THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
"And tell her—" began Seymour again.
Countess Eleanor interrupted him.
"You have sent enough pleasant messages for one time," she said. "You can talk to your mother afterwards: at present talk to me. Did you go to the wedding this morning?"
"Yes."
Seymour rather frequently allowed himself to be ruffled, but he always calmed down again quickly. "It is so like Mama to send a servant in the middle of dinner to say I am drunk," he said, "but she will be sorry now. Look, she is receiving my message, and is turning purple. That is satisfactory. She looks unusually plain when she is purple. Yes: I am describing the wedding for a lady's paper. I shall get four guineas for it."
"You do not look as if that would do you much good."
"If you take four guineas often enough they—they purify the blood," said he, "though certainly the dose is homeopathic. It is called the gold cure. About the wedding. I thought it was very vulgar. And it was frightfully bourgeois in spirit. It is very early Victorian to marry a man who has waited for you since about 1820."
"But they will be very happy."
"So are the bourgeoisie who change hats. At least I should have to be frightfully happy to think of putting on anybody else's hat. I recommend you not to eat that savory unless you have a bad cold that prevents your tasting anything. Shall I send another message to Mama about it?"
"Ah, my dear young man," said Countess Eleanor, "we are all common when we fall in love. You will find yourself being common too, some day. And the people who are least bourgeois become the most common of all. Nadine, for instance: there is no one less bourgeoise than Nadine, but if she ever falls in love she will be so common that she will be perfectly sublime. She will be the embodiment of humanity. But she is not in love with that great boy next her, who is so clearly in love with her. Dear me, what beautiful Sèvres dessert plates. I once collected Sèvres as well as snuff-boxes."
"Did you—did you get together a fine collection?" asked Seymour.
"Pretty well. It is easier to get snuff-boxes. My brother has some that used to be mine.—Ah, they are all getting up. Let me come to see your jade some other day."
Nadine and Esther escaped very soon after dinner from this dreadful party, and went to Seymour's flat where he had preceded them and was busy cooking with Antoinette in the kitchen when they arrived. He opened the door for them himself with his shirt sleeves rolled up above his elbows, showing an extremely white and delicate skin. Round one wrist he wore a gold bangle.
"I've left the kitchen door open," he said, "so that the whole flat shall smell as strong as possible of cooking. There is nothing so delicious when you are hungry. We will open the windows afterwards. You and Esther must amuse yourselves for ten minutes, and then supper will be ready."
"Oh, may I come and cook too, Seymour?" asked Nadine.
"Certainly not. Antoinette is the only woman in the world who knows how to cook. You would make everything messy. Go and rock the cradle or rule the world, or whatever you consider to be a woman's sphere, until we are ready."
Seymour disappeared again into the kitchen from which came rich cracklings and odors of frying, and Nadine turned to Esther with a sigh.
"My dear, I have got remorse and world yearnings to-night," she said. "I attribute it to your mother's awful party. But I daresay we shall all be better soon. You know, if I had asked Hugh to let me come and cook, he would have given me a golden spoon to stir with, and eaten till he burst because I cooked it. And I don't care! He was so dear and so utterly impossible this evening. I told him I wasn't going to the dance at the Embassy, and he said he should go in case I changed my mind. And if it had been Hugh cooking in there, I should have gone and cooked too, even if he hadn't wanted me to. It's no use, Esther: I can't marry Hugh. There's the end of it. Up till to-night I have always wondered if I could. Now I know I can't. I think I shan't see so much of him. I shall miss him, don't think I shan't miss him, but I want to be fair to him. As it is now, whenever I am nice to him, which I always am, he thinks it means that I am beginning to love him. Whereas it doesn't mean anything whatever. I wish people hadn't got into the habit of marrying each other, but bought their babies at a shop instead. And kissing is so disgusting. The only person I ever like kissing is Mama, because her skin is so delicious and smells very faintly of raspberries. Hugh smells of cigarettes and soap—"
"Darling Nadine, you haven't been kissing Hugh, have you?" asked Esther.
"Yes, I kissed him this evening, when he was putting my cloak on, but there were ninety-five footmen there so it wasn't compromising: we were heavily chaperoned. And I would just as soon have kissed any of the other ninety-five. But he wanted me to, and so I did, and then suddenly I saw how unfair it was for me. It didn't mean anything: I kissed him just as I kiss my dog, because he is such a duck. Also because he wanted me to, which Tobias never does: he always cleans his face on the rug after I have kissed him, and sneezes."
"Did he ask you to?" said Esther,—"not Toby, Hugh!"
"No, but I can see by a man's face when he wants. I saw one of the footmen wanted, too, and perhaps I ought to have kissed him as well, to show Hugh it did not mean anything."
Nadine sat down and spread her hands wide with a surprisingly dramatic gesture of innocence and despair.
"It isn't my fault," she said; "it's me. C'est moi: son' io! I would translate it into all the languages of the world, like the Bible, if that would make Hugh understand. People can't be different from what they are. It's a grand mistake to suppose otherwise. They can act and talk in accordance with what they are, or they can act and talk otherwise, but they, the personalities, are unchangeable except by miracles. I could act contrary to my own self and marry Hugh, but it would be no particle of good. I want him to understand that I can't love him, and I am too fond of him to marry him without. I wish to heaven he would marry somebody else."
"He won't do that," said Esther.
"I am afraid not. I think it is rather selfish. It is putting it all on me. I shall have to marry somebody else, I suppose, and that will be very unselfish of me, because I don't want to marry. Of course one has to: I don't want to grow old, but I shall have to grow old. They are both laws of nature, and perhaps neither the one nor the other is so disagreeable really."
Esther gave her long, appreciative sigh.
"It would be too wonderful of you to marry somebody else, in order to make it clear to Hugh that you couldn't marry him," she said. "It would be the most illustrious thing to do and it shows that really you are devoted to Hugh. But you really think that people don't change, Nadine?"
"Not unless a moral earthquake happens and earthquakes are not to be expected. Only an upheaval of that kind makes any difference in the essential things. Their tastes change, as their noses and hair change, but the thing that sits behind like some beastly idol in a temple never moves and looks on at all that changes round it with the same wooden eyes. Oh, dear, I am so tired of myself, and I can't get out of sight of myself."
Nadine looked at herself in a Louis Seize mirror that hung above the fireplace and pointed a contemplative finger at the reflection of her pale loveliness.
"I wish I was anything in the world except that thing," she said. "I am genuine when I say that, but having said that there is nothing else about me but what is intolerable. But I am aware that I don't really care about anybody in the world. The only thing that can be said for me is that I detest myself. I wish I was like you, Esther, because you care for me: I wish I was like Aunt Eleanor because she cares for stealing. I wish I was like Daddy because he cares for old brandy. You are all better off than I. I envy anybody and everybody who cares for anybody with her heart. No doubt having a heart is often a very great nuisance, and often leads you to make a dreadful fool of yourself, but it gets tedious to be wise and cool all the time like me."
Seymour entered at this moment carrying a little silver censer with incense in it.
"The smell of food is sufficiently strong," he said. "And