DODO'S APPRENTICESHIP
The morning papers were late that day, and when they arrived Dodo
snatched at them and automatically turned to the _communiqué_ 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 assiduous 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; buttons 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 encyclopædia 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 spacious 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 space 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 anticipation 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 noble example to the rest of the wealthy classes, 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 passed 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 damning 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 nobody 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 passes 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 God 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 advertisement 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 prickings of
my finger that were required to sew on a button 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 damned 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 button, 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 buttons 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 damned 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 damned 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 über alles,' on the
table with his fat fingers? The effect on you was that you played 'Rule
Britannia' and 'God 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 assumed a puzzled expression.
"Somebody, I don't know who," she said, "told me that there was an
English navy. Probably it was all lies like the German atrocities."
Edith threw her hands wide.
"Do you think I like feeling as I do?" she asked. "Do you think I do it
for fun?"
"No, dear, for my amusement," said Dodo briskly. "But unfortunately it
only makes me sick. Hullo, here's David."
David entered making an awful noise on a drum.
"Shut up, David," said his mother, "and tell Edith what you are going to
do when you're eighteen."
"Kill the Huns," chanted David. "Mayn't I play my drum any more, mummy?"
"Yes, go and play it all over the house. And sing Tipperary all the
time."
David made a shrill departure.
"Of course you can teach any child that!" said Edith.
"I know. That's so lovely. If I had fifty children I should teach it to
them all. I wish I had. I should love seeing them all go out to France,
and I should squirm as each of them went. I should like to dig up the
graves of Bach and Brahms and Beethoven and Wagner and Goethe, and stamp
on their remains. They have nothing to do with it all but they're Huns.
I don't care whether it is logical or Christian or anything else, but
that's the way to win the war. And you're largely responsible for that;
I never saw red before you talked such nonsense about the war being
over. If we haven't got an army we're going to have one, and I shall
learn to drive a motor. If I could go to that window and be shot,
provided one of those beastly Huns was shot too, I should give you one
kiss, darling, to shew I forgave you, and go to the window dancing! I
quite allow that if everybody was like you we should lose, but thank God
we're not."
Dodo's face was crimson with pure patriotism.
"I'm not angry with you," she said, "I'm only telling you what you don't
know, and what I do know, so don't resent it, because I haven't the
slightest intention of quarrelling with you, and it takes two to make a
quarrel. You know about trombones and C flat, and if you told me about C
flat----"
Edith suddenly burst into a howl of laughter.
"Or C sharp," said Dodo, "or a harpsichord. Oh, don't laugh. What have I
said?"
Edith recovered by degrees and wiped her eyes.
"In all my life I have never had so many offensive things said to me,"
she remarked, "I can't think why I don't mind."
"Oh, because you know I love you," said Dodo with conviction.
"I suppose so. But there's Berts going out to that hell----"
"Oh, but you said the war was over already," said Dodo. "Besides what
would you think of him if he didn't go?"
"I should think it extremely sensible of him," began Edith in a great
hurry.
"And after you had thought that!" suggested Dodo.
Edith considered this.
"I don't know what I should think next," she said. "What I'm going to do
next is to get back to my scoring."
* * * * *
Edith's remarks about the absurdity of people attempting to do things
for which they had no aptitude made a distinct impression on Dodo, and
she totally abandoned the stocking of which she could not turn the heel,
and made no further dislocation of work by trying to use a mop. But she
found that if she really attended, she could count blankets and
bed-jackets, and weigh out stores and superintend their distribution.
Again, driving a motor was a thing that seemed within the limits of her
ability, and by the time that Winston was in full running order as a
hospital she was fairly competent as a driver. Awful incidents had
accompanied her apprenticeship; she had twice stripped her gear, had run
into a stone wall, luckily in a poor state of repair, and had three
times butted at a gate-post. Her last accident, after a week really
tedious from mere uneventfulness, had been when she had gone all alone,
as a pleasant surprise, to the station to meet Jack, who was coming
home for two days' leave. She had been both driving and talking at high
speed, and so had not seen that she was close to a very sharp corner on
the marshy common just outside the gates, and preferring the prudent
course, as opposed to the sporting chance of getting round the corner
without capsizing, had gone straight ahead, leaving the road altogether,
until, remembering to apply her brakes, she stuck fast and oozily in the
marsh.
"There!" she said with some pride. "If I had been reckless and imprudent
I should have tried to get round that corner and had an upset. Didn't I
show presence of mind, Jack?"
"Marvellous. And what are we to do now?"
Dodo looked round.
"We had better shout," she said. "And then somebody will come with a
horse and pull us out backwards. It has happened before," she added
candidly.
"But if nobody comes?" asked he.
"Somebody is sure to. It's unthinkable that we should remain here till
we die of exposure and hunger, and the crows pick our whitening bones.
The only other thing to do is that you should jump out and fetch
somebody. I wouldn't advise you to, as you would sink up to your knees
in the mud. But it's a lovely afternoon; let's sit here and talk till
something happens. Haven't I learned to drive quickly?"
"Very quickly," said Jack. "We've covered the last three miles in four
minutes."
"I didn't mean that sort of quickly," said Dodo, "though daresay I said
it. Isn't it lucky it's fine, and that we've got plenty of time? I
wanted a talk with you and somebody would be sure to interrupt at home.
He would want sticking-plaster or chloroform or charades."
"Is all that your department?" asked Jack.
"Yes, they call me Harrods. You never thought I should become Harrods.
Oh, Jack, if you've got an ache in your mind, the cure is to work your
body till that aches too. Then two aches make an affirmative."
"What?" said Jack.
"You see what I mean. And the odd thing is that though I'm entirely
taken up with the war, I try not to think about the war at all, at least
not in the way I used to before I became Harrods. One is too busy with
the thing itself to think about it. In fact, I haven't looked at the
papers for the last day or two. Has there been any news?"
"Not much. I've been busy too, and I really hardly know. But there's
been nothing of importance."
"Jack, what's going to happen?" she asked.
"Oh, we're going to win, of course. God knows when. Perhaps after three
years or so. But it's no good thinking about that."
Dodo gave a little groan.
"I know it isn't. If I realised that this was going on all that time, I
think I should just get drunk every day. Let's talk about something
else, and not realise it."
"When are you coming to see my camp?" asked he.
"I should think when the war is over and there isn't any camp. I don't
see how I can get away before. How long has it been going now? Only
three months, is it? And I can hardly remember what things were like
before. How did one get through the day? We got up later, it is true,
but then we went to bed later. Did we do nothing except amuse ourselves?
I couldn't amuse myself now. And what did we talk about? I seem to
remember sitting and talking for hours together, and not finding it the
least tedious."
"I shall insist on your having a holiday soon," said Jack.
"Oh no, darling, you won't. I've had fifty-five years' holiday in my
life and three months' work. That doesn't give much of a daily average,
if you work it out; somewhere about five minutes a day, isn't it? I must
have something better than that to shew before I have another
holiday.... Jack, did you say that we must look forward to three years
or more of this? Good Lord, how senseless it all is! What do you _prove_
by setting millions of jolly boys to kill each other? Oh, I shouldn't
have said that; I would have said, 'What do you prove by having our
jolly boys killed by those damned Huns?' Yes, darling, I said damned,
and I intended to. I told Edith that one day. The way to win a war is to
be convinced that your enemy are fiends. 'Also,' as that fat Albert
would say, 'we must therefore kill them.' But I wish I really meant it.
There must be a lot of nice fellows among the Huns. They've had a bad
education; that's what is the matter with them. Also, they have no sense
of humour. Fancy writing a Hymn of Hate, and having it solemnly sung by
every household! That odious Cousin Willie has approved of it, and it is
being printed by the million. No sense of humour."
Dodo unconsciously hooted on her motor-horn, and looked wildly round.
"I didn't mean to do that," she said, "because I don't want to be
rescued just yet. It's lovely sitting here and talking to you, Jack,
without fear of being asked to sign something. What was I saying? Oh
yes, humour! The Huns haven't got any humour, and the lack of that and
of mirth will be their undoing. How wise Queen Elizabeth was when she
said that God knew there was need for mirth in England now, just at the
time when England was in direst peril. That is frightfully true to-day.
We shall get through by taking it gaily. It's much best not to let
oneself see the stupendous tragedy of it all. If I did that I would
simply shrivel up or get drunk."
Dodo began a laugh that was near to a sob.
"I saw three boys this morning," she said, "all of whom had had a leg
amputated. There were three legs to the lot of them. So they put their
arms round each other's necks so as to form a solid body, and marched
down the long walk shouting 'left, right, left, right.' Then they saw
me, and disentangled their arms and grinned, and tried to salute, and so
they all fell down with roars of laughter. My dear, did you ever hear of
such darlings? That was the mirth that Queen Elizabeth said was so
necessary. I wanted to kiss them all, Jack."
"I want to kiss you," he said.
"Then you shall, you dear, if you think it won't shock the magneto. I do
miss you so horribly; you're the only real link between the days before
the war and the war. All other values are changed, except you and David.
What a nice talk we have had, at least I've had the talk, so you must do
your part and find it nice. Now let's hoot, until several strong
cart-horses come to help us."
Dodo performed an amazing fantasy on the horn, while the early sunset of
this November day began to flame in the west, which reminded her that
there were charades this evening. A chance bicyclist was eventually
induced to take a message to a farm about half a mile distant, and a
small child came from the farm and took a message to his mother, who
came out to see what was happening, and took a message to her husband,
who did the same, and went back for a horse, which was found to be
insufficient, so deeply were they stuck, and another horse had to be
produced from another farm. After that they came out of the marsh like
a cork being pulled out of a bottle, and Dodo was in time to be the
German Emperor with a racing-cup upside down on her head for a helmet,
an enormous moustache, and half a dozen sons. This scene represented the
complete word, which was instantly guessed and hissed as being
undoubtedly Potsdam.