Dodo's Daughter Part 19

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-ba.s.s 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 d.a.m.ned game the third."

Edith had spoken with her usual c.o.c.k-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 h.e.l.l 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 _cretin_ 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 s.e.x, 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 n.o.body 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 ga.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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."