Dodo Wonders Part 24

"Resigned, whatever they call it. Look at the hole."

David opened his mouth to the widest.

"I never saw such a big hole," said Dodo. "But where did you hear about the Emperor?"

"On a news-board. May we have lunch? And what shall we do all this afternoon? I needn't go back till the six o 'clock from Paddington. Has it stopped bleeding?"

The terms of the armistice were accepted, and at eleven o'clock on Monday morning the roar of cannon and moan of sh.e.l.ls, which for more than four years had boomed and wailed without intermission over Europe, were still. The news of that, and the silence of it, came with a reverberation as stunning as had been the first shock of war; even as England breathed one long sigh of relief to know that her honour had demanded war, so now, silent for a moment, she sighed as she put back in its scabbard the sword that her honour had drawn. Then she proceeded to celebrate the event.

Dodo was not so foolish as to struggle against the invincible, and with greater wisdom sent a long telegram to Winston announcing that she was unavoidably detained in London that night. That was quite true, for the necessity of being here, in the hub of all things, was inexorable. To see the streets and the crowds to-night, to hear the shouting, to be one with the biggest ma.s.s of people that could be found, was as imperative as breathing. Nadine rang her up on the telephone and asked her to dine and look at the crowds, and she said she was dining with Edith. Edith rang her up and suggested looking at the crowds, and she said she was dining with Nadine. Jack, who had come up that day, proposed a window at the Marlborough Club, for there was certain to be a demonstration opposite, and she said she was dining with Edith and Nadine. A further enquiry came from a place where the biggest crowds were expected, as to whether she was up in town, and she said she was at Winston, and almost curtsied to the telephone. Having told so many lies, nothing else mattered, and after eating a poached egg she went quite mad, put on a mackintosh and an old large hat and sneaked off from the house into the streets, forgetting to take a latch-key, but remembering to take a quant.i.ty of small change. She wanted only to be in the crowd and of the crowd and not to be shut up in the window of a club, decorously watching its pa.s.sage, but to be merged in it, to get shoulder to shoulder with it, to look into its heart.

Hyde Park Corner was in flood; from the gate of her house to St.

George's on one side and to the top of Const.i.tution Hill on the other, pavements and roadway seethed with the glad huddle of humanity. Here and there was a motor or an omnibus quite unable to move forward through the crowd, being used as a vantage point for those who wanted to see more.

There was a taxi just opposite her gate; half a dozen folk were sitting on the roof of it, two more were by the driver, and were in charge of the horn.... During the day an attempt had been made to sc.r.a.pe the obscuring paint off the street lamps, and something of the old warm glow of London diffused itself over the long-darkened ways. Everywhere were vendors of festive apparatus, and Dodo instantly bought b.a.l.l.s of coloured paper ribands which shot out in an agreeable curve when you projected them, and whistles, and a small lead phial which she incautiously uncorked, and which instantly discharged a spray of odious scent into her face.

"Born from the dregs of the people," she thought exultantly to herself....

There were two strong tides at the corner, one setting towards Const.i.tution Hill, the other flowing along Piccadilly. Dodo meant to go along Piccadilly, but she got into the other tide, and after a vain attempt to extricate herself, was swept along by it. It was running so strongly that it was surely going towards some place of importance, and then she suddenly remembered that at the bottom of the hill lay Buckingham Palace. That would do excellently; and as she got near it, above the chatter and songs of the crowd there rose a long, continuous roar of shouting voices. Quite helpless in this great movement, she was cast forth upon the steps of the Victoria monument, and there in front of her was a row of lighted windows with a balcony, and the silhouette of heads and shoulders against the light. The shouting had collected itself into singing now, a certain rhythm directed it, and a kind of fugual chorus was in progress, some singing one line of the National Anthem, and some another, and stopping every now and then to cheer.

"Frustrate their knavish tricks," shouted Dodo at the top of her voice, and then being very hoa.r.s.e she blew piercingly on her whistle.

The tide swept her off again into the comparative gloom and quiet of the Mall, but the roar of the streets and their illumination increased as the crowd flowed up between St. James's Palace and Marlborough House.

She got into the stream which flowed along the south side of Pall Mall, noticed Jack at the window of his club, and tried to attract his attention with as much success as if she had attempted to signal to the man in the moon. She pa.s.sed Edith, who, jammed in the crowd along the north side, was pa.s.sing in the reverse direction; and they screamed pleasantly at each other, but were powerless to approach, and away she went up Regent Street into the central Babel of all London in Piccadilly Circus. Here like a leaf in some resistless eddy of bright eyes and shouting mouths she was trundled helplessly up the Quadrant, till at length, spent and breathless, she was cast out again, jetsam from that wonderful tide, into a backwater in Vigo Street, where voluntary movement was once more possible. What the time was she had no idea; she scarcely knew even who she herself was except in so far that she was just one drop of hot victorious English blood that flowed through the heart of London.

She made her way through the deserted streets of Mayfair into Park Lane, and finding she had left her latch-key at home, rang for a long time before she could get the door opened to her. When she succeeded it was still necessary to establish her ident.i.ty....

Dodo found that it was already half-past two. Outside the streets were beginning to grow empty, and the crowd surfeited with rejoicing, was moving homewards. And then, all at once, a wave of reaction, as irresistible as the wave of exultation had been, swept over her. The war was done, and the victory was gained, and along the thousand miles of battle fronts no gun that night boomed into the stillness, no sh.e.l.l screamed along its death-bearing way. Since the news had arrived no thought but that had visited her. She had burned in the glorious fire of sheer exultant thanksgiving. Now, as she undressed, her thoughts turned from the past and the present towards the future. There would be no more convoys of wounded arriving at Winston; there would be no more pinning up the record of the advancing Allied Armies. In a few weeks or at the utmost in a few months the wards would be empty, and the work which had occupied her to the exclusion of all that had made her life before would be finished. The smell of iodoform and Virginian tobacco would fade from the house; there would be no beds along the drawing-room walls, and no temperature charts hanging above the beds. There would be no more anxiety about the men who lay there, no repression of the rowdy, no encouragement of the despondent, no soothing of pain, no joy in recovery, no watching of the wounded creeping back into vigour again, no despair at seeing others lose their hold on life. Now that the four years of war, intense and absorbing with all their heart-breaks and exultations, were over, they seemed to have pa.s.sed like the short darkness of a summer night, and here was day dawning again. What would fill the empty hours of it?...

The reaction pa.s.sed, though the question remained unsolved, and once more Dodo recollected the stupendous event that had sent the millions of London shouting along the streets. And then her eyes, bright with excitement, grew dim with a storm of sudden tears.

CHAPTER XII

THE REVIVAL

Dodo went back to Winston on the morning after her night out, and had a second celebration of the armistice there. A gardener remembered that there was a quant.i.ty of fireworks, procured in pre-war days for some garden-fete, slumbering in a tool-house, and she arranged that there would be an exhibition of these on the lawn, under the direction of a convalescent patient who had embraced a pyrotechnical career before he became a gunner.

As an exhibition of smoke and smell these fireworks which had become damp and devitalised were probably unrivalled in the history of the art.

Faint sparks of flame appeared from time to time through the dense and pungent clouds that enveloped the operator: Roman candles played cup and ball on a minute scale with faintly luminous objects; Catherine-wheels incapable of revolution spat and spluttered; rockets climbed wearily upwards for some ten feet and then expired with gentle sighs, and Bengal fires smouldered like tobacco. Very soon nothing whatever could be seen of the display through the volumes of smoke which completely shrouded the lawn, and all that could be heard was the convulsive coughing of the asphyxiated gunner, who emerged with streaming eyes and said if being ga.s.sed was anything like that he would sooner be wounded ten times over. He was sorry that he had been absolutely unable to stop there any longer, but before rescuing himself had lit a remaining half-dozen of rockets, and a fuse attached to a square box called a "mine" of which he knew nothing whatever, and hoped less. He had hardly explained this when the mine went off with an explosion that caused all the windows to rattle, and a couple of rockets shot up to a prodigious height and burst in showers of resplendent stars. Half an hour later, a policeman groped his way up to the hospital through the fumes, and having ascertained that there had been fireworks, felt himself obliged to report the occurrence to a local tribunal, and Dora fined Dodo fifty pounds.

Altogether it was a joyful though an expensive evening.

It had been arranged by the military authorities that the private hospitals should first be evacuated now that the stream of wounded no longer poured into England from across the Channel, and gradually as the patients at Winston were discharged, the wards began to empty. Dodo resorted to all possible means to keep her hospital full. She besieged the War Office with such importunity that, had she been a widow, she must surely have had her request granted her; she threatened, flattered, and complained about the management of the Red Cross, she even considered the possibility of suborning an engine-driver of a Red Cross train going to York or some northern depot, to bring his waggons to a standstill at the station for Winston, and then go on strike. Thus the wounded must be conveyed somewhere, and as the train could not proceed, it would be necessary to bring them to Winston, and had strikes then been as popular as they soon became, this brilliant plan might possibly have succeeded. As it was, she saw her beloved establishment growing emptier and emptier every week; there were no more operations to be performed, so the surgeon went back to his practice in Harley Street; all but one of the staff of nurses departed to get married or take up the normal threads of life again, stretchers stood in disconsolate heaps in the pa.s.sages, bedding and bedsteads, drugget, tables and bath-chairs were put into lots for sale, the big ward was closed, and the beflagged pins so gleefully stuck into the map of France fell out one by one on to the floor, and were swept up by the housemaid. Soon there were but half a dozen men left in the whole place and these, like the little n.i.g.g.e.r-boys, vanished one by one. The gramophones grew mute, the smell of Virginian tobacco grew faint, n.o.body banged doors any more or played "There's a Little Grey Home in the West" on the cracked piano, hour by hour with one finger and a wrong note coming after a pause always in precisely the same place. Finally one man alone remained, who had missed his train and had to stop till the next morning. He tried that evening with very small success to teach Dodo a game of cards called "Snick," and she with even less success tried to entertain him with agreeable conversation. Under this enchantment he grew ever more morose, and when she could think of nothing more to say, a long silence fell, which was broken by his remarking, "Gawd, this place gives a man the hump!"... With that heartfelt e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n he shuffled up to bed, and was gone next morning before Dodo came down. The hospital fizzled out, like an oil-less lamp; it ceased to flame, the wick smouldered a little and then expired.

Dodo had, rather mistakenly, arranged to remain here for a couple of days after everyone had gone, in order to taste the sweets of leisure in a place where she had been so absorbingly occupied, for she hoped that this would draw the fullest flavour out of the sense of having nothing to do. From habit she awoke early, and tried to cajole herself into imagining how delicious it was to stop in bed, instead of getting up and going down to her business-room. It was a dark, chilly morning, and she heard the sleet tattoo on her window-panes; how cold the business-room would be, and how warm she was below her quilt. Instead of arising and shivering, she would doze again, and tell her maid to light a fire in her bedroom before she got up. Then, instead of dozing, she made lazy plans for the day; after breakfast she would read the paper, and then, not stirring from the fireside, would go on with that extremely amusing French book which made Jack say "Pish!" and throw it into the waste-paper basket, from which Dodo had rescued it. After lunch, fine or not, she would go for a ride, and stop out just as long as she chose, instead of hurrying back to duties that no longer existed, and she would have tea in her bathroom, and lie there hotly soaking, and she would go to sleep before dinner, and have a quail and some caviare and a hot-house peach and half a bottle of champagne and then she would finish her book, go to bed early and go on reading when she got there. There was n.o.body except herself to please, and nothing to do except exactly that which she chose to do. To-morrow morning Jack arrived, and the day after they would go up to town together. Chesterford House had also been evacuated a week ago and by this it should have resumed its usual appointments.

Dodo (though with slight internal misgivings) was so anxious to begin enjoying herself by doing nothing at all that she rang for her maid and got up. It was a perfect day for thinking how comfortable it was by the fire, for outside the wind screamed and scolded, and the sleet had turned to snow. She was rather glad to find that there was nothing of the smallest interest in the paper, for that made it more imperative to throw it away, put her feet on the fender and smoke one cigarette after another. "Too heavenly," she thought to herself. "I could sit and toast myself for days and days. I haven't got to give out bandages, n.o.body is going to have an operation, I haven't got any letters to write, and if I had I shouldn't write them. How wise I was to stop here and be lazy. The luxury of it!"

The house was perfectly quiet; how often she had longed for an hour's quiet during these last years, for the gramophone to be mute, and the piano to be silent, for the cessation of steps and whistling everlastingly pa.s.sing down the corridor outside her door! Now she had got it, and she tried hard to appreciate it. No one could possibly come to interrupt her, no one wanted her, she had leisure to amuse herself and taste the joys of a complete holiday. So she made up the fire and got her French book which she need not begin reading till she felt disposed. But she opened it, skimmed a page or two, and thought that Jack was really rather prudish. She would have argued with him about it if he had been here. Then the clock on her mantelpiece struck the hour, which she was surprised to find was only eleven, when she had imagined it was twelve. All the better; there was an extra hour of doing nothing.

The snow had ceased, and a patch of pale sunlight brightening the floor brought her to the window. There had been no heavy fall, but it still lay smooth and white on the broad gravel path and the lawn, for no footsteps that morning had trodden it. Just about a year ago there had been a similar fall, and by the middle of the morning the path had been swept clear, and the lawn had supplied sufficient material for the erection of a snow figure, which had been begun as a man, but had been transformed into a lady since skirts were more solid and easier of execution than legs. But she was not a satisfactory lady, and so she was snow-balled into even a more complete shapelessness.... Below the window this morning the warmth of the sun on the house had already melted the thin covering on the flower-beds, and snowdrops and aconites made a brave heralding of spring. But there was no object now in going out and picking them and making them into bedside posies. Dodo did not in the least want any snowdrops for herself; they seemed to her a depressed, frightened kind of flower that wished it had not blossomed at all. Then suddenly with an immense feeling of relief it occurred to her that she had not tidied up the business-room; there were all sorts of files and bills and papers, connected with the work of these last four years, to be arranged and put away, and delighted at having found something to do she spent a strenuous day, not stirring out of doors and sitting up into the small hours of next morning. That day there was the auction in the house of hospital furniture, and Dodo from pure sentimentality bought a gramophone, an iron bedstead with bedding complete, a bath-chair and five packets of temperature charts.

"Darling, they'll be so useful," she explained to Jack, who arrived in the afternoon. "We're growing old, you see, and either you or I, probably you, will be crippled with arthritis before many years are over, and then think how convenient to have a beautiful bath-chair all ready, without having to order it and wait for it to come. Very likely there would be a railway strike at the time, and then you wouldn't get it for weeks and weeks, and would have to remain planted on the terrace, if you could get as far, instead of having the most delicious pushes--I suppose you call it going for a push, don't you?--all over the woods.

And the cheapness of it! Why, a new one would cost double what I paid for it, and it's quite as good as new, if not better."

"I see. That was very thoughtful of you," said he. "But why all those temperature charts! There appear to be five packets of twenty."

Dodo felt perfectly able to account for the temperature charts.

"My dear, supposing the influenza came again this spring as it did last year," she said. "It often attacks an entire household. Suppose we've got a party here, suppose there are twenty people in the house; that will mean at least fifteen valets and maids as well and that makes thirty-five. Then there are all our own servants. Bang comes the 'flu, and without a moment's delay everybody's temperature chart is hanging up above his bed. Now I come to think of it, I wish I had bought more.

Two such visitations will use them all up. It was penny-wise, pound-foolish not to have taken the opportunity of getting them cheap."

"You certainly should have bought more," said Jack. "These will be used up in no time. I didn't know you kept charts for people who had influenza, but----"

"But you know now. Don't apologise," said she. "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad to see you. I thought I should like being alone here with nothing whatever to do, but it was h.e.l.lish. And that beautiful iron bed. Wasn't it a good thing I bought that?"

"I'm sure it was," said he. "Tell me why!"

Dodo raised her eyebrows in commiserating surprise.

"How often has it happened that somebody has proposed himself and I've had to telegraph, 'So sorry but not another bed in the house'? Now that will never happen again, for there it is!"

"There usually was another bed in the house," remarked Jack.

"Then with this that will make two," said Dodo brilliantly. "We can always have two more people. As for the gramophone--let me see, why did I buy the gramophone? A gramophone is much the most odious thing in the world for its size, worse than fleas or parsnips. I think I bought it because I hated it so. Shall I turn it on? Jack, I think I shall put it in the drawing-room where it used to play all day, and turn it on and then come back here, and you'll guess what it was like when it went on from dewy morn to dewier eve. Frankly, I bought it to remind me of the hospital. My dear, how I miss it! Without it this house gives me the hump, as Wilc.o.x said."

"Who is Wilc.o.x?"

"The last man who was here. He missed his train, and I tried to amuse him all evening with that result. The war's over, by the way, I have to say that to myself, for fear I should howl at the sight of this emptiness. What are we going to do with ourselves in London all March?"

Jack licked his lips.

"I'm going to sit down," he said. "I've stood up for four years strolling about in mud. I'm going to sleep in my nice chair, and play bridge when I awake. I'm going to matinees at theatres----"

"When you wake, or in order to sleep?" asked she.

"Both. I'm going to get up later and later every morning until there isn't any morning, and go to bed earlier and earlier until there isn't any evening. I'm cross and tired and flat. I never want to see a horse again."

Dodo looked at him in consternation.

"Oh, but that will never do," she said. "You've got to wind me up, darling, and stimulate me incessantly until I perk up again and hold myself upright. At present I feel precisely like one of those extremely frail-headed snowdrops--I always despised snowdrops--and wish I had remained comfortably underneath the ground, and hadn't come up at all.

We shall never get on if you mean to be a snowdrop too! Jack, you can't be a snowdrop: I never saw anyone so unlike a snowdrop. You really mustn't attempt to imitate anything that you resemble so little. I might as well try to be a penny-in-the-slot machine!"