The Essential E. F. Benson: 53+ Titles in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
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.
Chapter VII
Hugh's intention had been to stay several days, at the least, with the Chesterfords, and he had brought down luggage that would last any reasonable person a fortnight. Unluckily he had not foreseen the very natural effect that the sight of Seymour would have on him, and as soon as lunch was over he took his hostess into a corner and presented the situation with his usual simplicity.
"It is like this, Aunt Dodo," he said. "I didn't realize exactly what it meant to me till I saw Seymour again. He drove me up from the station, and it got worse all the time. I thought perhaps since Nadine had chosen him, I might see him differently. I think perhaps I do, but it is worse. It is quite hopeless: the best thing I can do is to go away again at once."
Dodo had lit two cigarettes by mistake, and since, during their ride Jack had (wantonly, so she thought) accused her of wastefulness, she was smoking them both, holding one in each hand, in alternate whiffs. But she threw one of them away at this, and laid her hand on Hugh's knee.
"I know, my dear, and I am so dreadfully sorry," she said. "I was sure it would be so, and that's why I didn't want you to come here. I knew it was no good. I can see you feel really unwell whenever you catch sight of Seymour or hear anything he says. And about Nadine? Did you have a nice talk with her?"
Hugh considered.
"I don't think I should quite call it nice," he said. "I think I should call it necessary. Anyhow, we have had it and—and I quite understand her now. As that is so, I shall go away again this afternoon. It was a mistake to come at all."
"Yes, but probably it was a necessary mistake. In certain situations mistakes are necessary: I mean whatever one does seems to be wrong. If you had stopped away, you would have felt it wrong too."
"And will you answer two questions, Aunt Dodo?" he asked.
"Yes, I will certainly answer them. If they are very awkward ones I may not answer them quite truthfully."
"Well, I'll