EDITH DECLARES WAR
There were not less than ten people in any of the compartments when the
London train, which was so long that both ends of it projected outside
the station, arrived at Winston, and so Dodo made herself extremely
comfortable in the luggage van, feeling it perfectly blissful to be
alone (though in a luggage van) and to be inaccessible to any intrusive
call of duty for three whole hours. Indeed, she almost hoped that the
train would be late, and that she would then get a longer interval of
solitude than that. She had a luncheon-basket, and a pillow, and a
fur-coat, and a book that promised to be amusing, and had very prudently
thrown the morning paper, which she had not yet read, out of the window,
for fear she should get interested in it and think about the war. If
there was good news, she could wait for it till she got to London; if
there was bad news she thought she could wait for ever. The friendly
guard, rather shocked to see her preference for a luggage van, rather
than a fraction of a seat in a crowded carriage, had drawn an iron
grille across the entrance, so that she resembled a dangerous caged
animal, and promised her an uninterrupted journey.
The book speedily proved itself a disappointment; it was clear that the
war was going to creep into it before long, like the head of Charles I.
into Mr. Dick's Memorial, and Dodo put it aside and looked out of the
window instead. The blossoms of springtime made snowy the orchards
around the villages through which the train sped without pause or
salute, while the names of insignificant stations flashed past. But the
country-side was thick with reminiscence of hunting days for her, and
with that curious pleasure in mere recognition which the sight of
familiar places gives long after all emotion has withered from them, she
identified a fence here, a brook there, or a long stretch of ploughed
land, lawn-like to-day with the short spikes of the growing crops, all
of which brought back to her mind some incidents of pleasant winter
days, now incredibly remote. Then as the train drew up in deference to
an opposing signal, she heard from a neighbouring coppice the first note
of a cuckoo, and unbidden the words of the old song, still fresh and
untarnishable by age, floated across her mind:
Summer is i-cumen in,
Lhoude sing cuccu:
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springthe the woode nu,
Sing cuccu.
"Oh, the old days!" thought Dodo to herself, feeling immensely old, as
the train jerked and moved on again. Trains used not to jerk, surely,
in the old days, and for that matter she used not to travel in a luggage
van. Then she concentrated herself on the view again, for very shortly
they would be passing the remount-camp where Jack was in charge. Of
course she missed it; probably it was on the other side of the line, and
she had been earnestly gazing out of the wrong window.
Well, it was very pleasant to renew the sense of travelling in a train
at all. The rush past crowded platforms, the rise and fall of the
telegraph-wires as the posts flicked by, the procession of green fields
and blossoming orchards, the streams running full with the spring rains,
the cuckoo, the fact of being on the way to London after four solid
months of hospital life at Winston, the thought of the luncheon-basket
with which she purposed soon to refresh herself had all the sweet savour
of remote, ordinary normal life about them, and a semblance of pre-war
existence, even when it would last but for a few hours, seemed
extraordinarily delicious. Almost more pleasant was the smell of
springtime that streamed in through the window, that indefinable
fragrance of moisture and growth and greenness, and she drew in long
inhalations of it, for of late the world had seemed to contain only
three odours, namely those of iodoform, of cooking dinners and of
Virginian cigarettes. For the last four months she had not spent a
single night away from Winston, and even then she had only gone away, as
she was doing now, to have a look at how things were going on in the
officers' hospital at Chesterford House. Never in her life, as far as
she could remember, had she spent anything approaching four months in
the same place.
Dodo, who a few years before had literally no first-hand experience of
what fatigue really meant, felt very tired this morning, but she had got
quite used to that to which she had been a stranger for so many years,
and now it seemed as much a part of general consciousness to be always
tired as it did in the old days to feel always fresh. But she had found
that when you had arrived at a sufficient degree of fatigue, it got no
worse, but remained steady and constant, and she now accepted it as
permanent, and did not think about it. Both sight and sound were veiled
with this chronic weariness, which took the keen edge off all sensation
and she smelt and listened to the odours and sounds of springtime as if
through cotton-wool, and looked at its radiance as if through smoked
glass which cut off the brightness of sun-ray, and presented you with a
sepia sketch instead of a coloured picture. Still it was very good to be
quit of the smell of iodoform and the sight of bandages.
This busy life in her hospital had now for a year and a half cut her off
from all the pursuits in which hitherto her life had been passed, so
that even while she recognised a brook she had jumped or a fence she had
fallen at, she realised how remote the doings of those days had become.
They were severed from her not merely by these two winters of
abstinence from hunting, but much more crucially by the chasm of the
huge catastrophe which had wrecked and was still wrecking the world.
Memory could accurately recall old incidents to her, but in her own
consciousness she could not recall the atmosphere in which those days
had been lived; at the most, they seemed to have been read about in some
very vivid book, not to have been personally experienced by her. She
realised that this was probably only a symptom of her general fatigue, a
false claim as Christian Scientists would have told her, but its falsity
was extremely plausible and convincing. The fatigue, however, and the
symptoms arising from it were just those things which she was bound most
sternly to suppress when she was at work. Her value, such as it was, in
the day-long routine, lay, as she was well aware, in her being gay and
ridiculous without apparent effort, giving a "frolic welcome" to her
tasks, as if it was all the greatest fun in the world. She had, in fact,
to pretend to be what she had always been. Deep down in her she hoped,
she believed that the mainspring of her vitality was unimpaired, for
now, as the train sped onwards, something within her hailed the
springtime, like an awakened Brunnhilde, with ecstatic recognition.
Only, it did not thrill her all through, as its custom used to be; there
was this hard, fatigued crust on her senses....
What she missed most, the thing that she did actively and continually
long for was the society and companionship of her friends. Just as, all
these weeks, she had done nothing but her work, so she had seen nobody
except those professionally engaged with it. Her legion of friends were,
with one exception, as busy over war-work as she was herself. Younger
men, with terrible gaps already in their numbers, were fighting on one
of the many battle-fronts, older men were engaged with office work or
other missions for the more mature, and women and girls alike were
nursing or typewriting, or washing dishes, or running canteens. They
were too busy to see her, just as she was too busy to see them, and that
was a very real deprivation to Dodo, for she had no less than genius for
friendship. Many of these, however, were in London, and Dodo proposed to
do something towards making up these arrears of human companionship
during this next week. Her daughter Nadine Graves was dining with her
to-night and going to the theatre; Edith (the sole exception among
war-working friends) was entertaining her to-morrow with an evening at
the opera; the next day there was a small dance somewhere, which would
be full of boys from France and girls from hospitals. A social
engagement or two a day, seemed to Dodo after these months of abstinence
to be a positive orgy, and she ate her sandwiches with an awakening zest
for life, and fell fast asleep.
The day was beginning to flame towards sunset when she got out at the
London terminus, and at the sight of the crowds, brisk and busy and
occupied with various affairs, this sense of stimulus was vastly
increased. There was a little fog in the station with the smell of smoke
and of grimy, beloved old London hanging there, and everyone seemed to
have two legs and two arms and not to be bandaged and not to limp. No
one had slings or crutches, and involuntarily there came into Dodo's
mind the verse from the Bible about "the lame and the blind that are
hated of David's soul." For one moment, as the intoxication of freedom
and independence, of crowds and brisk movement mounted to her head, she
felt a secret sympathy with that monarch's sentiments, which were so
literally translated into actual conduct by Edith who still refused to
have anything to do with war-work, and occasionally wrote to Dodo saying
how magnificently her new symphony was progressing. But even while she
sympathised with David, she detested Edith's interpretation of him,
though she realised that she herself, not having a single drop of
artistic ichor in her blood, could not possibly understand the
temperament that led Edith to remain the one unpatriotic individual in
all her circle. Edith similarly refused to talk or hear about the war at
all, because mention of it interrupted that aloofness from disturbing
thought that was necessary to give full play to an artist's creative
powers. Dodo would not, however, let a divergence of sentiment even on
so vital a topic interfere with her friendship. Edith had a right to her
own convictions, odious though they might be, and to the ordering of
her own life. Only, if your own thoughts and actions were entirely
concerned with the war, it was difficult, so Dodo found, not to let some
trace of that creep into your conversation. However, when she met Edith
to-morrow, she would do her best.
Dodo had several businesses to attend to before she went home, and when
finally, rather behind time, she drove down Piccadilly on her way to
Chesterford House, the sun had long set, and such lighting as, in view
of hostile raids, was thought sufficient, illuminated the streets. No
blink of any kind shewed in the blank fronts of the houses, but the road
and pavement presented the most fascinating harmonies in subdued and
variegated tints. The glass of some street-lamps was painted over with
violet, of others with red; others were heavily blacked on their
top-surfaces but not obscured below, so that an octagonal patch of
pavement was vividly lit. Whether this delightful scheme of colour
helped to confuse possible raiders, Dodo did not consider; she was quite
content to enjoy the æsthetic effect, which did seem very bewildering.
The streets were still shining with the moisture of some shower that had
fallen earlier in the afternoon and they furnished a dim rainbow of
reflected colours while the whole paint-box of various tints was held in
solution by the serene light of the moon now near to its full, and
swinging clear above the trees in the Park. The thought of a raid that
night struck her as rather attractive, for she had not yet been in one,
and her re-awakened interest in life welcomed the idea of any new
experience.
She was just turning in at the big gates of Chesterford House when it
became likely that her wish was to be gratified. The hooting of
bicycle-horns and a sound of police-whistles began to pierce shrilly
through the bourdon rumble of wheeled traffic and this grew swiftly
louder. Instantaneously there came a change in the movements of
foot-passengers; those who were strolling leisurely along first stopped
to verify what they had heard, and then proceeded on their way at a far
livelier pace, many of them breaking into a run, and soon, tearing along
the road, came half a dozen bicyclists hooting and whistling and
shouting "Take cover."
Dodo had just got out of her motor and was absorbed in these new
happenings, when Nadine in cloak and evening clothes came running in at
the gate.
"Oh, mamma, is that you?" she said. "Isn't it lucky; I've just got here
in time. Let us come in at once."
Dodo kissed her.
"Darling, I simply can't come in this minute," she said. "My legs refuse
to take me. I want to see what happens so dreadfully. What do they do
next? And how about our theatre! Would it be nice to be there for a
raid? I don't much mind if we can't go, we'll have a cosy little
evening together."
"Oh, I must go in," said Nadine. "It all gets on my nerves. I have to
sit in a corner, and shut my ears, and I get cold and my knees tremble.
What do they do next, do you ask? They drop enormous bombs on us, and we
let off all the guns in the world at them. It's all most unattractive.
You must come in before the guns begin."
Dodo promised to do so, and as soon as Nadine had gone inside the house,
went out of the big gates again into the street. Already the wheeled
traffic in the road had mysteriously melted away, and almost entirely
ceased, though the pavements were still full of hurrying
foot-passengers, most of whom crossed the road a hundred yards further
down towards the entrance of a tube-station which was already black with
people. As they went they spoke jerkily and nervously to each other, as
if vexed or irritated. But in ten minutes they had all vanished, leaving
the street entirely empty, and it seemed as if some uncanny enchantment
must have waved over the town a spell, which withered up its life, so
that it was now a city of the dead. The pulse of traffic beat no longer
down its arteries, not a light appeared in its windows, no trace of any
animation remained in it. Not a whisper of wind stirred, the remote moon
shone down on the emptiness, and Dodo, holding her breath to listen,
found the stillness ringing in her ears.
Suddenly the silence was broken by some distant mutter, very faint and
muffled, but sounding not like some little noise near at hand, but a
great noise a long way off, for low as it was, it buffeted the air. Dodo
felt that every nerve in her body was sending urgent messages of alarm
to her brain, but with them there went along the same wires messages of
tingling exhilaration. This was the real thing: this was war itself. In
her hospital she had lived, till she had got used to it, with those whom
that wild beast had torn and mangled, but the sound of guns, here in the
secure centre of London, was different in kind from that; it was war,
not the effects of war. She knew that the outer defences, away somewhere
to the east, were already engaged with the enemy, whose machines, laden
with bombs, were drawing closer every moment with the speed of swallows
on the wing. Then that remote mutter ceased again, absolute silence
succeeded, and Dodo, to her intense surprise, found that her hands were
icy cold and that her knees were shaking. Quite clearly, though she had
not known it, her brain was acting on those alarming messages that were
pouring into it, but more vivid than these was her intense curiosity as
to what was coming next, and her exhilaration in the excitement of it
all.
Again the silence became intolerable, filling the air like some dense
choking fog. One part of her would have given anything in the world to
be safe back at Winston, or huddled in the cheerful recesses of the tube
with those prudent crowds which had hurried by, but another part, and
that the more potent, would not have accepted any bribe to miss a moment
of this superb suspense. Then somewhere over the Green Park, but much
nearer at hand, there came a flash as of distant lightning, silhouetting
the trees against a faint violet background, a gun barked into the
night, and a shell whimpered and squealed. Several times was that
repeated, then some other gun barked more loudly and fiercely. At that
Dodo's intense curiosity must have conveyed to her that for the moment
it was quite satisfied, and before she fairly knew what she was doing,
her feet had carried her scudding across the gravelled space in front of
the house, and her fingers were fumbling with the latch-key at the door.
She did not feel in the least afraid of German bombs or fragments of
English shrapnel, but she was consciously and desperately afraid of
silence and of noise and above all of solitude.
For the next hour there was no need to fear silence, so few moments of
silence were there to be afraid of. Sometimes the firing died down to a
distant mutter like that with which it had begun, and then without
warning the Hyde Park guns from close at hand broke in with bouquets of
furious explosions and screams of squealing things, making the windows
rattle in their frames. Then, just as suddenly, they would cease, and
more distant firing seemed but the echo of that tumult. Between the
reports could be heard the drone of the engines of hostile aircraft;
once for the space of half a minute the noise came loud and throbbing
down the chimney, showing that the machine was directly overhead, and
two or three times a detonation infinitely more sonorous than the sharp
report of the guns gave the news that some bomb had been dropped. A
clanging bell grew louder and died away again as a fire-engine dashed up
the deserted street outside.
Dodo and Nadine sat together in the sitting-room that Dodo had reserved
for herself when she gave up the rest of the house to be a hospital. The
table for their early dinner before the theatre was half-laid, but since
the raid began the arrangements had been left incomplete. Now that she
was within walls and not alone any longer Dodo's fears had passed off
altogether; she found herself merely restless and excited, incessantly
going to the window and raising a corner of the blind to see what was
visible. Outside the Park lay quiet under the serene wash of moonlight,
but every now and then a tracer-shell lit a new and momentary
constellation among the stars, and the rays of the searchlight swept
across the sky like the revolving flails of some gigantic windmill.
Nadine meantime sat in a remote corner of the room directly underneath
an electric lamp, with a book on her lap on which she was quite unable
to concentrate her attention, and her fingers ready to apply to her ears
when the noise which she proposed to shut out had violently assailed
them. Once she remonstrated with her mother for her excursions to the
window.
"It's really rather dangerous," she said. "If a bomb was dropped in the
road outside, the window would be blown in and the glass would cut you
into small pieces of mince."
"Darling, how can you be so sensible as to think of that sort of thing
in the middle of an air-raid?" asked Dodo. "Though it's all quite
horrible and brutal, it is so amazingly interesting. I should like to go
up on to the roof in a bomb-proof hat. You must remember this is my
first air-raid. Even the most unpleasant things are interesting the
first time they happen. I remember so well my first visit to a dentist.
And do air-raids make most people thirsty, I'm terribly thirsty."
Nadine shut up her book and laughed.
"You're a lovely person to be with," she said. "I don't mind it nearly
as much as usual. Hark, don't you hear whistles?"
Dodo listened and beamed.
"Certainly," she said. "What does that mean? Is it another raid?"
"No, mamma, of course not," said Nadine. "What an awful idea! It's the
signal 'all clear.' They've driven them out of London."
"That's a blessing, and also rather a disappointment," said Dodo. "Let's
have dinner at once. I'll be dressed in five minutes, and then we can go
to the theatre after all. Wasn't it exciting? Aren't I cramming a lot
in?"
A weird melodrama thrilled Dodo that night, and the general thrill was
renewed again next morning by a telephone message from Edith that a bomb
had fallen in the road exactly in front of her house, completely
wrecking two front rooms. She wanted to come round instantly to see Dodo
over very important matters, and arrived a quarter of an hour late
boiling with conversation and fury.
"Insured? Yes, we're insured," she shouted, "but what has insurance got
to do with it? If I took up the poker, Dodo, and smashed your
looking-glass, you would find no consolation in the fact that it was
insured. It would be my infernal impertinence and brutality that would
concern you. Those brutes deliberately bombed me, who have always ...
well, you know what my attitude towards Germany has been, and we'll
leave it at that. There are twenty pages of my score of the new symphony
which were on the table, absolutely torn to shreds. It's impossible to
piece them together, and I can never re-write them."
"Oh, my dear, how dreadful!" said Dodo. "But why not write them again?
Wasn't it Isaac Newton, who----"
"Isaac Newton, wasn't me," said Edith. "I daresay he might do it with a
mere treatise, but there's a freshness about the first draft of music
which can never be recaptured. Never! The wreckage: you must come at
once to see the wreckage. It's incredible; there's a Chippendale suite
simply in splinters. You might light a fire with the bigger pieces, and
use the rest instead of matches. There are little wheels about the room
which were a clock, there's half the ceiling down, and there's glass
dust, literally dust over everything, exactly like the frosted
foregrounds on Christmas cards. Inconceivably thorough! I always said
the Germans were thorough."
"And where were you?" asked Dodo.
"In the cellar, of course, with the housemaid and the cook singing. But
the outrage of it, the wanton brutal destruction! Do those Huns----"
"You said 'Huns'," said Dodo gleefully.
"I know I did. Huns they are, brutes, barbarians! And do they think that
they can win the war by smashing my clock? First there were the Belgian
atrocities, then there was the massacre of peaceful travellers on
neutral shipping without any warning begin given, and now they must
break my windows. That has brought it home to me. I believe every
accusation of brutality and murder and loathsomeness that has ever been
made against them. And that is why I came round to see you. I want to
renounce all my previous convictions about them. I will never set foot
on German soil again; the whole beastly race is poisoned for me. There's
exactly the same callous brutality in pages of Wagner and Strauss, and I
thought it was strength! I lay awake half of last night hating them. Of
course I shall take up some war-work at once; best of all I should like
to go into some munition factory and make with my very own hands high
explosives to be dropped on Berlin. Why don't we prosecute the war with
greater frightfulness, and, oh, Dodo, at the very beginning why didn't
you convince me what brutes and barbarians they are!"
Edith walked rapidly about the room as she made this unreserved
recantation, stamping with fury.
"My clock! My symphony! My front-door!" she exclaimed. "My front-door
was blown right across the hall, and in its present position it's more
like the back-door. If I hadn't been so furiously angry at the sight of
the damage, I think I should have laughed at the thought that I once
believed the Huns to be cultured and romantic people. I'm almost glad it
happened, for it has brought enlightenment to me. That's my nature. I
must act up to my convictions whatever they are and I don't care at what
personal loss I learn the truth. Not one note more of music will I write
till the English are strolling down the Unter den Linden. The Kaiser
must be brought to justice; if he survives the war he must be treated
like a common criminal. He must suffer for smashing up my rooms exactly
as if he had been a hooligan in the street. He is a hooligan; that's
precisely what he is, and once I was pleased at his coming to my
concert. I talked to him as if he had been a civilised being, I curtsied
to him. I wonder that the sinews of my knees didn't dry up and wither
for shame. What a blind dupe I have been of that disgusting race! Never
will I trust my judgment again about anybody.... Give me a box of
matches and let me make a bomb."
Dodo was enchanted at this change of view in Edith. Though she had
determined that nothing should interfere with her friendship, things had
been rather difficult at times.
"How you can have tolerated me, I can't think," continued Edith. "And
you showed marvellous tact, because if you talked about almost anything
under the sun the war would creep in. Wonderful tact, Dodo; wonderful
patience! I must begin to do something at once; I must set to work to
learn something, and the only question is what shall it be. Luckily I
learn things quicker than anybody I know, for I can concentrate in a way
that hardly anyone else can. You never concentrate enough, you know. I
have often told you that."
"Yes, darling, often and often," said Dodo. "How much more fortunate you
are! What are you going to concentrate on?"
"I don't know. I must think. By the way, you are dining with me
to-night, aren't you? That will be all right, if you don't mind there
being no front-door; they left me my dining-room. But the road in front
of the house is all torn up; you will have to walk ten yards. The Huns!"
Dodo, by way of a holiday, spent an extremely strenuous week. She took
the convalescents out for drives in the morning, and to matinées in the
afternoon, and got up a variety of entertainments for those who were in
bed. Many of her friends were in town, busy also, but she sandwiched in,
between these hospital duties, a prodigious quantity of social
intercourse. Yet the spring, the sunshine, the aroma had for the present
gone out of all that used to render life agreeable; it was an effort
hardly worth making in these days when efforts were valuable, to wear
even the semblance of a light heart when there was nothing more to be
gained beyond the passing of a pleasant hour for herself. Fatigue of
mind and soul lay within her like some cold lump that would not be
dissolved and she had some sort of spiritual indigestion which made
amusement taste queerly. Apart from the mere stimulus of human
companionship, all this tearing about, this attempt to recapture a
little of the pre-war _insouciance_ was hardly worth the exertion. In
the wards she could be amazing, but there she had a purpose: to play the
fool with a purpose and see it fulfilling itself was an altogether
different affair and was easy enough. What was difficult was to play the
fool from mere ebullition of high spirits.
Edith came to the station to see Dodo off on her return to Winston. She
had meant to stop another couple of days but already she was fidgeting
to get to work again, and what clinched her decision to go back was that
a medical inspector had given notice of his visit to her hospital
to-morrow morning and it was unthinkable that she should not be there.
She had secured a seat in the train, and the two strolled along the
platform till it was due to start.
"It's a waste of time and energy," she said to Edith on this topic, "to
make an effort to enjoy yourself. If you don't enjoy yourself naturally,
you had better give it up, and try to make somebody else enjoy himself."
Edith was in rather a severe mood.
"Truly altruistic," she said. "Suck the orange dry, and then give the
rind away."
"Not at all: squeeze the juice out of it, and give the juice away," said
Dodo.
"Yes, as you don't want the juice yourself. That's precisely what I
mean. But don't let us discuss abstract questions; I have bought a
typewriter."
"A typewriter is a person," said Dodo. If Edith was going to be
magisterial she would be, too.
"No; the person is a typist," said Edith. "I'm one, so I ought to know.
In a week's time I shall be absolutely proficient."
"My dear, how clever of you," said Dodo, forgetting to be disagreeable.
"What will you do then?"
"I shall make a round of hospitals and do all their correspondence for
them for a week. I shall come to Winston."
"That'll be lovely," said Dodo. "But what about the munition factory?"
"They say I'm too old to stand the hours, and to stand the standing.
Old, indeed! Also you mayn't smoke, which is more important. One has to
make the most of one's faculties, and if I couldn't smoke all day, I
shouldn't be at my best. We've got to learn efficiency; we shall win
when we all do our best."
They had come out of the dim arch of the station, and Dodo, helplessly
giggling, sat down on a bench in the sunlight.
"That's so deliriously like you," she said. "You practically say that
the war is won because you've bought a typewriter. It's the right
spirit, too. I feel the Red Cross may be happy in its mind so long as I
am at Winston. All the same the abstract question is interesting. I feel
that the only way to laugh nowadays is to make other people laugh. And
we've got to take short views, and get through the day's work, and get
through to-morrow's work to-morrow. One is learning something, you know,
through all this horror; I'm learning to be punctual and business-like,
and not to want fifty people to look after me. We've been like babies
all our lives, getting things done for us, instead of doing them
ourselves. In the old days if I was going by train my maid had to come
on first and take my seat, and watch by the carriage door till I
arrived, and gave me my book and my rug, and the station-master had to
touch his cap and hope I would be comfortable, and the footman had to
shew my ticket."
An engine somewhere in the station whistled and puffed and a long train
slid slowly by them and vanished into the tunnel just beyond.
"We were babies, we were drones," continued Dodo, "and we were
ridiculously expensive. If a train didn't suit us, we took a special, if
a new dress didn't come up to our hopes, we never saw it again. But now
we wear a dress for years, and instead of taking specials we catch slow
trains humbly, and travel in luggage vans. I don't think we shall ever
go back to the old days, even if we had enough money left to do so."
She looked round, and a sudden misgiving dawned on her.
"Where's my train?" she said. "It ought to be standing there? What has
happened?"
It was soon clear what had happened.... Half an hour later Dodo left in
a special at staggering expense, in order to get down to Winston that
night.