by E. F. Benson
She was a widow, eight years older than he, when he had first met her. On her side she had just recovered her freedom after five years’ intolerable existence as wife of a Prussian graf, and in her American way had made up her mind to be rebaptized in the exhilarating waters of Paris after this trying experience as partner of a drunken Junker, who had mercifully now drunk himself to death. At the time Philip had a certain ephemeral flair there as the young student of distinguished English family, and, what mattered more, he had a marvellous talent for “catching a likeness.” It followed that she commissioned him to execute her portrait, and during those sittings she had incontinently fallen in love with him. She had preserved her considerable American fortune intact, except for the oceans of champagne which had gone beyond recall, and Philip Courthope had been sufficiently stimulated by the prospect of the enjoyment of an opulent fortune to accept her devotion. There was no opposition from the other side of the Atlantic, and since he was heir-apparent to an English barony, and his elder brother had already been married six years without occasion for a nursery, gratified Doubledays by the score had flocked to the wedding. It was a great relief to Philip when they flocked back again.
He had never been in the least in love with her, but that did not stand in the way of his feeling periodically ill-used ever since she had declined to live with him any longer. The vivacity which had always been characteristic of him had swiftly revealed itself to his wife as being a vivacity that was purely derived from egoism: Tie cared for those who ministered to it, and fed his own radical conceit. For her part, any one at all distinguished appealed to her; she persecuted princes with no greater determination than she persecuted eminent artists and actors, and her main aim in life was not so much to be anybody, but to know everybody. But she found that her husband did not really care whom he associated with (except for a curious attraction towards coronets), provided only that he could show off to them, and skip about and direct the affairs of any sort of circle. From the first he would much sooner have been a big frog in a small pond than a small frog in a big pond. In their respective ways they were both superlative: she in her appreciation of other people, he in his desire that other people should appreciate him.
After little more than two years of married life, her fire had quite burned itself out, and the deadliness of companionship with this transcendent egoist became intolerable. She had made herself a very comfortable and promising niche in London, and was feeding that wild beast into submission, but the handicap of her husband was heavy upon her. The fact that he was brother to a lord and heir-apparent to a barony did not seem to procure any consideration for his incomparable second-rateness, and her main desire was to be quit of him and every remembrance of her second unfortunate venture into matrimony. Had she completely known how much he disliked her she would have been less surprised at his acceptance of her proposal to give him two thousand pounds a year and the care of the infant Celia, on the sole condition that he did not interfere with her freedom, or intrude himself upon her in any way. This latter clause she took care to fence about with every legal stringency. She gave him two thousand pounds a year to “get out,” but any reasonable request, addressed to her lawyer, with regard to unforeseen expenses, should receive reasonable consideration. Her intense satisfaction at his acceptance of these terms was only equalled by his own.
All this flowed gently over Philip’s brain, like water coming out of some cool cave fringed with fern, and turning the mill-wheel of the past. Florence’s portrait (returned to him with his daughter as unwelcome memorials of the things which his wife wished to forget) was really amazingly like what she had been, and he wondered, with a sense of pity derived from his own sprightliness, what sort of a woman she had become. Then stripping off his dressing-gown he indulged in mild Swedish exercises, and told himself, as he bent and flexed and stood on tiptoe, how far off she probably was from being able to do anything of the sort. To be sure, she was eight years older than he, and the shortest of calculations revealed that she must now be fifty-three, but he had no sense of triumph over her about that People did get older; he himself must have got older, though the years had made so little impression on him. But poor Florence at fifty-three! Even if she had not given him two thousand a year all this time, he would probably have been sorry for her.
The August sun streaming in through his window was pleasantly warming when he fixed a small looking-glass over the bolt of his window and lathered his cheeks for shaving: It was characteristic of him that he believed that he conducted all the minor operations of life, like sharing, with greater still than anybody else, and he was full of chatty hints on how to shave, and how to despoil a sponge of water previous to packing it, and how to light a cigarette in a high wind. A large silver box with a wick and a flint was the proper method of doing that, and now, though there was no wind, he lit a cigarette in the prescribed manner, as he stropped his razor. His slim ankles above his red slippers, his strong arms below the short sleeves of his vest gave him a moment of satisfaction as he passed the long looking-glass, and he executed a couple of steps of the fox-trot over the flow with a neatness that almost warranted his own appreciation.... It was he, of course, who had introduced the fox-trot to Merriby, whatever young Mr. Evan Lamington thought about it. The latter was a tall, delicate young gentleman, lately invalided out of the Army for general debility, who made himself remarkably agreeable in a soft lapdog manner to ladies, who thought him such a dear. He held their skeins of worsted, and knew a great deal about the decoration of rooms and about millinery. Philip did not consider him a man at all, and Evan merely thought Philip a disagreeable one. But in exceedingly rare moments of depression Philip seemed to see Mr. Lamington’s slim finger writing a mystic inscription on the wall that denoted the fall of his supremacy....
Philip paid a great deal of attention to the matter of dress, and carefully aimed at giving the impression of careless picturesqueness. This morning he was going to play a mixed foursome of golf, and entertain the ladies at lunch afterwards, and thus he had to effect a compromise between a merely sporting-garb and a toilet more ceremonially fitted to the function of host to a couple of distinguished visitors. Knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket, stockings with orange-coloured tops, and little worsted balls hanging therefrom like the seeds of plane-trees, and shoes with frilled tongues would indicate manliness and athleticism; and a blue silk shirt, a voluminous soft tie, and a tam-o’-shanter perched a little sideways on his head were artistic and smartly negligent. He was going to walk to the links, some mile or so distant, and he proposed to take in his hand a malacca cane with a massive silver-gilt top from the stand in the hall. But there was half an hour in front of him when he got downstairs before he need set out, and, since he prided himself on never being idle, he took a couple of golf-clubs out on to the lawn in order to practise little shots over the flower-beds, and do some putting at a few holes he had cut there. This was an extremely important match in which he was going to take part, for he and Mrs. Muskett, a prodigious Nimrod of a woman, who passed her entire life in the saddle or on the links, or wading in Highland rivers, or stalking on Scotch moors, was his partner. She spent a month every year at Merriby with her husband, who was gorged with food, drink and gold, in order to keep him company, and to scare away by a course of the waters any forlorn fragment of adipose tissue that might possibly have found shelter beneath her skin. Their opponents were the local professional and Lady Matcham, who was as globular as Mrs. Muskett was linear, and hit the ground or the air about as often as she hit the ball. But she enjoyed golf very much, and talked all the time to her extremely good-looking partner, for whom she cherished an absolutely hopeless devotion. When she and Mrs. Muskett stood on the tee together they looked like a full-blown cauliflower side by side with a stick of wiry asparagus.
Philip found Celia sitting under a tree in the garden busying herself with invitations for a party he was giving next week. These were to be conveyed on his card, on which was printed his name and
that of his house, “Chez-moi” (pronounced by tradesmen and ignorant people Cheesmoy). In the bottom left-hand corner of half a dozen of these she had to write “Pot-luck 8.15,” with the date, and in the same place on about eighty more, “Soirée d’ennui, 10.30 N.R.P.S.V.P.,” which meant do not trouble to answer. These soirées d’ennui were a great feature in Merriby life, and when Merriby was full of suitable guests, were given by Philip every other week, with extras by special request. There was music, there was dancing, there was supper; all seemed unpremeditated, so carefully had it been thought out.
Celia’s presence in the garden was very congenial to her father, for she could look at his practice and admire him.
“I’ve just come out for a quarter of an hour, my dear,” he said, “to get into form. Ha! You’re sending out the invitations, are you? I shan’t disturb you. There, look! That was a good putt, wasn’t it? Now I’m going to loft over that flowerbed. Ah! Butter fingers! I took my eye off the ball.”
The comers of Celia’s mouth, even when she was perfectly serious, were a little turned up, as if she was inwardly smiling at something, while the high arch of her eyebrows added the suggestion that her amusement was ever so slightly indulgent. But there was not the smallest accentuation of her normal expression as she glanced up at her father.
“Your ball went through the bed,” she said, “it came out at the other side. You didn’t mean to do that. You have got your new stockings on.”
“A-ha, you are sharp-eyed,” said he. “I haven’t got a myope for a daughter. Do you like them?” Celia gave the orange tops and the dangling globes her serious consideration, while her father stood, with legs a little apart, glancing down at them himself.
“They are very smart,” she said.
“That is no answer.”
Her upward smile accentuated itself.
“I think I don’t like those tassel-things,” she said. “I don’t see what they are for. I should cut them off if I were you.”
“Pooh! You know nothing about men’s stockings,” said he.
“I know I don’t. That’s why I didn’t want to give my opinion, because it’s not worth having.” Celia always spoke rather slowly, pronouncing her words with extreme clearness in a voice that had a delicious husky quality about it. Even when she was angry, a thing that happened with extreme rarity, she never raised her voice or hurried her words. Her father, on the other hand, spoke rapidly and indistinctly, as if he was either intoxicated or irritated, and his words got jumbled up together in their eagerness to make themselves audible. This was a trick as natural to him as the upturned corners of Celia’s mouth were to her, but not so attractive.
Celia proceeded.
“Sometimes you don’t like my clothes,” she said, “but that doesn’t make any difference to me. It’s only you who lose a pleasure. And no doubt I lose a pleasure in not liking the blobs on your stockings. Oh, don’t cut them off, Daddy, if you like them. I only said that I should if they were mine.”
He severed the worsted that attached those ornaments with his knife, and threw them one by one on to her lap.
“Those were good shots,” he said. “I shall find them trimming your skirt. I believe you wanted them all the time.”
Celia regarded the yellow fluffy globes.
“I have got a skirt with blobs on it like these,” she observed, “I will see if it would be the better for any more of them. Thank you, darling.”’ Philip took up his putter again and played. “Look! I holed that out,” he said. “I’ve got a good eye this morning. We shall win.”
“Lovely,” said Celia, not looking up, but writing “Soirée d’ennui,” for the fiftieth time. “Are you playing with Mrs. Muskett? She is like a kipper. Who else?”
“She and I against Reeves and Lady Matcham. They are coming to lunch, remember.”
“Reeves, too? Lady Matcham will like that.”
“Don’t say that sort of thing,” said he.
“Why not? It is obvious enough. The other day when Reeves was playing with Major Dent, she took Violet and followed him all round the links saying, ‘Is he not marvellous? Oh, Reeves, what a beautiful stroke!’ Violet told me; it is odd that she should have such a very vulgar mother. Surely a countess ought to know better.”
“Lady Violet ought to know better than to say such things,” said he. “I shall give her a piece of my mind if she says anything of that sort to me.”
“Oh, but she wouldn’t, Daddy,” said Celia. “She only told me because she tells me everything. She is coming to see me this morning.”
“Look! There’s another good putt,” said her father. “She adores you: can’t think why.”
Celia directed an envelope before she answered. “But then, you never know why anybody adores anybody else,” she said, “any more than you can tell why, if you mix certain chemicals together and bang them, they explode. You only know that it happens. I like being adored; it makes me feel good, it makes me purr, even though I dislike the person who adores me.”
“You can express that more simply by saying ‘I’m a flirt,’” said Philip.
“But it’s such an ugly word. Besides, every one likes being adored, every one is a flirt in that sense. It’s only the people who never are adored who call it flirting. They would like to be adored, but as they can’t, the call the rest of us rude names.”
Celia took the writing-pad off her knee, and lit a cigarette.
“But it’s no use going about trying to be adored,” she said, “because nobody has the least idea as to how to set about it. It’s not the least use being kind and honest and amiable, for that only makes you mildly popular, while the most disagreeable people get worshipped. And it isn’t any good being beautiful, which is lucky for me, for otherwise all the boys there would love Violet, and all the girls adore Evan Lamington. I dare say beauty hurries people up, because there is obviously something rather attractive about it, but it’s not a bit of good by itself. Perhaps brains have got something to do with it, or is there a sixth sense which directs it all?”
“Really young ladies think about very queer things nowadays,” said he. “Where do you get all these queer ideas from?”
“I dare say I inherited them,” said Celia.
“Not from me,” said he, “nor yet from your mother, I should have said.”
“Oh, but I’m a combination of you both, and you can’t guess how a combination will turn out. You would never have guessed that blue and yellow would make green. There’s the post at last.”
Philip Courthope took the only letter that was for him, recognized the large sprawling hand, and tore it open.
“From your mother,” he said. “What on earth can she have got to say?”
The anxiety which had crossed his face at the idea that this might prove to be some odious communication regarding his allowance speedily cleared away as he turned over the pages covered with that spider-crawl. The purport of the letter was odd, but in no way disastrous, and from long-past familiarity with her handwriting in days when there arrived at his studio every morning a ham or a half-dozen of champagne, or some delicate offering of the sort accompanied by a letter, he was easily able to make out what Florence meant now. It ran as follows:
Cher ami (I know you like French),
Has it occurred to you, as it has occurred to me, that I have never set eyes on Celia since she was one year old? She promised to be extremely ugly, but you never can tell with females at that age. They may become beauties or witches, and anyhow I hope Celia has some qualities of the witch about her. (Was she Celia or was she Sheila?)
I suppose this seems to you a heartless beginning, but then you must remember that I have no heart. I had once, and cut it up into small pieces and fed your egoism with them, one by one. Since then I have learned that a heart is no more necessary to life than an appendix, and I have lived very pleasantly without the former for nineteen years, and even more pleasantly without the latter for six. I feel sure you saw the fact that I had had a serious
operation in the papers, but I am even more sure that the operation performed on me with regard to my heart was quite as serious.
Cher ami, you did not perform that operation so cleverly as the surgeon of the appendix. You seem to have left me a bit of heart which you did not extirpate, and it has been troubling me. I want to see what Celia is like. There! You have it. She is mine, you know, just as much as yours, more so indeed, since I had all the bother of her appearance. So for fear you should imagine that I want to see you again, I tell you frankly that it is Celia I want to see. I am motoring down on Thursday next week with Princess Lutloff to her house at Exmouth, and as this would be rather a long day, we shall stay at Merriby that night, and I should like to dine with you, and will bring Natalie Lutloff with me. If you object to my coming — and there is no reason why you should, for I am perfectly harmless — write and say so, and I will ask Celia (Sheila) to dine with me, and, if I like her, I shall ask her to come on to Exmouth with us. Don’t poison her mind now, Philip, against me. I have never poisoned any one’s mind about you, but have always said you were perfectly charming, but that you couldn’t stand me. I hope you have been as generous as I have. Naturally you meet a quantity of people in your gay life at Merriby who are friends of mine, and I will do you the justice to say that you never seem to “crab” me.
Ever yours,
FLORENCE.
P.S. — Your poor Florence is fifty-three to-day, but, thank God, she doesn’t believe it, the incredulous wretch.
Celia had taken up her task of addressing letters again, while her father read this, but out of the corner of her eye she observed when he had finished.