This sojourn at Meering in the month of June, when London and its
diversions were at their midmost, was Nadine's plan. Whatever Nadine was
or was not, she was not a _poseuse_, and her contention that it was a
waste of time to spend all day in talking to a hundred people who did
not really matter, and in dancing all night with fifty of them, was
absolutely genuine.
"As long as anything amuses you," she had said, "it is not waste of
time; but when you begin to wonder if it really amuses you, it shows
that it does not. Darling Mama, may I go down to Meering for a week or
ten days? I do not want any one to come, but if anybody likes to come,
we might have a little cheerful party. Besides it is Coronation next
week, and great _corvée_! I think it is likely that Esther would wish to
escape and perhaps one or two others, and it would be enchanting at
Meering now. It would be a rest cure; a very curious sort of rest, since
we shall probably never cease bathing and talking and reading. But
anyhow we shall not be tired over things that bore us. That is the true
fatigue. You are never tired as long as you are interested, but I am not
interested in the Coronation."
Nadine's solitary week had proved in quality to be populous, and in
quantity to exceed the ten days, and it was already beginning to be
doubtful if July would see any of them settled in London again. Dodo's
house in Portman Square had been maintained in a state of habitableness
with a kitchen-maid to cook, and a housemaid to sweep, and a footman to
wait, and a chauffeur to drive, and an odd man to do whatever the other
servants didn't, and occasionally one or two of the party made a brief
excursion there for a couple of nights, if any peculiar attraction
beckoned. The whole party had gone up for a Shakespeare ball at the
Albert Hall, but had returned next day, and Dodo had hurried to St.
Paul's Cathedral to attend a thanksgiving service, especially since she,
on leaving London, had taken a season ticket, being convinced she would
be continuously employed in rushing up and down. Subsequently she had
defrauded the railway-company by lending it, though strictly
non-transferable, to any member of the party who wished to make the
journey, with the result that Bertie had been asked by a truculent
inspector whether he was really Princess Waldenech. His passionate
denial of any such identity had led to a lesser frequency of these
excursions.
Nadine with the same sincerity had mapped out for herself a course of
study at Meering, and she read Plato every afternoon in the original
Greek, with an admirable translation at hand, from three o'clock till
five. During these hours she was inaccessible, and when she emerged
rather flushed sometimes from the difficulty of comprehending what some
of the dialogues were about, she was slightly Socratic at tea, and
tried to prove, as Dodo said, that the muse of Mr. Harry Lauder was the
same as the muse of Sir George Alexander, and that she ought to be rude
to Hugh if she loved him. She was extremely clear-headed in her reason,
and referred them to the Symposium and the dialogue on Lysis, to prove
her point. But as nobody thought of contradicting her, since the
Socratic mood soon wore off, they did not attempt to find out the
Hellenic equivalents for those amazing doctrines.
She was markedly Socratic this afternoon, when the whole party were
having tea on the lawn. Esther and Bertie had been down to bathe after
lunch, and since everybody was going to bathe again after tea, they had
left their clothes behind different rocky screens above the probable
high-water level on the beach, and were clad in bathing-dress,
moderately dried in the sun, with dressing-gowns above. Berts had
nothing in the shape of what is called foot-gear on his feet, since it
was simpler to walk up barefoot, and he was wriggling his toes, one
after the other, in order to divest them of an excess of sand.
"But pain and pleasure are so closely conjoined," said Nadine, in answer
to an exclamation of his concerning stepping in a gorse-bush. "It hurts
you to have a prickle in your foot, but the pleasure of taking it out
compensates for the pain!"
"That's Socratic," said Hugh, "when they took off his chains just before
they hemlocked him. You didn't think of that, Nadine."
"I didn't claim to, but it is quite true. There is actual pleasure in
the cessation of pain. If you are unhappy and the cause of your
unhappiness is removed, your happiness is largely derived from the fact
that you were unhappy. For instance, did you ever have a fish-bone stick
in your throat, Hugh?"
"As a matter of fact, never," said Hugh. "But as I am meant to say
'yes,' I will."
"And did you cough?"
"Violently," said Hugh.
"Upon which the fish-bone returned to your mouth?"
"No," said Hugh. "I swallowed it. It never returned at all."
"It does not matter which way it went," said Nadine; "but your feeling
of pleasure at its going was dependent on the pain which its sticking
gave you."
"Is that all?" said Hugh.
"Does it not seem to you to be proved?"
"Oh, yes. It was proved long ago. But it's a pedantic point. The sort of
point John would have made."
He absently whistled the first two lines of "Am Stillen Herd," and
Nadine was diverted from her Platonisms.
"Ah, that is so much finer than the finished 'Preislied,'" she said; "he
has curled and oiled his verse like an Assyrian bull. He and Sachs had
cobbled at it too much: they had brushed and combed it. It had lost
something of springtime and sea-breeze. A finished work of art has
necessarily less quality of suggestiveness. Look at the Leonardo
drawings. Is the 'Gioconda' ever quite as suggestive? I am rather glad
it was stolen. I think Leonardo is greater without it."
John drew in his breath in a pained manner.
"'Mona Lisa' was the whole wonder of the world," he said. "I had sooner
the thief had taken away the moon. Do you remember--perhaps you didn't
notice it--the painting of the circle of rock in which she sat?"
"You are going to quote Pater," said Nadine. "Pray do not: it is a
deplorable passage, and though it has lost nothing by repetition--for
there was nothing to lose--it shows an awful ignorance of the spirit of
the Renaissance. The eyelids are not a little weary: they are a little
out of drawing only."
Esther looked across at Berts.
"Berts is either out of drawing," she said, "or else his dressing-gown
is. I think both are: he is a little too long, and also the
dressing-gown is too short. They ought to proceed as far as the ankles,
but Berts' got a little weary at his knees."
"I barked my knees on those foul rocks," said Berts, examining those
injured joints.
"Barking them is worse than biting them," said Nadine.
"I never bite my knees," said he. "It is a greedy habit. Worse than
doing it to your nails."
"If you are not careful you will talk nonsense," said Nadine.
"I don't agree. If you are not careful you can't talk nonsense. If you
want to talk nonsense, you've not got to be not careful."
"There are too many 'nots,'" remarked Nadine.
"Not at all. If you are careless some sort of idea creeps into what you
say, and it ceases to be nonsense. There are lots of creeping ideas
about like microbes, any of which spoil it. Hardly anybody can be really
meaningless for five minutes. That is why the Mad Tea Party is a supreme
work of art: you can't attach the slightest sense to anything that is
said in it."
"The question is what you mean by nonsense," said Nadine. "Is it what
Mr. Bernard Shaw writes in his plays, or what Mrs. Humphry Ward writes
in her books? They neither mean anything but they are not at all alike.
In fact they are as completely opposed to each other as sense is to
nonsense."
Berts threw himself back on the turf.
"True," he said. "But they are neither of them nonsense. The lame and
the halt and the blind ideas creep into both. They both talk sense
mortally wounded."
Esther gave her appreciative sigh.
"Oh, Berts, how true!" she said. "I went to a play by Mrs. Humphry Ward
the other day, or else I read a book by Bernard Shaw, I forget which,
and all the time I kept trying to see what the sense of it had been
before it had its throat cut. But no one ever tried to see what Alice in
Wonderland meant, or what Aunt Dodo means."
"Mama is wonderful," said Nadine. "She lives up to what she says, too.
Her whole life has been complete nonsense. I do hope Jack will persuade
her to do the most ridiculous thing of all, and marry him."
"Is that why he is coming?" asked Esther.
"Oh, I hope so. It would be _the_ greatest and most absurd romance of
the century."
Hugh was eating sugar meditatively out of the sugar basin.
"I don't see that you have any right to lay down the law about nonsense,
Nadine," he said. "You are constantly reading Plato, and making
arguments, which are meant to be consecutive."
"I do that to relax my mind," said Nadine. "Berts is quite right.
Nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the negative of sense, just as
sugar is the negative of salt. To get non-salt with your egg, you must
eat sugar with it, not only abstain from salt."
"You will get a remarkably nasty taste," remarked John.
"Dear John, nobody ever wronged you so much as to suggest that you would
like nonsense. When was Leonardo born? And how old was he when he died?
And how many golden crowns did Francis of France give him for the
'Gioconda'? Your mind is full of interesting facts. That is why you are
so tedious. You are like the sand they used to put on letters, which
instantly made it dry."
Berts got up.
"We will go and bathe again," he said, "and John shall remain on the
beach and look older than the rocks he sits among. The rocks by the way
are old red sandstone. They will blossom as the rose when Granite John
sits among them. His is the head on which all the beginnings of the
world have come, and he is never weary. Dear me, if I was not a
teetotaller I should imagine I was drunk. I think it is the sea. What a
heavenly time the man who stole the 'Gioconda' must have had. He just
took it away. I can imagine him going to the Abbey at the Coronation,
and taking away the King's crown. There is genius, and it is also
nonsense. It is pure nonsense to imagine going to the Louvre and taking
'la Gioconda' away."
"I wonder what he has done with it," said Nadine. "I think he must be a
jig-saw puzzle maniac, and have felt compelled to cut it up. Probably
the Louvre will receive bits of it by registered post. The nose will
come, and then some rocks, and then a rather weary eyelid. I think John
stole it: he was absorbed in jig-saw puzzles all morning. Now that seems
to me nonsense."
"Wrong again," said Berts. "When it is put together it is sense. If
people cut up the pictures and then threw the bits away, it might be
nonsense. But they keep the pieces and these become the picture again."
"The process of cutting it up is nonsense," said Nadine.
"Yes, and the process of putting it together is nonsense," said Esther.
"And the two make sense," said Berts. "Let's go and bathe. Nadine, take
down some proper book, and read to us in the intervals."
"'Pride and Prej?'" said Nadine.
"Oh, do you think so? Not good for the sea-shore. Why not 'Poems and
Ballads'?"
"John will be shocked," said Nadine.
"Not at all. He will be old red sandstone. I know Aunt Dodo has a copy.
I think Mr. Swinburne gave it her," said Esther.
"She may value it," said Nadine. "And it may fall into the sea."
"Not if you are careful. Besides, that would be rather suitable.
Swinburne loved the sea, and also understood it. I think his spirit
would like it, if a copy was drowned."
"But Mama's spirit wouldn't," said Nadine.
* * * * *
On the moment of her mentioned name Dodo appeared at the long window of
the drawing-room that opened upon the lawn. Simultaneously there was
heard the buzz of a motor-car stopping at the front door just round the
corner.
"Oh, all you darlings," said Dodo, in the style of the 'Omnia opera,'
"are you going to bathe, or have you bathed? Berts, dear, we know that
above the knee comes the thigh, without your showing us. Surely there
are bigger dressing-gowns somewhere? Of course it does not matter: don't
bother, and you've got beautiful legs, Berts."
"Aren't they lovely?" said Esther. "They ought to be put in plaster of
Paris."
"But if you have bathed, why not dress?" said Dodo; "and if you haven't,
why undress at present?"
"Oh, but it's both," said Berts, "and so is Esther. We have bathed, and
are going to do it again, as soon as we've eaten enough tea."
Dodo looked appreciatively round.
"You refreshing children!" she said. "If I bathed directly after tea I
should turn blue and green like a bruise. I have wasted all afternoon in
looking at a box of novels from Melland's. I don't know what has
happened to the novelists: their only object seems to tell you about
utterly dull and sordid people. There is no longer any vitality in them:
they are like leaders in the papers, full of reliable information. One
instance shocked me: the heroine in 'No. 11 Lambeth Walk' went to
Birmingham by a train that left Euston at 2:30 P. M. and her ticket cost
nine shillings and twopence halfpenny. An awful misgiving seized me that
it was all true and I rang for an A.B.C. and looked out Birmingham. It
was so: there was a train at that hour and the tickets cost exactly
that."
"How wretched!" said Nadine in a pained voice.
"Darling, don't take it too much to heart. And one of those novels was
about Home Rule and another about Soap, and another about Tariff Reform,
and a fourth about Christianity, which was absolutely convincing. But
one doesn't go to a novel in order to learn Christianity, or
soap-making. One reads novels in order to be entertained and escape from
real life into the society of imaginary and fiery people. Another
one--"
Dodo stopped suddenly, as a man came out of the drawing-room window.
Then she held both her hands out.
"Ah, Jack," she said. "Welcome, welcome!"
* * * * *
A very kind face, grizzled as to the hair and mustache, looked down on
her from its great height, a face that was wonderfully patient and
reasonable and trustworthy. Jack Chesterford wore his years well, but he
wore them all; he did not look to be on the summer side of forty-five.
He was spare still: life had not made him the unwilling recipient of the
most voluminous and ironic of its burdens, obesity, but his movements
were rather slow and deliberate, as if he was tired of the senseless
repetition of the days. But there seemed to be no irritation mingled
with his fatigue: he but yawned and smiled, and turned over fresh pages.
But at the moment, as he stood there with both Dodo's hands in his,
there was no appearance of weariness, and indeed it would have been a
man of dough who remained uninspired by the extraordinary perfection and
cordiality of her greeting. It was almost as if she welcomed a lover: it
was quite as if she welcomed the best of friends long absent. That she
had thought out the manner of her salutation, said nothing against its
genuineness, but she could have welcomed him quite as genuinely in other
modes. She had thought indeed of putting pathos, penitence, and
shamefacedness into her greeting: she could with real emotion to endorse
it have just raised her eyes to his and let them fall again, as if
conscious of the need of forgiveness. Or (with perhaps a little less
genuineness) she could have adopted the matronly and 'too late'
attitude; but this would have been less genuine because she did not feel
at all matronly, or think that it was in the least 'too late.' But warm
and unmixed cordiality, with no consciousness of things behind, was
perhaps the most genuine and least complicated of all welcomes, and she
gave it.
She did not hold his hands more than a second or two, for Nadine and
others claimed them. But after a few minutes he and Dodo were alone
again together, for Jack declined the invitation to join the bathers, on
the plea of senility and feeling cold like David. Then when the noise of
their laughter and talk had faded seawards, he dropped the trivialities
that till now had engaged them, and turned to her.
"I have been a long time coming, Dodo," he said. "Indeed, I meant never
to come at all. But I could not help it. I do not think I need explain
either why I stopped away or why I have come now."
Apart from the perfectly authentic pleasure that Dodo felt in seeing her
old friend again, there went through her a thrill of delight at Jack's
implication of what she was to him. She loved to have that power over a
man; she loved to know how potent over him still was the spell she
wielded. In days gone by she had not behaved well to him; it would be
truer to acknowledge that she had behaved just as outrageously as was
possible for anybody not a pure-bred fiend. But he had come back. It was
unnecessary to explain why.
And then suddenly with the rush of old memories revived, memories of his
unfailing loyalty to her, his generosity, his unwearying
loving-kindness, her eyes grew dim, and her hands caught his again.
"Jack dear," she said, "I want to say one thing. I am sorry for all I
did, for my--my treachery, my--my damnedness. I was frightened: I have
no other excuse. And, my dear, I have been punished. But I tell you,
that what hurts most is your coming here--your forgiveness."
She had not meant to say any of this; it all belonged to one of the
welcomes of him which she had rejected. But the impulse was not to be
resisted.
"It is so," she said with mouth that quivered.
"Wipe it all out, Dodo," he said. "We start again to-day."
Dodo's power of rallying from perfectly sincere attacks of emotion was
absolutely amazing and quite unimpaired. Only for five seconds more did
her gravity linger.
"Dear old Jack," she said. "It is good to see you. Oh, Jack, the gray
hairs. What a lot, but they become you, and you look just as kind and
big as ever. I used to think it would be so dreadful when we were all
over forty, but I like it quite immensely, and the young generation are
such ducks, and I am not the least envious of them. But aren't some of
them weird? I wonder if we were as weird; I was always weirdish, I
suppose, and I'm too old to change now. But I've still got one defect,
though you would hardly believe it: I can't get enough into the day, and
I haven't learned how to be in two places at once. But I have just had
three telephone lines put into my house in town. Even that isn't
absolutely satisfactory, because the idea was to talk to three people at
once, and I quite forgot that I hadn't three ears. I really ought to
have been one of the people in the Central Exchange, who give you the
wrong number. You must feel really in the swim, if you are the
go-between of everybody who wants to talk to everybody else; but I
should want to talk to them all. Have you had tea? Yes? Then let us go
down to the sea, because I must have a bathe before dinner.--Oh, by the
way, Edith is coming to-night. I have not seen her yet. You and she were
the remnant of the old guard who wouldn't surrender, Jack, but went on
sullenly firing your muskets at me. I forgot Mrs. Vivian, but her
ear-trumpet seems to make her matter less."
* * * * *
They went together across the lawn, which that morning had been so
sweetly bird-haunted, and down the steep hillside that led across the
sand-dunes to the sea. Here a mile of sands was framed between two bold
headlands that plunged steeply into the sea, and Jack and Dodo walked
along the firm, shining beach towards the huge boulders which had in
some remote cataclysm been toppled down from the cliff, and formed the
rocks than which John was so much older. Like brown amphibious sheep
with fleeces of seaweed they lay grazing on the sands, and dotted about
in the water, and from the end of them a long reef of cruel-forked rocks
jutted out a couple of hundred yards into the sea. Higher up on the
beach were more monstrous fragments, as big as cottages, behind which
the processes of dressing and undressing of bathers could discreetly and
invisibly proceed. Dodo had forgotten about this and talking rapidly was
just about to advance round one of them when an agonized trio of male
voices warned her what sight would meet her outraged eyes. The tide was
nearly at its lowest and but a little way out, at the side of the reef,
these rocks ended altogether, giving place to the wrinkled sand, and in
among them were delectable rock-pools with torpid strawberry-looking
anemones, and sideways-scuttling crabs with a perfect passion for
self-effacement, which, if effacement was impossible, turned themselves
into wide-pincered grotesques, and tried to make themselves look tall.
Bertie and Esther who were already prepared for the bathe were pursuing
marine excavations in one of these, and Dodo ecstatically pulled off her
shoes and stockings, one of which fell into the rock-pool in question.
"Oh, Jack, if you won't bathe you might at least paddle," she said.
"Berts, _do_ you see that very red-faced anemone? Isn't it like Nadine's
maid? Esther, do take care. There's an enormous crab crept under the
seaweed by your foot. Don't let it pinch you, darling: isn't cancer the
Latin for crab? It might give you cancer if it pinched you. Here are
the rest of them: I must go and put on my bathing-dress. It's in the
tent. I put up a tent for these children, Jack, at great expense, and
they none of them ever use it. Nadine, are you going to read to us all
in the water? Do wait till I come. What book is it? 'Poems and Ballads?'
And so suspiciously like the copy Mr. Swinburne gave me. Don't drop it
into the water more often than is necessary. You shall read us 'Dolores,
our Lady of Pain,' as we step on sharp rocks and are pinched by crabs.
How Mr. Swinburne would have liked to know that we read his poems as we
bathed. And there's that other delicious one 'Swallow, my Sister, oh,
Sister Swallow.' It sounds at first as if his sister was a pill, and he
had to swallow her. Jack, dear, you make me talk nonsense, somehow. Come
up with me as far as the tent, and while I get ready you shall converse
politely from outside. It is so dull undressing without anybody to talk
to."
* * * * *
Jack, though cordially invited to take part in the usual Symposium in
Nadine's room that night at bed-time, preferred to go to his own, though
he had no intention of going to bed. He wanted to think, to ascertain
how he felt. He imagined that this would be a complicated process;
instead he found it extraordinarily simple. That there were plenty of
things to think about was perfectly true, but they all faced one way, so
to speak, one dominant emotion inspired them all. He was as much in love
with Dodo as ever. He did not, because he could not, consider how
cruelly she had wronged him: all that she had done was but a rush-light
in the mid-day sun of what she was. He was amazed at his stupidity in
letting a day, not to speak of a year, elapse without seeing her since
she was free again; it had been a wanton waste of twelve golden months
to do so. Often during these last two years, he had almost fancied
himself in love with Nadine; now he saw so clearly why. It was because
in face and corporal presence no less than in mind she reminded him so
often of what Dodo had been like. She reproduced something of Dodo's
inimitable charm: But now that he saw the two together how utterly had
the image of Nadine faded from his heart. In his affection, in his
appreciation of her beauty and vitality she was still exactly where she
was, but out of the book of love her name had been quite blotted out.
Blotted out, too, were the years of his anger and the scars of a
bleeding heart, and years of indignant suffering. But he had never let
them take entire possession of him: in his immense soul there had ever
been alight the still, secret flame that no winds or tempests could make
to flicker. And to-day, at the sight of her, that flame had shot up
again, a beacon that reached to heaven.
Hard work had helped him all these years to keep his nature unsoured.
His great estates were managed with a care and consideration for those
who lived on his land, unequaled in England, and politically he had made
for himself a name universally respected for the absolute integrity of
which it was the guarantee. But all that, so it seemed to him now, had
been his employment, not his life. His life, all these years, had lain
like some enchanted and sleeping entity, waiting for the spell that
would awaken it again. Now the spell had been spoken.
For a moment his thought paused, wondering at itself. It seemed
incredible that he should be so weak, so wax-like. Yet that seemed to
matter not at all. He might be weak or wax-like, or anything else that a
man should not be, but the point was that he was alive again.
For a little he let himself drift back upon the surface of things. He
had passed a perfectly amazing evening. Edith Arbuthnot had arrived,
bringing with her a violinist, a viola-player and a 'cellist, but
neither maid nor luggage. Her luggage, except her golf-clubs and a chest
containing music (as she was only coming for a few days) was certainly
lost, but she was not sure whether her maid had ever meant to come, for
she could not remember seeing her at the station. So the violinist had
her maid's room and the viola-player and 'cellist, young and guttural
Germans, had quarters found for them in the village, since Dodo's
cottage was completely crammed. But they had given positively the first
performance of Edith's new quartette, and at the end the violinist had
ceremoniously crowned her with a wreath of laurels which he had picked
from the shrubbery before dinner. Then they went into wild ecstasies of
homage; and drank more beer than would have been thought possible, while
Edith talked German even more remarkably than Dodo, and much louder.
With her laurel wreath tilted rakishly over one ear, a mug of beer in
her hand, and wearing an exceedingly smart dinner-gown belonging to
Dodo, and rather large walking-boots of her own, since nobody else's
shoes would fit her, she presented so astounding a spectacle, that Jack
had unexpectedly been seized with a fury of inextinguishable laughter,
and had to go outside followed by Dodo who patted him on the back. When
they returned, Edith was lecturing about the music they had just heard.
Apparently it was impossible to grasp it all at one hearing, while it
was obviously essential that they must all grasp it without delay. In
consequence it was performed all over again, while she conducted with
her wreath on. There was more homage and more beer. Then they had had
charades by Dodo and Edith, and Edith sang a long song of her own
composition with an immense trill on the last note but one, which was
'Shake'; and her band played a quantity of Siegfried, while Dodo with a
long white beard made of cotton-wool was Wotan, and Edith truculently
broke her walking-stick, and that was 'Spear,' and they did whatever
they could remember out of Macbeth, which wasn't much, but which was
'Shakespeare.'
It was all intensely silly, but Jack knew that he had not laughed so
much during all those years which to-night had rolled away.
Then he left the surface and dived down into his heart again.... There
was no question of forgiving Dodo for the way in which she had treated
him: the idea of forgiveness was as foreign to the whole question as it
would have been to forgive the barometer for going down and presaging
rain. It couldn't help it: it was like that. But in stormy weather and
fine, in tempest and in the clear shining after rain, he loved Dodo.
What his chances were he could not at present consider, for his whole
soul was absorbed in the one emotion.
Jack, for all his grizzled hair and his serious political years, had a
great deal about him that was still boyish, and with the inconsistency
of youth having settled that it was impossible to think about his
chance, proceeded very earnestly to do so. The chance seemed a
conspicuously outside one. She had had more than one opportunity of
marrying him before, and had felt herself unable to take advantage of
it: it was very little likely that she would find him desirable now.
Twice already she had embarked on the unaccountable sea; both times her
boat had foundered. Once the sea was made, in her estimate, of
cotton-wool; the second time, in anybody's estimate, of amorous brandy.
It was not to be expected that she would experiment again with so
unexpected a Proteus.
* * * * *
Meantime a parliament of the younger generation in Nadine's room were
talking with the frankness that characterized them about exactly the
same subject as Jack was revolving alone, for Dodo had gone away with
Edith in order to epitomize the last twenty years, and begin again with
a fresh twenty to-morrow.
"It is quite certain that it is Mama he wants to marry and not me,"
said Nadine. "I thought it was going to be me. I feel a little hurt,
like when one isn't asked to a party to which one doesn't want to go.
"You don't want to go to any parties," said Hugh rather acidly, "but I
believe you love being asked to them."
Nadine turned quickly round to him.
"That is awfully unfair, Hughie," she said in a low voice, "if you mean
what I suppose you do. Do you mean that?"
"What I mean is quite obvious," he said.
Nadine got up from the window-seat where she was sitting with him.
"I think we had all better go to bed," she said. "Hugh is being odious."
"If you meant what you said," he remarked, "the odiousness is with you.
It is bad taste to tell one that you feel hurt that the Ripper doesn't
want you to marry him."
Nadine was silent a moment. Then she held out her hand to him.
"Yes, you are quite right, Hugh," she said. "It was bad taste. I am
sorry. Is that enough?"
He nodded, and dropped her hand again.
"The fact is we are all rather cross," said Esther. "We haven't had a
look in to-night."
"Mother is quite overwhelming," said Berts. "She and Aunt Dodo between
them make one feel exactly a hundred and two years old, as old as John.
Here we all sit, we old people, Nadine and Esther and Hugh and I, and
we are really much more serious than they."
"Your mother is serious enough about her music," said Nadine. "And Jack
is serious about Mama. The fact is that they are serious about serious
things."
"Do you really think of Mother as a serious person with her large boots
and her laurel-crown?" asked Berts.
"Certainly: all that is nothing to her. She doesn't heed it, while we
who think we are musical can see nothing else. I couldn't bear her
quartette either, and I know how good it was. I really believe that we
are rotten before we are ripe. I except Hugh."
Nadine got up, and began walking up and down the room as she did when
her alert analytical brain was in grips with a problem.
"Look at Jack the Ripper," she said. "Why, he's living in high romance,
he's like a very nice gray-headed boy of twenty. Fancy keeping fresh all
that time! Hugh and he are fresh. Berts is a stale old man, who can't
make up his mind whether he wants to marry Esther or not. I am even
worse. I am interested in Plato, and in all the novels about social
reform and dull people who live in sordid respectability, which Mama
finds so utterly tedious."
Nadine threw her arms wide.
"I can't surrender myself to anybody or anything," she said. "I can be
cool and judge, but I can't get away from my mind. It sits up in a
corner like a great governess. Whereas Mama takes up her mind like one
of those flat pebbles on the shore and plays ducks and drakes with it,
throws it into the sea, and then really enjoys herself, lets herself
feel. If for a moment I attempt to feel, my mind gives me a poke and
says 'attend to your lessons, Miss Nadine!' The great Judy! If only I
could treat her like one, and take her out and throw brickbats at her.
But I can't: I am terrified of her; also I find her quite immensely
interesting. She looks at me over the top of her gold-rimmed spectacles,
and though she is very hard and angular yet somehow I adore her. I
loathe her you know, and want to escape, but I do like earning her
approbation. Silly old Judy!"
Berts gave a heavy sigh.
"What an extraordinary lot of words to tell us that you are an
intellectual egoist," he said. "And you needn't have told us at all. We
all knew it."
Nadine gave her hiccup-laugh.
"I am like the starling," she said. "I can't get out. I want to get out
and go walking with Hugh. And he can't get in. For what a pack of
miseries was _le bon Dieu_ responsible when he thought of the world."
"I should have been exceedingly annoyed if He had not thought of me,"
said Berts.
Nadine paused opposite the window-seat, where Hugh was sitting silent.
"Oh, Hugh," she said, speaking very low, "there is a real me somewhere,
I believe. But I cannot find it. I am like the poor thing in the
fairy-tale, that lost its shadow. Indeed I am in the more desperate
plight, I have got my shadow, but I have lost my substance, though not
in riotous living."
"For God's sake find it," he said, "and then give it me to keep safe."
She looked at him, with her dim smile that always seemed to him to mean
the whole world.
"When I find it, you shall have it," she said.
"And last night it was the moon you wanted," said he, "not yourself."
Nadine shrugged her shoulders.
"What would you have?" she said. "That was but another point of view. Do
not ask me to see things always from the same standpoint. And now, since
my mama and Berts have made us all feel old, let us put on our
night-caps and put some cold cream on our venerable faces and go to bed.
Perhaps to-morrow we shall feel younger."