The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “I doubt that,” said Edith loudly.

  “This is German scepticism then. Jack is much more like a boy than you are like a girl.”

  “I never was like a girl,” said Edith. “Ask Bertie, ask anybody. I was always mature and feverish. Dodo was always calculating, and her calculations were interrupted by impulse. Jack was always the devout lover. The troubadour on my medal is extremely like him.”

  Jack passed his hand over his forehead.

  “What are we talking about?” he said.

  “Getting old, darling,” said Dodo.

  “So we are. But the fact is, you know, that we’re getting old all the time, but we don’t notice it till some shock comes. That crystallises things. What is fluid in you takes shape.”

  Dodo got up.

  “So we’ve got to wait for a shock,” she said. “Is that all you can suggest? Anyhow, I shall hold your hand if a shock comes. What sort of a shock would be good for me, do you think? I know what would be good for Edith, and that would be that she suddenly found that she couldn’t help writing music that was practically indistinguishable from the Messiah.”

  “And that,” said Edith, “is blasphemy.”

  Jack caught on.

  “Hush, Dodo,” he said, “an inspired, a sacred work to all true musicians.”

  Edith glanced wildly round.

  “I shall go mad,” she said, “if there is any more of this delicious English humour. Handel! Me and Handel! How dare you? Brutes!”

  CHAPTER II

  HIGHNESS

  Unlike most women Dodo much preferred to breakfast downstairs in a large dining-room, facing the window, rather than mumble a private tray in bed. Jack, in consequence, was allowed to be as grumpy as he pleased at this meal, for Dodo’s sense of fairness told her that if she was so unfeminine as to feel cheerful and sociable at half-past nine in the morning, she must not expect her husband to be so unmasculine as to resemble her.

  “Crumbs get into my bed,” she had said to Edith the evening before, when, the morning venue was debated, “and my egg tastes of blankets. And I hate bed when I wake: I feel bright and brisk and fresh, which is very trying for other people. Jack breakfasts downstairs, too, though if you asked him to breakfast in your bedroom, I daresay he would come.”

  “I hate seeing anybody till eleven,” said Edith, “and many people then.”

  “Very well, Jack, as usual, will be cross to me, which is an excellent plan, because I don’t mind, and he works off his morning temper. Don’t come down to protect me: it’s quite unnecessary.”

  This was really equivalent to an invitation to be absent, and as it coincided with Edith’s inclination, the hour of half-past nine found Dodo reading her letters, and Jack, fortified against intrusive sociability by a copy of the Times propped against the tea-kettle.

  The room faced south, and the sun from the window struck sideways across Dodo’s face, as she exhibited a pleasant appetite for correspondence and solid food, while Jack sat morose in the shadow of the Times. This oblique light made the black ink in which Dodo’s correspondents had written to her appear to be a rich crimson. She had already remarked on this interesting fact, with an allusion to the spectacles which had been finally lost three years ago, and as a test question to see how Jack was feeling, she asked him if he had seen them. As he made no answer whatever, she concluded that he was still feeling half-past ninish.

  Then she got really interested in a letter from Miss Grantham, an old friend who had somehow slipped out of her orbit. Miss Grantham was expected here this afternoon, but apparently had time to write a long letter, though she could have said it all a few hours later.

  “Grantie is getting poorer and poorer,” she said. “A third aunt has died lately, and so Grantie had to pay three thousand pounds. I had no idea funerals were so expensive. Isn’t it miserable for her?”

  She turned over the page.

  “Oh! There are compensations,” she said, “for the third aunt left her twenty-five thousand pounds, so she’s up on balance. Three from twenty-five.… Not funerals: duties. But she sold a picture by Franz Hals to make sure. How like Grantie: she would run no risks! She never did; she always remained single and lived in the country away from influenza and baccarat. Oh, Jack, the Franz Hals fetched eight thousand pounds, so her poverty is bearable. Wasn’t that lovely?”

  “Lovely!” said Jack.

  Dodo looked up from Grantie’s letter, and ran her eyes round the walls.

  “But those two pictures there are by Franz Hals,” she said. “Do let us sell one, and then we shall have eight thousand pounds. You shall have the eight, darling, because the picture is yours, and I shall have the thousands because I thought of it.”

  Jack gave a short grunt as he turned over his paper. He had not quite got over the attack of the morning microbe, to which males are chiefly subject.

  “All right,” he said. “And what shall we buy with the eight thousand pounds? Some more boots or bacon?”

  Dodo considered this oracular utterance.

  “That’s a wonderfully sensible question,” she said. “I don’t really know what we should buy with it. I suppose we shouldn’t buy anything, and the picture would be gone. I would certainly rather have it than nothing! What a mine of wisdom you are! I suppose it was my mercantile blood that made me think of selling a picture. Blood’s thicker than paint.… It always shows through.”

  A fatal brown spot had appeared in the middle of Jack’s paper just opposite the spirit-lamp of the tea-kettle against which it leaned. As he was considering this odd phenomenon, it spread and burst into flame.

  “Fire!” cried Dodo, “Edith will be burned in her bed. Put—put a rug round it! Lie down on it, Jack! Turn the hot water on to it! Put some sand on it! Why aren’t we at the seaside?”

  Jack did none of these brilliant manœuvres. In an extraordinarily prosaic manner he took the paper up, dropped it into the grate and stamped on it. But the need for prompt action had started his drowsy mechanisms.

  “Well, it’s morning,” he said as he returned to the table, “so let us begin. No: I think we won’t sell a Franz Hals, Dodo. And then came Grantie and her auntie, and then you with your mercantile blood. Which shall we take first?”

  “Oh, blood, I think,” said Dodo, “because there’s a letter from Daddy. He would like to come down this afternoon for the Sunday, and will I telephone? He put a postal order for three-and-sixpence in his letter, to pay for a trunk-call: isn’t that rather sweet of him? Daddy is rich, but honest. Epigram. Put up a thumb, darling, to show you recognise it. Jack, shall I say that Daddy may come, and we should love it? I like people of eighty to want things. And really if we can give pleasure to a person of eighty hadn’t we better? Eighty minus fifty-four: that leaves twenty-six. It would be pathetic if in twenty-six years from now you no longer cared about giving me pleasures. What has happened to the postal order for three-and-six? He did enclose it, I saw it. I believe you’ve burned it with the Times, Jack. Can we claim from the fire-insurance?”

  Jack formed a mental picture of old Mr. Vane, contemplated it and dismissed it.

  “Of course he shall come if you want him to,” he said. “Send him my love.”

  “That’s dear of you. I do want him to come because he wants to, which after all is a very good reason. Otherwise I think—I think I should have liked him to come perhaps another day, when there weren’t twenty-five million other people. On the other hand Daddy will like that: he’s getting tremendously smart, and ‘goes on’ to parties after dinner. My dear, do you think he will bring another large supply of his patent shoe-horns with him this time? I think we must examine his luggage, like a customhouse.”

  This was an allusion to a genteel piece of advertising which Mr. Vane had indulged in last time he stayed with them. On that occasion Dodo had met him at the door, and without any misgivings at all had seen taken down from the motor an oblong wooden box about which he was anxious, and which, so he mysteriously informed her
, contained “presents.” This she naturally interpreted to mean something nice for her. It subsequently appeared, however, that the presents were presents for everybody in the house, for Mr. Vane had instructed his valet to connive with the housemaids and arrange that on the dressing-table of every guest in the house there should be placed one of Vane’s patent shoe-horns with a small paper of instructions. This slip explained how conveniently these shoe-horns fitted the shape of the human heel, and entailed no stamping of the human foot nor straining of leather.…

  “That’s what I mean by blood coming out,” continued Dodo, “when I want to sell a Franz Hals. I think I must be rather like Daddy over that. He doesn’t want any more money, any more than I do, but he cannot resist the opportunity of doing a little business. After all why not? A shoe-horn doesn’t hurt anybody.”

  “It does: it hurt me!” said Jack. “It bruised my heel.”

  “Did it? Who would have thought Daddy was such a serpent? I didn’t use mine: my maid threw it into the fire the moment she saw it. She observed, with a sniff, that she wouldn’t have any of those nasty cheap things. I remonstrated: I told her it was a present from Daddy, and she said she thought he would have given me something handsomer than that.”

  “They weren’t very handsome,” remarked Jack. “Nothing out of the way, I mean. Not raging beauties.”

  “Daddy went on to Harrogate afterwards,” said Dodo. “He flooded the hotel with them. He used to sit in the velvet place which they call a lounge, and make himself agreeable to strangers, and lead the conversation round to the fact that he was my father. Then as soon as they were getting on nicely, he produced a shoe-horn. Bertie Arbuthnot told me about it: Daddy worked the shoe-horn stunt on him.”

  “Priceless!” said Jack grinning. “Go on.”

  “Quite priceless: he gave them away free, gratis. Well, Daddy came in one day when Bertie was sitting in the lounge, and asked him if he knew me. So they got talking. And then Daddy looked fixedly at the heel of Bertie’s shoe which was rather shabby, as heels usually are, and out came the shoe-horn. ‘Take one of these, young man,’ said he, ‘and then you’ll make no more complaints about the bills for the cobbling of the heels of your shoes. Vane’s patent, you mark, and it’s that very Vane who’s addressing you!’”

  Dodo burst out laughing.

  “I adore seeing you and Daddy together,” she said. “You find him so dreadfully trying, and I’m sure I don’t wonder, and you bear it with the fortitude of an early Christian martyr. What was the poem he made about the shoe-horn which was printed at the top of the instructions?”

  Jack promptly quoted it:

  “As I want to spare you pains

  Take the shoe-horn that is Vane’s.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” said Dodo. “And what a gem! He told me he lay awake three nights making it up, like Flaubert squirming about on the floor and tearing his hair in the struggle to get the right word.”

  Dodo got up, looked for the Times, and remembered that it was burned.

  “That’s a relief anyhow,” she said. “I think it’s worth the destruction of the three-and-six-penny postal order. If it hadn’t been burned I should have to read it to see what is going on.”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “But one reads it all the same. If there’s nothing in the large type, I read the paper across from column to column, and acquire snippets of information which get jumbled up together and sap the intellect. People with great minds like Edith never look at the paper at all. That’s why she argues so well: she never knows anything about the subject, and so can give full play to her imagination.”

  Dodo threw up the window.

  “Oh, Jack, it is silly to go to London in June,” she said. “And yet it doesn’t do to stay much in the country, unless you have a lot of people about who make you forget you are in the country at all.”

  “Who is coming today?” asked he.

  “Well, I thought originally that we would have the sort of party we had twenty-five years ago, and see how we’ve all stood them; and so you and I and Edith and Grantie and Tommy Ledgers represent the old red sandstone. Then Nadine and Hughie and young Tommy Ledgers and two or three of their friends crept in, and then there are Prince and Princess Albert Allenstein. They didn’t creep in: they shoved in.”

  “My dear, what a menagerie,” said Jack.

  “I know: the animals kept on coming in one by one and two by two, and we shall be about twenty-five altogether. Princess Albert is opening a bazaar or a bank or a barracks at Nottingham on Tuesday, that’s why she is coming!”

  “Then why have you asked her to come today?”

  “I didn’t: she thought it would be nice to come on Saturday instead of Monday, and wrote to tell me so—remind me to give Daddy the autograph: he has begun collecting autographs— However, he will look after her: he loves Princesses of any age or shape. As for Albert he shall have trays of food brought him at short and regular intervals, so he’ll bother nobody. But best of all, beloved David is coming back today. He and his round of visits! I think I’ll send a paragraph to the Morning Post to say that Lord Harchester has returned to the family seat after a round of visits. I won’t say it was the dentist and the bootmaker.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake don’t teach David to be a snob!” said Jack.

  “Darling, you’re a little heavy this morning,” said Dodo. “That was a joke.”

  “Not entirely,” said Jack.

  Dodo capitulated without the slightest attempt at defence.

  “Quite right!” she said. “But you must remember that I was born, so to speak, in a frying-pan in Glasgow, enamelled by the Vane process, or at least that was my cradle, and if you asked me to swear on my bended knees that I wasn’t a snob at all, I should instantly get up and change the subject. I do still think it’s rather fun being what I have become, and having Royal Families staying with me—”

  “And saying it’s rather a bore,” put in Jack.

  “Of course. I like being bored that way, if you insist on it. I haven’t ever quite got over my rise in life. Very nearly, but not quite.”

  “You really speak as if you thought it mattered,” said Jack.

  “I know it doesn’t really. It’s a game, a rather good one. Kind hearts are more than coronets, but I rather like having both. Most people are snobs, Jack, though they won’t say so. It’s distinctly snobbish of me to put my parties in the paper, and after all you read it in the morning, which is just as bad. The Court Circular too! Why should it be announced to all the world that they went to the private chapel on Sunday morning and who preached? It has to be written and printed and corrected. That wouldn’t be done unless a quantity of people wanted to read it. I wonder if it’s read up in heaven, and if the angels say to each other how pleasant it all is.”

  Dodo bubbled with laughter.

  “Oh, my dear, how funny we all are,” she said. “Just think of our pomposity, we little funny things kicking about together in the dust! We all rather like having titles and orders; otherwise the whole thing would have stopped long ago. Here’s Edith: so it must be eleven.”

  Edith had taken to smoking a pipe lately, because her doctor said it was less injurious than cigarettes, and she wanted to hurt herself as little as possible. She found it difficult to keep it alight, and half-away across the room she struck a match on the sole of her shoe, and applied it to the bowl, from which a croaking noise issued.

  “Dodo, is it true that the Allensteins are coming to stay here today?” she asked. “I saw it in the Daily Mail.”

  Jack opened his mouth to speak, but Dodo clapped her hands in his face.

  “Now, Jack, I didn’t put it there,” she said, “so don’t make false accusations. Of course they did it themselves, because you and I—particularly I—are what people call smart, and the Allensteins aren’t. That proves the point I was just going to make: in fact, that’s the best definition of snob. Snobs want to show other people how nicely they are getting on.
”

  Edith sat down in the window seat between Dodo and Jack, who shied away from the reek of her pipe, which an impartial breeze, coming in at the window, wafted this way and that.

  “But who’s a-deniging of it, Saireh Gamp?” she asked. “The snob’s main object is not actually having the King or the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury to dinner; what he cares about is that other people should know that he has done so. Snobbishness isn’t running after the great ones of the earth, but letting the little ones know you have caught the great ones.”

  “You hopeless women!” said Jack.

  Dodo shook her head.

  “He can’t understand,” she said, “for with all his virtues Jack isn’t a snob at all, and he misses a great deal of pleasure. We all want to associate with our superiors in any line. It is more fun having notable people about than nonentities. When it comes to friends it is a different thing, and I would throw over the whole Almanack of Grotha for the sake of a friend—”

  Jack turned his eyes heavenwards.

  “What an angel!” he said. “Was ever such nobility and unworldliness embodied in a human form? What have I done to deserve—”

  Dodo interrupted.

  “And we like other people to know it,” she said. “Poor Jack is a lusus naturæ; he is swamped by the normal. You must yield, darling.”

  Jack made an awful face as the smoke from Edith’s pipe blew across him, and got up.

  “I yield to those deathly fumes,” he said.

  * * * *

  Dodo’s guests arrived spasmodically during the afternoon. A couple of motors went backwards and forwards between the station and the house, meeting all probable trains, sometimes returning with one occupant, sometimes with three or four, for nobody had happened to say what time he was arriving. About five an aeroplane alighted in the park, bearing Hugh Graves as pilot, and his wife Nadine as passenger, and while Dodo, taking her daughter’s place, succeeded in getting Hugh to take her up for a short flight, Prince and Princess Albert arrived in a cab with Nadine’s maid, having somehow managed to miss the motor. Jack was out fishing at the time, and Prince Albert expressed over and over again his surprise at the informality of their reception. He was a slow, stout, stupid man of sixty, and in ten years’ time would no doubt be slower, stouter, stupider and seventy. He had a miraculous digestion, a huge appetite for sleep, and a moderate acquaintance with the English language. They spent four months of the year in England in order to get away from their terrible little Court at Allenstein, and with a view to economy, passed most of those months in sponging on well-to-do acquaintances.