Part 18 (1/2)

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 gla.s.s 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 smas.h.i.+ng my clock? First there were the Belgian atrocities, then there was the ma.s.sacre of peaceful travellers on neutral s.h.i.+pping 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 smas.h.i.+ng 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 matinees 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 quant.i.ty of social intercourse. Yet the spring, the suns.h.i.+ne, 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 pa.s.sing 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 amus.e.m.e.nt taste queerly. Apart from the mere stimulus of human companions.h.i.+p, 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.”