Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

Yes, she was more dazzling, so Silvia found, when there was no one to contrast her with. The sheer, silly, conventional tittle-tattle took a sparkling quality quite alien to it when it came from her mouth. Her personality was like coloured lights playing on a fountain and turning the drops to gems.

  “I must be silent, then,” she said.

  “Oh, don’t be silent! When people are silent it means they are only being polite. If they were less polite they would say that they were excruciatingly bored. Then, after a suitable silence, they say, ‘How charming it is here!’ Don’t say ‘how charming it is here.’ That will be the last straw, Silvia. Dear me, I said ‘Silvia’ by accident. It — what they call — slipped out.”

  “Oh, do say it on purpose, then,” said Silvia. “Very well; me too, you understand. What a funny business is Christian names! The Christian name is never really ripe till it drops. I wonder if you know what an unutterable boon you and your mother have been to that smoky place over there. And to crown it all, you are giving the most delightful party with the most gorgeous punctuality, as far as I am concerned. Do say you settled it for that night because you knew I couldn’t come on any subsequent night.”

  Silvia gave a little moan like a dove in a tree.

  “I can’t say that,” she said.

  Nellie sighed, wholly appreciatively.

  “That’s so refreshing of you,” she said. “You’re one of the real people, I expect; the people who mean what they say. I usually mean what I don’t say.” Silvia turned round and lay facing her friend. “Don’t say it, then, Nellie,” she said. “I mean — do say the things you mean. How complicated it sounds, and how simple it is. Shall we stop talking about me, do you think? I’ve got another subject.”

  “I know it,” said Nellie. “What about Peter? I adore Peter, by the way; don’t say anything horrid.” A certain sense of shock came to Silvia. Peter had not, ever so remotely, been the subject to which she alluded. But when Nellie suggested him, he was flashed on the screen with disconcerting vividness.

  “But I didn’t mean him at all,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about — about Mr. Mainwaring.”

  “He wouldn’t like that,” said Nellie.

  Silvia sat up. She had a perfectly clear conscience to endorse an immediate repudiation. What caused that suspicious, that questionable little leap of blood to her cheeks, was, indeed, not that she had been thinking of Peter, but that Nellie supposed she had.

  “Oh, but this is quite silly!” she exclaimed. “Indeed, he wasn’t in my mind at all. Why should he be? I scarcely know him.”

  Nellie knew that she had ceased for that moment to dazzle Silvia, to whom the suggestion that Peter had been in her mind was clearly unwelcome and unexpected. It might be true or it might not (so ran Nellie’s swift argument) that Silvia was not thinking of Peter at all; but that she should be ruffled — ever so delightfully — at the notion that she had been, constituted a symptom, did it not?... But it was enough to note that, and pass on at once to the easy task of dazzling Silvia again.

  “You are too delicious,” she said. “Yes, I’m going to stick to my subject for a minute longer, which is you, since yours isn’t Peter. You’ve got the most lovely lack of self-consciousness, do you know? Of course you don’t, or you wouldn’t have it. But when I talk to other girls, we each think about ourselves. It’s like talking to a boy — not Peter, mind — to talk to you.”

  Silvia made some gesture of deprecation.

  “No, I will go on,” said Nellie. “Look at the glass I hold up to you, please. It isn’t only the lovely parties that you and your mother have given us that have polished up the rusty old season: it’s your quality — what shall I call it — wind and sun, sexlessness. You just move along’ like a spring day, with all your banners streaming, in the most entrancing glee. You re absolutely insouciante, if you understand French.”

  Silvia had lost sight of Peter by now; he was round the corner, and how near that corner was, was immaterial. She wanted to put herself round the corner, too, and seized on this as a possible diversion.

  “Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “I only came back this spring from three years in France.”

  “There you are again! There’s another of your completenesses. You’re spread evenly, richly, like butter (when we’re all eating margarine) over the whole slice of life. I wish I could bite you! I believe that with a little trouble I could, and, if so, I should hate you, not for what you’ve got but for what I haven’t.”‘

  At this moment Nellie became aware that her day in the wet woods had changed the character with which, prospectively, she had endowed it. She had meant, first with Peter as her companion, and next by herself, to enjoy the last hours of her celibacy. With Silvia, on the other hand, she was now not enjoying her own, but envying her companion’s. What she envied her most for was her decorated simplicity. Silvia wore her decorations externally; she didn’t attempt to swallow them and, by digestion, make them build up a complicated identity. Worst of all — from the envious point of view — she didn’t know how splendidly embellished she was.... It was as if you said to a gallant soldier, “Have you got the V.C?” sarcastically almost, and then he looked down — not up — at his decorations, and found that the little piece of riband was there.

  Silvia moved a shade away from her companion. The break in the thorn tree, with the consequent oval of hot sunlight, quite accounted for that.

  “But what haven’t you got?” she asked. “You live, as naturally as drawing breath, the life that’s so new to me, and so puzzling and so delightful; and below and beyond all that, you’re on the point of being married. He chose you, out of all the world, and you found all the time that you had chosen him. What is there left for you, just you now and here, to want? You’re adorable—”

  Silvia wrestled and threw the bugbear of shyness which so often sat on her shoulders and strangled her neck. There it writhed on the grass, not in the least dead, but, for the moment, knocked out.

  “Oh, sometimes I wish I was a boy,” she said. “I’m more in that key than in ours. Sometimes I think—”

  Nellie projected herself into that gap of sunlight from which, possibly, Silvia shrank. She had no definite scheme of exploration for the moment, but it seemed to her that something in the tangle of motives with which she had invited Silvia to share her afternoon was faintly stirring as if with unravelment. Those loops and knots might get more inextricably muddled, it is true; but, conceivably, the whole thing might “come out” like a conjuring trick.

  “Ah, what is it that you think?” she asked. “Don’t stop so tantalizingly. As if thinking wasn’t everything! Whatever one docs is only a clumsy translation of what one has thought. Think aloud!”

  Nellie looked more than ever at that moment like some exquisite wild presence of the woodlands, Dryad or Bacchante, delicate and subtle in face and limb and brain, and merely proto-plasmic in soul, a creature made for the bedazzlement and the undoing of man. Certainly she had woven her spells over Silvia again; the momentary check in the incantation, when she had attributed “Peter-thought” to her, had passed as swiftly as the shadow of one of those light clouds which drifted over the grass.

  But at that moment, when she so bewilderingly shone out again, there formed itself in Silvia’s mind, as she tried to follow this injunction to think aloud, not the image of her at all, but of Peter. For if Nellie was divinely akin to the blossoming thickets and the shadows that were beginning to lengthen over the grass, making cool islands on which the deer were grazing now, he, too, would be no less harmoniously bestowed by this reflecting lake-side. It was not that either of them suggested rurality; no one, indeed, was more emphatically of the street and the ballroom and the complication of the city than they. But by some secret pedigree of soul they were of the house and lineage of the things that glowed and enjoyed and were lovely, and gave as little thought to yesterday as they took for to-morrow. All this, not catalogued in detail, but fused into a single luminous impression, passed throug
h Silvia’s consciousness like the wink of summer lightning....

  “As if it wasn’t difficult enough to think at all,” she said, “and as for thinking aloud, thinking articulately — if I’m to sum it up, ever so clumsily, it’s merely that I adore, with all the incense I’ve got, the thought of your happiness. It does matter so much to me, and... and isn’t it noble fun to find someone who matters? Very few people really matter; I suppose little, silly, finite hearts like ours can’t take in many. ‘ But those who do matter must come right in, if they don’t mind. They mustn’t risk themselves by hanging about on the doorstep; they might catch cold. Aren’t I talking nonsense? It’s your fault for taking me into the country, for assuredly it has gone to my head. Where there’s a stifle of roofs and a choke of streets nobody matters and everyone is quite delightful. What a stupid word that is, and how expressive of a stupid thing.”

  Silvia very deliberately shot off into the backwater of nonsense, so to speak, out of the main stream, for the sun was on the water, in this dazzle of Nellie’s personality, and she could not see towards what weir the hurrying river might be taking her. Very likely there was no weir; the glistening tide, running swift, would very likely spread out into some broad expanse of Peace-pools; but it was the brightness that prevented scrutiny.

  By some flash of woodland instinct, by some uncanny perception, Nellie divined the cause of this retirement into the backwater of triviality. With a ruthlessness that rivalled Mrs. Wardour’s pursuit of desirable guests, she caught the rope of Silvia’s boat, so to speak, before she could tie it to the security of some overhanging branch, and shot it out into the main stream again.

  “Yes, my dear,” she said, “you talk nonsense delightfully. Ah, I didn’t mean stupidly; I didn’t mean in the sense you had just labelled it with. I meant delightfully, charmingly. But just for a change after that delightful (now I mean stupid) London, we’re talking sense. You interested me indescribably just now. You said you were more in a boy’s key than a girl’s. What did you mean exactly?”

  Silvia watched the receding shore to which she had hoped to tie up.... After all, what did it matter if there was a weir, not a Peace-pool down there in that dazzle of benignant sunshine? But there was another difficulty in the way of expression.

  “I can’t really explain,” she said. ‘‘There are things so simple that no explanation is possible. If I said, ‘It is a hot day,’ and you told me to explain, I couldn’t. I could only say, ‘If you don’t feel it, if you don’t know what that means, I can’t help you.’ It’s the same with all elemental things.” Nellie regarded her with eyes that were framed in some steely sort of interest; eyes that were eager to know not from the kindly tenderness of friends but from some surgical curiosity.

  “I think I know what you mean by a ‘boy’s key,’” she said. “Let me see if I can explain you to yourself, Silvia, since you won’t — ah, can’t — explain yourself to me. If you were in love, for instance, you would passionately want to give love, to pour yourself out, instead of, like most girls, provoking love and permitting it and ever so eagerly receiving it. You wouldn’t want a man’s homage so much as you would want to be allowed to love him. You would want, and how queer and delicious of you — you lovely upside-down, inside-out creature.”

  This abrupt termination of the presentment of Silvia in love, as imagined by her friend, was due to something quite unexpected. There came on Silvia’s face, as her own privacy was thus invaded, a dumb, but none the less violent signal of protest. She shrank and withdrew herself, as if a burglarious bullseye had been shot through the window of her room, where she lay lost in cool, soft maidenliness. The contact was even more direct than that; it was as if some pitiless incision had been made in her very flesh. But with this pause in the application of the knife, this shuttering of the bullseye — for any further beam would have disclosed the deliberate attempt to rifle the jewel-chest — there came the complete withdrawal of her protesting signal.... It had been the bullseye of a friend, that looked in, the scissors of a dear amateur manicurist....

  She was sitting there hatless in the shade, and with her hand she pushed her hair back.

  “Oh, you’re a witch, Nellie,” she said. “Two hundred years ago you would have been burned, and I should have helped to pile the faggots. I expect that you’re magically right. I can’t tell, you know, because I assure you, literally and soberly, that I never have been in love. Literally never. Soberly never. But, somehow, what you suggested (how did you divine it, you witch?) touched something, made something vibrate and sing. I didn’t know anything about it; I didn’t know it was there. Then you put your finger on it, and I knew... I knew I had it.”

  “And then you just hated me for a moment,” said Nellie.

  Silvia did not quite accept this.

  “You made me wince,” she said in correction. “And, oh, yes, I’ll confess: just for a moment you seemed to me hostile and hurting. You aren’t; you’re heavenly and healing. You taught me, bless you. But I think you’re a witch all the same. It wasn’t telepathy; you told me something about myself that I didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, and can’t know now, for that matter. Oh, you lucky creature. You’ve fallen in love. You know it all. Did you do it in the manner you attribute to me? Did you savagely give, not wanting anything but to give, give.... How did you put it just now? To be allowed to love, to pour yourself out, to pay homage instead of exacting it? The boy’s key! My dear, it seems ages and ages since that phrase came up. I’ve had a whole drama since then, you know.”

  Nellie, in point of fact, had had her drama, too. But it was as yet undetermined. She had not got at the root facts for which she was burrowing. Silvia’s volley of questions, anyhow, were easy of response. They were, barring, a certain inversion, very Victorian questions, dating from the days when men blindly adored and women swooned at the declaration of the passion which they had done their level best to excite. But that inversion made to her, and for particular reasons, a wildly interesting speculation. Silvia, when she loved (so much was certain), would love in the “boy’s key,” the eager, evocative key. She acknowledged herself, in contemplation of the event, as blindly adoring, as being “allowed” to love. Whether that was entirely a prognostication, or whether it was already partially, potentially fulfilled was another question, and the application of that concerned Nellie, and her own purposes, alone. Soon, deftly now, with the lesson of Silvia’s revolt against surprises, she would get a further result from her dissection. At present there was the impatient, intimate volley of questions to answer.

  “Oh, my dear, I understand so well the ‘boy’s key,’” she said. “A triumphal, victorious surrender, with all the bells ringing — isn’t that it? A march out with white flags insolently flying. I should love to be like that, if I was like that. But that isn’t my key. I just surrendered, rather terrified, you know. But I couldn’t be terrified of Philip for long: he’s such a dear.”

  This could not be considered more than an approximate account, a vague sketch, very faintly resembling the scene it portrayed — a quiet, feminine disclosure. But Nellie did not want to discuss that; she wanted to get back to her tangled skeins again.

  “I should like to see you in love, Silvia,” she said. “Promise to tell me when it happens. At least, you needn’t; it will be wonderfully obvious, you in your ‘boy’s key.’ Whom can we find for you who will just fall in with that, and be the complement of it, making it complete and round and perfect? Hasn’t ever so little a bit of him, just the top of his head, come over the horizon yet?”

  Silvia did not withdraw or raise any signal of protest this time. She made no signal at all; none, at any rate, that could be perceived by the girl who sat watching her very narrowly. And once more Nellie fumbled, so to speak, at the shutter of her bullseye, which would flash on the light.

  She looked at the watch on her wrist.

  “My dear, how late it is!” she said. “We must go at once. I promised to go to Mr. Mainwaring’s stud
io. Peter’s father, you know. Peter will be vexed if I don’t come.”

  Then came the signal. Silvia jumped up with wholly unnecessary alacrity. But more nimbly yet did the high colour mount to her face.

  CHAPTER VI

  ONE evening, a week or so before the date fixed for the wedding, Philip Beaumont and Nellie had dined and gone together to the first night of some new play. It was saliently characteristic of him — a peak, so to say, prominently uprising from the smooth level of his cultivated plains — that when arrangements for such diversions and businesses were in his hands they always went without a hitch. Nellie had expressed a desire to see this play, without giving long notice to him of her wish, and it followed, as a matter of course, that he managed to get gangway seats in the stalls at the most advantageous distance from the stage.

  Things happened like that with him: his own unruffled smoothness, which seemed immune from any of the attacks of asperities of one kind or another, to which human nature is subject, seemed to create a similar well-ordered decorum in his activities. Tonight, for instance, the dinner which preceded the theatre was punctual and swiftly served, so that neither hurry nor undue lingering followed it: his motor slid up to the kerb-stone precisely as they quitted the restaurant, and it might be taken for granted that at the conclusion of the piece it would be bubbling up opposite the portals of the theatre precisely as they emerged. Once in their seats there had been but a few minutes to wait before the lights were lowered for the first act; these afforded a convenient time to grasp the real and the histrionic names of the actors and see where the acts were laid.

  In those few minutes Nellie’s glance had swept over stalls and boxes, noting the position of various friends. Silvia was in a box with her mother, and loud screams of laughter from another box opposite, perhaps temporarily turned into a parrot-house, made it almost certain that Mrs. Trentham was having her usual splendid time surrounded by a bevy of young men. A glance verified that, and the same glance showed her that Peter, who, she knew, was to be present, was not among them. Then someone entered the box where Silvia and her mother sat, and she knew where Peter was. Immediately a loud flamboyant voice just behind her informed her that Peter’s entry had been noticed by someone else.