by E. F. Benson
To Miss Grantham’s detached and philosophic mind this conclusion, when she reflected on it, seemed extremely sound. She decided to pursue that track no further, for it appeared to lead nowhere, and proceeded violently upwards in a sort of moral lift.
“And then I happen to like culture and knowledge,” she said. “I just happen to, in the same way as you like princes. I know you won’t agree about the possible advantage of educating yourself. Last night at dinner I heard you say that you had probably forgotten how to read, as you hadn’t read anything for so long. That made me shudder. You seem to think that, because I live in the country, I vegetate. You call me mossy, and I am nothing of the kind. I read for three hours a day, wet or fine. I do wood-carving, I play the piano.”
Dodo gave a long sigh.
“I know; it sounds lovely,” she said. “So does suicide when you have to get up early in the morning. Sometimes Jack and I think we should like to live in a cottage by a river with a bee-hive and a general servant, and nine rows of beans like Mr. Yeats, and lead the simple life. But moral scruples preserve us from it, just as they preserve one from suicide. When I feel that I want to live in the country, I know it is time to take a tonic or go to Ascot. I don’t believe for a moment that I was meant to be a ‘primrose by the river’s brim.’ If you go in for being a primrose by the river’s brim, you so soon become ‘nothing more to him’ or to anybody else. If Nature had intended me to be a vegetable, she would have made me more like a cabbage than I am.”
Miss Grantham was hardly ever roused by personal criticism, partly because she hardly ever was submitted to it, and partly because it seemed to her to matter so singularly little what anyone else thought of her. But when Dodo began again, “You’re a delicious cow,” she interrupted firmly and decisively, dropped any semblance of defence and attacked.
“And now it’s my turn,” she said, “and don’t interrupt me, Dodo, by any smart repartees, because they don’t impress me in the least. I may be a cabbage—though as a matter of fact, I am not—but I would far sooner be a cabbage than a flea.”
“A flea?” asked the bewildered Dodo.
“Yes, dear, I said ‘flea.’ All the people who live the sort of life which you have deliberately adopted as your own, are precisely like fleas. You hop about with dreadful springs, and take little bites of other people, and call that life. If you hear of some marvellous new invention, you ask the inventor to lunch and suck a little of his blood. Then at dinner you are told that everybody is talking about some new book, so you buy a copy next morning, cut the first fifty pages, leave it about in a prominent place, and ask the author to tea. Meanwhile you forget all about the inventor. Then a new portrait-painter appears, or a new conjuror at the music-halls or a new dancer, and off you hop again and have another bite. For some obscure reason you think that that is life, whereas it is only being a flea. I don’t in the least mind your being a flea, you may be precisely what you choose. But what I do object to is your daring to disapprove of my way of life, about which you know nothing whatever. You called me narrow—”
“Never!” said Dodo.
“In effect, you called me narrow. Didn’t you?” asked Grantie calmly.
“Yes.”
“Very well then. When you talk about narrowness, you seem unaware that there is no greater narrowness possible than to adopt that cocksure attitude. You think you are competent to judge modes of living about which you are quite ignorant. What do you know about me?”
Dodo surged out of her chair.
“Grantie dear, we don’t understand each other one bit,” she said, kissing her. “How sad it all is!”
Grantie remained unmoved and calm.
“I understand you perfectly,” she said. “Though I am quite aware you don’t understand me.”
Dodo suddenly ceased to attend, and held up a silencing finger.
“Listen!” she said.
From the open window of a bedroom just above their seat came a sound sonorous and rhythmical. Dodo had not meant to have the war carried into her own country, and she was rather glad of an interruption.
“Albert!” she said rapturously. “Albert snoring.”
Any text would have done for Grantie’s sermon that moment.
“Yes, I hear,” she said. “We can all snore, but that particular snoring amuses you, in some odd way, because he’s a prince. I don’t love you any the less because you are a snob and a flea.”
Dodo burst into a peal of laughter.
“Grantie, you’re perfect!” she said. “Oh, how little did I think when I began calling you a vegetable, quite conversationally, that you would turn round and hustle me like this. And the worst of it is that you are right. You see, you arrange your ideas, you think what you mean to say, and then say it, whereas I say anything that comes into my head, and try to attach some idea to it afterwards if it’s challenged. Usually it isn’t, and we talk about something else, and everyone thinks ‘What clever conversation!’ But really you wrong me: I am something more than a snobbish flea.”
“Yes; you’re a parody,” said Miss Grantham thoughtfully. “That is the deplorable thing about you. You have always made a farce out of your good qualities, and a tragedy out of your bad ones. What a waste! You need never have been either a farce or a tragedy, but just a decent, simple, commonplace woman like me.”
Dodo knew perfectly well what Grantie meant by this considered indictment. It needed but the space of an astonished gasp, as this cold hose was sluiced on her, to understand it entirely, and recognise the basic truth of it. She knew to what Grantie alluded as her good points, namely her energy, her quickness, her vivacity, her kindliness. Of these, so said Grantie, she made a farce, used them to cause laughter, to rouse admiration, to make a rocket of herself. And there was no more difficulty in identifying the bad points, out of which tragedies had come. They were just the defects of her qualities, and could easily be grouped together under the general head of egotism.
Quite suddenly, then, there came a deepening in the import of the conversation which had begun so superficially. At first Dodo had used the lightness of touch, in discussing Grantie’s mode of life, which, to her mind, befitted such subjects. But now she found herself gripped; something had caught her from below. For some reason—perhaps from having lived so long in the country—Grantie took matters like tastes and conduct and character quite seriously. Dodo did not mind that in the least; it was still she who was being talked about, and thus her egotism was fed. Even if it was being fed with ‘thorns and briars of the wilderness,’ it was still being attended to.
“Go on,” she said. “Explain.”
“It’s hardly worth while,” said Grantie, “because you know it already. But just think of your telling me with disapproval that I have changed! So much the better for me, though you think it is a matter for regret.”
“Darling, I never said you weren’t quite delightful as you are,” said Dodo.
“I wasn’t aware that there was any such complimentary nuance in your criticisms,” said Grantie. “Anyhow there is none in mine. I find that you have not changed in the least: you are in essentials precisely the same as you always were, and I could weep over you. I talked to Edith last night, when you were taking off the Princess’s shoes or something, and she quite agreed with me. She said that you were amazing in the way that you had retained your youth. But she thought that was lovely, and there I disagreed. I find it tragic. It’s an awful thing, Dodo, to be youthful at your age, which is the same as mine. If you were worth anything, if you had ever got out of yourself, your life would have changed you. You say that there is a man covered with moss: well, there is a tortoise covered with its bony shell. You remain the same marvellous egotist that you were when you dazzled us all thirty years ago, and it is just because I have changed that I see through you now. You have thought about yourself for fifty-four long years. Aren’t you tired of the subject yet?”
Dodo felt a keen sense of injustice in this.
“But
you don’t understand me,” she said. “After all, I don’t know how you could. You haven’t got a husband and a son for whom you would do anything. Oh, and a daughter,” she added hastily.
“How you enjoyed saying that!” observed Miss Grantham.
Dodo paid no attention to this very just remark, and went on as if nothing had been said.
“Dear Grantie, you only understand things on your own plane. You don’t know what marriage and children mean. But I do; I’ve been married over and over again. Because you pat other people’s children on the head, and give tea and shawls to their parents, you think you know something about devotion.”
Miss Grantham looked at her watch.
“If Jack or you had to die in a quarter of an hour’s time, that is to say at five minutes to four in horrible agony, which would you choose?” she asked.
“But that’s impossible,” said Dodo in some agitation. “You are putting ridiculous cases.”
“They are ridiculous cases, because you know what your choice would be, and don’t want to confess it,” said Grantie. “I don’t press for an answer, but it was your own fault that I asked the question since you talked nonsense about devotion which I can’t understand. I merely inquired into its nature. That’s all; it is finished.”
“Grantie, I hate you,” said Dodo. “Why don’t you make the best of other people, as I always do?”
“Simply because they insist on making the worst of themselves, and it would be rude to disagree with them,” said Grantie.
“You are a sour old maid,” said Dodo with some heat.
Miss Grantham spoke to the terrace generally in a detached manner.
“‘Why don’t you make the best of people as I always do?’” she quoted.
Dodo laughed.
“Oh yes, you scored,” she said. “But to be serious a moment instead of pea-shooting each other. I allow you have hit me on the nose several times with devilish accuracy and hard, wet peas. What fun it used to be—”
“To be serious a moment—” said Grantie.
“That’s another pea; don’t do it. To be serious, as I said before, do you really suppose that you can alter your character? It always seems to me the one unchangeable thing. A thoroughly selfish woman can make herself behave unselfishly, just as a greedy person can starve himself, but they remain just as selfish and greedy as before. Oh, Grantie, I’ve got a dreadful nature, and the only thing to be done is to blow soap-bubbles all over it, so that it appears to be iridescent.”
“You don’t really believe that about yourself,” said Grantie.
Dodo groaned.
“I know I don’t,” she said. “I know nothing about myself. When David thinks I am adorable, I quite agree with him, and when you tell me that I am a worm, I look wildly round for the thrush that is going to eat me. There’s one on the lawn now; it may be that one. Shoo! You nasty bird!” she cried.
The thrush scudded off into the bushes at the sound of Dodo’s shrill voice and clapped hands.
“So it isn’t that one. What a relief!” said Dodo. “But what’s to be done?”
“Knit!” said Miss Grantham firmly. “Sew! Get out of yourself! Play the piano!”
“But I should only think how beautifully I was playing it,” said Dodo. “All you say is true, Grantie; that’s the beastly thing about you, but it’s all no use. Listen at that fortunate Cherman snoring! He isn’t thinking about himself; he’s not thinking about anything at all. I wish I was eighty. It’s better to be in a bath-chair than in a cage. We are all in cages, at least I am, and you are a raven in a cage. You croak, and you peck me if I come near you. Iron bars do make a cage, whatever Lovelace thought about it, if the iron bars are your own temperament. I can’t get out, and isn’t it awful?”
Dodo gave a great sigh, and lit a cigarette.
“I shall forget all about it in two minutes,” she said, “and that’s the really hopeless thing about me. I feel deeply for a few seconds, and then I feel equally deeply about something perfectly different. Just now I long for something to happen which will break the bars or open my cage. And yet it is such a comfortable one. That’s the matter with all of us, me with my egotism, and you with your school-feasts. We’re all far too cosy and prosperous. ‘See saw, Margery Daw!’ We’re all swinging in an apple-tree. The rope has got to break, and we must all go bump, if we hope for salvation. It must be something big, something dreadful. If Jack lost all his property, and went utterly bankrupt, that wouldn’t help me. I should get an old wheezy barrel-organ and parade the streets and squares in London, singing in a cracked voice, and have a lovely time. Or I should get a situation at a tea-shop, or I should chaperon climbers, and it would all amuse me, and I shouldn’t change one atom. Really I don’t think anything would do me any good except the Day of Judgment.… Thank God, here’s Hughie; I am getting rather insane. Hughie, what have you been doing, and if so, are you happy, and if so, how dare you be happy? Why are you happy?”
Hughie considered these questions, and ticked the answers off on his fingers.
“I’ve been doing nothing,” he said, “and I dare to be happy. I don’t know why. But again, why shouldn’t I be?”
“But why should you? What have you done to deserve it? Catechise him, Grantie, because it’s Sunday afternoon, and make him confess that he’s got a horrid nature, and ought to be miserable.”
“Go ahead,” said Hugh. “But it’s no use trying to make me confess that I’ve got a horrid nature. I haven’t. I’ve got rather a nice one.”
“Then you are wrapped up in self-esteem,” said Dodo, “and I’m better than you.”
Hugh, seated on the terrace, looked up at Dodo with the mild, quiet surprise that he exhibited when his aeroplane engine miss-fired.
“Of course you are,” he said. “So why not play croquet? Then I shall be better than you.”
“But I want to know what makes you happy. Grantie’s been stirring me up, and making me feel muddy. I’ve been telling her all the good reasons why I lead the life that suits me—”
Grantie gave a loud croak of dissent, like the raven to which Dodo had compared her.
“That bears not the most distant relation to truth,” she said. “What you have been doing is to give all sorts of bad reasons why I shouldn’t lead the life that suits me.”
Dodo paid no attention to this.
“And she’s been making me say that the Day of Judgment is the only thing that will do me any good. She has been ferreting me out, like a rabbit, and making me confused. It isn’t the real me that she has bolted. When you ferret rabbits, you get rabbits that are fussed and frightened and in a hurry; they aren’t normal rabbits. Grantie, you are a mixture between a raven and a ferret and a gadfly—a marvellous hybrid, as yet unknown to books on natural history. You have pink eyes, and a horny beak and a sting. I want Jack. Where is Jack? Oh, he’s still out with that dear old Cherman governess. And listen—oh, it has stopped!”
Dodo looked up at the window from which the noises of repose had come, and at the moment a large suffused face looked down.
“Also, your garden-party awoke me,” said its injured owner. “I was dreaming a pleasant dream, and then in my dream there came noise. I was in the restaurant at the Ritz, and it was dinner, and then people at the next table began talking and laughing, and I could no more attend to my dinner, and then I awoke, and it was all true except the Ritz and the dinner, for there were people talking and laughing, and so I awoke. And so it was a dream, and yet it was not a dream. Where is the Princess? She is not home yet? I will play croquet, and I will win and I will have my tea.”
“Yes, do come down, sir,” said Dodo. “It was me talking.”
“Also, in English you should say ‘I’ not ‘me,’” said this profound scholar.
“No, sir, you shouldn’t,” said Dodo. “You say ‘I’ when you’re learning English, because that is correct, and when you’ve learned it you say ‘me.’”
“So! Then me will come and play croqu
et. Ha! You see I have learned English so quickly. First will me put on my white pantaloons, and then I will play croquet. Auf wiedersehen.”
Dodo looked across at Grantie.
“You shall play with him,” she said in an encouraging whisper. “Devotion to others, darling! Duty! Change! Expansion of soul and development of character! All that we’ve been talking about which I haven’t got.”
Dodo strolled away with her son-in-law when she had seen Grantie firmly embarked on a game with the Prince, who played with even more deliberation than his opponents found so wearing when he played bridge, and with a thoroughly East Prussian thoroughness. He very soon made up his mind that he was a player of more resource than Grantie, and so arranged to have a stake of five marks on the game. This made it a peculiarly serious business, and one that entailed a great deal of stooping down behind the ball he was playing with, and accurately aligning his mallet in the direction of the object. Having done this he got up with creaks from his stiff white pantaloons, and clinging to the handle of his mallet, as to a life-buoy, while keeping it unmoved, bent down again to pick up his spectacles which had always fallen off. He answered, in fact, perfectly to Edith’s definition of the German spirit as the unhurrying and relentless entity which spared no trouble in securing a certain advance towards its appointed end. As exemplified by Prince Albert the efficiency of this industrious labour had to be supplemented by a ruthless system of cheating. The moment he thought that Miss Grantham’s eye was occupied in other directions, he rolled his ball by a stealthy movement of his foot into a more advantageous position for his next stroke, and made any little surreptitious adjustment that might tend to confound his adversary. Unfortunately it was a very short time before Miss Grantham awoke to these manœuvres, and proceeded to take counter-offensive measures of a more than neutralising character. For instance, the moment he had aligned his mallet, and bent down for the second time to pick up his spectacles, she shifted the position of the ball at which he had taken his aim, and if possible, put the wire of a hoop between him and it, or if that was not feasible, merely kicked it a foot or two away, for she had observed that on rising again for the second time he paid no more attention to where the object ball was but devoted his mind to hitting in the direction in which he had laid his mallet. He hit his own ball extremely true. Grantie, so far from having any compunction about this, felt that she was merely doing her proper part; if these were the German rules, it was incumbent on her to observe them.… At other times, if she hoped to make a hoop herself, she merely trundled her ball into an easier position.