THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
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his pocket and helped herself.
"The Greeks and Romans were so right," she said, "they had a slave class, though with them it was an involuntary slave class. We ought to have a voluntary slave class, consisting of all the people who like working for a cause. There are heaps of politicians who naturally belong to it, and clergymen and lawyers and nationalists, all the people in fact who die when they retire, and are disappointed when they have not got offices and churches to go to. You can recognize a slave the moment you see him. He always, socially, wants to open the door or shut the window, or pick up your gloves. The moment you see that look in a man's eye, that sort of itch to be useful, you should be able to give secret information and make him a slave at £200 a year, instead of making him a cabinet minister or a bishop or a director of a company. He wants work: let him have it. Edith, darling, you would be a slave instantly, and the State would provide you with double-basses and cornets. I haven't thought it all completely out, since it only occurred to me this minute, but it seems to me an almost painfully sound scheme now that I mention it. Think of the financiers you would get! There would be poor Mr. Carnegie and Rockefeller and—and the whole of the Rothschild house, and Barings and Speyers all quite happy, because they are happy when they work. And all the millions they make—how they make it, I don't know, unless they buy gold cheap and sell it dear, which I believe is really what they do—all the money they make would be at the disposal of those who know how to spend it. I suppose I am a Socialist."
Edith put her forehead in her hands.
"I don't know what you are talking about," she said.
"I have my doubts myself," said Dodo ingenuously. "It began about Nadine's marriage and then drifted. You get to all sorts of strange places if you drift, both morally and physically. It really seems very unfair, that if you don't ever resist anything, you go to the bad. It looks as if evil was stronger than good, but Algie shall explain it to me. He can explain almost anything, including wasps. Jack, dear, do make me stop talking; you and the sunshine and Edith have gone to my head, and given me the babbles."
"I insist on your going on talking," said Edith. "I want to know how you can let Nadine marry without love."
"Because a great many of our unfortunate sex, dear, never fall in love, as I mean it, at all. But I would not have them not marry. They often make excellent wives and mothers. And I think Nadine is one of those. She is as nearly in love with Hugh as she has ever been with anybody, but she quite certainly will not marry him. Here she is; I daresay she will explain it all herself. My darling, come and talk matrimony shop to Edith, Jack and I are going for a short ride before lunch. Will you be in when Hugh comes?"
Nadine sat down in the chair from which Dodo had risen. She was dressed in a very simple linen dress of cornflower blue, that made the whites and pinks of her face look absolutely dazzling.
"Yes, I will wait for him," she said. "Seymour thought it would be kinder if he went to meet him at the station, so that Hughie could get rid of some of the hate on the way up. He has perception—des aperçus très-fins. And I will explain anything to anybody in the interval. I want to be married, and so does Seymour, and we think it will answer admirably if we marry each other. There is very little else to say. We are not foolish about each other—"
"I find you are extremely modern," interrupted Edith.
"You speak as if you did not like that," said Nadine; "but surely somebody has got to be modern if we are going to get on at all. Otherwise the world remains stock-still, or goes back. I do not think it would be amusing to be Victorian again; indeed there would be no use in us trying. We should be such obvious forgeries, Seymour particularly. I consider it lucky that he was not born earlier; if he had grown up as he is in Victorian days, they would certainly have done away with him somehow. Or his mother would have exposed him in Battersea Park like Œdipus."
Edith leaned over the terrace wall, and took the double-bass bow out of the tall clump of sweet peas.
"There are exactly two things in the world worth doing," she said, "to love and to work. Certainly you don't work, Nadine, and I don't believe you love."
Nadine looked at her a moment in silent hostility.
"That is a very comfortable reflection," she observed, "for you who like working better than anything else in the world except perhaps golf. I wonder you did not say there were three things in the world worth doing, making that damned game the third."
Edith had spoken with her usual cock-sure breezy enthusiasm, and looked up surprised at a certain venom and bitterness that underlay the girl's reply.
"My dear Nadine!" she said. "What is the matter?"
Nadine glared at her a moment, and then broke into rapid speech.
"Do you think I would not give the world to be able to love?" she said. "Do you think I send Hugh marching through hell for fun? You say I am heartless, as if it was my fault! Would you go to a blind man in the street and say, 'You beast, you brute, why don't you see?' Is he blind for fun? Am I like this for fun?"
She got up from her seat and came and stood in front of Edith, flushed with an unusual color, and continued more rapidly yet, emphasizing her points by admirable gesticulations of her hands. Indeed they seemed to have speech on their own account: they were extraordinarily eloquent.
"Do you know you make me lose my temper?" she said. "That is a rare thing with me; I seldom lose it; but when I do it is quite gone, and I don't care what I say, so long as it is what I mean. For the minute my temper is absolutely vanished, and I shall make the most of its absence. Who are you to judge and condemn me? and give me rules for conduct, how work and love are the only things worth doing? What do you know about me? Either you are absolutely ignorant about me, or so stupid that the very cabbages seem clever by you. And you go telling me what to do! And what do you know about love? To look at you, as little as you know about me. Yes; no wonder you sit there with your mouth open staring at me, you and your foolish, great fat-bellied bloated violin. You are not accustomed to be spoken to like this. It never occurred to you that I would give the world to be able to love as Jill and Polly and Mary and Minnie love. I do not go about saying that any more than a cripple calls attention to his defect: he tries to be brave and conceal it. But that is me, a dwarf, a hunchback, a crétin of the soul. That is the matter with me, and you are so foolish that it never occurred to you that I wanted to be like other people. You thought it was a pose of which I was proud, I think. There! Now do not do that again."
Nadine paused, and then sighed.
"I feel better," she said, "but quite red in the face. However, I have got my temper back again. If you like I will apologize for losing it."
Edith jumped up and kissed Nadine. When she intended to kiss anybody she did it, whether the victim liked it or not.
"My dear, you are quite delightful," she said. "I thoroughly deserve every word. I was utterly ignorant of you. But I am not stupid: if you will go on, you will find I shall understand."
Suddenly Nadine felt utterly lonely. All she had said of herself in her sudden exasperation was perfectly genuine, and now when her equanimity returned, she felt as if she must tell somebody about this isolation, which for the moment, in any case, was sincerely and deeply hers. That she was a girl of a hundred moods was quite true, but it was equally true that each mood was authentically inspired from within. Many of them, no doubt, were far from edifying, but none could be found guilty of the threadbare tawdriness of pose. She nodded at Edith.
"It is as I say," she said. "I hate myself, but here I am, and here soon will Hugh be. It is a disease, this heartlessness: I suffer from it. It is rather common too, but commoner among girls than boys."
Then queerly and unexpectedly, but still honestly, her intellectual interest in herself, that cold egoism that was characteristic of another side of her, awoke.
"Yet it is interesting," she said, "because it is out of this sort of derangement that types and species come. For a million years the fish we call the sole had a headache because one of its eyes was slowly traveling through its head. For a million years man was uncomfortable where the tail once came, because it was drying up. For a million years there will be girls