Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Featherstone was impenetrable. He lounged back, if so small a thing can be said to lounge, and sat down again by Miss Grantham.

  “Fascinatin’ woman your mother is,” he said. “Arfly clever, isn’t she? What? Knows French and that sort of thing. I can always get along all right in France. If you only swear at the waiters they understand what you want all right, you know.”

  Two or three other fresh arrivals made it possible for another set to be started, and Mr. Featherstone was induced to play, in spite of his protestations that he had quite given up tennis for polo. Lady Grantham finished her Loti, and moved back to the tea-table, where Edith was sitting, fanning herself with a cabbage leaf, and receiving homage on the score of her tennis-playing. Lady Grantham did not offer to give anybody any tea; she supposed they would take it when they wanted it, but she wished someone would give her a cup.

  “What’s the name of the little man and his moustache?” she asked Edith, indicating Mr. Featherstone, who was performing wild antics in the next court.

  Edith informed her.

  “How did he get here?” demanded Lady Grantham.

  “Oh, he’s a friend of mine. I think he came to see me,” replied Edith. “He lives somewhere about. I suppose you find him rather trying. It doesn’t matter; he’s of no consequence.”

  “My dear Edith, between your sporting curate, and your German conductor, and your Roman Catholic cure, and this man, one’s life isn’t safe.”

  “You won’t see the good side of those sort of people,” said Edith. “If they’ve got rather overwhelming manners, and aren’t as silent and bored as you think young men ought to be, you think they’re utter outsiders.”

  “I only want to know if there are any more of that sort going to turn up. Think of the positions you put me in! When I went into the drawing-room yesterday, for instance, before lunch, I find a Roman Catholic priest there, who puts up two fingers at me, and says ‘Benedicite.’”

  Edith lay back in her chair and laughed.

  “How I should like to have seen you! Did you think he was saying grace, or did you tell him not to be insolent?”

  “I behaved with admirable moderation,” said Lady Grantham. “I even prepared to be nice to him. But he had sudden misgivings, and said, ‘I beg your pardon, I thought you were Miss Staines.’ I saw I was not wanted, and retreated. That is not all. Bob told me that I had to take a curate in to dinner last night, and asked me not to frighten him. I suppose he thought I wanted to say ‘Bo,’ or howl at him. The curate tried me. I sat down when we got to the table, and he turned to me and said, ‘I beg your pardon’ — they all beg my pardon— ‘but I’m going to say grace.’ Then I prepared myself to talk night schools and district visiting; but he turned on me, and asked what I thought of Orme’s chances for the St. Leger.”

  “Oh, dear! oh, dear!” cried Edith; “he told me afterwards that you seemed a very serious lady.”

  “I didn’t intend to encourage that,” continued Lady Grantham; “so I held on to district visiting. We shook our heads together over dissent in Wales. We split over Calvinism — who was Calvin? We renounced society; and I was going to work him a pair of slippers. We were very edifying. Then he sang comic songs in the drawing-room, and discussed the methods of cheating at baccarat. I was a dead failure.”

  “Anyhow, you’re a serious lady,” said Edith.

  “That young man will come to a bad end,” said Lady Grantham; “so will your German conductor. He ordered beer in the middle of the morning, to-day — the second footman will certainly give notice — and he smoked a little clay pipe after dinner in the dining-room. Then this afternoon comes this other friend of yours. He says, ‘Arfly rippin’ what.’”

  “He said you were arfly fascinatin’ what,” interpolated Miss Grantham, “when you went away to read your book. You were very rude to him.”

  Sir Robert Grantham had joined the party. He was a great hand at adapting his conversation to his audience, and making everyone conscious that they ought to feel quite at home. He recounted at some length a series of tennis matches which he had taken part in a few years ago. A strained elbow had spoiled his chances of winning, but the games were most exciting, and it was generally agreed at the time that the form of the players was quite first-class. He talked about Wagner and counterpoint to Edith. He asked his vicar abstruse questions on the evidence of the immortality of the soul after death; he discussed agriculture and farming with tenants, to whom he always said “thank ye,” instead of “thank you,” in order that they might feel quite at their ease; he lamented the want of physique in the English army to Mr. Featherstone, who was very short, and declared that the average height of Englishmen was only five feet four. As he said this he drew himself up, and made it quite obvious that he himself was six feet high, and broad in proportion.

  A few more cups of tea were drunk, and a few more sets played, and the party dispersed. Edith was the only guest in the house, and she and Frank, the Oxford son, stopped behind to play a game or two more before dinner. Lady Grantham and Nora strolled up through the garden towards the house, while Sir Robert remained on the ground, and mingled advice, criticism, and approbation to the tennis players; Frank’s back-handed stroke, he thought, was not as good as it might be, and Edith could, certainly put half fifteen on to her game if judiciously coached. Neither of the players volleyed as well as himself, but volleying was his strong point, and they must not be discouraged. Frank’s attitude to his father was that of undisguised amusement; but he found him very entertaining.

  They were all rather late for dinner, and Lady Grantham was waiting for them in the drawing-room. Frank and his father were down before Edith, and Lady Grantham was making remarks on their personal appearance.

  “You look very, hot and red,” she was saying to her son, “and I really wish you would brush your hair better. I don’t know what young men are coming to, they seem to think that everything is to be kept waiting for them.”

  Frank’s attitude was one of serene indifference.

  “Go on, go on,” he said; “I don’t mind.”

  Edith was five minutes later. Lady Grantham remarked on the importance of being in time for dinner, and hoped they wouldn’t all die from going to bed too soon afterwards. Frank apologised for his mother.

  “Don’t mind her, Miss Staines,” he said, “they’re only her foreign manners. She doesn’t know how to behave. It’s all right. I’m going to take you in, mother. Are we going to have grouse?”

  That evening Miss Grantham and Edith “talked Dodo,” as the latter called it, till the small hours.

  She produced Dodo’s letter, and read extracts.

  “Of course, we sha’n’t be married till after next November,” wrote Dodo. “Jack wouldn’t hear of it, and it would seem very unfeeling. Don’t you think so? It will be odd going back to Winston again. Mind you come and stay with us at Easter.”

  “I wonder if Dodo ever thinks with regret of anything or anybody,” said Edith. “Imagine writing like that — asking me if I shouldn’t think it unfeeling.”

  “Oh, but she says she would think it unfeeling,” said Miss Grantham. “That’s so sweet and remembering of her.”

  “But don’t you see,” said Edith, “she evidently thinks it is so good of her to have feelings about it at all. She might as well call attention to the fact that she always puts her shoes and stockings on to go to church.”

  “There’s a lot of women who would marry again before a year was out if it wasn’t for convention,” said Miss Grantham.

  “That’s probably the case with Dodo,” remarked Edith. “Dodo doesn’t care one pin for the memory of that man. She knows it, and she knows I know it. Why does she say that sort of thing to me? He was a good man, too, and I’m not sure that he wasn’t great. Chesterford detested me, but I recognised him.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he was great,” said Miss Grantham. “Didn’t he always strike you as a little stupid?”

  “I prefer stupid peopl
e,” declared Edith roundly. “They are so restful. They’re like nice; sweet, white bread; they quench your hunger as well as pâté de foie gras, and they are much better for you.”

  “I think they make you just a little thirsty,” remarked Miss Grantham. “I should have said they were more like cracknels. Besides, do you think that it’s an advantage to associate with people who are good for you? It produces a sort of rabies in me. I want to bite them.”

  “You like making yourself out worse than you are, Grantie,” said Edith.

  “I think you like making Dodo out worse than she is,” returned Nora. “I always used to think you were very fond of her.”

  “I am fond of her,” said Edith; “that’s why I’m dissatisfied with her.”

  “What a curious way of showing your affection,” said Miss Grantham. “I love Dodo, and if I was a man I should like to many her.”

  “Dodo is too dramatic,” said Edith. “She never gets off the stage; and sometimes she plays to the gallery, and then the stalls say, ‘How cheap she’s making herself.’ She has the elements of a low comedian about her.”

  “And the airs of a tragedy queen, I suppose,” added Miss Grantham.

  “Exactly,” said Edith; “and the consequence is that she as a burlesque sometimes: She is her own parody.”

  “Darling Dodo,” said Grantie with feeling. “I do want to see her again.”

  “All her conduct after his death,” continued Edith, “that was the tragedy queen; she shut herself up in that great house, quite alone, for two months, and went to church with a large prayer-book every morning, at eight. But it was burlesque all the same. Dodo isn’t sorry like that. The gallery yelled with applause.”

  “I thought it was so sweet of her,” murmured Grantie. “I suppose I’m gallery too.”

  “Then she went abroad,” continued Edith, “and sat down and wept by the waters of Aix. But she soon took down her harp. She gave banjo parties on the lake, and sang coster songs.”

  “Mrs. Vane told me she recovered her spirits wonderfully at Aix,” remarked Miss Grantham.

  “And played baccarat, and recovered other people’s money,” pursued Edith. “If she’d taken the first train for Aix after the funeral, I should have respected her.”

  “Oh, that would have been horrid,” said Miss Grantham; “besides, it wouldn’t have been the season.”

  “That’s true,” said Edith. “Dodo probably remembered that.”

  “Oh, you sha’n’t abuse Dodo any more,” said Miss Grantham. “I think it’s perfectly horrid of you. Go and play me something.”

  Perhaps the thought of Chesterford was in Edith’s mind as she sat down to the piano, for she played a piece of Mozart’s “Requiem,” which is the saddest music in the world.

  Miss Grantham shivered a little. The long wailing notes, struck some chord, within her, which disturbed her peace of mind.

  “What a dismal thing,” she said, when Edith had finished. “You make me feel like Sunday evening after a country church.”

  Edith stood looking out of the window. The moon was up, and the great stars were wheeling in their courses through the infinite vault. A nightingale was singing loud in the trees, and the little mysterious noises of night stole about among the bushes. As Edith thought of Chesterford she remembered how the Greeks mistook the passionate song of the bird for the lament of the dead, and it did not seem strange to her. For love, sometimes goes hand-in-hand with death.

  She turned back into the room again.

  “God forgive her,” she said, “if we cannot.”

  “I’m not going to bed with that requiem in my ears,” said Miss Grantham. “I should dream of hearses.”

  Edith went to the piano, and broke into a quick, rippling movement.

  Miss Grantham listened, and felt she ought to know what it was.

  “What is it?” she said, when Edith had finished.

  “It is the scherzo from the ‘Dodo Symphony,’” she said. “I composed it two years ago at Winston.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

  Dodo had written to Edith from Zermatt, where she was enjoying herself amazingly. Mrs. Vane was there, and Mr. and Mrs. Algernon Spencer, and Prince Waldenech and Jack. As there would have been some natural confusion in the hotel if Dodo had called herself Lady Chesterford, when Lord Chesterford was also there, she settled to be called Miss Vane. This tickled Prince Waldenech enormously; it seemed to him a capital joke.

  Dodo was sitting in the verandah of the hotel one afternoon, drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes. Half the hotel were scandalised at her, and usually referred to her as “that Miss Vane”; the other half adored her, and went [on] expeditions with her, and took minor parts in her theatricals, and generally played universal second fiddle.

  Dodo enjoyed this sort of life. There was in her an undeveloped germ of simplicity, that found pleasure in watching the slow-footed, cows driven home from the pastures, in sitting with Jack — regardless of her assumed name — in the crocus-studded meadows, or by the side of the swirling glacier-fed stream that makes the valley melodious. She argued, with great reason, that she had already shocked all the people that were going to be shocked, so much that it didn’t matter what she did; while the other contingent, who were not going to be shocked, were not going to be shocked. “Everyone must either be shocked or not shocked,” she said, “and they’re that already. That’s why Prince Waldenech and I are going for a moonlight walk next week when the moon comes back.”

  Dodo had made great friends with the Prince’s half-sister, a Russian on her mother’s side, and she was reading her extracts out of her unwritten book of the Philosophy of Life, an interesting work, which varied considerably according to Dodo’s mood. Just now it suited Dodo to be in love with life.

  “You are a Russian by nature and sympathy, my dear Princess,” she was saying, “and you are therefore in a continual state of complete boredom. You think you are bored here, because it is not Paris; in Paris you are quite as much bored with all your fêtes, and dances, and parties as you are here. I tell you frankly you are wrong. Why don’t you come and sit in the grass, and look at the crocuses, and throw stones into the stream like me.”

  The Princess stretched out a delicate arm.

  “I don’t think I ever threw a stone in my life,” she said dubiously. “Would it amuse me, do you think?”

  “Not at first,” said Dodo; “and you will never be amused at all if you think about it.”

  “What am I to think about then?” she asked.

  “You must think about the stone,” said Dodo decisively, “you must think about the crocuses, you must think about the cows.”

  “It’s all so new to me,” remarked the Princess. “We never think about cows in Russia.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying,” said Dodo. “You must get out of yourself. Anything, does to think about, and nobody is bored unless they think about being bored. When one has the whole world to choose from, and only one subject in it that can make one feel bored, it really shows a want of resource to think about that. Then you ought to take walks and make yourself tired.”

  The Princess cast a vague eye on the Matterhorn.

  “That sort of horror?” she asked.

  “No, you needn’t begin with the Matterhorn,” said Dodo, laughing. “Go to the glaciers, and get rather cold and wet. Boredom is chiefly physical.”

  “I’m sure being cold and wet would bore me frightfully,” she said.

  “No, no — a big no,” cried Dodo. “No one is ever bored unless they are comfortable. That’s the great principle. There isn’t time for it. You cannot be bored and something else at the same time. Being comfortable doesn’t count; that’s our normal condition. But you needn’t be uncomfortable in order to be bored. It’s very comfortable sitting here with you, and I’m not the least bored. I should poison myself if I were bored: I can’t think why you don’t.”

  “I will do anything you recommend,” said the Princess placidly. �
�You are the only woman I know who never appears to be bored. I wonder if my husband would bore you. He is very big, and very good, and he eats a large breakfast, and looks after his serfs. He bores me to extinction. He would wear black for ten years if I poisoned myself.”

  A shade of something passed over Dodo’s face. It might have been regret, or stifled remembrance, or a sudden twinge of pain, and it lasted an appreciable fraction of a second.

  “I can imagine being bored with that kind of man,” she said in a moment.

  The Princess was lying back in her chair,’ and did not notice a curious hardness in Dodo’s voice.

  “I should so-like to introduce you to him,” said she. “I should like to shut you up with him for a month at our place on the Volga. It snows a good deal there, and he goes out in the snow and shoots animals, and comes back in the evening with a red face, and tells me all about it. It is very entertaining, but a trifle monotonous. He does not know English, nor German, nor French. He laughs very loud. He is devoted to me. Do go and stay with him. I think I’ll join you when you’ve been there three weeks. He is quite safe. I shall not be afraid. He writes to me every day, and suggests that he should join me here.”

  Dodo shifted her position and looked up at the Matterhorn.

  “Yes,” she said. “I should certainly be bored with him, but I’m not sure that I would show it.”

  “He wouldn’t like you at all,” continued the Princess. “He would think you loud. That is so odd. He thinks it unfeminine to smoke. He has great ideas about the position of women. He gave me a book of private devotions bound in the parchment from a bear he had shot on my last birthday.”

  Dodo laughed.

  “I’m sure you need not be bored with him,” she said. “He must have a strong vein of unconscious humour about him.”

  “I’m quite unconscious of it,” said the Princess. “You cannot form the slightest idea of what he’s like till you see him. I almost feel inclined to tell him to come here.”

  “Ah, but you Russian women have such liberty,” said Dodo. “You can tell your husband not to expect to see you again for three months. We can’t do that. An English husband and wife are like two Siamese twins. Until about ten years ago they used to enter the drawing-room, when they were going out to dinner, arm-in-arm.”