Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “But one can’t help doing something,” said Dodo. “One can’t go on being useless.”

  “You don’t mend it by being worse than useless. That’s why I devote myself to music. I can do that, and I can’t do any of the things that everybody else is trying to do.”

  Edith paused a moment.

  “There’s another reason, too,” she said. “I should go off my head if I wasn’t busy about something. I wish there was such a thing as a clinical thermometer of unhappiness, and you would see how utterly miserable I am. You can’t guess what being at war with Germany means to me. All that is best in the world to me comes from Germany; all music comes from there. And yet last night when I was playing a bit of Brahms, Bertie said, ‘Oh, do stop that damned Hun tune!’ Why, there’s no such thing as a Hun tune! Music is simply music, and with a few exceptions the Huns, as he loves to call them, have made it all.”

  “He calls them Huns,” said Dodo carefully, “because they’ve already proved themselves the most infamous barbarians. Did you see the fresh atrocities in the Times this morning?”

  “I did, and I blushed for the wickedness of the people who invented them and the credulity of the people who believed them. They can’t be true. I know the Germans, and they are incapable of that sort of thing. I bet you that every German paper is full of similar atrocities committed by the English.”

  “Then you’ll have to blush for the wickedness and the credulity of the Germans too, darling!” remarked Dodo. “You will be red.”

  Edith laughed.

  “Yes, I’m sorry I said that,” she said. “But in any case what has Brahms got to do with it? How can any sane person develop racial hatred like that? Let’s have a pogrom of Jews because of Judas Iscariot. To go back. I’m not sent into the world to empty slops, but to make symphonies. Very few people can make symphonies, and I’m one of them. Huns or no Huns, what have artists to do with war?”

  “But, my dear, you can’t help having to do with it,” said Dodo. “You might as well say, ‘What have artists to do with earthquakes’?’ But an earthquake will shake down an artist’s house just as merrily as a commercial traveller’s. You can’t be English, and not have to do with war.”

  Edith was silent a moment, and suddenly her face began to tie itself into the most extraordinary knots.

  “Give me some port or I shall cry,” she said. “I won’t cry; I never do cry and I’m not going to begin now.”

  The prescription seemed to be efficacious.

  “Then there’s my boy,” she said. “Berts has left Cambridge and I suppose that before Christmas he’ll be out in France. He’s about as much fitted to be a soldier as you are to be a housemaid. Of all the instances of everybody wanting to do what they are totally incapable of, the worst is the notion that we can make an army. You can’t make an army by giving boys bayonets. Germany is an army, for forty years she has been an army. Why compete? Germany will wipe up our army and the French army like a housemaid, which you want to be, wiping up a slop. Have you seen what the German advance has been doing this last week? Nothing in the world can save Paris, nothing in the world can save France. Out of mere humanitarian motives I want France to see that as quickly as possible. The war is over.”

  Dodo rose.

  “Don’t talk such damned nonsense, Edith,” she said. “That port has gone to your head and given you vin triste. If anything was wanting to make me quite certain that we are going to win it, it is the fact that you say we are not. Do you remember when those beastly Allensteins were staying with me, and how he knocked out ‘Deutschland über alles,’ on the table with his fat fingers? The effect on you was that you played ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’ as loud as you could on the piano next door. It was extremely rude of you, but it shewed a proper spirit. Why can’t you do it now?”

  “Because it’s hopeless. Before Germany shewed her strength you could do that just as you can tweak a lion’s tail when he is lying asleep behind bars at the Zoo. But now we’re inside the cage. I don’t say we are not formidable, but we don’t make ourselves more formidable by sending all the best of our young men out to France to be shot down like rabbits. We were not prepared, and Germany was. Her war-machine has been running for years, smoothly and slowly, at quarter-steam. We’ve got to make a machine, and then we’ve got to learn how to run it. Then about the navy — —”

  Dodo assumed a puzzled expression.

  “Somebody, I don’t know who,” she said, “told me that there was an English navy. Probably it was all lies like the German atrocities.”

  Edith threw her hands wide.

  “Do you think I like feeling as I do?” she asked. “Do you think I do it for fun?”

  “No, dear, for my amusement,” said Dodo briskly. “But unfortunately it only makes me sick. Hullo, here’s David.”

  David entered making an awful noise on a drum.

  “Shut up, David,” said his mother, “and tell Edith what you are going to do when you’re eighteen.”

  “Kill the Huns,” chanted David. “Mayn’t I play my drum any more, mummy?”

  “Yes, go and play it all over the house. And sing Tipperary all the time.”

  David made a shrill departure.

  “Of course you can teach any child that!” said Edith.

  “I know. That’s so lovely. If I had fifty children I should teach it to them all. I wish I had. I should love seeing them all go out to France, and I should squirm as each of them went. I should like to dig up the graves of Bach and Brahms and Beethoven and Wagner and Goethe, and stamp on their remains. They have nothing to do with it all but they’re Huns. I don’t care whether it is logical or Christian or anything else, but that’s the way to win the war. And you’re largely responsible for that; I never saw red before you talked such nonsense about the war being over. If we haven’t got an army we’re going to have one, and I shall learn to drive a motor. If I could go to that window and be shot, provided one of those beastly Huns was shot too, I should give you one kiss, darling, to shew I forgave you, and go to the window dancing! I quite allow that if everybody was like you we should lose, but thank God we’re not.”

  Dodo’s face was crimson with pure patriotism.

  “I’m not angry with you,” she said, “I’m only telling you what you don’t know, and what I do know, so don’t resent it, because I haven’t the slightest intention of quarrelling with you, and it takes two to make a quarrel. You know about trombones and C flat, and if you told me about C flat — —”

  Edith suddenly burst into a howl of laughter.

  “Or C sharp,” said Dodo, “or a harpsichord. Oh, don’t laugh. What have I said?”

  Edith recovered by degrees and wiped her eyes.

  “In all my life I have never had so many offensive things said to me,” she remarked, “I can’t think why I don’t mind.”

  “Oh, because you know I love you,” said Dodo with conviction.

  “I suppose so. But there’s Berts going out to that hell — —”

  “Oh, but you said the war was over already,” said Dodo. “Besides what would you think of him if he didn’t go?”

  “I should think it extremely sensible of him,” began Edith in a great hurry.

  “And after you had thought that!” suggested Dodo.

  Edith considered this.

  “I don’t know what I should think next,” she said. “What I’m going to do next is to get back to my scoring.”

  Edith’s remarks about the absurdity of people attempting to do things for which they had no aptitude made a distinct impression on Dodo, and she totally abandoned the stocking of which she could not turn the heel, and made no further dislocation of work by trying to use a mop. But she found that if she really attended, she could count blankets and bed-jackets, and weigh out stores and superintend their distribution. Again, driving a motor was a thing that seemed within the limits of her ability, and by the time that Winston was in full running order as a hospital she was fairly com
petent as a driver. Awful incidents had accompanied her apprenticeship; she had twice stripped her gear, had run into a stone wall, luckily in a poor state of repair, and had three times butted at a gate-post. Her last accident, after a week really tedious from mere uneventfulness, had been when she had gone all alone, as a pleasant surprise, to the station to meet Jack, who was coming home for two days’ leave. She had been both driving and talking at high speed, and so had not seen that she was close to a very sharp corner on the marshy common just outside the gates, and preferring the prudent course, as opposed to the sporting chance of getting round the corner without capsizing, had gone straight ahead, leaving the road altogether, until, remembering to apply her brakes, she stuck fast and oozily in the marsh.

  “There!” she said with some pride. “If I had been reckless and imprudent I should have tried to get round that corner and had an upset. Didn’t I show presence of mind, Jack?”

  “Marvellous. And what are we to do now?”

  Dodo looked round.

  “We had better shout,” she said. “And then somebody will come with a horse and pull us out backwards. It has happened before,” she added candidly.

  “But if nobody comes?” asked he.

  “Somebody is sure to. It’s unthinkable that we should remain here till we die of exposure and hunger, and the crows pick our whitening bones. The only other thing to do is that you should jump out and fetch somebody. I wouldn’t advise you to, as you would sink up to your knees in the mud. But it’s a lovely afternoon; let’s sit here and talk till something happens. Haven’t I learned to drive quickly?”

  “Very quickly,” said Jack. “We’ve covered the last three miles in four minutes.”

  “I didn’t mean that sort of quickly,” said Dodo, “though daresay I said it. Isn’t it lucky it’s fine, and that we’ve got plenty of time? I wanted a talk with you and somebody would be sure to interrupt at home. He would want sticking-plaster or chloroform or charades.”

  “Is all that your department?” asked Jack.

  “Yes, they call me Harrods. You never thought I should become Harrods. Oh, Jack, if you’ve got an ache in your mind, the cure is to work your body till that aches too. Then two aches make an affirmative.”

  “What?” said Jack.

  “You see what I mean. And the odd thing is that though I’m entirely taken up with the war, I try not to think about the war at all, at least not in the way I used to before I became Harrods. One is too busy with the thing itself to think about it. In fact, I haven’t looked at the papers for the last day or two. Has there been any news?”

  “Not much. I’ve been busy too, and I really hardly know. But there’s been nothing of importance.”

  “Jack, what’s going to happen?” she asked.

  “Oh, we’re going to win, of course. God knows when. Perhaps after three years or so. But it’s no good thinking about that.”

  Dodo gave a little groan.

  “I know it isn’t. If I realised that this was going on all that time, I think I should just get drunk every day. Let’s talk about something else, and not realise it.”

  “When are you coming to see my camp?” asked he.

  “I should think when the war is over and there isn’t any camp. I don’t see how I can get away before. How long has it been going now? Only three months, is it? And I can hardly remember what things were like before. How did one get through the day? We got up later, it is true, but then we went to bed later. Did we do nothing except amuse ourselves? I couldn’t amuse myself now. And what did we talk about? I seem to remember sitting and talking for hours together, and not finding it the least tedious.”

  “I shall insist on your having a holiday soon,” said Jack.

  “Oh no, darling, you won’t. I’ve had fifty-five years’ holiday in my life and three months’ work. That doesn’t give much of a daily average, if you work it out; somewhere about five minutes a day, isn’t it? I must have something better than that to shew before I have another holiday.... Jack, did you say that we must look forward to three years or more of this? Good Lord, how senseless it all is! What do you prove by setting millions of jolly boys to kill each other? Oh, I shouldn’t have said that; I would have said, ‘What do you prove by having our jolly boys killed by those damned Huns?’ Yes, darling, I said damned, and I intended to. I told Edith that one day. The way to win a war is to be convinced that your enemy are fiends. ‘Also,’ as that fat Albert would say, ‘we must therefore kill them.’ But I wish I really meant it. There must be a lot of nice fellows among the Huns. They’ve had a bad education; that’s what is the matter with them. Also, they have no sense of humour. Fancy writing a Hymn of Hate, and having it solemnly sung by every household! That odious Cousin Willie has approved of it, and it is being printed by the million. No sense of humour.”

  Dodo unconsciously hooted on her motor-horn, and looked wildly round.

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” she said, “because I don’t want to be rescued just yet. It’s lovely sitting here and talking to you, Jack, without fear of being asked to sign something. What was I saying? Oh yes, humour! The Huns haven’t got any humour, and the lack of that and of mirth will be their undoing. How wise Queen Elizabeth was when she said that God knew there was need for mirth in England now, just at the time when England was in direst peril. That is frightfully true to-day. We shall get through by taking it gaily. It’s much best not to let oneself see the stupendous tragedy of it all. If I did that I would simply shrivel up or get drunk.”

  Dodo began a laugh that was near to a sob.

  “I saw three boys this morning,” she said, “all of whom had had a leg amputated. There were three legs to the lot of them. So they put their arms round each other’s necks so as to form a solid body, and marched down the long walk shouting ‘left, right, left, right.’ Then they saw me, and disentangled their arms and grinned, and tried to salute, and so they all fell down with roars of laughter. My dear, did you ever hear of such darlings? That was the mirth that Queen Elizabeth said was so necessary. I wanted to kiss them all, Jack.”

  “I want to kiss you,” he said.

  “Then you shall, you dear, if you think it won’t shock the magneto. I do miss you so horribly; you’re the only real link between the days before the war and the war. All other values are changed, except you and David. What a nice talk we have had, at least I’ve had the talk, so you must do your part and find it nice. Now let’s hoot, until several strong cart-horses come to help us.”

  Dodo performed an amazing fantasy on the horn, while the early sunset of this November day began to flame in the west, which reminded her that there were charades this evening. A chance bicyclist was eventually induced to take a message to a farm about half a mile distant, and a small child came from the farm and took a message to his mother, who came out to see what was happening, and took a message to her husband, who did the same, and went back for a horse, which was found to be insufficient, so deeply were they stuck, and another horse had to be produced from another farm. After that they came out of the marsh like a cork being pulled out of a bottle, and Dodo was in time to be the German Emperor with a racing-cup upside down on her head for a helmet, an enormous moustache, and half a dozen sons. This scene represented the complete word, which was instantly guessed and hissed as being undoubtedly Potsdam.

  CHAPTER VIII

  EDITH DECLARES WAR

  There were not less than ten people in any of the compartments when the London train, which was so long that both ends of it projected outside the station, arrived at Winston, and so Dodo made herself extremely comfortable in the luggage van, feeling it perfectly blissful to be alone (though in a luggage van) and to be inaccessible to any intrusive call of duty for three whole hours. Indeed, she almost hoped that the train would be late, and that she would then get a longer interval of solitude than that. She had a luncheon-basket, and a pillow, and a fur-coat, and a book that promised to be amusing, and had very prudently thrown the morning paper, whi
ch she had not yet read, out of the window, for fear she should get interested in it and think about the war. If there was good news, she could wait for it till she got to London; if there was bad news she thought she could wait for ever. The friendly guard, rather shocked to see her preference for a luggage van, rather than a fraction of a seat in a crowded carriage, had drawn an iron grille across the entrance, so that she resembled a dangerous caged animal, and promised her an uninterrupted journey.

  The book speedily proved itself a disappointment; it was clear that the war was going to creep into it before long, like the head of Charles I. into Mr. Dick’s Memorial, and Dodo put it aside and looked out of the window instead. The blossoms of springtime made snowy the orchards around the villages through which the train sped without pause or salute, while the names of insignificant stations flashed past. But the country-side was thick with reminiscence of hunting days for her, and with that curious pleasure in mere recognition which the sight of familiar places gives long after all emotion has withered from them, she identified a fence here, a brook there, or a long stretch of ploughed land, lawn-like to-day with the short spikes of the growing crops, all of which brought back to her mind some incidents of pleasant winter days, now incredibly remote. Then as the train drew up in deference to an opposing signal, she heard from a neighbouring coppice the first note of a cuckoo, and unbidden the words of the old song, still fresh and untarnishable by age, floated across her mind:

  Summer is i-cumen in,

  Lhoude sing cuccu:

  Groweth sed, and bloweth med,

  And springthe the woode nu,

  Sing cuccu.