by E. F. Benson
Dodo lifted her eyebrows in surprise that may have been genuine.
“Why not?” she asked.
Jack had no reasonable answer to give her.
“What did Mrs. Vivian say to you?” asked Dodo suddenly.
Jack paused.
“A few polite nothings,” he said; “and half the royal motto. Mrs. Vane said she was quite royal, which, of course, explains it.”
“I can’t conceive what you’re talking about,” remarked Dodo. “It seems to me to be sheer nonsense.”
Jack smiled.
“On the whole, I think it is sheer nonsense,” he said. “Yes, I’ll come.”
Dodo swept him the prettiest little curtsey.
“How good of you,” she said. “Good-night, Jack. Don’t be cross, it really isn’t worth while, and you can behave so prettily if you like. Oh, such a nice gentleman!”
“No, I expect it isn’t worth while,” said Jack.
CHAPTER THREE.
There is a particular beauty about the Thames valley for which you may search for years elsewhere, and not find; a splendid lavishness in the way that the woods are cast down broadcast along the river, and a princely extravagance of thick lush hayfields, that seem determined not to leave a spare inch of land between them and the water. The whole scene has been constructed with a noble disregard of expense, in the way of water, land, and warm wood-land air. The tall, clean-limbed beech-trees have room to stretch their great, lazy arms without being prosecuted for their clumsy trespasses, and the squirrels that chatter at you from their green houses seem to have a quite unusual sleekness about them, and their insolent criticisms to each other about your walk, and general personal unattractiveness, are inspired by a larger share of animal spirits than those of other squirrels. As you row gently up in the middle of the stream, you may see a heron standing in the shallows, too lazy to fish, too supremely confident to mind the approach of anything so inferior as yourself, and from the cool shadow of the woods you may hear an old cock pheasant talking to himself, and not troubling to practise a new and original method of rocketing in June, for he knows that his time is not yet.
At this time of year, too, you need not trouble to look round, to see if there are large boats full of noisy people bearing down on you; like the pheasant, their time is not yet. But now and then the long strings of creamy bubbles appearing on the deep, quiet water, and a sound rich in associations of cool plunges into frothy streams, warns you that a lock is near. And above you may see some small village clustering down to the river’s edge, to drink of its sweet coolness, or a couple of shaggy-footed cart-horses, looking with mild wonder at this unexpected method of locomotion, lifting their dripping noses from the bright gravelly shallows to stare at you, before they proceed to finish their evening watering.
Dodo was very fond of the Thames valley, and she really enjoyed giving up a day of June in London to the woods and waters. They were to start quite early in the morning, Dodo explained, and everyone was to wear their very oldest clothes, for they were going to play ducks and drakes, and drink milk in dairies, and pick buttercups, and get entirely covered with freckles. Dodo herself never freckled, and she was conscious of looking rather better for a slight touch of the sun, and it would be very dear of Mrs. Vivian if she would come too, if she didn’t mind being silly all day; and, if so, would she call for them, as they were on her way? Chesterford, of course, was going, and Jack, and Maud and her mother; it was quite a small party; and wasn’t Jack a dear?
Mrs. Vane had got hold of a certain idea about Mrs. Vivian, distinctly founded on fact. She was one of those women who cannot help making an impression. How it is done, or exactly what it is, one would be puzzled to define, but everyone noticed when she came info a room, and was aware when she went out. It was not her personal appearance, for she was short rather than tall, stout rather than graceful, and certainly middle-aged rather than young. Dodo has mentioned the effect she produced on her, and many people felt in the same way that Mrs. Vivian was somehow on a higher plane than they, that her mind was cast in a larger mould. Happily for our peace of mind such people are not very common; most of our fellow-men are luckily much on the same level, and they are not more than units among units. But Mrs. Vivian was much more than a unit. Dodo had said of her that she was two or three at least. And evidently nothing was further from Mrs. Vivian’s wishes than trying to make an impression, in fact, the very impressive element was rather due to her extreme naturalness. We are most of us so accustomed to see people behave, and to behave ourselves, in a manner not quite natural, that to see anyone who never does so, is in itself calculated to make one rather nervous.
Mrs. Vivian evidently intended to take her life up again at the point where she had left off, so to speak — in other words, at the period before her marriage. Of her husband, perhaps, the less said the better. He died, owing to an accident, after ten years of married unhappiness, and left Mrs. Vivian poorer than she had been before. After his death she had travelled abroad for two years, and then returned to England to live with her sister, who had married a rich judge and kept house rather magnificently in Prince’s Gate. Lady Fuller had always disapproved of her sister’s marriage, and she was heartily glad to see her well quit of her husband, and, on her return to England, received her with open arms, and begged her, on behalf of her husband and herself, to make their home hers. Mrs. Vivian accordingly settled down in the “extremely commodious” house in Prince’s Gate, and, as I said, took up her life where it had left off. A standing grievance that her husband had had with her was, that she interested herself in the poor, and in the East End slums, that she went to cabmen’s shelters, and espoused the cause of overdriven factory girls. He had told her that it was meddling with other people’s business; that nothing was so objectionable as an assumption of charitable airs; that a woman who went to balls and dinner-parties was a hypocrite if she pretended to care about the state of the poor, and that she only did it because she wished to appear unlike other people. But he altogether failed to perceive that her actions were entirely uninfluenced by the impression they were to make, and mistook her extreme naturalness for the subtlest affectation. However, Mrs. Vivian resolutely banished from her mind the remembrance of those ten years, and, being unable to think of her husband with tenderness or affection, she preferred to forget her married life altogether. The Vanes had been their neighbours in the country for many years, and she had known Dodo since she was a child. Dodo had once asked to accompany her in her visits to the East End, and had been immensely struck by what she saw, and determined to be charitable too. This sort of thing seemed extremely chic to Dodo’s observant mind. So she took up a factory of miserable match-girls, and asked them all to tea, and got Mrs. Vivian to promise her help; but when the afternoon came, Dodo particularly wished to go to a morning concert, and on Mrs. Vivian’s arrival she found, indeed, plenty of match-girls, but no Dodo. Dodo came back later and made herself extremely fascinating. She kissed the cleanest of the girls, and patted the rest on the shoulder, and sang several delightful little French songs to them to her own accompaniment on the banjo, and thanked Mrs. Vivian for being “such a dear about the slums.” But on the next occasion when she had nothing to do, and called on Mrs. Vivian to ask to be taken to another of those “darling little slums,” Mrs. Vivian hinted that, though she would be charmed to take her, she thought that Dodo had perhaps forgotten that the Four-in-hand Club met that day in Hyde Park. Dodo had forgotten it, and, as she had bespoken the box seat on one of her friends’ coaches, she hurried home again, feeling it freshly borne in upon her that Mrs. Vivian thought she was very contemptible indeed.
Altogether Mrs. Vivian knew Dodo well, and when she went home that evening, she thought a good deal about the approaching marriage. She was glad to have had that occasion of speaking to Jack, he seemed to her to be worth doing it for. She knew that she ran the risk of being told, in chillingly polite English, that she was stepping outside her province, and that Jack did not b
elong to the East End class who welcomed any charitable hand; but she had a remarkably keen eye, and her intuitive perception told her at once that Jack’s sense of the justice of her remark would stifle any feeling he might have that she was officious and meddlesome, and the event had justified her decision.
In the course of the next few days she met Jack several times. They both went to the water-party Dodo spoke of, and she took the opportunity to cultivate his acquaintance.
They were sitting on the bank of the river below the Clivedon woods, a little apart from the others, and she felt that as he had behaved so well, she owed him some apology.
“It was very nice of you, Mr. Broxton,” she said, “to be so polite to me last night. To tell you the truth, I did know you, though you didn’t know me. I was an old friend of your mother’s, but I hadn’t time to explain that, and you were good enough to take me without explanations. I always wonder what our attitude towards old friends of our mothers ought to be. I really don’t see why they should have any claim upon one.”
Jack laughed.
“The fact was that I knew you were right as soon as you spoke to me, though I wanted to resent it. I had been putting it differently to myself; that was why I spoke to Dodo.”
“Tell me more,” she said. “From the momentary glance I had of you and her, I thought you had been remonstrating with her, and she had been objecting. I don’t blame you for remonstrating in the general way. Dodo’s conduct used not to be always blameless. But it looked private, and that was what I did object to. I daresay you think me a tiresome, impertinent, old woman.”
Jack felt more strongly than ever that this woman could not help being well-bred in whatever she did.
“It sounds disloyal to one’s friends, I know,” he said, “but it was because I really did care for both of them that I acted as I did. What will happen will be that he will continue to adore her, and by degrees she will begin to hate him. He will not commit suicide, and I don’t think Dodo will make a scandal. Her regard for appearances alone would prevent that. It would be a confession of failure.”
Mrs. Vivian looked grave.
“Did you tell Dodo this?”
“More or less,” he replied. “Except about the scandal and the suicide.”
Mrs. Vivian’s large, grey, serious eyes twinkled with some slight amusement.
“I think while I was about it I should have told her that too,” she said; “that’s the sort of argument that appeals to Dodo. You have to scream if you want her to listen to what she doesn’t want to hear. But I don’t think it was quite well judged of you, you know.”
“I think she ought to know it,” said Jack, “though I realise I ought to have been the last person to tell her, for several reasons.”
Mrs. Vivian looked at him inquiringly.
“You mean for fear of her putting a wrong construction on it? I see,” she said.
Jack felt that it could not have been more delicately done.
“How did you know?”
“Oh,” she said, “that is the kind of intuition which is the only consolation we women have for getting old. We are put on the shelf, no doubt, after a certain age, but we get a habit of squinting down into the room below. That is the second time I have shown myself a meddling old woman, and you have treated me very nicely both times. Let us join the others. I see tea is ready.”
Dodo meanwhile had walked Chesterford off among the green cool woods that bordered the river. She had given Jack’s remarks a good deal of consideration, and, whether or no she felt that he was justified in them on present data, she determined that she would make the event falsify his predictions. Dodo had an unlimited capacity for interfering in the course of destiny. She devoted herself to her aims, whatever they might be, with a wonderful singleness of purpose, and since it is a fact that one usually gets what one wants in this world, if one tries hard enough, it followed that up to this time she had, on the whole, usually got her way. But she was now dealing with an unknown quantity, which she could not gauge. She had confessed to Jack her inability to understand what love meant, and it was with a certain sense of misgiving that she felt that her answers for the future would be expressed in terms of that unknown quantity “x.” To Dodo’s concrete mind this was somewhat discouraging, but she determined to do her best to reduce things to an equation in which the value of “x” could be found in terms of some of those many symbols which she did know.
Dodo had an inexhaustible fund of vivacity, which was a very useful instrument to her; like a watch-key that fits all watches, she was able to apply it as required to very different pieces of mechanism. When she wished to do honour to a melancholy occasion, for instance, her vivacity turned any slight feeling of sorrow she had into hysterical weeping; when the occasion was joyful, it became a torrent of delightful nonsense. To-day the occasion was distinctly joyful. She had a large sense of success. Chesterford was really a very desirable lover; his immense wealth answered exactly the requirements of Dodo’s wishes. Furthermore, he was safe and easily satisfied; the day was charming; Jack was there; she had had a very good lunch, and was shortly going to have a very good tea; and Chesterford had given orders for his yacht to be in readiness to take them off for a delightful honeymoon, directly after their marriage — in short, all her circumstances were wholly satisfactory. She had said to him after lunch, as they were sitting on the grass, “Come away into those delicious woods, and leave these stupid people here,” and he was radiant in consequence, for, to tell the truth, she had been rather indulgent of his company than eager for it the last day or two. She was in the highest spirits as they strolled away.
“Oh do give me a cigarette,” she said, as soon as they had got out of sight. “I didn’t dare smoke with that Vivian woman there. Chesterford, I am frightened of her. She is as bad as the Inquisition, or that odious man in Browning who used to walk about, and tell the king if anything happened. I am sure she puts it down in a book whenever I say anything I shouldn’t. You know that’s so tantalising. It is a sort of challenge to be improper. Chesterford, if you put down in a book anything I do wrong, I swear I shall go to the bad altogether.”
To Chesterford this seemed the most attractive nonsense that ever flowed from female lips.
“Why, you can’t do anything wrong, Dodo,” he said simply; “at least not what I think wrong. And what does it matter what other people think?”
Dodo patted his hand, and blew him a kiss approvingly.
“That’s quite right,” she said; “bear that in mind and we shall never have a quarrel. Chesterford, we won’t quarrel at all, will we? Everybody else does, I suppose, now and then, and that proves it’s vulgar. Mrs. Vivian used to quarrel with her husband, so she’s vulgar. Oh, I’m so glad she’s vulgar. I sha’n’t care how much she looks at me now. Bother! I believe it was only her husband that used to swear at her. Never mind, he must have been vulgar to do that, and she must have vulgar tastes to have married a vulgar person. I don’t think I’m vulgar, do you? Really it’s a tremendous relief to have found out that she’s vulgar. But I am afraid I shall forget it when I see her again. You must remind me. You must point at her and say V, if you can manage it. Or are you afraid of her too?”
“Oh, never mind Mrs. Vivian,” said he, “she can wait.”
“That’s what she’s always doing,” said Dodo. “Waiting and watching with large serious eyes. I can’t think why she does it, for she doesn’t make use of it afterwards. Now when I know something discreditable of a person, if I dislike him, I tell everybody else, and if I like him, I tell him that I know all about it, and I am so sorry for him. Then he thinks you are charming and sympathetic, and you have a devoted admirer for life.”
Chesterford laughed. He had no desire to interrupt this rapid monologue of Dodo’s. He was quite content to play the part of the Greek chorus.
“I’m going to sit down here,” continued Dodo. “Do you mind my smoking cigarettes? I’m not sure that it is in good form, but I mean to make it so.
I want to be the fashion. Would you like your wife to be the fashion?”
He bent over her as she sat with her head back, smiling up at him.
“My darling,” he said, “do you know, I really don’t care a straw whether you are the fashion or not, as long as you are satisfied. You might stand on your head in Piccadilly if you liked, and I would come and stand too. All I care about is that you are you, and that you have made me the happiest man on God’s earth.”
Dodo was conscious again of the presence of this unknown quantity. She would much prefer striking it out altogether; it seemed to have quite an unreasonable preponderance.
Chesterford did not usually make jokes, in fact she had never heard him make one before, and his remark about standing on his head seemed to be only accounted for by this perplexing factor. Dodo had read about love in poems and novels, and had seen something of it, too, but it remained a puzzle to her. She hoped her calculations might not prove distressingly incorrect owing to this inconvenient factor. But she laughed with her habitual sincerity, and replied, —
“What a good idea; let’s do it to-morrow morning. Will ten suit you? We can let windows in all the houses round. I’m sure there would be a crowd to see us. It really would be interesting, though perhaps not a very practical thing to do. I wonder if Mrs. Vivian would come. She would put down a very large bad mark to me for that, but I shall tell her it was your suggestion.”
Chesterford laughed with pure pleasure.
“Dodo,” he said, “you are not fair on Mrs. Vivian. She is a very good woman.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” said Dodo, “but, you see, being good doesn’t necessarily make one a pleasant companion. Now, I’m not a bit good, but you must confess you would rather talk to me than to the Vivian.”
“Oh, you are different,” said he rapturously. “You are Dodo.”
Dodo smiled contentedly. This man was so easy to please. She had felt some slight dismay at Jack’s ill-omened prophecies, but Jack was preposterously wrong about this.