Dolly sat up.
‘There now,’ she said. ‘That’s over. They look as blind and dim as a woman whose lover has left her. Have you ever,’ she asked, turning her head to me still lying pillowed on Mrs. Barnes’s grapes — the basket had a lid— ‘seen a woman whose lover has left her?’
‘Of course I have. Everybody has been left by somebody.’
‘I mean just left.’
‘Yes. I’ve seen that too.’
‘They look exactly like that,’ said Dolly, nodding towards the crocuses. ‘Smitten colourless. Light gone, life gone, beauty gone, — dead things in a dead world. I don’t,’ she concluded, shaking her head slowly, ‘hold with love.’
At this I sat up too, and began to tidy my hair and put my hat on again. ‘It’s cold,’ I said, ‘now that the sun is gone. Let us go home.’
Dolly didn’t move.
‘Do you?’ she asked.
‘Do I what?’
‘Hold with love.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Whatever happens?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Whatever its end is?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I won’t even say yes and no, as the cautious Charlotte Brontë did when she was asked if she liked London. I won’t be cautious in love. I won’t look at all the reasons for saying no. It’s a glorious thing to have had. It’s splendid to have believed all one did believe.’
‘Even when there never was a shred of justification for the belief?’ asked Dolly, watching me.
‘Yes,’ I said; and began passionately to pin my hat on, digging the pins into my head in my vehemence. ‘Yes. The thing is to believe. Not go round first cautiously on tiptoe so as to be sure before believing and trusting that your precious belief and trust are going to be safe. Safe! There’s no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk — to believe, and to risk everything for your belief. And if there wasn’t anything there, if it was you all by yourself who imagined the beautiful kind things in the other one, the wonderful, generous, beautiful kind things, what does it matter? They weren’t there, but you for once were capable of imagining them. You were up among the stars for a little, you did touch heaven. And when you’ve had the tumble down again and you’re scrunched all to pieces and are just a miserable heap of blood and brokenness, where’s your grit that you should complain? Haven’t you seen wonders up there past all telling, and had supreme joys? It’s because you were up in heaven that your fall is so tremendous and hurts so. What you’ve got to do is not to be killed. You’ve got at all costs to stay alive, so that for the rest of your days you may go gratefully, giving thanks to God that once ... you see,’ I finished suddenly, ‘I’m a great believer in saying thank you.’
‘Oh,’ said Dolly, laying her hand on my knee and looking at me very kindly, ‘I’m so glad!’
‘Now what are you glad about, Dolly?’ I asked, turning on her and giving my hat a pull straight. And I added, my chin in the air, ‘Those dead women of yours in their dead world, indeed! Ashamed of themselves — that’s what they ought to be.’
‘You’re cured,’ said Dolly.
‘Cured,’ I echoed.
I stared at her severely. ‘Oh — I see,’ I said. ‘You’ve been drawing me out.’
‘Of course I have. I couldn’t bear to think of you going on being unhappy — hankering—’
‘Hankering?’
Dolly got up. ‘Now let’s go home,’ she said. ‘It’s my turn to carry the basket. Yes, it’s a horrid word. Nobody should ever hanker. I couldn’t bear it if you did. I’ve been afraid that perhaps—’
‘Hankering!’
I got up too and stood very straight.
‘Give me those grapes,’ said Dolly.
‘Hankering!’ I said again.
And the rest of the way home, along the cool path where the dusk was gathering among the bushes and the grass was damp now beneath our dusty shoes, we walked with heads held high — hankering indeed! — two women surely in perfect harmony with life and the calm evening, women of wisdom and intelligence, of a proper pride and self-respect, kind women, good women, pleasant, amiable women, contented women, pleased women; and at the last corner, the last one between us and Mrs. Barnes’s eye on the terrace, Dolly stopped, put down the basket, and laying both her arms about my shoulders kissed me.
‘Cured,’ she said, kissing me on one side of my face. ‘Safe,’ she said, kissing me on the other.
And we laughed, both of us, confident and glad. And I went up to my room confident and glad, for if I felt cured and Dolly was sure I was cured, mustn’t it be true?
Hankering indeed.
September 21st.
But I’m not cured. For when I was alone in my room last night and the house was quiet with sleep, a great emptiness came upon me, and those fine defiant words of mine in the afternoon seemed poor things, poor dwindled things, like kaisers in their night-gowns. For hours I lay awake with only one longing: to creep back, — back into my shattered beliefs, even if it were the littlest corner of them. Surely there must be some corner of them still, with squeezing, habitable? I’m so small. I need hardly any room. I’d curl up. I’d fit myself in. And I wouldn’t look at the ruin of the great splendid spaces I once thought I lived in, but be content with a few inches. Oh, it’s cold, cold, cold, left outside of faith like this....
For hours I lay awake; and being ashamed of myself did no good, because love doesn’t mind about being ashamed.
Evening.
All day I’ve slunk about in silence, watching for a moment alone with Dolly. I want to tell her that it was only one side of me yesterday, and that there’s another, and another — oh, so many others; that I meant every word I said, but there are other things, quite different, almost opposite things that I also mean; that it’s true I’m cured, but only cured in places, and over the rest of me, the rest that is still sick, great salt waves of memories wash every now and then and bite and bite....
But Dolly, who seems more like an unruffled pool of clear water to-day than ever, hasn’t left Mrs. Barnes’s side; making up, I suppose, for being away from her all yesterday.
Towards tea-time I became aware that Mrs. Barnes was watching me with a worried face, the well-known worried, anxious face, and I guessed she was wondering if Dolly had been indiscreet on our picnic and told me things that had shocked me into silence. So I cast about in my mind for something to reassure her, and, as I thought fortunately, very soon remembered the grapes.
‘I’m afraid I ate too many grapes yesterday,’ I said, when next I caught her worried, questioning eye.
Her face cleared. I congratulated myself. But I didn’t congratulate myself long; for Mrs. Barnes, all motherly solicitude, inquired if by any chance I had swallowed some of the stones; and desiring to reassure her to the utmost as to the reason of my thoughtfulness, I said that very likely I had; from the feel of things; from the kind of heaviness.... And she, before I could stop her, had darted into the kitchen — these lean women are terribly nimble — and before I could turn round or decide what to do next, for by this time I was suspicious, she was back again with Mrs. Antoine and all the dreadful paraphernalia of castor oil. And I had to drink it. And it seemed hard that because I had been so benevolently desirous to reassure Mrs. Barnes I should have to drink castor oil and be grateful to her as well.
‘This is petty,’ I thought, sombrely eyeing the bottle, — I alluded in my mind to Fate.
But as I had to drink the stuff I might as well do it gallantly. And so I did; tossing it off with an air, after raising the glass and wishing the onlookers health and happiness in what I tried to make a pleasant speech.
Mrs. Barnes, Mrs. Antoine and Dolly stood watching me spellbound. A shudder rippled over them as the last drops slid down.
Then I came up here.
September 22nd.
Let me draw your attention, O ancient woman sitting at the end of my life, to the colour of the trees and bushes i
n this place you once lived in, in autumns that for you are now so far away. Do you remember how it was like flames, and the very air was golden? The hazel-bushes, do you remember them? Along the path that led down from the terrace to the village? How each separate one was like a heap of light? Do you remember how you spent to-day, the 22nd of September, 1919, lying on a rug in the sun close up under one of them, content to stare at the clear yellow leaves against the amazing sky? You ve forgotten, I daresay. You re only thinking of your next meal and being put to bed. But you did spend a day to-day worth remembering. You were very content. You were exactly balanced in the present, without a single oscillation towards either the past, a period you hadn’t then learned to regard with the levity for which you are now so remarkable, or to the future, which you at that time, however much the attitude may amuse you now, thought of with doubt and often with fear. Mrs. Barnes let you go to-day, having an appreciation of the privileges due to the dosed, and you took a cushion and a rug — active, weren’t you — and there you lay the whole blessed day, the sun warm on your body, enfolded in freshness, thinking of nothing but calm things. Rather like a baby you were; a baby on its back sucking its thumb and placidly contemplating the nursery ceiling. But the ceiling was the great sky, with, two eagles ever so far up curving in its depths, and when they sloped their wings the sun caught them and they flashed.
It seems a pity to forget these things. They make up, after all, the real preciousness of life. But I’m afraid my writing them down won’t make you feel any joy in them again, you old thing. You’ll be too brittle and rheumaticky to be able to think of lying on the grass for a whole day except with horror. I’m beginning to dislike the idea of being forced into your old body; and, on reflection, your philosophical detachment, your incapacity to do anything but laugh at the hopes and griefs and exultations and disappointments and bitter pains of your past, seems to me very like the fixed grimace of fleshless death.
September 23rd.
Mrs. Barnes can’t, however hard she tries, be with us absolutely continuously. Gaps in her attendance do inevitably occur. There was one of them to-day; and I seized it to say to Dolly across the momentarily empty middle chair — we were on the terrace and the reading was going on,— ‘I’ve not seen you alone since the grape day. I wanted to tell you that I’m not cured. I had a relapse that very night. I meant all I said to you, but I meant too, all I said to myself while I was having the relapse. You’d better know the worst. I simply intolerably hankered.’
Dolly let Merivale fall on her lap, and gazed pensively at the distant mountains across the end of the valley.
‘It’s only the last growlings,’ she said after a moment.
‘Growlings?’ I echoed.
‘It’s only the last growlings and mutterings of a thunderstorm that’s going away. Whatever it was that happened to you — you’ve never told me, you know, but I’m quite good at somehow knowing — was very like a thunderstorm. A violent one. It was rather brief, it raged incredibly, and then it rumbled off. Though you were flattened out while it was going on, like some otherwise promising crop—’
‘Oh,’ I protested; but I had to laugh.
‘ — still when it took itself off you missed it. I wouldn’t talk like this,’ she said, turning her sweet eyes to me, ‘I wouldn’t make fun if I weren’t sure you are on the road, anyhow, to being cured. Presently you’ll reach the stage when you begin to realise that falling out of love is every bit as agreeable as falling in. It is, you know. It’s a wonderful feeling, that gradual restoration to freedom and one’s friends.’
‘You don’t understand after all,’ I said.
Dolly said she did.
‘No. Because you talk of falling out of love. What has happened to me is far worse than that. That? That’s nothing. It’s what everybody is doing all the time. What has happened to me is that I’ve lost my faith. It has been like losing God, after years of trust in Him. I believed with all my heart. And I am desolate.’
But Dolly only shook her head. ‘You’re not as desolate as you were,’ she said. ‘Nobody who loves all this as you do—’ and she turned up her face to the warm sun, blinking her eyes,— ‘can go on being desolate long. Besides — really, you know — look at that.’
And she pointed to the shining mountains across the valley’s eastern end.
Yes. That is eternal. Beauty is eternal. When I look at that, when I am in the clear mood that, looking at the mountains, really sees them, all the rest, the bewilderment and crying out, the clinging and the hankering, seem indeed unworthy. Imagine, with the vast landscape of the splendid world spread out before you, not moving freely in it on and on rejoicing and praising God, but sitting quite still lamenting in one spot, stuck in sediment.
‘Did you say sentiment?’ asked Dolly.
‘Did I say anything?’ I asked in surprise, turning my head to her. ‘I thought I was thinking.’
‘You were doing it aloud, then,’ said Dolly. ‘Was the word sentiment?’
‘No. Sediment.’
‘They’re the same thing. I hate them both.’
September 24th.
What will happen to Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when I go back to England? The weather was a little fidgety to-day and yesterday, a little troubled, like a creature that stirs fretfully in its sleep, and it set me thinking. For once the change really begins at this time of the year it doesn’t stop any more. It goes on through an increasing unpleasantness winds, rain, snow, blizzards — till, after Christmas, the real winter begins, without a cloud, without a stir of the air, its short days flooded with sunshine, its dawns and twilights miracles of colour.
All that fuss and noise of snow-flurries and howling winds is only the preparation for the great final calm. The last blizzard, tearing away over the mountains, is like an ugly curtain rolling up; and behold a new world. One night while you are asleep the howls and rattlings suddenly leave off, and in the morning you look out of the window and for the first time for weeks you see the mountains at the end of the valley clear against the eastern sky, clothed in all new snow from head to foot, and behind them the lovely green where the sunrise is getting ready. I know, because I was obliged to be here through the October and November and December of the year the house was built and was being furnished. They were three most horrid months; and the end of them was heaven.
But what will become of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when the weather does finally break up?
I can’t face the picture of them spending a gloomy, half-warmed winter down in some cheap pension; an endless winter of doing without things, of watching every franc. They’ve been living like that for five years now. Where does Dolly get her sweet serenity from? I wish I could take them to England with me. But Dolly can’t go to England. She is German. She is doomed. And Mrs. Barnes is doomed too, inextricably tied up in Dolly’s fate. Of course I am going to beg them to stay on here, but it seems a poor thing to offer them, to live up here in blizzards that I run away from myself. It does seem a very doubtful offer of hospitality. I ought, to make it real, to stay on with them. And I simply couldn’t. I do believe I would die if I had three months shut up with Mrs. Barnes in blizzards. Let her have everything — the house, the Antoines, all, all that I possess; but only let me go.
My spirit faints at the task before me, at the thought of the persuasions and the protests that will have to be gone through. And Dolly; how can I leave Dolly? I shall be haunted in London by visions of these two up here, the wind raging round the house, the snow piled up to the bedroom windows, sometimes cut off for a whole week from the village, because only in a pause in the blizzard can the little black figures that are peasants come sprawling over the snow with their shovels to dig one out. I know because I have been through it that first winter. But it was all new to us then, and we were a care-free, cheerful group inside the house, five people who loved each other and talked about anything they wanted to, besides being backed reassuringly by a sack of lentils and several sacks of potatoes that Antoin
e, even then prudent and my right hand, had laid in for just this eventuality. We made great fires, and brewed strange drinks. We sat round till far into the nights telling ghost stories. We laughed a good deal, and said just what we felt like saying. But Mrs. Barnes and Dolly? Alone up here, and undug out? It will haunt me.
September 25th.
She hasn’t noticed the weather yet. At least, she has drawn no deductions from it. Evidently she thinks its fitfulness, its gleams of sunshine and its uneasy cloudings over, are just a passing thing and that it soon will settle down again to what it was before. After all, she no doubt says to herself, it is still September. But Antoine knows better, and so do I, and it is merely hours now before the break-up will be plain even to Mrs. Barnes. Then the combats de générosité will begin. I can’t, I can’t stop here so that Mrs. Barnes may be justified to herself in stopping too on the ground of cheering my solitude. I drank the castor oil solely that her mind might be at rest, but I can’t develope any further along lines of such awful magnanimity. I would die.
September 26th.
To-day I smoked twelve cigarettes, only that the house should smell virile. They’re not as good as a pipe for that, but they’re better than the eternal characterless clean smell of unselfish women.
After each cigarette Mrs. Barnes got up unobtrusively and aired the room. Then I lit another.
Also I threw the cushions on the floor before flinging myself on the sofa in the hall; and presently Mrs. Barnes came and tidied them.
Then I threw them down again.
Towards evening she asked me if I was feeling quite well. I wasn’t, because of the cigarettes, but I didn’t tell her that. I said I felt very well indeed. Naturally I couldn’t explain to her that I had only been trying to pretend there was a man about.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 238
