The reaction passed, though the question remained unsolved, and once more Dodo recollected the stupendous event that had sent the millions of London shouting along the streets. And then her eyes, bright with excitement, grew dim with a storm of sudden tears.
[CHAPTER XII]
THE REVIVAL
Dodo went back to Winston on the morning after her night out, and had a second celebration of the armistice there. A gardener remembered that there was a quantity of fireworks, procured in pre-war days for some garden-fête, slumbering in a tool-house, and she arranged that there would be an exhibition of these on the lawn, under the direction of a convalescent patient who had embraced a pyrotechnical career before he became a gunner.
As an exhibition of smoke and smell these fireworks which had become damp and devitalised were probably unrivalled in the history of the art. Faint sparks of flame appeared from time to time through the dense and pungent clouds that enveloped the operator: Roman candles played cup and ball on a minute scale with faintly luminous objects; Catherine-wheels incapable of revolution spat and spluttered; rockets climbed wearily upwards for some ten feet and then expired with gentle sighs, and Bengal fires smouldered like tobacco. Very soon nothing whatever could be seen of the display through the volumes of smoke which completely shrouded the lawn, and all that could be heard was the convulsive coughing of the asphyxiated gunner, who emerged with streaming eyes and said if being gassed was anything like that he would sooner be wounded ten times over. He was sorry that he had been absolutely unable to stop there any longer, but before rescuing himself had lit a remaining half-dozen of rockets, and a fuse attached to a square box called a "mine" of which he knew nothing whatever, and hoped less. He had hardly explained this when the mine went off with an explosion that caused all the windows to rattle, and a couple of rockets shot up to a prodigious height and burst in showers of resplendent stars. Half an hour later, a policeman groped his way up to the hospital through the fumes, and having ascertained that there had been fireworks, felt himself obliged to report the occurrence to a local tribunal, and Dora fined Dodo fifty pounds. Altogether it was a joyful though an expensive evening.
It had been arranged by the military authorities that the private hospitals should first be evacuated now that the stream of wounded no longer poured into England from across the Channel, and gradually as the patients at Winston were discharged, the wards began to empty. Dodo resorted to all possible means to keep her hospital full. She besieged the War Office with such importunity that, had she been a widow, she must surely have had her request granted her; she threatened, flattered, and complained about the management of the Red Cross, she even considered the possibility of suborning an engine-driver of a Red Cross train going to York or some northern depôt, to bring his waggons to a standstill at the station for Winston, and then go on strike. Thus the wounded must be conveyed somewhere, and as the train could not proceed, it would be necessary to bring them to Winston, and had strikes then been as popular as they soon became, this brilliant plan might possibly have succeeded. As it was, she saw her beloved establishment growing emptier and emptier every week; there were no more operations to be performed, so the surgeon went back to his practice in Harley Street; all but one of the staff of nurses departed to get married or take up the normal threads of life again, stretchers stood in disconsolate heaps in the passages, bedding and bedsteads, drugget, tables and bath-chairs were put into lots for sale, the big ward was closed, and the beflagged pins so gleefully stuck into the map of France fell out one by one on to the floor, and were swept up by the housemaid. Soon there were but half a dozen men left in the whole place and these, like the little nigger-boys, vanished one by one. The gramophones grew mute, the smell of Virginian tobacco grew faint, nobody banged doors any more or played "There's a Little Grey Home in the West" on the cracked piano, hour by hour with one finger and a wrong note coming after a pause always in precisely the same place. Finally one man alone remained, who had missed his train and had to stop till the next morning. He tried that evening with very small success to teach Dodo a game of cards called "Snick," and she with even less success tried to entertain him with agreeable conversation. Under this enchantment he grew ever more morose, and when she could think of nothing more to say, a long silence fell, which was broken by his remarking, "Gawd, this place gives a man the hump!"... With that heartfelt ejaculation he shuffled up to bed, and was gone next morning before Dodo came down. The hospital fizzled out, like an oil-less lamp; it ceased to flame, the wick smouldered a little and then expired.
Dodo had, rather mistakenly, arranged to remain here for a couple of days after everyone had gone, in order to taste the sweets of leisure in a place where she had been so absorbingly occupied, for she hoped that this would draw the fullest flavour out of the sense of having nothing to do. From habit she awoke early, and tried to cajole herself into imagining how delicious it was to stop in bed, instead of getting up and going down to her business-room. It was a dark, chilly morning, and she heard the sleet tattoo on her window-panes; how cold the business-room would be, and how warm she was below her quilt. Instead of arising and shivering, she would doze again, and tell her maid to light a fire in her bedroom before she got up. Then, instead of dozing, she made lazy plans for the day; after breakfast she would read the paper, and then, not stirring from the fireside, would go on with that extremely amusing French book which made Jack say "Pish!" and throw it into the waste-paper basket, from which Dodo had rescued it. After lunch, fine or not, she would go for a ride, and stop out just as long as she chose, instead of hurrying back to duties that no longer existed, and she would have tea in her bathroom, and lie there hotly soaking, and she would go to sleep before dinner, and have a quail and some caviare and a hot-house peach and half a bottle of champagne and then she would finish her book, go to bed early and go on reading when she got there. There was nobody except herself to please, and nothing to do except exactly that which she chose to do. To-morrow morning Jack arrived, and the day after they would go up to town together. Chesterford House had also been evacuated a week ago and by this it should have resumed its usual appointments.