by E. F. Benson
“He has an admirable temper,” said the Prince, “and is devoted to his keeper.”
“Oh, I’m not your keeper,” said Dodo. “I wouldn’t accept the responsibility. I’m only reading extracts from the advertisement about you.”
“I was only reading extracts as well,” observed the Prince. “Surely the intelligent animal, who knows several languages, may read its own advertisement?”
“I’m not so sure about your temper,” said Dodo, reflectively: “I shall alter it to ‘is believed to have an admirable temper.’”
“Never shows fight,” said the Prince.
“But is willing to fight if told to,” said she. “He said so himself.”
“Oh, but I only bark when I bite,” said the Prince, alluding to his modern system of duelling.
“Then your bite is as bad as your bark,” remarked Dodo, “which is a sign of bad temper. And now, my dear Prince, if we talk any more about you, you will get intolerably conceited, and that won’t do at all. I can’t bear conceited men. They always seem to me to be like people on stilts. They are probably not taller than oneself really, and they’re out of all proportion, all legs, and no body or head. I don’t want anyone to bring themselves down to my level when they talk to me. Conceited people always do that. They get off their stilts. If there’s one thing that amuses me more than another, it is getting hold of their stilts and sawing them half through. Then, when they get up again they come down ‘Bang,’ and you say: ‘Oh, I hope you haven’t hurt yourself. I didn’t know you went about on stilts. They are very unsafe, aren’t they?’”
Dodo was conscious of talking rather wildly and incoherently. She felt like a swimmer being dragged down by a deep undercurrent. All she could do was to make a splash on the surface. She could not swim quietly or strongly out of its reach. She stood by the window playing with the blind cord, wishing that the Prince would not look at her. He had a sort of deep, lazy strength about him that made Dodo distrust herself — the indolent consciousness of power that a tiger has when he plays contemptuously with his prey before hitting it with one deadly blow of that soft cushioned paw.
“Why can’t I treat him like anyone else?” she said to herself impatiently. “Surely I am not afraid of him. I am only afraid of being afraid. He is handsome, and clever, and charming, and amiable, and here am I watching every movement and listening to every word he says. It’s all nonsense. Here goes.”
Dodo plunged back into the room, and sat down in the chair next him.
“What a charming time we had at Zermatt,” she said. “That sort of place is so nice if you simply go there in order to amuse yourself without the bore of entertaining people. Half the people who go there treat it as their great social effort of the year. As if one didn’t make enough social efforts at home!”
“Ah, Zermatt,” said the Prince, meditatively. “It was the most delightful month I ever spent.”
“Did you like it?” said Dodo negligently. “I should have thought that sort of place would have bored you. There was nothing to do. I expected you would rush off as soon as you got there, and go to shoot or something.”
“Like Lord Chesterford and the partridges,” suggested Edith.
“Oh, that’s different,” said Dodo. “Jack thinks it’s the duty of every English landlord to shoot partridges. He’s got great ideas of his duty.”
“Even when it interferes with what must have been his pleasure, apparently,” said the Prince.
“Oh; Jack and I will see plenty of each other in course of time. I’m not afraid he will go and play about without me.”
“You are too merciful,” said the Prince.
“Oh, I sha’n’t be hard on Jack. I shall make every allowance for his shortcomings, and I shall expect that he will make allowance for mine.”
“He will have the best of the bargain;” said the Prince.
“You mean that he won’t have to make much allowance for me?” asked Dodo. “My dear Prince, that shows how little you really know about me. I can be abominable. Ask Miss Staines if I can’t. I can make a man angry quicker than any woman I know. I could make you angry in a minute and a quarter, but I am amiable this morning, and I will spare you.”
“Please make me angry,” said the Prince.
Dodo laughed, and held out her hand to him.
“Then you will excuse my leaving you?” she said. “I’ve got a letter to write before the midday post. That ought to make you angry. Are you stopping to lunch? No? Au revoir, then. We shall meet again sometime soon, I suppose. One is always running up against people.”
“Dodo shook hands with elaborate carelessness and went towards the door, which the Prince opened for her.
“You have made me angry,” he murmured, as she passed out, “but you will pacify me again, I know.”
Dodo went upstairs into her bedroom. She was half frightened at her own resolution, and the effort of appearing quite unconcerned had given her a queer, tired feeling. She heard a door shut in the drawing-room below, and steps in the hall. A faint flush came over her face, and she got up quickly from her chair and rah downstairs. The Prince was in the hall, and he did not look the least surprised to see Dodo again.
“Ah, you are just off?” she asked.
Then she stopped dead, and he waited as if expecting more. Dodo’s eyes wandered round the walls and came back to his face again.
“Come and see me in London any time,” she said in a low voice. “I shall go back at the end of the week.”
The Prince bowed.
“I knew you would pacify me again,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.
Dodo was up again in London at the end of the week, as she had told the Prince. Jack was also staying in town, and they often spent most of the day together; riding occasionally in the deserted Row, or sitting, as they were now, in Dodo’s room in the Eaton Square house. They were both leaving for the country in a few days’ time, where they had arranged to come across one another at various houses, and Dodo, at least, was finding these few days rather trying. She and Jack had arranged to have them together, quite alone, while they were in Switzerland, and Dodo had overlooked the fact that they might be rather hard to fill up. Not that she was disappointed in Jack. He was exactly what she had always supposed him to be. She never thought that he was very stimulating, though never dull, and she was quite conscious of enough stimulus in herself for that. For the rest he was quite satisfactory. But she was distinctly disappointed in herself. She felt as if her taste had been vitiated by drinking brandy. Mild flavours and very good bouquets of vintages that had pleased her before, sent no message from her palate to her brain. It was like the effect produced by the touch of hot iron on the skin, that forms a hard numb surface, which is curiously insensitive to touch. Dodo felt as if her powers of sensation had been seared in this way. Her perceptions no longer answered quickly to the causes that excited them; a layer of dull, unresponsive material lay between her and her world. She thought that her nerves and tissues were sound enough below. This numbness was only superficial, the burn would heal, and her skin would become pliant and soft again; and if she was conscious of all this and its corresponding causes, it could hardly be expected that Jack would be unconscious of it and its corresponding effects.
On this particular morning Dodo was particularly aware of it. It was raining dismally outside, and the sky was heavy and grey. The road was being repaired, and a traction engine was performing its dismal office in little aimless runs backwards and forwards. The official with a red flag had found there were no vehicles for him to warn and he had sat down on a heap of stones, and was smoking. There was a general air of stagnation, a sense of the futility of doing anything, and no one was more conscious of it than Dodo. She felt that there was only one event that was likely to interest her, and yet, in a way, she shrank from that. It was the searing process over again.
She wondered whether it would do any good to tell Jack of the fact that the Prince was down at Wokingham. She
found the burden of an unshared secret exceptionally trying. Dodo had been so accustomed to be before the footlights all her life, that anything of the nature of a secret was oppressive. Her conduct to her first husband she did not regard as such. It was only an admirable piece of by-play, which the audience fully appreciated. Did Dodo then never think of her late husband with tenderness? Well, not often.
A thought seldom remained long in Dodo’s mind without finding expression. She turned round suddenly.
“Jack, Prince Waldenech was at Wokingham.”
“What was he there for?” asked Jack quickly.
“I think he came to see me,” remarked Dodo serenely.
“I hope you didn’t see him,” he replied.
Dodo felt a slight stimulus in this subject.
“I saw him,” she said, “because he came to see me, as they say in the French exercise books. I couldn’t hide my head under the hearthrug like an ostrich — hot that they hide their heads under hearth-rugs, but the principle is the same. He walked in as cool as a cucumber, and said, ‘Howdy?’ So we talked, and he said he’d be glad to call you out, and you’d be glad to call him out, and we generally chattered, and then I made him angry.”
“Why did he propose to call me out?” asked Jack coldly.
“Oh, he said he wouldn’t call you out,” remarked Dodo. “He said nothing would induce him to. I never said he proposed to call you out. You’re stupid this morning, Jack.”
“That man is an unutterable cad.”
Dodo opened her eyes.
“Oh, he’s nothing of the kind,” she said. “Besides, he’s a great friend of mine, so even if he was a cad it wouldn’t matter.”
“How did you make him angry?” demanded Jack.
“I told him I was going away to write some letters. It was rather damping, wasn’t it? I hadn’t got any letters to write, and he knew it, and I knew he knew it, and so on.”
Jack was silent. He had been puzzled by Dodo’s comparative reserve during the last few days. He felt as if he had missed a scene in a play, that there were certain things unexplained. He had even gone so far as to ask Dodo if anything was the matter, an inquiry which she detested profoundly. She laid down a universal rule on this occasion.
“Nothing is ever the matter,” she had said, “and if it was, my not telling you would show that I didn’t wish for sympathy, or help, or anything else. I tell you all I want you to know.”
“You mean something is the matter, and you don’t want me to know it,” said Jack, rather unwisely.
They had been riding together when this occurred, and at that point Dodo had struck her horse savagely with her whip, and put an end to the conversation by galloping furiously off. When Jack caught her up she was herself again, and described how a selection of Edith’s dogs had kept the postman at bay one morning, until the unusual absence of barking and howling had led their mistress to further investigations, which were rewarded by finding the postman sitting in the boat-house, and defending himself with the punt pole.
Jack was singularly easy-going, and very trustful, and he did not bother his head any more about it at the time. But we have to attain an almost unattainable dominion over our minds to prevent thoughts suddenly starting up in front of us. When a thought has occurred to one, it is a matter of training and practice to encourage or dismiss it, but the other is beyond the reach of the general. And as Dodo finished these last words, Jack found himself suddenly face to face with a new thought. It was so new that it startled him, and he looked at it again. At moments like these two people have an almost supernatural power of intuition towards each other. Dodo was standing in the window, and Jack was sitting in a very low chair, looking straight towards her, with the light from the window full on his face, and at that moment she read his thought as clearly as if he had spoken it, for it was familiar already to her.
She felt a sudden impulse of anger.
“How dare you think that?” she said.
Jack needed no explanation, and he behaved well.
“Dodo,” he said gently, “you have no right to say that, but you have said it now. If there is not anything I had better know, just tell me so, for your own sake and for mine. I can only plead for your forgiveness. It was by no will of mine that such a thought crossed my mind. You can afford to be generous, Dodo.”
Something in his speech made Dodo even angrier.
“You are simply forcing my confidence,” she said. “If it was something you had better know, do you suppose that — —”
She stopped abruptly.
Jack rose from his chair and stood by her in the window.
“You are not very generous to me,” he said. “We are old friends though we are lovers.”
“Take care you don’t lose my friendship, then,” said Dodo fiercely. “It is no use saying ‘auld lang syne’ when ‘auld lang syne’ is in danger. It would be like singing ‘God save the Queen’ when she was dying. You should never recall old memories when they are strained.”
Jack was getting a little impatient, though he was not frightened yet.
“Dodo, you really are rather unreasonable,” he said. “To begin with, you quarrel with an unspoken thought, and you haven’t even given me a definite accusation.”
“That is because it is unnecessary, and you know it,” said Dodo. “However, as you like. You think you have cause to be jealous or foolish or melodramatic about Prince Waldenech. Dear me, it is quite like old times.”
Jack turned on her angrily.
“If you propose to treat me as you treated that poor man, who was the best man I ever knew,” he said, “the sooner you learn your mistake the better for us both. It would have been in better taste not to have referred to that.”
“At present that is beside the point,” said Dodo. “Was that your unspoken thought, or was it not?”
“If I would not insult you by speaking my thought whether you are right or not,” said Jack, “I shall not insult you by answering that question. My answer shall take another form. Listen, Dodo. The Prince is in love with you. He proposed to you at Zermatt. That passionless inhuman piece of mechanism, his sister, told me how much he was in love with you. She meant it as a compliment. He is a dangerous, bad man. He forces himself on you. He went down to Wokingham to see you; you told me so yourself. He is dangerous and strong. For God’s sake keep away from him. I don’t distrust you; but I am afraid you may get to distrust yourself. He will make you afraid of crossing his will. Dodo, will you do this for me? It is quite unreasonable probably, but I am unreasonable when I think of you.”
“Oh, my dear Jack,” said Dodo impatiently, “you really make me angry. It is dreadfully bad form to be angry, and it is absurd that you and I should quarrel. You’ve got such a low opinion of me; though I suppose that’s as much my fault as yours. Your opinion is fiction, but I am the fact on which it is founded, and what do you take me for? The Prince telegraphed from Dover to ask if I would see him, and I deliberately sent no answer. How he found out where I was I don’t know. I suppose he got hold of the telegram I sent here to say my address was uncertain. Does that look as if I wanted to see him so dreadfully?”
“I never said you did want to see him,” said Jack. “I said he very much wanted to see you, and what you say proves it.”
“Well, what then?” said Dodo. “You wanted to see me very much when I was married. Would you have thought it reasonable if Chesterford had entreated me never to see you — to keep away for God’s sake, as you said just now?”
“I am not the Prince,” said Jack, “neither am I going to be treated as you treated your husband. Do not let us refer to him again; it is a desecration.”
“You mean that in the light of subsequent events it would have been reasonable in him to ask me to keep away from you?”
“Yes,” said he.
Jack looked Dodo full in the face, in the noble shame of a confessed sin: In that moment he was greater, perhaps, and had risen higher above his vague self-satisfied ind
ifference than ever before. Dodo felt it, and it irritated her, it seemed positively unpardonable.
“Perhaps you do not see that you involve me in your confession,” she said with cold scorn. “I decline to be judged by your standards, thanks.”
Jack felt a sudden immense pity and anger for her. She would not, or could not, accept the existence of other points of view than her own.
“Apparently you decline to consider the fact of other standards at all.”
“I don’t accept views which seem to me unreasonable,” she said.
“I only ask you to consider this particular view. The story you have just told me shows that he is anxious to see you, which was my point. That he is dangerous and strong I ask you to accept.”
“What if I don’t?” she asked.
“This,” said he. “When a man of that sort desires anything, as he evidently desires you, there is danger. If you are alive to it, and as strong as he is, you are safe. That you are not alive to it you show by your present position; that you are as strong as he, I doubt.”
“You assume far too much,” said Dodo. “What you mean by my present position I don’t care to know. But I am perfectly alive to the whole state of the case. Wait. I will speak. I entirely decline to be dictated to. I shall do as I choose in this matter.”
“Do you quite realise what that means?” said Jack, rising.
Dodo had risen too; she was standing before him with a great anger burning in her eyes. Her face was very pale, and she moved towards the bell.
When a boat is in the rapids the cataract is inevitable.
“It means this,” she said. “He will be here in a minute or two; I told him I should be in at twelve. I am going to ring the bell and tell the man to show him up. You will stay here, and treat him as one man should treat another. If you are insolent to him, understand that you include me. You will imply that you distrust me. Perhaps you would ring the bell for me, as you are closer to it.”