O schwöre nicht und küsse nur
And I thought it sensible advice.
September 5th.
The weather after all hasn’t broken. We have had the thunderstorm and the one bad day, and then it cleared up. It didn’t clear up back to heat again — this year there will be no more heat — but to a kind of cool, pure gold. All day yesterday it was clearing up, and towards evening there came a great wind and swept the sky clear during the night of everything but stars; and when I woke this morning there was the familiar golden patch on the wall again, and I knew the day was to be beautiful.
And so it has been, with the snow come much lower down the mountains, and the still air very fresh. Things sparkle; and one feels like some bright bubble of light oneself. Actually even Mrs. Barnes has almost been like that, — has been, for her, astonishingly, awe-inspiringly gay.
‘Ah,’ she said, standing on the terrace after breakfast, drawing in deep draughts of air, ‘now I understand the expression so frequently used in descriptions of scenery. This air indeed is like champagne.’
‘It does make one feel very healthy,’ I said.
There were several things I wanted to say instead of this, things suggested by her remark, but I refrained. I mean to be careful now to let my communications with Mrs. Barnes be Yea, yea and Nay, nay — that is, straightforward and brief, with nothing whatever in them that might directly or indirectly lead to the encouragement of Dolly. Dolly has been trying to catch me alone. She has tried twice since Mrs. Barnes yesterday at tea told her I had asked them to stay on, but I have avoided her.
‘Healthy?’ repeated Mrs. Barnes. ‘It makes one feel more than healthy. It goes to one’s head. I can imagine it turning me quite dizzy — quite turning my head.’
And then she actually asked me a riddle — Mrs. Barnes asked a riddle, at ten o’clock in the morning, asked me, a person long since callous to riddles and at no time since six years old particularly appreciative of them.
Of course I answered wrong. Disconcerted, I impetuously hazarded Brandy as the answer, when it should have been Whisky; but really I think it was wonderful to have got even so near the right answer as Brandy. I won’t record the riddle. It was old in Mrs. Barnes’s youth, for she told me she had it from her father, who, she said, could enjoy a joke as heartily as she can herself.
But what was so surprising was that the effect of the crisp, sunlit air on Mrs. Barnes should be to engender riddles. It didn’t do this to my pre-war guests. They grew young, but not younger than twenty. Mrs. Barnes to-day descended to the age of bibs. I never could have believed it of her. I never could have believed she would come so near what I can only call an awful friskiness. And it wasn’t just this morning, in the first intoxication of the splendid new air; it has gone on like it all day. On the mountain slopes, slippery now and difficult to walk on because of the heavy rain of the thunderstorm, might have been seen this afternoon three figures, two black ones and a white one, proceeding for a space in a rather wobbly single file, then pausing in an animated group, then once more proceeding. When they paused it was because Mrs. Barnes had thought of another riddle. Dolly was very quick at the answers, — so quick that I suspected her of having been brought up on these very ones, as she no doubt was, but I cut a lamentable figure. I tried to make up for my natural incapacity by great goodwill. Mrs. Barnes’s spirits were too rare and precious, I felt, not to be welcomed; and having failed in answers I desperately ransacked my memory in search of questions, so that I could ask riddles too.
But by a strange perversion of recollection I could remember several answers and not their questions. In my brain, on inquiry, were fixed quite firmly things like this, — obviously answers to what once had been riddles.
Because his tail comes out of his head.
So did the other donkey.
He took a fly and went home.
Orleans.
Having nothing else to offer Mrs. Barnes I offered her these, and suggested she should supply the questions.
She thought this way of dealing with riddles subversive and difficult. Dolly began to laugh. Mrs. Barnes, filled with the invigorating air, actually laughed too. It was the first time I have heard her laugh. I listened with awe. Evidently she laughs very rarely, for Dolly looked so extraordinarily pleased; evidently her doing it made to-day memorable, for Dolly’s face, turned to her sister in a delighted surprise, had the expression on it that a mother’s has when her offspring suddenly behaves in a way unhoped for and gratifying.
So there we stood, gesticulating gaily on the slippery slope.
This is a strange place. Its effects are incalculable. I suppose it is because it is five thousand feet up, and has so great a proportion of sunshine.
September 6th.
There were letters this morning from England that wiped out all the gaiety of yesterday; letters that reminded me. It was as if the cold mist had come back again, and blotted out the light after I had hoped it had gone for good. It was as if a weight had dropped down again on my heart, suffocating it, making it difficult to breathe, after I had hoped it was lifted off for ever. I feel sick. Sick with the return of the familiar pain, sick with fear that I am going to fall back hopelessly into it. I wonder if I am. Oh, I had such hope that I was better! Shall I ever get quite well again? Won’t it at best, after every effort, every perseverance in struggle, be just a more or less skilful mending, a more or less successful putting together of broken bits? I thought I had been growing whole. I thought I wouldn’t any longer wince. And now these letters....
Ridiculous, hateful and ridiculous, to be so little master of one’s own body that one has to look on helplessly at one’s hands shaking.
I want to forget. I don’t want to be reminded. It is my one chance of safety, my one hope of escape. To forget — forget till I have got my soul safe back again, really my own again, no longer a half destroyed thing. I call it my soul. I don’t know what it is. I am very miserable.
It is details that I find so difficult to bear. As long as in my mind everything is one great, unhappy blur, there is a chance of quietness, of gradual creeping back to peace. But details remind me too acutely, flash back old anguish too sharply focussed. I oughtn’t to have opened the letters till I was by myself. But it pleased me so much to get them. I love getting letters. They were in the handwriting of friends. How could I guess, when I saw them on the breakfast-table, that they would innocently be so full of hurt? And when I had read them, and I picked up my cup and tried to look as if nothing had happened and I were drinking coffee like anybody else, my silly hand shook so much that Dolly noticed it.
Our eyes met.
I couldn’t get that wretched cup back on to its saucer again without spilling the coffee. If that is how I still behave, what has been the good of being here? What has the time been but wasted? What has the cure been but a failure?
I have come up to my room. I can’t stay downstairs. It would be unbearable this morning to sit and be read to. But I must try to think of an excuse, quickly. Mrs. Barnes may be up any minute to ask — oh, I am hunted!
It is a comfort to write this. To write does make one in some strange way less lonely. Yet — having to go and look at oneself in the glass for companionship, — isn’t that to have reached the very bottom level of loneliness?
Evening.
The direct result of those letters has been to bring Dolly and me at last together.
She came down to the kitchen-garden after me, where I went this morning when I had succeeded in straightening myself out a little. On the way I told Mrs. Barnes, with as tranquil a face as I could manage, that I had arrangements to discuss with Antoine, and so, I was afraid, would for once miss the reading.
Antoine I knew was working in the kitchen-garden, a plot of ground hidden from the house at the foot of a steep descent, and I went to him and asked to be allowed to help. I said I would do anything, — dig, weed, collect slugs, anything at all, but he must let me work. Work with my hands out of doors
was the only thing I felt I could bear to-day. It wasn’t the first time, I reflected, that peace has been found among cabbages.
Antoine demurred, of course, but did at last consent to let me pick red currants. That was an easy task, and useful as well, for it would save Lisette the assistant’s time, who would otherwise presently have to pick them. So I chose the bushes nearest to where he was digging, because I wanted to be near some one who neither talked nor noticed, some one alive, some one kind and good who wouldn’t look at me, and I began to pick these strange belated fruits, finished and forgotten two months ago in the valley.
Then I saw Dolly coming down the steps cut in the turf. She was holding up her long black skirt. She had nothing on her head, and the sun shone in her eyes and made her screw them up as she stood still for a moment on the bottom step searching for me. I saw all this, though I was stooping over the bushes.
Then she came and stood beside me.
‘You oughtn’t to be here,’ I said, going on picking and not looking at her.
‘I know,’ said Dolly.
‘Then hadn’t you better go back?’
‘Yes. But I’m not going to.’
I picked in silence.
‘You’ve been crying,’ was what she said next.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Perhaps not with your eyes, but you have with your heart.’
At this I felt very much like Mrs. Barnes; very much like what Mrs. Barnes must have felt when I tried to get her to be frank.
‘Do you know what your sister said to me the other day?’ I asked, busily picking. ‘She said she has a great opinion of discretion.’
‘Yes,’ said Dolly. ‘But I haven’t.’
‘And I haven’t either,’ I was forced to admit.
‘Well then,’ said Dolly.
I straightened myself, and we looked at each other. Her eyes have a kind of sweet radiance. Siegfried must have been pleased when he saw her coming down the sheet into his arms.
‘You mustn’t tell me anything you don’t quite want to,’ said Dolly, her sweet eyes smiling, ‘but I couldn’t see you looking so unhappy and not come and — well, stroke you.’
‘There isn’t anything to tell,’ I said, comforted by the mere idea of being stroked.
‘Yes there is.’
‘Not really. It’s only that once — oh well, what’s the good? I don’t want to think of it — I want to forget.’
Dolly nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
‘You see I came here to get cured by forgetting, and I thought I was cured. And this morning I found I wasn’t, and it has — and it has disappointed me.’
‘You musn’t cry, you know,’ said Dolly gently. ‘Not in the middle of picking red currants. There’s the man—’
She glanced at Antoine, digging.
I snuffled away my tears without the betrayal of a pocket handkerchief, and managed to smile at her.
‘What idiots we go on being,’ I said ruefully.
‘Oh — idiots!’
Dolly made a gesture as of including the whole world.
‘Does one ever grow up?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t.’
‘But do you think one ever learns to bear pain without wanting to run crying bitterly to one’s mother?’
‘I think it’s difficult. It seems to take more time,’ she added smiling, ‘than I’ve yet had, and I’m forty. You know I’m forty?’
‘Yes. That is, I’ve been told so, but it hasn’t been proved.’
‘Oh, I never could prove anything,’ said Dolly.
Then she put on an air of determination that would have alarmed Mrs. Barnes, and said, ‘There are several other things that I am that you don’t know, and as I’m here alone with you at last I may as well tell you what they are. In fact I’m not going away from these currant bushes till I have told you.’
‘Then,’ I said, ‘hadn’t you better help me with the currants while you tell?’ And I lifted the basket across and put it on the ground between us.
Already I felt better. Comforted, cheered by Dolly’s mere presence and the sweet understanding that seems to shine out from her.
She turned up her sleeves and plunged her arms into the currant bushes. Luckily currants don’t have thorns, for if it had been a gooseberry bush she would have plunged her bare arms in just the same.
‘You have asked us to stay on,’ she began, ‘and it isn’t fair that you shouldn’t know exactly what you are in for.’
‘If you’re going to tell, me how your name is spelt,’ I said, ‘I’ve guessed that already. It is Juchs.’
‘Oh, you’re clever!’ exclaimed Dolly unexpectedly.
‘Well, if that’s clever,’ I said modestly, ‘I don’t know what you would say to some of the things I think of.’
Dolly laughed. Then she looked serious again, and tugged at the currants in a way that wasn’t very good for the bush.
‘Yes. His name was Juchs,’ she said. ‘Kitty always did pronounce it Jewks. It wasn’t the war. It wasn’t camouflage. She thought it was the way. So did the other relations in England. That is when they pronounced it at all, which I should think wasn’t ever.’
‘You mean they called him Siegfried,’ I said.
Dolly stopped short in her picking to look at me in surprise. ‘Siegfried?’ she repeated, her arrested hands full of currants.
‘That’s another of the things I’ve guessed,’ I said proudly. ‘By sheer intelligently putting two and two together.’
‘He wasn’t Siegfried,’ said Dolly.
‘Not Siegfried?’
It was my turn to stop picking and look surprised.
‘And in your sleep — ? And so affectionately — ?’ I said.
‘Siegfried wasn’t Juchs, he was Bretterstangel,’ said Dolly. ‘Did I say his name that day in my sleep? Dear Siegfried.’ And her eyes, even while they rested on mine became softly reminiscent.
‘But Dolly — if Siegfried wasn’t your husband, ought you to have — well, do you think it was wise to be dreaming of him?’
‘But he was my husband.’
I stared.
‘But you said your husband was Juchs,’ I said.
‘So he was,’ said Dolly.
‘He was? Then why — I’m fearfully slow, I know, but do tell me — if Juchs was your husband why wasn’t he called Siegfried?’
‘Because Siegfried’s name was Bretterstangel. I began with Siegfried.’
There was a silence. We stood looking at each other, our hands full of currants.
Then I said, ‘Oh.’ And after a moment I said, ‘I see.’ And after another moment I said, ‘You began with Siegfried.’
I was greatly taken aback. The guesses which had been arranged so neatly in my mind were swept into confusion.
‘What you’ve got to realise,’ said Dolly, evidently with an effort, ’is that I kept on marrying Germans. I ought to have left off at Siegfried. I wish now I had. But one gets into a habit—’
‘But,’ I interrupted, my mouth I think rather open, ‘you kept on — ?’
‘Yes,’ said Dolly, holding herself very straight and defiantly, ‘I did keep on, and that’s what I want you to be quite clear about before we settle down to stay here indefinitely. Kitty can’t stay if I won’t. I do put my foot down sometimes, and I would about this. Poor darling — she feels desperately what I’ve done, and I try to help her to keep it quiet with ordinary people as much as I can — oh, I’m always letting little bits out! But I can’t, I won’t, not tell a friend who so wonderfully invites us—’
‘You’re not going to begin being grateful?’ I interrupted quickly.
‘You’ve no idea,’ Dolly answered irrelevantly, her eyes wide with wonder at her past self, ‘how difficult it is not to marry Germans once you’ve begun.’
‘But — how many?’ I got out.
‘Oh, only two. It wasn’t their number so much. It was their quality.’
‘What — Junkers?’
‘Junkers? Would you mind more if they had been? Do you mind very much anyhow?’
‘I don’t mind anything. I don’t mind your being technically German a scrap. All I think is that it was a little — well, perhaps a little excessive to marry another German when you had done it once already. But then I’m always rather on the side of frugality. I do definitely prefer the few instead of the many and the little instead of the much.’
‘In husbands as well?’
‘Well yes — I think so.’
Dolly sighed.
‘I wish I had been like that,’ she said. ‘It would have saved poor Kitty so much.’
She dropped the currants she held in her hands slowly bunch by bunch into the basket.
‘But I don’t see,’ I said, ‘what difference it could make to Kitty. I mean, once you had started having German husbands at all, what did it matter one more or less? And wasn’t the second one d — I mean, hadn’t he left off being alive when the war began? So I don’t see what difference it could make to Kitty.’
‘But that’s just what you’ve got to realise,’ said Dolly, letting the last bunch of currants drop out of her hand into the basket.
She looked at me, and I became aware that she was slowly turning red. A very delicate flush was slowly spreading over her face, so delicate that for a moment I didn’t see what it was that was making her look more and more guilty, more and more like a child who has got to confess — but an honourable, good child, determined that it will confess.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘that I’ve lived in Germany for years and years.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve guessed that.’
‘And it’s different from England.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘So I understand.’
‘The way they see things. Their laws.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Dolly was finding it difficult to say what she had to say. I thought it might help her if I didn’t look at her, so I once more began to pick currants. She mechanically followed my example.
‘Kitty,’ she said, as we both stooped busily over the same bush, ‘thinks what I did too dreadful. So did all our English relations. It’s because you may think so too that I’ve got to tell you. Then you can decide whether you really want me here or not.’
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 236
