The Enchanted April

by Elisabeth Von Arnim

  She sat quite still, staring straight in front of her. Strange that in this place she did not want to pray. She who had prayed so constantly at home didn’t seem able to do it here at all. The first morning she had merely thrown up a brief thank you to Heaven on getting out of bed, and had gone straight to the window to see what everything looked like – thrown up the thank you as carelessly as a ball, and thought no more about it. That morning, remembering this and ashamed, she had knelt down with determination – but perhaps determination was bad for prayers, for she had been unable to think of a thing to say. And as for her bedtime prayers, on neither of the nights had she said a single one. She had forgotten them. She had been so much absorbed in other thoughts that she had forgotten them – and, once in bed, she was asleep and whirling along among bright, thin, swift dreams before she had so much time as to stretch herself out.

  What had come over her? Why had she let go the anchor of prayer? And she had difficulty, too, in remembering her poor, in remembering even that there were such things as poor. Holidays, of course, were good, and were recognized by everybody as good, but ought they so completely to blot out – to make such havoc of – the realities? Perhaps it was healthy to forget her poor – with all the greater gusto would she go back to them. But it couldn’t be healthy to forget her prayers, and still less could it be healthy not to mind.

  Rose did not mind. She knew she did not mind. And, even worse, she knew she did not mind not minding. In this place she was indifferent to both the things that had filled her life and made it seem as if it were happy for years. Well, if only she could rejoice in her wonderful new surroundings, have that much at least to set against the indifference, the letting go – but she could not. She had no work, she did not pray, she was left empty.

  Lotty had spoilt her day that day, as she had spoilt her day the day before – Lotty, with her invitation to her husband, with her suggestion that she too should invite hers. Having flung Frederick into her mind again the day before, Lotty had left her – for the whole afternoon she had left her alone with her thoughts. Since then they had been all of Frederick. Where at Hampstead he came to her only in her dreams, here he left her dreams free and was with her during the day instead. And again that morning, as she was struggling not to think of him, Lotty had asked her, just before disappearing singing down the path, if she had written yet and invited him, and again he was flung into her mind, and she wasn’t able to get him out.

  How could she invite him? It had gone on so long, their estrangement, such years – she would hardly know what words to use, and besides, he would not come. Why should he come? He didn’t care about being with her. What could they talk about? Between them was the barrier of his work and her religion. She could not – how could she, believing as she did in purity, in responsibility for the effect of one’s actions on others – bear his work, bear living by it; and he, she knew, had at first resented, and then been merely bored by, her religion. He had let her slip away, he had given her up, he no longer minded, he accepted her religion indifferently, as a settled fact. Both it and she – Rose’s mind, becoming more luminous in the clear light of April at San Salvatore, suddenly saw the truth – bored him.

  Naturally when she saw this, when that morning it flashed upon her for the first time, she did not like it – she liked it so little that for a space the whole beauty of Italy was blotted out. What was to be done about it? She could not give up believing in good and not liking evil, and it must be evil to live entirely on the proceeds of adulteries, however dead and distinguished they were. Besides, if she did, if she sacrificed her whole past, her bringing up, her work for the last ten years, would she bore him less? Rose felt right down at her very roots that if you have once thoroughly bored somebody it is next to impossible to unbore him. Once a bore, always a bore – certainly, she thought, to the person originally bored.

  Then, thought she, looking out to sea through eyes grown misty, better cling to her religion. It was better – she hardly noticed the reprehensibleness of her thought – than nothing. But oh, she wanted to cling to something tangible, to love something living, something that one could hold against one’s heart, that one could see and touch and do things for. If her poor baby hadn’t died… babies didn’t get bored with one, it took them a long while to grow up and find one out. And perhaps one’s baby never did find one out – perhaps one would always be to it, however old and bearded it grew, somebody special, somebody different from everyone else, and, if for no other reason, precious in that one could never be repeated.

  Sitting with dim eyes looking out to sea, she felt an extraordinary yearning to hold something of her very own tight to her bosom. Rose was slender, and as reserved in figure as in character, yet she felt a queer sensation of – how could she describe it? – bosom. There was something about San Salvatore that made her feel all bosom. She wanted to gather to her bosom, to comfort and protect, soothing the dear head that should lie on it with softest strokings and murmurs of love. Frederick, Frederick’s child – come to her, pillowed on her, because they were unhappy, because they had been hurt… They would need her then, if they had been hurt; they would let themselves be loved then, if they were unhappy.

  Well, the child was gone, would never come now, but perhaps Frederick – some day – when he was old and tired…

  Such were Mrs Arbuthnot’s reflections and emotions that first day at San Salvatore by herself. She went back to tea dejected as she had not been for years. San Salvatore had taken her carefully built-up semblance of happiness away from her, and given her nothing in exchange. Yes – it had given her yearnings in exchange, this ache and longing, this queer feeling of bosom, but that was worse than nothing. And she who had learnt balance, who never at home was irritated but always able to be kind, could not, even in her dejection, that afternoon endure Mrs Fisher’s assumption of the position as hostess at tea.

  One would have supposed that such a little thing would not have touched her, but it did. Was her nature changing? Was she to be not only thrown back on long-stifled yearnings after Frederick, but also turned into somebody who wanted to fight over little things? After tea, when both Mrs Fisher and Lady Caroline had disappeared again – it was quite evident that nobody wanted her – she was more dejected than ever, overwhelmed by the discrepancy between the splendour outside her, the warm, teeming beauty and self-sufficiency of nature, and the blank emptiness of her heart.

  Then came Lotty, back to dinner, incredibly more freckled, exuding the sunshine she had been collecting all day, talking, laughing, being tactless, being unwise, being without reticence – and Lady Caroline, so quiet at tea, woke up to animation, and Mrs Fisher was not so noticeable, and Rose was beginning to revive a little, for Lotty’s spirits were contagious as she described the delights of her day – a day which might easily to anyone else have had nothing in it but a very long and very hot walk and sandwiches, when she suddenly said, catching Rose’s eye, “Letter gone?”

  Rose flushed. This tactlessness…

  “What letter?” asked Scrap, interested. Both her elbows were on the table and her chin was supported in her hands, for the nut stage had been reached, and there was nothing for it but to wait in as comfortable a position as possible till Mrs Fisher had finished cracking.

  “Asking her husband here,” said Lotty.

  Mrs Fisher looked up. Another husband? Was there to be no end to them? Nor was this one, then, a widow either – but her husband was no doubt a decent, respectable man, following a decent, respectable calling. She had little hope of Mr Wilkins – so little, that she had refrained from enquiring what he did.

  “Has it?” persisted Lotty, as Rose said nothing.

  “No,” said Rose.

  “Oh, well – tomorrow then,” said Lotty.

  Rose wanted to say no again to this. Lotty would have in her place, and would, besides, have expounded all her reasons. But she could not turn herself inside out like t
hat and invite any and everybody to come and look. How was it that Lotty, who saw so many things, didn’t see stuck on her heart, and seeing keep quiet about it, the sore place that was Frederick?

  “Who is your husband?” asked Mrs Fisher, carefully adjusting another nut between the crackers.

  “Who should he be,” said Rose quickly, roused at once by Mrs Fisher to irritation, “except Mr Arbuthnot?”

  “I mean, of course, what is Mr Arbuthnot?”

  And Rose, gone painfully red at this, said after a tiny pause, “My husband.”

  Naturally Mrs Fisher was incensed. She couldn’t have believed it of this one, with her decent hair and gentle voice, that she too should be impertinent.

  14

  That first week the wisteria began to fade, and the flowers of the Judas tree and peach trees fell off and carpeted the ground with rose colour. Then all the freesias disappeared, and the irises grew scarce. And then, while these were clearing themselves away, the double banksia roses came out, and the big summer roses suddenly flaunted gorgeously on the walls and trellises. Fortune’s Yellow was one of them – a very beautiful rose. Presently the tamarisk and the daphnes were at their best, and the lilies at their tallest. By the end of the week the fig trees were giving shade, the plum blossom was out among the olives, the modest weigelas appeared in their fresh pink clothes, and on the rocks sprawled masses of thick-leaved, star-shaped flowers, some vivid purple and some a clear, pale lemon.

  By the end of the week, too, Mr Wilkins arrived – even as his wife had foreseen he would, so he did. And there were signs almost of eagerness about his acceptance of her suggestion, for he had not waited to write a letter in answer to hers, but had telegraphed.

  That, surely, was eager. It showed, Scrap thought, a definite wish for reunion – and watching his wife’s happy face, and aware of her desire that Mellersh should enjoy his holiday, she told herself that he would be a very unusual fool should he waste his time bothering about anybody else. “If he isn’t nice to her,” Scrap thought, “he shall be taken to the battlements and tipped over.” For, by the end of the week, she and Mrs Wilkins had become Caroline and Lotty to each other, and were friends.

  Mrs Wilkins had always been friends, but Scrap had struggled not to be. She had tried hard to be cautious, but how difficult was caution with Mrs Wilkins! Free herself from every vestige of it, she was so entirely unreserved, so completely expansive, that soon Scrap, almost before she knew what she was doing, was being unreserved too. And nobody could be more unreserved than Scrap once she let herself go.

  The only difficulty about Lotty was that she was nearly always somewhere else. You couldn’t catch her – you couldn’t pin her down to come and talk. Scrap’s fears that she would grab seemed grotesque in retrospect. Why, there was no grab in her. At dinner and after dinner were the only times one really saw her. All day long she was invisible, and would come back in the late afternoon looking a perfect sight, her hair full of bits of moss, and her freckles worse than ever. Perhaps she was making the most of her time before Mellersh arrived to do all the things she wanted to do, and meant to devote herself afterwards to going about with him, tidy and in her best clothes.

  Scrap watched her, interested in spite of herself, because it seemed so extraordinary to be as happy as all that on so little. San Salvatore was beautiful, and the weather was divine, but scenery and weather had never been enough for Scrap, and how could they be enough for somebody who would have to leave them quite soon and go back to life in Hampstead? Also, there was the imminence of Mellersh, of that Mellersh from whom Lotty had so lately run. It was all very well to feel one ought to share, and to make a beau geste and do it, but the beaux gestes Scrap had known hadn’t made anybody happy. Nobody really liked being the object of one, and it always meant an effort on the part of the maker. Still, she had to admit there was no effort about Lotty – it was quite plain that everything she did and said was effortless, and that she was just simply, completely happy.

  And so Mrs Wilkins was – for her doubts as to whether she had had time to become steady enough in serenity to go on being serene in Mellersh’s company when she had it uninterruptedly right round the clock had gone by the middle of the week, and she felt that nothing now could shake her. She was ready for anything. She was firmly grafted, rooted, built into heaven. Whatever Mellersh said or did, she would not budge an inch out of heaven, would not rouse herself a single instant to come outside it and be cross. On the contrary, she was going to pull him up into it beside her, and they would sit comfortably together, suffused in light, and laugh at how much afraid of him she used to be in Hampstead, and at how deceitful her afraidness had made her. But he wouldn’t need much pulling. He would come in quite naturally after a day or two, irresistibly wafted on the scented breezes of that divine air, and there he would sit arrayed in stars, thought Mrs Wilkins, in whose mind, among much other debris, floated occasional bright shreds of poetry. She laughed to herself a little at the picture of Mellersh, that top-hatted, black-coated, respectable family solicitor, arrayed in stars, but she laughed affectionately, almost with a maternal pride in how splendid he would look in such fine clothes. “Poor lamb,” she murmured to herself affectionately. And added, “What he wants is a thorough airing.”

  This was during the first half of the week. By the beginning of the last half, at the end of which Mr Wilkins arrived, she left off even assuring herself that she was unshakeable, that she was permeated beyond altering by the atmosphere, she no longer thought of it or noticed it, she took it for granted. If one may say so, and she certainly said so, not only to herself but also to Lady Caroline, she had found her celestial legs.

  Contrary to Mrs Fisher’s idea of the seemly – but of course contrary: what else would one expect of Mrs Wilkins? – she did not go to meet her husband at Mezzago, but merely walked down to the point where Beppo’s fly would leave him and his luggage in the street of Castagneto. Mrs Fisher disliked the arrival of Mr Wilkins, and was sure that anybody who could have married Mrs Wilkins must be at least of an injudicious disposition, but a husband, whatever his disposition, should be properly met. Mr Fisher had always been properly met. Never once in his married life had he gone unmet at a station, nor had he ever not been seen off. These observances, these courtesies, strengthened the bonds of marriage, and made the husband feel he could rely on his wife’s being always there. Always being there was the essential secret for a wife. What would have become of Mr Fisher if she had neglected to act on this principle she preferred not to think. Enough things became of him as it was, for whatever one’s care in stopping up, married life yet seemed to contain chinks.

  But Mrs Wilkins took no pains. She just walked down the hill singing – Mrs Fisher could hear her – and picked up her husband in the street as casually as if he were a pin. The three others, still in bed, for it was not nearly time to get up, heard her as she passed beneath their windows down the zigzag path to meet Mr Wilkins, who was coming by the morning train, and Scrap smiled, and Rose sighed, and Mrs Fisher rang her bell and desired Francesca to bring her her breakfast in her room. All three had breakfast that day in their rooms, moved by a common instinct to take cover.

  Scrap always breakfasted in bed, but she had the same instinct for cover, and during breakfast she made plans for spending the whole day where she was. Perhaps, though, it wouldn’t be as necessary that day as the next. That day, Scrap calculated, Mellersh would be provided for. He would want to have a bath, and having a bath at San Salvatore was an elaborate business – a real adventure if one had a hot one in the bathroom – and it took a lot of time. It involved the attendance of the entire staff: Domenico and the boy Giuseppe coaxing the patent stove to burn – restraining it when it burned too fiercely, using the bellows to it when it threatened to go out, relighting it when it did go out – Francesca anxiously hovering over the tap, regulating its trickle – because if it were turned on too full the water instantly ran cold,
and if not full enough the stove blew up inside and mysteriously flooded the house – and Costanza and Angela running up and down bringing pails of hot water from the kitchen to eke out what the tap did.

  This bath had been put in lately, and was at once the pride and the terror of the servants. It was very patent. Nobody quite understood it. There were long printed instructions as to its right treatment hanging on the wall, in which the word pericoloso* recurred. When Mrs Fisher, proceeding on her arrival to the bathroom, saw this word, she went back to her room again and ordered a sponge bath instead, and when the others found what using the bathroom meant – and how reluctant the servants were to leave them alone with the stove, and how Francesca positively refused to, and stayed with her back turned watching the tap, and how the remaining servants waited anxiously outside the door till the bather came safely out again – they too had sponge baths brought into their rooms instead.

  Mr Wilkins, however, was a man, and would be sure to want a big bath. Having it, Scrap calculated, would keep him busy for a long while. Then he would unpack, and then, after his night in the train, he would probably sleep till the evening. So would he be provided for the whole of that day, and not be let loose on them till dinner.

  Therefore Scrap came to the conclusion she would be quite safe in the garden that day, and got up as usual after breakfast, and dawdled as usual through her dressing, listening with a slightly cocked ear to the sounds of Mr Wilkins’s arrival – of his luggage being carried into Lotty’s room on the other side of the landing, of his educated voice as he enquired of Lotty, first, “Do I give this fellow anything?” and immediately afterwards, “Can I have a hot bath?” – of Lotty’s voice cheerfully assuring him that he needn’t give the fellow anything because he was the gardener, and that yes, he could have a hot bath – and soon after this the landing was filled with the familiar noises of wood being brought, of water being brought, of feet running, of tongues vociferating – in fact, with the preparation of the bath.