‘Monsieur et Madame se refroidiront,’ said the woman, turning round and drawing her shawl closer over her chest as a gust of chilly wind swept over the terrace.
They were honeymooners, poor creatures, and therefore one had patience; but even honeymooners oughtn’t to wish to embrace in a cold wind on an exposed terrace of a château round which they were being conducted by a woman who was in a hurry to return to the preparation of her Sunday dinner. For such purposes hotels were provided, and the shelter of a comfortable warm room. She had supposed them to be père et fille when first she admitted them, but was soon aware of their real relationship. ‘Il doit être bien riche,’ had been her conclusion.
‘Come along, come along,’ said Wemyss, getting up quickly, for he too felt the gust of cold wind. ‘Let’s finish the château or we’ll be late for lunch. I wish they hadn’t preserved so many of these places — one would have been quite enough to show us the sort of thing.’
‘But we needn’t go and look at them all,’ said Lucy.
‘Oh yes we must. We’ve arranged to.’
‘But Everard — —’ began Lucy, following after him as he followed after the conductress, who had a way of darting out of sight round corners.
‘This woman’s like a lizard,’ panted Wemyss, arriving round a corner only to see her disappear through an arch. ‘Won’t we be happy when it’s time to go back to England and not have to see any more sights.’
‘But why don’t we go back now, if you feel like it?’ asked Lucy, trotting after him as he on his big legs pursued the retreating conductress, and anxious to show him, by eagerness to go sooner to The Willows than was arranged, that she wasn’t being morbid.
‘Why, you know we can’t leave before the 3rd of April,’ said Wemyss, over his shoulder. ‘It’s all settled.’
‘But can’t it be unsettled?’
‘What, and upset all the plans, and arrive home before my birthday?’ He stopped and turned round to stare at her. ‘Really, my dear — —’ he said.
She had discovered that my dear was a term of rebuke.
‘Oh yes — of course,’ she said hastily, ‘I forgot about your birthday.’
At that Wemyss stared at her harder than ever; incredulously, in fact. Forgot about his birthday? Lucy had forgotten? If it had been Vera, now — but Lucy? He was deeply hurt. He was so much hurt that he stood quite still, and the conductress was obliged, on discovering that she was no longer being followed, to wait once more for the honeymooners; which she did, clutching her shawl round her abundant French chest and shivering.
What had she said, Lucy hurriedly asked herself, nipping over her last words in her mind, for she had learned by now what he looked like when he was hurt. Oh yes, — the birthday. How stupid of her. But it was because birthdays in her family were so unimportant, and nobody had minded whether they were remembered or not.
‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said earnestly, laying her hand on his breast. ‘Of course I hadn’t forgotten anything so precious. It only had — well, you know what even the most wonderful things do sometimes — it — it had escaped my memory.’
‘Lucy! Escaped your memory? The day to which you owe your husband?’
Wemyss said this with such an exaggerated solemnity, such an immense pomposity, that she thought he was in fun and hadn’t really minded about the birthday at all; and, eager to meet every mood of his, she laughed. Relieved, she was so unfortunate as to laugh merrily.
To her consternation, after a moment’s further stare he turned his back on her without a word and walked on.
Then she realised what she had done, that she had laughed — oh, how dreadful! — in the wrong place, and she ran after him and put her arm through his, and tried to lay her cheek against his sleeve, which was difficult because of the way their paces didn’t match and also because he took no notice of her, and said, ‘Baby — baby — were his dear feelings hurt, then?’ and coaxed him.
But he wouldn’t be coaxed. She had wounded him too deeply, — laughing, he said to himself, at what was to him the most sacred thing in life, the fact that he was her husband, that she was his wife.
‘Oh, Everard,’ she murmured at last, withdrawing her arm, giving up, ‘don’t spoil our day.’
Spoil their day? He? That finished it.
He didn’t speak to her again till night. Then, in bed, after she had cried bitterly for a long while, because she couldn’t make out what really had happened, and she loved him so much, and wouldn’t hurt him for the world, and was heart-broken because she had, and anyhow was tired out, he at last turned to her and took her to his arms again and forgave her.
‘I can’t live,’ sobbed Lucy, ‘I can’t live — if you don’t go on loving me — if we don’t understand — —’
‘My little Love,’ said Wemyss, melted by the way her small body was shaking in his arms, and rather frightened, too, at the excess of her woe. ‘My little Love don’t. You mustn’t. Your Everard loves you, and you mustn’t give way like this. You’ll be ill. Think how miserable you’d make him then.’
And in the dark he kissed away her tears, and held her close till her sobbing quieted down; and presently, held close like that, his kisses shutting her smarting eyes, she now the baby comforted and reassured, and he the soothing nurse, she fell asleep, and for the first time since her marriage slept all night.
XV
Early in their engagement Wemyss had expounded his theory to Lucy that there should be the most perfect frankness between lovers, while as for husband and wife there oughtn’t to be a corner anywhere about either of them, mind, body, or soul, which couldn’t be revealed to the other one.
‘You can talk about everything to your Everard,’ he assured her. ‘Tell him your innermost thoughts, whatever they may be. You need no more be ashamed of telling him than of thinking them by yourself. He is you. You and he are one in mind and soul now, and when he is your husband you and he will become perfect and complete by being one in body as well. Everard — Lucy. Lucy — Everard. We shan’t know where one ends and the other begins. That, little Love, is real marriage. What do you think of it?’
Lucy thought so highly of it that she had no words with which to express her admiration, and fell to kissing him instead. What ideal happiness, to be for ever removed from the fear of loneliness by the simple expedient of being doubled; and who so happy as herself to have found the exactly right person for this doubling, one she could so perfectly agree with and understand? She felt quite sorry she had nothing in her mind in the way of thoughts she was ashamed of to tell him then and there, but there wasn’t a doubt, there wasn’t a shred of anything a little wrong, not even an unworthy suspicion. Her mind was a chalice filled only with love, and so clear and bright was the love that even at the bottom, when she stirred it up to look, there wasn’t a trace of sediment.
But marriage — or was it sleeplessness? — completely changed this, and there were perfect crowds of thoughts in her mind that she was thoroughly ashamed of. Remembering his words, and whole-heartedly agreeing that to be able to tell each other everything, to have no concealments, was real marriage, the day after her wedding she first of all reminded him of what he had said, then plunged bravely into the announcement that she’d got a thought she was ashamed of.
Wemyss pricked up his ears, thinking it was something interesting to do with sex, and waited with an amused, inquisitive smile. But Lucy in such matters was content to follow him, aware of her want of experience and of the abundance of his, and the thought that was worrying her only had to do with a waiter. A waiter, if you please.
Wemyss’s smile died away. He had had occasion to reprimand this waiter at lunch for gross negligence, and here was Lucy alleging he had done so without any reason that she could see, and anyhow roughly. Would he remove the feeling of discomfort she had at being forced to think her own heart’s beloved, the kindest and gentlest of men, hadn’t been kind and gentle but unjust, by explaining?
Well, that was at the ver
y beginning. She soon learned that a doubt in her mind was better kept there. If she brought it out to air it and dispel it by talking it over with him, all that happened was that he was hurt, and when he was hurt she instantly became perfectly miserable. Seeing, then, that this happened about small things, how impossible it was to talk with him of big things; of, especially, her immense doubt in regard to The Willows. For a long while she was sure he was bearing her feeling in mind, since it couldn’t have changed since Christmas, and that when she arrived there she would find that he had had everything altered and all traces of Vera’s life there removed. Then, when he began to talk about The Willows, she found that such an idea as alterations hadn’t entered his head. She was to sleep in the very room that had been his and Vera’s, in the very bed. And positively, so far was it from true that she could tell him every thought and talk everything over with him, when she discovered this she wasn’t able to say more than that hesitating remark on the château terrace at Amboise about supposing he was going to change his bedroom.
Yet The Willows haunted her, and what a comfort it would have been to tell him all she felt and let him help her to get rid of her growing obsession by laughing at her. What a comfort if, even if he had thought her too silly and morbid to be laughed at, he had indulged her and consented to alter those rooms. But one learns a lot on a honeymoon, Lucy reflected, and one of the things she had learned was that Wemyss’s mind was always made up. There seemed to be no moment when it was in a condition of becoming, and she might have slipped in a suggestion or laid a wish before him; his plans were sprung upon her full fledged, and they were unalterable. Sometimes he said, ‘Would you like —— ?’ and if she didn’t like, and answered truthfully, as she answered at first before she learned not to, there was trouble. Silent trouble. A retiring of Wemyss into a hurt aloofness, for his question was only decorative, and his little Love should instinctively, he considered, like what he liked; and there outside this aloofness, after efforts to get at him with fond and anxious questions, she sat like a beggar in patient distress, waiting for him to emerge and be kind to her.
Of course as far as the minor wishes and preferences of every day went it was all quite easy, once she had grasped the right answer to the question, ‘Would you like?’ She instantly did like. ‘Oh yes — very much!’ she hastened to assure him; and then his face continued content and happy instead of clouding with aggrievement. But about the big things it wasn’t easy, because of the difficulty of getting the right flavour of enthusiasm into her voice, and if she didn’t get it in he would put his finger under her chin and turn her to the light and repeat the question in a solemn voice, — precursor, she had learned, of the beginning of the cloud on his face.
How difficult it was sometimes. When he said to her, ‘You’ll like the view from your sitting-room at The Willows,’ she naturally wanted to cry out that she wouldn’t, and ask him how he could suppose she would like what was to her a view for ever associated with death? Why shouldn’t she be able to cry out naturally if she wanted to, to talk to him frankly, to get his help to cure herself of what was so ridiculous by laughing at it with him? She couldn’t laugh all alone, though she was always trying to; with him she could have, and so have become quite sensible. For he was so much bigger than she was, so wonderful in the way he had triumphed over diseased thinking, and his wholesomeness would spread over her too, a purging, disinfecting influence, if only he would let her talk, if only he would help her to laugh. Instead, she found herself hurriedly saying in a small, anxious voice, ‘Oh yes — very much!’
‘Is it possible,’ she thought, ‘that I am abject?’
Yes, she was extremely abject, she reflected, lying awake at night considering her behaviour during the day. Love had made her so. Love did make one abject, for it was full of fear of hurting the beloved. The assertion of the Scriptures that perfect love casteth out fear only showed, seeing that her love for Everard was certainly perfect, how little the Scriptures really knew what they were talking about.
Well, if she couldn’t tell him the things she was feeling, why couldn’t she get rid of the sorts of feelings she couldn’t tell him, and just be wholesome? Why couldn’t she be at least as wholesome about going to that house as Everard? If anybody was justified in shrinking from The Willows it was Everard, not herself. Sometimes Lucy would be sure that deep in his character there was a wonderful store of simple courage. He didn’t speak of Vera’s death, naturally he didn’t wish to speak of that awful afternoon, but how often he must think of it, hiding his thoughts even from her, bearing them altogether alone. Sometimes she was sure of this, and sometimes she was equally sure of the very opposite. From the way he looked, the way he spoke, from those tiny indications that one somehow has noticed without knowing that one has noticed and that are so far more revealing and conclusive than any words, she sometimes was sure he really had forgotten. But this was too incredible. She couldn’t believe it. What had perhaps happened, she thought, was that in self-defence, for the preservation of his peace, he had made up his mind never to think of Vera. Only by banishing her altogether from his mind would he be safe. Yet that couldn’t be true either, for several times on the honeymoon he had begun talking of her, of things she had said, of things she had liked, and it was she, Lucy, who stopped him. She shrank from hearing anything about Vera. She especially shrank from hearing her mentioned casually. She was ready to brace herself to talk about her if it was to be a serious talk, because she wanted to help and comfort him whenever the remembrance of her death arose to torment him, but she couldn’t bear to hear her mentioned casually. In a way she admired this casualness, because it was a proof of the supreme wholesomeness Everard had attained to by sheer courageous determination, but even so she couldn’t help thinking that she would have preferred a little less of just this kind of wholesomeness in her beloved. She might be too morbid, but wasn’t it possible to be too wholesome? Anyhow she shrank from the intrusion of Vera into her honeymoon. That, at least, ought to be kept free from her. Later on at The Willows....
Lucy fought and fought against it, but always at the back of her mind was the thought, not looked at, slunk away from, but nevertheless fixed, that there at The Willows, waiting for her, was Vera.
XVI
Those who go to Strorley, and cross the bridge to the other side of the river, have only to follow the towpath for a little to come to The Willows. It can also be reached by road, through a white gate down a lane that grows more and more willowy as it gets nearer the river and the house, but is quite passable for carts and even for cars, except when there are floods. When there are floods this lane disappears, and when the floods have subsided it is black and oozing for a long time afterwards, with clouds of tiny flies dancing about in it if the weather is at all warm, and the shoes of those who walk stick in it and come off, and those who drive, especially if they drive a car, have trouble. But all is well once a second white gate is reached, on the other side of which is a gravel sweep, a variety of handsome shrubs, nicely kept lawns, and The Willows. There are no big trees in the garden of The Willows, because it was built in the middle of meadows where there weren’t any, but all round the iron railings of the square garden — the house being the centre of the square — and concealing the wire netting which keeps the pasturing cows from thrusting their heads through and eating the shrubs, is a fringe of willows. Hence its name.
‘A house,’ said Wemyss, explaining its name to Lucy on the morning of their arrival, ‘should always be named after whatever most insistently catches the eye.’
‘Then oughtn’t it to have been called The Cows?’ asked Lucy; for the meadows round were strewn thickly as far as she could see with recumbent cows, and they caught her eye much more than the tossing bare willow branches.
‘No,’ said Wemyss, annoyed. ‘It ought not have been called The Cows.’
‘No — of course I didn’t mean that,’ she said hastily.
Lucy was nervous, and said what first came into her head, a
nd had been saying things of this nature the whole journey down. She didn’t want to, she knew he didn’t like it, but she couldn’t stop.
They had just arrived, and were standing on the front steps while the servants unloaded the fly that had brought them from the station, and Wemyss was pointing out what he wished her to look at and admire from that raised-up place before taking her indoors. Lucy was glad of any excuse that delayed going indoors, that kept her on the west side of the house, furthest away from the terrace and the library window. Indoors would be the rooms, the unaltered rooms, the library past whose window..., the sitting-room at the top of the house out of whose window..., the bedroom she was going to sleep in with the very bed.... It was too miserably absurd, too unbalanced of her for anything but shame and self-contempt, how she couldn’t get away from the feeling that indoors waiting for her would be Vera.
It was a grey, windy morning, with low clouds scurrying across the meadows. The house was raised well above flood level, and standing on the top step she could see how far the meadows stretched beyond the swaying willow hedge. Grey sky, grey water, green fields, — it was all grey and green except the house, which was red brick with handsome stone facings, and made, in its exposed position unhidden by any trees, a great splotch of vivid red in the landscape.
‘Like blood,’ said Lucy to herself; and was immediately ashamed.
‘Oh, how bracing!’ she cried, spreading out her arms and letting the wind blow her serge wrap out behind her like a flag. It whipped her skirt round her body, showing its slender pretty lines, and the parlourmaid, going in and out with the luggage, looked curiously at this small juvenile new mistress. ‘Oh, I love this wind — don’t take me indoors yet — —’
Wemyss was pleased that she should like the wind, for was it not by the time it reached his house part, too, of his property? His face, which had clouded a little because of The Cows, cleared again.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 253
