THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson

      Chapter Nineteen

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      Dodo slept long and dreamlessly that night; the deep, dreamless sleep which an evenly-balanced fatigue of body and mind so often produces, though we get into bed feeling that our brain is too deep in some tangle of unsolved thought to be able to extricate itself, and fall into the dim immensity of sleep. The waking from such a sleep is not so pleasant. The first moment of conscious thought sometimes throws the whole burden again on to our brain with a sudden start of pain that is almost physical. There is no transition. We were asleep and we are awake, and we find that sleep has brought us only a doubtful gift, for with our renewed strength of body has come the capability of keener suffering. When we are tired, mental distress is only a dull ache, but in the hard, convincing morning it strikes a deadlier and deeper pain. But sometimes Nature is more merciful. She opens the sluices of our brain quietly, and, though the water still rushes in turbidly and roughly, yet the fact that our brain fills by degrees makes us more able to bear the full weight, than when it comes suddenly with a wrenching and, perhaps, a rending of our mental machinery.

      It was in this way that Dodo woke. The trouble of the day came to her gradually during the moments of waking. She dreamed she was waiting for Jack in the garden where she had been sitting the night before. It was perfectly dark, and she could not see him coming, but she heard a step along the gravel path, and started up with a vague alarm, for it did not sound like his. Then a greyness, as of dawn, began to steal over the night, and she saw the outline of the trees against the sky, and the outline of a man's figure near her, and it was a figure she knew well, but it was not Jack. On this dream the sense of waking was pure relief; it was broad day, and her maid was standing by her and saying that it was a quarter past nine.

      Dodo lay still a few moments longer, feeling a vague joy that her dream was not true, that the helplessness of that grey moment, when she saw that it was not Jack, was passed, that she was awake again, and unfettered, save by thoughts which could be consciously checked and stifled. It was with a vast sense of satisfaction that she remembered her last act on the evening before, of which the scattered fragments in the grate afforded ocular proof. She felt as if she had broken a visible, tangible fetter—one strand, at any rate, of the cord that hound her was lying broken before her eyes. If she had been quite securely tied she could not have done that..—

      The sense of successful effort, with a visible result, gave her a sudden feeling of power to do more; the absence of bodily fatigue, and the presence of superfluous physical health, all seemed part of a different order of things to that of the night before. She got up and dressed quickly, feeling more like her own self than she had done for several days. The destruction of his photograph was really a great achievement. She had no idea how far things had gone till she felt the full effect of conscious effort and its result. She could see now exactly where she had stood on the evening before, very unpleasantly close to the edge of a nasty place, slippery and steep. Anyhow, she was one step nearer that pleasant, green-looking spot at the top of the slope—a quiet, pretty place, not particularly extensive, but very pleasing, and very safe.

      The three others were half-way through breakfast when Dodo came down. Lady Grantham was feeling a little bored. Dodo flung open the door and came marching in, whistling "See the Conquering Hero comes."

      "That's by Handel, you know, Edith," she said. "Handel is very healthy, and he never bothers you with abstruse questions in the scandalous way that Wagner does. I'm going to have a barrel-organ made with twelve tunes by Handel, you only have to turn the handle and out he comes. I don't mean that for a pun. Your blood be on your own head if you notice it. I shall have my barrel-organ put on the box of my victoria, and the footman shall play tunes all the time I'm driving, and I shall hold out my hat and ask for pennies. Some of Jack's tenants in Ireland have refused to pay their rents this year, and he says we'll have to cut off coffee after dinner if it goes on. But we shall be able to have coffee after all with the pennies I collect. I talked so much sense last night that I don't mean to make another coherent remark this week."

      Dodo went to the sideboard and cut a large slice of ham, which she carried back to her place on the end of her fork.

      "I'm going for a ride this morning, Edith, if you've got a horse for me," she said. "I haven't ridden for weeks. I suppose you can give me something with four legs. Oh, I want to take a big fence again."

      Dodo waved her fork triumphantly, and the slice of ham flew into the milk-jug. She became suddenly serious, and fished for it with the empty fork.

      "The deep waters have drowned it," she remarked, "and it will be totally uneatable for evermore. Make it into ham-sandwiches and send it to the workhouse, Edith. Jambon au lait. I'm sure it would be very supporting."

      "It's unlucky to spill things, isn't it?" Dodo went on. "I suppose it means I shall die, and shall go, we hope, to heaven, at the age of twenty-seven. I'm twenty-nine really. I don't look it, do I, Lady Grantham? How old are you, Edith? You're twenty-nine too, aren't you? We're two twin dewdrops, you and I; you can be the dewdrops, and I'll be the twin. I suppose if two babies are twins, each of them is a twin. Twin sounds like a sort of calico. Two yards of twin, please, miss. There was a horrid fat man in the carriage across France, who called me miss. Jack behaved abominably. He called me miss, too, and wore the broadest grin on his silly face all the time. He really is a perfect baby, and I'm another, and how we shall keep house together I can't think. It'll be like a sort of game."

      Dodo was eating her breakfast with an immense appetite and alarming rapidity, and she had finished as soon as the others.

      "I want to smoke this instant minute," she said, going to the door as soon as she had eaten all she wanted. "Where do you keep your cigarettes, Edith? Oh, how you startled me!"

      As she opened the door two large collies came bouncing in, panting from sheer excitement.

      "Oh, you sweet animals," said Dodo, sitting down on the floor and going off at another tangent. "Come here and talk at once. Edith, may I give them the milky ham? Here you are; drink the milk first, and then eat the ham, and then say grace, and then you may get down."

      Dodo poured the milk into two clean saucers, and set them on the floor. There were a few drops left at the bottom of the jug, and she made a neat little pool on the head of each of the dogs.

      "What are their names?" she asked. "They ought to be Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or Huz and Buz, or Ananias and Sapphira, or Darby and Joan, or Harris and Ainsworth. It ought to be Harris and Ainsworth. I'm sure, no one man could have written all that rot himself. Little Spencer is very fond of Harrison Ainsworth; he said it was instructive as well as palatable. I don't want to be instructed, and it isn't palatable. I hate having little bits of information wrapped up and given to me to swallow, like a powder in jam. Did you have to take powders when you were little, Lady Grantham?"

      Dodo's questions were purely rhetorical; they required no answer, and she did not expect one.

      "It is much nicer being completely ignorant and foolish like me," she said. "Nobody ever expects me to know anything, or to be instructive on any subject under the sun. Jack and I are going to be a simple little couple, who are very nice and not at all wise. Nobody dislikes one if one never pretends to be wise. But I like people to have a large number of theories on every subject. Everyone is bound to form conclusions, but what I dislike are people who have got good grounds for their conclusions, who knock you slap down with statistics, if you try to argue with them. It's impossible to argue with anyone who has reasons for what he says, because you get to know sooner or later, and then the argument is over. Arguments ought to be like Epic poems,