by E. F. Benson
CHAPTER VII
ROBIN had been enjoying himself quite stupendously during these last few weeks in London, but to-day, when he woke, he was not disposed to regret that he was going back to Cambridge that afternoon, to pass a quiet and more or less studious month there. For the last month he had dined out every night, and gone to balls afterwards, except when he was down at Grote for week-ends, or had other evening engagements of his own, of a kind both less public and less decorous than the ball-rooms of the great world. Day and night the mad rush had gone on, for a boy of nineteen, handsome, vivid, a genius at enjoying himself, and a son of Lady Grote had not far to look to find companions to enjoy himself with and houses to welcome him. He had flirted prodigiously, he had eaten and drunk and danced, and had not given a single thought except to the delightful diversion that happened to be going on at any particular minute. And some of his experiences had been very diverting indeed.
One of the less decorous nights had ended for him at dawn to-day, about the same time that the little London fog had looked out from his brocaded curtains, and, waking some five hours later, he had lain drowsily for twenty minutes more, thinking on the whole that he was not sorry to go back to Cambridge. At the same time he licked the chops of memory; chop after chop he licked of last night’s happenings.... In this serene morning sunshine, and in the white coolness of his bed they seemed almost incredible... he almost wondered if he had dreamed them.
He had dropped into bed at dawn this morning, not troubling to put on pyjamas, but rolling himself up cocoon-wise in a sheet, and had slept with the sound tranquillity with which youth so speedily repairs the effects of its extravagant freaks. Now he uncurled himself, and raising his arms above his head and spreading out his legs, he stretched himself till he heard his joints crack. Drowsily he could smell the tea and the bacon which his servant had brought up on a tray for his breakfast, drowsily he could see that there were some letters for him, and interest in correspondence and food made him gradually slip the sheath of slumber off. The bacon smelt delicious, for he was hungry, but mingled with it was an odour of stale smoke, not so pleasant, and one of stale scent. He could conjecture something of the origin of both of these from his memories of last night, but from where now, at this moment, did those reminders come? His servant had taken away the clothes he had worn yesterday evening; there was nothing in his room but himself that could carry these keepsakes about with him. Then, with a touch of disgust, he perceived that these odours undoubtedly lurked in his own hair, and his pillow where his head had rested smelled of them.
He instantly got out of bed and went into the bathroom next door, where the cool water was ready for him, and he jumped bodily into it, letting it go right over his head in a wave of cleansing refreshment. Then, spluttering from his immersion, he soaped his yellow crop till it became hoary with suds, and washed out with his sponge the remnants of the sordid legacy of the night. There were limits, and one of them was that his hair should smell of stale things.
As he rubbed himself into a glow of healthy heat again, he could not help grinning at the recollections that fluttered in and out of his mind. Badsley had been there, slightly intoxicated at first and very full of human affections, but as the hours went by he got more intoxicated and far less sociable. Eventually poor Badders became like Mr. Wordsworth’s heroine, “ for no motion had he now, no force;” and they had crowned him with a wreath of flowers round his top-hat, put him into Robin’s car, and told the chauffeur to drive him about quietly until the night air and carriage exercise enabled him to get over the effects of the lobster salad. When he had recovered and been deposited at the hotel he was staying at, the chauffeur might go home. But not long afterwards Badders had turned up again, having made a remarkable recovery, and full of fresh plans as to the proper way to spend an evening. He had given his flowers, so he told them, to a man coming out of the Athenæum Club, whom he took to be a bishop. Then Robin had a rather indistinct notion of having had to walk home a long way, and — well, here he was in a glow from his cold bath, with a nice clean red tongue, quite ready for his breakfast, and not smelling of stale things any longer. But in order to get quite rid of them, he ate his breakfast and read his letters, sitting in the sun by his open window, with nothing more than a bath-towel on him.
His mother’s room was just opposite his, and presently he put on a dressing-gown and slippers and went to pay her a short call.
“Good morning, darling,” she said, as he kissed her “Robin, you look like a rose-leaf and smell of soap. What a nice clean thing a boy is.”
“This one wasn’t such a nice clean thing half an hour ago,” said he, taking up his mother’s tortoiseshell brushes, and reducing his hair to some sort of order.
“Wasn’t it? What did you do last night? I heard you come upstairs about four o’clock.”
“Well, we had what you might call a pleasant evening,” said Robin discreetly. “A quiet, pleasant evening.”
“I like Mr. Badsley,” said Lady Grote (he had dined there a few nights ago).
Robin bubbled with laughter.
“Lor! I wonder if you’d have liked him about two o’clock this morning?” he said. “Oh, we had such a rag, but I don’t think I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Oh, tell me some,” said she.
“Well, we put a wreath of flowers round his hat, and he thinks he gave them to a bishop.”
“Did he indeed? Why?” asked Lady Grote, deeply interested. “And what bishop?”
“Oh, any bishop,” said Robin, “and then he came back.”
“Had he perhaps had a little supper?” asked she. “And had you?”
“Oh, I wasn’t screwed, if you mean that,” said he. She looked at him a minute, her motherhood finding itself somehow in opposition to her intense delight in being a “pal,” a chum to him. But she was his mother, too....
“Robin, dear,” she said. “Don’t think me a cross-grained old woman if I lecture you. But I’m so glad you weren’t screwed. It’s a dreadful habit to get into. I hope you’ll tell Mr. Badsley what a pig he made of himself. Of course, it’s dreadfully funny, the thought of his giving his flowers to a bishop, but it’s rather rowdy, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes, it was rowdy,” said Robin.
She was longing to hear all about it, but nobly suppressed her curiosity.
“My dear, don’t be rowdy. It isn’t that I don’t love your being young, but being rowdy and getting drunk are bad form, you know. I adore your coming in like this, and telling me about it, and I can’t bear to be unsympathetic, but I am rather unsympathetic over riots. And it is such a waste of time to get tipsy, tell Mr. Badsley so.”
Robin began to laugh again.
“Shall I tell it him with your love, mother?” he asked. “He’s madly devoted to you. He thinks you’re the most wonderful female he ever saw. If father was dead he would propose to you to-morrow. Then he’d become my step-father, if you accepted him. Lord! Fancy having Badders as a step-father!”
Lady Grote tried hard to feel as old as she was, and utterly failed to accomplish that ridiculous feat.
“Oh, did he like me, Robin?” she said. “That was nice of him.”
Robin had an awful twinkle in his guileless eyes.
“Yes, I thought I should have found him serenading you when I got home,” he said. “I expect he’ll write to you.”
“I wish he would. But let’s go back to our subject. Your party last night.”
Robin had finished brushing his hair, and came to perch himself on the arm of her chair. This action exposed a good deal of white, firm leg, up to a lean knee-joint. Somehow the sight of that took his mother back to those lovely days when she was a young mother, and he a little dimpled baby. How well she remembered kissing every inch of him, and under the impulse of that memory she could not forbear to kiss that exposed knee, and then cover it up again with the fold of his dressing-gown, as if to shut her kiss in. He was still so tremendously hers.
“I’ll
tell you all about the party, if you like,” he said.
“Oh, you darling. But I don’t want to know anything about it, since you are willing to tell me. I really only care that you should be willing to do so. It was rowdy, and were there by any chance a few young ladies there?”
“Well, naturally. You didn’t think Badders and I would go and sit in the Café Londres all alone? But I’m rather sick of that sort of thing. I shan’t be sorry to go back to Cambridge.”
“But are you going back, dear?” she said.
“Yes, I thought I told you.”
“Then you won’t come down to Grote to-morrow? I’m going there for the Sunday.”
“I think I won’t. I promised Jim to go up to Cambridge to-day, in fact I promised him to go up yesterday, but then Badders suggested an evening on the rampage. Have you got a party?”
“No; last Sunday was the end of them for this year. Lord Thorley is coming, and I think Gracie Massingberd. I had forgotten you were going back.”
She hesitated a moment; it was probable that if she urged Robin to come, he would do so, and leave Cambridge to take care of itself till Monday. On the other hand, if he would not come, she must see about getting a fourth to make their party square. Perhaps....
“I’ll come if you really want me, mother,” he said. “Jim will be furious, but after all he and I shall be there together till half-way through August.”
While he spoke she had made up her mind.
“No, dear,” she said, “I don’t want you more than I always want you, and if you’ve settled to go to Cambridge, why should you change your plans? In any case, it will be a very short stay at Grote, for I shan’t get down there till after the opera on Saturday night, and Gracie and Lord Thorley aren’t coming down till Sunday morning. Very likely I shan’t go down till Sunday morning either.”
Robin got up.
“All right, then I shall go up this afternoon,” he said.
“What’s the opera?”
“Tristan: the last Tristan of the season; Kuhhnann is singing.”
“A deplorable composition,” remarked Robin.
She began to laugh.
“Do explain why.”
“It’s so dreary; they’re so deadly serious. Do people really fall in love as mournfully as that? I prefer to do it more gaily.”
“Everyone falls in love in the same key as they do other things,” said she. “Tristan and Isolde weren’t gay.”
“No, not exactly what one ordinarily means by it. But most people in operas would be terribly depressing to live with. Think of living with all those beggars in the Ring. Awful! Perhaps I had better go and dress, if I’m going to begin the day. Lord! It’s after eleven. I say, mother, you’ve had your Italian stainer and polisher, haven’t you? But you’re not so red as he’s stained you, are you?”
Lady Grote smoothed her hand over her new Titian hair, rather piqued.
“Yes, darling,” she said, “it’s been exactly like that for three days, and this is the first time you’ve been kind enough to notice your poor old mother.”
Robin giggled.
“Badders saw,” he said. “He told me you had the most wonderful coloured hair of any girl — he did say ‘girl’ — he’d ever seen, except one. Lucky for you I hadn’t noticed it before, or I should have had to tell Badders all about the stainer. Wasn’t he funny when he came into your room at Grote one Sunday morning, and I thought he was the undertaker? I shall tell Badders about him.”
“You are a very rude, disagreeable sort of boy,” said Lady Grote. “And who was the one girl, I think you said, who was more decorative than me?”
“I forget. One of Badders’s. Shall I see you again before I go to Cambridge?”
Lady Grote instantly forgave those rude remarks about her colour.
“My darling, of course. Will you be in to tea or lunch or dinner? If not, I shall have to come and see you wherever you are. I hope it’s not disreputable, or an A.B.C. shop.”
“No, I’ll be in at half-past four and we’ll have tea together, shall we?”
“Yes, dear; that will be lovely,” said she, wondering exactly who she would have to put off. She knew the day was fitted together like a mosaic. “Half-past four, then.”
For a long time after Robin had left her she sat in a state of belated indecision. She knew that he would have come down to Grote with a word of urging from her, and even while he had said as much, she had made up her mind that she would not utter it. She had quite forgotten, if she had ever known it, that he was going back to Cambridge to-day, and fully expected that he would come down to Grote with her. But he was not going to do that, and the moment she knew that, she knew also whom she was meaning to ask there. Of course she was to be at the opera on Saturday night, and after the opera it would be very pleasant to have that hour’s cool drive down to Grote, instead of stopping in London that night and driving down on Sunday morning.
Robin would have driven down with her had he been coming, and they would have had a morning on the river together, while the other two amused themselves or each other. But Robin was not coming, it was therefore perfectly reasonable for her to find somebody who would drive down with her on Saturday night, or on Sunday morning, and complete the quartette.
That all sounded reasonable enough, but she knew that from beginning to end of it there lurked in it an essential insincerity. With two such old friends as Lord Thorley and Gracie, she was perfectly well aware that there was not the smallest need to look for a fourth, as far as companionship for any of them went. How often, she wondered, had they three spent a Sunday together perfectly content with each other? Naturally, Robin would come, if he had nothing else to do, but if he had, there could not be a more gratuitous proceeding than to look for somebody else merely for the sake of an even number. Should she still ask him to put off going to Cambridge till Monday and so deprive herself of her excuse for asking somebody else? It was not yet too late; he would still be in his room opposite, dressing. But she knew she was meaning to do nothing of the kind.
Obstinate questionings.... Why was it that he could have a rowdy supper-party, getting home at four in the morning, after goodness only knew what adventures, and yet somehow have no trace of it all in the morning, except what a cold bath and some soap would remove? If anything, it was rather suitable than otherwise, according to the code of the world in general, that a boy should go rampaging about, and wipe the whole affair off his mouth like a fringe of froth. No one with any sense would dream of blaming him for it, anyhow; it did not make his nature the least less wholesome. Was it just the lightness, the gaiety of youth that passed such things through the filter of itself, so that when they reached his real self they were clear and unmuddied. Or was it because a man, by some curious device of nature’s, could, within reason, do what he chose, and yet retain his own colour, whereas a woman was like a chameleon, and took on, at any rate in a much higher degree than a man, the colour of her conduct? Women were flesh and blood, no less than men, and if by the limitations of a loveless marriage she was uncared for and unsatisfied, must she acquiesce in so unreasonable a verdict? Of course she had to care; there was nothing so odious or so degrading as passion in cold blood. But passion in hot blood was a vastly different thing; to desire was a test of being alive.
She had no idea why she hesitated. Some scruple hitherto quite foreign to her nature seemed to have germinated within her. Was it connected with that moment just now, when, with Robin seated on the arm of her chair, and showing a good deal of leg, she had had so undimmed a vision of herself as a young mother, and of him as that adorable soft little burden, fruit of her rapture and her pain.
And then — well, so soon after that, such passion as there had ever been between herself and her husband grew as cold as the extinct craters of the moon. What was the use of trying to warm yourself by moonlight?
Neither of them had attempted so preposterous a proceeding. And yet warmth was the prime essential of life to those who had th
e temperament for loving, and for being desired. It puzzled her to know why, after so many years of taking these things for granted, she should suddenly begin to question their validity.
What was the nature of this scruple that troubled her? Surely it was not conscience, but cowardice masquerading in a black coat and parson’s tie. She was desperately serious in this bewildering attraction the man had for her, and she was afraid she was really nothing more than a toy to him, a great, beautiful toy with which he diverted himself. Sometimes she felt herself not even to be that to him, he was weary of her already. Yet the image of a toy did not wholly represent what she felt herself to be to that gross, savage creature that played with her. He played with her not so much as a toy, but as a prey: she was like a mouse encircled by the velvet paws of a drowsy cat, not hungry, but pleased to have her in its power. Was that, then, the reason of her scruple, of her hesitation to ask him to come down to Grote with her after he had sung Tristan, that she wanted to escape? Possibly that had its part in her scruple, and yet the fact that she felt herself to be his toy — his prey, heightened and intensified her desire. She wanted not so much to escape as to prove herself more than that. She must make him want her, he must at least be hungry.... And in the stress of that need, all question of scruple, whether conscience-born or cowardice-begotten, vanished utterly.
She rang him up at his hotel, and knew that he answered the call himself, for there was no mistaking the timbre of that soft, purring voice, even when passed through the wires and drum of the instrument which would blur a less individual utterance into a mere metallic gabble.
He recognized her voice, too, for in answer to her question if he was in, he said at once, “Ah, is it you, gracious lady?” and it seemed to her that there was something ironic in the phrase. She could almost see the half smile round his red, sensual mouth as he said it. And was there something ironic, too, in his answer to her suggestion that he should come down to Grote with her after the opera next day? “A rapturous plan,” he had purred, “you are too kind: you spoil me. And shall I have the joy of knowing that you hear your poor Tristan for the last time to-morrow?”