The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  It took the procession a considerable time to get down the choir, since Dodo had to kiss her bouquet (not having a hand to spare) to such an extraordinary number of people. But in course of time they got out, faced the battery of cameras and cinematograph machines, and got into their car. Jack effaced himself in a corner, but Dodo bowed and smiled with wonderful assiduity to the crowds.

  “They have come to see us,” she explained. “So it is essential that we should look pleased to see them. I should so like to be the Queen, say on Saturdays only, like the train you always want to go by on other days in the week. Darling, can’t you smile at them? Or put out your tongue, and make a face. They would enjoy it hugely.”

  Eventually, as they got further away from the Abbey, it became clear to Dodo that the people in the street were concerned with their own businesses, and not hers, and she leaned back in the carriage.

  “Oh, Jack,” she said, “it is you and I at last. But I can’t help talking nonsense, dear. I only do it because I’m so happy. I am indeed. And you?”

  “It is morning with me,” he said.

  They left town that afternoon, though Dodo rather regretted that they would not see themselves in the cinematograph to make sure that she had smiled and that Jack’s hair was tidy, and went down to Winston, Jack’s country place, where so many years ago Dodo had arrived before as the bride of his cousin. He had wondered whether, for her sake, another place would not be more suitable as a honeymoon resort, but she thought the plan quite ideal.

  “It will be like the renewal of one’s youth,” she said, “and I am going to be so happy there now. Jack, we were neither of us happy when you used to come to stay there before, and to go back like this will wipe out all that is painful in those old memories, and keep all that isn’t. Is it much changed? I should so like my old sitting-room again if you haven’t made it something else.”

  “It is exactly as you left it,” said he. “I couldn’t alter anything.”

  Dodo slipped her hand into his.

  “Did you try to, Jack?” she asked.

  “Yes. I meant to alter it entirely: I meant to put away all that could remind me of you. In fact, I went down there on purpose to do it. But when I saw it, I couldn’t. I sat down there, and—”

  “Cried?” said Dodo softly, sympathetically.

  “No, I didn’t cry. I smoked a cigarette and looked round in a stupid manner. Then I took out of its frame a big photograph of myself that I had given you, in order to tear it up. But I put it back in its frame again, and put the frame exactly where it was before.”

  Dodo gave a little moan.

  “Oh, Jack, how you must have hated me!” she said.

  “I hated what you had done: I hated that you could do it. But the other, never. And, Dodo, let us never talk about all those things again, don’t let us even think of them. It is finished, and what is real is just beginning.”

  “It was real all along,” she said, “and I knew it was real all along—you and me, that is to say—but I chose to tell myself that it wasn’t. I have been like the people who when they hear the scream of somebody being murdered say it is only the cat. I have been a little brute all my life, and in all probability it is past half-time for me already; in fact it certainly is unless I am going to live to be ninety. I’m not sure that I want to, and yet I don’t want to die one bit.”

  “I should be very much annoyed if you ventured to do anything of the sort,” remarked Jack.

  “Yes, and that is so wonderful of you. You ought to have wished me dead a hundred times. What’s the phrase? ‘Yes, she would be better dead.’ Just now I want to be better without being dead. I often think we all have a sort of half-time in our lives, like people in foot-ball matches, when they stop playing and eat lemons. The lemons, you understand, are rather sour reflections that we are no better than we might be, but a great deal worse. And somehow that gives one a sort of a fresh start, and we begin playing again.”

  * * * *

  They arrived at Winston late in the afternoon; the village had turned out to greet them, flags and arches made rainbow of the gray street with its thatched houses and air of protected stability, and from the church-tower the bells pealed welcome. Dodo, always impressionable and impulsive, was tremendously moved, and with eyes brimming over, leaned out of one side of the carriage and then the other to acknowledge these salutations.

  “Oh, Jack, isn’t it dear of them?” she said. “Of course I know it’s all for you really, but you’ve endowed me with everything, and so this is mine too. Look at that little duck whom that nice-faced woman is holding up, waving a flag! Hark to the bells! Do you remember the poem by Browning, ‘The air broke into a mist with bells’? This is a positive London fog of bells; can’t you taste it? Is it the foghorns, in that case, that make the fogs? And here we are at the lodge and there’s the lake, and the house! Ah, what a gracious thing a summer evening is. But how fragile, Jack, and how soon over.”

  That wistful, underlying tenderness in her nature, almost melancholy but wholly womanly, rose for the moment to the surface. It was not the less sincere because it was seldom in evidence. It was as truly part of her (and a growing part of her) as her brilliant enjoyment and insouciance. And the expression of it gleamed darkly in her soft brown eyes, as she leaned back in the carriage and took his hand.

  “I will try to make you happy,” she said.

  He bent over her.

  “Don’t try to do anything, Dodo,” he said. “Just—just be.”

  For a moment a queer little qualm came over her. Had she followed her immediate impulse, she would have said, “I don’t know how to love like that. I have to try: I want to learn.” But that would have done no good, and in her most introspective moments Dodo was always practical. The qualm lasted but a moment, as the door was opened, when they drew up. But it lasted long enough to cause her to wonder whether it would be the past that would be entered again instead of the future, entered, too, not by another door, but by the same.

  On the doorstep she paused.

  “Lift me over the threshold, Jack,” she said; “it is such bad luck for a bride to stumble when she enters her home.”

  “My dear, what nonsense.”

  “Very likely, but let’s be nonsensical. Let us propitiate all the gods and demons. Lift me, Jack.”

  He yielded to her whim.

  “That is dear of you,” she said. “That was a perfect entry. Aren’t I silly? But no Austrian would ever dream of letting his wife walk over the threshold for the first time. And—and that’s all about Austria,” she added rather hastily.

  Dodo looked swiftly round the old, remembered hall. Opposite was the big open fireplace round which they so often had sat, preferring its wide-flaring homely comfort to the more formal drawing-rooms. Today, no fire burned there, for it was midsummer weather; but as in old times a big yellow collie sprawled in front of it, grandson perhaps, so short are the generations of dogs, to the yellow collies of the time when she was here last. He, too, gave good omen, for he rose and stretched and waved a banner of a tail, and came stately towards them with a thrusting nose of welcome. The same pictures hung on the walls; high up there ran round the palisade of stags’ heads and Dodo (with a conscious sense of most creditable memory) recognized the butler as having been her first husband’s valet. She also remembered his name.

  “Why, Vincent,” she said, holding out her hand, “It is nice to see another old face. And you don’t look one day older, any more than his lordship does. Tea? Yes, let us have tea at once, Jack. I am so hungry: happiness is frightfully exhausting, and I don’t mind how exhausted I am.”

  Suddenly Dodo caught sight of the portrait of herself which had been painted when this house was for the first time her home.

  “Oh, Jack, look at that little brute smiling there!” she said. “I was rather pretty, though, but I don’t think I like myself at all. Dear me, I hope I’m not just the same now, with all the prettiness and youth removed. I don’t think I am qu
ite, and oh, Jack, there’s poor dear old Chesterford. Ah, that hurts me; it gives me a bitter little heart-ache. Would you mind, Jack, if—”

  Jack felt horribly annoyed with himself in not having seen to this.

  “My dear,” he said, “it was awfully thoughtless of me. Of course, it shall go. It was stupid, but, Dodo, I was so happy all this last month, that I have thought of nothing except myself.”

  Dodo turned away from the picture to him.

  “And all the time I thought you were thinking about me!” she said. “Jack, what a deceiver!”

  He shook his head.

  “No: it is that you don’t understand. You are me.

  “Am I? I should be a much nicer fellow if I was. Jack, don’t have that picture moved. It only hurt for a moment: it was a ghost that startled me merely because I did not expect it. It is a dear ghost: it is not jealous, it will not spoil things or come between us. It—it wants us to be happy, for he told me, you know, it was the last thing he said—that I was to marry you. It is a long time ago, oh, how long ago, though I say it to my shame. Besides, if you are to pull down or put away all that reminds me of that dreadful young woman”—Dodo put out her tongue and made a face at her own picture—“you will have to pull down the house and drink up the lake and cut down the trees. Ah, how lovely the garden looks! I was never here in the summer before: we only came for the shooting and hunting and the garden invariably consisted of rows of blackened salvias and decaying dahlias. But it is summer now, Jack.”

  There was no mistaking the figurative sense in which she meant him to understand the word “summer.” It had been winter, winter of discontent—so the glance she gave him inevitably implied—when she was here before, and she rejoiced in and admired this excellent glory of summer-time. And yet but a moment before the picture in the hall had “hurt” her, until she remembered that even on his death-bed her first husband had bidden her marry the man who had brought her back here today. She had neglected to do as she was told for about a quarter of a century, and had married somebody else instead, and yet this amazing variety of topics that concerned her heart, any one of which, you would have expected, was of sufficient import to fill her mind to the exclusion of all else, but bowled across it, as the shadows of clouds bowl across the fields on a day of spring winds, leaving the untarnished sunshine after their passage. It was not because she was heartless that she touched on this series of somewhat tremendous topics: it was rather that her vitality instantly reasserted itself: it was undeterred, impervious to discouraging or disturbing reflections.

  Dodo ate what may be termed a good tea, and smoked several cigarettes. Then noticing that a small golf links had been laid out in the fields below the garden, she rushed indoors to change her dress, and play a game with her husband.

  “It won’t be much fun for you, darling,” she said, “because my golf is a species of landscape gardening, and I dig immense hollows with my club and alter the lie of the country generally. Also I sometimes cheat, if nobody is looking, so admire the beauties of nature if you hear me say that I have a bad lie, because if you looked you would see me pushing the ball into a pleasanter place, and that would give you a low opinion of me. But a little exercise would be so good for us both after being married: the Abbey was terribly stuffy.”

  The fifth hole brought them near the memorial chapel in the Park, where her first husband was buried.

  “Darling, that puts you five up,” she said, “and would you mind waiting here a minute, while I go in alone? I don’t want even you with me: I want to go alone and kneel for a minute by his grave, and say my prayers, and tell him I have come back again with you. Will you wait for a minute, Jack? I shan’t be long.”

  Dodo wasn’t long: she said her prayers with remarkable celerity, and came out again wiping her eyes.

  “Oh, Jack,” she said, “what a beautiful monument: it wasn’t finished, you know, when I went away and I hadn’t seen it. And it’s so touching to have just those three words, ‘Lead, kindly Light’: the dear old boy was so fond of that hymn. It’s all so lovely and peaceful, and if ever there was a saint in the nineteenth century, it was he. Somehow I felt as if he knew about us and approved, and I remember we had ‘Lead, kindly Light’ on the very last Sunday evening of all. I am so glad I went in.”

  Dodo gave a little sigh.

  “Where are we?” she said. “Am I one hole up or two? Two, isn’t it? Do let it be two. And what a lovely piece of marble. It looks like the most wonderful cold cream turned to stone. It must be Carrara. Oh, Jack, what a beautiful drive! It went much faster than the legal limit.”

  * * * *

  The flames of the summer-sunset were beginning to fade in the sky when they got back to the house, and it was near dinner-time. Dodo’s spirits and appetite were both of the most excellent order, and all the memories that this house brought back to her, so far from causing any aching resuscitation of past years, were, owing to the incomparable alchemy of her mind, but transformed into a soft and suitable background for the present. Afterwards, they sat on the terrace in the warm dusk.

  “I must telegraph to Nadine tomorrow,” she said, “and tell her how happy I am. Jack, sometimes Nadine seems to me exactly what I should expect a very attractive aunt to be. Do you know what I mean? I feel she could have warned me of all the mistakes I have made in my life, before they happened, if she had been born. And she approves of you and me; isn’t it lucky? I wonder why I feel so young on the very day on which I should most naturally be thinking what a lot of life has passed. Jack, I don’t want any more events. Some people reckon life by events, and that is so unreasonable. Events are thrust upon you; what counts is what you feel.”

  He moved his chair a little nearer to hers.

  “I am satisfied with what I feel,” he said. “And though I have felt it for very many years, it has never lost its freshness. I have always wanted, and now I have got.”

  Suddenly Dodo’s mood changed.

  “Oh, you take a great risk,” she said. “Who is to assure you that I shan’t disappoint you, disappoint you horribly? I can’t assure you of that, Jack. It is easy to understand other people, but the silly proverb that tells you to know yourself, makes a far more difficult demand. If I disappoint you, what are we to do?”

  “You can’t disappoint me if you are yourself,” he said.

  “You say that! To me, too, who have outraged every sort of decency with regard to you?”

  He was silent a moment.

  “Yes, I say that to you,” he said.

  Dodo gave a little bubbling laugh.

  “You are not very polite,” she said. “I say that I have outraged every sort of decency and you don’t even contradict me.”

  “No. What you say is—is perfectly true. But the comment of you and me sitting here on our bridal night is sufficient, is it not? Dodo, there is no use in your calling yourself names. Leave it all alone: we are here, you and I. And it is getting late, my darling.”

  * * * *

  The same night Lady Ayr was giving one of her awful dinner-parties. Her family, John, Esther and Seymour were always bidden to them, and went in to dinner in exactly their proper places as sons and daughters of a marquis. Before now it had happened that Seymour had to take Esther in to dinner, and it was so tonight. But in the general way they saw so little of each other, that they did not very much object. They usually quarreled before long, but made their differences up again by their unanimity of opinion about their mother. That had already happened this evening.

  “Mother is bursting with curiosity about Aunt Dodo’s wedding,” said Esther. “She wasn’t asked. I told her it was a very pretty wedding.”

  “I went,” said Seymour, “and I am going to write an account of it for The Lady. If you will tell me how you were dressed, I will put it in, that is supposing you were decently dressed. Mother asked me about it, too, and I think I said the bridesmaids looked lovely.”

  “But there weren’t any,” said Esther.

 
; “Of course there weren’t, but it enraged her. By the way, there is some awful stained glass put up in the staircase since I was here last. A ruby crown has apparently had twins, one of which is a sapphire crown and the other a diamond crown. I shouldn’t mind that sort of thing happening, if it wasn’t so badly done. I shall try to break it by accident after dinner. Did you design it? My dear, I forgot: we had finished quarreling. Let us talk about something else. Nadine came to see me the other day, and if you will not tell anybody, I think it quite likely that I shall marry her. She likes jade. And she looks quite pretty tonight, doesn’t she?”

  Esther had already alluded to Nadine, who was sitting opposite, as the dream of dreams, and further appreciation was unnecessary.

  “You don’t happen to have asked her yet?” she said, with marked neutrality.

  “No, one doesn’t ask that sort of thing until one knows the answer,” said he. “That is, unless you are one of the ridiculous people who ask for information. I hate the information I get by asking, unless I know it already.”

  “And then you don’t get it.”

  “No. Esther, that is a charming emerald you are wearing but it is atrociously set. If you will send it round tomorrow, I will draw a decent setting for it. Do look at Mother. She has got the family lace on, which is made of string. I think it is Saxon. Oh, of course the coronets are about her. How foolish of me not to have guessed.”

  “It is more foolish of you to think that Nadine would look at you,” said Esther.

  “I didn’t ask her to look at me, and I shan’t ask her to look at me. I shall recommend her not to look at me. But I shall marry her or Antoinette. I don’t see why you are so stuffy about it. Or perhaps you would prefer Antoinette for a sister-in-law.”