Dodo Wonders Part 15

She felt suddenly tired, and going upstairs drew down the blinds over her open windows. She wanted to get to sleep at once, to shut out the dawning day and all that it might bring.

CHAPTER VII

DODO'S APPRENTICESHIP

The morning papers were late that day, and when they arrived Dodo s.n.a.t.c.hed at them and automatically turned to the _communique_ from the French front. There was a list of names of villages which had been lost to the allies, but these were unfamiliar and meant nothing to her. Then she looked with a sudden sinking of the heart at the accompanying map which shewed by a black line the new position of the front, and that was intelligible enough. For the last fortnight it had been moving westwards and southwards with regular and incredible rapidity like the advance of some incoming tide over level sands. Occasionally for a little it had been held up, but the flood, frankly irresistible, always swept away that which had caused the momentary check.... In the next column was an account of German atrocities compiled from the stories of Belgian refugees.

Dodo had come back to London last night from Winston where she had been seeing to the conversion of the house into a Red Cross hospital, and just now she felt, like some intolerable ache, the sense of her own uselessness. All her life she had found it perfectly easy to do the things which she wanted to do, and she had supposed herself to be an efficient person. But now, when there was need for efficient people, what did her qualifications amount to? She could ride, as few women in England could ride, she was possessed of enormous physical and nervous energy, she was an inimitable hostess, could convert a dull party into a brilliant one by the sheer effortless out-pouring of her own wit and infectious vivacity, but for all practical purposes from organisation down to knitting, she was as useless as a girl straight out of the nursery where everything had been done for her by a.s.siduous attendants.

She was even more useless than such a child, for the child at any rate had the adaptability and the power of learning appropriate to its age, whereas Dodo, as she had lately been ascertaining, had all her life been pouring her energy down certain definite and now useless channels. In consequence those channels had become well-worn; her energy flowed naturally with them, and seemed to refuse to be diverted, with any useful result, elsewhere. She could ride, she could play bridge, she could, as she despondently told herself, talk the hind leg off a donkey, she could entertain and be entertained till everyone else was dying to go to bed. And no one wanted her to do any of those things now; there was absolutely no demand for them. But when it came to knitting a stocking herself, or being personally responsible for a thing being done, instead of making a cook or a groom or a butler responsible for it, she had no notion how to set about it.

Very characteristically when David's nurse had announced her intention of being trained for hospital work, Dodo had warmly congratulated her determination, had given her an enormous tip, and had bundled her off to the station in a prodigious hurry, saying that she would look after David herself. But the things that a small boy required to have done for him filled her with dismay at her own incompetence, when she had to do them. If he got his feet wet, fresh socks had to be found for him; if his breeches were covered with short white hairs from his ride, these must be brushed off; b.u.t.tons had to be replaced; there was no end to these ministrations. Dodo could not get on at all with the stocking she was knitting or the supervision of the storing of the furniture at Winston, while she had to produce a neat daily David, and incidentally failed to do so. She advertised for another nurse without delay, and David was exceedingly relieved at her arrival.

Dodo was, luckily, incapable of prolonged despair with regard to her own shortcomings, and by way of self-consolation her thoughts turned to the fact that before she left Winston she had contrived and arranged a charming little flat in a wing of the house for herself and David and Jack whenever he could find time to come there, for he was in charge of a remount camp, knowing, as he certainly did, all that was to be known about horses from A to Z. Dodo's mind harked back for a moment to her own uselessness in envious contemplation of the solid worth, in practical ways, of her husband's knowledge. For herself, through all these frivolous years she had been content with the fact of her consummate horsemanship; she had hands, she had a seat, she had complete confidence (well-warranted) in her ability to manage the trickiest and most vicious of four-legged things. There her knowledge (or rather her instinct) stopped, whereas Jack, a mere lubber on a horse compared with herself, was a perfect encyclopaedia with regard to equine matters of which she was profoundly ignorant. He could "size up" a horse by looking at it, in a way incomprehensible to Dodo; he knew about sore backs and bran mashes and frogs and sickle-hocks, and now all the lore which she had never troubled to learn any more than she had troubled to decipher a doctor's prescription and understand its ingredients, was precisely that which made Jack, at this crisis when efficiency was needed, so immensely useful.... However, after all, she had been useful too, for she had planned that delicious little flat at Winston (necessary, since the house was to be made into a hospital), which would give accommodation to them. Everything, of course, was quite simple; she had put in two bathrooms with the usual paraphernalia of squirts and douches and sprays, and had converted a peculiarly s.p.a.cious pantry into a kitchen with a gas-stove and white tiled walls. Naturally, since the house was no longer habitable, this had to be done at once, and her energy had driven it through in a very short s.p.a.ce of time. The expense had been rather staggering, especially in view of the cost of running a hospital, so Dodo had sent the bill to her father with a lucid explanatory letter.

The thought of this delicious little flat, which would be so economical with its gas-stove for cooking, and its very simple central heating, in case, as Jack gloomily prognosticated, there should be difficulties about coal before the war was over, made Dodo brighten up a little, and diverted her thoughts from the on-creeping barbarous tide in France, and the sense of her own uselessness. After all somebody had to contrive, to invent, even though plumbers and upholsterers effected the material conversion, and Daddy paid the bill; and she had come up to town in order to superintend a similar change at Chesterford House. That was to be turned into a hospital for officers, and Dodo was determined that everything should be very nice. The ballroom would be a ward, so also would be the biggest of the three drawing-rooms, but the dining-room had better be left just as it was, in antic.i.p.ation of the time when the invalids could come down to dinner again. She intended to keep a couple of rooms for herself, and one for her maid, since she could not be at Winston all the year round.... And then suddenly she perceived that behind all her charitable plans there was the reservation of complete comfort for herself. It cost her nothing, in the personal sense, to live in a wing at Winston and a cosy corner of the house in London. There was not an ounce of sacrifice about it all, and yet she had read with a certain complacency that very morning, that Lord and Lady Chesterford had set a n.o.ble example to the rest of the wealthy cla.s.ses, in giving up not one only but both of their big houses. But now all her complacency fell down like a house of cards. Jack certainly had given up something, for his day was pa.s.sed in real personal work.... He was on the staff with a nice red band on his cap, and tabs on his shoulders and spurs.

And here, even in the moment that she was d.a.m.ning her own complacency, she was back in the old rut, thinking about signs and decorations instead of what they stood for. There was the black line of the tide creeping over France, and three columns of casualties in the morning's paper, and one of German atrocities....

Dodo was expecting Edith to lunch, and since the _chef_ had gone back to France to rejoin the colours, there was only a vague number of kitchen-maids, scullery-maids and still-room maids in the house to manage the kitchen, and even these were being rapidly depleted, as, with Dodo's cordial approval, they went to canteens and other public services. She had, in fact, warned Edith only to expect a picnic, and she thought it would be more picnicky if they didn't go to the dining-room at all, but had lunch on a table in her sitting-room. This did not, as a matter of fact, save much trouble, since the dining-room was ready, and a table had to be cleared in her sitting-room, but Dodo at the moment of giving the order was on the dramatic "stunt," and when Edith arrived there was a delicious little lunch in process of arrival also.

"Darling, how nice of you to come," said Dodo, "and you won't mind pigging it in here, will you? Yes, let's have lunch at once. The _chef's_ gone, the butler's gone, and I shall have parlour-maids with white braces over their shoulders. My dear, I haven't seen a soul since I left Winston yesterday, and I haven't seen you since this thunderbolt burst. Do they burst, by the way? All that happened before the fourth of August seems centuries away now. I can only dimly remember what I used to be like. A European war! For ten years at least that has been a sort of unspeakable nightmare, which n.o.body ever really believed in, and here we are plunged up to the neck in it."

Edith seemed to have something in reserve.

"Go on," she said, helping herself to an admirable omelette. "I want to know how it affects you."

Dodo finished her omelette in a hurry, and drew a basket full of wool and knitting needles from under the table. Out of it she took a long sort of pipe made of worsted. She made a few rapid pa.s.ses with her needles.

"I have been frightfully busy," she said. "If I'm not busy all the time I begin wondering if any power in heaven or earth can stop that relentless advance of the Germans. The French government are evacuating Paris, and then I ask myself what will happen next? What about the Channel ports? What about the Zeppelins that are going to shower bombs on us? And then by the grace of G.o.d I stop asking myself questions which I can't answer, and occupy myself in some way. I have been terrifically busy at Winston, clearing all the house out for the hospital we are having there, and just making a small habitable corner for David and Jack and me at the end of the east wing, do you remember, where the big wisteria is. Central heating, you know, because Jack says there will be no coal very soon, and my darling Daddy is going to pay the bill. Then I came up here, because this house is to be a hospital for officers----"

Dodo suddenly threw her hands wide with a gesture of despair.

"Oh, how useless one is!" she said. "I know quite well that my housekeeper could have done it all with the utmost calmness and efficiency in half the time it took me. When I was wildly exciting myself about blocking up a door in my room at Winston, so as not to have vegetable-smells coming up from the kitchen, and thinking how tremendously clever I was being, she waited till I had quite finished talking, and then said, 'But how will your ladyship get into your room?' And it's the same with this awful stocking."

Dodo exhibited her work.

"Look!" she said, "the leg is over two feet long already, and for three days past I have been trying to turn the heel, as the book says, but the heel won't turn. The stocking goes on in a straight line like a billiard cue. I can never do another one, so even if the heel was kind enough to turn now, I should have to advertise for a man at least seven feet high who had lost one leg. The advertis.e.m.e.nt would cost more than the stocking is worth, even if it ever got a foot to it. Failing the seven-foot one-legged man, all that this piece of worsted-tubing can possibly be used for, is to put outside some exposed water-pipe in case of a severe frost. Even then I should have to rip it up from top to bottom to get it round the pipe, or cut off the water-supply and take the pipe down and then fit the stocking on to it. Then again when David's nurse left, I said I would look after him. But I didn't know how; the nervous force and the time and the cotton and the p.r.i.c.kings of my finger that were required to sew on a b.u.t.ton would have run a tailor's shop for a week. Oh, my dear, it's awful! Here is England wanting everything that a country can want, and here am I with hundreds of other women absolutely unable to do anything! We thought we were queens of the whole place, and we're the rottenest female-drones that ever existed. Then again I imagined I might be able to do what any second-rate housemaid does without the smallest difficulty, so when other people had taken up the carpet on the big stairs at Winston, I sent four or five servants to fetch me a broom, so that I could sweep the stairs. They were dusting and fiddling about in the way housemaids do, and they all grinned pleasantly and stopped their work to fetch me something to sweep the stairs with. I supposed they would bring me an ordinary broom, but they brought a pole with a wobbly iron ring at the end of it, to which was attached a sort of tow-wig. I didn't like to ask them how to manage it, so I began dabbing about with it. And at that very moment the grim matron leaned over the bannisters at the top of the stairs and called out, 'What are you doing there? You look as if you had never used a mop before!' I hadn't; that was the beastly part of it, and then she came down and apologised, and I apologised and she shewed me what to do, and I hit a housemaid in the eye and hurt my wrist, and dislocated all work on that stair-case for twenty minutes. And then I tried to weigh out stores as they came in, and I didn't know how many pennies or something went to a pound Troy. And you may be surprised to hear that a hundred-weight is less than a quarter, or if it's more it isn't nearly so much more as you would think. I'm useless, and I always thought I was so d.a.m.ned clever. All I can do is to play the fool, and who wants that now? All my life I have been telling other people to do things, without knowing how to do them myself. I can't boil a potato, I can't sew on a b.u.t.ton, and yet I'm supposed to be a shining light in war-work. '_Marquez mes mots_,' as the Frenchman never said, they'll soon be giving wonderful orders and decorations to war-workers, and they'll make me a Grand Cross or a Garter or a Suspender or something, because I've made a delicious flat for myself in the corner of Winston, and sent the bill in to Daddy, and will be going round the wards at Winston and saying something futile to those poor darling boys who have done the work."

Dodo held up a large piece of hot-house peach on the end of her fork.

"Look at that, too," she said. "I'm an absolute disgrace. Fancy eating hot-house peaches in days like these!"

Edith had rather enjoyed certain parts of Dodo's vivacious summary of herself, but the most of it caused her to snort and sniff in violent disagreement. Once or twice she had attempted to talk too, but it was no use till Dodo had blown off the steam of her self-condemnation. Now, however, she took up her own parable.

"Wouldn't you think it very odd of me," she said in a loud voice, "if I began writing epic poems?"

"Yes, dear, very odd," said Dodo.

"It wouldn't be the least odder than you trying to sew on b.u.t.tons or washing David. You are just as incapable of that as I am of the other.

You only waste your time; you never learned how, so why on earth should you know how? We're all gone perfectly mad; we're all trying to do things that are absolutely unsuited to us. I really believe I'm the only sane woman left in England. Since the war began I have devoted myself entirely to my music, and I've written more in these last few weeks than I have during a whole year before. There have been no distractions, no absurd dances and dinners. I've been absolutely uninterrupted. Bertie has been taken on for the London Defence against Zeppelins. He has never seen a Zeppelin and knows as much about defences as I know about writing sonnets; and Madge pours out the most awful tea and coffee on the platform at Victoria. She never could pour anything out; if she was helping herself to a cup of tea she flooded the tray, and I should think that in a few days Victoria station will be entirely submerged. That will mean that troops will have to reach their trains in London by means of rafts."

"But one can't help doing something," said Dodo. "One can't go on being useless."

"You don't mend it by being worse than useless. That's why I devote myself to music. I can do that, and I can't do any of the things that everybody else is trying to do."

Edith paused a moment.

"There's another reason, too," she said. "I should go off my head if I wasn't busy about something. I wish there was such a thing as a clinical thermometer of unhappiness, and you would see how utterly miserable I am. You can't guess what being at war with Germany means to me. All that is best in the world to me comes from Germany; all music comes from there. And yet last night when I was playing a bit of Brahms, Bertie said, 'Oh, do stop that d.a.m.ned Hun tune!' Why, there's no such thing as a Hun tune! Music is simply music, and with a few exceptions the Huns, as he loves to call them, have made it all."

"He calls them Huns," said Dodo carefully, "because they've already proved themselves the most infamous barbarians. Did you see the fresh atrocities in the _Times_ this morning?"

"I did, and I blushed for the wickedness of the people who invented them and the credulity of the people who believed them. They _can't_ be true.

I know the Germans, and they are incapable of that sort of thing. I bet you that every German paper is full of similar atrocities committed by the English."

"Then you'll have to blush for the wickedness and the credulity of the Germans too, darling!" remarked Dodo. "You _will_ be red."

Edith laughed.

"Yes, I'm sorry I said that," she said. "But in any case what has Brahms got to do with it? How can any sane person develop racial hatred like that? Let's have a pogrom of Jews because of Judas Iscariot. To go back.

I'm not sent into the world to empty slops, but to make symphonies.

Very few people can make symphonies, and I'm one of them. Huns or no Huns, what have artists to do with war?"

"But, my dear, you can't help having to do with it," said Dodo. "You might as well say, 'What have artists to do with earthquakes'?' But an earthquake will shake down an artist's house just as merrily as a commercial traveller's. You can't be English, and not have to do with war."

Edith was silent a moment, and suddenly her face began to tie itself into the most extraordinary knots.

"Give me some port or I shall cry," she said. "I won't cry; I never do cry and I'm not going to begin now."

The prescription seemed to be efficacious.

"Then there's my boy," she said. "Berts has left Cambridge and I suppose that before Christmas he'll be out in France. He's about as much fitted to be a soldier as you are to be a housemaid. Of all the instances of everybody wanting to do what they are totally incapable of, the worst is the notion that we can make an army. You can't make an army by giving boys bayonets. Germany is an army, for forty years she has been an army.

Why compete? Germany will wipe up our army and the French army like a housemaid, which you want to be, wiping up a slop. Have you seen what the German advance has been doing this last week? Nothing in the world can save Paris, nothing in the world can save France. Out of mere humanitarian motives I want France to see that as quickly as possible.

The war is over."

Dodo rose.

"Don't talk such d.a.m.ned nonsense, Edith," she said. "That port has gone to your head and given you _vin triste_. If anything was wanting to make me quite certain that we are going to win it, it is the fact that you say we are not. Do you remember when those beastly Allensteins were staying with me, and how he knocked out 'Deutschland uber alles,' on the table with his fat fingers? The effect on you was that you played 'Rule Britannia' and 'G.o.d Save the King' as loud as you could on the piano next door. It was extremely rude of you, but it shewed a proper spirit.

Why can't you do it now?"

"Because it's hopeless. Before Germany shewed her strength you could do that just as you can tweak a lion's tail when he is lying asleep behind bars at the Zoo. But now we're inside the cage. I don't say we are not formidable, but we don't make ourselves more formidable by sending all the best of our young men out to France to be shot down like rabbits. We were not prepared, and Germany was. Her war-machine has been running for years, smoothly and slowly, at quarter-steam. We've got to make a machine, and then we've got to learn how to run it. Then about the navy----"

Dodo a.s.sumed a puzzled expression.