E. F. Benson - PAYING GUESTS

"Would you like me to talk to you then, if you don't feel you'll go to sleep?" she asked.

"Perhaps a little talk might compose me," said he, "if you can spare me ten minutes. I am very tired to-night, and that makes me wakeful. I have had a great deal to do. My thermos flask was unfilled, and I had to ring. There were no rusks in my little tin and I had to get out the big tin and fill it. My clock was not wound."

Florence sat down by his bed. Her chair grated on the margin of boards as she pulled it forward, and he winced.

"You've got everything now, haven't you?" she asked.

"Yes. I saw to everything myself. Talk to me, please. Yes?"

"I won three and ninepence," said Florence. "Colonel Chase lost to everybody."

"I heard him thumping by just now," said her father. "I supposed he had lost, for he banged his door. I was just beginning to get sleepy. A want of consideration, perhaps. Yes?"

At each interrogative 'yes', as Florence knew, a fresh topic of interest had to be furnished.

"Mrs. Oxney won threepence," she said.

"I am glad. Perhaps she will be able to afford me hot water in my bottle to-morrow. It was tepid tonight. I think you have told me enough about your game of bridge. Yes?"

"Miss Howard is playing at an entertainment in the assembly rooms next week."

"I will not go," said Mr. Kemp with some heat. "I do not see why I should be expected to turn out in the evening. Yes?"

Florence felt the swift on-coming of a sneeze. She fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief, and rattled richly among the nine coppers. Several violent explosions followed, and when the spasm subsided, she found her father spraying the air round him with his flask of disinfectant.

"Perhaps it would be wiser if you sat a little further off," he said. "Yes?"

"I don't think anything else has happened," said Florence wheezily. "Oh yes, that new arrival, Mrs. Bliss. I saw you talking to her. How she smiles! I wonder why?"

Mr. Kemp shewed the first sign of withdrawing the blight he had been casting on this commandeered conversation.

"She told me strange things," he said. "I could make little of them, though I must confess they interested me. She said I was perfectly well, and that pain had no real existence. To say that to me of all people appears on the face of it to be the gibbering of a lunatic. Yet as she talked I certainly did begin to feel that there was something behind it. She told me also that she was perfectly well, though I have never seen anybody limp more heavily. I scarcely think that I was as bad as that after my terrible experiences at Aix. I thought she would hardly be able to get upstairs yet she called to me from the landing, though much out of breath, that she had not felt a single twinge. Her theory is that all pain is an illusion or a delusion, I forget which, and if you only deny it, it vanishes. Ever since I came up to bed, which is a long time ago now, I have been denying it and I think--I am not sure, but I think--that I am lying a little more easily to-night than I have done since last Monday. But I must not get too much interested in it at this hour."

Mr. Kemp yawned as he spoke.

"I am beginning to get a little drowsy," he said. "I will not talk any more. Please go out very quietly, and turn off my light from the switch by the door. Don't bang it."

Florence tiptoed away to her room; though it was late, she felt wakeful and exhilarated. She had enjoyed her bridge, but it was not that alone, nor her unusually long remission from her father, nor yet the load of bullion that clinked in her bag which accounted for it. The evening had been adventurous, for Mrs. Holders had fluttered the red flag in the face of that formidable autocrat Colonel Chase: she had called in question the wisdom of his declaration, she had backed her own opinion by doubling, she had invoked the decision of Slam. And no retribution had followed, no thunderbolt had split her: the Colonel had merely paid up all round and gone to bed.

Florence wound up her watch and looked at her plump and rather pleasing image in the glass. Her hair was cropped like a man's, and parted at the side: she wore a stiff linen collar with a small black tie in a bow, and a starched shirt with a sort of Eton jacket; her skirt was about the same length as the jacket. Then crossing her legs in an easy attitude she sat down on her bed, and thought carefully over what had been happening this evening. It was an application of Mrs. Holders's defiance, rather than the defiance itself that claimed her attention. For Wentworth in general dumbly travailed under the domination of the Colonel, and if three hours ago she had been asked what she supposed would happen if anyone questioned his rulings and his bawlings and his tuition, her imagination would have failed to picture so impossible a contingency. Yet the impossible had now occurred and nothing had happened. The application was obvious, and she found herself wondering what would happen if she questioned her father's right to immolate her day and night on the altar of his aches. Daring though such a supposition was, would nothing particular happen?

Florence let the hypochondriac history of the last seven years, from the time when her father had seriously taken up the profession of invalidism instead of having no profession at all, spread itself panoramically out in front of her. Her mother was alive then, and for those first two years of this lean series, the three of them had trodden the uneasy circle of hydropathic establishments. Buxton, Bath, Harrogate, and Bolton (but never Aix again) had grown to be the cardinal points of the year, and these were followed by Torquay, Cromer, Scarborough and Bournemouth for the after-cure of bracing air or sunny climate. At first they had returned to the pleasant little flat in Kensington Square after the quarterly cure to wait for the next cardinal point to come round, but her father who was in his element in boarding houses with all their good opportunities of telling relays of strangers about his ailments, soon discovered that London did not suit him, for it was airless in the summer, treacherous in the autumn and spring and foggy in the winter, and now he and Florence remained at Torquay, Cromer, Scarborough and Bournemouth till the next cure. After two years of this preposterous existence, her mother, who had always been frail and anæmic, simply came to the end of her vitality, and exhausted by her husband's vampirism had stopped living. She had been possessed of a considerable fortune, half of which, with the flat in Kensington Square, she had left to Florence absolutely, the remainder to her husband for life. This appeared to him the most ungrateful return for all the care he had allowed her to take of him, and until his own health had completely driven all other interests from his mind he had sedulously nursed this grievance. Since then, for five years, Florence had been his enslaved companion.

She knew well that her interminable ministries to him were not performed out of the bounty of love, but from her own acquiescence in being crushed, and now it struck her that she thoroughly disliked him. Though she had not definitely stated that to herself before, the emotion must have been habitual, for its discovery did not in the least shock her nor did it shock her to conjecture that he equally disliked her. Probably all these years, he would have been happier with a trained nurse, who was paid for being bullied and bored, and she herself could have lived instead of merely getting older. She might even have married, for women did not become certified spinsters at the age of thirty, as she was when her solitary gyrations with him began, but the idea of marriage had hitherto seemed very embarrassing to her virginal soul. No man alive could justly claim to have raised the beat of her placid blood by a single pulsation; she had no spark of envy for any woman however happily married, compared with one who had her liberty. Miss Howard for instance seemed to her to live an almost ideal existence: she went where she liked, and nobody could claim her time or her energies, she tripped and sang about the passages, so sunlit to her was the normal hour: she devoted herself to her painting and her piano, the pursuits she adored, and had no bond-slave duties to anybody. Happy Miss Howard, gifted and accomplished and free! And how handsome she was: what a charm and vivacity! Though Florence had never experienced any sort of tenderness for a man, she sometimes thought of Miss Howard with a sort of shy, sentimental yearning.