Dodo's Daughter: A Sequel to Dodo. Benson Edward Frederic

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СКАЧАТЬ a long white beard made of cotton-wool was Wotan, and Edith truculently broke her walking-stick, and that was 'Spear,' and they did whatever they could remember out of Macbeth, which wasn't much, but which was 'Shakespeare.'

      It was all intensely silly, but Jack knew that he had not laughed so much during all those years which to-night had rolled away.

      Then he left the surface and dived down into his heart again… There was no question of forgiving Dodo for the way in which she had treated him: the idea of forgiveness was as foreign to the whole question as it would have been to forgive the barometer for going down and presaging rain. It couldn't help it: it was like that. But in stormy weather and fine, in tempest and in the clear shining after rain, he loved Dodo. What his chances were he could not at present consider, for his whole soul was absorbed in the one emotion.

      Jack, for all his grizzled hair and his serious political years, had a great deal about him that was still boyish, and with the inconsistency of youth having settled that it was impossible to think about his chance, proceeded very earnestly to do so. The chance seemed a conspicuously outside one. She had had more than one opportunity of marrying him before, and had felt herself unable to take advantage of it: it was very little likely that she would find him desirable now. Twice already she had embarked on the unaccountable sea; both times her boat had foundered. Once the sea was made, in her estimate, of cotton-wool; the second time, in anybody's estimate, of amorous brandy. It was not to be expected that she would experiment again with so unexpected a Proteus.

      Meantime a parliament of the younger generation in Nadine's room were talking with the frankness that characterized them about exactly the same subject as Jack was revolving alone, for Dodo had gone away with Edith in order to epitomize the last twenty years, and begin again with a fresh twenty to-morrow.

      "It is quite certain that it is Mama he wants to marry and not me," said Nadine. "I thought it was going to be me. I feel a little hurt, like when one isn't asked to a party to which one doesn't want to go.

      "You don't want to go to any parties," said Hugh rather acidly, "but I believe you love being asked to them."

      Nadine turned quickly round to him.

      "That is awfully unfair, Hughie," she said in a low voice, "if you mean what I suppose you do. Do you mean that?"

      "What I mean is quite obvious," he said.

      Nadine got up from the window-seat where she was sitting with him.

      "I think we had all better go to bed," she said. "Hugh is being odious."

      "If you meant what you said," he remarked, "the odiousness is with you. It is bad taste to tell one that you feel hurt that the Ripper doesn't want you to marry him."

      Nadine was silent a moment. Then she held out her hand to him.

      "Yes, you are quite right, Hugh," she said. "It was bad taste. I am sorry. Is that enough?"

      He nodded, and dropped her hand again.

      "The fact is we are all rather cross," said Esther. "We haven't had a look in to-night."

      "Mother is quite overwhelming," said Berts. "She and Aunt Dodo between them make one feel exactly a hundred and two years old, as old as John. Here we all sit, we old people, Nadine and Esther and Hugh and I, and we are really much more serious than they."

      "Your mother is serious enough about her music," said Nadine. "And Jack is serious about Mama. The fact is that they are serious about serious things."

      "Do you really think of Mother as a serious person with her large boots and her laurel-crown?" asked Berts.

      "Certainly: all that is nothing to her. She doesn't heed it, while we who think we are musical can see nothing else. I couldn't bear her quartette either, and I know how good it was. I really believe that we are rotten before we are ripe. I except Hugh."

      Nadine got up, and began walking up and down the room as she did when her alert analytical brain was in grips with a problem.

      "Look at Jack the Ripper," she said. "Why, he's living in high romance, he's like a very nice gray-headed boy of twenty. Fancy keeping fresh all that time! Hugh and he are fresh. Berts is a stale old man, who can't make up his mind whether he wants to marry Esther or not. I am even worse. I am interested in Plato, and in all the novels about social reform and dull people who live in sordid respectability, which Mama finds so utterly tedious."

      Nadine threw her arms wide.

      "I can't surrender myself to anybody or anything," she said. "I can be cool and judge, but I can't get away from my mind. It sits up in a corner like a great governess. Whereas Mama takes up her mind like one of those flat pebbles on the shore and plays ducks and drakes with it, throws it into the sea, and then really enjoys herself, lets herself feel. If for a moment I attempt to feel, my mind gives me a poke and says 'attend to your lessons, Miss Nadine!' The great Judy! If only I could treat her like one, and take her out and throw brickbats at her. But I can't: I am terrified of her; also I find her quite immensely interesting. She looks at me over the top of her gold-rimmed spectacles, and though she is very hard and angular yet somehow I adore her. I loathe her you know, and want to escape, but I do like earning her approbation. Silly old Judy!"

      Berts gave a heavy sigh.

      "What an extraordinary lot of words to tell us that you are an intellectual egoist," he said. "And you needn't have told us at all. We all knew it."

      Nadine gave her hiccup-laugh.

      "I am like the starling," she said. "I can't get out. I want to get out and go walking with Hugh. And he can't get in. For what a pack of miseries was le bon Dieu responsible when he thought of the world."

      "I should have been exceedingly annoyed if He had not thought of me," said Berts.

      Nadine paused opposite the window-seat, where Hugh was sitting silent.

      "Oh, Hugh," she said, speaking very low, "there is a real me somewhere, I believe. But I cannot find it. I am like the poor thing in the fairy-tale, that lost its shadow. Indeed I am in the more desperate plight, I have got my shadow, but I have lost my substance, though not in riotous living."

      "For God's sake find it," he said, "and then give it me to keep safe."

      She looked at him, with her dim smile that always seemed to him to mean the whole world.

      "When I find it, you shall have it," she said.

      "And last night it was the moon you wanted," said he, "not yourself."

      Nadine shrugged her shoulders.

      "What would you have?" she said. "That was but another point of view. Do not ask me to see things always from the same standpoint. And now, since my mama and Berts have made us all feel old, let us put on our night-caps and put some cold cream on our venerable faces and go to bed. Perhaps to-morrow we shall feel younger."

      Seymour Sturgis (who, Berts thought, ought to have been drowned when he was a girl) was employed one morning in July in dusting his jade. He lived in a small flat just off Langham Place, with a large, capable, middle-aged Frenchwoman, who worshiped the ground on which he so delicately trod with the cloth-topped boots which she made so resplendent. She cooked for him in the inimitable manner of her race, she kept his flat speckless and shining, she valeted him, she did everything in fact except dust the jade. Highly as Seymour thought of Antoinette he could not let her do that. He always alluded to her as "my maid," and used to take her with him, СКАЧАТЬ