Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “And what does she say?” she asked.

  “She is coming down here for a night, and wants to dine. Thursday next week; that is the day of our pot-luck party...

  The dancing-master, the dramatic egoist rose insurgent within him.

  “Just send her a pot-luck card,” he said, “and write on the back ‘So glad you will come. Celia, not Sheila.’”

  “Am I to write ‘Celia, not Sheila’?” asked the girl.

  “Yes, with brackets round ‘Not Sheila.’ And enclose another pot-luck card for Princess Lutloff. Et — et nous verrons! Adieu, chérie; je suis en retard:”

  He hurried into “Chez-moi,” and took the malacca cane from its place in the umbrella-stand.

  Celia did not need to waste much ingenuity on the solving of the problem as to what this mystic message meant, for it was immediately clear that her mother’s desire to dine here had something to do with her, since it was her welcome that was to be the answer; it was clear also that her mother was not quite certain what her daughter’s name was....

  “Probably she just wants to see me,” thought the girl, “and why not? I should like to see her too. I hope she won’t think I’m very ugly, but she can’t be a beauty herself, if she was like Daddy’s picture of her so long ago. And Princess Lutloff: Daddy will like that.”

  This was quite gravely thought, rousing no further raising of her eyebrows, for the wonder of her father’s liking to receive a total stranger merely because she was a princess had long ago evaporated, and such residue as was left had become merged in her habitual perception of her father. For herself, she could not see what the attraction was, any more than she could see what was the attraction in hitting a small india-rubber ball over three or four miles of hilly downs. If it amused you that it should be done, why not get somebody to do it for you? She understood dancing, for it gave her pleasure to move in rhythm to music, but she would have liked best to dance alone, instead of in the embrace of a hot young man who often collided with her, even though that hot young man evinced the greatest rapture in her partnership. If it was necessary to have a man there at all, she would have chosen to be embraced by her father, for he danced impersonally, and in a parent’s fashion clapped her on the shoulder when the dance was over and told her she wasn’t so lumpy as she used to be. True, the hot young man gave her a species of adoration, which certainly her father did not, but then they went and danced with some one else, and probably administered further adoration there. Perhaps she liked this sort of adoration to be exclusively directed to her; for certainly there was no use in it, if it was something to be handed round like claret cup.

  The train of vague thought went subconsciously through her head, as she continued directing envelopes to the eighty who were bidden to the soirée d’ennui, and it was with a sense of broken thought that she heard the faint rustling of Lady Violet Matcham coming up stealthily behind her across the lawn. Presently she had her eyes hidden underneath a cool hand, while her forehead was kissed.

  “Guess who it is!” said Violet.

  “It’s Evan Lamington,” said Celia slowly and huskily, still holding the pen above the half-completed address.

  Violet held her hands over Celia’s eyes, and tried to speak in the half-broken boy’s voice that Evan unfortunately affected.

  “Yes, you darling, it is,” she said. “I simply adore you. When will you promise to many me?”

  Celia felt suddenly bored. Violet’s hand, though cool, was also damp, and she hated being pawed.

  “Please take your hand away,” she said.

  Violet whisked round and stood with her back to Celia.

  “Good morning, Miss Courthope,” she said.

  Celia, knowing she was un seen, gently rubbed her face where Violet’s hands had been.

  “Good morning,” she said, and went on directing the unfinished envelopes. In the pause that followed, she noticed Violet’s ankles above her white shoes, and found that she disliked them.

  “If that is all, I think I will be going,” said Violet.

  Celia’s mouth took a decidedly upward turn, and her eyebrows expressed a more obvious indulgence.

  “What a short visit!” she said. “But no doubt you are busy.”

  Violet whisked suddenly round again, and knelt on the ground by Celia’s chair.

  “What a beast you are!” she said. “I don’t believe you care for anybody except yourself. Do stop writing. I shall tear up anything you write after this moment.”

  “Why?” asked Celia. “That will only oblige me to write it again.”

  “That is precisely why I shall do it,” said Violet. “You will hate me for it. Won’t you?”

  “Not a bit. I shall tell Reeves that you have gone mad, and ask him to break it to your mother.” Violet gave a little throttled giggle of laughter. “Mother’s playing golf with him this morning,” she said. “Oh, of course, your father and the kipper are playing against them. Mother put on her pearls. Isn’t it wonderful to play golf in pearls? I do love people enjoying themselves. Do be kind to me, Celia, and let me enjoy myself. I just want you to allow me to.”

  “Go ahead,” said Celia.

  “There you are! What could be more damping than that? Evan said last night that he was sure you hadn’t got a heart, and I believe he’s right.” Though it had been boring to have Violet’s hands over her eyes when she wanted to finish directing an envelope, Celia began to bask in the warmth of her adoration now that Violet did not touch her. It was pleasant to be looked at like that, to have charmingly pretty blue eyes eagerly gazing at you, to have a mouth ready to break into ecstatic smiles at any hint of graciousness.... Celia put the writing-pad off her knee again, and slid down on to the grass.

  “Oh, if Evan says I’ve got no heart, I must have,” she said, “for Evan is always wrong. Besides, I’m extremely fond of you, and you can’t be fond of any one unless you’ve got a heart.”

  Violet gave a great sigh.

  “I wonder if you really are,” she said. “Sometimes I think you don’t care about me one scrap.”

  “Then sometimes you indulge in extremely silly thoughts,” said Celia slowly and huskily.

  “But you often seem so cold and unresponsive,” said Violet, who loved quarrels and reconciliations, and mysteries and explanations.

  “On the other hand, you often seem to me rather sentimental—”

  “I am,” interrupted Violet with conscious pride. Celia gently disengaged herself from Violet’s arm, which now, flung round her waist, really rather hurt her.

  “Darling, I wish you would let me finish a sentence now and then,” said Celia. “And don’t look vexed because I took your arm away. I took it away because it hurt me. I was saying that you seemed to me rather sentimental: you like kissing me, and you like having little affairs and rows in order to be agitated and then make it up again. I know you’re very fond of me without that, and I love your being fond of me, I really do. But I don’t so much like being pawed. I suppose it’s because I am ticklish.”

  “If you really liked me you would like being touched by me,” said Violet.

  “No, I shouldn’t. That’s not my way, and it is yours. I think about you a great deal: I dreamed about you last night—”

  “Oh, did you?” said Violet. “What was it?” The comers of Celia’s mouth elevated themselves a little.

  “I dreamed we were having lunch,” she said. “There was boiled rabbit—”

  Violet gave a shrug of her shoulders.

  “You are horrid,” she said.

  “But I did dream that: it wasn’t my fault. I hoped you would think it funny. And then I awoke. May we be sensible? I wanted to tell you about something, but you wouldn’t let me speak. I wanted your advice.”

  In spite of the rather silly and meaningless prettiness of Violet’s face, with its china-blue eyes, its thin, dark eyelashes, its straight, small features, its tangle of flaxen-yellow hair, she was not quite the traditional rosebud maiden with all the thorns
plucked off and put into a glass of fresh spring-water. Similarly, below her sentimentality, there was a certain shrewdness and sense, which Celia had long ago discovered. This shrewdness came into her eyes now, and she put her head on one side like a listening bird.

  “Ah! tell me!” she said.

  “It is about my mother,” said Celia, “who, as you know, has scarcely set eyes on Daddy since I was a year old. And suddenly now she has written to him, saying she wants to come and dine with him next week. I know it must have something to do with me, for Daddy told me to send her a card from myself, signing it ‘Celia, not Sheila,’ from which I rather think that my mother cannot be sure what my name is.”

  Violet sent up a little rocket of laughter.

  “Oh, how marvellously like her!” she said. “She never forgets anything which interests her, and never remembers anything that doesn’t. Darling, I am thrilled at your news. But what’s the advice you want?”

  “About my line, my attitude, my behaviour,” said Celia. “Don’t tell me to behave naturally: that doesn’t mean anything. In spite of all that you may say about sincerity, it is often merely rude to behave naturally. If somebody bores you, the natural thing to do is either to yawn or to go quite away. But it is better to behave unnaturally and pretend to be interested.”

  “Oh, you won’t want to yawn with your mother,” said Violet. “No one yawns with her: people laugh and are interested. Dear me, how funny that I should be telling you about your own mother!”

  “Yes, but you know her, and I don’t. Daddy sometimes reads to me bits out of the paper about her parties. That’s really all I know about her. She gives parties, doesn’t she, quantities of parties?”

  “But, my dear, no one ever did it like her,” said Violet. “She has kept London from going flat during the war. She calls it her bit. She is too divine. She tried to pump the Prime Minister the other night about secret affairs, and when he wouldn’t tell her anything, she simply said, ‘And do you take any interest in the war?’”

  Celia half closed her eyes as if focussing some newly appeared vision.

  “Yes, yes, I see that; I like that,” she said. “Go on.”

  “Then again she knows everybody, and never knows a thing about them,” said Violet. “She asked Tommy Droitwich to lunch the other day, and when he came in, she said, ‘What! Haven’t you brought your wife?’ The reason he hadn’t was that he had divorced her the week before. And then she puts people who are not on speaking terms next each other at dinner, and when you point it out to her, she says, ‘Well, I’m sure they’ll like each other very much now they meet again. They are both of them charming.’”

  Celia laughed and the comers of her mouth flew upwards, while her eye closed completely.

  “Go on just like that,” she said. “I’m getting her beautifully into focus. Just little details.”

  “She was knocked down in the street the other day by a Rolls-Royce, and when they picked her up, she said, ‘Nobody’s fault, and what a nice car to be knocked down by.’ She kicks off her shoes after dinner-parties, and can’t find them. They are brought into the drawing-room on salvers, and she puts them on again!”

  “That might be pose,” said Celia.

  “It isn’t. She simply doesn’t care.”

  Celia lit another cigarette.

  “I am enjoying myself,” she said. “Now for a minute get on to bigger lines. What is she like inside? Is she — it’s a stupid word — but is she a lady?”

  Violet took Celia’s cigarette from her, and used it herself.

  “What a funny question!” she said. “Supposing I was to ask you if my mother was a lady?”

  “I should certainly say she wasn’t,” said Celia. “There you are then! What do you mean by ‘lady’? Birth doesn’t do it, which used to. Let’s leave out ‘lady.’”

  “All right. What does my mother think about, when she’s not making gaff est.”

  “You apparently. I’m sure I don’t wonder,” said Violet.

  “She probably will when she sees me. But I don’t any longer want to think how I shall behave. I think I shall know when the time comes. You’ve been brilliant, Violet: I’m sorry I said your mother wasn’t a lady.”

  “She is, though: she’s only a little mad, you know. My father was quite mad. He used to think he was the prophet Isaiah sometimes, and wrote quantities of prophecies which weren’t quite proper, I believe. Poor Pupsy! And then he used to think he was a pump, and go working his arm up and down like a pump-handle, until he was exhausted. And then there’s me, and then there’s Bernard, who has picked up all the sanity that was about. I absolutely adore Bernard, though he’s my brother and rather pompous and hasn’t quite got over the fact that he’s Lord Matcham. At least, I don’t think he has.”

  Violet threw the end of her cigarette away, and with it all her shrewdness.

  “Darling, I wish you would marry Bernard,” she said. “It would be lovely if you were my sister-in-law. Bernard is not too sane, I may tell you. You wouldn’t like anybody who was too sane.”

  Celia again disengaged an encircling arm.

  “Bernard,” she said. “A character sketch of Bernard by request.”

  “Well, you will see for yourself, for he’s coming down for two days next week. The Foreign Office can’t spare him for more; he said so. He was Secretary of Embassy at Petrograd when the war broke out. He’s quite brave, and tried again and again to be taken into the army, but they wouldn’t let him go. He would simply have hated it, so it was nice of him to try. He is about thirty, and — oh, there’s a gnat. I swell up if a gnat bites me, and you would hate me.”

  “Bernard!” said Celia.

  “Yea. Bernard’s rather precious. He likes pieces of embroidery with no nap left on them, and wooden candlesticks with the gilt rubbed off. But he always gets what he wants. He says you can get anything if you want it enough.”

  “So you can. The difficulty is to want enough,” said Celia. “If you don’t get it, you may be sure you didn’t want it enough.”

  “Then you can’t prove anything. But Bernard, when he was in Berlin, wanted an archaic Greek head very much. The owner was an extremely rich old Prussian, who told Bernard he didn’t care about money and would rather die than part with that head. So Bernard sat down and wanted. Sure enough the owner died, and Bernard purchased it from his executors. Wasn’t that clever?”

  “And the head?” asked Celia.

  “Bernard won’t show the head to any of us. He is in love with it, and says he won’t many anybody till he finds the girl who is that head.”

  “Oh! A sort of re-incarnation?” asked Celia.

  “No, not quite. You must get Bernard to explain it to you. Though he’s wonderfully practical and clever on the surface, he has got rather mystical ideas inside. He thinks all beautiful things are symbols, and that the reality is in existence somewhere. He’s sure there is a girl who is the embodiment of that head, and he is going to get her. He has the most marvellous patience, and has refused the most eligible girls who wanted to marry him.”

  “I think Bernard sounds a little mad too,” remarked Celia.

  “Perhaps he is, but his insanity is theoretical: he doesn’t try to be a pump. Don’t ever let him know that I told you about the head. Mother says there is no head at all, and that Bernard has simply made up the story in order to give a reason for not marrying. But then, Mother is so very materialistic, and believes in nothing which you can’t poke with your finger. After all, who is sane? I’m not: I’m perfectly insane about you. Mayn’t I talk about you for a little while? I have talked so much about other people.”

  Celia lay back, propping her head on Violet’s knees.

  “For exactly five minutes,” she said. “Lay it on thick. I feel in the mood to be appreciated.”

  CHAPTER II

  BERNARD MATCHAM’S hours of work at the Foreign Office were from four in the afternoon until midnight. Out of the three shifts into which the twenty-four hours were d
ivided this really seemed to him the most advantageous. It debarred you, it is true, from going out to dinner or attending theatres, but it gave you a reasonable night, and left you a good portion of the day at your disposal....

  But to-night it was a full hour and a half after his shift was over that he came downstairs from his room where he peptonized Turkish affairs for the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, for he had wanted to finish at the earliest possible moment the contents of the “Secret and Confidential” envelope which he had just given the porter to transmit the first thing in the morning. A week ago he had got a clue from a piece of news in the “Enemy Press Supplement” of the Daily Review of the Foreign Press (for private circulation only), and bits of the jig-saw puzzle had been dropping into his hands ever since, and the last completing fragment had reached him this evening. It was therefore after one o’clock in the morning that he penned the final words of his report.

  To summarize these pieces of information, the authenticity of which appears, after careful scrutiny, to be beyond doubt, it is clear that not only have Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey, in May of this year, transferred the whole of their private fortunes from the Deutsche Bank in Constantinople and invested them in two Swiss banks, namely the Banque Nationale de Suisse and the Bank Fédérale at Zurich, but they have drawn out also the entire funds of the Committee of Union and Progress, and similarly transferred them. This operation was not effected without considerable loss, for in return for the Turkish £1 (gold) they received only thirteen francs.

  It is significant, therefore, that the most prominent members of the Turkish Government preferred to lose half of their own private fortunes and of the funds entrusted to them, and have the remainder secure in Switzerland, rather than leave them in German hands. We may reasonably argue that a profound distrust both of German finance and of the chance of an ultimate German victory over the Allies exists among those Turks who are best qualified to form a judgment on these points.