Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Dr. Ashe was not in need of great explanations, for being the hospital doctor, he was already in possession of the main facts of the case. For the last month Dodo had been increasingly irritable, and increasingly forgetful. He had urged her many times to go away and have a complete rest; he had warned her of the possible consequences of neglecting this advice, but she had scouted the idea of being in need of anything except strenuous employment. Then, only yesterday afternoon, she had suddenly fainted, and recovering from that had simply collapsed. She now accounted to Dr. Ashe for these unusual proceedings with great lucidity.

  “I forgot about dinner,” she said, “and that came on the top of my being rather tired. I only wanted a good night’s rest, like everybody else, and I’ve had that. I’m quite well again. Who is attending to the stores?”

  Dr. Ashe slid his hand on to her wrist.

  “Oh, the stores are all right,” he said guilefully. “You’ve had Sister Alice under you for a couple of months, and you’ve made her wonderfully competent. But for your own peace of mind I want you to answer me one question.”

  “Go ahead,” said Dodo, “I hope it’s not crashingly difficult.”

  “Not a bit. Supposing I told you to get up at once and go back to your work, do you feel that you would be able to get through a couple of hours of it? On oath.”

  Dodo thought over this, trying to imagine herself active. It was difficult to imagine anything, for she seemed incapable of picturing herself otherwise than lying in bed. Even then everything was dream-like; Dr. Ashe did not seem like a real person, and Jack, dream-like also, had merely melted away. She was only conscious, with a sense of reality, of an enormous lassitude and languor unlike anything she had previously experienced. Even the burden of answering a perfectly simple question was heavy. Every limb seemed weighted with lead, but the bulk of the lead had been reserved for her brain. She had to make an effort in order to answer at all.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, “because I feel so odd. But I think that if you told me to stand up I should fall down. I can’t be certain; that’s only what I think. What’s the matter with me?”

  A dream-like voice answered her.

  “You’ve got what you asked for,” it said. “You wouldn’t take a holiday when you could, and now you’ve got to. You’re just broken down.”

  This sounded so alarming that Dodo had to make a joke.

  “I’m not going to break up, am I?” she asked.

  “Of course you’re not. Not a chance of it.”

  “What’s to happen to me then?” she asked.

  “You’re to spend two or three days in bed,” said he. “After that we’ll consider. Limit yourself to that for the present.”

  Something inside Dodo approved strongly of that.

  “That sounds quite nice,” she said. “I shall sleep, and then I shall sleep, and then I shall sleep.”

  That anticipation proved to be quite correct. Dodo was roused for her meals, resented her toilet, and for the next forty-eight hours was either fast asleep or at the least dozing in a vacancy of brain that she found extremely pleasurable. At the end of that time she entered with zest into future plans with the doctor and Jack.

  “You may leave out a rest-cure,” she said, “because if you want me to stop in bed for a month I won’t. I should hate it so much that I would take care that it shouldn’t do me any good.”

  “It would be the best thing for you,” said the doctor.

  “Then you must choose the second best. It would make me ill to stop in bed for a month, and so I should have to recover all over again afterwards. Oh Jack, you owl, for God’s sake tell me what I do want, because I don’t know. I know lots of things I don’t want. I don’t want you, darling, because you would look anxious, and don’t want David, because I couldn’t amuse him, and I certainly don’t want a nurse to blow my nose and brush my teeth and wash me.”

  Dodo sat up in bed.

  “I’m getting brilliant,” she said. “I am beginning to know what I want. I want to go somewhere where there isn’t anybody or anything. Isn’t there some place where there is just the sea — —”

  “A voyage?” asked Jack.

  “Certainly not; because of submarines and being unwell. I should like the sea to be there, but there mustn’t be any bathing-machines, and I should like a great flat place without any hills. The sea and a marsh, and nobody and nothing. Isn’t there an empty place anywhere?”

  Dr. Ashe listened to this, watching her, with a diagnostic mind.

  “Let’s hear more about it,” he said. “You don’t want to be bothered with anybody or anything. Is that it?”

  Dodo’s right arm lying outside the bedclothes suddenly twitched.

  “Who did that?” she said. “Why doesn’t it keep still? I’ve got the jumps, and I want to be quiet. Can’t either of you understand?”

  “And you want to go somewhere empty and quiet?” asked Jack.

  “Yes, I’ve said so several times. And I don’t want to talk any more.”

  They left her alone again after this, and presently when they returned, it appeared that Jack had once spent a couple of weeks one November at a small Norfolk village near the sea. The object of the expedition had been duck-shooting, but as far as duck went, it had been disappointing, for they usually got up a mile or two away, and flew out to sea in a straight line with the speed of an express train and never came back any more. But apart from duck, the village of Truscombe had promising features as regarded their present requirements, for Jack was not able to recollect any feature of the slightest interest about it. It squatted on the edge of marshes, there was the sea within a mile of it; he supposed there were some inhabitants, for there was a small but extremely comfortable inn. Now in July there would not even be any intending duck-shooters there; it promised to be an apotheosis of nothing at all.

  Dodo roused herself to take an interest in this, as the colourless account of it proceeded, and even under cross-examination Jack could not recollect anything that marred the tranquillity of the picture. Yes, there was a post-office where you could get a daily paper if you wanted one, but on the other hand if you did not want one, he hastened to add, you needn’t; there was also a windmill, the sails of which were always stationary. There were no duck, there was no pier, there as no band, the nearest station was four miles away; really, in fact, there wasn’t anything.

  The lust for nothingness gleamed in Dodo’s eyes.

  “It sounds delicious,” she said. “When may I go to Truscombe, Dr. Ashe?”

  “Have a couple more days in bed,” said he, “and then you can go as soon as you like, if you will promise not to make any exertion for which you don’t feel inclined — —”

  “But that’s why I’m going,” she interrupted. “Telegraph to the inn, Jack, and engage me a couple of rooms — oh, my dear, I feel in my bones that Truscombe is just what I want. They will meet me at the station with a very slow old cab, or better still with a dog-cart. It sounds just precisely right. Shall I call myself Mrs. Dodo of London? It’s all too blessed and lovely.”

  Three evenings later accordingly, Dodo arrived at Holt. She found a dog-cart waiting for her, exactly as she had anticipated, and a whisper of north wind off the sea. Her driver, a serene and smiling octogenarian began by talking to her for a little, and his conversation reminded her of bubbles coming up through tranquil water, as he asked her how the war was getting on. They didn’t hear much about the war down at Truscombe, but the crops were doing well, though the less said about apples the better. After this information he sank into a calm sleep, and so did the pony which walked in its sleep.

  As the vanished sun began to set the north-west sky on fire, this deliberate equipage emerged from the wooded inlands into flat and ample spaces that smouldered beneath an enormous sky. Across the open the sea gleamed like an indigo wire laid down as in some coloured map along the edge of the land, and a spiced and vivid savour which set the pony sneezing, awoke him, and with a toss of his hea
d he began of his own accord to trot. In time that unusual motion aroused his driver, and they jogged along at a livelier pace. The air seemed charged with the very elixir of life; it was like some noble atmospheric vintage that enlightened the eye and set the pulses beating full and steady. Presently they came to the village with the brick-facings of the flint-built houses glowing in the last of the sunset and the night-stocks redolent in their gardens. To the left stretched vast water-meadows intersected with dykes where loose-strife and willow-herb smouldered among the tall grasses, and tasselled reeds gave harbourage to moor-hens. Out of all the inhabitants of Truscombe but one representative seemed to be in the street, and he slowly trundled a barrow in front of him and let it be known that he had fresh mackerel for sale. Short spells of walking alternated with longer sittings on the handle of his barrow, but whether he sat or whether he walked no one bought his mackerel.

  The Laighton Arms stood on a curve of the sole street through the village, and Dodo entered as into a land full of promise. An old setter, lying in the passage thumped her a welcome with his tail, as if she was already a familiar and friendly denizen, just returning from some outing. She dined alone at a plain good hospitable board, and presently strolled out again through the front door that stood permanently open into an empty street. It was night now, and the sky was set with drowsy stars that glowed rather than sparkled, and up the street there flowed, not in puffs and gusts, but with the current of a slow moving tide the salt sweetness of the marshes and the sea. Very soon her strolling steps had carried her past the last houses, and in the deep dusk she stood looking out over the empty levels. A big grass-grown bank built to keep out high tides from the meadows zig-zagged obscurely towards the sea, and there was nothing there but the emptiness of the land and the star-studded sky. She waited just to see the moon come up over the eastern horizon and its light confirmed the friendliness of the huge solitude. Then returning, she found a candle set ready for her, which was a clear invitation to go to bed, and looking out below her blind she saw in front a stretch of low land with pools of water reflecting the stars. Six geese, one behind the other, like a frieze, were crossing it very slowly in the direction of the salt-water creek that wound seawards.

  For the next week Dodo pursued complete and intentional idleness with the same zeal which all her life had inspired her activities. She got up very late after long hours of smooth deep sleep, and taking a book and a packet of sandwiches in her satchel strolled out along the bank to the ridge of loose shingle that ran east and west along the edge of the sea. At high tide the waves broke against this, and since walking along it was an exercise of treadmill laboriousness she was content to encamp there in some sunny hollow and laze the morning away. Sometimes, for form’s sake, she opened her book, read a paragraph or two, wondered what it was about, and then transferred her gaze to the sea. An hour or so passed swiftly in stupefied content, and then shifting her position she probably lay down on her back. Bye and bye hunger dictated the consumption of her sandwiches, and refreshed and revived she would begin a pencilled note to Jack. But after a few words she usually found that she had nothing to say, and watched the sea-gulls (she supposed they were sea-gulls) that patrolled the edge of the breaking waves for food, and dived like cast plummets into the water. Then on the retreat of the tide, the ebb disclosed stretches of hard sand tattooed with pebbles, where walking was easy, and she would wander away towards the point of tumbled sand-dunes that lay westward. A coast-guard station stood there, brought into touch with the world by means of the row of telegraph-posts that ran, mile after mile, straight as an arrow, along this shingle-bank, which defended from the sea the miles of marshes and sand flats which lay on the landward side of it. Through the middle of them broadening into a glittering estuary when the tide was high ran the river that debouched into the sea beyond the point; at low tide it was but a runnel of water threading its way through the enormous flatness of shoal and mud-bank where flocks of sea-birds hovered.

  This great stretch of solitude attracted Dodo more even than the familiar emptiness of the sea. Once across the bank of shingle the sea was out of sight, and it lay spread out, this strange untrodden wildness, wearing an aspect of hospitable loneliness, and sun-steeped quiet. Narrow channels and meandering dykes, full at high tide and empty at the ebb, zig-zagged about the marsh which was clad in unfamiliar vegetation. There were tracts waist-high in some stiff heather-like growth, and between them lawns of sea-lavender now breaking out into full flower, and above high-water mark clumps of thrift and sea-campion and horned poppy. Overhead the gulls slid and chided balancing themselves on stiff pinions against the wind, or, relaxing that tense bow of flight were swept away out of sight across the flats. For miles there was but one house set on a spit of stony land, and even that seemed an outrage against the spell of solitariness till Dodo discovered that it was undwelled in, and therefore innocuous.

  For half a dozen days it was enough for her to sit on the edge of the shingle or stroll through the sea-lavender of the marshes, hardly recording the sounds and the sights that made up the spell, but merely lying open to the dew of their silent enchantments. Then, as her vigour began to ooze into her like these tides that imperceptibly filled the channels in the marshes, she extended her radius and came at last to the sand-dunes that were clumped together like a hammer-head on the shaft of the shingle-ridge. There the telegraph-posts took a right-angled turn towards the mouth of the estuary, where there were signs of inhabited places, shanties nestling in hollows, stranded ships made fast with chains, with the washing a-flutter on their decks. Votaries of solitude, botanists and ornithologists she was told, spent summer weeks here, but she never saw petticoat or trouser. Probably they too avoided the presence of others and sought refuge in the sand-dunes when her fell form appeared, just as she herself would undoubtedly have done at a glimpse of a human creature. Here then, while physically she inhaled the vitality that tingled in marsh and sea-beach and lonely places, she spent long solitary hours, dozing among the dunes, following the arrow flight of terns, wondering at the plants that seemed to draw nourishment from the barrenness of sand, and yet all the time pushing her roots, like them, into some underlying fertility.

  She was almost sorry when her mind, stained deep with these indelible days of unrelieved hard work in her hospital, began to show signs of its own colour again. Mental fatigue, too, had stricken her with a far severer stroke than had been laid on her body, and it was with something of a shock that she began to be interested in her surroundings instead of merely observing them. What started this first striving occurred during a walk she took along the upper ridges of the beach outside the sand-dunes. There had been shrill scoldings and screamings in the air above her from certain sharp-winged birds which clearly resented her intrusion, and, at this moment, she had suddenly to check her foot and step sideways in order to avoid treading on a clutch of four eggs with brown mottled markings that lay on the protective colouring of the shingle. A couple of yards further on was another potential nursery, and soon she found that the whole of this ridge was a populous nesting-place. It was natural to connect these aerial screamings from the hundreds of birds that hovered above her with the treasures at her feet, and her interest as opposed to her contemplation awoke. Someone had told her that a very high tide in June had washed away the eggs of hundreds of sea-birds, and here they were again industriously raising a second brood.... Had there been, instead of birds, hundreds of human mothers and fathers yelling at her to take care not to tread on their babies, she would have fled from adults and infants alike. But, though still shunning her own kind, she adored these shy wild things that gabbled at her, and wondered what they were.

  On her way home she noticed a crop of transparent erect stalks growing thickly from a mud-bank. It looked like some emerald-green minute asparagus. Then what was the shrubby stiff-stemmed thing that seemed to imitate a Mediterranean heath? And a pink-streaked convolvulus that, behaving as no known convolvulus had ever behaved, flowered out
of the sand? Really if you wanted to avoid human beings, it might be as well to make acquaintance with these silent companions of solitude. So thinking to start with a known specimen, she picked a sprig of sea-lavender, and stepped into a remarkably deep bog-hole. Thereupon her leg, as far as her knee, wore a shining stocking of rich black mud, and it was necessary to cross the bank of shingle, wash it in the sea, and leave the shoe to dry. For the sake of symmetry she pulled off the other shoe and stocking, and paddled about, rinsing out the mud in the tepid water.

  Dodo spread the mired stocking out to dry on the pebbles, just out of reach of the crisply-breaking ripples. Then she saw a most marvellous, translucent pebble, orange-red in colour, just being sucked into the backwash of a wave. Then a small crab, truculent and menacing, sidled towards her, and the next wave rolled it over with gaping pincers, and returned the cornelian to her feet. An interesting piece of drift-wood demanded investigation, and a little further on she found a starfish which she threw back into the sea. Then she remembered her stocking and turned back. There was no sign of that stocking, but the other one and her two shoes were just recoverable from the edge of the incoming tide. With them in her hand she paddled homewards along the “liquid rims” of the sea.

  That evening Dodo sent an immense telegram to her housekeeper in London for a standard book on British birds and another on British plants. These were to be despatched to her immediately, with some field-glass highly recommended for the observation of small distant objects. That done she spent a studious evening in planning out a scheme of study. She would take out with her in the morning the books on birds and flowers, and make a cache for them in the shrubby thing of which she would soon know the name. Then for two hours she would collect plants in the marsh, and, returning with her spoils, identify them in her book. After lunch she would take the book on birds to some commanding spot and bowl out the gulls with her field-glass and her authorities. There must be a note-book and a quantity of well-sharpened pencils. Two note-books, in fact, one for birds and one for botany.