This Freedom Part 38

Harry got up and went over to him. "Look here, you'd better run along. You're not in a fit state to talk to your mother. I'm not sure you're in a fit state to talk to any-body or to know what you're saying. You'd better go, my boy. We'll go into this in the morning. Come round early in the morning. We'll settle it then."

He was pa.s.sing with Huggo through the door when Doda, equipped for her dance, came running down the stairs. "Hull-o, Huggo! Why, I haven't seen you for weeks. Where have you been?"

Huggo, standing unsteadily, unsteadily regarded her. "Point is, where are you going? All dressed up and somewhere to go! I'll bet you have! I've seen you jazzing about the place when you haven't seen me, Dods. And heard about you! There was a chap with me watching you at the Riddle Club the other night told me some pretty fierce--"

"Oh, dash, I've left my fan," cried Doda, and turned and ran back up the stairs.

Huggo called, "I say, Dods. I'm in a row. So'll you be one day, if you don't look out for yourself."

Doda's voice: "Oh, dry up--you fool!"

Strike on!

CHAPTER IV.

Her Doda! The one that was her baby girl, that was her tiny daughter!

The one that was to be her woman treasury in which she'd pour her woman love; that was to be her self's own self, her heart's own heart, her tiny woman-bud to be a woman with her in the house of Harry and of Huggo! Her Doda!

Look, there she is! There's lovely Doda! She's fourteen. It's early in 1915, in the first twelve months of the war. (That war!) She's at that splendid school. She's been there nearly three years. She loves it. She's never so happy as when she's there, except, judging by her chatter, when she's away in the holidays at the house of one of her friends. It's at home--when she is at home--that she's never really happy. She's so dull, she always says, at home. She always wants to be doing something, to be seeing something, to be playing with somebody. She can't bear being in the house. She can't bear being, of an evening, just alone with Rosalie. "Oh, dear!"

she's always saying. "Oh, dear, I do wish it would hurry up and be term time again."

"Darling, you are a restless person," Rosalie says.

"Well, mother, it is dull just sticking here."

"You know how Benji loves to have you home, Doda. Benji simply lives for you. I've never known a brother so devoted. You ought to think of Benji sometimes, Doda."

"Well, I can't be always thinking of Benji. I'm surely ent.i.tled to be with my own friends sometimes. I don't ask Benji to be devoted to me."

She's strangely given to expressions like that: "I didn't ask for"--whatever circ.u.mstance or obligation it might be that was irksome to her. "Not traditions--precedents!" The watchword of the school was strangely to be traced in her att.i.tude, still in her childish years, towards a hundred commonplaces of the daily life.

She was always curiously older than her years. She seemed to have a natural bent away from traditionally childish things and towards attractions not a.s.sociated with childhood. She did excellently well at the school. She was, her reports said, uncommonly quick and vivid at her lessons. She was always in a form above her years.

Her friends, while she was smallish, were always the elder girls, and the elder girls gave her welcome place among them. "Perhaps a shade precocious," wrote the lady princ.i.p.al in one of the laconic, penetrating sentences with which, above her signature, each girl's report was terminated: and, in a later term, "Has 'Forward!' for her banner, but should remember 'not too fast'."

"Gripes! I know what she's referring to," said Doda, seeing it, and laughed, obviously flattered.

"Your expressions, Doda!"

"Huggo uses it."

"They're wretched even in Huggo. But Huggo's a boy. You're a girl."

"Well, mother, I didn't ask to be a girl."

"Doda, that's merely silly."

"A lot of us say it, that's all I know."

"Then, darling, a lot of you are silly."

"Oh, I shall be glad when next week I go to the Fergussons. It is dull."

Look, there she is. She's sixteen. She's beautiful. She's pretty as a picture, and she knows she is. She's grown out of the rather early fullness of figure that had been hers. She's slim and tall and straight and supple and slender as a willow wand. If she had her hair up and her skirts lengthened (skirts then were only starting on their diminution to the knees), she'd pa.s.s for twenty anywhere, and a twenty singularly attractive, curiously self-possessed, strikingly suggestive in her pale and beautiful countenance, and in an alternating sleepiness and glinting in her eyes; strikingly suggestive of, well, strikingly suggestive according to the predilictions and the principles of the beholder.

This was in 1917. She was beginning rather to hate school now. She wanted to be out and doing some war work of some kind. Oh, those sickening scarves and things they were eternally knitting, that wasn't war work. It was fun at first. They were fed to death with doing them now. She didn't much want to go into a hospital or into any of these women's corps. They were a jolly sight too cooped up in those things from what she'd heard. She wanted to go into one of the Government offices and do clerical work. Several of the school Old Girls who had been there with her were doing that and it was the most ripping rag. Of course you had to work, and of course it was jolly good patriotic work, but you had a topping time in many ways. That was what she wanted to do. Oh, mother, do let her chuck school now and get to it! Not till she was seventeen? Well, it was sickening. Well, it was only another term, thank goodness.

It was in the holidays--in her brief days at home of the holidays--in which these wishes were expressed, that Rosalie found Doda was corresponding with officers at the front.

Doda was appallingly untidy in her habits. She was out one evening to a party--she managed to get a considerable number of parties into her dull days at home. Rosalie, come in from Field's, peeped into her bedroom to find her. She had not known that Doda was going out. The bedroom cried aloud that Doda had gone out. Drawers were open and articles of dress hanging out of them. One drawer, no doubt stubborn in its yieldings, was bodily out in the middle of the room. Clothes were on the floor. Clothes strewed the bed. Powder was all over the mirror. It was as if a whirlwind had pa.s.sed through the room.

"Powder!" murmured Rosalie.

The state of the room dismayed her. The intense orderliness of her own character forbade her ringing for a maid. She simply could not look at untidiness like that without tidying it. She started to tidy. Doda's box was open. Its contents looked as if a dog had burrowed in it, throwing up the things as he worked down. If anything was to go in, everything must first come out. Rosalie lifted out an initial clearance.

There lay scattered beneath it quite half a dozen photographs of officers in khaki.

There were all inscribed. "To the school kid." "Wishing you were here." "With kisses." "Till we meet." And with slangy nicknames of the writers. There lay with them a number of letters, all in their envelopes. There lay also a sheet of paper covered in Doda's bold handwriting. It began "Wonderful Old Thing."

Rosalie had not touched these evidences of an unknown interest in Doda's life. She stooped, staring upon them, the lifted bundle of clothes in her hand. The stare that took in "Wonderful Old Thing"

took in also the first few lines. They were not nice. But she oughtn't to read it. One didn't do that kind of thing. She replaced the bundle and closed the box. Then she tidied the room and wiped the mirror.

Early next morning, immediately on coming out of her bath, she went in to Doda. She opened the door softly and she distinctly saw the lids of Doda's eyes flash up and close again.

"Doda!"

Doda pretended to be asleep. Rosalie had sat up for Doda the previous night but had said nothing to her either of her discovery or of going to an invitation without having told her. Doda wasn't pretending to be asleep because she feared trouble. She was pretending to be asleep just because she had no wish for an early talk with her mother.

There was a little pang at the heart of Rosalie.

But it was just that the child wasn't demonstrative of her affections.

None of them were. Even Benji not really what you would call demonstrative. How beautiful the child was! Her Doda! How little she ever saw of her!

She called her again.

Doda opened her eyes. "Hullo, mother."

Just that. No more. They were different, the children.

She sat down on Doda's bed and began to talk to her. Tidiness!

"Doda, your room as you left it last night when you went out was simply terrible. How can you?"