by E. F. Benson
There was a faint stir and rattle of crockery in the room below, which implied that the parlour-maid was removing her father’s tea. Helena knew all the noises of the house, down to the gurgling sound of tooth-cleaning that came from her father’s bedroom, which showed that he was nearly dressed, and now, correctly interpreting the chink of plate and tea-cup, she was certain of finding him in his study with his after-tea cigar. Very likely Jessie had gone there too; for she often took the evening paper in to her father and read him the news, and Helena hoped that this was the case to-day. She could let Jessie know the event of the afternoon with less embarrassment if there was somebody else present. She could tell her father about it much more easily than she could tell Jessie alone. She would sit close to him, and whisper and hide her head… her sense of drama would make it all quite simple.
She fastened one of the cream-coloured roses that Archie had brought her into the front of her dress and went down to her father’s room. It was a stale little apartment, dry and brown and smoked like a kippered herring, furnished chiefly with books and files and decorated with the produce of oriental bazaars, spears and shells and things suggestive of mummies. He was in a big basket chair close to the window, and in the window-seat, as she had hoped, sat Jessie, with the evening paper.
Helena had not forgotten that she had sent a message to him that she had a headache, and to Jessie that a friend had come to see her with a wish for a private conversation. She made these little plans quickly perhaps but always coolly, and remembered them afterwards. Sometimes a little delicate adjustment was necessary, but she seldom got caught out…
“Darling daddy,” she said, “may I pay you a little visit? Or are you and Jessie engrossed in something I shan’t understand?”
“No, come in, dear,” said he. “How’s the headache?”
She hovered for a moment like some bright bird, and then perched herself on the arm of his chair, between him and her sister.
“It’s quite gone, ever so many thanks,” she said. “I think I must have had a little snooze just before tea, which took it away. And then, as I told Jessie, somebody came here especially to have a little talk to me. Daddy, how delicious your cigar smells!”
“And who was you visitor?” he asked.
“Lord Harlow,” said she very softly, and paused.
Jessie had put down her paper, and Helena could feel that she was listening in tense expectation. She did not look round, but firmly laid her hand on Jessie’s clasping it. The other she tucked into her father’s arm, and leaned her head against his shoulder.
“Daddy, I had a long talk to him,” she said, “and he is coming here again to-morrow morning. At least, he did the talking, and I only spoke when he had said what he had come to say. Oh, my dear, I am so happy, so awfully, awfully happy.”
Helena felt that she had done that quite beautifully. If she had thought about it for ever so long, she could not have improved on it. A few boisterous ejaculations from her father followed, and, finding that Jessie had disengaged her hand, she completed the circle round her father’s arm. Then presently she rose, with smiling and suffused face, just kissed him, and left the room.
“Well, I’m sure that’s the best bit of news I’ve heard for a long time,” he said. “Certainly he is a good deal older than she, but there’s no harm in that. I was twenty years older than your mother, Jessie. And what do you think of it all?”
“I think Helena will be very happy,” said Jessie.
“So do I, and I’m sure she deserves to be. If she’s as kind and loving to her husband as she has been to her father, we shan’t hear any complaints. Dear me! What a bit of news!”
He was silent a moment.
“How we old folk get out of touch with young people!” he said. “If I had been told to guess who it was who would ask Helena to be his wife, I should have said it was Archie. Didn’t you think that Archie was very fond of her?”
Mixed with Jessie’s misery for Archie’s sake, and with her bitter contempt for her sister, was a pity for Helena, as deep as the sea, that she could be what she was. She could wear the roses Archie had sent her, and not be burned alive by them…
“I never though that Helena really cared for him,” she said quietly.
“No? Well, you were more clear-sighted than I. But I fancy Marion thought so too. He’s dining with us to-night, isn’t he? Or will Helena put him off? And are we to say anything to him about it?”
“I expect Helena will tell us what she wishes,” said Jessie.
He laughed.
“No doubt she will. She — what’s the phrase? — she pulls the strings in this piece, doesn’t she? Bless me, it’s after six o’clock. We might go across the bridge and have a stoll in Battersea Park. I expect Helena will like to be left alone. Yes; what is it?”
The parlour-maid had come in, with the request that Colonel Vautier would go to see Helena for a minute now, or some time before dinner. Accordingly he went upstairs, in high good humour, stumbling on the carpet-rods.
“Oh, daddy, how sweet of you to come to me at once!” she said. “Archie’s dining here to-night, and I think I will tell him my news myself. He’s such a dear; it would hurt him to hear it from anybody else.”
Colonel Vautier felt that he had perhaps not been so wrong after all.
“Yes, my dear, that is kind and thoughtful of you,” he said.
“So I’ll tell him as soon as he gets here,” said she. “Will you and Jessie be very kind and let me have two minutes with him?”
Helena’s eyes wandered away a minute, and returned rather dewy to her father’s face.
“Perhaps you would tell Jessie for me,” she said.
She opened her eyes very wide, in a sort of childlike bewilderment.
“I wonder why Jessie is so cold to me,” she said. “I must have vexed her somehow without meaning it. I feel sad about it. She did not say one word when I told you and her my news; she did not kiss me…”
“Jessie is never very demonstrative,” said her father, intending to speak to Jessie about this.
“No; perhaps that’s all. Thank you ever so much, daddy.”
She watched them going out together, and thought what a pity it was that some people were so frank as to say that others revolted them, even though they apologized afterwards. It never paid to be coarse and rude like that…
Helena, according to her plan, was in the drawing-room among his roses when Archie arrived.
“It was delicious of you to send them,” she said. “And I’ve got — something for you.”
“Hurrah!” said Archie. “What is it?”
She had put a half sovereign and a half-crown on the corner of the mantel-piece, and handed it to him.
“A tip?” he said.
“No; a bet. I am poor but honest.”
He looked at the money.
“Twelve and six?” he said. “When did you bet me twelve-and-six?”
Helena came a step closer to him. Even in the middle of London there was something of sea-wind and open spaces about Archie.
“Oh, you stupid boy!” she said. “How many half-crowns is that?”
Suddenly Archie remembered the wager he had made with her one morning in the Park, that Lord Harlow would propose to her before the end of the season. He pocketed the money with a shout of laughter.
“Ha! I knew I should win,” he said, “but it wasn’t nice of me to laugh. I take back the laugh. Poor old Bradshaw! Did he mind much?”
Helena looked at him, still standing close to him, smiling and in silence. She really found him most attractive at that moment, and she wondered with how changed a face he would presently look at her.
“Yes, he proposed to me this afternoon,” she said, still smiling, and still looking at him.
“Well, poor old Bradshaw!” said Archie once more. But he did not say it with quite the same confidence.
She laid her hand, that soft hand with sheathed claws, on his arm.
“Archie, are
n’t you going to wish me happiness?” she asked.
The lines of his laughter still lingered on his handsome mouth, but now they were merely stamped there and meant nothing.
“Wish you happiness?” he rapped out in a hard snappish voice.
“Yes; isn’t it usual between friends?”
“Do you mean you’ve accepted him?” he asked.
“Yes, my dear. Haven’t I told you?”
“Is it a joke?” he asked. “Shall I laugh?”
Helena moved a little away from him, and rang the bell. Archie looked so strange. She had expected something far more moving and dramatic than this wooden immobility.
“Tell Colonel Vautier and Miss Jessie that Lord Davidstow has come,” she said to the parlour-maid.
Archie said nothing till the door had closed again. He felt that he was made of wood, that everything was made of wood, he and Helena and the roses he had sent, and the Persian rug on which he stood. And when he spoke, it was as if a machine in his mouth said the words which had nothing whatever to do with him.
“I congratulate you,” he said. “I hope you will be very happy.”
Colonel Vautier entered; he had been to the cellar to get out a bottle of champagne in which to drink the health of Helena and the man she had chosen.
“Good evening, my dear Archie,” he said. “I know Helena has told you her news.”
Archie shook hands, and then his eyes went back to Helena again. She had never looked more entrancingly pretty, but she was made of wood. And then Jessie came in; they were all there, and dinner was ready, and down they went. In this wooden world, everything went on in precisely the same way as it had done when people were made of flesh and blood. Some cunning mechanical contrivance enabled them to talk and smile and eat: food tasted the same and so did the champagne in which presently they drank Helena’s health. It was the same prickly, bubbly stuff, with a little sting in it, that he so seldom drank. But it unfroze the surface of the stricture that bound him, as when the first stir of a thawing wind moistens the surface of ice. He began to feel again, to be conscious that somewhere within him was a deep well of the waters of pain. But anything was better than that cataleptic insensibility, which was like being unconscious, and, all the time, knowing that he was unconscious.
They were not going out that night, and after dinner they sat down to a rubber of bridge, in which as usual Helena took Archie as a partner, because she always insisted that she could form some idea of the principles on which he played, whereas the other two but wandered in a starless and Cimmerian gloom when mated with him. But Helena claimed that her spiritual affinity with Archie enabled her to perceive that, when he declared hearts, he wished her to understand that he hadn’t got any, and that she would do well to declare something different. “Bridge, properly understood,” Archie had enunciated once, “is a form of poker: you must bewilder and terrify your adversary. And then the fun begins, and you get fined.” What added to the hilarity was the concentrated seriousness which Jessie and her partner brought to bear on the game, and the miser’s greed and avaricious eye with which Jessie was popularly supposed to see her score mounting. All these jokes, these squibs of light-hearted nonsense, were there to-night, but there was nothing behind them. It was as if they were spoken from habit; a frigid rehearsal of some pithless drama was going on; they were tinsel flowers stuck into arid and seedless ground, and sprang no longer from the warm earth.
The sense of wooden unreality soon began to close in again on Archie, with that utter absence of feeling which was so far more terrible than any feeling could be, that soulless insensitiveness as of a live consciousness that knew it was dead, and he rose from the table after Helena had delivered him from the consequence of some outrageous declaration, and went across to a side-table where were placed syphons and spirits. But now, instead of pouring himself out a glass of soda-water, he half filled his tumbler with whisky, and but added a cream of bubble on the top of it. Immediately almost his sense of touch with life returned; there stole back into himself and the figures of Colonel Vautier and Jessie the perception of their several identities, and into Helena the love with which he had endowed her. But that, and all that it implied, was better than feeling nothing at all. He knew, too, that when Jessie spoke to him, or looked at him, her voice and her eyes held for him a supreme and infinite sympathy. He could not reach it, but he knew it was there. Perhaps when he got used to those new conditions of nightmare existence, he could make it accessible, get into touch with it. At present he scarcely wanted it; he wanted nothing so long as this perception of life still ran in his brain, except Helena. He thought that she rather pitied him too, but it was not her pity he wanted, for it was she who had brought her pity on himself.
They played two or three rubbers; Jessie’s miserly greed was assuaged by precisely the sum that Archie had won from Helena, and Colonel Vautier, after seeing him out, went back to his study to indulge himself in the cigar which was not permitted in the drawing-room, and the two sisters were left there. Helena’s brain had long been busy, beneath the habitual jests of their game, over her future relations with Jessie, and she had come to the conclusion that the sooner they talked the matter out the better. She found that it affected her comfort to be practically not on speaking terms with her sister, and, since she had no shrinking from what might be a painful interview for others, she had made up her mind to ascertain exactly how Jessie meant to behave to her in the few weeks for which they would be in close daily and hourly contact, for Lord Harlow had expressed his mind very clearly about an early date for their wedding, and Helena entirely agreed with him.
Jessie, on her part, could scarcely manage to think about her sister at all. With Archie in front of her all evening she had barely been conscious of anything but his bitter and miserable disillusionment, his awakening from the dream that had become so real to him. She was still seated at the card-table, and with that need for trivial employment which so often accompanies emotional crises, she was building a house with the cards they had been using, devoting apparently her whole faculties to its breathless construction. The strong, beautiful hands which Archie had never noticed hovered over it, alighting with their building materials, putting each card delicately and firmly in place, and her grave face watched the ascending stories, as if Babylon the Great was rising again for the marvel of mankind. Then Helena sat down by her, and, leaning her arm on the table, caused a vibration that demolished Babylon from garret to cellar.
“Oh, Jessie, I’m so sorry,” she said, and she was; the fall of an ingenious card-house was the sort of thing that provoked her pity.
Jessie swept the cards together and seemed about to get up.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It is bed-time, isn’t it?”
Helena put her head wistfully on one side.
“Aren’t you being horribly unkind to me?” she said. She did not suppose it was much use playing on the pathetic stop, that made, as a general rule, so insincere a bleating in her sister’s ears, but it was worth trying.
“I don’t think there is any use in talking, Helena,” she said. “If I am unkind, if I can’t bear what you have done, it is because I simply can’t help it.”
Helena fingered the debris of the card-house with those more delicate fingers that could caress and claw so exquisitely. Essentially, she cared not one atom what Jessie thought of her, but she wanted not to be uncomfortable for the next few weeks.
“Ah, that is it?” she added. “You are satisfied to hate and detest me because you can’t help it. That seems to you a final and unanswerable excuse. But nobody else may do anything because she can’t help it.”
“But you could have helped what you have done,” said Jessie. “You made Archie think you cared for him. You let him fall in love with you on that assumption.”
“He let himself fall in love with me,” said Helena. “That was not my fault. Besides…”
She was silent a moment, weaving delicate spider-threads in her mind
. She really wanted to propitiate Jessie just now, otherwise she would certainly have reminded her that she, anyhow, had allowed herself to fall in love with Archie, though she would not say that that was Archie’s fault. It would have been amusing to suggest that, but it did not seem to tend towards reconciliation. She bent her graceful head a little lower over the fallen card-house. It had collapsed with tragic suddenness, even as Archie had collapsed.
“Besides,” she went on, “it was open to Archie to propose to me. He did not. We were several weeks together at Silorno. And then I came to London and met Bertie. Was it my fault that I fell in love with him? I think you are horribly unkind to me.”
Jessie came a step nearer.
“Are you in love with him?” she asked. “If you tell me you are in love with him…”
“Do you think I should marry him if I was not?” asked Helena, looking the picture of limpid, childlike innocence.
Jessie made no reply. She could not say that she believed Helena was in love with him, though she was assuredly going to marry him. She could not tell a lie of that essential kind; merely the words would not come.
“If I have wronged you in any way, Helena,” she said at length, “I am most sincerely sorry for it. I ask your forgiveness unconditionally.”
Helena rose, wreathed in tender smiles and liquid eyes.