Dodo's Daughter Part 18

CHAPTER VI

Edith Arbuthnot had conceived the idea, an unhappy one as regards her family and neighbors, that every one who aspired to the name of Musician (it is not too much to a.s.sert that she did) should be able to play every instrument in the band. Just now she was learning the French horn and double-ba.s.s simultaneously. She kept her mind undistracted by the hideous noises she produced, and expected others to do so. Thus unless she was practising some instrument that required the exclusive use of the mouth, she would talk (and did so) while she learned.

Just now she was seated on the terrace wall at Winston, which was of a convenient height for playing the double-ba.s.s, which rested on the terrace below, and conversing at the top of her voice to Dodo who sat a yard or two away. These stentorian tones of course were necessary in order that she should be heard above the vibrating roar of the ill-played strings. She could not at present get much tone out of them; but for volume, it was as if all the b.u.mblebees in the world were swarming in all the thres.h.i.+ng-machines in the world, which were thres.h.i.+ng everything else in the world.

"I used to think you were heartless, Dodo," she shouted; "but compared to Nadine you are a sickly sentimentalist."

When Dodo did not feel equal to shouting back, she spoke in dumb show.

Now she concisely indicated "Rot" on her fingers.

"It isn't Rot," shouted Edith; "ah, what a wonderful thing a double-ba.s.s is: I shall write a Suite for the double-ba.s.s unaccompanied--I really mean it. If you seemed to me without a heart, Nadine would seem to have an organ which is all that a heart is not, very highly developed.

Probably she inherited a tendency from you, and has developed and cultivated it. What do you say?"

"I said, do stop that appalling noise, darling," screamed Dodo. "I shall burst a blood-vessel if I try to talk against it."

"Very well: I must just play two or three scales," said Edith.

The hoa.r.s.e clamor grew more and more vibrant and Dodo stopped her ears.

Eventually the bow, as Edith brought it down upon the first note of a new scale, flew from her hands, and describing a parabola in the air fell into a clump of sweet-peas in the flower-bed below the terrace.

"I must learn not to do that," she said. "It happened yesterday and I shan't consider myself proficient until I am safe not to hit the conductor in the face. About Nadine: She is going to perpetrate the most horrible cruelty, marrying that dreadful young man, while Hugh is just dying for her. Hugh reminds me of what Jack was like, Dodo."

"Oh, do you think so?" said Dodo. "Except that Jack was once twenty-five, which is what Hugh is now, I don't see the smallest resemblance. Jack was so good-looking, and Hugh only looks good, and though Hugh is a darling, he is just a little slow and heavy, which Jack never was. You will be able to compare 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-ba.s.s, and aroused the b.u.mblebees 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 gla.s.s 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-ba.s.s 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 quant.i.ty 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-ba.s.s 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 astonis.h.i.+ngly 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-ba.s.s 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-ba.s.s and her French horns. Oh me, oh me! The reasonable people in the world are the ruin of it; they spoil the suns.h.i.+ne. 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 case from his pocket and helped herself.

"The Greeks and Romans were so right," she said, "they had a slave cla.s.s, though with them it was an involuntary slave cla.s.s. We ought to have a voluntary slave cla.s.s, consisting of all the people who like working for a cause. There are heaps of politicians who naturally belong to it, and clergymen and lawyers and nationalists, all the people in fact who die when they retire, and are disappointed when they have not got offices and churches to go to. You can recognize a slave the moment you see him. He always, socially, wants to open the door or shut the window, or pick up your gloves. The moment you see that look in a man's eye, that sort of itch to be useful, you should be able to give secret information and make him a slave at 200 a year, instead of making him a cabinet minister or a bishop or a director of a company. He wants work: let him have it. Edith, darling, you would be a slave instantly, and the State would provide you with double-ba.s.ses and cornets. I haven't thought it all completely out, since it only occurred to me this minute, but it seems to me an almost painfully sound scheme now that I mention it. Think of the financiers you would get! There would be poor Mr.

Carnegie and Rockefeller and--and the whole of the Rothschild house, and Barings and Speyers all quite happy, because they are happy when they work. And all the millions they make--how they make it, I don't know, unless they buy gold cheap and sell it dear, which I believe is really what they do--all the money they make would be at the disposal of those who know how to spend it. I suppose I am a Socialist."

Edith put her forehead in her hands.

"I don't know what you are talking about," she said.

"I have my doubts myself," said Dodo ingenuously. "It began about Nadine's marriage and then drifted. You get to all sorts of strange places if you drift, both morally and physically. It really seems very unfair, that if you don't ever resist anything, you go to the bad. It looks as if evil was stronger than good, but Algie shall explain it to me. He can explain almost anything, including wasps. Jack, dear, do make me stop talking; you and the suns.h.i.+ne and Edith have gone to my head, and given me the babbles."

"I insist on your going on talking," said Edith. "I want to know how you can let Nadine marry without love."

"Because a great many of our unfortunate s.e.x, dear, never fall in love, as I mean it, at all. But I would not have them not marry. They often make excellent wives and mothers. And I think Nadine is one of those.

She is as nearly in love with Hugh as she has ever been with anybody, but she quite certainly will not marry him. Here she is; I daresay she will explain it all herself. My darling, come and talk matrimony shop to Edith, Jack and I are going for a short ride before lunch. Will you be in when Hugh comes?"

Nadine sat down in the chair from which Dodo had risen. She was dressed in a very simple linen dress of cornflower blue, that made the whites and pinks of her face look absolutely dazzling.

"Yes, I will wait for him," she said. "Seymour thought it would be kinder if he went to meet him at the station, so that Hughie could get rid of some of the hate on the way up. He has perception--_des apercus tres-fins_. And I will explain anything to anybody in the interval. I want to be married, and so does Seymour, and we think it will answer admirably if we marry each other. There is very little else to say. We are not foolish about each other--"

"I find you are extremely modern," interrupted Edith.

"You speak as if you did not like that," said Nadine; "but surely somebody has got to be modern if we are going to get on at all.