“Well, nothing like that’s happened to me. I’d broken off my engagement anyway. If it had been Robin, I shouldn’t have minded in the least. It was just—finding the whole thing out. There may be people who believe in it and act up to it, I don’t say there aren’t; but I couldn’t go back even to get my suitcase.”
“Child,” said Mrs. Lambert, “go to bed.”
“I’m not tired now, thank you. I was tired, terribly, I was dead. Therefore,” said Dodo, very logically, “I haven’t any one. Tommy’s no use, nor Uncle Treff, and now—nor is Sonia. I feel worst about Tommy, because I once did such a beastly thing to him. I made him kiss me, in public, to keep up appearances. It was like—like—”
“Like taking away a maid’s character, to provide light conversation.”
“Yes, it was rather. Aunt Adelaide, can’t I do something for you? Won’t you go to bed, and let me sit up?”
Mrs. Lambert smiled.
“Thank you, no. You seem to be a kind child.”
“Oh, no, I’m just a mess,” said Dodo, very earnestly. “I don’t know exactly where it started, but things have been collapsing so. Even Tommy, though he was almost too solid—”
A firm hand descended on her shoulder; still talking, Dodo found herself on her feet, propelled through a door into a queer room full of boxes and miniature scenery, where a truckle-bed had been set up, with blankets and a white pillow, and a flannel nightdress folded round a stone hot-water bottle. Still talking, she found herself undressed; the clean flannel, smelling like nursery bed-time, descended over her head; the blankets tickled round her chin; still in the middle of a sentence, Dodo slept.
Adelaide Lambert went quietly out of the flat and let herself into the foyer. She remembered Alice’s address perfectly, and had no difficulty in finding the phone number; nor, though it was by now long past midnight, had she to wait for an answer.
“Good evening, Alice. This is Adelaide.”
The startled silence lasted only a moment. Alice’s voice said “Freddy! It’s Adelaide!”—and then, very quickly:—
“Yes, what is it?”
“I rang up to say I had Dodo here.”
This time the pause was longer; when Alice spoke again her voice had risen a note, sharpened to suspiciousness.
“Dodo? What’s Dodo doing with you? She said she was going to a friend—”
“There has been a change of plan. I’m speaking from Britannia Mews. Dodo’s in my spare room.”
“Then please fetch her at once!”
“My dear Alice, the child’s asleep.”
“Adelaide, I will not have you shielding her. Tell Dodo to come and speak to her mother immediately! Both her father and I wish to speak to her! Adelaide, will you tell Dodo—”
Mrs. Lambert laid down the receiver for a moment or two, until she judged Alice would have exhausted herself. Then she took it up again and said firmly:—
“Dodo will telephone first thing in the morning. She is perfectly safe here—”
“She’s to come home first thing in the morning!” cried Alice.
“That you must settle between you. I don’t want your daughter, my dear; but I’m not going to bully her. Alice, control yourself.”
“I am controlling myself! No, Freddy, let me speak! Adelaide: Dodo is not to stay with you. She’s to come home at once. You’re not to keep her there, or encourage her to be disobedient—”
“Alice.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“I’m going to ring off. If you ring up again I shall not answer. Dodo appears to be over twenty-one, and I do not consider myself a disreputable influence. Good night.”
CHAPTER IX
1
Dodo rang up Surbiton next morning, but she didn’t go back, because there was too much to do. Gilbert still required his wife’s constant attention—“He’s better,” said Adelaide; “but he likes me to be there.” She smiled as she spoke; but her face, after the night’s vigil, was so white and fine-drawn, and at the same time so clear, that it made Dodo think of a shell worn thin to transparency by sea and sand. “You ought to lie down yourself,” said Dodo anxiously. She was standing just inside the bedroom door; Adelaide sat by Gilbert’s bed, and from his pillow the invalid regarded them both with an expression of great complacency. “I am being coddled,” he announced, in a rather cracked voice. “Tomorrow I shall get up; in the meantime my wife, regardless of her own fatigue, will continue to coddle me. What have you to say to that?” “I think Aunt Adelaide ought to rest,” said Dodo stoutly. “So do I,” said Mr. Lambert. “You make her; I can’t.” “I am resting at this moment,” said his wife, leaning back in her chair and pointedly closing her eyes. Dodo slipped away to clear up the breakfast, leaving each, for the sake of the other’s peace of mind, feigning deep sleep.…
This was about nine. By ten Dodo had gone out to do the shopping, come back, and made Bovril all round. By eleven she was established in the box-office, answering the telephone, running up between calls to report, making marks in blue pencil on a seating-plan, and generally having the time of her life. She had all the natural resilience of her age; but nothing could have been more beneficial to her than this burst of enthralling and necessary activity. When about eleven-thirty Sonia came out of Number 7, Dodo called across to her with scarcely a moment’s hesitation. “Sonia! You might bring over my suitcase. And my hat and bag.” Miss Trent was the startled one. “What the hell are you doing there?” she demanded, dumping those objects in the foyer. “Mrs. Lambert’s my aunt. Didn’t you know?” said Dodo casually; and this did her as much good as anything. With a slight effort she looked her friend in the eye: Sonia’s green glance was as mocking as ever, but in the cold morning light she had a raddled look. “Darling, you are such a little fool!” she said amiably. “Does this mean I’m to be cut off with a shilling?” Dodo nearly said, “No, with twenty pounds,” but a certain schoolboy sense of honour restrained her; and Sonia shrugged and went away laughing.
By comparison, the three-cornered interview with her mother and Mrs. Lambert, was positively agonizing.
Alice arrived, inevitably, about noon, and no sooner did Dodo see the familiar figure appear under the archway than she instinctively pressed the buzzer communicating with the flat above. Mrs. Lambert came out; paused a moment on the balcony; and slowly descended to meet her cousin.
“Well, Alice?” she said pleasantly. “It’s nice to see you again.”
The two women looked at each other; and each saw that the other had grown old. Half a lifetime, indeed, had passed since their last meeting; the gradual work of unshared years confronted them with its sum. Alice brought her little rabbit-teeth down on her lower lip to stop its trembling; if Adelaide had shown the least sign of emotion, she would have thrown herself on her cousin’s neck and wept. But Adelaide stood impassive, erect, her hands clasped lightly before her—just as she used to stand at the Kensington parties, looking superior; and in Alice’s breast an old resentment stirred. She said bluntly:—
“I’ve come to take Dodo home.”
“So I see. Well, she has only to put her hat on.”
Dodo threw her aunt an agonized look, which Alice fortunately failed to notice. She said more graciously:—
“It was good of you to put her up, Adelaide. I’m afraid Dodo’s been very silly.”
“Girls are silly things,” agreed Mrs. Lambert pleasantly. “Don’t you remember?”
Alice did not care for this remark at all. She could remember that her cousin had been silly, in fact quite wickedly so; she herself had not.
“Though I do think,” continued Mrs. Lambert, still in an agreeable, speculative tone, “that this generation takes longer to grow out of it than we did. They are younger for their age. Dodo is …?”
“Twenty-five,” snapped Alice. Though she secretly agreed with every word of the implied criticism, she resented it as coming from Adelaide.
“All the same, she’s been very useful to me this morning. My husband, whom you hav
en’t asked after, is not very well. How’s Freddy?”
“Freddy is always well, thank you.”
“So you see, my dear, I won’t ask you to come up.”
And as though, after almost thirty years, that was all she had to say to her first cousin, to the companion of her youth, Mrs. Lambert turned to the stair. At once Dodo jumped up with a confused and desperate cry.
“Aunt Adelaide, wait! Mother, I’m not coming back with you. I’m not a child! And anyway, who’s to answer the telephone?”
2
Mrs. Lambert halted. Alice said angrily, “Dodo, don’t talk nonsense!” Dodo sat down again and grasped the desk with both hands, as though prepared to resist physical force, and addressed her aunt.
“You said I’d been useful, didn’t you? Aunt Adelaide: may I stay here and help with the Theatre in return for my keep?”
“No, you may not!” cried Alice.
“I’m asking Aunt Adelaide.”
Mrs. Lambert looked from one to the other with a faint smile.
“It depends on your mother,” she said. “Don’t argue, Alice, I’m too tired. I don’t particularly want the child, we employ all the assistance we need; Dodo has been busy this morning simply because I have been busy upstairs. I am not asking for her. Still, she may stay and make herself useful—but not if it’s to involve periodical scenes. Is that quite clear?”
Immediately mother and daughter turned to confront each other; and Mrs. Lambert went quietly up the steps. Her demeanour gave no clue to her thoughts: she was in fact reflecting that at least Alice and Dodo were not about to attack one another with bottles. The Blazer and Iris, before Iris finally gained the upper hand, had once had a great set-to on that very spot.
3
Like the Blazer, Alice was defeated: Dodo stayed. And another pattern oddly repeated itself: Alice, scanning the narrow confines of the Mews, assured herself that her daughter would soon be glad to return to a comfortable home. So had Mrs. Culver thought, thirty-six years earlier. (Perhaps with more justice; but then Adelaide had a stronger stomach than her niece.) Like the Blazer, like Mrs. Culver, like all mothers faced with a stubborn daughter, Dodo’s mother was forced to yield; even to promise discreet behaviour; and went back to Surbiton alone.
Alice always had a great instinct for platitudes. When Freddy returned that evening he found her crying in Dodo’s empty room.
“I’ve lost my daughter,” said Alice, at the end of her sad tale. “I keep telling myself she’ll come back, but in my heart I know she won’t.”
Freddy sat down beside her, on Dodo’s bed, and kindly took her hand.
“Why should you say that, my dear? Dodo’s always been interested in the theatre, it must seem a great opportunity to her to dabble in it a little, until—”
“Until what?” asked poor Alice. “She won’t marry Tommy, she’ll probably never marry any one; my only daughter will be an old maid. It’s as though—as though Adelaide had cast a spell over her! After all these years! You always disliked her, and you were quite right!”
Freddy Baker, sitting there holding his wife’s hand, tried to think back down the years and remember why. Why had he disliked Adelaide? She’d gone off with the drawing-master; caused a great family rumpus; hurt Alice’s feelings. But all that was very long ago.…
“What’s she like?” he asked suddenly.
“Old,” said Alice. “She’s gone quite white—much whiter than I am. I didn’t see Mr. Lambert, he wasn’t well. Dodo said Adelaide had been up all night. She said it was bronchitis.” Alice wiped her eyes. “One thing I must say, Freddy; that marriage has lasted.”
“I remember you were all very down on it at the time.”
“Well, he drank, dear. I wasn’t supposed to know, but Miss Ocock told me he once came absolutely intoxicated to a drawing-lesson.” (“I haven’t thought of her for years!” exclaimed Alice, quite pleased by the recollection.) “I suppose he must have given it up, or he wouldn’t be alive to-day; and Adelaide did reform him.” Alice sighed. “Oh, dear, what a long time it is!”
“We’re all getting on,” agreed Freddy comfortably.
“And how unjust it is! There’s Adelaide, who’s always done exactly as she pleased, with no thought for any one else, and—and now she’s got Dodo too! It makes me feel I haven’t been a good mother to the child, and yet I’m sure I don’t see how I could have done better!”
Freddy put his arm round his wife’s plump shoulder and gave her a gentle, clumsy hug.
“You have always been an excellent mother, and an excellent wife. Only Dodo’s young, and we’re rather elderly—”
“So is Adelaide elderly!”
“And Dodo’s always wanted to live in London, and she sees her opportunity. Let’s have a little peace and quiet, my dear, just the two of us; for what with Dodo and young Hitchcock, and your cousin Treff and your sister Ellen, I’ve found the last few months uncommonly wearing.”
He could have said nothing more apt to distract and animate the current of his wife’s thoughts. Alice sat bolt upright and stared at him.
“Freddy! Don’t you feel well?”
As a matter of fact Freddy Baker’s excellent health was a matter of great pride to him; for the last half-century he had never spent a single day in bed. But he was a very good fellow. Before the evening was out he had allowed Alice to persuade him about two things: that he ought to drink a glass of milk every night, and that he ought to retire at sixty.
4
Among the persons most put out by Dodo’s flight was Aunt Ellen; she had no one to give her house to, and though there was no material reason why she should not have completed her design of moving into a flat, the idea of either letting or selling the Cedars was anathema to her. As she never tired of pointing out, it was the family home. “Good gracious,” exclaimed Alice impatiently, “you’d think we’d lived there for generations!” And this from Alice, usually so loyal in all that concerned the clan, produced a coolness. (Alice couldn’t get it out of her head that but for the house, Dodo might still have married Tommy.) Miss Hambro sought sympathy elsewhere, and found it in Treff, who for some time had been seriously concerned about his future. The friendly assistant at Hatchards informed him that T. Fowler Cox proposed to remain abroad indefinitely, on learning which Treff impulsively cabled asking for his summer underwear; when he opened the trunk and found not only his entire wardrobe, but his books, his few bibelots, and a sketch of a ruin he had actually presented to Mrs. Van Thal, he knew that he had cooked his goose. All was over; the breach complete. At the same time, Freddy and Alice showed a perverse tendency to talk about Florence.…
In these circumstances Treff did the best thing possible: he turned to the nearest unattached woman. Miss Hambro, who began by disliking him, now found him extraordinarily sympathetic. He alone seemed to appreciate her feelings; they were always going round the Cedars together, and as each room, each square yard of carpet almost, produced its appropriate reminiscence or anecdote, Treff’s sympathy grew. He said he could enter into her feelings because he remembered his own on leaving Platt’s End. He admired the Cedars extremely. (“In Florence, of course,” he remarked, surveying the drawing-room, “this would have been called a palazzo.”) The upshot was inevitable; shortly afterwards Miss Hambro informed her sister that she intended to stay on at the Cedars to make a home for Treff.
“But he’s going back to Italy!” exclaimed Alice in surprise.
“No, dear, he isn’t,” said Ellen. “Perhaps he talks more freely to me, dear, than he does to you; but I know for a fact he means to stay in England. Surely you realized that when he sent for his things?”
“There was only one trunk.”
Miss Hambro smiled. Treff had been living under the Baker roof for nearly five months, and Alice knew no more about him than that!
“All his life,” explained Miss Hambro, “Treff has avoided possessions. He’s like Epicurus—all he wants is a piece of bread, and on holidays a little bit of c
heese.”
Alice, who took this remark as a reflection on her housekeeping, said sharply that that was the first she had ever heard of Epicurus, and no doubt the first Ellen had either; but the arrangement was too agreeable to all parties to produce ill-feeling. Treff made the move a day or two later, and was installed in the large bedroom once occupied by the twins. Martha carried up his breakfast each morning without the least complaint, for she liked having a gentleman in the house again; and indeed Treff, by his mere masculine presence, seemed to bring the whole establishment to life, to give point to the eternal polishing of the furniture and the eternal cooking and serving of meals. As for Aunt Ellen, she blossomed. The constant small attentions with which Treff was so effortlessly lavish fell upon her like a gentle rain. She lost her tartness and learned to play bézique. (Martha learned to make ravioli.) Neither Alice nor anyone else knew whether Treff paid his share of expenses, and in fact he did not; but he certainly earned his keep.
Now and again, alone, at night, the image of Mrs. Van Thal still rose to torment him, the image of T. Fowler Cox leered; Treff bore his pangs in silence. He could recognize luck when it came his way. He wasn’t a conceited man; he knew that he had only one real talent, and that was for making women feel comfortable. He was genuinely grateful to Miss Hambro, as he had been genuinely grateful to Mrs. Van Thal—and this time he meant to be more careful. Fortunately Ellen had no desire to buy pictures, and Martha, besides being over fifty, was quite uncommonly plain.
Freddy and Alice were thus left to keep each other company, and if their life was monotonous, it was remarkably comfortable. Monotony, indeed, was their deliberate choice; they could have travelled, abroad or at home, as much as they wished; their means were ample. But Freddy Baker did not like foreign food, and Alice was a bad sailor; even the best English “hydros,” at guineas a day, could not quite supply the comforts of Surbiton; after Freddy took to gardening they never left home at all. His roses were a picture, and so was Alice’s house. They entertained much less, for Alice unfortunately developed a tendency to self-pity which only her husband could cope with; but they were very comfortable.
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