by E. F. Benson
“I do believe it,” she said. “It is mere common sense.”
“Then I’ll ask you another question. You would be very much relieved if I took this appointment. But shouldn’t I lose a little of your respect?”
She fancied she could quibble that away.
“Respect?” she said. “What a word to use. As if that had got anything to do with love!”
He laughed outright, and in the fashion that was so common with him, sat down on the arm of her chair.
“That’ll never do,” he said. “You must learn to respect me.” —
“I do,” she said hurriedly, for the instinct on which she had slammed the door asserted itself. “I respected your joining up as you did. You did all you could do.”
“And hasn’t it got anything to do with love?” he asked.
She paused before replying and Robin went on:
“It’s not only your respect,” he said. “It’s the respect of everybody who is serious. They wouldn’t tell me I had lost their respect: they would only congratulate me on getting a staff-appointment. But what would Jim feel, or Badders, or Jelf?”
“But you told me that Mr. Jelf was a pacifist,” she said. “You said that he loved the Germans and hated the English.”
“That was all his way of talking. I haven’t told you what he’s done. He has not applied for a commission at all: he has joined as a private.”
She made another appeal.
“Robin, you are all I have got,” she said simply.
She looked up at him, and saw that the soft, firm crease still sat between his eyebrows.
“So don’t make the mule-face,” she added.
He shook his head.
“Can’t help it,” he said. “I’m going to be a mule: I — I must look like one.”
“Will you think it over then, first,” she asked, “before you do anything?”
“I have thought it over. Will you think it over? I know you agree with me really, but I can’t get at the part of you that agrees. It’s there, though.”
She knew that just as well as he did, but made no promise, and with a face troubled and yet determined he left her.
It was that which started the wave of loneliness far out on the sea, and she sat there idly, after he had gone, not yet aware of its approach, but only of the deadly, bored depression that had settled down on her, never lifting, since the day that she had driven down to Grote alone and late on a Saturday night in July. She no longer wanted to see him who should have been her companion then, though for a day or two after that, she would have forgiven even that monstrous letter of his revelation of himself, could her forgiveness have brought him back. And yet Robin had said that respect had something to do with love....
When he had said it she, or some part of her, had acquiesced, and yet when she read Kuhlmann’s letter, though there was no one in the world for whom she had so profound a contempt, she still longed for his presence. Was that, then, another sort of love, something possibly not less real, certainly not less insistent, but more animal, essentially lower? She had always hated seeing Robin and Kuhlmann together, and had rather laughed at herself for her sentimentality, her squeamishness. And then, by degrees almost imperceptible, any other feeling for the man who had so grossly insulted her, but mere contempt, had been distilled away, leaving just that sediment which unemotionally despised him.
But that draining away of the boiling, bubbling liquid which had filled her heart, had left it totally apathetic to all the myriad interests and diversions of her life. Even the tremendous impact of the breaking-out of war had failed to rouse her from it, her whole soul seemed drugged into a drowsy, depressed somnolence. She cared for nothing, and she disliked nothing, except only that which concerned Robin. The live tissues of the mind that record the emotions were not dead: she still wanted to want, wanted to enjoy, wanted to feel, but they lay as if under some opiate that deprived them of sensation.
The only thing that for these last days had in the least interested her was the obtaining for Robin the post that would keep him in town, doing work which undeniably must be done, dressed in khaki as every self-respecting young man was, with little red tabs on his shoulders and a red band on his cap to show that he was not merely a puff of steam from the engine, but part of the intelligence that directed it. All that was alive in her clung to the sound sense of the simile, which Robin himself had admitted.... But somewhere in the drowsed, drugged part of her mind some instinct within her despised that sound sense as completely as Robin himself despised it. He, too, had drawn the distinction between “thinking” and “feeling,” wondering if she understood. Good heavens, did she not understand? Was not three quarters of life a battle between thinking and feeling?
She was not one of those optimistic lunatics who talked about the exposure of the enemy’s lengthening lines of communication, when day by day the tide of the black advance swept across the map towards Paris and the Channel ports, nor did she number herself with the large mass of folk who cheerfully maintained that the great steam-roller from the East was now giving forth encouraging hoots, as a signal for its starting on its relentless journey to Berlin. But at present, though not cheerful, she cared about the war as little as they, because she could not care about anything. It had broken out at a time when she was still stunned by the greatest emotional blow, delivered with every circumstance of insult and contempt, that she had ever experienced. It had taken away all her power of keen feeling, except as regards Robin. All but that slim passage between her emotions and life was choked with dead leaves.
She took up the morning paper, at which she had not yet cared to look. The black line had not moved either backwards or forwards, but there was a long list of casualties. She read it, and found that it contained notices of intimate bereavement for some half-dozen of her friends, to whom she must write a line of condolence. Then, in imagination, she saw herself reading some similar list, on a morning but a few months ahead, and finding it contained the beloved name concerning which she had already received communication from the War Office. At that the great wave of loneliness soared high above her and engulfed her.
On that day, so vivid at the moment to her imagination, that she felt that it was already actually here, there would be nothing whatever left for which she cared to live. She made no sentimental pictures of herself as a mother bereaved of her only son, or of the blow killing her, for a blow, in order to kill, has to strike some vital place, and there was nothing vital in her to strike. She would just go on living, if that could be called life, which had not enough keenness of edge to it to be termed either happy or unhappy, until the dark door opened, or, as she had phrased it once to herself, the great fish gulped down the fly that floated, waterlogged on the stream, and she went back into the nothingness out of which she came.
What had it all been about, this tedious story, which she had once read with such intense interest? Hitherto life had denied her nothing which she eared to take, and she had taken freely, grasping it by the armful, and sucking out of it the utmost of its sweetness. But henceforth life seemed to hold nothing that was worth taking; she no longer cared what it gave her or denied her, since “desire had failed.” No longer had she any part in it: all those who hitherto had been active with herself in its pageants and movements, seemed no longer to be alive, but to be mere marionettes, bobbing about in meaningless antics, while she had become the one spectator of the show, quite alone in this infinite array of empty benches....
By a violent effort she pulled herself together: she was meeting trouble before it came, in imagining what the world would be to her when there was Robin’s name in the daily list of casualties. She knew it was utterly unlike her to indulge in that sort of profitless speculation, but the billow of loneliness had for the moment completely submerged her, blotting out all else but the consciousness of itself. Now it had broken, and her head was above water again, and there was still a beach somewhere near, a shore to which she might struggle, and the engrained
habit of life, the eager planning of the hours so as to fill them in a manner as diversified and entertaining as possible, came back to her a little, striking feeble pulses in the arteries of her emotions. Perhaps the apathy of these last weeks had been leading up to a crisis like that she had just passed through; perhaps now the worst was over, and some hint of recuperation and of returning vitality was coming back to her.
Yes, faintly but unmistakably she wanted to be interested in the world again, until such time as the great fish gulped her down. So few months ago, without egotism and conceit, there had been nobody she knew who had more than a fraction of the intensity of interest with which the world, just the human race, inspired her. All sorts and conditions of men held for her their own talisman: once she had bidden to dinner a black bishop, a lion tamer and a suffragette, and had passed an entrancing evening, in the effort to realize what was the fascination of converting cannibals, of cowing lions and of destroying works of art in order to show how fit you were to have a hand in the government of the country. None, literally none, had excelled her in the cult of mankind; never had there been a more ardent worshipper.
Then suddenly, owing in the main to an emotional shock, life had lost its coherence for her: instead of its being a clamour of entrancing topics, it had become a meaningless babble. On the top of that had come this detestable war. If she was to win her way back to the ranks of the living, to enable herself to realize the world again as something more than a mere congregation of marionettes watched drowsily by a single spectator, she must somehow escape from this paralyzing influence of the war, which was sapping the intelligence just as it was monopolizing the entire energies of bishop, lion-tamer and suffragette alike. Of the women she knew there was scarcely one who was not knitting or sewing or learning to nurse: they were dead to every form of human interest except counting stitches, and to every pursuit except that of dropping them and beginning again with a pulled-out heap of crinkled wool.
Gracie Massingberd was a ringleader among these. She had taken possession of Ardingly House, and had established her Sewing and Knitting Society there. The ballroom was full of small tables round which sat little parties of her workers who made shirts all day and turned out yard after yard of woollen scarves. It seemed to give them a sense of doing something for their country, and there they sat and knitted and talked all day in a pessimistic manner about the war, hatching as in the warmth of an incubator a hundred rumours of peril and disaster. Helen had attended these gatherings for two or three days, but instead of finding an anodyne to her dull aching in manual employment, she merely found a physical and emotional atmosphere that were equally intolerable. These ladies ate sandwiches out of little paper packets at lunchtime, and consumed a good deal of tea, and Gracie moved among them with the air of a high-priestess, And all seemed to think that their personal discomfort, the sitting on high chairs and eating disgusting food, and turning out woollen scarves, somehow helped the war.
In the drawing-room next door was a depot for packing the fruits of their labours and old clothes of all sorts which were sent them in vast numbers. But after some three days in this rag and bone shop Helen had judged it better to retire, while, in ease those woollen scarves were really of use to somebody, she left a standing order at a shop for a woollen scarf to be sent to Lady Massingberd’s depot every other day, with her compliments. She was delighted to supply them, provided she was not obliged to make them, and did so with a greater prodigality than that with which they would have materialized under her unaccustomed fingers. But she thought with a sort of contemptuous envy of the type of mind which can evolve an approving conscience out of knitting and lugubrious conversation. In her it only produced a longing for fresh air and an escape from the nightmare that it wove about her. If all that she could do was to knit scarves, and admire Gracie standing waist high in a rubbish heap of old shoes and darned trousers, she would sooner admire and wonder at Gracie’s notion of what she called “personal service” at a distance, and buy scarves that were much better made than any she could herself make.
All this for the past week or two had formed the drab curtain of loneliness and depression in front of which her life had been enacted. All the relief from it that she had got lay in her exertions to obtain a post for Robin which would give him some useful and necessary job and prevent his exposure to the grim Moloch that sat in flaming hunger along the battle-line in France. But this morning, when Robin had passed by with a shake of his head what she had procured for him, there had come this crisis of loneliness which, when it subsided again, left her not dully, drowsily aching any more, but had stabbed her, though with a piercing point, into some sort of vitality.
Hitherto, she had just let the hours go on guttering away to form days, the days accumulate into weeks, content that time should waste itself, provided only that it definitely ran away. But now that dull ache passed into a pain that awoke her, from which somehow it was necessary to escape: it was as if she had been dreaming of pain, and awoke in a sweat of anguish, encompassed by the added terror of the dark — dark, and the faint outline of Robin against it, as against a drawn blind behind which burns some remote and terrible conflagration. At all costs she must turn on, here in the room of her own heart, some light that would blot out and extinguish that lurid smouldering of flame from without.
But even this sharp anguish and the horror of the dark were welcome to her, since they brought to her again something of the poignancy of life and the desire to live. Into her benumbed self as into a benumbed limb there came the prickings of returning sensation: it was beginning to be usable again, capable of grasping and of feeling. But there was a certain change already perceptible to herself in the quality of the life that was beginning to flow through it.
Hitherto, pleasure-seeking, self-centred, self-indulgently extravagant though her life had been, it had yet had this redeeming feature that she delighted in the delights of others, glowed with their joys, and gave herself to their pleasures. Though she never had risen to that higher altruism which equally rejoices in being associated with the troubles and sorrows of those it loves, and mourns for those who mourn even more sincerely than it plays for those who dance, she had always taken pleasure in spending her time, her money and herself on the enjoyment of others, and had found her reward in such application. The gem-like brilliance of her life had ever been undimmed by the softer fires of pity and compassion: she had had no use for the failures and the ineffectives of this world. She was sorry — vaguely — for any who were not soaked in success, but they had never received from her more than a dropped “Poor thing,” and an averted gaze: people in pain and distress had much better go away and hide themselves, as she herself would undoubtedly have done in similar circumstances, and not bring their damping and depressing influence among those whose privilege it was to live in sunlight....
But now the quality of her reviving desire for life was changed infinitely for the worse: little as she had previously cared for the sorrows of others, now she found herself awaking to an equal indifference to their joys. The great point was to extract for oneself all that life could possibly hold of pleasurable experience, and no longer to find pleasure in giving it. Robin had rejected the fruits of her efforts for his well-being; another had returned her gift with outrageous contumely.
Here were the rewards of the well-wisher! And more paramount than ever was the necessity of turning the back on all that was painful and distressing. Life did not last long, nor was she desirous that it should, but while the burden of consciousness was there, it was the only sanity to make it as light a weight as possible. It would soon be removed altogether, and for that interval, reason and feeling alike advised the decking of it with ribands and flowers. It mattered not from where they came: the flowers could be plucked, if need be, from the wreaths left on graves. It was only necessary that they should hide the burden of life.
A more immediate necessity was to shut out from herself all that reminded her of this horror of war. She hated an
d deplored it, and already she saw it, in some future not far off, assuming an aspect much more intimately menacing. It was out of her power (already she had done her vain best) to avert that, and now the only possibility of avoiding that this awakening of hers should be but the awakening from stupor into nightmare lay in banishing from her mind and from her sight all that could recall to her the grim reality. It was in a sort of self-protection that she framed her House of Life afresh: pity had long been banished from it, and now she must veil the face of love.
She had lived far too cosmopolitan a life to have much sense of patriotism, if by patriotism is implied the blind preference for one country above the sum of all other countries. The roots of her culture were too widely planted to enable her to say, “It is from here my life comes, or from there.” Though in a very different sense to that in which John Wesley spoke, the world was her parish: she found that in all the enthusiasms of her life there had been no touchstone applied that would record a permanent nationality. Just as she had never cared for class, so she had never cared for blood. It only mattered that it beat, and in her roused a beat in answer.
London in these psychical circumstances had become impossible. Wherever you went, war in some form confronted you or pounced out on you screaming: whether in Robin’s khaki, or in Gracie’s knitting establishment, or in the headlines of a paper, or in the innumerable appeals that, still unopened, littered her table.
What sense of patriotism had Gracie until Germany announced her most reasonable intention of invading France by the shortest possible route? That was a mere matter of common sense: the politics of a nation were exactly those of an individual. Certainly Germany had promised not to do so, but so for that matter had every married woman (herself included) promised to love, honour and obey her husband. But what in each case did that promise mean? It only meant that for convenience of a contract of international or personal importance, you declared yourself ready to enter into obligations without which no contract would have been possible. It fitted the facts for the moment, but if the facts changed, you acted as if you denied the authenticity of your signature. You felt like that then, or otherwise you would not have signed. But if you felt differently afterwards, if a question of national existence or of private happiness were at stake, naturally you said, “I feel so no longer.” Contracts only bound such as were willing to observe them. If a godfather vowed that his godchild renounced the devil and all his works, was he responsible, or for that matter was the unconscious godchild responsible, for the complete observance of that contract?