by E. F. Benson
“I could write jolly good ones,” said Jack serenely.
“I am sure they would be excellent, but they would be nonsense from the other’s point of view. It is so holy — so holy! Once it wasn’t holy to me; it was merely a bore. Then, when Nadine was born, it was not holy, but very exciting, and hugely delightful. But now it is holy.”
Dodo put up her foot, and kicked Jack’s knee.
“It’s yours, as well as mine,” she said. “Poor dear holy Jack. But I love you; that makes such a difference.”
Jack caught Dodo’s foot in his hand.
“Oh, Jack, let go,” she said. “It’s bad for me.”
Instantly his fingers relaxed; and a look of agonized apology came over his face. Dodo laughed.
“Oh, Jack, you silly old woman,” she said. “It is so easy to take you in.”
But her laughter quickly ceased, and she became quite grave again.
“I don’t want you to be as sick as Nadine and Hughie combined,” she cried, “but I should like to make a few cheerful remarks about dying. We’ve all got to do it, and it doesn’t make it any closer to talk about it. It’s a pity we can’t practise it, so as to be able to do it nicely, but it’s one performance only, without rehearsals, unless you die daily like St. Paul. I don’t think I shall do it at all solemnly or tragically, Jack, for it would not be the least in keeping with my life to have one tragic scene at the end. Nor would it suit the rest of my life to be frightened at it. You see if we all held hands and stood in a row and said, ‘One, two, three, now we’ll die,’ it wouldn’t be at all alarming. And then you see from a religious point of view, God has been such a brick — is that profane? I don’t think it is — such a brick to me all my life, that it seems most unlikely that He won’t see me through. Jack, dear, you look depressed. I won’t talk about it any more. I shall very likely out-live you, and I shall be such a comfort to you when you are dying. I shall be exceedingly annoyed, just as you said you would be if I did it, but, oh, my dear, I shall say au revoir to you with such a stout heart, and when I pass through the valley of the shadow myself how I shall look for your dear gray eyes to welcome me. It will be interesting! And now, as they say at the end of sermons, I must get ready to go out with Nadine. I promised to go out with her for an hour before lunch. Pull me up, and give me a chaste salute on my marble brow. What a good invention you are! It would be worse than going back to the days of hansoms and four-wheelers to be without you. Without undue flattery, it would!”
Dodo’s slight attack of seriousness evaporated completely, and having tried the effect of her hat, which comprised, so she said, the entire flora and fauna of Brazil, on Jack’s head, put it on her own, and sent a message to Nadine that she had been waiting an hour and a half.
“But Hughie shall not come out with us,” she said, “since he and Nadine don’t pay the smallest attention to me, when they are together, and I feel alone in London. Besides, Nadine has to buy things that young gentlemen don’t know anything about — and here you are at last, my darling Nadine, but I’m not going to take your darling with us, any more than he takes you to his haberdasher, or whoever it is sells that sort of thing. Don’t look cross, Hughie, because Jack’s going to let you have the yacht, and you and Nadine can be unwell to your heart’s content. Go and sulk at your club, dear, for an hour, and then you come back to lunch, and stop for tea and dinner if you like. But the obduracy of your esteemed mother-in-law elect on the subject of the drive is quite invincible. Dear me, what beautiful language!”
Nadine and her mother did their errands, and as only Edith was going to lunch with them, who was almost invariably half-an-hour late, but who, if she arrived in time, would be quite certain to begin lunch without them, they prolonged their outing by a turn in the Park. The morning was of that exquisite tempered heat that lies midway between the uncertain warmth of spring and the fierceness of true midsummer weather, and following, as it did, on a week of rainy days had brought out both crowds and flowers. The little green seats and shady alleys were full of kaleidoscopic color from hats and parasols and summer dresses, and more stable than these, but hardly less brilliant, were the clumps of full-flowered rhododendrons and beds of blossomings. The dust had been laid on the roads, and washed from the angled planes, and summer sat in the lap of spring. Summer and spring too, as it were, sat side by side in Dodo’s motor, and who could say which was the more glorious, the mother in the splendor of her full-blown life, or Nadine, that exquisite opening bud, still dewy in the morning of her days, no wild-flower, but more like an orchid, fragrant and subtle and complex. All that still remained to her: she would never be wild-rose or honeysuckle, in spite of the big simple human love which had come to her, and daily sprang higher, flame-like.
To-day neither paid much attention to the crowd that contained so many friends. Occasionally Dodo blew a sudden gale of kissed finger-tips at some especially beloved face, but the smile that never left her face, though it did duty for general salutation, was really inspired from within. Her daughter’s awakening was a deep joy to Dodo.
“You and Hughie and Jack and I ought to be stuffed and put in the South Kensington Museum, darling,” she said, “as curious survivals of absolutely happy people, who are getting exceedingly rare. I should utter a few words of passionate protest when the executioner and the taxidermist arrived, but I think I should consent for the good of the nation in general.”
Nadine disagreed altogether.
“We are much more useful alive,” she said, “because we’re infectious. Or would our broad fatuous grins be infectious when we were stuffed? Oh, there’s Seymour, Mama. Do kiss your hand violently, because it wouldn’t be suitable for me to. I can only smile regretfully.”
“But you don’t regret,” said Dodo, after giving him a perfect volley of kissed finger-tips.
“No, but only because I can’t. My will regrets. He has sent me a lovely necklace of jade, with a little label, ‘Jade for the jade,’ on it. So I think he must feel better, as it’s a sort of joke. I wrote him quite a nice little note, and said how dear it would be of him to come to my wedding, if he felt up to it.”
Dodo giggled.
“My dear, that is exactly what I should have done at your age,” she said. “But I think I should have kissed my hand to him just now, and people would certainly have thought you heartless, if you had, just because they have got great wooden hearts themselves, accurately regulated, that pump exactly sixty times in a minute, neither more nor less. You do feel kindly and warmly to poor Seymour, and you trust he is getting over it. About stuffing us, now. I’m not quite sure I should stuff Papa Jack. He’s anxious about me, poor old darling, as if at my age I didn’t know how to have a baby properly. I talked about dying a little, which upset him, I’m afraid, though it wasn’t in the least meant to. My dear, to think that in ten days from now you’ll be married! Nadine, I do look forward to being a grandmama: I want to be lots of grandmamas, if you see what I mean. Then there’ll be Papa Hughie, and Papa Jack, and look, there’s Papa Waldenech. I never knew he was in town. We must stop a moment: I have not seen him since he came uninvited to my ball in the autumn, a little bit on. Ah, what a fool I am: he meant me not to tell you, so bear in mind that I haven’t. Waldenech, my dear, what a surprise!”
They drew up at the curb, and he came to the carriage-door, hat in hand, courteous, distinguished and evil.
“I have just come from Paris,” he said. “It is charming of you to welcome me. Nadine, too. Nadine, is your father to be allowed to come to your wedding? May I—”
Dodo had half-risen to greet him, and he saw the lines of her figure. He broke off short.
“You are going to be a mother again?” he said.
“Yes, my dear, but you needn’t tell the Albert Memorial about it,” said she. “And of course you may come to Nadine’s wedding. I had no notion you would be in England.”
He appeared to pay not the slightest attention to this — but looked at her eagerly, hungrily, at th
ose wonderful brown eyes, at the still youthful oval of her face, at the mouth he had so often kissed.
“My God, you are a beautiful woman!” he said. “And you used to be mine!”
Then he turned abruptly, and walked straight away from them without another glance. Dodo looked after him in silence a moment, frowning and smiling together.
“Poor old chap: it was a shock to him somehow,” she said. “But he’ll go back to the Ritz and steady himself. How old he has got to look, Nadine.”
But Nadine had the frown without the smile.
“I didn’t like the way he went off,” she said. “He didn’t give another thought to my wedding, Mama, after he saw. He looked hungry for you, and he looked horrible. He admired you so enormously. He was thinking of what he had lost and what Papa Jack had gained. And I felt frightened of him, just as I felt frightened one night when I was very little, and he came stumbling into the nursery, and wanted to say good-night to me. I remember my nurse tried to turn him out, and he looked as if he would have murdered her. Poor Daddy isn’t a nice man, you know.”
But Nadine looked more puzzled than vexed.
Dodo’s frown had quite cleared away. She was far too essentially happy to mind little surface disturbances.
“Poor old Daddy,” she said. “He was startled, darling, and when people are startled they look like themselves, that is all, and Daddy isn’t quite nice, any more than the rest of us are. But it was rather sweet of him to want to go to your wedding. I hope he will be sober. He will probably want to kiss us all in the vestry, all of us except Jack. I shall certainly kiss him, if he shows the slightest wish that I should do so. But he might be nasty to Jack. Perhaps we had better not tell Jack he is here. It might make him anxious again, like when I talked about death this morning. Oh, Nadine, look at those delicious horses, cantering along, and praising God because they feel so strong and young! What a rotten seat that man has: oh, of course he has, because he’s Berts. How he fidgets his horse — Berts, dear—”
And Dodo blew a shower of kisses on the end of her fingers.
Nadine’s enjoyment in this liquid air had been suddenly extinguished. She herself hardly knew why, but her lowered pleasure she felt to be connected with her father. She tried, very sensibly, to get rid of it by speech, for the unreal thing when spoken, became so fantastically absurd.
“Was Daddy ever very jealous about you?” she asked.
Dodo recalled her mind from the tragedy of Berts riding so badly.
“But violently pea-green with it,” she said, “so that sometimes I didn’t know if I could say good-morning to the butler in safety. That was in the early days, and I am bound to confess that he got over it. After that came my turn to be jealous, but I never took my turn, for between the particular old brandy and Mademoiselle Chose, if you understand, poor Daddy became entirely impossible. But for auld lang syne I shall certainly kiss him in the vestry after your wedding, and he shall sign his name if he feels up to it.”
Dodo’s face recovered all its radiance.
“And he was the father who begot you,” she said. “How can I ever forget that, you joy of mine? I should be a beast if I wanted to. But he did look rather wicked just now. I think we had better turn, or Edith will have finished lunch and gone away.”
Waldenech’s appearance did not belie him: he both looked and felt very wicked indeed. The sight of Dodo so soon to become the mother of another man’s child had caused to break out into hideous activity a volcano that had long smoldered under the slag and ashes of his drunken and debauched days, and he flamed with a jealousy the more passionate because it had so long slumbered. He felt confused and bewildered by the violence of this unexpected passion, and, as Dodo had said, he felt he must steady himself. He wanted to think clearly and constructively, to determine exactly what he must do, and how he must do it. At present he knew only of one necessity, that, even as he had taken Dodo away from Jack years ago, so now he must take Jack away from Dodo. The particular old brandy, taken in sufficient quantities, would clear his head, and enable him to think out ways and means.
He shut himself into his sitting-room at the Ritz, and by degrees the monstrous nightmare-like lucidity that alcohol brings to heavy drinkers brightened in his brain, and he sat there emancipated from all moral laws, and thought clearly and connectedly, seeing himself and his desires as the legitimate center of all existence; nothing else and nobody else could be reckoned with. His jealousy that had shot flaming up, no longer flared and flickered: it shone with a steady and tremendous light, a beacon to guide him, and show him the way he must follow. What should happen to himself he did not care, nor did it enter into his calculations: most likely it would be better when he had accounted for Jack to account for himself also. That would arrange itself: he would see, when the time came, how he felt about it. And the time had better be soon, for there was no reason for delay. But he pushed away from him a glass which he had just refilled: he had drunk himself steady, and knew that if he went on he would drink himself maudlin and confused again. It would have been strange if by this time he did not know the stages, even as a man knows the stairs in his own house.
He sat still a moment longer, rehearsing in his mind what he had taken so long to construct. He would go to the house in Eaton Square, so that Dodo would be there, and he would see her look on what he had done. To make the picture complete that touch was necessary, though he did not want to hurt her. Then he would have finished with them, and would finish with himself, instead of waiting for the farce of a trial, and the ignominy of what must follow.
The afternoon had already waned, and looking at his watch he saw that it was after seven. That was a suitable hour to go on his errand, for it was probable that Jack would be at home now, soon to dress for dinner. As he got up to get from his despatch-box the revolver that he knew was there, he saw the glass of brandy which a little while ago he had pushed away from him, still standing there, and from habit merely he drank it off. Then he put the weapon, completely loaded, into his pocket, and took one more look round before leaving the room. Somehow deep down in him, and smothered and shadowed, was some vague repugnance towards what he was going to do, and once more, forgetful of his resolution not to trespass on the steadiness of nerves the spirit brought him, he refilled and emptied his glass. That, he felt sure, would soon stifle any conflicting voices within him. His plan was actively seated in his brain; inertia, almost, would achieve it.
He had been indoors all the afternoon, and an instinct for fresh air and the evening breeze caused him to go on foot across the Green Park. The air was fresh but coldish, and it or the extra brandy he had just taken seemed quickly to harmonize and quiet that vague jangle of repugnance that twanged discordantly in his mind, and he became reconciled to himself again. But the wish not to hurt Dodo became rather more pronounced in his poor fuddled brain. He had to kill Jack, but he hoped she would not mind very much: he could make her understand surely that he was obliged to do it. He had always been devoted to her, even when he most outraged the merest decencies of their married life, and this morning the sight of her glorious beauty had wakened not jealousy only. She was superb in her wonderful womanhood: she was more beautiful now than she had ever been, and Nadine was not fit to sit beside her.
It was with surprise that he saw he had come to the house. A motor was at the door, which stood open. On the pavement there was a footman bearing a coat and hat, holding a rug in his hand: another, bareheaded, stood by the door. Waldenech told himself that he had come very opportunely, for it was clear that they would soon come out.
He hesitated a moment, swaying a little where he stood, not certain whether he should just wait for them, or go into the house. Soon he decided to take this latter course, for it was possible that Dodo or Nadine might be going without Jack, and seeing him standing there would ask him what he wanted. That risked his whole plan: they might suspect something, and with one hand in his coat pocket, where his fingers grasped the thing he had brought with
him, he went up the three steps that led to the front door.
“Is Lord Chesterford in?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. But his Lordship is just going out,” said the man.
“Please tell him that Prince Waldenech would like to speak to him. I shall not detain his Lordship more than a moment!”
Dodo and her husband had dined early, for they were going to the opera which began at eight, and at this moment the dining-room door, which opened on to the back of the hall opposite the staircase, was thrown open, and Waldenech heard Dodo’s voice.
“Come on, Jack,” she said, “or we shall miss the overture which is the best part, and you will say it is my fault.”
She came quickly round the corner, resplendent and jeweled, and saw his figure with its back to the light that came in through the open door, so that for half-a-second she did not recognize him. Simultaneously, Jack came out of the dining-room just behind her. As he came out he turned up the electric light in the hall which had not been lit, and she saw Waldenech’s face. And at the moment he took out of his pocket what his right hand was fingering.
“Stand aside, Dodo,” he said rather thickly. “It is not for you.”
Not more than half-a-dozen paces separated them, and for answer Dodo walked straight up to him, with arms outstretched so that he could not pass her, screening Jack. She was menacing as a Greek fury, beautiful as the dawn, dominant as the sun.
“You coward and murderer,” she said. “Give me that.”
For one half-second he stood nerveless and irresolute, his poor sodden wits startled into sobriety by the power and glory of her, and without a moment’s hesitation she seized the revolver that was pointed straight at her, and tore it from his hand. By a miracle of good luck it did not go off.