Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Dodo stood there dim-eyed, unspeakably and mysteriously moved. She thought of other dawns she had seen, when coming back perhaps from a ball where she had been the central and most brilliant figure all night long; she thought of other troubled dawns when she had wakened from some unquiet dream and yet dreaded the day. But here was a perfect dawn and it seemed to symbolize to her the beginning of the life that lay in front of her. She looked forward to it with eager anticipation, she gave it a rapturous welcome. She was in love with life still, she longed to see what delicious things it held in store for her. She felt sure that God was going to be tremendously kind to her. And in turn (for she had a certain sense of fairness) she felt most whole-heartedly grateful and determined to deserve these favors. There were things in her life she was very sorry for: such omissions and commissions should not occur again. She felt that the sight of this delicious dawn had been a sort of revelation to her. And with a great sigh of content, she went back to bed, and without delay fell fast asleep and did not awake till her maid came in at eight o’clock with a little tray of tea that smelt too good for anything, and a whole sheaf of attractive-looking letters, large, stiff square ones, which certainly contained cards that bade her to delightful entertainments.

  She always breakfasted in her room, and when she came downstairs about half-past ten, and looked into the dining-room, she found to her surprise that Waldenech was there eating sausages one after the other. This was a very strange proceeding for him, since in general he adopted slightly shark-like hours and did not breakfast till at least lunch-time. Time, or at any rate, his habits and method of spending it, had not been so kind to him as to Dodo and though it had not robbed him of that look of distinction which was always his it had conferred upon him the look of being considerably the worse for wear. He seemed as much older than his years as Dodo appeared younger than hers, and she was no longer in the least afraid of him. Indeed it struck her that morning as she came in, with a sense of wonder, that she had ever found him formidable.

  “Good-morning, my dear,” she said, “but how very surprising. Has everybody else finished and gone out? Waldenech, I am so glad you suggested coming here, and I hope you haven’t regretted it.”

  “I have not enjoyed any days so much since you left me,” he said.

  “How dear of you to say that! Every one thought it so extraordinary that you should want to come here or that I should let you, but I am delighted you did.”

  He left his place, and came to sit in a chair next her. The remains of Nadine’s breakfast were on a plate opposite: half a poached egg, some melon rind, marmalade and a cigarette end. He pushed these rather discouraging relics away.

  “It is not extraordinary that I should want to come here,” he said, “for the simple reason that you are the one woman I ever really cared about. I always cared for you—”

  “There are others who think you occasionally cared for them,” remarked Dodo.

  “That may be so. Now I should like to stop on. May I do so?”

  “No, my dear, I am afraid that you certainly may not,” she said. “Jack comes to-day and the situation would not be quite comfortable, not to say decent.”

  “Do you think that matters?” he asked.

  “It certainly is going to matter. You haven’t really got a European mind, Waldenech. Your mind is probably Thibetan. Is it Thibet where you do exactly as you feel inclined? The place where there are Llamas.”

  “I do as I feel inclined wherever I am,” said he.

  Dodo remembered, again with wonder, the awful mastery that that sort of sentence as delivered by him used to have for her. Now it had none of any kind: his personality had simply ceased to be dominant with regard to her.

  “But then you won’t be here,” said she. “You will go by that very excellent train that never stops at all; I have reserved a carriage for you.”

  He lit a cigarette.

  “I must have been insane to behave to you as I did,” he said. “It was most intensely foolish from a purely selfish point of view.”

  She patted his hand which lay on the table-cloth.

  “Certainly it was,” she said, “if you wanted to keep me. I told you so more than once. I told you that there were limits, but you appeared to believe there were not. That was quite like you, my dear. You always thought yourself a Czar. I do not think we need to go into past histories.”

  He got up.

  “Dodo, would you ever under any circumstances come back to me?” he said. “There is Nadine, you know. It gives her a better chance—”

  Dodo interrupted him.

  “You are not sincere when you say that. It isn’t of Nadine that you think. As for your question, I have never heard of any circumstances which would induce me to do as you suggest. Of course we cannot say that they don’t exist, but I have never come across them. Don’t let us think of it, Waldenech: it is quite impossible. If you were dying, I would come, but under the distinct understanding that I should go away again, in case you got better, as I am sure I hope you would. I don’t bear you the slightest ill-will. You didn’t spoil my life at all, though it is true you often made me both angry and miserable. As regards Nadine, she has an excellent chance, as you call it, under the present arrangements. All my friends have come back to me, except Mrs. Vivian.”

  “Mrs. Vivian?” said he. “Oh, yes, an English type, earnest widow.”

  “With an ear-trumpet now,” continued Dodo; “and I shall get her some day. And Jack comes this afternoon. Voilà, the round table again! I take up the old life anew, with the younger generation as well, not a penny the worse.”

  “You are a good many pennies the better,” said he in self-justification. “As regards Lord Chesterford: why is he coming here?”

  “I suppose because, like you, he wants to see me and Nadine or both of us.”

  “Do you suppose he wants to marry you?” he asked. “Will you marry him?”

  Dodo got up, reveling in her sense of liberty.

  “Waldenech, you don’t seem to realize that certain questions from you to me are impertinent,” she said. “My dear, what I do now is none of your business. You have as much right to ask Mrs. Vivian whether she is thinking of marrying again. You have been so discreet and pleasant all these days: don’t break down now. I have not the slightest idea if Jack wants to marry me now, as a matter of fact; and I have really no idea if I would marry him in case he did. It is more than twenty years since I spoke to him — oh, I spoke to him out of a taxi-cab the other day, but he did not answer — and I have no idea what he is like. In twenty years one may become an entirely different person. However, that is all my business, and no one else’s. Now, if you have finished, let us take a stroll in the garden before your carriage comes round.”

  “I ask then a favor of you,” he said.

  “And what is that?”

  “That you be yourself just for this stroll: that you be as you used to be when we met that summer at Zermatt.”

  Dodo was rather touched: she was also relieved that the favor was one so easy to grant. She took his arm as they left the dining-room and came out into the brilliant sunshine.

  “That is dear of you to remember Zermatt,” she said. “Oh, Waldenech, think of those great mountains still standing there in their silly rows with their noses in the air. How frightfully fatiguing! And they all used to look as if they were cuts with each other, and there they’ll be a thousand years hence, not having changed in the least. But I’m not sure we don’t have the better time scampering about for a few years, and running in and out like mice, though we get uglier and older every day. Look, there is poor John Sturgis coming towards us: let us quickly go in the opposite direction. Ah, he has seen us! — Dear John, Nadine was looking for you, I believe. I think she expected you to read something to her after breakfast about Goths or Gothic architecture. Or was it Bishop Algie you were talking to last night about cathedrals? One or the other, I am sure. He said he so much enjoyed his talk with you.”

 
Waldenech felt that Dodo was behaving exactly as she used to behave at Zermatt. Somehow in his sluggish and alcoholic soul there rose vibrations like those he had felt then.

  “Talk to him or me, it does not matter,” he said in German to her, “but talk like that. That is what I want.”

  Dodo gave him one glance of extraordinary meaning. This little muttered speech strangely reminded her of the pæan in the thrush’s song at dawn. It recalled a poignancy of emotion that belonged to days long past, but the same poignancy of feeling was hers still. She could easily feel and habitually felt, in spite of her forty and more years, the mere out-bubbling of life that expressed itself in out-bubbling speech. She also rather welcomed the presence of a third party: it was easier for her to bubble to anybody rather than to Waldenech. She buttonholed the perfectly willing John.

  “Bishop Algie is such a dear, isn’t he?” she said. “He is accustomed not to talk at all, and so talking is a treat to him, and he loved you. He is taking a cinematograph show, all about the Acts of the Apostles, round the country next autumn to collect funds for Maud’s orphanage. The orphanage is already built, but there are no orphans. I think the money he collects is to get orphans to go there, scholarships I suppose. He made all his friends group themselves for scenes in the acts, and he is usually St. Paul. There is a delicious shipwreck where they are tying up the boat with rug-straps and ropes. He had it taken in the bay here, and it was extremely rough, which made it all the more realistic because dear Algie is a very bad sailor and while he was being exceedingly unwell over the side, his halo fell off and sank.”

  “We did not talk about the Acts of the Apostles last night,” said John firmly, “we talked about Gothic architecture, and Piccadilly, and Wagner.”

  “But how entrancing,” said Dodo. “I particularly love Siegfried because it is like a pantomime. Do you remember when the dragon comes out of his cave looking exactly like Paddington station, with a red light on one side and a green one on the other, and a quantity of steam, and whistlings, and some rails? Then afterwards a curious frosty female appears suddenly in the hole of a tree and tells Wotan that his spear ought to be looked to before he fights. Waldenech, we went together to Baireuth, and you snored, but luckily on the right note, and everybody thought it was Fafner. John, I was sitting in my window at dawn this morning, and all the birds in the world began to sing. It made me feel so common. Nobody ought to see the dawn except the birds, and I suppose the worms for the sake of the birds.”

  Waldenech turned to her, and again spoke in German. “You are still yourself,” he said. “After all these years you are still yourself.”

  Dodo’s German was far more expressive than his, it was also ludicrously ungrammatical, and intensely rapid.

  “There are no years,” she said. “Years are only an expression used by people who think about what is young and what is old. Every one has his essential age, and remains that age always. This man is about sixty, the age of his mother.”

  John Sturgis smiled in a kind and superior manner.

  “Perhaps I had better tell you that I know German perfectly,” he said. “Also French and Italian, in case you want to say things that I shan’t understand.”

  Dodo stared for a moment, then pealed with laughter.

  “Darling John,” she said, “I think that is too nice of you. If you were nasty you would have let me go on talking. Isn’t my German execrable? How clever of you to understand it! But you are old, aren’t you? Of course it is not your fault, nor is it your misfortune, since all ages are equally agreeable. We grow up into our ages if we are born old, and we grow out of them, like missing a train, if our essential age is young. When you are eighty, you will still be sixty, which will be delightful for you. I make plans for what I shall be when I am old, but I wonder if I shall be able to carry them out. When I am old, I shall be what I shall be, I suppose. The inevitable doesn’t take much notice of our plans, it sits there like the princess on the top of the glass-hill while we all try, without the slightest success, to get at it. Ah, my dear Waldenech, there is the motor come round for you. You will have to start, because I have at last trained my chauffeur to give one no time to wait at the station, and you must not jilt the compartment I have engaged you to. It will get to London all alone: so bad for a young compartment.”

  He made no further attempt to induce her to let him stop, and Dodo, with a certain relief of mind, saw him drive off and blew a large quantity of kisses after him.

  “He was such a dear about the year you were born, John,” she said, “but you are too old to remember that. Now I must be Martha, and see the cook and all the people who make life possible. Then I shall become Mary again and have a delicious bathe before lunch. Certainly the good part is much the pleasantest, as is the case always at private theatricals. I think we must act this evening: we have not had charades or anything for nearly two days.”

  John, like most prigs, was of a gregarious disposition, and liked that his own superiority of intellect, of which he was so perfectly conscious, should be made manifest to others and, literally, he could not imagine that Dodo should not seem to prefer burying herself in household affairs when he was clearly at leisure to converse with her. He did not feel himself quite in tune with the younger members of the party, and sometimes wondered why he had come here. That wonder was shared by others. His tediousness in ordinary intercourse was the tediousness of his genus, for he always wanted to improve the minds of his circle. Unfortunately he mistook quantity of information for quality of mind, and thought that large numbers of facts, even such low facts as dates, held in themselves the germ of culture. But since, at the present moment, Dodo showed not the smallest desire to profit by his leisure, he wandered off to the tennis-courts, where he had reason to believe he should find companions. His faith was justified, for there was a rather typical party assembled. Berts and Hugh were playing a single, while Esther was fielding tennis-balls for them. They were both admirable performers, equally matched and immeasurably active. At the moment Esther standing, as before Ahasuerus, with balls ready to give to Berts, had got in his way, and he had claimed a let.

  “Thanks awfully, Esther,” he said, as he took a couple of balls from her, “but would you get a little further back? You are continually getting rather in my way.”

  “Oh, Berts, I’m so sorry,” she said. “You are playing so well!”

  “I know. Esther was in the light, Hugh.”

  “Oh rather, lot, of course,” said Hugh.

  Nadine took no active share. She was lying on the grass at the side of the court with Tommy, and was reading “Pride and Prejudice” aloud. When Esther had a few moments to spare she came to listen. John joined the reading party, and wore an appreciative smile.

  Nadine came to the end of a chapter.

  “Yes, Art, oh, great Art,” she said, shutting the book, “but I am not enchained. It corresponds to Madame Bovary, or the Dutch pictures. It is beautifully done; none but an artist could have done it. But I find a great deal of it dull.”

  John’s smile became indulgent.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, “but what you call dull, I expect I should call subtle. Surely, Nadine, you see how marvelous.”

  Esther groaned.

  “John, you make me feel sick,” she began.

  “Balls, please,” said Hugh.

  Esther sprang up.

  “Yes, Hugh, I’ll get them,” she said. “Aren’t those two marvelous?” she added to Nadine.

  “John is more marvelous,” said Nadine. “John, I wish you would get drunk or cheat at cards. It would do you a world of good to lose a little of your self-respect. You respect yourself far too much. Nobody is so respectable as you think yourself. We were talking of you last night: I wish you had been there to hear; but you had gone to bed with your camomile tea. Perhaps you think camomile tea subtle also, whereas I should only find it dull.”

  “I think you are quibbling with words,” he said. “But I, too, wish I had heard you talking la
st night. I always welcome criticism so long as it is sincere.”

  “It was quite sincere,” said Nadine, “you may rest assured. It was unanimous, too; we were all agreed.”

  John found this not in the least disconcerting.

  “I am not so sure that it matters then,” he said. “When several people are talking about one thing — you tell me you were talking about me — they ought to differ. If they all agree, it shows they only see one side of what they are discussing.”

  Nadine sat up, while Tommy buried his dissipated face in his hands.

  “We only saw one side of you,” she said, “and that was the obvious one. You will say that it was because we were dull. But since you like criticism you shall know. We all thought you were a prig. Esther said you would be distressed if we thought differently. She said you like being a prig. Do tell me: is it pleasant? Or I expect what I call prig, you call cultured. Are you cultured?”

  Tommy sat up.

  “Come and listen, Esther,” he shouted. “Those glorious athletes can pick up the balls themselves for a minute.”

  Esther emerged from a laurel bush triumphant with a strayed reveler.