Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

“And where were you?” asked Dodo.

  “In the cellar, of course, with the housemaid and the cook singing. But the outrage of it, the wanton brutal destruction! Do those Huns — —”

  “You said ‘Huns’,” said Dodo gleefully.

  “I know I did. Huns they are, brutes, barbarians! And do they think that they can win the war by smashing my clock? First there were the Belgian atrocities, then there was the massacre of peaceful travellers on neutral shipping without any warning begin given, and now they must break my windows. That has brought it home to me. I believe every accusation of brutality and murder and loathsomeness that has ever been made against them. And that is why I came round to see you. I want to renounce all my previous convictions about them. I will never set foot on German soil again; the whole beastly race is poisoned for me. There’s exactly the same callous brutality in pages of Wagner and Strauss, and I thought it was strength! I lay awake half of last night hating them. Of course I shall take up some war-work at once; best of all I should like to go into some munition factory and make with my very own hands high explosives to be dropped on Berlin. Why don’t we prosecute the war with greater frightfulness, and, oh, Dodo, at the very beginning why didn’t you convince me what brutes and barbarians they are!”

  Edith walked rapidly about the room as she made this unreserved recantation, stamping with fury.

  “My clock! My symphony! My front-door!” she exclaimed. “My front-door was blown right across the hall, and in its present position it’s more like the back-door. If I hadn’t been so furiously angry at the sight of the damage, I think I should have laughed at the thought that I once believed the Huns to be cultured and romantic people. I’m almost glad it happened, for it has brought enlightenment to me. That’s my nature. I must act up to my convictions whatever they are and I don’t care at what personal loss I learn the truth. Not one note more of music will I write till the English are strolling down the Unter den Linden. The Kaiser must be brought to justice; if he survives the war he must be treated like a common criminal. He must suffer for smashing up my rooms exactly as if he had been a hooligan in the street. He is a hooligan; that’s precisely what he is, and once I was pleased at his coming to my concert. I talked to him as if he had been a civilised being, I curtsied to him. I wonder that the sinews of my knees didn’t dry up and wither for shame. What a blind dupe I have been of that disgusting race! Never will I trust my judgment again about anybody.... Give me a box of matches and let me make a bomb.”

  Dodo was enchanted at this change of view in Edith. Though she had determined that nothing should interfere with her friendship, things had been rather difficult at times.

  “How you can have tolerated me, I can’t think,” continued Edith. “And you showed marvellous tact, because if you talked about almost anything under the sun the war would creep in. Wonderful tact, Dodo; wonderful patience! I must begin to do something at once; I must set to work to learn something, and the only question is what shall it be. Luckily I learn things quicker than anybody I know, for I can concentrate in a way that hardly anyone else can. You never concentrate enough, you know. I have often told you that.”

  “Yes, darling, often and often,” said Dodo. “How much more fortunate you are! What are you going to concentrate on?”

  “I don’t know. I must think. By the way, you are dining with me to-night, aren’t you? That will be all right, if you don’t mind there being no front-door; they left me my dining-room. But the road in front of the house is all torn up; you will have to walk ten yards. The Huns!”

  Dodo, by way of a holiday, spent an extremely strenuous week. She took the convalescents out for drives in the morning, and to matinées in the afternoon, and got up a variety of entertainments for those who were in bed. Many of her friends were in town, busy also, but she sandwiched in, between these hospital duties, a prodigious quantity of social intercourse. Yet the spring, the sunshine, the aroma had for the present gone out of all that used to render life agreeable; it was an effort hardly worth making in these days when efforts were valuable, to wear even the semblance of a light heart when there was nothing more to be gained beyond the passing of a pleasant hour for herself. Fatigue of mind and soul lay within her like some cold lump that would not be dissolved and she had some sort of spiritual indigestion which made amusement taste queerly. Apart from the mere stimulus of human companionship, all this tearing about, this attempt to recapture a little of the pre-war insouciance was hardly worth the exertion. In the wards she could be amazing, but there she had a purpose: to play the fool with a purpose and see it fulfilling itself was an altogether different affair and was easy enough. What was difficult was to play the fool from mere ebullition of high spirits.

  Edith came to the station to see Dodo off on her return to Winston. She had meant to stop another couple of days but already she was fidgeting to get to work again, and what clinched her decision to go back was that a medical inspector had given notice of his visit to her hospital to-morrow morning and it was unthinkable that she should not be there. She had secured a seat in the train, and the two strolled along the platform till it was due to start.

  “It’s a waste of time and energy,” she said to Edith on this topic, “to make an effort to enjoy yourself. If you don’t enjoy yourself naturally, you had better give it up, and try to make somebody else enjoy himself.”

  Edith was in rather a severe mood.

  “Truly altruistic,” she said. “Suck the orange dry, and then give the rind away.”

  “Not at all: squeeze the juice out of it, and give the juice away,” said Dodo.

  “Yes, as you don’t want the juice yourself. That’s precisely what I mean. But don’t let us discuss abstract questions; I have bought a typewriter.”

  “A typewriter is a person,” said Dodo. If Edith was going to be magisterial she would be, too.

  “No; the person is a typist,” said Edith. “I’m one, so I ought to know. In a week’s time I shall be absolutely proficient.”

  “My dear, how clever of you,” said Dodo, forgetting to be disagreeable. “What will you do then?”

  “I shall make a round of hospitals and do all their correspondence for them for a week. I shall come to Winston.”

  “That’ll be lovely,” said Dodo. “But what about the munition factory?”

  “They say I’m too old to stand the hours, and to stand the standing. Old, indeed! Also you mayn’t smoke, which is more important. One has to make the most of one’s faculties, and if I couldn’t smoke all day, I shouldn’t be at my best. We’ve got to learn efficiency; we shall win when we all do our best.”

  They had come out of the dim arch of the station, and Dodo, helplessly giggling, sat down on a bench in the sunlight.

  “That’s so deliriously like you,” she said. “You practically say that the war is won because you’ve bought a typewriter. It’s the right spirit, too. I feel the Red Cross may be happy in its mind so long as I am at Winston. All the same the abstract question is interesting. I feel that the only way to laugh nowadays is to make other people laugh. And we’ve got to take short views, and get through the day’s work, and get through to-morrow’s work to-morrow. One is learning something, you know, through all this horror; I’m learning to be punctual and business-like, and not to want fifty people to look after me. We’ve been like babies all our lives, getting things done for us, instead of doing them ourselves. In the old days if I was going by train my maid had to come on first and take my seat, and watch by the carriage door till I arrived, and gave me my book and my rug, and the station-master had to touch his cap and hope I would be comfortable, and the footman had to shew my ticket.”

  An engine somewhere in the station whistled and puffed and a long train slid slowly by them and vanished into the tunnel just beyond.

  “We were babies, we were drones,” continued Dodo, “and we were ridiculously expensive. If a train didn’t suit us, we took a special, if a new dress didn’t come up to our hopes, we never saw i
t again. But now we wear a dress for years, and instead of taking specials we catch slow trains humbly, and travel in luggage vans. I don’t think we shall ever go back to the old days, even if we had enough money left to do so.”

  She looked round, and a sudden misgiving dawned on her.

  “Where’s my train?” she said. “It ought to be standing there? What has happened?”

  It was soon clear what had happened.... Half an hour later Dodo left in a special at staggering expense, in order to get down to Winston that night.

  CHAPTER IX

  MID-STREAM

  The morning paper had been brought in to Dodo with her letters, and she opened it quickly at the middle page. The German assault on Verdun was being pressed ever more fiercely; it seemed impossible that the town could hold out much longer. A second of the protecting forts had fallen, smashed and pulverised under the hail of devastating steel....

  Dodo read no more than the summary of the news. It was bad everywhere; there was not a single gleam of sun shining through that impenetrable black cloud that had risen out of Central Europe nearly two years ago, and still poured its torrents on to broken lands. On the Eastern front of Germany the Russian armies were being pushed back; the British garrison in Kut was completely surrounded, and even the sturdiest of optimists could do no more than affirm that the fall of that town would not have any real bearing on the war generally. They had said precisely the same when, a few months ago, Gallipoli had been evacuated, just as when in the first stupendous advance of the enemy across France and Flanders, they had slapped their silly legs, and shouted that the German lines of communication were lengthening daily and presently the Allies would snip them through, so that all the armies of the Hun would drop neatly off like a thistle-head when you sever its stalk with a stick. At this rate how many and how grave disasters were sufficient to have any bearing on the war? Perhaps the fall of Verdun would be a blessing in disguise. The disguise certainly seemed impenetrable, but the optimists would pierce it....

  Dodo pulled herself together, and remembered that she was an optimist too, though not quite of that order, and that it was not consistent with her creed to meditate upon irretrievable misfortunes, or indeed to meditate upon anything at all when there were a dozen private letters of her own to be opened at once, and probably some thirty or forty more connected with hospital work, waiting for her in the office. It certainly was not conducive to efficiency to think too much in these days, especially if nothing but depression was to be the result of thinking; and if all she could do was to see to the affairs of her hospital, it was surely better to do that than to speculate on present data about the result of the fall of Verdun.

  A tap at her door, and David’s voice demanding admittance reminded her that after she had attended to the immediate requirements of the hospital, she was to have a holiday to-day, as David was going to school for the first time to-morrow, and this day was dedicated to him. Thus there was another reason for liveliness; it would never do to cast shadows over David’s festival.

  “Yes, darling, come in,” she said. “I’m still in bed like a lazy-bones.”

  “Oh, get up at once, mummie,” said David. “It’s my day. Shall I fill your bath?”

  “Yes, do. While it’s filling I shall open my letters.”

  “But not answer them,” said David. “You can do that to-morrow after I have gone. Isn’t it funny? I don’t want to go to school a bit, but I should be rather disappointed if I wasn’t going.”

  “I know, darling. I’m rather like that, too. I hate your going, but I’m sending you all the same.”

  “Anyhow, I shan’t cry,” announced David.

  Dodo glanced through her letters while David was busy with her bath. There was one from Jack, announcing that he would be here for the Sunday, and that was good. There was one from Edith, and that made her laugh, for it informed her that she would arrive to-night bringing her typewriter with her. The speed at which she was getting efficient appeared to be quite miraculous, if her machine had not been away being repaired, she would have typed this letter instead of writing it. She had knocked it over yesterday, and the bell wouldn’t ring at the end of a line. She was learning shorthand as well, and it would be good practice for her to take down Dodo’s business letters from dictation, and type them for her afterwards....

  “Ready!” shouted David from the bathroom next door. “And I’ve put in a whole bottle of something for a treat.”

  From the thick steam that was pouring through the open door it seemed certain that David had treated her to a bottle of verbena salts.

  “Darling, that is kind of you,” said Dodo cordially. “Now you must go downstairs, and say we’ll have breakfast in half an hour.”

  “Less,” said David firmly.

  “Well, twenty-five minutes. You can begin if I’m late.”

  The rule on these festivals, such as birthdays and last days of the holidays, was that David should, with his mother as companion, do exactly what he liked from morning till night within reason, Dodo being the final court of appeal as to whether anything was reasonable or not. She was allowed to be reasonable too (not having to run, for instance, if she really was tired) and so when he had gone downstairs, she emptied the bath-water out and began again, since it was really unreasonable to expect her to get into the fragrant soup which David had treated her to. But she was nearly up to time, and in the interval he had learned the exciting news that the keeper’s wife had given birth to twins. This led to questions on the abstruse subject of generation which appalled the parlour-maid. Dodo adhered to the gooseberry bush theory, and would not budge from her position.

  An hour in her business-room after breakfast was sufficient to set in order the things that she must personally attend to, and she came out on to the lawn, where David had decreed that croquet should form the first diversion of the day. It was deliciously warm, for the spring which was bursting into young leaf and apple-blossom on the day that Dodo had gone up to town three weeks ago was now, in these last days of April, trembling on the verge of summer. A mild south-westerly wind drove scattered clouds, white and luminous, across the intense blue, and their shadows bowled swiftly along beneath them, islands of moving shade surrounded by the living sea of sunlight. Below the garden the beech-wood stood in full vesture of milky green, and the elms still only in leaf-bud, shed showers of minute sequin-like blossoms on the grass. The silver flush of daisies in the fields was beginning to be gilded with buttercups, the pink thorn-trees, after these weeks of mellow weather were decking themselves with bloom, and the early magnolias against the house were covered with full-orbed wax-like stars. Thrushes were singing in the bushes, the fragrance of growing things loaded the air, and David from sheer exuberance of youth and energy was hopping over the croquet-hoops till his mother was ready. Sight, smell and hearing were glutted with the sense of the ever-lasting youth of the re-awakening earth, and as she stepped out on to the terrace, Dodo recaptured in body and soul and spirit, for just one moment, the immortal glee of springtime. The next moment, she saw a few yards down the terrace, a bath-chair being slowly wheeled along. Two boys on crutches walked by it, its occupant had his whole face as far as his mouth, swathed in bandages.... And before she knew it, a whole gallery of pictures was flashed on to her mind. Hospital ships were moving out of port, and putting into port again, if they escaped the deadly menace of the seas; long trains with the mark of the Red Cross on them were rolling along the railways, and discharging their burdens of pain. Down the thousand miles of front the pitiless rain of shells was falling, Verdun tottered, in Kut....

  Dodo pulled herself together, and overtook the bath-chair.

  “Why, what a nice day you’ve ordered to come out on for the first time, Trowle,” she said. “Drink in the sun and the wind: doesn’t it feel good after that beastly old house? Ashley, if you go that pace already on your crutches, you’ll be taken up for exceeding the speed-limit in a week’s time. As for you, Richmond, you’re a perfect fraud;
nobody could possibly be as well as you look. Isn’t it lovely for me? I’ve got a whole holiday, because my boy is going to school to-morrow and we’re going to play games together from morning till night. He’s waiting for me now. If any of you want to be useful — not otherwise — you might stroll down to the lodge across there, and tell them I shall come in to see the keeper’s wife sometime to-day. She’s had twins. I never did. Yes, David, I’m coming.”

  David had never forgotten that remarkable game of croquet he once witnessed when Prince Albert Hun, as he was now called, and Miss Grantham both cheated, and this morning as a reasonable diversion, he chose to impersonate him and cheat too. Naturally he announced this intention to his mother, who therefore impersonated Miss Grantham, as a defensive measure, and the game became extremely curious. David, of course, imitated the Albert Hun mode of play, but, having adjusted his ball with his foot so as to be precisely opposite his hoop, and having bent down in the correct attitude to observe his line, he found that Dodo had taken the hoop up, and so there was nothing to go through.

  “Oh, I’ve finished being a Hun,” he said, when he made this depressing discovery. “Let’s play properly again. What made him so fat?”

  “Eating,” said Dodo. “You’ll get fat, too, if you go on as you did at breakfast.”

  “But I was hungry. I could have eaten a croquet-ball. Should I have been sick?”

  “Probably. Get on! Hit it!”

  “All right. And why did Princess Hun always creak so when she bent down. Do you remember? Did she ever have twins like Mrs. Reeves? Can I have twins?”

  “Yes, darling, I hope you’ll have quantities some time,” said Dodo.

  “Can I have them to-day?” asked David. “Let’s go to the kitchen-garden, and look among the gooseberry bushes.”

  “No, there’s not time for you to have them to-day.”

  “Then I shall wait till I go to school. Ow! I’ve hit you,” screamed David suddenly losing interest in other matters. “Now I shall send you away to the corner, and I shall go through a hoop, and I shall — —”