by E. F. Benson
Close on the heels of that, and swiftly as reflection answers light, came the remembrance, lost for that moment, that Silvia had withheld the knowledge from him. He could guess now with a conjecture that verged on certainty what the reason for that was, and his egoism, his deep-rooted vanity, returned and reinforced, cried out against the outrage of it. She from those heights, shining no longer, but merely superior, looked down on him, and judged him unworthy to share that white joy which crowned and enveloped her love. All his pride stiffened at the thought. He knew how to walk in the wet woods, sufficient unto himself.
Of intention Peter had started from London rather late, so that he should find the little party already assembled. His father, he rested assured, would have taken on himself the mantle of host, and would be wearing it far more superbly than he. That he found to be the case: John Mainwaring had complete possession of the place and all the members of what was, with the exception of Nellie and her husband, the same unique little family gathering which had preceded Peter’s marriage. There was Aunt Eleanor, stout and seal-like, there was a column of locomotive floral decoration around Aunt Joanna, there was Uncle Abe, now possessor of three monstrous cartoons, and Uncle Henry, the possessor of a nice stiff brandy and soda, for tea still continued to burn his heart. The cartoons, in fact, and the original sketches were the subject, as Peter entered, of debate between the aunts, to the glory and honour of their creator, who sat in clouds of incense. Mrs. Wardour had already got reconciled to the fact that her sister had been the purchaser, and bore it well.
“Lovely they look,” said Aunt Joanna; “all three in a row, with the rest to come opposite. Many a half-hour do I spend at my buhl writing-table there, not getting along at all with my correspondence by reason of looking at them. I’m sure I don’t know which I like best.”
“Tea, Peter?” asked Silvia. She had looked up at his entry; now she kept her eyes on her tray.
“Yes, indeed,” said Aunt Eleanor, “I’m sure they look very fine, Joanna. Three already finished. That’s wonderful. I suppose, Mr. Mainwaring, you’ll be soon wanting to borrow the fourth of my sketches?”
“Dear lady, I hesitate. I positively hesitate to ask you,” said he, “for I know how you will hate parting with it even for a week or two. But without it I can never paint the larger version. The inspiration, the first rapture, is there; I must study it again.”
Aunt Eleanor turned triumphantly to Nellie.
“You must positively come to see those sketches, Mrs. Beaumont,” she said. “I have all the original sketches of Mr. Mainwaring’s great cartoons. Such a treat!”
“I’m sure they’re charming,” said Nellie.
“Charming indeed! Masterpieces! Such fire! Such inspiration as never could be realized again.”
“The three great cartoons,” said Aunt Joanna firmly, while the floral decorations trembled, “fill up the whole side of Sir Abe’s last addition to our house. A new wing, I may call it, with bedrooms above.”
“My sweet little sitting-room,” said Aunt Eleanor absently. “All the sketches: the fire...
“Yes, dear, and as I was telling you, the great cartoons,” said Aunt Joanna. “That was what I was telling you.”
Uncle Henry made a diversion. He liked peace and plenty. “Capital good brandy this,” he said. “You should try my plan, Abe. Have a drop of brandy and leave the tea alone. A’most a pity to put soda into it.”
(He had not put much.)
“Well, I don’t say you’re not right, Henry,” said Uncle Abe. “But to my mind what’s given me at my dinner, if it’s a drop of something good, tastes all the better if I haven’t had — There’s some old dry Petiot now. There’s a wine! You must get on the right side of Peter for that.”
Silvia handed Peter his cup.
“And your cold’s better?” she asked.
“‘Bout the same, thanks.”
Nellie more than once had tried to catch Peter’s eye in order to telegraph to him her rapt appreciation of the family. But though Peter had met her glance, he had nothing to send in reply.
“I see the whole history of the war in my sketches,” proclaimed Aunt Eleanor. “News from headquarters, I call them. Such insight! And the fourth, dear Joanna, the submarine, you know. Ah, no, you haven’t seen that yet, but if Mr. Mainwaring’s cartoon from it comes up to the sketch, there’ll be something for you to look at.”
“Capital good brandy,” said Uncle Henry. Something had to be said.
Peter drifted away from the tea-table and established himself next Nellie.
“So you got down all right,” he said.
She let a circular sweeping glance pause infinitesimally four times, once for each of the aunts and uncles.
“Yes, and what a delicious room,” she said. “You hadn’t told me half.”
Peter was surely rather distrait, she thought. Even now he didn’t catch the point of her appreciation.
“It’s good panelling,” he said. “There’s more of it in my sitting-room next door. We’ll go there after tea.”
She, held out her cup.
“Silvia, darling, one inch more tea, please,” she said. “An inch. Pure greed.”
Silvia had an absent smile for her but no speech, and took the cup from Peter’s hand without looking at him till he had turned again towards Nellie with the desired inch. She then followed him, quick as a lizard, with one glance of mute raised eyebrows. Nellie got that, too; plucked it off, put it in her book. She felt that she was surrounded by interests: there were the priceless uncles and aunts: there was also something else going on, not so farcical, not farcical at all, perhaps, but quite as interesting.
“My dear, you have got a cold,” she said to Peter.
“I thought I had,” said he wheezily.
“I rather like having a cold,” she went on. “It’s an excuse for going to a doctor and being told that one has a brilliant constitution. That’s Dr. Symes’s cure. You’re a Symite, aren’t you?”
Peter looked right and left, then for a single second straight in front of him, where Silvia sat. “Rather,” he said. “We’re all Symites.”
He paused a moment.
“What a pity I didn’t go to see him this morning,” he said very deliberately, “before I left London. I might have been well by this time.”
Silvia did not look up: she turned away to Mr. Mainwaring, who was on her right. Some jerked movement of her hand caused a teaspoon to clatter from its saucer and fall on the floor.
His father gave a little yodel, adapted to the drawing-room.
“Let me have a word with you some time, my Peter,” he said.
“Yes. I’ll come to see you before I dress. Just now Nellie arid I are going to have a talk. Will that do? Come, Nellie.”
Peter drew two chairs up to the fire.
“That’s nice,” he said. “Priceless, aren’t they? Aunt Eleanor is really the most wonderful. Can you bear it for three days, do you think? They go day after Christmas.”
He lit a cigarette and threw it away again. “Muck!” he said. “By the way, Nellie, do stop till we go up to town.”
“Oh, my dear, I wish I could,” said she. “But I know Philip’s got some county business on the twenty-eighth that obliges him to go home. Something ridiculous about forbidding people to shoot golden orioles, of which there aren’t any.”
“Can’t you let him go alone?” asked Peter.
“Well; yes, I think I might. I’ll get my mother to go down. Mother will always go anywhere for board and lodging.”
“Don’t I remember that feeling!” said Peter. “So do stop. I heard Silvia ask my father.”
Nellie produced an admirable mimicry of Aunt Eleanor’s views on art, which, however, elicited from Peter only:
“Very funny: yes, very like her,” and he subsided into silence and fire-gazing again.
“Silvia seems rather silent,” said Nellie at length. Peter roused himself.
“Did she?” he said. “The aunts were
talking so much that I didn’t notice it. This is the panelling I spoke to you of, by the way.”
“Charming. Just the same as in the drawing room, isn’t it?”
“The green drawing-room, please,” said Peter.
“I beg its pardon,” she said.
“Granted, I’m sure,” said he without a smile. Nellie tried a handful of other topics, and her curiosity to know what was the matter vastly increased. She had narrowed down the field of her conjectures to a certainty that, whatever it was, it concerned her host and hostess. Yesterday at lunch, when she had been alone with Silvia, she had the first impression of it, yet she had seen Peter that same evening in town (by way of nursing his cold he had come to the theatre with her), and he, in spite of that affliction, had been immensely cheerful, chuckling with prophetic delight at the feast that the uncles and aunts would spread for them. And he had not seen Silvia since (for she had already left London) until his entry into the green drawing-room half an hour ago.
She would much have preferred, as on that evening a month ago, when they dined alone together in London and he had been so pointedly reticent on the subject of Silvia, that he should volunteer a statement, but his reticence then seemed of totally different quality from what it was now.... She tried one more topic.
“Peter, dear, isn’t it lovely?” she said. “I’m going to have a baby.”
Peter jerked himself upright in his chair.
“Really?” he said. “And here are you telling me that!”
He broke off.
“What’s the matter, my dear?” she said. “There’s something wrong.”
He got up and drove with his foot into the log fire.
“It’s really screamingly funny that you should tell me that,” he said.
Nellie felt that they were getting near it now.
“Funny?” she asked.
“Oh, Lord, I said funny, didn’t I?” said he.
She got up too, laying a hand on his shoulder.
“My dear, we’re very old friends,” she said.
He turned round to her with some unspoken bitterness blazing in his eyes.
“Then I’ll let you have the joke,” he said. “You tell me that, and yet my wife, who knows the same thing about herself, has not told me.”
He paused a moment.
“I found it out by accident this morning,” he said. “I went to see Dr. Symes about my cold — odd that you should have spoken of him — and before I told him anything he began telling me, and that was what he told me. Of course, he assumed I knew; thought that I had come to him for some general directions, which he gave me. Silvia had been to him two days before. She hasn’t said a word to me. Not a word.”
Nellie heard herself give some ejaculation.
“Now you’re fond of psychological problems,” he said. “Also you’re a woman, and know how women feel. Under what circumstances, feeling how, in fact, would a woman do that? Interesting point, isn’t it? It’s beyond me.”
“No quarrel? No misunderstanding? Nothing of that sort?”
“None. I’ve felt she was watching me sometimes. I’ve—”
“Well? Can you describe that?” she asked.
“I’ve only thought of that this minute,” he said, “and now I don’t really see any connection. But when my father knew my mother had gone, and was posing and posturing as a lost and stricken man, Silvia was watching me to see, I think, if I had real sympathy, real pity for him. I did feel then as if I was being tested. But I made that all right. I did it cleverly. I gave the most cordial welcome to his stopping on here — Lord, what evenings they were! — for endless weeks, and left him to tell her about it.”
“Are you quite sure you made it all right?” she asked.
“She told me she had been wrong about what she had thought about my feeling towards him,” he said. “But even if she made a reservation, or reconsidered it, what then?”
Nellie’s hand still rested, now with pressure, on his shoulder.
“And what if Silvia put herself, so to speak, in your father’s place?” she said. “What if it occurred to her that you had been charming with her, and clever with her? Mind, that’s only a guess.”
Again Peter thrust the logs together.
“She trusts me too much,” he said at length. “She loves me too much.”
This time Nellie was silent.
“Well?” said he at length.
“She thinks you’ve been clever with her and charming with her,” she said. “That’s it. I think that she was quite wrong in keeping this news from you, but that’s why. Silvia isn’t like us, you must remember. We may be complicated and clever in our way, but she’s not like that. There’s something tremendous about Silvia. A simplicity, a splendour.”
“And just when I was beginning to realize that, to adore it, she does this. I can’t forgive it,” said he.
She felt then, as perhaps never before, the charm of his egoism: it really was such a charming fellow he was egoistic about.
“My dear, it’s just because you, as you say, are beginning to realize that and to adore it, that you feel you can’t forgive it. You would forgive it easily enough if you didn’t care. But put yourself in her place. Assume, as I feel sure we’re right in assuming, that we have got at the reason for her not telling you; it is exactly what a woman of that simplicity and splendour would do. With all there is of her, she loves you.”
“A charming way of showing it,” said Peter. “You’re hurt; you’re smarting,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t say that.”
“She has spoiled everything,” exclaimed Peter. “Just when—”
All through their talk Nellie had been conscious of a dual stirring, not only in him — that was clear enough — but in herself. Not many weeks ago she would certainly have had her whole sympathies enlisted on his side. She would have fanned, secretly and stealthily no doubt, the flame of his resentment against Silvia, and with the same hidden action have insinuated into his mind that there was somebody; who was eager to console, to help him to forgets — one j who gave him a welcome.... Even now some breath of woodland irresponsibility, the morality of Dryads and Satyrs, swept over her, with the whispering of wild things and the stirrings in the bushes. Like sought like there, deriding the consequences to others. Should she twang that string, let the wind blow on that harp in the trees, she knew well that something would answer it. He was hurt and sore; there were woodland balms....
Something within her again jerked back the finger | that hovered over the string, ready to pluck it, and turned her hand into a shield instead, that prevented the wind from making the harp vibrate. Silvia had her harp, too, and he had begun, ever so faintly, to vibrate in answer to Silvia’s harp and not to her’s.... In this second impulse there was compassion for Silvia, there was motherhood. She made her choice.
“You can’t say that she spoiled it, my dear,” she said. “You know how she loved you when you asked her to marry you.”
Peter had a frown for this.
“I thought—” he began.
“I know what you thought. Silvia very likely told you that she wanted just to be allowed—”
“I never told you that,” said he quickly.
“Of course you didn’t. But wasn’t it clear that before you married, she loved you as a boy loves, with some tempestuous desire of possession?”
“But she’s got me,” said he. “It isn’t as if there were anyone else.”
“I know that, and she knows that for certain. It’s nothing of that kind that revolts her.”
“Revolts?” asked he.
“Oh, my dear, short of that, wouldn’t she have told you what she has known for two days, and suspected long before? But you would be quite wrong to think that she loves you any less. What you don’t see, especially, beyond that, is that Silvia has become a perfectly changed person. She keeps her splendour. Keeps it? Good heavens! I should think she did. But what she learned the other day quite changes her. She has become a w
oman, and she must have not just a man to love, but a man to love her. You’ve hinted that she’s on the way to get one. That’s the sum of the consolation I’ve got for you.”
Nellie, having determined, having chosen, was being magnificent just then, and all the time the Dryad within her scolded and derided her.
“You fool, you conventionalist,” the Dryad shrieked. “He might be yours; he’s as weak as water, and vain, vain! You want him: wait a few months and see how you want him! Idiot!”
Nellie heard all that as plainly as she heard the whistle of the wind in the chimney.
“It won’t be easy,” she said. “You’ve got to get out of yourself, Peter, a thing, by the way, that I’ve never succeeded in doing. And when you’ve got out of yourself you’ve got to convince her that you’ve got into herself. I wouldn’t bet on your chance.”
“Have I been a brute?” asked he.
Nellie hesitated; she had never yet realized how close to love had been her intimacy with Peter, or how far from love her own marriage-bond. And now, when, bitterly resenting what Silvia had done, he turned to her....
Peter, in her silence, repeated his question.
“A brute?” he asked, and now his voice shook.
She took her hand briskly off his shoulder. They had stood there like that, comrades and friends, for ten minutes now, and her fingers had dwelt on his shoulder, the bone and the muscle of it.
“Not a brute at all,” she said. “You couldn’t be a brute, you darling. But a liar and a cheat.”
“Ha!” said Peter.
He walked round the room after this, with a whistle for her and him, and a kick for a footstool that got in his way.