalists went down on their knees and said: ‘O wonderful Mother Nature! their instincts tell them this is a milder climate than Siberia.’ But this winter, the mildest ever known, the poor things have grown the thickest winter coats ever seen. So all the naturalists had to get up again, and dust their trousers where they had knelt down.”

  “Put your money on the gulls and me,” said Hugh. “Look there again, far away along the sands.”

  To Nadine, the most attractive feature about Hugh was his eyes. They had a far-away look in them that had nothing whatever spiritual or sentimental in it, but was simply due to the fact that he had extraordinarily long sight. She obediently screwed up her eyes and followed his direction, but saw nothing whatever of import.

  “It’s getting nearer: you’ll see it soon,” said Hugh.

  Soon she saw. A whirlwind of sand was advancing towards them along the beach below, revolving giddily. As it came nearer they could see the loose pieces of seaweed and jetsam being caught up into it. It came forward in a straight line, perhaps as fast as a man might run, getting taller as it approached and gyrating more violently. Then in its advance it came into collision with the wall of cliff on which they sat, and was shattered. They could hear, like the sound of rain, the sand and rubbish of which it was composed falling upon the rocks.

  “Oh, but did you invent that, Hughie?” she said. “It was quite a pretty trick. Was it a sign to this faithless generation, which is me, that you could smell the wind? Or did the gulls do it? Prophesy to me again!”