Edward Benson - Dodo's Daughter - A Sequel to Dodo

"Is that all?" said Hugh.

"Does it not seem to you to be proved?"

"Oh, yes. It was proved long ago. But it's a pedantic point. The sort of point John would have made."

He absently whistled the first two lines of "Am Stillen Herd," and Nadine was diverted from her Platonisms.

"Ah, that is so much finer than the finished 'Preislied,'" she said; "he has curled and oiled his verse like an Assyrian bull. He and Sachs had cobbled at it too much: they had brushed and combed it. It had lost something of springtime and sea-breeze. A finished work of art has necessarily less quality of suggestiveness. Look at the Leonardo drawings. Is the 'Gioconda' ever quite as suggestive? I am rather glad it was stolen. I think Leonardo is greater without it."

John drew in his breath in a pained manner.

"'Mona Lisa' was the whole wonder of the world," he said. "I had sooner the thief had taken away the moon. Do you remember – perhaps you didn't notice it – the painting of the circle of rock in which she sat?"

"You are going to quote Pater," said Nadine. "Pray do not: it is a deplorable passage, and though it has lost nothing by repetition – for there was nothing to lose – it shows an awful ignorance of the spirit of the Renaissance. The eyelids are not a little weary: they are a little out of drawing only."

Esther looked across at Berts.

"Berts is either out of drawing," she said, "or else his dressing-gown is. I think both are: he is a little too long, and also the dressing-gown is too short. They ought to proceed as far as the ankles, but Berts' got a little weary at his knees."

"I barked my knees on those foul rocks," said Berts, examining those injured joints.

"Barking them is worse than biting them," said Nadine.

"I never bite my knees," said he. "It is a greedy habit. Worse than doing it to your nails."

"If you are not careful you will talk nonsense," said Nadine.

"I don't agree. If you are not careful you can't talk nonsense. If you want to talk nonsense, you've not got to be not careful."

"There are too many 'nots,'" remarked Nadine.

"Not at all. If you are careless some sort of idea creeps into what you say, and it ceases to be nonsense. There are lots of creeping ideas about like microbes, any of which spoil it. Hardly anybody can be really meaningless for five minutes. That is why the Mad Tea Party is a supreme work of art: you can't attach the slightest sense to anything that is said in it."

"The question is what you mean by nonsense," said Nadine. "Is it what Mr. Bernard Shaw writes in his plays, or what Mrs. Humphry Ward writes in her books? They neither mean anything but they are not at all alike. In fact they are as completely opposed to each other as sense is to nonsense."

Berts threw himself back on the turf.

"True," he said. "But they are neither of them nonsense. The lame and the halt and the blind ideas creep into both. They both talk sense mortally wounded."

Esther gave her appreciative sigh.

"Oh, Berts, how true!" she said. "I went to a play by Mrs. Humphry Ward the other day, or else I read a book by Bernard Shaw, I forget which, and all the time I kept trying to see what the sense of it had been before it had its throat cut. But no one ever tried to see what Alice in Wonderland meant, or what Aunt Dodo means."

"Mama is wonderful," said Nadine. "She lives up to what she says, too. Her whole life has been complete nonsense. I do hope Jack will persuade her to do the most ridiculous thing of all, and marry him."

"Is that why he is coming?" asked Esther.

"Oh, I hope so. It would be the greatest and most absurd romance of the century."

Hugh was eating sugar meditatively out of the sugar basin.

"I don't see that you have any right to lay down the law about nonsense, Nadine," he said. "You are constantly reading Plato, and making arguments, which are meant to be consecutive."

"I do that to relax my mind," said Nadine. "Berts is quite right. Nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the negative of sense, just as sugar is the negative of salt. To get non-salt with your egg, you must eat sugar with it, not only abstain from salt."

"You will get a remarkably nasty taste," remarked John.

"Dear John, nobody ever wronged you so much as to suggest that you would like nonsense. When was Leonardo born? And how old was he when he died? And how many golden crowns did Francis of France give him for the 'Gioconda'? Your mind is full of interesting facts. That is why you are so tedious. You are like the sand they used to put on letters, which instantly made it dry."

Berts got up.

"We will go and bathe again," he said, "and John shall remain on the beach and look older than the rocks he sits among. The rocks by the way are old red sandstone. They will blossom as the rose when Granite John sits among them. His is the head on which all the beginnings of the world have come, and he is never weary. Dear me, if I was not a teetotaller I should imagine I was drunk. I think it is the sea. What a heavenly time the man who stole the 'Gioconda' must have had. He just took it away. I can imagine him going to the Abbey at the Coronation, and taking away the King's crown. There is genius, and it is also nonsense. It is pure nonsense to imagine going to the Louvre and taking 'la Gioconda' away."

"I wonder what he has done with it," said Nadine. "I think he must be a jig-saw puzzle maniac, and have felt compelled to cut it up. Probably the Louvre will receive bits of it by registered post. The nose will come, and then some rocks, and then a rather weary eyelid. I think John stole it: he was absorbed in jig-saw puzzles all morning. Now that seems to me nonsense."

"Wrong again," said Berts. "When it is put together it is sense. If people cut up the pictures and then threw the bits away, it might be nonsense. But they keep the pieces and these become the picture again."

"The process of cutting it up is nonsense," said Nadine.

"Yes, and the process of putting it together is nonsense," said Esther.

"And the two make sense," said Berts. "Let's go and bathe. Nadine, take down some proper book, and read to us in the intervals."

"'Pride and Prej?'" said Nadine.

"Oh, do you think so? Not good for the sea-shore. Why not 'Poems and Ballads'?"

"John will be shocked," said Nadine.

"Not at all. He will be old red sandstone. I know Aunt Dodo has a copy. I think Mr. Swinburne gave it her," said Esther.

"She may value it," said Nadine. "And it may fall into the sea."

"Not if you are careful. Besides, that would be rather suitable. Swinburne loved the sea, and also understood it. I think his spirit would like it, if a copy was drowned."

"But Mama's spirit wouldn't," said Nadine.

On the moment of her mentioned name Dodo appeared at the long window of the drawing-room that opened upon the lawn. Simultaneously there was heard the buzz of a motor-car stopping at the front door just round the corner.

"Oh, all you darlings," said Dodo, in the style of the 'Omnia opera,' "are you going to bathe, or have you bathed? Berts, dear, we know that above the knee comes the thigh, without your showing us. Surely there are bigger dressing-gowns somewhere? Of course it does not matter: don't bother, and you've got beautiful legs, Berts."

"Aren't they lovely?" said Esther. "They ought to be put in plaster of Paris."

"But if you have bathed, why not dress?" said Dodo; "and if you haven't, why undress at present?"

"Oh, but it's both," said Berts, "and so is Esther. We have bathed, and are going to do it again, as soon as we've eaten enough tea."

Dodo looked appreciatively round.

"You refreshing children!" she said. "If I bathed directly after tea I should turn blue and green like a bruise. I have wasted all afternoon in looking at a box of novels from Melland's. I don't know what has happened to the novelists: their only object seems to tell you about utterly dull and sordid people. There is no longer any vitality in them: they are like leaders in the papers, full of reliable information. One instance shocked me: the heroine in 'No. 11 Lambeth Walk' went to Birmingham by a train that left Euston at 2:30 p. m. and her ticket cost nine shillings and twopence halfpenny. An awful misgiving seized me that it was all true and I rang for an A.B.C. and looked out Birmingham. It was so: there was a train at that hour and the tickets cost exactly that."