[Illustration: Book Cover]
DODO WONDERS--
* * * * *
E. F. BENSON
* * * * *
BY E. F. BENSON
* * * * *
DODO WONDERS--
"QUEEN LUCIA"
ROBIN LINNET
ACROSS THE STREAM
UP AND DOWN
AN AUTUMN SOWING
THE TORTOISE
DAVID BLAIZE
DAVID BLAIZE AND THE BLUE DOOR
MICHAEL
THE OAKLEYITES
ARUNDEL
OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS
* * * * *
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
* * * * *
* * * * *
DODO WONDERS--
* * * * *
BY
E. F. BENSON
AUTHOR OF "QUEEN LUCIA," "DODO," "DAVID BLAIZE,"
"ACROSS THE STREAM," ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920, 1921, BY THE INTERNATIONAL
MAGAZINE COMPANY (HARPER'S BAZAAR)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I DODO DE SENECTUTE 9
II HIGHNESS 30
III CROSS-CURRENTS 52
IV JUMBO 77
V A MAN'S HAND 98
VI A WATERLOO BALL 119
VII DODO'S APPRENTICESHIP 143
VIII EDITH DECLARES WAR 167
IX MID-STREAM 189
X THE SILVER BOW 208
XI DODO'S NIGHT OUT 231
XII THE REVIVAL 251
CHAPTER I
DODO DE SENECTUTE
Dodo was so much interested in what she had herself been saying, that
having just lit one cigarette, she lit another at it, and now
contemplated the two with a dazed expression. She was talking to Edith
Arbuthnot, who had just returned from a musical tour in Germany, where
she had conducted a dozen concerts consisting entirely of her own music
with flaring success. She had been urged by her agent to give half a
dozen more, the glory of which, he guaranteed, would completely eclipse
that of the first series, but instead she had come back to England. She
did not quite know why she had done so: her husband Bertie had sent the
most cordial message to say that he and their daughter Madge were
getting on quite excellently without her--indeed that seemed rather
unduly stressed--but ... here she was. The statement of this, to be
enlarged on no doubt later, had violently switched the talk on to a
discussion on free will.
Edith, it may be remarked, had arrived at her house in town only to find
that her husband and daughter had already gone away for Whitsuntide, and
being unable to support the idea of a Sunday alone in London, had sent
off a telegram to Dodo, whom she knew to be at Winston, announcing her
advent, and had arrived before it. On the other hand, her luggage had
not arrived at all, and for the present she was dressed in a tea-gown of
Dodo's, and a pair of Lord Chesterford's tennis-shoes which fitted her
perfectly.
"I wonder," said Dodo. "We talk glibly about free will and we haven't
the slightest conception what we really mean by it. Look at these two
cigarettes! I am going to throw one away in a moment, and smoke the
other, but there is no earthly reason why I should throw this away
rather than that, or that than this: they are both precisely alike. I
think I can do as I choose, but I can't. Whatever I shall do, has been
written in the Book of Fate; something comes in--I don't know what it
is--which will direct my choice. I say to myself, 'I choose to smoke
cigarette A and throw away cigarette B,' but all the time it has been
already determined. So in order to score off the Book of Fate, I say
that I will do precisely the opposite, and do it. Upon which Fate points
with its horny finger to its dreadful book, and there it has all been
written down since the beginning of the world if not before. Don't let
us talk about free will any more, for it makes one's brain turn round
like a Dancing Dervish, but continue to nurse our illusion on the
subject. You could have stayed in Germany, but you chose not to. There!"
Edith had not nearly finished telling Dodo about these concerts, in
fact, she had barely begun, when the uncomfortable doctrine of free will
usurped Dodo's attention and wonder.
"The first concert, as I think I told you, was at Leipsic," she said.
"It was really colossal. You don't know what an artistic triumph means
to an artist."
"No, dear; tell me," said Dodo, still looking at her cigarettes.
"Then you must allow me to speak. It was crammed, of course, and the air
was thick with jealousy and hostility. They hated me and my music, and
everything about me, because I was English. Only, they couldn't keep
away. They had to come in order to hate me keenly at close quarters. I'm
beginning to think that is rather characteristic of the Germans; they
are far the most intense nation there is. First I played----"
"I thought you conducted," said Dodo.
"Yes; we call that playing. That is the usual term. First I played the
'Dodo' symphony. I composed one movement of it here, I remember--the
scherzo. Well, at the end of the first movement, about three people
clapped their hands once, and there was dead silence again. At the end
of the second there was a roar. They couldn't help it. Then they
recollected themselves again, having forgotten for a moment how much
they hated me, and the roar stopped like turning a tap off. You could
have heard a pin drop."
"Did it?" asked Dodo.
"No: I dropped my baton, which sounded like a clap of thunder. Then came
the scherzo, and from that moment they were Balaams. They had come to
curse and they were obliged to bless. What happened to their free will
then?"
"Yes, I know about Balaam," said Dodo, "he comes in the Bible. Darling,
how delicious for you. I see quite well what you mean by an artistic
triumph: it's to make people delight in you in spite of themselves. I've
often done it."
Dodo had resolved the other problem of free will that concerned the
cigarettes by smoking them alternately. It seemed very unlikely that
Fate had thought of that. They were both finished now, and she got up to
pour out tea.
"If I could envy anybody," she said, "which I am absolutely incapable of
doing, I should envy you, Edith. You have always gone on doing all your
life precisely what you meant to do. You've got a strong character, as
strong as this tea, which has been standing. But all my remarkable feats
have been those which I didn't mean to do. They just came along and got
done. I always meant to marry Jack, but I didn't do it until I had
married two other people first. Sugar? That's how I go on, you know,
doing things on the spur of the moment, and trusting that they will come
right afterwards, because I haven't really meant them at all. And yet,
'orrible to relate, by degrees, by degrees as the years go on, we paint
the pictures of ourselves which are the only authentic ones, since we
have painted every bit of them ourselves. Everything I do adds another
touch to mine, and at the end I shall get glanders or cancer or thrush,
and just the moment before I die I shall take the brush for the last
time and paint on it 'Dodo fecit.' Oh, my dear, what will the angels
think of it, and what will our aspirations and our aims and our
struggles think of it? We've gone on aspiring and perspiring and
admiring and conspiring, and then it's all over. Strawberries! They're
the first I've seen this year; let us eat them up before Jack comes.
Sometimes I wish I was a canary or any other silly thing that doesn't
think and try and fail. All the same, I shouldn't really like to be a
bird. Imagine having black eyes like buttons, and a horny mouth with no
teeth, and scaly legs. Groundsel, too! I would sooner be a cannibal than
eat groundsel. And I couldn't possibly live in a cage; nor could I
endure anybody throwing a piece of green baize over me when he thought I
had talked enough. Fancy, if you could ring the bell now this moment,
and say to the footman, 'Bring me her ladyship's baize!' It would take
away all spontaneousness from my conversation. I should be afraid of
saying anything for fear of being baized, and every one would think I
was getting old and anæmic. I won't be a canary after all!"
Edith shouted with laughter.
"A mind like yours is such a relief after living with orderly German
minds for a month," she said. "You always were a holiday. But why these
morbid imaginings!"
"I'm sure I don't know. I think it's the effect of seeing you again
after a long interval, and hearing you mention the time when you
composed that scherzo. It's so long ago, and we were so young, and so
exactly like what we are now. Does it ever strike you that we are
growing up? Slowly, but surely, darling, we are growing up. I'm
fifty-five: at least, I'm really only fifty-four, but I add one year to
my age instead of taking off two, like most people, so that when the
next birthday comes, I'm already used to being it, if you follow me, and
so there's no shock."
"Shock? I adore getting older," said Edith. "It will be glorious being
eighty. I wish I hadn't got to wait so long. Every year adds to one's
perceptions and one's wisdom."
Dodo considered this.
"Yes, I daresay it is so up to a point," she said, "though I seem to
have seen women of eighty whose relations tell me that darling granny
has preserved all her faculties, and is particularly bright this
morning. Then the door opens and in comes darling granny in her
bath-chair, with her head shaking a little with palsy, and what I
should call deaf and blind and crippled. My name is shouted at her, and
she grins and picks at her shawl. Oh, my dear! But I daresay she is
quite happy, which is what matters most, and it isn't that which I'm
afraid of in getting old!"
"But you're not afraid of dying?" asked Edith incredulously.
"Good gracious, no. I'm never afraid of certainties; I'm only afraid of
contingencies like missing a train. What I am afraid of in getting old
is continuing to feel hopelessly young. I look in vain for signs that I
realise I'm fifty-five. I tell myself I'm fifty-five----"
"Four," said Edith; "I'm six."
"And that I was young last century and not this century," continued Dodo
without pause. "We're both Victorians, Edith, and all sorts of people
have reigned since then. But I don't feel Victorian. I like the
fox-trot, and going in an aeroplane, and modern pictures which look
equally delicious upside down, and modern poetry which doesn't scan or
rhyme or mean anything, and sitting up all night. And yet all the time
I'm a grandmother, and even that doesn't make any impression on me.
Nadine's got three children, you know, and look at Nadine herself. She's
thirty, the darling, and she's stately--the person who sees everybody in
the Park walking briskly and looking lovely, always says that Nadine is
stately. I read his remarks in the paper for that reason, and cut that
piece out and sent to Nadine. But am I a proper mother for a stately
daughter? That dreadful thought occurs to Nadine sometimes, I am sure.
Would you guess I had a stately daughter?"
It certainly would have seemed a very wild conjecture. Dodo had
preserved up to the eminently respectable age of which she felt so
unworthy, the aspect as well as the inward vitality of youth, and thus
never did she appear to be attempting to be young, when she clearly was
not. She was still slender and brisk in movement, her black hair was
quite untouched with grey, the fine oval of her face was still firm and
unwrinkled, and her eyes, still dancing with the fire that might have
been expected only to smoulder nowadays, were perfectly capable of
fulfilling their purposes unaided. She had made an attempt a few years
ago to wear large tortoise-shell spectacles, and that dismal failure
occurred to her now.
"I have tried to meet old age halfway," she said, "but old age won't
come and meet me! I can't really see the old hag on the road even yet.
Do you remember my spectacles? That was a serious expedition in search
of middle-age, but it did no good. I always forgot where they were, and
sat down on them with faint fatal crunches. Then Jack didn't like them;
he said he would never have married me if he had known I was going to
get old so soon, and he always hid them when he found them lying about,
and he gave me an ear-trumpet for a birthday present. David used to like
them; that was the only purpose they served. He used to squeal with
delight if he got hold of them, and run away and come back dressed up
like Mummie."
"I am lost without spectacles," said Edith.
"But I'm not; it was my spectacles that were always lost. And then I
like rainbows and conjuring-tricks and putting pennies on the line for
the train to go over, and bare feet and chocolates. I do like them;
there's no use in pretending that I don't. Besides, David would find me
out in no time. It would be a poor pretence not to be excited when we
have put our pennies on the line, and hear the Great Northern Express
whistle as it passes through Winston on the way to our pennies. That's
why it rushes all the way from London to Edinburgh, to go over our
pennies. And we've got a new plan: you would never guess. We gum the
pennies on the line and so they can't jump off, but all the wheels go
over them, and they get hot and flat like pancakes. I like it! I like
it!" cried Dodo.
Edith had finished tea, and was waiting, rather severely, for a pause.
"But that's not all of you, Dodo," she said; "there is a piece of you
that's not a child. I want to talk to that."
Dodo nodded at her.
"Yes, I know it's there," she said, "and we shall come to it in time. Of
course, if I only thought about pennies on the line and conjuring tricks
I should be in my second childhood, and well on the way to preserving
all my faculties like the poor things in the bath-chairs. You see, David
is mixed up so tremendously in these games: I don't suppose I should go
down to the line five minutes before the six o'clock express passed
through and put pennies there if it wasn't for him. I was forty-five
when he was born, so you must make allowances for me. You don't know
what that means any more than I know what artistic triumphs mean. Oh, I
forgot: I did know that. David's away, did I tell you? He went away
to-day to pay a round of visits with his nurse. He is going to visit the
dentist first and then the bootmaker, and then he's 'going on' to stay
with Nadine for the night. That's the round, and he comes back
to-morrow, thank God. Where were we when you got severe? Oh, I know. You
said there was a piece of me which wasn't entirely absurd, and you
wanted to talk to that. But it's ever so difficult to disentangle one
piece of you from all the rest."
"Drawers!" said Edith relentlessly. "You must have drawers in your mind
with handles and locks. You can unlock one, if you want what's inside
it, and pull it out by its handle. When you've finished, push it back
and lock it again. That certainly is one of the things we ought to have
learned by this time. I have, but I don't think you have. All your
drawers are open simultaneously, Dodo. That's a great mistake, for you
go dabbing about in them all, instead of being occupied with one. You
don't concentrate!"
She suddenly relented.
"Oh, Dodo, go on!" she said. "I'm having a delicious holiday. You always
appear to talk utter nonsense, but it suits me so admirably. I often
think your activity is a fearful waste of energy, like a fall in a
salmon-river which might have been making electricity instead of running
away. And then quite suddenly there appears a large fat salmon leaping
in the middle of it all, all shiny and fresh from the sea. Don't let us
concentrate: let's have all the drawers open and turn out everything on
to the floor. I don't grow old any more than you do inside, in spite of
my raddled, kippered face, and bones sticking out like hat-pegs. I am
just as keen as ever, and just as confident that I'm going to make Bach
and Brahms and Beethoven turn in their graves. I hear there was a slight
subsidence the other day over the grave of one of them: it was probably
my last concert in Berlin that was the real cause of it. But I've kept
young because all my life I have pursued one thing with grim
persistence, and always known I was going to catch it. I haven't had
time to grow old, let alone growing middle-aged, which is so much more
tragic!"
"Oh, middle-age is rapidly growing extinct," said Dodo, "and we needn't
be afraid of catching it nowadays. When we were young, people of our age
were middle-aged. They wouldn't drain life to the dregs and then chuck
the goblet away and be old. They kept a little wine in it still and
sipped it on special occasions. They lay down after lunch and took
dinner-pills to preserve their fading energies. Now, we don't do that;
as long as we have an ounce of energy left we use it, as long as there
is a drop of wine left we drink it. The moment I cease to be drunk with
any spoonfuls of youth that remain to me," said she with great emphasis,
"I shall be a total abstainer. As long as the sun is up it shall be day,
but as soon as it sets it shall be night. There shall be no long-drawn
sunsets and disgusting after-glows with me. When I've finished I shall
go 'pop,' and get into my bath-chair till I'm wheeled away into the
family-vault. And all the time at the back of my atrophied brain will be
the knowledge of what a lovely time I have had. That's my plan, anyhow."
Dodo had got quite serious and absently dipped the last two or three
strawberries into her tea-cup, imagining apparently that it contained
cream.
"You're different," she said; "you can achieve definite projections of
yourself in music; you can still create, and as long as anybody creates
she is not old. Stretching out: that's what youth means. I daresay you
will write some new tunes and go to play them in Heligoland in the
autumn. That's your anchor to youth, your power of creation. I've got no
anchor of that kind; I've only got some fish-hooks, so to speak,
consisting of my sympathy with what is young, and my love of what is
new. But when you blame me for having all my drawers open, there I
disagree. It is having all my drawers open that stands between me and
the bath-chair. But, my dear, what pitfalls there are for us to avoid,
if we are to steer clear of being terrible, grizzly kittens."
"Such as?" asked Edith.
"The most obvious is one so many sprightly old things like us fall into,
namely, that of attaching some young man to their hoary old selves.
There's nothing that makes a woman look so old as to drag about some
doped boy, and there's nothing that actually ages her so quickly. I
never fell into that mistake, and I'm not going to begin now. It is so
easy to make a boy think you are marvellous: it's such a cheap success,
like spending the season at some second-rate watering-place. No more
flirting for us, darling! Of course every girl should be a flirt: it is
her business to attract as many young men as possible, and then she
chooses one and goes for him for all she's worth. That is Nature's way:
look at the queen-bee."
"Where?" said Edith, not quite following.
"Anywhere," continued Dodo, not troubling to explain. "And then again
every right-minded boy is in love with several girls at once, and he
chooses one and the rest either go into a decline or marry somebody
else, usually the latter. But then contrast that nice, clean way of
doing things with the mature, greasy barmaids of our age, smirking over
the counter at the boys, and, as I said, doping them. What hags! How
easy to be a hag! I adore boys, but I won't be a hag."
Dodo broke off suddenly from these remarkable reflections, and adjusted
her hat before the looking-glass.
"They are older than the rocks they sit among, as Mr. Pater said," she
remarked. "Let us go out, as Jack doesn't seem to be coming. His
tennis-shoes fit you beautifully and so does my tea-gown. Do you know,
it happens to be ten minutes to six, so that if we walk down across the
fields, on to the railway-cutting, we shall get there in time for the
express. One may as well go there as anywhere else. Besides, David put
the gum-bottle and our pennies inside the piano, and thought it would be
lovely if I gummed them down to-night, as if he was here. That's really
unselfish: if I was away and David here, I should like him not to put
any pennies down till I came home. But David takes after Jack. Come on!"
The roses round the house were in full glory of June, but the hay-fields
down which they skirted their way were more to Dodo's mind. She had two
selves, so Jack told her, the town-self which delighted in crowds and
theatres and dances and sniffed the reek of fresh asphalt and hot
pavement with relish, and the country self which preferred the wild-rose
in the hedge and the ox-eyed daisies and buttercups that climbed upwards
through the growing grasses to the smooth lawn and the garden-bed. She
carried David's gum-bottle and the pennies, already razor-edged from
having been flattened out under train-wheels, and ecstatically gummed
them to the rails.
"And now we sit and wait as close as we dare," she said. "Waiting,
really is the best part. I don't think you agree. I think you like
achievement better than expectation."
"Every artist does," said Edith. "I hated going to Germany, not because
I thought there was any chance of my not scoring a howling success, but
because I had to wait to get there. When I want a thing I want it now,
so as to get on to the next thing."
"That's greedy," remarked Dodo.
"Not nearly so greedy as teasing yourself with expectation. The glory of
going on! as St. Paul said."
"And the satisfaction of standing still. I said that."
"But great people don't stand still, nor do great nations," said Edith.
"Look at Germany! How I adore the German spirit in spite of their hatred
of us. That great, relentless, magnificent machine, that never stops and
is never careless. I can't think why I was so glad to get away. I had a
feeling that there was something brewing there. There was a sort of
tense calm, as before a thunderstorm----"
The train swept round the corner and passed them with a roar and rattle,
towering high above them, a glory of efficiency, stirring and
bewildering. But for once Dodo paid no attention to it.
"Darling, there has been a lull before the storm ever since I can
remember," she said, "but the storm never breaks. I wonder if the
millennium has really come years ago, and we haven't noticed it. How
dreadful for the millennium to be a complete fiasco! Oh, there's Jack
going down to the river with his fishing-rod. Whistle on your fingers
and catch his attention. I want to show him your tennis-shoes. Now, the
fisherman is the real instance of the type that lives on expectation.
Jack goes and fishes for hours at a time in a state of rapt bliss,
because he thinks he is just going to catch something. He hasn't heard:
I suppose he thought it was only the express."
"I want to fish too," said Edith. "I adore fishing because I do catch
something, and then I go on and catch something else. Besides nobody
ever fished in a tea-gown before."
"Very well. We'll go back and get another rod for you. Gracious me! I've
forgotten the pennies and the gum-bottle. David would never forgive me,
however hard he tried. Go on about Germany."
"But you don't believe what I say," said Edith. "Something is going to
happen, and I hate the idea. You see, Germany has always been my mother:
the whole joy of my life, which is music, comes from her, but this time
she suddenly seemed like some dreadful old step-mother instead. I
suppose that was why I came back. I wasn't comfortable there. I have
always felt utterly at home there before, but this time I didn't. Shall
I go back and give some more concerts after all?"
"Yes, darling, do: just as you are. I'll send your luggage back after
you. Personally I rather like the German type of man. When I talk to one
I feel as if I was talking to a large alligator, bald and horny, which
puts on a great, long smile and watches you with its wicked little eyes.
It would eat you up if it could get at you, and it smiles in order to
encourage you to jump over the railings and go and pat it. Jack had a
German agent here, you know, a quite terribly efficient alligator who
never forgot anything. He always went to church and sang in the choir.
He left quite suddenly the other day."
"Why?" asked Edith.
"I don't know; he went back to Germany."
* * * * *
Edith came back from her fishing a little after dinner-time rosy with
triumph and the heat of the evening, and with her arms covered with
midge-bites. Dodo had dressed already, and thought she had never seen
quite so amazing a spectacle as Edith presented as she came up the
terrace, with a soaked and ruined tea-gown trailing behind her, and
Jack's tennis-shoes making large wet marks on the paving-stones.
"Six beauties," she said, displaying her laden landing-net, "and I
missed another which must have been a three-pounder. Oh, and your
tea-gown! I pinned it up round my knees with the greatest care, but it
came undone, and, well--there it is. But I hear my luggage has come, and
do let us have some of these trout for dinner. I have enjoyed myself so
immensely. Don't wait for me: I must have a bath!"
Jack who had come in a quarter of an hour before, and had not yet seen
Edith, came out of the drawing-room window at this moment. He sat down
on the step, and went off into helpless laughter....
Edith appeared at dinner simultaneously with the broiled trout. She had
a garish order pinned rather crookedly on to her dress.
"Darling, what's that swank?" asked Dodo instantly.
"Bavarian Order of Music and Chivalry," she said. "The King gave it me
at Munich. It has never been given to a woman before. There's a
troubadour one side, and Richard Wagner on the other."
"I don't believe he would have been so chivalrous if he had seen you as
Jack did just before dinner. Jack, would your chivalry have triumphed?
Your tennis-shoes, my tea-gown, and Edith in the middle."
"What! My tennis-shoes?" asked Jack.
"Dodo, you should have broken it to him," said Edith with deep
reproach.
"I didn't dare to. It might have made him stop laughing, and suppressed
laughter is as dangerous as suppressed measles when you get on in life.
There's another thing about your Germans. I thought of it while I was
dressing. They only laugh at German jokes."
"There is one in _Faust_," said Jack with an air of scrupulous fairness.
"At least there is believed to be: commentators differ. But when _Faust_
is given in Germany, the whole theatre rocks with laughter at the proper
point."
Edith rose to this with the eagerness of the trout she had caught.
"The humour of a nation doesn't depend on the number of jokes in its
sublimest tragedy," she said. "Let us judge English humour by the funny
things in _Hamlet_."
Dodo gave a commiserating sigh.
"That wasn't a very good choice," she said. "There are the
grave-diggers, and there's Polonius all over the place. The most serious
people see humour in Polonius. Why didn't you say Milton? Now it's too
late."
Jack suddenly laughed.
"I beg your pardon," said he; "I wasn't thinking about Milton at all,
but a vision of Dodo's tea-gown appeared to me, as I last saw it. Yes.
Take Milton, Edith. Dodo can't give you a joke out of Milton because she
has never read him. Don't interrupt, Dodo. Or take Dante. Ask me for a
joke in Dante, and you win all down the line. Take Julius Cæsar: take
any great creature you like. What you really want to point out is that
great authors are seldom humorous. I agree: one up to you. Take a
trout--I didn't catch any."
Edith did precisely as she was told.
"I hate arguing," she said. "Dodo insisted on arguing about middle-age
all the afternoon. In the intervals she talked about putting pennies on
the line. She said it was enormous fun, but she forgot all about them
when she had put them there."
"Don't tell David, Jack," said Dodo, aside. "All right. Dodo's got
middle-age on her mind. She bought some spectacles once."
"My dear, we've had all that," said Dodo. "What we really want to know
is how you are to get gracefully old, while you continue to feel young.
We're wanting not to be middle-aged in the interval. There is no use in
cutting off pleasures, while they please you, because that makes you not
old but sour, and who wants to be sour? What a poor ambition! It really
is rather an interesting question for us three, who are between
fifty-four and sixty, and who don't feel like it. Jack, you're really
the oldest of us, and more really you're the youngest."
"I doubt that," said Edith loudly.
"This is German scepticism then. Jack is much more like a boy than you
are like a girl."
"I never was like a girl," said Edith. "Ask Bertie, ask anybody. I was
always mature and feverish. Dodo was always calculating, and her
calculations were interrupted by impulse. Jack was always the devout
lover. The troubadour on my medal is extremely like him."
Jack passed his hand over his forehead.
"What are we talking about?" he said.
"Getting old, darling," said Dodo.
"So we are. But the fact is, you know, that we're getting old all the
time, but we don't notice it till some shock comes. That crystallises
things. What is fluid in you takes shape."
Dodo got up.
"So we've got to wait for a shock," she said. "Is that all you can
suggest? Anyhow, I shall hold your hand if a shock comes. What sort of a
shock would be good for me, do you think? I know what would be good for
Edith, and that would be that she suddenly found that she couldn't help
writing music that was practically indistinguishable from the
_Messiah_."
"And that," said Edith, "is blasphemy."
Jack caught on.
"Hush, Dodo," he said, "an inspired, a sacred work to all true
musicians."
Edith glanced wildly round.
"I shall go mad," she said, "if there is any more of this delicious
English humour. Handel! Me and Handel! How dare you? Brutes!"