The Osbornes

by E. F. Benson

Dora ordered the motor, and set off on her drive to Richmond at once. The day was exceedingly hot, and the reverberation of the sun from the grilling pavements struck like a blow when she went out. A languid, airless wind raised stinging grit from the wood pavements, and the reek of the streets hung heavy in the air. She longed with an aching sense of physical want for the soft, dustless atmosphere of Venice, the cluck and ripple of its green waterways, and with no less an ache and thirst of the spirit for all that those things had once symbolized to her. Yet this last visit had not been the rapturous success of the one before. Venice was there unchanged, with the gold mist of romance that Claude had woven for her about it, but he, the magical weaver, or she, the woman for whom it had been woven, had altered somehow, and perhaps even in the enchanted city a certain vague but growing trouble that was in her mind would not be completely dissipated. In general outline she knew what it was, but hitherto she had not focussed her vision on it. But now she felt that it had better be examined, for it cried out to her from the darkness of her mind where she had been at pains to hide it. Perhaps on examination it might prove to be imagination only, to have no real existence except in her own mind. And the trouble was Claude.

It seemed to her ages ago, though in point of fact it was still scarcely twelve months, that she had told May Franklin that sometimes he said things that gave her a check. But it seemed almost longer ago, though it was only a few weeks, that she had sat alone one afternoon, when Claude was at Milan meeting his father and mother, and registered the fact that he again gave her checks. Between those two occasions lay romance, a golden dream, an experience which, common though it may be in this world of men and women, was none the less marvellous, miraculous. He, his love for her, and her love for him, had lifted life out of the levels on which it had hitherto moved, had made of it a winged and iridescent thing, which had soared many-coloured into sunlight and moonlight. And that marvel, the enchantment of it, had seemed to her then to be a thing indestructible and eternal. While she was she, and while Claude was Claude, it could never change, nor shed one feather from its rainbow wings. Often had she whispered to him, or he to her: “It will be like this for ever”; more often had the tense silence testified with greater authority than any voice, even his. In those months whatever her senses perceived was glorified: she looked at the world through the radiance of love.

That conviction that their romance would last for ever was part of the divine madness of love: she saw that now clearly enough. She who had believed that they, and they alone, were different from all others, had not been truly sane when she believed it: she had been living in a world, real no doubt while it existed, yet not only capable of being extinguished but doomed to extinction. Once, before their marriage, she had talked to Claude about what she called “the gray-business” of life, and he, she remembered, had given the gray-business a “facer,” to use his words, by pointing to the example of his father and mother. That had seemed to Dora, already ripening for romance, to fall very short of the reply she wanted. She had wanted lover’s nonsense which would assure her that for them romance could never fade. But it had faded: it always faded. The question now was concerned with what was left. Did even the consolation of Claude’s “facer” remain to her? Had she, to put her part of it baldly and brutally, got as great an admiration, respect, and affection for her husband as Mrs. Osborne had for hers? She knew she had not.

To-day she could look undazzled at the materials out of which her romance had been constructed and analyse them. It was made of her passion for beauty. She had fallen in love with his good looks. And she was getting used to them: she had got used to them. What else was there? What was left to learn, now she had that by heart?

There was a great deal left. So she told herself, but without emotion. There was his character left, which was sterling; his qualities, which were excellent; his kindness, his safeness, his—to go to purely material things—his wealth. And his vulgarity.

The word was coined: her thought for the first time definitely allowed it to pass into currency, and she had to reckon with it.

What a topsy-turvy affair it had been! How strikingly different a disposition from that which she had contemplated had come about! She had told herself that she must for ever be in love with that beautiful face, that slim, active body, those deft, decided movements; and she had told herself that his vulgarities were things of no moment, things to which she would swiftly get used. But events had been evolved otherwise. She was used to his beauty; his vulgarities were cumulative in their effect on her; instead of getting used to them she was daily more irritated by them and—more ashamed of them. She had imagined even that it would be easy to cure them, to eradicate them. But it proved to be a task like that of emptying a spring with a teacup. She had thought that they lay, so to speak, like casual water on the surface of the ground, a mere puddle that the sun would swiftly drink up. It was not so; they sprang from his nature, and came welling up bubbling and plenteous and inexhaustible.

And there was something about them, so it seemed to her now, that tinged and made unpalatable all the good qualities in which he was so rich. You could draw a gallon of pure fresh kindness from that well-spring which was inexhaustible, but even before you had time to put your lips to it, and drink of it, some drop—quite a little drop—would trickle in from the source of his vulgarity and taint it all. It was even worse than that; there was a permanent leak from the one into the other, the kindness was tainted at the source.

Dora did not indulge in these reflections from any spirit of idle criticism or morbid dissection. She wanted to see how they stood, how bad things were, and what chance there was of their righting themselves. They were no longer mere surface vulgarities in him (or so she believed) that got on her nerves: she no longer particularly minded whether he said “handsome lady” or not; what she did mind was the impulse that prompted him, for instance, to suggest that she might go down and see Uncle Alf because he gave them “fifteen thou.” a year. She minded his saying he had guessed the reason why she did not want to establish herself in Park Lane; namely, because she wanted to be alone with him. She minded the suggestion that she had written to say the flat was stuffy, in order to be asked there. It was all common, common; he judged her by impossible standards, standards that were inconceivable. And yet all the time he was good, he was kind, he had all the qualities that should make her love him, make her devotion an imperishable thing. As it was, they had been married scarcely six months, and already she knew that at times he so got on to her nerves that she could have screamed. Already, as she began to look closely at these things, she felt she was glad they were going to Park Lane; she was glad that limitations were placed on her being alone with him.

It was a little cooler out of town, and Richmond Park was in the full luxuriance of its summer beauty. They had entered by the Roehampton Gate; she had still half an hour to spare before the time she had said she would be at Uncle Alfred’s, and she directed her driver to turn up to the left, past the White Lodge, and go round by Robin Hood Gate and Kingston Gate. A delicious smell of greenness and coolness came from the noble groves of trees, beneath the clear shade of which, knee-deep in the varnished green of the young bracken, stood herds of fallow deer with twitching ears and switching tails, warding off the persistence of the flies. All the sweet forest sights and sounds were there: the air was full of the buzz of insects, and hidden birds called to each other from among the branches. Distantly on the right she could see gleams of water, where the Pen Ponds lay basking in the sunlight, and the flush of mauve and red from the great rhododendron thickets above them. All the triumph of summer time was there; all the joy of the ripeness and maturity of the year, of the kindled and immortal vitality of the world. But for herself, though every day brought nearer to her the miracle of motherhood, it seemed as if summer had stopped.