by E. F. Benson
As if she had actually told him so, Vincent became aware that it was not only of the two boys she was speaking, and his interest redoubled.
“That’s a mistake,” he said. “You should never hate finding your psychical level. One’s own level is the only place where one can feel at home. You don’t grow by standing on tiptoe: you only tire yourself.”
“How is one to grow, then?” she asked.
“By being yourself, surely, not feigning to feel the emotions of others. Besides, that never pays, to look at it from the lowest point of view. One is always found out if one pretends to emotions one doesn’t feel. At least I am.”
Celia interrupted.
“Oh, I don’t agree in the least,” she said. “For instance, I — I completely conceal the fact that I don’t rise to the gloriousness of those two.”
Her hesitation in choosing her instance did not pass unmarked. Vincent felt it to be certain that she was really thinking of another instance of her power of concealment and then substituted this. There was no need to wonder what the other instance was.... What made it even more clear was that she instantly changed the subject.
“You were wonderfully interesting about Russia last night,” she said. “I hope you developed it to Bernard afterwards.”
He steered back to the other point.
“Oh, Bernard is too happy to care about Russia,” he said. “I consider you’ve spoiled his career by making him so blissful.”
He saw the faint smile on Celia’s face and knew perfectly well what caused it. Just now he had warned her of the uselessness of feigning emotions: now by implication he congratulated her on doing so successfully.
“Oh, what a miserable hearing!” she said. “I really thought I had been helping Bernard a little. You don’t mean what you say, do you? Ah, here is Bernard: let’s get his opinion about it.”
Bernard had discarded his top-hat and black coat: the sacrifice to Sunday was over. The post had come in during his absence, and he was reading some communication out of an official-looking envelope with frowning attention as he came towards them. “Bernard, he says I’ve ruined your career,” said Celia slowly. “I make you too happy. What’s your view?”
He looked up at the sound of her voice, not hearing what she said, only that she spoke.
“What’s Vincent been saying?” he asked.
“Oh, do attend. I hate repeating myself. That you care for me more than your work.”
“Oh, I see. No answer required. Celia, I shall have to go up to the House of Bondage early tomorrow morning. I hoped I could have stopped till Tuesday, but I can’t.”
“News?” asked Celia, pointing to the envelope. “Yes. Now what will you do to-morrow?”
“Come with you. What was the sermon about, if you won’t tell me your news?”
“Rather mixed. We had to love the Boches and yet kill as many of them as possible. I wanted to ask questions.”
It was tolerably clear to Vincent that his presence interfered with the recounting of the news and he strolled off. As soon as he was out of hearing Bernard spoke.
“I wanted to consult you first,” he said. “They’ve asked me to go on a mission to Athens. I shall have to start at once if I go.”
“Oh, my dear, of course you’ll go,” said she. “How splendid! And Vincent saying I was spoiling your career! Is it important? How long will it take?”
“I should think a couple of months. But what about you? It’s very hot there in the summer.”
It had never occurred to Celia that he contemplated her going with him, nor to him that she had not assumed that she would. But the blankness of her pause informed him on that point.
“No, it would never do for you to come,” he said. “Do you know, I think I’ll refuse.”
“If your refusal has anything to do with my not coming,” she said, “I shall come.”
He laughed.
“Well, if you want to know, it has got just a little to do with it,” he said. “I should miss you a little at first. Perhaps. Just a shade.”
“Then I shall come,” said she.
“You will not. It was ridiculous of me to have thought of it after what you told me last night. Ah, my dear, what a night! And what a lovely hour at dawn. I brought you tea, by the way, and you were fast asleep. I kept it hot in my quilt in case you awoke.”
“That was dear of you,” said she. “About Athens. You must take it, Bernard. It would be throwing away a great chance if you didn’t.”
“Oh, as for that, other chances will come along.” He was sitting on the ground at her feet, and she pressed her hands on his shoulders.
“No one can afford to miss a chance,” she said. “You wouldn’t be asked to go if it wasn’t something worth doing.”
He put his head back, looking up into her face. “Nothing is worth doing without you,” he said. “A great many things are. It’s worth brushing your teeth, though I don’t hold the tooth-brush. You must be sensible.”
“I can’t be sensible where you are concerned.”’
Celia’s face had been grave with the shadow of a frown between her eyebrows. Now it suddenly cleared.
“Ah, I love to hear you say that,” she said, “and I hate scolding you for it. But just now it’s a question of which of us is to be the most obstinate, and it’s me. You must go, and if you won’t go without me, I shall come, too. Shall we consider that settled, as Mamma says, when she means to have her way? Oh, Bernard, it will be horrid without you. When will you have to go? This week, do you mean? As soon as that?”
He did not return her smile.
“Do you know what it will be to me to be without you for two months?” he asked.
She nodded at him.
“And you still tell me to go?” he asked.
“Yes, my dear.”
“Hell!” said Bernard.
Tommy, coming to be taken out for his walk, was making a devious way across the lawn towards them, steered by shouts of “Left” or “Right” from Jimmie, with occasional warnings of “Croquet hoop!”
“Oh, here’s Tommy!” said Celia. “I promised to take him out for a walk. Say it again for me, dear.”
Now that the decision had been made, there was no reason against its publication, and that afternoon Celia told Vincent what had been settled.
“That is very wise,” he said, and paused. “I wonder which of you will miss the other most,” he added.
CHAPTER III
BERNARD had been out at Athens for some two months: his work there had taken longer than he had anticipated, and this morning a letter had come from him to Celia, who was spending August at Stonepitts, that he did not expect to be able to get away for several weeks yet.
It is all fearfully tiresome [he said], and if I had guessed that the job would lengthen itself out in this way? I should not have come, and proved myself more obstinate than you. At the same time I don’t deny that it is interesting, and if you really must know what I think, I haven’t made a mess of it. What is more important than what I think, is that the F.O. thinks so too. In fact, I received a letter from the office last week which puffed me up with pride. But there’s time yet for me to disgrace myself.
It’s interesting, as I say, but every morning, my darling, it’s so hard to be interested. You run in my head like a song, and I miss you more every hour. At the same time, I wouldn’t have you out here for anything: the heat is fiendish, and the nights are hot, which is the worst of all. But don’t fuss about me: I am perfectly well. Your last letter seemed rather anxious and depressed. But before long now I shall be back, and in the interval, have people with you, even if you don’t feel inclined for it. Then when I come, we will send them all away. Let us do that: let us have a week or two at Stonepitts quite absolutely alone. I love your reason for not caring to see people (that puffed me up more than anything the F.O. said), but it’s not a good plan. I heard from Vincent the other day that he had seen something of you in town, and that he hoped to go down to Stonep
itts for a few days. Mind you make him come. I don’t know if you know it, but he stimulates you more than any one. He has clearly got a culte for you: so be kind to him.
Almost every day when the heat abates I go up to the Acropolis, and I feel sure that my Greek head came from there. There are half a dozen statues there found in the Erechtheum, and it is clearly one of them, though none of the others is you. I think they must be relations — I shall leave mine back to the Museum there: it will have done its work, bless it, and the man who made it, and your own sweet self. Oh, Celia... sometimes I want to take the largest sheet of official foolscap paper, and write “Celia, Celia” all over it. That would be what I feel, though perhaps it would not be a very interesting letter to receive. But it’s the fact of you which means everything to me....
I rejoice in your news of yourself, that you are so well. As for your letter being dull, what do you mean? Nothing is dull if it happens to you. I want to know what time you get up and what you have for breakfast, and what you do afterwards, and what happens after that, and after that, and after that, and after that. And the best of all is when at the end you say, “Best love, yours ever....” I just love the common words, knowing that your hand wrote them and your heart said them.
Give my love to your father if he is still with you, and then take it away again, because all the love I have is yours.
B.
Every mail brought one and often two of these letters, which were like variations on one theme, and they gave Celia moments of heartache, of a sort of horror of herself and of a blank wonder at what would happen on Bernard’s return. Since her marriage she had never spent happier days than during his absence: they had been days of unbroken relief, she had revelled in the regained sense of freedom, and of not being obliged to act a part. Growingly, all these months the necessity for that, as she found when the necessity was removed, had been a burden to her, and the repetition of it had not eased into a habit, but rather had increased in irksomeness. She hated herself for acting thus, she also hated the situation that forced it on her. Deeper down yet there was another cause that rendered such practices odious, for she was beginning to comprehend the marvellous sweetness that would have been there, if only they had been inspired by sincerity.
The letter dropped unheeded from her lap, as she sat there in the sun-flecked shade of the fir-trees, just where she had been when Bernard came back from church one Sunday in June, and having got rid of Vincent, told her about the mission to Greece. She had known then that she, in her secret heart, welcomed the idea of his severance from her; what she did not know was the full measure of the relief it would bring. It was horrible that it should be so; it was horrible that she looked forward to his return with a blank dreariness, an inability to see how she could take up the burden of his love again. It had been bad enough when she had no interior knowledge of what love meant, as opposed — for it was no less than that — to liking. Now she wondered, knowing that she need not wonder, whether that knowledge was not beginning to dawn on her. It was not day with her yet, but there was the dove colour in her sky that comes between night and day. From within, authentically, she was beginning to know something of what she meant to Bernard. And was there ever a more complete irony than his saying that Vincent “stimulated” her?...
A golf-ball out of the clear sky landed near her feet, and presently her father, coatless and in a blue silk shirt and knickerbockers, came round the corner of the wall of the kitchen garden, with a couple of golf-clubs in his hand:
“Ha! I didn’t know you were sitting here, Contesse,” he said. “My golf-ball must nearly have hit you. It was a good shot over that wall. You should get Bernard to lay out a few short holes round the house: capital practice. Or I would do it for you. Do you like my shirt?”
“Lovely,” said Celia. “I’ve just heard from Bernard, Daddy. He sends you his love.”
“Very kind of him. Cigarette? When will he be back?”
“He doesn’t know yet: his mission is taking rather longer than he expected.”
Philip produced the silver casket, and lit his tinder.
“He should hurry them up,” he said. “Those Greeks are always procrastinating. He has been gone two months now; time to settle anything in.”
“It rather depends on what the thing is,” said Celia. “The war hasn’t been settled in two months or in two years.”
“It might have been, if they’d gone the right way about it. We ought to have taken Constantinople straight off.”
“We did try,” said Celia.
“Pooh! Half-hearted affair. Now about these golf-holes. I shall cut one here, close to the path which will be a bunker. Then another by that holly-bush at the end of the lawn. That’ll require some playing. What are you going to do this afternoon?”
“Nothing,” said Celia firmly.
“Lazy-bones. You haven’t got my energy or your mother’s, either. By the way, I wonder if you could keep me till next week. I must get back to Merriby then for the tennis tournament; but there’s nothing just now.”
“By all means,” said she.
“Very good. I should like to see Douglas, who, I think you said, was coming down for the Sunday, and talk to him about Russia. They’ve messed things up there, too. I shall tell him my views about that, and then I think you said Princess Lutloff was coming. So I shall not feel de trop. I shall make your party carré. Now I shall get a trowel and cut a few golf-holes. Small flower-pots, too; I shall find them, I suppose.”
He hurried off, putting a ball across the lawn in front of him, leaving Celia in a state of amused wonder and envy. His shirt, his views on Russia, his lawn tennis, his golf, these were sufficient to turn life for him into a sort of innocent and everlasting and entrancing orgy. It was not that he had a secret life of his own, which sometimes fed him with glorious food that transfigured all the small things of life, and sometimes starved him so that the colour went out of the world. That could not be his condition, for if he had an earache, all Merriby knew, irrespective of his marvellous appearance, with head swaddled in orange-chiffon. He was completely patent to the world, whether in joy or sorrow, and given that he had a decent balance at the bank, and his mashie-shots were of the superb order of the one which just now had fallen at Celia’s feet, and his liver was acting as livers should act, he trod an earthly paradise — no artificial one, composed out of the weavings of imagination, but a nice definite paradise, with golf-links by its rivers, and for himself the central position in the Pumproom.
Celia’s amusement faded, so also did her envy, and there was only the wonder left. Vincent, in his way, was another of these roaring hedonists, to whom the material of life was the fount of rapture. He went a little deeper than her father, for intellectual achievement entered into his paradise; yet, after all, intellectual achievement was to him only a weapon, a spade with which he dug the foundation? of his career. His object in life was power, and so, too, was her father’s, for the lordship of Merriby was the inspiration of his golf and his blue shirt and his tennis. Vincent went farther than that, but only on the same road, though without doubt he would go very far on that road, for he was certain of a seat in the Cabinet before long. His masterly knowledge of the set of the huge tides which the war had put in motion was already recognized: the other day only he had made a speech in the House which swept him up out of the ruck of aspiring politicians into that gallery of marked men, which invariably implies recognition, provided only that he kept on the blind side of Mrs. Grundy. He was clever enough to do that. But he did not want power in order to exercise it beneficently, for the good of mankind. He wanted it because Vincent Douglas would then have it. He exercised his strength, his vitality, as does a colt in the meadow. He kicked up his heels for the sheer joy of doing so. It was all an assertion of himself, just as, in more provincial ways, her father led the revels at Merriby.
Suddenly, as by the turning round of the corner of a solid wall, a whole new vista of Vincent broke upon her. It was of himself
that he thought all the time: he swept things and people into his net, not because he valued them individually, but because it was fun to catch them. Then he turned them over, chucking out the rubbish, picking out and preserving the desirable which ministered to his own nutriment. He had a huge appetite for life, public and private; enjoyment and power were his quarry, which he hunted down with an indefatigable vigour. He loved, perhaps, the act of getting more than the completed achievement: when a thing was definitely his he did not care so much for it, just as a man might pick up a bright half-crown from the roadway with an elation in its acquisition, although his bank-balance was ample and half a crown meant nothing to him.
These things Celia looked straight in the face, as her father, in his silly blue shirt, disappeared in quest of flower-pots. She made this dissection of Vincent with deliberate intent, in order to induce herself to despise, or better still, to be unaware of him. She wanted, most of all, to wipe the slate clean with regard to him: she wanted to have a blank there, instead of uncomplimentary comments. If that was impossible, she must keep her comments, all of which were critical of him and in his disfavour. She added up an account against him to show his deficit: she contemplated that account, telling over to herself the damaging items. His selfishness, his greed were all down; his ignoble vitality which, instead of dedicating itself to others, sacrificed them to itself. That was all to the good as regards herself, just as it was all to the bad as regards him. But much better, if it was possible, would be the clean slate, the absence of like or dislike of him....
She had seen a good deal of him during these last two months; to take Bernard’s view he stimulated her, and certainly he seemed to find stimulus in her. Never once had he approached to speech that was unbecoming (to put it like that) as addressed to the wife of his friend. He admired her, and why should he not? He treated himself like an intimate friend, with every encouragement to do so, for Celia had already grasped that great fact in human intercourse, which escapes so many, that anything short of friendship with others, is, as far as relationship is worth anything, a pure waste of time. To like a man — just like him — has no more dynamic value than mildly to dislike him. Either of the two is worth no more than the reading of the newspapers, or a game of bridge; it serves but to pass the time. And yet, though she knew that perfectly well, she was sitting here determining, if possible, to attain this colourless indifference towards him. Why was that?