Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  David careering after the ball, tripped over a hoop which he had not observed, and fell down.

  Thereafter came an expedition to the trout-stream, and since their efforts to throw a fly only resulted in the most amazing tangles and the hooking of tough bushes, it was necessary to suborn a gardener to supply them with worms, and to promise to say nothing about it, for fear Jack should have a fit. With this wriggling lure, so much more sensible if the object of their fishing was to entrap fish (which it undoubtedly was) David caught two trout and the corpse of an old boot which gave him a great deal of trouble before it could be landed, since, unlike trout, boots seemed to be absolutely indefatigable and could pull forever. Then David distinctly saw a kingfisher come out of a hole in the bank (naturally the other side of the stream) and had to take off his shoes and stockings and wade across, as there was a firm legend that the British Museum would give you a thousand pounds for an intact kingfisher’s nest. He dropped a stocking into the water, and this was irrevocably lost, but on the other hand he found a thrush’s nest, though no kingfisher’s. But as he was totally indifferent as to whether he had two stockings or one or none, the fact of finding a thrush’s nest contributed a gain on balance. After that, it was certainly time to have lunch, as was apparent when they got back to the house and found it close on half-past three. So they decided to miss out tea, or rather combine it with supper, and continue looking for birds’ nests.

  Dodo was the least envious of mankind, but she was inclined that day, when the sunset began to flame in the west and kindle the racing clouds, to be jealous of Joshua, and if she had thought that any peremptory commands to the sun and moon would have had the smallest effect on their appointed orbits, she would certainly have told them to remain precisely where they were until further notice. All day she had been playing truant; she had slipped her collar, and gone larking in the spring time. With none other except David, could she have done that; there was no one intimately dear to her who would not have shoo’d her back into the environment of the war. Jack even, the friend of her heart, must have asked about the hospital, and told her about the remount camp, and given her the latest War Office news about Verdun and Kut. But Dodo could lose herself in love with David, and all day he had never brought her up gasping to the surface again. The most tragic of his recollections concerned his going to school to-morrow, and knit up with that was the joy of new adventures, and the grandeur of leaving home quite alone with trousers and a ticket of his own. His world all day had been the real world to her, and it was with the sense of an intolerable burden to be shouldered again that she saw the evening begin to close in. Often had the complete childish unconsciousness of any terrific tragedy going on enabled her to slip the collar to get a drop of water from this boyish Lazarus, who alone was able to cross for her the “great gulf fixed,” and now the giver of a little water was off to embark on other adventures. With an intuition wholly without bitterness Dodo knew that in a week’s time she would be getting ecstatic letters from him on the joys of school and the excitement of friendship with other boys. She loved the thought of those letters coming to her; she would have been miserable if she had pictured David really missing her. She had no doubt that he would be glad beyond words to see her again, but in the interval there would be cricket to play, and friends to make, and cakes to share and stag beetles to keep. It was intensely right that a new life should absorb him, for that was the way in which young things grew to boyhood and manhood and learnt the part they were to play in the world. But as far as she herself went (leaving the consideration of the big affairs outside) she imaged herself as a raven croaking on a decayed bough.... Jack would come and croak too; Edith would croak; everybody except those delicious beings aged twelve or under, croaked, unless they were too busy to croak. But to David the war, that aching interminable business was just a pleasant excitement, like the kitchen chimney being on fire, or a water-pipe bursting. There were a quantity of agreeable soldiers in the house, who sometimes told him about shrapnel and heavy stuff and snipers, and to him the war was just that; an exciting set of stories connected with the smashing up of the Hun. He had a world of his own, of the things that truly and rightly concerned him. The most thrilling at the moment was the fact of going to school to-morrow, after that came the lost stocking and the other diversions of the day. Since morning he had wiled Dodo from herself, and as they sat down with great grandeur to a splendid combination of tea and supper, which included treacle pudding, the two trout and bananas, reasonably chosen by David for the last debauch, Dodo’s jealousy of Joshua surged within her. In an hour from now, David would have gone to bed, and then she would go upstairs to say good-night to him, and come down again to welcome Edith and her typewriter and slide back into the old heart-breaking topics.

  Dodo had made a glorious pretence of being greedy about treacle pudding, in order to show how much she appreciated David’s housekeeping. Thus, when the hour for bed-time came, he got up, rather serious.

  “Oh, Mummie,” he said, “I shall never forget to-day, if I live to be twenty.”

  “My darling, have you enjoyed it? Have you enjoyed it just as much as you can enjoy anything?” said Dodo, feeling the shades of the prison-house closing round. “I have.”

  “To-morrow at this time,” said David solemnly, “you’ll be here and I shan’t.”

  Dodo heard her heart-cords thrumming; joy was the loudest because the child she had brought into the world, flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone was a boy already, and with the flicking round of the swift years would soon be a man, and for the same reason there was regret and aching there because never again would she see one who was part of herself, her life, swelling into bud, and thereafter blossoming....

  “Oh, David,” she said, “your darling body will be there, and I shall be here, but that’s nothing at all. There’s love between us, isn’t there, and what on earth can part that? You’ll understand that some day. Hasn’t to-day been delicious? Well, it was only delicious because you were you and I was I. Just think of that for a second! You wouldn’t have cared about catching boots with Albert Hun.”

  He opened his eyes very wide.

  “Why, I should have hated it!” he said. “It was the boot and you, Mummie, that made it lovely. Is that it?”

  “It’s it and all of it,” said she. “Off you go. I shall come to say good-night before dinner.”

  David wrinkled up his nose.

  “Dinner after treacle-pudding and bananas!” he shouted. “Who’ll be fat?”

  “I shall have to make a pretence to keep Mrs. Arbuthnot from feeling awkward,” said Dodo.

  “I see. Now you’ve promised to come to say good-night? It’s a con — something.”

  “Tract,” said Dodo.

  Dodo kept her part of the contract. But there was never anyone so deliciously fast asleep as was David when she went to perform it. He lay with his cheek on his hand, and his hair all over his forehead, and his mouth a little open with breath coming long and evenly. His clothes lay out ready for packing in the morning, and the immortal warless day was over.

  She went downstairs again, smiling to herself that David slept so well, back into the cage. The evening papers had been brought by Edith who was singing in the bathroom. Verdun still held out, and the news of the fall of the second defensive fort was unconfirmed. On the other hand, Trowle, the boy with the bandaged face, who had taken his first outing to-day, had a high temperature, and the matron had asked Dr. Ashe to come and see him. So there was David asleep and Edith singing, and Verdun untaken, and Trowle with a high temperature. Dodo felt that, on balance, she ought to have been very gay. But Trowle, one of a hundred patients, had a high temperature. She was worried at that in a way she wouldn’t have been worried a year ago. If only they would stop maiming and gassing each other for a few days, or if only the hospital could be empty for a week!

  By the middle of next morning, David had set off without tears according to promise. Trowle’s temperature much abated,
only indicated a slight chill, and Verdun still held out. Dodo had dictated a couple of letters to Edith, who with swoops and dashes of her pencil took them down on a block of quarto paper, and while Dodo opened the rest of her correspondence was transferring them on to her typewriter. She worked with a high staccato action, as if playing a red-hot piano. As she clicked her keys, she conversed loudly and confidently.

  “Go on talking, Dodo,” she said. “All I am doing is purely mechanical, and I can attend perfectly. There! when the bell rings like that, I know it is the end of a line, and I just switch the board across, and it clicks and makes a new empty line for itself. You should learn to typewrite; it is mere child’s play. I shall never write a letter in my own hand again. We ought all to be able to use a typewriter; you can dash things off in no time. I think the work you have been doing here is glorious, but you ought to type. Let me see, you said something in this letter about aspirin. I’ve got ‘aspirin’ mixed up with the next word in my shorthand notes. Just refer back, and tell me what you said about aspirin.”

  Dodo turned up a letter which she thought was done with. “We want aspirin tabloids containing two grains,” she said.

  “That was it!” said Edith triumphantly. “You said ‘grains,’ and it looked like ‘graceful’ on my copy. Are you sure you didn’t say ‘graceful’? Now that’s all right. I move the line back and erase ‘graceful.’ No, that stop only makes capitals instead of small letters. I’ll correct it when the sheet is finished. Let me see; oh, yes, that curve there means ‘as before.’ It’s all extraordinarily simple if you once concentrate upon it. The whole of this transcribing which looks like a conjuring trick — oh, I began writing ‘conjuring trick’ — is really like the explanation of a conjuring trick, which — did I type ‘before,’ or didn’t I? Do go on talking. I work better when there is talking going on. I shan’t answer, but the fact that there is some distraction makes me determined not to be distracted. Conscious effort, you know....”

  “Jack comes to-night,” said Dodo, continuing the opening of her letters, “and we’ll play quiet aged lawn-tennis to-morrow afternoon.”

  Edith paused with her hands in the air.

  “Why quiet and aged?” she said, plunging them on to the keys again. The bell rang.

  “Because the lights are low and I’m very old,” said Dodo.

  Edith forgot to move the machine, and began writing very quickly over the finished line.

  “Nonsense!” she said. “You must be fierce and strong and young with all the lights on. I mustn’t talk. Something’s happened. But all that concerns us now is to be as efficient as we possibly can. We can’t afford to make mistakes. We must — —”

  She pulled out the sheet she had been working on, and gazed at it blankly.

  “Dear Sir,” she repeated, “‘The Marchioness—’ is it spelled like March or Marsh, Dodo? Oh, March; yes. I’ll correct that. ‘Aspirin in graceful conjuring trick,’ that should be grains, and then four large Qs in a row. Oh, that was when I made a mistake with the erasing key. Very stupid of me. And what’s happened to the last line? It’s written over twice. Have you got any purple ink, Dodo? I always like correcting in the same coloured ink as the type; it looks neater. Well, if you have only got black that will have to do.”

  Edith shook the stylograph Dodo gave her to make it write, and a fountain of pure black ink poured on to the page.

  “Blotting-paper,” she said in a strangled voice.

  Dodo began to laugh.

  “Oh, Edith, you are a tonic,” she said, “and I want it this morning. My dear, don’t waste any more time over that, but tell me if you never feel in crumbs as I do. I think it’s reaction from yesterday. I escaped. I played with David all day, and forgot about cripples and Kut and Verdun, and now I’m back in the cage again, and David’s gone, and — and I’m a worm. If I followed my inclination, I should lie down on the floor and roar for the very disquietness of my heart, as the other David says.”

  “I shouldn’t,” said Edith loudly. “I want to dance and sing because I am helping to destroy those putrid Huns. Every letter I typewrite — I’ll copy this one out again by the way, as no one in the world could read it — is another nail in their odious coffin. I don’t care whether Verdun is lost or Kut or anything else. It’s not my business. And it’s not your’s either, Dodo. You mustn’t think; there’s too much to do; there’s no time for thinking. But what has happened to you is that you’re overtired. I shall speak to Jack about it.”

  “My dear, you will do nothing of the kind,” said Dodo. “It would be quite useless to begin with, for I should do exactly as I pleased, and it would only make Jack anxious.”

  Edith ran an arpeggio scale up her typewriter.

  “When I feel tired or despondent,” she said, “which isn’t often, I read about German atrocities. Then I get on the boil from morning till night.”

  Dodo shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “Living surrounded by the wounded doesn’t have that effect on me or anyone else. If you allow yourself to think, it simply makes you sick at heart. Two days ago a convoy of men who had been gassed came in, and instead of feeling on the boil, I simply ached. We are beginning to use gas too, and ... my heart aches when I think of German boys being carried back into hospitals in the state ours are in. I suppose I ought to be pleased that they are being gassed too. But I’m not. And I began so well. I was simply consumed with fury, and thought that that was the way to wage war. So it is no doubt. But what do you prove by it? Was anything ever so senseless? The world has gone mad.”

  Edith fitted a new sheet into her machine.

  “I know it has, and the best thing to do is to go mad too, until the world is sane again,” she said. “You haven’t had your house knocked to bits by a bomb. Now I’m going to begin the aspirin letter once again. I don’t want to think and you had better not, either.”

  Dodo laughed.

  “I know,” she said. “And will the aspirin letter be ready for the post? It goes in a quarter of an hour.”

  “It will have to be,” said Edith. “After that I insist on your coming out to play a few holes at golf before lunch. I shall work all afternoon. Give me a sheaf of letters to write, Dodo.”

  This time something quite unprecedented happened to Edith’s machine, for six of the keys including the useful “e” would not act at all, and Dodo, already much behindhand with her morning’s work, left her furiously tinkering with it. The aspirin letter was in consequence indefinitely delayed, and Dodo had to telegraph instead. Later in the day, the machine being still quite unuseable, Edith put it into its box and despatched it for repair to London, with a letter of blistering indignation. A day or two must elapse before it came back, and she devoted herself to shorthand, and gave a little series of concerts consisting of her own music to the astonished patients.

  David wrote happily from school, Trowle’s temperature went down, Verdun held out, and the convoy of gassed men did well. Under this stimulus, Dodo roused herself for the effort of not thinking. She did not even think how odd it was for her, to whom activity was so natural, to be obliged to make efforts. The days mounted into weeks and the weeks into months, and she ceased looking forward and looking back. It was enough to get through the day’s work, and every day it was a little too much for her. So too was the effort to keep her mind absorbed in the actual work which lay to hand. That perhaps tired her more than the work itself.

  CHAPTER X

  THE SILVER BOW

  Dodo was lying in bed, just aware that a strip of sunlight on the floor was getting broader. She was not precisely watching it, but, half-consciously she knew that it had once been a line of light and was now an oblong, the rest of her perceptions were concerned with the fact that it was extremely pleasant to have been commanded in a way that made argument impossible, to remain where she was, and not to get up or think of doing so until the doctor had visited her, for there was nothing so repugnant to her mind at the moment as the idea of doing a
nything. She believed that she had breakfasted in a drowsy manner, and believed (with perfect truth) that she had gone to sleep again afterwards, for now the sunlight made a broad patch on the floor. Collecting her reasoning faculties, and remembering that her room looked due south, she arrived at the brilliant conclusion that the morning must have progressed towards noon. That seemed something of a discovery, and having arrived at that conclusion she went to sleep again.

  She dreamed — the dream being about as vivid as her waking consciousness — that she was a chicken, and was being put up to auction in the operating theatre. Two bidders were interested in her, but they could not buy her till she awoke; One of the bidders was Jack, who stood on the left of her bed, the other the hospital doctor, on the right, before whose advent she was not allowed to get up. Then her dream was whisked off her brain in the manner of a blanket being pulled from her bed, and becoming wide awake, she was aware that this disconcerting dream was, as the retailers of incredible stories say, “largely founded on fact,” for there was Jack on one side of her bed and Doctor Ashe on the other. They did not look like bidders at an auction at all, nor, as her waking consciousness assured her, did they look at all anxious. Doctor Ashe seemed to have said “fine sleeper,” and Jack, as Dodo opened her eyes, remarked rather ironically, so she thought, “Good afternoon, darling.”

  This annoyed her.

  “Why afternoon?” she asked. “Don’t be silly.”

  Then looking at the patch of sunlight again, which seemed the only real link with the normal world, she saw it had got narrow, and was on the other side of her bed.

  “Very well then, it’s afternoon,” she said. “Why shouldn’t it be? I never said it wasn’t.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” said Jack in an absurdly soothing manner. “And now you’ll have a talk with Dr. Ashe.”