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.
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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 da
y 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.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 233
