The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  * * * *

  Certainly it was the most successful cotillion. As Dodo had arranged, all the more unattractive people got selected first, and all the more attractive, as Dodo had foreseen, saw exactly what was happening. The style was distinctly anti-Leap-year and in the mirror-figure men, instead of women, rejected the faces in the glass, and Lord Ayr had nothing whatever to say to his wife, who was instantly accepted by Jack. And at the end, the band preceding, they danced through the entire house, from cellar to garret. They waltzed through drawing-rooms and dining-room, and up the stairs, and through Dodo’s bedroom, and through Jack’s dressing-room, where his pajamas were lying on his bed (Berts put them on en passant), and into cul-de-sacs, and impenetrable servants’ rooms. And somehow it was Dodo all the time who inspired these childish orgies: those near her saw her, those behind danced wildly after her. There was no accounting for it, except in the fact that while she was enjoying herself so enormously, it was impossible not to enjoy too. Sometimes it was she shrieking, “Yes, straight on,” sometimes it was her laugh-choked voice, saying “No, don’t go in there,” but the fact that she was leading them, with her nursery fender, and her vitality, and her ropes of pearls, and her complete abandon to the spirit of dancing, with Berts for partner in Jack’s pajamas, made a magnet that it was impossible not to follow. They passed through bedroom and attic, they went twice round the huge kitchen, where the chef, at Dodo’s imperious command, laid down his culinary implements (which at the moment meant an ice-pail) and joined the dance with the first kitchen-maid. Then Dodo saw a footman standing idle, and called to him, “Take my maid, William,” and William with a broad grin embraced a perfectly willing Frenchwoman of great attractions, and joined in the dance. Like the fairies in a Midsummer-night’s Dream, they danced the whole hour through, Dodo with Berts, the chef with the kitchen-maid, William with Dodo’s maid, Lord Ayr with Nadine, Lady Ayr with somebody whom nobody knew by sight, who had probably come there by mistake, and the first twenty couples or so finished up in the cellar. This, though it seemed improvised, had been provided for, and there were cane-chairs to rest in, and bottles instantly opened. The rest, following the band, danced their way back to the supper-room, where they were almost immediately joined by the cellar party, who were hungry as well as thirsty, and had nothing to eat down below.

  * * * *

  It was between three and four o’clock that the last guests took their ways. As the dance had been announced to take place from ten till two, the cordial spirit of the invitation had been made good. And at length Dodo found herself alone with Jack.

  “Lovely, just lovely,” she said, as he unclasped her diamond collar. “Oh, Jack, what a darling world it is!”

  “Not tired?”

  Dodo faced round, and her brilliance and freshness was a thing to marvel at

  “Look at me!” she said. “Tell me if I look tired!”

  He laid the collar down on her table: her neck seemed to him so infinitely more beautiful than the gorgeous bauble with which it had been covered, a Beauty released from beauteous bonds.

  “Not very. Ah, Dodo, and this is the best of all, when they have all gone, and you are left.”

  She put her face up to his.

  “Why, of course,” she said. “Do you suppose I wasn’t looking forward to this one minute alone with you all the evening? I was, my dear, though if I said I thought of it all the time, I should be telling a silly lie. But it was anchored firmly in my mind all the time. Oh, what pretty speeches for a middle-aged old couple to make to each other! But the fact is that we get on very nicely together. Good-night, old boy. It’s all too lovely. Oh, Daddy! Fancy becoming Daddy! Oh, by the way, did Hugh come? I didn’t see him.”

  “Yes, he sat out a couple of dances with Nadine, and then went away.”

  “Poor old chap!” said Dodo.

  As has been mentioned, Dodo proposed to take her family and a great many other people as well to spend Christmas down at Meering, which at this inclement time of the year often had spells of warm and genial weather. Scattered through the same weeks there were to be several shooting-parties at Winston, but motor-cars, driven at a sufficiently high speed, made light of the difficulty of being in two places at the same time, and on the day after the dance she talked these arrangements over with Nadine.

  “In any case,” she said, “you can be hostess in one house and I, in the other, so that we can be in two places at once quite easily, so Jack is wrong as usual. Jack dear, I said ‘as usual.’”

  Jack got up: it was he who had made the ill-considered remark that you can’t be in two places at once.

  “I heard,” he said, “and you may hear, too, that I will not have you going up to North Wales every other day, and flying down again the next. Otherwise you may settle what you like. Personally, I shall be at Winston almost all the time, as there’s a heap of business to be done, and as Nadine hates shooting-parties—”

  “Oh, a story!” said Nadine.

  “Well, my dear, you always do your best to spoil them by making a large quantity of young gentlemen, who have been asked to shoot, sit round you and talk to you instead.”

  “Papa Jack, if you want to call me a flirt, pray do so. I will forgive you instantly. And to save you trouble, I will tell you what you are driving to—”

  “At,” said Jack.

  “Driving to,” repeated Nadine with considerable asperity, for she was aware she was wrong. “You want me to be at Meering, and Mama to be at Winston. So why not say so without calling me a flirt?”

  “This daughter of Eve—” began Jack.

  “My name is Dorothea,” interrupted Dodo, “but they call me Dodo for short. I was never called Eve either before, during, or after baptism.”

  “All I mean,” said Jack, “is that Dorothea is not going to divide the week into week-ends, and be twenty-four hours at Meering and then twenty-four at Winston. The master of the house has spoken.”

  “What a bully!” said Nadine.

  “Then I shan’t give you a wedding-present,” said Jack.

  “Darling Papa Jack, you are not a bully. Let’s all go down to Meering in a few days, and stop there over Christmas. Then you and Dorothea shall go to Winston, and I shall be left all alone at Meering, and you shall have your horrid shooting-parties and she shall do the flirting instead of me.”

  “Strictly speaking, will you be all alone at Meering?”

  “Not absolutely. I have asked a few friends.”

  “Who is going to chaperone you all, darling?” said Dodo.

  “We shall chaperone each other, as usual.”

  “That you and Dodo can settle,” said Jack. “Good-by: don’t quarrel.”

  “Indeed, that will be all right, Mama,” said Nadine, “or I daresay Edith would come. Anyhow, we were often all together before like that in the summer.”

  “Yes, my dear, but it’s a little different now,” said Dodo. “You are engaged to Seymour, and Hugh is going to be there, too.”

  “Yes, but that makes it all the simpler.”

  Dodo got up.

  “I wonder if you realize that Seymour is in love with you,” she said. “In love with you like Hugh is, I mean.”

  “Perfectly, and he is charming about it,” said Nadine. “And I practise every morning being in love with him like that. I think I am getting on very well. I dreamed about him last night. I thought he gave me a great box of jade and when I opened it, there was a rabbit inside—”

  “That shows great progress,” said Dodo.

  “Mama, I think you are laughing at me. But what would you have? I am very fond of him, he is handsome and clever and charming. I expected to find it tiresome when he told me he was in love like that, but it is not the least so.”

  Memories of the man she had married when she was even younger than Nadine, came unbidden into Dodo’s mind: she remembered her first husband’s blind, dog-like devotion and her own ennui when he strove to express it, to communicate it to her.

 
“Nadine,” she said, “treat it reverently, my dear. There is nothing in the world that a man can give a woman that is to be compared to that. It is better than a rabbit in a jade-box. When I was even younger than you, Papa Jack’s cousin gave it me, and—and I didn’t reverence it. Don’t repeat my irreparable error.”

  “Weren’t you nice to him?” asked Nadine.

  “I was a brute beast to him, my darling.”

  “Oh, I shan’t be a brute beast to Seymour,” said Nadine. “Besides, I don’t suppose you were. You didn’t know: wasn’t that all?”

  Dodo wiped the mist from her eyes.

  “No, that wasn’t nearly all. But be tender with it, and pray, oh, my dear, pray, that you may catch that—that ‘noble fever.’ Who calls it that? It is so true. And Hughie? I never saw him last night.”

  Nadine made a little gesture of despair.

  “Ah, dear Hughie,” she said. “That is not very happy. That is so largely why I wanted to marry Seymour quickly, in January instead of later, so that it may be done, and Hughie will not fret any more. I hate seeing him suffer, and I can’t marry him. It would not be fair: it would be cheating him, as I told him before.”

  “But you are not cheating Seymour?” asked Dodo.

  “Not in the same way. He is not simple, like Hugh. Hugh has only one thought: Seymour has plenty of others. He has such a mind: it is subtle and swift like a woman’s. Hughie has the mind of a great retriever dog, and the eyes of one. There is all the difference in the world between them. Seymour knows what he is in for, and still wants it. Hugh thinks he knows, but he doesn’t. I understand Hugh so well: I know I am right. And I would have given anything to be able to be in love with him. It was a pity!”

  There was something here that Dodo had not known and there was a dangerous sound about it.

  “Do you mean you wish you were in love with him?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes, Mama, but I’m not. I used to practice trying to be for months and months, just as I am practising for Seymour now. La, la, what a world!”

  Nadine paused a moment.

  “Of course I’ve quite stopped practising being in love with Hugh since I was engaged to Seymour,” she said with an air of the most candid virtue. “That would be cheating.”

  Nadine got up looking like a tall white lily.

  “Seymour is so good for me,” she said. “He doesn’t think much of my brain, you know, and I used to think a good deal of it. He doesn’t say I’m stupid, but he hasn’t got the smallest respect for my mind. I am not sure whether he is right, but I expect seeing so much of Hugh made me think I was clever. I wonder if being in love makes people stupid. He himself seems to me to be not quite so subtle as he was, and perhaps it’s my fault. What do you think, Mama?”

  DODO’S DAUGHTER (Part 3)

  CHAPTER IX

  It was the morning after Christmas Day, and Dodo and Jack had just driven off from Meering on their way to Winston, where a shooting-party was to assemble that day, leaving behind them a party that regretted their departure, but did not mean to repine. Edith Arbuthnot had promised to arrive two days before, to take over from Dodo the duty of chaperone, but she had not yet come, nor had anything whatever been heard of her.

  “Which shows,” said Berts lucidly, “that nothing unpleasant can have happened to mother, or we should have heard.”

  Until she came Nadine had very kindly consented to act as regent, and in that capacity she appeared in the hall a little while after Dodo had gone, with a large red contadina umbrella, a book or two, and an expressed determination to sit out on the hillside till lunch-time.

  “It is boxing-day, I know,” she said, “but it is too warm to box, even if I knew how. The English climate has gone quite mad, and I have told my maid to put my fur coat in a box with those little white balls until May. Now I suppose you are all going to play the foolish game with those other little white balls till lunch.”

  Seymour was seated in the window-sill, stitching busily at a piece of embroidery which Antoinette had started for him.

  “I am going to do nothing of the sort,” he said. “It is much too fine a day to do anything so limited as to play golf. Besides there is no one here fit to play with. Nadine, will you be very kind and ring for my maid? I am getting in a muddle.”

  Berts, who was sitting near him, got up, looking rather ill. Also he resented being told he was not fit to play with.

  “May I have my perambulator, please, Nadine?” he asked.

  Seymour grinned.

  “Berts, you are easier to get a rise out of than any one I ever saw,” he remarked. “It is hardly worth while fishing for you, for you are always on the feed. And if you attempt to rag, I shall prick you with my needle.”

  Nadine lingered a little after the others had gone, and as soon as they were alone Seymour put down his embroidery.

  “May I come and sit on the hillside with you?” he asked. “Or is the—the box-seat already engaged?”

  “Hugh suggested it,” she said. “I was going out with him.”

  Seymour picked up his work again.

  “It seems to me I am behaving rather nicely,” he said. “At the same time I’m not sure that I am not behaving rather anemically. I haven’t seen you much since I came down here. And after all I didn’t come down here to see Esther.”

  Nadine frowned, and laid her hand on his arm. But she did not do it quite instinctively. It was clear she thought it would be appropriate. Certainly that was quite clear to Seymour.

  “Take that hand away,” he said. “You only put it there because it was suitable. You didn’t want to touch me.”

  Nadine removed her hand, as if his coat-sleeve was red-hot.

  “You are rather a brute,” she said.

  “No, I am not, unless it is brutal to tell you what you know already. I repeat that I am behaving rather nicely.”

  It was owing to him to do him justice.

  “I know you are,” she said, “you are behaving very nicely indeed. But it is only for a short time, Seymour. I don’t mean that you won’t always behave nicely, but that there are only a limited number of days on which this particular mode of niceness will be required of you, or be even possible. Hugh is going away next week; after that you and I will be Darby and Joan before he sees me again. You are all behaving nicely: he is too. He just wanted one week more of the old days, when we didn’t think, but only babbled and chattered. I can’t say that he is reviving them with very conspicuous success: he doesn’t babble much, and I am sure he thinks furiously all the time. But he wanted the opportunity: it wasn’t much to give him.”

  “Especially since I pay,” said Seymour quickly.

  He saw the blood leap to Nadine’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I oughtn’t to have said that, though it is quite true. But I pay gladly: you must believe that also. And I’m glad Hugh is behaving nicely, that he doesn’t indulge in—in embarrassing reflections. Also, when does he go away?”

  “Tuesday, I think.”

  “Morning?” asked Seymour hopefully.

  Nadine laughed: he had done that cleverly, making a parody and a farce out of that which a moment before had been quite serious.

  “You deserve it should be,” she said.

  “Then it is sure to be in the afternoon. Now I’ve finished being spit-fire—I want to ask you something. You haven’t been up to your usual form of futile and clannish conversation. You have been rather plaintive and windy—”

  “Windy?” asked Nadine.

  “Yes, full of sighs, and I should say it was Shakespeare. Are you worrying about anything?”

  She looked up at him with complete candor.

  “Why, of course, about Hughie,” she said. “How should I not?”

  “I don’t care two straws about that,” said Seymour, “as long as your worrying is not connected with me. I mean I am sorry you worry, but I don’t care. Of course you worry about Hugh. I understand that, because I understand what Hugh feels, and one
doesn’t like one’s friends feeling like that. But it’s not about—about you and me?”

  Nadine shook her head and Seymour got up.

  “Well, let us all be less plaintive,” he said. “I have been rather plaintive too. I think I shall go and take on that great foolish Berts at golf. He will be plaintive afterwards, but nobody minds what Berts is.”

  * * * *

  Whatever plaintiveness there was about, was certainly not shared by the weather, which, if it was mad, as Nadine had suggested, was possessed by a very genial kind of mania. An octave of spring-like days, with serene suns, and calm seas, and light breezes from the southwest had decreed an oasis in midwinter, warm halcyon days made even in December the snowdrops and aconites to blossom humbly and bravely, and set the birds to busy themselves with sticks and straws as if nesting-time was already here. New grass already sprouted green among the grayness of the older growths, and it seemed almost cynical to doubt that spring was not verily here. Indeed where Hugh and Nadine sat this morning, it was May not March that seemed to have invaded and conquered December; there lay upon the hillside a vernal fragrance that set a stray bee or two buzzing round the honied sweetness of the gorse with which the time of blossoming is never quite over, and today all the winds were still, and no breeze stirred in the bare slender birches, or set the spring-like stalks of the heather quivering. Only, very high up in the unplumbed blue of the zenith thin fleecy clouds lay stretched in streamers and combed feathers of white, showing that far above them rivers of air swept headlong and swift.