by E. F. Benson
Their relations, then, were based on a deception of which the causes were solidly founded. She knew perfectly well that he mistook her devotion to his interests for her devotion to him, and she was untiring in her efforts to make him continue to do so. How much he missed in her she did not know, for she satisfied his needs in all ways, and the very humility of his access to her was her safeguard. There was another safeguard still, known to her, though not yet to him, which when he knew it would make him prouder of her than ever, and yet more humble. She had only known it herself yesterday.
All this formed not the subject of consecutive thought to her now, but the mere flash of consciousness. What concerned her as she stood overlooking the broad sweep of heather and gorse, was the utter lack of joy and of the vivid perception which is the root of joy with which her surroundings, mental and physical, inspired her. She knew the lilacs were in bloom, that the air was redolent with hot heather scent, that she was mistress of this gem of a house that stood behind her and of the great palace that crowned the ridge. She knew that Violet in a hospital motor would presently come tearing down the straight sandy road that led up the ridge, that there were two charming boys in the house, who both frankly adored her — despite the fact that one of them was to marry Violet: she knew that soon her husband would be here, and that it was hers to give him the sweetest tidings that a man, married to the woman he loved, could ever hear. But she was outside it all, who was yet the very centre of it. None of these things moved her, neither the loveliness of the visible world, nor the affection of friends, nor the adoration of her husband. She was as immobile and perfect as the Greek head about which Bernard had woven his romantic fancies, endowing it with a million living graces, and seeing in it the adumbration of herself. It stood, now that his private business with it was over, at the top of the stairs of the big London house, and in some fantastic fashion it had begun to trouble Celia. She saw in it all that she truly was, while Bernard saw in it the foreshadowing of all that she truly was not. It had been a symbol to him; now it was a symbol to her of herself.
The motor for which she had been looking came crawling down the steep ridge, like a fly on the wall. She could see Violet’s nurse’s cap flapping, and presently there was Violet’s hand raised in ecstatic recognition. Soon the carriage drew up on the road below, and Violet climbed up the meadow bank to where she stood.
“Oh, what a perfect plan of yours, darling,” she said. “Bernard wanted this Sunday alone with you so dreadfully, and it simply entranced him not to get it. He thinks it was too wonderful of you. Where’s my Tommy?”
“Your Tommy is making noises on the piano, and quarrelling violently with his Jimmie.”
“Oh, my dear, is Jimmie here too? Darling, you think of everything! Tommy will be perfectly happy. I shan’t go in to see him yet. I shall resist till I can’t bear it any longer. But I shall be able to bear it a long time yet, for if he is thumping on the piano with his Jimmie, it means he is happy. I won’t talk about Tommy. He is too marvellous to talk about. He is, isn’t he? He says he is not going to be the ordinary wonderful blind man, but the blind man. Darling!”
“Me or Tommy?” said Celia.
“Both, of course. My dear, the first time I saw Tommy after he was blind, he wanted to release me from my engagement. Just think of that a moment in capital letters. Release Me From My Engagement! The ignorance of those children who are called men! He insisted on it, without inquiring into my views on the question at all. He supposed in his silly soul that I couldn’t love him any more because he was blind. Do tell me: is Bernard ever stupid like that? From what you know of Bernard, do you imagine that he thinks you could cease to care for him because something happened to his eyes or his nose. What have Tommy’s eyes got to do with him? I apologize for talking about him when I said I wouldn’t. Let’s talk about you: you’re the only other possible thing to talk about.”
Celia experienced at that moment a gigantic access of envy. She would have bartered all the pleasure of the world to experience that sort of happiness. Her own inability to comprehend vexed and irritated her, and she ransacked her storehouse of remembered sensations to find anything which resembled the colour of that. When had she ever been stung out of herself, so that her soul, like Violet’s, was disembodied, and clung only to something quite external to herself? Never with Bernard had she got away from herself, never with Violet, never.... And she turned back from that direction, conscious that mingled with fear and with dislike, there was something that, inharmoniously enough as in Bakst decoration, repeated a colour jarring indeed, but related.
She swept that from her mind: the effort required was but small, for it had long been a habit with her to shut her ears to one particular group of... of discords. For several months now she had neither seen Vincent nor heard from him, for instead of those safe, swift journeys to Rome, he had been sent to Russia, where revolution and counter-revolution and the grim rise of Bolshevism had succeeded one another in a long nightmare of swollen barbarism. For a few weeks after his departure, Bernard had got news of the mission on which he was sent: then the curtain had fallen. Celia hardly knew if she wanted it to rise again. If that was not to be, she wanted the certainty that the last act was over...
“Oh, we won’t talk about me, just for once,” she said, letting her irritation wrinkle the smooth slowness of her speech. “I’m too prosperous to talk about. Happy is the woman who has no history, but her happiness debars her from being a subject of conversation. Tommy now! Supposing he was bald and blind and deaf and toothless and armless and legless. What would then be left to which you could bedevoted?”
Violet merely laughed.
“What a question!” she said. “There would be Tommy left.”
“And dumb,” said Celia. “And with cancer, and consumption, and corns and cramp?”
“Darling, he couldn’t have corns if he hadn’t got any feet,” said Violet carefully. “But I don’t see what you mean. Of course he has got delicious hair, crumply hair, if you know what I mean, and lovely teeth, and jolly arms and legs, but all that is only Tommy’s possessions. That isn’t Tommy. I might as well ask you if you would cease to love Bernard if he hadn’t got any nice houses and enormous quantities of money.”
“Oh, that’s not the point,” said Celia. “Could you fall in love with a torso? I think you would be a very odd person if you could.”
“And that’s not the point,” said Violet. “The “point is that when you had once fallen in love with a man, nothing, except his ceasing to care for you, could alter your devotion. I should be miserable if Tommy had his limbs lopped from him and lost the things I liked so dreadfully. But as long as he loved me, how could I change? Certainly, darling, when you put it so crudely, and tell me to imagine Tommy being a torso, you make it sound rather impossible, but the other is more impossible.”
“And if he frightened you and was disagreeable and coarse and cowardly,” said Celia, pursuing her own train of thought.
Violet considered this.
“I suppose I should tell myself that he was none of those things,” she said. “I should say he didn’t mean to frighten me, and was extremely agreeable and refined and brave.”
“But that would be foolish.”
“Now you have hit the point. One is foolish. What does that matter?”
They had been sauntering by the big yew hedge, and had turned from there on to the gravel path that led by the fir-trees that lined the short avenue from the gate. As they loitered here, the sharp ping of a bicycle-bell sounded, and the moment afterwards a boy with a telegram curved through the gate. He saw Celia, and dismounted.
“Telegram for you, my lady,” he said. “Any answer?”
Celia opened it and read the two lines which it contained.
“No, no answer,” she said, crumpling it up and throwing it into the long grass by the hedge. The boy mounted his bicycle again, and with feet up sped down the hill up which he had climbed. Celia watched him till he was out of
sight.
“From Bernard,” she said at length. ‘Vincent Douglas has just got back from Russia, and Bernard is bringing him here for the Sunday.”
“You will like that?” asked Violet.
“It will be interesting to hear what he has to tell us,” said Celia.
“I know, but you don’t say whether you like it. One doesn’t always like what is interesting.”
Celia moved towards the house.
“You mean really that you don’t like Vincent’s coming here?” she said.
“I suppose I do. Tommy doesn’t like him either, and I don’t think Bernard does. Why is he bringing him then? Oh, perhaps he thought you liked him.”
Celia just perceptibly shrugged her shoulders, as if this was a matter hardly worth mention.
“Oh, there are quantities of people about whom one doesn’t know whether one likes them or not,” she said. “But certainly I shall like to hear about Russia. I must go in and tell them there will be one more. I hope Bernard has remembered to bring something in the way of meat.”
Violet’s face assumed an aspect of idiotic intensity.
“Oh, listen!” she said. “That’s Tommy at the piano; isn’t it marvellous of him to determine to learn it. He has got a beautiful touch already.”
Celia laughed outright.
“For Heaven’s sake, don’t tell Tommy that until Monday,” she said.
The night was very warm and luminous with a full moon, and when after dinner a suggestion arose of garden strolling, taken up by Violet and her lover, it was with the utmost geniality that the girl welcomed Jimmie as the third. Her way of love was not in the least to segregate herself with Tommy, but to surround him with anything that was agreeable to him. If Jimmie’s companionship was not desired by him, he would certainly tell his pal so with the directness that characterized their intercourse, but he appeared to think that three would make an admirable company, and so after Jimmie’s bath-chair had stuck in the doorway and been released, it followed that the other four were left indoors. Celia, from whom came this suggestion of a stroll in the garden, had intended that Bernard should take it up, and she would then have made the opportunity to tell him her news. But he was speaking at the moment to her mother, and Violet had acted on the proposal. Now certainly the garden was no longer a place for whispered confidences, for the sight of the full moon had given rise to the idea of a raid, and the lawn resounded with whistles and cries of “Take Cover.” As she stood at the window, Celia could see Jimmie’s bath-chair careering about the lawn and nearly upsetting over a croquet-hoop. Tommy was pushing it, and Violet’s share in the exhibition seemed to be to get out of its way. It was an odd form of moonlight love-making, but Violet’s laughter and Tommy’s catcalls seemed to indicate that it satisfied....
She turned back from the window into the room again. Vincent was seated by her mother, filling the place, as his wont was, with his domineering vitality. He had scarcely spoken a word to her yet: without pointedly avoiding her, he had had his attention occupied in other ways, and, during dinner, Celia, following a lead that seemed unintentional, had made no attempt to claim a hostess’s share in her guest. She was conscious, however, that her share in this mutual neglect was a little overdone: more than once, when it was obvious he was about to speak to her, she turned aside and spoke to some one else. Somewhere at the back of her mind was pique that he paid so little attention to her, and she wondered if Bernard noticed the slight constraint, of which she was acutely conscious. The whole situation, if indeed there was a situation, was to her feeling forced and unnatural; she wished Bernard had not brought him. Yet she knew, even as she told herself she wished that, that if the raising of her little finger would have transported him back to Russia or any other conveniently remote spot, she would not have stirred a muscle.
Her mother, luckily, was completely unconscious of any inharmoniousness anywhere, for it took a social cataclysm to upset her pleasure in the company of others, and she was embarked in a finely incoherent monologue that started from a desire to hear about Russia.
“So terrible,” she said; “and just when we had been told it was a steam-roller on its way to Berlin. Fancy having a revolution just then, when it was so important to get on with the war. And not content with one revolution, they must have another. What did they all want? Why have two revolutions? And now Mr. Douglas tells us that there is an anti-Bolshevist reaction coming. What is it all about? Why don’t they make up their minds or have an election? They are like children, and the steam-roller all going to bits.”
Vincent had got up and was standing in front of the fireplace, and as Mrs. Courthope was expressing these views, Bernard had sat down on the arm of Celia’s chair. His coat-sleeve lay against her bare arm, pressing it, and she was aware that Vincent had taken notice of this. Without knowing precisely why, she moved a little sideways towards her husband, returning the pressure and letting Vincent see it.
Instantly he turned to her mother.
“Precisely; you have hit it,” he said. “They are like children. Eighty million — isn’t it, Bernard — eighty million children have got hold of machine-guns and cannons and soldiers and all sorts of real weapons, instead of pop-guns and lead soldiers, and here’s the result, that nobody knows what they are playing at. The only certain thing is that they are being killed or dying of starvation by the tens of thousands. They are playing at different games too. In one street in Petrograd there will be a pitched battle going on, and in the next an excellent performance of Russian ballet.”
“Those terrible Bolshevists,” said Mrs. Courthope. “The Czar! All those beautiful jewels. Poland too. Most complicated.”
Vincent had turned to Bernard and Celia again, and once more Celia fitted her shoulder into Bernard’s arm.
“You have told us nothing yet,” she said. “Would it bore you to talk about what you saw, to tell us what you expect?”
For the next half-hour Vincent held them, as he could hold even an antipathetic audience. He had a marvellous gift of clarifying a complicated situation, of disentangling from a ravelled heap of broken knotted pieces one thread and then another, joining this to that, until at length, instead of a confused jumble of sundered facts, there emerged as by a conjuring trick the whole thread complete. He had vivid language in which to clothe the vigour of his thought, he had strong gestures to emphasize the important, and the power of making detail illustrate and not obscure the broad lines of his argument. At his bidding, at the waving of the wand of words, there rose the jewel-encrusted throne of Czars, with the vermin crawling round its feet and the spectre of Nihilism at its back. Then came, still in brief, the democratic impulse which made the autocrat put off the divinity in which, for the vast mass of the people, his Czardom was invested. With that the spectre behind the throne throve and gathered solidity, for if the Czar was but a man like other men, then in truth he was no Czar at all. Down toppled the throne, crash followed crash, and lo, here was the nation playing bitter marbles in the gutter.
By degrees Vincent captured Celia’s attention completely: he made her unconscious of her husband, and she moved away from him, as if to detach herself from any distraction. Though the facts were well known to the speaker, he had never yet grouped them before to make them intelligible to others, and his exposition was a miracle of improvised speech. At the end he sat down in the chair next Celia. She turned to him with the naturalness that had been lacking all the evening.
“That’s wonderfully interesting,” she said. “You are the Pied Piper, you know. I told Violet so long ago. You enthralled me: I am a little dazed because, since you stopped speaking, I have returned from Russia.”
Not till then did she recollect that Bernard was sitting by her.
“Bernard,” she said, “you must pin down the Pied Piper to dine with us in town, and get the men of your Russian department to meet him. There is Edgar Antrobus, for instance. And all that Vincent told us about the Black Sea coast bears on your work in Turkey. Pick his
brains, darling, pick them, pickle them: serve them up with your cold beef. You must sit up late to-night, Vincent, and coach Bernard. No one has really considered how the South Russian problem affects Turkey.”
Certainly if Celia had forgotten about Bernard and his work and his adjacent arm for a little, she had made amends now. But her amends were an after-thought: it was Vincent and his exposition which had first occupied her to the exclusion of anything else. His purpose had been to effect just that: he would not have exerted an atom of the energy that was the “drive” of his speech in order to interest Bernard or Mrs. Courthope, but never had he called upon all his power of enlisting more imperatively than now, when Celia was added to his audience. It was purposely that he had refrained from claiming or seeking to capture her individual attention before, waiting in his cool, long-headed way for an opportunity to capture the attention of her among others. That he had done: he had made her attend to him in spite of herself. Her interest as regards the assistance he might be to her husband had been a second thought; primarily she had been interested in him. No doubt the subject matter interested her too, but that she might have got by study and out of reports and correspondences from Russia. It was his manner of putting it, the Pied Piper quality that had enthralled her, the personal ingredient.
Bernard got up from the arm of Celia’s chair.
“It’s amazingly instructive,” he said, with that manner that suddenly struck Celia as being a little pompous, a little pedantic. “I don’t think that particular point of view — I mean that of regarding Russia as a host of uneducated children — has ever struck anybody at the office. You can’t deal with them, I see, or frame a policy about Russia, as you would if you were dealing with a grown-up nation. Kerensky winding up his brain with champagne! Lenin reading fairy tales and eating chocolates, furious at being disturbed! The moujik braining the Colonel with the crucifix on which he was swearing fidelity! Up-to-date diplomacy is gibberish with such people.”