Well, it was very pleasant to renew the sense of travelling in a train at all. The rush past crowded platforms, the rise and fall of the telegraph-wires as the posts flicked by, the procession of green fields and blossoming orchards, the streams running full with the spring rains, the cuckoo, the fact of being on the way to London after four solid months of hospital life at Winston, the thought of the luncheon-basket with which she purposed soon to refresh herself had all the sweet savour of remote, ordinary normal life about them, and a semblance of pre-war existence, even when it would last but for a few hours, seemed extraordinarily delicious. Almost more pleasant was the smell of springtime that streamed in through the window, that indefinable fragrance of moisture and growth and greenness, and she drew in long inhalations of it, for of late the world had seemed to contain only three odours, namely those of iodoform, of cooking dinners and of Virginian cigarettes. For the last four months she had not spent a single night away from Winston, and even then she had only gone away, as she was doing now, to have a look at how things were going on in the officers' hospital at Chesterford House. Never in her life, as far as she could remember, had she spent anything approaching four months in the same place.
Dodo, who a few years before had literally no first-hand experience of what fatigue really meant, felt very tired this morning, but she had got quite used to that to which she had been a stranger for so many years, and now it seemed as much a part of general consciousness to be always tired as it did in the old days to feel always fresh. But she had found that when you had arrived at a sufficient degree of fatigue, it got no worse, but remained steady and constant, and she now accepted it as permanent, and did not think about it. Both sight and sound were veiled with this chronic weariness, which took the keen edge off all sensation and she smelt and listened to the odours and sounds of springtime as if through cotton-wool, and looked at its radiance as if through smoked glass which cut off the brightness of sun-ray, and presented you with a sepia sketch instead of a coloured picture. Still it was very good to be quit of the smell of iodoform and the sight of bandages.
This busy life in her hospital had now for a year and a half cut her off from all the pursuits in which hitherto her life had been passed, so that even while she recognised a brook she had jumped or a fence she had fallen at, she realised how remote the doings of those days had become. They were severed from her not merely by these two winters of abstinence from hunting, but much more crucially by the chasm of the huge catastrophe which had wrecked and was still wrecking the world. Memory could accurately recall old incidents to her, but in her own consciousness she could not recall the atmosphere in which those days had been lived; at the most, they seemed to have been read about in some very vivid book, not to have been personally experienced by her. She realised that this was probably only a symptom of her general fatigue, a false claim as Christian Scientists would have told her, but its falsity was extremely plausible and convincing. The fatigue, however, and the symptoms arising from it were just those things which she was bound most sternly to suppress when she was at work. Her value, such as it was, in the day-long routine, lay, as she was well aware, in her being gay and ridiculous without apparent effort, giving a "frolic welcome" to her tasks, as if it was all the greatest fun in the world. She had, in fact, to pretend to be what she had always been. Deep down in her she hoped, she believed that the mainspring of her vitality was unimpaired, for now, as the train sped onwards, something within her hailed the springtime, like an awakened Brunnhilde, with ecstatic recognition. Only, it did not thrill her all through, as its custom used to be; there was this hard, fatigued crust on her senses....
What she missed most, the thing that she did actively and continually long for was the society and companionship of her friends. Just as, all these weeks, she had done nothing but her work, so she had seen nobody except those professionally engaged with it. Her legion of friends were, with one exception, as busy over war-work as she was herself. Younger men, with terrible gaps already in their numbers, were fighting on one of the many battle-fronts, older men were engaged with office work or other missions for the more mature, and women and girls alike were nursing or typewriting, or washing dishes, or running canteens. They were too busy to see her, just as she was too busy to see them, and that was a very real deprivation to Dodo, for she had no less than genius for friendship. Many of these, however, were in London, and Dodo proposed to do something towards making up these arrears of human companionship during this next week. Her daughter Nadine Graves was dining with her to-night and going to the theatre; Edith (the sole exception among war-working friends) was entertaining her to-morrow with an evening at the opera; the next day there was a small dance somewhere, which would be full of boys from France and girls from hospitals. A social engagement or two a day, seemed to Dodo after these months of abstinence to be a positive orgy, and she ate her sandwiches with an awakening zest for life, and fell fast asleep.
The day was beginning to flame towards sunset when she got out at the London terminus, and at the sight of the crowds, brisk and busy and occupied with various affairs, this sense of stimulus was vastly increased. There was a little fog in the station with the smell of smoke and of grimy, beloved old London hanging there, and everyone seemed to have two legs and two arms and not to be bandaged and not to limp. No one had slings or crutches, and involuntarily there came into Dodo's mind the verse from the Bible about "the lame and the blind that are hated of David's soul." For one moment, as the intoxication of freedom and independence, of crowds and brisk movement mounted to her head, she felt a secret sympathy with that monarch's sentiments, which were so literally translated into actual conduct by Edith who still refused to have anything to do with war-work, and occasionally wrote to Dodo saying how magnificently her new symphony was progressing. But even while she sympathised with David, she detested Edith's interpretation of him, though she realised that she herself, not having a single drop of artistic ichor in her blood, could not possibly understand the temperament that led Edith to remain the one unpatriotic individual in all her circle. Edith similarly refused to talk or hear about the war at all, because mention of it interrupted that aloofness from disturbing thought that was necessary to give full play to an artist's creative powers. Dodo would not, however, let a divergence of sentiment even on so vital a topic interfere with her friendship. Edith had a right to her own convictions, odious though they might be, and to the ordering of her own life. Only, if your own thoughts and actions were entirely concerned with the war, it was difficult, so Dodo found, not to let some trace of that creep into your conversation. However, when she met Edith to-morrow, she would do her best.
Dodo had several businesses to attend to before she went home, and when finally, rather behind time, she drove down Piccadilly on her way to Chesterford House, the sun had long set, and such lighting as, in view of hostile raids, was thought sufficient, illuminated the streets. No blink of any kind shewed in the blank fronts of the houses, but the road and pavement presented the most fascinating harmonies in subdued and variegated tints. The glass of some street-lamps was painted over with violet, of others with red; others were heavily blacked on their top-surfaces but not obscured below, so that an octagonal patch of pavement was vividly lit. Whether this delightful scheme of colour helped to confuse possible raiders, Dodo did not consider; she was quite content to enjoy the æsthetic effect, which did seem very bewildering. The streets were still shining with the moisture of some shower that had fallen earlier in the afternoon and they furnished a dim rainbow of reflected colours while the whole paint-box of various tints was held in solution by the serene light of the moon now near to its full, and swinging clear above the trees in the Park. The thought of a raid that night struck her as rather attractive, for she had not yet been in one, and her re-awakened interest in life welcomed the idea of any new experience.
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.