Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Miss Grantham was conscious of the same sort of feeling. Since the others had gone in, Dodo had sat quite silent, and she had not taken her cigarette.

  “You had a nice time then, abroad?” she remarked at length.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dodo, rousing herself. “I enjoyed it a good deal. The hotel was full of the hotel class, you know. A little trying at times, but not to matter. We had a charming party there. Algernon is getting quite worldly. However, he is ridiculously fond of Maud, and she’ll keep him straight. Do you know the Prince?”

  “Hardly at all,” said Miss Grantham.

  “What do you think of him, as far as you’ve seen?” asked Dodo.

  “I think he is rather impressive,” said Miss Grantham. “I felt I should do as he told me.”

  “Ah, you think that, do you?” asked Dodo, with the most careful carelessness. “He struck me that way, too, a little.”

  “I should think he was an instance of what Edith meant when she said that to be intimate with anyone was to be under their influence.”

  “Edith’s awfully wrong, I think, about the whole idea,” said Dodo, hastily. “I should hate to be under anyone’s influence; yet, I think, the only pleasure of knowing people is to be intimate. I would sooner have one real friend than fifty acquaintances.”

  “Did you see much of him?” asked Miss Grantham.

  “Yes, a good deal,” she said, “a great deal, in fact. I think Edith’s right about intimacy as regards him, though he’s an exception. In general, I think, she’s wrong. What’s that she’s playing?”

  “Anyhow, it’s Wagner,” said Miss Grantham.

  “I know it,” said Dodo. “It’s the ‘Tannhauser’ overture. Listen, there’s the Venus motif crossing the Pilgrim’s march. Ah, that’s simply wicked. The worst of it is, the Venus part is so much more attractive than the other. It’s horrible.”

  “You’re dreadfully serious to-night, Dodo,” said Miss Grantham.

  “I’m a little tired, I think,” she said. “I was travelling all last night, you know. Come, let’s go in.”

  Dodo went to bed soon afterwards. She said she was tired, and a little overdone. Edith looked at her rather closely as she said good-night.

  “You’re sure it’s nothing more?” she asked. “There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?”

  “I shall be all right in the morning,” said Dodo, rather wearily. “Don’t let them call me till nine.”

  Dodo went upstairs and found that her maid had unpacked for her. A heap of books was lying on the table, and from among these she drew out a large envelope with a photograph inside. It was signed “Waldenech.”

  Dodo looked at it a moment, then placed it back in its envelope, and went to the window. She felt the necessity of air. The room seemed close and hot, and she threw it wide open.

  She stood there for ten minutes or more quite still, looking out into the night. Then she went back to the table and took up the envelope again. With a sudden passionate gesture she tore it in half, then across again, and threw the pieces into the grate.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN.

  Dodo slept long and dreamlessly that night; the deep, dreamless sleep which an evenly-balanced fatigue of body and mind so often produces, though we get into bed feeling that our brain is too deep in some tangle of unsolved thought to be able to extricate itself, and fall into the dim immensity of sleep. The waking from such a sleep is not so pleasant. The first moment of conscious thought sometimes throws the whole burden again on to our brain with a sudden start of pain that is almost physical. There is no transition. We were asleep and we are awake, and we find that sleep has brought us only a doubtful gift, for with our renewed strength of body has come the capability of keener suffering. When we are tired, mental distress is only a dull ache, but in the hard, convincing morning it strikes a deadlier and deeper pain. But sometimes Nature is more merciful. She opens the sluices of our brain quietly, and, though the water still rushes in turbidly and roughly, yet the fact that our brain fills by degrees makes us more able to bear the full weight, than when it comes suddenly with a wrenching and, perhaps, a rending of our mental machinery.

  It was in this way that Dodo woke. The trouble of the day came to her gradually during the moments of waking. She dreamed she was waiting for Jack in the garden where she had been sitting the night before. It was perfectly dark, and she could not see him coming, but she heard a step along the gravel path, and started up with a vague alarm, for it did not sound like his. Then a greyness, as of dawn, began to steal over the night, and she saw the outline of the trees against the sky, and the outline of a man’s figure near her, and it was a figure she knew well, but it was not Jack. On this dream the sense of waking was pure relief; it was broad day, and her maid was standing by her and saying that it was a quarter past nine.

  Dodo lay still a few moments longer, feeling a vague joy that her dream was not true, that the helplessness of that grey moment, when she saw that it was not Jack, was passed, that she was awake again, and unfettered, save by thoughts which could be consciously checked and stifled. It was with a vast sense of satisfaction that she remembered her last act on the evening before, of which the scattered fragments in the grate afforded ocular proof. She felt as if she had broken a visible, tangible fetter — one strand, at any rate, of the cord that hound her was lying broken before her eyes. If she had been quite securely tied she could not have done that.. —

  The sense of successful effort, with a visible result, gave her a sudden feeling of power to do more; the absence of bodily fatigue, and the presence of superfluous physical health, all seemed part of a different order of things to that of the night before. She got up and dressed quickly, feeling more like her own self than she had done for several days. The destruction of his photograph was really a great achievement. She had no idea how far things had gone till she felt the full effect of conscious effort and its result. She could see now exactly where she had stood on the evening before, very unpleasantly close to the edge of a nasty place, slippery and steep. Anyhow, she was one step nearer that pleasant, green-looking spot at the top of the slope — a quiet, pretty place, not particularly extensive, but very pleasing, and very safe.

  The three others were half-way through breakfast when Dodo came down. Lady Grantham was feeling a little bored. Dodo flung open the door and came marching in, whistling “See the Conquering Hero comes.”

  “That’s by Handel, you know, Edith,” she said. “Handel is very healthy, and he never bothers you with abstruse questions in the scandalous way that Wagner does. I’m going to have a barrel-organ made with twelve tunes by Handel, you only have to turn the handle and out he comes. I don’t mean that for a pun. Your blood be on your own head if you notice it. I shall have my barrel-organ put on the box of my victoria, and the footman shall play tunes all the time I’m driving, and I shall hold out my hat and ask for pennies. Some of Jack’s tenants in Ireland have refused to pay their rents this year, and he says we’ll have to cut off coffee after dinner if it goes on. But we shall be able to have coffee after all with the pennies I collect. I talked so much sense last night that I don’t mean to make another coherent remark this week.”

  Dodo went to the sideboard and cut a large slice of ham, which she carried back to her place on the end of her fork.

  “I’m going for a ride this morning, Edith, if you’ve got a horse for me,” she said. “I haven’t ridden for weeks. I suppose you can give me something with four legs. Oh, I want to take a big fence again.”

  Dodo waved her fork triumphantly, and the slice of ham flew into the milk-jug. She became suddenly serious, and fished for it with the empty fork.

  “The deep waters have drowned it,” she remarked, “and it will be totally uneatable for evermore. Make it into ham-sandwiches and send it to the workhouse, Edith. Jambon au lait. I’m sure it would be very supporting.”

  “It’s unlucky to spill things, isn’t it?” Dodo went on. “I suppose it means I shall die, and shall go,
we hope, to heaven, at the age of twenty-seven. I’m twenty-nine really. I don’t look it, do I, Lady Grantham? How old are you, Edith? You’re twenty-nine too, aren’t you? We’re two twin dewdrops, you and I; you can be the dewdrops, and I’ll be the twin. I suppose if two babies are twins, each of them is a twin. Twin sounds like a sort of calico. Two yards of twin, please, miss. There was a horrid fat man in the carriage across France, who called me miss. Jack behaved abominably. He called me miss, too, and wore the broadest grin on his silly face all the time. He really is a perfect baby, and I’m another, and how we shall keep house together I can’t think. It’ll be like a sort of game.”

  Dodo was eating her breakfast with an immense appetite and alarming rapidity, and she had finished as soon as the others.

  “I want to smoke this instant minute,” she said, going to the door as soon as she had eaten all she wanted. “Where do you keep your cigarettes, Edith? Oh, how you startled me!”

  As she opened the door two large collies came bouncing in, panting from sheer excitement.

  “Oh, you sweet animals,” said Dodo, sitting down on the floor and going off at another tangent. “Come here and talk at once. Edith, may I give them the milky ham? Here you are; drink the milk first, and then eat the ham, and then say grace, and then you may get down.”

  Dodo poured the milk into two clean saucers, and set them on the floor. There were a few drops left at the bottom of the jug, and she made a neat little pool on the head of each of the dogs.

  “What are their names?” she asked. “They ought to be Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or Huz and Buz, or Ananias and Sapphira, or Darby and Joan, or Harris and Ainsworth. It ought to be Harris and Ainsworth. I’m sure, no one man could have written all that rot himself. Little Spencer is very fond of Harrison Ainsworth; he said it was instructive as well as palatable. I don’t want to be instructed, and it isn’t palatable. I hate having little bits of information wrapped up and given to me to swallow, like a powder in jam. Did you have to take powders when you were little, Lady Grantham?”

  Dodo’s questions were purely rhetorical; they required no answer, and she did not expect one.

  “It is much nicer being completely ignorant and foolish like me,” she said. “Nobody ever expects me to know anything, or to be instructive on any subject under the sun. Jack and I are going to be a simple little couple, who are very nice and not at all wise. Nobody dislikes one if one never pretends to be wise. But I like people to have a large number of theories on every subject. Everyone is bound to form conclusions, but what I dislike are people who have got good grounds for their conclusions, who knock you slap down with statistics, if you try to argue with them. It’s impossible to argue with anyone who has reasons for what he says, because you get to know sooner or later, and then the argument is over. Arguments ought to be like Epic poems, they leave off, they don’t come to an end.”

  Dodo delivered herself of these surprising statements with great rapidity, and left the room to get her cigarettes. She left the door wide open, and in a minute or two her voice was heard from the drawing-room, screaming to Edith.

  “Edith, here’s the ‘Dodo Symphony’; come and play it to me this moment.”

  “There’s not much wrong with her this morning,” thought Edith, as she went to the drawing-room, where Dodo was playing snatches of dance music.

  “Play the scherzo, Edith,” commanded Dodo. “Here you are. Now, quicker, quicker, rattle it out; make it buzz.”

  “Oh, I remember your playing that so well,” said Dodo, as Edith finished. “It was that morning at Winston when you insisted on going shooting. You shot rather well, too, if I remember right.”

  Lady Grantham had followed Edith, and sat down, with her atmosphere of impenetrable leisure, near the piano.

  Dodo made her feel uncomfortably old. She felt Dodo’s extravagantly high spirits were a sort of milestone to show, how far she herself had travelled from youth. It was impossible to conceive of Dodo ever getting middle-aged or elderly. She had racked her brains in vain to try to think of any woman of her own age who could possibly ever have been as insolently young as Dodo. She had the habit, as I have mentioned before, of making strangely direct remarks, and she turned to Dodo and said: —

  “I should so like to see you ten years hence. I wonder if people like you ever grow old.”

  “I shall never grow old,” declared Dodo confidently. “Something, I feel sure, will happen to prevent that. I shall stop young till I go out like a candle, or am carried off in a whirlwind or something. I couldn’t be old; it isn’t in me. I shall go on talking nonsense till the end of my life, and I can’t talk nonsense if I have to sit by the fire and keep a shawl over my mouth, which I shall have to do if I get old. Wherefore I never shall. It’s a great relief to be certain of that. I used to bother my head about it at one time! and it suddenly flashed upon me, about ten days ago, that I needn’t bother about it any more, as I never should be old.”

  “Would you dislike having to be serious very much?” asked Edith.

  “It isn’t that I should dislike it,” said Dodo; “I simply am incapable of it. I was serious last night for at least an hour, and a feverish reaction has set in. I couldn’t be serious for a week together, if I was going to be beheaded the next moment, all the time. I daresay it would be very nice to be serious, just as I’m sure it would be very nice to live at the bottom of the sea and pull the fishes’ tails, but it isn’t possible.”

  Dodo had quite forgotten that she had intended to go for a ride, and she went into the garden with Nora, and played ducks and drakes on the pond, and punted herself about, and gathered water-lilies. Then she was seized with an irresistible desire to fish, and caught a large pike, which refused to be killed, and Dodo had to fetch the gardener to slay it. She then talked an astonishing amount of perfect nonsense, and thought that it must be lunch-time. Accordingly, she went back to the house, and was found by Edith, a quarter of an hour later, playing hide-and-seek with the coachman’s children, whom she had lured in from the stable-yard as she went by. The rules were that the searchers were to catch the hiders, and Dodo had entrenched herself behind the piano, and erected an impregnable barricade, consisting of a revolving bookcase and the music-stool. The two seekers entirely declined to consider that she had won, and Dodo, with a show of reason, was telling them that they hadn’t caught her yet at any rate. The situation seemed to admit of no compromise and no solution, unless, as Dodo suggested, they got a pound or two of blasting powder and destroyed her defences. However, a deus ex machina appeared in the person of the coachman himself, who had come in for orders, and hinted darkly that maternal vengeance was brewing if certain persons did not wash their hands in time for dinner, which was imminent.

  “There’s a telegram for you somewhere,” said Edith to Dodo, as she emerged hot and victorious. “I sent a man out into the garden with it. The messenger is waiting for an answer.”

  Dodo became suddenly grave.

  “I suppose he’s gone to the pond,” she said; “that’s where I was seen last. I’ll go and get it.”

  She met the man walking back to the house, having looked for her in vain. She took the telegram and opened it. It had been forwarded from her London house. It was very short.

  “I arrive in London to-day. May I call?

  — “WALDENECH.”

  Dodo experienced, in epitome at that moment, all she had gone through the night before. She went to a garden-seat, and remained there in silence so long that the footman asked her: “Will there be an answer, my lady? The messenger is waiting.”

  Dodo held out her hand for the telegraph form. She addressed it to the caretaker at her London house. It also was very short:

  “Address uncertain; I leave here to-day. Forward nothing.”

  She handed it to the man, and gave orders that it should go at once.

  Dodo did not move. She sat still with her hands clasped in front of her, unconscious of active thought, only knowing that a stream of pictu
res seemed to pass before her eyes. She saw the Prince standing on her doorstep, learning with surprise that Lady Chesterford was not at home, and that her address was not known. She saw him turn away, baffled but not beaten; she saw him remaining in London day after day, waiting for the house in Eaton Square to show some signs of life. She saw — ah, she dismissed that picture quickly.

  She had one sudden impulse to call back the footman and ask for another telegraph form; but she felt if she could only keep a firm hand on herself for a few moments, the worst would be passed; and it was with a sense of overwhelming relief that she saw the telegraph boy walk off down the drive with the reply in his hand.

  Then it suddenly struck her that the Prince was waiting for the answer at Dover Station.

  “How savage he will be,” thought Dodo. “There will be murder at the telegraph office if he waits for his answer there. Well, somebody must suffer, and it will be the telegraph boys.”

  The idea of the Prince waiting at Dover was distinctly amusing, and Dodo found a broad smile to bestow on the thought before she continued examining the state of her feelings and position. The Prince’s influence over her she felt was local and personal, so to speak, and now she had made her decision, she was surprised at the ease with which it had been made. Had he been there in person, with his courtly presence and his serene remoteness from anything ordinary, and had said, in that smooth, well-modulated, voice, “May I hope to find you in to-morrow?” Dodo felt that she would have said “Come.” Her pride was in frantic rebellion at these admissions; even the telegram she had sent was a confession of weakness. She would not see him, because she was afraid. Was there any other reason? she asked herself. Yes; she could not see him because she longed to see him.

  “Has it come to that?” she thought, as she crumpled up the telegram which had fluttered down from her lap on to the grass. Dodo felt she was quite unnecessarily honest with herself in making this admission. But what followed? Nothing followed. She was going to marry Jack, and be remarkably happy, and Prince Waldenech should come and stay with them because she liked him very much, and she would be delightfully kind to him, and Jack should like him too. Dear old Jack, she would write him a line this minute, saying when she would be back in London.