Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Dodo ran over what she had said in her mind, and thought it covered the ground. She had fully explained why she had told Jack that he mustn’t be a snowdrop, and all that sort of thing. She was convinced of her wisdom when he put up his feet on a chair, and showed no sign of questioning her sincerity.

  “We’ve all changed,” he said. “We don’t want any more excitements. At least you and I don’t. Edith’s a volcano, and till now, I always thought you were.”

  Dodo made a very good pretence at a yawn, and stifled it.

  “I remember talking to Edith just before the war,” she said. “I told her that a cataclysm was wanted to change my nature. I said that if you lost every penny you had, and that I had to play a hurdy-gurdy down Piccadilly, I should still keep the whole of my enjoyment and vitality, and so I should. Well, the cataclysm has come, and though it has ended in victory, it has done its work as far as I am concerned. I’ve played my part, and I’ve made my bow, and shall retire gracefully. I don’t want to begin again. I’m old, I’m tired, and my only reason for wishing to appear young and fresh was that you would expect me to. You are an angel.”

  Dodo’s tongue, it may be stated, was not blistered by the enunciation of these amazing assertions. She was not in the least an habitual liar, but sometimes it became necessary to wander remarkably far from the truth for the good of another, and when she engaged in these wanderings, she called the process not lying, but diplomacy. She had made up her mind instantly that it would never do for Jack to resign himself to inaction for the rest of his life and with extraordinary quickness had guessed that the best way of starting him again was not to push or shove him into unwelcome activities, but cordially to agree with him, and profess the same desire for a reposeful existence herself. She regarded it as quite certain that he would not acquiesce long in her abandoning the activities of life, but would surely exert himself to stimulate her interests again. For himself he was an admirable loafer, and had just that spice of obstinacy about him which might make him persist in a lazy existence, if she tried to shake him out of it, but he would be first astonished and soon anxious if she did the same thing, and would exert himself to stimulate her, finding it disconcerting and even alarming if she sank into the tranquil apathy which just now she had asserted was so suitable to her age and inclinations. This Machiavellian plan then, far from being a roundabout and oblique procedure, seemed, on reflection, to be the most direct route to her goal. Left to himself he might loaf almost indefinitely, but a precisely similar course on her part, would certainly make him rouse himself in order to spur her flagging faculties. And all the time, it was she who was spurring him.

  She proceeded to clothe this skeleton of diplomacy with flesh.

  “I always used to wonder how this particular moment would come to me,” she said, “and though I always used to say I would welcome it, I was secretly rather terrified of it. I thought it would be rather a ghastly sort of wrench, but instead of being a wrench it has been the most heavenly relaxation. I had a warning you see, and I had a taste of it, when I collapsed and went off alone to Truscombe; and how delicious it is, darling, that your resignation, so to speak, has coincided with mine. I thought perhaps that you would preserve your energy longer than I, and that I should have to follow, faint but pursuing, or that you would fail first, and would have to drag along after me. But the way it has happened makes it all absolutely divine. I might have guessed it perhaps. We’ve utterly grown into one, Jack; I’ve known that so many years, dear, and this is only one more instance out of a thousand. Just the same thing happened to Mr. and Mrs. Browning — —”

  “Who?” asked Jack.

  “Brownings — poets,” said Dodo, “all those books. After all, they were Mr. and Mrs., though it sounds rather odd when one says so. Don’t you remember that delicious poem where they sat by the fire and she read a book with a spirit-small hand propping her forehead — though I never understood what a spirit-small hand meant — and thought he was reading another, and all the time he was looking at her?”

  Dodo suddenly thought she was going a little too far. It was not quite fair to introduce into her diplomacy quite such serious topics and besides, there was a little too much vox humana about it. She poked the fire briskly.

  “‘By the fireside’; that was the name of it,” she said, “and here we are. We must advertise, I think, in the personal columns of the Times, and say that Lord and Lady Chesterford have decided to do nothing more this side of the grave, and no letters will be forwarded. They inform their large circle of friends that they are quite well, but don’t want to be bothered. Why, Jack; it’s half-past seven. How time flies when one thinks about old days.”

  Throughout March they stopped down at Winston, and the subtlety of Dodo’s diplomacy soon began to fructify. She saw from the tail of her eye that Jack was watching her, that something bordering on anxiety began to resuscitate him, as he tried to rouse her. Once or twice, in the warm days of opening April, he coaxed her down to the stream with him (for fishing was a quiet pursuit not at variance with the reposeful life) to see if she would not feel the lure of running water, or be kindled in these brightening fires of springtime. If fish were rising well, she noted with a bubble of inward amusement that he would forget her altogether for a time, but then, though hitherto he had always discouraged or even refused her companionship when he was fishing, he would come to her and induce her to attempt to cast over some feeding fish in the water above. So, to please him, she would take the rod from him and instantly get hung up in a tree. But oftener when he proposed that she should come out with him, she would prefer to stay quiet in some sheltered nook on the terrace, and tell him that she was ever so happy alone. Once or twice again he succeeded in getting her to come out for a gentle ride, solicitous on their return to know that it had not overtired her, eager for her to confess that she really had enjoyed it. And then Dodo would say, “Darling, you are so good to me,” and perhaps consent to play a game of picquet. He did not disquiet himself over the thought that she was ill, for she looked the picture of health, ate well, slept well, and truthfully told him that she had not the smallest pain or discomfort of any kind. Often she was quite talkative, and rattled along in the old style, but then in midflight she would droop into silence again. Only once had he a moment of real alarm, when he found her reading the poems of Longfellow....

  Then one day to his great joy, she began to reanimate herself a little. A new play had come out in London, and some paper gave a column-long account of it, which Jack read aloud.

  “Really it sounds interesting,” she said. “I wonder — —” and she broke off.

  “Why shouldn’t we run up to town and see it?” said he. “There are several things I ought to attend to. Lets go up to-morrow morning.”

  “Yes, if you like,” she said. “I won’t promise to go to the play, Jack, but — yes I’ll come. You might telephone for seats now, mightn’t you?”

  Certainly the play interested her, and they discussed it as they drove home. One of the characters reminded Dodo of Edith, and she said she had not seen her for ages. On which Jack, very guilefully, telephoned to Edith to drop in for lunch next day, and arranged to go out himself, so that Dodo might have a distinct and different stimulus. Unfortunately Dodo, hearing that Jack would be out, scampered round about lunch-time to see Edith, and drink in a little froth of the world before returning to the nunnery of empty Winston, and thus they both found nobody there. She and Jack had intended to go back to the country that afternoon, but Dodo let herself be persuaded to go to the Russian ballet, which she particularly wanted to see. Jack took a box for her, and in the intervals several friends came up to see them. He enjoyed the ballet enormously himself, and longed to go again the next night. This was not lost on Dodo, and she became more diplomatic than ever.

  “Stop up another night, Jack,” she said, “and go there again. I shall be quite, quite happy at Winston alone. Let’s see; they are doing ‘Petroushka’ to-morrow; I hear it is admirab
le.”

  “I shouldn’t dream of stopping in town without you,” said he, “or of letting you be alone at that — at Winston. You won’t stop up here another day?”

  Dodo was getting a little muddled; she wanted to see “Petroushka” enormously, and had to pretend it was rather an effort; at the same time she had to remember that Jack wanted to see it, though he pretended that he wanted her to see it. He thought that she thought.... She gave it up; they both wanted to see “Petroushka” for their own sakes, and pretended it was for the sake of each other.

  “Yes, dear, I don’t think it would overtire me,” she said. “But let’s go to the stalls to-morrow. I think you will see it better from straight in front.”

  “I quite agree,” said Jack cordially.

  About three weeks later Dodo came in to lunch half an hour late and in an enormous hurry. She had asked Edith to come at 1.30 punctually, so that they could start for the Mid-Surrey links at two, to play a three-ball match, and be back at five for a rubber before dinner which would have to be at seven, since the play to which they were going began at eight. She was giving a small dance that night, but she could get back by eleven from the play. They were going down to Winston early next morning (revisiting it after nearly a month’s absence), so that Jack could get a day’s fishing before the Saturday-till-Monday party arrived.

  “I don’t want any lunch,” said Dodo. “I’m ready now, and I shall eat bread and cheese as we drive down to Richmond. Things taste so delicious in a motor. Jack, darling, fill your pockets with cheese and cigarettes, and give me a kiss, because it’s David’s birthday.”

  “We were talking about you,” he remarked.

  “Tell me what you said. All of it,” said Dodo.

  “We agreed you had never been in such excellent spirits.”

  “Never. What else?”

  “We agreed that I was rather a good nurse,” said he.

  Dodo gave a little squeak of laughter, which she instantly suppressed.

  “Of course you are,” she said.

  “And I was saying,” said Edith, “that the war hadn’t made the slightest change in any of us.”

  “Darling, you’re wrong there,” said Dodo. “It has made the most immense difference. For instance — nowadays — we’re all as poor as rats, though we trot along still. Nowadays — —”

  A tall parlour-maid came in.

  “The car’s at the door, my lady,” she said.

  “Put the golf clubs in,” said Dodo.

  “Tell me some of the enormous differences,” asked Edith.

  Dodo waited till the door was closed.

  “Well, we all have parlour-maids,” she said.

  “That’s an enormous difference.”

  She paused a moment.

  “Ah, that reminds me,” she said. “Jack, I interviewed a butler this morning, who I think will do. He wants about a thousand a year....”

  Edith shouted with laughter.

  “Poor as rats,” she said, “and parlour-maids! Any other differences, Dodo?”

  “I wonder,” she said.

  THE END

  LOVERS AND FRIENDS

  This novel was first published in 1921 and is a typically waspish Bensonian comedy, concerning the one-upmanship that goes on between a mother, father and daughter. The story begins when all three are reunited at English seaside resort, years after the heartless, but rich mother has left her husband and daughter.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER I

  NOTHING short of a special revelation would have persuaded Philip Courthope that he was not the fulcrum by means of which Merriby had been levered back into its long-lost position as a fashionable English watering-place. Others without a due appreciation of his services in that regard might have thought that the lesser factor of the European War, which prevented the obese and the rheumatic from going to foreign Bethesdas, had something to do with the risen fortunes of the place, but Philip was aware that he was the angel who, though he did not precisely stir the healing springs, caused so brilliant a babbling of rank and fashion around them. But whatever the truth of this might be, it was certain that to-day he was the acknowledged figure-head which, like the bowsprit of a ship, presided over the waters. He was president of the County Club, for which visitors were eligible as temporary members, he was treasurer of the Golf Club, secretary of the Lawn Tennis Club, and over all these institutions, and whatever other contributed to the effervescent life of Merriby, he exercised an undisputed autocracy.

  No such measure of success ever comes to any one unless he has special gifts in the career that he has chosen, and it is impossible to deny that Philip Courthope was possessed of an almost perfect equipment as Master of the Ceremonies. He had a great power of social organization, was a foe to petty economies when large issues were at stake (it was he, for instance, who had successfully insisted on the new baths being made of marble instead of tiles), and had a truly Napoleonic eye for detail. He had an unrivalled memory for names in conjunction with faces, and an eagle’s eye for unfriended visitors or ladies with only an obvious “companion” to talk to, sitting in remote comers of the pump-room, and if he knew or guessed that they “mattered,” he would interrupt his liveliest conversations in order to entertain them. Above all, as regards his personal ascendancy, he had the dramatic gift of arranging his stage so that, as if by accident, he became the central point round which all else was grouped. He always saw himself at the centre, and his vivacity unconsciously influenced others to see him there too. For further equipment he was clad in the chain armour of a perennially youthful power of enjoyment which was impenetrable to the shafts of middle age with which his five and forty years unsuccessfully assailed him. This impenetrability must have been bequeathed by him to his daughter Celia who lived with him, and who at the age of twenty had not been crushed into the numb endurance into which any one who was brought into daily and intimate contact with him might have been expected to subside. Instead, Celia had a perfectly independent personality of her own, and at the present moment was developing with an exotic rapidity which puzzled her father when he was not too busy to think about it. He had always regarded her as rather an ugly girl, whose features were redeemed from plainness by their intelligence which she no doubt inherited from him. Lately, however, he had begun to be aware that there was somebody there who was decidedly not an emanation from himself. On these occasions his thoughts buzzed for a little about his wife, whom he had scarcely set eyes on for the last eighteen years, though small paragraphs in the daily papers kept him continually aware of her activities and occupations.

  The post was late this morning, and as he drank his early coffee and ate his rolls in his bedroom, he allowed his mind (not having the usual distraction of his letters) to drift into retrospect, slipping its anchor in the present by contemplation of the portrait of himself executed some four and twenty years ago by his own hand when he was a student in Paria It represented an extremely well-featured young fellow clad in a painter’s blouse, and a glance at the original, though more than a score of years later, would have given a guarantee of the probable fidelity of the portrait, for Philip still retained in body as well as in mind an amazing measure of youth, and the pretty boy with the faint line of moustache on his upper lip, and the big grey eyes and full rather sensual mouth had been gently handled by the years that had since passed over him. There was now a streak of grey in the brown hair that was still abundant, but the eyes were but little dimmed and the mouth and the short straight nose neither coarsened nor refined by t
he passage of time. The faint line of moustache had, it is true, developed into a far more predominant embellishment, and till lately, when the German Emperor had incurred a wide unpopularity in England, its ends had been trained upwards in marked resemblance to the use of Hohenzollem, but now they pursued a horizontal and less military course. A small imperial, also touched with grey, now decorated Philip’s chin, and gave the suggestion of a Frenchman in a farce or a dancing-master in real life. But Philip, light-heartedly busy ova: the resurrection of Merriby, could not possibly have understood any interpretation of himself into which the idea of farce on the one hand or dancing-master on the other entered. His Gallic pose, in fact, had become his second if not his first nature, and his little shrugs, his gestures, ‘his early coffee and his déjeuner at half-past twelve, had, from being affectations, passed into the fabric of his mind. In the same way he now quite naturally flipped his fingers in the middle of a sentence and said, “Let me see: how do you say it in English?” When considerably excited, he talked English quite perfectly, but at his committee meetings, when no crucial question was on the board (tapis), he spoke as if he were translating French into his mother tongue, and apologized for his imperfections.

  The contemplation of his own portrait which started in him the retrospection of his beaux jours was reinforced by a glance at the portrait of a young woman obviously by the same hand, which hung next it. There was the same probable fidelity about that also, and it would have been a winning wager to bet that Florence had been very like that when, twenty-three years ago, she became his wife. There was a trenchancy of touch about it which showed she could not have been otherwise: that small enticing face might indeed have grown larger and lost its enticement, but the brush gave evidence of conviction, and was unblinded by any glamour that might have been supposed to have insinuated itself into the handiwork of a young man about to be married to the subject of the canvas. There was the small eager face, the pale-coloured hair, the absence of any distinction apart from mere vitality. And now, when looking at that, and waiting for the retarded morning post, he slid back, anchorless, into a tide that took him swiftly far from land....