Dodo Wonders Part 3

Dodo got up, looked for the _Times_, and remembered that it was burned.

"That's a relief anyhow," she said. "I think it's worth the destruction of the three-and-six-penny postal order. If it hadn't been burned I should have to read it to see what is going on."

"There's nothing."

"But one reads it all the same. If there's nothing in the large type, I read the paper across from column to column, and acquire snippets of information which get jumbled up together and sap the intellect. People with great minds like Edith never look at the paper at all. That's why she argues so well: she never knows anything about the subject, and so can give full play to her imagination."

Dodo threw up the window.

"Oh, Jack, it is silly to go to London in June," she said. "And yet it doesn't do to stay much in the country, unless you have a lot of people about who make you forget you are in the country at all."

"Who is coming to-day?" asked he.

"Well, I thought originally that we would have the sort of party we had twenty-five years ago, and see how we've all stood them; and so you and I and Edith and Grantie and Tommy Ledgers represent the old red sandstone. Then Nadine and Hughie and young Tommy Ledgers and two or three of their friends crept in, and then there are Prince and Princess Albert Allenstein. They didn't creep in: they shoved in."

"My dear, what a menagerie," said Jack.

"I know: the animals kept on coming in one by one and two by two, and we shall be about twenty-five altogether. Princess Albert is opening a bazaar or a bank or a barracks at Nottingham on Tuesday, that's why she is coming!"

"Then why have you asked her to come to-day?"

"I didn't: she thought it would be nice to come on Sat.u.r.day instead of Monday, and wrote to tell me so--remind me to give Daddy the autograph: he has begun collecting autographs-- However, he will look after her: he loves Princesses of any age or shape. As for Albert he shall have trays of food brought him at short and regular intervals, so he'll bother n.o.body. But best of all, beloved David is coming back to-day. He and his round of visits! I think I'll send a paragraph to the _Morning Post_ to say that Lord Harchester has returned to the family seat after a round of visits. I won't say it was the dentist and the bootmaker."

"Oh, for goodness' sake don't teach David to be a sn.o.b!" said Jack.

"Darling, you're a little heavy this morning," said Dodo. "That was a joke."

"Not entirely," said Jack.

Dodo capitulated without the slightest attempt at defence.

"Quite right!" she said. "But you must remember that I was born, so to speak, in a frying-pan in Glasgow, enamelled by the Vane process, or at least that was my cradle, and if you asked me to swear on my bended knees that I wasn't a sn.o.b at all, I should instantly get up and change the subject. I do still think it's rather fun being what I have become, and having Royal Families staying with me----"

"And saying it's rather a bore," put in Jack.

"Of course. I like being bored that way, if you insist on it. I haven't ever quite got over my rise in life. Very nearly, but not quite."

"You really speak as if you thought it mattered," said Jack.

"I know it doesn't really. It's a game, a rather good one. Kind hearts are more than coronets, but I rather like having both. Most people are sn.o.bs, Jack, though they won't say so. It's distinctly sn.o.bbish of me to put my parties in the paper, and after all you read it in the morning, which is just as bad. The Court Circular too! Why should it be announced to all the world that they went to the private chapel on Sunday morning and who preached? It has to be written and printed and corrected. That wouldn't be done unless a quant.i.ty of people wanted to read it. I wonder if it's read up in heaven, and if the angels say to each other how pleasant it all is."

Dodo bubbled with laughter.

"Oh, my dear, how funny we all are," she said. "Just think of our pomposity, we little funny things kicking about together in the dust! We all rather like having t.i.tles and orders; otherwise the whole thing would have stopped long ago. Here's Edith: so it must be eleven."

Edith had taken to smoking a pipe lately, because her doctor said it was less injurious than cigarettes, and she wanted to hurt herself as little as possible. She found it difficult to keep it alight, and half-away across the room she struck a match on the sole of her shoe, and applied it to the bowl, from which a croaking noise issued.

"Dodo, is it true that the Allensteins are coming to stay here to-day?"

she asked. "I saw it in the _Daily Mail_."

Jack opened his mouth to speak, but Dodo clapped her hands in his face.

"Now, Jack, I didn't put it there," she said, "so don't make false accusations. Of course they did it themselves, because you and I--particularly I--are what people call smart, and the Allensteins aren't. That proves the point I was just going to make: in fact, that's the best definition of sn.o.b. Sn.o.bs want to show other people how nicely they are getting on."

Edith sat down in the window seat between Dodo and Jack, who shied away from the reek of her pipe, which an impartial breeze, coming in at the window, wafted this way and that.

"But who's a-deniging of it, Saireh Gamp?" she asked. "The sn.o.b's main object is not actually having the King or the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury to dinner; what he cares about is that other people should know that he has done so. Sn.o.bbishness isn't running after the great ones of the earth, but letting the little ones know you have caught the great ones."

"You hopeless women!" said Jack.

Dodo shook her head.

"He can't understand," she said, "for with all his virtues Jack isn't a sn.o.b at all, and he misses a great deal of pleasure. We all want to a.s.sociate with our superiors in any line. It is more fun having notable people about than nonent.i.ties. When it comes to friends it is a different thing, and I would throw over the whole Almanack of Grotha for the sake of a friend----"

Jack turned his eyes heavenwards.

"What an angel!" he said. "Was ever such n.o.bility and unworldliness embodied in a human form? What have I done to deserve----"

Dodo interrupted.

"_And_ we like other people to know it," she said. "Poor Jack is a _lusus naturae_; he is swamped by the normal. You must yield, darling."

Jack made an awful face as the smoke from Edith's pipe blew across him, and got up.

"I yield to those deathly fumes," he said.

Dodo's guests arrived spasmodically during the afternoon. A couple of motors went backwards and forwards between the station and the house, meeting all probable trains, sometimes returning with one occupant, sometimes with three or four, for n.o.body had happened to say what time he was arriving. About five an aeroplane alighted in the park, bearing Hugh Graves as pilot, and his wife Nadine as pa.s.senger, and while Dodo, taking her daughter's place, succeeded in getting Hugh to take her up for a short flight, Prince and Princess Albert arrived in a cab with Nadine's maid, having somehow managed to miss the motor. Jack was out fishing at the time, and Prince Albert expressed over and over again his surprise at the informality of their reception. He was a slow, stout, stupid man of sixty, and in ten years' time would no doubt be slower, stouter, stupider and seventy. He had a miraculous digestion, a huge appet.i.te for sleep, and a moderate acquaintance with the English language. They spent four months of the year in England in order to get away from their terrible little Court at Allenstein, and with a view to economy, pa.s.sed most of those months in sponging on well-to-do acquaintances.

"Also this is very strange," he said slowly. "Where is Lady Chesterford?

Where is Lord Chesterford? Where are our hosts? Where is tea?"

Princess Albert, brisk and buxom and pleasant and pleased, waddled through the house into the garden, where she met Nadine, leaving her husband to follow still wondering at the strangeness of it all. She talked voluble, effective English in a guttural manner.

"So screaming!" she said. "n.o.body here, neither dearest Dodo nor her husband to receive us, so when they come we will receive them. Where is she?"

Nadine pointed to an aeroplane that was flying low over the house.

"She's there just now," she said.

"Flying? Albert, Dodo is flying. Is that not courageous of her?"

"But Lady Chesterford should have been here to receive us," said he. "It is very strange, but we will have tea. And where is my evening paper? I shall have left it in the cab, and it must be fetched. You there: I wish my evening paper."

The person he had thus addressed, who resembled an aged but extremely respectable butler, took off his hat, and Princess Albert instantly recognised him.

"But it is dear Mr. Vane," she said. "How pleasant! Is it not amusing that we should arrive when Dodo is flying and Lord Chesterford is fishing? So awkward for them, poor things, when they find we are here."