"Don't you see my friendship for Chesterford is an absolute safeguard.
Dodo gives me more pleasure than anyone I know, and when I can't see
her, life becomes unbearable. Chesterford is one of those men to whom
one couldn't do a mean thing, and, furthermore, Dodo doesn't love
me. If those two facts don't ensure safety, I don't know what would.
Besides, Bertie, I'm not a rascal."
"I can't like it," said Bertie. "If one has a propensity for falling
into the fire, it's as well to keep off the hearthrug. I know you're
not a rascal, but this is a thing one can't argue about. It is a matter
of feeling."
"I know," said Jack, "I've felt it too. But I think it's outweighed by
other considerations. If I thought any mischief could come of it, I
should deserve to be horse-whipped."
"I don't like it," repeated Bertie stolidly.
Jack went to see Dodo the next afternoon, and for many afternoons
during the next fortnight he might have been seen on Chesterford's
doorstep, either coming or going. Her husband seemed almost as glad
as Dodo that Jack should come often. His visits were obviously very
pleasant to her, and she had begun to talk nonsense again as fluently
as ever. With Jack, however, she had some rather serious talks; his
future appeared to be exercising her mind somewhat. Jack's life at this
time was absolutely aimless. Before he had gone abroad he had been at
the Bar, and had been called, but his chambers now knew him no more. He
had no home duties, being, as Dodo expressed it, "a poor little orphan
of six foot two," and he had enough money for an idle bachelor life.
Dodo took a very real interest in the career of her friends. It was
part of her completeness, as I have said before, to be the centre of
a set of successful people. Jack could do very well, she felt, in the
purely ornamental line, and she by no means wished to debar him from
the ornamental profession, but yet she was vaguely dissatisfied. She
induced him one day to state in full, exactly the ideas he had about
his own future.
"You dangle very well indeed," she said to him, "and I'm far from
wishing you not to dangle, but, if it's to be your profession, you
must do it more systematically. Lady Wrayston was here yesterday, and
she said no one ever saw you now. That's lazy; you're neglecting your
work."
Jack was silent a few minutes. The truth of the matter was that he
was becoming so preoccupied with Dodo, that he was acquiring a real
distaste for other society. His days seemed to have dwindled down to
an hour or two hours each, according to the time he passed with Dodo.
The interval between his leaving the house one day and returning to it
the next, had got to be merely a tedious period of waiting, which he
would gladly have dispensed with. In such intervals society appeared
to him not a distraction, but a laborious substitute for inaction, and
labour at any time was not congenial to him. His life, in fact, was
a series of conscious pulses with long-drawn pauses in between. He
was dimly aware that this sort of thing could not go on for ever. The
machine would stop, or get quicker or slower, and there were endless
complications imminent in either case.
"I don't know that I really care for dangling," said Jack
discontentedly. "At the same time it is the least objectionable form of
amusement."
"Well, you can't dangle for ever in any case," said Dodo. "You ought
to marry and settle down. Chesterford is a sort of apotheosis of a
dangler. By performing, with scrupulous care, a quantity of little
things that don't matter much, like being J.P., and handing the
offertory plate, he is in a way quite a busy man, to himself at least,
though nothing would happen if he ceased doing any or all of these
things; and the dangler, who thinks himself busy, is the happiest of
men, because he gets all the advantages of dangling, and none of the
disadvantages, and his conscience--have you got a conscience, Jack?--so
far from pricking him, tells him he's doing the whole duty of man. Then
again he's married--to me, too. That's a profession in itself."
"Ah, but I can't be married to you too," remarked Jack.
"You're absurd," said Dodo; "but really, Jack, I wish you'd marry
someone else. I sha'n't think you unfaithful."
"I don't flatter myself that you would," said Jack, with a touch of
irritation.
Dodo looked up rather surprised at the hard ring in his voice. She
thought it wiser to ignore this last remark.
"I never can quite make out whether you are ambitious or not," she
said. "Now and then you make me feel as if you would rather like to go
and live in a small cathedral town----"
"And shock the canons?" suggested Jack.
"Not necessarily; but cultivate sheer domesticity. You're very
domestic in a way. Bertie would do admirably in a cathedral town. He'd
be dreadfully happy among dull people. They would all think him so
brilliant and charming, and the bishop would ask him over to dine at
the palace whenever anyone came down from London."
"I'm not ambitious in the way of wanting to score small successes,"
said Jack. "Anyone can score them. I don't mind flying at high game and
missing. If you miss of course you have to load again, but I'd sooner
do that than make a bag of rabbits. Besides, you can get your rabbits
sitting, as you go after your high game. But I don't want rabbits."
"What is your high game?" asked Dodo.
Jack considered.
"It's this," he said. "You may attain it, or at any rate strive after
it, by doing nothing, or working like a horse. But, anyhow, it's being
in the midst of things, it's seeing the wheels go round, and forming
conclusions as to why they go round, it's hearing the world go rushing
by like a river in flood, it's knowing what everyone thinks about, it's
guessing why one woman falls in love with one man, and why another man
falls in love with her. You don't get that in cathedral towns. The
archdeacon's daughter falls in love with the dean's son, and nobody
else is at all in love with either of them. The world doesn't rattle
in cathedral towns, they take care to oil it; the world doesn't come
down in flood in cathedral towns, there is nothing so badly regulated
as that. I don't know why I should choose cathedral towns particularly
to say these things about. I think you suggested that I should live in
one. If you like you can plunge into the river in flood and go down
with it--that's what they call having a profession--but it's just
as instructive to stand on the bank and watch it; more instructive,
perhaps, because you needn't swim, and can give your whole attention to
it. On the whole, that is what I mean to do."
"That's good, Jack," said Dodo; "but you're not consistent. The fact
that you haven't been going out lately, shows that you're standing
with your back to it, with your hands in your pocket. After all, what
you say only comes to this, that you are interested in the problem of
human life. Well, there's just as much human life in your cathedral
town."
"Ah, but there's no go about it," said he. "It's no more like life than
a duck pond is to the river in flood."
"Oh, you're wrong there," said Dodo. "It goes on just the same, though
it doesn't make such a fuss. But in any case you are standing with your
back to it now, as I said."
"I'm going into details, just at present," said Jack.
"How do you mean?"
"I'm watching a little bit of it."
"I suppose you mean Chesterford and me. Do you find us very
interesting?" demanded Dodo.
"Very."
Jack was rather uncomfortable. He wanted to say more, and wished he
hadn't said so much. He wondered how Dodo would take it.
Dodo did not take it at all. She was, for the time at any rate, much
more interested in Jack's prospects as they concerned him, than as they
bore on herself.
"What is the upshot of all your observations?" she asked.
Jack hardly knew whether to feel relieved or slighted. Was Dodo's
apparent unconsciousness of the tenor of what he had said genuine or
affected? On that he felt a great deal depended. But whether it was
genuine or not, the matter was closed for the present. Dodo repeated
her question.
"My observations on you, or on the world in general?" he asked.
"Either will do," said Dodo; "we're very normal. Any conclusion you
have formed about the rest of the world will apply to us."
"My conclusion is that you are not quite normal," said he.
Dodo laughed.
"Oh, I'm dreadfully normal," she said; "all my inconsistencies lie on
the surface--I'm married, I've got a baby, I'm honest, I'm lazy. I'm
all I should and shouldn't be. And Chesterford----"
"Oh, then Chesterford's normal too," said Jack.