Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Anyhow,” said Dodo.

  Jack clenched his fist and drew back his arm.

  “Well, I’m the Hun,” he said, “and it’s a boxing match. Your chin there, darling, is quite defenceless, and I can knock you out, if I have enough weight behind me to give you a good punch. But I haven’t; it looks as if I was exhausted. I can just advance my arm like that, but I can’t hit. You’re rather done, too, but you can just grin at me, and wait till you get stronger. But I shan’t get stronger; I’m fought out.”

  Dodo put up her hands to her forehead.

  “But ever since March we’ve been thrust back and back,” she said.

  “Yes. And now we’re going to begin.”

  Dodo made a wild gesticulation in the air.

  “I won’t think about it,” she said. “You must remember the idea of the Russian steam-roller, and the Queen Elizabeth steaming up the Dardanelles. Oh, Jack! It’s a trick! They’re going to break through in Kamkatka or somewhere and I won’t think about that either. We’ve got to go pounding along, and not attend to what is happening. I want a map, though. Do be an angel, and get me an enormous map with plenty of flags and pins and I’ll hang it up in the dining-room. One may as well be ready, and you have to order things long before you want them. Jack, if you were obliged to bet when the war would be over, obliged I mean, because I should cut your throat if you refused, when would you say? Name the day, darling!”

  “Can’t,” said he.

  “Don’t be so ridiculous. Name the year then. Or the century.”

  “Nineteen hundred and eighteen,” said he.

  “Pish!”

  “Very well, pish,” said Jack.

  Suddenly Dodo’s mouth began to tremble.

  “Jack, you’re not playing the fool, are you?” she said. “Do you mean that?”

  “I do. There’s a man called Foch. And there are a million Americans now in France. An Australian boy the other day told me that they are rather rough fighters.”

  “Bless them!” said Dodo.

  “By all means. Now don’t build too much on it. It’s only what some people think.”

  “I won’t think about it. But I want a map. Gracious, it means a lot to want a map again. I got an atlas August four years ago and coloured Togoland red.”

  Dodo sniffed the air.

  “I really believe I can smell greens cooking for dinner,” she said. “And I certainly can see a lot of those boys in blue suits, moving about on the lawn like ants. That’s all I must think about. But do you know what I’m stopping myself from thinking about? Don’t laugh when I tell you. David’s thirteen, you know, and in four years from now — —”

  For quite a long time Jack didn’t laugh....

  Dodo got what she described as a life-size map of France, and an immense quantity of pins to which were attached cardboard flags of the warring nations. The map was put up at one end of the men’s dining-room practically covering the wall, and morning by morning, standing on a step-ladder, she gleefully recorded the advance of the Allies, and the retreat of the Huns, in accordance with the information conveyed by the daily communiqué.

  “Amiens!” she said. “We must take out all those German flags and put English ones in instead. We shall be able to get coffee again there on the way to Paris, unless the Huns have poisoned all the supplies in the refreshment room, which is more than probable, and put booby-traps in the buns, so that they explode in your mouth. Look! A German flag has fallen out of Bapaume all of its own accord; that’s a good omen, it’s hardly worth while putting it back. Isn’t it a blessing we’ve got more French flags? Now we can make Soissons a pin-cushion of them. But it’s a long way to Berlin yet. I believe you’ll have to join up, David, before we get there. Why not make a betting-book about the date we get to Berlin? Oh, there’s a place called Burchem; what an extraordinary coincidence. Give me some more American pins.”

  Through August the advance continued, sweeping on during September back through Peronne, and through the Drocourt-Quéant line, until late in the month the Hindenburg line was broken, and Dodo pulled out the most stubborn of all the rows of German pins.

  “‘All according to plan,’ as the German communiqué tells us,” she said. “What a good thing their plans coincide so exactly with ours! They didn’t want to hold the Hindenburg line any longer. They had got tired of being so long in one place and thought they would like a change, and by the greatest good luck we agreed that a change would be nice for them. That’s all that’s happened: they had been abroad for four years, and it was high time to think of getting home. What liars! My dear, what liars. Presently they will get tired of being in Cambrai, and so, according to plan, they will leave that. I should love to be the German Emperor for precisely five minutes to see what he feels like. Then I would be myself again, and gloat. Wanted on the telephone, am I? Nobody must touch those pins. I must put every one of them in myself. To-morrow I will be unselfish and let somebody else do it, but not to-day. Just according to plan!”

  October came and flung a flaming torch among the beeches, and the thick dews brought out the smell of autumn and dead leaves in the woods and meadows. Once for two days a gale from the south-west roared through the grey rainy sky, strewing the lawn with the wreck of the woodland, but when that was past the weather became crystal clear again, with days of warm windless sun, and evenings that grew chilly and mornings when the hoar-frost lay white on the grass. Cambrai was regained and the British armies marched back into Le Cateau of evil memory, and the French flag flew once more over Laon. The tide of victory swept too along the Channel, and before the end of the month the waters of freedom washed the whole Belgian coast clean of the dust of its defilement. And not along the French front alone was heard the crash of the ruinous fortress of the Huns, nor there alone leaped the flames that rose ever higher round the crumbling walls of their monstrous Valhalla, shining brighter as the dusk deepened to night in the halls of their War God. For to the east Damascus had fallen; nearer at hand Bulgaria lay like a cracked and rotten nut, black and shattered; the Italian armies recrossed the Piave and on the last day of the month the Allied Fleet steamed through the Dardanelles past silent guns and deserted bastions to receive the surrender of the Turks. For four years of war the grim tower of Central Europe had stood firm: now as its outlying forts surrendered it shook to its foundations, the fissures widened in its tottering walls, and the dusk gathered.

  It tottered, and with a crash a wall fell in, for in the first days of November, Austria surrendered, and at Kiel the German sailors mutinied. Two days later full powers were given by the Versailles Conference to Marshal Foch (of whom Dodo had now heard) to treat with the German envoys who came to sue for an armistice. And next day Sedan fell to the Americans.

  “Sedan was rather a favourite town with the Huns till just now,” said Dodo, as she dropped the German pin on the floor and made an American porcupine of the place. “Now they won’t like it quite so much, and I’m sure I don’t wonder. What did the cocks say in Sedan when they woke up the hens in Sedan this morning! Nobody can guess, so I’ll tell you. They said, ‘Yankee-doodle-doo. Amen.’ Give me some more American pins! Yankee — —”

  She gave a loud squeal.

  “I’ve put an American pin into my finger instead of into Sedan,” she said. “I want a disinfectant and a sterilised bandage, and some more pins. Look, I’ve shed my blood on the French front. Give me a wound stripe and a Sedan chair, and let me try to be sensible. It won’t be any good, but we may as well try.”

  Dodo had arranged a week ago to run up to London on November the ninth, because David was coming up from Eton on leave that day to see a dentist, and because Monday had been notified to her as a day of inspection for the hospital at Chesterford House: it must therefore be distinctly understood that the fall of Sedan and the powers granted to Marshal Foch had nothing to do with the date of this expedition. The visit to the London hospital had to be made, and if David was coming up on the ninth, it was indicated, wi
th the force of a providential leading, that she should amalgamate these two events into one visit. Saturday afternoon, when the dentist was numbered with past pains, should be given to David; Sunday would be Sunday, and she would get back to Winston on Monday night. David would see his dentist in the morning, and Dodo accordingly left the house early, before the paper had come in, so that she would be ready for him by lunch time in London. That day the German envoys were to be received by Marshal Foch, who would hand them — so it was understood — the terms on which Germany would be granted an armistice. It was believed also that if the terms were accepted, the armistice would come into force on the morning of the eleventh. The terms, whatever they were, had been agreed upon by the Versailles Conference earlier in the week....

  David appeared soon after Dodo had reached Chesterford House.

  “Oh, it was too exciting,” he said. “I had gas, mummie, wasn’t it grand! They put a cage over my mouth, and I began to get buzzy in my head, and then before I got really buzzy I was all bloody instead and the beastly thing was gone. It was like a conjuring trick, and the Emperor has given up, and I am so hungry. Look where it came out.”

  “Darling, what’s happened to the Emperor?” she asked.

  “Resigned, whatever they call it. Look at the hole.”

  David opened his mouth to the widest.

  “I never saw such a big hole,” said Dodo. “But where did you hear about the Emperor?”

  “On a news-board. May we have lunch? And what shall we do all this afternoon? I needn’t go back till the six o ‘clock from Paddington. Has it stopped bleeding?”

  The terms of the armistice were accepted, and at eleven o’clock on Monday morning the roar of cannon and moan of shells, which for more than four years had boomed and wailed without intermission over Europe, were still. The news of that, and the silence of it, came with a reverberation as stunning as had been the first shock of war; even as England breathed one long sigh of relief to know that her honour had demanded war, so now, silent for a moment, she sighed as she put back in its scabbard the sword that her honour had drawn. Then she proceeded to celebrate the event.

  Dodo was not so foolish as to struggle against the invincible, and with greater wisdom sent a long telegram to Winston announcing that she was unavoidably detained in London that night. That was quite true, for the necessity of being here, in the hub of all things, was inexorable. To see the streets and the crowds to-night, to hear the shouting, to be one with the biggest mass of people that could be found, was as imperative as breathing. Nadine rang her up on the telephone and asked her to dine and look at the crowds, and she said she was dining with Edith. Edith rang her up and suggested looking at the crowds, and she said she was dining with Nadine. Jack, who had come up that day, proposed a window at the Marlborough Club, for there was certain to be a demonstration opposite, and she said she was dining with Edith and Nadine. A further enquiry came from a place where the biggest crowds were expected, as to whether she was up in town, and she said she was at Winston, and almost curtsied to the telephone. Having told so many lies, nothing else mattered, and after eating a poached egg she went quite mad, put on a mackintosh and an old large hat and sneaked off from the house into the streets, forgetting to take a latch-key, but remembering to take a quantity of small change. She wanted only to be in the crowd and of the crowd and not to be shut up in the window of a club, decorously watching its passage, but to be merged in it, to get shoulder to shoulder with it, to look into its heart.

  Hyde Park Corner was in flood; from the gate of her house to St. George’s on one side and to the top of Constitution Hill on the other, pavements and roadway seethed with the glad huddle of humanity. Here and there was a motor or an omnibus quite unable to move forward through the crowd, being used as a vantage point for those who wanted to see more. There was a taxi just opposite her gate; half a dozen folk were sitting on the roof of it, two more were by the driver, and were in charge of the horn.... During the day an attempt had been made to scrape the obscuring paint off the street lamps, and something of the old warm glow of London diffused itself over the long-darkened ways. Everywhere were vendors of festive apparatus, and Dodo instantly bought balls of coloured paper ribands which shot out in an agreeable curve when you projected them, and whistles, and a small lead phial which she incautiously uncorked, and which instantly discharged a spray of odious scent into her face.

  “Born from the dregs of the people,” she thought exultantly to herself....

  There were two strong tides at the corner, one setting towards Constitution Hill, the other flowing along Piccadilly. Dodo meant to go along Piccadilly, but she got into the other tide, and after a vain attempt to extricate herself, was swept along by it. It was running so strongly that it was surely going towards some place of importance, and then she suddenly remembered that at the bottom of the hill lay Buckingham Palace. That would do excellently; and as she got near it, above the chatter and songs of the crowd there rose a long, continuous roar of shouting voices. Quite helpless in this great movement, she was cast forth upon the steps of the Victoria monument, and there in front of her was a row of lighted windows with a balcony, and the silhouette of heads and shoulders against the light. The shouting had collected itself into singing now, a certain rhythm directed it, and a kind of fugual chorus was in progress, some singing one line of the National Anthem, and some another, and stopping every now and then to cheer. “Frustrate their knavish tricks,” shouted Dodo at the top of her voice, and then being very hoarse she blew piercingly on her whistle.

  The tide swept her off again into the comparative gloom and quiet of the Mall, but the roar of the streets and their illumination increased as the crowd flowed up between St. James’s Palace and Marlborough House. She got into the stream which flowed along the south side of Pall Mall, noticed Jack at the window of his club, and tried to attract his attention with as much success as if she had attempted to signal to the man in the moon. She passed Edith, who, jammed in the crowd along the north side, was passing in the reverse direction; and they screamed pleasantly at each other, but were powerless to approach, and away she went up Regent Street into the central Babel of all London in Piccadilly Circus. Here like a leaf in some resistless eddy of bright eyes and shouting mouths she was trundled helplessly up the Quadrant, till at length, spent and breathless, she was cast out again, jetsam from that wonderful tide, into a backwater in Vigo Street, where voluntary movement was once more possible. What the time was she had no idea; she scarcely knew even who she herself was except in so far that she was just one drop of hot victorious English blood that flowed through the heart of London.

  She made her way through the deserted streets of Mayfair into Park Lane, and finding she had left her latch-key at home, rang for a long time before she could get the door opened to her. When she succeeded it was still necessary to establish her identity....

  Dodo found that it was already half-past two. Outside the streets were beginning to grow empty, and the crowd surfeited with rejoicing, was moving homewards. And then, all at once, a wave of reaction, as irresistible as the wave of exultation had been, swept over her. The war was done, and the victory was gained, and along the thousand miles of battle fronts no gun that night boomed into the stillness, no shell screamed along its death-bearing way. Since the news had arrived no thought but that had visited her. She had burned in the glorious fire of sheer exultant thanksgiving. Now, as she undressed, her thoughts turned from the past and the present towards the future. There would be no more convoys of wounded arriving at Winston; there would be no more pinning up the record of the advancing Allied Armies. In a few weeks or at the utmost in a few months the wards would be empty, and the work which had occupied her to the exclusion of all that had made her life before would be finished. The smell of iodoform and Virginian tobacco would fade from the house; there would be no beds along the drawing-room walls, and no temperature charts hanging above the beds. There would be no more anxiety about the men who lay
there, no repression of the rowdy, no encouragement of the despondent, no soothing of pain, no joy in recovery, no watching of the wounded creeping back into vigour again, no despair at seeing others lose their hold on life. Now that the four years of war, intense and absorbing with all their heart-breaks and exultations, were over, they seemed to have passed like the short darkness of a summer night, and here was day dawning again. What would fill the empty hours of it?...

  The reaction passed, though the question remained unsolved, and once more Dodo recollected the stupendous event that had sent the millions of London shouting along the streets. And then her eyes, bright with excitement, grew dim with a storm of sudden tears.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE REVIVAL

  Dodo went back to Winston on the morning after her night out, and had a second celebration of the armistice there. A gardener remembered that there was a quantity of fireworks, procured in pre-war days for some garden-fête, slumbering in a tool-house, and she arranged that there would be an exhibition of these on the lawn, under the direction of a convalescent patient who had embraced a pyrotechnical career before he became a gunner.

  As an exhibition of smoke and smell these fireworks which had become damp and devitalised were probably unrivalled in the history of the art. Faint sparks of flame appeared from time to time through the dense and pungent clouds that enveloped the operator: Roman candles played cup and ball on a minute scale with faintly luminous objects; Catherine-wheels incapable of revolution spat and spluttered; rockets climbed wearily upwards for some ten feet and then expired with gentle sighs, and Bengal fires smouldered like tobacco. Very soon nothing whatever could be seen of the display through the volumes of smoke which completely shrouded the lawn, and all that could be heard was the convulsive coughing of the asphyxiated gunner, who emerged with streaming eyes and said if being gassed was anything like that he would sooner be wounded ten times over. He was sorry that he had been absolutely unable to stop there any longer, but before rescuing himself had lit a remaining half-dozen of rockets, and a fuse attached to a square box called a “mine” of which he knew nothing whatever, and hoped less. He had hardly explained this when the mine went off with an explosion that caused all the windows to rattle, and a couple of rockets shot up to a prodigious height and burst in showers of resplendent stars. Half an hour later, a policeman groped his way up to the hospital through the fumes, and having ascertained that there had been fireworks, felt himself obliged to report the occurrence to a local tribunal, and Dora fined Dodo fifty pounds. Altogether it was a joyful though an expensive evening.