Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  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 m
ust, 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 r
eason 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.

  September 1st.

  Dolly forgot herself this morning.

  On the first of the month I pay the bills. Antoine reminded me last month that this used to be my practice before the war, and I remember how languidly I roused myself from my meditations on the grass to go indoors and add up figures. But to-day I liked it. I went in cheerfully.

  ‘This is my day for doing the accounts,’ I said to Mrs. Barnes, as she was about to form the procession to the chairs. ‘They take me most of the morning, so I expect we won’t see each other again till luncheon.’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Mrs. Barnes sympathetically, ‘how very tiresome for you. Those terrible settling up days. How well I know them, and how I used to dread them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dolly —

  Reines Glück geniesst doch nie

  Wer zahlen soll und weiss nicht wie.

  Poor Kitty. We know all about that, don’t we.’ And she put her arm round her sister.

  Dolly had forgotten herself.

  I thought it best not to linger, but to go in quickly to my bills.

  Her accent was perfect. I know enough German to know that.

  September 2nd.

  We’ve been a little strained all day in our relations because of yesterday. Dolly drooped at lunch, and for the first time didn’t smile. Mrs. Barnes, I think, had been rebuking her with more than ordinary thoroughness. Evidently Mrs. Barnes is desperately anxious I shouldn’t know about Siegfried. I wonder if there is any way of delicately introducing Germans into the conversation, and conveying to her that I have guessed about Dolly’s husband and don’t mind him a bit. Why should I mind somebody else’s husband? A really nice woman only minds her own. But I know of no two subjects more difficult to talk about tactfully than Germans and husbands; and when both are united, as in this case, my courage rather fails.