August 1st.
The last first of August I was here was the 1914 one. It was just such a day as this,—blue, hot, glorious of colour and light. We in this house, cut off in our remoteness from the noise and excitement of a world setting out with cries of enthusiasm on its path of suicide, cut off by distance and steepness even from the valley where the dusty Swiss soldiers were collecting and every sort of rumour ran like flames, went as usual through our pleasant day, reading, talking, clambering in the pine-woods, eating romantic meals out in the little garden that hangs like a fringe of flowers along the edge of the rock, unconscious, serene, confident in life. Just as to-day the delphiniums stood brilliantly blue, straight, and motionless on this edge, and it might have been the very same purple pansies crowding at their feet. Nobody came to tell us anything. We were lapped in peace. Of course even up here there had been the slight ruffle of the Archduke's murder in June, and the slight wonder towards the end of July as to what would come of it; but the ruffle and the wonder died away in what seemed the solid, ever-enduring comfortableness of life. Such comfortableness went too deep, was too much settled, too heavy, to make it thinkable that it should ever really be disturbed. There would be quarrels, but they would be localised. Why, the mere feeding of the vast modern armies would etc., etc. We were very innocent and trustful in those days. Looking back at it, it is so pathetic as to be almost worthy of tears.
Well, I don't want to remember all that. One turns with a sick weariness from the recollection. At least one is thankful that we're at Now and not at Then. This first of August has the great advantage of having all that was coming after that first of August behind it instead of ahead of it. At least on this first of August most of the killing, of the slaughtering of young bodies and bright hopes, has left off. The world is very horrible still, but nothing can ever be so horrible as killing.
August 2nd.
The only thing to do with one's old sorrows is to tuck them up neatly in their shroud and turn one's face away from their grave towards what is coming next.
That is what I am going to do. To-day I have the kind of feelings that take hold of convalescents. I hardly dare hope it, but I have done things to-day that do seem convalescent; done them and liked doing them; things that I haven't till to-day had the faintest desire to do.
I've been for a walk. And a quite good walk, up in the forest where the water tumbles over rocks and the air is full of resin. And then when I got home I burrowed about among my books, arranging their volumes and loving the feel of them. It is more than ten days since I got here, and till to-day I haven't moved; till to-day I've lain about with no wish to move, with no wish at all except to have no wish. Once or twice I have been ashamed of myself; and once or twice into the sleepy twilight of my mind has come a little nicker of suspicion that perhaps life still, after all, may be beautiful, that it may perhaps, after all, be just as beautiful as ever if only I will open my eyes and look. But the flicker has soon gone out again, damped out by the vault-like atmosphere of the place it had got into.
To-day I do feel different; and oh how glad I'd be if I could be glad! I don't believe there was ever anybody who loved being happy as much as I did. What I mean is that I was so acutely conscious of being happy, so appreciative of it; that I wasn't ever bored, and was always and continuously grateful for the whole delicious loveliness of the world.
I think it must be unusual never to have been bored. I realise this when I hear other people talk. Certainly I'm never bored as people sometimes appear to be by being alone, by the absence of amusement from without; and as for bores, persons who obviously were bores, they didn't bore me, they interested me. It was so wonderful to me, their unawareness that they were bores. Besides, they were usually very kind; and also, shameful though it is to confess, bores like me, and I am touched by being liked, even by a bore. Sometimes it is true I have had to take temporary refuge in doing what Dr. Johnson found so convenient, —withdrawing my attention, but this is dangerous because of the inevitable accompanying glazed and wandering eye. Still, much can be done by practice in combining coherency of response with private separate meditation.
Just before I left London I met a man whose fate it has been for years to sit daily in the Law Courts delivering judgments, and he told me that he took a volume of poetry with him—preferably Wordsworth—and read in it as it lay open on his knees under the table, to the great refreshment and invigoration of his soul; and yet, so skilled had he become in the practice of two attentivenesses, he never missed a word that was said or a point that was made. There are indeed nice people in the world. I did like that man. It seemed such a wise and pleasant thing to do, to lay the dust of those sad places, where people who once liked each other go because they are angry, with the gentle waters of poetry. I am sure that man is the sort of husband whose wife's heart gives a jump of gladness each time he comes home.
August 3rd.
These burning August days, when I live in so great a glory of light and colour that it is like living in the glowing heart of a jewel, how impossible it is to keep from gratitude. I'm so grateful to be here, to have here to come to. Really I think I'm beginning to feel different—remote from the old unhappy things that were strangling me dead; restored; almost as though I might really some day be in tune again. There's a moon now, and in the evenings I get into a coat and lie in the low chair in the doorway watching it, and sometimes I forget for as long as a whole half hour that the happiness I believed in is gone for ever. I love sitting there and feeling little gusts of scent cross my face every now and then, as if some one had patted it softly in passing by. Sometimes it is the scent of the cut grass that has been baking all day in the sun, but most often it is the scent from a group of Madonna lilies just outside the door, planted by Antoine in one of the Septembers of the war.
'C'est ma maman qui me les a donn閟,' he said; and when I had done expressing my joy at their beauty and their fragrance, and my appreciation of his maman's conduct in having made my garden so lovely a present, he said that she had given them in order that, by brewing their leaves and applying the resulting concoction at the right moment, he and Mrs. Antoine might be cured of suppurating wounds.
'But you haven't got any suppurating wounds,' I said, astonished and disillusioned.
'Ah, pour 鏰 non,' said Antoine. 'Mais il ne faut pas attendre qu'on les a pour se procurer le rem鑔e.'
Well, if he approaches every future contingency with the same prudence he must be kept very busy; but the long winters of the war up here have developed in him, I suppose, a Swiss Family Robinson-like ingenuity of preparation for eventualities.
What lovely long words I've just been writing. I can't be as convalescent as I thought. I'm sure real vigour is brief. You don't say Damn if your vitality is low; you trail among querulous, water-blooded words like regrettable and unfortunate. But I think, perhaps, being in my top layers very adaptable, it was really the elderly books I've been reading the last day or two that made me arrange my language along their lines. Not old books,—elderly. Written in the great Victorian age, when the emotions draped themselves chastely in lengths, and avoided the rude simplicities of shorts.
There is the oddest lot of books in this house, pitchforked together by circumstances, and sometimes their accidental rearrangement by Antoine after cleaning their shelves each spring of my absence would make their writers, if they could know, curdle between their own covers. Some are standing on their heads—Antoine has no prejudices about the right side up of an author—most of those in sets have their volumes wrong, and yesterday I found a Henry James, lost from the rest of him, lost even, it looked like, to propriety, held tight between two ladies. The ladies were Ouida and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. They would hardly let him go, they had got him so tight. I pulled him out, a little damaged, and restored him, ruffled in spite of my careful smoothing, to his proper place. It was the Son and Brother; and there he had been for months, perhaps years, being hugged. Dreadful.
When I come down to breakfast and find I am a little ahead of the caf?au lait, I wander into the place that has most books in it—though indeed books are in every place, and have even oozed along the passages—and fill up the time, till Mrs. Antoine calls me, in rescue work of an urgent nature. But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading. The coffee grows cold and the egg repulsive, but still I read. You open a book idly, and you see:
The most glaring anomalies seemed to afford them no intellectual inconvenience, neither would they listen to any arguments as to the waste of money and happiness which their folly caused them. I was allowed almost to call them life-long self-deceivers to their faces, and they said it was quite true, but that it did not matter.
Naturally then you read on.
You open another book idly, and you see:
Our admiration of King Alfred is greatly increased by the fact that we know very little about him.
Naturally then you read on.
You open another book idly, and you see:
Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
Naturally then you read on.
You open—but I could go on all day like this, as I do go on being caught among the books, and only the distant anxious chirps of Mrs. Antoine, who comes round to the front door to clear away breakfast and finds it hasn't been begun, can extricate me.
Perhaps I had better not get arranging books before breakfast. It is too likely to worry that bird-like Mrs. Antoine, who is afraid, I daresay, that if I don't drink my coffee while it is hot I may relapse into that comatose condition that filled her evidently with much uneasiness and awe. She hadn't expected, I suppose, the mistress of the house, when she did at last get back to it, to behave like some strange alien slug, crawled up the mountain only to lie motionless in the sun for the best part of a fortnight. I heard her, after the first two days of this conduct, explaining it to Antoine, who however needed no explanation because of his god-like habit of never being surprised, and her explanation was that c'閠ait la guerre,—convenient explanation that has been used to excuse many more unnatural and horrible things during the last five years than somebody's behaving as if she were a slug.
But, really, the accidental juxtapositions on my bookshelves! Just now I found George Moore (his Memories of my Dead Life, with its delicate unmoralities, its delicious paganism) with on one side of him a book called Bruey: a Little Worker for Christ, by Frances Ridley Havergal, and on the other an American book called The Unselfishness of God, and How I Discovered It.
The surprise of finding these three with their arms, as it were, round each other's necks, got me nearer to laughter than I have been for months. If anybody had been with me I would have laughed. Is it possible that I am so far on to-day in convalescence that I begin to want a companion? Somebody to laugh with? Why, if that is so....
But I'd best not be too hopeful.
August 4th.
This day five years ago! What a thrill went through us up here, how proud we felt of England, of belonging to England; proud with that extraordinary intensified patriotism that lays hold of those who are not in their own country.
It is very like the renewal of affection, the re-flaming up of love, for the absent. The really wise are often absent; though, indeed, their absences should be arranged judiciously. Too much absence is very nearly as bad as too little,—no, not really very nearly; I should rather say too much has its drawbacks too, though only at first. Persisted in these drawbacks turn into merits; for doesn't absence, prolonged enough, lead in the end to freedom? I suppose, however, for most people complete freedom is too lonely a thing, therefore the absence should only be just long enough to make room for one to see clear again. Just a little withdrawal every now and then, just a little, so as to get a good view once more of those dear qualities we first loved, so as to be able to see that they're still there, still shining.
How can you see anything if your nose is right up against it? I know when we were in England, enveloped in her life at close quarters, bewildered by the daily din of the newspapers, stunned by the cries of the politicians, distracted by the denouncements, accusations, revilings with which the air was convulsed, and acutely aware of the background of sad drizzling rain on the pavements, and of places like Cromwell Road and Shaftesbury Avenue and Ashley Gardens being there all the time, never different, great ugly houses with the rain dripping on them, gloomy temporary lodgings for successive processions of the noisy dead,—I know when we were in the middle of all this, right up tight against it, we couldn't see, and so we forgot the side of England that was great.
But when she went to war we were not there; we had been out of her for months, and she had got focussed again patriotically. Again she was the precious stone set in a silver sea, the other Eden, demi-Paradise, the England my England, the splendid thing that had made splendid poets, the hope and heart of the world. Long before she had buckled on her sword—how easily one drops into the old language!—long before there was any talk of war, just by sheer being away from her we had re-acquired that peculiar aggressive strut of the spirit that is patriotism. We liked the Swiss, we esteemed them; and when we crossed into Italy we liked the Italians too, though esteeming them less,—I think because they seemed less thrifty and enjoyed themselves more, and we were still sealed up in the old opinion that undiscriminating joyless thrift was virtuous. But though we liked and esteemed these people it was from a height. At the back of our minds we always felt superior, at the back of our minds we were strutting. Every day of further absence from England, our England, increased that delicious sub-conscious smugness. Then when on the 4th of August she 'came in,' came in gloriously because of her word to Belgium, really this little house contained so much enthusiasm and pride that it almost could be heard cracking.
What shall we do when we all get to heaven and aren't allowed to have any patriotism? There, surely, we shall at last be forced into one vast family. But I imagine that every time God isn't looking the original patriotism of each will break out, right along throughout eternity; and some miserable English tramp, who has only been let into heaven because he positively wasn't man enough for hell, will seize his opportunity to hiss at a neat Swiss business man from Berne, whose life on earth was blamelessly spent in the production of cuckoo-clocks, and whose mechanical-ingenuity was such that he even, so ran the heavenly rumours among the mild, astonished angels, had propagated his family by machinery, that he, the tramp, is a b—Briton, and if he, the b—b—b—Swiss (I believe tramps always talk in b's; anyhow newspapers and books say they do), doubts it, he'd b—well better come outside and he, the tramp, will b—well soon show him.
To which the neat Berne gentleman, on other subjects so completely pervaded by the local heavenly calm, will answer with a sudden furious mechanical buzzing, much worse and much more cowing to the tramp than any swear-words, and passionately uphold the might and majesty of Switzerland in a prolonged terrific whrrrrr.
August 5th.
I want to talk. I must be better.
August 6th.
Of course, the most battered, the most obstinately unhappy person couldn't hold out for ever against the all-pervading benediction of this place. I know there is just the same old wretchedness going on as usual outside it,—cruelty, people wantonly making each other miserable, love being thrown away or frightened into fits, the dreadful betrayal of trust that is the blackest wretchedness of all,—I can almost imagine that if I were to hang over my terrace-wall I would see these well-known dreary horrors crawling about in the valley below, crawling and tumbling about together in a ghastly tangle. But at least there isn't down there now my own particular contribution to the general wretchedness. I brought that up here; dragged it up with me, not because I wanted to, but because it would come. Surely, though, I shall leave it here? Surely there'll be a day when I'll be able to pack it away into a neat bundle and take it up to the top of some, arid, never-again-to-be-visited rock, and leave it there and say, 'Goodbye. I'm separate. I've cut the umbilical cord. Goodbye old misery. Now for what comes next.'
I can't believe this won't happen. I can't believe I won't go back down the mountain different from what I was when I came. Lighter, anyhow, and more wholesome inside. Oh, I do so want to be wholesome inside again! Nicely aired, sunshiny; instead of all dark, and stuffed up with black memories.
August 7th.
But I am getting on. Every morning now when I wake and see the patch of bright sunshine on the wall at the foot of my bed that means another perfect day, my heart goes out in an eager prayer that I may not disgrace so great a blessing by private gloom. And I do think each of these last days has been a little less disgraced than its yesterday. Hardly a smudge, for instance, has touched any part of this afternoon. I have felt as though indeed I were at last sitting up and taking notice. And the first thing I want to do, the first use I want to make of having turned the corner, is to talk.
How feminine. But I love to talk. Again how feminine. Well, I also love to listen. But chiefly I love to listen to a man; therefore once more, how feminine. Well, I'm a woman, so naturally I'm feminine; and a man does seem to have more to say that one wants to hear than a woman. I do want to hear what a woman has to say too, but not for so long a time, and not so often. Not nearly so often. What reason to give for this reluctance I don't quite know, except that a woman when she talks seems usually to have forgotten the salt. Also she is apt to go on talking; sometimes for quite a little while after you have begun to wish she would leave off.
One of the last people who stayed here with me alone in 1914, just before the arrival of the gay holiday group of the final days, was a woman of many gifts—le trop est l'ennemi du bien—who started, therefore, being full of these gifts and having eloquently to let them out, talking at the station in the valley where I met her, and didn't, to my growing amazement and chagrin, for I too wanted to say some things, leave off (except when night wrapped her up in blessed silence) till ten days afterwards, when by the mercy of providence she swallowed a crumb wrong, and so had to stop.
How eagerly, released for a moment, I rushed in with as much as I could get out during the brief time I knew she would take to recover! But my voice, hoarse with disuse, had hardly said three sentences—miserable little short ones—when she did recover, and fixing impatient and reproachful eyes on me said:
'Do you always talk so much?'
Surely that was unjust?
August 8th.
Now see what Henry James wrote to me—to me if you please! I can't get over it, such a feather in my cap. Why, I had almost forgotten I had a cap to have a feather in, so profound has been my humbling since last I was here.
In the odd, fairy-tale like way I keep on finding bits of the past, of years ago, as though they were still of the present, even of the last half hour, I found the letter this morning in a room I wandered into after breakfast. It is the only room downstairs besides the hall, and I used to take refuge in it from the other gay inhabitants of the house so as to open and answer letters somewhere not too distractingly full of cheerful talk; and there on the table, spotlessly kept clean by Antoine but else not touched, were all the papers and odds and ends of five years back exactly as I must have left them. Even some chocolate I had apparently been eating, and some pennies, and a handful of cigarettes, and actually a box of matches,—it was all there, all beautifully dusted, all as it must have been when last I sat there at the table. If it hadn't been for the silence, the complete, sunny emptiness and silence of the house, I would certainly have thought I had only been asleep and having a bad dream, and that not five years but one uneasy night had gone since I nibbled that chocolate and wrote with those pens.
Fascinated and curious I sat down and began eating the chocolate again. It was quite good; made of good, lasting stuff in that good, apparently lasting age we used to live in. And while I ate it I turned over the piles of papers, and there at the bottom of them was a letter from Henry James.
I expect I kept it near me on the table because I so much loved it and wanted to re-read it, and wanted, I daresay, at intervals proudly to show it to my friends and make them envious, for it was written at Christmas, 1913; months before I left for England.
Reading it now my feeling is just astonishment that I, I should ever have had such a letter. But then I am greatly humbled; I have been on the rocks; and can't believe that such a collection of broken bits as I am now could ever have been a trim bark with all its little sails puffed out by the kindliness and affection of anybody as wonderful as Henry James.
Here it is; and it isn't any more vain of me now in my lamed and bruised condition to copy it out and hang on its charming compliments than it is vain for a woman who once was lovely and is now grown old to talk about how pretty she used to be:
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.,
December 29th, 1913.
Dear—
Let me tell you that I simply delight in your beautiful and generous and gracious little letter, and that there isn't a single honeyed word of it that doesn't give me the most exquisite pleasure. You fill the measure—and how can I tell you how I like the measure to be filled? None of your quarter-bushels or half-bushels for my insatiable appetite, but the overflowing heap, pressed down and shaken together and spilling all over the place. So I pick up the golden grains and nibble them one by one! Truly, dear lady, it is the charmingest rosy flower of a letter—handed me straight out of your monstrous snowbank. That you can grow such flowers in such conditions—besides growing with such diligence and elegance all sorts of other lovely kinds, has for its explanation of course only that you have such a regular teeming garden of a mind. You must mainly inhabit it of course—with your other courts of exercise so grand, if you will, but so grim. Well, you have caused me to revel in pride and joy—for I assure you that I have let myself go; all the more that the revelry of the season here itself has been so far from engulfing me that till your witching words came I really felt perched on a mountain of lonely bleakness socially and sensuously speaking alike—very much like one of those that group themselves, as I suppose, under your windows. But I have had my Xmastide now, and am your all grateful and faithful and all unforgetting old Henry James.
Who wouldn't be proud of getting a letter like that? It was wonderful to come across it again, wonderful how my chin went up in the air and how straight I sat up for a bit after reading it. And I laughed, too; for with what an unbuttoned exuberance must I have engulfed him! 'Spilling all over the place.' I can quite believe it. I had, I suppose, been reading or re-reading something of his, and had been swept off sobriety of expression by delight, and in that condition of emotional unsteadiness and molten appreciation must have rushed impetuously to the nearest pen.
How warmly, with what grateful love, one thinks of Henry James. How difficult to imagine anyone riper in wisdom, in kindliness, in wit; greater of affection; more generous of friendship. And his talk, his wonderful talk,—even more wonderful than his books. If only he had had a Boswell! I did ask him one day, in a courageous after-dinner mood, if he wouldn't take me on as his Boswell; a Boswell so deeply devoted that perhaps qualifications for the post would grow through sheer admiration. I told him—my courageous levity was not greater on that occasion than his patience—that I would disguise myself as a man; or better still, not being quite big enough to make a plausible man and unlikely to grow any more except, it might be hoped, in grace, I would be an elderly boy; that I would rise up early and sit up late and learn shorthand and do anything in the world, if only I might trot about after him taking notes—the strange pair we should have made! And the judgment he passed on that reckless suggestion, after considering its impudence with much working about of his extraordinary mobile mouth, delivering his verdict with a weight of pretended self-depreciation intended to crush me speechless,—which it did for nearly a whole second—was: 'Dear lady, it would be like the slow squeezing out of a big empty sponge.'
August 9th.
This little wooden house, clinging on to the side of the mountain by its eyelashes, or rather by its eyebrows, for it has enormous eaves to protect it from being smothered in winter in snow that look exactly like overhanging eyebrows,—is so much cramped up for room to stand on that the garden along the edge of the rock isn't much bigger than a handkerchief.
It is a strip of grass, tended with devotion by Antoine, whose pride it is that it should be green when all the other grass on the slopes round us up the mountain and down the mountain are parched pale gold; which leads him to spend most of his evening hours watering it. There is a low wall along the edge to keep one from tumbling over, for if one did tumble over it wouldn't be nice for the people walking about in the valley five thousand feet below, and along this wall is the narrow ribbon of the only flowers that will put up with us.
They aren't many. There are the delphiniums, and some pansies and some pinks, and a great many purple irises. The irises were just over when I first got here, but judging from the crowds of flower-stalks they must have been very beautiful. There is only one flower left; exquisite and velvety and sun-warmed to kiss—which I do diligently, for one must kiss something—and with that adorable honey-smell that is the very smell of summer.
That's all in the garden. It isn't much, written down, but you should just see it. Oh yes—I forgot. Round the corner, scrambling up the wall that protects the house in the early spring from avalanches, are crimson ramblers, brilliant against the intense blue of the sky. Crimson ramblers are, I know, ordinary things, but you should just see them. It is the colour of the sky that makes them so astonishing here. Yes—and I forgot the lilies that Antoine's maman gave him. They are near the front door, and next to them is a patch of lavender in full flower now, and all day long on each of its spikes is poised miraculously something that looks like a tiny radiant angel, but that flutters up into the sun when I go near and is a white butterfly. Antoine must have put in the lavender. It used not to be there. But I don't ask him because of what he might tell me it is really for, and I couldn't bear to have that patch of sheer loveliness, with the little shining things hovering over it, explained as a rem鑔e for something horrid.
If I could paint I would sit all day and paint; as I can't I try to get down on paper what I see. It gives me pleasure. It is somehow companionable. I wouldn't, I think, do this if I were not alone. I would probably exhaust myself and my friend pointing out the beauty.
The garden, it will be seen, as gardens go, is pathetic in its smallness and want of variety. Possessors of English gardens, with those immense wonderful herbaceous borders and skilfully arranged processions of flowers, might conceivably sniff at it. Let them. I love it. And, if it were smaller still, if it were shrunk to a single plant with a single flower on it, it would perhaps only enchant me the more, for then I would concentrate on that one beauty and not be distracted by the feeling that does distract me here, that while I am looking one way I am missing what is going on in other directions. Those beasts in Revelations—the ones full of eyes before and behind—I wish I had been constructed on liberal principles like that.
But one really hardly wants a garden here where God does so much. It is like Italy in that way, and an old wooden box of pansies or a pot of lilies stuck anywhere, in a window, on the end of a wall, is enough; composing instantly with what is so beautifully there already, the light, the colour, the shapes of the mountains. Really, where God does it all for you just a yard or two arranged in your way is enough; enough to assert your independence, and to show a proper determination to make something of your own.
August 10th.
I don't know when it is most beautiful up here,—in the morning, when the heat lies along the valley in delicate mists, and the folded mountains, one behind the other, grow dimmer and dimmer beyond sight, swooning away through tender gradations of violets and greys, or at night when I look over the edge of the terrace and see the lights in the valley shimmering as though they were reflected in water.
I seem to be seeing it now for the first time, with new eyes. I know I used to see it when I was here before, used to feel it and rejoice in it, but it was entangled in other things then, it was only part of the many happinesses with which those days were full, claiming my attention and my thoughts. They claimed them wonderfully and hopefully it is true, but they took me much away from what I can only call for want of a better word—(a better word: what a thing to say!)—God. Now those hopes and wonders, those other joys and lookings-forward and happy trusts are gone; and the wounds they left, the dreadful sore places, are slowly going too. And how I see beauty now is with the new sensitiveness, the new astonishment at it, of a person who for a long time has been having awful dreams, and one morning wakes up and the delirium is gone, and he lies in a state of the most exquisite glad thankfulness, the most extraordinary minute appreciation of the dear, wonderful common things of life,—just the sun shining on his counterpane, the scents from the garden coming in through his window, the very smell of the coffee being got ready for breakfast. Oh, delight, delight to think one didn't die this time, that one isn't going to die this time after all, but is going to get better, going to live, going presently to be quite well again and able to go back to one's friends, to the people who still love one....
August 11th.
To-day is a saint's day. This is a Catholic part of Switzerland, and they have a great many holidays because they have a great many saints. There is hardly a week without some saint in it who has to be commemorated, and often there are two in the same week, and sometimes three. I know when we have reached another saint, for then the church bells of the nearest village begin to jangle, and go on doing it every two hours. When this happens the peasants leave off work, and the busy, saint-unencumbered Protestants get ahead.
Mrs. Antoine was a Catholic before she married, but the sagacious Antoine, who wasn't one, foreseeing days in most of his weeks when she might, if he hadn't been quite kind, to her, or rather if she fancied he hadn't been quite kind to her—and the fancies of wives, he had heard, were frequent and vivid—the sagacious Antoine, foreseeing these numerous holy days ahead of him on any of which Mrs. Antoine might explain as piety what was really pique and decline to cook his dinner, caused her to turn Protestant before the wedding. Which she did; conscious, as she told me, that she was getting a bon mari qui valait bien 鏰; and thus at one stroke Antoine secured his daily dinners throughout the year and rid himself of all his wife's relations. For they, consisting I gather principally of aunts, her father and mother being dead, were naturally displeased and won't know the Antoines; which is, I am told by those who have managed it, the most refreshing thing in the world: to get your relations not to know you. So that not only does he live now in the blessed freedom and dignity that appears to be reserved for those whose relations are angry, but he has no priests about him either. Really Antoine is very intelligent.
And he has done other intelligent things while I have been away. For instance:
When first I came here, two or three years before the war, I desired to keep the place free from the smells of farmyards. 'There shall be no cows,' I said.
'C'est bien,' said Antoine.
'Nor any chickens.'
'C'est bien' said Antoine.
'Neither shall there be any pigs.'
'C'est bien,' said Antoine.
'Surtout', I repeated, fancying I saw in his eye a kind of private piggy regret, 'pas de porcs.'
'C'est bien,' said Antoine, the look fading.
For most of my life up to then had been greatly infested by pigs; and though they were superior pigs, beautifully kept, housed and fed far better, shameful to relate, than the peasants of that place, on the days when the wind blew from where they were to where we were, clean them and air them as one might there did come blowing over us a great volume of unmistakeable pig. Eclipsing the lilies. Smothering the roses. Also, on still days we could hear their voices, and the calm of many a summer evening was rent asunder by their squeals. There were an enormous number of little pigs, for in that part of the country it was unfortunately not the custom to eat sucking-pigs, which is such a convenient as well as agreeable way of keeping them quiet, and they squealed atrociously; out of sheer high spirits, I suppose, being pampered pigs and having no earthly reason to squeal except for joy.
Remembering all this, I determined that up here at any rate we should be pure from pigs. And from cows too; and from chickens. For did I not also remember things both cows and chickens had done to me? The hopes of a whole year in the garden had often been destroyed by one absent-minded, wandering cow; and though we did miracles with wire-netting and the concealing of wire-netting by creepers, sooner or later a crowd of lustful hens, led by some great bully of a cock, got in and tore up the crocuses just at that early time of the year when, after an endless winter, crocuses seem the most precious and important things in the world.
Therefore this place had been kept carefully empty of live-stock, and we bought our eggs and our milk from the peasants, and didn't have any sausages, and the iris bulbs were not scratched up, and the air had nothing in it but smells of honey and hay in summer, and nothing in winter but the ineffable pure cold smell of what, again for want of a better word, I can only describe as God. But then the war came, and our hurried return to England; and instead of being back as we had thought for Christmas, we didn't come back at all. Year after year went, Christmas after Christmas, and nobody came back. I suppose Antoine began at last to feel as if nobody ever would come back. I can't guess at what moment precisely in those years his thoughts began to put out feelers towards pigs, but he did at last consider it proper to regard my pre-war instructions as finally out of date, and gathered a suitable selection of live-stock about him. I expect he got to this stage fairly early, for having acquired a nice, round little wife he was determined, being a wise man, to keep her so. And having also an absentee patrone—that is the word that locally means me—absent, and therefore not able to be disturbed by live-stock, he would keep her placid by keeping her unconscious.
How simple, and how intelligent.
In none of his monthly letters did the word pig, cow, or chicken appear. He wrote agreeably of the weather: c'閠ait magnifique, or c'閠ait bien triste, according to the season. He wrote of the French and Belgian sick prisoners of war, interned in those places scattered about the mountains which used to be the haunts of parties catered for by Lunn. He wrote appreciatively of the usefulness and good conduct of the watch-dog, a splendid creature, much bigger than I am, with the lap-doggy name of Mou-Mou. He lengthily described unexciting objects like the whiskers of the cat: favoris superbes qui poussent toujours, malgr?ces jours maigres de guerre; and though sometimes he expressed a little disappointment at the behaviour of Mrs. Antoine's estomac, qui lui fait beaucoup d'ennuis et para顃 mal r閟ister aux grands froids, he always ended up soothingly: Pour la maison tout va bien. Madame peut 阾re enti鑢ement tranquille.
Never a word, you see, about the live-stock.
So there in England was Madame being enti鑢ement tranquille about her little house, and glad indeed that she could be; for whatever had happened to it or to the Antoines she wouldn't have been able to do anything. Tethered on the other side of the impassable barrier of war, if the house had caught fire she could only, over there in England, have wrung her hands; and if Mrs. Antoine's estomac had given out so completely that she and Antoine had had to abandon their post and take to the plains and doctors, she could only have sat still and cried. The soothing letters were her comfort for five years,—madame pe鹴-阾re enti鑢ement tranquille; how sweetly the words fell, month by month, on ears otherwise harassed and tormented!
It wasn't till I had been here nearly a fortnight that I began to be aware of my breakfast. Surely it was very nice? Such a lot of milk; and every day a little jug of cream. And surprising butter,—surprising not only because it was so very fresh but because it was there at all. I had been told in England that there was no butter to be got here, not an ounce to be bought from one end of Switzerland to the other. Well, there it was; fresh every day, and in a singular abundance.
Through the somnolence of my mind, of all the outward objects surrounding me I think it was the butter that got in first; and my awakening intelligence, after a period of slow feeling about and some relapses, did at last one morning hit on the conviction that at the other end of that butter was a cow.
This, so far, was to be expected as the result of reasoning. But where I began to be pleased with myself, and feel as if Paley's Evidences had married Sherlock Holmes and I was the bright pledge of their loves, was when I proceeded from this, without moving from my chair, to discover by sheer thinking that the cow was very near the butter, because else the butter couldn't possibly be made fresh every day,—so near that it must be at that moment grazing on the bit of pasture belonging to me; and, if that were so, the conclusion was irresistible that it must be my cow.
After that my thoughts leaped about the breakfast table with comparative nimbleness. I remembered that each morning there had been an egg, and that eggy puddings had appeared at the other meals. Before the war it was almost impossible to get eggs up here; clearly, then, I had chickens of my own. And the honey; I felt it would no longer surprise me to discover that I also had bees, for this honey was the real thing,—not your made-up stuff of the London shops. And strawberries; every morning a great cabbage leaf of strawberries had been on the table, real garden strawberries, over long ago down in the valley and never dreamed of as things worth growing by the peasants in the mountains. Obviously I counted these too among my possessions in some corner out of sight. The one object I couldn't proceed to by inductive reasoning from what was on the table was a pig. Antoine's courage had failed him over that. Too definitely must my repeated warning have echoed in his ears: Surtout pas de porcs.
But how very intelligent he had been. It needs intelligence if one is conscientious to disobey orders at the right moment. And me so unaware all the time, and therefore so unworried!
He passed along the terrace at that moment, a watering-pot in his hand.
'Antoine,' I said.
'Madame,' he said, stopping and taking off his cap.
'This egg—' I said, pointing to the shell. I said it in French, but prefer not to put my French on paper.
'Ah—madame a vu les poules.'
'This butter—'
'Ah—madame a visit?la vache.'
'The pig—?' I hesitated. 'Is there—is there also a pig?'
'Si madame veut descendre ?la cave—'
'You never keep a pig in the cellar?' I exclaimed.
'Comme jambon,' said Antoine—calm, perfect of manner, without a trace of emotion.
And there sure enough I was presently proudly shown by Mrs. Antoine, whose feelings are less invisible than her husband's, hanging from the cellar ceiling on hooks that which had once been pig. Several pigs; though she talked as if there had never been more than one. It may be so, of course, but if it is so it must have had a great many legs.
Un porc centip鑔e, I remarked thoughtfully, gazing upwards at the forest of hams.
Over the thin ice of this comment she slid, however, in a voluble description of how, when the armistice was signed, she and Antoine had instantly fallen upon and slain the pig—pig still in the singular—expecting Madame's arrival after that felicitous event at any minute, and comprehending that un porc vivant pourrait d閞anger madame, mais que mort il ne fait rien ?personne que du plaisir. And she too gazed upwards, but with affection and pride.
There remained then nothing to do but round off these various transactions by a graceful and grateful paying for them. Which I did to-day, Antoine presenting the bills, accompanied by complicated calculations and deductions of the market price of the milk and butter and eggs he and Mrs. Antoine would otherwise have consumed during the past years.
I didn't look too closely into what the pig had cost,—his price, as my eye skimmed over it was obviously the price of something plural. But my eye only skimmed. It didn't dwell. Always Antoine and I have behaved to each other like gentlemen.
August 12th.
I wonder why I write all this. Is it because it is so like talking to a friend at the end of the day, and telling him, who is interested and loves to hear, everything one has done? I suppose it is that; and that I want, besides, to pin down these queer days as they pass,—days so utterly unlike any I ever had before. I want to hold them a minute in my hand and look at them, before letting them drop away for ever. Then, perhaps, in lots of years, when I have half forgotten what brought me up here, and don't mind a bit about anything except to laugh—to laugh with the tenderness of a wise old thing at the misunderstandings, and mistakes, and failures that brought me so near shipwreck, and yet underneath were still somehow packed with love—I'll open this and read it, and I daresay quote that Psalm about going through the vale of misery and using it as a well, and be quite pleasantly entertained.
August 13th.
If one sets one's face westwards and goes on and on along the side of the mountain, refusing either to climb higher or go lower, and having therefore to take things as they come and somehow get through—roaring torrents, sudden ravines, huge trees blown down in a forgotten blizzard and lying right across one's way; all the things that mountains have up their sleeve waiting for one—one comes, after two hours of walk so varied as to include scowling rocks and gloomy forests, bright stretches of delicious grass full of flowers, bits of hayfield, clusters of fruit-trees, wide sun-flooded spaces with nothing between one apparently and the great snowy mountains, narrow paths where it is hardly light enough to see, smells of resin and hot fir needles, smells of traveller's joy, smells of just cut grass, smells of just sawn wood, smells of water tumbling over stones, muddy smells where the peasants have turned some of the torrent away through shallow channels into their fields, honey smells, hot smells, cold smells,—after two hours of this walking, which would be tiring because of the constant difficulty of the ground if it weren't for the odd way the air has here of carrying you, of making you feel as though you were being lifted along, one comes at last to the edge of a steep slope where there is a little group of larches.
Then one sits down.
These larches are at the very end of a long tongue into which the mountain one started on has somehow separated, and it is under them that one eats one's dinner of hard boiled egg and bread and butter, and sits staring, while one does so, in much astonishment at the view. For it is an incredibly beautiful view from here, of an entirely different range of mountains from the one seen from my terrace; and the valley, with its twisting, tiny silver thread that I know is a great rushing river, has strange, abrupt, isolated hills scattered over it that appear each to have a light and colour of its own, with no relation to the light and colour of the mountains.
When first I happened on this place the building of my house had already been started, and it was too late to run to the architect and say: Here and here only will I live. But I did for a wild moment, so great was the beauty I had found, hope that perhaps Swiss houses might be like those Norwegian ones one reads about that take to pieces and can be put up again somewhere else when you've got bored, and I remember scrambling back hastily in heat and excitement to ask him whether this were so.
He said it wasn't; and seemed even a little ruffled, if so calm a man were capable of ruffling, that I should suppose he would build anything that could come undone.
'This house,' he said, pointing at the hopeless-looking mass that ultimately became so adorable, 'is built for posterity. It is on a rock, and will partake of the same immovability.'
And when I told him of the place I had found, the exquisite place, more beautiful than a dream and a hundred times more beautiful than the place we had started building on, he, being a native of the district, hardy on his legs on Sundays and accordingly acquainted with every inch of ground within twenty miles, told me that it was so remote from villages, so inaccessible by any road, that it was suited as a habitation only to goats.
'Only goats,' he said with finality, waving his hand, 'could dwell there, and for goats I do not build.'
So that my excitement cooled down before the inevitable, and I have lived to be very glad the house is where it is and not where, for a few wild hours, I wanted it; for now I can go to the other when I am in a beauty mood and see it every time with fresh wonder, while if I lived there I would have got used to it long ago, and my ardour been, like other ardours, turned by possession into complacency. Or, to put it a little differently, the house here is like an amiable wife to whom it is comfortable to come back for meals and sleeping purposes, and the other is a secret love, to be visited only on the crest of an ecstasy.
To-day I took a hard boiled egg and some bread and butter, and visited my secret love.
The hard boiled egg doesn't seem much like an ecstasy, but it is a very good foundation for one. There is great virtue in a hard boiled egg. It holds one down, yet not too heavily. It satisfies without inflaming. Sometimes, after days of living on fruit and bread, a slice of underdone meat put in a sandwich and eaten before I knew what I was doing, has gone straight to my head in exactly the way wine would, and I have seen the mountains double and treble themselves, besides not keeping still, in a very surprising and distressing way, utterly ruinous to raptures. So now I distrust sandwiches and will not take them; and all that goes with me is the hard boiled egg. Oh, and apricots, when I can get them. I forgot the apricots. I took a handful to-day,—big, beautiful rosy-golden ones, grown in the hot villages of the valley, a very apricotty place. And, that every part of me should have sustenance, I also took Law's Serious Call.
He went because he's the thinnest book I've got on my shelves that has at the same time been praised by Dr. Johnson. I've got several others that Dr. Johnson has praised, such as Ogden on Prayer, but their bulk, even if their insides were attractive, makes them have to stay at home. Johnson, I remembered, as I weighed Law thoughtfully in my hand and felt how thin he was, said of the Serious Call that he took it up expecting it to be a dull book, and perhaps to laugh at it—'but I found Law quite an overmatch for me.' He certainly would be an overmatch for me, I knew, should I try to stand up to him, but that was not my intention. What I wanted was a slender book that yet would have enough entertainment in it to nourish me all day; and opening the Serious Call I was caught at once by the story of Octavius, a learned and ingenious man who, feeling that he wasn't going to live much longer, told the friends hanging on his lips attentive to the wisdom that would, they were sure, drop out, that in the decay of nature in which he found himself he had left off all taverns and was now going to be nice in what he drank, so that he was resolved to furnish his cellar with a little of the very best whatever it might cost. And hardly had he delivered himself of this declaration than 'he fell ill, was committed to a nurse, and had his eyes closed by her before his fresh parcel of wine came in.'
The effect of this on some one called Eugenius was to send him home a new man, full of resolutions to devote himself wholly to God; for 'I never, says Eugenius, was so deeply affected with the wisdom and importance of religion as when I saw how poorly and meanly the learned Octavius was to leave the world through the want of it.'
So Law went with me, and his vivacious pages,—the story of Octavius is but one of many; there is Matilda and her unhappy daughters ('The eldest daughter lived as long as she could under this discipline,' but found she couldn't after her twentieth year and died, 'her entrails much hurt by being crushed together with her stays';) Eusebia and her happy daughters, who were so beautifully brought up that they had the satisfaction of dying virgins; Lepidus, struck down as he was dressing himself for a feast; the admirable Miranda, whose meals were carefully kept down to exactly enough to give her proper strength to lift eyes and hands to heaven, so that 'Miranda will never have her eyes swell with fatness or pant under a heavy load of flesh until she has changed her religion'; Mundamus, who if he saw a book of devotion passed it by; Classicus, who openly and shamelessly preferred learning to devotion—these vivacious pages greatly enlivened and adorned my day. But I did feel, as I came home at the end of it, that Dr. Johnson, for whom no one has more love and less respect than I, ought to have spent some at least of his earlier years, when he was still accessible to reason, with, say, Voltaire.
Now I am going to bed, footsore but glad, for this picnic to-day was a test. I wanted to see how far on I have got in facing memories. When I set out I pretended to myself that I was going from sheer considerateness for servants, because I wished Mrs. Antoine to have a holiday from cooking my dinner, but I knew in my heart that I was making, in trepidation and secret doubt, a test. For the way to this place of larches bristles with happy memories. They would be sitting waiting for me, I knew, at every bush and corner in radiant rows. If only they wouldn't be radiant, I thought, I wouldn't mind. The way, I thought, would have been easier if it had been punctuated with remembered quarrels. Only then I wouldn't have gone to it at all, for my spirit shudders away from places where there has been unkindness. It is the happy record of this little house that never yet have its walls heard an unkind word or a rude word, and not once has anybody cried in it. All the houses I have lived in, except this, had their sorrows, and one at least had worse things than sorrows; but this one, my little house of peace hung up in the sunshine well on the way to heaven, is completely free from stains, nothing has ever lived in it that wasn't kind. And I shall not count the wretchedness I dragged up with me three weeks ago as a break in this record, as a smudge on its serenity, but only as a shadow passing across the sun. Because, however beaten down I was and miserable, I brought no anger with me and no resentment. Unkindness has still not come into the house.
Now I am going very happy to bed, for I have passed the test. The whole of the walk to the larches, and the whole of the way back, and all the time I was sitting there, what I felt was simply gratitude, gratitude for the beautiful past times I have had. I found I couldn't help it. It was as natural as breathing. I wasn't lonely. Everybody I have loved and shall never see again was with me. And all day, the whole of the wonderful day of beauty, I was able in that bright companionship to forget the immediate grief, the aching wretchedness, that brought me up here to my mountains as a last hope.
August 14th.
To-day it is my birthday, so I thought I would expiate it by doing some useful work.
It is the first birthday I've ever been alone, with nobody to say Bless you. I like being blessed on my birthday, seen off into my new year with encouragement and smiles. Perhaps, I thought, while I dressed, Antoine would remember. After all, I used to have birthdays when I was here before, and he must have noticed the ripple of excitement that lay along the day, how it was wreathed in flowers from breakfast-time on and dotted thick with presents. Perhaps he would remember, and wish me luck. Perhaps if he remembered he would tell his wife, and she would wish me luck too. I did very much long to-day to be wished luck.
But Antoine, if he had ever known, had obviously forgotten. He was doing something to the irises when I came down, and though I went out and lingered round him before beginning breakfast he took no notice; he just went on with the irises. So I daresay I looked a little wry, for I did feel rather afraid I might be going to be lonely.
This, then, I thought, giving myself a hitch of determination, was the moment for manual labour. As I drank my coffee I decided to celebrate the day by giving both the Antoines a holiday and doing the work myself. Why shouldn't my birthday be celebrated by somebody else having a good time? What did it after all matter who had the good time so long as somebody did? The Antoines should have a holiday, and I would work. So would I defend my thoughts from memories that might bite. So would I, by the easy path of perspiration, find peace.
Antoine, however, didn't seem to want a holiday. I had difficulty with him. He wasn't of course surprised when I told him he had got one, because he never is, but he said, with that level intonation that gives his conversation so noticeable a calm, that it was the day for cutting the lawn.
I said I would cut the lawn; I knew about lawns; I had been brought up entirely on lawns,—I believe I told him I had been born on one, in my eagerness to forestall his objections and get him to go.
He said that such work would be too hot for Madame in the sort of weather we were having; and I said that no work on an object so small as our lawn could be too hot. Besides, I liked being hot, I explained—again with eagerness—I wanted to be hot, I was happy when I was hot. 'J'aime beaucoup, I said, not stopping in my hurry to pick my words, and anyhow imperfect in French, 'la sueur.'
I believe I ought to have said la transpiration, the other word being held in slight if any esteem as a word for ladies, but I still more believe that I oughtn't to have said anything about it at all. I don't know, of course, because of Antoine's immobility of expression; but in spite of this not varying at what I had said by the least shadow of a flicker I yet somehow felt, it was yet somehow conveyed to me, that perhaps in French one doesn't perspire, or if one does one doesn't talk about it. Not if one is a lady. Not if one is Madame. Not, to ascend still further the scale of my self-respect enforcing attributes, if one is that dignified object the patrone.
I find it difficult to be dignified. When I try, I overdo it. Always my dignity is either over or under done, but its chief condition is that of being under done. Antoine, however, very kindly helps me up to the position he has decided I ought to fill, by his own unalterable calm. I have never seen him smile. I don't believe he could without cracking, of so unruffled a glassiness is his countenance.
Once, before the war—everything I have done that has been cheerful and undesirable was before the war; I've been nothing but exemplary and wretched since—I was undignified. We dressed up; and on the advice of my friends—I now see that it was bad advice—I allowed myself to be dressed as a devil; I, the patrone; I, Madame. It was true I was only a little devil, quite one of the minor ones, what the Germans would call a Hausteufelchen; but a devil I was. And going upstairs again unexpectedly, to fetch my tail which had been forgotten, I saw at the very end of the long passage, down which I had to go, Antoine collecting the day's boots.
He stood aside and waited. I couldn't go back, because that would have looked as though I were doing something I knew I oughtn't to. Therefore I proceeded.
The passage was long and well lit. Down the whole of it I had to go, while Antoine at the end stood and waited. I tried to advance with dignity. I tried to hope he wouldn't recognise me. I tried to feel sure he wouldn't. How could he? I was quite black, except for a wig that looked like orange-coloured flames. But when I got to the doors at the end it was the one to my bedroom that Antoine threw open, and past him I had to march while he stood gravely aside. And strangely enough, what I remember feeling most acutely was a quite particular humiliation and shame that I hadn't got my tail on.
'C'est que j'ai oubli?ma queue....' I found myself stammering, with a look of agonised deprecation and apology at him.
And even then Antoine wasn't surprised.
Well, where was I? Oh yes—at the transpiration. Antoine let it pass over him, as I have said, without a ruffle, and drew my attention to the chickens who would have to be fed and the cow who would have to be milked. Perhaps the cow might be milked on his return, but the chickens—
Antoine was softening.
I said quickly that all he had to do would be to put the chickens' food ready and I would administer it, and as for the cow, why not let her have a rest for once, why not let her for once not he robbed of what was after all her own?
And to cut the conversation short, and determined that my birthday should not pass without somebody getting a present, I ran upstairs and fetched down a twenty-franc note and pressed it into Antoine's hand and said breathlessly in a long and voluble sentence that began with Voil?/i>, but didn't keep it up at that level, that the twenty francs were for his expenses for himself and Mrs. Antoine down in the valley, and that I hoped they would enjoy themselves, and would he remember me very kindly to his maman, to whom he would no doubt pay a little visit during the course of what I trusted would be a long, crowded, and agreeable day.
They went off ultimately, but with reluctance. Completely undignified, I stood on the low wall of the terrace and waved to them as they turned the corner at the bottom of the path.
'Mille f閘icitations!' I cried, anxious that somebody should be wished happiness on my birthday.
'If I am going to have a lonely birthday it shall be thoroughly lonely,' I said grimly to myself as, urged entirely by my volition, the Antoines disappeared and left me to the solitary house.
I decided to begin my day's work by making my bed, and went upstairs full of resolution.
Mrs. Antoine, however, had done that; no doubt while I was arguing with Antoine.
The next thing, then, I reflected, was to tidy away breakfast, so I came downstairs again, full of more resolution.
Mrs. Antoine, however, had done that too; no doubt while I was still arguing with Antoine.
Well then, oughtn't I to begin to do something with potatoes? With a view to the dinner-hour? Put them on, or something? I was sure the putting on of potatoes would make me perspire. I longed to start my transpiration in case by any chance, if I stayed too long inactive and cool, I should notice how very silent and empty....
I hurried into the kitchen, a dear little place of white tiles and copper saucepans, and found pots simmering gently on the stove: potatoes in one, and in the other bits of something that well might be chicken. Also, on a tray was the rest of everything needed for my dinner. All I would have to do would be to eat it.
Baulked, but still full of resolution, I set out in search of the lawn-mower. It couldn't be far away, because nothing is able to be anything but close on my narrow ledge of rock.
Mou-Mou, sitting on his haunches in the shade at the back of the house, watched me with interest as I tried to open the sorts of outside doors that looked as if they shut in lawn-mowers.
They were all locked.
The magnificent Mou-Mou, who manages to imitate Antoine's trick of not being surprised, though he hasn't yet quite caught his air of absence of curiosity, got up after the first door and lounged after me as I tried the others. He could do this because, though tied up, Antoine has ingeniously provided for his exercise, and at the same time for the circumvention of burglars, by fixing an iron bar the whole length of the wall behind the house and fastening Mou-Mou's chain to it by a loose ring. So that he can run along it whenever he feels inclined; and a burglar, having noted the kennel at the east end of this wall and Mou-Mou sitting chained up in front of it, would find, on preparing to attack the house at its west and apparently dogless end, that the dog was nevertheless there before him. A rattle and a slide, and there would be Mou-Mou. Very morale-shaking. Very freezing in its unexpectedness to the burglar's blood, and paralysing to his will to sin. Thus Antoine, thinking of everything, had calculated. There hasn't ever been a burglar, but, as he said of his possible suppurating wounds, 'Il ne faut pas attendre qu'on les a pour se procurer le rem鑔e.'
Mou-Mou accordingly came with me as I went up and down the back of the house trying the range of outside doors. I think he thought at last it was a game, for as each door wouldn't open and I paused a moment thwarted, he gave a loud double bark, as one who should in the Psalms, after each verse, say Selah.
Antoine had locked up the lawn-mower. The mowing was to be put off till to-morrow rather than that Madame in the heat should mow. I appreciated the kindness of his intentions, but for all that was much vexed by being baulked. On my birthday too. Baulked of the one thing I really wanted, la transpiration. It didn't seem much to ask on my birthday, I who used, without so much as lifting a finger, to acquire on such occasions quite other beads.
Undecided, I stood looking round the tidy yard for something I could be active over, and Mou-Mou sat upright on his huge haunches watching me. He is so big that in this position our heads are on a level. He took advantage of this by presently raising his tongue—it was already out, hanging in the heat—as I still didn't move or say anything, and giving my face an enormous lick. So then I went away, for I didn't like that. Besides, I had thought of something.
In the flower-border along the terrace would be weeds. Flower-borders always have weeds, and weeding is arduous. Also, all one wants for weeding are one's own ten fingers, and Antoine couldn't prevent my using those. So that was what I would do—bend down and tear up weeds, and in this way forget the extraordinary sunlit, gaping, empty little house....
So great, however, had been the unflagging diligence of Antoine, and also perhaps so poor and barren the soil, that after half an hour's search I had only found three weeds, and even those I couldn't be sure about, and didn't know for certain but what I might be pulling up some precious bit of alpine flora put in on purpose and cherished by Antoine. All I really knew was that what I tore up wasn't irises, and wasn't delphiniums, and wasn't pansies; so that, I argued, it must be weeds. Anyhow, I pulled three alien objects out, and laid them in a neat row to show Antoine. Then I sat down and rested.
The search for them had made me hot, but that of course wouldn't last. It was ages before I need go and feed the chickens. I sat on the terrace wall wondering what I could do next. It was a pity that the Antoines were so admirable. One could overdo virtue. A little less zeal, the least judicious neglect on their part, and I would have found something useful to do.
The place was quite extraordinarily silent. There wasn't a sound. Even Mou-Mou round at the back, languid in the heat, didn't move. The immense light beat on the varnished wooden face of the house and on the shut shutters of all the unused rooms. Those rooms have been shut like that for five years. The shutters are blistered with the fierce sun of five summers, and the no less fierce sun of five winters. Their colour, once a lively, swaggering blue, has faded to a dull grey: I sat staring up at them. Suppose they were suddenly to be opened from inside, and faces that used to live in them looked out?
A faint shudder trickled along my spine.
Well, but wouldn't I be glad really? Wouldn't they be the dearest ghosts? That room at the end, for instance, so tightly shut up now, that was where my brother used to sleep when he came out for his holidays. Wouldn't I love to see him look out at me? How gaily he used to arrive,—in such spirits because he had got rid of work for a bit, and for a series of divine weeks was going to stretch himself in the sun! The first thing he always did when he got up to his room was to hurry out on to its little balcony to see if the heavenly view of the valley towards the east with the chain of snow mountains across the end were still as heavenly as he remembered it; and I could see him with his head thrown back, breathing deep breaths of the lovely air, adoring it, radiant with delight to have got back to it, calling down to me to come quick and look, for it could never have been so beautiful as at that moment and could never possibly be so beautiful again.
I loved him very much. I don't believe anybody ever had so dear a brother. He was so quick to appreciate and understand, so slow to anger, so clear of brain and gentle of heart. Of course he was killed. Such people always are, if there is any killing going on anywhere. He volunteered at the very beginning of the war, and though his fragility saved him for a long time he was at last swept in. That was in March 1918. He was killed the first week. I loved him very much, and he loved me. He called me sweet names, and forgave me all my trespasses.
And in the next room to that—oh well, I'm not going to dig out every ghost. I can't really write about some of them, the pain hurts too much. I've not been into any of the shut rooms since I came back. I couldn't bear it. Here out of doors I can take a larger view, not mind going to the places of memories; but I know those rooms will have been kept as carefully unchanged by Antoine as I found mine. I daren't even think of them. I had to get up off the wall and come away from staring up at those shutters, for suddenly I found myself right on the very edge of the dreadful pit I'm always so afraid of tumbling into—the great, black, cold, empty pit of horror, of realisation....
That's why I've been writing all this, just so as not to think....
Bedtime.
I must put down what happened after that. I ought to be in bed, but I must put down how my birthday ended.
Well, there I was sitting, trying by writing to defend myself against the creeping fear of the silence round me and the awareness of those shut rooms up stairs, when Mou-Mou barked. He barked suddenly and furiously; and the long screech of his chain showed that he was rushing along the wall to the other side of the house.
Instantly my thoughts became wholesome. I jumped up. Here was the burglar at last. I flew round to greet him. Anything was better than those shutters, and that hot, sunlit silence.
Between my departure from the terrace and my arrival at the other side of the house I had had time, so quickly did my restored mind work, to settle that whoever it was, burglar or not, I was going to make friends. If it really were a burglar I would adopt the line the bishop took towards Jean Valjean, and save him from the sin of theft by making him a present of everything he wished to take,—conduct which perhaps might save me as well, supposing he was the kind of burglar who would want to strangle opposition. Also, burglar or no burglar, I would ask him to dinner; compel him, in fact, to come in and share my birthday chicken.
What I saw when I got round, standing just out of reach of the leaping Mou-Mou on the top of the avalanche wall, looking down at him with patience rather than timidity, holding their black skirts back in case an extra leap of his should reach them, were two women. Strangers, not natives. Perhaps widows. But anyhow people who had been bereaved.
I immediately begged them to come in. The relief and refreshment of seeing them! Two human beings of obvious respectability, warm flesh and blood persons, not burglars, not ghosts, not even of the sex one associates with depredation,—just decent, alive women, complete in every detail, even to each carrying an umbrella. They might have been standing on the curb in Oxford Street waiting to hail an omnibus, so complete were they, so prepared in their clothes to face the world. Button boots, umbrella,—I hadn't seen an umbrella since I got here. What you usually take for a walk on the mountains is a stout stick with an iron point to it; but after all, why shouldn't you take an umbrella? Then if it rains you can put it up, and if the sun is unbearable you can put it up too, and it too has a metal tip to it which you can dig into the ground if you begin to slide down precipices.
'Bon jour,' I said eagerly, looking up at these black silhouettes against the sky. 'Je vous prie de venir me voir.'
They stared at me, still holding back their skirts from the leaping dog.
Perhaps they were Italians. I am close to Italy, and Italian women usually dress in black.
I know some Italian words, and I know the one you say when you want somebody to come in, so I tried that.
'Avanti,' I said breathlessly.
They didn't. They still just stood and stared.
They couldn't be English I thought, because underneath their black skirts I could see white cotton petticoats with embroidery on them, the kind that England has shed these fifty years, and that is only now to be found in remote and religious parts of abroad, like the more fervent portions of Lutheran Germany. Could they be Germans? The thought distracted me. How could I ask two Germans in? How could I sit at meat with people whose male relations had so recently been killing mine? Or been killed by them, perhaps, judging from their black clothes. Anyhow there was blood between us. But how could I resist asking them in, when if I didn't there would be hours and hours of intolerable silence and solitude for me, till evening brought those Antoines back who never ought to have been let go? On my birthday, too.
I know some German words—it is wonderful what a lot of languages I seem to know some words in—so I threw one up at them between two of Mou-Mou's barks.
'Deutsch?' I inquired.
They ignored it.
'That's all my languages,' I then said in despair.
The only thing left that I might still try on them was to talk on my fingers, which I can a little; but if they didn't happen, I reflected, to be deaf and dumb perhaps they wouldn't like that. So I just looked up at them despairingly, and spread out my hands and drew my shoulders to my ears as Mrs. Antoine does when she is conveying to me that the butter has come to an end.
Whereupon the elder of the two—neither was young, but one was less young—the elder of the two informed me in calm English that they had lost their way, and she asked me to direct them and also to tell the dog not to make quite so much noise, in order that they might clearly understand what I said. 'He is a fine fellow,' she said, 'but we should be glad if he would make less noise.'
The younger one said nothing, but smiled at me. She was pleasant-looking, this one, flushed and nicely moist from walking in the heat. The other one was more rocky; considering the weather, and the angle of the slope they had either come up or down, she seemed quite unnaturally arid.
I seized Mou-Mou by the collar, and ran him along to his kennel.
'You stay there and be good,' I said to him, though I know he doesn't understand a word of English. 'He won't hurt you,' I assured the strangers, going back to them.
'Ah,' said the elder of the two; and added, 'I used to say that to people about my dog.'
They still stood motionless, holding their skirts, the younger one smiling at me.
'Won't you come down?' I said. 'Come in and rest a little? I can tell you better about your road if you'll come in. Look—you go along that path there, and it brings you round to the front door.'
'Will the dog be at the front door?' asked the elder.
'Oh no—besides, he wouldn't hurt a fly.'
'Ah,' said the elder eyeing Mou-Mou sideways, who, from his kennel, eyed her, 'I used to say that to people about my dog.'
The younger one stood smiling at me. They neither of them moved.
'I'll come up and bring you down,' I said, hurrying round to the path that leads from the terrace on to the slope.
When they saw that this path did indeed take them away from Mou-Mou they came with me.
Directly they moved he made a rush along his bar, but arrived too late and could only leap up and down barking.
'That's just high spirits,' I said. 'He is really most goodnatured and affectionate.'
'Ah,' said the elder, 'I used to say that to people—'
'Mind those loose stones,' I interrupted; and I helped each one down the last crumbly bit on to the terrace.
They both had black kid gloves on. More than ever, as I felt these warm gloves press my hand, was I sure that what they really wanted was an omnibus along Oxford Street.
Once on the level and out of sight of Mou-Mou, they walked with an air of self-respect. Especially the elder. The younger, though she had it too, seemed rather to be following an example than originating an attitude. Perhaps they were related to a Lord Mayor, I thought. Or a rector. But a Lord Mayor would be more likely to be the cause of that air of glowing private background to life.
They had been up the mountain, the elder told me, trying to find somewhere cool to stay in, for the valley this weather was unendurable. They used to know this district years ago, and recollected a pension right up in the highest village, and after great exertions and rising early that morning they had reached it only to find that it had become a resort for consumptives. With no provision for the needs of the passing tourist; with no desire, in fact, in any way to minister to them. If it hadn't been for me, she said, as they sat on the cool side of the house drinking lemonade and eating biscuits, if it hadn't been for me and what she described with obvious gratitude—she couldn't guess my joy at seeing them both!—as my kindness, they would have had somehow to clamber down foodless by wrong roads, seeing that they had lost the right one, to the valley again, and in what state they would have re-entered that scorching and terrible place she didn't like to think. Tired as they were. Disappointed, and distressingly hot. How very pleasant it was up here. What a truly delightful spot. Such air. Such a view. And how agreeable and unexpected to come across one of one's own country-women.
To all this the younger in silence smiled agreement.
They had been so long abroad, continued the elder, that they felt greatly fatigued by foreigners, who were so very prevalent. In their pension there were nothing but foreigners and flies. The house wasn't by any chance—no, of course it couldn't be, but it wasn't by any chance—her voice had a sudden note of hope in it—a pension?
I shook my head and laughed at that, and said it wasn't. The younger one smiled at me.
Ah no—of course not, continued the elder, her voice fading again. And she didn't suppose I could tell them of any pension anywhere about, where they could get taken in while this great heat lasted? Really the valley was most terribly airless. The best hotel, which had, she knew, some cool rooms, was beyond their means, so they were staying in one of the small ones, and the flies worried them. Apparently I had no flies up here. And what wonderful air. At night, no doubt, it was quite cool. The nights in the valley were most trying. It was difficult to sleep.
I asked them to stay to lunch. They accepted gratefully. When I took them to my room to wash their hands they sighed with pleasure at its shadiness and quiet. They thought the inside of the house delightfully roomy, and more spacious, said the elder, while the younger one smiled agreement, than one would have expected from its outside. I left them, sunk with sighs of satisfaction, on the sofa in the hall, their black toques and gloves on a chair beside them, gazing at the view through the open front door while I went to see how the potatoes were getting on.
We lunched presently in the shade just outside the house, and the strange ladies continued to be most grateful, the elder voicing their gratitude, the younger smiling agreement. If it was possible to like one more than the other, seeing with what enthusiasm I liked them both, I liked the younger because she smiled. I love people who smile. It does usually mean sweet pleasantness somewhere.
After lunch, while I cleared away, having refused their polite offers of help,—for they now realised I was alone in the house, on which, however, though it must have surprised them they made no comment,—they went indoors to the sofa again, whose soft cushions seemed particularly attractive to them; and when I came back the last time for the breadcrumbs and tablecloth, I found they had both fallen asleep, the elder one with her handkerchief over her face.
Poor things. How tired they were. How glad I was that they should be resting and getting cool. A little sleep would do them both good.
I crept past them on tiptoe with my final armful, and was careful to move about in the kitchen very quietly. It hadn't been my intention, with guests to lunch, to wash up and put away, but rather to sit with them and talk. Not having talked for so long it seemed a godsend, a particularly welcome birthday present, suddenly to have two English people drop in on me from the skies. Up to this moment I had been busy, first getting lemonade to slake their thirst and then lunch to appease their hunger, and the spare time in between these activities had been filled with the expression of their gratitude by the elder and her expatiations on the house and what she called the grounds; but I had looked forward to about an hour's real talk after lunch, before they would begin to want to start on their long downward journey to their pension,—talk in which, without being specially brilliant any of us, for you only had to look at us to see we wouldn't be specially that, we yet might at least tell each other amusing things about, say, Lord Mayors. It is true I don't know any Lord Mayors, though I do know somebody whose brother married the daughter of one; but if they could produce a Lord Mayor out of up their sleeve, as I suspected, I could counter him with a dean. Not quite so showy, perhaps, but more permanent. And I did want to talk. I have been silent so long that I felt I could talk about almost anything.
Well, as they were having a little nap, poor things, I would tidy up the kitchen meanwhile, and by the time that was done they would be refreshed and ready for half an hour's agreeable interchange of gossip.
Every now and then during this tidying I peeped into the hall in case they were awake, but they seemed if anything to be sounder asleep each time. The younger one, her flushed face half buried, in a cushion, her fair hair a little ruffled, had a pathetic look of almost infantile helplessness; the elder, discreetly veiled by her handkerchief, slept more stiffly, with less abandonment and more determination. Poor things. How glad I was they should in this way gather strength for the long, difficult scramble down the mountain; but also presently I began to wish they would wake up.
I finished what I had to do in the kitchen, and came back into the hall. They had been sleeping now nearly half an hour. I stood about uncertainly. Poor things, they must be dreadfully tired to sleep like that. I hardly liked to look at them, they were so defenceless, and I picked up a book and tried to read; but I couldn't stop my eyes from wandering over the top of it to the sofa every few minutes, and always I saw the same picture of profound repose.
Presently I put down the book, and wandered out on to the terrace and gazed awhile at the view. That, too, seemed wrapped in afternoon slumber. After a bit I wandered round the house to Mou-Mou. He, too, was asleep. Then I came back to the front door and glanced in at my guests. Still no change. Then I fetched some cigarettes, not moving this time quite so carefully, and going out again sat on the low terrace-wall at a point from which I could see straight on to the sofa and notice any movement that might take place.
I never smoke except when bored, and as I am never bored I never smoke. But this afternoon it was just that unmanageable sort of moment come upon me, that kind of situation I don't know how to deal with, which does bore me. I sat on the wall and smoked three cigarettes, and the peace on the sofa remained complete. What ought one to do? What did one do, faced by obstinately sleeping guests? Impossible deliberately to wake them up. Yet I was sure—they had now been asleep nearly an hour—that when they did wake up, polite as they were, they would be upset by discovering that they had slept. Besides, the afternoon was getting on. They had a long way to go. If only Mou-Mou would wake up and bark.... But there wasn't a sound. The hot afternoon brooded over the mountains in breathless silence.
Again I went round to the back of the house, and pausing behind the last corner so as to make what I did next more alarming, suddenly jumped out at Mou Mou.
The horribly intelligent dog didn't bother to open more than an eye, and that one he immediately shut again.
Disgusted with him, I returned to my seat on the wall and smoked another cigarette. The picture on the sofa was the same: perfect peace. Oh well, poor things—but I did want to talk. And after all it was my birthday.
When I had finished the cigarette I thought a moment, my face in my hands. A person of tact—ah, but I have no tact; it has been my undoing on the cardinal occasions of life that I have none. Well, but suppose I were a person of tact—what would I do? Instantly the answer flashed into my brain: Knock, by accident, against a table.
So I did. I got up quickly and crossed into the hall and knocked against a table, at first with gentleness, and then as there was no result with greater vigour.
My elder guest behind the handkerchief continued to draw deep regular breaths, but to my joy the younger one stirred and opened her eyes.
'Oh, I do hope I didn't wake you?' I exclaimed, taking an eager step towards the sofa.
She looked at me vaguely, and fell asleep again.
I went back on to the terrace and lit another cigarette. That was five. I haven't smoked so much before in one day in my life ever. I felt quite fast. And on my birthday too. By the time I had finished it there was a look about the shadows on the grass that suggested tea. Even if it were a little early the noise of the teacups might help to wake up my guests, and I felt that a call to tea would be a delicate and hospitable way of doing it.
I didn't go through the hall on tiptoe this time, but walked naturally; and I opened the door into the kitchen rather noisily. Then I looked round at the sofa to see the effect. There wasn't any.
Presently tea was ready, out on the table where we had lunched. At least six times I had been backwards and forwards through the hall, the last twice carrying things that rattled and that I encouraged to rattle. But on the sofa the strangers slept peacefully on.
There was nothing for it now but to touch them. Short of that, I didn't think that anything would wake them. But I don't like touching guests; I mean, in between whiles. I have never done it. Especially not when they weren't looking. And still more especially not when they were complete strangers.
Therefore I approached the sofa with reluctance, and stood uncertain in front of it. Poor things, they really were most completely asleep. It seemed a pity to interrupt. Well, but they had had a nice rest; they had slept soundly now for two hours. And the tea would be cold if I didn't wake them up, and besides, how were they going to get home if they didn't start soon? Still, I don't like touching guests. Especially strange guests....
Manifestly, however, there was nothing else to be done, so I bent over the younger one—the other one was too awe-inspiring with her handkerchief over her face—and gingerly put my hand on her shoulder.
Nothing happened.
I put it on again, with a slightly increased emphasis.
She didn't open her eyes, but to my embarrassment laid her cheek on it affectionately and murmured something that sounded astonishingly like Siegfried.
I know about Siegfried, because of going to the opera. He was a German. He still is, in the form of Siegfried Wagner, and I daresay of others; and once somebody told me that when Germans wished to indulge their disrespect for the Kaiser freely—he was not at that time yet an ex-Kaiser—-without being run in for l鑣e majest?/i>, they loudly and openly abused him under the name of Siegfried Meyer, whose initials, S.M., also represent Seine Majest鋞; by which simple methods everybody was able to be pleased and nobody was able to be hurt. So that when my sleeping guest murmured Siegfried, I couldn't but conclude she was dreaming of a German; and when at the same time she laid her cheek on my hand, I was forced to realise that she was dreaming of him affectionately. Which astonished me.
Imbued with patriotism—the accumulated patriotism of weeks spent out of England—I felt that this English lady should instantly be roused from a dream that did her no credit. She herself, I felt sure, would be the first to deplore such a dream. So I drew my hand away from beneath her cheek—even by mistake I didn't like it to be thought the hand of somebody called Siegfried and, stooping down, said quite loud and distinctly in her ear, 'Won't you come to tea?'
This, at last, did wake her. She sat up with a start, and looked at me for a moment in surprise.
'Oh,' she said, confused, 'have I been asleep?'
'I'm very glad you have,' I said, smiling at her, for she was already again smiling at me. 'Your climb this morning was enough to kill you.'
'Oh, but,' she murmured, getting up quickly and straightening her hair, 'how dreadful to come to your house and go to sleep—'
And she turned to the elder one, and again astonished me by, with one swift movement, twitching the handkerchief off her face and saying exactly as one says when playing the face-and-handkerchief game with one's baby, 'Peep bo.' Then she turned back to me and smiled and said nothing more, for I suppose she knew the elder one, roused thus competently, would now do all the talking; as indeed she did, being as I feared greatly upset and horrified when she found she had not only been asleep but been it for two hours.
We had tea; and all the while, while the elder one talked of the trouble she was afraid she had given, and the shame she felt that they should have slept, and their gratitude for what she called my prolonged and patient hospitality, I was wondering about the other. Whenever she caught my pensive and inquiring eye she smiled at me. She had very sweet eyes, grey ones, gentle and intelligent, and when she smiled an agreeable dimple appeared. Bringing my Paley's Evidences and Sherlock Holmes' side to bear on her, I reasoned that my younger guest was, or had been, a mother,—this because of the practised way she had twitched the handkerchief off and said Peep bo; that she was either a widow, or hadn't seen her husband for some time,—this because of the real affection with which, in her sleep she had laid her cheek on my hand; and that she liked music and often went to the opera.
After tea the elder got up stiffly—she had walked much too far already, and was clearly unfit to go all that long way more—and said, if I would direct them, they must now set out for the valley.
The younger one put on her toque obediently at this, and helped the elder one to pin hers on straight. It was now five o'clock, and if they didn't once lose their way they would be at their hotel by half-past seven; in time, said the elder, for the end of table-d'h魌e, a meal much interfered with by the very numerous flies. But if they did go wrong at any point it would be much later, probably dark.
I asked them to stay.
To stay? The elder, engaged in buttoning her tight kid gloves, said it was most kind of me, but they couldn't possibly stay any longer. It was far too late already, owing to their so unfortunately having gone to sleep—
'I mean stay the night,' I said; and explained that it would be doing me a kindness, and because of that they must please overlook anything in such an invitation that might appear unconventional, for certainly if they did set out I should lie awake all night thinking of them lost somewhere among the precipices, or perhaps fallen over one, and how much better to go down comfortably in daylight, and I could lend them everything they wanted, including a great many new toothbrushes I found here,—in short, I not only invited, I pressed; growing more eager by the sheer gathering momentum of my speech.
All day, while the elder talked and I listened, I had secretly felt uneasy. Here was I, one woman in a house arranged for family gatherings, while they for want of rooms were forced to swelter in the valley. Gradually, as I listened, my uneasiness increased. Presently I began to feel guilty. And at last, as I watched them sleeping in such exhaustion on the sofa, I felt at the bottom of my heart somehow responsible. But I don't know, of course, that it is wise to invite strangers to stay with one.
They accepted gratefully. The moment the elder understood what it was that my eager words were pressing on her, she drew the pins out of her toque and laid it on the chair again; and so did the other one, smiling at me.
When the Antoines came home I went out to meet them. By that time my guests were shut up in their bedrooms with new toothbrushes. They had gone up very early, both of them so stiff that they could hardly walk. Till they did go up, what moments I had been able to spare from my hasty preparations for their comfort had been filled entirely, as earlier in the day, by the elder one's gratitude; there had still been no chance of real talk.
'J'ai des visites,' I said to the Antoines, going out to meet them when, through the silence of the evening, I heard their steps coming up the path.
Antoine wasn't surprised. He just said, 'Ca sera comme autrefois,' and began to shut the shutters.
But I am. I can't go to bed, I'm so much surprised. I've been sitting up here scribbling when I ought to have been in bed long ago. Who would have thought that the day that began so emptily would end with two of my rooms full,—each containing a widow? For they are widows, they told me: widows who have lost their husbands by peaceful methods, nothing to do with the war. Their names are Mrs. Barnes and Mrs. Jewks,—at least that is what the younger one's sounded like; I don't know if I have spelt it right. They come from Dulwich. I think the elder one had a slight misgiving at the last, and seemed to remember what was due to the Lord Mayor, when she found herself going to bed in a strange house belonging to somebody of whom she knew nothing; for she remarked a little doubtfully, and with rather a defensive eye fixed on me, that the war had broken down many barriers, and that people did things now that they wouldn't have dreamed of doing five years ago.
The other one didn't say nothing, but actually kissed me. I hope she wasn't again mistaking me for Siegfried.
August 15th
My guests have gone again, but only to fetch their things and pay their hotel bill, and then they are coming back to stay with me till it is a little cooler. They are coming back to-morrow, not to-day. They are entangled in some arrangement with their pension that makes it difficult for them to leave at once.
Mrs. Barnes appeared at breakfast with any misgivings she may have had last night gone, for when I suggested they should spend this hot weather up here she immediately accepted. I hadn't slept for thinking of them. How could I possibly not ask them to stay, seeing their discomfort and my roominess? Towards morning it was finally clear to me that it wasn't possible: I would ask them. Though, remembering the look in Mrs. Barnes's eye the last thing last night, I couldn't be sure she would accept. She might want to find out about me first, after the cautious and hampering way of women,—oh, I wish women wouldn't always be so cautious, but simply get on with their friendships! She might first want assurances that there was some good reason for my being here all by myself. Alas, there isn't a good reason; there is only a bad one. But, fortunately, to be alone is generally regarded as respectable, in spite of what Seneca says a philosopher said to a young man he saw walking by himself: 'Have a care,' said he, 'of lewd company.'
However, I don't suppose Mrs. Barnes knew about Seneca. Anyhow she didn't hesitate. She accepted at once, and said that under these circumstances it was certainly due to me to tell me a little about themselves.
At this I got my dean ready to meet the Lord Mayor, but after all I was told nothing more than that my guests are sisters; for at this point, very soon arrived at, the younger one, Mrs. Jewks, who had slipped away on our getting up from breakfast, reappeared with the toques and gloves, and said she thought they had better start before it got any hotter.
So they went, and the long day here has been most beautiful—so peaceful, so quiet, with the delicate mountains like opals against the afternoon sky, and the shadows lengthening along the valley.
I don't feel to-day as I did yesterday, that I want to talk. To-day I am content with things exactly as they are: the sun, the silence, the caresses of the funny little white kitten with the smudge of black round its left eye that makes it look as though it must be somebody's wife, and the pleasant knowledge that my new friends are coming back again.
I think that knowledge makes to-day more precious. It is the last day for some time, for at least a week judging from the look of the blazing sky, of what I see now that they are ending have been wonderful days. Up the ladder of these days I have climbed slowly away from the blackness at the bottom. It has been like finding some steps under water just as one was drowning, and crawling up them to air and light. But now that I have got at least most of myself back to air and light, and feel hopeful of not slipping down again, it is surely time to arise, shake myself, and begin to do something active and fruitful. And behold, just as I realise this, just as I realise that I am, so to speak, ripe for fruit-bearing, there appear on the scene Mrs. Barnes and Mrs. Jewks, as it were the midwives of Providence.
Well, that shall be to-morrow. Meanwhile there is still to-day, and each one of its quiet hours seems very precious. I wonder what my new friends like to read. Suppose—I was going to say suppose it is The Rosary; but I won't suppose that, for when it comes to supposing, why not suppose something that isn't The Rosary? Why not, for instance, suppose they like Eminent Victorians, and that we three are going to sit of an evening delicately tickling each other with quotations from it, and gently squirming in our seats for pleasure? It is just as easy to suppose that as to suppose anything else, and as I'm not yet acquainted with these ladies' tastes one supposition is as likely to be right as another.
I don't know, though—I forgot their petticoats. I can't believe any friends of Mr. Lytton Strachey wear that kind of petticoat, eminently Victorian even though it be; and although he wouldn't, of course, have direct ocular proof that they did unless he had stood with me yesterday at the bottom of that wall while they on the top held up their skirts, still what one has on underneath does somehow ooze through into one's behaviour. I know once, when impelled by a heat wave in America to cast aside the undergarments of a candid mind and buy and put on pink chiffon, the pink chiffon instantly got through all my clothes into my conduct, which became curiously dashing. Anybody can tell what a woman has got on underneath by merely watching her behaviour. I have known just the consciousness of silk stockings, worn by one accustomed only to wool, produce dictatorialness where all before had been submission.
August 19th
I haven't written for three days because I have been so busy settling down to my guests.
They call each other Kitty and Dolly. They explained that these were inevitably their names because they were born, one fifty, the other forty years ago. I inquired why this was inevitable, and they drew my attention to fashions in names, asserting that people's ages could generally be guessed by their Christian names. If, they said, their birth had taken place ten years earlier they would have been Ethel and Maud; if ten years later they would have been Muriel and Gladys; and if twenty years only ago they had no doubt but what they would have been Elizabeth and Pamela. It is always Mrs. Barnes who talks; but the effect is as though they together were telling me things, because of the way Mrs. Jewks smiles,—I conclude in agreement.
'Our dear parents, both long since dead,' said Mrs. Barnes, adjusting her eyeglasses more comfortably on her nose, 'didn't seem to remember that we would ever grow old, for we weren't even christened Katharine and Dorothy, to which we might have reverted when we ceased being girls, but we were Kitty and Dolly from the very beginning, and actually in that condition came away from the font.'
'I like being Dolly,' murmured Mrs. Jewks.
Mrs. Barnes looked at her with what I thought was a slight uneasiness, and rebuked her. 'You shouldn't,' she said. 'After thirty-nine no woman should willingly be Dolly.'
'I still feel exactly like Dolly,' murmured Mrs. Jewks.
'It's a misfortune,' said Mrs. Barnes, shaking her head. 'To be called Dolly after a certain age is bad enough, but it is far worse to feel like it. What I think of,' she said, turning to me, 'is when we are really old,—in bath chairs, unable to walk, and no doubt being spoon fed, and yet obliged to continue to be called by these names. It will rob us of dignity.'
'I don't think I'll mind,' murmured Mrs. Jewks. 'I shall still feel exactly like Dolly.'
Mrs. Barnes looked at her, again I thought with uneasiness—with, really, an air of rather anxious responsibility.
And afterwards, when her sister had gone indoors for something, she expounded a theory she said she held, the soundness of which had often been proved to her by events, that names had much influence on behaviour.
'Not half as much,' I thought (but didn't say), 'as underclothes.' And indeed I have for years been acquainted with somebody called Trixy, who for steady gloom and heaviness of spirit would be hard to equal. Also I know an Isolda; a most respectable married woman, of a sprightly humour and much nimbleness in dodging big emotions.
'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'has never, I am sorry to say, shared my opinion. If she had, many things in her life would have been different, for then she would have been on her guard as I have been. I am glad to say there is nothing I have ever done since I ceased to be a child that has been even remotely compatible with being called Kitty.'
I said I thought that was a great deal to be able to say. It suggested, I said, quite an unusually blameless past. Through my brain ran for an instant the vision of that devil who, seeking his tail, met Antoine in the passage. I blushed. Fortunately Mrs. Barnes didn't notice.
'What did Dol—what did Mrs. Jewks do,' I said, 'that you think was the direct result of her Christian name? Don't tell me if my question is indiscreet, which I daresay it is, because I know I often am, but your theory interests me.'
Mrs. Barnes hesitated a moment. She was, I think, turning over in her mind whether she would give herself the relief of complete unreserve, or continue for a few more days to skim round on the outskirts of confidences. This was yesterday. After all, she had only been with me two days.
She considered awhile, then decided that two days wasn't long enough, so only said: 'My sister is sometimes a little rash,—or perhaps I should say has been. But the effects of rashness are felt for a long time; usually for the rest of one's life.'
'Yes,' I agreed; and thought ruefully of some of my own.
This, however, only made me if anything more inquisitive as to the exact nature and quality of Dolly's resemblance to her name. We all, I suppose (except Mrs. Barnes, who I am sure hasn't), have been rash, and if we could induce ourselves to be frank much innocent amusement might be got by comparing the results of our rashnesses. But Mrs. Barnes was unable at the moment to induce herself to be frank, and she returned to the subject she has already treated very fully since her arrival, the wonderful bracing air up here and her great and grateful appreciation of it.
To-day is Tuesday; and on Saturday evening,—the day they arrived back again, complete with their luggage, which came up in a cart round by the endless zigzags of the road while they with their peculiar dauntlessness took the steep short cuts,—we had what might be called an exchange of cards. Mrs. Barnes told me what she thought fit for me to know about her late husband, and I responded by telling her and her sister what I thought fit for them to know of my uncle the Dean.
There is such a lot of him that is fit to know that it took some time. He was a great convenience. How glad I am I've got him. A dean, after all, is of an impressive respectability as a relation. His apron covers a multitude of family shortcomings. You can hold him up to the light, and turn him round, and view him from every angle, and there is nothing about him that doesn't bear inspection. All my relations aren't like that. One at least, though he denies it, wasn't even born in wedlock. We're not sure about the others, but we're quite sure about this one, that he wasn't born altogether as he ought to have been. Except for his obstinacy in denial he is a very attractive person. My uncle can't be got to see that he exists. This makes him not able to like my uncle.
I didn't go beyond the Dean on Saturday night, for he had a most satisfying effect on my new friends. Mrs. Barnes evidently thinks highly of deans, and Mrs. Jewks, though she said nothing, smiled very pleasantly while I held him up to view. No Lord Mayor was produced on their side. I begin to think there isn't one. I begin to think their self-respect is simply due to the consciousness that they are British. Not that Mrs. Jewks says anything about it, but she smiles while Mrs. Barnes talks on immensely patriotic lines. I gather they haven't been in England for some time, so that naturally their affection for their country has been fanned into a great glow. I know all about that sort of glow. I have had it each time I've been out of England.
August 20th.
Mrs. Barnes elaborated the story of him she speaks of always as Mr. Barnes to-day.
He was, she said, a business man, and went to the city every day, where he did things with hides: dried skins, I understood, that he bought and resold. And though Mr. Barnes drew his sustenance from these hides with what seemed to Mrs. Barnes great ease and abundance while he was alive, after his death it was found that, through no fault of his own but rather, she suggested, to his credit, he had for some time past been living on his capital. This capital came to an end almost simultaneously with Mr. Barnes, and all that was left for Mrs. Barnes to live on was the house at Dulwich, handsomely furnished, it was true, with everything of the best; for Mr. Barnes had disliked what Mrs. Barnes called fandangles, and was all for mahogany and keeping a good table. But you can't live on mahogany, said Mrs. Barnes, nor keep a good table with nothing to keep it on, so she wished to sell the house and retire into obscurity on the proceeds. Her brother-in-law, however, suggested paying guests; so would she be able to continue in her home, even if on a slightly different basis. Many people at that period were beginning to take in paying guests. She would not, he thought, lose caste. Especially if she restricted herself to real gentlefolk, who wouldn't allow her to feel her position.
It was a little difficult at first, but she got used to it and was doing very well when the war broke out. Then, of course, she had to stand by Dolly. So she gave up her house and guests, and her means were now very small; for somehow, remarked Mrs. Barnes, directly one wants to sell nobody seems to want to buy, and she had had to let her beautiful house go for very little—
'But why—' I interrupted; and pulled myself up.
I was just going to ask why Dolly hadn't gone to Mrs. Barnes and helped with the paying guests, instead of Mrs. Barnes giving them up and going to Dolly; but I stopped because I thought perhaps such a question, seeing that they quite remarkably refrain from asking me questions, might have been a little indiscreet at our present stage of intimacy. No, I can't call it intimacy,—friendship, then. No, I can't call it friendship either, yet; the only word at present is acquaintanceship.
August 21st.
The conduct of my guests is so extraordinarily discreet, their careful avoidance of curiosity, of questions, is so remarkable, that I can but try to imitate. They haven't asked me a single thing. I positively thrust the Dean on them. They make no comment on anything either, except the situation and the view. We seem to talk if not only certainly chiefly about that. We haven't even got to books yet. I still don't know about The Rosary. Once or twice when I have been alone with Mrs. Barnes she has begun to talk of Dolly, who appears to fill most of her thoughts, but each time she has broken off in the middle and resumed her praises of the situation and the view. I haven't been alone at all yet with Dolly; nor, though Mr. Barnes has been dwelt upon in detail, have I been told anything about Mr. Jewks.
August 22nd.
Impetuosity sometimes gets the better of me, and out begins to rush a question; but up to now I have succeeded in catching it and strangling it before it is complete. For perhaps my new friends have been very unhappy, just as I have been very unhappy, and they may be struggling out of it just as I am, still with places in their memories that hurt too much for them to dare to touch. Perhaps it is only by silence and reserve that they can manage to be brave.
There are no signs, though, of anything of the sort on their composed faces; but then neither, I think, would they see any signs of such things on mine. The moment as it passes is, I find, somehow a gay thing. Somebody says something amusing, and I laugh; somebody is kind, and I am happy. Just the smell of a flower, the turn of a sentence, anything, the littlest thing, is enough to make the passing moment gay to me. I am sure my guests can't tell by looking at me that I have ever been anything but cheerful; and so I, by looking at them, wouldn't be able to say that they have ever been anything but composed,—Mrs. Barnes composed and grave, Mrs. Jewks composed and smiling.
But I refuse now to jump at conclusions in the nimble way I used to. Even about Mrs. Barnes, who would seem to be an untouched monument of tranquillity, a cave of calm memories, I can no longer be sure. And so we sit together quietly on the terrace, and are as presentable as so many tidy, white-curtained houses in a decent street. We don't know what we've got inside us each of disorder, of discomfort, of anxieties. Perhaps there is nothing; perhaps my friends are as tidy and quiet inside as out. Anyhow up to now we have kept ourselves to ourselves, as Mrs. Barnes would say, and we make a most creditable show.
Only I don't believe in that keeping oneself to oneself attitude. Life is too brief to waste any of it being slow in making friends. I have a theory—Mrs. Barnes isn't the only one of us three who has theories—that reticence is a stuffy, hampering thing. Except about one's extremest bitter grief, which is, like one's extremest joy of love, too deeply hidden away with God to be told of, one should be without reserves. And if one makes mistakes, and if the other person turns out to have been unworthy of being treated frankly and goes away and distorts, it can't be helped,—one just takes the risk. For isn't anything better than distrust, and the slowness and selfish fear of caution? Isn't anything better than not doing one's fellow creatures the honour of taking it for granted that they are, women and all, gentlemen? Besides, how lonely....
August 23rd.
The sun goes on blazing, and we go on sitting in the shade in a row.
Mrs. Barnes does a great deal of knitting. She knits socks for soldiers all day. She got into this habit during the war, when she sent I don't know how many pairs a year to the trenches, and now she can't stop. I suppose these will go to charitable institutions, for although the war has left off there are, as Mrs. Jewks justly said, still legs in the world.
This remark I think came under the heading Dolly in Mrs. Barnes's mind, for she let her glance rest a moment on her sister in a kind of affectionate concern.
Mrs. Jewks hasn't said much yet, but each time she has said anything I have liked it. Usually she murmurs, almost as if she didn't want Mrs. Barnes to hear, yet couldn't help saying what she says. She too knits, but only, I think, because her sister likes to see her sitting beside her doing it, and never for long at a time. Her chief occupation, I have discovered, is to read aloud to Mrs. Barnes.
This wasn't done in my presence the first four days out of consideration for me, for everybody doesn't like being read to, Mrs. Barnes explained afterwards; but they went upstairs after lunch to their rooms,—to sleep, as I supposed, knowing how well they do that, and it was only gradually that I realised, from the monotonous gentle drone coming through the window to where I lay below on the grass, that it wasn't Mrs. Barnes giving long drawn-out counsel to Mrs. Jewks on the best way to cope with the dangers of being Dolly, but that it was Mrs. Jewks reading aloud.
After that I suggested they should do this on the terrace, where it is so much cooler than anywhere else in the afternoon; so now, reassured that it in no way disturbs me—Mrs. Barnes's politeness and sense of duty as a guest never flags for a moment—this is what happens, and it happens in the mornings also. For, says Mrs. Barnes, how much better it is to study what persons of note have said than waste the hours of life saying things oneself.
They read biographies and histories, but only those, I gather, that are not recent; and sometimes, Mrs. Barnes said, they lighten what Mrs. Jewks described in a murmur as these more solid forms of fiction by reading a really good novel.
I asked Mrs. Barnes with much interest about the novel. What were the really good ones they had read? And I hung on the answer, for here was something we could talk about that wasn't either the situation or the view and yet was discreet.
'Ah,' she said, shaking her head, 'there are very few really good novels. We don't care, of course, except for the very best, and they don't appear to be printed nowadays.'
'I expect the very best are unprintable,' murmured Mrs. Jewks, her head bent over her knitting, for it was one of the moments when she too was engaged on socks.
'There used to be very good novels,' continued Mrs. Barnes, who hadn't I think heard her, 'but of recent years they have indeed been few. I begin to fear we shall never again see a Thackeray or a Trollope. And yet I have a theory—and surely these two writers prove it—that it is possible to be both wholesome and clever.'
'I don't want to see any more Thackerays and Trollopes,' murmured Mrs. Jewks. 'I've seen them. Now I want to see something different.'
This sentence was too long for Mrs. Barnes not to notice, and she looked at me as one who should say, 'There. What did I tell you? Her name unsettles her.'
There was a silence.
'Our father,' then said Mrs. Barnes, with so great a gravity of tone that for a moment I thought she was unaccountably and at eleven o'clock in the morning going to embark on the Lord's Prayer, 'knew Thackeray. He mixed with him.'
And as I wasn't quite sure whether this was a rebuke for Dolly or information for me, I kept quiet.
As, however, Mrs. Barnes didn't continue, I began to feel that perhaps I was expected to say something. So I did.
'That,' I said, 'must have been very—'
I searched round for an enthusiastic word, but couldn't find one. It is unfortunate how I can never think of any words more enthusiastic than what I am feeling. They seem to disappear; and urged by politeness, or a desire to please, I frantically hunt for them in a perfectly empty mind. The nearest approach to one that I found this morning was Enjoyable. I don't think much of Enjoyable. It is a watery word; but it was all I found, so I said it. 'That must have been very enjoyable,' I said; and even I could hear that my voice was without excitement.
Mrs. Jewks looked at me and smiled.
'It was more than enjoyable,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'it was elevating. Dolly used to feel just as I do about it,' she added, her eye reproachfully on her sister. 'It is not Thackeray's fault that she no longer does.'
'It's only because I've finished with him,' said Mrs. Jewks apologetically. 'Now I want something different.'
'Dolly and I,' explained Mrs. Barnes to me, 'don't always see alike. I have a theory that one doesn't finish with the Immortals.'
'Would you put Thackeray—' I began diffidently.
Mrs. Barnes stopped me at once.
'Our father,' she said—again my hands instinctively wanted to fold—'who was an excellent judge, indeed a specialist if I may say so, placed him among the Immortals. Therefore I am content to leave him there.'
'But isn't that filial piety rather than—' I began again, still diffident but also obstinate.
'In any case,' interrupted Mrs. Barnes, raising her hand as though I were the traffic, 'I shall never forget the influence he and the other great writers of the period had upon the boys.'
'The boys?' I couldn't help inquiring, in spite of this being an interrogation.
'Our father educated boys. On an unusual and original system. Being devoid of the classics, which he said was all the better because then he hadn't to spend any time remembering them, he was a devoted English linguist. Accordingly he taught boys English,—foreign boys, because English boys naturally know it already, and his method was to make them minutely acquainted with the great novels,—the great wholesome novels of that period. Not a French, or Dutch, or Italian boy but went home—'
'Or German,' put in Mrs. Jewks. 'Most of them were Germans.'
Mrs. Barnes turned red. 'Let us forget them,' she said, with a wave of her hand. 'It is my earnest desire,' she continued, looking at me, 'to forget Germans.'
'Do let us,' I said politely.
'Not one of the boys,' she then went on, 'but returned to his country with a knowledge of the colloquial English of the best period, and of the noble views of that period as expressed by the noblest men, unobtainable by any other method. Our father called himself a Non-Grammarian. The boys went home knowing no rules of grammar, yet unable to talk incorrectly. Thackeray himself was the grammar, and his characters the teachers. And so was Dickens, but not quite to the same extent, because of people like Sam Weller who might have taught the boys slang. Thackeray was immensely interested when our father wrote and told him about the school, and once when he was in London he invited him to lunch.'
Not quite clear as to who was in London and which invited which, I said, 'Who?'
'It was our father who went to London,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'and was most kindly entertained by Thackeray.'
'He went because he wasn't there already,' explained Mrs. Jewks.
'Dolly means,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'that he did not live in London. Our father was an Oxford man. Not in the narrow, technical meaning that has come to be attached to the term, but in the simple natural sense of living there. It was there that we were born, and there that we grew up in an atmosphere of education. We saw it all round us going on in the different colleges, and we saw it in detail and at first hand in our own home. For we too were brought up on Thackeray and Dickens, in whom our father said we would find everything girls needed to know and nothing that, they had better not.'
'I used to have a perfect itch,' murmured Mrs. Jewks, 'to know the things I had better not.'
And Mrs. Barnes again looked at me as one who should say, 'There. What did I tell you? Such a word, too. Itch.'
There was a silence. I could think of nothing to say that wouldn't appear either inquisitive or to be encouraging Dolly.
Mrs. Barnes sits between us. This arrangement of our chairs on the grass happened apparently quite naturally the first day, and now has become one that I feel I mustn't disturb. For me to drop into the middle chair would somehow now be impossible. It is Mrs. Barnes's place. Yet I do want to sit next to Mrs. Jewks and talk to her. Or better still, go for a walk with her. But Mrs. Barnes always goes for the walks, either with or without me, but never without Mrs. Jewks. She hasn't yet left us once alone together. If anything needs fetching it is Mrs. Jewks who fetches it. They don't seem to want to write letters, but if they did I expect they would both go in to write them at the same time.
I do think, though, that we are growing a little more intimate. At least to-day we have talked of something that wasn't the view. I shouldn't be surprised if in another week, supposing the hot weather lasts so long, I shall be asking Mrs. Barnes outright what it is Dolly did that has apparently so permanently unnerved her sister.
But suppose she retaliated by asking me,—oh, there are so many things she could ask me that I couldn't answer! Except with the shameful, exposing answer of beginning very helplessly to cry....
August 24th.
Last night I ran after Mrs. Jewks just as she was disappearing into her room and said, 'I'm going to call you Dolly. I don't like Jewks. How do you spell it?'
'What—Dolly?' she asked, smiling.
'No—Jewks.'
But Mrs. Barnes came out of her bedroom and said, 'Did we forget to bid you goodnight? How very remiss of us.'
And we all smiled at each other, and went into our rooms, and shut the doors.
August 25th.
The behaviour of time is a surprising thing. I can't think how it manages to make weeks sometimes seem like minutes and days sometimes seem like years. Those weeks I was here alone seemed not longer than a few minutes. These days since my guests came seem to have gone on for months.
I suppose it is because they have been so tightly packed. Nobody coming up the path and seeing the three figures sitting quietly on the terrace, the middle one knitting, the right-hand one reading aloud, the left-hand one sunk apparently in stupor, would guess that these creatures' days were packed. Many an honest slug stirred by creditable desires has looked more animate than we. Yet the days are packed. Mine, at any rate, are. Packed tight with an immense monotony.
Every day we do exactly the same things: breakfast, read aloud; lunch, read aloud; tea, go for a walk; supper, read aloud; exhaustion; bed. How quick and short it is to write down, and how endless to live. At meals we talk, and on the walk we talk, or rather we say things. At meals the things we say are about food, and on the walk they are about mountains. The rest of the time we don't talk, because of the reading aloud. That fills up every gap; that muzzles all conversation.
I don't know whether Mrs. Barnes is afraid I'll ask questions, or whether she is afraid Dolly will start answering questions that I haven't asked; I only know that she seems to have decided that safety lies in putting an extinguisher on talk. At the same time she is most earnest in her endeavours to be an agreeable guest, and is all politeness; but so am I, most earnest for my part in my desire to be an agreeable hostess, and we are both so dreadfully polite and so horribly considerate that things end by being exactly as I would prefer them not to be.
For instance, finding Merivale—it is Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire that is being read—finding him too much like Gibbon gone sick and filled with water, a Gibbon with all the kick taken out of him, shorn of his virility and his foot-notes, yesterday I didn't go and sit on the terrace after breakfast, but took a volume of the authentic Gibbon and departed by the back door for a walk.
It is usually, I know, a bad sign when a hostess begins to use the back door, but it wasn't a sign of anything in this case except a great desire to get away from Merivale. After lunch, when, strengthened by my morning, I prepared to listen to some more of him, I found the chairs on the terrace empty, and from the window of Mrs. Barnes's room floated down the familiar muffled drone of the first four days.
So then I went for another walk, and thought. And the result was polite affectionate protests at tea-time, decorated with some amiable untruths about domestic affairs having called me away—God forgive me, but I believe I said it was the laundress—and such real distress on Mrs. Barnes's part at the thought of having driven me off my own terrace, that now so as to shield her from thinking anything so painful to her I must needs hear Merivale to the end.
'Dolly,' I said, meeting her by some strange chance alone on the stairs going down to supper—invariably the sisters go down together—'do you like reading aloud?'
I said it very quickly and under my breath, for at the bottom of the stairs would certainly be Mrs. Barnes.
'No,' she said, also under her breath.
'Then why do you do it?'
'Do you like listening?' she whispered, smiling.
'No,' I said.
'Then why do you do it?'
'Because—' I said. 'Well, because—'
She nodded and smiled. 'Yes,' she whispered, 'that's my reason too.'
August 26th.
All day to-day I have emptied myself of any wishes of my own and tried to be the perfect hostess. I have given myself up to Mrs. Barnes, and on the walk I followed where she led, and I made no suggestions when paths crossed though I have secret passionate preferences in paths, and I rested on the exact spot she chose in spite of knowing there was a much prettier one just round the corner, and I joined with her in admiring a view I didn't really like. In fact I merged myself in Mrs. Barnes, sitting by her on the mountain side in much the spirit of Wordsworth, when he sat by his cottage fire without ambition, hope or aim.
August 27th.
The weather blazes along in its hot beauty. Each morning, the first thing I see when I open my eyes is the great patch of golden light on the wall near my bed that means another perfect day. Nearly always the sky is cloudless—a deep, incredible blue. Once or twice, when I have gone quite early to my window towards the east, I have seen what looked to my sleepy eyes like a flock of little angels floating slowly along the tops of the mountains, or at any rate, if not the angels themselves, delicate bright tufts of feathers pulled out of their wings. These objects, on waking up more completely, I have perceived to be clouds; and then I have thought that perhaps that day there would be rain. But there never has been rain.
The clouds have floated slowly away to Italy, and left us to another day of intense, burning heat.
I don't believe the weather will ever break up. Not, anyhow, for a long time. Not, anyhow, before I have heard Merivale to the end.
August 28th.
In the morning when I get up and go and look out of my window at the splendid east I don't care about Merivale. I defy him. And I make up my mind that though my body may be present at the reading of him so as to avoid distressing Mrs. Barnes and driving her off the terrace—we are minute in our care not to drive each other off the terrace—my ears shall be deaf to him and my imagination shall wander. Who is Merivale, that he shall burden my memory with even shreds of his unctuous imitations? And I go down to breakfast with a fortified and shining spirit, as one who has arisen refreshed and determined from prayer, and out on the terrace I do shut my ears. But I think there must be chinks in them, for I find my mind is much hung about, after all, with Merivale. Bits of him. Bits like this.
Propertius is deficient in that light touch and exquisitely polished taste which volatilize the sensuality and flattery of Horace. The playfulness of the Sabine bard is that of the lapdog, while the Umbrian reminds us of the pranks of a clumsier and less tolerated quadruped.
This is what you write if you want to write like Gibbon, and yet remain at the same time a rector and chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons; and this bit kept on repeating itself in my head like a tune during luncheon to-day. It worried me that I couldn't decide what the clumsier and less tolerated quadruped was.
'A donkey,' said Mrs. Jewks, on my asking my guests what they thought.
'Surely yes—an ass,' said Mrs. Barnes, whose words are always picked.
'But why should a donkey be less tolerated than a lapdog?' I asked. 'I would tolerate it more. If I might tolerate only one, it would certainly be the donkey.'
'Perhaps he means a flea,' suggested Mrs. Jewks.
'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes.
'But fleas do go in for pranks, and are less tolerated than lapdogs,' said Mrs. Jewks.
'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes again.
'Except that,' I said, not heeding Mrs. Barnes for a moment in my pleasure at having got away from the usual luncheon-table talk of food, 'haven't fleas got more than four legs?'
'That's centipedes,' said Dolly.
'Then it's two legs that they've got.'
'That's birds,' said Dolly.
We looked at each other and began to laugh. It was the first time we had laughed, and once we had begun we laughed and laughed, in that foolish way one does about completely idiotic things when one knows one oughtn't to and hasn't for a long while.
There sat Mrs. Barnes, straight and rocky, with worried eyes. She never smiled; and indeed why should she? But the more she didn't smile the more we laughed,—helplessly, ridiculously. It was dreadful to laugh, dreadful to mention objects that distressed her as vulgar; and because it was dreadful and we knew it was dreadful, we couldn't stop. So was I once overcome with deplorable laughter in church, only because a cat came in. So have I seen an ill-starred woman fall a prey to unseasonable mirth at a wedding. We laughed positively to tears. We couldn't stop. I did try to. I was really greatly ashamed. For I was doing what I now feel in all my bones is the thing Mrs. Barnes dreads most,—I was encouraging Dolly.
Afterwards, when we had settled down to Merivale, and Dolly finding she had left the book upstairs went in to fetch it, I begged Mrs. Barnes to believe that I wasn't often quite so silly and didn't suppose I would be like that again.
She was very kind, and laid her hand for a moment on mine,—such a bony hand, marked all over, I thought as I looked down at it, with the traces of devotion and self-sacrifice. That hand had never had leisure to get fat. It may have had it in the spacious days of Mr. Barnes, but the years afterwards had certainly been lean ones; and since the war, since the selling of her house and the beginning of the evidently wearing occupation of what she had called standing by Dolly, the years, I understand, have been so lean that they were practically bone.
'I think,' she said, 'I have perhaps got into the way of being too serious. It is because Dolly, I consider, is not serious enough. If she were more so I would be less so, and that would be better for us both. Oh, you musn't suppose,' she added, 'that I cannot enjoy a joke as merrily as anybody.' And she smiled broadly and amazingly at me, the rockiest, most determined smile.
'There wasn't any joke, and we were just absurd,' I said penitently, in my turn laying my hand on hers. 'Forgive me. I'm always sorry and ashamed when I have behaved as though I were ten. I do try not to, but sometimes it comes upon one unexpectedly—'
'Dolly is a little old to behave as though she were ten,' said Mrs. Barnes, in sorrow rather than in anger.
'And I'm a little old too. It's very awkward when you aren't so old inside as you are outside. For years I've been trying to be dignified, and I'm always being tripped up by a kind of apparently incurable natural effervescence.'
Mrs. Barnes looked grave.
'That is what is the matter with Dolly,' she said. 'Just that. How strange that you should have met. For it isn't usual. I cannot believe it is usual. All her troubles have been caused by it. I do not, however, regard it as incurable. On the contrary—I have helped her to check it, and she is much better than she was.'
'But what are you afraid she will do now?' I asked; and Dolly, coming out with, the book under her arm and that funny little air of jauntiness that triumphs when she walks over her sobering black skirt and white cotton petticoat, prevented my getting an answer.
But I felt in great sympathy with Mrs. Barnes. And when, starting for our walk after tea, something happened to Dolly's boot—I think the heel came off—and she had to turn back, I gladly went on alone with her sister, hoping that perhaps she would continue to talk on these more intimate lines.
And so she did.
'Dolly,' she said almost immediately, almost before we had got round the turn of the path, 'is the object of my tenderest solicitude and love.'
'I know. I see that,' I said, sympathetically.
'She was the object of my love from the moment when she was laid, a new born baby, in the arms of the little ten year old girl I was then, and she became, as she grew up and developed the characteristics I associate with her name, the object of my solicitude. Indeed, of my concern.'
'I wish,' I said, as she stopped and I began to be afraid this once more was to be all and the shutters were going to be shut again, 'we might be real friends.'
'Are we not?' asked Mrs. Barnes, looking anxious, as though she feared she had failed somewhere in her duties as a guest.
'Oh yes—we are friends of course, but I meant by real friends people who talk together about anything and everything. Almost anything and everything,' I amended. 'People who tell each other things,' I went on hesitatingly. 'Most things,' I amended.
'I have a great opinion of discretion,' said Mrs. Barnes.
'I am sure you have. But don't you think that sometimes the very essence of real friendship consists in—'
'Mr. Barnes always had his own dressing-room.'
This was unexpected, and it silenced me. After a moment I said lamely, 'I'm sure he did. But you were saying about Dol—about Mrs. Jewks—'
'Yes.' Mrs. Barnes sighed. 'Well, it cannot harm you or her,' she went on after a pause, 'for me to tell you that the first thing Dolly did as soon as she was grown up was to make an impetuous marriage.'
'Isn't that rather what most of us begin with?'
'Few are so impetuous. Mine, for instance, was not. Mine was the considered union of affection with regard, entered into properly in the eye of all men, and accompanied by the good wishes of relations and friends. Dolly's—well, Dolly's was impetuous. I cannot say ill-advised, because she asked no one's advice. She plunged—it is not too strong a word, and unfortunately can be applied to some of her subsequent movements—into a misalliance, and in order to contract it she let herself down secretly at night from her bedroom window by means of a sheet.'
Mrs. Barnes paused.
'How very—how very spirited,' I couldn't help murmuring.
Indeed I believe I felt a little jealous. Nothing in my own past approaches this in enterprise. And I not only doubted if I would ever have had the courage to commit myself to a sheet, but I felt a momentary vexation that no one had ever suggested that on his account I should. Compared to Dolly, I am a poor thing.
'So you can understand,' continued Mrs. Barnes, 'how earnestly I wish to keep my sister to lines of normal conduct. She has been much punished for her departures from them. I am very anxious that nothing should be said to her that might seem—well, that might seem to be even slightly in sympathy with actions or ways of looking at life that have in the past brought her unhappiness, and can only in the future bring her yet more.'
'But why,' I asked, still thinking of the sheet, 'didn't she go out to be married through the front door?'
'Because our father would never have allowed his front door to be used for such a marriage. You forget that it was a school, and she was running away with somebody who up till a year or two previously had been one of the pupils.'
'Oh? Did she marry a foreigner?'
Mrs. Barnes flushed a deep, painful red. She is brown and weather-beaten, yet through the brownness spread unmistakeably this deep red. Obviously she had forgotten what she told me the other day about the boys all being foreigners.
'Let us not speak evil of the dead,' she said with awful solemnity; and for the rest of the walk would talk of nothing but the view.
But in my room to-night I have been thinking. There are guests and guests, and some guests haunt one. These guests are that kind. They wouldn't haunt me so much if only we could be really friends; but we'll never be really friends as long as I am kept from talking to Dolly and between us is fixed the rugged and hitherto unscaleable barrier of Mrs. Barnes. Perhaps to-morrow, if I have the courage, I shall make a great attempt at friendship,—at what Mrs. Barnes would call being thoroughly indiscreet. For isn't it senseless for us three women, up here alone together, to spend the precious days when we might be making friends for life hiding away from each other? Why can't I be told outright that Dolly married a German? Evidently she did; and if she could bear it I am sure I can. Twenty years ago it might have happened to us all. Twenty years ago I might have done it myself, except that there wasn't the German living who would have got me to go down a sheet for him. And anyhow Dolly's German is dead; and doesn't even a German leave off being one after he is dead? Wouldn't he naturally incline, by the sheer action of time, to dissolve into neutrality? It doesn't seem humane to pursue him into the recesses of eternity as an alien enemy. Besides, I thought the war was over.
For a long while to-night I have been leaning out of my window thinking. When I look at the stars I don't mind about Germans. It seems impossible to. I believe if Mrs. Barnes would look at them she wouldn't be nearly so much worried. It is a very good practice, I think, to lean out of one's window for a space before going to bed and let the cool darkness wash over one. After being all day with people, how blessed a thing it is not to be with them. The night to-night is immensely silent, and I've been standing so quiet, so motionless that I would have heard the smallest stirring of a leaf. But nothing is stirring. The air is quite still. There isn't a sound. The mountains seem to be brooding over a valley that has gone to sleep.
August 29th.
Antoine said to me this morning that he thought if ces dames—so he always speaks of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly—were going to stay any time, perhaps an assistant for Mrs. Antoine had better be engaged; because Mrs. Antoine might otherwise possibly presently begin to find the combination of heat and visitors a little—
'Of course,' I said. 'Naturally she might. I regret, Antoine, that I did not think of this. Why did you not point it out sooner? I will go myself this very day and search for an assistant.'
Antoine said that such exertions were not for Madame, and that it was he who would search for the assistant.
I said he couldn't possibly leave the chickens and the cow, and that it was I who would search for the assistant.
So that is what I have been doing all day—having a most heavenly time wandering from village to village along the mountain side, my knapsack over my arm and freedom in my heart. The knapsack had food in it and a volume of Crabbe, because it was impossible to tell how long the search might last, and I couldn't not be nourished. I explained to my guests how easily I mightn't be back till the evening, I commended them to the special attentiveness of the Antoines, and off I went, accompanied by Mrs. Barnes's commiseration that I should have to be engaged on so hot a day in what she with felicitous exactness called a domestic pursuit, and trying very hard not to be too evidently pleased.
I went to the villages that lie in the direction of my lovely place of larches, and having after some search found the assistant I continued on towards the west, walking fast, almost as if people would know I had accomplished what I had come out for, and might catch me and take me home again.
As I walked it positively was quite difficult not to sing. Only hostesses know this pure joy. To feel so deep and peculiar an exhilaration you must have been having guests and still be having them. Before my guests came I might and did roam about as I chose, but it was never like to-day, never with that holiday feeling. Oh, I have had a wonderful day! Everything was delicious. I don't remember having smelt the woods so good, and there hasn't ever been anything like the deep cool softness of the grass I lay on at lunch-time. And Crabbe the delightful,—why don't people talk more about Crabbe? Why don't they read him more? I have him in eight volumes; none of your little books of selections, which somehow take away all his true flavour, but every bit of him from beginning to end. Nobody ever made so many couplets that fit in to so many occasions of one's life. I believe I could describe my daily life with Mrs. Barnes and Dolly entirely in couplets from Crabbe. It is the odd fate of his writings to have turned by the action of time from serious to droll. He decomposes, as it were, hilariously. I lay for hours this afternoon enjoying his neat couplets. He enchants me. I forget time when I am with him. It was Crabbe who made me late for supper. But he is the last person one takes out for a walk with one if one isn't happy. Crabbe is a barometer of serenity. You have to be in a cloudless mood to enjoy him. I was in that mood to-day. I had escaped.
Well, I have had my outing, I have had my little break, and have come back filled with renewed zeal to my guests. When I said good-night to-night I was so much pleased with everything, and felt so happily and comfortably affectionate, that I not only kissed Dolly but embarked adventurously on an embrace of Mrs. Barnes.
She received it with surprise but kindliness.
I think she considered I was perhaps being a little impulsive.
I think perhaps I was.
August 30th.
In the old days before the war this house was nearly always full of friends, guests, for they were invited, but they never were in or on my mind as guests, and I don't remember ever feeling that I was a hostess. The impression I now have of them is that they were all very young. But of course they weren't; some were quite as old as Mrs. Barnes, and once or twice came people even older. They all, however, had this in common, that whatever their age was when they arrived, by the time they left they were not more than twenty.
I can't explain this. It couldn't only have been the air, invigorating and inspiriting though it is, because my present guests are still exactly the same age as the first day. That is, Mrs. Barnes is. Dolly is of no age—she never was and never will be forty; but Mrs. Barnes is just as firmly fifty as she was a fortnight ago, and it only used to take those other guests a week to shed every one of their years except the first twenty.
Is it this static, rock-like quality in Mrs. Barnes that makes her remain so unchangeably a guest, that makes her unable to develope into a friend? Why must I, because she insists on remaining a guest, be kept so firmly in my proper place as hostess? I want to be friends. I feel as full of friendliness as a brimming cup. Why am I not let spill some of it? I should love to be friends with Dolly, and I would like very much to be friends with Mrs. Barnes. Not that I think she and I would ever be intimate in the way I am sure Dolly and I would be after ten minutes together alone, but we might develope a mutually indulgent affection. I would respect her prejudices, and she would forgive me that I have so few, and perhaps find it interesting to help me to increase them.
But the anxious care with which Mrs. Barnes studies to be her idea of a perfect guest forces me to a corresponding anxious care to be her idea of a perfect hostess. I find it wearing. There is no easy friendliness for us, no careless talk, no happy go-as-you-please and naturalness. And ought a guest to be so constantly grateful? Her gratitude is almost a reproach. It makes me ashamed of myself; as if I were a plutocrat, a profiteer, a bloated possessor of more than my share, a bestower of favours—of all odious things to be! Now I perceive that I never have had guests before, but only friends. For the first time I am really entertaining; or rather, owing to the something in Mrs. Barnes that induces in me a strange submissiveness, a strange acceptance of her ordering of our days, I am for the first time, not only in my own house, but in any house that I can remember where I have stayed, being entertained.
What is it about Mrs. Barnes that makes Dolly and me sit so quiet and good? I needn't ask: I know. It is because she is single-minded, unselfish, genuinely and deeply anxious for everybody's happiness and welfare, and it is impossible to hurt such goodness. Accordingly we are bound hand and foot to her wishes, exactly as if she were a tyrant.
Dolly of course must be bound by a thousand reasons for gratitude. Hasn't Mrs. Barnes given up everything for her? Hasn't she given up home, and livelihood, and country and friends to come and be with her? It is she who magnanimously bears the chief burden of Dolly's marriage. Without having had any of the joys of Siegfried—I can't think Dolly would mutter a name in her sleep that wasn't her husband's—she has spent these years of war cheerfully accepting the results of him, devoting herself to the forlorn and stranded German widow, spending her life, and what substance she has, in keeping her company in the dreary pensions of a neutral country, unable either to take her home to England or to leave her where she is by herself.
Such love and self-sacrifice is a very binding thing. If these conjectures of mine are right, Dolly is indeed bound to Mrs. Barnes, and not to do everything she wished would be impossible. Naturally she wears those petticoats, and those long, respectable black clothes: they are Mrs. Barnes's idea of how a widow should be dressed. Naturally she goes for excursions in the mountains with an umbrella: it is to Mrs. Barnes both more prudent and more seemly than a stick. In the smallest details of her life Dolly's gratitude must penetrate and be expressed. Yes; I think I understand her situation. The good do bind one very heavily in chains.
To an infinitely less degree Mrs. Barnes's goodness has put chains on me too. I have to walk very carefully and delicately among her feelings. I could never forgive myself if I were to hurt anyone kind, and if the kind person is cast in an entirely different mould from oneself, has different ideas, different tastes, a different or no sense of fun, why then God help one,—one is ruled by a rod of iron.
Just the procession each morning after breakfast to the chairs and Merivale is the measure of Dolly's and my subjection. First goes Dolly with the book, then comes Mrs. Barnes with her knitting, and then comes me, casting my eyes about for a plausible excuse for deliverance and finding none that wouldn't hurt. If I lag, Mrs. Barnes looks uneasily at me with her, 'Am I driving you off your own terrace?' look; and once when I lingered indoors on the pretext of housekeeping she came after me, anxiety on her face, and begged me to allow her to help me, for it is she and Dolly, she explained, who of course cause the extra housekeeping, and it distressed her to think that owing to my goodness in permitting them to be here I should be deprived of the leisure I would otherwise be enjoying.
'In your lovely Swiss home,' she said, her face puckered with earnestness. 'On your summer holiday. After travelling all this distance for the purpose.'
'Dear Mrs. Barnes—' I murmured, ashamed; and assured her it was only an order I had to give, and that I was coming out immediately to the reading aloud.
August 31st.
This morning I made a great effort to be simple.
Of course I will do everything in my power to make Mrs. Barnes happy,—I'll sit, walk, be read to, keep away from Dolly, arrange life for the little time she is here in the way that gives her mind most peace; but why mayn't I at the same time be natural? It is so natural to me to be natural. I feel so uncomfortable, I get such a choked sensation of not enough air, if I can't say what I want to say. Abstinence from naturalness is easily managed if it isn't to last long; every gracefulness is possible for a little while. But shut up for weeks together in the close companionship of two other people in an isolated house on a mountain one must, sooner or later, be natural or one will, sooner or later, die.
So this morning I went down to breakfast determined to be it. More than usually deep sleep had made me wake up with a feeling of more than usual enterprise. I dressed quickly, strengthening my determination by many good arguments, and then stood at the window waiting for the bell to ring.
At the first tinkle of the bell I hurry downstairs, because if I am a minute late, as I have been once or twice, I find my egg wrapped up in my table napkin, the coffee and hot milk swathed in a white woollen shawl Mrs. Barnes carries about with her, a plate over the butter in case there should be dust, a plate over the honey in case there should be flies, and Mrs. Barnes and Dolly, carefully detached from the least appearance of reproach or waiting, at the other end of the terrace being tactfully interested in the view.
This has made me be very punctual. The bell tinkles, and I appear. I don't appear before it tinkles, because of the peculiar preciousness of all the moments I can legitimately spend in my bedroom; but, if I were to, I would find Mrs. Barnes and Dolly already there.
I don't know when they go down, but they are always there; and always I am greeted with the politest solicitude from Mrs. Barnes as to how I slept. This of course draws forth a corresponding solicitude from me as to how Mrs. Barnes slept; and the first part of breakfast is spent in answers to these inquiries, and in the eulogies to which Mrs. Barnes then proceeds of the bed, and the pure air, that make the satisfactoriness of her answers possible.
From this she goes on to tell me how grateful she and Dolly are for my goodness. She tells me this every morning. It is like a kind of daily morning prayer. At first I was overcome, and, not knowing how to ward off such repeated blows of thankfulness, stumbled about awkwardly among protests and assurances. Now I receive them in silence, copying the example of the heavenly authorities; but, more visibly embarrassed than they, I sheepishly smile.
After the praises of my goodness come those of the goodness of the coffee and the butter, though this isn't any real relief to me, because their goodness is so much tangled up in mine. I am the Author of the coffee and the butter; without me they wouldn't be there at all.
Dolly, while this is going on, says nothing but just eats her breakfast. I think she might help me out a little, seeing that it happens every morning and that she must have noticed my store of deprecations is exhausted.
This morning, having made up my mind to be natural, I asked her straight out why she didn't talk.
She was in the middle of her egg, and Mrs. Barnes was in the middle of praising the great goodness of the eggs, and therefore, inextricably, of my great goodness, so that there was no real knowing where the eggs left off and I began; and taking the opportunity offered by a pause of coffee-drinking on Mrs. Barnes's part, I said to Dolly, 'Why do you not talk at breakfast?'
'Talk?' repeated Dolly, looking up at me with a smile.
'Yes. Say things. How are we ever to be friends if we don't say things? Don't you want to be friends, Dolly?'
'Of course,' said Dolly, smiling.
Mrs. Barnes put her cup down hastily. 'But are we not—' she began, as I knew she would.
'Real friends,' I interrupted. 'Why not,' I said, 'let us have a holiday from Merivale to-day, and just sit together and talk. Say things,' I went on, still determined to be natural, yet already a little nervous. 'Real things.'
'But has the reading—is there any other book you would pref—do you not care about Merivale?' asked Mrs. Barnes, in deep concern.
'Oh yes,' I assured her, leaving off being natural for a moment in order to be polite, 'I like him very much indeed. I only thought—I do think—it would be pleasant for once to have a change. Pleasant just to sit and talk. Sit in the shade and—oh well, say things.'
'Yes,' said Dolly. 'I'd love to.'
'We might tell each other stories, like the people in the Earthly Paradise. But real stories. Out of our lives.'
'Yes,' said Dolly again. 'Yes. I'd love to.'
'We shall be very glad, I am sure,' said Mrs. Barnes politely, 'to listen to any stories you may like to tell us.'
'Ah, but you must tell some too—we must play fair.'
'I'd love to,' said Dolly again, her dimple flickering.
'Surely we—in any case Dolly and I—are too old to play at anything,' said Mrs. Barnes with dignity.
'Not really. You'll like it once you've begun. And anyhow I can't play by myself, can I,' I said, still trying to be gay and simple. 'You wouldn't want me to be lonely, would you.'
But I was faltering. Mrs. Barnes's eye was on me. Impossible to go on being gay and simple beneath that eye.
I faltered more and more. 'Sometimes I think,' I said, almost timidly, 'that we're wasting time.'
'Oh no, do you really?' exclaimed Mrs. Barnes anxiously. 'Do you not consider Merivale—' (here if I had been a man I would have said damn Merivale and felt better)—'very instructive? Surely to read a good history can never be wasting time? And he is not heavy. Surely you do not find him heavy? His information is always imparted picturesquely, remarkably so. And though one may be too old for games one is fortunately never too old for instruction.'
'I don't feel too old for games,' said Dolly.
'Feeling has nothing to do with reality,' said Mrs. Barnes sternly, turning on her.
'I only thought,' I said, 'that to-day we might talk together instead of reading. Just for once—just for a change. If you don't like the idea of telling stories out of our lives let us just talk. Tell each other what we think of things—of the big things like—well, like love and death for instance. Things,' I reassured her, 'that don't really touch us at this moment.'
'I do not care to talk about love and death,' said Mrs. Barnes frostily.
'But why?'
'They are most unsettling.'
'But why? We would only be speculating—'
She held up her hand. 'I have a horror of the word. All speculation is abhorrent to me. My brother-in-law said to me, Never speculate.'
'But didn't he mean in the business sense?'
'He meant it, I am certain, in every sense. Physically and morally.'
'Well then, don't let us speculate. Let us talk about experiences. We've all had them. I am sure it would be as instructive as Merivale, and we might perhaps—perhaps we might even laugh a little. Don't you think it would be pleasant to—to laugh a little?'
'I'd love to,' said Dolly, her eyes shining.
'Suppose, instead of being women, we were three men—'
Mrs. Barnes, who had been stiffening for some minutes, drew herself up at this.
'I am afraid I cannot possibly suppose that,' she said.
'Well, but suppose we were—'
'I do not wish to suppose it,' said Mrs. Barnes.
'Well, then, suppose it wasn't us at all, but three men here, spending their summer holidays together can't you imagine how they would talk?'
'I can only imagine it if they were nice men,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'and even so but dimly.'
'Yes. Of course. Well, let us talk together this morning as if we were nice men,—about anything and everything. I can't think,' I finished plaintively, 'why we shouldn't talk about anything and everything.'
Dolly looked at me with dancing eyes.
Mrs. Barnes sat very straight. She was engaged in twisting the honey-spoon round and round so as to catch its last trickling neatly. Her eyes were fixed on this, and if there was a rebuke in them it was hidden from me.
'You must forgive me,' she said, carefully winding up the last thread of honey, 'but as I am not a nice man I fear I cannot join in. Nor, of course, can Dolly, for the same reason. But I need not say,' she added earnestly, 'that there is not the slightest reason why you, on your own terrace, shouldn't, if you wish, imagine yourself to be a nice—'
'Oh no,' I broke in, giving up. 'Oh no, no. I think perhaps you are right. I do think perhaps it is best to go on with Merivale.'
We finished breakfast with the usual courtesies.
I didn't try to be natural any more.