The Second E. F. Benson Megapack

by E. F. Benson

  “We’ve all changed,” he said. “We don’t want any more excitements. At least you and I don’t. Edith’s a volcano, and till now, I always thought you were.”

  Dodo made a very good pretence at a yawn, and stifled it.

  “I remember talking to Edith just before the war,” she said. “I told her that a cataclysm was wanted to change my nature. I said that if you lost every penny you had, and that I had to play a hurdy-gurdy down Piccadilly, I should still keep the whole of my enjoyment and vitality, and so I should. Well, the cataclysm has come, and though it has ended in victory, it has done its work as far as I am concerned. I’ve played my part, and I’ve made my bow, and shall retire gracefully. I don’t want to begin again. I’m old, I’m tired, and my only reason for wishing to appear young and fresh was that you would expect me to. You are an angel.”

  Dodo’s tongue, it may be stated, was not blistered by the enunciation of these amazing assertions. She was not in the least an habitual liar, but sometimes it became necessary to wander remarkably far from the truth for the good of another, and when she engaged in these wanderings, she called the process not lying, but diplomacy. She had made up her mind instantly that it would never do for Jack to resign himself to inaction for the rest of his life and with extraordinary quickness had guessed that the best way of starting him again was not to push or shove him into unwelcome activities, but cordially to agree with him, and profess the same desire for a reposeful existence herself. She regarded it as quite certain that he would not acquiesce long in her abandoning the activities of life, but would surely exert himself to stimulate her interests again. For himself he was an admirable loafer, and had just that spice of obstinacy about him which might make him persist in a lazy existence, if she tried to shake him out of it, but he would be first astonished and soon anxious if she did the same thing, and would exert himself to stimulate her, finding it disconcerting and even alarming if she sank into the tranquil apathy which just now she had asserted was so suitable to her age and inclinations. This Machiavellian plan then, far from being a roundabout and oblique procedure, seemed, on reflection, to be the most direct route to her goal. Left to himself he might loaf almost indefinitely, but a precisely similar course on her part, would certainly make him rouse himself in order to spur her flagging faculties. And all the time, it was she who was spurring him.

  She proceeded to clothe this skeleton of diplomacy with flesh.

  “I always used to wonder how this particular moment would come to me,” she said, “and though I always used to say I would welcome it, I was secretly rather terrified of it. I thought it would be rather a ghastly sort of wrench, but instead of being a wrench it has been the most heavenly relaxation. I had a warning you see, and I had a taste of it, when I collapsed and went off alone to Truscombe; and how delicious it is, darling, that your resignation, so to speak, has coincided with mine. I thought perhaps that you would preserve your energy longer than I, and that I should have to follow, faint but pursuing, or that you would fail first, and would have to drag along after me. But the way it has happened makes it all absolutely divine. I might have guessed it perhaps. We’ve utterly grown into one, Jack; I’ve known that so many years, dear, and this is only one more instance out of a thousand. Just the same thing happened to Mr. and Mrs. Browning—”

  “Who?” asked Jack.

  “Brownings—poets,” said Dodo, “all those books. After all, they were Mr. and Mrs., though it sounds rather odd when one says so. Don’t you remember that delicious poem where they sat by the fire and she read a book with a spirit-small hand propping her forehead—though I never understood what a spirit-small hand meant—and thought he was reading another, and all the time he was looking at her?”

  Dodo suddenly thought she was going a little too far. It was not quite fair to introduce into her diplomacy quite such serious topics and besides, there was a little too much vox humana about it. She poked the fire briskly.

  “‘By the fireside’; that was the name of it,” she said, “and here we are. We must advertise, I think, in the personal columns of the Times, and say that Lord and Lady Chesterford have decided to do nothing more this side of the grave, and no letters will be forwarded. They inform their large circle of friends that they are quite well, but don’t want to be bothered. Why, Jack; it’s half-past seven. How time flies when one thinks about old days.”

  Throughout March they stopped down at Winston, and the subtlety of Dodo’s diplomacy soon began to fructify. She saw from the tail of her eye that Jack was watching her, that something bordering on anxiety began to resuscitate him, as he tried to rouse her. Once or twice, in the warm days of opening April, he coaxed her down to the stream with him (for fishing was a quiet pursuit not at variance with the reposeful life) to see if she would not feel the lure of running water, or be kindled in these brightening fires of springtime. If fish were rising well, she noted with a bubble of inward amusement that he would forget her altogether for a time, but then, though hitherto he had always discouraged or even refused her companionship when he was fishing, he would come to her and induce her to attempt to cast over some feeding fish in the water above. So, to please him, she would take the rod from him and instantly get hung up in a tree. But oftener when he proposed that she should come out with him, she would prefer to stay quiet in some sheltered nook on the terrace, and tell him that she was ever so happy alone. Once or twice again he succeeded in getting her to come out for a gentle ride, solicitous on their return to know that it had not overtired her, eager for her to confess that she really had enjoyed it. And then Dodo would say, “Darling, you are so good to me,” and perhaps consent to play a game of picquet. He did not disquiet himself over the thought that she was ill, for she looked the picture of health, ate well, slept well, and truthfully told him that she had not the smallest pain or discomfort of any kind. Often she was quite talkative, and rattled along in the old style, but then in midflight she would droop into silence again. Only once had he a moment of real alarm, when he found her reading the poems of Longfellow.…

  Then one day to his great joy, she began to reanimate herself a little. A new play had come out in London, and some paper gave a column-long account of it, which Jack read aloud.

  “Really it sounds interesting,” she said. “I wonder—” and she broke off.

  “Why shouldn’t we run up to town and see it?” said he. “There are several things I ought to attend to. Lets go up tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes, if you like,” she said. “I won’t promise to go to the play, Jack, but—yes I’ll come. You might telephone for seats now, mightn’t you?”

  Certainly the play interested her, and they discussed it as they drove home. One of the characters reminded Dodo of Edith, and she said she had not seen her for ages. On which Jack, very guilefully, telephoned to Edith to drop in for lunch next day, and arranged to go out himself, so that Dodo might have a distinct and different stimulus. Unfortunately Dodo, hearing that Jack would be out, scampered round about lunch-time to see Edith, and drink in a little froth of the world before returning to the nunnery of empty Winston, and thus they both found nobody there. She and Jack had intended to go back to the country that afternoon, but Dodo let herself be persuaded to go to the Russian ballet, which she particularly wanted to see. Jack took a box for her, and in the intervals several friends came up to see them. He enjoyed the ballet enormously himself, and longed to go again the next night. This was not lost on Dodo, and she became more diplomatic than ever.

  “Stop up another night, Jack,” she said, “and go there again. I shall be quite, quite happy at Winston alone. Let’s see; they are doing ‘Petroushka’ tomorrow; I hear it is admirable.”

  “I shouldn’t dream of stopping in town without you,” said he, “or of letting you be alone at that—at Winston. You won’t stop up here another day?”

  Dodo was getting a little muddled; she wanted to see “Petroushka” enormously, and had to pretend it was rather an effort; at the same
time she had to remember that Jack wanted to see it, though he pretended that he wanted her to see it. He thought that she thought.… She gave it up; they both wanted to see “Petroushka” for their own sakes, and pretended it was for the sake of each other.

  “Yes, dear, I don’t think it would overtire me,” she said. “But let’s go to the stalls tomorrow. I think you will see it better from straight in front.”

  “I quite agree,” said Jack cordially.

  * * * *

  About three weeks later Dodo came in to lunch half an hour late and in an enormous hurry. She had asked Edith to come at 1.30 punctually, so that they could start for the Mid-Surrey links at two, to play a three-ball match, and be back at five for a rubber before dinner which would have to be at seven, since the play to which they were going began at eight. She was giving a small dance that night, but she could get back by eleven from the play. They were going down to Winston early next morning (revisiting it after nearly a month’s absence), so that Jack could get a day’s fishing before the Saturday-till-Monday party arrived.

  “I don’t want any lunch,” said Dodo. “I’m ready now, and I shall eat bread and cheese as we drive down to Richmond. Things taste so delicious in a motor. Jack, darling, fill your pockets with cheese and cigarettes, and give me a kiss, because it’s David’s birthday.”

  “We were talking about you,” he remarked.

  “Tell me what you said. All of it,” said Dodo.

  “We agreed you had never been in such excellent spirits.”

  “Never. What else?”

  “We agreed that I was rather a good nurse,” said he.

  Dodo gave a little squeak of laughter, which she instantly suppressed.

  “Of course you are,” she said.

  “And I was saying,” said Edith, “that the war hadn’t made the slightest change in any of us.”

  “Darling, you’re wrong there,” said Dodo. “It has made the most immense difference. For instance—nowadays—we’re all as poor as rats, though we trot along still. Nowadays—”

  A tall parlour-maid came in.

  “The car’s at the door, my lady,” she said.

  “Put the golf clubs in,” said Dodo.

  “Tell me some of the enormous differences,” asked Edith.

  Dodo waited till the door was closed.

  “Well, we all have parlour-maids,” she said.

  “That’s an enormous difference.”

  She paused a moment.

  “Ah, that reminds me,” she said. “Jack, I interviewed a butler this morning, who I think will do. He wants about a thousand a year.…”

  Edith shouted with laughter.

  “Poor as rats,” she said, “and parlour-maids! Any other differences, Dodo?”

  “I wonder,” she said.