The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  The nurse’s room was a dressing-room attached to the bedroom where Hugh lay. Nadine went in through this, and the door into the room beyond being open, she saw that Nurse Bryerley was in there. At this moment she looked up and saw Nadine. She turned towards Hugh’s bed.

  “Here’s a visitor for you,” she said, and beckoned to Nadine to enter. She heard Hugh ask “Who?” in a voice that sounded somehow expectant, and she went in. In the doorway she passed Nurse Bryerley coming out, and the door closed behind her.

  Hugh had raised himself on his elbow in bed, and the light in his eyes showed that, though he had asked who his visitor was, his heart knew. He neither spoke nor moved while Nadine came across the room to his bedside. Then in a whisper:

  “It is Nadine,” he said.

  She knelt down by the bed.

  “Yes, Hughie. You wanted me,” she said.

  “I always want you,” he answered.

  For a moment Nadine hid her face in her hands without replying. Then she raised it again to him.

  “Hughie, you have always got me,” she said.

  She drew that beloved head down to hers.

  * * * *

  “And the news?” she said presently.

  “Oh, that!” said Hugh. “It’s only that I am going to get quite well and strong again. That’s all.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  Dodo was sitting in her room in Jack’s house in Eaton Square, one morning towards the end of May, being moderately busy. She was trying to engage in a very intimate conversation with her husband, and simultaneously to conduct communication through the telephone, to smoke a cigarette, and to write letters. Considering the complicated nature of the proceeding viewed as a whole, she was getting on fairly well, but occasionally became a little mixed up in her mind, and spoke of intimate things to Jack in the determined telephone voice habitually used, or puffed cigarette smoke violently into the receiver. She had just done this and apologized to the Central exchange.

  “I never knew you could send smoke down a telephone,” remarked Jack.

  “Double one two four Gerrard,” said Dodo. “In these days of modern science you can’t tell what is going to happen, and it’s well to anticipate anything. No, you fool, I mean Miss, I said double one two four, eleven hundred and twenty four, if that makes it simpler. As I was saying, Jack, I don’t see why I shouldn’t stop in town, and have my baby here. You can put lots of straw down, like Margery Daw, and that always looks so interesting. I should like to have straw down permanently, why don’t we? Darling, how are you, and as Jack’s going out to lunch, and I shall be quite alone, do come round—”

  Dodo’s face suddenly became seraphically blank.

  “Oh, are you?” she said. “Then will you tell Mrs. Arbuthnot that I hope she will come round to lunch with Lady Chesterford. Jack, I said all that to Edith’s footman, who always smiles at me. I wonder if he will come to lunch instead, and say I asked him, which after all is quite true. But Edith talks so much like a man, that of course I thought it was she, whereas it was he. Yes, I don’t see why I should go down to Winston for it. Babies born in London are just as healthy as babies born in Staffordshire, and people will drop in more easily afterwards. Besides I must go to Nadine’s wedding if I possibly can. It would be like reading a story that you know quite well is going to end happily, and finding that the last chapter of all, which you have been saving up for, so to speak, is torn out. I shall have the most enormous lump in my throat when I see her and Hughie go up to the altar-rails together, and I love lumps in the throat. Don’t you? I don’t mean quinzy.”

  “I’ll tell you all about the last chapter,” said Jack.

  “That would be very dear of you, but it wouldn’t be the same thing at all. I want to see it, to see Hugh walking as if he had never been smashed into ten thousand smithereens, and Nadine, as if she had never thought about anybody else since her cradle. Oh, by the way, they have settled at last that they would like to go on the yacht for their honeymoon. They are both bad sailors, but I suppose there are lots of harbors or breakwaters about, and they think it is the only plan by which they can be certain of being undisturbed. If it is rough, they will find a sort of pleasure in being sick into one basin: I really think they will. They are in that sort of foolishness, that whatever they do together will be in the Garden of Eden. And they are just forty-five years old between them which is exactly what I am all by myself. It seems quite a coincidence, though I have no idea what it coincides with. So let them have the yacht, Jack, as you suggested, and the moon will be lovely, honey, and they will be exceedingly unwell!”

  Dodo finished her letter, and having telephoned enough for the present, came and sat in a chair by her husband, in order to continue the intimate conversation.

  “Jack, dear,” she said, “I never do behave quite like anybody else, as you have known, poor wretch, for I don’t know how many years. So you must be prepared for surprises when I give you that darling David. Something ridiculous will happen. There’ll be two or three of them, and the papers will say I have had a litter, or I shall die, or David will arrive quite unexpectedly like a flash of lightning, and I shall say, ‘Good heavens, David, is it you?’ I should be exceedingly annoyed if I died—”

  “So should I,” said Jack.

  “I really believe you would. But it would be more annoying for me, because however nice the next world is going to be, I haven’t had enough of this. I want years and years more, because eternity is there just the same, and if I live to be a hundred there won’t be anything the less of that. Eternity is safe, so to speak: it is invested in the bank, but time is just pocket-money, of which you always say I want such a lot. Eternity will always be on tap, or else it wouldn’t be eternal. But this particular brew will come to an end, and I shall be so sorry when the last gurgle sounds, and one knows there is no more. It couldn’t come more nicely, if when it sounded, I had given you a son. I can’t imagine any nicer way to die. On the other hand, there’s no reason anywhere near as nice for living.”

  Jack put a great hand on her arm.

  “Dodo, if you talk about dying, I shall be—shall be as sick as Hughie and Nadine together,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t. But you see since we are us—is that right?—there is nothing I can’t say to you, because I am only talking to myself. I wonder if I had better write a quantity of letters to my son, as some woman, I believe a spinster, did. David shall read them when he has learned how to read. Oh, I could tell him so well how to make love, I know exactly what women like a man to be. Luckily, so few men really know it, otherwise the world would go round much quicker, and we should all be blown off it. Oh, Jack, fancy a woman who had never known what child-bearing meant attempting to describe it! You might as well sit down at your bureau and write letters to David.”

  “I could write jolly good ones,” said Jack serenely.

  “I am sure they would be excellent, but they would be nonsense from the other’s point of view. It is so holy—so holy! Once it wasn’t holy to me; it was merely a bore. Then, when Nadine was born, it was not holy, but very exciting, and hugely delightful. But now it is holy.”

  Dodo put up her foot, and kicked Jack’s knee.

  “It’s yours, as well as mine,” she said. “Poor dear holy Jack. But I love you; that makes such a difference.”

  Jack caught Dodo’s foot in his hand.

  “Oh, Jack, let go,” she said. “It’s bad for me.”

  Instantly his fingers relaxed; and a look of agonized apology came over his face. Dodo laughed.

  “Oh, Jack, you silly old woman,” she said. “It is so easy to take you in.”

  But her laughter quickly ceased, and she became quite grave again.

  “I don’t want you to be as sick as Nadine and Hughie combined,” she cried, “but I should like to make a few cheerful remarks about dying. We’ve all got to do it, and it doesn’t make it any closer to talk about it. It’s a pity we can’t practise it, so as to be able to do it nicely, but it�
��s one performance only, without rehearsals, unless you die daily like St. Paul. I don’t think I shall do it at all solemnly or tragically, Jack, for it would not be the least in keeping with my life to have one tragic scene at the end. Nor would it suit the rest of my life to be frightened at it. You see if we all held hands and stood in a row and said, ‘One, two, three, now we’ll die,’ it wouldn’t be at all alarming. And then you see from a religious point of view, God has been such a brick—is that profane? I don’t think it is—such a brick to me all my life, that it seems most unlikely that He won’t see me through. Jack, dear, you look depressed. I won’t talk about it any more. I shall very likely out-live you, and I shall be such a comfort to you when you are dying. I shall be exceedingly annoyed, just as you said you would be if I did it, but, oh, my dear, I shall say au revoir to you with such a stout heart, and when I pass through the valley of the shadow myself how I shall look for your dear gray eyes to welcome me. It will be interesting! And now, as they say at the end of sermons, I must get ready to go out with Nadine. I promised to go out with her for an hour before lunch. Pull me up, and give me a chaste salute on my marble brow. What a good invention you are! It would be worse than going back to the days of hansoms and four-wheelers to be without you. Without undue flattery, it would!”

  Dodo’s slight attack of seriousness evaporated completely, and having tried the effect of her hat, which comprised, so she said, the entire flora and fauna of Brazil, on Jack’s head, put it on her own, and sent a message to Nadine that she had been waiting an hour and a half.

  “But Hughie shall not come out with us,” she said, “since he and Nadine don’t pay the smallest attention to me, when they are together, and I feel alone in London. Besides, Nadine has to buy things that young gentlemen don’t know anything about—and here you are at last, my darling Nadine, but I’m not going to take your darling with us, any more than he takes you to his haberdasher, or whoever it is sells that sort of thing. Don’t look cross, Hughie, because Jack’s going to let you have the yacht, and you and Nadine can be unwell to your heart’s content. Go and sulk at your club, dear, for an hour, and then you come back to lunch, and stop for tea and dinner if you like. But the obduracy of your esteemed mother-in-law elect on the subject of the drive is quite invincible. Dear me, what beautiful language!”

  Nadine and her mother did their errands, and as only Edith was going to lunch with them, who was almost invariably half-an-hour late, but who, if she arrived in time, would be quite certain to begin lunch without them, they prolonged their outing by a turn in the Park. The morning was of that exquisite tempered heat that lies midway between the uncertain warmth of spring and the fierceness of true midsummer weather, and following, as it did, on a week of rainy days had brought out both crowds and flowers. The little green seats and shady alleys were full of kaleidoscopic color from hats and parasols and summer dresses, and more stable than these, but hardly less brilliant, were the clumps of full-flowered rhododendrons and beds of blossomings. The dust had been laid on the roads, and washed from the angled planes, and summer sat in the lap of spring. Summer and spring too, as it were, sat side by side in Dodo’s motor, and who could say which was the more glorious, the mother in the splendor of her full-blown life, or Nadine, that exquisite opening bud, still dewy in the morning of her days, no wild-flower, but more like an orchid, fragrant and subtle and complex. All that still remained to her: she would never be wild-rose or honeysuckle, in spite of the big simple human love which had come to her, and daily sprang higher, flame-like.

  Today neither paid much attention to the crowd that contained so many friends. Occasionally Dodo blew a sudden gale of kissed finger-tips at some especially beloved face, but the smile that never left her face, though it did duty for general salutation, was really inspired from within. Her daughter’s awakening was a deep joy to Dodo.

  “You and Hughie and Jack and I ought to be stuffed and put in the South Kensington Museum, darling,” she said, “as curious survivals of absolutely happy people, who are getting exceedingly rare. I should utter a few words of passionate protest when the executioner and the taxidermist arrived, but I think I should consent for the good of the nation in general.”

  Nadine disagreed altogether.

  “We are much more useful alive,” she said, “because we’re infectious. Or would our broad fatuous grins be infectious when we were stuffed? Oh, there’s Seymour, Mama. Do kiss your hand violently, because it wouldn’t be suitable for me to. I can only smile regretfully.”

  “But you don’t regret,” said Dodo, after giving him a perfect volley of kissed finger-tips.

  “No, but only because I can’t. My will regrets. He has sent me a lovely necklace of jade, with a little label, ‘Jade for the jade,’ on it. So I think he must feel better, as it’s a sort of joke. I wrote him quite a nice little note, and said how dear it would be of him to come to my wedding, if he felt up to it.”

  Dodo giggled.

  “My dear, that is exactly what I should have done at your age,” she said. “But I think I should have kissed my hand to him just now, and people would certainly have thought you heartless, if you had, just because they have got great wooden hearts themselves, accurately regulated, that pump exactly sixty times in a minute, neither more nor less. You do feel kindly and warmly to poor Seymour, and you trust he is getting over it. About stuffing us, now. I’m not quite sure I should stuff Papa Jack. He’s anxious about me, poor old darling, as if at my age I didn’t know how to have a baby properly. I talked about dying a little, which upset him, I’m afraid, though it wasn’t in the least meant to. My dear, to think that in ten days from now you’ll be married! Nadine, I do look forward to being a grandmama: I want to be lots of grandmamas, if you see what I mean. Then there’ll be Papa Hughie, and Papa Jack, and look, there’s Papa Waldenech. I never knew he was in town. We must stop a moment: I have not seen him since he came uninvited to my ball in the autumn, a little bit on. Ah, what a fool I am: he meant me not to tell you, so bear in mind that I haven’t. Waldenech, my dear, what a surprise!”

  They drew up at the curb, and he came to the carriage-door, hat in hand, courteous, distinguished and evil.

  “I have just come from Paris,” he said. “It is charming of you to welcome me. Nadine, too. Nadine, is your father to be allowed to come to your wedding? May I—”

  Dodo had half-risen to greet him, and he saw the lines of her figure. He broke off short.

  “You are going to be a mother again?” he said.

  “Yes, my dear, but you needn’t tell the Albert Memorial about it,” said she. “And of course you may come to Nadine’s wedding. I had no notion you would be in England.”

  He appeared to pay not the slightest attention to this—but looked at her eagerly, hungrily, at those wonderful brown eyes, at the still youthful oval of her face, at the mouth he had so often kissed.

  “My God, you are a beautiful woman!” he said. “And you used to be mine!”

  Then he turned abruptly, and walked straight away from them without another glance. Dodo looked after him in silence a moment, frowning and smiling together.

  “Poor old chap: it was a shock to him somehow,” she said. “But he’ll go back to the Ritz and steady himself. How old he has got to look, Nadine.”

  But Nadine had the frown without the smile.

  “I didn’t like the way he went off,” she said. “He didn’t give another thought to my wedding, Mama, after he saw. He looked hungry for you, and he looked horrible. He admired you so enormously. He was thinking of what he had lost and what Papa Jack had gained. And I felt frightened of him, just as I felt frightened one night when I was very little, and he came stumbling into the nursery, and wanted to say good-night to me. I remember my nurse tried to turn him out, and he looked as if he would have murdered her. Poor Daddy isn’t a nice man, you know.”

  But Nadine looked more puzzled than vexed.

  Dodo’s frown had quite cleared away. She was far too essentially happ
y to mind little surface disturbances.

  “Poor old Daddy,” she said. “He was startled, darling, and when people are startled they look like themselves, that is all, and Daddy isn’t quite nice, any more than the rest of us are. But it was rather sweet of him to want to go to your wedding. I hope he will be sober. He will probably want to kiss us all in the vestry, all of us except Jack. I shall certainly kiss him, if he shows the slightest wish that I should do so. But he might be nasty to Jack. Perhaps we had better not tell Jack he is here. It might make him anxious again, like when I talked about death this morning. Oh, Nadine, look at those delicious horses, cantering along, and praising God because they feel so strong and young! What a rotten seat that man has: oh, of course he has, because he’s Berts. How he fidgets his horse—Berts, dear—”

  And Dodo blew a shower of kisses on the end of her fingers.

  Nadine’s enjoyment in this liquid air had been suddenly extinguished. She herself hardly knew why, but her lowered pleasure she felt to be connected with her father. She tried, very sensibly, to get rid of it by speech, for the unreal thing when spoken, became so fantastically absurd.

  “Was Daddy ever very jealous about you?” she asked.

  Dodo recalled her mind from the tragedy of Berts riding so badly.

  “But violently pea-green with it,” she said, “so that sometimes I didn’t know if I could say good-morning to the butler in safety. That was in the early days, and I am bound to confess that he got over it. After that came my turn to be jealous, but I never took my turn, for between the particular old brandy and Mademoiselle Chose, if you understand, poor Daddy became entirely impossible. But for auld lang syne I shall certainly kiss him in the vestry after your wedding, and he shall sign his name if he feels up to it.”