Dodo Wonders Part 12

"Oh, how lovely for me!" she said, as the bus slowed down in Piccadilly Circus. "And do you know her too?"

They drew up a few yards down Piccadilly, and the conversation was interrupted by the exit down the gangway of dismounting pa.s.sengers.

During this pause the flat-fish was probably saved from direct perjury by the violent hooting of a motor immediately behind them. Looking round, Dodo saw Jumbo dismounting from his car, having evidently pursued them up Lower Regent Street. Her new friend looked round too, and beamed with excitement.

"Here's the Maharajah again!" she exclaimed. "Now you be quiet, little boy, and we'll have a good look at him."

Dodo rapidly considered this dramatic situation. It seemed highly probable that Jumbo would board the bus, as soon as its outgoing pa.s.sengers permitted him to do so. She decided on instant flight in order to spare the flat-fish unimaginable embarra.s.sment.

"We've got to get down here," she said hurriedly, "and we must keep seeing Chesterford House for a treat some other day. Come along, David."

Jumbo's mission was to insist on Dodo and David coming back to lunch with him at the Carlton, where he expected Lord Cookham, but Dodo first of all hurried him away from the bus, over the top of which the face of the flat-fish appeared gaping and wide-eyed.

"Jumbo, dear, we must get round a corner quickly," she said, "or David will burst. There's a woman looking over the edge of it, who----"

David's pent-up emotion mastered him, and he staggered after them yelling and doubled up with laughter. There had never been so marvellous a Sunday morning, and the joy of it was renewed next day when a paragraph appeared in a certain journal with an admittedly large circulation.

"The omnibus is becoming quite a fashionable mode of conveyance for the aristocracy. I saw the Marchioness of Chesterford with her son, Lord Harchester, now grown quite a big boy, dismounting from one at Piccadilly Circus yesterday morning, where they stood chatting with the Maharajah of Bareilly who will be the guest of Lady Dodo (as her friends call her) at Chesterford House this evening."

At lunch Dodo vehemently defended her conduct on the bus.

"I could do nothing else," she said. "The other lady began. She rolled over us like a tidal wave, didn't she, David, and told me to stop your shouting at the Maharajah of Bareilly. I couldn't have explained that we really knew you, and that David actually does call you Uncle Jumbo, because she wouldn't have believed me. And what was I to do when she said that I had reminded her of myself? I couldn't have said that I was myself. She would never have believed that I wasn't somebody else. I almost thought I was somebody else, too."

Lord Cookham condescendingly unbent to this frivolous conversation.

"A humorous situation," he said, "and one that reminds me of a similar experience, though with a different ending, that once happened to me at Corinth, where I arrived one day after a tour in the Peloponnese. My courier had gone on ahead, but he was out on some errand when I found my way to the home of the Mayor--the Demarch, as they still call him--where quarters were prepared for me. He and his family, very worthy people, and a few of the leading local tradesmen were awaiting my arrival. And I arrived on foot, dishevelled, dusty and in my shirt-sleeves. For a moment they positively refused to believe that I was myself."

Dodo's face had a.s.sumed a rapt air.

"How did you convince them?" she asked.

He made a conclusive little gesture with his hand.

"I did nothing," he said. "I did not even put on my coat, but lit a cigarette, perfectly prepared to wait till the return of my courier. But somehow they saw their mistake, and were profuse in apologies, which I a.s.sured them were unnecessary."

"It's like clumps," said Dodo. "We've got to guess what it was that convinced them. I believe you gave them five pounds for a local charity, just as you gave me five pounds this morning. Or did they see the coronet on your cigarette case?"

The impenetrable man smiled indulgently.

"Scarcely," he said, "I imagine they just realised who I was."

"My dear, what a different ending, as you said, to my adventure on the bus! They all felt your birth and breeding. That was it. With me there was nothing of that kind to be felt. Wasn't it that you meant?"

The bland superiority of his face suffered no diminution. He gave his butler-bow.

"I offer no explanation at all," he said, "I merely recounted an experience similar in some ways to yours."

"And in some ways so different," said Dodo. "How wonderful the perception of people at Corinth must be!"

Jumbo gave a loud quack of laughter like a wild goose, and entangled himself with asparagus. Lord Cookham noticed nothing of this, and proceeded.

"Talking of Greece, Lady Chesterford," he said, "I should like to remind you that the Queen of the h.e.l.lenes, to call her by her more official t.i.tle, came up to London yesterday. I had the honour of waiting on her, and the fact of your ball to-morrow drifted into our talk."

Dodo licked her lips.

"Who is she?" she asked. "Is she the sort of person I should like my friends to meet?"

"The German Emperor's sister," said Lord Cookham.

"She shall come to dinner, too," said Dodo wildly. "There won't be room, so Jumbo and I will have high tea with David upstairs. I shall paint my face brown, and Jumbo shall paint his face white, and we'll be announced as the white elephant from the Zoo, and the Maharanee of Bareilly from India. Jumbo, dear, I'm going mad through too much success for one of low birth. I think we won't have a dance at all, but we'll mark out the floor of the ballroom into squares, and have a great game of chess with real kings and queens, and two black bishops from the Pan-Anglican Conference, and two white ones from the polar regions. Then Daddy was made a knight the other day, so we'll try to get three more knights, and we'll advertise for four respectable people called Castle.

Then by hook or crook, probably crook, we'll entice in sixteen mere commoners to be the p.a.w.ns. Lord Cookham, do you think we can get hold of sixteen commoners between us? I shall direct the game from the gallery, and I shall call out 'White Queen takes Black Bishop,' and then the Queen of Greece will run across and pick up the Bishop of the Sahara Desert, and put him in the nearest bathroom, where the taken pieces go.

No, I think I shall be a p.a.w.n myself. I shall divorce Jack in the morning, and so I shall be a commoner again by the evening. And Edith shall sing the 'Watch by the Rhine,' to make the Queen of Greece comfortable. Then, we'll open all the windows and play draughts, and oh, Jumbo, may I go away? As long as Lord Cookham sits opposite me looking pained, I shall continue to talk this awful drivel. Let's all go to the Zoo, and see if the blue-faced mandrill reminds him of a certain royal personage or not. Oh, there are some delicious ices. I shan't go away just yet. Jumbo, what a good lunch you're giving us, and all because David howled at you from the top of a bus. Let me be calm, and see who is here."

The difficulty rather was to see who was not here, for that day the clattering restaurant overflowed with the crowds of those who live to see and be seen. Jumbo's party occupied an advantageous position in the centre of the room, and on all sides the tables teemed with the sort of person whose hours of leisure provide material for small paragraphs in the daily press, and many of them on their way out had a few words with our particular group. Prince Albert of Allenstein was there alone, "looking very greedy," as a veracious paragraphist might have remarked: here was a Cabinet Minister, Hugo Alford, lunching with a prima-donna, there an Australian tennis-champion with an eclipsed d.u.c.h.ess, a French pugilist and a cosmopolitan actress of quite undoubtful reputation dressed in pearls and panther-skins. Then there was old Lady Alice Fane bedizened in bright auburn hair and strings of antique cameos, looking as if she had been given a Sunday off from her case in the British Museum, smoking cigarettes and leaving out her aspirates, and with her a peer, obviously from Jerusalem, the proprietor of a group of leading journals, a sprinkling of foreign diplomatists, and several members of the Russian ballet. Dodo, enjoying it all enormously, had kissings of the hand for some of these, notes scribbled on the backs of menu-cards for others, shrill remarks for nearer neighbours and an astounding sense of comradeship for all the ingredients of this distinguished _macedoine_. Only an hour ago she had been alone with David in the dim dome of worship, diving down to the secret chamber of her soul; now with equal sincerity and appreciation of the present moment she was a bubble on the froth of life thrilled with the mere sense of the crowd whose chatter drowned the blare of the band.

Never had the whirlpool of London life revolved more dizzily than in these days of July; never had the revolt against quiet and rational existence reached so murderous a pitch. Just now even the attraction of Sat.u.r.day-till-Monday house-parties in the country had waned before the lure of London and the restaurant-life; at the most you would see thirty or forty people in your week-end at a country-house, so, if a breath of fresh air seemed desirable before Monday came round again, what was easier than to motor down to Thames-side after lunch on Sunday, spend the afternoon in Boulter's lock, dine and get back to town late that night, or, if some peculiar attraction beckoned, hurry off again after an early breakfast on Monday morning? The twenty-four hours of day and night must be squeezed of their last drop of possibilities; they must be drunk to the dregs and the cup be filled again. The round of hours pa.s.sed like the last few minutes in some _casino_ before closing-time; there was such a little time left before London was sheeted and silent, abandoned to care-takers and mournful cats. In a few weeks now the squares would be littered with the first fallen leaves, and the windows darkened. Till then leisure and sobriety of living were the two prime enemies of existence.

"We're all mad," said Dodo breathlessly as this varied interchange of greetings went on. "Why does it please everybody to see other people like this, where you can't talk to them, and only scream a word in greeting? Personally I love it, but I don't know why. Why don't we have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at home, and read a book afterwards or talk to a friend instead of grinning at a hundred? Oh, look, Jumbo!

Vanessa hasn't got a st.i.tch on except panther skins and pearls and mottled stockings to match. How bad for David. David, darling, eat your ice. Here she comes! Vanessa, dear, how perfectly lovely you look, and I hear you're going to dance at Caithness House on Tuesday. Of course I shall come. They didn't allow your great Dane in the restaurant? What hopeless management, but perhaps you'll find he has eaten the porter when you go out. Still, you know, if we all brought great Danes, there might be rather a sc.r.a.p. Hugo! I never saw anything so _chic_ as having a red despatch-box brought you by a detective in plain clothes, in the middle of lunch. You frowned too beautifully when you opened it, and are hurrying out now exactly as if a European complication was imminent. I believe you've been practising that all morning instead of going to church. Mind you keep up your responsible air till the very last moment, and then you can relax and go to sleep when you get back to the Foreign Office. Darling Lady Alice, what delicious cameos! I believe you stole them; there _aren't_ any cameos like those outside the British Museum.

Yes, of course you're coming to me to-morrow night. I think I must have sent you two invitations, and so they probably cancelled each other like negatives. We shall finish up with eggs and bacon on Tuesday morning, and I'm sure you'll look much fresher than any of us. Oh, there's the Prime Minister talking to Hugo. They're doing it on purpose so as to make us think that something terrific has happened. I like Prime Ministers to be histrionic. He's taking something out of his pocket.

It's only a cigar; I hoped it would be an ultimatum. David, what a day we're having!"

It was not till half-past three that Dodo remembered that the sea-lions were fed at four, and the land-lions half an hour later, and got up.

"We mustn't miss it," she said. "I've sworn an oath unto David--oh, that's profane. My dear, the keeper throws large dead fish into the air and the sea-lions catch them. Thank G.o.d, I'm not a sea-lion. I couldn't possibly eat raw fishes, heads and tails and bones and skins. And then there's the monkey-eating eagle, which I suppose they feed with monkeys.

Once when I was looking at it with Hugo who is so like a small grey ape, the monkey-eating eagle brightened up like anything when it saw him. I took Hugo away, as the bars didn't seem very strong. Bless you, Jumbo, good-bye. Oh, may I take your motor just as far as Regent's Park and keep it for an hour? Then you can get a taxi and come and have tea with us at home, and reclaim it. And I haven't got any money; give me a sovereign, please, Lord Cookham, because the more you give me, the more chance there is of my remembering to repay you. How mean you were to give me five pounds at St. Paul's for the offertory, and then contribute half-a-crown yourself. I saw you. Look, there's Prince Albert coming; let's go away at once, David, before he sees us."

Dodo dodged behind a tall waiter, whom she used as cover to effect an un.o.bserved exit, while the Prince made his ponderous way to the table where she had been.

"I saw here Lady Dodo," he said to Lord Cookham, "and also now I do not see her. And I wished to see her, for she has invited me to her dance, but not to her dinner. I would be more pleased to go to her dinner and not to her dance than to her dance and not her dinner. But now she is not here, and I cannot tell her so. But soon I will telephone to her."

His large red face a.s.sumed an expression of infinite cunning, and he closed one eye.

"I am here _en garcon_," he said. "I have given the Princess the slip.

She said 'I will go to church, and you will come with me to church,' and I said 'Also I will not go to church,' and while she was at church, I give her the slip. Ha!"

He lumbered out into the hall, and by way of amusing himself _en garcon_ sat down close to the band, and fell fast asleep.

David's happy day terminated after tea, and when Jumbo went off in his recovered car about seven, Dodo found that she had still half an hour to spare before she need dress for dinner. With an impulse very unusual with her, she lay down on her sofa, and determined to have a nap rather than busy herself otherwise. But before she had done more than arrive at this conclusion, Jack came in.

"You and David had a good time?" he asked.

"Lovely! Church, bus, Carlton lunch, Zoo. Any news?"

Jack sat down on the edge of her sofa.

"I think there's going to be," he said. "Do you remember the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand at Serajevo?"