“You’re being extremely illogical. You young people always talk about being ‘hard-boiled.’ If your Uncle Treff has been … accepting a woman’s hospitality all these years, and giving her no affection in return, he’s beaten you on your own ground, and you ought to admire him. But if you call his ideas disgusting, so are your own. You must make your choice.”
Dodo was silent. Put like that, the argument seemed valid: only she knew it couldn’t be, because—because she was young, and her mother and uncle were old.… After a moment’s thought she said:—
“We’re all hard-boiled together, Mother; that makes it fair. Uncle Treff’s sucker is probably some helpless little female who can’t take care of herself.”
But Alice for once had the sense not to argue, and presently Dodo put the envelope back in the bureau and silently departed—a good deal more disturbed than she wished to admit.
3
Mr. Culver meanwhile was standing with splashed trousers in Hatchards ordering A Sabine Farm to be sent to Mrs. Van Thal. The price, two guineas, struck him as ridiculous. He wasn’t paying it himself, Mrs. Van Thal had an account; he simply objected to it on principle.
“Very small edition, no doubt?” he suggested hopefully.
“About average for its class, sir. Conversations in the Campagna went very nicely.”
“Ah! Send that as well,” said Treff, remembering the rest of his commission. “Anything else of his in print?”
“Only the Latin Grammar for Middle Forms—with T. E. Parker.”
“Send it,” said Treff. “Let Parker have his cut. That the lot?”
“That’s all, sir.”
But Treff paused, as though struck by a sudden thought.
“By the way, I want to get in touch with Mr. Cox myself. Have you any idea where he is?”
The assistant took in Treff’s rather peculiar but rather academic appearance, and smiled.
“I can easily find out, sir, for he’s one of our regular customers; we’re always sending parcels to him. Will you wait a moment?”
Treff waited, his gaze fixed furiously but unseeingly on a pile of sensational novels published by Blore and Masterman. In five minutes the assistant returned with a slip of paper.
“He’s in Italy, sir; an address in Florence. Mr. Cox won’t be back till March.”
4
Treff returned to Oakley Road sneezing violently and went straight to bed. Trays! thought Alice crossly. There was nothing that put a house out so as the perpetual carrying up and down of trays; and she was all the more annoyed because Treff’s heavy cold was the direct result of not taking advice. Old people and children! thought Alice—managing to put her cousin into both categories at once. They were in fact almost contemporaries, Alice some years the elder; but the mornings in Kensington Gardens—she and Adelaide strolling like grown-ups while Treff played at soldiers—had established him for ever as belonging to a younger generation. At the same time, finding him now so finicking and old-fashioned in all his ways, she tended to lump him with the old. The combination of these two attitudes led her to indulge all his physical requirements, and pay slight notice to his conversation.
Treff, laid up in the best spare room, was thus treated kindly but firmly; he was kept in bed for three days, and Dodo wasn’t to go near him for fear of catching his cold. Dodo was to take plenty of exercise, and gargle every morning—and go and see Aunt Ellen, and take an interest in the house. “Good gracious!” cried Alice. “One would never think you were going to live there!” “Perhaps I’m not,” said Dodo sulkily—and went to see Sonia Trent.
CHAPTER V
1
“Hello, old thing,” said Miss Trent. “Have a drink. You might pour me one. You might get a clean glass.…”
Dodo did all these things, and sank down on the orange cushions with a sigh of pleasure. The untidy room, the slight smell of gin—the bottles on the gramophone and the gramophone records on the floor—how delightful, how welcoming it all was! How wonderful of Sonia to greet her like that, as though only an hour, instead of three weeks, had elapsed since their last meeting! Dodo gazed at her friend adoringly. She said:—
“I couldn’t get up before, because my uncle’s staying with us.”
Sonia raised her eyebrows—hair-thin, with a narrow line of gooseflesh above and below. She had been plucking her eyebrows for years.
“How ghastly for you!”
“Ghastly! He’s lived all his life in Florence and is too repressed for words. If any one mentions sex he simply goes upstairs.”
“I didn’t know any one did mention sex, in Surbiton.”
“Well, I do,” said Dodo. “In fact, at first I thought he might know something about it. But you know what that generation is.”
“Ghastly,” agreed Sonia.
“Utterly ghastly. You can’t imagine what a relief it is to get some civilized conversation.”
Sonia said idly, “You can always come here if you want to.…”
That afternoon was marked for Dodo by two very important events. This was the first of them. Never before, however much she fished, had Sonia made so definite an offer; and Dodo was on it in a flash.
“Can I really? Can I come and stay here? Of course I’d share expenses—”
Sonia lowered her eyelashes—very black, slightly sticky with mascara—over the long grey-green eyes that always made Dodo think of a mermaid’s, and said thoughtfully:—
“I’d better warn you, old thing, it would come to about five pounds a week. Or you could come for a month for twenty quid in advance.”
“I’ve got that much in the bank,” said Dodo promptly.
“Lucky infant.”
Something in her friend’s voice made Dodo sit up.
“Sonia, you don’t mean you want twenty pounds? Why on earth didn’t you tell me? I could easily lend it you!”
The eyelashes flickered.
“Could you, old thing? I’d be frightfully obliged …”
“Of course I can. I haven’t got it on me—”
“Use one of my cheques,” suggested Sonia. “Just cross out the name of my bank and put yours. It’s perfectly legal.”
Considering the confusion of the desk, she found her chequebook with remarkable speed. Dodo used the big green quill pen and signed her name with a flourish. So honest was Sonia that she wouldn’t accept the money as a loan, but insisted on calling it a month’s prepayment; and Dodo could arrive whenever she chose!
“I shall come straight away!” cried Dodo joyfully.
“To-morrow, if you like.”
Dodo giggled.
“What about Robin?”
“My dear, you won’t mind poor Robin just for the odd night? You’ll be sleeping down here on the divan, and he’s the quietest soul alive. Did I ever tell you he was devoted to you?”
Dodo was both pleased and surprised to hear it, for Sonia’s lover, a highbrow film critic, had never appeared to take the least notice of her. He was tall, very good-looking, and exasperated in his manner; Dodo was rather afraid of him. It just showed, she supposed, how little experience she had of really interesting men; and she was naturally eager to pursue the subject. But Sonia—just as Dodo tucked up her feet and reached for a cigarette—suddenly looked at her watch, exclaiming that if she didn’t fly she’d be late for a lunch date. It was very disappointing. “I’d hoped you could lunch with me,” said Dodo, in the ingenuous hope that her friend might ask her to come too; after all, the date was probably with Robin.… “I can’t, what a damned shame!” cried Sonia, not ceasing to apply powder. “There’s some cold ham in the kitchen, why don’t you picnic here? God knows when I’ll be back”—she stuffed the compact into her bag; out fluttered Dodo’s cheque; she thrust it back—“but I tell you what you can do, darling, you can go to the Puppet Theatre. I’ve a member’s ticket for this afternoon, matinées are ghastly, but they’re doing Music Hall. Want it?”
She flipped the ticket across; and Dodo, all disappointment fo
rgotten, seized on it with joyful hands. She had never been to the Puppet Theatre, she longed to do so; and she thought it was just like Sonia—darling Sonia, with her wonderful flippant manner, and all that wonderful kindness underneath—to give her the very thing she most wanted, and not even wait to be thanked.
2
The cold ham was not very nice; but Dodo found plenty of bread and butter, and also made herself tea, and this simple repast left her time to wash six pairs of Sonia’s stockings. Then she waited until she had seen three people go into the Theatre, and entered the foyer on the heels of the fourth.
This was the second important thing.
From the moment she stepped inside Dodo experienced a most definite feeling of satisfaction. The tiny lobby was painted a pale green, and hung with small brightly coloured sketches, designs for costumes or settings, some in narrow white frames, others simply pinned to the wall; and these last gave the place an air of informality. The booking-office was simply a nice old desk; the person seated behind it, Mrs. Lambert herself in her usual dark gown. She looked like a hostess who has sat down for a moment; she was indeed chatting pleasantly with an elderly gentleman, and Dodo, as she hung back a moment, caught their last words—“My dear lady, I always come to matinées now: I prefer the audience.” “I entirely agree with you,” replied Mrs. Lambert, in a clear voice. “In the evenings we get the riff-raff.” The preferrer of matinées passed on: Dodo presented her ticket almost with trepidation. But Mrs. Lambert barely glanced at her, being now busy with a seating-chart; and Dodo hung back another moment to admire at close quarters the magnificent white hair, the extraordinarily fine texture of an unpowdered skin. If Mrs. Lambert were aware of this scrutiny, she did not show it: her complete unselfconsciousness was evidently part of a supreme self-assurance, and in result highly impressive. I suppose the Victorians were self-assured, thought Dodo—poor saps! But she added the last phrase mechanically; for poise, in the degree attained by Mrs. Lambert, was something even Sonia had a good word for.
The auditorium, made out of four coach-houses, seated about three hundred. Its walls were green like the foyer, but undecorated. The seats showed great variety, for some had been picked up secondhand when a theatre or cinema was being remodelled (these had tip-up seats) some were plain wood, fastened in rows by a plank beneath; at the back were even some benches—and, astonishingly, a rocking-chair (unnumbered, and in fact permanently reserved for the Lamberts). The seating thus had no homogeneous colouring, but the curtain was a deep plum, emblazoned with the heads of Punch and Judy, father and mother of all puppets, on crossed staves.
Dodo found her place and settled down to watch the people come in. There were a good many children, who all sat in the front rows. Dodo saw one of them approached by an adult, apparently holding a ticket for the same seat: the child merely handed over its own stub, and the adult found a place further back: it was evidently a recognized procedure. But adults formed the great majority, and were certainly not riff-raff. Somewhere behind the curtain a person of catholic taste began to play the gramophone: Chopin’s “Tristesse” followed the “Robbers’ March” and “Life on the Ocean Wave”—someone playing to amuse himself. Dodo found that the odd mixture of tunes, the rather tinny tone of the machine, produced almost exactly the same effect on her as an orchestra’s tuning-up. Then silence; lights down, a bright ribbon widening on a plum-coloured hem; and curtains apart upon enchantment.
What Dodo loved was the brightness and smallness of it. The technical skill was beyond her; after the first few moments she forgot she was watching puppets at all, or rather forgot that any one was manipulating them. They seemed to move of their own volition, only more precisely, more exquisitely than was usual. Looking back afterwards, she was not sure whether they had all talked, or only some of them. Certainly all the members of the concert-party sang, and certainly the acrobat, like a silver flying-fish, was mute; but the speaking glances of the female impersonator were so eloquent as to be confusing. Music Hall was followed by a short ballet starring the Camargo, and this made the transition (as the programme curtly remarked, No Intervals at Matinées) to scenes from Les Précieuses Ridicules. A peculiar stillness fell on the audience as the curtains again parted: not this time on fantasy, but on magnificence. Now the puppets moved stately in spreading brocades: each gesture began, made its point, and finished with classic assurance: they spoke in clear, ringing tones, giving each vowel its value, biting off the last syllables, slurring no stress or accent of the great lines. One Frenchwoman was speaking for all of them; yet the illusion was complete—and the more so because only the puppets took their curtain-call. The second call, indeed, caught them unawares: Madelon was yawning, Du Croisy had removed his wig, and the rest were already strolling off the stage.…
The lights went up. Dodo came out of her trance blinking. Her neighbours to right and left looked unnaturally large, and how clumsily they moved! People pushed between the rows and stamped down the aisle like a herd of elephants, bumping against the end seats, bumping each other, as though they hadn’t proper control of their limbs. Dodo hung back till the line thinned; in front of her two men had also paused, and she heard one say to the other:—
“What is it that’s so satisfying?”
His companion shrugged.
“The perfection, old man. The sheer damned classic virtuosity. And of course artistic integrity and all that—”
“I should like to hear you talk to Mrs. Lambert about artistic integrity—”
“It’s her husband who is the artist, of course. He made the Molière lot. He was manipulating this afternoon, I can always spot his style. There’s nothing slipshod, nothing left to chance—”
“And it’s all so small and bright,” added Dodo.
They turned and looked at her in surprise. Then the taller said:—
“Exactly. Perfection in miniature. The only perfection we’re now capable of. Sonnets and string quartets. Have you seen the Yvette Guilbert?”
Dodo shook her head. The man at once turned away again, and both moved on. Dodo followed reluctantly, hating to leave.
CHAPTER VI
1
She returned to Surbiton, with a head full of dreams and a flat in Britannia Mews, to find her mother wrapping Christmas parcels for the twins in British Columbia.
Simple as it seemed, when actually with Sonia, in the Mews, to transfer herself thither from Surbiton, once she was in Surbiton it became extraordinarily difficult.
Christmas, for example. Already, at the beginning of December, plans had been made in detail: Tommy Hitchcock invited to eat his midday dinner at the Bakers’, and Dodo invited to eat a second dinner with the Hitchcocks at night. On Boxing Day Dodo and Tommy were invited together to Aunt Ellen’s, and in the evening there was a Tennis Club dance. For these two days each hour almost was consecrated to food or relations. Then on New Year’s Eve there was a dance at the Town Hall, and on New Year’s Day dinner at Aunt Ellen’s (because she came to the Bakers’ at Christmas). Working backwards, there was carol-singing on Christmas Eve, the Dramatic Society show on the twenty-second, review of puddings, mincemeat and lemon curd on the twentieth, and Christmas shopping for a good two weeks before that. Alice Baker adored Christmas (often referring to it as “the family festival”) and she spread it out as long as she could. Dodo thought it all bosh; but lacked the courage to throw a spanner into such complicated works.
If I were like Sonia, she thought, groaning over her diary (Bazaar on the twenty-first), I’d cut the lot! But Sonia was an ideal, an exemplar, towards which she was still only striving; and the morning of Christmas Eve found Dodo as usual on top of a step ladder, putting holly over the lights.
2
She was in the hall when the postman arrived; Alice hurried from the morning-room, and Treff downstairs, to see what he had brought. It was Alice who found the letter with the Italian stamp, addressed to Treff, and he was thus forced to open it in public.
It was from Mrs. Van Thal.
Amico mio,
I have a little commission I am sure you will be glad to execute for me, or rather for my friend Mr. Cox. It is a special kind of eye-lotion, none of the chemists here stock it, but Burroughs and Welcome (Wigmore Street) will surely send it out if you just say who it is for. Mr. Cox would write them himself only he has forgotten the name—he is just too impractical to live!—but it is something beginning with an O. I know you will be happy to oblige your old friend
M. VAN THAL
To this address.
Either the largest size bottle, or two small ones.
Alice looked up from her own mail.
“Dodo, dear, don’t grind your teeth so!”
“I’m not,” said Dodo, from her ladder. She looked at her uncle, and Treff immediately went upstairs again. Dodo said:—
“He’s had a pathetic letter from her.”
“From whom, dear?”
“From the Principessa.”
This was the name Dodo had given her uncle’s unknown victim, because she lived in a palazzo. In point of fact, the Principessa was Mrs. Van Thal’s dearest enemy. The whole situation was one of complicated misunderstanding.
“Well, he can’t go and sulk just when it’s lunch-time,” said Alice. “There’s the soup now; if he’s not down in five minutes I shall fetch him myself.”
She did fetch him; her manner throughout the meal remained severe, and Dodo unkindly persisted in talking about Florence. “How on earth could you bear to come home for the winter, Uncle Treff?” she asked. “Away from all the balmy breezes?” “The balmy breeze on the Prado can be a damned east wind,” said Treff crossly. After lunch, taking coffee in the drawing-room (Alice had started this elegant habit on Treff’s arrival, but now thought it a waste of a fire) Dodo sat down at the piano and strummed what she believed to be Italian airs—“Funiculi, Funicula,” and the “Soldiers’ Chorus” from Faust. “Do you mind?—I’ve a headache,” said Treff pointedly. Dodo at once stopped, and complete silence reigned until Alice, remembering that she had six spare Christmas cards, asked Treff if he wanted any for his editors.
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