Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Then I shan’t,” said Berts.

  “Berts, shut up,” said Dodo in a penetrating whisper. “Yes, darling Esther, Berts said something, but I don’t know what it was as they are all talking together. Yes, a cotillion. Good-by. Look out Hendrick’s Stores, Grantie. But I really won’t lead the cotillion with Berts. It is too ridiculous: a man may not lead the cotillion with his grandmother: it comes in the prayer-book.”

  “Three thousand and seven,” said Miss Grantham. “P’d’n’t’n.”

  “Three double-o seven, Padd,” said Dodo briskly, “please, miss. I always say, ‘please, miss,’ and then they are much pleasanter. I used to say ‘I’m Princess Waldenech, please, miss,’ but they never believed it, and said ‘Garn!’ But I was: darling Jack, I was! No, my days of leading the cotillion came to an end under William the Fourth. There is nothing so ridiculous as seeing an old thing — No, I’m not the Warwick Hotel? Do I sound like the Warwick Hotel?”

  Dodo’s face suddenly assumed an expression of seraphic interest.

  “It’s too entrancing,” she whispered. “I’m sure it’s a nice man, because he wants to marry me. He says I didn’t meet him in the Warwick Hotel this morning. That was forgetful. Yes? Oh, he’s rung off: he has jilted me. I wish I had said I was the Warwick Hotel: it was stupid of me. I wonder if you can be married by telephone with a clergyman taking the place of ‘please, miss.’ Where had we got to? Oh, yes, Hendrick’s: three double-o seven, you idiot. I mean, please, miss. What? Thank you, miss. No, Nadine and Berts shall lead it.”

  “I would sooner lead with Lady Ayr,” said Berts. “Nadine always forgets everything—”

  “Oh, Hendrick’s, is it?” said Dodo. “Yes, Lady Chesterford. I am really, and I want a band for the evening of December the first. No, not a waistband. Music. Yes, send somebody round.” Dodo put down the ear-piece.

  “Let us strive not to do several things together,” she said. “For the moment we will concentrate on the cotillion. Jack dear, why did you suggest I should lead? It has led to so much talking, of which I have had to do the largest part.”

  “I want you to,” he said. “I’ll take you to Egypt in the spring, if you will. I won’t otherwise.”

  “Darling, you are too unfair for words. You want to make an ass of me. You want everybody to say ‘Look at that silly old grandmama.’ I probably shall be a grandmama quite soon, if Nadine is going to marry Seymour in January— ‘Silly old grandmama,’ they will say, ‘capering about like a two-year-old.’ Because I shall caper: if I lead, I shan’t be able to resist kicking up.”

  Jack came across the room and sat on the table by her.

  “Don’t you want to, Dodo?” he asked quietly.

  “Yes, darling, I should love to. I only wanted pressing. Oh, my beloved Berts, what larks! We’ll have hoops, and snowballs, and looking-glass, and wooly-bear — don’t you know wooly-bear? — and paper-bags and obstacles, and balance. And then the very next day I shall settle down, and behave as befits my years and riches and honor. I am old and Jack is rich, and has endowed me with all his worldly goods, and we are both strictly honorable. But I feel it’s a hazardous experiment. If I hear somebody saying, as no doubt I shall, ‘Surely, Lady Chesterford is a little old?’ I shall collapse in the middle of the floor, and burst into several tears. And then I shall wipe my eyes, both of them if both have cried, and if not, one, and say, ‘Beloved Berts, come on!’ And on we shall go.”

  “You haven’t asked Hugh yet,” said Miss Grantham, looking at the list.

  “Nadine did,” said Dodo. “He said he wasn’t certain. They argued.”

  “They do,” said Berts. “Aunt Dodo, may I come to dine this evening, and have a practice afterwards?”

  “Yes, my dear. Are you going? Till this evening then.”

  Dodo turned to Jack, and spoke low.

  “Oh, Jack,” she said, “Waldenech’s in town. Nadine saw him yesterday.”

  “Glad I didn’t,” said Jack.

  “I’m sure you are, darling. But here we all are, you know. You can’t put him out like a candle. About the dance, I mean. I think I had better ask him. He won’t come, if I ask him.”

  “He won’t come anyhow, my dear,” said Jack.

  “You can’t tell. I know him better than you. He’s nasty, you know, poor dear. If I didn’t ask him, he might come. He might think he ought to have been asked, and so come instead. Whereas if he was asked, he would probably think it merely insulting of me, and so stop at home.”

  “Don’t whisper to each other,” said Edith loudly. “I can’t bear a husband and wife whispering to each other. It looks as if they hadn’t got over the honeymoon. Dodo, I haven’t had a single word with you yet—”

  “Darling Edith, you haven’t. If you only would go to the other end of the telephone, I would talk to you for hours, simply to thwart the ‘please, miss’ who asks if we haven’t done yet. The only comfortable conversation is conducted on the telephone. Then you say ‘hush’ to everybody else in the room. Indeed, it isn’t usually necessary to say ‘hush.’ Anybody with a proper interest in the affairs of other people always listens to what you say, trying to reconstruct what the inaudible voice says. Jack was babbling down the telephone the other day, when I particularly wanted to talk, but when he said ‘Never let him shave her again,’ how could I interrupt?”

  “Did he shave her again?” asked Miss Grantham. “Who was she?”

  “You shouldn’t have said that,” said Dodo, “because now I have to explain. It was the poodle, who had been shaved wrong, and she had puppies next day, and they probably all had hair in the unfashionable places. Please talk to each other, and not about poodles. Jack and I have a little serious conversation to get through.”

  “I will speak,” said Edith, “because it matters to me. We’ve let our house, Dodo, at least Bertie let it, and has gone to Bath, because he is rheumatic; Berts can stay at the Bath Club, because he isn’t, but I want to stay with you.”

  “The house is becoming like Basle railway-station,” remarked Jack.

  “Yes, dear. Every proper house in town is,” said Dodo. “A house in London isn’t a house, it is a junction. People dine and lunch and sleep if they have time. I haven’t. Yes, Edith, do come. Jack wants you, too, only he doesn’t say so, because he is naturally reticent.”

  Edith instantly got up.

  “Then may I have some lunch at once?” she said. “Cold beef will do. But I have a rehearsal at half-past one.”

  The telephone bell rang, and Dodo took up the ear-piece.

  “No, Lady Chesterford is out,” she said. “But who is it? It’s Waldenech, Jack,” she said in a low voice. “No, she hasn’t come in yet. What? No: she isn’t expected at all. She is quite unexpected.”

  She replaced the instrument.

  “I recognized his voice,” she said, “and I oughtn’t to have said I was unexpected, because perhaps he will guess. But he sounded a bit thick, don’t they say? Yes, dear Edith, have some cold beef, because it is much nicer than anything else. I shall come and have lunch in one minute, too, as I didn’t have any breakfast. Take Grantie away with you, and I will join you.”

  “I won’t have cold beef, whatever happens,” said Grantie.

  Dodo turned round, facing Jack, as soon as the others had left the room, and laid her hand on his knee.

  “Jack, I feel sure I am right,” she said. “I don’t want Waldenech here any more than you do. But after all, he is Nadine’s father. I wish Madge or Belle or somebody who writes about society would lay down for us the proper behavior for re-married wives towards their divorced husbands.”

  “I can tell you the proper behavior of divorced husbands towards re-married wives,” said Jack.

  “Yes, darling, but you must remember that Waldenech has nothing to do with proper behavior. He always behaved most improperly. If he hadn’t, I shouldn’t be your wife now. I think that must be an instance of all things working together for good, as St. Peter says.”

>   “Paul,” remarked Jack.

  “Very likely, though Peter might be supposed to know most about wives. Jack, dear, let us settle this at once, because I am infernally hungry, and the thought of Edith’s eating cold beef makes me feel homesick. I think I had much better ask Waldenech to our dance. There he is: I’ve known him pretty well, and it’s just because he is nothing more than an acquaintance now, that I wish to ask him. To ask him will show the — the gulf between us.”

  Jack shook his head.

  “I prefer to show the gulf by not asking him,” he said.

  Dodo frowned, and tapped the skirt of her riding-habit with her whip. She was rather tired and very hungry, for she had been playing bridge till two o’clock the night before, and had got up at eight to go out riding, and, meaning to have breakfast afterwards, had found herself plunged in the arrangements for her ball, which had lasted without intermission till this moment. But she felt unwilling to give this point up, unless Jack absolutely put his foot down with regard to it.

  “I think I am right,” she said. “He is rather a devil.”

  “All the more reason for not asking him.”

  “Do you mean that you forbid me?” she asked.

  He thought for a moment.

  “Yes, I forbid you,” he said.

  Dodo got up at once, flicked him in the face with the end of her riding-whip, and before he had really time to blink, kissed him on exactly the same spot, which happened to be the end of his nose.

  “That is finished, then,” she said in the most good-humored voice. “And now I have both the whip and the whip-hand. If anything goes wrong, darling, I shall say ‘I told you so,’ till you wish you had never been born.”

  He caught her whip and her hands in his.

  “You couldn’t make me wish that,” he said.

  Her whole face melted into a sunlight of adorable smiles.

  “Oh, Jack, do you really mean that?” she asked. “And because of me?”

  He pulled her close to him.

  “I suppose I should mean in spite of you,” he said. “Go and eat with that ogre Edith. And then, darling, will you rest a little? You look rather tired.”

  She raised her eyes to his.

  “But I am tired,” she said. “It would be a disgrace not to be tired every day. It would show you hadn’t made the most of it.”

  “I don’t like you to be tired,” he said, “especially since it isn’t lunch-time yet. You haven’t got much more to do, to-day, I hope.”

  “But lots, and all so jolly. Oh, my dear, the world is as full as the sea at high-tide. It would be wretched not to fling oneself into it. But it is only high-tide till after my dance. Then we go down to Meering, and snore, and sleep like pigs and eat like kittens, and sprout like mushrooms.”

  “You’ve asked a houseful there,” objected Jack.

  “Yes, darling, but it’s only people like you and Esther and Hugh. I shan’t bother about you.”

  “Is Hugh coming there?” he asked.

  “Yes. He goes abroad directly afterwards, as he has exchanged from the Foreign Office into the Embassy at Rome for six months. He is wise, I think. He doesn’t want to be here when Nadine is married, nor for some time afterwards. But he wants to see her again first.”

  “The rest is wise,” said Jack, “but that is abominably foolish.”

  “Perhaps it is, but how one hates a young man to be altogether wise. A wise young man is quite intolerable. In fact wisdom generally is intolerable. It would be intolerable of me to lie down after lunch, and not eat and drink what I chose. You would be intolerable if you didn’t make yourself so utterly foolish about me. Oh, Jack, let us die if necessary, but don’t let us be wise before that.”

  Jack had nothing to say to this remarkable aspiration, and Dodo went out to join Edith. But he sat still on the edge of the table after she had gone, not altogether at ease. During the last month or so, he had several times experienced impulses not to be accounted for rationally, which had made him ask her if she felt quite well, and now that he collected these occasions in his mind, he could not recollect any very reassuring response on her part. She had told him not to fuss, she had stood before him, radiant, brilliant and said, “Do I look particularly unwell? Why do you want to spoil the loveliest time of all my life?” But she did not seem to have given him any direct answer at all, and the cumulative effect of those possible evasions troubled him a little. But he soon told himself that such a cloud was born of his imagination only, for it was impossible to conceive, when he let himself contemplate the memory of those days since last July, that there could be anything wrong behind them, in so serene a beneficence of happiness were they wrapped. He had never dreamed that the world held such store, and he had not ever so faintly realized how jejune and barren his life had been before. He, for all his fifty years, had not yet lived one-half of them, for less than half himself had passed through the months that made them up. It was as if all his life he had dreamed, dreamed with God knew what shocks and catastrophes that Dodo was his, and last July only he awoke to find that his arms were indeed about her, and that she herself was pressed close to him. And she, too, had told him that she was happy, not pleased merely, or excited or thrilled, but happy. Incredible as it seemed to his modest soul, her happiness was one with his. It seemed there was nothing left to ask God for; the only possible attitude was to stand up and praise and thank Him. Jack did that every day and night that passed.

  Dodo, when she left her husband, had not gone straight to the dining-room to join Edith and the cold beef. For half an hour before, she had been conscious of a queer and rather sickening pain, that had made it an effort to continue enthusiastically telephoning and arguing. She had had no real doubt in her own mind that it was the result of a rather strenuous morning without any food except the slice of bread and butter that had accompanied her early bedroom tea, but she thought that she would go upstairs and have her hot bath, which was sure to make her quite comfortable, before she ate. Her bathroom which opened out of her bedroom was prepared for her, the water steaming and smelling of the delicious verbena-salts which her maid had put into it, and convinced that she would feel perfectly fit again after it, she quickly undressed, and went in with bare feet to enjoy herself. But even as she took off her dressing-gown, she had a start of pain that for the moment frightened her, and caused her to stand naked by her bath, holding on to the edge of it. Then the pain gradually drew away, as if pulled out of her by a string, and in a minute more she was quite herself again. But there was the memory of it left, like a black patch, so it seemed, even when it had quite ceased. However, it had gone now, and instinctively obeying the habit of years, she swiftly turned her mind to contemplate the thoroughly delightful things that lay in front of her, rather than the disturbing moment that had passed now, leaving only a black patch in memory. But before she slipped into the hot aromatic water, she wiped the sweat from her forehead. She splashed the steaming water over her back, wriggling a little at the touch of it.

  “O Lord, how nice!” she said to herself. “And it’s hardly possible to bear it. And that reminds me that I utterly forgot to say my prayers this morning, because I was in such a hurry. Any one would have been on such a lovely morning, with such a lovely horse waiting at the door. But I am having the nicest time that anybody ever had, and I’ll try not to be quite such a disgrace as I used to be.”

  Dodo gave a loud sigh of reverent content and splashed again. It must be understood that she was saying her forgotten prayers.

  “And Jack’s a perfect darling,” she went on, “and I am so pleased to love somebody. I never loved anybody before really, if you know what I mean by love, except perhaps Nadine. It makes the most tremendous difference, and one doesn’t think about oneself absolutely all the time, though I daresay very nearly. Of course I was always fond of people, but I think that was chiefly because they were mostly so nice to me. I must go to church next Sunday, which is to-morrow, and do all this properly, but it would have
been much more convenient if it had been the day after to-morrow, as I think I promised Jack to play golf with him to-morrow. But I’ll see what can be done. Now I’ve dropped the soap, and isn’t everything extraordinarily mixed up! Oh, please don’t let me have any more pain like what I had just now, if it’s all the same; but of course if I must have it, well, there it is. But I hope it doesn’t mean anything nasty—”

  Dodo dropped the soap which she had just rescued from the bottom of the cloudy water, and looked up with bright eyes.

  “Oh, my dear, can it be that?” she said aloud. “Is it possible?”

  She recollected that she had said “my dear” when she was by way of saying her forgotten prayers, and so added “Amen” very loudly and piously. Then, quite revivified, she got out, dried herself with great speed and went downstairs half-dressed, with an immense fur-coat to cover deficiencies, since it was impossible to wait any longer for food. She felt no fatigue any more, but a sudden intense eagerness at the thought of what possibly that pain might mean. It seemed almost incredible, but she found herself almost longing for a return of that which had frightened her before.

  It was impossible for her to cram any more engagements into that day, since they already fitted into each other like the petals of a rose not yet fully blown, but she made an appointment with her doctor for next morning. The interview was not a long one, but Dodo came out from it, wreathed in smiles, immensely excited, and hurried home, where she went straight up to Jack’s room. She seized him with both hands, and kissed him indiscriminately.

  “Oh, my dear, you can’t possibly guess,” she said, “because it is quite too ridiculous, and only a person like me could possibly have done anything of the kind, and you’re Zacharias, but you needn’t be dumb. Oh, Jack, don’t you see? Yes: it’s that. I’m going to have a baby, instead of cancer. I was prepared — at least not quite — for its being cancer, which I shouldn’t have enjoyed at all, but Dr. Ingram says it’s the other thing. Did you ever hear anything so nice, and I am a very wonderful woman, aren’t I, and pray God it will be a boy! Oh, Jack, think how bored I was with the bearing of my first child. I didn’t deserve it, and you used to come and cheer me up. And then, poor little innocent, it was taken from me. Poor little chap: he would have been Lord Chesterford now instead of you if he had lived. Won’t it seem funny giving birth to the same baby, so to speak, twice? Ah, my dear, but it’s not the same! It’s your child this time, Jack, and I shan’t be bored this time. You see I didn’t really become a woman at all till lately. I was merely a sprightly little devil, and so I suppose God is giving me another chance. Jack, it simply must be a boy: I shall love to hear Lord Harchester cry this time.”