Dodo Wonders–

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.