THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
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you that is a foolish thing to say. I am simply thinking of Antoinette's pride. It is as if I blew a soap-bubble, all iridescent, and you said you would come to look at it in ten minutes. You shall tell me news: if you talk you can always eat. What has happened in Philistia?"
Nadine frowned.
"You think of us all as Philistines," she said, "because we like simple pleasures, and because we are enthusiastic."
"Ah, you mistake!" he said. "You couple two reasons which have nothing to do with each other. To be enthusiastic is the best possible condition, but you must be enthusiastic over what is worth enthusiasm. Is it so lovely really, that Aunt Dodo has settled to marry the Ripper? Surely that is a rechauffée. You wrote me the silliest letter about it. Of course it does not matter at all. Much more important is that you look perfectly exquisite. Antoinette, the spinach is sans pareil: give me some more spinach. But it is slightly bourgeois in Jack the R. to have been faithful for so many years. It shows want of imagination, also I think a want of vitality, only to care for one woman."
"That is one more than you ever cared for," remarked Nadine.
"I know. I said it was bourgeois to care for one. There is a difference. It is also like a troubadour. I am not in the least like a troubadour. But I think I shall get married soon. It gives one more liberty: people don't feel curious about one any more. English people are so odd: they think you must lead a double life, and if you don't lead the ordinary double life with a wife, they think you lead it with somebody else and they get curious. I am not in the least curious about other people: they can lead as many lives as a piano has strings for all I care, and thump all the strings together, or play delicate arpeggios on them. Nadine, that hat-pin of yours is simply too divine. I will eat it pin and all if it is not Fabergé."
Nadine laughed.
"I can't imagine you married," she said. "You would make a very odd husband."
"I would make a very odd anything," said he. "I don't find any recognized niche that really fits me, whereas almost everybody has some sort of niche. Indeed in the course of hundreds of years the niches, that is the manners of life, have been evolved to suit the sorts of types which nature produces. They live in rows and respect each other. But why it should be considered respectable to marry and have hosts of horrible children I cannot imagine. But it is, and I bow to the united strength of middle-class opinion. But neither you nor I are really made to live in rows. We are Bedouins by nature, and like to see a different sunrise every day. There shall be another tent for Antoinette."
That admirable lady was just bringing them their coffee, and he spoke to her in French.
"Antoinette, we start for the desert of Sahara to-morrow," he said. "We shall live in tents."
Antoinette's plump face wrinkled itself up into enchanted smiles.
"Bien, m'sieur," she said. "A quelle heure?"
Nadine crunched up her coffee-sugar between her white teeth.
"You are as little fitted to cross the desert of Sahara as any one I ever met," she said.
"I should not cross it: I should—"
"You would be miserable without your jade or your brocade and the sand would get into your hair, and you would have no bath," she said. "But every one who thinks has a Bedouin mind: it always wants me to go on and find new horizons and get nearer to blue mountains."
"The matter with you is that you want and you don't know what you want," said he.
Nadine nodded at him. Sometimes when she was with him she felt as if she was talking to a shrewd middle-aged man, sometimes to a rather affected girl. Then occasionally, and this had been in evidence to-day, she felt as if she was talking to some curious mixture of the two, who had a girl's intuition and a man's judgment. Fond as she was of the friends whom she had so easily gathered round her, gleeful as was the nonsense they talked, serious as was her study of Plato, she felt sometimes that all those sunny hours concerned but the surface of her, that, as she had said before, the individual, the character that sat behind was not really concerned in them. And Seymour, when he made mixture of his two types, had the effect of making her very conscious of the character that sat behind. He had described it just now in a sentence: it wanted it knew not what.
"And I want it so frightfully," she said. "It is a pity I don't know what it is. Because then I should probably get it. One gets what one wants if one wants enough."
"A convenient theory," he said, "and if you don't get it, you account for it by saying you didn't want it enough. I don't think it's true. In any case the converse isn't; one gets a quantity of things which one doesn't want in the least. Whereas you ought not to get, on the same theory, the things you passionately desire not to have."
Nadine finished her sugar and lit a cigarette.
"Oh, don't upset every theory," she said. "I am really rather serious about it."
He regarded her with his head on one side for a moment. "What has happened is that somebody has asked you to do something, and you have refused. You are salving your conscience by saying that he doesn't want it enough, or you would not have refused."
She laughed.
"You are really rather uncanny sometimes," she said.
"Only a guess," he said.
"Guess again then: define," she said.
"The obvious suggestion is that Hugh has proposed to you again."
"You would have been burned as a witch two hundred years ago," said she. "I should have contributed fagots. Oh, Seymour, that was really why I came to see you. I didn't care two straws about the foolish lace. They all tell me I had better marry Hugh, and I wanted to find somebody to agree with me. I hoped perhaps you might. He is such a dear, you know, and I should always have my own way: I could always convince him I was right."
"Most girls would consider that an advantage."
"In that case I am not like most girls; I often wish I was. I wrote an article a month or two ago about Tolstoi, and read it him, and he thought it quite wonderful. Well, it wasn't. It was silly rot: I wrote it, and so of course I know. It came out in a magazine."
"I read it," remarked Seymour in a strictly neutral voice.
"Well, wasn't it very poor stuff?" asked Nadine.
"To be quite accurate," said Seymour, "I only read some of it. I thought it very poor indeed. If was ignorant and affected."
Nadine gave him an approving smile.
"There you are then! And with Hugh it would be the same in everything else. He would always think what I did was quite wonderful. They say love is blind, don't they? So much the worse for love. It seems to me a very poor sort of thing if in order to love anybody you must lose, with regard to her, any power of mind and judgment that you may happen to possess. I don't want to be loved like that. I want people to sing my praises with understanding, and sit on my defects also with discretion. If I was perfectly blind too, I suppose it would be quite ideal to marry him. But I'm not, and I'm not even sure that I wish I was. Again if Hugh was perfectly critical about me, it would be quite ideal. It seems to me you must have the same quality of love on both sides, or at any rate the same quality of affection. People make charming marriages without any love at all, if they have affection and esteem and respect for each other."
They had gone back to the drawing-room and Seymour was handing pieces of his most precious jade to Nadine, who looked at them absently and then gave them back to him, with the same incuriousness as people give tickets to be punched by the collector. This Seymour bore with equanimity, for Nadine was interesting on her own account, and he did not care whether she looked at his jade or not. But at this moment he screamed loudly, for she put a little round medallion of exquisitely carved yellow jade up to her mouth, as if to bite it.
"Oh, Seymour, I'm so sorry," she said. "I wasn't attending to your jade, which is quite lovely, and subconsciously this piece appeared like a biscuit. Tell me, do you like jade better than anything else?