THE COLLECTED WORKS OF E. F. BENSON (Illustrated Edition). E. F. Benson
are you going to telegraph to?" she asked.
Hugh had time for one contemptuous glance at her.
"Oh, Aunt Dodo, you ass!" he said. "Oh, by Jove, how awfully rude of me, and I haven't thanked you for coming to tell me. Thanks so much: I am so grateful to you for all your goodness to me—ah!"
He took a telegraph-form and scribbled a few words.
"May it go now?" he said.
Dodo was almost embarrassingly communicative at lunch, at which meal Edith did not appear, and the continued booming of the double-bass indicated that Art was being particularly long that morning. Consequently Dodo found herself alone with an astonished physician.
"If only a man could be a clergyman and a doctor," she said, "you could tell him everything, because clergy know all about the soul and doctors all about the body, and when you completely understand anything, you can't be shocked at it. I think I should have poisoned you, Dr. Cardew, if you had said that Hughie would never be the same man again: anyhow I shouldn't have asked you to lunch. Ah, in that case I couldn't have poisoned you! How difficult it must be to plan a crime really satisfactorily. I always have had a great deal of sympathy with criminals, because my great-grandfather was hanged for smuggling. Do have some more mutton, which calls itself lamb. I certainly shall. I'm going to have a baby, you know, or perhaps you didn't. Isn't it ridiculous at my age, and he's going to be called David."
"In case—" began Dr. Cardew.
"No, in any case," said Dodo. "I mean it certainly is going to be a boy. You shall see. What a day for January, is it not? The year has turned, though I hope that doesn't mean it will go bad. I wish you had seen Hughie's face when I told him he wasn't going to have a Bath-chair. He looked like one of Sir Joshua Reynolds' angels with a three weeks' beard, which I shouldn't wonder if he was shaving now, since, as I said, there aren't going to be any Bath-chairs."
"I don't quite follow," said Dr. Cardew politely but desperately.
"I'm sure I don't wonder," said Dodo cordially, "although it's so clear to me. But you see, he's going to propose to my daughter now that it's certain he will be the same man again and not a different one, and no eligible young man ever has a beard. What a good title for a sordid and tragic romance 'Beards and Bath-chairs' would be. Of course Hughie instantly called for a telegraph-form, and when I asked him who he was telegraphing to, he called me an ass, in so many words, or rather so few. After all I had done for him, too! Oh, here's Edith; Dr. Cardew and I have not been listening to your playing, but we're sure it has been lovely. Do you know Dr. Cardew? And it's Mrs. Arbuthnot, or ought I to say 'she's Mrs. Arbuthnot'? Edith, if you don't mind our smoking, Dr. Cardew and I will wait and talk to you for a little, but if you do, we won't."
Edith shook hands so warmly with the doctor, that he felt he must have been an old friend of hers, and that the fact had eluded his memory. But it was only the general zeal which a long musical morning gave her.
"I'm sure you came to see our poor Hugh," she said. "Do tell me, is there the slightest chance of his ever walking again?"
"Not the smallest," said Dodo; "I've just been to break the news to him, and he has telegraphed to Nadine to come at once—I can't keep it up. Edith, he is going to be perfectly well again, and he has telegraphed to Nadine just the same."
Edith looked a little disappointed.
"Then I suppose we must resign ourselves to a perfectly conventional and Philistine ending," she said. "There was all the makings of a twentieth century tragedy about the situation, and now I am afraid it is going to tail off and be domestic and happy and utterly inartistic. I had better hopes for Nadine, she always looked as if there might be some wild destiny in store for her, and when she engaged herself to Seymour without caring two straws for him, I thought I heard a great fate knocking at the door—"
This was too gross an inconsistency for even Dodo to pass over.
"And you said at the time you thought the engagement was horrible and unnatural and me a wicked mother for permitting it," she cried.
"Very possibly. No doubt then I was being a woman, now I am talking as an artist. You always confuse the two, Dodo, for all your general acumen. When I have been playing all morning—"
"Scales," said Dodo.
"A great deal of the finest music in the world is based on scale passages, and the second movement of my symphony is based on them too. When I have been playing all morning, I see things as an artist. I know Dr. Cardew will agree with me: sometimes he sees things as a surgeon, sometimes as a man. As a surgeon if a hazardous operation is in front of him, he says to himself, 'This is a wonderful and dangerous thing, and it thrills me.' As a man he says, 'Poor devil, I am afraid he may die under the knife.' As for you, Dodo, artistically speaking, you spoiled a situation as—lurid as a play by Webster. 'Princess Waldenech' might have been as classical in real life as the 'Duchess of Malfi.' Artistically an atmosphere as stormy as the first act of the Valkyries surrounded you. And now instead of the 'Götterdämmerung' you are going to give us 'Hänsel und Gretel' with flights of angels."
Dodo exploded with laughter.
"And while I was still giving you 'Princess Waldenech'," she said, "you cut me for a year."
"As a woman," cried Edith; "as an artist I adored you. You were as ominous as Faust's black poodle. Of course your first marriage to a man who adored you, for whom you did not care one bar of the 'Hallelujah chorus,' was a thing that might have happened to anybody; but when, as soon as he was mercifully delivered, you got engaged to Jack, and at the last moment jilted him for that melodramatic drunkard, I thought great things were going to happen. Then you divorced him, and I waited with a beating heart. And now, would you believe it, Dr. Cardew!" cried Edith, pointing a carving fork with a slice of ham on the end of it at him. "She has married Lord Chesterford, as you know, and is going to have a baby. And all that wealth of potential tragedy is going to end in a silver christening-mug. The silly suffragette with her hammer and a plate-glass window has more sense of drama than you, Dodo. And now Nadine is going to take after you, and marry the man she loves. Hugh is just as bad: instead of dying for the sake of that blear-eyed child who comes up to enquire after him every day, he is going to live for the sake of Nadine. Drama is dead. Of course it has long been dead in literature, but I hoped it survived in life."
Dodo turned anxiously to Dr. Cardew.
"She isn't mad," she said reassuringly. "You needn't be the least frightened. She will play golf immediately after lunch."
Edith had been brought her large German pewter beer-mug, and for the moment she had put her face into it, like old-fashioned gentlemen praying into their hats on Sunday morning before service. There was a little froth on the end of her rather long nose when she took it out.
"Why not?" she said. "All artistic activity is a sort of celestial disease, and its antidote is bodily activity which is a material disease. A perfectly healthy body, like mine, does not need exercise, except in order to bring down the temperature of the celestial fever. When I am playing golf, my artistic soul goes to sleep and rests. And when I am composing, I should not know a golf-ball from an egg. That is me. You might think I am being egoistic, but I only take myself as an instance of a type. I speak for the whole corporate body of artists."
"Militant here on earth," remarked Dodo.
"Militant? Of course all artists are militant, and they fight against blind eyes and deaf ears. They scream and lighten, and hope to shake this dull world into perception. But it is fighting against prodigious odds. The drama that seems to interest the world now is a presentation of the hopeless lives of suburban people. Any note of romance or distinction is sufficient to secure a failure. It's the same in music: Debussy when he tells us of rain in the garden makes the rain fall into a small backyard with sooty blighted plants growing in it, out of a foggy sky. When he gives us 'reflets dans l'eau' the water is a little cement basin in the same backyard, with anemic goldfish swimming about in it. As for Strauss, he began and finished with that terrible 'domestic symphony.' It went from the kitchen into the scullery, and back again. Fiction is the same. Any book that deals with entirely dull