The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “Shut the door quickly!” she cried. “And then come and have some breakfast, Dodo. I don’t think I shall get up today. I have been composing since six this morning, and if I get up the thread may be entirely broken. Beethoven worked at the C minor Symphony for three days and nights without eating, sleeping, or washing.”

  “I see you are eating,” remarked Dodo. “I hope that won’t prevent your giving us another C minor.”

  “The C minor is much over-rated work,” said Edith; “it is commonplace melodically, and clumsily handled. If I had composed it, I should not be very proud of it.”

  “Which is a blessing you didn’t, because then you would have composed something of which you were not proud,” said Dodo, ringing the bell. “Yes, I shall have some breakfast with you. Oh, Edith, everything is so interesting, and Hughie has slept all night, and Nadine with him. They are sleeping now, Nadine on the floor half-sitting up with her head against the bed, looking too sweet for anything. And poor dear Seymour has just gone away. I took him in to see them by way of breaking it to him. Whoever guessed that he would fall in love with her? It is very awkward, for I thought it would be such a nice sensible marriage. And now of course there will be no marriage at all.”

  At this moment the bell was answered, and Edith in trying to prevent her music-paper from practising aviation, upset the ink-bottle. Several minutes were spent in quenching the thirst of sheets of blotting paper at it, as you water horses when their day’s work is over.

  “One of the faults of your mind, Dodo,” said Edith, as this process was going on, “is that you don’t concentrate enough. You have too many objects in focus simultaneously. Now my success is due to the fact that I have only one in focus at a time. For instance this Stygian pool of ink does not distress me in the slightest—”

  “No, darling, it’s not your counterpane,” said Dodo.

  “It wouldn’t distress me if it was. But if I opened your mind I should find Hugh’s recovery, Nadine’s future, and your baby in about equally vivid colors, and all in sharp outline. Also you make too many plans for other people. Do leave something to Providence sometimes.”

  “Oh, I leave lots,” said Dodo. “I only try to touch up the designs now and then. Providence is often rather sketchy and unfinished. But yesterday’s design was absolutely wonderful. I can hardly even be sorry for Hugh.”

  Edith shook her head.

  “You are quite incorrigible,” she said. “Providence sent what was clearly intended to be a terrible event, but you see all sorts of glories in it. I don’t thing it is very polite. It is like laughing at a ghost story instead of being terrified.”

  Dodo’s breakfast had been brought in, and she fell to it with an excellent appetite.

  “There is nothing like scenes before breakfast to make one hungry,” she said. “Think how hungry a murderer would be if he was taken out to be hanged before breakfast, and then given his breakfast afterwards. I had a scene with Seymour, you know. I am very sorry for him, but somehow he doesn’t seem to matter. He lost his temper, which I rather respected, and showed me he had an ideal. That I respect too. I remember the struggles I used to go through in order to get one.”

  “Were they successful?” asked Edith.

  “Only by a process of elimination. I did everything that I wanted, and found it was a mistake. So, last of all, I married Jack. What a delightful life I have led, and how good this bacon is. Don’t you think David is a very nice name? I am going to call my baby David.”

  “It may be a girl,” said Edith.

  “Then I shall call it Bathsheba,” said Dodo without pause. “Or do I mean Beersheba? Bath, I think. Edith, why is it that when I am most anxious and full of cares, I feel it imperative to talk tommy-rot? I’m sure there is enough to worry me into a grave if not a vault, between Seymour and Nadine and Hugh. But after all, one needn’t worry about Nadine. It is quite certain that she will do as she chooses, and if she wants to marry Hugh with both arms in slings, and two crutches, and a truss and one of those sort of scrapers under one foot she certainly will. I brought her up on those lines, to know her own mind, and then do what she wanted. It has been a failure hitherto, because she has never really wanted anything. But now I think my system of education is going to be justified. I am also suffering from reaction. Last night I thought our dear Hughie was dying, and I am perfectly convinced this morning that he isn’t. So, too, I am sure, is Nadine: otherwise she couldn’t have fallen asleep like that. And what Hughie did was so splendid. I am glad God made men like that, but it doesn’t prevent my eating a huge breakfast and talking rot. I hope you don’t mean to go away. It is so dull to be alone in the house with two young lovers, even when one adores them both.”

  “Aren’t you getting on rather quick, Dodo?” asked Edith.

  “Probably: but Seymour is congédié—how do you say it—spun, dismissed, and quite certainly Nadine has fallen in love with Hugh. There isn’t time to be slow, nowadays. If you are slow you are left gasping on the beach like a fish. I still swim in the great waters, thank God.”

  Dodo got up, and her mood changed utterly. She was never other than genuine, but it had pleased Nature to give her many facets, all brilliant, but all reflecting different-colored lights.

  “Oh, my dear, life is so short,” she said, “and every moment should be so precious to everybody. I hate going to sleep, for fear I may miss something. Fancy waking in the morning and finding you had missed something, like an earthquake or suffragette riot! My days are reasonably full, but I want them to be unreasonably full. And just now Jack keeps saying, ‘Do rest: do lie down: do have some beef-tea.’ Just as if I didn’t know what was good for David! Edith, he is going to be such a gay dog! All the girls and all the women are going to fall desperately in love with him. He is going to marry when he is thirty, and not a day before, and he will be absolutely simple and unspoiled and a wicked little devil on his marriage morning. And then all his energies will be concentrated on one point, and that will be his wife. He will utterly adore her, and think of nobody else except me. I shall be seventy-four, you perceive, at that time, and so I shall be easy to please. The older one gets the easier one is to please. Already little things please me quite enormously, and big ones, as you also perceive, make me go off my head. Oh, I am sure heaven will be extremely nice, if I ever die, which God forbid; but however nice it is, it won’t be the same as this. You agree there I know; you want to make all the music you can first—”

  “As a protest against what seems to be the music of heaven,” said Edith firmly, “if we may judge by hymn tunes and chants, and the first act of Parsifal, and I suppose the last of Faust, and Handel’s oratorios. It is very degrading stuff; all the changes of key are childishly simple, and the proportion of full closes is nearly indecent. And I want another ink-bottle.”

  Edith whistled a short phrase on her teeth, as a gentle hint to her hostess.

  “It’s for the flutes,” she said, “and the ‘cellos take it up two octaves lower.”

  She grabbed at her music-paper.

  “Then the horns start it again in the subdominant,” she said, “and all the silly audience will think they are merely out of tune. That’s because they got what they didn’t expect. To be any good, you must surprise the ear. I’ll surprise them. But I want another ink-bottle. And may I have lunch in my room, Dodo, if necessary? I don’t know when I shall be able to get up.”

  Dodo was not attending in any marked manner.

  “We will all do what we choose,” she said genially.

  “We will be a sort of harmless Medmenham Abbey. You shall spill all the ink you please, and Nadine shall marry Hugh, who will get quite well, and I shall go and order dinner and see if Nadine is awake. I am afraid I am rather fatuously optimistic this morning, like Mr. Chesterton, and that is always so depressing, both to other people at the time, and to oneself subsequently. Dear me, what a charming world if there was no such thing as reaction. As a matter of fact I do not experience much of it
.”

  Edith gave a great sigh of relief as Dodo left the room, and concentrated herself with singular completeness on the horn-tune in the subdominant. She was quite devoted to Dodo, but the horn-tune was in focus just now, and she knew if Dodo had stopped any longer, she would have become barely tolerant of her presence. Shortly afterwards the fresh supply of ink came also, and Edith proceeded straight up into the seventh heaven of her own compositions, which, good or bad, were perfection itself to their author.

  Dodo found a packet of letters waiting for her and among them a telegram from Miss Grantham saying, “Deeply grieved. Can I do anything?” This she swiftly answered, replying, “Darling Grantie. Nothing whatever,” and went to Nadine’s room, where she found Nadine, half-dressed, rosy from her bath, and radiant of spirit.

  “Oh, Mama, I never had such a lovely night,” she said. “How delicious it must be to be married! I didn’t wake till half-an-hour ago, and simultaneously Hughie woke, which looks as if we suited each other, doesn’t it? And then the doctor came in, and looked at him, and said he was much stronger, much fuller of vitality for his long sleep, and he congratulated me on having made him sleep. And the nurse told me the first great danger, that he would not rally after the shock of the operation, was over. As far as that goes he will be all right.”

  Nadine kissed her mother, and clung round her neck, dewy-eyed.

  “I’m not going to think about the future,” she said. “Sufficient to the day is the good thereof. It is enough this morning that Hughie has got through the night and is stronger. If I had been given any wish to be fulfilled I should have chosen that. And if on the top of that I had been given another, it would have been that I should have helped towards it, which I suppose is the old Eve coming in. I think I had better finish dressing, Mama, instead of babbling. Have you had breakfast?”

  “Yes, dear, I had it with Edith. She is in bed making tunes and pouring ink over the counterpane, and not minding.”

  Nadine’s face clouded for a moment, in spite of the accomplishment of her wishes.

  “And then I must see Seymour,” she said. “It is no use putting that off. But, oh, Mama, to think that till yesterday I was willing to marry him, with Hugh in the world all the time. Whatever happens to Hugh, I can’t marry him, Seymour, I mean, if the ridiculous English pronouns admit of any meaning; and I must tell him.”

  “Seymour left half an hour ago,” said Dodo. “But there’s no need for you to tell him. I took him into Hugh’s room and he saw you asleep. He understands. He couldn’t very well help understanding, darling. He told me he understood before, when you called out to Hugh not to attempt the rescue. But he only understood it pretty well, as the ordinary person says he understands French. But when he saw you asleep, not exactly in Hugh’s arms, but sufficiently close, he understood it like a real native, poor boy!”

  “What did he do?” asked Nadine.

  “He behaved very rightly and properly, and lost his temper with me, just as I lose my temper with the porter at the station if I miss my train. I had been just porter to him. He thanked me for a horrid visit, only he called it damnable, and so I lost my temper, too, and we had a few flowers of speech on the staircase, not big ones, but just promising buds. And then, poor chap, he came back to me, and told me he was in hell, and I kissed him, and he didn’t seem to mind much, and I suppose he caught his train. Otherwise he would have been back by now. I’m exceedingly sorry for him, Nadine, and you must write him a sweet little letter, which won’t do any good at all, but it’s one of the things you have to do. Darling, I wonder if jilting runs in families like consumption and red faces. You see I jilted my darling Jack, to marry into your family. But you must write the sweet little letter I spoke of, because you are sorry, only you couldn’t help it.”

  “Did you write a sweet little letter under—under the same circumstances to Papa Jack?” asked Nadine.

  “No, dear, because I hadn’t got anybody exceedingly wise to give me that good advice,” said Dodo. “Also, because I was a little brute there is no reason why you should be.”

  “Perhaps it runs in the family, too,” suggested Nadine.

  “Then the quicker it runs out of the family the better. Besides you are sorry for Seymour.”

  Nadine opened her hands wide.

  “Am I? I hope so,” she said. “But if you are quite full of gladness for one thing, Mama, it is a little difficult to find a corner for anything else.”

  Dodo turned to leave the room.

  “Anywhere will do. Just under the stairs,” she said. “I don’t want to put it in the middle of the drawing-room. After all, darling, you propose to jilt him.”

  “There’s something in that,” said Nadine. “Oh, Mama, I used not to have any heart at all, and now that I’ve got one it doesn’t belong to me.”

  “No woman’s heart belongs to her,” said Dodo. “If it belongs to her, it isn’t a heart.”

  “I should have thought that nonsense yesterday,” said Nadine. “Oh, wait while I finish dressing; I shan’t be ten minutes. What meetings we have had in my lovely back room! One, I remember so particularly. You and Esther and Berts all lay on my bed like sardines in evening dresses, and I had just refused to marry Hugh, who was playing billiards with Uncle Algie. Somehow the things like love and devotion seemed to me quite old-fashioned, or anyhow they seemed to me signs of age. They did, indeed. I thought a clear brain was infinitely preferable to a confused heart, especially if it belonged to somebody else. I’m not used to it, Mama: it still seems to me very odd like a hat that doesn’t fit. But it’s a fact, and I suppose I shall grow into it, not that any one ever grew into a hat. But when Hugh swam out yesterday morning, something came tumbling down inside me. Or was it that only something cracked, like the shell of a nut? It does not much matter, so long as it is not mended again. But how queer that it should happen in a second, like that. I suppose time has nothing to do with what concerns one’s soul. I believe Plato says something about it. I don’t think I shall look it up. He wrote wonderfully, but when a thing happens to oneself, that seems to matter more than Plato’s reflections on the subject.”

  There was a short pause as Nadine brushed her teeth, but Dodo sitting on the unslept-in bed did not feel inclined to break it. She wondered whether a particular point in the situation would occur to Nadine, whether her illumination as regards a woman’s heart threw any light on that very different affair, a man’s heart. She was not left long in doubt. The question of a man’s heart was altogether unilluminated, and to Dodo there was something poignantly pathetic about Nadine’s blissful ignorance. She came and sat down on the bed close to her mother.

  “Hughie will see I love him,” she said, “because he won’t be able to help it. I shall just wait, oh, so happily, for him to say again what he has so often said before. He will know my answer, before I give it him. I hope he will say it soon. Then we shall be engaged, and people who are engaged are a little freer, aren’t they, Mama?”

  Dodo felt incapable of clouding that radiant face, for she knew in the days that were coming, all its radiance would be needed: not a single sparkle of light must be wasted. But it did not seem to her very likely that Hugh, whose joyous strength and splendid activity had been so often rejected by Nadine, would be likely to offer to her again what would be, in all probability, but a crippled parody of himself. But her sense of justice told her that Nadine owed him all the strength and encouragement her eager vitality could give him. It was only fair that she should devote herself to him, and let him feel all the inspiration to live that her care of him could give him. But it seemed to her very doubtful if Hugh would consent, even if he perceived that it was love not warm friendship that she gave him, to let himself and his crippled body appeal to her. In days gone by, she would not marry him for love, and it seemed to Dodo that a real man, as Hugh was, would not allow her to marry him for pity. He had offered her his best, and she had refused it; it would not be surprising if he refused to offer her his worst. The joy t
hat had inspired Dodo so that she had softly melted over the sight of Nadine asleep by Hugh, and had exultantly mopped up the spilt ink with Edith, suddenly evaporated, leaving her dry and cold.

  “You must wait, Nadine,” she said. “You must make no plans. Give Hughie your vitality, and don’t ask more.”

  She got up.

  “Now, my darling, I shall go downstairs,” she said, “and order your breakfast. You must be hungry. And then you can say your prayers, and breakfast will be ready.”

  Nadine, absorbed in her own thoughts, felt nothing of this.

  “Prayers?” she said. “Why I was praying all night till dawn. At least, I was wanting, just wanting, and not for myself. Isn’t that prayers?”

  Dodo loved that: it was exactly what she meant in her inmost heart by prayers. She drew Nadine to her and kissed her.

  “Darling, you have said enough for a week,” she said, “if not more. And you said them because you must, which is the only proper plan. If you don’t feel you must say your prayers, it is just as well not to say them at all. But you shall have breakfast, whether you feel you must or not. I say you must.”

  CHAPTER XII

  One morning a fortnight later, Jack, Dodo, and Edith were sitting together on the cliff above the bay, looking down to the sandy foreshore. Jack, finding that Dodo was obliged to stop at Meering with Nadine, had personally abandoned his third shooting-party, leaving Berts, whom he implicitly trusted to make himself and everybody else quite comfortable, in charge. Among the guests was Berts’ father, whom Berts apparently kept in his place. Jack had just told Dodo and Edith the contents of Berts’ letter, received that morning. All was going very well, but Berts had arranged that his father should escort two ladies of the party to see the interesting town of Lichfield one afternoon, instead of shooting the Warren beat, where birds came high and Berts’ father was worse than useless. But it was certain that he would enjoy Lichfield very much, and the shoot would be more satisfactory without him. If his mother was still at Meering, Berts sent his love, and knew she would agree with him.