by E. F. Benson
“I know that,” said she. “Don’t lose your sense of humour, Peter. It was a mild kind of joke.”
“Come on, then,” he said. “And as for its being my fault that we’re so late—”
The second act was drawing to an end when they stole into their box. On the stage there was proceeding the most elementary of muddles, to which it was not in the least worth while to devote any ingenuity. It was clear at the first glance that these people who pretended to be servants were really landed gentry, and that just before the end the Earl (who had taken the house) would propose to the cook and be violently accepted. Psychologically they presented no point of interest. Far more engrossing to Nellie was the fact that she had got Peter with her, and the pleasure of that and the general problem it propounded was far more absorbing. Marriage had certainly quickened her emotional perceptions, and she inferred, from the extraordinary delight that it was to be with him again, how much in the interval she had missed him. She had no reason to complain, either, of the welcome he had given her, but it was manifest (how she could not definitely have said) that the quality of that was different from hers to him. To his sense, as he had openly stated, they had taken up the old attitude, the old intimacy, without break, but as she thought over that in the few minutes that elapsed before the act was finished, she found that, for her part, she did not altogether endorse his view. Certainly the old intimacy was there, firm and unshaken, but somehow, hovering over it, like a mist which to her eyes seemed to be luminous with tears, there was some new atmospheric condition, sunny and tremulous.
Peter turned to her as the house sprang into light again.
“Oh, what a waste of time,” he said. “We should have done much better to have left our elbows on the table. We’re always doing it too. Do you remember the last play at which we met? That time you were with Philip and I with Silvia and Mrs.
Wardour. Then we had our talk afterwards; tonight we had it first. I like the other plan best.” Though Peter had here stated several things with which she was in cordial agreement, his tone was not in tune with the old footing, the old intimacy. Not many minutes ago it had been she who, in opposition to his inclination, had insisted on breaking their tête-à-tête; now, with all possible lightness of touch, she suggested its resumption.
“I’ve seen enough,” she said. “I can tell Philip all about it. Let’s go back, my dear, and have half an hour’s more talk. It was my fault that we broke up; but how could I have told that the play would have been as silly as this? We shall talk more sense in five minutes than they’ll put into the whole of the next act.”
Peter’s eyes were wandering round the house. At this moment they were attracted by a feather fan violently signalling from a box directly opposite, and the general buzz of the theatre was quite distinctly pierced with a shrill scream of laughter which came from precisely the same direction as the gesticulating fan. It was hardly necessary to put up his glasses to ascertain the authorship of these phenomena.
“Mrs. Trentham,” he said unerringly, “with the usual myrmidons. She has seen us, Nellie. Come round and be conventional.”
“Oh, why?” said she. “If she wants to see us she can come here, can’t she? But she doesn’t want to see us: she only wants to be seen.”
She felt that at that moment she was becoming, to Peter, part of the general foreground, a prominent object in it, but still only part of it. His next words confirmed the impression.
“Oh, come along,” he said. “Let’s embark on the ordinary ridiculous evening. Let’s all go back to supper with me. Or perhaps there’s a dance going on. Come round and forage, Nellie. I’ve been in the country for a month, you know. Besides—”
She knew perfectly well what he had left unsaid, and answered it.
“But what does it matter how much she talks?” she asked.
Peter gave her a glance of brilliant surprise.
“How did you know that that was what I didn’t say?” he demanded.
“Because it’s you, of course. Or, if you like, because it’s me.”
The fan waved more vehemently than ever.
“We’d better go,” said he.
Nellie got up. In the old days she would almost certainly have been able to superimpose her wish over his. Now it was the other way about. She seemed to be in the grip of some internal necessity of doing what he wanted. He had to have his way, not because he had become stronger of will, but because she had lost her power of self-assertion with regard to him. It was not any general debility of will on her part; she had her way with Philip, for instance, with an effortless ease. But then she was not part only of the foreground to Philip, nor to her was Peter part only of the foreground....
CHAPTER XII
PETER managed to get away from the Foreign Office next day, in the absence of anything to detain him, an hour or so before his usual time, and arriving at the gilded gates of the battlemented lodge of Howes while the warm October, twilight still lingered in the sky, he got out to walk across the mile of park that separated him from the house. His truant evening in town last night, the plunge into the froth and noise and chatter, had quieted some sort of restlessness, had assuaged some sort of hunger, and he was still licking the chops of memory, content in a few minutes now to “wipe his mouth and go his journey” again. He just had the sense of having enjoyed an evening out, of having lolled in the old familiar tap-room, with the usual habitues, over a pot of beer, while a friendly barmaid (this was Mrs. Trentham) made the usual jokes over the counter as she served him. Some of these seemed to have sounded better by electric light, 30 to speak, than did the timbre of their memory in the dusky crimson of the dying day, and he recalled the welcome of screams and shrieks she had given to Nellie and himself when, at his insistence, they had visited her in the box opposite. She threatened when she learned they had already dined alone (appearing so very late at the play) to send anonymous letters to Silvia and Philip. There was a judge in the divorce court, she added, who was much devoted to her, and would no doubt give her admission for the two cases when they came on. The robust wit of Lord Poole had ably seconded her.
Then, with the exception of Nellie, who had to go home to put an end to Philip’s solitary evening, they had all gone back to Wardour House, where Peter promised some sort of scratch supper, and Nellie, finding that her husband had already gone to bed, joined them again. It had been altogether a pleasant ridiculous evening which had made itself, in this impromptu and accidental manner, an ordinary human evening. Just twice there had for Peter been a slight check, a signal momentarily against him — once when he found that Nellie had left again, very soon after her reappearance at supper, without a word to him; once when, without warning, it had entered his mind that at just about this time, the night before, he had seen his bedroom door open, and Silvia’s face look in on him as he lay with closed eyelids, feigning sleep. That was rather a dreadful thing to have done....
He paused a moment on the bridge that crossed the lake, looking at the image of the house duskily reflected on its far margin. There was someone coming towards him along the path that led along the edge of the lake, and joined the road here, and before his eyes had time to tell him who it was, she waved a hand at him, without the screams, without the violent gesticulations by which Mrs. Trentham the night before had made herself known. She quickened her pace as he answered her signal, and in three minutes more he had joined her.
“The chauffeur told me you had walked from the lodge,” she said, “so I came to meet you. You’re early.”
Peter kissed her.
“I’ll go away again, shall I?” he said.
“No; as you’ve come, you can stop,” she said. “And what did you do with yourself last night? Not all alone, I hope: you found somebody?”
Peter smiled at her.
“Somebody?” he said. “Crowds! First of all, Nellie rang up at the F.O., saying that she had been going to the play with Philip, but that he had a cold. So would I? We dined at home first, and
talked so long with elbows on the table that we didn’t get to the play till toward the end of the second act.”
“Ah, that was luck to find Nellie,” said Silvia. “I was afraid you might have a horrid lonely evening. And then?”
“Then just one act of Downstairs.. But one act was better than four. There had been railway whistles and flags waving from the box opposite.”
“That was Mrs. Trentham,” said Silvia.
“It was. So we swept in her lot — the usual one — with Lord Poole, who told me to kiss you for him, and they all came to supper at home. Really, that plan of keeping the house open was an admirable one. It’s awful fun doing that sort of thing, and we talked and smoked and laughed until everyone melted away.”
She saw (and loved to see) the brightness and briskness of him; she heard (and loved to hear) his cheerfulness and alacrity.
“Oh, I am glad you had a nice evening,” she said. “I nearly telephoned to say I was coming up to keep you company. But then I thought I had better stop and — and try to make myself disagreeable at home.”
“Did you succeed, darling?” asked Peter.
Exactly then it struck Silvia that if Peter had dined, had sat “so long” with elbows on the table, and had got to the theatre in time for anything at all, he could not have been detained very late at the Foreign Office. She instantly drew down, with a rush and a rattle, some mental blind in front of that. She shut it out: she did not choose to see it.
“Yes, pretty well,” she said. “Mother went to bed at ten, anyhow, which is early for her, so I must have been fairly successful.”
“Not proved,” said Peter. “She may have been sleepy. It’s a sleepy place, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “Two nights ago I came and looked into your room, as I had not heard you come to bed, and there you were, fast asleep.”
“Snoring, I suppose you’ll tell me?” said he.
This point about detention at the Foreign Office, with time yet to dine and confabulate and go to the theatre, had struck him too. He had meant it to be assumed that he had telephoned to signify the knowledge that he would be detained, and now by this stupid inadvertence in giving the account of his evening, he had shown, for all who cared to think, that he had not been detained. But Silvia apparently had quite missed that, or she would surely have said something to that effect; as it was, she passed it by: it was out of sight by now, behind another — well, another misunderstanding.
She proceeded to put a further corner between her consciousness and it.
“No, I don’t say snoring,” she said. “Oh, Peter, your father has told me how delightful, how angelic you were to him, about his stopping on here till we go back to London. It touched him very much.” She took his arm. “It touched me too, dear,” she said, “and I must tell you that it furnished a reason — one out of several — why I came to meet you. I’ve got a confession—”
Peter guessed what this reason was and what the confession. When he made a plan he was quite accustomed to find it work itself out as he had meant. But now in the very apex of its success he felt ashamed of it. If it came to confessions he could make his contribution. He interrupted her.
“I don’t care about that reason,” he said. “Tell me the other ones instead.”
“The other ones will come afterwards,” she said, “if you want to hear them then. This has got to come first, so don’t interrupt, darling. I will tell you: it’s an affair of conscience.”
“And I’m a conscientious objector,” said he. As it became more and more certain in his mind what Silvia’s confession was, the less he wanted to hear it, though he himself, patting his own back for his cleverness, had contrived the plan of which this was the logical sequel. But when he did that he had not yet pretended to be asleep one night nor, on another, telephoned his detention in town.
Silvia went on with a gentle but perfectly determined firmness.
“I’ve misjudged you altogether, Peter,” she said, “and I’ve got to confess. For days now — more days than I like to number — I have been watching you, looking for something I missed in you. I thought you were unkind and sarcastic and cynical about your father, and what he told me of the manner in which you welcomed his proposal to stop on here convinced me how utterly I had been wronging you. It was owlishly stupid of me to suppose you could be like that, and, what was worse, it was brutally unloving.”
Peter laughed.
“Any more big words coming?” he asked. “Owlish, stupid, brutal, unloving? That’s you all over. Have you murdered anybody?”
She shook her head.
“It’s no use making light of it,” she said. “It was stupid, it was unloving of me. I thought that because you saw certain absurdities and unrealities about your father, you saw nothing but them, and were impatient and untender with him. Do you forgive me for being such a fool?”
Peter tried to imagine himself telling her that she had been perfectly right throughout: that only a piece of trickery on his part, in getting his father to give an account of the welcome his proposition had met with, had deluded her into thinking she was wrong. But his vanity, the thought of the sorry figure he would present, made it quite impossible to contemplate so fundamental an honesty. Short of being honest, he had better be superb.
He stopped, facing her, knowing well the effect his physical presence had on her.
“You darling, there’s one thing I don’t forgive you for,” he said, “and that is for being such a fool as to think there was anything for me to forgive.” Even as he made this neat phrase, the truth of it came home to him. There was indeed nothing for him to forgive. She gave a long sigh.
“Oh, you must teach me to be generous,” she said.
Peter felt himself unutterably mean at that moment. But the thing was done; he had been superb as well as dishonest, and if honesty had been too high for his vanity to attain to, it was just as incapable of demolishing the golden image of himself that he had set up for Silvia. Then there was the point concerning his apparent slumber two nights ago; there was the point concerning his telephone last night.... He wished intensely that she hadn’t asked him to teach her generosity.
“Now for the other reasons why you came to meet me,” he said. There would be balsam and food for his vanity here. He had the grace to recognize that even while he asked it.
“Because I wanted to see you,” said she.
“I like that reason. Have you any more of that brand?”
He knew that the word which took lightly what was so immense would, after her confession, cause her to smile. It was of the species which she had thought cynical, and which she now knew was just the everyday garb in which affection and tenderness clothed themselves.
“Because it seemed so long since I saw you,” she said. “Oh, Peter, there’s only one reason really which matters. Because I love you.”
... And that brought home to him a meanness, a dishonesty against which all the rest was but feathers in a scale weighted on the other side with the world itself. Often before now he had known how unintelligibly great that was; now for the first time he was irritated at himself for his want of comprehension with regard to it. He was accustomed to understand things to which he gave his mind, but here his mind was brought to a dead stop by this great shining wall that was unscalable and impenetrable. But, to be honest, was his irritation quite confined to himself, or did that shining wall from its very incomprehensibility, provoke a portion of it?
Silvia seemed to herself to miss something in his silence, but with Peter there, nothing could really be missing....
“How often I say that,” she whispered; “but how often I feel that there’s nothing else worth saying.”
“More of that brand,” said he.
“Not a drop. We must go in. You haven’t seen your father yet, and after that you must have your bath.”
“And after that you must send your maid away so that we can get a few minutes’ sensible conversation,” said Peter.
“I’ll begin it now,” said she. “Sometimes, you know, your bath goes to your head, and you’re not quite as serious as you might be.”
“Say I’m drunk and have done with it,” suggested he.
“Very well; sometimes your bath makes you tipsy. But while you’re sober, I want you to promise me something.”
“Shall I like it?” asked Peter prudently. “It isn’t to spend a week with Uncle Abe or anything of that kind?”
“Nothing of that kind. Poor Uncle Abe! You’ll like it. At least, you’ll find you’ll like it; you’ll know it does you good.”
“That’s not the same thing,” objected he. “It does me good to get up bright and early, so as to start for town without hurrying, but I hate it.”
Silvia laughed.
“It will relieve you of that to some extent,” she said. “Oh, do be quick and promise instead of making such a fuss!”
“Right. But if you’ve deceived me, I’ll never trust you again. I promise.”
“Well, for as long as we are here I want you to 6pend at least one night in the week in town.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said he. “I don’t care an atom about my promise. Pish for my promise! And how will it relieve me? Oh, I see. But I shan’t — unless you come too, that’s to say.”
Silvia stopped.
“Now listen to me,” she said. “You enjoyed last night immensely. It’s perfectly natural that you should have. I should think you were ill if you hadn’t.”
“How do you know I enjoyed it? I never said so,” said he.
“You did better than that. You beamed all over your atrocious countenance when you told me about it. You were obliged to stop in town, and being obliged you found, and you know it perfectly well, that it was a sort of night out. You saw your friends: you had a beano.”
Silvia kept her finger on the cord of the blind she had chosen to pull down in her mind. She refused with a sublime intellectual dishonesty to look at the fact that Peter certainly could have come down here by dinner time if he had time to dine early in town; she would not see it. Already, so she told herself, she had once fallen into an owlishly stupid error and worse, by doubting him, by watching him; now at least she could repair that to some extent by the supreme honesty of trusting him without question. Something had happened to keep him in town, and it was no business of hers to think of that at all. He had said he was detained at the Foreign Office, and, for her, he was detained there. She held her eyes open to the intensest light of all, which was that of her own love, and the more it blinded her to everything else the better. It was only creatures like bats (and owls), things of the night, that were blinded by the dayspring.