The House of Defence v. 1

by E. F. Benson

The movements and conjunction of these stars and planets of London life are far more inscrutable than the vagaries of the simpler constellations of the heaven, but just at this moment Catherine Thurso was the central sun round which all else revolved. There were twenty other people who had wealth, beauty, and charm in no less degree than she, though in the matter of beauty forty-nine Parises out of fifty would have awarded the golden apple to this Juno among women, and the world, for that reason or another, had chosen her to be their temporary idol. She was the person who mattered, and this was her hour. And her hour, no less than her own enjoyment of it, she used, as Thurso had said, magnificently, for it really seemed as if charity, no less than social entertainment, would collapse without her support. She made herself a slave to any scheme that helped the helpless, or encouraged the would-be worker to work, and yet all the time she lived, and intended to live, gorgeously. So, like the driver of a pair of horses, she did not suffer the social horse to be lazy or shirk its work, for she knew (and acted on the knowledge) that her social distinction brought buyers to her bazaars. She played, therefore, the brilliant woman of the world for all it was worth, in order to assist deserving objects, though she enjoyed the rôle enormously for its own sake. Both horses, charitable and social, felt her indefatigable lash, and she spurred herself on, just as she spurred on all those who surrounded her, inducing activity in them by the spectacle of her own glorious vitality.

Anyone as radically efficient as Catherine Thurso undoubtedly was has to march through life with as few impedimenta as possible, and all emotional baggage which is not likely to be needed must be firmly left behind. She had long ago realised this, and had always acted on it, so that now it was more from force of habit than by any conscious effort that she eliminated from her mind any emotion on its first appearance if it was likely to clog or hinder her energies. Worry, sorrow, regret for all that was past or irremediable, she simply threw away as one throws the envelopes of opened letters into the wastepaper basket. They were of no earthly use; they but made an unprofitable litter if they were allowed to lie about, nor did you want the drawers and compartments in your brain crammed with rubbish like this. Thus, it was but very seldom that she let her thoughts dwell on the one great thing that she had missed all her life. She had never loved. Her marriage with Thurso had, as the Press most truly announced, “been arranged,” and she had fallen in with this arrangement. Even as a girl she had wanted the sort of position and opportunity that such a marriage gave her, and she had made, certainly outwardly, and to a very considerable extent inwardly, the most splendid success of it. She had done her duty, too, as a wife in giving him three sons, and had filled her place superbly. But love had never really come to her. That, by no fault of hers, had apparently been left out of her emotional equipment, and since she was convinced that this omission was not her fault, and that it was out of her power to remedy it, she did not worry about it. But to-day, though she did not worry, she could not help wondering about a certain time now long past in her life, since it was conceivable that certain things which as yet belonged only to time long past would begin to be factors in her life in the immediate future. So now that the question of the staircase and the coming speech at the Industrial Sale were off her mind, these things occupied her somewhat insistently. There was no mystery about it all, and nothing whatever to fear either in the past or the future; but certain possibilities interested her.

Count Villars had just arrived in England, having at an extraordinarily early age—for he could be scarcely forty yet—been appointed Hungarian Ambassador to the Court of St. James; and there were quite a number of people resident in that parish who remembered very distinctly how desperately he had fallen in love with Catherine Thurso twelve years ago, when she had first come out, and, as her mother expressed it, taken “the shine” out of the rest of the girls of the year. Then, so the world still remembered, rather perplexing events had happened in rapid succession. Her engagement to young Villars had been actually supposed to have taken place, but hardly had that become news when it was contradicted, and Villars, then a junior secretary in the Embassy of which he was now the head, had been transferred elsewhere; while before the season was over Catherine Etheridge’s engagement to her present husband was formally announced, and was followed before the end of the year by her marriage. For Mrs. Etheridge had always meant that her daughter should marry Lord Raynham, as he then was; and if anybody thought that her plans were going to be interfered with by any volcanic young Austrian, however brilliant and handsome, without a penny of his own, and removed by half a dozen lives from the succession to the huge estates of Villars (those lives certainly made a lot of difference), she would show him his mistake. There were, in fact, many who thought that Mrs. Etheridge’s plans were going to be interfered with; but their mistake had been duly demonstrated to them when Catherine Etheridge so soon after became Catherine Raynham.

Rudolf Villars, in this long interval of twelve years between his abrupt departure and his return to England, had done everything except marry, and in all that he did Fortune had declared herself to be his parent. His really brilliant gifts had reaped their reward before he was too old to care about success, relations neither near nor dear had died, and he was now next in succession to the estates of Villars—with only a decrepit old great-uncle between him and them—and Ambassador to the English Court. To the world at large this situation, which just now was being rather largely discussed, had elements of interest. It was known that Catherine Thurso and her husband were not romantically attached to each other; it was conjectured that, since Rudolf Villars had remained single, he was still romantically attached to her, and it was impossible to help wondering whether at last she would show signs of being attached to anybody. To the world she was, in spite of her beauty, her charm, her brilliance, a somewhat irritating enigma. All the glory of her belonged to nobody. She did not care for her husband, which was a pity, but what made it worse was that she did not care for anybody else. And so many men had been wildly devoted to her, and of them all not one had met with a single particle of success, or, to do her justice, of encouragement, for she had nothing in common with the flirt. She was not in the least shocked, either, at their protestations. If she had been, her attitude would, at any rate, have been a moral and an intelligible one. But she merely laughed at them, and told them not to be absurd. If they persisted, she yawned. She forgot all about it, too, a week afterwards, even if she had been made to yawn very much, asked them to the house as usual, and was specially friendly.

Catherine Thurso, as will have been gathered, did her duty with exemplary fullness in the state of life to which her mother, in the main, had called her. As soon as she married she grasped the idea of life that her position entailed, if she was to fill it adequately and with any credit to herself; welcomed the prospect almost with rapture; and, with all the splendid energies of her mind and body, lived up to a really high ideal of it. Her time, her talents, and her money were always at the service of any scheme which she believed to be one that merited support, and she brought to her task not the sense of duty only, but a most warm-hearted kindliness. An unsupported sense of duty alone is a barren road to tread, but her genuine kindliness, her real interest in those who were in need, made it break out for her into flowers. She truly cared for the causes at which she so slaved; she wanted everybody to enjoy himself. But this warmth, this amiability, which pervaded her nature was both the strongest and the highest motive she knew. She did everything warmly, but nothing passionately, because it seemed as if passion had been left out of her nature. Yet sometimes, as on this afternoon, when the factors for years long past were coming up above the horizon again, she wondered whether that was quite strictly the case. It was years, certainly, since any hint or suggestion of it had come near her, but she remembered now that unquiet and perplexity, half bliss, half unhappiness, which she had known in those few weeks, and which had culminated in her half promise (it had not been more than that) to marry Rudolf Villars. Whatever that feeling was, it had been a bud only, something unopened, and had never expanded into a flower, for swift maternal hands had, without any figure of speech, nipped it off. She had been called a sentimental schoolgirl with such extraordinary assurance and acidity that she had felt that it must be the case.

But to-day, when she knew that this evening the man who had roused in her the sentimentality at any rate of a schoolgirl would, after this long lapse of years, come to her house again, she wondered (though this was useless emotional baggage) if she would feel anything that would show her that he had once been different to all others. She had not seen him since. Probably he was rather bald, rather stout, rather of the diplomatist type, which seemed to her often to be slightly tinged with pomposity. Very likely, when his name was announced, she would see a total stranger, shake hands with a stranger. She almost hoped that this would prove to be so.

Yes; she did not want to feel again anything which resembled the memory of that bewildering unrest, which, considering how long ago it all was, was so strangely vivid still. Her life was very full, she enjoyed it enormously; she was happy, she was nearly content, and she did not, as far as she knew herself, wish to risk agitation and upheaval in order to experience a new emotion. She had seen love, at the most, like distant lightning winking on the horizon; she did not want the thunderstorm to come any nearer. She wished it would go away.

Yet, yet ... even now, in the midsummer and zenith of her life, she sometimes asked herself, “Is this all?” And then, if she allowed herself to think further, it seemed to her a sorry comedy never to feel more acutely than she felt, never to be more absorbed, more eager, than this. Frankly, she did not believe in God, in any huge central force that was utterly good; and, that being denied her, she felt sometimes that it would have been something to believe in the devil. But she had never seen any reason to believe in him either. She had never been tempted to be wicked, as those moralists would say who believed in the devil. She was a woman healthy both in mind and body, with countless opportunities for doing good, of which she availed herself nobly, not because she believed in God, but because she was of a most kindly nature; and she was not what is called wicked, because she did not care sufficiently. Morality, perhaps it would be right to say, had no existence for her, and she was absolutely moral in thought and action because she had no real temptation to be otherwise. To her, as a married woman, it seemed also rather bad form to have a lover; it was not dignified. You had to play a mean part. But she realised that if only she had ever really cared for any of those men who certainly had “cared” for her, no moral code would have stood in her way for a moment. Simply she did not want, and she wondered whether the failure to want was strength or weakness.

The Industrial Sale went off with the success that always attended any scheme that she took up, and an hour after she had opened it most of the stalls were nearly empty, though the prices charged and paid for the objects sold were of the most fancy order. She herself had sold stockings, nothing but stockings, and all male London, it appeared, had been in dire want of stockings. They had been frightfully expensive, but the sense of her own cheapness in charging so much was counteracted by the knowledge of the good cause. Irish peasants had made them, and she willingly lent her place and position in order that Irish peasants might reap the benefits of what was adventitiously hers. She was sorry for people who had to live like that; she willingly gave her time, her energy, even her sense of “cheapness,” to help them.

But even before her stall was empty she had seen somebody in the crowd whom, though she had not seen him for so long, she recognised instantaneously. He was neither bald nor stout, nor did he look pompous. He was as she remembered him. And, again, though it had not come any nearer yet, the distant lightning flickered on the horizon.