Edith Arbuthnot had conceived the idea, an unhappy one as regards her
family and neighbors, that every one who aspired to the name of Musician
(it is not too much to assert that she did) should be able to play every
instrument in the band. Just now she was learning the French horn and
double-bass simultaneously. She kept her mind undistracted by the
hideous noises she produced, and expected others to do so. Thus unless
she was practising some instrument that required the exclusive use of
the mouth, she would talk (and did so) while she learned.
Just now she was seated on the terrace wall at Winston, which was of a
convenient height for playing the double-bass, which rested on the
terrace below, and conversing at the top of her voice to Dodo who sat a
yard or two away. These stentorian tones of course were necessary in
order that she should be heard above the vibrating roar of the
ill-played strings. She could not at present get much tone out of them;
but for volume, it was as if all the bumblebees in the world were
swarming in all the threshing-machines in the world, which were
threshing everything else in the world.
"I used to think you were heartless, Dodo," she shouted; "but compared
to Nadine you are a sickly sentimentalist."
When Dodo did not feel equal to shouting back, she spoke in dumb show.
Now she concisely indicated "Rot" on her fingers.
"It isn't Rot," shouted Edith; "ah, what a wonderful thing a double-bass
is: I shall write a Suite for the double-bass unaccompanied--I really
mean it. If you seemed to me without a heart, Nadine would seem to have
an organ which is all that a heart is not, very highly developed.
Probably she inherited a tendency from you, and has developed and
cultivated it. What do you say?"
"I said, do stop that appalling noise, darling," screamed Dodo. "I shall
burst a blood-vessel if I try to talk against it."
"Very well: I must just play two or three scales," said Edith.
The hoarse clamor grew more and more vibrant and Dodo stopped her ears.
Eventually the bow, as Edith brought it down upon the first note of a
new scale, flew from her hands, and describing a parabola in the air
fell into a clump of sweet-peas in the flower-bed below the terrace.
"I must learn not to do that," she said. "It happened yesterday and I
shan't consider myself proficient until I am safe not to hit the
conductor in the face. About Nadine: She is going to perpetrate the most
horrible cruelty, marrying that dreadful young man, while Hugh is just
dying for her. Hugh reminds me of what Jack was like, Dodo."
"Oh, do you think so?" said Dodo. "Except that Jack was once
twenty-five, which is what Hugh is now, I don't see the smallest
resemblance. Jack was so good-looking, and Hugh only looks good, and
though Hugh is a darling, he is just a little slow and heavy, which Jack
never was. You will be able to compare them, by the way, because Hugh is
coming here this afternoon. I asked him not to, but he is coming just
the same. I told him Nadine and Seymour were both here."
"Perhaps he means to kill Seymour," said Edith thoughtfully. "It
certainly would be the obvious thing to do--"
"Hughie would always do the obvious thing," said Dodo.
"I will finish my sentence," said Edith. "It certainly would be the
obvious thing to do, provided that the public executioner would not hang
him, and that Nadine would marry him. But things would probably go the
other way about, which would not be so satisfactory for Hugh. Really the
young generation is very bloodless: it talks more than we did, but it
does absolutely nothing."
"We used to talk a good deal," remarked Dodo, "and we are not silent
yet. At least you and I are not. Edith, has it ever struck you that you
and I are middle-aged? Or is middle-age, do you think, not a matter of
years, but of inclination? I think it must be, for it is simply foolish
to say that I am forty-five, though it would be simply untrue to say
that I was anything else. That is by the way; we will talk of ourselves
soon. Where had I got to? Oh, yes, Hugh is coming down this afternoon
though I implored him not to. Nadine says I was wrong. She wants me to
be very nice to him, as she has been so horrid. They have not seen each
other for a whole week, ever since her engagement was announced. I am
sure Nadine misses him; she will be miserable if Hugh deserts her."
Edith plucked impatiently at the strings of the double-bass, and aroused
the bumblebees again.
"That's what I mean by bloodless," she said. "They are all suffering
from anemia together. Their blood has turned to a not very high quality
of gray matter in the brain. Nadine wants you to be kind to Hugh,
because she has been so horrid! Dodo, don't you see how fishlike that
is? And he, since he can't marry her, takes the post of
_valet-de-chambre_, and looks on while Seymour gives her little
butterfly kisses and small fragments of jade. I saw him kiss her
yesterday, Dodo. It made me feel quite faint and weak, and I had to
hurry into the dining-room and take half a glass of port. It was the
most debilitated thing I ever saw. Berts is nearly as bad, and though he
is nine feet high and plays cricket for his county, he is somehow
ladylike. I can't think where he got it from: certainly not from me. And
as for Hugh, I suppose he calls it faithfulness to hang about after
Nadine, but I call it anemia. I am surprised at Hugh; I should have
thought he was sufficiently stupid to have more blood in him. He ought
to box Nadine's ears, kick Seymour and instantly marry somebody else,
and have dozens of great red-faced, white-toothed children. Bah!"
Dodo had subsided into hopeless giggles over this remarkable tirade
against the anemic generation and Edith plucked at her double-bass again
as she concluded with this exclamation of scorn.
"And I can't think how you allow Nadine to marry that--that jade," said
Edith.
Dodo became momentarily serious.
"If you were Nadine's mother," she said, "you would be delighted at her
marrying anybody. She is the sort of girl who doesn't want to marry, and
afterwards wishes she had. I am not like that: I was continually
marrying somebody and then wishing I hadn't. But Nadine doesn't make
mistakes. She may do things that appear very odd, but they are not
mistakes, she has thought it out very carefully first. You see, quite a
quantity of eligible youths and several remarkably ineligible ones have
wanted to marry her, and she has never felt any--dear me, what is it a
man with a small income always feels when a post with a large income is
offered him--oh, yes, a call: Nadine has never felt any call to marry
any of them. There are many girls like that in whom the physical makes
very little appeal. But what does appeal to Nadine very strongly is the
mental, and Seymour however many times you call him a jade, is as clever
as he can be. In him, also, I should say, the physical side is extremely
undeveloped, and so I think that he and Nadine may be very happy. Now
Hugh is not clever at all; he has practically no intellect and that to
Nadine is an insuperable defect. Now don't call her prig or blue
stocking. She is neither the one nor the other. But she has a mind. So
have you. So for that matter have I, and it has led me to do weird
things."
Edith thrummed her double-bass again.
"Dodo, I can't tell you how I disapprove of you," she said, "and how I
love you. You are almost entirely selfish, and yet you have charm. Most
utterly selfish people lose their charm when they are about thirty. I
made sure you would. But I was quite wrong. Now I am utterly unselfish:
I live entirely for my husband and my art. I live for him by seldom
going near him, since he is much happier alone. But then I never had any
charm at all. Now you have always lived, and do still, completely for
your own pleasure--"
Dodo clapped her hands violently in Edith's face for it required drastic
measures to succeed in interrupting her.
"Ah, that is an astonishingly foolish thing for you to say," she said.
"If I lived for my pleasure, do you know what I should do? I should have
a hot bath, go to bed and have dinner there. I should then go to sleep
and when I woke up I should go for a ride, have another hot bath and
another dinner and go to sleep again. There is nothing so pleasant as
riding and hot baths and food and sleep. But I never have sought my
pleasure. What I always have sought is my happiness. And that on the
whole is our highest duty. Don't swear. There is nothing selfish about
it, if you are made like I am. Because the thing that above all others
makes me happy is to contrive that other people should have their own
way. That is why I never dream of interfering in what other people want.
If they really want it, I do all I can to get it for them. I was not
ever thus, as the hymn says, but I am so now. The longer I live the more
clearly I see that it is impossible to understand why other people want
what they want, but it seems to me that all that concerns me is that
they do want. I can see how they want, but never why. I can't think,
darling, for instance, why you want to make those excruciating noises,
but I see how. Here's Jack. Jack, come and tell us about Utopia."
Edith had laid her double-bass down on the ground of the terrace.
"Yes, but I want to sit down," he said. "May I sit on it, Edith?"
Edith screamed. He took this as a sign that he might not, and sat on the
terrace wall.
"Utopia?" he asked. "You've got to be a man to begin with and then you
have to marry Dodo. It does the rest."
"What is It?"
"That which does it, your consciousness. Dodo, it would send up rents in
Utopia if Seymour went to a nice girls' school. He is rather silly, and
wants the nonsense knocked out of him."
"But there you make a mistake," said she. "Almost every one who is nice
is nice because the nonsense has not been knocked out of him. People
without heaps of nonsense are merely prigs. Indeed that is the best
definition of a prig, one who has lost his capability for nonsense. Look
at Edith! She doesn't know she's nonsensical, but she is. And she thinks
she is serious all the time with her great boots and her great
double-bass and her French horns. Oh me, oh me! The reasonable people in
the world are the ruin of it; they spoil the sunshine. Look at the
abominable Liberal party with terrible, reasonable schemes for
scullery-maids. They are all quite excellent, and it is for that reason
they are so hopeless.
"It is moreover a great liberty to take with people to go about
ameliorating them. I should be furious if anybody wanted to ameliorate
me. Darling, Bishop Algie the other day said he always prayed for my
highest good. I begged him not to, because if his prayers were answered,
Providence might think I should be better for a touch of typhoid. You
can't tell what strange roundabout ways Providence may have. So he
promised to stop praying for me, because he is so understanding and knew
what I meant. But when Lloyd George wants to give scullery-maids a happy
old age with a canary in the window it is even worse. It is so sensible:
I can see them sitting dismally in the room listening to their canary,
when they would be much more comfortable in a nice work-house, with
Edith and me bringing them packets of tea and flannel. Don't let us talk
politics: there is nothing that saps the intellect so much."
"Edith and I have not talked much yet," observed Jack.
"No, you are listening to Utopia, which as I said, consists largely of
nonsense. If you are to be happy, you must play, you must be ridiculous,
you must want everybody else to be ridiculous. But everybody must take
his own absurdities quite seriously."
Dodo sat up, pulled Jack's cigarette case from 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
OEdipus."
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 like me, poor wretches, and at the end there will
be another type of woman, a third sex, perhaps, who from not caring
about these things which Nature evidently meant them to care about have
become different. And all the boys like Seymour will be approximating to
the same type from the other side, so that eventually we shall be like
the angels--"
"My dear, why angels?" asked Edith.
"Neither marrying nor giving in marriage. La, la! And I was saying only
the other day to him that I wished to marry half-a-dozen men! What a
good thing that one does not feel the same every day. It would be
atrociously dull. But in the interval, it is lonely now and then for
those of us who are not exactly and precisely of the normal type of
girl. But if you have no heart, you have to follow your intelligence, to
go where your intelligence leads you, and then wave a flag. Perhaps
nobody sees it, or only the wrong sort of person, who says, 'What is
that idiot-girl waving that rag for?' But she only waves it because she
is lost, and hopes that somebody will see it."
Nadine laughed with her habitual gurgle.
"We are all lost," she said. "But we want to be found. It is only the
stupidest who do not know they are lost. Well, I have--what is Hugh's
word? ah, yes,--I have gassed enough for one morning. Ah, and there is
the motor coming back from the station. I am glad that Hugh has not
thrown Seymour out, and driven forwards and backwards over him."
The motor at this moment was passing not more than a couple of hundred
yards off through the park which lay at the foot of the steep garden
terraces below them. From there the road wound round in a long loop
towards the house.
"I shall go to meet Hugh at once, and get it over," said Nadine; and
thereupon she whistled so shrilly and surprisingly on her fingers, that
Hugh, who was driving, looked up and saw her over the terrace. She made
staccato wavings to him, and he got out.
"You whistled the octave of B. in alt," remarked Edith appreciatively.
"And my courage is somewhere about the octave of B. in profundis," said
Nadine. "I dread what Hugh may say to me."
"I will go and talk to him," said Edith. "I understand you now, Nadine.
I will tell him."
Nadine smiled very faintly.
"That is sweet of you," she said, "but I am afraid it wouldn't be quite
the same thing."
* * * * *
Nadine walked down the steep flight of steps in the middle of the
terrace, and out through the Venetian gate into the park. Hugh had just
arrived at it from the other side, and they met there. No word of
greeting passed between them; they but stood looking at each other. He
saw the girl he loved, neither more nor less than that, and did not know
if she looked well or ill, or if her gown was blue or pink or rainbowed.
To him it was Nadine who stood there. But she saw details, not being
blinded: he was big and square, he looked a picture of health,
brown-eyed, clear of skin, large-mouthed, with a habit of smiling
written strongly there. He had taken off his hat, as was usual with him,
and as usual his hair looked a little disordered, as if he had been out
on a windy morning. There was that slight thrusting outwards of his chin
which suggested that he would meet argument with obstinacy, but that
kind and level look from his eyes that suggested an honesty and
kindliness hardly met with outside the charming group of living beings
known as dogs. He was like a big, kind dog, polite to strangers, kind to
friends, hopelessly devoted to the owner of his soul. But to-day his
mouth did not indulge its habit: he was quite grave.
"Why did you kiss me the other night?" he said.
Nadine had already repented of that rash act. Being conscious of her own
repentance, it seemed to her rather nagging of him to allude to it.
"I meant nothing," she said. "Hughie, are we going to stand like posts
here? Shan't we stroll--"
"I don't see why: let us stand like posts. You did kiss me. Or do you
kiss everybody?"
Nadine considered this for a moment.
"No, I don't kiss everybody," she said. "I never kissed a man before. It
was stupid of me. The moment after I had done it I wanted to kiss
_anybody_ to show you it didn't mean anything. You are like the
Inquisition. My next answer is that I have kissed Seymour since. I--I
don't particularly like kissing him. But it is usual."
"And you are going to marry him?"
Nadine's courage which she had confessed was a B. in profundis, sank
into profundissima.
"Yes, I am going to marry him," she said.
"Why? You don't love him. And he doesn't love you."
"I don't love anybody," said Nadine quickly. "I have said that so often
that I am tired of saying it. Girls often marry without being in love.
It just happens. What do you want? Would you like me to go on
spinstering just because I won't marry you? That I will not do. You know
why. You love me. I can't marry you unless I love you. Ah, _mon Dieu_,
it sounds like Ollendorf. But I should be cheating you if I married you,
and I will not cheat you. You would expect from me what you bring to me,
and it would be right that I should bring it you, and I cannot. If you
didn't love me like that, I would marry you to-morrow, and the trousseau
might go and hang itself. Mama would give me some blouses and stockings,
and you would buy me a tooth-brush. Yes, this is very flippant, but when
serious people are goaded they become flippant. Oh, Hughie, I wish I was
different. But I am not different. And what is it you came down here
about? Is it to ask me again to marry you, and to ask me not to marry my
dear little Seymour?"
"Little?" he asked.
"It was a term of endearment. Besides, it is not his fault that he does
not weigh fourteen stones--"
"Stone," said he with the tremor of a smile.
"No, stones," said Nadine. "I choose that it should be stones: fourteen
great square lumps. Hughie, don't catch my words up and correct me. I am
serious and all you can answer is 'stone' instead of 'stones.'"
"I did it without thinking," he said. "I only fell back into the sort of
speech there used to be between us. It was like that, serious one moment
and silly the next. I spoke without thinking, as we used to speak. I
won't do it again."
"And why not?" demanded Nadine.
"Because now that you tell me you really are going to marry Seymour,
everything is changed between us. This is what I came to tell you. I am
not going to hang about, a mixture between a valet and an _ami de la
maison_. You have chosen now. When you refused me before, there was
always in my mind the hope that some day you would give me a different
answer. I waited long and patiently and willingly for that chance. Now
the chance no longer exists. You have scratched me--"
Nadine drew her eyebrows together.
"Scratched you?" she said. "Oh, I see, a race: not nails."
"And I am definitely and finally out of it."
"You mean you are no longer among my friends?" asked Nadine.
"I shall not be with you so much or so intimately. We must talk over it
just this once. We will stroll if you like. It is too hot for you
standing in the sun without a hat."
"No, we will settle it here and now," said she quickly. "You don't
understand. My marriage with Seymour will make no difference in the
quality of affection I have always had for you. Why should I give up my
best friend? Why should you?"
"Because you are much more than my best friend, and I am obliged to give
up, at last, that idea of you. You have forced me to see that it is not
to be realized. And I won't sit about your house, to have people
pointing at me, and saying to each other, 'That's the one who is so
frightfully in love with her.' It may sound priggish, but I don't choose
to be quite so unmanly as that. Nor would you much respect me if I did
so choose."
"But I never did respect you," said Nadine quickly. "I never thought of
you as respectable or otherwise. It doesn't come in. You may steal and
cheat at cards, and I shall not care. I like whom I like: I like you
tremendously. What do you mean you are going to do? Go to Burmah or
Bengal? I don't want to lose you, Hughie. It is unkind of you. Besides,
we shall not marry for a long time yet, and even then-- Ah, it is the
old tale, the old horror called Me all over again--I don't love anybody.
Many are delightful and I am so fond of them. But the other, the
absorption, the gorgeous foolishness of it all, it is away outside of
me, a fairy-tale and I am grown up now and say, 'For me it is not
true.'"
Hugh came a step nearer her.
"You poor devil," he said gently.
Tears, as yet unshed, gathered in Nadine's eyes. They were fairly
creditable tears: they were not at any rate like the weepings of the
great prig-prince and compounded merely of "languor and self-pity," but
sorrow for Hugh was one ingredient in them. Yet in the main they were
for herself, since the only solvent for egoism is love.
"Yes, I am that," she said. "I'm a poor devil. I'm lost, as I said to
that foolish Arbuthnot woman with her feet and great violin. Hark, she
is playing it again: she is a big 'C major'! She has been scolding me,
though if it comes to that I gave it her back with far more _gamin_ in
my tongue. And now you say you will not be friends any longer, and Mama
does not like my marrying Seymour, though she does not argue, and there
is no one left but myself, and I hate myself. Oh, I am lost, and I wave
my flags and there is no one who sees or understands. I shall go back to
Daddy, I think, and he and I will drink ourselves drunk, and I shall
have the red nose. But you are the worst of them all, Hugh! It is a very
strange sort of love you have for me, if all it can do is to desert me.
And yet the other day I felt as you feel; I felt it would only be fair
to you to see you less. I am a damned weathercock. I go this way and
that, but the wind is always cold. I am sorry for you, I want you to be
happy, I would make you happy myself, if I could."
Nadine's eyes had quite overflowed, and as she poured out this
remarkable series of lamentations, she dabbed at her moistened cheeks.
Yet Hugh, though he was so largely to blame, as it seemed, for this
emotion, and though all the most natural instincts in him longed to
yield, knew that deep in him his determination was absolutely
unsoftened. It, and his love for Nadine were of the quality of nether
mill-stones. But all the rest of him longed to comfort her.
"Oh, Nadine, don't cry," he said. "I'm not worth crying about, to begin
with."
"It is not you alone I cry about," said Nadine with justice. "I cry a
little for you, every third drop is for you. The rest is quite for
myself."
"It is never worth while to cry for oneself," he said.
"Who wants it to be worth while? I feel like crying, therefore I cry.
Hardly anything I do is worth while, yet I go on doing, and I get tired
of it before it is done. Already I am tired of crying, and besides it
gives me the red nose without going to Daddy. Not you and I together are
worth making myself ugly for. But you are so disagreeable, Hughie: first
I wanted to stroll, and you said 'no,' and then when I didn't want to
stroll you said 'yes,' and you aren't going to be friends with me, and I
feel exactly as I used to feel when I was six years old, and it rained.
Come, let us sit down a little, and you shall tell me what you mean to
do, and how it will be between us. I will be very good: I will bless any
plan you make, like a bishop. It shall all be as you will. I owe you so
much and there is no way by which I can ever repay you. I don't want to
be a curse to you, Hughie; I don't indeed."
She sat down, leaning against a great beech trunk, and he lay on the
coarse meadow-grass beside her.
"I know you don't," he said.
He looked at her steadily, as she finished mopping her cheeks. Her
little burst of tears had not made her nose at all red; it had but given
a softness to her eyes. Never before had he so strongly felt her
wayward, irresistible charm, which it was so impossible to analyse or
explain. Indeed, if it came to analysis there were strange ingredients
there; there was egoism as complete, and yet as disarming, as that of a
Persian kitten; there was the unreasonableness of a spoilt child; there
was the inconsiderateness and unreliability of an April day, which
alternates its gleams of the saffron sun of spring with cold rain and
plumping showers.
Yet he felt that there was something utterly adorable, wholly womanly
that lay sheathed in these more superficial imperfections, something
that stirred within them conscious of the coming summer, just as the
life embalmed within the chrysalis stirs, giving token of the time when
the husk shall burst, and that which was but a gray crawling thing shall
be wafted on wings of silver emblazoned with scarlet and gold. Then
there was her beauty too, which drew his eyes after the wonder of its
perfection, and was worthy of the soul that he divined in her. And
finally (and this perhaps to him was the supreme magnet) there was the
amazing and superb quality of her vitality, that sparkled and
effervesced in all she did and said, so that for him her speech was like
song or light, and to be with her was to be bathed in the effulgence of
her spirit. And Hugh, looking at her now, felt, as always, that his self
slipped from him, so that he was conscious of her only; she possessed
him, and he lay like the sea with the dazzle of sunlight on it that both
reflects the radiance and absorbs it.
Then he sat up: and half turned from her, for there were things to be
said yet that he could scarcely say while he looked at her.
"I know you don't mean to be a curse to me," he said, "and you couldn't
be if you tried. Whatever you did, and you are going to do a pretty bad
thing now in marrying that chap, must be almost insignificant compared
to the love which you have made exist in me."
He paused a moment.
"I have thought it all out," he said, "but it is difficult, and you must
give me time. I'm not quick like you as you know very well, but
sometimes I get there. It is like this."
She was watching him and listening to him, with a curious intentness and
nervousness, as a prisoner about to receive sentence may watch the
judge. Her hands clasped and unclasped themselves, her breath came short
and irregular. It seemed as if she, for once, had failed to understand
him whom she had said she knew too fatally well. Just now, at any rate,
and on this topic, it was clear she did not know what he was going to
propose. Yet it was scarcely a proposal she waited for; she waited for
his word, his ultimatum. Till now she had dominated him completely with
her quick wit, her far more subtle intelligence, her beauty, her
vitality. But for once now, he was her master: she felt she had to bow
to his simplicity and his uncomplicated strength, his brute virility. It
was but faintly that she recognized it; the recognition came to her
consciousness but as an echo. But the voice that made the echo came from
within.
"I have received my dismissal from you," he said, "as head of your
house, as your possible husband. As I said, I won't take the place of
the tame cat instead. God knows I don't want to cut adrift from you, and
I can't cut adrift from you. But my aspiration is rendered impossible,
and therefore both my mental attitude to you and my conduct must be
altered. I daresay Berts and Tommy and Esther and all the rest of them
will go lying about on your bed, and smoking in your bedroom just as
before. Well, I can't be intimate in that sort of way any longer. You
said you never reckoned whether you respected me or not, and that may be
so. But without wanting to be heavy about it, I have got to respect
myself. I can't help being your lover, but I can help tickling my love,
so to speak, making it squirm and wriggle. Whether I am respectable or
not, it is, and I shan't--as I said--I shan't tickle it. Also though I
would be hurt in any other way for your sake, I won't be hurt like that.
Don't misunderstand me. It is because my love for you is not one atom
abated, that I won't play tricks with it. But when it says to me, 'I
can't bear it,' I shall not ask to bear it. You always found me too
easy to understand: I think this is another instance of it."
He paused a moment and Nadine gave a little sobbing sigh.
"Oh, Hughie," she began.
"No, don't interrupt," he said. "I want to go through with it, without
discussion. There is no discussion possible. I wouldn't argue with God
about it. I should say: 'You made me an ordinary human man, and you've
got to take the consequences. In the same way, you have chosen Seymour,
and I am telling you what is the effect. Now--you are tired of hearing
it--I love you. And therefore I want your happiness without reservation.
You have decided it will conduce to your happiness to marry Seymour.
Therefore, Nadine--this is quite simple and true--I want you to do so. I
may rage and storm on the surface, but essentially I don't. Somewhere
behind all I may say and do, there is, as you once said to me, the
essential me. Well, that says to you, 'God bless you.' That's all."
He unclasped his hands from round his knees, and stood up.
"I'm going away now," he said. "I thought when I came down it might take
a long time to tell you this. But it has taken ten minutes only. I
thought perhaps you would have a lot to say about it, and I daresay you
have, but I find that it doesn't concern me. Don't think me brutal, any
more than I think you brutal. I am made like this, and you are made
otherwise. By all means, let us see each other, often I hope, but not
just yet. I've got to adjust myself, you see, and you haven't. You never
loved me, and so what you have done makes no difference in your feelings
towards me. But I've got to get used to it."
She looked up at him, as he stood there in front of her with the green
lights through the beech-leaves playing on him.
"You make me utterly miserable, Hugh," she said.
"No, I don't. There is no such thing as misery without love. You don't
care for me in the way that you could--could give you the privilege of
being miserable."
For one half-second she did not follow him. But immediately the
quickness of her mind grasped what came so easily and simply to him.
"Ah, I see," she said, her intelligence leading her away from him by the
lure of the pleasure of perception. "When you are like that, it is even
a joy to be miserable. Is that so?"
"Yes, I suppose that is it. Your misery is a--a wireless message from
your love. Bad news, perhaps, but still a communication."
She got up.
"Ah, my dear," she said, "that must be so. I never thought of it. But I
can infer that you are right. Somehow you are quickened, Hughie. You are
giving me a series of little shocks. You were never quite like that
before."
"I was always exactly like that," he said. "I have told you nothing that
I have not always known."
Again her brilliant egoism asserted itself.
"Then it is I who am quickened," she said. "There is nothing that
quickens me so much as being hurt. It makes all your nerves awake and
active. Yes; you have hurt me, and you are not sorry. I do not mind
being hurt, if it makes me more alive. Ah, the only point of life is to
be alive. If life was a crown of thorns, how closely I would press it
round my head, so that the points wounded and wounded me. It is so
shallow just to desire to be happy. I do not care whether I am happy or
not, so long as I feel. Give me all the cancers and consumptions and
decayed teeth, and gout and indigestion and necrosis of the spine and
liver if there is such a thing, so that I may feel. I _don't_ feel: it
is that which ails me. I have a sane body and a sane mind, and I am
tired of sanity. Kick me, Hughie, strike me, spit at me, make me angry
and disgusted, anything, oh, anything! I want to feel, and I want to
feel about you most particularly, and I can't, and there is Edith
playing on her damned double-bass again. I hear it, I am conscious of
it, and it is only the things that don't matter which I am conscious of.
I am conscious of your brown eyes, my dear, and your big mouth and your
trousers and boots, and the cow that is wagging its tail and looking at
us as if it was going to be sick. Its dinner, I remember, goes into its
stomach, and then comes up again, and then it becomes milk or a calf or
something. It has nine stomachs, or is it a cat that has nine lives, or
nine tails? I am sure about nine. Oh, Hughie, I see the outside aspect
of things, and I can't get below. I am a flat stone that you send to
make--chickens is it?--no, ducks and drakes over a pond: flop, flop, the
foolish thing. And somehow you with your stupidity and your simplicity,
you go down below, and drown, and stick in the mud, and are so
uncomfortable and miserable. And I am sorry for you: I hate you to be
uncomfortable and miserable, and oh, I envy you. You suffer and are
kind, and don't envy, and are not puffed up, and I envy your misery, and
am puffed up because I am so desirable, and I don't really suffer--you
are quite right--and I am not kind. Hugh, I can't bear that cow, drive
it away, it will eat me and make milk of me. And there, look, are Mama
and Papa Jack, coming back from their ride. Papa Jack loves her; his
face is like a face in a spoon when he looks at her, and I know she is
learning to love him. She no longer thinks when she is talking to him,
as to whether he will be pleased. That is a sure sign. She is beginning
to be herself, at her age too! She doesn't think about thinking about
him any more: it comes naturally. And I am not myself: I am something
else: rather, I am nothing else: I am nothing at all, just some
intelligence, and some flesh and blood and bones. I am not a real
person. It is that which is the matter. I long to be a real person, and
I can't. I crawl sideways over other things like a crab: I wave my
pincers and pinch. I am lost: I am nothing! And yet I know--how horribly
I know it--there is something behind, more than the beastly idol with
the wooden eye, which is all I know of my real self. If only I could
find it! If only I could crack myself up like a nut and get to a
kernel. For God's sake, Hughie, take the nut-crackers, and crack me. It
is idle to ask you to do it. You have tried often enough. You will have
to get a stronger nut-cracker. Meantime I am a nut, just a nut, with its
hard bright shell. Seymour is another nut. There we shall be."
Hugh caught her by the wrists.
"I can't stand it, Nadine," he said. "You feel nothing for him. He is
nothing to you. How can you marry him? It's profane: it's blasphemous.
You say you can give nothing to anybody. Well, make the best of
yourself. I can give all I am to you. Isn't that better than absolute
_nil_? You can't give, but let me give. It's worship, it's all there
is--"
She stood there with her wrists in his hands, his strong fingers
bruising and crushing them. She could have screamed for the pain of it.
"No, and a thousand times no," she said. "I won't cheat."
"I ask you to cheat."
"And I won't. Hughie dear, press harder, hurt me more, so that you may
see I am serious. You may bite the flesh off me, you may strangle me,
and I will stand quite still and let you do it. But I won't marry you. I
won't cheat you. My will is stronger than your body, and I would die
sooner."
"Then your marriage is a pure farce," said he.
"Come and laugh at it," she said.