THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
them, by the way, because Hugh is coming here this afternoon. I asked him not to, but he is coming just the same. I told him Nadine and Seymour were both here."
"Perhaps he means to kill Seymour," said Edith thoughtfully. "It certainly would be the obvious thing to do—"
"Hughie would always do the obvious thing," said Dodo.
"I will finish my sentence," said Edith. "It certainly would be the obvious thing to do, provided that the public executioner would not hang him, and that Nadine would marry him. But things would probably go the other way about, which would not be so satisfactory for Hugh. Really the young generation is very bloodless: it talks more than we did, but it does absolutely nothing."
"We used to talk a good deal," remarked Dodo, "and we are not silent yet. At least you and I are not. Edith, has it ever struck you that you and I are middle-aged? Or is middle-age, do you think, not a matter of years, but of inclination? I think it must be, for it is simply foolish to say that I am forty-five, though it would be simply untrue to say that I was anything else. That is by the way; we will talk of ourselves soon. Where had I got to? Oh, yes, Hugh is coming down this afternoon though I implored him not to. Nadine says I was wrong. She wants me to be very nice to him, as she has been so horrid. They have not seen each other for a whole week, ever since her engagement was announced. I am sure Nadine misses him; she will be miserable if Hugh deserts her."
Edith plucked impatiently at the strings of the double-bass, and aroused the bumblebees again.
"That's what I mean by bloodless," she said. "They are all suffering from anemia together. Their blood has turned to a not very high quality of gray matter in the brain. Nadine wants you to be kind to Hugh, because she has been so horrid! Dodo, don't you see how fishlike that is? And he, since he can't marry her, takes the post of valet-de-chambre, and looks on while Seymour gives her little butterfly kisses and small fragments of jade. I saw him kiss her yesterday, Dodo. It made me feel quite faint and weak, and I had to hurry into the dining-room and take half a glass of port. It was the most debilitated thing I ever saw. Berts is nearly as bad, and though he is nine feet high and plays cricket for his county, he is somehow ladylike. I can't think where he got it from: certainly not from me. And as for Hugh, I suppose he calls it faithfulness to hang about after Nadine, but I call it anemia. I am surprised at Hugh; I should have thought he was sufficiently stupid to have more blood in him. He ought to box Nadine's ears, kick Seymour and instantly marry somebody else, and have dozens of great red-faced, white-toothed children. Bah!"
Dodo had subsided into hopeless giggles over this remarkable tirade against the anemic generation and Edith plucked at her double-bass again as she concluded with this exclamation of scorn.
"And I can't think how you allow Nadine to marry that—that jade," said Edith.
Dodo became momentarily serious.
"If you were Nadine's mother," she said, "you would be delighted at her marrying anybody. She is the sort of girl who doesn't want to marry, and afterwards wishes she had. I am not like that: I was continually marrying somebody and then wishing I hadn't. But Nadine doesn't make mistakes. She may do things that appear very odd, but they are not mistakes, she has thought it out very carefully first. You see, quite a quantity of eligible youths and several remarkably ineligible ones have wanted to marry her, and she has never felt any—dear me, what is it a man with a small income always feels when a post with a large income is offered him—oh, yes, a call: Nadine has never felt any call to marry any of them. There are many girls like that in whom the physical makes very little appeal. But what does appeal to Nadine very strongly is the mental, and Seymour however many times you call him a jade, is as clever as he can be. In him, also, I should say, the physical side is extremely undeveloped, and so I think that he and Nadine may be very happy. Now Hugh is not clever at all; he has practically no intellect and that to Nadine is an insuperable defect. Now don't call her prig or blue stocking. She is neither the one nor the other. But she has a mind. So have you. So for that matter have I, and it has led me to do weird things."
Edith thrummed her double-bass again.
"Dodo, I can't tell you how I disapprove of you," she said, "and how I love you. You are almost entirely selfish, and yet you have charm. Most utterly selfish people lose their charm when they are about thirty. I made sure you would. But I was quite wrong. Now I am utterly unselfish: I live entirely for my husband and my art. I live for him by seldom going near him, since he is much happier alone. But then I never had any charm at all. Now you have always lived, and do still, completely for your own pleasure—"
Dodo clapped her hands violently in Edith's face for it required drastic measures to succeed in interrupting her.
"Ah, that is an astonishingly foolish thing for you to say," she said. "If I lived for my pleasure, do you know what I should do? I should have a hot bath, go to bed and have dinner there. I should then go to sleep and when I woke up I should go for a ride, have another hot bath and another dinner and go to sleep again. There is nothing so pleasant as riding and hot baths and food and sleep. But I never have sought my pleasure. What I always have sought is my happiness. And that on the whole is our highest duty. Don't swear. There is nothing selfish about it, if you are made like I am. Because the thing that above all others makes me happy is to contrive that other people should have their own way. That is why I never dream of interfering in what other people want. If they really want it, I do all I can to get it for them. I was not ever thus, as the hymn says, but I am so now. The longer I live the more clearly I see that it is impossible to understand why other people want what they want, but it seems to me that all that concerns me is that they do want. I can see how they want, but never why. I can't think, darling, for instance, why you want to make those excruciating noises, but I see how. Here's Jack. Jack, come and tell us about Utopia."
Edith had laid her double-bass down on the ground of the terrace.
"Yes, but I want to sit down," he said. "May I sit on it, Edith?"
Edith screamed. He took this as a sign that he might not, and sat on the terrace wall.
"Utopia?" he asked. "You've got to be a man to begin with and then you have to marry Dodo. It does the rest."
"What is It?"
"That which does it, your consciousness. Dodo, it would send up rents in Utopia if Seymour went to a nice girls' school. He is rather silly, and wants the nonsense knocked out of him."
"But there you make a mistake," said she. "Almost every one who is nice is nice because the nonsense has not been knocked out of him. People without heaps of nonsense are merely prigs. Indeed that is the best definition of a prig, one who has lost his capability for nonsense. Look at Edith! She doesn't know she's nonsensical, but she is. And she thinks she is serious all the time with her great boots and her great double-bass and her French horns. Oh me, oh me! The reasonable people in the world are the ruin of it; they spoil the sunshine. Look at the abominable Liberal party with terrible, reasonable schemes for scullery-maids. They are all quite excellent, and it is for that reason they are so hopeless.
"It is moreover a great liberty to take with people to go about ameliorating them. I should be furious if anybody wanted to ameliorate me. Darling, Bishop Algie the other day said he always prayed for my highest good. I begged him not to, because if his prayers were answered, Providence might think I should be better for a touch of typhoid. You can't tell what strange roundabout ways Providence may have. So he promised to stop praying for me, because he is so understanding and knew what I meant. But when Lloyd George wants to give scullery-maids a happy old age with a canary in the window it is even worse. It is so sensible: I can see them sitting dismally in the room listening to their canary, when they would be much more comfortable in a nice work-house, with Edith and me bringing them packets of tea and flannel. Don't let us talk politics: there is nothing that saps the intellect so much."
"Edith and I have not talked much yet," observed Jack.
"No, you are listening to Utopia, which as I said, consists largely of nonsense. If you are to be happy, you must play, you must be ridiculous, you must want everybody else to be ridiculous. But everybody must take his own absurdities quite seriously."
Dodo sat up, pulled Jack's cigarette