The House of Defence. Volume 2. Benson Edward Frederic

I haven’t the slightest idea,” she said. “Catherine, I do like him awfully – I like him most awfully. No one has ever attracted me like that. Good gracious! how indelicate I am! But I don’t care one straw. I should like to put all my affairs and all poor Thurso’s into his hands. I should do it with the utmost confidence, and I should then just curl round as one does in bed, and feel everything is all right. Is that being in love? I don’t know or care. He is so strong, and so windy and so sunny. He is surrounded by sun, and – and it is as if he had just had a cold bath and stepped into the sun. I love that strength and wind. Don’t you like it? I want somebody who would go on playing undoubled spades at bridge in the middle of an earthquake. He would – for a shilling a hundred. Am I in love with him? I tell you I don’t know. Certainly this sort of thing has never happened to me before, and, again, I certainly have never been in love. So perhaps ‘these are the ones.’ Oh, do tell me! When Thurso proposed to you, was it like that? Did you feel there wasn’t anybody else who really mattered? Oh dear! poor Mr. Cochrane, to have all this put upon him! He hasn’t shown the slightest sign of doing more than admire my fishing. Lots of people have done that. But about you and Thurso, did you feel that? Is that the one?”

      There was a fine irony about this, and Catherine, in spite of the previous discussion on Christian Science, which laid down that all that had any real existence was good, felt disposed to believe in the malice that lurked in chance questions. She evaded the direct answer.

      “Oh, there are as many ways of love as there are people in the world,” she said. “But, dear, I regard you with suspicion. There are certain symptoms – ”

      “Oh, don’t,” said Maud.

      “Very well. But I feel with you about strength. It is an adorable quality to women. And it is that which so troubles me about Thurso. I know – the throwing away of the bottle proves it – that he is fighting; but is he strong enough? He was weak when he allowed himself to form a habit that he knew was harmful.”

      She threw her hands wide.

      “Oh, it is so awful!” she said. “One begins by saying, ‘I shall do this when I choose,’ and so soon. This says, ‘You shall do it when I choose.’ Personally, I always make it a rule to give anything up before I begin to want it very badly.”

      There was an irony in this, too. The remembrance of what chiefly kept her awake last night made her know that her rule was not always quite easy to follow. But this was secret from Maud.

      “You, who get all you want!” she said, speaking from outside.

      Catherine got up, and began walking up and down the small angle of lawn where they sat, bordering the deep flower-bed. All June was in flower there, just as in herself, to the outside view, all June seemed to be flowering. It was no wonder that Maud thought that. But all the emotional baggage which she had consistently thrown away all her life seemed to her to be coming back now in bales, returned to her by some dreadful dead-letter office – at least, she had hoped it was dead – and a sudden bitterness, born of perplexity, invaded her.

      “Oh yes; everybody always thinks one is happy,” she said, “if one has good digestion and a passable appearance, and heaps of things to do, and the enjoyment in doing them which I have, and as much money as one wants. But all these things only give one pleasure. Do you think I am happy? Do you really think so?”

      Maud dropped her eyes. When talk deepens it is well to talk in the dark, or to talk without the distraction of sight.

      “No, I don’t think you are,” she said, “if I look deep down.”

      “Then you are two people,” said Catherine rather fiercely – “the superficial Maud who just now said I had all I wanted, implying happiness, and another Maud, who has to be fished for.”

      That was less personal, less intricate, and Maud looked up again, smiling.

      “Quite true,” she said. “But so are you two Catherines; so is everybody who is worth anything. I used to think you an ideally happy person, because, as far as one could see, you got all you wanted. I imagine it was what you call the superficial Maud who thought that; I don’t think the deep-down ‘you’ is happy.”

      Maud paused a moment, feeling that her sister-in-law was hanging on her words. It did not seem to her that in this claim for unhappiness, so to speak, that Catherine had made she had in her mind the drug-taking: it was something different to that. Only lately, too, had she herself been conscious of this “deeper Maud,” which yet did not in the least affect the workings of the more superficial self. The joy of morning and evening, the depression and irritation of east wind, the rapture of catching sea-trout, went on, on the surface, just as keenly as ever, but an interior life had awoke.

      “I used to envy you so, Cathy,” she said – “at least, I used to envy lots of things about you, when I thought that the ‘you’ which all the world knew and admired so was all there was. But now I believe that there is a greater ‘you’ than that, and that a realer ‘me’ than the ordinary thing perceives it. And since you ask me, I don’t think that essential part of you is happy, any more than Thurso is happy.”

      Catherine sat down again, and thought over this before she answered.

      “I would give, or give up, a great deal to make Thurso happy,” she said with absolute sincerity. “But I get on his nerves.”

      Maud looked up, waiting for more – waiting for the completion of the sentence which she had heard not so long ago on Thurso’s lips. It came.

      “And he bores me,” said Catherine.

      There was a long silence. Bees buzzed in the flowers, making them bend and sway and nod to their weight; a grasshopper clicked and whirred on the lawn; swifts swooped and chided together in sliding companies; while the splash of oars or churn of a steamer sounded from the river. Then – such is the habit of the world – it struck them both how unlike themselves, unlike the ordinary presentment of themselves, that is to say, they were being, and simultaneously they swam out of the depths that were in reality the much more essential abode of them both. But the return to normal levels was short; they soon went down again; since those who have met or seen each other below always go back there. It is only those who have talked insincerely on deep matters who prefer to splash about on the surface. But a few surface remarks followed.

      “Yet it is almost certainly one’s own fault if one is bored,” said Catherine. “To be bored only shows that a bore is present – probably oneself. Yet, Maud … if I tell him about the bazaars, and sales, and speeches, and so on, he is bored; and they do make up a big part of my life.”

      “On the surface,” said she, “since we are being frank.”

      “No, not on the surface, since we are contradicting each other. The deepest and most real part of me that I know is sorry for poor devils, and it expresses itself in these ways. And it is exactly that which gets on his nerves. If I get up from lunch because I have got to go somewhere, he is irritated. He thinks I am restless. Well, so I am. I want to be doing things, not eating stupid cutlets. What do you want me to do? What does he want me to do? Eat opium instead?”

      Maud gave a long sigh.

      “Oh, Cathy, that was a pity!” she said.

      Catherine gave a little hopeless gesture.

      “Oh yes; it was a pity. Lots of things are. Our attitude towards each other is a pity. But I’m sorry I said that. Oh, do help me! Let’s be practical. Remember, I am at home when I am doing things. And I want to know what to do about a hundred things.”

      Catherine got up again. She was, as she said, always practical, and she was always restless. This afternoon in particular, after the inconclusive wakefulness of the night before, she longed to map out plans, rules of conduct, a line to take about all these complications. Yet, since all her life she had been chary of emotion, apt to regard it as useless, if not dangerous, stuff to have on board; now, when it was certainly there, either through her will or in opposition to it, she found herself – she, the ready speaker – destitute of words to deal with it to Maud. And in her silent search for expression again she paced up and down the busy bee-travelled flower-beds.