THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
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flippant about things like food and dress. However, no doubt my influence will make her more serious. But as a matter of fact I can't tell you about Nadine. A fortnight ago, when I proposed to her, I could have. I could have given you a very complete account of her. But I can't any longer: I am getting blind about her. I only know that it is she. Not so long ago I told her a quantity of her faults with ruthless accuracy, but I couldn't now. I can't see them any more: there's a glamor."
Esther looked up.
"Oh, Seymour," she said, "are you talking about Nadine? Are you falling in love with her? How very awkward! Does she know?"
Seymour pointed a withering finger at his sister.
"Little girls should mind their own business," he said.
"Oh, but it is my business. Nadine matters far more than any one else. She might easily think it not right to marry you if you were in love with her."
Lady Ayr turned a petrifying gaze from one to the other.
"She seems a very extraordinary young person," she said. "And in any case Esther has no business to know anything about it."
"Whether she thinks it right or not, she is going to marry me," said Seymour.
Esther shook her head.
"You are indeed blind about Nadine," she said, "if you think she would ever do anything she thought wrong."
"You might be describing John," said Seymour rather hotly.
"Anyhow, Nadine is not like John."
"I see no resemblance," said Lady Ayr. "But it is something to know she would not do anything she thought wrong."
"When you say it in that voice, Mother," said Esther, "you make nonsense of it."
"The same words in any voice mean the same thing," said Lady Ayr.
Seymour sighed.
"I am on Esther's side for once," he said.
Esther turned to her brother.
"Seymour, you ought to tell Nadine you are falling in love with her," she said. "I really don't think she would approve. Why, you might become as bad as Hugh. Of course you are not so stupid as Hugh—ah, stupid is the wrong word—you haven't got such a plain kind of intellect as Hugh—which was Nadine's main objection—"
Seymour patted Esther's hand with odious superiority. "You are rather above yourself, my little girl," he said, "because just now I agreed with you. It has gone to your head, and makes you think yourself clever. Shut your eyes till we get to Lincoln. You will feel less giddy by degrees. And when you open them again, you can mind your own business, and mother will tell you about the Goths and Vandals who built the cathedral. You are a Vandal yourself: you will have a fellow-feeling. Mother, dear, put down that window. I am going to see cathedrals to please you, but I will not be stifled to please anybody. The carriage reeks of your beef sandwiches. But I think I have some scent in my bag."
"I am quite sure you have," said Esther scornfully. "I am writing to Nadine, by the way. I shall tell her you are falling in love with her."
"You can tell her exactly what you please," said Seymour suavely. "Ah, here is some wall-flower scent. It is like a May morning. Yes, tell Nadine what you please, but don't bother me. What is the odious town we are coming to? I think it must be Lincoln. John, here is Lincoln, and all the people are ancient Romans."
Seymour obligingly sprayed the expensive scent about the carriage, even though they were so shortly to disembark.
"The river Witham," said John, pointing to a small and fetid ditch. "Remains of Roman villas—"
"The inhabitants of which died of typhoid," said Seymour. "Tell Nadine we are enjoying Lincoln, Esther. Had father better be allowed to sleep on, or shall I wake him? There is a porter: call him, Mother—I won't carry my bag even to save you sixpence. But don't tell him we are marchionesses and lords and ladies, because then he will expect a shilling. I perceive a seedy-looking 'bus outside. That is probably ours. It looks as if it came from some low kind of inn. I wish I had brought Antoinette. And yet I don't know. She would probably have given notice after seeing the degradation of our summer holiday."
"Seymour, you are making yourself exceedingly disagreeable," said his mother.
"It is intentional. You made yourself disagreeable to me: you began. As for you, Esther, you must expect to see a good deal less of Nadine after she and I are married. I will not have you mooning about the house, reminding her of all the damned—yes, I said damned—nonsense you and she and Berts and Hugh talked about the inequality of marriages where one person is clever and the other stupid, or where one loves and the other doesn't. You have roused me, you and mother between you, and I am here to tell you that I will manage my own affairs, which are Nadine's also, without the smallest assistance from you. Put that in—in your ginger-beer, or whatever we have for dinner, and drink it. You thought I was only a sort of thing that waved its hands and collected jade, and talked in rather a squeaky voice, and walked on its toes. Well, you have found out your mistake, and don't let me have to teach it you again. You can tell Nadine in your letter exactly what I have said. And don't rouse me again: it makes me hot. But mind your own business instead, and remember that when I want either your advice or mother's I will ask for it. Till then you can keep it completely to yourselves. You needn't answer me: I don't want to hear anything you have got to say. Let us go to the cathedral. I suppose it is that great cockshy on the top of the hill. I know it will prove to have been built by our forefathers. The verger will like to know about it. But bear in mind I don't want to be told anything about Nadine."
Seymour had become quite red in the face with the violence of the feelings that prompted these straightforward remarks, and before putting the spray of wall-flower scent back into his bag, he shut his eyes and squirted himself in the face in order to cool himself, while Esther stared at him open-mouthed. She hardly knew him, for he had become exactly like a man, a transformation more unexpected than anything that ever happened at a pantomime, and she instantly and correctly connected this change in him with what he had been saying. For the reason of the change was perfectly simple and sufficient: during those last days at Winston, after the departure of Hugh, he had fallen in love with Nadine, and his nature, which had really been neither that of man or woman, had suddenly sexed itself. He had not in the least cast off his tastes and habits; to spray himself and a stuffy railway-carriage with wall-flower scent was still perfectly natural to him, and no doubt, unless Nadine objected very much, he would continue to take Antoinette about with him as his maid, but he had declared himself a man, and found, even as his sister found, that the change in him was as immense as it was unexpected. He thought with more than usual scorn of Nadine's friends, such as Esther and Berts, who all played about together like healthy, but mentally anemic, children, for he, the most anemic of them all, had suddenly had live blood, as it were, squirted into him. Indeed the only member of the clan whom he thought of with toleration was Hugh, with whom he felt a bond of brotherhood, for Hugh, like himself, loved Nadine like a man. Already also he felt sorry for him, recognizing in him a member of his own sex. Hitherto he had disliked his own sex, because they were men, now he found himself detesting people like Berts, because they were not. For men, so he had begun to perceive, are essentially those who are aware of the fact of women; the rest of them, to which he had himself till so lately belonged, he now classified as more or less intellectual amœbæ. And the corresponding members of the other sex were just as bad: Esther had no sense of sex, nor perhaps, and here he paused, had Nadine.
That, it is true, gave him long pause. He knew quite well that Nadine had been no more in love with him, when they had got engaged, than he had been with her. They had both been, and she so he must suppose was still, quite undeveloped as regards those instincts. Hugh with all his devotion and developed manliness awoke no corresponding flame in her, and Seymour was quite clear-sighted enough to see that there was no sign of his having succeeded where Hugh had failed. She belonged, as Dodo had remarked, to that essentially modern type of girl, which, unless she marries while quite young, will probably be spinster still at thirty. They had brains, they had a hundred intellectual and artistic interests, and studied mummies, or logic, or Greek gems, or themselves,