The morning papers were late that day, and when they arrived Dodo snatched at them and automatically turned to thecommuniquéfrom the French front. There was a list of names of villages which had been lost to the allies, but these were unfamiliar and meant nothing to her. Then she looked with a sudden sinking of the heart at the accompanying map which shewed by a black line the new position of the front, and that was intelligible enough. For the last fortnight it had been moving westwards and southwards with regular and incredible rapidity like the advance of some incoming tide over level sands. Occasionally for a little it had been held up, but the flood, frankly irresistible, always swept away that which had caused the momentary check.... In the next column was an account of German atrocities compiled from the stories of Belgian refugees.
Dodo had come back to London last night from Winston where she had been seeing to the conversion of the house into a Red Cross hospital, and just now she felt, like some intolerable ache, the sense of her own uselessness. All her life she hadfound it perfectly easy to do the things which she wanted to do, and she had supposed herself to be an efficient person. But now, when there was need for efficient people, what did her qualifications amount to? She could ride, as few women in England could ride, she was possessed of enormous physical and nervous energy, she was an inimitable hostess, could convert a dull party into a brilliant one by the sheer effortless out-pouring of her own wit and infectious vivacity, but for all practical purposes from organisation down to knitting, she was as useless as a girl straight out of the nursery where everything had been done for her by assiduous attendants. She was even more useless than such a child, for the child at any rate had the adaptability and the power of learning appropriate to its age, whereas Dodo, as she had lately been ascertaining, had all her life been pouring her energy down certain definite and now useless channels. In consequence those channels had become well-worn; her energy flowed naturally with them, and seemed to refuse to be diverted, with any useful result, elsewhere. She could ride, she could play bridge, she could, as she despondently told herself, talk the hind leg off a donkey, she could entertain and be entertained till everyone else was dying to go to bed. And no one wanted her to do any of those things now; there was absolutely no demand for them. But when it came to knitting a stocking herself, or being personally responsible for a thing being done, insteadof making a cook or a groom or a butler responsible for it, she had no notion how to set about it.
Very characteristically when David's nurse had announced her intention of being trained for hospital work, Dodo had warmly congratulated her determination, had given her an enormous tip, and had bundled her off to the station in a prodigious hurry, saying that she would look after David herself. But the things that a small boy required to have done for him filled her with dismay at her own incompetence, when she had to do them. If he got his feet wet, fresh socks had to be found for him; if his breeches were covered with short white hairs from his ride, these must be brushed off; buttons had to be replaced; there was no end to these ministrations. Dodo could not get on at all with the stocking she was knitting or the supervision of the storing of the furniture at Winston, while she had to produce a neat daily David, and incidentally failed to do so. She advertised for another nurse without delay, and David was exceedingly relieved at her arrival.
Dodo was, luckily, incapable of prolonged despair with regard to her own shortcomings, and by way of self-consolation her thoughts turned to the fact that before she left Winston she had contrived and arranged a charming little flat in a wing of the house for herself and David and Jack whenever he could find time to come there, for he was in charge of a remount camp, knowing, as he certainly did, all that was to be known abouthorses from A to Z. Dodo's mind harked back for a moment to her own uselessness in envious contemplation of the solid worth, in practical ways, of her husband's knowledge. For herself, through all these frivolous years she had been content with the fact of her consummate horsemanship; she had hands, she had a seat, she had complete confidence (well-warranted) in her ability to manage the trickiest and most vicious of four-legged things. There her knowledge (or rather her instinct) stopped, whereas Jack, a mere lubber on a horse compared with herself, was a perfect encyclopædia with regard to equine matters of which she was profoundly ignorant. He could "size up" a horse by looking at it, in a way incomprehensible to Dodo; he knew about sore backs and bran mashes and frogs and sickle-hocks, and now all the lore which she had never troubled to learn any more than she had troubled to decipher a doctor's prescription and understand its ingredients, was precisely that which made Jack, at this crisis when efficiency was needed, so immensely useful.... However, after all, she had been useful too, for she had planned that delicious little flat at Winston (necessary, since the house was to be made into a hospital), which would give accommodation to them. Everything, of course, was quite simple; she had put in two bathrooms with the usual paraphernalia of squirts and douches and sprays, and had converted a peculiarly spacious pantry into a kitchen with a gas-stoveand white tiled walls. Naturally, since the house was no longer habitable, this had to be done at once, and her energy had driven it through in a very short space of time. The expense had been rather staggering, especially in view of the cost of running a hospital, so Dodo had sent the bill to her father with a lucid explanatory letter.
The thought of this delicious little flat, which would be so economical with its gas-stove for cooking, and its very simple central heating, in case, as Jack gloomily prognosticated, there should be difficulties about coal before the war was over, made Dodo brighten up a little, and diverted her thoughts from the on-creeping barbarous tide in France, and the sense of her own uselessness. After all somebody had to contrive, to invent, even though plumbers and upholsterers effected the material conversion, and Daddy paid the bill; and she had come up to town in order to superintend a similar change at Chesterford House. That was to be turned into a hospital for officers, and Dodo was determined that everything should be very nice. The ballroom would be a ward, so also would be the biggest of the three drawing-rooms, but the dining-room had better be left just as it was, in anticipation of the time when the invalids could come down to dinner again. She intended to keep a couple of rooms for herself, and one for her maid, since she could not be at Winston all the year round.... And then suddenly she perceived that behind all her charitableplans there was the reservation of complete comfort for herself. It cost her nothing, in the personal sense, to live in a wing at Winston and a cosy corner of the house in London. There was not an ounce of sacrifice about it all, and yet she had read with a certain complacency that very morning, that Lord and Lady Chesterford had set a noble example to the rest of the wealthy classes, in giving up not one only but both of their big houses. But now all her complacency fell down like a house of cards. Jack certainly had given up something, for his day was passed in real personal work.... He was on the staff with a nice red band on his cap, and tabs on his shoulders and spurs. And here, even in the moment that she was damning her own complacency, she was back in the old rut, thinking about signs and decorations instead of what they stood for. There was the black line of the tide creeping over France, and three columns of casualties in the morning's paper, and one of German atrocities....
Dodo was expecting Edith to lunch, and since thechefhad gone back to France to rejoin the colours, there was only a vague number of kitchen-maids, scullery-maids and still-room maids in the house to manage the kitchen, and even these were being rapidly depleted, as, with Dodo's cordial approval, they went to canteens and other public services. She had, in fact, warned Edith only to expect a picnic, and she thought it would be more picnicky if they didn't go to the dining-room atall, but had lunch on a table in her sitting-room. This did not, as a matter of fact, save much trouble, since the dining-room was ready, and a table had to be cleared in her sitting-room, but Dodo at the moment of giving the order was on the dramatic "stunt," and when Edith arrived there was a delicious little lunch in process of arrival also.
"Darling, how nice of you to come," said Dodo, "and you won't mind pigging it in here, will you? Yes, let's have lunch at once. Thechef'sgone, the butler's gone, and I shall have parlour-maids with white braces over their shoulders. My dear, I haven't seen a soul since I left Winston yesterday, and I haven't seen you since this thunderbolt burst. Do they burst, by the way? All that happened before the fourth of August seems centuries away now. I can only dimly remember what I used to be like. A European war! For ten years at least that has been a sort of unspeakable nightmare, which nobody ever really believed in, and here we are plunged up to the neck in it."
Edith seemed to have something in reserve.
"Go on," she said, helping herself to an admirable omelette. "I want to know how it affects you."
Dodo finished her omelette in a hurry, and drew a basket full of wool and knitting needles from under the table. Out of it she took a long sort of pipe made of worsted. She made a few rapid passes with her needles.
"I have been frightfully busy," she said. "If I'm not busy all the time I begin wondering if any power in heaven or earth can stop that relentless advance of the Germans. The French government are evacuating Paris, and then I ask myself what will happen next? What about the Channel ports? What about the Zeppelins that are going to shower bombs on us? And then by the grace of God I stop asking myself questions which I can't answer, and occupy myself in some way. I have been terrifically busy at Winston, clearing all the house out for the hospital we are having there, and just making a small habitable corner for David and Jack and me at the end of the east wing, do you remember, where the big wisteria is. Central heating, you know, because Jack says there will be no coal very soon, and my darling Daddy is going to pay the bill. Then I came up here, because this house is to be a hospital for officers——"
Dodo suddenly threw her hands wide with a gesture of despair.
"Oh, how useless one is!" she said. "I know quite well that my housekeeper could have done it all with the utmost calmness and efficiency in half the time it took me. When I was wildly exciting myself about blocking up a door in my room at Winston, so as not to have vegetable-smells coming up from the kitchen, and thinking how tremendously clever I was being, she waited till I had quite finished talking, and then said, 'Buthow will your ladyship get into your room?' And it's the same with this awful stocking."
Dodo exhibited her work.
"Look!" she said, "the leg is over two feet long already, and for three days past I have been trying to turn the heel, as the book says, but the heel won't turn. The stocking goes on in a straight line like a billiard cue. I can never do another one, so even if the heel was kind enough to turn now, I should have to advertise for a man at least seven feet high who had lost one leg. The advertisement would cost more than the stocking is worth, even if it ever got a foot to it. Failing the seven-foot one-legged man, all that this piece of worsted-tubing can possibly be used for, is to put outside some exposed water-pipe in case of a severe frost. Even then I should have to rip it up from top to bottom to get it round the pipe, or cut off the water-supply and take the pipe down and then fit the stocking on to it. Then again when David's nurse left, I said I would look after him. But I didn't know how; the nervous force and the time and the cotton and the prickings of my finger that were required to sew on a button would have run a tailor's shop for a week. Oh, my dear, it's awful! Here is England wanting everything that a country can want, and here am I with hundreds of other women absolutely unable to do anything! We thought we were queens of the whole place, and we're the rottenest female-drones that ever existed. Then again I imagined I might be ableto do what any second-rate housemaid does without the smallest difficulty, so when other people had taken up the carpet on the big stairs at Winston, I sent four or five servants to fetch me a broom, so that I could sweep the stairs. They were dusting and fiddling about in the way housemaids do, and they all grinned pleasantly and stopped their work to fetch me something to sweep the stairs with. I supposed they would bring me an ordinary broom, but they brought a pole with a wobbly iron ring at the end of it, to which was attached a sort of tow-wig. I didn't like to ask them how to manage it, so I began dabbing about with it. And at that very moment the grim matron leaned over the bannisters at the top of the stairs and called out, 'What are you doing there? You look as if you had never used a mop before!' I hadn't; that was the beastly part of it, and then she came down and apologised, and I apologised and she shewed me what to do, and I hit a housemaid in the eye and hurt my wrist, and dislocated all work on that stair-case for twenty minutes. And then I tried to weigh out stores as they came in, and I didn't know how many pennies or something went to a pound Troy. And you may be surprised to hear that a hundred-weight is less than a quarter, or if it's more it isn't nearly so much more as you would think. I'm useless, and I always thought I was so damned clever. All I can do is to play the fool, and who wants that now? All my life I havebeen telling other people to do things, without knowing how to do them myself. I can't boil a potato, I can't sew on a button, and yet I'm supposed to be a shining light in war-work. 'Marquez mes mots,' as the Frenchman never said, they'll soon be giving wonderful orders and decorations to war-workers, and they'll make me a Grand Cross or a Garter or a Suspender or something, because I've made a delicious flat for myself in the corner of Winston, and sent the bill in to Daddy, and will be going round the wards at Winston and saying something futile to those poor darling boys who have done the work."
Dodo held up a large piece of hot-house peach on the end of her fork.
"Look at that, too," she said. "I'm an absolute disgrace. Fancy eating hot-house peaches in days like these!"
Edith had rather enjoyed certain parts of Dodo's vivacious summary of herself, but the most of it caused her to snort and sniff in violent disagreement. Once or twice she had attempted to talk too, but it was no use till Dodo had blown off the steam of her self-condemnation. Now, however, she took up her own parable.
"Wouldn't you think it very odd of me," she said in a loud voice, "if I began writing epic poems?"
"Yes, dear, very odd," said Dodo.
"It wouldn't be the least odder than you trying to sew on buttons or washing David. You are justas incapable of that as I am of the other. You only waste your time; you never learned how, so why on earth should you know how? We're all gone perfectly mad; we're all trying to do things that are absolutely unsuited to us. I really believe I'm the only sane woman left in England. Since the war began I have devoted myself entirely to my music, and I've written more in these last few weeks than I have during a whole year before. There have been no distractions, no absurd dances and dinners. I've been absolutely uninterrupted. Bertie has been taken on for the London Defence against Zeppelins. He has never seen a Zeppelin and knows as much about defences as I know about writing sonnets; and Madge pours out the most awful tea and coffee on the platform at Victoria. She never could pour anything out; if she was helping herself to a cup of tea she flooded the tray, and I should think that in a few days Victoria station will be entirely submerged. That will mean that troops will have to reach their trains in London by means of rafts."
"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 theTimesthis morning?"
"I did, and I blushed for the wickedness of the people who invented them and the credulity of the people who believed them. Theycan'tbe 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. "Youwillbe 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 intothe 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, nothingin 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 youvin 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 responsiblefor 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 competent 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 meetJack, 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 wasgoing 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 youproveby 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 werethree 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 producedfrom 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.
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, which 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.
"Oh, the old days!" thought Dodo to herself, feeling immensely old, as the train jerked and moved on again. Trains used not to jerk, surely,in the old days, and for that matter she used not to travel in a luggage van. Then she concentrated herself on the view again, for very shortly they would be passing the remount-camp where Jack was in charge. Of course she missed it; probably it was on the other side of the line, and she had been earnestly gazing out of the wrong window.
Well, it was very pleasant to renew the sense of travelling in a train at all. The rush past crowded platforms, the rise and fall of the telegraph-wires as the posts flicked by, the procession of green fields and blossoming orchards, the streams running full with the spring rains, the cuckoo, the fact of being on the way to London after four solid months of hospital life at Winston, the thought of the luncheon-basket with which she purposed soon to refresh herself had all the sweet savour of remote, ordinary normal life about them, and a semblance of pre-war existence, even when it would last but for a few hours, seemed extraordinarily delicious. Almost more pleasant was the smell of springtime that streamed in through the window, that indefinable fragrance of moisture and growth and greenness, and she drew in long inhalations of it, for of late the world had seemed to contain only three odours, namely those of iodoform, of cooking dinners and of Virginian cigarettes. For the last four months she had not spent a single night away from Winston, and even then she had only gone away, as she was doing now, to have a look at how things were going onin the officers' hospital at Chesterford House. Never in her life, as far as she could remember, had she spent anything approaching four months in the same place.
Dodo, who a few years before had literally no first-hand experience of what fatigue really meant, felt very tired this morning, but she had got quite used to that to which she had been a stranger for so many years, and now it seemed as much a part of general consciousness to be always tired as it did in the old days to feel always fresh. But she had found that when you had arrived at a sufficient degree of fatigue, it got no worse, but remained steady and constant, and she now accepted it as permanent, and did not think about it. Both sight and sound were veiled with this chronic weariness, which took the keen edge off all sensation and she smelt and listened to the odours and sounds of springtime as if through cotton-wool, and looked at its radiance as if through smoked glass which cut off the brightness of sun-ray, and presented you with a sepia sketch instead of a coloured picture. Still it was very good to be quit of the smell of iodoform and the sight of bandages.
This busy life in her hospital had now for a year and a half cut her off from all the pursuits in which hitherto her life had been passed, so that even while she recognised a brook she had jumped or a fence she had fallen at, she realised how remote the doings of those days had become. They were severed from her not merely by these two wintersof abstinence from hunting, but much more crucially by the chasm of the huge catastrophe which had wrecked and was still wrecking the world. Memory could accurately recall old incidents to her, but in her own consciousness she could not recall the atmosphere in which those days had been lived; at the most, they seemed to have been read about in some very vivid book, not to have been personally experienced by her. She realised that this was probably only a symptom of her general fatigue, a false claim as Christian Scientists would have told her, but its falsity was extremely plausible and convincing. The fatigue, however, and the symptoms arising from it were just those things which she was bound most sternly to suppress when she was at work. Her value, such as it was, in the day-long routine, lay, as she was well aware, in her being gay and ridiculous without apparent effort, giving a "frolic welcome" to her tasks, as if it was all the greatest fun in the world. She had, in fact, to pretend to be what she had always been. Deep down in her she hoped, she believed that the mainspring of her vitality was unimpaired, for now, as the train sped onwards, something within her hailed the springtime, like an awakened Brunnhilde, with ecstatic recognition. Only, it did not thrill her all through, as its custom used to be; there was this hard, fatigued crust on her senses....
What she missed most, the thing that she did actively and continually long for was the societyand companionship of her friends. Just as, all these weeks, she had done nothing but her work, so she had seen nobody except those professionally engaged with it. Her legion of friends were, with one exception, as busy over war-work as she was herself. Younger men, with terrible gaps already in their numbers, were fighting on one of the many battle-fronts, older men were engaged with office work or other missions for the more mature, and women and girls alike were nursing or typewriting, or washing dishes, or running canteens. They were too busy to see her, just as she was too busy to see them, and that was a very real deprivation to Dodo, for she had no less than genius for friendship. Many of these, however, were in London, and Dodo proposed to do something towards making up these arrears of human companionship during this next week. Her daughter Nadine Graves was dining with her to-night and going to the theatre; Edith (the sole exception among war-working friends) was entertaining her to-morrow with an evening at the opera; the next day there was a small dance somewhere, which would be full of boys from France and girls from hospitals. A social engagement or two a day, seemed to Dodo after these months of abstinence to be a positive orgy, and she ate her sandwiches with an awakening zest for life, and fell fast asleep.
The day was beginning to flame towards sunset when she got out at the London terminus, and at the sight of the crowds, brisk and busy and occupiedwith various affairs, this sense of stimulus was vastly increased. There was a little fog in the station with the smell of smoke and of grimy, beloved old London hanging there, and everyone seemed to have two legs and two arms and not to be bandaged and not to limp. No one had slings or crutches, and involuntarily there came into Dodo's mind the verse from the Bible about "the lame and the blind that are hated of David's soul." For one moment, as the intoxication of freedom and independence, of crowds and brisk movement mounted to her head, she felt a secret sympathy with that monarch's sentiments, which were so literally translated into actual conduct by Edith who still refused to have anything to do with war-work, and occasionally wrote to Dodo saying how magnificently her new symphony was progressing. But even while she sympathised with David, she detested Edith's interpretation of him, though she realised that she herself, not having a single drop of artistic ichor in her blood, could not possibly understand the temperament that led Edith to remain the one unpatriotic individual in all her circle. Edith similarly refused to talk or hear about the war at all, because mention of it interrupted that aloofness from disturbing thought that was necessary to give full play to an artist's creative powers. Dodo would not, however, let a divergence of sentiment even on so vital a topic interfere with her friendship. Edith had a right to her own convictions, odious though they might be,and to the ordering of her own life. Only, if your own thoughts and actions were entirely concerned with the war, it was difficult, so Dodo found, not to let some trace of that creep into your conversation. However, when she met Edith to-morrow, she would do her best.
Dodo had several businesses to attend to before she went home, and when finally, rather behind time, she drove down Piccadilly on her way to Chesterford House, the sun had long set, and such lighting as, in view of hostile raids, was thought sufficient, illuminated the streets. No blink of any kind shewed in the blank fronts of the houses, but the road and pavement presented the most fascinating harmonies in subdued and variegated tints. The glass of some street-lamps was painted over with violet, of others with red; others were heavily blacked on their top-surfaces but not obscured below, so that an octagonal patch of pavement was vividly lit. Whether this delightful scheme of colour helped to confuse possible raiders, Dodo did not consider; she was quite content to enjoy the æsthetic effect, which did seem very bewildering. The streets were still shining with the moisture of some shower that had fallen earlier in the afternoon and they furnished a dim rainbow of reflected colours while the whole paint-box of various tints was held in solution by the serene light of the moon now near to its full, and swinging clear above the trees in the Park. The thought of a raid that night struck her as ratherattractive, for she had not yet been in one, and her re-awakened interest in life welcomed the idea of any new experience.
She was just turning in at the big gates of Chesterford House when it became likely that her wish was to be gratified. The hooting of bicycle-horns and a sound of police-whistles began to pierce shrilly through the bourdon rumble of wheeled traffic and this grew swiftly louder. Instantaneously there came a change in the movements of foot-passengers; those who were strolling leisurely along first stopped to verify what they had heard, and then proceeded on their way at a far livelier pace, many of them breaking into a run, and soon, tearing along the road, came half a dozen bicyclists hooting and whistling and shouting "Take cover."
Dodo had just got out of her motor and was absorbed in these new happenings, when Nadine in cloak and evening clothes came running in at the gate.
"Oh, mamma, is that you?" she said. "Isn't it lucky; I've just got here in time. Let us come in at once."
Dodo kissed her.
"Darling, I simply can't come in this minute," she said. "My legs refuse to take me. I want to see what happens so dreadfully. What do they do next? And how about our theatre! Would it be nice to be there for a raid? I don't much mindif we can't go, we'll have a cosy little evening together."
"Oh, I must go in," said Nadine. "It all gets on my nerves. I have to sit in a corner, and shut my ears, and I get cold and my knees tremble. What do they do next, do you ask? They drop enormous bombs on us, and we let off all the guns in the world at them. It's all most unattractive. You must come in before the guns begin."
Dodo promised to do so, and as soon as Nadine had gone inside the house, went out of the big gates again into the street. Already the wheeled traffic in the road had mysteriously melted away, and almost entirely ceased, though the pavements were still full of hurrying foot-passengers, most of whom crossed the road a hundred yards further down towards the entrance of a tube-station which was already black with people. As they went they spoke jerkily and nervously to each other, as if vexed or irritated. But in ten minutes they had all vanished, leaving the street entirely empty, and it seemed as if some uncanny enchantment must have waved over the town a spell, which withered up its life, so that it was now a city of the dead. The pulse of traffic beat no longer down its arteries, not a light appeared in its windows, no trace of any animation remained in it. Not a whisper of wind stirred, the remote moon shone down on the emptiness, and Dodo, holding her breath to listen, found the stillness ringing in her ears.
Suddenly the silence was broken by some distantmutter, very faint and muffled, but sounding not like some little noise near at hand, but a great noise a long way off, for low as it was, it buffeted the air. Dodo felt that every nerve in her body was sending urgent messages of alarm to her brain, but with them there went along the same wires messages of tingling exhilaration. This was the real thing: this was war itself. In her hospital she had lived, till she had got used to it, with those whom that wild beast had torn and mangled, but the sound of guns, here in the secure centre of London, was different in kind from that; it was war, not the effects of war. She knew that the outer defences, away somewhere to the east, were already engaged with the enemy, whose machines, laden with bombs, were drawing closer every moment with the speed of swallows on the wing. Then that remote mutter ceased again, absolute silence succeeded, and Dodo, to her intense surprise, found that her hands were icy cold and that her knees were shaking. Quite clearly, though she had not known it, her brain was acting on those alarming messages that were pouring into it, but more vivid than these was her intense curiosity as to what was coming next, and her exhilaration in the excitement of it all.
Again the silence became intolerable, filling the air like some dense choking fog. One part of her would have given anything in the world to be safe back at Winston, or huddled in the cheerful recesses of the tube with those prudent crowds whichhad hurried by, but another part, and that the more potent, would not have accepted any bribe to miss a moment of this superb suspense. Then somewhere over the Green Park, but much nearer at hand, there came a flash as of distant lightning, silhouetting the trees against a faint violet background, a gun barked into the night, and a shell whimpered and squealed. Several times was that repeated, then some other gun barked more loudly and fiercely. At that Dodo's intense curiosity must have conveyed to her that for the moment it was quite satisfied, and before she fairly knew what she was doing, her feet had carried her scudding across the gravelled space in front of the house, and her fingers were fumbling with the latch-key at the door. She did not feel in the least afraid of German bombs or fragments of English shrapnel, but she was consciously and desperately afraid of silence and of noise and above all of solitude.
For the next hour there was no need to fear silence, so few moments of silence were there to be afraid of. Sometimes the firing died down to a distant mutter like that with which it had begun, and then without warning the Hyde Park guns from close at hand broke in with bouquets of furious explosions and screams of squealing things, making the windows rattle in their frames. Then, just as suddenly, they would cease, and more distant firing seemed but the echo of that tumult. Between the reports could be heard the drone ofthe engines of hostile aircraft; once for the space of half a minute the noise came loud and throbbing down the chimney, showing that the machine was directly overhead, and two or three times a detonation infinitely more sonorous than the sharp report of the guns gave the news that some bomb had been dropped. A clanging bell grew louder and died away again as a fire-engine dashed up the deserted street outside.
Dodo and Nadine sat together in the sitting-room that Dodo had reserved for herself when she gave up the rest of the house to be a hospital. The table for their early dinner before the theatre was half-laid, but since the raid began the arrangements had been left incomplete. Now that she was within walls and not alone any longer Dodo's fears had passed off altogether; she found herself merely restless and excited, incessantly going to the window and raising a corner of the blind to see what was visible. Outside the Park lay quiet under the serene wash of moonlight, but every now and then a tracer-shell lit a new and momentary constellation among the stars, and the rays of the searchlight swept across the sky like the revolving flails of some gigantic windmill. Nadine meantime sat in a remote corner of the room directly underneath an electric lamp, with a book on her lap on which she was quite unable to concentrate her attention, and her fingers ready to apply to her ears when the noise which she proposed to shut out had violently assailed them. Once she remonstratedwith her mother for her excursions to the window.
"It's really rather dangerous," she said. "If a bomb was dropped in the road outside, the window would be blown in and the glass would cut you into small pieces of mince."
"Darling, how can you be so sensible as to think of that sort of thing in the middle of an air-raid?" asked Dodo. "Though it's all quite horrible and brutal, it is so amazingly interesting. I should like to go up on to the roof in a bomb-proof hat. You must remember this is my first air-raid. Even the most unpleasant things are interesting the first time they happen. I remember so well my first visit to a dentist. And do air-raids make most people thirsty, I'm terribly thirsty."
Nadine shut up her book and laughed.
"You're a lovely person to be with," she said. "I don't mind it nearly as much as usual. Hark, don't you hear whistles?"
Dodo listened and beamed.
"Certainly," she said. "What does that mean? Is it another raid?"
"No, mamma, of course not," said Nadine. "What an awful idea! It's the signal 'all clear.' They've driven them out of London."
"That's a blessing, and also rather a disappointment," said Dodo. "Let's have dinner at once. I'll be dressed in five minutes, and then we can go to the theatre after all. Wasn't it exciting? Aren't I cramming a lot in?"
A weird melodrama thrilled Dodo that night, and the general thrill was renewed again next morning by a telephone message from Edith that a bomb had fallen in the road exactly in front of her house, completely wrecking two front rooms. She wanted to come round instantly to see Dodo over very important matters, and arrived a quarter of an hour late boiling with conversation and fury.
"Insured? Yes, we're insured," she shouted, "but what has insurance got to do with it? If I took up the poker, Dodo, and smashed your looking-glass, you would find no consolation in the fact that it was insured. It would be my infernal impertinence and brutality that would concern you. Those brutes deliberately bombed me, who have always ... well, you know what my attitude towards Germany has been, and we'll leave it at that. There are twenty pages of my score of the new symphony which were on the table, absolutely torn to shreds. It's impossible to piece them together, and I can never re-write them."
"Oh, my dear, how dreadful!" said Dodo. "But why not write them again? Wasn't it Isaac Newton, who——"
"Isaac Newton, wasn't me," said Edith. "I daresay he might do it with a mere treatise, but there's a freshness about the first draft of music which can never be recaptured. Never! The wreckage: you must come at once to see the wreckage. It's incredible; there's a Chippendale suite simply in splinters. You might light a fire withthe bigger pieces, and use the rest instead of matches. There are little wheels about the room which were a clock, there's half the ceiling down, and there's glass dust, literally dust over everything, exactly like the frosted foregrounds on Christmas cards. Inconceivably thorough! I always said the Germans were thorough."
"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 veryown 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 thatdisgusting 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 entertainmentsfor 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-warinsouciancewas 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, andto 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 whistledand 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 it 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.